Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  Elena did not pause a moment in her reply. “Yes.”

  “Good, then it’s a deal,” Jason said. “Now, where was I in the great epic that is my story? Ah, yes, divorced. I still thought I wanted to be an actor, but it was a crazy idea. I didn’t like the rehearsals, or learning the lines, or the tension of opening night, or the party after it. I didn’t like the people who liked these things. So in the end truth dawned and I left the stage. I was never much more than a spear carrier anyway.”

  “So what the stage lost, the historians gained,” I said.

  “Well, not straight away,” Jason told me. He turned back to Elena. “The divorce hit me very hard. I was raised a strict Southern Protestant, which is a whole lot, believe me — like being raised a Catholic. You have God’s eye watching you every minute, and sin is like polluted blood running through your veins, and in everything you do, everything you are, there is not so much God’s love as his disappointment.” He shrugged. “It becomes your disappointment, too, and I took my divorce very hard because of that, a real spiritual failure.” His eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to peer directly into my sister’s mind. “Fact is, I had a couple of fantasies. Not the usual kind, though, nothing to do with beautiful women, or spike-heeled shoes, or anything like that.” He smiled. “I had a fantasy, you see, that I would live my whole life with the woman I loved, that I would have children, and that they would be able to say of me that I was the one who never left them.

  “Of course, that didn’t pan out. So if you want to know the truth about it, well, I sort of hit bottom after that. I took a little room off Sullivan Street and started drinking. It really wasn’t even a room; it was a dank, stinking cellar I paid maybe ten cents a month for. There was a boiler in it and a single lamp, but the plug for the lamp was a long way from the boiler, so in the winter I had to choose between keeping warm and using the light to read by.” He laughed to himself. “I chose heat every time, Elena, every time. And I think that proved that nature opts for a thick coat of fur rather than intelligence, for comfort rather than knowledge … and so, if you follow me, the origin of illusion is in our very genes and chromosomes.”

  He waited a moment for Elena to respond to this, but when she didn’t he went on. “Of course, the library had light and heat. I began to read. It became a real passion for me. I found that I preferred history books to everything else, so I read a great many of them. And you know what they say: He who greatly reads will one day wish to write. Well, that’s what happened to me. I decided to write my own history of the United States. I worked very hard, and seven years later I finished The American Experience.”

  “Which, as they say in publishing,” I added, “became an instant classic.”

  Jason nodded. “In a way, yes.” He smiled. “And I started publishing fairly regularly after that. Then I got a job teaching at Columbia.”

  “Do you like it up there?” Elena asked. “William does.”

  “It’ll do,” Jason said. “They don’t work me too hard, and I’m becoming the mossback of the department.” He regarded Elena almost sadly. “To the new historians, I’m old hat, a Whig, a poor cousin of Macaulay. My concerns — with death and time and tragedy — are ones my colleagues don’t consider very great, or even very relevant. They say — and they mean this in a derogatory way — that they are only, you know, poetic.”

  Elena was looking at him very intently when he finished. “If you are very lucky in your life,” she would later write, in the words of Manfred Owen speaking to his daughter, “then from time to time all that you have learned will become a kind of love, as if in grand rebellion against your cynicism, and you will realize with infinite surprise the boundless depths of your sympathy. You will sense that compassion toward which all our faith and hope are tending, and you will understand that it was all worthwhile.” That happened to me only once, shortly after I realized that Elena was dying. I don’t know how often it happened to my sister, but as she watched Jason, I think that she at least suspected that in him she had found a man who had felt it too.

  For the next few months, Elena and Jason met frequently for dinner or the theater, usually capping the evening with a late-night drink in Brooklyn Heights, then a stroll along the promenade — so beautiful at night, the black plain of the East River set against the glittering cliffs of Manhattan. Finding a more romantic locale would have taxed the best minds in Hollywood.

  These must have been very peaceful walks, and I think something of their calm as well as what must have been their edgy expectation made it into the opening passage of Quality:

  They came as the inheritors of two forms of knowledge. The one had been gained by the history of bitter seamanship, a knowledge of winds, currents, and deadly shoals, of discerning one’s place on earth from the stars, a knowledge steadily increased from the time the Carthaginians set sail from northern Africa. And to the limits of their materialism, they joined another form of understanding, sprung from the soil of a Roman Palestine. They answered the call of a prophet dead almost two thousand years yet alive in a promise that beyond the world of the flesh there was a world of the spirit, one assailed by the depredations of Bishop Laud, from whom they had fled across the Atlantic to confront a forest standing frozen in the November chill. Unlike their predessors hacking out a village in the swamplands of Virginia, they had been driven to this bleak coast, divested of everything but two sustaining notions: that the body should survive as long as possible and that the soul should never die. One-third of them were truly Pilgrims, while the rest were scraped up from the detritus of England, victims of royal folly, tangled economies, cruel imprisonment. All together, they must have been a dreamy lot, though with separate dreams, some casting their eyes toward heaven and some toward their neighbor’s purse. Here the American mind began, stripped bare by confiscations of both property and heart, ignited not by a unified vision but by a multiplicity of need.

  In the spring of 1957, when Elena and Jason were beginning to spend time together, there was a steady sense that they had found each other in the eleventh hour of their lives and that they should take great care not to injure a relationship that both of them expected to be, for better or worse, their last. Because of this, in those first few months, they approached each other gingerly. Jason rather carefully avoided a too ardent inquiry into my sister’s expatriation or her affiliation with the Left of the thirties, of both of which, I am sure, he disapproved. For her part, Elena carefully avoided any criticism of those ideas of Jason’s which, even then, she thought of as romantic: his preoccupation with military exploit, though he was himself a pacifist; the sudden bursts of Southern chauvinism which rose in him when someone dared slight the South, though he railed against its backwardness continually. These were the contradictions most central to his character, against which his mind battled constantly but with little success, and for which Elena had the deepest sympathy as long as the lines were clearly drawn. In Jason, as it turned out, they were not.

  As much as a year after their first meeting, Elena and Jason still remained decidedly cautious with one another. Jason had read the first few chapters of Elena’s first attempt at Quality by then, had praised it, of course, but no doubt more moderately that Elena would have liked.

  We were together at Sam’s house on Cape Cod when this icy restraint between them broke for the first time. Sam had bought the house some time before but had used it very little. Instead he had made it available to a chosen few of his authors, Elena and Jason being foremost in that company.

  It was in September when we drove up to the Cape in Jason’s car. Alexander was quite the independent young man by then, and I suppose a weekend alone in the city, with his watchful father on Cape Cod, almost three hundred miles away, must have seemed like the answer to his late-adolescent prayers.

  In any event, Jason, Elena, and I had the run of the house for that first week in September. We could stroll the beach, walk the flats when the tide was out, or simply lounge on the lawn, taking in th
e sun. The relief it afforded us from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the city was exhilarating. I think that even Elena was surprised by how much she enjoyed the lovely spaciousness of Cape Cod, that unlimited openness which pervades it, as if it were the borderland, as she once said, between the merging infinities of the sky and the sea.

  In the morning Elena would work on Quality, either typing out her notes or rereading those parts of her manuscript which she thought unfinished. Jason was at work on a critical analysis of Alfred Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History, while I continued my investigation of the poet George Crabbe.

  But by afternoon all of us were intent upon putting these labors aside, and so we would stretch out on the lawn, sipping wine or lemonade, and talk about whatever came to mind.

  Jason always took the hammock on these occasions, swaying casually back and forth with one hand behind his head. He looked, Elena said, like an old campaigner, full of the fire and smoke of long-forgotten wars. He talked of Austerlitz and Trafalgar, Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, as if he had himself engaged the enemy on these historic sites. The horror of battle, and its exhilarations, lent an agonizing glory to his tales, and more than anything else about these afternoons I remember the somber allegiance Jason forever bestowed upon the weary, ghostly legions who had marched into the Crater or out of Stalingrad.

  “And I wonder, Elena,” he said cautiously one afternoon after we had all been on the Cape together for over a week, “I wonder if your work on Stephen Crane in the new book, if it can be complete without some knowledge of the actual writings on combat experience.”

  Elena was sitting in a lawn chair, her back to the bay. There was a magazine in her lap, and its pages fluttered sporadically in the breeze from off the water.

  “You don’t consider the works of Stephen Crane ‘actual writing,’ Jason?”

  “I mean nonliterary, of course,” Jason said. He looked at me. “Blunden’s Undertones of War, for example.” He turned back to Elena. “Blunden actually experienced the war he wrote about. But Crane? He was too young to have fought in the Civil War.”

  “Well, my book is about American literature, Jason,” Elena said casually. She glanced back down at the magazine in her lap. “It’s not about the American military experience.”

  Jason laughed lightly. “Well, I don’t just mean military experience either,” he said. “I mean all those other kinds of writing that go into the making of a national intellect.”

  Elena looked up again. “Like what?”

  “Well, the work of Parkman and Prescott in history, for example, and Helper and Fitzhugh on the antebellum South, and not just Sarah Jewett or Emily Dickinson, but maybe the letters of Abigail Adams, too.”

  “I see,” Elena said. “But I am writing on American literature, Jason.”

  “Which has to include other things, Elena,” Jason said emphatically. “You can’t just deal with, say, Jonathan Edwards as if he represents Puritan literature. There are the diaries of Michael Wigglesworth and Samuel Sewell. They were Puritans, too.”

  Elena closed the magazine. “Jason, a long time ago Jack MacNeill tried to tell me the book I should write.”

  “I’m not telling you what to write at all,” Jason said, “just that even a work on literature is incomplete if it avoids other kinds of writing. It doesn’t have to concentrate on them, of course, just take them into account.”

  Elena glanced over to me. “Do you agree?”

  “It depends on what you intend,” I said. “A very substantial book can be written on literature alone.”

  “But not a great one,” Jason said. “There are great works of literature, but no great ones about it. Do you know why?”

  Elena smiled indulgently. “Please tell us, Jason.”

  “Because they are, by their very nature, derivative works, you see? They are one step removed from the real source of greatness.”

  Elena looked at him doubtfully. “Which is?”

  Jason smiled, almost playfully. “Well, you’re a novelist, Elena, you must surely know the answer to that.”

  “I’d like to hear it from you.”

  “Well, I’d say it’s a freely roaming intelligence,” Jason said, “one that can make its own parameters as it goes along, which can move in sudden, odd directions, take on a sweeping scope, rather than one that is already determined by a too tightly defined subject matter.”

  “And what about your books?” I asked. “Are they too tightly defined.”

  “I suppose they are,” Jason said, “— except The American Experience, which had the advantage of having been written when I was young.” He smiled. “There’s a little sweep in that one, a little boldness that age and caution have drained away.”

  Elena stood up. “Who’s for a stroll to the jetty?”

  It was almost an hour before we got back to the house. Then we had dinner, and after that Elena retired to her room while Jason and I continued sipping brandy in the living room. Jason and Elena always retained separate rooms, at least when I was with them, and that night I could hear Elena padding about behind her closed door, then typing for a few minutes, then shuffling papers, then pacing the room again.

  She did not come out again until almost midnight. Jason and I were by then deeply in our cups.

  “I just wanted to tell you, Jason,” she said, “that I’ve been thinking about what you said this afternoon, and that I think you’re right.”

  “Good, good,” Jason said casually. His head lolled to the right. “Nothing to get all spinned around about, in any event.”

  “Anyway, thank you,” Elena said. Then she turned and walked back into her room.

  The next morning, after we’d all had breakfast, I happened to glance into Elena’s room as I passed it on the way to mine. She had scattered the pages of her manuscript all about, and I could see all those heartbreaking black X’s she had cut across page after rejected page. From the look of it, nothing whatsoever had survived the deep surgery of her mind.

  Martha drew the book from its place on my shelf, returned to her seat, and opened it. “So this is it.”

  Resting on Martha’s lap, it did not seem so large. On the front there was a rather blurry representation of the American flag, further concealed under the massive lettering of the title. Sam had insisted upon this dramatic rendering and Elena had gone along reluctantly, commenting that the cover of Quality looked like the front page of a tabloid.

  “I can’t imagine beginning such an enormous project,” Martha said. “I can’t imagine coming up with the design.”

  “I don’t think Elena did that.”

  Martha looked up. “She didn’t have an outline for Quality?”

  “Not a specific one, no. I think she allowed the book to surprise her.”

  Martha looked as if she doubted me. “But nowadays, you have to have a very clear idea of what a book will be before you begin it.”

  “Which may be why so few people will read it when it’s finished.”

  Martha scowled. “I’ve never met anyone so down on modern scholarship, William.”

  I smiled. “Well, chalk it up to the grouchiness of an old man.”

  It was obvious that she intended to do no such thing. She regarded me warily. “You know, I have a suspicion that when my biography of Elena is finished, well, that you may not like it.”

  “I wouldn’t let that worry you, Martha.”

  She shifted uneasily in her chair. “Yes, but, that would be a blow, wouldn’t it, I mean for you to —”

  I raised my hand to stop her.

  Martha smiled. “Yes, you’re right.” She opened Quality to the first page, looked at me knowingly, then read the first line: “From ten miles out to sea, the land that greeted them could have looked more forbidding only had it been aflame.” She lifted her eyes toward me. “Who does that sound like to you?”

  “Jason Findley,” I said. “Elena never denied his influence, especially over the first third of the book.”

  “W
ould you say the first third was a collaboration?”

  “No. The ideas were Elena’s. But Jason guided her research initially, particularly into areas beyond literature. I think he even perceived that as his major function.”

  “Would there have been a book without him?” Martha asked bluntly.

  “Yes,” I told her, “but it might not have included such things as the story of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity or Thomas Morton’s Maypole. Jason knew thousands of such minor historical episodes, and he showered her with them.”

  “What is Elena’s?” Martha asked.

  “Everything else,” I said. “But particularly the ideas.” I leaned over and took the book from Martha’s lap, then flipped through it. “Take Dreiser, for example,” I said. “Listen to what she writes about him.” I read aloud: “‘The primary difficulty in Dreiser’s vision is that his sense of fatality lacks the complexity of a profound intelligence. At times, and particularly in Sister Carrie, it seems little more than an overly elaborate defense of the simple-minded view of that judge in Butler’s Erewhon, for whom luck is the only human quality worthy of veneration.’” I closed the book and looked at Martha. “Elena goes on from this to write an entire essay on the nature of fortuity in American letters.” I shook my head. “Under no circumstances could Jason Findley have done that.” I stopped for a moment, suddenly seized by a memory of Elena near the end of her long labor on Quality, sitting at her desk, her glasses resting on her lap as she leaned back to rub her eyes.

  Martha seemed alarmed by the sudden pause in my speech, suspecting, as she must have, that it was perhaps a subtle prelude to a stoppage of the heart. “William?”

  I closed my eyes slowly and rubbed them, just as I imagined Elena doing. When I opened them, Martha was halfway out of her seat, one hand extended toward me.

  I smiled. “I’m fine,” I said. “I was just remembering how weary Elena sometimes looked while she was writing Quality, especially toward the end. And I was also thinking how very lovely that weariness was. Do you know what she said about Melville? It could be said about her, too, you know.”