*
McAlmon spent the autumn and winter of 1922 in Italy, and was on his way back to Paris in February 1923 when he called in at Rapallo, vaguely expecting to see Ezra Pound, and found instead Mike Strater and Ernest Hemingway. He had never heard of Hemingway.
He liked Strater immediately, ‘a direct young American’. Hemingway aroused more ambiguous feelings: ‘He was a type outside my experience.’ McAlmon particularly noted the ‘small-boy, tough-guy swagger’ put on for strangers. As Hemingway approached a café where McAlmon and others were sitting he would prance about, sparring at imaginary opponents, his lips moving as he called their bluff. McAlmon also guessed that his war reminiscences were largely sham. He guyed them in a short story, ‘Three Generations of the Same’, in which the narrator meets
Bob Goff, who was ornately groomed, with brilliantined hair smoothed carefully upon a head tending to fleshiness in the back. He worked his smile extensively to show even and tiny cut white teeth. He was smooth with the suavity begot of tailoring establishments, and barber-shop treatments.
‘Bob, show Carl that skull of a German you got when you were at the battlefront,’ Billy requested, wanting to make his friend appear impressive.
Goff took down a skull nonchalantly, saying, ‘There – not a bad one. Of course I got more than one Hun, but I couldn’t take a trunkload of skulls back with me, could I? But I’ve forgotten all that now – don’t even know where my medals are.’
McAlmon liked Hemingway enough, however, to agree to go with him on a trip to Spain in May 1923, three months after they had first met. The idea was to see bullfighting at first hand – it was Hemingway’s first experience of Spain and the country’s national sport. They went by train from Paris, and during the journey they drew up opposite a goods wagon on which lay the maggot-eaten corpse of a dog. McAlmon wrinkled his nose and turned away, whereupon Hemingway began a lecture on the necessity of ‘facing reality’, holding forth about how he had seen decayed corpses of men stacked up during the First World War. As it happened, McAlmon, during his barge-dwelling days in New York Harbour, had seen his own share of dead dogs, cats, and men, floating on the tide. He left Hemingway in the compartment and went to the dining car to order whisky.
During the trip, Hemingway made some notes on McAlmon’s personality:
27 years old … ridden horses on farm as a boy. Took flask of brandy to his first bullfight – took several drinks at ring – when bull charged picador and hit horse … gave sudden screeching intake of breath – took drink of brandy – repeated this on each encounter between bull and horse. Seemed to be in search of strong sensations. Doubted genuineness of my enthusiasm for bullfights. Declared it was a pose. He felt no enthusiasm and declared no one else could … Amusements and occupation drinking, night life and gossip.
In turn, McAlmon noticed how, after this first experience of bullfighting, Hemingway substituted shadow-bullfighting for shadow-boxing, and went in for imaginary cape-work and sword-thrusts.
Sylvia Beach says that Joyce observed to her that it was a mistake Hemingway thinking himself such a tough fellow and McAlmon trying to pass himself off as the sensitive writer: it was the other way round.
*
McAlmon was told about Hemingway’s loss of his manuscripts, and asked to see the two pieces that had survived. To these, Hemingway could now add another story, ‘Out of Season’, which portrayed himself and Hadley on holiday in the Dolomites having an argument while being taken trout-fishing by a drunken villager. Now that he had put his own short stories into print, McAlmon had decided to publish other writers under the name of Contact Editions, with Darantière as his printer and Shakespeare and Company as the mailing address. (Ford Madox Ford afterwards described the enterprise, not altogether unfairly, as ‘a number of uglyish wads of printing called Contact Books’.) He announced that he wanted manuscripts that showed ‘individuality, intelligence, talent, a live sense of literature, and … the colour and timbre of authenticity’. Despite his reservations about Hemingway, he presumably found evidence of these qualities in his writing, since the first prospectus (summer 1923) of Contact Editions advertised a forthcoming and titleless book of ‘Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway’.
Publication by McAlmon was not necessarily an accolade; Ezra Pound once suggested that he had chosen to print the work of several ‘geniuses’ simply to show them up as fakes. But the other books in this first batch were respectable enough – the authors included Bryher, Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams – and the only objection might be to a lack of a coherent programme for publication; Sylvia Beach says she never quite understood what the ‘Contact movement’ was all about.
When the book was announced, Hemingway still had only three short stories to his name, ‘Up in Michigan’, ‘My Old Man’, and ‘Out of Season’. However, there were also his poems, already published in Poetry, so he told McAlmon the title would be Three Stories and Ten Poems.
Meanwhile, Pound and Bill Bird were still waiting for their own Hemingway book for the ‘Inquest’ series. Pound had recently persuaded the Little Review to publish some of Hemingway’s ‘true sentences’, short exercises in prose realism like those he had written about Paris a few months earlier, and it was now agreed that Hemingway should put a set of these pieces together for the ‘Inquest’ book.
Darantière sent proofs of Three Stories and Ten Poems at the beginning of August 1923. Hemingway was excited by the look of it, though he worried that it was so slender, and decided to have it fattened with blank pages at each end. He announced proudly to an old Chicago room-mate, with no more than his usual degree of exaggeration, that the book was being published by ‘the same gang that published Ulysses’.
5
Summer’s just started
Hemingway wrote to a friend from Paris on 24 June 1923: ‘Here summer’s just started.’ On Saturday night they had all been to five prize fights – himself, Hadley, Pound, Jane Heap of the Little Review, Mike Strater, and McAlmon. ‘Swell fights. Warm weather started since yesterday.’
There was much more than prize fighting on offer to those with cultural appetites. Margaret Anderson, co-editor of the Little Review, describes Parisian artistic life as it was then flourishing:
The Swedish Ballet gave nightly galas in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. Jean Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel was given for the first time … Groups of insurgent artists prayed for scandal, hissing, booing … After a ballet Satie and Picabia appeared on the stage in a motor car to acknowledge applause. They received enough hisses to please any Parisian. Stravinsky gave his Noces with the Ballets Russes … [with] a new curtain by Picasso – two running women a hundred times larger than life. Picasso sat in Diaghilev’s loge, determined to be seen without evening clothes. Braque threatened to hold up a performance – one of his greens had been tampered with … Satie was discovered in tears because his ballet (décor by Picasso) was applauded less than others … Man Ray was photographing pins and combs, sieves and shoe-trees. Fernand Léger was beginning his cubist cinema, Ballet Mécanique, with music by Antheil. The Boeuf-sur-le-Toit (named by Cocteau) had a negro saxophonist, and Milhaud and Jean Wiener were beginning their worship of American jazz … The Dadaists gave performances at the Théâtre Michel where the rioting was so successful that André Breton broke Tzara’s arm.
Margaret Anderson is conflating several years, but her account gives the flavour of the times. Some of the events she mentions involved the Cubists, whose work had seemed so revolutionary before the First World War but who now appeared to the younger generation as somewhat ‘establishment’ figures. In l9l7 Picasso had provided the décor for Parade, a ballet about a group of music-hall artistes, with music by Erik Satie; this had caused a storm at its première, but by 1923 it seemed slightly passé and (to Satie’s distress) received little attention when it was revived. Picasso was now providing drop curtains for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes during their Paris seasons (the two running women were seen not at Str
avinsky’s Les Noces, premièred in June 1923, but in Le Train Bleu (1924) with music by Darius Milhaud), and another Cubist, Georges Braque, was designing ballets for Diaghilev. By 1923 the ‘revolutionary’ mantle had passed to the Dadaists, whose aim was to attack the bourgeois element in art. The painter Francis Picabia, a Cubist-turned-Dadaist, provided Satie with a libretto and décor for a ballet entitled Relâche, premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1924. Picabia describes this Dadaist entertainment as depicting
life as I like it; life without a morrow, the life of to-day, everything for to-day, nothing for yesterday, nothing for to-morrow. Motor headlights, pearl necklaces, the rounded and slender forms of women, publicity, music, motor-cars, men in evening dress, movement, noise, play, clear and transparent water, the pleasure of laughter, that is Relâche …
The Dadaists had already split into two warring factions. At the Théâtre Saint-Michel on 6 July 1923 they staged a ‘manifestation’ for which the American painter-photographer Man Ray had provided a three-minute film, The Return to Reason, but it came to pieces in the projector and plunged the auditorium into darkness, whereupon a fight began between André Breton, leader of one group, and his rival Tristan Tzara. As was usual at Dadaist events, the police had to be called.
On the fringe of the Dadaist group but commanding his own followers and audience was Jean Cocteau, who had been presenting ‘revolutionary’ material to the public before Dada had appeared in Paris – he was the librettist of Satie’s Parade in 1917. When his entertainment Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel was premièred at the Champs-Elysées theatre by the Swedish Ballet in June 1921, with music by the group of composers known as Les Six, the Dadaists tried to break up the performance by heckling, though the Cocteau work was itself ‘insurgent’: it depicted a farcical petit-bourgeois wedding party in a restaurant on the Eiffel Tower. The Cocteau group had its headquarters at a nightclub near the Madeleine, named Le Boeuf-sur-le-Toit after the ballet with libretto by Cocteau and music by Milhaud (one of Les Six) first performed in 1920. Milhaud and his musician friend Jean Wiener, often to be found at the piano at Le Boeuf along with an American saxophonist, were taking a close interest in jazz.
Man Ray was the only American to participate fully in these activities. Born Emanuel Rabinovitch in Philadelphia, he had established a New York Dada group with Marcel Duchamp before coming to Paris in 1921. Originally a painter, he was now making experiments in photography – his Rayographs, made in his Montparnasse hotel room, were images of miscellaneous objects placed on the photographic paper which was then exposed directly to the light. Ray’s work inspired the ‘Cubist cinema’ of Fernand Léger, culminating in Léger’s 1926 film Ballet Mécanique with music by George Antheil, a young American protégé of Ezra Pound whose score called for such curious instruments as aeroplane propellers.
Pound bridged the gap in his own way between American and French writers and artists in Paris. He had been coming to Paris regularly since before the First World War, had met survivors of the Symbolists and mingled with older French writers at Natalie Barney’s salon. He now took a paternalistic interest in the activities of the Dadaists and the Cocteau group (he once reduced Cocteau to helpless giggles by performing his opera single-handed). But on the whole the American crowd went its own way. Many of its members spoke not a word of French, and while a few young American writers had studied French literature and did their best to discover what was going on in French cultural circles, they were the exception. Certainly Hemingway and McAlmon – to mention only two – took not the slightest interest in the events described by Margaret Anderson.
*
‘The influx of expatriates,’ writes McAlmon of the early 1920s, ‘had begun before this, but now they hung out in Montparnasse at the Dôme and the Rotonde.’ During his own first few months in Paris, McAlmon, like Hemingway, had tended to frequent cafés in the St Germain-St Michel area of the Left Bank, the centre of the Latin Quarter next to the Sorbonne. He was ‘hardly aware of Montparnasse’, and Sylvia Beach informed him it was ‘ghastly’. But Sylvia, whose bookshop was just off the Boulevard St Germain, hardly ever went there; and by 1923 the group of cafés at the intersection of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail, just by the entrance to Métro station Vavin, had become the heartland of Left Bank artistic expatriate life. McAlmon was among many who shifted their headquarters there.
The ‘mountain’ from which Montparnasse originally took its name was simply a grass-covered heap of rubble from an old quarry on the edge of the city. During the seventeenth century, students from the Latin Quarter, who would come out there for some fresh air, sarcastically nicknamed the place Mount Parnassus. As the city expanded the stone-heap disappeared and the area became a pleasure quarter of cafés, cabarets, and dance halls. At the end of the nineteenth century writers and painters began to move there because Montmartre, their traditional home in the north of the city, was becoming increasingly tourist-ridden. Alfred Jarry and ‘Douanier’ Rousseau were among the first arrivals, and Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, and Guillaume Apollinaire – the man who coined the word ‘Cubism’ – soon followed. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Apollinaire could say that Montparnasse had become ‘for painters and poets what Montmartre was fifteen years ago’.
Marcel Duchamp, one of the pioneers of Dadaism, observes that the place felt ‘superior’ to Montmartre, Greenwich Village or Chelsea, because unlike them it was not populated largely by art students, but was full of established painters, and so seemed ‘more mature’. One of the last significant arrivals was Picasso, who moved his studio down from Montmartre to a street overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery just before the First World War. But he made less impression on Montparnassians than did the usually penniless Modigliani, who could be found wandering around the café tables offering his work for sale. The English painter Nina Hamnett describes him carrying pictures in a roll of newspaper and calling mournfully: ‘Je suis Modigliani, Juif, Jew.’ His paintings cost 5 francs each. When he died of tubercular meningitis in 1920, says Hamnett, ‘telegrams were sent to London to put up the prices of his pictures’.
For a while Montparnasse had also become a meeting place for political exiles. During the First World War, Trotsky had been seen there selling newspapers on the street and eating free of charge at a canteen run for starving artists by a Cubist painter, Marie Wassiliev. Lenin, too, lived in the quarter from 1909 to 1912 and could be found on the terrace of the Dôme. But by 1920 pride of place there was taken by a ‘painters’ table’, with Georges Braque and André Derain among the regulars, and Matisse and Picasso occasionally dropping by. So well established was Montparnasse as the domicile of Parisian artists that the custom had grown up of referring to it casually as ‘the Quarter’, a title properly belonging to the true Latin Quarter.
The presence of the French painters and writers soon attracted Americans to Montparnasse, and the Americans attracted more Americans. In the early 1920s the plain little cafés and bistros began to disappear from Boulevard du Montparnasse and its side-streets, to be replaced by more ambitious establishments competing for the new arrivals’ money. Harold Stearns, one of the American inhabitants of Montparnasse, recalls how as late as 1921 the Dôme itself was ‘just an old fashioned corner bistro, with César still puttering around and never giving you the drinks you ordered’, while on the other side of the street the Rotonde was ‘small and dirty and historical (Trotsky used to go there in the old days)’; the Dingo was ‘a tiny workmen’s café’, and the others did not exist. Jimmie Charters, who came to Montparnasse to work as a barman, similarly describes how ‘the year before I went to the Dingo it had been but a small bistro, a regular workman’s café, without even a name, or at least no name that anyone remembers’. Then around 1923 the Dingo, at 10 rue Delambre, just round the corner from the Dôme, was taken over by a Frenchman who named it, redecorated it, and installed a cocktail bar and an English interpreter. The American crowd discovered it and soon there was rarely a free
table. The proprietor, with his big moustaches and goatee, was immediately christened Old Man Dingo. ‘He spoke not one word of English,’ says Jimmie Charters, ‘and 90 per cent of his clients spoke no French. He was making money faster than he had ever dreamed.’
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes the sudden Americanisation of the old Closerie des Lilas, a couple of hundred yards up the road from the Dôme, which until the 1920s had remained virtually unchanged since the days of Mürger – its name came from the lilac bushes that decorated it: ‘They’re changing the management,’ [Evan] Shipman said. ‘The new owners want to have a different clientele that will spend some money and they are going to put in an American bar. The waiters are going to be in white jackets, Hem, and they have been ordered to be ready to shave off their moustaches.’ During 1923 the Rotonde, opposite the Dôme, and, like it, taking its name from the rotunda on its roof, took over the café next door, redecorated itself, installed a jazz band upstairs, and tripled the price of drinks. The next year the Dôme had its walls repapered in Jazz-Age style. The model Kiki complained: ‘It is too bad the little wine-shops where one used to be able to get so nice a meal have all disappeared.’
Places became fashionable overnight, and not just in Montparnasse. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton eat at ‘Madame Lecomte’s restaurant’ on the Île St Louis:* ‘It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Someone had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.’ In Montparnasse only the Café Sélect, almost next door to the Rotonde, remained comparatively unspoilt. Though adorned in the latest manner it was in the charge of old-style proprietors, described here by John Glassco:
Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 12