‘How did you get into these shenanigans?’ Bob wanted to know. ‘Couldn’t you find any work? I heard you were typing.’
‘The American writers all went home.’
‘What about Morley?’
‘Loretto does all his typing. Anyway they’ve gone back to Toronto.’
‘Did you see the story he wrote about you and Graeme and Stanley in This Quarter?’
“‘Now That April’s Here”? Not very good, was it? Rather nasty—and it’s full of holes.’
Bob was once more magnificently in funds and had sublet a large furnished apartment in the rue d’Assas. I was glad to join him there and said goodbye to Madame Godenot and Tom Cork the next day.
‘Sorry to see you go, kid,’ she said. ‘You made a real hit with the clients.’
‘I hope so. You still owe me 500 francs.’
‘Like hell I do. What for?’
‘That last show.’
‘I don’t remember a thing. Tom, is that right?’
‘Come on, Lolotte, have a heart.’
‘Listen to him. He goes into keeping and he wants money. Which of the old ladies is it? You’re the one should be giving me a cut.’
‘Let’s forget it. Give my love to everyone. It’s been nice knowing you.’
‘Now don’t go away like that. Here’s 100 francs. And let me give you a call some time. Don’t be proud, you never know when you’ll need a pal.’
‘Right,’ said Tom. ‘Part with a smile, I always say.’
Life in the rue d’Assas was wonderful. I liked best the steam heat. It seemed years since I had been properly warm in winter and able to soak myself for hours in a big bathtub. I also resumed the modern cultural thread by reading all the publications and manuscripts of Bob’s Contact Press—Williams’ Spring and All, Mary Butts’ Ashe of Rings, Marsden Hartley’s The Eater of Darkness, and Ken Sato’s The Yellow Jap Dogs. Faced with all this original work, I suspended my critical faculties altogether and enjoyed everything. I read these books the way I had once read Spenser to the music of Bach, opening my mind to all the resources of sound, rhythm and syntax, without judgement, embracing the effect of nuance, drowning myself in a feast of images and vowels, in a kind of sensuous verbal fog. I also began to eat heartily and was glad to see my legs filling out again. But with the removal of my worries and plenty of leisure, I was once again pursued by my thoughts and recollections of Mrs Quayle. I dreamed of her night and day.
‘What do you really think of Bill Williams’ poetry?’ Bob asked. ‘Sometimes I think it’s a lot of tripe. But he’s such a nice guy.’
‘I don’t like that flat Japanese style.’
‘I know. You like Keats and that kind of crap. Anything drenched in beauty. But Bill has got one hell of a technique. He can get a picture or a point across in five lines.’
‘But it’s always the same picture and the same point. Little negative things.’
‘He hits the spot every time.’
‘Like a fly-swatter.’
‘You don’t go for imagism.’
‘It’s too easy, naïve, sentimental, infantile. But perhaps poetry needs to get back to two-dimensional things—the wheelbarrow and the chickens. Just as long as it doesn’t stop there—with the image as an absolute. Even if it does, it’s better than the poetry of social comment.’
‘Balls to that. Anger, despair and history are the only materials of poetry. Ideas don’t belong. Who the hell cares what a poet thinks? His job is just to yell.’
Bob was writing a new long poem in which he was yelling louder than ever. It was a love poem full of frustration, agony, desire and scurrility and was almost impressive; the obscenity of the language was also striking. As usual he had a good title, ‘No for an Answer’; but he kept padding the poem by his favourite device of inserting prose extracts from catalogues and encyclopaedias, the lines being chopped up and set as verse.
‘It gives variety,’ he said. ‘Lets the reader breathe and look around a bit. Don’t tell me those parts are dull. Hell, they’re supposed to be dull! And I can’t be bothered to write them myself. Why should I? You can’t improve on nature, kid.’
This idea of literary collage sounded well enough, but in practice the effect was unsatisfactory. I found the extracts tasteless, distracting and ineffective. When I told him so he was delighted.
‘Just what I want,’ he said. ‘This poem is going to be like life—lousy in spots. Where it’s bad, it’s really crap. It’s going to be the worst poem ever written, see? I’m dedicating it to you.’
One day he suggested we go and see James Joyce. ‘He’s all alone and there’s some kind of eye operation coming up, so the old Irish tenor’s not feeling his oats. He said to bring along anyone I wanted. But don’t talk about his work; we’ll just get a little stinko together. Now’s the time, when Nora’s not there.’
He shaved carefully, put on a dark grey suit that didn’t fit him at all, a white shirt, and a rather frayed four-in-hand tie.
As we rode along in the taxi he warned me again not to question Joyce about anything he had written. ‘And whatever you do, don’t ask him what he’s going to call his Work in Progress. He has a bee in his bonnet that he’ll never finish it if he tells anyone what it’s called.’
‘I can’t make head or tail of it anyway.’
‘Good, tell him that if you get a chance. He’ll like it.’
‘What do you think of it yourself?’
‘If he thinks it’s good, it’s good enough for me.’
This, for Bob, was extraordinary. I had heard him dismiss Milton, Spenser, Donne, Wordsworth, Thackeray, Conrad, and Meredith (he had read only a few pages of each, but enough, as he said, to get their quality)—as well as any living author one could name—and this unquestioning acceptance of Joyce was surprising. I did not share his enthusiasm. I knew the Portrait and Ulysses almost by heart, and thought them the greatest English prose works of the century; but I saw faults in each, and I had a feeling that his Work in Progress, the first two chapters of which I had read in transition, was moving in the same direction Flaubert had taken in Bouvard et Pécuchet and the Dictionnaire des idées reçues—into a fragmented chaos. This was perhaps the only avenue to these virtuosos of the particular, who had so mastered their medium they had nowhere else to go but onward into a deliberately disformed universe of words and impressions. After all, what else could they do? I remembered Flaubert’s execrable verses and thought of Joyce’s own Pomes Penyeach in their little apple-green cover—so melodiously weak, so drowned in Celtic twilight, so spineless and sentimental, that you wondered why he had published them. Both were poets who had missed their vocation and only tampered with ideas. After their fiftieth year all that remained of either of these two great artists were tears, petulance, laughter, and a superb technique. But as the taxi went along the rue de Grenelle I was as excited as if I were going to see Flaubert himself.
On the landing of Joyce’s apartment Bob twitched his necktie nervously before rapping at the door. A maid in a soiled apron showed us into a dimly lit room, and a low voice called from beside a glowing fireplace, ‘Is it you, McAlmon? Come in.’ A slender, elegant, curved figure rose and weaved towards us. ‘Ah, it’s good to see you. And this is the young fellow you’ve brought, is it? You’re most welcome, sir.’
While he and Bob discussed mutual friends I breathed the homely smell of onions and furniture-polish. In the dim light I could see on the walls a number of what Bob had told me were the family portraits, and I made out the picture of Joyce’s father over the mantelpiece—a ponderous figure who didn’t look like Simon Dedalus at all; it was impossible to visualize this dignified old gentleman singing catches on a summer afternoon in the Ormond Hotel in Dublin.
‘I’ve some good wine there,’ said Joyce. ‘McAlmon, it’s right to your hand.’
The room was so dark, Bob said, he could see nothing, and he asked if he could turn up the lights.
When he did so I had my first sight of Joyce. He was almost as distinguished looking as in his posed portraits; but the thin twisted mouth was now little more than a slit, the bibulous nose was pitted with holes like a piece of red-coloured cork, and the little goatee looked affected and out of place; his eyes were almost invisible behind thick glasses. Of the sarcastic bounderish air of the snapshots there was not a trace: he was reserved, charming, gracious, and his voice was music. He had a good figure for clothes and very narrow feet, but he was wearing a very badly cut suit.
The chilled wine was a coarse Niersteiner—light, dry and aromatic. Joyce sipped it with gormandise.
‘I’m getting on well with the oeuvre grandissime,’ he said. ‘You’ll be seeing another piece of it in Mr Jolas’s little magazine soon. Tell me now, McAlmon, do you still like it?’
Bob jerked himself around in his chair. ‘It’s great, sir, simply great. It has a wonderful flowing quality, the quality of Molly Bloom’s thoughts, only it’s got more variety. I think you’re breaking up the language damn well. In a few years nobody’ll be able to write a book in English any more, the words will be out of date.’
Joyce shrugged deprecatingly. ‘Oh no.’
‘Rats, I don’t pretend to understand it yet. This young fellow here doesn’t either.’
Joyce turned to me courteously, his eyebrows raised.
I was seized with panic and stammered something about finding it more like the monologue in the tavern scene in Ulysses than Molly Bloom. ‘It’s like listening to a lot of people in a pub, all speaking at the same time—but I’m not sure what they’re talking about.’
‘This is a great compliment,’ he said, smiling. ‘So you liked the scene in the tavern?’
Thinking he was referring to the scene in Barney Kiernan’s in Ulysses, I told him this was my favourite section of the book and that I had privately given the name of Begob to the nameless speaker; then, unable to control my curiosity, I asked, ‘Was he M’Intosh?’
He looked at me quickly and I realized I had made a mistake: he had been referring to a chapter in his Work in Progress.
‘No,’ he said shortly, ‘he is not M’Intosh. Begob—it’s as good a name for him as any—was not at the funeral, of course.’
The first bottle of wine was emptied and Joyce became more animated. He spoke of puns, saying they were the highest form of humour and that Spoonerisms ran them a close second. In the Middle Ages, gatherings of learned men were great festivals of puns, anagrams, leonine verses and so forth.
‘It doesn’t sound like much to laugh at,’ said Bob.
‘Oh but it was, McAlmon. It was the great recreation of the schoolmen in those days. For politics and religion were dangerous subjects, and sports had not been invented, and as they were all in holy orders of some kind or other they could not very well talk smut.’
‘Rats. Those old schoolmasters were always talking and writing about sex.’
‘No, no, the schoolmaster was then in a very low rank in life—he was the pedant, the male nursery-governess, the minder.’
‘The profession of schoolmaster should be abolished,’ said Bob, emptying his glass.
Joyce was sipping his wine thoughtfully. When he licked his lips he licked only the upper one, very daintily, like a cat. ‘Yes, I think that the schoolmaster, like the policeman, is an unnecessary evil.’
‘A kind of leech,’ said Bob.
‘Perhaps. But I see him,’ said Joyce with a slightly intoxicated pseudoearnestness, ‘as doing more harm to himself, d’ye see, than to his pupils. The young people can always look after themselves, we know that. It is the poor teacher himself who should be protected against his terrible propensity to be among children all his life. It’s he is the cazhalty, he’s refused to grow up. Did you ever know a schoolmaster,’ he turned to me, ‘who was not a great big boy?’
‘No, sir.’
‘And that’s the dominie’s cross,’ he said with mock sadness, ‘to be a cipher out of his classroom. Like Gulliver, he’s either in Lilliput or Brobdingnag. But he’s willed it, nobody forced the thing on him.’
‘My sister Victoria teaches school in Los Angeles,’ said Bob. ‘She loves her job. But she’s a woman.’
‘And a very fine job it is for a woman,’ said Joyce. ‘Like being a nurse or a nun—but these are not callings for a man, as you can see from the poor type of creature who becomes a male nurse or a monk.’
‘You put them in the same boat? Monks and male nurses. You’re right. Men in skirts. Does that go for priests too?’
Joyce gave a twisted grin. ‘For some, I think. But there’s the power, too. Now how did we get to be talking about religion, boys? McAlmon, you’re always drawing me out.’
‘Haven’t you got any whisky?’
Inside the next hour they both became pleasantly drunk and so did I—though more by listening than by drinking. I remember little of the talk, except that Joyce ended by tearing the English novelist Richardson to pieces. ‘A spider,’ he said, ‘a remorseless, cruel, miserable spider is what he is. For there’s something wrong with that Clarissa, and I do not mean the plot but the very subject. These two people, she and Lovelace, are daft on an epic scale, with their struggle to the death over a maidenhead, their clash of wills that rises to some very sinister heights indeed—but they are not alive. Nothing in all these thousands and thousands of pages is alive except the miserable intelligence that keeps the fight going. Oh, it’s a cold, relentless, Anglo-Saxon intelligence that devises all these scenes of cruelty and prurience: now it’s taunting, and now it’s vindictive, but it’s always bent on tormenting someone and by heaven it reaches some surprising peaks of gloating. I really think the man was a little mad.’
I was struck by this original view of Richardson, whom I had never liked. ‘You say he’s an Anglo-Saxon, sir,’ I said, ‘but surely his book has always been more popular in France.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The French have always loved the persecuted maiden too. They are forever crucifying some poor woman or other, from Diderot to Sade to Flaubert right down to Mr Proust, who kills his old grandmother in such a way as will hardly bear reading. Flaubert, great as he is, is the worst of them all at this woman-racking. Have you, sir, ever turned a cold eye on the death of Emma Bovary?’
I agreed it was rather graphic.
‘Yes, but have you stopped to inquire into any good reason why it should be so?’ He cocked a blind eye at both of us. ‘I have always wondered why did the poor creature choose arsenic, of all the drugs she could have had? As a doctor’s wife and a woman of some reading she’d surely know its effects. Why, a few ounces of laudanum would have done her business, and she could have bought the stuff anywhere. But no, it had to be arsenic or there’d have been no retching or convulsions, no fine edifying anti-Christian agony to make our hair stand on end. Oh, it’s a bad and a weak ending for Emma, it does not make sense, and I wonder no one has noticed this foolish matter of the arsenic before.’
As we went home I told Bob I had never thought of Joyce as an original critic.
‘Oh, the old Irish tenor’s got sides to him that don’t show in his writing,’ he said. ‘Too bad he’s gone off the deep end with language.’
Now that Bob had plenty of money again he began to give parties that often lasted for two or three days.
‘We’re having all the Blackbirds tonight,’ he told me one afternoon. ‘Let’s get in a few cases of Scotch. And some siphon too—for the gals and the sissies. Order a few buckets of cracked ice.’
‘What about gin and brandy?’
‘Too much trouble. If these coloured pukes don’t like scotch they can skedaddle. Have you seen their show? I bet it’s lousy. They’re all being so goddamned black.’
‘How do you know if you haven’t seen it?’
‘I don’t have to see it. Dinges are always in blackface, they can’t help it. Just as we’re always in hoods and bedsheets to them. What the hell, people think we can all get together and be chummy on the basis of humanity or art or some kind of tripe. Like hell we can. You can’t even talk to a coon or a chink like a human being, so why pretend you can? A lord can’t talk to a miner, can he? Let’s face it, kid, Communism is the only thing, the breakdown of class and colour barriers. Take everyone’s money away, then jumble them all up and let them screw each other for twenty years, that’s the answer to the race problem. In the meantime let’s be ourselves, let’s not go round kissing black asses or letting them kiss ours.’
The party got off to a slow start. Fortunately Florence Mills left early, taking her dignity with her, and Jazzy Lips Johnson and Snaky Hips Tucker began to be themselves. After midnight the crowd increased steadily; no one left and the apartment was soon jammed. I remember the cherubic jowls of Picabia, the swollen forehead of Allen Tate, the prognathous jaw of Cummings, Nancy Cunard’s elegant painted mask, the calm monastic skull of Marcel Duchamp. In a corner Cyril Connolly was quietly entertaining a small group with a parodic imitation of a German describing the charms of the Parisian prostitute. ‘Kokott...’ he was murmuring, making expressive movements with his hands, ‘unbeschreiblich pikant—exotisch...’ By the mantelpiece Foujita, with his sad monkey-face, was holding court with his usual entourage of beautiful women. Soaring effortlessly above the noise was the husky parrotlike scream of Kiki, now very fat but as beautiful as ever: she was displaying her thighs and bragging, as usual, that she was the only woman in Paris who had never had any pubic hair. In the kitchen, where I went to open the bottles, Ford Madox Ford was towering like an elephant, talking almost inaudibly about Thomas Hardy.
‘The greatest English novelist of the last fifty years,’ he was wheezing to Narwhal. ‘After my old friend Conrad, of course.’
‘I can’t altogether go along with your verdict,’ said Narwhal in his soothing nasal voice. ‘I’ve read books by both those authors and they struck me as too sad. I don’t like an unhappy ending to a book. I’m not saying I like a happy ending either. I’m led to wonder if a book should end at all.’
‘You may have stated a great truth,’ whispered Ford, brushing his great moustache. ‘But it’s not really practicable to keep a book going indefinitely.’
‘I suppose it would set a problem,’ said Narwhal, settling his spectacles on his nose. ‘I’m not a literary ahtist, but I suggest there might be some merit in a book that was either left unfinished or ended, say, by repeating the sense of its beginning. I mean a kind of discontinuous or possibly circular, rather than a linear, structure.’
‘It would be a tour de force, of course.’
‘Then I’m against it. Cancel all I said.’
‘It would also, I think, be a bore. Not that I’m wholly against boredom in literature. It has its place—Arnold Bennett and Compton Mackenzie have shown us that.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say so.’
‘But they’re not great bores, my dear fellow. Now Dickens, for instance, among his other supreme accomplishments, can be tedious on a really grand scale. He has created at least two of the supreme bores in English literature, Mr Peggotty and Stephen Blackpool. Like everything of Dickens, their stature is epic, mythological. Beside them Jean Valjean and Lambert Strether are quite insignificant.’
The heat and noise began to give me a headache. I went into my bedroom and lay down; for a minute I didn’t see a haggard, white-faced, smartly dressed young man sitting quietly in a corner, his well-brushed head in his hands.
‘Tired?’ he said, looking up. ‘Oh, sorry, you’re the co-host. Don’t mind me, please.’
‘I’m not tired. Just had a little too much to drink for the moment.’
‘Take a sniff of this,’ he said, producing a small gilt flask. ‘It’s only ether.’
The effect was extraordinary. My headache vanished as if by magic, and all at once I felt gay and lighthearted. ‘Where can I get this stuff?’
He stoppered the flask and put it away. ‘You’re a little young to get the habit. By the way, you’re the chap who wrote that autobiographical bit in This Quarter, aren’t you? Tell me, where can I buy a dozen copies?’
I started to give him Ethel Moorhead’s address, but he stopped me and pulled out a cheque book. ‘I’ll buy them now and you can send them to me. Right?’
‘But this cheque is for 1000 francs! Too much.’
‘Ordering, postage, handling, your own trouble,’ he said, waving his hand. ‘Think no more of it. I write verse myself. I’m thinking of starting a magazine.’
‘Why don’t you take on This Quarter? Titus must be almost finished with it now.’
‘No, I want to start from scratch. I’ve got a publishing house too. I’d like to see your book. How long is it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m still writing it.’
A handsome hard-faced woman put her head in at the door. ‘Jimmy, come on out now.’
‘So long,’ said Jimmy, getting up and leaving.
I washed my face and went back to the party. ‘Who is he?’ I asked Bob, indicating the man with the ether.
‘It’s a young moneybags who’s trying to move in on culture. His name is Carter. He calls himself the Man in the Moon.’
‘He just gave me a cheque for a thousand francs.’
‘The son of a gun! Tell him to double it. What’s it for?’
‘A dozen copies of This Quarter.’
‘Let me see it. Now look at that, for Christ’s sake.’
The signature was flanked by a childish scribble representing a crescent with a blind eye and a hook nose.
‘He’s a megalomaniac,’ said Bob.
‘I thought he was rather nice.’
‘He’s nuts. Who’s the old bat with the dinge over there?’ He pointed to Madame Godenot and Tom Cork, whom I had asked to the party by telephone. ‘She looks like the keeper of a cathouse.’
‘She is. Let me introduce you.
‘I can do it myself. Why be formal?’
He went off jauntily. At that moment I saw Mrs Quayle and my heart turned over. She was looking more beautiful than ever in a short jacket of black monkey-fur, a little hat and a half-veil through which her enormous eyes were glittering. She was standing by the door talking to a large man who had his arm around her shoulders and whose back was to me; as he turned I saw the long ginger moustache.
‘What a lot of abominable people, Honour,’ he was saying. ‘Do let’s go. This is just scruff.’
‘How do you do, Mrs Quayle,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I have met your friend. May I have the pleasure?’
‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s you again.’
‘Dearest,’ said Mrs Quayle to me, ‘let me introduce Hector MacSween.’
We bowed, showing our teeth, but did not shake hands. I had never felt such a violent dislike for any living man; the feeling seemed to be returned.
‘Mrs Quayle,’ I said, ‘let me get you something to drink.’
‘Some gin, please. And a little ginger-ale. And ice.’
‘I’m afraid there’s only Scotch. Won’t you change your mind?’
‘Certainly. Scotch and water with ice will be lovely. Hector, a little of the same?’
‘Yes. No ice. Hold on, what kind of whisky is it?’
‘Dewar’s.’
‘Very well. But no ice, mind.’
I brought their drinks. My brain was in a turmoil of love and jealousy. MacSween’s hand was once more curved around Mrs Quayle with playful protectiveness. I stood looking at her for a few moments and then moved away. The party was quite spoiled for me. I looked for Jimmy Carter, thinking how much I would have liked another sniff of his ether, but he had disappeared. Madame Godenot came up and kissed me on the cheek.
‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘A swell layout you’ve got here. Nice drapes, nice carpeting, everything. Lot of smart people too. Nice going.’
‘Thanks, Lolotte. How are things at number 65?’
‘So-so. Up and down. Ha, ha! You know how it is.’
‘We-all sure miss you,’ said Tom Cork. ‘Hope you come back some day.’
The Blackbirds were now taking over the party with their songs and dances. Snaky Hips was whirling like a dervish, circled by shining black faces; people were rocking and clapping their hands; Kiki had at last taken her clothes off. In little knots people were arguing intensely, even acrimoniously, over art. The party was obviously a success. Then I saw in a corner MacSween brushing Mrs Quayle’s neck with his ridiculous moustache, and her eyes closing in apparent bliss. The sight pierced me and all at once I was gripped with an emotion so devastating that I felt I was being drawn into an abyss. I suddenly understood how deeply I was involved, and that nothing mattered to me any more: ambition, friendship, literature, my whole mental and physical being were of no importance. Everything had been absorbed by my passion for that absurd woman in the corner.
I had already had too much to drink and felt the cold sweat of nausea breaking out between my shoulder blades. I went into my bedroom, opened the windows to the little balcony and stepped out into the cold air. I was staring into the frosty night sky over Paris when I heard my name called behind me; then Mrs Quayle’s arm was around my neck. Her eyes were almost invisible behind the little veil.
‘Let me tell you how much, how very much I love you,’ she said.
Five minutes later Bob and Mr MacSween came in.
Next morning in the rue Galilée I had the worst hangover of my life, a black eye, and terrible memories—of a quarrel with Bob and our parting, of a fist-fight with Hector MacSween, provoked by Mrs Quayle, in which I was finally knocked down at least twice, and of a long, inept and unsuccessful attempt to make love to Mrs Quayle in the early hours of the morning.
It was in her nature, I think, insensibly to court and even encourage emotional outbursts in others: more than most women, she throve on ‘scenes’. That morning, however, I saw myself as mover rather than instrument of the passions of the night before and blamed myself for everything. The months of shameful illness, hopeless passion, boredom, poverty, prostitution, and dependence had made me behave, for about five minutes, as I had never done in my life. I was appalled by a new aspect of my nature—my hitherto unsuspected capacity for violence ... Waking alone in an unfamiliar bed, with dim light coming through the heavy leather curtains, I seemed for a whole minute to descend into a dizzy blackness, a gulf of such unbearable remorse and shame that I suffered an actual loss of identity before managing to swing my legs to the floor and sit up. A full tumbler of gin and a bottle of aspirin were on my bedside table. I was overcome with gratitude. What a wonderful mistress I had! In fifteen minutes I was restored. I went and knocked at her closed door.
‘No, no,’ she cried from inside. ‘My door is locked, I am making my toilet.’
‘I cannot wait. I am on fire with love.’
‘I am invisible. Take some gin. I will ring.’
A few minutes later I heard the silvery tinkle of a small handbell.
This signal, which I was to hear so often and with such rapture in the months to come, summoned me to a vision of beauty and warmth. Entering her bedroom, I was engulfed by the colour of rose and the odour of leather and musk. My mistress, looking very small in her enormous bed, held out her bare arms in welcome. I sprang to their embrace like a deer ...