Genius and Generosity, a (Sort of) Book Review

Rereading the restored edition of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has got me thinking about the nature of genius and of love.

This memoir about the American fiction writer’s years in Paris during the twenties is chock full of many of the things I most love: writing, reading literature, Paris, the café life, artistic community, an intimate, supportive marriage.

When Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, first came to Paris in their early 20s in the early twenties of the twentieth century, they lived on rue du Cardinal Lemoine, just before it opens out onto Place Contrescarpe. Though the name meant little to me when I first read the book in my twenties, now that Richard and I live on rue Cardinal Lemoine, the mention of the street on page two enchants me.

Speaking personally, what more could I ask of a book?

Well, as it turns out, one thing. Rather a big thing. More on that later.

Let’s begin with what is admirable, even breathtaking, about this book. What a model of devotion to the craft of writing Hemingway offers.

Hemingway had just quit his work as a journalist in order to make his way as a writer of fiction. This I admire. In order to find one’s genius one must listen to one’s genius.

Richard and I prefer Plato’s definition of genius in the myth of Er in The Republic to more recent conceptions of genius. Plato tells the story of Er, who, after dying and coming back to life, reveals what he learned: that each of us is born with a genius, a daimon or twin soul, who remembers what our purpose in life is even when we forget, and who is constantly dropping hints to us: not this, not this—yes, that. One’s genius, or purpose could be anything: artist, doctor, builder, business person, homemaker, mother or farmer. But unless we follow what our genius knows we should do in this life, we can’t find fulfillment. Hemingway had the courage to follow his.

Hemingway had impeccable discipline, impressive for a young man in his twenties. He arose early every morning and mounted the steps to the room he rented high in a nearby hotel (the hotel where Verlaine died). The room was so cold that if he left mandarines[1] there overnight, they’d freeze. From the window he could look down and see the goatherd come up the street blowing his pipes and a woman in his building come out onto the sidewalk to buy milk that the goatherd milked as she waited. (Oh, why can’t goats still wander the streets of Paris?)

Courage he had, and discipline. And another thing: luck. He happened to arrive in Paris at a very good time for Americans. The exchange rate was such that a writer, whose advance for a first book of short stories was $200, could, by living frugally (buying no clothes, no paintings, sometimes skipping meals), afford an apartment for himself and Hadley, a hotel room in which to work, and spend winters skiing in Austria, summers at the bullfights in Spain.

What he learned about writing:

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.”

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”

“It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.”

And then there were people. Not Hadley. People. He warns us: “The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

Of course in Hemingway’s world in the Paris of the twenties, “people” meant Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas; F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda; Ezra Pound; James Joyce; Ford Madox Ford; Wyndham Lewis; Sylvia Beach.

And here is where my enjoyment of the book cools. Hemingway describes Gertrude Stein’s generosity to Hadley and him. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s warmth to him. But his portraits of them are, ultimately, scathing.

From the night he meets Fitzgerald in one of Hem's favorite Montparnasse hangouts, the Dingo Bar, he is sizing him up. From instantly preferring Scott’s friend, the famous Princeton baseball pitcher, Dunc Chaplin, to him; to a head-to-toe physical appraisal: legs too short; wrong kind of tie; a faintly puffy face, to the most damning thing Hemingway can say about a man, that there is something female about him (“a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty…the mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more”); to how Fitzgerald praised him too much and asked questions that were too direct; to how his face was like a death’s head after a few glasses of champagne. All this in contrast with Hemingway’s portrayal of himself as manly, composed, able to hold his liquor, admirable in most other ways.

Later when Scott invites Hemingway to join him by train to Lyon to pick up a car that Scott and Zelda had had to abandon there because of bad weather, Scott misses the train. Hemingway is unable to reach Scott in Paris, so he goes to the best hotel in Lyon (though he’s worried about spending too much money), where Scott finds him the next morning.

They pick up the Renault at a garage, where the garage man recommends new piston rings, and Hemingway uses the opportunity to display his superior manly knowledge of cars, and Scott’s lack of good sense.

Hemingway notes that Fitzgerald has been drinking when they meet up in the hotel, so Hem suggests stopping in the bar for a whisky and Perrier. They set out on their road trip. Although he’s well aware of how sick alcohol makes Fitzgerald, and that he’s probably an alcoholic, at Macon, Hemingway buys four bottles of excellent wine, which they drink from the bottle as they drive. Another chance to point out how feminine Scott is. “I am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to him as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit.”

By that afternoon, Scott is worried about his health. In the hotel room that night, Hemingway observes Scott’s hypochondria and again dramatizes the slightly older writer’s foolishness to underscore Hemingway’s good sense.

An invitation to Hemingway and Hadley to lunch at Scott and Zelda’s apartment gives Hem the chance to criticize Zelda’s appearance and the meal. And to wonder at Scott and Zelda’s seeming to think that the two men’s road trip from Lyon had been great fun.

In contrast to Gertrude Stein’s generosity to him, Hemingway describes covertly overhearing a lovers’ spat between Gertrude and Alice. “That was the way it finished for me, stupidly enough…”

Having recently read Hemingway’s third wife, Martha Gellhorn’s Selected Letters, this is richly ironic. She describes getting the journalist’s assignment of a lifetime, being one of the only women allowed to cover the European front lines in World War II. Hemingway, at work on a novel at their finca in Cuba, tugs on her to return home, whining about his loneliness until she makes the fatal decision to come home early. He and his drinking buddies have trashed their home, he calls her every vicious name a man can call a woman, then secretly steals her Colliers Magazine assignment and goes off to the front lines himself.

And he’s willing to toss his friendship with Gertrude Stein out the window over one conversation he overheard her have with Alice? Hemingway had four wives. Gertrude Stein and Alice were together till the end. They are now buried side-by-side in Père Lachaise Cemetery, with Gertrude's name on the front of the headstone, Alice's on the back.

I have no idea why Hemingway so hated the English writer Ford Maddox Ford, who apparently was so generous to him.

Or why he savaged the English writer/painter Wyndham Lewis for wearing the “uniform” of a pre-World War I artist, and watching Hem teach Ezra some boxing tricks in a competitive spirit (pot calling the kettle black?). He describes Lewis as having the eyes of a “frustrated rapist.” It’s certainly a memorable phrase.

However, a more treacherous husband or friend I can’t imagine.

Yet, in the descriptions of Hemingway working, or spending winters in Schruns, Austria skiing with Hadley; in short, whenever he’s describing physical life—action, he is magnificent.

It’s when he describes “friends” that I wince. The final portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald is in a dialogue with Georges, the chasseur[2], later the bar man, at the Ritz Bar, who doesn’t remember Fitzgerald, though the novelist spent many evenings there.

“Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone asks me about?.... But why would I not remember him? Was he a good writer?” And “’I remember you and the Baron von Blixen arriving one night—in what year?’ He smiled.”

“He is dead too.”

“Yes. But one does not forget him. You see what I mean?”

Hemingway contrasts how memorable he himself is, and how unforgettable Baron von Blixen, Isak Dinesen’s first husband, was, with how Fitzgerald has simply disappeared from the chasseur’s memory.

Hemingway assures the man that he will do a portrait of Fitzgerald and then the man will remember him. But Hemingway’s portrait has already served its purpose: to demolish Fitzgerald as a man worthy of remembrance or admiration. I suppose one does with one’s friends exactly what one does to oneself. Hemingway killed himself a year after the book was completed in the spring of 1960.

If genius is the pinnacle of human achievement, then Hemingway served his genius well.

But love? Perhaps love is generosity—towards oneself, other people, and life itself. Our parents give birth to us. They care for us (or most do) from birth to adulthood, and sometimes beyond. We are alive on this beautiful earth, surrounded by mysterious objects, people, adventures, the sweetness of love and the challenge of work. Shouldn’t we return the favor with generosity towards life in all its many forms?

If generosity—love, really—is the pinnacle of human relationship, Hemingway was a sad specimen of humanity.

[1] mandarin oranges

[2] a hotel employee who takes care of outgoing mail, and retrieving theater tickets.

Boulevardiers

 

Café de Flore. It’s late.

We sit and plan our Book of Dreams.

In our carnet de croquis[1], we’ll draw or collage our wish

on the right hand page, and when it comes true, note it on the left.

When I say “Soupe a l’oignon,…non, un omelette fromage[2],”

the Asian waiter, a professional, gives me the look:

Don’t I know what I want?

Richard orders soupe a l’oignon, a décafé crème.

Then we get down to the business of the night: watching people go by.

A flock of fast-talking British girls in short spangly skirts.

Short stolid couples stroll arm in arm. An elderly gent

with a blond beauty, a young Gena Rowlands.

Quick-walking tall and thin young Frenchmen.

A dark-haired couple and son— maybe Israeli—take the next table.

The single smoking blonde to the other side leaves. Hooray!—

we can breathe. Two French guys sit down and talk of Chet Baker

while do do do wopping sounds to one another.

The waiter brings us food and drink. We eat and drink.

I tear my place mat into the size of a carnet page. 

A car parked in front of us tries to leave

but is blocked by the double-parker.

Richard says, “There’s a note on the windshield.”

“Let’s bring it to his attention,” I say.

Richard runs over and hands the man the note. It’s a ticket.

Everyone watches from their sidewalk seats. The blocked driver

is out of his car and playing to the crowd. Two men lounge

beside his car, smoking. One looks like Alain Delon with that boyish

French face, Levi’s and dark blue shirt. He knows where to stand

to be observed. Everyone conjectures. Where could the driver be?

A young woman dashes out of the Café, long tangled hair and jeans,

slips into the car laughing, pulls up, waits till the blocked driver leaves

and expertly backs in. The two young men chat her up.

Pretty and breezy, she laughs and disappears. Everyone approves.

She’s good looking, and handled this with style.

The air musician next to me says, “Tout est bien, qui finit bien.”

We get up to leave, the drama over.

“How do you say in French,

‘All’s well that ends well?'” Richard asks.

“That’s just what the guy next to us said!”

The next morning I read in Baudelaire:

“Elle croit, elle sait, cette vierge inféconde

Et pourtant nécessaire á la marche du monde,

Que la beauté du corps est une sublime don

Qui de toute infamie arrache le pardon.”

She believes, she knows, this infertile virgin,

—Who still is necessary to the world’s parade—

That beauty of the body is a gift sublime

Which can extort forgiveness for the basest crime.[3]   

Charles Baudelaire 

[1] sketchbook

[2] onion soup…no, a cheese omelette

[3] (113 * ALLÉGORIE) “The Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen; Poems by Charles Baudelaire,” translated by William H. Crosby, with a few tweaks by K.K.

Tatsuno Otoshigo

Earth slid open.

Poseidon’s waves rose and bit

the seahorse of Japan.

The underworld spit fire.

Kamikaze[1] winds streamed

the terrible news.

 

Earth’s axis shifted.

The baby dragon[2], in agony, burns.

All across the planet, we bow:

sadness.

Light comes flowing down

from the Milky Way.

(In Paris, all we can think about is Japan.)

---

[1] Japanese, literally, divine wind. First known use: 1945.

[2] In Japan, they call seahorses baby dragons (in Japanese “tatsuno otoshigo” literally means “baby dragon”).

The People of the Book

From Rue Lagrange, we turn a corner.  Suddenly, Notre Dame looms like a great ship before us, directly across the Seine. We pass the Square Réne Viviani, named for a WWI-era French prime minister, but once the garden of l’Église St-Julien-le-Pauvre, where St Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Villon and Rabelais all prayed, in the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th and 16^th centuries.

 

Here we are at 27 Rue de la Bûcherie, in front of this odd little bookstore that is so numinous for us. Shakespeare’s portrait is painted twice on the wall outside. Two young Americans sit at a table outside intently chatting (I hear their accents as we pass).

Out here on the paving stones between the store and the Seine is where Richard read his poems one day in spring of 1997 when we were here on our honeymoon. In 2006, on an evening when we’d just arrived in Paris, the two of us read poems together in the small intimate room upstairs.

I remember the dazzling warmth of Sylvia Beach Whitman, who had just taken over ownership of the bookstore from her father, George Whitman. She was like a fairy, delicate, blond, and full of light. Though she seemed far too young to run a bookstore, it was clear she would be very good at it.

 

This year, we enter as if visiting an old friend in our home town—Paris is our home town now. It’s 8:30 p.m., and chances of Sylvia being here this late are slim. But there she is to the left of the door, small, blond, radiant as ever. We exchange greetings, chat.

I ask her about my gift certificate. She dashes back to her office in the antiquarian book room, and returns: here it is, converted from dollars to Euros. Six weeks I’ve waited, gathering a list of books, savoring the thought of spending the goodbye gift from my writers group in Los Angeles. It’s a hefty amount.

But first Richard and I must sniff around this rabbit warren of a bookstore—a warren for enchanted rabbits.  In the front of the store to the left of the cashier, are books about Paris and France. Here I find Ernest Hemingway’s The Moveable Feast. But no Montaigne.

Sylvia, all in black, leggings and a long sweater, searches through the section on France. While she is looking, I remember bookstores where I’ve worked: The Tides in Sausalito, California; Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Rizzoli Books in New York City. I think that in a former life I was—not the owner of a bookstore—but a bookstore itself.

 Sylvia says she’ll be right back. She thinks there is a volume of Montaigne on hold, and Voila! she returns with The Complete Essays.

I move on to the next room, the poetry section. I search for Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men, and Susan Howe’s That This. No luck.

In the fiction section, I strike it rich. Here is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea; Leonardo Sciascia’s The Wine Dark Sea, and Andre Breton’s Nadja.

And here are a few volumes of The Paris Review Interviews. I select Volume II, with interviews by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Alice Munro.

In the France section, I find Paris Metro Tales, translated by Helen Constantine, and the recently published, How to Live; A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell.

I find Richard seated in the next room on a red theater seat, a huge book on the history of photography open on his lap.

“You pick a book that you want too.”

“No,” he says, “This is your gift. I don’t need to buy any more books.”

He is engrossed, which gives me time to sit on a ledge in the fiction section and read a bit from each book. Yes, the various recommendations from friends and book reviewers were all good.

A young black-haired couple speaking what sounds to me like Japanese stands nearby discussing choices of books.

Another couple in their 40s pokes through the France section speaking what might be Norwegian.

An Englishman talks with Lauren at the cashier's desk.

The sweet music of French is all around us.

At the counter, Lauren rings up my purchases, and asks me if I’d like my books stamped. Bien sûr! The stamp is a portrait of Shakespeare with the name of the bookstore and Kilometer Zero Paris in a ring around it.

I order Dorianne Laux’s latest and Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon. She hands me back my gift card. Half the credit amount still remains. Oh, how rich I feel!

In the window I notice a stuffed crow.

“….for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you…”

We walk out of Shakespeare & Company, in my right hand a big brown bag with nine books. Richard takes my left hand and chuckles, “You’re so happy with a stash of books.”

I send a thank you over the Seine, across France, sailing over the Atlantic Ocean, flying over the North American continent all the way to Los Angeles to Anna, Cassandra, Dawna, Diane, Jennifer, John and Jon. 

They—like Sylvia, like the authors she carries, like her father, like my mother who read to me as a child and is the greatest reader I know, like the voices already speaking to me from the big brown bag—are my tribe, the People of the Book.

Danse of the Gods

We walk a half-hour through rain, wet from shoes to hair. I do not

care. We find the building off the Avenue de l’Opéra. In the foyer

are milling young—a few Adonises and nymphs.

A bulletin board: Mythologie Conférence, Rez-de-chausée, Salle

zéro[1]. We climb a flight of stairs, pass a mural of vigorous

muscular youths circa the ‘20s, doing calisthenics for the state.

We peek in a room, see dancers at the barre.

Richard darts into the bathroom.

I peek again.  A miffed French woman with slicked back hair appears: “Nous

n’avons pas fini cette classe![2]”

Richard returns. We go up. We ask a woman if she knows the way

to the myth room. Down below, she thinks.

We go down to the basement. A Zen teacher smiles peace into us,

but Richard cannot feel it. He feels lost.

Up we go again. Wrong room.

Down we go to the main floor. I open a door that leads outside. Richard

snaps his fingers at me, as if I were a dog. I know it’s just stress. I follow him

into a small dark room with a mirror covering one wall. An empty dance

space.

A small Asian man enters. A tall heron of a teacher bustles in,

turns on the lights, sets up a slide projector and arranges notes on a

desk.  One by one, men enter. One looks like an accountant in a

short-sleeved shirt. Another is pudgy, shifty. There’s a young,

sleepy Frenchman.

We unstack the folding chairs, Richard and I at the back. Am I the only

woman in Paris who loves myth?

The lecture begins. Slides on the screen. Hermes has wings on his

hat, his caduceus, his shoes. He is “légèreté de l'être, rapidité,

l'échange d'énergie, mais pas commercial, non! L'échange

d'énergie spirituel, comme dans les secrètes d’Égypte[3],” or

something like that.

 

This teacher understands the essence of these êtres divins[4]. Here is

Zeus, king of the gods, bearded, powerful, gripping his

thunderbolt. As Monsieur speaks of Zeus, the rumbling overhead

gathers in volume—a stamping of feet in a ballet class, or the

god’s thunder? A back window blows open behind us. One man

moves to close it. It opens again. Another man closes it harder. It

opens to the rain and noise of the sky and the street. Another man

closes it. It opens again. Zeus will not be shut out. We surrender.

 

Here is Athéna, snake-haired Medusa on her shield. Perseus cut off

her head, freeing Pegasus, the winged horse of poetry. Athéna has

a creature on her helmet, resting on its haunches. Is it a lion? A

sphinx?

Athena and Ares 

And here is Hephaestus, the ugly god. His mother, Hera, dropped

him from Olympus, and he limps, ankles broken. He is heavy,

lourd, and he works with heavy things, iron, making weapons, also

jewelry for the goddesses, lovely things for his wife, Aphrodite.

Look at Aphrodite! In this painting I’ve never seen, she is all milky

skin with pink blush, up on clouds like swans, and swans are riding

the clouds.

 

Her lover is Ares, god of action, of muscular body and war.

(I think of him as the god of Italy, its shape a boot for walking, 

exploring, and hunting booty.)

Apollo is here in a painting with Daphne, who chose to become a

laurel tree, rather than sleep with him. A laurel wreath is now the

crown of achievement. He is inner beauty, says Monsieur. (But

I thought he was more a communal god of music and harmony.)

And here is Artemis, goddess of the hunt. Of the purity of nature.

Of cleanliness and chastity. When Actaeon happened upon her as

she was bathing, she turned him into a stag, and his own hounds

tore him apart.

 

And here is another painting I’ve never seen, of Hestia—ample-

bodied, in long dress, leaning against an altar holding a flame.

I am thrilled to hear his subtle understanding of this family I know

so well. Thrilled that I can understand much of what he’s saying.

Now he takes questions. First to wave his hand is the pudgy man

who’s been sneaking peeks at himself in the ballet mirror

the whole lecture. He asks a meandering question

about Aphrodite (of course!): “Elle, elle Aphrodite ... la bataille

entre le feu et l'eau .. la guerre à l'intérieur de nous ... les cygnes

la suite de son ... Zeus un cygne, un cygne ... Ares ai eue aussi, un

combat intérieur de ma tête,”[5] and who knows what else.

 

It’s painful listening to this question that never ends. The lecturer

grows tense and so do we. He tries to answer the man and move on.

I’m the last to ask. I agree with him, I say, on Hermes being about

spiritual exchange, rather than, as many say, commercial.

He suggests I ask the question in English. He’ll translate for the

class. Dang, I was so happy to understand, but I still can’t

voice what I mean. I ask him later about the bag Hermes

carries.

“Is it the sac[6] d’un égrue?” He looks confused.

“C’est un oiseau de l’eau[7],” I say. He doesn’t understand.

“Oh! Je veux dire, grue.[8]”

“Crane! Oh!” He gets it. But he doesn’t know.

We talk about the next lecture.

“It’s next Monday,” he says.

“Bon!”

But I forgot to ask, What was the animal on Athene’s head?

Who did the painting of Hestia? Who did the glorious Aphrodite

with white swan clouds?

The Invisibles take many forms in the imaginations of visionaries and artists

of every country, every time in history. The characters and shapes

of the goddesses and gods envisioned by the ancient Greeks have endured

over many centuries and miles. They still speak to us here today in Paris.

Hermes as Crane

---

[1] “Mythology Conference, Ground Floor, Room Zero.”

[2] “We have not finished this class!”

[3] “lightness of Being, speed, energy exchange, but not commercial, no! The exchange of spiritual energy, as in the secrets of Egypt.”

[4] “divine beings”

[5] “She, she Aphrodite … the battle between fire and water… the war inside us…the swans following her… Zeus a swan, a swan… Ares got her too, fighting a battle inside my head,”

[6] “bag”

[7] “It’s a bird of the water.”

[8] “I mean, crane.”