Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412)

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  Nina recalled the quatorze Juillet celebrations of pre-First World War Montparnasse as something of a golden age, simpler in its pleasures than the Bastille nights of the 1920s:

  I went to the Avenue du Maine and bought a pair of French workmen’s peg-top trousers. I borrowed a blue jersey and a corduroy coat from Modigliani and a check cap. I also bought a large butcher’s knife made of cardboard and silver paper at the Bon Marché … I dressed myself up and went out alone. I met Modigliani at the corner of the rue Delambre and the Boulevard Montparnasse. He did not recognise me and when I produced the knife he ran away. I went to the Rotonde, and the waiters did not know me, and to a fair outside the Closerie des Lilas. I returned to the Rotonde and we danced in the streets all night and kept it up for three days … After a time Modigliani decided to undress … Everyone knew exactly when he was going to undress, as he usually attempted to after a certain hour. We seized him … and sat him down.

  It is a little surprising that McAlmon ran across her in Bricktop’s. She scarcely ever set foot in Montmartre – ‘I did not like the atmosphere … or the people’ – though she would describe how, long ago, she had visited the Moulin Rouge and watched ‘elderly ladies in long skirts doing the can-can’; they looked like the very dancers Toulouse-Lautrec had painted, ‘grown considerably older’.

  According to Jimmie Charters, Nina knew everyone. ‘It became rather a joke at the Dingo, for the telephone would ring constantly for Nina, and the waiter would announce in a loud voice that the Prince of something or the Count of something else wished to speak to Miss Hamnett.’ She was greatly admired by Joyce – he ‘said I was one of the few vital women that he had ever met. I don’t know if that is true, but I have very big lungs and can make a great deal of noise if encouraged.’

  At Bricktop’s, continues McAlmon, ‘we didn’t ask each other’s names’, and on this July evening in 1923 ‘I sat for an hour at Beatrice Lillie’s table, and didn’t know it until Brick told me who she was, after she had gone’. The club had an all-black jazz band, and McAlmon listened while Buddy the trap-drummer played and sang Cole Porter’s ‘I’m In Love’. The piano-player was ‘a high-yellow boy who played classical music as well as jazz. He complained mildly to me that if he were of my race he’d be a famous concert pianist, but as it was he didn’t have a chance.’

  Jimmie Charters says that one day at the Dingo, a Negro came to see the cook and went in through the bar, whereupon most of the American clients got up and walked out in protest. At French-owned nightclubs, black American musicians were commonly found, but some places with American proprietors preferred to have white bands or pianists. At the Jockey in Montparnasse could be found Les Copeland, an old-time pianist and singer from the Gold Rush saloons of the West, who, says Jimmie, had ‘hoboed his way through every State in the Union … riding the rods’, and ‘always had about him that aura of “see what the boys in the back room will have”’. He claimed to have known the original Frankie and Johnnie, and was deeply contemptuous of the rising tide of jazz, complaining that ‘all a performer was required to do today was to play the ukelele in three lessons and boop-oop-a-doop through the adenoids’.

  College orchestras from Yale and Harvard soon began to appear in Montparnasse, introducing the Charleston. Frederic Kohner describes the arrival of this dance at the Jockey, with Kiki and her partner giving a ‘furious performance’ in the midst of an admiring circle.

  On his visit to Bricktop’s with McAlmon, John Glassco listened as Bricktop herself began her act:

  Her voice, small but beautifully true, tracing a vague pattern between song and speech, fitting itself to the sprung rhythms of a piano played by an old and dilapidated Negro, seemed to compose all by itself a sentiment at once nostalgic and fleeting … The melody, something banal by Berlin or Porter, was transformed and carried into a region where the heard became the overheard.

  The polite ripple of applause seemed suddenly to infuriate McAlmon. ‘These bastards don’t know what it’s all about. Balls, balls!’ he yelled. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, did you know you were dead?’ Someone began to laugh with embarrassment, and McAlmon got up and bowed gracefully at the audience. ‘You, my friends, have the luck to be listening to an old-fashioned sot. And if there are any Canadians among you’ – this was a dig at Glassco, who came from Montreal – ‘let me say that I hate all Canadians, only not quite so much as yanks and limeys. Down with the maple leaf! Bugger the American eagle!’

  Bricktop slid up to McAlmon, and Glassco heard her mutter: ‘Now, Bob. Please, Bob, you keep this clean.’ But there was no stopping him. He downed a fresh drink and stood up again: ‘I’m going to sing! This is an aria from my Chinese opera.’ He raised his arms, opened his mouth wide, and began what Glassco calls

  a hideous, wordless toneless screaming. The effect was both absurd and painful; a dead silence fell over the room. Reeling against his stool, his head raised to the ceiling like a dog, yowling, he suddenly seemed to be no longer a drunken nuisance but a man who had gone mad; he was, I thought, actually either out of his mind or trying to become so. Suddenly he turned white, staggered, looked around wildly, and fell back into the arms of the big dinner-coated Negro who had appeared at the bar. ‘Gentlemen, you give me a hand with Mistah Bob, huh?’ said the bouncer jovially.

  Even then it was not the alcohol to which McAlmon had succumbed. Bricktop had slipped ‘a little quietener’, a Mickey Finn, into his drink.

  *

  On Bastille Day 1923 by 7 a.m. most of the other customers at Bricktop’s had gone home, but McAlmon was still there, lingering with Nina Hamnett, Sylvia Gough, and Flossie Martin. Black musicians came in from other orchestras about town, and two tap dancers stood at the bar arguing about technique. Presently the young black pianist who had talked to McAlmon, Leon Crutcher, left the bar and McAlmon saw him outside talking to a French girl. Bricktop looked worried. ‘She said the French girl was ruining a good man, the best pianist she’d ever had.’ She told McAlmon she wanted to close the place, ‘so a throng of us went on to the Capitol for food’.

  At the Capitol there was a brawl going on between a waiter and a crippled Englishman with a swordstick. McAlmon made to throw a champagne bottle at the Englishman, but Sylvia ‘held my arms down’. He and the others had just finished their steaks when ‘Bricktop came into the place, a grim, frightened look on her face. She was carrying a huge bouquet of flowers. “Knock on wood,” she said hoarsely. “Crutcher’s shot dead. The best musician in Paris … He was fighting with that French chippy outside my place … They went home and she threatened to shoot him if he cut up with other women. He asked her how about with other men, and when she pointed a gun at him he dared her to shoot. She shot …”’ There were a number of other Negro musicians from Zelli’s and the Palermo eating in the Capitol, and when they heard what had happened they began to look anxious, for several had white mistresses, and, says McAlmon, ‘they agreed among themselves that the French girl would not be sentenced’.

  McAlmon paid the bill and decided to head off by himself for Les Halles, the central markets, ‘hoping to run into somebody I knew or to pick up some strangers’. Sure enough he encountered Hilaire Hiler and his friend Wynn Holcomb. Hiler, a painter, had redecorated and taken over the running of the Jockey Club, just down the street from the Dôme, on the corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse and rue Campagne Première. Kiki describes the club – named after its former owner ‘Jockey’ Miller – as ‘the rage, the one big-time attraction of the Quarter’. Frederic Kohner writes that ‘the most remarkable thing … was its compactness. I had never seen so many human beings packed into such a minuscule area. There were long tables placed against the wall … and over a miniature floor space, dancers seemed to have achieved a plastic unity. A thick cloud of smoke and amiability hung over the scene.’

  Hiler himself sometimes played the piano in the club, accompanying Kiki’s torch songs; she calls him ‘some player’, and describes him as ‘a guy who doesn’t show his ha
nd. He puts on a far-away look to help him get by, and hides behind his big ears.’ Jimmie Charters says he looked rather like Oscar Wilde; McAlmon calls him ‘a handsome frog: dark and sorrowful, with brooding eyes, a big mouth’.

  Jimmie tells the story of Hiler finding that Finnety, the inseparable lawyer of Goodman the songwriter, was trying to poison himself in the washroom at the Jockey. Hiler got a stomach pump, saved him, and told him not to do it again. Finnety said he was suffering from a terrible bone disease and had to kill himself. ‘Well,’ said Hiler, ‘the next time go somewhere else.’ Finnety asked where. Hiler answered thoughtfully: ‘The Dôme is my big rival, you know.’ The next day Finnety was found dead in the washroom of the Dôme.

  Running into Hiler and his friend on his way to Les Halles, McAlmon stopped with them at a bistro. ‘We were all drinking cognac when Kenneth Adams discovered us, and he too was intent upon going to the markets. Hilaire and Wynn had other plans, so we separated.’

  Les Halles was the traditional place to end an all-night binge, with a bowl of onion soup at one of the market cafés. ‘It was a mistily glistening morning,’ writes McAlmon, ‘the dazzle seemed to splinter before our befuddled eyes. We knew we were too late for the great show of meats, vegetables, and flowers, but as we walked we spoke … of how Brueghel painted fishes, game, meats, and common, low-down people … At every bistro we stopped to have another cognac … “What’s a guy to say?” Kenneth was saying again. He had constipation of the vocabulary … “What’s a guy to say?” “Just that, or nothing. Damn the sayers and the knowers. They are lousy bastards generally.” “Yep, they don’t drink. They keep early hours. Early to bed and earl to rise. And you never meet the regular guys. Hell, Ben Franklin was an old pirate. A whorehound. But he drank. He was a regular guy.”’

  The market workers were busy cleaning up the debris and closing their stalls. McAlmon and Adams bought a mass of flowers from an old woman, because she ‘was very good-natured and said she wanted to get rid of her stock’. They thought of taking a taxi and presenting the flowers to some lady-friend, but then they encountered three further old women sitting on sacks, and Adams gave all his flowers to one of them who had no teeth. ‘The women laughed heartily and complimented us for being young and happy and si beau. They insisted that we each accept bundles of their vegetables in return … So we left carrying radishes, carrots, and onions, and they also were a problem to dispose of.’ Nina Hamnett says people were always coming back to the Dôme from a drunken breakfast at Les Halles, laden with vegetables: ‘One day someone arrived back with a sack of potatoes.’

  Walking down the market street with their burden, McAlmon and Adams were hailed by a couple of poules. ‘One of them had no middle to her nose; the other was quite passable-looking … We agreed to buy them coffee and croissants, while we had soupe à l’oignon.’ The girls suggested McAlmon and Adams go home with them, ‘and mentioned prices, beginning at thirty francs and coming down to five, since the gentlemen were so charming. We thanked them and suggested another morning, as this was a gala day and we had other appointments. Instead, would they accept the vegetables? They did, for the vegetables would make a soup. We bade them goodbye.’

  It was past ten in the morning when McAlmon got back to the Dôme, whence he had set out about fourteen hours previously. A few elderly women were having their morning coffee, but most of the Quarterites were still in bed, if they had gone there at all. McAlmon and Adams ordered ‘a cooling demi-blonde’, but then McAlmon, making a trip to the washroom, discovered that Flossie Martin was asleep at one of the inside tables. ‘I became wise and grabbed a taxi, knowing that Flossie would waken and descend upon us all, insisting upon drink and more drink.’ Not that McAlmon had decided to go to bed. He told himself: ‘There’s a Paris full of people I have to have a drink with yet.

  *

  ‘The quarter is sort of more a state of mind than a geographical area,’ Hemingway writes in a passage rejected from the final text of The Sun Also Rises. ‘Perfectly good Quarterites live outside the actual boundaries of Montparnasse.’ This state of mind, he goes on,

  is principally contempt. Those who work have the greatest contempt for those who don’t. The loafers are leading their own lives and it is bad form to mention work. Young painters have contempt for old painters, and that works both ways too. There are contemptuous critics and contemptuous writers. Everybody seems to dislike everyone else. The only happy people are the drunks, and they, after flaming for a period of days or weeks, eventually become depressed. … The Scandinavians are the regular, hard-working residents.

  T. S. Eliot, discussing the Paris bohemian life in a 1921 letter to McAlmon, judged it with similar harshness, declaring it to be ‘such a strong stimulus’ that it ‘incites to rushing about and produces a pleasant illusion of great mental activity rather than the solid results of hard work’. Eliot concluded: ‘If I came to Paris the first thing to do would be to cut myself off from it, and not depend upon it.’ William Carlos Williams alleges that, when briefly in Paris in the mid-1920s, Eliot once appeared ‘at the Dôme and other bars in top hat, cutaway, and striped trousers. It was intended as a gesture of contempt and received as just that.’ McAlmon asks: ‘Is Eliot afraid of the interchange of relationships, with their attractions and antagonisms and experiences?’

  Rex, the poet hero of The Façade, takes the opposite attitude to Eliot and finds the Montparnasse life positively conducive to work:

  The writing of poetry seems to demand a particular sort of freedom from the trammels of a conventional existence, and this freedom, whatever its detractors may say, the Quarter undoubtedly provides. Any eccentricity of mood, any whim, could be easily humoured. If he felt sleepy at ten and went to bed, only to wake up at two in the morning, nothing was easier than to dress, leave his hotel, and continue talking to friends whom he had last seen at the hour of the apéritif. If he had one of those sudden cravings for excess which seem to afflict nearly all poets at different periods of their creative lives, nothing was simpler than to gratify it.

  John Glassco probably comes nearest to a fair judgement on the Quarter when he says that its life did not deserve to be treated merely as a distraction from or background to the serious business of work; it was an end in itself. And did the work really matter? After a few weeks in Montparnasse, Glassco

  began to feel that if I could only get rid of my itch for writing I might be quite happy. What, after all, was the use of tormenting oneself by putting words on paper, endlessly arranging and re-arranging them, and then, having at last accepted their inherent failure to say more than one-quarter of what they were meant to, of typing fair copies and hawking the work around to one editor after another until they were printed and perhaps read, if at all, by a few dozen people all busy doing the same thing? One might end up like Bob McAlmon, screaming with frustration in a nightclub.

  Perhaps the truly ‘productive’ and ‘creative’ Montparnassians were the people who did not bother to work at all, but trained themselves to be artists at pleasure-seeking.† Certainly the Quarter could easily become a total raison d’être, a complete way of life. ‘Montparnasse!’ writes Kiki. ‘You get into it you don’t know just how, but getting out again is not so easy! There are people who have got off by accident at the Vavin Métro station, and who have never left the district again, have stayed there all their lives.’

  * Probably the restaurant on the Quai de Bourbon now named Au Pont Marie.

  †The women – many of whom had no literary ambitions – seemed to manage this more easily than the men. Several people have observed that it was they who dominated the Quarter. William Carlos Williams, though only an occasional visitor there, noticed this: ‘The men merely served as their counterfoils.’

  Interlude: The oldest country in the world

  The man who socked the Rotonde patron on the jaw, Malcolm Cowley, was, in McAlmon’s eyes, just one of the crowd in Montparnasse that summer. With hindsight, Cowley stands out from the flock of e
xpatriates, since he, almost alone among them, became profoundly interested in his generation’s motives for this mass exile to Paris. He eventually wrote a book largely devoted to analysing them, Exile’s Return, in which his punching of the café proprietor features at some length, since he regarded it as emblematic of what had happened to him since he arrived in Paris in 1921.

  In general, though, Cowley prefers to theorise rather than reminisce. Even the opening of his narrative, describing childhood, portrays the typical experience of his generation – that born between 1891 and 1905 – rather than specifically recalling Cowley’s own young days in Pennsylvania:

  Somewhere the turn of a dirt road or the unexpected crest of a hill reveals your own childhood … The scattered comfortable houses, the flat cornfield along the creek, the hillside pastures where the whitetop bends in alternate waves of cream white and leaf green. The Schoharie Valley in August – or perhaps what we find is an Appalachian parade of mountains rank on rank … Perhaps our boyhood is a stream in northern Michigan … Perhaps we remember a fat farm in Wisconsin, or a Nebraska prairie, or a plantation house among the canebrakes. Wherever it lies, the country is our own … and retains our loyalty even when casting us into exile; we carry its image from city to city as our most essential baggage.

  Malcolm Cowley was born in a farmhouse on the western slopes of the Alleghenies. Boyhood summers were spent there, but his father was a doctor in Pittsburgh, and he attended high school in the city. His school was, he says,