A Moveable Feast Page 17

  The boy Larry fought in his first fight in Paris did not know much more than the carcass man but he wanted to fight and did not keep covered up. Larry jabbed him and jabbed him. The jabs were solid and they hurt and they cut. The other heavyweight had a hungry look and was just out of the army and Larry moved around him so fast jabbing him that the crowd was crazy about it. Larry hit him with a really good but long right that shook the other boy and as he started to go Larry forgot all he knew and started swinging and never stopped until the boy slipped off the ropes and fell head first down onto the canvas.

  After the fight Larry said, "I'm sorry. Tell your wife too I'm sorry please. I know I didn't look good but I'll be better next time."

  "They thought you looked wonderful. The crowd was crazy about it."

  "Oh sure," Larry said. "Could I see you Monday maybe to talk about the fight and things?"

  "Sure. At the same cafe, the Napolitain, at noon."

  The Stade Anastasie had turned out to be a very strange fight club.

  The Acrid Smell of Lies

  Ford: He sat upright like a great gasping fish breathing out a fouler breath than the spout of any whale.

  Many people loved Ford. Most of them, of course, were women. But a few men liked him after they knew him and many men tried to be just to him all of their lives. These were people who, like H.G. Wells, had seen him in a good epoque and had seen him badly treated.

  I never knew him in a good epoque although his Transatlantic Review period was very well spoken of both at the time and later. Almost everyone lies and the lies are not important. Some people we loved for their lies and would wait hopefully for them to start their best ones. Ford, though, lied about things that left scars. He lied about money and about things that were important in daily living that he would give you his word on. When his luck was running very badly he would sometimes give you close to a straight answer. If he made any money or his luck turned for the better he became impossible. I tried to be just to him and not be severe, nor judge him, but only try to get along with him; but to think or write about him with accuracy and exactitude was crueler than any judging.

  After I had met Ford first in Ezra's studio when my wife and I had come back from Canada with a six month old child and found the saw mill apartment on the same street where Ezra lived on, and moved into it in the dead of winter, Ezra told me I must be kind to Ford and I must not mind him lying.

  "He always lies when he is tired, Hem," Ezra told me. "The way he was tonight wasn't bad at all. You should understand that he lies when he is tired. One night he was very tired and he told me a very long story about crossing the south west part of the United States in the early days with a puma."

  "Was he ever in the south west?"

  "Of course not. That's not the point, Hem. He was tired."

  Ezra told me how Ford, unable to get a divorce from his first wife, when he was Ford Madox Hueffer, had gone to Germany where he had relatives. There it seems he had stayed until he convinced himself that he had become a German citizen and had obtained a valid German divorce. On his return to England his first wife had not agreed to this solution and Ford had found himself cruelly persecuted and many of his friends had behaved shabbily towards him. There was much more to it than this and it was more complicated and had many interesting people in it, all of whom are much less interesting now. Any man who had been able to convince himself that he had a divorce, and then was persecuted for such a simple error, deserved sympathy of a kind, and I wanted to ask Ezra if Ford had been tired during all that period; but I was sure he must have been.

  "Was that why he changed his name from Hueffer?" I asked.

  "There were many reasons. He changed it after the war."

  Ford had started the Transatlantic Review. He had once edited The English Review in London before the war and before his domestic trouble and Ezra told me this had been a really good review and Ford had done a splendid job of editing. Now under his new name, he was making a new start. There was a new Mrs. Ford, a very pleasant, dark, young Australian woman named Stella Bowen who was a serious painter and they had a young daughter named Julie, a large child for her age, who was very fair and had good manners. She was a good-looking child and Ford told me that she looked in features and in coloring almost as he had looked at her age.

  I had a completely unreasonable physical antipathy to Ford which was not simply for his bad breath, although I found I could alleviate it by trying to always keep windward of him. He had another very distinct odor that had nothing to do with his breath that made it almost impossible for me to be in a closed room with him. This odor would increase when he was lying and it had a sweetly acrid quality. Maybe it was the odor that he gave off when he was tired. I tried always to see him in the open air if possible and when I would go down to Bill Bird's hand press on the Quai d'Anjou at the Ile St.-Louis where he edited his review to read manuscripts for him, I always took the manuscripts out of the shop and sat on the wall of the Quai under the shade of the big trees to read them. I would have read them out there anyway as it was pleasant on the Quai and the light was good but I always had to go out of the shop as soon as I could when Ford came in.

  The Education of Mr. Bumby

  My first son, Bumby, and I spent much time together in the cafes where I worked when he was very young and we lived over the saw mill. He always went with us to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in the winters but when Hadley and I were in Spain in the summers he would pass those months with the femme de menage who he called Marie Cocotte and her husband, who he called Touton, either at 10 bis Avenue de Gobelins where they had a flat or at Mur de Bretagne where they went for monsieur Rohrbach's summer vacations. Monsieur Rohrbach had been a marechal de logis chef or sergeant major in the professional French military establishment and on his retirement had a minor functional post on which they had lived with his and Marie's wages and looked forward to his retirement to Mur de Bretagne. Touton had a great part in the formative years of Bumby's life and when there would be too many people at the Closerie de Lilas for us to work well or I thought he needed a change of scene I would wheel him in his carriage or later we would walk to the cafe on the Place St.-Michel where he would study the people and the busy life of that part of Paris where I did my writing over a cafe creme. Everyone had their private cafes there where they never invited anyone and would go to work, or to read or to receive their mail. They had other cafes where they would meet their mistresses and almost everyone had another cafe, a neutral cafe, where they might invite you to meet their mistress and there were regular, convenient, cheap dining places where everyone might eat on neutral ground. It was nothing like the organization of the Montparnasse quarter centered about the Dome, Rotonde, Select and later the Coupole or the Dingo bar which you read about in the books of early Paris.

  As Bumby grew to be a bigger boy he spoke excellent French and, while he was trained to keep absolutely quiet and only study and observe while I worked, when he saw that I was finished he would confide in me something that he had learned from Touton.

  "Tu sais, Papa, que les femmes pleurent comme les enfants pissent?"

  "Did Touton tell you that?"

  "He says a man should never forget it."

  At another time he would say, "Papa four poules passed while you were working that were not bad."

  "What do you know about poules?"

  "Nothing. I observe them. One observes them."

  "What does Touton say about them?"

  "One does not take them seriously."

  "What does one take seriously?"

  "Vive la France et les pommes de terre frites."

  "Touton is a great man," I said.

  "And a great soldier," Bumby said. "He taught me much."

  "I admire him very much," I said.

  "He admires you too. He says you have a very difficult metier. Tell me Papa is it difficult to write?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Touton says it is very difficult and I must always respect
it."

  "You respect it."

  "Papa have you lived much among the Peau-Rouges?"

  "A little," I said.

  "Should we go home by Silver Beach's book store?"

  "Sure. Do you like her?"

  "She is always very nice to me."

  "Me too."

  "She has a beautiful name. Silver Beach."

  "We will go by and then I must get you home in time for lunch. I have promised to have lunch with some people."

  "Interesting people?"

  "People," I answered.

  It was too early for them to be sailing boats in the Luxembourg gardens and so we did not stop to watch that and when we arrived home Hadley and I had quarreled about something in which she had been right and I had been wrong quite seriously.

  "Mother has been bad. Papa has scolded her," Bumby announced in French very grandly still under the influence of Touton.

  After Scott had taken to turning up drunk quite frequently Bumby asked me very seriously one morning when he and I had finished work together at the Place St.-Michel cafe, "Monsieur Fitzgerald is sick Papa?"

  "He is sick because he drinks too much and he cannot work."

  "Does he not respect his metier?"

  "Madame his wife does not respect it or she is envious of it."

  "He should scold her."

  "It is not so simple."

  "Are we meeting him today?"

  "Yes, I believe so."

  "Will he be drinking so much?"

  "No. He said we would not be drinking."

  "I will make an example."

  That afternoon when Scott and I met with Bumby at a neutral cafe Scott was not drinking and we each ordered a bottle of mineral water.

  "For me a demi-blonde," Bumby said.

  "Do you allow that child to drink beer?" Scott asked.

  "Touton says that a little beer does no harm to a boy of my age," Bumby said. "But make it a ballon."

  A ballon was only a half glass of beer.

  "Who is this Touton?" Scott asked me.

  I told him about Touton and how he might have come out of the memoirs of Marbot or of Ney, if he had written his, and that he embodied the traditions of the orders of the old French military establishment which had been destroyed many times but still existed. Scott and I talked of the Napoleonic campaigns and the war of 1870 which he had not studied and I told him some stories of the mutinies in the French army after the Nivelle offensive at the Chemin des Dames that I had heard from friends who had participated in them and how such men as Touton were an anachronism but an absolutely valid thing. Scott was passionately interested in the war of 1914-18 and since I had many friends who had served in it and some who had seen many things in detail recently these stories of the war as it actually was were shocking to him. The talk was far over Bumby's head but he listened attentively and afterwards when we had talked of other things and Scott had left, full of mineral water and the resolve to write well and truly, I asked Bumby why he had ordered a beer.

  "Touton says that a man should first learn to control himself," he said. "I thought I could make an example."

  "It is not so simple as that," I told him.

  "War is not simple either is it Papa?"

  "No. Very complicated. You believe what Touton tells you now. Then later you will find out many things for yourself."

  "Monsieur Fitzgerald was demolished mentally by the war? Touton told me many people were."

  "No. He was not."

  "I am glad," Bumby said. "It must be some passing thing."

  "It would be no disgrace if he had been demolished mentally by the war," I said. "Many of our good friends were. Later some recovered to do fine things. Our friend Andre Masson the painter."

  "Touton explained to me about it being no disgrace to be demolished mentally. There was too much artillery in this last war. And the generals were all cows."

  "It is very complicated," I said. "You will find it all out some day for yourself."

  "Meantime it is nice that we have no problems of our own. No grave problems. You worked well today?"

  "Very well."

  "I am happy," Bumby said. "If I can be helpful in anything?"

  "You help me very much."

  "Poor Monsieur Fitzgerald," Bumby said. "He was very nice today to remain sober and not molest you. Will everything be all right with him Papa?"

  "I hope so," I said. "But he has very grave problems. It seems to me that he has almost insurmountable problems as a writer."

  "I am sure that he will surmount them." Bumby said. "He was so very nice today and so reasonable."

  Scott and His Parisian Chauffeur

  After the Princeton game in the fall of 1928 Scott and Zelda, Henry (Mike) Strater, my wife Pauline and I rode in the crowded after football train to Philadelphia where we were to pick up the Fitzgerald's French chauffeur with their Buick car to drive to where they lived on the river outside Wilmington in a house called Ellerslie Mansion. Scott and Mike Strater had been at Princeton together and Mike and I had been good friends since we had first met in 1922 in Paris.

  Scott took football very seriously and he had stayed sober through most of the game. But on the train he had started speaking to people he did not know and asking them questions. Several girls were annoyed by him but Mike or I would speak to their escorts and quiet any rising feeling and maneuver Scott away from trouble. We had him seated several times but he wanted to wander through the cars and he had been so reasonable and decent all day that I thought we could help keep him out of anything serious. We had no choice but to try to take care of him and as he realized that he was being taken out of trouble as soon as he started it he began to expand his operations alternating indiscrete questions with excessive courtliness while one of us gently moved him along and the other apologized.

  Finally he found a Princeton supporter who was now absorbed in reading a medical book. Scott took the book away from him in a courtly way saying, "Do you mind Sir?" glanced at it and returned it with a bow in a voice pitched for all that part of the car, "Ernest I have found a clap doctor!"

  The man paid no attention to Scott and went on reading in his book.

  "You are a clap doctor aren't you?" Scott asked him.

  "Come on Scott cut it out," I said. Mike was shaking his head.

  "Speak up Sir," Scott said. "There is nothing to be ashamed about being a clap doctor."

  I was trying to work Scott away and Mike was speaking to the man apologizing for Scott. The man was keeping out of it and trying to study.

  "A clap doctor," Scott said. "Physician heal thyself."

  We got him away from persecuting the medical student finally and the train eventually came into the station at Philadelphia with no one having hit Scott. Zelda had been in one of her periods of perfect ladyhood on the train sitting quietly with Pauline and paying no attention to Scott's behavior.

  The driver of the car was a Parisian taxi driver who neither spoke nor understood English. He had brought Scott home one night in Paris Scott told me and had kept him from being robbed. Scott had brought him to America as his chauffeur. As we drove toward Wilmington from Philadelphia in the dark with the drinking now started the chauffeur was worried because the car heated up.

  "You should have filled the radiator," I said.

  "No, Monsieur. It isn't that. Monsieur will not allow me to put any oil in the motor."

  "How's that?"

  "He gets very angry and says American cars don't need to have oil added. That only worthless French cars need additional oil."

  "Why don't you ask Madame?"

  "She gets even more angry."

  "Do you want to stop and put in some oil now?"

  "It could make a dreadful scene."

  "Let's stop and put some in."

  "No Monsieur. You don't know the scenes there have been."

  "The motor's boiling now," I said.

  "But if I stop to put gas and fill with water I must stop the engine. They
will not put gas in without the engine being stopped, then the cold water will crack the cylinder block. There is plenty of water Monsieur. It is a very big cooling system."

  "For Christ sake let's stop and put in water with the engine running."

  "No Monsieur. I tell you Monsieur would never permit it. I know this motor. It will reach the chateau. This is not the first time. Tomorrow if you would come with me to a garage. We can go when I take the little girl to church."

  "Sure," I said.

  "We'll change the oil," he said. "We'll buy some tins. I'll keep them hidden and add them when it needs them."

  "Are you jabbering about oil?" Scott said. "Philippe has some sort of fixation that you have to put oil in this car all the time like that ridiculous Renault we drove up from Lyon that time. Philippe, ecoute, voiture americain pas d'huile."

  "Oui Monsieur," the chauffeur said.

  "He makes Zelda nervous with that silly oil chatter," Scott said. "He's a good fellow and absolutely loyal but he knows nothing about American motors."

  It was a nightmare ride and when the driver wanted to turn off at the side road that led to the house Zelda would not let him. Both she and Scott insisted that it was not the road. Zelda claimed the turn off was much further on and Scott said we had passed it. They argued and quarreled until Zelda went to sleep momentarily while the chauffeur drove slowly on. Then Scott told the driver to turn around and while he was napping too the chauffeur made the turn off.

  The Pilot Fish and the Rich

  The first year in the Vorarlberg was an innocent year. The second year of the great killing by avalanches was a different kind of year and you began to know people and the places very well. You knew some people too well and you were learning the places for survival as well as for pleasure. The last year was a nightmare and a murder year disguised as the greatest fun of all. It was that year that the rich showed up.

  The rich always have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes he is a little deaf, sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affably and hesitant ahead of them. The pilot fish talks like this: "Well I don't know. No of course not really. But I like them. I like them both. Yes, by God, Hem; I do like them. I see what you mean (giggle) but I do like them truly and there's something damned fine about her." (He gives her name and pronounces it lovingly.) "No, Hem, don't be silly and don't be difficult. I like them truly. Both of them I swear it. You'll like him (using his baby-talk nickname) when you know him. I like them both, truly."