A COFFEE BLACK, A JUG OF MILK, AND THOU

WRITING IN CAFES - TO SARTRE OR NOT TO SARTRE?

The old Cafe de la Poste, before renovation.

Paris is in a frenzy of renovation as the city prepares itself for the Olympics. (Our building has even acquired a new roof – overdue, given it dates from 1760.) Responding to this urge for renewal, one of the favourite Montmartre cafés, the Café de la Poste, has just reopened after a refit. I had lunch there this week with friend and colleague Samuel Lopez-Barrantes. The refit isn’t bad, having shifted the anbiance back a century or two, with wood paneling and armchair-style seating replacing the strip lighting and chrome trim of a typical ‘fifties bar.

Whether or not one could write in such a place is a old argument. James Campbell called the practice of cafe creation “a pleasant way of being outdoors – at play – and indoor – working – at once. In the café, the solitary writer could be writing and yet socializing at the same time.” Samuel often works in a Montmartre bar called Le Chat Noir, and insists the presence of coffee, cocktails and conversation merely fan his creativity. I, on the other hand, would struggle to complete a postcard.

Traditionally, a French author would no more work in a café than would a French dentist, but Jean-Paul Sartre made it chic.  “We installed ourselves completely [in the café]: from 9 to 12 am,” he wrote of a typical day. “We worked, then we had lunch, and at 2 pm we came back and spoke with friends we had met, until 8 pm. After having dinner, we received people with whom we had fixed an appointment. This could seem strange to you, but at this café, we were at home."

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at La Coupole.

Seldom represented in this discussion are the proprietors, whose patience is often sorely tried. Of Sartre, for example, a waiter at one of his haunts, the Deux Magots, grumbled that he tied up a table all day and never bought anything. Injury is frequently joined by insult. In the British sitcom Fleabag, a young man enters the other wise empty tea room run by series star and writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge. He produces a laptop, mobile phone and Kindle and, politely declining her suggestion that he buy something,  plugs in all three to recharge. Café owners here complain of the same thing, exacerbated by them using the toilets, asking repeatedly for water, and “reserving” their table while they go out to lunch.

It was less of a problem before cafes began to serve food. So long as most customers just dropped in for a coffee or beer, an aperitif before lunch and a digestif after, owners didn’t mind having a few tables occupied by expats eager to become the new Hemingway. It helped make the place feel inhabited. Today, however, all but a handful of tables in most cafes are set with knives, forks and glasses from late morning until mid-afternoon, blocking them from anyone who doesn’t want a meal.  

I leave the last word to Mavis Gallant, former doyenne of expat literary culture, who didn’t disguise her distaste. “The other day,” she wrote, “I was asked, in all seriousness, where one can see authors at work in cafés. It sounded for all the world like watching chimpanzees riding tricycles: both are unnatural occupations. I have only one friend who still writes her novels in notebooks, in cafés. She chooses  cafés that are ordinary and charmless, favoring one for a time,  then another, as one does with restaurants. Some are near home, many involve a long bus trip. If anyone she knows discovers the café, she changes at once for another, more obscure, hard to get to.”

“It was a dark and stormy night….”