by Gore Vidal
“Actually, I’ve lost four pounds. I play squash three times a week,” he added, defensively.
“Of course Petesie does.”
While Aeneas made them a drink, Rosalind showed Peter his room, which looked out on a windowless cement wall. Well, this was the New York of the intellectuals and Peter must get to know it since he had finally raised enough money for The American Idea to increase its coverage of the arts. Although Peter had thought of Aeneas as a philosopher with a polemical bent, he was now discovering that that diligent sleuth, who had pretty much solved the Pearl Harbor mystery, was addicted to poetry; Aeneas had published his master’s dissertation on Pope’s Dunciad; he was now excited by a young poet, Robert Lowell, whose collection Lord Weary’s Castle was far too Roman Catholic for Peter’s taste. Aeneas was reviewing it at length in the magazine, thus launching the new arts section.
“It would be a lot easier to publish out of New York,” said Aeneas, not for the first time. In the next room Rosalind was now tending to Master Duncan, with many a coo and hoot from overbonded mother and child.
“We can’t. Every America idea is political. That means Washington.”
“Lowell … political?” Aeneas shook his head.
“A young Boston Puritan from that solemn clan becomes a conscientious objector in the war and then turns Roman Catholic. What could be more political? More weirdly American?”
“What a Marxist critic you would have made!” Aeneas chuckled and coughed on cigarette smoke. “Speaking of Marxists, there’s one who wants to meet you. He’s a fan of the magazine. Lives at the Chelsea Hotel. Stays up all night in nightclubs. Writes songs. Been married but there is always a young man around.”
“I have heard of the love that dares not whisper its name. Mother says it’s more of a New York sort of thing than a Washington one.”
“Mother’s not just, as we used to say in the Army, beating her gums.” Aeneas blew smoke at a Léger poster set in a somber bookcase crowded with review copies of recent novels and books of poetry. Peter saw to it that history and politics were sent to the Union Trust Building office, already too small for their increased circulation.
Peter had never before seen the Chelsea Hotel, an old building that had once given shelter to Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe. A suspicious man at a desk in one corner of the lobby shouted, “Where you going?” Aeneas told him. The man barked a number as they entered what looked to be one of the first elevators in the city: a wire cage with a scarred wood floor, precariously set within a vast dark staircase that filled the center of the building.
“Grim,” said Peter.
“There are those who love it.”
At the end of a long corridor, Aeneas knocked on a door, which opened to the sound of an entire orchestra reverberating off high-ceilinged rooms. The voice of Paul Robeson was thundering the plangent question “Who am I?” then answering himself, in thunder:
“America!”
“Come in,” said John Latouche, a short barrel-chested, barrel-stomached man with a large head, bushy dark hair, bright blue eyes. “No one’s here yet. Except Paul Robeson. He often drops by to sing for me: it’s the acoustics in the Chelsea, he says. Better than the Ear of Dionysos in Syracuse, the one in Sicily not New York. I’ve never been to Sicily. But I know upstate New York like the back of my hand. Utica in the spring is why there were all those bloody footprints in the snow at Valley Forge. Why we fought!” During this, Latouche switched off Paul Robeson, who was currently inhabiting an old scratched record.
Latouche shouted, “Don!” A lanky young man came in from a bedroom that looked as if a tornado had been rehearsing among the bedclothes. “This is Don. He’s a poet from St. John’s College in Maryland. Currently, he’s my secretary. He also drives a taxi, for the sheer adventure of meeting exciting people outside his usual ken.”
“We’ve got whiskey or rum,” said Don. Peter and Aeneas asked for whiskey. Don went to the bar, which was a large tray uneasily balanced on the back of a life-size llama made out of innumerable bits of coiled plaster of Paris. “I call this,” said Latouche, “my llama in sheep’s clothing. The sculptor does only one work every five years. Like clockwork. He rolls what he calls his worms of plaster of Paris with his own hands and then, slowly, builds up his figures. This llama took him most of the thirties to complete. As you can see, very prewar in feeling. Better than Brancusi. For me, he is the Donatello of Macon, Georgia.”
Peter found the room somewhat hard to take in. There were posters advertising musical comedies and ballets. Apparently, Latouche had written a film called Cabin in the Sky. A piano covered with sheet music was set in an alcove. Books were piled everywhere. He had the latest of everything, including every issue of The American Idea.
“I read your paper from start to finish. It’s perfect for the toilet if you have colitis which I do and so plenty of time to concentrate. Do you really think that the old gentleman who was for Taft was killed in Philadelphia?”
“You do read everything!” Peter was startled. “Yes, I do. But I could never follow up.”
“Don, is that friend of yours who works for Pinkerton still in town?”
“If he isn’t in jail.”
“Give him a call. We’ll get him on the case.” Don went into the bedroom and shut the door.
“Did you know,” Peter felt obliged to compete in the omniscient league, “that on the first day of the 1940 convention …”
“The Philadelphia Philharmonic played my ‘Ballad for Americans.’ Yes. I heard it on the radio. I’m sick of it. Here’s something new.” He sat at the piano and played a melodic tune and sang, “It’s the coming home together when the day is through, something, something boom and then to do, and the dah dah duh-duh that’s always you …”
He struck a great chord. “It will sound better when it’s actually written. Most pieces don’t. Schubert was on the right track. Of course, what’s never begun is always best. Like ‘The Madonna of the Future.’ ”
“The what?” Peter was being left far behind.
“A story by Henry James.” Aeneas was smug.
“James is coming back, according to my publisher friend Eileen Garrett. She was Conan Doyle’s last medium. What a good title.” He struck more keys while improvising a duet between Sherlock Holmes in the spirit world and the mysterious Eileen Garrett in Murray Hill.
Then the room began to fill up.
“Contributors, or contributors-to-be,” said Aeneas to Peter, who knew only a few of their names. One was a tall languid young man who could, at the drop of a hat, according to Latouche, sing all of Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, playing all the parts. “But,” said Latouche ominously, “no hat will be dropped this night.”
In due course, the composer of the opera, Virgil Thomson, appeared. A fussy precise-voiced little man with a pink bald head, he introduced himself to Peter. “I live in the Chelsea, too. Touche provides us with twenty-four-hour entertainment. Amazing that they haven’t thrown him out yet. He never pays rent. It’s a principle with him. What do you do?”
Peter gave him a brief report on his few attainments. “I’m not reading about politics this season.” Thomson was crisp. “There’s been too much history lately. Hate it. Not good for the arts. That’s why I’m so glad you’re giving more pages to the arts. Who will you get for music?”
“You?”
“No, baby. I’m taken. Herald Tribune forever. What about Paul Bowles?”
Peter had not heard the name before. Fortunately, Thomson liked to answer his own questions. “He spells me at the Trib when I’ve got a concert. He’s a real critic. Knows what not to write about. Rare gift. Also, never gives his opinion. Who, outside maybe your mother, wants to know what you think about Mahler? Just describe for the reader exactly what you hear. That’s the trick of it. Paul and Jane—his wife—are staying up at Libby’s in the country. You know—Libby Holman. She killed her husband, the Reynolds tobacco man. Singer. Good Singer, Libby. She’s h
ired Paul to make an opera of Yerma. Paul and Jane have a dowsing rod for money. But then you have to, if you’re a serious composer. Anyway, when they come back to town, you must meet them. You do pay?” Thomson’s eyes were suddenly very sharp.
“Oh yes.”
“Baby, you only get what you pay for in this world, as I always tell Mrs. Reid at the Trib.”
Latouche brought over a Dracula-pale man with eyes that seemed to be permanently half shut. “Here’s your film critic. Parker Tyler. There’s no one like him.”
“Is it true that you are the nephew of Emma Traxler?” The voice was pansy-eager with an ironic intermittent base—bass?—to it that captured Peter’s full attention. He confessed that he was.
“Someone—Julian Sawyer over there, I think—said he saw her in the lobby of the St. Regis the other day. He does the lobbies of all the grand hotels, hoping to see stars. He saw her, obviously.”
“She was in town for Harry Hopkins’ funeral.”
“I’ve seen twenty-seven of her films, including the one she made in Tunisia with René Clément, a mistake because he’s not in her class. I regard Mary Queen of Scots as a touchstone for film criticism. A sort of high mark never to be reached again by any actress with such primitive lighting and dentistry.”
“I must tell her. She did say that that film ended her career in Hollywood.”
“Two-Faced Woman did the same for Garbo, and that was a negative masterpiece, too. I wrote about it in View.”
Peter wondered what View was. There was, obviously, a vast intricate world in New York, as distant from Washington as moon from earth. Were the two compatible? Aeneas thought so but then Aeneas belonged to both and Peter was at sea with Parker Tyler if not with the merry Latouche, who introduced him to a round little woman with squirrel-bright eyes.
“Peter. This is Dawn Powell. The economist. She’s longing to write for your magazine.”
“It’s been my dream ever since your first issue. But I warn you, I’m a post-Keynesian. I’m also postmenopausal as of last September at Doctor’s Hospital. I’ve got the scars to prove it. So I’m giving a party to celebrate. A carnival. Carne-vale, dear. That’s Latin for …”
“Flesh farewell.”
“Go to the head of the class.” She turned to Latouche. “Yesterday Mary McCarthy paid a call on Bunny Wilson.” To Peter: “Her ex-husband. And when he locked himself in his study to escape her, she set fire to a wastebasket and tried to smoke him out. It was a metal wire basket, by the way. Always get details like that right. Otherwise your listeners start to wonder why the house didn’t burn down.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” said Latouche, moving away.
“Why smoke him out?” asked Peter.
“Because he’s made so much money out of Memoirs of Hecate County and, of course, Mary’s envious. In fact, envy’s sort of a religion with her, which really makes her to be envied as someone with something to believe in. To cling to in the bad times when the living isn’t—‘ain’t,’ I should say—easy. All my friends are communists. But then so am I. And all of them are eaten up by envy, too. The Golden Calf is their god. Of course, I’d love to make money, too. No. Not make it. I’d love to be given a lot of money.”
“Are you really an economist?”
“Oh, no, child.” Suddenly, she became a gracious grandmotherly crone, presiding over a cookie jar. “Not poor old Dawn, trying to get that ole debil checkbook in order. No. I’m simply a purveyor of home truths, the more devastating the better. A mere teller of tales. About exotic places that make the reader’s heart—hearts—pound. ‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’—oh, there is nothing about the literary art that your old granny don’t know in her bones.”
“What exotic places?”
“Ohio, you silly-billy. That’s where everyone in Greenwich Village comes from. I’ll write you a monthly ‘Letter from Ohio.’ About real folks who sit on front porches, incest and depravity forever on their narrow minds. I can’t think how Faulkner gets away with it and I don’t. Of course, he doesn’t make any money either except when he prostitutes himself by writing for the movies. He sold out years ago to Hollywood. Now, God knows, I’m perfectly willing to sell out, but I can’t find a buyer. Just top the rum, Touche, and be quick about it. Auntie Dawn is parched.” She gave Peter a lascivious wink. “So tell me exactly what it is about George Sand you don’t like. And tell me exactly how you finally fell out with her. Oh, her promiscuity is a given. You must have known that going in. Even so, I want all the details. And remember this—you can trust me, dear,” she added with a Satanic leer. “Mum’s the word, cross my heart and hope to die. Your secrets are my secrets. The word ‘mongoloid’ will never pass my lips. That is a solemn promise.”
By midnight, Aeneas and Peter were running out of money as they followed Latouche from nightclubs in the Village all the way up to those on the East Side. Wherever he went, at his entrance, musicians would play “Taking a Chance on Love.” He also acquired, along the way, a train of admirers, some actually known to him, and like a Pied Piper he led them from dark place to dark place until he arrived at the elegant door to the Blue Angel in Fifty-fifth Street. When Latouche shouted, “Cover charge!” he lost most of his entourage.
As the smiling doormen held the door open, Touche said to Peter, “I’ve got a surprise for you.”
The Blue Angel occupied a thin brownstone. The front part of the ground floor contained a bar on the left and shiny black plastic booths on the right. The back part was full of round tables set before a small stage where comedians practiced their desperate art and musicians played, all in an onyx-black room with hanging plaster angels backlit in pink. “It’s just like Juliet’s tomb,” said Touche as the tall pale green manager, Herbert Jacoby, a Frenchman who had once been secretary to Léon Blum, greeted Touche and his party, to which had been added a beautiful black singer who had joined them at some point in the Village along with a stout banker named Reg Newton, “A veritable Midas, aren’t you, Reg?” Touche was exuberant. “Give him an apple and it turns to twenty-four-karat gold. So, Reg, we’ll let you pick up the bill. But just this once. Mustn’t spoil you.” Reg beamed.
The surprise was at a booth opposite the bar. Peter’s first cousin Emma Sanford and her husband, Timothy X. Farrell, were greeting Touche, who introduced Peter to Emma. “I just know you two will have a lot in common.”
Two parties now became one. The lugubrious Jacoby suggested supper for the newcomers. Sadly, he told them his menu. Glumly, he gave their orders to a maître d’. Despairingly, he moaned, “I must go introduce Alice Pearce. She is,” he gasped, “funny.” He left them for the crowded back room
“Herbert missed his calling,” said Touche. “He’s a born funeral director. Pompes funèbres grow out of his ears like celery. He has all the joie de vivre of an open grave. Yet he gets the funniest people in the business to play the room for next to nothing.” Touche finished a large snifter of brandy; then cleared his throat. “Now I suppose you’re all wondering why I asked you here tonight. Tim Farrell and I are doing a movie together. A musical, actually. The story of Ulysses—except this Ulysses is an American farm boy who goes off to the Spanish–American War and gets lost on his way back home …”
At a pause in the ongoing monologue, Peter turned to Emma. “I suppose I should congratulate you on your marriage.”
“It was sudden, I think.” Emma, the new blonde, was handsomer than Emma, the old brunette. “I do know that I was just bowled over by Tim when we first met.”
“But that,” said Peter in the interest of major mischief, “was years and years ago when he was with the Black Pearl of the Baltic.”
“Alsace-Lorraine,” said Emma. “Yes, I knew him as a child when he and Mother … You know? Then I met him again years later, after they had broken up, and he was a different person. I was a different person.” The waiter asked her what she wanted on the supper menu. “Oh, the lobster Newburg! I love it! But instead of the Newburg sauce,
I’ll have it with just plain mayonnaise. Hellman’s, if you have it. Though I despise Lillian’s politics. I’ll start with the onion soup. Really thick, if you have it. And could I have a glass of dry white wine with ice on the side? Not in it but on the side. And some butter right now.”
While Peter ordered a minute steak, his cousin proved not to be much changed since she had headed Fortress America. She was now in full flow while Latouche and her husband conferred, Aeneas and the spectacular black girl—could she be Thelma Carpenter?—laughed together, something Aeneas rarely did with anyone; Reg smiled happily, wallet at the ready.
“Tim and I are both interested in the Hometown series.” Emma sliced the butter squares into triangles; and ignored the bread.
“Aunt Caroline’s dream.”
“Well, it was Tim who made the pictures. We’re looking for something offbeat. But with the right sort of message, you know?”
“No, I don’t,” said Peter, who did know what she meant. When he had heard of the surprise marriage between Emma and Tim, he had decided that either she had changed for the better or Tim for the worse. He had no way of judging the weather of Tim’s soul, but Emma was as wildly overwrought as she had been in her prewar campaign against the Russian Bolsheviks, only now her fight had shifted to the menace of communism within the United States itself.
“We’re safe from the Russians. For the moment. We have the atomic bomb. By the time they have it, we’ll have the hydrogen bomb and then, one day—when they go too far—we’ll drop it. Pow! No more Moscow.” Methodically, she broke the crust of her onion soup and, voluptuously, stirred the contents of the bowl clockwise, inhaling the steam with distaste. “It’s all so clear. They want to conquer the world. Just the way Hitler did. It’s also clear—now, anyway—that we should have let Hitler destroy them first. Then we could have dealt with him. But my mother’s Red friends like Harry Hopkins were too busy working for Stalin. Now the life-and-death struggle for Iran’s begun. Stalin’s on the march in Azerbaijan. We must stop him. By force. And we will. This year, anyway.” Now the spoon which had been going clockwise was going counterclockwise. Was this some coded message American patriots used to identify one another?