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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  One letter was written half in French and half in English from a French sailor on leave near Toulon, who began: ‘Ma petite Flos,’ and signed himself ‘your very small friend JEAN, who loves you always and kisses you very much.’ Below his signature had been added those of a naval electrician from the battleship Edgar Quinet, a second lieutenant from the cruiser Yser, and a British sailor, all of whom (wrote Jean) were eager to go to Paris to meet Flossie at the Dôme. There was also a typed letter dated 5 February 1924, dictated by the American Consul General in Paris:

  Madam:

  I have to inform you that I am in receipt of a telegram from M. Martin, 362 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Mass, requesting me to report relative to your welfare.

  Will you please call at this Consulate-General to see me at your earliest convenience.

  I am,

  Very respectfully yours …

  Whoever ‘M. Martin’ may have been, says Kay, father or mother, uncle or aunt, brother or sister, he or she ‘must have been there at the bar with her that night in 1928, unseen and perhaps unanswered, and every time she gave a thought to M. Martin, she ordered another drink, and whooped aloud, and talked about getting up early tomorrow or maybe the day after that, and going on with her operatic career’.

  Sitting at the bar while McAlmon ordered drinks for himself and Kay, Flossie began to sing some absurd hit remembered from her Ziegfeld days:

  Is there something wrong with Otto Kahn,

  Or something wrong with me?

  ‘Wiz Otto Kahn, definitely,’ said a voice from the end of the bar. It was the first time Kay had seen and heard Kiki. That night her eyelids had been painted in opaline. ‘She was heavy-featured and voluptuous,’ says Kay, ‘her voice as hoarse as that of a vegetable hawker.’

  It was the first time, too, that Kay met Hilaire Hiler, who had come round from his Jockey Club and was standing absorbed in his own thoughts at the Coupole bar. ‘But Bob said that Flossie and Kiki and Hiler were no more than three survivors of another and far gayer company and of a wilder, more adventurous time. The lines that people spoke now were flat as stale beer, he said, and the props, the scenery, no longer had any meaning.’ There was nothing to do except have another drink. If only Djuna Barnes or Mina Loy would turn up, the evening might be saved. They had better both go across the road and see if there was anyone worth drinking with in the Sélect. It was only later, when Kay knew him better, ‘that I learned that whomever he was with, Bob was always seeking another name, and another face, in quite another place …’

  *

  Over at the Sélect they found Harold Stearns, drinking at the bar in his brown felt hat, ‘in a shabby parody of respectability’. McAlmon ordered drinks for the three of them. Kay knew it must be nearly dawn.

  Stearns began to talk of a horse that had fallen in a steeplechase and broken its leg. He had persuaded them not to destroy it but to let him take it home. He’d borrowed the money to get a horse van to haul it into Paris, and now he was looking after it in the overgrown courtyard behind his apartment. The leg had been set, and the vétérinaire said it was going to mend all right, but meanwhile the horse was eating him into the poorhouse. It needed oats, alfalfa, not to mention the rye straw for its bedding. (Stearns ‘talked quickly, looking straight ahead,’ says Kay.) And then there were the fees for the vétérinaire, who had to visit the horse every day.

  ‘Stearns, I admire you!’ said McAlmon, and began to laugh.

  Stearns solemnly went on saying: ‘So several times in the evening I have to take up a collection for him. I have no choice.’ And he wandered out on to the terrace of the Sélect, in search of the truly gullible; and McAlmon went on laughing his mirthless laugh.

  Soon Stearns was back, with banknotes in his pocket. ‘I’d like you to come and see him sometime,’ he said to McAlmon and Kay, buying drinks for the three of them out of his takings.

  ‘Better not tempt fate too far,’ said McAlmon. ‘We might take you up on that.’

  McAlmon had begun to sing to himself. ‘Me and My Shadow’, he was singing. ‘Next time I’ll tell you about another horse,’ Harold Stearns was saying to Kay, looking straight ahead across his glass.

  Me and My Shadow,

  Strolling down the avenue….

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ Stearns was saying, ‘about an American horse who happened to be travelling with us on a freighter as flat as an ark that was passing through the French Sudan, and when the natives laid eyes on him they dispersed like leaves before the customary storm …’

  Me and My Shadow,

  All alone and feeling blue …

  ‘… The fact was, they’d never seen a horse before, never so much as seen the picture of a horse, they’d never put money on a horse, never attended a cinder classic, if you can believe it …’

  And when it’s twelve o’clock,

  We climb the stair …

  ‘… They’d never heard ponies thundering into the stretch …’

  We never knock,

  For nobody’s there …

  ‘… Those natives, they were untouched by civilization.’

  Stearns paused, and drank, and there was a sudden silence. Kay realised that McAlmon had stopped singing. ‘I looked quickly around and he was no longer there.’

  * Le Grand Écart (‘the splits’ in dance terminology) was named after Cocteau’s novel of that title – a latter day Scenes de la Bohème – published in 19 23.

  EPILOGUE

  Homeward Trek

  It was not, of course, the end of the Quarter; not yet. There were other nights, other parties. One summer evening Hilaire Hiler held one in the open air. ‘Kiki sat under a grand piano that had been placed under the green branches of the trees,’ says Kay, ‘and hoarsely sang or spoke her famous bawdy songs, while Hiler played … and Harold Stearns, still wearing his brown felt hat, appeared and reappeared, taking up a collection for a steeplechase racer that did not exist.’

  That night Kay first met the heroine of Michael Aden’s The Green Hat, the real one, and she wore broad ivory bracelets from wrist to shoulder. Nancy Cunard was ‘straight as any stick,’ writes William Carlos Williams, ‘emaciated, holding her head erect, not particularly animated, her blue eyes completely untroubled, inviolable in her virginity of pure act. I never saw her drunk; I can imagine that she was never quite sober.’ Nancy was notable for having taken as lover a black jazz pianist, Henry Crowder, whom she had picked up from a band in a Venice café. (Lady Asquith, meeting Nancy’s mother one day in Mayfair, growled at her: ‘What is it now, Maud, whisky, opium, or niggers?’) Nancy had bought Bill Bird’s printing press, and she was going to publish an edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. She was said to be a nymphomaniac, but she seemed unable to involve herself deeply with anyone. In one of his few passable poems, McAlmon describes her:

  … your straw pale hair,

  your brittle voice machine-conversing,

  allotted speeches, no neglect,

  a social sense of order,

  a sharp dry voice

  speaking through smoke and wine,

  a voice of litheness;

  a hard, a cold, a stern white body.

  The poem might have been about himself.

  Another evening there was a St Patrick’s Day dinner at the Trianon, organised by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. McAlmon had been invited, but he did not much fancy the prospect of dining with Joyce’s ‘adulators, imitators, editors, translators and explainers’, so he sat aloof at the end of the table, refusing to eat anything and drinking Armagnac. Somebody persuaded him to sing his Chinese Opera. Inspired by it, Joyce gave a rendering of several ballads, and later wanted to climb a lamp-post. Nora manoeuvred him into a taxi.

  New bars opened, others closed. One day an enterprising madame announced the commencement of business at a de luxe establishment not far from the Dôme. A shiny bar américain was proudly displayed, and the girls took prospective customers on a tour of the bedrooms, ‘And we were supposed to bring our
wives!’ says Samuel Putnam. Downstairs, in the middle of a floor crowded with the clientele of the Dôme and the Sélect, Kiki and the painter Pascin did their own furious version of the Charleston.

  For Kay, there was sometimes the excitement of new friends, like Harry and Caresse Crosby. Harry came from an upper-class Boston family and had caused a great scandal by marrying a divorcée, Polly Jacob, who now called herself Caresse. In Paris they had set up the Black Sun Press, where under the appropriate imprint of Editions Narcisse they printed their own poems – and also those of D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and fragments from Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’. (In 1929, in the USA, Harry Crosby shot himself in an apparent suicide pact with another woman; his death was regarded as another sign of the ending of the expatriate era.)

  McAlmon took up for a while with John Glassco and his friend Graeme Taylor, whom Morley Callaghan calls ‘those two willowy graceful young men’; Callaghan was rather shocked at the way they continually laughed at McAlmon behind his back. Glassco ran out of money and took a job as a gigolo for a Montmartre madame. He had to bed elderly women at all hours of the day and night, and it completely wore him out. He acquired a rich mistress, caught tuberculosis, and decided it was time to return to Canada. He was not yet twenty.

  Before he left Paris, he sold the beginning of his memoirs to This Quarter, which had been restarted by Edward Titus who ran another of the private presses. Glassco gave a party on the proceeds, but it was not a great success. An organ-grinder who had been hired to provide the music consumed most of the drink before the party had properly begun, so Glassco and McAlmon and Glassco’s girl slipped away, leaving the guests and the almost empty bottles. It was Bastille night once again and the whole city was seething with celebration. Everywhere people were dancing in the streets, and many of the women had taken off their clothes.

  ‘What a good idea it was,’ said Glassco’s girl, ‘to capture the Bastille in July.’

  ‘They were probably thinking ahead. They’re a practical people.’

  *

  But McAlmon did not revise his opinion. ‘Paris,’ he writes, ‘was by now, as it probably always has been to “old-timers”, completely finished … What Paris had once offered was no longer there so far as I was concerned.’ People began to realise that The Sun Also Rises had been a watershed: Hemingway had embalmed the spirit of the Quarter in the novel, and now they all seemed to be playing the parts he had written for them. They began to talk about two eras of Montparnasse, B.S. (Before Sun) and A.S. McAlmon had heard rumours about some vital art movement in Mexico City. He had friends there, so ‘why not go and see?’

  One August afternoon in 1929, Kay was sitting on a high stool in the empty bar of the Coupole. Suddenly Gaston the barman remembered that McAlmon had left a note for her when he took off for Mexico a month earlier. Gaston gave it to her. It was written in pencil, on ruled paper. It did not say very much; only that her typewriter had looked in pretty bad shape to him, and so he had left her his: ‘It’s with the patronne of the Café du Metro at the corner of the Boulevard St Germain and the rue de l’Odéon. It’s a fairly new Remington portable, so it ought to last through several books.’

  *

  Smitten with a social conscience at living off the princess and her memoirs, Kay decided to join Raymond Duncan’s vegetarian colony at Neuilly, and learn how to milk goats and weave tunics and make sandals out of raw hide. She endured it for six months, long enough to discover that it was simply a commercial operation to manufacture goods for Duncan’s Paris shops. No tunics were woven: Duncan sold those that his dead wife had made years earlier. The nearest thing to weaving in the colony was Kay’s darning of Harold Stearns’s collars and cuffs.

  One day she went with Archie Craig to tea at Gertrude Stein’s. It all seemed to be going well, and Kay got into earnest conversation with Alice about recipes for gazpacho, which Alice had been gathering all over Spain. But Archie told her afterwards that Gertrude had asked him not to bring her back again; she had found her ‘as incurably middle-class as Ernest Hemingway’.

  Hemingway had quarrelled with Gertrude, though no one could quite make out why. He said she had been offended when he and Hadley turned down an invitation to go on holiday with her and Alice. Then one day he had called at the rue de Fleurus and heard the two of them quarrelling: ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t.’ (This was Gertrude.) ‘I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’ He had run away quickly; he hinted that he had heard more, and worse. (Is it possible that until now he had not come to terms with Gertrude’s lesbianism?)

  Hadley said it was Gertrude who had broken off the friendship. Hadley had come to rue de Fleurus one day with Bumby and had been told by Alice at the door: ‘I’m very sorry. Gertrude can’t see you today.’ The quarrel was probably due partly to The Torrents of Spring. Gertrude thought it in deplorable taste, and agreed with Sherwood Anderson that Hemingway had written it through jealousy. Eventually, in 1933, she got her own back in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: ‘Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway … Hemingway had been formed by the two of them and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed … But what a book, they both agreed, would be the real story of Hemingway …’

  *

  Hemingway did not quarrel with Scott Fitzgerald, even though Fitzgerald took almost as much pleasure in interrupting Hemingway’s work as Zelda did with his own. By now, he was drunk in the daytime as well as at night. He blamed his failure to work on Paris. One day he came with his small daughter Scottie to Hemingway’s flat; out on the stairs she announced that she needed to go to the bathroom. Fitzgerald started to undress her there and then, and the landlord appeared and said: ‘Monsieur, there is a cabinet de toilette just ahead of you to the left of the stairs.’ Fitzgerald answered: ‘Yes, and I’ll put your head in it too, if you’re not careful.’

  Another day he asked Hemingway to have lunch with him. He said he had something very important to ask, that meant more than anything in the world to him, and that Hemingway must answer absolutely truthfully. They had finished lunch before Fitzgerald worked up courage to talk about it. Over a final carafe of wine, he said: ‘You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.’

  Hemingway took him off to the cabinet and examined him. ‘You’re perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Look at yourself in the mirror in profile.’ ‘But why should she say it?’ ‘To put you out of business.’ They went to the Louvre, and Hemingway showed Fitzgerald that none of the statues had big ones. ‘It is not basically a question of the size in repose,’ he told Fitzgerald. ‘It is the size it becomes.’

  *

  Hemingway published one more book while living in Paris, Men Without Women (1927). It contained several short stories as good as anything he had written. Pauline became pregnant late in 1927, and, like Hadley with Bumby, decided she wanted the baby born on the other side of the Atlantic. The Hemingways left France the following March, he having posed for a farewell photo with Sylvia outside the bookshop. In the picture, Sylvia looks admiringly at a large bandage swathing Hemingway’s temples; once again he has the appearance of a returned war hero. He had accidentally pulled a skylight down on his head. ‘How the hellsufferin tomcats,’ wrote Ezra Pound from Rapallo, ‘did you git drunk enough to fall upwards thru the blithering skylight?’

  Hemingway and Pauline decided to settle on Key West, an island just off the Florida peninsula. They were back in Paris during 1929, but Hemingway realised that the end of his marriage to Hadley had been ‘the end of the first part of Paris. Paris was never to be the same again.’

  *

  During
1929 the Little Review finally folded. Apart from transition, most of the other little magazines had now petered out. During 1930 Kiki’s memoirs were published; Hemingway contributed the introduction, and said that their appearance definitely marked ‘the era of Montparnasse’ as ‘closed’. The very expression ‘An American in Paris’ had become a cliché now that George Gershwin’s tone-poem of this title (1928) had been performed. Gershwin had composed most of it in New York before even setting eyes on Paris.

  On his infrequent return visits, Hemingway found the Quarter becoming ‘a dismal place’. Laurence Vail grumbled that the Dôme had been overrun by ‘barbarians, happy German families in ulsters, hardy Scandinavian raw fish eaters, trans-Mississippi school teachers, and too many pretty little girls and boys from Yale, Oxford, Bryn Mawr’. They would sit on the terrasse and take hours to consume a couple of beers, ‘a morose contrast to the old days,’ said Vail, ‘when, in less than two hours, Flossie Martin and other notables could pile towers of saucers half a metre high’.

  There were still American writers in the Quarter, a whole new generation of exiles who had arrived in the late 1920s and did not want to go home yet. Many of their antics had a familiar ring to the older expatriates. Hart Crane arrived in 1929 and one evening had a savage, furniture-smashing battle with police at the Sélect, resulting in his imprisonment in the Santé. As with Malcolm Cowley six years earlier, his friends got him out again. Such goings-on were recorded, in what was virtually a private language, by Wambly Bald, a Chicago-ite who had begun a weekly gossip column in the Paris Tribune and would wander in and out of the Quarter like an alcoholic ghost. Bald’s column of 14 October 1932 introduced a new figure to the Montparnasse stage: ‘Miller is not a son of badinage. He is a legitimate child of Montparnasse, the salt of the Quarter. He represents its classic color that has not faded since Mürger and other optimists. A good word is esprit’