FLAHIVE IS ONE of the teachers at this Successful Writers School. He sits at his desk all day correcting articles and stories that are sent in and giving the scholars pointers by return mail, which was the gist of the objection he raised when I phoned him about a look at some stuff of mine. “We’re a correspondence school, you know, Mr. Spofford. The proper procedure is for you to enrol in the course and get your instructions by post.” I had an answer for that one which he probably antisipated without looking forward to it.
Flahive writes himself, or tries to. He’s had one novel published that the New York Times called derivative. I was impressed till I looked the word up—my word for that day—and even then remained a little impressed considering the heap of reading you have to do to get to be what the word means. “He owes a lot to Faulkner,” the critic wrote. Well he don’t owe Faulkner no more than he does me. I let him run up a bill of thirty-four smackers for fryers out at the farm when he was writing Mauberly’s Wobble, evadently a tender fictionalized memoir of his father, a ex-alcoholic. Flahive himself is a potential ex-alcoholic, if you get my meaning, who use to turn up in his cups at the farm lamenting how tough things were and softening me up for a little more credit. He knew exactly what afternoons George and Mare killed and I was on duty in the salesroom. He would complain how badly the book was going. “Why don’t you take a course at the Successful Writers School?” I finally says one day. “Maybe they can get you out of the bunker.” He drew himself up to his full height, such as it is, and says, “Nothing worth learning can be taught.” A principle that apparently don’t hinder you none on the dispensing end, because next thing I knew he had a job teaching there hisself while he wrote on the side. Now that he had an income he still didn’t seem in no hurry to discharge his debt, which I gently hinted as much over the wire. So it didn’t take much pressure to make him agree to have lunch, on me, and read what I had so far.
We went to Indelicato’s. Its an Italian joint in the wrong part of town that I used to go to a lot but was frequenting only seldom at the time because the suburban element had discovered it and made it shiek. Its an old house in the upper floor of which Indelicato hisself lives. I’ve known Angelo for years and introduced my friend to him.
Flahive is a born Irishman. He has your Irishman’s taste for public drinking, sentimental one minute pugnacious the next, but always sociable; buttering you up when he isn’t telling you off, but always company. Flahive put away two whiskies while he appreciated the interior, running his eye around the silk paneled walls, the bah relief above the fireplace and the old-fashioned teardrop chandelier which I admire too but would rather not sit under as it stirs old memories of The Phantom of the Opera. The place was a rich man’s residence at the turn of the century, and Indelicato wastes no money on cleaning and restoring, hence the seedy elegance that draws the disserning. I was surprised Flahive had never been there before. It was filling up rapidly with ish women and sort-of men. When Flahive started to make mystical signs in the air with his empty glass for the benefit of the waiter I hinted there would be a bottle of Chianti to go with the veal Parmagiana we had both ordered, and he took the hint. He put his tongue in among the ice cubes for the last drop of whiskey, like a bee in quest of nectar, and set the glass down. When Indelicato himself had hobbled over with the wine and poured us each a glass, I reached into my pocket and passed the manuscript to Flahive.
“Ah, my reading for tonight.”
“You can read it now. Its the only copy I got.”
As he read he glanced at me from time to time over the hornrim glasses he had to put on to do so, his pink nose twitching like a rabbit’s, a sort of tick he has, and the wine glass rarely out of his hand. By the time he had finished three or four pages our veal Parmagianas were steaming in front of both of us.
“You’ve got something in your craw, Mr. Spofford,” he said, continuing to read with the manuscript flat on the table now, so he could eat at the same time. “That’s as good a motive as any for a work of art of course,” he added quickly.
I sensed that I was going to be worn thin. His way of beating around the bush in generalities without giving no opinion of the work in question caused this, in large part. He said vaguely, describing circles in the air with his knife and fork, that I seemed to have an animus. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded dirty. “What Auden calls a catharsis of resentment,” he explained, making it no better fast and shedding no real light on anything. All I seemed to be getting out of this was my word-for-the-day for a month in advance. I tried to grab them out of the air and stack them up in my mind as they went by.
All the while Flahive talked he kept flipping hot little amounts of veal around in his big mouth to cool them off, with short hissing and gasping noises that didn’t add much to the occasion either. I could see that he was stalling. He rolled his eyes to the ceiling and made faces as he burned his tongue. Finally he put his knife and fork down and seemed to be trying to push himself away from the table, as though he was sitting in a wheelchair and wanted to bolt. He sat farther and farther back in the chair, till at one point he was connected to his lunch by one strand of melted cheese running between his plate and his mouth. Riled as I was by this incompetence, I felt at the same time a keen interest in all these details that I wanted to hurry home and put down on paper before I forgot them—how Flahive’s green eyes rolled around in his bald dome, the hot food, the gasping and hissing, the single frail string of cheese sauce connecting him to his veal Parmagiana—in other words all the living, breathing essence of a work of art.
“What about the writing?” I says. “What about how good that is? The texture of the prose and all.”
Flahive’s eyes threatened to disappear up into his skull as he leaned back even farther in the chair, the single strand of cheese sauce thinning out alarmingly now till it was ready to snap. He fought off this cobweb with both hands as he said: “The spelling. That’s of course out of the question, but of course it can be corrected. Lots of good writers don’t know how to—but the mistakes aren’t even consistent. I mean they vary. Just as your grammatical constructions do, I notice. They keep changing from page to page. One place you have it hisself and in another himself. And how the apostrophes come and go!”
I remembered a English teacher Geneva had in school who commented on one of her themes that she sometimes spelled the same word two different ways in the same paragraph, thereby showing spontaneity. I wondered if Flahive was sharp enough to spot the same element at work here. Not that it was any skin off my back; he was on trial here as a teacher, not me. Flahive made odd humming noises, as though some kind of kettle was starting to boil inside him, or some kind of engine generating ideas that nobody would be sure of their validity till they came out. He seemed curious himself about what he was going to say next, some teacher!
“Your work needs discipline,” he said, and closed his eyes. He put his head back past the top of the chair, as though against some invisible wall he wished he was behind. I felt my hackles really rise now, thinking to myself that if his parents had of administered a little of what he was talking about at the age when it does some good he might not be sitting there dishing out impertinences to somebody twice his age. Just because he wrote a novel that was derivative didn’t make him the world’s leading authority. I could of done as well myself if I’d had more of a chance to read.
“And what you’ve got can’t seem to make up its mind what it is,” he went on with the same crucified look as he took a gulp of his Chianti. “Is it a novel? Is it a reminiscence? Is it a book of loosely strung together observations about life? Of course I’m only going on a very small sample, too little to form a fair judgement. I’d have to read a great deal more.”
“I aim to see to that,” I says with a look intended to add by way of reminder, Thirty-four clams worth to be exact, pal.
When I finally drove him back to the Successful Writers School he was in a heavily oiled condition, thanks to a few brandies he had with the coffee, and I in a thoroughly foul humor. It was while we were sitting side by side in the car rather than facing one another that he really opened up. “The thing is your too close to the subject. You lack the objectivity necessary to really pin down this society you’ve got in your crop, even satirically. By all means write. Scribble away, put everything down that comes into your head. What I mean wells up. But then let it cool off. That’s the important thing. Don’t show me anything again for six months at the very least.”
He lit a cigar and threw the match out. He didn’t have to roll down any window to do so as the Ford is an open runabout.
“I think you ought to put this car in the book. Tell why you keep it at all. Why you tool around Fairfield County in a 1926 Model T with a license plate reading SCAT. Why do you?”
I thought the question self-explanatory, but I explained it to him anyways.
The 1926 flivver was an answer to the sports cars, Rollses, Bentleys and Cadillacs with radios and even phonographs whizzing by at speeds that may sublamate sex but also endanger children on bicycles. I mean I’d rather have the children endanger me. The SCAT was my razzberries to the whole kit and kaboodle, but spesifically to the custom introduced by the commuters theirselves, whose personalized letters-instead-of-numbers license plates made my teeth ache, especially when they are cute things like CLEF, which declares the owner to be a composer, or WNBC, that he is a net exec. But most of all the letter combinations which are the inishles of husband and wife cunningly intertwined. They gave me the worst belly ache of all because one out of three of them are going to get divorced anyway and then who gets custody of the plates? Its an interesting question. I gave prolonged thought to the four-letter word I would hurl back at them, like my exhaust, settling for the stiffest the law would allow. I showed the clerk at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles a list I had made and he shook his head at all of them except SCAT and he hesitated at that a little.
“You sure hate the sheepherders, don’t you cowboy?” Flahive says. “But this Lizzie is wonderful. Where did you ever get it?”
“I never got it. I just kept it.”
Here Flahive doubled over and liked to perish with such a fit of coughing I thought the cigar had done him in, but it turned out to be amusement. Laughing like hell he said, “Wonderful. Like Proust and the woman he asked where she ever got her hats and the woman answered, I don’t get them, I just have them.” Here he had another paroxysm and I thought if he choked to death the Renasonce would really be on in Connecticut, but no such luck. He says, “Well let’s do this again sometime,” for we had come to a halt in the parking lot behind the Successful Writers School. I stopped with a jerk, and I can say that again.
Flahive asked me to pull in behind as he wanted to sneak in the rear door so as not to have to explain where he was two and a half hours for lunch. “Lets rip a chop again soon. I’ll give you a ring. And I do mean take your time with the book. Let it marinate for a while. Don’t be in any rush.” He hesitated and took me in. “I seem to have irritated you. Please take what I’ve said in the spirit in which its meant—constructive criticism.”
He started to walk toward the door of the building. Then he suddenly came back again and put his head in the open flivver. “There is no great art without compassion,” he said. He had to patter alongside the car to get in this postscript, because I had thrun in the clutch and started out the driveway, to hell with him. “And what do you really know about these people you’re attacking? I mean as people. You don’t know enough about them to hate them, let alone love them.”
“You jist said I was too close to the subject,” I says without turning to look at him, and picking up speed as I bounced out onto the road, Flahive galloping alongside the car. “Having a little trouble making up your mind which it is? A little trouble diagnozing my work, Flahive?”
“Too close emotionally while being remote from it in fact, is my point,” he says, jumping onto the running board like a cop commandeering the car, or a crook. “It’s a question of authentisity. You haven’t the slightest idea how these people live. Don’t go away mad, Mr. Spofford. I don’t mean any offense.” I told you he was a born Irishman, now acting on the Irishman’s instinct to keep a conversation going no matter what. We were now in the thick of traffic. Flahive kind of squatted down on the running board, holding onto the top of my door with both hands, his coattails flying and his tweed hat nearly falling off. “I didn’t say you had no talent. There are primitives in art, why not in literature? You could be above sentence structure like Joyce, you have Lardner’s anti-sophistication, and you’re mean as O’Hara. Greater praise in my book there isn’t.”
I brought my fist down on his hands with all my might. I kept banging first one of them then the other, as he kept pulling one off then the other, grabbing hold again with the first, like a survivor in the water trying to climb into a lifeboat there isn’t room for and having his knuckles rapped by an oar held by who’s boss.
“Be careful who you call names,” I warned him. “I don’t take abuse from nobody, especially when their half my age.” With that I slammed on the brake for a red light, flinging Flahive around in a half circle so that his rear went to the front and his face came into view with mine. He lost his balance, getting his footing again in the street. He grinned nervously at me under the tweed hat, which he straightened with one hand. “Your wonderful,” he said. “We been through all that,” I said. We waited for the light to change, our situation becoming dreamlike. His lips twitched in a grin that was a combination of charm and despair.
“So then is it to be a novel we’re going to have, a memoir, or a volume of loosely connected pungent observations?”
“None of your beeswax.”
Just then the light changed and I put the car in gear and started off. I could see him in the rear-view mirror, standing there in the middle of the street, looking at my vanishing license plate.
I had made the mistake of consulting the enemy.