Renoir’s Dancer - The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon by Catherine Hewitt- 2018

Renoir’s Dancer - The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon by Catherine Hewitt- 2018

Paris in July hosted by Thyme for Tea, great event, will end on August 4th. 

I Focus on literary works and nonfiction but you are invited to share your thoughts and experience on anything Paris related, from a great recipe, a favourite movie set in Paris, mine is Ninotchka, an account of your stay in Paris.  I hope lots of people join in.  Just be sure to  link you post on The event home page.  

There is still time to join us.

 There are lots of very interesting posts from food bloggers, Francophiles, travel bloggers, as well as book bloggers.  Normally I don’t venture far from the international book blog community so for me this event is an excellent way to expand my horizons. 

So far I read for Paris in July 2018

1. “A Yiddish Poet in Paris” by Blume Lempel, 1978
2. Vagabond by Colette, 1904
3. Lost Times - Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czafski -translated and introduced. by Eric Karpeles - 2018
4. “Her Last Dance” by Blume Lempel - 
5. Gerorge Sand by Martine Reid 2017

THE ARCHIVE THIEF The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust LISA MOSES LEFF

6. “Cousin Claude” by Blume Lempel
7. Taste of Paris:A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie
8. “The Beggar” by Gaito Gazdanov, 1962
9. “Image on a Blank Canvas” by Blume Lempel
10. Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick.  2004,Kind of a rewrite of The Ambassadors by Henry James with a female lead.  No post planned
11. “Salmon Rushdie at the Louvre” - an essay by Cynthia Ozick. No post planned.
12. In Another Country by James Baldwin.  1960, Partially set in Paris. No post planned.  
13. Renoir’s Dancer - The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon by Catherine Hewitt- 2018

Suzanne Valadon

Born 1865

Died 1938

1883- begins to model for Renoir and others

Became a full time painter in 1896, mentored by Degas.

She is widely considered France’s greatest female painter.

I was completely fascinated and very involved on several levels by Renoir’s Dancer - The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon by Catherine Hewitt- it is biography elevated to high art.  I knew nothing about Suzanne Valadon when I began the book, by the close I felt I knew her with near intimate vermisilitude.  

Valadon’s mother was a laundress in the provinces.  Hewitt offers a lot of interesting details about life and folkways in rural France. Valadon was a bit of a wild child, by age fifteen the nuns at her school felt it was time for her to go to work.  She tried washing dishes, doing laundry, and hat maker.  It seemed for a while she might succeed as a circus acrobat but she injured herself in a fall.  

Now 17, very attractive and outgoing, she went to the Paris Model’s market.  I was unaware of this and greatly enjoyed learning how artists hired their models.  A model had to have lots of stamina which Valadon had and for many assignments be willing to pose nude.  The job paid a good bit more than her prior work.  Models were seen by polite society as part demi-monde but Valadon liked to party, drinking and couldn’t care less. Men clearly were drawn to her.

Soon, with her mother, she was living in the Montmarte district, infamous for nightlife.  She was introduced to Pierre-Auguste Renoir and became his favourite model and mistress.  She also modeled for other elite impressionists.  The Paris art scene was very intertwined, with gossip, swapping models and artistic cross pollination.  Hewitt description of the art scene is very informative and fun to read.

Valadon was now pregnant, having numerous lovers, she did not name a father but a minor artist took responsibility.  In time  her son, her only child, was became difficult.  Soon Valadon married and  began to live with an older affluent businessman, her mother and son lived with him also. Hewitt lets us see what a devoted mother Valadon was to her son whose severe drinking binges kept him in and out of sanatoriums the rest of his life. The death of her mother is very movingly depicted. Her mother was very important to her and helped her with her son.

The most exciting part of the biography for me was Valadon’s progress from model to highly acclaimed artist.

She had shown an aptitude for drawing since a child.  She learned a lot about artistic techniques from observing those who painted her.  She began to paint in an impressionistic style.  Toulouse-Lautrec, one of her clients, introduced her to high end art markets.  At 28 she had an exhibition and sale at a top venue.  For the rest of her life she produced and sold hundreds of works of art.  A fun for me segment of the biography was Hewitt’s treatment of Toulouse-Lautrec.

At around age 45 she divorced her first husband and married a younger man, also an artist.  Her troubled son had also become a serious commercial success as a painter and was to become a bigger earner than his mother.  Mother and son were very close, the destructive behavior of her son, including several arrests, was a life long trial for her, one she bore as well as she could.  She was a very devoted mother and her son worshipped her.  Eventually he married and stabilized somewhat.

There is much more in this wonderful biography, it is a potrait of the life among The Impressionists of Paris, I think anyone interested in this era will like this book.  One thing it brought out was how the railroad connected the provinces to Paris.  

Valadon is considered an early feminist icon by msny, supporting herself, flaunting conventional moral restraits on women.

Maybe she was to French painting what Colette was to literature.  

I give my total endorsement to Renoir’s Dancer - The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon by Catherine Hewitt.  I look forward to reading more of her work.

From The author’s website 

http://catherinehewitt.co.uk/

Having been awarded a first-class honours degree in BA French from Royal Holloway, University of London, she went on to attend the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art where she took a Masters in the History of 19th-Century French Art and was awarded a distinction. In 2012, she completed her PhD on The Formation of the Family in 19th-Century French Literature and Art, with joint supervision from Royal Holloway and the Courtauld Institute. Throughout her academic career, she has regularly presented papers at conferences, published work in academic journals and was awarded numerous university prizes.

After being awarded her PhD, she set out on her career in biography. Based on meticulous research, Catherine’s writing seeks to lift history out of the dusty annals of academia and bring its characters and events to life for the 21st-century reader. Her writing introduces real people, telling their stories in intimate detail and enabling readers to share their successes and frustrations. As well as writing, Catherine lectures and runs workshops on 19th-century French art, literature and social history, always seeking to share her enthusiasm for French history and culture. She also works as a freelance translator, and her portfolio includes a translation of a permanent exhibition of the work of the radical French female painter Suzanne Valadon for a gallery near Limoges in France.

Catherine lives in a village in Hampshire, UK. When she is not writing, she can be found helping restore her family’s house in the middle of rural France, cooking, reading and enjoying country walks with her little black cockerpoo, Alfie.

Mel u

“Images on a Blank Canvas”.— A Short Story by Blume Lempel

Paris in July 2018

Yiddish Literature on The Reading Life

“I am a housewife, a wife, a mother, a grandmother —and a Yiddish writer. I write my stories in Yiddish. Yiddish is in my bones. When I hear my mother’s “Oy!” in my head, I lift my eyes to the heavens and hear God answering me in Yiddish.”  Blume Lempel 

Paris in July hosted by Thyme for Tea is a great event.  I Focus on literary works and nonfiction but you are invited to share your thoughts and experience on anything Paris related, from a great recipe, a favourite movie set in Paris, mine is Ninotchka, an account of your stay in Paris.  I hope lots of people join in.  Just be sure to  link you post on the event home page.  

There is still plenty of time to join us.

 There are lots of very interesting posts from food bloggers, Francophiles, travel bloggers, as well as book bloggers.  Normally I don’t venture far from the international book blog community so for me this event is an excellent way to expand my horizons. 

So far I have posted on

1. “A Yiddish Poet in Paris” by Blume Lempel, 1978
2. Vagabond by Colette, 1904
3. Lost Times - Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czafski -translated and introduced. by Eric Karpeles - 2018
4. “Her Last Dance” by Blume Lempel - 
5. Gerorge Sand by Martine Reid 2017

THE ARCHIVE THIEF The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust LISA MOSES LEFF

6. “Cousin Claude” by Blume Lempel
7. Taste of Paris:A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie
8. “The Beggar” by Gaito Gazdanov, 1962
9. “Images on a Blank Canvas” by Blume Lempel

I have three anthologies of Short Stories translated from Yiddish, about sixty different writers.  Looking through the brief included biographies, maybe fiveteen of the authors left their homelands in Eastern Europe between 1929 and 1939, trying to find a country more open to Jews.  Compared to Eastern Europe and Russia, Jews had been left in relative peace in France for five hundred years. Of these writers, about half made it to America before the French began turning over foreign born Jews to the Germans.  Blume Lempel and her husband and children arrived in New York City in 1939.  She loved Paris, was fluent in French and always wanted to return.

I was gratified when my post on a story by Blume Lempel “A Yiddish Poet in Paris” drew attention from event participants.  Many thousands of Eastern European Jews immigrated to France in the 1930s, hoping they would be safer from the Nazis.  

Blume Lempel

Born 1907 in The Ukraine

Moved to Paris in 1929, to be near her brother who lived there.

While in Paris she worked as a furrier and attended night school.

1939- having married and had two children, her Family moved to New York State, out of concern over rising anti-Semiticism.  Many in her extended Family died in The Holocaust as would she and her Family had they not left.  In 1942 French authorities in a compromise with the Germans, agree to arrest and turn over to the Germans all foreign born Jews. 

1943- begins to publish with a Short Story, all her writings were in Yiddish.  In part this was her way of defying those who wanted the magnifcient Yiddish Cultural tradition destroyed.

In 1950 the Family locates permanently in Long Island.

1999 passes away.

This is the fourth  story by Blume Lempel I am including as part of my participation in Paris in July 2018.  Previously I posted on her 

“A Yiddish Poet in Paris”, love the title, and “Her Last Dance”, about a Yiddish heritage French born woman that was the mistress of the chief of Police of Paris while it was occupied by the Germans. I also posted on a story about a man sent out from Paris to New York City by his hiders after his parents were murdered by the Germans.

In my post on THE ARCHIVE THIEF The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust LISA MOSES LEFF there is a bit of information about what I call Yiddish Paris.

The narrator of “images on a Blank Canvas”, lives in Paris, the time lines are not real clear but well before the Holocaust her family moved from Poland  to Paris.  The story is set long after the war but we dont learn how she escaped being deported to Auschwitz (most all French Jews were sent there).  Her very good friend was captive there when the camp was liberated.  As the story is told she and her friend’s adult daughter are on the way to her funeral in Israel, where she moved later in life.  The power in this dark story is how the Holocaust deformed the spirit of her friend, how twenty years later it drove her to suicide.

Living in Tel Aviv she was shunned because she was a prostitute who lived with an Arab.  

I cannot begin to match descriptive power of Lempel:

“to her eternal rest and remember how gladly I would have relinquished all my worldly ambitions to study in Lemberg. Through the skylight of my Parisian garret I used to look up at the tiny rectangle of heaven that fortune had allotted me and conjure up Zosye’s lush, slumbering garden. How I cursed the fate that had stranded me in Paris on my way to Israel! Zosye did not want to go to Israel, nor did she need to. For her, the vine was abloom with all the brilliant hues of the bejeweled peacock that resides in the dreams of every young woman. How could she have known, as she played the piano, that the civilization of those magical notes was even then writing her people’s death sentence? How could she have known that form and harmony were but the seductive song of the Lorelei, the façade behind which the cannibal sharpened his crooked teeth? Protected and sheltered like the golden lilies in her father’s garden, Zosye could not see those teeth. With the natural power that is the birthright of every living thing, she glowed in the light of the sun. Endowed with all the attributes she needed to thrive and grow, Zosye was primed to scatter her own seeds across God’s willing earth. The pages I turn are blank, as unreadable as the image in a shattered mirror. It occurs to me that the earth to which Zosye is now returning holds the remains of another prostitute, the biblical Tamar, who sat down at the crossroads where fortunes were decided and seduced men with her charms. I search for a spark of Tamar’s desire in the image of Zosye that is anchored deep in my memory. I search for the lust of a whore in her dimples and her rosy, Polish-speaking lips that surely didn’t even know the meaning of the word “prostitute.” I look into her eyes, the reflection of her soul. Her character, unripe, uprooted, is borne by the wind to the four corners of the world. I search for the legacy of modesty passed down through the generations. I search for the set path of her father, and before me another form rises up: her Uncle Shloyme, the Russian. I don’t force this figure to take shape —I let it grow on its own. I relive the terror that his death caused me, which penetrated my dreams long after I’d left my town behind.”

Please excuse the long quote, I want others to feel the depth of Lempel

This story was published in a collection of her work, Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, named for one of the stories, translated and introduced by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Taub, assembled from two Yiddish language collections published by Lempel.  In my prior posts on Lempel there are links  to two very good lectures by the translators. I thank them for bringing Lempel to the Yiddish lacking literary world.

Mel u

“The Beggar” - A Short Story by Gaito Gazdanov, first published 1962,translated from Russian 2018 by Bryan Karetnyk

Paris in July 2018

Paris in July hosted by Thyme for Tea is a great event.  I Focus on literary works and nonfiction but you are invited to share your thoughts and experience on anything Paris related, from a great recipe, a favourite movie set in Paris, mine is Ninotchka, an account of your stay in Paris.  I hope lots of people join in.  Just be sure to  link you post on The event home page.  

There is still plenty of time to join us.

 There are lots of very interesting posts from food bloggers, Francophiles, travel bloggers, as well as book bloggers.  Normally I don’t venture far from the international book blog community so for me this event is an excellent way to expand my horizons. 

So far I have posted on

1. “A Yiddish Poet in Paris” by Blume Lempel, 1978
2. Vagabond by Colette, 1904
3. Lost Times - Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czafski -translated and introduced. by Eric Karpeles - 2018
4. “Her Last Dance” by Blume Lempel - 
5. Gerorge Sand by Martine Reid 2017

THE ARCHIVE THIEF The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust LISA MOSES LEFF

6. “Cousin Claude” by Blume Lempel
7. Taste of Paris:A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie
8. “The Beggar” by Gaito Gazdanov, 1962

“The longer the emigration went on, the more our Russians resembled the notion we had of them. They flattered us by assimilating themselves to it. Their feeling of playing a part maybe soothed their misery. They bore it more easily once it was appreciated as literature. The Russian count as Paris cabbie takes his fares straight into a storybook. His fate itself may be ghastly. But it is at least literary......They all lost their way. They lost their Russianness and their nobility. And because that was all they had ever been—Russian noblemen—they lost everything. They fell out of the bottom of their own tragedy. The great drama was left without heroes. History bitterly and implacably took its course. Our eyes grew tired of watching a misery they had revelled in. We stood before the last of them, the ones that couldn’t understand their own catastrophe, we knew more about them than they could tell us, and arm in arm with Time, at once cruel and sad, we left these lost souls behind. By Joseph Roth, Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 September 1926. Reprinted in Hotel Years, a collection of essays by Joseph Roth translated and assembled by Michael Hoffman 

Gaito Gazdanov

Born December 6, 1903

1919 - age 16 - served in White Russian military unit as a machine gunner’s assistant

1920 emigrated to Paris, works at various jobs.  In 1926 he begins driving a taxi cab at night, he will continue this until 1953.  He was very active in Russian Emigrés Cultural circles.  During WW II he and his wife helped hide Russian Jews. He edited a resistance journal, at great personal risk.

In 1953 he became a broadcaster for Radio Liberty, moving to Munich.  This is considered now to have been a C I A project aimed at Russians in Europe. He worked there The rest of his Life while he continued writing.

He published Seven novels and some fifty Short stories

When he died in 1971 he was buried in the city he loved,

“The Beggar”, told in the third person is about a man who for years has slept at night in a crate and by day, a to all eyes a complete wreck, wanders the streets of Paris.  He eats scavanged food.  He speaks to no one and most pretend they do not see him.  We slowly learn his back story.  He was once a sucessful business owner with a wife and grown children.  One day he just vanished from sight.  Everyone speculated.  Did he leave for another woman, had his busuness come to ruin, had he committed a horrible crime?  Investigations showed his business was strong, his marriage sound, and his personal life beyond reproach.  

Here he is initially presented to us:

“High up, on the Elysian Fields, where in these winter months from four o’clock in the afternoon neon advertisements glow and the windows of the enormous cafés are illumined, icy sleet was falling, while down below, in the long subterranean passageways of the Métro, the air was warm and still. In the middle of one of these underpasses, always in exactly the same spot, stood an old man in rags, hatless and with a dirty-pink bald patch, around which, above his temples and above the nape of his neck, grey hairs protruded in all directions. As with the majority of Paris’s poor, he was dressed in some shapeless garb. Both his overcoat and his trousers looked as though they had ever been thus, as if they had been made to order like that, with those soft creases, with that absence of any lines or contours, like a dress or a great sackcloth robe that people belonging to another world, and not the one surrounding them, would wear.”

He wanders in a wasteland

“However, no one ever asked him anything. For many years, since he had become a beggar, one of the peculiarities of his existence had consisted in the fact that he had almost ceased speaking, not only because he lacked the urge to do so, but also because there was no necessity. Words and their meaning had long since lost for him their former value, as had everything that preceded his current life. One day he spotted a discarded newspaper: it was lying on the grey floor of the passageway in the Métro, and on the front page, in enormous lettering, were printed the words: “War in korea”. He looked at the newspaper with his dull eyes and marked neither the combination of letters nor their meaning. This war, which was being followed by millions of people the whole world over, did not exist for him, as nothing else existed, except for his own protracted delirium, through which he was slowly but surely moving towards death. Sometimes, when at night he would leave the Métro and walk through the deserted streets of Paris, across the entire city, towards a wasteland on the periphery, where there was an enormous wooden crate in which he would spend the night”

Slowly we learn why he preferred life on the streets to living in a lovely villa, with servants, books, music, family, and abundant money.

I do not wish to spoil this story by explaining to much.

There are five other stories in the collection, for sure I will read them all, saving one, I hope, for my participation in Paris in the Spring 2019.

Mel u

A Taste of Paris - A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie, 2017

Paris in July

Paris in July hosted by Thyme for Tea is a great event.  I Focus on literary works and nonfiction but you are invited to share your thoughts and experience on anything Paris related, from a great recipe, a favourite movie set in Paris, mine is Ninotchka, an account of your stay in Paris.  I hope lots of people join in.  Just be sure to  link you post on The event home page.  

There is still plenty of time to join us.

 There are lots of very interesting posts from food bloggers, Francophiles, travel bloggers, as well as book bloggers.  Normally I don’t venture far from the international book blog community so for me this event is an excellent way to expand my horizons. 

So far I have posted on

1. “A Yiddish Poet in Paris” by Blume Lempel, 1978
2. Vagabond by Colette, 1904
3. Lost Times - Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp by Józef Czafski -translated and introduced. by Eric Karpeles - 2018
4. “Her Last Dance” by Blume Lempel - 
5. Gerorge Sand by Martine Reid 2017

THE ARCHIVE THIEF The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust LISA MOSES LEFF

6. “Cousin Claude” by Blume Lempel
7. A Taste of Paris:A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie 2017
8. Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, 2004,sort of a retake on The Ambassadors by Henry James - no post planned. 

There are lots of mouth watering food posts so far this year by participants in Paris in July 2018.  A Taste of Paris:A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie gives us an entertaining and very well researched account of how Paris became a food lovers (I include myself in this category) paradise.  

Downie takes us on a historical walk through French dining history, starting with Romans roasting oysters, moving on to a 32 course medieval royal dinner, spending some time with high decadence of the final days of the monarchy, on up to the enrichment of the contemorary by residents of former colonies.  Some say the French restaurant scene was launched when 1000s of cooks were put out of work by the revolution and started businesses to survive.  Some of these still exist.

Downie takes us into some of the holy temples for foodies, four and five Michelin star restaurants as well as simple neighbourhood bistros serving classic French regional dishes.  He walks us through markets, teaches us enough not to seem a fool in a butcher shop or at fish monger.  The French still food shop daily, seeking out the freshest ingredients.  

Downie has a deep feel for French history and culture.  He loves Paris and it shows.

A Taste of Paris:A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie left me wishing I was in Paris, with a very large food budget and no concerns about health!

I greatly enjoyed A Taste of Paris:A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food by David Downie and endorse it for all foodies on either a real or an arm chair trip to Paris.

Knowing a culture, a Literature, requires an  understanding of diet.  Now I know what the aristocracy depicted by Proust ate, what Henry James and Turgenev might have ordered at a restaurant and what the ordinary Parisians in La Comedie Humaine dined upon.

My thanks to Downie for this marvellous walk through Paris.

www.davidddownie.com

Official Author Auto - Biography 

A native San Franciscan, I've called Paris home since 1986. I'm the author of a dozen books. My travel, food and wine features have appeared worldwide. I've been contributing editor or Paris correspondent for half a dozen magazines. After a quarter century I still love living in Paris. My wife Alison and I also enjoy sharing with our readers, taking them on private tours of Paris, Rome, Burgundy and the Italian Riviera. Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light, with photography by Alison (Random House) is into its 10th printing. Paris City of Night is a classic thriller set in Paris; Food Wine Italian Riviera & Genoa; Rome; and Burgundy are published by The Little Bookroom, as is Quiet Corners of Rome. My Paris Timeline App, on the Apple store, traces 10,000 years of history, mystery, and lore. The Food Wine Rome app lists hundreds of restaurants and gourmet shops. Paris to the Pyrenees is my latest bestseller. 

Mel u