Paris Journal.
Inscribed By America’s Premiere Expatriate Columnist
[Flanner, Janet]. Genêt. Paris Journal 1944-1965. Edited by William Shawn. New York: Atheneum, 1965.
8vo.; blue cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; beige dust-jacket; worn, lightly chipped at edges.
First edition of Flanner’s best known collection of expatriate dispatches, all of which first ran in The New Yorker.
A presentation copy, with a cryptic double inscription by Flanner, written in two different pens, offering a summation of the role of the writer in society: To darling Eyre, with love & memories—as she says—Jan; and: from the eternal refreshment—May 5 1978—To Eyre again and again—in painting you paint what you know is there not what you see—It is a good thing to be a writer. You report on a new world—every moment of it. In 1968 the young threw stones, tomorrow is difficult for you to locate—nothing is better because someone helps—No one can do better than you—by yourself—All of us feminists or some feminists.
This volume begins with Flanner’s descriptions of a fallen Paris, circa 1944, and follows the rise of modern France under de Gaulle. An independent woman and a lifelong feminist—as revealed touchingly by her inscription—Flanner was intimate with some of the most significant creative women of her time, many of whom she introduced to the public in her column. Her role in the rise of feminist modernism has yet to be thoroughly investigated.
Flanner inscribed this copy twice to Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux, the American writer, illustrator and modernist furniture designer. After marrying the French writer and diplomat Pierre de Lanux, Eyre (as she became known) moved with him to Paris. There she studied with Brancusi, and developed her career as a writer, illustrator and designer. Quite possibly it was in Paris that Flanner first encountered Eyre, who was covering the art scene for Town & Country. Eyre’s obituary in The New York Times noted that she and her husband “moved in literary and art circles with André Gide, Hemingway, Matisse, Picasso and Bernard Berenson.” After her husband’s death Eyre returned to the States in the ‘60s, writing for The New Yorker—where her career most definitely intersected with Flanner’s—and Harper’s Bazaar. In later years she continued to work as an interior designer and illustrator; she died in September of 1996, aged 103.
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