Sophie's Choice (Open Road)

by William Styron

  His identification with Wolfe was so complete that it was as if he were the writer’s alter ego—and this was excruciating to me, since like countless young men of my generation I had gone through the throes of Wolfe-worship, and I would have given all I had to spend a chummy, relaxed evening with a man like the Weasel, pumping him for fresh new anecdotes about the master, voicing phrases like “God, sir, that’s priceless!” at some marvelous yarn about the adored giant and his quirks and escapades and his three-ton manuscript. But the Weasel and I utterly failed to make contact. Among other things, he was rigorously conventional and had quickly accommodated himself to McGraw-Hill’s tidy, colorless and arch-conservative mold. By contrast, I was still very much feeling my oats, in every sense of that expression, and had to bring a facetious attitude not only to the whole idea of the editorial side of book publishing, which my fatigued eyes now saw plainly as lusterless drudgery, but to the style, customs and artifacts of the business world itself. For McGraw-Hill was, after all, in spite of its earnest literary veneer, a monstrous paradigm of American business. And so with a cold company man like the Weasel at the helm, I knew that it was not long before trouble must set in and that my days were numbered.

  One day, soon after he assumed command, the Weasel called me into his office. He had an oval, well-larded face and tiny, unfriendly, somewhat weasel-like eyes which it seemed impossible to me had gained the confidence of anyone so responsive to the nuances of physical presence as Thomas Wolfe. He beckoned me to sit down, and after uttering a few strained civilities came directly to the point, namely, my clear failure within his perspective to conform to certain aspects of the McGraw-Hill “profile.” It was the first time I had ever heard that word used other than as a description of the side view of a person’s face, and as the Weasel spoke, moving up to specifics, I grew increasingly puzzled over where I might have failed, since I was certain that good old Farrell had not spoken ill of me or my work. But it turned out that my errors were both sartorial and, tangentially at least, political.

  “I notice that you don’t wear a hat,” the Weasel said.

  “A hat?” I replied. “Why, no.” I had always been lukewarm about headgear, feeling only that hats had their place. Certainly, since leaving the Marine Corps two years before, I had never thought of hat-wearing as a compulsory matter. It was my democratic right to choose, and I had given the idea no further thought until this moment.

  “Everyone at McGraw-Hill wears a hat,” the Weasel said.

  “Everyone?” I replied.

  “Everyone,” he said flatly.

  And of course as I reflected on what he was saying, I realized that it was true: everyone did wear a hat. In the morning, in the evening and at lunchtime the elevators and hallways were bobbing seas of straws and felts, all perched on the uniformly sheared, closely cropped scalps of McGraw-Hill’s thousand regimented minions. This was at least true for men; for the women—mainly secretaries—it seemed to be optional. The Weasel’s assertion was, then, indisputably correct. What I had up until then failed to perceive, and was only at this moment perceiving, was that the wearing of hats was no mere fashion but, indeed, obligatory, as much a part of the McGraw-Hill costume as the button-down Arrow shirts and amply tailored Weber & Heilbroner flannel suits worn by everyone in the green tower, from the textbook salesmen to the anxiety-ridden editors of Solid Wastes Management. In my innocence I had not realized that I had been continually out of uniform, but even as I now grasped this fact I stirred with mingled resentment and hilarity, and did not know how to respond to the Weasel’s solemn insinuation. Quickly I found myself inquiring of the Weasel in tones as grim as his own, “May I ask in what other way I haven’t fitted the profile?”

  “I cannot dictate your newspaper-reading habits, nor do I want to,” he said, “but it is not wise for a McGraw-Hill employee to be seen with a copy of the New York Post.” He paused. “This is simply advice for your own good. Needless to say, you can read anything you care to, on your own time and in privacy. It just does not look... seemly for McGraw-Hill editors to be reading radical publications at the office.”

  “What should I be reading then?” It had been my lunchtime custom to go down to Forty-second Street and pick up the early afternoon edition of the Post along with a sandwich, both of which I would consume in my office during the hour allotted me. It was my only newspaper reading of the day. At the time I was not so much politically innocent as a political neuter, a castrato, and I read the Post not for its liberal editorials or for Max Lerner’s columns—all of which bored me—but for its breezy big-city journalistic style and its alluring reports on the haut monde, notably those of Leonard Lyons. Yet as I replied to the Weasel, I knew that I was not about to give that paper up, any more than I intended to stop by Wanamaker’s and get myself fitted for a porkpie hat. “I like the Post,” I went on with a touch of exasperation. “What do you think I should read instead?”

  “The Herald Tribune might be more appropriate,” he said in his Tennessee drawl so strangely devoid of warmth. “Or the News, even.”

  “But they’re published in the morning.”

  “Then you might try the World-Telegram. Or the Journal-American. Sensationalism is preferable to radicalism.”

  Even I knew that the Post was hardly radical and I was on the verge of saying so, but held my tongue. Poor Weasel. Cold a fish as he was, I suddenly felt a little sorry for him, realizing as I did that the snaffle he was trying to curb me with was not of his making, for something in his manner (could it have been the faintest note of apology, one Southerner reaching out to another in faltering, belated sympathy?) told me that he had no real stomach for these foolish and sordid restrictions. I also saw that at his age and position he was the true prisoner of McGraw-Hill, irrevocably committed to its pettifoggery and its mean-spirited style and its single-minded concern for pelf—a man who could never again turn back—while I, at least, had the freedom of the world spread out before me. I recall that as he pronounced that forlorn edict “Sensationalism is preferable to radicalism,” I murmured beneath my breath an almost exultant adieu: “Goodby, Weasel. Farewell, McGraw-Hill.”

  I still mourn the fact that I lacked the courage to quit on the spot. Instead, I went on a sort of slow-down strike—work-stoppage would be a more accurate term. For the next few days, although I appeared on time in the morning and left precisely at the stroke of five, the manuscripts became piled high on my desk, unread. At noontime I no longer browsed in the Post, but walked over to a newspaper stand near Times Square and bought a copy of the Daily Worker, which without ostentation—indeed, with grave casualness—I read, or tried to read, at my desk in my habitual way as I chewed at a kosher pickle and a pastrami sandwich, relishing each instant I was able to play, in this fortress of white Anglo-Saxon power, the dual role of imaginary Communist and fictive Jew. I suspect I had gone a little crazy by then, for on the last day of my employment I showed up for work wearing my old faded green Marine “pisscutter” (the kind of cap John Wayne wore in Sands of Iwo Jima) as companion headdress to my seersucker suit; and I made sure that the Weasel caught a glimpse of me in this absurd rig, just as I’m certain I contrived that same afternoon that he would catch me out in my final gesture of defection...

  One of the few tolerable features of life at McGraw-Hill had been my view from the twentieth floor—a majestic prospect of Manhattan, of monolith and minaret and spire, that never failed to revive my drugged senses with all those platitudinous yet genuine spasms of exhilaration and sweet promise that have traditionally overcome provincial American youths. Wild breezes whooshed around the McGraw-Hill parapets, and one of my favorite pastimes had been to drop a sheet of paper from the window and to watch its ecstatic tumbling flight as it sped across the rooftops, often disappearing far off into the canyons around Times Square, still tumbling and soaring. That noon, along with my Daily Worker, I had been inspired to buy a tube of plastic bubble material—the kind commonly used by children now, although then a n
ovelty on the market—and once back in my office, I had blown up half a dozen of these fragile, lovely, iridescent globes, all the while anticipating their adventure upon the wind with the greedy suspense of one at the brink of some long-denied sexual blessing. Released one by one into the smoggy abyss, they were more than I had hoped for, fulfilling every buried, infantile desire to float balloons to the uttermost boundaries of the earth. They glowed in the afternoon sunlight like the satellites of Jupiter, and were as big as basketballs. A quirky updraft sent them hurtling high over Eighth Avenue; there they remained suspended for what seemed interminable moments, and I signed with delight. Then I heard squeals and girlish laughter and saw that a gaggle of McGraw-Hill secretaries, attracted by the show, were hanging out the windows of adjoining offices. It must have been their commotion which called the Weasel’s attention to my aerial display, for I heard his voice behind me just as the girls gave a final cheer and the balloons fled frantically eastward down the garish arroyo of Forty-second Street.

  I thought the Weasel controlled his rage very well. “You’re dismissed as of this day,” he said in a strained voice. “You may pick up your final paycheck at five o’clock.”

  “Up yours, Weasel, you’re firing a man who’s going to be as famous as Thomas Wolfe.” I did not say this, I’m sure, but the words trembled so palpably on my tongue that to this day I’ve retained the impression that they were spoken. I think I merely said nothing, only watched the small man wheel about on his small feet and saunter off out of my existence. Then there was an odd sense of release that flooded through me, a physical sensation almost like comfort, as if I had removed warm stifling layers of clothes. Or to be more exact, as if I had remained immersed too long in murky depths and had struggled to surface gulping blissful drafts of fresh air.

  “A narrow escape,” said Farrell later, reinforcing my metaphor with unconscious precision. “People have been known to drown in this place. And they never even find their bodies.”

  It was long past five o’clock. I had remained late that afternoon to pack my effects, such as they were, to say goodby to one or two of the editors with whom I had struck up a mildly amiable acquaintance, to collect my last $36.50 and, finally, to bid what turned out to be a surprisingly painful and sad farewell to Farrell, who, among other things, revealed what I might have suspected all along had I really cared or had I been more observant—that he was a solitary and despondent drinker. He came into my office, wobbling a little, just as I was stuffing into my briefcase carbon copies of some of my more thoughtful manuscript reports. I had removed them from the files, feeling a rather wistful affection for my piece on Gundar Firkin, and coveting especially my musings on Kon-Tiki, about which I had the odd suspicion that they might comprise someday an interesting sheaf of literary marginalia.

  “They never even find their bodies,” Farrell repeated. “Have a little snort.” He extended toward me a glass and a pint bottle of Old Overholt rye, half full. The rye was heavily aromatic on Farrell’s breath, indeed he smelled a bit like a loaf of pumpernickel. I declined the snort, not out of any real reticence but because in those days I imbibed only cheap American beer.

  “Well, you weren’t cut out for this place anyway,” he said, tossing down a gulp of the Overholt. “This wasn’t the place for you.”

  “I had begun to realize that,” I agreed.

  “In five years you’d have been a company man. In ten years you’d have been a fossil. A fossilized old fart in his thirties. That’s what McGraw-Hill would have turned you into.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of glad to be going,” I said. “I’m going to miss the money, though. Even though it was hardly what you might call a bonanza.”

  Farrell chuckled and made a modest little burp. His face was such a long upper-lipped Irish prototype that it verged on a joke, and he exuded sadness—something intangibly rumpled, exhausted and resigned that caused me to reflect with a twinge of pain on these lonesome office drinking bouts, the twilight sessions with Yeats and Hopkins, the bleak subway commute to Ozone Park. I suddenly knew I would never see him again.

  “So you’re going to write,” he said, “so you’re going to be a writer. A fine ambition, one that I once shared myself. I hope and pray that you become one, and that you send me a copy of your first book. Where are you going when you start writing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I know I can’t stay in the dump I live in any longer. I’ve got to get out of there.”

  “Ah, how I wanted to write,” he mused. “I mean, to write poetry. Essays. A fine novel. Not a great novel, mind you—I knew I lacked the genius and the ambition for that—but a fine novel, one with a certain real elegance and style. A novel as good as, say, The Bridge of San Luis Rey or Death Comes for the Archbishop—something unpretentious but with a certain quality of near-perfection.” He paused, then said, “Oh, but somehow I got sidetracked. I think it was the long years of editorial work, especially of a rather technical nature. I got sidetracked into dealing with other people’s ideas and words rather than my own, and that’s hardly conducive to creative effort. In the long run.” Again he paused, regarding the amber dregs in his glass. “Or maybe it was this that sidetracked me,” he said ruefully. “The sauce. This one-hundred-proof goblet of dreams. Anyway, I did not become a writer. I did not become a novelist or a poet, and as for essays, I wrote only one essay in my entire life. Know what it was?”

  “No, what was it?”

  “It was for The Saturday Evening Post. A little anecdote I sent in regarding a vacation that my wife and I took in Quebec. Not worth describing. But I got two hundred dollars for it, and for several days I was the happiest writer in America. Ah, well...” A great melancholy appeared to overtake him, and his voice trailed off. “I got sidetracked,” he murmured.

  I did not know quite how to respond to his mood, which seemed perilously near grief, and could only say, as I continued to stuff things into my briefcase, “Well, I hope we can somehow keep in touch.” I knew, however, that we would not keep in touch.

  “I do too,” Farrell said. “I wish we had gotten to know each other better.” Gazing down into his glass, he fell into a silence which became so prolonged that it began to make me nervous. “I wish we had gotten to know each other better,” he repeated slowly at last. “I had often thought to ask you to come to my home out in Queens for dinner, but I always put it off. Sidetracked again. You remind me very much of my son, you know.”

  “I didn’t know you had a son,” I said with some surprise. I had heard Farrell once allude casually and wryly to his “childless state” and had simply assumed that he had not, as the phrase goes, been blessed with issue. But my curiosity had ceased there. In the McGraw-Hill atmosphere of gelid impersonality it was considered an effrontery, if not downright dirty, to express even mild interest in the private lives of others. “I thought you—” I began.

  “Oh, I had a son all right!” His voice was suddenly a cry, startling me with its mingled tone of rage and lament. The Overholt had unloosed in him all the Celtic furies with which he had consorted daily in the desolate time after five in the afternoon. He rose to his feet and wandered to the window, gazing through the twilight at the incomprehensible mirage of Manhattan, set afire by the descending sun. “Oh, I had a son!” he said again. “Edward Christian Farrell. He was just your age, he was just twenty-two, and he wanted to be a writer. He was... he was a prince with language, my son was. He had a gift that would have charmed the devil himself, and some of the letters he wrote—some of those long, knowing, funny, intelligent letters—were the loveliest that ever were written. Oh, he was a prince with the language, that boy!”

  Tears came to his eyes. For me it was a paralyzingly awkward moment, one that appears now and then throughout life, though with merciful infrequency. In grieving tones a near-stranger speaks of some beloved person in the past tense, throwing his listener into a quandary. Certainly he means the departed is dead. But hold! Mightn’t he simply have run off, victim of
amnesia, or become a fleeing culprit? Or was now pathetically languishing in a lunatic asylum, so that use of the past tense is merely sorrowfully euphemistic? When Farrell resumed talking, still offering me no clue to his son’s fate, I turned away in embarrassment and continued to sort out my belongings.

  “Maybe I could have taken it better if he hadn’t been my only kid. But Mary and I could have no more children after Eddie was born.” He stopped suddenly. “Ah, you don’t want to hear...”

  I turned back to him. “No, go ahead,” I said, “please.” He seemed to be suffering from an urgent need to talk, and since he was a kindly man whom I liked and, furthermore, one who in some fashion had indeed identified me with his son, I felt it would have been indecent for me not to encourage him to unburden himself. “Please go ahead,” I said again.

  Farrell poured himself another huge shot of rye. He had become quite drunk and his speech was a little slurred, the freckled indoor face sad and haggard in the waning light. “Oh, it’s true that a man can live out his own aspirations through the life of his child. Eddie went to Columbia, and one of the things that thrilled me was the way he took to books, his gift for words. At nineteen—nineteen, mind you—he had had a sketch published in The New Yorker, and Whit Burnett had taken a story for Story. One of the youngest contributors, I believe, in the history of the magazine. It was his eye, you see, his eye.” Farrell jabbed his forefinger at his eye. “He saw things, you understand, saw things that the rest of us don’t see and made them fresh and alive. Mark Van Doren wrote me a lovely note—the loveliest note, really—saying that Eddie had one of the greatest natural writing gifts of any student he’d ever had. Mark Van Doren, imagine! Quite a tribute, wouldn’t you say?” He eyed me as if in search for some corroboration.