Artemis Dreaming

Above: left to right Ernest Hemingway with Lady Duff Twysden, Hadley Hemingway, and three unidentified people at a cafe in Pamplona, Spain, July 1925.

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Some of the most famous novels and literary moments of all time were written and inspired by cafes in Europe. From the American ex-pat writers in Paris to Henrik Ibsen’s continental travels, cafes were a place to work while socializing, building stories, and of course, eating and drinking. Links and description: HERE, photos: google

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Picasso and his mistress, Paquerette, at the Cafe de la Rotonde

La Rotonde: One of the most famous Parisian cafes during the great American literary ex-pat era is Cafe La Rotonde, which was actually written about in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, although Hemingway’s Jake Barnes seems to lament its overwhelming popularity: “No matter what cafe in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde,” Hemingway wrote. Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot were also patrons there.

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Le Dome Cafe

Le Dome Cafe: The very next line in Hemingway’s quote above is, “Ten years from now it will probably be the Dome.” Le Dome Cafe in Montparnasse in Paris was actually the first major cafe in that area to attract ex-pats and intellectuals. La Rotonde, Le Select and La Coupole were its competitors, but the Dome is now a more established seafood restaurant, no longer catering to up-and-coming artists and writers.

The Literary Cafe: St. Petersburg’s Literary Cafe supposedly entertained many top Russian writers, including Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky, and is said to be the last cafe that poet Alexander Pushkin visited before dying in a duel.

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Ernest Hemingway and American writer Janet Flanner, Les Deux Magots, Paris circa 1940-1945 (artist unknown)

Les Deux Magots: Now a popular tourist spot, Les Deux Magots is known as Hemingway’s favorite spot in Paris. But the St. Germain-des-Pres cafe also served many other legendary writers and artists, including Rimbaud, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Jean Paul Sartre, and even Picasso. It’s one of the oldest cafes in Paris, and pays tribute to its old but polished heritage in its current design and character (though is most likely more expensive than it was in Hemingway’s day).

Cafe Braunerhof: Like Paris, Vienna is a city dotted with cafes, many of which were home to famous writers, artists and intellectuals. The Cafe Braunerhof located near the Habsburg city palace is said to be lauded writer Thomas Bernhard’s favorite spot, and where we worked on some of the most important works in the German-speaking world after WWII.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone du Beauvoir and friends enjoy a drink and conversation at the iconic Café de Flore (artist unknown)

Cafe de Flore: Now a popular hang-out among the fashion set and other glamorous types, Cafe de Flore — principal rival to Les Deux Magots — was another office for Hemingway and his contemporaries. In 1994, Cafe de Flore began handing out its own annual literary prize — the Prix de Flore — to promising young authors of French-language literature. Besides a cash prize, the winner gets to drink a glass of the white wine Pouilly-Fume at the cafe every day for a year.

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Dingo Bar: Now the restaurant Auberge de Venise, the Dingo Bar was another Montparnasse staple that opened in 1923 and catered to English and American ex-pats in Paris, like writer Djuna Barnes and publishing house owner Nancy Cunard. It’s also the spot where Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald met for the first time.

Cafe Montmartre: This cafe is actually located in Prague and was sometimes called by its nickname, Montik, or The Monty. Some of the most important writers from Germany and Czechoslovakia — like Franz Kafka, Eduard Bass and Max Brod — all came here.

Pedrocchi Cafe: Padua’s Pedrocchi Cafe is one of the biggest cafes in the world and was known as a favorite hang-out for Lord Byron and French writer Stendhal.

Man Reading About Election Straw Votes at Harry's New York Bar Photographic Print

Man Reading About Election Straw Votes at Harry’s New York Bar, photo: Yale Joel

Harry’s New York Bar: Actually located in Paris, Harry’s New York Bar was named for its early manager, a Scotsman. It opened in 1911, and Harry was supposedly responsible for making it a legitimate ex-pat cafe during the next decade, attracting Sinclair Lewis, Humphrey Bogart, Hemingway, and others. Side tip: Harry’s New York Bar is also where the Bloody Mary was first concocted.

Antico Caffe Greco: Situated near the Spanish Steps in a very posh area of Rome, the Antico Caffe Greco — founded in 1760 — is also the city’s most famous. Over the past centuries, writers like Lord Byron, John Keats, Henrik Ibsen and Hans Christian Andersen became patrons.

La Coupole: La Coupole is another historical Montparnasse cafe, which opened in 1927, soon after Le Select, and aimed to compete against Le Dome for the expat intellectual clientele. The massive cafe could seat 600 people, including famous guests like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre. La Coupole is now an official historic monument.

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La Closerie des Lilas (1909)

La Closerie des Lilas: Also situated in Paris’ Montparnasse is La Closerie, which opened in 1847 and attracted everyone from Henry James to Leon Trotsky to Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, who references nearby statues and descriptions in The Sun Also Rises.

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Caffe Giubbe Rosse, from left: Massimo Bontempelli, Maria Bellonci, Romano Bilenchi, Eugenio Montale (Giovannetti Photo Archive)

Caffe Giubbe Rosse: One of Florence’s most famous cafes is Caffe Giubbe Rosse, named for Garibaldi’s Red Shirts, and also inspiration for the waiters’ uniforms. Celebrated for its role in producing the Futurist movement, Caffe Giubbe Rosse was also a favored spot for many notable Italian poets.

Grand Cafe: The Grand Hotel in Oslo is home to the Grand Cafe, a famous restaurant and meet-up. It’s where the Nobel Peace Prize banquet is held each year, and is said to be the daily lunch spot of Henrik Ibsen. Roald Dahl also stayed at the hotel during his youth.

Photo: No. 6, Rue du Pot de Fer, Paris. George Orwell lived at No. 6, Rue du Pot de Fer which he transformed into Rue du Coq d’ Or in Down and Out in Paris and London. orwell.ru

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There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a
gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into
solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or
decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as
money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives
that were curious beyond words.

~ George Orwell

Down and Out in Paris and London, Chapter I

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The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

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Buddha

‘The peony was as big as this,’
Says the little girl
Opening her arms.

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Issa

:)

Franck Balestracci

Frank O’Connor, The Art of Fiction No. 19

Interviewed by Anthony Whittier - The Paris Review

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Autumn-Winter 1957, No. 17

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SCENE: Frank O’Connor is of medium height and build; he has heavy silver hair, brushed back; dark, heavy eyebrows; and a mustache. His voice is bass-baritone in pitch and very resonant—what has been described as jukebox bass. His accent is Irish, but with no suggestion of the “flannel-mouth,” his intonation musical. He enjoys talk and needed no urging regarding the subject of the interview. His clothes tend toward the tweedy and casual: desert boots, corduroy jacket, rough tweed topcoat; and a bit of California touch evident in a heavy silver ornament hung on a cord around his neck in place of a tie.

Although a friendly and approachable man, O’Connor has a way of appraising you on early meetings, which suggests the Irishman who would just as soon knock you down as look at you if he doesn’t like what he sees. His wife provides a description of an encounter with a group of loitering teenagers while the two of them were out for a walk. A remark of some sort was made, O’Connor whipped over to them and told them to get home if they knew what was good for them. The boys took him in, silvery hair and all, and moved off.

O’Connor’s apartment is in Brooklyn, where he lives with his pretty young American wife. The large white-walled modern living room has a wide corner view of lower Manhattan and New York Harbor. The Brooklyn Bridge sweeps away across the river from a point close at hand. On his table, just under the window looking out on the harbor, are a typewriter, a small litter of papers, and a pair of binoculars. The binoculars are for watching liners “on their way to Ireland,” to which he returns once a year. He says he’d die if he didn’t.

INTERVIEWER

What determined you to become a writer?

FRANK O’CONNOR

I’ve never been anything else. From the time I was nine or ten, it was a toss-up whether I was going to be a writer or a painter, and I discovered by the time I was sixteen or seventeen that paints cost too much money, so I became a writer because you could be a writer with a pencil and a penny notebook. I did at one time get a scholarship to Paris,* but I couldn’t afford to take it up because of the family. That’s where my life changed its course; otherwise I’d have been a painter. I have a very strongly developed imitative instinct, which I notice is shared by some of my children. I always wrote down bits of music that impressed me in staff notation, though I couldn’t read staff notation—I didn’t learn to read it until I was thirty-five—but this always gave me the air of being a musician. And in the same way, I painted. I remember a friend of mine who painted in water colors and he was rather shy. He was painting in the city, so he used to get up at six in the morning when there was nobody to observe him and go out and paint. And one day he was going in to work at nine o’clock and he saw a little girl sitting where he had sat, with a can of water and an old stick, pretending to paint a picture—she’d obviously been watching him from an upstairs window. That’s what I mean by the imitative instinct, and I’ve always had that strongly developed. So I always play at knowing things until, in fact, I find I’ve learned them almost by accident.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you prefer the short story for your medium?

O’CONNOR

Because it’s the nearest thing I know to lyric poetry—I wrote lyric poetry for a long time, then discovered that God had not intended me to be a lyric poet, and the nearest thing to that is the short story. A novel actually requires far more logic and far more knowledge of circumstances, whereas a short story can have the sort of detachment from circumstances that lyric poetry has…