McAlmon arrived more or less unannounced and stayed for three days. ‘During that time,’ says Kay, ‘he and I exchanged not more than a dozen sentences,’ even though ‘there was so much to ask him … so much to enquire about Paris, and what Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul, the editors of transition, were like,‡ but I found it impossible to ask him anything … He spoke so cynically of the great with whom he was intimate … I quailed before his icy gaze.’
While Kay listened in silence, McAlmon spoke of the Quarter that she had never seen, and the goings-on there. Dorothy Pound, after years of childless marriage, had come back to Paris to give birth to a son in the American Hospital, and ‘life was striking Ezra as complicated’. Everyone had been to see Cocteau’s Romeo and Juliet at the Cigalle, but that was only because Yvonne Georges was in it and there was a bar at the back of the auditorium. Louis Aragon was going about with Nancy Cunard, the wild daughter of Lady Maud, and people were calling her le Cunard sauvage. Ezra’s opera had been performed – it was about François Villon – and everyone had come to hear it, even Eliot, over from London, though typically he had hidden in the back row. Mina Loy wanted to meet him, but he ran away before the end. The music had been much better than most of them had anticipated. Afterwards they’d all gone on to the Boeuf-sur-le-Toit, and then up to Bricktop’s. Ezra loved being a musician. He’d persuaded Natalie Barney to have one of George Antheil’s works performed at her Friday salon, though it was bound to deafen the neighbours. Sylvia Beach had got it into her head that Antheil – who lived above her shop – had tuberculosis, so she had made everyone contribute to send him to a sanatorium. Then they all found out that there was nothing wrong with his lungs at all. By that time most of the money had gone. So people’s enthusiasm about his music was rather fading away.
Satie the composer had died. One evening, said McAlmon, he was drinking at the Stryx with Nina Hamnett, the next day – or so it seemed – they were all marching in his funeral procession. Over the years he’d bought drinks for most of the poules in the Quarter, so they all turned up to see him off. It was marvellous, it could only have happened in Paris.
Hemingway’s Lady Brett, as everyone now called her, had acquired an American boyfriend. He was much younger than her, and they’d moved into an empty studio on the rue Broca. They couldn’t afford the key money, let alone the last occupant’s few sticks of furniture, so McAlmon had helped out: ‘I took it on a year’s lease.’ They were supposed to pay him rent, but he told Kay and Moorhead that he didn’t hold out much hope.
Jimmie the barman was said to be writing his memoirs. They ought to make better reading than The Sun Also Rises. Nowadays Hemingway would only talk about bullfighting and ‘how a man needs to test himself to prove to himself that he can take it’. McAlmon had been down to Pamplona with Hemingway the year before the trip that inspired the book, and it was crazy the way they’d all climbed into the ring for the amateurs’ event. McAlmon had been persuaded to do it, but his only idea was ‘to avoid getting butted’.§
Hemingway had split up with Hadley. They’d been apart since August 1926, a couple of months before The Sun Also Rises was published, and now the divorce had come through. He had married Pauline Pfeiffer. She wasn’t bad-looking, the new Mrs Hemingway, ‘small-boned and lively as a partridge,’ said McAlmon. Kitty Cannell had introduced them to each other, though Pauline had known Hadley for years, and she’d been machinating to win him from Hadley as soon as she could see he’d got bored with ‘Lady Brett’. Like Hadley, Pauline would be able to support him. Her cash came from an Uncle Gus who was very big in perfumes and liniments. ‘Stiff with money,’ as Dos Passos put it. Pauline was four years older than Hemingway, but she’d reduced her age on the marriage certificate. They’d taken a smart flat near the Jardin du Luxembourg, with two bathrooms, so Hemingway could say goodbye to the cold-water tap and the outside lavatory.
Pauline was a Catholic, so Hemingway had converted. Or rather he’d somehow convinced the Catholic authorities that he’d been one all along. He said he’d been baptised by a Catholic priest after being shot up in Italy. It was no more improbable than his other war stories, and no one could disprove it, so he’d managed to get off all that tedious instruction. But he couldn’t be much of a Catholic, judging by a two-liner he’d just written for Ezra’s new magazine in Rapallo:
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want him for long.
The bar where everyone in the Quarter now went was a place near the Hotel Foyot, the Trois et As, because Jimmie was working there. One evening Lady Brett had been sitting at the bar with her new man when in came the first Mrs Hemingway, and then a few minutes later the second Mrs Hemingway. It was like a Keystone movie. But Hadley was very dignified and quite witty about it.
Gertrude Stein said that Contact Editions ought to publish the entire Making of Americans, and somehow McAlmon had found himself agreeing, though she was right at the top of his list of megalomaniacs, and it was infuriating to think that she could pay the entire printing bill just by selling one of those over-valued pictures from her collection. She’d been pestering Darantière with corrections ever since his men started typesetting.
To be fair, she’d actually admitted that she wondered how anybody could read her stuff. ‘It seems to me quite meaningless at times,’ she had said, though she explained it had felt pretty fine when she’d actually been writing it. You had to hand it to the old girl, said McAlmon to Kay and Moorhead, she’d got ‘vitality and a deep belief in the healthiness of life, too great a belief for these rocky days’.
McAlmon said he’d had an argument on a cross-Channel ferry with Scott Fitzgerald about Eliot’s poems. ‘When Scott discovered that I didn’t dote on them, he sorrowingly gave me up as a hopeless cause.’ Someone called Mary Butts, who was with them, had said: ‘But you don’t know the depths of Europe. What will become of us all?’ McAlmon said he was sure he didn’t know: ‘Rats! If the world’s going to hell, I’m going there with it, and not in the back ranks either.’
As McAlmon talked, Ethel Moorhead decided he was falling for Kay. ‘I’ll never understand it,’ she said to Kay afterwards. ‘You’re not really that beautiful, you’re really not. How in the world or why in the world …’ Moorhead told McAlmon he should go away before Kay ruined a third man’s life. To which McAlmon replied: ‘Hell’s bells, my life was born ruined.’ And went.
The next day he wrote to Kay from St Tropez:
I don’t want to butt into anybody’s life, and you’ve certainly been around long enough to know what you’re doing. But you don’t belong there. You haven’t asked me, but I would say get out. Write me to Paris; c/o Sylvia Beach. If you need money, which I would think to be the case, Williams and I between us will get it to you, and quickly.
They were, says Kay, ‘undoubtedly the words I had been waiting to hear’. She asked McAlmon for $50, and he sent it. But she did not use it to go to Paris. She went to Stoke-on-Trent, where her husband Richard was working for the Michelin tyre company.
*
In Stoke, trying to make her marriage work again, Kay read the early numbers of transition, to which she herself was contributing, and wrote endless letters to Jolas, its editor; and to McAlmon, who rarely answered. She lived as French a life as she could manage, in the little enclave of Michelin employees and their wives, and tried to ignore the eternal gloom of Arnold Bennett’s Five Towns. On the day in August 1927 when the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were finally executed for alleged murder in the USA, after years of left-wing outcry in their defence, she set out to burn the American flag in front of the US Consulate in Stoke. And ‘England went away, and the English people who passed us in the street were suddenly not there’.
In the spring of 1928, at last she had a direct invitation to go to Paris, not from McAlmon, but from a man called Archibald Craig, who wanted her to help him edit a yearbook of poetry, and had fixed her up with a job ghosting a princess’s memoirs. ‘So at the end of April, Sharon and
I set off again. Richard and I told each other again that it would only be for a little while; but we must have known …’
She arrived in Paris, met Jolas and the transition crowd, and went to a party where she was introduced to James and Nora Joyce. There was a sudden hush in the conversation, and in came a formal procession: Jolas’s wife Maria leading Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Kay noticed that Joyce seemed unaware of them, though they passed within a few feet of him. He and Gertrude had never before been seen in the same room. A little later in the evening, Sylvia Beach brought them together; she says they shook hands ‘quite peacefully’.
Kay liked the Joyces, who assumed that she travelled from country to country all the time, ‘like our friend McAlmon’, and kept recommending cheap pensions in Switzerland. After a while Sylvia came over and sat on a footstool at Joyce’s feet, in her grey mannish suit. But someone was missing. ‘McAlmon was not anywhere around.’
*
He was not around all spring, nor in the early summer. Kay got on with writing the princess’s book, and with editing the poetry anthology with Archie Craig. Kay suggested they might get it produced by Darantière, McAlmon’s printer. ‘But Archie always fell silent when I mentioned this man he had never clapped eyes on.’
The princess gave a tea party for Gertrude and Alice, and everyone was stricken with shyness, Gertrude worst of all – she kept nervously touching the short hair at her temples and forehead. Kay said how marvellous the weather was, and then dried up. ‘I could have asked her how her Ford was running, and told her I had had one like it in Cincinnati … I could have asked her what she meant on page nine of “An Elucidation” which transition had published in April … But my tongue was dry in my mouth.’
The maid came in with the tea wagon, and everyone pecked silently at rum babas and chocolate éclairs. Then, miraculously, the doorbell rang, and in came Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, in his invariable tunic and sandals, looking like a Roman emperor and speaking like a Mid-Western farmer. (John Glassco on Raymond Duncan: ‘A walking absurdity who dressed in an ancient handwoven Greek costume and wore his hair in long braids reaching to his waist, adding, on ceremonial occasions, a fillet of bay-leaves.’ McAlmon said he was ‘trying to prove he’s something else besides being Isadora’s brother’.)
Raymond and Gertrude had grown up together in California, and had scarcely met since. They started talking about baseball games: ‘You weren’t much good at bat, Raymond!’ ‘You weren’t too good yourself at home runs!’ Gertrude reminded him how he had once drunk stronger liquor than his present diet of goat’s milk. ‘You have an excellent memory, Gertrude,’ came the answer, ‘probably due to the fact that you keep repeating things over and over.’
*
By the summer, Kay, whom a Paris specialist had diagnosed as not being tubercular after all, had been swept into a hectic social life, but, there was still no sign of McAlmon. At first she gathered that he was away. Then she learnt from Archie Craig that he was back in Paris. Sylvia Beach had told McAlmon that Kay was in town, and wasn’t it strange, said Archie, that such a good and devoted friend shouldn’t come looking for her?
Surely she would run into him soon. But he was not at the Bal Nègre when Jolas took her there one midnight to meet two new friends of his, Harry and Caresse Crosby; nor in the shooting galleries of the fête she went to on the Champs de Mars. Then, one night, she was eating with a crowd at Lipp’s when she looked up and saw him searching from face to face across the brasserie. ‘And if his cold eye gave a sign of recognition when he saw me, or even if he saw me, I could not tell.’ He did not turn his head again in her direction, so she got up and left the others and went over to where he stood alone at the bar, ordering a beer.
‘Bob,’ she said, unable for the moment to think of anything more to say.
He scarcely turned his head, but he put some francs for the unfinished beer down on the bar. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go up to Le Grand Écart. There may be some lively people there.’
* The satirical short story in In Our Time about the couple trying to have a baby.
† A sneer at McAlmon’s long unfinished poem North America, Continent of Conjecture.
‡ Jolas, born in New Jersey and brought up in Alsace-Lorraine, was a journalist on the Paris Tribune, as was his co-editor, the American writer Elliot Paul. They started transition during 1927 as a monthly. Later it became a quarterly, surviving until 1939, publishing segments of Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (Finnegans Wake) and writings by Gertrude Stem as well as work by younger authors and poets. Paul soon left the magazine because it became too serious. He was a portly bearded man who played the accordion – said Gertrude Stein – like a native. His book on Paris, A Narrow Street (1942), entirely ignores the expatriates and describes the life and character of the French.
§ Bill Bird had been on that 1924 Pamplona trip too, and after reading The Sun Also Rises he suspected that Hemingway had intended McAlmon for the role Loeb eventually played in 1925, ‘the goat of the trip’. However, since McAlmon was paying all the bills, this was not so easy.
6
Summer’s almost ended
They made their exit from Lipp’s and took a taxi up to Montmartre. In the cab, McAlmon began mocking what he called the pseudo-intellectuality of the transition crowd with whom Kay was hanging out: ‘How can you sit for hours listening to the talking about the “revaluation of spirit in its intercontinental relations”, and the “destruction of mechanical positivism”? Rats!’
He was still in the same mood when they reached Le Grand Écart* and he ordered gin fizzes for both of them. Kay listened as he went on lecturing her about what she was and what she wasn’t and what she ought to be, and she tried to make a joke of it. ‘The dimmed lights and the muted music made a dreamy shadowy place of the night club, but McAlmon didn’t ask me to dance.’ It was the son-in-law of the patron, tall and built like a prize-fighter, who came up to the bar in his dinner jacket and bowed to Kay and McAlmon. ‘Go ahead,’ McAlmon said to her. And she, disturbed by his disparagement of her new friends, ‘danced with this man I did not know’.
The couples were packed on to the small highly polished square of dance floor. Looking beyond it, out into the darkness behind the rows of tables, Kay could see the figure of McAlmon sitting aloof at the bar. Her partner asked about him: was he an American newspaperman, or maybe a novelist? ‘What’s he looking for, wandering around night after night, alone?’ Kay was hurt by the question: ‘That night, I made the mistake of believing he had actually put the pieces of himself together and that he was seated in high and mighty and inaccessible security somewhere.’
When she got back to the bar, he had switched from gin fizz to Scotch, ‘and we were sitting there silenced and saddened and embittered by the ugliness and opulence of the middle-aged people, French and American and English, who danced, and ate, and drank, and threw their money away instead of giving it to the poets and beggars of the world’. And then, suddenly, through the green silk draperies that concealed a window which had been opened to the summer night, ‘a miserable hand reached in from the deserted street, a black-nailed, dirty, defeated hand, with a foul bit of coat sleeve showing at the wrist. Without a word McAlmon placed his fine, tall glass of whisky and soda into the fingers of the stranger’s hand, and the fingers closed quickly on it and drew it back through the draperies into the lonely dark.’ It was, as Kay says, ‘a parable acted out for exactly what this man was’.
*
From Le Grand Écart they went on to Bricktop’s, and Bricktop herself sat down and had a drink with them. ‘And here was a woman to be cherished, her tinted brick-coloured hair, her cocoa flesh, her lively and almost impossibly beautiful legs, her dogwood-white teeth, her clear-eyed poise in the dancing, drinking, worldly turmoil of the place.’ A decade later it was said she had entered a convent in California. Kay thought it quite plausible.
McAlmon talked of Montparnasse. ‘The good days of the Quarter wer
e finished, Bob kept telling me; I had come too late.’ Nina Hamnett had gone back to London and was holding court at a pub in Fitzrovia. Flossie Martin was still around, but her beauty and exuberance were on the wane. All the same, said McAlmon, from Bricktop’s they would go back to the Quarter, to the Coupole, to see who was around.
As they walked through the Coupole door, Kay immediately identified Flossie, ‘her voice clamorous as an excited child’s, her milk-white arms and throat, her bosomy flesh, packed with care into a baby’s flawless, silken skin. A green straw hat with an enormous brim was over one eye, and there were orange tendrils of hair curling in the sea shells of her ears.’ Seeing McAlmon, she seized him in her arms, and placed lipstick kisses like little footprints all over his brow.
Forty years later, says Kay, somebody picked up in a secondhand bookstore in Los Angeles a handful of postcards and letters that must once have lain about in Flossie’s room, since they were all addressed to her. They were in different handwritings, written by different men in different countries, most of them sailors, and they were addressed in such fashions as
Miss Flossie Martin, Café du Dôme, Paris, France.
Mme la Marquise de Montparnasse, née Florence Martin, somewhere near the Dôme or Dingo, France.
La Belle Martin, Reine du Quartier Montparnasse, Royaume de France.
Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Page 28