The Bumby pages are frankly sentimental but nonetheless somehow dry, while the little boy’s attempts to be a man in two languages, and to keep up with his father’s enjoyment of café society, are simply charming. (Once you have heard the proprietress of Shakespeare and Company grandly referred to as “Silver Beach,” you are doomed to remember her that way. And you will perhaps also recall Bumby’s announcement of what he has learned from his nanny’s husband, Touton: “Tu sais, Papa, que les femmes pleurent comme les enfants pissent?” A different version of Papa, to be sure, but one worth having.)

Even in this record of spontaneous innocence, however, the chance is not missed to take another sidelong whack at Scott Fitzgerald:

“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.”

Again, there is nothing to complain of here in point of terseness and economy, but it sent me back again to that supremely unsatisfactory moment in the original collection, in the chapter titled “A Matter of Measurements,” when Fitzgerald invites Hemingway to lunch at Michaud’s restaurant and tells him:

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

By his own account, Hemingway thereupon leads the author of The Diamond As Big As the Ritz out to the men’s room, conducts a brief inspection, and reassures (or, to be more exact, fails to reassure) his pal that all is well, and that he’s looking down on his penis, literally and figuratively, rather than taking the sidelong perspective. I have never trusted this story, if only because—as Hemingway himself later admits—“it is not basically a question of the size in repose. It is the size that it becomes.” So, unless the viewing in the Michaud pissoir was of an engorged and distended “Scottie”—which it plainly was not—then Papa was offering Fitzgerald a surrogate form of consolation. And was then planning to write about it! (That Zelda was a lethal bitch who wanted her husband at least to fail and perhaps to die is for once not confirmed by another new inclusion, “Scott and His Parisian Chauffeur,” where she is pictured as behaving really quite gracefully under pressure and where the same Mike Strater whose absence was deplored in the original preface is also shown in a fairly good light on a train from Princeton to Philadelphia.)

I suppose that another way of betraying a friend of whom it’s thinkable that you were jealous, and who would, as it happens, do you the good turn of introducing you to an editor like Maxwell Perkins and a publisher like Scribner, would be to write about him thus:

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty [italics mine].

All right so far, perhaps, even with that emphasis noted, but then: “The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.” And this in the second paragraph of the first page of the chapter about his friend—the one he is later on bluffly cheering up about his sand-castle masculinity …