Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank

by James Campbell

Exiled in Paris provides a compelling look at the personalities who fueled the literary and philosophical dramas of postwar James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, Boris Vian, Maurice Girodias, and many others. James Campbell provides a fresh look at Samuel Beckett's early career; reveals the facts behind the publication of the scandalous best-seller The Story of O; and tells the poignant story of Richard Wright's years in exile. He captures the sense of deliverance that Wright, so accustomed to daily humiliations in his own country, experienced during his sojourn on the Left Bank, where, for the first time in his life, he was treated as a great man of letters. Here, too, are all the circumstances surrounding Wright's mysterious death, which many close to him regarded as suspicious.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, France, Poetry, Philosophy

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

James Campbell is a Scottish writer. He left school at the age of fifteen to become an apprentice printer. After hitchhiking through Europe, Israel and North Africa, he studied to gain acceptance to the University of Edinburgh (1974–78). On graduating, he immediately became editor of the New Edinburgh Review (1978–82). His first book, Invisible Country: A Journey Through Scotland, was published in 1984. Two years later, Campbell published Gate Fever, “based on a year’s acquaintance with the prisoners and staff of Lewes Prison’s C Wing”.

Campbell's other books include Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991, 2021), Paris Interzone (1994), Just Go Down to the Road: A Memoir of Trouble and Travel (2022). He worked for many years at the Times Literary Supplement and wrote the column 'J.C.' A collection of these appeared as NB by J.C.: A Walk Through the Times Literary Supplement in 2023.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d like to begin this review - of this very readable and factual book, which is also about beginnings (the early years that some fantastically famous Americans spent in France) - with a little choice vignette from it, about one of my great faves, Samuel Beckett.

The point is unwittingly trenchant in its own skewed way- the first English review of one of Samuel Beckett's works, the great novel Molloy, by one Jared Shlaes in the Paris journal Points in 1951:

"Beckett is a saint, but he is not yet a very great saint.

"He may come to be one if enough people begin to write and talk about his books… he has everything it takes to make a saint - except publicity." (Page 45)

The last two words twist the knife of good old Left Bank irony.

Had young Jared only known!

But he got his wish.

And if you must know, I think Beckett WAS a bit of a saint - maybe even cast in the same mold as that much-maligned REAL saint, Simeon Stylites (am I spelling that right)?

For he was THE Twentieth Century’s proudest Champion of the Underdog.

This and other, warmer, reviews did the trick of propelling Beckett into literary sainthood - like it or not! He soon became impeccably irreproachable in the world’s eyes.

He was Jean-Paul Sartre’s favourite author (probably because he couldn’t tear him to critical ribbons, as his prose is too mean, lean and perfectly lived).

For when a writer of unimpeachable genius, like Beckett, Joyce or Flaubert, sees the world in all its fallen former glory - and then publicly makes their intended plan of moral action against it plain in writing - they’re in for a real tightening of critical screws, at first, until they become saints.

Such is the price of acute sensitivity and awareness.

Literary martyrdom.

Sure, they all had the refuge of irony, unlike the acknowledged saints of the church. But their pain was every bit as real, and as vivid, as theirs.

For eternal peace must always come at a price. And the price all saints pay is to be plunged into the fire of the world‘s ferocious folly.

And the mocking ascent of that folly into the judge’s bench in the Fifties Courtroom of the Absurd was to suddenly make guilty victims out of the writers assembled here. Hence their greatness.

And the fire wasn’t finished with them till it had made them into golden idols - late or soon.

Isn’t that the same with so many talented voices nowadays whose genius breaks into blossom just at that moment the world kicks them hardest?

For it’s then that their very words are inscribed in fire, and their truth becomes unbearable to the hoi polloi, who spit them out undigested.

So as a whole, the book is by and large quite a good look at fifties’ Americans in Paris, but not worth paying a princely price for - as it’s no longer in print.

I was lucky - my wife got it for a song at Value Village!

These are the Lost Years of some great writers, and so important in their future development. They will be especially intriguing to their fans.

It is a very decently written book, with its wealth of detail on some lesser lights among 1950’s émigrés who later had their time of fame, and a valuable one for research students.

It is especially good, though, if you want to know more about Baldwin’s and Wright’s fallow years, when they were charging their batteries for the uphill battle that faced them when they got back to the States!

And for the “sudden shafts of sunlight” with which it illuminates these true greats, I rate it as quite Good.

[Creolecat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Robert Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I am not much of a non-fiction reader as of late, books about writers, especially expatriot writers, always make for fun reading. I found the synthesis of lives and ideas in the book to be worthwhile, the narrative well structured and the subject matter more than engaging. The myriad circles orbitting through Paris cafes makes modern life seem dull, while the thought of new genres emerging from the garbled mess of our society today almost impossible. "There is nothing new under the sun", Ecclesiastes exhorts, but we have to remind ourselves that there is always another horizon, another chapter.

While life in Paris from the Lost Generation to the Beat Generation seems so wonderful, we have to be careful lest we fall into the pit of nostalgia, unable to pull our thoughts out of the past. Exiled in Paris made me long for something as great, if not greater, for myself and those people around me, and gave me a sense of surity, I suppose, that there are always newer and newer things over the horizon and that we just have to keep on marching towards it.

Having read a good deal of James Baldwin's essays and fiction, it was good to find more writers, if not of the same calibre, then certainly worth reading in context. Alexander Trocchi and the Olympia Press gang make me feel a sense of duty to continue the pursuit of literature and the rebellion against society. Alas, so much we take for granted today were the taboos and social "ills" of yesterday. What is left? What is there to rail at, but I answer my own question: everything/

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came upon this book while researching Boris Vian. It's a great history of Post-War Paris, which was a magnet for a lot of Black American writers such as the great James Baldwin, Wright, and Chester Himes among others.

[Steven Spector · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of my favorites living in Paris all around the same time! I understand that the TV pilot based on this book didn't sell because it would have required too intelligent an audience.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the subtitle, the "stars" of this book are less Baldwin and Beckett than Trocchi and Girodias, the editors and publishers who transformed the world of books and the literary journals by publishing the timeless and the scatological alike. Girodias was a pornographer who was lucky or forward-thinking enough to bring out some amazing literature alongside it (and trying to figure out where the pornography ends and the literature begins is a task for abler minds than me). Wright comes across as an almost pathetic figure, one who wrote little of consequence in exile and whose relationship with the US became even more complicated. Baldwin perhaps burns the brightest, along with Chester Himes (I admit I had not heard of him). I don't know that the work provided great insight into the emigre community after WWII, which was at least as diffuse and multifaceted as the Lost Generation, but it did provide impressive insight into the changes to the literary scene. The book is not about Sartre but he haunts it, and what I still struggle with is his conclusion that the logical outcome of the world that brought us the camps and the conflagration was to destroy everything. Sartre was a communist but plenty of his intellectual peers would have ranked Stalinism alongside Hitlerism in deeming them the dead end of civilization, and America and the Coca-Colonization as a sham successor, but the spiritual outcome of the destruction of Western Civ's shibboleths has been not vigor and dynamism but emptiness, apathy, and nihilism. In that I see the fundamental flaw as the determination that Stalinism, Hitlerism, and even the worst of the America of the time - violent, virulent racism - represented the apotheosis/nadir of Western Civ rather than hideous derogation from it.

[Anne Green · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful commentary on the post World War II literary scene in Paris including a fresh look at some of the iconic personalities of that time, in particular the black writers - James Baldwin, Richard Wright and stories behind the publication of scandalous (or considered to be so at the time) books like "The Story of O", Henry Miller's series of novels, works by Alexander Trocchi, "Lolita", the pornographic books commissioned by Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press (known as "DB's" - dirty books), and the beat generation - Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs and so on. Fascinating to
see how the first inroads against the strict literary censorship laws were forged.

[David Partikian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Left Bank of Paris has hosted literary ex-patriots throughout the 20th century. Writers with vastly disparate backgrounds and artistic philosophies congregated together in different decades that resemble each other as marginally as the writers who lived there. Scotsman James Campbell attempts to make sense of this farrago of literary talent, weaving a tale of literary ex-Patriots who found a home in the Left Bank during the 1950’s.

The Black American ex-patriot writers, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes, were all attempting to find a home free from government surveillance and with less prejudice than the USA. They are the center point of much of Campbell’s narration. While Wright isn’t read so much today, he was among the first Black writers to seek refuge in Paris, and his tale along with his tutelage of other black American writers, even if they fall out later, is worthy of mention. James Baldwin, from today’s vantage point, is the most famous of this trio. A reader looking for in depth information on Baldwin’s years abroad should look elsewhere, especially since he wasn’t always based in Paris and since he kept a distance from the other writers. Chester Himes, the least known of the three, is perhaps the most interesting and under-rated, with one stone cold classic to his name, his debut novel If He Hollers Let Him Go. Unfortunately, Exiled in Paris is not rife with Himes anecdotes, and it is difficult to find materials on him elsewhere; his biography is long out of print. I--for one--wish that Campbell had concentrated on Himes more.

In addition to the theme of Black ex-patriots, there are chapters on the journal Merlin and the Olympia Press, especially with dissolute Scotsman Alexander Trocchi as editor and anonymous writer of pornography. The Olympia Press serves as a bridge between pre-World War II writers like Henry Miller and later Beat writers like William Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch debuted with Olympia Press; most of these writers churned out literature that was considered obscene, erotic, and—sometimes--scatological. Somehow in this mix, the Olympia Press managed to include a couple of books by Samuel Beckett in its catalogue, the masterful Molloy and, the unreadable and awful Watt. Interspersed with these literary offerings is a plethora of erotic literature mostly written under pseudonyms. Perhaps even Beckett was involved, as his opening passage in Molloy alludes to lines being written quickly and anonymously for money: “There’s a man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money.” (Molloy, pg. 6, Grove Press edition). While Campbell does not delve into what makes literature pornographic and obscene to the French authorities (that subject has been more than covered elsewhere), he does make a compelling case for the Olympia Press being the central hub for ex-patriot writers attempting to break through the stifling mores of bourgeois society. Although the writers were not paid well, the Olympia Press served as a steppingstone for some huge careers including Nabokov (Lolita was first published by the Olympia Press), J.P. Donleavy, Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller and William Burroughs. And this is precisely where the book is most fascinating. While a straight biography of any of these writers can bog a reader down in obscure minutia, Campbell’s account revolves more around the press and the different scenes, most being funded by illicit erotic literary offerings, so we learn less about Beckett, but more about how he was viewed at the Olympia Press.

For a reader looking for a serious in depth look at the Black American ex-patriot writers in the 50’s, Exiled in Paris is a good place to start. But those looking for specific details should look elsewhere in works that solely concentrate on the Black authors abroad in Paris. For those looking to understand the writers whose worked ended up at the Olympia Press and why, Exiled in Paris is a wonderful account that manages to be erudite without being soporific. Exiled in Paris is a relatively quick read that wonderfully evokes an era and leaves a curious reader with plenty of options to delve further into the life of any writer mentioned in the book.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting studies of the various authors.