SOURCE: Brown, Russell. “Callaghan, Glassco, and the Canadian Lost Generation.” Essays on Canadian Writing 51-2 (winter-spring 1993-94): 83-112.

[In the following essay, Brown discusses how Callaghan's memoir That Summer in Paris and John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse challenges the American-in-Paris myth of expatriate life in the 1920s.]

I

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you. …

—Ernest Hemingway, epigraph to A Moveable Feast, 1964

The notion, in the years immediately after World War I, that Paris was the best place for artists and intellectuals may have been true, but it functioned chiefly as a myth: that is, it embodied a cluster of unarticulated assumptions, it shaped decisions and attitudes in ways that went beyond rational appeal, and it generated many narratives.

Emerging in something like its enduring form by 1924, the American myth of the Paris twenties was first disseminated in magazine articles and newspaper stories and then, increasingly, in books. It was a powerful myth with broad popular currency, and from the start historical accuracy was not a concern: “There was too much music, dancing, drinking and moiling about of the mob for anybody's memory to be trusted,” wrote Robert McAlmon in 1938 in one of the most famous memoirs of the period, Being Geniuses Together (112-13).¹ “It was all very interesting in those days. … You just mentally tossed a coin in your mind and decided, I believe, or I don't believe” (173; B222).²

The myth of Paris as a place for marginally living artists and free-thinkers has its roots in Henri Murger's popular 1851 book Scènes de la vie de Bohème. As well as being widely available to the postwar generation in French editions and in English translations, the book inspired Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème (1896), an opera of immense popularity that also helped create the myth of Bohemian Paris. The American version of this myth, that of necessary expatriation from one's homeland as too provincial, was anticipated in George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1888). Moore transformed the British aristocratic notion—that a journey to the Continent was good seasoning for a young man because it provided sophistication and culture he could not get at home—into a somewhat different trip across the channel, one that represented a gleeful throwing-off of the restraint, conventionality, and dedication to work that seemed essential to late Victorian England in order to embrace the freedom, joie de vivre, and attention to art associated with nineteenth-century Paris.

However, the more immediate shape of the American-in-Paris myth was a result of American intellectuals' and artists' disillusionment with the postwar business ethos and materialism and their restiveness with lingering Victorian standards. As Malcolm Cowley points out in Exile's Return (1934; rev. 1951), the idea that European centres such as Paris were superior in their appreciation of culture and tolerance of nonconformity was central to the essays that Harold Stearns gathered in 1922, in Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, and to his emblematic and highly publicized departure for Paris following the book's publication (74-79). Stories about a Paris scene, made up of (mostly American) writers, painters, intellectuals, and the generally disaffected, began to appear regularly in the press, usually expressed in a tone of moral disapproval that barely veiled its intention to titillate. As the twenties progressed, the Paris expatriate community became journalistic fodder and a convenient metonym for artistic licence and the Bohemian life in general.³ McAlmon wryly wrote that journalists who had only briefly visited the Latin Quarter “went back to their own countries—the Americans were the worst—and wrote righteous and moralizing articles and editorials on expatriate life” (24). “In the year 1924,” he observed, “there were appearing in American magazines and newspapers a number of articles about the life of the deracinated, exiled and expatriate, who lived mainly in Paris leading, the articles implied, non-working and dissolute lives” (105). This journalistic construction of “Paris,” enhanced by such things as the Hollywood silent film So This Is Paris (1926), was one of the first manifestations of the myth-making power of twentieth-century media, and this myth grew until, by 1929, it had become “passionately the fashion to be an artist or a genius” (B251).

Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the first full-length narrative of this mythic Paris café society, appeared in 1926. Naming into existence “the lost generation,” it gave heightened significance and apparent unity to a small and loosely defined community. A flow of nonfiction books soon followed, elaborating the details of this lost generation finding stimulating refuge in left-bank Paris: They Had to See Paris, by Homer Croy in 1926; This Must Be the Place, by James (“Jimmie the Barman”) Charles in 1927; Sisley Huddleston's Paris Salons, Cafes, Studios in 1928 and Back to Montparnasse in 1931; Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which contains a long section about the era, in 1933; Cowley's Exile's Return in 1934; McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together in 1938; and Janet Flanner's An American in Paris in 1940. Since then, just as there seems to be no limit to books about Bloomsbury (a similar—if more exclusive—mythic locus for artists and intellectuals in the twentieth-century imagination), books contributing to the myth of the Paris twenties and its American lost generation have continued to appear long after the passing moment. These have included such notable works as Elliot Paul's The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942), Samuel Putnam's Paris Was Our Mistress: Memoirs of a Lost and Found Generation (1947), Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company (1959), and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964). As well, earlier books gained new life: in 1968 Kay Boyle revised McAlmon's memoirs and interpolated chapters of her own to produce a substantially new version of Being Geniuses Together, and, in 1972, Janet Flanner's New Yorker columns were reprinted—with sections from An American in Paris—as Paris Was Yesterday. If in the last two decades, the appearances of personal accounts have finally decreased, they have given way to the volumes of letters, biographies, and period studies that also contribute to our idea of the age.

One striking feature of this story of Paris in the twenties is the degree to which it was an American narrative. Gertrude Stein, the great forerunner of the twenties expatriates and the formidable mistress of an obligatory shrine on the Paris literary circuit, insisted that she was not an exile: “America is my country,” she said, “and Paris is my home town” (qtd. in Cunliffe 237). According to the literary historian John McCormick, this sense of Paris as an extension of America was justified. He remarks that for most of the twenties expatriates, “abroad” in general, and “Paris in particular, was a village or an American suburb, with Gertrude Stein as Mayor and with Robert McAlmon and Harry and Caresse Crosby as Deputy Sheriffs by virtue of their having capital to publish their friends' work” (5). Indigenous French culture of this period has been so overshadowed by the success of this American myth-making that when Richard McDougall compiled and translated yet another account of the Paris twenties—Adrienne Monnier's memoirs, published in America in 1976 as The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier—it carried the following remark by Archibald MacLeish on its back cover: “Every now and then a book appears which twists the kaleidoscope of the past and changes the pattern. This book does exactly that for the Paris Twenties which are so often presented on this side of the Atlantic as an American decade somehow passed in France.”

An American decade somehow passed in France is what the myth of the Paris twenties has become. However, even before 1976, two books challenged this American view: Morley Callaghan's belated Paris memoir, That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others, published in 1963, and John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse, published in 1970 (though Glassco claimed to have written it much earlier). Each author modifies the American-in-Paris myth by offering an alternative Canadian-in-Paris narrative that inserts his presence into a history in which Canadians had previously been invisible. Their memoirs are, that is, acts of revisionist literary history that moved Canadian protagonists to a place of unaccustomed centrality as they renarrated a story previously constellated around Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein, with guest appearances by James Joyce and the always-disdained Ford Madox Ford, and fleshed out by minor but highly visible American literati such as Robert McAlmon, Kay Boyle, and Harry Crosby. Because part of the American myth of Paris was that it gave birth to modernism (which turns out, therefore, to have been American modernism), Callaghan's and Glassco's narratives also locate Canadian authors within the emerging modernist tradition.

This recontextualizing came at a significant moment in Canadian literary history. Many Canadian writers who emerged in the fifties and sixties seemed to have found their own period of expatriation necessary. Behind American artists' earlier rhetoric about their country's philistine disregard for the finer things there had resided a more general anxiety—a fear that America was still too colonial to realize that art and literature of value could be produced at home. For American expatriates, therefore, going abroad—and (what was sometimes just as important) writing about life abroad—was not so much a repudiation of their country as a way of locating themselves in an international arena in order to gain their homeland's attention.⁴ (No wonder Americans fashioned a Paris that sometimes looked familiar.) The later generation of Canadian artists felt similarly disappointed by Canada's failure to acknowledge the value of its culture or to regard its own cultural products as important. Like the generation of American expatriates before them, Canadian writers sought recognition at home yet left home to find it. They longed for approval in Canadian terms, without recourse to larger and potentially distorting frames of reference. At the same time, they dreamed of a literary culture that would be part of an international mainstream, one that not only included membership in the European community that Americans of the twenties had longed for but that also brought them recognition in the now-important American milieu. Writers such as Norman Levine, Mordecai Richler, Dave Godfrey, Margaret Laurence, Leonard Cohen, and Robert Kroetsch spent some or all of the fifties and sixties outside Canada. During that period, Callaghan and Glassco published books showing that they had already made their necessary journeys—a generation earlier.

.....

But what have been the consequences of their delay in telling their stories? In “The Other Paris,” Mavis Gallant (another Canadian writer abroad) shows how Paris-as-myth can infect reality:

To have met and married Howard there would sound romantic and interesting, more and more so as time passed. She would forget the rain and her unshared confusion and loneliness, and remember instead the Paris of films, the street lamps with their tinsel icicles, the funny concert hall where the ceiling collapsed, and there would be, at last, a coherent picture, accurate but untrue.

(30)

While “accurate but untrue” might be a way to characterize all Paris memoirs, Gallant's narrator reminds us that the passage of time plays a special role in the transformation of memory to myth. As Kay Boyle reflects, in her late version of the tale, “But how do I know that I am telling the truth now about what I believed and wanted then?” (B103).

We now know that Glassco's story of Paris is closer to a novel than to the autobiographical account that it pretends to be. Of course, Glassco warns us, at the beginning of Memoirs of Montparnasse, that his project was to write “not a journal but a record of my life written in chapters, like one of George Moore's books—to impose a narrative form on everything that has happened” (4). Similarly, Callaghan's account is so shapely and convenient—and also written so long after the fact—that we can presume a good deal of aesthetic design has been imposed on his reconstructed memories as well. But even if both Callaghan's and Glassco's memoirs do have some of the status of art, even if they are more responsible to myth than to history, nevertheless we should recognize that they were useful fictions. Callaghan says as much when, at the end of That Summer in Paris, he calls his early dream of Paris “a necessary fantasy” (229). As he makes clear at the beginning of his second chapter, it is not the reality but the personal symbolism of Paris that we need to understand: “I have to tell how Paris came to have such importance as a place for me” (13).

These two books became, for Callaghan and Glassco, a way of writing themselves into the larger and already-told story of Paris. By assigning meaning to the “Paris” in their lives, they gained control over the story of those lives. By identifying their lives as part of a recognizable tale, they gave them new importance.⁵

II

In my account of the years 1920-1930, I attempted to record the times and the settings. … Yet I did so aware of the violent truth in the words [of] the young French surrealist, René Crevel. … “Memory is the tattooing by which the weak, the betrayed, the exiled, believe they have armed themselves,” he wrote.

—Kay Boyle, afterword, Being Geniuses Together, 1984 (B333-34)

Intertwined with the North American myth of the Paris twenties is another myth, one of personality rather than of place—for the story of Paris intersects with that of the man who may be America's most important fiction writer, and is certainly its most mythic one, Ernest Hemingway. The Hemingway myth was largely self-created, shaped by his actions as much as by his books. A journalist in his early days, he became the subject of endless journalism. As Callaghan puts it in That Summer in Paris, “he was able to get these legends going” (26).

The figure of Hemingway is as intertwined with the American myth of Paris as Apollo is with Mt. Olympus.⁶ Hemingway began his literary career in Paris, and he wrote what is generally regarded as his best fiction while living there. The legend of his work habits and way of life helped form the popular American image of the expatriate writer who, after working each morning at a café table with a Scotch at his elbow, spent the rest of his day exploring the quarter and mingling with other expatriates and artists before settling down to an evening of drink and parties. Hemingway seemed both a spokesman for, and the embodiment of, that “lost generation” depicted in The Sun Also Rises.

Both myths—that of Paris and that of Hemingway—powerfully affected Callaghan; both influenced his early career and haunted him thereafter. More than simply claiming a place within a mythic landscape, That Summer in Paris reaffirms his association with the writer who gave his landscape much of its meaning. Yet if this book is conscious and sometimes self-serving myth-making, it is also an exploration of Callaghan's ambivalent feelings about these myths. Indeed—and this is perhaps what makes it so interesting—That Summer in Paris is a protest against the very myths that it helps perpetuate.

.....

Although Hemingway did not give the public his version of Paris until the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Callaghan tells us that Hemingway conveyed it personally to him three years earlier, when he returned to Canada in 1923 to work for the Toronto Daily Star. According to That Summer in Paris, Callaghan, prompted by the writer's presence, read Hemingway's first publication, Three Stories and Ten Poems (recently published by McAlmon's Contact Editions), and then saw (in proof) the in our time sketches. Recognizing the artistic merit of this work, he also saw in Hemingway's previous stay in Paris and in the return he soon made (“He couldn't write in Toronto” [27]) a symbol of necessary escape:

In my city were many poets, a group of painters called the Group of Seven, and no doubt many great readers and scholars. But in those days it was a very British city. I was intensely North American. … I was wonderfully at home in my native city, and yet intellectually, spiritually, the part that had to do with my wanting to be a writer was utterly, but splendidly and happily, alien.

(22)

Six years passed before Callaghan, temperamentally less able to ignore the demands of orderliness and responsibility, could bring himself to follow Hemingway to France. By then he had a contract with Scribner's for his first two books and, with his career under way, he was ready to allow himself this journey abroad. Yet his memoir suggests that it is what Paris had already meant to him that had allowed him to function as a writer. He had become an expatriate by dwelling in the myth—if not in the city—of Paris. “I dreamt of Paris,” he writes. And when he adds that, “In my exile, I sat at the typewriter working on stories to send to Paris” (40), he ironically inverts the usual way of understanding expatriation: it is his remaining in Toronto, he suggests, that makes him an expatriate—because he feels so out of place in his home town.

Callaghan lived in a Paris of the imagination after Hemingway left Toronto: he corresponded with Hemingway and others among the expatriates; he published one of his earliest stories in a Paris journal and used that fact to help establish himself as a writer; and, during a trip to New York, he talked so intensely about the “news from Paris” that the writers he met assumed he had only recently returned from France (52). He grew so preoccupied with the French capital that he began to think of that distant city “as some kind of magical milieu where there would be a vast number of nameless perceptive men” (46). Feeling that the centres of literary modernism in America were not satisfactory alternatives (“Chicago didn't beckon to me. Nor did Greenwich Village” [20]), he concluded, “If I was ever to receive any good news about my work, I seemed to know that it had to come from Paris” (46). When, in the account he gives in his memoir, he finally arrives at his long-anticipated destination, he provides a panegyric for Paris, calling it “the world capital for the novelist … in twenty-nine” (115):

A whisper had gone the rounds that Greenwich Village was washed up: Paris was the new frontier. … Above all, Paris was the good address. It was the one grand display window for international talent, and … you had to be there. … [S]ome of the magic still remains in the word from Paris. … It's not the voice of the turtle today but it was in the twenties. It offered the climate, the ambience, the importance of the recognition of the new for the artist.

(113-14)

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Perhaps Callaghan longed to be part of the Hemingway myth as much as of the Paris myth because it was Hemingway who first authorized him in his desire to be a writer. In That Summer in Paris, Callaghan describes the older man's approval of the first story he showed him (“You're a real writer. … [K]eep on writing” [29]), and adds: “He spoke so casually, but with such tremendous authority, that I suddenly couldn't doubt him. Without knowing it, I was in the presence of that authority he evidently had to have to hold his life together” (29). But we eventually discover that the things that empower Callaghan—gaining Hemingway's approval and then following his mentor to the magical city—also threaten him. Having finally had his sojourn in Paris, Callaghan tells us, by the end of his memoir, that he must return home to Toronto:

if I were to stay on in France I should now be soaking up French culture. I should want to be with French writers. If I didn't want the French culture, then I was there in exile. Could the dream I had had for years of being in Paris been only a necessary fantasy? A place to fly to, a place that could give me some satisfactory view of myself?

(229)

What is less overtly stated is his realization that he must similarly leave—must dissociate himself from—Hemingway.

Noticing the importance of this unacknowledged level helps us appreciate why That Summer in Paris takes as its central event the famous boxing match that resulted in the estrangement between Hemingway and Callaghan. But Callaghan's book does more than chronicle their separation: it is an enactment of it. In it, some thirty years after the fact, Callaghan bids his final farewell to Hemingway.

.....

Callaghan often protests in his memoir—as he has protested elsewhere—against the way that his work was associated with Hemingway's, both at the beginning of his career and since. There has always been some doubleness in these protests, for they remind us that his work has been compared to the writing of one of the great prose stylists, even while they create an image of Callaghan as a writer of such integrity that he has resisted this flattery and gone his own way. Still, if Callaghan valued the Hemingway connection more than he admitted (and his memoir extends the association even as it decries it), he also did feel in danger of being overshadowed. In That Summer in Paris, Callaghan at last strives to deal with the shadow of his literary father-figure.

The nature of the struggle is apparent in the opening paragraph of That Summer in Paris: the question is who will be in control of the story. Callaghan is told a false story about himself; the true version, the text implies, has not yet been spoken. The memorist has, therefore, even before he begins his memoir, a rival for its control. The false story is, of course, an inaccurate account of the celebrated boxing match, and the author of this distorting narrative is the man who was once in the ring with him, his one-time friend, Hemingway. The account that follows, and that makes up the body of the book, a summary of Callaghan's brief stay in Paris while a young man, is thereby assigned a single function: it is a long preparation for—and the necessary contextualizing of—a corrective retelling, one that begins with Callaghan's protest in the second paragraph: “Of course it wasn't true that we had all been full of wine that afternoon in Paris in 1929” (10).

Callaghan's use of the boxing match as a way of giving narrative shape to the book might seem merely a convenience, a way to bring together a loose collection of anecdotes and justify a belated addition to the (North) American-in-Paris genre; however, his need both to recount his victory and to regain control of his own story parallels other aspects of his struggle with Hemingway. The construction of his memoir around the correction of the story of their match expresses a desire already apparent in the opening, when Callaghan remarks how

the secondhand greeting from Ernest only made me wonder and smile. It didn't put me in a sentimental mood. Anyway, I was now feeling confident and sure of myself. In the last ten years I had written The Loved and the Lost, The Many Colored Coat and was finishing A Passion in Rome. What Hemingway might have thought of any of these books, or whether he had even read one of them, had ceased to matter to me.

(10)

The boxing match is a literalization of his agonistic relationship with Hemingway. In providing a corrected account, Callaghan wants to put a period to what we soon learn has become a posthumous struggle: he seeks to claim the story of Paris for himself.⁷

In this reclaiming of narrative control, That Summer in Paris becomes Callaghan's account of regaining the authority he had yielded to Hemingway. How has Callaghan become self-authorized? Chiefly, he suggests, by having come through an extended period of dryness. After his early success, he experienced a troubling hiatus. Working chiefly as a journalist for a decade, he did not publish a new book between More Joy in Heaven in 1937 and The Loved and the Lost in 1951. It is his return to fiction that lies beneath Callaghan's response to the friend who brings him Hemingway's greeting in 1960: “I was now feeling confident and sure of myself.” That “now” should be heard as emphasizing an important development.

The way Callaghan associates boxing and writing throughout That Summer in Paris gives the Callaghan-Hemingway match particular artistic meaning. In his second chapter, he provides an extended statement of his own aesthetics: a Hemingwayesque literary code, it calls for the writer to avoid cleverness and vanity, and to “face the thing freshly and see it freshly for what it was” without metaphor or any other use of “language to evade” (19). The duty of every writer is to “Tell the truth cleanly” (20) by finding “the right relationship between the words and the thing or person being described: the words should be as transparent as glass” (21). “I wanted,” he says of his sensory experience, “to get it down so directly that it wouldn't feel or look like literature” (21-22). Dismissing the bad writing of his time—writing that fails to achieve these ends—as like the tricks of “stunt men” such as flagpole-sitters, he contrasts it with a kind of writing that will resemble “the way Jack Dempsey fought. His brutal mauling style seemed to be telling me something: do the thing you want to do in your own way. Be excellent at it. Seek your own excellence. Having no use for pure aesthetes or aloof intellectuals, I went on …” (21). Throughout, Callaghan emphasizes recording “the stuff of experience” (115), a goal that links him with the (especially American) modernist aesthetics of writing based on firsthand knowledge—what Philip Rahv called “the cult of experience”—often seen as having Hemingway as its central figure. Callaghan hints that he is even more committed to the value of experience than Hemingway. Alluding to the paradoxical role Stephen Crane played in establishing the American emphasis on writing from experience (the Civil War, about which Crane wrote so vividly, ended before he was born—so it was only in his later work that he became an exemplar of the writer in pursuit of dangerous first-hand knowledge), Callaghan writes: “I was to wonder about his [Hemingway's] enthusiasm for The Red Badge of Courage, especially when, later on, he made such a point about a writer needing to experience for himself the scenes he described” (28).

In fact, it turns out to be aesthetic concerns arising from this question of experience that led to Callaghan and Hemingway meeting in the boxing ring. Before going to Paris, Callaghan tells us that,

in a letter to a mutual friend, he [Hemingway] had made one critical comment that puzzled me about a story of mine—a story about a prizefighter—that had appeared in Scribner's Magazine. And he told this friend that when Morley wrote stories about the things he knew, there was no one any better, but he should stick to the things he knew something about.

Thinking about this, Callaghan wonders: “What was bothering Ernest? … Did he think that in writing about a fighter I had made an unworthy excursion into his own imaginary world? Was it because I had forgotten to tell him I had done a lot of boxing and went to all the fights?” (64). Later, when they first meet in Paris, Hemingway quizzes him about his knowledge of boxing and—obviously sceptical of Callaghan's reply (“Yes, I had done quite a bit of boxing, I said truthfully”)—insists that the younger man immediately put on gloves and spar with him there in his room. This challenge leads to their regular meetings in a gymnasium and eventually to the disputed victory. Therefore, in the famous boxing match, the two writers were just showing each other their credentials.

.....

While the opening scene of That Summer in Paris is a new encounter and struggle with Hemingway (if at one remove), the event we learn about a few paragraphs later is what gives the real impetus to, and context for, Callaghan's memoir: Hemingway's death. The rest of the opening chapter describes Callaghan's sadness at the news—a sadness greatly increased by his shock at learning that his one-time mentor had taken his own life. Although we may believe in the sense of loss described here, what we can also read out of That Summer in Paris is how this death gave Callaghan a way to measure his own, superior achievement: by merely surviving, he has proved himself tougher than the man whose writing defined manhood in the modern era. Although the comparisons are never made explicit, Callaghan's ability to endure his period of dryness and regain his early form stands in contrast to Hemingway's suicide, which, we are encouraged to infer, may have resulted from the fact that his career was, according to the generally accepted critical view, marked by a decline in his talents after the Paris twenties.⁸ The strength of will that carried Callaghan through his fallow period is therefore given heightened significance by an implied contrast with Hemingway's apparent despair. Though Callaghan expresses feelings of benevolence toward his early mentor, and though he speaks of his grief—indeed, at the end of the opening chapter he expresses regret over not having tried to patch up their rift (“why did I never get in touch with Ernest again?” [8])—when we finish That Summer in Paris and recall the opening pages, it is hard not to feel that he stands there victorious over his fallen comrade (who had also been his adversary), as he did long ago in a Paris gym.

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One of the impressions we carry away from That Summer in Paris is that it is as much an inquest into Hemingway's death as it is a recollection of distant lives. Among the several narrative structures that organize this memoir, the presiding one is therefore that of the mystery story. There is Hemingway's death to be investigated (Hemingway did it, of course, but his motives still need to be understood) and—as is always the case in the mystery—that death is a crucial event disrupting a once-harmonious (or seemingly so) order. As with all detective stories, the solution can come from the observation of clues (“It was a fact I was to remember later and brood on,” says Callaghan about Hemingway's behaviour at one point [149]). But, playing the role of detective within his mystery story, as well as serving as its author, this memoirist will also reconstruct a more accurate narrative of the crucial events, so that, as with the best mystery novels, his solution chiefly depends on the unravelling of other, false narratives—that is, on the disproving of alibis.

The quasi-mystery form of That Summer in Paris further links it to the sixties (and early seventies) Canadian project of reclaiming a national literature. Deriving much of its interest from its promise to replace a false story with an authentic one, this narrative anticipates Canadian novels such as The Stone Angel, the volumes in the Deptford trilogy, and Surfacing.⁹ Like Callaghan's memoir, these are books that untell an old story in order to tell a new one in its place; employing the narrative structure that Robert Kroetsch later characterized as unhiding the hidden, they reflect a sense that one task of the contemporary Canadian writer is to throw off the inherited and alien story lest it cover up the real, the native, truth.¹⁰

What the mystery structure of That Summer in Paris is designed to reveal is that Hemingway died because he failed to adhere to his own aesthetics, especially to that essential principle of remaining true to reality (a principle Callaghan repeatedly suggests he himself has always followed). Hemingway's mistake was that because he grew “committed … to the romantic enlargement of himself,” there had to be “one adventure after another, until finally there was no home” (225-26). Hemingway, that is, was crushed under the weight of the very myths he propagated. In the end, deracinated by the condition of exile that was an essential part of “Paris,” he was doomed to employ all his energies being “Hemingway.”¹¹

When he attributes Hemingway's self-defeat to “the romantic enlargement of himself,” Callaghan levels his most substantial charge. The key word in this passage is “romantic,” and its meaning is heavily loaded, not merely because the modernists generally disdained romanticism as lacking the tough-mindedness that they thought was their own greatest strength, but also because Hemingway himself often used the word dismissively.¹² Several times in That Summer in Paris, Callaghan makes a point of rejecting Wordsworth (he does so again shortly after speaking of Hemingway's “romantic enlargement”) in order to underline the goal of his own writing, which is to respond to “the wonder of the thing in itself” (226)—a stylistic project that he surely thinks of as associated with Hemingway. Borrowing again from the imagery of a book whose author says he wanted to write “the way Jack Dempsey fought,” I would suggest that the word romantic is a blow meant to send Hemingway once more to the mat.

III

… it interested her to have letters telling other versions of the same incidents and characters which occur in some books. The books were often interesting to me for what they did not tell more than for what was put down, and in some cases a novel by one writer would shortly be followed by a novel by another writer who had been used as a character in the first book.

—Robert McAlmon, Being Geniuses Together, 1938 (346)

While the opening of That Summer in Paris suggests that it is a book written to emend Hemingway's falsification of the record, it became in turn a book in need of correcting for a younger writer who felt that his life's story had been distorted by Callaghan. That is, just as Callaghan strove to regain control from Hemingway, so John Glassco, in writing Memoirs of Montparnasse, sought to reclaim control of his narrative. Paul Delany, discussing a similar case—the way Ford Madox Ford used his 1931 novel When a Wicked Man to correct Jean Rhys's version (in Quartet, 1929) of their mid-twenties Paris affair, and the way Rhys's and Ford's mates of the time then responded to those books—writes that “in the endless struggle for personal and collective justification, text contends with text, and it takes one nail, always, to drive out another” (23).¹³

Although he arrived in Paris somewhat earlier than Callaghan, Glassco also made his journey near the end of the twenties. Inspired by Moore's Confessions of a Young Man, the adolescent John Glassco—“Buffy” to his friends—travelled there, accompanied by Graeme Taylor, to pursue a lightly chosen literary career and escape the respectability and responsibility back home. Glassco and Taylor established themselves in the Paris expatriate community, and Glassco, as well as dabbling in poetry, embarked on his youthful memoirs. Although he published a first chapter in This Quarter, neither he nor Taylor accomplished anything of real literary significance. (A recurring motif in Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse is the turning from the discipline of writing to the distractions of pleasure.) For this reason as much as for any other, Glassco and Taylor left little record of their passing—until Glassco's belated but successful forging of a bit of literary history in the form of those long-abandoned memoirs.

About a dozen years passed after the publication of Memoirs of Montparnasse in 1970 before researchers recognized that it was a species of literary forgery. Until then, the details of its composition, contained in the text where they become a crucial and affecting part of the narrative, were generally believed. Glassco gave this false provenance to his work by appending a short “Prefatory Note” in which he tells his readers that, in addition to publishing the first chapter, he finished two further chapters while living riotously “In Paris in 1928 when I was eighteen.” He explains how his life there as a high-liver and a wastrel—a life he now claims to have chosen because it would provide the material for his chronicle—distracted him from its writing and eventually broke his health, almost leading to his death. And he adds that, though his manuscript remained unpublished for almost four decades, it had been completed long ago, “in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal during three months of the winter of 1932-3, when I was awaiting a crucial operation.” He had not published it at that time because “After barely surviving the operation I turned away from my youth altogether” (xiii).

Since Glassco records that the odds of his surviving that operation had been no better than fifty-fifty, this prefatory history of composition sets the free-and-easy Paris days it chronicles within a sombre context—that of the Montreal hospital ward in which he light-heartedly recounts the events that have brought him to the brink. In the narrative that follows, this somewhat older, authorial Glassco occasionally intrudes from his hospital ward and remarks on the behaviour of his younger self in his glittering days in Paris, viewing the late-adolescent Buffy from this new perspective of rapidly maturing and world-weary man who can provide objective, if not really disapproving, commentary.

The credibility of Glassco's claims about the early composition of Memoirs of Montparnasse was greatly enhanced by Leon Edel's apparent belief. In an admiring introduction to the published volume, Edel (yet another Canadian in expatriate Paris) wrote:

The Buffy memoirs have the fascination of a long-buried artifact suddenly turned up by a spade. … If his book is more modest than most of the Montparnasse memoirs, it is more immediate—possessing almost the effect of “instant” memory, total recall. The other memoirs (I have read I believe most of them) look back from middle life. Buffy couldn't wait that long. He wasn't sure, when he wrote them, that he would have his middle age.

(ix-x)¹⁴

But in fact Glassco wrote the book at a much later moment. The history of Glassco's actual composition is summarized in Thomas E. Tausky's essay “Memoirs of Montparnasse: A Reflection of Myself” (1983) and, in greater detail, in Philip Kokotailo's 1988 study John Glassco's Richer World: Memoirs of Montparnasse.¹⁵ Though Glassco began his memoirs in Paris and though he published one (substantially different) chapter there, he did not continue them; in fact, he did not return to them until after the publication of That Summer in Paris. We can, of course, still enjoy Memoirs of Montparnasse. But we must now appreciate its prefatory portrayal of a young man who, as he faces possible death, recounts with relish the events that have brought about his sad condition for what it always was: not extratextual information about the history of composition, but a striking and effective frame tale.

.....

That Summer in Paris is the first published account that records Glassco's presence among the expatriates. This fact has been obscured for us because Glassco was twice mentioned in the McAlmon chapters of the 1968 revision of Being Geniuses Together. (As well, in Kay Boyle's interpolated chapters, Glassco figures more largely.) But it was Boyle—who corresponded with Glassco while working on her revision—who introduced these references from McAlmon's unedited typescript. The reader will search in vain for references to Glassco in the original, 1938, edition of McAlmon's book.¹⁶

Although Glassco was stimulated to return to his memoirs after reading Callaghan's,¹⁷ he soon let them languish again. It was learning from Boyle of her revisionary work on McAlmon's reminiscences that finally prompted Glassco to complete his book (Kokotailo 31). Because Glassco had, for a while, been an intimate companion of McAlmon's, we can assume that he must have keenly felt his omission from Being Geniuses Together. Because he had similarly been Boyle's companion, he must have been cheered by her willingness to acknowledge his presence in Paris, and delighted that, through her, belated recognition was inserted into McAlmon's famous record of Paris events. Indeed, the influence of Being Geniuses Together—most likely in its 1968 reincarnation—seems strong on the final version of Memoirs of Montparnasse. Though Glassco tells a more orderly story than McAlmon, his tone and handling of the material in Memoirs of Montparnasse are closer to McAlmon's way of writing than to George Moore's in Confessions of a Young Man.

.....

One convention of the Paris memoir is that it is chiefly a record of encounters with the famous and near-famous—which is reason enough to explain Glassco and Taylor's omission from the original edition of Being Geniuses Together. Why, then, did Callaghan, who generally adhered to this convention, give Glassco and Taylor a significant place in his version of the Paris story? Since Callaghan takes pains to call attention to their nationality, one reason he mentions them may be simply because they are Canadian. He notes earlier, before he describes his journey abroad, that it was important to him to encounter “people with Paris connections,” one of whom, Raymond Knister, he describes as “A countryman of mine who had actually written in This Quarter!” (56). But if, for this young writer who clearly feels that he dwells at the margin of literary empires, there is so much significance in finding a fellow Canadian with Paris connections, he must have regretted that, like himself, Knister hadn't actually been to the fabled city. So Callaghan may have made a point of locating Glassco and Taylor in Paris because, by calling attention to the two Montrealers who were there when he arrived, he could show that Canadians were a part of the expatriate community.

There is, however, a second, and more likely, explanation for Callaghan's decision to locate Glassco and Taylor in that Paris milieu: he had depicted them there already. As That Summer in Paris revealed for the first time, the two young men had been the models for the central characters in “Now That April's Here.” This story, in which Callaghan satirized the pretentiousness of such expatriates, was—until he wrote That Summer in Paris—the chief literary product of his visit to Paris, and it had become one of his best-known stories. By documenting the existence of the two men on which it was based, Callaghan could not only draw attention to a story of which he was proud, but also illustrate one of the central points that he makes concerning his artistic method—the way he has always worked from “concrete reality, the stuff of experience” (115).

In That Summer in Paris, Callaghan mentions Glassco on six occasions, each time in the company of his companion, Graeme Taylor. Most of these mentions come with a tag phrase set off by quotation marks; they are the “two ‘bright boys’ from Montreal” (85), “Those two ‘bright little devils’ Buffy and Graeme” (91), and (twice) “‘the clever little devils’” (132, 168). Callaghan describes them as “Our new friends” on his second encounter, saying that they helped him find an apartment (111), and in their last appearance in his memoir, he says he'd grown to like them (though he adds “by this time” [169]); nevertheless, he treats them with a supercilious irony each time he describes them. In his final depiction, he dramatizes an encounter in which they fail to recognize the painter Miró, thinking he might be Hemingway's butler—a scene that both emphasizes their foolish affectations and shows Callaghan's ability to see through their posturing. He then dramatizes himself informing them of their mistake, thus appearing the more mature man in contrast to the callow attitude of “bland superiority” affected by these “boys” (169-70).

While we now know that the patronizing tone of these passages offended Glassco, what probably bothered him more was that Callaghan had revealed something previously known only to a few members of the original Paris scene—that he and Taylor were the models for the two homosexuals treated so satirically in “Now That April's Here,” Callaghan had written that

[McAlmon's] view of the boys amused me and I said so. We kept jibing and jeering at each other, offering contrasting views of the boys. Titus, brightening and becoming an alert editor, suggested we should both write stories; he would publish the two stories side by side in the next issue of This Quarter. Immediately I agreed to do it. So did McAlmon.

By the way, I did write the story, “Now That April's Here,” and Titus did publish it. Ezra Pound wrote me a letter from Rapallo expressing his admiration of the story and suggesting that I go to Washington and write about the politicians in the same manner.

(That Summer in Paris 132-33)

Near the end of Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco provides a scene that allows him to record his negative response to Callaghan's story. “Did you see the story he wrote about you and Graeme and Stanley in This Quarter?” McAlmon is shown asking him; Glassco replies, “‘Now That April's Here’? Not very good, was it? Rather nasty—and it's full of holes” (221).

Both “Now That April's Here” and That Summer in Paris suggest that Glassco and Taylor made Callaghan uncomfortable. While their habitual air of mocking superiority (which Boyle, who is otherwise sympathetic, also mentions [237]) was undoubtedly off-putting,¹⁸ it is hard not to infer that it was their homosexuality that most bothered Callaghan.¹⁹ And since Glassco himself felt anxiety about his homosexual relationships, being explicitly identified with the character in Callaghan's short story must have disturbed him.²⁰

Perhaps Glassco felt an ambivalence about That Summer in Paris similar to the ambivalence that Callaghan felt about being compared to Hemingway. Though unhappy about his treatment, Glassco may have welcomed the belated confirmation of his existence in the Paris expatriate community. Again, the recognition by the better-known writer seems to have stimulated the lesser-known to take himself more seriously—even if, again, the recognizing authority must also be overcome. Clearly the main reason Glassco returned, in the early sixties, to his interrupted project was his sense of injury over Callaghan's depiction of him. Kokotailo calls it “a desire to even the score”:

That Summer in Paris not only belittles Glassco, it publicly disclosed that Callaghan modeled the two pitiable characters in “Now that April's Here” on him and Graeme Taylor. Together, these two works present a mocking, burlesque caricature of them. By calling attention to Callaghan's “rather spiteful ridicule” …, Glassco makes it clear that he felt the offence. … [He] had to revive his own memoirs, where he could turn the tables on Callaghan.

(25)²¹

A turning of the tables is indeed what Glassco's Memoirs gives us in this reduplication of narratives. Where Glassco once existed as a character manipulated by Callaghan as author, Glassco now becomes the author in charge of a character named “Morley Callaghan.”²²

Although Callaghan does not figure largely in Glassco's book (as Glassco did not in Callaghan's), when he does appear, he is handled no less slightingly and is always made to appear less sophisticated and less worldly than the younger Buffy. Glassco has his own story about having to correct his compatriot's misperception:

Morley … was pensive. In an interval of comparative quiet he pointed to a sign above the bar that read Consommations, 40 francs. “What's a consommation?” he asked. “Does that mean—intercourse?”

“No [Glassco replies], it's just a drink.”

(99)

So much for Glassco's not having recognized Miró. If Callaghan will reveal Glassco as pretentious, then Buffy will expose Morley as provincial.

This is the beginning of a passage in Memoirs of Montparnasse (99-102) that forms Callaghan and Glassco's only extended exchange. In this dialogue—and we now know that Glassco freely invented the conversations in his book—Glassco clearly establishes the counterpoint between Callaghan and himself. Callaghan is shown undervaluing Dreiser, whom Glassco defends on the ground that he joins a sense of commitment to a nature that is “anarchic, amoral, immature, antediluvian.” Then Buffy breaks off, reflecting:

I suddenly realized I was talking like a character in a Huxley novel. This problem of commitment was Morley's, not mine. I had no commitments except, in a vague way, to remain uncommitted. … [N]ow, vis-à-vis the deadly earnestness of Morley Callaghan, a man only ten years older than myself, I had once again the salutary sense of the abyss that yawns for everyone who has embraced the literary profession: … literature, like every other form of gainful employment, was just another trap.

(102)

.....

Kokotailo discovered that when Leon Edel described, in his preface to Memoirs of Montparnasse, how “Buffy and Graeme … [were] quite cleverly satirized at the time in Morley Callaghan's unkind tale, ‘Now That April's Here,’” Glassco added to the proofs, as if they were Edel's words, an additional phrase: “and much later they were made the object of some rather spiteful ridicule in his That Summer in Paris” (Kokotailo 23). Edel demurred at allowing Glassco to put these words into his mouth this way, but, apparently as a concession, he did add a sentence to the passage, so that it ends: “These memoirs help to correct his caricature” (Kokotailo 24). Glassco must have taken pleasure in mocking the “deadly earnestness of Morley Callaghan,”²³ but correction was his chief aim in writing Memoirs of Montparnasse, as it had been Callaghan's in That Summer in Paris.

Reading the two works together shows us that a shaping force on Memoirs of Montparnasse was Glassco's need to retell, from his point of view, the material that Callaghan had appropriated from his life. Throughout, Glassco paints a portrait of himself and Taylor that is quite different from that found in either “Now That April's Here” or That Summer in Paris. He makes himself wittier and more charming—more “insouciant,” as Edel puts it (x)—and makes no mention of his homosexual encounters. In particular, he provides readers with a new version of the events treated in “Now That April's Here.” In Callaghan's story, the two boys share a girlfriend; given the ironic name Constance Foy, she appears only at the end of the narrative, chiefly to suggest Johnny's insecurities about Charles's love. In his retelling, Glassco gives considerably more prominence to this shared girlfriend, whom he calls Stanley, and portrays the three characters as living in a heterosexual ménage à trois.²⁴ All three are much more likeable and more generally attractive; and what seemed serious misdeeds in Callaghan's version become mere pranks in Glassco's, youthful and justifiable high jinks. Where Callaghan's story alludes to the threesome's having skipped out on a hotel bill in Nice, Glassco's dramatizes the event in detail. He even shows himself protesting the dishonourable decision to abandon their debt—until Taylor tells him that the hotel-keeper has been padding their accounts “for the last three months” and Stanley adds, “… we're just setting things to rights, like Robin Hood” (149, 150). Glassco's insistence here on the rightness of their actions is so much at odds with the rest of Memoirs of Montparnasse (its “insouciance” derives, after all, from its blithe amoral tone) that it makes sense only when we realize that the whole Nice section is a countertext, written with “Now That April's Here” in mind.²⁵

.....

Memoirs of Montparnasse is striking not because it is yet another in a long line of books providing subjective retellings of what really happened in Paris, but because, by claiming to have completed his memoirs in the winter of 1932-33, Glassco did something no one before him had done: he gave his book an unwarranted priority. Not only did this act create the sense of immediacy that Edel mentions, but it was an effective way to upstage most of the previous tellers—especially Callaghan. It was already true that Glassco had gotten to Paris first; now we are told that Glassco had also written about Paris first. Glassco's claim that his book was composed earlier than Callaghan's is his way of usurping authority. When Callaghan comments presciently on literary figures in the twenties, we wonder how much his remarks benefit by what he later learned—but we are invited to hear Glassco's observations as exhibiting uncanny foresight.²⁶

The most conscious bit of mischief that arises from Glassco's altered chronology comes when he (inevitably) alludes to the famous boxing match. Callaghan had taken pains in That Summer in Paris to suggest that he had always been reluctant to speak about knocking Hemingway down: that emphasis on his reticence was necessary because he wanted to show that he had not been the source of the early rumours or the distorted newspaper story that had so distressed his famous friend. But Glassco has Callaghan telling the story freely (“bubbling quietly” is his phrase [154]) immediately after the bout. Moreover, while Callaghan had sought to clarify the tale of boxing with Hemingway in order to show clearly his triumph over Papa, Glassco deliberately returns it to ambiguity. According to Memoirs of Montparnasse, Callaghan's original claim was that he had either “knocked the great man out or given him a nosebleed,” and “it wasn't clear which” (154).

Thus, though he was the younger man, Glassco turned himself into Callaghan's elder brother. He even found support for his worldly, older air by affirming in Memoirs of Montparnasse what in Callaghan's account seemed to be evidence that Glassco was behind the times. While writers such as Callaghan may have gone to Paris under the influence of Hemingway, Glassco reminds us that he arrived first because, reading an earlier writer, George Moore, he had already known the importance of Paris. To use a boxing metaphor for a final time, Glassco's strategy of false priority shows Callaghan arriving at the ring too late; he'd already forfeited the bout to Buffy.

IV

The memory of Felix and Odile and all their distasteful strangeness would slip away; for “love” she would think, once more, “Paris,” and, after a while, happily married, mercifully removed in time, she would remember it and describe it and finally believe it as it had never been at all.

—Mavis Gallant, “The Other Paris,” 1956 (30)

One powerful aspect of the Paris-twenties narrative is that it has closure. The 1929 stock-market crash brought this story to a decisive end, a conclusion conventionally reported with the words, “The party's over.” Yet, because the milieu eventually became mythic, books about the era evoke a landscape out of time—and thus resist closure. In That Summer in Paris, Callaghan solves the problem of how to conclude a mythic narrative by demythologizing his material. In recognizing that Paris is only a “necessary fantasy,” he is free to leave the fabled realm and return home to become what Edmund Wilson later christened him, “Morley Callaghan of Toronto.” In his last chapter, Glassco—perhaps here again playing off against Callaghan's narrative—moves toward a similar demythologizing by having Taylor chide him: “You were in love with Paris. You thought it the Great Good Place. Well, it's not. You were in love with a dream” (237).²⁷ But Glassco, once more unwilling to accept anything that resembles Morley's “earnestness,” refuses to close his book by assigning to Paris the function of “necessary fantasy.” Indeed, it may have been his unwillingness to relinquish the fantasy of an idealized place that led him to elude closure so effectively at the end of Memoirs of Montparnasse. (A few pages earlier he prepares us for this manoeuvre by having one of his characters “wonder if a book should end at all” and refer to the “merit in a book that was … left unfinished” [230, 231].) Instead of bringing his story to its historical end, he tells us in a brief epilogue that his surgery prevented him from finishing it. His last two chapters remain forever unwritten.

Thus, even though the stock-market crash has just occurred, and even though Buffy's party is over and his Paris life is in a state of decay, Glassco can end his account with an exchange that keeps him inside the realm of myth: “This Paris winter is lasting much too long,” his latest lover says, in the last of the Paris memories that he gives us. When Glassco asks, “Where are we going?”, her answer, the last line of these “unfinished” memoirs, does not renounce fantasy but proposes a new destination: “To the land of sunshine and dancing. Spain.”²⁸

A land of sunshine and dancing, a land that lies elsewhere, still beckoning, outside the “reality” that is Callaghan's chief interest. Such a land is visible in all Paris memoirs. It is the “Other Paris” that exists outside time, the Paris that McAlmon recognizes when, near the end of Being Geniuses Together, he returns after a long absence to find that “Paris had changed, but Paris was the same” (371). It is the realm that Hemingway points to at the end of A Moveable Feast when he writes, “There is never any ending to Paris …” (209). Even Callaghan, if not in his conclusion, then at least in the opening of That Summer in Paris, acknowledges the attraction of a timeless, mythic land. It is hard to think of Hemingway dead, he writes, because “we assumed that he would always be secure in some place in some other country … writing something beautiful” (11).

Notes

1. For this essay I have drawn on McAlmon's original 1938 edition of Being Geniuses Together as well as on the better-known 1968 revision by Kay Boyle, to which she added chapters of her own memoirs. The substantial differences between the two versions seem not yet to have been recognized: in places, Boyle's reordering of, revisions of, and additions to McAlmon's original version are extensive. In her prefatory note, she explains that McAlmon's sections in this later edition contain some material not in the original because, “In revising, shortening, and adding alternate chapters of my own to the 1938 edition, I consulted … McAlmon's typescript. … I have frequently substituted McAlmon's undeleted text rather than the edited sections which appeared in the original edition” (xi). When a passage appears in both versions, I have ignored Boyle's stylistic revisions; because the original edition of Being Geniuses Together is not readily available, however, I have provided page references to both editions when passages occur in both. References to Boyle's edition are prefaced with the letter B and keyed to the 1984 North Point Press reprint (which contains a new afterword by Boyle).

2. McAlmon frequently casts doubt on the accuracy of previous accounts of Paris life, often by emphasizing the unreliability of the sources. See 39 (B61), 86 (B116), and 136 (B206), where he describes (in turn) Sinclair Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, and Gertrude Stein as “mythomaniacs.” (Indeed, he says of the first of these, “Lewis, however, is not the only mythomaniac among the geniuses or megalomaniacs.”) McAlmon also points out the inevitable heightening of the stories of Paris that results from memory, narrative compression, and selection. See, for example, 65 (B97), 120 (B198, in incomplete form), and 344.

3. The best and most influential of this journalism was undoubtedly Janet Flanner's fortnightly “Letter from Paris,” which appeared under the nom de plume Genêt in The New Yorker beginning in 1925.

4. Recall the obituary Callaghan gives to Eugene Shore, the self-portrait in his 1975 novel A Fine and Private Place: “A unique artist who belonged to the world, yet was of this town” (246).

5. And in turn, of course, they contributed to the further development of the myth. As Noel Riley Fitch observes, “The reminiscences of Glassco (Memoirs of Montparnasse), who was nineteen at the time, and those of Callaghan (That Summer in Paris), who was twenty-six, have helped to create the myth that expatriate life in Paris was all drinking, boxing, and having trivial spats” (290).

6. In The Paris Edition: 1927-1934 (1989), a very belated Paris memoir compiled from seventies newspaper columns, Waverley Root wrote: “The first question asked, inevitably, of anyone who lived in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, at least if he moved at all in the culture-conscious circle that came to be synonymous with the name of Montparnasse, is: ‘Did you know Ernest Hemingway?’” (12).

7. Although he suggests that he was disturbed, Callaghan was not likely to have been surprised to hear that Hemingway was telling the story of his having been knocked down because he was “full of wine.” Undoubtedly he had already read the following passage in McAlmon's memoirs:

   Hemingway's story was that he had been drinking the night before and was boxing on three pick-me-up whiskies so that his wind gave out. The decision results were, however, that neither Hemingway nor Callaghan could decide what the bout proved. Was one a better boxer but not so good a writer as the other, or was the other a better writer and boxer, or had Scott [Fitzgerald, serving as timekeeper] framed one or the other of them?

   At this time Hemingway felt that Callaghan was imitating his style. … Possibly then their writing bout was a draw. The final bell has not rung.

   (164; B162)

   A measure of Callaghan's success in winning the writing bout and ringing the final bell comes in the present edition of Being Geniuses Together, where Boyle appends this footnote to McAlmon's statement: “For Morley Callaghan's version of this bout, see That Summer in Paris.” Similarly, in Denis Brian's oral biography of Hemingway, The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him (1988), Callaghan gets one more opportunity to rehearse his version of events. Having already reiterated his complaints about Hemingway's distorted version of their bout in his 1981 review of Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961, he reads that review into the record.

8. In this context, the first sentence of the original back-cover blurb for That Summer in Paris becomes significant: “A contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, discovered by Maxwell Perkins, hailed as the world's best short story writer, Morley Callaghan is one of the authors of his generation who has demonstrated consistent development and deepening insight over the decades since the 1920s” (emphasis added).

9. For additional discussion of the use of the mystery genre in such fiction, see my essay “In Search of Lost Causes: The Canadian Novelist as Mystery Writer.”

10. See “Unhiding the Hidden,” which was originally published in 1974.

11. Callaghan thus affirms a frequent early criticism of the American literary colony in France, one that he introduces earlier in his book when he has Maxwell Perkins “grumble about Americans who went to Paris to become expatriated. It was all wrong, and he hoped we wouldn't stay too long in Paris” (67).

12. Hemingway comments in Death in the Afternoon on the “useless and romantic things that the spectators like” (12). Compare McAlmon's claim that Hemingway once mocked him by saying: “Hell, Mac, you write like a realist. Are you going to be a romantic on us?” (160; B160).

13. For an essay that treats this kind of intertextual interrelationship in terms of Bloomian and Bakhtinian theory, see Draine.

14. In a 1989 article in the Globe and Mail, Stephen Godfrey observes that “Louis Dudek said Edel's reputation was compromised by taking part in the deception. But neither the deception nor his involvement bothers him at all, Edel says now”: “‘I suspected that Buffy had rewritten them, but I didn't say it,’ says Edel. … ‘Buffy was always writing fiction about himself. And if you're going to start defining memoirs, you're in for a devil of a job.’”

15. I am indebted to both Tausky and Kokotailo for their comments and generous sharing of information and material with me.

16. Though Glassco is not named in the original edition of Being Geniuses Together, McAlmon probably alludes to him when he writes, “I doubt the wisdom of young men who consult the aged master [George Moore]. … It would be too bad to have an epidemic of Moores breaking loose on the world” (71; B101).

17. On 19 and 26 February 1986, the CBC Radio program Ideas broadcast “A Canadian in Paris,” a presentation about Memoirs of Montparnasse. In an interview taped for this program, Glassco says that he found That Summer in Paris “too much” and decided to take a little “mild revanche.”

18. In the interview he gave for the CBC Radio program on Glassco, Callaghan says he wrote “Now That April's Here” partly because he was fond of McAlmon and therefore wanted to get back at Glassco and Taylor for the way they made fun of the man despite his sometimes being their patron. Since there is no hint of that in That Summer in Paris, this explanation may be an afterthought.

19. In “Now That April's Here,” Callaghan makes the homosexual relationship between Johnny and Charles clear, mentioning that “an elderly English gentleman” had paid “to see the boys make a ‘tableau’ for him” (134) and, in the conclusion, both telling the reader that Charles “was very much in love with Johnny” and having Charles say, “How could he hit me, … and he knew I loved him so much” (136). In moving from fiction to nonfiction in That Summer in Paris, Callaghan is more cautious about attributing an emotional or sexual relationship to Glassco and Taylor. But he is explicit about McAlmon's bisexuality and his attachment to the “boys,” and he suggests their homosexuality in his descriptions: “Along the street came those two willowy graceful young men from Montreal whom McAlmon called affectionately ‘the clever little devils.’ … [T]he two boys shared his snickering wit” (132). In addition, a story that Callaghan tells in the chapter from which this description comes—of the young married man who has been initiated by four young homosexuals who were part of the café scene (“he had been corrupted by these boys” [133-34])—suggests that in That Summer in Paris, “boys” carries a distinct suggestion about sexual preference.

20. Tausky observes that in the original manuscript version of Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco's “Direct statements [acknowledging his sexual relationships with McAlmon and Taylor] … are frequently accompanied, curiously enough, by furious denunciations of the practice of homosexuality and the character of homosexuals” (65). In preparing the final published version, Glassco apparently changed his mind about going public and, in consequence, deleted the explicit references to his own homosexuality.

21. See also Tausky: “Publication of Callaghan's memoir … likely played a part in Glassco's decision to write his own book. Glassco's hostility towards Callaghan, and towards That Summer in Paris is re-affirmed in his letters to Kay Boyle” (82n14).

22. In the original draft Callaghan was even more explicitly a character of Glassco's creation, since he was there given a new name—albeit one meant to call attention to the original: “Corley Mulligan.” Although many of Glassco's characters remain concealed (or partly so) behind such masks, Callaghan is one of the figures who appears in his own person in Memoirs of Montparnasse.

23. “Earnestness” is a word that occasionally occurs in Callaghan's self-description in That Summer in Paris; for example, in the second chapter he says that he gained his initial entrée to the Toronto Daily Star because “The elderly gentleman at the reception desk” was “impressed by my earnestness” (14). (Although this passage comes immediately after the discussion of Hemingway in chapter 1, it seems unlikely that Callaghan was consciously playing with any Ernest/earnest associations; Glassco, on the other hand, may have been.)

24. However, Glassco is probably having a bit of fun here by assigning a male name, Stanley, to his female character—especially since in “Now That April's Here” the character based on McAlmon is called Stan Mason.

25. In Glassco's notes for his book, he explicitly mentions the Callaghan story as material to be retold in his Memoirs (Kokotailo 38).

26. Like That Summer in Paris, Memoirs of Montparnasse has, since its appearance, been treated as a reliable source of documentary evidence and cited by the authors of several later books and essays on the period and its chief figures. Indeed in 1986, Cowley described it as “one of the truest books about Montparnasse” (148). Thus, like Callaghan, Glassco succeeded in writing himself into the history of the Paris expatriate era.

27. Glassco's use of the phrase “the Great Good Place” is especially interesting here because of the way it recalls E. K. Brown's famous definition of the colonial mentality in Canada: “It sets the great good place … somewhere outside its own borders, somewhere beyond its own possibilities” (14). This passage, which appears in “The Problem of a Canadian Literature” (the opening essay in On Canadian Poetry in 1943), follows Brown's criticism of Callaghan as a writer who succumbed to one version of colonialism by remaining in Canada while looking for approval and readership abroad, a criticism that seems to have pained Callaghan deeply.

28. By opposing this conclusion in Memoirs of Montparnasse to Callaghan's decision at the end of That Summer in Paris to return from Paris to Toronto, Glassco may be having one final joke at his rival's expense: his proposed journey, from France to Spain, will make his life the one that more resembles Hemingway's.

Works Cited

Boyle, Kay. See McAlmon.

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