We sat across from each other at the table, reading, and not a word was said. His work was just a series of long paragraphs, little vignettes. They were so polished they were like epigrams, each paragraph so vivid, clean and intense that the scene he was depict-ing seemed to dance before my eyes. Sitting there I knew I was getting a glimpse of the work of a great writer.
When he saw that I had finished with his proofs he put down my story and said quietly, “You’re a real writer. You write big-time stuff. All you have to do is keep on writing.”
He spoke so casually, but with such tremendous authority, that I suddenly couldn’t doubt him. Without knowing it, I was in the presence of that authority he evidently had to have to hold his life together. He had to believe he knew, as I found out later, or he was lost. Whether it was in the field of boxing, or soldiering, or bullfighting or painting, he had to believe he was the one who knew. And he could make people believe he did, too. “Now what about my proofs?” he asked. Fumbling a little, and not sounding like a critic, I told him how impressed I was. “What do your friends in Paris say about this work?” I asked.
“Ezra Pound says it is the best prose he has read in forty years,” he said calmly.
At that time the poet Ezra Pound was not a big name in Toronto, but to young writers in English, whether they lived in New York, Paris or London, he was the prophet, the great discoverer, the man of impeccable taste. I think I saw then why Hemingway wanted to get out of Toronto like a bat out of hell. He had a kind of frantic pride, and though he had good friends among his colleagues in Toronto, they couldn’t imagine they were in the presence of a man who was writing the best prose that had been written in the last forty years. Was that why he said to me so firmly, “Whatever you do, don’t let anyone around here tell you anything”?
From then on, whenever I came down to the Star I would wait around in the library and often Hemingway would show up and we would talk about writers and writing. My life was taking a new turn in those encounters, for at last I had found a dedicated artist to talk to. He would say such things as, “A writer is like a priest. He has to have the same feeling about his work.” Another time he said, “Even if your father is dying and you are there at his side and heartbroken you have to be noting every little thing going on, no matter how much it hurts.” Words wouldn’t pour out of him; sometimes he would talk haltingly as if he stuttered. But he made me feel that he was willing to be ruthless with himself or with anything or anybody that got in the way of the perfection of his work.
Yes, at that time the dedicated artist, but not the big personality. I think at that time he would have scoffed at the notion of ever becoming such a big public personality for people who hardly knew his work. And as for me – I couldn’t even imagine him ever letting it happen to him. The work was the thing, he seemed to say with every gesture. When I think of some of those absurd pictures I’ve seen of him in these last few years, or recall now how he went in for that Indian talk, one-syllable grunts, my mind goes back to those conversations years ago in the Star library.
What seems incredible now, almost mysterious, is that we would talk about Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Scott Fitzgerald – then at the height of his fame – all far away from me in Toronto, and yet it turned out that we were talking about people I was to know and be with in a few short years.
I was the one who mentioned Fitzgerald. I had been reading him in the Hart House library at college. I was dazzled by his quick success. Some of his stories meant nothing to me at all. But I had just read “The Diamond As Big As the Ritz.” I had liked it. I had begun to wonder about him. I said I thought This Side of Paradise too literary a production, yet it was bright and fresh and engaging. Ernest seemed to be on the fence about that early Fitzgerald work. Not grudging, but somewhat dubious about the direction Fitzgerald might take. But he did make it clear that Fitzgerald wasn’t exciting him at all. There in the library, talking so dispassionately, so judicially about Scott, how could we have imagined that a little time would pass and we would be with Scott, and our lives would become tangled in a swirl of fierce passions and wounded pride?
I remember our last conversation before he went away. When we met in the afternoon he asked me if I had a copy of his Three Stories and Ten Poems. I hadn’t. At that time there was a little bookstore at Bay and Bloor where Hemingway had left some copies. “Let’s walk up there,” he said. It was a long walk and we loafed along slowly, absorbed in our conversation. I remember we were talking about the great Russian, Dostoevski, and I said, “The way he writes – it’s like a forest fire. It sweeps indiscriminately over everything.”
“That’s pretty good,” he said, pondering. Then he stopped on the street. “You know Harry Greb,” he said, referring to the wonderful middleweight champion with the windmill style. “Well, Dostoevski writes like Harry Greb fights,” he said. “He swarms all over you. Like this.” And there on the street he started shadow-boxing.
We got his little book from the bookshop, then walked over to Yonge and Bloor for a coffee. He wrote in the book, To Callaghan with best luck and predictions, and while he was doing it I said wryly that now he was going away it looked as if I was losing my reading public of one – him. “No,” he said. “Remember this. There are always four or five people, somewhere in the world, who are interested in good new writing. Some magazines are starting up in Paris,” and he sounded like a bishop and again I believed I only needed to wait.
On his last day at the Star I went down to the Weekly and walked in boldly to say goodbye to him. I remember he was sitting with the three top writers of the Star Weekly: Greg Clark, who was his friend, Charlie Vining and Fred Griffin. As I approach Hemingway to say goodbye, these three men looked at me in surprise, for they didn’t even know me.
“Write and let me know how you’re doing and as soon as you get anything done, shoot it to Paris,” he said. “I’ll tell them about you.”
“I’ve got your address. I’ll see you in Paris.”
“Care of the Guaranty Trust. That’s right.”
As I shook hands with him my face was burning, for I knew the others were looking at me in some wonder.
CHAPTER 3
I didn’t doubt that I would hear from him and see him again. It was just a feeling of certainty. With great confidence I began to write stories. At the university I found a student named Tom Murtha, who was interested in Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield. This student, a shy, talented man, was not given to the expression of much enthusiasm, but I could talk to him on even terms about my friend Hemingway and show him what I was writing myself. Of an afternoon I would go down to the Star building and into the Weekly office and ask Greg Clark if he could go across the road to Childs and have a coffee. Greg Clark, a little man with a wonderful strut, a lot of charm, and shrewd gray eyes, had been a fine soldier in the war. He had a kind of big-brother sympathetic friendliness. Sometimes Jimmy Cowan would join us for a coffee and we would talk about Hemingway and wonder what he was doing, then Greg would start telling his own war stories.
Years later I found that Greg could never remember anything I said to him, sitting in Childs. How could it have been otherwise? He was never listening to me. My confidence about writing amused him, but when I would show him a story, written on Star copy paper, he would lean back meditating. “I don’t know. How do I know? Well, maybe Hem would like it,” and I would know he thought it was unprintable. We were both laughing at each other, yet the wonderful thing about him was that he was the only man I knew on the newspaper who was willing to admit that possibly, just possibly, someone else in the world might think I was doing something very good.
When I had written a ten-thousand-word story about a young fellow’s first love affair, I sent it to Paris. A month passed. No word came. It didn’t matter. I never doubted the intensity of Ernest’s interest. And I had found someone to whom I could communicate his faith in me. At a college dance I met Loretto. She had brown eyes and black hair an
d a Renaissance profile, and she had the advantage of not being steeped in bad writing. I remember the night I met her downtown, the night when I came hurrying to the street corner where she stood under the streetlight, and I whipped out a letter from Paris. Just a few lines on the page written in a small cramped hand, but signed by Ford Madox Ford. My story, shown to him by Hemingway, he wrote, was too long for the Transatlantic Review, which he was editing in Paris, but could I send him something shorter? I was full of joy and excitement.
Taking Loretto’s arm, I hurried her along the street, telling her Ford was a great man in English letters, the collaborator of Joseph Conrad. “Didn’t Hemingway say he would tell them in Paris about me?” I said. “Well, he’s telling them.” Crossing in front of the Catholic cathedral I stopped suddenly. “I’ll go to Paris. I’ll take you with me,” I said. Laughing, not quite believing me, she asked how I could get to Paris if I studied law. But that night I knew in my heart that I had touched the world beyond my hometown. In Toronto, Paris indeed became my city of light.
CHAPTER 4
But Hemingway’s privately printed Three Mountain Press edition of In Our Time, just the short paragraphs, had come out. Each day I looked through the revues for some notice of the work. Finally I found one of those shorter notices in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury. The note said: … written in the bold bad manner of the Café Dôme. This derisive little notice enraged me. “Who told Mencken to print those stories of Anderson’s, I wonder?” I said jeeringly to Loretto. “Someone must have told him. Left to himself, Mencken obviously has no feeling for what is new and good.”
Summer came, and I was back on the Star. When I wrote a story called “A Girl With Ambition” and sent it to Paris, Hemingway answered at once. A first-class story, he said, and he urged me to do more and let him see them. Boni and Liveright were bringing out a trade edition of In Our Time which would have some longer stories between the short paragraphs I had seen, he wrote. I sent him another story called, “Last Spring They Came Over,” and he wrote me that he had known at the beginning I would do such stories. Let him see anything else I did and he would keep on passing the word around about me. In these letters he would tell me little about what he was doing himself. I seemed to be writing more stories than he was. Imagine my pride when he wrote me that Tolstoy couldn’t have done my “Wedding Dress” story any better! I was always elated, always excited in those days.
Whenever I got one of these letters from him I would go down to the Weekly and see my friend Greg Clark or some of the other older newsmen. They couldn’t figure out why Hemingway was writing to me from Paris. My friend Greg had made some comment on one of my stories and when I told it to Ernest he wrote me that Greg was the “most wonderful guy in the world,” but I was never to let him tell me about anything. Each letter, each passing month, seemed to take me a little closer to Paris where my friend now had my stories.
Sometimes at night, after leaving Loretto, I would go home to my parents’ house, and read Tolstoy in bed for an hour, then begin to dream that there would be a letter from Paris in the morning telling me that some distinguished editor, having spent the night reading all my stories, wanted to hear from me.
When Hemingway’s book In Our Time came out in New York, I remember picking up a copy of the Saturday Review of Literature in which there was a review by the editor, Henry Seidel Canby, with the heading, “Art On Its Last Legs.” I threw it down in disgust.
Writing to Ernest I told him I had got a piddling little six-inch notice of the book in a local paper. Avoid reviewing books, he wrote me. It was all right to talk about a writer if you had to, but always remember that you can’t run with the hares and hunt with the hounds.
At the end of that second summer on the Star, Mr. Hindmarsh called me into his office. “All right, Callaghan, now that you are to be on the permanent staff—” he began.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hindmarsh,” I said meekly. “I have another year to go at college before I graduate.”
“What do you mean? You failed your year?”
“No, I got through all right.”
“You assured me last year you had one more year more.”
“I said I had to go back. Nobody ever asked me what year I was in at any time.”
I had put him in the position I had put Mr. Johnston in; it was intolerable to him and he regarded me sourly. Johnston would laugh. Then fairly enough he may have recalled that he, too, had forgotten to ask me what year I had been in at college. Never had I met a man who had such a devastating scowl. But he finally grunted at me, “Are you now definitely in your graduating year at college?”
“I am, Mr. Hindmarsh.”
“When you go back this time we won’t pay you any salary. We’ll pay you space rates. You can come down here three times a week to get your assignment.” After thanking him, I got away quickly.
I had a good year at college, going to Pittsburgh with the debating team. But Hemingway, hearing of it, wrote me that I should leave debating to men like Main Johnston, a Star editorial writer. But then, as I knew, Hemingway himself often seemed to have a little stutter, and I smiled to myself. Having finished my final examination, I reported to Mr. Hindmarsh, who was sitting at the city desk. Turning to me he said with too much grim satisfaction, “All right, Callaghan. You’re on the permanent staff now. Well, you need discipline, the routine assignments. Now I’m going to put you to harness.”
He might just as well have grabbed me by the arm, shouting, “I’ve got you now, you little bastard. You’ve no place else to go.” And I retreated, muttering to myself, “If that guy thinks he’s putting me in his damned harness he’s crazy.”
A comical period on the Star had begun for me. Trying on the harness for size, I went to the summer courts at Osgoode Hall. In summer, of course, the courts were hardly in session. It was a nothing job. Nothing to do but wait around until judgments were handed down. The other court reporters, older men enjoying the quiet life, took turns sleeping on the table in the reporters’ room or playing checkers. In this company, as Mr. Hindmarsh saw it, I was supposed to bite my nails, dream of being restored to his impe-rial favor, dream of great assignments. Well, instead I dreamt of Paris. In my exile I sat at the typewriter working on stories to send to Paris. Even the legal judgments handed down in the summer I read as if they were case books on human nature. I would come back to the city room quietly, hoping I wouldn’t be noticed, and with hardly a glance at Mr. Hindmarsh, slip away. If he gave me a small story of another kind to do, a piece of reporting, I would take great pains with the writing, practicing my own prose, trying to be exact and get a certain rhythm. Of course to do this I had to avoid all the bright showy gestures that were supposed to mark the work of an ambitious young reporter anxious to attract the attention of Mr. Hindmarsh.
One day he called me to the city desk. “I know what’s the matter with you,” he said sourly. “You’re sore, aren’t you?”
“You’re wrong, Mr. Hindmarsh. I’m not sore. What am I supposed to be sore about?”
“I’m not wrong,” he said sharply. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong. You’re sore because I have you over there in Osgoode Hall. You think you should be getting sixty dollars a week and writing all the big stories on the paper. Well, I’m breaking you in. You’ll get into harness just like anybody else. You might as well get used to it.”
It was his custom, when coming in in the morning, to walk the length of all the desks on his way to his office. On the way he would smile and nod to each reporter, who would say brightly, “Good morning, Mr. Hindmarsh.” All the quick, bright, alert “good morning, Mr. Hindmarsh’s” would ring in his ears as he moved heavily into his office. One morning his secretary, Ernie, came to me. “Mr. Hindmarsh wants to see you,” he said. The big fellow, lonely and brooding, was slumped in his chair. Finally I seemed to come under his eyes, but he waited till I grew embarrassed, then snapped at me, “What’s the matter with you, Callaghan? There’s something the matter with you.”
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“You’re wrong, Mr. Hindmarsh.”
“Don’t contradict me,” he said petulantly. “When I come in in the morning I expect a cheerful good morning from the men. What do I get from you?” he asked bitterly. “Every morning when I come in I have to look at your sullen face.” My sullen face troubling such a dominating figure? What a man. He sound so much like a petulant boy it was embarrassing. Then he went on, “I’m tired of your sullen face.”
“That’s all wrong, Mr. Hindmarsh…” I began.
“Don’t you stand here in my own office telling me I’m wrong,” he shouted. “Get out of here. You’re fired!”
Startled, mute, I backed away from him, but when I got to the door he seemed to relent. “Just a minute,” he said and I remember I had to wait as he got up and stood looking out the window. His face showed anger, concern, resentment; he looked like a hurt boy. “You present a problem to me, Callaghan,” he said finally, now like a wounded father. “You present the whole problem of the university man.”
Dumfounded, I went to tell him again he was wrong. Yet look how worried he was. Since it was a fact he had been good to me, I listened attentively. He, being a varsity graduate himself, wanted to have other university men on the paper, he explained. In the beginning he had been sure I was one who was cut out for newspaper work. Why then did I resist the discipline? Why should a university man grow resentful if told to toe the line? Caught off balance by his troubled honest tone, I was overwhelmed. Me, embodying the problem of the university man! “Tell me,” he went on in a kindly tone, “do you smoke too much?” No. Then did I run around with girls and not get enough sleep? As I assured him I had the most temperate habits, I had a grudging respect for his insight. Now at his fatherly best, he was shrewd enough to see that something was going on in me. Paris? Joyce? Pound? My friend Hemingway? No. How could any of this enter his head? I was supposed to be feeling belittled, exiled in the courts. I assured him that from now on I would call out cheerfully, “Good morning, Mr. Hindmarsh,” and not spoil his day.
That Summer in Paris Page 3