"That Summer in Paris"

That Summer in Paris by Morley Callaghan

In 1929 Morley Callaghan and his wife Loretto lived for a few months in Paris, a city to which many of the world's young literary notables were drawn for both the lifestyle and the daily opportunity of bumping into other writers with whom to hold long wine-fueled conversations. Also there at that time were Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Callaghan had met Hemingway when they both worked for the Toronto Star and Hemingway had encouraged him in his writing. After reading one of his stories Hemingway said to him, "You're a real writer. You write big-time stuff. All you have to do is keep on writing." Callaghan became good friends with both Hemingway and Fitzgerald while he was staying in Paris. He boxed with Hemingway and they all did a lot of drinking together, but there was always a tension between Hemingway and Fitzgerald that eventually affected his relationships with them as well.

There is a humility in the telling of this story that I found very appealing. Let's face it, it would be easy to do some name-dropping and bragging about who he had met and what nice things they might have said about his work but Callaghan doesn't fall into that trap.  He writes a rather straightforward memoir revealing them all, including himself, to be ordinary people with idiosyncrasies, weaknesses and flaws like the rest of us. Ordinary - except that they were also brilliant writers.

I've never read Morley Callaghan before, something that, as a Canadian, I hate to admit. I can't say I thought the writing to be anything memorable but it was a memoir and I expect it will be different with his novels, which I am going to find and read eventually. To me the fascinating thing about this book is the look it gives you into the writing life, the personal lives of some well known writers, and life in Paris in 1929.  It's a rich experience, full of life, living and writing, and as you are a person who reads book blogs, I suspect you might like it too.