LM281 Left Bank Lit: Being Geniuses Together, by Robert McAlmon

Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together is one of the most candid insider accounts of the expatriate world that flourished in 1920s Paris. McAlmon—writer, publisher, and close friend to Hemingway, Joyce, Stein, and Pound—spent a decade at the center of the Left Bank’s literary ferment. Originally published in 1938 and later expanded by Kay Boyle, the book blends memoir, sketches, and portraits of the extraordinary constellation of artists who defined the modernist era. McAlmon’s voice is wry, weary, and unsentimental; he strips away the mythic glow surrounding the “Lost Generation,” revealing instead a community of ambitious, restless, and often self-destructive creators. His accounts of evenings at cafés, of failed manuscripts and fragile friendships, convey both the freedom and the futility that shadowed those years. Where Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast celebrates the memory of Paris and Barnes’s Nightwood transforms it into dream, McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together records it as lived experience—vivid, cynical, and unvarnished. The result is a rare, firsthand chronicle of a moment when the boundaries between art and life blurred in the smoky rooms and long nights of the Left Bank.

Note: This book is mildly challenging to find. It is not available in Kindle, or from Amazon.fr. 

Two spaces are reserved for new WICE members. If no new WICE members have registered before 21 March, those two spaces will become available to the general WICE membership.

The book group meets in the downstairs of the Impact Café.

Registration for the March meeting opens on Sunday, 01 March.