NOTE VIII
I WAS living in a rooming house in a side street in New York and had spent more years of my life than I cared to think about in just such places. When I first began writing I used to read a great deal, in George Moore and others, of writers, painters, poets and the like sitting in cafés. That however happened in Paris, not in New York or Chicago. Everyone has read about it. You know how they do. In the evening one by one they come in at the door of the café. On the arm of the painter there may chance to be a beautiful grisette. The writers are less fortunate with the ladies and are glad to sit in silence listening to the talk. And how brilliant the talk! Such things are said! There is always an old wit, someone in the manner of Whistler or Degas. The old dog sits at a table keeping everything in order. I remember that two or three men I knew in New York tried something of the sort but did not quite pull it off. Let someone get a little “hifalutin’”—some scribbler, let us say. Suppose he sighs and says “The beautiful must remain the unattainable,” or something like that. Or let some other scribbler go off on a long solemn pronouncement about government, “All government should be done away with. It’s nonsense.” Bang! The Jimmy Whistler or the Degas of the café has shot him right between the eyes. There was a sense in which Miss Jane Heap of The Little Review supplied the need of such a one in New York, but she and Miss Margaret Anderson could not cover the whole field. That was impossible.
And, in any event, neither New York nor Chicago has any cafés. When I first went to New York drinking was still publicly going on but one stood up at a bar with the foot on a rail and shot the drink into oneself. There might be a moment of conversation with the bartender. “What chance you think the Giants got?” etc. Nothing specially helpful in that and anyway what one secretly hoped was that the White Sox of Chicago would win.
Everyone lived in rooms, except those who had rich parents and most young American artists gathered in the city, ate at cafeterias. In Chicago, before I left, they had begun taking the chairs out of the restaurants and one fancied that, in a few years, all Chicagoans would eat as they drank, standing. It would save time.
We more solemn and serious American scribblers, painters, etc., for the most part lived in rooms and I have myself a memory of rooms in which I have lived, that is like a desert trail. I can no longer recall all of them. In a sense they haunt my whole life. At a little distance they become gray, little gray holes into which I have crept.
And we Americans have enough of the blood of the northern races in us that we must have our holes into which to creep, to contemplate ourselves, to say our prayers. In Paris, during a summer when I loitered there, I found myself able to sit all afternoon in a café, watching the people pass up and down a little street. At another café across a small square a young student made love to a girl. He kept touching her body with his hands and laughing and occasionally he kissed her. That happened and carts passed. One side of my mind made little delightful mental notes. The French teamsters did not make geldings of their horses. Magnificent stallions passed drawing dust carts. Why did Americans unman stallions while the French did not? The teamster walked in the road with his hat cocked to the side of his head and a bit of color in the hat. The stallion threw back his head and trumpeted. The teamster made some sort of sarcastic comment to the student with the girl, who answered in kind but did not quit kissing her. There was a small church on the west side of the square and old women were going in and coming out. All these things happened and I was alive to them all and still I sat in a café writing a tale of life in my own Ohio towns. How natural it seemed, in Paris, to lead one’s secret inner life quite openly in the streets and how unnatural the same sort of thing would have seemed in an American city.
In Chicago alone there had been enough rooms, in which I myself had lived, had hidden myself away, to have made a long street of houses. How much had my own outlook on life been made by the rooms? How much were the lives of all Americans made by the places in which they lived? When Americans grew tired of their houses—or rooms—and went into the street there was no place to sit unless one went into a movie or went to eat expensive and unnecessary food in a crowded restaurant. In the movies signs were put up: “Best place in town to kill time.”
Time then was a thing to be killed. It would seem an odd notion, I fancy, to a Frenchman or an Italian.