While reading Hemingway’s engaging memoir of life in Paris (A Moveable Feast) in the 1920s I came across a passage that struck a cord, though I hope I have more patience than Hemingway – he of the notoriously short fuse – had available to him.
When he was writing in a Parisian café, deep in thought, as was his habit, he was sometimes interrupted:
‘Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write in a café?’
Your luck had run out and you shut the notebook. This was the worst thing that could happen. If you could keep your temper it would be better but I was not good at keeping mine then and said, ‘You rotten son of a bitch what are you doing in here off your filthy beat?’
‘Don’t be insulting just because you want to act like an eccentric.’
‘Take your dirty camping mouth out of here.’
‘It’s a public café. I’ve just as much right here as you have.’
Now my experiences in cafes and bars are not directly comparable in that I rarely lose my temper (just a quirk of fate I guess). But I know how Ernest, or Hem as he preferred, felt. When I venture alone into a café, accompanied only by my laptop, I am mentally prepared for solitary contemplation and a paragraph or two. If I am chanced upon by an acquaintance, or worse a friend, then I’m not inclined to tell the son of a bitch to get lost, but I do typically have to rapidly adjust, take a time-out and re-focus to accomplish a minimally acceptable degree of sociability. The truth is that any reluctance I might have to do this is related to the degree of familiarity with the person interrupting my solitude. The closer the relationship the more speedily I reconcile myself.
Other factors are salient too. In my local pubs for example, the King Willie and The Running Horses, the gritting of my teeth takes second place to the pleasure of conversation with friends. I may still grit my teeth, but I can the more readily and easily redirect my attention and interest. I am aware too, as was Hem’s acquaintance, that cafes and pubs are (perhaps increasingly) significant ‘third places’, that is, rare, rightful, important and ‘actual’ meeting places oriented to talking, ‘arguing’ and sharing.
There is a moral here, not least for me:
If you know me, or, even if you don’t but you have good reason, please insist on my attention in those important public arenas and forums that are cafes and bars.
But there’s an addition:
If you don’t know me, and have no good reason, then bugger off, can’t you see that I’m busy!