That Summer in Paris

by Callaghan, Morley;

  If I would only put my nose to the grindstone I would be a good reporter, he had said, but I could have told him he was wrong about this too. On two or three occasions I had known I wasn’t cut out to be a hard-boiled old-fashioned reporter. Little things had happened that put me off. A fire at a Muskoka resort hotel took the lives of many guests. All the Star men who could be mustered had been taken north on a special train. We had come back and worked all night sorting out the names of those who had been saved and those who had died. Having handed in my story, I found myself standing at the city desk beside my Mr. Johnston, who had in front of him a list of names of those who had died. The telephone kept ringing. I answered, and a woman, giving me her name, asked if there was any word about her daughter. Harry Johnston, running his finger down the list came to the girl’s name among the dead, and whispered to me to tell the mother we had no word that her daughter had died, so could she let us have the girl’s picture? The poor mother sounded immensely relieved. She would look for a picture; certainly we could send for it. I hated myself.

  On another occasion I was sent to Lake Simcoe to cover a drowning. A storm, coming up suddenly on the lake, had over-turned a boy’s canoe. All night long the search had been conducted for the boy’s body. Late that night I had gone to the cottage of the boy’s mother. The weeping woman could hardly hear me asking her for a picture of her son. Like so many other people, the distracted woman seemed to believe that she was under some obligation to the rapacious press. “Oh please,” she begged me, “if I could just be left alone,” and I knew I had no dignity and her grief had no dignity if I insisted she keep on looking around the cottage for a picture of her drowned boy. The silly front page! The unreality of its importance tormented me. I told her not to be concerned about the picture; just promise not to let any other newspaperman bother her. She promised. I went away. But the next day, of course, a photograph of the drowned boy appeared in the rival newspaper, the Telegram.

  My sense of reality was often being offended, I say, and besides, with the summer passing I was having more preposterously comical quarrels with Mr. Hindmarsh. Honestly, I tried to be subdued and respectful to him. Yet whenever he growled at me as he growled at others too, my lip must have curled. We had a showdown over a strange disaster in our town. In a heavy fog a lake boat, bound for the harbor, had crashed into the breakwater two miles away. In the morning I was sent down to the harbor to see the harbor master, a nice man who showed me a map of the harbor and the lakefront. Moving red pins around on the map, he indicated where the ship should have been and how far it had got off its course. Back in the office I wrote the interview which came out on the street at noon.

  An hour later a note was put in my box; it was a note to Mr. Hindmarsh from Joseph Atkinson, the owner; it was a very curt note. The harbor master, a friend of Mr. Atkinson’s, had assured Mr. Atkinson it was the duty of a commission, which would be appointed, to determine whether the ship had been off its course. He, the harbor master, would not be so presumptuous as to make such a decision himself. He asked for a retraction and an apology.

  White-faced, I hurried into Mr. Hindmarsh’s office. “An apology in this case is ridiculous, Mr. Hindmarsh,” I said. Jerking back in his chair he glared at me. “Don’t tell me what is ridiculous,” he said furiously. “The harbor master insists that he said no such thing to you.”

  Looking back on it now, I wonder if he wasn’t furious because he hated to have to print a ridiculous retraction. Where was the ship if it wasn’t off its course? I went on belligerently. That harbor master was calling me a liar. Did he think I made up the story? In his own grim sullen style Hindmarsh repeated that the harbor master denied to Mr. Atkinson that he had made such a statement. That was all there was to it. Oh, no, not on your life, it certainly wasn’t all there was to it, I said angrily. We’d see. I rushed out.

  “Come back here,” he yelled. “What do you think you’re going to do?”

  “I’m going right down to that man’s office. I’ll tell him how he moved those pins around—”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” he roared, and he jumped up, slapping both his big palms down on his desk. “You’ll do what you’re told, do you hear? Now you think you’re running this paper.” When I replied, “You’re wrong, Mr. Hindmarsh,” his face got so red I thought he would burst a blood vessel.

  “Again you tell me I’m wrong. In my own office you keep telling me I’m wrong. Get out of this office. You’re fired!”

  What do you do when you’re fired from a job? Go down to the cashier or work out the week? In the morning I came in to see if my name was on the assignment book. Yes, there it was. Evidently one departed when one picked up one’s salary envelope. But on payday, when I opened up my envelope, it held no formal dismissal notice, just my salary. Again I was in a quandary. Next morning I kept out of sight, then sneaked a look at the assignment book. My name was there again. So Mr. Hindmarsh, too, was ignoring the fact that I was fired. Good.

  But I began to wish fervently I would hear some encouraging news from Paris. What had happened to all my stories? What could Hemingway be doing with them? I wondered. What I overlooked was that my friend, at that time, was fighting desperately for recognition himself. In my mind he might be a big figure in modern literature, but in America he had won the approval of only a small coterie. His beautiful book of stories, In Our Time, had been a commercial failure. Deciding to take some action myself, I sent my story, “The Wedding Dress,” the story Hemingway had said Tolstoy couldn’t have done any better, to Harper’s Magazine. It bounced back fast without even a word of comment. Either the editor didn’t know about Tolstoy or couldn’t read, I thought. If I was ever to receive any good news about my work, I seemed to know that it had to come from Paris.

  It did not seem to be comical that I was not thinking of France as the place where I might go to cultivate my mind, become aware of the currents of French literature, see Gide, talk to Cocteau, sneer at the naughty boys, Breton and Aragon, expose myself to the marvelously quick French intelligence. No, I thought of Paris as some kind of magical milieu where there would be a vast number of nameless perceptive men who would appreciate my own stories. In the meantime, rather than go on dueling with the inef-fable Mr. Hindmarsh, I would study law and pray that within the three years needed for the law course I might get established as a writer. Others had done it by the time they were twenty-five. Scott Fitzgerald had done it.

  Remembering how I had talked to Hemingway about Fitzgerald, I wondered if they were now friends. I would find myself looking again at Fitzgerald’s early books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. The elegant men and girls in these books did not seem to belong to my generation. What did it matter? Fitzgerald had his own strong talent, as I was sure I had mine; and in his case an editor, one editor, then the world had suddenly reached out for him. I looked at many pictures of Fitzgerald and I read about his beautiful Zelda. I brought him into my own Tor-onto world. I couldn’t imagine he would like my work, but his early success was always in the back of my mind, giving me faith and hope that soon there would be great news from Paris.

  CHAPTER 5

  I was articled to a plump and amiable young lawyer named Joseph Sedgwick who was just getting established. I used to go to morning law classes and often doze in my chair – the law came easily to me– and then I would go to the law office. If Joe Sedgwick wanted a title searched I did it for him. Otherwise, with him out on business, I would sit in his office at my typewriter working on a short novel. And wasn’t I businesslike? As soon as I had finished a chapter I would hand it to the secretary, who would type it promptly and cheerfully just to have something to do. In the office even the few clients wanted to hang around and talk, so there was always a lot of laughter and clowning, and Joe, my lawyer, in his amiable chuckling style, would try to tell me about Dickens as I in turn tried to tell him about Dostoevski.

  Having finished my short novel and sent it off to Paris, I suddenly found my
self reading Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring. It was a painful experience. How torn I was in my loyalties. My only reader, the only one who believed in me, was satirizing Sherwood Anderson, who, when I was in high school, had brought the world so close. Anderson’s style, God knows, had become more affected. Certainly he was vulnerable to mockery and satire, but the mockery shouldn’t have come from Hemingway. Why did he do it? But wasn’t he also mocking Ford Madox Ford’s style? This puzzled me too. Didn’t friendship count? And one’s own origins? For my part I wanted everybody to know I was grateful to Anderson. Someday I would tell it to him, I knew, and I did too, though I had to wait ten years. Yes, I also remember wishing that it had been at the time I had read The Torrents of Spring – not ten years later.

  It was at a big cocktail party in Greenwich Village to which I had gone with Bennett Cerf. The apartment was crowded with well-known writers and reviewers, and after an hour of it I, like all the others, was seeking a little attention. Each new face offered the promise of gratifying recognition. Then I saw that my colleagues were all as self-centered and hopeful as I was. Wryly amused and a little ashamed, I withdrew and stood off by myself, looking out the window. In the hum of voices an older man, probably as restless and bored as I, had left his group and came sauntering aimlessly in my direction. A square-built man with rugged features and a lion’s head. No other man in the world could have looked so much like the pictures of Anderson. All the delight I had got from his work when I had been only nineteen came back to me. Full of affection for this man I had never seen before, I played the clown and did it well. Approaching him with a solemn accusing air, I took him by the arm. “Excuse me, aren’t you Sherwood Anderson?” I asked accusingly.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Good,” I said quietly. “Then you’re my father.”

  The look on his face as he drew back uneasily made me want to laugh. I was young enough to be his son. Wild thoughts must have been in his head as he saw the look of recognition on my face. Finally he said, “I don’t understand. What is your name?”

  “Morley Callaghan.”

  “Morley…” and then he burst out laughing. Delighted he put his arms around me. “What a wonderful thing to say to me,” he said. After we had laughed and shaken hands again, and stood back looking at each other, he said earnestly, “Don’t make a mistake about it. You would have written the way you write if you had never heard of me.” He was staying at the Washington Mews, he said, insisting I come for dinner next night.

  But those years ago in Toronto, reading The Torrents of Spring, I couldn’t understand why Ernest had felt compelled to kill off old Sherwood. To a man of Ernest’s temperament, was it an intolerable frustration to be so definitely linked to Anderson; did he have to kill or reject, or show his superiority in order to be free himself? A man couldn’t believe these things about a friend who had been kind and incredibly generous in his interest, and as if to bear out my loyal view of Ernest as a generous man there came suddenly the letter from Paris.

  Ernest wrote that his affairs had been unsettled, but now everything had straightened out and he was working rapidly on a novel, writing three thousand words a day. (The novel was The Sun Also Rises.) He had carried my stories and my short novel around in his trunk, he wrote. Now he thought he should hand over all my work to Robert McAlmon, of the Contact Press, in Paris, and I would soon be hearing from McAlmon. Well, I only had to wait a week or so.

  Since the Contact Press had been Ernest’s first publisher, I thought McAlmon and Ernest would be close friends. And that hand-printed edition of In Our Time had been dedicated to Robert McAlmon, along with William Bird, and Captain Eric Dormen Smith. Robert McAlmon, publisher of the city of Paris! How sedately impressive it had looked on the dedication page! In his letter, the first of so many I was to receive from him, McAlmon wrote that my stories had “the odor and timbre of authenticity.” What a grand phase it was! All puffed up, I wanted to look down my nose at someone. Then he compared my stories with the stories Hemingway had done up to that time. What he distrusted in Hemingway’s stories, he wrote, was “the hardening process.” But in my case the hardening process wasn’t there, he wrote. Then he told me he was showing my stories to Ezra Pound and to the editors of This Quarter and transition. As for my short novel, the Contact Press would do it if I couldn’t get a New York publisher. Again I was left waiting for news from Paris.

  One winter afternoon at twilight when I was in the law office, I phoned home to ask if there was any mail for me. My mother told me a parcel from Paris was there, and I asked her to open it. In a moment she said, “It’s a book or a magazine, and it’s called, This Quarter. ” And then I heard her gasp, “Son, your name is on the cover!” I hurried home.

  That orange-colored cover of the second number of This Quarter had the names of the contributors in bold black lettering: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Emmanuel Carnevali, Kay Boyle, Morley Callaghan… My hands trembling, I opened the magazine and there was my story, “A Girl With Ambition.” After dinner I hurried out to meet Loretto. I think we talked for hours. My confidence had become tremendous.

  Within a few months my “Last Spring They Came Over” appeared in the second number of transition, which was edited by Eugene Jolas and Eliot Paul, and McAlmon wrote me that Ezra Pound would be publishing a magazine of his own in Rapallo, Italy, to be called The Exile. Every few weeks now a letter came from McAlmon. And Yvor Winters began to write to me from Palo Alto, California. I remember that in one letter he lectured to me about the danger of becoming, as he called it, “a knick-knack for the mantelpiece,” and advised me to read Racine. In my native city, of course, the little magazines of Paris had small importance. To my friends, I was still a lazy student at law who went to all the boxing matches and was always seen at the football games. But close at hand were friends of my friends in Paris. In New York were friends of McAlmon, who had lived in the Quarter. So that fall I took a four-day trip to New York to see these friends and hear news of Paris.

  I was twenty-two, and I remember that I had my return ticket on the train and fifty dollars. I remember too how I went by way of the Lehigh Valley, and how I came out of the Pennsylvania Station and looked up at the skyscrapers against the sky while my heart leaped. A cop told me where Broadway was. Near Times Square would be the kind of hotel I wanted. On Broadway I began to walk in the wrong direction. An hour later I found myself wandering around Wall Street, so I started to walk uptown again, taking my time, looking around carefully. Near Times Square I found a cheap hotel. My heels were so blistered I had to bathe my feet before I could go out and walk down Fifth and make my first call on Josephine Herbst and John Herrman.

  Years later Josephine Herbst would laugh as she told of the way I walked in on her. I still don’t know why she laughed. Climbing a long staircase, I knocked and a woman with a good honest face reminding me a little of Lillian Gish’s face opened the door.

  In the room with the windows overlooking Fifth was a pretty, fair girl with bandaged wrists: the Follies girl, I found out later, who had just tried to commit suicide, and of whom Edmund Wilson had written in I Thought of Daisy. I was a friend of Hemingway’s and McAlmon’s, I said. Maybe I was just too straightforward and candid, I don’t know, but I remember that as we talked about McAlmon and Hemingway, and life in Montparnasse, Miss Herbst’s fine blue eyes had a grave and sometimes troubled expression. “What’s the news from Paris?” she asked. Well, I had it, didn’t I? I could give her McAlmon’s latest opinion on the literary situation, I could tell her Hemingway had been writing freely and happily at the rate of three thousand words a day, yet I seemed to be making some mistakes. How long since I had been in Paris? She asked. I confessed I had never been in Paris, that I had written my stories in Toronto and that Hemingway had carried them around with him. It was getting darker out and the light in the room had faded, but I kept them there talking to me about Paris.

  The girl with the bandaged wri
sts remained motionless and quiet, and I forgot she was there. I could tell Miss Herbst had some kind of generosity of spirit or heart while having a grim hard mind. And I liked her. The room was now in twilight and Miss Herbst said she had an engagement, but I wanted to keep her talking about Paris. She and her husband, John Herrman, could see me the following night, she said. And who else had McAlmon asked me to see? Whipping out my list I asked what kind of a guy Nathan Asch was. Nathan, the son of the great Jewish novelist, Sholem Asch, had just written a book called The Office. An amusing talented man who was a little wistful, she said. She told me how to find his street in the Village.

  I left, ate in another cafeteria, read the newspapers and sat for an hour, then walked down to Washington Square. The old neighbourhood, looking so friendly with all the lights on, filled me with a sense of elation and expectancy. On Bank Street, I think it was, I climbed a stair and knocked on the door and there he was, the young friend of Ford Madox Ford, not long from Paris, with his mustache and thick hair and melancholy eyes. Behind him, stretched out on a bed, was a fair girl, his wife. As I looked around the room and saw that they had no money, I told him McAlmon had asked me to look him up. “What’s the news from Paris?” he asked. Again I was the ambassador from Paris. Six months later Nathan told me I had come walking in on them “with all the confidence of a plumber come to fix a pipe.” Naturally he had thought I was from Paris. Soon we were talking eagerly about Ford and McAlmon and Hemingway and corners in Montparnasse.

  Finally I explained I was from Toronto. The confession seemed to charm Nathan, and he told me that if I had as little as five dollars we could see some of the Village spots, having only coffee at one place, then coffee again at another. We went out happily. What a happy night it was. The whole three days were a delight.