It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. LOCATION: 10
its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling. LOCATION: 20
All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife—second class—and the hotel where Verlaine had died where you had a room on the top floor where you worked. LOCATION: 21
I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. LOCATION: 35
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. LOCATION: 46
I hope she’s gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad. LOCATION: 51
After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day. LOCATION: 53
Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. LOCATION: 64
her eyes and her smile lighted up at decisions as though they were rich presents. LOCATION: 69
The trees were beautiful without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains were blowing in the bright light. LOCATION: 80
All the distances were short now since we had been in the mountains. LOCATION: 81
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. LOCATION: 91
That way I could be sure of going on the next day. LOCATION: 92
But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline. LOCATION: 92
It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when you had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris. LOCATION: 99
I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. LOCATION: 107
converted into a controlled fire on your tongue LOCATION: 115
although the friend was frightening, LOCATION: 123
what if it is not dirty but it is only that you are trying to use words that people would actually use? That are the only words that can make the story come true and that you must use them? You have to use them.” LOCATION: 131
I did not agree at all but it was a point of view and I did not believe in arguing with my elders. I would much rather hear them talk and many of the things that Gertrude said were very intelligent. LOCATION: 135
She told me that sooner or later I must give up journalism and I could not have agreed with her more. LOCATION: 136
“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes and money to buy pictures.” LOCATION: 141
She had such a personality that when she wished to win anyone over to her side she could not be resisted, and critics who met her and saw her pictures took writing of hers that they could not understand on trust because of their enthusiasm for her as a person, and their confidence in her judgment. LOCATION: 162
She had also discovered many things about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them. LOCATION: 164
But for her to continue to write each day without the drudgery of revision nor the obligation to make her writing intelligible and continue to have the true happiness of creation, it was beginning to become necessary for her to have publication and official acceptance, especially for the unbelievably long book called The Making of Americans. LOCATION: 166
This book began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with stretches of great brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket. LOCATION: 169
I came to know it very well as I got Ford Madox Ford to publish it in The Transatlantic Review serially—forced, perhaps would be the word—knowing that it would outrun the life of the review. LOCATION: 170
Miss Stein thought that I was what we would probably call now a square about sex and I must admit that I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. LOCATION: 175
If you knew you would kill, other people sensed it very quickly and you were let alone; but there were certain situations you could not allow yourself to be forced into or trapped into. LOCATION: 181
“Yes, yes, Hemingway,” she said. “But you were living in a milieu of criminals and perverts.” LOCATION: 185
I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world such as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them; but some of them I could not like and some I still hated. LOCATION: 186
I took another sip of the eau-de-vie and pitied the old man and looked at Picasso’s nude of the girl with the basket of flowers. I had not started the conversation and thought it had become a little dangerous. There were almost never any pauses in a conversation with Miss Stein, but we had paused and there was something she wanted to tell me and I filled my glass. LOCATION: 201
I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of A Sportsman’s Sketches and an early book of D. H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky. LOCATION: 234
“Wait until you see if I pay you,” I said. “But thank you very much.” LOCATION: 250
“Don’t read too fast,” she said. LOCATION: 251
We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.” “We can have two drinks.” “Then we can eat somewhere.” “No. Don’t forget we have to pay the library.” “We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.” “And we’ll never love anyone else but each other.” “No. Never.” LOCATION: 259
“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too. LOCATION: 277
All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.” LOCATION: 301
When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. LOCATION: 340
The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. LOCATION: 345
the small, pretty and larcenous track that was the home of the outsider. LOCATION: 358
The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on. LOCATION: 369
We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other. LOCATION: 376
“You wouldn’t rather spend it some other way?” “No,” she said arrogantly. She had the lovely high cheekbones for arrogance. “Who are we anyway?” LOCATION: 381
“Yes Tatie, and you and Chink always talking about how to make things true, writing them, and put them rightly and not describe. LOCATION: 424
“We all three argued about everything and always specific things and we made fun of each other. I remember everything we ever did and everything we ever said on the whole trip,” Hadley said. LOCATION: 428
When you and Chink talked I was included. It wasn’t like being a wife at Miss Stein’s.” LOCATION: 430
Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, “I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.” LOCATION: 462
I knew I was hungry in a simple way. LOCATION: 465
the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper. LOCATION: 475
But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight. LOCATION: 481
It was not really racing either. It was gambling on horses. But we called it racing. LOCATION: 487
I, the one who was so righteous about people and their destructiveness, tolerated this one that was the falsest, most beautiful, most exciting, vicious, and demanding because she could be profitable. LOCATION: 489
When I stopped working on the races I was glad but it left an emptiness. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. LOCATION: 506
for a long time it was enough just to be back in our part of Paris and away from the track and to bet on your own life and work, and on the painters that you knew and not try to make your living gambling and call it by some other name. LOCATION: 535
each one a part of his machine; LOCATION: 539
French is the only language it has ever been written in properly and the terms are all French and that is what makes it so hard to write. LOCATION: 555
She wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad. LOCATION: 565
The other things I did not talk of and wrote by myself. LOCATION: 567
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written, to keep my mind from going on with the story I was working on. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in my body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing; but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it. LOCATION: 569
To keep my mind off writing sometimes after I had worked I would read writers who were writing then, such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence LOCATION: 575
“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.” LOCATION: 579
In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald. LOCATION: 598
I had attacked someone that was a part of her apparatus. LOCATION: 611
Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. LOCATION: 618
“That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” Miss Stein said. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.” “Really?” I said. “You are,” she insisted. “You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death. . . .” “Was the young mechanic drunk?” I asked. “Of course not.” “Have you ever seen me drunk?” “No. But your friends are drunk.” “I’ve been drunk,” I said. “But I don’t come here drunk.” “Of course not. I didn’t say that.” LOCATION: 622
Later when I published my first novel I tried to balance Miss Stein’s quotation from the garage keeper with one from Ecclesiastes. LOCATION: 634
I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation? LOCATION: 638
I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill. LOCATION: 640
and all the dirty, easy labels. LOCATION: 647
“But she does talk a lot of rot sometimes.” LOCATION: 650
“I never hear her,” my wife said. “I’m a wife. It’s her friend that talks to me.” LOCATION: 651
Hunger Was Good Discipline LOCATION: 653
I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought it was possibly only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way. LOCATION: 659
By the time you reached 12 rue de l’Odéon your hunger was contained but all of your perceptions were heightened again. The photographs looked different and you saw books that you had never seen before. LOCATION: 670
“But, Hemingway, don’t worry about what they bring now. The point is that you can write them.” “I know. I can write them. But nobody will buy them. There is no money coming in since I quit journalism.” “They will sell. Look. You have the money for one right there.” “I’m sorry, Sylvia. You forgive me for speaking about it.” “Forgive you for what? Always talk about it or about anything. Don’t you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles? But promise me you won’t worry and that you’ll eat enough.” “I promise.” “Then get home now and have lunch.” LOCATION: 696
And then the next thing you would be compromising on something else. LOCATION: 708
Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry. Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now? LOCATION: 708
Then, when he read the story, I saw he was hurt far more than I was. I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry. We would work it out. Then, finally, she told me. I was sure she could not have brought the carbons too and I hired someone to cover for me on my newspaper job, I was making good money then at journalism, and took the train for Paris. It was true all right and I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true. That was over now and Chink had taught me never to discuss casualties so I told O’Brien not to feel so badly. It was probably good for me to lose early work and I told him all that stuff you feed the troops. I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it, only trying to lie so that he would not feel so badly, I knew that it was true. LOCATION: 734
It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood. LOCATION: 744
Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it; but you can work something out. LOCATION: 750
I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. LOCATION: 752
It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race. LOCATION: 753
I knew too that I must write a novel. I would put it off though until I could not help doing it. I was damned if I would write one because it was what I should do if we were to eat regularly. When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice. Let the pressure build. In the meantime I would write a long story about whatever I knew best. LOCATION: 755
What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most? LOCATION: 760
The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it. LOCATION: 766
All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start to work again. In those days we never thought that any of that could be difficult. LOCATION: 770
In those days many people went to the cafés at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality. LOCATION: 778
no one was on exhibition. LOCATION: 790
In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone, and there was a strong feeling that Cendrars, our only poet, might well be a little less flashy about his vanished arm. I was glad he had been in the Lilas early in the afternoon before the regular clients had arrived. LOCATION: 796
“Then you can only cut someone you have known on terms of equality?” I pursued. “Naturally.” LOCATION: 857
“You had the air of a man alone in the jungle,” he said. LOCATION: 906
“I am like a blind pig when I work.” LOCATION: 907
I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink. LOCATION: 920
some of whom I knew and some that were only decoration. LOCATION: 936
One was very dark, small, beautifully built with a falsely fragile depravity. She was a lesbian who also liked men. LOCATION: 939
The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring. LOCATION: 939
The dark girl was restless and she sat on display turning her profile and letting the light strike the concave planes of her face and showing me her breasts under the hold of the black sweater. Her hair was cropped short and was sleek and dark as an oriental’s. LOCATION: 960
“You’ve posed all day,” Pascin said to her. “Do you have to model that sweater now at the café?” LOCATION: 962
“You want me to paint you and pay you and bang you to keep my head clear, and be in love with you too,” Pascin said. “You poor little doll.” LOCATION: 972
“No. I go to eat with my légitime.” That was what they said then. Now they say “my régulière. LOCATION: 981
“You have to go?” “Have to and want to.” “Go on, then,” Pascin said. “And don’t fall in love with typewriting paper.” “If I do, I’ll write with a pencil.” LOCATION: 982
He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. LOCATION: 994
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure. LOCATION: 996
I was very impressed by them but I did not like their paintings. I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it. LOCATION: 1003
He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment. LOCATION: 1008
If a man liked his friends’ painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. LOCATION: 1009
even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous. LOCATION: 1012
Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint. He was also irascible but so, I believe, have been many saints. LOCATION: 1013
I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him, as you do when you are boxing, and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. LOCATION: 1028
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty. LOCATION: 1029
when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. LOCATION: 1033
About a week afterwards I met Miss Stein and told her I’d met Wyndham Lewis and asked her if she had ever met him. “I call him ‘the Measuring Worm,’ ” she said. “He comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb. Sighting on it and measuring it and seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn’t come out right. He’s missed what it’s all about.” LOCATION: 1036
So I thought of him as the Measuring Worm. It was a kinder and more Christian term than what I had thought about him myself. Later I tried to like him and to be friends with him as I did with nearly all of Ezra’s friends when he explained them to me. But this was how he seemed to me on the first day I ever met him in Ezra’s studio. LOCATION: 1040
You should know a little about the system of not visiting people. You had to learn it. LOCATION: 1057
It was sad to see new worthless pictures hung in with the great pictures but it made no difference any more. LOCATION: 1077
She quarreled with nearly all of us that were fond of her except Juan Gris and she couldn’t quarrel with him because he was dead. I am not sure that he would have cared because he was past caring and it showed in his paintings. LOCATION: 1078
He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. I was embarrassed and 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 was 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, lest thou be not conned. Death was not conning with him. It was coming all right. LOCATION: 1163
“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. LOCATION: 1167
“Now 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 cannot remember when Walsh died. It was long before that evening with Joyce. But I can remember telling Joyce of my first meeting with him in Ezra’s studio with the girls in the long fur coats and how very happy it made him to hear the story. LOCATION: 1180
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. LOCATION: 1191
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 or your pension in the Hotel Taube in the village at night; and you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians. LOCATION: 1196
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,” 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 given 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. LOCATION: 1208
“Keep to the French,” Ezra said. “You’ve plenty to learn there.” “I know it,” I said. “I’ve plenty to learn everywhere.” LOCATION: 1215
“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.” LOCATION: 1259
“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.” LOCATION: 1270
“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.” “Don’t bring it, Jean.” “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.” LOCATION: 1289
For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. LOCATION: 1363
Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery. “We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,” he once said to me. “The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.” LOCATION: 1363
The man said the lecturer was the type of swine who had ruined Germany and in twenty years they would do it again. The woman with him told him to shut up in French and said this is a small place and you never know. LOCATION: 1458
the peasants at the far upper end of the Montafon where we hired porters to go up to the Madlener-Haus, we were all foreign devils who went into the high mountains when people should stay out of them. That we started before daylight in order not to pass avalanche places when the sun could make them dangerous was not to our credit. It only proved we were tricky as all foreign devils are. LOCATION: 1492
The last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to that winter and the murderous summer that was to follow. Hadley and I had become too confident in each other and careless in our confidence and pride. In the mechanics of how this was penetrated I have never tried to apportion the blame, except my own part, and that was clearer all my life. The bulldozing of three people’s hearts to destroy one happiness and build another and the love and the good work and all that came out of it is not part of this book. I wrote it and left it out. It is a complicated, valuable and instructive story. How it all ended, finally, has nothing to do with this either. Any blame in that was mine to take and possess and understand. The only one, Hadley, who had no possible blame, ever, came well out of it finally and married a much finer man than I ever was or could hope to be and is happy and deserves it and that was one good and lasting thing that came of that year. LOCATION: 1505
Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more. LOCATION: 1523
we sat there, me liking it and he trying to like it, LOCATION: 1588
Since I had started to break all my writing down and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph. LOCATION: 1623
I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life. LOCATION: 1761
Scott was still lying as though on his tomb, sculpted as a monument to himself, LOCATION: 1764
You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone who was crazy, but I was getting angry with myself for having become involved in the whole silliness. LOCATION: 1771
Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer. LOCATION: 1776
At that time Scott hated the French, and since almost the only French he met with regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi-drivers, garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them. LOCATION: 1803
He hated the Italians even more than the French and could not talk about them calmly even when he was sober. The English he often hated but he sometimes tolerated them and occasionally looked up to them. I do not know how he felt about the Germans and the Austrians. I do not know whether he had ever met any then or any Swiss. LOCATION: 1805
He gave me a sort of oral Ph.D. thesis on Michael Arlen. LOCATION: 1897
We were happy the way children are who have been separated and are together again and I told her about the trip. LOCATION: 1903
“I learned one thing.” “What?” “Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.” LOCATION: 1909
We both touched wood on the café table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood nor on marble, as this café table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy. LOCATION: 1919
Scott was being the good cheerful host and Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes and her mouth too as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write. Zelda was very jealous of Scott’s work and as we got to know them, this fell into a regular pattern. Scott would resolve not to go on all-night drinking parties and to get some exercise each day and work regularly. He would start to work and as soon as he was working well Zelda would begin complaining about how bored she was and get him off on another drunken party. They would quarrel and then make up and he would sweat out the alcohol on long walks with me, and make up his mind that this time he would really work, and would start off well. Then it would start all over again. LOCATION: 1953
It was only Zelda’s secret that she shared with me, as a hawk might share something with a man. But hawks do not share. Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane. LOCATION: 2031
“It is not basically a question of the size in repose,” I said. “It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.” I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know. LOCATION: 2068
Zelda just wants to destroy you.” “You don’t know anything about Zelda.” LOCATION: 2072
“Have you ever seen anything in here except the Mona Lisa?” LOCATION: 2076
When you first start writing stories in the first person, if the stories are made so real that people believe them, the people reading them nearly always think the stories really happened to you. That is natural because while you were making them up you had to make them happen to the person who was telling them. LOCATION: 2271
If you do this successfully enough, you make the person who is reading them believe that the things happened to him too. If you can do this you are beginning to get what you are trying for, which is to make something that will become a part of the reader’s experience and a part of his memory. There must be things that he did not notice when he read the story or the novel which, without his knowing it, enter into his memory and experience so that they are a part of his life. This is not easy to do. LOCATION: 2273
My own small experiences gave me a touchstone by which I could tell whether stories were true or false and being wounded was a password. LOCATION: 2284
I found out very quickly that the best way to avoid going over to the right bank and get involved in all the pleasant things that I could not afford and that left me with, at least, gastric remorse was not to get a haircut. You could not go over to the right bank with your hair cut like one of those wonderful looking Japanese noblemen painters who were friends of Ezra’s. That would have been ideal and would have limited you to your own side of the river completely and kept you working. You were never free of assignments long enough for that sort of mane to grow but in two months you would look like something left over from the American Civil War and unacceptable. After three months you would have a good start on the sort of hair cut Ezra’s wonderful Japanese friends had and your right bank friends would think of you as damned. I never knew just what it was that you were supposed to be damned to but after four months or so you were considered damned to something worse. I enjoyed being considered damned and my wife and I enjoyed being considered damned together. LOCATION: 2295
People who interfered in your life always did it for your own good and I figured it out finally that what they wanted was for you to conform completely and never differ from some accepted surface standard and then dissipate the way traveling salesmen would at a convention in every stupid and boreing way there was. LOCATION: 2309
They knew nothing of our pleasures nor how much fun it was to be damned to ourselves and never would know nor could know. Our pleasures, which were those of being in love, were as simple and still as mysterious and complicated as a simple mathematical formula that can mean all happiness or can mean the end of the world. LOCATION: 2312
We looked at each other and laughed and then she said one of the secret things. LOCATION: 2337
We sat and she said something secret and I said something secret back. LOCATION: 2350
Nothing can be simpler than growing.” LOCATION: 2358
I held my hand against the silky weight and bluntness against her neck and said something secret and she said, “Afterwards.” LOCATION: 2375
“It will look sort of funny maybe.” “Not to us. Who are the others anyway?” “Nobody.” LOCATION: 2387
“No. This other.” LOCATION: 2410
“Now we have another secret. We won’t say anything to anybody.” LOCATION: 2413
the barber was very particular to try and get the fashion correct and took a great interest. He had seen it in Italian illustrated papers, he said. Not everyone could wear it, he said, but he was glad to see it coming back. He thought it was a revolt against the years of war. A sound and good thing. LOCATION: 2422
So we had one more thing that was a pleasure that winter. LOCATION: 2449
Some people we loved for their lies and would wait hopefully for them to start their best ones. Ford, though, lied about things that left scars. He lied about money and about things that were important in daily living that he would give you his word on. When his luck was running very badly he would sometimes give you close to a straight answer. If he made any money or his luck turned for the better he became impossible. I tried to be just to him and not be severe, nor judge him, but only try to get along with him; but to think or write about him with accuracy and exactitude was crueler than any judging. LOCATION: 2546
when we arrived home Hadley and I had quarreled about something in which she had been right and I had been wrong quite seriously. LOCATION: 2617
I told him about Touton and how he might have come out of the memoirs of Marbot or of Ney, if he had written his, and that he embodied the traditions of the orders of the old French military establishment which had been destroyed many times but still existed. LOCATION: 2636
such men as Touton were an anachronism but an absolutely valid thing. LOCATION: 2640
The talk was far over Bumby’s head but he listened attentively and afterwards when we had talked of other things and Scott had left, full of mineral water and the resolve to write well and truly, I asked Bumby why he had ordered a beer. “Touton says that a man should first learn to control himself,” he said. “I thought I could make an example.” “It is not so simple as that,” I told him. “War is not simple either is it Papa?” “No. Very complicated. You believe what Touton tells you now. Then later you will find out many things for yourself.” “Monsieur Fitzgerald was demolished mentally by the war? Touton told me many people were.” “No. He was not.” “I am glad,” Bumby said. “It must be some passing thing.” “It would be no disgrace if he had been demolished mentally by the war,” I said. “Many of our good friends were. Later some recovered to do fine things. Our friend André Masson the painter.” “Touton explained to me about it being no disgrace to be demolished mentally. There was too much artillery in this last war. And the generals were all cows.” “It is very complicated,” I said. “You will find it all out some day for yourself.” “Meantime it is nice that we have no problems of our own. No grave problems. You worked well today?” “Very well.” “I am happy,” Bumby said. “If I can be helpful in anything?” “You help me very much.” “Poor Monsieur Fitzgerald,” Bumby said. “He was very nice today to remain sober and not molest you. Will everything be all right with him Papa?” “I hope so,” I said. “But he has very grave problems. It seems to me that he has almost insurmountable problems as a writer.” “I am sure that he will surmount them.” Bumby said. “He was so very nice today and so reasonable.” LOCATION: 2642
The last year was a nightmare and a murder year disguised as the greatest fun of all. It was that year that the rich showed up. LOCATION: 2717
The pilot fish leaves of course. He is always going somewhere, or coming from somewhere, and he is never around for very long. He enters and leaves politics or the theater in the same way he enters and leaves countries and people’s lives in his early days. He is never caught and he is not caught by the rich. Nothing ever catches him and it is only those who trust him who are caught and killed. He has the irreplaceable early training of the bastard and a latent and long denied love of money. He ends up rich himself, having moved one dollar’s width to the right with every dollar that he made. LOCATION: 2724
They never wasted their time nor their charm on something that was not sure. LOCATION: 2739
It sounds very silly. But to really love two women at the same time, truly love them, is the most destructive and terrible thing that can happen to a man when the unmarried one decides to marry. LOCATION: 2759
All things to be truly wicked must start from an innocence. LOCATION: 2770
So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You love both and you lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous and you work harder and when you come out from your work you know what is happening is impossible, but you live day to day as in a war. Everyone is still happy except you when you wake in the middle of the night. You love them both now and you are gone. Everything is split inside of you and you love two people now instead of one. LOCATION: 2771
The new and strange girl that now owned half of you, once she had decided to marry, you could not say decided to break up the marriage because that was only a necessary step, a regrettable step, not an end, probably passed over or avoided in thinking, made only one grave mistake. She undervalued the power of remorse. LOCATION: 2783
It was a bitter winter on the North Atlantic and there was snow knee deep in New York and when I got back to Paris I should have caught the first train from the Gare de l’Est that would take me down to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris now, still writing to my wife, and where we went and what we did and the unbelievable wrenching, kicking happiness, selfishness and treachery of everything we did, gave me such happiness and un-killable dreadful happiness so that the black remorse came and hatred of the sin and no contrition, only a terrible remorse. LOCATION: 2786
Certainly the rich never did anything for their own ends. They collected people then as some collect pictures and others breed horses and they only backed me in every ruthless and evil decision that I made and all of the decisions seemed so inevitable and logical and fine and all had been brought about by deceit. It wasn’t that the decisions were wrong although they all turned out badly finally from the same fault of character that made them. If you deceive and lie with one person against another you will eventually do it again. If some person is able to do it to you once another person will do it again. I had hated these rich because they had backed me and encouraged me when I was doing wrong. But how could they know it was wrong and had to turn out badly when they had never known all the circumstances? It was not their fault. It was only their fault for comeing into other people’s lives. They were bad luck for people but they were worse luck to themselves and they lived to have all of their bad luck finally to the very worst end that all bad lucks could go. LOCATION: 2800
Nobody climbs on skis now and almost everybody breaks their legs but maybe it is easier in the end to break your legs than to break your heart although they say that everything breaks now and that sometimes, afterwards, many are stronger at the broken places. I do not know about that now but this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy. LOCATION: 2817
No one can ever say they will not break a leg now under certain conditions. Breaking a heart is different. Some people say there is no such thing. Certainly you can not break it if you do not have it and many things unite to take it away from those who started with it. Perhaps there is nothing there. Nada. You can take this or not. And it can be true or not. There are philosophers who explain it very well. LOCATION: 2832
In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in. Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away. In much later times than these stories of Paris you may not have it ever until you state it in fiction and then you may have to throw it away or it will be stolen again. They say other things too but do not pay them too much attention. They are the secrets that we have that are made by alchemy and much is written about them by people who do not know the secrets or the alchemy. LOCATION: 2835
There are many more explainers now than there are good writers. LOCATION: 2840
You need much luck in addition to all other things and you do not always have it. This is regrettable but nothing to complain about as you should not complain of those explainers who tell you how you do it and why, if you do not agree with them. LOCATION: 2840
Let them explain it all but it must be difficult to reconcile the nothingness you know and the part where you live in other people. Some wish you luck and others do not. Good writing does not destroy easily but you must be careful making jokes. LOCATION: 2842
“You were very thoughtful about them, Hem. It is not that things should be published. But I believe now that it is important that they exist. We’ve both existed quite a lot haven’t we Hem? And you wrote awfully well about Nada LOCATION: 2862
y pues Nada,” I said. But I remembered the Gulf Stream and the sea and other things. LOCATION: 2864
But you must keep on because you write for all of us.” “Who’s all of us?” “Please don’t be difficult. I mean us of the early days and the best parts and the bad parts and Spain. Then this other one and everything since and the times now. You have to put in the fun and the other that only we know who have been at some strange places in some strange times. Please do it even when you want to never think about it. And you have to put in now. I am so busy with the horses that I don’t know about now. Only my now.” “I’m sorry he’s late with that stuff, Evan. That stuff is our now for today.” “It’s only pain,” he said. LOCATION: 2868
You’ll forgive me speaking so seriously about your writing. I’m asking you to do the opposite of what I’ve done about my poetry. You understand why. We never had to make explanations to each other. I write about my now. It is the horses. You have a very interesting now. And you’ve made me presents of many places and people.” LOCATION: 2877
Hem, you won’t forget about the writing?” “No,” I said. “I won’t forget about the writing.” I went out to the telephone. No, I thought. I would not forget about the writing. That was what I was born to do and had done and would do again. Anything they said about them, the novels or the stories or about who wrote them was all right by me. LOCATION: 2885
But there are remises or storage places where you may leave or store certain things such as a locker trunk or duffel bag containing personal effects or the unpublished poems of Evan Shipman or marked maps or even weapons there was no time to turn over to the proper authorities and this book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist. LOCATION: 2889