A Moveable Feast Page 10

  "I know," I said. "But you can't read Dostoyevsky over and over. I had Crime and Punishment on a trip when we ran out of books down at Schruns, and I couldn't read it again when we had nothing to read. I read the Austrian papers and studied German until we found some Trollope in Tauchnitz."

  "God bless Tauchnitz," Evan said. The whisky had lost its burning quality and was now, when water was added, simply much too strong.

  "Dostoyevsky was a shit, Hem," Evan went on. "He was best on shits and saints. He makes wonderful saints. It's a shame we can't reread him."

  "I'm going to try The Brothers again. It was probably my fault."

  "You can read some of it again. Most of it. But then it will start to make you angry, no matter how great it is."

  "Well, we were lucky to have had it to read the first time and maybe there will be a better translation."

  "But don't let it tempt you, Hem."

  "I won't. I'm trying to do it so it will make it without you knowing it, and so the more you read it, the more there will be."

  "Well I'm backing you in Jean's whisky," Evan said.

  "He'll get in trouble doing that," I said.

  "He's in trouble already," Evan said.

  "How?"

  "They're changing the management," Evan said. "The new owners want to have a different clientele that will spend some money and they are going to put in an American bar. The waiters are going to be in white jackets, Hem, and they have been ordered to be ready to shave off their mustaches."

  "They can't do that to Andre and Jean."

  "They shouldn't be able to, but they will."

  "Jean has had a mustache all his life. That's a dragoon's mustache. He served in a cavalry regiment."

  "He's going to have to cut it off."

  I drank the last of the whisky.

  "Another whisky, Monsieur?" Jean asked. "A whisky, Monsieur Shipman?" His drooping mustache was a part of his thin, kind face, and the bald top of his head glistened under the strands of hair that were slicked across it.

  "Don't do it, Jean," I said. "Don't take a chance."

  "There is no chance," he said, softly to us. "There is much confusion. Many are leaving."

  "Don't bring it, Jean."

  "Entendu, Messieurs," he said aloud. He went into the cafe and came out carrying the bottle of whisky, two large glasses, two ten-franc gold-rimmed saucers and a seltzer bottle.

  "No, Jean," I said.

  He put the glasses down on the saucers and filled them almost to the brim with whisky and took the remains of the bottle back into the cafe. Evan and I squirted a little seltzer into the glasses.

  "It was a good thing Dostoyevsky didn't know Jean," Evan said. "He might have died of drink."

  "What are we going to do with these?"

  "Drink them," Evan said. "It's a protest. It's direct action."

  On the following Monday when I went to the Lilas to work in the morning, Andre served me a bovril, which is a cup of beef extract and water. He was short and blond and where his stubby mustache had been, his lip was as bare as a priest's. He was wearing a white American barman's coat.

  "And Jean?"

  "He won't be in until tomorrow."

  "How is he?"

  "It took him longer to reconcile himself. He was in a heavy cavalry regiment throughout the war. He had the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire."

  "I did not know he was so badly wounded."

  "No. He was wounded of course but it was the other sort of Medaille Militaire he has. For gallantry."

  "Tell him I asked for him."

  "Of course," Andre said. "I hope it will not take him too long to reconcile himself."

  "Please give him Mr. Shipman's greeting too."

  "Mr. Shipman is with him," Andre said. "They are gardening together."

  15

  An Agent of Evil

  The last thing Ezra said to me before he left the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to Rapallo was, "Hem, I want you to keep this jar of opium and give it to Dunning only when he needs it."

  It was a large cold-cream jar and when I unscrewed the top the content was dark and sticky and it had the smell of very raw opium. Ezra had bought it from an Indian chief, he said, on the avenue de l'Opera near the Boulevard des Italiens and it had been very expensive. I thought it must have come from the old Hole in the Wall bar which was a hangout for deserters and for dope peddlers during and after the first war. The Hole in the Wall was a narrow bar, almost a passageway, on the rue des Italiens with a red-painted facade, which had, at one time, a rear exit into the sewers of Paris from which you were supposed to be able to reach the catacombs. Dunning was Ralph Cheever Dunning, a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat. When he was smoking too much he could only drink milk and he wrote in terza rima which endeared him to Ezra who also found fine qualities in his poetry. He lived in the same courtyard where Ezra had his studio and Ezra had called me in to help him when Dunning was dying a few weeks before Ezra was to leave Paris.

  "Dunning is dying," Ezra's message said. "Please come at once."

  Dunning looked like a skeleton as he lay on the mattress and he would certainly have eventually died of malnutrition but I finally convinced Ezra that few people ever died while speaking in well rounded phrases and that I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza rima and that I doubted even if Dante could do it. Ezra said he was not talking in terza rima and I said that perhaps it only sounded like terza rima because I had been asleep when he had sent for me. Finally after a night with Dunning waiting for death to come, the matter was put in the hands of a physician and Dunning was taken to a private clinic to be disintoxicated. Ezra guaranteed his bills and enlisted the aid of I do not know which lovers of poetry on Dunning's behalf. Only the delivery of the opium in any true emergency was left to me. It was a sacred charge coming from Ezra and I only hoped I could live up to it and determine the state of a true emergency. It came when Ezra's concierge arrived one Sunday morning at the sawmill yard and shouted up to the open window where I was studying the racing form, "Monsieur Dunning est monte sur le toit et refuse categoriquement de descendre."

  Dunning having climbed to the roof of the studio and refusing categorically to come down seemed a valid emergency and I found the opium jar and walked up the street with the concierge who was a small and intense woman who was very excited by the situation.

  "Monsieur has what is needed?" she asked me.

  "Absolutely," I said. "There will be no difficulty."

  "Monsieur Pound thinks of everything," she said. "He is kindness personified."

  "He is indeed," I said. "And I miss him every day."

  "Let us hope that Monsieur Dunning will be reasonable."

  "I have what it takes," I assured her.

  When we reached the courtyard where the studios were the concierge said, "He's come down."

  "He must have known I was coming," I said.

  I climbed the outside stairway that led to Dunning's place and knocked. He opened the door. He was gaunt and seemed unusually tall.

  "Ezra asked me to bring you this," I said and handed him the jar. "He said you would know what it was."

  He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs.

  "You son of a bitch," he said. "You bastard."

  "Ezra said you might need it," I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle.

  "You are sure you don't need it?" I asked.

  He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door.

  I picked up the jar which was only slightly cracked and put it in my pocket.

  "He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound," I said to the concierge.

  "Perhaps he will be tranquil now," she said.

  "Perhaps he has some of his own," I said.

  "Poor Monsieur Dunning," she said.

  The lovers of poetry that Ezra
had organized rallied to Dunning's aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know the date of Dunning's actual death, nor if he ever died, nor why he threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase "Monsieur Dunning est monte sur le toit et refuse categoriquement de descendre" gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very great poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery.

  "We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem," he once said to me. "The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance."

  I have never seen anything written about Evan Shipman and this part of Paris nor about his unpublished poems and that is why I feel it so important to include him in this book.

  16

  Winters in Schruns

  When there were the three of us instead of just the two, it was the cold and the weather that finally drove us out of Paris in the winter time. Alone there was no problem really when you got used to it. I could always go to a cafe to write and could work all morning over a cafe creme while the waiters cleaned and swept out the cafe and it gradually grew warmer. My wife could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters keep warm playing and come home to nurse Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a cafe in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that happened and was never bored. There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, wonderful cat named F. Puss. There were people who said that it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby's breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat's weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out; and Marie, the femme de menage, had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter.

  But when you are really poor, and we were truly poor when I had given up all journalism when we came back from Canada, and could sell no stories at all, it was too rough with a baby in Paris in the winter; even with Mr. Bumby who at three months had crossed the North Atlantic on a twelve-day small Cunarder that sailed from New York via Halifax in January, and never cried once on the trip and laughed happily when he would be barricaded in a bunk so he could not fall out when we were in heavy weather.

  We went to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in Austria. After going through Switzerland you came to the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch. The train went through Liechtenstein and stopped at Bludenz where there was a small branch line that ran along a pebbly trout river through a valley of farms and forest to Schruns, which was a sunny market town with sawmills, stores, inns and a good, year-around hotel called the Taube where we lived.

  The rooms at the Taube were large and comfortable with big stoves, big windows and big beds with good blankets and feather coverlets. The meals were simple and excellent and the dining room and the wood-planked public bar were well heated and friendly. The valley was wide and open so there was good sun. The pension was about two dollars a day for the three of us, and as the Austrian schilling went down with inflation, our room and food were less all the time. There was no desperate inflation and poverty there as there had been in Germany. The schilling went up and down; but its course was down.

  There were no ski lifts from Schruns and no funiculars; but there were logging trails and cattle trails that led up different mountain valleys to the high mountain country. You climbed on foot carrying your skis and higher up, where the snow was too deep, you climbed on seal skins that you attached to the bottoms of the skis. At the tops of mountain valleys there were the big Alpine Club huts for summer climbers where you could sleep and leave payment for any wood you used. In some you had to pack up your own wood, or if you were going on a long tour in the high mountains and the glaciers, you hired someone to pack wood and supplies up with you, and established a base. The most famous of these high base huts were the Lindauer-Hutte, the Madlener-Haus and the Wiesbadener-Hutte.

  In back of the Taube Hotel there was a sort of practice slope where you ran through orchards and fields and there was another good slope behind Tschagguns across the valley where there was a beautiful inn with a wonderful collection of chamois horns on the walls of the drinking room. It was from behind the lumber village of Tschagguns, which was on the far edge of the valley, that the good skiing went all the way up until you could eventually cross the mountains and get over the Silvretta into the Klosters area.

  Schruns was a wonderful place for Bumby who had a very dark-haired beautiful girl to take him out in the sun in his sleigh and look after him, and Hadley and I had all the new country to learn and the new villages, and the people of the town were very friendly. Herr Walther Lent who was a pioneer high-mountain skier and at one time had been a partner with Hannes Schneider, the great Arlberg skier, making ski waxes for climbing and all snow conditions, was starting a school for Alpine skiing and we both enrolled. Walther Lent's system was to get his pupils off the practice slopes as soon as possible and into the high mountains on trips. Skiing was not the way it is now, the spiral fracture had not become common then, and no one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols. Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up to first, and you could run down only as often as you could climb up. That made you have legs that were fit to run down with.

  Walther Lent believed the fun of skiing was to get up into the highest mountain country where there was no one else and where the snow was untracked and then travel from one high Alpine Club hut to another over the top passes and glaciers of the Alps. You must not have a binding that could break your leg if you fell. The ski should come off before it broke your leg. What he really loved was unroped glacier skiing, but for that we had to wait until spring when the crevasses were sufficiently covered.

  Hadley and I had loved skiing since we had first done it together in Switzerland and later at Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Dolomites when Bumby was going to be born and the doctor in Milan had given her permission to continue to ski if I would promise that she would not fall down. This took a very careful selection of terrain and of runs and absolutely controlled running, but she had beautiful, wonderfully strong legs and fine control of her skis, and she did not fall. She would not fall any more than she would have fallen in unroped glacier skiing. We all knew the different snow conditions and everyone knew how to run in deep powder snow.

  We loved the Vorarlberg and we loved Schruns. We would go there about Thanksgiving time and stay until nearly Easter. There was always the skiing although because Schruns was not high enough for a ski resort except in a heavy snowy winter, you had to climb for it. But climbing was fun and no one minded it in those days. You set a certain pace well under the speed at which you could climb, and it was easy and your heart felt good and you were proud of the weight of your rucksack. Part of the climb up to the Madlener-Haus was steep and very tough. But the second time you made that climb it was easier, and finally you made it easily with double the weight you had carried at first.

  We were always hungry and
every meal time was a great event. We drank light or dark beer and new wines and wines that were a year old sometimes. The white wines were the best. For other drinks there was wonderful kirsch made in the valley and Enzian Schnapps distilled from mountain gentian. Sometimes for dinner there would be jugged hare with a rich red wine sauce, and sometimes venison with chestnut sauce. We would drink red wine with these even though it was more expensive than white wine, and the very best cost twenty cents a liter. Ordinary red wine was much cheaper and we packed it up in kegs to the Madlener-Haus.

  We had a store of books that Sylvia Beach had let us take for the winter and we could bowl with the people of the town in the alley that gave onto the summer garden of the hotel. Once or twice a week there was a poker game in the dining room of the hotel with all the windows shuttered and the door locked. Gambling was forbidden in Austria then and I played with Herr Nels, the hotel keeper, Herr Lent of the Alpine ski school, a banker of the town, the public prosecutor and the captain of Gendarmerie. It was a stiff game and they were all good poker players except that Herr Lent played too wildly because the ski school was not making any money. The captain of Gendarmerie would raise his finger to his ear when he would hear the pair of gendarmes stop outside the door when they made their rounds, and we would be silent until they had gone on.

  In the cold of the morning as soon as it was light the maid would come into the room and shut the windows and make a fire in the big porcelain stove. Then the room was warm, there was breakfast of fresh bread or toast with delicious fruit preserves and big bowls of coffee, fresh eggs and wonderful ham if you wanted it. There was a dog named Schnauz that slept on the foot of the bed who loved to go on ski trips and to ride on my back or over my shoulder when I ran down hill. He was Mr. Bumby's friend too and would go for walks with him and his nurse beside the small sleigh.

  Schruns was a good place to work. I know because I did the most difficult job of rewriting I have ever done there in the winter of 1925 and 1926, when I had to take the first draft of The Sun Also Rises which I had written in one sprint of six weeks, and make it into a novel. But I cannot remember what stories I wrote there. There were several though that turned out well.