The critics raved about the play In Paris created by Dmitry Krymov and based on a prize-winning story by Ivan Bunin, which debuted in the U.S. at the Berkeley Rep. Since it’s set in the City of Light in the ‘30s, with the incomparable Mikhail Baryshnikov playing an exiled Russian general, it seemed an event not to miss. So I didn’t. But, evidently, I did miss its heart and soul.
“An ephemeral dream of last romance,” said the San Jose Mercury News. “A moody, wryly comic blend of engaging visuals, enchanting found-object music and romance,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle, while the Huffington Post applauded the “play’s commitment for getting the emotion out to the audience.”
Really?
While I do go along with the great visuals, beginning with the sepia-toned huge postcard of Paris carried in sideways to open the play;

the funky running English text for the dialog delivered in French and Russian; and agree presence of Baryshnikov, as actor, is commanding (along with the quite lovely Anna Sinyakina), the rest escaped me. From the revolving set and anonymous “others” to the vague evocation of the real Paris, I found myself, rather like Anna herself, upside down on an invisible swing, trying in vain to connect with something, to connect with him.
I can grasp it best by analogy. If this were a painting, it would be a René Magritte, with a figure in tails and a top hat on a head helpfully removed from the body.
If it were a poem, it would be “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by Keats, in which the lovers don’t quite kiss. For eternity.
    If it were a novel, it would be Russian for sure: “Dr. Zhivago,” where close to the end, Zhivago finally sees his beloved Lara from a streetcar window as she is walking along a Moscow street. He gets off the streetcar and begins to run after her, only to collapse and die without her ever knowing he was there. He gets off the streetcar and begins to run after her, only to collapse and die without her ever knowing he was there.
    If this were an opera, it would definitely not be Carmen. Although the play finishes with a graceful flamenco performed by the great Baryshnikov, he is not the toreador. There is no vanquished bull, no great love waiting to receive his gift, no passion. But oddly, at the end, with this kind of resurrection dance after death, the play comes to life as it has not before and gives a poignant salute to the passion, love and, yes, poetry, that might have been.

We all know that Proust could conjure worlds by dipping his famous madeleine in a teacup. I found that listening and talking with mystery writer Cara Black, creator of the unstoppable, smart and thoroughly modern detective Aimée Leduc, had the same effect on me. Hearing Black’s memories, and wandering the shadowy streets and dark underbelly of Paris with Aimée, sent my own memories wandering too.

Black regaled an audience of Left Coast Writers recently with how she first arrived in Paris as an eighteen-year-old wearing a lumberman’s jacket and boots and boldly went unannounced to knock on the door of celebrated writer Romain Gary. Since he had politely responded to a fan letter she’d written him, she figured he’d be happy to see her. My own first moment was also tinged with the ridiculous. Like Black, I had hitch-hiked all over, so for my arrival at age nineteen, my transportation was by large truck. Joining the affable truck driver. in smoking Gauloises, I decided I needed to look chic for my grand entrance in the City of Light. So I added a skirt, hose and heels to my ensemble — much enhanced I’m sure, by a battered suitcase.

I asked Black if, upon arrival, her French was actually up to the task of speaking with Romain Gary. She laughed and said her schooling with French-speaking nuns had given her a fluency and vocabulary that was vintage end-of-nineteenth century. In that respect, I can match and raise her one. By the time I arrived, I had taken so many French lit. classes, and devoured so much grammar, that a Parisian friend joked she loved getting my letters straight out of the eighteenth century. Tongue-tied and stumbling when first trying to communicate, I’m sure I made a verbal leap straight to the Middle Ages.

For both of us, that initial trip was indeed just a beginning, and we have returned to Paris over our lives for pleasure, for work and for love, because one never outgrows the ability to be besotted with Parisian charms.

Black spoke of taking her son there as a child, and his complaints at being dragged to another museum. I remember the cry of my own children, “no more churches,” and their happiness with an expedition I sent them on. Like Aimée Leduc, who wears a Tintin watch, they were great Tintin fans. So without adult supervision, I sent them armed with a map, Metro tokens, some Euros and their middle-school French to the Tintin bookstore. A ragged collection of taped-together Tintin books in French is still kicking around my house.

The ripples of similar experiences sparked by Black and her detective go on and on. I, too, have written a novel, if not a mystery, based on early experience in Paris, That Paris Year. But whereas I’m just working on a sequel, Black is the author of an acclaimed series of murder mysteries set in various Parisian neighborhoods. Her twelfth, Murder at the Lantern Rouge, is just out. I can’t wait to read it. And to check out that little-known part of the Marais, where it is set, when I go with our group of travel writers to Paris in September.

What’s in a word? An impression, a sound, a scent, an evocation? All of that and more in the word “Indochine” which exists in films and books and calls up tropical heat in fragrant gardens, broad tree-lined boulevards in the formal French manner,

invisible exchanges behind half-closed shutters, the sounds of passing rickshaws and horse-drawn carriages.
These are images drawn from a colonial past, an era that officially and rightfully ended in the mid-20th century. That was in 1954, when the French left, the country was divided into North and South, and two decades after the last Nguyen emperor, the French-educated Bao Dai, longing for a game of tennis, called upon his adopted father, Charles de Gaulle, to play with him on the royal tennis courts of the Imperial City.
And yet. As with any empire that came and went, the French left their mark on the region once know as Indochina, and while traveling for the first time through Viet Nam and Cambodia, I have been often surprised by the sense of “déjà vu,” that I seen this before, only to realize, yes, I’ve been there in France. From the broad, tree-lined boulevards of cities from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh, to the elegant “French-style” buildings in Hanoi and Hue

to the proliferation of cafes where one can sit and sip latte or a dark espresso-like brew from mountain-grown beans, there are these inescapable moments of knowing. Yes, in fact, the French were here.
But the daily reminder of their presence is in the bread. Imagine being offered a sandwich on a lovely French roll in Siem Reap, on the edge of the temples of Angkor. Or encountering fresh baked baguettes in Hanoi, the capital of the communist government of the united Viet Nam. Or finding glass cases with exquisite pastries, equal to any grand “patisserie” of Paris, replete with “éclairs,” “palmiers” and “petits fours.” Or how about this: the exit to the main road east from Hanoi lined at intervals, like erect pillars in a temple, with women in conical straw hats holding immense bags of fresh rolls, round loaves and long, elegant baguettes of French bread to sell as a treat to motorists going to the countryside.
As for the French of Indochine, this much can be said: they came, they conquered, they built, they bombed, they lost, they left, but above all, they baked.

Those blurs zipping around the base are CARS

My first exposure to traffic in Paris was dizzying, and nowhere more than in the madness zooming around the Etoile, where cars circulate at mad speeds according to rules only divined by those with French blood types. Not only did the notion of priorité à droit, whereby those entering the stream of traffic on the right (always at great velocity) have the right-of-way make my hair curl, but on a more primitive level, I feared each whirl around the Arc de Triomphe would be my last. I’m too young to die, I whimpered in silent terror.
Now many countries (yes, even Italy) and many decades later, I am having a whole new version of traffic angst on the storied isle of Bali. Even though I’ve been here before, (and yes, even have experienced the world-class traffic jitters and jams of Jakarta), yesterday added a whole new deep-tissue test of my ability to breath steadily, turn the other cheek against endless infractions of my pitiful ideals of common sense, and to do the only honorable (ok, cowardly) thing in the face of certain destruction – look the other way. Because yesterday my husband Doug and I engaged Wayan, an affable driver with the build of a heavy-weight wrestler and a pate like Andrew Agassi, to drive us the length of the entire island and then some.
Leaving Ubud and the serenity of Sayan, where the tropical forest cascades down a steep valley to the gushing Ayung River, a place where I had peacefully resided for some ten days, we quickly got that Wayan was not just your ordinary Balian chauffer-magician, capable of weaving, honking, swerving and accelerating with the best of his brothers-in-karma behind the wheel, but occupied a class apart. For one thing, a thoroughly engaging raconteur, he had many interesting tales to tell us as the country whizzed by. That was for about half the time; the other half he spent regaling others on his cell phone. Which meant that he had one hand free to conduct the actual business of steering. The other notable characteristic was his marked predilection for the other side of the road, whatever direction we were headed.
As we wove through windy mountain roads with magically green terraced fields,

Terraced rice fields of central Bali

thick forests of banana and palms, groves of clove trees with leaves bundled for distant markets, small villages with thatch or tin roofs, and ubiquitous roadside stands, his garrulousness and good nature kept his speedy tendencies more or less in check. As did the fact that the engine of his small Toyota SUV was barely up to the mountainous task. When we reached the top of Gunung Batur, the second largest volcano on Bali, to stop for lunch, the car seemed as grateful as we were.

Gunung Batur

From there we came down through flatter, drier country on the other side of the mountains making our way to the north coast – the old Dutch colonial capital of Singaraja with large circular roundabouts for proper wheeling around (though with admittedly fewer terrifying options than those at the Etoile), and to the quiet beach town of Lovina, with sandy two-land roads filled with lazy bikes, carts and cars and drowsy beach-goers. It wasn’t obvious that Wayan’s truest impulses had been merely thwarted.
But somewhere after we turned south and had destination Denpasar by 6:00 in our sights, Wayan really hit his stride. The road was fairly straight and crowded, but with just enough room to let our man cut loose. His proclivity to drive on the wrong side of the road grew as the traffic thickened. Bicycles and motorbikes, often with whole families, usually unadorned by helmets, swerved in, out and around the buses, cars and vans that brushed past each other at high speeds with only inches to spare. Doug commented that if we’d had an extra coat of paint, we wouldn’t have made it. Wayan, cell phone constantly engaged, passed, dodged, and danced through the barrage of vehicles, hitting the brake with only the greatest reluctance. I think I neither blinked nor swallowed for at least two hours, as I sat frozen in the back seat watching motorbikes come within inches of us, going in every direction. I realized my long ago fear of not surviving Parisian traffic had now evolved into a different, mordant terror: that I would be responsible for killing somebody else.
But, of course, we didn’t. From the lessons learned in Jakarta I already knew that two lanes quickly become three, or maybe even four, as one vehicle squeezes in between others – and here’s the thing of it – the others give way. As Doug and I had what we dubbed our Balian NASCAR moment, he commented that watching the traffic move was like watching a dance, one where everybody knows the steps and moves just at the right moment. He was right. It seemed a miracle that we had not witnessed a single accident (though assuredly they do have them), let alone mass wreckage. But it was another lesson learned from Bali. People smiled at one another, and gave room, and so the traffic moved. If one tried to maneuver here in the Parisian manner, bursting in from the right, horns blaring, or God help us the Italian manner, starting with comments about your mama up front, there would have been carnage. But this was Bali, where things, even traffic, move in their own way. It has to do with moving aside to make room for others. Even clueless, white-knuckled foreigners.

Indonesian family going with the flow

By the time we reached Denpasar in the height of rush hour, I was deep breathing calmly enough to make a yoga instructor proud. I relaxed in my seat, felt myself in the mysterious flow of cars, and was certain we would hit no one, and would arrive at our hotel just in time, safely delivered by a smiling Wayan, who had now moved on to texting

So, through that long lens of time I got to revisit a place, with all its sensations, I used to live in decades in the past, and share it with others who were there, including my favorite French professor, Leonard Pronko, and many others who were not. The bond we had, and the affection we shared, centered on Paris and its delights, the eternal allure of France and all its seductions.

I also got to experience time travel of another sort by reading the opening pages of my novel, That Paris Year, and discussing them with a large group of students —  just like the narrator J.J. comes to discuss Paris with a group of students in those same pages. Although it was assumed that I am in fact J.J., and therefore I had really done this before, the truth – stranger than fiction – is that I am not that fictional character. Nor had I ever addressed that audience about France before. So it was a delicious moment of life imitating art, or perhaps the other way around?

Time travel, where all the niggling boundaries between reality and un-, fact and fiction, here and there, melt away. If you’ve not gone there, get your passport now.

Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas

An Oaklander with a thing for Paris? That would be me, of course. But in this San Francisco Stein summer – with major exhibits, readings, performances, in addition to her appearance in the new novel about Hemingway, The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, and Kathy Bates’ rendering in Woody Allen’s magical Midnight in Paris — my small light has been rather subsumed by Gertrude Stein, Superstar. Although we both started out elsewhere – she in Pittsburgh, I in Pasadena – and she left Oakland early, while I landed here late, I’m fascinated by the Franco-California crosscurrents she fanned and the role the Stein family played in bringing modern French art, and a French sensibility, to the Bay Area.
The world she left and the one she entered when she visited her brother Leo in Paris in 1902 — only to decamp there permanently – seem very distant. Yet they are not hard to imagine, thanks in large part to all the documentation she left behind. Of course the self-proclaimed genius made her mark as stream-of-consciousness “ a rose is a rose is a rose” kind of writer with a pronounced antipathy to commas. But she was as famous for becoming an icon of the avant-garde that she helped promote and create with her art collecting, her salons, her famous friendships and quarrels.
Soon after her arrival, she and Leo began collecting, and promoting, the works of Matisse, Renoir, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and many other great contemporary artists, whose works hung on the walls of their Left Bank apartment, 27 Rue de Fleuris, where “salons” were held so the work could be viewed by an invited public, rather like an exclusive museum. That “museum” was revisited, and then some, by two simultaneous San Francisco exhibits this summer, one at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, dedicated to telling the story of Gertrude’s life using stories, photos and memorabilia, and a large collection of paintings originally owned by the Stein family at SFMOMA.
There, among hundreds of pictures, two of the most famous are reunited on the same wall: Picasso’s 1906 Portrait of Gertrude Stein,

Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein

and Matisse’s 1905 Woman with a Hat. It was the latter, curiously that caused a furor, and certainly more public controversy than Gertrude’s outsized life. Think modern art, experimental literature, lesbianism, marijuana use, theatrical dress, bohemian Left Bank Paris. But the painting, with it’s green face and unnatural colors was considered an outrage.

Matisse's Woman with a Hat

The two paintings also symbolize the rift between siblings Leo and Gertrude that led to a permanent split in 1914. It is said that problems began with Gertrude’s lifelong partnership with Alice B. Toklas, which commenced in 1911; or that because Leo also considered himself a genius, one apartment eventually couldn’t contain two such egos. But it is undeniable that the two disagreed more and more about art. Leo made off with most of the Matisse’s, and Gertrude, who embraced Cubism, kept the Picassos.
Their brother Michael and his wife Sarah collected, too, and they eventually returned from Paris to Palo Alto, where they showed many of their Matisse’s – the first to be seen in California – and other family works. Eventually, their collection, including The Woman with the Hat, became the core of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
With these exhibits, performances, books, plus an showing of Picasso’s Picassos earlier this summer at the De Young Museum, it’s easy to visualize Gertrude Stein in our midst here. But I particularly like to imagine the triumphal trip she and Alice made back to the States and the Bay Area in 1933 after the publication of her bestselling The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas. It was then that she returned to Oakland looking for her old family home in East Oakland. It had been torn down, prompting the oft-misconstrued comment, “there is no there there.”

Stein girls and Stein homestead in Oakland

My grandfather was born not far away in East Oakland in 1882. The old family home is now a Vietnamese grocery. I, at least, know exactly what she meant.

Guide to Paris from David McCullough's Book

J.J. here – There’s a new book out about Americans in Paris, called The Greater Journey, by historian David McCullough. It’s about influential Americans who went to Paris to learn stuff they couldn’t learn at home. Although many went for their formal education, such as in art schools, most often the real education was along more esoteric lines, such as about style, manners, wine, and oh yes, sex.

Going to France for a real education is nothing new. What Thomas Jefferson learned about wine resulted in a burgeoning wine industry at Montecello. Manners? Well, probably nobody bested Mr. A. Billfinger, a.k.a. Ferguson, the starring rogue of Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad.” As for sex, where to begin? Maybe with Hnery Wadsworth Longfellow who wrote to friends about the “naughty women” of Paris. Or with Duke Ellington’s 70th birthday party when three naked dancers jumped out of a camembert-shaped cake?

In the 20th century, seems like each decade had it’s own character with exiled Americans front and center. The Jazz Age of the ‘20s with Hemingway, the Zelda and F. Scott, Gertrude Stein and Alice, and Josephine Baker mingling with all those musicians.

Hemingway in Paris

But the ‘60s? Nobody has done much to record how Americans participated in that tumultuous decade in Paris that began with J.F.K.’s triumphant trip in 1961 – with the American Queen of Style, Jackie, at his side – and ended with riots in the streets in ’68.

La Jacquie

DSK apprehended

Seduction Paris-style

J.J. here…It looks as if fate has turned again for M. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and in another stunning reversal of fortune, he may soon be a free man. He may even, who knows, once again be the Socialist candidate and a real contender to become President of France. If so, the real question will be, how many women support him now?

For DSK, as he is known, the fall from grace – and his world leadership position as head of the International Monetary Fund – came with the seemingly credible accusation of a chambermaid, a young immigrant from Guinea, that he assaulted and raped her after she entered his swish New York hotel room to clean it. He was snatched from a Paris-bound flight out of JFK, arrested by New York law enforcement officers, and famously photographed handcuffed and disheveled.

Then it turned out that the chambermaid had her own issues – lying among them – and that her plausible story was full of holes. So DSK is out of jail and may soon be released to France, where he has been portrayed as a kind of hero victimized by an out-of-control American justice system and crazed press. The problem, the theory goes, is vengeful and puritanical America, not a man known (and renowned) for his sexual appetites.

Hmm. Why do I think I’ve seen this movie before?

It all takes me back to those long-ago days at the Sorbonne when three of my friends had encounters with the suave, cravat-wearing, silver-haired seducer, Alain St.-Georges, famous prof of political science and specialist in American affairs. Each of the entanglements ended badly, but then there wasn’t even a vocabulary to deal with it. True, nobody was raped. But sexual harassment, predatory behavior, imbalance of power, victim’s rights? In 1962, all such concepts were still in the future. As was the idea of women’s solidarity. If my friends had publicly complained, they would most likely have suffered public ridicule. Those pathetic, puritanical pin-heads. Those Americans.

But now it looks as if some French women are speaking out and fighting back. Maybe it’s no longer O.K. for alpha males to abuse power and, short of rape, to seek sexual favors wherever and however they want. Maybe emboldened French women will use the ballot box to say, in elegant French of course, “We won’t take it anymore.”

Les Halles, Soul and Stomach of Paris

A couple days ago I did an interview with French-American t.v., and one of the questions that came up was about Paris in the old days, meaning the ‘60s. Was it better then or now? Not a new question to be sure: Just ask M.F.K. Fisher or Proust, or Woody Allen for heaven’s sake, who has just made a film about the ever-receding horizon of the “real Paris.”

And of course, when changes are made to a beloved skyline, people are bound to be upset. The Eiffel Tower, after all, the ultimate symbol of Paris, was decried as an ugly monstrosity of the Industrial Age when it first loomed over the Seine.

Quatorze Juillet at the Eiffel Tower

Personally, I don’t believe it’s the addition of the new that’s so disturbing, as the destruction of the old. One thing I do still miss about that “old Paris,” is the great central market Les Halles, sometimes referred to as the soul and the stomach of the city. Its heaps of produce, the sounds of the truckers and vendors and buyers, the smells that arose from the cheeses and meats, to say nothing of gutters nearby, produced visceral and unforgettable sense memories. And that doesn’t even get to those late nights spent there seeing in the dawn, eating onion soup and drinking hardy vin du pays.

As Luc Sante said in 2010 in the New York Review of Books, “Les Halles ws more central to the idea of Paris in the minds of its own citizens than any tower or monument could ever be.”

The destruction, or modernization, of Les Halles began in 1970 until it was transformed, mainly into a mindless underground shopping mall.

So, in this case, old Paris or new Paris? You make the call.

MFK Fisher, the incomparable chronicler of France (and food) wrote that her husband used to regale her with tales of the “real Paris” – in the ‘20s – while they were living in France in the ‘30s. Later she revisited old haunts while introducing her children to France in the ‘50s, telling them about the “real Paris” of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Now Woody Allen has made a fanciful film for romantics of all ages on that very subject – finding the Golden Age of Paris. The Woody Allen-like protagonist of “Midnight in Paris,” the hapless would-be writer Gil, wants nothing more than to wander the moody streets and conjure the artist greats of the past, but his hard-nosed fiancée is there to shop. You can see where this is going, and eventually our hero does time-travel to a far, far better place – Paris in the ‘20s, schmoozing with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Zelda, and Gertrude Stein. Then a dark-haired beauty leads him to an even more distant perfection – la Belle Époque – where the likes of Monet and Degas pine for the authentic Paris of the Renaissance over the strains of the can-can. This film is a delight, both a poem and a paean to a city that might be most beautiful in the rain. As for it’s most magical moment? The ‘60s, of course, when I was there. Or was I?