The Writer: Chapter Three

Chapter Three: Manhattan’s Shock and Awe

I shared a cabin on the S.S. United States with two Americans, a barber from Upstate New York, and the assistant manager of a New Jersey bank: three men in a boat that began a gentle boogie-woogie soon after leaving Southampton dock and then let rip.
The swarthy Italo-American barber took to his bunk and was soon pleading for the last rites. The atheist banker tried mind-over-matter and then transcendental meditation but must have had bad connections. I tried something from the ship’s pharmacy from which I quickly parted company.
Apart from half a Hershey chocolate bar I went on a five-day fast, sipping ice water and trying to block out the sad symphony of the air-conditioner and the barber’s pitiful gasps and groans. He was only briefly a soloist, then the banker and I joined it.
The savage sea became subdued as we approached the American shoreline and the banker and I recovered enough to go on deck, leaving the barber still thrashing around on his back as if in labor. “Morning sickness, or a false pregnancy?” quipped the banker, with the callousness of a convalescent.
As we glided closer on that overcast morning, Manhattan’s massive, masculine skyscrapers put Easter Island and Pompeii for shame. “It’s like a massive monument to a fertility cult,” I said.
The non-stop motor traffic on the Westside Highway and Riverside seemed as frantic to get off as I was to get on, not only to have solid ground underfoot but also to begin the adventure.
Standing in line on the Manhattan dockside waiting for a cab even the air had a foreign flavor: cold, sharp and salty. I shuffled similes, searching for the right way to fix my first close view of our lost colony, as a ferocious wind-whipped rain drove the drivers to park or switch on their pale headlights. The banker lent me his pen to write his phone number on the back of an envelope, and I added, “Wet potatoes hitting hot fat in a pan—plus a swish.”
Water dripped onto the paper from his prominent eyebrows as he looked over my shoulder and muttered a baffled, “What the hell’s that?”
“Traffic noise in the rain”
“Too labored,” he said.
The barber arrived and squeezed between us. “Think the rain cured me. What you up to, pal?”
I told him.
“How about a cow pissing on a flat rock?”
“Great,” I said. “Thanks.” I planned to play around with the phrase and make it my own. Would I ever have the confidence to admit that my muse was a seasick barber?
“Any time. Let’s keep in touch.” And he gave me his phone number. “Here’s your cab. Good luck.” You could tell from his handshake that he was an ex-marine.
My cab driver dressed like a bum, but smoked a cigar with the panache of a plutocrat. He took off in a pigsqueal turn, cutting in front of a sports car, its convertible roof stuck half way and letting in the driving rain. I glimpsed a young woman in the passenger seat holding a soggy newspaper over her head.
We met at the next red light.
“You fucking jerk!” the other driver yelled.
“What was that?” my driver snarled. He opened his window an inch and agitated his cigar between his teeth in an angry up and down motion.
“You FUCKING Jerk!”
“No, Johnny!” the young woman pleaded. She sounded scared. “Don’t. Please don’t!”
“You’re lucky my girl’s here!” Johnny shouted.
“No, son, YOU’RE the lucky one!”
“You fucking JERK!”
The light favored us, but we didn’t move. Traffic backed up behind us gave a ragged imitation of the 1812 Overture, with dashing vocal arrangements. Just what I expected of New York! Street opera! Then I recalled Gershwin’s Slaughter on Fifth Avenue, or was it Murder on Tenth? We were on Tenth! I slumped to make myself a less inviting target.
The two cars began to slither forward like Siamese twins, until my driver saw a chance to escape between two trucks, took it and some paint off them, and rattled ahead.
A few lights later the sports car caught up alongside and wobbled menacingly at as like a movie-chase car.
“Guy’s nuts!” my driver hissed and braked unexpectedly.
The sports car shot ahead. Cars and trucks behind us collided and stalled.
“They’re okay,” said my driver, complacently, glancing in his mirror, “Minor whiplash at worst.”
The enemy awaited us at the next red light. We stopped behind him.
He leaped from his car, his soaked T-shirt accentuating his weight-lifter muscles, and what from a distance appeared to be bruises close to were a tattoos. One word stood out: HELL.
“Watch this,” my driver said, still trying to make light of it. ”We’re in for a fundamentally religious experience.”
“No, Johnny! DON’T!” his girl shrieked. Was he a homicidal maniac on parole? One of the one in five lunatics reputed to be at large in the city? She looked like a drowning chipmunk. He looked like he meant business.
And our windshield wipers went Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!
My driver got the message, yelling, “I warn you, I’ve got heart trouble,” and arching his thumb at me. “This man is my witness. If I die he can swear it was premeditated murder,” Then he frantically closed the inch-open window.
“LOWER YOUR FUCKING WINDOW!” He began to beat on it with his fists.
My driver lowered the window a hair and Johnny flicked rain at him. “If you’ve got a bad heart,” he spat at him, “you shouldn’t pull that shit!”
Sensing victory, my driver opened the window a fist to have the last word. But he was too slow. Johnny reached in and ripped the cigar from his mouth. He raced back to the water-locked car, leaped in and drove off through a red light. His girl half stood, and turned to yell “Bastards!” as she aimed her soggy newspaper at us.
My driver was quiet for a block, then, “Took half my fucking lip with him,” he complained. He looked in his mirror, catching my eye, “Shook you rigid, didn’t it!” He was either trying to imitate me or so scared his voice had climbed a register.
“It was your driving that shook me,“ I replied. “Do you really have a bad heart?”
“Christ, no. But I would have had if that mother-fucker had connected.”
He stopped at the thirty-fourth street address Gwen had recommended. Expecting something a step or two down from the Paris Ritz Hotel, or London’s Savoy Hotel, I thought the driver had made a mistake when I entered the less than lush portals of The Young Men’s Christian Association. Maybe the Rev. Applegate’s prayers were being answered.
Dear Nobby and Adam and vice versa:
Waiting for Gwen or Underwood to tell me my next move, I’m bashing this out on a typewriter in the entrance of my new temporary home, the YMCA. Fortunately you don’t have to be a Christian to get in. It costs twenty five cents an hour. {The typewriter, not the YMCA} You’ll get about ten cents worth. Before breakfast this morning a fellow resident at the next washbasin in the rest room as they call he lavatory, asked, ”Did you hear that howl last night?” I heard nothing but howls,” I said. {Police cars, ambulances, and fire engines sounding off.} “This was different,” he said. “Guy went berserk and took a dive from the twelfth floor. Lost an arm on the way down.” They say one in five New Yorkers is mentally disturbed, or, in the vernacular, “nuts.” I’ve never seen so many people talking to themselves or making obscene gestures as they prowl the streets. I sleep in spurts, because from fourteen floors up Manhattan sounds like a prehistoric forest during the dinosaur-mating season. And I wake with each impregnation.
The night I arrived in the city, a gangster was gunned down in a nearby fish restaurant, midway through his bluefish and french fries, chips to youse guys, the bullets also shattering the glass tank containing lobsters treading water. That same night, to change to a minor key, a young Christian (Ha! Ha!) stole my overcoat (topcoat in Yankee lingo) from a hanger in the Y dining room while I toyed with what seemed to be red peppers and gravy. And he left a fragile piece of cotton in its place. It was three below and snow was up to your elbows, where it hadn’t been ploughed (plowed here) I trudged and skidded across the street to buy a replacement with a fur collar, taking giant bites out of my nest egg—and that’s no yoke. Forgive me.
I called on the business agent who represents Underwood on the east coast, who handed over forty dollars, exactly the cost of the coat. At least I now look like a native.
At night I roam the snow-free sidewalks {pavements} window shopping, sometimes talking or singing to myself so that I don’t look out of place. And I’ve found treasures in some doorways after dark, colorful copies of Life, Look and Fortune magazines, which I take back to my cell. The food is colorful, but the swollen tomatoes have lost their taste and shop-sold carnations have lost their scent. But the coffee is great and tastes as good at is smells.
It’s weird living high above a blazing city—blazing with lights, not fires—all the pleasures of the world at my feet. Sounds like a foot fetish, or time-travel back to Biblical times, doesn’t it? Intriguing opportunities seem to lurk around every corner. If it’s just an illusion, why is it so strong and pervasive? Is the air hypnotic, or are the jazzy flashing lights responsible? It’s worth a thesis.
Their cops are chunkier than ours, leer at women, carry guns like growths on their hips. Out of uniform its hard to distinguish them from the hoods. One took a seat next to mine in a fast-food joint and his portable radio blared incoherently, while he calmly chewed pastrami on rye and ogled the charming waitress who called everyone “honey”. When waitresses shout, “Burn the English!” I no longer flinch. It’s snackbar-ese for “Toast the English muffin.”
By the sound of the cop’s radio I guessed that a holdup had been called in. His response: “Another coffee and prune Danish, sweetheart.” A prune Danish is not a wrinkled Scandinavian but pastry plus prunes. And to “knock up a woman,” is not to wake her, but to get her pregnant. You can imagination the misunderstanding when you ask a woman, “Shall I knock you up, tomorrow?”
Home seems as remote as Shangri La. The few bars (pubs) I’ve seen resemble funeral homes with no or darkened windows. Among the graffiti in the YMCA urinal are the usual affectionate invitations and this gem: “Don’t piss on the floor. My shoes have holes.” Maybe it was the guy who pinched my coat. On a return visit I saw a new message. An asterisk was followed by very small, neat writing low on the wall. I leaned forward and read; “You are now shitting at exactly 45 degrees.” I’m sending mother a similar letter purged of suicide, scatology, homicide, and insanity, You get Mickey Spillane. She gets P. G. Wodehouse.
My Dear Mother, Everything is great. I’m still practicing typing, as you see. No mistakes so far! I’m learning not to take American English for granted: lift is elevator; flat,apartment; tram, streetcar; snack bars are fast food restaurants; fags mean cigarettes to us, homosexuals to them. “I’d like a fag,” is easily misunderstood. I was surprised to find that their words are often longer than our shorter and snappier equivalents. Thanks for the cakes. They arrived intact. You must have mailed them the day after I left. Now, only the crumbs remain. Food here is plentiful, but tomatoes taste like tap water, and carnations are so lacking in scent they might just as well be made of paper. America lacks at least four things with which Britain’s blessed: bluebells, fish-and- chip shops (not pale imitations), drinking establishments with the ambiance of our pubs, and unarmed cops. No, five things. Unarmed crooks. The cold air here is marvelous. It’s like breathing razor blades and, strangely, invigorating, when you find you’re not bleeding. In this arctic weather I hurry from over-heated drug store (chemist) after coffee and prune Danish, to any other overheated refuge I come across. I once sauntered through a hotel called The Waldorf-Astoria that stretches from one street to another, Lexington to Park, along lush-carpeted corridors, among scented women, chandeliers and warm air. It’s a town under one roof.
In contrast to our soccer, a game of skill, dash and almost constant movement, American football is ludicrous. Players wear so much protective padding they can only be identified by numbers on their shirts. Basketball too has its freakish aspect: the game of choice of men twenty two feet tall and above. I’ve loaded up with books about William Blake thanks to the public library, and am looking forward to starting work on this intriguing project. Meanwhile am savoring this sensational city. Regards to the neighbors, especially Mrs. Willet, Parsons and Whelan. Any news of David? He’d love it here, especially the ladies—-called women. Many are extremely attractive, with perfect teeth, smiles, and shapes. Expect to hear from Gwen, Underwood, or one of his minions with my marching orders any moment. Although I expect to fly to California. Hurrying to catch the post, or mail as they call it.
Love, Stephen.
Snow settled on the city like ice on a wedding cake, except where plows took bites out of it. Although I spent little time in my Spartan six-by-ten-feet room at the Y, I called at the reception desk several times daily and last thing at night for messages that never came. Had Underwood forgotten me? Met with a fatal accident? I called his agent who reassured me. Be patient, he said.
For days the sky was blue as a child’s painting, swept clear of clouds, its brightness accentuated by the snow, a new world. I never tired of seeing my own breath, as if I were a kettle. And I soon responded with sangfroid when my nostril hairs froze rigid, knowing that I could always step into an overheated building before the rest of me froze too.
One Sunday, my intercom sputtered incoherently and I eagerly took the elevator down. Underwood was waiting at the reception desk, in a beaver-fur coat that doubled his width and gave him the air of an Arctic trapper. He carried a basket of apples. ”Been visiting friends in Connecticut,” he said. “They forced these on me. I assume your need is greater than mine.” He handed over the fruit. “I’m at the Carlyle, if you need to get in touch. We’ll be leaving in a few days. Make the most of your freedom.” Little did I suspect what that meant.
He briefly questioned me about life at the Y, like an officer making sure his troops are comfortable. Then he nodded and left. I watched him buy a New York Times at the newsstand. He noticed me, pretended the bloated paper was too heavy to carry, waved goodbye and was gone. The apples gave me diarrhea.

Airborne

When I told Underwood it was my first flight, he surrendered the window seat, saying, ”Seen it all before.” His nonchalance reassured me. When we broke through the overcast, he sighed as if infinity was his natural element. Not that he didn’t take a collector’s-like interest in the finite.
He was a repository of bizarre information which he disgorged at intervals during our flight. I expected him to want to discuss William Blake, instead, after an air hostess brought us drinks and we had skirted the Grand Canyon, I learned that the British Queen Boadicea, a contemporary of Nero, is buried under London’s St. Pancras Railroad Station. He even knew which platform.
“And Anne Boleyn,“ I said, “is buried in a church near the Tower of London, where she was executed for adultery.”
“For adultery, incest and high treason,” he added. “Did you study the Tudors at Oxford?”
“No, at grammar school. And just the reigns of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth. To bring history to life our teacher took us on a trip to Boleyn’s childhood home, Hever Castle. It’s only ten miles from our school.”
“At Edenbridge. I know it well. Despite his reputation, Henry the Eighth was justified in getting rid of two wives. Especially Boleyn. After all, she committed adultery with at least four lovers, as well as incest with her brother.”
“But the men were tortured into confessing.”
“Not all of them. The aristocrats weren’t. More important, Henry was desperate for a son to succeed him, and she wasn’t up to it. Not being prescient, he wasn’t to know what a great monarch their daughter Elizabeth would turn out to be. Bloodlines are important. A shame she remained childless. What a king her son might have been.”
“D’you believe that Henry regarded Anne Boleyn’s failure to give him a son, in the same league as committing adultery and high treason?”
“Of course not. But certainly a reason to get rid of her. It threatened the survival of the House of Tudor, for goddsake. Without offspring, the family tree simply fizzles out. As the House of Tudor did in sixteen hundred and three, with the death of Elizabeth. Incidentally, I prefer to think of her as the Barren rather than the Virgin Queen. Who knows if she was a virgin?”
During lunch, mentioning the operas he had enjoyed in Italy as a boy, he spoke of the strange deaths of composers. “Ernest Chausson by riding his bicycle into a wall, Henry Purcell from a chill after his irate wife locked him out of the house one cold night. And just after World War 2, during the American occupation of Austria, composer Anton von Webern stepped out of his house to smoke a cigar and was fatally shot by a drunken, trigger happy American sentry, who later drank himself to death.”
Underwood accepted another drink from the air hostess, took a sip, and continued: “Charles Alkin, greatly admired by Liszt, was crushed to death when his bookcase fell on him. Franz Koczwara died in a brothel from auto-erotic asphyxia. And Jean-Baptiste Lully, conducted so vigorously that he stabbed himself to death with his baton. Another, whose name escapes me, died by falling out of a tree.”
This led to our discussing how to handle the scene of William Blake claiming he had seen “angels” in a tree. Should the proposed film show what might look like dazzling sunlight, or from Blake’s viewpoint have the kind of ethereal beings he produced in his own paintings? Or what?
He opened a green leather notebook and handed it to me. saying, “None of this is made up, none is fiction. All of it is true to Blake’s life and the various biographies I’ve read. So look it over and tell me how you would handle it without getting laughs.”
I read, ”Blake persuades his reluctant wife to join him in the garden and follow his lead in taking off all her clothes. How avoid laughs? It’s not a comedy. And here’s another scene. After Blake witnessed his brother’s death, he claimed that he saw the man’s soul flying to heaven and clapping its hands for joy. Seems to justify his critics calling him a lunatic. Am I making a movie about a lunatic a genius or both?”
I found the answer I needed in my briefcase, and said. “Here it is. Wordsworth among others thought Blake was mad, but added, ”There is something in the madness of this man which interest me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.”
“Not bad,” Underwood said and took the page from me. “The mad genius. I like the premise. ”Apparently he’d forgotten that I’d made a similar suggestion at the first interview.
When the pilot told us we would be landing in twenty minutes, Underwood put away his notes and said, ”Forget Blake. You’ll have plenty more time to think about him. We have to come up with something to jump-start tonight’s homecoming party. My friends Hal and Iris are holding it in their home and we’ll probably stay there for the night.”
Parties at Oxford were usually sparked by booze, wild men and willing women; and the highlights were dancing or debauchery. The so-called intellectuals among us favored word games that disintegrated as the evening progressed to the battle of the quips, debagging, or dunking someone in the lake. And intellectual intercourse, if the party lasted long enough, quite often led to sexual intercourse.
“I suppose charades is too tame.”
“I think so. I like to keep them guessing.” He looked across me at the wing, lost in thought, then, “Suppose we just pretend that you’re from some Godforsaken place, Borneo, or Upper Mongolia say, and see how long we can fool them.”
Though uneasy at the idea that I’d be the bright spark at a party of strangers, I felt even more reluctant to be a wet blanket. “Are there any rules?” I asked.
“Make them up as you go along. They’re used to the Hollywood scene anyway, where not everyone’s what they seem to be. And if they get too suspicious, just clam up. Tell them you’re with M.I.5. and not free to elaborate.”
“Does a secret agent ever admit he is one except under torture?”
He thought that was funny. “Sure,” he said, “Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene spoke about it all the time.”
“But only when they were former agents.”
“Well that’s what you’ll be.”
I felt uneasy and tried to ridicule the idea to make him give it up. “It’s really like a childhood game of Let’s Pretend.”
“That’s it,” he said enthusiastically. “It’s just a game.”
“At twenty two I’m a little too young for the role.”
“You could easily pass for twenty six.”
When I wondered aloud if masquerading as a secret agent was considered “moral turpitude” in the States, which could get me deported, Underwood didn’t think this worth a response.
As we buckled up for the landing, he exclaimed, “I’ve got it! You’re a former travel agent from Tibet. That’s the game plan. Let’s see how long you can get away with it.”
California Here I Come

Underwood sent me to collect our luggage and said he’d be waiting in the airport bar. As I lifted off the first spinning case I pulled a muscle. Underwood’s chauffeur, who’d flown in the previous day, found me sitting on the case. “What the fuck happened to you?” he asked.
“How about welcome to California?”
“Welcome to California. What the fuck happened to you?”
“Pulled a muscle.”
”That’s because you obviously don’t work out.” He helped me to spot Underwood’s dark-green cases, and, when I tried to lift one, he beat me to it, saying, “Noblesse oblige. That’s French for get the fuck out of the way. You’ll only do yourself another injury” He insisted on lifting all of them off the roundabout and onto a trolley, told me that we would be driving north for about seventy miles to Hal and Iris’s home, enroute and more than half way to Underwood’s estate. Then he headed for the exit and waved me to the bar.
There Underwood introduced me to our host and hostess for tonight’s welcome home party. “I was discussing your bizarre experiences in Tibet among the Yogis,” he said.
Though my eyes were not yet adjusted to the room’s semi-darkness, I assumed that the jasmine scent was emanating from Iris as she took my outstretched hand, saying, “Charles tells us that you learned to levitate.” She held on a touch longer than necessary. I was too flummoxed to reply.
Gradually Iris came into focus: Nerfetiti hairstyle, elegant eyebrows, a beauty spot near her glistening lips, and almost childlike brown eyes.
Sweat-soaked socks came to mind as I sipped my first whisky ever, but I kept at it, anxious to appear sophisticated, and hoping a few more sips would mask my nervousness.
“Can you talk about it?” Iris asked. “I mean it’s not like having to keep your mantra secret, is it?”
Hal asked for a demonstration and Underwood told him not to rush me.
“Can’t even stand up straight,” I said. But not wanting Iris to think that I was permanently disabled, I explained, “Put my back out lifting the luggage.”
She moved closer. “If it still hurts in the morning I’ll take you to my masseur. His hands are unbelievable.”
“So are his fees,” Hal said.
Now I could see him, he looked like a football player who’d broken training, with an incipient double chin and a slightly confrontational manner, which encouraged me to go along with Underwood’s game.
“Is there a difference between doing the high jump and levitating?” Hal asked.
“You’re defying gravity in both cases,” I explained, surprised that I could answer so confidently.
“But one’s natural and the other seems miraculous,” Iris said.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Hal said.
It didn’t strike me at the time, how unlikely it was that I, who couldn’t even straighten my back, was claiming to be able to float in space.
“Don’t try to rationalize Eastern mysticism,” Underwood said. “It takes years to understand, right, Elliot?”
“No question.”
Our plane had been late and Hal and Iris had obviously tanked up while waiting for us. Which explained why on our way out, Hal walked into a Christmas tree and apologized to it.
I joined the chauffeur up front in the custom-built Silver Wraith, but Iris called me to join them in the back. Underwood didn’t object so I took what was left, the jump seat, toe to toe with Iris who sat between the two men.
“Fasten your seat belts,” Underwood commanded.
“We’re in for a bumpy ride” Iris added, a fair imitation of Bette Davis in All About Eve.
“Los Angeles,” Hal said. “Or nineteen suburbs in search of a city.”
As the sun began to set, we eased into one of the lines of fast traffic and were soon sipping brandy from the same leather-jacketed flask. Iris wiped off her lipstick with paper tissue, then put a sun=kissed finger lightly on my arm, “All I want you to do darling, when you’re in the mood, is to levitate while I’m watching.”
Sounds like an invitation you can hardly refuse, Elliot,” Underwood said with the hint of a chuckle.
“Meanwhile I’ll be watching Iris,” Hal said.
I don’t have total recall, especially when awash with whisky but if I was hypnotically regressed my drive from L A. airport to Hal and Iris’s home would probably include:
Iris rests her hands—diamond and emerald rings on the right one, plain gold wedding band on the other—on her immaculate white skirt. She often puts her hands to her necklace above her decollete lime-green blouse as if we were in bandit territory and she’s scared of it being snatched. Lively hands, sleepy sensuous eyes, not childlike as I first thought. She’s slightly smashed and it suits her. Hal plays yokel to Underwood’s man-of-the-world, but conveys to me by winks and raised eyebrows, that it’s merely a role—-and if he ever had more cash than Underwood then, oh boy, then we’d see a quick role reversal. “Fuck you money,” they call it.
These, of course, are first impressions, during which I am also under the intoxicating influence of Iris’s jasmine scent which she shares with her every movement, and agreeably trapped by her toes.
From the somewhat cryptic conversation I gather that Hal is designing another house for Underwood on the coast, Iris will decorate it. They are also somehow involved with the William Blake project.
As we leave the highway and drive along a winding street, where our Rolls is as common as coal in Cardiff, Iris points out movie celebrity houses, almost invisible in the dark, or hidden behind high hedges. ”Gene Kelly’s, Ingrid Bergman’s, David Selznick’s--he’s having a fight over Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. He wants to shoot it in the South of France and Zurich. The money boys have opted for Malibu and the studio back-lot. . .Ricardo Montalban’s, Jennifer Jones’s.”
After a pause, Underwood says dryly, “And, I suspect, several Mafiosi.”
We pass Beverly Hills’ often land-poor palaces, as
incongruous on their narrow lots as the royal coach would have been squeezing through London’s rush-hour traffic.
Judging by the architecture, an Arab sheik lives next-door to a Frenchman, who has tried to outdo Versailles, and can chat over his garden wall to an Englishman on the other side who brought the Tudor mansion with him when he emigrated, and now lives alongside a color-blind Mexican millionaire. What is claimed to be the city’s oldest house looks as if its architect had been inspired by Grimms’ Fairy Tales. But there is no one around to discuss it. No one is outside, not a soul walking a dog, picking a flower, or going for a stroll, or to mail a letter. It is as if the enemy is about to attack and the alarm has been sounded to evacuate.
More astonishing, was the appearance of a red double-decker London bus moving in the opposite direction. At least some passengers on the top deck get a better sight of the stars’ houses than we did.
What I remember vividly is when we left Beverly Hills and stopped at a red light near a store featuring dog turds and false noses. A large handwritten message in white paint on the store’s window invited you to HAVE YOUR FORTUNE READ IN THE REAR, and I imagined each customer bending over. A new Californian cult, perhaps.
It was disconcerting how close the luscious land of those who had made it, was to the mean streets of those who hadn’t. I assumed that the latter came for fame and fortune, too, but failing had settled for the sun and Social Security.
We headed north on the Pacific coastal road for over an hour, before turning northeast through small villages. Wine groves and farmland, entertained by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, on the radio.
Then, out of nowhere police and patrol cars were everywhere. And we stopped. I’d seen enough American movies to know that this was a murder scene or a drug bust.
Hurrying cops with flashlights directed us along a palm-tree-bordered driveway to the sound of staccato squeals and confusing voices from their intercoms.
One cop with a flashlight passed us on to another, and he to a third, our tires on the driveway imitated, not a cow pissing on a flat rock, more like milk meeting breakfast cereal. No one said a word in our car, as if they feared that it was bugged, until we reached a huge Spanish-style house with red-tiled roof and white walls on a hillside. “We’re home,” Iris said. “And the party seems to have started without us.” A butler opened the front double doors and from the swirl of color and music inside it was an unlikely crime scene.
When the chauffeur stopped the car to drop us off, I let the others walk ahead, so they didn’t see me walking with a bent back, like an old man, and asked him what the police were up to.
“Directing traffic.”
“For a private party?”
“Sure.”
“Can anyone get them for a private party?”
“If they pay them.”
“I didn’t think you could buy the cops.”
“This is America, Limey. The land of the free and the brave. They’re off duty. Cops can work two or three jobs in this land of opportunity.”
A smiling Filipino carried my case, leading me upstairs along carpets with bounce. En route I had a bird’s-eye-view of Underwood’s homecoming party in progress which would have made a great New Yorker cover: about fifty penguins and peahens on a white-marble floor, band one end, bar the other bordering the shallow end of a luminous, blue-tiled swimming pool. A dazzling display I had only seen matched in a few big-budget movies.
The lights ricocheted off the chandeliers, band instruments, battles and glasses on the bar, a skintight sequined dress, someone’s spectacles. And as the band played, “Just One of Those Things,” I thought—-anything’s possible. Sure I could get to the moon on gossamer wings. Or, better still, after helping Underwood turn out an Oscar-winning movie, I’ll go it alone, out-Proust Proust, out-Joyce Joyce, make a bundle, buy mother central heating, a downstairs lavatory and a part-time
gardener, send David back to college to get a degree, if he wants to go. If not, buy him a bank.
“Injured yourself, sir?” the Filipino asked, as he opened a bedroom door and gestured for me to precede him.
“I’m afraid so.”
“A few drinks will loosen you up.”
“Thanks for the advice.” When he left, I flushed the toilet three times before I realized that it was the silent type.
In the shower I directed the spray at the small of my back, which helped a bit, but the towels had so much embroidery on them I had to use three before I was dry.
Nobby’s dinner jacket, his farewell gift to me, was loose but not ludicrous. He’d worn it only once for a cocktail party, at which he never sat. And never expected to wear it again.
I hovered on the landing. What now? He stoops to conquer?
Do I join the giddy throng as a guest, Underwood’s assistant, a former spy. Or as a former travel agent from Tibet? And if I make the wrong choice will Underwood fire me?
----------------
Descending the stairs, hoping I might pass for a war-wounded veteran, I spotted Underwood at the far end of the room next to the bar. He was talking to a tall, emaciated-looking man who appeared to be stooping to examine a wall safe.
Threading my way to them, skirting the swirling dancers, I grabbed a vodka from a waiter’s tray and finished it with eye-stinging gulps. Accidentally elbowing a silky-skinned woman smelling expensive, I apologized vigorously.
“Darling, any time!” she exclaimed. “Didn’t hurt a bit.” I think she might have stayed longer, but a little man with a cigar eased her away.
Several non-dancing men I passed flashed cigars: the smaller the man the bigger the smoke.
My mistake. It was no safecracker, but Aldous Huxley peering through a magnifying glass at a small painting by Corot.
My God, Huxley! The feverishly debated subject of at least two of our “literary soirees” at home. Of course, he was slumming in Hollywood, among the philistines. But even so, his Brave New World puts him up there among the immortals.
Underwood was talking to the back of Huxley’s head: “Might it tempt you if Shostakovitch handles the score?”
I made a mental note to look up how to spell the composer’s name and to tell mother he might do the music for the Blake movie.
Huxley straightened up to what looked like six-three and faced Underwood. “I’d love to Charles, but I’m already behind on two deadlines. Shouldn’t really be here, but didn’t want to miss the chance of seeing you.”
They began to talk about the increasing violence in inner-city streets, and Huxley mentioned that in one savage tribe when its members felt their adrenalin rising dangerously, they would use their excess energy to chop down forest trees, instead of decapitating their neighbors. Since this was hardly an option for tree-starved city dwellers, Huxley suggested teaching the violent prone to channel their energy into boxing, wrestling or jujitsu competitions.
“Or long distance running,” Underwood added. “At least that would get them off the city streets.”
He noticed me. “Ah, here’s my new assistant,” he said. And, to Huxley, “What are you drinking?”
I reached for Huxley’s empty glass, before I could be ordered into waiter status. Now I could be taken for a fellow guest being courteous to an older fellow countryman.
He handed it over.
“Charles tells me you’re from England,” he said when I returned with his drink. ”Where, exactly?”
“Orpington in Kent, near London.”
‘Ah, famous for Buff Orpington chicken,” he said
“That’s not our only claim to fame. It was also the home of Orde Wingate.”
He sharpened his interest as if I’d just come into focus. “Really? A remarkable man. The Jew’s Lawrence of Arabia. Weren’t he and Lawrence somehow related?”
“Distant cousins, I believe.”
“You knew Lawrence, didn’t you Charles?” Huxley asked.
“And Wingate, Both briefly.”
All the time I was nervously waiting for Underwood to resume the game of let’s pretend, only too aware that Huxley was a sophisticated world traveler, who invariably carried on his journeys portable leather-bound copies of The Encyclopedia Britannica.
I was reluctant to deceive Huxley especially as I knew of his failing eyesight, and I was stricken by the certainty that he would eventually unmask me as a nobody with lower back pain trying to fool him.
I tuned in and out of their conversation whether the torture inflicted on him by Turks, which Lawrence claimed to have endured, was real or invented, while thinking, “How can I get Underwood to drop the game without antagonizing him? Get him onto poetry? Divert the conversation to William Blake?”
Iris rescued me, with, “I’m stealing Stephen from you to meet more of our friends.”
Huxley bent to kiss her hand, saying to her wristwatch, “You look irresistible as always,” then straightened up and patted me on the shoulder, spilling some of my vodka down my front.
Iris steered me to several guests who grasped my hot hand and looked searchingly at me with the feigned, manic air of the half-sloshed simulating interest. She glanced at two women almost hidden by an entourage. “Garbo and Gardner,” she explained. “But shy of strangers, so they’ll miss out on you.” I was sloshed enough to think she meant it.
She took me, instead, to meet George Cukor. “The so-called women’s director, but don’t say I said so or he’ll erupt. He thinks it’s so limiting.” He was erupting, anyway. “No! No! No!” he responded with a rising inflexion to someone who had proposed a remake of Jekyll and Hyde with Huxley for the script and a woman to play the dual role. “But it’s a natural,” the man insisted. ”And timely. Women are after equality everywhere”
“Time is the whole point,” said Cukor. “I don’t have it. Booked solid for the next three years.”
When Iris introduced me, Cukor wished me well as Underwood’s assistant, thought that Blake was a challenging subject, recited faultlessly the ”Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright,” poem, and concluded with, “After meeting the great Huxley, you must find us all very small potatoes!” As we walked away he said emphatically, “That’s a lot of shit!” Booze and Iris had bolstered my confidence so that I dismissed the thought that he was referring to me.
Underwood took Iris for a few spins around the room, and they moved close to Hal who had a ravishing young woman in his muscular arms.
The looks and shapes of the other males were roughly what I expected, from trim, smooth and distinguished, to obese button poppers. But the women were even more sharply divided between the ravishing with flawless everything, and the grotesquely ugly. Like an audition for Cinderella.
I guessed that the unlovely were the brains, or the excessively affluent offspring of self-made millionaires and chorus girls, who took their looks from dad. Then thought of Iris, both bright and stunning, and aborted the theory.
This night was my introduction to the solipsistic school of dancing. Each dancer shook, wiggled, twirled, stomped, and swooped, creating a unique choreography in which the only rule seemed to be—-You must not touch each other!
When it changed to the old style with, “Embrace me, you sweet Embraceable you,” Iris surprised me with, “Yes thank you, Stephen, I’d love to dance,” but quickly backed off. “You’re soaked!” she complained.
“It’s the vodka Huxley spilled on me.”
She took my arm and led me towards the stairs. “I’ll lend you one of Hal’s shirts.”
I grasped the curving rail to stop from falling backwards, recognizing my room by its bayberry smell and the window view of a grapefruit tree.
Iris came in before I had my shirt off, closing the door with her back. The Filipino was right. I could stand upright without pain. The drinks had unlocked my back. But they also had me swaying almost us much as Iris.
She wavered towards me, saying, “All right, then,” stopped, and seemed to be watching me blink. Then slowly and carefully she planted her lips on my left eyelid. She , whispered: “What I really want you to do, darling, when you’re in the mood, is to let me see you levitate.” She kissed the air between us, and was gone.
The room began to simulate the ocean liner I’d come over in. I flushed the toilet, grateful for its quiet whisper.
I don’t remember going to bed. I must have, of course, because that’s where I woke. And I felt marvelous. My back pain had vanished, so I could stand upright. Maybe I could levitate, too, if I tried.

The Writer: Chapter Four

Chapter Four: Underwood’s Estate

Underwood shoved his head around my bedroom door: ”We’re leaving immediately. I’ve thanked Iris and Hal for their hospitality. We’ll breakfast en route.”
Although hardly light, the sun had already warmed the air.
In khaki pants and short-sleeved shirt, he led the way to our car as if to defend what’s left of the British Empire.
Two servants trailed us with our luggage like native bearers.
There was no mention of last night’s party, though the chauffeur’s face was eloquent, matching his gray-green uniform. He’d obviously been well oiled in the servants’ quarters, and drove cautiously through empty streets as if the car had the hangover.
“Where is everyone?” I asked Underwood, who had dumped his fattening brief case between us, and taken out some of the papers.
“On various film sets or TV studios. They’re very early risers. When they work they don’t work nine to five, you know. More like five to nine. Others are on vacation. Or on locations abroad.”
“But how about their staff?”
“All inside the houses polishing the furniture or polishing off the whisky.”
After a few miles of fantasy land, we entered the twilight zone--of gas stations, stray dogs, thin cats, pigeons, and people.
A billboard warning that THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH was conveniently near a drug store, where the sinner could stave off the ultimate with tranquilizers.
As if to emphasize the hazards of human existence, our air-conditioner failed and within seconds you could have ripened tomatoes in the car.
To cool off, we quickly opened all the windows and the chauffeur put on a burst of speed.
The subsequent hurricane gave Underwood’s notes on Blake hysteria.
“Christ almighty!” he protested, grabbing some of the pages and sitting on them, a human paper-weight.
After the chauffeur reduced speed, and we drove through dusty and potholed streets, Underwood gave the notes to me, a fistful at a time, to stuff back into his briefcase.
As I got hotter, I first took off my jacket, then my old school tie, and finally opened my shirt at the collar. Infra dig in England, except in mid summer.
Dressing so casually was almost like giving up my British passport.
The chauffeur came to life at a coffee stall where short-skirted girls fluttered to and from customers’ cars, bringing back on plastic trays freshly-squeezed-orange
juice, bagels and cream cheese, and coffee in paper cups. “Thanks, sweetheart,” the chauffeur said, giving his passable imitation of Humphrey Bogart. “Any movies being shot around here?”
“Only some TV junk.”
When she’d gone, he turned to Underwood, ”Notice how these girls are all clones of the latest heartthrobs?”
Underwood did not respond. After finishing his orange juice and tasting his coffee, he took a quick breath and used it to clean his dark glasses. I admired his ability to ignore rhetorical questions, not even replying to the chauffeur with a grunt, slight nod, or raised eyebrows. “Hauteur,” my brother, David, would have called it, in his crippled cockney imitation, ridiculing my pretensions, in his eyes, either to be “one of the ’aughty haristocrats!’” Or, at least, to emulate them. I wasn’t sure that he was wrong.
After refueling, we drove west until we hit the coastal highway and then headed in the general direction of Alaska, screeching along a wild S-bend, to test our nerves, I guess. Steep cliffs on our right kept us in cooling shadow for a bit. Once, when the car swerved into the wrong lane—I still wasn’t used to traffic on the wrong side of the road--I saw the Pacific ocean sharply below just waiting for us to drop in.
“Take is easy,” Underwood said evenly.
After a few mile of silence, the chauffeur said, “Hearst Castle is midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now state property. About two hundred and fifty miles. We’re about midway between Los Angeles and Hearst Castle. About a hundred and forty.”
Two hours later we turned inland into hill country, where Underwood pointed out our destination, an immense, spectacular place on even higher ground, red roofs, light gray stone walls, Spanish influence. Like several houses cemented together in a hexagon.
“Pentagon,” Underwood corrected me.
“Was it ever a monastery?”
“Parts of it were. The material is imported from Europe and several hundred years old. I had the structure built seventeen years ago.”
“How many rooms?”
“Forty two. But most are closed except when there are conferences here.”
“And eighteen bathrooms,” the chauffeur added.
I’d never seen anything like it, not even in Country Life, Architectural Digest, or my dreams, and speculated that the architect was a native American inspired by the tales of White men under attack who deployed their wagons in a circle.
“The interior courtyard is more than an acre,” the chauffeur said. “Enough room for a cricket field.”
Underwood chuckled. “He knows that because he once cut the grass there when the gardeners were sick or on vacation.” The subject spurred him to reach into his grab bag of odd but interesting facts.
“It’s about the size of Lords or the Oval in South London. The Oval’s my favorite. Converted from a cabbage patch and leased from the Duchy of Cornwall. In 1882 the visiting Australian team beat the English by seven wickets. And one English supporter was so tense during the match that he bit through the handle of his umbrella. It was the first time the English team had ever lost a home game. I’d love to have seen it.”
There were fields and gardens around the building, all surrounded by a high thick hedge, and a guard in the gatehouse who let us through with the touch of a switch.
Underwood’s entire estate was over fourteen hundred acres and included hills, valleys, woods and several streams, a lake and river.

Pamela
A woman stood outside the front door who, even from a distance, was vaguely familiar.
“Your secretary awaits you,” I guessed.
He grunted. “Not my secretary. My wife, Pamela.“
For some reason I had assumed that he was a widower. Strange that he’d never mentioned her before. She wasn’t easily overlooked.
From fifty feet away, tall, tawny, slim but shapely. Taller and slimmer than Iris. From a car length, an oval face and genuine smile. Stunning in an understated way, her eyes half-closed in the midday sun. She moved to Underwood with the assured, loose-limbed stride of a ballet dancer but without the Charlie-Chaplin splayed feet some dancers have.
“Terrible trip,” he grumbled. “Air conditioner went on the fritz.”
“Too bad, but it’s cool inside. Just arrived myself,” she said, embracing him. I thought I had heard her voice before. Incongruously, although deep, almost masculine it made her seemed more feminine and vulnerable, as if she had a sore throat.
“Well, here he is,” Underwood said, in the manner of an expert appraising a painting of doubtful authenticity. “The good news is that Huxley may join our Blake project.”
Her hand was cool and her grip warm. I followed her through the massive door along a blessedly cool corridor, the chauffeur, with my luggage, in close pursuit. We briefly surveyed my sunny room. “Hope you’ll be happy here,” she said. “Anything you need, just ask.”
The chauffeur waited until she was out of earshot. “Smashing, isn’t she? Every home should have one.”
“Where have I seen her before?”
“In your dreams.”
“Her voice seems familiar.”
“Shows how much you know about showbiz, professor.
She’s a fairly well-known actress. Played in Streetcar on tour last year. Better than Vivien Leigh, according to the critics. She’s been in about twenty movies. What the hell did you stuff in those fucking bags? Think I’ve emasculated myself.”
“For you, no doubt, a fate worse than death. You didn’t have any trouble at the airport.”
“Didn’t have to walk a mile with them then, did I, sport? Now I’ve got to fix the car’s fucking air conditioner.” Still, he walked off whistling, apparently happy to be here, too.
Though my room had large double windows, the view was obscured by a grapevine which tamed the now fierce sun to a mellow glow, Beyond the vine, I glimpsed space and trees and, in the distance, the high, thick hedge. Trees hid the ten-car garage above which, I assumed, the servants, chauffeur included, lived.
My room was beautifully proportioned, with wide plank flooring, white walls, and a wood-beamed ceiling. My cherry wood desk had three drawers either side and a shallow central drawer, and a six-tiered bookcase alongside overflowed with William Blake biographies, one subtitled, “Prophet of Universal Brotherhood.” But the most provocative titles were, “A Stranger From Paradise,” and “Fearful Symmetry.” There was a book of his art work, several of his poetry, a thesaurus, and histories of the London and the politics of his time, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I sat in the captain’s chair on a red-Moroccan-leather cushion, hand on a scarlet phone, ready to snatch it up at first peep, eager to get to work after so much hanging around. I checked. There was a dial tone.
What I took for a clothes cupboard was a small, immaculate, white-tiled bathroom, brightened with random colorful Mexican tiles, a shower with frosted glass sliding doors, gray and scarlet towels thick as carpets and soft as puppies, and several bars of scented transparent soap.
After a quick shower I tried the no frills bed for size, head to the wall, feet towards the windows, room for one and a half adults, or two thin kids. And woke from a dream of roller-skating with the Pope to find a woman using my leg as a bell-rope.
“Lunch is ready and I have to do your room.” She was so round that in my sleepy state I thought of bowling her.
Instead of walking across the courtyard to the dining room diagonally opposite, I took the long way along a corridor with French windows at frequent intervals opening on to the courtyard. It meant skirting the great hall in the main entrance, the living room with Spanish-style furniture of dark woods, leather and copper. All so well-kept and highly polished they had the air of overindulged pets. Underwood’s study door was open and the library beyond it through which I glimpsed a greenhouse. I wondered how much work-time he wasted to enjoy the flowers. Then a sharp left turn up a flight of stairs took me to the dining room.
“Oh, there you are,” Underwood said. “On time.”
Although not excluding me from their animated conversation, naturally, after two months apart, they had lots of news to exchange. She had returned from making a film in Canada, was free for a few weeks and then faced several weeks of filming on the fringes of Los Angeles. After that there was the chance of another movie with locations in the rainforests of South America. The chauffeur had been badgering her to get him a part, not only in her current film, but in Underwood’s projected William Blake movie.
“I’ll talk to him,” Underwood said decisively, as if to say, “I’ll shut him up.”
I gathered that he and several other servants lived in rooms above the six-car garage, separate from the main building but within easy reach.
Underwood’s quick changes of mood and topic still caught me by surprise. We had been discussing what I had noticed, the sudden signs of poverty after the affluence of Beverly Hills. “In London, for example,” I said, “the river Thames creates a distinct buffer between the rich and poor. And the City, the business district, separates the affluent West Enders and the less affluent East Enders.”
“True enough,” Underwood said. Then, “Iris took quite a shine to our young friend, here. Hal even suspected that she was making a play for him. ”
“She really is the limit,” Pamela said, indulgently, as if Iris was a favorite sister.
Underwood had work to do, and Pamela offered to show me the garden we’d been admiring during lunch. Glancing back, after a few minutes I caught Underwood watching us, before he quickly moved out of sight.
Although it was still winter, there were enough plants showing signs of life to see that he had, as in England, painstakingly replicated the scene of a French painting. This was Monet’s garden.
Blake wanted to build a new Jerusalem in England’s “green and pleasant land.” Maybe this was Underwood’s American version of the same idea.
“Charles didn’t depend on photographs or the painting. He sent landscape gardeners to France to get exact measurements.” She laughed. “It’s an understatement to call him a perfectionist.”
I thought that he must have kicked himself for missing out on buying London Bridge, when the real thing was on the market. When I mentioned this to Pamela, she replied, ”That’s the last thing he would have wanted. It went to an Arizona oil executive at auction for two and a half million dollars and he had it rebuilt piece by piece. And now it’s the second most popular tourist attraction in Arizona after the Grand Canyon. He loves this place because it’s so far from the crowds.”
I toyed with the idea that Underwood’s replications had not stopped at gardens. Pamela at first sight might have been a double for Shirley McLaine. But now, as I noticed her unique intonations, gestures, at times her
wistful smile, and the way she lowered her head slightly to think something over, I realized that she was no one’s replica. She obviously admired and loved Underwood.
We strolled from Monet’s twin garden, across two fields into a pine and birch wood penetrated by shafts of sunlight, joining a lively, musical bird population. When panels of light ahead indicated that we were approaching the far end of the wood, she touched my arm and said, “Charles wouldn’t want us to go any further.”
I waited for her to get the double entende, sharpened by recalling the sight of Underwood at the window, but she didn’t.
We took a slightly different return route through the wood and emerged onto grounds giving us a low-flying-birds-eye-view of Underwood’s incredible estate. Almost everything visible in every direction was his.
Pamela pointed out the public highway three miles from the edge of the estate and the weaving rhododendron-sheltered drive—not unlike the one in Wiltshire—leading from the gatehouse to pass the garage, a small mansion in itself, and end at the circular drive in front of the house.
“Someone compared it to a huge monastery,” she said.
“Where the monks broke their vows of poverty.”
She laughed.
During our walk she asked me about Oxford and Orpington, amused by my embroidered account of frustrating encounters with Lord George Teddington.
“Yet you seem at ease with Charles.”
“He doesn’t think that King Lear’s a comedy. That’s only a slight exaggeration of Teddington’s view,” I conceded, adding, “Perhaps if they’d had a course in genuflecting, his being a lord would have been less of a problem.”
“Didn’t anyone tell you?” she asked.
“Tell me what?”
She lowered her head. “I’ll think about it,” she said. I guessed it was something to do with Underwood’s reputed connection with the royal family.
She questioned me about London theater directors and performers. My ignorance of show business surprised her. Her expression implied, “You’re a freak but refreshing.” At least, that’s how I took it.
“I had heard of Garbo, of course,” I said. “ My mother will be thrilled to know I saw her even from a distance, and our neighbor, Mrs. Willett, will treat me like a celebrity because of it.”
I denied her lighthearted comment that the English summer lasted one day in contrast to the almost perpetual California sunshine. “Though I do think the English character has been molded by generations of boys playing cricket in pelting rain. Teaches you to keep going, even if you’re miserable at what you’re doing. Empire building and all that.”
“Americans think you must be masochists to play that game.” She laughed. “Perhaps you are. But now you’ve almost lost your Empire, will you give up cricket?”
“Never. We’ll fight to regain our Empire rather than do that.”
She pointed northwest, saying, “Carmel, Big Sur and the Pacific Ocean are over there. But I’m afraid you won’t see any of them until the work’s finished. It’s not indentured servitude but you may think so. Still it’s under very comfortable conditions.”
“Suits me,” I said. “I’m really looking forward to it. That homecoming party will last me for months.”
She smiled. “That good, was it?”
A mug of hot coffee, two reams of typing paper, and a tape recorder, were waiting on my desk. I sat, sipped, and pressed Play.
Underwood spoke: “In this first tape I’m giving a rough, cursory blueprint, an attempt to circumscribe the object. I’m playing this back to make sure I’m recording. Okay. I don’t intend to show God looking through Blake’s window, like a Peeping Tom, nor angel-bearing trees. Nor will I try to make his visionary or poetic experiences, tangible, in an attempt to render them plausible and so please or placate skeptics. Although, it is to be a film of the imagination, the inflamed subconscious or visionary mind, I want to avoid any resemblance to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Jekyll and Hyde, The Enchanted Cottage, ghost scenes in Olivier’s Hamlet, and the Scandinavian school of the supernatural. There is no model. I hope this will be unique. Ask Huxley and the American Film Institute if they know of anything similar to our Blake project. Tell them it will be nothing like Cocteau’s Orpheus, though I like his remark that myths die if they are not adapted to the times. And contact London’s Tate Gallery for their view on his most representative paintings. . (A long pause.] I don’t want to see too far ahead. Some perceptive person described creative writing as like driving a car at night. At any moment you can only see as far as the car’s headlights. But, eventually, if you’re lucky, you make the whole journey. The setting will be Blake’s eighteenth century London, transformed by his imagination into The Promised Land, where he walked, at times in a poetic trance—some would say hallucinating—-once with tigers at his side. He conjured up the dead to chat with Dante, Moses, Shakespeare, Isaiah, Milton, and Voltaire. And, glancing up at a tree, saw in its branches, not birds--but angels. Although nothing is set in stone, for such scenes I would suggest rather than show, hint rather than state, be oblique rather than emphatic. The idea being that we are not insisting that this is what REALLY happened, but what Blake THOUGHT happened. Difficult to achieve? Sure is. Let’s find the answers. Don’t forget his close friends, some of the great revolutionary thinkers of the time, Thomas Paine, whose life he may have saved by warning him that the police were after him, and the feminist-writer, Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary’s husband, philosopher William Godwin—all Utopian idealists, I believe. Criticism is welcome, Elliot.”
He also wanted me to open the green folder on my desk, and to retype several of the enclosed copies of his own poems after amalgamating the penciled additions and corrections.
I needed the dictionary to check his spelling, because I too often trust words to look as they sound. Jooleus Seezer, for example. Well, not quite that bad. I think it’s inherited, like being color blind through the male line. I especially liked his rhyming “Phantasmagoria” and “The Waldorf Astoria.”
Dear Wage Slaves,
Everything’s more dazzling and emphatic here in California thanks to the dazzling sunshine. Manhattan is the coldest spot I’ve ever known. This is the hottest and its still officially winter. Deodorants, like hot dogs, hamburgers and coca colas are a must. Although Underwood and his adorable wife have classier tastes. EVERYTHING’S several times bigger here, insects, birds, meal portions, drinks, newspapers, and people. Their robin, for example, is three times the size of ours. The Sunday New York Times and Los Angeles Times would give the average Englishman hernia. Remember our hitchhiking weekend to Paris and we noticed that most Frenchmen were smaller than we are? It’s the opposite here. And many of them seem to wear the same clothes they slept in. It’s called casual.
Having spoken to Huxley at U’s homecoming shindig--hey there’s an odd word--I assume I am now part of literary history. Did we ever settle if he was part of the Bloomsbury Group, on the fringes, or part of a splinter group? I’ll ask him if we meet again. During our brief conversation, I had added to his encyclopedic knowledge with the news that Orde Wingate was Orpington’s claim to fame. He was frailer than I expected, had a higher voice, as we shook hands I thought “This hand touched H. G. Wells’ hand, who touched Bernard Shaw’s, who touched D. H. Lawrence’s.” It was also the hand that patted me on the back and spilled vodka on my shirt and your former jacket, Nobby.
I glimpsed Ava Gardner’s eyebrows, and the back of Greta Garbo’s head. They were mostly hidden and surrounded, by supplicants. Our hostess judged that I wouldn’t enhance their evening and whisked me away to meet mere mortals. It’s not that Hollywood legends are a different species, as I once thought through ages nine to fourteen, from the females we know, just a different breed. If they were birds, Mrs. Willet would be a starling, mother a chaffinch, and Garbo a thrush. Okay, I’d be a cuckoo. Aha! Beat you two guys to it.
Apart from Huxley, the guests glowed with wealth, or perhaps frequent massage therapy. Some women were ravishing, and would have you drooling, Nobby. In fact, as I was wearing your dinner jacket-—tuxedo here-—you can claim that you were there in suit if not in spirit. I drooled on your behalf. Their skin is so flawless, ditto their clothes, grooming, and posture, they looked untouchable, as if they would instantly and automatically repel foreign bodies, which, of course, included me.
Some of these super-rich of both sexes swore with the frequency and verve of your typical London dock worker (longshoremen). Of course, some may have been former London dock workers. The “shits:” and “fucks” were flying with the fervor of “Hallelujahs” at revival meetings.
My Dear Mother,
I met Aldous Huxley at a party for Underwood . Completely unpretentious with a slightly flutey voice. Do you remember when you had the flu and I read Huxley to you. He’s the one who quoted William Blake’s, ”If the doors of perception were cleaned everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” And talking about that, tell Mrs. Willet that Huxley may have the solution to her eye troubles. Apparently, he did eye exercises that improved his vision. I’ll find out more about it. Also, tell Mrs. W. that Garbo and Gardner were also at U’s homecoming, but I only saw them from a distance, hot-house flowers hidden by the undergrowth. California itself seems a step on the way to a clearer view of everything, it’s so bright apart from the smog. In Britain, by contrast, except for a few days in the spring and fall, it’s as if we’d always been looking through smoked glass. And the glass clears on reaching the United States.
Iris, who came to meet us at the airport with her husband, was the hostess for U’s homecoming party and seems a warm and friendly kind. They both somehow work for U. I hope to see more of them.
Nobby’s dinner jacket helped me look like every other penguin at the party. Apart from Huxley, I spoke with George Cukor, who has directed Hepburn and Garbo, and U hopes to talk him into directing our Blake movie. I say “our,” not because I expect to be co-author of the script, but because I already feel part of the team. Blake would love it here in California, especially among one group of people who are having conversations with porpoises, or other groups who believe they can talk with the dead, like Sam Houston, at the tip of a table.
Nobby tells me that on their last visit, you gave them a Rachmaninoff recital. U hopes to get Shoshtakovith to do the Blake score. Pity Rachmaninoff isn’t alive. He’d be great.
U talks a lot about Huxley—perhaps his closest friend. You’ll love this, and it will give you a flavor of this part of the world: The great Aldous Huxley married his second wife—first died—in what’s called a drive-in wedding chapel, which doubled as a fast-food eatery. One witness for the ceremony was the ladies’ room attendant. Huxley came to California just before World War 2, was a guest of D.H. Lawrence’s widow in New Mexico when someone suggested that his novels would make great movies, so he moved here and stayed. He refused to make a screenplay from one of your favorites, a Galsworthy novel, but wrote the Madame Curie script, based on her daughter Eve’s biography. It paid him enough to live in splendor for a year. Garbo was meant to play Curie but Greer Garson did it instead. An Irish gal instead of a Swede to play a Pole!
According to Huxley’s brother, Julian, (remember? He was on the BBC’s Brains Trust program, and you used to gasp at his range and depth of knowledge) thinks that his brother, Aldous, is much brighter than he is and it gives him an inferiority complex.
I heard all this at lunch or dinner, from U himself, the master of unusual facts. Would you believe that Huxley, who is six feet four and a half inches tall, studied ballet for several years? And taught French to George Orwell.
According to the servants’ gossip, Underwood is the son, born out of wedlock to one of King Edward the Seventh’s many lady friends. You know the reputation of the randy regent, son of Victoria and Albert, don’t you?. Paradoxically, U is besotted with Blake, who supported the French Revolution until it got too bloody. Perhaps U is extolling Blake the anti-monarchist to hit back at his dad for not legitimizing him by royal decree. The chauffeur here says that U only claims to be the King’s godson to avoid being called “a right royal bastard.”
The sun is so bright, I’ve just had to pull the blinds. Marvelous. A buzzer. Must go.
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In late January, news of the Blake Project leaked out–someone at the homecoming party probably—and was published in the entertainment sections of several newspapers. Scores of begging letters followed. One man, using double negatives and both sides of fifteen foolscap pages, introduced himself as the reincarnated William Blake. and volunteered to be technical advisor for ”the film of my life. I should also, of course, play the part, but I know Hollywood will demand a box-office star.”
The next morning, Pamela brought in about forty letters, followed by a houseboy with coffee, and laughed or gasped as she read out the most outrageous requests and proposals. The news reports having failed to mention that Underwood was married, a slew of women offered themselves to him with various promises of bliss, nutritious cooking, a good time, and lots of fun. The fun was guaranteed by the mother of five, who denied any interest in his money, but wanted her offspring brought up in an artistic milieu.
One correspondent mentioned a sex change without explaining from which to what.
As an actress wise to the wiles of the gutter press, Pamela believed that some letters were from reporters bent on exposing the depravities of the rich and famous, who hoped to trap Underwood into compromising replies. Others, she noted, from return addresses, came from prisons and one from a mental asylum.
Most, she believed, came from the kind of woman who advertised for a mate in personal columns. These, invariably, described themselves as statistical impossibilities. There surely weren’t that number of ”radiant,” “ravishing,” “red-hot,” creatures at large and unclaimed.
Few days passed without mail from lecture agents after his voice, fellow poets after his patronage, con artists—often in religious guise—after his cash, advertisers after his name, and biographers and Ph.D. candidates after his memories.
We junked all letters expecting Underwood to pay for a reply. Those who enclosed stamps got either, “Mr. Underwood thanks you for your letter. Unfortunately, he is unable to meet with your request.” or, “Mr. Underwood does not wish to resurrect the past, and sorry that he has to disappoint you.”
I had two piles of cards with these messages on my desk and the work simply involved glancing at the letters and stuffing the cards in the appropriate, already stamped and addressed envelopes.
This allowed me to spend most of my time typing out extracts from bought or borrowed books about Blake in the margins of which Underwood had marked in pencil what he wanted. After typing and erasing the pencil marks my desk appeared to have developed dandruff.
During the next few weeks, Underwood was in and out of my room several times a day, to make sure I was “on top of things.” One morning, Pamela tapped on my door, glanced at the work on my cluttered desk including a letter from Manhattan’s Ninety Second Street Y to read his poems and answer questions. “Tell them to try again next year,” she said.
Manuel, the Filipino servant, joined us with a radio and framed Van Gogh reproductions. “To enliven your walls,” said Pamela. The mail had just brought my own colorful contribution to the room, a parcel from mother wounded in transit. Despite her elaborate care, wrapping new white shirts and homemade raspberry jam in corrugated cardboard, cotton wool, and tissue paper, a jar had cracked and bloodied both shirts.
Pamela rested her hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m sure we can rescue it.”
It was then that I realized how quietly Underwood moved around. He was in the room staring at Pamela’s hand on my shoulder then at me with a voodoo-look which had at least severe pins-and-needles pain in mind. She didn’t seem to
notice,
Manuel left with the splattered shirts and shattered jar and returned with crackers on which Pamela and I sampled splinter-free jam from the undamaged jar.
All I needed to feel like a billionaire—-I had the food and drink, the housing, and the services of a housemaid, housecleaner, houseboy, chef, and butler-—was Pamela, and a Silver Phantom Rolls. Oh, and lightweight jacket and pants.
That day’s mail was the usual fistful of begging letters, sale of men’s suits for fifteen hundred dollars apiece—-if I saved for a year I might be able to afford one sleeve—-Time magazine at eight cents a copy. I wavered, not enough time even to skim it. A chain letter threatening dire consequences should the recipient fail to send a dollar to five addresses found at random in the phone book. Not having five dollars to spare, I decided to face the consequences. Mr. Tomkins in the throes of a book about gifted but neglected poets would welcome my impressions of Underwood. Who gave him my name and Underwood’s address? Gwen? Iris? Mother? Huxley? Cukor? I noted the letter writer’s name and address while thinking, “Why give him Underwood? I’ll keep him for myself.”
Gwen phoned from England while Underwood was outside rallying the gardeners for another assault on the vagaries of nature, so I took the call. Though her voice was a whisper she had no trouble hearing mine and brightened when told that we’d made a good start on the Blake screenplay. “My instincts in hiring you were right after all,” she said. “Please tell Mr. Underwood I’ll be waiting for his call.” She sounded slightly worried.
He came in while I was leaving a note to that effect on his desk where everything was so neat it gave the false impression of never being used. It made me think how well he covered his tracks.
Ten minutes later he entered my room. “Elliot, I’m off to England for a week or two. Keep up the good work.”
”Lucky man,” Pamela said, “England’s wonderful in the spring.” Neither said why he was going.