Since we rarely sat for long at the Coupole at that hour, we moved across the street to the Sélect where Titus joined us. A girl at loose ends, somebody’s girl, sat down beside us waiting for her friend. Bob McAlmon came along. Then I remember someone saying, “Eugene Jolas and his wife are sitting over there at the Coupole. Are you going over?” and I half rose. Jolas was the editor of transition, and had been printing stories of mine. Then I sank back in my chair, feeling a stab of resentment. Not many months ago, he had printed a piece by one of the aesthetes who had said that I was “immersed in life” and “ready for quick publication.” It was not intended as a compliment, and looking at that Coupole deck of chairs, I said to myself jeeringly, What the hell am I supposed to be immersed in? Dreams? Like those French cut-ups, Breton, Aragon and Soupault? The naughty boys. And I worked myself up into such a state of combat I knew I had better not go across the street and speak to Jolas.
Then someone called me by name. My mouth fell open. A young newspaperman from my hometown, Toronto, was approaching us, all warmth and smiles. He was spending a weekend in Paris, he said, and heard I was in the Quarter. Innocently enough, I introduced him to the priest. “Father Tom,” I said. “Yeah, a priest, eh?” said the newspaperman with an owlish leer. “Where’s the Roman collar? Never mind. I get it.” The leer was alien to the life of the Quarter. A cardinal, or Polly Adler, could have sat at any one of the cafés and no one I knew, meeting them, would have leered. And unfortunately the leer now was on the face of a man from back home. All that I liked about the Quarter, and all that I must have wanted to reject in my hometown, seemed to clash savagely. All the hostility I felt must have shown in my eyes as I explained that an American priest was not expected to wear the Roman collar in France; after all, he might be mistaken for a Protestant minister. The newspaperman quickly withdrew.
“Let him think what he wants,” said the priest. “He’s probably a very good-hearted fellow.” And he was too. I had always liked him. But that leer – my hometown. Well, an odd thing happened a year later when I was back in Toronto. I had come to a party from a concert where I had had to wear a dinner jacket and black tie, and suddenly there was the newspaperman, whom I hadn’t seen since the night at the Sélect, offering me an affable greeting. But he said, “Is that a real tie or one of those snappers?” Reaching out from the other side of the sofa which was between us, he gave the tie a little jerk to see if it would snap back into place. I was blind with rage. Leaping across the back of the sofa, I bowled him over, had him on the floor by the throat and was choking him. Afterwards I felt ridiculous. How could I explain I had suddenly remembered his alien leer that night in Paris?
“What’s that pale yellow drink?” asked the priest. “I’ll try one.” We told him he should be careful of the Pernods. “Now don’t be foolish,” he said. “It’s just a sweet drink and it tastes like licorice with water in it. No drink ever gave me any trouble.” Well, we had warned him.
While he drank one Pernod and then another, we invited him to observe our little streetwalker, who was busy as always at that hour on the strip of pavement extending from the Sélect halfway over to the Gare Montparnasse. Every night we watched her ply-ing her trade. A short stout girl, she was hardly beautiful, and, incredible as it may sound, she usually wore a red dress. She worked out of a little hotel behind the Sélect. She had all the noble virtues of the Frenchwoman in real life, the woman at the market or at the cash register. She didn’t loaf, there was no seductive silliness about her, nothing of the storybook dreamy siren with the Parisian flair. Just from watching her we could have given her a splendid character reference: honest, reliable, punctual, industrious. When she had picked up a customer, he would follow two paces behind her, both of them walking briskly, determinedly, as if she had found someone to help her clean up the kitchen, and they would vanish around the corner. A half hour later she would reappear, just as brisk, just as unsmiling, back on the beat. And regularly at 2 a.m. she would come from the hotel, always with a paper parcel under her arm, her head back, and hurry away home, as sensible, and as domesticated a woman as you ever saw. I told the priest that after watching the girl night after night we had decided she had her place, a hard-won place, in the neighborhood pattern.
He made no comment. A strange smile on his face, he looked around the whole brightly lit neighborhood. Was he thinking of the hard monotony of the prison, comparing the prison life with this disordered idle sinful life flowing around him here? Could it be giving him some strange sense of peace? He could have been relating this abandoned café life to the prison life and his own fevers, making out of it all some satisfying total spiritual pattern.
Or was it just the many Pernods he had insisted on drinking? But he did look happy and at peace. Around about two, we wandered happily along the boulevard. Music from the jazz band in the Jockey and crazy laughter floated out to the street. He wanted to go in. In that little smoke-filled room, where tipsy couples danced on a dime to wailing saxophones, he just watched. But as he watched he spoke about his convicts back home. Unfortunately, he also had another one of the sweet Pernods.
When we left the Jockey he didn’t want to go back to the hotel. Holding our arms, he asked if he couldn’t walk home with us. “I don’t like to leave you,” he said simply. So he walked us home and came in and he talked for an hour about his mother in Ireland, whom he would be seeing in a day or two, and for the last time, and how he would go back to the prison content.
At four, when he stood up, he lurched. He was surprised, hurt, unbelieving and terribly humiliated. We had warned him about the Pernods, and now he was bewildered. “Never in my life has this happened to me before,” he kept muttering.
When we had driven him to his hotel, I remember that as we guided him into the lobby he turned. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be up in the morning at eight.”
“You can’t get up at eight,” I said.
“I have to,” he muttered. “And I will. I told those women I had seen them for the last time. I told them they were malicious, uncharitable, backbiting and small-souled, and I was glad I would never see them again. And I won’t. Don’t worry. I’ll catch that plane. I have to.” Laughing a little, very moved, he put his arms around my wife and kissed her. He put his arms around me, too. “God bless you both,” he whispered, steadying himself, and he walked slowly into the hotel.
It had been such an innocent evening, just sitting around. All he had done was drink too many Pernods, a drink he was unac-customed to. Yet he left us feeling like Samaritans who had rescued a good man who had fallen among thieves. We had given him a good memory to take back to his penitentiary.
It was our weekend to have callers. We had another one. We had got up very late – it was actually early in the afternoon. Too lazy even to go out for something to eat, we nibbled at some croissants and had some of the champagne. It was a clear warm sunlit day. Our Russian landlady, rouged and buxom, her hair freshly tinted, came and asked if we would like a drive around Paris. Well, the car was outside. It was a taxi. The swarthy and rather sinister-looking taxi driver was introduced to us as a colonel. A czarist colonel indeed he was, middle-aged now, who had fled from the Bolsheviks and was reduced to driving a taxi in Paris. He was obviously our Russian lady’s lover. Since he had no English and even less French than I had, our madame kept him company in the front seat while we sat in the back. Rolling grandly around Paris through the Bois, and out to the country, he sat in utter silence. Out of politeness, Loretto and I didn’t want to talk in English; they did not want to shut us out, talking in Russian. Yet we didn’t get home till nearly seven.
Then on Sunday, in the middle of the afternoon, we had another caller. Loretto had washed out some handkerchiefs. While they were still wet she had smoothed them out flat on the win-dowpanes so the strong sunlight would dry and stiffen them. An hour later a knock came on the door. It was Scott Fitzgerald.
CHAPTER 22
He looked beautifully tailored and clear-eye
d. His eyes were not quite blue, but hazel or green-flecked. He came in with that smiling grace which was so natural to him and which I found so attractive. He had been thinking about us, he said, and he wondered if we wouldn’t like to go over to the Ritz and have some drinks. Then his eye caught the handkerchiefs smoothed out on the win-dowpanes and drying quickly in the sunlight. Childlike in his curiosity, he approached the window, touched one of the handkerchiefs and turned to Loretto. “What is this? What are you doing with these handkerchiefs, Loretto?”
“Just this,” she said. Tearing one of the stiffly dried handkerchiefs from the pane she calmly folded it, and it looked starched and neat. Since she had no facilities for ironing, she said, this was the method employed. And Scott, musing, was simply delighted. He had her take another handkerchief off a pane so he could fold it himself. Did women often do this? he asked. How simple and wonderful it was. Oh, he would certainly use it in a story. Day by day he sought out fresh little details like this one for use in his stories, he said. It was so difficult to come on something he hadn’t used before. How pleased and charmed and grateful to Loretto he was.
In the little pause as we all smiled at each other, I waited uneasily for him to ask if I had spoken to Ernest about us all getting together. What could I say to him if he mentioned it? Tell him the truth? I couldn’t bear to. Could I say, “The subject didn’t come up, Scott?” What a look he would give me. The difficult moment passed easily. He was too sensitive a man to raise the subject bluntly. Raise it he would, of course, but in his own way when he had to. He had seen a copy of The Great Gatsby on the table and he picked it up, looking pleased. The sale of the book had been very disappointing to him, he said. Not that it hadn’t done reasonably well, but no one would have called it a big seller. But there had been an explanation. “It was too short a book,” he said. It was the one thing that was the matter with the book. “Remember this, Morley. Never write a book under sixty thousand words.”
I had been getting ready to go out with him. When I had combed my hair and put on my coat I said, “Well, let’s go.”
But he was appraising me, consternation in his face. “Would you go over to the Ritz,” he asked in a shocked tone, “wearing those sandals?”
They were the sandals I wore around the Quarter, as others, too, were wearing them. Smiling, I was about to tease him and ask what was the matter with sandals in the Ritz? But Loretto, who had seen the pain in Scott’s eyes, said, “Imagine, Scott. Morley didn’t notice he still had his sandals on.” And I said, “I’m excited. Wait, I’ll put on my shoes.” We fell in with his attitude so willingly that the sudden stiffness in him vanished. In his turn he had to explain himself.
Did I know Louis Bromfield? Well, Bromfield and his wife, who lived in some style in a château outside Paris, had invited him and Zelda to dinner. When they arrived at the Bromfield house they found Louis receiving them in his slippers. It was a mark of such disrespect it couldn’t possibly be overlooked; it showed what the Bromfields thought of the Fitzgeralds. The Fitzgeralds had never visited the Bromfields again.
Remembering Scott telling this story, I marvel at the little things that shape the relationships of men; only the little things seem to do it. Not great matters of principle or articles of faith, but fancied slights, a little detail acutely observed that is supposed to reveal how things really stand between friends. This matter of the slippers! Years later when I met Louis Bromfield I told him this story about his slippers. Wide-eyed, not smiling at all, full of wonder, he explained that he always wore those slippers in his own house when his guest was someone he felt close to. He had often wondered why Scott had turned against him.
In my case I had got out of my sandals and into my shoes in time. Scott seemed to be satisfied I had intended no disrespect to him or to the Ritz.
In the hotel, where he had the air of being at home, he exuded some of that satisfaction he had shown when we had been with him in the Joyce shrine, the Trianon. In deference to Loretto we did not sit at the bar; we were at a table in the corner, but I think he would have been more satisfied with the rightness of things if we had been at the celebrated long Ritz Bar. Again I waited for him to ask about Hemingway.
“Do you know, Morley,” he said in that sweet quiet unspoiled tone, “you have written some of the finest stories in the English language.” Taken aback, I tried to laugh. Those strangely colored eyes of his were on me, and if I clowned I knew I would be insulting him. His head on one side, he reflected, a wistful expression on his face. His extraordinary charm seemed to be in this unspoiled frankness; he could make you believe he was merely telling you something he had known for a long time. Obviously he had come out that afternoon with some hunger in him for talk, a gnawing necessity to express his interest in writing. How unlike Hemingway he was, I thought. You had to draw Hemingway out. And if Hemingway was working on a story, he was almost superstitious in his refusal to talk about it. He believed that if you talked about it before doing it, something was lost in the talking that should have gone into the writing. Now with Scott I was delighted to be my opinionated self.
Had I seen Gertrude Stein yet? he wanted to know. No, and I no longer had any curiosity about the grand lady. If Scott was interested in Miss Stein, he could have her. For my part, she had written one book, Three Lives. Having waded through The Making of Americans, and those stories of hers like “As A Wife As A Cow, A Love Story,” I had done a little brooding over her. Abstract prose was nonsense. The shrewd lady had found a trick, just as the naughty Dadaists had once found a trick. The plain truth was, as I saw it, Gertrude Stein now had nothing whatever to say. But she was shrewd and intelligent enough to know it. As for her deluded coterie, well, I had no interest in finding one of them who would lead me shyly to her den.
My vehemence delighted Scott. Angular opinions also came from him. He had taken some kind of a scunner to André Gide. Perhaps it was because Gide was presiding over the literature of France as I claimed Gertrude Stein was presiding over her little coterie. We agreed Gide was a second-rate novelist. I put in a word for his intellectual curiosity. We talked of Proust. Scott was dismayed by my refusal to go on with Proust. I explained that Proust was the kind of a great writer who got into your blood, and I knew he was not right for mine.
Suddenly Scott began to talk about himself, making odd candid remarks as if he would suddenly see himself against the background of the people and events we were talking about. Now he said most disarmingly, “Do you know what my own story is? Well, I was always the poorest boy at a rich man’s school. Yes, it was that way at prep schools, and at Princeton too.”
What was there to say to him? We had been talking only about writing. Now he seemed to be trying to explain why he felt driven to have such commercial success with his own writing. “Do you know I’m a millionaire now?” he asked simply.
Our little smiles didn’t put him off. He argued sensibly that any man who had an income of fifty thousand a year was ranked as a millionaire. Wasn’t it so? Our confusion came from suspect-ing he didn’t have a million dollars in capital. We were right. But we were overlooking the fact that a writer’s capital was the writer’s talent. Since this thing he had himself, which was his capital, brought him in fifty thousand a year, very well, then wasn’t he to be ranked as a millionaire?
He was indeed, we agreed. But as he grew more confidential he was more troubled, and he looked unhappy. He had to write eight stories a year for the Saturday Evening Post at four thousand dollars a story. Oh, so I thought four thousand dollars a story was a lot of money, eh? Well, in view of the value of the storywriter to the big circulation magazine, he was actually being underpaid. Anyway, he, himself, had to be always looking around for material for those eight stories; he had to be working on them all the time, never resting, day by day picking up stuff like that bit about the handkerchiefs. Yet he also had to find time to turn to the work that was the core and hope of his whole life – his novel. At the present moment the novel – it was Ten
der Is the Night – was going very, very slowly. He couldn’t get time. My God, there never was enough time. And when he found this time he couldn’t seem to tap his imagination at will – not to his satisfaction.
I remember drawing back and looking in wonder at this slender, charming and secretly tormented man. This was the man who was supposed to be leading a crazy disorderly life. Yes, he did get a little drunk, did crazy things, and people thought of him as the wild, irresponsible playboy of the era. Yet what fantastic energies he had stored in him, What power of concentration while at the same time he watched over the wife whom Hemingway had called crazy! Here he was telling me of a production which could only come from an exacting rigid discipline. What haunted him, I was sure, was that he gave only his spare time to the work that was closest to his heart. Well, it was up to him. I became subdued. He made me feel lazy, as I was, and it seemed incredible that a man as knowing as Ernest could talk of him as if he were simply an alcoholic. He worked much harder than Ernest did. In fact he made me feel I didn’t work at all. Drinking champagne cocktails, we talked on until after six. Then he told us he was supposed to take Mary Blair, the actress who had been Edmund Wilson’s wife, to dinner. Could he meet us at one of the cafés afterward? We suggested the Lilas. We went out and got into a taxi.
When we were dropping him off he said suddenly, ”Wait a minute.” Pulling out his wallet, he counted his bills, and looked vague. “I may not have enough money,” he said. “Have you got any money, Morley?” The two hundred francs, worth eight dollars at that time, which I had in my wallet I gave to my millionaire. To me eight dollars was eight dollars. I knew I wouldn’t see it again, but I also knew that Scott, under similar circumstances, would have thrust eight dollars into my hand.
That Summer in Paris Page 15