Early 1920s

Early 1920s names the period in which the memoir places a writer’s life in Paris and abroad, and gives a temporal frame to scenes of work, walking, and material constraint. The period emerges through ordinary details rather than a calendar: rain darkening the streets, fishermen working the Seine, and a story taking shape in a café notebook.

The period and its frame

The phrase is used retrospectively to describe an American writer who lived for a time in Paris and abroad. The memoir’s scenes make that broad label tangible through the daily conditions of a working life: the narrator moves through the city on foot, weighs small expenses against uncertain future needs, and returns repeatedly to the effort of writing. The evidence does not assign a precise date to each scene, so the period is best understood as a frame for these experiences rather than a claim that every episode occurred in the same year.

Winter, lodging, and limited means

Winter brings a sudden change in the city’s appearance and mood. The high white houses disappear into the view as the streets turn wet and black; small shops close, and the narrator’s room is in the top floor of a hotel where Verlaine had died. The room is reached by six or eight flights of stairs and is cold. Even making a fire requires a calculation: a bundle of twigs, three wire-wrapped packets of short split pine to catch, and then half-dried hardwood to sustain the heat.

The narrator looks across the street at the roof to see whether any chimneys are smoking. With none in view, the possibility that the chimney might fail to draw becomes a practical risk: the room could fill with smoke, the fuel be wasted, and the money spent for nothing. Rather than take that chance, the narrator walks on through the rain. This small decision makes poverty concrete not as a general condition but as a series of choices in which warmth, money, and uncertainty are tightly connected.

Walking, watching, and the river

Walking is also a way to think. After work, or when trying to resolve a problem, the narrator follows the quais and watches people doing work they understand. Below the Pont Neuf, at the point of the Île de la Cité, a small park beneath chestnut trees gives access to fishing places along the Seine. The productive spots shift with the river’s height; fishermen use long jointed cane poles, fine leaders, light tackle, quill floats, and carefully placed bait. Their catches include Goujon, which are fried whole and eaten bones and all.

The narrator knows several fishermen working the river between the Île Saint-Louis and Place du Verte Galente. On a bright day, a liter of wine, bread, and sausage can accompany a book bought on a small budget, while the narrator sits in the sun and watches them fish. This is not simply picturesque diversion: the memoir insists that the fishing is serious and productive, contrary to travel writers who portray the men as foolish or unsuccessful. Many are pensioners, or workers fishing on days or half-days off; their pensions, the narrator observes, would later lose their value through inflation.

The narrator does not fish. Lacking tackle, the narrator prefers to save money for fishing in Spain, and cannot know when work will end or when departure will be necessary. Fishing, with its own periods of abundance and slackness, would require a commitment that this unsettled life cannot accommodate. Still, watching the fishermen brings pleasure: they make a modest living from the river and take a few fish home to their families. The scene places the narrator among the city’s observers, close to its routines but not free of financial limits.

Work and the making of a story

The same combination of movement and restraint shapes the writing scenes. After leaving a café, the narrator crosses the rue de Rennes specifically to avoid stopping for coffee at Deux-Magots, then takes a route home by way of the rue Bonaparte, Guynemer, the rue d’Assas, and the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs before reaching Closerie des Lilas. The walk carries a practical question: what does the narrator know best, and care about most, that has not already been written and lost?

At Closerie des Lilas, the narrator sits in a corner with afternoon light over one shoulder and writes in a notebook. A waiter brings a café crème; the narrator drinks half when it cools, leaving the rest on the table while writing. The story concerns a return from war, yet makes no mention of the war. Its central image is a river pool, where the surface presses smoothly against the resistance of the bridge’s log-driven piles. The narrator does not want to leave that imagined place, but the work also has a next step: in the morning, the river, the country, and what happens there must be made on the page.

Money from Germany means there is no immediate financial crisis, though that assurance is temporary: when it is gone, other money will have to arrive. For now, the narrator’s task is to remain sound and ready to begin again the next morning. Across these scenes, the early 1920s takes shape as a time when writing depends on a close attention to ordinary life—its routes, costs, weather, work, and intervals of observation—and on the repeated return to the page.