Wright among the “G-Men”: How the FBI Framed Paris Noir

Abstract

If histories of African Americans in Paris cohere into a full-blown literary genre, that genre is a modernist arraignment of racial antiquity, a movable feast exposing the past-frozen provincialism of American apartheid. And if that genre mandates a mise-en-scène, it is the Parisian café-turned-ecumenical black church, the quarter refuge crossed with the diasporan contact zone. In Tyler Stovall’s exemplary book Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (1996), the affective architecture of the café locates and symbolizes the freedom enjoyed by the colony of black Americans who settled the Left Bank after World War II. Assimilating the everyday life of their French hosts more gamely than the earlier postwar generation of Gertrude Stein and her Imagist pupils, these second-wave expatriates went native to choose carefully among terraces and proprietors, settling on the Tournon outside the Luxembourg Gardens and the Monaco on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, not coincidentally the same street on which pioneer emigre Richard Wright discovered his most comfortable Paris apartment. Once dug in, the literary wing of black Paris employed its favored cafés as both workplaces and social clubs, tending sequentially to coffee, page counts, alcohol, serious conversation, and sexual pursuit. In this double occupation of café space, African American writers proved their receptiveness to several strains and moments of Parisian café culture: they paid their respects to the proletarian “people’s parliaments” of the nineteenth century, busy intersections of “the worlds of work and leisure” (Haine 3), even as they cemented their ties to the postoccupation existentialist network of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, so identified with punctual writing hours and romantic assignations at the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots that the latter advertised itself in Parisian papers as the “[r]endez-vous de l’élite intellectuelle” (qtd. in Campbell, Exiled 85).