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

  I have stood on the crowded back platform of a seven o’clock Batignolles bus as it lurched along the wet lamp lit street while men who were going home to supper never looked up from their newspapers as we passed Notre Dame grey and dripping in the rain …

  These might seem like exercises in modernism, but their subject matter was traditional to the point of romanticism – the hypocrisy of American puritanism, teenage heroism, the beauty of Paris. He tried the same thing in free verse, and though this time Harriet Monroe at Poetry agreed to print some of the results, the experiment suggested that he was not a modernist at all:

  Yesterday’s Tribune is gone

  Along with youth

  And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach

  The year of the big storm

  When the hotel burned down

  At Seney, Michigan.

  Hemingway began to feel that Gertrude Stein was rather dangerous as a model. He judged her Three Lives ‘intelligible to anyone’, and the ‘Melanctha’ story in it ‘very good’, but he despaired of The Making of Americans (she had let him see the vast manuscript), saying it ‘began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with great stretches of great brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket’. He felt that her reputation as a writer was largely due to her obvious achievement as an art collector, and suspected that ‘critics who met her and saw her pictures took on trust writing of hers that they could not understand because of their enthusiasm for her as a person’. He saw that she was incorrigibly lazy, that while she longed for publication and gloire, she ‘disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to make her writing intelligible’.

  He had only picked up certain verbal tricks from her – the elimination of complex sentence structures, the unembarrassed repetition of the same word rather than the use of synonyms, the description of a scene or person ‘cubistically’ by setting down first one facet and then the other. His developing style owed just as much to his work as a journalist. Long ago, when he had been a cub reporter in Kansas City, he had been drilled into the use of ‘short snappy sentences, clarity, and immediacy’, and now he felt that these were ‘the best rules I ever learned’. In fact Gertrude Stein eventually acquired as much from him as he had from her. By the time she came to write The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in the early 1930s, she had picked up several of his tricks, and the book is as lively as a Hemingway novel.

  She tried to guide his reading. He had now discovered D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but she was disapproving; she dismissed Lawrence as ‘pathetic and preposterous’ and said he wrote like ‘a sick man’. Why did Hemingway bother to read Huxley – ‘Can’t you see he is dead?’ She recommended, of all things, thrillers by Marie Belloc Lowndes. In turn, Hemingway suggested she read Simenon, but discovered that she ‘did not like to read French’. He began to realise that she only had good words for writers who had praised her own work. The sole exception was Ronald Firbank; she was greatly amused by his high-camp fantasies with their sexual ambiguities.

  Talking to Sylvia Beach, Hemingway showed a mild curiosity about Joyce. He mentioned that he had seen him eating with his family at a smart restaurant, Michaud’s, peering through his thick glasses at the menu, all of them talking Italian to each other. But usually he paid no attention to Joyce, whose experiments and achievements did not seem relevant to what he was trying to do himself. Places like Michaud’s were usually beyond his own pocket, not least because he was gambling away a lot of Hadley’s money at the Paris racetracks. As for the stories he was writing, although they were now far better than anything he had completed before he came to Paris, ‘every one I sent out came back’.

  *

  In December 1922, when he had been in Paris for a year, there was a disaster. Hadley, on her way to join him at Lausanne, decided to take all his typescripts with her so that he could work on them. Rashly, she packed both top copies and carbons. While her back was turned at the Gare de Lyon the suitcase containing them was stolen.

  When she arrived and told Hemingway the news, he simply could not believe her. He took the next train back to Paris to see if the carbons, at least, were not still in the apartment. They were not; all that had survived was a story called ‘My Old Man’, set at a Paris racetrack, which was out with an editor, and ‘Up in Michigan’, which was in a different drawer from the rest. Among other losses was the novel at which he had been working for months.

  ‘I suppose you heard about the loss of my Juvenilia?’ Hemingway wrote to Pound in mid-January 1923. ‘You, naturally, would say “Good” etc. But don’t say it to me. I ain’t yet reached that mood, 3 years on the damn stuff.’ Sure enough, Pound wrote back that the loss was an ‘act of Gawd’, and Hemingway should write it all out again from memory, which was ‘the best critic’. (Privately, Pound said that Hadley must be jealous of Hemingway’s writings, and had lost the manuscripts deliberately.)

  In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway claims that the loss affected him deeply, and says that though he quickly put a brave face on it he was only doing this for Hadley’s sake. However, the January 1923 letter to Pound shows that he had already started reconstruction: ‘Am now working on new stuff.’

  Pound had a plan for him. In mid-November 1922, a couple of weeks before the loss of the manuscripts, Hemingway had written to Harriet Monroe at Poetry explaining that ‘the Three Mountains Press here, Ezra Pound editing, is bringing out a book of my stuff shortly and I want to use the poems you have if you will give me permission to republish them’. Three Mountains Press was the small printing business run by Hemingway’s journalist friend Bill Bird, using a hand press ‘of about Benjamin Franklin vintage’ on the Île St Louis. Bird had gone to Pound asking if he had any cantos that could be printed; instead, Pound came up with a plan for a series to be called ‘The Inquest’ because it was intended to show the state of prose after the publication of Ulysses, which Pound claimed had killed off nineteenth-century writing. He enlisted Ford Madox Ford, William Carlos Williams, and several other contributors, including young Hemingway – indeed he probably dreamt up the series in order to get Hemingway into print. But Hemingway had almost nothing to put in the book. When Bird issued a prospectus for the series, he had to describe one item as simply ‘Blank, by Ernest M. Hemingway’.

  * I owe this observation, and much of what I have to say about Hemingway’s style, to some very shrewd suggestions by Ian Smith.

  † It wasn’t; it was Pernod, which had been marketed when the genuine absinthe was banned in France in 1915. Absinthe was flavoured with wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), and this herb came to be considered the cause of the mental afflictions and paralysis which were supposedly caused by the drink, though the high alcohol content (68 per cent) was more probably responsible. True absinthe was served in an aperitif glass accompanied by a lump of sugar in a perforated spoon through which iced water was dripped to dilute it. John Glassco, who drank it in Luxembourg in 1928, said that its effect was ‘as gentle and insidious as a drug: in five minutes the world was bathed in a fine emotional haze unlike anything resulting from other forms of alcohol’. On the other hand Nina Hamnett said it was ‘horrible … reminded me of cough drops’.

  It is tempting to speculate whether Hemingway developed his characteristic style by writing when he was mildly drunk. Certainly it comes particularly alive when the reader is in that state himself.

  4

  McAlimony

  Hadley now discovered that she was pregnant. Hemingway was not exactly overjoyed; Gertrude Stein says that when she next saw him, he spent hours plucking up courage to tell her and Alice, then said gloomily: ‘I am too young to be a father.’ Gertrude and Alice ‘consoled him as best we could and sent him on his way’.

  He and Hadley had been invited by Pound to go down to Rapallo, on the Italian coast near Genoa, to join him and Dorothy on a walking tour in the steps of Sigismondo Malatesta, a fifteenth-cen
tury Italian despot whom Pound was going to write about in the Cantos. Hemingway had never heard of Sigismondo, and the thought of a walking tour in February, even in Italy, was not attractive; but he and Hadley went. Rapallo disappointed them – it was just a seaside resort – and as soon as they got there the Pounds vanished on some expedition of their own, saying they would be back in a couple of weeks.

  Hemingway sat around gloomily in the hotel. Among the other people staying there was an amiable Princetonian named Mike Strater, with whom he had fought a round in Pound’s Paris studio. He wanted to box with him again, but Strater had sprained his ankle, and the only fun he could offer was painting Hemingway’s and Hadley’s portraits. Every day Hemingway would ask how the ankle was getting on – he said he had stopped making love to Hadley in order to save his energies for the fight.

  He wrote to Gertrude that he had got two new stories done: ‘I’ve thought a lot about the things you said … Am working hard about creating and keep my mind going about it all the time.’ He was greatly encouraged when an American called Edward O’Brien, who was staying in a monastery near Rapallo, accepted one of the two stories that had survived the theft of the suitcase, ‘My Old Man’, for an anthology he was editing, The Best Short Stories of 1923. Hemingway wrote to Sylvia Beach: ‘Don’t say anything about it or he might change his mind.’

  Hemingway described another visitor to Rapallo in a note to Pound: ‘McAlmon came and stayed a long time. I read all his new stuff. Some 16–18 stories a novel or so. He wrote seven or nine new stories while at Rapallo.’

  Robert McAlmon was, says William Carlos Williams, ‘a coldly intense young man, with hard blue eyes’. Another friend describes ‘his lean mouth closed like a wallet, his eye like iron’. John Glassco, a young Canadian who first met him in Paris in 1928, was immediately refreshed by McAlmon’s rudeness and ‘total absence of attitude or artifice.’ Glassco goes on: ‘He admired no writing of any kind, either ancient or modern; all government was a farce; all people were fools or snobs. He spoke of his friends with utter contempt … but all with such an absence of conviction that one could not take him seriously.’

  Hemingway’s chief reaction to McAlmon during this first encounter at Rapallo was admiration of his literary productivity. ‘If I was in the tipster business,’ he wrote to Pound, ‘I would whisper into the shell like ear of a friend, “go and make a small bet on McAlmon while you can still get a long price.”’ McAlmon had a volume of short stories in print. True, he had published it at his own expense, but people spoke well of it. He had also written a novel about ‘arty’ life in Greenwich Village, Post-Adolescence, and there was a volume of poems, Explorations, issued by the Egoist in London, who were Joyce’s British publishers. Now he said he was at work on a long family novel set in the Dakotas; he would mention casually that he had knocked off 150,000 words during the last few months. Glassco describes him pounding ceaselessly at the typewriter keys: ‘It must be a wonderful thing, I thought, to be able to write so fast.’ Since Hemingway was still struggling to shape individual sentences he was understandably impressed.

  In Paris, McAlmon was an habitué of the Dôme and other Montparnasse cafés, where he was popular with almost everyone. Somehow, says Sylvia Beach, ‘he dominated whatever group he was in. Whatever café or bar McAlmon patronised at the moment was the one where you saw everybody.’ This was largely because, unlike most of the expatriates, McAlmon had plenty of money. ‘The drinks were always on him,’ writes Sylvia, ‘and alas! often in him.’ Though a teetotaller herself, she was sometimes prepared to venture into Montparnasse night-life in his company; she says he made it ‘quite bearable’.

  Everyone, she says, was ‘looking forward to his contribution to the writing of the twenties’. If nothing remarkable had emerged yet, it was probably because his friends were always distracting him. ‘He would tell me,’ says Sylvia, ‘he was leaving for the south of France, to look up some place where he could get right away from people and do some work.’ Then she would get a telegram: ‘Found right place and quiet room.’ Soon, somebody would tell her they had seen McAlmon down there: ‘His room is above the bistro and they all meet at this bistro.’

  *

  Robert McAlmon’s father was an Ulster Protestant from County Armagh, and all his life McAlmon wore the grim intolerant visage of an Ulsterman confronting a naughty world. The father had emigrated first to Canada, where he married a Scottish Canadian, and then to the USA. He became a nomadic Presbyterian minister, and McAlmon (who was three years older than Hemingway) spent most of his childhood in a succession of small towns and villages in South Dakota. Later the family moved to Minneapolis, then to California; McAlmon found high school boring, and drifted uninterestedly to university. He hoped that the First World War would take him to Europe, but never got further than an airfield in San Diego. After demobilisation in 1919 he took a variety of jobs, working for an aviation magazine, doing some manual labouring, and picking up cash as a movie extra. Eventually he took off for Chicago, where Harriet Monroe had printed a few poems by him in Poetry, but he found nothing there to excite him, so he went on to New York and Greenwich Village, where he earned a dollar an hour posing in the nude for drawing classes.

  In Post-Adolescence, McAlmon describes life as an art school model:

  There were no students yet at the studio when he arrived, but he undressed anyway … He sat on the model stand. The looking glass faced him, reflecting his body. What was he posing for? None of the students would ever sketch or sculpture him well enough for it to matter. Nice lines he had, after all, there around the belly particularly. It was nice being slender, but his belly might be getting a little too paunchy. He’d have to stand straighter, draw it up, take some exercises. Hated a paunchy belly. He ran his lips along his arms, his hands up and down his legs. Legs are graceful things; slender, deerlike, and how fine the skin is on the side of the foot, frogbelly fine with ethereal tiny pores and pearly white. That’s the nicest skin on the body. He wondered if he could touch it with his mouth, and strained to do so, but was unsuccessful. He supposed a contortionist could. Wished there was a young girl in here with him, and undressed, but she’d have to be young and slender. He was tired of older women, too sophisticated, and not buoyant enough; wanted one with exuberance, not shy but capricious – what to hell anyway, always looking forward to a climax …

  Students began to come in …

  At a studio party in Greenwich Village, McAlmon met William Carlos Williams, a doctor from New Jersey who had been a college friend of Ezra Pound. Williams had taken much longer than Pound to make a reputation as a poet, partly because he scorned – or claimed to scorn – the professional literary life, and he also refused to become an expatriate like Pound. McAlmon’s bored intolerance and his disdain for the Village appealed to Williams, and during 1920 the two of them started their own ‘little magazine’. They named it Contact because it was supposed to exemplify ‘the essential contact between words and the locality that breeds them’, though Djuna Barnes said it did not seem to have much contact with anyone or anything. To support himself and the magazine, McAlmon worked in an advertising agency, trained polo ponies, and did landscape gardening on Long Island. He lived on a garbage boat on the Hudson.

  One day Hilda Doolittle wrote to Williams, whom she had known since college days, that she would be passing through New York with a friend. She invited him to meet them for tea. Williams says he asked McAlmon: ‘Wanna see the old gal?’ (Hilda was by now in her mid-thirties.) McAlmon said yes. ‘So one afternoon,’ continues Williams, ‘we decided to take in the show. Same old Hilda, all over the place looking as tall and skinny as usual. But she had with her a small, dark English girl with piercing, intense eyes … “Well, how did you like her?” I asked Bob when we came away. “Oh, she’s all right, I guess,” said Bob. “But that other one … she’s something.”’

  Hilda thought her friend was ‘something’ too, for she was making plans to share her life with this girl, having
given up men. After a youthful romance with Ezra Pound she had been married for a while to Richard Aldington, but her daughter Perdita (still a baby when McAlmon met her) had been fathered by a music critic named Cecil Gray. The dark girl was called Annie Winifred Ellerman; she was twenty-five – eighteen months McAlmon’s senior – and the daughter of the British shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman. She wrote poems and fiction under the name of Bryher, taken from one of the Isles of Scilly.

  About six months after this tea party, in February 1921, McAlmon and Bryher were married. It was strictly a business arrangement, or so both parties afterwards claimed, and Bryher describes it in these terms:

  I had happened to meet a young American writer … who was full of enthusiasm for modern writing. He wanted to go to Paris to meet Joyce but lacked the passage money. I put my problem before him and suggested that if we married my family would leave me alone. I would give him part of my allowance, he would join me for occasional visits to my parents, otherwise we would lead strictly separate lives.

  Bryher’s ‘problem’ was that her father tried to act the perpetual watchdog over her life. It does not sound typical of McAlmon that he should have urgently desired to go to Paris to meet Joyce, but the prospect of a free trip to Europe and a handsome income cannot have been unappealing.

  A few weeks after the wedding, McAlmon wrote to Williams:

  The marriage is legal only, unromantic, and strictly an agreement. Bryher could not travel, and be away from home, unmarried … She thought I understood her mind, as I do somewhat, and faced me with the proposition … There are discomforts, but I don’t give a damn. Bryher’s a complexity, and needs help.

  He added that his only regret was ‘I don’t like pretense’. He was uncomfortable at having to pass it off as a real marriage.