Visiting The Famous Cafes Where The Dead Intellectuals, Artists, And Writers Hung Out

You’re sitting in Café Central in Vienna, a true intellectual coffeehouse where Leon Trotsky used to sit day after day while in exile from pre-1918 Imperial Russia, plotting the revolution against the Czar.  His buddy Lenin of course hung out here too, along with Sigmund Freud and Adolf Hitler, in the same year (Der Führer wasn’t exactly an intellectual, but cafés love to name-drop).  The poet Peter Altenberg, the father of Zionism Theodor Herzl, and the polymath Egon Friedell all hung out here, names that if dropped would impress anyone, yes?  More: The Vienna Circle of logical positivists met here as well (people such as Kurt Gödel and Alfred Tarski).  Just imagine the positive vibes they left, and the customers now who tremble when they enter, imagining the burden of history and their own intellectual conversations to come.

Recognizing these folks as kindred souls, you then sit down and order a Coffee Viennese, as anyone would.  The black-clad waiter, acknowledging you as an appreciator of higher thinking, brings your coffee on a plate together with a little cookie, a napkin, a small glass of water, and then provides the daily newspaper, as coffeehouses do here.  In your case, it’s USA Today that he brings and spreads out before you, your humiliation complete.  The other patrons politely turn away.

Later, you find out that the original Café Central had closed at the end of WWII.  It’s gone.  Another café with the same name opened again in the same building but a different spot decades later, in 1975, perhaps no connection with the past.  The intellectuals, freethinkers, literati, bohemians, the counterculture, and other alternative lifestyle people are probably pouring out thoughts over their coffee, masterfully balancing the line between tragedy and farce, somewhere else.

Yet travelers still visit places like this, the famous cafes and such.  These types of cafés and watering holes get into the guidebooks and blog posts and visitors flock there, for reasons that we shall explore.  So very often, I’ve seen a place described as hangout for intellectuals, the literati, or perhaps the counterculture, usually based on the famous people who used to hang out there.  I always wonder why people go there now.  The sense of history, yes we can understand, but do people think they will be observing some literati intelligentsia there now, eavesdropping on their lofty conversations, or engaging in an intellectual conversation themselves?  It’s too easy to declare these places overrated, overpriced, and not authentic anymore, because I think we all already know that.  People still go.

 

Paris’ Les Deux Magots

 

At least some of today’s intelligentsia might actually have the cash to hang out there in Café Central or the other famous cafes, perhaps occasionally.  It’s worse for cafes made famous by writers, poets, and artists.  In Paris’ Montparnasse district, the Dôme Café was made famous by Henry Miller, Sinclair Lewis, Anaïs Nin, Picasso, and Man Ray, and Hemingway (it’s always about Hemingway).  It’s utterly impossible to describe these cafés without name-dropping like mad.  The almost-next door brasserie La Coupole was home to the same people (yes, and Hemingway), probably just because it was next door.  The writer/poet/artist Max Jacob said he hung out there to “sin disgracefully”, while the novelist Joseph Kessel once ate glass there.

See, there are other famous haunts nearby where you can even more soak up the artistic intellectual vibe, such as La Rotonde (Picasso and Modigliani hung there!) and Le Select (Samuel Beckett!  And yes, Hemingway) and of course Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore in St.-Germain (Everyone.  Including that sod Hemingway, who was everywhere).

Let’s then be off to Italy, where one may head to Antico Caffè Greco near the Spanish Steps in Rome, where Byron, Shelly, Goethe, and even Cassonova drank coffee.  Wikipedia, that arbitrator of prose, says “Today Caffe Greco remains a haven for writers, politicians, artists and notable people in Rome.”  Sure, because those people love mingling with the tourists who come to see them.  In Budapest, there’s the amazingly beautiful New York Café, whose website talks about “the many painters, actors and intellectuals that have forever frequented the popular Café.”  Yes, yes, but what crowd is there nowadays?

The in Literaturnoe Kafe in St. Petersburg is oft-cited as the last café that poet Alexander Pushkin visited before he was killed in a duel, an utterly random would-be throw-away fact that, blimey, turned out awfully well for the café’s ongoing popularity.  I can’t find confirmation of other names associated with the place (only that people like Dostoevsky and Chernyshevsky were said to have been there), though one blog post says, “it’s reminiscent of the ancient Petersburg, when famous poets and journalists met and discussed matters of cultural and literal importance.”  I’m willing to bet that happened often at other places as well.

 

 

It’s certainly not just Europe.  The Vesuvio Cafe in San Francisco was the center of the beat generation, where Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsburg, and Dylan Thomas hung out.  You can join them and see if the best minds of your own generation are still being destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked and such.  We could head to New York, to the Blue Bar in NYC’s Algonquin Hotel, site of Dorothy Parker’s “round tables”.  I used to drink in the White Horse Tavern in New York City a while back.  Dylan Thomas (there he is again) drank himself to death here, which is as good a reason as any to consider it a haunt.

Café Riche in Cairo has long been a meeting place for revolutionaries: the 1919 one against the British, in 1952 against King Farouk, and the more recent 2011 “Arab Spring”.  In the 50s, Nasser himself sat in there making plans, because there’s no better place to plan the overthrow of the government than in a public coffeehouse.  The cafe closed briefly after its owner died, but has since reopened, telling us it “has resumed receiving the Arab intellectual, revolutionary and political visitors it has always hosted…”

 

Here’s what you may see in the famous cafes.  Lines of tourists, soaking up the atmosphere

 

I mock, indeed, and yet I’m not immune to the lure.  I’ve chased the ghost of that bastard Hemingway too much, starting in Paris in Harry’s New York Bar, where Sinclair Lewis and Humphrey Bogart also drank (there are few places in Paris where Hemingway didn’t drink, which should come as no surprise now).  I went to Harry’s when I was young and heedless, not knowing what to expect, and asked for a very dry martini.  The bartender was not impressed.  A plate with raw veggies and dip (crudities) were the bar snacks.  A sign on the wall said, “Try our hot dogs.”  It didn’t seem very Hemingway.  On a different trip, I stepped into the other Harry’s Bar, in Venice, and quickly stepped out again, feeling rather unwelcome.  It doesn’t do to chase Hemingway.

Halfway around the world, one could sip a very expensive Singapore Sling in the Long Bar, in the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, said to be once the haunt of Somerset Maugham and Rudyard Kipling (and yes, dammit, Hemingway).  After the bar nails you for the $20 (USD) cliché drink that is not even made fresh for you (it’s made in batches), and after you find out this isn’t even the original Long Bar where those guys hung anyway, you can then pen a story about it.

 

 

Intellectuals, poets, and all other people mentioned do not always hang out in public discussing matters of literary, political, and epistemological importance.  They do not habitually, consciously, and purposefully meet at the Vienna-style coffeehouse or the absinthe bar to whirl away the gentle afternoon by arguing the meaning of life.  These establishments are liked, as caffeine and alcohol both are needed in this kind of life, but few people rise from lunch and decide to head to the coffee house for the express purpose of having an intellectual mind-bender conversation.

If that’s what someone is hoping to find at a coffeehouse in Vienna or an old literary café in Paris, good luck.  What you are more likely to find at these famous cafés is a lack of natives, along with expensive drinks and substandard food, though a few are notable for keeping standards up.  If we could flash back in time to the café-bound conversations that Simone de Beauvoir was having with Sartre and Camus in Paris, we might find that they were merely drunkenly mocking each other’s works.  One might like to think that Hemingway and Fitzgerald met over coffee to hash over what makes good narrative structure, but mostly they just got drunk over pastis and then retired to the men’s room so that Ernest could assure Scott that his manhood was adequate.

 

Since we’re drinking with Hemingway anyway, let’s quote him.  He said that a writer is a profession where you just have to say that you’re a writer and voila!, thus you are.  Somewhat the same, methinks, of poetry.  Who’s to say you are not a poet?  Every one of us has a creative side.  So many of us think, only sometimes secretly, that we could have been a painter or a set designer or an essayist or a photographer.  Moreover, we identify with these things though we don’t belong to their world.  Artists and writers and intellectuals and such, yes, we are simpatico.  We’re one of them at heart, though people may not know it.

And that is one reason why we tourists like to hang in the places where the intellectuals hang out.  Really, they’re not so different from us.  And yet.  Hanging at an intellectuals’ café is like going to “models’ night” at the nightclub.  No models are actually going to show up, but people who want to hang out with models will.  So many of us somewhat want to be part of that world.  We may not all want to be counter-culture bohemian freethinkers, but yes maybe for an hour we can do that.  Going to a famous café put us in touch with that side.

 

This tourist is probably expressing his outrage over being charged six euro for a cup of coffee

 

The other reason to hang there is simply we like history and famous places.  When we travel, we go see the castle associated with Henry VIII or the house where Karl Marx was born or a place where George Washington slept, so why not go to a place where famous writers used to hang?

Most of these historic places coddled their artists and writers back in the day.  Drinks were cheap, as well as a few food entrees that would fill them up, such as a sausage and potato plate.  The café would supply writing paper.  Bill payment could be delayed, perhaps for months, or perhaps exchanged for a painting.  Amazingly bad behavior was tolerated, or at least handled.  Had the tourists of the time known about these places, they might have been warned to avoid them.  There might have been some glamor to a few, but they weren’t upscale places.

I still see the archetype descriptions of these places, online and in guidebooks.  The prose describes how the intellectuals yes still gather in Vienna’s coffeehouses, how someone can still imagine Hemingway passed out under a table at Le Dome.  We can’t blame these institutions for promoting their history, but it’s too much to expect budding writers to be there anymore.  They can’t afford it.  Still, as tourists, we want to go to places where things have happened.

 

The intellectual cafes of tomorrow will be places that serve extra-large coffees, hoppy IPAs, pork belly tater tots, and have two hundred outlets around their walls for all the laptops and phone chargers.  The future Hemmingways and Fitzgeralds still won’t be discussing narrative styles, but they will be texting.  In 100 years, people may flock to The Elephant House in Edinburgh to see where J.K Rowling sat and wrote the early Harry Potter books.  It will be in all the guidebooks and people will pay $100 for a pint, sitting under a huge wall mural with characters from the books, imagining that other authors are busy at work around them.