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nicholas_i.
kristina_otmenoThroughout the 'twenties in Paris, life in the large colony of "ex-patriates", from England, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and other countries, was a continuous round of excitement, working up to a crescendo of gaiety which had reached its climax at the moment of the Wall Street collapse. Those who took part in it, if only for brief intervals, must agree with Stella Bowen that there will never again be anything like it in our lifetime. The cheapness of the franc made anyone possessed of "hard" currency much richer than he would have been at home, while in France, unlike Britain and the United States, the pleasures and amenities of life have always been available to people of all classes, including those existing on the lowest income levels.
It was of course, a period of uninhibited freedom degenerating often into license. Too much drink, too much sex, too much of everything except high spirits, gaiety, and creative excitement. From the point of view of the human community, of, shall we say, "civilisation" it has to be judged by what it produced in the way of literature and art. From this standpoint the prolonged Partisan "kermese" must, I think, be held to have justified itself. It provided liberation, compensation for over-tired nervous systems and, for those strong enough to stay the course, a valuable measure of catharsis. For Ford, whatever may have been its effects, thanks to his impressionable nature, on his personal conduct, it provided the necessary stimulus and the conductive atmosphere which he required for the production of his most enduring work. In the brief interval before the Wall Street hit Europe like a blizzard, before the rise of Hitler in aggressive partnership first with Mussolini, then with Franco, threatened vast populations with massacre and menaced with hangings, concentration camps and subtler forms of persecution the intellectual life of whole continent, Ford any many other artists enjoyed their halcyon days. No one particularly in Ford's case can suggest that the "good time" was not deserved, had not been earned. "It is difficult now to remember," writes Stella Bowen, "how completely we were without political preoccupations, but such as the world we lived in, and from England in 1940 it looks like a remote and unbelievable Heaven." From England in 1947 it looks still more remote, still more heavenly.
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