Youngblood hawke, p.59
Youngblood Hawke, page 59
Hawke shrugged at Jeanne, and they walked to the passageway. Mrs. Hawke said, taking Jeanne's arm, "Seems to me you need a little champagne, Jeanie. You're awful down in the mouth. Jeanie, I want you to know Nancy and John think the world of you, and I sure do too. Why, you've changed all my ideas about the Jews. People are just people, and that's a great truth."
The ship was scheduled to sail at two. At five minutes to two Hawke left his suite, where he had been unpacking while two stewards cleared away the debris of the party. Hawke had drunk a lot of champagne after his talk with Jeanne, and he was feeling dizzy and gay, and the end of his nose was numb; something that usually happened only when he was very drunk. He found a place at the crowded rail amidships, and looked up and down the wharf until he saw the splotch of pink which was his mother, and with her Jeanne, and Ross Hodge, and to his surprise, Gus Adam. The lawyer had told him half an hour earlier that he was late for a faculty conference, yet there he was, deep in conversation with Jeanne. Hawke's emotions were all on edge; he had a swift pang of jealousy, and then he laughed out loud at himself, so that the passengers on either side of him glanced at the burly laughing man uneasily. He waved both hands in the air and bellowed, "Hey, ma! Hey, Jeanne! Ma! Ma!"
His mother heard, and looked up, searching for him. "Right here, ma! Up here! The big money maker!"
She saw him, and eagerly waved. She pointed him out to the others, who waved too. The ship's whistle blasted several times. The Nieuw Amsterdam began to move. He waved and waved. Was Jeanne touching a handkerchief to her eyes? It was hard to see her clearly.
A woman standing beside him at the rail said, "Aren't you Youngblood Hawke?" She wore a fetching white linen suit; she was blonde, perhaps thirty, well-groomed, pretty and her smile was inviting.
"Yes, ma'am, Ah am."
"You've given me many hours of pleasure. I just wanted to tell you that." She fluttered her eyelashes at him.
Lifted yet on the foam of the champagne, Hawke had the impulse to pick up the thrown rose. The woman was not bad-looking at all; she had a small-boned figure like Frieda's. It was a momentary flare of the self that he hoped he was leaving behind. "Ah'm glad, ma'am. Ah appreciate your telling me. Excuse me."
He went to his cabin, got the working pad out of the old brown satchel, and resumed work on page one thousand, five hundred and eighty-four of his new book.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1
AMONG Jeanne Fry's old friends in California and Washington she had become a legend. She was the girl who had made good, the glitterer of the crowd, the one who had gone to New York and carved for herself, while yet in her twenties, the career of an editor in the great publishing house of Hodge Hathaway. But Jeanne had not come to New York to seek a career. She had drifted into publishing in order to support herself, while she waited for her destiny, probably in the form of a man. In retrospect her fate seemed to have been fixed by the flimsiest chain of accidents—the encounter at a dreary Greenwich Village party with a girl who had just left a job in the styling department of Prince House to get married; her own stab at the job, which had been a lucky hit; then after months of tedious drudgery the illness of one of the older copy editors, which had resulted in her finding on her desk the enormous messy manuscript of Alms for Oblivion; and then—and then Arthur Hawke, blasting through her life like a typhoon and somehow leaving her married to Karl Fry, in a dismal piled wreckage of emotions and dreams. All those decisive events had gone so fast, so terribly fast! She had acted hastily, had said and done many wrong things, and had capped her blunders by striking at Hawke with the only weapon she could find to hand, marriage to another man. Some sure instinct had told her that, whatever Hawke's entanglement with Frieda, it would hurt him if she married Karl; and blinded with rage and frustration, she had done it, and so had stamped a shape on her whole life.
Thinking back on it Jeanne had long since concluded—perhaps in order to be able to keep her sanity—that marriage was all luck. Girls at a marriageable age were emotion-ridden nervous ignorant harried fools. Prudent marriages fell apart; mad marriages turned out beautifully; it was all luck, all luck! Why, even her marriage with Karl had worked, in a fashion! She was fond of him, and on the whole they jog-trotted through the days amiably enough. Jeanne could never decide once for all whether she should or should not have tried harder to marry Hawke, whether she should have been more patient with him, whether other tactics might not have worked better, and whether life with him would have been a glory or a horror. Of one thing she was certain: she could not have tolerated the casual infidelities that Frieda put up with.
The Frys now lived quietly in the small apartment in the Sixties east of Lexington Avenue where Karl had first taken her years ago, to feed her martinis and commence his tenacious and respectful wooing. They each had a small dark bedroom, and an L-shaped main room of fair size which was library, sitting room, and dining room in one. The furniture was old, dowdy, and comfortable. Nothing was impressive in the place except the walls and walls of books. It was the reverse of luxurious, and when old friends visited her they were surprised, having expected a couple of Hodge Hathaway editors to live in an apartment such as one sees in movies of Manhattan high life: spacious, ultra-modem, with sweeping views of the downtown towers and the rivers. But this small gloomy place was about what they could afford. The rent was fixed by law at a fraction of the prices for new apartments. Salaries of editors are modest, and too much of Karl's earnings still went in alimony. From this apartment they could walk to the offices of Hodge Hathaway in good weather, and on Lexington Avenue there were shops that served the wealthy residents of Park and Fifth Avenues. They could enjoy the amenities of these shops. They ate in restaurants much of the time; but Jeanne could also insert herself into the tiny kitchenette, revolve here and there for an hour or so in a great clatter, and emerge hot and dishevelled with a fine dinner when she chose. Even to the people who knew them fairly well, the Frys appeared to be a happy couple.
At Hodge Hathaway, Jeanne and Karl had two desks in an office by themselves, and they shared a secretary. On the organization chart they were the mysteries department, and they had built up a good list of writers of murder puzzles. But there was not enough work in that for both of them. Karl did most of it. To Jeanne's desk also came a variety of manuscripts, usually first novels or translations of little-known Europeans.
Her relationship with the major novelist Youngblood Hawke, which gave her special status, was most unusual. He had fastened on to her from the first, he had developed an immediate and total trust in her, and he had turned off approaches by senior editors of the firm, who were not too pleased at seeing a money maker like Hawke in the hands of this young woman. Jeanne and Hawke had talked of these approaches, and they suspected that Ross Hodge was behind them. The latest had occurred shortly after the painful meeting of Hodge and the Frys with the lawyer Adam. But Hawke had made it clear that nobody but Jeanne could hope to touch his copy.
Aside from this curious distinction of Jeanne's she was rated as an able and conscientious editor, with certain faults: too intolerant and caustic in her judgments, insensitive to richly poetic prose, inclined to impatience with allegory or symbolism, a ruthless slasher of manuscripts once she was given the authority to slash, prudish about foul language, violently contemptuous of imitations, and decidedly old-fashioned in her emphasis on plotting. On the other hand, she had an excellent instinct for picking out promising new books and authors. When she liked a book, she was effective at suggesting revisions and story changes that could transform a confused and dubious effort into a success; and her tact and persuasiveness in getting weary authors to keep at their tasks, or to undertake new ambitious ones, were valuable traits. It was always a mistake to give her a manuscript by a homosexual. There had been some wild blowups as a result, and Hodge Hathaway had lost one very talented young sodomite from Canada who was now a critics' darling and a best-seller besides. But Jeanne Fry had never withdrawn her opinion that his writing reminded her of soiled nylon underwear.
Her acid judgments had made her enemies, of course. Hawke's fantastic success had made yet more enemies for her, as well as for him. It was a widespread bit of gossip in the trade that she was his mistress. People believed this, despite the fact that Hawke's long affair with Frieda Winter was the next thing to common knowledge in New York. There was another whisper that also had much circulation: the books of Youngblood Hawke had "really" been written by Jeanne Fry!
One would think that the professional people who passed this rumor around would have been the first to laugh at the folly of it. If Jeanne really had written the books, why had she not published them as hers? What was gained by pretending that they were written by a man named Hawke? Yet the rumor held its ground. Publishing is competitive enough in the United States, though it is not, as in some lands, a snarling whirl of starved dogs. Hawke's great success called forth in the business the itch to tear him down. It was not enough that some little magazines and college teachers berated his books. That was a routine thing; it happened to all successful novelists. But if he had not "really" written his books, if an obscure young woman had written them, or had collaborated in the writing of them, that was wonderful news. It detracted from Hawke, and somehow added no special lustre to Jeanne. They were a pair of forgers, and Hawke's popular books were nothing but concocted fakes. When it soothes people's vanities to believe something, it will go hard but they will believe it. Jeanne and Hawke knew of this rumor. When Hawke first heard it he had flown into a bellowing rage. Jeanne thought it was a joke. Yet a man as astute as Quentin Judd had begun his questions about her work methods during their lunch by asking how much truth there was to the story.
In point of fact, Jeanne contributed to Youngblood Hawke's books, beyond technical editing, about as much invention, criticism, and help as some authors' wives do. Of course no two authors are alike in their methods, or in their marriages. There have been famous novelists whose wives never looked at their books, even after they were printed. But often the wife of a writer serves him as copyist, sounding board, research assistant, day-to-day critic, encourager of his strong points and suppressor of his failings; all this in addition to her household labors, and the special task of being custodian of a creative person, who is usually one sort or another of a cranky fool when he is not burning with his flame. Jeanne seemed born to be an author's wife; perhaps to be Hawke's wife. Had she been married to him the rumors that she was his collaborator or his ghost could not possibly have gotten started. The trouble was that she rendered him these wifely services without being his wife, outside the privacy of wedlock, in which most authors hide the contribution of their wives, taking all the credit to themselves. You might say that Hawke had been sleeping with Frieda Winter, and using Jeanne Fry as a wife in his art. But the way it came out, to the public view, he was an author who depended too much on his editor, and who—on the evaluation of malice—could not exist without her.
2
His first letters to her were wonderful patches of brightness in an exceptionally gray and miserable September.
Never had there been such damp heat, such pouring rain, and such exasperation at home and in the office. Karl was bedridden. The weather was plain hell. She seldom got to the office in the morning without being drenched; if not by rain, then by perspiration. To get a taxicab was next to impossible; when she did manage to halt one, like as not some burly ferocious woman would dart through the streaming rain, seize the door handle, bare her teeth at Jeanne and take the cab; in the unending New York fight for taxis Jeanne was a perpetual loser. She would trudge through the rain to Hodge Hathaway, where the clammy air-conditioning after the steambath of the streets made her sneeze and shiver. She had an unshakable cold, and her voice was down to a rasp.
In her office nothing seemed to await her but bad manuscripts, offended authors, and short stiff notes from Ross Hodge. In the aftermath of the summer demoralization of routine, books were being printed full of mistakes; art work on jackets was coming out all wrong; five thousand copies of one travel book emerged from the binder with illustrations upside down; and so forth. She was doing most of Karl's work as well as her own. Her secretary inconsiderately got pregnant and quit. Nothing was selling, and the fall list was the weakest in years. In fact it seemed to be raining inside the Hodge Hathaway offices as well as in the black streets. The wind howled down Madison Avenue, the thunder crashed and echoed all day long, and purple cracks of lightning seemed to have replaced daylight as the ordinary illumination of New York City.
Karl was a restless patient at best, and at this time he became a real devil. His two weapons were sarcasm and martyrdom. Of the two she preferred the sarcasm; if it stung, it was sometimes amusing. His white-faced lapses into silence, his too-patient smiles, his averted eyes whenever she returned a short answer, were unendurable, mostly because she knew she was wrong to be impatient with him. It was a beastly trap he was in, a hot bed in a dark room, week after week. He peevishly refused to try an air conditioner, saying that when he was a corpse, which would not be long at the present rate, it would be time enough to refrigerate him. As his health mended and the last weeks of his confinement began to seem a mere medical formality, he grew more trying. They had an appalling squabble over some eggs she scrambled for his breakfast which he thought were too loose, and they did not talk for twenty-four hours, and then his self-abasing apology did not clear the air. A new quarrel broke out when she had lunch with Adam and did not first tell Karl about it.
This happened about two weeks after Hawke sailed. At the farewell party the lawyer had asked for a chance to meet with her and explain his reasons for advising Karl as he had. It was a delicate business, a little like talking things over with a doctor behind the patient's back, but Jeanne had decided to do it, and she was glad she had. Adam's ideas about Karl's predicament made sense to her once he spelled them out. She had to admit that he had probably saved Karl's life by discouraging him from returning to Washington. The lawyer remained an enigma to her—she could not tell whether his politics were liberal or very reactionary, even after talking to him for two hours about communism—and his slightly patronizing self-assurance still irritated her, but she became convinced that he meant well to Karl. Also it was clear that he thought her mightily attractive, and a woman will forgive a man much when she discerns that. But she made the mistake of disclosing the lunch to Karl that night and the effect on her invalid husband really alarmed her. She stopped answering his bitter accusations—which went as far as a remark that men from the back counties of Kentucky seemed to have a fatal fascination for her—because she began to think he might have another heart attack. He got out of the bed, and took several drinks of forbidden whiskey and a sleeping pill. Next day he said nothing about the fight, nor did he ever refer to it again. But it left a further residue of unhappiness in the hot, hot, dark, small apartment.
Into all this petty misery Hawke's letters came like rays of April sunlight. When she saw one at the door in the morning she all but fell on it. He carelessly typed three or four sheets at a time, full of cheery news and irradiated with affection for her. Everything seemed to be going as well as possible. The trip to Europe was beginning to look like the most fortunate decision of his life. First of all, he was piling up pages of Will Horne, and he was doing it with no more than three hours of work a day, three hours before dawn rigidly scheduled and rigidly held to, whatever his hours the night before. His old energy had come back. He could sightsee all day, sleep four or five hours, write off his pages, and tear away to sightsee again. Apparently the solution to all his woes had been to get away from New York and Frieda. He wrote in his first letter, which he mailed from London, that his personal rule for fame, fortune, and good health would henceforth be half a dozen words in the Book of Proverbs: "Give not thy strength to women." He was holding to that rule without any exertion of will power, he claimed, despite the numbers of attractive and unattached women aboard the ship, and at the hotels where he was staying.
If you'll believe me, what decides me against women in the end is the time they take. Nothing more moral or praiseworthy is involved. It's impossible to tell you how much I relish my freedom. I'm reading a book a day, the way I used to before I came to New York. I just got through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in a week; it took me a month in the Seabees, the first time around, but I've read a lot of philosophy since then. If I'm not mistaken the Critique is a huge gloomy Gothic labyrinth of words, at the center of which you find a bright red box of crackerjacks. I used to be diffident about such impressions until I read the other philosophers, who all hint that Kant was an idiot compared to them.
This letter then went into ecstatic praise of Devon and Cornwall. He was certainly going to settle down in a small English country town once he had "done" Paris and Rome, and maybe Venice. And he would never stop hoping that she would appear one day, and they would revel together in the magic green picturebook that was England.
I can't tell you what it's like. Just imagine driving into and through a series of dissolving Constable landscapes, like Alice going through a lot of looking glasses one after the other, and you'll have a vague notion of it, maybe. England is heaven, that's all. You've got to come when I finish the book, if not sooner.
His letter from Rome was mainly a narrative of his encounter with the Hauptmanns. Hawke was not inclined to dwell on famous sights:
Saw St. Peter's and the Vatican. St. Peter's a little too much, the Pantheon stuck on top of the Parthenon, Michelangelo trying to prove that the Christian Renaissance had it all over the Greeks and only succeeding in being titanically vulgar to my ignorant taste, like a woman wearing two Paris hats one on top of the other. The chic effect is not doubled. The Vatican has a clutter of bad paintings and statuary, too, at least what I saw, besides some good things. Best thing I've seen in Rome, far and away, is Michelangelo's Moses, stuck off in some small church. No point letting that old Jew into the first-class hotels, I guess they figure, and they're probably right. He's embarrassing.
