McA (left) and Hem in Spain
Thinking about Robert McAlmon induces the kind of depression that follows a particularly malevolent hangover. It fills me with desperation and obliterates all hope. Well, not all hope because I soon remember that the fact that I am thinking about someone who died four years before I was born is itself a reasonable definition of hope.
At a time when the drive for profit and the disruption of media has made life for artists even more complicated and less secure than it was at the dawn of the 20th Century, it is reassuring to know that remaining true to one’s craft can still be rewarded by immortality. Even if it is the kind of immortality that needs treatment with Alka-Seltzer and a long sleep.
McAlmon (McA)’s gin-dry memoir, with its much-imitated, much misunderstood title, Being Geniuses Together, recalls his time hanging out with the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Augustus John, Ford Madox Ford and Kay Boyle in 1920s Paris. And he writes about those insane war-sandwiched years in a way that still seems fresh.
McA would have been hard to match drink-for-drink, and he may also have been the kind of friend whose company would have soured long before closing time. He didn’t mind goading strangers — or the brawls that inevitably ensued — and when drunk he loved to wail his incomparable “Chinese opera”, described here in Geniuses:
“[James] Joyce wanted me to sing it, and I did. It is the corncrake and calliope wail of a Chinese virgin in a snowstorm, not understanding where she got her newborn babe, and the neighbour’s son claims it is not his inasmuch as he never saw her before. This is a performance that has had me thrown out of several bars and most respectable households and the police of various stations know it well. If they have any comedy in them it prevents them from putting me in for the night.”
Take it from me, there are not many doormen with that amount of comedy in them nowadays, let alone police officers, but such antics were certainly a magnet to the 1920s crowd. Sylvia Beach in her eponymous memoir of the Paris bookshop
Shakespeare & Company (1959) notes, “Whatever café or bar McAlmon patronised at the moment was where you saw everybody.”
McA knew how to have a good time. William Weintraub of the Literary Review of Canada says McA’s roman à clef Nightinghouls of Paris documents the “dyspeptic underside of the moveable feast”. Sanford J. Smoller, in his introduction to Nightinghouls, quotes from McA’s response to a 1929 questionnaire circulated in Paris by The Little Review:
Like: some people and some things.
Dislike: same answer.
Like: music, mainly jazz, and dancing, mainly my own, and gregarious life and lots of it.
Hard-drinking destiny
While living lots of this gregarious life, it was McA’s destiny to become tangled up with a great many more familiar literary names; so although his own writing has largely been forgotten, his name frequently recurs on the boundaries of other writers’ success.
He was driven by an uncompromising urge to publish work he found to be good and original, by writers who were undervalued or ignored by the big, commercial publishers. Often, this work was by expatriates and, when exported from France to Britain or the United States, their books were confiscated and destroyed at customs without McAlmon and US journalist and Three Mountains Press publisher William “Bill” Bird (McA’s sometime partner in his Contact Editions publishing venture) being informed.
The reason for this was that McA wanted Contact Editions to specialise in books “not likely to be published … for commercial or legislative reasons”, which meant that many of these works were considered obscene. The printing was by poet Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach’s Dijon printer Darantierre.
Contemporaries talk of McA having been betrayed by friends and fellow writers. Certainly, most successively turned against him, having first fully availed themselves of his generosity. But, in spite of these disloyalties, McA continued writing, publishing and partying. By all accounts, he was more of a binge-drinker than an alcoholic and, like most latter-day binge-drinkers, knew when to stop when there was work to be done. From Smoller’s Nightinghouls introduction:
“…when McAlmon wrote concertedly, he would be, in Sisley Huddleston’s word, ‘invisible’, largely because he would leave Paris for a rural retreat such as Rambouillet, dry out, and get down to work.”
Surviving the “McAlimony” slur
While living in Greenwich Village after the First World War, McA befriended William Carlos Williams, who would become his most loyal friend — until McA read and was disappointed by the way he was portrayed in the poet’s Autobiography. While there, McA also met Winifred Ellerman; known as a writer by the name Bryher. He married her and they went to Paris, via London. Bryher was the daughter of shipping magnate Sir John Ellerman, who is rumoured to have paid more income tax than any other man in England at the time. Sir John liked McA, but Bryher married him to simplify her movements with her lover, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and to deflect the disapproving gaze of her father, who trusted McA to domesticate her.
“Maintaining that he chose to marry Bryher because he loved her,” writes Smoller in Nightinghouls, “McAlmon repeatedly asserted that he was both surprised and distressed by her refusal to consummate their union. Williams, Sylvia Beach, and many other intimate friends strongly supported McAlmon’s account.”
When McA was granted a divorce from Bryher and received a large settlement from Sir John, those on the social scene began calling him “McAlimony”. But he rose above it. His sham marriage to Bryher notwithstanding, McAlmon corresponded at length with H.D.
Also in the introduction to Nightinghouls Smoller says: “In early 1923, McAlmon received a gift of seventy thousand dollars from his generous father-in-law. (Whatever he thought about Bryher, he was a dutiful son-in-law and well liked by her family.) He used much of the money to establish the Contact Publishing Company so that he could publish his friends’ writings as well as his own.”
Even if the money came largely from his father-in-law, McA had no moral obligation to spend it on supporting the expat literati and their various habits. James R. Mellow (author of Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, the final volume of a trilogy devoted to the writers of the lost generation) in his New York Times review of McA’s Village, ‘Talent and all the right connections’, describes McA’s career as “one of the cautionary tales in the chronicles of the hard-drinking Lost Generation”:
“For a time he provided the always needy James Joyce with a monthly $150, he paid the expenses for Hemingway’s first trip to the bullfights in Spain in 1923, contributed to the welfare of indigent poets and, from 1922 to 1929, by way of the Contact Editions, published the works of the American vanguard writers…”
It could be a thankless task. In a funny third-person interlude in the 1924-1925 chapter of his first-person Geniuses, McA describes how, while the Gertrude Stein book he had decided to publish at his own expense (The Making of Americans) was at the binder, Stein refused to sign a contract with McA but asked Darantière, the printer, to ship all copies of the book to America behind McA’s back.
On the fateful trip to Spain (described in Boyle’s 1928-1930 chapter of Geniuses by Bird), it was McA’s munificence that made Hem’s novel The Sun Also Rises, about a group of expatriates in Paris who journey to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, possible:
“All the bills were paid by Bob, of course, but when a choice of seats came up at a bullfight, Hem would throw his stalwart honour to the wind and have to have the one good seat left, down by the ring, because he was ‘studying the art of it’ … Hem had to have his bottles of Johnnie Walker, or whatever the brand was, even in Spain, and at Bob’s expense. The price of them was enough to ruin a millionaire, and Bob was never that…”
(Hem — in the guise of his protagonist Jake — tells the story somewhat differently in The Sun Also Rises.)
As a thankyou for his patronage McA was as usual exploited, betrayed and gossiped about. The atmosphere was astringent and writers soon got bitchy with each other. Canadian novelist and Papa-pugilist Morley Callaghan describes the tensions in this well-titled Time article, ‘The Importance of Beating Ernest’:
“‘Scott didn’t like McAlmon. McAlmon no longer liked Hemingway. Hemingway had turned against Scott. I had turned up my nose at Ford. Hemingway liked Joyce. Joyce liked McAlmon.’”
Watered down
It was with not a little irony and perhaps a dose of bitterness that in 1934 McA wrote Being Geniuses Together, in which he says that, by 1926, it was “passionately the fashion to be an artist or a genius”. But in 1968 McAlmon’s contemporary Kay Boyle decided to revise, shorten and add alternate chapters to McAlmon’s original:
“McAlmon’s original text is approximately one hundred and ten thousand words in length; Boyle’s edition is one hundred and sixty thousand words, only seventy thousand of which were written by Robert McAlmon.”
Although she frequently substituted McA’s undeleted typescript for the edited, published version, Boyle also excised some important sections in order to accommodate her largely illusory impressions of a romantic link between herself and McA.
The poet Marianne Moore apparently rebuked McAlmon for anti-Semitism in 1921, but McAlmon railed against the Nazis in his solo edition of Geniuses. However, Boyle chose to remove these politically tinged interludes entirely; perhaps to make her own fantasies and reminiscences of her commune dalliances with the Duncan family (dancer Isadora and bohemian brother Raymond) seem less flighty.
But McA’s most famous work survived dilution and substitution by Boyle — in spite of contrary critical comment at the time of publication and later. Smoller, in his Nightinghouls introduction, questions whether Boyle much helped McA’s reputation by revising and editing Geniuses: “More than half the book is devoted to her story, and in lopping off the years 1931-1934 she deprived readers of his insights into the social and political unrest in Germany and France during this period. In Munich in 1932 with Seldon Rodman, for example, McAlmon watched a Nazi parade led by Hitler and his Brown Shirts; and in Paris he witnessed riots, police aggression, and clashes between fascists and communists. ‘Potential war or revolution was in the air, and hate and distrust,’ he correctly predicted in 1934 (McAlmon, Geniuses, 372).”
Notwithstanding her questionable role of partisan editor, we do have Boyle to thank for a resurgence of interest in McA’s life and contribution to literature. In her Note on Robert McAlmon in the Boyle-McA edition of Geniuses, she wrote: “It was McAlmon who, in liberating himself from genteel language and thought, spoke for his generation in a voice that echoes, unacknowledged, in the prose of Hemingway and that of other writers of his time.”
There is little doubt that Boyle championed McA, but romanticising his work as a writer and publisher and tying his life immortally to her own was really the last thing he needed. From her ‘1928-1930’ chapter of Geniuses:
“Bob was always seeking another name, and another face, in quite another place. I wrote a short story called ‘I Can’t Get Drunk’ about his endless search, saying: ‘Whatever you said to him was drawn with labour word by word from the bog of his interest in something else. Up and down and around he was looking for something that might catch his curiosity. If I stay up all night was he thinking, perhaps something will happen after all.’”
[My italics]. And Boyle at her most starry-eyed:
“Nancy Cunard once said to me, her laughter quick, bright, and minuscule as a hummingbird, her eyes like jewels in her lovely head: ‘Ah, me, dearest, the nights Bob and I spent looking for you all over Paris, in and out of everywhere before I so much as knew your name!’ It was like the nights we spent looking for her, when we had to find her, or else for Bob it seemed the night would die.”
There are many clues here to Boyle’s illusions about McA. Most of us have friends whose attentions are elsewhere when we want them to be entirely with us, who are often somewhere else even when we are alone with them. It was in Boyle’s nature to imagine that McA loved her, just as it was in McA’s nature to be on the lookout for the next best thing.
It is also extremely telling that, of the 49 plates in the Hogarth Press Edition of the Boyle-McA edition of Geniuses, there is not a single photograph showing Boyle and McAlmon together. Even a poor, out-of-focus snapshot would lend credence to Boyle’s attempt to link her and McA in eternity, which was clearly her wish and would demonstrate the common bond and friendship that from her chapters was so important to her.
In Geniuses (1928-1930) Boyle recounts an episode when she began to quote one of McA’s poems (‘Oh, let me gather myself together’) back to him. He reacted aggressively:
“McAlmon did not say anything until we were near the farmhouse door again, and this time I opened it, and the light from inside fell on his face. ‘For Christ’s sake, six years saying the same poem? When are you going to grow up, kid?’ he said. Then he began jerking out — not laughter this time but the words of self-vituperation. ‘The god-damned, fucking, quivering pieces of me! Good enough to be flushed like you know what down the drain! Stinking enough to be tacked on the barn door in warning to the young!’ he shouted.”
As Smoller correctly notes in his Nightinghouls introduction, for McA to curse in one sentence and then hold back demurely in the next does not seem authentic. Boyle is almost certainly romanticising things again; but it is to her credit that she paraphrases McA on that very topic (Geniuses, 1928-1930):
“It was in New York or in Mexico that summer of 1929 that Bob met Katherine Anne Porter. He wrote Bill Bird that he was outraged over the pitiful size of the edition for her book the publisher was bringing out. ‘They expected to sell no more than six hundred copies,’ he wrote, and he added that both Katherine Anne Porter and Kay Boyle were better writers than Katherine Mansfield, but because no legends had been manufactured for them, their reputations would probably remain scandalously small. Katherine Anne, Bob said, was in his judgement the sounder writer of the two, for she wrote with greater authenticity, while Kay, come hell or high water, had to romanticise every situation. This may very well be true.”
Office boy’s revenge
McA was also James Joyce’s “drinking buddy”, and often dragged Joyce home and carried him up the stairs when he couldn’t keep up with McA’s appetite for the hard stuff. Nora was grateful. McA restored lost passages of Ulysses for Joyce and yet usually isn’t even mentioned by scholars — not even in the afterword on the reconstruction of the manuscript in the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of the book.
You would think that his efforts to restore such an important book from bowdlerisation might have been remarked upon in the book itself and not merely by McAlmon experts: “When a prude destroyed the only copy of the concluding erotic soliloquy in Ulysses, McAlmon reconstructed the text from Joyce’s notes, improvising as he went along.” McAlmon describes that process in Geniuses (1923-1924):
“…the husband of the English typist who was typing his work had destroyed some forty pages of the original script of Ulysses, because it was obscene… [Joyce] knew that I typed not well but quickly and had suggested it one night as we were drinking. I thought then, ‘Fifty pages, that’s nothing, sure I’ll type it for him.’ … his handwriting is minute and hen-scrawly; very difficult to decipher. With the script he gave me four notebooks, and throughout the script there were marks in red, yellow, blue, purple, and green, referring to phrases which must be inserted from one of the notebooks. For about three pages I was painstaking, and actually retyped one page to get the insertions in the right place. After that I thought, ‘Molly might just as well think this or that a page or two later, or not at all,’ and made the insertions wherever I happened to be typing. Years later I asked Joyce if he had noticed that I’d altered the mystic arrangement of Molly’s thought, and he said that he had, but agreed with my viewpoint.”
But Joyce was offended when Geniuses was published because McA depicted him as more of a drinker than as a writer, and tried to dismiss the memoir as “the office boy’s revenge”. But they never really had enough in common to be real friends: in William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography an incident is cited in which, in a half-drunken toast McA says to the assembled revellers, “Here’s to sin,” and James Joyce suddenly replies, “I’ll not drink to that.”
Flogging a dead dog
In 1923, McAlmon had paid to print Hem’s first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, in Paris. The circumstances were (as Smoller writes in his introduction to Nightinghouls) that almost all of Hem’s manuscripts were stolen from Hem’s then wife Hadley at a Paris train station, and McAlmon offered to publish what remained. McA describes it in Geniuses (1923-1924):
“Hemingway had just suffered a minor tragedy. His wife had lost a briefcase containing the script of writing he had done over the period of nearly a year. However, he had three short stories and a few poems on hand … As I was publishing books in Paris, I decided to do his three stories and ten poems. One story ‘My Old Man’, was distinctly in the tone of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘I’m a Fool’, and some other race-track story of Anderson’s, but the other two stories, or, rather, sketches, were fresh and without derivation so far as I could detect.”
Hemingway would later complain that all he earned from this book “was the enmity of McAlmon, because it sold out while his own volumes remained in stock”.
Some say that Jake, the protagonist of Hem’s The Sun Also Rises, is based on McA rather than on Hem himself. Based on my reading of McA and my re-reading of Hem’s book, I didn’t detect many similarities and, as I’ve said, Hem’s telling of the Pamplona story differs starkly from McA’s in Geniuses. Nevertheless, Hem co-dedicated the shorter, limited print run version of his short story collection in our time to McA and Bird (among others), and a group of ‘Four Poems by Ernest Hemingway’ at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston includes one called The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publisher.
And we should not forget that Hem once rated McAlmon highly as a writer. “‘Village is absolutely first rate and damned good reading,’ he wrote to Robert McAlmon from Schruns in Austria, in 1925. ‘We’ve all read it down here and everybody thinks it’s a knock-out.’ It was not simply a matter of buttering up the man who had published Hemingway’s first book … Hemingway, in fact, was just as enthusiastic about McAlmon’s novel when he wrote to Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Company with a bit of bravado: ‘McAlmon’s book Village came and is damn good. If anyone asks for it tell them it’s recommended by E. M. Hemingway, the famous Austrian skiing authority.”
But, as Morley Callaghan knew, Hem was fickle in his alliances and he also liked to fight; at least provided the pre- and post-bout PR was good. McA’s 1923-1924 chapter of the Kay Boyle edition of Geniuses details this account of the infamous Callaghan-Hemingway bout of 1929:
“[It] was reported to me several ways: by Hemingway, by Callaghan, and by Scott Fitzgerald. Callaghan’s report was that Scott was to referee, and they were to have three or four two-minute rounds. Hemingway was the taller and heavier man. Callaghan, actually, was short, and inclined to a look of flabbiness and rotundity. Scott was sure that Hemingway only needed to play with Callaghan, and let him down easily, without showing him up in a mortifying way. The first round did not turn out that way, however, and so Scott forgot to tell time. Callaghan had Hemingway backing away and getting winded, but the fight went on and on. Neither of the boxers wanted to suggest that the round-time was up, but after a long delay Scott did call time. Callaghan was sure that Hemingway thought Scott forgot to call time purposely.
“Hemingway’s story was that he had been drinking the night before and was boxing on three pick-me-up whiskies and that his wind gave out. The decision results, were, however, that neither Hemingway nor Callaghan could decide what the bout proved. Was one a better boxer but not so good a writer as the other, or was the other a better writer and boxer, or had Scott framed one or the other of them?”
McA’s glee at recounting this incident might have something to do with the fact that the rumours McA had been spreading about Hem among his gossip-hungry friends — that the Man’s Man was homosexual and so was his second wife Pauline — eventually came back to haunt him: Hem decked McA at the entrance to a Parisian bistro; some say with the words, “Now tell that to your God-damn friends!”, others claiming Hem called McA “a half-assed, fairy ass-licking, fake husband” (note the Steinian repetition). Try using that kind of language on your publisher nowadays.
A note in the Boyle-McA Geniuses says: “… Bill Bird writes that on one occasion when he ‘met Bob in a Montparnasse bar — his upper lip was covered with surgeon’s plaster. He could speak only very indistinctly, but made me understand that Hem had socked him. It was during that same period when Hem was assaulting [Theodore] Dreiser, Max Eastman, etc … it seemed to me that he felt flattered to be in such good company.’” Hem wanted the world to believe that McA was afraid of physical punishment, but according to Bird it’s unlikely that McA cared much about being hit: “Bob was quite cheerful about his wounded lip.”
According to Bird, this incident occurred outside Jimmie Charters’s Falstaff bar (retold in the introduction to Nightinghouls). Boyle heard about it from the artist Hilaire Hiler, but in Geniuses reckons Hiler couldn’t remember which bar it occurred outside.
(Incidentally, Charters, “the world’s greatest barman”, rated McA as a drinker, fighter and friend even if Hem didn’t. Practised drunks know never to underestimate the camaraderie of a good barman. In Boyle’s 1926-1928 chapter of Geniuses, quoting from Charters’s autobiography, This Must Be The Place, Charters says: “Bob McAlmon was one of my best friends among the writers … I don’t know much about Bob as a writer, because I have little time for reading, but I know he’s a good fighter.”)
Another episode, when Hem and McA saw the carcass of a dead dog on a flatcar next to their train in Spain, was used by Hem as proof that McA was “going soft” because instead of studying the carcass and taking notes to improve his craft, McA headed for the bar car for a brandy — where, McA pointedly notes, he was soon joined by Hem. There’s a nice (fictionalised) version of this story here, but it’s virtually impossible to get the ‘real oil’ on their relationship as each was a notorious needler and baiter, as Smoller notes again in Nightinghouls.
Needling each other about who was less of a man was just one aspect of the antagonism between Hem and McA. The latter had also stopped showing the necessary reverence for the former’s work, as exemplified in this passage from Geniuses (1923-1924): “Hemingway is always protesting and explaining his emotions, so much so that one is inclined to wonder if he has not invented some convention for himself as to how one should feel in particular circumstances: to be professionally brave here, tough there, gentle and inarticulate with tenderness somewhere else, the rough man, so reticent but oh so full of sensibility.”
There are also examples aplenty of Hem, his crony Fitzgerald and their biographers taking pot-shots at McA’s writing. But crucially it is McA’s first impressions (from Geniuses) that all Hem’s biographers use to describe Papa:
“At times he was deliberately hard-boiled and case-hardened; again he appeared deliberately innocent, sentimental, the hurt, soft, but fairly sensitive boy trying to conceal hurt, wanting to be brave … He approached a café with a small-boy, tough-guy swagger, and before strangers of whom he was doubtful a potential snarl of scorn played on his large-lipped, rather loose mouth.” (McAlmon, Geniuses, 155).
Ahead of his time
A key reason for McA’s feud with Hem and his friend Fitzgerald was the fact that Hem violently denied any homosexual tendencies, whereas McA seemed to think he knew better. But perhaps he was merely spreading the same rumours his new enemies were circulating about him. In his short stories, most notably those in Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales (1925), McAlmon had recorded life in the decadent, gay subculture of Berlin with a frankness that was unequalled in the era:
“Compared to his stories, Christopher Isherwood’s later and more famous tales of the city seem almost tame.”
Edward N. S. Lorusso writes, in his introduction to the recent new edition of Village (University of New Mexico Press), that in a drunken moment McA had told Callaghan: “‘I’m bisexual myself, like Michelangelo, and I don’t give a damn who knows it.’” (Callaghan, incidentally, was the man who wrote of McA: ‘My curiosity about this generous man was immense … He was willing to help any writer of talent. And what did he get for it? Sneers and open hostility.”
Charles Shively writes that McA’s “precise rendering” of gay bar talk in Distinguished Air (1925) might be considered risqué even today:
“He uses terms like ‘blind meat’ (uncircumcised hard cock whose foreskin does not pull back), ‘rough trade’ and ‘auntie’…”
Don’t ask me what the euphemism ‘auntie’ means because I don’t know. I do know that Miss Knight, who gives her name to one of the four short stories in McA’s Distinguished Air was based on a real character called Daniel Mahoney.
Slipshod stylist?
Critics complain that McA was a slipshod writer. Shively points out that McA predated Kerouac with his “First thought best thought” approach, but that will always be part of the problem because it is not an axiom by which every writer can live.
McA, then, is not an all-time great but at least he writes honestly. His style at times is clumsy, but it is largely unmannered and not overly descriptive. His at times bald, unembellished method can be attributed to an ambition, as Smoller says in Nightinghouls: “to describe in precise detail, what he himself had experienced and observed, without embellishment”. He is, nevertheless, at pains to be seen in a favourable light — usually more by omission than by ‘creative’ writing (he never, for example, described being struck by Hem).
Smoller, again in Nightinghouls, of Village: “[It] has its flaws, deriving from the impatient, racy style dictated by McAlmon’s disdain for revision and his insistence that a writer should trust to the first flush of inspiration … That carelessness, indeed, occasioned Joyce’s suggestion that McAlmon label his 1922 collection of short stories A Hasty Bunch.” He also refers to McA’s tendency to overwrite descriptive passages: “McAlmon clearly never learned from Ezra Pound — as Hemingway had — to ‘distrust adjectives’.”
But McA did know how to be mischievous and humorous in his writing; as here, discussing the sad case of Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, a former maths teacher who had been hit by a truck and suffered some kind of logorrhoeic epiphany:
“Someone had remarked that he had a head shaped slightly like Joyce’s, and so Lincoln had grown a goatee and come to Paris.”
McA was right, being a genius was fashionable in the 1920s, and even a bonce shaped like a famous writer’s was in those days reason enough to head for ‘gay Paree’.
Exploited, betrayed, neglected, deceived and imitated
James R. Mellow closes his NY Times review of Village with the words: “Clearly, it is time to rescue McAlmon the writer, to make a long overdue assessment of his real contribution to American literature.”
Bird, in Boyle’s 1928-1930 chapter of Geniuses, calls McA “the third corner in every triangle” and says, “McAlmon had been exploited, betrayed, neglected, deceived and imitated beyond recognition, but anyway preyed on by the vultures of the writing world.”
The evidence is there. It is my contention that in his writing McA confused honesty with spontaneity. His impatience to get the words down on paper without artifice rarely led to the spare prose of writers like Hem, who honed their sentences and their craft conscientiously.
Boyle in her 1984 Afterword to Geniuses, echoes Robert Knoll’s question from McAlmon and the Lost Generation, A Self-Portrait, about why McA was incapable of making full use of his gifts in his own work:
“It is perhaps William Carlos Williams who has best answered that question. ‘He cared for nothing so much as excellence in his craft as a writer,’ Williams wrote, ‘but he could not be a liar to obtain it. And he had an eye and a fierce tongue when he saw others among the writers about him — liars in one form or another —who were lying to make their reputations. Many of them were doing just that. Not he. But he suffered for it in the world’s estimation.’ And to that Knoll adds: ‘Men of fierce integrity being rare, he does not deserve oblivion.’”
But even McA with his disdain for rewriting, must have recognised the frustration of not being able to correctly express a thought, an idea or a sensation; after all, the helpless yearning for the right words was all there in the poem he rescued from the poet William Carlos Williams’s wastepaper basket, as McA describes in Geniuses:
“[Williams] is apt to think his best [poem] not worth publishing because it has come straight from a direct and stark impulse, it does not perplex and torment and irritate him and make him restless. In New York I kept him from destroying one such poem, one of the most beautiful in any language. It was the ‘Portrait of the Author’, which appeared first with Contact, and later in his book, Sour Grapes. Marianne Moore later commented on it, saying, ‘It preserves the atmosphere of a moment, into which the impertinence of life cannot intrude’.”
And this is not merely McA, having failed as a poet, trying to take credit for saving another poet’s work. The incident is verified from Williams’s point of view in Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams by Zhaoming Qian: “Williams told us that he discarded the poem because he found it imitative of Pound but that Bob McAlmon retrieved it from a wastebasket and called it one of his best.”
I urge you to read ‘Portrait of the Author’ [on the internet this poem seems also to be known as ‘The Light-hearted Author’]. If McA had felt the frustration Williams did in the struggle to express oneself, would he have worked harder at honing his own craft? And if he hadn’t believed in “first thought best thought” would his legacy be intact? Would he be remembered as a writer, alongside Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the rest, instead of just as a drinker and wasted talent?
I don’t know and I don’t even care; I have exorcised McAlmon’s ghost. All except for that eerie wailing that sounds like Chinese opera reverberating around a Paris police cell.
Robert McAlmon died on 2 February 1956, James Joyce’s birthday.
Further reading
Explorations (1921, poetry)
A Hasty Bunch (1922, short stories)
A Companion Volume (1923, short stories)
Post-Adolescence (1923, novel)
Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period (1924, novel)
Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales (1925)
The Portrait of a Generation (1926, poetry)
North America, Continent of Conjecture (1929, poetry)
Not Alone Lost (1937, poetry)
Being Geniuses Together: An Autobiography (1938, memoir)
