Kay Boyle, still alive and writing well, is widely known. Robert McAlmon has been dead for some years. He seems to be remembered only in the books of those who knew him personally. Yet he was one of the most admirable, infuriating, contemptuous, generous, malicious, interesting, insulting, unbudgeable men of his time. The reason for all these adjectives may be found in this memoir of his, first published in 1934.
McAlmon, a young American from the middle west, in New York at the beginning of the twenties, and determined to be a writer, had married Bryher, the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, one of the rich men of England. It was strictly a marriage of con-venience. McAlmon now had money. Soon he was off to Paris, off to Spain, off to Berlin and meeting everyone and respecting no one.
But he had a touch of greatness about him. He established his Contact Press. He was the first to publish Hemingway’s work; he also published Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans when that well-off old girl wouldn’t risk a nickel of her own on it. He was that unique thing, a writer willing to spend his money on the advance-ment of other writers. And of course, by the time he died he must have been nursing the bitter thought that all those he helped had soon forgotten him.
But the key to McAlmon’s fate, and surely Kay Boyle sees it, or remembers it, is in this book. He had to cut you down. Even if he liked you and was drinking with you, he turned the knife. You winced, and if you liked and respected him, you laughed it off. I can still see him sitting there at the café with his little grin growing more disdainful as he got really drunk. The fact is, though, that his cutting down, his cattiness, was always based on some shrewd perception: high and splendid irreverence and happy malice. In the memoir he treats Wyndham Lewis as a grovelling tradesman, T.S. Eliot as a kind of English undertaker’s assistant, Gertrude Stein as a rather dim-witted lady who had conned a little public into believing her childish repetitions profound because she was so heavy herself.
And Hemingway, his old friend? Something happened between them the first time they went to Spain together. McAlmon doesn’t really tell about the incident. From then on his bitterness about Hemingway won’t let him rest. Hemingway owed him a lot. He paid off by punching McAlmon in the mouth. In the end, he sees Hemingway simply as a cheap publicity seeker.
Of the great names, only two held his affection to the end. His old dear drinking companions, Joyce and William Carlos Williams; they are spared his amused disdain. All this seems to put McAlmon in a horrible light; indeed, he often was in that light. But if he was bent on belittling everyone, dozens of his friends were bent on belittling him. All I can say, as one whom he often made wince, then grin, is that I would love to see him coming along the boulevard with his disdainful smile, ready to sit down at the café with us for the evening; and it would be very refreshing to hear some of his cutting perceptions into the work of Joyce, of Eliot, of Hemingway – perceptions rooted in his first hand contact with their texts.
Kay Boyle’s memoir in this same book, it seems to me, should be dealt with separately and not taken as a dialogue with McAlmon. But that’s the way it is presented and this arrangement irritated me. The Boyle memoir, about the same years and often about the same people, is a charming and beautiful story of a romantic girl in love with the idea of being a great writer among the most interesting people of the time. Yet, there is reason for having her memoir in the same book as McAlmon’s; her touch is so different; in happy contrast, she is free from malice.
The central incident of her story has to do with her love affair with Ernest Walsh, who was the editor of This Quarter, one of the important magazines then publishing Joyce and Hemingway. She had a child by Ernest Walsh. Her picture of their relationship and how her love for him haunted her after his quick death is quite moving. But this picture also has another value that makes it belong in the literature of our time with a note underneath explaining it should be always read in contrast with the picture Hemingway gives of the same Ernest Walsh in his A Moveable Feast. The Hemingway portrait is all malice and viciousness. Is this the way Paris was in those days? Backbiting and needling! Or did it all depend on who the teller of the tale was? Because it wasn’t all hate and malice. It was a wonderful time to be alive. These two memoirs in the one book bring the period and those people very close, all vivid and angry and alive again.
Toronto Telegram, 1968
COLLEGE OF ONE: FITZGERALD
Back in 1937, Sheilah Graham tells us, she grew tired of being a decorative wallflower in the Robert Benchley set of Hollywood, a gossip queen who could be easily exposed as a fake; and she turned to her tormented lover, Scott Fitzgerald, for an education. In College of One, she opens the window again on her familiar Hollywood-Fitzgerald landscape. But it is not as it was in her Beloved Infidel, where the accent was on the splendour and misery of life with the doomed and alcoholic Fitzgerald. Here, the accent is on another side of his character, a bright, good and true side, and he is presented as a gifted teacher who could give an ambitious woman in a hurry a liberal arts course in about two years of directed reading.
The good thing about this record is that it is so compellingly authentic. If Miss Graham has had to retell her own life story and throw in odds and ends, hoping to enlarge her original portrait of Fitzgerald, no one should complain. Sheilah Graham has a fresh and valid point to make about him; he had a great natural talent for teaching.
Indeed he had! I can recall that you couldn’t be at a café in Paris getting a view of a church, or riding in a taxi with him and passing a monument, or going down an old street, without getting a lively and interesting discourse from him. Even when he was quite wrong in his information, there was no pleasure to be found contradicting him. His desire to impart the information seemed to be his way of celebrating his enthusiasm for being alive.
To educate Miss Graham he had prepared a curriculum and there were sheafs of notes. Much of this appeared to be lost. As the years passed and Fitzgerald rose so splendidly from his own ashes, Miss Graham realized she had lost a treasure in those notes. Then, just two years ago, she found the treasure among Fitzgerald docu-ments in the library at Princeton University. The curriculum is given here in College of One, along with many of his bright and sardonic comments. In its way, this outline of an education is a kind of period piece, but interesting, for it not only reveals what Fitzgerald thought a bright woman of his time should know; it reveals the slant of his own mind.
The period’s fashionable historian was Spengler. Miss Graham was certainly to know all about him. And Proust! Of all things she began her reading of the novel with Proust.
The real delight, however, is to be found in the offhand Fitzgerald comments about the master works. They are bright and pungent and so often wise. “Poetry is not something you get started on by yourself,” he noted. “You need at the beginning some enthusiast who knows his way around.” And about Palgrave and his Golden Treasury! Palgrave was “that Protestant pansy.” His view of Dreiser is surprising: “As a storyteller, the best of his generation.” And surprising, too, was the fact that he could ignore those beautiful early stories of Hemingway’s in his short story list, yet recom-mend Gertrude Stein’s “Three Lives.”
Miss Graham’s desire to get an education from the man she loved was obviously part of an ancient yearning; a woman’s desire to share her lover’s inner life. If Fitzgerald, the tutor, hadn’t loved his pupil, there couldn’t have been this happy involvement with her in which the whole world of learning is made part of the ritual of love. They could read poems aloud, they could clown and kid, they could in this way draw all the learning into their daily lives.
But some questions come up about those days Sheilah Graham shared with Fitzgerald. At the time she was making very good money herself, and if she was so close to him, how is it that she has to say now she didn’t know how broke he was? And a question about Fitzgerald, an old nagging one. In those last years, he was working on The Last Tycoon. The legend is that with all the drinking and the hack work he couldn’t find
time to get on with the novel. Yet he planned and worked on these studies for Sheilah Graham, studies aside, as she says, he catalogued everything, simply everything, only so he could then compose all those fine letters.
This means he was spending long serious reflective hours at his desk. Why couldn’t he get to the novel? Were those reflective hours, busy creating a curriculum for his lover, just a way of avoiding that novel? I wish Miss Graham could have revealed that story.
Washington Post, 1969
PARIS REVISITED
I used to wonder why I did not want to revisit Paris and Montparnasse. If the suggestion came up, and it did again and again, I found myself growing thoughtful, then making excuses and shying away. Paris, 1929, the days when Montparnasse had reached its opulent and exotic flowering just before the fall, which was of course the Great Depression. That was my Paris. Moreover, I had written a book about it, That Summer in Paris, and I suppose I felt I had embalmed that part of my life.
I have a temperament that recoils from visiting scenes in a pathetic effort to recapture singular moments. Some years ago one of the Paris veterans wrote me a letter in which he counted the number of relics who were left alive, and he made the grand proposal that we all meet again in Paris. I fled from the notion like a bat out of hell. The editor of Esquire then proposed a meeting of what he called, “The Lost Generation” in New York. They would take a photograph, he said. Well, the photograph duly appeared in Esquire, but I was not in it. I couldn’t bear the idea. My excuse was that I had never felt I was a member of a lost generation.
The Paris of 1929 and the life my wife Loretto and I lived there had remained alive only in our hearts, only there because we believed the scene was gone forever, as the people were gone. I hate reunions. I hate visiting graveyards, which means I suppose, that I hate going back. Going back, dozing in the sun, taking pleasure in a world of ghosts, always seemed to be a way of going too willingly into the dark night. When I passed through Paris with my wife on our way to Rome and had several hours to spend at the air-port, I knew we could easily have taken a quick trip along the Boulevard Montparnasse. But I remembered those lines of Scott Fitzgerald’s about feeling “that he was standing on a rifle range at twilight with all targets down,” so I didn’t take the run at Montparnasse. I went on to Rome and something else. Something else. There always has to be something else.
Then one night in Rome a doubt about my attitude to Paris began to gnaw away at me. When I was twenty-six, my wife and I had shown up on the Paris boulevards like people coming home. Most of my writing friends were there. Robert McAlmon, who had first published Hemingway and had been enormously helpful to me. And Hemingway, and Scott Fitzgerald who had urged my short stories on Max Perkins, and the editors of Transition, that great review, and Ford Madox Ford, the first editor who had ever written to me asking for a story, and Joyce, whom we all adored, and Ezra Pound who had printed me in his magazine, The Exile.
Paris had been my city of light when the world seemed to be my oyster. My young wife and I had been completely happy in Paris. So there was this question: did I hesitate, even, did I dare to walk again in those streets and sit in those cafés where we had been so alive, so elated, so arrogant, so sure we belonged at the centre of the world? Was I afraid that I would have a thousand poignant regrets that we hadn’t remained forever young? This could have been the very core of the reluctance I had held on to for years. Yet how stupid! Yet how like a certain kind of man to avoid the places where he had once been happy as if that kind of happiness could never come again if he dared, even, to revisit those places.
So again in April, as it had been in the beginning, we came back into Paris, returning from Rome. It was late at night. The cooling freshness of a spring night. The taxi tires humming on the cobblestones. We were booked into the Hilton Continental, a hotel of sweep and grandeur on the Right Bank at the corner of rue de Rivoli and rue de Castiglioni – a part of town at ease with expense. Why were we not over in some little hotel on Raspail on the Left Bank where we once had stayed? Because it would have been pretending; it would have been fake. I was not the man I used to be. I knew where my next dollar was coming from. But on that first night when we came out of the hotel and looked along the rue de Rivoli and saw the Tuileries, and the Louvre, and then the Seine and the lighted bridges leading to the Left Bank, I was gripped by a kind of magic; a sense of permanence of place.
Nothing seemed to have been torn down. Not even removed. Years ago we could have been standing on this corner, wondering if it was time to cross the bridge and go home to our little flat close by the prison. Suddenly Paris wasn’t just a memory, locked in the heart of youth. It was here, now, as it had been then. On this corner, men of many generations had come and gone, yet they hadn’t gone, they were all around. They could suddenly reappear as I was doing. My wife and I shared this strange and unexpected sense of happy familiarity with the living and the dead; those who had come our way either in our lives, or just in our imaginations.
Around noon the next day, we set out for that celebrated café, Les Deux Magots on the left bank near the old St. Germain de près Church. It used to be such a beautiful corner, with its three cafés, Lips, the Flore – made famous by Sartre and his friends – and the old Deux Magots. In the twenties, André Gide and Jean Cocteau had often sat on the terrace, and from one of the cane chairs you could look along the splendid avenue, the Boulevarde St. Germain with its great old houses solidly packed together in a long vista, a vista right into the salons of duchesses in the world of Proust. And it used to be quietly soothing sitting on the café terrace just before nightfall watching the sun hit the grey-white stone of the twelfth-century square-towered church. This was the café where I used to meet Fitzgerald. He had lived not far away. The last time I saw him had been on the terrace. He was leaving Paris and we had met to talk about a novel I was writing, It’s Never Over. He had been open and generous, but at this café I had also had a painful experience with him. I had called on him late one night, when he had just come back from a Montmartre nightclub where he had been very drunk and had got into a spot. In spite of Zelda’s desperate admo-nitions he had insisted on coming back out with me into the night to the Deux Magots. At midnight the terrace was crowded.
Fitzgerald, his shirt open, his hat askew, his face a ghastly ashen shade, had the earnestly sober manner of a drunk, and I could see that Americans at the café had recognized him. There he was, the golden boy, the drunk. They were laughing at him because, when it came time to settle up for our drinks, he insisted on paying and his franc notes kept falling to the ground and I kept solemnly picking them up. I hated the gloating curiosity in the faces of the tourists.
So I was afraid, approaching that café, that I would see the ashen-faced ghost of Fitzgerald coming across the square to join me as we sat down. But it wasn’t like that at all. Nothing looked right. A building near the café was being renovated, workmen were chis-elling and pounding. The terrace was crowded with rubber-neck-ing tourists as the Dôme used to be crowded after Hemingway wrote about it in The Sun Also Rises. I felt uncomfortable. Within a few minutes I was asking myself, “What am I doing here?” It seemed incredible that I could have imagined the ghost of André Gide, or Fitzgerald could have come barging through the tables.
I couldn’t believe there were writers, painters, poets in this crowd, and with that incredible snobbery of the man lost in his own world, and feeling he belonged to better days, I wanted to move on. Then I was held there by the sudden realization that it was not true that this was my first return to the Quarter. In writing my book, That Summer in Paris, I had relived those relationships with my friends so intensely, with the place coming so alive in my mind, that this visit had become like a trip to a theater after the play had finished.
We went walking along the rue de l’Odeon to see if the store, Shakespeare and Co. that was Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, was still around. Along the way I tried to pick out the lamppost Fitzgerald had used as a desk wh
en he had given me his wallet as something to remember him by. He had scratched his name on it with a penknife, but I could not find the post. And I didn’t want to fool myself into thinking that I had found the post. Though it would have made a comforting story. Then, at the bookstore, the owner told me that Sylvia Beach’s desk was still there.
“Well, let’s see,” I said. Her store had been a meeting place, where you left your address, and people from out of town, wanting to look you up, would get in touch with Sylvia Beach who presided busily behind her desk. There had also been a backroom where a friend like James Joyce could be looked after, or hidden away. Now, I couldn’t imagine I was in the same store. Maybe I wasn’t. And the back room! The sacred grove! It seemed to be a storage room. Approaching the desk where a young fellow sat, I stood silent for a moment, then I said solemnly, “This isn’t Sylvia Beach’s desk. I remember that desk very well.” Looking at me blankly for a moment, the owner said finally, “No, it isn’t. That desk was disposed of quite a while ago.”
Back on the Right Bank and in the hotel room I suffered from a grim sense of air-conditioned isolation and disappointment. I kept thinking, “Who do I know now in Paris?” It was plain I was not going to have the old ghosts gathering around me bringing happy tears to my eyes. Everything had flattened out, we were going to be alone! Well, I knew my son’s close friend, John Montague, the Irish poet, lived in Paris and he was Beckett’s friend, and I knew Mavis Gallant, and my old friend William Saroyan was reported to be living here. Already my mind was seeking a new Paris. But where did these friends live? How could they be found? Soon, through the hotel, we were in touch with a young lady who said, yes, she thought she could make the connections. That buoyed me up. And at least I had Montague’s phone number. I called. But no one answered.
That Summer in Paris Page 23
