Here, in the right café, convened by fate,
These true expatriates accumulate.
With oaths in ordinary wine, they swear
They would be writing if they were not there.
Artists and students, fierce in love and art,
Hate tourist-countrymen with all their heart;
Across the street in existential places,
Café de Flore and Deux Magots, fat faces
From San Francisco, Canton, Butte, and Lynn,
Pay higher prices and are drinking gin.
Here’s Spanish Moss, the southern novelist,
Whose accent is as boneless as his wrist;
Who hasn’t smelled magnolia since eighteen,
But mentions it in every magazine;
Whose novel’s hero was a mongoloid
Mulatto dwarf, of arms and legs devoid.
Dixie can make him cry, or so he says,
And shares this honor with the Marseillaise.
Once dedication filled his working hours,
But now old age, at thirty, robs his powers.
Next to him lounges bearded Ezra Ounce,
“A fraction of a Pound,” his foes pronounce.
Three years ago, a groping Ph.D.,
He heard that Europe nourished poetry.
By methods of research, he quickly found
That Paris had the climate most renowned.
It’s true he hasn’t written yet, alas,
Except his “Gay Paree,” which will not pass
A monthly column for the folks at home,
As adjectival as a Kodachrome.
Then Junior Miss, a Junior and a broad,
Two-fifths ingenuous, three-fifths a fraud,
Who tried in vain, for three long months of shaving,
To raise a beard and set all Paris raving.
Her arm surrounds the narrow, would-be bard,
And now and then she kisses him quite hard;
Yet Rumor, evil-mouth’d, has spread the news
That all this public loving is a ruse,
That Ezra Ounce and Junior Miss abide
In separate rooms at night, not side by side.
Elliott Sandalwood, whose ripe disdain
Blossoms against the ceiling, not to wane,
Is leader of the New Expatriates:
“Rich, Lewd, Untalented,” their epithets.
They hope to scavenge, in the right cafés,
Left-over genius from the palmy days.
In conversations over tea, he praises
Paul Bowles and Mrs. Ward in chosen phrases,
And keeps a drawer of scented woods for smelling,
And one of silks whose texture is compelling.
Beside him, and beside himself with drink,
Slumps withered Eld, who only moves to blink.
Survivor of the parties of that day
When Scott, Ernest and Dos were making hay,
He sits befogged among these odds and ends
Who build themselves on novels by his friends.
In nineteen-twenty-five he was the man
Who drank with writers, good or bad, by plan,
And called them by their nicknames in his prime,
And meant to write, but never found the time.
By grace of Guggenheim imported here
To write an ageless novel in a year,
The teacher Bald sat in a little while
But left to write, with someone else’s style.
Industrious, he follows all the fashions;
Eight years ago he trimmed his sordid passions
And wrote a Trollope novel for the boom,
Then turned around and pillaged Melville’s tomb,
And now begins on twentieth century names
By stealing from the later Henry James.
So sat the clever group. So sags each day,
And only closing time takes them away,
Down St. Germain to sleep on unmade beds
Where drunken sleep will rest their restless heads.
Across the street, their crude forefathers sit,
Beneath their scorn, oblivious of it,
And watch the bearded corduroys that pass
As Paris scenery beyond the glass.
An ass whose two long heads are set apart
Will not suspect it functions with one heart.
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