IT TOOK GREGORY JOHNS many days and nights to absorb the exhilarating shock of his book’s reception by the public. The country-wide reviews (most of them), the sales, the new printings, the best-seller lists, the deluge of mail, the smiles of his neighbors, his parents’ pride, Thorn’s bulletins, Hat’s delirium, Abby’s joy, his own inner turbulence and sense of miracle—all this combined into a force to stun him.
On publication day he lived from moment to moment, scarcely able to think, for the rapidity of impression and sensation; for perhaps a fortnight more, he welcomed endless talks with Abby, with Ed, with Thorn and each of his sisters and their families, with the Zatkes and his mother and father. One night Mr. and Mrs. Digby came out to pay a call; a strange and lively delight possessed him at the sight of them, and even Digby’s spate of reminiscence and rosy froth of prediction did not dispel it completely.
Little by little, the process of absorption did go on and though, even by early May, Gregory Johns could not yet go back to regular work on his new manuscript, he did quiet down enough to take up his old habits of observation and reflection. As he pondered certain bits of new behavior or speech or attitude on his own part, as well as on the part of his daughter, wife, brother, relatives, he found himself frequently remembering a phrase that had once amused him. He could not recall the precise circumstances of its genesis, and decided that these must have concerned Hat, or his parents, or perhaps his speculations last winter about whether Thorn really wanted to chuck his old life and start all over.
The collateral results, the phrase had run, the ramifications going on and on. Could Patrick King be called a ramification, Gregory asked himself? Could the small steady household wrangle over their vacation plans for August? The polite stubbornness that had developed over the merits of three weeks in Provincetown versus three weeks of touring in Canada was a phenomenon he never had encountered in the days when they couldn’t go anywhere. And there were other complications, not yet fully emerged from the cocoon which, instinct told him, would be terribly big butterflies before Abby or he knew it.
By an association of ideas whose classicism he would have appreciated if he had only been aware of it, Gregory Johns instantly thought of Jill Goodwyn. Thorn had not mentioned her since their return from California; indeed, though Thorn had continued to report every other hour on what he was doing, Thorn had recently become highly noncommunicative about what he was feeling.
Who, Gregory Johns thought, ever knew more than a fraction of what anybody else was feeling? You thought you knew, you secretly congratulated yourself on being more intuitive than less knowledgeable fellows, but the day came when life pitched you a fast curving one and left you fanning the air.
Thornton Johns was fully and gracefully prepared to take a back seat for quite a time, now that The Good World was the talk of the nation as well as the town. But he was caught short on South Pacific.
For it to go and open just thirteen days before the pyrotechnics of publication day, so that everywhere he went people were talking about that too, was, he could not help feeling, just too much. It was one thing to give over the center of the stage to your own brother, but to have the whole proscenium arch and footlights and aisles ripped out over something you had had no part in at all—the justice of this kept eluding him.
Not being a man to harbor grudges or carry on vendettas, Thorn forced himself to sound gracious about South Pacific whenever people mentioned it, but it took something out of him each time he did. And so it was that one morning in the middle of May he found himself unexpectedly listless as he sat at his desk, waiting to call Digby for a report on yesterday’s orders.
As he meditated, the fingers of his right hand, for the first time in months, began to beat out their old restless tattoo; the rapid arpeggio from the pinky, the two downbeats with the ring finger. Soon his mind supplied lyrics to go along with the muted tune of fingertips on wood: the little arpeggio was accompanied by a long sighing SOUTHPA; the two raps by a pianissimo and dwindling “cific.”
He glanced at his watch and the telephone: SOUTHPA cific, SOUTHPA cific. It was still too early to call Digby. Each time he waited to call, he was reminded of the superstitious fears he used to have before the Imperial Century contracts were finally signed. If Digby were to tell him one morning that orders for The Good World had suddenly stopped dead, the blow would be unbearable.
And yet, Thorn thought, and yet.
He gazed vacantly around him. He was busier than he had ever been, even in Hollywood. It was nearly all desk work, though, paper work, tax work with Hathaway, trying for a digest sale, setting foreign publication in motion, planning a year ahead of time on cheap reprints to come. He was learning something every day and succeeding in everything he tried. There was no more solid satisfaction for any man, and yet—
Diana came in with a huge stack of mail and he welcomed the sight of it. She also unrolled a proof of a large newspaper advertisement. “Mr. Digby sent it down by boy,” she said,“B.S.B.’s running it June first in all New York papers. They’re scheduling a lot of out-of-town insertions too, and did you have any suggestions?”
Thorn smoothed the proof out on his desk. It was a distinguished-looking advertisement, despite the large coupon in the lower right-hand corner. The type face was conservative, the only illustration a life-size copy of The Good World, and a facsimile, signature reading “Lyman French, President.”
THE PROUD MOMENT COMES . . .
Book Clubs in America are sometimes attacked by thoughtless men. The ideal of making books available to millions—so runs the charge—is too often offset by the dissemination of ignoble work aimed at ignoble tastes.
Best Selling Books, Inc., has chosen to bear in silence its share of this sly attack. Knowing the dedicated, the uncompromising search made each month by its six renowned judges, and knowing that sooner or later the proud moment comes when a book so fine—
Thornton Johns tossed the proof at the brand-new basket marked “Clips” and turned eagerly to the letters. Before May first there must have been fifty lecture invitations to Gregory, even though major lecturing dropped sharply in the summer. Now requests for next fall were pouring in, as well as for sporadic dates during July and August with garden clubs and special functions of one kind or another. What a pity, what a waste! It had become peculiarly poignant to him to think of all those eager groups, not so much the political ones asking for a speech on world government, but the other groups, little literary clubs just like Hollywood’s “Friends of Books.” The first kind, the World Federalist Chapters all over the; country—:who could have guessed there were so many?—could take care of their own speeches, but the second kind appealed to everything in him. To them, it almost killed him when he wrote back in that stern unbending negative.
Thornton Johns leaned back in his chair. For a long time he sat without moving, his mind drifting back to “the terrible woman named Martin,” to the press table, to the kiss blown so thoughtlessly, so uncalculatingly, at Jill.
Unwittingly, his hand strayed to the batch of mail before him. If only he didn’t have to sound so cold and inhumane when he wrote; if a friendly tone, an understanding sympathy could go into the refusals.
“And so,” he could hear himself dictating to Diana, “though it does look as though my client and brother, Gregory Johns, will not change in attitude toward invitations to speak, there is always the possibility that at some later date he could be persuaded to. If you happen to be near my office, and feel in the mood to risk a waste of your time—”
Sooner or later it would be bound to happen. Sooner or later somebody named Martin or Jones or Smith would have her own emergency. Sooner or later she would come, in person, from White Plains, or East Orange, or Mamaroneck, to plead that he use his influence with his brother. If nothing but some good talk and an exchange of anecdotes resulted—
Suddenly a brightness was in the room, and, ignoring the buzzer before him, he shouted, “Diana.”
By late May, Hat had become an inveterate browser in bookstores. She would wander about, picking up first one, then another, current novel, occasionally even glancing through a copy of The Good World. Often Patrick King accompanied her.
Parental limitations were still in effect on evening dates during the school weeks but Hat often found Pat waiting for her when she came out of her last class. He was fascinated with her game; he said he loved to see the displays and the number of copies piled up; he remembered every store they had already been in and kept her from repeat visits. It was he who urged her, one warm afternoon, to try the large Doubleday store on Fifth Avenue, pointing out that they’d see more sales being made.
“Fifth printing,” Hat exclaimed a few minutes later, as she turned to the copyright page of The Good World. “I didn’t know they had run another.”
A clerk came up and spoke with bright, nonurgent politeness. “Did you want a copy? It’s our biggest—”
Patrick King laughed. “She has a copy,” he said. “Her father wrote it.”
The clerk said, “Oh.”
Hat said, “Now, Pat, you shouldn’t—”
“Well, Miss Johns! You ought to be very proud of your father.”
“I am,” Hat said, with a gracious inclination of her head.
“It’s coming out as a movie at Christmas,” Patrick King said. “Did you know that?”
“Yes indeed.” He turned back to Hat. “Do you suppose your father would come in and autograph a few copies for us, Miss Johns? So many of our special customers want an autographed copy if they’re going to buy any book.”
“I could ask Daddy,” Hat said helpfully.
The conversation was not carried on in hushed voices; Hat was aware that several real customers were hearing it, one sidling up to listen, another looking her up and down with respect. Hat thanked her stars she was wearing her new cashmere sweater from Saks, and when they were outside again, she squeezed Pat’s arm in delight. “Wasn’t that fun?”
“It just popped out, Hat, telling him who you were.”
“I realized it was an accident. I do wish Daddy would go in, and I’d go with him.” Her voice became aggrieved. “Everybody else has autographing parties at Brentano’s or even at the Ritz—I can’t see why my father has to go and say it’s being a salesman for your own wares. He’s so queer.”
“Your father,” Patrick King said, “is the most wonderful man I have ever met. It is a privilege to have him like me.”
Hat went on quickly. “It isn’t as if he thinks autographs are wrong or anything. Look at the ones he does at home for Gran’pa and Gran’ma’s friends, and all the aunts and uncles and the people in their offices or stores. The whole family keeps driving out with stacks.”
“I hope he didn’t think I had a nerve, taking out those eight copies. It does help, if you send something around to a casting director.”
Hat made vague sounds of reassurance, and he added, “I’m no name-dropper, but show business is crammed with gossips and somehow they all know I know Gregory Johns.”
“Can you imagine what it’ll be like, once the movie’s out?”
He stared at her as if a glory were unrolling before him. “It must be wonderful, having a famous father.”
“If Daddy would get normal, it would be.”
Well, Hat comforted herself, perhaps Daddy would see the light later on. He was peculiar about feature interviews in the papers too, except for one skinny column in each of the Sunday book sections. “But why?” she had asked him. “If they’re all right, why can’t you let all the others, and Life and Look and all?” He had laughed. “‘The author in pajamas,’” he had said, “that’s Life’s idea about what you do on a book. Or, ‘The author collapses after a hectic day at the Boston Book Fair.’ Or, ‘The author with his lovely wife and daughter.’” He had looked at her apologetically after the last one. “I’m sorry, Hat, but you see, Breit on the Times and Hutchens on the Trib are interested in books and writers, not in pajamas.”
Sometimes, Hat thought helplessly, parents are creeps. They won’t be in Life magazine, they won’t take you tonight clubs where you could see all the celebrities, they could be celebrities themselves and they throw it away. Why should her two cousins, Fred and Thorn Junior, be getting more fun out of everything these days than she was, and as for Uncle Thorn and Aunt Cindy, going out every night to the most glamorous places—
Pat noticed her doleful face and suggested a soda for her and a martini for him—a combination of orders possible only at Schrafft’s. She glanced up at him and her spirits rose. How handsome he was, how well dressed, how much a man of the world! Whatever Dad and Mother thought they were doing by being modern and letting her have him to the house all the time, hoping she’d get sick of him if they didn’t pull a Montague and Capulet on her, they weren’t either of them fooling her. Anybody like Patrick King was just beyond parents, that was all. But the girls at Vassar would know, the minute they laid eyes on him and wished he was theirs.
Hat looked happily about her. They were at Rockefeller Center; the clean sharp buildings, the flying flags, filled her with exhilaration, as the visit to Doubleday’s had done. “It’s just two blocks to Brentano’s,” Hat said. “What say we drop in there first and look around?”
Scarcely two blocks from Brentano’s, in a beauty parlor on Madison Avenue, Mrs. Luther Digby was having her gray hair dyed. “I’m shaky,” she told the hairdresser, “I really am. Look at my hand.” She held it out, palm down, fingers extended.
“Every lady is afraid the first time.”
“After all these years of saying I never would!”
“Every lady says it for years until—”
“It isn’t that I want to look younger,” she said. “I just got so tired of seeing myself in the mirror.”
“Of course,” he said soothingly. “All the ladies say it’s a lift, more than a new hat.” He thought, Why this talk always, not to look younger?
“You’re absolutely sure it will come out like the sample you did?”
“Just like the sample. Every lady worries; it always comes out the same as the sample.”
“And not red at all? Just ash blond? My husband—”
“Not even one little tinge of red. Your husband was right to suggest you should try it.”
“I can’t understand him. He was always against anything like that.”
“All the husbands are against. And then!”
She couldn’t understand anything about Luther any more, she thought miserably, as the thud thud of wet cotton wrapped around a stick patted her skull. He hadn’t suggested it; he had practically ordered her to. And to get some new clothes, and to fix up the house. They would be doing a lot more entertaining, he had said, and he was sick of the way they lived, and settling down like two old people. He was going to a gym every day now; why couldn’t she go to one of those places they rolled around on the floor? And maybe it was chic these days to get rid of gray hair. Times change, he had said, in that lordly way he said everything now, times change.
He had changed. He was trying to get himself invited to address that Writers’ Conference they held every summer in Vermont, and he hadn’t said a word about taking her with him. He never stayed home any more in the evenings; he always said it was business, but there was a wild swaggery look on him sometimes—
“Now we rinse and look,” the hairdresser said. “I keep it light, light, light, to start. We can go darker later. It will be beautiful. You will see.”
He pressed her head back against the metal drainboard. Her neck felt as if it would crack, and a spray of furious water tore at her temple. It was nice to have money for new clothes and new furniture and new hair, but she couldn’t seem to be happy about any of it. If the truth were known, she was always shaky these days. I’m going to hate my hair, Mrs. Digby thought suddenly. I’ve always hated dyed hair. He doesn’t want an old wife any more, that’s what it all means. He goes strutting off every day—a lump stood hard and insoluble in Mrs. Digby’s throat. What she really hated, she thought, lowering her voice even in her own mind, was that horrible book.
Turning first to the best-seller list in the Times, James Whitcomb Hathaway began on the Sunday papers. What a book, he thought, what a client to have. He turned next to the best-seller list in the Herald Tribune and was equally pleased. Thorn kept him posted beforehand, calling him as soon as the advance sections were received at Digby and Brown. But it was good to see things in print anyway.
Hathaway had taken the papers outdoors with him to a terrace chair on the lawn of his country house in Connecticut. He had also furnished himself with pencils and a long pad of foolscap, and he was wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks. It was hot for the end of May and this year he meant to start his sun-bathing early.
Lolling back in his chair, Hathaway soon discovered that there was no other news that interested him and gave himself up to private matters. In the motionless air, the abandoned papers lay on the grass without fluttering, and even after many minutes, the pad propped upon his knee was blank of writing.
The family was not downstairs yet; he and Frances had been out late last night with Thorn and Cindy at a party given by his client, the famous playwright, Maude Denkin. That eccentric old lady apparently never went anywhere but when she gave a party she could invite Ethel Merman or Tallulah Bankhead or Jimmy Durante and God knows what other great stars, and be sure that most of them would come. He had had a strong motive for taking Thorn along last night, and the result was what he had expected. Thorn had always had a flair for getting on with people; Hollywood and his fling at lecturing and now the success of The Good World had developed that flair into nothing less than genius. Especially if the people were famous.
Hathaway stretched and shifted his forgotten pad from right knee to left so he would burn more evenly. As always after too little, sleep, he had waked early, his body tired but his mind clearer than usual, as if he had not laid thinking aside at all.
There was no doubt about it. The time had come to talk over his new idea, with Thorn.
The Hathaway-Johns Agency, Incorporated. It was a nice name; there was a resounding syllabic conformation to it. Turned around the other way, people might misread Johns for John, which would do neither Thorn nor him any good. Thorn would see that.
James Whitcomb Hathaway shifted to a more vertical position. His pencil began to move on his pad. H.J., it wrote. H.J. HHHH$$$$$$$. Thorn and he together could carve out hunks of the literary agency world; he had begun to think of it after his big row with Farley Storm and Ephraim Goldberg, even before Thorn had managed the Horn of Plenty sale alone. The whole development of Thorn in these last months had been beautiful to see, beautiful in a clinical sense, as incisions and sutures and grafts could be beautiful to a surgeon. It was doubtful whether Thorn ever once stopped to ask himself why he did what he did, why he said what he said, where he got his flawless timing. The two charge accounts! Undoubtedly Thorn could have arranged them as soon as he had begun to be a regular and frequent patron, but he had waited until after publication day to decide he’d like to sign checks at “21” and the Stork.
Not too much capital would be needed for the Hathaway-Johns Agency, and since Thorn had none, it would have to be Hathaway capital complete. It was a good risk. They would need a specialist to head up a magazine fiction department, and later another expert for a radio and television department, but on everything else Thorn and he could start tomorrow.
Hathaway shifted his pad to his right knee and thought of the authors and playwrights whom he always called “my clients,” and not “our clients.” His pencil became more purposeful.
Gregory Johns $3,000.00
Maude Denkin 3,000.00
Nell Abbott 1,500.00
The list grew rapidly, and almost touched the bottom of the page; the important matter of a balanced sunburn was forgotten. About thirty names and nearly one hundred thousand dollars in annual legal fees! To most of the thirty, the firm was just a background anyway; to most of them he, Jim Hathaway, was “my lawyer,” not Storm, Goldberg, Miller, and Hathaway. Nobody liked to leave a lawyer who had been intimate with his tax returns and royalties and contracts for years, and any author who could get agency representation, legal counsel, and tax work in the same office would hop to it pretty quickly.
As for new clients, Hathaway-Johns would be perfection. Plenty of youngsters began to write because they itched for fame; unconsciously they would gravitate to Thorn. It wasn’t wise for a lawyer to be too much of a cafe-society figure, but in another few months at most, Thorn would be as frequently mentioned by Winchell and Sullivan and Walker and Earl Wilson as he was now by Leonard Lyons. And by Christmas, when The Good World was on every marquee in the land, Thornton Johns would be all the celebrity any firm could use.
Several mornings later, in a classroom at Columbia University, Thornton Johns, Junior, was asked by his English professor why he had not yet turned in his term paper on Shakespeare.
“He was reading his uncle’s book again,” a voice replied from the back row.
A manly snicker swept the room, and young Thorn writhed. Along with his father’s crew cut, he had inherited his mother’s florid complexion, and in embarrassment or anger he went carrot all over. As the professor rebuked the class, his thin old voice sternly demanding silence and order, Thornton Junior grew bitter at the perfidy of his fellow students. They had kept at him and his brother Fred for inside stuff about the book; they had licked their lips over every word of Hollywood; they had asked what Jill Goodwyn was like off the screen. And now their jealousy was making him and Fred absolute outcasts. If any of Columbia’s twenty-two thousand students weren’t cracking wise behind their backs, he’d like to know who it was.
It was a terrible thing to stand out from the crowd; the reward was great, the penalty greater. “For within this hollow crown”—Shakespeare knew, as Shakespeare knew everything. “’Tis better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perked up in a glistering grief, And wear a golden sorrow.”
It was grief; it was sorrow; but there was no sense cringing. Neither Fred nor he had made that mistake. And if Mr. Hathaway’s new plan went through, why, the whole of Columbia and Barnard could go jump in the Hudson. If it went through, Uncle Gregory wouldn’t be the only author hobnobbing with the family; trips to Hollywood would become annual affairs, and if you were a ’50 man, you could maybe get to go along next year as a graduation present.
The period had come to an end and Thorn Junior returned to more immediate problems. Looking neither right nor left, he made his way up to the front of the room. “Professor, could I talk to you?”
“Perhaps you’d better, Johns.”
“I left a note in your office, asking could I take some extra time to polish up my paper. Didn’t you see it?”
“No.”
“It was last week, and I thought silence meant assent. Consent.”
The professor said, “I see.”
“I’ll turn it in tomorrow, sir. I’ve been doing a lot of extra collateral reading in preparation,” young Thorn went on. “There was a fascinating essay, in Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille, I think it was. It wasn’t on the assigned list, but I read it anyway, and I was tempted to crib whole parts of it.”
The professor smiled. Johns was an engaging student, always was, and willing to work. Perhaps a little forbearance was called for during this attack of swell-headedness. The modern educator had to be a psychiatrist as well as a teacher, and in a country where every stenographer and bank clerk had visions of becoming famous, or working for somebody famous, or meeting somebody famous and gaining importance by telling about it at every opportunity—in such a culture, perhaps young Johns was not to be blamed for his Prince of Wales psychosis.
The professor was pleased at his own largeness of spirit and smiled once more. Thorn Junior sensed the softening attitude. “Speaking of cribbing, sir,” he said, “reminds me of a family anecdote about my Uncle Gregory and Ralph Henry Barbour—”
At the end, the professor laughed aloud, and as they walked out of the room together, strolling along in leisure like old friends, the old man said, “You know, Johns, twenty years ago your uncle was a student of mine. He took this very course, and my course in the nineteenth-century English novel. Did he ever tell you that?”
“Why, sir, I—”
“I was just talking about that at a faculty meeting yesterday,” the professor said, in his eyes an unmistakable glint of satisfaction, “and to some of my personal friends last night.”
Young Thorn remained silent. He thought, I bet the old duffer lugs Uncle Gregory in, every chance he gets. But forbearance rather than blame filled his heart.
At this same moment, young Thorn’s father was very much in the thoughts of the estimable switchboard operator at Digby and Brown. Janet reached into a five-pound box of candy Thorn had just sent her, set her teeth firmly into a caramel raisin nougat, and prayed that no call would come in for ten seconds. Her prayer was not answered. She said, “Gaftoon, Dig—” and gave up further conversational effort except “Uh-uh.” She didn’t care what she sounded like today. The whole office had got a five-dollar raise, and for the first time in four years she felt rich. Besides, Mr. Johns, that wonderful fascinating man—
She reached again for the box of candy but withdrew her hand and picked up the card beside it instead. “Blessings on you, little Jan—” It was so mysterious; it put her in mind of something but she couldn’t say just what. He had never called her Jan; only her boyfriend called her Jan and he’d been calling her that for six years, so it didn’t have this feeling of meaning something special.
Boyfriend indeed. The run-around artist, that’s what Dick was, always breaking dates at the last minute, acting as if she was nobody and would come running the instant he got good and ready. And half the time here recently, even when he was good and ready, he’d just drop in around nine to listen to the radio with her so he wouldn’t have to part with a dime!
A dome flashed red and she swallowed the last of the caramel raisin nougat.
“Gafta—well, Mr. Muncy, why don’t you close up down there and give the printing presses a rest?”
“I’ll do that. Will you buy me a lunch, if I’m broke?”
She put him through to Sales and adjusted her earpieces. Kidding around with a Big Executive at Brentano’s! Getting presents from somebody like Thornton Johns!
She glanced at her watch. It was nearly one. Vigorously she spun the dial and, as she asked for Dick MacMulligan, she tossed her head haughtily at the elongated horn suspended before her nose.
“I’m awful sorry,” she began, “but I have to stand you up for lunch.”
“You what?”
“I just can’t make it today.”
“Well, I like that. I was just starting out. Got a better date?”
“Hold it a minute.” Cut-offs riled him, but she couldn’t help it. She took her time on the incoming call and pulled out three dead cords before she flicked herself back. “I’m not going out, that’s all,” she said.
“Did your relief drop dead or what?”
“Hold it a minute.” He’s real sore, she thought, trembling happily. The magazines were always saying you should feel and act glamorous, but you had to wait until your life really got glamorous. She clicked Dick’s key open. “Suppose I do have another date?” she said. “Matter of fact, just now, one of the biggest executives at Brentano’s was asking me could I lunch with him soon.”
A moment later, her earpieces were conveying to her astounded ears an invitation for dinner that very evening, and a thousand closed philosophies suddenly opened to her.
“O.K.,” she said. “But listen, I don’t want to just hang around after, see?”
“Who wants to hang around?”
“There’s a picture with Betty Grable at the Roxy,” she said. “We can go there.”
Not even by circuitous routes did news of Janet’s swift change of social theory and Mrs. Digby’s swift change of hair get through to Gregory Johns, but he had not been hungering for matters to occupy his mind.
He was glutted. He was also swamped. He no longer told Abby that “next week it will quiet down.” It never quieted down. He kept vaguely planning rebellion at some future date but he was as yet too amiable to abandon vagueness; his adrenal gland maintained a beneficent adjustment and refused to spurt forth the juices of anger and action.
Thus, one sweltering morning, he was busily answering letters from readers and telephone calls from everybody. Abby was out searching for a new apartment.
In the heat wave that had begun early in June and now promised to break all records, Gregory had urged her not to go but she had simply looked at him without answering. Ever since their return from the West, she had kept at the search. “All they want to show is houses,” she had said. “Great big fifteen-room houses. Do real estate brokers read the bestseller lists too?”
Gregory opened the door to the front hall, hoping for a breeze, and returned to his desk. The bell from the downstairs lobby rang twice, the mailman’s signal for the eleven o’clock delivery. Gregory went down to the box and returned with another handful. Letters from readers he would permit nobody but himself or Abby to answer. They were sent first, at Thorn’s insistence, downtown to his office so that proper records could be kept of all names and addresses, but despite Thorn’s arguments, every last one was then forwarded out to Martin Heights.
Gregory began to read the newest batch; he never could resist an unread letter in favor of finishing what he was doing. After the first page of the first one, the telephone rang. He did not leave his desk for it; a week after publication day, it had been placed on a small table within reach of his long arm.
“It’s Harry,” his brother-in-law said. “Of Harry Brinton Ink.”
“What do you mean, ‘Ink’?”
“No longer of R. H. Macy Ink—that’s what I mean.”
“You pulled out for good?” Gregory listened with pleasure. Harry had become his favorite brother-in-law; Harry’s rush to success was so free of self-delusion.
“By God, Gregory, every time your book goes another edition, Gloria wants something else. I’ve been taking on one more account, and one more, and one more, and suddenly I thought, What the hell, I’m free-lancing up to my ears, why do it at night and weekends?”
“That’s great, Harry, just great.”
“Did I get a bang out of resigning! And out of telling Gloria. I even owned up how glad I am she hounded me to take the first step.”
“She knew it all along, didn’t she?”
Harry laughed. “Mind your own business. She phoned me just now. As of tomorrow, we’ve got not only a British governess, but also a French maid.”
Gregory said, “Next comes a Danish cook and an Italian gardener and you’re a whole new Marshall Plan.”
“Give her time, give her time. But for God’s sake, don’t write anything new for a while!”
“Not for a while,” Gregory said and returned to the letters. Abby answered the general ones, those Thorn had dubbed the it’s-wonderful-you’re-wonderful ones, but to anybody raising points about world government as an idea, Gregory replied himself. Often, he had to write a long, careful reply, but he never resented or begrudged time and energy spent this way. It was heartening to find such deep earnest agreement, such a passion of longing that there might yet be time to strengthen the United Nations, to change the Charter so that world law and powers to enforce that law might at last be achieved. People everywhere believed it the only solution, not just illustrious people like Churchill and Bevin and Douglas of the Supreme Court, not just a quarter of Congress and a fifth of the Senate, but men and women everywhere, in every State of the Union, in every walk of life.
It made him happy to read their letters, to write his answers. It was perhaps as deep a reward as any other single reward for having written his book.
He read the rest of the new mail, picked up his pen, and went on with the letter he had been writing. “Of course Communists hate—” The telephone rang again and he tried to ignore it. What would life be like without Thorn taking ninety per cent of the calls? Whatever one felt about Thorn, he did spare him most of the load. In the two months since publication day, the quantity of business mail had quadrupled, and the character of it had changed. Thorn showed him only a fraction of it—would he sponsor this movement, endorse that demand on Congress, sign his name to this public protest, be guest of honor at that function, send a check here, there, the other? “We understand from Mr. Thornton Johns that you never speak, but the use of your name and your presence on the dais would mean so much to the success of this important occasion.”
But it was the telephone that made consecutive thought or consecutive work impossible. What would happen next week when the new phone book came out with his number listed? Up to now only those people who by-passed Thorn, Digby and Brown, and the U. S. Post Office, and who had the idea of calling Information could get his number. Only those strangers, he amended. The family and a hundred other people had it anyway.
The phone was still ringing. Gregory gave in and answered; it was Thorn.
“French publication too!” Thorn called so often now he never wasted time on greetings. “Jim’s sending out the preliminary agreement.”
“That’s wonderful! What publisher?”
“Librairie Hachette. Jim says it’s one of the best houses in France. A hundred and twenty thousand francs’ advance; that’s around three hundred and fifty dollars. I think they’ve got a nerve, but Jim says that’s tops.”
“Thorn, it’s terrific.” Thorn must know by now what news like this meant to him. Back in April, Thorn had asked Hathaway and Ed Barnard for a list of the leading publishers and agents in Europe, and had air-mailed each of them a copy of The Good World, together with best-seller lists, sales figures, and major reviews (Bill MacNiccol’s excepted). Publication had already been arranged in England, Italy, Sweden, and Norway. Each time Gregory joyfully reported a new country to his editor, Ed Barnard called it “just a start.” In the calmest of tones, Ed would say, “Give it time. It will come out in Turkey and India and Occupied Japan and South America—everywhere except Russia and the satellites.” Long ago Partial Eclipse and Horn of Plenty had been published abroad, but only in England; the idea of seeing The Good World translated into foreign languages had moved Gregory unaccountably. Thorn was always kicking because so little money would result—”A few thousand all together, and with ten per cent for the foreign agent and then nine per cent for me, it’s just peanuts left over for you.” But even Thorn admitted there was something besides money involved. Thorn called it “world-wide publicity, including the Scandinavian.”
“One more thing,” Thorn said now. “Could Jim and I drop in on you tonight?”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Jim put an idea to me a couple of weeks ago; I’ve been thinking about it and talking it out with Cindy and the kids, but now I’d like to hash it out with you. And so would Jim.”
They made the date, and Gregory reread the beginning of his sentence. “Of course Communists hate—” He picked up his pen and wrote, “—any concept of a world government, but in five years, or ten or twenty, maybe after one more full or partial war, if the fifty non-Communist nations were actually beginning mankind’s first experiment—”
The telephone rang once more and a feminine voice said mellowly, “Good morning, Mr. Johns, this is ‘Meet the Author.’”
Gregory stiffened. This was the newest radio and television entry into the Let’s-Kill-the-Author Sweepstakes; the course was rougher, the fences higher, the water-jumps wider. “Good morning,” Gregory said. “My brother Thornton—”
“Yes, we know. We’ve written him three separate times and called him as well, so Mr. Boland decided it would be all right to telephone you direct.”
“Mr. Boland decided that, did he?”
“You see, Mr. Johns, we do understand how you feel about public appearances, but it is such a big subject, and so many people join us in thinking it deserves a huge audience. Our current rating—”
“I know your program has a huge audience.”
“And I’m sure you yourself would want the largest possible discussion of world government. We have a wonderful program lined up. Norman Cousins will take the affirmative—”
“I admire Mr. Cousins very much, and his editorials on world government always move me.”
Victory blew its heady scent into his caller’s nostrils. “Mr. Boland says we could keep the entire program on a nonpersonal plane. Just the ideas, just the book itself. Wouldn’t you agree that a lively debate, a public forum on world government, might help convince a great many people?”
“Indeed I would.” He fell silent, and this time she held her peace. It was a disturbing moment; they had put it to him on a new level; it threw him. Perhaps some part of that huge audience would be stimulated enough to think and talk and ask about world government.
An idea flashed through his mind. “In that case,” he said, “since we all seem to want the large public forum, I have a suggestion to make.”
“Oh, we really do. Mr. Boland and all of us here.”
Gregory Johns spoke very slowly. “It’s rather an odd suggestion. Why not go ahead without me there, just the book?”
“Just the what?”
“For this once, you might call it, ‘Don’t Meet the Author,’ and really discuss only the book, and its ideas.”
“You’re joking, Mr. Johns.”
“About the title, sure. But you said it wouldn’t be on a personal plane, that all of you wanted a lively debate on world government. You certainly could have a lively one. There are several critics who’d love smashing at the book again.”
For a moment there was no answer at all. Gregory thought of the letter he had just had from Hy Bernstein: the screenplay was almost finished, and Von Brann was sure they’d have a box-office smash as well as everything else they wanted. Fifty million people might see The Good World, Hy had said. Perhaps this refusal to Mr. Boland wasn’t robbing world government of too much.
“Why, Mr. Johns, I’ll ask, but I think I can say now—”
“I think so too, and I’m sorry to be so unsatisfactory.”
“Well,” she said stiffly, “it’s just that most authors are perfectly delighted to appear with us.”
“I really am sorry, and thank you for inviting me.”
Once again he turned back to the same sentence in his letter, but he had lost the desire to go on. His refusal troubled him, unimpeachable in logic though it might have been.
Suddenly he remembered Marvin Kitterly and the dentist’s office. That was ten years ago, before television, but after writing a novel that had set the country talking, Kitterly had begun to guest-star on just about every radio program on the air. “If you tuned in on ‘Information Please,’” Ed had said recently, “there was Kitterly every other week; on ‘Town Forum,’ on quiz shows, word-defining shows, current-events shows, child-psychology shows, prison-reform shows—unless it was a full symphony orchestra or a heavyweight fight at the Garden, there was Marvin Kitterly.”
“Even I heard him often.”
“So one day at his dentist’s, Kitterly was chatting with the nurse, and another patient kept stealing surreptitious glances at him. Kitterly saw it and preened a bit—of course he’d had interviews and pictures all over the place too. At last the stranger couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Excuse me, aren’t you Marvin Kitterly, the author?’”
“‘Why, yes,’ Kitterly beamed at him. ‘Yes, I am.’”
“‘I thought so, Mr. Kitterly. I recognized your voice.’”
At his desk, Gregory Johns picked up his pen. As for me, he thought, I’d rather have somebody recognize a paragraph.