[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]
Once you’re in Paris, you will probably end up living in a tiny studio to keep expenses down. You can certainly survive in a small studio, just as millions of artists have done from time immemorial. But there is a catch. The smallness of your studio will definitely grate on you. Cheap rooms and the things that come with them—the alienation, the bad dreams, the roaches, the dingy walls, the ratty furniture, the unbroken silence—addle the brain over time. One afternoon you’ll find yourself daydreaming about wide verandas. Then, rather more dangerously, you’ll think about proposing marriage to the next person you meet who has a real apartment.
I once lived in a room that was also being used by the building’s owner as a storeroom. That shoebox contained seven wardrobes, three drop-leaf tables, two standing mirrors, and a mattress on the floor that you fell onto as you entered. Its only saving grace was a small table by the window where I could breathe and smoke Camels. To preserve my mental health, I developed a ritual entrance, a ceremonial dive onto the mattress when I entered. That ritual dive—going with the absurdity of the situation, rather than against it—made all the difference. Humor helps.
In another apartment, the oversized bathtub in the bathroom proved more accommodating than the adjoining room. I therefore used the bathtub for living. Sometimes I did the dishes there, sometimes I read—avec or sans water—sometimes I wrote, sometimes I entertained. Put two pillows and a candle in a bathtub, and you guarantee memories. The room I can hardly remember; but, oh, the bathtub. Make use of your room’s best feature, which may be its balcony or its writing niche. If it has no good features, pretend that it does. Pretending helps.
I asked some writers in Paris what they did when their cramped quarters started to addle them. Some went out, day or night, and walked until exhausted. Others used the café down the block as their living room. Some called friends back home and left their room via the telephone. Others gave in to the feeling and cried until the mood passed. Most used Paris like an extension of their living quarters, the Village Voice bookshop becoming their personal library, the Tuileries their personal garden.
That’s the best answer: Stay out all day. Use Paris. Write out, rather than in. Find a home café, or several. Find a bookstore with comfortable seating. Make some friends. Go back to your room only when you find it absolutely necessary; which, if you strike it lucky, may not be for days on end. Use your room as you would a bathroom—as a necessary convenience, as better than outdoor plumbing or nights under a bridge. In the winter, when the rains come, this will prove more difficult. Then you’ll need extra candles, extra chocolate, and music with a beat.
Prepare for the onslaught of strangeness by pledging to remain passionate and ambitious no matter how cramped your room begins to feel. Your very ambitiousness can inoculate you and save you. Georges Rouault, filling his studio with one unfinished painting after another, cried to his loving daughter, “How am I ever to manage?” She replied, sensibly enough, “Why not try to finish three or four of them?” But small rooms do not make for small agendas. “No!” he replied. “I will finish 133 of them!” Even if your room is shrinking daily, your ambition can buoy you.
Another antidote is making friends with people who live in real apartments. I visited some expats on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and their apartment was American-size, with room after spacious room-one even sporting huge beanbag chairs. When you sat down at the kitchen table, your back was not directly up against the wall. Make at least one such friend, and drop in whenever your walls close in on you.
Small rooms are not death sentences. We have all written in them, and most of us have survived them. Solitary confinement can turn a warrior to jelly, but out of those small rooms have come the melodies that enrich lives, the paintings that break traditions, the novels that bear witness. We tolerate those threadbare rooms and maybe even revere them, their real dangers notwithstanding. We make sacrifices for our art. If a too-small room in Paris is the greatest sacrifice you ever have to make, thank your lucky stars.
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