The Paris Wife

It’s so beautiful here it hurts,” Ernest said one evening as we walked to take our evening meal at the cafe we now frequented on rue des Saints-Peres. “Aren’t you in love with it?”

I wasn’t, not yet-but I was in awe of it. To walk the best streets in Paris just then was like having the curtained doors of a surreal circus standing open so you could watch the oddity and the splendor at any hour. After the enforced austerity of the war, when the textile industry collapsed and the great couturiers nailed their doors shut, brightly colored silks now ran through the streets of Paris like water-Persian blues and greens, startling oranges and golds. Inspired by the orientalism of the Ballets Russes, Paul Poiret dressed women in culotte harem pants and fringed turbans and ropes and ropes of pearls. In sharp contrast, Chanel was also beginning to make her mark, and you saw splashes of sharp, geometric black amid all that color. More and more, chic meant a shingle-bob and deeply lacquered nails and impossibly long ivory cigarette holders. It also meant lean and hungry looking-but that wasn’t me. Even when I was hungry, I never lost my round face and my plump arms. I also didn’t care enough about clothes to do any thinking about what would suit me. I wore what was easiest and required the least maintenance, long wool skirts and shapeless sweaters and wool cloche hats. Ernest didn’t seem to mind. If anything, he thought highly costumed women were ridiculous. It was part of the way he favored everything simple-good, straightforward food, rustic and almost chewy wine, peasant people with uncomplicated values and language.

“I want to write one true sentence,” he said. “If I can write one sentence, simple and true, every day, I’ll be satisfied.”

He had been working well since we’d come to Paris, chinking away at a story he’d begun on our honeymoon at Windemere called “Up in Michigan.” It was about a blacksmith and a maid in Horton Bay who meet and discover each other sexually. He’d read some of it to me, from the beginning, where he described the town and the houses and the lake and the sandy road, trying to keep everything simple and pure and as he remembered it, and I couldn’t help but be struck by how raw and real it was.

His ambitions for his writing were fierce and all encompassing. He had writing the way other people had religion-and still he was reluctant to send Sherwood Anderson’s letters of introduction to any of the famous American expatriates. I guessed he was afraid they’d reject him out of hand. He was more comfortable making friends with the working class of Paris. The language I had was stiff, schoolgirl French, but his was picked up here and there during the war, rough-and-tumble common speech suited to conversations started on street corners with cooks and porters and garage mechanics. Around them he could be himself without feeling defensive.

That night, though, after dinner, we were set to meet Lewis Galantiere, a writer friend of Sherwood’s. Lewis was originally from Chicago and now worked for the International Chamber of Commerce. He had a reputation for having wonderful taste, and when Ernest finally met him at his apartment in the rue Jean-Goujon, it was full of expensive-looking antiques and engravings that he described in detail when he came home to me. “All the tables and chairs had slender, spindly feet. A little fastidious for my liking, but you could see the man knows style.”

I was anxious about meeting Galantiere because I wasn’t remotely elegant and didn’t feel I belonged in Paris at all. If the women in Paris were peacocks, I was a garden-variety hen. I’d recently given in to pressure and bobbed my hair-maybe the last American woman to do so-and hated it. It made me look like an apple-faced boy, and even though Ernest said he loved the way I looked, every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I felt like crying. It may have been dowdy and Victorian before, but my hair had been mine-me. What was I now?

Lewis had offered to treat us to dinner at Michaud’s, a fashionable restaurant I’d only stopped at to peer in the window. When we arrived, I paused at the door and fussed hopelessly with my clothes, but Ernest didn’t seem at all aware of my self-consciousness. He held me firmly by the elbow and gave me a small but insistent shove toward Lewis, saying, “Here’s the swell, smart girl I’ve been raving about.”

“Hadley. I’m honored and pleased,” Lewis said as I blushed furiously. I still felt embarrassed, but loved knowing that Ernest was proud of me.

Lewis was twenty-six, dark and slim and endlessly charming. He did very funny impressions, but when he showed us his best James Joyce he had to explain it for us. We’d glimpsed Joyce a few times on the streets of Montparnasse, with his neatly combed hair and rimless glasses and shapeless coat, but we’d never heard him speak.

“He does speak,” Lewis insisted, “but only under some duress. He has several hundred children, I’m told.”

“I’ve seen two girls,” I said.

“Two or two hundred, it’s all the same in Paris, isn’t it? He can barely afford to feed them, they say, but if you come here to Michaud’s any night of the week at five o’clock sharp, you can see the whole brood consuming buckets of oysters.”

“Everyone says Ulysses is great,” Ernest said. “I’ve read a few serialized chapters. It’s not what I’m used to, but you know, something important is happening in it just the same.”

“It’s dead brilliant,” Lewis said. “Joyce will change everything if you believe Pound. Have you been round to Pound’s studio?”

“Soon,” Ernest said, though he hadn’t sent that letter of introduction yet either.

“Good man, you have to go. Not everyone can tolerate Pound, but meeting him is compulsory.”

“What’s difficult about Pound?” I asked.

“He himself, actually.” Lewis laughed. “You’ll see. If Joyce is the very quiet professor with his shabby coat and walking stick, Pound is the devil, bumptious and half crazed with talk of books and art.”

“I’ve met the devil,” Ernest said, finishing his glass of wine, “and he doesn’t give a damn about art.”

By the end of the evening, we were all drunk and back at our flat, where Ernest was trying to get Lewis to box with him. “Half a round, just for laughs,” he coaxed, stripping to the waist.

“I’ve never been a fighting man,” Lewis said, backing away-but after a few more cocktails, he finally submitted. I should have done something to warn him that no matter what Ernest said, sport was never a laughing matter for him. I’d seen the look in his eye in Chicago, when he’d nearly laid Don Wright flat out on Kenley’s floor. This match went the same way, to the letter. For the first few minutes, it was all a pleasant enough cartoon, with both men hunkered into position, knees bent, fists out and curled. It was so obvious that Lewis wasn’t athletic I thought Ernest would give up altogether, but then, without any provocation, he threw a live punch, dead center, from his shoulder.

His fist landed hard. Lewis’s head whipped back and forward again, his glasses flying into a corner. They were shattered, and his face was nicked in several places.

I ran and tried to help him recover himself, but found he was laughing. Ernest began laughing, too-and it was fine, after all. But I couldn’t help thinking how close we’d come to losing our only friend in Paris.

It was Lewis who helped bolster Ernest’s courage enough to send the rest of the letters of introduction, and soon an invitation came from Ezra Pound. Pound wasn’t terribly well known in the States yet, unless you knew something about poetry and read literary magazines like the Dial and the Little Review, but in Paris he had a great reputation as a poet and critic who was helping to revolutionize modern art. I didn’t know more than a scrap about what was modern-I was still reading the terribly square Henry James, as Ernest liked to remind me-but Lewis had said such nice things about Pound’s English wife, Dorothy. I was keen to make new friends and was happy to go along when Pound invited Ernest to tea.

Dorothy met us at the door and led us into the studio, an enormous drafty room filled with Japanese paintings and scrolls and scattered pyramids of books. She was very beautiful, with a lovely high forehead and skin like a China doll. Her hands were pale and finely tapered, and she talked in whispers as we walked to where Pound sat in a blood-red damask chair surrounded by shelves stacked high with dusty volumes and stained teacups, sheaves of paper and exotic-looking figurines.

“You’re a redhead,” Pound said to me once Dorothy had made the introductions.

“So are you. Is that auspicious?”

“No one holds a grudge like a redhead,” he said gruffly and with all seriousness, turning to Ernest. “Mind that, young Mr. Hemingway.”

“Yes, sir,” Ernest said like a good pupil.

Ernest was Pound’s pupil, too, from the first moment they clapped eyes on one another. Pound could evidently spot a man hungry for knowledge and obliged Ernest by talking nonstop while Dorothy ushered me over to another corner of the studio, well away from the men. Under a long window streaming sunlight, she poured me tea and told me about her famous lineage.