feeling extraordinarily virtuous because I had worked well and hard on a day when I had
wanted to go out to the races very badly. But at this time I could not afford to go to the
races, even though there was money to be made there if you worked at it. It was before
the days of saliva tests and other methods of detecting artificially encouraged horses and
doping was very extensively practised. But handicapping beasts that are receiving
stimulants, and detecting the symptoms in the paddock and acting on your perceptions,
which sometimes bordered on the extrasensory, then backing them with money you
cannot afford to lose, is not the way for a young man supporting a wife and child to get
ahead in the full-time job of learning to write prose.
By any standards we were still very poor and I still made such small economies as
saying that I had been asked out for lunch and then spending two hours walking in the
Luxembourg Gardens and coming back to describe the marvellous lunch to my wife.
When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal makes you very
hungry. But it also sharpens all of your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I
wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of
them were looking forward to having a drink.
At the Negre de Toulouse we drank the good Cahors wine from the quarter, the half
or the full carafe, usually diluting it about one-third with water. At home, over the
sawmill, we had a Corsican wine that had great authority and a low price. It was a very
Corsican wine and you could diute it by half with water and still receive its message. In
Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals
occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries.
Coming back from The Select now I had sheered off at the sight of Harold Stearns
who I knew would want to talk horses, those animals I was thinking of righteously and
light-heartedly as the beasts that I had just forsworn. Full of my evening virtue I passed
the collection of inmates at the Rotonde and, scorning vice and the collective instinct,
crossed the boulevard to the Dome. The Dome was crowded too, but there were people
there who had worked.
There were models who had worked and there were painters who had worked until
the light was gone and there were writers who had finished a day's work for better or for
worse, and there were drinkers and characters, some of whom I knew and some that were
only decoration.
I went over and sat down at a table with Pascin and two models who were sisters.
Pascin had waved to me while I had stood on the sidewalk on the rue Delambre side
wondering whether to stop and have a drink or not. Pascin was a very good painter and he
was drunk; steady, purposefully drunk and making good sense. The two models were
young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with a falsely fragile
depravity. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way.
She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring.
'The good and the bad sisters,' Pascin said. 'I have money. What will you drink?'
'Une demi-blonde,' I said to the waiter.
'Have a whisky. I have money.'
'I like beer.'
'If you really liked beer, you'd be at Lipp's. I suppose you've been working.'
'Yes.'
'It goes?'
'I hope so.'
'Good. I'm glad. And everything still tastes good?'
'Yes.'
'How old are you?'
'Twenty-five.'
'Do you want to bang her?' He looked towards the dark sister and smiled. 'She needs
it.'
'You probably banged her enough today.'
She smiled at me with her lips open. 'He's wicked,' she said. 'But he's nice.'
'You can take her over to the studio.'
'Don't make piggishness,' the blonde sister said.
'Who spoke to you?' Pascin asked her.
'Nobody. But I said it.'
'Let's be comfortable,' Pascin said. 'The serious young writer and the friendly wise
old painter and the two beautiful young girls with all of life before them.'
We sat there and the girls sipped at their drinks and Pascin drank another fine a l'eau
and I drank the beer; but no one was comfortable except Pascin. The dark girl was
restless and she sat on display turning her profile and letting the light strike the concave
planes of her face and showing me her breasts under the hold of the black sweater. Her
hair was cropped short and was sleek and dark as an oriental's.
'You've posed all day,' Pascin said to her. 'Do you have to model that sweater now at
the cafe?'
'It pleases me,' she said.
'You look like a Javanese toy,' he said.
'Not the eyes,' she said. 'It's more complicated than that.'
'You look like a poor perverted little poupee.'
'Perhaps,' she said. 'But alive. That's more than you.'
'We'll see about that.'
'Good,' she said. 'I like proofs.'
'You didn't have any today?'
'Oh that,' she said and turned to catch the last evening light on her face. 'You were
just excited about your work. He's in love with canvases,' she said to me. 'There always
some kind of dirtiness.'
'You want me to paint you and pay you and bang you to keep my head clear, and be
in love with you too,' Pascin said. 'You poor little doll.'
'You like me, don't you, Monsieur?' she asked me.
'Very much.'
'But you're too big,' she said sadly.
'Everyone is the same size in bed.'
'It's not true,' her sister said. 'And I'm tired of this talk.'
'Look,' Pascin said. 'If you think I'm in love with canvases, I'll paint you tomorrow in
water colours.'
'When do we eat?' her sister asked. 'And where?'
'Will you eat with us?' the dark girl asked.
'No. I go to eat with my legitime.' That was what they said then. Now they say 'my
reguliere'.
'You have to go?'
'Have to and want to.'
'Go on, then,' Pascin said. 'And don't fall in love with typewriting paper.'
'If I do, I'll write with a pencil.'
'Water colours tomorrow,' he said. 'All right, my children, I will drink another and
then we eat where you wish.'
'Chez Viking,' the dark girl said.
'Me too,' her sister urged.
'All right,' Pascin agreed. 'Good night, jeune homme. Sleep well.'
'You too.'
'They keep me awake,' he said. 'I never sleep.'
'Sleep tonight.'
'After Chez Les Vikings?' He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked
more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and
afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at
the Dome. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to
me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a
higher grade of manure.
12 Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit
Ezra Pound was always a good friend and he was always doing things for people. The
studio where he lived with his wife Dorothy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was as
poor as Gertrude Stein's studio was rich. It had very good light and was heated by a stove
and it had paintings by Japanese artists that Ezra knew. They were all noblemen where
they came from and wore their hair cut long. Their hair glistened black and swung
forward when they bowed and I was very impressed by them but I did not like their
paintings. I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I
understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I
could do about it.
Dorothy's paintings I liked very much and I thought Dorothy was very beautiful and
built wonderfully. I also liked the head of Ezra by Gaudier-Brzeska and I liked all of the
photographs of this sculptor's work that Ezra showed me and that were in Ezra's book
about him. Ezra also liked Picabia's painting but I thought then that it was worthless. I
also disliked Wyndham Lewis's painting which Ezra liked very much. He liked the
works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment. We ,
never argued about these things because I kept my mouth shut about things I did not like.
If a man liked his friends' painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people
who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. Sometimes you can go
quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is
easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as
families can do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them. But even when
you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer
letters, families have many ways of being dangerous. Ezra was kinder and more Christian
about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and
he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamoured of his errors, and so kind to people
that I always thought of him as a sort of saint. He was also irascible but so perhaps have
been many saints.
Ezra wanted me to teach him to box and it was while we were sparring late one
afternoon in his studio that I first met Wyndham Lewis. Ezra had not been boxing very
long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to
make him look as good as possible. But it was not very good because he knew how to
fence and I was still working to make his left into his boxing hand and move his left foot
forward always and bring his right foot up parallel with it. It was just basic moves. I was
never able to teach him to throw a left hook and to teach him to shorten his right was
something for the future.
Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat, like a character in the quarter, and was
dressed like someone out of La Boheme. He had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a
bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him. At that time we
believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no
official uniform for the artist; but Lewis wore the uniform of a pre-war artist. It was
embarrassing to see him and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra's left leads or
blocked them with an open right glove.
I wanted us to stop but Lewis insisted we go on, and I could see that, knowing
nothing about what was going on, he was waiting, hoping to see Ezra hurt. Nothing
happened. I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me, sticking out his left hand and
throwing a few right hands, and then said we were through and washed down with a
pitcher of water and towelled off and put on my sweatshirt.
We had a drink of something and I listened while Ezra and Lewis talked about
people in London and Paris. I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him, as
you do when you are boxing, and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man.
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a
hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.
Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things.
They were all medical except toe-jam and that was a slang word. I tried to break his face
down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first
seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
'I met the nastiest man I've ever seen today,' I told my wife. 'Tatie, don't tell me about
him,' she said. 'Please don't tell me about him. We're just going to have dinner.'
About a week afterwards I met Miss Stein and told her I'd met Wyndham Lewis and
asked her if she had ever met him. 'I call him "the Measuring Worm",' she said. 'He
comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket
and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb. Sighting on it and
measuring it and seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it
and it doesn't come out right. He's missed what it's all about.'
So I thought of him as the Measuring Worm. It was a kinder and more Christian term
than what I had thought about him myself. Later I tried to like him and to be friends with
him as I did with nearly all of Ezra's friends when he explained them to me. But this was
how he seemed to me on the first day I ever met him in Ezra's studio.
Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He
helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help
anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble. He worried about
everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T. S. Eliot
who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad
hours to function as a poet.
Ezra founded something called Bel Esprit with Miss Natalie Barney who was a rich
American woman and a patroness of the arts. Miss Barney had been a friend of Remy de
Gourmont who was before my time and she had a salon at her house on regular dates and
a small Greek temple in her garden. Many American and French women with money
enough had salons and I figured very early that they were excellent places for me to stay
away from, but Miss Barney, I believe, was the only one that had a small Greek temple in
her garden.
Ezra showed me the brochure for Bel Esprit and Miss Barney had allowed him to use
