Youngblood hawke, p.85
Youngblood Hawke, page 85
Leffer's rabbit-like face became bleak, and his eyes took on a slaty look. "I've done business in Kentucky. I haven't noticed any difference." He turned to Hawke. "What do you say?"
Hawke said, "That's my signature you've got there. If Scott doesn't pay by Tuesday I will."
Scotty said, "Art, that's unnecessary, but if it makes Newt feel better, okay."
Leffer offered Hawke his hand, and Hawke shook it. The little man rose, smiling. "Well! How do I get back to Wall Street, from this magnificent mudhole?"
"Hell, I'll drive you, Newt." Scott jumped up. "Got to see the Mehlman crowd at three anyway."
"Well, I'll appreciate that, Scotty. No, no more coffee, thanks a lot."
The animosity between the two men was all gone. They were making jokes about the weather as they left the shed side by side, followed by Hawke and Adam. The rain was still falling heavily. The trailer truck lay silent and abandoned, sunk aslant to its wheel tops, in the muck of Paumanok Plaza.
3
Jeanne drifted to the desk in her apartment one morning, a few days after the funeral, to glance through the piled-up mail. Sorting out the letters and the magazines, she was putting aside the rolled-up Rambler when she recalled the reporter's questions in Washington, in the dim time before the death of her husband. She tore off the wrapper and spread the gray journal on her desk. There in the center of the front page was the startling heading:
EVELYN BIGGERS
by Youngblood Hawke?
She read the review with alarm that gradually became horror.
At one point in this peculiar new production from the pen of Youngblood Hawke, the author causes the heroine to say to her seducer, "I hate you for allowing me to hope. It's the worst thing you did to me." That is a pretty fair statement of this reviewer's present feelings toward Mr. Youngblood Hawke.
The publication seven years ago of Alms for Oblivion, his sloppy but undeniably powerful first novel, gave real grounds for hope that a new Jack London or Theodore Dreiser was trying to struggle up out of the abominable miseducation and obscurantist criticism that make the writing of serious American fiction just about out of the question today. Naturally he was attacked at once by the learned boneheads who carry on current literary discussion. These priests have consistently opposed Mr. Hawke not because he writes badly, as indeed he does, very badly, but because they need mysteries. There's not much sacerdotal dignity in telling the public that books are good when the public already likes those books; dignity consists in pointing out that the peasants are buying brass and ignoring gold. But the history of criticism shows that the common reader is wiser than the priests. The thing is that much of the time there isn't any gold around, and then people settle for the shiniest brass. They like to read stories.
Mr. Hawke's legion of foes will make gory holiday out of the carving-up of this novel, a weak, listless, and remarkably silly little work by an author who, whatever his glaring faults, has been carrying all before him until now with his unusual energy. I am sorry to see this catastrophe of a promising if limited talent. The one purpose in dwelling on it is to try to derive, if one can, from the spectacular spin-in of Youngblood Hawke, some general truths about the low present state of American fiction.
Let us look at his new story, to begin with.
Here Judd described the plot and characters of the novel with his usual derisive technique, a mixture of solemn plodding accuracy and bursts of savage slang. The result was amusing and lethal; Jeanne found herself wincing and smiling at the same time. Then Judd proceeded:
. . . One would like to dismiss this gray and damp anecdote as an experimental failure, a laudable if mistaken attempt by the author to extend his range by writing a short honest character study of a dreary woman: an American Eugenie Grandet, let us say. But a closer look at the package brings to light disturbing details that bode no good for Mr. Hawke's creative future, or for the art of fiction in the United States.
I have called Evelyn Biggers a little book. It is little. A word count probably would not exceed seventy thousand. Mr. Hawke's previous behemoths have weighed in with Victorian amplitude at three to four hundred thousand words. However, when this volume comes to hand it does not look little. It is a big thick book. Set it on the shelf beside Alms for Oblivion, Chain of Command and Will Horne, Mr. Hawke's popular successes, and it seems a worthy successor in bulk, if nothing else. But then one reads through the tale—if one can stay interested in Mr. Hawke's lugubrious nuisance of a heroine—in perhaps an hour and a half. How is this possible? The answer is simple. Fat margins, fat type, fat paper, fat binding, every imaginable kind of artificial publishers' fat, have gone into the book, with only one conceivable purpose: to raise the price. A butcher can go to jail for selling fat as meat. An author seems to be beyond the reach of that just ordinance.
The publisher of this work is "Haworth House," an imprint nobody has ever seen before. It is no secret in the book trade that "Haworth House" is Youngblood Hawke himself, and that he has bludgeoned this device out of his actual publishers, Hodge Hathaway, in order to get a larger share of the book's earnings. As an old hand at the writing racket, let me say that I hope the arrangement works. My hat is off to Mr. Hawke for pioneering along new paths away from the crowded literary poor-house. It was not my impression, however, that destitution was threatening to overtake Youngblood Hawke. He cannot have earned less than a million dollars since his career began in 1946; probably he has earned more. That is not hay to most starveling word-mongers.
Why "Haworth House," then? Why these greasy layers of false blubber in the new book? What on earth is Mr. Hawke up to? One is almost forced to conclude that success in American fiction today, by flooding a young man with sudden big money from all the mechanical sources of mass revenue—the movies, the book clubs, the paperbacks—simply drives him cuckoo. Instead of standing apart from the endemic American money insanity that may yet destroy us all, and indicting it with the voice of art, he himself succumbs. Out roll the next books; each slicker, more calculated, emptier than the last. If he happens to grind out a skimpy flop along the way, an Evelyn Biggers, what of that? He has the brand name by now. The one problem is to pad up the package.
With the arrival of Mr. Hawke at this abysmal stage, it becomes important, and in a sense necessary, to examine certain curious facts about his publishing career. Ordinarily, it is true, criticism addresses itself to printed texts, and an author's personal life and business practices are—or should be—irrelevant to literary judgments. However, the case of Youngblood Hawke is no ordinary one.
For we now have in hand a strange and revealing statement on the dedication page of Evelyn Biggers:
To
Mrs. Jeanne Fry
who has helped me in all my work
far more than I had better admit,
with deepest affection
and gratitude
Mrs. Fry is the Hodge Hathaway editor who has seen all of Mr. Hawke's books to the press; including Evelyn Biggers, notwithstanding the fiscal abracadabra of "Haworth House." The dependence on Mrs. Fry that Youngblood Hawke now publicly confesses is not news to anybody in the book business. When she left Prince House five years ago and went to Hodge Hathaway, Mr. Hawke at once followed her. Hodge Hathaway has on its staff some of the most distinguished editors in the United States. Mr. Hawke could have had his choice among them. But from the first day he came to the house, no editor but this little-known young woman has been permitted to work on a Hawke manuscript, or even to read it, until it has left her hands and gone to the typist. What Mr. Hawke contributes, what Mrs. Fry adds or subtracts, nobody knows.
This kind of loyalty of an author to an editor is commendable. It is also rare. I have had the opportunity, as it happens, to work with Mrs. Fry. She has qualities which are praiseworthy. She also has very narrow limits. She holds strong opinions, her will power is awesome, her analytic comments on character are good, and her sense for plot is serviceable. Her preoccupation with plot may be her chief fault, for she is ruthless in subordinating all other values in fiction to the story. One would gather from Mrs. Fry that the evolution of fiction came to a stop at Robert Louis Stevenson. She has little interest in the present state of the fiction art, or in modern thought generally. I do not imagine she knows Herman Hesse from Herman Talmadge. And she has a powerful, single-minded devotion to the heavily plotted best-seller. One sees at once the affinity of Mr. Hawke for an editor with such a Philistine view. It is actually not an unsound view at the moment. The next renascence of American fiction may well come in a swing from the present overtwisted and overworked vein of romantic pessimism and symbolism to the classic three-decker naturalism of Trollope and Fielding. It is not that one side is more right than the other in this long dialogue of the fiction art. It is merely that, as the politicians say, it's time for a change.
In fact, Mr. Hawke's instinctive seizing on old techniques in Alms for Oblivion was my chief reason for hoping at first that he was headed somewhere. The overlay of Dos Passos and Joyce-Faulkner could be dismissed as the placental material that apparently must accompany the birth of a novelist nowadays; under this messy business was a strong, well-controlled, Trollopian story, and most important, a broad convincing fresco of a Kentucky mountain town. Mr. Hawke wrote this novel before encountering Mrs. Fry. Since then it has been all downhill for him, at toboggan velocity.
The critic now discussed each of Hawke's four novels, carefully tracing in them a growing mechanical cynicism and lack of honesty. His long methodical assault on Chain of Command astounded Jeanne, because he had given the novel a favorable notice when it first appeared. He made no apology for his earlier review, and did not refer to it. Chain of Command, in short, was commercial trash, derivative to begin with, and shocking in its "Rover Boy attitude to the horrors of modern warfare." Will Horne was even worse,
. . . the most tired caper of today's lending library fiction, the triumphant heel who gets his comeuppance on the next to the last page, after a protracted glorious riot in elevator-boy fantasies of wealth and sex. This literary form was invented by Defoe, of course, and saw sturdy service for centuries thereafter, rising to its high mark in serious fiction in The Financier and The Titan; but once Hollywood took it over, the form passed out of artistic usage, as a beauty celebrated in her youth is no longer welcome in good society after she has become a drunken old bag. Mr. Hawke, undismayed by this fact, ground out Will Horne and collected his heavy booty and his thrashing by the book reviewers with no visible pangs.
After completing his studied dissection of the four novels, Quentin Judd went on:
In the publishing trade, it has long been whispered that Mrs. Jeanne Fry "really" writes the novels of Youngblood Hawke. This gossip will gain swifter circulation after Evelyn Biggers, because the book is so frankly feminine in outlook, and so weak and slight in execution. Nobody has ever answered the question, if Mrs. Fry writes the novels, why doesn't she put her name to them? And what are we to do with the imposing presence of Mr. Youngblood Hawke himself?
I would like to venture an answer. It now seems clear to me that Mr. Hawke is that too-common figure in modern American letters, the one-book novelist, done in by the onslaught of success, of sudden fame and sudden money. Any one of us would love to have such troubles, no doubt. But the destructive effect of the process exists, all the same, and it has resulted not only in artistic collapses like Mr. Hawke's, but in a number of suicides. Three of the best writers to appear in the United States since the Second World War have died by their own hands, and several more have become mental cases. It is true that successful authors in every era have had to cope with this transition, but the strain of it has been fearfully multiplied by the money magnitudes and the publicity glare of mass culture.
What Mrs. Fry has done for Youngblood Hawke, then, may have been an act of rescue. Apparently she has kept him at work, and that is something. All this is guesswork; but we may suppose that ever since the delayed but explosive success of Alms for Oblivion, she has set him one synthetic narrative task after another and to an unknown extent has helped him to execute them. If so, she has rendered good service to Hodge Hathaway, for the job of an editor in our society is to bring in the best-sellers; and she has indeed given Youngblood Hawke "far more help than he had better admit."
For in all fairness to Mr. Hawke, he has certainly done a lot of hard work, he has sedulously ground out words by the metric ton, and he has provided many people with ephemeral amusement in a grisly era. The trouble with Evelyn Biggers is that it is not amusing. Perhaps Mrs. Fry has indeed had more of a hand in this book than in the others, or perhaps Mr. Hawke's dogged energy has finally given out. It doesn't much matter. If Mr. Hawke has not developed into a serious writer, I think one can blame the times, and not the man. It may be that he will yet recapture the possibilities that were in him. He is not yet thirty-five. But he will have to find his salvation in his own inner resources, if they survive, and not in the strong-minded guidance or collaboration of a commercial editor, however loyal and clever. Mr. Hawke should forget about being a money maker, in short, and make one last try, against all the odds, to become a writer. The chips are down.
Ordinarily Jeanne could hear her son whimpering, even through the drugged sleep that had been her only rest since Karl's sudden death; but the Judd review so hypnotized her that when she finished reading it she heard the wails of the child all at once, as though a radio had been turned on. The baby was hungry, and Elizabeth was clattering together his breakfast in the kitchen. She went and talked to Jim, until his food came. Then she telephoned Hawke.
He answered at the first ring. He was at his desk he said, having been up since three in the morning working at Boone County.
She said, "Arthur, I've just read Quentin Judd's review."
He said, "Oh." Then after a pause, "I'm sorry, it must be a nuisance to you. How are you, Jeanne?"
"I'm all right. A nuisance to me, indeed! Arthur, it's a violent attempt to destroy you."
Hawke said with weary good humor, "It is kind of rough. We're holding a council of war at noon. Gus, Ross Hodge, Givney, and me. Can you come?"
"Sure I will. I'm an interested party, to say the least. At your place?"
"Yes."
"I'll come early. I want to talk to you."
"Good. You sound better, Jeanie."
"I'm beginning to pick up the pieces."
She went through the old hair and makeup rituals with care. As she painted her face, for the first time in over a week, she seemed to be painting color back into her existence.
4
HAWORTH HOUSE, read an austere bronze plaque on the wall of the brownstone house, newly sandblasted to an angry pinkish color. Hawke's organization consisted of a secretary-receptionist and an editor-business manager: not a large staff, but it meant twenty thousand a year in overhead, and much social security paperwork and other accounting annoyance. Givney had not exactly taken these things off his hands after all; forms, documents, contracts, bills, checks to sign came at him in thick piles quite regularly.
The receptionist sat just inside the street door, a fat Wellesley girl clad in purple fuzz, clearly disenchanted with her stagnant little place in the publishing world. "He's in his apartment, Mrs. Fry," she said to Jeanne, with a malicious flash in her eyes that spelled Judd.
Jeanne rode up in the tiny elevator installed by Hawke. The estimate for the job had been ten thousand dollars. She had been present at Hawke's insane outburst when the bill for twenty-three thousand had come to his desk. It had been the last straw; he had left for the west the next day.
From the elevator she stepped straight into the enormous slope-roofed room where he worked and slept. He had had all the partitions of the old servants' quarters knocked out, and the room was as long and as wide as the house itself. Before it could be decorated, he had cut off all expenditures on Haworth House, so it was unfinished and barren; indeed not unlike the loft room where he had worked on Alms for Oblivion. There was no laundry hanging around, but books and magazines stood in untidy piles on the dusty floor, a refrigerator jutted from a corner between a small electric stove and two steel file cabinets, and a broad unmade bed was at the other end of the room. Hawke sat at the same old cheap desk, in his shirtsleeves, scrawling. He glanced up at her, and again the glasses surprised her. "Jeanie, can I finish one paragraph before it melts away?"
"Of course." She skinned off her black gloves and sat on the one chair at this end of the room, thinking how odd it was that despite all the money Arthur had poured into this building, he had in the end merely spun the old shabby cocoon for himself again. He had done it before in the garret of the Seventy-third Street house; had lived in exactly this squalid manner for a year under a sloping roof while beneath him the workmen had been creating a costly mansion. Here in the floor below was a handsome bachelor's apartment done in Colonial style: living room, dining room, kitchen were all finished, and there was an excellent antique desk under a tall north window. Yet this grubby lair, originally intended for his bedroom, was where he lived, and apparently where he chose to work.
He thrust his pen into the holder, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Well, there you are. Eight and a half solid hours of ephemeral entertaining. Say what you will about Mr. Hawke, he works hard." He came toward her with long lunging strides, holding out an ink-stained hand. "Hello, Jeanie."
She took his hand in hers, but resisted the slight tug to pull her to her feet. "Hello, Arthur."
