the small Greek temple on the brochure. The idea of Bel Esprit was that we would all
contribute a part of whatever we earned to provide a fund to get Mr. Eliot out of the bank
so he would have money to write poetry. This seemed like a good idea to me and after we
had got Mr. Eliot out of the bank Ezra figured we would go right straight along and fix up
everybody.
I mixed things up a little by always referring to Eliot as Major Eliot, pretending to
confuse him with Major Douglas, an economist about whose ideas Ezra was very
enthusiastic. But Ezra understood that my heart was in the right place and that I was full
of Bel Esprit even though it would annoy Ezra when I would solicit funds from my
friends to get Major Eliot out of the bank and someone would say what was a Major
doing in a bank anyway and if he had been axed by the military establishment did he not
have a pension or at least some gratuity?
In such cases I would explain to my friends that this was all beside the point. Either
you had Bel Esprit or you did not have it. If you had it you would subscribe to get the
Major out of the bank. If you didn't it was too bad. Didn't they understand the
significance of the small Greek temple? No? I thought so. Too bad, Mac. Keep your
money. We wouldn't touch it.
As a member of Bel Esprit I campaigned energetically and my happiest dreams in
those days were of seeing the Major stride out of the bank a free man. I cannot remember
how Bel Esprit finally cracked up but I think it had something to do with the publication
of The Waste Land which won the Major the Dial award, and not long after a lady of title
backed a review for Eliot called The Criterion and Ezra and I did not have to worry about
him any more. The small Greek temple is, I believe, still in the garden. It was always a
disappointment to me that we had not been able to get the Major out of the bank by Bel
Esprit alone, as in my dreams I had pictured him as coming, perhaps, to live in the small
Greek temple and that maybe I could go with Ezra when we would drop in to crown him
with laurel. I knew where there was fine laurel that I could gather, riding out on my
bicycle to get it, and I thought we could crown him any time he felt lonesome or any time
Ezra had gone over the manuscript or the proofs of another big poem like The Waste
Land. The whole thing turned out badly for me morally, as so many things have, because
the money that I had earmarked for getting the Major out of the bank I took out to
Enghien and bet on jumping horses that raced under the influence of stimulants. At two
meetings the stimulated horses that I was backing outraced the unstimulated or
insufficiently stimulated beasts, except for one race in which our fancy had been
overstimulated to such a point that before the start he threw his jockey and breaking away
completed a full circuit of the steeplechase course jumping beautifully by himself the
way one can sometimes jump in dreams. Caught up and remounted he started the race
and figured honourably, as the French racing phrase has it, but was out of the money.
I would have been happier if the amount of the wager had gone to Bel Esprit which
was no longer existent. But I comforted myself that with those wagers which had
prospered I could have contributed much more to Bel Esprit than was my original
intention.
13 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 Stein had asked
me to come by in the forenoon to say goodbye. She had asked us to come and visit,
Hadley and I staying at an hotel, 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. I knew a little about the system of not visiting people. I 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 gravelled 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 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 WasMarked 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
