Looking for Mr. Gilbert

Coppiced willows, undated and unidentified, but probably Great Meadows, Concord, Massachusetts

“A photograph is neither taken nor seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you.”

One winter I lived in a one-room cabin without running water or electricity. It was set in a hickory grove about three hundred yards back from a paved road and when the first snows fell, as they did early that year, I would sometimes become encased in the cabin. Not that I minded, I had gathered about me there a large number of eclectic books, and I spent most of the winter reading—everything from the collected works of Lafcadio Hearn, to natural history volumes dealing with moths and butterflies, to obscure travel diaries.

Along with these books, I found myself rereading many of the old classics that I was supposed to have studied in college. One of these was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which made especially pleasant reading on sleety afternoons, with its evocation of the hot light of Antibes and the Cote d’Azure and the degenerate, hedonistic life of the collection of expatriates who gathered at La Garoupe beach in the late 1920s. I remembered, probably from college days, that Fitzgerald tended to rework his own life into his fiction and that most of the characters in his novels could be identified. The central character of Dick Diver and his wife, Nicole, for example, are a combination of the famous expatriate couple Gerald and Sarah Murphy and Scott and his wife Zelda. The drunken Abe North is supposedly based on Fitzgerald’s friend, the sportswriter Ring Lardner.

Things go well for this group of characters as long as they are in the south. But in the second half of the novel, after they all move up to Paris, the action begins to spiral down, with drunken forays, pointless shopping sprees, eventual madness on the part of Nicole, and a descent into drunkenness by Dr. Diver, who started the whole group rolling.

I was in the midst of one of the Paris scenes one Sunday afternoon and came across a passage that snapped me out of my winter dreams and set me on a more intensive hunt for Mr. Gilbert.

The episode concerned a dispute in a café in Montparnasse. In the narrative, Nicole Diver was awakened in her hotel room by a handsome Paris police official who questioned her concerning the whereabouts of her friend Abe North. It seems that North had been robbed the night before and had filed a complaint and the policeman said they had arrested the miscreant and wanted North to come down to the station and file the charges. Later in the morning, North appeared at the hotel, accompanied by a black man from Stockholm named Jules Peterson. North explained that Peterson was in trouble and that he, North, was the cause of it all and needed help. It seems that North was in a bar in Montparnasse, drunk as usual, and a Negro had snatched a thousand-franc note from his hand and disappeared. North went to the police, accompanied by Peterson, who had witnessed the incident. They returned to the bar with the police agent and too hastily identified the perpetrator as a man who had only entered the bar after North left. A dispute began, there were accusations, and then the police complicated the situation by arresting a prominent black bistro owner named Freeman. In fact, the crowd at the bar insisted, the thousand-franc note had only been taken from North to pay for the drinks he had already consumed. With the black clients now up in arms against him, and Freeman hauled off to jail, North fled the scene accompanied by Jules Peterson, who had assumed the role, Fitzgerald writes, of the friendly Indian who had helped a white man. Now the raucous blacks were more out to get Peterson than to get North.

In the hotel scene, North ushers Peterson into the room to meet Dick Diver and Nicole. Peterson is described as “a small respectable Negro on the suave model that heels the Republican party in the border States …,” which is to say, a literate, ambitious, middle-class black man with aspirations of equality.

The next line gave me a jolt.

“Up in Stockholm,” Fitzgerald writes, “Peterson had failed as a small manufacturer of shoe polish, and now possessed only his formula and sufficient trade tools to fill a small box.…”

I stopped reading, went to the window, and watched the sleet hammer down. It rattled on the roof of the cabin, and beyond a little pasture, the wall of the sleet-patterned forest assumed a dense, stippled look. How many American blacks in 1927 failed as manufacturers of shoe polish in Stockholm and ended up in Paris?

Peterson must have been based on Mr. Gilbert.

It seems that my first and singular account of the life and times of Mr. Robert A. Gilbert, delivered to me by an old hermitlike farmer who could stand in one place and tell stories one after the other for two hours without tiring, was proving true in almost every detail. Sanfred Bensen had told me that Gilbert was the jack-of-all-trades for Mr. William Brewster, that he ran October Farm, and that he went everywhere the great white man went. Then I found the evidence of this in the form of Brewster’s journals, which chronicled, day after day, year after year, for twenty years, the comings and goings of Gilbert. He was, as Bensen said, everywhere.

Mr. Bensen told me that Gilbert had graduated from Harvard. He didn’t actually graduate, I learned, but he was very much associated with Harvard. He knew, among other dignitaries, the president of the university. He knew Thomas Barbour, and the former curator, Samuel Henshaw, and the head of the ornithology department, Joel Asaph Allen. Bensen said that Gilbert was a favorite of the Brahmins and their associates. Gilbert knew Daniel Chester French, and R. H. Dana, Harriet Hemenway, and the ornithologist Frank Chapman of the American Museum of Natural History. He met Rudyard Kipling, who was an acquaintance of Brewster’s. He was with Brewster the day Brewster met President Teddy Roosevelt and probably had a few words with him about wildlife. In short, as Bensen had told me, “He knew many world famous people.…”

And now, just as Bensen said, here he was in Paris, having failed as a shoe polish manufacturer, and having fallen in with a low group of “musicianers.”

Long before there was a Jules Peterson character, Fitzgerald had wanted to have a murder at the core of Tender Is the Night. He decided to use the Peterson scene to create one.

The young movie star Rosemary Hoyte, as well as the Divers and North, were all staying in the hotel together. In the hotel room, with Peterson now present, Diver tried to straighten out the matter. He encouraged Abe North to go sleep it off first and attend to the problem later, but North argued, saying that there were innocent Negroes now in jail. Seeing the complicated situation (and true to Gilbert form), Jules Peterson politely excused himself and said he would wait in the hall while they decided what to do. When North finally departed, still garbled and drunk, Peterson was no longer in the hall. Later Rosemary Hoyte burst in and made Dick return to her room with her. There, stretched out on the bed, was Jules Peterson, dead. Apparently, as North had predicted, he had been tracked and killed by one of the irate blacks of Montparnasse.

It’s a bit of an outrageous scene—after all, how many murders occur in upscale Paris hotels—but the event marks a turning point in the novel and, in the seventy-odd years since Tender Is the Night was published, scholars and critics have analyzed the scene meticulously and have come up with a variety of imaginative interpretations, everything from a reversal of the Emancipation Proclamation to an interracial psycho-sexual drama—a dead black man on the bed of a white vedette. The whole of Tender Is the Night is a confusion of events, national identities, races, and all of it played against the background of the hot, jazz-driven, champagne-fueled age.

The portrait of Robert A. Gilbert delivered to us at the hands of Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald is hardly a favorable one, nor is it a particularly egalitarian portrait of black people in general, but the scene has to be viewed from the perspective of Scott Fitzgerald, the context of the novel, and the period of history in which it was written. Inasmuch as he gave the matter any thought at all Fitzgerald seems to have accepted, without examination, all the engrained stereotypes of deeply seated American racism—spelled out in the extreme by the beloved scientist of an earlier era, Louis Agassiz. This was, unfortunately, the norm in the United States. Those who were not racist, or at least tried not to be, as with, perhaps, some of the Boston Brahmins, were the anomalies.

To be kind about the matter, you could say that Fitzgerald used black people as a metaphor. According to critics, the presence of Negroes in a scene tended to indicate a crack in the thin cover of civilization. They represented an older, more chaotic order. Ironically, he did the same thing in reverse with very white people. All the social climbing newcomers at La Garoupe beach, for example, the destroyers of the civilized, cultured, and spirited world of Dick Diver, are pale and pasty, whereas the fashionable crowd in the novel are all tanned and colored by the sun. Rosemary Hoyte, happening upon this group in the opening scenes of the story, immediately gets a sunburn; she joins the crowd in other words. (She also knows how to swim. Those in the inside group all know how to swim. The arrivistes don’t.)

The long party in Paris of which Fitzgerald and company were so much a part began on a hushed November day in 1918. Edith Wharton was living in Paris at the time, in a quiet quarter on the Rue de Varennes. By 1918, she and the other members in her floating salon had become accustomed to the dull thud of cannonades and the deep-throated roar of the Germans’ huge, distant cannon, Big Bertha, whose deathly trajectory permitted shells to fall on Paris. But on this particular day, from the open windows of her flat, Wharton heard an altogether different sound. It was the familiar bell of the nearby Sainte Clotilde, ringing at an odd hour. She went out on the balcony and listened. The cannon throb and the roar of Big Bertha had stilled, and all across the city she could hear, one after another, the bells of Paris starting up—first Saint Louis, then, more distant, Saint Sulpice, then Saint Etienne du Mont, and, farther off, Sacré Coeur, the Madeleine, and finally, joining the chorus, the deep solemn voice of Notre Dame itself. The bells began tentatively, one following the other until all of Paris consisted of bells—a huge, joyous chorale that rang like rain from the skies.

The people of the city had lived for four years for this moment. The chorus of church bells could mean only one thing; the war was over. From that date forward, for the next ten years, it was a madcap joyride in a fast Bugati.

You can find evidence of the decade-long party in old photographic prints in the bookstalls along the Left Bank of the Seine:

Here’s a dark-haired woman in a bar with her right arm draped around the shoulder of an effeminate dandy with painted lips, manicured nails, and a monocle. He leans forward, kissing her cheek. She’s just lifting a glass of champagne to her lips: Montmartre, 1928.

Another shows two pretty women in cloche hats at an indoor table at the Coupole, also dated—Montparnasse, 1926. There is a man with the two women, dressed in a wide-brimmed slouch hat with a leather band and a square watch that looks like a Bulova. On the table in front of them is an open bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. One of the women is lifting her glass seductively to the cameraman.

Here’s the bar at the Rotonde, also in Montparnasse. Crowded that night: three women, one with a drawn-back Spanish-style hairdo, the other two in cloche hats, their arms draped around a man with owlish black-rimmed glasses and straight bangs, his hat pushed to the back of his head. Behind him a man in his cups, eyes half-closed, barely able to stay on his feet. Sugar shakers on the polished wood bar. Empty glasses, spilled beer on the counter, everyone drunk. Later, perhaps, on a lark, this group will descend to one of the so-called “interchange” clubs, Le Monocle maybe, a famous lesbian nightclub with an all-woman band and tough-guy singers who pretend to beat up their female partners—who, in this case, could just as well be some man in drag—or was it a woman, playing a man, playing a woman. Nobody cared.

Maybe the group would go up to Pigalle, or the Rue St. Denis and hire a whole troop of putains to make a quadro, all of them naked and piled together, performing despicable acts with one another, and maybe one of the crowd spills red wine down his shirtfront and someone else is sick, and there is some shouting and the madame comes in and chases everyone out and it’s night again in the streets, or is that light in the east the dawn and has yet another night in Paris in 1927 come to an end. Nobody gave a damn, nobody cared; the war was over and what could be worse than that war, with all the pretty young boys dying with the mud of Verdun in their mouths, and gas, and people without legs coming home, sons dead, millions of sons dead, and then, thank God, the sun goes down and here comes another night and it’s off to the Rotonde to have a drink and get started all over again.

The party seemed unstoppable. It was the short, sweet decade that the French came to call “les Années Folles.” Even their president was crazy, would act a bit odd at times, was overly theatrical in his speeches, played to an approving crowd, and was once found near some railroad tracks wandering around in his pajamas. His claim was that he had fallen off a train. Nobody cared. And so it was off to the Beaumont Ball—1927—prancing horses, demimondaines, transvestites, artistes of all sexual persuasions, and champagne, of course, always champagne, every night champagne. Or they’d go off to the silly bourgeois Bal des Loufoques in Montmartre, or over to La Baker’s club or go looking for the white Russians and the cocked-hat accordion players and violinists making people weep with their renditions of “Dark Eyes” and “Little Snowbell.” Or they’d go up to Montmartre again to the Hot Club or the Jazz Hot, or go slumming with the apache dancers, or maybe go over to the really sick club where the abortionist and Irish tenor homosexual Dr. Maloney held his nightly parties. Nobody cared. They could find something. On almost any night in Paris between the wars there would be a fancy dress ball, Egyptian pharaohs, bare-bosomed harem girls, many Mandarins, African medicine men, Cleopatras with real vipers, powerful mustachioed men in drag, jungle men and clowns and overweight ballerinas, Red Indians, and Roman warriors and gorillas in checked suits, dancing up a storm.

These were the American years in Paris, the era of the Lost Generation and its followers, of whom, it should be said, there were many. The American expatriates felt that anything was possible in Paris. They were away from the restrictions of home. They learned about free love and nightclubs where men dressed up like women, and what’s more, you could drink anything you wanted in Paris, even absinthe if you could find it. Back home, after 1919, it was against federal law to have a drink. In Paris it was de rigueur. The Americans were tolerated by the French—generally—but they were not a particularly civilized lot. The rowdy, would-be artists fought with each other, they beat up bartenders, they got themselves arrested and abused by the French police. They pissed so often in the streets that the police slang of the period had a code for them—yet another pisseur américain, they would write in their record books. One of the worst behaved of this group was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was so rude when he was drunk that it was said he had been punched in the nose by every taxi driver in Paris. The nightclub owners knew all the cutups, and on occasion, when they saw trouble brewing from a particular American client, they would have the waiters serve up a Mickey Finn for his next drink.

The visiting Americans may have relaxed many of their old inhibitions on arriving in the night world of Paris, but there was one taboo that was perhaps so deeply rooted that it was difficult for even the most liberated of them to let go of entirely, one social stricture that still lingered and about which the French, in their decadence, did nothing. Drunks and spitting clochards the Americans could handle, opium, cocaine, homosexuals, and lesbian whores, petty criminals, filthy pictures, men in gorilla suits, they became accustomed to. But they had a problem with the large company of free-wheeling, uppity, seemingly enfranchised American Negroes who had been loosed on the streets of Paris in these years. If you wanted to be bad, really bad, you could associate with them. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who was from the South (and happened also to be crazy), danced with one once at a nightclub, causing a scandal among the visiting tourists.

The French, with typical laissez-faire, allowed the resident American blacks to attend the same dance clubs as the whites; they ate in the best restaurants, and they sat table to table with trim little families from Illinois and Georgia as if—well—as if it were their right to be there. What was worse, what really must have galled the Americans, is that the French, with their infamous degeneracy, actually enjoyed them. Some had even married Negroes after the war, an act that was illegal in most of the United States until 1967.

One night in the mid-twenties, the Théatre des Champs Élysées staged a show called le Revue Nègre. It was a short performance, no more than an hour or so, and it had an all-black, mostly American cast. The show was attended by a number of influential painters and writers and was risqué, of course, they all were, but something happened that night that had not so far occurred in the other revues in town, something that struck a chord. The crowd wouldn’t stop clapping after the show, and those who didn’t clap shouted with outrage, and there was a curiously loud and sustained applause and many bravos for one performer in particular, a 19-year-old bright-eyed black girl from St. Louis with a crazy dance style named Josephine Baker. After that night, Paris never could get enough of “La Baker.” France could not get enough of “La Baker.” She was so popular that shops actually sold little black dolls named “Josephine,” and fifty years later in Paris you could bring tears to the eyes of old men with long memories by simply asking questions about her. She reminded them of their youth and les Années Folles.

For all their popularity with the French, the American blacks in Paris were no better behaved than the white revelers, maybe even a little worse. They too stuck together in their own district, mainly around Montmartre, a quarter that housed many artists and writers but was also plagued by racketeers and petty gangsters, and was one of the hangouts for many American black jazz musicians. All these lowlife types were armed with one manner of weapon or another. The underworld thugs of Paris used to carry knives to do their work, but by the twenties pistols, a Chicago import, began to be the weapon of choice, with, of course, much deadlier consequences. Many of the American jazzmen packed heat, as the American expression had it, and sometimes used their weapons. The popular clarinetist Sidney Bechet got eleven months in jail for a little shooting spree he participated in after an all-nighter at a club where he was playing. And then, perhaps reluctantly, the authorities exiled him. He came back, though, in the 1950s. Who wouldn’t have?

A contemporary African American minister named Henry Hugh White, who visited France after the war to observe the situation of blacks abroad, wrote a book called Between White and Black about the American Negroes in France. He believed that the French and the African Americans had somehow found in each other a kindred spirit and that there was an almost spiritual connection between the French of that period and American blacks, an affinity of some sort that affected both cultures during this period of history. “They are both emotional, artistic, musical, fun-loving, and religious,” he wrote. None of which was necessarily true, but the statement sums up the zeitgeist of Paris in the 1920s (except perhaps for the religious part).

It is not likely that you could find two cities as disparate as Paris and Boston in these years. Back in Gilbert and Brewster’s world the ever-vigilant Watch and Ward Society, which was founded to protect family life in New England, or more accurately to keep Puritans pure, was censuring movies, plays, and literature. The Society was founded in 1878 and, among other works, promptly suppressed Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. 1927 was a banner year for the group, no less than sixty-eight volumes were skewered, including the Paris authors John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. Drinking of even so refined a beverage as a good claret was against federal law by 1919, and the speakeasies were subtle in Boston and well-obscured.

In Paris the party was still going on, ever increasing in degeneracy and frenzy as the end drew near. And now, into this tumultuous scene, in 1927 there comes a small well-tailored Boston black man, dressed in old-fashioned starched shirts and a high collar, with a little suitcase of goods and a ramrod-straight walk. He’s 56 years old now and wears steel-rimmed glasses and has a high, balding forehead. And here he comes down the Boulevard des Italiens. He passes the Café de la Paix, looking over the happy throngs of white, recently arrived tourists. He has heard that if he sits there long enough he will eventually see someone he knows. But he knows also, having spent some time by now in Paris, that whomever he recognizes there will be someone from Boston, from the Brahmin world of Brewster. He pauses, thinking to take a citronade, and then proceeds down l’Avenue de l’Opéra and along the river, which he crosses eventually on the Pont du Carousel.

It was near here, on a February evening, earlier in the year when Gilbert first arrived, that he came upon a bizarre scene, as strange as anything he had yet encountered in this strange and otherworldly city. He was stopped by a procession of young people in a variety of spangled costumes and outrageous hats and wigs. They were led by a bare-breasted woman riding on an elephant and wearing a long blue wig. Ahead of her was a blackfaced white man dressed as an African chieftain in leopard skins, waving a threatening spear at the curious passersby, and behind the elephant stretched a long dragon-like float and behind the dragon, bowing to the sidewalks, was a man wearing a collar of dead pigeons, carrying a bag of living snakes. He was followed by shocking lines of costumed dancers and chanting faux priests, nuns, and monks, more bare-breasted women dressed as Algerian harem girls, a few pharaohs striding regally along, and finally files of marching dogs, leashed and dressed for the occasion in flaring ruffled circus collars and pointy hats.

Gilbert watched as the troop passed, singing, hammering cymbals, and pounding drums.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Gilbert asked a passerby in his halting French. “Qu’est-ce quise passe?”

“Ce n’est rien,” the pedestrian said. “C’est le Bal des Artistes.”

Once he’s over on the Left Bank, Mr. Gilbert cuts through the Rue Jacob where, he has heard, an odd, very rich American woman named Natalie Barney lives. She is (so Gilbert has heard) a woman who attracts to her person a number of artists and writers and he has heard that she prefers women to men. He walks slowly up the Rue de Rennes, glancing to left and right. It’s March, and all through the Latin Quarter the tables are strewn all over the sidewalks and the shock-haired students and poseurs are all there, drinking coffees and demis of beer—most of them white. At the Rue de Fleurus he pauses again. There is another odd American woman living down there someplace. She cuts her hair short like a man and lives intimately with another woman and inside her flat, or so he has heard, there are some very strange paintings—broken, jagged images, and distorted people with African eyes, three noses and four eyes, going every which way. Americans gather here as well, white ones from the Midwest mostly (so he has heard).

He carries on, and at the Boulevard Raspail comes upon a collection of crowded cafés. Here they are again, an older crowd of Americans, English, Italians, and French, more weathered out than the students, and slightly more wasted from drink and too many all-night parties, only this time there are also a few black faces. He looks over the crowd at the Rotonde—all sorts there too, the noisy Americans all sitting together at one side of the café. A few blacks, also noisy. He does not like their loud, braying laughter. While he’s standing there a man in a wide-checked suit and a big gorilla mask stumbles out onto the street accompanied by a woman with loose hair. They’re laughing and dipping and grabbing each other indecently. Gilbert averts his eyes, turns down the Rue Delambre, and goes into a place he knows called the Dingo Bar and, speaking in English, orders his citronade.

The bar man there is friendly, Gilbert has been here before and he even recognizes some of the faces. There’s a big barrel-chested white man with a brush moustache he sometimes sees, who seems to be respected by the other whites. There is a French woman with black bangs who is apparently attached to a narrow-faced American man who is (so he has heard) some kind of photographer who creates pictures that are as strange as the paintings in the short-haired woman’s apartment. Someone told him that for three francs his woman friend, whose name is Kiki, would reveal her breasts to anyone in Paris. Sometimes in here Gilbert has seen a friendly drunken American man with strawberry blond hair who seems to be slightly richer than the others, but is loud, makes a fool of himself, and demands club sandwiches from the barman any time of the day or night.

Among this same crowd he has also encountered American Negroes. Back home he would avoid this type. They’re loud, they drink a lot, and talk about books and jazz, and some are from the northern cities in the Midwest, and there are also some low types there from the cotton belt. But they all speak his language, and he falls into conversation with them, asks questions. He is looking for work, needs money.—What you do?—they ask—I am a pianist—he says in his straight-shot broad A’d northern accent, and they name a few spots, none of which appeals to the classically trained Mr. Gilbert. But then another man comes in. He’s a light-skinned fellow with a pencil-thin moustache, well-attired in a houndstooth sport coat. He and Gilbert start to talk and Gilbert can hear his refined accent, no trace of the giveaway southern drawl. He is, unlike the others in the bar that day, an educated man, and it turns out he went to Harvard, where he had earned a master’s degree in English. He’s a lot younger than Gilbert, but he knows Cambridge, and even though he doesn’t know anything about the museum and has never heard of Brewster or even Barbour, he has met President Lowell, and so has Gilbert (sort of), having served him elephant’s-foot stews (except that he doesn’t make clear). The two of them have a lot to talk about. This man is not the low type of barfly that Gilbert has been meeting in Paris. He tells Mr. Gilbert that he has come to the bar only because there are a few American literati there whom he knows. He’s modest, a published poet, and he’s refined and knows another side of Paris. His name, he says, is Countee Cullen and he knows (sort of) the man with the strawberry blond hair (but tries to avoid him) and also Langston Hughes, the poet, and what’s more, he is married to the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois. He gives Gilbert some leads. And in time, Gilbert was able to move from his squalid three-franc-a-night closet in Montmartre to a long-term Right Bank hotel, where other blacks were then living. Not far away is the fancy upscale hotel where that silly young cutup Josephine Baker lives.

While he was living in the cheap Montmartre hotel room, there were, perhaps, some regretful memories of his early days in Boston and the dark little room on Sussex Street in the South End that he shared with his brother, and perhaps he experienced a certain amount of reexamination of his days, his successes, and his current spate of bad luck. But he carries on. He avoids the lowlifes, goes to bed early when he can, and must have found some employment. He stayed on in Paris for two years. Maybe more.

In the Cambridge, Massachusetts, phone directory, after 1926, you will not find his name until 1930.