Joshua Then and Now (33 page)

“Certainly not,” he said.

“Jolly good. We’ll expect you a week Wednesday. You can speak on modern American writing.”

Early that Wednesday evening, in The Bale of Hay, Joshua pleaded with a drunken Murdoch to come along with him.

“Oh, but it’s no good, my dear. If I go, the room’s bound to tilt in my direction. You’ll be totally ignored.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

“The women who attend those lectures are perfectly dreadful. They pong. They have moustaches. They wear elastic stockings. And they always want you to sign some bloody petition. Let them get
Amis. He’s willing to sign anything, if only because his name comes even before ‘Auden.’ But nobody reads as far as the M’s.”

“If you don’t come with me, Sidney, I’m going to sign your name to every petition going, and you will never get to be a visiting lecturer at Iowa or Stanford.”

“They’ll only serve punch or some vile Georgian wine, and they’ll expect us to sing songs with them.”

“They’ve promised a bottle of Scotch,” Joshua lied.

The house was in Highgate. At least thirty comrades had been prepared for, but only sixteen had turned up.

“The Bulgarian folk dancers opened in the West End tonight,” the host, a
Daily Worker
editor, explained consolingly.

They waited another half-hour in the dowdy living room, sipping plonk, until three more people drifted in. Everybody in the group was supposed to be a writer, but most of the audience was composed of plump, good-natured matrons who had brought their knitting. Joshua was given a fulsome introduction and dug right in to pontificate – knowledgeably he hoped – about younger American writers. Mailer, Styron, Salinger, Capote. Nobody was interested. Nobody, that is, except for a febrile Colin Fraser, who scribbled notes throughout his lecture. Unlike Pauline, who appeared to be reading the
New Statesman
, rattling the pages as noisily as possible. Infuriated, Joshua decided to get a rise out of them. Although he admired the political stance of progressive writers such as Howard Fast, he said, he much preferred reading reactionaries like Faulkner or Evelyn Waugh.

“Why,” a woman immediately demanded, “won’t they let Howard Fast out of jail?”

“Because he’s done such violence to the English language,” Murdoch called out.

Everybody turned to glare.

“I’m Sidney Murdoch,” he said, grinning.

“Oh, is that who you are,” Pauline said. “I thought for a moment that you were Mary McCarthy.”

Murdoch shrank back into his folding chair, seething.

“Is it true,” another woman demanded, “that a progressive writer can’t find a publisher in the United States today?”

“Would you say that all American writers are corrupted by success?”

Joshua managed to excuse himself early, but he was stopped at the door by Colin Fraser, notebook in hand, a disapproving Pauline trailing after.

“I’ve seen you at Celia’s,” Colin gushed. “We’re Canadians too,” and, introducing Pauline, he suggested they move on to the nearest coffee bar.

“Coffee keeps me awake,” Murdoch protested.

“Well then, let’s go to our place. Digs. We can knock back a few jars there.”

Emerging from the Haverstock Hill tube station, strolling back to their place, Joshua managed a quick word alone with Murdoch. “I want you to wait until I’ve gone to the toilet, and then you are to tell her how absolutely wonderful I am.”

“But I’d like to fuck her myself,” Murdoch pointed out, grieving.

“God damn it, Sidney. This is important to me.”

“Do you think he’s a poof?”

“I hope so.”

Colin Fraser, scrawny, pallid, angular, constantly jerking his oblong head to clear stringy brown hair from troubled blue eyes, sprang from Ottawa, an ambassador’s son. He was a literary scholar, doing research in the British Museum on the novels of Jack Lindsay and others, and working on a progressive novel of his own, its theme the Winnipeg general strike. He and Pauline lived in a dank little basement bed-sitter in England’s Lane, where, fortunately, there was a half-bottle of gin available, as well as beer, but only old mustard or jam jars to serve as glasses. They lived in penury (self-inflicted). Colin had his scholarship and Pauline was working as a supply teacher, mostly in terrifying secondary moderns in Brixton or North
Kensington. Neither of them, as a matter of principle, was dipping into family money. Colin, in fact, had renounced his sizable inheritance. “I had a look at the trust fund portfolio once,” he said indignantly. “It holds shares in South Africa and in companies that produce arms that were used in the Korean war of aggression.”

“Oh, shocking,” Murdoch said.

Colin read
Peace News
, he subscribed to
Tribune
. He would, Joshua was to discover, journey to any church hall or school basement, no matter how difficult to get to, if only there was a minister appearing on the platform there, who would rebuke him for having been born white, an exploiter of Africa’s soul, or failing that, if there was some frizzy-haired matron in sensible shoes who had just returned from liberated China to show a jumpy, out-of-focus documentary about the joys of life in a Cantonese bicycle factory. Having discovered that Joshua was from Montreal, he droned on and on about French Canadians and how badly exploited they were. Joshua was inclined to scoff, but nodded instead, agreeing to anything, his eyes fastened longingly on Pauline. Maddeningly beautiful, perversely hostile. She was drinking heavily, seemingly embarrassed by Colin’s progressive bromides, but fiercely protective, not yielding an inch. She was clearly more intelligent than he was; he couldn’t figure out what they were doing together.

Murdoch, having performed his commission during Joshua’s calculated absence, laying it on Pauline about his incomparable merits, had begun to doze. He was bored. And so was Joshua. But he was determined not to leave without a moment alone with Pauline. Finally, the insufferable Colin rose to go to the toilet. Joshua quickly sat down beside Pauline. “Would you have lunch with me tomorrow?” he asked.

“Only,” she said, her smile sweet, “if you promise me that we can go back to your place afterwards and fuck like crazy.”

Joshua turned pale. Murdoch wakened, gaping.

“No. We can’t go to lunch. I’m a married woman.”

“Yes. Certainly. I appreciate that. But I thought maybe –”

“Besides, I don’t like you.”

“Neither do I,” a revived Murdoch said. “He’s poking my wife on Wednesday afternoons. She comes home late. I have to make do with a cold plate and maybe yesterday’s trifle reheated.”

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Joshua said, and once more he asked, “Please come to lunch with me.”

She was hesitating, possibly about to acquiesce, when Colin bounded back into the room, beaming. “This is fun,” he said. “This is damn good fun. I so enjoy the company of creative comrades.”

Pauline, betrayed, grabbed her coat and stomped out of the bed-sitter.

“I’ll get her,” Joshua offered.

“No. She-does it from time to time,” Colin said, not the least distressed. And all at once he seemed to relax, as if to say, Now they could really talk. Saying how highly he valued Joshua’s opinion, he asked if he would read his manuscript. Oh, with pleasure, Joshua said icily. And then next Wednesday, Colin said, he could come to dinner, and they would discuss it.

“He’s busy on Wednesdays,” Murdoch said.

In the morning, Joshua wakened to find a letter from Peabody, who was working for
Esquire
, along with an issue of the magazine including a piece of Joshua’s on London. Janet had given birth to their first child only a month earlier. “I’m writing this by the seaside, on the beach where I used to build sandcastles as a boy. We’re staying in East Hampton for the summer, at my father’s place, and the day of Jeremy’s birth my father and I solemnly planted an apple tree to mark the event. The tree my father planted the day I was born still bears sweet fruit, even as Janet has, but I fear my father will not live to see this tree mature. He’s seventy-one and suffered his second stroke last winter. I read Dickens aloud to him at night, even as he once did for me, and I assure my mother on the hour that I do not smell gas in the kitchen and that I will wear a hat in the sun. I waken each morning at dawn, a voyeur, concealed in the grass that grows on top of a dune,
come to watch Janet nurse Jeremy in the sand by the sea. It is an exquisite sight, beyond my powers of description, and my only fear, embarrassingly coarse, is that such is my reverence for mother and son joined in such poignant embrace that I will never lust for her again. I have decided to lay down a library rather than a wine cellar for Jeremy, all our favorite books, and I would appreciate suggestions. Yes, I know, Isaac Babel.

“Janet, who was working at
Time
until swollen with seed, is a splendid girl. After she has nursed Jeremy, she sets him down tenderly in a wicker basket in the shade, unpins her black hair, shakes it out, and plunges into the sea. My God, Joshua, old Feodor be damned, and crabby old Eliot as well, there’s a lot to be said for this life. In the evening we soak our freshly cut corn in a bucket of sea water and then roast them over a charcoal fire. This we follow with bluefish, caught that very morning, and fruits de pays, as we used to say. Come home, troubled spirit. Janet longs to know you and even I have come to miss your surly presence. I’ll be taking a leave of absence this autumn to work for Adlai, assuming that he will run again, but I doubt that he has the fire to take Ike. Even so, I’m glad to be back. Come home, Joshua.”

Having suffered through Colin’s unspeakably bad and sentimental attempt at a novel, Murdoch howling at passages Joshua read aloud to him, he made his way to the basement bed-sitter on Wednesday night, armed with a dozen red roses. But Pauline had outwitted him. She wasn’t there, but at the local Odeon, he was told.

“She felt we could talk more freely on our own,” Colin said. “Well, I’m all pins and needles. What do you think?”

“I think your novel’s absolutely marvelous,” Joshua said, “and that you should send it to a publisher immediately. Don’t change a word.”

They sat down to eat bangers and mash Colin had thoughtfully prepared. The bangers, squirting hot fat like pus, were pink through the middle and the potatoes abounded in rock-hard lumps. “Shall I be mum and pour?” he asked.

“Sure.”

Joshua indicated the set of golf clubs leaning against the wall. “Don’t tell me,” he began.

“Oh, no. I don’t play. They belong to her darling brother, who’s visiting London at the moment.” And then Colin went on to say how they must all return to Canada soon and work together to expel the American exploiters. “If you only knew,” he said, “how much I envy you your working-class experience.”

“Well, Colin, old fuck,” Joshua said, beginning to play with him, “I wouldn’t mind having your inheritance. I wouldn’t turn my back on it.”

“Oh yes, you most certainly would,” Colin said, all twinkly.

Midnight came and went and there was no Pauline. “Well,” Joshua said, getting up to go, “I do hope to see you both at Celia’s on Saturday night.”

“You’ve got your eye on Pauline,” Colin said.

“Oh no I haven’t.”

“Take care. She may not be the stuff your dreams are made of.”

There was a couple locked in a heated argument in a parked Hillman across the street, but as Joshua emerged onto the pavement the man who was with Pauline quickly doused the inside light. Joshua hurried away, bent into the slashing rain. Local Odeon my ass, he thought.

They did show up at Celia’s on Saturday night, but Pauline infuriatingly defeated his every approach, sliding away from him each time he started in her direction. She was drinking heavily again and laughing too much. Bitch. He hated her. But she was also beautiful, wearing a tight black silk dress that buttoned down the front. Joshua kept his hands in his pockets, drifting to another part of the living room, looking for an argument. But he couldn’t stay away and neither, if he’d only realized it then, could she, constantly fluttering around him, tantalizingly just out of reach. When he next caught sight of Pauline, she was hanging on the arm of a big handsome
black, a talented West Indian writer Joshua knew. Bitch bitch. He also began to drink too much, seeking out strangers to insult, and when he next did a compulsive circuit of the rooms, he couldn’t find Colin or Pauline anywhere. Heading for the toilet, he concluded that they both had left, and good riddance too. His mistake. He opened the toilet door to find Pauline and the West Indian writer in a fierce embrace. Pauline was bent over almost backwards, his basketball-player-size hands with their pink palms driving her silken buttocks to him. Elbowing past them, Joshua whacked back the toilet seat.

“Oh, come on, man,” the West Indian moaned, “please.”

Joshua contrived to piss in a pleasingly high arc, singing in his froggiest voice, “Tote dat barge, lift dat bale, git a little drunk and you land in jay-il, but ole man rivah, dat ole man rivah …”

The West Indian began to heave with laughter.

“I thought you were a married woman,” Joshua called over his shoulder.

“I don’t want you coming round to our place any more and patronizing him. He’s a much better man than you are.”

“Or woman,” Joshua shot back, slamming the door on them.

A fresh drink in trembling hand, maybe a half-glass of straight Scotch, he drove an unsuspecting blacklisted screenwriter against the wall, excoriating him and his kind.

In those days, when the blacklist was most rigorously applied, many of them had to write or direct episodes of the Robin Hood series under pseudonyms for producer Hannah Weinstein. With a stroke, $10,000-a-week masters reduced to £500-an-episode navvies. Oh God, Joshua thought, film-makers of the left actually driven to living off capital. But, mindful of their heritage (the Paris Commune, the storming of the Winter Palace, Lillian Hellman saying no to the resounding sound of her own applause), they sneaked progressive thoughts into the Robin Hood series. So a soulful Jewish tailor might be discovered in Sherwood Forest, doing piecework for the dastardly sheriff of the
shtetl
of Nottingham, who maintained a non-union
shop. The tailor, scratching his snowy head, ruminating under an oak tree, anticipating Proudhon, might tell Friar Tuck that all property was theft. In Nottingham itself, miraculously, a black might be found, maybe a runaway slave, and Robin and the
chevra
would do battle for his equal rights. Put plainly, though the work was demeaning, no opportunity was lost to educate the masses.
De haut en bas
.