That Summer in Paris

by Callaghan, Morley;

  Saturday Night, 1926

  JOYCE: INTO THE DREAMWORLD

  For seventeen years, it is said, Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake, and it seems only fair that anyone writing about the work should be given at least a year to get at its full value and meaning. I have been reading the book for about a week. Therefore, all I can pretend to give is some first impressions gathered when first looking into Finnegans Wake.

  The legend is that Finnegan had a fall and was thought to be dead, and there was a wake that lasted some time, and he suddenly awoke when he heard the word, “Whiskey.” With the first line you plunge right into the dream or night world. There is no getting back to the objective rational world of the conscious mind. Not only is there no way of seeing things in clear related outlines, the whole rational or logical structure of language seems to be broken down. It is a little frightening. You are caught in this flow, you try desperately to catch the meaning, to get hold of something that is familiar to the day world which can serve as a guide. It is the apparent meaninglessness that is frightening, for the eye can catch nothing, yet the tireless anti-logical voice keeps sounding, and you have to listen; suddenly the sound itself begins to give a kind of hope or comfort. In this night world where all things are terrify-ingly strange, the sense of music is retained.

  It is possible, bit by bit, to become familiar with the dream structure, as nearly everyone has found out. Only most mortals dream in pictures. The structure or arrangement of these pictures may or may not be rational; they keep flowing in, often telescoped, the waking sense of time and space readily violated, yet making a perfectly good sense according to the dream reality. But instead of doing it with pictures, Joyce does it with words; they flow, break, are telescoped, or violated, new words are created, old words made into more suggestive sounds by the mind plunged into the dream reality and entirely at the mercy of it, its overwhelming and frightening authority.

  Of course the dream flow is of the world of Dublin and Ireland. Much is necessarily lost to a North American reader. But you must never lose sight of the fact that it is an Irish book. In fact, large sections seem to be written in Irish brogue. What seems so strange to the eye can be turned into something very familiar and comical to the ear simply by reading these passages aloud. At other times, as I have mentioned, the dream language seems to be set to music, as in the well-known Anna Livia section. Though there is nothing for the eye, the musical flow of words conveys very beautifully and mysteriously the impression of the waters of the Liffey flowing by and the women by the river with their washing and the water licking the embankment. It is great writing. It is a new sensation in literature, a new way of looking at things perfectly realized, something that can be brought off only by a great master.

  Since the greatness of the achievement can be grasped in the Anna Livia section, and in other smaller passages, the mind keeps hungering to grasp the same full meaning in the opaque passages. The flow is so deliberate, so relentless, that is, it is maddening to feel that the mind is missing the significance. You stop and take a paragraph word by word: words that seem to be in there as sounds, or musical notes, words that were never heard before, made by telescoping together the words of many languages that convey the same meaning. Inescapably it comes to you that Joyce is conduct-ing some great prose orchestration out of all the words from all the languages that have flowed through his Irish mind.

  It gets that you can follow, or get used to the new word structure, and of all things, you find that again and again it is based upon the pun. There is great wit. And rarely does a page fail to offer some kind of laugh. Parodies of all styles are here. The reader begins to get a curious satisfaction from this all-pervading comedy. It is the life-line that holds him to the rational world. It is as though the dream-er, out of whom this great flow of words comes, had a vast comic sense and every word was touched by it.

  But this very play of words arouses some suspicion and wonder in the reader. Is Joyce actually attempting to produce the dream reality, or is he just using that structure again and again to orchestrate words for their own sake. Of course, the answer might readily be that that was exactly what the dreaming night mind did: get drunk on words. But whatever the intention the result seems to be there over and over again: a literature feeding not on life but on words.

  And in that case, the end of the alley is in sight and it is a dead end. Whether it be in painting or writing, the tendency toward pure abstraction can only lead finally to the starvation of the medium. It is a gesture of great intellectual pride and spiritual isolation on the part of the artist. But the pursuit has gone on steadily in our time, and it seems to me that the pursuit is continued on page after page of Finnegans Wake: an unholy effort, or if you will, the actual job done, of making pieces of literature with words, simply as words, as the substance.

  And that is why you get the impression that in this book you are dealing with the end of something in literature. It isn’t just the ivory tower, it is the ivory tower with every window shut and every door locked. It is the great artist retreating completely from life and burning his bridges behind him. For, beside Finnegans Wake, Ulysses is a simple human document. In the end all one can say is that a great master is going his own way, as a great master should.

  Saturday Night, 1939

  IN A JUGULAR VEIN: HEMINGWAY

  A Moveable Feast opens with the young Hemingway sitting at a café on the Place St. Michel, and straightway the old familiar and terribly determined elegiac note is sounded. It is very disquiet-ing. Is he going to try to recapture the rhythms of A Farewell to Arms, I wondered unhappily? But soon, and mainly because he is able to recapture some of the feeling he had had for his first wife, Hadley, and their small son in those Paris days between 1921 and 1926, the style gets straightened out; this sad, disturbing and often funny book gets going in its own right. Once again after all these years we seem to see him sitting alone at a café, writing and hoping. It is very moving. We see him, too, as he watches the fishermen on the banks of the Seine, or goes into the Musée du Luxembourg to study the paintings of Cézanne, and wonders if he could get the same landscape effects in prose.

  It was the time when he was writing those little stories that were something new in the language. Working in poverty, and in love with his wife, he was strangely happy. Having given up newspaper work, he was committed to writing and was turning out a kind of story that was so suggestive, so stripped, so objective, so effective in capturing pure sensation that it became a unique kind of poetry. Never again was he to be as original or as objective as he had been in those days. When the time came to write this book, maybe he knew what he had lost. And maybe this knowledge explains the book’s bitter tone.

  But in those days he wasn’t as self-absorbed or as isolated as he makes out. In fact, long before he wrote The Sun Also Rises, he had had a peculiar underground fame, and the wonderful thing about him at the time was that he had a generous interest in the work of other unknown writers, was in touch with them, and would go out of his way to try to get them published in the little Paris magazines. Did he forget about the young writers who adored him? Why is it that the main thing he wanted to remember, or get down on paper, was that he had found perfect happiness in isolation, work and love – till other people came into the picture? And the only wisdom he has to offer now, looking back on it, is that other people, any people, are always the enemies of those who are in love, and the enemies of the artist also. They smell out happiness, they move in to destroy it. It is always people, never himself, who are to blame.

  And so he manages to give the impression that two star-

  crossed lovers, himself and Hadley, the Farewell to Arms theme again, had their happiness destroyed by the great enemy – people. A man’s fate is in the people who are interested in him, and if you are skiing in the Alps with your girl and people find you there, you can’t prevail against them. This is, surely, a pretty childish view of life.

  Some of the people to be looked down on ar
e done in the book as set pieces, and not at all in a flow of memories. This faulty structure is the great weakness of the book. And what frightening sketches of people who at one time knew and liked him! There is Ford Madox Ford, who, as editor of the Transatlantic Review, had printed some of Hemingway’s early work, and who, even before the triumphant appearance of The Sun Also Rises, had written a front-page article in the Herald Tribune Books, New York, calling him the best young writer in America; Ernest Walsh, the Irish poet, an editor of This Quarter, who had first printed “Big Two Hearted River” and “The Undefeated;” Gertrude Stein, once his motherly friend, who had belittled him in print; Wyndham Lewis, who over the years had deplored Hemingway’s love of violence; Pascin, the painter, and Scott Fitzgerald, who as he says, had been a loyal friend for years – until they fell out.

  The touch he uses in these portraits is controlled, expert, humorous and apparently exact; he is like a proud pool player, who lines up the balls with his cue, says, “That one in the corner pocket,” and sinks it cleanly. But underneath the surface humour – it’s really a gallow’s humour – there is a long-nourished savagery, or downright venom, and in his portraits there is the quick leap for the jugular vein.

  What a relief it is to find him expressing tenderness and respect and loyalty to Ezra Pound – or affection for Sylvia Beach. And a relief, too, to discover there was a young poet named Evan Shipman whom he liked. Otherwise, one could gather he had no capacity for friendship at all. In a prefatory note he says there were many good friends. There were indeed. It is unfortunate that he didn’t get some of his old simple friendliness into the book. How much fairer he would have been to himself in revealing what he was really like in those days. He was actually an attractive, interesting, fascinating companion, dark and brooding though he might be, with strange shrewd hunches about people that turned into grudges. He was likeable and simple in manner, too. The savagery that was in him only broke out when he went berserk, as in this book. He is a mockingly amusing cold killer with a weapon he often controls so beautifully – his own prose.

  In those days he would tell you he disliked Ford. He would openly scoff at him. Yet his brother, in his hero-worshipping book, tells how Ford had been sent by Ernest to visit the Hemingway family home in Chicago. Yet in the Hemingway sketch of Ford, the two of them sitting at a café, a very expert, very funny sketch, he pictures Ford as a liar and a clown who gave off a body odour that fouled the air. Was this all there was to Ford? Of course not, and he knew it.

  It is true, too, that Wyndham Lewis was a difficult man to meet. He was so self-conscious, so worried that his importance would not be recognized, that he was always ill at ease and without any grace of manner. Hemingway and Lewis met in Pound’s studio when Hemingway was teaching Pound to box. Looking back on the meeting, he believed he hated Lewis on sight. He can hardly express his loathing for the “meanest-looking man I ever met.” Yet here, again, Hemingway overdoes it. And why? Only God knows! He had no more interest in trying to understand Lewis than he had in understanding Ford. Yet these highly prejudiced, personal reac-tions are interesting. In them may be found the keynote to the brilliance of much of his work. With him, everything was personal, his work became the projection of his personality. He was not concerned with fairness or charity, or moral judgements, just with his own sensations.

  Mind you, I, for one, don’t care whether he was fair to Gertrude Stein or not. That domineering woman had talked her way into a reputation, and she had taken her snide cracks at him. So, he’s gone to work on her. It’s the literary life, I suppose.

  The best and happiest writing in the book, and in some ways the fairest picture he gives of anyone, is of Scott Fitzgerald. The writing turns free and easy. He forgets the Biblical rhythms. He is at home and happy with his subject. The description of a trip to Lyon with Fitzgerald is simply hilarious; it is more than that; he gives a wonderfully vivid glimpse of Fitzgerald in all his changing moods, drunk and sober, and recognizes his talent. Yet on end, aside from recognition of the talent, Fitzgerald is so cut down as a person – well, as Hemingway tells it, even the bartender at the Ritz, where Fitzgerald spent so much time, can’t remember him, but promised to try to do so, if old Hem would only write about him and make him memorable.

  As for the terrible disorder in Fitzgerald’s life, Hemingway blames it on Zelda. Poor crazy Zelda, who, he says, was jealous of Scott, and liked to see him get drunk, knowing he wouldn’t be able to work. And what may be just as fantastic is Hemingway’s explanation of why he began to shy away from Scott. He saw that Scott liked walking in on him to interrupt him, and saw that it was all a plan to make it impossible for him to work. This leaves us with Fitzgerald doing to Hemingway what Zelda was doing to Fitzgerald. It gets mixed up and very complicated. But you remember they were two men who dramatised everything, simply everything, including each other.

  As the book draws to an end there is a curious revelation which is almost shocking in its candour. The idyllic love between Hemingway and his wife had continued up to the writing of The Sun Also Rises. When they are skiing happily in the Alps, some rich people seek them out. A rich girl moves in with them, and in no time Hemingway has two women, and then finally he has only one and it isn’t Hadley any more. “Then you have the rich and nothing is ever as it was again,” he says, and his life took another turn, and with sourness, he blames the rich for moving in on him and taking away his happiness. Was he so weak and helpless in the presence of the rich? It is such a surprising revelation one can’t at first quite believe it, and then comes the thought, it must be true, for it is the first time Hemingway has ever deliberately put himself in a bad light.

  The Spectator, 1964

  SCOTT FITZGERALD

  Scott Fitzgerald has a high place in American letters, but strange things have happened to the Fitzgerald reputation over the years. Without batting an eye, one of Scott Fitzgerald’s scholarly admirers said the other day that Fitzgerald had come “to grips more fully than any novelist of his generation with modern movements in western culture and philosophy,” and that in his own person, Fitzgerald had not only acted out the role of the genteel romantic hero, but in his work he had transformed the whole genteel romantic tradition. Slightly bemused, I had to ask, “Was this really Fitzgerald?”

  The view that Fitzgerald was personally acting out that role is derived from all the familiar information, but certainly the word “genteel,” if it has any meaning at all, is not to be applied to Fitzgerald’s life. A romantic? Of course. Extravagantly so. In his way, he was a kind of Madame Bovary. He was quite an actor, too. But as for being a critic and great thinker – a student of western culture and philosophy? Really!

  Fitzgerald had his insights. He had a remarkable sensibility. But even in these areas he was always personal – and a truly great dramatic character in the sense that he could say one thing, do another, and think another.

  The real Fitzgerald dilemma was neither romantic nor tragic.

  It was utterly commonplace. He wanted to make a lot of money, yet he wanted to rise above the practice that gave him the money. It sounds elegant now to say that in turning out all those stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Fitzgerald was mastering the genteel romantic tradition, but other writers – his then admirers – said he was writing “formula stories,” and indeed he was. The stories were a triumph of packaging. They were written in his unique lyric style. He could make a thing look better than it really was. It was like this in real life, too – his natural eloquence, his spontaneous charm, could make you feel he was so much better than the regrettable thing he had just done.

  The truth is that Fitzgerald, without his special lyric touch, was a knight without armour. His Hollywood experience proves it. Fitzgerald was not a successful screenwriter. Yet he could have got from Hollywood all he wanted from the Post, and more; the money was there, and he had all the training to look at life out of someone else’s genteel romantic eye. Isn’t it likely his failure as a screenwriter l
ay in the circumstances of picture making, circumstances which denied him the totality of his lyric flow; and that without his lyric flow, he was simply another hack screenwriter?

  As for this genteel romantic tradition and Fitzgerald’s place in it, there are those who believe that Fitzgerald was like a saint in our world: in it, but not of it; and as he increased in strength as an artist, he finally saw the tradition for what it was, and reached beyond it to a new power and wisdom. If you believe this, you have to believe that Tender Is the Night is a better book than The Great Gatsby, and that The Last Tycoon, if he had finished it, would have topped them all. This is a very dubious point of view.

  In The Great Gatsby, there is no revolt at all against that strange mixed-up world of commercial romanticism and Calvinistic vener-ation of success that has enchanted the American imagination. It is the world of the Post editor, the established clergyman, the Rotarian, the social climber, the banker, and it is Fitzgerald’s world, too; but he was able to find a magic pattern in it, the one right story to bring out all his talents. For the only time in the Fitzgerald novels, the lyric gift was more than beguiling surface; it actually seemed to deepen the insights and the revelations.

  ON BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER

  The two writers, Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle, whose memoirs of Paris in the twenties are offered here in the form of a dialogue in Being Geniuses Together, belong to the scene they write about as authentically as do those cafés, the Dôme and the Select on Montparnasse. Kay Boyle and Robert McAlmon, in the lives they led in the Quarter, earned the right to the expression of their intensely personal views of their old friends and their enemies, too, and since at the time Paris was the one lighted place drawing to it talented people from all over America and Europe, most of them to become friends or enemies of McAlmon, this book becomes the place you go to find out what the people with the great names of the time, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Hemingway, Stein, Wyndham Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, William Carlos Williams, and a half a hundred others really thought of each other.