That Summer in Paris

by Callaghan, Morley;

  “Why, how are you?” I said, and we shook hands. I introduced my wife to him and his boy, and then as he entered the room slowly there was a moment of shyness when I felt like a stranger. I had on a dark brown velvet dressing gown which Loretto had given me as a present; it was expensive and looked like a crocodile skin. Stepping back, looking at me and shaking his head, Ernest said to Loretto, “I haven’t seen such a dressing gown on a man since the last time I saw Georges Carpentier climb into the ring.” That dressing gown saved us a lot of slow words. I asked him where he had picked up the scar on his forehead. Reluctantly, he told about an object falling through the skylight and hitting him on the head.

  And the strange part of it is – I remember this well – that having written so many stories myself, and having heard from him about them, and having read his stories, and heard too, the McAlmon view on him, which I simply didn’t believe, as well as the stories of mutual friends in New York, I nevertheless seemed to know him better sitting there in this Paris hotel room then I ever had back home. We talked for a few minutes about Bumbi, a handsome boy. Ernest said he was on his way to Hadley’s place with Bumbi; Hadley was the wife he had had in Toronto; we could go with him, he said, then we could go to a café and have a drink.

  On that slow walk up the rue Vaugirard with the sun coming out suddenly after the grayness of noontime, the little boy kept a step ahead so the three of us could walk abreast. Now, years later, Loretto asks, “Who was the fighter he started talking about? What was that fighter’s name? Remember, he laughed about him and dismissed him, don’t you remember?” But how did it come about that he started right in talking about fighters, going slowly up the street? Maybe he had asked me if I had seen any good fights lately. Or that he knew for sure I would have seen Larry Gains, this big Negro heavyweight in my own town. It was Gains we talked about. Ernest laughed derisively at Gains. He should know all about the Negro, he said. The fact was he, himself, had tried to manage Gains in Europe. No one though could do much with Gains. It made me feel abashed. This Negro fighter had seemed to me to be a very talented boy. I had seen him fight with Mike McTeague, the middleweight champion. A beautiful boxer who unfortunately couldn’t take a punch. Already Ernest was making me feel I had never seen a really good fighter.

  It is a long walk up to Montparnasse, and perhaps Ernest

  noticed that his boy was tiring. We got into a taxi, drove to Hadley’s place, and while Ernest went in with the boy, we waited in the taxi. On his return he told the driver to take us to a café on the Boul’ Mich. This café was right down the corner by the quai. From the terrace you could see the river and the Isle de la Cité. As we sat down in the sunlight and he ordered the beers I looked at him cau-tiously. Loretto, knowing I was trying to feel sure of him, smiled at me. Naturally I was watching Ernest to see if I could notice any change in him, or discover any shift in his view of me. Would he say, “Well, years ago I knew you were going to be heard from?” And could I say to him, “That quality you had which I noticed five years ago, the quality that makes people want to make up stories about you, does it bother you now?” I was thinking now of his literary personality, the public view of him.

  And there was another thing; it was the cause of the slight feeling of caution in both Ernest and me. What about all that Scribner promotion that linked my name with his? I knew how fiercely jealous he was of his own identity. Hadn’t he tried to belittle Anderson to free himself from him, to make it plain he stood alone? Why shouldn’t he now push me away from him? But Ernest was very smart about such things, and aside from the fact that we both knew he had read and praised my stories before he scored his own great success, I think he knew that I was the one who was being disastrously damaged by the Scribner promotion. So I didn’t mention this promotion to him. I felt it was beneath me, and sitting there, he didn’t mention it either. And from then on I was sure he would never raise the subject. And he never did.

  Suddenly he told us he had become a Catholic. The girl he had married, Pauline, was Catholic. So there we were, three of the faithful. Perhaps I should have clasped his hand warmly. I only looked reflective. Then Loretto asked him how he had been able to get a divorce and marry within the Church. Wasn’t it always difficult? It hadn’t been difficult, he said, since his first wife, Hadley, had never been baptized. Oh yes, a bit of luck, we agreed. He felt very good about being a convert. But converts had always bored me. At that time in France there were many conversions among the intellectuals. Christian artists were finding new dignity and spiritual adventure in the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain. Most converts I had known had changed their faith but not their personalities or their temperaments, and since they usually gained enormous self-assurance from the new faith, I would find myself disliking them more than ever. Too often a dualism remained in them. A beautiful writer like Mauriac would have one of his women characters, while holding a lover in her arms, be aware of the blackheads on his nose, a reminder that even in an ecstatic moment the flesh ought to be seen in its worst light. He made me feel exuberantly pagan. My own problem was to relate a Christian enlightenment to some timeless process of becoming. A disgust with the flesh born of an alleged awareness of an approaching doomsday bored me, as did the flash of light that gave a man the arrogant assurance that he was the elect of God.

  I remember how I looked at Ernest, ready to question him, then I shrugged and smiled. There he sat, so full-blooded and healthy. And he had been so unassertive in telling about his conversion, no one could have imagined he would ever think of himself as the elect of God. Perhaps he saw I was neither impressed nor enthusiastic, for his manner changed. I mean he suddenly was with me in my feeling about converts; he seemed to be saying that he called himself a Catholic now because he recognized that he really had been Catholic for some time – by temperament. In New York later, I heard someone at a party say mockingly, “Hemingway became a Catholic because all the Spanish bullfighters were Catholic.” No. There was much more to it than that. At the café that day, reflecting, watching his face as he talked, it struck me that by some twist of temperament, in spite of his puritan family, he was in fact intended to be a Mediterranean Catholic. And as it turned out, the older he got, the more often death kept hovering over his stories; he kept death in his work as a Medieval scholar might have kept a skull on his desk, to remind him of his last end.

  You only needed to look at his face, his eyes and his mouth, to know that he delighted in all that was sensuous. He had to savor all the sensations, know all the delights of the senses – with death apparently in his imagination like a presiding officer always asking him how he would take it when he came to the end of his knowing. What was more natural now that having established himself as an old hand in the faith, he should quickly begin to share my indul-gent air toward all the well-known converts. As old pros, whom did we pick on for our condescension? T. S. Eliot! We looked down our noses at his conversion. We shared our amusement over his choice of Anglo-Catholicism. Well, with the temperament he had it was probably the best Eliot could do. It was all very discreet and if it left him way out in left field, no harm was done.

  Then Ernest told us about the new baby and asked if we’d like to come to his house and see the boy. We told him we would. We were at ease. Within a few minutes I had felt all my old liking for him.

  As we drank our beer I noticed that Ernest would empty his glass in a few gulps, then turn to me. “Have another beer?” I had kept up with him for three quick ones. I had always liked to drink beer slowly, and after the three I felt distended. Why the hell am I doing this? I asked myself. Though I kept my half-filled glass in my hand, and Ernest could see it was still half-filled, each time he ordered he would say, “Are you sure you won’t have one?” The waiter leaves the saucer that comes with each drink on the table, so he can count them up for you when you are leaving and show you what you owe him. Soon Ernest had a pile of seven saucers to my three.

  When he had left us, I turned to Loretto. “Well, how do
you like him?”

  “Very much. You can’t help liking him. Tell me, has he changed at all?”

  “No, he hasn’t changed at all – except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Didn’t you notice about the beer and how he made it plain I couldn’t keep up with him? Now he just has to be the champ.”

  CHAPTER 12

  He lived at 6 rue Ferou, which was within a quarter of a mile of the St. Sulpice Cathedral – this fact comes into the story later. He had a living room off a narrow room with a long oaken table, and, I suppose, a kitchen and some bedrooms. On the wall was a Joan Miró painting of a fish. The great Miró was his friend, he said. With some pride he showed us a small Goya he had been able to smuggle out of Spain.

  When he went back to speak to his wife, we looked around the living room. The furniture might have been all of a period. By the window was an antique table, but what took our eye was a Spanish chair with the largest grandest curving back I had ever seen. Returning, and still by himself, Ernest led us into a little nursery. I remember his half-proud, half-shy and boyishly awkward shrug as he said, “Well, if you’re interested in babies, there he is...” The dark-haired child was indeed plump and beautiful. While Ernest and I watched, my wife played with the child, and such an occasion is a time for silence on the part of watching men.

  Then Pauline came into the living room, followed by a maid bringing tea and sandwiches on a tray which she put on the table by the window, and, of course, as soon as I turned to her, I remembered how Ernest had praised his first wife, Hadley the musician. This was the one who had taken Hadley’s place. Pauline, a small woman with dark brown hair and a good complexion, wasn’t a beauty, but she was pleasant-faced and steady-eyed. She had firmness or quiet determination in her expression. As soon as she shook hands I knew she had no intention of going overboard for us. Polite, courteous, yes. But after all, she seemed to say in her manner, just what did we expect? What could I mean to Ernest, or want of him, unless, well...

  But Loretto and Pauline could smile warmly at each other as they delighted in the baby. That day Loretto was wearing a kind of high white straw Cleopatra hat and a silk suit, a short coral skirt, a coat with a black and white zigzag pattern, and lined with coral; a suit she had made herself. The suit took Pauline’s eye. Having been a fashion writer for Vogue, she went straight to the point. Loretto had got the suit in Paris, of course? No? She had made it herself? Oh? Well, at least she had got the hat here. It was indeed a Paris hat, Loretto admitted, but she had got it back home. A little surprised, Pauline said it was lovely. The great trick in Paris, she said, was to pick up these hats very cheaply from little unknown milliners who had great style. As a matter of fact, she knew of a comparatively unknown milliner who was wonderful. Did Loretto want her address? It may have been that Loretto sounded merely gratefully appreciative rather than warmly eager, for Pauline, after taking the trouble to get a pencil and a piece of paper, and have Loretto stand at the window so she could give her directions, said abruptly, “Are you sure you really want to use this milliner? I won’t bother giving you the name unless you really intend to go there.”

  It was a blunt and startling challenge. The look coming into Loretto’s brown eyes was familiar to me. But she affirmed quickly and solemnly she had every intention of hurrying directly to the milliner. Pauline wrote down the name.

  Whether Ernest had been listening as closely as I had to the little dialogue between the two wives, I don’t know. But he turned to me as he sat down, and apparently at random, just to make conversation, asked if I had ever done any boxing. Yes, I had done quite a bit of boxing, I said truthfully. “Just a minute,” he said quietly and he left the room. While he was gone I drank a cup of tea. Then Ernest reappeared with a set of boxing gloves. “Come on, let’s see,” he said, holding out a pair of gloves to me.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, refusing the gloves. Then suddenly I remembered the comment he had made to the mutual friend about my fight story in Scribner’s; nobody was any better than Morley when he stuck to the things he knew something about. I seemed to know then intuitively that quite aside from his interest in my career, or any changes that might have taken place in my personality since he had seen me, he had this one little curiosity about me. It is these little questions about each other that are at the root of most men’s relationships. Suppose I had been faking an interest in fighters? Would it mean the loss of his respect for me? But this little thing, this little question, must have been in the back of his mind when he came to our hotel room. The crack about the Georges Carpentier dressing gown! And wasn’t it why he had started talking about that Negro fighter, Larry Gains, getting my opinion of him as we walked up the street? And maybe, even when we were talking about his own conversion, he had been looking at me, his curiosity gnawing away at him. Not my work, or my life, just this one detail! What a strange man, I thought, looking at him. Calm, untroubled, just a little amused, he waited, holding out the gloves. Was he making a point about writing? Was it why we hadn’t talked so far about his writing or mine? “Come on, put them on,” he insisted.

  “Here in this room?”

  “Just put them on. I want to see,” he said.

  Trying to laugh in my embarrassment, I looked around the room. The tea tray was on the table by the window. But the Spanish chair with the great curving back was close to me. Loretto, alarmed, mystified, also tried to laugh. “You can’t box here,” she said. Pauline, though, had made no protest, in fact she seemed to be interested. Then I felt annoyed; he had asked me if I had ever boxed; why wouldn’t he take my word for it? Feeling like a fool, I got up, wondering what would happen if we lurched against the Spanish chair and shattered it. I pulled on the gloves. Raising my hands as he raised his, we squared off.

  Unless I had to, I didn’t want to move around and fall in Loretto’s lap. How could I know what would happen? He lunged at me with a left and I ducked, and then he swung a right at me which I blocked. Rooted in our positions, both showing the same respect for the Spanish chair, we made some more passes at each other. And it was ridiculous. But suddenly he appeared to be satisfied. A real glow of pleasure came on his face, and he began to pull off his gloves. “I only wanted to see if you had done any boxing,” he said apologetically. “I can see you have.” He ignored the fact that he hadn’t taken my word for it. Yet his pleasure was so genuine I was immediately mollified. The doubt he had had about me seemed to have vanished.

  When we were seated and laughing, he suggested eagerly that we go boxing. Nobody around the Quarter could really box, he said. He had been missing his boxing. Not far away was the American Club. It had no ring, but there was lots of space. Would I call for him tomorrow late in the afternoon? Everything then was fine. In a little while we left.

  But outside Loretto took a slightly different tone. “Isn’t that Pauline a blunt one?” she said loftily. “Just imagine. Her time is so valuable she can’t write down the address of a milliner unless I take an affidavit I’ll use it. What’s the matter with her?”

  “Well, she liked your own hat anyway.”

  “Oh, just because you could see it was a Paris hat,” Loretto said airily. “You know, a lot of those fashion writers haven’t much style themselves. Well, I had a feeling about Pauline. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I felt something. I felt Pauline is prepared to resist us. Not put herself out in any way. She’s read all that silly Scribner stuff about you and Hemingway. Oh sure, Ernest may have told her all about you, but she’s not fooled. Nobody’s edging in on Ernest while she’s around. It’s a very big thing for her to be Ernest’s wife, you know.”

  “Come on now. For her Ernest became a Catholic.”

  “You said he should be a Catholic anyway.”

  “I said he could see himself as a Catholic. I wonder what Pauline would have said if we had lurched around and broken her furniture?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Next day I called for Ernest. He was carrying a bag containing
the boxing gloves and his gym shoes, and I had in my hand a pair of those French rope-soled espadrilles as we loafed along the streets. And I remember we talked about the Irish novelist, Liam O’Flaherty, whose book The Informer I had liked very much, and who had written a novel called Mr. Gilhooley. Ernest agreed that The Informer was a fine book, but in Mr. Gilhooley, O’Flaherty had made a mistake; he had started thinking too much. A writer always got into trouble when he started thinking on the page. He per-mitted the reader to see that the character was being forced to do the author’s thinking. I began to be charmed. Walking so slowly, engaged completely in each other’s opinion, I could see that Ernest had the same firm tone, the same utter conviction he had five years ago. It was as if no time had passed; nothing had happened to either one of us. I argued with him, Wasn’t he rejecting a whole aspect of life? Surely he could agree that a metaphysical problem could be part of a man’s life. Maybe so, but he shook his head grudgingly; he distrusted metaphysics, all abstract thought. The job of the writer was to deal in what was concrete, what a character could feel, and taste and touch, and his thinking should go along with this immediacy of things. No, that last phrase is wrong; he couldn’t have talked about “the immediacy of things.” Just the same, in those days he didn’t use the strange dumb-Indian talk he palmed off years later on interviewers. He expressed himself rather slowly but very accurately. A character, a pure intellectual, he went on, doing his thinking on the page, well, it was pretty hard for the author to keep out of it. The story should be the thing. Shaking his head, he clammed up, wouldn’t go on talking about metaphysics; he distrusted the whole speculative process. But I had taken law. I had studied philosophy a little and I liked arguing about ideas. If we were two Christian gentlemen and artists out for a stroll in Paris we ought to have been able to talk, say, about Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism. But Ernest had an artist’s, not a philosopher’s, interest in art. To this day someone will say, “Hemingway didn’t seem to have much of an education.” By this, I suppose, the academic critic means Ernest hadn’t taken his own formal academic drill. But as the philosophers themselves are aware, the artist kind of knowing, call it intuition if you will, could yield a different kind of knowledge beyond rational speculation. Anyway, Ernest read everything.