A Moveable Feast Read online

  "C'est entendu, Monsieur. What a shame you cannot wait."

  "Yes," I said. "What a shame."

  That was the way it finished for me, stupidly enough, although I still did the small jobs, made the necessary appearances, brought people that were asked for and waited dismissal with most of the other men friends when that epoch came and the new friends moved in. It was sad to see new worthless pictures hung in with the great pictures but it made no difference any more. Not to me it didn't. She quarreled with nearly all of us that were fond of her except Juan Gris and she couldn't quarrel with him because he was dead. I am not sure that he would have cared because he was past caring and it showed in his paintings.

  Finally she even quarreled with the new friends but none of us followed it any more. She got to look like a Roman emperor and that was fine if you liked your women to look like Roman emperors. But Picasso had painted her, and I could remember her, when she looked like a woman from Friuli.

  In the end everyone, or not quite everyone, made friends again in order not to be stuffy or righteous. I did too. But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst. It never occurred to me until many years later that anyone could hate anyone because they had learned to write conversation from that novel that started off with the quotation from the garage keeper. But it was really much more complicated than that.

  13

  The Man Who Was Marked for Death

  The afternoon I met Ernest Walsh, the poet, in Ezra's studio, he was with two girls in long mink coats and there was a long, shiny, hired car from Claridge's outside in the street with a uniformed chauffeur. The girls were blondes and they had crossed on the same ship with Walsh. The ship had arrived the day before and he had brought them with him to visit Ezra.

  Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture. He was talking to Ezra and I talked with the girls who asked me if I had read Mr. Walsh's poems. I had not and one of them brought out a green-covered copy of Harriet Monroe's Poetry, A Magazine of Verse and showed me poems by Walsh in it.

  "He gets twelve hundred dollars apiece," she said.

  "For each poem," the other girl said.

  My recollection was that I received twelve dollars a page, if that, from the same magazine. "He must be a very great poet," I said.

  "It's more than Eddie Guest gets," the first girl told me.

  "It's more than who's that other poet gets. You know."

  "Kipling," her friend said.

  "It's more than anybody gets ever," the first girl said.

  "Are you staying in Paris very long?" I asked them.

  "Well no. Not really. We're with a group of friends."

  "We came over on this boat, you know. But there wasn't anyone on it really. Mr. Walsh was on it of course."

  "Doesn't he play cards?" I asked.

  She looked at me in a disappointed but understanding way.

  "No. He doesn't have to. Not writing poetry the way he can write it."

  "What ship are you going back on?"

  "Well that depends. It depends on the boats and on a lot of things. Are you going back?"

  "No. I'm getting by all right."

  "This is sort of the poor quarter over here, isn't it?"

  "Yes. But it's pretty good. I work the cafes and I'm out at the track."

  "Can you go out to the track in those clothes?"

  "No. This is my cafe outfit."

  "It's kind of cute," one of the girls said. "I'd like to see some of that cafe life. Wouldn't you, dear?"

  "I would," the other girl said. I wrote their names down in my address book and promised to call them at Claridge's. They were nice girls and I said good-bye to them and to Walsh and to Ezra. Walsh was still talking to Ezra with great intensity.

  "Don't forget," the taller one of the girls said.

  "How could I?" I told her and shook hands with them both again.

  The next I heard from Ezra about Walsh was that he had been bailed out of Claridge's by some lady admirers of poetry and of young poets who were marked for death, and the next thing, some time after that, was that he had financial backing from another source and was going to start a new magazine in the quarter as a co-editor.

  At the time the Dial, an American literary magazine edited by Scofield Thayer, gave an annual award of, I believe, a thousand dollars for excellence in the practice of letters by a contributor. This was a huge sum for any straight writer to receive in those days, in addition to the prestige, and the award had gone to various people, all deserving, naturally. Two people, then, could live comfortably and well in Europe on five dollars a day and could travel. The advance I had received from an American publisher on my first full-length book of short stories was two hundred dollars and supplemented by loans and savings it meant a winter to ski and write in the Vorarlberg.

  This Quarter, of which Walsh was one of the editors, was alleged to be going to award a very substantial sum to the contributor whose work should be judged the best at the end of the first four issues.

  If the news was passed around by gossip or rumor, or if it was a matter of personal confidence, cannot be said. Let us hope and believe always that it was completely honorable in every way. Certainly nothing could ever be said or imputed against Walsh's co-editor ever.

  It was not long after I heard rumors of this alleged award that Walsh asked me to lunch one day at a restaurant that was the best and the most expensive in the Boulevard St.-Michel quarter and after the oysters, expensive flat faintly coppery marennes, not the familiar, deep, inexpensive portugaises, and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse, began to lead up to it delicately. He appeared to be conning me as he had conned the shills from the boat--if they were shills and if he had conned them, of course--and when he asked me if I would like another dozen of the flat oysters as he called them, I said I would like them very much. He did not bother to look marked for death with me and this was a relief. He knew I knew he had the con, not the kind you con with but the kind you died of then and how bad it was, and he did not bother to have to cough, and I was grateful for this at the table. I was wondering if he ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask him. I began my second dozen of the flat oysters, picking them from their bed of crushed ice on the silver plate, watching their unbelievably delicate brown edges react and cringe as I squeezed lemon juice on them and separated the holding muscle from the shell and lifted them to chew them carefully.

  "Ezra's a great, great poet," Walsh said, looking at me with his own dark poet's eyes.

  "Yes," I said. "And a fine man."

  "Noble," Walsh said. "Truly noble." We ate and drank in silence as a tribute to Ezra's nobility. I missed Ezra and wished he were there. He could not afford marennes either.

  "Joyce is great," Walsh said. "Great. Great."

  "Great," I said. "And a good friend." We had become friends in his wonderful period after the finishing of Ulysses and before starting what was called for a long time Work in Progress. I thought of Joyce and remembered many things.

  "I wish his eyes were better," Walsh said.

  "So does he," I said.

  "It is the tragedy of our time," Walsh told me.

  "Everybody has something wrong with them," I said, trying to cheer up the lunch.

  "You haven't." He gave me all his charm and more, and then he marked himself for death.

  "You mean I am not marked for death?" I asked. I could not help it.

  "No. You're marked for Life." He capitalized the word.

  "Give me time," I said.

  He wanted a good steak, rare, and I ordered two tournedos with sauce Bearnaise. I figured the butter would be good for him.

  "What about a red wine?" he asked. The sommelier
came and I ordered a Chateauneuf du Pape. I would walk it off afterwards along the quais. He could sleep it off, or do what he wanted to. I might take mine someplace, I thought.

  It came as we finished the steak and french-fried potatoes and were two-thirds through the Chateauneuf du Pape which is not a luncheon wine.

  "There's no use beating around the bush," he said. "You know you're to get the award, don't you?"

  "Am I?" I said. "Why?"

  "You're to get it," he said. He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. I was embarrassed and it made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. I've seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust was for all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death. Now you will con me. Con not, lest thou be not conned. Death was not conning with him. It was coming all right.

  "I don't think I deserve it, Ernest," I said, enjoying using my own name, that I hated, to him. "Besides, Ernest, it would not be ethical, Ernest."

  "It's strange we have the same name, isn't it?"

  "Yes, Ernest," I said. "It's a name we must both live up to. You see what I mean, don't you, Ernest?"

  "Yes, Ernest," he said. He gave me complete, sad Irish understanding and the charm.

  So I was always very nice to him and to his magazine and when he had his hemorrhages and left Paris asking me to see his magazine through the printers who did not read English, I did that. I had seen one of the hemorrhages, it was very legitimate, and I knew that he would die all right, and it pleased me at that time, which was a difficult time in my life, to be extremely nice to him, as it pleased me to call him Ernest. Also, I liked and admired his co-editor. She had not promised me any award. She only wished to build a good magazine and pay her contributors well.

  One day, years later, I met Joyce who was walking along the Boulevard St.-Germain after having been to a matinee alone. He liked to listen to the actors, although he could not see them. He asked me to have a drink with him and we went to the Deux-Magots and ordered dry sherry although you will always read that he drank only Swiss white wine.

  "Now about Walsh," Joyce said.

  "A such and such alive is a such and such dead," I said.

  "Did he promise you that award?" Joyce asked.

  "Yes."

  "I thought so," Joyce said.

  "Did he promise it to you?"

  "Yes," Joyce said. After a time he asked, "Do you think he promised it to Pound?"

  "I don't know."

  "Best not to ask him," Joyce said. We left it at that. I cannot remember when Walsh died. It was long before that evening with Joyce. But I can remember telling Joyce of my first meeting with him in Ezra's studio with the girls in the long fur coats and how very happy it made him to hear the story.

  14

  Evan Shipman at the Lilas

  From the day I had found Sylvia Beach's library I had read all of Turgenev, what had been published in English of Gogol, the Constance Garnett translations of Tolstoi and the English translations of Chekov. In Toronto, before we had ever come to Paris, I had been told Katherine Mansfield was a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer, but trying to read her after Chekov was like hearing the carefully artificial tales of a young old-maid compared to those of an articulate and knowing physician who was a good and simple writer. Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water. But Chekov was not water except for the clarity. There were some stories that seemed to be only journalism. But there were wonderful ones too.

  In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter or your pension in the Hotel Taube in the village at night; and you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

  I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

  "To tell you the truth," Ezra said, "I've never read the Rooshians."

  It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste--the one and only correct word to use--the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain given situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

  "Keep to the French," Ezra said. "You've plenty to learn there."

  "I know it," I said. "I've plenty to learn everywhere."

  Later after leaving Ezra's studio and walking along the street to where we now lived in the courtyard of the sawmill, looking down the high-sided street to the opening at the end where the bare trees showed and behind them the far facade of the Bal Bullier across the width of the Boulevard St.-Michel, I opened the gate of the sawmill, went in past the fresh-sawn lumber and left my racket in its press beside the stairs that led to the top floor of the pavillion. I called up the stairs but there was no one home.

  "Madame has gone out and the bonne and the baby too," the wife of the sawmill owner told me. She was a difficult woman, over-plump, with brassy hair, and I thanked her.

  "There was a young man to see you," she said, using the term jeune homme instead of monsieur. "He said he would be at the Lilas."

  "Thank you very much," I said. "If Madame comes in, please tell her I am at the Lilas."

  "She went out with friends," the wife said and gathering her purple dressing gown about her went on high heels into the doorway of her own domaine without closing the door.

  I walked down the street between the high, stained and streaked white houses and turned to the right at the open, sunny end and went into the sun-striped dusk of the Lilas.

  There was no one there I knew and I went outside onto the terrace and found Evan Shipman waiting. He was a fine poet and he knew and cared about horses, writing and painting. He rose and I saw him tall and pale and thin, his white shirt dirty and worn at the collar, his tie carefully knotted, his worn and wrinkled grey suit, his fingers stained darker than his hair, his nails dirty and his loving, deprecatory smile that he held tightly not to show his bad teeth.

  "It's good to see you, Hem," he said.

  "How are you, Evan?" I asked.

  "A little down," he said. "I think I have the 'Mazeppa' licked though. Have you been going well?"

  "I hope so," I said. "I was out playing tennis with Ezra when you came by."r />
  "Is Ezra well?"

  "Very."

  "I'm so glad. Hem, you know I don't think that owner's wife where you live likes me. She wouldn't let me wait upstairs for you."

  "I'll tell her," I said.

  "Don't bother. I can always wait here. It's very pleasant in the sun now, isn't it?"

  "It's fall now," I said. "I don't think you dress warmly enough."

  "It's only cool in the evening," Evan said. "I'll wear my coat."

  "Do you know where it is?"

  "No. But it's somewhere safe."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I left the poem in it." He laughed heartily holding his lips tightly over the teeth. "Have a whisky with me, please, Hem."

  "All right."

  "Jean," Evan got up and called the waiter. "Two whiskies please."

  Jean brought the bottle and the glasses and two ten-franc saucers with the syphon. He used no measuring glass and poured the whisky until the glasses were more than three-quarters full. Jean loved Evan who often went out and worked with him at his garden in Montrouge, out beyond the Porte d'Orleans, on Jean's day off.

  "You mustn't exaggerate," Evan said to the tall old waiter.

  "They are two whiskies, aren't they?" the waiter asked.

  We added water and Evan said, "Take the first sip very carefully, Hem. Properly handled, they will hold us for some time."

  "Are you taking any care of yourself?" I asked.

  "Yes, truly, Hem. Let's talk about something else, should we?"

  There was no one sitting on the terrace and the whisky was warming us both although I was better dressed for the fall than Evan as I wore a sweatshirt for underwear and then a shirt and a blue wool French sailor's sweater over the shirt.

  "I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky," I said. "How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?"

  "It can't be the translation," Evan said. "She makes the Tolstoi come out well written."

  "I know. I remember how many times I tried to read War and Peace until I got the Constance Garnett translation."

  "They say it can be improved on," Evan said. "I'm sure it can although I don't know Russian. But we both know translators. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over."