In a letter from Guy Debord to Gianfranco Sanguinetti in 1971, he discusses the names of cafes they have known and visited. Debord asks if the Cafe of Lost Time really exists, ("I hope so! What a name!" he writes), saying that it is a more beautiful name than the Cafe Inconstant in Antwerp, or the Cafe at the End of the World that used to be in Paris. The world of cafes - and their names - is of importance here as the next novel I am discussing is Patrick Modiano's In the Cafe of Lost Youth (2017), but I also need to say a couple of things about cafes and the early history of the Situationists.
In the early 1950s Guy Debord moved to Paris from the south of France and enrolled at the Sorbonne, but apparently never attended any lectures. Instead he wandered the city, drinking and making friends and spending a lot of time in cafes. After spending time in various cafes, the group he'd found himself in settled in Chez Moineau, at 22 rue de Four in St Germain des Pres. In itself it probably wasn't that much different to many other cafes, opening until late at night, full of people who drifted and who weren't sometimes very respectable. It was also photographed beautifully by Ed van der Elsken in his photo novel Love on the Left Bank which captures many of the people Debord associated with, and has become a very famous archive of Parisian cafe life of the time.
Debord's experience of his early life in Paris was for him a time of huge change, living away from home, becoming an adult and falling in love with both women and political thought. At the time Debord was establishing himself as a leader, breaking away from Isidore Isou's Lettrist group and establishing his own Lettrist International. It was at this time that he became involved with two women who would become life long influences and with whom he fell in love, Eliane Papaii and Michele Bernstein.
Eliane was Debord's first great love, and right up until his final film, In Girum Immus Nocte consumimur igni, and his final book Panegyric, one of van der Elsken's photos of her was used by him as an image of rebellion, "it shows all the hate in the world, all the fear in the world, all the violence, all the refusal" said her ex husband Jean-Michel Menison. Part Hungarian, part Spanish, part gypsy, Eliane was a persistent runaway, law breaker and as Debord put it a "lost young hoodlum girl". Eliane and Debord eventually broke up, and as a way of getting out of repeatedly being picked up by the police as a runaway she married Jean Michel Mension and then later Jean Louis Brau. Like many other of his friends they were cast into a social outer darkness by Debord, who was probably heartbroken as well as cross, and when she had the temerity to write a book about the Situationist movement he ridiculed it in the Internationale Situationniste journal. By then he had married another Moineau regular, Michele Bernstein, and had begun his long relationship with his future wife Alice Becker. I often wonder what the course of the Situationist movement would have been had he remained with Eliane, rather than the much better behaved Michele.
In the Cafe of Lost Youth covers the years that Chez Moineau was the favoured cafe, and like many of Modiano's other novels concerns memory, lost people, present day life and the pursuit of the past, where everything was at its best. Four narrators tell us about Jacqueline - nicknamed Louki - a regular at the La Conde cafe, a teenage runaway with a fractured relationship with her mother, who desperately wants some sort of group of friends to relate to. She wanders the streets, often lying about her home life and her situation, idly taking drugs and marrying for some sort of convenience and a home rather than any sort of connection or love. When she decides to end a relationship it's always in a very passive way, by simply deciding not to go home to her mother or her husband again. The group at La Conde are just as fractured, young people who have lost their way, their family or who are at a loss to work out what they should do, and this echoes so much the way that Debord and others write about their experirences at Chez Moineau, that it was a world where nothing they ever did afterwards would be better, where it was better to live in poverty than anywhere else in the world and people were truly alive.
Louki wanders the streets of Paris, sometimes in company, sometimes alone, and finds joy in night-time derives around the hillier, Right Bank areas of Paris, walking with a "feeling of lightness that sometimes comes over you in dreams [where] you're no longer afraid of anything," being guided only by her emotions and her response to her environment, just as Debord framed such walks in his theory of the derive. Her involvement with Guy de Vere introduces her to books and ideas beyond Paris - as his real life equivilant did for so many people and especially women - taking her seriously, guiding her.
The other narrators who tell the story are either remembering her or trying to find traces of her, in memories of other people, in tiny notebooks underlined with blue ink, in part remembrances of long ago. As Debord aged he looked back to his youth in St Germain des Pres, and there is a lyrical section in his final film In Girum, about this time. Roland, the final narrator and one of Louki's lovers, remembers seeing ne travaillez jamais written on the wall in the rue Mazarine, and discerns zones within Paris as being a neutral zone, much like Debord and others wrote in Potlatch, their pre-Situationist journal, dividing the city into quarters such as the Sinister Quarter, the Bizarre and the Historical Quarters, not to mention a Useful Quarter with hospitals and tool shops.
The SI's official stance on writing novels was that they were a thing of the past, that there would be no place for them in the future. In reality Debord's archive shows that he read novels voraciously, being a John le Carre fan and had no qualms noting his reading down for posterity. In the Cafe of Lost Youth is a love letter to the early years of the Lettrist International, and I believe its non sensational, non distorting, faithful treatment of the group might have been appreciated by Debord. I could be wrong though.
At the end of the novel we find out that Louki has committed suicide by jumping from a window, but even this is not treated in a sensational way, it is part of her story, gently told. And if you are wondering if a similar bad fate befell Eliane, then don't worry. She lived until 1992, wrote several books, became an editor of Lettrist material and as far as I can tell remained married to Jean Louis Brau. And although Debord often contacted old girlfriends, there's no evidence that I've seen so far that he tried to contact her, but his repeated use of her image, along with tender words, says much more than maybe a letter ever would.
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