TEN HEMINGWAY

The Other American Expatriates 

Baldwin and Hughes provide us with a new dimension of the expatriate life in Paris through the lens of African-Americans. They too, believe in a myth of Paris “as a crucially non-racist city”. Baldwin presents a rather unfortunate encounter in Paris and expresses his negative feelings over his fate. Yet he chooses to remain in the city of lights. On the other hand, Hughes delivers his story with a frankness with exclamations of humor despite it having his fair share of misfortunes.It is through Kramer that we learn about the reason behind Baldwin’s fondness of Paris — its cultural hybridity. Both the writers reflect this hybridity through their tales while replicating the insular nature of the expatriate community in the French capital. In this process, their expectations of Paris are also confronted with her realities.

As African-Americans, Baldwin and Hughes arrive in Paris about two decades later than the first Lost Generation to escape the racial discrimination in America. Parallel to the idle, romantic notion of Paris that the Lost Generation had in the 1920s, a racially-tolerant, liberating idea of Paris was held by the African-American hopefuls. However, both writers soon learn that Paris was difficult in her own ways to survive in. 

Socioeconomically, Baldwin and Hughes differ from the previous wave of Americans. They were disadvantaged in America in terms of social standing and were financially less favorable than most of the 1920s American expatriates. Unlike Hemingway or Stein or Pound, the African-American expatriates had less connections back home and in Paris. In Baldwin’s account, it appeared that even if they did, they could not associate with them unless they had the same amount of wealth. 

“In those days in Paris, though I floated, so to speak, on a sea of acquaintances, I knew almost no one. Many people were eliminated from my orbit by virtu of the fact that they had more money than I did,”

In light of this, the 1920s expatriate community seemed to be a much more generous group. The warmth of Sylvia Beach’s encouragement, unconditional help and sharing of books at Shakespeare and Co., and Alice Toklas’s cooking while writers and artists gathered at Gertrude Stein’s apartment to discuss life, literature and the arts seemed like such heaven as we contemplate these scenes against Hughes and Baldwin’s experiences. 

Indeed, while Hemingway’s “hunger” was as metaphorical, poetic and even philosophical, the hunger of our African-American writers were recounted with much less rumination. The harsh conditions of Baldwin’s jail cell that almost made him “cry” and “vomit” is described in a realistic tone that did not produce any of the beauty that Hemingway’s honesty did. Even as Baldwin recounts Paris, it is not an idyllic picture. 

In Paris everything is very slow. Also, when dealing with the bureaucracy, the man you are talking to is never the man you have to see. The man you have to see has just gone off to Belgium, or is busy with his family, or has just discovered he is a cuckhold; he will be in next Tuesday at three o’clock, or sometime in the course of the afternoon, or possibly tomorrow, or, possibly, in the next five minutes. But if he is coming in the next five minutes he will be far too busy to be able to see you today. 

Baldwin is more upfront with reality in this case. There is skepticism and sarcasm in his tone, which also produces a humorous effect as the triviality of Frenchmen and their businesses are underlined. As such, we can infer that his memory was not tainted by nostalgia like Hemingway’s, or rather, it was tainted with a different type of sentiment. 

We see a different class of expatriates even if they are writers too. This group of writers mingle with the non-literary, the non-creatives, and notably, other “expatriates” who did not come from the same country. Hughes enjoyed an interestingly innocent friendship with Russian dancer Sonya, who was “older than I (Hughes) was.” Even though there seemed to be an awkward sexual tension at the beginning, the relationship developed into an older sister-younger brother dynamic, in which Sonya takes care and even supports Hughes until he finds a job. The “quick friendship of the dispossessed” surprised Hughes too, and it ended in a clean, quick way too — no hard feelings, no underlying budding hatred towards or distaste of each other, but simply because of life. Sonya had found another job in another part of Paris, which in the circumstances back then, made it difficult for them to stay in touch. Similarly, Baldwin’s New Yorker friend was not a professional peer to him like Fitzgerald was to Hemingway. 

Yet, like the 1920s Lost Generation, this community of expatriates were still insular. If they had any interaction with the French it was due to work, or in Baldwin’s case, trouble with the law. However, the diversity of this expatriate community and the more trying circumstances that our African-American writers faced that provided a different landscape for creativity. This landscape was the “new, vital” one that cultivated the “cultural hybridity” that Baldwin praised. Through the two African-American writers’ accounts, the existence of multiple voices is due to the allowance of Parisian existence for them, despite the existence of prejudice.

The ideals that between-wars Modernism are concerned with — such as equality and freedom —  could not find a place in the unfiltered reality of Paris. Hughes’ account reflect a stereotype of African-American (and possibly anyone else of African descent).

They thought I was musical competition.  

I said: “None. I’m just looking for an ordinary job.” 

Puzzled, another one asked: “Do you tap dance, or what?” 

No,” I said, “I’ve just got off a ship and I want any kind of job there is.” 

“You must be crazy, boy,” one of the men said. “There ain’t that kind ofa job’ here. There’re plenty of French people for ordinary work. ’Less you can play jazz or tap dance, you’d just as well go back home.”

From this short exchange, Hughes paints the perception and job prospects that “colored” people have of themselves (and possibly those that the French, or the others, have of them) in Paris. The subsequent challenges in job hunting proves that this perception did hold true to a large extent. After all, it was not after living off his lady friend for what seemed like a significant period of time before he could actually find a job as a doorman at a “little club” for “Cinq francs et le dîner.” This was also after Hughes “had tried all the big night clubs at Montmartre”. This brings us to question the equality and freedom as Modernists did — has society gotten any better? Why are these situations still present? How has the enlightenment, science or technology improved our lives if the underlying prejudice towards and amongst groups of people still persists (and as we know in WWII, aggravated to a scale as horrific as genocide?)

Interestingly, this exchange also gives us a perspective of the French — they did not job discriminate. Unlike America (or many other developed countries of today), the natives took up "ordinary jobs", including construction, taxi-driving etc. This presents an outlook on Paris that is again different from the home that Baldwin and Hughes sailed from.

At the same time, Hughes’s willingness to take on a spectrum of menial jobs is in contrast to the literary or journalistic occupations that Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s generation held for money. Baldwin identified with the 1920s generation’s notion of “work” more. His pride as a writer and personal outlook on life is expressed through his reluctance or distaste of the so-called “Great Adventure” way of living. Between Hughes and Baldwin, we see two different attitudes of writers towards pragmatic survival in Paris. While Hughes’s narrative ends on an optimistic note, “I was coming up into the world.”, Baldwin resolved to see that “the American racism he had fled was simply a subset of a larger and inevitable human indifference to suffering.” The sinister “laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real” was his learning point from the “crudest trick [he] had ever played on [him]self.”

This “human indifference to suffering” in Paris was different than that of America’s because it never manifested into institutional marginalization of the expatriates by the French. Therefore, the city could accommodate “multiple voices of a national cultures” and “mixtures”. It is hence why Paris remained so mythical and alluring to foreigners — she had a place for the non-French within her non-French community for those who felt out of place at home.