When at last we went home he could see my whole body, and I felt as though I had seen his whole soul.
Then I carefully wrote this down on paper. I put in every touch that I could remember. I rewrote it to make it big, and I made it so big I spoiled it all. I tore this up and began again. For about two weeks I wrote nothing else. But at last I tore up everything. After all, he was a friend of mine.
"But where's the harm," I argued, "so long as I always tear it up? This is real stuff. I'll get somewhere this way if I keep on."
And I did keep on. Shamelessly I wormed my way into friends by the dozen. I found it such an absorbing pursuit I could hardly wait to finish up one before I went on to another. There were such a bewildering lot of them, now that I had pried open my eyes. Would-be painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, rich and poor, tragic ones and comic ones, with the meanest pettiest jealousies, the most bumptious self-conceits, the blindest worship of masters, the most profound humility, ambition so savage it made men inhuman. Many were starving themselves to death.
There was a little Hungarian Jew, an ardent follower of Matisse.
"Technique?" he cried. "It is nothing! To grip your soul in your two hands and press it on your canvas—that is art, that is Matisse!"
He took me night after night through old buildings up in Montparnasse, immense and dismal rookeries crowded with Poles, Bohemians and God knows what other races, all feverish post-impressionists. Often we would find three together close around one candle, scowling and squinting at their easels, gaunt, silent, eager. Matisse—Matisse!
"Most of them," said my guide, "are just mad. They cannot paint. All think they are going to do great things, but all they are going to do is to die."
It was through this little Hungarian that I made my first study of female life.
Why delay any longer? I had been in Paris over six months, and I had qualms almost of guilt at the thought of this chastity of mine. At first I said, "Art is a jealous mistress." And this did splendidly for a time. But then a stout German youth came along and laid it down as an absolute law that no writer could do a woman right until he had lived with a dozen. Hence that scented little cat with whom he had lived for the past year. She was the first of the dozen, eh? Damn the fellow, how much was there in it? De Maupassant certainly hadn't held off. In fact there were few of my idols who had. Why not be brave and take the plunge? It need not be such a terrific plunge; no doubt if I went at it right I could find a safe, easy kind of a her, friendly and confiding, a thoroughly good fellow with none of these wild ups and downs. The less temperament the better; she must have a good quiet head on her shoulders; no doubt we would need it. And she must not be too young. Let her have had affairs enough to know that ours was only one more and would probably be as brief as the rest—the briefer the better.