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.
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 Dostoevsky.
'To tell you the truth, Hem,' 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 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 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 and 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 pavilion. 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.'
'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 threequarters
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 Dostoevsky,' 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 translations. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest
I suppose, and you can read it over and over.'
'I know,' I said. 'But you can't read Dostoevsky over and over. I had Crime and
Punishment on a trip when we ran out of books down at Schruns, and I couldn't read it
again when we had nothing to read. I read the Austrian papers and studied German until
we found some Trollope in Tauchnitz.'
'God bless Tauchnitz,' Evan said. The whisky had lost its burning quality and was
now, when water was added, simply much too strong.
'Dostoevsky was a shit, Hem,' Evan went on. 'He was best on shits and saints. He
makes wonderful saints. It's a shame we can't re-read him.'
'I'm going to try The Brothers again. It was probably my fault.'
'You can read some of it again. Most of it. But then it will start to make you angry,
no matter how great it is.'
'Well, we were lucky to have had it to read the first time and maybe there will be a
better translation.'
'But don't let it tempt you, Hem.'
'I won't. I'm trying to do it so it will make it without you knowing it, and so the more
you read it, the more there will be.'
Well, I'm backing you in Jean's whisky,' Evan said.
'He'll get in trouble doing that,' I said.
'He's in trouble already,' Evan said.
'How?'
'They're changing the management,' Evan said. 'The new owners want to have a
different clientele that will spend some money and they are going to put in an American
bar. The waiters are going to be in white jackets, Hem, and they have been ordered to be
ready to shave off their moustaches.'
'They can't do that to Andre and Jean.'
'They shouldn't be able to, but they will.'
'Jean has had a moustache all his life. That's a dragoon's moustache. He served in a
cavalry regiment.'
'He's going to have to cut it off.'
I drank the last of the whisky.
'Another whisky, Monsieur?' Jean asked. 'A whisky, Monsieur Shipman?' His heavy
drooping moustache was a part of his thin, kind face, and the bald top of his head
glistened under the strands of hair that were slicked across it. 'Don't do it, Jean,' I said.
'Don't take a chance.' 'There is no chance,' he said, softly to us. 'There is much confusion.
