Chapter 4

DECEMBER 1932

ROYAL VICTORIA HOSPITAL

MONTREAL

I am taking up this book again four whole years later, only anxious to preserve its continuity. Here I am, in an advanced state of tuberculosis, waiting for the final operation that will mean either life or death: since I refuse to entertain any view of the latter, but also since I know my survival is mainly a matter of luck, I would like to continue my record of those years—the years in which I really lived—before the onset of death or the inevitable dullness of a mature outlook: this is to be the book of my youth, my golden age. I have a pen, six blank oilcloth-covered scribblers, perfect mental clarity, freedom from pain, and there’s a whole month before me. And so I resume.

I took Robert Desnos’s advice and for the next week studied all the surrealist work I could get hold of, finding most of it in a little bookshop on the rue Jacques-Callot off the rue de Seine. From this study I emerged with my whole purpose altered. I was not only dismayed by the scope and brilliance that the surrealist writers showed and that I could not hope to equal but was also struck, in a contrary way, by a certain sameness and monotony of treatment and even of syntax in their work, above all by the reiteration of the heavy mallet-like grammatical constructions of Ducasse—a positive trade mark of the surrealist style—where an endless number of out-of-the-way objects were placed in apposition to adjectives and verbs to which they had no relation but that of surprise.

‘I think I’ll go back to prose,’ I told Graeme, ‘and drop surrealism.’

‘Most of it’s pretty fake, isn’t it? Automatic writing, indeed. It smells of the lamp though. But what are you going to do with all those first lines of surrealist poems? They’re too good to destroy. Let me see them.’ An hour later he had turned them into a Shakespearean sonnet.

That evening I began the first chapter of this book, and when anyone asked me what I was doing in Paris I was now able to say I was writing my Memoirs. The reactions ranged from sympathy to good-natured derision. Adolf Dehn was enthusiastic. ‘I’ll do a portrait of you for it,’ he said.

After this burst of creativity I did nothing for a whole month. It was now spring, and much pleasanter to go to Montparnasse every day or wander about the city. I was more and more enslaved by the beauty of Paris. Merely to ride downtown in an open taxi, over the smooth streets paved with tarred wooden blocks, was a great pleasure. Almost every morning we would take a dash through the Place de la Concorde, thrilling to the absence of traffic regulations and the wild blowing of horns, and then find our way on foot back to Montparnasse for breakfast at the Dôme or the Select.

Soon Graeme and I simply spent the warm sunny days of spring wandering about the odd and archaic parts of Paris—the rue Mouffetard, the Place de la Contrescarpe, the rue des Tanneries, the Halle aux Vins, the rue de la Gaîté, the Alésia district and the little network of streets around the Place St Michel—the rue Galande, the Passage des Hirondelles, the rue de la Huchette, and the churches of Saint-Séverin and Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. The Grands Boulevards, Montmartre, Passy, and the Champs-Elysées we agreed to regard as out of bounds, and we absolutely refused to enter the Louvre. Once, having made a mistake in the mazes of the subway, we surfaced at the Invalides and were so appalled by the sight of Napoleon’s tomb that we fled back down the steps.

It has always been the Paris of André Breton and Léon-Paul Fargue that I have loved; and, greatly impressed by the eclectic double-tongued construction of Arthur Symons’ translation of Les Fleurs du mal, I wrote a sonnet to Paris in the same hybrid manner, which was later published, together with ‘Nobody’s Fool’, in Bilge, a bright irrational little magazine edited by Arthur Loewenstein.

Very soon we were habitués of the Falstaff Bar on the rue du Montparnasse, only a few doors down from the Jules-César. It seemed on the whole better than the Dôme, which was often too noisy, than the Dingo and the Strix, which were too full of alcoholics and Scandinavians respectively, than the College Inn, which though run by Jed Kiley and having a genuine Red Indian barman was too favourite a meeting-place for Americans who really belonged in Harry’s New York Bar. Though all these places were amusing and comfortable the Falstaff gained a special charm from the contrast between its rather stuffy oak panelling and padded seats and the haphazard way it was run by the bartender Jimmy Charters, an ex-prizefighter, and the waiter Joe Hildesheim, who came from Brooklyn and was known as Joe the Bum. The Falstaff was owned jointly by two Belgian gentlemen who also shared a mistress, a very plump handsome grey-eyed woman called Madame Mitaine. The three of them sat quietly in the ingle of the fireplace every evening and did not interfere in any way, being content to count the cash when the bar closed at two o’clock in the morning. Madame Mitaine would then enter the figures in a little red notebook. Jimmy and Joe ran the place on the principle that about every tenth drink should be on the house, so that regular clients, and still more the casual visitors, were constantly being surprised by a whispered intimation that there was nothing to pay.

I saw Daphne and Angela occasionally and found them as good company as ever. Graeme’s affair with Caridad continued on a friendly but sporadic basis. They were both such casual people, however, that it had not much dramatic nourishment; also, she had no money at all and would take none from him and was obliged to sleep quite often with serious unsympathetic men in order to pay the rent on her little apartment, which was in a lovely courtyard full of trees and birds, just off the rue Delambre.

At this time Graeme interrupted his planning of The Flying Carpet long enough to write a short story about a French-Canadian farmer whose wife left him: it was set in the village of Baie d’Urfé outside Montreal but I can remember nothing else—except that the characters used to play three-handed whist on a table they set up at the roadside under the street-lamp in order to save electricity. It was called ‘Deaf Mute’ and he sent it to Eugene Jolas who at once accepted it for transition and asked Graeme to meet him at the Café Lipp.

Graeme could hardly believe it: this was the first story he had ever published, outside of some juvenilia in the McGill Fortnightly Review, and the fact that it was to appear in transition, along with the latest instalment of James Joyce’s Work in Progress, which was then coming out piecemeal, was overwhelming. Moreover both of us had always thought transition the best review in the world and had eagerly read what few copies found their way to Montreal. We had wondered at the grace and daring of the European surrealist work, at the astonishing rhythms and texture of Joyce’s new work, and at the crusading spirit that impelled Jolas to publish a manifesto, signed by almost all his contributors, supporting Charlie Chaplin’s natural right to engage in the odd sexual techniques that were at that time being alleged by his wife as one of her grounds for divorce; in fact we liked everything in transition but the work of Gertrude Stein, which seemed to me (as indeed it still does) pretentious and intolerably arch. Here we had first read Aragon, Fargue, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Eluard, Soupault, Drieu La Rochelle and a dozen others, all enthusiastically translated by either Jolas or his wife; here we had first seen reproductions of Mirò, Arp, Klee, Ernst, Labisse, Tanguy, and de Chirico, painters then almost unknown in North America and absolutely so in Canada; here we had learned of the bowdlerized pirating of Ulysses by Samuel Roth and laughed at Elliot Paul’s burlesque of Hemingway. Now Graeme, at the age of twenty-one, was to appear in the same gallery.

While he was gone I started on the second chapter of these memoirs but could not get past the first few lines and soon gave up. I still believed rather too much in the necessity of being ‘in the right mood’ to write and didn’t understand that the mood can be induced with a little effort; which is not to say I believe anything worthwhile comes from simply sitting down at a desk every day at a certain hour and writing—as Shaw and Bennett claim it does.

When I met Graeme at the Falstaff in the evening he told me of Jolas and his wife. ‘He is short, dark, shiny-faced and full of verve,’ he said, ‘and she is six feet tall, rather plain, very sensitive and full of a charming and indiscriminate enthusiasm for all forms of modern art. He wanted to know all about the present condition of literature in Canada and who were our best authors, so I mentioned Raymond Knister, Arthur Smith, Frank Scott, and Leo Kennedy. We are both invited to a party in the suburbs tomorrow night. James Joyce may be there. We’d better take a bath.’

It was so complicated reaching the party by subway, train, and taxi that we arrived almost an hour late, and as there was no one we knew, we saw we would have to talk to each other to begin with. So we mounted an attack on the hidden sentimentality of the poetry of E. E. Cummings, stabbing the air with our forefingers and capping each other’s quotations, and so gathered a small anglophone audience who at last joined in the discussion. Among them was the famous British novelist Diana Tree who had just severed her connection with the editorial staff of the magazine Hemisphere and had come to Paris with the baby boy who was one of its visible fruits. She was tall, blonde, beautiful, and carelessly dressed, with a large nose, a humorous mouth, and blue-grey eyes that were always moving. I had never cared greatly for her work but felt an immediate liking for her that seemed to be returned. Taking me by the arm she introduced me to a very slender man with a great tiered pompadour who turned out to be the surrealist poet Georges Pol, author of Circoncision du Coeur; he was suffering from such a rash of acne that he seemed almost speechless from diffidence and discomfort. I learned later that he was her current cavalier.

‘Why, do you have both?’ He seemed delighted. ‘But of course, you have the département of Québec. Well then, who is the greatest poet of Québec?’

‘In the last twenty-five years you have a choice between Morin, the Canadian Gautier, and Choquette, the Canadian Hugo, and Nelligan, the Canadian Verlaine.’

‘We have Lampman, the Canadian Keats, and Carman, the Canadian Swinburne. We also have Smith, who is sometimes hailed as the Canadian Yeats but whom I prefer to all of them.’

‘May I ask if you yourself are already the Canadian avatar of someone else, and if so of whom?’

‘So far I have not donned any mantle at all, but it was not easy. This is probably why I embraced surrealism.’

I soon learned from Diana Tree that Joyce was not coming to the party. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘Jolas may have intimated he was, but the fact is that Joyce goes nowhere. Nora does not allow him.’

‘How goes the life of literature?’ he asked. ‘But let me take you to André Breton. He is in good form tonight.’

Breton, who was holding forth to a small group of disciples, was stout, handsome, and had an even more imposing pompadour. He was talking, with extraordinary force and rapidity, of crime.

‘Peguy has assured us,’ he was saying, ‘that the sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. He is probably right, though that is of no importance. What is really important is that the criminal is at the very heart of the law. It’s obvious: the law could not exist without the criminal. But the debt is so seldom acknowledged. This enormous, majestic and complicated apparatus of law—its pretentious, portentous buildings; its army of policemen, detectives, bailiffs, turnkeys; the panoply of its actioning, with its robes, bibs, coats of arms, maces, fancy linen, and so forth; the fortunes and honours accruing to its practitioners; the fund of learning, effort and ambition it expends and sets in motion—all this would disappear in a flash but for the poor wretch on whom it all depends, the criminal, the poor stupid crook, the shifty-eyed devil in the dock. Make no mistake, the criminal is the prime benefactor of the law. To borrow a phrase from the science of economics, the criminal is one of the most important consumers in our society: he consumes law. And he goes unrecognized and unthanked.’

‘He gets no more recognition or gratitude,’ said a short man who had compensated for his baldness by a pair of long sideburns, and who I learned later was Léon-Paul Fargue, ‘than the sick man does from the doctor. Ah, when I think of the good doctor as we know him nowadays, with his large income, his honoured place in our society, his godship in the hospital, his ghastly cottage in the country, and how all this depends on a wretch not unlike your criminal, André—on the poor, terrified, pain-racked creature in the public ward. Where would the doctor be without him? He would have to find other work.’

‘Yes,’ said Breton, arranging his hair, ‘I envisage a millennium in which lawyers will be reduced to the condition of village secretaries, and doctors to being dispensers of euthanasia and abortion.’

Maria Jolas approached me and asked if I would like to be presented to Narwhal, the famous photographer and surrealist painter.

I found Narwhal much more sympathetic than the literary surrealists. Tall and thin, with large horn-rimmed glasses and a talon-shaped nose like an owl’s, he walked pigeon-toed, was dressed in black, wore his hair in a neat bang, and was speaking with great wit in a quiet nasal voice that retained a strong Brooklyn accent.

‘So this man from the U.S. Internal Revenue,’ he was saying, ‘he wants to know how much dough I made in the past year. “I don’t know, I don’t keep records, I’m an ahtist,” I said.—“How much do you get for taking a person’s picture?”—“It depends. Sometimes I get a lot of dough. The amount varies: sometimes nothing, sometimes I pay the subject myself.”—“Well, how much does it average?”—“I told you, I don’t keep records. If I did I wouldn’t have time to take pictures.”—“You mean you don’t have a bank-account—a big-name photographer like you are? You don’t keep your money in your pocket, do you?”—“Yes, that’s just where I do keep it. Not in a bank, good God no. What would I do walking in and out of a bank?”—“Well,” he says, “as a citizen of the United States, you got to pay income tax.”—“That’s what the law says, I know.”—“Look, mister,” he says, “you’re making us a lot of work.”—“Sure,” I said, “but you’re making a regular salary out of it. What’s more, you’re a man that understands figures, you can count, while I’m an ahtist. So you go ahead and have your office figure out how much I might owe you, and then we’ll see. After all, if you nailed Al Capone I guess I shouldn’t give you too much trouble.” So he went away.’

He peered at me solemnly. ‘I don’t know, the matter is still pending. They write me letters now and then.’

After a while he said thoughtfully, ‘The experience was quite fruitful. It made a lot of things plain to me. I devised a sculpture on the subject, treating it abstractly—not exactly a sculpture, not an objet trouvé. No, I suppose you might call it more of an artifact—two squares of black wood fastened together by a piece of old automobile chain. A very powerful thing, it turned out, with overtones of satire.’

He then told me of his idea of doing an imaginary portrait of the Marquis de Sade. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there was no portrait of that gentleman ever made, so I’ll have a free hand. I’m going to represent him as being real big and fat, as indeed he became towards the end of his days in the Charenton lunatic asylum, and make the face all out of blocks of prison stone, with the courtyard of the Bastille in the background and two or three desolate little figures staggering around inside the walls. Sade is perhaps the most interesting writer in France since Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. We’ll be hearing a lot about him very soon. He’s the forerunner of all the Freivögeln.’

‘They were at the mercy of his temperament. Of what philosopher or moralist can’t you say the same thing? Their masks are simply better adjusted than his, their rational and metaphysical apparatus is a little neater.’

Since then I have re-read all Sade’s books and agree with Narwhal’s view of him. It was certainly not the view of a simple ‘artist’, much less a photographer, and testified to a vision that was immediate, direct, naïve in the best sense, and quite unswayed by tradition or prejudice.

‘Would you like to meet Ford Madox Ford?’ he asked. ‘I understand you write, and he is a well-known English man of letters.’

Ford inclined graciously towards us from what seemed to be a height of about seven feet. His reputation, his high wheezing voice, and his walrus moustache were frightening until one saw his small twinkling eyes, which were full of kindness and curiosity.

‘You write poetry, my young friend,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you would mind my asking whether your poems are sad or joyous?’

‘Admirable. I was talking to Willie Yeats the other day,’ he said, ‘about the communication of joy in poetry. Why should it, we were both wondering, be so much more difficult—and therefore so much more seldom attempted—than the communication of sorrow? It is not so in prose. Dickens is at home in either joy or sorrow. Meredith excels in the former, as do the naturalists like White, Jefferies, Buckland and Waterton. But why is there so little joy in poetry?’

‘Yes, but only in the songs, my dear fellow. He knew that joy is something instantaneous, it cannot be held for more than a moment. One does not sift and handle the shining grains, one lets them pour out with a single gesture.’ His hand moved like a sower’s. ‘But Willie and I were asking ourselves what was the most joyous modern poem in English. And do you know, we couldn’t think. What is your opinion, my young friend? Come now, tell me.’ He placed his fingers together like a schoolmaster. ‘A joyous English poem.’

‘Shelley’s “Skylark”? Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty”? Of course they’re not exactly modern.’

‘Good try, good try! But no.’ He shook his head. ‘No, there’s something febrile, almost hysterical, in those two. They just won’t do. No,’ he repeated with enormous satisfaction, ‘there isn’t one. All modern poetic effusions of joy are definitely unbalanced. Very well. Now, if poetry expresses the reality of existence—as I believe, along with Willie Yeats, it does, and as I hope you will too, my young friend—it follows that the experience of joy is in the nature of a fever, of hysteria, and not a well-founded natural human experience or condition. Therefore we can say: joy itself is hysteria, a drunkenness, an unnatural state.’

‘Would you say that was why the French poet Baudelaire said, “Man, be always drunken”?’ asked Narwhal.

‘Undoubtedly. You’ve hit it. The poet, you see—who is essential, veritable man, as we know—is more at home in sorrow. And a further and irrefragable proof of this can be found in that dreadful hymn, “Jerusalem, my happy home”, which is sung by thousands of my benighted countrymen on Sundays.’

His logic was overpowering. Driving home later with Georges Pol, Diana Tree, and Graeme, I felt, moreover, that if neither he nor Yeats had been able to think of a joyous modern poem in English there could not be one, and I was further confirmed in my decision to stick to prose.