Teo Tarras - Cafe de la Paix

Paintings and music, street noises, flower markets, modes, fabrics, poems, ideas, everything seemed to lead toward a half-sensual, half-intellectual swoon. Inside the cafes, color, perfume, taste and delirium could be poured together from one bottle or many bottles - from square, cylindrical, conical, tall, squat, brown, green or crimson bottles - but you drank black coffee by choice, believing that Paris itself was sufficient alcohol.
(Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s)

Cowley lived in Paris for three years and he was a friend of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Later in life he edited the works of Hemingway, Faulkner and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Very important his introductions to The Portable Faulkner and to Winesburg, Ohio of Sherwood Anderson. His Exile's Return appeared in 1934 and chronicles the general movement by the Lost Generation out of the United States (Wikipedia).

The Hours was firstly a novel written by Michael Cunningham, and then a movie - the story of how a book affects (and is affected by) the life of three women, living in different epochs. The three women are the author, the reader, and the main character. The author is Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) - she is starting to write the first chapter of her Mrs. Dalloway, in 1923 in England. The reader (played by Julianne Moore) filters the universe of Mrs. Dalloway through her own universe - other time (1951), other space (California), other experience of life. And the main character of Mrs. Dalloway (played by Meryl Streep) lives also in her own universe! - once she was created by the author, she got (with or without the author's will) autonomy, an existence of her own, free to chose her time (2001), her space (Manhattan), her career, her issues. Actually a book has three independent players, the author, the character, and the reader - there are so many Don Quixote as many readers are - and Don Quixote is not only what Cervantes decided. Great authors (Chekhov is such an example) understood this need of their characters for autonomy and did not impose too many constraints through the plot of their books.

This album on Parisian cafes, that I follow page after page, shows me also the way the author, the characters and the reader have impact on each other. The author, Val Clark, made the selection of the images and of the texts. The characters of the book are great photographs along with great writers. And I see Paris through the eyes of Brassaï, Kertesz, Doisneau, Boubat, Man Ray, Dennis Stock, Teo Tarras (and also Van Gogh, Manet, Stuart Davis, Pissaro), each one with its own sensibility, with its own obsessions. I am looking on the web for the images from the album, sometimes I found other photos, and as I follow the book, I get more and more intimate with the universes of these masters. Then the writers selected in the book, generally belonging to the so called Lost Generation - each one different, with its own memories of Paris - and each one surprising me in a slightly different way.

And as I follow the pages of the album, looking on the web for the photos, finding sometimes others, understanding little by little the universes of these fabulous artists, photographs, painters or writers - all this is filtered through my own life experience, my memories from Bucharest, as well as my present experience - I think at Paris as I am strolling through the streets of Washington, as I am interested also in other lost generations: the generation of Vietnam (Caputo, Herr, Wolff), the generation of Bosnia (Loyd), along with the generation of writers from the Eastern Europe, my generation, who lived under the Communist rule, having our own dreams, obsessions, hopes... I am just reading Imperium, by the Pole Ryszard Kapuscinski, fantastic journey through a Soviet Union in the moment of collapse.

So my reading (so to speak my own Don Quixote) is not only the Paris of Val Clark and not only her selection of artists – my reading is in the same time Paris and DC, and not only.

Teo Tarras - Rendezvous a Paris

STOPPING ALONG THE WAY
Sometimes we used to enter secret wayside cafes
There might be a step down, and always there was a table to choose in the silence or murmur of speech.
A shadow was the most ancient of the regulars; a long, long time she had sat at every place.
The sun would be there, on good terms with her, lying upon a forehead, on your hand, on a glass - and soon he left, like a god one forgets.
During these halts that seemed to become eternal experience came to us,
And we always left these secret cafes subtly changed from what we had been before.
Guillevic, translated by Denise Leverow

Eugène GUILLEVIC, poète à découvrir ...

Écoute en toi le merle
Comme il t’habite

or

L’armoire était de chêne
Et n’était pas ouverte.

Peut-être il en serait tombé des morts,
Peut-être il en serait tombé du pain.

Beaucoup de morts.
Beaucoup de pain.


I looked on the web for a photo made by Brassai, without success. It belongs, it seems, to a collection within the New York Museum of Modern Art - I searched their web site, only it was vainly. That's it!

The photo was showing a chair, and that was the title, too, THIS IS A CHAIR - NOTHING MORE. That reminds me of Magritte, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, with its replica, Ceci n'est pas un Magritte, of Jos de Mey, but it reminds me more of Andre Kertesz and his fork - perhaps the photo of Brassai is not as minimalist as the one of Kertesz (I said, The Fork of Kertesz is minimalism at its best) - but it has the same ellegance, and a subtle nostalgia.

It is an iron chair, of old shape. It stays in a garden, because that's its use, to stay in a garden, and its shadow reflects on the ground. It's summer, perhaps August, only summer is passing, nobody's there, and fall will come soon. Fall, with the verses of Arghezi.

Has Arghezi two mysterious verses, I leave them in Romanian here, to keep their musicality:

Niciodata toamna nu fu mai frumoasa
Sufletului nostru doritor de moarte

It's July 16th, middle of summer. Fall will come soon...

The shadow of the chair of Brassai would have been a subtle paraphrase of the verses of Guillevic (A shadow was the most ancient of the regulars...)

I did't find the photo of Brassai on the web, but probably the Rendesvous a Paris, made by Tarras shares the same ellegant nostalgia.

After some days: here is the photo of Brassai

Teo Tarras - La Terrasse

It was late and every one had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.
Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place


I was today in Clarendon firstly and then in Georgetown. I was looking for a book, A Rumor of War, by Philip Caputo, I found it in the bookstore in Clarendon. I read the first pages and it is remarcably written - only it should wait, I am now reading the Imperium of Ryszard Kapuscinski. In Georgetown I went to see an art gallery, the Attis Art, displaying only French artists: Tobiasse, Ferrer, Cayrac, among others. Cayrac has a splendid cut-out, Carnet de voyage, I will come later to it. I'd like to link the story behind Carnet de voyage to a work of Ferrer, Orient, also on view in the gallery. Here is an image of Carnet de Voyage:





Teo Tarras was born in Barcelone, in 1960. Here is another photo made by him, the Taj Mahal:






(Washington, District of Columbia)

(Hemingway)

Teo Tarras - Les Escaliers de Montmartre

Was it fun? ... did the blue creep out from the Colonades of the rue de Rivoli through the grill of the Tuilleries... was the Louvre gray and metallic in the sun and did the trees hang brooding over the cafes and were the lights at night and the click of saucers and the auto horns that play de Bussey?

Zelda Fitzgerald in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Summer 1930




What would have been the answer of Scott Fitzgerald? Well, perhaps, it was so fun, only now I'm lonely - I was today aux Escaliers de Montmartre, and I was missing you, and les Escaliers were looking a bit sad, without you ...

Actually he set his short story Babylon Revisited along the same boulevards, and at one point there is a paraphrase to Zelda's letter, he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent facade, and imagine... the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lente.




(The Fitzgeralds)