PART THREE
THE STALWART YOUNG MAN, WHILST JOYCE had been telling me that story, had retired to a distance in the vast dim studio, and was threatening with his fist a relic of Ezra’s Chinese stage—the rendering in silk of a fat and blinking bonze.
“That young man,” I said to Ezra, “appears to have sinophobia. Why does he so dislike that….”
“He’s only getting rid of his superfluous energy,” Ezra said.
It appeared like it. The young man was dancing on his toe-points. Shadow-boxing was what it seemed to be.
Ezra said:
“You ought to have had him for your sub-editor. He’s an experienced journalist. He writes very good verse and he’s the finest prose stylist in the world…. He’s disciplined too.”
I answered:
“He has to be if he’s a prose stylist. It isn’t like verse. You can turn that out in your sleep…. But you told Mrs. Levoir Suarez yesterday that I was the finest prose stylist in the world….”
“You!” Ezra exclaimed. “You’re like, all English swine….”
Ezra a few years before had been called the greatest bore in Philadelphia, so ceaselessly had he raved about London and Yeats and myself to uninterested Pennsylvanians. Now he was Anglophobe.
“It’s just like you to miss the chance of a sub-editor like that,” Ezra fulminated: “Disciplined! Energetic! Trained!”
I said that yesterday he had insisted on my engaging the Russian Colonel. I had engaged him. Ezra said:
“Isn’t that like you! … of course I was only recommending him. How could you think I wanted you to engage him? … Engage Kokulof! … You must be mad. He’s a Russian Colonel—a Colonel Completely illiterate….”
I said I would engage the young man too. I could easily do with two sub-editors. The young man certainly looked disciplined in a Herculean way. Ezra confirmed my suspicion that he must have been in the Army. I took him to be one of those Harrow-Cambridge-General Staff young Englishmen who make such admirable secretaries until they let you down.
I asked where Ezra’s Conscientious Objector was. He ought to have brought those MSS. round to me that morning. Ezra said:
“Oh, he…. That’ll be all right…. You mustn’t keep his nose too close to the grindstone…. He’s not used to discipline. But he’ll be invaluable…. That’s what he’ll be…. Only your excremental Review will be in the gutter to-morrow….”
Mr. Quinn, who had been looking at me over Ezra’s shoulder, said:
“Poor fellow…. Poor fellow…. I’m sorry for you….”
Mr. Quinn, tall, lean, perpetually indignant, had, as Mæcenas, conversational licence.
Ezra said:
“I’d never think of letting Ernest engage himself under those English diarrhœas…. Why couldn’t you have found French backers? The French are the only people who have any guts…. Look at Tristan Tsara! … Why didn’t you go to him? …”
I said that M. Tsara was a Rumanian and, as far as I knew, was no Crœsus.
Mr. Quinn said:
“Poor fellow…. You’re an honest man…. I hate to see you in that position….”
Ezra said:
“The damn fool deserves it…. He can’t see the difference in merit between Arnault Daniel and Guillem de Cabestanh…. He prefers Guillem…. What could you expect? …”
Mr. Quinn’s resentful eyes fixed me for a long time. He repeated:
“I just hate to see you in that position.”
I said it was not as uncomfortable as it looked. The chair I was in had been made by Mr. Pound during his cabinet-making stage. It was enormous, compounded of balks of white pine, and had a slung canvas seat so large that, once you sat down, there you lay until someone pulled you out.
Mr. Quinn said:
“I’ll send Mrs. Foster to you…. Have a cigar …”
I struggled on that chair-bottom like a horse that had fallen down on a slippery street. Mrs. Foster gave me a hand. I avoided Mr. Quinn’s cigar. It was as large as a crowbar, black and minatory. It had cost a dollar. I was not man enough for that. I smoked Alsatians that cost 40 centimes—say three farthings.
I said I should just love to have Mrs. Foster come and see me…. But I had no pictures to sell. I wasn’t, I explained, a painter. When I had nothing else to do I wrote a book….
“And fall among thieves,” Mr. Quinn said. “I hate to see it. You’re an honest man…. I’ll send Mrs. Foster to see you.”
Mrs. Foster was the ravishingly beautiful lady who bought Mr. Quinn’s pictures for him. She was an admirable business woman and, as far as they were susceptible of management, she managed the American side of the transatlantic review to perfection. But I had only met her that afternoon when she had taken the opportunity to warn me that Mr. Quinn was very irritable—as I afterwards knew, because of a painful illness—and that I must not mention Conrad to him. At the moment I only knew her as the picture-buyer of genius, who advised a millionaire. And I thought then that Mr. Quinn took me for a painter.
Mr. Quinn said:
“Hang it, you mustn’t swear at me…. I only mean your good…. Conrad told me what a violent fellow you are…. But I’ve done nothing to be sworn at for.”
I had sworn actually at a piece of Ezra’s sculpture. As sculptor Ezra was of the school of Brancusi. He acquired pieces of stone as nearly egg-shaped as possible, hit them with hammers, and then laid them about on the floor. The particular piece that had distressed me had, to be appreciated, to be seen from a reclining position in the chair from which Mrs. Foster had just extricated me. In my struggles I had forgotten that piece of work. One should never forget works of Art.
I limped away with the assistance of Mr. Bird. The Mr. Bird of those days was everybody’s uncle. He knew everything, and could get you everything that you wanted. He was what the Assistance Publique would be if it were worthy of its name. In public he was a stern and incorruptible head of a news-agency, with the aspect of a peak-bearded banker. In private he had a passion for a hand-printing press that he owned, and his hands and even his hair would be decorated with printer’s ink.
On that occasion I asked him if he could find me a private office. That seemed impossible. Paris in those days was as crowded as a swallow’s nest that expands and contracts as the young brood breathes inside. You advertised that you would pay thousands of francs to anyone who would find you an apartment. No young couples could get married. Middle-class people slept under the arches of bridges over the Seine. Six artists slept in the kitchen of the Rotonde—by courtesy of the chef.
Bird said:
“Certainly. I am taking a second office to-morrow. There will be plenty of room for you.”
The next day was Saturday. I sent the White Russian down to the office of the Review Company for the first week’s salary of himself and the Conscientious Objector. The Conscientious Objector’s spectacles had not yet again beamed on me, but I thought he might like a little salary.
The Colonel came back from that office raving like a lunatic and unable to speak any language but Russian. I gathered that he had not received his salary, and that he was afraid that the Princess would have to go without caviare for another week-end. When he could again speak French, he asserted that Mr. P—— the financier had confessed himself a Communist, and had threatened to have General —— murdered.
He remembered at last that he had a note from Mr. P. Mr. P—— said that the articles of the Company not having been signed, he was not really empowered to pay out anything and the banks were closed. He would, however, send me a small sum for salaries and petty cash by my brother on Monday morning….
That seemed good enough. I engaged that evening an advertising manager….
I was not as green as I seemed. It was quite possible that that company might never take shape. I knew enough of business men to know, even then, that it never might. If those were business men the chances were that they would wriggle out of the arrangement somehow or other. Business men have to have enthusiasms—but they have also to have cold feet…. If they weren’t business men, or if, for the moment, they were not in business frames of mind, they might keep their word.
On the other hand, the date when the public renews its magazine subscriptions or makes new ones was rapidly approaching. It was important, if the review was to come out, to get out some sort of programme and some sort of prospectus. If the review went on, we should then be in a much stronger position. If it did not, I should look like a fool, but no one else would be hurt. With the exception of the advertising manager, the people I had engaged were nearly useless, but they had no employment and, as far as I could see, had no early chance of ever being employed. So it did them no harm to give them work that might not be lasting, and it would keep them going for a week or two. And the loss would actually be very little, for there was then so much distress amongst the thousands of incapable foreign artists who had flocked to Paris, that one was forced to dispense in charity a weekly sum about equal to what I was to dispense in salaries. It was thus merely concentrating a weekly expense on one or two people, instead of doling it out by francs to innumerable beggars at café tables…. In the upshot one had to dole out at least as much to the beggars too…. But that was human weakness rather than any defect in my possible balance-sheet.
The case of the advertising manager was very different. This was Miss Marjorie Reid, now Mrs. Robert Rodes. She was an exceedingly capable journalist and had occupied a number of important posts on New York and Paris papers. At the time she was not working owing to sickness occasioned by domestic or other troubles. She needed distraction rather than employment, and was perfectly willing to take the chance of the Review coming to an untimely end. Thus no one risked anything save myself. And I was ready to risk looking like a fool. There was too much need for such a magazine….
On Monday, at an amazingly early hour, Miss Reid turned up with a highly lucrative serial advertisement contract from the French Line … the Compagnie Transatlantique. How she had got it or at what hour that company opens its Paris offices I have never known. There was great joy in our office—which was an empty bedroom I had hired in another pavilion in the garden of white blackbirds…. Miss Reid brought also the almost equally astonishing news that someone else, apparently acting for the existing but moribund review, had secured at least half a dozen quite good serial advertisements for banks, railway companies and fashion houses.
I didn’t know whether that money would go to my review or not. But it was at least good news. It seemed to show that advertisements were easily obtainable in Paris….
On the strength of it, I authorised the jubilant White Russian Colonel to order some dummy copies from his White Russian printers. He left me with the speed of an antelope that scents new pastures.
It seemed to me then that everything would turn on the amount of money that my brother would bring from Mr. P.’s office for the salaries and petty cash. If it was a fair sum I might be satisfied that those business men intended to behave according to the generous letter of the agreement. If it were derisively small, I determined, I would at once look for new capitalists. The advertising position had heartened me to that…. Miss Reid came in just after lunch with another advertisement from an American bank.
In spite of vigorous telephoning my brother did not arrive till past seven in the evening. He had been away for the week-end. The cheque that he brought was insufficient to cover the costs of the postage stamps I had used. He said that he had had great difficulty in getting it. Mr. P—— was exceedingly irritated by the commotion that the White Russian had made in his office on the Saturday. He was convinced that the Russian was a Communist of a violent and dangerous kind. The company absolutely refused to subsidise agents of the Soviet Republic.
That appeared to me to be reasonable as far as it went. But Mr. P—— had himself seen General K——. (The White Russian was a courtesy general.) He had seen General K—— at our business meeting, and had consented to my engaging him. Of course, he could not be expected to distinguish between Russians, but I could not be expected to allow him to interfere with my staff.
My brother said:
“But he’s a very rich man.”
I pointed out that if he wanted to be useful to me Mr. P—— had better forget it except when he was signing cheques.
My brother repeated shockedly:
“But he’s a very rich man.”
He had a certain engaging naïveté that made him see an aura round the heads of the very rich. I am bound to confess that to some extent I share it. When I see very rich men of no special intelligence I feel a certain awe. I feel that they are favourites of the gods since they are rich without the intelligence to earn their riches. And a certain reverence should attach to the favourites of the gods, lest the heart of the gods should be turned against you. They must have some qualities or the gods would not show favours to them.
“Besides,” my brother said, “it’s his view that you should be of service to him.” His expressive brow was furrowed as he added: “Mr. P—— is not too pleased with you either. He says you did not treat him with the respect to which he is entitled. He’s very rich as I’ve told you. He says he went out of his way to be complimentary to you, and you did not show the least empressement. In fact he said he almost believed …”
I asked if Mr. P——believed that I too was a Communist….
My brother’s embarrassment increased. He said he must say that I had treated Mr. P—— very much de haut en bas…. As if he had been the dirt beneath my feet.
I said that when it came to the Arts he probably was. But did that matter? I need never see him again. He was not coming to my private office and I certainly should not go near his. There was he, my brother, to act as a buffer. And well padded.
His distress increased. He said that they had de cided that I could not have a private office. I must work in their building. They thought they must keep an eye on me. The race-horse owner, passing through the room, had not liked my looks much. As for Mr. Pound…. Look at his slouch hat, his forked beard, his spectacles. And his extraordinary tie. His malacca cane certainly contained a sword-stick. What else could make you carry anything so out of date as a malacca cane? … And his pockets! Why did they bulge? Probably because they contained bombs…. And he mumbled. Incomprehensible words! To himself.
That is how the Left Bank looks to the Right.
In short, my brother said, they thought that I might be a worthy person. I dressed passably. My hat, of course, was a last year’s model. Brims were not so wide that year. They had suggested that Oliver should hint that to me. They thought that I was weak. Worthy, but easily led astray…. I was in the hands of the red-bearded Anarchist and the sham Russian General….
I said: “Get it out….”
“In short,” Oliver said, “Mr. X——”—the race-horse owner—“insists that he shall censor the review himself. You must give an undertaking not to print a word that he has not O.K.’d…. That seems reasonable. He’s finding the money. But fine pie he’ll make of Joyce and Pound and Conrad…. Not to mention you!”
I felt like cold steel. I said:
“I suppose Mr. X—— wants to insert an article a month. On racing form?”
My brother said:
“Two! He wants to have space for two articles every month. One by himself; on racing form. The other by Mr. P——. That will be on finance…. Be reasonable. They’re finding the money. They’ve surely a right to some say about how it’s spent. After all they’re as keen on their subjects as you are on what you call the Arts….”
Half an hour afterwards Mrs. Foster came in. She said Mr. Quinn wanted me to go to him. He was rather sick. In a hotel on the Champs-Elysées. I said:
“No. Let’s all go and have dinner somewhere. I’ve shut the Review down.”
She said that that was why Mr. Quinn wanted to see me. He had known I should shut the Review down. He didn’t want me to.
When we were in the taxi she said she wanted to tell me something about Mr. Quinn. After she had said it several times I understood. It was a very old taxi: it must have been in the battle of the Marne. It was no good trying.
We stopped in the rue de Rivoli and went into the Bodega. At least a hundred Americans who were reacting from Prohibition and at least a hundred others of assorted nationalities who had never known the effects of Prohibition were there already. I could not have learned anything about Mr. Quinn there, even if Mrs. Foster had roared in my ears with the voice of Stentor….
We decided to walk the rest of the way. In the Champs-Elysées, at least, it was reasonable to hope for quiet. Alas! … I was sufficiently a young man from the country—or an old Parisian—to imagine that one ought to be able to cross the Place de la Concorde, as in my day one had done it—from the Tuileries gates to Cleopatra’s Needle, and from there to one or other of the pavements of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. … I was used to seeing two or three fiacres drooling along, and a three-horse bus a quarter of a mile off…. It was not like that.
We got as far as the base of the Needle and Mrs. Foster began telling me about Mr. Quinn.
I was watching for an opportunity to cross. I realised that it would not be too easy. I had never seen so many motor vehicles, travelling so fast and in four concentric streams. It was, perhaps, all the worse that it was night…. Mrs. Foster went on telling me about Mr. Quinn. We left the kerb and, crossing a stream of motors coming from the right, we were halted by another that came from the left. I knew some of the fables recounted of Mr. Quinn and perhaps a little more. A car bearing directly down on us just brushed my trousers…. Mr. Quinn was reported to have thrown fabulous sums into the laps of Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, Ezra, Picasso, George Moore, Matisse, Seurat, Modigliani—in return, of course, for MSS. and pictures. Mrs. Foster told me that Mr. Quinn had come over from Ireland as an emigrant. He was a wonderful lawyer…. We got across a stream of traffic to find another coming from the left. We had to stand between the two. I said:
“You’d better take my arm. There’s nothing really to be alarmed at. The Paris motorists are fiendishly skilful….”
She said:
“What with domestic worries and business worries he’s not….”
I said:
“Now,” and we got across the penultimate stream. … That was the worst place of all. We seemed farther than ever from anywhere. The space between us and the pavement was greater and cars raced each other instead of going in single file. It was also darker, we being further from the lights at the base of the Needle. The drivers, therefore, would see us less plainly.
Mrs. Foster said:
“So you mustn’t think if he talks to you oddly or sharply it’s out of disrespect for you. On the contrary, he has the very greatest respect for you, because of what Conrad and Yeats….”
I started to make a break for the pavement. I succeeded in dragging Mrs. Foster from in front of an immense, racing limousine. There we were back again…. Mrs. Foster said:
“So with all that and the dreadful spasms of pain. … And he will have to sell some of his collection….”
As if miraculously, the space between us and the pavement was a swept desert. There was not a car in sight. We strolled across.
Mrs. Foster said:
“He burst into tears…. I was at the telephone. … And when I told him the Doubledays said that Conrad wouldn’t see him…. After all he’d done….”
I said.
“Conrad was afraid to see him…. He was a sick man himself…. And he was told Mr. Quinn had a violent temper…. The publishers advised him not to see him….”
“But Mr. Quinn had been so good….”
That evening, before the arrival of Mrs. Foster, in the depression that had followed my rage over the race-horse owner’s proposals, I had said to myself that happiness could only be ensured by the possession of a great deal of money. If you have that, nothing can really touch you…. But, as we reached the kerb, I qualified that dogma…. I said to myself:
“Nothing can really touch you on condition that you do good to nobody….”
I did my best. We walked beside the dim trees. But it was very depressing…. I said, which was true, that the last time I had seen Conrad he had told me he had refused to see Quinn. But he had felt bad about it. He acknowledged that Quinn had been a real benefactor to him. He had sold his later manuscripts to Me——, I forget the name. He had imagined that Quinn would be enraged about it. He had really a right to be. But the war had been on. Conrad had been afraid of what the German submarines might do. He did not dare to send the MSS. to Quinn in New York and he had been dreadfully pressed for money. Nobody could sell books. And Mr. —— had pressed and pressed, offering very large sums. Beside the MSS. were not really manuscripts—not what books were printed from. They were passages that he had copied out by hand, in order to make a little money. He had had his family to think of…. It was dreadful for a man like Conrad to have to descend to that…. And he had asked me, if I saw Quinn in Paris, to explain all this … about the submarines and the distance. And if necessary to apologise.
Mrs. Foster said:
“Yes. It is dreadful for a man like Conrad to have to descend to that. And Mr. Quinn quite understood. Until Conrad refused to see him…. I do not think you had better talk to Mr. Quinn about it. It was a great misfortune that Conrad ever came to America. Mr. Quinn has never been the same again.”
It was a foretaste of the dreadful mist of cupidity that burst out before poor Conrad’s corpse was cold in its grave. I sometimes wish that authors’ manuscripts could be destroyed at the printer’s sooner than that they should be so dishonoured as articles of barter. But many poor writers would go hungrier if there were none to buy those buckshee products of their agonies. Certainly poor Conrad would have found his grim declining years grimmer and more insupportably anxious, but for the real goodness of poor Quinn. Quinn had bought his manuscripts at a time when they seemed to be of no particular value to anyone else….
… About him in his hotel bedroom there was a sort of air of forlorn majesty. Perhaps that quality attaches to every man who is bound to die very soon—even to condemned murderers. But about him there was a special shade of that quality—as if he had been a disabled eagle. He had the air of a chained eagle waiting for his old enemy, the sun, to rise and find him no longer there.
His first words to me were:
“They will ruin you. You had better let me handle them. I’ll …”
I forget what he said he was going to do to them—something picturesque and destructive. But they were just business men and mystified at that. They had really no idea that I might object to their using my name for the rigging of the markets or the influencing of betting prices. And their naïveté was proved by their imagining that articles in a review devoted to chronicling international art-activities could much help their designs.
I said as much and at that, that forlorn, lean Quixote went, as the saying is, quite off the handle. His imprecations against Messrs. P—— and X—— would have been exaggerated if they had beggared a thousand orphans…. It was, indeed, as if I had been an orphan. He told me over and over again to leave it to him. He would set his French lawyer on the fellows. He would see that I had my review.
I left it to him all right and he dragged me next day to office after office, including that of Mr. P—— himself. Mr. P—— preferred to be represented by a poor devil of an English attorney, whom he employed in his business. Him, Mr. Quinn certainly left miserable….
The poor fellow was exactly like the sweated Cockney clerks of Dickens’s London, old, broken, with a back nearly bent double, and it was not the affairs of the review that worried him. He did not like his employer, and his employer soon afterwards got rid of him. No: it was the sight of Mr. Quinn that made him miserable. He was a lawyer—and he himself was a lawyer…. But Quinn was enormously wealthy, and passed for being enormously powerful, even in Paris. And that poor fellow could not scrape together enough to pay for his monthly bottle of hair-dye!
Mr. Quinn was not the first very wealthy man I had met, but he was the first I had gone about with for any time. It was impressive. As a supposedly great poet I am always treated with distinguished deference wherever I go in Paris. Anybody announcing himself as a poet will receive the same treatment. But to go about Paris with Quinn was to see the doors of palaces, banks, offices, fly open as if propelled by gunpowder…. And before him, even the poets prostrated themselves, and inflexible notaries departed from the routines of their lifetimes. It was as if he carried about with him the power to make you see fairy tales….
He appeared, and at once the poor poets saw their one chance—if he would only glance at them—to realise then their material dreams. The rich refurbished their ideas of fantastic business operations that should make them as Emperors. The starveling London lawyer precipitated himself before him and offered, firstly to become his Paris or London correspondent, then to sell Mr. Quinn his law library….
It was not so much Quinn’s reputation for wealth. I do not think he was ever a very wealthy man, and at that time some fantastic litigation in Scandinavia had considerably impoverished him. His professional income must have been very large, and out of that he bought the items of his collection and distributed his largesses. But even his legal income he jeopardised in fighting lawsuits for oppressed poets…. It was thus his personal prestige, his fame as the maker of extraordinary combinations and the impatient insolence with the powerful that made up his singular aura and his power to force people to act against their wills….
He once broke a date for lunch with me. I met him a little later with his notaire, my friend, the inflexible Maître L——. They were carrying golf-clubs. At an hour when the Law Courts were open, they had been playing and lunching at Versailles! Some time later, Maître L—— having been of considerable service to me—or at least, having put himself to considerable trouble: for no one can be very useful to you if you have any contacts with French commercial law—I asked him to play golf and lunch with me at a club of which I was an honorary member. I rather dislike golf, which seems to me to be a futile occupation for a grown man who, if he wants to be in the open, would be better employed cultivating a melon patch. But I was ready to sacrifice myself; a lawyer who would play golf whilst the courts are sitting must be a golf-maniac indeed!
Me L—— froze me. He was an inflexible, hard-fleshed and silent man, with an always indignant glance. He asked me if I took him to be mad. What spare time, he said, indicating his magnificent and piled desk—what time had he to spare for the distractions of the imbecile? When, doing violence to his feelings, he tore himself from his desk in the small hours, he spent an hour or two in reading poetry or other imaginative literature. A man must keep himself abreast of the Arts and the Thought of his time…. But golf! That derivative for the half-witted.
I reminded him that I had seen him at three in the afternoon, in the rue St. Honoré, carrying golf-clubs. … His brow cleared as he realised that I had not been trying to insult him.
“Oh, that!” he laughed…. “That was to please that infernal tyrant, old Quinn. The man could force a cat to take to swimming or an elephant to eat beef-steaks…. But I can assure you I have never felt so painfully deranged….”
My own association with Quinn was not very fortunate. He forced me to do things that I knew would turn out to be unfortunate and to avoid courses that I felt convinced would be propitious…. With his legal keenness he discovered that Messrs. P—— and X—— had put themselves in the wrong—I think by agreeing, before witnesses, to my terms, and he proposed to me to begin a whole series of lawsuits, that both he and Me L—— assured me would land at least one of them eventually in prison. That I did firmly refuse to do. It is completely against such principles as I have to take the law against any man—for it is obvious that if any one wrongs me his necessity to do so must be greater than my need for redress.
The Company in the meantime took action, in order to forestall any that I might take. They ordered me to hand over the editorship and office of the Review to two gentlemen they named, and threatened to sue me for the 120 frs. that they had advanced me for salaries. I took absolutely no notice, and two or three days later I saw Mr. Frank Harris and a gentleman in the worst Derby hat I have ever seen. They were making their way, rather gingerly, between the rose bushes of my garden pavilion. They were coming to take possession of the perfectly empty bedroom which I had taken for an office.
I was always afraid of Mr. Frank Harris. I was conscious of being a just man, but he affected me with a sense of the supernatural, as if he could mysteriously work with hidden powers, so that I committed crimes whilst I slept. I had known him with his high colour, his buffalo-horn moustache and his voice of a town bull that was weeping over a sentimental novelette—had known him in the days when he had with infinite brilliance edited the Saturday Review. Later, whilst I was editing the English Review, he trepanned me into lunching with him at the Savoy. All through that meal he advanced arguments to me to force me to print a story of his, so salacious that I thought that if I published it the front of the English Review office would become purple. In a case like that—it is the only one—I can be adamant. I will not print anything I do not want to print. Mr. Harris went on interminably with his persuasions and even threats. He pointed out that a touch of salaciousness would make the Review infinitely livelier. Moreover, the ordinary man craved for salacious literature. His story would increase tenfold the circulation of the Review. But the great argument that his fruity and cavernous voice brought out again and again was that I was the only editor in the world who would have the courage to print his story.
In his pauses for breath I told him over and over again that I had the greatest possible admiration for his gifts and that I considered—and it was true!—that some of his short stories were with the best in the English language. But he went on and on, pleading until I got really frightened—as if I should wake up one day and find, in spite of myself, that story in the Review.
Suddenly, however, he changed his tactics, and my near-hypnosis cleared away. He hammered the table with his fist and shouted:
“By God, I know why you won’t print it! By God, I know….”
Everyone else in the Grill must have heard him. I had a strong suspicion that that was what he wanted, and that the scene was staged for the benefit of Colonel Harvey, then Pierpont Morgan’s representative, and afterwards American Ambassador. Harris knew that I knew the Colonel very well as Editor of the North American Review. He was two tables away, and I had spoken to him as we went in. Harvey was, indeed, meditating putting some money into the English Review. But it eventually came out that he proposed to have a say in the contents of the Review. I declined rather reluctantly. I could not consent to let it become an organ of the Morgan interests in England. But I liked the Colonel and believe, contrary to the usual opinion in the United States, that he was one of the best ambassadors that country ever sent to the Court of St. James’s. He had not the courtly vacuity of Mr. Whitelaw Reid or the moral impressiveness of Mr. Page, but he had a keen sense of public affairs, and without the diplomatic lip-service of the other ambassadors or too great a show of Anglo-philism, managed to get round more than one difficult corner in the relations of the two countries. I have told elsewhere the story of the curious literary adventure I had with him in Brighton.
Harris banged and banged on the table and shouted:
“By God, I know…. It’s because you think I’m a financial bad hat. Not safe! Not fit to be trusted! By God, I’ll show you….”
He called at the top of his voice:
“Here, head-waiter … Maître d’hôtel. Whatever you call yourself. Tell the manager I want to see him. Et plus vite que cela!”
The manager hurried to the table.
Harris said:
“Go at once and look at my account and tell me what I owe you….”
When the manager came back he said:
“Four hundred and seventy-three pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence!”
Harris shouted:
“Four hundred and seventy-odd pounds, that’s what I owe you, is it?”
The manager said:
“That’s what you owe us, Mr. Harris.”
Harris shouted:
“And how much credit will you give me?”
The manager said:
“Unlimited credit, Mr. Harris.”
Harris became magnificent. He fairly roared:
“And to how many men in London will you say that—that you will give them unlimited credit?”
“We have to be very careful about giving credit, Mr. Harris….”
I am bound to say that that display made me still more frightened of Harris. If he could thus hypnotise a Savoy Hotel manager, what wouldn’t he be able to do to me? …
It was this redoubtable figure who was approaching my hide-hole through the rose bushes. Since his Savoy Hotel days he had fallen on worse times. He said he had himself set up as a hotel-keeper. He professed to have spent millions on a magnificent palace on a Riviera rock in the Mediterranean. To discover that there was no way of reaching it except at low tide in very still weather! … There are no tides in the Mediterranean, but I was none the less afraid of Mr. Harris. He must have been in low water indeed to want the editorship of the Company’s Review.
I saw him enter, dubiously, the passage about ten yards away that led to that abandoned bedroom, and I gave orders that if he knocked on my door it was on no account to be opened to him. But he drifted away without calling on me. That was the last I heard of that Company. Its Review never saw another number.
Then, of course, Mr. Quinn proposed to finance a different Review for me.
I was very doubtful and apprehensive. I had no doubts of the bona fides of Mr. Quinn, but I very much doubted if his tyrannous nature would not betray him into interfering a great deal more with the Review than at the moment he thought he would. On the other hand he would be in America and I in Paris. But what frightened me most was the thought of having to manage the business affairs of the Review. I am a very good business man when it comes to other people’s affairs. I know the ins and outs of printing, publishing, and business-editing a review as few others do. But when it comes to managing my own affairs, I am worse than hopeless. I do not manage them at all, and if they have any chance of becoming complicated at all they become incredibly complicated.
Mr. Quinn, still pathetically conscious of his notion that I was an honest man who had been struggling with knaves, was determined that I must have my review. And I was convinced that at that juncture some such review was a necessity. It is the greatest blot on the face of Anglo-Saxondom that it has never been able to support a review devoted entirely to the Arts. Anglo-Saxondom consists of four hundred million subjects, citizens and variously coloured dependants, yet it cannot find ten thousand to display a glimmering of interest in what differentiates man from the brute creation. It seemed, therefore, my duty, if there was any chance of the existence of such a periodical, to do all I could to bring it into being.
Mr. Quinn appeared to smooth away most of the difficulties. The French business affairs he said Me L—— would manage; the American branch he would manage himself. Then Mr. Gerald Duckworth, who had published the English Review, consented to take over the London side. Mr. Duckworth was one of my oldest friends; he had been losing money over my books for over thirty years, and I would have trusted him with my purse, my life and almost with my reputation—that being the last thing one should entrust to anyone not an archangel or a deaf-mute…. I consented at last. It seemed to me that if Mr. Quinn put his extraordinary powers of organisation into the American side of the business the fortunes of the Review were made.
We came to an arrangement. I stipulated that I was to find 51 per cent of the capital and should hold 51 per cent of the shares. I had no doubt of Mr. Quinn’s integrity, but I did not know anything about his heirs or assigns. I also stipulated that neither he nor I should touch any of the profits of the Review, if it made any profits. It did not seem to me decent that either he as Mæcenas or I as writer should benefit by the labours of artists. He stipulated the Review should be turned into a limited company according to French law. It was this that really proved the undoing of the Review. The charges for founding and registering that company exhausted nearly half our original capital, and the exasperation and minute formalities insisted on by Me L—— caused me more labours and loss of time than all the rest of the Review together.
On the face of it the Review should have prospered. The costs of production in Paris were ludicrously small; contributors, aware that the proprietors were not to make any profits, worked at the tiniest of rates; even distribution was very cheap, and office expenses were almost nothing as compared with those of any journal in London or New York. All out, a copy cost between two and three cents, and was sold to the public for fifty! … You would have thought that there must be a fortune in it…. Alas, I have not yet succeeded in liquidating the debts it caused me to incur. I do not suppose I ever shall.
For a time it was fun. Mr. Bird’s “office” turned out to be exactly what I craved for—a great wine vault on the banks of the Seine in the Ile St. Louis. The ground floor was occupied by his great iron, seventeenth-century hand-press and his formes. In a sort of kitchen he kept the books he printed and the spare copies of the Review. The Review office was in a gallery that covered half the vault. It was sufficiently large as to floor-space, but it was not much more than five feet high, and Miss Reid and I had permanently contused skulls. Every time anybody who looked like a purchaser rang the door bell, we would spring up from our tables. Miss Reid—who is very tall—had then become the Review’s admirably efficient secretary…. And it was fine, sitting there in our swallow’s nest, looking over the Seine to the grey houses on the other bank. The stove below made our gallery sufficiently hot even for a New Yorker like Miss Reid, and far too hot for me, who had most times to sit in my shirt-sleeves. And, across the space occupied by the press, with its gilt eagle atop, we could watch the plane leaves drifting down into the river; and then the thin sifting of snow; and then the young plane leaves growing green again. And then dusty!
And the excitement when somebody bought a copy of a Review! … I never sold anything in my life, but my emotions, when I actually received seven francs fifty for a wad of paper that existed because of the labours of Miss Reid and myself, made me think that to be a shopkeeper must be the most glorious of fates. And there was an old, broken London printer to make and bring me up cups of tea and Mr. Bird bending over his types below…. And the wonderful manuscripts!
For me all manuscripts by unknown writers are wonderful until I open them, and every time that I open one I have a thrill of anticipation. And I may say I have read every manuscript that was sent to either the English or the Transatlantic Reviews, except for a few that Mrs. Foster weeded out in the New York office. Of course, if a manuscript is by an obviously illiterate person, I do not read every word of it: on the other hand I have accepted manuscripts by unknown writers after reading the first three lines. This was the case with D. H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, (Percy) Wyndham Lewis, and H. M. Tomlinson. In the case of Mr. Hemingway I did not read more than six words of his before I decided to publish everything that he sent me. Of course, he had been recommended to me. He was the young man who had been shadow-dancing in Ezra’s studio. In the case of Ezra, in the days of the English Review I read three verses of his Goodly Fere; in that of Mr. E. E. Cummings I had decided after reading ten lines of his that I would open the transatlantic review with the poems he sent me.
There then was the transatlantic review—without capitals. I had no motive in printing the title without capitals. I had seen the name of a shop somewhere on the Boulevard without capital letters and had rather liked the effect. Then, by a mere coincidence, Mr. Cummings’ poems had no capitals. The conjunction made a great sensation. It was, of course, taken to be a display of Communism. We were suspected of beheading initial letters as if they had been kings. The American Women’s Club in Paris solemnly burned the second number of the review in their hall fire, thus giving a lead to Mr. Hitler. Their accusation was that we were not only Communists, but indecent—that, on account of a really quite innocent story in French by my extraordinarily staid friend M. Georges Pillement. But one of the scenes took place in a … bathroom. It seemed to me that it would be better if some American ladies did not read French. It might cause international complications if they set up a censorship in Paris. After I had written that the Club cut off its subscription.
Bringing out the first number was rather hectic. The misprints made by the Russian printers were natural, but their corrections made the pages look like a Soviet battlefield, and their procrastination was without parallel. The White Russian Colonel almost went out of his mind because he read communism into every incomprehensible English sentence. Finally everything was ready except for the proof of my editorial, which conveyed a slight aperçu of the Arts in Paris at that moment. It had cost me a good deal of work. There seemed to be no way of getting this proof from the printers.
The White Russian Colonel now resigned. He said with a great deal of dignity that he would probably starve. But it was inconsistent with his honour to go on taking money from an organ that was now definitely proved to be an agency of the U.S.S.R. I didn’t argue with or even question him. The Soviet Republic loomed enormously large in the Paris of those days, for Paris is an excitable city, and the finger of Lenin was traced to the most unlikely things. Even the mark of a newly-invented rubber boot-heel! It was taken to print a trail, by means of which Soviet agents could follow each other’s movements….
I had nevertheless, within a week, offers of every kind of service from every kind of White Russian noble or army officer or their wives. I refused them.
I was in rather a hole. The only person at the printer’s who spoke comprehensible French or seemed reasonably sane was the manager. He had taken the opportunity to go sick. The rest of the staff who appeared to be mad, flew into frenzies whenever I entered their office. My Russian is very limited, and Miss Reid was afraid to go near that madhouse. As far as we could make out that firm was run by near relatives of Grand Dukes. As soon as Miss Reid or I appeared, one of them would insinuate that another was an Israelite. A free fight would ensue.
About that time Mr. Pound strolled into my studio and said that my secretary was next door and would like to see me. I was a little confused, because I thought that Miss Reid was at the office in the wine vault of the Quai d’Anjou. I had quite forgotten the conscientious objector. “Next door” was the Santé prison.
The ten shillings or so that I had given that studious and bespectacled young man as earnest money had proved his undoing. He had been really near starvation, having been earning what living he did earn as an artist’s model. So, instead of spending the money on a square meal he laid it out on the normal products of the Dôme. That is not a good thing to do.
When he got home he found that his concierge’s lodge had been moved to the other side of the passage: its furniture was quite different and the concierge was a new man. In his own room an aged gentleman was sitting on the bed. The aged gentleman threw him down the stairs. The kindly agent to whom he told this unusual story patted him on the back and recommended him to go home, as a good, spectacled student should.
The young man walked round a block and tried again. Things were worse. The strange concierge blocked the way. The young man knocked him down. … The aged gentleman was still on the bed. This time he held a gun. Outraged by their offences against the laws of hospitality the young man smashed some windows, defiled the staircase, yelled at the top of his voice, and got into bed with the concierge’s wife.
When the agents arrived in great numbers the young man made a spirited attempt to bite off the nose of the sergeant in charge of them. He was carried, spread-eagled, to the Santé. Next morning a kindly magistrate told him he had acted very wrongly. Poets have a certain licence, but his deeds were not covered by that indulgence. The concierge pleaded for him; the old gentleman pleaded for him; the sergeant, who was a poet too, if a Corsican, asserted his conviction that the prisoner was an excellent young man. He had indulged too freely in the juice of the grape—but to indulge freely in wine was in France an act of patriotism.
He was ordered to pay frs. 15 for injuries to the aged gentleman; frs. 12 for the broken window; frs. 5 for the cleaning of the staircase and frs. 9 to the wife of the concierge, all these with sursis—the benefit of the First Offenders Act. He expected to go free and unmulcted.
Alas, a much more dire offence was alleged against him. He had been found to be in possession of a prohibited arm! The weapon was a penknife, three inches long. But the blade could be fixed. It was one of those Scandinavian, barrel-shaped affairs that some gentlemen use for cleaning their finger-nails. The unfortunate young man was remanded in custody.
The kindly sergeant did his best to lighten the irksomeness of the young man’s captivity. He visited him in his cell, declaimed to him his own vocéros and other poems to the glory of the vendetta. He listened with attention to the poems of the young man and to the music of Mr. Pound, who had brought his bassoon and rendered on it the airs to which the poems of Arnaut Daniel had been sung. That sergeant even brought half-bottles of thin wine and slices of the sausage called mortadella. With this he fed the captive. It is good to be a poet in France.
The Higher Court before whom the case was tried was less placable. The poor young man had just, when Ezra visited me, been sentenced to a fine of frs. 4, with frs. 66 for costs and, it having been discovered that as conscientious objector he had been in prison in England, he was sentenced to expulsion from France:—Ezra’s proposition now was that I should pay the fine and approach the authorities with assurance of the excellence of the young man’s poetry and of my conviction that he would no further offend…. I had never read the young man’s poetry and had only seen him for ten minutes at the Dôme, so I knew little about his character. But I perjured myself all right. I did it rather reluctantly, for I dislike the militant sides of the characters of conscientious objectors and, having once seen a man’s ear bitten off by an American trooper, I felt some distaste at the idea that my own nose might leave my face between the teeth of an English poet…. Eventually, on the assurance that the young man was in my service, the authorities decided that as long as he kept that job he might stay in Paris.
I was glad, for I did not like the idea of France expelling poets. So that young man became sub-editor. He assisted me to get out the first number. He made the discovery that what was delaying the printers was the fact that that White Russian Colonel had carried off the manuscript of my article and had never returned it. He had taken it to the General, who was the Chief Organiser of the Counter Revolution in Paris and, between them I suppose, they had puzzled out that my account of the Dadaists, Surrealists, Fauves, Cubists and supporters of M. Gide was a Soviet guide to the houses of White Russian organisers in Paris…. The idea does not really seem so mad when you consider that that General was, actually, a year or so later, “taken for a ride” in the streets of Paris in full daylight—and murdered.
I never saw that MS. again and had to substitute for it something I had written for a sort of prospectus. I am sorry, for, beside the week it cost me, it was, I think, rather a good “constatation” of the ideals of the plastic artists of those days. But perhaps it wasn’t!
The first number of the review came out thus about six weeks later. And even at that it did not properly get out. The printers being apparently unable to pay their papermakers, had bound the two or three copies that they sent to the office in a fairly substantial paper. But for those they supplied to the trade they provided a binding made apparently of white toilet paper. So, two days after the review had been out for notice, I had to face the fact that the trade refused to take it. I had to have it bound all over again. As soon as he saw that cover, enraged cables began to come from New York. Mr. Quinn must have spent more on cables than he spent on the review….
As soon as the first number was out the social life began. It came like an avalanche. I had arranged to give a modest Thursday tea to contributors after the time-honoured fashion of editors in Paris. The broken-down London printer was to make the tea and there would be biscuits, whilst we sat on benches round the press and talked of the future policy of the review. It is a useful function as it is arranged in France.
But you never saw such teas as mine were at first. They would begin at nine in the morning and last for twelve hours. They began again on Friday and lasted till Saturday. On Sunday disappointed tea-drinkers hammered all day on the locked doors. They were all would-be contributors, all American and nearly all Middle Westerners. If each of them had bought a copy of the review we should have made a fortune. Not one did. They all considered that as would-be contributors they were entitled to free copies.
I had to shut these teas down and to admit no one except contributors to the current numbers, and instead of a Thursday tea I gave a Friday dance. I do not mind giving dances. I can think my private thoughts while they go on nearly as well as in the Underground during rush hours—and if any one is present that I like and there is a shortage of men, I dance. I would rather dance than do anything else.
It was during one of these festivals that I had my first experience of Prohibition. I was dancing with a girl of seventeen, who appeared to be enthusiastic and modest. And suddenly—amazingly—she dropped right through my arms and lay on the floor like a corpse. I was, as it were, shattered. I thought she had died of heart disease.
No one in the room stopped dancing. They were all Americans and nearly all from the Middle West. The girl’s mother came from another room and, helped by her brother, carried the girl away. She expressed no particular concern and hardly any vexation. I had never seen a girl—I don’t believe I had ever seen a woman or even a man—in such a condition before.
… Prohibition made these Friday dances noisy and sometimes troublesome affairs. I didn’t much mind. I have a large presence and can overawe trouble-makers as a rule. And I like to see people enjoy themselves, and Heaven knows some of these poor devils needed to enjoy themselves. There was one poor nice boy—without the beginnings of any talent, who had come to France on a cattle boat—to paint. He committed suicide when he found that he would never paint even passably, and I learnt that the sandwiches and things at those Fridays had, for several months, been his only regular and certain food. To some devotees the Arts can be very cruel goddesses.
The dances gradually became burdensome and then overwhelming. In the beginning I had asked about thirty couples, all writers or painters, with one or two composers. On the second occasion there were perhaps forty-five, on the third, sixty…. So they increased. By May, as the tourist season commenced, they became overwhelming. I had to shut them down.
I did it with reluctance. It seemed to me that the review and everything connected with it was—I venture the statement—a burden of public duty laid on me. And the dances, burdensome as they were, gave the review a certain publicity. I do not mean that I was so naïf as to imagine that any of those who danced would afterwards subscribe, and as a matter of fact not a soul amongst all those that came did subscribe to the review. Not one…. But a very large proportion of those who have real merits as artists are painfully shy. They are shy of submitting their work and still more shy of personal contacts. So it seemed to me that if for such shy persons there could be a little, intimate function, they might be drawn from their shells and establish contacts, not merely with those responsible for the review itself, but also with each other. Thus one might evolve an atmosphere of artistic friendliness and intimacy, such as is extremely beneficial to the population of an art centre on its æsthetic side.
In that way the review and its social side-shows did their work. The dances had changed their character almost too soon, the greater number of those who crashed them being not only not artists but having no connection or concern with any Art. Indeed towards the end the dancers were, in the majority, people like State Senators and up-state bankers and publishers, who, passing through Paris, came as it were to a dance straight from a boat-train, made themselves offensive, and caught the next morning’s train for Monte Carlo, Berlin or Vienna. That, of course, froze out all my French friends and nearly all the practitioners of the Arts.
The work, however, had been done, and I do not think that there could ever have been an artistic atmosphere younger or more pleasurable or more cordial than that which surrounded the review offices and the Thursday teas, when they were again instituted. It was now possible to keep them intimate. They were not festivities for State Senators or up-state bankers, and the purely derogatory bringers of manuscripts had by then made the discovery that neither my assistants nor I myself were pigeons easy to pluck. There came to these frugal feasts regularly, Mr. Bird and Mr. Pound, before he set up as a musician and, discovering with startling rapidity that all Frenchmen were swine and all French art the product of scoundrels, shook the dust of Paris from his feet. On most Thursdays Mr. Hemingway shadow-boxed at Mr. Bird’s press, at the files of unsold reviews, and at my nose, shot tree-leopards that twined through the rails of the editorial gallery and told magnificent tales of the boundless prairies of his birth. I actually preferred his stories of his Italian campaign. They were less familiar. But the one and the other being supposed by Ezra, Mr. Robert McAlmon and others of the Faithful, to assist me by making a man of me, Mr. Hemingway soon became my assistant editor. As such he assisted me by trying to insert as a serial the complete works of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhofen. I generally turned round in time to take them out of the contents table. But when I paid my month’s visit to New York he took charge, and accomplished his purpose at the expense of cutting a short story of Mrs. H. G. Wells down to forty lines—and the London Letter of an esteemed correspondent down to three.
The baroness, too, was a fairly frequent visitor to the office, where she invariably behaved like a rather severe member of any non-Prussian reigning family. So I thought the stories of her eccentricities were exaggerated. Her permis de séjour, which she had somehow obtained from the British Consulate-General in Berlin, expired and she asked me to try to get the Paris Consulate-General to extend it. The Consulate-General in Paris is made up of most obliging people, and I made a date with her to meet me there. I waited for her for two hours and then went home. I found the telephone bell ringing and a furious friend at the British Embassy at the end of it. He wanted to know what the hell I meant by sending them a Prussian lady simply dressed in a brassière of milktins connected by dog chains, and wearing on her head a plum-cake! So attired, she that afternoon repaired from the Embassy to a café, where she laid out an amiable and quite inoffensive lady, and so became the second poet of my acquaintance to be expelled from France. The Embassy discontinued its subscription to the review.
The conscientious objector had had to go. He had worked quite well till Christmas. I sent him to England to do some private work for me and to get a rest. Whilst there he discovered inside himself that I regarded him as an object of charity, and resigned his post in a letter of great expletive violence. I had never regarded him as an object of charity, but as one who was by turns quite useful and a great nuisance. As he had had nowhere to go to after he left the Santé, I had taken him to live with me. His salary was rather small, so he was really under no obligation to me…. He was eventually arrested and conducted to the frontier. I regretted it, because he appeared to be a young man of real talent. He has since pursued the career of a poet and savant in a country bordering on France….
His going severed the review’s last editorial contact with England—except for a day when a young Eton and Oxford boy took over the duties. He didn’t return on the morrow. The duties were pretty hard and without glamour. A bewildering succession of sub-editors then helped me and Mr. Hemingway. They had all been cowboys, so that the office took on an aspect and still more the sound of a Chicago speakeasy, invaded by young men from a Wild West show. The only one whose identity comes back to me is Mr. Ivan Bede, who wore large, myopic spectacles, in front of immense dark eyes, wrote very good short stories about farming in the Middle West, and boasted of his Indian blood and the severe vastnesses that had enveloped his childhood. I take that to be much the same thing as being a cowboy.
Mr. Hemingway had, I think, been a cowboy before he became a tauromachie expert: Mr. Robert McAlmon, the printer-author, certainly had; so had poor Dunning, the gentle poet; even Mr. Bird had been a rancher in his day, and Mr. Pound had come over to Europe as a cattle-hand!
That a great literary movement—for a really great literary movement was there beginning—should have originated in the Middle West, which is usually regarded as the culminating point of materialism, is not really astonishing. It was a matter of reaction, the young reacting violently against the frame of mind of the sires. I went to Chicago some years ago to persuade the father of one of my contributors to permit his son to take up literature as a profession, and to let him have a little money while he made his way. Chicago is the butchering metropolis, and this was a Chicago magnate—not at all a gross or illiterate person—but adamant. I argued with him for some time. I said his son had great talent and might well one day ornament his family and name….
He said—almost pathetically:
“Mr. Ford, on the tombstones of three generations of my family there is a statement that they left honourable records in the trade I follow. Would it not be a dreadful thing if my son had to have on his gravestone the fact that he was a mere ink-slinger? …”
I pointed out that a butcher’s son whose epitaph began, “Dear Friend, for Jesus’s sake forbear …” had for three hundred years conferred on his country and mine, since they had a common origin, the greatest lustre that they could show.
That produced no effect on him. He said that Shakespeare was different. His father was no doubt not a very important butcher. He understood, too, that he had given his father and his family great cause for concern. He himself would rather see his son starve than that he should become a writer…. And starve the boy did for several years in Paris…. Another boy from Chicago, who came to me for encouragement, whose parents had the same pride in their trade, ran away from home and worked his passage to France. He had seen a translation of Gourmont’s Night in the Luxembourg, and when he got to Paris had just enough money and just enough French to take a taxi to the Luxembourg. He spent the night wandering round and round the gardens, seeking for the entrance. He had, of course, a hard time for some while, but he is now, I understand, as a painter, one of the ornaments of his home-town.
I will add as a contrast a story, that I do not remember to have told before, because it lets’me mention a very charming personality…. On my second morning in Chicago during that visit the telephone bell rang. A voice said:
“Mr. F——, I see you are in this city. I am Mrs. ——. Mrs. ——, don’t you know? The de bunker….”
I said that for years it had been one of my chief longings to hear the voice of Mrs. ——.
She continued:
“I want to tell you something—to give you advice….”
She went on to say that she was Ernest Hemingway’s confidante and adviser, and one thing she begged me … she begged me! … not to call on Hemingway’s father and mother. I should have a most frightful reception. They regarded me as having horns and a tail…. Because I had encouraged Ernest to become a writer. I must promise! … Promise!
I promised and hung up the receiver. Before it was well on its hooks the instrument gave cry again. A voice said:
“I am Hemingway….”
It was so exactly Hemingway’s voice that I exclaimed in astonishment that I had thought he was safe in Paris. The voice said:
“No—not Ernest. It’s his father.” He said that he and Mrs. Hemingway wanted me to stay with them for the time I was in Chicago—because I had given Ernest encouragement to become a writer. He was an extraordinarily gentle, swarthy, bearded man, who should have been an Elizabethan poet-adventurer…. May his ashes know peace!
In any case what I had predicted to myself in my Sussex cottage had by the time of the transatlantic review days become fully true. The Middle West was seething with literary impetus. It is no exaggeration to say that eighty per cent of the manuscripts in English that I received came from west of Altoona, and forty per cent of them were of such a level of excellence that one might just as well close one’s eyes and take one at random, as try to choose between them. It is true that a great proportion of them were auto-biographical in conception, and all of them local in scene. But a just perception of one’s surroundings and of one’s own career forms the first step towards a literature that shall be great in scope. Local literatures are as a rule a nuisance, the writers devoting to local distinctions of speech without interest and to local ill-manners that would be best forgotten, talents that might, in a wider scene, develop comprehension and catholicity. But a wave of literature that in a few years produced—to mention them without appraisal and at random—Mr. Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Mr. McAlmon’s photographic reports on Berlin night life; Mr. Nathan Ash’s Love in Chartres; Miss Katherine Anne Porter’s Mexican stories, side by side with Mr. Glenway Westcott’s Grandmothers; Mr. Davis’s The Opening of a Door; Miss Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s My Heart and My Flesh, and Miss Caroline Gordon’s Penhally—such a wave of literature cannot, whatever else can be said of it, be called parochial…. And I don’t know what else can be said against it.
So that, try as I might, to divide the space of the review into equal portions devoted to French, English and American writings, the preponderating share of its pages went to the Middle West. There was no difficulty in finding French contributions or even French pictures to reproduce—though as a matter of fact most of the reproductions came from the brushes and pencils of foreigners like Picasso, Juan Gris, Brancusi…. The level of literature and the Arts is in France always amazingly high, though from time to time there will be no great outstanding figure. That was the case in the days of the transatlantic review. Anatole France having died unhonoured, Loti forgotten and Proust amidst the lamentations of a people, there were no great outstanding peaks. But outstanding peaks are not of much benefit to the general run of literature. They destroy perspective, so that whilst the public read one applauded book they ignore a hundred others that are as good or better, and thus the community loses. Certainly with the help of M. Jean Cassou, M. Georges Pillemont, M. Ribemont Dessaignes, M. Philippe Soupault, the transatlantic review managed to have as good French pages as anyone could desire who wished to know how good and clear the French writing and the French mind can be.
Thus through no volition of my own, but I daresay partly through the patriotic coercion of Mr. Hemingway, the review was Middle Western as to a little more than half and a little less than one-third French. The remaining sixth, mostly consisting of chronicles, came from the Eastern States, New York, and England.
It was singular how few manuscripts came from England. This can hardly have been due to dislike of the youth of England for myself, for the youth of England knew nothing about me. Nor can it have been due to want of knowledge of the existence of the review, for with a population about equal to that of the Middle West, England consumed a good many more copies of the review. That fact was owing to better distribution. Yet I did not receive from all England one-tenth of the number of MSS. that came from Chicago alone. Of what we did print I remember only a beautiful story by Mr. Coppard, a couple of delicate ones from Mrs. H. G. Wells, a story by Miss Ethel Mayne, and two or three by a lady whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten. I cannot refresh my memory, because my last set of the review was carried away by a gentleman from Chicago. He professed to be a bibliographer, but, though it was some years ago, he has neither made the bibliography nor returned the borrowed set. A full set of the review is now rare and, at any rate until the crisis, was rather expensive…. But those short stories were very good, or I should not after ten years so closely remember them.
I should like to make the note that in my opinion, for what it is worth, the real germ of the Middle Western literary movement is to be found in the Three Mountains Press, Paris, of Mr. William Bird, who worked in conjunction with the Paris Contact Publishing Company of Mr. Robert McAlmon. Mr. Bird, an almost hypersensitive dilettante, when he was printing, produced a series of beautifully-printed specimens of new prose. These books were edited by Mr. Pound and were mostly American. Mr. McAlmon published a number of uglyish wads of printing called the Contact Books. These were nearly all Middle Western in origin, and included Mr. Hemingway’s first work.
These two printing establishments formed a centre and established between young writers contacts precisely that were, in the early twenties, more than invaluable. The young writer may find himself without being actually published, but he cannot do so without contacts with ardent fellows in his art. Neither, indeed, can an old writer. The claim is made on the point of one or another non-commercial publication—including the transatlantic review—that it “discovered” this or that writer because it published his first lispings. It is not for me to deny the service to literature of, say, the Little Review, or, in its more opulent way, of the Dial. But for myself I could not claim that the transatlantic discovered anybody. It would like to have, but the spadework had already been done by the gentlemen and enterprises that I have had the honour above to mention.