Slot Attendant

by Jack Engelhard

  “All is futility and vanity… A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth endures forever.”

  One paradox follows another in the life of Ernest Hemingway. He is still America’s most famous writer and yet, most of his years were spent overseas.

  He was at war against nearly all his contemporaries, but gave time and even money to literary fledglings.

  He was synonymous with virility but in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, hero Jake Barnes can not satisfy Lady Brett Ashley. Moreover, in real life Hemingway was stricken by bouts of impotence. A visit to a Catholic church cured him and he remained a somewhat devout Catholic until the end.

  How did it all fall apart? He became depressed and paranoid. At the peak of his fame, wealth and glory, why the onset of despair? He must have known this from the wisdom of the Hebraic Midrash: “Man has no profit for all his toil under the sun, for life and fortune on this earth are transitory.”

  He complained that the FBI was tailing him. People said he was wrong. Turned out he was right. Depression and physical ailments made him increasingly incoherent and enfeebled. His doctors tried everything, including electroconvulsive therapy. Even at his worst, he was able to persuade them that he was well enough to go home, back to Ketchum, Idaho. A few days later he shot himself.

  In accepting his Nobel Prize, by letter, he wrote: “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”

  Ernest Hemingway was not afraid of writing. He was only afraid of living.

  Casino “Eye in the Sky”

  Knew You Before NSA

  WASHINGTON, June 12, 2013 ― If you get that creepy feeling that you are being watched, bet on it; you are.

  The Shadow Knows. Nationwide, casinos have known you like a brother, or Big Brother, even before the FBI or the NSA or the DOJ or the IRS snuggled up to you without even a kiss. If they did not do it earlier, casinos certainly did it better in what is chillingly known by dealers and gamblers as “The Eye in the Sky.”

  Banks of surveillance monitors are up there atop every casino in the United States watching every move you make.

  They will catch you misbehaving. They surely will catch you cheating and they won’t call you Shirley. They will pick you out of a crowd and make you cry uncle. Gambling has always been a metaphor for life – sometimes you win, mostly you lose – and casinos have always served as a microcosm for life in the real world.

  Apparently, we, that is, gamblers and non-gamblers alike, can not be trusted to behave properly unless we are being shadowed. Acts of lawlessness are rare in the casino, any casino. People know. So they are careful. Does this argue in favor for the massive snooping going on in America today?

  Heck no. Some privacy, please. We did not bargain for Sweet Land of Tyranny.

  But already we are being far more cautious in the messages we send by text, email, and by telephone. That is good and that is bad. Bad because this is America and we ought to be able to say whatever we want. We should not be like so many other countries where people have to whisper.

  We should not have language police.

  So what’s the good? Maybe it is time to bring it down a notch, all that unfiltered garbage talk that floats throughout the Internet, and maybe every idiot that has a grudge to announce against his neighbor ought to think twice, and maybe every imbecile who has nothing to say but says it anyway ought to just shut up.

  Has there ever been so much road rage in America, on and off the road? Has there ever been so much stupidity in 140 characters or less?

  Consider it a gain if the “eye in the sky” stops the next fool from seeking his or her 15 Minutes of Infamy.

  Headlines come and headlines go, but there is still nothing new under the sun. We have it from Eugene Ionesco and H. G. Wells and George Orwell and Arthur Conan Doyle who, through their fiction, saw what was coming – arbitrary and unrestrained use of power, as happened before and will happen again. Is this where we are headed?

  Franz Kafka gave us a world where first we prosecute and then hear testimony. Are we there yet?

  France’s Robespierre was sure that everybody was guilty of something (and he had a point there) hence, White Terror, in which everybody spies on somebody else. We get an especially chilling quote from him, which goes something like this, “Show me 20 words written by any man and I will find reason to hang him.”

  That is something to think about if we allow our government to get out of hand – and also, this, from Hebrew Scriptures (Mishna):

  “Know what is above you…an eye sees, an ear hears, and everything is recorded in a Book.”

  Scary.

  Me and Esther Williams

  WASHINGTON, June 7, 2013 – Right now she is probably teaching the angels how to swim. Esther Williams is dead. She left us last Thursday at the great age of 91.

  I met her many years ago and am still star struck. Bill Holland, my editor at the Burlington County Times (NJ), scanned the newsroom and found no one else around. I was the new kid. “You’ll do,” he said even before handing me the assignment. A star had come to our neighborhood to promote her swimming pool business.

  “How would you like to interview Esther Williams?” Bill asked.

  Could this be a joke?

  “There is no such person,” I protested instinctively. “She is a movie star.”

  Where I came from, movie stars were not people. They were gods. Gods cannot be approached, and some of them were so magnified that their names alone signified a mystique that was strictly and awesomely American… names like Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Elizabeth Taylor, and right there with them was Esther Williams!

  Esther Williams – goddess of the waters!

  Such divinities truly walked among us?

  “Yes, there is such a person,” said Bill, laughing, and off I went to the interview, dizzy with anticipation.

  Apparently, then, celestial beings did come down once in a while to visit the world of mortals.

  But I still thought it had to be a joke. Me? Esther Williams?

  But there she was. No longer was she the young darling that swam in all those MGM extravaganzas. But she still radiated.

  Oh brother did she radiate!

  But I still had a job to do. I was here as a reporter, for gosh sakes.

  I had a list of questions, but forget them all. My mind was zapped. I just stared at her.

  The manager of the swimming pool operation, a terribly annoying man, hovered over me, afraid of what? Was he worried that I would make a play for her? That would be logical. Was there a chance our eyes would meet, me and Esther Williams, and that the attraction would be so irresistible that, despite everything, we would link up and run off together?

  That may have entered my mind, yes. Fernando Lamas – big deal! When you are 21 you want to have every woman.

  But there would be no future for me and Esther Williams. I can’t swim.

  Finally, I came around and asked some questions – but only pertaining to the swimming pool business. Those had been my orders anyway, plus this tip-off: she was wearing a business suit. No bathing suit. Driving over, I had thought, catching Esther Williams – Esther Williams! – in a bathing suit would be as close as I’d ever get (at that time) to the entertainment divinity that is Hollywood.

  There was so much I wanted to know. But I was an absolute tenderfoot. If I asked the wrong question, might she storm off?

  Might word get back to Bill Holland, to have him say, “How dare you talk this way to a movie star?”

  Anyway, that creepy manager kept breathing down my neck. I did ask her if she was planning to do any more movies. The guy tried to intercept. “I can answer for myself, thank you,” she told him to brush him off. Offering a generous smile, she replied that yes, there will be other movies, and that I would be the first to know.

  I have been waiting.

  So now she is in heaven. But wasn’t she there all along?

  On Writing A Novel in Six Weeks

  NEW YORK, March 2
8, 2013 - Jack Kerouac told people that he wrote On the Road in three weeks. Never mind Truman Capote’s dig: “That’s not writing; it’s typing.”

  Is it possible to write a truly good or great novel in that period of time, in one non-stop flourish of heat and inspiration?

  There is a catch to Kerouac’s claim: He spent seven years on the road before he wrote On the Road, so all the material he included in the book was already distilled and waiting to pop.

  I could argue both sides. On the one hand, a novel needs to be revised and polished a thousand times before it can be declared done. The other argument is that the first bloom, the first rush of excitement, tells the real story. Writing a novel is like being in love. Enjoy the romance and don’t ask too many questions.

  Love happens and novels happen by the same inexplicable combustion.

  As a horseplayer will tell you, your first choice, follow your first instinct (there is no second instinct) is the most reliable, and when you start second-guessing yourself, you ruin the honest moment that came in a flash, a moment that will never come round again.

  Kerouac chose his speedwriting method to attain spontaneous prose. He wanted to match the improvisational rhythm of jazz and bebop.

  Conventional critics dismissed Kerouac and his fellow Beats, but today On the Road is deemed a classic.

  Back in the mid-1800s in Russia, Fyodor Dostoyevsky had no choice but to write fast. Broke and desperate, he had 26 days to produce a completed novel. If he failed, the earnings from all his works over the next decade would revert to an exploitative publisher, Stellovsky, who insisted that the work be done by November 1, 1866, and not a moment past midnight.

  Dostoyevsky met the deadline by dictating his prose to a stenographer, whom he later married, but when he presented the work at the publisher’s office, the publisher was conveniently not in. Dostoyevsky then rushed to a police station to have his manuscript certified in the nick of time. He called it Roulettenburg. We know it today as The Gambler.

  This is now a minor classic. I This writer, Dostoyevsky, had no qualms about degrading himself, and when he wrote about the harrowing days and nights at the roulette wheel in the flesh pots of Europe, he knew what he was talking about. This greatest of Russian writers, along with Tolstoy, was a gambling addict, prone to bad luck. That is partly why he’d been in debt in the first place.

  The novel is largely autobiographical. Dostoyevsky had this novel in mind years before he found himself in desperate straits. Though the writing, the sprouting, took three weeks, there were years of seeding and planting. So we cannot say the writing was fast, only the typing.

  The Gambler illustrates that really great novels proceed liberated and unafraid. They tell it uninhibited, blemished, warts and all. Even the hero can be as flawed as any villain. There are sections in the book that make the reader cringe, both for the blunt honesty of the hero and for the choppy, uneven prose. We can tell that it was rushed. But we are hooked because it is so honest and unvarnished.

  Or as Hemingway said of Dostoyevsky in general, “How can a man write so poorly and still make you feel so deeply?”

  Readers who follow these pages will recall that I confessed to having ditched a novel that wasn’t working. But what I didn’t say, for fear of the kibosh, was that the very next day I picked myself up and started all over again. I started a new novel. I finished it in six weeks. I sent it off to the publisher (typos and all) before I could change my mind.

  I knew that if I let it sit I would re-work it to perfection. No, I would rather it be imperfect – imperfect but true.

  But did I really write it in six weeks? Let’s say I typed it in six weeks and started on it at the moment of a relentless brainstorm. But to get there, it took years of gathering material, consciously and subconsciously – material that was already percolating and seething in my mind for years, even decades. Then the right moment came for it to explode onto the page. I will only say it too is about a hero obsessed by an addiction.

  On average I spend two years on a novel. Indecent Proposal took three years. By far my shortest work, the memoir Escape from Mount Moriah, took 20 years.

  This new one just burst. Is it good, bad, great? Usually it takes generations to find out.

  My enemies will surely be waiting for the result. But we also have friends.

  Don Imus to Frank Rich:

  Regrets for Butchering Broadway?

  NEW YORK, March 6, 2013 - Still after all these years my early mornings begin with coffee and Don Imus on Radio or TV. He’s still tops, especially in getting his guests to open up as if there’s no microphone picking up deep dark secrets – as he did again this morning with Frank Rich, who used to be known as the Butcher of Broadway, and for good reason.

  Rich so affably offered his confessions and condolences a second time, and that made it no tidier or prettier than the first time. Rich now sings a different Broadway melody as a writer for New York Magazine, but back then, between 1980 and 1993, he served as senior drama critic for The New York Times, and here the word “critic” is not used in vain.

  For more than a decade Broadway shuddered at what that man Rich might say next.

  A play that opened on Friday could be shut down on Saturday after Frank Rich had his final say, and in those days The New York Times was most firmly the final say. Not so anymore, as New York Post theater reviewer Michael Riedel told Imus just the other day, noting that The New York Times does not enjoy the same singular power anymore, at least on drama.

  Riedel, who has a knack for telling it good, straight and honest for the Post, is no fan of Frank Rich. He still thinks the man was too brutal.

  Here’s the kicker: Frank Rich thinks so himself.

  This morning he told Imus and that on second thought, all those plays he savaged – well, maybe they weren’t all that bad, after all.

  Now we hear this? A bit late, no?

  Actually we heard this before, and it’s still not funny, even though Rich laughs when he says something like, “Yes, I could have been wrong.”

  That is not an exact quote, but it is the gist.

  Years ago I heard Frank Rich make the same confession, accompanied by giggles and laughter. As a member of the fraternity of writers who knows how ruinous a bad review can be, I was not amused by the carefree and whimsical condolences Rich offered to the many Broadway artists who’d been destroyed by the might of his heartless pen.

  The topic came up again this morning, on Imus, because Rich has written a book, and in it, apparently, he discusses his “second thoughts.”

  Yes, on second thought, maybe those plays did not deserve to be killed, along with the people whose years of artistic work were cursed into the netherworld.

  I covered that in a book I wrote in 2007, here, where editor in chief Jay Garfield confronts his drama critic for getting to be too much like Frank Rich. I never thought those words would come back to life, or maybe I did for life has a habit of repeating itself for the good, the bad, and the vicious, like this, from page 211:

  “Yes, Frank Rich. This man had been the theater critic for The New York Times but was better known as The Butcher of Broadway. In his day he had scorched nearly every play under his withering eyes, sending thousands of writers, actors, directors, producers, stagehands and angels into the pit of eternal damnation. Most were never heard from again, so all-powerful was this executioner for The New York Times.

  “Finally (and for whatever reason) he got switched to another beat and now he could speak his mind, and so on a morning radio show – Imus, I believe it was – relaxed and entirely happy with himself, he confessed that most of these plays, on second thought, weren’t all that bad. Some were even good and maybe excellent. But he destroyed them and why? Well, because he felt like it and because he could.

  “Then, after saying all that, he laughed, never mind all the people he had ruined, and all the dreams he had dashed.”

  So once again Frank Rich gives his regards to Broadway – and still not
funny.

  Dear Writers:

  Suppose Your Novel Sucks?

  NEW YORK, February 26, 2013 - All things considered, it could have been much worse. Some writers put 10 years into a book, and only after giving it all that blood, discover that it was all in vain. I only put in a month of sweat, or thereabouts, and woke up one morning with something of an epiphany, like this: hey, this novel sucks!

  This would have been my 11th published book and my ninth novel and I had it figured from beginning to end, which is mistake number one. If you’ve got it all figured out so perfectly then surely you can never surprise yourself, and if you can’t surprise yourself, how can you expect to amaze the reader?

  A novel has to breathe and if you’ve got every scene charted out, you’re suffocating the baby.

  Besides, a novel should never be perfect. It is usually the imperfect ones that are the great ones, like James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, which is full of bad writing, but incredibly alive. Like Hemingway said of Dostoyevsky, “How can someone write so poorly and make you feel so deeply?”

  Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was full of mistakes, he thought so himself, and yet it turned out to be his preeminent triumph.

  Hemingway thought his Across the River and into the Trees would be his finest work. He was thrilled about the progress he was making. He kept reminding A.E. Hotchner that passage for passage, chapter for chapter, he had never written so well – and what happened? The book turned out to be about some grumpy old colonel, which nobody liked. (Well, some did and some do.)

  I stopped the bleeding before it was too late. Each morning when I’d start back to work on it, I found that no matter how many pages I’d written the day before, I was still on page 66. This was inexplicable and entirely weird. How can I still be on page 66 after hours of writing?