1. “They all think it’s never going to end.”
Every September, a festival of American films is held in Deauville, France—the new films that will be appearing in both countries that fall. I don’t know how or why the festival was started, but every year an award is given (or used to be given) to an American writer for the body of his work. In 1994, I turned out to be that lucky man, and when I was told that Mailer and Styron had both won in previous years, I decided it was an honor worth crossing the Atlantic for, so off Siri and I went to the Normandy resort town of Deauville. It was a good year to be there—the fiftieth anniversary of the D-day landings. To mark the occasion, the festival had invited various children and grandchildren of the Allied generals, among them one of Leclerc’s descendants and Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Susan. Siri and I wound up spending some time with Susan Eisenhower (we liked her very much), and when we found out that she was a “Russia expert” who was married to a scientist from one of the republics of the former Soviet Union, we both understood that the cold war was indeed over. Eisenhower’s granddaughter married to a Soviet scientist!
Also to mark the occasion, the festival had scheduled screenings of films about World War II and had sent out invitations to some of the old American actors who had appeared in them. That was how we got to meet such people as Van Johnson (deaf as a post), Maureen O’Hara (still beautiful), and Roddy McDowall. At one point during the dinner we attended with those bygone movie stars, O’Hara leaned over to McDowall and asked: “Roddy, how long have we known each other?” To which McDowall replied: “Fifty-four years, Maureen.” They had acted together in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. Astonishing to have been there, to have witnessed that exchange.
One of the other people who came that year was Budd Schulberg. I had met him a couple of times in America, and his connection to Hollywood films probably went further into the past than anyone else in the land of the living, since his father had been B. P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount in the twenties and thirties, and all the way back when he was nineteen years old, Budd had collaborated on a screenplay with F. Scott Fitzgerald. The man who wrote On the Waterfront, author of one of the best novels about Hollywood, What Makes Sammy Run?, as well as the script of Bogart’s last film, The Harder They Fall, an excellent movie set in the world of boxing—a complex man, a former Communist Party member who had named names before HUAC in the late forties or early fifties, but from what I have read, he turned against the party with great violence after they tried to interfere with his work and condemned them as bastards one and all. Anyway, I didn’t know him well, we were causal acquaintances at best, but I had enjoyed talking to him back in America, always struck by how well he spoke in spite of a double speech impediment (stutter and lisp), and now, at Deauville in 1994, we unexpectedly ran into each other in the lobby of the hotel where we were both staying, where everyone involved with the festival was staying (movie stars, directors, producers, young actors and actresses), and because we were both waiting for our wives to come downstairs for dinner, we sat down together on a bench in the lobby and quietly surveyed the hectic comings and goings of the rich and famous and beautiful. In rushed Tom Hanks (it was the year of Forrest Gump—a dreadful film in case you are tempted to see it), in rushed a glamorous starlet with her entourage, in rushed numerous others, all of them looking confident, filled with a sense of their own importance, on top of the world, as if each one of them in fact owned the world, and after a while Budd turned to me, the eighty-year-old Budd, who had been watching such people since he was a child, who had been at the top and been at the bottom, the wise old man who both stuttered and lisped turned to me and said: “They all think it’s never going to end.”
2. “They were all dead.”
The third Hustvedt sister is married to a sculptor named Jon Kessler, and for twenty-five years Jon and I have been good friends—brothers-in-law who treat each other more as brothers than as in-laws. Jon’s great-uncle, Bernie Kamber, who died a few years ago in his early nineties, was a marvelous character who worked as a press agent for Hollywood films in the forties, fifties, and sixties, a throwback figure to the time of Damon Runyon, who spoke a particular form of New Yorkese that has now vanished from the face of the earth and who, in his dotage, liked nothing better than to share stories with us about his youthful escapades. He seemed to have known everyone, from Rita Hayworth to Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, George Burns (who was his closest friend), and especially Burt Lancaster, for whom he worked on several projects. “Burt was a serious guy,” he told us once, “and he read a lot of heavy books. You know, people like Pluto and Aristotle.” (Pluto—the cartoon dog—not Plato.) One of my favorite Bernie stories goes back to the war, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies. He was responsible for promoting a mediocre film called Three Russian Girls, and for the opening night in Kansas City he had come up with a plan to draw a large crowd to the theater: anyone willing to donate a pint of blood to our Russian friends would be let in for free. As Bernie told it, he got to the theater a bit late, after the film had started, and as he approached the entrance, he saw the theater owner standing on the sidewalk engaged in a loud argument with a man. Bernie asked what was wrong, and the exasperated owner wailed: “You and your big ideas. This guy wants his blood back!”
Such was Jon’s Uncle Bernie. One evening a couple of years before he died, Bernie told us that he had been reading a new biography of John F. Kennedy. In the book, he was both happy and surprised to stumble across some references to a well-known brothel from the 1950s, a place that Kennedy had apparently frequented and which Bernie and many of his friends were also familiar with. Excited to share these passages with his old pals, Bernie went to the phone to ring them up, but as he went down the list in his mind, he understood that none of them was in a position to answer his call. “They were all dead,” he told us. Bernie had outlived his friends, and now that he was the last man standing, there was no one left for him to talk to about the past. He made me think of one of those anthropological oddities I have occasionally read about: the last living member of his tribe, the last person to speak a language—which will become extinct upon his death.
Warmest greetings from Neverland,
Paul
May 5, 2011
Dear Paul,
Thanks for the letter of April 22. I hope your European trip is going well.
You write of me as the “absent other” to whom you find yourself talking in your head. Let me make a parallel but somewhat different admission. I have been to your home but, as you know, have not seen the apartment—rather simply appointed, as you describe it—in which you work. Now and again I have visions of you in this apartment, which in my imagination is painted white, well lit, and windowless, not unlike one of your fictional spaces of confinement. You sit at your desk, your fingers poised over your typewriter, which in these visions is a rather ancient, bulky Remington (sometimes the ribbon sticks and you have to release it: the black smudge on your thumb is by now ingrained). There you sit, hour after hour, day after day, wrapped in your thoughts.
Seeing you thus, I feel a certain fraternal tenderness for you and your dogged, unappreciated bravery. Of course I know there is another, public face you wear—that of the admired man of letters. But I am convinced my vision of you as voluntary prisoner of the Muse is more true. The world is at his feet, I think to myself, yet there he is at eight-thirty every morning, unlocking the door of his cell, checking in for the new day’s punishment.
I know there is a lot of romantic bullshit spoken about the writing life, about the despair of confronting the blank page, about the anguish of inspiration that won’t come, about unpredictable—and unreliable—fits of sleepless, fevered creation, about the nagging and unquenchable self-doubt, and so on. But it’s not entirely bullshit, is it? Writing is a matter of giving and giving and giving, without much respite. I think of the pelican that Shakespeare is so fond of, that tears
open its breast in order to feed its offspring on its blood (what a bizarre piece of folklore!). So I think of you in that lonely place, dishing up yourself into the gaping mouth of the Remington.
I confess I have some minor difficulty fitting the sandwich shop you describe into this picture of monastic privation. But then I think, maybe when Paul visits the sandwich shop he sits in a corner, silent and unrecognized, and slips away like a ghost as soon as he has eaten.
New Hope for the Dead: that’s a great title. What a pity it’s already taken.
Thanks for your kind concern over my insomnia. I hesitate to authorize you to ask Siri to write, not because I don’t believe she has specialized knowledge but because I feel I am beyond help. I had a long series of meetings with a sleep specialist a couple of years ago. She was pretty up-to-date, I thought, and prescribed a regimen for me which might have worked had I lived a more regular life and been a tougher character. But in the end I just couldn’t face the misery of forced rising at 3:00 A.M. followed by battling to stay awake through the day until a 9:00 or 10:00 P.M. bedtime. And anyway—as the therapist was forced to acknowledge—any gains I made were lost as soon as I traveled abroad across time zones, and subverted a second time when I returned.
Curiously, I find it easier to sleep in Western Europe, which happens to share a time zone with my natal South Africa, than in Australia. Perhaps, even after nine years, my organism has not adjusted to the Antipodes.
May 31, 2011
Thank you for the long and happy-sounding letter from your Italian castle (May 24). What did you do to deserve such good fortune?, you ask. The answer: this particular episode of good fortune makes up for an equivalent episode of bad fortune that hit you sometime in the past, an episode you have forgotten about because it is not your manner to hold grudges against fate.
So you have completed a two-hundred-page history of your body. What an interesting idea, and how I envy you for not only having the idea but also giving it flesh—always the more difficult part. I’ll wait to see whether you deal with your body part by part or treat it integrally.
I’ve always found it interesting that whereas we human beings think of our bodies as having parts—arms, legs, and so forth—animals don’t. In fact, I doubt that animals think of themselves as “having” bodies at all. They just are their bodies.
I’ll be attending a conference on Samuel Beckett in the UK next month. Foolishly, I consented to do an e-mail interview with one of the organizers beforehand, on the subject of my relations with Beckett. As he and I are discovering, I don’t have anything new to say about Beckett, and perhaps don’t even have a relation with him. I certainly wouldn’t be the kind of writer I am if Beckett had never been born, but that sort of debt—call it a debt, for want of a better word—is best not scrutinized. I’d rather simply pay my silent respects at the SB shrine or the SB temple (I’ve never visited the SB gravestone).
All the best,
John
June 14, 2011
Dear John,
So good to hear from you.
Just to put your mind at rest: I don’t eat lunch in the sandwich shop. On most mornings, I go there on my way to work and order something to take out—which I eat several hours later in my little apartment, always in utmost solitude. I am in the shop for approximately four to seven minutes, and except for telling the counterman what kind of sandwich I want, I rarely say anything to anyone. But how much one can see and hear in four to seven minutes!
They know me there, however (at least a couple of the workers do), since I mentioned the place by name in The Brooklyn Follies and stole a remark made to Siri by one of the countermen about ten years ago. From the book: “I was intending to ask for a cinnamon-raisin bagel, but the word caught in my mouth and came out as cinnamon-reagan. Without missing a beat, the young guy behind the counter answered: ‘Sorry, we don’t have any of those. How about a pumpernixon instead?’”
The work space actually has several windows and a good deal of light. The typewriter is not a Remington but an Olympia—but no matter, the ink smudges my thumbs every time I put in a new ribbon, and the spirit of the place—if not the physical environment—is very much as you imagine it. And no, what you say is not entirely bullshit, and I am touched, in fact deeply touched, that you understand me well enough by now to know that the most significant part of my life takes place within the silence of those four walls. The word “bravery” might be a bit excessive (I have never thought of myself as brave), but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the thought.
I have continued to worry about your sleep problems, and now that I have been back for two weeks and am still struggling to readjust to New York time (waking at five every morning), I am convinced that what you are suffering from is a prolonged case of jet lag—a nine-year case of jet lag, the worst case of jet lag in recorded history. The only way to cure it would be to stop traveling for a year or two, to stay put in Australia and let your body finally adapt itself to the demands of living in that far-flung place. But now you are off to a Beckett conference in England! (Nearly every time we write to each other, it seems that one of us is about to take off for another country.) If you can’t control your impulse to travel to Europe several times a year, then perhaps the answer (dare I say it? it seems so simple and obvious) is to pull up stakes again and move to Europe. A logical solution, perhaps—but then again, life is not logical, and you must live where you feel happiest. On the other hand: you must sleep. You absolutely must sleep.
As for the new book about my body—no, it is not an anatomical breakdown of one piece of me after the other. There are disquisitions on pleasures and pains (sex and food, for example, as well as illnesses and broken bones), some long passages about my mother (in whose body my own body began), a list of all the places where I have ever lived (the domiciles in which my body has been sheltered), reflections on deformity, death, and experiences that could have led to death but didn’t . . .
Thinking about the book, it suddenly occurs to me that it might be a good idea to read from it when we do our joint event in Canada this September. And no sooner do I mention Canada than I think about Portugal in November. I just had breakfast with Paulo Branco—who is in New York for a couple of days—and he said he is going to send you a formal invitation to be on the jury again. Because of the financial crisis in Portugal, there was some question about whether the festival would be held this year, but Paulo assures me that the problems have been solved and all is well. I am going, Siri is going, our daughter Sophie is going (to sing), and I hope that you and Dorothy will be going as well. A pox on jet lag! How good it will be to spend some time with you there.
Another chapter from the ongoing saga of New Hope for the Dead:
My first wife’s mother lived to be a hundred, perhaps even a hundred and one. Born in 1903, the youngest of six or seven children, she once showed me a photograph taken before her first birthday, a family portrait that included her parents, her siblings, her aunts and uncles, her cousins, her grandparents, and herself, a small baby sitting on someone’s lap. Standing to the far left in the back row was an old man with a white beard. She told me he was her great-uncle and that he was ninety-nine years old when the picture was taken. I quickly did the math in my head and realized that he had been born in 1805. Four years before Abraham Lincoln. It was 1967 when I held that picture in my hand, and I still remember the overpowering effect it had on me. I said to myself: “I am talking to a person who knew someone who was born before Abraham Lincoln.” One hundred and sixty-two years: the blink of an eye! Now, forty-four years later, I say to myself: Two hundred and six years—the blink of an eye!
As ever,
Paul
August 29, 2011
Dear Paul,
I recently came across a posthumously published poem by A. R. Ammons: Getting old gets old, he says; even trying to find something new to say about getting old gets old.
I don’t feel that way at all, though I am nearly as old as Ammons was when he wrote the poem. Things keep being revealed to me, or at least coming into sharper focus. What I see, I see more clearly than when I was young. Am I deluded?
For instance Libya. Who would have thought that our attention would, for a space, be fixed on events in this neglected corner of the world! And how good it is for one’s general sense of things to behold one of the world’s nastier dictators being brushed away. It is almost as though the gods have organized a piece of theater for our benefit, to reassure us that there is, after all, justice in the universe, that if only we will wait long enough the wheel of fortune will turn and the high and mighty be brought level with the earth.
Of course (here enters the spirit of Ammonian pessimism) the euphoria in the streets of Tripoli, like the euphoria in the streets of Cairo, will die down as the reality of unpaid salaries, power cuts, and uncollected garbage hits home; and doubtless the regime that replaces Gaddafi will turn out to be venal and corrupt and perhaps even dictatorial too. But at least those young men careering around in their Toyota pickups, firing their Kalashnikovs in the air, will have something to remember for the rest of their lives, something to tell the grandchildren. Glory days! Perhaps that is what revolutions are really about, perhaps that is all one should expect from them: a week or two of freedom, of exulting in one’s strength and beauty (and of being loved by all the girls), before the gray old men reassert their grip and life is returned to normal.