Since we had McAlmon’s address, the Paris-New York Hotel on the rue Vaugirard, we would get into a taxi and go to this hotel. It was about noontime. Then Father Tom appeared beside us, taking my arm. Like a shy apologetic boy, he asked us if we would have lunch with him at the Café de la Paix. Before he joined his touring party, he said, he would like to sit with us at some famous French café, and he had heard of this one.
For April it was surprisingly chilly, about as chilly as it would have been back home, so we ate inside the café and drank too much wine. Outside on the rue de la Paix the girls were passing, taxis whirled by, the street life of Paris was just beyond our window. And I nursed a sweet satisfaction. For a long time, in my dream, I had seen us sitting here just this way.
The priest was to meet his party at a small Right Bank hotel, and we went with him to this hotel where we decided to register for the night so we could get our bearings. Then the priest had to leave us. “I don’t know what it’ll be like on this tour,” he said gloomily. “Well, look here. I’ll be back in June. I could look you up, couldn’t I? Would you mind very much?” Then he added in a resigned tone, “Ah, no, you’ll forget all about me.” We swore we wouldn’t, and as we watched him cross the lobby to meet an offi-cial of his tour, he had his head back like a man staunchly resigned to the company of a hundred middle-aged women, and convinced he would be allowed to drown in the depth of our memories without leaving a ripple.
While in the hotel I telephoned McAlmon. So many letters had passed between us that when I spoke to him I expected to recognize his voice. Come over to his Left Bank hotel and see him, he said. “Well, here I go,” I said to Loretto as I left her, and we knew I was opening the first door, taking a taxi to the Paris-New York on the rue Vaugirard.
CHAPTER 10
Surely my expectation of friendship with McAlmon was soundly based, for not only had he got my stories published, he had been willing to publish them himself. My curiosity about this generous man was immense. Of all the Americans who had been in Paris – those who appear in memoirs and movies – McAlmon is the overlooked man. Not only did his Contact Press first publish Hemingway, but it published Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. And as I found out, he had the friendship of Joyce and Pound as well as William Carlos Williams. He was willing to help any writer of talent. And what did he get for it? Sneers and open hostility. Suppose he did write sloppy prose himself. It was his awareness of what was fresh and new and good in other writers that made him enormously superior to his detractors – the aesthetes. The writers about writers. In his letters to me he had shown himself arrogant and contemptuous, but I didn’t hold it against him; it had given his letters an edge, a tang. And I felt the secret envy of him in some of my friends in New York, for marry-ing Bryher, the writer, who was the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the shipping magnate, one of the rich men of England. After bumming his way across America, doing everything from dish-washing to modeling for painters and sculptors in New York, it had been a very nice thing for him to marry a rich girl and get a handsome divorce settlement, but I had always believed his story that he hadn’t been aware it was to be a marriage in name only; he had insisted he was willing to be interested in women. And with the money, what did he do? Spend it all on himself? No, he became a publisher, he spent the money on other people he believed in.
In New York I had heard this little ditty:
I’d rather live in Oregon
And pack salmon
Than live in Nice
And write like Robert McAlmon
And this little ditty was in my mind when I rapped on his hotel door, and it opened, and at last there he was. “How are you, come on in,” McAlmon said laconically. He looked a little like his letters; about thirty-five, sort of nervous and crowded and with restless blue eyes. About my height, he was slim, long-nosed, thin-lipped and handsome, and, of course, he had the arrogant or contemptuous tilt to his head. But his low-toned greeting put me off.
Entering the room I seemed to know he had looked at me and been unimpressed. It’s hard to meet a man who has helped you from afar and believe you see this look in his eyes. But I didn’t understand that if Tolstoy himself had appeared suddenly in the room, McAlmon would not have been impressed. And I can see too, now, that the encounter was a comic checkmating of two temperaments; it had to be casual and laconic. As a young reporter I had acquired an air of being professionally unimpressed. With him the same attitude was a point of honor. And so we faced each other after three years of letter writing as if we had been having a beer every afternoon for years.
Pointing at the packed bag on the bed he explained that in an hour he was leaving for the South of France. To meet me, to part from me so quickly, it was all the same to him, he didn’t care, his eyes seemed to say. So I, for my part, didn’t sound the slightest bit broken-hearted at the news. How unsentimental we were as we sized each other up – he, hardly looking, and I watching him directly all the time! Sitting down, he looked straight at me for the first time. He began to thaw. He even smiled at me as he talked about the Quarter with a belittling wit that made me laugh. His lip kept twisting in an ironic smile. I began to like him, not as you approvingly like a man, but as if you knew you would have some strange sneaking liking and respect for him no matter how badly he behaved. And that was the way it was always to be between me and McAlmon. Now I wished he wasn’t going away. Suppose no one known to me was in Paris and we were left alone?
I asked if Hemingway was in town. It brought McAlmon to life in another way; it was as if he saw that I was counting on meeting another good friend. It upset him and he brooded over it. He and Hemingway didn’t see much of each other now, he admitted. With his curling lip, McAlmon could never admit he had been hurt in a friendship; it had to be the other way around; this way Hemingway had revealed an aspect of his personality that made one look down his nose at him. With a little laugh and a careless wave of his hand, as if it were really all unimportant, he nevertheless began to belittle Ernest. They had gone together to Spain, he drawled. In Spain, he had been the one who had introduced Hemingway to the run of the little bulls at Pamplona. Coming back, at one of the train stops, there had been a corpse rotting in the sun – a dog, an animal of some kind. And Hemingway, contemplating the sunlight on the rotting flesh, had said it was beautiful. Oh Christ, McAlmon said derisively. What posturing!
His derision upset me. What was the cause of it? What was he holding against Ernest? I reminded him that Baudelaire had written a good poem about a corpse. That cynical twisted grin came on his face. “Oh, sure,” he jeered, “Hemingway probably read it too.” While I argued with him he knew I was resisting his view of Ernest. I remembered that Ernest had once admired him enough to dedicate a book to him. It annoyed him and he got up and looked out the window and I joined him, asking if it was true the rue Vaugirard was the longest street in Paris. It was, he said. Coming back to Ernest, he told a scandalous story of something he claimed had happened between them on that trip back from Spain. And I remember thinking, Oh, Bob, you’re all wrong even if you don’t believe you’re wrong. You wouldn’t be talking this way if you weren’t hurt. Is it that you think Ernest has forgotten that you helped him and hasn’t tried to get you published in New York?
Poor Bob, if he only could have restrained his malice when he thought he had been belittled; if he could only have known that he was wrong in thinking Ernest, in his success, had forgotten about him and wouldn’t lift a hand to help him. Within a year, back in New York, I was to learn that Hemingway had persuaded Perkins at Scribner’s to publish a book of McAlmon’s. Yet, at lunch Perkins told me grimly there was something he wanted me to know about my friend McAlmon, whom I kept mentioning. As a favor to Hemingway, and only as a favor, mind you, they had planned to publish a novel of McAlmon’s. McAlmon had come to New York for the inevitable lunch with Perkins. At this lunch McAlmon had told about the trip to Spain and his scandalous interpretation of an incident, not knowing that in his malice
he was trying to destroy the man who was secretly helping him.
Perkins said to me belligerently, “I tell you this because McAlmon is your friend. You too may have wondered if Hemingway forgot him. Well, he didn’t.” Then Perkins added sternly, “I don’t care if you tell McAlmon why we’re not publishing his book. I hope you do tell him.” And I was silent and sad.
But there in McAlmon’s hotel room I couldn’t know what was going to happen. I remember he saw that he had upset me, and brushing aside the talk about Ernest, he became a quite charming man. Chuckling, he told me there were two “bright boys” from Montreal in the Quarter, and I should surely meet them, and he laughed. He gave me their names. He would leave word I was around. He suggested that I come and stay at this hotel and he would know where to look for me on his return to Paris. In the meantime he had to catch a train.
Leaving his hotel, I was gloomy, half convinced that writers couldn’t go on being friends. Something would always happen that would make them shy away from each other. McAlmon had said Ernest now didn’t want to have other writers as friends. In that case he wouldn’t care whether or not he saw me. It could be that I was now just another writer, not an old friend.
That night Loretto and I, staying on the Right Bank, went to a movie where we were quickly reminded we were in Paris and not at home. The usher led us to a good seat. After we had been watching the movie for fifteen minutes the usher returned, asked to see our tickets, gave our seats to two other patrons who had tipped her, and led us back to the rear. So we had at least learned one thing in Paris: in a theatre you have to tip the usher. I told Loretto there was something else we might as well learn just as quickly: to feel at home in Paris all by ourselves. There was no reason why writers, admiring each other’s works, should like each other personally, or even want to see each other. Let us, therefore prepare ourselves to be on our own from now on. She, for her part, said she knew she was going to be happy in Paris whether or not we ever saw Fitzgerald or Hemingway, and even if McAlmon never came back. We would move to the Paris-New York Hotel tomorrow and look over our chosen neighborhood. And we did this. We moved to McAlmon’s hotel. Just at twilight next day we were on our way up rue Vaugirard, and turning along Montparnasse by the station. For a few blocks Montparnasse was a dismal stretch of boulevard, but then we came to the Raspail corner and the cafés.
On one corner was the Dôme, which not long ago had been merely a zinc bar with a small terrace. Now it was like the crowded bleachers at an old ball park; the chairs and the tables set in low rows extending as far as the next café, the Coupole. It had an even longer crowded terrace. Opposite the Dôme, on the other corner, was the Rotonde, where painters and a great many Scandinavians used to sit. Beside it, and by the intersecting side street, was a small new café. An intersecting street separated it from the Sélect, which was open all night. We sat at the Coupole. The faces in rows there looked more international, whereas at the Dôme there seemed to be hundreds of recognizable Americans; men and women who, like us, had just got off the boat and were there for a night. Naturally we rejected all these too familiar faces. As it got darker the whole corner seemed to brighten and take on its own exotic life.
In those days they used to say if you sat there long enough you were bound to see someone you knew come strolling by. We watched and waited hopefully. We watched the taxis jammed at the corner making trouble for the gendarmes. It looked as if the taxi drivers were doing it deliberately, half taunting the gendarmes. It was to become such a familiar sight; there was, for example, to be the night when the drunken American poet, fighting with the gendarmes, got knocked cold. They were dragging him by the neck over the rough cobblestones; then the taxis, maneuvering, suddenly had the cops and their prey hemmed in, the taxi horns all hooting wildly, the traffic at the corner getting hopelessly snarled. The hemmed-in cops had to wait until the prostrate poet came to, so they could get him on his feet and let him have the dignity of walking away with them out of the taxi ring. In those days taxi drivers and artists seemed to have something in common.
But that first night, sitting there as strangers, wondering hopeful if Joyce, or Pound, or Fitzgerald or Ford, someone we would recognize, might pass by, we didn’t feel lonely or out of place. The corner was like a great bowl of light, little figures moving into it and fading out, and beyond was all of Paris. Paris was around us and how could it be alien in our minds and hearts even if no Frenchman ever spoke to us? What it offered to us was what it had offered to men from other countries for hundreds of years; it was a lighted place where the imagination was free. Men have to make room for such places in their thoughts even if they never visit them.
When we had had our fill of the faces and the snatches of conversation at the Coupole, we strolled along the boulevard as far as the Closerie des Lilas. How lovely the lighted tables spread out under the chestnut trees looked that April night; a little oasis of conviviality! Apollinaires’s Café. We had a drink there under the trees and listened to a street singer and a fiddler till the weather suddenly turned cooler. Loretto wished she had worn a jacket. When she shivered we got up and walked away. Arm in arm we walked down the Boul’ Mich, wondering why the big cafés were half deserted, cafés that in Oscar Wilde’s time had been crowded, for this had been his territory. Every generation seemed to pick out its own territory in Paris, we agreed. Down at the Seine we stood for a long time together, watching the reflection of the colored lights on the river. Against the sky were the towers of Notre Dame.
Oh, Catherine Medici, you Renaissance snob, why did you cut off those towers? Wandering along the quai I did the thing I used to do back home, whisper lines of Poe: “And thou wert all to me, love, a fountain and a shrine…” My father and mother read little prose, but I had grown up learning poetry by heart from them, and Poe was a great favorite in our house. And then as we stopped, watching the river, Loretto hummed, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.” We felt very confident and I said I would look up Hemingway tomorrow.
CHAPTER 11
The address we had was care of the Guaranty Trust Co. We didn’t bother with it. In the afternoon we went to Shakespeare and Co., Sylvia Beach’s famous bookshop on the rue de L’Odéon. Shakespeare and Co., which had published Joyce’s Ulysses, was simply a good-sized, pleasant, uncommercial-looking bookstore. There was one rather large book-lined room, with another smaller one adjoining. At the desk sat a woman whom I knew, from pictures I had seen, to be Miss Beach. She was a fair, handsome woman in a severe suit, in her forties, I would have said; an Englishwoman; and in her manner there was something a bit severe and mannish. Yet she was an American. Having published Ulysses, she had become a famous woman. Writers in Paris, at least those who wrote in English, came often to her door. Her shop was a shrine for the Joyce lovers. Approaching the desk, I introduced myself and wondered if she could give me Hemingway’s address. Without batting an eyelash, she told me she wasn’t sure whether Hemingway was in town, nor if he were, whether she would be able to locate him before she heard from him. But if I would leave my own address she would make an effort to see that it was passed on.
Immediately I was unbelieving. The brush-off came a little too smoothly. Thanking her for the major effort I pretended to believe she would put forth, I rejoined Loretto and we busied ourselves seeing what books she had on her shelves. Suddenly Miss Beach left her desk and approached us. Had I seen the piece about my work in the Harvard Hound and Horn? she asked, handing it to me, then leaving us. “See,” I whispered to my wife, “she knows who I am and she knows Hemingway’s address and won’t give it to me.”
A section of the wall was taken over by a whole series of portraits of Joyce: as he was now with the heavy glasses, then as a student, a small boy, and even as a little baby. “I can understand her having a motherly feeling for Joyce,” Loretto whispered, hiding her laughter, “since she’s got him here with her in diapers. You should feel lucky. Supposing you had asked for Joyce?”
“To the devil
with Miss Beach,” I said. “Come on.” Returning the Hound and Horn to Miss Beach’s desk, we departed. No doubt she was right in protecting Hemingway from callers, just as she protected Joyce, but I was too young and arrogant to have respect for her consideration for her friends. In fact I was glad to hear from McAlmon a few weeks later that Miss Beach in her role of den mother sometimes made ridiculous mistakes. On one occasion, McAlmon told me, the great Irish writer, old George Moore, had come into her shop looking for Joyce. At the time Joyce had been browsing around in the back room. But Miss Beach, unyielding in her prim determination that Joyce should have a chance to screen the names of all prospective callers, had told Moore she would leave his name with Joyce. It didn’t matter that Moore was leaving Paris next day. According to McAlmon, Joyce had been dismayed; it had seemed ridiculous to him that he had been left hidden a few yards away from a great Irishman he had always wanted to meet. My own name is not likely to be found in a memoir written by any of Miss Beach’s coterie. On only one other occasion did I ever go back to her shop – to get a copy of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Disgruntled, we wandered away from the rue de l’Odéon. It would be necessary to write Ernest a note explaining that Mr. and Mrs. Callaghan were in residence at the Paris-New York Hotel on the rue Vaugirard, and hoped to hear from him. Well, why not?
But we let two days pass without sending this note, half hoping Sylvia Beach might really have got in touch with him. The night of the second day we had been out till nearly dawn. Those two “bright little devils” Buffy and Graeme, McAlmon’s friends, had come our way. Two slender boys in their early twenties, they were inseparable companions, very understanding of each other, soft spoken with a mocking opinion about everybody. They were writers. One of them had some money of his own, but not much. Within a few hours of meeting them we seemed to know ten or twelve other people at the café. And after being out all night we had slept till past noon, had eaten some croissants and coffee in our hotel room, and were sitting around when a knock came on the door. It was Hemingway. With him was his six-year-old boy, Bumbi. Ernest was wearing a dignified dark gray suit. He still had that old sweet charming smile. On his forehead was a new scar.
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