A Moveable Feast Page 4

  But for her to continue to write each day without the drudgery of revision nor the obligation to make her writing intelligible and continue to have the true happiness of creation, it was beginning to become necessary for her to have publication and official acceptance, especially for the unbelievably long book called The Making of Americans.

  This book began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with stretches of great brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket. I came to know it very well as I got Ford Madox Ford to publish it in The Transatlantic Review serially--forced, perhaps would be the word--knowing that it would outrun the life of the review. I was overly familiar with the review's finances, and I had to read all of Miss Stein's proof for her as this was a work which gave her no happiness.

  On this cold afternoon when I had come past the concierge's lodge and the cold courtyard to the warmth of the studio, all that was years ahead; and on this day Miss Stein was instructing me about sex. By that time we liked each other very much and I had already learned some time before that everything I did not understand probably had something to it. Miss Stein thought that I was what we would probably call now a square about sex and I must admit that I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. I knew it was why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women. I knew many inaccrochable terms and phrases from Kansas City days and the mores of different parts of that city, Chicago and the lake boats. Under questioning I tried to tell Miss Stein that when you were a boy and moved in the company of men, you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really know that you would do it in order not to be interfered with. That was the term that was accrochable. If you knew you would kill, other people sensed it very quickly and you were let alone; but there were certain situations you could not allow yourself to be forced into or trapped into. I could have expressed myself more vividly by using an inaccrochable phrase that wolves used on the lake boats, "Oh gash may be fine but one eye for mine." But I was always careful of my language with Miss Stein even when true phrases might have clarified or better expressed a prejudice.

  "Yes, yes, Hemingway," she said. "But you were living in a milieu of criminals and perverts."

  I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world such as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them; but some of them I could not like and some I still hated.

  "But what about the old man with beautiful manners and a great name who came to the hospital in Italy and brought me a bottle of Marsala or Campari and behaved perfectly, and then one day you would have to tell the nurse never to let that man into the room again?" I asked.

  "Those people are sick and cannot help themselves and you should pity them."

  "Should I pity so and so?" I asked. I gave his name but he delights so in giving it himself that I feel there is no need to give it for him.

  "No. He's vicious. He's a corrupter and he's truly vicious."

  "But he's supposed to be a good writer."

  "He's not," she said. "He's just a showman and he corrupts for the pleasure of corruption and he leads people into other vicious practices as well. Drugs, for example."

  "And in Milan the man I'm to pity was not trying to corrupt me?"

  "Don't be silly. How could he hope to corrupt you? Do you corrupt a boy like you, who drinks alcohol, with a bottle of Marsala? No, he was a pitiful old man who could not help what he was doing. He was sick and he could not help it and you should pity him."

  "I did at the time," I said. "But I was disappointed because he had such beautiful manners."

  I took another sip of the eau-de-vie and pitied the old man and looked at Picasso's nude of the girl with the basket of flowers. I had not started the conversation and thought it had become a little dangerous. There were almost never any pauses in a conversation with Miss Stein, but we had paused and there was something she wanted to tell me and I filled my glass.

  "You know nothing about any of this really, Hemingway," she said. "You've met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink, take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy."

  "I see."

  "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."

  "I see," I said. "But what about so and so?"

  "She's vicious," Miss Stein said. "She's truly vicious, so she can never be happy except with new people. She corrupts people."

  "I understand."

  "You're sure you understand?"

  There were so many things to understand in those days and I was glad when we talked about something else. The park was closed so I had to walk down along it to the rue de Vaugirard and around the lower end of the park. It was sad when the park was closed and locked and I was sad walking around it instead of through it and in a hurry to get home to the rue Cardinal Lemoine. The day had started out very brightly too. I would have to work hard tomorrow. Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe it now. Then all I had to be cured of, I believed Miss Stein felt, was youth and loving my wife. I was not at all sad when I got home to the rue Cardinal Lemoine and told my newly acquired knowledge to my wife and we were happy in the night with our own knowledge we already had and other new knowledge we had acquired in the mountains.

  3

  Shakespeare and Company

  In those days there was no money to buy books. Books you borrowed from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l'Odeon. On a cold windswept street, this was a lovely, warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive. Sylvia had a lively, very sharply cut face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal's and as gay as a young girl's, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.

  I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished.

  There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were the shelves and shelves of the richness of the library.

  I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of A Sportsman's Sketches and an early book of D. H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.

  "You won't be back very soon if you read all that," Sylvia said.

  "I'll be by to pay," I said. "I have some money in the flat."

  "I didn't mean that," she said. "You pay whenever it's convenient."

  "When does Joyce come in?" I asked.

  "If he comes in, it's usually very late in the afternoon," she said. "Haven't you ever seen him?"

  "We've seen him at Micha
ud's eating with his family," I said. "But it's not polite to look at someone when they are eating, and Michaud's is expensive."

  "Do you eat at home?"

  "Mostly now," I said. "We have a good cook."

  "There aren't any restaurants in your immediate quarter, are there?"

  "No. How did you know?"

  "Larbaud lived there," she said. "He liked it very much except for that."

  "The nearest good cheap place to eat is over by the Pantheon."

  "I don't know that quarter. We eat at home. You and your wife must come sometime."

  "Wait until you see if I pay you," I said. "But thank you very much."

  "Don't read too fast," she said.

  At home in our two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic portable container that was not uncomfortable to anyone who was used to a Michigan outhouse, but which was a cheerful gay flat with a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor, well and tastefully covered, and pictures that we liked on the walls, I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found.

  "But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay," she said.

  "Sure I will," I said. "We'll both go. And then we'll walk down by the river and along the quais."

  "Let's walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops."

  "Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new cafe where we don't know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink."

  "We can have two drinks."

  "Then we can eat somewhere."

  "No. Don't forget we have to pay the library."

  "We'll come home and eat here and we'll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we'll read and then go to bed and make love."

  "And we'll never love anyone else but each other."

  "No. Never."

  "What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we'd better have lunch."

  "I'm very hungry," I said. "I worked at the cafe on a cafe creme."

  "How did it go, Tatie?"

  "I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?"

  "Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart."

  "And we're going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them."

  "Would that be honest?"

  "Sure."

  "Does she have Henry James too?"

  "Sure."

  "My," she said. "We're lucky that you found the place."

  "We're always lucky," I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

  4

  People of the Seine

  There were many ways of walking down to the river from the top of the rue Cardinal Lemoine where we lived. The shortest one was straight down the street but it was steep and it brought you out, after you hit the flat part and crossed the busy traffic of the beginning of the Boulevard St.-Germain, onto a dull part where there was a dull, windy stretch of river bank with the Halle aux Vins on your right. This was not like any other Paris market but was a sort of bonded warehouse where wine was stored against the payment of taxes and was as cheerless from the outside as a military depot or a prison camp.

  Across the branch of the Seine was the Ile St.-Louis with the narrow streets and the old, tall, beautiful houses, and you could go over there or you could turn left and walk along the quais with the length of the Ile St.-Louis and then Notre-Dame and Ile de la Cite opposite as you walked.

  In the bookstalls along the quais you could sometimes find American books that had just been published for sale very cheaply. The Tour D'Argent restaurant had a few rooms above the restaurant that they rented in those days, giving the people who lived there a discount in the restaurant, and if the people who lived there left any books behind there was a bookstall not far along the quai where the valet de chambre sold them and you could buy them from the proprietress for a very few francs. She had no confidence in books written in English, paid almost nothing for them, and sold them for a small and quick profit.

  "Are they any good?" she asked me after we had become friends.

  "Sometimes one is."

  "How can anyone tell?"

  "I can tell when I read them."

  "But still it is a form of gambling. And how many people can read English?"

  "Save them for me and let me look them over."

  "No. I can't save them. You don't pass regularly. You stay away too long at a time. I have to sell them as soon as I can. No one can tell if they are worthless. If they turn out to be worthless, I would never sell them."

  "How do you tell a valuable French book?"

  "First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them."

  After that bookstall near the Tour D'Argent there were no others that sold American and English books until the quai des Grands Augustins. There were several from there on to past the quai Voltaire that sold books they bought from employees of the left bank hotels and especially the Hotel Voltaire which had a wealthier clientele than most. One day I asked another woman stall-keeper who was a friend of mine if the owners ever sold the books.

  "No," she said. "They are all thrown away. That is why one knows they have no value."

  "Friends give them to them to read on the boats."

  "Doubtless," she said. "They must leave many on the boats."

  "They do," I said. "The line keeps them and binds them and they become the ships' libraries."

  "That's intelligent," she said. "At least they are properly bound then. Now a book like that would have value."

  I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood. At the head of the Ile de la Cite below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water's edge with fine chestnut trees, some huge and spreading, and in the currents and back waters that the Seine made flowing past, there were excellent places to fish. You went down a stairway to the park and watched the fishermen there and under the great bridge. The good spots to fish changed with the height of the river and the fishermen used long, jointed, cane poles but fished with very fine leaders and light gear and quill floats and baited the piece of water that they fished expertly. They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called goujon. They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavor than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all.

  One of the best places to eat them was at an open-air restaurant built out over the river at Bas Meudon where we would go when we had money for a trip away from our quarter. It was called La Peche Miraculeuse and had a splendid white wine that was a sort of Muscadet. It was a place out of a Maupassant story with the view over the river as Sisley had painted it. You did not have to go that far to eat goujon. You could get a very good friture on the Ile St.-Louis.

  I knew several of the men who fished the fruitful parts of the Seine between the Ile St.-Louis and the Square du Vert Galent and sometimes, if the day was bright, I would buy a liter of wine and a piece of bread and some sausage and sit in the sun and read one of the books I had bought and watch the fishing.

  Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless wi
th inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work. There was better fishing at Charenton, where the Marne came into the Seine, and on either side of Paris, but there was very good fishing in Paris itself. I did not fish because I did not have the tackle and I would rather save my money to fish in Spain. Then too I never knew when I would be through working, nor when I would have to be away, and I did not want to become involved in the fishing which had its good times and its slack times. But I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a few fritures home to their families.

  With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great plain trees on the stone banks of the river, the elms and sometimes the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

  In those days, though, the spring always came finally; but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

  5

  A False Spring

  When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.