The Café Lifestyle

Throughout centuries of civilization, differing somewhat from culture to culture, one thing stands out as a well-beloved institution, and that is the café experience. The café, pub, coffee house, inn is the meeting-place for a community, a social interaction over the beverage of choice, a moment of relaxation for everyone except those behind the bar, a chance to greet known companions or meet intriguing newcomers. Some cafés, by the nature of their clientele, become famous as centers of the arts.

The Savoy Tivoli terrace by Kevin Evans

For a decade of my adult life, I lived in North Beach, that once-bohemian heart of San Francisco, immersed in the total café existence. The first hours of the day were spent in the Caffé Trieste, where my father had been a regular when it opened in the '50s, a piece of his old country where he could speak his language, discuss poetry and politics, and have a decent espresso. In the family tradition, I began the day there downing a few lattes, catching up on all the neighborhood gossip, chatting with friends, or, when left to my own devices, working on whatever writing I needed to complete. Late in the afternoon, or early evening, I walked up the street to the front patio of the Savoy Tivoli, where most evenings passed amicably with conversation, or the amusement of neighborhood slag-fests, and martinis, watching the parade of humanity on the street. The Savoy had a huge crowd of regulars who, like me, knew just about everybody on the terrace, sometimes all too well; any newcomer to our living room was met, purposefully, by someone among us, and discussed by all the hopeless wags. Other topics to get a lot of play: what we were writing, what other people were writing, what we were reading, and the characteristics and suitable fates of the cohabitors of this café planet. I never found this boring, and on the nights when I was forced to leave the neighborhood, I found myself wondering what I had missed at the Savoy. Fortunately I would hear multiple versions of what happened over the next day's wake-up latte, daily café Rashomon.

One never knew when there'd be a new entertainment on the street in front of the Savoy. One summer, a 20-piece French brass band would pull up their bus, bring out their instruments and play for us every few weeks, and we loved them. For years we had occasional performances by an amazing fellow, a son, one guessed, of some Caribbean plantation magnate. His immense white limo would pull up, he would leap from the back and to a crowd of mostly white people wearing black, this ebony prince in his immaculate white suit and white straw fedora would bellow arias from Italian opera. It was awful, but when he was gone, everybody was in a much better mood. Or perhaps, one of the grand beat poet survivors would show up and have a raging argument with someone else, a prime topic for weeks of discussion.

Every so often you'd leave your seat on the terrace, and go inside to the bar to talk to Franco, the bartender and Buddha of the Beach, perhaps sit down to have a round with that trustfund baby who burned out with the postwar bohemian expatriots, and knew Durrell, His Lord and Lady Leslie, or my dear friend and primary cruising partner, O'Toole, who had come to Franco's presence. Or you might stroll out with a few friends to get dinner somewhere, or to go by a few other places, in search of a someone you might want to see, who'd be hiding in another café, working on his screenplay. You'd go by the Roma, saunter through to the back garden, and back out again, then up to the garden behind the original Old Spaghetti Factory, and see who was contributing to the night air beneath the fig and datura trees, peek into the Trieste. You'd walk into places, scan the clientele, and failing to find the person you sought, head back out to look in more unsociable spots. The truly retiring would be sequestered at a table upstairs at the Europa on Columbus, or upstairs at Vesuvio.

Once in a while you'd run into someone else along the way, stop and have a something, but eventually you'd be back at the Savoy. And if you waited long enough on the terrace, the person you were looking for would at least saunter by. Sitting on the terrace, Jack Sarfatti would tell you about his newest theory, his personal war with a huge figure in New Age big business, or books, or you'd nod at the funny rants of Kim, whose first claim to fame was being the subject of an article in Esquire, about golden boys who have surprised everyone by not being famous yet. Stephen Schwartz would come in with plenty to say, about his current book or this week's attempted assassination of his character. My beloved pal Miss X taught me everything I know about neurosis. Lin, Danise, Pamela and Miss X became sisters I never had. Dozens of others offered great company while you waited for a particular person to show up.

Writers often have some affinity to cafés. Their work precludes co-workers, being a solitary endeavor, but the loneliness is tempered by the presence of other bodies. The voices you choose to tune in tell you stories, give you plots, or give you, with observation, the details with which your characters are adorned, patterns of speech, expressions, garments, body language. I wrote a book in those naughty days called Caffé Chiachiarino (Caffé Little Blabbermouth) based entirely on stories people told me over drinks. I didn't do it well enough, but it sits there, in one of my filing cabinets, perhaps material for the days when I give up society and retire to a cork-lined room.

In retrospect, those years were like a minor golden era in the history of café life. A true golden era arose in Paris during the life of Proust, and perhaps partly because of him, as he was a café habitué, one of those people who, if you sat down beside him in a café, would say something witty; surely his appearances were discussed by others who saw him after he was gone. His friend Léon Daudet, in his book Salons et journaux, remembers the charm of café nights with Proust, "...wrapped up in woolens like a Chinese knick-knack. He would ask for a grappa de raisin and a glass of water and declare that he just got up, that he had influenza, that he was going back to bed, that the noise was bothering him, glance around him anxiously, then mockingly, finally bursting out in a magical laughter and stay. Soon coming from his lips, hastily and tentatively offered, remarks of extraordinary originality and perceptions of diabolical subtlety..."

When Proust rose from bed in the late evening, without a particular social occasion to rouse him, he often went for a cruise of the cafés. Like most café afficianados, Proust had his favorites; he was most inclined to go to Larue's or the Café Weber, or to dine at the ultra-chic Ritz, all places of sumptuous quality where the well-to-do gathered to eat, drink and socialize. The Ritz became something of a second home, thanks, no doubt, to his habit of tipping extravagantly. Long after the Ritz had closed for the night, Proust could send one of his household to fetch him a beer there, as they'd been shown and permitted access to the supply in the wee hours.

"The joy of those who made their way into the cafés was the greater... the client ordered a drink and the waiter hurried off to get it. Then, while he waited for it to come, keeping his eyes glued to each fresh arrival, longing to start a conversation with him... while those present were drinking and playing and keeping up a continuous flow of gay talk... careless ease and a general sense of well-being..." -Jean Santeuil

In the book Toulouse-Lautrec's Table, yet another glorious work in the series that gave us Dining With Proust, and co-created by one of the Proust volume's collaborators, Jean-Bernard Naudin, we are told of the scene at the Café Weber. Regulars included Robert de Montesquiou, that likely model for Charlus, and definite model for Whistler's portrait, Léon Daudet, Debussy, Colette's husband Willy, and certainly Lautrec himself. Proust frequently dined there, according to his biographers, but sometimes, in the time-honored tradition of cruising café society, "... the collar of his coat half turned-up, his pockets stuffed with magazines and books, ever looking for someone he never found, Marcel Proust would make his appearance... then retrace his steps, push through the door, and vanish."

Certainly Proust must have made similar appearances at the Bar du Pont-Royale, next door to his publishers, Gallimard. This house, started by a partnership of three that included André Gide, had rejected him at first (as told in PST #4) but later had a change of heart, and all their editors and writers met there to do after-hours business or just drink. Considering Proust's nocturnal schedule, what better place for him to confer with his editors?

Is it possible that he never cruised the Flore, where Huysmans (the other writer who seemed to find inspiration from de Montesquiou) and the Surrealists hung out, Aux Deux Maggots, where Oscar Wilde drank twice each day, and the menu bears the motto "Rendez-vous de l'élite intellectuel" or the Brasserie Lipp, the other headquartes of Nouvelle Revue Francaise/Gallimard? Proust left such a mass of minutia about his life in his correspondence that we are inclined to think that we can account for every minute; in fact we can't, and I dare say that many of his unexplained moments out of the house were spent looking for the right company in Paris cafés.

Proust's café life was to outlive his terrestrial one. After his death, at the Café de l'Arrivée, Samuel Beckett went to avoid the company of other writers, and there wrote Proust in 1931.

"My numerous dinners at restaurants have made my stomach good as new. I eat much more there, however, but much more slowly. Besides, eating at restaurants is my substitute for Evian, and going away, and holidays in the country. Anyhow, everyone thinks I'm looking very well." -Letter to his mother, August, 1902

All my adult life I have known that my true calling, the one way that I would make my fortune, so I might some day sit down at ease and simply write, would be to own the greatest café on earth, or the greatest cafés, as I plan to open them in all my favorite cities in the world. My café would be as much a salon as anything else, not filled with a decor chosen by some cutting edge designer, but filled with fine art, with books, great music, the thousands of extraordinary people I have met, the thousands I have yet to meet and, of course, the HQ of  The Marcel Proust Support Group.

I have come very close many times in my life to getting what I want. Through each near-miss, besides suffering a certain unavoidable disappointment, I have learned an amazing amount about the hard edges, pitfalls and disasters of business. Savvy now, after eleven years in my own catering business and the knocks sustained in my effort to escape this dreadful career, which frequently demands stretches of 18-hour days on one's feet, I continue to insist on the hard way out: my café will be the creation of my life, it will be me, and so I must own most of the shares in it, and I continue to search for solely financial investors.

The beloved Dean Gustafson, who knows me very well, and keeps a close eye on my business prospects, came up with an idea the other night as we looked over the sketches of Paris for this issue. "Thousands of people read Proust Said That," he said, "the kind of people who are drawn to you, your values, and what you have to say... So you should write an article about cafés, and tell them what you are looking for, and maybe the right investors will show up."

There was something about this idea that was so delightful; my efforts to reach investors have been, so far, through all the usual channels, addressing persons of business who have a keen eye for the bottom line on their p and l's, but no obsession to create, and profit by, the Aux Deux Maggots of the century. They might see the value of a chain that features the souveniers of pop music, but few of these people understand, because they probably don't read themselves, the utter beauty of books, or the attraction that such a place would have for a population starved for a literary milieu.

Dozens of potential investors have surfaced over the last few years. "We're VERY interested," they tell me, "Let's have lunch." Or my young friend, the venture capital broker, will turn up a prospect who, for nearly a year, will propose investing a fifth of the needed capital, demanding this or that explanation of a detail of the estimated costs, and holding me at bay while his accountants ponder the prospects. When I decided that one such person was a wash-out, he came back with the offer of the total investment, dangling the Big Carrot while his accountants spent another long stretch of months convincing him he was crazy, or perhaps he was just enjoying the power of making me crazy. In theory there are half a dozen people out there who have the all the needed money and are willing to invest it; I have yet to see a single dime.

Recently I have considered the ways in which other cultures deal with the investment situation. In San Francisco's Chinese and Korean communities, I hear, groups of people will contribute small sums to the big picture, and open business even though no one has more than a few thousand dollars. "Hmmm," I say, "A hundred people with a few thousand dollars each would provide the funding for the cafe of my dreams, and I believe, of theirs, with half of their dollars stowed in the bank collecting interest, facilitating repayment."

Anyone who knows business realizes that opening without reserves in the bank is foolhardy; you must have resources to pay the bills until you have developed your clientele. Such a person wouldn't trust anyone who opened a business without back-up funds in the budget, plans of an amateur. So I look for twice what I really need, but those of you who've read this publication, who have a growing conception of the size and richness of my life, will know that my biggest asset upon opening is that the clientele is there, waiting for the place to go.

Among you there are people who are blessed, if not by work you love, but with decent rewards for your labor that are taxed heavily, people looking for investments to stave off the IRS from the wallet. There are people who have always thought that it might be wonderful to own a piece of a great place, at which there would always be a table for you, and perhaps, if your timing's right, the table in the kitchen. Surely there are among you many who would love to use your resources to create a great place to go, where you might meet some of the most interesting and arty folks in town. To all of you who might be in one or more of these categories, I offer this possibility, and a lifetime subscription to Proust Said That.

A stack of executive summaries waits in my office, and beyond them, the pile of blah-blah business plans; perhaps you might like one.

P Segal