The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  “Hill has left Paris,” I said. “Ten days ago. You knew that. I’ve not heard from him. Louisa, you know about. The baby, McKenna, is staying with Edith de Chambrolet—you know, Louisa’s Countess friend.”

  “Have I met her?”

  “I think you have, at their place.”

  “I don’t remember. And Harry?”

  “You saw the telegram I had from him yesterday. He’s arrived in Tel Aviv.”

  “You think he’ll ever catch up with her?” Weintraub asked. “With Samantha? Make it back?”

  “I haven’t the least idea,” I said. “You would know the answer to that better than I would.”

  “No,” he said, and hollows showed under his eyes. “No, I wouldn’t really. Really.”

  “Well, I certainly wouldn’t have an inkling,” I said. “Dave, would you like another drink? I’m pouring. But would you mind making it a quick one? I’ve got some things I’ve really got to do tonight.”

  “Sure. I would like one. And I will make it quick. What are you doing? Writing something about our past six weeks, our Révolution?”

  “No,” I said. “But I suppose I will have to have something done about it for the Review.”

  He actually leered. “But you’re doing something on it yourself?”

  “No. I think I’d much prefer to have a French political expert—Left, of course—do it for me. I might translate it myself, though.”

  He pulled himself up to his full five-foot-four, and grinned—again; this time a genuine one. “Don’t forget to have him tell what part Weintraub played in the transpiration of this Revolution! Including the one at Harry Gallagher’s!”

  After he left, I wondered if his very last remark was not still a further allusion to these papers, to his awareness of their existence, and that he was giving me permission—no, was asking me, please to include him in anything I wrote about the Gallaghers. History he wanted. Well, I would certainly have to include him. He certainly did play a role. A key role. But somehow it depressed me. It depressed me even more than I had known that seeing him would do, and I went myself to my window. I leaned on the protective wrought-iron railing looking out at the sadness of the flowing river. As Weintraub had done. It was always there, that sadness of the river, of the flowing of the river. But I’ve never been able to isolate why. But it was always sad. That was one thing I could count on. Night had fallen since he had arrived. And the Paris streetlights had come on along the quai. Across the river, lights were coming on in the Left Bank apartments. And in the Quartier itself there were no more thuds of gas grenades igniting, no more fires flickering from barricades to light up the rising clouds of smoke and tear gas, no more flashes and the cracking reports of the percussion grenades. Something indeed had truly ended.

  By leaning out I could look up the quai to the Pont de la Tournelle and see that the two squad cars of police were changing shifts. Twenty-four hours a day they guarded that bridge’s access to the home of M. Pompidou on the Île’s Quai de Bethune.

  I made myself another, very stiff drink, and downed it. Then I made another, and downed that. Damn it, I thought, I’m going to bed. And if I can’t sleep, I’ll take a Mogadon.

  I didn’t take the Mogadon.

  I feel I have not given an adequate picture of Harry Gallagher. To understand him you have to understand something of his background. Harry at 49 comes of an old Boston Irish family, who left him an income of some 20-odd thousand a year. In spite of that he has made a considerable name for himself as a screenwriter, and makes an excellent living on his own. He is famous enough and competent enough—what they call a “star” writer in the industry—to be in demand by big-money American producers. He has published two novels in the past six years. He has written screenplays for France’s most successful young avant-garde movie makers. In short, Harry was a winner, a man who, entering the bottom edge of middle age as he was, could relax a little and look back without anger.

  When he was 19, Harry left Harvard in his junior year as a social protest, to become an actor in New York with the idea of writing plays of social protest somewhat in the manner of Odets. When his first accepted play was in production, but long before it actually reached the boards to flop, he was on his way to Hollywood—at what then seemed a fabulous salary—to do his first screenplay, and on a big production. An old Communist-buddy director pal of his from the New York stage, who had gone out there before him, had asked for him and got him.

  I will not go into any moral issues here about their going to Hollywood. Suffice it to say that they two (as well as a whole generation of them, I guess, who went out there then) felt that they could reach more people with their message through films than through the theater. That was in 1939. By the time the war came at the end of 1941, at the age of 23, Harry had written two hit screenplays and was a boy-genius in the industry, with a big name.

  After Pearl Harbor, Harry threw all this up. Unlike his dedicated Communist confreres, who mostly received commissions as Lieutenant Commanders and went right on, making propaganda films for the Government now, Harry enlisted in the Marines where he fought the war in the Pacific as a Sergeant.

  After the war, of course, he had to start all over. A lot of new blood—that voracious, clamorous, greedy-ambitious new blood—had come in and taken over every place that was not occupied, and a lot that were. But he re-established himself in Hollywood as a top writer; and though his friends who had fought the war on the Silver Screen had trouble looking him in the eye, he became again a wheel and involved himself in the intellectual and humanistic Communism-Marxism side of the film-industry community which he had always been drawn to. There is no use here of my going into the relative goods and evils of Communist-Marxism as they were seen in the 1930s and ’40s. A lot of things that have happened in the world since then have changed an awful lot of things. But back then everybody was a pearly idealist. And Harry Gallagher was one of them. And, in 1947, on a visit home to Boston to his conservative Irish family, he met and married young Louisa Dunn Hill, another dedicated Marxist-Liberal idealist from an old Boston Brahmin family whose line and whose Liberalism dated even from before the days of Thoreau and Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Together they carried on their political activities in Hollywood, although neither ever actually became a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party. She immediately bore him their first child, Hill, in 1948.

  In 1950, when the House Un-American Activities Committee anti-Communist hunt got going full blast in all its glory, and the Hollywood Ten had finally been jailed, Harry (often jokingly called Number Eleven of the Hollywood Ten—although a number of others claimed that title, too, I gather) was investigated. Somebody had given in his name, obviously. Rather than talk to the Committee and give the names of friends as most of his friends did, Harry chose to skip out to Canada and make his way to France, later sending for Louisa and Hill when he got settled, I do not choose to comment on what will be history’s verdict on these ignorant, primitive, self-seeking American politicians who could tolerate and even defend a Rankin and a Joe McCarthy, though they will probably be slightly less badly thought of than the Catholic Inquisition.

  Even had he stayed and not gone to jail, he could not have gotten a job anywhere in the American film industry without talking for the Committee because of the secret blacklist—the blacklist which the industry denied existed but which in fact did exist. We tend to prefer not to remember all this today whenever we righteously criticize the Russians for putting their outspoken writers to jail.

  Harry’s first two years in France were very hard indeed, because of the language problem. But without help from his family (his parents disapproved of him and had not quite died yet to leave him his inheritance), Harry started over. He played bit parts as Americans in French films, became adept at the new industry of dubbing American films into French for the French market, and finally was writing screenplays in French—now for the young French Nouvelle Vague film makers. And as the years passed
and the McCarthy Era blew finally away back home, more and more American producers were coming to him for screenplays of productions to be done in Europe, and finally for screenplays to be done at home. It had been discovered Harry had a natural talent for American love stories, and for America’s morality play, the Western. Success followed success.

  So it is true that on that night of April 27th, when young Hill threw his first young monkey wrench into the machinery, Harry Gallagher was an unqualified, even a disgusting success.

  But Harry had paid pretty dearly for never compromising his principles. It was, Harry felt, something to be proud of. And it was that that stunned him so about Hill’s accusation. It was as if everything he had done and stood for had gone by the board, been thrown out, negated, denied existence by his son in a wild youthful jettison, as if in his housecleaning young Hill, was throwing out the furniture and rugs and even the wall fixtures, along with the dirt.

  And yet they were not all that far apart. Hill with his anti-Capitalist, anti-Communist Nouvel Anarchisme and the black flag of Dany Cohn-Bendit was not all that far from Harry’s viewpoint. Because Harry had given up on Communism. After watching the developments in Russia, China and elsewhere during the ’40s and ’50s and the ’60s, Harry had become convinced that while these societies might be—probably were—helping the lowest common denominator of humanity, their demand, their drive to compel rigid inflexibility of belief from every citizen (as the Church had also done in its day of power) was diminishing, impeding the movement upward of the highest common denominator of the race: its growth, which was where the true creativity, the talent for innovation, and genius for change and spiritual growth were situated. And for him, however reluctantly, that meant a return to enlightened Capitalism as the lesser evil of the two. But he didn’t like that Capitalism, either. Or what it stood for. Spiritually, that made him an Anarchist too.

  But try and tell that to Hill. Certainly I couldn’t. And Harry was not about to.

  I suppose really the only difference between them was that Hill was activist. He, like the rest of Dany Cohn-Bendit’s group with their black flag, wanted to act on his Anarchism. Believed you must act on your Anarchism. He believed in organization of the Anarchists, already an anomaly, of course. Hill believed Harry had become cynical, I suppose you could say—an old man’s right. Wisdom is the right of the aged not to declare themselves. But where, in our day and age, were the old men going to be left to rest peacefully and with dignity upon their laurels? As far as Hill was concerned, all that belonged to the disenfranchised past. To Hill it was the most profane sacrilege.

  Perhaps, after all, it was only a problem of the generations. Hill—very jealously—was not about to let his old man get into the act and usurp his youthful rebellion.

  Now, I really must sleep.

  3

  MY OWN MARRIAGE HAD ENDED in the spring of 1958, And it was while my wife was doing her Reno residence time that I departed for a European trip, never dreaming I would end up staying there, in Paris on the Île St.-Louis. Our marriage was always a New York marriage, and a literary one. We lived the whole nine years of it in Manhattan, in a rather grand apartment on Central Park West, and entertained lavishly everybody during that time who had made it on the New York literary or theatrical scene. We were both would-be writers, I in poetry, she in the novel and as an essayist, and Eleanor was wealthy: rich: the heiress of an ancient publishing and writing family that had made millions back when a million counted. Fortunately, we were without issue.

  It is difficult to go back to teaching Lit. at some school, even a ritzy one, when you have lived nine years married to an heiress. And we had practically lived together the two years before that, before we married and I gave up my teaching job. My book on The Rhythms of Early English Prose came out to very good reviews, and sank. As expected. My two slim poetry volumes got very bad reviews. Eleanor’s first long, long novel, very Joycean in style and very Virginia Woolf in outlook, appeared, died, and joined my three books. And that was probably what did it. We continued to entertain, even stepped up our entertaining. Eleanor drank more and more at night, and so did I. Our parties got oftener and oftener, and longer and longer, often lasting deep into the morning. We got so we each hated to see people leave and go home, begged them to stay for one more drink when they tried to leave. In desperation I tried a tough realistic novel which I never did believe would work. It didn’t. And that was just about it.

  I never did believe, as Eleanor accused, that it was all my fault, that I caused the withering and downfall of her talent by my own lack of one, by my budding “alcoholism”. She has never published anything since then, and has married twice and divorced twice. I am sure she had a string of literary and theatrical lovers during our last years, and maybe she had them sooner. But she did love the arts and artists. And I feel that I did fail her there. It left me with a strong guilt. Fortunately for me I still had my own small income which my family of successful New York lawyers had left me:—my family of New York lawyers who had always disapproved of me as Harry Gallagher’s family of Boston bankers and doctors had always disapproved of him.

  In late September of 1959 Louisa Gallagher came to my apartment alone for the first time. She called ahead of time and asked to see me and made an appointment. At that time I had known her pretty well for almost two years, and she and Harry had been to my place often. But this was the first time she had ever come there alone. In fact, it was the first time Louisa and I had ever been really alone together anywhere. She certainly had never been to my apartment alone.

  If I seem to dwell on this point unduly, it is because Louisa herself made me so aware of it. Not that she ever mentioned it openly in words. She didn’t. But there was about Louisa a kind of quasi-Puritanical quality which seemed to make her always aware of herself as a sexual object, in a sort of guilty and uncomfortable way. Dear Louisa. For instance, she was always very meticulous, even prissy, about her person—always carefully adjusting her skirt when she pulled her lovely long legs up under her; always feeling almost guiltily at her skirt to make sure it was properly adjusted whenever some man looked admiringly at her legs; always sitting primly with her knees pressed tight together when she was in a chair. Even with me, whom I believe she liked more than any other friend they had, there was often this look of guilty start on her face, as if it had again occurred to her that I might find her attractive, and that this was her fault.

  I always supposed this was part of her New England heritage. Her New England heritage was evident also in her lanky, almost rawboned build, and in her long, sharply sculptured horse-face. When she grinned, two deep lines would appear beneath her high cheekbones. And yet she was extremely beautiful as a woman, with her lovely long legs and vague, eager eyes. An extremely reserved person about herself, she was by fits and starts almost hysterically talkative about just about everything else, especially politics. Even back then Louisa was already violently and volubly anti-de Gaulle, saying he had only saved France from the militant Rightists of the OAS to impose upon it a gentler Rightism of his own, which would make it that much harder to fight for any truly modern economic reforms. But it was not about de Gaulle that she was coming to my apartment alone to see me that September.

  Naturally, I was curious and puzzled. To call me for a rendezvous alone in my apartment was certainly not the usual Louisa. When she came in, I offered her a seat and suggested a drink.

  Well, for a moment that startled, wild-deer look came into her eye and I seriously thought she was going to bolt out the door.

  “Oh, no! No, no! No drink!” she stammered—as if to accept a drink was the first step along a path that must end in her seduction there in my own apartment. For a few moments I thought she was actually going to refuse to sit down on my Second Empire couch.

  There was always about Louisa the feeling of tension as of a tightly drawn wire, but now the drawing was so tautened you actually felt you might hear the wire snap singing in the air.

&nb
sp; It was about Harry that she had come to see me. “I’m leaving him, Jack,” she said without preamble. “I’m taking Hill and I’m going back home to America to my family.”

  “You’re what!” I exclaimed.

  “That’s it. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  “You must be out of your mind!” I said. “Harry loves you! He adores you!” The thought of their marriage foundering, too, made me actually physically sick at my stomach.

  “If he does, he does not show it in any way which I can any longer tolerate,” she said firmly.

  I had heard some pretty explicit gossip about Harry Gallagher’s sexual flings with young actresses and such. When people find out you know someone, they hasten to tell you everything scandalous they have heard about them. After his first successes in France in the mid-’50s, Harry apparently had gone through quite a list of young actresses and would-be actresses, of just about every nationality—a number of whom both European and American are today world-worshipped sex symbols.

  At first I was shocked by this talk. I still thought of Harry and Louisa as my perfect happy-American-family—something I had perhaps failed to achieve, but was glad nevertheless to know did exist. But then I decided if Louisa did not care, why should I? And obviously Louisa didn’t. And after all what could be more truly American, than that the man of the family should have his peccadilloes and that the wife should forgive him and not care as long as she had him himself and his love. That was truly the perfect happy-American-family.

  And of course, Harry was working on scripts for most of these girls; and in his favor it had to be admitted that they all certainly made themselves exceedingly available. Whether it was simply their supreme availability, or whether something deeply important inside Harry had been torn apart by the ignominy of his forced flight from Hollywood, I would not presume to judge.