Melville House Books

“We are so used to standing at the white cliffs (or at the port of New York) and waving to English-speaking writers as they set off for France to sign up for the avant garde — Joyce, Hemingway, Pound, HD, Beckett, and after the second world war, Baldwin, Wright and others — that we are apt to overlook the traffic coming the other way,” writes James Campbell in this Guardian story. But in fact, lots of French writers went to London, not for literary fame but for love. It may have started with Apollinaire, who in 1904 went to London “in a last attempt to win the love of a young Englishwoman named Annie Playden,” about whom he subsequently wrote some lovely poems (and a letter to a friend citing her “great tits”). Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stephane Mallaremé went there, too. Says Campbell, “It was the city of fog, industry and repression, but for French poets in the last century the capital held an abiding romantic allure.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.