Chocolates for Breakfast (23 page)

 

With the income from her book sales and film rights, Pamela purchased a car for him. No cadre of the revolution should have to cross the continent in an unreliable or uncomfortable car—the stakes were simply too high, and his comfort and sense of style were essential to his ability to command. Pamela dwelled on the details of the car, and the kind of coat that she would send de Laurot, in her letters that Jonas Mekas handed me more than fifty years later.

These letters make plain her love for de Laurot, which she tried to contain with a soldierly resolve. She would put her talents at his command and “bear him a novel,” as a wife would bear a man his child. She pined for him in nondescript towns along the Czechoslovakian and Polish borders while he made forays beyond the Iron Curtain.

She described in one letter her outline for “Prophets without Honor.” Although the book was delivered to Knopf once she was married to my father, the outline on the basis of which Sterling Lord sold it had been written while she was still with de Laurot. I searched in the archives and found it: the heroine in the outline is a novelist, not the fashion model she would later become. In one scene she is on her way to meet André at a Paris café:

 

But when she sees him, the last refuge of her independence, the belief in her writing ability will be destroyed, and she will no longer be able to justify to herself her refusal to submit wholly to his intellectual domination. She stares from her hotel room out over the roofs of the Latin quarter: she is struck with horror at the vision of herself become the tool of this passionate, overpowering man. In this crisis, she even asks herself whether her abdication will make her lose his love, because he scorns and casts aside those that are weak.

 

In the outline, a dark hero. In the submitted manuscript, a craven villain. But the same man can be discerned in these very different renderings, the man who first captivated her on the ship sailing across the Atlantic in June 1956.

 

His appearance was bizarre, so flagrantly so that this seemed his intention. He wore his hair in a nineteenth-century manner only slightly modified with the dark, thick locks long and full, brushed back from his high, square, furrowed forehead . . . “Come with me,” he repeated, the playfulness gone from his carefully-modulated voice. “You will find it more amusing than avoiding me.”

 

After two years, Pamela was exhausted and broke. She returned to New York and confided in my father enough detail about de Laurot's past for him to begin showing her how much of it must have been fabrication. De Laurot then came to New York and summoned her to a meeting, to which my father showed up instead. This dramatic showdown on a highway overpass featured prominently in the final version of “Prophets without Honor.” But most of her money was already gone; she owed more income tax to the IRS than she was ever able to pay off in her lifetime, and although
Chocolates
continued to sell briskly and generate royalties, her career had suffered a derailment and never got back on track.

In the wake of de Laurot, Adam Kanarek rose to the occasion and rescued and protected my mother—but in such a way, it seems to me, that ensured she would never be really free. Some vital force in her had already diminished. Or perhaps she allowed herself to be saved only on condition that she might sacrifice herself again. The arrow fits the wound exactly.

 

In trying to understand what happened to Pamela, I have to also consider the role of her mother, Isabel Moore. Clearly the model for the has-been actress Sondra Farrell, Courtney's mother in
Chocolates for Breakfast
, Isabel had even more of a malevolent streak than the fictional character. A successful writer of pulp fiction and editor of
Photoplay
magazine, Isabel, like Sondra, lived at the Garden of Allah in Hollywood in the late 1940s, although it was actually Pamela's half-sister, Elaine, who resided with her there, not Pamela herself. Paralleling a scene in
Chocolates
, where Sondra fails to warn Courtney of their impending eviction from the hotel, Isabel abruptly departed from an Arizona spa, where Pamela awoke to find her mother gone. Isabel had left nothing behind but the unpaid bill and her fifteen-year-old daughter as collateral. Pamela had to fend for herself until several months later, when Isabel settled the bill and sent for her.

When Pamela was nineteen, Isabel visited her in Paris. Pamela was already deeply involved with de Laurot but kept him and their activities a secret. In a letter to Adam, still back in New York, Isabel tantalized him with news about her daughter, while being coy and even flirtatious with her daughter's would-be suitor. The letter also gives a remarkable picture of Isabel's relationship with Pamela:

 

[S]he became quite petulant and demanding when I couldn't have dinner with her. You will like the fact that when she did complain, I burst out, “For heaven's sake, Pamela, I'm not—” and stopped, appalled. Pamela had the good humor to chuckle and to say, “That's very good, Mummy. You were about to say, ‘I'm not your mother—' ” And I said, “Yes, I've disciplined myself to the point where, I guess, the new arrangement is so without my having to pretend it's so.”

 

In the same letter, Isabel told another story, one that a different mother might not have taken quite so casually:

 

I prefer not to think too much about her personal relationships, Adam. I think they were summed up pretty well by her when, in discussing Rimbaud, she said, “he had to destroy himself in order to prove that the things he represented should be destroyed—” and I said, “Is that how you feel,” and her answer was, “Of course.”

 

In the letters that Pamela wrote to de Laurot, she endeavored to show him how well she understood the importance of secrecy and her utter loyalty to their cause. But I suspect she also had her own reasons for keeping her mother at a distance—a mother who could refuse to be nurturing in any way, who placed her self-advancement ahead of any other person in her life, family included, yet respected no boundary between her daughter's psyche and her own.

In a letter postmarked June 24, 1964, Isabel Moore wrote to Adam Kanarek:

 

It is now two weeks since Pamela's tragic death, and I have not heard from you regarding any of the questions I put to you in my previous letter . . . Meanwhile, I have been contacted, through my agent, by two publishing houses who wish me to do a biography of Pamela . . . I'm sure you as well as I wish to do full justice to her memory. Therefore it seems we should stop being immature and get together to make her death a memorial to the living rather than the tragic waste it is now.

 

Ultimately, she wrote the book by herself, entitled “Forgive Me My Darling,” and sold it to World Publishing. Advance ads for it began appearing, until Adam and Pamela's father, Don Moore, convinced Isabel and her publisher that they would block the book's publication by any means necessary. Uncharacteristically, in this case, Isabel backed down.

 

As Pamela wrote toward the end of
Chocolates for Breakfast
, after Janet's suicide: “There never is anything anyone else can do. Everyone must save himself, no one can help him.”

In the end, it was Pamela Moore who killed Pamela Moore.

 

In a diary entry written shortly before the end of my mother's life, she contemplates a possible different pathway her life might have taken. This reverie was triggered by the name of her old high-school boyfriend, the one who had inspired the character of Charles Cunningham:

 

March 31 1964: In the phone book I see “John W.” “Cortland” the name that inspired Courtney. So he must have returned, John W., to become a broker like everyone else. Does he still associate with the old people? Would I, if I were with him? To think that my life might have taken that turn! I would have stayed in the same milieu, with the problems, like alcoholism, that I understood at 16! No Faustian despairs? Would I have written
Chocolates
? Yes, I have no doubt. And then what, if not for college if John instead? Nursing an alcoholic at worst, and a non-intellectual one, writing would without any doubt have reasserted itself.

 

Here she was, two months before her death, looking back over the trajectory of her life and considering the choices she had made. What if she had married John? She would have been spared the humiliation and abuse to which Edouard subjected her, and the airless claustrophobia of safety with Adam, these two very different men, who had so much in common: both of them far removed from the milieu of her own upbringing, both Polish refugees, survivors of World War II, dark and overbearing.

And then follows a refrain that crops up several times in her entries that last year, the invocation of “deviltry.”

 

I bit off more than I could chew in this Europe . . . Please leave me alone and spare me all that heavy baggage of culture . . . As for deviltry—that is what I've done with Edouard and Adam. One was a con-man, the other gave up being a devil because he realized he was nothing on his own. The devil-principle is in me and must be realized in me.

 

I don't fully understand her meaning, and I do not wish to overstep whatever right a son has to question the archives and writings of his mother, looking for answers. Pamela is no longer here to explain herself, and I can only go so far in trying to decode her thoughts, or to infer a sequence of events and reasons from what is essentially a cry of pain, a call for help.

Read on

The Three Texts of
Chocolates for Breakfast

Excerpts from the Original Manuscript and the French
Nouvelle Édition

I
N THE MANUSCRIPT
that Pamela Moore submitted to Rinehart early in 1956, dozens of pages were crossed out and did not appear in the published book. By the time the first American edition came out in September 1956, Moore had already left the United States for France.

The first French edition was published by Julliard soon after, in November 1956. It was a straight translation of the book published in America. This French edition had already begun to ship when Moore came to René Julliard with dozens of typewritten pages that she wanted him to include in the book. As Moore would later tell the story, Julliard at first refused, saying, “Pamela, even if you were my mistress, I couldn't do this.”

Eventually, he agreed. Julliard released the second edition with the heading “New Edition, Revised by the Author” printed on the cover. This
nouvelle édition
, dated January 1957, includes a great deal of new material, including a preface about the kind of self-censorship (
censure par anticipation
) that Moore believed she had imposed on herself in the United States.

But the restored material is different from the cut pages of the original manuscript. It is essentially a new text. A study of the original American manuscript, the French text, and Moore's notes, letters, and diaries from that time suggests that much of this French material was created after the original work, in collaboration with the filmmaker Edouard de Laurot. There are in fact three versions of the story: the book written by Moore, the book published by Rinehart, and the
nouvelle édition
that Julliard published afterward in French. This new edition was used as the basis for subsequent European translations.

Readers have sometimes remarked on the episodic nature of
Chocolates for Breakfast
. As Courtney moves from boarding school to Hollywood and then to New York City, the continuity with her previous situation isn't always apparent. But in the alternative versions of the story, there is a refrain: the memory of Miss Rosen, Courtney's kindly and intelligent boarding school teacher, comes back to Courtney at key moments throughout the book.

In the American manuscript, Courtney's attachment to Miss Rosen is visceral; her former teacher reappears as a kind of sense-memory of lost love and affection. In the French version, Miss Rosen embodies a political awareness and existentialist philosophy—one's destiny is created, not discovered—with which Courtney wrestles right up until she meets the Charles Cunningham character, who in the French edition is cast as a student revolutionary. The differences between these alternative versions of the same book can be quite striking.

 

La Nouvelle Édition
: The French New Edition

The French book begins with a preface, in which Moore explains a process of self-censorship, which she calls a “a censorship by anticipation,” that had caused her to leave out not only some of the more explicit sensual content but also what she now sees as the moral to her story: the conflict between American values and the human condition. “We turn away from this terrifying truth with what I would term a kind of collective bad faith (
mauvaise foi commune
).” She concludes by saying, “I felt obliged to try to arrive at the causes of this moral crisis that so afflicts the youth whom I describe in this book.”

The passages that had been cut from the Rinehart edition in 1956 were vivid, direct, and often sensual. But the new material that Moore added to the French edition in 1957 is much more cerebral: discourses on politics and philosophy, delivered by Courtney, Miss Rosen, Anthony Neville, and Charles Cunningham. Moore may not have even had the original typescript pages with her in the Paris hotel room where, over the course of several weeks, she and de Laurot created the Julliard
nouvelle édition
.

For example, the conversation between Courtney and Miss Rosen now includes the following:

 

“Just jargon!” the girl exclaimed angrily. “Even you, you spout the same jargon I hear all around me. You hide life between the pages of your psychology manual . . . We say ‘relationship' when we mean ‘love,' or ‘communication' instead of ‘meeting of minds.' It couldn't be that I love you because I see the truth in you. Of course not! It's a fixation due to transference of my mother-image—a fixation with lesbian overtones . . . We repeat phrases as we hear them, and we silence our hearts to better hear the anthem of our civilization.”

“It's true, Courtney. All my life, I've listened to that anthem. I sought my liberation in study, travel and reflection . . . this jargon poisons our souls . . . it taints our food . . . It is a sterilizing mist sprayed upon the forests of America.”

 

Soon after, Miss Rosen provides the lesson in existentialist philosophy that will serve as a kind of refrain further on in the book:

 

“I'm going to tell you something, Courtney, that you may not understand right away. You'll remember it in a few years, and maybe then you'll understand it. You will discover that truth and love are inseparable. One cannot know one without the other. Love flourishes not in innocence, but in purity. One cannot create love without destroying the Myth.”

“You know this kind of love, then?”

“Yes, I do.”

“How did you find it?”

“I didn't find it, I created it.

I didn't discover myself, I created myself. I did not ‘meet' my destiny, I forged it for myself. You must understand that, in order to understand what I represent, and why my Love is linked to Truth.”

 

And here is Janet, stretching naked on her bed:

 

Courtney looked over at her roommate and admired her tanned and athletic body. Suddenly, this secret pleasure shocked her. She had always prided herself on repressing the latent sensuality that whispered between the walls of Scaisbrooke and troubled the protective silence of Puritanism.

 

Afterward comes Courtney's initiation of Janet—to revolutionary consciousness:

 

“Look,” said Courtney, stretching her hand toward the New England countryside that unfolded before them. Janet leaned out . . . she saw the neatly trimmed walkways of Scaisbrooke and the asphalt driveway that disappeared into the foliage. Here and there, a Colonial house, freshly repainted, stood out from the shadows . . . “You can see the lush, well-tended countryside of an Empire, with its Metropolis over there, beyond the hills—The Empire State, as they say.” She turned abruptly to her friend. “Is it my fault, Jan, that I see there a land where only fraud and wretchedness can thrive?”

 

There are times when this 1950s French Courtney sounds almost hip, like a teenager who's just discovered Beat poetry. In Hollywood, when Barry asks her if she likes it there, Courtney replies:

 

“I don't like this town. It's under the command of the Guardians of Myth. Here, by their order, the Myth is conceived, the idols are carved and the canticles are written.”

Barry's eyes widened. She shrugged her shoulders and continued.

“I see you don't understand me. I'm not surprised. You just understand everyday things.” She added in a theatrical tone: “The Hollywood sun doesn't make anything grow, doesn't change any season to show the passage of time. It tans the bodies of lotus eaters who never grow old, because they were never young. There's no winter or spring, no past and no future. The people are prisoners of this timeless irreality.”

“Pete,” says Barry, “another Martini. You want another glass?”

“Yes, a Daiquiri.”

“And a Daiquiri for the young lady.”

 

Anthony Neville and Charles Cunningham both win Courtney's approval by their renunciation of American values. As a European, Anthony has an easier time of it, complaining of American women and their puritanical ideas about sex.

 

“Puritanism is not a refusal to make love, it is a way of making love. It is cocktails that dull awareness, darkness that hides young bodies, the closed eyes . . . and silence that denies pleasure.”

 

But even Charles Cunningham, the straight-arrow law student who put himself through school, chimes in with his own social criticism, sounding in French like a student revolutionary straight from the Left Bank of Paris. When Courtney repeats what Anthony has told her, that childhood is not an age but a world, Charles contradicts her:

 

“It is not a world but a state of mind. Retaining that state of mind is what protects the adults around us from destroying their childhood and accepting responsibility for their society. It is our national state of mind. That is why our youth does not know what Revolution is.”

 

And at the end of the book, Anthony has given Courtney much more than enchantment; he has allowed her to fulfill the prophecy Miss Rosen gave her at the beginning:

 

“You have given me something much more precious, something you'll never know. A long time before I met you, someone told me that I'd learn some day what I'm telling you now. I would have never understood it if you had not given me my childhood. She told me that love does not exist in innocence, but in growth . . .”

“You have found this love?”

“No, I cannot find it. I must create it. I shall create it as I shape my destiny, and try to expose the Myth that destroyed Janet.”

 

Armed with this new knowledge, Courtney sets forth to save the world, as Anthony retreats to his island and the summer comes to a close.

 

The Preface to the
Nouvelle Édition

Quelle est la raison d'être d'une préface? Apologie? Explication? Commentaire? Indice de faiblesse ou de mauvaise foi— si elle est écrite par l'auteur—, éloge de complaisance parfois, si elle est due à quelqu'un d'autre. Je n'ai jamais compris l'utilité des préfaces, j'ai peu de goût pour en écrire une. Une note pourtant s'impose ici.

La première édition française de mon livre a été traduite de la version américaine que je n'ai jamais considérée comme complète. Je me trouvais à cette époque-là aux Etats-Unis et il ne me semblait pas possible d'y faire paraître mon livre dans sa version intégrale. L'occasion de publier cette dernière me fut offerte lorsque j'ai rencontré à Paris mon éditeur français.

Voici donc l'édition non expurgée. Est-ce à dire que la version américaine avait subi des altérations arbitraires? Certes non. Il s'agissait plutôt d'une contrainte que je m'étais à moi-même imposée et que je voudrais pouvoir nommer : une censure par anticipation. Cette même contrainte existe dans l'esprit de beaucoup d'écrivains américains qui sont conscients de préférences du public à propos duquel ils écrivent et qui connaissent bien aussi l'idée que se font de notre public ceux qui le servent.

Il est difficile chez nous de servir à chacun ses quatre vérités, surtout lorsqu'il s'agit de ce conflit essentiel qui existe entre les principes de notre mode de vie et les exigences de la condition humaine. Ce conflit est latent dans tous les cœurs de notre pays, et il tourmente beaucoup d'entre nous. Nous nous détournons de cette vérité terrifiante avec ce que j'appellerai une sorte de mauvaise foi commune. C'est ce qui m'a poussé à m'exprimer avec certaines réticences au cours de mon travail initial. Mais après y avoir réfléchi, j'ai senti qu'il me fallait tenter de parvenir jusqu'aux causes de cette crise morale dont souffre tant la jeunesse que je décris ici.

 

What is the purpose of a preface? Apology? Explanation? Commentary? Indication of weakness or of bad faith—if it is written by the author—or obligatory praise, perhaps, if the work of another. I never understood the purpose of prefaces, and I have little desire to write one. A note, nonetheless, is called for here.

The first French edition of my book was translated from the American version, which I never considered to be complete. I was in the United States at the time and it didn't seem possible to me to bring out my book in its integral version. The possibility of publishing the latter was offered to me when I met my French editor in Paris.

Here then is the unexpurgated version. Is that to say that the American version was subject to arbitrary alterations? Certainly not. It was rather a constraint that I imposed upon myself and that I would like to be able to name: a censorship by anticipation. This same constraint exists in the mind of many American writers who are conscious of the preferences of the audience about whom they are writing, and who also understand quite well how that audience is viewed by those that serve it.

It is difficult for us to offer each reader the unvarnished truth, especially when it concerns the essential conflict that exists between the principles of our way of life and the demands of the human condition. This conflict lies latent in all the hearts in our country and torments many of us. We turn away from this terrifying truth with what I would term a kind of collective bad faith. This is what led me to express myself with some reticence in the course of my initial work. But after having reflected on it, I felt obliged to try to arrive at the causes of this moral crisis that so afflicts the youth whom I describe in this book.

P. M.

 

Or as one contemporary critic wrote, after comparing the original with the new version: “Julliard, give us back the untutored freshness of the original work!”

The indictments of American capitalist society that Pamela Moore added to the French edition in 1956 turned out to be very good for business.
Chocolates for Breakfast
did well in France, remaining in print well into the 1970s. Moore's popularity in France also extended to her later books, which were better received abroad than in the United States. The French
nouvelle édition
also used as the basis for other translations, including the Italian edition published by Mondadori, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and remained in print as late as 2005.