I was so shocked I dropped my gloves. My face must have gone white, for I was shaken and didn’t know what to do. It is a terrible insult for a man to spit at another man. We stared at each other. “That’s what the bullfighters do when they’re wounded. It’s a way of showing contempt,” he said solemnly.
My sense of outrage was weakened by my bewilderment when he suddenly smiled. Apparently he felt as friendly as ever. I tried to laugh. But we had to stop boxing so I could wipe off the blood. I didn’t even complain, for I saw that he had more complete goodwill for me than ever. But I was wondering out of what strange nocturnal depths of his mind had come the barbarous gesture. What other wild gesture might he make in some dark moment in his life to satisfy himself, or put himself in a certain light, following, or trying to follow some view he had of himself? But here he was, so sweet and likable again, so much at ease with me. I tried to tell myself he had put it just right; he had yielded to his boyish weakness for amusing and theatrical gestures. The whole thing could have been pure theatre.
As we sat down to talk before we dressed, he seem to be full of lighthearted enthusiasm. Standing up, he regarded me with a professional eye. “You’re really a light heavyweight,” he insisted. “It’s the way you’re built. I thought at first it was just fat on you.” I assented to this rather reluctantly, knowing I was twenty-five pounds over-weight, simply potbellied and secretly ashamed of it. I liked eating. Then he told me had written to Max Perkins, trying to describe the fun we had been having and my peculiar boxing style.
He suggested we go up to the Falstaff, off Montparnasse, an oak-paneled English bar presided over by Jimmy, a friend of his, an Englishman who had been a pro lightweight fighter. At that hour hardly anyone else was in the bar. Behind the bar Jimmy now looked like an amiable roly-poly host. Just a day or two ago I had been asking Jimmy what Lady Duff, the Lady Brett of The Sun Also Rises, was really like. Leaning across the bar, Jimmy had said confidentially, “You won’t tell Hemingway, will you? No? Well, she was one of those horsey English girls with her hair cut short and the English manner. Hemingway thought she had class. He used to go dancing with her over on the Right Bank. I could never see what he saw in her.”
But now Jimmy, observing the bag with the boxing gloves Ernest was carrying, and our scrubbed, wet-haired look, the look of men who have been exercising then showering, grinned knowingly. “You’ve been boxing, eh?” Smiling happily, Ernest touched his swollen lip, rolling it back to show it to Jimmy, the old fighter. I remember Ernest’s line: “As long as Morley can keep cutting my mouth he’ll always remain my good friend.” We all laughed. Yet Ernest did look remarkably happy. His cut and swollen mouth seemed to make him feel jolly and talkative. He told how good Jimmy had been in the ring. He insisted Jimmy have a drink with us. And the strange part of it was that in spite of the fact that Ernest had spat his blood on my face, I felt closer than ever to him.
But the look on his face as he spat at me must have stayed in my head. Of course I had to explain to Loretto the cause of the blood marks on my gym shirt. We wondered at the source of his unbridled impulse, so primitive and insulting. Supposing it had enraged me and caused us to part forever? Had such a thought ever entered his head?
Late one night we were at the Sélect, six or seven of us around two tables, and a pretty woman named Mary Bryant, whom I had never met before and who had been the wife of William Bullitt, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, told a story about Hemingway. She had had a Turkish boy as a protégé. This boy was an expert knife thrower. The boy had been with her one time when she had told Hemingway he could throw a knife at twenty paces and pin an object, a man’s hand for example, to a door. Getting up suddenly, Hemingway had gone over to the door, and thrust out his hand. “Come on, show me. Come on,” he challenged the boy. “Pin my hand to the door.” The story may or may not have been true. I had been rejecting all stories about Ernest that made him a strange dark primitive nocturnal figure. Yet now I seemed to know from what had happened between us that any time he faced a situation from which he ought to recoil protestingly or normally, he might start to play around with the destructive idea, testing his own courage in his imagination. In those days, as I said before, it seemed to me he could make the imagined challenging fear become so real, it might become unbearable. And he would act. Somehow these thoughts seem to tie up with that picture I had of him spitting the blood at me with such theatrical scorn, and then, knowing he shouldn’t have done it, laughing.
At the Sélect that night, after hearing the story about the Turkish boy, I laughed with the others. Ernest did a lot of things that were merely imaginative gestures, I said. But they were only gestures. And I told about him spitting a mouthful of blood all over me when we were boxing, and how it hadn’t altered our relationship at all. It was the only time I had talked about any incident in our boxing matches. Later on it became important to me to recall this one occasion. But the Quarter in those days, crowded as it was at certain hours with tourists, was a very small, backbiting, gossipy little neighborhood.
CHAPTER 16
The Quarter was like a small town. It had little points of protocol, little indignities not to be suffered. There was a general awareness of what was going on in everyone else’s life, a routine to be followed if the café was to be the center of your social life. For the Joyces or Gertrude Stein, the café was not the place where one entertained one’s friends, or the place where wives showed up to meet their husbands. Nor did the Fitzgeralds, as we were to discover, belong to the Left Bank café set. But for us, not having the family responsibilities of the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds, the late hours at the café were a happy time – unless a neighborhood indignity was being endured by a friend.
We had a friend, a middle-aged man named Edward Titus, who was the husband of Helena Rubenstein, the rich beautician. He lived by himself in a comfortable apartment just around the corner at 4 rue Delambre. He was a famous book collector and the publisher of the Black Maniken Press. An agreeable quiet man, with graying hair combed straight back, he had grown tired of the opulent display, the chauffeurs, and all the business detail that took up his time in the great cosmetic firm of Helena Rubenstein. He had chucked it all. He was living his own life. When the editor of the magazine This Quarter had died, Titus, not wanting the magazine to die too, had taken it over.
At nine-thirty in the evening, Loretto and I would come along the boulevard to the Sélect. Within half an hour Titus would join us. Sometimes Helena Rubenstein would come over to the Quarter from the Right Bank. She came to the parties with a tall dark opera singer named d’Alvarez, who wore evening dresses showing a broad and fascinating expanse of bare back. Sometimes Madame Rubenstein would come to the café with Titus, and he would have her sit with us. In those days she was a very busy woman, growing stout, but still dark, handsome and full of energy. Too much energy, I suppose, for sometimes she gave the impression of wanting to take a little nap. When she was with us there was always an amusing interplay about paying for the saucers. Titus was an old resident of the Quarter; no one treated him as a visiting businessman who was expected to pay the shot, and he seemed to know that if he ever gave in and picked up the tab just because he was rich, he would lose all caste with the people whose respect he wanted. Quite properly he paid for his own saucers as I for mine.
At the end of an evening Helena Rubenstein would watch, aloof and impatient, while the waiter busily counted up our separate piles of saucers. “Pay for them, Edward,” she would say impe-riously. Did she ever understand his reluctance? I wonder. Maybe she didn’t care. As a grand dame, a figure of opulence, she could hardly sit there listening to the public bookkeeping. One way or another, only a couple of dollars was involved. Whenever she intervened, Titus understood that protocol was being broken; he was being made to look like an alien in the Quarter, and he didn’t like it.
Though he was established in the neighborhood, and a publisher in his own right, Titus did not know Joyce, Pound, Wyndham Lewis
, Hemingway, Fitzgerald or McAlmon. It was hard to explain why he didn’t know any of these people. I used to wonder if there was a lot of anti-Semitism in the Quarter.
McAlmon, having returned to Paris, had quickly looked us up. I liked McAlmon. No matter what they say about him, his judgment of other writers was respected by some of the best people on earth. His destructive malice didn’t bother me at all. If a man of talent was in any kind of trouble, McAlmon would help him if he could.
When he met my wife, he showed he was pleased with her; then he had to jab his little needle into me, or her, and sow the seeds of discord. “You had me fooled,” he said to her some hours after meeting us. “I thought you were Spanish. You’re Irish.” And then he added with a touch of weary disdain, “You ought to be always dressed well, be seen in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. It’s too bad. Morley won’t bother. You might as well know it now.” When he saw we were laughing at him, he didn’t mind; he laughed too.
I had asked Titus if he would like to meet McAlmon. Indeed he would, he said. That night McAlmon came to the Sélect.
Alone with me, or even when my wife was along, McAlmon never behaved badly, or got outrageously drunk. Maybe he felt ill at ease with Titus, or wasn’t sure how he felt about him, therefore he had to drink a lot very quickly. I had asked if he had heard whether Fitzgerald was in Paris. It set him off. He told of a meeting with the Fitzgeralds when Zelda had cast a lustful eye at him. Titus, who had said little, and no wonder, pricked up his ears. I laughed cynically and shook my head at Titus. When Bob McAlmon had had a drink or two he seemed to believe every good-looking citizen, man or woman, postman or countess, wanted to make a pass at him.
Along the street came those two willowy graceful young men from Montreal whom McAlmon called affectionately “the clever little devils.” Sauntering into the café with their bland and distinguished air, they saw us and bowed. My lighthearted wave of the hand piqued McAlmon. “Oh, you don’t understand those two at all,” he jeered. But I did understand that the two boys shared his snickering wit. Friends of his they might be, but it didn’t stop them from laughing at him. Just before his return, his Contact Press had printed one of his own poems. One boy would look at the other solemnly, quote a line from the poem, “Is this the Aztec heart that writhes upon the temple floor,” then they would both kill themselves laughing.
His view of the boys amused me and I said so. We kept jibing and jeering at each other, offering contrasting views of the boys. Titus, brightening and becoming an alert editor, suggested we should both write stories; he would publish the two stories side by side in the next issue of This Quarter. Immediately I agreed to do it. So did McAlmon.
By the way, I did write the story, “Now That April’s Here,” and Titus did publish it. Ezra Pound wrote me a letter from Rapallo expressing his admiration of the story and suggesting that I go to Washington and write about the politicians in the same manner.
By now McAlmon, exhilarated by our debate, and getting tight, had become truly expansive. He ordered another champagne cocktail and a Welsh rarebit. When the waiter brought the rarebit McAlmon tasted it, and dropped his fork. “Tell Madame Sélect,” he said in a disgusted tone, “that this rarebit did not come from the kitchen. It came from the toilet.” The waiter hurried to Madame Sélect.
She was a plump, dark, determined-looking woman with a round high-colored face, who watched over the cash register and the waiters. Indeed she was the café boss. Approaching our table, quivering with rage, she told McAlmon she, herself, had made the rarebit. In that case, said McAlmon, waving his hand disdainfully, she ought to know where it came from. Aghast, she snatched the plate off the table and fled to the kitchen. In a little while she came out and stood back from the terrace at the door, watching us bale-fully, muttering, throwing glances of hatred at McAlmon, who had kept on laughing.
McAlmon’s real target, and I couldn’t put it past him if he was in one of his contemptuous moods, may have been Titus. Half drunk as he was, did he feel compelled to show some disrespect to this other publisher whose aims were so different from his own? In the meantime I had turned to watch a group of young homosexuals two tables away. The expression on my face must have irritated McAlmon. Maybe I did look too concerned. Four of the young homosexuals were commiserating with a sad-looking young fellow of twenty-five, whose story we knew. His wife, now on her way from the States to join him, did not know that in the months he had been without her, he had been corrupted by these boys. Now he had no desire to see her. McAlmon, evidently resenting my expression of concern or pity, wanted to offend me. Knowing I had kept all my good feeling for Hemingway, he struck very deftly at him. In The Sun Also Rises, why had Hemingway treated these homosexuals in such a vulgar orthodox manner? he asked. The answer was simple: he had been catering to all the virile men of the Middle West. All he had been really doing was strutting and flex-ing his own big powerful muscles, asserting his own virility – something, said McAlmon, looking down his nose, that was open to question. “So, Morley old boy, don’t you start turning up your nose at homosexuals,” he said, “or I’ll suspect you too.”
“It’s the one boy there, Bob. I feel sorry for him.”
“You’re ridiculous,” he said, and he began a funny, mocking, eloquent, but often loud defense of homosexuals. As Titus showed his embarrassment, McAlmon went on talking grandly about Plato and Michelangelo. Our objections only aroused his chuckling disdain. He was happily drunk. Suddenly he cried exuberantly, “I’m bisexual myself, like Michelangelo, and I don’t give a damn who knows it.” He hurled his glass out to the sidewalk where it splin-tered in front of an elderly man who stopped, rattled, waving his hand as if he were calling the police.
Madame Sélect, who had been standing at her post, watching and scowling at McAlmon and brooding over the insult to her rarebit, now came rushing over to the table. McAlmon would pay for the glass, she cried. Not only would he pay, she added grimly, he would leave the café at once. With a patient, tolerant smile, McAlmon rose, tried to bow, then had to sit down quickly – he couldn’t move. While he sat there staring earnestly at the table top, his face chalk white, I went for a taxi. When I returned, Titus told me Madame Sélect had said my friend was not welcome at her café any more.
Glancing at Madame Sélect, who waited, her arms folded, grim, solid and unyielding, Titus urged me to hurry and get McAlmon into a taxi. I did. But again for Titus, the protocol was broken; being treated as a businessman, he was left paying for McAlmon’s drinks, the Welsh rarebit, the broken glass, and our drinks too. Though McAlmon, in the taxi, was in a stupor, as I looked at him I wondered if he hadn’t actually wanted this to happen.
Now a matter of the greatest dignity became to concern our little neighborhood. Next night at nine-thirty when Loretto and I came along the boulevard, Titus, in his chair at the Sélect, stood up and beckoned. We bowed apologetically. We went to a new little café between the Rotonde and the Sélect. Each night we followed this procedure. From his chair at the Sélect, Titus could see us sitting at the new place. We hated this little café. No one we knew sat there. Sometimes one of our friends, feeling sympathy for the grandeur of our position – the support of a drunken friend – would come and sit with us.
Each night Titus watched us with a lonely and disgusted expression on his face. Sometimes we saw him arguing with Madame Sélect. They would both grow vehement. One night, after they had had one of these cold grim arguments, we saw Madame Sélect and her headwaiter come out to the sidewalk, look along to the café where we sat, and contemplate us in silence.
It went on like this all week. One Saturday night as we were passing the Sélect at nine-thirty, Titus came hurrying from his place on the terrace. “Madame Sélect would like a word with you,” he said coaxingly and he beckoned to her.
We waited, aloof, dignified, beyond reproach as she came toward us, all grace, smiles and kindly benevolence. Would we sit down and have a drink on her? she asked. Would we invite our friend McAlmon to come an
d have a drink on her? There was much handshaking all around and so we sat down at the Sélect again, confident that a great victory for something or other had been won.
CHAPTER 17
On the boulevard one night at the apéritif hour we encountered McAlmon. “What are you doing tonight?” he asked.
“Nothing, as usual.”
“I’m having dinner with Jimmy Joyce and his wife at the Trianon. Why don’t you join us?”
Jimmy Joyce! “No,” I said quickly. “I understand he hates being with strangers and won’t talk about anybody’s work.”
“Who told you that?”
“Hemingway.”
“Oh, nuts,” he said, curling his lip. “Don’t you want to see Jimmy? You’ll like him. You’ll like Nora, too.”
“Well, of course we want to meet Joyce.”
“See you in about an hour and a half at the Trianon,” and he went on his way.
He had made it sound as if anyone could drop in on the Joyces at any time. Jimmy, he called him. Yet Sylvia Beach kept on throwing up her protective screen as dozens of English and American scholars tried to get close to the Irish master. What kind of magic touch did McAlmon have? Was it possible that Joyce had the same sneaking respect for McAlmon that I had myself and liked drinking with him? We’d soon see. At twilight we approached the Trianon just as casually as we might approach a bus stop.
It was a restaurant near the Gare Montparnasse, where the food was notably good. Just to the right as you go in we saw McAlmon sitting with the Joyces. The Irishman’s picture was as familiar to us as any movie star’s. He was a small-boned, dark Irishman with fine features. He had thick glasses and was wearing a neat dark suit. His courtly manner made it easy for us to sit down, and his wife, large bosomed with a good-natured face, offered us a massive motherly ease. They were both so unpretentious it became impossible for me to resort to Homeric formalities. I couldn’t even say, “Sir, you are the greatest writer of our time,” for Joyce immediately became too chatty, too full of little bits of conversation, altogether unlike the impression we had been given of him. His voice was soft and pleasant. His humor, to my surprise, depended on puns. Even in the little snips of conversation, he played with words lightly.
That Summer in Paris Page 11