That Summer in Paris

Here is a testament to my lack of focus...

I recently finished (by recently, I mean yesterday) a book I bought in Montreal at a used bookshop, The Word. It came highly recommended in Lonely Planet, but was unfortunately disappointing when we got inside. But that is beside the point. The point is, I started it in Montreal and lugged it around since, to finish it...yesterday. In Austria.

The title, as you may have guessed, is That Summer in Paris, written by Morley Callaghan (who? Yes, I'm getting to that). Famous in his own right in the 1920s and 1930s, Morley Callaghan was a Canadian writer who grew up in Montreal and ended up hightailing it to Paris with the best of them in the 20s and became part of the ex-pat community, including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway - and the less well-known of them: Robert McAlmon, Sherwood Anderson, etc.  

Furthermore, I have a thing about ex-pat writers in general, and a really big thing about the Summer of '29 - and most things Hemingway. I read a now out-of-print collection of short stories, Men without Women while I was living in Paris in the summer of 2008, finishing out an internship. The book had been left in the apartment I was renting, and, seeing as I had an hour commute every day to get from one side of the city to the other, I ended up reading a lot that summer - a book a week, at least. I now regret not stealing the book from the apartment, considering it has been out of print for several years and I am unlikely to ever find it the way I read it. However, I hope the current inhabitant of my former apartment in enjoying it as much as I did.

Unfortunately for poor Morley, he wasn't very popular outside of Canada, except for a few short stories. I had never heard of the guy, to be honest, and what drew me to the book was the fact that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were both on the cover (a first edition - 1963, which would be worth something if a) Morley Callaghan were actually famous and b) it were not a paperback). 

Callaghan seems to think, however, that he was the inspiration for one or other character in The Sun Also Rises and suffers under the expectation of greatness - don't we all, though? I was originally enraptured by his name-dropping, which, by the end became tedious:

"One September afternoon in 1960 I was having a drink with an old newspaper friend, Ken Johnstone,   when unexpectedly he told me he had a message to pass on from Ronnie Jacques, the well-know New   York photographer. Jacques had been in Sun Valley taking some pictures of Hemingway, and they had gotten to talking about me." 

No doubt, Morley. Surely his ears were always burning.

The central theme of That Summer in Paris is this boxing match between Callaghan and Hemingway during that summer, where Callaghan knocked the $#^& out of Hemingway while Fitzgerald kept time (poorly), against which Hemingway took personal grievance - his relationship with Fitzgerald was never good to begin with - and is coincidentally (or not) mentioned both on the first page and used as the climax of the story arch. Why? This was obviously the highlight of Morley Callaghan's life, and he didn't have much else to write about. Certainly it could not have been because the scene was so intensely interesting. 

I continued reading, despite flat prose and excruciating ego because I decided I might as well, having bought the book. And the funny thing is, I have a character who is Morley Callaghan - I just didn't know it until I read That Summer in Paris and could compare my ideas on the aspiring (but ultimately doomed) writer and his real-life counterpart (poor baby - would have ended up teaching in a community college were it not for Hemingway) which I hope will prove fruitful. Otherwise, I wasted $6.50 CAD and almost 3 months...