March 13, 1983

My Paris

By SAUL BELLOW

hanges in Paris? Like all European capitals, the city has of course undergone certain changes, the most conspicuous being the appearance of herds of tall buildings beyond the ancient gates. Old districts like Passy, peculiarly gripping in their dinginess, are almost unrecognizable today with their new apartment houses and office buildings, most of which would suit a Mediterranean port better than Paris. It's no easy thing to impose color on the dogged northern gray, the native Parisian grisaille, flinty, foggy, dripping and for most of the year devoid of any brightness. The gloom will have its way with these new immeubles, too, you may be sure of that. When Verlaine wrote that the rain fell into his heart as it did upon the city (referring to almost any city in the region) he wasn't exaggerating a bit. As a onetime resident of Paris (I arrived in 1948), I can testify to that. New urban architecture will find itself ultimately powerless against the grisaille. Parisian gloom is not simply climatic, it is a spiritual force that acts not only on building materials, on walls and rooftops but also on your character, your opinions and judgments. It is a powerful astringent.

But the changes - I wandered about Paris not very long ago to see how 30-odd years had altered the place. The new skyscraper on the Boulevard du Montparnasse is almost an accident, something that had strayed away from Chicago and come to rest on a Parisian street corner. In my old haunts between the Boulevard de Montparnasse and the Seine, what is most immediately noticeable is the disappearance of certain cheap conveniences. High rents have done for the family bistros that once served delicious, inexpensive lunches. A certain decrepit loveliness is giving way to unattractive, overpriced, overdecorated newness. Dense traffic - the small streets make you think of Yeats's ''mackerel-crowded seas'' - requires an alertness incompatible with absent-minded rambling. Dusty old shops in which you might lose yourself for a few hours are scrubbed up now and sell pocket computers and high-fidelity equipment. Stationers who once carried notebooks with excellent paper now offer a flimsy product that lets the ink through. Very disappointing. Cabinet makers and other small artisans once common are hard to find.

My neighbor the emballeur on the Rue de Verneuil disappeared long ago. This cheerful specialist wore a smock and beret, and as he worked in an unheated shop his big face was stung raw. He kept a cold butt-end in the corner of his mouth -one seldom sees the megots in this new era of prosperity. A pet three-legged hare, slender in profile, fat in the hindquarters, stirred lopsidedly among the crates. But there is no more demand for hand-hammered crates. Progress has eliminated all such simple trades. It has replaced them with boutiques that sell costume jewelry, embroidered linens or goosedown bedding. In each block there are three or four antiquaires. Who would have thought that Europe contained so much old junk. Or that, the servant class having disappeared, hearts nostalgic for the bourgeois epoch would hunt so eagerly for Empire breakfronts, Recamier sofas and curule chairs.

Inspecting the Boulevards I find curious survivors. On the Boulevard St. Germain, the dealer in books of military history and memorabilia who was there 35 years ago is still going strong. Evidently there is a permanent market for leather sets that chronicle the ancient wars. (If you haven't seen the crowds at the Invalides and the huge, gleaming tomb of Napoleon; if you underestimate the power of glory, you don't know what France is.) Near the Rue des Saints Peres, the pastry shop of Camille Hallu, Aine, is gone, together with numerous small bookshops, but the dealer in esoteric literature on the next block has kept up with the military history man down the street, as has the umbrella merchant nearby. Her stock is richer than ever, sheaves of umbrellas and canes with parakeet heads and barking dogs in silver. Thanks to tourists, the small hotels thrive - as do the electric Parisian cockroaches who live in them, a swifter and darker breed than their American cousins. There are more winos than in austere postwar days, when you seldom saw clochards drinking in doorways.

The ancient gray and yellow walls of Paris have the strength needed to ride out the shock-waves of the present century. Invisible electronic forces pierce them but the substantial gloom of courtyards and kitchens is preserved. Boulevard shop windows, however, show that life is different and that Parisians feel needs they never felt before. In 1949 I struck a deal with my landlady on the Rue Vaneau: I installed a gas hot-water heater in the kitchen in exchange for two months' rent. It gave her great joy to play with the faucet and set off bursts of gorgeous flame. Neighbors came in to congratulate her. Paris was then in what Mumford called the Paleotechnic age. It has caught up now with advancing technology, and French shops display the latest in beautiful kitchens -counters and tables of glowing synthetic alabaster, artistic in form, the last word in technics.

Once every week during the nasty winter of 1950 I used to meet my friend, the painter Jesse Reichek, in a cafe on the Rue du Bac. As we drank cocoa and played casino, regressing shamelessly to childhood, he would lecture me on Giedion's ''Mechanization Takes Command'' and on the Bauhaus. Shuffling the cards I felt that I was simultaneously going backward and forward. We little thought in 1950 that by 1983 so many modern kitchen shops would be open for business in Paris, that the curmudgeonly French would fall in love so passionately with sinks, refrigerators and microwave ovens. I suppose that the disappearance of the bonne a tout faire is behind this transformation. The post-bourgeois era began when the maid of all work found better work to do. Hence all these son et lumiere kitchens and the velvety pulsations of invisible ventilators.

I suppose that this is what ''Modern'' means in Paris now. It meant something different at the beginning of the century. It was this other something that so many of us came looking for in 1947. Until 1939 Paris was the center of a great international culture, open to Spaniards, Russians, Italians, Rumanians, Americans, to the Picassos, Diaghilevs, Modiglianis, Brancusis and Pounds at the glowing core of the modernist art movement. It remained to be seen whether the fall of Paris in 1940 had only interrupted this creativity. Would it resume when the defeated Nazis had gone back to Germany? There were those who suspected that the thriving international center had been declining during the '30's, and some believed that it was gone for good.

I was among those who came to investigate, part of the first wave. The blasts of war had no sooner ended than thousands of Americans packed their bags to go abroad. Among these eager travellers, poets, painters and philosophers were vastly outnumbered by the restless young, students of art history, cathedral lovers, refugees from the South and the Midwest, ex-soldiers on the G.I. Bill, sentimental pilgrims, as well as by people, no less imaginative, with schemes for getting rich. A young man I had known in Minnesota came over to open a caramel-corn factory in Florence. Adventurers, blackmarketeers, smugglers, would-be bon vivants, bargain hunters, bubbleheads - tens of thousands crossed on old troopships seeking business opportunities, or sexual opportunities, or just for the hell of it. Damaged London was severely depressed, full of bomb holes and fire weed, whereas Paris was unhurt and about to resume its glorious artistic and intellectual life.

The Guggenheim Foundation had given me a fellowship and I was prepared to take part in the great revival when and if it began. Like the rest of the American contingent I had brought my illusions with me but I like to think that I was also skeptical (perhaps the most tenacious of my illusions). I was not going to sit at the feet of Gertrude Stein. I had no notions about the Ritz Bar. I would not be boxing with Ezra Pound, as Hemingway had done, nor writing in bistros while waiters brought oysters and wine. Hemingway the writer I admired without limits, Hemingway the figure was to my mind the quintessential tourist, the one who believed that he alone was the American whom Europeans took to their hearts as one of their own. In simple truth, the Jazz Age Paris of American legend had no charms for me, and I had my reservations also about the Paris of Henry James - bear in mind the unnatural squawking of East Side Jews as James described it in ''The American Scene.'' You wouldn't expect a relative of those barbarous East Siders to be drawn to the world of Mme. de Vionnet, which had in any case vanished long ago.

Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument. That, friends, is real wisdom. I was concertizing and practicing scales at the same time. I thought I understood why I had come to Paris. Writers like Sherwood Anderson and, oddly enough, John Cowper Powys had made clear to me what was lacking in American life. ''American men are tragic without knowing why they are tragic,'' wrote Powys in his ''Autobiography.'' ''They are tragic by reason of the desolate thinness and forlorn narrowness of their sensual mystical contacts. Mysticism and Sensuality are the things that most of all redeem life.'' Powys, mind you, was an admirer of American democracy. I would have had no use for him otherwise. I believed that only the English-speaking democracies had real politics. In politics continental Europe was infantile and horrifying. What America lacked, for all its political stability, was the capacity to enjoy intellectual pleasures as though they were sensual pleasures. This was what Europe offered, or was said to offer.

There was, however, another part of me that remained unconvinced by this formulation, denied that Europe-as-advertised still existed and was still capable of gratifying the American longing for the rich and the rare. True writers from St. Paul, St. Louis and Oak Park, Ill., had gone to Europe to write their American books, the best work of the 1920's. Corporate, industrial America could not give them what they needed. In Paris they were free to be fully American. It was from abroad that they sent imaginative rays homeward. But was it the European imaginative reason that had released and stirred them? Was it Modern Paris itself or a new universal Modernity working in all countries, an international culture, of which Paris was, or had been, the center? I knew what Powys meant by his imaginative redemption from desolate thinness and forlorn narrowness experienced by Americans, whether or not they were conscious of it. At least I thought I did. But I was aware also of a seldom mentioned force visible in Europe itself to anyone who had eyes - the force of a nihilism that had destroyed most of its cities and millions of lives in a war of six long years. I could not easily accept the plausible sets: America, thinning of the life-impulses; Europe, the cultivation of the subtler senses still valued, still going on. Indeed a great European prewar literature had told us what nihilism was, had warned us what to expect. Celine had spelled it out quite plainly in his ''Voyage to the End of the Night.'' His Paris was still there, more there than the Sainte Chapelle or the Louvre. Proletarian Paris, middle-class Paris, not to mention intellectual Paris which was trying to fill nihilistic emptiness with Marxist doctrine - all transmitted the same message.

Still I had perfectly legitimate reasons for being here. Arthur Koestler ribbed me one day when he met me in the street with my 5-year-old son. He said: ''Ah? You're married? You have a kid? And you've come to Paris?'' To be Modern, you see, meant to be detached from tradition, traditional sentiments, from national politics and, of course, from the family. But it was not in order to be Modern that I was living on the Rue de Verneuil. My aim was to be free from measures devised and applied by others. I could not agree to begin with any definition. I would be ready for definition when I was ready for an obituary. I had already decided not to let American business society make my life for me, and it was easy for me to shrug off Mr. Koestler's joke. Besides, Paris was not my dwelling place, it was only a stopover. There was no dwelling place.

One of my American friends, a confirmed Francophile, made speeches to me about The City of Man, the City of Light. I took his rhetoric at a considerable discount. I was not, nowever, devoid of sentiment. To say it in French, I was ''aux anges'' in Paris wandering about, sitting in cafes, walking beside green, medicinal-smelling Seine. I can think of visitors who were not greatly impressed by the City of Man. Horace Walpole complained of the stink of its little streets in the 18th century. For Rousseau it was the center of amour propre, the most warping of civilized vices. Dostoyevsky loathed it because it was the capital of Western bourgeois vainglory. Americans, however, loved the place. I, too, with characteristic reservations, fell for it. True, I spent lots of time in Paris thinking about Chicago, but I discovered, and the discovery was a very odd one, that in Chicago I had for many years been absorbed in thoughts of Paris. I was a longtime reader of Balzac and of Zola, and knew the city of Pere Goriot, the Paris at which Rastignac had shaken his fist, swearing to fight it to the finish, the Paris of Zola's drunkards and prostitutes, of Baudelaire's beggars and the children of the poor whose pets were sewer rats. The Parisian pages of Rilke's ''Malte Laurids Brigge'' had taken hold of my imagination in the '30's, as had the Paris of Proust, especially those dense, gorgeous and painful passages of ''Time Regained'' describing the city as it was in 1915 - the German night bombardments, Mme. Verdurin reading of battlefields in the morning paper as she sips her coffee. Curious how the place had moved in on me. It was not at all a Francophile, not at all the unfinished American prepared to submit myself to the great city in the hope that it would round me out or complete me. In my generation the children of immigrants became Americans. An effort was required. One made oneself, freestyle. To become a Frenchman on top of that would have required a second effort. Was I being invited to turn myself into a Frenchman? Well, no, but it seemed to me that I would not be fully accepted in France unless I had done everything possible to become French. And that was not for me. I was already an American, and I was also a Jew. I had an American outlook, superadded to a Jewish consciousness. France would have to take me as I was.

From Parisian Jews I learned what life had been like under the Nazis, about the roundups and deportations in which French officials had cooperated. I read Celine's ''Les Beaux Draps,'' a collection of crazy, murderous harangues, seething with Jew-hatred.

A sullen, grumbling, drizzling city still remembered the humiliations of occupation. Dark bread, pain de seigle, was rationed. Coal was scarce. None of this inspired American-in-Paris fantasies of gaiety and good times in the Ritz Bar or the Closerie des Lilas. More appropriate now was Baudelaire's Parisian sky weighing the city down like a heavy pot lid, or the Paris of the Communard petroleurs who had set the Tuileries afire and blown out the fortress walls. I saw a barricade going up across the Champs Elysees one morning, but there was no fighting. The violence of the embittered French was for the most part internal.

No, I wasn't devoid of sentiments but the sentiments were sober. But why did Paris affect me so deeply? Why did this imperial, ceremonious, ornamental mass of structures weaken my American refusal to be impressed, my Jewish skepticism and reticence; why was I such a sucker for its tones of gray, the patchy bark of its sycamores and its bitter-medicine river under the ancient bridges? The place was, naturally, indifferent to me, a peculiar alien from Chicago. Why did it take hold of my emotions?

For the soul of a civilized, or even partly civilized, man Paris was one of the permanent settings, a theater, if you like where the greatest problems of existence might be represented. What future, if any, was there for this theater? It could not tell you what to represent. Could anyone in the 20th-century make use of these unusual opportunities? Americans of my generation crossed the Atlantic to size up the challenge, to look upon this human, warm, noble, beautiful and also proud, morbid, cynical and treacherous setting.

Paris inspires young Americans with no such longings and challenges now. The present generation of students if it reads Diderot, Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust does not bring to its reading the desires born of a conviction that American lifeimpulses are thin. We do not look beyond America. It absorbs us completely. No one is stirred to the bowels by Europe of the ancient parapets. A huge force has lost its power over the imagination. This force began to weaken in the '50's and by the '60's it was entirely gone.

Young M.B.A.s, Management School graduates, gene-splicers or computerists, their careers well started will fly to Paris with their wives to shop on the Rue de Rivoli and dine at the Tour d'Argent. Not greatly different are the Behavioral Scientists and members of the learned professions who are well satisfied with what they learned of the Old World while they were getting their B.A.'s. A bit of Marx, of Freud, of Max Weber, an incorrect recollection of Andre Gide and his Gratuitous Act, and they had had as much of Europe as any educated American needed.

And I suppose that we can do without the drama of Old Europe. Europeans themselves, in considerable numbers, got tired of it some decades ago and turned from art to politics or abstract intellectual games. Foreigners no longer came to Paris to recover their humanity in modern forms of the marvelous. There was nothing marvelous about the Marxism of Sartre and his followers. Postwar French philosophy, adapted from the German, was less than enchanting. Paris, which had been a center, still looked like a center and could not bring itself to concede that it was a center no longer. Stubborn de Gaulle, assisted by Malraux, issued his fiats to a world that badly wanted to agree with him, but when the old man died there was nothing left - nothing but old monuments, old graces. Marxism, Eurocommunism, Existentialism, Structuralism, Deconstructionism could not restore the potency of French civilization. Sorry about that. A great change, a great loss of ground. The Giacomettis and the Stravinskys, the Brancusis no longer come. No international art center draws the young to Paris. Arriving instead are terrorists. For them, French revolutionary traditions degenerated into confused leftism and a government that courts the Third World make Paris a first-class place to plant bombs and to hold press conferences.

The world's disorders are bound to leave their mark on Paris. Cynosures bruise easily. And why has Paris for centuries now attracted so much notice? Quite simply, because it is the heavenly city of secularists. ''Wie Gott in Frankreich'' was the expression used by the Jews of Eastern Europe to describe perfect happiness. I puzzled over this simile for many years, and I think I can interpret it now. God would be perfectly happy in France because he would not be troubled by prayers, observances, blessings and demands for the interpretation of difficult dietary questions. Surrounded by unbelievers He too could relax toward evening, just as thousands of Parisians do at their favorite cafes. There are few things more pleasant, more civilized than a tranquil terrasse at dusk.

THE LEFT BANK The Left Bank of Paris, between the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Seine, has more than its share of offbeat little shops, restaurants and wine bars. Patricia Wells, the Paris-based restaurant critic for the International Herald Tribune, has some suggestions: LODGING WITH A DIFFERENCE

There are dozens of small hotels that range from spartan to homey, but one, recently redone with great panache, stands out like a peacock among doves. L'Hotel (telephone: 325-27-22), 13 Rue des Beaux Arts, is an elegant, 25-room establishment with fabric-covered walls, fresh flowers everywhere and a talking parrot in the dining room. Each room offers a different, well-chosen decor: among the options are the room Oscar Wilde died in (his often quoted remark, ''Either this wallpaper goes, or I do,'' is probably apochryphal) or the one once occupied by Mistinguett, the Paris music-hall star. Room rates range from $71 for a single to $257 for a suite; breakfast is $6.50 extra. SNACKS AND MORE

Le Sauvignon (548-49-02), 80 Rue des Saints Peres, is is perhaps Paris's smallest and best known wine bar. A great place to stop for a quick lunch -a nibble of crottin de Chavignol goat cheese, say, with fresh Poilane bread - and a little glass of fresh white Sancerre, all of which should cost no more than $3 or $4 a person. (Closed Saturday and all of August.)

La Sologne (705-98-66), 8 Rue de Bellechase, is one of hundreds of very personal family-run restaurants, here specializing in game and fresh fish. Among the best dishes are a spinach salad with marinated duck breast and any of the simpler fish preparations. About $30 a person buys a meal with wine. (Closed Saturday, Sunday and all of August.)

The Restaurant de la Tour d'Argent (354-23-31) 15 Quai de la Tournelle, is as much a monument as Notre Dame, which it overlooks. Diners come for the theatricality of the setting and appointments, for the famous pressed duck and for one of the best wine cellars in existence. Reserve two weeks in advance, and expect to pay $55 or more a person for dinner, depending on the wines selected. (Closed Monday.) CURIOSITY SHOPS

Madeleine Gely, 218 Boulevard Saint Germain, offers everything from everyday rain umbrellas to frilly silk parasols in every color under the sun. There are umbrellas old and new, with handles of ebony, bamboo, wood sheathed with lizard or wood carved in the shape of a duck's or dog's head. There are even tiny umbrellas for dolls or infants, as well as a collection of more than 400 new and antique canes.

Pierre Petitot, 234 Boulevard Saint Germain, is an elegant, serious-looking shop devoted to military history, including books on the history of arms and uniforms, as well as famous battles. The windows are filled with attractive posters on military themes, which are also for sale.

Deyrolle, 46 Rue du Bac, is a dim, warehouse-like shop devoted to maps, shells, and taxidermy. Even if you don't need a elephant stuffed this week, you can spend hours browsing among the oddities.

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