[MUSIC]
I
Elliot Paul's family was Maine on his father's side - Kittery and Eliot - and
French-Canadian on his mother's. These maternal Doucettes, later Dowsetts, were among the
Acadians deported from Canada by the British in 1756. More recently there was a long
lineage in Rockport on both sides, and Mrs Paul was on her mother's side one of Rockport's
formidable Tarr family.
Before Elliot, there were two children, at intervals, both boys. The younger, Everett,
died at seven, of diphtheria. And Mr Paul just wasn't making a go of business. To change
their luck, to start again, the Pauls moved from Rockport to 63 Beach St, Malden - Linden
- about 1890. In the very next year, another son was born, Elliot Harold, a replacement
for the lost child. He gained a brother, Edwin Leslie, in 1892.
But a new life for the family was not to be. Mr Paul soon fell ill, became violent, was
taken away to the dreaded asylum in Danvers, and died within a few months. It was 1895;
Elliot was four. Mrs Lucy Paul - "Lutie" - "nervous" even to her
friends, now had two small children on her hands to worry over. Not easy times.
Elliot and Leslie weren't wholly isolated, however, and were part of two communities,
Linden and Rockport. Each summer they went to a seaside cottage on Eden Road above
Loblolly Cove in Rockport. For Elliot, Rockport was the "ancestors," Linden the
parent, which like a parent was loved and disparaged, everything and nothing to him.
(Malden, at whatever period, was too big for Paul's emotional attention.)
First, memory, from Paul's Linden on the Saugus Branch:
[MUSIC]
Ia: LINDEN
Linden, in Massachusetts, at the turn of the twentieth century, was as obscure a little
community as there was in the broad United States. It was neither backwoods, seashore,
country, city or town, but only a detached precinct of the outermost ward of the suburban
city of Malden, eight or nine miles distant from Boston, as the crow flies....
To the North were miles and miles of virgin woods... extensive and mysterious
enough so that there seemed to be no end to them. And in shocking contrast, to the east,
lay the Lynn marshlands, all the way from Linden to the sea, flat, bleak, and containing
beneath their drab camouflage all the wonders of the tidelands and the littoral. Southward
lay more vacant miles... one of the largest and least beautiful burying grounds in all the
world. The view between Linden and the sunset, to the west, had in the foreground a
winding creek bottom and a swamp, with the flat roof of rambling carbarns against the
maples... and the jagged evergreens on the horizon. (Linden, 3)
[MUSIC]
Ib: LINDEN, CONTINUED
[The town was] neither prepossessing nor altogether unsightly. The station
agent, who studies law evenings, won a five dollar prize in nineteen seven for planting
flowerbeds beside the ticket office and marking the name of the station on the ground with
smooth, white-washed stones. There is a flag pole in the Square and on holidays, the town
shoemaker, an Italian immigrant, raises the Stars and Stripes in the morning and lowers
the colours at sundown. Each November, there are about four hundred votes cast in the
polling place at the rear of the fire station, and at least three-fourths of them are
straight Republican....
To the north are the Lynn woods, thick, quiet and lovely, in the years the
caterpillars spare the foliage. [Beach Street], straight through the centre of the town,
is beautified by a double file of Linden trees, which shade the gravel sidewalks with
blue-black shadows on the grass plots and cream-brown shadows on the dust. Some of the
residences in this section are freshly shingled and painted. There are granite curbstones
and uneven brick side-walks.
Lawrence Street, parallel to [Beach], has graceful elms in which orioles
build swinging nests. There are fields of daisies and buttercups. Damp spaces where the
creek overflows are covered with white violets, cat-tails and fleur-de-lis.
When the wind blows from the sea, the tang of salt air invigorates the
townsfolk. When it blows from the south, the good people complain of Squire's Piggery, but
nothing is ever done about it. (Impromptu, 3-4)
II
The second selection was from Paul's novel, Impromptu,
published in 1923, when he still lived in Boston. Impromptu is
harder on the town than the later memoir, perhaps truer to his earlier feelings as a
youngster both involved and detached, and needing a vivid social involvement to compensate
for a diminished and apprehensive home environment.
Here is Linden again, on the Fourth of July 1905, from the same novel:
IIa: LINDEN, FOURTH OF JULY 1905
Fourth of July in [Linden] meant disappointment and sticky underwear if the day was
muggy and a sunstroke or two if the day was hot. The inevitable thunderstorm broke up the
ball game in the afternoon, or the municipal display of rockets and Roman candles in the
evening. In times when the patriotic urge ran high, there was a parade. Premature
explosions of cannon crackers each year maimed a half dozen or so fingers and put out an
eye, now and then. It never chanced to be the eye of the politician who spoke at the
evening exercises.
In nineteen five, elaborate plans were made by the Improvement Association. A
pyre of logs, discarded by the Saugus Branch, was burned on the marsh east of town, at
midnight of the "night before." Moderate drinkers seldom get drunk more than
twice each year, once to commemorate the birth of Christ, and again to celebrate their
nation's independence. There was more of a scent of alcohol around the bonfire than was
usual in "No License" [Linden]. Red fire glowed, the Congregational bell rend
and shivered the dark air and the blaze extended awful fingers toward the sky, dying in
every shade of orange.
The conversation was about the same as usual. Business, sickness, politics,
recent deaths and weather prospects. Mothers were nervous, and afraid their boys would be
hurt....
The parade confined itself to the more pretentious streets, in order to save
the bandsmen from swallowing their instruments as they walked into holes or tripped over
bumps. Did you ever thy to play a clarinet on a rough street?
Jack Standwood followed the band, driving the fire engine, tiny flags
tickling the ears of the proud, white horses. A float, on which sat a dozen cheering
adolescents, consisting of a platform on one of W.W. Hale's erstwhile coal wagons. The
Republican Town Committee in an open carryall. (They were not so open when they met to
determine whom the people should elect.) (Impromptu, 34-6)
[MUSIC]
III
That passage echoes an early memory, perhaps Elliot's first, when his father took
him to hear his first brass band, on Powderhorn Hill: "The sound of those instruments
[he later wrote] and the glint of the setting sun on the bass horns and the buttons of the
uniforms excited me to such a point that I ran a high fever that night, and could not
sleep" (Linden, 373). This is a key memory, uniting in an
image his father and excitement, uncontrollable, fevered. He came to identify public,
especially outdoor events with energy, enthusiasm and joy; private life, indoors, with
"nerves" and repression - with the solitary mother who stayed at home and
worried that he was his father's son, with his father's future. For Elliot the party, the
festival, the parade, the celebratory (or dissenting) public event became a crucial symbol
of human warmth and unpredictability.
As he wrote later of a different neighborhood which he had adopted, the rue de la
Huchette in Paris, France: "In times of excitement and general good feeling in our
little street, human fellowship and tolerance blossomed and penetrated dim corners with a
wholesome fragrance. A drink with a friend became a symbol reaching back into time and
forward into the future.... Enmities, if not forgotten, were temporarily laid aside. One
of the most important elements in national or community life is public entertainment, not
the formal kind that is presented, like canned food, for sale at a price, but piquant
incidents the people make their own and in which they have the illusion, at least, of
being participants" (A Narrow Street [The Last Time I Saw Paris],
Penguin ed., p. 66).
[MUSIC]
There was no money for Elliot to go to college in 1907. A desk job, regular hours,
seemed threatening. Life with mother was becoming increasingly difficult.
Elliot didn't even stay in town long enough to collect his Malden High School diploma.
His older brother Charles had gone west, as an engineer with the U.S. Reclamation Service.
At sixteen, Elliot joined him in the Lower Yellowstone, in Montana, taking what jobs they
gave him. Later, he felt it changed not so much his outlook on life as his sense of what
place he could have in it:
IIIa: THE YELLOWSTONE
After a spring and summer on the Yellowstone I no longer speculated about what I should
do, or worried about the money to do it with. I had not made any conscious decisions, but
I knew that I should never live in a town like Linden, or be cooped up anywhere at all,
for long. [MUSIC under.] ...I knew that I should not stay forever in Montana. The sensible
way of life seemed to me to be a wandering existence, with frequent changes of scene. I
had no impulse to take root anywhere.... What had depressed me about the "jobs"
or "occupations" the Linden folks had was their permanence. In Montana, I felt
that I could know almost anything the others did. In a pinch I could work in a store or
bank, or in the harvest fields, or a construction camp. After six or eight weeks, if I got
restless, I could change my job, or blow.
... From my point of view, what was important had to do with independence. I
felt as if, in any populated place, I could earn enough to eat, drink, sleep, amuse myself
and get acquainted with the people. (Ghost Town, 204-5)
IV
That was from Elliot's second volume of memoirs, A Ghost Town on the
Yellowstone, 1948. All life was there, God's plenty of people in their
"tackle and trim," and he among them. This Yankee had a instinctive zest for
what we would call a "multicultural, multiracial society." It extended to all
conditions of mankind, the common humanity of whom he would enumerate in appreciative
catalogues, as in Walt Whitman's poetry. All were Americans, and later, all were citizens
of the world.
A year at the University of Maine returned Elliot temporarily to a boy's life. Then,
through his engineering connections he found a job in Louisville, Kentucky, working for
the Sewer Commission. He was now eighteen. His formal education was over; the informal one
resumed with gusto.
In Linden, Elliot had taken piano lessons from Miss Mary Clapp and played in recitals
and at supper events in the old Congregational Church. Out west less presentable
selections had been called for and his piano playing gave him a relatively safe perch in
Madam "Jack" Little's house of ill fame. Now in Louisville he found the music
which colored his life thereafter, jazz:
IVa: ELLIOT DISCOVERS JAZZ IN LOUISVILLE
What I was not prepared for, in any way, before I encountered it in Louisville was the
type of narcotic called jazz. Young men nowadays [in 1949] have heard it from the cradle,
although usually in strained and bastard form.... Whatever else I remember about
Louisville, my most poignant recollections have to do with hearing the beginnings and
development of jazz.... [MUSIC under.]
...Nearly everything else could be taken away from [black people], or aroused
the white man's jealousy. In those years, jazz was their own, and had little or no
monetary value. There were no white critics writing about it, no violent supporters of one
school or another, no white composers to scramble it with the classics or dilute it with
their own amorphous product. The jazz men who were playing... worked themselves into
trances and frenzies outdoing the others and themselves. (My Old Kentucky Home,
215)
[MUSIC]
V
Though Elliot had abandoned his college course, it was for a kind of desk job, and
though "the Gateway to the South" held an exotic interest for a New Englander,
the West held more. He went out west again to another dam-building project. With
increasing maturity he began to see the implications of something that was changing the
face of America - more than its face, its nervous system, its circulatory system, its
musculature:
Va: ELLIOT ON THE BEAUTY OF ENGINEERING
Suddenly I realized that engineering was not merely a pleasant pretext for getting from
place to place and earning board money, but had ramifications in the field of progress,
science, humanity and art. [MUSIC under.] The Jackson Lake project was a challenge to all
of us, a kind of very big game that mattered. Would it be possible to build a wagon road
sixty miles long, over rough mountain country; buy hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth
of machines, vehicles and goods; put up a telephone line from Ashton, Idaho, to Moran,
Wyoming, in the heart of the Tetons; transport men and horses and materials to the dam
site before the snow blocked all ingress and egress; and build a concrete structure with
steel gates that must fit exactly the places we laid out for them, under conditions of
snow, isolation and cold that might reach 50 degrees below zero? (Desperate
Scenery, 50-51)
VI
Now, in 1910, Elliot was in Wyoming and Idaho, working on reclamation projects. But
there is some "lost" time when he apparently bummed around, taking any job,
playing barroom piano. By 1914, at 23, he was back home in Linden, and soon living and
working in Boston, under Bulfinch's gold dome at the State House, a reporter on
legislative events. And when the country went to war in 1917, he joined the
locally-recruited 317th Field Signal Battalion, which took him abroad for the first time.
He described his first contact with Europe, his troop ship coming in to land in France at
the harbor of Brest:
VIa: WORLD WAR I
[MUSIC under.] the ominous night movements of the great machinery, sombre shadows of
captive balloons over the harbour, variegated shapes of anchored transports, trails of
blue lights and red lights, brown sleeping sails of fishing craft, and the square rim of
the fortress in a horizontal streak across the sky. As windows in the city were painted in
and blotted out, [Irwin Atwood] wondered what they meant, what was concealed behind them,
what manner of people dwelt there. Mademoiselles? Light wines and beer? When would they
have a chance to see the place....
A narrow, cobbled street with queer dark houses, all the shutters tight like
front parlours sheltering a corpse. French signs along the shops. A strange, sleeping city
and he was sloshing through it in the middle of the night. They started up an endless
hill, on and on, until their legs ached.
[MUSIC under.] ...They could not be more wet. The mist gained confidence as
the city was left behind, and drizzled into rain, beating their faces, soaking the
sensitive area on the back of their heads which the military haircuts exposed. A cold wind
was blowing. They steamed on the march and shivered during rests, mud tugging at their
boots, buckles chafing their shoulders.
No houses at all now. Only rain-soaked fields, and mud, deeper and heavier,
on their soles. Pup tents cowered in the muck to the left. A halt, - the men in front
staring at the yellow wall, overgrown with ivy. A Camp. Sentries scurried to and fro.
Orders were flapped into the rain. Flashlights. Curt voices. Then the regiment marched
into the old, stone camp, muddier inside than out, dodging the flying ends of duckboards.
Before a low stone building "C" Company lined up, shivering in a wet night. (Impromptu,
104-06)
VI-2
Before long, Paul's regiment went into battle. In his war fiction, he recorded the
power of a barrage:
VIb: WORLD WAR I (CONTINUED): BATTLE
the entire universe burst into sound, stripped its gears, rocking schools of stars like
millions of storm-tossed boat lanterns. Great sheets of sound leaped like flames, roaring,
flaring, reverberating. All the thunder in a sky of angry clouds snarled over the earth,
and, flinging back the challenge, the earth bristled with an answering roar. Lions
bellowed into the open throats of lions. Zigzag whiplashes of blue-white skipped and
danced about the horizon. Blood red lyddite paled the rest. Every thicket pounded, boomed
and crackled. Cannon barked from every tree. The air overhead was a swirl of whines,
shrieks, hisses and wails. The shattered air cut the eardrums like falling glass. Shrill,
speeding parabolas leaped with seven league boots. The jar of the earth prodded the knee
caps. Clashes of sharp coloured lights showered sparks inside the eye-lids.
The barrage had burst. (Impromptu, 181)
VII
Paul went in to the army as a private and came out a sergeant, took part in three
campaigns, and after the Armistice left his regiment early to return home to marry a
Linden girl, Rosa Gertrude Brown, of Oliver St, in St Luke's Episcopal Church. It was one
of his last conventional actions, and though he resumed State House work, he was becoming
restless. Though married, he seemed only now to be sowing his wild oats.
In 1921 Paul produced the manuscript of a first novel, walked across Boston Common and
handed it in at Houghton Mifflin on Park St. They published it, and on publication day he
seems to have hired a taxi and told it to head north. (It may have taken him and some
friends to Montreal.) The novel, Indelible, contrasted a
reserved and restricted Linden life with a more vibrant, immigrant life of Boston's Jewish
and Italian West and North Ends. The Linden Protestant boy married a Jewish girl. A second
novel followed two local boys to war and, unpatriotically to some, exposed their
intellectual, emotional and moral unreadiness. A year later, a third novel retraced the
events of his own life and sought an unlikely "imperturbability" in the face of
the world's stresses and strains. For all the contemporary toughness of his writing, he
could show a keen appreciation of the appeal of the city of Boston:
|
[MUSIC]
VIIa: FAREWELL TO BOSTON
the towers of the nearby cities talk to one another in solemn bronze tones every hour.
Cambridge, Quincy, Brookline, Somerville, Chelsea, - the spires of each sending out their
drowsy sound waves above the Charles, over the Mystic, the Neponset, the harbour.
Searchlights and funnels of large boats, lanterns on masts of little boats, nodding with
the waves, all in the sweet salt smell of the Atlantic. Cabs wheeling, autos purring,
tramps, scrubwomen, brokers, immigrants, Catholics, Yankees, Jews, pouring through the
thoroughfares at noon, scurrying along the narrow streets at night. He liked to cross the
bridge from the Esplanade and watch the city shadows in the late afternoon weaving
patterns in black and gold on the hill and back of Beacon Street, - to see the shadow city
pass slowly over the city of brick and stone on its way to the sunset. Chequer-boards,
tiles, lacquers, - angles, planes, pyramids and cones and, over all, the gleam of the sun
on the State House dome. What a gift to the passing years had the man bequeathed who saw,
long ago, that radiance over Beacon Hill when there was to other eyes no dome at all. In
the bright sun, it reflected a brilliant gold orange, slashed by the black shadow of the
flag in front. And at night it was half moon, half sun, making the sky a deeper indigo
around it.
[MUSIC under] ....The West end had its crowd of Jewish mothers, patriarchs in
black skull caps before their little shops, children swarming the sidewalks in sun or
rain. The North end stabled the hurdy-gurdies at night, with clarinets, push-carts,
bandannas and snatches of Neapolitan songs. Tyler street, smelling of tea and incense,
where the Chinese fiddle squealed at midnight and Orientals stood impassive by the hour or
shuffled mysteriously along the sidewalks. Back Bay with heels clicking on the pavements,
plain-clothes men, clang of patrol wagons, furtive apartment-dwellers. Hudson Street with
Armenians and Turks and Greeks, hookahs, fezes, turbans, riot calls. The market at Faneuil
Hall with its fragrant heaps of fruit and vegetables fresh every morning, shabby and
deserted each evening. The wharf and the waterfront, where the liners and freighters rode
in and out with the tides, carrying coal, bananas, leather, lumber, canned goods, cattle.
(Impromptu, 276-78)
[MUSIC]
VIII
This was perhaps the moment when Elliot Paul might have settled down to become a
respected New England author, eventually a pillar of the Boston literary community. But
there was a wanderlust, such as had taken him in 1909, and while he celebrated community
and communities, neighborhood and neighborhoods, there was something which impelled him to
leave them behind. In 1925, like so many writers in the 1920s - but older than most - Paul
was off, for Paris, but alone.
To be a writer only, without a regular salary, wasn't Paul's way. Perhaps it was just
that he had no royalties or remittances to support him, perhaps it was the memory of his
straightened Linden background. He took a job on the English-language daily Tribune,
offshoot of the Chicago Tribune, where his colleagues included James Thurber,
William L. Shirer and a poet named Eugene Jolas. Jolas invited him to leave the Trib
and co-edit - for a salary - a monthly literary review, which they named transition.
Between them the editors gained the regular contributions of the two lions of expatriate
experimental literature, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. The young Ernest Hemingway said
that if you mentioned Joyce twice to Stein, you were dead: Paul was the exception to the
rule.
Paul's Paris wasn't, however, just the Café du Dôme and other expatriate haunts in
Montparnasse. He had found another, more authentic Left Bank on the rue de la Huchette,
that of the common people of Paris, and it gave him a new "home town." He was in
love with Paris:
VIIIa: Springtime in Paris
[excerpt omitted]
[MUSIC]
VIIIb: Les Halles
[excerpt omitted]
IX
Newspaper and transition magazine work was both demanding and harum-scarum
with adventure, and stories abound of Paul as a prankster, some probably true. Did he
really lose everything but his shorts in a strip-poker game, and to get home put on a
runner's red sash? And did the Paris police really stop traffic to let him run by? He had
fallen in love with Camille Haynes, a young (and beautiful) American journalist in Paris.
They were married in 1928 and Paul took a job on the more staid Paris Herald newspaper,
at the same time returning to novel-writing. In the next three years he produced two long
and two short novels. One of these, Low Run Tide, is set in
coastal Maine, and has the clarity and economy of a story by Chekhov; another, titled The
Governor of Massachusetts, was written in Castine, Maine, in 1930, during
Paul's first return to the United States since 1925. It has a character based on Governor
Alvin Fuller. Satirical, and said to pay off old scores, it is a wry if not affectionate
revisiting of old haunts. Paul looked like becoming a full-time writer, but it was more a
sabbatical. After a trip across America to California, Camille's home state, the couple
returned to Paris, despite the Depression which brought so many Americans home from
Europe, and Paul rejoined the Herald. Then he disappeared from sight.
What even most of his friends never knew was that he had had a severe depressive
nervous breakdown, one of those writers' "crack-ups" that Scott Fitzgerald would
famously chronicle. Looked after by Camille, but now without income, Paul went late in
1931 to the village of Santa Eulalia on the island of Ibiza off the coast of Spain, where
he attempted to recuperate. It was a slow business, and while he could disguise his inner
condition from the few other foreign residents and from the locals, he could not bring any
of his writing in progress to a successful completion. He was sometimes near to despair
while outwardly carefree (if clearly poor), playing piano and his accordion in Cosmi's
Hotel and Antonia's fisherman's bar, to entertain but to earn his drink money. The
Ibicencos grew to love him, and he them. (Until I met them, I had only his word for this.)
And as we know from the book he wrote when he left the island, he had kept his
appreciation of the ordinary work of the world which ordinary people do and of the world's
bounty:
IXa: Fishing in Ibiza
[excerpt omitted]
X
[MUSIC]
During the long years of marking time, Paul and Camille were divorced, apparently
amicably [untrue: 2001] and Paul married again - Flora Thompson, whom he had met on the
island. She was from a wealthy Southern American family, and his means changed radically.
The couple left, but returned to Santa Eulalia, just as it was drawn into a conflict not
of its making.
On 18 July 1936, the Spanish Nationalists rebelled against the country's Republican
government. There were few chances to leave and Paul had fellow-feeling for his Ibizan
friends, mostly republicans loyal to the legitimate Government. First, the Ibiza military
governor assumed command of the island in the name of the rebels. Then Government forces
arrived by sea to retake the island. The villagers were told to leave Santa Eulalia for
their safety, and the Paul family fled with them, including Flora's young son and the
island's only boxer dog Moritz. Paul left octopus cooking on the stove. Ominous news came
of the death of a priest in the next village, and the voices which had been saying,
"we shall not begin killing one another" now changed: "Now," they
said, "Now it never will be over." Country people took the fleeing villagers in:
Xa: IBIZA: HIDING OUT IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
[MUSIC under.] The entire family and all the guests sat around the long table, and
for us plates were set and glasses for the wine. Our hosts ate from the common dish and
drank from the wine pitcher, catching the stream at a distance of four or five inches from
the spout. We had boiled chickpeas seasoned with port, a potato omelette, dark home-made
bread in huge slices, almonds and dried black figs for dessert. The women were
unbelievably shy until we got started, then thawed and there was liquid laughter when we
spoke Ibicenco (not one of them spoke Spanish). We assured them that bombs were nada
(blessed word) and that everything would be "regulated" without delay. They
believed, not our words, but the plaster walls and the ceiling beams from which hung
peppers and sobresada, the sound of their mules in the stable, the night stillness of
their nest of hills....
Girl's laughter and exclamation. "Moritz! Supper for Moritz!" And
hearing his name, the dog squealed hopefully. Young Maria put chickpeas on a plate. Titter
of young aunts. A plate for a dog. Strange ways of [foreigners]. But not to be outdone,
young Xumeu's wife rose daintily and offered also a spoon. I explained that Moritz did not
use a spoon. More laughter, but she would not have been impolitely surprised if he had
used a knife and fork. (The Life and Death of a Spanish Town,
310-11)
XI
The Government forces, first landing on terrain that looks like the Cape Ann
peninsula, recaptured Ibiza, and the Santa Eulalians put the Nationalist rebels - traitors
really - into the local prison. They didn't really know what to do with their prisoners,
who were their neighbors. They didn't want to sentence them, much less execute them for
treason against the state. When they held an outdoor celebration for the reassertion of
civic legitimacy - Elliot Paul's dream of social participation - they couldn't really
believe that the traitors shouldn't have a place in their community still.
XIa: THE NIGHT OF SAN XUMEU
[excerpt omitted]
XII
Then the Government military forces were ordered to evacuate Ibiza to retake the
nearby island of Majorca. Though the soldiers left the civil authorities in charge,
"irregulars," armed anarquistas (anarchists) from Barcelona, soon
replaced them, shouldering the police aside. But the invasion of Majorca bogged down, and
the Government troops were ordered back to the Spanish mainland. When it became clear that
the rebel Nationalists, using Italian planes for bombing, would retake Ibiza, the
Barcelona anarchists murdered the local Nationalist prisoners in the fortress,
machine-gunning them. Then they abandoned Ibiza and its Loyalist civilians to their fates,
and to take the punishment for the murders. All was eerily quiet. Paul went to the
fortress.
XIIa: THE CATASTROPHE OF WAR
The inner harbor, smashed fishing boats and fish, belly up and stinking. At the corner,
the wreck of the tobacco shop and the gasoline pump. Bloodstains on all the walls. On the
broad paseo, one building still inhabited.... I walked alone through the old
Roman gates to the walled city and through narrow slits of street and up stairways to the
fortress. About a hundred bodies were still lying on the floor, and the first I recognized
was that of Francisco Ribas, the boy I had promised [his father] to save. Ex-Capitain
Nicolau's head, or rather the top of his head, had been blown off. Francisco Guasch and
old Bonéd had fallen side by side....
Alone, I stood in that frightful hall, too numb to be saddened or horrified, faint from
the unspeakable smell, alone in the ancient town the sight of which had always raised such
thankful emotion in my heart, alone in blaming or not blaming or what or who, alone in
yesterday's riddled hopes and illusions, unable to be sick, to vomit, to weep, to tear my
hair, unable to... stay or go away or not do either. Later I snapped out of it, and numbly
and dutifully, as being the only man alive for miles around who tapped nightmares on
typewriters, I found the fascist boy survivor and the militia boy survivor, and separately
and together I listened and asked and prodded my numb brain and obtained what facts I have
written of events I did not actually see but only heard and smelled the morning following,
as other mornings and events will be following following [sic] ever. (The Life
and Death of a Spanish Town, 417-19)
XIII
When an opportunity presented itself to leave, Paul took his new family and went,
smuggling on board ship with them as their cook the Ibizan Republican leader, his
hotel-keeper friend Cosmi Mari. (I thought this was a fictitious touch until I met Cosmi's
wife and son, who not knowing what Paul had written, confirmed it.)
The accounts of Ibiza come from the book Paul now wrote at speed, which he called The
Life and Death of a Spanish Town. The war had galvanized in him a spirit and
an energy that he had perhaps thought he had lost. The book is full of love and of anguish
for a way of life and for friends he believed to have been destroyed. Just when a
democratic and republican spirit, itself native - not an import from Moscow - had come
into the light in previously monarchist and still Catholic Spain, it was being snuffed
out. The young girl-women especially, he felt, would be thrust back into the Dark Ages of
repression. At least he would publicise to the world the horrible wrong being perpetrated
in his beloved Spain.
On the basis of his book about Santa Eulalia and the Spanish Civil War, Paul became an
international celebrity, raising money for the Spanish Loyalist cause. And he resumed
writing fiction, full of literary plans, publishing two more novels and then beginning a
series of comic detective stories, set in Paris, and featuring the cosmopolitan sleuth
Homer Evans. The Mysterious Mickey Finn, Hugger
Mugger in the Louvre, and Mayhem in B-Flat
followed in quick succession, celebrating the more chaotic side of his earlier life. It
seemed partly as though he was making up for the fallow years, having the energy of two
authors. He even used a pseudonym to disguise the fact that he published four books in
1940. But partly he drove himself to stave off depression from the failure of the Loyalist
cause in Spain, and the success of Generalissimo Franco's Nationalists. And worse, as so
many including Paul had predicted, the Spanish Civil War became a rehearsal for a greater
fascist takeover. The Nazi threat loomed over Europe. Paul's other European hometown,
Paris, found itself in the throes of a catastrophe.
Fleeing once again, from America Paul wrote another documentary book on the plan of his
Spanish one. This time he considers first the life of Paris as he had known and loved it -
not the colorful newspaper world and the world of expatriate authors, but the life of the
common people on the rue de la Huchette and its immediate environs. He recalled how the
writer Sherwood Anderson, famed for his fictions about American small towns, recognised
the neighborhood's equivalent of American small town life: "he felt [Paul wrote] the
genuineness of the atmosphere and its relation to communities in America he had
known." And in The Last Time I Saw Paris, he described what
the coming of war meant to the Quarter's inhabitants, here using the symbol he always
found potent, the sensibility of a young woman, an actress, for him the very spirit of a
besieged country:
XIIIa: THE END OF PARIS
[excerpt omitted]
XIV
The Last Time I Saw Paris consolidated Paul's
fame, and he now shuttled between Hollywood, where he was scripting films, and New
Milford, Connecticut, where he had purchased Pumpkin Hill Farm. But his third marriage
also ended and he stayed more and more in California, and married again, the marriage to
Barbara Mayock producing Paul's only child, a son.
Then Paul and his publisher, Random House, agreed on a series of memoirs which would
begin with Paul's Linden childhood. We have already heard selections from Linden
on the Saugus Branch (1947), A Ghost Town on the Yellowstone
(1948), My Old Kentucky Home (1949) and Desperate
Scenery (1954). They are wonderingly recreative of the detail of a lost
America between 1900 and 1912, brought to life with a keen relish for human weakness,
deception and honesty alike. In letters to a friend in 1949, he wrote perceptively of his
writing, "my observations to be most effective have to be on minute details.... That
makes for slow development...." His prose, he knew, worked by "microscopic or
molecular action." "When I started writing the Spanish Town I was depressed
constantly with the idea that no-one cared where bushes grew or what rocks were strewn
around or whether some obscure guy got up at sunrise or later. I was very wrong. That's
all the reader cares about. The intimate images, phrases, situations, etc. which are
evoked."
Before the fourth of these memoirs appeared, Paul returned to Paris to write a sequel
to The Last Time I Saw Paris. (The persistence of Franco in
Spain meant, of course, that he couldn't return to Ibiza.) The trip abroad, in 1949,
marked Paul's separation from his fourth wife and his companionship with Nancy McMahon
Dolan, who became his fifth. The sequel, Springtime in Paris, is
set on the Easter weekend when the street-lights were kept on all night for the first time
since the inception of hostilities in 1939. He found that against his expectations many of
his old friends had survived the war. Like them, Paris, "The plants and the people
were persistently alive." Easter 1949 marked the end of a long, dark decade for
France. Life moved into the streets once again, where Paul was always happiest with
humanity.
He had, however, misjudged the tenor of the times, or perhaps simply failed to turn
them back towards the gaiety and human kindness he recalled. Reviewers like Time
magazine's complained that he treated the French Communist Party just like any other
political party, comically, and not like the vicious and menacing enemy of the American
way which it was. Paul's liberalism - which had room for all races and classes, and all
kinds of idiosyncrasy - became increasingly intransigent as he came to believe that the
forces of reaction were taking his country over.
Biography has a sadder trajectory than autobiography: there is only one end, always the
same, and we are approaching it. After Paul's return from Paris to New York, he suffered a
series of heart attacks, and was brought to Cranston, Rhode Island, where friends and his
brother Leslie lived. He convalesced there for many months, under watchful eyes, making
many good new friends. Gradually he gained strength. The editor of the Malden Press
and Medford Mercury, David Brickman, helped Paul to keep hold of his journalistic
skills by offering him a column in the paper, which Paul contributed regularly for a year.
It is notable for a proud liberalism which we could scour other Boston area papers for in
vain in the era of Joe McCarthy and the Korean War.
Nancy joined him in Cranston and they were married in 1951, living for a time in Boston
and then in California. He revived his detective series from time to time, also producing
other miscellaneous work, including a book on American music. He hoped but failed to write
a book on cooking, to crown years devoted both to preparing and to eating the world's
foods with zest. He labored longest and hardest on the successor volume to his memoir
series, a book on his decade in Boston from 1914. It was to have recaptured the heights of
his achievement, but his Boston typescripts never satisfied his New York publisher, were
never published, and are lost. His marriage to Nancy also ended and one day in 1957 he
reappeared on his Cranston friends' Josef and Ann Lorenzo's doorstep, having suffered a
further heart attack. He never fully recovered, eventually went to the Veterans' Hospital
in Providence, and typing away to the end, converted to the Greek Orthodox Church - a
characteristically flamboyant gesture - and died there in April 1958. He is buried with
his parents in Beech Grove Cemetery, Rockport.
Elliot Paul sought tumult and he longed for calm and peace, perhaps the more because of
the toll which he knew uproar caused in him. When in May 1953, he played evening recitals
of piano music in the Cafe Paesano in Los Angeles - and a bar-restaurant was the nearest
thing to an outdoor festival for him - he included selections from folk musics, from rowdy
jazz and from the classics. Shubert's "Litany," his notes say, is "for a
solemn moment, which begins, 'peace to all the souls departed' and [it] is the simplest
expression of tribute to the memory of departed friends." It can be our tribute, to
him.
[MUSIC: SCHUBERT'S LITANY]
END
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