Youngblood hawke, p.24
Youngblood Hawke, page 24
HAWKE
A major new name in American fiction
followed by a delirious description of the book and of its coal-truck-driving author.
Prince was full of hopes for the novel. The failure of the book clubs to pick it up had not dampened him. "They'll hop on the bandwagon, Hawke, when we pass our first hundred thousand. They'll make it a special selection or something. They're always doing that. We've got a big goddamn doorstopper of a book here and it's going to sell like hell. You just get on with that next book as fast as you can."
Hawke was not wholly flattered by the description of his first novel as a big goddamned doorstopper. But the publisher's belief in the book was exciting. Moreover Prince had infected his salesmen with this belief. They had pushed out an advance sale to the bookstores of thirty thousand copies. Prince House was money ahead on a first novel before publication, something that rarely happens. The air at the publishing company's offices was charged with favor for Youngblood Hawke, and he liked to drop in and collect the smiling deference of secretaries and sub-editors.
Jeanne Green was gone from her desk. She had taken the job at Hodge Hathaway, and in her place was a fat girl with a spotty skin, and that was saddening. Hawke missed Jeanne very much. The new chapters of Chain of Command seemed to him overstuffed and lacking in sharpness, and he would have given much to restore their working comradeship. But he had not been willing to give her a wedding ring, which had begun to seem the price, and that was that. He was riding very high, triumphant in the conquest of Frieda Winter, triumphant in the feeling of success at Prince House. He telephoned his mother, inviting her to come with Nancy to New York for publication. And when his sister got on the telephone and shyly started to talk about John Weltmann, the man with the wig, he told her by all means to bring him along, since that was what she seemed to be driving at.
Ten days before publication day, the telephone woke him in The Park Tower. It rang and rang and rang and rang, and at last the young man sat up heavily, blinking, and reached for the receiver. It was still a delicious novelty to have a telephone at his bedside, to be confronted on waking by a small Monet on the wall, and to see the Hudson River glittering far off through the western windows. "Hello?"
"Arthur, it's Waldo Fipps. I hope I didn't disturb you. Knowing your nocturnal habits I waited till eleven to call."
"Perfectly all right, Waldo. What is it?"
"We've got the first review. An advance proof. The Saturday Review of Literature."
Hawke gripped the phone. "Yes? Is it all right?"
"It's an absolute stinker."
"Oh? I'm sorry to hear that . . . Nothing good in it at all?"
"Not much. Want me to read it to you? It isn't long."
"I guess so. Who wrote it?"
"A fellow named Phil Gebble. I know Phil, he's a ham writer, a frustrated novelist. We turned down a manuscript of his a few weeks ago. His opinion is utterly meaningless. Just a vomiting of spleen. Unfortunately that's the kind of fellow they sometimes get to do book reviews."
"Well, let's hear it, Waldo."
He sat there in the broad bed, telephone to ear, with the faint perfume of Mrs. Winter rising from the bedclothes when he stirred restlessly under the stream of abuse. Fipps read the review slowly and distinctly from start to finish. "Well, Arthur, that's it. Just half a column or so. One mercy is they usually bury a panning like this in the back of the magazine."
"Is Jay upset?"
"He hasn't seen it yet. Why should it upset him? It couldn't mean less."
"But the Saturday Review is important, isn't it?"
"One notice is never of any consequence. You'll get plenty of raves to balance this."
"Let's hope so."
"You sound dismayed. I hope I haven't spoiled your morning or anything. Really, Phil Gebble is an idiot, and nobody can possibly take him seriously. I just thought you'd like to know about it."
"Of course. Thanks, Waldo. I may drop in later."
"By all means, do that. Goodbye."
Hawke hung up, and that was his welcome to the green pastures of American literature.
It seemed to him that he could repeat the whole review by heart. The phrases had sunk into him as though planted with a hot iron. "Having gotten this pile of coal-heaving prose off his chest, Mr. Hawke will perhaps return now to his former occupation, unless he makes the fatal mistake of taking his publisher's claims seriously. To this reviewer, Dostoevsky and Faulkner remain untoppled, indeed unshaken, by Mr. Prince's literary discovery from the Kentucky coal country."
Most of the review had attacked the extravagant boasts on the jacket. The book itself Gebble had dismissed as "a laboring mountain that never even brings forth its mouse." Hawke's writing was amateurish, his plot was a melodrama that would have done well in the nineteenth century, his aunt was a synthetic monster out of Dickens or possibly Dick Tracy. There had been one brief grudging sentence of praise: "The atmosphere of the town is well enough conveyed, and one somehow reads on and on in Mr. Hawke's interminable book to the very end, staying up to the late hours to do so, wanting to know how it will all come out and yet ashamed of oneself for this curiosity, as when one cannot get up and walk out of a bad movie."
Feeling a good deal as though his head had been chopped off, Hawke dragged his bleeding trunk out of bed, set his head back on his neck—as one might say—and went about showering, shaving, and dressing. The sight of Frieda's gray night dress in the bathroom was reassuring; he buried his face for a moment in the silken folds. He called room service and ordered a mighty breakfast, and when it came he ate all of it. With a double order of ham and eggs and half a dozen rolls under his belt, and the caffeine from two full coffee jugs coursing through his system, he brightened up, and combativeness began to flow from his heart to his brain and out along his limbs. It wouldn't do, of course, to find out where this Gebble lived, and go to him, and beat him senseless or throw him through a window. That was exactly what Hawke wanted to do, and it really seemed the only thing to do to a stranger who had insulted him in this way. But he was able to laugh at himself for these feelings; a real mountaineer reaction! He was in the big city. City people didn't act like that. Under the city rules he had written a book, hoping for fame and money; once the book came to light, any man who thought he wasn't entitled to fame and money was privileged to say so in print in the most venomous terms. There was nothing he could do to Gebble, nothing at all.
And yet sickness throbbed in him at the thought of the rancor, the hatred, the urge to destroy, that his book had aroused in this faceless stranger. Another thing bothered him almost as much, though it was so queer that he had not quite grasped it at first, and awareness of it only nagged to the surface as he sat smoking his first cigar, on Feydal's soft couch upholstered in yellow-and-black striped satin—and this was the relish with which Fipps had told him the bad news. The phone had rung at the stroke of eleven, as though the editor had been holding himself in and had plunged to call him. He could hear that dry voice yet, enunciating the poisonous sentences with clarity and care. Why? Why had Fipps done this so eagerly, and with so much circumstance—why, come to think of it, had he called him at all? Had he been in Fipps' place he would have waited for some good reviews. It seemed the only sensible, the only kind thing to do; authors had feelings, even a truck driver from Letchworth County had them. Wasn't Fipps the editor of this book, and wasn't he bound to hope for its success and to suffer at any reverse, as much as the author? If there had been suffering in Fipps' heart, it had not come into his telephone voice; he had never sounded gayer and more full of life. Hawke finished dressing and went to Prince House.
Fipps greeted him with the same gaiety as he came into the office. "Hi. Recovered from the Gebble yet? Here's something to counteract it." He tossed across the desk a newspaper cutting with the pink tag of a press-clipping service on it. Hawke read it with hunger. It was a review in the Summit, Nebraska Sentinel praising the book wildly. The only trouble with it was that the whole review consisted of the advertising copy on the book jacket, word for word. He pointed this out to the editor. Fipps grinned. "Oh sure. The out-of-town papers are always doing that. Saves them the trouble of reading the book. But it's a straw in the wind, anyway. How are you feeling?" The editor stared at him, and Hawke imagined that he was looking hard for the red scar where his head had been chopped off.
"I'm feeling great," he said. "My new book's rolling fast now." As a matter of fact he was feeling wretched. He had arrived at the publishing office at lunch time, and perhaps a dozen employees had passed him on his way to the editor's office. Unless it was a trick of morbid imagination, there had been a marked shading-off in the cordiality of their smiles, a sort of new politeness in their greetings, as though the Gebble review of Alms for Oblivion had been posted in every cubicle in Prince House.
The business face of Jason Prince now materialized, leaning into the doorway. "Waldo, we'd better try—oh, hello there, Youngblood," he said, walking in and slapping the author on the back. "Sitting around gossiping instead of working, hey? Bad business."
"I've just been commiserating with him over the Gebble," Fipps said.
"Phil Gebble? I would be seriously alarmed if that squirt liked the book. Look at the advance, Youngblood, not at one silly notice. We've passed thirty-one thousand."
"It just occurs to me," Hawke said, "that the jacket copy, and possibly the advertisements too, are a bit strong. I really don't think I've knocked out Dostoevsky. I may have to land a few more blows."
"My boy," said Jay Prince in a heavy jocose tone, "you just leave the bookselling to us and write up those two books you owe us. Waldo, come with me a minute."
Fipps should have looked at his desk before walking out, but he didn't. Hawke's prying eyes ran over manuscripts, letters, notes, and came on a green office memorandum clipped to several proof sheets of advertisements for Alms for Oblivion. In Jay Prince's quick spiky scrawl were these words : "In view of Gebble, etc. hold off any further advertising commitments on Hawke." This was an unpleasant turn. What did "etc." mean? What other bad news had come in? He heard the voice of Fipps in the hall, and made a show of looking out of the window.
"Arthur, still here? Anything else I can do for you?"
Hawke said, "I think I'd like to tell you about my new novel."
"Oh? Splendid." The bony, spruce editor glanced at his wrist watch, and sat behind his desk. "You've been awfully secretive about it."
"Yes, I know." Hawke was sinking into a black quicksand of despair, a deep certainty that Alms for Oblivion was a catastrophe, perhaps the most egregious failure in the history of American bookselling. He now wanted reassurance, and he wanted it so badly, he was so shaken, that he impulsively threw aside his reserve to get it from Waldo Fipps.
He told the editor the whole story of Chain of Command. He thought he told it well enough. Fipps smoked a couple of cigarettes in his elongated rather shaky fingers, rocked back and forth in his swivel chair, now and then touched his wispy mustache, and mostly stared out of the window, though once or twice his reddish eyes shifted to Hawke. When the author finished, Fipps clasped his hands behind his head, leaned back, and laughed. "It's a funny thing. It sounds like a novel that we turned down last week."
Hawke managed to say, "I don't believe you'll turn down this one."
"Oh certainly not. We've already bought it. Arthur, Jay and I have this lunch date. Jay's waiting for me." Fipps swept up the papers on his desk, dropped them in a drawer, locked the desk, and left.
Hawke had not seen or talked to Jeanne since their break-off. He telephoned her now without thinking, but the operator at Hodge Hathaway said she had gone to lunch. He hung up sadly; after this ghastly talk with Fipps he needed the assurance Jeanne, and only Jeanne, gave him. Most of the time a crest tide of self-confidence carried Hawke headlong through the days, but he could fall into suicidal troughs, and he had always suffered through these alone until he had encountered Jeanne. Frieda was different; Frieda made him feel virile and conquering. But he was not sure she really liked Alms for Oblivion, for all her frequent loving talk about his coming greatness; and he had told her little about Chain of Command. He now called Frieda at her office, despite their understanding that she was the one to call him. Her male secretary drily said, "Oh yes, Mr. Hawke, I'm sorry, Frieda is out."
2
She was lunching with Fanny Prince.
A woman needs not only a man to complete her, as the books say, she usually needs at least one other woman to talk with on pretty frank terms. Fanny Prince had discarded a husband and three small sons in her time, to take up with Jay. The two women were more or less of the same voltage. They knew the same people. Each had a good reason for looking down on the other. Frieda thought Fanny was devoid of taste, except for what she could pick up by quick imitation. Fanny thought Frieda was immoral, and what was worse, careless. Frieda's husband had more money, but the Prince money came from the creative field of publishing, whereas Paul Winter was only a wise dealer in bonds. It was a nice balance. They were good friends, as friendships go in the rapid circulation of well-to-do New York people.
They fenced around for a while on other topics before Fanny brought up Hawke. They were in the Commons Room of the Ritz Hotel, an expensive restaurant walled in gloomy wainscotting and stained glass to simulate a refectory in an old British university; it was the lunchtime haunt of the publishing trade at the moment.
Fanny said, "I talked to Jay on the phone just before I came. They're getting vorried about the Hoke book, a little bit."
"Oh?" Frieda sipped wine. "I thought it was a roaring smash before publication."
"Ve didn't mind about the Booksellers Bulletin. They can be wrong, God knows, they've missed some of the biggest ones. But they made it class four. That really hurt. Some of the retailers who gave us big orders are cutting them in half, or even cancelling to 'vait and see.' The book clubs, Jay checked and not one of them sent it up to the judges, it got knocked out in the screening. Now the notices are starting to come in. The Saturday Review is horrible. The Sunday Times gave it to Todd Fenney to review, can you imagine, another young Southern novelist, and a homosexual at that! He hates it, naturally."
"Well, a good book can survive bad notices."
"Jay's going to push it, don't vorry."
"I'm not worried. Well, no, I'm a little worried about him, the way he'll take it. He doesn't look it, Fanny, but he's thin-skinned."
"How is everything?" Fanny took the woman-to-woman tone.
Frieda spun her cigarette lighter on one corner, and glanced demurely at Mrs. Prince. "Everything? Everything is divine, thank you."
"How is he taking to The Park Tower?"
"As though he'd been born there."
"But is it such a good idea? I mean, have you thought about it? The Park Tower! Vy didn't you put him in Macy's window, Frieda?"
"I know a lot of people in The Park Tower."
"That's my point, darling."
"Well, my point is that I'm in and out of there all the time, and always have been. Anyway, I didn't plan this, it all just happened, I wanted to get him out of the revolting hole he was in and I knew Georges was going on tour and I just went and did it. He can't stay there long. And if you want to know the truth, I plain don't care. I feel as though I've just been born. I'm not doing anything wrong. He's going to be a great man, but right now he's a lamb among wolves, and I think I'm good for him. I know I am. If I'd known him a year ago Jay wouldn't have gotten him to sign that contract."
"It was a very fine contract for an unknown writer," Fanny said coldly.
Frieda said with a drop in her voice, "There he is."
Fanny turned around, and saw Hawke talking to the head waiter. He came edging through the tables, in his bulky "novelist's suit" of brown; huge, clumsy, following the head waiter like a bull led by the nose. Frieda decided to take him to a tailor tomorrow; and why did he always seem to need a haircut? His hair grew like a little boy's. He walked past them with an awkward, shamefaced, "Hello," and Frieda lifted her arm and barely moved her fingers.
Fanny called, "Youngblood, you're alone? Come eat vith us." He looked over his shoulder at her with an embarrassed smile and shook his head, his pale face suddenly crimson. Fanny said, "Ach, Harry's putting him at that tiny table by the post. That's disgusting. Let me go get him. What's wrong if he has lunch with his publisher's wife?" She moved as though to get up.
"Let him alone," Frieda said in a razor voice.
Fanny looked at her, a smile curving her heavily painted lips, and shrugged. "Yes, darling."
Across the room, in a far dim corner booth that held six people, Jeanne was having lunch with Karl Fry and Ross Hodge; they were entertaining a new mystery writer and his agent. The writer was a shy man about Hawke's age, not much more than five feet tall, gotten up in the over-collegiate style favored by New York writers: bristly short haircut, thin black knitted tie, sport-cut dark gray jacket. His manuscripts—he had submitted two—were as violent and sexy as he was peaceful and sexless. Jeanne had been comparing him in her mind with Hawke when Hawke walked into the grill. The girl stopped eating, and watched Hawke walk toward Mrs. Winter's table. Had he stopped to chat with the two women, had he sat down to lunch with them, she would have been jealous, but she would have felt that the situation was not hopeless. Mrs. Winter's small wave of the fingers, Hawke's blush and his boorish hurry to get past her said too much; said everything. Jeanne had had some bad moments in the past weeks. This trivial instant, unperceived in all its nuance by anyone but herself, was the lowest. She endured it, and even managed to answer with relevance, and in a steady voice, a question about one of the manuscripts that Fry tossed at her.
