The Prize (73 page)

‘Thanks, my friend.’

‘I have read all the works of Jack London and Upton Sinclair, but I am sorry to say I have not read your books. Are they translated into Swedish?’

‘Yes, they are.’

‘When I tell my wife, she will buy them.’

‘I wish I had some copies along, but I didn’t have room.’

‘No—no—my wife will buy them.’ He was reluctant to leave, but he saw Craig’s impatience. ‘If you need me in the night, you press the bell. I am at the end of the aisle, at my table. Do you wish to leave a morning call?’

‘Just wake me an hour before we get in.’

‘I won’t forget, Mr. Craig.’

After the conductor had gone, Craig remained at the open door. He bent and peered through the window. In the distance, behind the moat of darkness, a Swedish town, brightened by outdoor fluorescent lights, briefly filled the window and as rapidly disappeared from sight. Shortly, a second Swedish town, also illuminated by fluorescent lights, showed itself, and then withdrew. After the third town came and went, Craig closed his door.

Kneeling, he unsnapped his overnight case removed his pyjamas and the toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, and neatly placed them at the foot of his berth. He took off his shoes, sat on the bed, swaying with the train, and at last he lay down on his back. He was not sleepy, but neither was he wide awake. He was disoriented, not part of this time and place, but contentedly detached. He had consumed more of the bottle than he had realized. He wondered when Lilly would bring what was left of it, and how he would treat her. Was it proper or improper to invite her in to drink with him? . . .
mycket trevligt
—yes, he had enjoyed her, and it would be relaxing to drink with her as they had in the car at the prow of the ferry-boat. Still, he did not feel like talking. He wanted her female presence, and most of all he wanted to unbutton her white blouse.

The eroticism of his thoughts surprised him. He felt immature and ashamed and disloyal to Harriet. He tried to explain to her, and went back to find her, as so often he did, and at once he felt more comfortable in the past, which was all solved with its beginnings, middles, ends, than he ever could in the present, which offered him only beginnings and enigmas. It was good to go home again, where everything had happened and was done, and no burdens of proof existed, no demands, no mysteries, because it was done. . . .

It was the winter after the end of World War II, and New York was bedded down in snow. Two days before, he had been honourably discharged from the Signal Corps at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and now he was in an old hotel on Forty-fourth Street, off Sixth Avenue, waiting for the holiday season to end—it was the week between Christmas and New Year—so that he could see the magazine editors and then leave the city that always made him feel unsure and dissatisfied.

On this day, luxuriating in his civilian status, drawing on his newly acquired pipe, he stared into the street below the hotel—even the snow was dirty here—and he could not understand the lyricists and singers of this city. What was there to recommend it? There was no sky, no earth with flowers and all things green, no private air to inhale, no aesthetic beauty, no neighbourliness, no place to daydream or meditate leisurely. But its professional spokesmen, with inverted snobbery, treated these lacks as its very virtues. It was a place alive and crackling, a place stimulating, civilization’s centre. The centre of what? He wondered. The plays were mediocre gabble, projected by over-publicized personalities rather than first-rate talents, in shameful, musty old barns. Concerts were no better, their small voices and small orchestral sounds slanted at pseudo specialists and reading aesthetes who would turn off the same sounds if heard in a private room. Businesses were the worst, because here competitors were piled on top of each other like gigantic club sandwiches, yet they were expected to disarm and treat each other civilly at lunch and dinner, which was anti-nature, and there could be no other reason for the statistics on martinis dry, ulcers bleeding, and analysts prospering.

Craig wanted no permanent part of this unnatural club. Before the war, while on the rewrite desk of a St. Louis newspaper, he had tried some short fiction on the side. When he learned the formula, and compromised his fancies sufficiently, the short fiction began to sell. He had determined to free-lance full time, but Pearl Harbor diverted him to a different employment. During his three years of service, especially the months in England and France, he had devoted his leaves to a minimum amount of whoring and a maximum amount of writing. The short stories that he wrote were better, and sold for higher prices, and now that he was free at last, he knew what he would do.

He had arranged to spend the week after New Year’s Day going about Manhattan, with his agent, meeting the current crop of editors and telling them some of his ideas. With commitments under his arm, he would return to Cedar Rapids, where he had an ailing father, a robust aunt and uncle, and friends, and he would dig in and write. With the money, he would continue westwards. He would live cheaply, but royally, in Taos or Monterey, and he would write the novels that had burned inside him during the war years.

There was one other possibility. He might visit Peru for a year. He had read that it was inexpensive. The purpose of going to Peru would be research. Among several ideas, he had entertained one about Francisco Pizarro. It would be an historical novel about Pizarro and the strange group of 183 men he had recruited in Panama. It would record the changes in the leader and his men, their conflicts and corruption as well as their strengths, from the day of their landing at Tumbez until they sailed for home. It would lay bare in human terms the whole incredible story of how a small, mortal, fanatical gang, armed with only three muskets and twenty crossbows, conquered Atahualpa and ten million Incas and won a vast empire. The idea had been further nourished by the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler and his original small band, but the Nazis were of too recent date to be examined, and a parallel tale about Pizarro might put the whole modern-day tragedy in perspective.

But then the telephone rang, and Craig turned away from the window and his speculations to answer it, and when he was finished, he was also finished with Taos and Monterey and Peru, only he did not know it yet. He did not know, either, that he had just joined the New York club, for most of four years at least.

The telephone had been an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party from an army friend, Wilson by name, with whom he had been discharged at Fort Dix. The cherubic Wilson was not a particularly close friend. He was a lightweight, and wealthy, or at least his mother was, and Craig accepted because he supposed the food would be good, and it was the only New Year’s Eve invitation he had.

Fortified by two drinks, he arrived in the plush apartment after ten o’clock. The food was, indeed, good, but what was better was Miss Harriet Decker. When Wilson had introduced him to the nearest drunks at hand, Harriet had been stretched supine on the sofa, in stockinged feet, her head in someone’s lap, as was the fashion for that age that year. She was one of many guests horizontal, but the only guest completely sober. She had acknowledged Craig by shading her eyes, passing her gaze up his lank figure, and saying, ‘Hi, up there.’

He had come to the party alone, but when he departed at three in the morning, it was with Harriet. At five in the morning of the first day of the brand-new year, he sat in the Automat with Harriet and knew that she had parents and a younger sister in Springfield, Illinois, that she had undergone a mastoid operation at age thirteen, that she had read
Of Human Bondage
three times and Frank Harris’s
My Life and Loves
in duplicated copy, that she had quit Barnard College in the third year to write copy for a large advertising agency, and that she was in love with him just as much as as he was in love with her.

Now he found that New York oppressed him less, and he wrote his stories in the day and saw Harriet every night, and four months after he had met her, they were man and wife. They leased a spacious, unfurnished flat in Long Island, and did it together for comfort, not show, and at the end of the first year, Harriet had a miscarriage, and he had money enough to give her the deferred honeymoon abroad.

The trip was wonderful. They were younger than young, and who on earth had called their new world Old World? They felt wealthy with the black-market money exchanged on street corners, and bought a brown leather-and-teak chair in Stockholm, wooden shoes in Amsterdam, a Picasso pencil sketch and antique bidet in Paris, a Toledo desk set and skin
bota
in Madrid, a crystal chandelier in Venice.

In Rome, the first afternoon, they had a pilgrimage to make. From the starkly modern Mediterraneo Hotel, they took a battered taxi to the Protestant Cemetery, and then dismissed the driver. At the gate they waited, until a little black-eyed boy opened it, and then they went up the gravel walk, climbing, and then turned to the left and continued to the highest rise near the ancient Roman wall, and there they found the white slab pressed in the earth—Percy Bysshe Shelley—or what had been left of Shelley saved from the pyre on the beach at Viareggio—and beside him, so eager to be beside him, the one who had buried him here, the old pirate, Edward John Trelawny.

As Harriet and Andrew Craig stood in mourning, the sun came through the great quiet trees and touched each grave, and the gentle silence that day made death seem lovely and possible, the peaceful resting after the long travail. Later, they had walked hand in hand downwards, beyond the Pyramid of Cestius, and arrived below, at the far corner of the cemetery, where stood the majestic shaft without a name—writ on water—and beside it, vigilant, faithful, the resting-place of Joseph Severn.

Shelley and Keats. That day, Craig felt an affinity for them, felt a sense of history as had they, felt that he was not one of the faceless of the world, the nonentities of time who come, stay briefly, and are blown away into nothingness, forgotten and unremembered as the flying sands on a windswept beach. He, too, would leave a shaft on earth that would stand as long as men stood or could incline their heads before it. That day, in Rome, he knew strength and purpose, and he was filled with his uniqueness and his mission.

The feeling that had seized him in the Protestant Cemetery expanded and solidified in the next days as he walked beside Harriet through the city. One afternoon, passing the Colosseum and Venus Temple, passing the Constantine Arch, they entered the remains of the Roman Forum, baked hot in the remorseless sun. Ahead of him, beyond the jagged fragments of a powerful and cruel civilization and time, Craig could see the broken colonnades and tossed stones of the once Imperial Palace. Above it was left pitifully few of the pillars behind which Julius Caesar, writhing like a helpless animal at the base of Pompey’s statue, had taken the twenty-three stabs that extinguished his life.

The greatness and smallness of man, and more than that, the continuity and eternity of man, held Craig silent. Minutes later, still looking up, he took Harriet’s arm. ‘I think, at last, I know how, how Edward Gibbon felt—how he could have been inspired to tackle the work of a lifetimes—’

Harriet nodded, and quietly, she recited the words of Gibbon. ‘ “It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started in my mind.” ’

Four weeks later, the Craigs arrived in New York City. Five weeks later, Andrew Craig wrote the first page of his first and best novel,
The Perfect State
.

The novel had its roots in history. Somewhere, Craig had read that the philosopher, Plato, having advanced his radical ideas for a Utopia to his students, in the suburban grove known as the Academy, had once been given the opportunity to practise what he had so long preached in his thirty-six Dialogues. In Syracuse, capital of Sicily, the new, twenty-five-year-old dictator, Dionysius II, had been prevailed upon to invite Plato to reform both the dictator and his government. In 367B.C., Plato travelled to Syracuse to install Utopia. Not only did he attempt to establish a constitutional monarchy, but he tried to introduce the perfect socialized state—the Republic—where men were to be directed into certain occupations by elimination tests. The most brilliant were to continue their study of philosophy until the age of fifty, when they would be made rulers, and would live on together, without personal advantage or gain, in common quarters; children were to be taken from their parents at birth and raised by the state; women to be emancipated and allowed careers, and permitted to marry only under eugenic control; foreign trade was to be eliminated; profits to be curbed so that no single individual might acquire more than four times the wealth of the average man.