Please, Archie, Amy said. Please stop.
But I haven’t finished.
No, Archie, please. I can’t take it.
Ferguson was about to speak again, but before he could get his tongue into the proper position, Amy stood up from her chair, wiped away her tears with a napkin, and walked out of the restaurant.
* * *
MAY–JUNE 1968. THE next morning, Amy packed up her things, deposited them with her parents on West Seventy-fifth Street, and then spent her last month as a Barnard undergraduate camped out on the sofa in the living room of Patsy Dugan’s apartment on Claremont Avenue.
Ferguson was more than exhausted now, more than numb, he was back in the dark dormitory elevator of the 1965 blackout, which could no longer be distinguished from the 1946–47 blackout when he was still in his mother’s womb. He was twenty-one years old, and if he meant to have any kind of life in the future, he would have to be born all over again—a yowling neonate pulled from the darkness for another chance to find his way in the glare and shimmer of the world.
On May thirteenth, one million people marched through the streets of Paris. The whole country of France was in revolt, and where in God’s name had de Gaulle gone to? One placard read: COLUMBIA-PARIS.
On the twenty-first, Hamilton Hall was occupied for a second time, and one hundred and thirty-eight people were arrested. That night, the battle on the Columbia campus between cops and students was bigger, bloodier, and even more savage than the one on the night of the seven-hundred-person bust.
After the May twenty-second issue, the Spectator ceased publication until the final issue of the semester on June third. That same day, Ferguson left New York to spend a month with his parents in Florida.
While he was in the air heading south, Andy Warhol was shot and almost killed by a woman named Valerie Solanas, who had written a manifesto entitled SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) and a play called Up Your Ass.
Two days after that, Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles by a man named Sirhan Sirhan and killed at the age of forty-two.
Ferguson walked on the beach every evening at dusk, played tennis with his father on most mornings, ate lox and eggs at Wolfie’s in honor of his grandmother, and spent the bulk of his time in the air-conditioned apartment working on his translations of French poems. On June sixteenth, not knowing where Amy was anymore, he sealed up one of those poems in an envelope and sent it off to her in care of her parents in New York. He couldn’t write her a letter and wouldn’t write her a letter, but the poem somehow managed to say most of the things he himself could no longer say to her.
THE PRETTY REDHEAD
BY GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE
I stand here before you a man full of sense
Knowing life and as much of death as a living person can know
Having tasted the sorrows and joys of love
Having known at times how to get across his ideas
Knowing several languages
Having done his fair share of traveling
Having seen war in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost his best friends in the nightmare of battle
I know as much as one man can know of both the ancient and the new
And without bothering myself about this war today
Between us and for us my friends
I judge this long quarrel between tradition and imagination
As a dispute between Order and Adventure
You whose mouth is made in the image of God’s mouth
A mouth that is order itself
Be gentle when you compare us
To those who are the perfection of order
We who are looking for adventure everywhere
We are not your enemies
We want to give you vast and strange kingdoms
Where the flowers of mystery are there for anyone to pluck
In those places there are new fires colors never seen
The chaos of a thousand optical illusions
Which must be made real
We want to explore kindness the enormous country where everything is silent
As well as time which can be chased away or summoned back
Pity for us who are always fighting at the frontiers
Of boundlessness and the future
Pity our mistakes pity our sins
Now summer is upon us the violent season
And my youth is as dead as the spring
O sun this is the time of burning Reason
And I am waiting
To follow the sweet and noble form
She always takes so I alone can love her
She comes and draws me to her as iron filings to a magnet
She has the charming look
Of an adorable redhead
Her hair is made of gold it would seem
A beautiful flash of lightning that flashes on and on and on
Or those flames that waltz around
In wilting tea roses
But laugh laugh at me
Men from around the world especially people from here
For there are so many things I don’t dare tell you
So many things you wouldn’t let me say
Have pity on me
(translated by A. I. Ferguson)
6.2
6.3
Thirty-nine days after he threw Fleming’s money out the window, Ferguson typed the last pages of the final version of his book. He had assumed he would start to feel all sorts of good things about himself at that moment, but after a brief surge of elation as he rolled the last five sheets of paper and carbon out of his typewriter, those feelings soon went away, even the supposedly eternal good feeling of having proved to himself that he was capable of writing a book, that he was a person who finished what he started and not one of those weak-willed pretenders who dreamed big dreams but never managed to deliver the goods, which was a human quality that pertained to far more than just the writing of books, but after an hour or so Ferguson wasn’t feeling much of anything but a kind of weary sadness, and by the time he went downstairs for a pre-dinner drink with Vivian and Lisa at six-thirty, his insides had gone numb.
Empty. That was the word for it, he said to himself, as he sat down on the sofa and took his first sip of wine, the same empty space Vivian had talked about when describing how she had felt after finishing her own book. Not empty in the sense of standing alone in a room without furniture—but empty in the sense of feeling hollowed out. Yes, that was it, hollowed out in the way a woman was hollowed out after giving birth. But in this case to a stillborn child, an infant who would never change or grow or learn how to walk, for books lived inside you only as long as you were writing them, but once they came out of you, they were all used up and dead.
How long does the feeling go on? he asked Vivian, wondering if it was just a temporary crisis or the beginning of a plunge into full-blown melancholia, but before Vivian could answer him, live-wire Lisa jumped in and said, Not long, Archie. Only about a hundred years. Right, Viv?
There’s one quick solution, Vivian said, smiling at the thought of those one hundred years. Start writing another book.
Another book? Ferguson said. I’m feeling so burned out right now, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to read another book.
Nevertheless, Vivian and Lisa toasted Ferguson on having given birth to his baby, which might not have been alive for him, they said, but it was very much alive for them, and so much so, added Lisa (who hadn’t read a single page of the book), that she would be willing to quit her law job if Ferguson promised to hire her as the nanny. Such was Lisa’s sense of humor—her nonsensical sense of humor—but it tended to be funny because she herself was funny, and Ferguson laughed. Then he imagined Lisa strolling around Paris with a dead baby in a pram, and he laughed again.
The next morning, Ferguson and Vivian walked to the post office on the Boulevard Raspail, their local branch of the s
tate-run PTT (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones), which in French was known as the Pay-Tay-Tay, the triple initials that tripped off the tongue so euphoniously that Ferguson never tired of repeating them, and once they had entered that sturdy edifice of communication services provided to the citizens of the French Republic and all others either traveling through or living in France, they airmailed a copy of Ferguson’s manuscript to London. The envelope was not addressed to Aubrey Hull of Io Books but rather to a woman named Norma Stiles, who worked as a senior editor at Vivian’s British publishing house (Thames & Hudson) and happened to be a friend of her younger T&H colleague Geoffrey Burnham, who in turn happened to be a close friend of Hull’s. This was the way Vivian had chosen to submit the manuscript—through the intervention of her friend, who had assured her she would get to the manuscript at once and then pass it on to Burnham, who would then pass it on to Hull. Wasn’t that unnecessarily complicated? Ferguson had asked Vivian when she proposed the idea to him. Wouldn’t it be faster and simpler just to ship it off straight to Hull himself?
Faster, yes, Vivian had said, and simpler, too, but the odds of it being accepted would be close to nil, since over-the-transom submissions generally wind up in the slush pile—(both new terms to the uninitiated Ferguson)—and are almost always rejected without a proper reading. No, Archie, in this case the long way around is the better way, the only way.
In other words, Ferguson had said, two people have to like the book before it gets to the only person whose opinion matters.
I’m afraid so. Fortunately, those two people aren’t dumb. We can count on them. The mystery is Hull. But at least there’s a ninety-eight percent chance he’ll read it.
So there they were on the morning of March 10, 1966, standing in line at the local Pay-Tay-Tay in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, and when their turn came, Ferguson marveled at how quickly and efficiently the little man behind the counter weighed the package on his gray metal scale, at how eagerly he slapped the postage onto the large brown envelope and then proceeded to pummel those red and green rectangles with his rubber stamp, canceling the multiple faces of Marianne to within an inch of her life, and suddenly Ferguson was thinking about the wild scene in Monkey Business when Harpo goes crazy stamping everything in sight, even the bald heads of the customs officials, and all at once he was flooded with a love for all things French, even the stupidest, most ridiculous things, and for the first time in several weeks he told himself how good it was to be living in Paris and how so much of what was good about it came from knowing Vivian and having her as a friend.
The cost of the airmail stamps was excessive, more than ninety francs when the insurance and the certified proof-of-delivery receipt were added in (close to twenty dollars, or one-fourth of his weekly allowance), but when Vivian reached into her bag to find the money to pay the clerk, Ferguson grabbed hold of her wrist and told her to stop.
Not this time, he said. It’s my dead baby in there, and I’m the one who pays.
But Archie, it’s so expensive …
I pay, Viv. At the Pay-Tay-Tay, I’m the one who pays.
Okay, Mr. Ferguson, as you wish. But now that your book is about to fly off to London, promise me you’ll stop thinking about it. At least until there’s a reason to start thinking about it again. All right?
I’ll do my best, but I’m not making any promises.
* * *
THE SECOND PHASE of his life in Paris had begun. With no book to work on anymore and no need to continue going to the language classes at the Alliance Française, Ferguson was no longer bound by the rigid daytime schedule of the past five months. Except for his studies with Vivian, he was free to do whatever he wanted now, which above all meant that he had the time to go to movies on weekday afternoons, to write longer and more frequent letters to the people who counted most for him (his mother and Gil, Amy and Jim), to look for an indoor or outdoor court somewhere so he could start playing basketball again, and to make inquiries about rounding up some potential students for private English lessons. The basketball question wasn’t resolved until the beginning of May, and he never managed to find any students, but he did send off a steady flow of letters and saw a staggering number of films, for good as New York had been as a place for watching movies, Paris was even better, and in the next two months he added one hundred and thirty entries to his loose-leaf binder, so many new pages that the original binder from New York now had a French brother.
That was the only writing he did throughout the first part of the spring—letters, aerograms, and postcards to America and a growing stack of one- and two-page synopses and shorthand observations of films. While working on the final revisions of his book, he had also been thinking about the essays and articles he wanted to write afterward, but now he realized those thoughts had been fueled by the adrenaline driving him to finish the book, and once the book was finished, the adrenaline was gone and his brain was kaput. He needed a little pause before he started up again, and consequently all through the early weeks of spring he was content to jot down ideas in the pocket-sized notebook he carried around with him on his walks, to sketch out possible arguments and counterarguments on various subjects while sitting at the desk in his room, and to come up with more examples for the piece he wanted to write about children in films, the representation of childhood in films, from the stinging switch whacks delivered to Freddie Bartholomew’s rump by Basil Rathbone in David Copperfield to Peggy Ann Garner walking into the barbershop to retrieve her dead father’s shaving mug in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from the hard slap to Jean-Pierre Léaud’s head in The 400 Blows to Apu and his sister sitting first in a field of reeds to watch the train rush by and then perched in the hollow of a tree as rain pours down on them in Pather Panchali, the single most beautiful and devastating image of children Ferguson had ever encountered on film, an image so stark and dense with meaning that he had to restrain himself from crying every time he thought of it, but that essay and the other essays were all on hold for the time being because he was still so spent from working on his miserable little book that he scarcely had the energy to sustain a sequence of thoughts for more than twenty or thirty seconds without forgetting the first thought by the time he came to the third.
In spite of his joke about not being sure if he would ever be able to read another book, Ferguson read many books that spring, more books than he had read at any time in his life, and as his studies with Vivian moved forward, he felt more and more engaged in what they were doing together, more fully in it because Vivian herself seemed more confident, more comfortable in her role as teacher. So one by one they marched through six more plays by Shakespeare along with plays by Racine, Molière, and Calderón de la Barca, then tackled the essays of Montaigne as Vivian introduced him to the word parataxis and they discussed the power and speed of the prose and explored the mind of the man who had discovered or revealed or invented what Vivian called the modern mind, and then it was on to three solid weeks with the Knight of the Sad Countenance, who did for Ferguson at age nineteen what Laurel and Hardy had done for him as a boy, that is, conquer his heart with an all-embracing love for an imaginary being, the early seventeenth-century fumbler-visionary-madman who, like the movie clowns Ferguson had written about in his book, never gave up: “… and for a long while, stumbling here, falling there, flung down in one place and rising up in another, I have been carrying out a great part of my design…”
The books on Gil’s list but also books about film, histories and anthologies in both English and French, essays and polemics by André Bazin, Lotte Eisner, and the New Wave directors before they started making their own films, the early articles of Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol, a rereading of Eisenstein’s two books, the musings of Parker Tyler, Manny Farber, and James Agee, studies and meditations by old venerables such as Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and Béla Balázs, every issue of Cahiers du Cinéma from cover to cover, sitting in the British Council Library reading Sight & Sound, waiting for his subscripti
on copies of Film Culture and Film Comment to arrive from New York, and then, after reading in the morning from eight-thirty to twelve, the afternoon excursions to the Cinémathèque just across the river, only one franc for a ticket with his old student card from the Riverside Academy, which the ticket taker never even glanced at to see if the card was still valid, the first and biggest and best film archive anywhere in the world, founded by the fat, obsessive, Quixote-like Henri Langlois, the film man of all film men, and how curious it was to watch rare British films with Swedish subtitles or silent films with no musical accompaniment, but that was the Langlois Law, NO MUSIC, and although it took Ferguson some time to adjust to an all-silent screen and a theater with no sounds in it but the coughs and sneezes of the crowd and an occasional crackling from the projector, he came to appreciate the power of that silence, for it often happened that he heard things while watching those films, the slamming of a car door or a glass of water being put down on a table or a bomb exploding on a battlefield, the silence of the silent films seemed to produce a frenzy of auditory hallucinations, which said something about human perception, he supposed, and how people experienced things when they were emotionally involved in the experience, and when he wasn’t going to the Cinémathèque, he was off to La Pagode, Le Champollion, or one of the theaters on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince or on or behind the Boulevard Saint-Michel near the rue des Écoles, and then, most helpful to furthering his education, there was the surprise discovery of Action Lafayette, Action République, and Action Christine, the triumvirate of Action houses that showed nothing but old Hollywood films, the black-and-white studio fare of a bygone America that few Americans remembered anymore, the comedies, crime stories, Depression dramas, boxing pictures, and war movies from the thirties, forties, and early fifties that had been cranked out by the thousands, and so rich were the possibilities offered to him that Ferguson’s knowledge of American films greatly increased after he moved to Paris—just as his love of French films had been born at the Thalia Theater and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.