She'll Always Have Paris. - Review - book review

National Review, April 16, 2001 by Jeffrey Hart

String of Pearls: On the News Beat in New York and Paris, by Priscilla L. Buckley (St. Martin's, 183 pp., $21.95)

I've been a friend and colleague of Priscilla Buckley for decades. This will not prevent me from telling the truth about her book.

Its prose is energized by intelligence and concreteness, a claim I will soon validate. It is wonderfully evocative of a time and place. Or, rather, two places, New York and Paris, but mostly Paris. Reading it, I thought of Elliot Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris, Janet Flanner's Paris Was Yesterday, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

In his own memoir, however, Hemingway-while celebrating youth and Paris-imposed upon us his most unattractive side. He denigrated, without shame, T. S. Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and many others. Nice guy. But at least he liked Paris.

In contrast, A String of Pearls is generous in spirit. Priscilla Buckley loved and still loves the life she evokes here. Because she has a sparkling sense of humor, she also enjoys its frequent absurdities.

Part One deals with her life in New York City between 1944 and 1948. A recent graduate of Smith College, she gained an entry-level job at the United Press wire service. Low pay, long hours, and dingy apartments could not dampen her spirit. This was New York! The capital of the world! Just being there, then, was, as she puts it, "tops." Life had few cares and was all possibility.

Though she does not put it this way, she captures a sense of New York in the '40s as an extension of a Silver Age that began in the '20s and ended around 1960. The grim years of the Depression were gone. The war had been won. The great musicals were on Broadway, and sophisticated jazz was in the air. Yet to appear were Elvis, the Beatles, the Kennedys, Abbie Hoffman, and Charles Manson. Miss Buckley conveys the spirit of this time with carefully polished-one might say pearl-like- anecdotes. One of my favorite characters in this part of the book is one Johnny Zischaung, who "had been born with a stump instead of a left hand":

It was only in his cups that Johnny came to life. He played a mean piano despite his disability, hitting a steady bass with the stump of his left hand while his right hand moved with astonishing agility over the usually tinny keyboards of the uprights to be found in many Greenwich Village apartments. He wrote songs and was the beery life of many an impromptu postwork party in the Village, where most of us lived in dirty, crowded, cramped apartments. One of Johnny's songs I remember-I can almost hear the thump-thump of its beat today-was entitled "The Blonde and the Yokel on the Uptown Local."

Somewhat later, Johnny, then in Paris and no doubt drunk, fell into the Seine and drowned. This is sad, but perhaps also artistically perfect. I recall Fitzgerald's wonderful sentence about a friend who was mortally beaten in a speakeasy and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die.

In 1953, Priscilla Buckley went to work as a writer and reporter for UPI in Paris. Her affection for this city and things French is contagious. She describes even those who played only minor roles in her life with crystallizing vividness.

The greengrocer from around the corner with the Chinese long fingernails and the angora sweater he wears winter and summer, and the twin of which his wife seems to be perpetually knitting in the back of their store, picks up his truck for the early morning visit to Les Halles, the central Paris market, to gather the day's fruits and vegetables. He promises to save a good head of lettuce for me.

Miss Buckley's Parisian patriotism is a matter of French style, ambience, and personality. French life is full of the unexpected because France is not America, and the French are so French.

A principal character here is her secondhand Hillman-Minx convertible, which, because of a broken part, is in the habit of suddenly stopping and freezing in the midst of the heaviest Paris traffic. She meets a lot of people this way, though not the car's manufacturer in London-who cannot, or will not, send a new part.

People who love Paris often express this by the music of street names. Hemingway does this beautifully in The Sun Also Rises. Miss Buckley uses the device admirably, but punctures it humorously at the end:

I drive down the Avenue Henri Martin to the Trocadero, down Avenue Woodrow Wilson, and hit the Seine at the Place de l'Alma. Every day in the last fortnight as I have made this trip to report for the 7 a.m. shift the sky has become a smidgen lighter. Now it is almost full daylight. I drive past le Grand Palais and just beyond it am clipped by a truck driver barreling across the Alexandre III bridge, trying to beat a light.

In an example of how journalists can create an international celebrity, Miss Buckley describes the manufacture of the "Angel of Dien Bien Phu." At the peak of that disastrous battle, she was perusing a long wire story about the fighting:

Way down in the story, about the twenty-fifth or twenty-eighth take, AFP [a French wire service] gave the names of the medical evacuation team now stranded in the doomed fort: two doctors and a nurse, Lt. Genevieve de Gallard-Terraube.