I was seven years old when my father burned to death in an arsonist’s fire. His scorched remains were put in a wooden box, and after my mother and I put that box in the ground, the ground we walked on began to crumble beneath our feet. I was an only child. My father had been my only father, and my mother had been his only wife. Now she was no one’s wife, and I was a boy without a father, the son of a woman but no longer of a man.
We lived in a small Jersey town just outside New York, but six weeks after the night of the flames, my mother and I left that town and moved to the city, where we temporarily holed up in my mother’s parents’ apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street. My grandfather called it “a curious interregnum.” By that he meant a time of no fixed address and no school, and in the months that followed, the cold winter months of late December 1954 and early 1955, as my mother and I tramped through the streets of Manhattan in search of a new place to live and a new school for me to attend, we often took shelter in the darkness of movie theaters …
A first draft of the first part of the book was completed before Ferguson left New York in mid-October. Seventy-two typed pages written in the two and a half months between the army physical and the flight across the Atlantic, roughly one page per day, which was the goal Ferguson had set for himself, one decent page per day and anything beyond that to be considered a miracle. He hadn’t had the nerve to show that unrevised portion of the book to Gil or his mother, wanting to present them with the finished product only when it was well and truly finished, but most of the films he had seen with his mother during the Curious Interregnum were discussed in those pages, along with the Curious Interregnum itself, and then the beginning of his career at Hilliard, his war with God and the self-destructive program of willed failure, the countless forays to movie theater balconies to watch more Hollywood films with his mother during the Glorious Oblivions period, followed by his mother’s new start as a photographer and the transformation of his once bright playroom into the darkroom where she developed her pictures, eleven and a half months of his early life beginning on the morning of November 3, 1954, when his mother told him his father had burned to death in the Newark fire, and ending on the afternoon of October 17, 1955, when Ferguson turned on the television in their third-floor apartment and stumbled across the Cuckoos theme song and the credits announcing the first Laurel and Hardy film he ever saw.
It took a couple of weeks for him to adjust to his new surroundings and make his peace with the smallness of his room, but by November first he was back inside the book, having prepared for the “Stan and Ollie” section by making a complete list of their films while still in New York and then, with his stepfather’s help, arranging with Clement Knowles, the head of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art, to watch all the Laurel and Hardy films in their collection, often by himself on Moviolas, sometimes projected for him on larger screens, and because Ferguson wrote down a detailed account of each film he saw, the films were fresh in his mind again when he began writing about them in Paris. Remarkably enough, only one book had been written about Laurel and Hardy in English, a 240-page double biography by John McCabe that was published in 1961, but other than that nothing, not one other book in English that Ferguson was aware of. Ollie had died in 1957, and the not terribly old Stan (seventy-four) had died in February 1965, not six months before Ferguson conceived of his plan to write about how the two of them had saved his life ten years earlier, and once he began that section of the book, he couldn’t help thinking about the opportunity he had missed, for nothing would have made him happier than to have sent Stan the manuscript of his book when the final draft was done. As with the articles he had written as a student in New York, Ferguson’s approach was all about looking at the movies themselves, the movies as he had first seen them as an eight- and nine-year-old boy, with no biographical information about his bowler-hatted friends, no historical information about how the team had been formed in 1926 by director Leo McCarey at the Hal Roach studio, and nothing about Ollie’s three marriages and Stan’s six marriages (three of them to the same woman!). Beyond writing his book, and fully just as important as writing the book, the subject that dominated Ferguson’s thoughts most persistently was sex, and yet even now, at the advanced age of eighteen, he found it nearly impossible to imagine Stan Laurel having sex with anyone, let alone with his six wives, three of whom had been the same person.
He pushed on through November, December, and halfway into January, concluding the second section of the book by recounting his grandparents’ surprise visit to the apartment on Central Park West in December, laden with the bulky presents of roll-up movie screen, sixteen-millimeter movie projector, and the ten cans of Laurel and Hardy shorts, a section that for some unfathomable reason was precisely the same length as the first, seventy-two pages, the last paragraph of which read: Little matter that the projector had been bought secondhand—it worked. Little matter that the prints were scratched and the sound sometimes seemed to be coming from the bottom of a bathtub—the films were watchable. And with the films came a whole new set of words for me to master—“sprocket,” for example, which turned out to be a far better word to think about than “scorched.”
Then Ferguson lost his way. The third section of the book, which in the intervening months had been given a new title, “Junkyards and Geniuses,” was meant to explore the differences between art films and commercial films, mostly the differences between Hollywood and the rest of the world, and Ferguson had given much thought to the filmmakers he had chosen to write about, three Hollywood junkmen who had excelled at making good commercial products in a wide range of genres and styles (Mervyn LeRoy, John Ford, Howard Hawks) and three geniuses from abroad (Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, and Satyajit Ray), but after spending two and a half troubled weeks trying to get his thoughts down on paper, Ferguson understood that the subject he was writing about had nothing to do with the rest of the book, that he was writing another book or another essay and that there was no room in his book about dead fathers and struggling widows and crushed little boys for speculations of that sort. It came as a shock to realize how badly he had misconstrued his project, but now, on the strength of that wrong turn, he felt he knew how to fix the damage. He put aside the first twenty pages of “Junkyards and Geniuses” and went back to the first section, which he now divided into two sections, “A Curious Interregnum,” which covered his post-fire, pre-Hilliard days in New York and ended with the words his mother had spoken to the woman selling tickets at the movie theater on the Upper West Side—Butt out, lady. Just give me my change—and “Glorious Oblivions,” which began in a different spot now, with Ferguson walking into Hilliard on his first day of school there, but still ended with the television and his first Laurel and Hardy film. In the third part, he added some paragraphs about his mother’s reaction to the two morons and explored the daily duties gag a bit more thoroughly, but the chapter still ended with the word scorched. Then he added a fourth section, “Dinner in the Balcony,” which he now understood was the logical conclusion of the book, the emotional heart of the book, and how could he have been so blind and so dumb as to have ignored that scene with his mother in the living room, to have considered leaving it out of the book when in fact everything in the book had been building toward that moment, and so, over three mornings in mid-February, three mornings of devastation and utterly focused work, feeling more alive in the words he was writing than with any other passage of the book, Ferguson wrote the ten pages he needed to write about breaking down and confessing to his mother, about the deluge of tears that had poured out of them as they sat on the living room carpet, about the silent-God-no-God-anti-God rehash and the reason for his bad marks at school, and then, after they had dried their tears and pulled themselves together, of course!—off they went to the movies at Ninety-fifth Street and Broadway, where they ate hot dogs in the balcony and washed them down with fizzless, watery Cokes as his mother lit up another Chesterfield and they watched Doris Day sing one of the stupidest
songs ever written, Que Sera, Sera, in Hitchcock’s Technicolor version of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Writing about himself over the six months it had taken him to finish his short, 157-page book had thrust Ferguson into a new relationship with himself. He felt more intimately connected to his own feelings and at the same time more remote from them, almost detached, indifferent, as if during the writing of the book he had paradoxically become both a warmer and a colder person, warmer by the fact that he had opened up his insides and exposed them to the world, colder by the fact that he could look at those insides as if they belonged to someone else, a stranger, an anonymous anyone, and whether this new interaction with his writing self was good for him or bad for him, better for him or worse for him, he could not say. All he knew was that writing the book had exhausted him, and he wasn’t sure if he would ever have the courage to write about himself again. About movies, yes, perhaps about other things as well someday, but autobiography was too wrenching, the demand to be both warm and cold was too difficult, and now that he had rediscovered his mother as she had been back then, he suddenly found himself missing her as she was now, missing both her and Gil, and with the Herald Tribune on the verge of collapse, he hoped they would come to visit him in Paris before long, for even though Ferguson was almost a man, there was much about him that was still a child, and having dwelled inside his childhood for the past six months, it wasn’t easy to get out of it.
That afternoon, he went downstairs for his Thursday study session with Vivian carrying the unbound pages of How Laurel and Hardy Saved My Life instead of his copy of Hamlet. Hamlet would have to wait, Ferguson decided. Hamlet, who did nothing but wait, would have to go on waiting a little longer, because now that the book was finished, Ferguson was desperate for someone to read it, since he himself was incapable of judging what he had written and had no idea whether it came across as a real book or a failed book, a garden filled with violets and roses or a truckload of manure. With Gil on the other side of the ocean, Vivian was the best choice, the inevitable choice, and Ferguson knew he could trust her to give his work a fair and impartial reading, for she had already proved herself to be an excellent preceptor, always assiduously prepared for their twice-a-week tutorials and incredibly sharp, with countless things to say about the works they pored over together (close readings, the explication de texte method for certain crucial passages, as demonstrated by the chapter about Odysseus’s scar in Auerbach’s Mimesis) but also around the works and behind the works, social and political conditions in ancient Rome, for example, Ovid’s exile, Dante’s banishment, or the revelation that Augustine was from North Africa and consequently a black man or a brown man, a constant in-flow of reference books, history books, and critical studies checked out from the nearby American Library and the farther-off British Council Library, and Ferguson was both impressed and amused that the supremely mondaine and often frivolous Madame Schreiber (how she could laugh at parties, how she roared at dirty jokes) was at the same time a dedicated scholar and intellectual, a summa cum laude graduate from Swarthmore, a Ph.D. in art history from what she mockingly referred to as the Sore Bone in Paris (dissertation on Chardin—her first stab at the material that would eventually become her book), and a clear and fluid writer (Ferguson had read parts of that book), and in addition to instructing him on how to read and think about the literary works on Gil’s list, she was taking the trouble to instruct Ferguson on how to look at and think about works of art with Saturday visits to the Louvre, the Musée de l’Art Moderne, the Jeu de Paume, or the Galerie Maeght, and even though Ferguson still found it incomprehensible that she should want to devote so much of her time to his education, he understood that his mind was steadily growing because of her, but why, he would ask, why are you doing all this for me, and the enigmatic Viv would always smile and say: Because I’m having fun, Archie. Because I’m learning so much.
By the time Ferguson went downstairs with his manuscript that afternoon in mid-February, he had been living in Paris for four months, and he and Vivian Schreiber had become friends, good friends, and perhaps (Ferguson sometimes thought) even a little bit in love with each other, or at least he was in love with her, and she had never failed to show him anything but the warmest, most complicitous affection, and when he knocked on the door of her study for their two-thirty appointment, he didn’t wait for her to ask him in because that wasn’t how they went about it, all he had to do was knock on the door to let her know he had arrived and then walk in, and so he walked in and found her sitting in her usual spot in the black leather armchair with her reading glasses on and a burning Marlboro wedged between the second and third fingers of her left hand (she still smoked American cigarettes after twenty-one years in France) and a paperback copy of Hamlet in her right hand, the text open somewhere in the middle of the book, and, as always, the picture of himself on the wall just behind her head, Archie, the photograph his mother had taken more than ten years ago, which he suddenly realized should be on the cover of the book if anyone ever wanted to publish it (good luck!), and as Vivian glanced up from the book and smiled at Ferguson, Ferguson walked across the room without saying a word and deposited the manuscript at her feet.
All done? she asked.
All done, he said.
Good for you, Archie. Bravo. And many merdes to mark the day.
I’m wondering if we could skip Hamlet this afternoon so you could take a look at it instead. It’s short. I doubt you’ll need more than two or three hours to finish it.
No, Archie, I’ll need more time than that. I assume you want a real response, yes?
Of course. And whenever something jumps out at you, feel free to mark it up. The book isn’t final yet, just finished for now. So read it with a pencil. Suggest changes, improvements, cuts, anything that occurs to you. I’m so sick of it, I can’t look at it anymore.
This is what we’ll do, Vivian said. I’ll stay here, and you’ll go out for a walk, for dinner, for a movie, for any old thing you want, and when you come back to the house, you’ll go straight upstairs to your room.
Pushing me out, huh?
I don’t want you around while I’m reading your book. Too much mental interference. Tu comprends? (You understand?)
Oui, bien sûr. (Yes, of course.)
We’ll meet in the kitchen tomorrow morning at eight-thirty. That will give me the rest of the afternoon, all evening, and into the night if necessary.
What about your dinner with Jacques and Christine? Aren’t you supposed to see them at eight?
I’ll cancel. Your book is more important.
Only if it’s good. If it’s bad, you’ll curse me for missing the dinner.
I’m not expecting it to be bad, Archie. But even if it is, your book is still more important than the dinner.
How can you say that?
Because it’s your book, your first book, and no matter how many books you write in the future, you’ll never write your first book again.
In other words, I’ve lost my virginity.
That’s it. You’ve lost your virginity. And whether you’ve done it with a good fuck or a bad fuck, you’ll never be a virgin again.
The next morning, Ferguson walked into the kitchen a few minutes before eight o’clock, hoping to fortify himself with a bowl or two of Celestine’s café au lait before Vivian showed up to pronounce her verdict on his miserable excuse of a book and cast it into the dustbin of history, one more discarded human thing to rot among the millions of others. In spite of his calculations, however, Vivian had beaten him to the punch, and there she was when Ferguson entered the room, sitting at the white enamel table in the white kitchen dressed in her white morning bathrobe with the white-and-black pages of his manuscript standing in a pile next to her own white bowl of Celestine’s café au lait.
Bonjour, Monsieur Archie, Celestine said. Vous vous levez tôt ce matin (You’re up early this morning), addressing Ferguson with the formal vous of servants rather than the tu of familiar equals, a quirk of
the language that still grated on his American ears.
Celestine was a brisk little woman of around fifty, reserved, unobtrusive, but exceedingly kind, Ferguson had always felt, and even though she insisted on calling him vous, he liked the way she pronounced his name in French, softening the hard ch sound into a less abrasive sh, which turned him into Ar-shee, which in turn invariably made him think of the French word for archive, ar-sheeve. Young as he still was, he had already become an archive, which meant he was someone to be kept for the ages—even if his book belonged in the dustbin of history.
Parce que j’ai bien dormi, Ferguson said to her (Because I had a good sleep), which was manifestly untrue, since one glance at his tousled hair and hollowed-out eyes would have told anyone he had drunk a full bottle of red wine last night and had hardly slept at all.
Vivian stood up and kissed him once on each cheek, their standard morning salutation, but then, diverging from the daily ritual, she put her arms around him and kissed him on each cheek again, two smacking busses this time, loud smooches that resonated throughout the tiled kitchen, after which she abruptly pushed him back, held him at arm’s length, and asked: What’s wrong with you? You look terrible.
I’m nervous.
Don’t be nervous, Archie.
I’m about to shit in my pants.
Don’t do that either.
What if I can’t help myself?
Sit down, stupid, and listen to me.