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.