Milking the Moon (27 page)

Anyway, George said, “Do you have any unpublished material?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Well, we need a story that’s a little lighter.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know if it’s light, but I hope to God people will at least smile at certain passages.” “Well,” he said, “let’s see it.” So I showed them two stories, and he left a message at my hotel saying, “We like your story ‘Troubadour’ and want to put it in the first issue of the
Paris Review
.” So they took my story for the first number and it did all kinds of things, and I think that sort of corroborated what the princess had said about me. It went into the O. Henry collection, and then it was bought by
Atlantic Monthly,
and then it was a radio program starring Brandon De Wilde, who had just appeared on Broadway in
Member of the Wedding.
So I was not an original articulator of the
Paris Review,
but I was working with them before the first number came out. My name did not appear on the masthead until the second number. They said, “You help the princess, don’t you?” and I said, “Yeah.” And I said, “I think this magazine is a grand idea, and I’ll give you my mailing list.” (I always have a mailing list.) Then they said, “Well, gee, why don’t you come and join us?” Somehow it just was natural for them to get me to help.

I liked all of those
Paris Review
boys right away. I got the right vibrations. Now George is as much a mystery to me as I am to him. I realize it was a Harvard/Boston thing. And he was more Harvard than Boston. I only saw his real humor the second or third time. Being New England, he fears exuberance or extravagance. I’m perfectly certain that if he were in the slums of Rostov-on-Don, and drunk on vodka, and it was Carnival time, we might see him take all his clothes off and dance in the street as a satyr. But I don’t think he’s gotten around to it yet. Thus speaks one who has swung from an iron bar three floors above the street and gone in Mardi Gras costume to a Brooks Brothers party in New York. He would not understand why I did it. And I would never understand some of his reticences. But he has the cat and monkey sense of humor. He is one of the 3 percent. He has that Yankee laconic sense of humor—that understatement—whereas Southerners tend to give colorful details, reinvented with each telling of the story. George sometimes mutters things under his breath just like my Mobile friend Emily Lynn. In the middle of that rackety-rackety and everybody talking about themselves, she was brushing white hairs off her navy blue velvet dress and saying, “What I really need is a navy blue cat.” George has that kind of little muttered thing in the midst of cocktail parties and me-first publication parties, and I’m crazy about him. He is one of my favorite people on this planet.

They called me “Tum-te-tum.” I did say that, I guess. It’s one of those Southern expressions. Somebody says something with which you do not agree or disagree; you say, “Tum-te-tum,” or “We’ll talk about it later” is what it means. Or “Well, that’s a piece of news, but let’s don’t dwell on it now.” It’s one of those useful noncommittal things when you have something else to talk about, like addressing envelopes. George never writes “Dear Eugene,” he writes “Dear Tum-te-tum.” At his age. At my age.

*

There had been a café in the rue de Tournon for one hundred years. But before the
Paris Review
crowd, there was no Café de Tournon. It was across the street from my hotel, so I naturally drifted over. Then, when the
Paris Review
was being formed, they were given space by Georges Duhamel’s daughter, Colette Duhamel, who worked with
La Table Ronde,
which had its quarters in rue Garancière, which was the next tiny little street over, like a back alley, behind the café de Tournon. So then somehow we all were there. Eventually the people from
La Table Ronde,
the clerks and underlings, all went to that café. So did the people from
Merlin,
which was a terribly serious, nonhumorous, avant-garde magazine financed by this girl from Limerick, Maine, Jane Lougee. Austryn Wainhouse was the big-deal editor of
Merlin.
There was a pretended rivalry between it and the
Paris Review.
They thought George and all of us were fools.

Upstairs, next door over the post office at the corner, lived an important Polish composer, and Stravinsky came to call on him, for example, and they sat in the Tournon sipping their drinks. The Palais Luxembourg was right there at the head of the street, so there were certain curators who would come there for their aperitif. The Pakistan actress Roshann Dhunjibhoy was staying in the Hotel Scandinar, which was next door to where I stayed in the Helvétia, and she became the mistress of the Dutch photographer Otto van Noppen, who was also in the Scandinar. And Dominic Beretty, the Dutch photographer with the Italian name, was in the Scandinar, and Hans de Vaal, the Dutch journalist, was in the Scandinar, and up the street was Catherine Morison and William Gardner Smith and Vilma Howard, this black girl I had met at the Alliance from Davis Avenue in Mobile, who was one cute thing who wrote poetry. I got her first poems published in the
Paris Review.
She had written some poetry and asked me if I would look at it. I thought it was very good so I took it to George, and the other editors liked it, and she was published first in the
Paris Review.
So everybody just congregated at the Tournon, which was natural.

This was that moment five or six years after World War II when Paris suddenly just burst with exuberance. The
Paris Review
and what became the Tournon crowd was part of all that sweep to Paris. That was 1951. The war ended in ’45, but people didn’t come immediately after the war because it was miserable. Paris was a hardship center, broken-down and dirty, and the plumbing didn’t work. There was a shortage of a lot of things: no heat, no food, no nothing, for quite a while. And long about 1950 is when it was livable, and people couldn’t wait to get there. So all these young people who graduated from wherever they graduated rushed to Paris. Everybody’s dream: Paris, Paris. Paris was the place.

I wouldn’t say that I was riding the crest of the wave, because that sounds like it’s planned or you’ve worked to be there. I’m traveling with the wave of the crest. It’s accidental. It’s triple Sagittarius cat and monkey.

*

Max Steele, the young man from North Carolina who won the Harper Prize for his novel
Debbie,
came to Paris. He got a cash prize, so he went to Paris. He lived not far away, and he came to the Tournon. I met him there before the
Paris Review
even started. He came in about the same time I
did, when they found he was there and had heard about his book and all. He was shy: one of those people who didn’t tell you everything. You could know him all your life and not know him.

He knew this girl from the South in Paris—she was one of those extras on the set. She had invited Max and myself as two literary figures to have dinner at her place. But of course, Southern girls don’t really learn to cook. They had black cooks. And Max had explained that I was very fussy about food. So she was going to make what she thought was a kind of beef creole dish. She had this recipe out of a cookbook, and it said “flavor with bay leaf.” She didn’t know anything about bay leaves. She went to this herb shop in her neighborhood and said she wanted some bay leaf, and the clerk said, “How much do you want?” She said, “Oh, I guess a pound.” Being French, he didn’t question her. In France, you think, Well, maybe she does some funny sniffing thing. He didn’t question. So he gave her a pound of bay leaves. She made a beef stew. And when we turned into her street, you could smell bay leaves in the air. She didn’t put a whole pound in, but I think she took a handful and dumped it in the casserole. It smelled like Davis Avenue in Mobile when they are making catfish stew. We got to her apartment house and went in, and the concierge was out of his mind going, “What is that smell?” We got to her hall upstairs, and Max said, “Courage.” When we went in, she was looking a little nervous. She had
that look,
which any perceptive male creature knows. When you go to an unmarried female’s house and she’s cooked, there’s a look of the ends of the hair being damp and freshly combed. There’s a dab of perfume she’s just put on, always one button undone or one strap showing. You know that she’s been slaving away in the kitchen and that she’s had ten minutes to bathe, dress. So we sat politely and had our Dubonnet. When we were served, Max wouldn’t look at me and I wouldn’t look at Max. So we tasted it, and Max, who was really a quiet soul, said, “Um, bay leaf.”

It must have taken ten years to get the smell out of the curtains. And of course Max and I, with laughter, rushed to the Tournon for drinks afterwards. And sat far into the night talking about girls who had scorched things and girls who’d forgotten to get the fish for the fish stew.

But curiously, Max Steele didn’t write anymore. He went and became a teacher of creative writing at Chapel Hill. He is still at Chapel Hill. I would have expected him to go on. It’s dangerous to fall into the world of academe until you’ve really thumbed your nose three times in all four directions. East, north, south, and west. Three times you must thumb your nose in those directions. That’s an old Gulf Coast charm. Keep you out of trouble.

One of the crowd at the Café de Tournon was this model, from a very eccentric and marvelous family in the mountains of Tennessee. She had come to Paris, and she was a pert, charming creature: Pati Hill. For some reason, she wished either to drop or let lapse her accent, so she had learned to breathe in a different way. She’d been modeling for two years and was in
Vogue
and all that. One day she came out of the alcove and onto the runway at Schiaparelli’s in a mink coat and immediately took it off and then dragged it down the runway behind her, showing off this evening dress. In the middle of this fashion show, she looked around and had this moment of revelation that Southerners have more often than other Americans of the total picture of where she was. And she said, “Oh, shit.” Ran out and got a taxi and went into the woods near Paris and didn’t leave for a year. Cut her hair off short and lived in one-piece peasant dresses in this shepherd’s dugout in the woods. She just looked around and said, “Oh, shit,” at the artificiality of the Paris fashion world, especially the backbiting and feuding. She couldn’t take it. They couldn’t see the humor of the whole thing. To her, the artificiality was basically humorous. At first. But they couldn’t see it. She could. So she wrote a book called
The Pit and the Century Plant
that had a certain success. Max Steele had this big crush on her. They flirted, but I don’t think she took him seriously.

I’m sure it was Max Steele who introduced me to another delightful creature, Miss Daphne Athas, also from North Carolina. Her mother was from Boston. Her father was from the wildest mountains in southern Greece. In fact, she used to say, “I have a double-barreled ancestry. I’m descended from Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts on my mother’s side, and from the Zephs on my father’s side.” He immigrated to America because he was one of the younger sons and there wasn’t enough land to go around. Miss Winthrop was doing some kind of work that great ladies do, like helping with people who didn’t speak English who were coming in, showing them where they had to go, giving them their papers, and finding somebody who spoke their language. Miss Winthrop took one look at Pan Athas and fainted dead away when he got off the boat. He was this gorgeous young man with black curls and honey-colored skin and rosy cheeks. She said, “That’s for me.” That led to marriage. He didn’t have any money, but he’d learned perfect English, and they came down to Chapel Hill and in no time at all he was teaching classical mythology, classical literature, and classical Greek at the University of North Carolina. He built the family house, but he never got around to putting in a front porch. They went in and out of the back porch, and there was only a long ladder from the ground to the front door.

Daphne wrote her first novel based on a school where she had taught—I think it was blind children—and it was much made over. She had this soft way of speaking and this immensely pleasing voice. Everybody stopped everything to listen to what she was saying. And she has those eyes that always look as though she hadn’t slept last night. Natural shadows under the eyes that some people have. She wrote several very good novels, and the publishers were crazy about them, but for me—as much as I enjoyed them—knowing her, I felt she was holding back a little bit. I wanted her to go ahead and say, “Shit,” because she was very realistic, and they really had a struggle: this big family and this house under construction at the tail end of the Depression. Every once in a while, amidst this Carolina softness and this true gentleness, there would come some word with a Boston accent to surprise you. That’s what her novels needed. But oh, she was delightful.

*

Some friends of mine in New York said, “We are sending you someone very special. She will be writing you.” She wrote me from London and said, “I hope my knight of the white rose will meet me on Tuesday the nth at three P.M.” so I went with a white rose. Some of those tourist people got out, the guys in shorts, women in those awful red and green clothes with everything hanging on little straps everywhere. I thought, Oh, what am I doing here? and my white rose was beginning to melt. Suddenly there was a lady in a Christian Dior long skirt and a hat with a little veil. I said, “Ooh, ooh.” And in good eighteenth-century style she said, “La! There you are.” And that was Catherine Morison. She brought only useful things with her to Paris, such as her grandmother’s fan collection.