Barbara Sjoholm

Barbara Sjoholm is the author of the new memoir Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer. She has also published The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, short-listed for a PEN USA award for creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the American Scholar, The New York Times, Smithsonian, and Slate, among other publications. As Barbara Wilson, she is the author of Blue Windows and Gaudi Afternoon, which won a British Crime Writers award and was filmed in Barcelona. She is currently at work on a travel narrative about the north of Scandinavia in winter, which will be published in 2007. She lives in Port Townsend.

From Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me a Writer

Seal Press, 2006

Reprinted by permission of Seal Press

All rights reserved

Paris, 1971

By Barbara Sjoholm

My first night in Paris I stayed at a barracks-like student hostel in Pigalle. I had my almost-full tube of toothpaste stolen and went out with a Chinese girl to the film, Battle of Algiers. The next day, December 31,  I took the Métro to the Latin Quarter to look up Ben, a man I'd met on the airport bus from Stansted to London, who was staying here with a friend. He'd said Nina was studying literature at the Sorbonne, and to be sure to look them up. He'd kissed me lightly on the cheek when we parted in London and had added, meaningfully, that Nina was just a neighbor from the Village.

 Ben and Nina had gone to Majorca for the holidays, but the man next door, another young American from New York, took me in for coffee, after hearing me knock on Nina's door. Charlie had a lot of frizzy hair; he was short, muscular, and as I soon discovered, bankrolled by an uncle who'd made a fortune in television—selling TVs, that is. The uncle, unlike Charlie's father, an accountant on Long Island, had encouraged Charlie first to get an English degree at Columbia and then spend two years in Paris, writing.

"He said, 'You must live all you can, it's a mistake not to," Charlie told me and looked expectant.

I smiled. "That sounds like good advice."

"It's from Henry James, The Ambassadors. The quote."

"Oh, of course."

Charlie's book-jammed studio was very writerly. On a wooden table piled with Village Voices and Herald Tribunes, a Royal manual typewriter sat with a page inserted, There was a bottle of wine next to the typewriter, a few unwashed dishes, and most intriguing to me, a small pile of typescript.

"This is my second year in Paris, but I'll probably stay at least a year longer. It's a great place to write. I've had a couple of personal rejections from the Paris Review. Plimpton encouraged me to send more. I don't bother now to send my work anywhere else. I'm aiming high. I'm writing a novel. I have over fifty pages." He gestured at the pile of pages.

It looked more like twenty. "I'm writing a novel too," I said, though this was not true. I hadn't even written a short story since I was seventeen. But there were certain kinds of men who brought out the competitive streak in me. Charlie, with his aggressive confidence, was one. "What's yours about?"

"It's very New York," he began, and went on for some time about a world that was more foreign to me than Dickens' London. Finally, when I stopped making encouraging noises, he asked, "And your novel?"

I thought quickly. "It's about a Hollywood stand-in. A stand-in for a famous male star. It's sort of Dostoyevskian—you know, the theme of the double." Rob had once been the stand-in for the main male character (not a famous person) in a terrible film shot around Monterey and Big Sur. It was called Thumbtripping, and the last lines were, "Have a nice life."