She'll Always Have Paris.(Review)

String of Pearls: On the News Beat in New York and Paris, by Priscilla L. Buckley (St. Martin's, 183 pp., $21.95)

I've been a friend and colleague of Priscilla Buckley for decades. This will not prevent me from telling the truth about her book.

Its prose is energized by intelligence and concreteness, a claim I will soon validate. It is wonderfully evocative of a time and place. Or, rather, two places, New York and Paris, but mostly Paris. Reading it, I thought of Elliot Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris, Janet Flanner's Paris Was Yesterday, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.

In his own memoir, however, Hemingway-while celebrating youth and Paris-imposed upon us his most unattractive side. He denigrated, without shame, T. S. Eliot, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and many others. Nice guy. But at least he liked Paris.

In contrast, A String of Pearls is generous in spirit. Priscilla Buckley loved and still loves the life she evokes here. Because she has a sparkling sense of humor, she also enjoys its frequent absurdities.

Part One deals with her life in New York City between 1944 and 1948. A recent graduate of Smith College, she gained an entry-level job at the United Press wire service. Low pay, long hours, and dingy apartments could not dampen her spirit. This was New York! The capital of the world! Just being there, then, was, as she puts it, "tops." Life had few cares and was all possibility.

Though she does not put it this way, she captures a sense of New York in the '40s as an extension of a Silver Age that began in the '20s and ended around 1960. The grim years of the Depression were gone. The war had been won. The great musicals were on Broadway, and sophisticated jazz was in the air. Yet to appear were Elvis, the Beatles, the Kennedys, Abbie Hoffman, and Charles Manson. Miss Buckley conveys the spirit of this time with carefully polished-one might say pearl-like- anecdotes. One of my favorite characters in this part of the book is one Johnny Zischaung, who "had been born with a stump instead of a left hand":