Direct From Paris!

Somewhere along life's road, we paused.

Do you need a vacation from the tense present? Come with me to the past nearly perfect, and from there we will circle back to a recent day of happiness for me in Northport. 

 

Most Americans, whether they have been able to make the dream come true or not, have a dream city. For some it is Manhattan or San Francisco, for others London or Rome. For me, all my life, it was always Paris. It had certainly been that for my father, who was there in the intoxicating days following the Liberation and who had a chance to see and hear Edith Piaf, the “little sparrow,” in person one evening. And for the Artist—well, how many artists from all over the world, through the years, have sought refuge and validation in Paris? 

 

So Paris was a dream we shared from the beginning. As it turned out, however, each of us made our first trip solo, which was as important for me as it was for him. When I went for the month of May in 1987, it was because so much else in my life had fallen apart that I needed to save at least one important dream. I didn’t want to speak English at all during my weeks in Paris and avoided situations to do so. For me, it was a personal test. When the Artist went for three weeks in April of 1992, it was a different kind of test for him. He needed to make his way around independently with only smatterings of the language. 

My beautiful room!

Complete with a cat named Sirius!

Both of us succeeded, and we made important friends, as well, during our solo times in Paris. The older Frenchwoman from whom I rented a room on the rue de Vaugirard became one of the best friends of my life, and the young Englishman he met became an important friend to the Artist. We dreamed of having these two visit us in the U.S. so we could show them our country. That dream was never realized, but in September of 2000, when the Artist and I finally went to Paris together, it was natural that we would introduce our two dear friends to each other. 

Justin and Hélène as she shows some of the art on her walls

What an enchanted, unforgettable evening that was! Drinks and hors d’oevres at Hélène’s apartment, followed by dinner at a little Auvergnat restaurant in the neighborhood! “We are making beautiful memories!” Hélène said to me, resting her head on my shoulder. She did not speak English any more than the Artist spoke French, but to my great delight they “got” each other without a common language. Of course! 

 

I had chosen our hotel, le Recamier, in part because of its proximity to Hélène’s apartment, my first “home” in Paris, but the peacefulness of the Place with its fountain of the Four Cardinals (and the four cardinal directions), the church of St.-Sulpice with its grand organ, and the bookshops nearby all added their own charms. 

After an exciting but somehow leisurely Paris sojourn, we took the train of grande vitesse south to Avignon, picked up a rental car, and wandered north. We had maps but no reservations, simply exploring as the spirit moved us—and by great good fortune happening upon the village of Blesle, which I will never, never forget. 

We always talked of a return. We wanted to go back to Paris, to see Justin and Hélène again, to visit places we hadn’t had time to see, and maybe spend an entire week in Blesle, seeking out the treasures of the Auvergne. But it was not to be. We never gave up the idea, but time ran out on us. 

 

So imagine the thrill I felt when an email came from the publishing house of Gallimard in Paris, saying they were putting together a new volume of some of Jim Harrison’s work in French translation and that the translator had discovered a couple of screenplay treatments, never sold, that the Artist and the Writer had cowritten back in the 1970s—and would I give permission for translations of those two pieces, with credit given to David Grath, to be included in the volume?!

 

But of course!!!

 

There followed months of emails back and forth between Paris, France, and Northport, Michigan. The flood of forms seemed to multiply overnight like wire coat hangers in the closet of an old farmhouse. (Do I know about that, or do I know about that?) It was international business, there was an advance on royalties involved, etc., etc. About the time I was ready to give up and tell them “Forget the royalties! Just make sure the pieces get into the book!” I was assured that the last form requested would be the final one required and that when the book was published in November 2024 a copy would be sent to me. 

 

Publication timelines are often subject to alteration, so I was not surprised to learn that Métamorphoses would not be released until January 2025. It had been so long since the initial email that for days, even weeks at a time, I would forget about the book completely. Last week, then, when I had a yellow slip to pick up a package at the post office, the contents took me completely by surprise.

Identifying name on package

 

Contents of package

The two screenplay treatments are near the end of the book in a section called “Unedited texts,” and the Artist’s name is in small type in a footnote at the bottom of the first page of the first screenplay (this is, after all, a work of the revered Jim Harrison), but I remember how absolutely thrilled David had been, on his first visit to France, to see the Bob James album, “Grand Piano Canyon,” in a shop in Paris with the image of his painting of the same name on the album cover, so I can easily imagine how pleased he would be to have the collaborative work he did with his friend Jim in a book issued by the one of France’s leading publishers, which is the reason I jumped through that seemingly endless series of bureaucratic hoops—not for money but for love. And there you have it. That's my story.

 

Which brings us back to northern Michigan, on a cold January day, in a turbulent and disturbing moment in American history, but I promised myself and my readers a vacation in today’s post and am not about to renege on my promise. So, some more happy news? There was practically no wind this morning! What joy for the momma and her girl when they went out for their first walk of the day! A perfect morning for chasing chunks of icy snow and slipping and sliding in the process! What fun!

What on earth can I possibly say?

 

I’ve been writing this blog since 2007, and odds are I’ll keep going for the foreseeable future. Why do I do it? 

 

The truth is, Books in Northport does not have a huge readership. None of its posts has ever “gone viral.” Occasionally (and the occasions are rare) someone struck by a certain thought or story of mine here will share a post with a friend or put a link on Facebook, but my readers are more generally content to enjoy for themselves, quietly. Even comments to any particular post are uncommon.

 

And when I look at my stats (which no, I am not going to share publicly, thank you very much), I see that 2017 was the high-water readership mark for this blog. (Six years ago. Should that make me sad?) The statistics give only numbers and a jagged line climbing to a sharp peak before falling again – no indication why more people were reading me in that year than any other. 

What did I write about in 2017? I did a lot of book reviews that year. There were adventures in the Southwest. (But I still do book reviews and recount adventures, when I have any to recount.) There was the launch of Sarah Shoemaker’s novel, Mr. Rochester, a lot of my personal musings (examples here and here), topics literary, historical, social and political pleas (here's an example of that kind of thing), and small personal and local observations here and there, as snippets of my small-town bookselling life dog-paddled furiously to survive in a stormy sea of national chaos. Because that's how I remember 2017 -- as a plunge into national chaos.

Did readers find my questions similar to ones they were asking themselves that year, or were they seeking refuge from disturbing questions in books and in someone else’s life?

 

Because maybe, I’m thinking, it wasn’t my writing or subject matter that caused the spike at all but simply a new kind of chaos that drove more people that year to online forums in general. And now, maybe we have gradually become accustomed to chaos and have given up any attempt either to escape fully or to understand. Maybe recipes and dogs and word puzzles and jigsaw puzzles on Facebook are more tranquilizing, and therefore more appealing, than anything I could possibly write. Whatever!

Numerous suggestions for increasing website audience can be found online, if marketing is your aim or popularity (numbers) your goal. I had a professional group “reach out” to me a few years back, offering to provide more exciting “content” to my blog than I had come up with myself. Unlike the Queen, I was amused, because while my bookstore often appears on this site, as do books, I’m not writing advertising copy. Most simply put, this is my life I'm sharing – certain aspects of it, anyway: books read, travels enjoyed, adventures undertaken, thoughts entertained, questions that plague me, as well as (to steal from Carl Jung) memories, dreams, reflections -- regardless of how many or how few friends or strangers may be interested.

 

Poet Fleda Brown, on her blog, "The Wobbly Bicycle," writes that she has not been writing poems lately but a diary instead, which she approaches as a literary project, in hopes that it will eventually be published. Another writer whose work I admire told me at one point that he felt I had found my “form” in blog posts, and more than one friend (both writers and nonwriters) suggests now and again that Books in Northport could be turned into a book. Is it motivation I lack or energy or something else? Others have done it, so the idea itself is not absurd. -- But a bound volume of my originally digital words without accompanying images (related or unrelated, today's being the latter) and embedded links? It would be, I’m thinking, more hole than cloth.

 

There’s no Big Question here today. No plan for the future. No sudden epiphany. Idle speculation, merely, after four housebound days of clouds and rain and wind and a few snow flurries and a dead car battery, so, as always, take it or leave it. 

Dear Reader, Whoever You May Be

Enter ghost town!

One windy afternoon here in the high desert, while removing membrane from sections of grapefruit for a citrus-based salad, I fell to musing about friendships in my life that have been nurtured by the exchange of handwritten letters. The thought was not unusual, since I am far, far from my Michigan home. Laurie, Ellen, and Leonore, all back in Michigan, came first to mind, friends very much still in my life. 

Laurie and I met on her return from a year in Spain and saw each other occasionally in Kalamazoo, since our husbands were old friends, but only when she left to live in South America and we began writing one another leisurely epistles recounting events in our respective lives did we begin truly to know each other. It was different with Ellen. She and I had worked together before she and her husband moved to Arizona for a year, and writing letters seemed natural to us both. Leonore and I were friends in Kalamazoo, where our children were in school together, but letters between Michigan and Colorado when she and her family were living out West brought us close in a new way. With all three of these friendships, someone I knew in one context went to live far away from the place where we first knew each other, so perhaps part of my interest in writing and being written to was a desire to enlarge my own world.

Sarah investigates cattle path

There is something intimate about a handwritten letter, too, and no doubt some of its value comes from the rarity of such communication in our modern lives. We have no need to write letters, buy stamps, and delay the gratification of knowing our efforts have been received and appreciated, when it is so simple to make a phone call or send a text or an e-mail. Because letters are not necessary, and time to write a letter must be intentionally carved out of a busy life, the friend who takes the time to write adds something valuable to the friendship. 

But — a confession! At least one of my friends understands that my letters to her are just as much self-indulgence as they are gifts to her! In one letter to her years back I quoted from M.F.K. Fisher, writing to one of her correspondents, the passage an admission on Fisher’s part that letter-writing, for her, took the form of an addiction. Yes, there is that, too! So the friends who receive my letters are doing me a great kindness, indulging me for having given way to an overwhelming compulsion.

Ed and I began writing letters to one another in French but have fallen off lately. I remember how long I would labor over letters to my friend Helene in Paris and how pleased I was when she complimented my efforts. Something new this year: thrilled that I am now working too learn Spanish, my friend Laurie encourages me to write to her in Spanish. These missives in other languages lack the spontaneity and ease I feel with English, but writing them affords me a particular sense of accomplishment — and I love the letters I get in return, too.

For many years I had a couple of good friends who never answered my letters in kind but would pick up the phone from time to time, and that worked for us in those relationships. I was uncomfortable making phone calls, and they were not good at writing letters. I still miss the surprise of a call from M., whose present whereabouts are unknown to me, though I have tried repeatedly to locate her. And I cherish the memory of an actual letter from L., the first and last I ever had from her, written in the winter before she died. We were looking forward to a spring visit in Arizona, and when she wrote she recalled our first Arizona visit twenty-three years before. Well, we did have the anticipated second Southwest visit, a lovely time of reconnection. I thought there would be many more to come, but though I can see her no longer, her letter assures me still that our meeting was as important to her as it was to me.

I miss my letters from Helene, another friend whose death hurt my heart, and I miss letters from Annie, too, mon amie philosophe fauve, her ashes now sprinkled at the site of the ancient stone circle of Avebury. What joy it was to find their letters waiting for me in the post office box!

Naturally, I have e-mail correspondence, too. In fact, e-mail letters are already an almost obsolete form, aren’t they? Old-fashioned! But the friends with whom I exchange e-mail messages are mostly of my generation (or are understanding family members a generation younger), and we compose our messages in the manner and with the care we would take to write letters on paper. “Dear Kathy,” I begin, and she begins “Dear Pamela.” Kathy and I pay attention to paragraphs and spelling, and we try to entertain each other with lively description. 

Recently a friend on Facebook sent me a link to a feature article about writers and their diaries and journals. Of all the writers appearing in the story, the one that meant the most to me, the only one that brought a catch to my throat, was Anne Frank. She had never kept a diary before and probably never would have except in hiding; in her normal, prewar life, she was a sociable, outgoing young girl, and had her family been able to escape altogether lands occupied by Nazis, I can easily imagine her writing letters to real living friends back in Holland, not to the imaginary friend “Kitty” she had to invent. When I first read her diary, I was the same age she had been when writing it, and I longed to have been able to exchange letters with the living Anne….

A diary may be hidden away or published in multiple volumes. Writers of private journals intend different ends for them, and it seems to me that the future a writer imagines for his or her diary — whether forever private or completely public — must affect the writing. Some writers wanted their private writings destroyed, but posterity decided otherwise. What would those writers think now, could they return and see their most personal and heartfelt struggles printed and bound and offered for sale in the marketplace?

I have never kept copies of my letters written to friends, and Books in Northport, this blog, now in its eleventh year and public though it is, is the closest I have ever come to keeping a journal of my life with any discipline. My letters, it should surprise no one, often contain more personal thoughts, but the images in this public log give it a dimension the letters lack. 

And what occurred to me over the citrus bowl — the goad to my sitting down and writing this post at all — is that every post published here is like a letter in a bottle, tossed out onto the waves, to be found and read by anyone or no one. When I release it to the world, it is out of my control. Sometimes, as was the case when I was 17 and went with a friend one night a week to a local radio station to take call-in song requests, I wonder if there’s anyone out there in the dark at all. Other times I am surprised to learn how far a specific letter has traveled, on what shore that bottle washed up. 

“Dear reader” is an old-fashioned literary conceit, but I am an old-fashioned person — a bookseller, a reader of print books, and a handwriter of letters to friends. I don’t even have a “smart” phone! All of which is to say, as I struggle for a way to bring this post to a graceful close, that when you read Books in Northport, you are reading as much of a diary as I will ever write, and you are also reading a letter from a friend, whether or not we ever meet face to face. And I do thank you, once again, for indulging me as you do in this strange compulsion.

Sincerely yours, 

P.J.

Simple materials