The Pretender (2 page)

That was how I finally came upon a job. I was having an espresso in a quiet bar on Mo. St. Michel, reading Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir of Paris,
A Movable Feast
, when a middle-aged American tourist sat down next to me.

‘I’ll bet you can tell me where to find Shakespeare and Co,.’ he said.

I was about to make a joke about Stratford-upon-Avon when I realised he meant the bookshop, which used to be on the Left Bank and featured in the book I was reading. Its owner, Sylvia Beach, was the first to publish Joyce’s
Ulysses
.

‘I think it’s closed down,’ I told him,‘years ago.’

‘No,’ he told me, ‘it’s in my guide book. I just can’t find the street.’

He handed me the book, and, sure enough, there was a listing for the shop, at 37 rue de la Bucherie, which, according to the pocket map I carried, was just round the corner. This version of Shakespeare and Co. had been open since the 1950s, the book said. I volunteered to help the American locate it and, after two false starts, we found a bustling place overlooking the Seine. There was an antiquarian store on the left and a store selling new books on the right. The latter was piled high with works in English. I pounced upon a paperback of Jeffrey Meyer’s Hemingway biography and asked, as I was paying, whether there were any jobs going.

‘Are you a writer?’ the young Australian at the till asked. It was the first time anyone had put this question to me, so I answered it honestly.

‘I’d like to be.’

‘If you say you’re a writer, and George likes you, he’ll let you stay here. You have to help out and he expects you to read a book a day.’

‘And all I have to do is pretend to be a writer?’

‘If you want to be a writer, you wouldn’t be pretending, would you?’

I didn’t answer this. Lots of people thought they would be great writers if they could only be bothered to sit down and write. I’d written enough rubbish to know that writing wasn’t easy. But I remained curious about the bookshop.

‘How many people stay here?’ I asked.

‘At the moment? I think it’s fourteen. There are less in the winter.’

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere. Look upstairs.’

After I’d paid for my book, I found the staircase hidden away at the back of the shop. A sign said that none of the books upstairs were for sale, but customers were welcome to use the library. The first floor was full of nooks and crannies. One was decorated entirely with letters and postcards from people who used to live in the shop. A room on the right had a table with two typewriters and, around a corner, a single bed. A youth my age was asleep on it. Every wall was piled high with bookshelves.

The room at the front was a formal, old fashioned library, with easy chairs, a table in the middle and a window overlooking the Seine. To the right was a door that had a substantial lock, but was ajar. I pushed it open. Across the stairwell, above the antiquarian store, was a room full of cardboard boxes. Standing over a table in the middle, looking through one of the boxes, was a grey-haired man in a checked shirt.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked, in an American accent. I knew at once that he was in charge. If he liked me, I could solve my work and accommodation problems in an instant. But I also knew that, much as I hated the hostel where I was staying, I was far too young and shy to cope with a dozen or more well travelled want-to-be-writers at close proximity. I was, for better or worse, a loner.

‘I was looking for a job,’ I said, ‘but I gather the people who work here are all volunteers.’

The American laughed. ‘Volunteers, that’s one word for them. They’re hiring at WH Smith’s on Rue de Rivoli. You could try there.’

Next day I found myself working, thirty hours a week, at the Paris branch of Britain’s biggest bookseller. My job was to unpack boxes. My co-workers and boss were French. They hardly spoke to me, so I wasn’t improving my language skills and remained friendless, but I was used to being self sufficient. What mattered was I had a reason to stay in Paris.

The pay was only enough to live on if I found cheaper accommodation. A guy at work directed me to a dowdy house on the edge of Clichy, not far from the Sacre-Coeur. My room was on the top floor of a tall, off-white tenement in between an estate agent’s and an artist’s studio on Rue Joseph de Maitre, overlooking Montmartre cemetery. There was a cheap Indian restaurant at one end of the street and a taxi rank at the other, though I never once used a taxi. For transport I made the five minute walk to the Metro at the Place de Clichy, crossing the road bridge that bisected the cemetery. A good location, though the room itself wasn’t much. I still had to share a tiny kitchen and bathroom, but I could read as late as I wanted and at last had an address to give my mother.

I worked six hour days five days a week, starting at ten and finishing at six, with an unpaid two hour break at lunch, when there were no deliveries. This became my time for mooching around the city, hoping to meet women or, at least, find inspiration. My new job gave me little opportunity for either. The only girls I met were shop assistants, and, as boyfriend material, I was beneath their consideration. They didn’t ask a lot, but a full time job and a car were pretty much essential in any man, in France as much as in Britain.

There were many long, blank hours that could only partly be filled with letters home, reading and abortive attempts at writing fiction. Writing by hand wore me out. My handwriting was an ugly squiggle. Sometimes I had trouble reading it back to myself. I needed a computer, or, at least, a typewriter. It seemed to me then that, if your words looked good on the page, the rest would follow.

Most Sunday mornings, on a street two minutes walk from mine, there was a regular flea market. It took place in a covered market that, for the rest of the week, sold flowers and vegetables. Some of the stalls were taken by professional dealers. Others were run by people who had stuff they wanted rid of. It was there, some five weeks after my arrival, that I found the typewriter.

It was a portable Royal, an American model with a QWERTY keyboard rather than the French AZERTY.

‘How old is it?’ I asked the old woman behind the table.

‘Seventy years old,’ she told me, in French. ‘I think it belonged to a lodger of my grandmother’s. I found it in her attic when she died.’ She shrugged. ‘Not quite old enough to be an antique, they tell me, but something nice to put on your shelf, perhaps?’

I told her I was interested in using it. ‘But I don’t suppose you can still get the ribbons...’

‘Oh yes, it’s a standard size. And...’ She pulled out an old cardboard box. ‘I found this with the typewriter. Look.’

There were two spare ribbons, still wrapped in cellophane, and two packets of manuscript paper held together by ancient string.

‘I’ll throw these in with it. Two hundred francs.’

This was over twenty pounds — hardly a bargain, when most typewriters were being binned, rather than sold, but I had fallen for the machine. The ribbon stretched between the rollers was dried up and worn, but the other two should see me through the rest of my stay in Paris. I had taught myself to touch type on a computer keyboard. A typewriter shouldn’t be too hard to use. I bargained her down to a hundred and fifty francs. Madame Devonier insisted on writing out a full receipt, for which I would later be very grateful.

A typewriter handles differently from a word processor. If you type too quickly the keys are liable to jam up, forcing you to get your fingers covered in ink while you untangle them. Writing requires physical effort. At first, I could only manage an hour before my fingers ached. The machine was also noisy. Other residents of the house complained if I typed after ten at night, or on Sunday afternoons when they were trying to sleep off lunch. I didn’t blame them. Sometimes the typewriter’s machine gun staccato gave me a headache.

The quality of my writing got no better. I began to wonder why I thought I could become a writer.Was it because, three years earlier, I’d imitated Dickens and fooled my English teacher? Before coming to France I’d found the Dickens file on my word processor and read the piece for the first time since Mr Moss tore it up. By now, I’d read much of Dickens. I could see how far my imitation fell short. My syntax was too simple. My similes were awkward. I had no grasp of historical detail. A kind of lucky fluency had fooled the teacher, but it didn’t satisfy me.

I was still fascinated by Hemingway. Now I tried to write like him. He seemed an easier target than Dickens because of all the one and two syllable words he used, the repetitions. I soon realised that Hemingway could get away with repeating ‘and’ and ‘but’ only because they were part of a rhythm. There was a kind of poetry that was cumulative and easy to imitate, but hard to bring off successfully. Many had tried. Sometimes it seemed I could hear Hemingway’s rhythms in every new American short story I read in
Granta
magazine. But the American authors at least made something of their own in the copying process. Not me.

I was given a week off for Christmas and went home, feeling like I’d learnt nothing in my three months away.

At home, Mum fussed over me, saying how much older I looked and acted. She wanted me to say I’d really missed her. I did and I had, but you didn’t say that sort of thing to your mother. Men always leave their mothers behind. There are fewer mothers than fathers in fiction and not very many of either. In real life, maybe, many men have their closest relationships with their mothers. But they don’t write fiction about it.

Christmas passed. On the morning I was leaving, I found something sinister, tucked away at the back of the cupboard where I thought Mum might have put my sleeping bag. It was wrapped in a blanket, the way a baby might be protected by swaddling clothes. Beneath the blanket I found a fourteen inch, portable Sony TV set. I covered it up and never once mentioned the thing. Mum must get lonely, I told myself on the long journey back to Paris. The nights are long and the radio’s not as good as it used to be. Still, I felt betrayed. I thought it was the first big secret she’d kept from me.

Back in Clichy, I had no idea why I’d returned. I was doing a job I could have been doing at home. I was missing New Year’s Eve parties to spend the night in a cold room, alone. Everybody else in the house was out. I spent the last evening of the decade rereading
The Sun Also Rises
in conjunction with Carlos Baker’s edition of Hemingway’s letters and Meyer’s biography of the writer, which I’d already devoured once.

There was one story about Hemingway in Paris that particularly fascinated me. What happened was this: in late 1922, Hemingway was living in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, who was several years his elder. Ernest was a journalist at the time and an aspiring, unpublished novelist who had already done much of the work that, when published, would make his early reputation.

Hemingway went skiing. Hadley travelled from Paris to Lausanne to join him. With her she brought a suitcase containing all of his manuscripts, including the carbon copies. Having secured a compartment on the train at the Gare de Lyon, Hemingway’s wife went off to buy a London paper and a bottle of Evian. When she returned to the compartment, the suitcase was gone.

Hadley joined Hemingway in Lausanne. She was in a terrible state, and asked her husband to guess the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Hemingway thought for a moment that she had fallen in love with another man. But it was worse than that. The loss devastated Hemingway. He couldn’t believe that Hadley had brought both the manuscripts and the copies, something she never explained. No-one knows exactly what was in the case. Hemingway once said there were eleven stories, a novel and some poems.

In
A Moveable Feast
, written just before he killed himself, Hemingway claims the loss was good for him. It forced him to start over and the fresh versions of the missing stories made his reputation. But it must have hurt terribly at the time and marked the first rupture of his relationship with Hadley.

As for my own writing, I didn’t know if I was writing a comedy or a coming-of-age novel. How could I write such a thing? I hadn’t come of age. As an experiment, I started to write my own versions of the missing stories. I thought that, by imitating Hemingway, I might learn something. I reread the stories from his first collection,
In Our Time
, and rewrote three from memory. Others I made up afresh, using details taken from my reading of the biography and later Hemingway.

In my notebooks, they weren’t much. I threw endless pages away. Why should I think I was good at this? But when I began typing, the words that came out were my own, yet not my own. Carlos Baker, in his edition of the letters, listed Hemingway’s most common grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors. I included a few of these, superstitiously thinking that, by making Hemingway’s mistakes, some of his talent might rub off on me.

By February, I had written seven Hemingway stories and hated them all. Only two had any promise, I thought: an ‘early’ version of
Out of Season
and a ‘new’ story, untitled, where Nick Adams, Hemingway’s hero from the
In Our Time
stories and many others, is in Paris. Like Hemingway, he is married, but his wife is away. Nick goes to meet another ex-pat who has been in the war.They spend an awkward evening together. I wrote it the way Hemingway used to write, with a pencil, then typed it out, trying to avoid any redundant words, to keep the sentences short and the tone authentic. Then I went back over it, cutting repetitions and phrases that seemed too modern. In the third sentence, ‘could use’ became ‘was in need of’. Later, I changed the word ‘chore’ which sounded too English, into ‘bind’.

I rewrote until I could no longer tell how well the piece read. Was the pace too jerky? I was pleased with the tone, but had no idea what to do with the plot, in which the Nick Adams character can’t work out how to deal with his acquaintance, who is suffering the aftermath of shell shock. We’d studied First World War poetry at school, but I didn’t know what it was like to be newly married, or fresh out of a war. Hemingway didn’t write about his marriage in his early work. It was years before his fiction would broach the First World War. Nobody alive knew what he had tried, and failed, in those lost, early stories. Playfully, I inserted a grammatical error at the start of the second paragraph, where I had Hemingway write: ‘there was a lot of people on the street’. This was a mistake I’d noticed Hemingway make in one of his best known stories,
Fifty Grand
.