'Paris Letters: An Anthology December 1935-July 1940'

Paris Letters: An Anthology December 1935-July 1940 edited by Chris Harte collects columns by the journalist and bohemian David Arkell. I knew of him previously because of his enjoyable Looking for Laforgue: An Informal Biography (1979), a Quest for Corvo style book about the French symbolist poet who influenced the Imagists, Eliot and others, and his Alain Fournier: A Brief Life 1886-1914 (1986). These reveal his interest not only in French literary classics but in the elusive and transient. 

Chris Harte provides a helpful and interesting introduction which explains Arkell’s fluency in French due to family links and a literary background. He entered journalism, starting with local papers, but was spotted and recruited by the Rothermere empire and was sent to Paris as a correspondent and editor.

The columns are lively, bubbling with information about the byways of the French capital, including hotels, bars, revues, theatres and night-life. The tone is hectic, brisk and practical (giving, for example, prices and routes) but also lets the reader feel they are in on the modish high life. There are some good Parisian jokes and stories, some tips about handling taxi drivers, waiters and porters, and brief character sketches both of the notable and the unknown. He notes the number of Russian exiles in the city, and also the American style jazz clubs. I was reminded of the contemporary journals of Mary Butts in her swirling Parisian days and of the way Paris features in the fiction of the Roaring Twenties as a glittering cosmopolitan capital spinning like a roulette wheel. 

The selection gives a vivid background for those interested in the literary and artistic circles of interwar Paris, but is also a swiftly moving, cinematic portrayal of a legendary time, when the high-spirited young and the fashionable cognoscenti danced, drank, drugged and loved from midnight to dawn, until the lights went out all over the continent. The editor provides an afterword about Arkell’s internment in Occupied Paris and his later career after the Liberation. The book, ISBN 978-1-898010-22-7,  is available from the usual outlets.

(Mark Valentine)