Paris was Yesterday, 1925-1939

This is the third (but earliest chronologically) collected volume of Janet Flanner's pieces which appeared in The New Yorker when it was still a "minnow learning to swim" under the byline Genet. There is a seductive backward look -- in the form of an introduction -- at the time when she was "new there [and] Paris was yesterday." In all, the columns (as they appear here edited by Irving Drutman) seem less concerned with political figures and events than they will become, during this period which ends with that "commonplace war, since it is simply a fight for liberty." But there are art and theater and music and dance and book notes of all kinds: Rousseau, the Sunday painter, will touch shoulders with Brillat-Savarin or Chanel; obituaries will appear sometimes in the form of mixed tributes to Lawrence or Mme. Curie or Signac or Ravel -- even the passing of the old Flea Market; then there are singular current events -- the Stavisky scandal or a fantastically gruesome murder of a mother (a tooth pegged into her scalp) by her two daughters at Le Mans. There are longer and particularly fine pieces on Isadora Duncan again occasioned by her latterday appearance -- "Her spirit was still green as a bay tree but her flesh was worn" -- and Edith Wharton from beginning to expatriated end -- a "taffeta sofa under a gaslit chandelier." Lovely occasional reading for any occasion.