Then you would hear someone say, "Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write in a cafe?"
Your luck had run out and you shut the notebook. This was the worst thing that could happen. If you could keep your temper it would be better but I was not good at keeping mine then and said, "You rotten son of a bitch what are you doing in here off your filthy beat?"
"Don't be insulting just because you want to act like an eccentric."
"Take your dirty camping mouth out of here."
"It's a public cafe. I've just as much right here as you have."
"Why don't you go up to the Petite Chaumiere where you belong?"
"Oh dear. Don't be so tiresome."
Now you could get out and hope it was an accidental visit and that the visitor had only come in by chance and there was not going to be an infestation. There were other good cafes to work in but they were a long walk away and this was your home cafe. It was bad to be driven out of the Closerie des Lilas. You had to make a stand or move. It was probably wiser to move but the anger started to come and I said, "Listen. A bitch like you has plenty of places to go. Why do you have to come here and louse a decent cafe?"
"I just came in to have a drink. What's wrong with that?"
"At home they'd serve you and then break the glass."
"Where's home? It sounds like a charming place."
He was sitting at the next table, a tall fat young man with spectacles. He had ordered a beer. I thought I would ignore him and see if I could write. So I ignored him and wrote two sentences.
"All I did was speak to you."
I went on and wrote another sentence. It dies hard when it is really going and you are into it.
"I suppose you've gotten so great nobody can speak to you."
I wrote another sentence that ended the paragraph and read it over. It was still all right and I wrote the first sentence of the next paragraph.
"You never think about anyone else or that they may have problems too."
I had heard complaining all my life. I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises; certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon.
"Suppose you wanted to be a writer and feel it in every part of your body and it just wouldn't come."
I went on writing and I was beginning to have luck now as well as the other thing.
"Suppose once it had come like an irresistible torrent and then it left you mute and silent."
Better than mute and noisy, I thought, and went on writing. He was in full cry now and the unbelievable sentences were soothing as the noise of a plank being violated in the sawmill.
"We went to Greece," I heard him say later. I had not heard him for some time except as noise. I was ahead now and I could leave it and go on tomorrow.
"You say you used it or you went there?"
"Don't be vulgar," he said. "Don't you want me to tell you the rest?"
"No," I said. I closed the notebook and put it in my pocket.
"Don't you care how it came out?"
"No."
"Don't you care about life and the suffering of a fellow human being?"
"Not you."
"You're beastly."
"Yes."
"I thought you could help me, Hem."
"I'd be glad to shoot you."
"Would you?"
"No. There's a law against it."
"I'd do anything for you."
"Would you?"
"Of course I would."
"Then keep the muck away from this cafe. Start with that."
I stood up and the waiter came over and I paid.
"Can I walk down to the sawmill with you, Hem?"
"No."
"Well I'll see you some other time."
"Not here."
"That's perfectly right," he said. "I promised."*
"I have to write."
"I have to write too."
"You shouldn't write if you can't write. What do you have to cry about it for? Go home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don't talk about it. You could never write."
"Why do you say that?"
"Did you ever hear yourself talk?"
"It's writing I'm talking about."
"Then shut up."
"You're just cruel," he said. "Everybody always said you were cruel and heartless and conceited. I always defended you. But not any more."
"Good."
"How can you be so cruel to a fellow human being?"
"I don't know," I said. "Look, if you can't write why don't you learn to write criticism?"
"Do you think I should?"
"It would be fine," I told him. "Then you can always write. You won't ever have to worry about it not coming nor being mute and silent. People will read it and respect it."
"Do you think I could be a good critic?"
"I don't know how good. But you could be a critic. There will always be people who will help you and you can help your own people."
"What do you mean my own people?"
"The ones you go around with."
"Oh them. They have their critics."
"You don't have to criticize books," I said. "There's pictures, plays, ballet, the cinema--"
"You make it sound fascinating, Hem. Thank you so much. It's so exciting. It's creative too."
"Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh."
"Of course there's nothing to prevent me doing creative writing too."
"Not a thing. Except you may set yourself impossibly high standards by your criticism."
"They'll be high. You can count on that."
"I'm sure they will be."
He was a critic already so I asked him if he would have a drink and he accepted.
"Hem," he said, and I knew he was a critic now since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end, "I have to tell you I find your work just a little too stark."
"Too bad," I said.
"Hem it's too stripped, too lean."
"Bad luck."
"Hem too stark, too stripped, too lean, too sinewy."
I felt the rabbit's foot in my pocket guiltily. "I'll try to fatten it up a little."
"Mind, I don't want it obese."
"Harold," I said, practicing speaking like a critic, "I'll avoid that as long as I can."
"Glad we see eye to eye," he said manfully.
"You'll remember about not coming here when I'm working?"
"Naturally, Hem. Of course. I'll have my own cafe now."
"You're very kind."
"I try to be," he said.
It would be interesting and instructive if the young man had turned out to be a famous critic but it did not turn out that way although I had high hopes for a while.
*ALTERNATE ENDING: I did not think that he would come back. The Closerie was off his beat and he had probably been passing and seen me working and come in. Or maybe he had come in to telephone. I would not have noticed while I was working. Poor bastard I thought but if I had been civil to him or decent even it would have been worse. I would have to hit him sooner or later probably but I would choose the place. I was damned if I would hit him at my home cafe and then have the others all coming to see the place where it happened. Sooner or later I would have to do it but I must be careful not to break the jaw. The hell with being careful of that, what I must be careful of was not to have his head hit on pavement. That was what you always think about. Keep out of the poor bastard's way I thought. Quit thinking about cooling people. You worked all right. He didn't do you any harm. If you run into him and he crowds you tell him to muck off. You were bad enough to him the way it was. But what other way could you be?
It was your own fault if anyone interfered with your working in a cafe because you had a good cafe for working where no one you knew would ever go. But the Closerie de Lilas was such a fine place to write and so convenient that it was worth the risk of being bothered. You ought to feel c
lean after you worked instead of dirtied though. Sure. And you ought not to have to be ruthless. Sure. But all that really mattered was that you go good the next day.
So the next day I woke early, boiled the rubber nipples and the bottles, made the formula, finished the bottling, gave Mr. Bumby a bottle and worked on the dining room table before anyone but he, F. Puss the cat, and I were awake. The two of them were quiet and good company and I worked better than I had ever done. In those days you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit's foot, but it was good to feel it in your pocket.
Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit
Ezra Pound was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He was always doing something practical for poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone, whether he believed in them or not, if they were in trouble. He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T. S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.
Ezra founded something called Bel Esprit with Miss Natalie Barney who was a rich American woman and a patroness of the arts. Miss Barney had been a friend of Remy de Gourmont who was before my time and she had a salon at her house on regular dates and a small Greek temple in her garden. Many American and French women with money enough had salons and I figured very early that they were excellent places for me to stay away from, but Miss Barney, I believe, was the only one that had a small Greek temple in her garden.
Ezra showed me the brochure for Bel Esprit and Miss Barney had allowed him to use the small Greek temple on the brochure. The idea of Bel Esprit was that we would all contribute a part of whatever we earned to provide a fund to get Mr. Eliot out of the bank so he would have money to write poetry. This seemed like a good idea to me and after we had got Mr. Eliot out of the bank Ezra figured we would go right straight along and fix up everybody.
I mixed things up a little by always referring to Eliot as Major Eliot pretending to confuse him with Major Douglas an economist about whose ideas Ezra was very enthusiastic. But Ezra understood that my heart was in the right place and that I was full of Bel Esprit even though it would annoy Ezra when I would solicit funds from my friends to get Major Eliot out of the bank and someone would say what was a Major doing in a bank anyway and if he had been axed by the military establishment did he not have a pension or at least some gratuity?
In such cases I would explain to my friends that this was all beside the point. Either you had Bel Esprit or you did not have it. If you had it you would subscribe to get the Major out of the bank. If you didn't it was too bad. Didn't they understand the significance of the small Greek temple? No? I thought so. Too bad, Mac. Keep your money. We wouldn't touch it.
As a member of Bel Esprit I campaigned energetically and my happiest dreams in those days were of seeing the Major stride out of the bank a free man. I cannot remember how Bel Esprit finally cracked up but I think it had something to do with the publication of The Waste Land which won the Major the Dial award and not long after a lady of title backed a review for Eliot called The Criterion and Ezra and I did not have to worry about him any more. The small Greek temple is, I believe, still in the garden. It was always a disappointment to me that we had not been able to get the Major out of the bank by Bel Esprit alone, as in my dreams I had pictured him as coming, perhaps, to live in the small Greek temple and that maybe I could go with Ezra when we would drop in to crown him with laurel. I knew where there was fine laurel that I could ride out and get on my bicycle and I thought we could crown him any time he felt lonesome or any time Ezra had gone over the manuscript or the proofs of another big poem like The Waste Land. The whole thing turned out badly for me morally, as so many things have, because the money that I had earmarked for getting the Major out of the bank I took out to Enghien and bet on jumping horses that raced under the influence of stimulants. At two meetings the stimulated horses that I was backing outraced the unstimulated or insufficiently stimulated beasts except for one race in which our fancy had been overstimulated to such a point that before the start he threw his jockey and breaking away completed a full circuit of the steeplechase course jumping beautifully by himself the way one can sometimes jump in dreams. Caught up and remounted he started the race and figured honorably, as the French racing phrase has it, but was out of the money.
I would have been happier if the amount of the wager had gone to Bel Esprit which was no longer existent. But I comforted myself that with those wagers which had prospered I could have contributed much more to Bel Esprit than was my original intention. It turned out all right though as we used the money to go to Spain.
On Writing in the First Person
When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader's experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do.
What is, if not easy, almost always possible to do is for members of the private detective school of literary criticism to prove that the writer of fiction written in the first person could not possibly have done everything that the narrator did or, perhaps, not even any of it. What importance this has or what it proves except that the writer is not devoid of imagination or the power of invention I have never understood.
In the early days writing in Paris I would invent not only from my own experience but from the experiences and knowledge of my friends and all the people I had known, or met since I could remember, who were not writers. I was very lucky always that my best friends were not writers and to have known many intelligent people who were articulate. In Italy when I was at the war there, for one thing that I had seen or that had happened to me, I knew many hundreds of things that had happened to other people who had been in the war in all of its phases. My own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password. After the war I spent much time in the 19th Ward and other Italian quarters in Chicago with an Italian friend I had made while in hospital in Milano. He was a young officer then and had been severely wounded many times. He had gone from Seattle, I think, to Italy to visit family there and had volunteered when Italy came into the war. We were very good friends and he was a wonderful storyteller.
In Italy too I had known many people in the British army and in their ambulance service. Much that I later invented from in writing I learned from them. My best friend for many years was a young British professional soldier who had gone from Sandhurst to Mons in 1914 and who had served with troops until the end of the war in 1918.
Secret Pleasures
As long as I did newspaper work and had to go to different parts of Europe on assignments it was necessary to have one presentable suit, go to the barber, and have one pair of respectable shoes. These were a liability when I was trying to write because they made it possible to leave your own side of the river and go over to the right bank to see your friends there, go to the races and do all the things that were fun that you could not afford or that got you into trouble. I found out very quickly that the best way to avoid going over to the right bank and get involved in all the pleasant things that I could not afford and that left me with, at least, gastric remorse was not to get a haircut. You could not go over to the right bank with your hair cut like one of those wonderful looking Japanese noblemen painters who were friends of Ezra's. That wo
uld have been ideal and would have limited you to your own side of the river completely and kept you working. You were never free of assignments long enough for that sort of mane to grow but in two months you would look like something left over from the American Civil War and unacceptable. After three months you would have a good start on the sort of hair cut Ezra's wonderful Japanese friends had and your right bank friends would think of you as damned. I never knew just what it was that you were supposed to be damned to but after four months or so you were considered damned to something worse. I enjoyed being considered damned and my wife and I enjoyed being considered damned together.
Sometimes I would run into foreign correspondents I knew when they were slumming in what they thought of as the Quarter and one would take me aside and talk to me seriously for my own good.
"You mustn't let yourself go, Hem. It's none of my business of course. But you can't go native this way. For God's sake straighten out and get a proper haircut at least."
Then if I was ordered to some conference or to Germany or the Near East I would have to get a haircut and wear my one passable suit and my good English shoes and sooner or later I would meet the man who had straightened me out and he'd say, "You're looking fit old boy. Dropped that bohemian nonsense I see. What are you up to tonight? There is a very good place, absolutely special, up beyond Taxim's."
People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was. They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world.
A Moveable Feast Page 15