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

  Joyce then enquired: ‘What do you do?’ So Sylvia told him about the shop. Taking a small notebook out of his pocket and holding it very close to his eyes, he wrote down the name and address. ‘He said he would come to see me.’

  *

  He did, the very next day. Sylvia was in the shop when ‘Joyce came walking up my steep little street wearing a dark blue serge suit, a black felt hat on the back of his head, and, on his narrow feet, not so very white sneakers. He was twirling a cane … “Stephen Dedalus,” I thought, “still has his ashplant.”’

  He stepped into Shakespeare and Company, peering at the photographs of writers, and sat down in the armchair beside Sylvia’s desk. He explained to her that he had three problems: ‘Finding a roof to put over the heads of four people; feeding and clothing them; and finishing Ulysses.’ The first was the most pressing. Madame Bloch-Savitsky had lent them her apartment, but the lease expired in two weeks. As for money, would Sylvia look out for pupils who might want English lessons? He assured her he had a great deal of experience working for the Berlitz in Trieste, and he had given private lessons too. He could also teach German and Latin, even French. Would she send people to ‘Professor Joyce’?

  She asked about Ulysses: was he progressing all right? He answered: ‘I am.’ (She observes: ‘An Irishman never says a plain “yes”.’) He was five episodes from the end. But several issues of the Little Review had already been confiscated by the US Post Office because passages in the novel were judged obscene; it looked as if complete suppression could not be far off. Joyce said it was all very alarming. He told Sylvia that he would keep her informed about it. Before he left the shop he joined the lending library.

  He became a regular at the bookshop, and could often be found sitting by the desk, talking to Americans who drifted in. ‘He obviously enjoyed the company of my compatriots,’ writes Sylvia. ‘He confided to me that he liked us and our language.’ Sometimes she would find him waiting for her at the bookshop, listening attentively to a long tale her concierge was telling him. ‘“Melancholy Jesus,” Adrienne and I used to call him.’

  Sylvia introduced him to Sherwood Anderson, whose vacation in Paris was nearing its close. Anderson wrote of Joyce in his journal as ‘a long, somewhat gloomy, handsome man with beautiful hands’. And of his works: ‘Among all modern writers his lot has perhaps been the hardest and it may well be that his Ulysses is the most important book that will be published in this generation.’

  In the informal atmosphere of Shakespeare and Company, Joyce alone was formal, ‘excessively so’, writes Sylvia. The French authors who sat around in the shop would address her and Adrienne by their first names, but Joyce seemed to be trying to set a good example with his ‘Miss Monnier’ and ‘Miss Beach’. No one dared to call him anything but ‘Mr Joyce’.

  It appeared that he was sustaining himself and his family by borrowing from anyone who would lend. After a few weeks he received £2,000 as a gift from Harriet Shaw Weaver, his publisher in London, who had been contributing anonymously to his support for some time. With this, he took a flat on the Boulevard Raspail.

  Soon after he had settled there, late in 1920, the expected prosecution against the Little Review for serialising Ulysses was launched by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The case came to court the following February, and resulted in a conviction and fine for the editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; a prison sentence was staved off only because it was understood that no further episodes of Joyce’s book would be printed in the magazine. Joyce came to tell Sylvia the news. He said to her: ‘My book will never come out now.’

  It occurred to her that something might be done. She asked: ‘Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?’

  Joyce, naturally, accepted the offer immediately and joyfully. Sylvia had absolutely no experience of printing or publishing, but Adrienne had been using a Dijon printer called Darantière to produce a series of reprints for her, and he now agreed to take on Ulysses, even though Sylvia warned him that there could be no question of paying his bill till the whole job was finished and the subscriptions could be collected. Adrienne gave her approval to the project.

  At the beginning of April 1921, Joyce signed an agreement that Sylvia should order an edition of 1,000 copies of the book from Darantière; he would receive the very generous royalty of two-thirds of the net profits when it came out. He, Sylvia and Adrienne set off from the shop to celebrate. Joyce was in high spirits; he remarked that the concierge’s son, who was playing on the steps, would one day be ‘a reader of Ulysses’.

  2

  The fastest man on a typewriter

  Sylvia clashed off an excited letter to her mother: ‘Mother dear it’s more of a success every day and soon you may hear of us as regular Publishers and of the most important book of the age … I’m going to publish “Ulysses” of James Joyce in October.’ The French authorities were not likely to concern themselves about a literary work in English, even though an American court had judged it obscene, but the Paris Tribune (the European edition of the Chicago Tribune) speculated that if she published Ulysses, Sylvia Beach ‘will not be allowed to return to America’.

  Galley proofs of the early chapters started to arrive from Dijon, whereupon Joyce set to work on revisions so extensive (and expensive for Sylvia) that the book began to increase drastically in length, and the publication date had to be pushed back. Meanwhile, Sylvia and her friends collected subscriptions from anyone who came within reach, and Shakespeare and Company took on a girl to cope with the extra work. This young woman had a boyfriend studying at medical school in Paris, a Cambodian prince, and in honour of Joyce’s work he changed his name to Ulysses.

  In the midst of this, Sylvia moved the shop around the corner to rue de l’Odéon, Adrienne having found that the antique dealer at no. 12, opposite her own premises, was disposing of the lease. It was at this new shop, at Christmas 1921, that Sylvia noticed a young man standing in a corner, glancing through the magazines and looking at the adventure stories of Captain Marryat. She describes him as ‘a tall, dark young fellow with a small mustache’.

  Sylvia began to talk to him, trying to draw him out in her usual friendly way. She discovered that he did not have enough money in his pocket to join the lending library, so she told him he could pay the deposit when he liked, and meanwhile he could borrow as many books as he wanted. She wrote him out a member’s card.

  It was only now that she discovered that he had a letter of introduction to her from Sherwood Anderson, who was back in Chicago. He had been too shy to present it. ‘I am writing this,’ said the letter,

  to make you acquainted with my friend Ernest Hemingway, who with Mrs Hemingway is going to Paris to live, and will ask him to drop it in the mails when he arrives there.

  Mr Hemingway is an American writer instinctively in touch with everything worth while going on here and I know you will find both Mr and Mrs Hemingway delightful people to know.

  Sylvia asked the young man more about himself. All shyness now overcome, he explained that he had ‘spent two years in a military hospital getting back the use of his leg’. What had happened to it? ‘He had got wounded in the knee, fighting in Italy.’ Would Sylvia care to see the wound? ‘Of course I would. So business at Shakespeare and Company was suspended while he removed his shoe and sock.’

  Ernest Miller Hemingway had only spent two months in hospital, not two years, and he had been a Red Cross orderly, not a soldier. Almost nothing Sylvia says he told her that day was true. Very likely she remembered everything wrongly, since her memoirs (in which she describes their talk) were written nearly forty years after the first conversation with Hemingway. Yet she showed him the text before publishing the book, so everything in it seems to have had his approval; and the things she quotes him as saying that day in 1921 are exactly the sort of stories he did tell about himself, to anyone who would listen.

  She says he went on to explain that ‘before h
e was out of high school’ his father ‘had died suddenly and in tragic circumstances leaving him a gun as sole legacy’. At this time, Dr Clarence E. Hemingway, MD, was very much alive and living in Oak Park, Illinois; he did eventually shoot himself, but not until 1928. Sylvia says Hemingway told her that his father’s death had left him ‘the head of the family’ so that ‘he had to leave school and begin making a living. He earned his first money in a boxing match, but, from what I gathered, didn’t linger in this career. He spoke rather bitterly of his boyhood.’

  This is complete invention; for a start, he had never supported his family. Certainly his parents did not get on – the father suffered terrible depressions and the mother seems to have had a lesbian affair – and Oak Park, Illinois, where his father practised medicine, was a stuffily respectable ‘village’ on the edge of Chicago; but a lot of Hemingway’s time was spent at a family lakeside cottage in Michigan, where he learnt to fish, hunt, make shelters and build camp fires, and enjoy the wild. As to boxing, certainly he had taken up the sport while in high school, and thereafter would tell tales of having sparred with famous men of the ring, alleging that the poor vision in his left eye was due to their dirty tactics; but there is no evidence that he ever boxed against professionals in his youth, while the bad eyesight was inherited – other members of the family suffered from it. However, there was no stopping the boxing stories. This is another version, told by Hemingway to a Montparnasse barman, Jimmie Charters:

  One Christmas his father presented him with a course of fifteen lessons at the local gym. The managers, who operated the business as a racket, insisted on payment in advance for all the lessons. When the candidate presented himself for the first workout, the instructors so beat, mauled and manhandled him that he rarely returned a second time. But Hemingway, as soon as he could stand up again comfortably, returned for more.

  The sport that he really mastered in childhood, the skill that kept him going after he left school, was the telling of tall tales. At the age of five he was claiming to have stopped a runaway horse single-handed, and in his earliest recorded letter he describes making ‘the largest catch of trout that has ever been made’ in a certain stretch of water. A minor incident in his adolescence, when he got into trouble for shooting a heron, was elaborated by him into an account of how a couple of game wardens had pursued him all over Michigan; he had been lucky, he said, not to be sent to reform school.

  ‘He didn’t tell me much about his life after he left school,’ says Sylvia. ‘He earned his living at various jobs, including newspaper work, I believe, then went over to Canada and enlisted in the armed forces. He was so young he had to fake his age to be accepted.’ Again, this is largely invention. Hemingway’s father wanted him to have a university education, but his son, impatient for a taste of city life, went off to live with an uncle in Kansas City, where he was allowed to do some cub reporting on one of the daily newspapers. He aspired to be like another journalist on the paper, whom he described as being able to

  carry four stories in his head and go to the telephone and take a fifth and then write all five at full speed to catch an edition … If any other man was getting more money he quit or had his pay raised. He never spoke to the other reporters unless he had been drinking. He was tall and thick and had long arms and big hands. He was the fastest man on a typewriter I ever knew

  When America entered the war in 1917, the eighteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway did not go to Canada nor enlist – he was judged unfit for active service on account of his eyesight – but it is perfectly true that he was determined to go to war. ‘I can’t let a show like this go on without getting into it,’ he wrote to his family. ‘I’ll make it to Europe.’ He enrolled in the Red Cross and soon found himself in Paris. The Germans were just then bombarding the capital with their long-range gun, Big Bertha, and the delighted Hemingway and a friend rushed about the city in taxis in the hope of seeing the shells actually fall. Then they went to Italy and worked in an ambulance unit, but Hemingway was soon grumbling: ‘There’s nothing here but scenery and too damn much of that.’ He decided to ‘find where the war is’.

  He managed to get posted to a canteen near the front line in the Piave district, and a few days before his nineteenth birthday he was up at the front itself – where he had no right to be – distributing chocolate and cigarettes in a forward observation post, when he was hit by shrapnel from an enemy shell. The most plausible account of what happened next comes in his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929), where the American lieutenant Frederic Henry, serving with an ambulance corps, undergoes just such an experience:

  I tried to breathe but my breath would not come … I tried to move but I could not move … I heard close to me someone saying, ‘Mama mia! Oh, mama mia!’ I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him … His legs were towards me and I saw in the dark and the light that they were both smashed above the knee … [He] was quiet now … I made sure he was dead … My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn’t there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped my hand on my shirt and … I looked at my leg and was very afraid. Oh, God, I said, get me out of here. I knew, however, that there had been three others … Someone took hold of me under the arms and somebody else lifted my legs.

  ‘There are three others,’ I said. ‘One is dead …’

  ‘Hold onto my neck, Tenente [Lieutenant]. Are you badly hit?’

  ‘In the leg …’

  A shell fell close and they both dropped to the ground and dropped me …

  ‘You sons of bitches,’ I said.

  ‘I am sorry, Tenente,’ Manera said. ‘We won’t drop you again.’

  Hemingway was sent to the Red Cross hospital at Milan, and at once stories began to circulate of his bravery. A friend who visited him in hospital wrote to the Hemingway parents:

  The concussion of the explosion knocked him unconscious and buried him in earth. There was an Italian [who] … was killed instantly, while another … had both his legs blown off. A third Italian was badly wounded and this one Ernest, after he had regained consciousness, picked up on his back and carried to the first aid dugout. He says he did not remember how he got there, nor that he carried the man, until the next day, when an Italian officer told him all about it and said that it had been voted to give him a valor medal for the act.

  He was indeed awarded the Medaglia d’Argento al Valore (Silver Medal for Valour), but the official citation made no mention of his carrying a wounded man. Its description of his behaviour is more like that of Frederic in A Farewell to Arms; it states:

  Gravely wounded by numerous pieces of shrapnel from an enemy shell, with an admirable spirit of brotherhood, before taking care of himself, he rendered generous assistance to the Italian soldiers more seriously wounded by the same explosion and did not allow himself to be carried elsewhere until after they had been evacuated.

  And in the novel, Frederic even denies that he performed this small piece of heroism:

  ‘Didn’t you carry anybody on your back? Giordini says you carried several people on your back but the medical major at the first aid post declared it is impossible. He has to sign the proposition for the citation.’

  ‘I didn’t carry anybody. I couldn’t move.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Rinaldi … ‘I think we can get you the silver. Didn’t you refuse to be medically aided before the others?’

  ‘Not very firmly.’

  The real-life Hemingway was not so modest. Though others may have invented the carrying-a-man story, he was glad to give it credence. A letter to his parents from hospital in July 1918 alleged that he had ‘227 wounds’, including ‘bullets’ in both knees, and a month later he was telling them the story about carrying the wounded man:

  I … got my wounded into the dug out … The Italian I had with me bled all over my coat and my pants looked like somebody had mad
e currant jelly in them … They couldn’t figure out how I had walked 150 yards with a load with knees shot through and my right shoe punctured two big places. Also over 200 flesh wounds. ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘My Captain, it is of nothing. In America they all do it!’*

  A British officer who met Hemingway soon after he was discharged from hospital was given the impression that he had been wounded ‘leading Arditi troops on Monte Grappa’.

  As soon as he could manage it, Hemingway put together a hero’s uniform for himself – a Sam Browne belt, an Italian officer’s cape, a brown tunic with a ‘wound stripe’ on the sleeve, elegant calf-length military boots – and began a romance with the hospital’s most glamorous nurse. He was filmed for an American newsreel sitting in a wheelchair with her at his side. She wrote to him as ‘My hero’, and he observed: ‘It does give you an awfully satisfactory feeling to be wounded.’ She was an American, eight years older – it was still only a few weeks since he had turned nineteen – and she did not sleep with him; afterwards she said that they had both been ‘very innocent’.

  However, Hemingway was soon telling tales of amatory exploits. Shortly before returning to the USA he set off to join a friend for a holiday in Sicily, but alleged that he never got there because en route the proprietress of a small hotel had hidden all his clothes and detained him in her bedroom for a week. In another version, he claimed that her irate soldier husband had challenged him to a duel.