CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN

Entering into a Dreamscape of Words

“Paris, as I have said, is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers …” ~ Julian Green, Paris, p. 59

Who?

Julian Green. Or Julien Green, as he preferred to be called. An American, but not an American. Born in Paris in 1900 to American parents, he wrote sixty-five books, most in French, and spent the majority of his life in France. It’s no surprise I’ve stumbled across him and his work, given my current writing project.

In 2012, Penguin Books republished Green’s very short book Paris, first published in 1983, in a bilingual Modern Classics edition. It’s the type of book requiring a long, leisurely afternoon of reading, with no obligations to cook dinner or pick up clothes from the dry cleaners.

An upper-class Southerner from Georgia, Green’s mother never got over the shame of the South’s defeat in the Civil War. She profoundly influenced Green with the tales she told of her life during the “glorious” Antebellum period. Many of Green’s later writings reflected these stories of her Antebellum American South. He briefly attended the University of Virginia but left because he didn’t feel completely at home there, a feeling any expat will likely identify with.

One of Green’s most astonishing achievements came in 1971, when L’Académie française named him the first American to be one of its forty members. He replaced François Mauriac. However, in 1996, at age 96, he gave up the honor. The French playwright and poet, René de Obaldia (1918–2022) assumed his seat.

For a partial list of his works in English, see Publishers Weekly’s list. Although I generally prefer not to cite Wikipedia as a major source, I am doing here because you, the reader, will learn much more about Green and his life, all of which informs Paris.

So what about Paris?

Green was basically a flâneur, one who walks without any particular destination in mind, observing whatever crosses his path. And Paris reflects that tendency of his.

To my mind, Julian/Julien Green is one of those incredibly lucky people, born in a different culture, knowing it like his own soul, speaking the language – in this case French – before English, thanks to the nannies his parents hired. He attended French schools and passed the bac, thanks to his education at the Janson de Sailly, a distinguished lycée.

He left Paris during World War II, but the city was forever on his mind.

His journals, more than his novels, offer insights into his own interior world – where the carnal and the spiritual wrestled. One of the more interesting of these journals is La Fin d’un monde: Juin 1940, in which he described leaving France and how it affected him. Unfortunately, it has not been translated into English yet.

Like many French people, he believed, hoped even, that the Germans would not prevail:

[W]e were all blind, and the power of analogy was so strong even for the most skeptical that we obstinately believed in the rapid defeat of Germany. The idiocy of propaganda had found its path: the departure of the government was a wise measure required by the risk of another bombardment and the desire to preserve one of the most beautiful cities in the world by declaring it open. And hadn’t the government left Paris in September 1914? This reminder was reassuring instead of being disquieting because we were so sure of being part of a sort of reenactment of the Great War with a decisive victory before summer.

When he returned at the war’s end, he climbed the steep hill to the church of Sacré-Coeur – Green was gay and a devout Roman Catholic – determined to embrace his city once again. He said of the view:

“It was as if the whole city hit me in the chest. That was how I got it back. Winter was drawing to a close; the dazzling March light already consumed everything, and as far as the eye could see there was Paris, wearing, like a cloak that kept slipping from its shoulders, the shadow of the great clouds that the wind was chasing across the breadth of the sky.

Paris, p. 11.

The message I took away from Paris, which is but just one small snippet of Green’s overall opus, is his love for the city where he was born, lived, and died at 97.

Every walk I have ever taken along its streets has seemed to create a fresh link, invisible yet tenacious, binding me to its very stones. I used to wonder as a child how the mere name of Paris could denote so many different things, so many streets and squares, so many gardens, houses, roofs, chimneys, and above it all the shifting, insubstantial sky that crowns our city.

Every corner, building, street, or so it seems, held a memory for him.

Place is so often intertwined in an author’s work, but with Julian Green, Paris bursts forth like green shoots from each page, in writing that approaches the ethereal. Even corners filled with poverty and desolation take on beauty under Green’s gaze.

All I know is I will be reading Green’s Paris more than once, particularly on those dark days when only memories will do, of a place I love more than any other where I’ve lived.

As Green remarks:

It [the banks of the Seine] is a good place, the lower embankment, to take your dreams for a walk and cast behind you those grand, futile glances that measure the time you have travelled.

Paris, p. 57