Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios

Huddleston had the best seat in Paris and knew it. The Times of London sent him to cover the 1919 Peace Conference; he stayed to cover everything else, and by the mid-twenties the portly Englishman presiding over the Anglo-American press lunches knew both literary Parises — the French one of Paul Fort and the academies, and the foreign one assembling at the Dôme and the rue de l'Odéon — better than anyone writing in English.

In 1928 he did the sensible, priceless thing: he wrote it all down while it was still happening. Salon by salon, café by café, studio by studio, the book tours the era mid-performance — Sylvia Beach deciding to publish Ulysses, Pound turning composer, the riots at modernist premieres, and a newly famous young Hemingway, whose hunt for a simple style Huddleston had watched at the press lunches and whose finished manner he affectionately parodies in these pages.

Lippincott published it in America in 1928; Britain got it from Harrap as Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris. It sold as journalism and survives as testimony: no hindsight, no legend-polishing, no idea how any of it would end. The book is now in the public domain — free to read — and half its rooms are on our map, which makes it something like our founding document, written from the next chair.

A guided tour of literary and artistic Paris in the twenties, written by the Times correspondent who had a chair in every room. Huddleston organizes it the way the city organized itself: by salon, café, and studio — the French literary world of Paul Fort and the academies on one side, the Anglo-American colony of Montparnasse on the other, and the traffic between them that most memoirs never mention. Sylvia Beach and the publishing of Ulysses, Pound's operatic experiments, the riots that greeted the new music and painting, the tourist invasion of the Rotonde — all reported as news, because it still was.

The pleasure is the eyewitness present tense: nobody in these pages knows how the story ends, least of all the affectionately parodied young Hemingway. Chapters stand alone, so the book rewards browsing — start with a room you know from our map and read outward. It is the era's best single piece of testimony from the next chair, and it is in the public domain: the whole thing can be read free online.