The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [41]
C.J.M.
The days after that letter came are still a dream, or at least I remember them no better than we remember our dreams. Coco said that I spent many weeks just sitting in my room doing nothing except staring at my useless hands.
What saved me finally, or restored me, was my first real memory of those days: looking down at my useless hands and discovering that they contained a letter, which I vividly recall reading almost as if it were my salvation, a letter from Thomas Fletcher, the features editor of the Arkansas Gazette, who said that, yes, they would be interested in seeing a column I might wish to write, with a view toward regular publication (weekly, at best, not daily). I roused myself out of my fugue or funk, or whatever depression I was in, and wrote a column, which I titled “An Arkansawyer in Paris,” trying to capture for the homefolks the sights and sounds and smells of Paris. My first column was devoted to the life of the streets: the quay along the Seine, with its many bookstalls where you could buy books and prints very cheap; the street musicians; a barrel organ pulled by a donkey; the strong, gray draught horses with their heavy carts; the colorful, picturesque caps the women wore, and the failure of the caps to cover the sadness in their eyes. For weeks after mailing it off to Thomas Fletcher, I feared that my column had captured the melancholy and suffering of Paris but not its gaiety. Yet finally Thomas Fletcher wrote back to say that the Gazette would be happy to use it and subsequent columns on a regular basis—although style or usage required them to change the title to “An Arkansan in Paris,” and Thomas Fletcher was required to blue-pencil my references to Bohemian free love, drinking, and “abstract” art. The Gazette began to run my column weekly, and in Paris in those days it was possible, though difficult, to live on the $8.50 a week that the Gazette paid me.
Marguerite Thompson came into my life again, asking me if I wanted to join the American Women’s Art Association of Paris and to show my work at the annual exhibition of the American Art Students’ Club. I said yes, and took the opportunity to thank her for having suggested what was now my sole means of livelihood, my column for the Gazette. We two columnists exchanged notes and experiences. Marguerite was leaving Paris soon to travel in Bordeaux and perhaps Spain. Would I like to go with her? I couldn’t afford it. Marguerite generously offered to pay my expenses. Why? “Because I like you,” Marguerite said. “I like your work. You need to travel more, broaden your sense of landscape, get into the sunny South. Or are you afraid to leave your famous friends?”
No, I was all too eager to escape my famous friends, especially Willy, who could never take no for an answer and still attempted whenever he could to seduce me and, failing that, to insult me. As for Coco, our friendship was becoming strained, not by her suspicions (she suspected that Willy was unfaithful to her with every woman he knew…except me) but by our artistic differences: Coco’s painting was becoming increasingly charming, sweet, fashionable, and, yes, feminine; she was pleased with its feminine daintiness and sought to capitalize on it; I thought her painting was becoming more superficial and losing substance in both subject and form, and I couldn’t help telling her my reservations. In retaliation for my critical remarks on her feminine style, Coco called me an interior decorator who was all eye and no mind. Actually, her paintings and mine at that particular time were more similar than our arguments would have indicated, but we went our separate ways ideologically and, at last, geographically. I went with Marguerite to Bordeaux.
I never returned to Paris, except when passing through. With Marguerite I traveled to Burgos and Madrid during May and back to southern France for June; in July we traveled through Switzerland and to Germany (Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Munich). In August we rented a studio for six