The sound of the tracks, the inner weakness, the uneasy sleep, the pressure of something that had to be done. But why be anxious on the Wagonlit (wasn’t Jere better, Radio passing 100 again and the book near done?) with Paris to meet them in the morning like an old friend? (What was it he had to finish by the time they arrived?) No, after Kitzbühel it was never clear, more like a Fourth of July pinwheel burning itself out as it whirls into darkness. Cease to be whirled about. He and Jere whirling and whirling as on an amusement park turntable. (How do you get out of this amusement park?) The wonderful memory that could bring back every word and look and gesture going out of commission after Kitzbühel, except for the things he’d rather forget. These survived erasure like indelible ink: the transatlantic call from Wally Betz to their fifty-dollar-a-day suite at the Crillon which went off in the middle of their Paris vacation like dynamite. Hello, hello, is this Wally? It didn’t sound like Wally who always started with some sort of a rib. But anyway here was Wally with a voice like a man confessing a murder. Manley this has been the God-damnedest day the God-damnedest day! I’ve just come from the Floor. This is tough to tell you but you need thirty thousand to cover your margin. I’d cover for you in a flash. Didn’t even bother telling you about it last month. Looked like a little levelling that’d take care of itself. Christ, Charley Mitchell himself said there was nothing to worry about but I lost two hundred thousand today, maybe more. The goddam ticker is still three hours behind. Feel like somebody just whopped me in the belly with a sledge hammer. ‘But I haven’t got thirty thousand in cash, Wally.’ Well, borrow on whatever you can, insurance, go into hock. Hell, you’ll be in good company. If we c’n all come through with our margin maybe we c’n hold this thing together. Charley Mitchell says …
Next morning’s Paris Trib was a footnote to debacle and he hurried over to the customers’ room of Halle Steiglitz, already jammed with American investors on whose faces the fatal numbers were written as clearly as on the big board on the wall. On the board and over the cables disaster came ticking. He sat there among the other victims fascinated by the terrible little numbers on the board, the fascination a man must have who having slashed his wrists in the bathtub now watches the blood flowing softly from his veins. He looked around at the others and their faces were grey with physical illness. There was a distinguished old man with white hair parted in the middle like a young man’s who took a cigarette from a beautiful gold case, lit it and crushed it out without smoking and lit another. When the Trib reported his death from heart attack, the involuntary suicide, it said he had sold an independent steel company to Big Steel and had come to France to retire. His losses were reported as $480,000 in two days. There was a fat man from Biloxi (whom they had seen gay-blading around the nightspots) who held his puffy cheeks in his hands and sobbed. A genteel lady in her late forties, upon hearing that 5 now stood for 25 rather than 55, cried out in her suffering the foulest oath in the language.
Once he had accustomed himself to the idea of being wiped out, he began to appreciate how his $55,000 had bought him a ringside seat for the knockout in the tenth year of Young Jazz Age, otherwise known as Big Bull Market. And he wondered what he, who had thought he was fleeing the American money-machine, was doing here in Halle Steiglitz with the coupon clippers and the heavy plungers. Until the year before he had always said the market was a game for Yale Club men and chambermaids and he had bandied it in High Noon as the bog in which his hero is almost lost. Now it seemed even with his own instinct for prophecy that he had written his own defeat into Ted Bentley’s. What was it Hank had said? Man, the trouble with you is you never learnt how to keep your distance. You can’t decide whether you’re the photographer or the one being photographed.
Maybe that’s what drew them to Maxims that night where they knew all the recently rich Americans would be holding a wake for themselves. Through the desperate gaiety the waiters moved with a cynical obsequiousness, as if to say, ‘Let this batch have their last little fling. By the time they pay for the champagne we’ll be richer than they are.’
President Hoover was clearing his throat bravely, but the party was over. With no more dollars to cash in for francs, the expatriates were folding their manuscripts and quietly going home. It turned out even Hank had been drawing a modest income from some family investments; now he came in a little sheepishly to say he was going home. Everything was going to pieces. The word home had a strange sound on his Gallicised tongue. Hank had found a real home in Paris. Just as so much American writing had. Perhaps in the quick fever of the twenties it had had no other. Yet saying goodbye to Hank he realised that he had never belonged to the literary Americans-in-Paris. He hadn’t belonged to anything.
Defeated soldiers falling back to shorten their lines, they withdrew from the Crillon to a pension near Hank’s studio on the Rue de l’Université. It was all a pinwheel jumble flashing into darkness. Bits and pieces were flying off into space. Jere, with whom he was increasingly out of sorts, came home with a Rose Rescat creation that had cost 750 francs. ‘But, Man, I felt so blue. And’ (remembering that fabulous hat in ’19) ‘I thought maybe this would change our luck.’ His only answer had been to look at her dully, knowing there was no way to tell her that luck had nothing to do with them, that luck was a schoolgirl’s dream, that luck was only the bulb that shone when the current was on, a result and never a cause, and now the powerhouse that illuminated their world had gone dead.
But of course Jere would not understand, so she turned to brandy instead of breakfast and was off for three days with the stragglers of a Surrealiste group who in his opinion mistook their own foulness for the infections of society. When finally he came to fetch her he was sick with what he saw, unable even to summon up jealousy against such a circus of the flesh. Jere, homelessly home with him in the rooms with the scaly wallpaper and the so-called plumbing, remembered less of what had happened than if suddenly she had been awakened from a dark dream. The bits and pieces flew about as he dreamt of arms, legs, eyes, birthmarks, toes and tufts of hair, all jigsawed into scattered twisty parts. As he reached out to put them together, a piece dropped off the window ledge and then another. When he rushed into the street to rescue them, the pieces had been swept into the gutter and washed down the sewer. He would wake in a sweat with a dry sob and Jere would be lying there with him and he would wonder if she was the part that had slipped off the ledge.
When he tried now on the train to bring back into focus the how and why of separation, the pinwheel had almost burnt itself away and the crazy circles of light were dimmer and dimmer. The cable from Jere’s sister with the clear cold words Papa died this morning you are needed here for the settling of the estate – They agreed it might be better or at least cheaper for him to stay on and finish the book. It was no good without her or with her, but he worked and worked to make this the book.
When it was finished he came back to the new America of soup kitchens and apple vendors and Communists, to the professional cheerleaders pointing to prosperity around the corner, beating out the musical assurance that Happy Days Are Here Again and following Jimmy Walker’s advice to avoid depressing movies. The big joke was the hotel clerk asking the man if he wanted the room for sleeping or jumping, which was hard to laugh at with Wally Betz doing a swan dive from his penthouse facing the Park and not even succeeding in doing away with himself but merely in twisting up his spine.
He had cabled Jere to meet him, for they weren’t really separated though she hadn’t answered a letter in months. But she had always been an erratic correspondent. On the pier he kept hoping until an executor for the Wilder estate came along and told him where she was.
At a luxurious sanitarium in upper New York he found her on a croquet lawn as smooth as a putting green playing intently with an ex-senator, a steel magnate’s soft son who had drunk his way through five wives, and a depleted Follies girl who had once been a front-page scandal. A guard whose function was not concealed by his sportclothes had led him to the group. When she saw him she went on playing her ball and missed the wicket. She came over and said, ‘See what you did? You made me miss my shot.’ When he apologised, feeling like a latecomer to the garden party of the White Queen, she became almost the Jere he used to know. ‘It doesn’t matter. I hate this silly OT stuff anyway. You should see us all trying to sew and play bridge in the salon after supper. I think it’d make a hilarious play. My doctor thinks I should try it.’
It seemed that she had been furious with him for deserting her and not leaving Europe sooner. Apparently she had forgotten all about their decision that she should come back and join him when she was ready. ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. I guess nobody cares whether I live or die any more,’ she insisted on ending the argument.
His talk with Dr Stedman was no more satisfactory. He had discounted Jere’s charge that Stedman was a phony, but somehow the man was a little too suave for a scientist. His answers to the hard questions were diplomatic. With a great many high-sounding phrases he knew how to say nothing at all in such a way as to reassure the average visitor. The impression he left was that at $40 a day he was in no hurry to let go of a good thing.
The book came out to mixed notices and a disappointing advance sale. The ephemeral quality of the subject matter made him seem wordy and decadent. Most of the reviewers buried him respectfully. Some of the critics actually blamed him for ‘the social irresponsibility of the twenties’ as if the entire spirit of the decade had been his own private idea.
The reaction, or rather the lack of reaction, made him feel as if in entering this new decade he was entering a strange house to which he had not been invited. It seemed almost too damned easy to think of himself and the twenties as going smash together, as if he were unconsciously acting out the twenties in some ghastly charade, and yet here he was in the first year of the Depression with his money gone, his wife nearly gone, his reputation going. What had Hank said? He didn’t know how to keep his distance.
Hank came in to see him at the Harvard Club one day, an American radical now with vague plans for organising a new left-wing book club. ‘Man, one thing the Crash has done, it’s killed the illusion of a middle class. We have to take our stand with the workers or go over to the ruling class.’ They argued as they always seemed to now, and Hank made the grim prediction that he’d never write another first-rate book until he faced the economic realities (seemed as if people were always shaking fingers in his face and warning him to Get Reality like a new religion). But when they parted Hank still said, ‘Now, for Chris’sake, if you need me for anything, a little dough or something, holler’ and ‘Remember for my money you still start where the others leave off. Write the story of our generation from a social point of view and you’ve got the first important book of the Depression.’
Old Man Wilder had written Jere out of the will and only one of the sisters helped at all (though she was thoroughly ashamed of Jere like the others). So forty dollars a day was soon too much and he had to move her into town to a place on Central Park West for a hundred a week (still too much but what could he do?). There people wandered up and down the corridors all day and all night and lived on little black capsules of belladonna (and God knows what else) that Jere began to crave almost as much as the Terpene Hydrate. But one night she called from an obscure hotel on the West Side – Man, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’ve just taken two dozen sleeping pills and I want to say goodbye. ‘Jere, for God’s sake, I thought you were at Coomb’s.’ He found her lying across the bed breathing hideously. Up through a city that didn’t care screamed the ambulance. Then three days under the oxygen tent, with Hank and Burt Seixas there with the money for the private room. Watching her breathe and holding his breath with her, loving her still. Yet when the tent was removed and she could talk enough to say Man, let’s try it again and promise all the old promises, he knew he had to say, ‘First you go back to Coomb’s and stop drinking and then let’s try another analyst and then we’ll see.’ She turned her head to the wall and cried and he put his hand over his eyes to hide his own helpless tears.
The ordeal with Jere, the frustration of money-needs, loneliness, disorientation and the first real writing block of his career made drinking a necessity. Alcohol had always loosened his wits and his sense of festival, but now it only dragged him down into despondency and evil temper. For the first time in his life he was thrown out of a speak for insulting a guest; another time when he started a fight he would have been booked for disorderly conduct if Burt Seixas hadn’t come to his rescue and pulled some strings.
An old friend from Amherst got Douglas into Eagle School near Greenfield, Mass., and that cost money. So he squeezed Burt Seixas for advances and because it was cheap and still had a few memories he holed up at the Murray Hill to crank out formula for the magazines. He had to do five before, even with his name, they would take one. Somehow he managed the tuition and Jere’s bills at Coomb’s. He would have sold his eyes right out of their sockets to keep her out of a state institution. And his own drinking was mean and double-desperate, murderous and suicidal. One day, one day, where was he? Could you tell me where I am? I mean what hotel? What town? Greenwich Arms in Stamford? Oh. An’ an’ what day is it? Friday, June tenth. Date means something. Hasta mean something. Lord, Douglas’s graduation. Ready for Lawrenceville. Musn’t let Douglas down. Trying to hold himself together among the oh-so-proper parents of the boys at Eagle School and the stares the who-in-the-world-is-that looks and the hurt of hearing the outraged parents from Brookline saying He looks like something from Skid Row and the answer that half killed him, They say he’s the author of something or other. Christ, what a humbug this whole educational system was, he was telling them, not just thinking but actually telling them and people were laughing and the headmaster hovered over the scene like a buzzard ready to snatch his rotten presence from the midst of all this respectability. Then into this nightmare thrusts the face of Douglas crying, ‘God damn you, you’re stinking drunk. All the guys’re laughing at me, they’re laughing.’ The child’s pain came through sharply to him and he slunk away. On the B & M going back to New York he churned in an agony of self-disgust.
He remembered walking up the steps of the fine old Fifth Avenue mansion that housed the publishers who used to make a celebration of his every appearance. He remembered having to wait twenty minutes while Burt Seixas finished reading a new outline with Caulfield Kdaly, the new twenty-two-year-old flash, then listening to Burt, his old close friend, talking from behind his big curved pipe, ‘Man, we simply can’t see our way to any further advances. You know how the book business has been hit. Frankly, Man, it would be easier if I could show them upstairs that you were actually at work on something. But, Man, if a few dollars will help you in a personal way …’ ‘No, no, thanks anyway, Burt. So after all I’ve done for Dorset House, I’m not even a good professional risk.’ ‘Now, Manley, be reasonable, you know it isn’t that exactly …’
And getting back to his two-dollar room in the Hotel Excelsior (after all those palatial Excelsiors on the European circuit) to find a hundred-dollar bill in his overcoat pocket pinned to a note that said only I believe in you. B.S. Lying low in a cubbyhole room in this Hotel Excelsior was like not being in New York at all; that night he bought a box of fig newtons for supper and sat down at the desk to make an inventory of the cluttered disorder of his mind. On one page of stationery he added up his debts, $32,475. On another, the money he had loaned to friends through the years when he was flush, $11,500. Paring to the bone he budgeted his living expenses and family responsibilities for $12,000. He made a list of all his literary assets, the stories that might be resold for radio programmes or movies and the ones he had in mind but had never written. There were ideas for at least three more novels he was going to write. The mere listing of these things started a feeble current. Finally he listed the names not only of those who owed him money but some moral indebtedness or mere wealthy friends from the past who had once made that nice little speech about feeling free to call on them.
They all came up with the same answer, as if they had rehearsed it together; wished they could, but times’ve changed, maybe if things improve with the new Administration … The run-around, the stall, leaving him to wonder just how many friends he had of all those masquerading as friends, made up to look like friends, I know what – I’ll go as a friend, but now the costume party’s over and they’ve all gone home.
When the last phone call to the last name on the list led nowhere but back into himself, a heavy hammer went thud against a leaden bell and he said, Well, worse has come to worst and I’ll wire Phil Coyne. For years he had been conscientiously ignoring the fabulous offers from Coyne on behalf of producers looking for polish jobs to give their scripts the Halliday touch. Well – his telegram tried to sound light-hearted – the Halliday touch was on the market at last.
Two days later his answer was one of those exuberant Hollywood responses – tickled to death know I can get you fifteen hundred a week quicker than you can say Spyros Skouras buzz me what plane to meet.
He couldn’t tell Coyne he was coming by bus. All he had was the C-note from Burt, fifty dollars from Hank and another seventy-five for a first edition of Bleak House in its original monthly instalments he had paid $785 for in 1927 when he had thought of becoming a collector. (‘Rare books are always a good investment,’ he remembered explaining to Jere.) He also had a complete leather-bound edition of Cabell, twenty-two handsome volumes, which he had once thought of passing down to his son and heir as an invaluable possession. When he asked fifty dollars for the set, the dealer just showed his bad teeth in a mirthless laugh.
He travelled across the continent with his head back against the seat rest, a part of the grey crumpled mass crowded into the bus, a piece of human cargo in a cross-country truck with seats.
Like the others he moved dully west with the listless dream of maybe it’s a little better farther on. He looked out through unfocusing eyes at the monotonous American landscape. He hardly listened to the drone of complaints that took the form of idle argument about the course of the Depression, Roosevelt, Communism, the bonus, the eviction strikes. And through it all, through twenty-three sovereign states, a young man in a shabby suit with a thin face discoloured with impetigo sang in a tireless drone: I guess I’ll have to change my plan …
When he climbed out of the bus and called Coyne, his agent said, Sweetheart I’m tickled to death, and he observed morosely, ‘People have been tickled to death. I understand it’s a form of torture among certain African tribes.’
‘Are you an expert on Africa?’ Coyne said, right on the ball. ‘There’s something at Universal called The Gorilla Woman. About a beautiful white girl raised by gorillas. She can’t talk, kind of a female Tarzan, until this white hunter finds her. She attacks him like a gorilla and he captures her and keeps her in a cage until he tames her. Ends in a helluva chase with all the gorillas after them. They want to make it as big as the elephant stampede in Chang. But I hear they’re having script trouble.’
He heard himself saying with admirable restraint that he did not think he’d be ideal for Gorilla Woman.
‘To tell you the truth, I’ve never been even formally introduced to a gorilla woman.’
‘Well, hundreds of you writers are out of work,’ Coyne said reprovingly. ‘We’re beginning to feel the pinch out here too. But don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll have something for you by the end of the week.’
Meanwhile Coyne had made reservations for him at the Beverly-Wilshire. ‘Mr Coyne, you might as well know, if I were in a position to maintain myself at the Beverly-Wilshire, I wouldn’t have bothered coming out here at all.’
‘Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. After all, you’re a famous author, aren’t you? You’ve got to keep up a front. You don’t have to pay the bill till you get a job – the manager’s a pal of mine. And you’re a cinch, even if things are a little tighter at the moment and you aren’t quite as hot now as you were last time out. You’ll hear from me, Hally.’
Up on Yucca above Hollywood Boulevard he found a room in a boarding house for ten dollars a week. It was a run-down wooden mansion built in that fussy hybrid architecture of twenty years before, full of run-down movie people. A blonde who had been something of a name only a few years back, somewhat bloated with drink but still attractive enough to lead a busy life, showed him her scrapbook and he liked the way she tossed off the good years without a fleck of self-pity – ‘What the hell, I had a lot of laughs.’ A stunt man who had broken his back doing a comic fall down a flight of stairs and would never be able to straighten up again said he was going to write a book to solve the Depression. There was a wrestler who thought he had an operatic voice and made the rounds of the studios each day to convince them he was a second Lawrence Tibbett. There was an old couple who used to make fifty dollars a day playing bits but now ‘the directors we knew are nearly all gone’ and a hundred a month was doing well. There was quite a pretty young girl from Hazelton, Pa., who had been picked as a star by her high-school dramatic coach and who wrote her mother every day. She had a terrible time with the operatic wrestler and Manley couldn’t help feeling a little sorry when she finally succumbed.
He found himself surprisingly at home among all these people, the has-beens and the never-will-bes. Here in this flea-bitten rooming house were the pain and the false hope and the terrible day-to-day waiting that was more Hollywood than all the fanfare of Grauman’s Chinese.
Once he had written the story of an extra, The Telephone Slave, and he had not done badly with his imagining, but now he was an extra and his constant calls to Coyne followed a cheerless pattern in which both parties pretend to be friendly and light-hearted. ‘Hello, Hally … just going to call you … nothing new at the moment, sweetheart … Joe Siskind may have something for you when he gets back from New York … I’ll be in touch with you, Hally …’
But less and less in touch as the months dragged on. No, Mr Coyne hasn’t come in yet, no, Mr Coyne has just gone out – the technique of the snub which the business world has done so much to develop. With a sense of outrage he worked himself up to calling Coyne at his home while Coyne was giving a crucial dinner party for J.C. Coles. The brush-off incited him to the point of telling Coyne off, which left him not only jobless but agentless, a kind of Hollywood untouchable.
Summer came on in a wave of enervating heat that all the natives assured one another was pleasantly dry. He walked the steaming Middle-Western streets of Hollywood – Kansas City with prettier girls and pistachio architecture. Friends of his were receiving two thousand dollars a week here every Wednesday, but he was careful to avoid them. He would liked to have looked into Stanley Rose’s Book Shop but he had no desire to be introduced to the young men of promise who were said to hang out there, and he was wary of Stanley’s reputation for generosity.
He had taken the precaution of registering as Joseph Manley and it gave him an inexplicable satisfaction to be addressed as Joe. Not that the chances were very great of anyone’s quickening to the name of Manley Halliday. But this Joe business gave him a gratifying sense of a new identity. The idea of moving to another country with a new name, perhaps even a new occupation, beginning again as someone else, appealed to him enormously, became an insistent daydream.
With an unexpected cheque for $803.17 for reprint royalties, he bought an old Lincoln roadster, an impractical purchase which he recognised as a hangover from his habits of the Boom. He had always been the slave of elegant machines. He had worshipped Stutz, Pierce-Arrow, Rolls-Royce, Daimler, Renault, Hispano-Suiza, Duesenberg. The big Lincoln was a steal.
On a Monday morning (is there anything that makes a man feel so adrift and unemployed in America as going nowhere in particular on a Monday morning?) he drove up the coastal highway, past the hotel-size beach house of Marion Davies where he had once been a guest of honour. Although the day promised to be warm it was still early and the beaches were almost deserted. He enjoyed the way the giant sea stretched lazily along the sand. He enjoyed the typical Southern Californian flourishes, the hamburg stand built to resemble a feudal castle, the arrestingly developed young girl whose yellow dab of sunsuit allowed nearly all of her to darken to golden brown.
This was the passive journey of a tumbleweed at the mercy of winds carrying north. At Topanga Canyon the radiator boiled over. He walked along the row of ramshackle cottages on stilts above the water. There was one that attracted his attention, first because of its name San Simian (between C-Breeze and Dive Inn) and then because of the small for-rent sign on the door. Forty minutes later San Simian was his: $50 for the summer months, $25 after the season. It was just beaver-board inside, a room, a small bath and a kitchenette. Each time the waves pounded up beneath him San Simian would shudder like a small ship in a heavy sea. But the room had a good wide window, where he could sit for hours and watch the ocean. He liked the idea that this room was a one-man cave where he could hibernate to lick his wounds. He made a game of seeing how modestly he could live and, depending largely on fig newtons and crackers, was especially pleased with himself the week his food bill cut under six dollars.
He would sit at his window watching the waves or the birds forming up for flight and think how good and peaceful it was that not a person in the world knew where he was. No phone, no address, no neighbours. He sat at his window and watched the sandpipers chase the foamy line of the surf back into the sea.
On rickety supports that somehow managed to be more secure than they looked, like those of his shaky retreat, bothering no one and only asking not to be bothered in return, he lived through the crowded summer into the fall, when only the hardy ones trusted themselves to the sea; then on into the winter, when the beach was abandoned to the desolate and the foolhardy.
Now, with one exception, he had the beach colony all to himself. A young woman whose regular dips at seven each morning had become, without his noticing it, part of the pattern of his day, like the rise and fall of the sun and the tide, the passing of the fishing boats and the movement of the birds. Each morning he watched her from his window, running a hundred yards up and down the narrow beach, then neatly putting her towel down and plunging out beyond the breakers to swim perhaps a dozen strokes in one direction, then a dozen in the other. He grew fond of watching her ride the last wave in, remove her yellow bathing cap and shake out her thick black hair. With a nice sense of physical disinterest, he grew accustomed to her tall, sturdy, full rather than plump and not at all unhandsome body. He found himself looking forward each morning to her ritual.
One winter’s morning he was especially pleased when she appeared and went through her programme despite a driving rain and a grey, roiled surf. On several occasions they were the only people on the beach and there seemed an obligation to nod or mumble good morning as they passed, but he felt no desire to break out of the pattern of solitude he had established. She seemed perfectly willing to accept this arrangement.
As winter drew on he took a mild pride in their relationship. They had a mutual respect for each other’s privacy while maintaining a pleasant seashore civility. One cool morning in March, unable to sleep, he had risen to stroll the beach. When she appeared they said their usual good morning but this time he was closer and he stopped just beyond the waterline to watch her take the waves.
‘Pretty cold?’ he felt he ought to say when she ran over to pick up the towel lying near him.
‘About fifty,’ she said.
She dried herself vigorously and unselfconsciously. She had a fine reassuring face. It was not one of the beautiful faces in his life, but it was interesting. The nose was classically high-bridged, graceful in an ancient Semitic way. The eyes were dark blue and unusually direct.
‘You stay down here all winter?’ he asked, so he wouldn’t seem to be staring.
‘Yes, I like winters here. Well, I have to hurry. Goodbye.’
She walked rapidly up the beach to her cottage and went in without looking back.
The following weekend brought one of those warm spring days that reward year-round beach-dwellers for all the greyness and gloom. He was sitting on the beach when she came out, smiled at him matter-of-factly, and began to read. When after half an hour or so she put the book down to take a dip, he couldn’t resist wandering by, as if by accident, to see what book it was. It was Shadow Ball. He would have thought himself beyond such things but the unlikelihood of this coincidence seemed to arouse his sleeping vanity. On his way back to his cottage for a bite of lunch he paused for small talk of weather and swimming and then asked in a casual way what she was reading and how she liked it. ‘Nice job,’ she said. ‘He’s caught something true about Hollywood. The extravagance and the fear.’
‘Oh, I think he’s pretty half-baked and second-rate,’ he had said, enjoying himself immensely.
She said, ‘That’s ridiculous. He makes some silly technical mistakes about Hollywood, but it’s thoughtful and it’s damn literate.’
She seemed so interested in the works of Halliday that he couldn’t resist saying, ‘I wonder where he is now.’
‘Haven’t heard of him in years,’ she said. ‘My father used to know him when he was in Hollywood.’
This called for introductions. She was Ann Loeb. Loeb. Loeb. Name’s familiar. ‘Not the daughter of old Sam Loeb?’
His powers of deduction almost gave him away. ‘Yes, how did you know?’
‘Oh, after all it was a big name. Is he still producing?’
‘Died last year. Poor guy, pretty much broken. When he was on top our house Christmas Day was Grand Central. Christmas before last the phone didn’t ring once. Mean town.’
Uh, Jack Delaney he said his name was. First one that came to him. He had seen Delaney put up a sensational fight against Paul Berlenbach in the Garden years ago. Delaney had been one of his heroes too, before Jack hit the skids.
He had stood talking to her so long that it seemed easy to accept her invitation to sit down. After all the months alone it was good to talk to someone again. Miss Loeb had a calm, accurate way of going at things that was stimulating without being too disquieting. She seemed very sure of what she knew, but more in a scientific than in a defiant way and when she said, as she often did, That’s ridiculous, she had a way of making whatever she was passing judgement on seem indeed the most ridiculous thing in the world.
All that next week she was away and though he desired no more than to have little conversations with her the beach seemed desolate without her. On the beach the following Saturday she mentioned casually that she was making spaghetti and perhaps he’d like to drop in for a bite. ‘Nothing formal, just come if you feel like.’ Despite all resolves he was still a social animal and, though very much on his guard, he even showed up with a clean shirt. To avoid laundering, he had stripped his wardrobe to beach-combing essentials.
Her cottage was four rooms, built more substantially than his, furnished with rough-and-ready good taste. There was a surprisingly good library for a beach shack and a record player with a lot of chamber music, Bach and some Ravel and Stravinsky. She made a batch of Martinis and they listened to the Chaconne from the Violin Sonata and sipped a fair local red wine with the spaghetti. The moon threw a ghostly road across the sea. It was the first civilised eating since he had come to Topanga and the wine and then the brandy on top of the Martinis brought him a sense of well-being that began to blur into dizziness. He remembered her saying she was a film cutter and his drawing her out with a conventional attack on the movies and her beginning to explain a number of technical phases of the art he had never thought of before. He remembered sliding off into space with her face and her words farther and farther in the distance. But after a vague struggle of where am I? he remembered nothing until late the next morning when with a shaky feeling of self-reproach he realised the answer was: on her daybed in the front room.
She brought him a glass of orange juice. She already had been swimming. She said it was a nice day.
‘This proves exactly what I feared,’ he said. ‘My days as a social human being are definitely behind me.’
‘That’s ridiculous. All it proves is that you have a very low tolerance to alcohol.’
But he insisted on the tragic view. He was sorry he had spoilt what promised to be a pleasant acquaintanceship. ‘If I have any genius,’ he said, ‘it’s for making an unholy mess of everything I do.’
‘You’re too intelligent for self-pity,’ she said. ‘Now go home and shave and stop worrying about yourself. And come for supper next Saturday night if you feel like it.’
Before he could realise its true significance, the Saturday-night supper had become the hook on which his whole week hung. They had a running argument about movies which they both seemed to enjoy. He insisted that any art which was not dependent on the skill and taste and integrity of a single person was doomed to everlasting mediocrity. But she said, ‘That’s ridiculous. You’re judging from the Hollywood pictures and nearly all of them are mediocre. But they’re mediocre for business reasons, not for the ones you give. Building pyramids was a group art. There must have been a producer in the person of the Pharaoh who had the money and the general idea, an architect, a sculptor, and master masons to carry out the design, skilled workmen under them and so forth. Or the totem poles. Of course there can be a valid group art. We’ve seen it in the movies with Griffith and Eisenstein and Chaplin. It needs a guiding genius or at least a knowing hand like Vidor’s or Ford’s. But when you start with something good enough and everyone does his job, the director, writer, cameraman, cutter, composer and sound mixer – for some reason I always leave out the actors – it’s an art all right.’
They talked about Thalberg – funny how after all the blank years his memory could fill in everything that had been said – and he wondered whether he was the great genius that Hollywood believed.
‘Well – it’s a worn-out word,’ she had said. ‘Maybe in its original sense Irving was a genius. A kind of inspirational god. Genius has its practical side too. The man who gets there first when he’s most needed. A man who manages to dig a well in the driest part of the Sahara is a genius even though there may be a hundred who dig much better wells in town. Irving is that kind of genius. He’s come to the desert and he’s struck water. It may not be a very deep well but it’ll do for a start.’
‘In other words God was the first genius,’ he said. ‘And you have to be at least a little god in a little pool to qualify.’
‘Are you doing any writing at all now?’ she asked suddenly.
He began to answer and then he remembered he was Jack Delaney and caught himself. ‘What makes you think I’m a writer?’
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. I’ve known for weeks. Since the day I was reading Shadow Ball on the beach. When I went in I looked at the picture on the back. You haven’t changed that much.’
‘That picture was taken a thousand years ago when I was still a young man and still a writer.’
‘SP,’ she said.
‘SP?’
‘Self-pity. It doesn’t become you. You’re better than that.’
After that he found he could talk quite frankly about his predicament. It was not a nervous or a mental breakdown, he said, just a feeling that too much had happened. And he told her his image of the boat that could not be steered or propelled, forever needing to be bailed. ‘I used to be pretty good at bailing when Sam had a boat at Laguna,’ she said. ‘Madame, I shall be delighted to hand you the pail,’ he said with an echo of his old charm.
The following Saturday night she asked him again if he was writing and he said just remaining alive seemed to require all his energy and creative power now and she said, ‘That’s ridiculous. Why don’t you try writing your life? Just a kind of summing up of what you’ve done and thought and become. Write it for yourself so you won’t have to compete with anything. A lot cheaper than going to an analyst. Now start right away.’
To his surprise, he did, and just the sound of the typewriter’s clicking was tonic for him. It felt good even to be going through the empty exercise of writing and he began to think that getting it all down, the too-early triumphs, the reckless celebration, the soaring success, the plunging to earth of his dreams and twenties, the wreckage and the attempt to salvage, would give him a blueprint at last on which to build for middle-age. He was like a crustacean, he had written, that sheds its first bright shell and then fails to find the larger, duller, more substantial one it needs for protection through maturity.
He read some of this to Ann, including the confession that at first he had wanted the applause of his friends and then the rewards of his own society and now he saw through temporal success to the life-after-death of being read by future generations. ‘Like Stendhal, I’d settle for a hundred years,’ he said. ‘But if you don’t get that, you’re just like any sandpiper chasing crabs along the beach, living for the moment.’
‘You have a chance if you think of yourself as just beginning. If you think of the writing and the living so far as just a preparation.’
He knew what she was trying to do, pull him up out of the past, but he said, ‘Ruth’s home-run record didn’t prepare him for hitting more home runs. He had just so many home runs in him and he got rid of most of them before he was thirty.’
‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,’ she had said. ‘For a gifted, intelligent man you are full of the most juvenile nonsense. Forget these silly sports heroes. An athlete’s career is just the opposite of an artist’s. The athlete matures faster, loses his reflexes through his twenties and is washed up in his thirties. But an artist should build slowly through his twenties, start maturing in his thirties and reach his peak in his fifties or sixties. Maybe that’s the trouble with you American writers, you think of yourselves as athletic stars.’
‘I always had a crazy ambition to be a backfield star – I’ll never know why,’ he confessed. ‘To break out into the open with one of those dazzling exhibitions like Red Grange or Chris Cagle.’
‘I think you’re the second author I know who wanted to be a football player. And two others who are frustrated pitchers and one would-be Jimmy McLarnin. In Europe the authors would like to have been composers or painters or mathematicians.’
‘We’re a more muscular race. And I suppose since writers are fairly sensitive registers of national consciousness, they naturally reflect the hero-worship of their times. After all who else had any grandeur in American life except a Ruth, a Dempsey or a Bobby Jones?’
‘You go home and start your novel and leave the touchdowns to Orv Mohler,’ she said.
He had begun dropping in for supper Sundays as well as Saturdays and without either of them thinking anything about it they began to say, ‘If you’re going up to the store we need some ketchup and a can of coffee.’ There was no danger of his falling in love with her, for his heart was hidden away securely in the vault with Jere’s, but he had the fondness for her that a crumbling wall might have for the post that shores it.
One night talking about the writing that was starting to trickle into a flow again (he had finished a short story that seemed as good as ever he had done) he wondered how it would affect his work to be so withdrawn, not just from the world but from himself. ‘My only real experience comes when I’m writing now. I woke up this morning thinking I’m not a man at all, just a man-like machine for writing fiction.’
‘That’s ridiculous. Of course you’re a man. Sounds like SP to me.’
(‘Every time I catch you in an SP you have to go to the store for the groceries,’ she had said, beginning a cure remarkable for its simplicity. Every time be caught himself in a soft attitude he’d find himself thinking SP and after a while it became automatic and the self-pity began to dry up like a sore exposed to ultraviolet.)
But this time he said, ‘No, Ann, there’s a difference; this is SA and it doesn’t stand for sex-appeal but self-analysis. For instance, if this had been ten years ago I’m sure I would have thought about wanting you. That’s probably as far as it would have gone, but once or twice at least I’d have thought about it, wondered about it.’
‘And you don’t think about it now?’
He shook his head.
‘That’s ridiculous.’
It was like urging him to write, or to exorcise self-pity. It was all part of her effort to convince him that he was a better man than he gave himself credit for being. By the time summer came on again it seemed unnecessary to keep San Simian when her cottage was more than large enough.
‘You understand, I’m completely incapable of loving you, but much to my surprise I like being with you,’ he had felt obliged to say.
‘Let’s leave it this way,’ she said. ‘Any time it gets too much for you just feel free to go, the same way you came.’
Perhaps because this enabled him to have a relationship without being weighed down with its responsibilities the bond grew stronger. By the end of summer he had sold two stories that were not pot-boilers. He had been thinking about the new novel since the previous spring and by autumn was ready to begin. But after a few pages he tired exasperatingly. At times nausea left him unable to work for days and by mid-afternoon his brain would be dull with the need for sleep.
He despised himself for his inertia and told Ann he was determined not to succumb to symptoms he was sure were psychic – his unwillingness to face the challenge of a new book. Said Ann, consistent pragmatist, ‘Don’t be too sure everything’s neurotic. There’s a danger of swinging too far the other way. Before you give yourself up as a subconscious malingerer, I want you to see my doctor. Dr Rubin’s a diagnostician with enough psychoanalytic knowledge to advise you if that’s your trouble.’
Dr Rubin said: diabetes. It was a final blow to vanity to realise he carried an incurable physical flaw. On the other hand, it was reassuring to learn that his routine could be stabilised by careful diet, rest and drugs rather than by the more uncertain correctives of the mind. There was more energy to draw on after that, and the manuscript began to grow. But the medical treatment had added to his expenses. Jere was trying a new analyst, Douglas was in prep school, and in addition to these burdens there was the embarrassment of slipping into a dependant’s status in a household supported by Ann. So the sugar balance was restored but not the financial, and this began to prey so insistently on his mind that he kept interrupting his work to write short stories again. It was like groping through a maze of underground tunnels from which he could find no exit. But if he could ever work his way out into the light, he’d be all right. He was sure of that now. With Ann, he was absolutely sure. Only these story sales would never heal the wound. You didn’t apply a band-aid when a man had a six-inch gash in his side.
That’s how the idea of a movie job was resurrected. A job of fifteen weeks at two thousand a week would square him with the world. With that behind him he could stay with the new writing programme until he was as old as GBS. Fifteen weeks – it wouldn’t be easy to put the book aside – but he rationalised the delay as the debt he owed for past transgressions. Ann was willing to loan him the money to see the book through but when he insisted she told him about the Love on Ice job. She knew Milgrim was looking for a new writer. And he was partial to literary reputations. She’d talk to Al Harper, the agent, about seeing Milgrim.
So there it was, full circle, from Hollywood when it wanted him to Hollywood when he wanted it, or rather, needed it. A college musical – the chore appealed to him about as much as if he had been asked to write the text for a Sears Roebuck catalogue.
But there was that ten weeks’ minimum of two thousand a week – ten weeks’ minimum of two thousand a week – ten weeks’ minimum of two thousand a week the tracks seemed to be saying.
If only he could keep his mind on the story, keep your mind on the story – keep your mind on the story, the tracks kept saying, what story – what was the story – what story – what was the story.
Ann was asking him, Manley, are you all right?
No, it wasn’t Ann. Where the hell was Ann? Pro’ly not back from the studio yet. My God, his head. Must’ve forgotten to take his shot. Must’ve fallen asleep waiting for Ann. Ann ’s it you?
‘Manley this is Shep, Shep.’
Shep? Oh. Oh. ‘Got my part finished. Think we got it now, Shep.’
The train suddenly screamed its warning into the night.
‘Shep? Shep. Where are we Shep?’
‘Not sure. Think we’re coming in to Springdale.’
‘Coming in …?’
He felt the unfamiliar leather, slowly remembering, the men’s room – what was he doing in the men’s room of a train coming into Springdale? He lay back experimentally and tried to open his eyes again in the familiar darkness of his room in the cottage. No good, he was on the train all right, he was writing that damned movie all right, he was on his way to Webster all right, and suddenly as he went down for the last lime his whole life passed before his eyes. Good Lord, maybe the slicks had something there after all, he was always going down for the last time, his life was always passing before his eyes, at least one of his eyes was always watching his life pass before him, only what he had told, what he had dreamt, what he had thought, was all a horrible tangle.
‘’F I said anything I shouldn’t …’
‘Forget it,’ Shep said. It had begun as if he were going to spill his guts but then it had wandered off into a meaningless jumble that finally reached an end in restless sleep. ‘Manley, are you sure you’re all right? Not sick or anything?’
Manley said, ‘Gotta keep our promise. Gotta work out this story.’
Looking at the spent face with the dark shadows under the eyes, Shep said, ‘Manley, you better lie down and get some more sleep. I’ll see what I can do alone and wake you up an hour before we get in to talk it over.’
‘No. Feel like I was deserting. ’F I could just get a cup of coffee. Stayed up three days and nights once to finish a job on nothing but coffee. Gonna lick this thing with you.’
He staggered to his feet, sick inside with a tremendous effort to hold together. ‘Let’s go the diner get some coffee.’
‘Know what time it is – nearly two.’
‘Gotta have coffee.’
The train was slowing down for Springdale. Shep asked the sleepy porter how much time they had. Ten minutes. He peered out beyond the squat dark shadow of the little station to the fuzzy red neon of an all-night diner across the street.
‘Maybe we c’n make that diner if we run for it.’
‘Gotta have coffee,’ Manley said. ‘Be a new man ’f I have a cupa coffee.’