His manner was correctly courteous. All the little gentlemanly amenities seemed to be important to him. There was nothing lazy or slovenly about his speech or his movements. His light brown hair was cut cleanly and combed exactly, and he spoke with a quiet precise firmness. He was slender and of medium height. In the cut of his jaw, in his little gestures, there was a forcefulness, almost a sense of authority. Perhaps it was the manner of a man who knew he should always appear in this light; yet he did seem to assert a deep confidence in his own importance. It was attractive and somehow reassuring. Later on it came out that this sense of his importance both sustained and tormented him. Yet meeting him there for the first time I can see now that if he had been told that night that he would become the Phoenix of modern letters he would not have been surprised. A proud man, he would have taken it as his due.
And his wife too had the appearance, I say the appearance, of this strange confidence. In her handsome face there was a firmness that was almost a stubbornness, a kind of challenging confidence that didn’t put one quickly at ease with her, and yet made one believe in all the wild stories one had heard about her. They both looked as if they were cut from an expensive pattern that included the apartment.
It was a big elegant apartment, a far more elaborate apartment than Hemingway’s place, and whereas I could think of Hemingway’s or Joyce’s apartments as having living rooms, in this place of Scott’s I knew I was in a drawing room. It had period furniture, too. We all sat down and looked at each other, not apprehensively or critically, just trying to get used to each other quickly. Then Scott explained that they had been to a theatrical performance, I forget whether it was ballet or a play. From what we had heard of Zelda we expected perhaps a grand gesture, a rippling laugh or some romantic absurdity. Instead, she sat with a little smile, studying us. They asked if we had seen the Hemingways. When we said indeed we had, Scott wanted to know when, and asked if we often saw Ernest. He got drinks for us. Then we all seemed to relax and grow animated, and I could see that Scott was a man of sudden quick enthusiasms who, after he had made up his mind that you were temperamentally akin to him, wasn’t concerned about withholding anything of himself. I liked him immediately. In fact it was a joy to see that he was so much like the picture of him I had kept in my thoughts.
Soon we were talking about anything and everything, all getting a little closer to each other. Suddenly he asked if we had read A Farewell to Arms. Only some parts of it? Hurrying to his study he returned with a manuscript copy, and glowing with enthusiasm, he fumbled through the pages till he found the part he wanted. “Just listen to this,” he said. He read that passage, “...if people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them—” He read it with emotion. When he finished he asked quietly, “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Well, yes it is,” I agreed, “but...” Maybe I frowned as I deliberated. It was hard to describe the impression the passage had made on me. Finally I said, “Of course it’s beautiful, but...”
“But what?” Scott asked gravely.
“But maybe it’s too deliberate. Maybe the rhythmic flow is too determined, and the passage emerges as a set piece.”
Certainly it was lyrical, Scott said, shrugging and changing his tone, but for that matter the whole book was lyrical. He waited, watching me, then he shrugged. “All right, it doesn’t impress you.”
“If you ask me, it sounds pretty damned Biblical,” Zelda said firmly. Perhaps she had heard the passage read to her many times. Anyway, she seemed to be relieved to have someone else on her side. “If you’re not impressed, it’s all right, Morley,” Scott assured me. With an injured air he riffled through some more pages of the manuscript, then paused, pondered, came to some firm decision, closed the book, put it aside and sat listening as Zelda became talkative about prose generally. But even on that first night I became aware that Scott kept an eye on her. He let her talk on, saying little himself, just listening; then abruptly, to our surprise, he told her that she was tired. She did look tired. She should go to bed, he said firmly. Turning to us, he explained she was taking ballet lessons and had to get up early; he hoped we would understand. We didn’t quite understand; she left either too meekly or too willingly.
We were left with Scott, who was sitting about eight feet away from us, regarding me too solemnly. Having poured himself another drink, he began to ask my opinion of some American writers. All my answers were frank. Making no comment, he kept on drinking, smiling encouragement. Then I became aware that he was nodding to himself, as if agreeing with himself, not with me. Leaning forward, his face suddenly pale, he said, “Let’s have lunch tomorrow, Morley.”
“I’d be glad to have lunch,” I said. Perhaps I should have expressed more warmth and enthusiasm, but his tone and his pallor now worried me. The way he watched me began to make me feel unhappy.
“Whom would you like to have lunch with us?” he asked mildly, his head on one side.
“It doesn’t matter, Scott.”
“Clive Bell, the art critic, is in town. Do you know his work?”
“I’ve read his book.”
“No,” he said, pondering and still watching me intently. “No, I don’t think he impresses you enough.”
“I’d like to meet him, if you’d like to have him along,” I said, laughing awkwardly. In a swift glance at my wife I saw she was as uneasy as I was. In our hurt embarrassment we both waited. Though Scott had an awful pallor, and I knew he was getting drunk, he smiled sweetly, his head on one side again, as he considered some grave problem. “No, I don’t think Clive Bell impresses you, Morley,” he said, with his deceptive smile. Then half to himself, “Who does impress you, Morley?”
My face began to burn, and my wife, stiffening, sat helplessly on the edge of her chair, no doubt remembering all I had told her about Scott. With her eyes she was pleading with me to go. But before I could speak, stand up, make the necessary polite little remarks, Scott himself stood up slowly. “Would this impress you, Morley?” he asked sweetly.
Suddenly he got down on his knees, put his head on the floor and tried to stand on his head. One leg came up, and he tried to get the other one up and maintain his balance. And while he was swaying and flopping at my feet, my shame and anger became unbearable. I thought of that afternoon on Fifth Avenue when I had walked up to the Plaza, wondering about him, moved by his generosity in going into Scribner’s with my story, and how anxious I had been for his friendship. Now here he was on the floor of his own drawing room, trying to stand on his head to mock me. In my anger and anguish, I felt there must be some dreadful flaw in my character which he had immediately perceived. Then he lost his balance and sprawled flat on his face. I got up and helped him to his feet. “You’re a little drunk,” I said. “No, not at all,” he said, and he was almost convincing, for as soon as he got to his feet he had good balance and control of himself. It was nice meeting him, we said. Untroubled, he walked us to the door and shook hands politely. We said good night.
Outside, heartbroken and humiliated, I walked along beside Loretto. “He was drunk, that’s all,” she said sympathetically. “Yet how did it happen to him so quickly?”
“Even if it was the alcohol,” I said bitterly, “it only helped him to show what he thought of me.”
Then Loretto stopped suddenly and turned to me, shaking her head in wonder. “Do you know you have the craziest friends?”
“Nobody else has been crazy.”
“All along the way they’ve been crazy. Look. I met Sinclair Lewis. What does this great man do? Puts on a first-class vaude-ville act.”
“He was very nice and you know it.”
“He was wonderful. I loved him. And McAlmon?”
“He does crazy things, I admit.”
“And the great Joyce plays an Aimee Semple McPherson record for a laugh. And Ernest? Imagine! He spits blood right in your face. It’s insane.”
“I like him and so do you.”
“I like them all
. They’re all so attractive. All so wonderfully upsetting. How do I know what’s going to happen next? We’ve just met a man we’ve always wanted to meet. What does he do? He doesn’t spit. He stands on his head for us. Absolutely crazy too.”
“Aren’t you lucky?” I said. “I’m the only one who is calm, objective and rational.”
CHAPTER 19
As soon as I got up next day I wrote a letter to Scott. In the letter I asked him to forgive us for walking in on him unannounced – we shouldn’t have done it. It would have been much more sensible to have written to him and informed him we were in Paris, but Max Perkins had assured me that such a letter was unnecessary. If we had upset him and Zelda in any way, or if we had kept them up, we could only offer an apology.
A day later when I called for Hemingway, I told him what had happened. Smiling a little to himself as he listened, he offered neither advice nor consolation. What a gift he had for minding his own business and keeping his thoughts to himself. But he and Scott were supposed to be the best of friends. I was baffled. If I had asked his advice about a publisher, an editor, a political situation or how to conduct myself in some activity requiring some physical skill, he would have been full of expert advice. All he said now was, “Well, that’s Scott.”
“Standing on his head!” I said bitterly. “It might have been better if I had punched him on the nose.”
And I remember his odd smile as he shrugged. “There’s no distinction in punching Scott on the nose,” he said. “Every taxi driver in Paris has done it.”
So Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest’s friend, the figure I had built up in my imagination as my own good friend too, could go to the devil as far as I was concerned. I tried to put him out of my mind altogether. I told no one else around the Quarter about him. The day passed, and next afternoon Loretto and I went across the river to the American Express, then loafed around the Place Vendôme and the Madeleine. It was supposed to be Cocteau’s neighborhood. We had seen photographs of his hands in so many store windows we joked about recognizing him on the street by his hands. The violent contrast between the elegant Frenchwomen coming out of the little shops and the black-stockinged plainly dressed working girls fascinated us.
That day, feeling restless, we wandered for hours from neighborhood to neighborhood. My wife had an extraordinary sense of direction. When we were lost we would agree to let her follow her nose, and sooner or later we would be on more familiar ground. I used to attribute her sure step to a little pair of brown shoes she wore. Anyway, that day after we had eaten, and got back our apartment about eight, our carrot-topped plump Russian landlady stopped us in the hall. In her hopeless mixture of French and Russian, she tried to tell us a man and a woman had called. With her hands, her eyes, strange movements of her lips, a sway of her body and garbled words, she tried to describe our callers. The name? Did it sound like McAlmon? Mr. Hemingway? No. Well, we consoled her, it didn’t matter. At the café later in the evening the friends would appear and find us at our table.
When we opened our door, there on the floor were three of those blue pneumatiques, the Paris special-delivery letters. We opened one. It was from Scott Fitzgerald. Tried to see you after lunch, he wrote, but you were not at home. The other two special-delivery letters told how he had kept looking for us. Speechless, we both sat down on the bed. Why had Scott come dashing back and forth after us? we wondered. I felt uneasy. Had my curt, cold note caused some kind of unpredictable trouble? While we sat there a knock came on the door. Our Russian lady said, “Your friends... I hurried to the door. Along the hall came Scott and Zelda, both with a breathless air. Without any aplomb at all we stared at them apprehensively. They weren’t smiling. They were upset and determined. “Morley, I got your note,” Scott blurted out. “This is terrible. All afternoon we’ve looked for you.” He took me by the arm as my wife invited them in.
The concern in Scott’s eyes, and the way Zelda was backing up this concern, overwhelmed us. Never in my life had anyone come to me so openly anxious to rectify a situation. They wouldn’t sit down. Starting to make light of the whole situation, I faltered, knowing by the light in Scott’s eyes that I would be belittling his generosity. He must have insisted that Zelda come with him; he must have carted her grimly around with him all afternoon, making her believe something very important to him was involved. I remember the expression on his face as I put out my hand, laughing; it had a curious kind of dignity, making me feel that he was the one, not I, who knew we ought to be better than we were. My wife told Zelda that she shouldn’t have put herself to the trouble of coming after us; she was too generous. Then Scott, taking me by the arm again amid all our protestations of goodwill and self-deprecation, made one of those generous remarks which few other men could have made, and which seemed to come so easily out of his heart. “You see, Morley,” he said simply, “there are too few of us.”
His conduct of two nights before, my attitude, my hesitation about accepting the enchantment of that one passage in A Farewell to Arms, whatever it was that had set him off, making him feel I was hard to impress, was forgotten. Zelda said they couldn’t sit down, they were on their way out for dinner and were late. On the way they had decided to make another try at catching up with us. Would we come to dinner with them tomorrow night? Would it be all right if we all sat at Joyce’s table in the Trianon? They made us happy, we said. And Scott now believed us. We all shook hands warmly. They hurried out. We went to our window overlooking the Santé Prison wall, and as we watched the slim elegant Scott and his beautiful wife getting into the taxi they had kept waiting, I felt paradoxically both humble and important. What a charming man he was, said Loretto, moved as she watched the taxi pull away.
Next night at the appointed hour we met them at the Trianon. And indeed, just as he had promised, Scott said we were to sit at Joyce’s table. But he led us to a table to the left, not the right side of the restaurant. We couldn’t bear to tell him we had been there a few nights ago with Joyce. What did it matter that Joyce had been at another table? A man like Scott, talented as he was himself, got so much pleasure out of thinking he was at a master’s table it would have been ridiculous to have said, “No, over there!” Now I can see that Scott at his best was lucky in his temperament. He was always being dazzled. The very rich – no, it would be fairer to say he was fascinated by the unlimited possibilities of action and enjoy-ment, a kind of possible grandeur of opulence offered by the enormously rich. Surely Balzac too was fascinated in the same way. To get the excitement of a schoolboy, sitting at Joyce’s table! Well, Scott, as much as anyone I ever met, had a conception of an aris-tocracy of talent.
Even now I seem to hear Zelda’s voice coming at us suddenly. “I write prose. It’s good prose.” Her strange intensity, the boldness of her insistence that she too be regarded as a talent, was surprising. What could I say except, “I’m sure it is”? She had had a story in Scribner’s Magazine which I had read. It was a story in a careful, determined style with a flash of metaphor.
And she was the one who first mentioned Hemingway. We had been talking about someone’s manners. How odd that in those free-swinging, disorderly days in the Quarter there was so much awareness of a man’s or a woman’s manners! Zelda said, “Hemingway has charming manners, don’t you think?” When we all agreed she added, “He has the most charming manners of anyone I know.”
Now it was plain that Ernest was more than a good writer to them. Scott had to have his heroes. Joyce was a hero, of course. But I wondered if he had made Ernest into a special kind of hero. Aside from his liking for him he seemed to believe Ernest had some capacity for the rich, adventurous experience that had been denied to him. Even there at “Joyce’s table” – was our pretending somehow right in view of his attitude to Ernest? – as he asked me questions about him. I felt in him a yearning for a closer friendship with the man. No, not friendship – rather comradeship. He asked when we had last seen Ernest and what we had done. I felt ridiculous, believing they were intimate frien
ds. And with his strange candor he asked suddenly, “What do you make of Pauline? Do you find her attractive? Can you see her appeal for Ernest?” My wife and I agreed in saying simply that Pauline seemed to be a very nice woman.
But Scott began to weigh the matter. Yes, he could see that Ernest might find her attractive. But then he startled us. In his candid and intensely interested manner he said he had a theory about Ernest and his women. It was as if he had thought many times about Hemingway’s divorce and remarriage and I can still hear him saying thoughtfully, “I have a theory that Ernest needs a new woman for each big book. There was one for the stories and The Sun Also Rises. Now there’s Pauline. A Farewell to Arms is a big book. If there’s another big book I think we’ll find Ernest has another wife.”
My wife and I looked at each other uncomfortably. If ever we should ask Ernest if he had a big new book in mind we would inevitably remember Scott’s theory, wouldn’t we? And Pauline? Could we ever ask about a new book in front of Pauline? But that theory of Scott’s always remained in my mind. And over the years I had occasion to wonder if Scott didn’t have far more insight into Ernest’s temperament, as it was related to his work, than any of us.
By dinner’s end we were laughing and at ease, and when we left the restaurant, just loafing along, all of Paris seemed to come a little closer. It was for me, as it had been for others for a thousand years, the place where the stranger could believe he was among his own people; the meeting place for all those who wanted to meet. As we walked along slowly in the moonlight, Zelda laughed out loud, looking around. She had the restless air, the little sway of a woman seeking some new exhilaration, a woman in Paris who knew the night should be just beginning. She kept saying, “What’ll we do? Let’s do something,” and again she laughed. I remember her stopping suddenly on the street. “I know,” she said. “Let’s go roller skating.”
That Summer in Paris Page 13
