Later that night, for a reason I did not try to explain to myself, I did not want to go over to Montparnasse. Loretto and I wandered around the Madeleine and the Place Vendôme, poking into corners, as if we felt that in the old days we had cheated ourselves by dwelling so much just in Montparnasse. Kidding ourselves in this way, we avoided going back to our old haunts. “Things really look just the same!” I said to Loretto. “Don’t they?”
“It’s the same. Only no one is here,” she said.
“No one who means anything to us, anyway,” I said.
“It’s like coming into town and finding everyone is out of town,” she said.
We loafed around St. Honoré, liking the little fashion shops, then past a movie house where a Jerry Lewis picture was doing line-up business. The French like Jerry Lewis. There are aspects of French taste that I have never understood. We ambled back to the hotel where I asked if there were any phone messages. None. But who had my name to call? It had started to rain. Then, as we sat disconsolately in the spacious empty lobby, Loretto suddenly asked: “How about going to the Coupole?” It was nearly midnight and pouring rain, and in the mood I was in, deserted even by my Paris ghosts who had been so alive in my mind, I thought it would be a rather forlorn occasion, finding myself back on the Boulevarde Montparnasse at midnight in the rain, but . . . “Okay,” I said, “let’s go,” and we got into a taxi. In ten minutes we had crossed the river and were back at Raspail and Montparnasse.
Every day, just before noon when we were young, we used to come walking along Montparnasse from the rue de la Santé where we lived and have our breakfast on the terrace of the Coupole. Breakfast would often last some two hours, for friends, passing on the street, would see us and join us. It used to be an international café. Only occasionally did a French writer come there. But American movie stars visiting Paris would manage to spend an evening sitting at the Coupole, and then dozens of citizens, patrons just for that evening, would file slowly by the great star’s table. And there had been that one evening, that beautiful evening when James Joyce had invited us to his house, and afterwards feeling exhilarated, we had come to the Coupole, and in the bar where there had been music and Loretto had done a solo dance on a table and a tall young Serbian count had asked who she was. Told that her husband was sitting at the bar, he had bowed to me and formally presented Loretto with one red rose. And now all these years later, entering the Coupole once again, and feeling morose, all I could think of was, “Where did that Serbian get that red rose?”
I said to Loretto, “The first meal we ever had was right here at the Coupole. Come on. I’ll show you the spot,” and I led the way through the stern waiters in their tuxedos to the table. “I remember this for good reason. It was at this table on our first day on the Left Bank that I learned a little Paris restaurant trick. Our first mistake had been that we had adhered to our Toronto dining habits.
At six-thirty, ready for dinner, we entered the Coupole, and were surprised at the absence of patrons. We decided the place wasn’t doing very well. I remember we ordered a mixed grill, and we went on talking. We had a lot to talk about. Things were happening. We were beginning to meet people who knew me. In about twenty minutes the waiter brought in a big covered silver dish, and standing beside me, he removed the cover. I looked up at him. “Merci,” I said. He stood there, I thought, somewhat stupidly, then turned away with his tray to the service table and got some hot plates. But out of the corner of my eye I had caught the expression on his face. Disdain! He was full of disdain. He had even shrugged to another waiter. Well, I got the point. When he had held out that tray I should have scrutinized it with a gimlet eye, not a mere “thank you” glance. I should have examined every scrap of meat in that mixed grill, frowning doubtfully at some cuts, hesitating over others, perhaps complaining that a chop looked a bit overdone, one couldn’t be sure, and invited the waiter to engage in weighing the merits of the cooking of the chop; or perhaps even sending the whole dish back for some extra touch from the chef. I had simply accepted the dish. Therefore I had had to also accept the man’s waiterly contempt for a country boy. Well, never again did I make that mistake – my Coupole mistake.
But standing there by our table, the waiter was wondering what we were going to do, whether we were going to sit down. I didn’t feel at home. I felt ill at ease. Familiar faces wouldn’t come to mind: they weren’t even in my heart; so I began to look around at those who were on the terrace just as I would have done years ago. A regrettably young crowd! No, not at all. Most of them were of the age we had been when we sat there. But not an American or Englishman. No glamour girls from Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar; they looked like girls who lived in the Quarter. I noticed that everyone was speaking French, and then I realized with delight that the French had recaptured the Coupole. Why did this give me the pleasure of an important revelation?
Well, in the Nineties, and before World War One, the big cafés on the Boul Mich had been taken over by the English. In our day in Paris, the Boul Mich cafés had reverted to the students. Now the Coupole had become a spoke on the wheel: another life than the one I had known had come around. Everything looked the same yet everything was different. I began to laugh to myself. I felt a crazy exuberant exhilaration. There were no ghosts around in the Quarter, no one was missing anyone. No one was regretting that some figure had died. No one cared. This was the new life. It was something to look at freshly, and wonder what could happen if you were here among these people. The snake of the past was scotched: only new things could be here for me now. So at that hour, at the Coupole while it rained, I found I wanted to laugh about the old crowd, talk about them, keep remembering, trying to see the crowd without a moment confusing us with what was going on now. I was eager to be back in the Quarter tomorrow, especially if there was sunlight.
In my eager new laughing mood, I found I couldn’t go to bed. I had to wander around a little near the hotel, in the streets washed by the rain that had stopped. I noticed one remarkable change. The hookers in this expensive hotel neighbourhood operated with a new distinction. In the old days, a man with a car would cruise along and pick up a girl. Now, on rue de Castiglione, all the hookers had their own cars. A neat little car had passed me several times. Finally, it stopped, the girl smiled. That was how I got the hang of the system. In the next half hour, while I was standing at the hotel entrance, little car after little car drove up, a nice plump well-dressed executive American would get out, lean in and kiss the girl, and come into the hotel, and the girl, turning the car around, would patrol up and down the street again.
Next day, in the strong sun of early afternoon we were back in the Quarter, and soon Loretto was sitting at our old all-night café, the Select. I stood out on the pavement looking at her till she started to laugh. She could have been sitting on that very spot years ago. Often, by herself like this, too. It was there she would meet Hemingway and me on the days when we went boxing, and Hemingway would put down his boxing bag and say, “Loretto, you’re drinking Pernod. You shouldn’t be drinking that stuff,” and then he would sit with us until he had to go home. Now, looking across the road at the Coupole I seemed to see young Buffy Glasco, a young faun, coming across the road with his loping stride. This had been our café between the hours of nine-thirty and midnight.
Over to the left was the terrace where we used to sit with Edward Titus, who was the publisher of The Black Manikin Press. He was married to Helena Rubenstein. Every week Helena Rubenstein would come over from the Right Bank and join us. The coat! “You remember the beautiful coat, Loretto?” Titus had asked if we would like to go with Madame Rubenstein to the Paul Poiret fashion opening. Poiret was the fashionable dressmaker of the day. I couldn’t go. Loretto went with Madame Rubenstein. She came home at about dinnertime with a beautiful black velvet coat trimmed with squirrel, as beautiful a coat as I had ever seen. I said, “Where did you get that coat?”
“It’s mine now,” she said laughing, and told me that when a model had worn i
t in the show she had cried: “Oh, I just love that coat,” and Madame Rubenstein, a practical woman, had said, “How much could you pay on a coat?”
“Well, a hundred dollars,” Loretto said.
With a shrug Madame Rubenstein, calling the director, had said, “Give her the coat for a hundred. She likes it.” And he gave her the coat, and we never knew how many hundreds it did cost. We just thanked God that Madame Rubenstein was a lover of the arts, and that night Loretto had worn her velvet coat to our café.
The woman we called Madame Select, who had very black hair and a solid body, shrewdly watched over the café cash register, and all her clients, too. Across the road in the Coupole I had learned my lesson about an appreciative scrutiny of the food being served to you. At the Select, I learned that too devastating an inspection of a dish can cause disruption.
My friend Robert McAlmon, of the City of Paris, publisher – at least that was how he had described himself on the fly leaf of all the books he published – had joined us one night at about ten. Bob drank too much. He despised all people who did not drink too much. When he had money, and he had a lot (he was married to the daughter of one of the richest men in England), he had helped Hemingway. He had published writers who couldn’t get published, and was the close friend of James Joyce. He had fallen out with Hemingway who, when speaking to me about Bob, had always referred to him as “Your friend, McAlmon.” On this night, though deep in the drink, he was navigating beautifully: in fact, he was in good enough shape to be hungry. He ordered a Welsh rarebit. After the dish had been brought to him he tasted it and commanded the waiter to summon Madame Select. When she came smiling, ready to greet old friends, McAlmon, his lip twisting in his familiar expression of disdain, raised the dish, the Welsh rarebit. “This is not good,” he said.
“But what is the matter with it? I cooked that myself,” she said.
“Incredible,” he said. “You should take it back to the toilet where it obviously came from.”
Quivering with rage Madame Select ordered him to leave the café and never come back. But if McAlmon was banished, then we were banished, too, we said. She didn’t care. We left.
The Select became an embarrassment to us. We used to pass every evening at nine. Titus would be there, looking unhappy, the head waiter would bow to us, we would bow, but pass on. Each night, Titus grew more exasperated and finally he summoned Madame Select. I don’t know what he said, but that night the head waiter came out to the sidewalk, bowed, insisted on shaking hands with us and said he had a message from Madame Select. If our friend McAlmon would join us there at the Select, she would like to buy us a drink.
Those ridiculous little incidents! Everything that happened seems amusing now. And looking around the corner, Montparnasse and Raspail, which had been reclaimed by the French, it seemed incredible that it had once been a crowded lighted place at the crossroads of international letters in the western world. Writers from all nations had dropped in, and what seemed extraordinary as I stood there, was that we all had believed that it was a great period, believed that we, better than any editor in New York or London, knew when a young writer was great. We took it for granted that Joyce was the greatest writer in the language, that the young Hemingway was great, and Ezra Pound the greatest of poets. Many years have passed and the astonishing thing is those names, those Montparnasse names, have grown bigger. I could see, walking the streets again, that the cocksureness, the arrogance, the pontifications we shared, and certainly no one was more unyieldingly assertive in his opinion than I, was a mark of the extraordinary youthful vitality of the time.
Of course, there had been hundreds of poets and painters and prose writers haunting the little bars and dance halls who are not even ghosts now, yet I swear, and such now is my faith in that milieu, that if they had been taken seriously in the Quarter – then, they had to have had some real talent. And women’s liberation, sexual liberation, gay power – that was just part of the scene: how could I get excited about these things years later.
But what about the strange fate of Scott Fitzgerald? I found myself thinking of Fitzgerald and the night when we had had dinner in the Café des Lilas, which is some distance from the Coupole on Montparnasse, going over toward the Observatoire. It had been the most romantic of old cafés, with tables under the trees and street musicians always playing and I used to think that the line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises about this café, “And there was Marshal Ney waving his sword among the green horse chestnut leaves,” had summed up gaily and beautifully the temperament of the time. But now, though the statue of Marshal Ney was still there, where were the horse chestnut trees? It took me a while to figure it out. The Lilas had become an expensive and quietly elegant restaurant, and part of the old terrace, where there had been chestnut trees, was included now in the enclosed restaurant. Tonight the dinner crowd was wildly different from the old crowd. The men, solid, subdued, grey-haired French businessmen with young women. Appolinaire! Cocteau! They would not have been at home here. Not with these faces. The table, the green, where we had sat with Fitzgerald on many a night was gone.
We had spent one afternoon with Fitzgerald at the Ritz Bar drinking champagne cocktails and when we had parted he had said he was taking Mary Blair, an actress who had been Edmund Wilson’s second wife, to dinner, but what café would we be sitting at around nine-thirty. We had said the Café des Lilas, and around nine, with the musicians playing under the trees, Fitzgerald and Mary Blair had joined us. Fitzgerald, only charmingly drunk, and he could be the most loveable and charming of men, had on an expensive ivory-coloured felt hat. Growing sentimental as the evening wore on he insisted on giving me that hat. He kept putting it on my head, refusing to keep it when I took it off. Finally I left it on my head, but when we were leaving Loretto said firmly, “That’s a beautiful hat, Scott. You must not give it away like this,” and she firmly took the hat from my head and put it on Scott and we left.
Since those days, no matter his personal despair and humiliation, the Fitzgerald stock has zoomed. But what did I think of his work then? And now? In the beginning I had thought The Great Gatsby a beautiful book. I still think it is a beautifully written book. When I first read Tender Is the Night, I had thought the last third of the book was slightly out of focus. I still think so. He had worked too hard on it. Edmund Wilson said to me in the sixties, “Surely those two books, the ones I have mentioned – will stand up.” I told him I had reread Tender Is the Night and felt about it as I had done in the beginning. Later, he wrote me and said he was inclined to agree. Now, it seems to me that the tireless professors, feeding the Fitzgerald legend, treating him like a river god, have no taste at all. They commit the cardinal sin against Fitzgerald. They don’t know when he was good and when he was third-rate, and so he is probably laughing in his grave.
I thought of him again next afternoon going along Montparnasse on the long walk to the rue de la Santé, the place where we used to live. As we went, I couldn’t get accustomed to this old walk, nor to the Boulevarde. Cars. The parked cars. Always the cars. And to the west, high above Montparnasse, a ghastly great tombstone hotel, that one slab, violating the skyline. I didn’t know, as we got to the rue de la Santé, what I expected to feel looking up at the windows of the place that had been ours, where we had loved and I, sitting in my underwear on hot days, had written stories and my novel, It’s Never Over. The flat was almost directly opposite the prison gate. Why were there so many guards around the gate now? Up there, Hemingway had sat reading the New York Times waiting for me to get ready to go boxing. And those windows. Again I started to laugh.
On a Sunday afternoon, when Fitzgerald had dropped in, Loretto had her wet washed handkerchiefs pasted on the sun-hot window panes, and Fitzgerald had been fascinated. She had peeled them off for him, showing him how stiff they were and how they could be folded, and he, full of childlike wonder, had said he would use this in a story. So again we were laughing. Everything had become endearingly comical. There wasn�
�t even a touch of sadness in any of our memories. The whole place had become an exhilarating backdrop for good memories. Especially later, when we went back along Montparnasse, on past the Coupole, and turned the corner to the Falstaff.
The Falstaff had been a panelled English bar, a quiet place with a famous barkeep, Jimmie, and now, as soon as we entered, I wanted to burst out laughing again and say, “Well, where’s everybody?” The place looked fantastically the same. It was as if we had walked out only two nights ago. There was the shiny oak bar, the tables. This was the bar Hemingway and I often came to after boxing, and if his mouth was cut – it always seemed to be cut – he would say to Jimmie, “As long as Morley can keep my mouth bleeding I’ll always have him for a friend.” And now sitting on the stool where I used to sit, I asked the barkeep if he knew my friend, the Irish poet, John Montague, and he said he knew him but he hadn’t seen him recently. Troubled, superstitious for a moment, I wondered, Why can’t I reach Montague? Why don’t I hear from Saroyan? And Mavis Gallant? What is the matter with the hotel, their bureau called Celebrity Service? Why does no one want to see me?
In this time of half-mad exhilaration with my memories, I became aware that in these places I could also have puzzling poignant regrets. Opposite the Gar Montparnasse there used to be a restaurant called the Trianon. We had dined there with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. We had had a beautiful night there with McAlmon and James Joyce and his wife Nora. Around eleven, when we were leaving to drink at Joyce’s house, McAlmon and Loretto and Nora Joyce had gone ahead, crossing the wide cobblestoned boulevard and I, walking with Joyce and talking, had forgotten he was blind, then suddenly I became aware he wasn’t with me. I looked around. Taxis were whizzing by. He was standing alone, in the middle of the road, wildly swinging his cane. Crying out, I leaped back to take his arm. And now the Trianon was gone, and as I stood there trying to pick out that place on the cobblestones where Joyce had stood abandoned, I felt regret. I don’t know why. Regret for what? It wasn’t like me. Time, time! Time as the enemy. The only enemy. The mocking enemy! And then, I became aware that I regretted, too, how young painters had gone out of my life and how I missed – here in Paris – seeing some kind of painting, bad or good, in the little shop windows. I used to think that everyone in Paris was a Sunday painter. Where were those shop windows now? And why had painting been so important to me then? Why did Matisse seem so right for me, and why, standing in the Luxembourg Art Gallery, did Cézanne seem able to tell me things about writers I wanted to hear? I regretted, too, that I had never really realized the wonder of the great avenues of chestnut trees as I saw them now on the boulevarde Arrago, and in the Luxembourg Garden. I regretted that a perverse snobbery in those days had inhibited me from exploring Montmarte: I had dismissed it as a place belonging to tourists. But these weren’t lost things; they were just missed things, things I would like to go on with now.
That Summer in Paris Page 24
