Another Life (23 page)

These were questions that I couldn’t very well ask Wallace, who was busily showing me how much more space was available for his future works. The entire structure had been designed in the grand spirit of American optimism, on the assumption that Wallace’s output would be prolific and extend over a long, productive lifetime. There was ample room here for many more novels and nonfiction books, even should the Iron Curtain be raised and that many more languages opened up to him.

We stepped back through the door into the office. He opened another door, and there—Proustian indeed—was a small room lined in cork, with an old-fashioned table and desk chair. On the table was an antique typewriter. It was, Wallace said reverentially, the typewriter he had bought with his savings in Kenosha, where he had delivered newspapers to buy it. On it, he had written his first stories, which he had sent out to every magazine that published short stories. It was on
this
typewriter that he had composed all his books. Wallace stared at the typewriter, his eyes misting over, a cloud of pipe smoke drifting over his head, toward the concealed grille of the air conditioner. Here was where the act of creation took place, he whispered, in this very room, and on this very typewriter, beside which I could not help noticing a thick stack of fresh white paper, no doubt soon to be turned into yet another two-hundred-thousand-word novel.

Wallace shook his head, as if in awe. “Quite something, isn’t it?” he asked in a husky voice.

I nodded.

“I thought you’d like to see this place,” Wallace said. “This is where I got the idea for writing
The Chapman Report
—right here!” He touched the desk gently.

I stared at the clean, shining desktop, the rows of pipes, the glass humidor full of Wallace’s favorite tobacco. The emotion of the moment was evident on Wallace’s face. At any moment I expected him to ask me to take off my shoes, as if we were on holy ground, but fortunately he came out of his trance and took me off to admire his new Bentley.

T
HE MORE
a writer is held in contempt by the reviewers, the more seriously he is likely to take himself. Harold Robbins was a notable exception to this rule, but Irving Wallace was more typical. In any case, life in L.A., particularly in those days, virtually forced writers to take themselves seriously, since nobody else did. In a society where money and beauty were the only things that mattered, it was hard for a mere writer, however successful, to compete. In the movie industry, screenwriters were at the bottom of the totem pole; on the other hand, a certain guarded respect, not unmingled with contempt, was accorded to what were described as “real” writers, the ones who actually wrote books that were published by major New York publishing houses. But they were still not taken altogether seriously by their neighbors in “the industry.” Writers who lived in the shadow of the movie business, like Wallace, tended to suffer from massive inferiority complexes, since at every party, PTA meeting, and visit to the supermarket, they were surrounded by people who considered them impoverished dilettantes who wrote books only because they couldn’t make it in the “real” world—that is, the studios. Hence, no doubt, Wallace’s Bentley and Robbins’s yacht.

Of course, L.A. was full of writers who
didn’t
live in the shadow of the studios and didn’t care whether they were invited to parties or not, who were there because they had always lived there, or because they liked the climate, or to escape from the presence of other writers, or out of some obscure combination of sun worship and natural living that
was as deeply embedded in the city’s culture as the entertainment business. The Durants, needless to say, were in this category and ignored the movie people—to the extent that they were even aware of them—as much as they were ignored by them. Whatever had brought them to the West Coast from New York in the first place, they lived in resentful seclusion among the ravines and steep, wooded hills of North Hollywood, unfindable without elaborate directions and a map. Back in the day of silent pictures, this had been a fashionable neighborhood, though its aspect was sinister and strangely dark for L.A.: winding, narrow roads, high walls with dense shrubbery concealing grotesque houses and huge, overhanging trees, all combined to produce an atmosphere that was more Transylvanian than Californian. Unlike Brentwood, where the Wallaces lived amid flat, manicured lawns, stately palm trees, and cheerful houses, the Durants’ neighborhood was more in the spirit of Norma Desmond’s gloomy mansion in
Sunset Boulevard
. Their home, what could be seen of it behind high stone walls and fiercely overgrown vegetation, was in the 1920s Hollywood Spanish Gothic style, with much wrought iron, heavy wooden doors, gargoyles, tiny barred windows, and carved oak shutters. It looked more than capable of holding off an assault by armed pikemen or the angry peasantry, if necessary. Innumerable parapets and towers vaguely suggested a medieval castle, while the rusting wrought-iron gate in the wall that faced the street resembled that of a prison, so that one half expected to be taken immediately to a dungeon. Had Erich von Stroheim appeared in livery to announce a chimpanzee’s funeral, I would not have been surprised.

After I had vigorously rung the old-fashioned bell, Ariel Durant appeared from out of the dense shrubbery that covered the flagstone pathway and shuffled out to open the gate for me. Her home attire was even more eccentric and bulky than what she had worn in New York. She greeted me in a hoarse, gravelly voice and warned me that I was about to see something to which few people had ever been granted entry—she squeezed my arm sharply—Will’s workplace, the place where he had researched and written his books. Max and Ray Schuster had never been here—a lot
they
cared for the Durants’ labors; all that mattered for them was money, money, money. But I, Ariel confided, seemed to her—though she was prepared to be disappointed—to have a finer sensibility and a real love of history, despite my having been
brought up in wasteful affluence and having chosen an odious profession that was based on exploiting honest, decent, hardworking writers and scholars and stealing bread out of the mouth of genius.

But the house into which she ushered me was not exactly the West Coast equivalent of a Left Bank garret. It would, in fact, have been luxurious, had the Durants cared to give it some thought and attention, and must have been built by or for a star. The library had big French windows overlooking the garden and the empty pool. The overgrown trees around the house made it dark and cool, but it was the books that gave it a certain dusty, mildewed air, rather like that of Miss Havisham’s dining room in
Great Expectations
. I felt a little like Pip, when he returned from London dressed as a gentleman, except that there was no Estella in sight, worse luck.

The Durants’ working arrangements, unlike those of Irving Wallace, seemed jury-rigged and primitive. Will worked in an old wooden armchair covered in ratty-looking rugs, writing in longhand on a pad placed on his knees, with lots of spring clips to hold cards bearing his handwritten notes, lit by a shaded lamp like that of an accountant. His pages were laboriously typed up by Ethel, the Durants’ daughter. All around him were books, piled to the ceiling, covering the floor, even stacked in the fireplace. Ariel worked beside him, on a smaller chair, handing him the quotations and historical references he required.

Affable as ever, he rose and shook my hand. His movement scattered dozens of file cards and slips of paper. Ariel got him seated again, covered his shoulders with a blanket, and put all the cards and slips in order again. He did not thank her. He did not even seem to notice her presence, in fact, his mind, no doubt, fixed on the firm, upward march of progress.

Ariel dragged me out into the garden, clutching my arm. “You see what he’s like!” she hissed.

I nodded sympathetically, though it seemed to me that Will was much the same as ever, caught up in his work to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

“He’s getting worse and worse,” Ariel said. “He pretends to be working just so as not to have to talk to me.”

I murmured calming phrases. If Will had in fact developed a way of shutting himself off from Ariel’s ceaseless rancor and complaining, I thought, he was a lucky man, and a smart one, too. I recognized the
symptoms easily enough. My father had always been stone-deaf to the voices of his wives, though in fact his hearing was acute when there was something he wanted to listen to. He could hear a whisper from across a soundstage if it concerned his work, particularly if it was in Hungarian.

“Perhaps Will should have a hearing aid?” I suggested, though hearing aids, I knew, were no cure for that kind of deafness.

“He won’t have one,” Ariel said lugubriously, in her strange, guttural baritone.

That seemed to me proof of real common sense on Will’s part. Ariel’s grip was rendering my arm numb, but I could think of no polite way to escape from it. “I have to do everything,” Ariel went on. “Whole passages of the book are my work, you know.”

This was news to me. That Ariel busied herself with footnotes and hunting for the exact quotation or fact that Will needed I knew well, if only because Ariel never failed to mention the fact in her letters, which usually ended with the handwritten warning, “Don’t mention any of this to Will!” (Will’s letters often ended with a quick note from Ariel at the bottom, reading, “Pay no attention to what Will has written above.”) But it had never occurred to me, nor to Max Schuster, that Ariel might be doing any of the actual writing.

“I do my share of the work,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s wrong that I don’t get any credit?”

I had no opinion one way or the other, but I knew that publishers had an almost superstitious dread of changing a winning formula. After nearly thirty years of publishing Will Durant’s books, I doubted that Max would be overjoyed at the idea of adding Ariel’s name. It seemed impolitic to suggest this to Ariel, who was still clinging to me fiercely. Indeed, I had the impression that unless I agreed, she might never let go, so I nodded encouragingly until she released her grip.

We were standing in front of a sizable swimming pool, empty and overgrown with weeds. The Durants’ garden, a fairly narrow and pinched space between the house and the wall, had the look of a set for
Rain
, a tropical jungle that threatened to engulf us from every side. One thing that can be said in favor of Los Angeles is that it is usually light and sunny, but here there was a dark closeness like that which so dismayed the Roman troops in the Teuteborg Forest before they were massacred by Arminius’s Germans. I am not normally afraid of plants, but there was something aggressive and claustrophobic about the garden
that made me edge my way gingerly back toward the house, careful to keep my feet on the narrow flagstone path, not that the house itself was very much more cheerful.

All the same, it was with a certain sense of relief that I regained Will’s library—partly because Ariel had gone off to get tea. There was an atmosphere that seemed in some way familiar, like that of my grandparents’ house north of London in the years after the war—a certain overheated stuffiness that I associate with age. I experienced the same depressing and slightly guilty feeling that overcame me on those Sunday afternoons in Hendon—the sense of performing a slightly tedious obligation, coupled with a desperate desire to get away. Just as they had in Hendon, the minutes seemed an hour long, and every time I looked at my watch, I thought it must have stopped. I could not help feeling, too, that my visit gave the Durants as little pleasure as it gave me. I could hear Ariel banging pots and muttering in the kitchen, presumably infuriated because I had said yes when Will asked if I would like a cup of tea—for Ariel was ahead of her time in rejecting all forms of domesticity as unnatural impositions on womankind—while Will, however serene his smile, occasionally glanced surreptitiously at his watch. No doubt I was keeping them from a brisk afternoon spent producing five or six thousand words on the ideas of Hume or Hobbes, followed by a nut burger and a glass of herb tea, then early to bed with Pascal’s
Pensées
.

Will and I sat companionably for a few moments. He had a tendency to go blank from time to time, perhaps as he contemplated the vast stretch of history still left to him to cover, with or without his wife’s help. In the seventh volume of
The Story of Civilization
he had reached the seventeenth century. True, that only left him with three centuries to go, but since he planned to devote a whole volume to the age of Louis XIV, another to Rousseau and the French and American revolutions, and a further one to Napoleon, the work before him must have weighed heavily on his shoulders. I chatted with him about the nineteenth century and suggested it might be called
The Age of Victoria
, but he gave me a kindly smile of reproof and shook his head. He did not think he would live to reach the nineteenth century, he said, but felt it would probably require two volumes: The first might be named after Darwin and the second after Marx or Freud. He was not an admirer of Victoria. But if he reached Napoleon, he would be content. (He did, but only just.)

He wanted to be very frank with me, he said. It was of course a pleasure to see me, but there was a purpose to my being here, a small problem that needed to be dealt with between himself and S&S, which I might be able to raise with Max on my return. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief and fell silent again.

Might the subject be that of joint authorship? I asked, hoping to put him out of his misery, for he was clearly having a great deal of difficulty bringing the subject up himself. A look of immense relief appeared on his face, and he glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where the kettle could be heard whistling. “Ariel talked to you then?” he asked. I wondered what he had supposed we were doing in the garden. “Do you think Max will mind?”

I suspected that Max would hate the idea, but of all people he should understand that Will wasn’t going to stand in the way of whatever Ariel wanted. After all, however scared Will might be of Ariel, it could hardly exceed Max Schuster’s fear of Ray. All the same, it didn’t seem to me that Will was all that happy about the idea himself. He had the look of a man who has given in to overwhelming pressure and was determined to put the best face on it. I guessed that in his own quiet, passive-aggressive way, Will had been resisting this change for a long time.