An Editor’s Burial

A scintillating collection of inspirations for Wes Anderson's star-studded tenth film The French Dispatch--fascinating essays on the expatriate experience in Paris by some of the twentieth century's finest writers.

A glimpse of post-war France through the eyes and words of 14 (mostly) expatriate journalists including Mavis Gallant, James Baldwin, A.J. Liebling, S.N. Behrman, Luc Sante, Joseph Mitchell, and Lillian Ross; plus, portraits of their editors William Shawn and New Yorker founder Harold Ross. Together: they invented modern magazine journalism. Includes an introductory interview by Susan Morrison with Anderson about transforming fact into a fiction and the creation of his homage to these exceptional reporters.Contents
 
 
The Pilot Light                                                                      7
A conversation between Wes Anderson and Susan Morrison
The Years with Ross                                                         25
JAMES THURBER
Here at The New Yorker                                                 42
BRENDAN GILL
The Other Paris                                                                  54
LUC  SANTE
Thirty-two Rats from Casablanca                                81
JOSEPH MITCHELL
Mr. Hulot                                                                           103
LILLIAN  ROSS
Remembering Mr. Shawn                                             107
VED  MEHTA
The Days of Duveen                                                         129
S.M.  BEHRMAN
Art Talker                                                                          166
CALVIN  TOMKINS The Events in May: A Paris Notebook Part I               170
MAVIS  GALLANT
Dearest Edith                                                                   229
JANET  FLANNER
Equal in Paris                                                                239
JAMES BALDWIN
Memoirs of a Feeder in France: A Good Appetite      261
A.J.  LIEBLING
Memoirs of a Feeder in France: Just Enough Money 285
A.J.  LIEBLING
Wolcott Gibbs                                                                   307
e.b. white
Harold Ross: A Recollection                                         310
S.M.  BEHRMAN
H.W. Ross                                                                         318
e.b. white
Letters from The New Yorker Archives             323
Acknowledgments                                                      351Wes Anderson's films include Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, Fantastic Mr Fox, Isle of Dogs and Moonrise Kingdom. The French Dispatch will be released on October 22, 2021Art Talker
Calvin Tomkins
1977
A fiery redhead with the speed of light, a cloud of
blue chiffon, and a hearty “This lecture is about a very
good-looking man with rather thin legs who was born just under
five hundred years ago and had ideas about hospitality which
most of us would find it hard to put into practice”—who but
Rosamond Bernier, talking about François I of France, on a
recent Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
We are not alone in thinking Mme. Bernier the most stylish art
talker around. A recent lecture series in the Met’s Grace Rainey
Rogers Auditorium was sold out two months in advance. Her
invigoratingly literate television interviews with Philip Johnson,
the architect, on CBS-TV’s “Camera Three” made the three
Sunday mornings when they were shown astonishingly bearable
for a much larger audience. Could we catch up with this
scintillating creature (who has been married since 1975 to John
Russell, the Times’s equally scintillating art critic) and importune
her with a few questions? We could and we did.
“Imagine being paid to talk!” Mme. Bernier said to us over
lunch in a midtown French restaurant the other day. “I’ve been a
listener all my professional life, and here I am talking everybody’s
head off.” Mme. Bernier’s lecturing self, it seems, rose quite
recently from the ashes of her former, publishing-and-writing
self. After twenty-odd very busy years in Paris, where she and
her ex-husband, Georges Bernier, founded the magazine L’OEil
in 1955 and made it into one of the century’s best art journals,
she was, as she put it, left “absolutely flat” when, in 1969, she
lost both Bernier and L’OEil through divorce. “All at once, I
had nothing to do,” she said. “I just cried all day.” Friends did
what they could to cheer her up, but nothing really helped
until Michael Mahoney, an art historian, persuaded her to
give fourteen lectures on modern art to his students at Trinity
College in Hartford in the fall of 1970. “I was terrified at the
start, but it worked,” she said. “I’m probably the only person
you know who hasn’t been psychoanalyzed. Those lectures
literally saved my life.”
Mme. Bernier, who was born in Philadelphia but grew up
mostly in London, approached her subject from the point of
view of an active participant. Having arrived in Paris in 1946
as European feature editor for the American Vogue, she followed
her natural bent toward art by becoming a close friend
of virtually all the important European artists of the period.
Picasso took to her because she spoke fluent Spanish as well as
French, and she was the first to see and report on his postwar
paintings. Matisse saw to it that she wrote the first article on
the chapel he was designing in Vence. Miró, Braque, Max
Ernst, and many other artists gave her exclusive interviews and
became lifelong Bernier-philes, and from 1955 on they all took
a personal interest in the development of L’OEil. In her lectures
at Trinity, she was careful to avoid the “famous-men-who-havebreathed-
on-me” sort of gossip, but her close connection with
the Paris art scene, her memory for the telling detail, and her
own infectious delight in recapturing the atmosphere of the
period made for a wonderfully vivid presentation.
The Hartford success led to an invitation from Rice University,
in Houston, where she spent a month in 1971 as a guest of John
and Dominique de Menil. “Roberto Rossellini was staying with
them, too, and we became great friends,” she told us. “What a
talker! He would sit down at the breakfast table and say, ‘Pascal
n’avait pas raison,’ or something similar, and we’d be off on that
for an hour.” The Metropolitan Museum heard about her Rice
lectures and signed her up for the fall of 1971, and she has
been in demand ever since, from places as far apart as Paris
(where she has lectured at the Grand Palais on the painters of
the School of Paris) and Yakima, Washington (where she spoke
last spring on contemporary French painting).
As one could gather from her Metropolitan lectures on “Four
Royal Collectors” (François I, Charles I, Queen Christina of
Sweden, and Catherine the Great), Mme. Bernier does not
limit herself to modern art. L’OEil’s slogan was “Tous les arts,
tous les pays, tous les temps,” and Mme. Bernier, who draws upon
her years with the magazine for most of her lecture ideas and
much of her material, now has more than thirty lectures in her
quiver. But whether she is discussing the French Renaissance
under François I, the Paris of Paul Poiret, or the effect on art of
writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Proust,
she manages to bring to her subject what sounds like firsthand
knowledge. “I’m not a scholar or an art historian,” she told us.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve never gone to lectures—once, I went
to hear Erwin Panofsky, but that’s about it. I’ve always loved
books and magazines, and playing around with images, and to
me making a lecture is just like making a book. I started projecting
two slides simultaneously, side by side, because that’s like
having an open book with facing pages. And I love making the
juxtapositions between images, tying things together, without
a lot of big blocks of talk. That keeps things moving, and it
keeps people amused. I think it’s important to be amused,
don’t you? I must say, after one of my early lectures at the Met
I overheard one woman in the audience say to another, ‘Well,
she’s obviously slept with Léger. I wonder what she’ll have to
say next week about Braque.’ Actually, I never slept with any
of them, worse luck. But I’m enjoying it all very much. In fact,
I’ve recently had two of the biggest thrills of my life. The first
was dancing the Charleston and the Black Bottom with Merce
Cunningham, at the Whitney Museum dinner for Sandy Calder.
Merce Cunningham! And later John Cage told me that Merce
had said he enjoyed it. The second was flying across the country
for a lecture, getting off the plane, and seeing a huge sign in
red lights that read ‘Welcome to Yakima Rosamond Bernier.’”Inspirations for The French Dispatch, an American Empirical Picture by Wes Anderson