At the time the Dial, an American literary magazine edited by Scofield Thayer, gave an annual award of, I believe, a thousand dollars for excellence in the practice of letters by a contributor. This was a huge sum for any straight writer to receive in those days, in addition to the prestige, and the award had gone to various people, all deserving, naturally. Two people, then, could live comfortably and well in Europe on five dollars a day and could travel.
This quarterly, of which Walsh was one of the editors, was alleged to be going to award a very substantial sum to the contributor whose work should be judged the best at the end of the first four issues.
If the news was passed around by gossip or rumor, or if it was a matter of personal confidence, cannot be said. Let us hope and believe always that it was completely honorable in every way. Certainly nothing could ever be said or imputed against Walsh’s co-editor.
It was not long after I heard rumors of this alleged award that Walsh asked me to lunch one day at a restaurant that was the best and the most expensive in the Boulevard St.-Michel quarter and after the oysters, expensive flat faintly coppery marennes, not the familiar, deep, inexpensive portugaises, and a bottle of Pouilly Fuisé, began to lead up to it delicately.
He appeared to be conning me as he had conned the shills from the boat—if they were shills and if he had conned them, of course—and when he asked me if I would like another dozen of the flat oysters as he called them, I said I would like them very much. He did not bother to look marked for death with me and this was a relief. He knew I knew he had the con, not the kind you con with but the kind you died of then and how bad it was, and he did not bother to have to cough, and I was grateful for this at the table.
I was wondering if he ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask him. I began my second dozen of the flat oysters, picking them from their bed of crushed ice on the silver plate, watching their unbelievably delicate brown edges react and cringe as I squeezed lemon juice on them and separated the holding muscle from the shell and lifted them to chew them carefully.
“Ezra’s a great, great poet,” Walsh said, looking at me with his own dark poet’s eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “And a fine man.”
“Noble,” Walsh said. “Truly noble.” We ate and drank in silence as a tribute to Ezra’s nobility. I missed Ezra and wished he were there. He could not afford marennes either.
“Joyce is great,” Walsh said. “Great. Great.”
“Great,” I said. “And a good friend.” We had become friends in his wonderful period after the finishing of Ulysses and before starting what was called for a long time Work in Progress. I thought of Joyce and remembered many things.
“I wish his eyes were better,” Walsh said.
“So does he,” I said.
“It is the tragedy of our time,” Walsh told me.
“Everybody has something wrong with them,” I said, trying to cheer up the lunch.
“You haven’t.” He gave me all his charm and more, and then he marked himself for death.
“You mean I am not marked for death?” I asked. I could not help it.
“No. You’re marked for Life.” He capitalized the word.
“Give me time,” I said.
He wanted a good steak, rare, and I ordered two tournedos with sauce Béarnaise. I figured the butter would be good for him.
“What about a red wine?” he asked. The sommelier came and I ordered a Châteauneuf du Pape. I would walk it off afterwards along the quais. He could sleep it off, or do what he wanted to. I might take mine someplace, I thought.
It came as we finished the steak and french-fried potatoes and were two-thirds through the Châteauneuf du Pape which is not a luncheon wine.
“There’s no use beating around the bush,” he said. “You know you’re to get the award, don’t you?”
“Am I?” I said. “Why?”
“You’re to get it,” he said. He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. It made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. I’ve seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust for all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death. Now you will con me. Con not, that thou be not conned. Death was not conning with him. It was coming all right.
“I don’t think I deserve it, Ernest,” I said, enjoying using my own name, that I hated, to him. “Besides, Ernest, it would not be ethical, Ernest.”
“It’s strange we have the same name, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Ernest,” I said. “It’s a name we must both live up to. You see what I mean, don’t you, Ernest?”
“Yes, Ernest,” he said. He gave me complete, sad Irish understanding and the charm.
So I was always very nice to him and to his magazine and when he had his hemorrhages and left Paris asking me to see his magazine through the printers, who did not read English, I did that. I had seen one of the hemorrhages, it was very legitimate, and I knew that he would die all right, and it pleased me at that time, which was a difficult time in my life, to be extremely nice to him, as it pleased me to call him Ernest. Also, I liked and admired his co-editor. She had not promised me any award. She only wished to build a good magazine and pay her contributors well.
One day, much later, I met Joyce who was walking along the Boulevard St.-Germain after having been to a matinée alone. He liked to listen to the actors, although he could not see them. He asked me to have a drink with him and we went to the Deux-Magots and ordered dry sherry although you will always read that he drank only Swiss white wine.
“How about Walsh?” Joyce said.
“A such and such alive is a such and such dead,” I said.
“Did he promise you that award?” Joyce asked.
“Yes.”
“I thought so,” Joyce said.
“Did he promise it to you?”
“Yes,” Joyce said. After a time he asked, “Do you think he promised it to Pound?”
“I don’t know.”
“Best not to ask him,” Joyce said. We left it at that. I told Joyce of my first meeting with him in Ezra’s studio with the girls in the long fur coats and it made him happy to hear the story.
Evan Shipman at the Lilas
From the day I had found Sylvia Beach’s library I had read all of Turgenev, what had been published in English of Gogol, the Constance Garnett translations of Tolstoi and the English translations of Chekov. In Toronto, before we had ever come to Paris, I had been told Katherine Mansfield was a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer, but trying to read her after Chekov was like hearing the carefully artificial tales of a young old-maid compared to those of an articulate and knowing physician who was a good and simple writer.
Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water. But Chekov was not water except for the clarity. There were some stories that seemed to be only journalism. But there were wonderful ones too.
In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi.
Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house.
Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village
