The Paris Wife

THIRTEEN

It’s so beautiful here it hurts,” Ernest said one evening as we walked to take our evening meal at the café we now frequented on rue des Saints-Pères. “Aren’t you in love with it?”

I wasn’t, not yet-but I was in awe of it. To walk the best streets in Paris just then was like having the curtained doors of a surreal circus standing open so you could watch the oddity and the splendor at any hour. After the enforced austerity of the war, when the textile industry collapsed and the great couturiers nailed their doors shut, brightly colored silks now ran through the streets of Paris like water-Persian blues and greens, startling oranges and golds. Inspired by the orientalism of the Ballets Russes, Paul Poiret dressed women in culotte harem pants and fringed turbans and ropes and ropes of pearls. In sharp contrast, Chanel was also beginning to make her mark, and you saw splashes of sharp, geometric black amid all that color. More and more, chic meant a shingle-bob and deeply lacquered nails and impossibly long ivory cigarette holders. It also meant lean and hungry looking-but that wasn’t me. Even when I was hungry, I never lost my round face and my plump arms. I also didn’t care enough about clothes to do any thinking about what would suit me. I wore what was easiest and required the least maintenance, long wool skirts and shapeless sweaters and wool cloche hats. Ernest didn’t seem to mind. If anything, he thought highly costumed women were ridiculous. It was part of the way he favored everything simple-good, straightforward food, rustic and almost chewy wine, peasant people with uncomplicated values and language.

“I want to write one true sentence,” he said. “If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I’ll be satisfied.”

He had been working well since we’d come to Paris, chinking away at a story he’d begun on our honeymoon at Windemere called “Up in Michigan.” It was about a blacksmith and a maid in Horton Bay who meet and discover each other sexually. He’d read some of it to me, from the beginning, where he described the town and the houses and the lake and the sandy road, trying to keep everything simple and pure and as he remembered it, and I couldn’t help but be struck by how raw and real it was.

His ambitions for his writing were fierce and all encompassing. He had writing the way other people had religion-and still he was reluctant to send Sherwood Anderson’s letters of introduction to any of the famous American expatriates. I guessed he was afraid they’d reject him out of hand. He was more comfortable making friends with the working class of Paris. The language I had was stiff, schoolgirl French, but his was picked up here and there during the war, rough-and-tumble common speech suited to conversations started on street corners with cooks and porters and garage mechanics. Around them he could be himself without feeling defensive.

That night, though, after dinner, we were set to meet Lewis Galantière, a writer friend of Sherwood’s. Lewis was originally from Chicago and now worked for the International Chamber of Commerce. He had a reputation for having wonderful taste, and when Ernest finally met him at his apartment in the rue Jean-Goujon, it was full of expensive-looking antiques and engravings that he described in detail when he came home to me. “All the tables and chairs had slender, spindly feet. A little fastidious for my liking, but you could see the man knows style.”

I was anxious about meeting Galantière because I wasn’t remotely elegant and didn’t feel I belonged in Paris at all. If the women in Paris were peacocks, I was a garden-variety hen. I’d recently given in to pressure and bobbed my hair-maybe the last American woman to do so-and hated it. It made me look like an apple-faced boy, and even though Ernest said he loved the way I looked, every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I felt like crying. It may have been dowdy and Victorian before, but my hair had been mine-me. What was I now?

Lewis had offered to treat us to dinner at Michaud’s, a fashionable restaurant I’d only stopped at to peer in the window. When we arrived, I paused at the door and fussed hopelessly with my clothes, but Ernest didn’t seem at all aware of my self-consciousness. He held me firmly by the elbow and gave me a small but insistent shove toward Lewis, saying, “Here’s the swell, smart girl I’ve been raving about.”

“Hadley. I’m honored and pleased,” Lewis said as I blushed furiously. I still felt embarrassed, but loved knowing that Ernest was proud of me.

Lewis was twenty-six, dark and slim and endlessly charming. He did very funny impressions, but when he showed us his best James Joyce he had to explain it for us. We’d glimpsed Joyce a few times on the streets of Montparnasse, with his neatly combed hair and rimless glasses and shapeless coat, but we’d never heard him speak.

“He does speak,” Lewis insisted, “but only under some duress. He has several hundred children, I’m told.”

“I’ve seen two girls,” I said.

“Two or two hundred, it’s all the same in Paris, isn’t it? He can barely afford to feed them, they say, but if you come here to Michaud’s any night of the week at five o’clock sharp, you can see the whole brood consuming buckets of oysters.”

“Everyone says Ulysses is great,” Ernest said. “I’ve read a few serialized chapters. It’s not what I’m used to, but you know, something important is happening in it just the same.”

“It’s dead brilliant,” Lewis said. “Joyce will change everything if you believe Pound. Have you been round to Pound’s studio?”

“Soon,” Ernest said, though he hadn’t sent that letter of introduction yet either.

“Good man, you have to go. Not everyone can tolerate Pound, but meeting him is compulsory.”

“What’s difficult about Pound?” I asked.

“He himself, actually.” Lewis laughed. “You’ll see. If Joyce is the very quiet professor with his shabby coat and walking stick, Pound is the devil, bumptious and half crazed with talk of books and art.”

“I’ve met the devil,” Ernest said, finishing his glass of wine, “and he doesn’t give a damn about art.”

By the end of the evening, we were all drunk and back at our flat, where Ernest was trying to get Lewis to box with him. “Half a round, just for laughs,” he coaxed, stripping to the waist.

“I’ve never been a fighting man,” Lewis said, backing away-but after a few more cocktails, he finally submitted. I should have done something to warn him that no matter what Ernest said, sport was never a laughing matter for him. I’d seen the look in his eye in Chicago, when he’d nearly laid Don Wright flat out on Kenley’s floor. This match went the same way, to the letter. For the first few minutes, it was all a pleasant enough cartoon, with both men hunkered into position, knees bent, fists out and curled. It was so obvious that Lewis wasn’t athletic I thought Ernest would give up altogether, but then, without any provocation, he threw a live punch, dead center, from his shoulder.

His fist landed hard. Lewis’s head whipped back and forward again, his glasses flying into a corner. They were shattered, and his face was nicked in several places.

I ran and tried to help him recover himself, but found he was laughing. Ernest began laughing, too-and it was fine, after all. But I couldn’t help thinking how close we’d come to losing our only friend in Paris.

It was Lewis who helped bolster Ernest’s courage enough to send the rest of the letters of introduction, and soon an invitation came from Ezra Pound. Pound wasn’t terribly well known in the States yet, unless you knew something about poetry and read literary magazines like the Dial and the Little Review, but in Paris he had a great reputation as a poet and critic who was helping to revolutionize modern art. I didn’t know more than a scrap about what was modern-I was still reading the terribly square Henry James, as Ernest liked to remind me-but Lewis had said such nice things about Pound’s English wife, Dorothy. I was keen to make new friends and was happy to go along when Pound invited Ernest to tea.

Dorothy met us at the door and led us into the studio, an enormous drafty room filled with Japanese paintings and scrolls and scattered pyramids of books. She was very beautiful, with a lovely high forehead and skin like a China doll. Her hands were pale and finely tapered, and she talked in whispers as we walked to where Pound sat in a blood-red damask chair surrounded by shelves stacked high with dusty volumes and stained teacups, sheaves of paper and exotic-looking figurines.

“You’re a redhead,” Pound said to me once Dorothy had made the introductions.

“So are you. Is that auspicious?”

“No one holds a grudge like a redhead,” he said gruffly and with all seriousness, turning to Ernest. “Mind that, young Mr. Hemingway.”

“Yes, sir,” Ernest said like a good pupil.

Ernest was Pound’s pupil, too, from the first moment they clapped eyes on one another. Pound could evidently spot a man hungry for knowledge and obliged Ernest by talking nonstop while Dorothy ushered me over to another corner of the studio, well away from the men. Under a long window streaming sunlight, she poured me tea and told me about her famous lineage.

“My given name’s Shakespear, though without the e at the end. My father was a descendant of the great man himself.”

“Why no e?”

“I have no idea, actually. It’s more bohemian feeling that way. Not that I need help in that regard. My mother was mildly notorious for a time as the mistress of William Butler Yeats. That’s how I met Ezra, when he was Yeats’s assistant. I suppose I should have been a poet with all this history, but I married one instead.”

“We were reading Yeats a little in school, sprinkled in with the Robert Browning and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ernest showed me ‘The Second Coming’ in a magazine. We were both very struck by it.”

“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,’ ” she said. And then added, “I wonder how Uncle Willy would feel about all the passionate intensity around here?”

Over in their shadowy corner of the studio, Ernest was literally crouched at Pound’s feet while the older man lectured, waving a teapot around as he talked. His ginger-colored hair was growing wilder all the while, and I could see why Lewis Galantière would compare him to Satan-not just because of the hair and his Satyr-like wiry goatee, but also because of his natural vehemence. I couldn’t hear individual words, but he ranted in a volcanic stream, gesturing constantly and rarely sitting down.

I thought the two were a funny match, with Dorothy so elegant and reserved, and Pound so vociferous, but she claimed he’d been very important in her work. She was a painter, and as we talked that afternoon she pointed out some of her canvases to me. I thought they were lovely, with colors and forms as soft and gauzy as Dorothy’s own voice and hands, but when I began to ask her questions about them, she quickly said, “They’re not to be shown.”

“Oh. Well, you’re showing them here, aren’t you?”

“Only incidentally,” she said, and smiled a beautiful smile, looking like something out of a painting herself.

At the end of our visit, after Ernest and I said our farewells, we made our way down the narrow staircase and out onto the street.

“I want to know everything,” I said.

“He’s very noisy,” Ernest said. “But he has some fine ideas. Big ideas, really. He wants to start movements, shape literature, change lives.”

“Then he should be a good person to know,” I said. “Watch that you don’t aggravate him, though. You’ve been warned about redheads.”

We laughed and walked to the nearest café, where Ernest told me more over squat glasses of brandy and water. “He’s got some funny ideas about women’s brains.”

“What? That they haven’t got any?”

“Something like that.”

“What about Dorothy? How’s he feel about her brains?”

“Hard to say-though he did tell me they both have leave to take lovers.”

“How forward thinking,” I said. “Do you suppose this is how all artists’ marriages go in Paris?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“It’s hardly something you could force on someone. You’d have to agree, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you feeling sorry for her? What if she likes it? What if it was all her idea?”

“Maybe, but more likely the other way around.” I drank from my brandy, eyeing him over my glass.

“In any case, he’s going to send some of my poems to Scofield Thayer at the Dial.”

“Not stories?”

“I don’t have anything good enough yet, but Pound said I should write some articles for them about American magazines.”

“Well, that’s flattering.”

“This has to be the beginning of something,” Ernest said. “Pound says he’ll teach me how to write if I teach him how to box.”

“Oh, God help us,” I said, laughing.

Our next major introduction came a few weeks later, when Gertrude Stein invited us to tea. Strangely, it went much the same way our encounter with Pound and Dorothy had. There were two corners here, too, one for the men-in this case, Ernest and Stein-and one for the women, with no crossover whatsoever.

When we arrived at the door, a proper French maid met us and took our coats, then led us into the room-the room, we knew by now, the most important salon in Paris. The walls were covered with paintings by heroes of cubism and postimpressionism and the otherwise highly modern-Henri Matisse, André Derain, Paul Gauguin, Juan Gris, and Paul Cézanne. One striking example was a portrait of Stein done by Picasso, who had long been in her social circle and often attended her salon. It was done in dark browns and grays, and the face seemed slightly detached from the body, heavier and blockier, with thickly lidded eyes.

She seemed to be somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with an Old World look to her dark dress and shawl and to her hair, which was piled in great skeins onto her beautiful head. She had a voice like rich velvet and brown eyes that took in everything at once. Later, when I had time to study her, I was struck with just how like Ernest’s her eyes were-the deepest and most opaque shade of brown, critical and accepting, curious and amused.

Stein’s companion, Alice Toklas, looked like a tight string of wire in comparison. She was dark in coloring with a sharply hooked nose and eyes that made you want to look away. After a few minutes of general conversation, she took my hand and off we went to the “wives’ corner.” I felt a twinge of regret that I wasn’t a writer or painter, someone special enough to be invited to talk with Gertrude, to sit near her in front of the fire, as Ernest did now, and speak of important things. I loved to be around interesting and creative people, to be part of that swell, but for the time being I was removed to the corner and interrogated by Miss Toklas on current affairs, about which I knew nothing. I felt like an idiot, and all the while we had tea and more tea and tiny, artfully arranged cakes. She did needlepoint, her fingers moving endlessly and efficiently. She never looked down and never stopped talking.

Meanwhile, Ernest was sharing a glass of some sort of gracefully tinted liquor with Gertrude. I think I half fell in love with her that day, from a distance, and Ernest did, too. When we walked home he had much to say about her taste, which was innovative and impeccable. He also admired her breasts.

“What do you think they weigh?” he asked. He seemed to seriously want to know.

I laughed. “I couldn’t even wager a guess.”

“How about them living together? Women, I mean.”

“I don’t know. They have such a life.”

“The paintings alone. It’s like a museum in there.”

“Better,” I said. “There are cakes.”

“And eau-de-vie. Still, it’s strange. Women together. I’m not sure I buy it.”

“What do you mean? You don’t believe they can get anything substantial from one another? That they love each other? Or is it the sex you don’t buy?”

“I don’t know.” He bristled defensively. “She said women together are the most natural thing in the world, that nothing is ugly to them or between them, but men together are full of disgust for the act.”

“She said this?”

“In broad daylight.”

“I suppose it’s flattering she was so open with you.”

“Should I give her an earful about our sex life next time?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t.” He smiled. “She might want to come watch.”

“You’re horrible!”

“Yes, but you love me for it.”

“Oh, do I?” I said, and he swatted me on the hip.

Two weeks later, Gertrude and Alice accepted our invitation to come to tea in our dreary flat. What they thought as they climbed the dim and ramshackle stairwell, past the pissoir and the ghastly smells, I could hardly bear to guess-and yet they were gracious and accommodating, behaving as if they came to this quarter of Paris all the time. They drank our tea out of the wedding-gift china teapot-that at least was nice-and sat on the mahogany bed.

Gertrude had offered to look at some of Ernest’s work, and now she asked for it, reading quickly through the poems, a few stories, part of a novel set in Michigan. Just as he’d done in Chicago, when I read his work for the first time, Ernest paced and twitched and seemed to be in pain.

“The poems are very good,” Stein said finally. “Simple and quite clear. You’re not posing at anything.”

“And the novel?”

I thought he was very brave to ask or even show her the pages, because he was newly in love with it. So protective was he, he had shown me next to nothing.

“It’s not the kind of writing that interests me,” she said finally. “Three sentences about the color of the sky. The sky is the sky and that’s all. Strong declarative sentences, that’s what you do best. Stick to that.”

As Stein spoke Ernest’s face fell for a moment, but then he recovered himself. She’d hit on something he’d recently begun to realize about directness, about stripping language all the way down.

“When you begin over, leave only what’s truly needed.”

He nodded, lightly flushed, and I could almost hear his mind closing in on her advice and adding it to Pound’s. “Cut everything superfluous,” Pound had said. “Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.”

“What do you think about Pound’s theory about symbolism?” he asked her. “You know, that a hawk should first and foremost be a hawk?”

“That’s obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “A hawk is always a hawk, except”-and here she raised one heavy eyebrow and gave a mysterious smile-“except when the hawk is a cabbage.”

“What?” Ernest said, grinning and game and clearly perplexed.

“Exactly,” Gertrude said.