Paris: The Novel

And Chagall nodded modestly. “Will you go over for it?” Frank asked, but the Russian shook his head.
    “Can’t afford it.”
    Claire was impressed that Frank was already ahead of her with thisinformation. Obviously she’d better keep an eye out for Monsieur Chagall in the future.
    They discussed Paris for a while, and all the exciting people in it.
    “It’s funny,” Claire remarked. “If I listen to my uncle Marc, who’s been at the center of everything going on here for three or four decades, he talks of Paris as a French city, full of French culture. But you all see it as something else. As a place where all the artists come to play. So which is the real Paris, I wonder?”
    Hemingway reached over and poured her some wine.
    “Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder,” he said. “Paris has always been proud of being a cultural center ever since the university was set up. Now it’s become the place that people come to from all over the world. So it’s just a more international version of what it always wanted to be. A city’s a huge organism. It can be all sorts of things at the same time. History may or may not remember the recent French presidents, but it’s going to remember the Impressionists, and the Ballets Russes, and Stravinsky, and Picasso I suspect, all together. So what will Paris be? The memory of all those wonderful things. We remember Napoléon, the Corsican, and Eiffel, who was Alsatian, and most of us also remember that Ben Franklin lived here. That’s Paris.” He grinned. “Paris became an international city, so now it belongs to all of us. Everyone in the world.”
    They started ordering food after that. And then Hemingway and Frank got into a friendly argument about Paris and New York, because Frank said that after Paris he wanted to go and live there.
    “You stay here,” Hemingway told him. “At the moment, at least, Paris is the only place to be.” He turned to Claire. “Don’t you agree?”
    “For painting, dance, and fashion, everyone says it is,” said Claire. “Though I love London theater. What about music, though?”
    “Stravinsky’s here,” said Hemingway. “What more do you want?”
    “I want jazz,” said Frank. “I want all that fresh rhythm and excitement and improvisation of jazz. That’s in New York. And by the way,” he turned to Claire, “I know London theater has the best tradition in the world, but amazing things are happening in New York now. Eugene O’Neill will have five plays running on Broadway this season.”
    But Hemingway wasn’t having it.
    “If you’re going to write for the stage, Frank, then maybe. But none of the good writers of books and poetry want to be in New York. They’re all in London and Paris. Eliot, Pound, Fitzgerald. Everyone’s in Europe.”
    “Not true. There’s a crowd of writers in New York. They hang out together at the Algonquin Hotel every week.”
    “A bunch of old women,” Hemingway retorted.
    “They’re not old women. They’re bright, and they’re young.”
    “Give them time.”
    It was obviously no use arguing with Hemingway, so Frank didn’t try. Soon they were all eating. The waiters put small candles on the table as the sun went down.
    By the end of the main course, a certain mellowness had descended upon the table. Claire noticed that Chagall had taken out some crayons and was quietly doodling on the paper tablecloth. By the candlelight, it looked like a goat in a green space and a lady in a flowing dress flying through a deep blue sky.
    But then Hemingway rapped on the table and said he was going to read from something. And she supposed it might be one of his latest stories, and she was eager to hear it, but it wasn’t his own, he told them.
    “This is something I was shown in Shakespeare and Company the other day, and I liked it and thought you’d enjoy it too. It’s the opening to a story that’s still being written.”
    Hemingway had a good voice for reading. It was a light baritone, unaccented, straightforward, like a correspondent reporting from a faraway place, and when he descended into the wide trench of the open vowels, his tone became somewhat gravelly.
    But the place he was describing now, as he read from some sheets of typewritten paper, was not a war zone, nor was it an American forest, nor a big river or a mountain somewhere, but a long garden, and a wide French house, quite simple and provincial, with shutters on the windows, and a bed full of lavender and