A Moveable Feast (8 page)

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil-lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil sharpener and you would use the small blade of the penknife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down for the lake.

Then you would hear someone say, 'Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write in a cafe?'

Your luck had run out and you shut the notebook. This was the worst thing that could happen. If you could keep your temper it would be better but I was not good at keeping mine then and said, 'You rotten son of a bitch, what are you doing in here off your filthy beat?'

'Don't be insulting just because you want to act like an eccentric.'

'Take your dirty camping mouth out of here.' 'It's a public cafe. I've just as much right here as you have.' 'Why don't you go up to the Petite Chaumiere where you belong?'

'Oh dear. Don't be so tiresome.'

Now you could get out and hope it was an accidental visit and that the visitor had only come in by chance and there was not going to be an infestation. There were other good cafes to work in but they were a long walk away and this was my home cafe. It was bad to be driven out of the Closerie des Lilas. I had to make a stand or move. It was probably wiser to move but the anger started to come and I said, 'Listen. A bitch like you has plenty of places to go. Why do you have to come here and louse a decent cafe?'

'I just came in to have a drink. What's wrong with that?'

'At home they'd serve you and then break the glass.'

'Where's home? It sounds like a charming place.'

He was sitting at the next table, a tall fat young man with spectacles. He had ordered a beer. I thought I would ignore him and see if I could write. So I ignored him and wrote two sentences.

'All I did was speak to you.'

I went on and wrote another sentence. It dies hard when it is really going and you are into it.

'I suppose you've got so great nobody can speak to you.'

I wrote another sentence that ended the paragraph and read it over. It was still all right and I wrote the first sentence of the next paragraph.

'You never think about anyone else or that they may have problems too.'

I had heard complaining all my life. I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises, certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon.

'Suppose you wanted to be a writer and felt it in every part of your body and it just wouldn't come.'

I went on writing and I was beginning to have luck now as well as the other thing.

'Suppose once it had come like an irresistible torrent and then it left you mute and silent.'

Better than mute and noisy, I thought, and went on writing. He was in full cry now and the unbelievable sentences were soothing as the noise of a plank being violated in the sawmill.

'We went to Greece,' I heard him say later. I had not heard him for some time except as noise. I was ahead now and I could leave it and go on tomorrow.

'You say you used it or you went there?'

'Don't be vulgar,' he said. 'Don't you want me to tell you the rest?'

'No,' I said. I closed the notebook and put it in my pocket.

'Don't you care how it came out?'

'No.'

'Don't you care about life and the suffering of a fellow human being?'

'Not you.'

'You're beastly.'

'Yes.'

'I thought you could help me, Hem.'

'I'd be glad to shoot you.'

'Would you?'

'No. There's a law against it.'

'I'd do anything for you.'

"Would you?'

'Of course I would.'

'Then keep the hell away from this cafe. Start with that.'

I stood up and the waiter came over and I paid.

'Can I walk down to the sawmill with you, Hem?'

'No.'

'Well, I'll see you some other time.'

'Not here.'

'That's perfectly right,' he said. 'I promised.'

'What are you writing?' I made a mistake and asked.

'I'm writing the best I can. Just as you do. But it's so terribly difficult.'

'You shouldn't write if you can't write. What do you have to cry about it for? Go home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don't talk about it. You could never write.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Did you ever hear yourself talk?'

'It's writing I'm talking about.'

"Then shut up.'

'You're just cruel,' he said. 'Everybody always said you were cruel and heartless and conceited. I always defended you. But not any more.'

'Good.'

'How can you be so cruel to a fellow human being?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Look, if you can't write why don't you learn to write criticism?'

'Do you think I should?'

'It would be fine,' I told him. 'Then you can always write. You won't ever have to worry about it not coming nor being mute and silent. People will read it and respect it.'

'Do you think I could be a good critic?'

'I don't know how good. But you could be a critic. There will always be people who will help you and you can help your own people.'

'What do you mean, my own people?'

'The ones you go around with.'

'Oh them. They have their critics.'

'You don't have to criticize books,' I said. 'There's pictures, plays, ballet, the cinema

—'

'You make it sound fascinating, Hem. Thank you so much. It's so exciting. It's creative too.'

'Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.'

'Of course there's nothing to prevent me doing creative writing too.'

'Not a thing. Except you may set yourself impossibly high standards by your criticism.'

'They'll be high. You can count on that.'

'I'm sure they will be.'

He was a critic already, so I asked him if he would have a drink and he accepted.

'Hem,' he said, and I knew he was a critic now since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end, 'I have to tell you I find your work just a little too stark.'

'Too bad,' I said.

'Hem, it's too stripped, too lean.'

'Bad luck.'

'Hem, too stark, too stripped, too lean, too sinewy.'

I felt the rabbit's foot in my pocket guiltily. 'I'll try to fatten it up a little.'

'Mind, I don't want it obese.'

'Hal,' I said, practising speaking like a critic, 'I'll avoid that as long as I can.'

'Glad we see eye to eye,' he said manfully.

'You'll remember about not coming here when I'm working?'

'Naturally, Hem. Of course. I'll have my own cafe now.'

'You're very kind.'

'I try to be,' he said.

It would be interesting and instructive if the young man had turned out to be a famous critic, but it did not turn out that way although I had high hopes for a while.

I did not think that he would come back the next day but I did not want to take chances and I decided to give the Closerie a day's rest. So the next morning I woke early, boiled the rubber nipples and the bottles, made the formula, finished the bottling, gave Mr Bumby a bottle and worked on the dining-room table before anyone but he, F. Puss the cat, and I were awake. The two of them were quiet and good company and I worked better than I had ever done. In those days you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit's foot, but it was good to feel it in your pocket.

11 With Pascin at the Dome

It was a lovely evening and I had worked hard all day and left the flat over the sawmill and walked out through the courtyard with the stacked lumber, closed the door, crossed the street and went into the back door of the bakery that fronted on the Boulevard Montparnasse and out through the good bread smells of the ovens and the shop to the street. The lights were on in the bakery and outside it was the end of the day and I walked in the early dusk up the street and stopped outside the terrace of the Negre de Toulouse restaurant where our red and white checkered napkins were in the wooden napkin rings in the napkin rack waiting for us to come to dinner. I read the menu mimeographed in purple ink and saw that the
plat du jour
was
cassoulet.
It made me hungry to read the name.

Mr Lavigne, the proprietor, asked me how my work had gone and I said it had gone very well. He said he had seen me working on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas early in the morning but he had not spoken to me because I was so occupied.

'You had the air of a man alone in the jungle,' he said.

'I am like a blind pig when I work.'

'But were you not in the jungle, Monsieur?'

'In the bush,' I said.

I went on up the street looking in the windows and happy with the spring evening and the people coming past. In the three principal cafes I saw people that I knew by sight and others that I knew to speak to. But there were always much nicer-looking people that I did not know that, in the evening with the lights just coming on, were hurrying to some place to drink together, to eat together and then to make love. The people in the principal cafes might do the same thing or they might just sit and drink and talk and love to be seen by others. The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together. The big cafes were cheap then too, and all had good beer and the aperitifs cost reasonable prices that were clearly marked on the saucers that were served with them.

On this evening I was thinking these wholesome but not original thoughts and 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.