In the heyday of les années folles you might have discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Man Ray, Fujita, or the irrepressible Kiki at the bar, or, on the terrace. And today, Terrance, M, Martin Walker, and Tiffany Hofstetter, discussing politics, art, theatre, literature-ah well, the gamut of culture. We had just seen a a great play at the Lucernaire, on the life of the acerbic critic and author Dorothy Parker, and perhaps inspired by her ever present bottle of Jack Daniels, M and I trotted around the corner to Le Select for a drink.

In the heyday of les années folles you might have discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Man Ray, Fujita, or the irrepressible Kiki at the bar, or, on the terrace. And today, Terrance, M, Martin Walker, and Tiffany Hofstetter, discussing politics, art, theatre, literature-ah well, the gamut of culture. We had just seen a a great play at the Lucernaire, on the life of the acerbic critic and author Dorothy Parker, and perhaps inspired by her ever present bottle of Jack Daniels, M and I trotted around the corner to Le Select for a drink.

Having become a trifle bourgeois, I have been spending most of my time in Saint-Germain, and had forgotten the bohemian quality that Montparnasse seems to be reacquiring. It was a favorite of American expatriate writers, the awning proclaims AMERICAN BAR, and European painters in the 1920s.

Within moments of approaching the bar and being served Cotes du Bourg by James, our English-speaking, Sri Lankan barman, we were engaged in conversation with the beer-sipping Breton, Cedric, who turned out to be the weekend bartender at Rosebud, another local favorite.

Over the next two hours we were joined by his Italian wife and French boss, as we discussed politics, American and European, the state of the French economy, Herman Hesse, and New York in French, English, Italian, Spanish, German and even a smattering of Hebrew.

The following day I had scheduled a meeting with Tiffany Hostetter, the co-founder, co-artistic director and member of the acting company, of THE BIG FUNK  COMPANY, based at the Lucernaire. On my way to our table I waved to Gerry & Joanne Dryansky, sitting side by side à la Sartre and de Beauvoir, working on a TV script.

At 6PM Martin Walker arrived for a kir and delivery of several kilos of Perigordienne victuals for next week’s literary salon. He was en route to Dusseldorf for the launch of his new wine, Bruno.

This is the Paris I had fantasized about when I read John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse in 1974 in anticipation of my first trip to Paris, and in future weeks I will be discovering and reporting on life in this one again cool hood.

My friend John Baxter has taken up the challenge to write about Great Parisian Neighborhoods.

Volume One, Saint-Germain-des-Prés will be followed in 2017 by Montparnasse and eighteen more?

Here is an excerpt  that focuses on Le Select

Just after I arrived in Paris, a waiter young enough to be my nephew addressed me genially as "jeune homme."  On my next visit, a different serveur  took the opportunity to correct my grammar - "une  table, m'sieur" - as he waved me to a place on the terrasse.

By then,  I had begun to recognise these as Parisian habits, characteristic of an institution which, while maintaining a level of common politeness, saw it as its duty to put the newcomer straight.

Both incidents took place at the Sélect, the most authentic of the four great Montparnasse cafés, superior in almost every respect to the more venerable Cafe du Dôme and Café de la Rotonde, not to mention its contemporary , La Coupole, which it faces across Boulevard de Montparnasse.

Though it only dates from 1923, the Sélect looks older than either the Dôme, opened in 1898, or the Rotonde,  dating from 1911.  A British journalist recetly noted approvingly its "mirrored walls, and art deco lamps, grumpy waiters, and a cat asleep on the bar."  Beyond the spring-like green and cream decor of the terrasse, the interior preserves the varnished tables, bent-wood chairs and leatherette banquettes of the traditional cafe, immersed in a companionable gloom less typical of up-market Montparnasse than some Gauloise-permeated Café des Sports in the depths of the dix-neuvieme.

So why the attitude? Blame a history more colourful than any of its competitors. Back in the days when the rights of waiters were less respected, one establishment in each district was permitted to remain open 24 hours as an amenity to locals who worked unsocial hours. In Montparnasse it was the Sélect, ostensibly for the benefit of journalists, but any scribouillard  who stuck his head into 99 Boulevard de Montparnasse in hopes of a quiet supper generally pulled it back out again and went looking for somewhere less flamboyant to read France Soir  while he ate his croque monsieur  and blonde.

Only four years after opening its doors, the Sélect already had a raunchy reputation.  In 1927, the American guide book Paris With the Lid Lifted  warned that a visit was not for the faint-hearted.

"Open all night. At its best about 5am. The haven of tired 'streetwalkers' and American gluttons for more.  Gentlemen with long wavy hair and long painted fingernails and other gentleman who, when they walk, walk 'falsetto,' toss their hips and lift their brows. But interesting."  

By 1936, the clientele  had changed only marginally.   According to Simone de Beauvoir, the regulars at that time were "crop-haired Lesbians who wore ties and even monocles on occasion."  She and her companion Jean-Paul Sartre  dismissed such behaviour as "exhibitionism"  and "affected,"  hardly fair to the ladies who stopped by for a reviving cognac after a long night at the nearby Le Monocle on Boulevard Edgar Quinet, where male evening dress and eyewear were the price of admission.   

The Sélect was as welcoming to cross-dressers as to the putes  who paused to rest their feet after pounding the pavements and the petits messieurs  for whom it was a late night haven. Better them than certain Americans such as the poet Hart Crane.  The gifted author of The Bridge and At Melville's Tomb was a belligerent drunk who tended to settle his bar bill with his fists.  In June 1929, Crane's friend and publisher Harry Crosby noted in his journal, "Hart C. back from Marseilles where he slept with his thirty sailors and he began again to drink Cutty Sark." Shortly after, Crane again took on a load at the Sélect, fought waiters and the gendarmerie,  was fined 800 francs and, when he couldn't or wouldn't pay, ended up in the Santé prison.  After six days, Crosby bailed him out and shipped him back to the USA.  (On his next sea voyage, returning from Cuba, Crane jumped or was pushed to his death.)

Other regular clients included Ernest Hemingway, who came to prefer the modest Sélect to the upmarket Dôme, his favourite during his first days in Paris but since over-run with tourists.  The Sélect became his setting for some scenes in The Sun Also Rises, including an encounter with burned-out expatriate "Harvey Stone,"  a thinly disguised Harold Stearns. Once a writer of promise,  Stearns became a barfly, eking out a living as a racing tipster under the name "Peter Pickem."  

Some sources associate Picasso with the Sélect but there's no evidence that he or any other major artist spent time there.  He was more attracted to the deep-pocketed clientele of the Coupole and to the Rotonde, where the Spanish community met every afternoon for a peña or informal discussion group. The Sélect would always exted a more cordial welcome to writers. In the nineteen-fifties, it was the haunt of Americans servicemen who remained in France after the war to study under the G.I. Bill. African-American novelist James Baldwin passed some white nights in its secluded inner corners where, sustained by cigarettes and black coffee, he wrote most of his first book, Giovanni's Room. When I was writing the biography of the film-maker Luis Buñuel, who lived around the corner of Boulevard Raspail, I used , in belated tribute, to meet there with his son Juan-Luis.  No barman, said Buñuel pere, was more expert in making his preferred tipple, a potent variation on the Negroni he called the Bunueloni.*

In The Cafés of Paris, Christine Graf pays the Sélect the rarest of all compliments ."Unlike some of its larger neighbours," she writes, "Le Sélect retains its historic appeal. This is a café which still has life to it."  On its terrasse,  we may still feel that we are, as Sisley Huddleston wrote in the nineteen-twenties,  at "the crossways of the world," part of "a horizontal Tower of Babel where there is no language that is not spoken:  that stretch of sidewalk between the Gare Montparnasse and the Boulevard Saint-Michel, around which live and move, and have their sometimes riotous being, representatives of every country, and members of every school of artistic expression."

* Bunueloni .

   1.5 oz. gin

   1 oz. Carpano Antica Formula vermouth

   1 oz. Cinzano Rosso sweet vermouth  

Stir and pour over ice in a highball glass. Garnish with an orange slice.