A Moveable Feast Read online

  "That's Hilaire Belloc," I said to my friend. "Ford was here this afternoon and cut him dead."

  "Don't be a silly ass," my friend said. "That's Alestair Crowley, the diabolist. He's supposed to be the wickedest man in the world."

  "Sorry," I said.

  10

  With Pascin at the Dome

  It was a lovely evening and I had worked hard all day and left the flat where we lived over the sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and walked out through the courtyard with the stacked lumber, closed the door, crossed the street and went into the back door of the bakery that fronted on the Boulevard Montparnasse and out through the good bread smells of the ovens and the shop to the street. The lights were on in the bakery and outside it was the end of the day and I walked in the early dusk up the street and stopped outside the terrace of the Negre de Toulouse restaurant where our red and white checkered napkins were in the wooden napkin rings in the napkin rack waiting for us to come to dinner. I read the menu mimeographed in purple ink and saw that the plat du jour was cassoulet. It made me hungry to read the name.

  Mr. Lavigne, the proprietor, asked me how my work had gone and I said it had gone very well. He said he had seen me working on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas early in the morning but he had not spoken to me because I was so occupied.

  "You had the air of a man alone in the jungle," he said.

  "I am like a blind pig when I work."

  "But were you not in the jungle, Monsieur?"

  "In the bush," I said.

  I went on up the street looking in the windows and happy with the spring evening and the people coming past. In the three principal cafes I saw people that I knew by sight and others that I knew to speak to. But there were always much nicer-looking people that I did not know that, in the evening with the lights just coming on, were hurrying to some place to drink together, to eat together and then to make love. The people in the principal cafes might do the same thing or they might just sit and drink and talk and love to be seen by others. The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together. The big cafes were cheap then too, and all had good beer and the aperitifs cost reasonable prices that were clearly marked on the saucers that were served with them.

  On this evening I was thinking these wholesome unoriginal thoughts and feeling extraordinarily virtuous because I had worked well and hard on a day when I had wanted to go out to the races very badly. It was necessary to give up going racing in the time of our real poverty and I was still too close to that poverty to risk any money. By any standards we were still very poor and I still made such small economies as saying that I had been asked out for lunch and then spending two hours walking in the Luxembourg gardens and coming back to describe the marvelous lunch to my wife. When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal completely makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all of your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink.

  At the Negre de Toulouse we drank the good Cahors wine from the quarter, the half, or the full carafe, usually diluting it about one-third with water. At home, over the sawmill, we had a Corsican wine that had great authority and a low price. It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message. In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries. But at this time I could not afford to go to the races, even though there was money to be made there if you worked at it. It was before the days of saliva tests and other methods of detecting artificially encouraged horses and doping was very extensively practiced. But handicapping beasts that are receiving stimulants, and detecting the symptoms in the paddock and acting on your perceptions, which sometimes bordered on the extrasensory, then backing them with money you cannot afford to lose, is not the way for a young man supporting a wife and child to get ahead in the full-time job of learning to write prose.

  Coming back from The Select now where I had sheered off at the sight of Harold Stearns who I knew would want to talk horses; those animals I was thinking of righteously and lightheartedly as boosted beasts that I had just foresworn at Enghein to work on this day as a serious writer; now full of my evening virtue I passed the collection of inmates of the Rotonde and, scorning vice and the collective instinct, crossed the boulevard to the Dome. The Dome was crowded too, but there were people there who had worked.

  There were models who had worked and there were painters who had worked until the light was gone and there were writers who had finished a day's work for better or for worse, and there were drinkers and characters, some of whom I knew and some that were only decoration.

  I went over and sat with Pascin and two models who were sisters. Pascin had waved to me while I had stood on the sidewalk on the rue Delambre side wondering whether to stop and have a drink or not. Pascin was a very good painter and he was drunk; steady, purposefully drunk and making good sense. The two models were young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with a falsely fragile depravity. She was a lesbian who also liked men. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring.

  "The good and the bad sisters," Pascin said. "I have money. What will you drink?"

  "Une demi-blonde," I said to the waiter.

  "Have a whisky. I have money."

  "I like beer."

  "If you really liked beer, you'd be at Lipp's. I suppose you've been working."

  "Yes."

  "It goes?"

  "I hope so."

  "Good. I'm glad. And everything still tastes good?"

  "Yes."

  "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-five."

  "Do you want to bang her?" He looked toward the dark sister and smiled. "She needs it."

  "You probably banged her enough today."

  She smiled at me with her lips open. "He's wicked," she said. "But he's nice."

  "You can take her over to the studio."

  "Don't make piggishness," the blonde sister said.

  "Who spoke to you?" Pascin asked her.

  "Nobody. But I said it."

  "Let's be comfortable," Pascin said. "The serious young writer and the friendly wise old painter and the two beautiful young girls with all of life before them."

  We sat there and the girls sipped at their drinks and Pascin drank another fine a l'eau and I drank the beer; but no one was comfortable except Pascin. The dark girl was restless and she sat on display turning her profile and letting the light strike the concave planes of her face and showing me her breasts under the hold of the black sweater. Her hair was cropped short and was sleek and dark as an oriental's.

  "You've posed all day," Pascin said to her. "Do you have to model that sweater now at the cafe?"

  "It pleases me," she said.

  "You look like a Javanese toy," he said.

  "Not the eyes," she said. "It's more complicated than that."

  "You look like a poor perverted little poupee."

  "Perhaps," she said. "But alive. That's more than you."

  "We'll see about that."

  "Good," she said. "I like proofs."

  "You didn't have any today?"

  "Oh that," she said and turned to catch the last evening light on her face. "You were just excited about your work. He's in love with canvases," she said to me. "There's always some kind of dirtiness."

  "You want me to paint you and pay you and bang you to keep my head clear, and be in love with you too," Pascin said. "You poor little doll."

  "You like me, don't you, Monsieur?" she asked me.

  "Very much."

  "But you're too big," she said sadly.

  "Ever
yone is the same size in bed."

  "It's not true," her sister said "And I'm tired of this talk."

  "Look," Pascin said. "If you think I'm in love with canvases, I'll paint you tomorrow in water colors."

  "When do we eat?" her sister asked. "And where?"

  "Will you eat with us?" the dark girl asked.

  "No. I go to eat with my legitime." That was what they said then. Now they say "my reguliere."

  "You have to go?"

  "Have to and want to."

  "Go on, then," Pascin said. "And don't fall in love with typewriting paper."

  "If I do, I'll write with a pencil."

  "Water colors tomorrow," he said. "All right, my children, I will drink another and then we eat where you wish."

  "Chez Viking," the dark sister said promptly.

  "You want to contrast me with all the beautiful Nordic types. No."

  "I like it very much at Chez Viking," the dark girl said.

  "Me too," her sister urged.

  "All right," Pascin agreed. "Good night, jeune homme. Sleep well."

  "You too."

  "They keep me awake," he said. "I never sleep."

  "Sleep tonight."

  "After Chez Les Vikings?" He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dome. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

  11

  Ezra Pound and the Measuring Worm

  Ezra Pound was always a good friend and he was always doing things for people. The studio where he lived with his wife Dorothy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was as poor as Gertrude Stein's studio was rich. It had very good light and was heated by a stove and it had paintings by Japanese artists that Ezra knew. They were all noblemen where they came from and wore their hair cut long. Their hair glistened black and swung forward when they bowed and I was very impressed by them but I did not like their paintings. I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

  Dorothy's paintings I liked very much and I thought Dorothy was very beautiful and built wonderfully. I also liked the head of Ezra by Gaudier-Brzeska and I liked all of the photographs of this sculptor's work that Ezra showed me and that were in Ezra's book about him. Ezra also liked Picabia's painting but I thought then that it was worthless. I also disliked Wyndham Lewis's painting which Ezra liked very much. He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment. We never argued about these things because I kept my mouth shut about things I did not like. If a man liked his friends' painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. Sometimes you can go quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as families can do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them. But even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous. Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint. He was also irascible but so, I believe, have been many saints.

  Ezra wanted me to teach him to box and it was while we were sparring late one afternoon in his studio that I first met Wyndham Lewis. Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible. But it was not very good because he knew how to fence and I was still working to make his left into his fencing hand and move his left foot forward always and bring his right foot up parallel with it. It was just basic moves. I was never able to teach him to throw a left hook and to teach him to shorten his right was something for the future.

  Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat, like a character in the quarter, and was dressed like someone out of La Boheme. He had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him. At that time we believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no official uniform for the artist; but Lewis wore the uniform of a prewar artist. It was embarrassing to see him and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra's left leads or blocked them with an open right glove.

  I wanted us to stop but Lewis insisted we go on, and I could see that, knowing nothing about what was going on, he was waiting, hoping to see Ezra hurt. Nothing happened. I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me sticking out his left hand and throwing a few right hands and then said we were through and washed down with a pitcher of water and toweled off and put on my sweatshirt.

  We had a drink of something and I listened while Ezra and Lewis talked about people in London and Paris. I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him, as you do when you are boxing, and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.

  Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except toe-jam and that was a slang word. I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

  "I met the nastiest man I've ever seen today," I told my wife.

  "Tatie, don't tell me about him," she said. "Please don't tell me about him. We're just going to have dinner."

  About a week afterwards I met Miss Stein and told her I'd met Wyndham Lewis and asked her if she had ever met him.

  "I call him 'the Measuring Worm,' " she said. "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. Sighting on it and measuring it and seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn't come out right. He's missed what it's all about."

  So I thought of him as the Measuring Worm. It was a kinder and more Christian term than what I had thought about him myself. Later I tried to like him and to be friends with him as I did with nearly all of Ezra's friends when he explained them to me. But this was how he seemed to me on the first day I ever met him in Ezra's studio.

  12

  A Strange Enough Ending

  The way it ended with Gertrude Stein was strange enough. We had become very good friends and I had done a number of practical things for her such as getting her long book started as a serial with Ford and helping type the manuscript and reading her proof and we were getting to be better friends than I could ever wish to be. There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers. One time when I gave the excuse for not having stopped in at 27 rue de Fleurus for some time that I did not know whether Miss Stein would be at home, she said, "But Hemingway, you have the run of the place. Don't you know that? I mean it truly. Come in any time and the maidservant"--she used her name but I have forgotten it--"will look after you and you must make yourself at home until I come."

  I did not abuse this but sometimes I would stop in and the maidservant would give me a drink and I would look at the pictures and if Miss Stein did not turn up I would thank the maidservant and leave a message and go away. Miss Stein and a companion were getting ready to go south in Miss Stein's car and on this day Miss Stei
n had asked me to come by in the forenoon to say good-bye. She had asked me to come and visit, Hadley and I staying at an hotel, before and after this trip and we had written many letters. But Hadley and I had other plans and other places where we wanted to go. Naturally you say nothing about this, but you can still hope to go and then it is impossible. It was something that we never learned. You should know a little about the system of not visiting people. You had to learn it. Much later Picasso told me that he always promised the rich to come when they asked him because it made them so happy and then something would happen and he would be unable to appear. But that had nothing to do with Miss Stein and he said it about other people.

  It was a lovely spring day and I walked down from the Place de l'Observatoire through the little Luxembourg. The horse-chestnut trees were in blossom and there were many children playing on the graveled walks with their nurses sitting on the benches, and I saw wood pigeons in the trees and heard others that I could not see.

  The maidservant opened the door before I rang and told me to come in and to wait. Miss Stein would be down at any moment. It was before noon but the maidservant poured me a glass of eau-de-vie, put it in my hand and winked happily. The colorless alcohol felt good on my tongue and it was still in my mouth when I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever.

  Then Miss Stein's voice came pleading and begging, saying, "Don't, pussy. Don't. Don't, please don't. I'll do anything, pussy, but please don't do it. Please don't. Please don't, pussy."

  I swallowed the drink and put the glass down on the table and started for the door. The maidservant shook her finger at me and whispered, "Don't go. She'll be right down."

  "I have to go," I said and tried not to hear any more as I left but it was still going on and the only way I could not hear it was to be gone. It was bad to hear and the answers were worse.

  In the courtyard I said to the maidservant, "Please say I came to the courtyard and met you. That I could not wait because a friend is sick. Say bon voyage for me. I will write."