Overdrive (22 page)

I hadn't seen Van since the swearing-in, which he now described to everyone at lunch in hilarious detail, and I told the guests that I had the videocassette at hand, so we trooped into my music room that looks out over the sea, drew the curtains, placed the big television screen up, and ran Ambassador Galbraith's Atlantic Charter. That reminded David of a story in which
he
was caught up in mad social embarrassment, but he said Pat and I had heard it, but I made him tell it, and his old vocal powers came through.

It was a couple of years ago, and the dozen tables, at one of those palaces around Buckingham, were set for six people each, and David found himself seated opposite the Queen of England, and on the Queen's right an elderly duke-type, full of whiskers, who approached David most affably while the Queen was in animated conversation with the man on her left. The duke said to David, "I say, Niven, have you seen Tommy Phipps in New York lately?"

"Well yes," said David.

"How is he?"

"Well, I saw him just a week ago, and I said, 'Tommy, how are you?' And he said, 'Well, I fall down a lot, and cry a lot, but otherwise I'm fine!"' The duke roared.

At which point the Queen suddenly turned and said, "What was that, Mr. Niven?"

Well, David said, there was no
'way
such a story could be repeated and made to sound funny, but neither was there any way to deny the Queen's request, so he had said, "Well, ma'am, there's this man in New York, a friend of uh"—but David hadn't of course caught the duke's name, so he nodded with a bright smile—"a friend of some of us over here, and he said to me"—David said he was growing more and more desperate in the foreknowledge of the absolutely certain failure of his story—"and he said to me"— David's voice here trails off slightly—"that he feels fine except he falls down a lot and cries a lot."

"Oh dear!" said the Queen. "Poor man!"

But, said David—and now he stands up. He usually does, from sheer excitement, when he really gets going—the duke then said, "Ah, Niven, it's been a long,
long
time." And, not having any idea who he was, David could only say, "Yes, it's been a long,
long
time!" And then he said, "But it was a
memorable
day, Niven, a memorable day." "Yes," David had said in desperation, "it was
certainly
a memorable day!" Whereupon the duke said, "I know we haven't seen much of each other in recent years, Niven, but I
always
tell my friends I was very proud to serve as best man at your wedding."

It was all great fun, and we went in to eat one of Pat's incomparable meals, with Julian (whom Pat met, years ago, as the chef on the boat in the south of France that David and Hjordis Niven had chartered) introducing something (I forget what) brand-new as dessert. We went into the living room for coffee, and Gloria told me that "el senor Valenti" was on the line.

I hadn't talked to Fernando since getting his news and I dreaded this conversation, though Tom Wendel had informed me that Fernando had finally agreed to submit to the radiotherapy and that the neck tumor—though not the primary tumor, which they hadn't succeeded in locating— was responding. We spoke in Spanish for a while, as over the years we have got into the habit of doing (Fernando's father was Spanish—the doctor to the King of Spain). Fernando has a way of inducing great melancholy by ostentatious levity. But he told me he had decided to spend Christmas in New York, the doctors willing, and that they would give him their decision the following week. I told him I'd have his plane met, and Jerry would take him to Barbara's apartment (Barbara, Fernando's former wife, was ill in southern California, and had turned over her apartment to him). Fernando asked what was I doing this year about a Christmas concert? I told him that I had assumed right along that he would not be in New York, and that even if he was, he would not (I must get just the right word here) "feel" like playing. But I hadn't wanted to engage another harpsichordist (Judith Norell, also a fan of Fernando, sweetly volunteered) on the grounds that it would sound too much like king-is-dead-long-live-the-king, so I had arranged, via Michael Sweeley who runs Caramoor, the great summer music festival at Katonah, New York, to bring in a choral group. Fernando said he thought that was fine, and anyway he wouldn't be reaching New York until five days after the scheduled concert. I told him I'd continue to pray for his recovery, and went back to the living room.

The weather had suddenly turned bright, and I asked if anyone wanted to walk. Van said he had to go home and attend to last-minute business. He and David arranged to disport in Switzerland in December, as Van would continue the skiing vacations with the children in Gstaad (he had solemnly explored the question whether the French would resent his going to a Swiss resort).

Sam and David and Jo were dressed in overcoats, I handed around walking sticks, and as we set out I thought, Why not take them and show them my new boat? We could then take our walk around Yacht Haven. They thought this a capital idea, so we got into the Volvo and five minutes later stopped outside the pier, one of thirty or forty, where my little (36-foot) sloop was squatting, along with three or four others whose owners had decided, as I had, to winter in the water.

It was very cold, but the sun had come out, and as I stepped into the cockpit and diddled with the combination lock I got a second capital idea. I said, Hey, let's take a ten-minute cruise! They said fine, though I think I detected just a trace of hesitation in Sam, but taxing him on this a few minutes later, he countered by saying that he was trying to reflect on whether Doubleday's insurance policy permitted the publisher and two authors to go out in the same hull.

In a minute the little diesel was purring, the dock lines were released, and then with David handling the bow line and Sam the stern line, off we went. At first I hadn't thought to raise the sail, but I decided I'd show them, as we headed south toward the harbor entrance, with the strong wind coming in from the west, how wonderfully easy it was to handle the genoa with the roller furling device. So I turned the wheel over to David, got the winch handle, and lo and behold the genoa was out, and we were bouncing along at six and a half knots. Oh how exhilarating the sailboat is! I thought about the mainsail, decided against raising it. A practical problem was that the temperature was so cold, one's hands had to be stuffed into one's pockets every minute or so. Poor Jo looked frostbitten. Without just a little crew drill, better stick to the genoa.

So we raced out, about a mile and a half, just outside the harbor, and they marveled at the seakindliness of the vessel, which seemed to iceskate over the waves. Then we turned around, and headed back, and en route I gave excruciatingly detailed instructions on how to effect a landing. And there was never a prettier one than this, as the boat came to a dead stop just by its pier and was promptly snubbed down at either end by David and Sam. I told them that the very next time I sailed to Spain, I'd take them along. We walked back to the car, and of course Pat was furious on learning that we had been out sailing, declaiming at vigorous length that obviously Sam shouldn't be head of Doubleday Publishing if he permitted his
most valuable asset
, David, to go out in midwinter with the madman she was married to. All this was great fun, but Sam and Jo had to drive back to New Jersey, so regretfully we saw them off. David said he would take a little nap, and I got into the car and drove to the Radio Shack a mile or so down the line, because I need to have a present for James Burnham's birthday party tomorrow, and it occurred to me that perhaps a few of those television games would entertain him. He has always liked games, and with that mind of his, which framed
The Managerial Revolution
and
Suicide of the West
, good as ever in brief moments but, since the stroke, incapable of retention, perhaps engagements on the television screen—some solitaire, some he might play with his wife Marcia—might be just the thing. I scooped up a few and drove back. It was dark now, and I parked opposite the study and groped my way in. I turned on the light and checked the temperature— forty-five degrees, so I turned on both the gas heater and the electric heater, and in ten minutes it was sixty-five and I had an hour in which to go back to the mail.

Sophie Wilkins, my beloved friend, scholar, translator, writes the most complex, ornate, profound, erudite letters I regularly get, and it is always a little dismaying when I answer them because there is never the time, and often not the resources, to do them justice. Today she comments on an essay Jeff Hart has published in
National Review
in which he gives an account of hearing four poets while studying and teaching at Columbia: Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot. Her own memory of Eliot's performance (she was then departmental secretary for the English Department) was sharply different from Jeff's. "The 'show,' " she wrote, "was so dramatically the exact opposite of the Dylan Thomas event, somebody should really make a movie on the basis of my description: the Great Dead Poet, looking totally mummified—well, he was [now] happily married and had gained weight, as Jeffrey Hart says. He looked like a well-upholstered package—flanked by
two
undertakers in dress uniform (penguins): Jacques Barzun to the right of him, Lionel Trilling to the left of him. I didn't even hear the introduction, it was given in such hushed tones, appropriate to the funereal occasion. Then the GDP at last was stood up behind the lectern and proceeded to read, indeed, indeed, work that had been the great excitement of myself and schoolmates in high school, a quarter of a century ago! 'April is the cruellest month . . Yes, to be sure, but the way it came across was that he was basing his appearance solidly on the past. Normally a poet gives you a little work-in-progress, something you haven't seen yet that he needs to try out on a live audience in a live voice—and he reeled it off in the spirit of those ancient, scratchy, flawed Caruso records: mechanically, with the whole afflatus of infinite boredom he was entitled to feel at such reiteration of what had once been a bombshell. Not one living word came out of him, in that dead voice (the poet was dead, the man had probably never been so happy, and I did not begrudge him that; he had certainly earned it). But to read Jeffrey Hart's pious conclusion, 'Eliot
was
the West that night.' Yes indeedy, but if so, he was burying us more effectively than Khrushchev ever could, burying us from the Inside, beginning with himself. Just thought you ought to know."

Sophie then harks back to Edgar Smith. She is grateful that Warren Steibel does not intend to portray her. He is planning a movie based on the killer who had persuaded WFB of his innocence—who in turn mobilized rescue missions—which in turn got the conviction upset—which in turn got Edgar out of jail on a second-degree plea—who in turn five years down the road tried to kill another woman, was caught (WFB turned him in), tried, at which trial he confessed his guilt of the first crime, convicted, and sentenced. Sophie had befriended Edgar during his long spell in the New Jersey Death House and had edited his extraordinarily successful autobiography,
Brief Against Death
. The whole business got fresh publicity when, shortly after Abbott's release, which had been effected by Norman Mailer, Jack Henry Abbott resumed killing. The theme played was that writers tend to exhibit a weakness for killers. There was Norman Mailer, sponsoring Jack Henry Abbott. William Styron had had a similar experience, as had William Buckley with Edgar Smith. A critical distinction is finessed here: I thought Smith innocent, Mailer knew Abbott to be guilty—indeed, Abbott never said he was not.

Anyway, Warren has assured Sophie she need not be portrayed in the movie. I write: "Dearest Sophie: I for one am glad to coexist [with you]. But then many of such matters as you raise I have never given conscious thought to, and of course I'm not so sure whether that is good or bad. Your wonderful recollection of Eliot and of Thomas elated me, but I don't think I'll pass it along to Jeff, for the obvious reason. As for Edgar's situation, I am happy you are reassured by your meeting with Warren. Occasionally he talks to me about the film, but by no means systematically. It occurs to me suddenly that somebody has got to play me. I hope he will find someone who looks very innocent. . . . All love."

David Belin was the principal staff lawyer during the Warren investigation of the Kennedy assassination, and was chief counsel for the committee, headed by then Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, looking into the CIA. He wrote what was taken to be the definitive book on the assassination
(November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury
) in which he said that there was simply no proof that anyone else was in on the killing. He dined with me last week, coming in from Des Moines, to ask my help in getting a publisher to bring out a twentieth anniversary (of the assassination) book that would dispose of all the grassy knollers that have cropped up over the years. In the course of the evening he complained about the Des Moines
Register's
tendentious handling of a UAW strike of the Delavan Corporation, and I told him I didn't know about the news editor of the
Register
, but had had dealings with the editorial page editor whom I found to be a humorless hypocrite who wrote prose heavier than lead. Now he sends me a detailed account of what happened at Delavan, and the failure of the
Register
to report it fairly. I thank him, and ask him to let me know when he is ready for me to approach the book publishers.

Twenty-five years ago I drafted a form note that continues to go out regularly to readers who let lapse their subscriptions to
National Review
. The text hasn't changed, and a surprising number of people reply, giving the reasons for dropping out (mostly it is eyesight, or cost; occasionally, acedia). The circulation department routes to me especially provocative letters, negative or affirmative. Some of these I acknowledge. Mr. Bob Wyche of Tyler, Texas, was
horrified
at his delinquency. He teaches government. "On the second day of school, government classes came to life as they viewed and interpreted all of the political cartoons printed in
National Review
over the summer. I took all of them, ran them through the Thermo-Fax, made transparencies of them, and projected them onto a screen with the overhead. Why, then, had I not renewed my subscription? Mere neglect and procrastination. Enclosed is my check for a renewal. Thank you for writing." So I thanked
him
.