During 1927 whilst I was still at the RA Schools, I had a number of portrait commissions. I was able to pay the rent of a large room in Twickenham Park which I used as a studio. I saved, for my rent was low and I was also getting money from a Landseer Scholarship I had won at the schools.
Since my first short visit to Paris in 1925 I had dreamed of going there again, for a long stay. When still a schoolboy I had read Murger’s ‘La Vie de Bohème‘, and ever since I had thought of Paris and I was sure that nothing had changed since the days of Marcel, Mimi, Rudolph and the rest.
That was how we should live, I had decided. I too would spend my money carelessly when I had it, and get along somehow when it was all gone. Mimi awaited me. I was very romantic, and eager to get away from home.
At the beginning of 1928 I had saved nearly £150. Edwin John* was already in Paris and wrote to remind me I had promised to join him when I had enough money. Sickert was no longer teaching at the Academy, even Sims had gone, and the schools were dull and uninteresting. Edwin wrote again. He had found a place, very cheap and not far from Montparnasse. I was eager to go. My father saw me off. He gave me a sovereign, a golden sovereign, in case I ever really needed it, and told me to be careful to avoid women.
* Edwin John (Nov 27 1905 – Feb 2 1978) the fourth son of Augustus John and his first wife Ida Nettleship. GRH
During most of 1928 I shared a studio with Edwin in Malakoff, a working-class suburb of Paris. It was situated just outside the outer boulevard. We could walk from Malakoff to Montparnasse in about three-quarters of an hour, or we could go by tram. Our studio was fairly large and had a gallery bedroom. We did not have much furniture. Two single divan beds, one chair, a table, a couple of easels and an old wooden box. There was a built in wash basin with running water and a large, very ornamental iron stove. We kept a heap of coal on the floor, in a corner under the stairs. A few drawings were pinned on the walls. Very austere.
It was one of several in the rue Leplanquais and next door our landlord, his sons, and several workmen produced quantities of sculpture à machine, a horrifying method involving the use of a sort of drill worked by compressed air. The drills made a good deal of noise. The men worked very hard and were covered with powdered stone. They wore round paper caps on their heads to keep the dust out of their hair. They often sang as they worked.
Our landlord was a charming old man. I used to see him every evening in the market place, smoking his pipe.
‘Ah Monsieur Clifford,’ he always said, ‘off to Paris again.’ He spoke as if I was undertaking a long, long journey, yet Paris was only a bare fifteen minute tram ride away.
‘And have you never been to Paris?’ I asked him.
‘I went there once. Someone died and I had to see a lawyer. But I prefer to remain here.’
Just inside the gate through which one passed from Malakoff to Paris was a large tract of waste ground. Here the gypsies sometimes camped with painted wagons and shabby tents. Gypsies from Spain, from Roumania. Straight lithe girls in long flowered dresses with a streak of thin red braid plaited into their hair. Terrifying old women, huddled up, smoking a pipe, grim reminder of what the girls would in time become. Insolent, handsome young men, and dignified old grandfathers with dozens of silver coins on their watch chains. Many little children in summer time, stark naked, golden brown firm little bodies, running everywhere.
Edwin and myself used to draw in the Cours Libre at the Grande Chaumière several times a week. For a short time I worked in André Lhote’s studio near the Gare Montparnasse. On Monday mornings the big atelier was crowded with students. The model waited. A few minutes before 9 o’clock, Lhote would suddenly appear through a door opening on to the balcony at the far end of the studio. He was a little man with a charming smile, dressed in a dark lounge suit with a coloured silk handkerchief neatly arranged round his neck. He beamed at the faces upturned towards him. ‘Bonjour mes enfants,’ he said, and ‘Bonjour Maître,’ came the reply. I think he liked it. The master tripped down the stairs from the balcony and into the studio. He posed the model and gave a short talk on how he thought we should plan work during the week. We did not see him again until Saturday, the last day of the pose, when he reappeared still smiling and gave a few words of criticism to each student.
I did not stay there very long. I had had enough of schools and I began to work more and more on my own. Sometimes in the Malakoff studio, sometimes in the streets round about. But I continued to draw at the Cours Libre. I think it was at the zinc bar of the Dôme, where we sometimes went for a drink when the drawing class was over, that Edwin introduced me to Rowley Smart.
In those days Rowley was living in Montparnasse and he was never very far from his favourite haunts, the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Dingo Bar and the Select.
He was clean-shaven and wore his hair fairly long, hair that was just beginning to grey. A short, slight little man with a very big nose, lively blue eyes, a fresh complexion, a weakish chin and the most beautifully shaped hands I have ever seen.
It was summer when I first met him, and he wore an open-neck shirt, flannel trousers, a check jacket and a fawn coloured hat with a very wide brim, chapeau d’artiste, as they were called. On his feet, a pair of rope soled canvas beach shoes.
We had drinks, and Rowley was sure he had met me at some party or private view in London a year or so back. I certainly had no recollection of having seen him before, but I agreed that he was probably right. I said this to please him, for I had already made up my mind that we would meet again. He seemed interesting. I guessed that he had taken a liking to me. Edwin was morose, and sometimes would not speak for days on end – a difficult companion.
Rowley and I saw each other frequently after that first meeting. Indeed it was impossible not to come across him somewhere in Montparnasse.
At times during the afternoon I would see him sitting on the terrasse of some café, a 24″ x 20″ canvas propped on a chair in front of him, busy painting a view of the street. Drink and cigarettes were on a table by his side. His brushes were, to me, shockingly kept, I never saw him wash them, and his palette had obviously not been cleaned for years, but he worked with bright colours in a high clean key. These street pictures were complicated things in their way. Perspective, chimney pots, crazy French skyline, windows, shutters, café awnings, chairs, trees, people, shadows.* He would make a few guiding lines in pencil, very faint on the white canvas, and then commence to draw the whole design in cobalt blue, delicately touched but using no medium. Then he started to paint in the colours, but contrary to anything I had seen before, he commenced at the top and worked down towards the bottom, finishing as he went. He would spend four to six sittings on such a canvas, never working for more than two hours at a time, and always choosing a sunny day. His oils at that period were frankly influenced by the Impressionists.
When the sun did not shine and it was consequently impossible to continue a particular painting, Rowley could find nothing better to do than to sit gloomily at some café drinking, smoking and cursing the weather, declaring France was developing a climate as bad as that of Manchester, his home town, the ‘dirty city’, where it rained always and it was impossible for a man to paint, much less get a drink when he wanted one. By early evening of a wet or dull day the drinks would have made him cheerful and most of the night would be passed with more drinks and singing at the Dingo, rue Delambre, with American sailors, French girls and people he referred to as ‘booze-fighters’. He could then stand a huge quantity of alcohol – wine, Pernod, brandy – and although he was drunk most nights he was not ‘paralytic’ as we said in the Quarter; that is unable to walk or even speak. No, Rowley was a merry drunk, dashing off obscene rough sketches (these were usually grabbed by someone of the party. I rescued a few myself.), laughing and roaring out dirty songs, making up fresh verses as he went along. A clown, but an amusing clown, and Lew Wilson who ran the Dingo knew Rowley was an attraction. He was good for business, and Lew gave him drinks when he was hard up, lent him money and hung the bar with his paintings. For some months the Dingo was literally covered with Rowley Smart oils. Wilson had lent Rowley several thousand francs and the pictures were there as security.
* See Quai St Michel, Paris 1928, oil on canvas, Manchester City Art Gallery. The painting currently (in the year 2005) hangs in Room 10 and nearby hangs a portrait of Rowley Smart by Adolphe Valette, his teacher, who was also the teacher of L. S. Lowry. JH
Rowley had, for the time, given up painting in watercolour. It was as a watercolourist that Edwin remembered him. ‘He had a perfect technique, very little more, and he gave me a few lessons.’ This I suppose was when Rowley was staying in Dorset with Augustus John, after the Great War, 1914-1918. Rowley once or twice referred to that visit and remembered Edwin as a quiet little boy. He told me he once took him out driving in a pony trap. Edwin fell out, and the wheel went over him. ‘It didn’t seem to do him any harm, ‘he said.
He talked about watercolour and told me that he had got to such a pitch of technical skill that he could ‘do anything’ with the medium. ‘I had got too clever so I decided to leave it alone for a while and work in oils.’
This was one of the very few times he spoke about painting. He would talk of painters, mostly scandal, but hardly ever of painting. He used to praise my drawings, and sometimes he said one of my paintings was ‘swell’. This was high praise. Sometimes he said nothing, and later I came to decide for myself that the picture was not a success. Most of Rowley’s expressions were American. He had lived, off and on, in France for a considerable time but he never learned to speak the language. ‘Just grab what you want and ask “combien?”.’ He loved the country to live in but I do not think he loved the people. Americans he liked immensely and spent most of his time with them. Montparnasse was full of Americans, American bars, restaurants, shops. It was, from his point of view, unnecessary to understand French, and even his voice had acquired a distinctly American intonation. ‘What the hell is the guy saying, Cliff?’ I explained. ‘Tell the bastard to take a flying jump at himself, I can’t stand these French joints anyway. Let’s go to the Dingo.’
Rowley Smart, self-portrait 1922. Now in the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Collection.
Drink and women were the chief interests of the crowd who frequented this bar, the Dôme and the other so-called artists’ resorts in Montparnasse. Rowley was a success with women and he usually had one with him. He changed partners frequently. The women who hung about the cafés were not prostitutes but were the type who were always ready to go home and stay with a man for the sake of shelter and food. They were nearly all young, attractive and made the most of their appearance. Some were French girls who had come to Paris from the country with ambitions, tired of living a quiet life. Perhaps the promised job fell through. They got odd sittings as models and gradually drifted into this free and easy promiscuous life centred at the Dôme corner. Again, others were Swedes, Poles, Norwegians, Finns. Many came to learn French and to study on a minute allowance from home. The allowance went on drinks and clothes and they came to rely on finding their bed with whoever took their fancy. Many came to Montparnasse, men and women, for a few weeks and stayed on, living somehow, for months, even years.
Montparnasse had a terrible fascination, and at night the cafés were full and the customers sitting outside on the pavement, almost to the kerb, talked and sipped their drinks until dawn. The Dôme was open for 23 hours out of the 24, the Rotonde the same, while the Select a few doors away never closed. I think of Rowley in Moret painting landscapes, again during the months towards the end of his life when he was lying, almost helpless at the Eiffel Tour Hotel*, Percy Street, still painting, even in bed; but it is in Montparnasse that I can visualize him most clearly. Montparnasse was his setting with its feverish hard drinking atmosphere. He loved it.
* The Eiffel Tour (Tower) Hotel at 1, Percy Street, Fitzrovia, London, later called the White Tower Restaurant and now called The House of Ho. GRH
Aperitif time invariably found us on the Dôme terrasse, at our favourite corner, just outside the entrance to the tabac end of the zinc bar, facing the newspaper kiosk that stood on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail, and looking along the Boulevard Montparnasse towards Les Lilas. The rest of the crowd would be there: Francis Musgrave, Homer Bevans, and others whose names I cannot remember. Sometimes Linc Gillespie with Anne, Hilaire Hiler who decorated the Jockey and Jungle night clubs, Flossie Martin and Jo, a French girl with whom Rowley lived for a few weeks.
Homer Bevans was an American. A huge man, not exactly fat but big, he seemed over life size. Every movement, even his speech, was deliberate, slow, elephantine. The colour of his face, of his great hands with their short thick fingers, was a leathery yellow. He always wore a nondescript dark suit – I never saw him with an overcoat – a stiff not too clean collar, that miraculously never got really dirty but just remained soiled, and a ridiculously small hat perched on his huge head. He was between forty and fifty. When he grasped a Pernod, his favourite drink, and commenced to raise the glass, it seemed an eternity before the cloudy green liquid actually touched his lips, was gulped, and the glass began its slow downward journey towards the round, marble-topped, brass-ringed table and finally came to rest, Homer’s huge paw still holding it with what seemed to be a gentle, almost caressing gesture. He consumed, however, an alarming number of these drinks during the day and night. He seldom talked. ‘Pernod is my life work,’ he once remarked in his deep throaty voice, the words following each other slowly, unwillingly from between thick lips that always smiled stupidly. Sometimes, I used to think, a trifle languorously. I would watch him, fascinated.
Homer was said to have once played the flute in one of the large New York orchestras. Edwin, who was also a musician, went to see him and came back with a very poor opinion of his ability. The Homer legend continued thus: his wife in New York had left him, and Homer, who had a certain amount of private money, gave up his job and came to Paris. He took a studio and decided to become a sculptor. He actually started a bust and a figure. In the meanwhile he discovered Pernod and very soon abandoned art for that fatal drink. Rowley often told the story of Homer’s modelling. Homer referred to these clay models most seriously, saying he would finish them when he had time, when Pernod would allow him time, that is; and they stood on their respective stands carefully swathed in damp cloths so that the clay would not harden and crack. His concierge had to leave a bucket of water in the studio each night so that Homer could redampen the cloths before going to bed. One night, as Rowley put it, Homer, more tight than usual, ‘flung the water in the direction of the figure and forgot to keep hold of the bucket’. His aim was good. The heavy bucket hit the figure, which in falling knocked the bust off its stand and both were smashed. So ended Homer’s career as a sculptor. He then devoted himself seriously to Pernod. One morning about 2.00 a.m. in the Select he mentioned his wife. Someone had a copy of the New York Times and Homer drawled, ‘One day I hope I will pick up that paper and read that Mrs Homer Bevans has been flattened by a tram.’ That is one of the few long sentences of his I can recall.
He had a deep low chuckle that sounded good-natured but foolish.
Pernod killed him in the end. He lived on it and hardly ever ate, couldn’t face food in the later stages. It gets some of them that way.
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Mornings Linc Gillespie, an American, spent propped up in bed, writing one of his almost incomprehensible articles for ‘Transition‘, an advanced American literary magazine, published in Paris. He lived in an hotel in the rue Cujas off the Boulevard St Michel. I did a sketch of him there lying on his bed.
About five Linc would stir himself, get up and start for the Dôme. The girl who lived with him had a job with some American firm in Paris. She kept an eye on the money he spent, and Linc usually set off with ten francs, which he carried in a little leather purse. At the Dôme he bought himself a fine à l’eau, and usually produced a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some lettuce. He drifted away after an hour or so to play bridge with a few friends in the interior of the café. Sometimes he played all night. Linc was a good follower of James Joyce and he talked as Joyce wrote. It was impossible to understand him half the time, but he insisted that this new language was the thing of the future. He did not keep it up all the time, fortunately for his friends.
Linc had given much thought to finding a sentence that would be applicable to every conceivable situation. He finally hit on: ‘It serves you/them/it right.’ This, he declared, covered everything in life and was unanswerable.
He arrived one evening at the Dôme and announced that he had found the greatest line in modern poetry. ‘Jesus Christ came off the cross shaking like an albatross.’
‘Anyone who has seen an albatross, as I have, cannot fail to realize what a shattering and original simile that is.’ It did not create the stir Linc seemed to expect, but Rowley characteristically seized on it and ever after, when asked how he felt ‘the morning after’, would reply: ‘Shaking like an albatross.’
Edwin and I, passing the Dôme one morning, noticed a somewhat large group for the time of day gathered on the terrasse. ‘I think it must be my father,’ said Edwin. Rowley, Tommy Earp*, Eve Kirk, several other women and men were all clustered round Augustus John. England’s foremost romantic painter sat chain smoking French Yellows and drinking demi blondes. He said nothing and reminded me of a tired eagle; he looked a hundred years old. Once he thanked me, in French, for lighting his cigarette. The chain had momentarily broken. Edwin and I got hungry and went off to lunch. When we returned an hour or so later the group round John was larger. He continued his smoking and occasionally drank a beer. He had hardly changed his position and still said nothing. We sat around and talked. There was a slight scuffling in the outskirts of the close-packed circle of chairs and little round tables. An individual pushed through and stopped before John. ‘Say,’ in a strong American voice, ‘Are you the great Augustus John?’ John hardly looked up. He jerked his thumb upwards and backwards. ‘Fuck off!’ he growled.
* Tommy Earp, British poet, critic, ex-president of the Oxford Union and wealthy friend of photographer Bernice Abbott while she was in Paris. GRH
Someone suggested the Dingo, round the corner. An American battleship had put in at Cherbourg and a party of the sailors were spending their leave in Paris. The Dingo was full of them. Sam, a great hard-drinking fellow, was calling a round of drinks as we went in. He caught sight of John and, handing him a glass, said, ‘My name’s Sam. I don’t know yours, but have a drink.’ ‘Mine’s Gus. Good luck.’ answered John. At the bar Eve Kirk explained to me that she was on her way to Rome. She looked very attractive in a green velvet costume and had great coils of carelessly piled up tawny hair, slipping out from beneath her hat. She was a very clever painter. There were a number of other women who seemed attached to John in some way. A kind of retinue. ‘If only he would eat,’ Eve said. ‘It’s very difficult. All the way from Marseille last night, it’s long past dinner time now and still he’s eaten nothing.’
About 1.00am, now back at the Dôme at the zinc bar John, decided to eat and started on cold sausages from a basket full on the counter. I vaguely remember him throwing the sausages about the bar. No one took much notice – they were used to worse than that in the Dôme – and I last saw him hurrying out, a trifle unsteadily, to a waiting taxi, with a woman – not one of the retinue. He did not reappear for two or three days and the retinue plagued Edwin for information. ‘How should I know,’ he said. ‘I’m not his keeper.’ Eve was very worried and I often wondered if she ever got to Rome.
It was a perfect summer and most days Rowley painted in the streets around Montparnasse, sometimes by the Seine and also in the quarter by the Panthéon, off the Boulevard St Michel. Faithfully about six, with his coat, trousers and hands messed up by paint, he would drop into his usual chair at the Dôme and call for a drink.
His was a personality that attracted, and moreover he was generous with his money. His corner of the terrasse was always crowded and noisy. He loved to sing ‘Bollocky Bill ‘, ‘Anthony Clare‘. ‘The Sentimental Skipper’ and ‘Toby’. He egged the others on to join in, but his voice could always be heard above the rest. ‘The Sentimental Skipper’ and ‘Bollocky Bill’ were two of his great favourites and Bill’s adventures were the theme of one or two large and magnificently decorative watercolours that he painted during this period.
We were at the Dôme most evenings; or perhaps we would wander across the way to the Rotonde but the music from the dance hall upstairs filled the place, and it was never a great resort of ours. If we were hard up we might start on the round of the bistros, dirty little dens in which one drank standing uncomfortably at the bar, served by an unshaven, collarless patron, in the company of doubtful looking customers who were probably not so villainous as they appeared.
Drinks were very cheap at the bistros. I was often with Rowley. He did not like to be alone. Even when he painted he preferred to have someone with him, although he concentrated on his work. It was not difficult to realize that he had a perfect horror of being by himself even in those days. Later this desire for company at all times and at any cost became abnormal. So he stayed on in Montparnasse, held there, I believe, by its life and by the constantly changing drinking companions that it offered. Stayed there although another part of him wanted to be in the country during that perfect weather, painting the landscapes he loved.
He told me that he could not stand the country because there was nothing to do in the evenings. I suggested that he might try going to bed early and easing up on the drinking.
‘It’s no good Cliff, I could not sleep, and I always was a dirty bastard. Why I remember one time when I was a kid in Manchester some uncle or aunt came to see us and brought me a tiny toy boat. I was eager to float it and although now I remember there was a bath I could have used, the only place that occurred to me was the chamber pot in my room. I always did do things the most difficult way. At the Manchester Art School I missed the chance of a scholarship because I would experiment and not do what I was told. When I joined the army what did I choose to be? A bloody mule driver.’ He was badly gassed during the Great War. In after years he blamed this as the first cause of his lung trouble. ‘London was hell after the Armistice. I was ill and had no money. I was on the bum and could not work. John Flanagan* was knocking around too. A crowd of us used to take a studio and sleep on old newspapers with which we covered the floor. Flanagan was a good talker and a business man. He took the studio, and when the first lot of rent became due we just faded. We kept this up for a while, going from place to place, but landlords got wise to the racket and began to demand rent in advance. I spent some time in Stewart Gray‘s house. He was a crazy sort of bastard. He had a big house in Regent’s Park. All sorts of people used to live there and hardly any of them paid rent. Stewart did not mind. He had had quite a bit of money left him. But things at last got bad with him too. We chopped up the furniture, even the banisters from the staircase, to make fires. The gas and light were cut off and we actually sold the bathroom taps for old iron. I used to spend days in the Café Royal on one beer, and I was forced to sleep on a table in one of Mrs Merrick‘s night clubs. The table was not free until about 4 or 5 am. when the club closed, and it was a hell of a business waiting around. She was a good sort.
* This was probably the British painter John Flanagan who had a relationship with Gracie Fields. GRH
‘One day I met Augustus. He asked how things were and I told him. He sent me down to his place at Fordingbridge, gave me paints and canvas and let me use his studio. I was able to have a show some time after and it was successful.
‘I had an amusing time with John. He was very good to me but we sometimes quarrelled like hell. I remember once at dinner he threw the joint at me. I picked up the cat and threw it at him. Only one thing I would not do and that was to let him drive me in his car. He was a crazy driver. He said driving was easy, like drawing. You simply fixed your eye on a certain point and aimed straight at it. The villagers got out of the way pretty damn quick when they saw Augustus coming. Once he landed up in the middle of a pond and another time he drove smash through the drive gates to the house.’
Rowley’s marriage was not a success. How could it have been? Anita, too, drank hard. She bit right through her lip in a violent attack of D.T.s. I should say that Rowley never needed much encouragement where drinking was concerned and he was always the first to admit that, but life with Anita did not help. They had made a bad start. They had a room in the Tottenham Court Road. The first meal she cooked for him was a steak. ‘I did not like the look of it so I pitched it out of the window. It landed on top of a passing bus, dish and all.’
He always acted on impulse. He was impulsive in his work too, and it gave his paintings a vitality that so many of his contemporaries lacked. And when he had been drinking, this natural impulsiveness, perhaps recklessness, had a dangerous side. He was walking one evening some yards behind Aicha, a little fellow with a mop of fair hair hanging on his shoulders. Aicha drew shockingly bad portraits of customers in the large cafés. He always had a portfolio under his arm. ‘Don’t like his hair!’ exclaimed Rowley, and suddenly running forward shouting ‘Take that you bastard!’ he struck a match and Aicha’s hair was alight. ‘He had a hell of a job beating it out,’ said Rowley, chuckling over the incident. It shocked me, although I knew he could not have been sober when he did it.
It is after midnight. I want you to see the Boulevard Montparnasse running wide and straight, with its trees on either side, its cafés ablaze with light, their orange, red, white, yellow and blue awnings, and with all the brightly coloured chairs and tables occupied. The pavements too, filled with a vast crowd passing up and down the Boulevard. Sightseers, artists of sorts, respectable bourgeois fathers taking their wives and ugly children for a late stroll in the warm summer night. Smartly dressed girls pass and repass, their high heels making sharp staccato beats on the pavement. Negroes, men of every nationality are among the crowd. There is an officer of Spahis in long white Moorish burnous and red fez, a brilliant note flashing against the duller civilians. As I recollect the scene, men seemed to predominate. The girls, beautifully made up, sat outside the cafés and the men passed by staring, always staring.
If you meet a friend on the Boulevard you must try to find a vacant table inside or outside one of the many cafés. It is utterly impossible to stand and talk, for the slow-moving throng on the pavement inexorably bears you along with it. You are swept apart, not violently but quite surely, and escape presents itself only in a side street or in a café.
And the Dôme corner was the true centre, the very heart of it all. The interior of the cafés and restaurants were packed too. Stiflingly hot, thick with tobacco smoke, the air heavy with the presence of the perfumed women, with delicious whiffs of cooking and filled with a steady yet rising and falling clatter of conversation shot through with the voices of the waiters as they shouted their orders. From outside came the accompaniment of the endless traffic flow, the hooting of taxis and the clanging tram bells. There were still trams in those days.
Here and there in the interior a game of cards went on, but most people just talked, smoked and drank. Some nights a fight would break out, almost always inside, no one ever knew how. Usually the original contestants were drunk, but others would join in, and sometimes a real roughhouse developed. The waiters then advanced with full soda-water siphons, aiming so as to direct a steady stream in the fighters’ eyes. As soon as a siphon was emptied, another waiter standing behind the first passed forward a full one.
Rowley was inclined to get mixed up in these affairs and although not particularly strong physically he still had, in 1928, a nervous wiry strength and was able to lash out with amazing speed, putting every ounce of his energy into the blow.
Serious fights, however, occurred very seldom. Heavy, consistent drinking was not the rule. I cannot remember more than a dozen habitual drunks in the whole quarter and I remember them because they were altogether more thorough, more hopelessly consistent than the type one sees in London. Montparnasse must have been a drunk’s idea of Heaven. No closing hours, and almost all the tough drinks were cheap. If he was a foreigner, and all of the drunks except one were foreigners, he had the advantage of the exchange. A tolerant police force had never been known to arrest a man for mere alcoholic incapability. I have often seen a couple of agents carry away a drunk, place him carefully on a seat, pick up his fallen hat and rest it by his side, take what money he had left in his pocket and put in its place a piece of paper stating the amount with directions to call at the police station and claim it the following day. Practically all the hard, never-let-up drinkers were American, English or Scandinavian. Only one, Georges Mergault, the poet, was a Frenchman.
Georges spent his life in the *Quarter. He had no home but sat in the cafés most nights. Once, in the summer, he tried sleeping on one of the stone benches in the Luxembourg Gardens. There are a number of these and behind each stands a statue of one of the Queens of France. We asked Georges what sort of night he had had. ‘Terrible. I chose Marie de Medici. She’s as hard as a rock.’
* See “Fame”, a short story by Clifford Hall inspired by the poet Georges Mergault. GRH
Gradually the lovely violet grey evening changes to night. But from one’s seat on the Dôme terrasse it was impossible to see the stars. They were dimmed by the blaze of light from the street lamps, the open cafés and the coloured strip lighting which flickered along the facades of the buildings. One was held, as it were, in this pool of illumination that yet stopped abruptly but a few yards away from the Boulevard. Turn away, if you could, and walk down the rue Vavin towards the gardens of the Luxembourg and immediately you were in comparative darkness and the sounds of the Boulevard gradually became fainter and at last died. It was as if one had left a brilliantly lit crowded room and allowed the door to close with infinite slowness.
In the doorway of the Dôme Granowsky, the painter, leant with an easy grace, a red carnation held between his strong white teeth. He surveyed the crowded scene with the air of a proprietor. He, at least, could remember when the Dôme was just a little bistro. Foujita appeared. The Japanese painter wore his deep black hair cut in a fringe. He was dressed in an American tuxedo with a beautiful white silk shirt which held diamond studs. Diamonds sent flashes from his ears as he turned his head to fondle the Siamese cat that perched on his shoulder, and he wore a straw hat with a coloured band. Two gorgeous women accompanied him. He did charming work and was very successful.
The exquisite Kiki, artist’s model and the queen of the Quarter would be there, her make-up and toilette a symphony in lemon yellow and mauve with the Indian red of her lips striking a bizarre note.
And past it all marched a strange uncouth man. His capped, stubble covered face looked pale and ill. He appeared unaware of his surroundings. Summer or winter he wore a threadbare, patched overcoat. He carried a long staff, shoulder high, and handled it as if it were a punt pole. He was always referred to as ‘The Gondolier’. He never spoke, never stopped, but almost throughout the night made his slow perambulation through the noisy crowds. Round and round the triangular block of which the Dôme served as a kind of blunted apex. Along the Boulevard, round the corner, and so by way of the rue Delambre and the dark rue du Montparnasse to the Boulevard again. He appeared, vanished and reappeared among the seemingly happy crowd. The skeleton at the banquet of gaiety. A silent reminder of another, more sinister aspect of existence.
Rowley never missed a night. Nothing could drag him away. Only once during all those months. Jo, a little French girl with whom he lived for a few weeks began to get really concerned about the sort of life he was living. He promptly left her. ‘She kept on at me and actually succeeded in making me waste an evening at the cinema.’ Jo consoled herself with a succession of American sailors, and finally died of T.B.
He boasted, as most men do, of his affairs with women, yet I remember him telling me one night, in one of those strange lucid intervals that sometimes came to him after a day and a night of steady drinking, that he was ‘played out for that sort of thing years ago’. But in the breast pocket of his coat he carried a tube of ointment against infection. ‘An American sailor gave it to me and it’s absolutely certain – if you remember to use it at the right time.’
He loved to tell the story of the patron of the hotel who came to him one morning and said that he had no objection to Monsieur Smart bringing home a different woman every night. No objection at all; but he felt that when Monsieur Smart brought back the same fat negress three nights running in succession his hotel might begin to get a bad name!
Then there was the story of Rowley being taken to the American YMCA by Sam and a lot of other sailors; they were all rather merry and Rowley tripped over the mat as he went in and he swore violently. At that moment a clergyman was coming down stairs – ‘Who is that terrible person you have brought here? The man is drunk.’
‘Oh no, he’s not drunk sir’ replied Sam, ‘he’s a genius.’
About the end of November 1928 I left Paris and I did not see Rowley again until the following year. We wrote to each other regularly, however.
I believe that sometime either during 1928, whilst I was still in Paris, or during the early part of 1929, he returned to England for a few weeks. But I cannot be sure.
I think it was in the June or July of 1929 that I returned to Montparnasse. Rowley was then in Moret. One day, about lunch time, a loud voice called my name as I went along the rue Delambre to the little restaurant opposite my hotel. It was Rowley. He looked well, the country had done him good. He had just come up for a couple of days to see how the booze-fighters were getting on. He had 300 francs and a toothbrush for luggage. The toothbrush pushed its head out of the breast pocket of his coat, alongside the famous tube of ointment that was ‘certain if you remembered to use it at the right time’.
Well, we went off to lunch at Djguite, Boulevard Edgar Quinet. Then to the Dôme, then to the Rotonde, and on to the Dingo. Montparnasse had us again. About 2 a.m. Rowley’s 300 francs were spent and I had got rid of an alarming amount of my small store of money. Also he had nowhere to sleep. I had a tiny room in the Hotel Delambre so we went there and tossed a coin for who should have the narrow single bed or its mattress which we had laid on the floor. I remember Rowley won the toss and chose the mattress. I think he got the best of it. The springs in the bed were positively diabolical.
I painted the following day and arranged to pick him up at the Dôme that evening. He had decided to stay on for a few days and had managed to get hold of some more money. He told me that he had originally gone to Moret with a Finnish girl. I remembered seeing her one night in the Dingo during the previous year. She was very quiet, with reddish hair, grey eyes and a good complexion. Rowley told me that she had helped him a lot. He had really fallen for her and she used to go out with him when he painted. ‘She used to help me fix my compositions. She would say, “Now you just take in so much and finish the picture there. Don’t take in that bit on the left,” and so on.’ At that period Rowley’s chief interest was in colour and light and I had noticed that his compositions were often too little considered. It appeared she had quite reformed him too. They went to bed at 10 or 11 o’clock. But she had sworn that if ever he got really drunk again she would listen to no excuses and leave him for good. She had enough to live on and could do what she liked. There is no doubt that she was really fond of him. Maybe she loved him.
It did not last. Some of the old crowd from the Dingo came to spend a weekend in Moret. A post card was sent to Homer Bevans telling him that you could get a bigger shot of Pernod for less money in Môret than you could in Paris. Homer arrived by the next train. That night Homer and Rowley were hopelessly drunk. The Finn left next morning.
And now Rowley was back in Paris again and it was impossible to do anything with him. Money for some pictures came from England and in a way it made matters worse. But he did not forget her easily. He often spoke of her at that time. ‘She was a swell girl. I wish I was still with her.’
Later, when I went to Moret with him, I saw a large canvas he had painted of her. She sat on the banks of the Loing wearing, if I remember rightly, a big hat and a blue dress. The background was the trees on the far bank of the river and their reflections in the still water. It was painted with the small touches he then used and it resembled a piece of beautifully worked tapestry. It was kicking about his hotel bedroom when I last saw it.
It was the loss of the Finn, or perhaps finding himself back in Paris with money in his pocket – I do not know – but now Rowley began to drink more than ever. For some days he did no work but he continued to share my room. He was always going to return to Moret the following day and it did not seem worth while finding a place to sleep. But day after day went by and he stayed on in Paris. At the end of two weeks my hotel proprietor came to me and explained that he could not be expected to put up two people for the price of one. We must either take a larger room or leave. ‘And moreover he is so often drunk, your friend. Why, I have seen you carry him through the door and along the passage more than once.’
This I could not deny. I had given up trying to restrain Rowley. I had tried but he seemed desperate. He had lost interest in painting and seemed to think fatalistically that there was nothing to do, for the time being, but to drink himself into insensibility night after night. I had got rather tired of the business. For one thing I could not afford it, and it put me off working the following day. Rowley seemed to cling to me but he could not consider for a moment any other way of spending an evening than at the Dôme or the Dingo. ‘Don’t worry about me Cliff, I’ll be all right.’ But, a trifle hopefully, ‘If you should be around latish just pick me up.’ And I would go off to the Promenade of the Moulin Rouge or the Folies Bergères sometimes with Garralda and sometimes by myself with a sketch book in my pocket. Yet Rowley would be on my mind and I always made it my business to ‘be around later’. First I would enquire at the Dingo in the rue Delambre, making myself heard with difficulty. There was always such a hell of a din in there, packed as it was with the noisiest drinkers of the Quarter, determined to have a good time. ‘Mr Smart has been here, of course, but he left some time ago. A couple of guys were kinda helping him.’ Rudolph the German barman had caught the American atmosphere of the bar. ‘I guess they were going to the Dôme.’ and so to the Dôme, pushing my way through the crowded interior and not finding him; going outside, searching among the sea of faces on the terrasse, finally asking a waiter who knew him or Monsieur Jambon the patron. ‘Monsieur Smart? Yes. He was here. Comme toujours. He is gone to the Rotonde perhaps.’ So I dodge through the traffic across to the Rotonde only to hear that Rowley has been practically carried out in the direction of the Select. And there I find him. Alone. Propped up in a chair on the terrasse; for some reason or other, the terrasse of the Select was seldom crowded. A small, rather pathetic little figure like a limp marionette – his collar turned up and his head sunk between his shoulders, his big nose poking out. His long hair all messed up, perhaps with sawdust in it, not vine leaves, where he had fallen on the floor of some bar. His big hat crammed down on his head, obviously put there anyhow, by a fellow reveller only a little less drunk than himself.
I speak to him. No reply. Shake him by the shoulder. No response. Pick him up, literally by the scruff of the neck and then, experimentally, leave go. He would fold up quietly into the chair once more as if his limbs were made of rubber, entirely without any rigidity. Sometimes he would mutter a greeting. He always seemed to know it was me, and then:- ‘Can’t walk. Goddam booze.’ Or he might be so far gone that he was speechless. I must pick him up in my arms, for he weighed no more than a child, and carry him back to the hotel. It was only a couple of hundred yards away. Sometimes he might be able to stumble along by my side, holding on to me for support and muttering to himself. And at breakfast time he was bright eyed and good tempered. Perhaps he would refer to the night before: ‘Guess I was drunk last night Cliff.’ and that was all.
Quite often I found him in the second or third bar I visited. I got to know that his usual crawl was from the Dingo to the Select, a matter of three hundred and fifty yards at the most, and by way of the Dôme and the Rotonde. He did not always get as far as the Select. It all depended on who he had picked up at the other places and, I suppose, how they had been able to stay the pace.
Unlike many drinkers, Rowley was a great believer in food, particularly when there was what he called ‘serious drinking’ to be done. The Dingo gave you the finest pork chop, apple sauce, mashed potatoes and watercress in Paris. It was our favourite meal, round about 8 or 9 o’clock. In the early hours of the morning he would eat raw steak and lots of watercress, if he could get it. He was a great believer in watercress and said that it would always counteract the effects of drinking. If only it had! And he showed an almost childlike faith in fish as a means of combatting alcohol. ‘Nothing like fish for breakfast, Cliff, fresh water fish if you can get it, and of course plenty of watercress. That’s the thing to fix you up.’ I used to imagine Rowley as a kind of battlefield on which fish and watercress waged unceasing war with the forces of alcohol. He took it all most seriously. In the mornings his one idea was to ‘fix himself up’. In the evenings he just got himself in the state that would make the ‘fixing up’ vitally necessary again next day.
The time came to leave my hotel. For some days I had been anxiously waiting for money, owing me, to come from London. It did not arrive. After I had paid the hotel, with Rowley’s help, I had only a few francs left. Rowley too had by now spent all his money. Our position did not worry him half as much as it worried me. He assured me that everything would be easy. We would just hang around for a few days, stay up all night in some café or try to borrow the fare to Moret. At Moret he could get credit for himself and for me too. I could pay him back when my money turned up. ‘You will soon learn the first lesson, Cliff. It’s dead easy to get all the drinks you want without paying for them, but it’s damned hard trying to get anyone to buy you something to eat.’
Indeed I had already noticed this. More than once I had offered a drink to one or other of the girls who hung about the Dôme, only to be asked, a little sadly, if she could have a sandwich instead. And the drink would have cost more than the sandwich.
The technique of living practically without money was really very simple. The problem each day was to obtain one’s ‘entrance fee’ as we called it, to a café. In other words to scrounge a drink or borrow the money for one. You were allowed to doze in your chair all night at the Select as long as you had a drink in front of you. It was even possible, if the worst came to the worst, to pass the night there on one drink. But Heaven help you if you forgot yourself and inadvertently emptied your glass, for if within a reasonable time you failed to order another, out you went! Food was the real problem, but there were ways of managing that too. The Dingo bar from about 5 onwards became our hunting ground.
As Rowley said, we both looked like artists and we would work the racket for all it was worth. If at times I had tried to look after him, he certainly made up for it now. He performed miracles. Somehow he managed, each day, to borrow the few francs that would make it possible for us to avoid being in the streets all night. And borrowing in Montparnasse was not easy. It was Rowley who, with unswerving discrimination, picked just the type of American who would be flattered to talk to a real artist in Montparnasse. The victim must be selected with care. He must already have had a few so that he would not notice anything strange when he was charged for whiskeys after, in reply to his offer of a drink, we had been served with beer. Rowley had ‘fixed’ this with the barman, Rudolph, who would slip us a sandwich apiece and pocket the difference between the price of a beer and sandwich and a whiskey. As far as I can remember a beer cost 3 francs 50 and a whiskey 12 or 15 francs. The sandwich wasn’t much and when we had a good night Rudolph must have done pretty well, but at the time we thought the arrangement a very clever one. Sometimes those sandwiches were all we got to eat for days on end.
Before Rowley had managed this arrangement with Rudolph, Lou Wilson, the proprietor of the Dingo, had made him an offer. He would provide paint and canvas and one good meal a day plus beer if Rowley would paint a decoration to hang behind the bar. Rowley agreed and fixed it so that I would help him, thus get food and drink for us both. I suppose Wilson thought that if two of us were working on it the job would get done quicker. So, our food problem was settled for a while. We painted the decoration on a canvas with tempera colours. It was about 3 feet deep by about 8 feet long. We used a room to work in on the first floor above the Dingo Bar. It was also in this room that Wilson allowed us to store our luggage when we had had to leave the hotel.
I did not mind the conditions so much, the hell of this sort of life was not being able to paint. All one’s energies were concentrated on getting something to eat, on obtaining, by some means, that precious but so necessary ‘entrance fee’ to some café that would at least give one the opportunity of getting an hour or two of sleep.
One morning I told Rowley that I must paint, I had done nothing for a week. ‘All right Cliff, go ahead if you can get a canvas.’ I got the canvas, on credit. From our favourite corner in more prosperous times, I started a sketch of the Boulevard with the kiosk on the corner and the long perspective of trees running away towards the Observatoire. I remember I gave that picture away, to someone I was very fond of; actually, I saw it only a short while ago and although I regretted that it was not better framed, yet seeing it again brought back to me the circumstances in which it was painted.
It is a sketch, no more, no better and no worse than thousands of others but when I looked at it again I remembered going to the colour merchant and asking for a canvas, telling him I had no money but would pay when I could. Triumphantly carrying off the canvas to Rowley and telling him I was going to paint again.
We sat on our favourite corner and I began to work. We ordered a couple of demis, and we just hoped someone would happen along from whom we could borrow the money to pay the bill. I painted and as I painted Rowley continued to order more drinks. We began to have a formidable pile of saucers on our table. ‘God knows how we can pay for it. We may stick here all night until some guy comes along and we can hang it on to him.’
I remember that the pile of saucers on our table grew bigger and the waiter ostentatiously divided them into two piles as they threatened to overturn. They added up to twenty francs, maybe.
‘Say, do you want to sell that picture?’ We both turned quickly, nearly upsetting the toppling pile of saucers in our haste to connect with the questioner. The inevitable American, but he appeared genuine, bought drinks and sandwiches and paid for everything, saucers included, with a hundred franc note, one of an impressive looking roll that he carried in his pocket. It was Rowley who took charge of the situation, displaying a business sense that I would never have associated with him.
A price was at last agreed upon – 250 francs. I would have sold it for less but Rowley insisted on 250. ‘Cliff will just sign it for you, you give him the 250 and take the picture right away.’ What good fortune! Our fares to Moret, where we could live on credit, and some money over for paints and canvas. Everything seemed perfect but now there was a hitch. Our American had an appointment and he could not possibly carry a wet oil painting around with him. We suggested leaving it at his hotel, but he thought it would be best if I met him at the Dôme the following morning, with the picture. He would pay for it then. We both saw our good fortune slipping away, but neither of us liked to press the business too far in case the sale slipped away entirely.
Finally, an appointment was made for 9.30 next morning. I was there on time with the picture and found the American having breakfast. He asked me to join him and I was glad to, for the previous night at the Dingo had been a bad one. Also I had walked to and from the English Theatre* near the Gare St Lazare after leaving him the day before, in wet leaking shoes, in an attempt to get a job painting scenery. So I placed the picture carefully against the wall and sat down to coffee and croissants. Rowley was anxiously hovering not far off and I thought it best not to hang two breakfasts on the American, particularly as he had paid up so well for yesterday’s saucers. Anyway, Rowley and I would get a good meal as soon as the 250 francs was paid.
* This was probably the Théâtre de la Madeleine, which is built in the English style and is fairly near the Gare St Lazare train station. GRH
The American produced a cable. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘I can’t take your picture.’ It said something about returning to New York immediately and there seemed nothing I could do about it. He said there was no time to pack the picture, it was still sticky and would need special packing, for he must leave that day. From the background Rowley had heard every word, he had crept closer when the cable had appeared and although I was horribly disappointed I could not help being amused at his dismayed expression. ‘It was something quite unforeseen,’ explained my client and he felt very bad about it. He knew it must be a disappointment for me. He reached for his hip pocket. Hope appeared again, for the hip pocket, I remembered, held the wad of notes. It was a moment of supreme excitement. Was he simply going to pay for the breakfast, or was he – ? I gazed at the roll of notes in his hand, fascinated. Very slowly he detached one for 100 francs and held it towards me. ‘I realize that I have let you down. Will you take this for the trouble I have caused you?’ he said. I hesitated, and I hesitated. I glanced up and saw Rowley, behind the American’s back, making agonized gestures and mouthing ‘Take it! For Christ’s sake take it!’
‘I can’t take money for nothing,’ I said. It seemed to me that the cable was an excuse. He had changed his mind about the picture and didn’t really want it, and suddenly I became very foolish and proud and most determined. I would not take his money. He persuaded, he put the precious note on the table in front of me. I refused to touch it, and I really wanted it. It was most foolish of me. I wanted that note badly. How could I get it and still satisfy that silly pride of mine?
And then I remembered a portfolio of drawings that Lou Wilson had allowed me to leave in an unused room above the Dingo. I suggested that he choose a drawing for the 100 francs and he agreed that it could easily be packed flat at the bottom of his suitcase. Asking him to wait, I dashed out of the Dôme, round the corner and soon returned with my drawings. I am sure I appeared far too eager but he must have been a nice fellow after all, for he bought two drawings at 100 francs each.
We were saved.
I got Rowley off to Moret that very day. I was still hoping for a job at the English Theatre but it came to nothing in the end, and soon after I joined Rowley.
The ROWLEY SMART MEMOIR part 2 “Moret”
