The Lost Weekend (21 page)

The whisky warmed him all inside, as usual; and took away the pain and fatigue and jumping nerves, as usual; and caused his spirits as usual to wake and rise so pleasantly, so reassuringly—the spirits that only this morning, only yesterday, only tomorrow and next week, he thought and would think would never rise again. He wasn’t beaten down after all. Who or where was the wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie now? O what a panic may be in thy breastie an
other
day but not while you had this in your hand and that on the table. But easy, there; easy this time. Go get another drink if you like but get a book too.

He poured the drink and walked over to inspect the bookshelves. Sleekit, hell! not with a two-day beard and a black-eye like a Rouault portrait. Looking over the brightly-jacketed novels, he thought of the volumes at home in his father’s library, the books that had never been taken away when his father left and still remained in the shelves in his mother’s house: the salesman-sets his father had always fallen for—the green Kiplings, the blue de Maupassants, the maroon Bjornsons (who the hell was he anyway and why a whole set of him?), the small red
Masterpieces of Wit & Humor
, the tan
World’s Greatest Orations
, the sickeningly limp limp-leather Roycroft books that almost gave you the creeps to hold, the dark red Mark Twains and the two handsome Trollopes in purple calf or morocco or levant or whatever it was. But all he could think of (suddenly) when he thought of his father’s books was that letter to his mother he had found and the sentence that read “I will always fondly remember you and the boys.” He had run upstairs then and flung himself down on the bed and cried his eyes out, weeping for the father who would no longer be giving him the cardboards from his laundered shirts to draw beautiful pictures on, pictures his father always admired and showed to all his friends and sent off to the Children’s Page of a New York
newspaper. How could your admiring father do that to you, go away and leave you forever, did he really not care for you any more, was it possible? And though he sobbed and sobbed on the bed in shame and anguish, he realized too the awful importance of that letter, and he glanced up into the mirror of the bureau to see what a moment of crisis looked like.…

He took a drink and searched for a book to read or think about. He had an author, too, in calf or morocco or levant, an author whose works he had had bound himself, both as a kind of personal tribute to the writer he so dearly loved and because he would be reading those nine books (and all the others to come) for the rest of his life. He took down
The Great Gatsby
and ran his finger over the fine green binding. “There’s no such thing,” he said aloud, “as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it.” He nodded. The class looked and listened in complete attention, and one or two made notes. “Don’t be fooled by what the Sunday reviewers say of the jazz-age, Saturday-Evening-Post-popularity, et cetera. People will be going back to Fitzgerald one day as they now go back to Henry James.” He walked back and forth, tapping the book in his hand. “Pay no attention, either, to those who care for his writing merely; who speak of ‘the texture of his prose’ and other silly and borrowed and utterly meaningless phrases. True, the writing is the finest and purest, the most entertaining and most readable, that we have in America today; the nearest anyone has come to it is James Cozzens in
Ask Me Tomorrow
.— Scott Fitzgerald has enormous natural gifts as a writer; but it’s the content that counts in literature. I’d rather have someone say of my writing that it had energy than beauty any day. You can write badly and still be a great novelist: look at Dreiser; look at the James Farrell of
Studs Lonigan
.” He paused to note the surprised, gratified, or puzzled reactions. “Apart from his other gifts, Scott Fitzgerald has the one thing that a novelist needs: a truly seeing eye. He sees so clearly, in fact, that his latest book has embarrassed those critics who have come to look to him for entertainment, not for such deeply searching
stuff as this. What does it matter that
Tender Is The Night
fails as a novel?—which it does. While it lasts, it is the most brilliant and heart-breaking performance you will find in recent fiction. Get the book and read it yourself; it came out last year; and of the four novels so far, it is my favorite. Speaking for myself, it’s fatal to open the book at any page, any paragraph; for I must sit down then and there and read the rest of it right through, from that point on, to the finish.” (He would not bother to tell the students—too personal, unbecoming—that when he had finished
Tender Is The Night
at nine-thirty in the morning he had telephoned all over the Atlantic seaboard till he finally located Fitzgerald at Tuxedo; and the man had said: “Why don’t you write me a letter about it? I think you’re a little tight now.”) “The fellow is still under forty. The great novels will yet come from his pen. And when they do, we shall have as true a picture of the temper and spirit of our time as any age of literature can boast in the past. One word more. Fitzgerald never swerves by a hair from the one rule that any writer worth his salt will follow:
Don’t write about anything you don’t know anything about
. Class dismissed.”

He put the book back on the shelf, feeling suddenly very foolish and let down. He wasn’t that drunk. Was he? It wasn’t possible, no not yet, or ever. He could never be so drunk that he would mock his beloved Scott Fitzgerald. Mock? He meant every word of it and more. He felt so deeply about the man and his work— But that was the point. Keep it to yourself. Who cared?

But there was more to it than that. He knew only too well—he had heard, who hadn’t?—what was going on with that gifted unhappy man. Would ten years go by again before another novel came out, like the long ten years between
Gatsby
and
Tender Is The Night
? And in the meantime, couldn’t something be done to save those gifts and restore the man himself? Would the talent reassert itself and lift the man up, or would it go under still more to drink? Though he didn’t know him and never would
know him, he felt a personal concern and worry for his welfare, an anxiety as for a well-loved friend in distress of his own making. The very thought of him filled him with such a sadness that he could have wept. Nothing hurts more than to see a soaring spirit brought low.

A crying jag, that’s what he’d be going into any minute if he didn’t watch out. He poured a drink to bring him out of this state, drank it, and the telephone began to ring from the bedroom.

What is amiss?—You are, and do not know’t
. Well there was one way to fix that. No-no, nothing so foolish as to lift the receiver off the hook; that would be a giveaway to the guy at the other end. But the door was still shutable and he was still able to shut it and shut out the offending clamor partially. He got up and walked jauntily to the foyer and closed the bedroom door.

Partially was enough. From the big chair in the living room with a drink in your hand and the bottle within easy reach, it sounded like a summer insect back home, the metallic drone of a locust high up in a foliaged tree, fading farther and farther away as the hours passed.…

He was into the second Act of
Antony and Cleopatra
and his excitement as he approached the great description was intense. He began to get nervous and fidget in his chair. He sat forward and uttered the opening words as he knew they had never been uttered before: simple, yet cynical; unemotional, yet admiring in spite of himself; faintly derisive, but, in all honesty, forced to concede the triumph—Enobarbus to the life, with something of Iago’s intellect, the daring of Lear’s Fool, the loyal devotion of Horatio:

He smiled to himself at the open-dropped mouth of Maecenas, the popping eyes of Agrippa, that pair of visiting firemen hanging breathless on his every grudging syllable, only too ready to believe the last fabulous word. He would dazzle them even more by under-playing to the limit, speaking almost as if he were bored:

Maecenas gave a low whistle under his breath and shook his head in the disbelief he didn’t feel for an instant. But wait. He held up his hand—they hadn’t heard the half of it. Hear how our great leader, demi-Atlas of this earth, world-sharer and universal landlord, fell like a ton of bricks:

“Royal wench!” exclaims Agrippa of the one-track mind; “She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed: He plough’d her, and she cropt.” And the un-understanding Maecenas, the righteous and shocked family-man, inanely adds: “Now Antony must leave her utterly.”

He sprang up from his chair.

“Never; he will not.”

He walked slowly up and down, deliberating, and out of the corner of his eye, beyond the glare of the footlights, he saw the expectant hushed audience waiting for the familiar words, challenging him to bring them forth as new. Forget the audience; forget you ever heard the words; concentrate on the thing at hand: how to explain to these provincial Romans the secret and mystery of the lass unparallel’d. He faces the two, but he doesn’t say it to them. He says it as if thinking aloud, for himself—cold, matter-of-fact, no more than the truth—giving the devil her due:

The only sound is the audible sigh of released breath from the other side of the footlights: and he is, indeed, the absolute
Enobarbus at last, as no actor has ever been able to play him yet.…

He was tired out. He poured a fresh drink. Oh to feel the power of giving such a performance, or the power of swaying others in any medium, the power of accomplishment. Would it ever be his? What did he mean would it. Wasn’t it now? Did any actor, any artist in any field, ever strike so to the root and heart of things as he did now? What matter that no one was around to appreciate the performance?
You
knew—and that was best of all.

The old pain was back, the head heavy. But the senses were dull too and you didn’t mind a bit, you knew it was there but you scarcely felt it, you paid as little notice to the ache and the throb and the sleepiness and the lovely lazy falling into a sleep that was yet to come but coming blessedly any minute now as you did to the zinging and faraway metal-like droning of the midsummer locust in the foliaged tree in the bedroom behind the closed door. Put the glass down it is heavy it will spill, no drink it, drink it to save it, then over to the couch keeping your eyes closed not to spoil the spell or waken, to the couch for a little while for a little rest.…

He stretched out and fell deeply into a dream:

He was in a vast low one-story auditorium like a gymnasium. Overhead, trapezes had been pulled up out of the way and wound around the steel rafters that supported the wide squat roof. Basketball-boards hung at either end of the hall. Horizontal bars, hurdles, Swedish booms, rowing-machines, leather horses for vaulting—all the paraphernalia of gymnastics had been stacked along the side walls to make room for thousands of lightwood folding-chairs packed in tight rows as dense as thatch. Sunshine streamed down through the half-dozen skylights, making great transparent blocks of slanting yellow in the dust- and mote-filled air.

In the very center of the vast room, Don sat on a rickety folding-chair—or on the edge of one, for the other half was occupied
by a young student in a grey-white sweatshirt. There was no chance that either of them would fall off: to each side, other students sat as closely packed. They sat two to a seat throughout the entire hall; pressed together, shoulders hunched, arms pulled forward between their knees, to make room. They were wedged so solidly in a collective mass that no single one of them could have risen to his feet without dragging up his immediate neighbors as well. Don turned, as far as he was able to, and looked about. Row upon row of close-cropped heads and brush-cuts, blond for the most part, spread in a wide sea all around him—heads of hair clipped almost to the scalp because of their natural shameful curls. Other students stood tight in overlapping file along the side walls, standing on the piled-up gear, craning their necks toward the front platform. The air was heavy with the strong dry sickish-sweet smell of young men.