St. Urbain's Horseman (24 page)

Earlier, in Montreal, Jake had earnestly assured his troubled relatives that their city was a cultural desert, a colonial pimple, and he was off to nourish himself at the imperial fountainhead, but once he was there and rid of them, all he thought about was girls.
Where were the girls?
Take me, have me. Oh my God, the ones he saw in the pubs were so depressingly lumpy, all those years of bread-and-dripping and sweets and fishpaste sandwiches having entered their young bodies like poison, coming out here as a mustache, there as a chilblain, and like lead through the teeth. And the elegant
shiksas
of Belgravia, the ones he ravished with his eyes, who for generations had packed their tomato-faced husbands (C. Aubrey Smith, Ralph Richardson) off to take India, Canada, and Rhodesia (or come back, God forbid, to get four white feathers in the mail); those insufferably arrogant-looking women, he thought, would see him only as a boy late with the avocado delivery from Harrod's.

Within weeks, Jake was miserable. London, he came to believe, was no more than a gum-gray, depressing city. Where the workers were short with black teeth and the others were long and pallid as forced asparagus with a tendency to stammer.

Goysville. Tasteless white bread. Sawdust bangers at the local. Brussels sprouts floating in tepid greasy water. At the Windmill Theater, he and Luke watched an aging stripper with jellied thighs. No sooner had the febrile comics bounced on stage –

“Do you know we've got a plane bigger than any plane the Yanks ever built?”

“No.”

“Yes, we have. Salisbury Plain.”

– than the countrymen in tweed caps, who filled the first two rows, lit matches and bent over their girlie books.

“I've been to Brighton to watch the football matches under the sea.”

“Ruddy fool. There are no football matches under the sea.”

“Haven't you heard? There are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”

The very day of Jake's arrival, as the pavement continued to heave up at him like the deck of a Cunarder, he went to Canada House, in Trafalgar Square, to inquire about mail.

“Anything for Hersh?”

“What initial?”

“J.”

“You're not J. Hersh.”

Affronted, Jake slapped his passport down on the counter.

“Oh, I see. There must be two of you, then.”

“Can you give me this other J. Hersh's address?” Jake asked, excited.

“I don't think he's in London any more. He hasn't been around in months.”

“Has he left a forwarding address?”

“Are you a relation?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he knew better than to leave an address.” The girl pulled out a wad of letters bound with an elastic. “Overdue bills. Registered letters from his bank. Final notices. Summonses. It's shameful.”

“I'd like to leave my address for him, then. Just in case he shows up.”

The girl watched, tapping her pencil, as Jake wrote it out. “Have you just come over from Canada?” she asked.

Jake nodded.

“Travelers abroad should think of themselves as good-will ambassadors for our country. We're well-liked here.”

“Like Willy Loman. I know. But you see,” Jake said, “I'm a drug addict. I came over to register with the National Health.” And scooping up his parcel, he retreated to the reading room.

The parcel was from Jake's father. A Jewish calendar, listing the holidays to be observed, a skullcap, and a prayer book. There was a message tucked into the skullcap:
WRITE WEEKLY, NOT WEAKLY
.

Jake and Luke arrived in London riding the crest of a TV play which Luke had written and Jake directed, in Toronto, that was to be repeated on British commercial television.

It was, as it turned out, a most propitious time for Canadians, however callow, to descend on the United Kingdom. Commercial television was burgeoning, but desperate for skilled hands. Whereas Americans, who required work permits, were prohibited, overeager colonials, like Jake, like Luke, were elected to fill that office. In those frenetic, halcyon days of live television drama, when plays were usually rehearsed for two weeks with two additional days of camera rehearsal, the Canadians bullied the indolent native camera crews, cajoling in the morning, proffering baksheesh in the evening, into actually moving their hitherto static cameras, zooming in here, dollying out there, imitating film everywhere, improvising from the control room when camera three blew out during transmission and waiting exhausted by the telephone all the next day for the summons
from on high that didn't come. From the Holy Trinity: M-G-M, Columbia, Twentieth. The chance to break into film.

Until Jake became entangled with the girl who was his production assistant, moving into a flat of his own, he and Luke shared a place in Highgate. In the semi-detached houses around them, wherever there flourished a salesman or shopkeeper, who had only yesterday slipped in under the middle-class wire, there bloomed not an aspidistra but a Tory poster in the window, the badge of breathless arrival, as Sir Anthony Eden led his party into an election. Jake, convinced it was time he entered fully into the life of his adopted country, scooted round to the local Labor Party office to volunteer for work, secretly expecting that considering his rising reputation his name would be instantly recognized by the dreamiest deb in the place, unfortunately sex-crazed (Yes, I'm
the
Hersh), and that he would be prevailed upon to direct a party political piece for the telly, sweeping Hugh into office, and creating totally unexpected conundrums for himself when he emerged as the cynosure of the Hampstead set. “Yes, I do appreciate it's a safe seat. I'm not ungrateful, Hugh. But …”

The flaking Labor Party office, a bankrupt laundromat on short lease, was empty except for a stout middle-aged lady in a tweed suit. “Yes,” she asked sharply, “what is it?”

Disheartened, Jake nevertheless inquired whether there was any work he could do.

“Do you know my son?” she demanded. “Do you know him personally?”

Her son was the candidate. “No,” he confessed.

“Then why do you want to work for us?”

“I'm a Labor supporter,” Jake said, retreating.

“I see. Well, I really don't know …” She flapped about, a startled hen, finally perching on a pile of pamphlets. “I guess there'd be no harm in your putting these through letter boxes …”

Gradually Jake climbed from roistering bottle parties to invitations to dinner, cards left out on his mantelpiece to be scanned by
lesser types, the uninvited. He directed, Luke wrote. Within a year they had become the darlings of Armchair Theater and, to fill the time, began work on their parody script,
The Good Britons
.

Jake regularly took his lunch at the Partisan Coffee Bar, on Carlisle Street, though his revanchist stomach rumbled against the militant Irish stew. With Luke, he stood in blinking attendance, on Easter morning, 1957, when Canon Collins led CND marchers into Trafalgar Square one more time.

When the summons from on high finally came it wasn't from Columbia, M-G-M, or Twentieth Century-Fox. Neither was it Jake they wanted, but Luke. A play he had submitted to the Royal Court, rewritten since Jake had first directed it for Canadian television, had been accepted for production. It was then that the two friends, seemingly inseparable partners, came unstuck through a variant of an affliction that was peculiar to Canadian artists of their generation: a suspension of belief in each other's real rather than national trading stamp value. They had emerged,
pace
Auden, from
tiefste Provinz
, a place that had produced no art and had exalted self-deprecation above all. They were the progeny of a twice-rejected land. From the beginning, Canada's two founding races, the English and the French, had outbid each other in scornfully disinheriting them. A few arpents of snow, Voltaire wrote contemptuously, and Dr. Johnson dismissed the dominion as “a region from which nothing but furs and fish were to be had.”

Jake, Luke, and others of their generation were reared to believe in the cultural thinness of their own blood. Anemia was their heritage. As certain homosexuals pander to others by telling the most vicious anti-queer jokes, so Jake, so Luke, shielded themselves from ridicule by anticipating with derisive tales of their own. Their only certitude was that all indigenous cultural standards they had been raised on were a shared joke. No national reputation could be bandied abroad without apology.

Adrift in a cosmopolitan sea of conflicting mythologies, only they had none. Moving among discontented commonwealth types in London, they were inclined to envy them their real grievances. South Africans and Rhodesians, bona fide refugees from tyranny, who had come to raise a humanitarian banner in exile; Australians, who could allude to forebears transported in convict ships; and West Indians, armed with the most obscene outrage of all, the memory of their grandfathers sold in marketplaces. What they failed to grasp was the ironic truth in Sir Wilfred Laurier's boast that the twentieth century would belong to Canada. For amid so many exiles from nineteenth-century tyranny, heirs to injustices that could actually be set right politically, thereby lending themselves to constructive angers, only the Canadians, surprisingly, were true children of their times. Only they had packed their bags and left home to escape the hell of boredom. And find it everywhere.

When the summons from on high finally came, Jake's girlfriend cooked a dinner to celebrate. After she retired, the two friends became uneasy with one another. Luke was in a turmoil. He was reconciled to Jake's directing his play at the Royal Court, if he insisted, a most unlikely prospect, but he wasn't going to ask. Luke had faith in Jake's talent, even though it was forged in Canada; he had a deeper rapport with him than he could possibly enjoy with another director, and yet – and yet – given his first big chance for a breakthrough, unsettled by enormous self-doubts, he yearned for the reassurance of somebody unknown to him. A reputation. Somebody real, somebody British. Jake, on his side, was already casting the play in his mind's eye, worrying about the second act, when he realized with a heavy heart that Luke, his manner surreptitiously pleading, would be happier with somebody else.

Initially, Jake was not inclined to let Luke off the hook. Dangle, baby. Suffer. Flitting about the periphery, but never confronting the problem, the two friends waited each other out. One didn't ask, the
other didn't volunteer. Desperately, they retreated into reminiscences, surprisingly finding no restorative warmth there, but, instead, unsuspected resentments. Finally, Jake had had enough.

“I should have said as much earlier, Luke, but much as I'd like to do your play, I'm not going to be free.”

“I see.”

“It's a terrific play. I always thought so. But I've got to think of my own career, don't you think?”

Luke recoiled warily.

“I've already done the play in Toronto. I'd only be repeating myself.”

So big, skinny, straw-haired Luke, fumbling with his glasses, was able to quit the flat not churning with guilt, as he had entered it, but bracingly angry, for he had already begun to convince himself that the play had been Jake's for the asking, only he didn't want to do it. He was sad, he was incensed, but he was also immensely relieved. He believed he had a better shot at success with a British director, his new and risky venture unencumbered by a cherished friend who even so was merely another Canadian and therefore a reminder of his picayune beginnings. Even so, anger failed to sustain Luke all the way home. He crawled into bed feeling lousy, dismayed by his own cunning.

Jake continued to drink alone, hurt and indignant, for his best friend had judged his talent and found it wanting, and yet – and yet – he grudgingly had to admit, in some dark and secret place, that he was astonished the Royal Court had considered a Canadian play, even one of Luke's, good enough to be produced. He was also relieved that his own first effort on the British stage would not be a Canadian play. He assumed, based on his education and sour experience, that nothing Canadian was quite good enough. His conjecture was poor old Luke's play wouldn't fail, but neither would it succeed. It would open to end-of-the-column notices, uniformly solicitous,
play to half-filled houses for six weeks and then fade into the middle distance, condemned as a promising first effort.

Within the Canadian colony, there was more skepticism than envy when Luke revealed his play had been sent to Timothy Nash, a young director only two years down from Cambridge but already a fabled name.

“Don't count on anything,” another writer cautioned him with appetite. Somebody else ventured, “It's very encouraging. Even if your play isn't ready and Nash is overrated …”

Nash, to Luke's amazement, read the play within a fortnight and summoned him to a meeting. The only friend Luke wanted to consult beforehand was Jake, but he knew that would be improper, especially considering his own unbridled enthusiasm. So Luke spent the evening alone, unfortunately re-reading his play. It struck him as windy, adolescent, and embarrassing, as if he were not sufficiently fearful of tomorrow's meeting with Nash.

“Your p-p-play's a swinger, m-m-man. I d-d-dig it. I haven't been so h-h-hung up on anything for years.”

Grab your play and run now, Luke thought – go – but he didn't. He couldn't. He was far too bedazzled by Timothy and Lady Samantha, and more than somewhat grateful for Jake's absence, which enabled him to flatter the Nashes with impunity.

But if not then, Luke thought, he certainly should have broken it off once Nash pranced into rehearsal and it became sickeningly clear that his reputation was unearned. He was a fraud, albeit a delightful one. But Luke was astute enough to grasp that Nash's presence festooned his play with glitter. What might have been merely another opening was acquiring the dimensions of an event. Nash not only attracted classy actors, otherwise prohibitively expensive, but with a wave of his wand he drew Fleet Street columnists out of El Vino's and the promise of the most desirable West End theater, should the play transfer.