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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

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  From the general discontent among young American intellectuals, one idea began to surface: ‘They do things better in Europe; let’s go there.’ This is how Malcolm Cowley puts it; similarly the hero of McAlmon’s Post-Adolescence longs to be ‘in a place where there was color and music that caught him up’. Civilization in the United States proposed no single practical remedy for the malaise it believed it had diagnosed, but Harold Stearns knew what he should do. In the summer of 1921 he delivered the completed book to the publisher and then sailed for Europe. He chose his date of embarkation deliberately: the Fourth of July.

  ‘Reporters,’ writes Malcolm Cowley, ‘came to the gangplank to jot down his last words. Everywhere young men were preparing to follow his example … “I’m going to Paris,” they said … “I’ll meet you on the Left Bank. I’ll drink your health in good red Burgundy, I’ll kiss all the girls for you. I’m sick of this country. I’m going abroad to write one good novel.”’

  A few who set off had plenty of cash at their disposal. McAlmon had Bryher’s allowance; E. E. Cummings, who had left for Europe four months before Stearns sailed, was being supported by his father. Most were not so fortunate, but even if an intending writer’s family could not pay for him there were ways of acquiring money: it could be borrowed from friends, raised from hopeful publishers as an advance on an unwritten book, cadged from newspapers that were interested in reports from Europe, or begged from official institutions. Cowley himself came over during 1921 on an American Field Service Fellowship for study at a French university:

  It was only twelve thousand francs, or about a thousand dollars at that year’s rate of exchange, but it also entitled my wife and me to a reduction of fifty per cent in our cabin-class steamship fares. We planned to live as economically as a French couple, and we did. With the help of a few small checks from American magazines, the fellowship kept us in modest comfort, even permitting us to travel, and it was renewed the following year.

  In Paris, apartments and studios were not hard to find on the grapevine. John Glassco and a friend, arriving from Canada on a cattle boat, were lent one by two girls who were going into the country for the summer. It was typical of what the expatriates could afford: there was no electricity, only a cold-water tap, and the roof leaked. Everything in it belonged to different people – most of the furniture to Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent of the New Yorker; the curtains to an abortionist, Dr Maloney; and the beds to a mysterious man named Boomhower. ‘We never knew who owned the lease, and merely paid the rent to the concierge, an old woman called Madame Hernie who lived across the street and spent all her time illuminating the entries in a folio-sized album devoted to the records of her family funerals.’

  Though rudimentary, the apartment had great attractions – again typical. There was a big skylight and a tall window filling one wall, while outside, the moonlight would shine on a group of unfinished abandoned statues left by some former sculptor-tenant. ‘The smell of some flowering shrub is coming in through the long window,’ wrote Glassco in his journal, ‘and there’s a bird singing somewhere in the walled garden of the Ursuline Convent …’ Afterwards, Glassco recalled the apartment with great nostalgia:

  It was here that I tried seriously to write for the first time, here I brought my two or three girls, and here I met the woman with whom I at last fell in love and whom, however miserable the outcome of that love, I shall always remember in this setting as she undressed one night in a luminous haze of gaslight and moonbeams before we threw ourselves in ecstasy on one of Mr Boomhower’s straw-stuffed beds. It was the theatre of my youth.

  For those who could not afford apartments or be bothered to look after themselves, hotel rooms were available at the very cheapest prices, while the quality of Parisian bread and vin ordinaire made it possible to live delectably on virtually nothing. For the reasonably affluent, bistros and workmen’s restaurants offered more than adequate meals for a few centimes, while each charcuterie and fromagerie displayed modestly priced wares that would have shamed the produce of a New York delicatessen. A few expatriates set up home in some style – the Hemingways, though they were far from rich, could afford a maid who came in twice a day and cooked their evening meal – but most, like McAlmon, perched in hotel rooms and ate in cafés. Transport was an easy matter: taxis were plentiful and cheap and drove at breakneck speed, while the Métro, with its stations at almost every major road intersection, made it possible to flit about the city for a small coin or two. Not only did Paris offer these delights: it offered them at all hours, never shutting down, and reaching a peak of gaiety around midnight. For those in flight from the Prohibition-ridden USA, it was scarcely believable.

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  Paris was not the only European city with these advantages: they could be found in some measure in Vienna, Venice, Rome, or Berlin, and some American expatriate would-be writers roosted there; but most came to Paris because Americans had always come to Paris, because James Joyce and Gertrude Stein were holding court there, and because Paris could offer a particular blend of metropolitan excitement and almost rural idyll that no other European city could quite achieve.

  Sherwood Anderson, arriving there in the summer of 1921 wrote in his notebook of the ‘special kind of pearly clearness’ of the sky, the ‘soft floating clouds and the fresh flowers for sale at marvellously low prices on every street corner’, and observed of life on the Seine quais that there was ‘something quiet, pastoral’ about it: ‘What a contrast to the dark black shores of the rivers that flow thro our American cities’. John Glassco, who had been brought up in Montreal, responded with even more excitement: ‘For the first time I can feel the movement of my thoughts, the pulse of my youth – as you’re supposed to at eighteen. I’m lucky to be here, in this city that I love more and more every day.’

  Anderson was constantly struck by the nearness of Parisian life to the country: ‘Wagon loads of hay go thro the streets, peasants from the country are driving in in carts, the vegetables and fruits are peculiarly fresh and delicious. The morning dew is still on these berries now for sale from a little wheeled cart under my window.’ In the rue de la Glacière, near his apartment, Glassco ‘met a man with a flock of goats, playing a little pipe to announce he was selling milk from the udder’. Hemingway saw the same thing outside his door in the rue du Cardinal Lemoine: a goatherd leading his flock down from Place de la Contrescarpe and householders coming out with pots into which the animals were milked.

  Even the taxis were fun.

  Merely to ride downtown in an open taxi [writes Glassco], over the smooth streets paved with tarred wooden blocks was a great pleasure. Almost every morning we would take a dash through the Place de la Concorde, thrilling to the absence of traffic regulations and the wild blowing of horns, and then find our way back on foot to Montparnasse for breakfast at the Dôme or the Sélect.

  Most members of the expatriate community carefully avoided the tourist sights, and would only explore the back streets. Glassco and his friend spent sunny days wandering about the odd and obscure parts of Paris – the rue Mouffetard, the Place de la Contrescarpe, the little network of streets around the Place St Michel, the churches of Saint-Séverin and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. They became fascinated by the weird occupations and trades pursued by keepers of small shops in these back streets: producers of catskin waistcoats, fake antiques, glass eyes, curious musical instruments, woodworking machinery, martinets for punishing children. They ‘agreed to regard as out of bounds’ the Grand Boulevards, Passy, the Champs-Élysées, and Montmartre, ‘and we absolutely refused to enter the Louvre’.* Once, having made a mistake in the mazes of the Métro, ‘we surfaced at the Invalides and were so appalled by the sight of Napoleon’s tomb that we fled back down the steps’.

  In Civilization in the United States, Lewis Mumford had argued that the modern city encourages perpetual mobility and restlessness. Sherwood Anderson noted in contrast how very stable Paris life seemed: ‘Everyone is settled down here.
Men stay in the place to which fate has assigned them. A certain freedom of action and living is achieved … One never sees the tired discouraged faces so characteristic of the American city.’

  It was perhaps not ‘democratic’, not a society in which self-improvement and the attainment of riches were within the grasp of every citizen as they were supposed to be in the USA. But in some scarcely definable way the riches of Paris seemed every man’s property: ‘Even though a man is a waiter in a café under the shadow of the cathedral of Notre Dame,’ wrote Anderson, ‘he feels himself in some obscure way a part of the cathedral. Frenchmen built it. He is himself a Frenchman. He is a stockholder in the great company that is France.’

  Anderson reflected that the USA, made up of every race in the world, had become a home of racial intolerance. Paris, however, was truly cosmopolitan: ‘One often sees negroes dining in restaurants and walking about in the streets with their white sweethearts. The sight attracts no attention. In an American city it would cause a riot.’

  On a bridge over the Seine, Anderson watched a young working man with his girl: ‘They kissed oblivious to the thousands of people passing … One sees lovers everywhere going straight on being lovers without self consciousness.’ There was also a cheerful lack of conformity: ‘The American is afraid he will, in clothes, in manner of walking, in facial adornment, in the style of his hat, not quite conform to the accepted standards. He trembles lest someone stare at him in the street. With the Frenchman it is not so. It is his passion to be an individual sharply defined, to stand forth among men.’ When the American takes in this fact, continues Anderson, ‘a delightful sense of freedom is at once achieved. Deeply buried within yourself is some passion for display. You have in secret hungered to wear a green feather in your cap, to adorn yourself with a red sash, to wear long fierce looking mustachios.’ But the American sadly realises that there is no point in trying: ‘I am Anglo Saxon. The most humble Paris cab driver can outdo me without an effort.’

  Henry Miller reacted in the same way in 1930, noting with pleasure the gendarmes smoking on duty, the general nonconformity: ‘Here is the greatest congregation of bizarre types. People do dress as they please, wear beards if they like, and shave if they choose. You don’t feel that lifeless pressure of dull regimentation as in N.Y. and London.’

  Clarence Britten, writing on ‘School and College Life’ in Civilization in the United States, remarked on this American desire to be inconspicuous, the ‘universal desire to be alike … to put on straw hats the same day, to change your clothes in Texas in accordance with the seasons in New York, to read the books everybody else is reading, to adopt the opinions a weekly digests for you from the almost uniform opinions of the daily press, in war and peace to be incontestably and entirely American’. In This Side of Paradise Fitzgerald reflected on the same characteristic among Princeton undergraduates: ‘Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light was labelled with the damning brand of “running it out” … Standing for anything very strongly … was running it out; in short, being personally conspicuous was not tolerated, and the influential man was the non-committal man.’ Clarence Britten puzzled over the causes of the determination to conform; perhaps it was a substitute for ‘some natural background we lack but should like to have’. Whatever the root, it was a dangerous and alarming tendency, ‘for it masks our ignorance of what we are and what we may reasonably become’.

  Yet Sherwood Anderson was not altogether blind to the virtues of his fellow countrymen. He admitted that Americans were capable of ‘real humbleness and a strange kind of rather fine sensitiveness’, and a friend who was with him in Paris suggested that ‘Americans are like fine children, badly brought up’; by contrast, the French seemed ‘too alert, too sure of themselves. What have they found to make them so self satisfied? If Paris is beautiful, present day Frenchmen did not make it so.’

  Some Americans quickly realised that the European Dream was as false as the American. Malcolm Cowley wrote to a New York friend from France during 1923: ‘America is just as god-damned good as Europe – worse in some ways, better in others … New York is refinement itself besides Berlin. French taste in most details is unbearable. London is a huge Gopher Prairie. I’m not ashamed to take my coat off anywhere and tell these degenerate Europeans that I’m an American citizen.’ Cowley also says that many Americans, coming in search of a France where ‘poets had labored for days over a single stanza’, found instead among many French writers a greed for all things American, a hunger to be told about skyscrapers.

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  Though the rate of exchange was favourable in Paris, elsewhere in Europe it was often spectacular. Europe seemed to have lost all its old certainties; instead, it had prices that changed from country to country virtually from hour to hour. On Tuesday in Hamburg, says Cowley, you could order ‘a banquet for eight cents (or was it five?)’. On Thursday in Paris ‘you might buy twenty cigarettes for the price of a week’s lodging in Vienna’. Hemingway calculated that two people could live well and travel comfortably on $5 a day; in Germany he and Hadley had four days’ room and full board for 80 cents each. In Paris a hotel room for two people cost on average a dollar a night, and a good dinner 50 cents.

  Consequently there sprang into being a new race of tourists, ‘parasites of the exchange’ who wandered through Europe in quest of the lowest prices. ‘Especially,’ says Cowley, ‘you saw them in the railway station at Innsbruck: Danes, Hindus, Yankees, South Americans, wine-cheeked Englishmen, more Yankees, waiting by the hundreds for the international express that would bear them toward the falling paper-mark or the unstabilized lira.’ Cowley and his wife were among them; after an initial month in Paris and half a year in Montpellier where Cowley took a diploma in French literature at the university, they travelled to Brussels, Munich, Vienna, the Tyrol, and back to Germany, where inflation was rampant. The game of getting the best value for dollars, as much as restlessness or the search for literary ‘copy’, explains the constant journeyings about Europe of such people as Hemingway and McAlmon. ‘Following the dollar,’ says Cowley, ‘we saw machine guns in the streets of Berlin, Black Shirts in Italy … and drifted down to Pamplona for the bullfights.’

  For a salary of $100 a month from the USA, Matthew Josephson, an expatriate poet, lived in Berlin in a lavish apartment with two maids. He could afford riding lessons for his wife, meals in the most expensive restaurants, picture collecting, and charitable gifts to struggling German writers. Cowley, who visited him, thought it all insane, and hurried back to France on an international express full of amateur smugglers, among them an English army officer with seven suitcases full of German butter which he proposed to sell in Belgium at an enormous profit.

  Thereafter, Cowley and his wife spent some months in Giverny, the village on the edge of Normandy where Claude Monet was still painting at the age of eighty; Monet’s daughter had married an American artist, and a small American colony had gathered around them. From Giverny, Cowley would go up to Paris every week or so, just for the day:

  You rose before dawn, breakfasted on a quart of milk-and-coffee, just caught a branch-line train full of peasants dressed for market day, then changed at the junction for the Paris express – all this hurry and loss of sleep was a stimulant like cocaine. You could not sit still in your compartment, but picked your way up and down the crowded corridor, watching the Seine unwind as the train creaked faster … Paris! You leaped into the first empty taxicab outside the station … raced from one appointment to another, from an art gallery to a bookshop … Paintings and music, street noises, shops, flower markets, modes, fabrics, poems, ideas … You drank black coffee by choice, believing that Paris itself was sufficient alcohol. Late at night, you took the last train for Normandy, happy to be returning to your country routine.

  On one of these day trips Cowley was introduced to the Dada group. ‘They are the most amusing people in Paris,’ he wrote to a friend a few days later. He had accompanied André Breton to a play
of which they approved. The ‘approval’ consisted of taking thirty seats in the balcony night after night, booing the curtain raiser, and applauding the main play (a banal melodrama) with such wild cheers that the police were forced to intervene. Breton would then orate for half an hour to the stalls, and the audience would break up into arguing factions. ‘Really,’ reported Cowley, ‘it is huge fun.’

  He was particularly delighted to discover Dada because he and most of his contemporaries were failing to find the guidance they had hoped for from the established masters of the older generation, resident in Europe. Up to now, T. S. Eliot had been the poet who seemed to suggest the direction they should take. He also appealed, says Cowley, as a Mid-Western local-boy-makes-good. But in the autumn of 1922 The Waste Land made its first appearance in the Dial, and simultaneously in Eliot’s new Criterion, and while they admired it greatly Cowley and his friends were distressed by its implication that the present was inferior to the past, and that the modern age could only express itself by borrowing and patching together lines from dead poets. Hemingway felt strongly that Eliot had been overrated and was really dry as dust. During 1924, writing on the death of Joseph Conrad, he said that if he could bring Conrad to life again ‘by grinding Mr Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Conrad’s grave’, then he would ‘leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage-grinder’.

  Joyce was widely held to be the epitome of the isolated, exiled artist, producing a work of genius without regard to physical comforts or other distractions. But when – as Cowley did, on one of his weekly visits to Paris – one actually met the man, one realised that he was not by any means averse to comfort; furthermore, said Cowley, on anything other than literature his opinions were ‘those of a fourth or fifth-rate mind’. It was as if he had ‘starved everything else in his life to feed his ambition’. Despite this discovery, Cowley remained deeply admiring of Ulysses, though certain of his friends wondered if there had been an overvaluing of the book-John Dos Passos read it ‘at one gulp’ while laid up with ’flu: ‘Parts I found boring and parts I found magnificent.’ Fitzgerald had read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at Princeton and was ‘puzzled and disappointed’. Hemingway judged Joyce to be more a conjuror than a great artist: ‘It was easy to write if you used the tricks. Everybody used them. Joyce had invented hundreds of new ones. Just because they were new didn’t make them any better. They would all turn them into clichés.’