WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS:
Sex and Love in the City of Light

By John Baxter
Review by Jeffrey Greene author of French Spirits

If you live in the center of Paris, you quickly become accustomed to seeing half the summer street population puzzling with the folds of maps or consulting the same guides, the kind of sightseeing that obviates any chance of experiencing what lurks in most tourists’ imaginations: how did Paris become the city of “sex and love”? We hardly suffer a shortage of Paris memoirs, or Paris novels for that matter; still, it’s not surprising that there is a craving for them, a desire to live vicariously in a city where devotion to beauty, sensuality, and liberal mindedness is not just a cult but a way of life that is alien to most of us. The appeal of memoir is that the speaker is both a central character and an intimate guide, and in We’ll Always Have Paris we have the personal story of charming, funny, and mischievous (even caustic) John Baxter, who comes to us via his numerous film related biographies and his passion for book collecting as recorded in his enormously entertaining account, A Pound of Paper.

Baxter doesn’t hide his contempt for the sensual and intellectual deprivation he experienced growing up in Australia, a country he decided was moving backward in evolution. At the same time, he invokes a vision of Europe through the 20s and mid-30s that he knowingly idealizes as the pinnacle of “glamour,” Paris being central to his youthful fantasies. Baxter becomes a broadcaster and film critic in London and Australia, and later moves to Los Angeles to work in the film industry’s capital. He enters a lively affair with a lovely Frenchwoman, Marie Dominique, a radio journalist, but their relationship doesn’t survive the demands of their careers. Remarkably, however, years later, the love is re-ignited after Baxter’s divorce, and he suddenly finds himself displaced from glitzy L.A. to what seems at first a gloomy Paris where he is jobless, friendless, and incapable of speaking the language. To his dismay at age 50, he is faced with reinventing himself. The book traces his deepening love for his wife and her luminous city while fathering a daughter later in life.

Baxter’s personal love story serves as a humorous and moving pretext for a clever investigation into the extraordinary sexual psyche of Paris, its humane freedoms that led to some of our last century’s greatest films, theater, artwork, songs, and literature. Baxter offers a window onto nightclub and open brothel life epitomized by Le Chabanais, Le 122, and Le Sphinx, and he provides a seemingly endless wealth of anecdotes on the notorious behavior of celebrities. He explores the world of lesbianism exemplified by Stein, Toklas, and Sylivia Beach and takes us into Hemingway’s cafés, central to the mystique of expat writers that still haunts Paris. We are given intriguing profiles of legendary women such as Maryat Rollet-Andriane (the real Emanuelle) and Catherine Millet of the Confessions of Catherine M. Throughout the book, Baxter uses his background as film critic and book collector to link Paris to a pervasive erotic imagination and show that pornography and eroticism were not just tolerated in France but even officially promoted. Baxter maintains that there is “a traditional separation in French culture of public and private lives,” so that indulging one’s erotic desires, however wild, rarely result in the social or political self-immolation that we witness regularly in other societies.

In many ways, We’ll Always Have Paris is a celebration of Baxter’s astonishing good fortune. He resides in the building that housed Sylvia Beach, owner of the original Shakespeare and Company and her companion Adrienne Monnier, owner of the French language bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres Amis, enjoys a summer home in Charente, and creates a loving family while joining a formidable French aristocratic one. He lives in the city of his youthful fantasies, swirling with surrealism; art deco; and the poets, writers, and artist he so thoroughly admires. The book operates on at least two levels: one cataloging French cultural and erotic delights and the other providing a kind of disguised guidance to Paris tourists, the blunders of whom he can’t resist satirizing. Appreciating the sensuality of Paris takes as much careful attention and playful imagination as falling in love.

Order We'll Always Have Paris for $30.00!