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

by Carpenter, Humphrey

  Henry Miller had come to Paris in 1930 at the age of thirty-eight with several novels that nobody would publish and next to no money in his pocket. Later he moved from Montparnasse to Clichy, on the outskirts of the city, later still to Villa Seurat in the fourteenth arrondissement. He worked for a while as a proofreader of stock-market reports on the Paris Tribune, and Samuel Putnam remembers him wandering into the ‘vinous-streaked dawn’ at the Coupole after the paper had gone to press, ‘a broad ingenious grin on his face’. At the bar he would ‘expound his Weltanschauung, principally in words of four letters’. Its gist was that prostitutes were about the only pure beings in a world of reeking garbage. ‘Not a highly original conception,’ says Putnam, ‘but provided his listeners had had a sufficient number of Pernods, he could lend it all the force of novelty. Once in a while, someone would mutter: “For Christ’s sake, Hank, why don’t you write a book?”’

  One day Miller wandered into Shakespeare and Company and showed Sylvia ‘an interesting novel he had been working on, Tropic of Cancer’. As with Frank Harris, she sent him off to Jack Kahane at Obelisk Press, who brought it out in 1934. Miller soon became the centre of attraction to a group of expatriate writers in Paris – Lawrence Durrell among them – just as Joyce had been for the previous generation.

  The Paris of Miller’s sexual odyssey is scarcely recognisable as that of the Lost Generation, but it is identifiably the same city as was inhabited by George Orwell from the spring of 1928 until the end of 1929. Orwell ran out of money and took a job as a hotel dishwasher. He describes the penury he experienced during these weeks in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), his first published book.

  *

  ‘Slowly but surely,’ writes Samuel Putnam, ‘the Depression was making itself felt among us. The great homeward trek had begun.’ As Harold Loeb puts it, ‘one by one we went on to recognized achievements or succumbed to the attrition of our dreams.’ Loeb returned to the USA and became a civil servant in the National Survey of Potential Product Capacity; Bill Smith, who had been with him in Pamplona, worked on his staff there for a time, and later became a speech writer for Harry Truman. Duff Twysden and her American boyfriend also went to the USA; Loeb saw her once in the late 1930s: ‘She looked terrible and died shortly afterwards.’ Kay Boyle married Laurence Vail, who had divorced Peggy Guggenheim. Later she divorced him and married an Austrian baron. She became a successful novelist. Hadley Hemingway married a Chicago journalist; Hemingway continued to write to her so affectionately that her second husband had to ask him to stop.

  Harold Stearns went on working the racetracks for a while, until suddenly one afternoon he went blind. He was sacked by the newspaper that was currently employing him – the London Daily Mail – and though his sight recovered he became completely destitute, sleeping on benches around Paris. His health broke down, and at a friend’s recommendation he had all his teeth removed. ‘With no teeth, few friends, no job, and no money, I naturally decided that all I could do was return to my own country.’ The American Aid Society paid for his passage home, and a man he met on the boat fixed him up with a hotel room in New York. He went to Scribner’s Magazine and offered them an article called ‘A Prodigal Returns’. They bought it, and he began to get some book-reviewing work. Gradually he put his life together again.

  In 1938 he edited another symposium, America Now: an Inquiry into Civilization in the United States. In the introduction, Stearns referred ironically to ‘my thirteen years’ French Sabbatical’, but otherwise made no mention of his Parisian experiences, nor gave any indication of what he had learned in Europe. None of his 1921 contributors reappeared in the new symposium, which by comparison with its predecessor was blandly, shallowly optimistic.

  *

  Early in 1929, a year after he had left Paris, Hemingway finished his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, which quickly became a commercial success; the film rights were disposed of for $24,000, a Gary Cooper-Helen Hayes movie was released in 1932, and sales eventually passed the one million mark. But with his next book, Death in the Afternoon (1932), which is a celebration of bullfighting, his reputation began to suffer a little. One reviewer suggested that he had developed ‘a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the chest’. The trouble was, indeed, the assumption of false masculinity and the increasing repression of the ambiguities of his real nature. By the 1940s the name Hemingway had become, even among his admirers, something of a joke. Raymond Chandler, himself a skilled Hemingway follower, defined the word ‘Hemingway’, in Farewell My Lovely (1940), as meaning, ‘A guy that keeps saying the same thing over and over till you begin to believe it must be good’.

  The critic Alfred Kazin describes Hemingway’s visible decline from the mid-1930s:

  As the years went by, one grew accustomed to Hemingway standing like Tarzan against a backdrop labelled Nature; or, as the tedious sportsman of Green Hills of Africa, grinning over the innumerable beasts he had slain, while the famous style became more mechanical, the sentences more invertebrate, the philosophy more self-conscious, the headshaking over a circumscribed eternity more painful. Many of the lost generation had already departed to other spheres of interest; Hemingway seemed to have taken up a last refuge behind the clothing advertisements in Esquire, writing essays in which he mixed his fishing reports with querulous pronouncements on style and the good life.

  But he was aware of what had happened to him. In his long short story ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, written in the late 1930s, a dying author contemplates his failure to live up to early promise, a failure chiefly caused, he believes, by affluence and the companionship of the very rich:

  … You made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it. But, in yourself, you said that you would write about people; about the very rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by someone who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all …

  It was not quite as bad as that; Hemingway kept on writing, and two of his 1930s books, To Have and Have Not (1937) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), deal with serious contemporary themes – the Depression and the civil war in Spain. The first, a portrait of a Key West tough guy struggling to survive in bad times, is too obviously the work of a Have rather than a Have Not, a hasty response to Hemingway’s critics’ demand for social commitment; but For Whom the Bells Tolls is many people’s opinion the best book about the Spanish Civil War – Hemingway went to Spain as a journalist with Martha Gellhorn, who eventually became his third wife. Yet there is something disquieting about the novel if it is read as a serious political book; it is too lush, too self-indulgent; its real subject is ‘going native’ with the band of guerrillas in the hills, and sleeping with the girl Maria. The best thing in the book is the portrayal of Pilar, the wife of the guerrilla leader who herself takes over the leadership when her husband shows signs of treachery. Hemingway describes her as ‘a woman of about fifty … almost as wide as she was tall, in black peasant skirt and waist, with heavy wool socks on heavy legs, black rope-soled shoes and a brown face like a model for a granite monument’. Later in the book she says: ‘Life is very curious … I would have made a good man, but I am all woman and all ugly.’ She is, of course, a portrait of Gertrude Stein.

  *

  Sylvia Beach continued to minister to Joyce throughout the 1920s, but by 1932, ten years after the publication of Ulysses, she and Adrienne were worn out by his incessant requests for money, and told him so. Joyce was wounded by this rejection, but once when someone belittled her role in the publication of Ulysses, he said quietly: ‘All she ever did was to make me a present of the best years of her life.’

  Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas lived on in the rue de Fleurus. Gertrude became an int
ernational celebrity, giving lectures at Oxford and Cambridge, and in America. In 1933 she spent the proceeds of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas on a new eight-cylinder Ford. Leo Stein said of the book: ‘God what a liar she is!’

  Henry Miller left Paris at the end of May 1939, first for Greece, then the USA. Joyce, having completed Finnegans Wake and seen it published in the spring of 1939, left France for Zurich in mid-December 1940 after the German occupation had begun. He died there less than a month later, of a perforated ulcer.

  McAlmon, who had quickly tired of Mexico, spent the 1930s travelling the world as restlessly as he had roamed the bars of the Quarter – Munich, Berlin, Majorca, Barcelona, Strasbourg, Texas, Los Angeles, Paris again – always in search of that missing face, that riotous party that must be going on somewhere, if only he could find it. He was in France when war broke out, and he too stayed until the Germans arrived. When he went back to the USA, his brothers gave him a job with their Southwest Surgical Supply Co. He became a travelling salesman in the Arizona desert, selling trusses.

  *

  Having struggled along through the Depression, Sylvia Beach was still open for business at Shakespeare and Company when the Germans arrived in Paris in the summer of 1940. She was interned for six months, then lived in hiding, still in Paris, for the rest of the Second World War.

  Paris was liberated by the Allies in August 1944. Leon Edel had a glimpse of the Quarter that day:

  The snipers were still at their work when our vehicle rounded into Montparnasse in the long cavalcade that brought de Gaulle back to the French capital. Across the gay glass fronts of another day … the Dôme, the Sélect, the cavernous Coupole and the boarded-up Rotonde … chairs and tables were heaped in earthquake disorder. Down the way, at the Gare Montparnasse, Nazis in field-green – the dishevelled unhelmeted children of Hitler’s ‘master-race’ – were surrendering in terror or glum despair … I suddenly remembered Kiki of Montparnasse; in the midst of war, in the thronged street, I could smell chicory and Pernod.

  That day, says Sylvia, ‘there was still a lot of shooting going on in the rue de l’Odéon, and we were getting tired of it, when a string of jeeps came up the street and stopped in front of my house. I heard a deep voice calling: “Sylvia!”

  ‘“It’s Hemingway! It’s Hemingway!” cried Adrienne. I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered.’ He had managed to get to France as a journalist, and had somehow taken command of some soldiers. They dealt with the remaining Nazi snipers; then Hemingway drove the jeep off to the rue de Fleurus to greet Gertrude and Alice, and to the Place Vendôme, ‘to liberate,’ he told Sylvia, ‘the cellar at the Ritz’.

  *

  After the war, Sylvia lived on in the rue de l’Odéon, doing a little bookselling from her apartment, and presiding over a great exhibition of American writers in Paris held there in 1959. She died in 1962. Today another shop, on the quai of the Left Bank opposite Notre Dame, sells American and English books and bears the name ‘Shakespeare and Company’.

  In the 1950s Samuel Beckett inherited the role of Joyce to the latest generation of exiled writers in Paris, many of them Irish. Unlike Joyce he always insisted on paying for every round of drinks; like Joyce, he often needed to be helped home from the Falstaff, his favourite bar. After one such occasion he wrote to thank a friend for ‘your invaluable help up that blazing boulevard’.

  Gertrude Stein died in 1946; Alice survived her by twenty-one years, living on alone in Paris. Kiki ended up selling matches and safety-pins on the terrace of the Dôme; Nina Hamnett threw herself out of a window in London; Robert McAlmon died of pneumonia at Desert Hot Springs, California in 1956, at the age of sixty.

  Hemingway shot himself in June 1961, just before his sixty-second birthday, leaving his fourth wife Mary to see his final book through the press. She chose its title from something he had said a few years earlier: ‘If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.’

  A Moveable Feast is better than anything else he wrote in his later years – far better than his last novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952), though that book helped to win him the Nobel Prize for Literature. The idea of writing his reminiscences of Paris in the 1920s came to him after he had discovered his notebooks from those days, mouldering in a trunk he had forgotten and which had lain for thirty years in the basement of the Paris Ritz. Only the description of Ford Madox Ford at the Closerie des Lilas, originally written for The Sun Also Rises, actually came from those notebooks; the rest was a brilliant recapturing of the flavour of his earliest work – a recovery of sensitivity, almost, one might say, a recovery of the feminine side of Hemingway:

  It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more, the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face …

  *

  Natalie Barney had continued to hold her Friday evening salon all through the 1920s and 1930s, and she resumed after the war. The last was held when she was ninety-one. She refused to be deterred by the student riots that were disrupting Paris that day, for this was May 1968. A young writer who was present, Jean Chalon, recalls how ‘the corks popped, keeping time with the explosions in the street.’

  *

  Malcolm Cowley made himself a reputation as a critic and man of letters in the USA. ‘Ten years after the first migration to Montparnasse,’ he writes:

  I met a talented, rather naive young woman just returned from London, where she had published her first novel. Yes, it had been fairly successful – it was good enough for the English, she said, but she didn’t want to publish it over here until she had time to rewrite it completely; it wasn’t good enough for New York. I knew she did not intend to be smart; she was a simple person trying to state her impressions and those of the circle in which she moved.

  In the 1930s American writing certainly began to hold its head high, but it is questionable how much this had to do with what had happened in Montparnasse. The chief authors to emerge in this decade – William Faulkner, grand master of Southern Gothic, Thomas Wolfe, creator of sprawling semi-autobiographies, and John Steinbeck, who wrote the fine Depression novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) – had none of them been members of the Lost Generation, and had little in common with it. Malcolm Cowley, reviewing the 1930s, argues that the exiles had played their part in the strengthening of American literature; yet some words in his Exile’s Return about the failure of the Dadaists could also be applied to his American friends in Montparnasse during the 1920s.:

  Here was a group of young men, probably the most talented in Europe: there was not one of them who lacked the ability to become a good writer or, if he so decided, a very popular writer. They had behind them the long traditions of … literature (and knew them perfectly); they had all the examples of living masters (and had pondered them); they had a burning love of their art and a fury to excel. And what, after all, did they accomplish? They wrote a few interesting books, influenced a few others, launched and inspired half a dozen good artists, created scandal and gossip, had a good time. Nobody can help wondering why, in spite of their ability and moral fervor and battles over principle, they did nothing more.

  Far more fruitful in terms of literature was another exile, which had been going on long before the Lost Generation beached itself in Paris, and which accelerated in the 1930s with the menace of Hitler: the flight of Europeans, espec
ially Jews, to the USA. This was the ‘movement’ that played the vital part in rehabilitating American literature, as these exiled Europeans began to write, or gave birth to children who became outstanding authors – Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut and Vladimir Nabokov.

  *

  The symbolic figure for the return of the Lost Generation to America is not Hemingway leaving Paris for an affluent life in Florida, but Harold Stearns, broken and destitute, staggering back steerage class. The geniuses had mostly turned out not to be geniuses after all. Yet they had been geniuses at being together, drinking together, sleeping together, and quarrelling together; and that was something worth remembering.

  Most of them could not help remembering it. In ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, the dying writer, lying on his camp bed in the African bush as his leg rots with gangrene, realises that over the years he has methodically destroyed his talent. But he can still look back with a kind of euphoria to his early days in Paris. Hemingway – for of course he is writing about himself – can still summon up an untarnished vision of it all:

  ‘… The Place Contrescarpe … and the Bal Musette they lived above … And in that poverty, and in that quarter … he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that … There were only two rooms in the apartment where they lived and he had a room on the top floor of the hotel that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could see the roofs and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris …’

  *

  THE END

  Appendices

  Appendix A:

  Biographies in Brief