In Paris With Scott, Zelda, Kiki, Ernest, Gertrude, Etc., and Georges Barbier

by Stephen J. Gertz

"All gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken," I  said to Zelda. The novel was killing me. I didn't know where to begin, what it was about, nothing, and needed  madness to fan my flaming youth and fuel the typewriter. So we went to the Artists and Models Ball. It was the Jazz Age. Laissez les bons temps rouler.

Kiki looked ravishing in a gown that Man Ray spent the entire evening underneath, ravishing Kiki from within what he called “my darkroom of delights,” where, he boasted, interesting things always developed. When the lights were low, you could see its red light faintly aglow; she was a walking brothel. Zelda and I were pleased that Kiki resisted his entreaties to wear the violin ensemble; he would have fiddled with her f-holes all night. Man is a shameless satyr. Would it kill him to engage the f-stop every now and then?

"How's the book going," he asked from within.

"Not so great."

I ran into Gertrude Stein. Her gown was a huge thing; you could have hidden a rhinoceros in it. But considering that a rhinoceros was already occupying the premises, it was a moot point. Yet it did have the slenderizing effect she was after; Gertrude was a svelte calf and cut quite a figure.

Gertrude was Gertrude was Gertrude, though she’d deck me if she knew I referred to her in the past tense; she’s got a right like Dempsey. She’s very much into the present, tense if she doesn’t like it and can’t return it for cash or credit. Alice was at home baking who knows what, and Stein was all by herself, doing a whole lot of nothing. “Gert, what gives?” I asked.

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius,” she said, “you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

“But, Gertrude,” I replied, “if you’re doing nothing by definition you’re doing something. Doing is action.”

“Don’t start up with me, Scotty. I’ll pop you this side of paradise to the other side of hell.”

She apologized immediately for the threat, asked how the book was going ("Lousy"), and offered me an Alice brownie.

"No, thanks," I said, "I prefer my snacks 90-proof."

Thus inspired, I stopped at the bar, had a few snacks, and then casually went looking for Ernest. Couldn't find him.

Saw Natalie Barney. She was in page boy drag, coming on to every woman in the room.

"I am a page of love, sent by Sappho," she said to each one. I've heard worse opening lines. She's been using this routine since 1899 when she threw herself at Liane de Pougy. It's getting old.

When Natalie pitched the line to Zelda, she replied "And I'm the King of Sparta, sent by Alcibiades."

Natalie was taken aback by Zelda's impertinence, which she found so charming that she was taken on her back, right there, by Renée Vivian, whose poetry Natalie knew by heart: the curve of her buttocks, the contour of her hips, the crease of her furrow. Natalie was always forthcoming about her sexuality but preferred coming first; so competitive.

Afterward, Renée said, "I do not belong here. Who will bring me hemlock with their own hands."  The life of the party.

Zelda and I excused ourselves and went looking for Ernest in earnest. I searched all over but for the life of me could not find him. The problem was that Ernest was not Ernest. Or. rather, that Ernest was earnestly trying to find the real Ernest.

Apparently, he did. We finally caught up with him, as he, I guess, caught up with himself, and I never saw him so radiant. He really looked divine, the diaphanous top  of his extraordinary gown highlighting his pecs. It did prove difficult, however, when he left to spar a few rounds on the balcony with an extremely reluctant Ezra Pound, whose stock demurral, “Canto, boy-o,” Ernest repeatedly ignored. His frock got the worst of it; organza wrinkles easily and chiffon is so delicate. It was sheer travesty. Particularly as Ernest had the weight advantage over Pound.

"I'm not going to get in the ring with Tolstoy," Ernest said.

Sure, Tolstoy was dead. Yet he still had an excellent chance against Ernest, who always overestimated his prowess as a boxer.

I asked him, What's with the hat?

Turns out, he'd been assiduously avoiding Gertrude, with whom he'd had a major falling out, and figured the hat would mask his identity, the gown, apparently, too subtle a charade. I'm probably the only one who knows the truth: He insisted that they spar and she kicked his ass; he couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper bag. Having a woman clean his clock was too much to bear, his clockworks got all bent out of shape, and he never gave her the time of day again.

"Any progress with the book?" he asked, already aware. I didn't bother answering; the schadenfreude was palpable.

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes  you," I thought to myself while Zelda was in the ladies room having a transient breakdown. The drink took me over to the bar; it was lonely and wanted companionship. I obliged.

 

Gerald and Sara Murphy paraded by. Sara, a statuesque beauty, led the way, with Gerry as her worshipful  attendant. He was protecting her from the glare of dim light with a parasol from which hung, at first glance, sausages but on closer inspection were actually penises. G & S are the soul of decadent modernity, Paris' favorite fun couple. They have a flexible marriage; he bends to her will, she stretches his tolerance.

"Interesting umbrella," I said to Sara.

"And when there's a gentle breeze," she replied, "it's a heavenly wind chime."

O-kay... I mentally scratched her off my to-do list.

A moment later, a woman began a flamenco baile, danced right up to me, stopped, gave me the  once-over, said, "The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment," handed me a flower, and danced away. "Lighten up, Djuna," I called after her but she was already halfway across the ballroom. My troubled manuscript came to mind. I felt the night pull over my head. Time for another snack, a double double.

"How's the book coming along," someone behind me asked. I turned, and, my God,  it was James Joyce, indescribable in an outfit more out there than his prose. "It is you, Scott, isn't it? Without my fookin' glasses I can't see a fookin' thing."

"Jimmy, all good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath," I said. "And I'm drowning."

"A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk," he said, obliquely, but I  understood, acutely. What's a blocked novel? Corpse of writer.

"I'm ready to put a gun to my head," I lamented.

He leaned in, squinted at me, hard, and said, "I can help.  I've got a gat. It's a hell of a gat, one big giant gat, it's a rich gat, a fat gat, an enigma gat, a gat in a hat and spats, a gat to end all gats.  This gat's be great."

Suddenly, a green light beckoned from across the bay. Two giant blue eyes, faceless, behind a pair of yellowed glasses, winked at me from above a valley of ashes while in the west an egg set as the moon. The drinks had finally kicked in. I felt serene.

Yes,  I  can  write  this  novel, I  thought. I   retrieved  Zelda   from  the   ladies  room,  we  said  our goodbyes, and staggered out into the night. It was tender.

__________

Apologies to Georges Barbier and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
__________

All images from Georges Barbier's Vingt-Cinq Costumes pour Le Theatre, Paris: Chez Camille Bloch & Jules Meynial, 1927, and are courtesy of Eric Chaim Kline, Bookseller.
__________

If you enjoyed this bagatelle you may also be entertained by A Decadent Night in Paris With Georges Barbier.

__________
__________

Ernest Hemingway: Down for the Count

by Stephen J. Gertz

 In 1922, Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey was the toast of Paris. He was feted and fawned over, the women obliging, the men in awe.

Champion for three years, he was used to celebrities wanting to put the gloves on and spend a fantasy few minutes sparring with him. A fighter who took all that occurred within the ring with extreme seriousness – it is not a playground1 - he nonetheless indulged many: he allowed silent film star Douglas Fairbanks to throw jabs and rights at him, knowing that Fairbanks’ smaller frame and lesser weight would not put much power behind his punches, if they connected at all. Singer Al Jolson put the gloves on with Dempsey and, being an aggressive fool, made the bad decision to get cute and throw a punch that had some stream in it. After he woke up, he was forever afterward proud of the scar on his chin, bearing it as a badge of honor; Dempsey had reflexively countered but, being a gentleman, was horrified and apologetic.

There were more than a few in Paris that year who stepped into the four corners with the Champ for a light dance around the squared circle. They were no threat.

There was one person in Paris that year whose desire to get in the ring with Dempsey would not be indulged. Ernest Hemingway was a threat. Not to Dempsey but to himself.

As Roger Kahn, in his biography of the champion, A Flame of Pure Fire, reported Dempsey’s side of the story:

“’There were a lot of Americans in Paris and I sparred with a couple, just to be obliging,’ Dempsey said. ‘But there was one fellow I wouldn’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hemingway. He was about twenty-five or so and in good shape, and I was getting so I could read people, or anyway men, pretty well. I had this sense that Hemingway, who really thought he could box, would come out of the corner like a madman. To stop him, I would have to hurt him badly, I didn’t want to do that to Hemingway. That’s why I never sparred with him.’”

Hemingway had delusions of competence. He often boasted to interviewers that he was “a good semi-professional boxer.” He was nowhere near so.

In 1948, Hemingway, then forty-nine, challenged Brooklyn Dodger relief pitcher Hugh Casey, a guest at Hemingway’s Havana retreat, to get in the ring with him. In his living room. Casey, without any boxing experience whatsoever, dropped Hemingway, who crashed into a glass-topped table on his way to horizontal.

On another occasion, related by George Plimpton in his story, Ring Around the Writers, Hemingway insisted that his friend, former Heavyweight Champion, Gene Tunney, get in the ring with him. Hemingway presumed too much but was saved by Tunney’s sportsmanship and control: Countering a Hemingway punch thrown with a little too much seriousness given the situation, Tunney ripped a straight right but pulled it just an angstrom unit away from Hemingway’s face, the clear message being, “you were that close to having your head handed to you and it is only because I am merciful that you are not currently residing on Dream Street.”

“In those days,” novelist Morley Callaghan recalled in That Summer in Paris, his memoir of a season in 1920s France and his friendship with Hemingway, “He liked telling a man how to do things.” The kid’s in his mid-twenties and he’s telling other man-children how to do things. Hemingway loved boxing, hung around gyms, and tried to box with someone, anyone at every opportunity. But the reality, according to Callaghan, who had done some boxing himself, was that, “we were two amateur boxers. The difference between us was that he had given time and imagination to boxing; I had actually worked out a lot with good fast college boxers.” In other words, Hemingway was lost in the romance of a sport that has no romance to those seriously pursuing it; the romance strictly belongs to spectators.

“My writing is nothing,” he once averred to writer Josephine Herbst in all sincerity, “my boxing is everything.” Good thing he didn’t quit his day job.

Callaghan and Hemingway boxed together quite a bit that summer. Callaghan may have been being generous when he called Hemingway an amateur. He remembers that his wife would complain that he always came home with bruised shoulders after sparring with Hemingway. Callaghan would laugh in response, explaining that the shoulder welts and bruises meant that Ernest had always missed his jaw, nose, or mouth. Against someone who had any sense of what they were doing, Hemingway, apparently, couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn or fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

Once, the two sparred, and, as Callaghan recalled, “he did something that astonished me.” Continually being tagged by Callaghan’s left jab and unable to counter or beat him to the punch with his right, Hemingway was taking a slow, steady shellacking, his mouth bleeding, his lips split open. “It must have been exasperating for him.” Particularly as Callaghan was five inches shorter and lighter than Ernie The Oak Park Pretender Hemingway.

“Courage is grace under pressure,” Hemingway famously declared. Under intense pressure to keep his oversized ego from circling the drain and self-image flushing down the toilet, Hemingway then “loudly sucked in all the blood. He waited, watching me, and took another punch on the mouth. Then…he stiffened. Suddenly he spat at me; he spat a mouthful of blood; he spat in my face.”

“That’s what bullfighters do when they’re injured. It’s a way of showing contempt,” Hemingway offered as lame excuse for this cross-culturally acknowledged insult, an affront so profound it is an invitation to violent response. So much for sportsmanship.

I, admittedly, know little about bullfighting but my guess is that when a bull is frantically twirling a toreador on one of his horns like a plate-spinning Vaudeville act, the only reason blood is running out of the bullfighter’s mouth is because he’s been gored in the abdomen, and the only contempt he may be feeling is for himself, for his stupidity while he, panicked and afraid, ruefully contemplates death.

Suffice it to say, had Hemingway gotten into the ring with Dempsey and pulled that nonsense, Papa would have wound up a paragraph in Le Monde’s obit section, his novels never written. Too bad it didn’t happen. The Western world’s men would have been spared a lot of grief by the twentieth century’s greatest master of macho baloney. “A little less machismo, a little more pianissimo,” as Booktryst correspondent, Nancy Mattoon, dryly notes of Hemingway.

Later, Hemingway and Callaghan sparred again. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in awe of Ernest, was present as timekeeper, a chore he knew nothing about. Hemingway was, yet again, on the receiving end of Callaghan’s left jab, bleeding, and not looking like the god that Fitzgerald (and Hemingway) imagined him to be. During the one-minute break, Hemingway noticed that Fitzgerald was stricken. When F. Scott rang the bell for the next round, Hemingway came out like a bull, throwing wild, wide punches. Then “Ernest, wiping the blood from his mouth with his glove, and probably made careless with exasperation and embarrassment from having Scott there, came leaping at me. Stepping in, I beat him to the punch…I caught him on the jaw; spinning around he went down, sprawled out on his back,” Callaghan reported.

Fitzgerald was aghast; he’d mistakenly let the round go an extra minute. He admitted this to Hemingway, who promptly laid into him, unmercifully accusing Fitzgerald of deliberately allowing the round to go overtime so that that he could “see me getting the shit knocked out of me.” Grace under pressure…

Hemingway’s embarrassment and resentment would negatively affect his friendships with Callaghan and Fitzgerald. There is a name for someone who behaves so atrociously after honest defeat: sore loser.

Hemingway also fancied himself an amateur bullfighter. As there is no record of his blood being spilled, it is reasonable to conclude that the bulls he was fighting were not wearing boxing gloves.

It may be that as he aged and all the psychic armor he’d been donning piece by piece in youth like multi-layered underwear against the cold began to fall off in tatters, he was left naked and shivering. His body was breaking down, his robustness bust. He was no longer the a man he wished to be. So he knocked himself beyond next week into the next life. So much for grace under pressure, the only real grace being if feces don’t run down your pants leg during extreme duress, cool equipoise occurring only in novels, particularly those of you know who.

Hemingway was, by all accounts of those who truly knew him, a soft, sensitive and sentimental young man. He went to enormous lengths bordering on travesty to mask it. “It was amusing to remember the Hemingway who had first come to Montparnasse,” Callaghan wrote. “Ask anybody. Why had he been wearing those three heavy sweaters to make himself look husky and powerful? A ridiculous giveaway.” He was a victim of his own warped sense of virility, an insecure artist’s sense that what he is doing is perhaps feminine in nature, God help him, and rather than balance it, go overboard and, in the end, drown. Writer and publisher Robert McAlmon claimed that a “scandalous incident” transpired between him and Hemingway early in the future Nobelist’s career. McAlmon was a homosexual. Whether true or not, the mere rumor must have driven Hemingway to throw on a few more sweaters no matter how uncomfortable the fit.

Let us now officially deep-six the Hemingway fantasy of people growing “strong in the broken places.” That nonsense is strictly for bones. In the real world, the psychic wounds we bear remain weak at the break, they never heal, they never scar. They remain as hard scabs that when scratched or rubbed will bleed again, the blood-run slow or fast depending upon the how forceful the scratch or rough the rub. Or how we pick at them, ourselves. Time may heal all wounds but for most of us there isn’t enough of it. Hemingway was a deeply wounded man. No crime in that. The felony is in the fallacy of his writing.

Earnest Hemingway was an innovative stylist but not an honest writer. Rather than examine the uncomfortable realities of manhood and masculinity in his work, he evaded them, avoiding the inner exploration that would have been necessary to discover truth. In its stead he created a romanticized, wishful thinking vision of virility that plagued his and successive generations of men with an impossible standard that even he could not bear.

My Grandfather, a huge man in an era when few were that size and quite handy, once dropped heavyweight contender, Harry Krakow aka Kingfish Levinsky, with a single punch that laid him out cold on the street for wolf-whistling and cat-calling my grandmother. Poppy could have taken out Papa in a blink; he was the toughest man I’ve ever known and I’ve known more than my share. I did some amateur boxing when I was young, dumb and made of rubber. Compared to my grandfather, I’m a cream puff. But even I could have put Hemingway on the horizontal express.

If John Donne were alive today, I suspect he'd have the last word. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee, Ernest, it tolls for thee…

… eight…nine… ten. OUT! “

___________

1. As Thomas Hauser, the best writer on boxing of our and, perhaps, any generation has noted with devastating acuity: “People play baseball, they play football, tennis, basketball, hockey, they play a lot of sports. Nobody plays boxing.”
____________


OF RELATED INTEREST: 

Bookworms and Boxers Battle Back! 

Them's Fightin' Words!