The Adding Machine (7 page)

Menace poses challenge. Man meets challenge. Menace is removed by protagonist. What is
The Great Gatsby
about? Poor boy loves rich girl. He loses rich girl to rich man and meets a violent death trying to turn back the clock and realise ‘the last and greatest of human dreams.’ What is
Lord Jim
about? Honor lost. Honor regained.

Now the third question poses itself. Is it worth doing? Art makes us aware of what we know and don’t know that we know. Our conscious awareness, our ego, has been compared to the tip of the iceberg that appears above water. Fitzgerald shows us more of the iceberg, more of the hidden depths than O’Hara. He is literally a deeper writer. Gatsby touches us in a way that the protagonist of O’Hara’s
Appointment in Sumarra
does not

Some other questions the creative reader can ask are: Does the writer have an ear for dialogue? Many good writers don’t. Fitzgerald’s characters are delineated more by his descriptive prose than by what they say. His dialogue tends to be wooden, with occasional flashes of brilliant insight as when Gatsby says about Daisy’s voice: ‘It’s full of money.’ John O’Hara, a much lesser writer, had a superb ear for dialogue.

Does the writer have a distinctive style? Style, the manner of writing, the choice of one word rather than another, may be so distinctive that you read one sentence and you know who wrote it: ‘The hole in his forehead where the bullet went in was about the size of a pencil. The hole in the back of his head where the bullet came out was big enough to put your fist in if it was a small fist and you wanted to put it there.’ Who else but Papa Hemingway could have penned these lines and challenged Dryden’s hitherto undisputed title to the most atrocious conceit in the English language for his stunning lines on Lord Hasting’s smallpox:

‘In his youth he had considered raising alligators in Florida. But there was no security in the alligators.’ Janey Bowles — who else?

‘I had not ridden since I was ten years old when my horrible little black pony had at last been given away. How I hated it! Once it had broken out of the stable and had galloped through the roses and over the lawns, showing its awful yellow teeth,’ Denton Welch,
Maiden Voyage.

Style can become a limitation and a burden. Hemingway was a prisoner of his style. No one can talk like the characters in Hemingway except the characters in Hemingway. His style in the wildest sense finally killed him. ‘I’d shoot down my own mother,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. If she was a mallard and I could lead her sweet and clean with no. 4 load.’

Papa is explaining to Papa about Hollywood. ‘One can with honor sell one’s soul in Hollywood. Everyone does it here,’ he says. His style was hermetic. No escape for Papa. Mektoub. It was written. Sold his soul for a Safari. For a valorous wildebeest steak after a muscular martini. For the sheer joy of killing a charging rhino. ‘Aye,’ says the wise old hunter puffing on his pipe which he lights from a firebrand, ‘That’s a natural feeling for a man.’

And the quick shot straight from the hip to the shoulder just so long and long enough, almost a snap-shot from my 270 Weatherby that folded the wildebeest at 305 yards, my boy paced it, the meat sweet and clean. If your wildebeest runs even three yards after the hit the glandular juices of stress spoil the meat The
meat
stinks of fear and death. The guests start back from the barbecue pit appalled.

This was a fearless kill it would yield up brave steaks. And this was a joy too but a different joy, steadier, quieter, the joy of a craftsman in his trade. Joy that leaves a man fresh inside like the smell of salt spray and the smell of valor in the bull ring...

‘S’Death what stuff’s here?’

The
Snows of Kilimanjaro
was certainly the best if not the only writing Hemingway ever did. It is one of the best stories in the language about death, the
stink
of death. You know the writer has been there and brought it back. The end deserves a place among the great passages of English prose, with the end of Joyce’s
The Dead
and the end of
The Great Gatsby.
The pilot was pointing: ‘White white white as far as the eye could see ahead, the snows of Kilimanjaro.’ And a blinding flash of white must have been the last thing Papa saw when he put the double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun against his forehead and tripped both triggers.

So Papa sold death to Hollywood when he let them tack a happy ending onto their dreadful movie of
The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
Instead of the phantom messenger of death who appears at the end of the story, a real live shitting pilot from Hollywood arrives with penicillin —just the thing for a writer’s gangrene. And Papa sat and watched this butchery and signed his name to it.

‘Look, they’re gone!’ says wifey pointing to where the vultures had been roosting. Yes even the vultures have flapped away in disgust from that sell out.

On a sell-out you have to think in terms of
properties
. I mean he sells
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
which is gilt-edged stuff for
The Green Hills of Africa.
Was
The Green Hills
even worth doing? No. For all that hunting and loading shit I’d rather read
Field
and Stream
and
The American Rifleman.
But the real tragedy is that
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
could have been a great film about Death. Hemingway could smell death on others. Here he is in a jeep with General Lanham, known as Bucky to his friends, and Ernie was a real general lover. It’s worse than being a cop lover.

‘Have to relieve that man,’ says Bucky.

‘Bucky,’ says Ernie, ‘You won’t have to relieve him. He won’t make it. He stinks of death.’

When the jeep reached Regimental Command Post it was stopped by Lieutenant Colonel John Ruggles.

‘General...’ said Ruggles saluting. ‘The Major has just been killed. Who takes the First Battalion?’

And there is a great description in
Farewell to Arms
of the feeling you get when leaving the body at death. He has an opportunity to do a film about his
specialty
the thing he
does
best
as a writer. And he throws it away for an expensive hunting trip. So the writer doesn’t die after all. He will go back to America and hole up in a cabin he knows about in Minnesota and write the great American novel. His gear is packed. The jeep will come at dawn. The sun is setting. The wise old hunter lights his pipe and points with the burning firebrand to the white dome of Kilimanjaro.

‘Don’t ever sell your dream, son.’ The old hunter waves to the jeep. ‘You see he had learned that life is more important than death. He had learned to live humbly for something he believed in. I guess it was just making his own dream real for a lot of people. You see Ernie wanted to
give,
he wanted to give from the heart with every word he wrote.’

He’s gonna pay death off with a load of corn, or so he thinks.

Who wrote that? I mean Death was Ernie’s inspiration. When Death walked out on him in Hollywood he took Ernie’s inspiration with him. ‘It doesn’t come anymore,’ he groans. You have to respect him for the courage to blow his brains out like that, don’t care what you say about the higher courage of living, it takes guts to do that. Makes me feel queasy just to think about it He certainly died in style.

‘I reckon you could have put your foot in the back of his head where the two barrels of heavy duck load splattered out even if it was a medium-sized foot and you didn’t want to put it there.’

Old Lady: It must be very dangerous to be a writer.

Papa: It is Madam, and few survive it.

Does the book contain memorable passages? I first read Denton Welch in 1948. I re-read
Maiden Voyage
thirty years later and found that I had virtually memorized passages from the book. I have already quoted an example concerning his ‘horrible little black pony, its awful yellow teeth.’

And here is the end of
The Great Gatsby:
‘He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter, tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further and one fine morning... So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’.

This passage stays with the reader and becomes part of his inner landscape ‘commensurate with his capacity for wonder.’

And the characters? Can you see them? So long as there are readers Gatsby will look across his blue lawn to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. But I can’t see the protagonist of
Appointment in Samarra.
I can’t remember his name. He is as real and as quickly forgotten as today’s newspaper: Elderly Woman Dies in Fire. Death was attributed to smoke inhalation. Why should this elderly woman thrust her death upon one? I doubt if she even made a good-looking corpse.

Does the writer play fair with the reader? There are rules to this game between reader and writer. Two books are on the list simply to illustrate the violation of the rules.

The Critical Threshold
by Brian Stableford. Colonists stranded on a distant planet undergo an alteration through contact with a powerful hallucinogenic substance given off by mating butterflies. The change leaves them devoid of language and so altered that the human rescue party inspires in them horrors and something akin to nausea. A very interesting idea, but the writer couldn’t follow through. We never find out what this wondrous change consists of. We are led to expect something that is not forthcoming.

In
The Great Sun Flower
by Clifford Stone, the protagonist has a
strange
experience in Nice. He won’t talk about it. So this
experience
which leads to his madness and suicide by hanging is never revealed to the reader. It’s like a who-done-it where you don’t find out who done it or a monster movie where you never get to see the monster. It’s just the old ‘Nothing will ever bring me to reveal what I saw in that infamous crypt...’ (where the inventiveness of the writer lies buried).

What about the title? Does it arouse your interest? Does it evoke a picture in your mind? A good title can sell a mediocre book, a bad title can sink a good book.
The Biological Time Bomb
is a much more informative book than
Future Shock. Future Shock
became a best seller on the title, while
The
Biological Time Bomb
sank into oblivion. There were two hundred suggested titles for
Jaws.

Devise alternative endings: Happy endings like Papa used to make. Gatsby marries Daisy and here they are twenty years later living in the south of France a dreary empty snobbish couple. Daisy has become a secret drunk.

‘Looking for this, Daisy?’ He holds up a bottle of gin. Quarrelling, angling for invitations to the Duchess’s party.

Lord Jim lives on to become a living legend written up in all the Sunday Supplements, living in a 19th-century set that could fold tomorrow. Jim points sadly to graffiti scrawled on the wall of his compound:
Honky Honk Home.
He should be gone with the wild geese in the sick smell of morning. Often an early death is the kindest gift a writer can bestow on a beloved character, and Gatsby and Lord Jim both shimmer and glow from the love bestowed upon them by their creators.

You can move character and story to another time and place, always looking for the right slot where it can fit. Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
becomes
Apocalypse Now.
In the early days of the Vietnam conflict CIA agents set up their Ops in remote outposts, requisitioned private armies, overawed the superstitious natives and achieved the status of white Gods. So the context of 19th-century colonialism was briefly duplicated. That is what writing is about: time travel. So I drafted Denton Welch to be the protagonist of a 19th-century western on which I was then working.
^*

In this novel Kim Carson is hiding out in a remote mountain valley with nothing to occupy his mind except an anthology of poetry, leather-bound with gilt edges and this leads us to an exercise I call
intersection reading.
Just where and under what circumstances did you read? What were you reading when the phone rang or some other interruption occurred? Note the exact place in your reading where this occurred. The point at which your stream of consciousness — and when you read of course you are simply borrowing the writer’s stream of it, being bored by your own, if indeed you
have
one, isn’t it all just bits and pieces, shreds and patches? Constantly being cut by
seemingly
random factors which on examination turn out to be highly significant and appropriate. For example, I am walking down a New York Street, Elizabeth Street come to think of it, just turned off Houston past The Volunteers of America. I am thinking about New Mexico and I look up and there is a New Mexico license plate. Land of Enchantment. So note and write down in the margin actual interruptions, which may be frequent if you are riding on a subway. I admire the intrepid breed of subway readers; perhaps they are quite literally escaping into their books. I have never heard of a reader being attacked. Why only yesterday a black youth was occupying a double seat with such truculent insolence that no one, myself included, dared to demand our squatters rights, but a young man with a large book on mathematics, he was very technical, made the sullen youth move his briefcase and set right to work on his formulae. So choose the subway for really
adventurous
intersections, but waiting rooms and airports are also rich motherlodes. You can just sit there and attract incidents like a blue serge suit attracts lint.

And trains are the best because you’re perfectly safe and some oaf won’t suddenly confront you with a bestial snarl: ‘Who are you reading at?’