ii
I met lots of extraordinary creatures. I met Esther Arthur, the granddaughter of President Arthur. He was the one who signed the thing
that took Yankee occupying troops out of the South a decade after the Civil War. Northerners had occupied the South longer than the United States has occupied any country it has conquered. So she was naturally someone I enjoyed meeting. She was a passionate historian and a lady with nervous kidneys.
It was in the apartment of Charles Lovatt, whose family had the Bank of Singapore. I had come to Paris armed with two letters of introduction, one to Alice B. Toklas, one to Charles Lovatt and Thad Lovatt. They had one of the first grand art nouveau apartments designed by the architect who designed the entrances to the subway. It had this enormous oval window that looked out over the Montparnasse Cemetery where Baudelaire was buried. It was an extraordinary view, like an opera set. And Charles gave these wonderful dinner parties.
Charles would always seat Esther Arthur in one particular easy chair. “Oh, no, Esther, honey, you must sit—Esther, darling, I’m sorry, you must sit right here where you like to sit.” Because he would put a sponge pad in the seat and put this old blanket over the chair. Because when she got started on subjects that impassioned her, she would just let go.
I remember a conversation that I shall never forget as long as I live about the famous poisoner in the late 1600s in Paris, Madame de Brovier. Esther Arthur was saying, “I disagree with von Ranke! Madame de Brovier had no intention of poisoning both her brothers!” And she stood up and her chair overflowed. Of course, everybody pretended not to notice. “She had no intention of poisoning them!” Drip, drip, drip, drip. She pretended not to notice. She was a president’s granddaughter, and she had been doing it since she was a child. She had weak kidneys. President’s granddaughters can get away with murder, or floods.
Eugene-ing
One day I heard that they were doing Rousseau’s opera
Le Devin du Village—The Village Soothsayer
—in a courtyard of something at Tours. So I organized these friends in Paris and we tootled off on a Saturday and had a wonderful lunch. We went to the Hôtel de l’Univers and had the famous fish paste they make from the Loire River. It’s a wonderful old restaurant. Then we went over to this courtyard. We were met at the door by a very sweet young lady who said, “We are terribly sorry, but one of the singers has been ill and we’ve had to put it off till next Saturday.” I
said, “Oh, well, I’ve got my
Baedeker.”
And I looked and I said, “Well, we are only a mile or so from the church and the abbey where the poet Pierre de Ronsard was curator or a friar or a secular priest or something.” And I said, “Maybe we just better stop by Pierre’s place.” We got there, but of course it had been destroyed in the war. The only thing left was one little piece of rubble standing. But they had found the grave of Ronsard and had a carpet of green around it and two rosebushes. There was this delightful old man who was the caretaker. He had a leather apron, and he was doing some kind of work on something. He said,
“Ah oui.
Nobody ever knew where Ronsard was buried. After the bombardment, we found a skeleton that could only be his because he had this misshapen spine which was examined by doctors and pronounced upon in his lifetime. There was a young doctor in Tours who was coming here gathering skeletons from all the graves to use for his medical students, and it was he who identified it. So we had a reinterment, and for the first time we know where he is buried.” So I said, “Oh, what a story. I’ll have to have a couple of those fallen rose petals to press in my complete Ronsard, where he says, ‘This rose that opens with the morning and shows her purple garments to the sun.’” But I put it in something I was carrying—my passport or wallet or something—and didn’t think anymore about it.
Now. In Mobile, when I was growing up, we loved catalogs. We used to send for catalogs, catalogs, catalogs. We always got the Macmillan Publishing Company catalog. Every spring it came. They always had one page about each new book. Well now, one time they had a book called
A Mad Lady’s Garland
by Ruth Pitter. It had an example of mock Jacobean poetry, someone addressing a black cat. Anyway, I saved that catalog from when I was about ten. I had it with me when I sat on that dreary island in the Aleutians thinking of what books to order. I had read some comic pieces in
Punch
by Miss Pitter, who said that the duty of a poet was to make people laugh during wartime. And she wrote a poem called “The Rude Potato” about this farmer who digs up a potato that’s like a big phallus and testes, and he hangs it over the bar in the village and everybody laughs and gets drunk. So I wrote to Heffer in Cambridge, England, and ordered
A Mad Lady’s Garland.
Then I got this little note saying “You are lucky because there were only two copies left. It came out nearly twenty years ago, but Macmillan still had two copies left in their basement, and this is the original edition.” It took about three months to get from London to the island of Atka. But not a book that I ordered from Heffer ever got submarined on the Atlantic during the entire war. The monkey gods were protecting them. I just loved the book. So I wrote to Miss Pitter care of Macmillan to tell her how much I approved of everything she had done and blah, blah, blah. I got this letter back in this tiny little cranky hand. So we corresponded.
Then when I was living in Paris, I met a creature that I loved dearly: Jeremiah James Sullivan Sherman. He was from some tiny town in Pennsylvania and obviously had money in the bank, because he collects old racing cars and Baroque organs. He didn’t like the idea of working with his brain. He wanted to do manual labor so he could be free to read, play the organ, and race through the countryside. I had never met anything like that, from Pennsylvania, and he had never met anything like me, from the South. So we just sat there at the Café de Tournon night after night, exchanging worldviews. Well, he had this Bugatti racing car, and we were going to make a tour of southern England in a Bugatti racing car, which is too small for American boys. It was made for midget Italian drivers. We had to wear caps and goggles, and we both looked like Mr. Toad of Toad Hall because we stuck up over the windshield. So I wrote Miss Pitter and I said, “I’m coming with this friend of mine to England, and I’d love so much to stop in London and see you.” She lived in Church Street, Chelsea. “Oh,” she said, “I think I’ll be in London that weekend, but I may go down to Black Chapel. Just be kind enough to telephone or come by Church Street. If I am out of town, by chance, I’ll leave you exact directions so you can find me.”
I called her number in London, and this terribly British voice said, “Ruth’s gone down to Black Chapel. This is her friend, Miss O’Brien. She looks forward so much to meeting you. All you do is, you go down— Do you know Sussex?” “Ah, no, ma’am. This is the first time I’ve been in Sussex.” “Well, it’s very easy, you see. Just get a map and be sure that you go to New Haven, and if you take the road out of New Haven, you turn left and then go six kilometers and then turn into this little lane and then you come to the black chapel.” “Oh, yes. Sure. Thank you, ma’am.” So I turned to Jeremiah, and he said, “Do you think it’s worth it? Are we going to make it?”
We got lost, of course. We searched, and we searched and then finally I found the address where she was staying and called. Miss Pitter said, “Oh, hello. Yes, Miss O’Brien called and said you had rung. Why don’t we meet at the black chapel at twilight?” I said, “Well, what time?” “Oh, around eight o’clock.” Well, it wasn’t a black chapel, it was bright white. And it wasn’t twilight; the sun was still in the sky. Here was this little thing in a tweed suit with gray hair. She had tweed-colored hair and hair colored tweed. She was cute as a button, a real wit, a real live wire. We went to see the house—it was a thatched cottage—and she showed me her garden, which was not at all big, but she took me through as though it were the gardens of Versailles. And she said, “I suppose you want to see my pond.” There was a tiny little thing of water with one duck sitting on it. That was a pond.
Then we went to have drinks, and as we sat down, she pointed to something growing under the window. She said, “This is the bedroom of my friend, Miss O Brien.” I hadn’t met Miss O’Brien, didn’t know anything about Miss O’Brien. She said, “That’s the true poet’s myrtle. She loves that plant.” And I said, “Oh, I don’t know the true poet’s myrtle. I’ve never seen that plant. I’d give anything for a cutting, and I’ll pay for it in coinage of the realm.” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “I have rose petals that I gathered at Ronsard’s grave, and I’ll give you three of them if you give me a cutting.” She turned quite pale, and she said, “Yes.”
Then the minute I got back to Paris there was a letter from her. She said, “Dear Mr. Walter. What you cannot know is that Miss O’Brien is directly descended through her Huguenot antecedents from the young lady to whom Ronsard wrote that poem where you pressed your petals.”
The P.S. to the story: I was minding my own business in Rome one day—or at least, I was sitting still in Rome one day—and there came a telephone call. “Mr. Walter? This is Miss O’Brien. We’ve never met, but you remember the friend of Miss Pitter? She gave me your address and your telephone number in Rome, and I’m here with a friend of mine. Of course, we’ll have to meet you; you’re responsible for the rose petals.” I said, “Yes, it is a long and marvelous story.” “Oh,” she said, “isn’t it? We’d love to take you to lunch.” I said, “Oh, how wonderful.” Then we had lunch, and she turned out to be Edna O’Brien, who writes historical novels.
A singer had to have a sore throat, a Rousseau opera had to be postponed, they had to have discovered Ronsard’s body through a medical student stealing bones, I had to collect the rose petals, I had to get to the backwoods of England through many misstarts and finally get into Sussex and sit by Miss O’Brien’s window and get a leaf of poet’s myrtle and pay for it with rose petals from Ronsard’s tomb. But things like that happen to everybody every day. They just don’t notice. I do. And I have pleaded with the monkey to enlighten me and send me the wayward, the undefined, the unexplained, and he is doing his best.
*
It was Sally Higginson who said one day, “Well, I’m going this afternoon to see Alice B. Toklas. Do you want to come?” Sally knew her through the Harvard financial wizard and economics specialist Galbraith. And I said, “I’d kind of like to meet her because I do have this letter to her.” Sally said, “You do?” I said, “Yes, Miss Ruth Haber from Mobile was her classmate in San Francisco and gave me a note of introduction. They used to say that Ruth was famous as the only person who knew what the
B
stood for: Babette.” And Sally laughed, and so we went.
The street was the same one where Oscar Wilde died. Rue Christine. That’s where they moved from Fleurus and where Gertrude died. She’d been dead, oh—four or five years when I got to Paris. In the apartment, the first thing I noticed was the needlework on the chairs was pure Matisse. It was Alice who had done the needlework, but Matisse had designed it. And of course, the paintings there we know now from postcards from museums. Every painting was by somebody, and you recognized it. But Alice wasn’t making a thing about it. They were just pictures she enjoyed. The chairs were just chairs. You could sit in them. Naturally I did. The whole apartment had a strange mixture of twenties audacity, World War II privation, and natural exuberance.
Alice was tiny. And Sally looked down at this little lady, as I imagine she would in her Boston house, if a Pekingese of unknown provenance had suddenly walked into the house. A very well mannered, well-brushed, and combed Pekingese. “Oh, isn’t she cute” was the look.
I adored Alice B. Toklas because she had this little mustache, and I swear she waxed it. I can just see people staring at it, so finally instead of shaving every day, she let it grow and waxed the ends. I’m sure she waxed it. It was a proper mustache. She was in this kind of hip-length, sleeveless garment of some strange twenties patterned wool with a velvet edge. Then this peasant blouse with big sleeves under this hip-length. She could have been anything from Catherine the Great’s scrubbing woman to high chic of 1927 to underground French in World War II. I just adored her. Right away you could see cat and monkey. She had a very logical mind, but she also had the gift of the parenthesis. A lot of people start parentheses and never finish them. To me, it is the most maddening of all human characteristics. I don’t say, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. I say, If you must parenthesis unto others, finish the goddamn parenthesis. Now there are some who are mountain goats and jump from mountain crag to mountain crag. Like “Oh, I’ve got something to tell you. And then I saw Mimi this morning. Now, have you gotten a telephone call from Eleanor? It’s next week, you know. He was coming down the street when I came out of Delchamps. And then I asked him, ‘Did she call you?’” Those are not parentheses. That’s mountain goat stuff. Cliff to cliff, peak to peak. That’s different. But Alice B. Toklas had the gift, the true classical gift, of the parenthesis. I’m not sure but that’s a French characteristic rather than Anglo-Saxon. If, in conversation, the French begin a parenthesis, they usually end it and finish the original thought. Anyway, I loved Alice the moment I met her. She had some wonderful tales about Gertrude.
My favorite was about the American professor who was particularly boring and who was writing a paper on Paris in the twenties. Gertrude and Alice obligingly invited him to lunch at some old-fashioned hotel that had very good food. And this man went on and on and on and on about semantics. And about the restructuralization of English. Alice said Gertrude was so well behaved. But this guy barely seemed to notice that Alice had asked the chef to do this, Gertrude had asked the chef to do that and this special for the occasion. So when this man had finished his long recitation aria, Gertrude said to the man very seriously, “Did you see that?” He said, “Huh? Who? What?” She said, “At the next table.” Apparently these people had a white poodle that reminded Gertrude of her white poodle. And she said, “The white poodle sitting in a chair at this next table.” They were giving it tidbits. And Gertrude said, “You didn’t see it? A white poodle with blue eyes and a pink tongue eating a green grape?”