WRITERS AND CAFÉS go together like coffee and cream. Perhaps the connection started in the place where coffee houses first evolved, Ottoman Turkey, when the men met over small, sweet cups of Turkish coffee to socialize and entertain one another with backgammon and poetry, which is renowned in the East.
Later, when coffee came to Europe, the Viennese cafès were the unofficial office sites of many well-known writers. The Austrian journalist, Alfred Polgar (1873-1955), said to be a great wit at Vienna’s Café Central, wrote that coffee houses are “a place where people want to be alone, but need company to do so.” Maybe writers needed the noise and the caffeine to maintain the energy to face one white page after another.
CAFÈ CENTRAL, Vienna
Boris Vian (1920-1959), the French polymath (his skills included writing and poetry) claimed that “if there had not been any cafés, there would have been no Jean-Paul Sartre.” That’s an exaggeration of course, but one with which we can probably sympathize. I’ve read that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir hung-out in Paris at Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore. The former was also a favorite of Rimbaud.
Pushkin boosted his courage with coffee, not alcohol, before his fatal duel in 1837 at The Literary Café in St. Petersburg. Byron, Casanova, and Henry James had their favorite coffee houses in Vienna. Lorca met Dalí at the Cafe de Oriente in Madrid, and Kafka worked on Metamorphosis at the Café Stefan in Prague. Oscar Wilde was famous in coffee houses throughout Europe, though perhaps not for having pen in hand.
HEMINGWAY, HADLEY and Friends, American Ex-pats in Paris
The connection between writers and coffee houses was well established by the time American ex-patriots arrived in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway wrote about Cafe La Rotonde and Le Dome Cafe in The Sun Also Rises. He also frequented the Dingo Bar along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes.
The Pedrocchi Caffè in Padua, like many of the coffee houses mentioned here, is still in operation and is one of the world’s largest. It was Stendhal’s home-away-from-home …
… and so the affinity continues into recent times where The Elephant House in Edinburg is consider the “birth place of Harry Potter.”
THE ELEPHANT HOUSE, Edinburg, “the birthplace of Harry Potter”
My favorite coffee house is a modest little place, The Daily Grind, where they do what they call “Turkish Coffee.” It’s actually an American coffee with cardamom. Not too shabby and more than a little inspirational …So what are you waiting for? Grab a cup of joe and write on ….
CAFÉ CENTRAL, VIENNA AUSTRIA
Photo credits ~ First photo courtesy of morgueFile. Cafè Central and Hemingway and Friends is in the public domain and via Wikipedia. The Elephant House Cafè is courtesy of Nicolai Schäfer licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license via Wikipedia.
Video uploaded to YouTube by astramediaTV.
