I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.
“To tell you the truth, Hem,” Ezra said, “I’ve never read the Rooshians.”
It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste—the one and only correct word to use—the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.
“Keep to the French,” Ezra said. “You’ve plenty to learn there.”
“I know it,” I said. “I’ve plenty to learn everywhere.”
Later after leaving Ezra’s studio and walking along the street to the sawmill, looking down the high-sided street to the opening at the end where the bare trees showed and behind them the far façade of the Bal Bullier across the width of the Boulevard St.-Michel, I opened the gate and went in past the fresh-sawn lumber and left my racket in its press beside the stairs that led to the top floor of the pavillon. I called up the stairs but there was no one home.
“Madame has gone out and the bonne and the baby too,” the wife of the sawmill owner told me. She was a difficult woman, over-plump, with brassy hair, and I thanked her.
“There was a young man to see you,” she said, using the term jeune homme instead of monsieur. “He said he would be at the Lilas.”
“Thank you very much,” I said. “If Madame comes in, please tell her I am at the Lilas.”
“She went out with friends,” the wife said and gathering her purple dressing gown about her went on high heels into the doorway of her own domaine without closing the door.
I walked down the street between the high, stained and streaked white houses and turned to the right at the open, sunny end and went into the sun-striped dusk of the Lilas.
There was no one there I knew and I went outside onto the terrace and found Evan Shipman waiting. He was a fine poet and he knew and cared about horses, writing and painting. He rose and I saw him tall and pale and thin, his white shirt dirty and worn at the collar, his tie carefully knotted, his worn and wrinkled grey suit, his fingers stained darker than his hair, his nails dirty and his loving, deprecatory smile that he held tightly not to show his bad teeth.
“It’s good to see you, Hem,” he said.
“How are you, Evan?” I asked.
“A little down,” he said. “I think I have the ‘Mazeppa’ licked though. Have you been going well?”
“I hope so,” I said. “I was out playing tennis with Ezra when you came by.”
“Is Ezra well?”
“Very.”
“I’m so glad. Hem, you know I don’t think that owner’s wife where you live likes me. She wouldn’t let me wait upstairs for you.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said.
“Don’t bother. I can always wait here. It’s very pleasant in the sun now, isn’t it?”
“It’s fall now,” I said. “I don’t think you dress warmly enough.”
“It’s only cool in the evening,” Evan said. “I’ll wear my coat.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“No. But it’s somewhere safe.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I left the poem in it.” He laughed heartily holding his lips tightly over the teeth. “Have a whisky with me, please, Hem.”
“All right.”
“Jean,” Evan got up and called the waiter. “Two whiskies please.”
Jean brought the bottle and the glasses and two ten-franc saucers with the syphon. He used no measuring glass and poured the whisky until the glasses were more than three-quarters full. Jean loved Evan who often went out and worked with him at his garden in Montrouge, out beyond the Porte d’Orléans, on Jean’s day off.
“You mustn’t exaggerate,” Evan said to the tall old waiter.
“They are two whiskies, aren’t they?” the waiter asked.
We added water and Evan said, “Take the first sip very carefully, Hem. Properly handled, they will hold us for some time.”
“Are you taking any care of yourself?” I asked.
“Yes, truly, Hem. Let’s talk about something else, should we?”
There was no one sitting on the terrace and the whisky was warming us both although I was better dressed for the fall than Evan as I wore a sweatshirt for underwear and then a shirt and a blue wool French sailor’s sweater over the shirt.
“I’ve been wondering about Dostoyevsky,” I said. “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?”
“It can’t be the translation,” Evan said. “She makes the Tolstoi come out well written.”
“I know. I remember how many times I tried to read War and Peace until I got the Constance Garnett translation.”
“They say it can be improved on,” Evan said. “I’m sure it can although I don’t know Russian. But we both know translations. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over.”
“I know,” I said. “But you can’t read Dostoyevsky over and over. I had Crime and Punishment on a trip when we ran out of books down at Schruns, and I couldn’t read it again when we had nothing to read. I read the Austrian papers and studied German until we found some Trollope in Tauchnitz.”
“God bless Tauchnitz,” Evan said. The whisky had lost its burning quality and was now, when water was added, simply much too strong.
“Dostoyevsky was a shit, Hem,” Evan went on. “He was best on shits and saints. He makes wonderful saints. It’s a shame we can’t reread him.”
“I’m going to try The Brothers again. It was probably my fault.”
“You can read some of it again. Most of it. But then it will start to make you angry, no matter how great it is.”
“Well, we were lucky to have had it to read the first time and maybe there will be a better translation.”
“But don’t let it tempt you, Hem.”
“I won’t. I’m trying to do it so it will make it without you knowing it, and so the more you read it, the more there will be.”
“Well I’m backing you in Jean’s whisky,” Evan said.
“He’ll get in trouble doing that,” I said.
“He’s in trouble already,” Evan said.
“How?”
“They’re changing the management,” Evan said. “The new owners want to have a different clientele that will spend some money and they are going to put in an American bar. The waiters are going to be in white jackets, Hem, and they have been ordered to be ready to shave off their mustaches.”
“They can’t do that to André and Jean.”
“They shouldn’t be able to, but they will.”
“Jean has had a mustache all his life. That’s a dragoon’s mustache. He served in a cavalry regiment.”
“He’s going to have to cut it off.”
I drank the last of the whisky.
“Another whisky, Monsieur?” Jean asked. “A whisky, Monsieur Shipman?” His heavy drooping mustache was a part of his thin, kind face, and the bald top of his head glistened under the strands of hair that were slicked across it.
“Don’t do it, Jean,” I said. “Don’t take a chance.”
“There is no chance,” he said, softly to us. “There is much confusion. Many are leaving. Entendu, Messieurs,” he said aloud. He went into the café and came out carrying the bottle of whisky, two large glasses, two ten-franc gold-rimmed saucers and a seltzer bottle.
“No, Jean,” I said.
He put the glasses down on the saucers and filled them almost to the brim with whisky and took the remains of the bottle back into the café. Evan and I squirted a little seltzer into the glasses.
“It was a good thing Dostoyevsky didn’t know Jean,” Evan said. “He might have died of drink.”
“What are we going to do with these?”
“Drink them,” Evan said. “It’s a protest. It’s direct action.”
On the following Monday when I went to the Lilas to work in the morning, André served me a bovril, which is a cup of beef extract and water. He was short and blond and where his stubby mustache had been, his lip was as bare as a priest’s. He was wearing a white American barman’s coat.
“And Jean?”
“He won’t be in until tomorrow.”
“How is he?”
“It took him longer to reconcile himself. He was in a heavy cavalry regiment throughout the war. He had the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire.”
“I did not know he was so badly wounded.”
“No. He was wounded of course but it was the other sort of Médaille Militaire he has. For gallantry.”
“Tell him I asked for him.”
“Of course,” André said. “I hope it will not take him too long to reconcile himself.”
“Please give him Mr. Shipman’s greeting too.”
“Mr. Shipman is with him,” André said. “They are gardening together.”
An Agent of Evil
The last thing Ezra said to me before he left the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to Rapallo was, “Hem, I want you to keep this jar of opium and give it to Dunning only when he needs it.”
It was a large cold-cream jar and when I unscrewed the top the
