Paris in the Twenties Was Not a Party
The mythology of the Lost Generation in 1920s Paris has been so thoroughly processed into glamour that the actual conditions of the period have become nearly unrecognizable inside it: a city still rebuilding after the war, full of American expatriates living cheaply on the dollar-franc exchange rate, several of them drinking themselves toward early death, most of them producing work of lasting importance under circumstances that were genuinely precarious and not always recognizably fun.
Gertrude Stein coined the term — she said a garage owner had used it to describe the young men who serviced his cars, trained quickly and wastefully, and she applied it to the generation that had come of age during the war. Hemingway used it as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926) and spent the rest of his career in an ambivalent relationship with the label, both claiming the identity and resenting its implications. What the Lost Generation were actually lost from, and whether lostness was their defining condition or simply their retrospective brand, is a question the surviving work answers differently depending on which work you read.
The expatriate community in Paris between roughly 1920 and 1930 was small enough that most of its significant members knew each other and large enough to sustain an ecosystem of magazines, salons, small presses, and arguments. Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus was its most famous gathering point — a room whose walls were covered in Cézannes and Picassos, where Stein held court and dispensed opinions with the authority of someone who had been watching modernism happen from a close distance since 1903. She was generous, exacting, frequently wrong about individual writers (she cooled on both Hemingway and Fitzgerald after early enthusiasm), and indispensable as a reader and editor to the generation that gathered around her. Her own work — Three Lives, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Tender Buttons — occupied a position in the avant-garde that most of her disciples admired without fully understanding.
Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the rue de l’Odéon served as lending library, mail drop, and informal bank for the American community. Beach had published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 when no commercial publisher would touch it, an act of literary faith that cost her the better part of a decade of financial stability. The bookshop was a physical manifestation of the idea that literature mattered enough to organize a life around; it attracted everyone who felt similarly, including Adrienne Monnier, Beach’s partner, who ran a French-language equivalent across the street.
Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921, 22 years old, on a newspaper correspondent’s salary, with his first wife Hadley. He was already working on what would become his style — the stripped declarative sentence, the omission of stated emotion, the theory he would later describe as the iceberg: the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926) established him as the defining voice of the generation. He left Paris for Key West in 1928, a year after The Sun Also Rises, one marriage into what would eventually be four. The Paris years were the ones he kept writing about for the rest of his life, most directly in A Moveable Feast, the memoir he was working on when he died in 1961 and which was published posthumously in 1964. It is a beautiful and unreliable account of a period he had by then spent 35 years mythologizing.
F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived in Paris for the first time in 1924, already famous from This Side of Paradise (1920) and already aware that his relationship with Zelda was an engine of productivity and mutual destruction in roughly equal measure. The Great Gatsby was finished in France and published in 1925, to reviews that recognized its importance without producing the sales Fitzgerald had hoped for. He spent the rest of his life trying to repeat it and largely failing, dying in 1940 at 44, working as a Hollywood screenwriter, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished. Zelda had been institutionalized since 1930.
The work the Lost Generation produced in Paris — Ulysses, The Waste Land, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Stein’s salon experiments, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood — is not the product of a party. It is the product of people who had survived a war that had invalidated most of what their culture had told them was true, working in a city cheap enough to live in without certainty, in a language they had no intention of surrendering, in forms they were in the process of breaking and rebuilding at the same time.
The glamour arrived later, as it usually does. While it was happening, it was mostly poverty, argument, and work.