“That’s right,” Elena said. “But I think of her a little differently — as the god, you might say, of empty rhetoric.”
I had not read a word of the manuscript, and so I had no idea to what extent she had transformed her material from the chaotic jumble of The Forty-eight Stars. “I’m looking forward to reading it,” I said politely.
Elena smiled, put some money on the table, and stood up. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
It was finished by the summer of 1938. Miriam found it lying on her desk when she arrived at work one morning. Elena had gotten to Parnassus long before the rest of us so that she would not be asked any questions about the manuscript.
Miriam stared at it for a moment, then she turned to me. “Well, this is Elena’s book,” she said. “God, I hope it’s good. What can I tell her if it isn’t?”
“The truth, Miriam,” I said.
Miriam nodded, took the manuscript into a small room that had been set aside for undisturbed reading, and closed the door behind her.
Almost four hours passed before she came out again. She walked into the outer office where I sat drowsily reviewing yet another unsolicited abomination.
“Step in here, please, William,” she said, retreating back into the reading room.
She was seated behind the desk when I came in.
“Close the door,” she said.
“That bad?” I asked.
“Just close the door,” Miriam said, “and sit down.”
I did as I was told. I could feel the tension building, the terrible feeling that you must now deliver to an unprotected mortal the worst imaginable news.
Miriam drew a single page of the manuscript from the pile. “All right,” she said, “listen to this.” Then she began to read what turned out to be the final paragraph of Calliope, an internal monologue in the mind of the narrator, Raymond Finch:
Ah, Markham, what am I to do with such stranded zeal? Betray my father? To what use should I put my moral bafflement? Feed the hungry? Clothe the naked? Inspire the faithless? But with what faith? Where do we stand, those like me — silent, full of doubt, bannerless, beyond all anthems — what can we do but choke on our anger? And after anger, what? You must know that to free the moth suspended in the web I would suffer the lash; to save the deer from a crippling leap, I would bear the weight; to save the infant blistered in the sun, the bushman wounded by a spear, the Bedouin poisoned at the well, I would lie down across the wood, stretch out my arms; to end all this, I would open up my hand, receive the nail.
Miriam looked up. “It’s all like this,” she said, “the whole book.”
“Is that bad or good?” I asked.
Miriam reinserted the page. “I’m not quite sure,” she said, “but it is different.” She lifted the manuscript toward me. “Your turn.”
I read it in one sitting, just as Miriam had, though in the comfort of my apartment. I sat in the front room, while Miriam struggled at her typewriter a few yards away, and read the book word by careful word, and with a steadily rising sense of Elena’s achievement. For she had managed to take the notes she had brought back with her from the road, those painful details of hunger and distress, and then to strip them almost entirely of their topicality, so that in the end they stood far beyond the scope of anything social or economic theory could embrace. The smug young man whom we had met outside Woolworth’s that day had been transformed into Raymond Finch, a man of almost theological grandeur, full of the deepest moral insight and complexity, a character of constantly shifting lights, part infidel, part Jesuit, a man who moves continually between the poles of what love and rage have made him, a medievalist drifting through the modern plague of the Depression, a modernist staring back at the undeniable horrors of the medieval world, at times a Christ who has lost his faith, at times a pagan who has found it.
It was still fairly early when I finished it. For a long time I sat in the living room, rethinking it. It was the voice of the novel, rather than the very simple plot, that remained most powerfully with me, so full as it was of chants and litanies, so different from my sister’s. And yet it was quite deeply hers — thoughtful, measured, softly resonant, almost Gregorian; a low, monkish hum.
I was still sitting by the window, the book in my lap, when Miriam came out of her room, wearily rubbing her eyes.
“How’s the novel coming?” I asked.
She shrugged, then nodded toward the manuscript in my lap. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s remarkable, Miriam,” I said. “I think everyone will like it.”
Miriam gave me a doubtful look. “Not everyone, William,” she said. “Believe me, not everyone.”
I knew instantly whom she meant, but at that moment he seemed so far away.
Madrid fell in late March of 1939. Jack was there, caught in the dead center of a resistance that had been collapsing for two years. Later, in his autobiography, he wrote of his own panic, of his madness in “trying to book passage on a ship while living in a city that was not only besieged by a large armed force but which could hardly have been more thoroughly landlocked.” He did get out, however, trudging southward for no apparent reason, “except that that appeared to be where other foreign refugees were headed.” He finally reached the southern coast of Cádiz, booked passage to Tangiers, and from there at last managed to sail to New York on a creaky steamer “that listed continually to the right no matter what the wind direction, giving you the distinct impression that the earth was limping.”
He arrived in New York on a steamy July day with nothing but a duffel bag and a few books to his name. He looked wizened, graying at the temples, and much thinner than I had ever seen him. He told me he had contracted pneumonia while crossing the Montes de Toledo. A gypsy family had treated him by making him sleep on mounds of dried peppers. “Didn’t do much for the pneumonia,” he said with a wry smile, “but it sure did wonders for my headache.”
He still had an ambling gait, but it was slower now, as if his experience in Spain had used up his youth. And as he stood slumped against Miriam’s desk with Sam and me gathered around him, he looked almost old, a body trimmed in white.
“Thanks for sending me a book once in a while, Sam,” he said.
Sam nodded. “Like any of them?”
“Oh, sure,” Jack said. “I thought Carla Weatherwax’s novel was pretty good.” He looked at me. “Sorry about The Strike.” He was referring to the poor reception of his own novel. Sales had sagged badly. The reviews had not been enthusiastic.
“We can’t always have a hit, Jack,” I said.
Jack shook his head. “Aw, hell, I’m no novelist. I’m barely a journalist. Christ, it was hard covering that war.” He looked at Sam. “Man, if you think we’ve got factional problems over here, you should have seen the situation in Barcelona when they expelled the POUM.” He turned back to me and smiled.
“Did Elena publish her book yet?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s called Calliope. Haven’t you seen her?”
“It’s my vanity, William. I look like a tramp. Worse. A sick tramp.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
“No, but I would,” he said. “When did the book come out?”
“Last month.”
“Doing well?”
“It’s a little early to tell.”
Jack scratched at his face. Even clean-shaven now, he looked somehow scraggly. “You got a copy of it?”
“Of course.”
“Could I borrow it?”
I walked over to the bookshelf behind my desk and pulled one down. “I’m sure she’ll autograph it for you.”
“Do me a favor, William. Don’t tell her I’m in town, yet.”
I agreed, and he walked out, waving to Sam, then to Miriam and me.
“This is not a vanishing act,” he said, trying, I think, with all his will, to bring some lightness to his voice. “I just need a little rest.”
Then he was gone, leaving Miriam and me standing
in the foyer outside Sam’s office.
Three weeks later a review of Calliope appeared in New Masses. It was facetiously entitled “Oh Woe Is Me,” and it had been written by Jack MacNeill:
Let’s get this much down from the start: this is a book that has us look at the terrible reality of our times through the eyes of a tipsy upper-class Augustine, the sort who wants to be saved from his iniquity, but not, O Lord, quite yet.
We are supposed to believe that this plutocrat can actually comprehend the misery around him better than the poor fellows who have to live in it, which is a little like saying that the housewife who lays the trap knows it better than the mouse.
The book begins at a wedding. It doesn’t matter who is getting married, it only matters that they’re rich. All looks well. But then a waiter stumbles. This is enough to change the life of the book’s hero, Raymond Finch. He discovers that some people don’t have it so good in These United States and decides to investigate. If this were all that was needed to bring a sense of justice to the wealthy classes, then I’d say let’s hire stumbling waiters by the thousands.
So off Raymond trots. He pops in at the local labor hall and muses about the nature of labor. Then it’s off to the docks, where he muses about the soiled world of international trade. He takes chow at a tumbledown greasy spoon, and here he muses about the way people eat.
By now Raymond is moved. Only one problem: he can’t seem to get off the dime, and he doesn’t know why. But I do. For all his thundering avowals, Raymond’s conscience is as thin as a pancake.
Raymond keeps on sniffing around the slum side of life wondering what he can do about all this. Then it happens. Raymond discovers that his father the capitalist is rottenly corrupt.
But what to do? Raymond doesn’t know. I can tell him. Turn the money-grubbing bastard in! But Raymond is more subtle. He needs to think. A nasty investigative reporter tries to persuade him to turn over the papers that will destroy his father. But all he can do is more of what he’s good at. He thinks.
Then, at last, the vision comes, the ultimate death wish. Raymond wishes to be crucified, dreams that he is crucified — one or the other. It’s hard to tell. The prose is unclear. Anyway, Raymond is crucified. Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe only Raymond knows. He’s more subtle.
My phone rang early on the Sunday morning that Jack’s review appeared. It was Elena. Her voice was flat.
“Did you know that Jack was back in New York?”
“Yes,” I said drowsily, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “He looked pretty bad. He wanted to get fixed up before he saw you. He said he’d let me know when he was ready to contact you.”
“Have you seen the latest issue of New Masses?”
“No.”
“Go down and get it. I think Jack has made contact.”
I went out immediately, bought the issue, brought it back up to my apartment, and with Miriam staring wide-eyed over my shoulder read Jack’s review with ever-deepening consternation.
When I had finished, I looked up at Miriam. She looked thunderstruck.
“I can’t believe he’d do that,” she said.
I folded the paper and let it slide to the floor. “I didn’t think he’d agree with all of it, but I’m surprised that he would be so vitriolic, that he’d be so blind to the merit in it.”
“It must have been agonizing for Elena,” Miriam said.
But as Elena wrote in Calliope, “After anger, what?”
As the days passed, it became clear that Jack’s review had sounded a trumpet. Before its publication, Calliope had been treated with respectful interest as the second, and long-awaited, book by the controversial author of New England Maid. Sam had been discouraged. He stormed about the office, declaring that there was nothing worse for a book than respect. “Respect is boring, boring,” he shouted. “What gets people going is love or hate. Those critics out there are respecting Calliope right into the literary bone yard.”
But after Jack’s bitter attack, the forces arrayed themselves, and Elena once again found herself in the middle of a raging controversy. The left-wing press, given the screaming go-ahead by one of its most honored journalists, bared its teeth and leaped for the jugular. In city after city, they hauled Calliope through the streets, burned it in effigy, hung it from the neck till dead. Sam was jubilant. “Jesus Christ, William, did you see this?” he’d thunder, waving another attack in the air. “God damn, William, Elena’s great. She can’t put pen to paper without pissing off half the country. Wait until the reactionaries catch on to it. They’ll come to her defense like the Seventh Cavalry. Just you wait and see.”
And indeed they did. For every attack in something like New Masses, there was a spirited defense in the right-wing press.
But how, in the end, did all of this affect Elena? It drove her into silence. She remained secluded in her apartment, refusing interviews with an absoluteness that enraged Sam Waterman.
“People don’t get famous in this country,” he told her one tropical day in late August, “by running from the press.”
But Elena was adamant. Standing by her window, wiping the sweat from her neck with a wet cloth, she told Sam exactly what she thought.
“If you think that all these attacks on me by many old friends don’t hurt, Sam, you’re crazy.”
“I know it does. Fight back.”
“How?”
“Use the method they use. Let the reporters in here. Give them a Scotch and soda. Sit down by the fan. Then, when they’re nice and comfortable, let them have it. Draw as much blood as you like.”
Elena shook her head. “No.”
Sam looked at me helplessly. “Tell her, please, William.”
I said nothing, and Sam walked over to the window.
“Look, Elena,” he said, “I stood up for you once. Remember all the trouble with New England Maid? Parnassus didn’t take one step back, right?”
Elena nodded silently.
“Well, this time you’ve got to stand up for yourself. And I don’t mean just for publicity. I mean they’re lying about you. All of them. The people following Jack’s lead, and the stuffed-shirts who are defending you. But when the smoke clears, there’s only Calliope left, and that book belongs to you. Don’t you think you have a duty to defend it?”
Elena looked Sam straight in the eye. “No, I don’t,” she said.
She resolutely maintained this position, and after only one more attempt Sam gave up entirely and trudged out of the room, exasperated.
“I hope he can forgive me,” Elena said after he had left.
“You should do what you think is right, Elena,” I told her.
Miriam nodded. “Yes. A writer should think like a writer, not like a publisher.”
“Speaking of writers,” I said, “I thought you might like to waste some time looking over my new manuscript.” I pulled it from my briefcase and handed it to her. It was hefty, to say the least: over seven hundred pages on William Blake.
“I’ll read it right away,” Elena promised.
“No rush,” I said with a slight smile. “It won’t change the world.”
She had finished it a week later, and on an overcast Saturday morning I returned to her apartment to get her response. I had expected only a few words, mostly of encouragement, perhaps some advice about this idea or that. But instead Elena delivered what amounted to a learned address on the subject before her. And as she spoke, it became clear to me how well my sister had used her time, all those many hours of solitude in Standhope, then in her room at Hewett Hall, and after that at Three Arts, and finally in this apartment in Brooklyn Heights, with its sober, book-lined walls and undistracting potted plants. During all those years, she had gathered that harvest of unelaborated fact which any mind may gather, but had then reshaped it in miraculous configurations, as only a great one can.
Certainly there were scores of scholars who knew more about Blake than Elena. But I suspect that few of them could have spoken of that poet with greater feelin
g or more passionately expanded upon what I had written. She made Blake’s dream of an English Jerusalem rise like a revolutionary force, portraying this vision of a Broad Street hosier’s son as the human miracle it surely was.
“It is odd, isn’t it, William,” she concluded, “that beside someone like Blake, most ordinary striving looks not only petty but willfully mischievous?”
I did not have the opportunity to comment, for just as I was about to speak, Miriam came into the room with a letter for Elena, which had been sent in care of Parnassus Press. It was from Joe Tully, that affable man who was one of the leading lights of New York left-wing society.
Elena opened it, read it, then handed it to me. It was an invitation for her to “confront your critics in a lively give-and-take, sponsored by contributions from our membership. There will be no admission charge, and I presume, Elena, that you will not require a fee?”
I handed the letter back to Elena. “They’ll butcher you. It’s a setup.”
“Joe’s not like that,” Elena said.
“He won’t be the only one there,” I told her. “They mean to sink you. There won’t be one person with guts enough to take your side. They’ll all be coming for the express purpose of carving you up and serving you to the membership like little bits of flank steak.”
Elena winced. “For God’s sake, William, you don’t have to be so lurid.”
“It’s true. There is nothing ecumenical in their mood. They’re going to burn you alive.”
Elena raised her hand. “Enough.” Then she looked at Miriam. “What do you think?”
“I think William’s right, but I also think that you can hold your own against them, if that’s what you want to do.”
Elena smiled slightly. “Sam would love it, wouldn’t he?”
“Sam wouldn’t be the one on the spot,” I told her. “And frankly, I don’t see why you should.”
Elena looked at me as if I were a small child who knew nothing of the world. “Because I wrote the book.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “But if you want to defend it, then why not do it the way Sam suggested a long time ago. Write a defense. You wouldn’t have any trouble finding someone to publish it.”