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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  Stella made no claim to be in control of Ford. She told Hadley twice in the same evening: ‘You know I caught Ford too late to train him.’ Hemingway wondered if she meant house-trained.

  Stella is ‘rather vague’ in her memoirs as to how Ford’s transatlantic review started, and how Hemingway became involved in it. She explains its birth as almost inevitable: ‘Ford’s name as an editor was one to conjure with, since he had been the founder and editor of the English Review and had there published the early work of a whole galaxy of writers who afterwards became famous. He could judge the quality of a manuscript by the smell, I believe! “I don’t read manuscripts,” he said, “I know what’s in ’em.”’

  In fact Ford’s editorship of the English Review had been years earlier (1908–9), and had only lasted a few months before he was sacked by the proprietor. Certainly during that brief period he had discovered and printed the work of Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and D. H. Lawrence, but the magazine’s celebrity at the time was chiefly due to its regular contributors including such big names as Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells. Stella is, however, quite correct in saying that Ford often did not bother to read manuscripts before sending them to the printer.

  His own excuse for starting a new magazine in Paris was that ‘a dozen times I was stopped on the Boulevards and told that what was needed was another English Review.’ No doubt somebody, maybe Pound, made such a remark to him. But Ford was neither in touch nor in sympathy with the young American exiles in Montparnasse. The only new writer he particularly wanted to publish at that moment was an Englishman, A. E. Coppard, whom he had just discovered living in obscurity in Oxford; he wrote to Coppard: ‘I’ve started this review with you in mind as I started the English Review to publish stuff of Hardy’s.’ Indeed he even tried to get Hardy himself to contribute once again – and received the wise reply from Dorset: ‘Don’t you think you should invite young men more particularly, and keep out old men like me?’

  Stella says that Pound had ‘a whole line-up of young writers waiting for Ford, with Hemingway at the top’. But really the list began and ended with Hemingway. Pound did persuade John Quinn, a New York lawyer who had been supporting various of his protégés, to put up money for the magazine, but as far as literary contributions were concerned Pound’s only ideas were to push Hemingway in Ford’s direction and himself write articles publicising George Antheil’s music, his latest Paris discovery. After delivering his articles on Antheil and telling Ford to get Hemingway to run the transatlantic review for him, Pound left permanently for Rapallo, as he now found Paris too full of Americans for his taste. From this safe distance he sent Ford a good deal of abuse about the way the magazine was going.

  A specimen issue of the transatlantic review, distributed free to booksellers and potential subscribers, included contributions by Mina Loy, McAlmon, and Cummings, but thereafter Ford made almost no effort to extract manuscripts from the crowd at the Dôme. The first number came out in January 1924, just as Hemingway was sailing back from Toronto. ‘The whole thing,’ says Stella, ‘was run in conditions of the utmost confusion. Everything that could possibly go wrong with regard to the printing, paper, forwarding and distribution, did go wrong.’ An elegant White Russian colonel appointed himself to manage the magazine’s affairs but soon departed, leaving them in confusion, and Joyce described the first issue as ‘very shabby’ in appearance, while Quinn sent angry telegrams of complaint.

  As to the content, there were poems by Cummings, but by now his work could be found in virtually all the little magazines, not to mention the Dial. The issue was largely taken up with a reprint of The Nature of a Crime, an ancient Ford-Conrad collaboration that had first been published in the English Review in 1909; there was also an article by Ford making much of his own part in the writing of it. The issue also contained a memoir of Whistler by an eighty-seven-year-old friend of Pound’s mother-in-law, and many columns of ponderous editorialising by Ford, both in his own identity and as Daniel Chaucer, under which pseudonym he began a series of articles entitled ‘Towards a Re-Valuation of English Literature’. The tone of it all was absurdly nostalgic; Ford seemed to be trying to conjure up the pre-Waste Land world. T. S. Eliot wrote ambiguously to Ford that he welcomed the appearance of the magazine ‘with extreme curiosity’.

  The White Russian was briefly replaced by Basil Bunting, a fierce young poet whom Pound had rescued from the Santé prison where he had been thrown after some drunken antics, but Bunting found that his duties included babysitting for Ford and Stella, so he soon made way for Hemingway. In his memoirs Ford suggests that besides Hemingway there was ‘a bewildering succession of sub-editors’ who ‘had all been cow-boys’, but this was just another attempt to belittle Hemingway.

  One of Hemingway’s first actions as sub-editor was to write to Gertrude Stein saying that Ford would like to print The Making of Americans in what he (Hemingway) referred to as the Transportation Review. Ford ‘wondered if you would accept 30 francs a page … I said I thought I could get you to … He is under the impression that you get big prices when you consent to publish.’ Hemingway did not trouble to correct him: ‘After all it is Quinn’s money.’

  Gertrude was ‘quite overcome’ with excitement at getting the great work into print at last, and since she had only the one manuscript she immediately set Alice and Hemingway to work to copy it out for the printer. Hemingway must quickly have resented his joke against Ford as he laboured to transcribe the endless and frequently incomprehensible epic. Meanwhile, Gertrude contemplating the gloire that would result from the publication of the book she claimed was ‘the beginning, really the beginning of modern writing’.

  Ford soon discovered what was going on. He said that Hemingway had told him that The Making of Americans was just a short story, whereas ‘it was not a short story but a novel, in fact several novels’ – and several unreadable novels at that. Hemingway admitted to Gertrude that he was having ‘a constant fight’ to make Ford keep printing it, but it filled the space, and Gertrude’s name was much admired in the circles where Ford wanted the transatlantic review to be read. Reluctantly he let it ramble on month after month.

  Joyce had promised to contribute, and had allowed himself to be photographed with Ford, Pound, and Quinn to help launch the magazine. Now he gave Ford some pages from the new book he had begun in March 1923, a year after the publication of Ulysses. Ford did not like the future Finnegans Wake any more than he admired The Making of Americans, and he deplored the Joyce cult, but Joyce’s name was of course an excellent selling-point, and Ford put the new piece of prose in a section in the April 1924 issue entitled ‘Work in Progress’. Joyce liked this title and decided to use it for the book itself until it was complete. Hemingway reported to Pound that as usual Joyce was making free with his proofs; ‘His manuscript started at 7 pages (printed) but by additions to the proof in microscopic handwriting eventually reached about 9 pages.’

  The transatlantic review conducted much of its editorial business on Thursday afternoons. In fact it seemed to be chiefly an excuse for Ford to hold an ‘At Home’ in Bill Bird’s print shop that day, with Stella making tea for everyone. ‘Ford,’ she writes, ‘would first be observed aloft at his desk … talking to a new contributor. Presently he would descend and spread geniality among the faithful.’ Ford himself writes of these Thursdays: ‘You never saw such teas as mine. They would begin at nine in the morning and last for twelve hours. They began again on Friday and lasted until Saturday. On Sunday disappointed tea drinkers hammered all day on the locked doors.’

  McAlmon gives a less enthusiastic account: ‘Ford’s teas were not highly interesting, but as Bird and I were often in the shop we dropped in.’ McAlmon’s view of Ford was as critical as Hemingway’s: ‘It was quite impossible to talk of a place or a person without Ford topping your story.’ He says Ford liked telling the world that he was ‘the master of prose style’. Conrad died soon after the magazine was launched, and Ford organised a memorial issue designed, says M
cAlmon with little exaggeration, so that ‘the glory which was Conrad’s appeared but a reflection of Ford’s glory’.

  Now and then, Ford would expand the Thursday teas into evening gatherings when literary discussion was supposed to take place. McAlmon describes one of these occasions in a Montparnasse bistro on a Saturday night. Joyce was supposed to be guest of honour and the usual crowd of Quarterites turned up, but the evening was not a success. ‘Miss Hamnett arrived, primed for gaiety,’ writes McAlmon, ‘and then Miss Florence Martin … But, miracle of miracles, Miss Martin was cold sober.’ Joyce forgot to come, so someone had to go to fetch him, and when he arrived neither he nor anyone else had much to say. Nora Joyce was heard by McAlmon to mutter: ‘Jim, what is it all ye find to jabber about the nights you’re brought home drunk for me to look after? You’re dumb as an oyster now, so God help me.’

  Slightly more successful but potentially just as embarrassing were Ford’s gatherings at the grubby bal musette underneath Hemingway’s old flat in the rue du Cardinal Lemoine. These evenings could reveal unexpected talents. ‘Ezra Pound was a supreme dancer,’ writes Sisley Huddleston, an expatriate who sometimes attended them. ‘Whoever has not seen Ezra ignoring all the rules of tango and of fox-trot, kicking up fantastic heels, in a highly personal Charleston, closing his eyes as his toes nimbly scattered right and left, has missed one of the spectacles which reconcile us to life.’

  *

  Hemingway said that McAlmon had presumably written ‘8 or ten novels etc’ since they last met. He had published Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems during the autumn of 1923 while Hemingway and Hadley were in Toronto. The slim booklet caused no public stir, but it was at least in print, which was more than could be said for the Bill Bird pamphlet of Hemingway pieces. Bird had announced the booklet, which was to be called in our time (lower case was becoming fashionable), for December 1923, but the following March it was still at the binder’s. ‘After awaiting various dates,’ Hemingway wrote to Pound, ‘I have lost the fine thrill enjoyed by Benj. Franklin when entering Philadelphia with a roll under each arm. Fuck literature.’

  Hemingway had hoped the transatlantic review would print some of the ‘damn good stories’ he said he was now writing, but Ford was turning out to be a very cautious editor. He had been anxious about possible suppression on account of the ‘Work in Progress’ stuff from Joyce – presumably just because it was by Joyce, for nobody could detect anything obscene about it, or indeed make much of it at all. Hemingway reported to Pound that, apart from Joyce and Gertrude Stein, Ford was accepting only the sort of things Century or Harper’s would have printed, which seemed crazy considering the secure financial backing from Quinn. ‘The only stories I’ve got that I know the St. Nicholas Mag.† wont publish I know damn well Ford wont too.’ And such pieces of his as Ford had accepted, he ‘changes … revises … cuts … makes it not have sense etc.’

  It is quite true that when Hemingway’s story ‘Indian Camp’ appeared in the April 1924 transatlantic review it had been lopped of the first eight pages of the manuscript, but whoever performed this surgery – and it may have been Ford – knew very well what he was doing. As published in Ford’s magazine, ‘Indian Camp’ has a wonderfully abrupt start:

  At the lake shore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.

  Nick and his father got into the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.

  The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oar-locks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water.

  In the manuscript the story starts with the boy Nick Adams afraid of the dark and firing off a rifle to fetch his father and uncle back from fishing in the lake. Shorn of this rather pedestrian setting-up, the story becomes laden with dark significance.

  It describes Nick’s doctor-father going with the boy and his uncle to assist an Indian woman in labour. For Nick, the experience is implicitly an initiation into (in T. S. Eliot’s phrase) ‘Birth, and copulation, and death’, the three elements of life. Nick is rowed across to the other shore of the lake with his father’s arm around his shoulder–a symbol of his own infancy – and is led through a wood to the place where the birth is to take place; Hemingway informs us that it ‘smelled very bad’ there. Nick’s father, who all along behaves maternally to the boy, tries to explain about reproduction, but Uncle George can only play the brutal father-male (‘Damn squaw bitch!’ he snarls at the woman in labour), and the birth, a Caesarean without anaesthetic, is so disgusting as to appal the child:

  Later when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still …

  ‘There. That gets it,’ said his father and put something into the basin.

  Nick didn’t look at it.

  The boy’s horror is reinforced by the discovery that the baby’s father, lying in the upper bunk, has cut his own throat. Uncle George, unable to come to terms with this, vanishes into the night – male authority has proved unreliable – and Nick and his father are left discussing death. Having covered the whole of life in four pages, the story finally allows Nick to revert to the false security of childhood: ‘In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.’

  In this small masterpiece, as in all Hemingway’s writing from now on, a sense of drama is created through the omission of all specific expression of emotion, giving the impression that comment is superfluous, that the events in the story – themselves often implied rather than clearly described – are too traumatic to require it. Hemingway said of this: ‘I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can you eliminate and it only strengthens the iceberg.’

  This ‘iceberg’ principle produces writing that is superficially close to the school of literature – generally thrillers or detective fiction – known as ‘hard-boiled’, in which the hero or narrator is a ‘tough guy’ who represses his feelings and does not allow himself to give way to horror or pity. Hemingway’s prose in his early books is not like this: ‘Indian Camp’, not a ‘tough’ story at all, is remarkably squeamish. Nick’s view of the world is fearful and cautious, and whenever possible he averts his eyes and shelters under his father’s protection. ‘“I’m terribly sorry I brought you along, Nickie,” said his father … “It was an awful mess to put you through.”’ Life itself is ‘an awful mess’, and the story, far from being ‘hard-boiled’, is about the trauma of discovering this.

  *

  Ford afterwards claimed that he had discovered Hemingway – ‘I did not read more than six words of his before I decided to publish everything that he sent me’ – but at the time he showed no enthusiasm, handing the task of reviewing Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems to his secretary on the transatlantic review, an American girl named Marjorie Reid whom Pound had recruited from the Dôme terrace. She wrote a perceptive piece, observing that Hemingway had taught himself to seize upon ‘moments when life is condensed and clean-cut and significant’, and had learnt to eliminate ‘every useless word’.

  in our time finally emerged from the binder during the spring of 1924. Its thirty-two pages consisted of sixteen short untitled ‘chapters’ – prose fragments of a paragraph’s length – six of which had already appeared in the Little Review. The book’s title was an ironic reference to words from the Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give us peace in our time, O Lord.’

  The sixteen ‘chapters’ are presented as fragments from narratives that have otherwise evaporated, leaving these short episodes stranded, There is no obvious connecting thread betweeen them, other than that several describe incidents in the First World War, some refer to bullfights, and all are concerned with t
he theme of brutality – there are descriptions of executions and of refugees struggling through the mud. But though it amounts, as one reviewer said, to ‘a harrowing record of barbarities’, the events are described, like the birth and death in ‘Indian Camp’, in a manner that is the opposite of ‘tough’. Here an English officer recalls the killing of Germans at an improvised barricade:

  It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old wrought-iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.

  Hemingway is trying to mimic the verbal style of an English acquaintance who had fought in the war, but it sounds more like a girl describing her pony’s performance in a gymkhana. The viewpoint, like Nick Adams’s in ‘Indian Camp’, is childlike; the speaker experiences such a revulsion from what really happened – the killing of soldiers helplessly caught in a trap – that he can only allude to it by talking about ‘potting’ them, an expression perhaps suggesting a children’s game with toy pistols. Again, life is such ‘an awful mess’ that the narrator is having to retreat from it, to regress into childhood, using language itself as a defence against the world.