Samuel Putnam (1892–1950)

Putnam's 1929 biography of Francois Rabelais is very substantial, although it lacks a scholarly apparatus. It begins--delightfully--with an autobiographical essay. That a writer should explore his own motives in studying another writer is a very responsible, and in this case, enjoyable thing. After the autobiography comes a prefatory "cosmology": really a sort of historical anthropology, to provide the reader with a mise en scene for a period--the Renaissance--that has often been distorted show more through polemic.

The professed goal is a volume which, "while making use of all the aids and props of scholarship, should yet transcend erudition and attain a creative view" of the life of Rabelais (15). Putnam's prose is assertive and sometimes droll. He was writing at the same time as Mencken and Cabell, and he chides the latter for misreading eroticism into the Theleme of Rabelais, when Cabell was actually addressing the Thelema of Crowley (390-1).

While he declines the "freethinker" Rabelais of Professor Lefranc, Putnam is hardly aligned with conventional religion. He (all too correctly) calls the Reformation "that revolt which was to produce the ugliest form of civilization that the world has known" (60). His discussion of the tensions between Humanism and Protestantism is threaded through the book, and really helps to clarify Rabelais' situation.

The book doesn't describe the writing life of Rabelais until its final third, and at that point the chapters become progressively shorter, and the pace quickens. The Fifth Book is barely mentioned; his later legacy is a matter of two closing pages. Man of the Renaissance is trained on Rabelais' "first life" as a writer, not the "second life" that he has been given posthumously by readers. Putnam's treatment is the fullest and best biographical approach to Rabelais I have read so far. show less

Literary and artistic Paris in the 1920s and 30s has developed into an interest for me. It's interesting to see how the same basic cast of characters changes with each telling of the same, but also not quite the same story. For the most part, the story was told by those (mostly American, with the exception of Jimmy the Barman who was a Brit) who made up the expat society -- those of the Dome and the other terraces in Montparnasse. A few, such as Sylvia Beach and Gertrude Stein, who did not show more frequent the bars also have told important stories. But there are only a few expats who actually spoke French and mixed with the French writers and artists. Sylvia Beach was one, and I have yet to read her memoir. Elliot Paul was another and his book, The Last Time I Saw Paris is probably the most charming of all the books I've read so far in that he doesn't talk at all about the other writers and expats, but just about the people who inhabited the small neighborhood where he lived. Kay Boyle, who, together with Robert McAlmon, describe their experience in the Paris of those years, spoke French, was married to a Frenchman, and had a very different experience of Paris than the rest of the expats who she eventually joined. Her account is also more interesting (and more personal) than most.

Here we have Samuel Putnam, who also spoke French (among several other languages), mixed with the French, and once again had a different take on that era. He was a literary critic, a journalist, a writer, an editor, and a translator. His friendships were broader than most of the other expats and thus his stories have more variety. In addition to the usual cast of characters such as Ford Madox Ford, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrud Stein, Ezra Pound and Harry Crosby, he knew and tells us about Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso, and Marc Chagall. But his best story of all is about Luigi Pirandello, an Italian writer I never heard of but whose story I found very moving.

Putnam was a literary critic and a fair amount of what he writes about has to do with literary criticism. Those parts didn't interest me, mainly because I didn't really understand what he was saying. But for me, the rest -- the stories and anecdotes -- more than made up for that. show less

3396 Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of A Lost & Found Generation, by Samuel Putnam (read 27 Jan 2001) The author was part of the expatriate scene in Paris and Europe from about 1927 to 1934, and much of what he discusses in this book, insofar as it dealt with art, was of little interest to me. His account of writers--Hemingway, Pound, Henry Miller, Joyce, Pirandello, etc.--was of more interest, and his conclusion--kind of an appreciation of U.S. when he came back--was good to read.