Milking the Moon (32 page)

Pati Hill always remembers one particular meal that I made for her. She was dead broke, down to absolutely nothing. And I was down to absolutely nothing. But she had three onions, and I had a bottle of wine and some crackers. So I put some olive oil in a frying pan, and I did onions in three ways. I did all this elaborate froufrou about giving it French names and pretending we were doing this very elaborate French meal. But it was onions thrown into boiling water just long enough to be crunchy and flavored with cloves; and then onions boiled until they were mush, flavored with something else; and then onions fried with a little sherry poured into them. Then crackers, and I think I had some peppermints. We were both absolutely penniless; we just had arrived at nothing. So I did this pretend snob French dinner of onions. Lord, Lord. It just goes to show it’s not money that makes a party; it’s imagination.

Sally loved to give parties in her room at the Hôtel Vendôme. They didn’t have a restaurant, but they had kitchens that catered to the rooms. She’d arranged a beautiful party for George Plimpton’s birthday. Or was it the party for Eddie Morgan, of the wealthy Morgan family, after he had failed the course in good manners at Long Island University? Those were two great parties that Sally gave. Anyway, I knew that everybody would come to the Hôtel Vendôme very well dressed. And my idea always was let’s make every party something else. So I took a suitcase of colored scrap paper and tinfoil and made everybody do something. Either on their own or I just bullied them and put something on them. I made Sally mess up her hair and put something on it. I made George put on a white jacket and be a Southern planter. Everybody was wearing little bits and pieces of different things. And of course, it makes a good party. The minute you leave the here and the now, it’s a party. Whether it’s in a ruined filling station in Pascagoula or the Hôtel Vendôme. When you’ve done something to banish the commonplace, it’s a party. It really is a childish thing or a highly sophisticated thing, according to how you look at it. Children given a package of Hershey’s silver bells and left to their own devices will get under a tree or climb a tree and eat them all and make something with the silver paper. You know. I can remember, with Mary Agnes Wolfe, eating a whole bag which we stole from my grandmother’s kitchen. It was our bag, but my grandmother had said, “Now I’ve bought this bag of silver bells that has to last you a whole week. It’s here on the shelf.” So we each had a couple, and we looked at each other. We didn’t think again. It was actually Mary Agnes who reached in and took it and put it in an apron pocket and we climbed a tree. We ate them all, and we covered our ears with silver paper. And enjoyed a morning in the tree with silver ears. There was no difference in that and the party at Sally’s. It was banishing the commonplace.

On occasion, when I gave a dinner party, I’d have all the food the same color, like all white food. All purple food. All green food. Or serve a meal backwards. Like first you have the dessert. All the courses would be carefully chosen to be eaten in reverse order. The dessert would be something like avocado sherbet with tiny little almond cookies. Then a special, heavy yogurt for the cheese course. And then paper-thin ham when you get to the meat. But just making the meal backwards somehow has an effect. I’ve done all kinds of parties. It makes people a little giddy when you break the rules.

A Ticket of Admission to Everything in Paris

One day the Princess Caetani said, “Oh, Eugene, Carson
McCullers is here, and Mrs. Alfred Knopf is bringing her over. You must come and join us.” I said, “Oh, that would be so exciting,” because I loved Carson’s books. It was one lovely summer afternoon in Paris with all the windows open and the curtains blowing. And here was Blanche Knopf, a rather theatrical lady with a very New York cocktail party—type dress and lots of makeup although it was bright sunlight still. I belong to that upbringing in the South where ladies can put on all they like when the sun goes down, but in the daytime, belles only put on makeup that’s invisible. Anyway, Blanche sort of dominated things. There was this little mousy thing with green skin and huge shadows under her eyes and looking like a lemur sitting next to me on the sofa. She was a charming Southern girl, but she was odd looking. If I were casting a sharecropper film, I would cast her. She looked slightly unhealthy. But she was animated and charming; she was one of those cats and monkeys.

After we talked for a while, she turned to me and said, “Where are you from?” It’s a Southern question. I said, “I’m from Mobile.” She said, “Oh, Mobile, I knew somebody from Mobile in school….” Anyway, she and Reeves had taken this old ruined monastery about an hour from Paris that they were able to get through her publisher. And she said, “I’m going to try to start a Southern garden. I’ve got to get me some lantana seeds and some four o’clock seeds. But I don’t want those bright pink ones. I don’t want the ones that are all speckled and spotted. I want some pure white four o’clocks and some pale pink four o’clocks.” I wrote home to some friends in Mobile who I knew had the four o’clock seeds themselves. A lot of people pick off the seeds when they are ripe to be sure they are put in the garbage because they don’t want the whole land to be four o’clocks. I was able to get for her the pure white and the pale pink. And I got white lantana for her, and I got something else. I can’t remember what. Anyway, she was very happy and invited me to come visit her. George Plimpton and I thought of driving there, but then Reeves committed suicide in a Paris hotel room.

Reeves had been in the hospital since the end of the war, having an aluminum stomach put in or whatever they do. His stomach was shot out in the war, and he had some aluminum parts. He had never been to Europe, and he kept a room in a little hotel about three blocks from my hotel. He was this blond Southern country boy from Georgia, soft-spoken. “Yes, ma’am.” “Yes, sir.” “Why, I do declare.” You know. We met as Southern boys would to have drinks, have supper, and go out and get drunk. We had a marvelous drunk on B&B together once. We talked and talked and talked about the war and exchanged stories. We didn’t talk anything about books. We just talked about things Southern boys talk about when they get drunk. He didn’t seem suicidal to me at all. If I’d been asked to guess ten people out of a hundred that I would be sure would never commit suicide, he would have been one of the ten. That’s why I think he was only doing it to get attention. Everybody made such a fuss—I mean a fus-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s—over Miss Carson. And didn’t even notice him. So he took to staying in town more and more and getting drunker and drunker because he was free from hospital and didn’t have to go to bed at ten. He could go from bar to bar and see all those crazy people.

He took sleeping pills one night afterwards, but he telephoned everyone he knew in Paris. I was gone; I was somewhere else that particular weekend. But he telephoned everybody he knew, saying he was going to end it all. He’d had it. So he took those sleeping pills. Didn’t take many, but he was so full of whatever he drank that it didn’t do well, and he just passed out cold and died. I don’t think he really meant to kill himself; I think he just wanted the attention. But I never saw Carson again because she just went into a state of shock.

I saw William Faulkner when they had that twentieth-century festival, and he came to Paris and made a speech. I had met him as a child in Mobile. On Government Street one day I was going along, and here was Faulkner and my grandparents’ friend Mr. Lyons. Faulkner was a friend of the Lyons family and was there visiting. He was polite and charming, but he didn’t say very much; never did. In Paris I saw him at Natalie Barney’s. She had this grand party and invited the
Paris Review
editors. Mr. Faulkner was there, and I said, “You don’t remember, but many years ago we met on Government Street with Mr. Lyons.” “Oh, yes, well, I did go to Mobile several times.” And I said, “Well, the news from Mobile is there was this big snow and it didn’t melt. It stayed on the ground.” He said, “Snow in Mobile. Think of that.” Then I told him how much I liked the speech he’d made, and he said, “Snow in Mobile. Think of that. Snow in Mobile.” And I said, “Well, have you been in Paris much before?” And he said, “Yes, I’ve been here before. Snow in Mobile and it didn’t melt.” That was our conversation.

Then, I knew this French gentleman who was one of the editors of the publishing house where Faulkner was published in Paris, and he invited me to dinner with Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter at the Grand Véfour. We’d finished this extraordinary meal. The chefs had known who Faulkner was, and obviously they knew the French editor was a bigwig in one of the publishing houses and brought all kinds of white elephants and dead ducks to that restaurant. So they’d gone all out. You wouldn’t believe what we’d had. It was a hot summer evening, and there was that moment as we sipped our 1870 cognac or Grand Marnier or whatever we had after the coffee, when Katherine Anne Porter said something like “Back home, first butter beans’ll be coming in.” And he said, “The baby speckled ones.” After all the triumph of French cuisine. It’s a warm summer evening, and they’re thinking about the first butter beans back home.

Again, he didn’t talk much. He never did. He had his pipe and he drank a lot and he ate rather properly. He would cut his meat, put his knife down, pick up his fork, pick up a piece of meat, put it in his mouth, put the fork back, pick up the knife, and cut another piece of meat. Miss Porter and the French editor just rattled on. I didn’t feel she was Southern the least bit. She had a kind of pointed sense of humor, where you got the sting a little bit after she’d said it. I could tell by the way she handled the French editor and Mr. Faulkner—she didn’t bother much with me—I could tell she was BOGB. Bitch on good behavior.

*

Archibald MacLeish was one of those serious thirties people. I had lunch with him a couple of times. The princess received him. He was a friend of her half sister, Mrs. Francis Biddle, who was very instrumental, very helpful, and very backing of the Library of Congress poetry readings. A real patron of the arts without a fuss. She sent Archibald MacLeish to the princess. He was of that world of Harvard professors. Some of them are jolly souls, but most are what I call the tenure commentators, the tenure critics, who don’t have one idea to present. What half ideas they have they clothe in upside-down English, so you get the idea there’s profundity, if you could understand it.

I’ve nothing against the dear boy. His jackets were so beautifully cut. He could afford a very good tailor. He did some wonderful poems, and he certainly was a charming man. But I don’t think he’ll be remembered for literary creativity. He was a literary society figure. In about thirty years some intelligent child graduating from someplace like Iowa State is going to do a grand book about literary society figures. People who sort of advised writers or advised publishers or presided over evenings in the tavern or in the saloon. Who wrote a lot—piles—but who will never be remembered as creators.

The Harvard boys respected him very much. He was on sort of that honorary board, or something, of the
Paris Review.
But he wasn’t Café de Tournon. He was part of a more serious Harvard crowd that was in Paris. I’m not putting the man down. He had a sense of humor. I just never thought of him as creative. He was a promulgator. It goes back to what I liked about George and Peter Matthiessen and all those creatures and the princess. They wanted to publish texts. They had some essays, and they had interviews, but it wasn’t that gobbledygook.

*

In Paris the world of literature was small and rather closed. You had to know somebody to be introduced into it. I had the highest introduction on earth: I was the editorial assistant to the Princess Caetani. You can’t do better than that. The fact that I worked for the princess was like a ticket of admission to everything in Paris. That was how I got invited by Natalie Barney to her marvelous weekly salon. She was a very wealthy lady, an undertaker’s daughter from Ohio who’d come around the turn of the century and stayed on. She was a fixture in Paris. She wore squarish glasses and wandered about, beaming, looking a lot like Benjamin Franklin. You entered a dim, cluttered hallway and were received by an ancient servant and led back to a huge room with a big round table in the middle loaded with sandwiches and pastries. The food was wonderful, and everybody was yakkity, yakkity, yak about some new book or some new play. It was a zoo, with all those rare creatures. Many of those present had known Proust. Some were angry at having been used as models for characters in his novel. Some were angrier still for not having been used. There was a great divan in each of the four corners of the room, and some major personality or beauty presided over his or her court from the center of each divan. Once Colette was there; she sat on one of the four sofas, preening like a great pussycat. She was so crowded around by a cluster of people chatting over her and around her and under her and above her and next to her that I didn’t really get to see her there.

But then one day this delightful man who was a publisher in Paris said to me, “Now I’ve got to stop in for a moment and see Madame Willy. Do you want to come?” Her married name was Willy. In fact, she was a ghostwriter for him until something she wrote was published under Willy’s name and was so successful that she just started doing her own stuff. Anyway, we went there where she lived in those grand, grand residences in the Palais Royale. She was in bed then. She was old, and she had arthritis and this and that. It was not like other bedrooms. She slept there, but it was her salon. There were three or four cats on the bed and fresh flowers everywhere. Little sketches all over the walls from Picasso and Matisse. Lots of mirrors. Her hair looked as though one of those bristly baboons of East Africa had tried to imitate a human being. It was this bristly thing that stood up in every direction, like a Brillo wig. I would call it Colette red, which was a combination of mahogany and henna. But it was the mascara that really got me. I’m certain she flung her mascara on with a tablespoon, then took a toothpick to pry out a peephole. She had this fancy dressing gown of some sort, and then there was an animal skin thrown over her. It was a first-act entrance, although she was in bed, not entering.