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

  A few people supposed it to be a love match, but the general assumption was that McAlmon was after Bryher’s money. Possibly he was also attracted by her lesbian inclinations; Williams says he once tried to kiss Sylvia Beach’s beloved Adrienne Monnier in a taxi, whereupon she ‘sank her teeth into his lips’. In his bitchy memoirs, John Glassco portrays McAlmon addressing him and his friend Graeme as ‘sweetie-pie’ and taking them to homosexual bars in Paris, but not making an overt pass at them. When drunk, says Glassco, he would sometimes claim to be bisexual. Probably he was as bored with sex as with everything else.

  *

  Before going to Paris, it was necessary for McAlmon to play the son-in-law, so he, Bryher, Hilda Doolittle, and Hilda’s baby all set off for London. Early in 1921 the British capital struck McAlmon as ‘sodden’ – much the way Ezra Pound had described it a few weeks earlier when he left for Paris – and the atmosphere of the Ellerman home in Mayfair was oppressive. Sir John was a stickler for routine, but, says McAlmon, ‘after two weeks of our presence in the household he looked a bit harried’. McAlmon made an ally of the butler so that nobody would be informed when he crept home late and awash.

  Exploring London on his own, McAlmon ran across Wyndham Lewis, who emerged out of the shadows like an anarchist spy: ‘His hat shaded his eyes and a faded blue scarf was in disarray about his neck. His overcoat looked seedy.’ Lewis began to gossip about the intrigues of artistic London, but McAlmon only found this irritating, and when Lewis discovered that McAlmon had access to money he set about trying to ensure that none of his own enemies should receive any. Sitting in the Tour Eiffel restaurant in Percy Street, where the Vorticists had met in the heady days before the First World War, he warned McAlmon against rash remarks: ‘Ssh,’ he cautioned, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb to an empty table behind, ‘they’re listening.’ It was paranoid, but Pound had suffered from the same delusion, and there was something unpleasant about the London atmosphere.

  T. S. Eliot was now in the ascendancy as the leading critic of the new generation; he had not yet started the Criterion nor become a publisher, but he had been editing the literary pages of the Egoist and reviewed for the more imposing journals. McAlmon did not care for Eliot’s poetry – he calls it ‘mouldy’ and says it struck him as ‘the perfect expression of a clerkly and liverish man’s apprehension of life’ – but the Egoist had published his own book of poems, and it seemed worth making contact with Eliot, if only out of curiosity.

  Eliot was wary when McAlmon phoned for an appointment, but when they met, says McAlmon, ‘I was surprised to find him very likeable indeed, with a quality … of charm that few people possess’, though he looked ‘tired and overworked’ from his job in Lloyds Bank. He warned McAlmon against the distractions of Paris; he had spent a year there himself from 1910 to 1911, after finishing his undergraduate studies at Harvard, and had liked it enough to consider ‘giving up English and trying to settle down and scrape along in Paris, and gradually write French’. He had been to lectures at the Sorbonne and heard Henri Bergson, but had made almost no friends and lived quietly in his pension, watching the café celebrities from a distance. Most of them, he felt, were ‘futile and timewasting’.

  After a few weeks, Bryher kept her promise and released McAlmon to go off to Paris, giving him a considerable share of the large allowance she received from her father. She set off for Switzerland with H.D. using Shakespeare and Company as a forwarding address so that her father would think she was with McAlmon. In Paris, McAlmon introduced himself to Sylvia Beach and, like everyone else, used the bookshop as a post office. ‘I shared Bob McAlmon with the Dôme, the Dingo, and other such places,’ writes Sylvia, ‘but his permanent address was c/o Shakespeare and Company, and at least once a day he wandered in.’ McAlmon also looked up Pound. ‘I mildly liked a poem or so of his,’ he says, but ‘disliked his critical work generally’. Pound met him for lunch and was ‘very instructorial,’ though McAlmon formed the impression that under all the brashness he was shy.

  Harriet Shaw Weaver of the Egoist had given McAlmon a note of introduction to Joyce. McAlmon did not care for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, calling it ‘precious, full of noble attitudinizings, and not very admirable in its soulful protestations’, but the short stories in Joyce’s Dubliners attracted him, as did those passages of Ulysses which had already appeared in the Little Review. McAlmon called at the Joyces’ apartment on Boulevard Raspail and was greeted by Nora. ‘Although there was a legend that Joyce’s eyes were weak,’ he writes, ‘it was evident that he had used eyesight in choosing his wife. She was very pretty, with a great deal of simple dignity and a reassuring manner. Joyce finally appeared, having just got up from bed. Within a few minutes it was obvious that he and I would get on.’ McAlmon was soon writing to William Carlos Williams: ‘I believe I understand him better than most people because of the Irish in me.’

  They had dinner together that first night, and hit it off, though McAlmon admits that they had little in common intellectually; Joyce refused to understand that questions of theology did not disturb or interest McAlmon, and never had. ‘When I assured him that instead of the usual “religious crises” in one’s adolescent life I had studied logic and metaphysics and remained agnostic, he did not listen. He would talk about the fine points of religion.’ Moreover, when Joyce began to read aloud from Ulysses, McAlmon soon became bored by ‘the high-minded struttings and the word prettifications and the Greek beauty part’.

  McAlmon was the first male American Joyce had seen at length, and he was interested in his speech. ‘He was constantly leaping upon phrases and bits of slang which came naturally from my American lips.’ One night when ‘a bit spiffed’ he wept while explaining to McAlmon ‘his love or infatuation for words, mere words’. However, what really appealed to Joyce about McAlmon was his money and his readiness to part with it. He got McAlmon to ‘lend’ him $150 a month to ‘tide him over’ until the completion of Ulysses. It was very likely Joyce who, when McAlmon’s marriage was eventually dissolved (in the late 1920s) with a beneficial settlement from Sir John, dubbed him ‘McAlimony’.

  Joyce was ready enough to go out drinking with McAlmon, who invariably picked up the bill. ‘Although he was working steadily on Ulysses,’ says McAlmon, ‘at least one night a week he was ready to stay out all night, and those nights he was never ready to go home.’ One of their favourite haunts was a seedy establishment called the Gypsy Bar. ‘The patron and the “girls” knew us well, and knew that we would drink freely and surely stay till four or five in the morning. The girls … collected at our table and indulged in their Burgundian and Rabelaisian humours.’ Joyce, currently at work on Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, listened attentively, says McAlmon, as ‘Jeanette, a big draught horse of a girl from Dijon, pranced about like a mare in heat and restrained no remark or impulse which came to her’. (According to John Glassco, by 1928 the Gypsy had become a lesbian bar; he describes it as ‘a little foul-smelling bôite on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, full of hardfaced young lesbians and desperate looking old women’.)

  One night at the Gypsy, Joyce ‘wept in his cups when telling of his forefathers. His father had parented a large family, and his grandfathers before him had been parents of families of from twelve to eighteen children. Joyce would sigh, and then pull himself together and swear that by the grace of God he was still a young man and he would have more children by the end.’ Later, moved by the drink, the girls, and his own lachrymose reflections, he began to recite long passages of Dante in sonorous Italian, like a priest saying mass, with ‘owl eyes’ and a mesmerised expression; all this (says McAlmon) ‘amid the clink of glasses, jazz music badly played by a French orchestra, the chatter and laughter of the whores’. Eventually Joyce and McAlmon made their way homeward; they had consumed a particularly wild assortment of drinks, and McAlmon leant against a lamp-post and threw up while Joyce watched him solicitously: ‘Maybe they’ll be saying I’m a bad example for you.’

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sp; McAlmon found him utterly unpredictable as a drinking companion. ‘We went one night to the Brasserie Lutetia, and he ordered, as usual, that horrible natural champagne … We had but one glass when suddenly I saw a rat running down the stairs from the floor above. I exclaimed upon it. “Where, where?” he asked nervously. “That’s bad luck.”’ Joyce had a whole range of superstitions, and a moment later he had fainted in terror. McAlmon quickly got him home.

  When Joyce was laid low for several weeks with eye trouble, delaying the completion of Ulysses, McAlmon vowed never to take him out drinking again for fear of further damaging his health and the book. But that decision was useless: ‘When Joyce wants to drink he will drink.’ One night, accompanied by Joyce’s friend Frank Budgen, they went to the Gypsy Bar. Budgen got drunk, decided that the girls were paying more attention to Joyce and McAlmon than to him, and rushed out into the night. Joyce thought that he had lost a valuable friend and sank into melancholy. He and McAlmon lingered in the Gypsy until five in the morning, when the patron finally told them to get out.

  ‘Out we got, and ensconced ourselves in a small bistro on the Boulevard St Germain. We bought cigars … As we had decided to drink through the list of French drinks, Joyce began dropping cigars. At first I leaned to pick them up and return them to him. When I could no longer lean without falling on my face I took to lighting the cigars and handing them to him. He almost immediately dropped them, and I lighted cigar after cigar until they were all gone, and then we took to cigarettes. At ten in the morning we sat alone in the small bistro, the floor covered with some twenty cigars.’

  The patron helped them into a taxi. Back at the Joyce apartment, Nora looked at them and began: ‘Jim, you’ve been doin’ this for twenty years, and now you’ve started McAlmon in the same say.’ McAlmon crept back to his hotel room and fell into an alcoholic slumber – only to be woken by a telegram from Joyce summoning him round at once: ‘I must not fail him. I must be in for tea at four-thirty.’ He struggled back to Boulevard Raspail and discovered that Joyce had concocted some sort of cover-up story to explain why they had been out all night; McAlmon was required to back him up. He duly played his part, then crawled back to bed. ‘It took me three months to get my health mildly into order after that night.’

  *

  Though he had mixed feelings about Ulysses, McAlmon helped Sylvia Beach to gather subscribers for the book. She describes how he would ‘comb the night clubs’ for prospective purchasers, persuading them to put their signatures – many of them ‘slightly zigzag’ – on the order forms. When the book was published many people were surprised to find they had signed up.

  As composition drew to a close, Joyce began to worry about getting a typist for Molly Bloom’s interior monologue. The ‘Circe’ episode, set in a brothel, had already caused enough trouble; Sylvia had found a series of typists for it but they had dropped out in quick succession, and the husband of one of them, a Mrs Harrison at the British Embassy, threw the manuscript in the fire when he saw what it contained. (Joyce managed to retrieve an earlier draft which had been sold to a patron in America.) Molly’s sexual musings now made ‘Circe’ seem positively demure.

  While drunk in Joyce’s company one night, McAlmon rashly offered his own services as typist – ‘Fifty pages, that’s nothing’ – and was accepted. The next day Joyce handed him the manuscript. Not only was it difficult to decipher, but it was accompanied by four notebooks containing additional passages; throughout the text were markings in red, yellow, blue and purple, referring to passages which must be inserted from each of these notebooks. For the first three pages McAlmon painstakingly observed instructions, though it meant retyping to get everything right. After that he decided: ‘Molly might just as well think this or that a page or two later, or not at all …’

  Joyce wanted the book to be published on his fortieth birthday, 2 February 1922. Darantière, the printer, just managed to get the first two copies to Paris early that morning, and Sylvia picked them up at the Gare de Lyon; before eight o’clock she was at Joyce’s door to hand over one of them. ‘Copy No. 2,’ she writes, ‘was for Shakespeare and Company, and I made the mistake of putting it on view in the window. The news spread rapidly in Montparnasse and outlying districts, and next day, before the bookshop was open, subscribers were lining up.’ Thereafter Joyce could often be seen in the shop, helping to wrap parcels, ‘lavishing glue on the labels, the floor, and his hair’. Sylvia and her helpers managed to get all the English and Irish copies dispatched and delivered before the authorities in those countries were aware of it, but it soon transpired that copies for American subscribers were being confiscated at the Port of New York. Replacements were shipped to Canada and smuggled across the border by a couple of sympathisers. Shakespeare and Company subsequently published and sold ten further printings between 1922 and 1932 (Joyce said that the numbering of the printings as ‘Ulysses IV’ and so on made it sound like the popes). Copies sold over the counter in rue de l’Odéon to Americans or English about to return home could be disguised, if the customer wished, as Shakespeare’s Complete Works or Merry Tales for Little Folk.

  Naturally the reputation of Ulysses as a banned book helped the sales; an Irish priest asked Sylvia: ‘Any other spicy books?’ Not only readers but writers began to visit the shop on the assumption that she was going to specialise in erotica. One day a small man with whiskers drove up in a barouche and pair, hired for the occasion to impress her, and introduced himself as Frank Harris. He undid a parcel ‘and showed me a thing called My Life and Loves’. She sent him to a Paris publisher genuinely specialising in such things, Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press. On another visit to the shop, Harris asked for something exciting to read on the train, and Sylvia handed him a copy of Little Women. ‘He jumped at the title.’

  *

  Although Joyce seemed unaware of or unconcerned by McAlmon’s cavalier treatment of the Molly Bloom text, he afterwards wrote a short spoof of his typist’s careless and hasty attitude to the job:

  Did Fossett change those words? They was two. Doesn’t matter. ‘Gromwelling’ I said and what? Oh, ah! Bisexcycle. That was the bunch. Hope he does, anyhow. O rats! It’s just a fool thing, style. I just shoot it off like: If he ain’t done it, where’s the use? Guess I’m through with that bunch.

  (With apologies to Mr Robert McAlmon.)

  (Re-enter Hamlet.)

  Joyce remarked to a mutual acquaintance: ‘Maybe McAlmon has a disorderly sort of talent,’ and suggested that McAlmon should call his book of short stories A Hasty Bunch. McAlmon, perhaps not perceiving the joke against him, used the title.

  A Hasty Bunch consists of 300 pages of stories and prose sketches, all of them written after McAlmon arrived in Paris – in a mere six weeks. He sent the manuscript to a printer in England, but received it back with this letter:

  You have quite evidently mistaken the standing that our firm enjoys in the Printing World. We have been established over 60 years and do not remember ever being asked to place such literature before our workspeople before, and you can rest assured that we are not going to begin now.

  McAlmon decided to get Darantière to print A Hasty Bunch, and to publish it himself.

  Ezra Pound had earlier grumbled at McAlmon’s literary ambitions – ‘another young one wanting me to make a poet out of him with nothing to work on’ – but he expressed some admiration for A Hasty Bunch, writing of it in the Dial that McAlmon showed ‘little skill’ but had at least been determined to present the American small town ‘in a hard and just light’. As for the style, ‘McAlmon has written in the American spoken language’.

  Certainly McAlmon wrote as he spoke. While Hemingway was trying to achieve his ‘true sentence’ by cutting and polishing, refining and experimenting, McAlmon put down the first thing that came into his head and never revised. This lack of artifice extended to the construction of the narratives. Indeed they were hardly constructed at all; Hemingway’s friend Harold Loeb scarcely exaggerates when he says that McAl
mon ‘wrote indefatigably, without plots’. Unfortunately this did not prevent McAlmon from descending into the occasional purple passage:

  The wheat fields were ripening, caressed to sleek maturity by the sun as a calf is licked by the tongue of its fond mother, and upon its bosom the sunlight poured and rippled so that across its gold expanse was continual gentle breathing.

  This is from ‘A Boy’s Discovery’, one of the stories which upset the English printer; it describes a group of boys puzzling over sex and persuading some girls to experiment with them. The most shy of the boys is deeply shocked, and soon afterwards contracts a fatal illness, but his sense of horror at sex is so lightly conveyed that the end of the story lacks bite. The small town atmosphere is conveyed, but rather limply, and the book has none of the strength of Winesburg, Ohio, which it resembles in form.

  John Glassco writes of McAlmon’s books:

  I would have liked to admire them but it was impossible. There was neither invention nor subterfuge … The style and syntax revealed the genuine illiterate. I was soon to discover that Bob had in fact read absolutely nothing … He formed his critical opinions of books from reviews and personal contacts and his blanket condemnation of almost everything was mainly due to laziness and pique.

  (In 1928 McAlmon told Morley Callaghan: ‘I haven’t read Joyce or Hemingway. I don’t have to, I know them.’)

  But although he judges McAlmon no writer, Glassco admits that he had a knack for good titles, such as Post-Adolescence and Being Geniuses Together. Indeed, Glassco alleges that the content of the books scarcely mattered to him; they were so like each other that he was constantly switching whole chapters from one book to the other, and was even unsure whether he should exchange the titles themselves. ‘When he asked me,’ says Glassco, ‘I was able to say it could make no difference – an opinion that delighted him.’ For some years Glassco believed that if McAlmon would condescend to work hard at writing, his books could be very fine. ‘I see now, of course, that if he had done so they would have been still worse.’