Walk in the Steps of the Lost Generation in Paris. The Beats Get Naked at Shakespeare and Company.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Stein, Path, live again in Montparnasse.

On a recent trip to Europe my wife, Cherie, purchased us a private Ernest Hemingway tour of Paris with Ellen Leventer. Cherie also booked us into the Relais Hotel Du Vieux Paris on 9 Rue de-Git-Coeur, the home of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. It is a half block from the Seine and three blocks from the famed Shakespeare and Company bookstore.

For me, this was a true literary adventure. I liked the tour so much, I took another with Ellen a week later to follow in the steps of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and the rest of the Lost Generation.

We found many of Hemingway’s haunts in Montparnasse neighbor––his apartments, the site of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore––a gathering spot for the Lost Generation, and the home of Gertrude Stein’s salon, where the literary gentry talked and talked and talked (and Hemingway learned and learned and learned). We sat in cafes where Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos and many other literary lights hung out. Fitzgerald and Zelda had so many apartments here we couldn’t visit them all (from the street, of course). This neighborhood is where most of the literary crowd hung out thanks to its low rents, abundance of cafes and creative spirit.

One of Hemingway’s apartments was on the upper floor of this building.

We had lunch at Auberge de Venise, an Italian restaurant at 10 Rue Delambre. Ellen and I sat at the center table in the photo on the restaurant’s home page, (click here) where I enjoyed the tortellini and a glass of wine. Back in the 1920s, the eatery was called the Dingo. It’s where Fitzgerald, then one of the most famous authors in America, went in search of a young Hemingway after he’d read some of Hemingway’s short stories. Fitzgerald found him––where else––at the restaurant’s mahogany bar, which continues today to define the myth and reality of both writers.

Gertrude Stein’s salon where she entertained the Lost Generation was just beyond this courtyard.

Hemingway fascinates me, although his writing doesn’t always. He was disloyal to his friends, petty, backbiting, egotistical, and yet often very human and kind. I’ve always considered him the first author to create his own brand (adventurer, tough guy), but Ellen corrected me. That was Fitzgerald, who defined himself with the Jazz Age. She should know. She was in marketing and advertising until becoming a literary guide. She is from New York but has spent the last 35 years in Paris.

The original Shakespeare and Company owned by Sylvia Beach was shut down during WWII when she refused to sell a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. In 1951 George Whitman opened Le Mistral bookstore across the Seine from Notre-Dame. He renamed it Shakespeare and Company in honor of Beach in 1963. The store is a labyrinth of new and used books of all genres. Every morning there is a crowd lined up to enter. Such is the pull of the Lost Generation, even though today’s Shakespeare and Company has nothing to do with that literary era.

A clothing store occupies literary sacred ground where Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore thrived until forced to close during World War II when she refused to sell Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer.

However, the newer version of the bookstore does have a lot to do with the Beat Generation. Our temporary home there, the Relais Hotel Du Vieux Paris, once known as the Beat Hotel, was where the Beat Generation of writers stayed while carousing at the second-generation Shakespeare and Company bookstore. The Beat Generation started in this hotel back when it was cheap and lacked basic amenities such as hot showers, heat, and bathrooms in the rooms. Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso were among many famous writers who stayed there while frequenting Shakespeare and Company. Ginsburg drank a lot to get up the nerve to read Howl at a gathering at the store. Corso read naked there while surrounding by two bodyguards. Burroughs did a reading of a book he was working on at the Beat Hotel. You may have heard of it, Naked Lunch.

If you’re going to be in Paris anytime soon and want to learn more about the Lost Generation, I highly recommend you contact Ellen. Her rates are very reasonable.

In his later years, Dos Passos lived about an hour from me in Virginia in Westmoreland County and is buried in Yeocomico Churchyard in Cople Parish. Fitzgerald, who died in California, is buried next to Zelda in Old Saint Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland––about ninety minutes from my home. Hemingway, of course, is buried in Ketchum Cemetery, in Ketchum, Idaho, near family and friends.

While Hemingway and Fitzgerald are the more famous of the three, they burned the candle at both ends and died early. Dos Passos was the most productive and lived to be 74.

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen