by J. R. Lonie
Their sneers hurt, as sneers always do.
But hang it all, she was, along with the great Gide, a supporter of Shakespeare and Company, and, like Gide, with money she’d earnt herself, not from some trust fund. Eventually, she owned up to her contributions, only to discover that Sylvia had known but respected her evident desire for anonymity. She also discovered that Sylvia was blessing her endeavours by stocking and lending her books. ‘You’re popular,’ she explained. This wasn’t meant in a back-handed way. ‘My customers are intelligent, they know good writing. And darling,’ she added, ‘I make money out of you.’
*
‘I’d write in blood on the walls if I had anything to say,’ Eleanor groaned that afternoon.
‘Now you really are being pathetic,’ Sylvia scolded.
‘Maybe it’s time I went back to the States.’
‘Scandalous-writer-turns-prodigal-spinster,’ said Sylvia. ‘I can see the gloating headlines in Providence now.’
‘Come now,’ Eleanor laughed. ‘Wayward, perhaps.’
‘You were a married man’s mistress,’ Sylvia reminded her. ‘Twice divorced before that.’
‘Once, strictly speaking,’ Eleanor corrected. One divorce was enough of a scandal in her family’s circle back home, even though she hadn’t asked for it nor done anything to deserve it, other than put her head above the literary ramparts. Becoming a married man’s mistress, common enough in Paris, only confirmed her status as the Gorton black sheep.
‘You should have an affair,’ Sylvia enthused. ‘Twelve months of mourning is too long. Eighteen months is egotistical. Affairs revive the creative juices.’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ Eleanor drawled, ‘but the current opportunities are all dishonourable. It’s the only way I really would become a black sheep.’
The bell tinkled as the door opened. Sylvia and Eleanor, who had gone to the tiny kitchen to make tea, were startled because they had been their own company since the shop opened at two.
‘Oh no,’ Sylvia muttered as she looked at the mirror placed strategically to show the door.
A mangy ankle-length fur had entered, out of which poked a face that looked like a malevolent pear with two bulbous studs for eyes and wearing a toque hat. This was Hester Rosen, a cast-iron leftist of indeterminate age, originally from New York, who, with a family fortune behind her, bought rather than borrowed books from Shakespeare and Company. For her causes, she bought big. She didn’t believe in make-up and it wasn’t so much that she disbelieved in manners as had no patience for them. She banged the bell on the side shelf imperiously.
Eleanor still had just enough of her dander up to spare Sylvia the encounter. She pasted on a smile and emerged from the tiny kitchen.
‘Why, Miss Rosen, what a pleasant surprise,’ she said with gay insincerity.
‘Where’s Miss Beach?’ Hester Rosen demanded.
‘She’s busy at the moment. May I help you?’
‘I want Miss Beach to order in ten copies of Native Son.’
Eleanor could scarcely believe it. Talk of being in denial about what was going on around her. Was it senility? ‘Shakespeare and Company hasn’t been able to get American books in since the German occupation, Miss Rosen,’ she replied.
‘Well, where am I to get them?’ Miss Rosen snorted. ‘This is very annoying.’
‘Maybe the library at the Russian embassy has had better luck with our occupiers,’ Eleanor said with sweet venom, and she imagined she could feel the draught from Sylvia’s gasp of breath behind the kitchen curtain.
‘If you mean the Soviet embassy,’ Hester Rosen replied haughtily, ‘the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has broken off relations with the collaborator regime in Vichy, unlike the government of the United States.’
‘Oh, that’s right,’ said Eleanor. ‘And the Soviets used to be such pals with the Nazis until the recent unpleasantness.’
Miss Rosen looked Eleanor up and down, as if preparing her for the firing squad. ‘You’re still working here, Miss Clarke,’ she said, momentarily disarming Eleanor by remembering she had a name, even if it was only the latter half. Eleanor replied that she liked to help Miss Beach now things were so precarious, which they were.
‘Isn’t that just peachy of you?’ Miss Rosen began her retaliation, her eyes bulging with malice and mischief. ‘I suppose you have nothing better to do. How long is it since you had a book out?’
It was early 1939 but Eleanor kept quiet so as not to give Hettie any ammunition.
‘Oh well,’ continued Miss Rosen, undeterred, ‘you shouldn’t be surprised. Art does imitate life, and the well of bourgeois fantasy you rely on has long dried up. Still, I can’t think the masses or American literature will be the poorer. Such a pity all those marriages of yours didn’t work out. There was a child, wasn’t there?’
‘Miscarriage, and only one marriage,’ Eleanor growled, hoping common decency might shut Miss Rosen up.
It didn’t. ‘What a pity,’ she continued. ‘You would have had lots of children to look after by now instead of sitting around watching history pass you by. A good day to you.’
Sylvia appeared as the bell tinkled and Miss Rosen’s mothy fur exited the front door.
‘How about that,’ Eleanor said, tears welling. ‘I thought I wasn’t able to write because of the German occupation, but now I realise Hettie Rosen and her coven of reds have put a curse on me.’
She felt something in her hand. Looking down, she saw a fresh typewriter ribbon that Sylvia had curled her fingers around.
‘On one condition,’ Sylvia said and made a typing motion with both hands. ‘I don’t believe in writer’s block or covens or curses or having babies.’
Eleanor did weep, but briefly; this wasn’t the sort of place a writer should cry, even in these bad times. She dabbed her eyes and kissed Sylvia on the cheek and again regretted those years before she’d been brave enough to open her mouth.
‘Blow the tea,’ she said, ‘we need a whisky.’ She fossicked in her bag for the small flask she carried to ward off the cold. ‘Just a swig. My supply has to outlast the Nazis.’
Neither really believed it would, but you said this sort of thing because you wanted to believe it. They looked at each other with an empty-handed gesture bordering on despair.
Before Eleanor could retrieve her flask, the bell announced another arrival. A sleek middle-aged German officer in grey uniform nodded, smiled and wished them a good afternoon. He removed his cap, which he tucked under his arm, and announced himself with a slight, debonair bow as ‘Gunther Krolow at your service’ – not Herr Major Krolow and none of the heel-clicking they usually went in for. He clasped his hands and looked around the bookshelves with a sense of pleasure such that out of the uniform of the conqueror, he might have been one of those fresh-faced, blue-eyed Americans stepping for the first time into their longed-for literary Mecca. But each of the women saw only that uniform, you could hardly ignore it, and wondered if this wasn’t the promised visit to take Sylvia away, with a postscript for Eleanor that her morning’s foolishness at the Kommandantur might have landed her in hot water.
‘You have a copy of Finnegans Wake in your window, madame,’ he said in excellent French. ‘I wish to buy it.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Sylvia replied briskly. ‘It’s not for sale.’
‘May I ask why not?’ he said politely, although you could tell he was not only surprised but hurt.
‘It’s my only copy,’ Sylvia explained.
‘But you have it in your window,’ Krolow said, toning back his sense of pained entitlement.
‘Yes, as a sign of what we stand for,’ she said. ‘In any case, I doubt you would understand it.’
‘But we admire James Joyce very much in Germany,’ said Krolow, ignoring the provocation and adding a pleasant we’re-all-literary-people-here smile. He was going to argue his case. From his leather satchel, he produced a copy of Ulysses.
Sylvia and Eleanor could see it was a first ed
ition.
‘Published by you, madame,’ he said proudly, offering his treasure as his credentials. Sylvia didn’t even look as if she would take it, so he handed it to Eleanor. ‘I like to think of myself as quite an expert on your Mr Joyce. I have collected first editions of all his books except Finnegans Wake. I would be willing to pay any amount.’
‘It’s not for sale,’ Sylvia persisted, unmoved.
‘I am so very disappointed,’ he said. ‘Are you quite sure?’
‘I am,’ said Sylvia obdurately and he sighed. He took back his copy of Ulysses from Eleanor and said, switching into perfect English, ‘Is this not Miss Gorton Clarke?’
Eleanor was mute with astonishment.
‘My wife is a great admirer of your work,’ he said. ‘She of course must read you in English or French. Your work is still a little risqué to appear in German.’
‘What on earth would your Doctor Goebbels make of Finnegans Wake, then?’ Sylvia blurted out. It was the obvious question. Eleanor held her breath.
‘He personally would approve,’ said Krolow, continuing in quite mellifluous English, ‘but for the larger good at the moment, he cannot make exceptions until we bring this dreadful war to a conclusion.’
He saw the look of incredulity on Sylvia’s face. ‘You misunderstand him, madame,’ he said, reverting to French. ‘Like me, he is an educated man. He understands Joyce’s literary quest, which of course is metaphysical. And after all, the character Bloom is the quintessential Jew, at the end of his line of evolution, is he not? Replaced by Boylan, the lusty, stronger Aryan?’
He was giving what he thought was his best shot. Sylvia, used to bizarre commentaries about Ulysses – though, as she would say later, this was possibly the most bizarre – wished him a curt good afternoon and even held the door open for him to leave, which he did and without any of the courtesies he’d used on arrival.
Once he was gone, Eleanor quickly poured a generous drop of whisky into each of their cups. They deserved it. They deserved a cigarette too, and to hell with her self-imposed rationing.
‘His copy of Ulysses is freshly procured,’ Eleanor said. She’d noticed the Rothschild ex libris on the inside cover. It was probably from the library of Baron Maurice, who had racier tastes than his cousin, Baron Édouard, and whose collections had been found recently, hidden near Lourdes. They’d been immediately purloined by Vichy only to be plundered by the Nazis.
‘No wonder he wants your copy of that book,’ she said.
‘I guess I should be relieved he asked and took no for an answer,’ Sylvia said.
‘You’re lucky I saw he’d filched his Ulysses,’ said Eleanor. ‘If I’d been here by myself, I would have sold your precious last copy of Finnegans Wake for a sou, even to a Nazi.’
Sylvia laughed and made a long sound that began with baba and was followed by an unbroken disjunction of consonants. On the page, the word, allegedly the longest in English – if it was English, which Eleanor disputed – was bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!
‘That’s what God said when he discovered Adam and Eve had eaten the apple. Page one,’ Sylvia had told Eleanor in one of her attempts to persuade her to read Finnegans Wake. ‘You go to church every Sunday, that should appeal to you.’
‘I’m an Episcopalian, darling. Going to church every Sunday is a civic duty,’ Eleanor countered, flippantly disguising her stubborn adherence to her childhood faith. James Joyce was a rebellious Irish Catholic as far as she was concerned, which accounted for everything – his creativity, which she acknowledged, although on advice, and his crackpottery.
Since the war began, saying the word was now Sylvia’s little joke with Eleanor when things were going wrong, a way to lighten prospects that seemed forever dim. She was the only person in the entire world who knew how to pronounce it and, Eleanor was sure, the only one who commonly did.
‘How does he know who we are?’ Sylvia asked.
‘He’s a major in the security service,’ replied Eleanor, for whom this was obvious. She wasn’t a writer for nothing. She’d noticed the Sicherheitsdienst SD diamond patch on the sleeve of his well-tailored grey uniform, and through the window, she’d seen his car parked out front, stolen from its French owner, probably a Jew. She thought everyone in Paris knew those markers by now.
‘Actually, dear,’ she said, ‘I doubt he will take no for an answer.’ She had seen the anger in Krolow’s eyes as he’d left, his jaw like concrete.
AMERICAN CATHEDRAL, AVENUE GEORGE V, PARIS VIII
Morning, Sunday, 7th December 1941
Since the arrival of the Germans and the departure of the dean, services at the American cathedral had been held in the adjoining tiny parish hall, led by the cathedral organist, Mr Whipp. The congregation, smaller of course, didn’t look as diminished in the hall, which also had the advantage of a fireplace. Each Sunday, Eleanor kept noticing one or two fewer parishioners – no warning, gone, just another empty chair. This caused the stayers to question their own wisdom but at the same time allowed them to feel morally superior in sticking it out. They were, they said to one another, like one of Paul’s congregations surrounded by hostile pagans of every variety. They did what they could, raising money for those among them who were in trouble financially; making a separate fund for foreign Jews in the city, who really were in greater trouble than any of them would ever be; looking in on the elderly and the sick and raising money for the American Hospital.
When the war started, the raptors from the future, the literary set with their moral certainties at sea because of the Soviet–Nazi pact, fled abruptly, as if the Black Death had arrived, though it didn’t really arrive until June 1940. Only then did the American colony begin to shrink to those like Eleanor and Sylvia, whose loyalties were of heart, family and moral obligation; or like Mrs Gould and her set, who, with their husbands’ money, had the Germans to dine; or like Hettie Rosen and her gang, who, since Hitler had turned on their hero Stalin, were, in Eleanor’s opinion, proving how insane they were. Like Eleanor, they were protected only by their American passports and the red seals the US embassy had affixed to their front doors.
Eleanor was hardly naïve. Sure, at the time of Munich, she’d felt immense relief. She’d seen with her own eyes in 1918 what happened in war, and if giving Hitler the Sudetenland kept the peace, give it to him. It was full of Germans, after all, and if they were stupid enough to want to live under Hitler, good luck to them. When finally war came and Claude was called to his regiment, she’d tried to join the ambulance corps, but this time around there wasn’t room for smart girls from America with driver’s licences and their own ambulances, especially those like Eleanor, who was no longer a girl. She didn’t feel at all American, she felt French. They’d sung the ‘Marseillaise’ at the bar in the Pigalle where she and Claude had gone the night before he left for his duty. Going back to the States then would have been a betrayal and dishonourable. Her mother and father had constantly pressed her to return. During her last trip back, in the summer of ’39, when she knew what was likely to happen, the thought of staying hadn’t crossed her mind – even when her parents tried emotional blackmail about each having one foot in the grave, which they most decidedly did not. She’d always enjoyed their visits, and hers to them, but she also enjoyed having the Atlantic between them. Now, she couldn’t even write to them or receive letters, a loss she felt quite keenly. They, she was realising with some dismay – her parents, her two sisters and three brothers – had been the rock to which she’d kept her allegedly bohemian self firmly tethered.
If you were a stayer, what you thought would happen if or when the United States entered the war depended on whether you were an ‘if’ or a ‘when’. The ‘ifs’ said it would never happen again, and even though wicked FDR clearly wanted it, Congress would stop him. Eleanor started the war as an ‘if’. But Claude was killed and France occupied, which bound her even more strongly to stay. The Nazis had plac
ed terrible restrictions on the Jews, and only the other day they’d shot Jews as hostages. She knew evil when she saw it. She’d always voted Republican but now she was a ‘when’. The Germans had interned all the British and Canadian women, so she knew the fate that awaited her. But truth to tell, she was like so many others, becalmed – hoping for the best, expecting the worst.
If cutting and running in September 1939 or June 1940 would have been a betrayal, now it was difficult because the Germans had recently forbidden all foreigners in occupied France from going to the Vichy zone at all. Short of joining the missing in a daring escape across the Vichy demarcation line, she was trapped and she knew it.
During the homily that morning, Eleanor drifted back to Sylvia calling her a scandal. If she was a scandal, she was a pretty poor example of one in a congregation that before the war had included the Duchess of Windsor. The characters in her novels were much more scandalous and adventurous than she had ever been. Each had risked everything for love – their happiness, their reputations, even their lives. Looking around the hall that morning, it also dawned on her that she was now the congregation’s chief plutocrat as well, when before the war they’d had real ones. This really was a joke.
At the end of the service, Mr Whipp played a Bach cantata on the piano, which kept everyone in their seats with the joy of it and Eleanor’s forebodings at bay. The visit of that SD officer to Shakespeare and Company on Friday had rattled her more than she at first admitted. She, who didn’t have a superstitious bone in her body, thought his intrusion a bad omen.
Afterwards, Eleanor walked down to the metro on the Place de l’Alma, carefully avoiding the patches of ice lurking across the footpaths. Remains of the light snow that had fallen during the night still dusted windowsills and architraves. The morning was so quiet she could hear her footsteps through the still air. No traffic at all; not even the Germans were about. Along the riverbank, fishermen were out in such numbers she wondered the Seine had any fish left. She’d certainly eaten none of it. What did hearten her, though, was seeing a small group of students over on the quay painting at their easels, a sight that had charmed her when she’d first come to Paris and still did. On closer inspection, she was dismayed to find they were in the grey-green uniforms and caps of the Wehrmacht, soldiers having their einmal in Paris experience.
