by David Belbin
I worked six hour days five days a week, starting at ten and finishing at six, with an unpaid two hour break at lunch, when there were no deliveries. This became my time for mooching around the city, hoping to meet women or, at least, find inspiration. My new job gave me little opportunity for either. The only girls I met were shop assistants, and, as boyfriend material, I was beneath their consideration. They didn’t ask a lot, but a full time job and a car were pretty much essential in any man, in France as much as in Britain.
There were many long, blank hours that could only partly be filled with letters home, reading and abortive attempts at writing fiction. Writing by hand wore me out. My handwriting was an ugly squiggle. Sometimes I had trouble reading it back to myself. I needed a computer, or, at least, a typewriter. It seemed to me then that, if your words looked good on the page, the rest would follow.
Most Sunday mornings, on a street two minutes walk from mine, there was a regular flea market. It took place in a covered market that, for the rest of the week, sold flowers and vegetables. Some of the stalls were taken by professional dealers. Others were run by people who had stuff they wanted rid of. It was there, some five weeks after my arrival, that I found the typewriter.
It was a portable Royal, an American model with a QWERTY keyboard rather than the French AZERTY.
‘How old is it?’ I asked the old woman behind the table.
‘Seventy years old,’ she told me, in French. ‘I think it belonged to a lodger of my grandmother’s. I found it in her attic when she died.’ She shrugged. ‘Not quite old enough to be an antique, they tell me, but something nice to put on your shelf, perhaps?’
I told her I was interested in using it. ‘But I don’t suppose you can still get the ribbons...’
‘Oh yes, it’s a standard size. And...’ She pulled out an old cardboard box. ‘I found this with the typewriter. Look.’
There were two spare ribbons, still wrapped in cellophane, and two packets of manuscript paper held together by ancient string.
‘I’ll throw these in with it. Two hundred francs.’
This was over twenty pounds — hardly a bargain, when most typewriters were being binned, rather than sold, but I had fallen for the machine. The ribbon stretched between the rollers was dried up and worn, but the other two should see me through the rest of my stay in Paris. I had taught myself to touch type on a computer keyboard. A typewriter shouldn’t be too hard to use. I bargained her down to a hundred and fifty francs. Madame Devonier insisted on writing out a full receipt, for which I would later be very grateful.
A typewriter handles differently from a word processor. If you type too quickly the keys are liable to jam up, forcing you to get your fingers covered in ink while you untangle them. Writing requires physical effort. At first, I could only manage an hour before my fingers ached. The machine was also noisy. Other residents of the house complained if I typed after ten at night, or on Sunday afternoons when they were trying to sleep off lunch. I didn’t blame them. Sometimes the typewriter’s machine gun staccato gave me a headache.
The quality of my writing got no better. I began to wonder why I thought I could become a writer.Was it because, three years earlier, I’d imitated Dickens and fooled my English teacher? Before coming to France I’d found the Dickens file on my word processor and read the piece for the first time since Mr Moss tore it up. By now, I’d read much of Dickens. I could see how far my imitation fell short. My syntax was too simple. My similes were awkward. I had no grasp of historical detail. A kind of lucky fluency had fooled the teacher, but it didn’t satisfy me.
I was still fascinated by Hemingway. Now I tried to write like him. He seemed an easier target than Dickens because of all the one and two syllable words he used, the repetitions. I soon realised that Hemingway could get away with repeating ‘and’ and ‘but’ only because they were part of a rhythm. There was a kind of poetry that was cumulative and easy to imitate, but hard to bring off successfully. Many had tried. Sometimes it seemed I could hear Hemingway’s rhythms in every new American short story I read in Granta magazine. But the American authors at least made something of their own in the copying process. Not me.
I was given a week off for Christmas and went home, feeling like I’d learnt nothing in my three months away.
Four
At home, Mum fussed over me, saying how much older I looked and acted. She wanted me to say I’d really missed her. I did and I had, but you didn’t say that sort of thing to your mother. Men always leave their mothers behind. There are fewer mothers than fathers in fiction and not very many of either. In real life, maybe, many men have their closest relationships with their mothers. But they don’t write fiction about it.
Christmas passed. On the morning I was leaving, I found something sinister, tucked away at the back of the cupboard where I thought Mum might have put my sleeping bag. It was wrapped in a blanket, the way a baby might be protected by swaddling clothes. Beneath the blanket I found a fourteen inch, portable Sony TV set. I covered it up and never once mentioned the thing. Mum must get lonely, I told myself on the long journey back to Paris. The nights are long and the radio’s not as good as it used to be. Still, I felt betrayed. I thought it was the first big secret she’d kept from me.
Back in Clichy, I had no idea why I’d returned. I was doing a job I could have been doing at home. I was missing New Year’s Eve parties to spend the night in a cold room, alone. Everybody else in the house was out. I spent the last evening of the decade rereading The Sun Also Rises in conjunction with Carlos Baker’s edition of Hemingway’s letters and Meyer’s biography of the writer, which I’d already devoured once.
There was one story about Hemingway in Paris that particularly fascinated me. What happened was this: in late 1922, Hemingway was living in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, who was several years his elder. Ernest was a journalist at the time and an aspiring, unpublished novelist who had already done much of the work that, when published, would make his early reputation.
Hemingway went skiing. Hadley travelled from Paris to Lausanne to join him. With her she brought a suitcase containing all of his manuscripts, including the carbon copies. Having secured a compartment on the train at the Gare de Lyon, Hemingway’s wife went off to buy a London paper and a bottle of Evian. When she returned to the compartment, the suitcase was gone.
Hadley joined Hemingway in Lausanne. She was in a terrible state, and asked her husband to guess the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Hemingway thought for a moment that she had fallen in love with another man. But it was worse than that. The loss devastated Hemingway. He couldn’t believe that Hadley had brought both the manuscripts and the copies, something she never explained. No-one knows exactly what was in the case. Hemingway once said there were eleven stories, a novel and some poems.
In A Moveable Feast, written just before he killed himself, Hemingway claims the loss was good for him. It forced him to start over and the fresh versions of the missing stories made his reputation. But it must have hurt terribly at the time and marked the first rupture of his relationship with Hadley.
As for my own writing, I didn’t know if I was writing a comedy or a coming-of-age novel. How could I write such a thing? I hadn’t come of age. As an experiment, I started to write my own versions of the missing stories. I thought that, by imitating Hemingway, I might learn something. I reread the stories from his first collection, In Our Time, and rewrote three from memory. Others I made up afresh, using details taken from my reading of the biography and later Hemingway.
In my notebooks, they weren’t much. I threw endless pages away. Why should I think I was good at this? But when I began typing, the words that came out were my own, yet not my own. Carlos Baker, in his edition of the letters, listed Hemingway’s most common grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. I included a few of these, superstitiously thinking that, by making Hemingway’s mistakes, some of his talent might rub off on me.
By February, I had written
seven Hemingway stories and hated them all. Only two had any promise, I thought: an ‘early’ version of Out of Season and a ‘new’ story, untitled, where Nick Adams, Hemingway’s hero from the In Our Time stories and many others, is in Paris. Like Hemingway, he is married, but his wife is away. Nick goes to meet another ex-pat who has been in the war.They spend an awkward evening together. I wrote it the way Hemingway used to write, with a pencil, then typed it out, trying to avoid any redundant words, to keep the sentences short and the tone authentic. Then I went back over it, cutting repetitions and phrases that seemed too modern. In the third sentence, ‘could use’ became ‘was in need of’. Later, I changed the word ‘chore’ which sounded too English, into ‘bind’.
I rewrote until I could no longer tell how well the piece read. Was the pace too jerky? I was pleased with the tone, but had no idea what to do with the plot, in which the Nick Adams character can’t work out how to deal with his acquaintance, who is suffering the aftermath of shell shock. We’d studied First World War poetry at school, but I didn’t know what it was like to be newly married, or fresh out of a war. Hemingway didn’t write about his marriage in his early work. It was years before his fiction would broach the First World War. Nobody alive knew what he had tried, and failed, in those lost, early stories. Playfully, I inserted a grammatical error at the start of the second paragraph, where I had Hemingway write: ‘there was a lot of people on the street’. This was a mistake I’d noticed Hemingway make in one of his best known stories, Fifty Grand.
I don’t know why I aimed for such verisimilitude in my Hemingway pastiche. I’m not claiming that it was terribly good. I’d include a passage to demonstrate its mediocrity, but I’m unable to, for reasons that will appear in due course.
My New Year’s resolution was to get another job. It didn’t have to be a better one — I still had my university place lined up and was living pretty cheaply — but it had to be one where I met new people. If I couldn’t teach, perhaps I could use my written French, at which I’d always excelled.
I went to a translation agency on Rue Saint-Lazare. The proprietor, a stylish, forty something brunette called Madame Blanc, told me I fell down on three scores: no degree, no computer, no experience. However, it was a very quiet day, so she offered me coffee. I pressed my luck and asked whether I could take the agency’s translation test. Madame Blanc shrugged and said bien sur, then watched, amused, as I did it in ten minutes. She looked it over for thirty seconds before telling me I’d passed with flying colours.
‘At least let me give you my address and phone number,’ I said to Madame Blanc.‘Maybe something will come up.’
She could hardly refuse that. As I was writing it, Madame took a phone call. She spoke in English.
‘No, we don’t do that. I could give you a number, but most places are closed until next week. Wait, what exactly is it you want? Hold on.’ She covered the receiver and spoke to me. ‘Can you do French tuition? Teach somebody to speak French?’
‘Certainement.’
It was the wrong way round, even I knew that. You want to learn French, you go to a Frenchman. But none of the people who’d taught me French at school were French. So why not?
‘We have a young Englishman here,’ she said. ‘His French is very good.Would you like me to put him on?’
I found myself speaking to Paul Mercer.
‘We’re in.’ there was a pause as he coughed and yelled for somebody called Helen. ‘What’s the name of this place? And your name is...? Well, Mark, would you be prepared to come to us for an interview?’
I asked Madame Blanc how much I should charge if I was successful and she suggested an hourly sum between four and five times as much as I was being paid at WHS. It seemed ridiculous but turned out to be more than reasonable.
‘I’ll owe you a commission,’ I said.
‘No need for that,’ she said, flirtatiously, putting on an American accent, ‘but you can come and see me sometime.’
Her smile made me blush. I assumed she was teasing me. It was years before I realised I was the kind of young man who attracted older women much more readily than those his own age.
Five
The Mercers were staying in an ancient hotel in St. Germain. Paul Mercer greeted me at the door of their spacious suite. He was fiftyish, wearing blue jeans and a plain T-shirt, with a full head of brown hair and warm, laughing eyes. To my mind, he dressed at least ten years younger than a man his age could get away with. His every sentence seemed to end with an exclamation mark.
‘Mark! Why, you’re so young! Come in, sit down, let me get you a drink!’
Paul poured on the charm. It would have been churlish to take a dislike to him. He was sipping brandy, though it wasn’t yet midday, and added cognac to my coffee. Helen, he told me in his big, overfamiliar voice, was the daughter from his second marriage. He had just come out of his fifth.
‘She can’t stand her mother so I seem to have ended up with her. Helen!’ he yelled at the bathroom door. ‘Come and meet Mr Trace.’ He turned back to me, draining his brandy in a single gulp. ‘Done much of this kind of thing?’
Before I was forced to lie, Helen came into the room. From the way that Paul had been talking about her, I’d expected a sullen adolescent. Instead I found a beautiful gazelle, with long dark hair — I wasn’t sure of the colour at first because her hair was wet. She wore only the towelling gown the hotel provided, which was noticeably too small for her. Helen looked me up and down. Her expression was disguised disdain at best, yet, smitten with her charms, I barely registered this.When Paul asked my rates, I quoted him the lowest end of the fee range suggested by Madame Blanc.
‘Do you speak much French?’ I asked Helen, who was brushing back her hair.
‘Hardly,’ she said. ‘I’m an English Literature major.’
‘I love literature,’ I said, getting ready to warm to a theme. ‘That’s what I plan to study, in London.’
‘Really?’ she said, as though I were trying to catch her out, rather than chat her up. Within an hour, I discovered that Helen wasn’t majoring in anything. She’d dropped out of two different universities. Paul said that he was trying to get her into the Sorbonne, but they wouldn’t touch her unless she spoke fluent French.Which was where I came in.
All I had to do, Madame Blanc had assured me, was talk to Helen in French. But this wasn’t going to be easy, for Helen had no French whatsoever. At my suggestion, while Helen dressed, Mr Mercer accompanied me to WH Smith, where I chose a French/English dictionary, a book on French Grammar and two copies of a textbook that looked similar to something I’d used in school aged thirteen. Mercer (‘call me Paul’) paid cash without looking at the books, being far more interested in eyeing up the female customers browsing in the store. Maybe he had come to Paris to find wife number six.
On our way back to the hotel, he asked if I was free for three hours every afternoon, five days a week. I did a quick calculation: I would earn twice as much as WH Smith paid me for half the work.
‘It’s a deal.’
When we got back to the hotel, Helen was dressed in jeans and a cashmere sweater. It had just gone two. Paul announced that he and I had come to an arrangement and I would be coming at this hour every day for three hours. He then paid me three days in advance and said that he had to go out.
‘Bon chance,’ he added, at the door, leaving Helen and me alone.
‘Three hours is a long time,’ she said.
I agreed. ‘We can allow ourselves a break in the middle.’
‘Paul won’t know what we’ve been up to anyway. Teach me to say something.’
We went through hello, how are you and what’s your name. Soon we were calling each other tu. Then we went on to age. When Helen asked me quelle age as-tu? I decided to go with the oldest age I thought I could get away with, and told her I was nineteen.Then I asked her her age. She told me she was twenty. I claimed that I turned twenty in March (I would actually be eighteen) and she seemed to believe
me. We were more or less the same age — and we were to be in each other’s company five days a week. What better chance would I get?
Our conversation soon faltered. At school, I realised, I had paid no attention to teaching methods. French relied largely on responding to tapes in language laboratories. I had no cassettes, and could see that Helen wouldn’t have the patience to use them. Not that Helen wouldn’t talk. Once Helen had decided she liked me, it was hard to get a word in edgeways. It was only when I mentioned the Sorbonne, that Helen got irritated.
‘I’m not really going to get into the Sorbonne. That’s Paul’s excuse to have me here while he spends the afternoons drinking, doing deals with his buddies.’
‘What does Paul do?’
‘He’s an... Art dealer, I guess you’d call it.’
Next day, with the advance Paul had given me, I bought a new shirt and wore it to the Mercers’ hotel suite. It was two in the afternoon but Helen still gave the impression of having only just got up. She ordered a large pot of coffee from room service, occupying the time before it arrived by brushing her luxuriant hair. I watched the back of her head, tongue-tied. The coffee, when it came, was so lethally strong, I couldn’t get through a cup. While she tied back her hair, I began talking in simple French. Helen drank cup after cup of the strong coffee. With each gulp, she seemed to thaw, responding to my questions in monosyllables at first, then muttered phrases. After a while, I managed to drag whole sentences out of her. As the coffee kicked in, her eyes lit and she talked in paragraphs, then pages — though, unfortunately, few of them were in French. She told me about bands she’d seen, drugs she’d taken, even boys she’d slept with, making me feel terribly naïf.