A Moveable Feast Page 6

  But for a long time it was enough just to be back in our part of Paris and away from the track and to bet on your own life and work, and on the painters that you knew and not try to make your living gambling and call it by some other name. I have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is as good as it is both on the indoor and outdoor tracks and on the roads. All that and the six day races are still to come. But I will get the Velodrome d'Hiver with the smoky light of the afternoon and the high-banked wooden track and the whirring sound the tires made on the wood as the riders passed, the effort and the tactics as the riders climbed and plunged, each one a part of his machine; I will get the magic of the demi-fond, the noise of the motors with their rollers set out behind them that the entraineurs rode, wearing their heavy crash helmets and leaning backward in their ponderous leather suits, to shelter the riders who followed them from the air resistance, the riders in their lighter crash helmets bent low over their handlebars their legs turning the huge gear sprockets and the small front wheels touching the roller behind the machine that gave them a shelter from the air resistance to ride in, and the duels that were more exciting than any racing, the put-puting of the motorcycles and the riders elbow to elbow and wheel to wheel up and down and around at deadly speed until one man could not hold the pace and broke away and the solid wall of air that he had been sheltered against hit him.

  There were so many kinds of racing. The straight sprints raced in heats or in match races where the two riders would balance for long seconds on their machines for the advantage of making the other rider take the lead and then the slow circling and the final plunge into the driving purity of speed. There were the programs of the team races of two hours, with a series of pure sprints in their heats to fill the afternoon, the lonely absolute speed events of one man racing an hour against the clock, the terribly dangerous and beautiful races of one hundred kilometers on the big banked wooden five-hundred-meter bowl of the Stade Buffalo, the outdoor stadium at Montrouge where they raced behind big motorcycles, Linart, the great Belgian champion that they called "the Sioux" for his profile, dropping his head to suck up cherry brandy from a rubber tube that connected with a hot water bottle under his racing shirt when he needed it toward the end as he increased his savage speed, and the championships of France behind big motors of the six-hundred-and-sixty-meter cement track of the Parc du Prince near Auteuil, the wickedest track of all where Pauline and I saw that great rider Ganay fall and heard his skull crumple under the crash helmet as you crack an hard-boiled egg against a stone to peel it on a picnic. I must write the strange world of the six-day races and the marvels of the road-racing in the mountains. French is the only language it has ever been written in properly and the terms are all French and that is what makes it so hard to write. But Mike was right about it, there is no need to bet and it comes at another time in Paris.

  7

  "Une Generation Perdue"

  It was easy to get into the habit of stopping in at 27 rue de Fleurus late in the afternoon for the warmth and the great pictures and the conversation. Often Miss Stein would have no guests and she was always very friendly and for a long time she was affectionate. She loved to talk about people and places and things and food. When I had come back from trips that I had made to the different political conferences or to the Near East or Germany for the Canadian paper and the news services that I did work for she wanted me to tell her about all the amusing things that had happened. There were funny things always and she liked them and also what the Germans call gallows-humor stories. She did not like to hear really bad nor tragic things, but no one does, and having seen them I did not care to talk about them unless she wanted to know how the world was going. She wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad.

  I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time and Miss Stein liked to hear these things. The other things I did not talk of and wrote by myself.

  When I had not come back from any trips and would stop in at the rue de Fleurus after working I would try sometimes to get Miss Stein to talk about books. When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written, to keep my mind from going on with the story I was working on. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in my body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing; but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

  To keep my mind off writing sometimes after I had worked I would read writers who were writing then, such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence or any who had books published that you could get from Sylvia Beach's library or find along the quais.

  "Huxley is a dead man," Miss Stein said. "Why do you want to read a dead man? Can't you see he is dead?"

  I could not see, then, that he was a dead man and I said that his books amused me and kept me from thinking.

  "You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad."

  "I've been reading truly good books all winter and all last winter and I'll read them next winter, and I don't like frankly bad books."

  "Why do you read this trash? It is inflated trash, Hemingway. By a dead man."

  "I like to see what they are writing," I said. "And it keeps my mind off me doing it."

  "Who else do you read now?"

  "D. H. Lawrence," I said. "He wrote some very good short stories, one called 'The Prussian Officer.' "

  "I tried to read his novels. He's impossible. He's pathetic and preposterous. He writes like a sick man."

  "I liked Sons and Lovers and The White Peacock," I said. "Maybe that not so well. I couldn't read Women in Love."

  "If you don't want to read what is bad, and want to read something that will hold your interest and is marvelous in its own way, you should read Marie Belloc Lowndes."

  I had never heard of her, and Miss Stein loaned me The Lodger, that marvelous story of Jack the Ripper and another book about murder at a place outside Paris that could only be Enghien les Bains. They were both splendid after-work books, the people credible and the action and the terror never false. They were perfect for reading after you had worked and I read all the Mrs. Belloc Lowndes that there was. But there was only so much and none as good as the first two and I never found anything as good for that empty time of day or night until the first fine Simenon books came out.

  I think Miss Stein would have liked the good Simenons--the first one I read was either L'Ecluse Numero 1, or La Maison du Canal--but I am not sure because when I knew Miss Stein she did not like to read French although she loved to speak it. Janet Flanner gave me the first two Simenons I ever read. She loved to read French and she had read Simenon when he was a crime reporter.

  In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald. When I first met her she did not speak of Sherwood Anderson as a writer but spoke glowingly of him as a man and of his great, beautiful, warm Italian eyes and of his kindness and his charm. I did not care about his great beautiful warm Italian eyes but I liked some of his short stories very much. They were simply written and sometimes beautifully written and he knew the people he was writing about and cared deeply for them. Miss Stein did not want to talk about his stories but always about him as a person.

  "What about his novels?" I asked her. She did not want to talk about Anderson's works any more than she would talk about Joyce. If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back.
It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. You learned not to do it the first time you made the mistake. You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.

  Anderson's stories were too good to make happy conversation. I was prepared to tell Miss Stein how strangely poor his novels were, but this would have been bad too because it was criticizing one of her most loyal supporters. When he wrote a novel finally called Dark Laughter, so terribly bad, silly and affected that I could not keep from criticizing it in a parody,* Miss Stein was very angry. I had attacked someone that was a part of her apparatus. But for a long time before that she was not angry. She, herself, began to praise Sherwood lavishly after he had cracked up as a writer.

  She was angry at Ezra Pound because he had sat down too quickly on a small, fragile and, doubtless, uncomfortable chair, that it is quite possible he had been given on purpose, and had either cracked or broken it. That finished Ezra at 27 rue de Fleurus. That he was a great poet and a gentle and generous man and could have accommodated himself in a normal-size chair was not considered. The reasons for her dislike of Ezra, skillfully and maliciously put, were invented years later.

  It was when we had come back from Canada and while we were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein's Ford. Perhaps he had not realized the importance of Miss Stein's vehicle having the right of immediate repair. Anyway he had not been serieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein's protest. The patron had said to him, "You are all a generation perdue."

  "That's what you are. That's what you all are," Miss Stein said. "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."

  "Really?" I said.

  "You are," she insisted. "You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death. . . ."

  "Was the young mechanic drunk?" I asked.

  "Of course not."

  "Have you ever seen me drunk?"

  "No. But your friends are drunk."

  "I've been drunk," I said. "But I don't come here drunk."

  "Of course not. I didn't say that."

  "The boy's patron was probably drunk by eleven o'clock in the morning," I said. "That's why he makes such lovely phrases."

  "Don't argue with me, Hemingway," Miss Stein said. "It does no good at all. You're all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said."

  Later when I published my first novel I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage keeper with one from Ecclesiastes. But that night walking home I thought about the boy in the garage and if he had ever been hauled in one of those vehicles when they were converted to ambulances. I remembered how they used to burn out their brakes going down the mountain roads with a full load of wounded and braking in low and finally using the reverse, and how the last ones were driven over the mountainside empty, so they could be replaced by big Fiats with a good H-shift and metal-to-metal brakes. I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation? Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a balls-up he'd made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill. But sitting there with the beer, watching the statue and remembering how many days Ney had fought, personally, with the rearguard on the retreat from Moscow that Napoleon had ridden away from in the coach with Caulaincourt, I thought of what a warm and affectionate friend Miss Stein had been and how beautifully she had spoken of Apollinaire and of his death on the day of the Armistice in 1918 with the crowd shouting "a bas Guillaume" and Apollinaire, in his delirium, thinking they were crying against him, and I thought, I will do my best to serve her and see she gets justice for the good work she had done as long as I can, so help me God and Mike Ney. But the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels.

  When I got home and into the courtyard and upstairs and saw my wife and my son and his cat, F. Puss, all of them happy and a fire in the fireplace, I said to my wife, "You know, Gertrude is nice, anyway."

  "Of course, Tatie."

  "But she does talk a lot of rot sometimes."

  "I never hear her," my wife said. "I'm a wife. It's her friend that talks to me."

  8

  Hunger Was Good Discipline

  You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you were skipping meals at a time when you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to do it was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought it was possibly only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way.

  After you came out of the Luxembourg you could walk down the narrow rue Ferou to the Place St.-Sulpice and there were still no restaurants, only the quiet square with its benches and trees. There was a fountain with lions, and pigeons walked on the pavement and perched on the statues of the bishops. There was the church and there were shops selling religious objects and vestments on the north side of the square.

  From this square you could not go further toward the river without passing shops selling fruits, vegetables, wines, or bakery and pastry shops. But by choosing your way carefully you could work to your right around the grey and white stone church and reach the rue de l'Odeon and turn up to your right toward Sylvia Beach's bookshop and on your way you did not pass too many places where things to eat were sold. The rue de l'Odeon was bare of eating places until you reached the square where there were three restaurants.

  By the time you reached 12 rue de l'Odeon your hunger was contained but all of your perceptions were heightened again. The photographs looked different and you saw books that you had never seen before.

  "You're too thin, Hemingway," Sylvia would say. "Are you eating enough?"

  "Sure."

  "What did you eat for lunch?"

  My stomach would turn over and I would say, "I'm going home for lunch now."

  "At three o'clock?"

  "I didn't know it was that late."

  "Adrienne said the other night she wanted to have you and Hadley for dinner. We'd ask Fargue. You like Fargue, don't you? Or Larbaud. You like him. I know you like him. Or anyone you really like. Will you speak to Hadley?"

  "I know she'd love to come."

  "I'll send her a pneu. Don't you work so hard now that you don't eat properly."

  "I won't."

  "Get home now before it's too late for lunch."

  "They'll save it."

  "Don't eat cold food either. Eat a good hot lunch."

  "Did I have any mail?"

  "I
don't think so. But let me look."

  She looked and found a note and looked up happily and then opened a closed door in her desk.

  "This came while I was out," she said. It was a letter and it felt as though it had money in it. "Wedderkop," Sylvia said.

  "It must be from Der Querschnitt. Did you see Wedderkop?"

  "No. But he was here with George. He'll see you. Don't worry. Perhaps he wanted to pay you first."

  "It's six hundred francs. He says there will be more."

  "I'm awfully glad you reminded me to look. Dear Mr. Awfully Nice."

  "It's damned funny that Germany is the only place I can sell anything. To him and the Frankfurter Zeitung."

  "Isn't it? But don't you worry ever. You can sell stories to Ford," she teased me.

  "Thirty francs a page. Say one story every three months in the transatlantic. Story five pages long make one hundred and fifty francs a quarter. Six hundred francs a year."

  "But, Hemingway, don't worry about what they bring now. The point is that you can write them."

  "I know. I can write them. But nobody will buy them. There is no money coming in since I quit journalism."

  "They will sell. Look. You have the money for one right there."

  "I'm sorry, Sylvia. You forgive me for speaking about it."

  "Forgive you for what? Always talk about it or about anything. Don't you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles? But promise me you won't worry and that you'll eat enough."

  "I promise."

  "Then get home now and have lunch."

  Outside on the rue de l'Odeon I was disgusted with myself for having complained about things. I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly. I should have bought a large piece of bread and eaten it instead of skipping a meal. I could taste the brown lovely crust. But it is dry in your mouth without something to drink. You God damn complainer. You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord. You have credit and Sylvia would have loaned you money. She has plenty of times. Sure. And then the next thing you would be compromising on something else. Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry. Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now?