Youngblood hawke, p.61
Youngblood Hawke, page 61
The choice had only been open to her for a short while. When Hawke had first proposed to her in Lexington, he had been wholly tangled with Frieda. She had confronted Frieda over the delirious author's bed on the wild crisis night of his pneumonia. She still found it hard to believe that he had shaken Mrs. Winter off for good. But she could no longer deny that he intended to and was trying to. If ever she was going to rally to him, now was probably the time. He had always been in love with her, but now he knew it, and now he wanted nobody but her. She was ready to believe all this at last, and it filled her with hope so extravagant, so shot through with rainbows, that she had to exert strong will power to keep a grip on herself.
Jeanne wondered how other women went about divorcing their husbands. For her it was an unnatural, almost an unimaginable act. If Hawke had ever forced her to come to bed with him, that would probably have solved the matter, she thought. To prove she was not a whore, if nothing else, her one course would have been to give up the man she had betrayed and do her best to marry the man who had prevailed with her. But in her present situation, she could not picture herself calmly announcing to Karl that she was through with him and was going to Hawke. That meant reneging in cold blood on the most serious commitment of her life. Moreover, she was still extremely fond of Karl—one does not shrug off years of married intimacy—and she knew he needed her, perhaps in order to survive at all, certainly to continue in his career. She was in a worse knot with Karl Fry than Hawke had ever been with Frieda; and she did not yet see how she could extricate herself. But after this letter of Hawke's, a large part of Jeanne Fry's daytime thoughts began to go to the question of cancelling three years of her life and starting over with Arthur Hawke.
Then another letter came. Hawke was bubbling again, the book was roaring along, and he took back everything he had said about Paris. It was a city of pure enchantment, the fairyland of the civilized world, and the French were an elegant and admirable people, a little reserved but soaked through with culture and wisdom.
It was just Fain and that disgusting trench coat café crowd that put me off. I should have remembered that Balzac described the scribbling rabble of Paris in Lost Illusions once for all. They haven't changed an iota, they've just found a few new rubber words and ideas to stretch and bounce and play with and try to pass off as creative thought. And they've put on trench coats. But I've since met some ordinary Parisians and some genuine aristocrats, and believe me they're all wonderful.
Honor and Manuel Hauptmann, it appeared, had come to Paris and taken Hawke in tow again, and the aspect of the city had quite changed.
Also the author had had a satisfying meeting with his French publisher; satisfying because he had crushed the editor-in-chief, a gray and bitter-faced little man, himself a novelist, and obviously used to making other novelists crawl. The three men had met in the publisher's office, a minute cubbyhole in a sort of blind alley full of bookshops and publishers' signs. The editor had opened the meeting by saying that Chain of Command would have to be revised for the French reader. He had proceeded for ten minutes to describe the plot and character changes he demanded.
I didn't say a word till he was finished, Jeanne. Then I just turned to the publisher and told him that I was convinced the book wasn't publishable by these high standards and so I was withdrawing it and would offer it to some other house. The publisher—a genteel little millionaire who must publish as a hobby, he owns a big château we visited later—turned on the editor and spat out a short burst of French that I couldn't follow. The effect, however, was quite visible. The editor curled up and I'd swear he charred all over. The publisher and I then went to lunch at Le Tour d'Argent, leaving this editor in his chair, a crumpled cinder with staring eyes, and a cigarette burning in paralyzed fingers. This little incident, you'll understand, in itself reconciled me to Paris. The city's been getting better and better ever since.
However, Hawke wrote, he was beginning to feel the strain of living as a tourist and also writing full-time. He was having trouble falling asleep and his headaches were coming back; so he was cutting his Paris stay short and returning to England to look for quarters somewhere in the countryside. He was also getting a little tired of the Hauptmanns.
I wasn't born sociable. I'm aware that my manners are crude. When I'm in high-toned company I'm always working at it. I mean working. I perspire. It usually crosses my mind at some point in an evening that I really don't give a good goddamn what Madame de Snootvisage, descended from one of the finest French families and living in a cold elaborate Parisian town house, thinks of Monsieur Auk. (That's me.) I get tired of constantly translating my small talk into stumbling French that obliterates whatever little point I'm making. And I remind myself that all these people, Honor Hauptmann included, are bothering with the big ape Art Hawke from Hovey not because he can wear clothes with an air, or exchange persiflage out of a Marivaux play, but because the coarse sweaty vulgarian writes big books that sell lots of copies, and that for all they know may even be art, since Monsieur Auk has won le prix Pulitzer. Then I tell myself it's high time I got my tail out of Paris and into some quiet place where I don't have to work at making myself understood, and where I can finish this endless stupid Horne and get on to a really good book.
So yo ho for the white cliffs of Dover. If you don't hear from me for a while I'll be roaming England looking for a place to hole up.
I need a conference with you badly.
Your loving,
MONSIEUR AUK.
She did not hear from him for several weeks after that, weeks that were momentous in her life. To any outer view, even to her husband's, Jeanne Fry was going about her business as always. Within her spirit, however, all was hurricane, earthquake, and tidal wave. She decided that she was going to set her affairs at Hodge Hathaway in order, and then cross the ocean to join Hawke. Once with him she was going to offer to marry him; she was going to put herself wholly in his hands, for better or worse. The decision did not fill her with happiness; fears, doubts, and conscience pangs haunted her, and she spent more nights without closing her eyes than Karl knew. Nevertheless the decision was taken, and she was sure it was irrevocable. But before she even received another letter from Hawke, the one thing that she utterly failed to anticipate—that she no more expected than the arrival of the Messiah in the middle of a business day—happened. She found that she was pregnant.
Like most young women before the first pregnancy, she had had her fears that there might be something wrong with her. The barrenness of her marriage, however, she had been inclined to ascribe to Karl, though he had had children. Jeanne had—somehow—never cared enough about her childlessness to make any medical investigation, or perhaps she had been afraid to. Nor had Karl pressed the matter. They had scarcely spoken of it. Karl was fond of saying that a successful marriage rested on seven pillars of silence, or words to that effect, and his reticence in such things amounted to a blackout. But when a man and woman live together in marriage, whether on terms of great love, or mutual fondness, or mere inertia, they will find themselves in the same bed; and if this part of Jeanne's marriage was not something she set great store by, she had of course accepted it. Nothing had resulted from it for three years. Now nature had worked its most commonplace and least understandable wonder with Jeanne, and she was pregnant.
Her decision to go to Hawke was blasted to atoms by the first words that the doctor spoke on the telephone, reporting the results of the test. It was as though she had been wakened from a sweet dream by a clap of thunder. She was all Mrs. Karl Fry again when she hung up the receiver; Mrs. Karl Fry, dazedly starting to make plans for having her baby.
4
The Mulberries
Haworth, Yorkshire,
England.
January the first, 1951
12:03 A.M.
Dearest Jeanie:
Happy New Year to you and yours, including that little unborn rascal who has loused up what was once a good working relationship. I'm glad to hear that everything is going normally so far. It will all go normally to the last, so stop worrying. There are more than two billion people in the world, Jeanne. You have every reason to believe that this curious process works. There aren't enough able-bodied storks around to justify the other theory.
I wasn't going to write you tonight. I didn't want to burden you with my blue johnnies. But do you know what just happened? I wrote "1951" in the middle of a blank page in my diary, at the stroke of midnight, just when the church clock finished the twelfth "clong." I turned the page to start the first entry of the new year, and the page tore completely in half in my hand!! Now this is a damned dirty practical joke for a supposedly meaningless universe to play on a superstitious mountain boy, all alone in an old house four thousand miles from home, in a roaring snowstorm. It finished me for diary writing, and I'm afraid you're for it, my love. However, you get paid to put up with me.
I've been making a wretched mistake in the past two days, Jeanie, I've been reading Will Horne. I know I should have waited to hear from you about the last hundred and fifty pages, but the stuff came from the typist, and there was the whole pile, and I couldn't resist. I started at page one and read my new novel.
Jeanie, is Will Horne a publishable book? If you were ever honest in your life I want you to be honest this time. I know there are good parts in it—I have powers, and they haven't quite deserted me—but isn't the whole thing a catastrophic botch? Is it alive? Is it endurable? Who is going to read a thick book about an ice-cold scheming bastard like Willard W. Horne? I guess I never realized, in the middle of all that long drudgery, the full monstrosity of this man I've called out of nowhere to go through the antics of a political career. If the portrait isn't truthful then I can't write, and I may as well give up. I think it's all true. The fatal mistake I seem to have made at the very start was to imagine you could write a long book about a leper. You can, of course. You can write a book about anything. But why should an intelligent person slog through a novel about a thoroughly dastardly subject? Jeanie, tell me the truth.
The only sequence that seems really well managed to me is the investigation of the highway contract. It says everything that has to be said about a man like Will Horne. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe I should just lift that out and publish it, a short study in corruption like Death in Venice. Tell me the truth, Jeanie. I will not say another word in this letter about the sprawling unreadable honor called Will Horne.
My low spirits are not due to that alone. I have on my desk a very long letter from a rather well-known New York woman by the name of Frieda Winter. I'm sure you've seen her name in the columns. She does a little of everything in the arts, including sympathetic encouragement of young writers. This is the first word I've had from the lady (whom I once knew slightly) in a half a year or so. She wrote it on Christmas Day in the morning. Christmas Day, I must tell you, had in the past some slight sentimental association for Mrs. Winter and myself. Mrs. Winter writes very vividly and persuasively. If by any chance you read in the New York papers that she has killed herself—I imagine the suicide of such an eminent lady would rate some newspaper space—please send me the clippings, as I will be interested in the details, for old times' sake. However, I imagine you will read that she has been seen as usual at various concerts, first-nights, charity balls, and the like, having a high old time. Mrs. Winter is a lady who has been far too careful in the construction of her life, and in the planning of her pleasures, to shuffle off this mortal coil on a sentimental impulse, even on Christmas Day in the morning. Please understand me, she didn't threaten suicide, she's too subtle for that. I believe I was supposed to read her last farewell between the lines, and telephone her or cable her or hop a plane home or all three. I did nothing. I would lay a reasonably large sum that she is alive and well. I can be coarsely facetious about it to you, but her letter gave me a frightful couple of nights; nights in which I am sure she had eight full hours of refreshing and undisturbed slumber. The real hell of it is that I haven't forgotten Frieda and that I'll never forget her, although I hope to God I'll find a love some day, some how, that will transform the thought of Mrs. Winter from an agony to a memory. You could have done it, but you're too busy having Karl's babies, and I can't blame you. I am no great bargain.
I'm not likely to find this love in Haworth (pronounced Horth, in case I never told you). My monkish regime continues, nor are the village maidens apt to upset it. When I go up to London, as I do occasionally, I buy the books or clothes I need, see a couple of shows, and retreat hastily to Haworth, leaving the temptations of the great city untasted. It reminds me too much of New York.
Haworth is the discovery of my life. I wonder whether I could get away with ending my days here? I really think I'd like to buy this old place I'm renting—it belongs to some admiral's widow who lives in Majorca and I'm sure I could get it for about fifteen thousand dollars—and just stay on and on in this gnarled, hilly, small Yorkshire town where two great novelists once lived as a pair of old maid sisters in a tiny parsonage. I can't tell you what fascinates me so about this place. It isn't just the Brontës, though I'll admit I hang around that dollhouse parsonage and the graveyard like a ghost. There's something about the moors, and the deep green pastures with the black stone fences, and the distant mountains—it has a little of the feeling of Hovey. But the people are not Hovey people, thank Heaven. It's as though they had a tradition of the proper way to treat novelists; which is, exactly like anyone else, with a little extra kindness because we have big egos and bad nerves. Anyway I've been able to work here like a lunatic, and I've read up whole libraries, and I've taken long walks and auto drives, and I'm getting pretty good at galloping across the moor on horseback, too. Jeanie, this is the life! My one reservation is that any woman I marry—if one will ever have me—is not likely to share my pleasure in being buried out here in the rustic English nineteenth century like this, in this horrible weather. If she doesn't want New York or Paris, she'll want the south of France, or the Italian Riviera, or some other warm place full of palm trees and idle drunken idiots, and she won't let me stay in Haworth. Will she?
Anyway, at the moment it all seems a pathetic dream. I wrote to Gus Adam to ask about the tax angle of making my home in Britain. I'm that serious about it. He sent me back a twenty-page memorandum, the nub of which was that if I don't get the hell out of England by October, I may be liable to British taxes on my royalties—and these British rates are truly backbreaking—and American taxes TOO! Getting credit for paying foreign taxes is a big mess, and to be on the safe side I'm on notice to get my overgrown carcass out of England by September!
Now how about that, Jeanne?
God knows I believe in paying my fair share of the cost of maintaining civilization, particularly with all those Marxist Chinese hammering at the gates, as Howard Fain said, but doesn't it strike you that there seems to be built into existing tax systems a determination to hound writers from land to land and from one counsel of desperation to another until the last tax notice flutters down on the unresponding mud of a new grave?
But I've given this a lot of thought, and I've decided that such an impression is self-pitying nonsense. The problem is amazingly simple in essence. An artist is half an entrepreneur and half a laborer. But he's taxed as a laborer only. Nevertheless if he's lucky he makes the great gains of an entrepreneur now and then. Whenever he does, his laborer's tax rates shoot up through the roof, and he's left with little or nothing. Now you can call it an injustice and rant and rave but that's all foolishness. Writers are damned lucky to get paid at all for doing what they are forced to do anyway, out of sheer inability to do something more useful and sane.
No, it's simply a technical problem. The artist, in the tax structure, is a duck-billed platypus. He fits neatly into no category, so the decision is to cook him and eat him and otherwise ignore him. In self-defense he must figure out ways to get classified as an entrepreneur, not as a duck-billed platypus. The magic words are "capital gains." These are the earnings of an entrepreneur. The tax systems all treat them with the greatest respect and take only a polite nibble. Or nothing at all if the entrepreneur follows wise courses.
Here in the isolation of Haworth I've had the time to do some solid analysis of this problem. I am going to lick it via two routes. One concerns you and one does not. There's no better way to start the new year than to put this program for my liberation on paper. I'll dispose of the part that doesn't concern you very briefly.
You know, of course, that I've been investing in Kentucky construction ventures with an old friend named Scotty Hoag, ever since I started making money. They've all paid off, every one of them. In fact I think I told you that Scott was my physical model for Willard Horne. I used a lot of his mannerisms too. Scotty is much the same kind of jovial cool rascal, but on a smaller, milder scale. Unlike Will, Scotty is not up to deep long-planned skulduggery. My mother, bless her heart, is sure he's the greatest villain in the world, the way she's sure you're a Jew. You remember that lawsuit she kept jawing about? She sued the coal firm which Scotty more or less runs, for two million dollars, on the assumption that Scott had concocted a devilish plot to steal some land of hers and mine it. The case came to court last month, by the way, and mama got thrown out. After years of delay the whole thing was over in a couple of hours. Scott's lawyer moved for a summary judgment and got it. She never had a leg to stand on. End of mama's chimeras. For everybody but mama, that is. She's entered an appeal for a new trial, but even her own lawyer won't take the case any further, and I think she'll calm down and forget about it. Scott's been damned decent about it, he's offered her generous settlements any number of times, but for mama it was two million or nothing, and so I guess it's nothing. Moral: one mustn't be a hog.
This lesson hasn't been lost on me. The mistake is excessive greed. One shouldn't try to dodge taxes. It can't be done. What can be done is a cool, slow, careful transformation of one's earnings from one category to another. Scotty is now starting to build a terrific shopping complex in the heart of Long Island. He calls it Paumanok Plaza, which I kind of like. Remember your Whitman? That's the old Indian name for Long Island. I've seen the plans and studied the whole financial structure and there isn't the slightest doubt that Paumanok Plaza is going to be a success. Money invested in Paumanok Plaza is going to pay off at three or four to one. Now if the Oblivion play is halfway as big a hit in New York as it seems to be on the road—did you see those glittery notices from New Orleans and St. Louis?—I'm going to be getting a flood of cash in 1951 and 1952. Ordinarily I would simply endorse those play royalty checks over to the U. S. Treasury. There wouldn't even be any point in cashing them, hardly. But if I form a corporation with Scotty to build Paumanok Plaza, and put in the play copyright in return for stock, all that money can be put to use, and can be transformed into capital gains! At least Scott says so, and everything he's told me has proven out right so far. I've got Gus Adams working on this right now. He seems skeptical but Scotty will convince him, I feel sure.
