Short Stories for Short Times

by

Lauren Roberts

Sometimes you want to start and finish a story in one reading session be it a lunch break, a short interlude before sleep or while waiting at the dentist’s office. Short stories are ideal for this kind of quick, pleasurable reading, and sheathed in a beautifully design is a fabulous collection of stories revolving around and appropriately titled, Americans in Paris: Great Short Stories of the City of Light (from now-defunct Capra Press).

As the Introduction notes, the stories are “not about Paris; they are about human situations played out in Paris where the city is palpably felt.” They cover most of the 20th century and include a range of superb writers outside the usual assemblage of Hemingway, James, Wharton, Miller and Nin.

Loneliness, love and deception are hauntingly portrayed in Joan Frank’s “The Waiting Room.” Rita, a 46-year-old woman has come to Paris with a college class for a Paris semester after a divorce left her bereft of emotional bearings. But she has little in common with the 18- and 19-year-old students with whom she shares a dorm, and her lack of language skills leave her stumbling under the contemptuous treatment of Parisian shop clerks.

Then one day she takes a train to Orléans. It’s a pleasant city providing a few enjoyable hours. But she gets on the wrong train for her return trip, and it is there that she meets a young French railroad conductor. Dreams begin to manifest themselves through the fantasies she envisions for herself—an attractive Frenchman, a life in Paris. Rita’s struggle to find something, anything to believe in, out of the relationship is not unfamiliar, but in this story it is emotively rendered.

“Il Ploe:r Dã Mõ Loe:r” by Hortense Calisher begins with a young woman’s experience with the French language in her high school class, and of her continuing interaction with it during a visit to France 20 years later. “I was taught to speak French,” the narrator writes, “with tears.” In other words, their high school instructor believed not in teaching them French grammar or meaning but French sounds, using poitrine, muscles of the face and throat unused by Americans.

Twenty years later, she visits Paris. An initial encounter with the hotel owner who pronounces her French “absolument pur,” strengthens her early confidence in her skills, but she soon discovers that belief is a bit overdone. Certain phrases, practiced at night in her room at night for use the next day, “fell so superbly that any French vis-à-vis immediately dropped all thought of giving me a handicap and addressed me in the native argot, at the native rate—leaving me struck dumb.” It’s only on New Year’s Eve, her last night in Paris, when she meets an old man and they exchange mutual delight in various writers that she finds herself speaking French “into an air freed of cuneiform,” and her reflection that “to learn a language outside its native habitat you must really believe that the other country exists—in its humdrum, its winter self” is a good one for everyone, everywhere to remember.

One of the most touching stories is a painful yet oddly amusing portrayal of the shabby side of Paris’ reputation as a city of love. Casual sex and indifferent lies are at the heart of  Waverly Root’s “Carmencita.” It seems a lighthearted story that carefully positions anguish between its lines.

Ray Farquharson is one of the “uninhibited and unrepressed souls who made up the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune” in 1920s Paris. These boys or men spent most of their off time hatching, nurturing or engaged in affairs of temporary convenience. Farquharson is not only the oldest of them but the only married one. But marriage, as was and is common in France, was a convenience. His affairs were far more serious—at least as long as they lasted—until at last one compelled him to leave France for Spain until his boss was able to intervene with the young woman.

Farquharson, in the meantime, had met another woman and when his “problem” was cleared up, brought Carmencita back with him to Paris. She was billed to his co-workers as a member of one of the most aristocratic families of Spain. But reports filtered back to his colleagues through his abandoned girlfriend, Edna, and her lover, his boss, of down-and-out, emotion-laden fights. Once, when questioned closely about his most recent scars, Farquharson shouted, “What do you fellows know about love? None of you ever had a woman who loved you enough to scrap half your face off.”

Alas, the truth about Carmen outs shortly thereafter in a Dorothy Parker-style finale. Joy, indifference, a tiny measure of kindness are all there, and all built upon a foundation of casual cruelty in the City of Light.
 
Among the authors included in this collection are Alice Adams, Evan S. Connell, Mark Helprin, Ellen Gilchrist, Paul Theroux, Robert McAlmon and Lily Tuck. Whether you love Paris or hate it, have been there or not, these stories are enthralling. Superb writing always is, but add in Paris’ characteristic influence on writers and it becomes bewitching. Capra Press (former publisher of Anais Nin and Henry Miller) did a lovely job with this book so if you are looking for a small but exquisite gift book for yourself or someone else, Americans in Paris might just be it. A highly recommended read.

Note: A search on AddALL brought up 24 copies ranging in price from $50 for an “as new signed and numbered hardcover edition to $3.04 for a “very good” trade paperback edition. Bookfinder has 22 copies and ABE has nine in the same price range as already noted.


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it