A Moveable Feast (10 page)

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 colourless 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.'
'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 quarrelled 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 quarrelled 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.

But it was more complicated than that.

14 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 goodbye 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.

This quarterly, 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 rumour, or if it was a matter of personal confidence, cannot be said. Let us hope and believe always that it was completely honourable in every way. Certainly nothing could ever be said or imputed against Walsh's co-editor.

It was not long after I heard rumours 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 some place, 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.

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 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, that 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 haemorrhages 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 haemorrhages, 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, much 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.

'How 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 told Joyce of my first meeting with him in Ezra's studio with the girls in the long fur coats and it made him happy to hear the story.

15 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 Chehov. 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 Chehov 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 Chehov was not water except for the clarity. There were some stories that seemed to be only journalism. But there were wonderful ones too.

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable 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 travelled 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 worm you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the daytime, and at night 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.