Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (29 page)

The accounts are linked by Ford’s visceral dislike of Wilde. In 1911, it is confined to Wilde’s writing: ‘His works seemed to me derivative and of no importance, his humour thin and mechanical.’ But by 1931, Ford has extended it to the man: ‘It was humiliating to dislike so much one so unfortunate. But the feeling of dislike for that shabby and incoherent immensity was unavoidable.’ In his elaboration of the revulsion youth feels towards age, is Ford Madox Ford rehearsing his own imminent destruction at the hands of Ernest Hemingway?

LOSES HIS NERVE WITH

9, boulevard Malesherbes, Paris

November 1891

When the much-fêted Oscar Wilde arrives in Paris, he is preceded by his reputation as a wit and dandy.
¹²⁸
Now aged thirty-seven, he has come for two months to brush up his first play,
Salome
, which he is writing in French. ‘French by sympathy, I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare,’ he complains to Edmond de Goncourt. He speaks the language fluently, with a prodigious vocabulary, though he makes no attempt at an accent.

He makes his mark straight away, aphorisms spraying from his blubbery lips in all the most fashionable salons. Everyone is held spellbound. At one lunch party, guests weep to think words can achieve such splendour. ‘I have put all my talent into my works,’ he announces. ‘I have put all my genius into my life.’

He is adept at conquering all conversational obstacles, brushing aside contradiction as pedantry. When he tells a dinner party about Salome, and a professor points out that he is confusing two Salomes – one the daughter of Herod, the other the dancer – Wilde retorts that this is the drab truth of an academic: ‘I prefer the other truth, my own, which is that of a dream. Between the two truths, the falser is the truer.’

L’Echo de Paris
describes Wilde’s arrival in the city as ‘
le “great event” des salons littéraires parisiennes
’ of the season. His principal guide is a young literary lion called Marcel Schwob, who also translates his story ‘The Selfish Giant’. After Wilde’s departure, Schwob describes him as ‘A big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck
some more. While he ate – and he ate little – he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes. A terrible absinthe-drinker, through which he got his visions and desires.’

Schwob often entertains Wilde at his apartment. Léon Daudet, who meets him there, finds him both attractive and revolting, words tumbling out of his slack mouth ‘like a fat, gossipy woman’. Sensing this ambivalence, at their third meeting Wilde asks Daudet what he thinks of him: Daudet hedges with a few words about his complexity, and his possible guile. The next day, he receives a letter from Wilde, insisting he is ‘the simplest and most candid of mortals, just like a tiny, tiny child’.

A glimpse of Wilde’s manner of speaking is offered by Ernest Raynaud, who bumps into him on a sunny day in the boulevard des Capucines: ‘We must let our instincts laugh and frolic in the sun like a troop of laughing children. I love life. It is so beautiful and –’ at this point, Wilde surveys his surroundings, lit by the sun ‘– How all this outdoes the languishing beauty of the countryside! The solitude of the country stifles and crushes me ... I am not really myself except in the midst of elegant crowds, in the exploits of capitals, at the heart of rich districts or amid the sumptuous ornamentation of palace-hotels, seated by all the desirable objects and with an army of servants, the warm caress of a plush carpet under my feet ... I detest nature where man has not intervened with his artifice! When Benvenuto Cellini crucified a living man to study the play of muscles in his death agony, a pope was right to grant him absolution. What is the death of a vague individual if it enables an immortal world to blossom and to create, in Keats’s words, an eternal source of ecstasy?’

But, just occasionally, language fails him.

Wilde is first introduced to the twenty-year-old Marcel Proust at the home of Madame Arthur Baignères on rue du Général Foy. He is impressed by Proust’s extraordinary knowledge of English literature, and when Proust asks him to dinner at his home in boulevard Malesherbes he immediately accepts.

On the evening in question, Proust is delayed, so arrives puffing and panting, several minutes late. ‘Is the English gentleman here?’ he asks his servant.

‘Yes, sir, he arrived five minutes ago. He had barely entered the drawing room when he asked for the bathroom, and he has not come out of it.’

Proust runs to the end of the passage, and shouts through the door of the bathroom, ‘Monsieur Wilde, are you ill?’ Wilde unlocks the door and peers out. ‘Ah, there you are, Monsieur Proust. No, I am not in the least ill.’

It emerges that he has suffered an unprecedented attack of shyness, and is now overcome by embarrassment. ‘I thought I was to have the pleasure of dining with you alone, but they showed me into the drawing room. I looked at the drawing room and at the end of it were your parents. My courage failed me. Goodbye, dear Monsieur Proust, goodbye ...’

With that, he departs in a flurry. Baffled, Proust goes into the drawing room and greets his parents, who inform him that Wilde burst into the room, took one look at the interior decoration, exclaimed, ‘How ugly your house is!’ and rushed out.
¹²⁹

It is an odd sequence of events, somehow out of character. Wilde may be bombastic, but he is seldom rude, and his retreat into the bathroom seems additionally strange.

Could this be the most likely explanation? On first entering the drawing room, Wilde fails to notice anybody else. He exclaims, ‘How ugly your house is!’ out loud, but to himself; only then does he catch sight of Proust’s parents, sitting quietly in the corner. Horribly embarrassed, he rushes out of the room, and can then think of no way of returning with his dignity intact.

Wilde returns to Paris in the summer of 1894, the year before his downfall, and again encounters Marcel Proust. Might it be some subliminal imprint of his past mistake that makes him come out with another rude remark
¹³⁰
about Proust’s furnishings? ‘I don’t think Mr Wilde has been well brought-up,’ comments Monsieur Proust as soon as he has departed.
¹³¹

GETS RID OF

Hôtel Majestic, avenue Kléber, Paris

May 19th 1922

Marcel Proust, once so social, is nowadays very picky about going out, preferring to stay in his bedroom. He has developed a particular distaste for exclusive, intimate parties. ‘Nothing amuses me less than what was called, twenty years ago, “select,”’ he observes.

The British art patrons Sydney and Violet Schiff are obliged to employ stealth to attract him to the dinner party of their dreams, which they are holding in a private room at the Hôtel Majestic, in celebration of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

For some time, they have been plotting to gather the four men they consider the world’s greatest living artists – Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce and Marcel Proust – together in the same room. Proust is perhaps their greatest catch, being both the most lionised and the most elusive; since the publication of
Sodome et Gomorrhe
the week before last, he has been the talk of the town. Knowing his aversion to select gatherings, Sydney Schiff does not send him a formal invitation, but craftily slips a reference to it into a letter a few days before: might he perhaps drop by after dinner?

Picasso and Stravinsky arrive in good time. The less dependable James Joyce arrives after coffee, drunk and shabby, swaying from side to side. ‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond,’ he admits. He sits to the right of his host, places his head in his hands, and says nothing.

Their fellow guest Clive Bell remembers the entry at 2.30 a.m. of ‘a small, dapper figure clad in exquisite black with white kid gloves ... looking for all the world as though he had seen a light in a friend’s window and had just come up on the chance of finding him awake. Physically he did not please me, being altogether too sleek and dank and plastered: his eyes were glorious however.’ This otherwise elegant entrance of Marcel Proust
gets off to a bad start when another guest, Princesse Violette Murat, looks daggers at him and flounces out of the party, furious at being depicted as a skinflint in his recent volume.

Proust, flustered by this rebuff, is placed between Igor Stravinsky and Sydney Schiff. Stravinsky notes he is ‘as pale as a mid-afternoon moon’. Proust tries to pay Stravinsky a compliment by comparing him to Beethoven.

‘Doubtless you admire Beethoven,’ he adds.

‘I detest Beethoven.’

‘But,
cher maître
, surely those late sonatas and quartets ...?’

‘Worse than the others.’

Around this time, James Joyce emits a loud snore (‘I
hope
it was a snore,’ adds Bell), then wakes with a jolt. Proust – looking ten years younger than he is, or so Joyce thinks – introduces himself.
¹³²
The two are widely regarded as rivals; their works are often compared, generally to Joyce’s disadvantage.

Encounters at parties are subject to the vagaries of memory, and further obscured by layers of gossip and hearsay and inaudibility, the whole mix invariably transformed even more by alcohol. So it is unsurprising that the Proust/Joyce exchange should be related in at least seven different ways:

1) As told by Joyce’s friend Arthur Power:

PROUST
: Do you like truffles?

JOYCE
: Yes, I do.

2) As told by the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre:

PROUST
: I have never read your works, Mr Joyce.

JOYCE
: I have never read your works, Mr Proust.
¹³³

3) As told by James Joyce many years later to Jacques Mercanton:

‘Proust would talk only of duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.’

4) As told by James Joyce to his close friend Frank Budgen:

‘Our talk consisted solely of the word “No”. Proust asked me if I knew the duc de so-and-so. I said, “No.” Our hostess asked Proust if he had read such and such a piece of
Ulysses
. Proust said, “No.” And so on. Of course the situation was impossible. Proust’s day was just beginning. Mine was at an end.’

5) According to another friend of Joyce, Padraic Clum, Joyce wants to undermine the Schiffs’ hopes for a legendary occasion, so tries to stay as silent as possible:

PROUST
: Ah, Monsieur Joyce, you know the Princess ...

JOYCE
: No, Monsieur.

PROUST
: Ah, you know the Countess ...

JOYCE
: No, Monsieur.

PROUST
: Then you know Madame ...

JOYCE
: No, Monsieur.

However, in this version, Joyce clearly wrong-foots himself, as his silence becomes part of the legend.

6) As told by William Carlos Williams:

JOYCE
: I’ve had headaches every day. My eyes are terrible.

PROUST
: My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It’s killing me. In fact, I must leave at once.

JOYCE
: I’m in the same situation. If I can find someone to take me by the arm. Goodbye!

PROUST
:
Charmé
. Oh, my stomach.

7) As told by Ford Madox Ford:

PROUST
: As I say, Monsieur, in
Du Côté de chez Swann
, which without doubt you have –

JOYCE
: No, Monsieur.

(
PAUSE
)

JOYCE
: As Mr Bloom says in my
Ulysses
, which, Monsieur, you have doubtless read ...

PROUST
: But, no, Monsieur.

(
PAUSE
)

Proust apologises for his late arrival, ascribing it to malady, before going into the symptoms in some detail.

JOYCE
: Well, Monsieur, I have almost exactly the same symptoms. Only in my case, the analysis ...

And from then on, for a number of hours, the two men discuss their various illnesses.

According to Schiff, who has a leaning towards accuracy, the party ends with Proust inviting the Schiffs back to his apartment, and with Joyce squeezing into the taxi too. Joyce then starts smoking, and opens the window, causing upset to Proust, an asthmatic who hates fresh air. In the brief journey, Proust talks incessantly, but addresses none of his remarks to Joyce.

When the four of them alight in rue Hamelin, Joyce tries to join the others in Proust’s apartment, but they do their best to divert him. ‘Let my taxi take you home,’ insists Proust, before disappearing upstairs with Violet Schiff, leaving Sydney Schiff to bundle Joyce back into the taxi. Free of Joyce’s company at last, Proust and the Schiffs drink champagne and talk merrily until daybreak.

FINDS LITTLE TO SAY TO

31 Hyde Park Gardens, London W2

July 30th 1931

A small group of guests has gathered in the drawing room of the Chairman of Putnam, the publishers, ready for a lunch in honour of James Joyce. The air is heavy with Madonna lilies, their scent intensifying an already nervy and oppressive atmosphere.

The Chairman’s wife, Gladys Huntington, is perhaps the most agitated of all. Any lunch is made all the more daunting for a hostess if her chief guest has an almost militant devotion to silence. Though the characters in Joyce’s novels are known for talking – internally, externally, both at the same time, for pages on end – the author himself is more likely to translate his thoughts into long sighs. Joyce is seldom prepared to break his silence unless a topic really interests him: at his meeting with Le Corbusier, he only really got going when the architect asked after his parakeets, Pierre and Pepi.