Barman to Barflies

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE--James Charters, as told to Morrill Cody-- Furman ($3).

Ten to 15 years ago, in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, there were four persons known, by name at least, to the most assiduous tourist and most casual habitue. These were: Flossie Martin, plump, china-cheeked ex-show girl; Kiki, black-haired, impish French painters' model; Nina Hamnett, English painter and expert on sailors' chanteys; Jimmy Charters, ruddy-faced and unfailingly genial barman. The four were not friends, were in fact rather rivals, each ruling a separate coterie--the ladies at their tables at the Dome, Rotonde or Select, Jimmy at whatever bar he happened to be tending at the moment.

Since these characters achieved prominence in a piquant period, it was to be expected that something in the way of written reminiscences would sooner or later appear. But Bohemians are notoriously lackadaisical about such matters, and though Kiki's Memoirs (Black Manikin Press; Paris, 1930) and Hamnett's Laughing Torso (Long & Smith, 1932) have been published, it was to small audiences; the panning of Montparnasse gold has been largely left to the more journalistically-minded. Third in the authentic train, Jimmy Charters' narrative would be condemned forthwith as a rehashing of minor and well-chewed-over material--the renamings of expatriate celebrities (Harold Stearns, Nancy Cunard, Homer Bevans, Ford Madox Ford), the retelling of the pranks, suicides, brawls that made up the life of the Quarter--were it not for the fact that Jimmy was and is a barman, and proud of it.

Hence there is a somewhat more workaday point of view throughout the book, and mixed in with the anecdotes, gobbets of such practical information as how to handle drunks, raucous, tearful or belligerent; comparative analyses of drunks, male and female; how to tell when a fight is brewing and how to stop it. Collectors of contemporary Americana should note that the book contains an introduction by Ernest Hemingway. Largely made up of veiled, bitter aspersions on ladies who run salons and write memoirs, it is only too apparently another reply to Gertrude Stein's strictures on Hemingway in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933).

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