The Sunday Gentleman

Home > Other > The Sunday Gentleman > Page 24
The Sunday Gentleman Page 24

by Irving Wallace


  Friends came to the rescue. There was an opening in the Princeton University Library. Larry was recommended, and accepted for the job subject to an interview. In high spirits, he invested a fifty-dollar deposit on a modern new apartment in Lawrenceville, to be near his library, and then he had his interview. Shortly afterward, a member of the library called Larry—apologetically, to be sure—to explain that the opening was no more, because its former occupant had decided to return. In short, in his interview, Larry had talked too much.

  There was something about a possible post-office job in Philadelphia, so Larry and Nellie moved to Philadelphia. Once more, Larry bent to his books, and Nellie hovered over him, and finally he took his civil service examination. His grade was passing, but low. Jobs were given on the basis of grades received. Impatiently, Larry waited to be called. Once more, funds were needed, and Nellie went to work. This, then, became their life, Nellie, frail and fading and fearful, working, and Larry, agitated and angry and aggrieved, waiting. It was eighteen months before the Philadelphia post-office summoned him. Once more, the fateful interview. Once more, Larry talked. Once more, he remained unemployed.

  At last, in Philadelphia, reality caught up with Nellie. She came to the knowledge that dreams are for the sleeping and not the waking hours. She came to see what her life with Larry truly was, and what it could truly never be. The weight of this disenchantment, atop her own neuroses, broke her down completely.

  A friend who was with them in Philadelphia told me the next of Nellie: “The Seven Plagues of Egypt were visited on her frail and quaking little body and suffering soul. There were protracted periods of sweats, chills, insomnia, violent and alarming tachycardia. She had depression to the point of nausea. Then there was severe pyorrhea, to add to all else, or because of it, that cost one thousand dollars to repair. Inevitably, the total nervous breakdown. She was committed to the Philadelphia General Hospital. After three weeks, she was released as possibly cured. But she was still in black despair. Then followed private treatments—ten electric shock treatments—and this helped her considerably.”

  All of that was 1962, a year that ended with one more job prospect for Larry, on one more far horizon. The prospect was in Sacramento, California, and so Larry and Nellie left Philadelphia and moved to the West, and the full circle had closed for Larry. He was back where he came from, in effect, but this time not committed to a hospital.

  The job prospect in Sacramento did not work out. However, there was temporary employment, very temporary, as a salesclerk in a department store. And then, more important, there was something better. After ten years of resenting and missing his younger brother, Jack, Larry was reunited with him in the early part of 1963.

  The years had not been easy on Jack since he had fought the Veterans Administration in a Los Angeles court to keep Larry institutionalized. True, in terms of career, he had grown and become successful. While still a struggling young publicity man, he had determined to risk going into business on his own. He established a talent agency. Because of his ingenuity and drive, he had prospered enormously. But there had been difficulties. One major problem was with his wife, Susan. Another was with his own neuroses, coupled with his guilts and uneasy conscience about consenting to Larry’s lobotomy.

  For Jack, his marriage became untenable, and he and Susan drifted apart, until at last, in 1959, they were divorced. Now his guilts had become unbearable, and finally, on advice, Jack acted to make himself happier. Psychosurgery, especially lobotomy, had fallen into disrepute, and the new medical age was experimenting with, even favoring, mind-changing drugs such as LSD, mescaline, psyilocybia, and tranquilizers such as reserpine and chlorpromazine. Jack decided to undergo LSD treatments. He received nine treatments in all. As he told me, “When I went into LSD, I was filled with self-recrimination. All of Larry locked up inside me poured out. Other things poured out, too. And at the end of my treatments, I was a new person. It was the most remarkable and wonderful thing that ever happened to me.”

  Freed from tensions by his divorce and his LSD therapy, Jack Cassidy married a lovely fashion model, had a son and by her, expanded his business firm, and thus fortified, determined to see Larry for the first time in ten years. Early in 1963, Jack flew to Sacramento to face Larry and meet Nellie. He recounted the reunion to me. “I had not seen Larry in so long. I was full of apprehension. Then there he was before me, and when I saw him, the dam burst, burst wide open. We embraced and kissed, and there were tears in his eyes, and I don’t mind admitting I cried. He was so very proud of his baby brother who had made good among the film stars. He was sweet, and all the old hostility was gone.”

  Jack was thrilled at the transformation he thought he detected in Larry. “His face was cherubic and peaceful,” said Jack. “And he looked youthful. He is eleven years older than I am, but he seemed at least three or four years younger.” The several times that they saw each other, Larry was cleanshaven, and although his clothes were frayed and worn, they were immaculate. And the small apartment in which Larry and Nellie lived, while sparsely furnished, was neat and comfortable. Before returning to Los Angeles after his first visit, Jack bought the couple a television set, and also a shelf of books, since Larry had become a voracious reader again. Jack promised to find a medically oriented hypnotist, to help Nellie, and before departing, he promised to see them from time to time, to write regularly, and to assist them with money.

  Larry and Nellie still live in Sacramento. Larry devotes his days to reading fiction, favoring mysteries, and to hunting for jobs. Most recently, he was trying to become a printer or an editorial assistant. At night, Larry and Nellie sit mesmerized before the new television set, so now both have an outside social life in their own living room. Financially, they struggle along on the monthly veteran’s check, the regular checks from Burt and Jack, and the income from the occasional job.

  Larry receives no extraordinary medical attention. From time to time, he will hear from Dr. Goldsmith, who writes from Boston to inquire about Larry’s progress, mainly for the psychiatrist’s statistical records. Larry hates the psychiatrist, and rarely replies to him. Once, Larry wrote him to try to borrow money, but received no answer. Larry informed Burt, “I wrote to Dr. Goldsmith to tell him I’m now in Sacramento, and to ask him for advice on jobs. His only suggestion was that I should apply for a job as a garbage collector!”

  And so, Larry today. I asked the two men closest to him, his friend, Burt in New York, and his brother, Jack in Los Angeles, what they think of his present and his future. While Burt tends to be mildly pessimistic, and Jack mildly optimistic, both are in full agreement that Nellie has improved Larry, brought him closer to the company of men.

  According to Burt:

  “Is Larry’s progress real or specious? I can’t be certain. I am no professional (if such there be, which I purely doubt), but I’d lean toward specious. Take Nellie away from him, take away the humanizing restraints she places on him, the proprieties she insists upon, and he might lapse within a week. In my opinion, it’s all Nellie. Because I suspect his lobotomy personality is still there. She is the one who keeps it contained. She is the supporting cast that enables him to play the role I’m sure he would have enjoyed playing in New York before her time, had he been able to find someone to play opposite him. He knows what words like status and respectability mean. He likes them. He wants status and respectability, but not if he has to do anything to get them. So Nellie does the job for him.

  “Was I wrong to bring Nellie to him? I’ve come to this. It was an eye for an eye. Larry is vastly better off, and Nellie vastly worse. Have I any final judgment to pass on Dr. Goldsmith and Dr. Rogers and their lobotomy? Certainly not. As between the wretch who spent his days sweating and screaming, before the lobotomy, and the wretch who now has brought someone else down to his former level, but himself knows no pain, who can choose? Anyway, he wanted her, and she was ready to die without him. And that’s the way it is.”

  According to Jack:

/>   “Of course, today Larry’s handicaps remain, the same inability to get and hold a job, the same inability to sustain interest in anything, the same necessity to talk incessantly. Yet, in a sense, this is a story with a sort of happy ending, if it can be called that. I believe this. The life he lives would not be a meaningful or normal or happy life to you or to me. It is too limited. But for him, in relation to what he had been before, it is now better and happier than it has ever been since he became an adult. From his point of view, he has a life he can live with, thanks to Nellie.

  “As to the lobotomy to which I gave my consent in 1947—well, I’ve come a great distance since then. I’ve learned to live with my part in deciding about his life. I get along with it now…But you know, often, so often, I say to myself—maybe if we had waited, just waited a little longer…”

  PART THREE

  THE

  SUNDAY GENTLEMAN

  ABROAD

  8

  Tourist’s Bible

  Early in World War II, when Hitler assigned Hermann Goering the job of blasting Great Britain “from the map, Goering cast about for an accurate list of targets. He did not have to look far. On his bookshelves rested the one source that he trusted even more than his costly intelligence reports. He pulled down his red-covered copy of Baedeker’s London and Environs, studied it, then officially commanded the Luftwaffe to “destroy every historical building and landmark in Britain that is marked with a star in Baedeker.” Thus began the thunderous Nazi air attacks which came to be known to the English as “the Baedeker raids.”

  It was not surprising that Goering owned a set of Baedeker guidebooks. Up to the outbreak of war, over two million other persons residing in every civilized nation of the world had bought the eighty-seven different titles of the famous peacetime guidebooks published in Leipzig. Most of these readers, however, used their Baedekers for more constructive purposes.

  Unlike Goering, the mass of Baedeker owners were ordinary tourists, who reverently regarded the guidebook as their sightseeing bible. They relied upon its pioneer system of rating sights by stars to save them time in travel (Two stars, “must see,” the Louvre, the Kremlin, Niagara Falls; one star, “see, if possible,” the Jungfrau, Yale University, street scenes of Cairo; no stars, Tolstoi’s home, the Chicago stockyards, the Albert Memorial). Tourists counted upon Baedeker for capsule culture (“China’s Great Wall, completed towards the end of the 3rd century B.C. as a protection against inroads by Huns. Constructed mainly of bricks and is in a ruinous condition. No stars”). Readers drew heavily on its practical advice (In Naples, “Iron bedsteads should if possible be selected as being less infested by the enemies of repose”).

  But above all, sightseers depended almost fanatically on Baedeker’s accuracy. Their faith was mirrored, some years ago, in a German cartoon depicting a father and his family studying a castle and a waterfall. In the father’s hand, a copy of Baedeker shows the scene reversed, waterfall and then castle. And the father is complaining, “Why, this scenery is all wrong!”

  In a century and a quarter, Baedeker’s hypnotic influence over readers grew so strong that its subjects often took Baedeker’s descriptions as seriously as did the sightseers. Once, when Kaiser Wilhelm was in a critical conference with his ministers in Potsdam’s palace, the wall clock struck noon and the palace band began forming outside for its daily concert. Immediately, the Kaiser rose. “With your kind forbearance, gentlemen,” he said, “I must excuse myself now to appear in the window. You see, it says in Baedeker that at this hour I always do.”

  More recently, an innkeeper located in the Black Forest, a mile north of the main highway, was horrified to learn a new edition of Baedeker had mistakenly placed his inn a mile south of the highway. When his business began to fall off, he filled the highway with signs pointing out the right direction to his inn. But tourists ignored his signs and stuck to their Baedekers. At last, in desperation, the innkeeper uprooted his entire establishment, moved it from its position north of the highway, to a mile south, exactly where Baedeker had located it.

  Such devotion by readers, and submission by sites, to the judgment of a travel volume—the first to make a fetish of infallibility—soon made the name Baedeker an international synonym for guidebook. Nothing in the travel field, published before or since, has ever attained the renown of Baedeker—with its thirty volumes in English and fifty-seven in French and German.

  Yet, despite its historic popularity, it appeared for a time that Baedeker might not survive World War II. For Goering, by perverting the guidebook’s use, almost caused its downfall.

  The British, enraged by “the Baedeker raids” and determined to destroy Baedeker’s presses and great store of maps, retaliated. In 1943, the RAF struck at Leipzig, unloading tons of bombs on the Baedeker printing plant, reducing a century and a half of painstakingly prepared records, maps, plates to rubble.

  As if that were not enough, Baedeker was beset by an even greater menace in postwar Europe and America. While Baedeker, trying to replenish its records, trying to raise financing, wavered between continuing or quitting, the world’s tourists were suddenly bombarded by a new type of guidebook. The new guides, written or edited by Fielding, Sutton, Joseph, Ogrizek, Clark, Fodor, were, for the most, “modern”—i.e., casual, cute, wisecracking, bright. Often, facts were smothered under personal opinion and prejudice. In some, photographs and art had completely replaced scholarship. Several were insensitive to culture and history. While all strove for accuracy, and a few attained it, still, it was not the dogged, detailed, checked and rechecked Teutonic accuracy provided by the old Leipzig plant.

  That was enough for the elders of the Baedeker clan—old Hans and Dr. Dietrich Baedeker, grandsons of the founder. No one, they felt, had yet successfully replaced them. No one, they decided, had yet given their vast footsore public what it most desired. They made their decision. Baedeker bounced back into the postwar battle for the world’s sightseers.

  But still it was not easy. On resuming publication, seventy-three-year-old Hans Baedeker, because of lack of funds and backlog of material, decided to stick close to home with his first book. Working in Communist-controlled Leipzig, he obtained Russian approval for a guidebook on that city. He was forced to let the Communist mayor of Leipzig write the preface, and forced to publish it through a Communist printing plant. But he would not compromise on detail or accuracy. Because all Germans, at one time or another, had to visit the Russian Kommandatura Building, Hans plainly located the building on one of his maps. The moment Baedeker’s Leipzig was released, the Soviets saw the map and arrested Hans for committing a breach of security. He got off with his life, but had his publishing license revoked. In despair, Hans quit, and disappeared into the anonymity of the Russian zone with his brother, Dr. Dietrich Baedeker.

  But old Hans had a nephew, Karl, and Dr. Dietrich had two sons, Hans and Otto, all three dwelling outside of Leipzig. These young Baedekers, physically free of Russian restrictions, fired by the popular reception to the family’s first postwar guidebook, pledged themselves to keep the firm alive. Karl Baedeker, a handsome, forty-four-year-old army veteran, established new headquarters in the British zone, outside Hamburg, using his father-in-law’s thatch-roofed cottage for a publishing office. Young Hans set up shop in Stuttgart, while aristocratic, twenty-eight-year-old Otto went to work in London.

  Slowly, steadily, in the seven years since, the dry, factual, oddity-crammed, red-covered books, still stressing accuracy, have crowded their way back into the world’s bookstores. After Baedeker’s Leipzig came a whole series of German travel guides on Munich, Frankfurt, Northern Bavaria, and Schleswig-Holstein—and, finally breaking out of Germany, Baedeker’s London, which had first been issued in 1862, and was now republished simultaneously in Hamburg, London, and New York City.

  Although the Saturday Review detected in the Northern Bavaria guidebook, an “undercurrent of nationalism”—because the Baedekers, though never pro-Nazi, harped on the Allied bombing
s of Germany—the general reception was enthusiastic. The New York Times spoke of Baedeker’s “enviable standard of scholarship,” and the Cincinnati Enquirer admitted, “when you come right down to it, there is no more satisfactory guidebook than the Baedeker type.”

  Encouraged, the three Baedeker great-grandsons are today preparing more popular volumes on Paris, Switzerland, and Italy. But they agree even guidebook makers must have a guide. Theirs is the original Karl Baedeker, who founded the firm 126 years ago. The great-grandsons speak of him as if he were still alive, their active senior partner, as well he might be—since it is his name that continues to appear as author of the books, even though he died in 1859.

  While researching for their most recent editions, the three young Baedekers like to remember that the original Karl, one April night and morning in 1854, spent thirteen and a half hours alone in the Père Lachaise cemetery of Paris, searching out famous gravestones and noting their inscriptions and positions. The modern Baedekers like to remember, too, the old man’s honest admission, in a guide on Austria, that he could not describe a certain stretch of countryside because he had “traveled over it by night only.” Above all, they like to remember the founder’s warning, “A good guidebook is always in the making and never made.”

  Karl Baedeker the First, a printer’s son born in Essen during 1801, entered Heidelberg University at the age of sixteen to major in philosophy and history, and later, went to Berlin to study bookmaking. The most important part of his schooling, however, took place outside the classroom. Fellow students regarded Baedeker as an eccentric because he constantly wandered off on lone sightseeing hikes, during which he filled dozens of notebooks with historical facts, statistics, impressions. At twenty-six, facing the necessity of earning a livelihood, he opened a bookstore in bustling Coblenz, capital of the Rhine Province of Prussia, a city which harbored the first Rhine steamship line, already heavily used by English vacationists en route to Switzerland.

 

‹ Prev