Comments

1. Head-the-Ball

   on September 9, 2006
   

   Suggestions? Ah Martin, how that picture brings back so many memories! Despite the ravages that time may have wreaked on my eyesight, the memories come flooding back of that marvellous summer that I spent in an attempt to solve the perennial problems with the drains at rue de Fleurus (although I must plead that my efforts might have been crowned with success had I not loaned Hemingway my best spanner and had I more resolutely refused all offers of “help” with the manhole cover from Sylvia Beach). So, let me attempt to set the record straight…
   Martin, you’re not the first person to be taken-in by the “Josephine Baker” disguise; let us hope that you may be the last! No, in fact it’s old Oswald Moseley, who always delighted in dressing-up; but whose friendship with Joyce was irretrievably shattered that evening because he made the mistake of sitting too close to the latter who (his eyesight having all but failed by that time) misinterpreted the “Bon Appétit” invitation from Sister Gertie (as I use to playfully call her, much to her amusement) and helped himself to a banana from “Josie’s” hat. Las belle Josie herself spent that entire summer at Leningrad with Errol Flynn, of whose difficulties with the plumbing at Bilignin I need say nothing here.
   Radclyffe Hall, who had dropped in on her way back from finding her lost generator, sits second from the left in the picture (I often wonder if this event accounts, in fact, for the all-too-frequent “lost generation” misquotation; originated, I believe, by Sam Beckett, who was somewhat the worse for wear having returned from a trip to the village to buy kerosene for the same generator, but from his appearance I believe that he had spent most of the afternoon in the Café des Amis in the company of Scottie Fitzgerald). This may also account for her frosty demeanour towards Mícheál McLiammóir, to her right (supposedly engaged in re-tiling Picasso’s roof at Antibes at the time, but he had appeared mysteriously at Montparnasse the previous day “to buy more grout”).
   Seated to Errol Flynn’s right it is of course Ford Madox Ford, of whose difficulties with the plumbing at Bilignin I need say nothing here (his drunken attempt to dance with Auden later that night may well account for the later “Hueffer” synonym). He recounted an amusing anecdote about a farmer in Cúil Aodha who claimed to own “a million beds”.
   Gertie had told me that we would dine on a simple Omelette, obviously in an attempt to make her peace with me after the débâcle of the previous week when she had foolishly agreed to allow Anäis Nin to prepare supper; but you will be all-to-aware of how a mysterious outbreak of food poisoning throughout the 6ème put paid to John Steinbeck’s efforts to re-paint the patio and install a fountain in the atrium. Máirtín O Caidhin (that’s his coat draped over the back of Baldwin’s chair) told me many years later that Hemingway swore to him that he had foolishly given Nin some caillos de buey that he had found outside the Plaza de Toros in Ronda before setting-out for Paris.
   But an intervention by that appalling Toklas woman (seated beside Willie Thackeray) earlier that same afternoon meant that we dined instead on some rather distasteful morsels of paté des rognons and fromage de lapin which you can see on the table, together with a bottle of spirits of wine which I had foolishly left on the table after an attempt to fix the deraillieur on W. H. Auden’s bicycle (whose self-portrait, if I’m not mistaken, occupies a privileged position on Gertie’s wall, just above the group-photo that I took when we all visited the quincaillerie in the Marais to buy new hinges for the music-stand (Ezra Pound subsequently purchased the quincaillerie from Matisse, who had always told Sylvia that “Shakespeare & Co” was putting the customers off but who never had much head with figures, and ran it as a successful business until his death. I searched for it on my last visit to Paris, and was intrigued to find “The Pound Shop” at the same location; but Martin, you of all people know how the memory can play tricks).
   Although I will admit (as has been asserted elsewhere by the Zola brothers, of whom more anon) to a fondness for all of the Steins (Gertie, Ein, Wittengen, Bier, beck, among others) the story put-about by Apollinaire is, I assure you, largely a fabrication; Helene always insisted that Gertie’s relationship with the tradesmen be on a strictly professional level.

The comments are closed.