The Heart to Artemis

by Bryher;

  Occasionally we ventured to slip away into the kitchen to discuss the shops that sold the best vegetable seeds as we were both gardeners or to talk of the hardships of some French servant who had neither parents nor adequate wages to protect her. Once we were sharply reproved by Gertrude for leaving her circle. I am afraid that while I had a profound admiration for Gertrude, it was Miss Toklas whom I loved. She was so kind to me. Perhaps this came from her long practice as Gertrude wrote “of sitting with the wives of geniuses” but it was very pleasant and the rue de Fleurus, if I were not with Adrienne and Sylvia, was the only place in Paris where I felt at home.

  I read some of the magazines of the period over again recently and it is Gertrude’s work that now seems the most alive. It is not dated. She was a scientist and one of the few among us who had almost entirely freed herself from the past although her “electronic brain” was stocked with knowledge. Her attack on language was necessary and helped us all, even if we did not follow her. Some of her books are both so simple and so profound that we can read them whether we are eighteen or eighty. The rest of her work is experimental, highly technical and should be reserved for specialists. It is a measure of the decline of real learning that some people today have questioned her genius.

  It was quite another story at the Boeuf. There I was a dismal failure and I remember Cocteau’s expression of horror when he looked at me as we were introduced. He was right. The Boeuf was a place for men and for decorative women. The most arresting was Nancy Cunard. Every head turned to stare at her whenever she entered a room. In an age of creative activity there is often some external reflection of an inner drive and there were a dozen others, almost as beautiful in their way. (Surely the pointed chin and the overlarge eyes, however, in so many illustrations are an exaggeration?) It is very difficult to describe a particular face or form in words, it is partly a question of movement and light and here photography can preserve memory better than a book. It was another flower of the time. I remember most vividly a discussion one evening. Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, Iris Tree and another man whose name I forget were arguing about the future of art. Man Ray said that technique had reached such a level that it deprived an artist of imagination and that he would work in future with a camera instead of a brush. I imagine the others were only half serious but I agreed with enthusiasm. I would still much rather collect photographs than pictures. (There may be a personal reason, even now it is hard to forget how brutally I was torn from my drawing at fifteen.) Anyhow, from that moment I often went to Man Ray’s studio to look at his experiments and there I met Berenice Abbott who was working with him temporarily as his assistant and Kiki, the famous model.

  Berenice and I liked each other but we were both inarticulate. I tried to break the barrier but we were at such different stages of development that we never got further than smiles and a few words. It was rather different with Kiki.

  Man Ray’s studio consisted of a huge, bare room furnished with a staircase that led to a narrow gallery at the height of the first floor. He was explaining one of his photographic plates to me one day when a door in the gallery opened and I looked up to find Kiki, literally a “nude descending the staircase,” attired in a couple of soap bubbles and a wisp of towel, tied where she did not need it, round her neck. I was firmly in favor of nudity on the beaches but my training in etiquette at Queenwood had hardly prepared me for such an encounter in town. Impassively, I hoped, but heartily, I shook Kiki warmly by the hand and remarked that the weather had favored us, it was a sunny, summerlike day.

  The names were there but who at that time had heard of them? A man used to come striding up to the Dôme about seven in the evening, sometimes alone, sometimes with his wife. “He wants to write but is short of funds,” McAlmon explained, “so he’s coaching a couple of American youngsters.” Few of us had much money although we agreed that the painters had the worst of it as paper cost much less than brushes and colors. He talked incessantly about Spain and bulls but nobody took him very seriously until Adrienne said quietly one evening when we were predicting certain success for a writer whose name I do not now remember, “Hemingway will be the best known of you all.” She spoke in French and some of the others did not understand her but I had a great respect for her critical judgment and asked her in some surprise why she felt that he was better than we were. “He cares,” she said, “for his craft.” (I imagine that she used the word métier,) I then discovered that after a hard day’s work and some equally hard drinking, Hemingway went to a printer’s shop in the late evening to learn how to set up type so as to know exactly how his manuscripts, to the last comma, would look on the printed page.

  It was true, so many wrote their masterpieces in their heads with the saucers piling up on the zinc-topped table in front of them but it is a very different thing to live a story and to try to bang out something even approaching it on a typewriter. Besides, we know so little about the raw material of art. On a subsequent visit, McAlmon met me full of stories about a week that he had spent in Pamplona. It was to figure in a number of books but when I listened to the tale at the time, it seemed to me simply another tiresome escapade. It became a symbol for a whole generation in The Sun Also Rises. Perhaps a small hunk of a particular material is given to every artist and the measure of his success or failure is how he uses it.

  McAlmon called me a frightened rabbit who was unable to “take” Paris, It was not strictly true. I had arrived there through intense difficulties that had turned me into an observer. I was utterly in sympathy with the rebellion of the group but their solutions did not solve my particular problem. I suppose McAlmon must have said something of the kind one day because as we left, Hemingway came up to me in great kindness and asked me to fence with him. I looked up at his broad shoulders and knew his reach would be much longer than my own so for once I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and hastily invented an appointment on the other side of Paris.

  Then or now, Hemingway has never seemed to me a “tough” writer. Petronius is tough, so is Norman Douglas but Hemingway is rather the last of the great Victorians who still believed in loyalty and honor. He was writing for a completely different audience than the one familiar to his critics. I have often met people on my voyages who have spoken and felt in a Hemingway manner although they had certainly never heard of him and possibly never read a book. A man has just as much right to express their point of view as the contemplative his tests and trials. Let us only beware of calling either “nobler” than the other. He never forgot the command of our generation to put down truth as we saw it and I see no reason now to disagree with Adrienne.

  People have sometimes said to me in awe, “Did you really meet Joyce?” I did on several occasions but the strange thing is that although I only saw Yeats once, I can recall his intonation, the way that he moved his head and something of what he told us, but I see the Joyces in a series of slightly out-of-focus snapshots. The first time that we met he was standing with his wife in front of a shop window and commenting upon the changes that the proprietor had made since the previous day. He was a naturalist of cities. Not a thing escaped his observation, not even the fact that a packet of rice was on another shelf or that the delivery boy’s cycle had been moved a few yards up the street. But what did he say while we were sitting at lunch? I simply cannot remember. Of course I recognized his greatness but Ulysses was about the nineteenth century from which I was trying to escape. I longed passionately for aeroplanes, a new approach, a different world. Yet to be in the same room with our elders for even a short time is of the utmost value to a beginner. Their works take on a different value after we have met them. It is literally a passing on of the tradition, it is continuity, even if at the time we are plunging off ourselves in a different direction.

  More than most of us, I was a child of my age. The one mind among the older writers who spoke directly to me and whose books I read passionately was André Gide.

  “You must be kind to the boy,” my mother a
dmonished when I joined my family for lunch one day. They had come over to Paris for the Easter holidays and found a tutor to speak French with my brother. “Try not to stare at Mr. Allégret,” she continued, “it startles people and I had so hoped that after your marriage you would get out of it.” I did stare, it was before I had learned that an intonation or the choice of a word could tell me as much about a person as watching them, but I had been trained to silence for so many years that it had become a habit.

  I supposed that I should meet the usual tutor who would be occupied with le verbe in its grammatical rather than with its philosophical sense. Judge of my surprise when I was introduced to a handsome young diplomat who asked me politely during a pause in the conversation if I happened to have read Cocteau’s latest book. I was able to reply to our mutual astonishment that I had been talking to Cocteau himself during the previous evening at the Boeuf. It may have been imagination but I thought that I saw a feeling of relief pass across his face. We were sitting in the dining room of a conventional hotel, we discussed the question of whether my brother should go first to Versailles or Le Jardin des Plantes as if it were a draft for an important treaty and it was not until I was leaving that Mare managed to whisper as if we were fellow conspirators, “And who, writing in France today, do you admire the most?”

  “Gide,” I said firmly and with enthusiasm.

  “Gide! But he is my uncle.” He looked at me as if he could hardly believe his ears. “I must arrange for you to meet him at once.”

  Allégret wanted my father to leave my brother in Paris for his education and I have often wondered whether this would not have turned out better for him in the end. Perhaps not, he hated being out of London. Whatever broadening of the mind he got while I still knew him, came from Marc. I was not thinking about my brother, however, as I waited in the tiny hall of the Left Bank hotel where I was staying; I had no feeling of awe about any of the other writers, most of them were part of the group and we argued and fought as if it were a bigger Queenwood but Gide was different. He was the one elder writer whom I profoundly respected. He was fanatical in his search for truth, he had actually met Mallarmé, and if Paludes had been published in 1895 when I was a year old, the sentence “Il suit des cours de biologie populaire” was terribly 1920. Actually, although I only realized this many years later, he was the forerunner of the present scientific age. We were trying then to throw off the barren and terrible years of our education and the trenches, Gide, I felt, asserted the right of all of us to be happy.

  The door opened. Marc came towards me followed by a tall figure in a long cloak who transported me instantly to the Channel steamers of my childhood and the decks full of people in black and white cheviot ulsters. I hesitated, fearing the shock of my Anglo-French upon Gide’s sensitive ears. I need not have worried. He shook me by the hand and said in one of the clearest, most precise voices that I have ever heard, “Good evening, Mistress McAlmon.” Nobody had warned me that he had learned his English directly from Shakespeare.

  To judge from the memoirs written after Gide’s death, everybody found their first meeting with him difficult, I was terrified and was only able to utter, “Oui, monsieur” while Marc, the wretch, stood grinning at us both in the background. I made the usual mistake of the beginner, I tried to tell him how much I admired his books. Now I should have asked him what he, himself, was reading or drawn him on to talk about some incident of the day. It is hard for the apprentice, he (or she) has nothing as yet to show for his efforts and is desperately afraid that his elders may not take him seriously and in his anxiety makes them nervous as well. As it was, the beauty of Gide’s spoken French reduced me to silence (little else did!), he gave me a signed copy of Le Voyage d’Urien, glanced at Marc for rescue and left. The meeting could have come directly out of Paludes but that, at the time, was no consolation.

  I was a disappointment again to my mother in Paris. The irony of the situation was that she fitted into “the bunch” immediately and they all liked her. “Bob would take you out every evening,” she said wistfully, “but he says you won’t go out at night.” McAlmon got on with her happily and easily and they became great friends. He took her to see Brancusi. She did not pretend to understand modern art but she loved the sculptor’s birds. He could see to the core of people and knew that it was a genuine admiration. He began to talk to us one afternoon about a city where all the girls were beautiful and the young men wise. It was pure William Morris, as if that writer had come back to tell us a new tale about a land beyond the seas. Brancusi ran his fingers over a block of stone as powerful as his head, and continued, “In Kensington Gardens each branch had its own form and it was golden...golden...there will never be another summer like it.” I realized to my astonishment that he was talking about 1914. It had been his most profound experience as a young man and I, not a mile away, had been too unhappy then to notice whether the days were sunny or wet.

  About this moment I committed an unforgivable crime. Gradually and then completely, I refused all alcohol. I had been offered wine and water in the French fashion ever since my childhood so drinking had no glamour for me. I said openly that I wanted to leave a sensation or two for my old age but I had the sense to keep the main reason to myself. It was Mallarmé. Drinks and la poésie pure did not mix. I am not bigoted, I should fight prohibition as firmly as a drinker, I take wine occasionally in the South if I am uncertain of the water but I have never regretted my early decision although I once saw it lose me a job I particularly wanted and who knows, of course, what I shall do when I am really old? Yet Fate had me in its keeping because the Quarter was not Queenwood but a post-war world where many lived by their wits. There were many dangers that I did not then fully understand and many of my companions, young, desolate and unsure of themselves, were lost. All the same, if any system of ethics or religion has a meaning, we are here to learn and not to walk smugly through life. It is only after we have passed through some of our particular temptations that compassion, the greatest gift of all, is sometimes within our reach.

  It has been the custom throughout the ages to encourage an apprentice to leave home for a time as he is coming to maturity. It avoids much conflict with the older generation. The exiles in Paris were there for the same reason. They were throwing off the yoke, not of their country but of the small towns where they had grown up. I did not want to live in England because I knew I shocked my family with my “advanced” ideas, yet I had been abroad so much that the Continental atmosphere was completely familiar to me and it never occurred to me that I was anything but English. It was different for the Americans; the scenes, the speech, the way of life, were completely new. They could write, paint, love and be gay with no recriminations from their elders and whatever they may have said afterwards, most of them were completely happy.

  There was one visitor who denounced the States in stronger terms than his fellows. This was William Carlos Williams and his apparent hatred of his native land startled even us. He was not particularly popular but we tried to help him, this was our code, as he went around making inquiries about what he would have to do before he could practice as a doctor in France.

  He repaid this help in his Autobiography by making a number of inaccurate and derogatory statements about myself and my friends. We invited him in friendship, he did not need to accept our hospitality. He spoke of Adrienne Monnier, who was as near a saint as anyone whom I have known, in appalling terms, and he apparently hated the lot of us. I wished to bring a legal action against him. My lawyers argued that this would only attract publicity to the book. I have always regretted taking their advice. All the survivors from the Quarter should have joined together to refute his charges in open court. There is the danger otherwise that future historians of the period may believe them after we are dead. I can forgive many things but not the person who turns on the people from whom he has both asked and accepted help.

  I remember particularly one June evening. We were sitting at the Rotonde and I was thinking
about Thessaly. I had never been in that part of Greece but I thought that it must be like the wild hills that rose beyond Corinth covered with speckled shrubs. Sheep flowers, the captain of the boat had called them or was it sleep? Tristan Tzara was sitting at the next table and complained that I was scowling at him. It was unintentional, my thoughts were far away.

  “Here’s home.” Somebody waved, it was a general greeting that included not only ourselves but everybody else in the café. Half a dozen boys tumbled out of a taxi, all in a uniform of heavy white sweaters with polo collars. “See who’s around and bring them up,” the leader shouted, smiling his famous-in-the-Quarter smile. The biggest, fattest young man dropped into a chair, I wondered that it did not break under his weight, and banged the table with the flat of his arm. “Paper, garçon, bring me paper,” he roared in his strongly accented foreign English, “I have to write to Oslo. At once.” A neighbor translated the order into equally peculiar French. “He’s a nice fellow,” somebody explained to McAlmon, “but his cash has gone and he thinks an aunt at home may help him out.” I gazed round me dismally and wondered why at least I was not in Switzerland.

  “If I have been introduced, I do not remember you,” a languid glove touched my arm and I wanted to answer, “Don’t you know that gloves aren’t languid anymore?” It was an Englishwoman in a long, gray skirt that was already trailing in a beer puddle under the table. A gray scarf that matched the meditative sky was draped over her shoulders. “Ah, comme elles sont belles,” the dark-haired French girl who was looking for a partner for the evening pleaded too obviously with Oslo for carnations. A smudge of charcoal-colored fringe fell over her made-up eyelashes. I could bear this, I thought, if I could draw, if I could rough out this scene in pencil nothing would matter.