Youngblood hawke, p.60
Youngblood Hawke, page 60
The Roman food! People talk about Paris but I don't see how any food on earth can touch what I've been eating. I've been lucky in a way, I've been doing Rome with a colossally rich and very pleasant couple who know Rome the way I know Hovey. The woman is the daughter of Anne Karen. You remember, Karen was supposed to play Aunt Bertha in the Oblivion movie and then she up and died in India and the movie collapsed. Anyway, her daughter, a Mrs. Hauptmann, once wrote me a letter about Chain of Command from Rome. That's how I happened to look her up.
I had only the faintest recollection of her. That was the time I drove from Hovey to New York in a blizzard, you remember, and I must have been plumb delirious when I showed up at the Waldorf-Astoria. I hardly remember anything that happened. But if you'll forgive me, the episode seems to have been one of the most impressive experiences of this woman's life. She describes it with amazing vividness. It seems I fell into Anne Karen's suite in a greasy duffle coat caked with snow, two-day growth of beard, face white as paper, eyes like burning coals, and I proceeded to down a whole quart of whiskey without the slightest effect, and to sweep Anne Karen off her feet—and the daughter too—with the most magnificent narration of a story either of them had ever heard. I promise you I don't remember a particle of this. I know I met with Karen and Luzzatto and they decided to buy the book, but I have no impression of the daughter as she was. All I remember is Anne Karen, sitting on the floor in a puddle of green silk, dazzlingly beautiful though she must have been fifty.
Anyway her daughter now is a too-plump woman of thirty or so with especially fat little hands, but if she were unattached I might be inclined to overlook all that because she must be one of the rich women of the world, and she obviously thinks the world of A. Youngblood Hawke. Her father was Monroe Lesser, and evidently Lesser and Karen between them were two of the cleverest people who ever came to Hollywood. They put all their earnings into Los Angeles real estate—in the depression! Can you picture it, buying in a couple of million dollars' worth of that land at 1930 prices? To top it all some of the land is now producing oil! Honor Hauptmann's wealth almost passes calculation. She must be worth twenty million dollars in her own right, yet nobody's ever heard of her. Christ, Jeanne, there are rich people in this world, that's one thing I'm learning! I mean rich. The Winters are pikers compared to the Hauptmanns and the set they move in, the South American crowd. Because mind you, Honor's husband has even more money than she has! Manuel Hauptmann is a Peruvian. Obviously his family was once German but now they're thoroughly Latinized and they own nearly all the sugar in Peru. It seems that's about half the sugar in the world, which was also news to me. He's a very genteel and manly little man, Teutonic, blondish; he doesn't look exactly Latin and yet his speech and his manners are wholly South American: soft, elegant, fantastically polite. It's an interesting mixture. He goes for racing cars, flies his own plane, has his own yacht, and all that. I have no idea how Honor Lesser came to marry a Peruvian. I gather they met in Rome about four years ago. Now they have twins three years old and a new baby, but it doesn't keep them from barrelling all over Europe. The kids live with about ninety servants in a villa outside Florence overlooking the Arno. Anyway I've been a protégé of the Hauptmanns ever since I came to Rome. I've met some of the fanciest people, here and in Florence, Italian admirals and generals and marchesas as well as these South American plutocrats—good lord, those Latin millionaires seem to comb the world for the best-looking women! The wives are absolute staggerers, and oh Jeanne, their clothes, their manners, their chic! The effect is to make me firmer than ever in my celibacy, I swear. Why bother with women unless you can have one of those? And I can't. Those cost more money than I now have or probably will ever have. The only other kind of woman worth having is one you love heart and soul, and I have no available candidates in sight, have I? I half wish Honor Lesser had let me know before she got married how fascinated she was by the unshaven feverish literary scarecrow who fell in on her out of a blizzard. If Shaw could live off a millionairess, why not Hawke? However, it's just as well, the fact is the slightest trace of excess fat on a woman disgusts me and Honor is too fat. She eats like a pig. A woman should never, never, never have fat hands.
(Here Jeanne stopped reading to take a long look at her hands, turning them here and there. She knew Hawke loved her hands, and indeed they were one of her good points, small, blunt, yet graceful, the skin smooth and translucent, the fingers thin but rounded; strong pretty hands. A lot of good they had done her!)
Then in this long letter he described the magnificence of some of the Italian homes in Rome and Florence that the Hauptmanns had taken him to.
These people live in actual museums, Jeanne, honestly! The paintings and statues I saw in the Rizzoti home, just in the main gallery and the library (I never got into the bedrooms), would be enough to start a museum in Louisville or Trenton. There are dozens of homes like it, maybe hundreds, in Rome and Florence. Yet these people sit and talk and smoke and drink among these stunning million-dollar masterpieces, and eat, and make love, and go to the bathroom, and all that. It's a revelation to me that this way of life exists. I'd never have had a glimpse of it, in all likelihood, if not for the curious chance that Honor Hauptmann has had a long crush on me. However once in the charmed group, I must say I'm treated well. These people are very bored because they've had everything since birth, and I'm a sort of talking bear on a chain I guess. My French is coming in handy though I'm dead in Italian. You never know when conscientiousness will pay off. When I got going on Balzac and Victor Hugo out at sea, during the war, I made the decision never to read any French writer except in French. My dictionary fell apart from eking out my lousy University of Kentucky French, and my accent strains the amazing politeness of these people, I know, yet I get along.
There was more in this vein, including a few references to the "remote and tantalizing" loveliness of the upper-class Italian women, which Jeanne could have done without. But he ended with a handsome paragraph about how much he missed her, and with the new page count of Will Horne, which if true was almost beyond belief.
His first letter from Paris was in quite another vein. Nothing about Paris was good. The weather was an unending warm drizzle, the hotel prices were astronomical, and the Parisians were in a general conspiracy to make Americans feel ill-at-ease and inferior.
By Christ, I'm beginning to understand here how a colored man must feel in Alabama. I swear it would probably help if I were colored. I've seen some Negroes in the restaurants and theatres squiring around the most spectacular Frenchwomen in sight (though believe me not one of them compares to the Italian killers I met or to those heartrending collectors' items that the South American nabobs marry!). When I talk French here to a taxidriver or desk clerk I'm like as not met with a sneer and an answer in disgusting zis-and-zat English. So to hell with them, I now talk nothing but English and I lay on Kentucky too. I make these French bastards work to understand me.
I can't imagine where the rumor got started that the French are gay and frivolous. I have never seen people more glum at their pleasures. They eat elaborate lavish meals with dead-pan solemn faces, Jeanne, as though they were ritualistically eating their own fathers. They sit in their naughty night clubs and stare at the drooping files of bare titties parading in front of them, and for all the frivolity they show they might be at a guillotining. The Americans in the crowd get infected with the gloom, they get boisterously drunk in self-defense or they just sit looking as if they'd just heard that their party lost the election. Take my word for it, Paris is ghastly.
He had met Howard Fain, and the encounter had sealed his depression. He saw in the disintegrated young novelist an image of his own future, or at least a threat that was hanging over him. They had the same literary agent in France, a woman who was Ferdie Lax's Paris representative, and she had brought them together for dinner. Then Fain had taken him to a café frequented by the existentialists, all with the ceremonial dirty trench coat, Jeanie, and the ceremonial cigarette, and the ceremonial thick glasses, and the ceremonial sweater. The French like their priesthoods to dress so they can be recognized at a glance, by God.
Jeanne, I wish you'd been with us in that café as we proceeded to get drunk on brandy and Fain started to let his hair down. In the first place Fain looks so frightful! He must be on drugs. Nothing else would account for the unfocussed glitter in his eyes and a sort of watery, tallowy softness that's spread over his entire body. You met him in 1947, didn't you, when he was the new king of the novelists, the Hemingway of World War II that they'd all been waiting for? My God, how handsome he was! A strong young poet's face, a face like Byron's or Rupert Brooke's, a squat powerful tapering body and an air of truly noble command. I remember once he walked into a roomful of stars in Hollywood and upstaged them all. Suddenly the man in the room was Howard Fain. (He arrived with Frieda, goddamn her soul, but that's another story and I'll say nothing about that.)
He is a physical wreck. He is a gross slob, a red-faced fat little fellow with purple veins in his nose. He wears a dirty shirt without a tie, and the café vestments, trench coat and all. How could this happen to such a handsome and wonderful youth in three or four years? His talk is as brilliant as ever, or more so. I thought I'd read a lot, and I guess I have, but Fain has really been working at it, he's turned into an unbelievably encyclopedic reader. He's becoming like James Joyce, or Edmund Wilson, or Ezra Pound. He's read almost everything. But what good has it done him? He's drowned in the Paris brand of existentialism. As I understand the creed, you do what you goddamn please, you chase women and money and drive fast cars and eat rich food like any other Frenchman. The thing is, you do all this with sad irony, and that makes it existentialism. Because life is meaningless and communism is inevitable but will not restore God to the empty heavens, you see. And so you face the absurd universe with defiant courage and take from life, wearily and without illusion, the crumbs it offers. Before the onrushing end comes, the thermonuclear deluge of fire that erases Europe, Russia, and America, ushering in the final and everlasting rule of the Marxist Chinese. I may be simplifying the picture, but not much. Howard presents it with terrible eloquence in a solid monologue an hour long, fueled by brandy. I think he could go home and make a fortune doing it for the ladies' clubs. It is a fantastic chilling horror act, and American club women love nothing like getting scared out of their drawers.
That's Fain the Jeremiah. He has an absolutely different second self, that's even more scary to me—Fain the shrewd angle man, the financial wizard, the international manipulator, the man who's beaten the tax rap and is getting unbelievably rich on movie money and soaking every quarter away. Why? He says to buy himself an estate in Tasmania one year before the calculated blowup. This side of Fain horrifies me because I have my own spasms of greed for money, God knows. In every way he seems the ghost of Christmas-yet-to-come, and he gives me the cold shudders.
It's impossible to tell when he's being serious, or how much he's saying is true. He just talks on and on, his eyes glassy, chain-smoking. But I've seen one or two of his spy movies, they're damned good, full of real European atmosphere and sharp invention, and I'm sure he must be getting rich. Howard speculates in international currencies. To hear him tell it, he has made a couple of killings on wide swings in the franc, due to political events that he's been tipped off on in advance by his pessimistic philosophical friends, who know some big government wheels. These profits are just one more sad existential pleasure they all take with courage and dignity if without hope in this absurd universe, I gather.
Howard is most ominous about my own future as a writer. I told him the story of the new one. He said that I seem to be trying a little harder to be serious this time, but it doesn't matter, I must prepare myself for a bloodbath. "They will be waiting for you this time with cleavers," he said. "Do you suppose that any critic in the United States is going to forgive you for a smash hit like Chain of Command plus the Pulitzer Prize? Your first novel was a freak delayed hit of sorts and somehow didn't count. With Chain of Command you entered the circle of success. The iron rule now, on the next book, is that you must go through the ordeal. That is the literary religion in America. It must all be derived from the Aztecs. They raise you high, Hawke, to an exalted pinnacle, to the top of the sacrificial pyramid and there, where all eyes can see you, when you publish your next book, they strip you naked, flourish glittering knives and begin to hack pieces of living meat from your body. Your smoking blood pours out of you, your own flesh lies in gobbets at your feet, and you are required to stand in silence, to offer no resistance, and to smile! If you faint, if you wince, if you protest, if you cry out in pain, your disgrace is immediate and permanent. If you die, the ordeal proves that you never belonged in the circle in the first place." (I'm giving you almost his exact words, Jeanne. It really spouted out of him, like blood. His hands shook so the brandy spilled, his eyes glared.) "Who is left in the circle today?" he said. "Three or four mutilated horrors who somehow survived this ordeal, crawling feebly around, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Marquand, all of them scarred like air crash victims, all of them numb and stunned and unwilling to utter a word about literature or literary criticism, pretending to be sports fans or farmers or business men or anything but artists.
"Hawke," he said, "I think you're next. You can't escape the ordeal, nobody can, and I'm sure you're going to get it on this book."
It was mighty cheery stuff, Jeanne. I've always thought that if you couldn't take criticism, fair or unfair, you ought to find some other way of paying your bills than writing. I wanted to tell Fain this but I was interrupted, which may have been a good thing. I was interrupted by the arrival of his girl friend, a beautiful small shy French girl in a shabby dress and scarf and the compulsory trench coat, no hat, a dancer in some ballet company, with enormous brown eyes like an animal's, obviously insane about Howard. He acknowledged her arrival with a grunt, didn't get up or pull out her chair. But he bought her a couple of brandies, and our conversation languished. After a while they went off together, and if the looks she kept casting at him meant anything, it was for a long night's exercise of making the beast with two backs.
Well, there you are, Jeanne. I'm writing this letter after scrawling four thousand red-hot words of Horne. Went to work right after I got back from the café, didn't even lie down for a nap, just wrote as if all the devils in hell had broken out and were after me. The sun has long since come up. The city looks lovely today from my hotel window, all like a soft etching printed in blue ink, the Paris I once knew from reading about it and seeing pictures of it. But I want no part of it. I want to flee Europe, and go back and bury myself in the most American town in America—St. Louis, Dallas, even Hovey. Paris repels me. Its final wisdom is vulgar and joyless self-indulgence, justified by a lot of learned double-talk. I mean, if all this doom chatter in the cafés is real, why do they behave as they do? They write and talk in the threatening note of the Hebrew prophets, but did Jeremiah after thundering out one of his denunciations tank up on brandy and spend the night horsing with a ballet girl? Did Ezekiel orate about the valley of dry bones and then pull off a hell of a smart coup in Babylonian currency?
Howard tried to high-hat me at first on the assumption that I hadn't read Marx or the existentialists. I guess he took me as some kind of peasant story-monger. All my long hours on my behind in the Forty-second Street Library came in handy, and I took pleasure in rocking him with some of the Germans who haven't even been translated except in fragments. Among other things I try to keep up with the philosophical journals. I believe if you want to describe a scene at a political rally accurately you have to know what the best contemporary brains are thinking about matter and God, but that it's none of the reader's business. Howard's mistake in his second book was to fill it with existentialist talk, which is exactly like shining your spot lights into the audience's face instead of concealing them and aiming them to bathe the stage. He should have studied the big money maker of the lot, Camus, more carefully. He sure masks his lighting. You'd never know, reading L'Étranger, that this was a man who also writes dense philosophical tracts.
Jeanne, I want to tell you one thing. Put this letter away, and if I die young and fail to do my work read what follows over me instead of allowing anybody to deliver a eulogy. Howard Fain said 'they' had tried to destroy him, 'they' did not respect the creative spirit in America, he would steamroller 'them' with his big masterpiece. What I want to say is this: 'They' do not exist! Critics are only men with wives and children and dogs and mortgages, trying to get along with what skills they have. The creative gift doesn't exempt a man from the struggle of existence. It makes the struggle harsher. The man who presumes to create is setting himself above the captains and the kings. He offers himself as the voice next to God's and he must expect the severest kind of challenge. If Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy endured this ordeal, why should Howard Fain and Arthur Hawke be spared?
I intend to give them—Howard Fain's nonexistent 'them'—one hell of a run for their money, and in fact, at this nadir, I still think I'm going to make it. Just seeing Fain depressed me. You can understand that.
One last word. I don't think we're going to lose out to the Marxist Chinese.
3
This letter came a couple of days after Karl was released from his bed by the doctor, and allowed to go back to work. Jeanne had been up very late the night before; she did not wake till ten, and Karl had already gone to the office. She read the letter over and over, alone in the small apartment, and she found herself thinking in a fairly matter-of-fact way about divorcing Karl and marrying Hawke.
