Girl With A Typewriter.

It is possible that you are unfamiliar with the name Robert Doisneau, but I am quite sure that you have seen his work. Robert Doisneau (14 April 1912 – 1 April 1994) was a French photographer. From the 1930s onwards he roamed the streets of Paris looking for interesting subjects to photograph. He once said, ‘The marvels of daily life are so exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street’. 

The photograph that I am certain you will know is his 1950 image Le baiser de l'hôtel de Ville (The Kiss by the City Hall), a photograph of a couple kissing on a busy Parisian street. This iconic picture for millions of people has come to represent the nostalgia and romance of Paris in the post-war years. It was the first of his works that I became aware of. Very often when I am listening to the Van Morrison song Angelou that image will come into my mind, ‘In the month of May, In the city of Paris, In the month of May, In the city of Paris, And I heard the bells ringing’. However, there is another photo by Robert Doisneau that I find just as romantic and intriguing. 

One day in the summer of 1948 he was working on an assignment for Paris Match magazine when he spotted a young woman sitting by the Seine at the Ile de la Cite working on a manual typewriter and he took her picture. For me that photo is synonymous with the creative spirit of Paris in the pre and post war years. There were many great French writers living in Paris such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, but Paris in that era had also become a mecca for many of my favourite authors such as Henry Miller,( His book Quiet Days In Clichy gave me the title of this blog page) Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde lived out his last years in poverty in Paris, George Orwell wrote Down and Out In London and Paris here, James Joyce wrote Ulysses which was published in Paris by Sylvia Beach at her famous Shakespeare & Company bookshop. James Baldwin also lived here. All these people were drawn to Paris by the creative freedom and artistic Bohemian atmosphere. That is why the photo of the girl with the typewriter fascinated me. I wanted to know who she was, and also what was she writing? Years ago it might have been difficult to find this out, but now thanks to the likes of google and Wikipedia it was quite an easy task.

It turns out that she was English, and her name was Emma Smith. She was 25 years old at the time of the photograph and was living in Paris while working on her second novel. She was born in Cornwall in 1923. During the Second World War, she worked on the canals as a boatswoman. Her experiences working on the Grand Union Canal would become the basis for her debut novel, Maidens' Trip. In 1946, still only 23, she went to India with a team of documentary filmmakers where she became friends with Laurie Lee and encouraged him to complete his memoir of his childhood in Gloucestershire Cider With Rosie which eventually sold millions of copies. Emma returned to England in 1947 and wrote her first book. Maidens' Trip which a commercial success and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. With the proceeds from it, she moved to Paris, where she took a room in the Hotel de Tournon, and drawing on her memories of India, typed up her second novel The Far Cry. That was what she was working on when Robert Doisneau came across her on that fateful day. The book was published to great acclaim in 1949. 

She married in 1951 and had two children, but sadly her husband died after only six years of marriage. She moved to rural Wales with her children and seemed to have lost interest in writing for many years. Eventually she produced four books for children and a novel which didn’t repeat the success of her earlier books. In recent years there has been a revival of interest in her work. The novelist Susan Hill found a copy of The Far Cry in a jumble sale and wrote an article full of praise for it in the Daily Telegraph. The book was finally reprinted as a forgotten classic by Persephone Books of Bath 53 years after its first publication. Emma lived in Putney, London from 1980. In her 80s she published two memoirs The Great Western Beach and As Green As Grass which were both received enthusiastically by critics and public alike. She died peacefully in April 2018 aged 94. For many people she will be remembered for her books, but I think for me she is immortalised in that famous photograph of Robert Doisneau taken on a summers day 76 years ago which symbolises the creative atmosphere and romance of Paris when the world seemed a lot more optimistic than it does now.

Robert Doisneau.