Burning the Days (44 page)

When we finished lunch he insisted on seeing me to the door. We walked down the five flights and in the entrance said goodbye. He had been a lieutenant colonel at twenty-four, in France. They had wanted him to stay in, but he decided not to. I would understand the reason, he said. “There was no one to talk to.”

In the street I jotted down the name of the book,
Disenchantment,
by C. E. Montague.

He died a few months later, on Bastille Day, as it happened. I was in France at the time and felt a shock as I read it in the paper. In the obituary there was something I had forgotten or never knew: He had the DSC.

——

In a black shirt and Texas tie with a beaded steer’s-head holding it, John Masters appeared. It was in the country, New City, on South Mountain Road. He was tall and stern of appearance as befitted a former English officer. High on his cheeks were clumps of long, untrimmed hair, a mark of caste. “Bugger tufts,” he explained without elaboration. He had served in the British Indian Army. Eventually, in a history of the war in the Pacific, I came across an account he had written of a battle in Burma, his battalion in defense of a hill in the jungle against overwhelming Japanese attacks, an episode, like many others, of which I never heard him speak. They were part, perhaps, of his authority. It was to his
house one would hurry in case of grave danger. He would know without hesitation what to do.

There was a night we had invited people to see a film never shown in theaters but nonetheless legendary, the hymn that Leni Riefenstahl had created of the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934. It opened with Wagner, and a Junkers transport flying through ethereal clouds, bringing the German leader to the ancient city. Masters and his wife arrived late. They were standing in the doorway as Hitler was seen, deep in his thoughts, looking out one of the aircraft windows. “I don’t think I want to watch this,” Masters said, and with his wife he turned and walked out.

Behind his best-selling books,
Bhowani Junction
and
Nightrunners of Bengal,
there was the organization of a military campaign. On large index cards were written detailed descriptions of his characters—date of birth, schooling, color of hair and eyes. On larger paper the chronology of events was laid out. He had studied the business of writing in a very methodical way. He had worked out firm principles. Never lose focus or take the spotlight from where it belongs, he told me. If a main character is a woman, say, and she is going up in an elevator, don’t begin to describe the elevator operator. That would loosen the grip.

My own methods seemed negligent when I listened to his. Their failure might be predicted. On the other hand, I was not trying to write
Bhowani Junction.
I had the rapturous dreams of an opium addict, intense but inexpressible. I wanted—someone in Rome supplied the words for me a few years later—to achieve the
assoluta.

I was still thinking in this immodest way when I met, entirely by chance—it turned out he lived in an apartment next door to one I was using in the city—a writer who I at first felt was traveling, though in a different manner, a similar path. He lived alone, with a small dog, in a long, darkened room pricked with white lights, pinpoint lights, strung along the bookshelves. There were expensive art books piled on the tables—he would go to Scribner’s on
Fifth Avenue and buy them whenever he happened to have some money—and high on the wall three or four large framed photographs such as one might see of movie stars except these were of a woman’s gleaming black
chose,
as Pepys liked to call it, her furnace, as if what lay beneath the satin evening gowns and soft skirts of
Vogue
were made bare.

His name was Davis Grubb. He had written a book called
Night of the Hunter.
One of the first things he asked me was whether I had read an article—an entire issue of
The Nation,
I think it was, had been devoted to it—denouncing J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. I had to read it, he said in a low voice. The FBI had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Surely I knew there had been a conspiracy? Had I read Mark Lane, who provided proof? No, but I had seen him on television.

“When?” he asked.

“Oh, a couple of months ago. It wasn’t here. It was in Toulouse.”

“Toulouse.”

“You know. In France.”

“I know. I was there last night,” he said. There was the stare of a man willing to be thought mad.

His dog, a Lhasa Apso, may have been named Laddie. They often went together, late at night, to Clarke’s, a bar where Grubb drank with men who were unquestionably off-duty policemen. How did he know they were? I asked. “White socks,” he said. I could see the dog sitting patiently near his feet, Grubb, the drunken father, careless but loved.

It was said that he was an addict. Looking back, it makes sense, the nocturnal habits, the surreal remarks, the continual need for money. One morning he asked me to help him carry a suitcase filled with remaindered copies of his book. He was going to try to sell them to a store a block or two away—did I think he could get a dollar apiece for them? I did not give an opinion. The store was not even a bookstore.

I believe he was lonely. I never saw visitors. I saw him in the hallway, poorly dressed, locking the door to his apartment. He was in desperate shape, he told me. He needed money for the rent, otherwise he would be evicted. I had thirty dollars and gave him twenty; he thanked me with some embarrassment. We walked out together, down Park Avenue, then over to Madison. There was a luxurious restaurant on the corner.

“Do you have time for lunch?” he asked casually.

“Lunch? Not here,” I said.

“Another time, then,” he replied, adding that he thought he’d go in for a bite. I watched in disbelief as he passed through the doors of shining glass.

It was his final image, though I saw something that made me think again of him once in England: a footpath across wide fields and on it, gray-haired, alone, with a staff in his hand and a pack on his back, a man walked, a soiled dog trotting behind him. The years were gone and all possessions. The villages did not know him, nor would he ever be known. He had only what was crazed and unbroken inside him, and he would be well as long as his dog was alive.

——

Of those years, the 1960s, I remember the intensity of family life, its boundlessness. It was an art of its own—costume parties; daring voyages in an old sailboat, a leaky Comet, far out on the river; dogs; dinners; poker on Christmas night; ice skating. We were in a world of families, all young, unscarred: the beautiful Dutch girl and her husband; the painter and his wife who unexpectedly opened a restaurant on the highway, named for one of his heroes, del Piombo; the psychiatrist and his wife who were our first close friends. It was all an innocent roundelay, a party of touching originality being carried on in the midst of real-estate transactions and countryside that was slowly falling, field by field, to builders.

We lived, for the most part, in a half-converted barn near New City, about thirty miles from New York. Of all the houses this remains the clearest—the cozy room that was made into a study just off the front door, the long bright bathroom with a row of windows above the sink looking down on trees and a shed that served as garage, the stone fireplace, the rough wood floors, the huge kitchen. There was a terrace of large squares of slate that had once served as sidewalk in Nyack, and in back, through woods, was a stream. Still farther one came to a long, slanted field planted each year with tomatoes, the mere gleaning of which was a harvest. Fingernails black with earth we brought basketfuls back to the house in the fall.

Not far away, on South Mountain Road, was the aristocracy. The early artists had settled there, and Maxwell Anderson, the playwright, had owned a house designed by Henry Varnum Poor. Of the latter I knew only that his name was attached to certain structures like a particle. The one I was most familiar with had blue walls and rooms of inherited art, Bonnards and Utrillos, Vuillards, and Cézannes. “Callas just left,” they might have said.

The seasons passed in majesty: summer’s inescapable heat, the storms of winter, the leaves of autumn which in a single night fell from the elms along the road. A few days later I drove through. In the great arcade a wave of yellow leaves was rising, driven into the air again by wind, as far as one could see. It was, unknown to me, a foretelling of what was to come, the time still far off when the beautiful debris would rise again and I would write about those days.

——

The famous figures, writers who taught at universities and were nominated for awards, were still lofty to me and remote from the path I was beating between country and town, diurnal in, nocturnal out, listening to the car radio and watching the black, familiar road unreel before me.

I had written a third book, some of it during a summer in Colorado, some in the Village, fragments of it scribbled on the empty passenger seat while driving to one place or another reciting to myself, rehearsing. It was not a maiden book. It was the book born in France in 1961 and 1962. Not a word of it had been read by anyone. I had a letter from Paula written at the time that urged,
the important thing, and I go back to what we used to talk about when we were twenty-one and twenty-two, is to do the things you believe you can do, and want to do and will do.

It was my ambition to write something—I had stumbled across the words—
lúbrica y pura,
licentious yet pure, an immaculate book filled with images of an unchaste world more desirable than our own, a book that would cling to one and could not be brushed away. During its writing I felt great assurance. Everything came out as I imagined. The title was partly ironic,
A Sport and a Pastime,
a phrase from the Koran that expressed what the life of this world was meant to be as against the greater life to come.

I was at the time under the spell of books which were brief but every page of which was exalted, Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
or
As I Lay Dying.
This sort of book, like those of Flannery O’Connor, Marguerite Duras, Camus, remains my favorite. It is like the middle distances for a runner. The pace is unforgiving and must be kept up to the end. The Finns were once renowned for running these distances and the quality that was demanded was
sisu,
courage and endurance. For me the shorter novels show it best.

This almost perfect, so I believed, book was turned down by my publisher out of hand. Other publishers followed suit. The book was repetitive. Its characters were unsympathetic. Perhaps I was mistaken and in isolation had lost my bearings or failed to draw the line, emerging as a kind of hermit with skewed ideas. At last the manuscript was brought to the attention of George Plimpton, the editor of
The Paris Review,
which had a small publishing capability, and he at once agreed to take it.

That year, in the autumn evening I hurried towards corner newsstands, their light spilling on stacks of papers, to pick up the just arrived issue of
The New Yorker,
which was running, in four long parts, the entire book that turned its author, Truman Capote, from a kind of pet into a blazing celebrity.

In Cold Blood
filled me with envy for its exceptional clarity and power, and my admiration was all the greater since I remembered the original chilling article in the
Times,
the prosperous farm family brutally executed in their own home in safe Kansas. I had even cut it out of the paper, it seemed so monstrous and foretelling. Capote, to his great credit, had done more. In a terrific gamble he had set out, flagrantly daring and astute, with nothing besides his talent and a notebook, to lay bare every facet of the crime he could discover. It was a gamble because the case might never be solved and all his time and energy might be wasted. As it was, the murderers were for a long time uncaught.

Blood, sex, war, and names—the same bouquet goes for the
Iliad
and the front page.
In Cold Blood
was somewhere between the two, an enormous success. Capote soared to the heights. He was clever, his tongue wickedly sharp. He had already swooped through the bright lights developing the diva persona that was to prove irresistible, and now there was money, too.

That November he gave a great party, a masked ball, at the Plaza. The guests, in the hundreds—the list of those invited had been kept secret—were a certain cream. Many came from prearranged dinners all over town, movie stars, artists, songwriters, tycoons, Princess Pignatelli, John O’Hara, Averell Harriman, political insiders, queens of fashion, women in white gowns, men in dinner jackets. They were going up the carpeted steps of the hotel entrance, great languid flags overhead, limousines in dark ranks. The path of glory: satin gowns raised a few inches as they went up on silvery heels. Stunning women, bare shoulders, the rapt crowd.

They woke, these people, above a park immense and calm in the morning, the reservoir a mirror, the buildings to the east in shadow with the sun behind them, the rivers shining, the bridges lightly sketched. There were no curtains. This high up there was no one to see in.

In the small convertible I had bought in Rome I was driving past that night and for a few moments saw it. I knew neither the guests nor the host. I had the elation of not being part of it, of scorning it, on my way like a fox to another sort of life. There came to me something a nurse had once told me, that at Pearl Harbor casualties had been brought in wearing tuxedos, it was Saturday night on Oahu, it was Sunday. The dancing at the clubs was over. The dawn of the war.

In the darkness the soft hum of the tires on the empty road was like a cooling hand. The city had sunk to mere glowing sky. My own book was not yet published, but would be. It had no dimensions, no limit to the heights it might reach. It was deep in my pocket, like an inheritance.

——

At the very end of 1969,
A Sport and a Pastime
having been published with sales of a few thousand copies, I received a fan letter, long, intelligent, and admiring with, although I was unaware of it until afterwards, the title of one of the writer’s own books woven secretly into a line.
I would like to ply you with questions,
it read.
Sincerely, Robert Phelps.