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Salons & Creativity
the synergy of creative gatherings
Ernest Hemingway, a great admirer of Winesburg, Ohio, the masterful collection of interconnected short stories by Sherwood Anderson, managed to meet the prominent writer when they were both in Chicago in 1921. Anderson took Hemingway under his wing and encouraged him to go to Paris. He provided advice; attended Hemingway’s wedding to Hadley in September; and wrote letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach. By December Ernest and Hadley were in Paris.
Anderson chose the city and people for Hemingway well. A large scene of American expat writers and painters had established itself in Paris. Gertrude Stein regularly held salons in the apartment she shared with Alice B Toklas at 27 rue de Fleurus. Ezra Pound was already an established writer who also served as a facilitator for young artists. Sylvia Beach published books — she was the first to publish James Joyce’s hulking Ulysses in 1922 before anyone else was sure what to make of it — and she also ran a bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 rue de l’Odéon in the 6th arrondissement in 1922. The shop lent and sold books and provided a gathering place for Hemingway, Pound, Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford, and several others.
(Today there is a Shakespeare & Co at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, in the 5th arrondissement, on the edge of the Left Bank with a clear clear view of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité. This Shakespeare & Co is faithful to the many generous practices of its namesake established by Sylvia Beach — including lending books and exchanging labor in the bookshop for a place to sleep — but it is otherwise unrelated to Beach’s store, which closed permanently in 1941 when the Germans occupied Paris.)
Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return provides a history of the expats — the group Gertrude Stein would call The Lost Generation — among whom Hemingway now found himself. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harold Stearns, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and a whole slew of literary aspirants out of a scene in Greenwich Village all moved to Paris within weeks of each other, but not because it had the reputation as an incubator for young artists — indeed, it was the expats’ exploits that created the American in Paris reputation. News of the expats’ doings grew into a legend that attracted…
