Some Faces in the Crowd (15 page)

K
ENNETH CHANNING BAXTER STUDIED
the young man who had answered his ad in
The Saturday Review.
He not only studied him but was conscious of doing so, for as readers of Kenneth Channing Baxter’s famous novels knew, KCB was a great student of human nature. An adulatory profile in a national magazine had quoted the great man as saying that his vocation was also his avocation, for “I have a passion for studying people—reading their faces, their gestures, their silences; my fellow-man never ceases to fascinate, challenge and amuse me.”

That was a characteristic observation of KCB’s. His first novel had been an instantaneous success when he was only twenty-eight and for the past several decades he had failed only once in his admirable ambition to “give my public a novel every two years.”

“In this most uncertain of enterprises,” his happy publisher was fond of saying, “a Baxter novel is one of the few sure things. He’s America’s answer to Somerset Maugham.”

America’s answer leaned back in his dark-red leather writing chair, tenderly caressing the rich brown bowl of his Dunhill, and smiled reservedly on the young man who wished to become his secretary. It was a smile such as is sometimes seen on a sleek, well-cared-for cat while regarding the mouse she has trapped but has not yet molested.

In this case the mouse, or, rather, the young man was a decidedly unprepossessing creature. He was slight and pale and chinless and he wore an unpressed thirty-dollar suit bought in a small-town store on the occasion of his graduation from college. It was not even what Baxter would consider one of the real colleges—he was a Williams man himself, but one of his sons was at Princeton and the other was prepping at Lawrenceville. The young man was a graduate of the local state teachers’ college, where he had done some proctoring while getting his master’s in English literature. He seemed rather nervous, and in the course of Baxter’s direct and somewhat blunt questioning (KCB prided himself on his “frankness”) the young man would lick his lips and blink his eyes. He also, Baxter detected, had a tendency to stammer.

Baxter had doubts about him. Even the name, Sheldon Dicks, seemed a little odd and unworldly. A young lady from Bryn Mawr had impressed the author as far more efficient and presentable—a bit too much of the latter, in fact, and for that reason Baxter had passed her over. He had his own writing house directly on the lake, several hundred yards removed from the main house, and since it was sometimes his habit to dictate at night, neighbors might talk. People in the limelight were invariably victimized by vicious gossip. If he had had more time he would have liked to interview some others—but he was in something of a jam at the moment. His most recent novel,
My Father’s House,
had not only soared right to the top of the best-seller lists, but had received an inordinate amount of critical acclaim. Reviewers were calling it “the most mature work this penetrating craftsman has given us.” There were fan letters to answer, at the rate of about twenty a day, Baxter told the young man. And there were telephone calls. The young man would have to use his ingenuity in separating the nuisance calls from the real thing. And there was the lecture and public-appearance calendar to be kept up. And callers to be protected from—autograph hounds, publicity seekers, job wanters, salesmen, charity solicitors. “They would all crawl in and carry me off in little pieces if we didn’t keep a strong bolt on the door.”

Sheldon Dicks bore little resemblance to a strong bolt, but he said he would try. Baxter told his new secretary that it would also be his responsibility to see that the writing table was supplied with paper, typewriter ribbons, pencils, erasers and the like. “Two dozen pencils sharpened to a fine point ready at nine each morning—that has been my rule for over twenty years,” said Kenneth Channing Baxter. The young man said, Very well, he would attend to all these details so capably that the illustrious author would be free to concentrate exclusively on the plot, theme and characters of his work in progress.

“And then there are the archives,” the novelist said. “The Princeton Library has set aside a Baxter Room where all of my manuscripts, proofs, correspondence, reviews, notebooks and clippings are being collected. So you will also be in charge of what I immodestly call the Posterity Department.”

Sheldon Dicks promised to take charge of Baxter’s posterity.

“Now one final word,” Baxter said in his fame-weary voice. “I see in your references here that you have published a few poems and things in college magazines. One of the banes of my career is the budding, would-be, never-will-be writer. Friends who beg me to look over the first three chapters of their young nephew’s novel. Young men who write that they want nothing from me but half an hour of advice. Everybody in this world seems to have a manuscript. There’s a literary diamond in the rough behind every bush and under every bed, so to speak …”

Sheldon Dicks observed that this sort of mixed metaphor was not unknown to Baxter’s prose style, but his face remained expressionlessly earnest, a weapon of passive resistance he had developed to balance his sensitivity to incompetent or graceless speech and text.

“—so,” Baxter was continuing, “if you have any literary ambitions, if you aspire to be another T. S. Eliot or William Faulkner or even poor K. C. Baxter, I say that is splendid—provided you do not cultivate this ambition on my time or with my knowledge. In other words, no grubby little manuscripts shoved under my nose with a sniveling ‘If you like this enough I wondered if you’d be good enough to show it to your publisher.’”

Sheldon Dicks did have a manuscript, a number of them, in fact, and he couldn’t help wondering how Kenneth Channing Baxter had got his start. Had he sprung fully blown as a famous novelist out of some publisher’s brain? But he put the question and the impertinence out of his mind. A room of his own in the writing cottage and seventy-five dollars per week seemed a perfectly good reason for saying, “I promise not to inflict any manuscripts on you, Mr. Baxter.”

Somewhat to Baxter’s surprise, Sheldon Dicks turned out to be the most satisfactory secretary ever in his employ. He was efficient. He was unobtrusive. He was resourceful. He was able to answer the fan mail without even bothering to consult the author. And Baxter had to admit that the letters were every bit as good as if he had composed them himself. Before the end of the first year young Dicks, on his own initiative, was writing Baxter’s lectures for him, and even magazine articles. It rather gave Baxter a start to be told by a friend of his at the Lotus Club that his article on “What I Think of Our Younger Novelists” was one of the finest bits of critical work the author had done. “Quite frankly, old boy,” his friend had said with an ingenuous twinkle, “I was beginning to think you were going to seed, but this piece proves you have wit and vitality and ideas to spare.”

In addition, Sheldon Dicks had rare gifts as a typist. In the course of transcribing a Baxter manuscript, he would tighten the sentences, improve the syntax, judiciously change a word or sharpen a phrase, so that when the finished copy was submitted to Baxter’s publishers, the editor wrote that he was happy to see that “the old master, like fine wine, is definitely improving with age.”

One day after Sheldon Dicks had been with Baxter for a number of years and was so firmly established in the Baxter ménage that he was referred to by Mrs. Baxter and the household staff as “The Shadow,” he came into the author’s study to inform his lord that it was time to dress for his radio interview and that he had a few letters to be signed. They made a rather nice composition, Baxter thought, the author in his dark-green smoking jacket against the wine-red leather of the writing chair and the mild-mannered ghost of a secretary bending over him in attentive submission. As Baxter signed the first letter, thanking a reader for calling him “his favorite writer since Galsworthy,” an impulse prompted him to realize that in all these years, nearly seven it was now, Sheldon Dicks had never volunteered an opinion of any one of the three novels he had typed and proofread so conscientiously.

“By the way, Sheldon,” Baxter said without looking up, “what do you think of the new book?”

Sheldon Dicks’s sensitive, birdlike face betrayed no emotion. “I don’t feel it my place to comment, sir,” he said.

Baxter frowned. “But after all, Sheldon, we’re—we’re more than author and secretary now. I would say we’ve gotten to be friends.”

It was true that Baxter had advanced Dicks as much as five hundred dollars on occasion, to meet such emergencies as the death of his mother and the collapse of one lung. And during the last year or so, Baxter had fallen into the habit of lunching with Dicks at the cottage, during which time he would relax from the rigors of his work by chatting with Dicks of politics, the state of literature, modern art, the aerial ruts of television and other subjects of the moment. Often he found that Dicks’s ideas and phrases could be fitted quite neatly into his own work in progress. “Dicks has a nice mind,” Baxter had conceded to his wife. “I would sooner talk with him than with half the writers and publishers I know.”

So now Baxter looked up at his secretary and repeated his question. “Seriously, Sheldon, what is your honest opinion of
Moondays?”
When he noticed the younger man’s hesitation, he added, “Go ahead, I won’t bite your head off. I’m not insisting you tell me it’s better than
War and Peace.”

The wisp of humor seemed wasted on the young man. “Mr. Baxter, if you don’t start now, you’ll be late for your broadcast.”

“Oh, bother the broadcast—I’ll make it. Lloyd drives as if he’s in the 500 at Indianapolis. But tell me now, I insist”—for suddenly he had to know—“what do you think of
Moondays?
And
Father’s House?
And
Second Harvest?
And—what is your opinion of the body of my work? Of my place, shall we say, in American letters?”

There was a long and (what used to be called) pregnant pause.

“Mr. Baxter, since you insist on my telling you this—I do not think you have any place in American letters.”

On Kenneth Channing Baxter’s face there was no mark, but the look was that of a man who has been sharply flicked by a leather whip.

“My dear boy …”

“I think you are the most overrated writer in America today,” the words of Sheldon Dicks poured through the vents that suddenly had been opened after having been sealed for years. “Every age has its forgotten heroes and its renowned nonentities. Their span is their own lifetime or a part of it and they flash in it with the spectacular impermanence of fireflies. When Melville was a neglected customs inspector, for instance, there were a whole covey of lady writers being discussed in the serious reviews as if they were the female counterparts of Tolstoy and Turgenev.”

Except for the fact that his teeth clenched around the bit of his pipe more severely than usual, Baxter managed to look like the poised, confident man of letters who has received not one but a brace of Pulitzer Prizes.

“At least I admire your frankness. Naturally your—uh—subnormal estimate of my literary powers will not have the slightest bearing on our professional relationship.”

Kenneth Channing Baxter believed that and thought of himself as adhering to this principle scrupulously. A few months later, when he found it necessary to dispense with the services of Sheldon Dicks, it was—he believed—for quite a different reason. It was for failure, after several warnings, to have the L key repaired on Baxter’s favorite typewriter. The author’s fourteenth novel had just been designated merely an alternate book-club selection and this, on top of Dicks’s negligence in regard to the L key, had been just too much. After nearly seven years of conscientious and ghostlike servitude, Sheldon Dicks had been pushed out of the Baxter nest and into the wide, wide world.

He did not remain there long. A year later he was in Arizona with spots on his lung and the year after that he was dead. A five-line obituary in the
Times
notified its readers that the deceased had served as private secretary to the eminent author Kenneth Channing Baxter.

Whether or not the dismissal and passing away of Sheldon Dicks had anything to do with the decline of Baxter is one of those intangibles forever to be argued. But Baxter’s next novel was not even a book-club alternate, and the one that followed was rather generally ridiculed as old-fashioned and contrived. Baxter went on grinding out novels, but the tide had turned, and he was left floundering in the wake of others’ success. Most of the reviewers who had lavished columns of print on the new Galsworthy and the American Maugham were dead or retired. A whole new generation of critics placed Baxter somewhere between Zane Grey and Oliver Kirkwood. To add to Baxter’s plight, his money ran out, a fate not uncommon to the fortunes of the get-famous-quick in America. In anticipation of recapturing his lost public he had continued to live in the grand manner with his lake, his private writing house, his green rolling lawns, his great parties and the expensive Mrs. Baxter, long after his books had failed to sustain this sort of living. At last he had to sell, for a fraction of its value, his charming landmark, Rolling Brook. He was faced with the prospect of living out his days ingloriously on a modest annuity.

One Sunday a few months after Mrs. Baxter had passed on, KCB walked around the corner from his small Greenwich Village apartment to pick up the morning papers. As had been his habit for some thirty years, he fingered through the bulky Sunday sections until he found the book review. On the front page was a two-column cut of a face he had hardly thought about in recent years.

Sheldon Dicks’s. A banner line asked a provocative question: “An American Rimbaud?” A review by a distinguished English poet welcomed “to the thin ranks of first-line American writers a new poet of such brilliance, intensity, originality and depth as to suggest—but in no way imitate—the erratic French genius of Rimbaud.”

Wandering along the street in an uneasy trance, Baxter read the strange facts behind the publication of Dicks’s long narrative poem, “A Mass for the Living Dead.” When Dicks had died in obscurity on a ranch in Arizona, he had left a request in writing that all his papers should be burned. But a high-school English teacher who had become his friend in the closing days of his life had been so impressed by the manuscript that he had not had the heart to carry out Dicks’s instructions. After several years of soul-searching, the English teacher had written in his introduction, he had decided that a higher conscience demanded his giving Dicks’s long poem to the world.