B007RT1UH4 EBOK (37 page)

There will be time: a line from Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As noted earlier, “Life is very long” is from his “The Hollow Men.”

Bruce, and Tommy: Helen Parker’s children from an earlier marriage, aged five and ten.

To Edith Gaddis

Sevilla

28 May, 49

Fair stood the wind for France . . .

Well, fair or not, that is where I am going any day now. And I suppose that we are in for a Royal disaster, involving misdirected mail, pennies lost down the drain, imprisonment for illegal entry of wild flowers, heaven knows what.

A moment of lucidity: Immediately you receive this letter, send no more mail to Sevilla; to Madrid instead.

At present planned: to leave here about the 7th of June, for Madrid. To leave Madrid about the 12th of June, for points north. I should like, if I can afford it, to stop over at a town or two in the north of Spain before going on to France; if I can’t shall go right along to Paris D.V.

I believe I have enough money to manage it—though if I should receive a Jackson from you before moving on it will be welcome. Therefore: if you will send to this Paris address, to be there around the 15th of June,
or a few days before
, any kind of negotiable check for 50$: c/o American Express [¶] 11, Rue Scribe, Paris France., and if I arrive penniless, as I most certainly shall, I can, with Jake’s help, get straightened out. Also: have cashed the Bilbao check.

I wonder: did you ever get around to sending that medicine, for my pension master in Madrid, that I asked for in the US-mailed letter?

Looking at the calendar, there is apparently hardly more than time for a letter from you at Madrid, answering this one—though send nothing in it in the way of $, cheques, gold-pieces, &c. Greetings and God-speed will suffice.

That seems to be all at the moment; must write Jake, from whom I have just had a letter, warning him of the Thing that will soon appear on his horizon—garbed in a linen toga, wild-eyed, and hempen sandals, with pockets full of oranges, —the lost Iberian.

love to you,

W

Fair stood the wind for France: the opening line of Michael Drayton’s “To the Cambro-Britions and Their Harp, His Ballad of Agincourt” (1619).

Jackson: their code for a $20 bill.

To Edith Gaddis

[
WG spent the next year and a half in Paris, which is satirized in the second chapter of
R
.
]

Paris

17 June 49

dear Mother,

No doubt about it, Paris is a beautiful city. And everything is somehow pleasanter than I expected. Nothing to be alarmed about. I was apparently very fortunate to get a hotel room, they being about as difficult to come on as in NY; but met in the train from Madrid a very nice Spanish gentleman, who had the whole Spanish lack of respect for things French (a mutual attitutude), and, I think somewhat alarmed that this young American would find France nicer than Spain, outdid himself in niceties, finally recommending me to a friend of his here, a hotel-keeper. And so I am, and on the Right Bank (the Left Bank being you know the traditional home of Bohemian high-jinks &c). Still having monstrous difficulties with the language, Spanish is all I can speak, blubbering and yammering.

But the city, in spite of the fact that it [is] not architecturally anything remarkable—Notre Dame for instance is not at all as magnificent as Christmas-card engravings have led us to believe—is impressive in its endless vistas, boulevards and avenues of great width, always terminating in some sort of well-known construction. And so in spite of the familiarity of the Arc de Triumphe, the Eiffel Tower &c, all these things are wonderful because of the way they are presented. Unlike most cities I have seen (and notably NY) Paris is less impressive when seen from an elevation. NY for instance is nothing until you get up 102 storeys and look down on it; Paris from the top of the Arch is simply a table-top of dull house-rooves, because of the fairly consistent height of the buildings, they are all about 7 storeys. But the city radiating out around you as you stand in the Champs Elysees, or along the Seine, is beautiful. (And after all a city is to be lived in on the ground, or is it.) And along the Seine at 5am remarkably beautiful.

I have seen Jake, and he looks wonderfully well, in good spirits and healthy, working at his school where he will be through in a few weeks and on translations, in general very fine. Just now he and I are trying to work out the summer plans, may involve going to an inexpensive country place near Tours, south of Paris, quite undecided as yet. But here was Jacob, perfectly: after we had not encountered for something like 2 years, and of course there were thousands of words to exchange, things to go over, cultures to compare &c &c, the evening of our meeting (and both of us grinning like idiots on the first encounter, with pleasure) Mr Bean proposes that we attend a performance of some Beethoven quartets, which we did. Well.

And then, if all sounds too healthy to be bearable, I shall go on to say that last evening there arrived from Florence Italy the paralytic Mr Bubu Faulkner, drink being the agency of his paralysis. Dear heaven, how he can keep it up. At any rate we went over to the left bank, where generations of odd people have congregated, and there I participated briefly in what Miss Williams called the imitation of Greenwich Village, and since Gr Vil is a traditional imitation of the left bank . . . boring to me, bored to extinction, the flowers of evil indeed. The whole thing rather pathetic, seeing French police loading American lily-boys into a van, and really quite foolish. And so I continue to enjoy Paris from the river’s bourgeois side.

One thing remarkable after the desert of Spain is to find here such unlimited publications, books, reviews, and theatre, and concerts, &c. But even so I am still attached south of the Pyrenees, Spain has more to do with me, or for me, than here. Paris is, needless to say, more expensive on all counts. But there are aspects that are almost provincial after Spain; for instance, one must eat lunch between 12 and 1:30, while Madrid’s lunch hour is 2 at earliest. And you can’t dine after 9 (I suppose Maxims and Fouquets serve, haven’t investigated), in all that they are like nice respectable French farmers. And by 11 the city seems to have retired, while Madrid’s theatre starts at 11, and you really can’t be seen at night spots before 1. Well. I am quite pleased to find it so innocent.

For other plans, I don’t know. Bernie is to arrive here in a few days, but somehow I don’t think, after the initial greetings, we’ll have much to do. The pleasures and pastimes he has adopted in the last year don’t appeal even slightly to me, nor the company, most of whom seem to be appearing. And then for Barney, another uncertainty. Paris, I understand, is something he can’t cope with. And heaven knows I don’t want to see any human disasters just now. But shall write him and see what he ‘plans’. And there is Miss Williams, still on the Riviera and half-planning to come up here, hope to see her but don’t manage such a trip just now. [...]

One oclock, I had best get out and look for a small restaurant, or shall be caught lunchless in this provincial town.

with love,

W

BuBu Faulkner: Robert Eames Faulkner III (1913–86); after working for the
New Yorker
in the 1930s and serving during World War II, he led a bohemian life in Europe and North Africa.

imitation of Greenwich Village [...] imitation of the left bank: In
R,
Ed Feasley complains, “—I haven’t been in Paris since I was seven years old, Chrahst to go there now! I mean to Saint Germain des Prés where they’re imitating Greenwich Village and here we are in Greenwich Village still imitating Montmartre” (746).

the flowers of evil:
Les Fleurs du mal
(1957), Charles Baudelaire’s best-known book of poetry.

To Edith Gaddis

(American Express) [Paris]

[3 July 1949]

dear Mother.

Here we are, 6 of us at noon sitting before a small café, all over the sidewalk—Bernie, Jake, and an interesting assortment—and I realise—have for some days—that it is long since I wrote. Things have been “active”—having just gone down to Nice, Cannes &c—found Miss Margaret Williams, and brought her back to Paris. Well. By now I am so mixed up. Quite uncertain about the summer, about Miss Williams, about everything in sight. And of course in the expected desperate state about money. ——Knowing this letter sounds distracted (it is hardly the propitious circumstance for letter-writing) but I am “well”—Also to say I had the sad news of Grunter, wrote you another and unmailed letter—and just now of Chas. Hall, whom I may manage to see if I can find a clean shirt—

love,

W.