Geniuses Together : American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (9780571309412) Read online

  HUMPHREY CARPENTER

  GENIUSES TOGETHER

  American Writers in Paris in the 1920s

  Contents

  Title Page

  Map of the Left Bank and Montparnasse

  Illustrations

  Foreword

  Prologue: A denser civilisation than our own

  Part One: The Introducers

  1 Slowly I was knowing that I was a genius

  2 The Amazon entertains

  3 Sylvia and Company

  Part Two: Being Geniuses Together

  1 Melancholy Jesus

  2 The fastest man on a typewriter

  3 No fat, no adjectives, no adverbs

  4 McAlimony

  5 Summer’s just started

  Interlude: The oldest country in the world

  Part Three: Fiesta

  1 Iceberg principle

  2 La vie est belle

  3 Some fiesta

  4 Just a damn journalist

  5 These rocky days

  6 Summer’s almost ended

  Epilogue: Homeward Trek

  Appendices:

  A Biographies in Brief

  B Bibliography

  C Notes on Sources

  D Acknowledgements

  Index

  Plates

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  1 (a) Medallion of Benjamin Franklin

  (b) The Statue of Liberty under construction in Paris in 1883

  2 (a) Natalie Barney and friend as nymph and shepherd

  (b) Portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge

  3 Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein at home

  4 (a) Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein

  (b) Gertrude Stein photographed by Man Ray

  5 (a) Sylvia Beach with James Joyce in Shakespeare and Company

  (b) Sherwood Anderson

  6 (a) Ernest Hemingway photographed in Shakespeare and Company

  (b) Ernest Hemingway: a photograph given to Sylvia Beach

  7 (a) Hemingway at home in 1919 in his ‘uniform’

  (b) Ernest and Hadley Hemingway

  8 (a) and

  (b) Robert McAlmon

  9 (a) Robert McAlmon and James Joyce

  (b) Robert McAlmon and Ernest Hemingway at Pamplona

  10 (a) The terrace of the Dôme

  (b) The Rotonde, in August 1922

  11 (a) Kiki

  (b) Jimmie Charters, ‘Jimmie the Barman’

  12 (a) Geniuses together

  (b) Malcolm Cowley

  13 (a) Summit conference for the transatlantic review

  (b) F. Scott Fitzgerald and Adrienne Monnier

  14 (a) Kay Boyle, photographed by Man Ray

  (b) Ernest Walsh

  15 (a) Harold Loeb

  (b) Duff Twysden and Jimmie Charters

  16 (a) Harold Loeb on the horns of the bull

  (b) Hemingway makes his departure from Paris

  Foreword

  This is the story of the longest-ever literary party, which went on in Montparnasse, on the Left Bank, throughout the 1920s.

  Writers tend to huddle in gangs for self-protection; hence Bloomsbury, the Transcendentalists of Concord, the Auden Generation. Most of them are ‘movements’ to which we ourselves would not greatly wish to have belonged; we would have found Virginia Woolf terrifying, Ralph Waldo Emerson daunting, W. H. Auden overpowering. The American literary goings-on in Paris during the 1920s are a different matter.

  ‘I went to a marvellous party,’ runs the first line of a Noël Coward song, and evidently that was how it felt to have been a young American writer – or would-be writer – in the Montparnasse district of Paris after the First World War. It is hard to read about life in ‘the Quarter’, as they all called Montparnasse, without wishing to have tasted it oneself – to have bumped into Ernest Hemingway in a bar, to have drunk away the night with Robert McAlmon, to have been caught up in the intrigues of the expatriates and participated in their long fiesta. It was far from being the most productive ‘movement’ in literary history; but to live in Paris is always a delight, and to live there when life seems full of possibilities and tomorrow you might turn out to be a genius – well, to quote another song,* ‘Who could ask for anything more?’

  This book, its title shamelessly stolen from Robert McAlmon’s memoirs of Paris in the 1920s, Being Geniuses Together (1938), is chiefly a collage of Left-Bank expatriate life as it was experienced by the Hemingway generation – the Lost Generation, as Gertrude Stein named them in a famous remark to Hemingway. There had been Americans in Paris for nearly 150 years before this particular crowd arrived, and I have prefaced the story with a brief history of the special relationship between the USA and the French capital. Next, I have supplied brief portraits of the three women – Gertrude Stein, Natalie Clifford Barney, and Sylvia Beach – who, arriving in Paris before the First World War, provided in their different ways meeting points and vital introductions for the exiles of the 1920s. But the main narrative concerns the years 1921 to 1928, because these saw the arrival and departure of Hemingway and most of his Paris associates.

  Even within this short period I have been highly selective. The volume of the Dictionary of Literary Biography devoted to American writers in Paris between the two World Wars† contains nearly 100 entries, and Robert McAlmon could think of 250 expatriates connected with the arts in Montparnasse during the 1920s. I have concentrated on those I believe to be the most intriguing (in both senses of that word), and have allowed only a comparatively small number of the others to flit in and out of the narrative; even so, the ‘Biographies in Brief’ at the end of the book may be needed to help identify minor characters. The epilogue, dealing with the years after 1928, is short. There were American writers haunting the Dôme, the Sélect, and other Montparnasse cafés long after the Lost Generation had gone home, but the period 1921 to 1928 was when the party was at its wildest.

  *‘I Got Rhythm’, by the Gershwin brothers, from the film An American in Paris (1951).

  †For details of this and other books referred to in the narrative, see the bibliography and notes at the end of the book.

  PROLOGUE

  A denser civilisation than our own

  In the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris, roughly half-way between the Arc de Triomphe and the railway lines that sprout north-westwards from the Gare St Lazare, lies the rue de Chazelles, where in former times stood the iron foundry of Monduit et Béchet. Here, during the year 1883, passers-by had their attention diverted by a curious spectacle.

  The first that could be seen of it, projecting above the foundry walls, was a hand of stupendous proportions, grasping a gigantic torch, of which the rim was so broad as to permit several workmen to stand upon it. A few weeks later the hand had risen level with the second storey of the neighbouring apartment blocks, and a face could be seen frowning over the foundry, its forehead topped with a spiked corona. Thereafter, month by month, the colossus relentlessly raised its robed torso, until it dominated the surrounding streets with their little tabacs and wine-shops. All the time there was the sound of hammering.

  The foundry and its formidable iron figure soon became a favourite Sunday resort for Parisian strollers. Wine-stalls were set up in the street, and leaflets were distributed by the Committee which had proudly given birth to the giantess. She was called (so read the Parisians) La Liberté éclairant le monde, and she was to be a gift from the French people – or such as cared to contribute to her cost – to their republican brethren across the Atlantic. The noted scul
ptor Monsieur Bartholdi had designed her; the ingenious framework beneath the iron sheets of her skin was the work of the up-and-coming engineer Monsieur Eiffel; and the entire project was the brainchild of the distinguished historian Monsieur Laboulaye, who had conceived it as a commemoration of the centenary of the American nation’s Declaration of Independence.

  Admittedly the project had been so long in gestation that the centenary had come and gone, and it was true that the American Congress had shown itself somewhat hesitant about the gift. But a splendid site, on an island at the entrance to New York harbour, had been granted, so that future generations of emigrants to the New World would be greeted by La Liberté, a symbol of that Franco-American amity which had begun in 1776. Plans were already being made to transport her, piece by piece, by train from the Gare St Lazare to the harbour at Rouen, whence she would take ship to her new home. Some disappointment was expressed in the newspapers that so splendid a creation would not be remaining in Paris.

  *

  A hundred and seven years earlier, on 5 July 1776, Paris had received its first official American visitor. His name was Silas Deane, and he did not know that he was technically an American. News had not yet come that a Declaration of Independence had been signed, and Deane, a Connecticut congressman, regarded himself as still a subject, though an unwilling one, of the British Crown. He was the first member of a delegation sent to win the support of France for the colonies’ War of Independence to arrive in Paris.

  He was not well equipped for the task: he could scarcely speak half a dozen words of French, and on principle he would not address any Frenchman who claimed an aristocratic title. By October he had managed to buy arms from France, but he had hardly attracted the notice of the Parisians. However, by Christmas another member of the delegation had joined him, and suddenly Paris was agog.

  Benjamin Franklin was seventy years old, and in many ways typified the founding fathers of the USA. As a youth he had made his way from Boston to Philadelphia, where he set himself up as a printer. He made his fortune and fame by publishing almanacs full of self-help maxims (‘He that riseth late must trot all day’), and by the age of forty-two could afford to retire and devote himself to public works and scientific experiments. He established a Free Library and a university in Philadelphia; he also invented the lightning-conductor, and devised much of the electrical terminology that we still use today, including ‘positive’, ‘negative’, and ‘battery’. He served in Congress, made a trip to London to conduct some tricky Government business, and soon after the Declaration of Independence was chosen as a commissioner to the Court of France. It was hoped that he could secure economic and military assistance for the Americans, and raise French sympathy for their cause. France was chosen for this mission because it was the traditional enemy of England.

  Franklin had never before set foot in Europe, but had spent hours in the reading room of his own Free Library in Philadelphia teaching himself French, and had corresponded with French scientific societies. His lightning-conductor had already been adopted all over France. The French were looking forward to meeting him in person.

  He arrived in Paris in mid-December 1776, putting up in a mansion on the rue de l’Université, and was immediately besieged by Paris intellectuals and fashionable persons who wished to inspect this distinguished emissary of the New World. After a few weeks he escaped to the comparative quiet of Passy, a little village on the road to Versailles. He was given quarters free of charge in the mansion of one Monsieur de Chaumont, supplier of uniforms to the French army, who hoped that in return for hospitality he might be rewarded with a grant of land in the USA. Five years later, when Franklin was still staying in the house and no land had been offered, Monsieur de Chaumont thought he had better charge rent after all.

  Franklin was thoroughly amiable, and women and children adored him, especially women. A young American visitor to Passy describes one of the de Chaumont girls approaching the old man as if she were his own daughter, tapping him playfully on the cheek and calling him ‘Papa Franklin’. Franklin himself reported to a niece in Boston: ‘This is the civilest Nation upon Earth …’Tis a delightful people to live with.’ He had brought his two grandsons with him; the younger boy was sent to school in Passy, while the elder acted as secretary to his grandfather.

  Franklin was amazed by the extravagant costume and manners of the French aristocracy, who filled their noses with tobacco, dressed their heads so elaborately that their hats would not stay on, and therefore had to walk about with them under their arms. But unlike Silas Deane he was amused rather than outraged by it all, while for their part the aristocrats reciprocated his kindly curiosity, admiring his shrewdness and lack of artifice rather than being affronted by his rough ways. One French count wrote enviously of Franklin’s ‘almost rustic attire, the simple but proud attitude, the free and direct language, the hair-style without trappings or powder’, and judged him more genuinely civilised than his French counterparts; it was as if one of Plato’s friends had suddenly strolled into ‘the weak and servile civilisation of the eighteenth century’.

  Franklin himself perfectly understood the effect he was having, and played on it. He described himself as ‘very plainly dressed, wearing my thin, gray straight hair, that peeps out from under my only coiffure, a fine fur cap, which comes down on my forehead almost to my spectacles. Think how this must appear among the powdered heads of Paris!’ The fur cap, acquired during a journey to Canada a few months earlier, seemed a good middle course between the aristocratic hairstyles and the headgear of the poor. Franklin also wore bifocal glasses (another of his own inventions) and found that he particularly needed them when talking to Frenchmen, since ‘when one’s Ears are not well accustomed to the Sounds of a Language, a Sight of the Movement in the Features of him that speaks helps to explain; so that I understand French better by the help of my Spectacles’. Even with them on, he did not always understand everything. Attending a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, he decided it was safest to clap whenever his neighbour did – and so applauded loudest and longest when he himself was being eulogised.

  From the outset, Paris adored him. After only three weeks it had become the mode for everyone to have his picture over the mantelpiece. His face appeared on trinkets and snuff-boxes, on vases, even on chamber-pots, and ladies began to arrange their wigs in imitation of his fur cap. A medallion of him was put on sale, bearing the legend B. FRANKLIN – AMERICAIN.

  Silas Deane went home and was replaced by the young American statesman John Adams; some time later Thomas Jefferson was sent over to join the delegation. Both men brought their families. An American colony was establishing itself in Paris, for along with the diplomats there was now a trickle of merchants, artists, and young men in search of an education. Soon the trickle became a flow, and they all expected Franklin to invite them to dinner. He tried to keep at least part of his weekend free for ‘my grandson Ben with some of the American children from his school’, but Americans were always turning up at Passy, and he felt obliged to entertain them.

  Despite the warm welcome the Parisians had given him, Franklin found it an uphill task to negotiate a firm Franco-American alliance. The two countries could scarcely have differed more in religion and method of government, and there was also the snag (said Franklin) that the French noblesse, ‘who always govern here’, thought it ‘indiscreet and improper’ even to mention Trade.

  Meanwhile the British suspected the worst of Franklin’s negotiations. They planted a spy in his household at Passy, who sent a hair-raising report that Franklin and the French were plotting to construct some giant mirrors. These would be set up at Calais, and would reflect the heat of the sun on to the Royal Navy across the Channel, burning it up as it lay at anchor. While the fire was blazing, said the spy, Franklin would have a huge chain carried across to Dover, and by means of ‘a prodigious electrical machine of his own invention’ would ‘convey such a shock as will entirely overturn our whole island’.

&
nbsp; Franklin’s real business in Paris was rather more prosaic. On 20 March 1778 treaties of alliance and commerce were signed by him and Louis XVI. Franklin had a wig specially made for the occasion, but it did not fit, so he decided to meet the King in his own hair and without a ceremonial sword. One of the French aristocracy who was present said that ‘but for his noble face’ one would have supposed him to be ‘a big farmer’. The King told Franklin: ‘Assure Congress of my friendship. I hope this will be for the good of the two nations.’

  *

  Franklin finally went back to Philadelphia in 1785, after nearly nine years in Paris, taking with him several crates of mineral water, and leaving the Paris mission in the charge of Thomas Jefferson, who had been in public service since his mid-twenties and was an example of a new type of American. He took grand quarters in the Champs-Élysées, engaged his own maitre d’hôtel, acquired a carriage, powdered his hair, and frequented the smartest salons. During working hours he set about negotiating further commercial deals with the French, in the hope of shifting the main part of American overseas trade from Britain to France.

  He was helped by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had joined Washington’s army in the War of Independence and had proved a daring and capable commander of volunteer French troops. Now a citizen of several of the States, Lafayette had christened his two children Virginia and George Washington, and had taught them to sing American songs. He had also adopted two American Indian boys, and in the study of his Paris mansion had hung a framed copy of the Declaration of Independence; next to it was a blank frame, which Lafayette said was ‘waiting for the declaration of the rights of France’.

  Even with Lafayette’s support, Jefferson could not cut his way very far through the jungle of tax-farming that tangled the French economic system and made negotiation practically impossible, while with the end of the American War of Independence against Britain, trade had automatically begun to flow again between those two countries. Jefferson ruefully admitted that there were links that bound the USA to the British, ‘whether we will or no’.