So after we had left Lausanne and gone down to Italy I showed the racing story to
O'Brien, a gentle, shy man, pale, with pale blue eyes, and straight lanky hair he cut
himself, who lived then as a boarder in a monastery up above Rapallo. It was a bad time
and I did not think I could write any more then, and I showed the story to him as a
curiosity, as you might show, stupidly, the binnacle of a ship you had lost in some
incredible way, or as you might pick up your booted foot and make some joke about it if
it had been amputated after a crash. Then, when he read the story, I saw he was hurt far
more than I was. I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable
suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and
cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had
happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry.
We would work it out. Then, finally, she told me. I was sure she could not have brought
the carbons too and I hired someone to cover for me on my newspaper job. I was making
good money then at journalism, and took the train for Paris. It was true all right and I
remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true. That
was over now and Chink had taught me never to discuss casualties; so I told O'Brien not
to feel so bad. It was probably good for me to lose early work and I told him all that stuff
you feed the troops. I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it, only
trying to lie so that he would not feel so bad, I knew that it was true.
Then I started to think in Lipp's about when I had first been able to write a story after
losing everything. It was up in Cortina d'Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley
there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to the Rhineland
and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called Out of Season and I had omitted the real
end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory
that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would
strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.
Well, I thought, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be
much doubt about that. There is most certainly no demand for them. But they will
understand the same way that they always do in painting. It only takes time and it only
needs confidence.
It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you
will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it.
And as long as they do not understand it you are ahead of them. Oh sure, I thought, I'm so
far ahead of them now that I can't afford to eat regularly. It would not be bad if they
caught up a little.
I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been
trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made
a novel. It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race.
When I had written a novel before, the one that had been lost in the bag stolen at the Gare
de Lyon, I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as
youth was. I knew it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must
write a novel. I would put it off though until I could not help doing it. I was damned if I
would write one because it was what I should do if we were to eat regularly. When I had
to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice. Let the
pressure build. In the meantime I would write a long story about whatever I knew best.
By this time I had paid the check and gone out and turned to the right and crossed the
rue de Rennes so that I would not go to the Deux-Magots for coffee and was walking up
the rue Bonaparte on the shortest way home.
What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about
truly and care for the most? There was no choice at all. There was only the choice of
streets to take you back fastest to where you worked. It went up Bonaparte to Guynemer,
then to the rue d'Assas, up the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to the Closerie des Lilas.
I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the
notebook. The waiter brought me a cafe creme and I drank half of it when it cooled and
left it on the table while I wrote. When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river
where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against
the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back
from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.
But in the morning the river would be there and I must make it and the country and
all that would happen. There were days ahead to be doing that each day. No other thing
mattered. In my pocket was the money from Germany so there was no problem. When
that was gone some other money would come in.
All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would
start to work again.
9 Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple
The Closerie des Lilas was the nearest good cafe when we lived in the flat over the
sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and it was one of the best cafes in Paris. It
was warm inside in the winter, and in the spring and fall it was very fine outside with the
tables under the shade of the trees on the side where the statue of Marshal Ney was, and
the square, regular tables under the big awnings along the boulevard. Two of the waiters
were our good friends. People from the Dome and the Rotonde never came to the Lilas.
There was no one there they knew, and no one would have stared at them if they came. In
those days many people went to the cafes at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse
and the Boulevard Raspail to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the
columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.
The Closerie des Lilas had once been a cafe where poets met more or less regularly
and the last principal poet had been Paul Fort whom I had never read. But the only poet I
ever saw there was Blaise Cendrars, with his broken boxer's face and his pinned-up
empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand. He was a good companion until
he drank too much and, at that time, when he was lying, he was more interesting than
many men telling a story truly. But he was the only poet who came to the Lilas then and I
only saw him there once. Most of the clients were elderly bearded men in well-worn
clothes who came with their wives or their mistresses and wore or did not wear thin red
Legion of Honour ribbons in their lapels. We thought of them all hopefully as scientists
or savants and they sat almost as long over an aperitif as the men in shabbier clothes who
sat with their wives or mistresses over a cafe creme and wore the purple ribbon of the
Palms of the Academy, which had nothing to do with the French Academy, and meant,
we thought, that they were professors or instructors.
These people made it a comfortable cafe since they were all interested in each other
and in their drinks or coffees, or infusions, and in the papers and periodicals which were
fastened to rods, and no one was on exhibition.
There were other people too who lived in the quarter and came to the Lilas, and some
of them wore Croix de Guerre ribbons in their lapels and others also had the yellow and
green of the Medaille Militaire, and I watched how well they were overcoming the
handicap of the loss of limbs, and saw the quality of their artificial eyes and the degree of
skill with which their faces had been reconstructed. There was always an almost
iridescent shiny cast about the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a wellpacked
ski run, and we respected these clients more than we did the savants or the
professors, although the latter might well have done their military service too without
experiencing mutilation.
In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not
completely trust anyone, and there was a strong feeling that Cendrars might well be a
little less flashy about his vanished arm. I was glad he had been in the Lilas early in the
afternoon before the regular clients had arrived.
On this evening I was sitting at a table outside of the Lilas watching the light change
on the trees and the buildings and the passage of the great slow horses of the outer
boulevards. The door of the cafe opened behind me and to my right, and a man came out
and walked to my table.
'Oh here you are,' he said.
It was Ford Madox Ford, as he called himself then, and he was breathing heavily
through a heavy, stained moustache and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory,
well-clothed, up-ended hogshead.
'May I sit with you?' he asked, sitting down, and his eyes which were a washed-out
blue under colourless lids and eyebrows looked out at the boulevard.
'I spent good years of my life that those beasts should be slaughtered humanely,' he
said.
'You told me,' I said.
'I don't think so.'
'I'm quite sure.'
'Very odd. I've never told anyone in my life.'
'Will you have a drink?'
The waiter stood there and Ford told him he would have a Chambery Cassis. The
waiter, who was tall and thin and bald on the top of his head with hair slicked over and
who wore a heavy old-style dragoon moustache, repeated the order.
'No. Make it a fine a l'eau,' Ford said.
'A. fine a l'eau for Monsieur,' the waiter confirmed the order.
I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath
when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air and the fallen leaves
blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him,
repented, and looked across the boulevard. The light was changed again and I had missed
the change. I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.
'You're very glum,' he said.
'No.'
'Yes you are. You need to get out more. I stopped by to ask you to the little evenings
we're giving in that amusing Bal Musette near the Place Contrescarpe on the rue Cardinal
Lemoine.'
'I lived above it for two years before you come to Paris this last time.'
'How odd. Are you sure?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I'm sure. The man who owned it had a taxi and when I had to get a
plane he'd take me out to the field, and we'd stop at the zinc bar of the Bal and drink a
glass of white wine in the dark before we'd start for the airfield.'
'I've never cared for flying,' Ford said. 'You and your wife plan to come to the Bal
Musette Saturday night. It's quite gay. I'll draw you a map so you can find it. I stumbled
on it quite by chance.'
'It's under 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine,' I said. 'I lived on the third floor.'
'There's no number,' Ford said. 'But you'll be able to find it if you can find the Place
Contrescarpe.'
I took another long drink. The waiter had brought Ford's drink and Ford was
correcting him. 'It wasn't a brandy and soda,' he said helpfully but severely. 'I ordered a
Chambery vermouth and Cassis.'
'It's all right, Jean,' I said. 'I'll take the/w. Bring Monsieur what he orders now.'
'What I ordered,' corrected Ford.
At that moment a rather gaunt man wearing a cape passed on the sidewalk. He was
with a tall woman and he glanced at our table and then away and went on his way down
the boulevard.
'Did you see me cut him?' Ford said. 'Did you see me cut him?'
'No. Who did you cut?' 'Belloc,' Ford said. 'Did I cut him!' 'I didn't see it,' I said.
'Why did you cut him?' 'For every good reason in the world,' Ford said. 'Did I cut him
though!'
He was thoroughly and completely happy. I had never seen Belloc and I did not
believe he had seen us. He looked like a man who had been thinking of something and
had glanced at the table almost automatically. I felt badly that Ford had been rude to him,
as, being a young man who was commencing his education, I had a high regard for him
as an older writer. This is not understandable now but in those days it was a common
occurrence.
I thought it would have been pleasant if Belloc had stopped at the table and I might
have met him. The afternoon had been spoiled by seeing Ford but I thought Belloc might
have made it better.
'What are you drinking brandy for?' Ford asked me. 'Don't you know it's fatal for a
young writer to start drinking brandy?'
'I don't drink it very often,' I said. I was trying to remember what Ezra Pound had
told me about Ford, that I must never be rude to him, that I must remember that he only
lied when he was very tired, that he was really a good writer and that he had been through
very bad domestic troubles. I tried hard to think of these things but the heavy, wheezing,
ignoble presence of Ford himself, only touching-distance away, made it difficult. But I
tried.
'Tell me why one cuts people,' I asked. Until then I had thought it was something
only done in novels by Ouida. I had never been able to read a novel by Ouida, not even at
some skiing place in Switzerland where reading matter had run out when the wet south
wind had come and there were only the left-behind Tauchnitz editions of before the war.
But I was sure, by some sixth sense, that people cut one another in her novels.
'A gentleman,' Ford explained, 'will always cut a cad.'
I took a quick drink of brandy.
'Would he cut a bounder?' I asked.
'It would be impossible for a gentleman to know a bounder.'
