That Summer in Paris

by Callaghan, Morley;

  However, none of his jokes made his wife laugh out loud, and I was reminded of McAlmon’s story that she had once asked the author of the comic masterpiece Ulysses, “Jimmy, have we a book of Irish humor in the house?”

  No matter what was being said, I remained aware of the deep-bosomed Nora Joyce. The food on the table, the white tablecloths, our own voices, everything in the restaurant seemed to tell me Joyce had got all the stuff of Molly Bloom’s great and beautiful soliloquy at the close of Ulysses from this woman sitting across from me; all her secret, dark night thoughts and yearning. Becoming a little shy, I could hardly look at her. But the quiet handsome motherly woman’s manner soon drove all this nonsense out of my head. She was as neighborly and sympathetic as Joyce himself. They both gossiped with a pleasant ease.

  The sound of Joyce’s voice suddenly touched a memory of home which moved me. My father, as I have said, didn’t read modern prose, just poetry. Fond of music as he was, he wouldn’t listen to jazz. He wouldn’t read Anderson. I had assumed he would have no interest in experimental prose. When that copy of This Quarter carrying my first story, along with the work of Joyce, Pound, Stein, Hemingway and others, had come to our house, my father sat one night at the end of the kitchen table reading it. Soon he began to chuckle to himself. The assured little smirk on his face irritated me. Passing behind his shoulder, I glanced down at the page to see what he was reading. “Work in Progress,” by James Joyce, which was a section from Finnegan’s Wake. Imagining he was getting ready to make some sarcastic and belittling remark, I said grimly, ”All right. What’s so funny?”

  But he looked up mildly; he had untroubled blue eyes; and he said with genuine pleasure, “I think I understand this. Read it like Irish brogue... ‘Shem is short for Shemus just as Jem is joky for Jacob. A few toughnecks are gettable ...’ It’s like listening to someone talking in a broad Irish brogue, isn’t it, Son?” “Yeah,” I said. But I felt apologetic.

  And now, after listening to Joyce in our general gossiping, I blurted out that my father had said the new Joyce work should be read aloud in an Irish brogue. Whether it was Joyce or McAlmon who cut in quickly, agreeing, I forget. It came out that Joyce had made some phonograph records of the work; in the way he used his voice it had been his intention to make you feel you were listening to the brogue; much of the music and meaning was in the sound of the brogue. So my father had helped me; I wanted to go on: had Joyce read those proofs of A Farewell to Arms which I knew Hemingway had taken to him? Why not ask him? But there had been that warning from Hemingway, “He doesn’t like to talk about the work of other writers.” I felt handcuffed, exasperated, and therefore was silent. So Joyce had to make most of the conversation. Were we going to London? Sooner or later? He wrote down the name of an inexpensive hotel near the Euston Station.

  McAlmon, who had been drinking a lot as usual, suddenly got up, excused himself and went toward the washroom. And then, almost as soon as McAlmon’s back was turned, Joyce, leaning across the table, asked quietly, “What do you think of McAlmon’s work?”

  Surprised, I couldn’t answer for a moment. Joyce? Someone else’s work? Finally I said that McAlmon simply would not take time with his work; he had hypnotized himself into believing the main thing was to get down the record.

  “He has a talent,” Joyce said. “A real talent; but it is a disorganized talent.” And as he whispered quickly about this disorganized talent, trying to get it all in before McAlmon could return, I wanted to laugh. How had the story got around that the man wouldn’t talk about another writer? Then Joyce suddenly paused, his eyes shifting away. McAlmon was on his way back from the washroom and like a conspirator Joyce quickly changed the subject.

  As McAlmon came sauntering over to us with his superior air, I noticed a change in his appearance. He looked as if he had just washed his face and combed his hair. From past experience I knew what it meant. When with people he respected he would not let himself get incoherently drunk; he would go to the washroom; there he would put his finger down his throat, vomit, then wash his face, comb his hair and return sober as an undertaker.

  It was now about ten o’clock. Turning to his wife, Joyce used the words I remember so well. “Have we still got that bottle of whiskey in the house, Nora?”

  “Yes, we have,” she said.

  “Perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Callaghan would like to drink it with us.”

  Would we? My wife said we would indeed and I hid my excitement and elation. An evening at home with the Joyces, and Joyce willing to talk and gossip about other writers while we killed a bottle! Stories about Yeats, opinions about Proust! What would he say about Lawrence? Of Hemingway? Did he know Fitzgerald’s work? It all danced wildly in my head as we left the restaurant.

  Looking for a taxi, McAlmon had gone ahead with Mrs. Joyce and Loretto. Joyce and I were trailing them. The street was not lit very brightly. Carried away by the excitement I felt at having him walking beside me, I began to talk rapidly. Not a word came from him. I thought he was absorbed in what I was saying. Then far back of me I heard the anxious pounding of his cane on the cobblestones and turned. In the shadows he was groping his way toward me. I had forgotten he could hardly see. Then headlights of an approaching taxi picked him up, and in the glaring light he waved his stick wildly. Conscience-stricken, I wanted to cry out. Rushing back, I grabbed him by the arm as the taxi swerved around us. I stammered out an apology. He made some pun on one of the words I used. I don’t remember the pun, but since I was trembling the poor quick pun seemed to make the situation Joycean and ridiculous.

  The Joyces lived in a solid apartment house, and in the entrance hall Mrs. Joyce explained we would have to use the lift in shifts; it was not supposed to carry more than two people at one time. For the first ascension my wife and Mrs. Joyce got into the lift. When it returned, McAlmon offered to wait while Joyce and I ascended. No, said Joyce, the three of us would get in. The lift rose so slowly I held my breath. No one spoke. Out of the long silence, with the three of us jammed together, came a little snicker from Joyce. “Think what a loss to English literature if the lift fails and the three of us are killed,” he said dryly.

  The Joyce apartment, at least the living room in which we sat, upset me. Nothing looked right. In the whole world there wasn’t a more original writer than Joyce, the exotic in the English language.

  In the work he had on hand he was exploring the language of the dream world. In this room where he led his daily life I must have expected to see some of the marks of his wild imagination. Yet the place was conservatively respectable. I was too young to have discovered then that men with the most daringly original minds are rarely eccentric in their clothes and their living quarters. This room was all in a conventional middle-class pattern with, if I remember, a brown-patterned wallpaper, a mantel, and a painting of Joyce’s father hanging over the fireplace. Mrs. Joyce had promptly brought out the bottle of Scotch. As we began to drink, we joked and laughed and Joyce got talking about the movies. A number of times a week he went to the movies. Movies interested him. As he talked, I seemed to see him in a darkened theatre, the great prose master absorbed in camera technique, so like the dream technique, one picture then another flashing in the mind. Did it all add to his knowledge of the logic of the dream world?

  As the conversation began to trail off, I got ready. At the right moment I would plunge in and question him about his contemporaries. But damn it all, I was too slow. Something said about the movies had reminded McAlmon of his grandmother. In a warm, genial, expansive mood and as much at home with the Joyces as he was with us, he talked about his dear old grandmother, with a happy nostalgic smile. The rich pleasure he got out of his boyhood recollections was so pure that neither the Joyces nor my wife and I could bear to interrupt. At least not at first. But he kept it up.

  For half an hour he went on and on. Instead of listening to Joyce, I was listening to McAlmon chuckling away about his grandmother. Quivering with impatience I looked at Joyce, who had an amuse
d little smile. No one could interrupt McAlmon. Mrs. Joyce seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for sitting motionless and looking interested. The day would come, I thought bitterly, when I would be able to tell my children I had sat one night with Joyce listening to McAlmon talking about his grandmother.

  But when McAlmon paused to take another drink, Joyce caught him off balance. “Do you think Mr. and Mrs. Callaghan would like to hear the record?” he asked his wife.

  “What record?” asked McAlmon, blinking suspiciously, and for a moment I, too, thought Joyce had been referring to him. Now Mrs. Joyce was regarding my wife and me very gravely. “Yes,” she said. “I think it might interest them.”

  “What record?” McAlmon repeated uneasily.

  Mrs. Joyce rose, got a record out of a cabinet and put it on the machine. After a moment my wife and I looked at each other in astonishment. Aimee Semple McPherson was preaching a sermon! At that time everyone in Europe and America had heard of Mrs. McPherson, the attractive, seductive blond evangelist from Canada. But why should Joyce be interested in the woman evangelist? and us? and McAlmon? Cut off, and therefore crestfallen, he, too, waited, mystified. Joyce had nodded to me, inviting my scholarly attention. And Mrs. Joyce, having sat down, was watching my wife with a kind of saintly concern.

  The evangelist had an extraordinary voice, warm, low, throaty and imploring. But what was she asking for? As we listened, my wife and I exchanging glances, we became aware that the Joyces were watching us intently, while Mrs. McPherson’s voice rose and fell. The voice, in a tone of ecstatic abandonment, took on an ancient familiar rhythm. It became like a woman’s urgent love moan as she begged, “Come, come on to me. Come, come on to me. And I will give you rest... and I will give you rest... Come, come...” My wife, her eyebrows raised, caught my glance, then we averted our eyes, as if afraid the Joyces would know what we were thinking. But Joyce, who had been watching us so attentively, had caught our glance. It was enough. He brightened and chuckled. Then Mrs. Joyce, who had also kept her eyes on us, burst out laughing herself. Nothing had to be explained. Grinning mischievously, in enormous satisfaction with his small success, Joyce poured us another drink.

  Before we could comment his daughter, a pretty, dark young woman, came in. And a few minutes later, his son too joined us. It was time for us to leave.

  When we had taken Robert McAlmon, publisher of the city of Paris, home, we wandered over to the Coupole. That night we shared an extraordinary elation at being in Paris. We didn’t want to go back to the apartment. In the Coupole bar we met some friends. One of them asked Loretto if she could do the Charleston. There in the bar she gave a fine solo performance. A young, fair man, a Serbian count, who had been sitting at the bar holding a single long-stemmed red rose in his hand, had been watching her appreciatively. But one of our friends told him the dancing girl was my wife. With a shy, yet gallant bow to me from a distance, he asked if he had permission to give Loretto the rose. It was a good night.

  CHAPTER 18

  But the day and night I always remember came a week later. The May weather was so fine I didn’t want to stay in the apartment in the afternoons and work. Bit by bit, looking at paintings had become part of our daily fare. Everybody in Paris seemed to paint, and in store windows in strange little streets you would see reproductions of Matisse, Derain, Rouault, Chirico, Modigliani, Picasso, Utrillo, and in the Quarter the surrealists Picabia and Miró were famous names. At that time there was still a common language of painting; the language hadn’t got broken up. The painters hadn’t quite entered their tower of Babel.

  Some writers like to sit for long hours at their desks. Not me. At that time the New Yorker had written asking if I had any stories. I began to work on some. And I was also working on the novel that was to be called It’s Never Over. But the Paris streets were my workshop. While loafing along the streets ideas for the stories would grow in my head. Little street scenes would seem to distract me, would indeed get my full attention: the intent expression on the faces of men hurrying to the street urinals; workingmen quarreling under the eyes of a gendarme, each seeking the triumph of provoking the other to strike the first blow and get arrested. Or some little street whore would make me wonder, “Why are so many of these girls of the same short, solid build as the whores Lautrec loved to paint?” A writer is always working. I can remember watching the ease and style with which Lacoste and Cochet handled Big Bill Tilden in the Davis Cup tennis matches and telling myself it had something to do with style in writing. When I got back to the apartment I would sit by the window overlooking the prison wall and write rapidly, most of the work having been done in my head before I came home. Often it rained. It was the time for reading. Very late at night was also a good time. From the window I could watch the bicycle patrol, the three tough French cops no one wanted to tangle with, come peddling slowly down the street.

  Even when reading, a writer is busily at work watching how an effect is achieved on the page. But whether I was reading D. H. Lawrence or Tolstoy or Virginia Woolf I would notice that when I hit certain scenes I would be so carried away I would cease to be aware of style or method. What then made good writing good? That was always the question. Freshness? Verbal felicity? No, there always seemed to be some other quality. There had been at the time a quarrel about the methods of Arnold Bennett and Virginia Woolf; Bennett’s or Zola’s camera eye and Virginia Woolf ’s interior flow of impressions. But it seemed to me, reading so late at night in my room overlooking the prison wall, that there could be no quarrel at all. The temperament, the character, the very identity of the writer was in his kind of eye. Virginia Woolf had a sensibility so fragile it must have been always close to the breaking point; she couldn’t have written any other way. And Lawrence? Again the writer’s own character gave his work its identity. He must have been an Anglo-Saxon puritan with an inborn uneasiness about female flesh; he must have hated this uneasiness and hungered for the expression of ecstasy; therefore the natural poetry of sex. But then I would wonder why Lady Chatterley’s correct copulations didn’t move me as much as one surrender by Anna Karenina, or one of poor Emma Bovary’s fugitive rolls in the hay.

  At the cafés, of course, one could always get an argument on these questions. But I knew what I was seeking in my Paris street walks, and in the typing hours – with Loretto waiting to retype a chapter. It was this: strip the language, and make the style, the method, all the psychological ramifications, the ambience of the relationships, all the one thing, so the reader couldn’t make separations. Cézanne’s apples. The appleness of apples. Yet just apples.

  Wandering around Paris I would find myself thinking of the way Matisse looked at the world around him and find myself growing enchanted. A pumpkin, a fence, a girl, a pineapple on a tablecloth – the thing seen freshly in a pattern that was a gay celebration of things as they were. Why couldn’t all people have the eyes and the heart that would give them this happy acceptance of reality? The word made flesh. The terribly vanity of the artist who wanted the word without the flesh. I can see now that I was busily rejecting even then that arrogance of the spirit, that fantasy running through modern letters and thought that man was alien in this uni-verse. From Pascal to Henry Miller they are the children of St. Paul.

  Often we would go to the Luxembourg Museum and then, when tired, sit in the gardens and watch the little girls in their severe black frocks sailing their boats on the pond. On this particular day we had spent hours in those galleries on the rue Bonaparte. We had eaten at a small café down that way. It was dusk when we wandered up to Montparnasse. Sitting at the café I had got to thinking about Fitzgerald. Until then we had counted on Hemingway letting us know if he had news of the Fitzgeralds. But what if they were in Paris and hadn’t as yet got in touch with Ernest? I had a hunch it was time to go looking for them ourselves.

  The hour was about nine-thirty, and as we saw it, a reasonable hour to go calling. If the Fitzgeralds had been out for dinner, well, by this time they might be hom
e. And Max Perkins had said, “Don’t write to Scott. Don’t be formal. Just drop in on him.”

  The Fitzgeralds lived near the St. Sulpice Cathedral in an old stone building which must have been a great house at one time. As soon as we got out of the taxi I said to Loretto, “Why this place isn’t more than a stone’s throw from Hemingway’s place. Or at least a stone thrown twice.” It was a fact I was to remember later and brood on. Standing in the little vestibule, we scanned the apartment nameplates. There, indeed, was the Fitzgerald name. We rang the bell. No one answered. As we turned away disappointed, at loose ends standing in the shadowed doorway, a taxi drew up. A man and woman got out. They were under a streetlight. We could see their faces. “Why, there’s Fitzgerald,” I said to Loretto. In that light, even from a distance, he looked like the handsome, slender, fine-featured man whose picture I had so often seen, whose profile, in fact, appeared to be copied again and again by magazine illustrators. Coming toward us slowly, they couldn’t see us. We were half hidden in the shadows. The vestibule light touched Zelda’s blond hair. A handsome woman, her features were as regular as Scott’s. I don’t know why it upset me seeing these fine classic heads coming into the vestibule shadows where we waited.

  Stepping out, I said, “I’m Morley Callaghan and this is Loretto.” Startled for a moment, they had no words for us. They seemed to be trying to get used to the sight of us on their doorstep. “Well, hello, how are you?” Scott said. Then, half confused, he added, “Why didn’t you let us know you were in Paris?” We all shook hands. Opening the door he let us in.