Because of the change in altitude I did not notice the grade of the hills except with
pleasure, and the climb up to the top floor of the hotel where I worked, in a room that
looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter, was a pleasure.
The fireplace drew well in the room and it was warm and pleasant to work. I brought
mandarines and roasted chestnuts to the room in paper packets and peeled and ate the
small tangerine-like oranges and threw their skins and spat their seeds in the fire when I
ate them and the roasted chestnuts when I was hungry. I was always hungry with the
walking and the cold and the working. Up in the room I had a bottle of kirsch that we had
brought back from the mountains and I took a drink of kirsch when I would get towards
the end of a story or towards the end of the day's work. When I was through working for
the day I put away the notebook, or the paper, in the drawer of the table and put any
mandarines that were left in my pocket. They would freeze if they were left in the room
at night.
It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good
luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I
knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in
front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and
watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of
Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So
finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then
because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard
someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting
something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and
start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I
decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to
do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing
from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my
subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other
people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I
would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs
when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful
feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.
If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I
could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musee du Luxembourg where the
great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de
Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cezannes and to see the Manets and the
Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art
Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made
writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions
that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not
articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides, it was a secret. But if the light was
gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio
apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.
My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her
had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great
paintings. It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big
fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea
and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.
These were fragrant, colourless alcohols served from cut-glass carafes in small glasses
and whether they were quetsche, mirabelle or framboise they all tasted like the fruits they
came from, converted into a controlled fire on your tongue that warmed you and loosened
it.
Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She
had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano
and she reminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile
face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way
she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about
people and places.
Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like
Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was
working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and
saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened
to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me
that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we
liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and
the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated
us as though we were very good, well-mannered and promising children and I felt that
they forgave us for being in love and being married - time would fix that - and when my
wife invited them to tea, they accepted.
When they came to our flat they seemed to like us even more; but perhaps that was
because the place was so small and we were much closer together. Miss Stein sat on the
bed that was on the floor and asked to see the stories I had written and she said that she
liked them except one called Up in Michigan.
'It's good,' she said. 'That's not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That
means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a
show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.'
'But what if it is not dirty but it is only that you are trying to use words that people
would actually use? That are the only words that can make the story come true and that
you must use them? You have to use them.'
'But you don't get the point at all,' she said. 'You mustn't write anything that is
inaccrochable. There is no point in it. It's wrong and it's silly.'
She herself wanted to be published in the Atlantic Monthly, she told me, and she
would be. She told me that I was not a good enough writer to be published there or in the
Saturday Evening Post but that I might be some new sort of writer in my own way, but
the first thing to remember was not to write stories that were inaccrochable. I did not
argue about this nor try to explain again what I was trying to do about conversation. That
was my own business and it was much more interesting to listen. That afternoon she told
us, too, how to buy pictures.
'You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,' she said. 'It's that simple. No one who is
not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the
mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes
money to buy pictures.'
'But even if I never bought any more clothing ever,' I said, 'I wouldn't have enough
money to buy the Picassos that I want.'
'No. He's out of your range. You have to buy the people of your own age - of your
own military service group. You'll know them. You'll meet them around the quarter.
There are always good new serious painters. But it's not you buying clothes so much. It's
your wife always. It's women's clothes that are expensive.'
I saw my wife trying not to look at the strange, steerage clothes that Miss Stein wore
and she was successful. When they left we were still popular, I thought, and we were
asked to come again to 27 rue de Fleurus.
It was later on that I was asked to come to the studio any time after five in the winter
time. I had met Miss Stein in the Luxembourg. I cannot remember whether she was
walking her dog or not, nor whether she had a dog then. I know that I was walking myself,
since we could not afford a dog nor even a cat then, and the only cats I knew were in the
cafes or small restaurants or the great cats that I admired in concierges' windows. Later I
often met Miss Stein with her dog in the Luxembourg gardens; but I think this time was
before she had one.
But I accepted her invitation, dog or no dog, and had taken to stopping in at the
studio, and she always gave me the natural eau-de-vie, insisting on my refilling my glass,
and I looked at the pictures and we talked. The pictures were exciting and the talk was
very good. She talked, mostly, and she told me about modern pictures and about painters
- more about them as people than as painters - and she talked about her work. She showed
me the many volumes of manuscript (chat she had written and that her companion typed
each day. Writing every day made her happy, but as I got to know her better I found that
for her to keep happy it was necessary that this steady daily output, which varied with her
energy, be published and that she receive recognition.
This had not become an acute situation when I first knew her, since she had
published three stories that were intelligible to anyone. One of these stories, Melanctha,
was very good, and good samples of her experimental writing had been published in book
form and had been well praised by critics who had met her or known her. She had such a
personality that when she wished to win anyone over to her side she would not be resisted,
and critics who met her and saw her pictures took on trust writing of hers that they could
not understand because of their enthusiasm for her as a person, and because of their
confidence in her judgment. She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the
uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them.
But she disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to make her writing
intelligible, although she needed to have publication and official acceptance, especially
for the unbelievably long book called The Making of Americans.
This book began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with great
stretches of great brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more
conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket. I came to know it
very well as I got - forced, perhaps, would be the word -Ford Madox Ford to publish it in
The Transatlantic Review serially, knowing that it would outrun the life of the review.
For publication in the review I had to read all of Miss Stein's proof for her as this was a
work which gave her no happiness.
On this cold afternoon when I had come past the concierge's lodge and the cold
courtyard to the warmth of the studio, all that was years ahead. On this day Miss Stein
was instructing me about sex. By that time we liked each other very much and I had
already learned that everything I did not understand probably had something to it. Miss
Stein thought that I was too uneducated about sex and I must admit that I had certain
prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. I knew it was
why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when
you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the
pursuit of women. I knew many inaccrochable terms and phrases from Kansas City days
and the mores of different parts of that city, Chicago and the lake boats. Under
questioning I tried to tell Miss Stein that when you were a boy and moved in the
company of men, you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really
know that you would do it in order not to be interfered with. That term was accrochable.
If you knew you would kill, other people sensed it very quickly and you were let alone;
but there were certain situations you could not allow yourself to be forced into or trapped
into. I could have expressed myself more vividly by using an inaccrochable phrase that
wolves used on the lake boats, 'Oh gash may be fine but one eye for mine.' But I was
always careful of my language with Miss Stein even when true phrases might have
clarified or better expressed a prejudice.
'Yes, yes, Hemingway,' she said. 'But you were living in a milieu of criminals and
perverts.'
I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world as it was
and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them, although some of
them I could not like and some I still hated.
'But what about the old man with beautiful manners and a great name who came to
the hospital in Italy and brought me a bottle of Marsala or Campari and behaved perfectly,
and then one day I would have to tell the nurse never to let that man into the room
again?' I asked.
'Those people are sick and cannot help themselves and you should pity them.'
'Should I pity so and so?' I asked. I gave his name but he delights so in giving it
himself that I feel there is no need to give it for him.
'No. He's vicious. He's a corrupter and he's truly vicious.' 'But he's supposed to be a
good writer.' 'He's not,' she said. 'He's just a showman and he corrupts for the pleasure of
corruption and he leads people into other vicious practices as well. Drugs, for example.'
'And in Milan the man I'm to pity was not trying to corrupt me?'
'Don't be silly. How could he hope to corrupt you? Do you corrupt a boy like you,
