It is through Jack O’Brien, the Arbiter Elegantiarum Philadelphiae, that I trace my rapport with the historic past through the laying-on of hands. Sitting on the floor, I started “The Sweet Science,” with its introductory flourish: But Liebling had died fifteen years earlier, in 1963, and almost all of his books were out of print. He was a hero to some of the “new journalists” of the sixties and seventies, who put him in a nonfiction lineage that begins with Defoe. I’d heard of Liebling but never read him. One afternoon, while I was browsing in the “used” section, a friend pulled down a paperback by A. In the late seventies, while on a sojourn of my own, I bought or borrowed my books at Shakespeare & Company, the destination for English-speaking waywards on the Rue de la Bûcherie near Notre-Dame.
One of the pleasures of such an indolent, never-to-be-repeated existence is the liberty it provides the student on leave from academy-drafted reading lists and deadlines that frog-march undergraduates up and down “The Magic Mountain” in the time it took Hans Castorp to catch cold. To this day, countless children of American privilege arrive in the Latin Quarter, bent double under their backpacks and concealing a money belt holding a Eurail pass and a freshly squeezed carte orange.
Adams wrote home, pleasure is the “business of life” in Paris-there is another way to live, in other words-and this is the lasting gift, and illusion, that every visiting American brings home in his bags. The literature begins with the decorous engagements in the letters of Benjamin Franklin and Abigail Adams and leads soon enough to the earthier liaisons in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Tropic of Cancer.” Much is promised to the prospective traveller: if not a passage of enlightenment or erotic adventure, then at least a taste for boiled innards and string beans done right. From the start of the American republic, the most tantalizing means of indulging a youthful desire for escape and re-creation has been the sojourn in Paris.
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