M. Bresson brought his lady over to lunch at my house. I was living alone then like an ascetic, which I found necessary to the completion of a new book. But I asked Mr. Charles Ford over to meet my guests. He came in his bathing suit, walking his way down the peninsular strip which lay between the river and the bay, and swimming over to my house. He took one look at the pair and left. The lady said, "He smells like a down-home." I said, "Yes, but he's not a cracker." Later Ford explained that his precious artistic sense of the harmony of form and rhythm had suffered too great a shock.
Our conversation turned upon M. Bresson's unwillingness to carry on with his father the business of an industrialist. M. Bresson's colored lady thought that he would be more interesting as a business man than as a modern photographer. She said he was not so artistic as he was plain lazy; that he was so lazy he wouldn't even pick up his pajamas from the floor.
I said that there at the head of Africa in Morocco, hard by the ancient civilized Mediterranean, the natives did not worry about pajamas. Going to bed was an effortless thing. And I asked M. Bresson whether among the pure primitives (if there were any left) in the middle or the bottom of Africa, one had to worry about pajamas. Or if one might be satisfied with a broad banana leaf. M. Bresson was not so sure. He had returned all the way to Paris to find his pure primitive and bring her to Morocco to show me. Well, in less than a couple of years I heard of M. Bresson in Mexico with a Mexican girl. Perhaps when his protracted period of adolescence has passed he will finally finish like a cool Norman and practical Frenchman by marrying a woman of his country and his class.
I am a little tired of hearing precious bohemian white men protesting their admiration and love for Negro women and the rest. Yet many of them are shocked at the idea of intimacy between a black man and a white woman, because of their confused ideas of erotic attraction. Perhaps I am hypercritical in detecting a false accent in their enthusiasm. But it strikes me as being neither idealistic or realistic. I know it is a different thing from the sympathy and friendship that the humane and tolerant members of one group or nation or race of people feel for the members of another. And I know it is different from that blind urge of sexual desire which compelled white men to black women during the age of black slavery in the Occident (and perhaps in Africa today), and created an interesting new type of humanity. The performance of such men was not actuated by false and puerile theories of sex. I have a certain respect for them. But these nice modern faddists—they give me a feeling of white lice crawling on black bodies.
The most interesting visitor of them all was the American writer and protégé of Gertrude Stein, Charles Henri Ford, who published a queer book of adolescence in Paris under the rather puritan title of The Young and Evil. Young Mr. Ford suddenly dropped in upon me one day when a group of tribesmen were killing a steer in my garden. They cooked the liver in the yard and roasted some of the meat on skewers and invited him to join us in the feast. He was like a rare lily squatting in among the bearded and bournoused natives, and he enjoyed it. When he left in the evening I gave him a chunk of meat from what had been given to me.
He had been in Italy with a Cuban girl. When they came to Madrid she found a young Spanish lover and the three of them came on to Tangier. He came to see me soon again and I invited some of the younger Moors and a few fatmahs to meet him. They all rather liked him. They said he looked wonderfully like the cinema portraits of Marlene Dietrich.
He came again and again, evidently liking my little isolated house on the river. He was likable enough, and we gave a few native parties for him. The young men brought their lutes and mandolins and sang Andalusian melodies, and the girls danced. One evening Mr. Ford came over early and excitedly told me that the young men were bringing a very beautiful fatmah—prettier than any he had seen at my place. I said I couldn't think of any pretty girl of that class whom Mr. Ford knew and I had not seen before. He said he felt certain I hadn't seen her. So we waited expectantly until the carriages arrived with the party. When the girl unveiled she turned out to be the first little one who had worked for me when I arrived in Tangier. We were both very surprised. She had lost the quaint native freshness of our earlier acquaintanceship and already she had developed like a fine and hardened cashew-nut. She was not aware that the joy-makers were bringing her to my new place. But she was not in the slightest embarrassed. She established herself as temporary hostess as well as guest and was just as charming in the rôle as she had been efficient as a little housekeeper.... Our fiesta lasted two days. The Moroccans are a magical barbaric people, if one isn't too civilized to appreciate the subtlety and beauty of their barbaresques. When at last I decided to return to America, in homage to them I indited: "A Farewell to Morocco."