Today we’re meeting the white hope of North American literature,’ said Bob next morning. ‘His name is Callaghan, and he’s just come to town with a pisspot full of money from a book called Strange Fugitive. Have you read it?’
‘No,’ said Graeme. ‘But I know his stories in The New Yorker. Very fine and sophisticated. Just like Hemingway’s, only plaintive and more moral.’
‘Well, Fitzgerald says he’s good, so he’s probably lousy. Anyway he has a lot of dough, so we might get a dinner out of him. He’s Canadian too. What do you think he’s like?’
‘Well,’ said Graeme, ‘I see him as tall, thin, blond, cynical, in a pinstriped suit. It’s the way he writes anyway.’
‘Rats,’ said Bob, ‘that doesn’t scare me. I know these sophisticated New Yorker types. They’re just a bunch of arrivistes.’
However, he shaved carefully, running the razor up to his eyes, shined his shoes with his socks, and put on a new polka-dot bow tie before going to meet Callaghan at the hotel-room he was still keeping on the rue de Vaugirard.
‘Join us in the Coupole Bar around four,’ he said. ‘I’ll have him softened up by then. Sophisticated, what the hell! I’ve handled John Barrymore in my day. But look, for God’s sake, both of you get your hair cut.’
Graeme and I went to a barber shop and then idled around the quarter until four o’clock. We looked into the Coupole, the Dôme, the Select, and the Rotonde without seeing Bob; by five o’clock we had also done the Dingo, the College Inn, and the Falstaff, still without success. Coming from the Falstaff we saw Bob sitting with a couple at the little tabac on the corner. He hailed us and we sat down.
Morley Callaghan was short, dark, and roly-poly, and wore a striped shirt without a collar; with his moon face and little moustache he looked very like Hemingway; he had even the same shrewd little politician’s eyes, the same lopsided grin and ingratiating voice. His wife was also short and thickset, and wore a coral dress and a string of beads. Both of them were so friendly and unpretentious that I liked them at once. It was like meeting people from a small town. We apologized for not finding them sooner, saying we had looked in the Coupole.
‘I didn’t like that Coupole, it’s too much of a clip-joint,’ said Callaghan. ‘The drinks here are just as good, and a lot cheaper. Eh, Loretto?’
‘Yes, about fifteen per cent less, Morley. And you have just the same view here. My, this is a lovely city, but the French are right after you for all they can get. You find that, Mr Taylor?’
‘Yes,’ said Graeme. ‘You get used to it.’
‘Like hell we will,’ said Morley. ‘Right now we’re looking for an apartment. The hotel we’re at charges like the dickens.’ Suddenly changing the subject, he asked, ‘Say, how do you get to meet James Joyce? McAlmon, you know him, I’m told.’
‘You’re damn right I do,’ said Bob. ‘But what do you want to do in Paris, go around like a literary rubberneck meeting great men? I’m a great man too, for God’s sake. And here I am. Ask me your questions. I’ll even give you my autograph.’
‘You’re a good writer,’ said Morley, all his strength of character appearing, ‘but you’re not Joyce—not yet. What the hell,’ he went on, ‘this guy Joyce is great. Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century. I wouldn’t compare myself to him. Why should you?’
‘Oh,’ said Bob, ‘now you’re getting modest. Well, you can’t fool me. You think you’re one hell of a writer, why don’t you admit it? Why do you give me all this crap about Joyce? You’re more important to yourself. If you think so much of Joyce, why don’t you write like him instead of your constipated idol Hemingway? Lean, crisp, constipated, dead-pan prose. The fake naïve.’
‘Now, McAlmon, let’s go into this properly. First thing, I don’t write like Joyce for the simple reason that I can’t, it’s not my line. But I can admire him, can’t I?’
‘No, you can’t. You can’t admire Joyce and write like Hemingway. If you do, you’re a whore.’
Morley reddened. ‘You’re a funny guy. I don’t know if you’re talking seriously, but let me tell you I write as well as I can, and though you may not like my stuff...’
‘I’ve never read your stuff. I don’t read The New Yorker.’
‘Well then what in heck are you talking about? Perhaps you haven’t read Joyce either.’
‘Right! I haven’t read Joyce or Hemingway. I don’t have to, I know them—and I know you too, Morley, and I like you. Especially when you get mad. I know you’re a good writer. The test of a good writer is when he gets mad.’
‘Are you boys all through arguing?’ said Loretto. ‘Shall we all go and have supper somewhere?’
‘Sure, but none of these clip-joints. McAlmon, where’s a good cheap restaurant? Fitzgerald told me you know Paris inside out.’
‘My generation doesn’t eat supper,’ said Bob. ‘I’m having another drink. Waiter, five whiskies and water!’
The conversation continued in the same way. Bob was unreasonable and outrageously rude; Morley remained patient and serious. At last things became boring and I let my attention wander.
A little old man in rags came by, holding up a sheaf of pink papers. ‘Guide des poules de Paris!’ he cried in a shrill quavering voice. ‘All the girls in Paris, only ten francs! The names, the addresses!’ He broke into a tittering sing-song, smacking his lips. ‘Ah, les jolies pou-poules, fi-filles de joie de Paris! Achetez, achetez le Guide Rose! Toutes les jolies petites pou-poules de Paris! Dix francs, dix francs!’
Two Americans sitting nearby began to laugh. The little man pounced on them, fluttering his pink sheets.
‘All the girls in Paris for only ten francs,’ one of them said. ‘It’s a bargain.’ He held out a blue ten-franc bill, the little man seized it, peeled off one of the pink sheets and ran away. The two men bent over the Guide Rose for several minutes. ‘Say, this is the real thing. Listen: “Pierrette gives aesthetic massage.” “Chez Suzy, everything a man wants.” “Visit Mademoiselle Floggi, in her Negro hut: specialities—”’
‘Boy, where do these girls hang out?’
‘Here are all the phone numbers—’
‘Man, these are just numbers—they don’t give the exchange...’
They both studied the sheet carefully, then one of them pointed to the foot of it in disgust. ‘No wonder there’s no exchange! Look, this goddamn thing was printed in 1910.’
‘Well for Christ’s sake. The little bastard!’
Loretto Callaghan was shaking her head at me. ‘Now isn’t that just like the French,’ she said. ‘Always cheating!’
‘Well, there goes your sophisticated New Yorker type,’ said Bob when Morley and Loretto had left in search of a cheap restaurant.
‘They’re both very nice,’ said Graeme. ‘He’s got brains and determination and a devoted wife. He’ll go far.’
‘Rats, he’s just a dumb cluck, an urban hick, a sentimental Catholic. All he’s got is a little-boy quality.’
‘I’ll bet he works like a dog,’ I said. ‘I wish I could.’
‘Don’t you ever work like he does, kid! Hard work never got anyone anywhere. A real writer just keeps on putting the words down! He gets the emotion straight, the scene, the quality of life—the way I do. Nuts to all that literary business.’
I thought of the inchoate maunderings of The Politics of Existence and said nothing. I was thinking that if Bob would only condescend to work, his books would be very fine. I see now, of course, that if he had done so they would be still worse than they were.
‘All this literary talk is boring,’ said Graeme. ‘It’s almost as bad as the chatter of poets—they’re all so earnest, smelling trends, clawing or kissing each other—’
‘Keep your skirts clean,’ said Bob. ‘That’s all a writer has to do.—Hello, Caridad, sit down and have a drink.’
‘Yes, I will. Graeme, my dear pussycat, you look very serious. You all do! You must stop it at once. And you must all come to a nice party tonight with me—a real party of poets and painters and writers.’
‘Not me,’ said Bob. ‘I know those lousy parties.’
‘Oh but this is a very distinguished party—and very, very wealthy. Our hostess will be the great American lady-writer, Miss Gertrude Stein.’
‘That old ham! You three go there and lap up the literary vomit. Not me.’
‘Let us have dinner first anyway,’ said Caridad. ‘You will have to pay for mine because I haven’t any money. But please, Bob, let us not have one of those awful ducks at the Coupole. We’ll go to a nice cheap place like Salto’s where I can eat a lot of spaghetti.’
We went around the corner to Salto’s, just above the Falstaff, famous for the size of its portions and its coarse red wine. Here the food was good; there was always a minestrone that was a meal in itself and a wonderful gâteau maison made of some kind of yellow cake filled with raisins and drenched with marsala. Caridad ate her way through a plate of anchovies, a bowl of minestrone, a mound of spaghetti, an osso buco, and the gâteau, chattering all the time; Bob toyed with a veal cutlet; Graeme and I had a fine spicy rabbit stew made with green peppers, celery and lima beans. We went to the Dôme for coffee.
‘Now,’ said Caridad, pouring a ten-cent rum into her coffee, ‘we shall go soon to Miss Gertrude Stein’s and absorb an international culture. Her parties are very well behaved and there are always plenty of rich men—which I find very agreeable. A girl must live. Bob, you must show yourself there—you, celebrated man of letters, publisher, man of the world. It will also make my own entrance so much more impressive—with three cavaliers. Come, it is only a few streets away—’
‘Rats, I know the place. I’ve been to her parties. Never again. Gertrude paid me to publish her lousy five-pound book and we’ve never been the same since. She thinks I held back some of the proceeds. No, you three run along.’
Although neither Graeme nor I cared for Gertrude Stein’s work, we really wanted to see the great woman. I was thinking too of how I would write my father about meeting her, and that (once he had checked her credentials with the English Department at McGill) he might just raise my allowance. The business of living on fifty dollars a month was becoming almost impossible: we were always short of money, we were never able to eat or drink enough, and while Bob was often generous it was apparent his own resources were running low and he would soon have to make another requisition on his father-in-law. As foreigners we could take no regular work, and while Graeme’s skill with the poker dice seldom failed, it often took him over an hour to win 100 francs and obliged him to endure as well the conversation of the dreariest types of American barfly; the worst of it was that he had to spend almost a quarter of his winnings drinking with them during his operations.
Accordingly we set off with Caridad down the boulevard Raspail in the plum-blue light of the June evening, arrived at the rue de Fleurus, and were greeted at the door by a deciduous female who seemed startled by the sight of Caridad.
‘Miss Toklas!’ Caridad cried affectionately. ‘It is so long since we have not met. I am Caridad de Plumas, you will remember, and these are my two young Canadian squires to whom I wish to give the privilege of meeting you and your famous friend. We were coming with Mr Robert McAlmon, but he is unavoidably detained.’
As she delivered this speech she floated irresistibly forward, Miss Toklas retreated, and we found ourselves in a big room already filled with soberly dressed and soft-spoken people.
The atmosphere was almost ecclesiastical and I was glad to be wearing my best dark suit, which I had put on to meet Morley Callaghan. I had begun to suspect that Caridad had not been invited to the party and all of us were in fact crashing the gate. But Caridad, whether invited or not, was in a few minutes a shining centre of the party: her charm coruscated, her big teeth flashed, her dyed hair caught the subdued light. She paid no further attention to Graeme or myself, and I understood that she was as usual looking for rich men.
The room was large and sombrely furnished, but the walls held, crushed together, a magnificent collection of paintings—Braques, Matisses, Picassos, and Picabias. I only recovered from their cumulative effect to fall under that of their owner, who was presiding like a Buddha at the far end of the room.
Gertrude Stein projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability; her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress, were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down. Her fine close-cropped head was in the style of the late Roman Empire, but unfortunately it merged into broad peasant shoulders without the aesthetic assistance of a neck; her eyes were large and much too piercing. I had a peculiar sense of mingled attraction and repulsion towards her. She awakened in me a feeling of instinctive hostility coupled with a grudging veneration, as if she were a pagan idol in whom I was unable to believe.
Her eyes took me in, dismissed me as someone she did not know, and returned to her own little circle. With a feeling of discomfort I decided to find Graeme and disappear: this party, I knew, was not for me. But just then Narwhal came up and began talking so amusingly that I could not drag myself away.
‘I have been reading the works of Jane Austen for the first time,’ he said in his quiet nasal voice, ‘and I’m looking for someone to share my enthusiasm. Now these are very good novels in my opinion. You wouldn’t believe it but here—among all these writers, people who are presumably literary artists—I can’t find anyone who has read her books with any real attention. In fact most of them don’t seem to like her work at all. But I find this dislike is founded on a false impression that she was a respectable woman.’
‘Jane Austen?’
‘I don’t mean to say she was loose in her behaviour, or not a veuhjin. I’m sure she was a veuhjin. I mean she was aristocratic, not bourgeoise, she was no creep, she didn’t really give a darn about all those conventions of chaystity and decorum.’
‘Well, her heroines did.’
‘Oh sure, they seem to, they’ve got to, or else there’d be no story. But Austen didn’t herself. Who is the heroine, the Ur-heroine of Sense and Sensibility? It’s Marianne, not Elinor. Of Pride and Prejudice? It’s the girl that runs off with the military man. What’s wrong with Emma? Emma.’
‘You mean Willoughby and Wickham are her real heroes?’
‘No, they’re just stooges, see? But they represent the dark lifeprinciple of action and virility that Austen really admired, like Marianne and Lydia stand for the life force of female letting-go. And when Anne Elliott falls for Captain Wentworth—you’ll notice he’s the third W of the lot—it’s the same thing, only this time he’s tamed. It’s a new conception of Austen’s talent which I formed yesterday, and which was suggested to me by the fact that Prince Lucifer is the real hero of Paradise Lost, as all the savants declare.’
This idea of Jane Austen as a kind of early D.H. Lawrence was new. Never had the value of her books been so confirmed as by this extraordinary interpretation of them: it was a real tribute.
‘Do you happen to know if there were any portraits of Austen made?’ he asked.
‘A water colour by a cousin, I think.’
‘Good! I guess it’s lousy then,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Because I’ve been thinking of doing an imaginary portrait of her too. I see her in a wood, in a long white dress. She’s looking at a mushroom. But all around her are these thick young trees growing straight up—some are black with little white collars and stand for ministers of the church and some are blue and stand for officers in the Royal English Navy. I’m also thinking of putting some miniature people, kind of elves dressed like witches and so forth, in the background—but I’m not sure.’
‘It sounds good.’
‘The focus of the whole thing will be the mushroom,’ he said. ‘It represents the almost overnight flowering of her genius—also its circumscribed quality, its suggestion of being both sheltered and a shelter—see?—and its economy of structure.’
‘An edible mushroom?’
‘You’ve got it. That will be the whole mystery of the portrait. The viewer won’t know and she won’t know either. We will all partake of Jane Austen’s doubt, faced with the appalling mystery of sex.’
We must have been talking with an animation unusual for one of Gertrude Stein’s parties, for several of the guests had already gathered around us.
‘You are talking of Jane Austen and sex, gentlemen?’ said a tweedy Englishman with a long ginger moustache. ‘The subjects are mutually exclusive. That dried-up lady snob lived behind lace curtains all her life. She’s of no more importance than a chromo. Isn’t that so, Gertrude?’
I was suddenly aware that our hostess had advanced and was looking at me with her piercing eyes.
‘Do I know you?’ she said. ‘No. I suppose you are just one of those silly young men who admire Jane Austen.’
Narwhal had quietly disappeared and I was faced by Miss Stein, the tweedy man and Miss Toklas. Already uncomfortable at being an uninvited guest, I found the calculated insolence of her tone intolerable and lost my temper.
‘Yes, I am,’ I said. ‘And I suppose you are just one of those silly old women who don’t.’
The fat Buddha-like face did not move. Miss Stein merely turned, like a gun revolving on its turret, and moved imperturbably away.
The tweedy man did not follow her. Leaning towards me, his moustache bristling, he said quietly, ‘If you don’t leave here this moment, I will take great pleasure in throwing you out, bodily.’
‘If you really want,’ I said, ‘I’ll wait outside in the street for three minutes, when I’ll be glad to pull your nose.’
I then made my exit, and after standing for exactly three minutes on the sidewalk (by which time I was delighted to find he did not appear), I took my way back to the Dôme. Graeme joined me there fifteen minutes later.
‘That’s the last party we go to without being invited,’ he said.