A Moveable Feast

The Man Who Was Marked for Death

The afternoon I met Ernest Walsh, the poet, in Ezra’s studio, he was with two girls in long mink coats and there was a long, shiny, hired car from Claridge’s outside in the street with a uniformed chauffeur. The girls were blondes and they had crossed on the same ship with Walsh. The ship had arrived the day before and he had brought them with him to visit Ezra.

Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture. He was talking to Ezra and I talked with the girls who asked me if I had read Mr. Walsh’s poems. I had not and one of them brought out a green-covered copy of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, A Magazine of Verse and showed me poems by Walsh in it.

“He gets twelve hundred dollars apiece,” she said.

“For each poem,” the other girl said.

My recollection was that I received twelve dollars a page, if that, from the same magazine. “He must be a very great poet,” I said.

“It’s more than Eddie Guest gets,” the first girl told me.

“It’s more than who’s that other poet gets. You know.”

“Kipling,” her friend said.

“It’s more than anybody gets ever,” the first girl said.

“Are you staying in Paris very long?” I asked them.

“Well no. Not really. We’re with a group of friends.”

“We came over on this boat, you know. But there wasn’t anyone on it really. Mr. Walsh was on it of course.”

“Doesn’t he play cards?” I asked.

She looked at me in a disappointed but understanding way.

“No. He doesn’t have to. Not writing poetry the way he can write it.”

“What ship are you going back on?”

“Well that depends. It depends on the boats and on a lot of things. Are you going back?”

“No. I’m getting by all right.”

“This is sort of the poor quarter over here, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But it’s pretty good. I work the cafés and I’m out at the track.”

“Can you go out to the track in those clothes?”

“No. This is my café outfit.”

“It’s kind of cute,” one of the girls said. “I’d like to see some of that café life. Wouldn’t you, dear?”

“I would,” the other girl said. I wrote their names down in my address book and promised to call them at Claridge’s. They were nice girls and I said good-by to them and to Walsh and to Ezra. Walsh was still talking to Ezra with great intensity.

“Don’t forget,” the taller one of the girls said.

“How could I?” I told her and shook hands with them both again.

The next I heard from Ezra about Walsh was that he had been bailed out of Claridge’s by some lady admirers of poetry and of young poets who were marked for death, and the next thing, some time after that, was that he had financial backing from another source and was going to start a new magazine in the quarter as a co-editor.

At the time the Dial, an American literary magazine edited by Scofield Thayer, gave an annual award of, I believe, a thousand dollars for excellence in the practice of letters by a contributor. This was a huge sum for any straight writer to receive in those days, in addition to the prestige, and the award had gone to various people, all deserving, naturally. Two people, then, could live comfortably and well in Europe on five dollars a day and could travel.

This quarterly, of which Walsh was one of the editors, was alleged to be going to award a very substantial sum to the contributor whose work should be judged the best at the end of the first four issues.

If the news was passed around by gossip or rumor, or if it was a matter of personal confidence, cannot be said. Let us hope and believe always that it was completely honorable in every way. Certainly nothing could ever be said or imputed against Walsh’s co-editor.

It was not long after I heard rumors of this alleged award that Walsh asked me to lunch one day at a restaurant that was the best and the most expensive in the Boulevard St.-Michel quarter and after the oysters, expensive flat faintly coppery marennes, not the familiar, deep, inexpensive portugaises, and a bottle of Pouilly Fuisé, began to lead up to it delicately. He appeared to be conning me as he had conned the shills from the boat — if they were shills and if he had conned them, of course — and when he asked me if I would like another dozen of the flat oysters as he called them, I said I would like them very much. He did not bother to look marked for death with me and this was a relief. He knew I knew he had the con, not the kind you con with but the kind you died of then and how bad it was, and he did not bother to have to cough, and I was grateful for this at the table. I was wondering if he ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask him. I began my second doz…