The Education of Mr. Bumby
My first son, Bumby, and I spent much time together in the cafés where I worked when he was very young and we lived over the saw mill. He always went with us to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in the winters but when Hadley and I were in Spain in the summers he would pass those months with the femme de ménage who he called Marie Cocotte and her husband, who he called Touton, either at 10 bis Avenue de Gobelins where they had a flat or at Mur de Bretagne where they went for monsieur Rohrbach’s summer vacations. Monsieur Rohrbach had been a maréchal de logis chef or sergeant major in the professional French military establishment and on his retirement had a minor functional post on which they had lived with his and Marie’s wages and looked forward to his retirement to Mur de Bretagne. Touton had a great part in the formative years of Bumby’s life and when there would be too many people at the Closerie de Lilas for us to work well or I thought he needed a change of scene I would wheel him in his carriage or later we would walk to the café on the Place St.-Michel where he would study the people and the busy life of that part of Paris where I did my writing over a café crème. Everyone had their private cafés there where they never invited anyone and would go to work, or to read or to receive their mail. They had other cafés where they would meet their mistresses and almost everyone had another café, a neutral café, where they might invite you to meet their mistress and there were regular, convenient, cheap dining places where everyone might eat on neutral ground. It was nothing like the organization of the Montparnasse quarter centered about the Dome, Rotonde, Select and later the Coupole or the Dingo bar which you read about in the books of early Paris.
As Bumby grew to be a bigger boy he spoke excellent French and, while he was trained to keep absolutely quiet and only study and observe while I worked, when he saw that I was finished he would confide in me something that he had learned from Touton.
“Tu sais, Papa, que les femmes pleurent comme les enfants pissent?”
“Did Touton tell you that?”
“He says a man should never forget it.”
At another time he would say, “Papa four poules passed while you were working that were not bad.”
“What do you know about poules?”
“Nothing. I observe them. One observes them.”
“What does Touton say about them?”
“One does not take them seriously.”
“What does one take seriously?”
“Vive la France et les pommes de terre frites.”
“Touton is a great man,” I said.
“And a great soldier,” Bumby said. “He taught me much.”
“I admire him very much,” I said.
“He admires you too. He says you have a very difficult métier. Tell me Papa is it difficult to write?”
“Sometimes.”
“Touton says it is very difficult and I must always respect it.”
“You respect it.”
“Papa have you lived much among the Peau-Rouges?”
“Should we go home by Silver Beach’s book store?”
“Sure. Do you like her?”
“She is always very nice to me.”
“Me too.”
“She has a beautiful name. Silver Beach.”
“We will go by and then I must get you home in time for lunch. I have promised to have lunch with some people.”
“Interesting people?”
“People,” I answered.
It was too early for them to be sailing boats in the Luxembourg gardens and so we did not stop to watch that and when we arrived home Hadley and I had quarreled about something in which she had been right and I had been wrong quite seriously.
“Mother has been bad. Papa has scolded her,” Bumby announced in French very grandly still under the influence of Touton.
After Scott had taken to turning up drunk quite frequently Bumby asked me very seriously one morning when he and I had finished work together at the Place St.-Michel café, “Monsieur Fitzgerald is sick Papa?”
“He is sick because he drinks too much and he cannot work.”
“Does he not respect his métier?”
“Madame his wife does not respect it or she is envious of it.”
“He should scold her.”
“It is not so simple.”
“Are we meeting him today?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“Will he be drinking so much?”
“No. He said we would not be drinking.”
That afternoon when Scott and I met with Bumby at a neutral café Scott was not drinking and we each ordered a bottle of mineral water.
“For me a demi-blonde,” Bumby said.
“Do you allow that child to drink beer?” Scott asked.
“Touton says that a little beer does no harm to a boy of my age,” Bumby said. “But make it a ballon.”
A ballon was only a half glass of beer.
“Who is this Touton?” Scott asked me.
I told him about Touton and how he might have come out of the memoirs of Marbot or of Ney, if he had written his, and that he embodied the traditions of the orders of the old French military establishment which had been destroyed many times but still existed. Scott and I talked of the Napoleonic campaigns and the war of 1870 which he had not studied and I told him some stories of the mutinies in the French army after the Nivelle offensive at the Chemin des Dames that I had heard from friends who had participated in them and how such men as Touton were an anachronism but an absolutely valid thing. Scott was passionately interested in the war of 1914–18 and since I had many friends who had served in it and some who had seen many things in detail recently these stories of the war as it actually was were shocking to him. The talk was far over Bumby’s head but he listened attentively and afterwards when we had talked of other things and Scott had left, full of mineral water and the resolve to write well and truly, I asked Bumby why he had ordered a beer.
“Touton says that a man should first learn to control himself,” he said. “I thought I could make an example.”
“It is not so simple as that,” I told him.
“War is not simple either is it Papa?”
“No. Very complicated. You believe what Touton tells you now. Then later you will find out many things for yourself.”
“Monsieur Fitzgerald was demolished mentally by the war? Touton told me many people were.”
“No. He was not.”
“I am glad,” Bumby said. “It must be some passing thing.”
“It would be no disgrace if he had been demolished mentally by the war,” I said. “Many of our good friends were. Later some recovered to do fine things. Our friend André Masson the painter.”
“Touton explained to me about it being no disgrace to be demolished mentally. There was too much artillery in this last war. And the generals were all cows.”
“It is very complicated,” I said. “You will find it all out some day for yourself.”
“Meantime it is nice that we have no problems of our own. No grave problems. You worked well today?”
“Very well.”
“I am happy,” Bumby said. “If I can be helpful in anything?”
“You help me very much.”
“Poor Monsieur Fitzgerald,” Bumby said. “He was very nice today to remain sober and not molest you. Will everything be all right with him Papa?”
“I hope so,” I said. “But he has very grave problems. It seems to me that he has almost insurmountable problems as a writer.”
“I am sure that he will surmount them.” Bumby said. “He was so very nice today and so reasonable.”