'You don't know anything about Zelda.'
'All right,' I said. 'Let it go at that. But you came to lunch to ask me a question and
I've tried to give you an honest answer.'
But he was still doubtful.
'Should we go and see some pictures?' I asked. 'Have you ever seen anything in here
except the Mona Lisa?'
'I'm not in the mood for looking at pictures,' he said. 'I promised to meet some people
at the Ritz bar.'
Many years later at the Ritz bar, long after the end of the World War II, Georges,
who is the bar chief now and who was the chasseur when Scott lived in Paris, asked me,
'Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone asks me about?'
'Didn't you know him?'
'No. I remember all of the people of that time. But now they ask me only about him.'
What do you tell them?'
'Anything interesting that they wish to hear. What will please them. But tell me, who
was he?'
'He was an American writer of the early Twenties and later who lived some time in
Paris and abroad.'
'But why would I not remember him? Was he a good writer?'
'He wrote two very good books and one which was not completed which those who
know his writing best say would have been very good. He also wrote some good short
stories.'
'Did he frequent the bar much?'
'I believe so.'
'But you did not come to the bar in the early Twenties. I know that you were poor
then and lived in a different quarter.'
'When I had money I went to the Crillon.'
'I know that too. I remember very well when we first met.'
'So do I.'
'It is strange that I have no memory of him,' Georges said.
'All those people are dead.'
'Still, one does not forget people because they are dead and people keep asking me
about him. You must tell me something about him for my memoirs.'
'I will.'
'I remember you and the Baron von Blixen arriving one night - in what year?' He
smiled.
'He is dead too.'
'Yes. But one does not forget him. You see what I mean?'
'His first wife wrote very beautifully,' I said. 'She wrote perhaps the best book about
Africa that I ever read. Except Sir Samuel Baker's book on the Nile tributaries of
Abyssinia. Put that in your memoirs. Since you are interested in writers now.'
'Good,' said Georges. 'The Baron was not a man that you forget. And the name of the
book?'
'Out of Africa,' I said. 'Blickie was always very proud of his first wife's writing. But
we knew each other long before she had written that book.'
'But Monsieur Fitzgerald that they keep asking me about?'
'He was in Frank's time.'
'Yes. But I was the chasseur. You know what a chasseur is.'
'I am going to write something about him in a book that I will write about the early
days in Paris. I promised myself that I would write it.'
'Good,' said Georges.
'I will put him in exactly as I remember him the first time that I met him.'
'Good,' said Georges. 'Then, if he came here, I will remember him. After all, one
does not forget people.'
'Tourists?'
'Naturally. But you say he came here very much?'
'It meant very much to him.'
'You write about him as you remember him and then if he came here I will remember
him.'
'We will see,' I said.
20 There Is Never Any End to Paris
When there were the three of us instead of just the two, it was the cold and the weather
that finally drove us out of Paris in the winter time. Alone there was no problem when
you got used to it. I could always go to a cafe to write and could work all morning over a
cafe creme while the waiters cleaned and swept out the cafe and it gradually grew
warmer. My wife could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters
keep warm playing and come home to nurse Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a
cafe in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that
happened and was never bored. There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay
happy in his tall cage bed with his big, loving cat named F. Puss. There were people who
said that it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced
said that a cat would suck a baby's breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on
a baby and the cat's weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage
bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him
when we were out and Marie, the femme de menage, had to be away. There was no need
for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter.
But when you are poor, and we were really poor when I had given up all journalism
when we came back from Canada, and could sell no stories at all, it was too rough with a
baby in Paris in the winter. At three months Mr Bumby had crossed the North Atlantic on
a twelve-day small Cunarder that sailed from New York via Halifax in January. He never
cried on the trip and laughed happily when he would be barricaded in a bunk so he could
not fall out when we were in heavy weather. But our Paris was too cold for him.
We went to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in Austria. After going through Switzerland
you came to the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch. The train went through Liechtenstein and
stopped at Bludenz where there was a small branch line that ran along a pebbly trout river
through a valley of farms and forest to Schruns, which was a sunny market town with
sawmills, stores, inns and a good, year-around hotel called the Taube where we lived.
The rooms at the Taube were large and comfortable with big stoves, big windows
and big beds with good blankets and feather coverlets. The meals were simple and
excellent and the dining-room and the wood-planked public bar were well heated and
friendly. The valley was wide and open so there was good sun. The pension was about
two dollars a day for the three of us, and as the Austrian schilling went down with
inflation, our room and food were less all the time. There was no desperate inflation and
poverty as there had been in Germany. The schilling went up and down, but its longer
course was down.
There were no ski-lifts from Schruns and no funiculars, but there were logging trails
and cattle trails that led up different mountain valleys to the high mountain country. You
climbed on foot carrying your skis and higher up, where the snow was too deep, you
climbed on sealskins that you attached to the bottoms of the skis. At the tops of mountain
valleys there were the big Alpine Club huts for summer climbers where you could sleep
and leave payment for any wood you used. In some you had to pack up your own wood,
or if you were going on a long tour in the high mountains and the glaciers, you hired
someone to pack wood and supplies up with you, and established a base. The most
famous of these high base huts were the Lindauer-Hutte, the Madlener-Haus and the
Wiesbadener-Hutte.
In back of the Taube there was a sort of practice slope where you ran through
orchards and fields and there was another good slope behind Tschagguns across the
valley where there was a beautiful inn with an excellent collection of chamois horns on
the walls of the drinking-room. It was from behind the lumber village of Tschagguns,
which was on the far edge of the valley, that the good skiing went all the way up until
you could eventually cross the mountains and get over the Silvretta into the Klosters area.
Schruns was a healthy place for Bumby who had a dark-haired beautiful gkl to take
him out in the sun in his sleigh and look after him, and Hadley and I had all the new
country to learn and the new villages, and the people of the town were very friendly. Herr
Walther Lent who was a pioneer high-mountain skier and at one time had been a partner
with Hannes Schneider, the great Arlberg skier, making ski-waxes for climbing and all
snow conditions, was starting a school for Alpine skiing and we both enrolled. Walther
Lent's system was to get his pupils off the practice slopes as soon as possible and into the
high mountains on trips. Skiing was not the way it is now, the spiral fracture had not
become common then, and no one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols.
Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up. That gave you legs that were fit to run
down with.
Walther Lent believed the fun of skiing was to get up into the highest mountain
country where there was no one else and where the snow was untracked and then travel
from one high Alpine Club hut to another over the top passes and glaciers of the Alps.
You must not have a binding that could break your leg if you fell. The ski should come
off before it broke your leg. What he really loved was unroped glacier skiing, but for that
we had to wait until spring when the crevasses were sufficiently covered.
Hadley and I had loved skiing since we had first tried it together in Switzerland and
later at Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Dolomites when Bumby was going to be born and the
doctor in Milan had given her permission to continue to ski if I would promise that she
would not fall down. This took a very careful selection of terrain and of runs and
absolutely controlled running, but she had beautiful, wonderfully strong legs and fine
control of her skis, and she did not fall. We all knew the different snow conditions and
everyone knew how to run in deep powder snow.
We loved the Vorarlberg and we loved Schruns. We would go there about
Thanksgiving time and stay until nearly Easter. There was always skiing even though
Schruns was not high enough for a ski resort except in a winter of heavy snow. But
climbing was fun and no one minded it in those days. You set a certain pace well under
the speed at which you could climb, and it was easy and your heart felt good and you
were proud of the weight of your rucksack. Part of the climb up to the Madlener-Haus
was steep and very tough. But the second time you made that climb it was easier, and
finally you made it easily with double the weight you had carried at first.
We were always hungry and every mealtime was a great event. We drank light or
dark beer and new wines and wines that were a year old sometimes. The white wines
were the best. For other drinks there was kirsch made in the valley and Enzian schnapps
distilled from mountain gentian. Sometimes for dinner there would be jugged hare with a
rich red wine sauce, and sometimes venison with chestnut sauce. We would drink red
wine with these even though it was more expensive than white wine, and the very best
cost twenty cents a litre. Ordinary red wine was much cheaper and we packed it up in
kegs to the Madlener-Haus.
We had a store of books that Sylvia Beach had let us take for the winter and we
could bowl with the people of the town in the alley that gave onto the summer garden of
the hotel. Once or twice a week there was a poker game in the dining-room of the hotel
with all the windows shuttered and the door locked. Gambling was forbidden in Austria
then and I played with Herr Nels, the hotel keeper, Herr Lent of the Alpine ski school, a
banker of the town, the public prosecutor and the captain of Gendarmerie. It was a stiff
game and they were all good poker players except that Herr Lent played too wildly
because the ski school was not making any money. The captain of Gendarmerie would
raise his finger to his ear when he would hear the pair of gendarmes stop outside the door
when they made their rounds, and we would be silent until they had gone on.
In the cold of the morning as soon as it was light the maid would come into the room
and shut the windows and make a fire in the big porcelain stove. Then the room was
warm there was breakfast of fresh bread or toast with delicious fruit preserves and big
bowls of coffee, fresh eggs and good ham if you wanted it. There was a dog named
Schnautz that slept on the foot of the bed who loved to go on ski trips and to ride on my
back or over my shoulder when I ran downhill. He was Mr Bumby's friend too and would
go for walks with him and his nurse beside the small sleigh.
Schruns was a good place to work. I know because I did the most difficult job of
rewriting I have ever done there in the winter of 1925 and 1926, when I had to take the
first draft of The Sun Also Rises which I had written in one sprint of six weeks and make
it into a novel. I cannot remember what stories 1 wrote there. There were several though
that turned out well.
I remember the snow on the road to the village squeaking at night when we walked
home in the cold with our skis and ski poles on our shoulders, watching the lights and
then finally seeing the buildings, and how everyone on the road said 'Gruss Gott'. There
were always country men in the Weinstube with nailed boots and mountain clothes and
the air was smoky and the wooden floors were scarred by the nails. Many of the young
men had served in Austrian Alpine regiments and one named Hans, who worked in the
sawmill, was a famous hunter and we were good friends because we had been in the same
part of the mountains in Italy. We drank together and we all sang mountain songs.
I remember the trails up through the orchards and the fields of the hillside farms
above the village and the warm farmhouses with their great stoves and the huge wood
piles in the snow. The women worked in the kitchens carding and spinning wool into
grey and black yarn. The spinning wheels worked by a foot treadle and the yarn was not
dyed. The black yarn was from the wool of black sheep. The wool was natural and the fat
had not been removed, and the caps and sweaters and long scarves that Hadley knitted
from it never became wet in the snow.
One Christmas there was a play by Hans Sachs that the schoolmaster directed. It was
a good play and I wrote a review of it for the provincial paper that the hotel keeper
translated. Another year a former German naval officer with a shaven head and scars
