That Summer in Paris

by Callaghan, Morley;

  Right at the beginning of that round Ernest got careless; he came in too fast, his left down, and he got smacked on the mouth. His lip began to bleed. It had often happened. It should have meant nothing to him. Hadn’t he joked with Jimmy, the bartender, about always having me for a friend while I could make his lip bleed? Out of the corner of his eye he may have seen the shocked expression on Scott’s face. Or the taste of blood in his mouth may have made him want to fight more savagely. He came lunging in, swinging more recklessly. As I circled around him, I kept jabbing at his bleeding mouth. I had to forget all about Scott, for Ernest had become rougher, his punching a little wilder than usual. His heavy punches, if they had landed, would have stunned me. I had to punch faster and harder myself to keep away from him. It bothered me that he was taking the punches on the face like a man telling himself he only needed to land one big punch himself.

  Out of the corner of my eye, as I bobbed and weaved, I could see one of the young fellows who had been playing billiards come to the door and stand there, watching. He was in his shirt sleeves, but he was wearing a vest. He held his cue in his hand like a staff. I could see Scott on the bench. I was wondering why I was tiring, for I hadn’t been hit solidly. Then Ernest, wiping the blood from his mouth with his glove, and probably made careless with exasperation and embarrassment from having Scott there, came leaping in at me. Stepping in, I beat him to the punch. The timing must have been just right. I caught him on the jaw; spinning around he went down, sprawled out on his back.

  If Ernest and I had been there alone I would have laughed. I was sure of my boxing friendship with him; in a sense I was sure of him, too. Ridiculous things had happened in that room. Hadn’t he spat in my face? And I felt no surprise seeing him flat on his back. Shaking his head a little to clear it, he rested a moment on his back. As he rose slowly, I expected him to curse, then laugh.

  “Oh, my God!” Scott cried suddenly. When I looked at him, alarmed, he was shaking his head helplessly. “I let the round go four minutes,” he said.

  “Christ!” Ernest yelled. He got up. He was silent for a few seconds. Scott, staring at his watch, was mute and wondering. I wished I were miles away. “All right, Scott,” Ernest said savagely, “if you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake,” and he stomped off to the shower room to wipe the blood from his mouth.

  As I tried to grasp the meaning behind his fierce words I felt helpless with wonder, and nervous too; I seemed to be on the edge of some dark pit, and I could only stare blankly at Scott, who, as his eyes met mine, looked sick. Ernest had told me he had been avoiding Scott because Scott was a drunk and a nuisance and he didn’t want to be bothered with him. It was plain now it wasn’t the whole story. Lashing out with those bitter angry words, Ernest had practically shouted that he was aware Scott had some deep hidden animosity toward him. Shaken as I was, it flashed through my mind, Is the animosity in Scott, or is it really in Ernest? And why should it be in Ernest? Did Scott do something for him once? Is it that Scott helped him along and for months and months he’s wanted to be free of him? Or does he think he knows something – knows Scott has to resent him? What is it? Not just that Scott’s a drunk. I knew there was something else.

  Then Scott came over to me, his face ashen, and he whispered, “Don’t you see I got fascinated watching? I forgot all about the watch. My God, he thinks I did it on purpose. Why would I do it on purpose?”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said, deeply moved, for he looked so stricken. For weeks he had been heaping his admiration of Ernest on me, his hero worship, and I knew of his eagerness for the companionship. Anyone who could say that he was under some secret and malevolent compulsion to let the round go on would have to say, too, that all men are twisted and no man knows what is in his heart. All I knew was that for weeks he had wanted to be here with us, and now that he was here it had brought him this.

  “Look, Scott,” I whispered. “If you did it on purpose you wouldn’t have suddenly cried out that you had let the round go on. You didn’t need to. You would have kept quiet. Ernest will see it himself.” But Scott didn’t answer. He looked as lonely and as desperate as he had looked that night when he had insisted on coming to the Deux Magots with Loretto and me. The anguish on his face was the anguish of a man who felt that everything he had stood for when he had been at his best, had been belittled.

  “Come on, Scott,” I whispered. “Ernest didn’t mean it. It’s a thing I might have said myself. A guy gets sore and blurts out the first crazy thing that comes into his head.”

  “No, you heard him. He believes I did it on purpose,” he whispered bitterly. “What can I do, Morley?”

  “Don’t do anything. Forget the whole thing. He’ll want to forget it himself. You’ll see.”

  He moved away from me as Ernest returned from the shower room. With his face washed, Ernest looked much calmer. He had probably done a lot of thinking, too. Yet he offered no retraction. For my part, I tried to ignore the whole incident. Since we had had a good two or three minutes’ rest to make up for the long round, why couldn’t we go on now? I asked. It gave us something to do. Ernest and I squared off.

  Scott, appearing alert and efficient, and hiding his terrible sense of insult and bitterness, called “Time.” As I look back now I wonder why it didn’t occur to me, as we began the round, that Ernest might try to kill me. But between us there was no hostility. The fact that I had been popping him, and then had clipped him and knocked him down, was part of our boxing. We went a good brisk round, both keeping out of trouble. When we clinched, my eye would wander to Scott, sitting there so white-faced. Poor Scott. Then suddenly he made it worse. The corner of a wrestling mat stuck out from under the parallel bars, and when I half tripped on it and went down on one knee, Scott, to mollify Ernest, called out foolishly, but eagerly, “One knockdown to Ernest, one to Morley,” and if I had been Ernest, I think I would have snarled at him, no matter how good his intentions were.

  But it was to continue to be a terrible and ridiculous afternoon for Ernest. It is a wonder he didn’t go a little mad.

  As soon as we had finished the round, that slender young fellow who had been playing billiards, the one wearing the vest, who had been standing watching, his cue in his hand, came over to us. He might have been an inch taller than me, but he was very slender; he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and thirty-five pounds. A student probably. “Excuse me,” he said to Ernest in an English accent. “I’ve been watching. Do you mind me saying something? Well, in boxing it isn’t enough to be aggressive and always punching. If you don’t mind me saying so, the real science of boxing is in defense, in not getting hit.”

  It was incredible. The student was prepared to tell Ernest how to box. I was shocked and fearful. Both Scott and I, gaping at the student, must have been sharing the same sense of dread. What would Ernest do? A man can stand only so many mortifications in a single afternoon. If Ernest had grabbed the presumptuous fellow’s billiard cue and broken it over his head, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Yet Ernest, after waiting a moment, the moment of astonishment, asked quietly, ”Do you think you could show me?”

  “Well, I could try,” the young fellow said modestly.

  “Good,” said Ernest. “No, wait. Don’t show me. Show him,” and he pointed at me. “I’ll watch.”

  Now I, in my turn, felt a twinge of resentment against Ernest. The student didn’t want to show me how to box; he wanted to show Ernest, didn’t he? I was to be used as a tuning fork. And who could tell whether or not this slender fellow was an English lightweight champion? Scott hadn’t said a word. Nor did he speak as he removed Ernest’s gloves and laced them on the intruder. Squaring off with him, I was ready to cover up like a turtle. As we circled around each other, I tried warily to make him lead at me. A feeble left did come at me, but it seemed to be only a feint. This boy was obviously a counterpuncher. Sooner or later I would have to lead at him. He had
probably worked with pros. He was probably a hooker; I had always been rattled by a good hooker. I would lead now, then he would blow my head off. But gradually I was forc-ing him into a corner. Suddenly I caught a familiar expression in his eyes. I could see he was more scared of me than I was of him. As I began to flail away happily at the young fellow’s head, Ernest suddenly shouted, “Stop!”

  Now Ernest had a very good moment. In a beautiful bit of acting, not a trace of mockery in his tone, he said to the student, “I think I understand what you meant. Now show me.” Ernest now unlaced my gloves. I in turn laced them on him. The student looked pale and worried. Against me had been inept and he knew it, and he knew, too, that he had in effect invited Ernest to knock his block off. Then he caught the derision in Ernest’s eyes. Shaking his head apologetically, he would have withdrawn. “No, come on. You’ve got to show me,” Ernest insisted.

  The student still believed, no doubt, that Ernest was wide open. As he faced him he crouched a little, his hands high, ready to demonstrate his defense. Smiling faintly, Ernest spread his legs, stood rooted there like a great stiff tree trunk, and simply stuck his long left arm straight out like a pole and put his right glove on his hip, contemptuously. He refused to move. It was a splendid dramatic gesture of complete disdain. In fairness to him, he didn’t try to clobber the boy, didn’t try to strike a single blow. As the student circled around him, he, himself, turned slowly like a gate, the hand still on his hip, the great pole of an arm thrust out stiffly.

  The student grew humiliated. Without hitting a blow or being hit, he quit. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really haven’t done much boxing. I’ve read a lot about it. It looked much easier than it is,” and he held out his gloves to me and let me unlace them. I didn’t feel sorry for him. He went back quickly to his billiard table.

  The student’s absurd intervention, adding to the general sense of humiliation, must have put Scott more on edge. He must have felt bewildered. Yet now my two friends began to behave splendidly. Not a word was said about the student. We were all suddenly polite, agreeable, friendly and talkative. I knew how Scott felt; he had told me. He felt bitter, insulted, disillusioned in the sense that he had been made aware of an antagonism in Ernest. Only one thing could have saved him for Ernest. An apology. A restoration of respect, a lifting of the accusation. But Ernest had no intention of apologizing. He obviously saw no reason why he should. So we all behaved splendidly. We struck up a graceful camaraderie. Ernest was jovial with Scott. We were all jovial. We went out and walked up to the Falstaff. And no one watching us sitting at the bar could have imagined that Scott’s pride had been shattered.

  Yet he had some class, some real style there at the bar. I told Ernest that Scott agreed with me that the chapters of a novel I had started ought to be abandoned. I remember Ernest saying, “There are two ways of looking at it. You can think of a career, and would it help your career to have it published? Or you can say to hell with a career and publish it anyway.” Scott said he was glad I wasn’t going on with the book. As we exchanged opinions I noticed that two of the patrons, two young fellows at a nearby table, were cran-ing their necks, listening and watching. And I laughed and said that by tomorrow word would go around the café that I, shamefully, was letting Fitzgerald and Hemingway tell me what to do about a book. Ernest said, “What do you care? We’re professionals. We only care whether the thing is as good as it should be.”

  And again, as I say, anyone watching would have believed that we were three writers talking about a literary problem. No one could have imagined anything had happened that could be heartbreak-ing. Well, I had come a long way to have my two friends get together with me, and here they were.

  CHAPTER 27

  My two friends, when I saw them separately, seemed to be wonderfully untroubled about each other. Ernest would have had me believe he hadn’t given a second thought to his words to Scott in the American Club. Nothing worth mentioning again had happened. When I saw Scott, he was superb too – he didn’t even ask for Ernest. And I joined in the general pretending. I became a man who “knew how to behave” as Ernest would say. I managed to give the impression of being completely unaware of any deep disappointments and hidden resentments. How could bitterness flare up if they weren’t seeing each other? I asked myself. For now that July had come they were both to go away, Ernest south, probably to Spain, and Scott would soon be off to the Riviera. What could be better than to have everybody go away for awhile? Everybody off to the seashore! I was glad they were going. While they were away I could relax a little myself and pretend that we would all be the best of friends when they returned. I knew I ought to have stopped pretending. But pretending is contagious. It makes life more agreeable.

  I should have said, “Ernest, I think you’ve got Scott all wrong.” But Ernest was a strange ingrown man who could make you feel his resentments were born of some deep primitive wisdom. Besides, I didn’t want to keep reminding him I had had a hand in his embarrassment. If I kept prodding him about Scott, if I dared to suggest he might owe Scott an apology, I was afraid his vivid imagination would start working on me and he wouldn’t want to see me either. Let the whole thing blow over, I thought.

  July was a hot month. In the strong afternoon sunlight the Dôme, the Coupole and the Sélect, the whole corner, had a bright hard look. But too many summer soldiers had come to town. Visitors dropping off buses sat around for an evening, then disappeared. At night now Loretto and I would wander off with someone to other neighborhoods. There were the bals musettes down by the Bastille, the Pigalle bars, and the Hôtel du Caveau on the rue de la Huchette; then back to our roosting place to find amusement in the antics of strangers. In the hot weather we had a nightly supply of comics. An Englishman and his wife would be giving a remarkable performance, discussing Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  Talking quite rationally at first, the lady would suddenly say, “But those forget-me-nots. Why, that woman put a wreath of forget-me-nots on that man’s… well, an unmentionable part of his body.” And her husband, his face suddenly bursting red with outrage, “It’s incredible,” and turning on us, his voice quivering, “Are you prepared to say those forget-me-nots on the man’s privates isn’t rubbish?” As a man and wife they suddenly had a perfect union in their sense of outrage. And we knew they themselves didn’t go monkeying around with forget-me-nots.

  Other faces, other voices had become familiar. The voices of the two young Jews who had become Catholics would drift over to us, one saying softly to the other, “Notre Baudelaire,” the other nodding in his enchantment; or from the two boys having their week in town, two who loved Jane Austen, would come the ador-ing words, “Dear Jane...”

  But all that month I didn’t hear any arguments about econom-ics or politics. No one stood up and shouted about the necessity of a social conscience. I remember that Hemingway had talked about Mussolini, and the Social Democrats in Germany, but he would talk as a shrewd observer; a man who had the political facts right out of the horse’s mouth; he would be letting you in on what was going on. Yet there was no distinction in being against Fascism – everyone was. The Left – the Marxist? To me at that time it would have seemed incredible that writers within a few years would go running to commissars seeking direction. If I talked about Dos Passos, it was because I was interested in what he was trying to do with his material society; he was against the social fraud, the bour-geois values. But who wasn’t? At the cafés the writers and the hang-erson – my God, now they seem to have been nearly all hangers-on – were more interested in the revolution of the word than the world. Yet within a few months the stock market in New York was to crash, the Depression was to begin, and the clients of those cafés who got money, no matter how little, from home, were to vanish one by one.

  In those hot days when everyone else was going away, moving on, we had to make a move too. One morning after waking up, my wife showed me a little blood mark on her leg. What was it? It worried us. Next morning she had fresh little pinpr
icks of blood on her ankles. Alarmed, we wondered if she was suffering from some strange malady. Next night, in the very middle of the night, she suddenly threw off the cover and turned on the lights. A bedbug! We had never seen one. In the morning we summoned our Russian landlady and showed her the dead bug in the newspaper. “Ah, pounais! ” she cried. Writhing with mortification, she explained that the grocery store below us had been fumigated. No doubt the bedbugs were driven up to her establishment. When we told her we would have to leave her, she understood. Her proud aristocratic Russian blood seemed to help her to understand. Her shame, mixed up with rage against the grocer, made us want to root for her. But nevertheless we moved to a little hotel on Raspail, and it was during that week that Scott told me that he and Zelda were going south to Nice.

  The morning I met him at the Deux Magots, I remember that we talked quietly about our plans and about his hope of getting time enough to finish the novel. It still wasn’t going right for him. Now I remember that the conversation stuck in my mind, and when Tender Is the Night finally came out, I felt Scott never did get Dick Diver, his central character, in focus.

  There at the café he didn’t ask for Hemingway. Maybe Ernest was in our minds, for Scott that morning seemed to have a stiff dignity. He had been treated without respect in my presence, and he had taken it; a little thing like that could make him want to avoid me, I knew. We assumed that I would be in Paris when he returned. As we walked away from the café, talking easily, I suddenly felt great affection for him. He hoped I would quickly finish the book I was working on. I remember he said, “Try and get something from a child’s point of view as a contrast. It opens up another world. It lightens all the material.” Then it was time for us to part. Suddenly he pulled his wallet out of his pocket, took out the bills, thrust the wallet at me. “Here, Morley, keep this wallet. I’d like you to have something of mine.” And I said, “All right. Write your name in it then.” Neither one of us had a pen. He put the wallet against a lamppost, and taking out his knife he scratched his name on the leather. We shook hands and he was gone.