Burning the Days (47 page)

——

I love Nabokov interviews,
Ben Sonnenberg wrote.
May I see it before it appears?

I knew him only from correspondence. I had just come back from Montreux and meeting with Nabokov.
I recently read twenty-two of them before falling asleep,
Sonnenberg went on.
They are all in
Strong Opinions.
In my dreams that night, he was persecuting me with his high opinion of
Ulysses,
which I do not share. He scoffed at my liking Cervantes and Genet. Fortunately, before I woke up we found a common ground in the movies of Max Linder.

He had read ten books by Nabokov that year, he said, including
Lolita,
which he had reread and which was still his favorite. The letter was dandyish but I was reassured by the straightforward choice.

We were in touch because of the theater. He had a job reading plays for Lincoln Center and had written to me about one I had submitted that he unsuccessfully championed. We finally met for dinner in a restaurant on Division Street in Chinatown. I arrived a little late to find him in a small room with bare tables, four bottles of Japanese beer in front of him, waiting. He wore a flowing bow tie and his hat, overcoat, scarf, and—I had not seen one for years—cane were hanging near the door.

“Do you know Fukienese cooking?” he asked. His voice was clear and soft with a faint whiff of England. “Permit me to order for you. It’s not so spicy as Szechuan but more distinguished than Cantonese.”

After discussing it with a waiter, whose name he knew, he ordered soup, pork chops, and sea bass. I liked his epicurean nonchalance and the intelligence in his voice. Both of his eyes had a slight cast so that he never seemed to be truly looking at you. They were dark, possessing eyes. His formal education, it turned out, had ended in prep school. The life that followed was devoted to women and art.

We talked about his marriages; he discussed them as one might discuss ships. Somehow, in listening to the recounting, I was filled with a sense of strength. It was of Ford Madox Ford I was reminded, the sleek Ford, in the sense of being properly nourished, who all his life remembered the words of an uncle, told to him while strolling through the fields: Always help a lame dog over a stile.

Sonnenberg’s father was well known. He was one of the early lords of publicity and image-making, an art collector and a man whose every outward appearance, including a great moustache, was proof of success. The family house was a mansion on the south side of Gramercy Park, where extravagant dinners were given and the guest list was thick with famous names.

Formed by all this and at the same time contemptuous of it, the son made rebellion his guiding principle. Like a Regency sport he took pride in distressing his family, his father in particular. What redeemed him was the high level of squandering. The evil companions were books.

That first night, on the street, he handed me a stack he was carrying while he went to use a rest room. I looked through them. Some plays, a book on Elizabethan drama, a novel of Naipaul’s, the Sunday
Observer.
While I waited I read four or five pages of the novel, my first taste of Naipaul.

Sonnenberg was a prodigious reader and had a powerful memory. These qualities later served him well as an editor when he founded, with inherited money when his father died, a literary quarterly,
Grand Street,
and ran it for ten years until illness and exhaustion of funds forced its sale. It was the chief work of his life.

His most noticeable trait apart from taste was a polite but remorseless candor. He could be counted on to speak his view in few words. I recall, among other things, his dealings with a manipulative and troublesome writer, Harold Brodkey. For the first issue of
Grand Street,
Brodkey had submitted a very long story, which Sonnenberg didn’t like, tactfully suggesting that perhaps ten pages of
it could be published. Brodkey, indignant, refused and in its place offered a poem, which Sonnenberg rejected with a note he later was sorry he’d sent, to the effect that he liked the poem rather less than the story.

Over the years, as the magazine flourished, there were some infrequent letters exchanged between the two, as well as an occasional encounter at a party. Finally a letter came from Brodkey in which he proposed, for whatever reasons, that they might resume their friendship. Sonnenberg wrote back civilly that he preferred not to, he didn’t want to be in a state of watchful cordiality, he said.

The play of mine that originally brought us together eventually had a staging in an avant-garde theater converted from a church. The director was a bantam of a man with bold Celtic charm. John Beary was his name. His father had trained horses for Aly Khan, who in fact was Beary’s godfather, recalled as strolling through sunflecked mornings near the track,
My Old Man
mornings, in casual clothes, the kind one carries wood in, Levi’s and a worn sport-coat.

Beary was passionate, articulate, and somehow lonely, though he was married. Domesticity he described as “the other life—the child, home, all of that.” He meant it in contrast to life in the theater, art. I remember his stories which were the true pay for the years he had spent, his great love affair once with a leading actress. The night she played at the Abbey. The affair had passed its zenith, and at the reception she was with another man, a pathetic figure, someone to be detested, Beary said. They were bickering and suddenly she tired of it and left.

Beary followed her to her room. In the darkness she said only, “Well, then. You’ve come,” and heartened, he lay down beside her. In the midst of things the door flew open and in came the rival, his arms filled with bottles from the reception. He was drunk.

“Why don’t we have a drink?” he cried, standing there.

“Why don’t you throw that stuff right out the window?” Beary, sitting up, growled.

There was a pause and the man went to the window, pushed it open, and the bottles crashed in the street. Within minutes the hall porter was up, banging on the door. He threw them all out.

The theater is unto itself, artificial and grand, trailing a magnificent pedigree like a fur coat behind it on the ground, extravagance, pretension, little biting lives. Tyranny abounds. Beary, himself, was arbitrary in many of his actions, probably because he so rarely had the chance to be. One actress he chose on the spot, the audition having lasted less than a minute. “The role is yours,” he said grandly. I suspected it was because of her good looks. He was sure she could act.

The play, “the best thing you’ve ever done,” as I was told, was too ambitious, with some startling moments but weak in structure. It was called
The Death Star
and focused on the vain belief that the death of a legendary military figure, a repentant one, could still the human urge for war. Those days will return, it said, the chaos.

There were more than thirty roles, played by twenty actors, some talented, and Beary, in a state of nerves, alternately praised and nipped at them through the rehearsals. The stage manager, a cooperative girl, he had in tears. She seemed to thrive on it. Plainly, he knew more than I.

The evening of the first performance arrived. From the lighting booth I could see faces I knew pass below. In the crowded dressing room there was excitement. One of the actors, I noticed, a strange man with a hyphenated name, seemed almost drunk. Playwrights, I knew, often were. I drank nothing, however. It was too late for anything except resignation. I was fearful and attempting to be calm.

From the earliest moments, when the curtain was raised, I saw it was wrong. The mood in the theater is something one can feel
like heat or cold. Everything that had gone before, the preparation, the belief, was suddenly of no importance—the play was like a ship put to sea; whatever mattered before did not matter now. Before the indifference of the audience, the many people seated and silent, the whole enterprise was transparent, as if x-rayed. My stomach was turning over. I was in literal pain. There was a moment at last when the play came to life, the attention rose to meet it, there was a swell, like being brought up by a wave. A powerful speech—Kevin McCarthy delivered it—closed the act.

I lay on the floor in a small upstairs room, alone in the dark, for fifteen minutes.

The second act was better. McCarthy, in his closing lines, was chilling, a glimpse of what might have been. The play had an epilogue. As it was being read, a lone remorseful figure appeared behind the speaker, head down, ashamed. It was the drunken actor.

I was too embarrassed to be seen afterwards. Finally I went down the back stairs. I was greeted by enthusiasm and beaming faces. They had loved it, the power, “I’d buy a ticket anytime.” I did not believe them. I was more inclined towards the comment of a friend that he had liked it better when he had read it. The two scouts from the Public Theater had left during intermission, along with a couple of black whores who had wandered in from the street, probably for warmth, and then sat bored. They were the hard-hearted audience I coveted.

Sonnenberg telephoned the next morning. “Well, how does it feel to be famous?” he asked. “All the actresses calling?”

“Not really.”

“How did you feel about the play?”

I said I thought it wasn’t too bad. How did he like it?

“I didn’t like it,” he said simply, “not at all. All the directorial choices were wrong, casting, staging, everything. It was much too slow and certain actors”—he named the girl Beary had instantly picked—“were hopeless.”

——

Sonnenberg’s illness, which proved terrible beyond description, had first showed itself in the most trivial way: the toe of a shoe caught for an instant in a sidewalk crack. I did not see that, but I watched the cane slowly become more than an item of dress and then change to two canes as their owner struggled to emerge from a taxi and shuffled slowly towards the door of a restaurant. Inside he fell across one of the tables. A waiter and people sitting nearby tried to help him to his feet but he grimly declined.

“Is it a matter of balance?” I asked when we had sat down.

“Yes, largely.”

“Do you have feeling down there?”

“Yes. It’s just that the nerves won’t control,” he said calmly.

It was multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacked the nerve sheathings. It progressed relentlessly. He lost the use of his hands. At the bottom of typed letters was a scrawl—he could barely sign his name. The pleasure of food was gone, so much of it had to do with the satisfaction of cutting, the holding of utensils, and so forth. He mentioned this at dinner at his apartment—more and more rarely did he go out—and, as if to prove it, spilled a glass of water over himself when he tried to drink. Pieces of food had fallen around his plate, dropped from dead fingers.

He appeared not to notice. His calm behavior, his lack of complaint, were a kind of scorn. He was proud of the torment, as if it were part of the price of the expensive clothes, the girls he had known, the exotic names. Stupidity and death must not alarm you, he seemed to say. The illness was a mark of superiority like his faint, forbearing smile. The useless fingers, the disobedient limbs, were a sign of aristocracy. We who did not have them were inferior.

Year by year it grew worse. The New Year’s birthday parties were abandoned. The magazine, in which I had been published a number of times, was gone. He was reduced to the inexhaustible, the
life of the mind, but without relief. Memories, yes, but from the rest he was removed except as people came to tell him of it, the city that lay all around in dawn and darkness, the traffic floating at night on the streets below, the crowds, the avenues and shops, women with their daughters in department stores, long elegant noses, tumbling hair, the floor of cosmetic booths with scores of salesgirls, cheeks smoothed with color, white smocks, bright mouths, beckoning, counseling, smiling. He had known all this in the days when, as someone said, the life of reason was not in itself sufficient. Now he had stoicism, essential but useless. I think of the plea of Sonnenberg’s father when he was ill and dying, which echoed something my own father had said near the end. “If you have a son,” the old man said, “teach him to shoot.”

——

It is the evenings one remembers, the end of the day, dinners in the Fifties, dinners downtown.

Dinners with Fox, beyond counting. He lived on the south side of the park in a luxurious building that had originally been painters’ studios. His apartment was lofty with a curved, white balcony above the main room and bookcases everywhere. He was the ultimate New Yorker. In the city he invariably wore a suit. He had worked first for Alfred Knopf, the legendary publisher, and was related by marriage to the Canfields and Burdens. His best friends, in all likelihood, were women, to whom he attached himself with little difficulty.

Dinners with him at Caravelle, Remi, Petite Marmite, smoked salmon in slender coral sheets, lamb, expensive Pauillac. Dinners at a hotel in the country, a table in the bar. Winter night, black as ice. The warmth of the room, a fire burning. The Japanese woman hostess, the bartender in vest and white shirtsleeves. Mussels
à la barque.
Bacala. Women taking off their coats at the door and being shown with their escorts to tables.

The fragrant smoke rose from his after-dinner cigarette. He told of famous parties, the one of George Weidenfeld’s in London. The invitation in beautiful calligraphy said
Exotic dress.
Weidenfeld himself came as a pasha. There were three orchestras, one of them on the stairs, and the most beautiful women Fox had ever seen. Couples would disappear into the garden or splendid upper floors and return after long intervals. There was that English phenomenon, an upper-class wanton who, though dropped from the guest list, came anyway. As an act of disdain she pleasured nine of the guests, one after another, in a bedroom. Marie Antoinettes and Japanese samurai lay collapsed on the sofas at dawn.

Through him one met many writers. He was like an old courtier who understood and could arrange almost anything. His nostrils were large, sometimes with hair in them. He hadn’t gone to his twenty-fifth reunion at Harvard, he told me. He’d looked over the list very carefully. There were fifteen hundred names, only forty he knew, twenty-five of whom he didn’t want to see again, ten, for a few minutes, and only five he liked. The figures were probably inaccurate but they were stamped with his self-confidence; his ancestors preceded Benjamin Franklin. One of them contemptuously shook Andrew Jackson’s hand with his own wrapped in his coattail. At Random House his position was secure. He was not one of the razors. He was protected by his ability and by not having an ambition to run things.