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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  Proust, who died in November 1922, seemed another symbol of fulfilled literary ambition. But he was not a model Cowley and his friends wanted to copy: ‘We had neither the wish nor the financial nor yet the intellectual resources to shut ourselves in cork-lined chambers and examine our memories.’

  By comparison with these men, Dada seemed wonderfully refreshing. Up to now, writers of Cowley’s age had wondered if anything remained to be said in literature. Now they could take heart again, for Dada announced ‘new subjects waiting to be described, machinery, massacre, sky-scrapers, urinals, sexual orgies, revolution’. Yet Dada was not really so original: F. T. Marinetti and his Futurists had done much the same thing in Italy before the First World War, and even in ‘waterlogged’ London the Wyndham Lewis group, with its iconoclastic magazine BLAST, had trodden a similar path. It was less an artistic revolution than a game of shocking the bourgeoisie in a superficial manner. By the time Cowley arrived in Paris, Dada had in any case split into its two mutually hostile factions (the Breton-Aragon group against Tristan Tzara and his adherents), and was shading off into the more restrained excesses of Surrealism. Some of Cowley’s associates thought it all plain silly; a contributor to Broom described the Dadaists as ‘merely a group of young Parisians many of whose innovations of literary capering are possibly less signs of new life than the death spasms of a movement in which the last word was practically said by Mallarmé – right at the start’. Hemingway dismissed Tzara and Dadaism as ‘shit’.

  Nevertheless Cowley had a lot of fun with the Dadaists, both in Paris and Giverny, where Aragon came to stay to work on a book and Tzara paid a visit. One evening after a jubilant dinner at a restaurant, at which E. E. Cummings was also present, they all went back to Cowley’s studio over a blacksmith’s shop, and Cowley began to make a Dadaist speech against ‘book fetishism’ – the fact that people collect books. He pulled some of his own collection off the shelves, or at least a few unwanted review copies and French texts, tore them in two and set the pile alight: ‘It was a gesture in the Dada manner, but not a successful one, for the books merely smouldered … Cummings proved that he was a better Dadaist … by walking over and urinating on the fire.’†

  Equally Dadaist and more successful in causing a stir was the punch that Cowley landed on the jaw of the Rotonde patron that 1923 Bastille night while McAlmon was making the rounds of the bars. Cowley, who was due to return to America in three weeks’ time, was not exercising any personal grudge against the café proprietor; he explains that he merely felt the man ‘deserved to be punched’ because he was thought to be a paid police informer who had reported some years earlier on the conversations of Lenin and other revolutionaries at his café table. He was also inclined to insult American girls, treating them as if they were poules. He was, in other words, a symbol of a certain bourgeois mentality.

  The idea of hitting the man was proposed by the ever-belligerent Laurence Vail. They had all been sitting on the terrace of the Dôme when suddenly Vail said: ‘Let’s go over and assault the proprietor of the Rotonde.’ Cowley agreed, and he, Vail, Aragon, and other members of the party crossed the road. Aragon led the first assault, which as befitted a true Dadaist was entirely verbal; in beautifully shaped sentences he expressed his opinion of all mouchards (stool-pigeons) and asked ‘why such a wholly contemptible character as the proprietor of the Rotonde presumed to solicit the patronage of respectable people’. The waiters, sensing that a fight was coming, formed ‘a wall of shirt fronts’ round their employer; Laurence Vail pushed through it and, being a native French speaker, made an angry oration at such speed that Cowley could only catch a few phrases, all of them abusive. The patron backed away: ‘His eyes shifted uneasily, his face was a dirty white behind his black mustache.’ Harold Loeb looked on anxiously with an embarrassed smile.

  Cowley began to be angry at these useless gestures, and was ‘seized with a physical revulsion for the proprietor, with his look of a dog caught stealing chickens and trying to sneak off’. Elbowing the waiters aside he struck him a glancing blow on the jaw. Then, before he could strike again, ‘I was caught up in an excited crowd and forced to the door’. He had almost forgotten about the incident when later in the evening he met Tristan Tzara at the Dôme and they went for a stroll together, arguing as to whether the Dada movement could be reunited. They passed the terrace of the Rotonde: ‘The proprietor was standing there with his arms folded. At the sight of him a fresh rage surged over me. “Quel salaud!” I roared for the benefit of six hundred customers. “Ah, quel petit mouchard!”’ A few moments later, recrossing the street towards the Dôme, Cowley ‘felt each of my arms seized by a little blue policeman’.

  One of the gendarmes was determined to amuse himself.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ he said, ‘to be arrested in Paris. If you were arrested by those brutal policemen of New York, they would cuff you on the ear – like this,’ he snarled, cuffing me on the ear … ‘Ah, the police of Paris are incomparably gentle. If you were arrested in New York, they would crack you in the jaw – like this,’ he said, cracking me in the jaw, ‘but here we do nothing, we take you with us calmly.’ He rubbed his hands, then thrust his face toward mine. His breath stank of brandy. ‘You like the police of Paris, hein?’ ‘Assuredly,’ I answered. The proprietor of the Rotonde walked on beside us, letting his red tongue play over the ends of his mustache.

  Cowley found himself charged with assault and resisting arrest – the policeman showed a scratch he claimed had been inflicted on him-but a bribe dispensed with the second charge. He spent a night and a day in jail, was let out after a preliminary hearing, and collected ‘nine young ladies in evening gowns’ as witnesses for his defence. ‘None of them had been present at the scene in the Rotonde the night before, but that didn’t matter: all of them testified in halting French that I hadn’t been present either; the whole affair was an imposition on a writer known for his serious character.’ The examining magistrate was impressed; moreover Cowley got the poet and novelist André Salmon, who was also a crime reporter for Le Matin, to work behind the scenes. ‘He managed to have my trial postponed from day to day and finally abandoned.’

  The most striking feature of the affair was the effect it had on Cowley’s Dadaist friends: ‘They looked at me with an admiration I could not understand.’ He became, instantly, a Dadaist figure, and was pressed to contribute to Dadaist reviews all over Europe. The irony of this was that his poems were not Dadaist at all, nor even faintly revolutionary in tone: ‘They were poems about America, poems that spoke of movies and skyscrapers and machines, dwelling upon them with all the nostalgia derived from two long years of exile.’ A typical poem describes the decaying scenery of his childhood summers in Pennsylvania:

  I watched the agony of a mountain farm,

  a gangrenous decay;

  the farm died with the pines that sheltered it;

  the farm died when the woodshed rotted away.

  It died to the beat of a loose board on the barn

  that flapped in the wind all night;

  nobody thought to drive a nail in it.

  The farm died in a broken window light …

  The same issue of Broom in which this was published contained E. E. Cummings’s ‘Three United States Sonnets’, unambiguously expressing a longing for Greenwich Village and New York. Harold Loeb writes that in the exiles’ minds the USA had become ‘a land transformed by distance into a place of shining towers and green hills’. Cowley, Cummings, and the rest of them had found, in Cowley’s words, ‘a crazy Europe in which the intellectuals of their own middle class were more defeated and demoralized than those at home’. Consequently they began to reconsider their own country: ‘We had come three thousand miles in search of Europe and had found America.’

  *Even Man Ray said he had been in Paris for ten years before he could bring himself to look round the Louvre; eventually he spent about an hour there.

  † This episode is also recalled in his memoirs by John Dos Passo
s, a kind of alter ego to Cummings, who was there too. Born in 1896, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of a prominent Mid-Western attorney of Portuguese descent. He had been educated at Choate and Harvard, where he became great friends with Cummings, and he served in an ambulance corps during the war. Like Cummings, he got into trouble through writing anti-war letters. He took himself to study at the Sorbonne in 1919, and published two novels based on his war experiences. He was a left-wing sympathiser who regarded the war as a deceit by Woodrow Wilson. Contemporaries found him rather a comic figure, peering through thick glasses. He was an incorrigible traveller and only made sporadic appearances in Paris, though he had numerous friends among the expatriates there, including Hemingway, who had first met ‘Dos’ during war service. His novel trilogy U.S.A., published volume by volume during the 1930s, is an extended exercise in social realism.

  PART THREE

  Fiesta

  1

  Iceberg principle

  The Hemingways decided that their baby should be born in Toronto. Hadley thought the medical care would be better there,* and Hemingway could earn a steady wage from the Toronto Star, which had been printing his reports from Europe.

  But arriving in the Star offices in September 1923 he was not exactly treated as a returning hero. The editor made it clear that he would have to work like any young reporter, refused him a by-line and sent him long distances to cover routine stories. ‘The free time that I imagined in front of a typewriter in a newspaper office has not been,’ he wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas after a month of this. ‘The whole thing is a sort of nightmare.’ In October the baby was born – a boy, who, says Harold Loeb, was soon trained to put up his fists and assume a fierce expression – and Hemingway decided that they must return to Europe as soon as possible. ‘We have both been very homesick for Paris.’ he told Gertrude and Alice. And to Sylvia Beach: ‘Thank Gawd we will get back to Paris.’

  They sailed back in mid-January 1924. ‘Have you seen Hueffer’s new magazine?’ Hemingway had asked Gertrude and Alice in a letter not long before leaving Toronto. ‘I have been invited today in a letter by Pound to come home and direct its policy etc. I feel the invitation has been exaggerated.’ But when he got back to Paris – where this time he and Hadley took a second-floor apartment at 113 rue Notre Dame des Champs, just round the corner from the Dôme and up the street from Ezra Pound’s studio – he discovered that there was little exaggeration.

  In a tiny balcony perched precariously over Bill Bird’s antediluvian printing machine on a quai of the Île St Louis, the fifty-year-old English novelist Ford Madox Ford, né Ford Madox Hueffer, was attempting to launch a new literary journal. Thanks to Bird’s whim, its title was being printed as transatlantic review. The use of lower case might be avant-garde but the editor emphatically was not.

  Hemingway already knew Ford a little, and could not stand him. Ford shared his predilection for tall stories, but unlike Hemingway, Ford expected no one to believe them. He told Gertrude Stein that people kept following him around Paris because he looked exactly like the Bourbon claimant to the throne; if so, a very moth-eaten Bourbon. Harold Loeb describes his appearance: ‘Ford moved ponderously, with his feet at right angles to each other. His head resembled Humpty Dumpty’s except for the walrus mustache and the rosy complexion of a retired officer of the Indian Army.’ Wyndham Lewis once compared him to a seedy character out of Conrad, with whom Ford had collaborated in their early days – Ford told Lincoln Steffens he was ‘the man who taught Conrad to write’.

  Hemingway’s mistake was to take Ford seriously and brand him a liar. Most people were amused rather than annoyed by the fact that, as Harold Loeb puts it, Ford was ‘blessed with total unrecall; he remembered nothing as it actually happened’. John Glassco encountered him at a Paris party:

  Ford inclined graciously towards us from what seemed to be a height of about seven feet. His reputation, his high wheezing voice, and his walrus moustache were frightening until one saw his small twinkling eyes, which were full of kindness and curiosity. ‘You write poetry, my young friend,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you would mind my asking whether your poems are sad or joyous?’ ‘Mostly joyous, I’m afraid.’ ‘Admirable. I was talking to Willie Yeats the other day, about the communication of joy in poetry … Willie and I were asking ourselves what was the most joyous modern poem in English …’

  Which must have been an invention, since – as Pound always pointed out – Ford and Yeats could not tolerate one another’s company.

  But then, Ford claimed friendship, even kinship, with anyone who was influential. Before 1914 he had been heard describing his intimacy with the Kaiser; when war broke out he abandoned his Germanic surname and volunteered for the British Army, though he was over age. After the war it got about that his mouth hung open because he had been gassed, but really it had always hung open. He made a great deal of his war experiences, and Hemingway began to learn a lesson from this: ‘I’m going to start denying I was in the war,’ he wrote to Pound, ‘for fear I will get like Ford to myself about it.’ Actually, he had already far exceeded Ford’s modest degree of exaggeration about his military exploits.

  The Hemingway’s new apartment was near the Closerie de Lilas in the Boulevard du Montparnasse. A generation earlier this had been the café where all the French poets met, and Hemingway took to working there because it was a little distance up the road from the Dôme and the Rotonde crowds. But Ford soon discovered it too, and in A Moveable Feast Hemingway gives a wickedly funny caricature of one of their encounters:

  I was sitting at a table outside of the Lilas watching the light change on the trees and the buildings and the passage of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards. The door of the café opened behind me and to my right, and a man came out and walked to my table.

  ‘Oh here you are,’ he said.

  It was Ford Madox Ford, as he called himself then, and he was breathing heavily through a heavy, stained moustache and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well-clothed, up-ended hogshead.

  Ford allows Hemingway to order a drink for him, changes his mind after the order has been given, and then complains that he has been brought the wrong cocktail. Hemingway – who mentions that Ford suffered from halitosis – describes Ford then inviting him to ‘the little evenings we’re giving in that amusing Bal Musette near the Place Contrescarpe on the rue Cardinal Lemoine’. Hemingway says he knows the place well, having lived above it for two years, but Ford pays no attention and says he will ‘draw a map so you can find it’. Then he spots a passer-by, ‘a rather gaunt man wearing a cape’, and claims he has ‘cut him’ by refusing to greet him. Hemingway asks who it was, and is told: ‘Belloc … Did I cut him!’ (Later, says Hemingway, it turned out not to have been Belloc at all, but Aleister Crowley.)

  I was trying to remember what Ezra Pound had told me about Ford [Hemingway continues], that I must never be rude to him, that I must remember that he only lied when he was very tired, that he was really a good writer and that he had been through very bad domestic troubles. I tried hard to think of these things but the heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence of Ford himself, only touching-distance away, made it difficult.

  Ford was scarcely more charitable about Hemingway. Writing in 1927, he complained that

  in Paris I have lived for years buried under mountains of Middle-Westerners who there find it necessary to assume the aspects, voices, accents and behaviours of cow-boys crossed with liberal strains of prize-fighters and old-time Bowery toughs. They may have been born in Oak Park, that suburb of Chicago that is the mildest suburb in the world; but they are determined to make you and Paris think them devils of fellows who have only left Oklahoma of the movies ten minutes before.’

  In his autobiography, Ford also implies that Hemingway’s stories were distinctly tall: ‘Mr Hemingway shadow-boxed at Mr Bird’s press … shot tree-leopards that twined through the rails of the editorial gallery and told magnificent tales of the boundless prairies o
f his birth.’

  Pound had reason to be charitable to Ford. In his own early days in London, Ford had been the first editor to print his work, and had given him some invaluable advice about the need to modernise his poetry. As for the ‘bad domestic troubles’ to which Pound had alluded, fifteen years earlier Ford had abandoned his wife and daughter for the leading femme fatale of the Edwardian literary world, Violet Hunt – the ‘Sylvia’ of his Parade’s End novels, of which the first was about to appear when Hemingway met him. That affair lasted till the First World War, when Ford took up with an Australian art student whom Ezra had introduced into London society, Stella Bowen. In 1924 he and Stella had just arrived in Paris after a period of trying to live off the land in Sussex. Ford was a prolific writer, but until Parade’s End only his short novel The Good Soldier (1915) had achieved much success. He had scarcely any literary income, and he and Stella were surviving on her Australian capital. They had a baby daughter.

  Hemingway found Stella almost as trying as Ford. He wrote to Pound:

  Every few days Madame F comes over in her best Australian manner and while complaining in a high voice of her troubles, all her troubles, sneezes and coughs on our baby … On the slightest encouragement … she will start on the tale of her 50 hour confinement that produced Julie. I am going to interrupt some time with the story of the time I plugged the can in Kansas City … so that the plumbers had to be sent for … with a turd produced after 5 hours of effort.