In the forefront of the artistic post-war immigrants were John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings (later ‘e.e. cummings’) and Hemingway, all three of whom had worked as volunteer ambulancemen during the war. Ambulancemen enjoyed greater freedom of movement than regular soldiers, and had more contact with local people. Dos Passos did make contact with French writers, though Cummings, despite his fluent French, did not. The writer and critic Malcolm Cowley, alone in Montpellier writing a thesis on Racine, also managed to bridge the gap, as did Matthew Josephson, who became friendly with a broad group of writers and artists including Jules Romains, Tristan Tzara and Louis Aragon. There was some reciprocation: Aragon and his friend the poet Philippe Soupault both read English, adored America, read all the ‘Nick Carter’ dime novels they could find, and were committed fans of Charlie Chaplin.
The quiet streets and dim bars recorded by the pioneer photographer Eugène Atget before the war were giving way to noisy thoroughfares and brassy cafeterias. Workers’ cafés, such as the Dôme, quickly became the stylish haunts of young American drinkers; but the charm of the old Paris didn’t disappear overnight. John Glassco, who lived in the rue Broca district, wrote that ‘in the rue de la Glacière I met a man with a flock of goats, playing a little pipe to announce that he was selling ewe’s milk from the udder.’ And in A Moveable Feast Hemingway recalled a similar scene when he was living in the rue Cardinal Lemoine in 1921: ‘The goatherd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goatherd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk.’ In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway lamented how things had changed four years later: ‘We ate dinner at Mme Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Someone had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.’ Elsewhere in A Moveable Feast he records poignantly that the old waiters at the Closerie des Lilas, Jean and André, had been forced to shave off their drooping moustaches and don white ‘American’ jackets to serve their new clientele. With flashy new establishments like the Coupole opening only a few hundred metres away along the boulevard du Montparnasse, and Americans flocking to the Sélect and the Rotonde, something had to be done to smarten up the Lilas’ image.
Up on the boulevard St Germain the Flore and the Deux Magots are still there, side by side, dispensing expensive but good cognac to Frenchman and tourist alike, the Magots just having an edge over the dingier Flore; but many of the other bars Peggy was soon to be frequenting around what is now the Place Pablo Picasso, the junction of the boulevard du Montparnasse and the boulevard Raspail, have either disappeared or changed beyond recognition. The Dôme is an expensive fish restaurant, though its bar is still there. The Sélect and the Rotonde still have a slightly seedy charm, while La Coupole is as grand a piece of art déco as ever it was. The Falstaff is now a cheap restaurant, and the Jockey and the Dingo have disappeared.
In the 1920s, though, this was the centre of ‘Bohemia’ for the American expatriates in Paris, and it was waiting to be introduced to Peggy.
Leon and Helen Fleischman had taken up with Laurence Vail, now back in Paris, and through them he met Peggy again. Laurence was an original. He looks bad-tempered and intense in photographs, though those who knew him well were fond of him, and many think that as an artist he sold himself short. By modern standards he looks physically weak, though he was an expert skier and alpinist. By the standards of the day he wore his blond hair long, and he avoided hats. He dressed extravagantly, buying curtain or furniture material in Liberty prints to be made into shirts, with yellow or blue canvas or corduroy trousers, and white overcoats, or jackets all the colours of the rainbow. As he was pigeon-toed he preferred sandals to shoes, but made a great fuss over buying any kind of footwear, to the extent that Peggy suspected him of having a mild complex.
Vail was a handsome man, despite a beaky, aquiline nose, with a volatile and childish personality which overshadowed his better points. Seven years Peggy’s senior, he had been born in Paris. His mother, Gertrude Mauran, came from a wealthy New England family, and was every inch a Daughter of the American Revolution. His father, Eugene, was the product of a New York father and a Breton mother, and a moderately successful landscape painter (particularly of Venice and Brittany) by profession.
From his mother Laurence had inherited a love of the mountains. She was one of the first women ever to climb Mont Blanc, and had encouraged her son to be a mountaineer from an early age. From his father he inherited the less attractive traits of advanced neurosis, and an egotism which manifested itself in temper tantrums when he thought he was not the centre of attention. Eugene Vail was also a hypochondriac with a strong suicidal tendency. It was from his father that Laurence inherited his artistic sensibility, and a sense of humour which never had enough of a chance to show itself. And if Peggy’s family had its share of eccentrics, mention should be made here of Laurence’s Uncle George, Eugene’s brother. George was a great aficionado of roller-skating. Roller-skates had been around for over a hundred years, but with the introduction of the ball-bearing in the 1890s their efficiency was much improved, and it was possible to go very much faster on them. George added to his speed by holding on to the backs of lorries, and thus it was that he would meet his end, when in his sixties. He was also a great lover, and made an album collection of his mistresses’ pubic hairs.
Neither parent – Gertrude cold and domineering, and Eugene self-obsessed – had much time for Laurence or his younger sister Clotilde, and the children in consequence were drawn close together. Though suggestions of incest are without foundation, their relationship did inspire William Carlos Williams’ 1928 novel A Voyage to Pagany, in which an American doctor and writer, Evans, returns to Paris to see his sister, who is pursuing a career as a singer (Clotilde had a brief career as an actress and opera singer herself).
… differing [physically] as the brother and sister did, they had grown up intimately together, almost as one child. They had shared everything with each other … The thing which had always kept them together was the total lack of constraint they felt in each other’s company – a confidence which had never, so far, been equally shared by them with anyone else.
Elsewhere in the book, a minor character called Jack Murry, a writer, is given a description based on Laurence:
The firm, thin-lipped lower face, jaw slightly thrust out, the cold blue eyes, the long downward-pointing, slightly-hooked straight nose, the lithe, straight athletic build … [Evans] loved his younger friend for the bold style of his look at life. Often, when Jack demolished situations and people with one bark, Evans smiled to himself at the rudeness of it, the ruthlessness with which so much good had been mowed down.
Both Eugene and Gertrude had private money, though Gertrude, with an income of $10,000 a year, was considerably the richer of the two. From this she paid her husband’s hospital and medical consultancy bills (he had already run through his own patrimony on such things), and gave Laurence a small allowance of about $1200 a year – just enough to live on without working, and enough to make him rich in comparison with the artists with whom he associated. This, coupled with a great love of the bottle, was the main reason why Laurence never exploited to the full what artistic talents he had. On the other hand, a streak of humorous self-awareness runs through his own writings and recorded pronouncements. ‘I take my medicine;’ he writes in his autobiographical novel Murder! Murder!, ‘gulp down without a murmur a tumbler of imported New York whiskey. My stomach sinks, bravely reacts. And suddenly I know that I have it in me to do great things. But what great things? Just what?’ His son-in-law Ralph Rumney, who was also a friend, has remarked that as far as he is concerned, Laurence was never given his due as an artist or as a man. Peggy loyally said that Laurence