ineffable... profligate... genuflect (?)

The estate sale goods were crammed in the garage and basement of a split level house. The deceased had been a college professor, teaching – as was clear from the titles in the hundreds of books on the shelves – literature, film and theatre.

I picked up a few books that morning, mid-century curiosities with titles like Vespers in Vienna, Philosopher’s Holiday, Who Did What to Fedalia (signed its author, The Music Man’s Meredith Willson) and then a memoir: That Summer in Paris.

Published in the early 60’s, after Hemingway’s suicide, and perhaps, in a way, motivated by it, the book is a memoir of just what it says – the summer of 1929, spent in Paris by the (then) young Canadian writer Morley Callaghan and his wife. Callaghan had some contacts In Paris and was hoping to live that writer’s life, hanging out with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce, perhaps permanently.

You’d expect a lot of sitting in cafes, and while there is that, the book is about far more: friendship, the ways we present ourselves, what we expose, what we conceal, the fragile dynamics of relationships and what kind of place do we need to be in to create.

It also includes an evening with James Joyce spent, not as Callaghan expected and dearly hoped, discussing literature, but rather listening to a recording to American evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

But the primary tension Callaghan, experiences over the summer is his puzzlement over Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s relationship, which he had believed to be amicable, but indeed was not. Callaghan and Hemingway had become friends in Toronto, where they were both reporters. He reconnects with Hemingway in Paris, and they set up a regular boxing date. It takes him longer to meet Fitzgerald. When he finally does, Fitzgerald frequently asks him if he’s seen Hemingway, and if Callaghan could take him along next time he’s going to meet up with Hemingway – and Hemingway responds non-committedly when Callaghan brings up Fitzgerald. It’s mysterious and awkward.

The story of that summer, as Callaghan relates it thirty years later, gives us insight into both men’s characters. Hemingway is friendly, but clearly, as Callaghan sees it, on his way to presenting a character, rather than himself to the world. Fitzgerald initially strikes Callaghan as aristocratic and kind, if a bit elusive, but ends up just being sad, the whole mess coming to a head during a boxing workout in which Fitzgerald was timekeeper, and turned out badly, a well-known incident in literary history, in fact.

And then, Catholics. As seems to be the case so often when I find random books about which I know nothing, a Catholic element turns up. For yes, Morley Callaghan was Catholic, incorporated Catholic-type plotlines into some of his fiction, and here notes interactions with Catholic people and Catholic things.

First, there’s the priest whom Callaghan and his wife Loretto meet on the ship to Europe. He’s on leave, for reasons of physical and mental health, from his chaplaincy at a California penitentiary where in ten years he’d walked sixteen men to their executions. A bit adrift, affable, he gratefully latches onto the Callaghans during the voyage. They meet again in Paris a few times, including after he’s returned from his group tour of the Mediterranean, a tour during he which he found himself shunned by the other participants. Why? Because his tourmates were Methodist women who, in Italy,

…had watched him closely and disapprovingly; they had gossiped; furthermore they had been full of blue-nosed malice. And why? Because he had liked to consume the wine of the country.

Of course, the other two main figures in the book – Hemingway and Fitzgerald – had Catholic in them as well. Hemingway had recently converted to Catholicism, which gives Callaghan a chance to reflect on converts in general. He’s glad for anyone to enter the fold, but is nonetheless often annoyed by the convert affect:

At that time in France there were many conversions among the intellectuals. Christian artists were finding new dignity and spiritual adventure in the neo-Thomism of Jacques Maritain. Most converts I had known had changed their faith but not their personalities or their temperaments, and since they usually gained enormous self-assurance from the new faith, I would find myself disliking them more than ever.

Hemingway was different, though:

At the cafe that day, reflecting, watching his face as he talked, it struck me that by some twist of temperament, in spite of his puritan family, he was in fact intended to be a Mediterranean Catholic.

One day, Callaghan, his wife and Fitzgerald met for a walk (Zelda had a ballet lesson). The Fitzgeralds lived near St. Sulpice.

I made a joke about Scott living in the shadow of bad Catholic art. It amused him. Then he said that he liked living near the church; he liked the neighbourhood; he was always aware he was in the shadow of the church.

Callaghan’s wife suggested they go inside. Fitzgerald refused. Callaghan’s wife took his arm and he firmly moved away.

“I never go into the church,” he said quietly. Suddenly his manner embarrassed us.

The couple entered the church, walked around quickly, looked at the enormous columns and then returned outside to the waiting Fitzgerald. Callaghan reflected:

…his grim refusal to go in seemed to me to be a betrayal of some deep religious sentiment in him. We made some cheerful comment about the columns and went on our way.

At the sale, I’d only skimmed the book’s back matter before committing to the fifty cent price. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later that I actually opened That Summer in Paris. Two items tumbled from its pages: a black-and-white photograph and a scrap of paper.

The photograph is of a handsome young man standing in front of a hill covered with scrub. I knew the owner, the deceased professor, had been Palestinian, so I presumed this to be him or a relation or friend back in the home country. It wasn’t Alabama that’s for sure.

The scrap of paper bore a hand-written list of words. They were (including the writer’s question marks):

Ineffable…articled(?)…walrus…aperitif…pallor…peremptory…soutane…scunner…profligate…genuflect(?)…alderman

All words from the book, even soutane and genuflect because of the priest who was encountered and the churches which were toured.

Why these? Were they new to the reader? Of interest because of origin or sight or sound?

I sat outside in the almost-cool of the Birmingham evening with the book, the photograph and the words. I contemplated the man in the photo and the land surrounding him. I said the words aloud. I wondered what I was supposed to say about these found things.

Here I am, a 63-year old woman, writing a few things, tending to the people in her life in 2023, contemplating words noted by a dead Palestinian scholar from a book written by a Canadian around the time I was born, a book about the Writing Life in Paris circa 1929 with a Catholic twist or two, written just a couple of years after my Catholic mother was born in New England of Canadian parents

I don't know what the connection means. I can't explain, can't think of a cozy, inspiring circle to draw it all together. All I know is that I like it.

I like the actual scrap of paper and the photograph, uncurated artifacts that seem to weave threads of communion in a way that the carefully crafted digital self-presentation inundating us all right now does not.

I like the material reality of the paper and what’s printed on it, what’s dashed off by hand, surprising me, fluttering to the ground from the book that I bought in a garage in a real house from real people - the daughters, maybe, or granddaughters of the man in the picture - a mile or so from my real house – all of which somehow connects me sitting here in Alabama to those people, and then to Palestine, to Paris, to Canada, to all of them through time and around the world trying to make sense of life, and caring enough about it all to leave some memories and questions, if not many answers, leaving them behind, not for me, but somehow, yes, for me to find in the books they wrote, the photographs they snapped, the memories they preserved and even the words they jotted down and left in the book, perhaps even forgetting what they had written and why:

ineffable...profligate....genuflect (?)