by Paula McLain
At home, we were both sick, one after another, in the chamber pot. The dance hall was still roaring with drunks when we went to bed; the accordion had risen to a fever pitch. We nuzzled forehead to forehead, damp and nauseous, keeping our eyes open so the world wouldn’t spin too wildly. And just as we were falling asleep, I said, “We’ll remember this. Someday we’ll say this accordion was the sound of our first year in Paris.”
“The accordion and the whores and the retching,” he said. “That’s our music.”
It rained for much of January, and once that passed, winter in Paris was stingingly cold and clear. Ernest had believed he could write anywhere, but after a few weeks of working in the cramped apartment, always aware of me, he found and rented a single room, very nearby, on rue Descartes. For sixty francs a month, he had a garret not much bigger than a water closet, but it was perfect for his needs. He didn’t want distractions and didn’t have any there. His desk overlooked the unlovely rooftops and chimney pots of Paris. It was cold, but cold could keep you focused, and there was a small brazier where he could burn bundles of twigs and warm his hands.
We fell into a routine, rising together each morning and washing without talking, because the work had already begun in his head. After breakfast, he’d go off in his worn jacket and the sneakers with the hole at the heel. He’d walk to his room and struggle all day with his sentences. When it was too cold to work or his thoughts grew too murky, he’d walk for long hours on the streets or along the prettily ordered paths of the Luxembourg Gardens. Along the Boulevard Montparnasse there was a string of cafés—the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Select—where expatriate artists preened and talked rot and drank themselves sick. Ernest felt disgusted by them.
“Why is it every other person you meet says they’re an artist? A real artist doesn’t need to gas on about it, he doesn’t have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.”
I could certainly see how hanging around cafés all day wasn’t work, but I also wondered if everyone was as serious and inflexible about their craft as Ernest was. I imagined there were lots of other writers who worked in their own houses and could tolerate conversation at breakfast, for instance. Who managed to sleep through any given night without stewing or pacing or scratching at a notebook while a single candle smoked and wavered. I missed Ernest’s company all day, but he didn’t seem to miss mine, not while there was work to do. When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities. Cézanne’s river was thick and brown and realer for it. That’s what Ernest was after—and sometimes the going was achingly slow. Many days he came home looking exhausted, defeated, as if he’d been struggling with sacks of coal all day instead of with one sentence at a time.
When Ernest worked, I kept house for us, making the bed, sweeping and dusting and washing up the breakfast dishes. In the late morning, I’d take a market basket into the street and do our shopping, hunting for the best bargains. Even though it was on the Right Bank of the Seine and nowhere near our apartment, I liked to walk to Les Halles, the open-air market that was known as the Stomach of Paris. I loved the maze of stalls and stands with offerings more exotic than anything I’d ever seen back home. There was all manner of game, venison and boar and pyramids of soft, limp hares. Everything was displayed naturally, hooves and tusks and fur left intact so you knew just what you were looking at. Although it was disconcerting to know these creatures had recently been up and running in the nearby fields and farms, there was something almost beautiful in the sheer volume and variety of things on display, all edible in some form. I didn’t half know what to do with most of it—unplucked pheasant and goose, or the baskets of small dun-colored birds I couldn’t even identify—but I loved to look before gravitating toward the vegetable and fruit stalls. I always stayed much longer than I needed to, walking and admiring the bushels of leeks and parsnips, oranges and figs and thick-skinned apples.
But in the alleyways behind the marketplace, fruit and meat rotted in crates. Rats crawled; pigeons crowded and pecked each other savagely, trailing feathers and lice. This was reality, and though living with Ernest was giving me more tolerance for the real than ever before, it made me feel sick even so. It was like looking into the gutters at the Place de la Contrescarpe, where colored dyes ran freely from the flower vendors’ carts: brief false lushness, and ugliness underneath. What had Ernest said way back when in Chicago? Love is a beautiful liar? Beauty was a liar, too. When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren’t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked.
From the wasted alleyways threading out from Les Halles, I walked toward the Seine. At the edge of the Pont Neuf, the quay was harsh and imposing. A cold wind sliced through my thin coat, but just beyond was the Île St.-Louis with the beautifully preserved houses and elegant streets that made it an oasis. I walked all the way along the island until I found a park at the tip, thick with bare chestnut trees, and then followed a little staircase down to the river. Fishermen were stringing their lines for goujon and frying them up on the spot. I bought a handful wrapped in newspaper and sat on the wall watching the barges move under Pont Sully. The nest of fish was crisp under a coarse snow of salt and smelled so simple and good I thought it might save my life. Just a little. Just for that moment.
THIRTEEN
t’s so beautiful here it hurts,” Ernest said one evening as we walked to take our evening meal at the café we now frequented on rue des Saints-Pères. “Aren’t you in love with it?”
I wasn’t, not yet—but I was in awe of it. To walk the best streets in Paris just then was like having the curtained doors of a surreal circus standing open so you could watch the oddity and the splendor at any hour. After the enforced austerity of the war, when the textile industry collapsed and the great couturiers nailed their doors shut, brightly colored silks now ran through the streets of Paris like water—Persian blues and greens, startling oranges and golds. Inspired by the orientalism of the Ballets Russes, Paul Poiret dressed women in culotte harem pants and fringed turbans and ropes and ropes of pearls. In sharp contrast, Chanel was also beginning to make her mark, and you saw splashes of sharp, geometric black amid all that color. More and more, chic meant a shingle-bob and deeply lacquered nails and impossibly long ivory cigarette holders. It also meant lean and hungry looking—but that wasn’t me. Even when I was hungry, I never lost my round face and my plump arms. I also didn’t care enough about clothes to do any thinking about what would suit me. I wore what was easiest and required the least maintenance, long wool skirts and shapeless sweaters and wool cloche hats. Ernest didn’t seem to mind. If anything, he thought highly costumed women were ridiculous. It was part of the way he favored everything simple—good, straightforward food, rustic and almost chewy wine, peasant people with uncomplicated values and language.
“I want to write one true sentence,” he said. “If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I’ll be satisfied.”
He had been working well since we’d come to Paris, chinking away at a story he’d begun on our honeymoon at Windemere called “Up in Michigan.” It was about a blacksmith and a maid in Horton Bay who meet and discover each other sexually. He’d read some of it to me, from the beginning, where he described the town and the houses and the lake and the sandy road, trying to keep everything simple and pure and as he remembered it, and I couldn’t help but be struck by how raw and real it was.
His ambitions for his writing were fierce and all encompassing. He had writing the way other people had religion—and still he was reluctant to send Sherwood Anderson’s letters of introduction to any of the famous American expatriates. I guessed he was afraid they’d reject him out of hand. He was more comfortable making friends with the working class of Paris. The language I had was stiff, schoolgirl Fre
nch, but his was picked up here and there during the war, rough-and-tumble common speech suited to conversations started on street corners with cooks and porters and garage mechanics. Around them he could be himself without feeling defensive.
That night, though, after dinner, we were set to meet Lewis Galantière, a writer friend of Sherwood’s. Lewis was originally from Chicago and now worked for the International Chamber of Commerce. He had a reputation for having wonderful taste, and when Ernest finally met him at his apartment in the rue Jean-Goujon, it was full of expensive-looking antiques and engravings that he described in detail when he came home to me. “All the tables and chairs had slender, spindly feet. A little fastidious for my liking, but you could see the man knows style.”
I was anxious about meeting Galantière because I wasn’t remotely elegant and didn’t feel I belonged in Paris at all. If the women in Paris were peacocks, I was a garden-variety hen. I’d recently given in to pressure and bobbed my hair—maybe the last American woman to do so—and hated it. It made me look like an apple-faced boy, and even though Ernest said he loved the way I looked, every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I felt like crying. It may have been dowdy and Victorian before, but my hair had been mine—me. What was I now?
Lewis had offered to treat us to dinner at Michaud’s, a fashionable restaurant I’d only stopped at to peer in the window. When we arrived, I paused at the door and fussed hopelessly with my clothes, but Ernest didn’t seem at all aware of my self-consciousness. He held me firmly by the elbow and gave me a small but insistent shove toward Lewis, saying, “Here’s the swell, smart girl I’ve been raving about.”
“Hadley. I’m honored and pleased,” Lewis said as I blushed furiously. I still felt embarrassed, but loved knowing that Ernest was proud of me.
Lewis was twenty-six, dark and slim and endlessly charming. He did very funny impressions, but when he showed us his best James Joyce he had to explain it for us. We’d glimpsed Joyce a few times on the streets of Montparnasse, with his neatly combed hair and rimless glasses and shapeless coat, but we’d never heard him speak.
“He does speak,” Lewis insisted, “but only under some duress. He has several hundred children, I’m told.”
“I’ve seen two girls,” I said.
“Two or two hundred, it’s all the same in Paris, isn’t it? He can barely afford to feed them, they say, but if you come here to Michaud’s any night of the week at five o’clock sharp, you can see the whole brood consuming buckets of oysters.”
“Everyone says Ulysses is great,” Ernest said. “I’ve read a few serialized chapters. It’s not what I’m used to, but you know, something important is happening in it just the same.”
“It’s dead brilliant,” Lewis said. “Joyce will change everything if you believe Pound. Have you been round to Pound’s studio?”
“Soon,” Ernest said, though he hadn’t sent that letter of introduction yet either.
“Good man, you have to go. Not everyone can tolerate Pound, but meeting him is compulsory.”
“What’s difficult about Pound?” I asked.
“He himself, actually.” Lewis laughed. “You’ll see. If Joyce is the very quiet professor with his shabby coat and walking stick, Pound is the devil, bumptious and half crazed with talk of books and art.”
“I’ve met the devil,” Ernest said, finishing his glass of wine, “and he doesn’t give a damn about art.”
By the end of the evening, we were all drunk and back at our flat, where Ernest was trying to get Lewis to box with him. “Half a round, just for laughs,” he coaxed, stripping to the waist.
“I’ve never been a fighting man,” Lewis said, backing away—but after a few more cocktails, he finally submitted. I should have done something to warn him that no matter what Ernest said, sport was never a laughing matter for him. I’d seen the look in his eye in Chicago, when he’d nearly laid Don Wright flat out on Kenley’s floor. This match went the same way, to the letter. For the first few minutes, it was all a pleasant enough cartoon, with both men hunkered into position, knees bent, fists out and curled. It was so obvious that Lewis wasn’t athletic I thought Ernest would give up altogether, but then, without any provocation, he threw a live punch, dead center, from his shoulder.
His fist landed hard. Lewis’s head whipped back and forward again, his glasses flying into a corner. They were shattered, and his face was nicked in several places.
I ran and tried to help him recover himself, but found he was laughing. Ernest began laughing, too—and it was fine, after all. But I couldn’t help thinking how close we’d come to losing our only friend in Paris.
It was Lewis who helped bolster Ernest’s courage enough to send the rest of the letters of introduction, and soon an invitation came from Ezra Pound. Pound wasn’t terribly well known in the States yet, unless you knew something about poetry and read literary magazines like the Dial and the Little Review, but in Paris he had a great reputation as a poet and critic who was helping to revolutionize modern art. I didn’t know more than a scrap about what was modern—I was still reading the terribly square Henry James, as Ernest liked to remind me—but Lewis had said such nice things about Pound’s English wife, Dorothy. I was keen to make new friends and was happy to go along when Pound invited Ernest to tea.
Dorothy met us at the door and led us into the studio, an enormous drafty room filled with Japanese paintings and scrolls and scattered pyramids of books. She was very beautiful, with a lovely high forehead and skin like a China doll. Her hands were pale and finely tapered, and she talked in whispers as we walked to where Pound sat in a blood-red damask chair surrounded by shelves stacked high with dusty volumes and stained teacups, sheaves of paper and exotic-looking figurines.
“You’re a redhead,” Pound said to me once Dorothy had made the introductions.
“So are you. Is that auspicious?”
“No one holds a grudge like a redhead,” he said gruffly and with all seriousness, turning to Ernest. “Mind that, young Mr. Hemingway.”
“Yes, sir,” Ernest said like a good pupil.
Ernest was Pound’s pupil, too, from the first moment they clapped eyes on one another. Pound could evidently spot a man hungry for knowledge and obliged Ernest by talking nonstop while Dorothy ushered me over to another corner of the studio, well away from the men. Under a long window streaming sunlight, she poured me tea and told me about her famous lineage.
“My given name’s Shakespear, though without the e at the end. My father was a descendant of the great man himself.”
“Why no e?”
“I have no idea, actually. It’s more bohemian feeling that way. Not that I need help in that regard. My mother was mildly notorious for a time as the mistress of William Butler Yeats. That’s how I met Ezra, when he was Yeats’s assistant. I suppose I should have been a poet with all this history, but I married one instead.”
“We were reading Yeats a little in school, sprinkled in with the Robert Browning and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ernest showed me ‘The Second Coming’ in a magazine. We were both very struck by it.”
“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’ ” she said. And then added, “I wonder how Uncle Willy would feel about all the passionate intensity around here?”
Over in their shadowy corner of the studio, Ernest was literally crouched at Pound’s feet while the older man lectured, waving a teapot around as he talked. His ginger-colored hair was growing wilder all the while, and I could see why Lewis Galantière would compare him to Satan—not just because of the hair and his Satyr-like wiry goatee, but also because of his natural vehemence. I couldn’t hear individual words, but he ranted in a volcanic stream, gesturing constantly and rarely sitting down.
I thought the two were a funny match, with Dorothy so elegant and reserved, and Pound so vociferous, but she claimed he’d been very important in her work. She was a painter, and as we talked that afternoon she pointed out some of her canv
ases to me. I thought they were lovely, with colors and forms as soft and gauzy as Dorothy’s own voice and hands, but when I began to ask her questions about them, she quickly said, “They’re not to be shown.”
“Oh. Well, you’re showing them here, aren’t you?”
“Only incidentally,” she said, and smiled a beautiful smile, looking like something out of a painting herself.
At the end of our visit, after Ernest and I said our farewells, we made our way down the narrow staircase and out onto the street.
“I want to know everything,” I said.
“He’s very noisy,” Ernest said. “But he has some fine ideas. Big ideas, really. He wants to start movements, shape literature, change lives.”
“Then he should be a good person to know,” I said. “Watch that you don’t aggravate him, though. You’ve been warned about redheads.”
We laughed and walked to the nearest café, where Ernest told me more over squat glasses of brandy and water. “He’s got some funny ideas about women’s brains.”
“What? That they haven’t got any?”
“Something like that.”
“What about Dorothy? How’s he feel about her brains?”
“Hard to say—though he did tell me they both have leave to take lovers.”
“How forward thinking,” I said. “Do you suppose this is how all artists’ marriages go in Paris?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“It’s hardly something you could force on someone. You’d have to agree, wouldn’t you?”
“Are you feeling sorry for her? What if she likes it? What if it was all her idea?”
“Maybe, but more likely the other way around.” I drank from my brandy, eyeing him over my glass.
