I never arrive in California without thinking of that era—of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford—and the freedom the West Coast seemed to offer. Now Los Angeles is a sprawling city of impossible traffic, but even in the seventies you could sense what it once had been to the old movie colony coming West. It was a place to reinvent yourself in the desert air. It was the West—land of sunset and dreams. Never mind that the West had represented death to the ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks.
I went to sleep thinking of that era, intoxicated by California as everyone is, at first. The last time I’d been in California was to transport my first husband to the loony bin. I had my father and a shrink in tow. And the time before that, I was with my parents, staying at the Bel-Air on the way to a summer in Japan before I started Barnard. It seems to me now that I was always in California at important crossroads in my life. New York was home. The Coast, like Venice, was an incarnation of
away.
It’s always easier to change your life while
away.
The next day, Julia was to meet me for lunch at the Polo Lounge, but she never showed. She called several times, saying she was late for several different reasons. She didn’t make it to lunch, to tea, to drinks—always with a new excuse. I tried to work on the script but didn’t know where to begin. It was not a bad script, but, like all scripts, it needed work. I tried to reach Julia. Her assistant was evasive and the housekeeper at her beach house spoke no English.
I whiled the day away somehow. Then, at five-thirty or so, Howard Fast called to say he was sending his son, Jonathan, to pick me up.
I often know in an instant the people who are going to change my life.
Jonathan Fast drove under the portico of the Beverly Hills Hotel in a green MG, smiled at me with his toothy smile, and I knew I was going to marry him, have a child with him and live happily ever after. Well—so that part was wrong.
As we drove up through the canyon to his parents’ house on Laurel Way, I stared at his profile and tried to figure out
how
I knew my life was never going to be the same.
We went to the party—a huge gang bang full of radiant movie stars, pale, hunched-over writers and Zen Buddhist disciples of Howard’s.
Howard meditated daily, to little effect. If he sought detachment, he never found it. A more
attached
individual never lived on this fickle planet. He worshipped Zen masters because he was their polar opposite, a man who wanted to shackle everything to himself—his children, his wife, his grandchildren. There never was such a contradictory spirit, a proponent of freedom who practiced slavery on his family, a communist turned capitalist, a practitioner of open marriage who couldn’t let his wife out of his sight. Some of his books are wonderful:
Spartacus, Being Red, The Hessian, The Jews.
I hardly pretend to have read all seventy-five of them. He was an extraordinary historical novelist. I understood Roman crucifixion better after reading
Spartacus
than after reading any book about Jesus, including the New Testament. And Howard was
brave.
Standing up to the House Un-American Activities Committee was valiant in a way we can hardly imagine now. We forget that there were many who believed more in their swimming pools and Rolls-Royces than in free speech—and Howard was definitely not among them. He went to jail. He moved to Mexico when he was blacklisted. He endured the bitterness of his longtime publisher’s telling him, regarding
Spartacus,
“I dare not even open the manuscript because I know it’s brilliant and there’s no way I can publish it and risk having us closed down.” Howard had the guts to publish it himself under the Blue Heron imprint. And when it became a famous book, Howard always said, Kirk Douglas paid as little as possible for the movie rights.
Bette, Howard’s wife, had more than a gift for entertaining, for cooking, for warmth, for making people mingle. She continued to be a working artist when there was no room for two artists in that household. If she did indeed have a torrid affair with Dashiell Hammett, God bless her. I only hope she did—but perhaps Dash was too drunk. (Jon and I found a copy of
The Maltese Falcon
tenderly inscribed to her.) Howard certainly provoked her with his many movie-star adulteries. All this is hindsight. At the time, I thought of Howard as a leftist saint.
Jonathan and I lost each other, then kept trying to find each other in the crowd of actors, producers and writers. I talked to Irving Wallace and his wife, Sylvia, to Howard’s latest blonde squeeze, always looking over my shoulder to see where Jonathan was. After two hours or so, we escaped the party and drove to the top of Mulholland to watch the lights of Los Angeles twinkling in the smog.
We spoke about marriage, whether a true marriage of minds and bodies was possible. It astonishes me to remember this—how quickly we got into the subject of our being together. It was as if we both knew the future—and the future was Molly. Someday, scientists will understand how this works—pheromones?—how a man and woman meet and know instantly that they will have a child together. Anyway, we fell in love ferociously and violently—and went back to the pink adobe palace to plight our troth.
The marriage didn’t last, but we loved each other for a long time, hated each other for a long time and finally made peace when three of our four parents died and our grandson was born. I cannot say that we are best friends, but we are happy to talk and joke and e-mail, to spend holidays together with Molly and her family and to jointly adore Max.
I remember Jon’s ferocious sense of humor when I hear Molly’s acid jokes. And I love him for fathering this amazing woman. Without him I might not have had the courage. The best part of getting older is this: watching the circles get completed and former enemies or lovers join hands again.
Julia didn’t call the next day or the next. I tried to reach her but struck out. Finally, I took my studio-rented car and drove to Pacific Palisades to meet Henry Miller, my pen pal.
Henry had started writing to me a year before. In his first missive, he announced that I had written the female version of
Tropic of Cancer
—so of course I had to read it. When I did, I found it nothing whatever like my novel.
Tropic of Cancer
—like all Henry’s books—was a wild mélange of free association, word cadenzas and philosophical rants, spoken by an antihero who is always looking for the secret of life in the unlikeliest places. Its reputation as dirty book astonished me. It was no dirtier than
Portnoy’s Complaint
or
Couples.
By 1974, literary sex was ubiquitous. Of course, this was partly the doing of Henry Miller, whose books were repatriated to his home country in 1962, thanks to Barney Rosset, his publisher at Grove Press, and other literary pioneers.
What troubled people, I thought, was Miller’s ability to break his head open and show the maggots within. Also, Henry Miller declared himself “the happiest man alive”—and it’s verboten for writers to be happy. We are supposed to be miserable. How dare the happiest man alive presume to be a writer? Didn’t he know the rules? Apparently not. He neither knew nor cared. This insouciance was the ultimate transgression. He was oblivious of the etiquette of literary life. He didn’t care about genre. He thought fiction and autobiography were one and the same. He predicted, in fact, that in the future the lines between genres would disappear—as they have—and he refused to recognize distinctions he thought were stupid. He was hated not so much for his sexual transgressions as for his exuberance. Well, maybe there was a resemblance there after all.
I’ve always thought that the idea of genre was a blot on the soul of literature. Categories like novel, memoir, biography have no value when you’re writing—however much value they may have to librarians or bookstores. A book is a book is a book. I suspect that the idea of genres has silenced more writers than it has liberated. Even the
idea
of a book is daunting, which may be why Jack Kerouac wrote on those endless rolls. Think of the idea of a book and you will immediately think of what’s permitted and what is not permitted. What you want is to write what has not been written before, or why bother? “There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books,” Henry Miller said in
Tropic of Cancer.
And then he proceeded to do so:
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is
...
a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.
I suspect that an author must always feel this way to create anything original.
The novel when new in the eighteenth century was thought to be a low and tawdry form, suitable only for serving maids. Henry Fielding wrote his novels as mock epics in the hopes of elevating them to literature. He convinced himself that his epic trappings would fool his readers into thinking his novels were art. But with Fielding, as with later novelists, it is the story, not the trappings, that matters.
People have been telling each other stories since cave days. Wondering what to call these stories is the least of our problems. We only want them to be entertaining. And illuminating.
I’ve never begun a book without having grave doubts about the form in which I was writing. I thought of
Fear of Flying
as a rant rather than a novel. I always hoped to find a way to tell a story partly in poetry and partly in prose. The closest I came was
Sappho’s Leap,
in which Sappho’s fragments are used as road markers in the plot. I always admired Nabokov for having found a way to tell an entire story in annotations, in his wonderful
Pale Fire.
The urge to reinvent forms is endemic in writers. The novel is endlessly elastic. It can take all sorts of playfulness and switches in perspective and still be a novel. In the last few decades it has merged into the memoir (or the memoir has flowed into it). Poems can be part of a novel. All kinds of digressions can be accommodated as long as they illustrate character and don’t stop the music. All that matters is that the voice be consistent (or intelligently inconsistent) and that the reader wants to turn the page. The reader turning the page is the only sine qua non.
So I drove to Pacific Palisades, parked my car on a shady street and knocked on the door of 444 Ocampo Drive, refusing to obey the admonishment on the front door that encouraged passersby to move on rather than bother the ancient sage within.
Henry didn’t mean it. He loved guests. They kept him alive. I knocked and knocked. When no one answered, I opened the door hesitantly and let myself in.
Twinka Thiebaud heard me. A beautiful redhead in her twenties, the daughter of Wayne Thiebaud, the artist, she knew immediately who I was, embraced me and told me how much she loved
Fear of Flying.
She ushered me into a room with a Ping-Pong table and Henry’s watercolors all over the walls and ran to get Henry.
Several minutes later, he appeared. An old man in a bathrobe and slippers, pushed in a wheelchair by a gorgeous young woman, he immediately began to talk and didn’t stop until exhaustion set in and he had to go back to sleep. He rattled on about Brooklyn, the Village, Paris, Greece—a torrent of words, words, words that turned into rivers, lava flows, mountains, valleys. He took me from his father’s tailor shop in Brooklyn to the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company, from Anaïs Nin’s house in Louveciennes to Clichy to the Villa Seurat to Greek islands cleansed by sunlight. He talked until he could talk no more. Then he loaded me down with gifts—watercolors, books, posters—which he inscribed to me: “To Erica bursting with talent.” Then Twinka took him back to his bedroom in his wheelchair.
Later he would tell me that, in those years, his head was full of the most erotic fantasies, which he could no longer act on. But I knew how alive he was. My most lasting impression was that I had met one of the most exuberant souls who ever landed on Earth.
I think it’s almost impossible for a young person to get into the head of an old person. If we could, the world would never go forward, nor would it change. The old are perhaps younger in mind than we. But their bodies have rebelled against them, and while we still have our eyes, our legs, our ears, we cannot imagine this. We think our material selves will last forever. The old know better. They know that nothing lasts but words, music and color. The rest is just a pile of bones and teeth and a dark spot on the ground.
So two days in Los Angeles and I had met my mentor and the father of my daughter. But not my producer. I had no idea what had become of her.
And so it went. I joined the Fast and Miller families. I did television shows for my book—by now a runaway best-seller in paperback—and I agonized about leaving Allan Jong, which I had known for years I was someday going to do. How could I not do it now? I had been reborn as a Henry Miller protégée.
It’s strange to me that certain times in our lives present a multitude of impossible choices all at once. Only in retrospect do we know that it was all part of some plan. We think we are undecided, but the anxiety of indecision is a smoke screen the gods put before our eyes so we won’t be paralyzed by fear.
Change is terrifying—and necessary. How do we accomplish it despite the terror?
I wish I could say that Henry had the answer, because he writes a lot about life-changing risks taken and survived. But it is really Homer who has the answer. The gods put mists of their own making before our eyes so that we can do what we are meant to do without fear stopping us. The mists can be made of sex, of filial love, of witchcraft. Without them, we would never leave home. Or return.
Julia came back. We had a lunch in which she apologized profusely and then we drove out to Malibu to meet her adorable baby, Kate. We had dinner with the Dunnes, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, who were lovely, but we never did get to work on the screenplay, despite Julia’s promises.