While his wife travelled, McAlmon stayed in Paris, drinking too much and indulging in some minor writing and a memoir, later revived by his friend Kay Boyle, of his life and of the artistic life of the time.
McAlmon was a fine editor, with a well-developed sense of what was best in the new writing, and used the money he derived as an ‘income’ from his marriage to set up his small publishing house. Despite personal differences between the two men (McAlmon could be very bitter), he was the first to publish Hemingway, and he also produced volumes of verse by William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy and Marsden Hartley. Though he had dreaded the thought of being destitute once Bryher – as she inevitably did, after about six years – divorced him, he found himself in fact with a handsome settlement of about £14,000, which led his friends Bill Williams and Allan Ross Mcdougall to dub him ‘Robert McAlimony’.
Gertrude Stein, though she stood apart from the 1920s set, having been in Paris since 1903, was among the first great female collectors of modern art. As patrons in America, Katherine Dreier and the Cone sisters were not far behind her. The Cones were distant cousins of Stein, and Etta Cone had typed the manuscript of Stein’s first book, Three Lives. At Stein’s home at 27, rue de Fleurus, crammed with paintings and sculpture, many of the new arrivals rubbed shoulders with the older established expatriates and some of their French colleagues too. Any given salon might include Virgil Thomson, Hemingway, Pound, Duchamp, Cocteau, Picabia, Matisse, T.S. Eliot (on visits from London), Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Robert McAlmon. And Picasso, of course, whom Stein’s friend Nelly Jacott called ‘a good-looking boot-black’.
In the early days, Picasso had exhibited his work in a little furniture shop; and Leo and Gertrude Stein had been able to pick up Matisse’s Femme au Chapeau for 500 francs from the dealer Vollard. Things were changing fast, though. Daniel Kahnweiler, the great pioneer modern art dealer, had set up shop in Paris a couple of years before the First World War. Ignoring Picasso’s advice to become a French citizen (he was married to a Frenchwoman but had already done national service in his native Germany and didn’t want to have to go through it a second time, especially with a war looming), Kahnweiler had his effects sequestered at the outbreak of war and all his pictures were auctioned off – notably most of the Cubist work painted between 1911 and 1914. When he returned to Paris soon after the war, his former artists except Juan Gris had become ‘too successful to have need of him’, Stein tells us. Certainly the three other great Cubists, Picasso, Braque and Léger, had begun to be seriously collectable by this time, though the prices asked for their work remained low compared to the levels they subsequently reached.
Hemingway quoted Gertrude Stein, whose family-derived income was comfortable but not great, with a respect born of admiration: ‘ “You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode … and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”’ But not all the new arrivals treated Stein with particular reverence. The poet, artist and film-maker Charles Henri Ford called her ‘Sitting Bull’, while John Glassco wrote that she
projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability; her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress, were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down. Her fine close-cropped head was in the style of the late Roman Empire, but unfortunately it merged into broad peasant shoulders without the aesthetic assistance of a neck; her eyes were large and much too piercing. I had a peculiar sense of mingled attraction and repulsion towards her. She awakened in me a feeling of instinctive hostility coupled with a grudging veneration, as if she were a pagan idol in whom I was unable to believe.
As backdrop and inspiration to all the artistic activity that was going on, there was the city itself. The writer Malcolm Cowley has observed:
Prohibition, puritanism, philistinism and salesmanship: these seemed to be the triumphant causes in America. Whoever had won the war, young American writers came to regard themselves as a defeated nation. So they went to Paris, not as if they were being driven into exile, but as if they were seeking a spiritual home. Paris was freedom to dress as they pleased, talk and write as they pleased, and make love without worrying about the neighbours. Paris was a continual excitation of the senses.
And if you were lucky enough to be working for an American publication as a correspondent and were paid in dollars, all the better.
How close to all of this were Peggy and Laurence? Given that they were caught in an unsatisfactory marriage and expecting their first child, it is understandable that they had little time to immerse themselves fully in the cultural life of the time; but there seems to have been no profound connection at all, other than through parties and jaunts through the bars and bistros of the Quartier Latin. They were generous hosts – though Peggy secretly resented the amount of money spent on entertaining – and the guests came largely because of the prospect of free food and drink.
Although Laurence’s slim output of work shows the influence of the Surrealists, he was never seriously involved with them, and Peggy had yet to show any hint of the interest in modern art that was to define her life later. She had as yet no conscious sense of purpose. If Laurence told her, as she attests he did in order to humiliate her, that ‘I was fortunate to be accepted in Bohemia and that, since all I had to offer was my money, I should lend it to the brilliant people I met and whom I was allowed to frequent,’ his remark at least planted another seed – but it took time to grow.
The Vails’ money set them apart, but they did not hold salons like Stein or Barney, nor did they patronise the arts. They lived in the grand Hôtel Lutétia, far from the Left Bank. Peggy did make friends within the artistic community, and might have become more involved with that world earlier in her life had it not been, paradoxically, for the presence of her husband, who partly facilitated and partly inhibited her entrance to it. She had not forgotten the lessons and the principles instilled in her by her teacher Lucile Kohn, but she was handicapped by her lack of confidence, something which Laurence was at pains to undermine anyway, on account of his own sense of inadequacy and inferiority, which stemmed from a similar source to Peggy’s: parental neglect.
That they saw themselves as doyens of artistic life, however – Laurence more so than Peggy – is clear from contemporary observations of them during the 1920s. The contradictions in Laurence’s character – charm and intelligence struggling with petulant egotism – are noticeable too. Matthew Josephson remembered that
A few Byronic figures loomed among us; they owned private incomes and showed no great urge or haste to fill many volumes with their written words. Laurence Vail was such a one, who wrote and also painted a little, but more often and more seriously seemed bent on painting the Left Bank of the River Seine red … With his long mane of yellow hair always uncovered, his red or pink shirts, his trousers of blue sailcloth, he made an eye-filling figure in the quarter. Moreover he was young, handsome, and for all his wild talk, a prince of a fellow; whenever he came riding in, usually with a flock of charming women in his train, he would set all the cafés of Montparnasse agog.
Laurence literally ‘knew everyone’; and even if he didn’t, would buy him a drink. His vivacious sister, Clotilde, who resembled Laurence in appearance as in