Paris Review - The Art of Biography

And then I read that he had tried to release plays for atomic number 23 geezerhood and been booed off the stage. someways that episode intrigue me; it shocked me that a man so delicate and svelte could receive this winsome of treatment. I went keep going end to my prof and we stop up with a compromise: I could write on James as a mental novelist and smuggle in a chapter on Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, whom I too was reading. That was how I came to the moderns, at that early time. Where did you go from there? \nEDEL I had put myself by college working on a local paper in Montreal. After commencement exercise and a age work I found myself dissatisfiedthe action of a newsperson somehow wasnt what I wanted. So I applied for a kinsperson to go abroad. I popular opinion only of capital of France and the Joycean earth. In Quebec at the time the political sympathies had sold a great deliberate of liquor in their liquor-control stores to thirsty prohibition-starved America ns who track the border weekends, creating a great tourer industry. The provincial governing body decided to instal a intercommunicate out of its sumptuosity to humanism and the humanities; the result, a twelve fellowships a yr for European field. I was carried across the Atlantic on the downpour profits, ostensibly to study French journalism. In Paris, I hung close to the writing crowd, respect Hemingway from a distance, watched Joyce at the opera applauding an Irish singer, frequented Sylvia Beachs bookshop where I met the unripened Cyril Connolly; I went to Brittany for a holiday, to Concarneau, a port change then with departure and blue sails of the tuna fish fleet, ran into Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, and Lonie Adams, who were there, and they took me in Paris to concern cover Madox Ford so he could talk to me about Henry James, which he did, leaning on a bossy piano and breathe like a walrus. I was a junior tagalong of the expatriates in Montparnasse, audience the far-off rumbles of fright and the Wall channel crash. Then I pulled myself together. It dawned on me that I would go back to a changed world and I had break out find something to interpret for my stay abroad. Also, I had to have continue reports to get my fellowship renewedit was good for cardinal years if I showed myself serious and industrious. I made friends with a gifted young Canadian from Toronto named E. K. Brown, whose liveness of Willa Cather I would subsequent complete when he died prematurely. It was he who took me to grab the French professor of American literary productions and Civilization, and this professor, Charles Cestre, urged me to go on with my Jamesian studies. I offered to do a harangue on Jamess five years of failed playwriting. \n