In his various reminiscences about the early twenties Hemingway recalls with grim satisfaction how difficult it was to get his stories accepted. One persistent memory was associated with the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where he lived when he returned to Paris from Canada in 1924 after quitting his newspaper job.

On the table was a volume of Rembrandt reproductions, and a box of English cigarettes—one of which is eventually smoked by Mme. Cuttoli who does not know one goes outside to smoke in order not to stimulate the desire to smoke in Picasso. In the thousands of photographs, he always had a cigarette in his mouth or fingers.

Gustave Lerouge, who died several years ago on the eve of the Second World War, was the author of 312 works (in any case, that is the number of his works in my library), many of which were in several volumes and one, Le Mysterieux Docteur Cornelius, was a 150-page masterpiece of scientific detective fiction in 56 installments; others were not even signed since Gustave Lerouge often worked for publishers of the seventeenth order. 

XXX. THE MOST, THE BEST, WE CAN DO, WE
BELIEVE (WANTING TO GIVE EVIDENCE OF 
LOVE), IS TO GET OUT OF THE WAY, LEAVE

When through who the unotherish twilight up drops but his nib licks Sir Oral Ne Ferdinand Joegesq’ (disarmed to the nonteeth by lose able scripture befisto-zr-P—nd subjesting etsemina our light written) and him as mightily distant from a fit of the in cheerful as am our hero but naturally encore when the ittorian extroverts Well why not send your portrait of you and your portrait of me? J, says sprouts, it ch’ll bepigged, if only in the name of Adver the Tisement;but will they immaculate it on t’other conception(meaning Brussels) which being respond fully pre answered we thus forth are proseeding.

Re LSD, Psylocibin [sic], etc., Paris Review #37 p. 46: “So I couldn’t go any further. I may later on occasion, if I feel more reassurance.”

On the night of June 26, 1957, Malcolm Lowry pitched forward and died, and his body lay on the floor all night amid a gin bottle’s broken splinters. His big novel, Under the Volcano, had been published ten years before, and somebody called him a genius then, but after the inquest “death by misadventure" only eight people attended his country church funeral. The Brighton Argus ran a few paragraphs under the headline, ’’She Broke Gin Bottle.” The Times did not cover it.

In New York I was already aware of both the lady and her attributes, and on leaving for France in the spring of 1949 was determined to know her. I arrived like any other Francophile tourist with intentions of spending one summer. But from the outset that insular nation contradictorally greeted me with open arms: within a month I knew and—so much more important!—was known by most of the musical milieu I have frequented since.

I am surprised that no novelist of today has yet devoted a work to the automobile, to the modern highway, to road side inns, to gallant adventures of the road such as Casanova celebrated in his Memories, which were full of post-chaises and hostelries familiar to travelers at the end of the Eighteenth century; or as George Borrow in The Bible in Spain wrote of adventures and encounters along the road in Spain at the beginning of the Twentieth century (a little in the manner ofL’Intineraire Espagnol of t’Sterstevens, except that Borrow hadn’t gone to Spain to write a book—that would never have occurred to him—but to distribute the book of books, the Bible, in Spain, and particularly to distribute it—queer idea!—to the gypsies). 

In my (Tr. Note l.) room. No. 13 on the fifth floor of the Hotel Carcassonne at 24 Rue Mouffetard, to the right of the entrance door, between the stove and the sink, stands a table that VERA painted blue one day to surprise me. I have set out here to sec what the objects on a section of this table (which I could have made into a snare-picture) (see Appendix II) might suggest to me, what they might spontaneously awaken in me in describing them: the way SHERLOCK HOLMES, starting out with a single object, could solve a crime; (see Appendix III) or historians, after centuries, were able to reconstitute a whole epoch from the most famous fixation in history, Pompeii.