THE REAL LOST GENERATION

OPIUM AND ASSES MILK

           I'm not sure how many books I have about Paris. Hundreds, anyway. If you include periodicals, it runs into the thousands. The most interesting date from the 'twenties and 'thirties, when Paris was, as Gertrude Stein said, "where the future was".

           You could imagine from A Moveable Feast that most Americans in Paris were writers and artists. This assumption wouldn't survive a dip into one of the annual directories issued by the American Chamber of Commerce in France, that for 1933 being a particular treasure.

           In 800 pages, it documents a lively community of more than 30,000 people, supporting everything from banks to bookshops, printers to private detectives - even a dairy proudly advertising asses' milk and assuring clients that all its products were unpasteurised.

           Only a tiny fraction of those listed have any connection with the arts.  Most of the big names departed after the Crash of 1929. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald would not have been listed, since they always stayed in hotels. Ernest Hemingway was on Key West with Wife No. 2. First wife Hadley remained, however, remarried and living comfortably off the royalties from The Sun Also Rises, given her in lieu of alimony.

           On the facing page is Hilaire Hiler, proprietor of the Jockey club in Montparnasse, which deserves a book all to itself. Legends are rife. Ernest danced here with Josephine Baker - who, as she left, opened her long fur coat to reveal she was nude under it. Alice Prin, alias Kiki de Montparnasse, ran its ribald amateur night once a week, and Hiler, discovering a client about to commit suicide in his WC, persuaded him to do so in a rival establishment and ruin their business.

           Here are a few habituees outside the Jockey in autumn 1923.

Rear. Bill Bird, Hilaire Hiler, ? Miller [former jockey and part owner of Jockey w. Hiler], Curtis Moffat,  Holger Cahill,  Loyd Ring Copeland. Middle: Unknown woman, Alice Prin aka Kiki de Montparnasse, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, possibly Emily Holmes Coleman, Ezra Pound. Front:  Man Ray, Mina Loy, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau.

On another page, next to Bicycle Parts and Building Materials, we find both Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and Caresse Crosby, widow of Harry Crosby, founder of the Black Sun Press and, since his suicide in 1929, its proprietor.

           The sensational reputation of expatriate Paris owes much to the Crosbys, who smoked opium at the city's premier fumerie, Drosso's, and staged orgies in the Bois de Boulogne, illuminated by the headlights of their and their friends' limousines. Their limo appears in this photograph, with Harry, Caresse and her whippet, Clitoris. Harry had a crucifix tattooed on the sole of his left food and once attended the annual Artists and Models ball in just a loincloth, a coating of red paint, and a necklace of dead pigeons

           Ernest Hemingway? Never heard of him.