Contemporary Authors

• Jean Cocteau: A Life Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2016
• Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2016

1. Flâneuse : women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London LCCN 2016033253 Type of material Book Personal name Elkin, Lauren, author. Main title Flâneuse : women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London / Lauren Elkin. Edition First American edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016 Description 317 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9780374156046 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER HQ1150 .E45 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Flâneuse : women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London LCCN 2016438449 Type of material Book Personal name Elkin, Lauren, author. Main title Flâneuse : women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London / Lauren Elkin. Published/Produced London : Chatto & Windus, 2016. Description 317 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm ISBN 0701189029 9780701189020 CALL NUMBER HQ1150 .E45 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Jean Cocteau : a life LCCN 2016930231 Type of material Book Personal name Arnaud, Claude, author. Uniform title Jean Cocteau. English Main title Jean Cocteau : a life / Claude Arnaud ; translated by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell. Published/Produced New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] ©2016. Description viii, 1014 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, portraits ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780300170573 (hardcover) 0300170572 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PQ2605.O15 Z56513 2016 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Une Annee a Venise - 2012 Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson, Paris, France
• (With Scott Esposito) The End of Oulipo?: An attempt to exhaust a movement - 2013 Zer0 Books, Alresford, Hants, United Kingdom

• Bonjour Paris - https://bonjourparis.com/books/interview-with-lauren-elkin-author-of-flaneuse/

  Interview with Lauren Elkin, Author of Flâneuse
  By Anne McCarthy - Sep 12, 2016 1329 1 Print Print Email Email

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  Author Lauren Elkin
  Author Lauren Elkin. Photo credit: Marianne Katser
  Author Lauren Elkin recently published Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London. She will be speaking at Shakespeare & Company bookstore on September 13 at 7pm. Find out more here.

  What originally brought you to Paris?

  I came to Paris to study abroad and fell in love with it; I came back a few years later as a research assistant, then returned a few years after that to do a masters in French literature at the Sorbonne, and that time I ended up staying.

  Flâneuse, by Lauren Elkin
  Flâneuse, by Lauren Elkin
  Can you discuss your writing career and background a bit?

  My background is in scholarly research, but when I was in graduate school I started writing book reviews and fiction, and writing in my journal all the time, and keeping a blog about daily life in Paris. Those last two forms of writing were very important ways of learning to write – I didn’t study creative writing in college or do an MFA. The journal forced me to write and made me get so much better at it, but I knew I was writing stuff that no one would ever read. It was very different writing for the blog, which was especially good training for writing things about myself that other people would read.

  I think my age group (born in the late 70s) was lucky in a lot of ways – blogs didn’t exist until we were old enough not to embarrass ourselves too badly by keeping them, and they enabled us – or me in any case – to make contact with a lot of like-minded people, and to figure out how, exactly, to tell a story, to move from the actual event to the account of it on the page. I developed a sense for what about a story made it interesting, how to strip out the filler and get a sense for what was really happening in the exchange – socially, culturally, personally.

  This is less a question of shaping a piece of writing to please an audience, and more a question of its audience shaping the cast of it, somehow.

  Cafetière in porcelain
  Cafetière in porcelain. Photo: Coyau / Wikimedia Commons
  Why do you think so many writers come to Paris?

  I think to some extent it’s a question of legacy – writers and artists flocked to Paris in the early and mid-twentieth century* – and partly a question of how livable a city Paris can be. It offers a really wonderful quality of life and isn’t that expensive if you know how to do it – which markets to shop in, what kind of coffee to get, what kind of restaurants to go to. There’s a learning curve for sure but once you crack it (the internet is a big help here) it lends itself very well to the writerly lifestyle, where the work happens while you sit in a café for hours over one tiny cup of coffee.** There are also beautiful libraries that are free to use.

  *It’s worth noting that American writers and artists came to Paris in the 20s because of the favorable exchange rate, and throughout the century because it offered certain freedoms that they couldn’t find at home – I’m thinking particularly of black and/or gay writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, or Djuna Barnes.

  **I wouldn’t recommend sitting in the cafe from morning til the end of the day – they will probably want to do a lunch service and they’ll make you feel pretty uncomfortable if you’re squatting without eating.

  Buses crossing the Pont Saint-Michel
  Buses crossing the Pont Saint-Michel/ Mossot/Wikipedia
  What current project(s) are you working on?

  I’ve been writing my second novel for longer than I’d like to admit, but which I kept putting aside for academic projects, or Flâneuse, mainly for financial reasons. So I’m trying to get back to that. I’m in the end-stages of revising a flâneuse-y book about a year of riding the bus in Paris. And I’m working on a few essays – some academic (one on Virginia Woolf and Chris Kraus!), some not.

  What is your favorite thing(s) to do in Paris on a lazy Saturday?

  I love the brocantes and the flea markets so much. I’ll stroll through a brocante if there’s one near where I live, in Belleville, but a real luxury is to take the afternoon and go up to the Puces de Clignancourt or down to the Porte de Vanves. I just bought a flat and am slowly tracking down the various bits and pieces of things I want to decorate it – at the moment I’m in the market for a massive gilded mirror and a set of old steamer trunks. I’m always looking for vintage cocktail glasses, and I have this dream of replacing or at least supplementing my Ikea and Habitat silverware with a set of really beautiful silver cutlery. I also love these little Schweppes dishes that I use for everything from putting out snacks at an apéro to feeding the dog, and I always keep an eye out for enamel jugs and Iittala Kastehelmi goblets. Oh god I sound so bougie. But this is what I like to do on the weekend. In my defense, my grandmother was an interior decorator…

  Marché aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen
  antiques at the Marché aux Puces de Paris Saint-Ouen
  Do you think you’ll ever move back to the U.S.?

  I’d happily go back for a little while for a residency or to teach, but Paris is my home.

  Who are some of your favorite writers and why?

  I have loved Jeanette Winterson since I read The Passion in my sophomore year at Barnard. Her prose is so lush and lyrical but her outlook is so wise and wise-cracking that it doesn’t get too ponderous, or only very rarely. I always feel so inspired after reading her or seeing an event with her. I’ve recently fallen for Ali Smith – Artful is the most heart-enlarging book I’ve read in so long and I really admire the way she moved between fiction and essay-writing, and How to Be Both is incredibly rich and so technically accomplished.

  I’ve bought all her story collections – Other Stories and Other Stories is the kind of title that really tickles me, that kind of joke is exactly my kind of thing. I also have a deep love for Deborah Levy’s work – she takes no prisoners and writes so incredibly about love and loss and estrangement and politics and places and the world and oh, just humans in general, I can’t recommend her work enough – you might start with her latest novel, Hot Milk. Annie Ernaux is another longtime favorite – for the way she turns daily life, and daily loves, into (French) prose.

  My enduring “favorite writers” are Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and Jean Rhys, but I’ve been reading them and writing about them for so long that it’s too late now to say why; it would be like trying to explain why I love my family.

  To get away from 20th/21st century women: the French 19th century is my imaginative homeland, I am never happier than when I’m engrossed in a big thick novel by Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Sand… I love how richly they imagine the world on the page, I just love all that excess detail, sometimes the psychology is incredibly precise, sometimes the interior worlds are sloppy or missing altogether but as long as they’re saturated in a time and place I’m hooked.

  If you had to generalize with abandon, what would you say are some major differences in the writing styles of writers from France and writers from the U.S.? (i.e. do you think there are certain cultural aspects which affect the way people write?)

  Okay, with that caveat in place: I like this book by the writer Dany Laferrière, Je suis un écrivain japonais, in which he decides – having been born and raised in Haiti and having moved to Canada in adulthood – that he shall be henceforth known as a Japanese writer. He’s subverting the idea that national identity determines who we are and what we produce as writers, which is a burden frequently and paradoxically placed on non-white authors, who are asked by the publishing industry to write great epics of their homelands – the great Indian novel, the great African novel (as if Africa were one country).

  If a writer grows up and lives in the U.S. or the UK, there are going to be certain cultural differences between them, and differences in the way they use English, but for the most part they’re writing in the same language and so I don’t see much of a point in distinguishing between the two, as some prizes do. The Booker caused quite a lot of outrage a few years back when it was opened up to Americans but really how could it not be? I get really irritated when prizes require residency in a given country in order to qualify – there’s so much exchange between English-speaking countries.

  But your question was about France and the U.S. – and that, too, is a question of language, and what you’re accustomed to reading, and how. There are certain syntactical and grammatical differences between the two languages that a translator has to get to grips with – French sentences can really go on and on, stacking up the clauses and the comma splices; English sentences tend to be shorter. English has so many source languages feeding into it that it has a really varied texture; variation of texture hasn’t been historically prized in French literature, though it has been in the last 50 years – look at the weird character names in Marguerite Duras, like Lol V. Stein or Anne-Marie Stretter, or Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex, or calling a novel King Kong Theory. There seems to me to be an interesting volition to escape from really Franco-Français sounds. It jars when you see these names but I think French writers are trying to break out of the prison of their beautiful language and make it a bit more ugly and forceful.

  Paris skyline at sunset
  Paris Skyline at Sunset. Photo by James Whitesmith/ Flickr
  How would you describe Paris to someone who has never heard of it?

  I’m tempted to write something like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a novel with descriptions of 55 cities which are all actually Venice, recounted by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. There are so many Parises, depending on who you ask. Even my own Paris varies radically from day to day. My Platonic ideal of Paris is formed of moments where I’ve caught the setting sun turning the sky pink while the buildings go grey in silhouette, and of stone buildings the color of sand, sometimes with the sun shining so the plane trees cast leaf-shadows on their surfaces, sometimes becoming a darker yellow in the grey or the rain, or a more luminous yellow in the amber-colored streetlights at night. So if you can imagine this changeable stone city, where the light is so amazing they invented photography here, then you might begin to imagine Paris. But it would be an incomplete Paris – it wouldn’t have people, movement, life, sounds, smells, love, anger, conflict, heartbreak, refuse…

  What advice would you give aspiring writers?

  Read everything and write all the time. Write everything down. Even if you feel like you’re in the middle of something and too busy, just make a quick note on your phone or a random piece of paper and come back to it when you have time. (The nicest thing to do for yourself is to keep a notebook just for this purpose.) Writing is made up of our whole lives, not just the increments of time we give to it.

• Bookslut - http://www.bookslut.com/features/2012_04_018806.php

  QUOTED: "The idea to write about Venice came because I was in Paris and very sad and lonely those first few months that I lived there and felt very unmoored and had all of these Sunday afternoons. Sunday is the hardest day in Paris. It's the day when, if you're French, you're with your family or you're with your significant other doing whatever significant others do together on Sundays. Sunday is the day to go to an expo or to have a long lunch or to go for a really long walk."
  "And you can do those things when you're alone, but for me, my disposition is such that when I'm alone and I see everyone else doing those things together I feel very sad."
  "Feeling so unmoored in Paris got me thinking about how Venice is a place that is essentially unmoored itself. Going to a place where you have no foundations seems to resonate really well with the idea that Venice is a city that was built on the sea. There was no foundation whatsoever."
  "The people who founded it were fleeing the Huns or the Goths, whoever was chasing them. And they were like, there's a little bit of mud over there, what if we drive down some piles into it? What possesses you to build a city like that? I think you have to be as crazy to build a city on the sea as you have to be to move to a foreign country and try to set up a life there."

  APRIL 2012

  MEGAN MARZ
  FEATURES

  AN INTERVIEW WITH LAUREN ELKIN
  Set in Venice, Lauren Elkin's first novel tells the story of Catherine, an American grad student who has left New York to spend nine months studying early printed manuscripts. Almost immediately, she begins to feel estranged from her American life, in particular her fianc� and the publishing family into which she'd planned to marry. She takes a lover, Marco, who lets her in on a secret: a hidden, centuries-old synagogue to which a mysterious Croatian visitor had led him. Instead of the books she went to Venice to study, Catherine begins to research the history of the synagogue as she helps clear the mud from its beautiful mosaics.

  Along the way a mosaic of languages -- English with snatches of French, Italian, Croatian, and Hebrew -- takes shape across the book's pages. (Elkin speaks French and Italian and knows a bit of Hebrew, but had to get a friend's help with the Croatian.) This internationality makes it seem somehow appropriate that the novel,�Floating Cities, is appearing this month in French (as�Une ann�e � Venise) without first having been published in its author's native tongue.

  Though Anglophone readers won't be able to read her novel right away, Elkin's nonfiction writing appears widely in publications including�Bookforum, the�Quarterly Conversation, and her blog (formerly called Ma�tresse), which she started in 2004 just after moving to Paris for her own graduate studies (last year she earned a PhD in English literature from the Universit� de Paris VII and the CUNY Graduate Center). I talked to Elkin over Skype -- I in Chicago and she in London, where she was spending a couple of months away from her home in Paris -- about her novel, publishing in France, and what different kinds of writing require of writers.

  How did it come to be that your first book is coming out next month in France without having been published in English?�

  It was a very strange and convoluted process, which I guess is kind of typical for first-time novelists. I had an agent in New York in 2007 who was shopping the book and couldn't really do anything with it. So I was like, okay, well, it's just a first attempt, I'll just put it in a drawer and do better next time. But then I was chatting to a friend of mine in Paris who is also a writer and just said something in passing about my novel. And she was like, you have a novel?

  Her name is Tatiana De Rosnay. She's the author of a book called�Sarah's Key�that was on the�New York Times�bestseller list for a very long time. Her publisher in France was H�lo�se d'Ormesson, and I guess Tatiana had enough pull because of her own success with H�lo�se to be able to say to her, this is my friend's novel, I think it's really great, I think you'll love it too. So that was how it ended up getting into H�lo�se's hands. And she read it -- in English -- and she loved it. That happened in 2010 and since then it's been the long march to publication. They had to find the translator and then the translator had various issues that prevented him from doing the translation as quickly as H�lo�se had hoped, and so it was postponed a couple of times. Now it's definitely happening.�

  What was it like to see the translation of your work?

  Oh my god, it was the weirdest, wackiest, strangest, most alienating and also really flattering thing. Because on one hand you're like, oh my God, it's in French. I didn't write that. I did write that, but I didn't write that that. And at the same time you're like, wow, I can't believe -- even though he was paid to do it -- that someone spent a lot of time in my little world, rendering it in another language. So that was the flattering part.

  Also, he used really fancy French. I don't think that my English is necessarily really�soutenu, really elevated English. I don't think of it as super mannered or prim or anything. But the French that he used is full of the�pass� simple�and a lot of flowery subjunctives. I think it's really beautiful, but I was surprised by the tone.�

  Did the translation and publication process change the book in a way that you think will affect the English version?

  One byproduct of the way that this has ended up happening is that I finished the book a really long time ago. I finished it in July 2007. So I as a writer have come -- well, I don't know how far I've come, but I think that I've come fairly far. Even just this past August, I massively revamped the English version. So the French translator did work a little bit from my revamped version but there were some things where the publisher was like, we just don't have time to fix that, we can fix it if we sell it to an English market. So I have felt, slightly, that the book is not totally representative of where I am as a writer right now. So I worry about being judged on it. But I think that's just a neurotic writer thing that I have to get past. Because we're always evolving past things that we've written in the past and we have to live with them.

  The one area that it has affected, having looked at this translation last week: The second novel that I'm writing now I've been trying to write in French and English, going back and forth self-translating from one language to another. Because it's set in Paris, these are French characters, so to a certain extent it just comes out in French. But my style in French is not this really complicated�pass� simple�kind of French that the translator used. That is probably in large part because I'm not a native French speaker so I don't write novelistic French really easily. So it's made me think twice about writing this thing in French. But yeah, the goal is to be able to publish the French version as I wrote it, not translated by anyone. So we'll see.�

  Catherine, the protagonist, is always thinking about her antecedents -- especially her Anglophone antecedents -- in Venice, whether James or Ruskin. I wondered how that relates to your own feelings about being an Anglophone writer in Paris with all the baggage and history that entails?

  You probably have stages that you go through in response to that question depending on how long you've lived there. I defy any writer to move to Paris and not be posing like Hemingway in a caf� within the first few months. I had that kind of Lost Generation love when I first moved to Paris. Actually, I wrote about this in an essay for the Huffington Post years ago, about the way that hanging out in caf�s and pretending to be a writer like Hemingway actually did make me a writer. I wouldn't necessarily have self-identified as a writer before I studied abroad in Paris. I was more of a reader than a writer. But I guess if you pretend to do something for a while, you realize that, oh, wow, that was just a way to do get to something that I guess I secretly wanted to do.

  I do have a really strong sense -- and this comes through in the Venice book -- of the narrative of the American abroad and the narrative conventions that seem to govern the experience of the American who goes to Europe. This idea that Americans can't ever feel at home going back to the old country. They all feel somewhat out of place and eventually have to return to the new world. You see that with expats in Paris who are a bit defensive about their limited French. They make a joke out of the fact that they haven't really been able to learn French. And that's a kind of snobbery all on its own that I think is implicitly critical of any Americans who think they can go to Europe and try to assimilate. As if there's something wrong with the attempt to assimilate and to make your home somewhere other than where you come from. I think this is a really interesting problem -- the idea of the limitations that are placed on Americans when they try to go abroad, to keep them American. And I think we probably think about that because of all these antecedents that have written the narrative for us.�

  There's a part in the book where Catherine talks about the importance of not getting too close as a scholar to what she's researching. As an academic who does research related to literature, who's also writing novels and journalism and a blog, how do you square all of those kinds of writing? Is there one that it feels like has some kind of primacy?

  Academic research is one of those strange occupations where it's important to be passionate about your subject and, I think, not to research the thing that's most important to you. Because you're subjecting it to such scrutiny that you might become tired of it or find that it doesn't actually stand up to the scrutiny that you're subjecting it to. I mean, I wrote about Virginia Woolf in my dissertation, and I really, really love her. I just love love love and adore Virginia Woolf. So that's the exception to what I just said. But the others, although I do love Elizabeth Bowen and Jean Rhys, I find that there's more of an intellectual curiosity about those texts. It's motivated from a place of intellectual interest rather than oh, I love this so much, I have to write about it. And I find that in my freelance journalism, it's similar. I write about books that relate to my intellectual concerns.

  But the novels, oh god, that's where all the messy heart stuff gets poured onto the page and you try to make it into something that will resonate with other people. There's that Woolfian idea that fiction has to be an expression of impersonality as well as personality. And I think that's a very true thing. I worked at a literary agency for a while and so I've read a lot of aspiring writers' manuscripts, and you can just tell when something has got it. I don't necessarily know if my work has got it. But when I read fiction that I really, really admire, there's this element where it's not about them. It just seems to be impersonal or universal or, I don't know, it doesn't seem to be furthering an agenda on the part of the author. And when you read something that's really bad -- or less good -- you can see where the writers are trying to prove something about themselves or trying to work through something that happened to them. So that's where I'm wary in my own writing of the distinction between stuff that's coming from me and from my own personal experience and my own feelings and needs and something that might have resonance for other people. You don't want to be too blinded by your own passions and your own agenda and the chip on your own shoulder when you're writing fiction.

  The book covers a lot of Venetian art history and the history of the city itself. How did you come to the topic? Did it take a lot of research?

  Oh god, so much. I was basically researching the novel instead of researching my dissertation for a couple of years. I love to research and I just spent all of these joyful hours at the BNF [the French National Library] in Paris reading everything I could about Venice.

  The idea to write about Venice came because I was in Paris and very sad and lonely those first few months that I lived there and felt very unmoored and had all of these Sunday afternoons. Sunday is the hardest day in Paris. It's the day when, if you're French, you're with your family or you're with your significant other doing whatever significant others do together on Sundays. Sunday is the day to go to an expo or to have a long lunch or to go for a really long walk. And you can do those things when you're alone, but for me, my disposition is such that when I'm alone and I see everyone else doing those things together I feel very sad.

  So, I was reading a lot and happened to come across Ian McEwan's�The Comfort of Strangers�and that was the first time I had ever read a really menacing vision of Venice, and that just got me thinking. And I had really loved Jeanette Winterson's�The Passion. That was another major antecedent for me, a book that I think I had in my head ever since I read it in college. And feeling so unmoored in Paris got me thinking about how Venice is a place that is essentially unmoored itself. Going to a place where you have no foundations seems to resonate really well with the idea that Venice is a city that was built on the sea. There was no foundation whatsoever. The people who founded it were fleeing the Huns or the Goths, whoever was chasing them. And they were like, there's a little bit of mud over there, what if we drive down some piles into it? What possesses you to build a city like that? I think you have to be as crazy to build a city on the sea as you have to be to move to a foreign country and try to set up a life there.

  There's one part in the novel where Marco has left Catherine and in dealing with that she feels as though she's come through a marathon. There's a satisfaction at not having crumbled. To me that seemed similar to being in a foreign place and just being more satisfied by completing everyday tasks. I wondered if that similarity played a role in the book and in your ideas of foreignness.�

  That's a great comparison. Because I think that part of why some people love to travel is that the sort of heightened experience that you're trying to get through travel is very similar to the heightened experience of being in love, where your daily life just feels enriched by having this new thing to think about. And yeah, when you're in between loves, traveling or moving to a foreign country can be a great way to feel like your life has suddenly become extraordinary. But then you have the same kind of pitfalls: just feeling like such a failure if you can't get the language right or you can't navigate the city or you're feeling lonely, which feels very similar to the failure of an emotional relationship or a physical relationship.

  And with a romantic relationship you're having all of these feelings that other people have had before but they feel so exciting and so idiosyncratic to you, which is something you address in the novel in terms of visiting these cities that are considered to be museums. You have that Mary McCarthy quotation in there: "One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin."�

  Yeah, exactly. Everything you're feeling in Venice has been felt before and put better than you could possibly put it. It's the same about love.

  Can you talk a little bit about the Anglophone literary community in Paris?�

  There's a really great community there. I've been spending time in Paris since 1999, although I didn't move there officially until 2004, and I've seen a really radical change that I think has been a consequence of Sylvia Whitman's having come back to Shakespeare and Company. I've seen an influx of much younger people who are very creative and who make things like magazines and have events and have shaken things up in a good way. And at the same time, Sylvia has organized more events at the bookshop that tend to invite a larger variety of people.

  So Sylvia on one hand has turned the shop into a destination for lots of different kinds of creative people, as well as writers. And these younger people -- I'm thinking of Rosa Rankin-Gee, who started the Book Club at Le Carmen, or my friend Harriet Lye, who started a magazine called�Her Royal Majesty�-- they are always getting people together. So I think now, as opposed to in 1999 or 2002 or 2004, all of the earlier times when I lived in Paris, there's much more of an inclusive feeling to the literary community in Paris, which is not just literary and not just the same group of men, guys who are living at Shakespeare and Company. It's gotten younger, it's gotten more female, which I appreciate, and just more vivacious.

  Also, there are a lot of poets in Paris and they do lovely readings, bilingual readings in French and in English. Very often it's poets who've translated each other, so there's a really nice rapport between the two of them and they discuss the art of translating poetry. One series is called Double Change and one is called Ivy Paris, and they do events very often. So yeah, those are the primary bolts around which Anglophone literary Paris turns.

  Is there any interaction between the Anglophone and French literary scenes?

  No. I will ask French writers, so, have you been to Shakespeare and Company? And they'll be like, I don't know what that is. And it's shocking because it's such a major tourist attraction on one hand -- it's right there across from Notre Dame and it's always in newspapers around the world; they get a ton of press -- but it's also one of the major centers of our Anglophone literary scene. The French literary scene and the Anglophone scene don't really intersect. Sadly, very sadly.�

  What has it been like to work with a French publisher?

  I don't have experience as a writer in the States so I can't be sure to what extent it is different. One thing that's apparently going to be my experience soon is that they do these book fairs all over the country, which I don't think we really do. The publisher or the festival will pay for your ticket for the train and then you have a special book train, and all the writers will take that same train together to the festival. And then everyone apparently just hangs out and gets drunk and talks about literature. So I'm kind of excited to discover this world of book fairs. I'm going to be signing books, not necessarily giving readings, because they're not really into readings. So I'm a little bit nervous to be seated in some kind of tent with a stack of books that I'm just waiting for someone to stop by and buy. It seems really embarrassing; how big the pile is represents how many people have bought your book, and you have to watch people as they hover near your table, kind of pick your book up, and then put it down and walk away. So that's an aspect of the French process that I'm kind of wary of but also looking forward to.

• University of Liverpool - https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2016/11/01/writer-lauren-elkin-joins-department-english/

  Published: November 1, 2016
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  Writer, Lauren Elkin joins Department of English

  Writer, critic and academic, Lauren Elkin has joined the University of Liverpool’s Department of English, combining teaching with a role as Co-Director of the Centre for New and International Writing.

  Lauren, who has been living in Paris for 12 years, is the author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, a cultural history of women writers and artists who found personal freedom and inspiration by engaging with cities on foot.

  Lauren said: “The fact that I can teach creative writing and co-direct this Centre that’s so amazing at creating links with arts organisations, connecting with the city and bringing in people from around the world makes this such a dream job.”

  Also a translator, Lauren will be taking to the stage this evening at Kabinett Wine Bar on Myrtle Street as part of the Miriam Allott Visiting Writers Series. She will be joined by Ned Beauman, whose first novel, Boxer, Beetle, was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Guardian First Book Award.

• University of Liverpool - https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/english/staff/lauren-elkin/

  Dr Lauren Elkin
  Lecturer
  English
  +44 (0)151 794 2287
  Lauren.Elkin@liverpool.ac.uk
  http://www.laurenelkin.com
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  Biography

  Administrative Roles

  Co-director, Centre for New and International Writing
  +44 (0)151 794 2287
  Lauren.Elkin@liverpool.ac.uk
  http://www.laurenelkin.com

• Lauren Elkin Home Page - http://laurenelkin.tumblr.com/about

  About

  Originally from New York (the suburbs, then the city), I moved to Paris in 2004; along the way I’ve spent varying periods of time in London, Venice, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Recently transplanted to the Right Bank after years on the Left, I now spend most of my time tramping around Belleville.

  My essays on books and culture have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the FT, and frieze (some of which you can read here), and I'm a contributing editor at The White Review. I tend to write on women’s writing, experimental poetics, life-writing, studies of place, and visual culture, especially photography.

  My most recent book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, is out in the UK from Chatto & Windus and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US. Flâneuse is a cultural history of women writers and artists who have found personal freedom as well as inspiration by engaging with cities on foot, and includes chapters on Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda, among others. Radio 4 very kindly chose it as their Book of the Week.

  Awhile back I wrote a novel called Floating Cities which came out in France under the ridiculous title Une Année à Venise (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson), and which was awarded the Prix des Lecteurs at the Rue des Livres literary festival. After that I co-authored a book with Scott Esposito called The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement, published by Zer0 Books; I love the Oulipo but after that book, they don’t love me. I’ve been slowly writing my second novel, Scaffolding, set in Paris in 1972 and the present day, which I’ve masochistically chosen to write in both English and French.

  With Charlotte Mandell, I recently translated Claude Arnaud’s biography of Jean Cocteau (Yale UP, 2016). We won the 2017 French-American Foundation Translation Prize! I recently translated Michelle Perrot’s fascinating history of the bedroom, Bedroom Stories, also for Yale UP; perhaps that will be out in 2018.

  I’m also an academic; my PhD was on phenomenology and British women’s writing in the 1930s (focusing on the work of Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, and Rosamond Lehmann). A graduate of Barnard College, I also hold an M.Phil. in French literature from the Sorbonne. You can access some of my scholarly writing here.

  I curate and host the Art of Criticism series at Shakespeare & Company; see their events page for details.

  Back in the last century I was a musical theatre fiend, and one of these days I’m going to write a response to Geoff Dyer’s Zona except it’ll be entirely about Sunday in the Park With George.

  Twitter: @laurenelkin

  Instagram: @drlaurenelkin

  All text copyright © Lauren Elkin, 2004-2017. All rights reserved.

  photo: Marianne Katser

  CONTACT

  I am always happy to discuss new projects and commissions; you can reach me via my agent or by email.

  I am represented by Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency:

  17 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3JA

  +44(0)20 7908 5900

  250 West 57th Street, Suite 2114, New York NY 10107

  +1 212 246 0069

  schalfant[at]wylieagency.co.uk

  For UK press requests or review copies please contact Aidan O'Neill.

  For US press requests or review copies please contact Sarah Scire.

  Follow me on Twitter: twitter.com/LaurenElkin

QUOTED: "splendidly discursive homage to intrepid women walkers."

Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New
York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. By Lauren Elkin. Feb. 2017.336p.
illus. Farrar, $26 (9780374900328). 758.
Raised on Long Island, writer and critic Elkin never fully appreciated the joys of a storied city until she spent a college
year in Paris. She soon discovered a favorite new pastime, that of the flaneur, "one who wanders aimlessly," though the
"one" is typically male. Surely women also strolled and observed, Elkin thought, coining the term flaneuse and
embarking on a gloriously rambling quest to celebrate women worthy of this designation. Though such excursions were
forbidden for "respectable" women, she discovered an impressive group of rebellious gallivanting females. Elkin shares
her findings in a smart and shimmering mix of her own painful and exhilarating adventures in Paris, London, New
York, Venice, and Tokyo, and those of such literary flaneuses as George Sand, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf (whose
character Clarissa Dalloway is "perhaps the greatest flaneuse of twentieth-century literature"), and Martha Gellhorn,
along with artist Sophie Calle. Elkin concludes her splendidly discursive homage to intrepid women walkers with the
sobering reminder that, in many places, "a woman still can't walk in the city the way a man can."--Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London." Booklist, 15 Feb.
2017, p. 14. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442456&it=r&asid=804397b167ab9ca856c88677e4a4af4c.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442456

QUOTED: "insightful mix of cultural history and memoir."

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Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New
York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
Lauren Elkin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-374-15604-6
In her richly evocative and absorbing debut, cultural critic Elkin homes.in on the female version of the flaneur, or "one
who wanders aimlessly." In Elkin's telling, the flaneuse is strongly responsive to exploring the potential of a city on
foot, believing that every alleyway, corner, and stairway can conjure a memory or yield a new discovery. As Elkin
meanders through N.Y.C., Paris, London, Venice, and Tokyo, she also traces the journeys of the flaneuses who came
before her: authors George Sand, who dressed as a man to stroll the streets of Paris in the 1830s so she could be "an
atom lost in that immense crowd"; Jean Rhys, whose protagonists use walking as a form of self-avoidance; and Virginia
Woolf, who felt liberated by her "street haunting" in London, as well as filmmaker Agnes Varda, whose work explored
women's relationships to their environments both as the object of the gaze and as the ones doing the looking, and
others. In this insightful mix of cultural history and memoir, Elkin emerges as the protagonist as she mines her personal
journey from the suburbs of Long Island to her current home in Paris. Highly attuned to her surroundings wherever she
walks, she shows readers how to be aware of "invisible boundaries of a city," so they can embrace each environment on
their own accord. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p.
61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224894&it=r&asid=47d100997074ed54cfa4c013b1273e56.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224894

QUOTED: "At times the narrative feels dense and academic ... but this is ultimately a celebration of women."

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Elkin, Lauren. Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in
Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
Erin Entrada Kelly
Library Journal.
141.20 (Dec. 1, 2016): p110.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Elkin, Lauren. Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London. Farrar. Feb.
2017.336p. illus. notes, bibliog. ISBN 9780374156046. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780374715892. SOC SCI
This is a book about wandering women, the author included, who build relationships with their cities by walking
through them. Anyone who has taken a stroll down a city street knows how visceral the experience can be (as long as
you're paying attention), but this is uniquely true for women, who have never had the advantage of a covert relationship
with their city sidewalks. Unlike men, women are singularly visible, whether they were breaking norms of yesteryear
by drifting without a chaperone, or are clipping around New York in modern-day heels. Women can and do make
feminist statements simply by strolling through their stomping grounds; Elkin creates an interesting and inarguable case
for this. She, too, is a wanderer and provides compelling anecdotes about her own journeys, interspersed with those of
literary heavy-hitters George Sand, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and others. VERDICT At times the narrative feels dense
and academic (with a hefty bibliography), but this is ultimately a celebration of women. You'll want to take a stroll by
the end.--Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Kelly, Erin Entrada. "Elkin, Lauren. Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London."
Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 110. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371268&it=r&asid=9df3907a6bb89be966848bdbe49481b3.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371268

QUOTED: "For the patient, there are the bright rewards of insight and new information. Enlightening walks through cities, cultural history, and a writer's heart and soul."

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Elkin, Lauren: FLANEUSE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Elkin, Lauren FLANEUSE Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 2, 21 ISBN: 978-0-374-15604-6
An American freelance essayist and translator living in Paris debuts with an appealing blend of memoir, scholarship,
and cultural criticism.White Review contributing editor Elkin presents a feminine alteration of the French word flaneur
("one who wanders aimlessly") and uses both her own experiences and those of some noted writers and other artists to
illustrate her principal thesis: that women have long needed to be as free to roam about, geographically and artistically,
as men have been. "The portraits I paint here attest that the flaneuse is not merely a female flaneur," writes the author,
"but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own....She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly
attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk." Elkin's own story runs
through the text like a luminous thread. She tells us the woman-in-the-street stories of Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf,
George Sand, Sophie Calle, Agnes Varda, and Martha Gellhorn, but all sorts of other cultural figures appear, including
Barthes, Rilke, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Derrida, Dickens, and numerous others. Elkin is frank about her own life,
discussing a long, failed relationship--following him, she moved to Tokyo, where her initial unhappiness in the city
transformed to deep affection--her ambivalence about leaving one city she loved, New York, which is near family and
friends, for another she came to love even more: Paris. (She has become a French citizen.) Elkin also lived for a time in
London and Venice, but though she loved both places, it is Paris now owning her heart. The pattern of her principal
chapters is fairly steady: her own story mixed with sometimes overly detailed accounts of a notable woman associated
with the city. These minibiographies and exegeses of the artists' work are occasionally heavier than casual readers may
be willing to bear, but for the patient, there are the bright rewards of insight and new information. Enlightening walks
through cities, cultural history, and a writer's heart and soul.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Elkin, Lauren: FLANEUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865799&it=r&asid=f626177db28f723a1667c29fc4d40d58.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865799

QUOTED: "An outstanding portrait of a chameleonic individual, this work will appeal to individuals interested in LGBTQ history, French culture, and literature."

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Arnaud, Claude. Jean Cocteau: A Life
Erica Swenson Danowitz
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p83.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Arnaud, Claude. Jean Cocteau: A Life. Yale Univ. Sept. 2016.1024p. tr. from French by Lauren Elkin & Charlotte
Mandel. photos, notes, index. ISBN 9780300170573. $40; ebk. ISBN 9780300182163. LIT
It took 13 years for an English translation of this impressive biography to appear. Arnaud (Chamfort: A Biography)
takes readers on a journey that presents the extraordinary but also complicated life of Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) who
experienced the Roaring Twenties, two World Wars, and the rise of French cinema. Cocteau's friends, associates, and
contemporaries included such notables as Jean Genet, Vaslav Nijinsky, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, Erik Satie, and
Igor Stravinsky. The author's use of personal interviews and correspondence creates an exhaustive work. Despite a
prolific and eclectic career as a playwright, director, novelist, librettist, and filmmaker, Cocteau struggled to establish
his literary reputation, especially as a poet. Arnaud describes an individual who was often misunderstood and unfairly
considered an opportunist or imitator of other writers. His depiction of Cocteau's opium addiction and attempts at detox
is particularly fascinating. This work is also an excellent study of human dynamics with friends coming in and out of
the artist's life. Openly gay during a time when homosexuality was still considered taboo, Cocteau always had a strong
desire to please, even when it was futile. VERDICT An outstanding portrait of a chameleonic individual, this work will
appeal to individuals interested in LGBTQ history, French culture, and literature.--Erica Swenson Danowitz, Delaware
Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Media, PA
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Danowitz, Erica Swenson. "Arnaud, Claude. Jean Cocteau: A Life." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 83+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466412974&it=r&asid=dc10e5dc7ab4e01425f5851d0cdbfd56.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466412974

QUOTED: "Arnaud's poetic prose, skillfully translated by Elkin and Mandell, ... and devotion to his subject make this an endlessly rewarding read."

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Jean Cocteau: A Life
Publishers Weekly.
263.34 (Aug. 22, 2016): p102.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Jean Cocteau: A Life
Claude Arnaud, trans. from the French by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell. Yale Univ., $40 (1,040p) ISBN 978-0-
300-17057-3
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Originally released in France in 2003, this sweeping biography of Jean Cocteau is now available in English for the first
time. Arnaud (Chamfort: A Biography) has composed an insightful profile, rich in detail and exhaustive in its scope,
that honors and illuminates its multifaceted subject, who was a poet, playwright, author, designer, and filmmaker. The
dense tome traces the stormy trajectory of Cocteau's life, beginning with an idyllic childhood shattered by his father's
suicide. Amid tragedy, Cocteau developed limitless imagination and fortitude while nurturing a versatile artistic vision
that would span five decades and survive two world wars. His questionable politics, complicated sexuality, and welldocumented
opium addiction have often overshadowed his work, but in this passionate retelling of a life fully lived,
Cocteau emerges as a butterfly from a tangled cocoon. He inspired awe and affection from a circle of artistic and
intellectual luminaries that included Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, and Erik Satie, to
name a few. Arnaud's poetic prose, skillfully translated by Elkin and Mandell, sharp observations, and devotion to his
subject make this an endlessly rewarding read and invaluable addition to readers' understanding and appreciation of
Cocteau, the masked Harlequin of French arts and letters. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Jean Cocteau: A Life." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 102. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461609341&it=r&asid=55ee9538adaf9b84588a7b3c81ac6779.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461609341

QUOTED: "an intense meditation on what it means to be a woman and walk out in the world."
"The book blends memoir, social history and cultural criticism in an intriguing mix."

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Reclaim the streets
Erica Wagner
New Statesman.
145.5327 (Aug. 12, 2016): p43.
COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Flaneuse
Lauren Elkin
Chatto & Windus, 319 pp, 16.99 [pounds sterling]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
"Place names were the most powerful magic I knew," Martha Gellhorn wrote in her memoir Travels with Myself and
Another. The pioneering photographer and traveller is one of the abiding spirits of Lauren Elkin's Flaneuse, an intense
meditation on what it means to be a woman and walk out in the world. Gellhorn--intrepid observer, wife of Ernest
Hemingway, friend of Robert Capa--is an icon of independence. Elkin is a New Yorker who now lives in Paris, though
she has also spent time in Tokyo, Venice and London: but in the 21st century this is not all that unusual. Elkin is under
no illusions that her peripatetic life, spent studying in Europe or following a boyfriend to Japan, confers any sheen of
glamour upon her. But Flaneuse isn't after glamour: it's a book that encourages its readers to lace up their shoes and go
for a walk.
"Flaneuse," you might well ask--"what's that?" The male form, flaneur, means "an idler, a dawdler, usually found in
cities". As for its feminine form, Elkin admits that official recognition is hard to come by. "The Dictionnaire vivant de
la langue francaise defines it, believe it or not, as a kind of lounge chair." No matter. The word began to be heard
towards the middle of the 19th century; usage peaked during the Roaring (or perhaps they might be called the Walking)
Twenties. Yet, for Elkin, it was her move to Paris, one of the greatest cities to experience on foot, that marked her selfidentification
as a flaneuse. "Learning to see meant not being able to look away; to walk in the streets of Paris was to
walk the thin line of fate that divided us from each other."
The book blends memoir, social history and cultural criticism in an intriguing mix. Deborah Levy has called Elkin "the
Susan Sontag of her generation". Luc Sante and Rebecca Solnit spring to mind as influences, too; both appear in the
text, and in a sense the book is an explicit answer to the question Solnit raises in her terrific book Wanderlust: a History
of Walking (2000). Dickens strides through the city, Wordsworth through the Lakes, but Solnit reminds us that we must
ask "why women were not out walking too".
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On the surface, the answer is simple. See the word "streetwalker" and only one thing comes to mind. So, to move as an
independent woman through a city makes a statement, especially if that movement has no goal. What's the difference
between strolling and loitering? A fine one, indeed. Elkin lets the reader become a companion to many women who
have thought seriously about the relationship between a woman and the path she chooses to tread: not just Gellhorn, but
George Sand, Sophie Calle, Agnes Varda and Virginia Woolf.
Woolf's essay "Street Haunting", published in 1927, is a touchstone for Elkin, presenting the pavement as another way
to define the self. "As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six we shed the self our friends
know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after
the solitude of one's own room," Woolf wrote. For Woolf, Elkin says, writing is "stepping out of bounds"; walking the
streets of London offers another way of gaining access to that freedom.
Freedom is what Elkin seeks as she stalks the byways of one great city after another. New York is where she begins, yet
she is careful to note that she grew up not in that city but in the suburbs, on Long Island, where New York was viewed
as a perilous place in the 1980s when the family dared to visit. " 'Don't make eye contact,' my mother would warn as we
walked in Times Square." But although New York becomes familiar, it does not become home: Paris is the city she
circles repeatedly as she tries out the pavements of Europe and Asia. Tokyo is the most rebarbative, the most resistant
to her efforts to understand a place on foot: she feels "marooned" there, she writes. Yet even in her beloved Paris she
can find herself at an angle to the city, "displaced, dislocated", despite the romance of its place names, the intrigue of its
alleyways. Such is the fate of the flaneuse. One of this book's delights is the consolation it offers to those of us who
never feel quite at home.
While Elkin's heart clearly remains that of a wanderer, she is now firmly settled in France. British readers--at least, 48
per cent of them--may find reading about Elkin's desire for French citizenship a bittersweet experience. Her US
passport imposes a border, through which she wishes to break; in Paris she meets people from all over the world and
has the powerful sense that to be a citizen of France involves being part of something much larger. Yet even in France
the European project is under threat, as all around are those who defend "a white, Christian Europe, even if this is
largely their own fiction".
The flaneuse strolls for her own purpose; the transgressive nature of the act recedes into history. Those who set out to
flee oppression come with a purpose that threatens those who would reinforce the borders between us: but putting one
foot in front of the other can be the beginning of building a new world.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Wagner, Erica. "Reclaim the streets." New Statesman, 12 Aug. 2016, p. 43. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462327615&it=r&asid=cd9dfc3a25c00d99439bd27259e12cbf.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462327615
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Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New
York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
Jen Rickard Blair
World Literature Today.
91.3-4 (May-August 2017): p39.
COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Full Text:
Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
Lauren Elkin
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
This work of nonfiction explores a distinctly female perspective on "the creative potential of the city and the liberating
possibilities of a good walk." Having just read Mrs. Dalloway, I'm particularly looking forward to Elkin's literary
portraits of Virginia Woolf and many other creative and inspiring women with restless, wandering spirits.
This summer Web Editor Jen Rickard Blair is planning to read a balance of books that refuel calm and creativity as
well as examine human nature and our shared history. She hopes to read these under the shade of big trees, in the
company of friends, or in the cool of cof ee shops where iced drinks can keep the heat at bay .
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Blair, Jen Rickard. "Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London." World
Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 3-4, 2017, p. 39. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491539683&it=r&asid=d976f4a387f273b79aaf5af23f0faac7.
Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491539683

Seaman, Donna. "Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 14. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442456&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. "Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224894&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. Kelly, Erin Entrada. "Elkin, Lauren. Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 110. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371268&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. "Elkin, Lauren: FLANEUSE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865799&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. Danowitz, Erica Swenson. "Arnaud, Claude. Jean Cocteau: A Life." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 83+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466412974&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. "Jean Cocteau: A Life." Publishers Weekly, 22 Aug. 2016, p. 102. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461609341&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. Wagner, Erica. "Reclaim the streets." New Statesman, 12 Aug. 2016, p. 43. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462327615&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017. Blair, Jen Rickard. "Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 3-4, 2017, p. 39. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491539683&it=r. Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.

• Star Tribune
  http://www.startribune.com/review-flaneuse-women-walk-the-city-in-paris-new-york-tokyo-venice-and-london-by-lauren-elkin/414013613/
  Word count: 617

  REVIEW: 'Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York,Tokyo, Venice, and London,' by Lauren Elkin
  NONFICTION: Lauren Elkin's memoir is a captivating hybrid, both a cosmopolitan jaunt and a reflection on women in the city.
  By MARIAN RYAN Special to the Star Tribune FEBRUARY 20, 2017 — 6:33AM
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  You can’t get the news from poetry — thank heaven; yet as William Carlos Williams famously wrote, our souls are starving “for lack of what is found there.” But writers and artists know that you can get poetry from the streets, along with nourishment for psyche and spirit.

  Arts critic Lauren Elkin’s sparkling and original “Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London,” explores how women writers and artists have traversed the city streets in hopes of gleaning sustenance and the occasional spark of transcendence. Her literary peregrinations defy boundaries, fusing cultural history, criticism, psycho-geography and memoir. Both playful and bracingly intelligent, Elkin’s elegant prose unfurls a portrait of the writer as an urban woman.

  “Flâneuse” traces Elkin’s intellectual and artistic development, from her early 20s to mid-30s as she strikes out from New York to forge a new life in Paris. Along the way she rambles through her adopted city and several others, suffers the glories and griefs of love, writes a novel, becomes a professor and tries to win French citizenship. But “Flâneuse” is no angsty expat tale, but rather a project to reframe conventional, masculine notions of flânerie. “The flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur,” she writes, “but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own. She voyages out, and goes where she’s not supposed to.” She is “keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city.”

  Elkin revels in this energy, mapping her experience in several cities onto the process and works of women writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Martha Gellhorn, filmmaker Agnès Varda, artist Sophie Calle, and George Sand, in whose footsteps we trod at explosive moments when art and life intersect with periods of great social and political unrest in the city of Paris.

  Some 150 years later, Elkin begins to take part in the protest marches that surge through the streets several times a year as students, teachers, and workers in turn resist the edicts of authority — and again when thousands of Parisians gather in mourning, defiance, resilience after the deadly terrorist attacks on the city that bookended 2015.

  If you can’t quite get the news from literature, you may have current events in mind while reading the history of protest and civil unrest in Paris that winds through the book. “Flâneuse” also happens to reflect the polarities our global age: flânerie is rooted, local, nostalgic, but Elkin’s globe-trotting exemplifies the way we live now, mixing cultures, blurring borders and negotiating the widening gaps between identity and place. With perhaps an eerie prescience, “Flâneuse” examines the interrelationships of city, self and world.

  “Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London,” by Lauren Elkin

  “Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London,” by Lauren Elkin

  Marian Ryan’s work has appeared in Granta Online, Slate, Salon, Literary Hub and other publications.

  Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
  By: Lauren Elkin.
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 317 pages, $27.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/25/flaneuse-women-walk-city-paris-new-york-tokyo-venice-london-review-lauren-elkin
  Word count: 770

  QUOTED: "Impressively, Elkin doesn’t simply make a case for the re-evaluation of her titular figure; ultimately she makes flânerie itself appear urgent and contemporary. I defy anyone to read this celebratory study and not feel inspired to take to the streets in one way or another."

  Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin review – wandering women
  In this enjoyable memoir-cum-cultural history, Lauren Elkin calls upon the female spirit of idle strolling

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  Lucy Scholes
  Monday 25 July 2016 02.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.43 EDT

  The flâneur was born in 19th-century Paris, his native habitat the boulevards and arcades of Haussmann’s newly redesigned city. “The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, the poet, essayist and art critic famed for his description of the ephemerality of life in the modern metropolis. The flâneur is a man of means and leisure; one of action – he walks and he observes – but not involvement. He is detached from the crowd rather than a participant: a “central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye”, writes Virginia Woolf in her 1927 essay Street Haunting. But Woolf’s description is based on her own perambulations around London, and if we learned one thing from Baudelaire, it’s that the flâneuse does not exist. Women lacked access to the city streets that their male counterparts took for granted, reduced instead to mere objects upon which the flâneur’s gaze alighted and delighted. From Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd, through the psychogeographers of today, the city streets remain a site of masculine privilege, “As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane,” Lauren Elkin adds wryly.

  Jean Rhys, like her dissolute and dispossessed protagonists, haunted the cafes of the Left Bank
  Flâneuse is characterised by such playful subversiveness. I imagine Elkin as an intrepid feminist graffiti artist, scrawling “Woman woz here” on every wall she passes. Deliciously spiky and seditious, she takes her readers on a rich, intelligent and lively meander through cultural history, biography, literary criticism, urban topography and memoir, arguing that the flâneuse is any “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city, and the liberating possibilities of a good walk”.

  Elkin isn’t the first to contest the status quo – feminist scholars have long debated the existence of the flâneuse, and Rebecca Solnit covered some of Elkin’s ground in Wanderlust: A History of Walking – but her call to “redefine the concept itself”, rather than simply attempt to squeeze female experience into the masculine mould, is effectively clearsighted. “We can talk about the social mores and restrictions,” she says with a similar straight-talking clarity, “but we cannot rule out the fact that women were there.”

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  There’s Woolf in Bloomsbury, of course, sallying forth under the guise of buying a pencil; and Sophie Calle, the artist turned flâneuse as stalker who pursued her quarry alongside the Venetian canals. Then there’s Paris, where George Sand swapped her cumbersome skirts and dainty footwear for a suit of sturdy grey cloth and boots with “iron-shod heels” in order to access the freedoms of the cobblestones; where Jean Rhys, like her dissolute and dispossessed protagonists, haunted the cafes of the Left Bank; and where Agnès Varda, in whose films women both are looked at and do the looking, lived and worked.

  Elkin has mapped her own identity on to the streets of every city she’s lived in. She found her feet as a student walking the Manhattan grid (she had grown up in the Long Island suburbs, where driving was de rigueur), but the passion only really took hold when she moved to Paris. Brief sojourns in London, Venice and Tokyo brought whole new cities to explore – how does flânerie work in a city that people don’t navigate on foot? – along with the discovery of a sisterhood of fleet-footed flâneuses.

  Impressively, Elkin doesn’t simply make a case for the re-evaluation of her titular figure; ultimately she makes flânerie itself appear urgent and contemporary. I defy anyone to read this celebratory study and not feel inspired to take to the streets in one way or another.

  Flâneuse is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.93

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/25/flaneuse-by-lauren-elkin-review-how-women-walk
  Word count: 1488

  QUOTED: "this is a book not so much about walking as about rootlessness, because the best flâneuses are at home anywhere and therefore throw into question the whole notion of home. But it’s more complex than this because one of Elkin’s strengths is her openness to the difficulties involved in this notion."
  "Elkin’s flâneuse does not simply wander aimlessly, any more than Elkin does herself in this elegant book: she uses her reflection to question, challenge and create anew the life that she observes."

  Flâneuse by Lauren Elkin review – how women walk
  This elegant book considers defiant female walkers from Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Woolf to the author, and celebrates the freedom of being on the move

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  Lara Feigel
  Thursday 25 August 2016 04.30 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.41 EDT

  In Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark, a 45-year-old woman walks across a London building site, her clothes ill-fitting, her hair a dishevelled combination of grey and red, and her shoulders hunched. She finds that she’s ignored, invisible, free to wander at will. She changes into a fitted silk dress, straightens her back and walks across the same stretch of road again, her hips swaying as she moves. Now a series of whistles accompanies her from the scaffolding.

  I’ve always found this scene both exciting and disturbing. Now, from reading Flâneuse, the wonderful book by the Paris-based US cultural critic Lauren Elkin, I know that Lessing’s heroine is one of a long line of defiant female walkers, and that she is exploring two possibilities available for the flâneuse. She can be looked at and can enjoy the sexual possibility of the streets, like the early-20th-century heroines of Jean Rhys or Djuna Barnes. Or she can enjoy the freedom of invisibility, like the novelist George Sand when she donned the heavy grey costume of a man and dashed around Paris observing the 1830 revolution: “No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd.”

  A tribute to female flâneurs: the women who reclaimed our city streets
  Read more
  In Flâneuse, Elkin provides a joyful genealogy of the female urban walker, taking her own wanderings in Paris as her starting point. The flâneur is defined by the dictionary as “one who wanders aimlessly”. He has his origins in the 19th-century Paris of Balzac and Baudelaire and his heir in the 21st-century psychogeographer, parsing the city like a poem. Elkin takes issue, rightly, with the critics who deny the possibility of a female flâneur or claim psychogeography as an exclusively male pastime. “There is not and could not be a female flâneuse,” writes the art historian Griselda Pollock, while Will Self has declared the psychogeographers a “fraternity” of “middle-aged men in Gore-Tex … prostates swelling as we crunch over broken glass”. Elkin successfully shows that even in the 19th century, women were as capable of aimless wandering as men.

  The book’s narrative meanders brilliantly and appropriately across several time periods at once. The central character is Elkin herself, growing up in suburban America, moving to Paris in her early 20s and discovering flânerie before she had heard the term flâneur. Through walking, she tells us, she encountered the “total freedom unleashed from the act of putting one foot in front of the other” while on the lookout “for residue, for texture, for accidents and encounters and unexpected openings”. In her 20s, Elkin moved from New York to Paris to Venice to Tokyo and back to Paris again, stopping off in London, and these locations form the coordinates of her book. She has her heart broken in Paris, ends a relationship in Tokyo and writes a novel in Venice.

  Surrounding her is a large cast of writers, artists and revolutionaries. We meet Rhys on her desultory wanders around Paris and her more urgent border-crossing from Belgium to France, stateless after the first world war. We see Virginia Woolf discovering freedom in “the roar and splendour of the Strand”, the artist Sophie Calle creating an artistic project out of following strange men in Venice, and Sand observing the revolution in Paris.

  Martha Gellhorn
  Martha Gellhorn: ‘flânerie is as necessary as solitude.’ Photograph: FPG/Getty Images
  Perhaps the only one of Elkin’s characters who defined herself as a flâneuse was Martha Gellhorn, who thought flâner was the “best French verb” and found flânerie “as necessary as solitude: that is how the compost keeps growing in the mind”. Gellhorn’s journalism was an art born out of walking. Her early, eviscerating pieces from Spain were the result of walks she took in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. And Gellhorn’s whole, restless mode of living, moving rootless from place to place, was itself a form of flânerie. “There is too much space in the world,” she wrote to a lover. “I am bewildered by it, and mad with it.”

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  This is the way in which flânerie in Elkin’s book becomes not just a means of traversing the city but a way of life and even a form of ethics. It’s this that gives it its power. There are moments when Elkin’s enthusiasm might be a little breathless for some readers. “Let me walk. Let me go at my own pace,” she writes. “Let me feel life as it moves through me and around me … The city is life itself.” Too much of this could become trying, but it’s saved from being sentimental by the larger issues at stake.

  “Beware roots. Beware purity,” Elkin exhorts, approvingly quoting Homi Bhabha’s statement: “To be unhomed is not to be homeless.” For Elkin, the flâneuse is “saturated with in-betweenness” because she is walking between places, caught up in the process of becoming. In a book that moves fluidly between the personal and the political, the argument for becoming is twofold. The individual can live more honestly when she allows life to be experienced as a process rather than a series of goals to be worked towards. At the same time, collectively, we can create a more hospitable world when we allow the possibility of wandering to challenge the fixed borders of the nation state.

  In the end, then, this is a book not so much about walking as about rootlessness, because the best flâneuses are at home anywhere and therefore throw into question the whole notion of home. But it’s more complex than this because one of Elkin’s strengths is her openness to the difficulties involved in this notion. “I was not a rebel,” she writes, describing her unhappiness in Paris as she moved from one unsatisfactory relationship and apartment to another, uncertain whether she could remain there while she waited year after year for her French citizenship to come through. “Displaced, dislocated, I wanted to be re-placed, re-located.”

  Here Elkin distances herself from her rootless subjects. She is honest enough to know that she’s not a Gellhorn or a Sand, risking everything to be free. And this honesty, expressed through a form of ironic distance, itself becomes one of the central duties of Elkin’s flâneuse. She tells us that of all the accounts she has read of 1968 in Paris, she most admires Mavis Gallant’s because of Gallant’s ability to step away from the events she describes.

  It’s telling that most of Elkin’s cast are writers and artists. Balzac made a distinction between the “common” flâneur and the artist flâneur. But Elkin’s book makes it hard to imagine a flâneur, male or female, who isn’t in some sense an artist, creating the city at the same time as observing it. Even in the passage I quoted at the beginning, Lessing’s protagonist is moving from living unconsciously to consciously in a way that seems to engage her in something like the process of artistic creation. So the dictionary definition does not suffice. Elkin’s flâneuse does not simply wander aimlessly, any more than Elkin does herself in this elegant book: she uses her reflection to question, challenge and create anew the life that she observes.

  •Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich. To order Flâneuse for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-flaneuse-20170223-story.html
  Word count: 1136

  QUOTED: "Elkin demonstrates her academic chops with a rich mix of references—to Baudelaire, Rebecca Solnit, Walter Benjamin, Joan Didion, Jean-Luc Godard. She also doesn’t shy from bold, sometimes debatable pronouncements. ... But Flâneuse is a stimulating read whose itinerary ranges from wanderlust and space as 'a feminist issue' to self-definition in connection with a specific place."

  Take a walk on the Parisian side with Lauren Elkin's 'Flâneuse'
  Lauren Elkin and 'Flaneuse'
  Lauren Elkin and "Flaneuse." (Marianne Kaster / Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  Heller McAlpin
  Lauren Elkin’s “Flâneuse,” part cultural history, part personal memoir, fervently celebrates women who have asserted their freedom and sharpened their identities by taking to urban streets — whether on solitary, exploratory rambles or amid crowds of demonstrators. Although Elkin’s book went to press before the massive, global women’s rights marches that followed President Trump’s inauguration, she couldn’t have invoked a more apt postscript.

  Elkin, like so many American college students, fell in love with Paris during a semester abroad — from Barnard in the late 1990s. She returned a few years later for graduate studies and eventually decided to live there permanently. After growing up in the isolating, soul-sapping car culture of suburban Long Island, she was charmed by Paris’ sense of history and nostalgia.

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  Exploring the city on foot through Montparnasse and beyond, Elkin fancied herself a flâneuse, a female version of that classic Parisian figure, the flâneur — an aimless wanderer and observer, “walking for no particular reason.” Yet she was surprised to learn that “scholars have mostly dismissed the idea of a female flâneur”; “flâneur-ing,” as she somewhat awkwardly calls it, was traditionally the prerogative of well-to-do men. In the 19th century, women out walking were more likely servants headed to market, or streetwalkers.

  Elkin is certainly not the first to rue these “sexual divisions,” or to rail against the implicit notion that “a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.” But by focusing on six writers and artists — George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle and Martha Gellhorn — whose life trajectories were deeply influenced by their soles-to-the-pavement, eyes-on-the-street engagement with cities, her book makes a forceful case for the genderless joy and vital importance of striking out for the territory — on foot.

  Following a growing trend in intellectual history, “Flâneuse” interweaves the author’s personal story with that of her subjects. Other recent examples of these personally inflected studies include Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café,” Katie Roiphe’s “The Violet Hour,” Elizabeth Hawes’ “Camus, a Romance” and John Kaag’s “American Philosophy.”

  Reminders of a writer’s personal stake in her subject — along with the relative intimacy of first-person memoir — help offset potential dryness. But integrating the personal and scholarly can be tricky, and Elkin’s book occasionally suffers from tonal inconsistencies between research-heavy passages that read almost as if they were repurposed academic papers or lectures, and doleful accounts of the author’s “soul-scarring” love affairs.

  Which is not to say that Elkin’s odyssey lacks interest. For starters, her astute portrait of suburban Long Island and the relief she felt on leaving it provides an apposite segue into her studies of two women in particular, Jean Rhys and George Sand, who also felt liberated upon moving to Paris. Elkin identifies with aspects of each of her subjects, extracting examples from their life and work that relate to her own experiences and feelings.

  With Jean Rhys, née Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams in the West Indies in 1890, the unhappy relationships that fueled her novels — whose plots Elkin relays in excessive detail — provoke thoughts about “the addictive pleasure of despair” and Elkin’s misguided, insulting relationship with a “Jewish Patrick Dempsey,” for whom she was “not Jewish enough.”

  George Sand was the pen name of Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin, born in 1804. She was an “everyday radical” who challenged “received notions of morality” when she left her husband to live with a lover in Paris, where, cross-dressed, she was able to wander freely in disguise. Elkin’s fascination with Sand lies less in her sentimental novels and famous lovers (Alfred de Musset, Frederic Chopin) than in her role in the Paris uprisings of 1830 and 1848. For Elkin, public demonstrations are another salubrious aspect of urban living. She writes, “We need the mass movements, we need people to get together and march…You show yourself. You toss in your chips. You walk.”

  A recurrent theme of “Flâneuse” is the pull between wandering and settling, illustrated most vividly with war journalist Martha Gellhorn’s story. Hemingway’s third wife, Elkin writes, “turned flânerie into testimony,” but she “pinged between extremes” of free-range activity and domesticity, often painfully.

  Elkin, too, does some pinging. She follows a boyfriend from Paris to Tokyo, which makes her feel powerless and lonely. A month in Venice to research a novel doesn’t warrant the dull chapter she devotes to it. Time tracing Virginia Woolf’s tracks in London is better spent.

  “Flâneuse,” in keeping with its peripatetic subject, jumps around, sometimes disorientingly: one paragraph, we’re deep in the filmography of nouvelle vague director Agnès Varda, the next we’re confronted with Elkin’s visa and job uncertainties. One moment, we’re in New York, the next, “here” is back in Paris, months (or is it years?) later, married and pregnant.

  Elkin demonstrates her academic chops with a rich mix of references — to Baudelaire, Rebecca Solnit, Walter Benjamin, Joan Didion, Jean-Luc Godard. She also doesn’t shy from bold, sometimes debatable pronouncements: “There is no sharper truth than that of fiction,” she claims. Back in New York, she sees only “two speeds of life … married or very, very young,” which makes me want to urge her to look harder, and not just through the lens of her own preoccupations.

  But “Flâneuse” is a stimulating read whose itinerary ranges from wanderlust and space as “a feminist issue” to self-definition in connection with a specific place. For Elkin, her chosen home is Paris, yet New York is still part of her identity. Not everyone, alas, male or female, has such freedom to choose.

  In addition to the Los Angeles Times, Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for NPR.org, the Washington Post and other publications.

  “Flâneuse”

  Lauren Elkin

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 336 pp., $27

• A.V. Club
  http://www.avclub.com/review/victorian-england-womens-march-women-taking-street-250302
  Word count: 933

  From Victorian England to the Women’s March, women taking to the street is political

  By Randon Billings Noble @randonnoble
  Feb 20, 2017 9:00 AM

  Image: Marcus Nuccio
  Image: Marcus Nuccio
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  Flâneuse: Women Walk The City In Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, And London

  Author: Lauren Elkin
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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  Flâneuse is a book about a woman walking through cities. But it is also about reading and writing, seeing and being seen, youth and age, architecture, urban planning, rebellion, protest, romance, heartbreak, longing, and belonging. In the introduction, “Flâneuse-ing,” author Lauren Elkin’s explains her “imaginary definition” of this term:

  Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities.

  Elkin writes that the idea of the flâneur was born in Paris, in the first half of the 19th century. But the term—and the act—applied to men only. The female flâneuse would have to wait until the late 19th century, when women of all classes braved public spaces unaccompanied by a man. With the arrival of the “new woman” in the 1890s, the flâneuse could be seen regularly on city streets walking between home, shops, cafés, and offices.

  Elkin, living firmly in the 21st century, writes that for her, walking “is like mapping with your feet.” She herself walks because it can help her solve a problem (“solvitur ambulando, as they say”), “because it confers—or restores—a feeling of placeness,” and because walking is “like reading.” As we keep reading though her words, we see these different kinds of walks in action.

  Flâneuse is loosely organized by city—the Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London of its subtitle—but it is not entirely linear. A section might begin with a description of the city in question but then veer into history or architecture or the philosophy of revolution. You become a flâneuse (or flâneur) of the book—wandering where it takes you through different moods and modes.

  In New York, we learn about Elkin’s childhood on Long Island and her relationship to her home city. But Elkin also broadens her scope by gathering insights from other writers on the nature of cities. Rebecca Solnit compares cities to suburbs: The “history of suburbia,” Solnit writes, “is the history of fragmentation.” In Paris we walk the streets alongside the writer Jean Rhys, who moved there just after the First World War. Elkin provides a sense of her work as well as her feelings about her new home by quoting a letter Rhys wrote:

  The “Paris” all these people write about, Henry Miller, even Hemingway etc. was not “Paris” at all—it was “America in Paris” or “England in Paris.” The real Paris had nothing to do with that lot…

  Rhys’ Paris is one of women—including herself—trying to find themselves as they live in the freedom of the city and “outside the machine,” as she put it in her short story of the same name. In a later Paris section, Elkin writes about Paris’ centuries-long tradition of rebellion and protest marches, and how she herself participated in their “manifs” after September 11th. Whether through the lives of the women who live there, the writers who work there, or the rebels of the 18th century and beyond, Paris feels poised to “explode into rebellion, given the right circumstances.”

  In London, Elkin turns to a different kind of rebellion. She looks at the life and work of Virginia Woolf, who turned away from the traditions of Victorian England and embarked on a new life in a new neighborhood: Bloomsbury. Here Woolf created a fictional flâneuse in Mrs. Dalloway, who reflects on her past while walking out to buy flowers for a party. But Woolf also writes about her own adventures walking London’s streets, in search not of flowers but a pencil. Woolf calls it “street haunting.” Elkin writes of this essay:

  Sailing out into a winter evening, surrounded by the “champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets,” the observer feels blessed with the “irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow.” In the street we are no longer “quite ourselves”—instead we become “functions of the urban landscape.” Whereas once we were objects of the gaze, as street haunters we become observing entities, de-sexed, un-gendered. We cloak ourselves in anonymity, and become as incomprehensible to the city as it often is to us.

  This anonymity confers great freedom on the flâneuse, whether she be Woolf or Rhys; the artist Sophie Calle stalking her subjects through the streets of Venice; filmmaker Agnès Varda in Paris; the fictional Charlotte in Lost In Translation’s Tokyo; or Elkin herself in all of these cities. And from this freedom of being a flâneuse comes thought, writing, and art.

  Flâneuse is a deeply pleasurable book, whether you are a man or a woman, whether you know these cities (or books, or writers, or artists) or not. You will see these streets anew, just as if you were a flâneur in a New York neighborhood or along a canal in Venice. There is always something more to explore, just around the next corner—or on the next page.

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/claude-arnaud/jean-cocteau/
  Word count: 415

  JEAN COCTEAU
  A Life
  by Claude Arnaud translated by Lauren ElkinCharlotte Mandell
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  The first substantial life of the French surrealist writer and artist to appear in English since 1970.

  You might not have known that Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was an angst-y, tormented artist to look at him: he “always tried to put himself forward as happy and detached,” writes French biographer Arnaud (Chamfort: A Biography, 1992), and he had a happy childhood without much drama. Still, as Arnaud remarks, Cocteau wrestled for a long time with his homosexuality, a preference for men that “remained more acted than lived,” no small thing in a time when the law still weighed heavily against same-sex relationships. Arnaud accomplishes several things in this overstuffed life of the writer, artist, and filmmaker. He does much, for example, to correct the emphasis on Cocteau as eccentric artist—he was, after all, a shining light of Dadaism—that comes “to the detriment of the creator.” Focusing closely on Cocteau’s works, Arnaud ventures that he was often at his best as a collaborator, whether encouraging Marcel Proust during the long years of his writing Recherche, even if Proust may have thought of him as “a piece of furniture,” or concocting strange experiments with Pablo Picasso. In the end, Arnaud provides a portrait of a committed, seasoned artist who was, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, a vortex of energy, constantly at work, writing “on invitations, record jackets, cigarette boxes, theater programs, book covers.” If Cocteau was not well-understood in his own time, and often savaged critically, he is unjustly overlooked today. Although, for instance, he was long considered one of the trio of “uncle Jeans” of French film, the others being Renoir and Epstein, many students know him only for Orphée (1950), and although his literary production was steady, he remains known today mostly for his middle-period novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929). Concludes Arnaud, a touch hopefully, “we haven’t yet finished with Cocteau.”

  Arnaud’s biography provides a useful corrective and will inspire renewed interest in Cocteau’s work.

  Pub Date: Sept. 27th, 2016
  ISBN: 978-0-300-17057-3
  Page count: 1056pp
  Publisher: Yale Univ.
  Review Posted Online: July 4th, 2016
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15th, 2016

• Nation
  https://www.thenation.com/article/jean-cocteau-a-life-book-review/
  Word count: 1977

  In the Wings of Reality

  Claude Arnaud’s biography of Jean Cocteau shows how the artist lived a life nourished by infinity.
  By Ricky D’Ambrose JANUARY 23, 2017
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  Jean Cocteau
  Jean Cocteau with his Self Portrait, 1953. (AP Photo / FS)

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  Hidden away from his bedroom, somewhere inside the family’s Paris townhouse on rue La Bruyère, were the frontiers of Jean Cocteau’s “unreal, fabulous zone,” in which every room seemed mythic and far-flung, like a fantastic curiosity shop halfway around the world, known only by hearsay. Born Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau in Maisons-Laffitte, outside of Paris, he was one of three children in a comfortable Catholic family of diplomats and lawyers. His childhood was spent as a restless mental traveler—a habit intensified by age, as Cocteau the child became Cocteau the artist, creator of an enormous and ungovernable body of poems, plays, novels, films, journals, and drawings. The German governess who read fairy tales to him and his siblings; the family billiard room stocked with two Stradivariuses and a plaster mask of Antinous; the summer home decorated with Ingres drawings and Delacroix paintings—here were the early indulgences, the origins of a sensibility that saw any place, however familiar, as an enchanted case for further study.
  In Jean Cocteau: A Life—a massive work, totaling more than 800 pages, published in France in 2003 but appearing in this country last fall, in a translation by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell—Claude Arnaud puts this sensibility at the center of a 74-year labor of continuous self-invention. As a literary biography, it is comprehensive and stimulating, worked through with great care. As a work of cultural history, guided by an aesthetic worldview, it is relevant to some of the broad impulses and compulsions of the arts of our own period. When so much of the art of the last decade consists of seemingly unfinished and interminable “situations” (Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss, for instance, with its 12-hour repetition of the final aria from The Marriage of Figaro), or when the works become evidence of an earlier unseen activity, completed on the artist’s behalf (the plywood encampments of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, with their arranged public lectures and seminars), we may be reaching the outer limits of a peculiar taste: a taste for what Cocteau called, in the diary he kept during the making of his 1946 film Beauty and the Beast, “work which devours its author.”

  The total, devouring work, which forgoes not only its author but also its audience, was Cocteau’s privileged aim. It was the principle of Parade, the ballet he wrote for Diaghilev in 1916, scored by a clamorous sensory mix of Satie, gunfire, and typewriters—booed at its premiere but praised by Apollinaire for its “surrealism”—and of his first film, The Blood of a Poet, a ghostly moving-picture manifesto with an artist-protagonist passing through mirrors and squinting through keyholes, anguished by what he sees (“documentary scenes of another kingdom,” in Cocteau’s words), which culminates in an act of self-destruction. But art could also exceed the typical materials (celluloid, language, the stage): Indeed, a life could be a work of art, lived out with great bravado and ebullience in the company of many admirers, ingénues, and madmen. Life was, or could be, as Cocteau remarked about his own childhood, a “theater in which you played every role, in unequalled possession of the world.”

  But, of course, it could also be an initiation into infirmity. “The child wants a bedroom, to gather together his belongings and loves there,” Cocteau wrote. “He hates things that disperse. He likes illnesses, which bring people together and leave him in seclusion.” And the illnesses—among them hay fever and scoliosis, rheumatism and insomnia, shingles and toothaches—would, like his opium addiction of later years, prove painful and transfiguring. For Cocteau, every agony was proof of an ennobling sensitivity connected to a frail, lithe body. He was, as Arnaud puts its, “a being made not of flesh but of vapor, bewitching but too unstable not to suffer from it—like a cloud traversed by horizontal flashes of lightning.” Illness for Cocteau meant the building up of an inner life and the creation of a place for make-believe, which could be perused and replenished ad infinitum.
  Tootal, devouring work, which forgoes not only its author but also its audience, was Jean Cocteau’s privileged aim.
  It is difficult to talk about Cocteau without talking about the sacrificial character of his relationships. When he admitted to being “seduced by people who have a mysterious prestige” (a quality he thought inseparable from “lack of heart”), Cocteau was in a sense justifying his infatuation with the young, gifted Raymond Radiguet, whom he met in 1919, and who would be killed at age 20 by typhoid. Despite their trips to the French coast, where Radiguet wrote the only two novels he would ever publish, and where Cocteau worked on his Thomas l’imposteur; despite what Arnaud calls the “long neoclassical summer” spent together reading Ronsard and du Bellay; despite the cavalier effort to repudiate Symbolism once and for all, to scour the Dadaism of the age, to make “tradition newer than rupture”—despite all of this, Radiguet’s relationship to Cocteau was punishingly, damningly impassive. But it was also a provocation. “Moved by Radiguet’s silence,” Arnaud observes, crucially, “Cocteau fell in love.” Because the young man’s sexuality was inadmissible to his older mentor (Radiguet flaunted his women, uncharitably, in front of an aggrieved Cocteau), their relationship took the form of a complex sequence of interlocking deprivations, like an erotic negative theology, in which every absence was filled by strong imaginative work, as Cocteau’s childhood had taught him to do so well.

  Viewed in proximity, Radiguet’s imperiousness, his phantom grandeur and incurable cool, could only appall. Viewed from without, they could be understood “scenically,” as props laid out in deep orthogonal space. Cocteau’s was the talent of a grand scenarist, an acquisitive metteur en scène, using up whatever seemed most inert and impersonal about other people—typically the people dearest to him, like Radiguet, but also, at different times, collaborators and established impresarios like Picasso and Stravinsky and Diaghilev. (As Arnaud puts it, the more Radiguet “withdrew into his own enigma, the more that Cocteau’s fairy-like imagination made him into an untouchable entity, and hence one worthy of being adored.”) In this dark ethics of hoarded rebukes, every relationship had at its painful center an unreciprocated emotional transaction, demanding enormous rations of adulation and attention, which Cocteau dispensed freely to his protégés and mentors alike.

  When he turned to opium in the early ’20s, it was an anguished response to Radiguet’s death. “Everything we do in life, even love, we do on an express train headed for death,” he wrote in 1930. “To smoke opium is to leave the moving train.” A regimen of three pipes in the morning, four in the afternoon, and three in the evening was, in those years, Cocteau’s chief technique for sabotaging the moving train, for taking up residence in a deathless, exalted headspace that, if it couldn’t entirely reproduce the special structures and pleasures of his relationships, seemed equally gratifying and valid. Here is Arnaud:

  He confused day and night, his limp body resting on the mat, head propped up by a cushion, legs curled up in the fetal position, as he raised himself up just long enough to suck on the bamboo while the opium crackled in the bowl of the pipe, like a diseased lung. Time froze, and with it the horrific sensation of driving at breakneck speed. Life reversed itself, and he felt as if he were moving backward, washed in the photo-development bath that turned negative back into the image taken from reality.
  I can think of no better summary of the Cocteau sensibility: the confused, directionless break in all orientation; the destruction of intelligible transitions (between feelings, between identities); the dual love of repose and speed. “Time froze,” and so Cocteau would build a life outside it, impishly, like the brother and sister of Les enfants terribles. Cocteau had his own committed share of detractors. Sartre called him “the prince of counterfeit money” and lamented his “harassed, choked way of thinking, which still continues, jumping nimbly from one thought to the next, without realizing it is running in circles in its cage.” Breton resented him, describing him in a letter to Tristan Tzara as “the most detestable being of this time.” Toward the end of his life, when asked if he respected Cocteau as poet, Genet answered sharply: “No.”

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  But Cocteau—and this may be what joins him to Sartre, Breton, and Genet—was writing at the far end of an established intellectual tradition that made his own peculiar mix of pathos and sincerity possible at all, and that he would spend a lifetime working to ransack and exaggerate—with tremendous, unstinting speed. Sartre’s complaint about Cocteau’s “harassed, choked way of thinking” might as well be self-portraiture; it is by now well known that the author of Nausea and Being and Nothingness consumed, with incomprehensible frequency, enormous doses of amphetamines to complete The Critique of Dialectical Reason. As he told Simone de Beauvoir, “In philosophy, writing consisted of analyzing my ideas; and a tube of Corydrane meant ‘these ideas will be analyzed in the next two days.’” Whereas Sartre’s was an intensive and disaggregating mind that could be induced to run at a much higher speed—in effect, doing the same kind of work, but more quickly—Cocteau’s could be tuned and dialed into at whim, fielding signals from a place that remains inaccessible to most of us. (He once boasted that Les enfants terribles was “dictated” to him in 17 days.)

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  For Cocteau, all art—like all thinking—is an extensive, gratuitous act. The French intellectual tradition of l’esprit géométrique, of Pascal and Condillac and Fontenelle, found itself, more than two centuries later, solemnly inverted by the maker of Orpheus. “Irrational, not classical, and anti-Voltairean, Cocteau had the conviction that serious things were happening elsewhere,” Arnaud writes, “beyond or beneath appearances—in the wings of reality, where past, present, and future were woven into a unique form of time that had infinite density.”

  The consequences are still being borne out. In the arts of our own period, perhaps the central, regulating unit isn’t the picture (the legacy of the perspective system in painting, for example, with its approximation of human vision) or the picture plane (the legacy of modernism, in which a work’s formal properties are at least as valuable as its depiction of familiar persons or things) or even the conceptual problem, but the process. Under this new alignment, art more and more resembles an enormous circulatory system: Any object, image, sound, gesture, text, etc., can become data, set to motion in a thick, clamorous junk-space. Not l’esprit géométrique, but l’esprit infini—a life nourished by infinity—which is by necessity always a little marginalized, always beautiful and generous and lucid, and for which Cocteau, we can know now thanks to this fine biography by Claude Arnaud, remains unsurpassable.

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-dunce-gets-a-doorstop-a-life-of-jean-cocteau/
  Word count: 2438

  QUOTED: "Arnaud’s scholarly diligence is combined with imaginative sympathy; he makes not only the protagonist but the supporting characters come alive."

  The Dunce Gets a Doorstop: A Life of Jean Cocteau
  By Kevin McMahon

  366 5 1

  OCTOBER 17, 2016

  THE MOST FAMOUS unknown modernist has never lacked biographers — beginning with himself — but Claude Arnaud’s 2003 epic, now available in English courtesy of Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandel, is the first to attempt the impossible: a continuous narrative of Jean Cocteau’s life, instead of selected highlights. The result is an unwieldy 1,000+ page doorstop. But the vastness is not vacuous; it’s the space necessary to unreel Cocteau’s story in full. If some of the previous biographies, like Francis Steegmuller’s 1970 classic, are more readable, it’s because they weren’t as ambitious. Readers owe Arnaud thanks for dispatching a job that none before him had the stamina to face.
  Telling the story in full, and working primarily from documents, Arnaud collates accounts and fixes the chronology of events, sorting the probable from the improbable. This would require quite a bit of work when dealing with any subject, but in the case of Cocteau, the requisite labor is awe-inspiring. Cocteau links the Paris of Jacques-Émile Blanche and Sarah Bernhardt to that of Jean-Luc Godard and Brigitte Bardot. He lived in the thick of so many significant cultural events that, as Arnaud notes, “there is not a book devoted to the literature, cinema, ballet, theater, or music of the twentieth century in which his name doesn’t figure frequently.” Even while zonked on opium during most of the last 40 years of his life, Cocteau managed to pursue a half-dozen careers with greater success than the most disciplined professional manages to pursue in a single one.
  And yet, though the book is dense with detail, it is the furthest thing from a slog. Whatever he was, Cocteau was never boring, and I can’t think of another full-dress biography with a higher laugh-out-loud count. Arnaud’s scholarly diligence is combined with imaginative sympathy; he makes not only the protagonist but the supporting characters come alive. His nuanced account of Anna, Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles, for example, rehumanizes a Belle Époque freak. Arnaud shows how she taught the adolescent Cocteau that torrents of talk — if sufficiently brilliant and outrageous — could enchant and dominate others. But this was a dangerous art, which laid Cocteau — like the Countess — open to the charge of being a better talker than writer.
  Arnaud’s narrative charts Cocteau’s ascent from the faded little world of the Countess, Edmond Rostand, and Reynaldo Hahn to the world stage of Marcel Proust, Misia Sert, Sergei Diaghilev, and Vaslav Nijinsky. From there, in between sorties behind the lines of World War I, Cocteau invaded the Parisian avant-garde, attaching himself to Erik Satie, Stravinsky, Picasso, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and other titans of modernism.
  One of the accomplishments of Arnaud’s fine-grained approach is resolving doubts over Le Potomak, Cocteau’s first, and still eye-opening, avant-garde text. It was published in 1919, but Cocteau always insisted he had completed it six years earlier. This has always seemed unlikely: he didn’t encounter the avant-garde until 1915. But Arnaud confirms the dates, adding that Cocteau was by then subscribing to Les Soirées de Paris, where he would have discovered the work of Apollinaire, Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and other future colleagues. Le Potomak is key, because it marks Cocteau’s commitment to fairy tale as his distinctive genre. He continued mining this vein for 50 years, in fiction, poems, plays, movies, and gossip. Within another specialized subcategory of fable, journalism, Cocteau remade himself into spokesman-curator-advocate for Parisian modernisms of many flavors, from Les Six to the New Wave. He became world-famous, but also widely despised.
  Arnaud demonstrates how André Breton’s calumny against Cocteau in the ’20s, aped by his Surrealist brethren, still taints Cocteau — even though its blatant homophobia is now evident and intolerable. Arnaud’s discussion of interwar Parisian art politics follows the traditional historiography, accepting at face value the significant manifestos and party allegiances. This authorizes him to cite well-worn “années folles” anecdotes — for example, Robert Desnos publicly vowing to assassinate Cocteau at a 1923 banquet in honor of Ezra Pound — but I wonder if this approach is still valid, especially because Arnaud dismisses most of the players, except for Cocteau and Louis Aragon, as “corpses.”
  Declared enemies were troublesome, but friends were not necessarily Cocteau’s best supporters. In person he was obviously a force to be reckoned with: one after another of his peers testifies to how stupid he made them feel when he held forth. And they all seem to have taken their revenge at their desks. André Gide was a serial offender, but T. S. Eliot’s 1951 comment to Stravinsky is a Nobel Prize–worthy specimen of the genre: “Cocteau was very brilliant the last time we met […] but he seemed to be rehearsing for a more important occasion.”
  I suspect Arnaud was aided by the fact that he did not rely on the testimony of old friends, who all have axes to grind, and would have liked to redirect the historical spotlight on themselves.
  When Cocteau abandoned Anna de Noailles and others for the School of Paris avant-garde, hardly anyone saw the change as an ascent. Misia Sert, for one, predicted that his new companions would ruin him, and she was almost right. It was only after the war, when Cocteau turned his back on the official avant-gardes — at the instigation of his teenage boyfriend, the literary prodigy Raymond Radiguet — that he came into his own. Under the influence of Radiguet’s acidic 1923 noir romance Devil in the Flesh, Cocteau produced a laconic depiction of disintegration, The Miscreant (originally Le Grand Écart), followed the same year by the even more remarkable Thomas the Impostor. Outside of movements, he found his way.
  Arnaud is at his best in the section covering World War II. He manages to discuss the Vichy regime, the German occupation, censorship, collaboration, and the rest without losing the thread, or his objectivity. His diagnosis is plausible and fair:
  The social milieu in which Cocteau had been raised had no tradition of resistance. It had always managed to maintain a relationship with whoever was in power, whether radical or right-wing, in order to maintain its prestige and privilege, however much it may have ridiculed or denounced the government in private.
  If not a collaborator, Cocteau was certainly guilty of bad taste, celebrating in print the sculptor Arno Breker, a fabricator of homoerotic Nazi kitsch. Justifying himself after the war, Cocteau claimed that Breker had saved Picasso and many others; Arnaud conscientiously presents Breker’s own list of the French artists and craftsmen he had protected, but he also makes clear that Cocteau — with or without Breker — wasn’t able to save Max Jacob, whose death in captivity and grotesque funeral are presented in detail.
  In his journal, Cocteau made light of the post-Liberation tribunal that evaluated his culpability: “I forgot to mention my Purification. […] In five minutes they purified me, and then I passed in front of the others, very dignified, with a lily in my hand” (my translation). He forgot? That’s contradicted in the films Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960), in which the confrontation with a jury in a shabby room becomes a life-and-death struggle.
  The ideal biographer of Cocteau needs not only diligence, but a sensitive bullshit detector as well, and Arnaud’s is reliable. He dismisses young Cocteau’s escape from home to Marseilles for a few weeks of adolescent rebellion — which previous biographers have related with complete credulity — as fiction. Arnaud’s skepticism and tact illuminate Cocteau’s romantic life. His account of Cocteau and Jean Marais’s relationship makes it clear that “The First Modern Gay Couple” (according to homohistory.com) ceased physical relations 18 months into their 10-year cohabitation. Likewise, Cocteau’s time with Raymond Radiguet included only the briefest period of intimacy, as did the last 16 years of his life with Edouard Dermithe. Was Cocteau the first public figure in Western culture to publicly exaggerate his affairs with men?
  Arnaud makes the brilliant suggestion that Nijinsky established Cocteau’s erotic ideal: a physically stunning male who is an artistic genius by dint of instinct and constant work, not intellectual effort. This description fits both Radiguet and Marais, but doesn’t apply so well to Cocteau’s other hunks, despite his dogged promotion of all of them as geniuses of one sort or another. Drugged-out Jean Desbordes at least seemed to care for Cocteau and died a martyr of the Resistance, which is more than can be said for the self-mutilating Franz Thomassin. Arnaud’s imaginative sympathy even extends to the worst boyfriend of his life — and perhaps of all time: Maurice Sachs, a psychopathic conman and thief who ended his days betraying foreign factory slave-workers to the Gestapo in the twilight of the Reich.
  Arnaud further complicates the picture with the story of Cocteau’s romantic attachment to the Romanov princess Natalie Paley — a man-killer out of Evelyn Waugh’s worst nightmares — with whom Cocteau almost produced a child.
  By this point it should be clear that this book is rife with names and dates. In order to get all the characters through their entrances and exits, Arnaud makes liberal use of paraphrase and — to be blunt — cliché. This is no fault in itself; the alternative would have been to quote Cocteau and his almost-as-voluble friends verbatim, which would have swelled the volume to three times its current length. And yet, unfortunately, Arnaud’s paraphrases sometimes slip into sloppiness. The 1928 classic The Seashell and the Clergyman is not a film by Antonin Artaud but instead Germaine Dulac. “[F]ifty-year-old transvestite” is not the most apt description of the Kabuki performer Onoe Kikugorô VI. Arnaud’s odd interpretation of the film Orpheus is premised on the mistaken belief that it ends with Eurydice having given birth (not with her and Orpheus expecting a child). Arnaud also appropriates without comment material from sources that merit full discussion. The worst instance is his account of the production of Beauty and the Beast (1946), which naturally relies on Cocteau’s Diary of a film (1947). But beyond an endnote, Arnaud doesn’t even mention the existence of the Journal, and so readers may miss out on Cocteau’s most compelling dissection of the pain and joy of creation — and most terrifying and hilarious adventure story. (Also annoying is the absence of an index of works discussed; the original Gallimard edition didn’t have one, but Yale University Press should have fixed that.)
  Despite the slips, Arnaud’s biography succeeds so well that I hope it shelves discussion of Cocteau’s life for a good long while, and redirects attention toward his work. And here we come to my biggest complaint: Arnaud provides in-depth accounts of the production of Le Potomak, The Miscreant, The Holy Terrors (originally Les Enfants Terribles, 1929), The Human Voice (1930), and other works as episodes of Cocteau’s life, but he rarely pauses to offer much evaluation. And when he does, it’s often the most minimal indication of praise or dispraise. Non-experts will finish Arnaud’s book without any idea as to which of Cocteau’s works are worth pursuing. This is a major disservice to the book’s subject.
  Arnaud makes clear that what saved Cocteau’s life, again and again, from his various failures, betrayals, and reversals, was his superhuman work ethic and manic productivity. When W. H. Auden wrote in 1950 that “to enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse,” he meant it as a compliment. But it’s a compliment that’s far more likely to scare people off, rather than invite them in. The productivity has certainly scared off literary professionals. As Arnaud himself observes, “No major critic has ever taken the time to analyze Cocteau’s work.”
  Academia can keep reputations evergreen, but Cocteau has never enticed scholars. His oeuvre encompasses major works in multiple media, crossing departmental boundaries. And since Cocteau’s fairy tales have a deliberately unserious cast, the work seems too idiosyncratic to link up with any larger cultural trend. There’s no easy argument for its significance.
  Given the state of foreign-language modernism available in English, Cocteau’s standing in the Anglophone world is not the worst. But the work deserves better. Most of his movies are in circulation, but Les Parents terribles and L’Aigle à deux têtes (both 1948) are not. We still need a translation of the novel La fin du Potomak (1940). A smart publisher could issue all the long-form fiction in a single volume — the result would be slimmer than a standard airport novel. None of his volumes of poetry has ever appeared in English, nor has his verse play Renaud et Armide (1943), without which Beauty and the Beast is incomprehensible (Armide is the Beast’s big sister). The last English-language anthology was published over 40 years ago. Can’t we have a new one to mark the upcoming centenary of Le Potomak? On the other hand, I suspect Cocteau’s reputation would brighten considerably if most of his visual art vanished without a trace, except for the caricatures from the ’20s and a few posters and book covers.
  In every medium, Cocteau maintained to the end the manners of a Belle Époque host: he never fails to entertain. During his life this rendered his high modernist credentials suspect — but none of that matters now. As Arnaud shows, the amiability, as well as the manic productivity, stem from a kind of despair: the world is a misunderstanding; the poet is a weak point in its lie.
  During his life, Cocteau was routinely accused of devoting more energy to playing the part of poet than producing worthwhile work. Furthermore, his dedication to fables has allowed subsequent generations to dismiss his work as trifling. And indeed, his mirrors and hunks and statues can seem pretty tame and unserious. But seriousness is not significance. A professed Nietzschean, he considered solemnity ridiculous, writing in his journal (in Richard Howard’s translation), “I’m the dunce of the class. I hope to remain so until I die and after death. Gide believes me incapable of gravity. My gravity is not his. Thank God!”
  ¤
  Kevin McMahon is a writer, scholar, and archivist based in Los Angeles.

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