Noël Riley Fitch – 1937 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I met Noël on a lovely Parisian June afternoon in 2002 at a reception in her honor and we actually had a brief conversation in which geographical connections were discovered. Here’s the entry from my journal. “Went over to the Abbey Bookshop, but was a little early, so I went for a walk along St. Michel. When I returned to the bookstore, there were a number of people already there. Turns out that Noël Riley Fitch had led a walk on Île St. Louis in the morning and this is where they finished – just in time for Noël to be here for her reception….sign the three books of hers that I had….she has roots in Massachusetts. She and her husband live in LA (Brentwood) from January to April – she teaches at USC and then they spend the summer in Paris where Noel teaches an expatriate literary course at the American University. Her husband writes and edits books on food and wine. And there was wine, cheese and crackers (and water) for the reception. The owner of the bookstore, Brian, gave a little background talk about the street on which the Abbey Bookshop is located and then he introduced Noël Riley Fitch. She talked about the books she has written and told some Paris-related literary stories. After her talk, I hung around and talked to some of the people….There was a violinist playing at the end of the street….having the violinist come over to the bookstore and play. Such a pleasant afternoon – Literature, food and wine, music and meeting new people.” – personal journal, Sunday 23 June 2002. In my copy of her book, Literary Cafes of Paris, that she graciously signed, Noël wrote: “For Adrean With best wishes and happy drinking Noël Riley Fitch 23 June 2002 Paris.”

Dedication in Literary Cafes of Paris

“Dedicated to Gailyn Fitch, café sitter par excellence”

Excerpt from the Café de Flore entry in Literary Cafes of Paris

“’This afternoon I’m upstairs at the Flore, near the window; I can see the wet street, the plane tree swaying in the sharp wind; there are a lot of people, and downstairs there’s a great hubbub.’ So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s, on one of the many days that she worked at a table at the Flore. She wrote portions of her journal, Second Sex and novels such as The Mandarins in this venerable neighborhood café. Flore was founded in 1865 and named for a small statue of Flore, the goddess of flowers and mother of spring, that once stood in front of the door.

The café is homey, with its worn Art Deco interior of red banquettes, mahogany and mirrors. Outside it is characterized by cream-colored awnings with green and gold letters and by its location on the corner of two busy streets: the little Rue St-Benoit is crowded with foot traffic in the evenings when the restaurants are full; on the wide boulevard, the Flore sits between an excellent postcard shop and a distinguished bookstore, La Hune, next to the Deux-Magots.

Beginning with Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont in the late 19th century, nearly every French writer has spent time at the Flore. Yet the Flore has been identified with several distinct groups at different times, and each one has in turn determined the personality of the café. One of the first significant groups to make the Flore home was the political Right. L’Action Française wrote its first manifestos here in 1899 (they were printed nearby in Rue Cassette). The leader of L’Action Française was Charles Maurras, who lived at 60 Rue de Verneuil. He called his political memoirs Souvenirs de vie politique: Au signe de Flore.

In the first decade of this century, Apollinaire and his friends funded Les Soirees de Paris magazine here. The group that dominated the Flore environment in the following decade included Léon-Paul Fargue, André Breton and his Surrealist colleagues, and Picasso. After he moved to live in his studio nearby in Rue des Grands-Augustins. Picasso patronized first the Deux-Magots. He moved to the Flore in the late 1930s, where he engaged in lengthy political discussions joined occasionally by Marc Chagall. At the end of an evening the two exiled artists would exchange the matchbooks on which each had doodled. Janet Flanner says she saw Picasso there every night after 1945, sitting at the second table in front of the main door, sipping a small bottle of mineral water and speaking with his Spanish friends.”


Yesterday’s writer – Anne Fine
Tomorrow’s writer – Fannie Flagg

Source: Fitch, Noël Riley. Literary Cafes of Paris. Starrhill Press, 1989. ISBN 0-913515-42-6. Dedication: page 4, Excerpt: pages 23-24

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris
Center: Noël Riley Fitch from the website noëlrileyfitch.com
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris