The Paris Notebooks

by Quentin S. Crisp

In 2007, Quentin S. Crisp visited Paris and kept a diary of his stay there and his return to Britain. An experiment in literary improvisation, the Notebooks are also a tribute to mood, moment, image and allusion. Making a virtue of pareidolia, the author sifts through the subjective impressions of cumulative duration in an attempt to distil beauty and truth from the everyday, and to reclaim first-person experience from the ravages of 21st century media ¬saturation.

Genres: Memoir

126 pages, Paperback

First published September 4, 2017

Reviews

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Once upon a time, perhaps ten years ago, in 2007, Quentin S. Crisp took a non-vacation train ride to Paris from his home in London. It should be noted that Quentin claims little knowledge of the French Language. However, the train tickets and a place to stay in Paris were provided to Mr. Crisp by a female friend known throughout the narratives simply as S. . This is important as much of the thoughts and dialog surround the communication between the two.

What is provided here are three notebooks that Quentin S. Crisp began to kind of document the trip and provide a mechanism to further expand his writing capabilities and record his impressions, feelings and thoughts (sometimes quite unrelated to this trip) in a form that could later be presented for publication.

On one level this is a personal inside glimpse of the man and his mind in a kind of fish out of familiar waters, recounting thoughts that only slightly touch on the superficiality of the trip itself. Mr. Crisp shares his inner fears, insecurities, personal philosophies and thoughts on many subjects.

Most of the first two notebooks were mainly written in Paris, The third notebook consists of thoughts about the trip to Paris combined with more contemporary insights and reflections.

This was a well written book and I would highly recommend it to people interested in Philosophy, thought processes, and writing with that personal slant that cannot be found in many fiction works. In addition there were points in the narrative that made me laugh out loud.

This hardcover book states it is one of 60 copies.

[John Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cemetery whose name escapes Quentin S Crisp at the time in The Paris Notebooks most likely is Père Lachaise, and the tortured unfortunate, who challenged Apollo to a musical duel, Marsyas. He’s right – Quentin that is, not Marsyas with his cursèd flute - to hold to the ignorance of the time and not make inauthenticising correction later. His seriousness is cause for laughter, as on the Mona Lisa. I do trust in saying that that I am in no way whatsoever being condescending. Asked if it’s overrated, he says it has to be, it can only be overrated. His deepest fear has already come true: he’s failed at what he wanted to do – he doesn’t say what, for artistic reasons, unless I’ve missed where he does or forgotten it (I have been accused of not reading what he says) – and he’s ended up alone. Much can change in the ten years or so since that was written. A friend read the first three chapters and gave up before they became depressing.

What he wants to do in writing is catch a living moment. I thought of a butterfly pinned down but it’d be deadened by the pinning. Better a beautiful brooch, heavy and lifeless but what’s the alternative? A butterfly landed on my clothing as I went shopping and stayed pinned by its will and mine all through the supermarket and walk home to give me what I wanted to know. ‘Catch’ is the wrong word. ‘Convey’? How may I convey a pleasure I barely remember from an experience you cannot have. If the butterfly was conscious it might rationalise what it was doing as having a prolonged rest or, at best, because god, me, willed it – god knows why! – wondering the while why I had no wings before feeling released, free to flutter off for sustenance and sex.

Call me perverse if you will but I find him droll eg on his sexuality. He has one but it seems somewhat vestigial, like a man’s nipples, and he goes on to define what vestigial means, otiosely I would say. Tautologously. It’s the ‘somewhat’ I want explained to banish the image of third ‘nipple’ loosely hanging like a witch’s teat from ...a place no teat should be! Brrr. But it is for the devil’s convenience.

Oh dear: ‘the great homelessness of the world, where there is nothing in the end to find, no destiny waiting, no soul mate, nothing....’ My friend might be right. That is depressing. It shortly evokes a laugh however. A friend had left him a bottle of red. ‘I decided that I needed it now.’ Fortified, he then bravely overcomes timidity to go out, the carrot cigarettes and wine. He is not afraid of showing himself up, off-setting it in the writing with the use of the word, ‘ridiculous’, before ‘mime of smoking, only to discover that the man understood the word ‘cigarette’ anyway.’ It would’ve been funnier without the ‘ridiculous’ unless it’s put in to convey that at the time he felt ridiculous performing his mime. He goes back to the flat to work on a novel, The Lovers. Whatever happened to that? I’ve read it and liked it, the protagonist propelling himself or pulled upwards without quite breaking surface or through it. It had drive. That puts the events of The Paris Notebooks into chronological context for me. He’s the more lonely from coming out of a failed love, writing it out. A Japanese writer, ‘it is better to keep the ...dream of an unfulfilled love than ...have the love fulfilled and ...become commonplace,’ consoles him, though better still to use the love to write out what’s on the unconscious memory as he might’ve been doing with his novel.

A barman likes an American writer ‘responsible for LA Confidential. I smiled indulgently, since language failed me,’ which is funny, from the double meaning of inadequate French and inexpressible recrimination against whoever was responsible for that.

He has to choose a café, he says. Whatever he chooses only seems to become his life. His dream remains in whatever he failed to choose. Whatever that means I’ve commented in the margin. He’s generalised from choosing a café to that of choosing anything, with a presupposition of failure whatever his choice. Since there was no reason to choose a café to go into on his way home, I suspect the postulated choice of one - he doesn’t go into – was a means to the generalisation in order to conclude the chapter with where his dream might reside, obviously nowhere it can be realised since whatever the choice it’s life and failure. The deck’s stacked.

Wherever he went he was still him and couldn’t take a holiday from himself, he tells a friend. True. I once remarked to a friend who sought to change her situation by going to America that she took herself with her. She did come back with a husband she was going there to find. “There’s always divorce,” she reassured me should I ever change my mind about marrying her.

He and a friend walk into a greasy spoon café and order a veggie full-English breakfast for a hangover, at which I could only exclaim, in the margin, though I suppose had it been me I’d’ve asked had it anything gluten-free. He goes on, greasy spoons should be greasy and grimy and smoky. And not vegan.

His job he enjoys is to nudge people into sustainable living while his own life is financially unsustainable. Oh the irony, Ivy, the irony! And, ooh, Mark Samuels gets a mention. I know him, Horatio. Usually people are referred to as an initial capital letter and a dash, to preserve the privacy of people you’re unlikely to know anyway and suggest the writing is true to living fact, though a first name would be more convincing or so I was thinking till he gives that of Drapeau. Flag? Mark Samuels gets not only a first name but a surname as a known published writer. How true to life writing may be is up to the belief of the reader, which is generally false.

On the job he mistakes an open doorway in a block for a toilet and wasn’t entirely mistaken, to my amusement, since it led to lifts and a stairwell used, yes you’ve guessed, as a toilet. His initial suggestion for overpopulation is sterilisation. He isn’t optimistic man will solve this problem but it will ultimately be solved by its effect, presumably runaway global warming from the unwillingness to curtail. It tends him to believe existence is inherently evil. I enjoy life too much to share that belief. You don’t have to agree with him to enjoy his writing which is not pre-digested thought regurgitated but thinking on the page.

‘What if I demanded that we should stop bringing into the world those who have never asked to be born?’ made me laugh, at the inherent presumption of that ‘I demand’, and that we should only have been born if we asked. I was asked my greatest wish, for a school magazine. ‘Never to have been born’ was my reply. I didn’t know Sophocles had anticipated me with his never to be born is best. We didn’t think we had a choice. “I didn’t choose to be born,” I told my mother whose choice it was. The author makes play, by repetition, of people being born who never asked to be as if that they didn’t consent to it makes their existence a bad thing from their helpless suffering in an uncaring world as he is conceiving it to be, though finally all that concerns him is his own suffering in the face of what he conceives. You have to read this.

He’s told a long philosophical essay on why human life is inexcusably horrible is available on download. ‘Naturally, I leapt at the chance to read it.’ Naturally I laughed. And louder at this: until a verdict was returned on whether the universe was entirely evil or entirely good, he was erring on the side of caution in refraining from procreation. I myself decided against procreation, if not for his reason, but my unconscious had other ideas. I was refusing, on the grounds of the woman’s deceitfulness, but, as my will said, how else is she going to get it out of you! It was a compelling argument.

[Seregil of Rhiminee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published at Risingshadow.

Quentin S. Crisp's The Paris Notebooks is a fascinating experiment in literary improvisation and storytelling, because it tells of the author's visit to Paris in 2007. It's one of the few books of its kind, because there are not many works that can be compared to this one in terms of depth and prose. It's a rewarding and irresistibly thought-provoking reading experience.

If there are readers out there who are not familiar with Quentin S. Crisp, here are a few words about him. His fiction has been published by Tartarus Press, PS Publishing, Eibonvale Press and other presses. He is the author of such works as Rule Dementia!, Shrike, Defeated Dogs, Blue on Blue and The Cutest Girl in Class (with Brendan Connell and Justin Isis).

The Paris Notebooks is an interesting book, because it's something different. Although it has been written by an author who has become known to several readers as an author of literary speculative fiction, it is not speculative fiction, but experimental literary fiction.

One might easily be fooled to think that a book that consists of diary entries would be boring or stale, but this book is excellent and deserves to be read. It's an enjoyable account of what happens to the author, what he thinks about several things and what he does in Paris. It's a deeply rewarding reading experience in many ways. When you read this book, you'll get insight into the author's life and you may be able to understand his fiction in a more profound way.

The diary entries begin at 7th May and end at 31st May. These entries form a compelling narrative structure about being in Paris and returning back to England. I found each of the entries worth reading and was fascinated by the author's way of telling about his feelings and thoughts, because the entries were fascinatingly detailed and vivid.

This book can be seen as a kind of an exploration of life, identity and self, because it covers a period of one month in the author's life. The mood, moments and emotions fluctuate in a realistic way in this book, just as they do in real life. There's a surprising amount of personal and intimate thoughts in the diary entries, because the author doesn't hold anything back, but boldly explores many things. These private thoughts make this book stand out, because some of them are satisfyingly honest and poignant. This is an essential part of the book's charm, because it sheds a bit of light on the author's life back in 2007.

The author's observations about spending time in Paris are insightful and occasionally delightfully sharp. For example, the comparison of English and French landscape is interesting and has a significant affect in evoking a distinct sense of place. What the author writes about art, people and sexuality deepens the reading experience. I enjoyed reading about what the author wrote about paintings and classical music, because his comments were honest.

What makes this book unique is that underneath all the private thoughts, philosophical elements and refined juxtaposition can be found bits and pieces of wisdom. This is one of the reasons why this book is worth reading and can be recommended to many readers.

By the way, if this book awakens an interest in you to explore Quentin S. Crisp's fiction, I say go for it. Don't hesitate to explore his fiction, because you won't regret reading his stories. All of his stories are worth reading, because they're good and well written.

If you're an openminded speculative fiction reader or if you enjoy reading literary fiction, I'm sure that this book will be of interest to you. It's something different and will charm those who are willing to step out of their comfort zones and experience something new. If you like books and stories by such authors as Joel Lane, Nina Allan, David Rix, Brendan Connell and Douglas Thompson, you owe it to yourself to read this book, because it's a charming little gem of literary fiction and experimental fiction, highlighted by the author's evocative prose.

Highly recommended!

[Kulchur Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvellous book and probably a keystone in the Crisp oeuvre. A trip to Paris affords the author the opportunity to mine the quotidian, to question the role writing has played in his life and to philosophise on his place in literature and life. A writer and an individual at odds with his culture; more at home in Japanese aesthetics than English materialism. This book is an eloquent and brutally honest, if pessimistic, reflection on his powers as a writer and his place in the world.

“Action is boring. Events, for the most part, are boring. This becomes very clear indeed when one attempts to keep a diary of any sort. Jot down the events of the day, and really, as bare facts, who would ever care or find meaning in them? What matters in life, since the fact is, we never happen upon the big event we want, that somehow places as at the centre of the universe, what matters, then, in life, is texture, atmosphere and so on. This is really all that is left to us. We must enjoy ambience, or we must go to war out of boredom – one or the other.”

“There are things still to say. Maybe I will not be able to say all of them before I gasp my last. Maybe I will not find the appropriate place to launch my attack on all that I hate in literature via a discussion of the greater availability of Japanese literature in French translation than in English translation. Ah, the brittle arrogance of the English speaking world! The loathsomeness of the Protestant work ethic underlying Anglo-American literature, the twin dominating influences of Christianity and science, both of them pushing the spirit away into some nether region of the inaccessible, both of them fostering a vile imperialism of thought.”

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope I can be useful to him by pointing out that ‘learnéd’ to indicate two Syllables should be ‘learnèd’ and Sickhert should be spelt Sickert.
Essentially, though, perhaps I am a flibbertigibbet, too, with these reviews of fiction which have both obsessed me and agonised me since 2008. “Flighty and flimsy”, not academic. Yet, part of me knows, as part of this book’s diary knows, that there is something out there useful, however much we dally on a daily basis with concepts such as suicide and uselessness.
Writing is a mop. (I say this purely because someone came into the room just now talking about a mop.)

“Just look at these blowsy great peonies sprawling on the jaundiced sides of my cup.”

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.