'There was nothing wrong with me at the Dingo. I simply got tired of those
absolutely bloody British you were with and went home.'
'There weren't any British there when you were there. Only the bartender.'
'Don't try to make a mystery of it. You know the ones I mean.'
'Oh,' I said. He had gone back to the Dingo later. Or he'd gone there another time. No,
I remembered, there had been two British there. It was true. I remembered who they
were. They had been there all right.
'Yes,' I said. 'Of course.'
'That girl with the phony title who was so rude and that silly drunk with her. They
said they were friends of yours.'
'They are. And she is very rude sometimes.'
'You see. There's no use to make mysteries simply because one has drunk a few
glasses of wine. Why did you want to make the mysteries? It isn't the sort of thing I
thought you would do.'
'I don't know,' I wanted to drop it. Then I thought of something. 'Were they rude
about your tie?' I asked.
'Why should they have been rude about my tie? I was wearing a plain black knitted
tie with a white polo shirt.'
I gave up then and he asked me why I liked this cafe and I told him about it in the old
days and he began to try to like it too and we sat there, me liking it and he trying to like it,
and he asked questions and told me about writers and publishers and agents and critics
and George Horace Lorimer, and the gossip and economics of being a successful writer,
and he was cynical and funny and very jolly and charming and endearing, even if you
were careful about anyone becoming endearing. He spoke slightingly but without
bitterness of everything he had written, and I knew his new book must be very good for
him to speak, without bitterness, of the faults of past books. He wanted me to read the
new book, The Great Gatsby, as soon as he could get his last and only copy back from
someone he had loaned it to. To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very
good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have
when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so
that I might read it.
Scott told me that he had heard from Maxwell Perkins that , the book was not selling
well but that it had very fine reviews. I do not remember whether it was that day, or much
later, that he showed me a review by Gilbert Seldes that could not have been better. It
could only have been better if Gilbert Seldes had been better. Scott was puzzled and hurt
that the book was not selling well but, as I said, he was not at all bitter then and he was
both shy and happy about the book's quality.
On this day as we sat outside on the terrace of the Lilas and watched it get dusk and
the people passing on the sidewalk and the grey light of the evening changing, there was
no chemical change in him from the two whisky and sodas that we drank. I watched
carefully for it, but it did not come and he asked no shameless questions, did nothing
embarrassing, made no speeches, and acted as a normal, intelligent and charming person.
He told me that he and Zelda, his wife, had been compelled to abandon their small
Renault motor car in Lyon because of bad weather and he asked me if I would go down
to Lyon with him on the train to pick up the car and drive up with him to Paris. The
Fitzgeralds had rented a furnished flat at 14 rue de Tilsitt, not far from the Etoile. It was
late spring now and I thought the country would be at its best and we could have an
excellent trip. Scott seemed so nice and so reasonable, and I had watched him drink two
good solid whiskies and nothing happened, and his charm and his seeming good sense
made the other night at the Dingo seem like an unpleasant dream. So I said I would like
to go down to Lyon with him and when did he want to leave.
We agreed to meet the next day and we then arranged to leave for Lyon on the
express train that left in the morning. This train left at a convenient hour and was very
fast. It made only one stop, as I recall, at Dijon. We planned to get into Lyon, have the
car checked and in good shape, have an excellent dinner and get an early-morning start
back towards Paris.
I was enthusiastic about the trip. I would have the company of an older and
successful writer, and in the time we would have to talk in the car I would certainly learn
much that it would be useful to know. It is strange now to remember thinking of Scott as
an older writer, but at the time, since I had not yet read The Great Gatsby, I thought of
him as a much older writer. I thought he wrote Saturday Evening Post stories that had
been readable three years before, but I never thought of him as a serious writer. He had
told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and
which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission,
knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into saleable magazine
stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was
whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money
ahead to write decent books. I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way
except the very best he could write without destroying his talent. Since he wrote the real
story first, he said, the destruction and changing of it that he did at the end did him no
harm. I could not believe this and I wanted to argue him out of it but I needed a novel to
back up my faith and to show him and convince him, and I had not yet written any such
novel. Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try
to make instead of descrbe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult,
and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a
full morning of work to write a paragraph.
My wife, Hadley, was happy for me to make the trip, though she did not take
seriously the writing of Scott's that she had read. Her idea of a good writer was Henry
James. But she thought it was a good idea for me to take a rest from work and make the
trip, although we both wished that we had enough money to have a car and were making
the trip ourselves. But that was something I never had any idea would happen. I had
received an advance of two hundred dollars from Boni and Liveright for a first book of
short stories to be published in America that fall, and I was selling stories to the
Frankfurter Zeitung and to Der Querschnitt in Berlin and to This Quarter and the
Transatlantic Review in Paris, and we were living with great economy and not spending
any money except for necessities in order to save money to go down to the feria at
Pamplona in July and to Madrid and to the feria in Valencia afterwards.
On the morning we were to leave from the Gare de Lyon I arrived in plenty of time
and waited outside the train gates for Scott. He was bringing the tickets. When it got
close to the time for the train to leave and he had not arrived, I bought an entry'ticket to
the track and walked along the side of the train looking for him. I did not see him and as
the train was about to pull out I got aboard and walked through the train hoping only that
he would be aboard. It was a long train and he was not on it. I explained the situation to
the conductor, paid for a ticket, second class - there was no third - and asked the
conductor for the name of the best hotel in Lyon. There was nothing to do but wire Scott
from Dijon giving him the address of the hotel where I would wait for him in Lyon. He
would not get it before he left, but his wife would be presumed to wire it on to him. I had
never heard, then, of a grown man missing a train; but on this trip I was to learn many
new things.
In those days I had a very bad, quick temper, but by the time we were through
Montereau it had quieted down and I was not too angry to watch and enjoy the
countryside and at noon I had a good lunch in the dining-car and drank a bottle of St-
Emilion and thought that even if I had been a damned fool to accept an invitation for a
trip that was to be paid for by someone else, and was spending money on it that we
needed to go to Spain, it was a good lesson for me. I had never before accepted an
invitation to go on any trip that was paid for, instead of the cost split, and in this one I had
insisted that we split the cost of the hotels and meals. But now I did not know whether
Fitzgerald would even show up. While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to
Fitzgerald. Later I was delighted that I had used up the anger at the start and got it over
with. It was not a trip designed for a man easy to anger.
In Lyon I learned that Scott left Paris for Lyon but had left no word as to where he
was staying. I confirmed my address there and the servant said she would let him know if
he called. Madame was not well and was still sleeping. I called all the name hotels and
left messages but could not locate Scott and then I went out to a cafe to have an aperitif
and read the papers. At the cafe I met a man who ate fire for a living and also bent coins
which he held in his toothless jaws with his thumb and forefinger. His gums were sore
but firm to the eye as he exhibited them and he said it was not a bad metier. I asked him
to have a drink and he was pleased. He had a fine dark face that glowed and shone when
he ate the fire. He said there was no money in eating fire nor in feats of strength with
fingers and jaws in Lyon False fire-eaters had ruined the metier and would continue to
ruin it wherever they were allowed to practise. He had been eating fire all evening, he
said, and did not have enough money on him to eat anything else that night. I asked him
to have another drink, to wash away the petrol taste of the fire-eating, and said we could
have dinner together if he knew a good place that was cheap enough. He said he knew an
excellent place.
We ate very cheaply in an Algerian restaurant and I liked the food and the Algerian
wine. The fire-eater was a nice man and it was interesting to see him eat, as he could
chew with his gums as well as most people can with their teeth. He asked me what I did
to make a living and I told him that I was starting in as a writer. He asked what sort of
writing and I told him stories. He said he knew many stories, some of them more horrible
and incredible than anything that had ever been written. He could tell them to me and I
would write them and then if they made any money I would give him whatever I thought
fair. Better still, we could go to North Africa together and he would take me to the
country of the Blue Sultan where I could get stories such as no man had ever heard.
I asked him what sort of stories and he said battles, executions, tortures, violations,
fearful customs, unbelievable practices, debaucheries; anything I needed. It was getting
time for me to get back to the hotel and check on Scott again, so I paid for the meal and
said we would certainly be running into each other again. He said he was working down
towards Marseilles and I said sooner or later we would meet somewhere and it was a
pleasure to have dined together. I left him straightening out bent coins and stacking them
on the table and walked back to the hotel.
Lyon was not a very cheerful town at night. It was a big, heavy, solid-money town,
probably fine if you had money and liked that sort of town. For years I had heard about
the wonderful chicken in the restaurants there, but we had eaten mutton instead. The
mutton had been excellent.
There was no word from Scott at the hotel and I went to bed in the unaccustomed
luxury of the hotel and read a copy of the first volume of A. Sportsman's Sketches by
Turgenev that I had borrowed from Sylvia Beach's library. I had not been in the luxury of
a big hotel for three years and I opened the windows wide and rolled up the pillows under
my shoulders and head and was happy being with Turgenev in Russia until I was asleep
while still reading. I was shaving in the morning getting ready to go out for breakfast
when they called from the desk saying a gentleman was downstairs to see me.
'Ask him to come up, please,' I said and went on shaving, listening to the town which
had come heavily alive since early morning.
Scott did not come up and I met him down at the desk.
'I'm terribly sorry there was this mix-up,' he said. 'If I had only known what hotel you
were going to it would have been simple.'
'That's all right,' I said. We were going to have a long ride and I was all for peace.
'What train did you come down on?'
'One not long after the one you took. It was a very comfortable train and we might
just as well have come down together.'
'Have you had breakfast?'
'Not yet. I've been hunting all over the town for you.'
'That's a shame,' I said. 'Didn't they tell you at home that I was here?'
'No. Zelda wasn't feeling well and I probably shouldn't have come. The whole trip
has been disastrous so far.'
'Let's get some breakfast and find the car and roll,' I said.
'That's fine. Should we have breakfast here?'
'It would be quicker in a cafe.'
'But we're sure to get a good breakfast here.'
'All right.'
It was a big American breakfast with ham and eggs and it was very good. But by the
time we had ordered it, waited for it, eaten it, and waited to pay for it, close to an hour
had been lost. It was not until the waiter came with the bill that Scott decided that we
have the hotel make us a picnic lunch. I tried to argue him out of this as I was sure we
could get a bottle of Macon in Macon and we could buy something to make sandwiches
in a charcuterie. Or, if things were closed when we went through, there would be any
number of restaurants where we could stop on our way. But he said I had told him that
the chicken was wonderful in Lyon and that we should certainly take one with us. So the
hotel made us a lunch that could not have cost us very much more than four or five times
