A quick post about this quick read.
My son picked it up, read the cover flap and remarked, “Oh, so this is like Midnight in Paris. ” Well, sort of, but not really. Some of the same people, but living in real life, not Woody Allen’s fantasy.
Published in the early 60’s, after Hemingway’s suicide, and perhaps, in a way, inspired by it, the book is a memoir of just what it says – the summer of 1929, spent in Paris by (very) young Canadian writer Morley Callaghan and his wife. Callaghan had some contacts already, and traveled across the Atlantic hoping to spend his time hanging out with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce.
Which he did.
And while there’s a lot of sitting in cafes, the book is about far more than sitting in cafes. It’s really about friendship, the ways we present ourselves, what we expose, what we conceal, and the fragile dynamics of relationships.
The primary tension Callaghan experiences over the summer is his puzzlement over Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s relationship, which he had believed to be friendly, but was not. Callaghan had become friends with Hemingway in Toronto when they both worked as reporters. He reconnects with Hemingway in Paris, they set up a regular boxing date, but it takes him longer to meet Fitzgerald. When he finally does, Fitzgerald frequently asks him if he’s seen Hemingway, and if Callaghan could take him along next time he’s going to meet up with Hemingway – and Hemingway responds non-committedly when Callaghan brings up Fitzgerald. It’s awkward for Callaghan and he doesn’t understand it at first – the writers are certainly different, but both appealing, so what’s the problem?
There’s no easy answer, but the story of that summer, as Callaghan tells it thirty years later, gives us insight into both men’s characters. Hemingway is very kind and affable, but clearly, as Callaghan sees it, on his way to presenting a character, rather than himself to the world. Fitzgerald initially strikes Callaghan as aristocratic and kind, if a bit elusive, but ends up just being sad, the whole mess coming to a head during a boxing workout in which Fitzgerald was timekeeper, and turned out badly, a very well-known incident in literary history, in fact.
(This is the kind of life being led at the time – this boxing workout between Hemingway and Callaghan had Fitzgerald as a timekeeper. During a previous workout, they’d enlisted Jean Miro to keep time. Personally, I’d rather watch a movie based in those realities rather than Allen’s ridiculous fantasies.)
MY two friends when I saw them separately, seemed to be wonderfully untroubled about each other. Ernest would have had me believe he hadn’t given a second thought to his words to Scott in the American Club. Nothing worth mentioning again had happened. When I saw Scott, he was superb too—he didn’t even ask for Ernest. And I joined in the general pretending. I became a man who “knew how to behave” as Ernest would say. I managed to give the impression of being completely unaware of any deep disappointments and hidden resentments. How could bitterness flare up if they weren’t seeing each other? I asked myself. For now that July had come they were both to go away, Ernest south, probably to Spain, and Scott would soon be off to the Riviera, What could be better than to have everybody go away for awhile? Everybody off to the seashore ! I was glad they were going. While they were away I could relax a little myself and pretend that we would all be the best of friends when they returned. I knew I ought to have stopped pretending. But pretending is contagious. It makes life more agreeable.
I should have said, “Ernest, I think you’ve got Scott all wrong,” But Ernest was a strange ingrown man who could make you feel his resentments were born of some deep primitive wisdom. Besides, I didn’t want to keep reminding him I had had a hand in his embarrassment. If I kept prodding him about Scott, if dared to suggest he might owe Scott an apology, I was afraid his vivid imagination would start working on me, and he wouldn’t want to see me either. Let the whole thing blow over, I thought.
There’s a lot to like in this book, and I particularly appreciated this observation on change:
But with time passing, I was learning the grim lesson that all writers who aren’t just morning glories, and go on, have to learn. In the beginning the good opinion of Hemingway and Fitzgerald had helped me to feel I was not alone—even in my hometown. Having passed the morning-glory period, I had learned that you can’t be sustained by the praise and admiration of a few friends. You lose them along the way anyway, and since you should always be changing and becoming something else, the friends, if they stay alive, may not stay with you. I find that people who like what I did when I was twenty-five often do not like what I do now, but I have learned that this is because they would like things to be done as they were done when they, themselves, were twenty-five or thirty—the time when they were most alive themselves. And those dreams I had of Paris—as a place—the lighted place—I had learned it had to be always in my own head, wherever I was. Sometimes in strange places I have remembered that prison chaplain who insisted that no prison should be so obviously escape proof that freedom was even beyond the imagination of the inmates. They ought to be allowed at least a condition for the comfort of their fantasies. I won’t enlarge on this splendid idea.
The summer ends. Callaghan and his wife realize that as charming as it is, as much of a literary adventure it had been, Paris was not home, and was not a place where he could take root and write from. They were pilgrims, visitors, travelers in Paris, and it was time to go home.
****
A twist that I discovered in doing a bit of research – the letters between the three of them related to this boxing match and the subsequent controversy were stolen from a bookseller in 1993 and have never been recovered:
The target — the prize — was the package of rare books and letters he had advertised for sale around the world: first editions of Hemingway’s first two books, one a personally inscribed copy to Callaghan, four original Hemingway letters, only one previously published, and more correspondence from Callaghan, Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and others.
The collection was not just rare. It was historic: the complete, post-fight exchange of the famous writers, squabbling over what had happened in the ring at the American Club in Paris that summer of 1929, and what happened after.
Charlotte was Both 