I’d never seen or heard of that particular monkey. I knew about monkeys. I had books about monkeys. I’d seen pictures of all kinds of monkeys. But I had never encountered the white-mantled colobus. They’re rare. Nobody had ever seen them until fairly recently because they just don’t come to the ground. And they also said that when humans walk through their grove, they remain absolutely motionless. The minute that person is a little farther on, they blink to the others, “They are on hand.” I couldn’t leave. I stayed till closing. I just sat there. In those habitat groups with stuffed animals, they have a curved painted backdrop—a panorama—that’s very realistic. If you close even one eyelid slightly, you really think you’re in an East African jungle. For that afternoon, I was in an East African jungle.
I walked away in this daze and wrote a sonnet about the white-mantled colobus, which got lost and only turned up much later, perfectly illustrating what Gertrude said to Alice: “Never never never never never
NEVER T
hrow anything away.” Then, of course, I wrote poems about all the other kinds of monkeys. That’s how
Monkey Poems
started. If something really strikes me, I guess I deal with it the rest of my life.
Later in Paris, Sally Higginson and I went one night to see the first time they’d had fireworks at Versailles in thirty years or something. We sat in our uncomfortable wooden folding chairs, gossiping about whatever party we’d been to the night before, and waiting, thinking, Oh, goodness, I hope this is worth waiting for, because those chairs were comfortable. Suddenly, way up at the top of the steps came a fanfare of eight hunting horns. Now a French hunting horn is quite unlike the English hunting horn. Naturally. They were playing something very Baroque and full of frilly phrases, and then these little torches appeared at the top of the stairs, and then water began to trickle down this little waterway between the steps. Down the hill came these eight huntsmen, tootling away in eighteenth-century costume. Then, as if by magic, light came out of these eight urns along the side of the pond. Later we saw there were eight little boys behind these urns. Then there was this extraordinary bang—the caps being released by some mechanism in the fountains—and these jets of water began to grow very slowly in the air. Then the fireworks began, so you had water and fire going simultaneously. It ended up that there were fireworks coming out of the bushes, coming from the top of the stairs, and the water just all going mad with little sprays from little jets that you just couldn’t imagine were there. I almost peed in my pants. I didn’t. I didn’t. But it was back to childhood. It was genuine awe. It was like those Italian acrobats and those little twinkling lights at the vaudeville. It was just pure magic. So I went right home and wrote the poem “The Fireworks at Versailles,” which begins, “I’ll celebrate all wayward things from man’s mind born,” and I realized that was the theme of the
Monkey Poems.
The princess liked those first ones very much, and she published about eight of them. Then John Train read them in
Botteghe Oscure
and said that he would like to publish them as a book. And he did. I wouldn’t say he was wealthy, but his father was a judge who wrote murder mysteries. He had all his daddy’s mystery story royalties. And he had that passion for publishing that a lot of young people do who are readers—who are perhaps not creative writers themselves. So he published it.
But I made him mad. The book came out with this sort of olive green cover, and it looked like a literary pamphlet. It didn’t look like
Monkey Poems.
It had this dingy green color that just turns me off because I have seen too many doctoral dissertations bound in that color. Dismal green. It’s very close to army uniform color, which ain’t a pretty color. It’s green, but it’s kin to khaki. Not a gleeful color. So I was raising hell and complaining mightily. I went to a shop that still made that gorgeous marble paper, and I got six colors: yellow, pinky blue, blue, rose, red, bright green. I had a little jacket made with the King of the Monkeys pasted on that marble paper. I think I may have said something nasty. I’m afraid I insulted him. I wrote much later and apologized and said, “When I meet you next I will bow my head on the sidewalk and you can put your little red heels on my neck.” I haven’t seen him since. We’ve never been in the same city at the same time. I’ve lost three friendships with people who surprised me with that color.
*
By pure chance, when I went back to America to do broadcasts and interviews when my first novel was coming out, I met this dear, wonderful creature, Daisy Alden, who published this thing called
Folder.
She was one of the new crowd that had come up around the galleries—the new young painters, the new young poets—since the years I’d been out of America. She asked me what I was working on. Well, I had had this idea about doing a little essay on
Hamlet,
but when I went to the New York Public Library and saw how many professors had written essays on
Hamlet,
I thought, Well, I’d better write a new version of
Hamlet.
I cannot add another thing to that groaning board. So I told her, “I’m writing a version of
Hamlet
for monkeys.” She said, “Oh, I’d love to see it,” so I showed her some bits and pieces. “Oh, sure,” she said, “I want to publish it.” So
Singerie Songerie
appeared in this rather elegant thing called
Folder.
It really was a folder with poems and silk-screened prints in color from those young painters in the news in New York City. She had color serigraphs from them and new poems and again, no reviews, no criticisms. Just new work. So she published
Singerie Songerie,
and then I became the Paris editor of
Folder.
Then I sent some poems to
Whetstone
in Philadelphia. They said, “Wouldn’t you like to join us as a foreign editor?” Then I sent some to the
Wormwood Review
in Connecticut. And he said, “Wouldn’t you like to join us as our European editor?” They were all beginning, and my name had begun to be seen in
Paris Review
and
Botteghe.
So, of course, I was delighted to do anything, because they were publishing creative people. They had some book reviews and some essays now and then, but the big thing was new work, new work, new work, new work, new work. So I just guided things their way. If I saw a poem that I thought was perfect for the
Wormwood Review,
I would say, “I’m sending you a manuscript on.” A lot of people had begun sending me manuscripts just as an editor. Not as an editor with this or that. If I saw work from a young writer and it wasn’t taken by
Botteghe
or
Paris Review,
I could always suggest other possibilities that they might not have heard of. It’s more and more impossible for any young artist, the cost of printing being what it is. Of course,
Whetstone
didn’t pay, nor did
Intro Bulletin,
nor did
Folder,
nor did
Paris Review.
But it was publication. The princess paid ten dollars a page for prose and two or three dollars a line for poetry. No other literary magazine paid anything like that.
When I really went full-time with the princess in Rome, I more or less gave up the others except for
Paris Review
and the
Transatlantic Review.
I was with
Transatlantic
from the first number to the last. Joseph McCrindle, whose father was General McCrindle and whose mother was a novelist, was born with books. He was an apprentice at my publisher’s in London, and they wrote me and said there was someone who wanted to meet me and he was coming to Paris and his name was Joseph McCrindle. He was this cherub. Now there are some cherubs that are childlike. This was an older cherub. He’s round and he has a pink English complexion, but there is nothing childish about him. This was just an older cherub. He’s shy, but not that shy. He has great good taste, and the
Transatlantic
was wonderful. People always think that when someone rich like the princess or Joseph McCrindle makes a magazine, it’s just their money and they are having talent do it under the counter. But Joseph did edit it. He did know all the writers, and he did talk to them. He was the real editor, and he paid for the whole thing.
At a given moment—I think in its tenth year—the tax people said, “Well, you can’t go on. This is a fluke. You are doing something crooked here.” He wasn’t. He took a tax cut on what he spent, but he sold subscriptions and sold it on the newsstands and made a big point of trying to make it support itself. But the tax people, who hate free thinkers or art of any kind, couldn’t believe that Mr. McCrindle actually did it because he thought there should be a good literary review. They thought it was a tax dodge. They forced him to close it then; they wanted millions of dollars in taxes.
Banishing the Commonplace
I had lovely dinner parties in Paris. I don’t really enjoy cooking for myself. I really cook to invite people in, do the gossip and the book reviews. And I loved to sort of alarm people by saying, “Would you come to dinner? “
“Where shall we go? Where shall we meet?”
“Well, in my room.” Since nobody ever did anything like cook or even eat in those cubbyhole rooms, I liked to do it as a gesture. I worked hard at it.
It was strictly forbidden to cook in the rooms, but I had a one-burner stove—one of those wonderful alcohol burners they have in France. You just go to the corner store and buy a quart of alcohol, you put it into this thing, and you pour one drop on a little coal and take a match and light that. When that little drop is burning on the coal, you turn the little handle and then it goes blue and then you can cook.
By then Mme. and M. Jordan knew me. They knew that I never left one crumb in the room. Because they were afraid of rats, I carefully washed everything, carried everything down, and put it in the sewer hole in the street after cooking a meal in the room. All of Paris was rats. The Parisians always loved their cats, but they ate them in the last months of the war. Since all of the cats of Paris were eaten during the starvation period at the end of World War II, kittens cost like twenty-five dollars. That’s why Mme. Jordan loved her orange cat that matched the woodwork. But they were afraid of rats in the attic of the hotel, which was full of luggage left by Jewish refugees who’d been hauled off to the camps. Although M. Jordan was a cranky Frenchman, he kept all of those things with the people’s names carefully on them even though it was perfectly obvious what had happened to them. The attic was full. And it was full of rats. I kept something in the attic that later had deep bites out of it.
So when I gave these dinner parties, I very carefully took every scrap and I swept and I washed everything. I remember once I had forgotten something I needed, and when I got back into the lobby of the hotel, you could smell gumbo simmering somewhere. And of course, they pretended not to notice. I went to early morning market, and they saw me carrying those string bags of food. They never said anything, because I never left any food in the room. Never. In America, the rules would be the rules. But in Europe, rules can be bypassed if done gracefully, graciously, and logically. With logic, grace, and style, you could do anything in Europe. In America, the law is the law. You have to go underground to break it. Young Europeans are raised with the idea that they are themselves. They are not controlled by rules and laws. Rules and laws exist, but only to thumb your nose at.
Anyway, I did have some lovely parties. I could only really do four people because the room was so small. Catherine Morison once did a little dinner in her room prepared by a restaurant. One of the seats was the bidet; she put a sofa cushion on the bidet. Then there was a chair and a stool and a trunk. Those were the four seats at her dinner party. I had a marble-top dresser where I kept the stove in the bottom drawer and used that marble top when I wanted to cook with it. There was a fireplace with a metal front that pulled up, and I kept my wine bottles in that unused fireplace. Then there was a little washbasin behind a curtain hanging from the ceiling in one corner. But I gave rather elaborate meals.
Once I had a cocktail party honoring Stephen What’s-his-name, the Polish writer and publisher who created his own press in London. He wrote these mad, wonderful novels and wonderful, crazy plays. Nobody in the
Paris Review
crowd had met him or his wife, who did these delightful books of cartoons. I thought, I’ll try to see how many people can I get into this room. There was this vicious old bull dyke in the room next to me, but I was always terribly polite to her, and when she was ill, I did her shopping for her. I asked if I could leave a chair and a box in her room just for that night, so that gave a little space. Then I thought, Now how am I going to decorate this place? There is nothing you can do. It was faded floral wallpaper that obviously was put up before the Second World War. And dingy curtains. It was very clean, because Mme. Jordan was from the scrub-and-dust set. But it was dingy. It was sad. I thought, Oh, I have a beautiful sheet of rose red marble paper made by that bookbinder supply house that I loved just to go in, stand inside, and smell. So I took that sheet of rose red paper and put it over the lighting fixture in the middle of the room. I took my scissors and made little star-shaped holes out of the paper. Wherever that beam of light made a white star on the wall or the curtain, I made a red paper rose and put it so the spotlight was on a red paper rose in various places. It was a very odd effect. And it was a great party. I got twenty-five people into that tiny room.