Yet after reading Ulysses I said to my friends, as I had previously said to Frank Budgen, one of Joyce's early admirers in London, that D.H. Lawrence was the modern writer I preferred above any. I thought Ulysses a bigger book than any one of Lawrence's books, but I preferred Lawrence as a whole. I thought that D.H. Lawrence was more modern than James Joyce. In D.H. Lawrence I found confusion—all of the ferment and torment and turmoil, the hesitation and hate and alarm, the sexual inquietude and the incertitude of this age, and the psychic and romantic groping for a way out.
But in James Joyce I found the sum of two thousand years, from the ending of the Roman Empire to the ending of the Christian age. Joyce picked up all the ends of the classical threads and wove them into the ultimate pattern in Ulysses. There is no confusion, no doubt, no inquiry and speculation about the future in James Joyce. He is a seer and Olympian and was able to bring the life of two thousand years into the span of a day. If I were to label James Joyce I would say that he was (in the classic sense of the word) a great Decadent.
Some of my friends thought I showed a preference for D.H. Lawrence because he was something of a social rebel. But it was impossible for me seriously to think of Lawrence as a social thinker, after having studied the social thinking of creative writers like Ruskin, William Morris, Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, and other social propagandists. In fact, Lawrence's attitude toward his subject matter, his half-suppressed puritanism, often repelled me. What I loved was the Laurentian language, which to me is the ripest and most voluptuous expression of English since Shakespeare.
If Joyce was le maître of the ultra-moderns, Gertrude Stein was the madame, and her house was open to all without discrimination. Even Negroes. I cannot remember how often people said to me: "Haven't you been to Gertrude Stein's?" ... "Everybody goes to Gertrude Stein's." ... "I'll take you to Gertrude Stein's." ... "Gertrude Stein does not mind Negroes." ... "Gertrude Stein has written the best story about Negroes, and if you mean to be a modern Negro writer, you should meet her...."
I never went because of my aversion to cults and disciples. I liked meeting people as persons, not as divinities in temples. And when I came to examine "Melanctha," Gertrude Stein's Negro story, I could not see wherein intrinsically it was what it was cracked up to be. In "Melanctha," Gertrude Stein reproduced a number of the common phrases relating to Negroes, such as: "boundless joy of Negroes," "unmorality of black people," "black childish," "big black virile," "joyous Negro," "black and evil," "black heat," "abandoned laughter," "Negro sunshine," all prettily framed in a tricked-out style. But in the telling of the story I found nothing striking and informative about Negro life. Melanctha, the mulattress, might have been a Jewess. And the mulatto, Jeff Campbell—he is not typical of mulattoes I have known anywhere. He reminds me more of a type of white lover described by colored women. "Melanctha" seemed more like a brief American paraphrase of Esther Waters than a story of Negro life. The original Esther Waters is more important to me.
Ernest Hemingway was the most talked-about of young American writers when I arrived in Paris. He was the white hope of the ultra-sophisticates. In the motley atmosphere of Montparnasse, there was no place for the cult of little hero worship. James Joyce was worshipped, but he had won out with a work that took men's eyes like a planet. But in Montparnasse generally writers and artists plunged daggers into one another. That atmosphere in its special way was like a good tonic, if you didn't take too much of it. Good for young creative artists who have a tendency to megalomania. And many of them do. And also it was an antidote for the older ones who have already arrived and are a little haughty, expecting too much homage from the young.
It was therefore exciting that Ernest Hemingway had won the regard and respect of the younger creative artists and even of the older. I remember Nina Hamnett pointing him out to me at the Dôme and remarking ecstatically that Hemingway was a very handsome American and that he had a lovely son. But it was long after that before I met him for a moment through Max Eastman.
In Our Time, that thin rare book of miniature short stories, was published, and it was the literary event among the young expatriates. I cherish an unforgettable memory of it and of Montparnasse at that time. A cultivated and distinguished American, liberal of attitude and pocket to unpopular causes, was sitting at the Dôme, reading a copy of In Our Time. He invited me to his table and offered a drink. He read aloud Chapter III, and wondered whether there was a double entendre in that last sentence: "It rained all through the evacuation." I said I did not know and did not think it mattered, and I asked the garçon to bring me a double cognac. My friend and host said: "They are talking in a big way about this Hemingway, but I just can't get him. I like the young radical crowd and what they are aiming to do. But this thing here"—he pointed to In Our Time—"I don't like it. It is too brutal and bloody."
"But so is life," I ventured to say, and not too aggressively, because I was expecting my host to come across with a gift of money.