Many are leaving. Entendu, Messeurs,' he said aloud. He went into the cafe and came out
carrying the bottle of whisky, two large glasses, two ten-franc gold-rimmed saucers and a
seltzer bottle. 'No, Jean,' I said.
He put the glasses down on the saucers and filled them almost to the brim with
whisky and took the remains of the bottle back into the cafe. Evan and I squirted a little
seltzer into the glasses.
'It was a good thing Dostoevsky didn't know Jean,' Evan said. 'He might have died of
drink.' 'What are we going to do with these?' 'Drink them," Evans said. 'It's a protest. It's
direct action.' On the following Monday when I went to the Lilas to work in the morning,
Andre served me a bovril, which is a cup of beef extract and water. He was short and
blond and where his stubby moustache had been, his lip was as bare as a priest's. He was
wearing a white American barman's coat. 'And Jean?'
'He won't be in until tomorrow.' 'How is he?'
'It took him longer to reconcile himself. He was in a heavy cavalry regiment
throughout the war. He had the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille Militaire.'
'I did not know he was so badly wounded.' 'No. He was wounded of course but it was
the other sort of Medaille Militaire he has. For gallantry.' 'Tell him I asked for him.'
'Of course,' Andre said. 'I hope it will not take him too long to reconcile himself.'
'Please give him Mr Shipman's greeting too.' 'Mr Shipman is with him,' Andre said.
'They are gardening together.'
16 An Agent of Evil
The last thing Ezra said to me before he left the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to
Rapallo was, 'Hem, I want you to keep this jar of opium and give it to Dunning only
when he needs it.'
It was a large cold-cream jar and when I unscrewed the top the content was dark and
sticky and it had the smell of very raw opium. Ezra had bought it from an Indian chief, he
said, on the avenue de 1'Opera near the Boulevard des Italiens and it had been very
expensive. I thought it must have come from the old Hole in the Wall bar which was a
hangout for deserters and for dope peddlers during and after the first war. The Hole in the
Wall was a very narrow bar with a red-painted facade, little more than a passageway, on
the rue des Italiens. At one time it had a rear exit into the sewers of Paris from which you
were supposed to be able to reach the catacombs. Dunning was Ralph Cheever Dunning,
a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat. When he was smoking too much he could
only drink milk and he wrote in terza-rima which endeared him to Ezra who also found
fine qualities in his poetry. He lived in the same courtyard where Ezra had his studio and
Ezra had called me in to help him when Dunning was dying a few weeks before Ezra was
to leave Paris.
'Dunning is dying,' Ezra's message said. 'Please come at once.'
Dunning looked like a skeleton as he lay on the mattress and he would certainly have
eventually died of malnutrition but I finally convinced Ezra that few people ever died
while speaking in well-rounded phrases and that I had never known any man to die while
speaking in terza-rima and that I doubted even if Dante could do it. Ezra said he was not
talking in terza-rima and I said that perhaps it only sounded like terza-rima because I had
been asleep when he had sent for me. Finally after a night with Dunning waiting for death
to come, the matter was put in the hands of a physician and Dunning was taken to a
private clinic to be disintoxicated. Ezra guaranteed his bills and enlisted the aid of I do
not know which lovers of poetry on Dunning's behalf. Only the delivery of the opium in
any true emergency was left to me. It was a sacred charge coming from Ezra and I only
hoped I could live up to it and determine the state of a true emergency. It came when
Ezra's concierge arrived one Sunday morning at the sawmill yard and shouted up to the
open window where I was studying the racing form, 'Mtinsieur Dunning est monte sur le
toit et refuse categoriquement de descendre.'
Dunning having climbed to the roof of the studio and refusing categorically to come
down seemed a valid emergency and I found the opium jar and walked up the street with
the concierge who was a small and intense woman very excited by the situation.
'Monsieur has what is needed?' she asked me.
'Absolutely,' I said. 'There will be no difficulty.'
'Monsieur Pound thinks of everything,' she said. 'He is kindness personified.'
'He is indeed,' I said. 'And I miss him every day.'
'Let us hope that Monsieur Dunning will be reasonable.'
'I have what it takes,' I assured her.
When we reached the courtyard where the studios were the concierge said, 'He's
come down.'
'He must have known I was coming,' I said.
I climbed the outside stairway that led to Dunning's place and knocked. He opened
the door. He was gaunt and seemed unusually tall.
'Ezra asked me to bring you this,' I said and handed him the jar. 'He said you would
know what it was.'
He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or
the shoulder and rolled down the stairs.
'You son of a bitch,' he said. 'You bastard.'
'Ezra said you might need it,' I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle.
'You are sure you don't need it?' I asked.
He threw another milk botde. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in
the back. Then he shut the door.
I picked up the jar, which was only slightly cracked, and put it in my pocket.
'He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound,' I said to the concierge.
'Perhaps he will be tranquil now,' she said.
'Perhaps he has some of his own,' I said.
'Poor Monsieur Dunning,' she said.
The lovers of poetry that Ezra had organized rallied to Dunning's aid again
eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar
of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully
tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my
personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar
was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he
remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an
innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase 'Monsieur
Dunning, est monte sur le toit et refuse categoriquement de descendre' gave to Evan
Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps
Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be
kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as
fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.
But Ezra, who was a very great poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman,
who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published,
felt that it should remain a mystery.
'We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,' he once said to me. 'The completely
unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at
this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.'
17 Scott Fitzgerald
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings.
At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it
was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their
construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight
was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange
things happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget. He had come into the
Dingo bar in the rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless
characters, had introduced himself and introduced a tall, pleasant man who was with him
as Dunc Chaplin, the famous pitcher. I had not followed Princeton baseball and had never
heard of Dune Chaplin but he was extraordinarily nice, unworried, relaxed and friendly
and I much preferred him to Scott.
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and
pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a
delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty.
His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful,
unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the
colouring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him
and then it worried you more.
I was very curious to see him and I had been working very hard all day and it seemed
quite wonderful that here should be Scott Fitzgerald and the great Dunc Chaplin whom I
had never heard of but who was now my friend. Scott did not stop talking and since I was
embarrassed by what he said - it was all about my writing and how great it was - I kept on
looking at him closely and noticed instead of listening. We still went under the system,
then, that praise to the face was open disgrace. Scott had ordered champagne and he and
Dunc Chaplin and I drank it together with, I think, some of the worthless characters. I do
not think that Dunc or I followed the speech very closely, for it was a speech and I kept
on observing Scott. He was lightly built and did not look in awfully good shape, his face
being faintly puffy. His Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well and he wore a white shirt
with a buttoned-down collar and a Guards' tie. I thought I ought to tell him about the tie,
maybe, because they did have British in Paris and one might come into the Dingo - there
were two there at the time - but then I thought the hell with it and I looked at him some
more. It turned out later he had bought the tie in Rome.
I wasn't learning very much from looking at him now except that he had well-shaped,
capable-looking hands, not too small, and when he sat down on one of the bar stools I
saw that he had very short legs. With normal legs he would have been perhaps two inches
taller. We had finished the first bottle of champagne and started on the second and the
speech was beginning to run down.
Both Dunc and I were beginning to feel even better than we had felt before the
champagne and it was nice to have the speech ending. Until then I had felt that what a
great writer I was had been carefully kept secret between myself and my wife and only
those people we knew well enough to speak to. I was glad Scott had come to the same
happy conclusion as to this possible greatness, but I was also glad he was beginning to
run out of the speech. But after the speech came the question period. You could study
him and neglect to follow the speech, but the questions were inescapable. Scott, I was to
find, believed that the novelist could find out what he needed to know by direct
questioning of his friends and acquaintances. The interrogation was direct.
'Ernest,' he said. 'You don't mind if I call you Ernest, do you?'
'Ask Dunc,' I said.
Don't be silly. This is serious. Tell me, did you and your wife sleep together before
you were married?'
'I don't know.'
'What do you mean, you don't know?'
'I don't remember.'
'But how can you not remember something of such importance?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'It is odd, isn't it?'
'It's worse than odd,' Scott said. 'You must be able to remember.'
'I'm sorry. It's a pity, isn't it?'
'Don't talk like some limey,' he-said. 'Try to be serious and remember.'
'Nope,' I said, 'It's hopeless.'
'You could make an honest effort to remember.'
The speech comes pretty high, I thought. I wondered if he gave everyone the speech,
but I didn't think so because I had watched him sweat while he was making it. The sweat
had come out on his long, perfect Irish upper lip in tiny drops, and that was when I had
looked down away from his face and checked on the length of his legs, drawn up as he
sat on the bar stool. Now I looked back at his face again and it was then that the strange
thing happened.
As he sat there at the bar holding the glass of champagne the skin seemed to tighten
over his face until all the puffiness was gone and then it drew tighter until the face was
like a death's head. The eyes sank and began to look dead and the lips were drawn tight
and the colour left the face so that it was the colour of used candle wax. This was not my
imagination. His face became a true death's head, or death mask, in front of my eyes.
'Scott,' I said. 'Are you all right?'
He did not answer and his face looked more drawn than ever.
'We'd better get him to a first-aid station,' I said to Dunc Chaplin.
'No. He's all right.'
'He looks like he is dying.'
'No. That's the way it takes him.'
We got him into a taxi and I was very worried but Dunc said he was all right and not
to worry about him. 'He'll probably be all right by the time he gets home,' he said.
He must have been because, when I met him at the Closerie des Lilas a few days
later, I said that I was sorry the stuff had hit him that way and that maybe we had drunk it
too fast while we were talking.
'What do you mean, you are sorry? What stuff hit me what way? What are you
talking about, Ernest?'
'I meant the other night at the Dingo.'
