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

  Gertrude did most of the talking. Hemingway, despite having his tongue loosened a little by the liqueurs, was very shy. He listened while she ‘talked all the time and at first it was about people and places’. She spoke of Sherwood Anderson, and he was amused that she had nothing to say about Anderson’s writing; she spoke only of his ‘great, beautiful, warm, Italian eyes’. Then the subject of Joyce and Ulysses came up, and Hemingway asked her opinion. She would say nothing about Ulysses itself, but made some caustic observations about Joyce’s constant demands for money: ‘The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other, but you never heard of an Irishman starving.’

  Sylvia Beach explains that Gertrude ‘was disappointed in me when I published Ulysses; she even came with Alice to my bookshop to announce that they had transferred their membership to the American Library on the Right Bank. I was sorry, of course, to lose two customers all of a sudden, but one mustn’t coerce them.’ Since The Making of Americans, which Gertrude regarded as her own modernist masterpiece, had yet to find a publisher, her jealousy of Joyce was understandable. Hemingway formed the impression that a visitor to rue de Fleurus who brought up Joyce’s name with any frequency would not be invited back.

  Hadley had the worst of the tea party since she was only allowed to talk to Alice, who poured the tea and liqueurs, worked away at a piece of needlepoint, and, says Hemingway, ‘made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making’. But it was Hadley who had the courage to press a return invitation on Gertrude and Alice.

  So the two ladies took a taxi up the hill to the top of rue du Cardinal Lemoine, went in past the dance hall, and climbed the stairs above the cesspool. Gertrude comments only slightly sardonically in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that Hemingway ‘has always a very good instinct for finding apartments in strange but pleasing localities’.

  Hadley served refreshments, and Hemingway diffidently showed Gertrude some of his writing. She looked at the poems he had recently written and said she rather liked them; she called them ‘direct, Kiplingesque’. She also glanced through a novel he had begun, and this time she was discouraging. ‘There is a great deal of description in this,’ she told him, ‘and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate.’ He also fetched from a drawer the manuscript of ‘Up in Michigan’. She thought this was much better than the novel – it was, after all, an imitation of her own style – but she was displeased by the sex scene, or at least she thought he would never be able to publish it: ‘It is like a picture that a painter paints and then cannot hang it.’

  Gertrude and Alice went home, and Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson that his letter of introduction had borne fruit; he did not mention the criticisms: ‘Gertrude Stein and me are just like brothers and we see a lot of her.’

  *

  There still remained one of Anderson’s letters to send out, to Ezra Pound. Anderson had explained to Hemingway that Pound was influential: he had been responsible for much of the early success of Poetry. But Hemingway was suspicious of what he had heard. Eventually he sent off the letter, and received an invitation to the Pounds’ studio at 70 bis rue Notre Dame des Champs, a side-street much favoured by painters, near the Dôme café in Montparnasse.

  They had settled in Paris the previous spring, Pound having written off London as ‘waterlogged’. Until Christmas he and Dorothy had been living in a hotel, and though they now had the studio it was sparsely furnished; Hemingway noted that it was ‘as poor as Gertrude Stein’s studio was rich’. Pound had made most of the furniture himself with a hammer and nails, and the tea table was a packing-case with a cloth spread over it. But there were paintings by a Japanese protégé of Pound’s, and also pictures by Dorothy, who painted in the Vorticist style of the Wyndham Lewis group.

  Tea was served in the English manner. Hadley, who came too, thought that even ‘low-voiced words seemed a little presumptuous’ during the tea-ceremony, and was overawed by Dorothy’s very British reserve. But Pound swallowed cup after cup, sprawling in one of his vast, canvas-bottomed, home-made chairs and pontificating noisily on one subject after another while Hemingway listened rather resentfully. He was irritated by Pound’s absurd clothes, a stage bohemian outfit including beret and painter’s smock that seemed to be based on Whistler’s Latin Quarter garb of half a century earlier. He was every bit the poseur Hemingway had expected.

  Yet there were several similarities between them. Like Hemingway, Pound had fled from a conventional ‘village’ on the edge of a big American city (in his case Philadelphia), and from the restraints of a strictly Christian home. Also, again like Hemingway, he was apt to make grandiose claims for himself, which the facts did not altogether support.

  Fourteen years Hemingway’s senior, he had fled to Europe at the age of twenty-two and had arrived in London in 1908 with a small book of privately printed poems, florid imitations of the troubadours, Browning, and the Celtic Twilight. On this slender literary base he had quickly erected a considerable reputation, achieved largely through his vivid appearance and brashly self-confident public manner. Punch was soon caricaturing him as the most comic creature on the literary scene since Oscar Wilde.

  Just as Hemingway had sought out Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein, so in 1908 Pound had sat at the feet of W. B. Yeats and Ford Madox Ford. Sensing that a poetic revolution was in the air, without having much idea what form it should take, in 1912 he had invented what he called the Imagist school of poetry, appointing himself its leader. Such acolytes as ‘H.D.’ (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, and Amy Lowell were soon writing vers libre under his instruction, dutifully pruning away all but the barest statements of images, and allowing him to blue-pencil out their more florid phrases. At the same time he became a long-distance huckster for Poetry in Chicago, and found for its editor, Harriet Monroe, such unknown poets as D. H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams. But he was strikingly jealous when Miss Monroe began to discover some first-rate talent on her own doorstep, in the form of Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and other members of the ‘Chicago School’, and he showed his resentment quite openly. He next devoted all his showman’s energy to the promotion of the then unknown James Joyce, whom he discovered in 1913, when Joyce was languishing in Trieste unable to get A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into print. Pound found publishers for it, and persuaded the Little Review to serialise Ulysses four years later as soon as Joyce had begun to write it. But when everyone else started to take up Joyce – as was now happening in Paris – Pound backed away, and became almost as resentful about the fuss over Ulysses at Shakespeare and Company as was Gertrude Stein. He and Gertrude, though, were openly hostile to each other: she dismissed him tartly as a ‘village explainer’, and he dubbed her ‘an old tub of guts’.

  His next one-man discovery after Joyce had been T. S. Eliot, whose ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ he had persuaded Poetry to print after he had met Eliot in London in 1914. Since then, he and Eliot had worked closely together at the development of a strict technique for modern poetry, and when Hemingway called on him early in 1922 Pound was in the final stages of ‘editing’ The Waste Land for Eliot, pruning it from a sprawling collection of poems into a terse modernist sequence. He was also, with the aid of Natalie Barney, about to launch a scheme to rescue Eliot from his job in Lloyds Bank in London and finance his becoming a full-time writer. In the midst of all these activities, Pound had somehow found time to translate ancient Chinese poetry – or rather, brilliantly rewrite the translations by Ernest Fenollosa; produce a madcap modern version of the elegies of Sextus Propertius; write a gnomic verse farewell to London, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920); turn out pseudonymous weekly art and music reviews for a London journal; and begin what he called an ‘endless poem’ that was appearing from his desk canto by canto. On arrival in Paris in the spring of 1921 he also began to compose an opera.

  Nevertheless he was rather bored, and was on the look-out for a ne
w protégé. Joyce, Eliot, and his other discoveries had little need of him now – he had always been almost as much of a nuisance to them as a help, with his constant and sometimes banal trumpetings of their work – and his cantos occupied him only in a rather desultory fashion, as he ‘bottled’ random characters from European and American history. He had settled experimentally in Paris in search of some action, the kind of excitement he had known in his early days in London, and Hemingway was exactly the kind of person he had hoped to find.

  Pound himself had a lot of Hemingway’s swagger. He liked to imply that women flocked after him, but sometimes it seemed that he really cared very little for the opposite sex. Much more sincere was his hero-worship of such masculine figures as Wyndham Lewis, another of his protégés. He took to ‘Hem’, as he called him, largely because Hemingway was a tough guy, or liked to behave as one.

  A few days after the tea party in rue Notre Dame des Champs, Hemingway handed Lewis Galantière a satirical piece he had just written about Pound’s pretentious bohemianism. He intended to offer it to the Little Review, but Galantière said that there was no point in offending such an influential person as Pound, and advised him to tear it up. Hemingway did so, and by 9 March 1922 the relationship with Pound had warmed up considerably. That day Hemingway wrote to Sherwood Anderson that ‘Pound took six of my poems and sent them with a letter to Thayer’. Scofield Thayer of the Dial paid better than any other American editor with whom Pound was in touch; on the other hand he by no means always took Pound’s advice, and now he rejected Hemingway’s poems. Pound also sent a Hemingway story to the Little Review; it fared no better, but he had at least shown himself willing to help. Also, he displayed interest when Hemingway said he was an experienced boxer.

  For all his Whistlerian way of dressing, Pound liked physical sports. He regarded himself, scarcely with justice, as a skilled fencer and tennis player, and the thought of pugilism appealed to his aggressive nature. ‘I’ve been teaching Pound to box,’ Hemingway reported to Anderson in the same letter of 9 March, but added that it had met with ‘little success’ since Pound had ‘the general grace of the crayfish’. However, ‘it’s pretty sporting of him to risk his dignity’. One day Wyndham Lewis walked into Pound’s studio without knocking, and found them at it; he was impressed by Hemingway’s ‘dazzling white’ torso, and calls him ‘tall, handsome, and serene’; Pound was attempting ‘a hectic assault’ at the other’s ‘dazzling solar plexus’, but this was repelled ‘without undue exertion’ and Pound ‘fell back upon his settee’.

  Hemingway remembered the occasion vividly:

  Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat [he writes in A Moveable Feast], and was dressed like somebody out of La Bohème. He had a face that reminded me of a frog … He watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra’s left leads or blocked them with an open right glove. I wanted to stop but Lewis insisted we go on, and I could see that … he was … hoping to see Ezra hurt.

  They all had a drink, and Hemingway studied Lewis more closely. ‘I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.’ He decided that Lewis’s eyes were ‘those of an unsuccessful rapist’. Actually, Lewis was a thoroughly successful womaniser; he had scattered illegitimate children all over the place, having learnt his trade in the Latin Quarter while studying painting there in the early 1900s.

  Hemingway told Gertrude Stein that he could not stand Lewis. She agreed, and said she called him The Measuring Worm, because ‘he comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb. Then he goes back to London and it doesn’t come out right. He’s missed what it’s all about.’ This was nonsense, but then Gertrude had probably seen very little of Lewis’s Vorticist painting.

  Pound told Hemingway about his scheme to rescue Eliot from slavery in Lloyds Bank, and encouraged him to come to Natalie Barney’s Friday salon where the plan was being formulated. Miss Barney had given the scheme the high-flown name ‘Bel Esprit’. Hemingway was wary of salons – ‘I figured very early that they were excellent places for me to stay away from’ – but he could not help seeing the funny side of Pound’s scheme, all the funnier since Pound would keep sidestepping into his obsession with Social Credit, an obscure economic theory devised by one Major C. H. Douglas. Hemingway had not yet read a word of Eliot’s poetry, and he pretended to confuse him with Major Douglas. He began to refer to Eliot as ‘the Major’, and fantasised about his being released from the bank and given the temple in Miss Barney’s garden to live in, and ‘maybe I could go with Ezra when we would drop in to crown him with laurel.’ Bel Esprit soon foundered, having hugely embarrassed Eliot. Hemingway gathered some subscriptions for it, but then lost them all at a racetrack. However, he continued to show his writing to Pound; as it steadily improved, Pound said it showed ‘the touch of the chisel.’ In 1933 Hemingway claimed that he had learned more about ‘how to write and how not to write’ from Pound than from anyone else. Possibly Pound applied his editorial pencil to Hemingway’s drafts much in the way he had to The Waste Land; certainly he made the biggest technical advances of his career during the months when he was seeing Pound frequently. On the other hand, Pound claimed to have little feeling for prose, and the influence most clearly visible in Hemingway’s writing was, of course, that of Gertrude Stein.

  ‘He and Gertrude Stein used to walk together and talk together a great deal,’ she writes in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Hemingway records that he was welcome to come to 27 rue de Fleurus ‘any time after five’. She always gave him eau-de-vie, ‘insisting on refilling my glass’, and they looked at the pictures and talked. She pointed out the Matisse Femme au Chapeau as the picture beneath which she had sat while writing Three Lives, and talked to him about Cézanne. Hemingway decided that he ‘wanted to write like Cézanne painted. Cézanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing.’

  Sometimes he met Gertrude walking her dog in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He soon lost most of his wariness with her, and began to enjoy her company in a relaxed way that few other people had managed. He perceived that beneath the formidable exterior lay a great sense of humour and an almost peasant shrewdness. She told him how she and Leo had amassed their art collection. ‘You can either buy clothes or pictures,’ she said. ‘It’s simple. No one who is not very rich can do both.’ Looking at the ‘strange, steerage clothes’ she wore, Hemingway could well believe it.

  He let slip to her his fear of homosexuals, and she responded with spirit: ‘You know nothing about any of this really, Hemingway … The act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy … In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.’

  *

  Hemingway began to send regular pieces to the Toronto Star, writing about anything on which he could glean information: Swiss tourism (after a short trip he and Hadley had made to the Alps), the depreciation of the German mark (a favourite topic among Americans travelling around Europe), tuna fishing, the election of a new Pope, and the politics of France. Besides bringing in money it was good practice; but Gertrude did not approve. ‘One day,’ she writes in the Autobiography, ‘she said to him, look here, you say you and your wife have a little money between you. Is it enough to live on if you live quietly. Yes, he said. Well, she said, then do it. If you keep on doing the newspaper work you will never see things, you will only see words and that will not do, that is of course if you intend to be a writer.’

  This was intellectual snobbery, and he wisely ignored it. He told her he undoubtedly intended to be a writer, but he let himself be drawn more and more into newspaper work – it allowed him to travel, to gain the varied experience he so b
adly needed. In April 1922, he went to Genoa to cover an international economic conference. The following month, visiting Milan with Hadley, he interviewed Mussolini. During a Black Forest holiday in August 1922 he reported on unrest in Weimar Germany; he also went to Constantinople to cover the war between Greece and Turkey, catching malaria in the process; interviewed Clemenceau at his seaside retreat (the old man attacked Canada for not having done her part in the First World War, and the editor in Toronto thought the story too hot to print); and covered the Lausanne Peace Conference, convened to settle the Graeco-Turkish conflict. On these trips he made friends with such seasoned newspapermen as Lincoln Steffens, celebrated exponent of the ‘Muckraking’ school, and Bill Bird, a thin American who ran the European office of Consolidated Press in Paris and practised high-quality printing as a hobby. These and other old hands taught Hemingway ‘cablese’; Steffens describes him joyously exclaiming: ‘Stef, look at this cable: no fat, no adjectives, no adverbs … It’s great. It’s a new language.’

  In the intervals between these trips, affected by what he had seen and learnt during them, he worked away at his prose style, recording in his notebooks some distillations of Paris:

  I have seen the one-legged street walker who works the Boulevard Madeleine between the Rue Cambon and Bernheim Jeune’s limping along the pavement through the crowd on a rainy night with a beefy red-faced Episcopal clergyman holding an umbrella over her.

  I have watched the police charge the crowd with swords as they milled back into Paris through the Porte Maillot on the first of May and seen the frightened proud look on the white beaten-up face of the sixteen-year-old kid who looked like a prep school quarter back and had just shot two policemen.