That Summer in Paris [Paperback]

Morley Callaghan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1986 | ISBN-10: 0771592701 | ISBN-13: 978-0771592706

It was the fabulous summer of 1929 when the literary capital of North America moved to La Rive Gauche—the Left Bank of the Seine River—in Paris. Ernest Hemingway was reading proofs of A Farewell to Arms, and a few blocks away F. Scott Fitzgerald was struggling with Tender Is the Night. As his first published book rose to fame in New York, Morley Callaghan arrived in Paris to share the felicities of literary life, not just with his two friends, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but also with fellow writers James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Robert McAlmon. Amidst these tangled relations, some friendships flourished while others failed. This tragic and unforgettable story comes to vivid life in Callaghan's lucid, compassionate prose.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If there is a better story writer in the world we don't know where he is."  —The New York Times

"His unobtrusive art is more subtle and his intelligence more mature than those of either [Hemingway or Fitzgerald]. Callaghan's book will surprise and shock the Hemingway fans."  —Edmund Wilson

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Morley Callaghan is the author of It's Never Over, The New Yorker Stories, Strange Fugitive, Such Is My Beloved, and The Vow. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Canadian Governor General's Award for Fiction. He died in 1990.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 255 pages
• Publisher: Macmillan of Canada (November 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0771592701
• ISBN-13: 978-0771592706
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,937,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The last summer that Paris was Paris, June 30, 2009

By 

C. Ebeling "ctlpareader" (PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: That Summer in Paris (Exile Classics series) (Paperback)

Canadian writer Morley Callaghan was a 20-year-old student who had talked his way onto the reporting staff of the Toronto Star when a star war correspondent named Ernest Hemingway came on board. Hemingway knew another writer by instinct and took the younger man under his wing, continuing to advise and advocate for him after decamping to Paris. Thanks to Hemingway's letters of introduction, Callaghan had begun publishing and lusting after the utopian writers' community he envisioned the Paris of the Lost Generation to be. Finally, in the spring of 1929, he and his bride Loretto took off for France where things were slightly different than expected. Thirty years later, a photographer who had recently met Hemingway in Idaho relayed that Hemingway had recalled Callaghan rather fondly, especially a boxing match they had, with Fitzgerald as timekeeper. The message casually relayed by the photographer unleashed powerful memories of that pivotal summer and the result is this book.

Callaghan looked forward to the camaraderie of Hemingway, Joyce, Fitzgerald and the others. He was eager to talk literature, debate one another's work in a like-minded group and draw creative energy from its air. Instead, Hemingway seemed to value their friendship most when the short, fat Callaghan was expertly challenging him in the boxing ring. Hemingway was avoiding the café culture and especially an old friend, Fitzgerald. Callaghan ended up meeting Fitzgerald, Joyce and Hemingway's first publisher, Robert McAlmon, on his own. He and his wife enjoyed the lifestyle all the same but sensed change in the air. As someone observed, the Lost Generation was no longer lost. It had found an anchor in Paris and grown quickly into so many famous names. American tourists were traveling to Paris to gawk at them. Zelda Fitzgerald was on the psychotic edge; Hemingway had left one marriage for another.

That Summer in Paris reads like a well-constructed novel. The boxing match Hemingway would remember thirty years later becomes the climax, after which everyone begins moving on. Callaghan muses on the irony of how quickly the players would change: the stock market crash took away the world of which Fitzgerald wrote with authority, Hemingway and others who had never been particularly political would become involved in political causes and New York would take over as the intellectual center that Paris had been. This is an interesting account not only of the end of the Lost Generation in Paris but a meditation on the role of community in a writer's life and one man's opinion of his peers and what art is and is not. This does not compete with A Moveable Feast; it is a valuable first-hand account by an insider of the end of the era Hemingway's memoir more fully chronicles.

A note about this edition: There is no critical introduction but someone clobbered together book club discussion questions, some of which are okay and some of which reveal certain biases behind them.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Timing is everything, May 23, 2000

By 

Owen Hughes (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: That Summer in Paris (Paperback)

They say that timing is everything and the fact that this particular writer just happened to be sitting on the Boulevard Montparnasse on the right evening of the right year, means we have a further insight into the lives of those Paris expatriates, Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others. At the same time, this may be an opportunity for some people to discover Morley Callaghan, who is a very fine writer in his own right. His life ran parallel to Hemingway's for some time, as they met in Toronto and later in Paris and remained friends thereafter, even if they saw each other only rarely. In a sense, he is just the person to give us a penetrating look behind the legends that were being created in the cafés and bars of the ville lumière at the end of the thirties. This is a delightful book as well; Callaghan is nobody's fool, which means he's not writing for the mundane reasons that might otherwise be expected, and you can trust him. He is painting a portrait of a world teetering on the very brink (it is the summer of 1929), and in his own artful way, he has succeeded in giving us a rare glimpse into the ill-lit streets and nightclubs just before it all fades away into the decade of hopelessness that followed. It's well worth finding this book if you can - it's a little gem.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars *the* must-read literary memoir of Paris in the 1920s, December 20, 2003

By 

A. C. Walter "awalter" (Lynnwood, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: That Summer in Paris (Mass Market Paperback)

Canadian writer Morley Callaghan (1903-1990) published 16 novels and more than 100 works of short fiction, and he was one of the first Canadian authors to make his living solely from his craft. Callaghan believed in capturing the bare truth and honest emotional content of people's lives, so his prose shuns stylistic busyness. Edmund Wilson called him "the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world," and Maxwell Perkins called him the world's best short story writer.

THAT SUMMER IN PARIS, as a memoir of Paris in the 20s, is every bit as engaging a book, if more limited in scope, as Hemingway's A MOVEABLE FEAST. The book begins with Callaghan's inspiring story of meeting Hemingway while working on the same paper in Toronto--at the time Callaghan was in his early 20s (still in college), and Hemingway was a couple years older. Hemingway had temporarily left Paris and was in town working for the paper to provide his wife Hadley with the benefits of Toronto hospitals during childbirth. Hemingway quickly became a sort of literary patron for Callaghan and, when he returned to Europe, took Callaghan's short stories with him and passed them around Paris. Fitzgerald became enthusiastic about Callaghan's work and also began championing him with Paris and New York publishers. After Callaghan published 2 books of fiction (in no small part due to the help of his "Paris friends"), Callaghan finally made his own visit, with his wife, to Paris in 1929. The anecdotes he recounts are simply marvelous, and I can't recommend the book highly enough. Boxing matches with Hemingway, Fitzgerald's drunken histrionics, a strange evening with Joyce and a phonograph... it's priceless stuff.