Paris

In June 1957, Robert Lowell attended a poetry reading by E.E. Cummings. Sitting dutifully and deferentially alongside him were Allen Tate, W.S. Merwin and his wife Dido and the classical scholar William Alfred, ‘while Cummings read outrageous and sentimental poems, good and bad of both kinds’. They were not alone: ‘About eight thousand people listened.’ But you can tell from Lowell’s adjectives – ‘outrageous and sentimental’ – that Cummings’s reputation is already on the slide. Edna St Vincent Millay’s diaries record a reading in Waco on 10 January 1930: ‘In spite of icy streets, really dangerous & cold weather, abt. 1500 people present.

Jean Rhys, who died at the age of 88 in 1979, lived to be forgotten and rediscovered. Like many readers, I first came across her through her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which imagines the pre-history of Jane Eyre’s ‘madwoman in the attic’, the Creole heiress married off to Mr Rochester and then incarcerated by him at Thornfield Hall. When it came out to great acclaim in 1966, it marked the rebirth of a writer who hadn’t published a book for more than a quarter of a century and who had even been presumed dead.

The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo. Ten years after the publication of his debut memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, he is once again in Paris, lurking about the rue de Monceau, ruminating on dust, trying to make the dead speak. He’s particularly keen to elicit a word from Count Moïse de Camondo (1860-1935), the last patriarch of a clan of absurdly rich French Jewish bankers with roots in Constantinople. The count was a friend and neighbour of de Waal’s cousin, the art historian Charles Ephrussi, whose collection of Japanese netsuke played such a large role in The Hare with Amber Eyes. The wary reader may ask: hasn’t de Waal had quite enough of the rue de Monceau?

Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs with young girls and his travels to the Philippines in search of pre-pubescent boys — insert Gallic shrug here — but he still won literary prizes and enjoyed a state stipend. He was celebrated by the chattering classes, who said little when he brought different adolescent girls as his plus one to interviews. Little V, or V sometimes, was one of those girls. She had slipped in and out of his autofiction for decades. In Consent, her memoir, Vanessa Springora returns the favour and refers to him by his initial. She first met G. at a dinner party in 1986. She was 13, dragged along by her single mother who worked in publishing. He was the guest of honour.

At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his reader with a glimpse of the all-too-real horrors that underpin his work. In Invisible Ink such a moment comes when the narrator recalls images from a postwar trial, where ‘behind the accused were about 30 suitcases — the only remaining traces of persons who had gone missing’. You might say that Modiano has spent a literary lifetime opening those suitcases to find out whose lives they contained. Born in Paris in 1945 to a Belgian actress mother and a Jewish father who had survived the Occupation by weaving through an underworld of shady deals, he grew up in a family microclimate of evasion and oblivion.

I met Jane Birkin’s parents, who flit across these pages. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an actress in Noël Coward plays and a cabaret singer who’d worked with Charles Hawtrey, and when I invited her to a party once she drove her Mini up the steps and into the hotel lobby. Jane’s father, David, had a good war, his boat picking up pilots and spies hidden by the Resistance on the Breton coast. He told me ’Allo ’Allo wasn’t a comedy, it was documentary realism. He endured many operations on his optic nerve. A piece of hip bone was grafted to his eye socket. His lungs, as Jane says, were weakened by ‘too many anaesthetics’. The Birkin fortune came from Nottingham lace. There were aristocrats (the Russells) in the background.

I like a book that can put its point in four outrageous words and use it as its title. Diana Souhami might be right. Without the women her book is devoted to, literary modernism would have looked very different. A consciously new approach to writing met a body of women who were being heard for the first time; the results were compelling. At the beginning of a novel by one of them, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, the terror of masculine traditions is concisely stated: Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’, cried the groaning old man at last, ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.