Timebends (87 page)

“What happened?”

“I had a pancreas operation. That's why I was in pain all the time.”

I knew she did not mean to sound this rebuke—as though I, and probably Huston as well, had not taken her ill health seriously enough in our impatience with her endless delays on the picture; she was only trying to say that her behavior was not due to trivial malice or bad character or addiction. But it made me wonder if she realized even now how close to the end she had brought herself. For in her voice and in the demonstrative way she held up the sweater she seemed to see the disease as a visitation and not a consequence of immense dosages of barbiturates; she did not know she was still endangered by her very self and by her anger, however rightful it might be; she was still utterly the child and the prey. I felt the old admonitions branching out inside me but corrected myself and let them subside. And despite these tattered old signal flags fluttering at each other, I think we both felt vaguely silly waving goodbye as the car pulled out of the driveway, whose specific curve we had laid out together with the architect almost five years before. Alone, I stood there staring down at the tiny black stones imbedded in asphalt and recalled how unhappy she had been that we were not going to have the elegant crushing sound of loose stones under a car's wheels like they had in California; it snowed here, and the plows would have pushed them out into the road every winter. But of course you could always get more. And
she was right, too—you could get more if you didn't mind the waste. I went back into the house still arguing with myself about it. Nothing really ends.

Too many honors are invented for the glorification of the donor for them to be accepted without a certain salt of skepticism, but this time it was easy to feel good about being in attendance. Among the crowd waiting in the Blue Room to go in to dinner were some of the best artists and writers in the country, as well as scientists, composers, and musicians. The White House dinner was in honor of Andre Malraux, currently De Gaulle's minister of culture, whose work I had admired since the thirties, but it was also manifestly a show of American intellectual pride. To my great surprise and pleasure I learned that I would be sitting with Jacqueline Kennedy and Malraux. Marine ushers in blue dress uniforms deftly shepherded the happy crowd into a long line, as if we were schoolchildren, and guided us toward the dining room, where we would go to our assigned tables. I found myself at the very end of the line, as had been my fate since grammar school due to my height, and as I slowly moved forward, I saw one lone man remaining outside. Of towering height, wearing a ruffled pale blue shirt, he was almost demonstrably disdaining the occasion, standing with one knee raised and a shoe pressed against the immaculate wainscoting, studiously cleaning his fingernails with a file like an idler in front of a country store. He looked friendless, if not peeved. I only gradually recognized his face. He was Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice-president of the United States, and clearly not in his element tonight. It was the only time I ever felt sorry for a vice-president.

Despite having been scorched by government power in the past, I was moved by Kennedy at last a president who understood that a country needed not only its showbiz stars but its brains and its imaginative people. But my recent immersion in Hollywood may have cautioned me against Kennedy's high-speed, on-the-make inner spirit; his hard glazed eyes I found mechanized and a little frightening. He might have a quick mind, but I had to wonder about his compassion. Still, his excitement and happiness with the company he had attracted tonight swept everyone.

Malraux spoke in passionate bursts of French at a speed that defied comprehension by the president's wife much of the time and by me at any time. He was a star fencer flicking his foil before you had a chance to get set. He smoked almost violently and had
a fascinating and disconcerting tic that made you wonder how he ever relaxed enough to sleep. The French ambassador, Hervé Alphand, deftly managed to loft an occasional translation toward me. Some two years later I was reminded of the subtlety of his performance and of Malraux's unrelenting intensity by another Frenchman, Cartier-Bresson. Sitting on the dock of my pond in Connecticut, Henri would read aloud for half an hour at a time to Rebecca, Inge's and my daughter, from his pocket edition of the memoirs of Saint-Simon, the superb chronicler of the machinations at the court of Louis XIV. It was his way of amusing himself and at the same time his admired Inge's daughter, even if she could understand nothing of what he was saying, let alone in French, since she was hardly more than a year old. Watching him down there by the placid water patiently turning the tiny pages while Rebecca cooed and kicked at the sky, I thought of our one American approximation of a royal court, and of Kennedy himself, who by this time had been murdered.

When it happened, we were in a large Connecticut hardware store. A radio was playing. “The President has been shot,” came the voice through the shine and glitter of housewares. At first none of the two or three other customers seemed to hear. I felt an urge to laugh, maybe at the absurdity. The two clerks continued waiting on people. Nobody had been listening. For about a minute I couldn't locate the radio in all the clutter of mixers, irons, appliances. My mind kept saying, No, it's going to change, it's a mistake. Then I found the radio. Gradually the others were turning toward it. I knew what was in Inge's mind—that it was all happening again.

Like the headline about the bombing of Hiroshima, done and done. A tree struck by lightning, with split, still-living limbs swaying aimlessly against the sky, and the question “Why?” fluttering toward the blackened grass, and then the silence.

Driving back to the house with Inge, I thought of Roosevelt, who had also died unexpectedly, but the shock was of a different order. Roosevelt had so dominated my generation that we wondered who could take his place in the conduct of the war. Radio reporters describing the cortege passing down Pennsylvania Avenue suddenly broke into helpless sobbing, as though their own father had gone. The loss seemed far more intimate. Or was it simply that I had been younger then? Kennedy, on the other hand, was a contemporary of mine, and his death pushed a finger through the delicate web of the future. Even in the thirties, as bad as things got, there was always the future; certainly in all my work was an implicit
reliance on some redemptive time to come, a feeling that the cosmos cared about man, if only to mock him. With Kennedy's assassination the cosmos had simply hung up the phone.

An image remaining to me from his inauguration ball, which I attended with Joe and Olie Rauh, was of Frank Sinatra and his pack in a special box overlooking the festivities. Lounging in magisterial isolation above the excited crowd, Sinatra seemed not so much to rise to the honor of presidential favor as to deign to lend his presence to the occasion. A singer for all seasons, he proceeded to do the same for Ronald Reagan, as high above politics as royalty while transitory presidents arrived and departed. Could this signify that the business of America was not business, as an innocent Calvin Coolidge had said, but show business, symbolic display, the triumph at last of metaphor over reality and the domination of the performer with his pure and pointless charm?

But maybe my lack of reverence was due to the fact that I could remember Sinatra in the late thirties, a skinny kid with a chicken neck, surrounded by screaming girls at the Paramount stage door after his first sensational breakthrough. We too were the same age.

It was hard to understand why, but a strange futility had crept into the very idea of writing a play. I am not sure whether it was the age we were entering or my own evolution, but wherever I looked there seemed to be nothing but theatre rather than authentic, invigorating experience. Practically everything—plays, department stores, restaurants, a line of shoes, a car, a hair salon—was being reviewed as though it had become a self-conscious form of art; and as in art, style was the thing, not content. One did not, after all, select a restaurant for nutrition but for taste and service, or a brand of shoes for durability or even comfort but for fashion. The tradition that a play of any significance had to address human destiny seemed ludicrously presumptuous, was going the way of values themselves. In the theatre, it was said, we were in the age of the director, with the playwright his assistant, in effect—but didn't this flow from the fascination not with what was being said but how? The very existence of the playwright was under challenge now; it was as though he represented the concept of predictability itself, with his preset speeches and plots that ended in some approximation of order. One avant-garde critic, to much applause, announced that it was much harder to write a good review than a good play. Only in spontaneity could truth be found, the mind being a congenital liar, and words but persuasive deceits. Gesture, preferably mute, was truth's last refuge, and even there it could
only be a suggestion open to all kinds of interpretation, the more the better.

It was also taken for granted now that the audience was mortally bored, distracted, its attention splattered everywhere but on the stage it was facing. Nor was this purely an American phenomenon, as I would shortly learn, for they were also having trouble holding public interest in theatres across Europe. For one thing, nobody seemed to want to hear a story anymore; a story, I theorized, meant some continuity from past to present, and in our gut we knew there was no such continuity in a life where absolutely anything was perfectly possible for every kind of character. The only reliable recurring element in existence was the perverse, and the only sane reaction to it was bitter laughter, cousin to disgust.

In Peter Brook's Paris studio one afternoon in the mid-sixties, I watched his troupe of some two dozen actors perform for a class of deaf-mute schoolchildren. The troupe moved austerely through a series of dancelike formations, each actor carrying a baton to create patterns of contact and disconnection, design and confusion rearranging itself into new designs. It was pleasant to look at, communicating some aspect of longing, perhaps, but I could not be sure.

The schoolchildren now performed for the actors. Unable to speak or hear, they were condemned to the condition the actors aspired to, having nothing but gesture with which to communicate. They proceeded to present a mimed detective story of a child kidnapped from its parents, acting out the police investigation, the child's recovery, and the punishment of the criminals. There was suspense, a beginning and end, and a range of individual characterizations—the policeman identified himself by constantly saluting, the parents rushed about striking their chests and affecting attitudes of prayer for their child's safe return, the police dog sniffed everywhere for a scent of the criminals, and the kidnapped child rubbed her eyes as though permanently weeping. But what was striking was the children's anguished voiceless attempt to communicate with each other, the exaggerated gestures forced upon them by their inability to speak—gestures that seemed neither more nor less filled with feeling than the words they might have used had they not been mutes.

It seemed utterly wrong for those with all their senses to strive to eliminate some of them in the name of a closer contact with truthful expression. This experience typified for me the theoretical exhaustion of our artistic attitudes; here was a kind of admission
that there was nothing worth saying anymore, and therefore nothing but mode or style to pursue and perfect. The deaf and dumb were desperate to convey an experience, to tell a story, hackneyed though it might be; those who could hear and speak were desperate to create a mood, a
feeling
pure and simple.

I suppose the theatre disgusted me because it seemed merely a sordid ego exercise, nothing more, and I hated egoism now, my own no less than others'. Truth-telling, I had once thought, was all that could save, but now it only seemed another disguise for the common brutality. Without mercy there was no truth, and without faith—in man, let alone God—mercy was merely one option among many others.

One laid one's work at the feet of a god unknown, without whose invisible presence there was no point in striving. “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” Kennedy had declared on that blustery inauguration day, with ancient Robert Frost trying to rescue the pages of his speech from the wind. The young president knew exactly what was wanted because he knew that it wasn't there. Why write?

Inge usually stayed at the old Chelsea Hotel in her numerous passages through New York, at the recommendation of her friend Mary McCarthy, to whose
Venice Observed
she had contributed photographs. For her it was the closest thing in America to a European hotel. The place was not yet as renowned for its famous artist residents as it would become in the mid-sixties, and I rented an apartment in part on the assurance of Mr. Bard, the owner, that nobody would know I was living there. With the same delightfully straight face, he claimed total innocence a few weeks later when the news began popping up in papers here and abroad, but it was hard to stay mad at Mr. Bard when he was so incapable of registering one's disapproval. A short, fair-haired Hungarian refugee with sublime self-confidence and a bad heart, he would vanish for days of fishing at Croton Reservoir between bouts of card playing with his fellow old-country survivors, the stakes often being hotels they owned, some as large as the New Yorker. But the Chelsea was his favorite of all his properties. “I like to be around artists, creative people,” he would say. One needn't believe him to like him, if only because, like his hotel, he tolerated everything, except, quite naturally, a deficit.

I felt at home there almost at once, relaxing in the Chelsea
charm, its unique air of uncontrollable decay. It was not part of America, had no vacuum cleaners, no rules, no taste, no shame. Bard's two partners, Krauss and Gross, did all the plumbing repairs, and that was why the hot water faucets were on the right, as in Hungary, and if some unwary bourgeois American happened to wander in, it served him right if he was scalded. On the top floor Virgil Thomson, at the time a reassuring sign of intelligent life, served drinks in his oak-paneled rooms that should have looked out on Fifth Avenue, potions that paralyzed Inge and me one forgettable evening; down the hall another composer, George Kleinsinger, aroused his girlfriends by scaring them with his collection of cobras, South American lizards, and tortoises, all dreaming away in their slimy floor-to-ceiling tanks; a defrocked minister nearly seven feet tall impatiently awaited cold, miserable weather to provide him with the new customers whose last rites would help pay his rent; Charles James, the once celebrated couturier, wandered the corridors in anguish at the old decay of the place being supplanted by the new decay of vulgar dope-dizzy artists, pseudo and legitimate, poisoning the atmosphere with their self-publicizing funk, not a lady or gentleman among them; and keeping order over the whole circus, the diminutive house detective sat in his room behind quadruple locks, surrounded by television sets, hi-fi equipment, typewriters, and fur coats he had stolen from guests, as was only discovered when the fire department had to smash down his door because the adjoining room caught fire after a drunk fell asleep with his cigarette burning.