Bloomsbury. 211pp, £9.99 in UK
Paris, Ernest Hemingway famously remarked, is a moveable feast. This nicely poetic if imprecise formulation gave him the title for one of his last books - like Elvis Presley, old Hem kept miraculously producing new works long, long after his death - a melancholy, frequently moving and wholly spiteful memoir of his early days in what Walter Benjamin called the Capital of the 19th Century. Paris in the 1920s and 30s is the gilded legend that everyone knows. The names themselves evoke a louche, caporal-and-absinthe atmosphere: Hemingway himself, and Scott and Zelda; all the Surrealists; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; the "irrespressible" and probably tooth-achingly irritating Kiki of Montparnasse, as she styled herself; even Josephine Baker, if you pronounce it the French way. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and young, and possessed of even a smidgin of talent.
In those days Paris was cheap, and a dollar went a very long way indeed. The city was beautiful, and so were many of the people in it, native and foreign. It was also remarkably tolerant of immigrants, no matter what the colour of their skin. And to add seriousness to the endless play, a genuinely original art movement was coming to full, molten maturity; even if Modernism did not turn out to be quite the revolution it seemed, well, neither did 1789. Much that was experimental at the time, in life as well as in art, turned out to be a dead end, but what fun everyone had on the way up that cul-de-sac.
It would be easy, now, to be cool about Paris. It has as many problems as any other of the world's great cities, and a few that are just its own. Racism is rife, though these days it is the Arabs rather than the Jews who are the target of the far right's fury. The statistics for AIDS are frighteningly high, mainly because the French, even the homosexual French, for years tried to deny the threat posed by the disease. The city has lost its pre-eminent position among art capitals, the real action having moved to New York and even, God help us, London.
Nor is Paris the flawless architectural jewel it once with some justice could claim to be; though a very great deal of Baron Haussmann's glorious cityscape remains intact, its new Opera House is a monstrosity - apparently Mitterrand picked the wrong architect by mistake - there is a giant glass pyramid plonked down in the Louvre's back yard, and, to cap it all, one of the world's ugliest skyscrapers towers over the venerable quarter of Montparnasse, standing on the very spot where in the old days many of the greatest artists of the 20th century had their studios and cheap lodgings. And as for the Centre Pompidou . . . one recalls that it was under the wise and cultured rule of the man for whom the Centre was named that the Tour Montparnasse was erected. What is the French for say no more?
In The Flaneur, the first volume of what we are promised will be an occasional Bloomsbury series, "The Writer and the City", Edmund White chooses as one of his epigraphs a sharp if ambiguous quote from the poet John Asbery: "Having lived in Paris unfits you for living anywhere, including Paris". White himself, fit or not, succeeded in living there from the early 1980s until he moved back to America a couple of years ago. One has the sense that from the time when he escaped from his native Midwest White was headed for Paris, whether he knew it or not. He is a natural flaneur, a stroller through life's more cosmopolitan streets, fixing on trifles, savouring the sounds and smells of the city, and always, of course, eyeing the boys. The flaneur, says White, echoing Walter Benjamin, "is in search of experience, not knowledge", and experience remains for him "somehow pure, useless, raw". Uncertainty, indecision, aimlessness, these are the true traits of the flaneur; as Benjamin has it, "Just as waiting seems to be the true state of the motionless contemplative, so doubt seems to be that of the flaneur".
Contrasting Paris with the more rustic Rome, White observes that "Parisians are the ones who wander their own city". After all, the whole city, "at least intra muros, can be walked from one end to the other in a single evening".
Perhaps its superficial uniformity - the broad avenues, the endlessly repeating benches and lamps stamped from the identical mould, the unvarying metal grates ringing the bases of the trees - promotes the dreamlike insubstantiality of Paris . . .
As a writer White is acutely conscious of, and intensely grateful for, the rich conflict of sensations and emotions that Paris provokes in the resident foreigner. There is Baudelairean decadence - the author of Les Fleurs du mal was the flaneur par excellence - and Rimbaudian spleen and Proustian nostalgie; there is, above all, melancholy, unfocused and sweet.
Imagine dying and being grateful you'd gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That's something like living in Paris for years, even decades. It's a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.
In Paris, the visitor cannot resist the suspicion that "maybe the French have got it right, that they have located the juste milieu . . . Why then does the sadness persist?" White has no answer, but he does propose a temporary cure. Leave the "matronly, pearl-grey Paris" built by Haussmann for Napoleon III, the city of "foreign millionaires, five-star hotels, three-star restaurants and embassies", and venture instead into the outlying quartiers such as Belleville and Barbes, where the "marginal" people live.
Despite a few glitches, Baron Haussmann's concept of a uniform Paris laid out along the most imperial lines has triumphed - a Paris that is efficient, clean, modern and always impressive. But in the cracks are those little forgotten places that appeal to the flaneur, the traces left by people living in the margins - Jews, blacks, gays, Arabs . . .
AS a homosexual, Edmund White is a connoisseur of "little forgotten places". The Spartacus International Gay Guide, he tells us, has some 36 closely printed pages devoted to Paris, listing bars, clubs, and even cruising places. When he lived on the Ile St Louis his own favourite spot for casual pick-ups was a little park at the end of the island where the lights of the bateaux mouches going past on the river would turn the trysting place momentarily into a stage set. Such are the transient and melancholy joys of the gay life.
The Flaneur is a very good and beautifully written short study of Paris, one that every prospective visitor, and indeed, every old Paris hand, should have in his or her suitcase. There is an absorbing chapter on the Marais, the old Jewish quarter on the Right Bank which has suddenly, and unfortunately, become tres chic, though it still retains much of its former strangeness and charm. White writes wonderfully too on the "countless small and bizarre museums" tucked away in hidden corners of the city, such as the one devoted entirely to the paintings of Delacroix on the intimate and inexplicably mysterious Place Furstemberg, surely one of the most beautiful city squares in the world, and quintessential of Edmund White's Paris, which is not only the grande cite of pale stone and unbroken facades, but also of lace curtains in the concierge's window, the flow of cleansing water in the gutters sandbagged to go in one direction or the other, the street fairs with rides for kids, the open-air food markets two days out of every week, segregated into different stalls under low awnings: this one loaded down with spices, that one with jellies and preserved fruits, not to mention the stands of the patissier and the baker, florist, butcher, fishmonger, the counter selling hot sausage and choucroute - or two hundred kinds of cheese.
Ah, la vie en rose . . .
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times