'A Room on the Garden Side': Hemingway's unpublished liberation of Paris - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1994 by Susan F. Beegel

Robert returns to reading Les Fleurs du Mal, and Hemingway quotes for us a long section of the poem his narrator is reading:

Les morts, les pauvres morts, ont de grandes douleurs, Et quand Octobre souffle, emondeur des vieux arbres, Son vent melancholique a l'entour de leurs marbres, Certe, ils doivent trouver les vivants bien ingrats, A dormir, comme ils font, chaudement dans leurs draps, Tandis que, devores de noires songeries, Sans compagnon de lit, sans bonnes causeries, Vieux squelettes geles travailles par le ver, Ils sentent s'egoutter les neiges de l'hiver . . .(6)

The poem, one of Baudelaire's "Tableaux Parisiens," is not translated in the short story. In fact, Robert regrets that Baudelaire has never found someone who could translate his work into English as sublimely as he translated Edgar Allan Poe's into French. Because the Baudelaire quotation is central to the story, however, we offer Richard Howard's 1982 translation here:

The dead, poor things, have sorrows of their own, and when October comes and strips the trees and hums its dismal tune among the graves, how thankless we the living must appear, sleeping as we do in our own beds while they, subsiding into black despair, without a bedmate or a joke to share, worm-eaten skeletons, old and cold, endure the constant seeping of the winter snows . . .

Baudelaire's poem about the dead is at the center of "A Room on the Garden Side." The dead are unhappy in their tombs - alone, without lovers or companions, devoured by depression, worked on by worms, their skeletons cold - they find the living ungrateful. Who are these dead? One might expect in a story set in World War II, about men who have made the push to Paris following the Normandy invasion, that the dead are war dead, and indeed Robert does not read the poem to his men because he knows that is how they will interpret it. He can hear his American driver, Red Pelkey, saying "the poor fucking deads," and he is afraid the poem would be bad for Claude, who has been permanently marked by all the killing he has seen, although Robert also believes that Claude's intimacy with the war dead would make him the best translator of Baudelaire.

But there are other dead in "A Room on the Garden Side," dead invoked by name, and they are dead writers. Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Charles Baudelaire - they rise in their shrouds to accuse Robert, le vivant bien ingrat, a writer not grateful for the gift of life he possesses, a writer who is following the war by choice, pursuing death rather than his craft. The occasion of the poem Robert reads is a visit to the grave of an old nurse - a woman who has suckled and nurtured the poet into life, and who now from her grave tacitly accuses him of ingratitude for that gift. And what greater ingratitude can a writer like Robert display for the gift of life than to waste that life in not writing?

Out of sympathy for Robert's loneliness, Red gives him his own letters to read. Red receives letters every day from an oriental dancer he has met in Paris "someplace on a big hill," certainly Montparnasse, artists' quarter and home of the muses (Leland 187). The dancer writes every day "just like she said she would." She "really loves" Red, and she has an "impressive torso," but he cannot remember where he met her. Claude and Red have looked for her very seriously, but they cannot find her.(7) For Red, the girl's loss is "just one of those things like in a war"; it is Robert who reads her letters. For Robert, once a writer in Paris in some distant pre-war past, the beautiful, exotic dancer is analogous to the muse who used to visit him there, still beckoning seductively, but at least temporarily lost, a casualty of war.