We had come to the American Club, where Ernest seemed to be at home. We went downstairs and into a back room that had a cement floor. In one corner of the room were some mats and the parallel bars. this was the room the members evidently used for a little gym exercise. In an adjoining room was a billiard table. Some fellows were playing. They paid no attention to us. Ernest and I stripped down to our shorts and shirts. I tied on my espadrilles, he put on his gym shoes. We began to box.
In the back of my mind were all the stories I had heard of Hemingway’s skill and savagery. That one story Max Perkins had told me about Hemingway jumping into the ring and knocking out the middleweight champion of France with a single punch made me feel apprehensive. And the way he had looked down his nose at Larry Gains! Ernest was big and heavy, over six feet, and I was only five foot eight and fat. Whatever skill I had in boxing had to do with avoiding getting hit. Admittedly I had a most unorthodox style, carrying my gloves far too low, counting on being fast with my hands. Moving around, crouching, bobbing and weaving, I waited for a chance to counterpunch. I was a little afraid of Ernest. All the lore and legend of the pros seemed to be in his stance; and in the way he held his hands, his chin down a little to his shoulder, he made an impressive picture. Watching him warily, I could only think, Try and make him miss, then slip away from him. All I did for the first three-minute round was slip away. Resting a minute, we chatted affably, then went on with it.
Suddenly he rushed me, loomed up over me, big and powerful, got me in a corner where I crouched lower and lower, all covered up like a turtle in its shell. Then he stopped, smiling. “Look, Morley,” he said patiently, “never crouch that low. It’s impossible to punch from that angle,” and there he was, giving me kindly instructions. As I listened I was dreadfully humiliated.
I’m not trying to box with him, I thought with disgust at myself, I’m trying to defend myself against all the wild legends I’ve heard – against the man who tried to make something out of big Larry Gains. Yet all winter long I had been boxing with my friend Joe Mahon, who, just as big as Ernest, had been the international intercollegiate heavyweight champion. Concealing the disgust I felt for myself, I assured Ernest he wouldn’t find me doubled up, almost on my knees, in the corner again.
I soon found out I could hit him easily. Seeing that I was carrying my left far too low, he would half jab with his left then try the right, but his timing was way off. I would draw him closer by feinting a step backward, inviting him to move in with his long left, then step in and beat him to the punch with my own left. His right, coming at me correctly, was too slow. I was catching him on the mouth or jaw. As the round progressed I became at ease and sure of myself. I could see that while he may have thought about boxing, dreamed about it, consorted with old fighters and hung around gyms, I had done more actual boxing with men who could box a little and weren’t just taking exercise or fooling around. Since I could see this for myself, it didn’t matter to me that he would never believe it.
How did he take it, my left flicking all the time at his mouth and nose? One of the legends I had heard was that he grew savage when hurt and had to kill. It was plainly nonsense and dreadfully unfair to him. That day he took a punch on the nose like any good college boxer; he took it with grace and an appreciation of the aptitude of the man who had landed it. It may have been that he felt he had helped me, got me going with the instructions about not crouching too low. He certainly had; he had hurt my pride.
He couldn’t have known my thoughts.
When we had called it a day and were taking a shower, he was extraordinarily happy and full of good spirits. We went out for a drink.
The small café had only three tables on the sidewalk. We talked for awhile about sports. For some reason I had assumed that he had been good at football and baseball, so I talked about ballplayers and my years as a pitcher, and asked what position he had played. But he said he had only played ball a little, and had never been really good at team sports. He liked skiing and boxing and fishing and shooting, the solitary sports. The things a man could do alone. Then I asked him if Fitzgerald was in town. Not that he knew of, he said. As far as he knew the Fitzgeralds would not be in Paris for a few weeks. He volunteered no further information about Scott, so I dropped the subject.
In a happy mood, I tried in my best comic style to talk about our mutual friends on the Star. Listening, he barely smiled. So I swung into some of my most amusing stories about Harry Hindmarsh. Ernest had said that he would one day write a book about Hindmarsh and call it The Son in Law. By his silence he made it clear he no longer had to hate Hindmarsh. He made me feel, too, that I was talking about people and things that belonged to a time long ago. Untouched, impassive, so darkly hidden as he listened, he became like a stranger. This gift of sudden complete withdrawal was new. It worried me. Coming out of it suddenly, he told me he liked Loretto very much; she was a fine girl, and then with the old frankness I had always liked in him, he added, “She has a kind of savage candor, hasn’t she?” Instantly I wondered what Pauline had said to him about that milliner, or had he too noticed that Pauline’s bluntness had taken Loretto aback? Or could it have been that he had been surprised when Loretto asked him how he had managed to get married in the Church? But since we were on delicate ground I made no comment other than I had thought he would like Loretto. And of course I said we liked Pauline too.
Reaching down to the bag in which he carried the boxing gloves, he asked me if I would like to glance at the proofs of A Farewell to Arms. Right now, he said, he was taking the proofs to James Joyce. Ordering another drink, he waited, asking no questions while I read the first two chapters. I noticed the change in style since The Sun Also Rises. But the magic was in the way the words came cleanly together; the landscape was done with his painter’s eye, not Cézanne’s eye, his own, and I recalled that back in Toronto he had told me that he wished sometimes he had been a painter. Yet here was a little trait I noticed, a continuation of a trend that I, maybe wrongly, had marked in The Sun Also Rises. I had felt in my bones that Hemingway himself was going to be identified with his hero, Jake Barnes. Now the identification would be pinned on Lieutenant Henry. Readers would be convinced that everything happening to the lieutenant had happened to Hemingway, and his literary personality would grow apace. Was this what he wanted? Would there ever be a showdown between himself as he was and this growing literary personality? It bothered me.
In the beginning I had been sure Hemingway would be a broad objective writer like Tolstoy. Was he to become an intensely personal writer, each book an enlargement of his personality in the romantic tradition? Well, a good writer goes his own way. But sitting there with him at the little café, all in the shadow now for the sunlight had gone, I wondered if he was to make all his work seem like a personal adventure. Then I tried to express my admiration of the descriptive prose; it was to be a bigger book than The Sun Also Rises, I said, and I remember that as he picked up the proofs he laughed. “The Sun Also Rises was the kind of book you write in six weeks,” he said. Just the same, I said, rarely had a book been so warmly received by reviewers, and, marvelous to relate, rarely had they been so right. Growing more serious, talking with that intensity of conviction that had always made me feel he had a vast store of secret wisdom about writing, he said, “Always remember this. If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular, it is always because of the worst aspects of your work. They always praise you for the worst aspects. It never fails.”
It was comforting; it was encouraging; it was like knowing that he would never be taken in by spurious adulation, or let the mob make him anything but the fine artist he was. Closing my eyes now, I can see us sitting at that café, hearing him talk about becoming popular because of the weakest aspects of one’s work. Now, remembering, it becomes deeply moving.
We had got up and were walking slowly along the street. At the corner he said, “I’ll leave you here. I’m late. I told Joyce I’d bring these proo
fs to him.” And then he must have seen an envious look in my eyes. Suddenly he was boyishly apologetic. “I know you’d like to meet Joyce. I’d take you with me and have you meet him, Morley, but he’s so shy with strangers. It’s no good when you walk in on him. He won’t talk about writers and writing. This way it wouldn’t be any good. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “I wouldn’t dream of going with you. You want to talk to him about your work,” and I laughed. We made a date for boxing the next week. He went one way and I another up to the Sélect to meet Loretto. When I looked back he was going along slowly, carrying his bag, a big fellow, feeling good.
If I couldn’t meet Joyce with him it wasn’t likely I would ever meet him, I thought. And then suddenly I felt my own peaceful satisfaction. After five years, there I was on a Paris street; in spite of the stories, the malice, my own doubts, I was watching the retreating figure of the man who had been so quick and generous in his appreciation of my work, and we had had an immensely enjoyable afternoon together.
CHAPTER 14
Our room in the Paris-New York Hotel overlooked a side street. It was always late in the morning when we got up, but we were never too late to see a little funeral procession, a quaint hearse and an equally quaint-hatted driver and a handful of black-clad mourn-ers, following the hearse. Men passing on the street would always take off their hats. Loretto might be young and blooming, and I might be feeling pretty good myself, but death indeed was always there, just around the corner. I have said that Ernest, always keeping the thought of death in his work, reminded me of a Medieval scholar who kept the skull on his desk to remind him of his last end. With my girl close to me I preferred to consider the lilies of the field. I was a great caster of bread on the waters. Does the dol-phin or the rose flourish with an eye on eternity? Death for me was a painful, gloomy, inevitable experience. As for the Greek who said, “Better never to have been born,” I thought he was kidding.
Our job, I used to say to Loretto, was to be concerned with living and it seemed to me it would be most agreeable to God if we tried to realize all our possibilities here on earth, and hope we would always be so interested, so willing to lose ourselves in the fullness of living, and so hopeful that we would never ask why we were on this earth. Therefore, it was pointless to have these little funeral processions with our breakfast. We decided to move, and quickly.
Our new friends, the two boys, Buffy and Graeme, helped us to find an apartment. They sat with us at the café, reading the advertisements in the newspaper. We found an apartment over a grocery story on the rue de la Santé, near the prison. Our landlady, a handsome, carrot-topped, buxom Russian in her rapidly fading forties, had only a few words of English and not much more French. Now that we were established we fell into a routine. We would get up around noon, walk slowly over to the Coupole, have a little lunch on the terrace, then go across the river to the American Express to inquire for mail. Sometimes we loafed around the Right Bank for two hours, having a drink at some café by the Opéra, or the Madeleine, then making some purchase in the Galerie Lafayette, then on to the Champs Elysées where the sunlight was on the trees. In the daytime we never went to Montmartre, only at night when we went to Zelli’s or dropped into Bricktop’s. But Paris was always in our minds as a very satisfying and beautiful picture; the soft river valley, the gentle slopes, the two hills, and on the Right Bank sunlight on the white dome of Sacré Coeur.
Back at the apartment I would work for a couple of hours, then at six we could be seen coming down the street by the long prison wall, turning and passing the Observatoire, then the Lilas, and on to the Coupole for an apéritif and some conversation. My friendship with Hemingway seemed to give us an anchor beyond our own neighborhood. At least once a week I would see him for boxing. Afterwards the two of us would walk up to the Sélect to meet Loretto and have a drink. How quick and interested would be his rebuke if we found her having a glass of Pernod. “Loretto, you shouldn’t be drinking that stuff. Don’t drink it,” he would complain. “I’m only taking the one drink,” she would protest.
At that time he would never come wandering around the cafés by himself; he had given it up. And besides, Pauline had conveyed to us her belief that café sitting was a little beneath her. For our part we were not concerned with the impression we might be making, nor the fact that French ladies of quality did not sit at the cafés. Often I would mention Fitzgerald to Hemingway. Had he any word of Scott being in town? It was still in my mind that Perkins had said Scott and Ernest were the greatest of friends. Ernest would say he had had no word of Scott. I never told him how much I looked forward to meeting Scott, nor did I tell him of the picture I had had of the three of us being together and enjoying each other’s company. That day would soon come, I was sure.
By ten in the evening Loretto and I, established at our table at the Sélect, might remain there with friends for hours, or we might go to a party. There was always a party, someone leaving or someone returning. Many a night we spent with young unknown painters who would ask us to their studios to see their work. Now that I look back on it, those good times, good conversations with young painters, must have come about because neither Loretto nor I had the regular critical patter. We could only talk to them about what we saw and felt ourselves in a canvas. They seemed to love it; one canvas after another, the young painter watching us and listening with a little gleam in his eye.
In our neighborhood many of the painters and writers were desperately poor. Yet at that time, in the world of that time, there was the certainty that loose money was close at hand, even if it was in someone else’s pocket. In New York the stock market always seemed to be going up. If you weren’t in on it, it was because you preferred the quest for new experience. That particular quest, the drive of the idler, the bum, the artist – the quest for some new experience! The morality of the experience was measured by its novelty; the charm, the virtue of novelty. Yet the Quarter was an aristoc-racy. A rich man had no distinction and no real power. I remember the night in a bar with McAlmon and a rich young American who was living a life of splendid idleness in the Quarter; when it came time to pay the bill after hours of drinking, McAlmon, indicating the young rich man, said ruthlessly, “No, let him pay. He’s along with us, isn’t he?” It was even more humiliating when the young businessman quickly and quietly paid for all the drinks.
Why had this young Chicago businessman settled in Paris? He happened to be “a lover of the arts.” Some years earlier Sherwood Anderson in Dark Laughter had told how a “wonderful and terrible thing had happened in Paris.” It was the wide-eyed Midwestern view of the city for those who had the money and the time for a holiday fling. For other Americans there had been the grand dis-covery of European culture, another way of living, a promise of some enlargement of inner freedom. A whisper had gone the rounds that Greenwich Village was washed up: Paris was the new frontier. In the early twenties living had been inexpensive, and if you wanted to be a publisher and have a little magazine the printing costs were cheap. Above all, Paris was the good address. It was the one grand display window for international talent, and if you were at all interested in the way the intellectual cloth of the time was being cut, you had to be there, even if you couldn’t do more than press your nose against the window.
Looking back on it, what American writer of the twenties or thirties, or the fifties, from Gertrude Stein to Faulkner to Henry Miller or Tennessee Williams, didn’t feel compelled to drop into the great style center to look around. It is not quite the same today. New York has challenged the Paris influence, and Rome has come into the picture and so has London. But some of the magic still remains in the word from Paris. If you want to know what it was like in the late twenties you only have to recall what has gone on in the forties and fifties. How these French writers get blown up so the international public is persuaded to listen and believe something new is being said is probably a carefully guarded French national trade secret. Through the late forti
es and fifties; now is the time for the writer to be engaged with society; then later; now is the time for disengagement. And Existentialism! Today in the North American universities thousands of students are worrying and wondering if there is anything new in Existentialism, or perhaps deciding that they too ought to look at the world with Sartre’s “disgust and anguish.”
The word from Paris. It’s not the voice of the turtle today but it was in the twenties. It offered the climate, the ambience, the importance of the recognition of the new for the artist. In those days a writer coming to Paris could believe he would find contemporaries and it didn’t seem to matter to him that the French themselves paid no attention to him. In no time you learned that the oddly parochial French took it for granted you were absorbed in their culture. If not, what were you doing there in their style center? Stealing a style or two? Why not? It was the international custom. The burglars of French literature and painting.
That Summer in Paris Page 9
