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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  *

  Fitzgerald proposed a trip on the train to Lyon to pick up a car that he and Zelda had abandoned there because of bad weather. Hemingway agreed, and they decided to go the next morning. Hemingway was enthusiastic about the trip: ‘I would have the company of an older and successful writer, and in the time we would have to talk in the car I would certainly learn much that it would be useful to know.’

  When Hemingway got to the Gare de Lyon, Fitzgerald was not there. The trip was supposed to be at Fitzgerald’s expense; however, Hemingway decided to set off, paying for his own ticket, in case Fitzgerald had caught an earlier train. He arrived in Lyon and managed to discover that Fitzgerald had left Paris, but could not find where he was staying. The next morning Fitzgerald turned up at Hemingway’s hotel, full of apologies and looking rather the worse for drink. They collected the car, which proved to be entirely roofless; Fitzgerald explained that Zelda liked fresh air at all times and had insisted on abandoning the hood. Hemingway, who had not been warned about this, had not brought an overcoat. They set out for Paris, and it soon began to drizzle. To keep themselves warm, they bought and drank a great deal of white Mâcon, swigging from the bottle while Fitzgerald drove. As the wine took effect, Fitzgerald decided that he was suffering from ‘congestion of the lungs’. Hemingway, speaking as a doctor’s son, said there was no such thing unless he meant pneumonia. Fitzgerald disagreed, and they quarrelled. Hemingway eventually won the argument, with the consequence that Fitzgerald said he must be dangerously ill and would probably collapse before they reached the next town. When he was not announcing his own imminent death, he spent the journey describing his recent anguish over an affair Zelda had had at St Raphael with a French aviator. Hemingway was still a novice in such matters, and wondered how, if it was true, ‘could Scott have slept each night in the same bed with Zelda?’

  It was now raining heavily, and they took refuge in a hotel, Fitzgerald feeling certain he was dying. Hemingway took his pulse, listened to his chest, felt his temperature, and said there was nothing whatever wrong with him. They had another quarrel about this. Hemingway comments: ‘I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life.’

  Fitzgerald cheered up enough to go down to dinner, but kept on drinking, and at the table passed out completely. Hemingway got him to bed. The next day they completed the journey back to Paris without event, Fitzgerald entertaining Hemingway by telling him the plots of Michael Aden’s novels. A few days later he lent him a copy of The Great Gatsby; Hemingway read it and decided that he had to put up with the man on account of the writing, ‘whether I could be of any use to him or not’.

  Fitzgerald had abandoned the rather effete manner of This Side of Paradise for a much terser narrative style in the new novel; but The Great Gatsby interested Hemingway less for the way it was written than for its subject matter. It showed that a narrator like Nick Adams – to whom Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway bore no small resemblance – could be used in a story with a sophisticated social setting. Also, the other characters in the book – the oddly assorted Buchanans, the cool golfing girl Jordan Baker, and the questionable, mysterious playboy Jay Gatsby – were just the sort of people among whom Hemingway was moving in the Quarter. Clearly, a lot of good copy lay to hand.

  Soon after the Lyon trip the Hemingways were invited to lunch at the Fitzgeralds’ Paris apartment not far from the Champs-Élysées. Hemingway took a dislike to Zelda, who seemed to be jealous of him, perhaps for being invited on the journey to Lyon which she evidently assumed had been a great success. To Fitzgerald, it had. He wrote to Max Perkins: ‘Hemminway is a fine, charming fellow; and to Gertrude Stein he described it as ‘a slick drive’. Fitzgerald had been introduced to Gertrude Stein by Hemingway. Rather surprisingly, she admired This Side of Paradise, or at least she described it as the book that ‘really created for the public the new generation’, which was a sound commercial judgement if not a literary one. She and Fitzgerald struck a rapport, largely because, like Hemingway, he refused to take her very seriously.

  Meanwhile, as soon as he had finished reading The Great Gatsby, Hemingway started writing a novel of his own – the first he had attempted since the loss of his manuscripts two and a half years earlier. It was to be called Along With Youth – a phrase from one of his poems that Harriet Monroe had printed – and it began with Nick Adams on an American troop ship in 1919. Presumably it was going to deal with war experiences. But he abandoned it after two dozen pages, for The Great Gatsby suggested to him that he could write a novel about the life he and his friends were leading at that moment.

  * Although there was an excellent American Hospital in Paris (at Neuilly), founded in 1910.

  † Celebrated American magazine for children.

  ‡ Or so Hemingway says in A Moveable Feast, though it appears that Chaplin was not in Europe at the time.

  2

  La vie est belle

  In June 1923, Kay Boyle, a twenty-year-old American girl married to a young French engineer who had been an exchange student in the USA, set off for France with her husband. She was going to write a novel in the quiet and peace of Brittany, where his family lived, while he worked out his future. She hoped ultimately to get to Paris, meet Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, and make her name in the Quarter.

  During two years in New York, Kay Boyle had done a little reviewing for the Dial – unsigned and almost unpaid, just as Malcolm Cowley describes it – and had had a poem published in McAlmon’s and William Carlos Williams’s Contact. She had worked in the New York office of Harold Loeb’s Broom, meeting some of those who had gone to Paris, hearing about others. She had developed a particular obsession for Robert McAlmon, though they had never met. She read his work in the little magazines and heard that he was ‘wild and daring and hard as nails’. She saluted him as ‘a man of rebellion’, a symbol of what she and her husband Richard hoped to find on their French trip.

  Their Atlantic crossing was paid for by Harold Loeb’s estranged wife Marjorie, though they expected to be able to repay the loan very soon. ‘Richard would look for a temporary job,’ writes Kay, ‘I would begin my novel, and after the first few chapters were done a New York publisher would pay me an advance.’

  They arrived at Le Havre, and immediately, thanks to their lack of money, Kay found herself in the grip of Richard’s hautbourgeois family – who were distressed at her Greenwich Village costume of startling lipstick and gigantic white hoops of earrings, and hinted that she should buy a sober grey suit and hat. ‘The next morning, as tough and determined as McAlmon, I put my lipstick and earrings away, and I did not put them on again for a long time.’

  Immured for the summer in her father-in-law’s mansion in Brittany, learning the proper haut-bourgeois lifestyle, Kay would keep asking Richard what the time was in New York, and would take refuge in her memories of the Village. She began to write her novel – about the USA, ‘about all that had happened to me as I grew up in Philadelphia, in Atlantic City, in the Pocono Mountains, and in Cincinnati, as if a recounting of these experiences must finally reveal to me who I was’.

  In September she and Richard set off for Paris so that he could find a job. They travelled overnight, third class, Kay refusing to eat on the journey, telling Richard she was train-sick. ‘I had taken a vow in silence to eat only one meal a day until we had money of our own to live on’. Richard went for job interviews and Kay resumed her white hoops and lipstick. On the third or fourth day she went up the rue de l’Odéon towards no. 12, thinking that ‘I might catch a sight of James Joyce’, but ‘once I actually saw the sign, Shakespeare and Company, I did not have the courage to approach the door’. She went back to her cheap hotel behind the Opéra and scrubbed off the lipstick and brushed her hair into a tight knot: ‘This was the guise in which I would present myself to Sylvia Beach.’ As soon as Richard had found his job in Paris, ‘I would ask Miss Beach to let me sell books for her’.

  Next morning she rang Harold Loeb’s doorbell. He h
ad been asleep (with Kitty Cannell) ‘and he stood there in the partly opened door in a silk dressing gown, a bit put out, but suggested that we meet on the terrace of the Café de la Paix that afternoon at four’. Nervously, Kay turned up early for this appointment and walked round the block until she saw Loeb arrive and make his way across to one of the tables, joining a young man in a grey suit who was drinking an apéritif. Numb with shyness and feeling that she looked like a whore – she had put the lipstick back on again – she had to go once more round the block before she could summon the nerve to approach them. Still nervous as she sat down, she failed to catch the name of the young man in the grey suit, who was American and in his late twenties, with steel-blue eyes. She thought his profile not unlike John Barrymore: ‘His lips were thin, and there was a half-humorous, half-mordacious twist to them as he talked.’ The effect was to make Harold Loeb seem to have ‘no more personality than a clean, expensive blanket lying folded across the café chair’.

  The young man was talking about Gurdjieff’s ‘school’ at Fontainebleau, saying that the cult had been spreading among people he had thought too sensible to dabble in it: ‘Jane Heap got involved out there, and Margaret Anderson. It’s mass hypnotism of some kind. The pupils, sitting in a circle, repeat “twilight”, or “dawn”, or “tragedy”, or “labour”, or “love”, over and over, in their different languages. In the middle of the circle are placed bottles of armagnac, and the Master is disturbed if these bottles are not emptied, and this adds to the hypnotism. It sounds pretty much like what we do every night in Montparnasse.’ Kay, sipping Pernod, felt that the young man was really talking about something else: ‘His eyes had scarcely left my face, and their icy blueness had not altered.’

  Loeb shifted in his seat, and turned to the young man: ‘McAlmon, I’m going to have another drink. What about you?’ McAlmon said yes, but Kay, overtaken with panic at realising that this was the man who symbolised so much to her, got up quickly and said that Richard was waiting and she had to go. Loeb muttered something about telephoning her at the hotel to arrange dinner, but Kay knew he did not mean to. ‘I could not bring myself to look at McAlmon when I said goodbye.’

  She fled to the hotel, and when Richard came back from job-hunting she told him: ‘We must find our people and commit ourselves to them! We must know!’ To which Richard replied: ‘Know what?’ In reply, Kay ran out into the street and spent the night on a bench in the Bois de Boulogne.

  With the dawn, she decided to go back to rue de l’Odéon and ask Sylvia Beach for Robert McAlmon’s address. ‘And once I had found him, I would ask him to give me a job. I could type, I could take dictation, I could read proof. I would tell him that I wanted to give a shape to life.’ She reached the shop, but realised that it was only 7.15 a.m. – and that Miss Beach would not be opening for two or three hours. So she wandered away again, bought a novel at a bookstall, and, losing her nerve for action, read it all day in the Tuileries garden. At last she went back to the hotel. Richard, distraught as to what had become of her, told her that he had found a job, but it was not in Paris.

  *

  They set up home in Le Havre on the pittance Richard was being paid for his work there with an electric company. Their apartment was cold and primitive; all the water had to be carried from a pump half a mile up the hill, they shared a stinking outside lavatory, and it took Kay most of the morning to get the coal stove alight so that she could begin to cook.

  One day, Richard’s wealthy brother-in-law sent his chauffeur with a limousine full of fruit and vegetables from the family château. Kay had just finished the week’s wash in the stone sink, and had hung Richard’s shirts and underwear and their sheets and pillowcases on an improvised line in the kitchen. Pools of water had collected on the linoleum, and the chauffeur, too polite to comment, ducked under the hanging sheets. Suddenly the clothes-line slipped from its mooring and down came the washing in a sodden mess. The chauffeur fought his way free of it and left, and Kay began picking the sheets out of the pools of filthy water and coal dust. ‘And now I began crying for everything in the world, for the great hopes we had had for our life in France that had come to nothing …’

  Gradually, she learnt how to survive, lying to the landlady when the rent was overdue. She stole a cat which had befriended her in the street, taking it home for company: ‘It was an exceptionally beautiful cat, with eyes of a transparent jade, a grey and ebony striped coat, and the mindless face of a chorus girl.’ Sometimes the live crabs she had brought home from the market would escape from their basket, scuttling under the bed, and the cat would help her to round up and subdue them.

  One day – it was in January 1924 – William Carlos Williams and his wife landed in Le Havre on their way to Paris. Kay, who knew Williams from the Village, met them at the quay and implored them to stay for lunch; but Williams said McAlmon was waiting for them in Paris, that he was expecting them on the boat train, and they must not disappoint him. ‘Kay Boyle had come down to the train at Le Havre,’ Williams writes in his autobiography, ‘where she was so lonely, knowing only her grocer, as she said. But we couldn’t do it. We had to get to Paris where she, poor girl, would gladly have followed us.’

  Later, she and Richard moved to Harfleur. ‘There we lived for two years, and so totally French did I become that I scarcely recognized the look of my own features when I happened to catch sight of them in the glass.’ She developed what seemed to be tuberculosis, and ‘almost lost my mind in anguish’ when one of her neighbours, a railway guard, annoyed by the mewing of her cat, drowned it in the communal cesspool. The cat’s death became ‘symbol and sign for me of all we had forgotten to defend, of all we had allowed to perish, to vanish, from our lives’.

  She began to correspond with Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead, who had read her poems and wanted to print her work in This Quarter. When Walsh learned about her tuberculosis he sent a telegram from the South of France: ‘INSIST YOU SEE MY LUNG SPECIALIST. I WILL TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING. LA VIE EST BELLE. WE WANT YOU TO JOIN US HERE. COME QUICKLY.’ She went, so blinded by tears that she could scarcely see Richard standing on the station platform.

  3

  Some fiesta

  Hemingway set off south with Hadley, heading towards Spain. All through the winter of 1924 to 1925 he had been looking forward to his third visit in as many summers to the fiesta of San Fermín in Pamplona. ‘Why don’t you come over,’ he had written to a friend from Oak Park days, Bill Smith, ‘and we’ll go down to Spain in June … fish the Irati … and then go to Pamplona for the big bull fight week. It would be a swell trip.’

  Bill Smith, who had been Hemingway’s best man, featured in several stories in In Our Time. He said he would come, and two other Americans were co-opted into the party: Don (Donald Ogden) Stewart, a professional writer of humour, and Harold Loeb. Bumby, now aged nearly two, was dispatched to Brittany with friends, and the party left Paris towards the end of June 1925. Loeb sent word that he would join them in Pamplona, as he had already gone south to stay at a small resort near Biarritz. He did not tell them why he had made this trip.

  Kay Boyle’s ‘clean, expensive blanket’ was an all too apt description of Loeb. The son of a Wall Street broker – one of his cousins was the sponsor of the Loeb Classical Library and his mother was a Guggenheim – he had been brought up in great affluence. His father encouraged him to do something worthwhile with his life, but Harold found it hard to make a mark on the world. At Princeton he took up boxing – Hemingway alleged that this was to ‘counter the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew’ – but he made no impression on his contemporaries, and Hemingway adds: ‘I never met anyone of his class who remembered him.’

  On his twenty-first birthday he inherited $50,000, swiftly married the daughter of another Wall Street broker, and began to try his hand at various forms of business, including the Guggenheim-owned lead and smelting industry, without much success. In 1919, having used up most of his capital, he and his
wife Marjorie took over a little New York bookshop, the Sunwise Turn, and this prospered reasonably – Peggy Guggenheim, Harold’s cousin, was among those who worked for it. But Harold was no more comfortable in literary and bohemian circles than he had been at Princeton or in the smelting business, and he describes the Villagers he met at bookshop parties as ‘flaunting their new liberties … with all the dogmatic piety of Tennessee mountaineers’.

  After a while his marriage broke up, and he decided to sell the bookshop and start a little magazine with a poet named Alfred Kreymborg as joint editor. It was to be called Broom, though Loeb scarcely seems to have known why. ‘Clean sweep – elemental rhythm?’ he suggests uncertainly in his autobiography. He decided to go off to Europe to edit it, believing he could ‘recognize America’s significant aspects more easily by … observing them from a distance’. He sailed in June 1921, and he and Kreymborg first went to Paris. There, they met the Dadaists; talked to Ezra Pound, who, says Loeb, ‘was dressed like one of Trilby’s companions’; saw McAlmon, ‘a handsome young Westerner with clear blue eyes and the straightest of noses’; visited Joyce, who ‘did not seem to be interested in anything until the subject of cooking came up’; and called upon Gertrude Stein – ‘no suggestion of her writing style appeared in her conversation’. She wrote a word-portrait of Loeb, which seems to say that he made absolutely no impression on her, or that she could not distinguish him from his companions, Kreymborg and his wife: