The Book of Illusions

by Paul Auster

It was a lot of money back then.

  It’s still a lot of money today, but there’s more to the story than just money. Hector made a promise never to work in films again. You told me that a few hours ago, and now he’s suddenly back directing films. What made him change his mind?

  Frieda and Hector had a son. Thaddeus Spelling II, named after Frieda’s father. Taddy for short, or Tad, or Tadpole—they called him all sorts of things. He was born in 1935 and died in 1938. Stung by a bee one morning in his father’s garden. They found him lying on the ground, all puffed up and swollen, and by the time they drove him to the doctor thirty miles away, he was already dead. Imagine the effect it had on them.

  I can imagine it. If there’s one thing I can imagine, I can imagine that.

  I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing for me to say.

  Don’t be sorry. It’s just that I know what you’re talking about. No mental gymnastics required to understand the situation. Tad and Todd. It can’t get any closer than that, can it?

  Still …

  No still. Just go on talking …

  Hector collapsed. Months went by, and he didn’t do anything at all. He sat in the house; he looked at the sky through the bedroom window; he studied the backs of his hands. It wasn’t that Frieda didn’t have a hard time of it, too, but he was so much more fragile than she was, so unprotected. She was tough enough to know that the boy’s death was an accident, that he’d died because he was allergic to bees, but Hector saw it as a form of divine punishment. He had been too happy. Life had been too good to him, and now the fates had taught him a lesson.

  The films were Frieda’s idea, weren’t they? After she inherited the money, she talked Hector into going back to work.

  More or less. He was headed for a nervous breakdown, and she knew that she had to step in and take action. Not just to save him, but to save her marriage, to save her own life.

  And Hector went along with it.

  Not at first. But then she threatened to leave him, and he finally gave in. Not with any great reluctance, I should add. He was desperate to get back into it. For ten years, he’d been dreaming about camera angles, lighting setups, story ideas. It was the one thing he wanted to do, the one thing in the world that made sense to him.

  But what about his promise? How did he justify breaking his word? From all you’ve told me about him, I don’t see how he could have done that.

  He did it by splitting hairs—and then he made a pact with the devil. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it fall, does it make a sound or not? Hector had read a lot of books by then, he knew all the tricks and arguments of the philosophers. If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie exist or not? That’s how he justified what he did. He would make movies that would never be shown to audiences, make movies for the pure pleasure of making movies. It was an act of breathtaking nihilism, and yet he’s stuck to the bargain ever since. Imagine knowing that you’re good at something, so good that the world would be in awe of you if they could see your work, and then keeping yourself a secret from the world. It took great concentration and rigor to do what Hector did—and also a touch of madness. Hector and Frieda are both a bit mad, I suppose, but they’ve achieved something remarkable. Emily Dickinson wrote in obscurity, but she tried to publish her poems. Van Gogh tried to sell his paintings. As far as I know, Hector is the first artist to make his work with the conscious, premeditated intention of destroying it. There’s Kafka, of course, who told Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, but when it came to the decisive moment, Brod couldn’t go through with it. But Frieda will. There’s no question about that. The day after Hector dies, she’ll take his films into the garden and burn them all—every print, every negative, every frame he ever shot. That’s guaranteed. And you and I will be the only witnesses.

  How many films are we talking about?

  Fourteen. Eleven features of ninety minutes or more, and three others that run under an hour.

  I don’t imagine he was still into comedies, was he?

  Report from the Anti-World, The Ballad of Mary White, Travels in the Scriptorium, Ambush at Standing Rock. Those are some of the titles. They don’t sound very funny, do they?

  No, not what you’d call your standard laugh-a-thons. But not too grim, I hope.

  It depends on how you define the word. I don’t find them grim. Serious, yes, and often quite strange, but not grim.

  How do you define strange?

  Hector’s films are extremely intimate, low to the ground, unflamboyant in tone. But there’s always this fantastical element running through them, a weird kind of poetry. He broke a lot of rules. He did things film directors aren’t supposed to do.

  Like what?

  Voice-overs, for one thing. Narration is considered a weakness in movies, a sign that the images aren’t working, but Hector relied on it heavily in a number of his films. One of them, The History of Light, doesn’t have a word of dialogue. It’s wallto-wall narration from start to finish.

  What else did he do wrong? Wrong on purpose, I mean.

  He was out of the commercial loop, and that meant he could work without constraints. Hector used his freedom to explore things other filmmakers weren’t allowed to touch, especially in the forties and fifties. Naked bodies. Down-to-earth sex. Childbirth. Urination, defecation. Those scenes are a bit shocking at first, but the shock wears off rather quickly. They’re a natural part of life, after all, but we’re not used to seeing them presented on film, so we sit up for a couple of seconds and take notice. Hector didn’t make a big point of it. Once you come to understand what’s possible in his work, these so-called taboos and moments of explicitness blend into the overall texture of the stories. In a way, those scenes were a form of protection for him—just in case someone tried to walk off with one of the prints. He had to make sure that his films would be unreleaseable.

  And your parents went along with this.

  It was a hands-on, do-it-yourself operation. Hector wrote, directed, and edited the films. My father lit them and shot them, and after the shooting was done, he and my mother did all the lab work. They processed the footage, cut the negatives, mixed the sound, and saw everything through until the final prints were in the can.

  Right there at the ranch?

  Hector and Frieda turned their property into a small movie studio. They began construction in May 1939 and finished in March 1940, and what they wound up with was a self-contained universe, a private compound for making films. There was a double sound stage in one building, along with additional areas for a carpentry shop, a seamstress shop, dressing rooms, and separate storage spaces for sets and costumes. Another building was for post production. They couldn’t risk sending out their films to a commercial lab, so they built their own lab. That took up one wing. In the other half was the editing facility, the projection room, and an underground storage vault for prints and negatives.

  All that equipment couldn’t have come cheap.

  It cost them over a hundred fifty thousand dollars to set the place up. But they could afford it, and most things had to be bought only once. Several cameras, but only one editing machine, one pair of projectors, and one optical printer. After they had what they needed, they worked within tightly controlled budgets. Frieda’s inheritance was drawing interest, and they dipped into the principal as sparingly as they could. They worked on a small scale. They had to if they meant to stretch out the money and make it last.

  And Frieda was in charge of sets and costumes.

  Among other things. She was also Hector’s assistant editor, and when films were in production, she handled any one of several different jobs. Script supervisor, boom operator, focus puller—whatever needed doing on that day, at that moment.

  And your mother?

  My Faye. My beautiful, beloved Faye. She was an actress. She came to the ranch in 1945 to do a role in a film and fell in love with my father. She was still in her early twenties then. She performed in every film they made after that, mostly as t
he female lead, but she helped out on other fronts as well. Sewing costumes, painting scenery, advising Hector on his scripts, working with Charlie in the lab. That was the adventure of it. No one did just one thing there. They were all involved, and they all put in incredibly long hours. Months and months of laborious prep work, months and months in post production. Making films is a slow, intricate business, and with so few of them trying to do so much, they pushed along by inches. It generally took them about two years to finish a project.

  I understand why Hector and Frieda wanted to be there—or partly understand it, am struggling to understand it—but your mother and father still baffle me. Charlie Grund was a gifted cameraman. I’ve studied his work, I know what he did with Hector in 1928, and it makes no sense that he would have walked away from his career.

  My father had just been through a divorce. He was thirty-five, going on thirty-six, and he still hadn’t made it into the top echelon of Hollywood DP’s. After fifteen years in the business, he was working on B pictures—when he had work at all. Westerns, Boston Blackie movies, kids’ serials. He had immense talent, Charlie did, but he was a quiet person, someone who never appeared to be very comfortable with himself, and people often mistook that shyness for arrogance. He kept losing out on the good jobs, and after a while it started to get to him, to eat away at his confidence. When his first wife left him, he went to hell for a few months. Drinking too much, feeling sorry for himself, not keeping up with his work. And that’s when Hector called—just when he was down in that hole.

  That still doesn’t explain why he agreed to do it. No one makes pictures without wanting others to see them. It just isn’t done. What’s the point of putting film in the camera, then?

  He didn’t care. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but the work was all that mattered to him. The results were secondary, almost of no importance. A lot of film people are like that—especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They enjoy figuring things out. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It’s not about art or ideas. It’s about working at something and making it come out right. My father had his ups and downs in the film business, but he was good at making films, and Hector gave him the opportunity to make films without having to worry about the business. If it had been anyone else, I doubt that he would have gone. But my father loved Hector. He always said that working for him at Kaleidoscope was the happiest year of his life.

  He must have been shocked when Hector called. More than ten years go by, and suddenly there’s a dead man on the other end of the line.

  He thought someone was playing a prank on him. The only other possibility was that he was talking to a ghost, and since my father didn’t believe in ghosts, he told Hector to go fuck himself and hung up the phone. Hector had to call back three more times before he was willing to accept it.

  When was this?

  Late thirty-nine. November or December, just after the Germans invaded Poland. By early February, my father was living at the ranch. Hector and Frieda’s new house was ready by then, and he moved into the old one, the little cottage they’d built when they first got there. That’s where I lived with my parents when I was growing up, and that’s where I live now—in that six-room adobe house, under the shade of Hector’s trees, writing my insane and endless book.

  But what about the other people who came to the ranch? Actors were brought in, you said, and your father must have had some technical help. It’s not possible to make a film with just four people. Even I know that. Maybe they could handle pre production and post production on their own, but not production itself. And once you have people coming in from the outside, how do you get away with it? How do you stop them from talking?

  You tell them you’re working for someone else. You pretend you’ve been hired by an eccentric millionaire from Mexico City, a man so in love with American movies that he’s built his own studio in the American wilderness and commissioned you to make movies for him—movies that will never be seen by anyone but the man himself. That’s the arrangement. If you come to the Blue Stone Ranch to work on a film, you do so with the understanding that your work will be seen by an audience of just one person.

  That’s preposterous.

  Maybe so, but a lot of people swallowed the story.

  You’d have to be pretty desperate to believe a thing like that.

  You haven’t spent much time with actors, have you? They’re the most desperate people in the world. Ninety percent of them are unemployed, and if you offer them a job with a decent salary, they’re not going to ask many questions. All they want is the chance to work. Hector didn’t go after big names. He wasn’t interested in stars. He just wanted competent professionals, and since he wrote his screenplays for small casts—sometimes just two or three roles—it wasn’t difficult to find them. By the time he finished one film and was ready to go on to the next, there was a new crop of actors to choose from. Except for my mother, he never used the same actor twice.

  All right, forget about everyone else. What about you? When did you first hear the name Hector Mann? You knew him as Hector Spelling. How old were you when you realized that Hector Spelling and Hector Mann were the same person?

  I always knew that. We had a complete set of the Kaleidoscope films at the ranch, and I must have seen them fifty times when I was a child. The moment I learned how to read, I noticed that Hector was Mann, not Spelling. I asked my father about it, and he said that Hector had acted under a stage name when he was young, but now that he wasn’t acting anymore, he’d stopped using it. It felt like a perfectly plausible explanation to me.

  I thought those films were lost.

  They almost were. By all rights, they should have been. But just when Hunt was about to declare bankruptcy, a day or two before the marshals came to seize his goods and padlock the door, Hector and my father broke into the Kaleidoscope offices and stole the films. The negatives weren’t there, but they marched off with prints of all twelve comedies. Hector gave them to my father for safekeeping, and two months later Hector was gone. When my father moved to the ranch in 1940, he brought the the films with him.

  How did Hector feel about that?

  I don’t understand. How should he have felt?

  That’s what I’m asking you. Was he pleased or displeased?

  Pleased. Of course he was pleased. He was proud of those little films, and he was glad to have them back.

  Then why did he wait so long before sending them out into the world again?

  What makes you think he did that?

  I don’t know, I assumed …

  I thought you understood. It was me. I was the one who did it.

  I suspected as much.

  Then why didn’t you say something?

  I didn’t think I had the right to. In case it was supposed to be a secret.

  I don’t have any secrets from you, David. Whatever I know, I want you to know, too. Don’t you get it? I sent out those films blind, and you were the one who found them. You’re the only person in the world who found them all. That makes us old friends, doesn’t it? We might not have met until yesterday, but we’ve been working together for years.

  It was an incredible stunt you pulled. I talked to curators everywhere I went, and not one of them had any idea who you were. When I was in California, I had lunch with Tom Luddy, the head of the Pacific Film Archive. They were the last place to receive one of the Hector Mann mystery boxes. By the time theirs came, you’d already been at it for a few years, and the word was out. Tom said that he didn’t even bother to open the package. He took it straight to the FBI to have it checked for fingerprints, but they couldn’t find any in the box—not a single one. You didn’t leave a trace.

  I wore gloves. If I was going to go to the trouble of keeping a secret, I certainly wasn’t going to slip up on a detail like that.

  You’re a clever girl, Alma.

  You bet I’m clever. I’m the cleverest girl in this ca
r, and I dare you to prove I’m not.

  But how could you justify going behind Hector’s back? It was his decision to make, not yours.

  I talked to him about it first. It was my idea, but I didn’t go ahead with it until he gave me the green light.

  What did he say?

  He shrugged. And then he gave me a little smile. It doesn’t matter, he said. Do whatever you want, Alma.

  So he didn’t stop you, but he didn’t help you, either. He didn’t do anything.

  It was November eighty-one, almost seven years ago. I’d just come back to the ranch for my mother’s funeral, and it was a bad time for all of us, the beginning of the end, somehow. I didn’t take it well. I admit that. She was only fifty-nine when we put her in the ground, and I hadn’t been prepared for it. Pulverizing. That’s the only word I can think of: a pulverizing sorrow. As if everything inside me had turned to dust. The others were so old by then. I looked up and suddenly realized that they were finished, that the great experiment was over. My father was eighty, Hector was eighty-one, and the next time I looked up, they’d all be gone. It had a tremendous effect on me. Every morning, I went into the screening room to watch my mother in her old films, and by the time I came out again, it would be dark outside and I’d be sobbing my guts out. After two weeks of that, I decided to go home. I was living in L. A. then. I had a job with an independent production company, and they needed me back at work. I was all set to go. I’d already called the airline and booked my ticket, but at the last minute—literally, on my last night at the ranch—Hector asked me to stay.

  Did he give a reason?

  He said he was ready to talk, and he needed someone to help him. He couldn’t do it on his own.

  You mean the book was his idea?

  It all came from him. I never would have thought of it myself. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have talked to him about it. I wouldn’t have dared.

  He lost his courage. That’s the only explanation. Either he lost his courage or he went senile.

  That’s what I thought, too. But I was wrong, and you’re wrong now. Hector changed his mind because of me. He told me I had a right to know the truth, and if I was willing to stay there and listen to him, he promised to tell me the whole story.