It’s appropriate that I read this anecdote yesterday. I’d meant to post this, well, yesterday, but I got tired out after finishing watching Patton, an episode of Mad Men and then discussing various matters with the people who still live here.
But anyway. It’s from That Summer in Paris, a book I picked up at a recent estate sale, and is proving to be absolutely delightful – as well as an introduction to a writer I’d never heard of before, Canadian Morley Callaghan. Who was, as it turns out, Catholic, and did work Catholic themes into some of his fiction – as in Such is my Beloved, about a priest trying to reform two prostitutes.
So, obviously that rabbit hole will be explored later this week.
Anyway, in his mid-twenties, he arrived in Paris in the summer of 1929, with several publications to his name already, some connections made and many more, he hoped, on the way. He’d hoped to meet James Joyce, of course, but Sylvia Beach, Joyce’s gatekeeper at the Shakespeare & Co bookstore, was not helpful in that regard. But one night, it happened, and this…is very funny.
It was a restaurant near the Gare Montparnasse, where the food was notably good. Just to the right as you go in we saw McAlmon sitting with the Joyces. The Irishman’s picture was as familiar to us as any movie star’s. He was a small-boned, dark Irishman with fine features. He had thick glasses and was wearing a dark suit. his courtly manner made it easy for us to sit down, and his wife, large bosomed with a good-natured face, offered us a massive motherly ease. They were both so unpretentious it became impossible for me to resort to Homeric formalities. I couldn’t even say, ‘Sir, you are the greatest writer of our time,’ for Joyce immediately became too chatty, too full of little bits of conversation, altogether unlike the impression we had been given of him…
….It was now ten o’clock. Turning to his wife, Joyce used the words I remember so well. ‘Have we still got that bottle of whisky in the house Nora?’
‘Yes we have,’ she said.
‘Perhaps Mr and Mrs Callaghan would like to drink it with us.’
Would we? My wife said we would indeed and I hid my excitement and elation. An evening at home with the Joyces, and Joyce willing to talk and gossip about other writers while we killed a bottle! Stories about Yeats, opinions about Proust!…It all danced wildly in my head as we left the restaurant….
And here follows a narrative of them walking down the street and Callaghan almost losing Joyce, since he’d forgotten that the man’s eyesight was quite impaired…..
…The Joyce apartment, at least the living room in which we sat, upset me. Nothing looked right. In the whole world there wasn’t a more original writer than Joyce, the exotic in the English language. In the work he had on hand he was exploring the language of the dream world. In this room where he led his life I must have expected to see some of the marks of his wild imagination. Yet the place was conservatively respectable….The room was all in a conventional middle-class pattern with, if I remember, a brown patterned wallpaper, a mantel, and a painting of Joyce’s father hanging above the mantel. Mrs Joyce had promptly brought out the bottle of Scotch. As we began to drink, we joked and laughed and Joyce got talking about the movies. A number of times a week he went to the movies. Movies interested him. As he talked I seemed to see him in a darkened theatre, the great prose master absorbed in camera technique, so like the dream technique, one picture then another flashing in his mind. Did it all add to his knowledge of the logic of the dream world?
As the conversation began to trail off I got ready. At the right moment I would plunge in and question him about his contemporaries. But damn it all, I was too slow. Something said about the movies had reminded McAlmon of his grandmother. In a warm, genial, expansive mood, and as much at home with the Joyces as he was with us, he talked about his dear old grandmother, with a happy nostalgic smile. The rich pleasure he got out of his boyhood
recollections was so pure that neither the Joyces nor my wife nor I could bear to interrupt. At least not at first. But he kept it up. For half an hour he went on and on. Under my breath I cursed him again and again. Instead of listening to Joyce, I was listening to McAlmon chuckling away about his grandmother. Quivering with impatience I looked at Joyce, who had an amused little smile. No one could interrupt McAlmon. Mrs Joyce seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for sitting motionless and looking interested. The day would come, I thought bitterly, when I would be able to tell my children I had sat one night with Joyce listening to McAlmon talking about his grandmother.
When McAlmon paused to take another drink, Joyce caught him off balance. ‘Do you think Mr and Mrs Callaghan would like to hear the record?’ he asked his wife.
‘What record?’ asked McAlmon, blinking suspiciously…Mrs Joyce was regarding my wife and me very gravely. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think it might interest them.’
‘What record?’ McAlmon repeated uneasily.
Mrs Joyce rose, got a record out of a cabinet and put it on the machine. After a moment my wife and I looked at each other in astonishment. Aimee Semple McPherson was preaching a sermon! At that time, everyone in Europe and America had heard of Mrs McPherson, the attractive, seductive blonde evangelist from California. But why should Joyce be interested in the woman evangelist? and us? and McAlmon? Cut off, and therefore crestfallen, he too waited, mystified. Joyce had nodded to me, inviting my scholarly attention….
….The evangelist had an extraordinary voice, warm, low, throaty and imploring. But what was she asking for? As we listened, my wife and I exchanging glances, we became aware that the Joyces were watching us intently, while Mrs McPherson’s voice rose and fell. The voice, in a tone of ecstatic abandonment, took on an ancient familiar rhythm. It became like a woman’s urgent love moan as she begged. ‘Come, come on to me, And I will give you rest…and I will give you rest…Come, come…’ My wife, her eyebrows raised, caught my glance, then we averted our eyes, as if afraid that the Joyces would know what we were thinking. But Joyce, who had been watching us intently, had caught our glance. It was enough. He brightened and chuckled. Then Mrs Joyce, who had also kept her eyes on us, burst out laughing herself. Nothing had to be explained. Grinning mischievously, in enormous satisfaction with his small success, Joyce poured us another drink.
Before we could comment, his daughter, a pretty dark young woman, came in. And a few minutes later, his son too joined us. It was time for us to leave.
When we had taken Robert McAlmon, publisher of the city of Paris, home, we wandered over to the Coupole. That night we shared an extraordinary elation at being in Paris….It was a good night.
Charlotte was Both 