‘Maybe, but I don’t think so,’ said P.O.M. ‘We have fun though, don’t we? Without all those people.’
‘God damn it if we don’t. I’ve had a better time every year since I can remember.’
‘But isn’t Mr. J. P. wonderful? Really?’
‘Yes. He’s wonderful.’
‘Oh, you’re nice to say it. Poor Karl.’
‘Why?’
‘Without his wife.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Poor Karl.’
CHAPTER TWO
So in the morning, again, we started ahead of the porters and went down and across the hills and through a deeply forested valley and then up and across a long rise of country with high grass that made the walking difficult, and on and up and across, resting sometimes in the shade of a tree, and then on and up and down and across, all in high grass now, that you had to break a trail in, and the sun was very hot. The five of us in single file, Droop and M’Cola with a big gun apiece, hung with musettes and water bottles and the cameras, we all sweating in the sun, Pop and I with guns and the Memsahib trying to walk like Droopy, her Stetson tilted on one side, happy to be on a trip, pleased about how comfortable her boots were, we came finally to a thicket of thorn trees over a ravine that ran down from the side of a ridge to the water and we leaned the guns against the trees and went in under the close shade and lay on the ground P O M. got the books out of one of the musettes and she and Pop read while I followed the ravine down to the little stream that came out of the mountainside, and found a fresh lion track and many rhino tunnels in the tall grass that came higher than your head. It was very hot climbing back up the sandy ravine and I was glad to lean my back against the tree trunk and read in Tolstoy’s {Sevastopol}. It was a very young book and had one fine description of fighting in it, where the French take the redoubt, and I thought about Tolstoy and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer. It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to write truly of, and those writers who had not seen it were always very jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a disease as a subject, while, really, it was just something quite irreplaceable that they had missed. Then Sevastopol made me think of the Boulevard Sevastopol in Paris, about riding a bicycle down it in the rain on the way home from Strassburg and the slipperiness of the rails of the tram cars and the feeling of riding on greasy, slippery asphalt and cobble stones in traffic in the rain, and how we had nearly lived on the Boulevard du Temple that time, and I remembered the look of that apartment, how it was arranged, and the wall paper, and instead we had taken the upstairs of the pavilion in Notre Dame des Champs in the courtyard with the sawmill {(and the sudden whine of the saw, the smell of sawdust and the chestnut tree over the roof with a mad woman downstairs)}, and the year worrying about money {(all of the stories back in the post that came in through a slit in the saw-mill door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always anecdotes, sketches, conies, etc. They did not want them, and we lived on poireaux and drank cahors and water)}, and how fine the fountains were at the Place de L’Observatoire ({water sheen rippling on the bronze of horses’ manes, bronze breasts and shoulders, green under thin-flowing} {water)}, and when they put up the bust of Flaubert in the Luxembourg on the short cut through the gardens on the way to the rue Soufflot {(one that we believed in, loved without criticism, heavy now in stone as an idol should be)}. He had not seen war but he had seen a revolution and the Commune, and a revolution is much the best if you do not become bigoted because every one speaks the same language. Just as civil war is the best war for a writer, the most complete. Stendhal had seen a war and Napoleon taught him to write. He was teaching everybody then; but no one else learned. Dostoevski was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if they sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. He seemed sad, really, like Camera. Tolstoy was a small man. Joyce was of medium height and he wore his eyes out. And that last night, drunk, with Joyce and the thing he kept quoting from Edgar Quinet, ‘Fraiche et rose comme au jour de la bataille’. I didn’t have it right I knew. And when you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.