That Summer in Paris

by Callaghan, Morley;

  My mother had left a note for me: Call Mr. Johnston, but by that time it was nearly dawn. I went to bed. At nine the phone rang and it was Harry Johnston. “Why didn’t you meet Mr. Reade?” he shouted angrily. I said, “I was there. Why wasn’t Mr. Reade there?” But he screamed, “Mr. Reade was there,” and I said, “Why didn’t Mr. Reade speak to me?” and he yelled, “Mr. Reade says he doesn’t know you.” And I yelled, “What makes Mr. Reade think I should know him? The story is in your box.” “It is? Well, we’ll see,” he said threateningly. “A Star man doesn’t have to be told things, Callaghan. If he can’t pick up things in a week, a simple thing like knowing who our Mr. Reade is, we don’t want him around.” And he hung up. But when I went into the office on Monday he told me he had put me down for a five-dollar raise. Only then did he introduce me to the scholarly Mr. Reade.

  I was getting along. In the mornings there was the hotel beat, and loafing from hotel to hotel, in the hope of encountering a vis-itor who might make a good interview, my thoughts were usually on writing. Visitors to the hotels might be strange characters I could use in stories. Why did I dislike so much contemporary writing? I would wonder. The popular writers of the day like

  Hergesheimer, Edith Wharton, James Branch Cabell, Galsworthy, Hugh Walpole, H. G. Wells – except for Tono Bungay – I had rejected fiercely. Show-off writers; writers intent on proving to their readers that they could be clever and had some education, I would think. Such vanities should be beneath them if they were really concerned in revealing the object as it was. Those lines, A primrose by a river’s brim, a yellow primrose was to him, and it was nothing more, often troubled me, aroused my anger. What the hell else did Wordsworth want it to be? An orange? A sunset? I would ask myself, Why does one thing have to remind you of something else? Going from hotel to hotel on my job I would brood over it.

  I remember deciding that the root of the trouble with writing was that poets and storywriters used language to evade, to skip away from the object, because they could never bear to face the thing freshly and see it freshly for what it was in itself. A kind of double talk; one thing always seen in terms of another thing. Criticism? A dreary metaphor. The whole academic method! Of course there were lines like Life’s but a walking shadow… Just the same, I’d be damned if the glory of literature was in the metaphor. Besides, it was not a time for the decorative Renaissance flight into simile. Tell the truth cleanly. Weren’t the consequences of fraudulent pretending plain to anyone who would look around? Hadn’t the great slogans of the First World War become ridiculous to me before I had left high school? Wilsonian idealism! Always the flight of fancy. And Prohibition. Another fantasy. It was hilarious, a beautiful example of the all-prevailing fraudulent morality; and at college it had become a social obligation to go to the bootlegger’s, and a man came to have a sneaking respect for those who openly broke the law – not for the policeman standing on a corner.

  And the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas which I got in my college classroom? All the big words, the metaphysics, were to be treated with grudging suspicion. Nothing could be taken for granted. Nothing could be taken on authority. A craving for authority had led to Prohibition and stupid censorship in Boston. Orthodoxy was for fat comfortable inert people who agreed to pretend, agreed to accept the general fraud, the escape into metaphor. All around me seemed to be some kind of a wild energy that could be tapped and controlled. In the dance halls I heard the jazz sounds coming from Chicago. That town, Chicago! The bootleggers, the shootings, the open disrespect for all that had been thought of as socially acceptable. And Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg had lived in Chicago.

  Yet Chicago didn’t beckon to me. Nor did Greenwich Village. Edna Millay, Eugene O’Neill, Floyd Dell, Max Bodenheim. I knew all the names. But the Village seemed to me to be a place full of characters. I was against all writers who wanted to become “characters.” The whole contemporary world was full of characters. Women rode on the wings of airplanes, men sat on flagpoles, there were stunt men of all kinds, jazz musicians, young ladies going gallantly to hell on bathtub gin. But there was also the way Jack Dempsey fought. His brutal mauling style seemed to be telling me something: do the thing you want to do in your own way. Be excellent at it. Seek your own excellence. Having no use for pure aesthetes or aloof intellectuals, I went on playing ball, and enjoyed the skill required of a pitcher working on a hitter. I tell this to show the kind of thinking, the thoughts about writing, of a young reporter doing the hotel beat. In the hotels I sat talking far too long with opera singers or visiting senators.

  In the hotel one day I remember encountering a British author, a nice middle-aged gray-haired man. And in no time I was telling him firmly that writing had to do with the right relationship between the words and the thing or person being described: the words should be as transparent as glass, and every time a writer used a brilliant phrase to prove himself witty or clever he merely took the mind of the reader away from the object and directed it to himself; he became simply a performer. Why didn’t he go on the stage? The elderly British writer, regarding me thoughtfully, asked me how old I was. “An interesting view of style. Look here,” and he took a page out of his notebook and wrote on it his name and the address of an English publisher. If I ever wrote anything I was to send this note along with it to the English publisher.

  I remember one time at twilight, sitting at the typewriter in the sunroom of my parents’ home. I could smell the lilacs. A night bird cried. A woman’s voice came from a neighbor’s yard. I wanted to get it down so directly that it wouldn’t feel or look like literature. I remembered too being with a girl one night, and on the way home, walking alone, I felt the world had been brought close to me; there seemed to be magic in the sound of my own foot-steps, even in the noise of the streetcars – all mingled with the girl’s kiss, the memory of the little run I had noticed in her stocking, the way she said good-bye to me. None of it had to be written up. There it was, beautiful in itself. A “literary guy” would spoil it.

  I was not at all lonely. I liked my father, mother and brother, and felt under no compulsion to leave home. I liked the university and had learned there that if I just passed my exams, no professor could get on my back and I had time to get my own education. I loved working on the Star, went to the dance hall, always had a girl.

  In my city were many poets, a group of painters called the Group of Seven, and no doubt many great readers and scholars. But in those days it was a very British city. I was intensely North American. It never occurred to me that the local poets had anything to do with me. Physically, and with some other part of me, the ball-playing, political debating, lovemaking, family part of me, I was wonderfully at home in my native city, and yet intellectually, spiritually, the part that had to do with my wanting to be a writer was utterly, but splendidly and happily, alien. It was something like this: my father had no interest in baseball; I never bothered him about it; he never bothered me about it. That was the way it was with me as a student, a young reporter interested in his own view of writing in this city. If I had to become a lawyer, all right, I would practice law. And then I met our real city editor, the fear-some Mr. Hindmarsh, who had come back from his holidays.

  I have to tell you about this man, Harry Hindmarsh. If it had not been for Hindmarsh, Hemingway might have remained a year in Toronto, he might not have written The Sun Also Rises, and I might have settled into newspaper work. Hindmarsh was the grand antagonist. But I never hated him as Hemingway did. There was always some sardonic humor in my view of him. All the duels with him really pushed me closer to Paris. Hemingway maintained that Hindmarsh was a bad newspaperman. It wasn’t true. Hindmarsh was a hard-driving, good, ruthless newspaperman. But as the general of the Star army, always on the move, he had some failings. Perhaps it wasn’t such an advantage to him after all that he had married the daughter of the president of the Star Publishing Company, Joseph Atkinson. Perhaps it had something to do with his refusal to permit any one of his employees to
enjoy his own sense of security. With his anger, childish petulance and inexplicable moodiness, he seemed to be driven to break any proud man’s spirit. And yet he was sentimental. He was capable of gusts of inexplicable moody kindness. When a man was really broken, an alcoholic or a debt-ridden fool or some other lost soul, helpless and on his knees, Hindmarsh would be there with a helping hand, saying in effect, “Rise, my son, I am with you. Let me look after things for you.”

  One morning Hindmarsh, accompanied by his assistant Johnston, came walking along the aisle from the city desk past the row of reporters’ desks on his way to his office. The big heavy-shouldered man with close-cropped hair and an assured, dominating manner, stopped in front of me. Astonished, I stood up slowly. “Mr. Callaghan,” said my Mr. Johnston, “meet Mr. Hindmarsh.” I put out my hand warily, but the big fellow was smiling at me benevolently.

  “You were hired as a summer replacement,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Hindmarsh,” and I saw that Mr. Johnston, who had gambled and hired me, was not looking unhappy.

  “Well, my boy,” said Mr. Hindmarsh, with a surprisingly warm grin, “I understand you wrote that story about W. Z. Foster. I have decided you’re cut out to be a newspaperman. You can join the permanent staff.”

  Embarrassed, I told him I hadn’t finished my university course and would have to go back to college.

  Whirling on my Mr. Johnston, Hindmarsh growled, “I thought you told me this man was a varsity graduate?”

  “Mr. Callaghan, didn’t you tell me you were a graduate?” asked Johnston, and I saw by the expression on his face that he was scared stiff of Hindmarsh. “You didn’t ask me,” I said nervously. “Nobody asked me.”

  “Nobody asked you?” and Mr. Hindmarsh, grunting, drew back and brooded over both me and Mr. Johnston, then shook his head sadly.

  “I assumed…” began Mr. Johnston nervously. But then Mr. Hindmarsh half smiled. “Never mind,” he said. “Go back to college. Graduate. We’ll work something out for you to keep you on the paper.” As Mr. Hindmarsh strode away Mr. Johnston remained studying me with a perplexed air. But I hurried out. My God, I thought, what will Hindmarsh say when he discovers that I have still another year to go at college?

  By this time that thin, whispering deskman, Jimmy Cowan, the only one I talked to about writing, would pass on to me bits of local gossip in his sinister mutter. Cowan read all the American writers, kept track of Mencken in the old Smart Set, could talk about the Greenwich Village crowd, and even read the theatrical paper, Variety. One day, near the end of summer, he whispered to me, his eye rolling around the newsroom as if he had to make sure no one was listening, “A good newspaperman is coming from Europe to join the staff. Our European correspondent, Ernest Hemingway.” Then he told me that Hemingway had been in Toronto some four years ago when he had done some work for the Star Weekly. Since I had never heard of this Mr. Hemingway I could only say “Oh.”

  A few weeks later, one noontime, crossing the street to the Star building, I saw a tall, broad-shouldered, brown-eyed, high-colored man with a heavy black mustache coming out of the building. He was wearing a peak cap. He smiled at me politely. He had a quick, eager, friendly smile and looked like a Latin. No Toronto newspaperman would be wearing that peak cap, and I knew he must be the new man from Europe, Ernest Hemingway.

  Next morning when the assignment book was brought from H.C. Hindmarsh’s office and the reporters gathered around, I ran my eye down the page and saw Hemingway’s name in at least five places. Fascinated, I looked to see what kind of assignment was being given the big correspondent from Europe. Five consequen-tial jobs such as I might be asked to do myself! While I stood there Hemingway came in, looked at the book, muttered a terse four-letter word and hurried out white-faced. I could see what was happening. Our Mr. Hindmarsh was determined that no one should get the impression that he was going to be coddled. But Hemingway’s startled curse, muttered over my shoulder, was the only word I heard from him for over a month.

  In those weeks I don’t think I saw him more than once or twice, for he was busy galloping around the country in the Hindmarsh harness. But I had heard – I was always hearing things about him– that he’d brought from Paris a book of his called Three Stories and Ten Poems, privately printed. My friend Jimmy Cowan loaned me this book for one night. I can remember being in the city room long after midnight, finishing up an assignment, and across from me sat two older, learned and well-paid colleagues. I couldn’t resist asking them if they had read Three Stories and Ten Poems. They had. And what did they think of it? Their supercilious contempt enraged me. When I argued with them, they dismissed me good-humoredly. After all, they didn’t even know my name. I can still remember the patient smile of the older one as he said, “Remember this, my boy. Three swallows never made a summer.”

  “All right, I think he’s a great writer,” I said belligerently. “Now just wait and see.”

  So far I hadn’t even shaken hands with Hemingway, and yet I would pick up bits of information about him. He had a peculiar and, for him, I think, fatal quality. He made men want to talk about him. He couldn’t walk down the street and stub his toe without having a newspaperman who happened to be walking with him magnify the little accident into a near fatality. How he was able to get these legends going I still don’t know. But I would hear of the dramatic tension developing between him and Mr. Hindmarsh. How magnified all this was I can’t say. I do say, even in those days everything that was happening to Hemingway was magnified by someone. I heard that he had hardly time to be with his wife, Hadley, when she was having her baby. And yet he was suddenly moved downstairs to enjoy the leisurely life on the Star Weekly.

  At this time I went back to school for the fall term. But three times a week I would come down to the editorial room where I got my assignment, then I would go downstairs to the library and sit writing my story. One afternoon I looked up and there was Hemingway, watching me. I imagine he had time on his hands and was looking for someone to talk to. Though years have passed I still wonder what brought him to me.

  He was sitting across from me, leaning close, and there was a real sweetness in his smile and a wonderful availability, and he made me feel that he was eagerly and deeply involved in everything. We began to talk. He told me that he had come to Toronto because his wife was having a baby and he had heard Toronto doctors were very good. As soon as possible, he said vehemently, he’d go back to Paris. He couldn’t write in Toronto. There is a story that while he was in Toronto he was sending out stories to the little magazines in Paris. This is nonsense. Those Paris magazines, the Trans-atlantic Review, transition, This Quarter and Ezra Pound’s Exile hadn’t even been launched.

  He had come to Toronto with good expectations, and now he seemed to feel smothered, though he had good friends here. I could see it wasn’t only the job that was bothering him. I didn’t know what it was. Yet he had a strange and delightful candor, and every time I looked at his warm, dark face with the restless eyes I liked him more.

  Words came from him not in an eloquent flow but with a quiet, tense authority. He gave me a quick rundown on the talents of the better-known reporters. This one was “a good newspaperman.” Another one “There’s no one better at the kind of thing he’s doing.” But with some he was brutal. “Him? He simply has no shame.” This one had a homosexual style. Then we began to talk about literature. All his judgments seemed to come out of an intense and fierce conviction, but he offered them to you as if he were letting you in on something. “James Joyce is the greatest writer in the world,” he said. Huckleberry Finn was a very great book. Had I read Stendhal? Had I read Flaubert? Always appearing to be sharing a secret; yet watching me intently. He seemed pleased that I was so approving of the intention behind the great Stendhal style. And there was Melville; if I was interested in symbolism, Moby Dick was the great work. And what did I think of Stephen Crane? Did I agree that The Red Badge of Courage was a great war book? I was to wonder about his enthusiasm for The Re
d Badge of Courage, especially when, later on, he made such a point about a writer needing to experience for himself the scenes he described. Crane’s book was a work purely of the imagination.

  Suddenly he asked how old I was, and I told him, and he said he was seven years older. Then he said solemnly, “You know, you are very intelligent.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said uncomfortably, for people I knew in Toronto didn’t say such things to each other.

  “Do you write fiction?” he asked.

  “A little.”

  “Have you got a story around?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have.”

  “When do you come down here again?”

  “On Friday.”

  “Bring the story along,” he said. “I’ll look for you,” and he got up and left.

  But my Friday assignment took me out of the office. The following Monday afternoon I passed Hemingway on the stairs. Wheeling suddenly four steps above me, looming over me, big and powerful, he growled, “You didn’t bring that story down.”

  “No, I was busy.”

  “I see,” he said, then rude and brutal he added, “I just wanted to see if you were another goddamned phony.”

  His brutal frankness shocked me, and I felt my face burning.

  “I’m retyping the story,” I said curtly. “I’ll bring it down. Don’t worry. I’ll be in there Wednesday at three.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, and as he hurried up the stairs, anyone watching would probably have thought I owed him some money and had been ducking him.

  On Wednesday I was waiting in the library with my story, and within five minutes Hemingway appeared. He had some proofs in his hand. “Did you bring the story?” he asked. I handed it to him. “I brought these along,” he said, handing me the proofs. They were the proofs of the first edition of In Our Time, the little book done in Paris on special paper with hand-set type. “I’ll read your story,” he said, “and you read these.”