ELLIOTT BAKER

The Penny Wars

1968

IN THE SUMMER OF 1968 and again in 1970, I taught creative writing at the California State College at Hayward, a wonderfully tidy suburb of San Francisco. Bob Williams, a member of the faculty, had arranged my invitation to Hayward. In 1964 he had spent a sabbatical year teaching at the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa, where I was. We first met at a getting-to-know-you faculty party where he gave me a disquisition on the Yiddish word putz. Tequila was his drink because it had “no waste motion.” Free spirits, he and his wife Hatch, more properly Harriet, had decided not to have children. Bob had published a couple of novels under his full name of R. V. Williams. He had come up the hard way. His father, a railway guard, had been a bigamist. In the war Bob had driven a landing craft at Salerno on D-Day, which entitled him to a college education paid for by the Fulbright program. If only he could have written as vividly as he talked about his experiences of battle.

Somehow, maybe through Bob Williams, Herb Caen, the gossip writer of the San Francisco Chronicle, heard that I was at Hayward and I believe it was through him that I was asked to do some reviewing for the paper. Elliot Baker’s The Penny Wars was one of the novels I was sent. His first novel, A Fine Madness, had set him up as a writer from whom masterpieces could be expected. The Penny Wars apparently tells a tight story of relationships gone wrong, but much more profoundly is about America and Europe discovering one another in the shadow of Hitler. Baker, I wrote, allows his characters “to speak and laugh and cry for themselves,” and that was something that “went out with the classics.” Still, it might win him the honorific title to which he aspired, of Great American Writer.

Back in London, several years later, a letter arrived from Elliott. It turned out that he and Helen, his wife, had settled here and we lived only a few hundred yards apart. We took to meeting in a favorite café on Kensington High Street. The blueness of his eyes, the energy of his person, was telling. One day, he let drop that his real surname was Sukenik, though he was no relation of Yigael Yadin, the famous Israeli soldier and archaeologist, originally born Sukenik. And he also let drop that in 1945 he’d been in an infantry battalion engaged in the Battle of the Ardennes. Afterwards they’d all volunteered for a mission behind the German lines, killing SS concentration camp guards before they could kill their prisoners.

Elliott’s conversation was like his books – you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. An obsessive gambler, at home in the lurid world of clubs and croupiers, Mafiosi, blackjack, odds and debts and threats, he committed himself to hackwork to pay for his losses.

Elliott had made a huge sum of money writing the script for Lace, a popular television series. Due to the time change with Hollywood, it was the middle of the night when the producer telephoned to commission the script of Lace Two. Elliott refused. Every twenty-four hours for several consecutive nights, the producer woke him up again, each time offering a million more. Finally he said, “Name what you’ll do it for and that’s positively my last offer.” So Elliott became the best-paid scriptwriter in the United States. A very well-known lady romancer had a three-book contract for ten million dollars but didn’t actually feel like writing the stuff. For a token ten thousand dollars Elliott ghosted one of her books in six weeks. And still his own books were written, mostly in his tragi-comic style, though Klynt’s Law is slapstick that had me laughing aloud. A second obsession, more restricted than gambling but equally deranging, was the insoluble riddle of Shakespeare’s identity.

In the end, he and Helen returned to the United States. We used to correspond. Modestly he made no claims, but I sensed his regret that time was running out and he wouldn’t ever know whether or not he was accepted as a Great American Writer.