Herself

by Hortense Calisher

  As it happens, nudity doesn’t startle me, but on this occasion I felt distinctly uncomfortable, because it did seem as if no one was noticing those girls except me. In the brown light, I glanced stealthily at the audience. This particular show had started at one in the afternoon, and in the queue outside (the queue starts around ten in the morning at the Windmill) there had been a fair number of bowler hats, striped pants, and tightly rolled umbrellas—City gents, I assumed, hesitating to believe they could be from Whitehall. We had arrived at change-of-show time (the Windmill has six shows a day), and as we came down the side aisle to the stalls we had been caught up in what still lingers in my mind as the ultimate example of the triumph of English disciplinary manners over human impulse. Silently, bumbershoots hooked on wrists, hats in hand, faces rigid with noninterest, the brigade oozed forward. Not an elbow dug, no bunion was trod upon, no whiting pleaded haste to the snail, but in the end the advance guard landed, as if its muscles had unwittingly carried it there, in the choice seats in the front rows.

  Since then I’ve been to the Windmill many times: as a paying customer out front, as a hanger-on at rehearsals and canteen causerie, as an onlooker at auditions, and as a guest bidden to what surely must be the most gemütlich dress (or undress) rehearsal in show business—an every-seventh-Sunday-afternoon affair attended by a packed audience of the company’s parents and families, including small brothers and sisters, and friends.

  This afternoon, however, we are late on account of the weather, without mention of which no study of the British would be complete, and this one not true. My train, bearing me away from more intellectual weekend society in East Anglia, has been delayed an hour by an August flurry that has, among other things, dumped two feet of hailstones on Kent. We find the street door locked, and must be led, via backstage, up and up through the flights of offices, wardrobe departments, canteen and rehearsal floors that make the Windmill a peculiarly self-contained theatrical organism and give it the air of a raffish home away from home.

  We come out in the back rows of the dress circle to a view of the chorus that must have its own devotees—the kind of plunge-line perspective that a giant basketball center might have if he were ringed by an opposing team of lady pygmies in décolletage. It is interesting, but the audience, fanned out beneath and around us to the full capacity of three hundred seats, interests me more.

  The front rows of the dress circle are lined with about thirty-five photographers. This is the Camera Club, which pays a sum to charity for the privilege and regards it “as a wonderful opportunity to try out various lens systems and high-speed grain-free film stock.” Elsewhere the audience is solid with middle-aged couples who may be parents or aunts and uncles; and just in front of me is a white-haired pair of a type more often seen near the band pavilion at a watering place or on a golden-wedding tour at Torquay.

  There on the stage is Chastely Unclad, as usual, but everyone is watching the fan dance going on in front of her. As you must know, this consists of a bare girl manipulating two ostrich fans with a wingspread of at least five feet each, in such a manner that, although she and the fans are in constant motion, one never sees more than a small slice of girl. To this the Windmill has added two other girls with fans that, in flowing rhythm, cover the center girl just as her own fans rise.

  From behind me, I hear a small voice say, “Coo, isn’t the red one lovelly,” and an even smaller one answer, “I choose the pink.” Turning, I see, sitting behind me under the duennaship of their mother—their starched skirts spread, their lapped hands prim—two little girls, ages about eight and twelve.

  For the children who, as I now see, dot the audience, the time may be written off as educational: Art is present, all right, and a flicker of current events, as when the News Girls blame the scantiness of their leopard-skin panties on the credit squeeze. As for the book, there’s scarcely a leer in it, unless you count the tenor’s impassive castanet-charged singing, in the Spanish fiesta scene, of “The secret things we did (click click click) In Madrid (click click click).” There’s nothing else your daughter shouldn’t hear, really—unless you prefer yours not to pattern her metabolism on Albion’s damp version of a torch song: “I’ve taken a slow-ow burn, for a fah-ast man,” sung, with the faintest of struts, by an asbestos blonde.

  When the ballerina, executing a comic version of Giselle, enthusiastically loses her costume to the waist and carries on bravely without it, I do steal a glance at the mother behind me. Better bred than I, she stares me down. Her girls, she seems to say, are not the sort to exclaim—if they notice—that some of the empresses down there have no clothes on at all, and I remind myself that they come of a nation where once almost a whole town did not look at Godiva.

  As the afternoon wanes toward the cancan, I almost fall asleep to the innocent rustle of the girls’ candy papers and their gentle litany of “I choose the red one,” “I choose the pink.”

  In the aisle seat of the last row there is a handsome old man, nodding and smiling at the stage, whom I notice because his morning suit is exquisite and because he is the only one in his row who isn’t munching. Now that I think of it, although most London theaters have a peculiarly recognizable odor of must and dust, the air of the Windmill this afternoon smells much more nimble, if artificial. Everyone is eating candy; the house sibilates with it.

  It occurs to me that if Sir Osbert Sitwell can claim that the genius of English life is characterized in the names of its butterflies and its fruits—Beautiful Pug, Light-Feathered Rustic, Brixton Beauty, and Cambridge Veneer—there is no particular reason why I shouldn’t try a similar interpretation via British sweets, whose light-feathered names I adore. On the stage down there, four girls are doing their tap routine around that statue. Take Number One, the jolly team captain, whose teeth are not her most remarkable projection; one knows her at once—a Nuttie Crisp. Next the shy one with the coronet—a Sherbet Bonbon, I fancy, a pensioner’s dream. Rum Truffle for Number Three, a girl with a knowledgeable smirk and moiréed hair. Four does a handspring as I ponder and comes up moue-ing; there, if ever I saw one, goes a Fizzer Fruit. I leave the statue unnamed; she is nobody, she is noumenon. But before I go I cast a glance of respect at the old boy on the aisle. Whoever he is, he’s the only one I’ve ever caught looking at her.

  Outside, the weather is fine, all hail melted, and I walk home along the Embankment. The sky is suddenly weirdly beautiful with platinum cloud castles tumbled straight out of a Virginia Woolf sentence, and the sodium flares on Waterloo Bridge make the lurid river below the Thames that Turner saw. At such times in this country, in the all too sudden presence of the awe and mystery of life, one wants only to be comfy, not exacerbated as in America. And I am prepared; I take out of my purse a piece of something called Raspberry Fuzzle.

  So, fuzzling, I enter the Middle Temple, that bastion of law, where I happen to be staying, and climb the stairs. And as I pass names still worthy of Dickens’s law courts—Ponsonbys, Widgerys, Hurle-Hobbses—I remember those girls in the cage at Nottingham. They too are the law’s embodiment in this most orderly of nations: English Daphnes standing firm, perpendicular, and above all fast, in the lion’s den. But that lion must have come from somewhere else. Must have been some aggressive foreign beast not yet weaned to treacle toffee—still ravening after good red trainer. Might have been some vulgar old reprobate from the States, left over from Ringling’s. Wherever it came from, that certainly was no British lion.

  Yes, my eye is being trained to the genial reportial near-insolence which sees everything—countries, people—from the slim vantage of its own idiosyncrasy. Here I have taken cover under the comic, but daily I can see it neatly done in the highest seriousness, for “our tragic times.” A novelist must have his “authority”—cricketese for what wins his readers’ trust, and keeps their hand and eye in his. A reporter has his assurance, which he must be able to give the reader. For the few moments they are spared to jog together (and it is useful if the reader can be made
to feel that their time together is snatched from even more important matters on both sides) the reporter must give his reader the same conqueror’s sensation to be got from finishing a crossword puzzle—that for the moment the reader is on top of the subject and that if only all subjects could be as conclusively run through, he would be on top of life.

  My pen has been ruined for this, or saved from it, by being unable to make points quickly and then run. Nothing to do with length, but with the thickening of life that a novelist hopes for. The quick take is fun anywhere. Literature all the way to Shakespeare is full of them. But running also beside them is a horse of another color and rougher coat, bearing a less easy rider. Who carries the extra weight of his own fallibility in the presence of mystery, and will never concede that any subject in human life is done.

  The Reporter, trimming the article down, had inflated the title, to “Bowlers and Bumbershoots at a Piccadilly Peep-Show.” I hadn’t learned that economy yet. But I might.

  With some relief, I get on to the second piece and back to books and writers, who, steeped in commerce though we might all be, were continually scrambling to be spiritually on top of it. C. P. Snow’s recent novel The Masters had interested me, partly for reasons close to home. I was trying to find a world to write a novel in. Or to see that world, where, somewhere about me, it lay. He had one, though not as so many of the British seemed to, with a dulling sense of having been given it outright. Snow had made his own world as a writer does, in the act of seeing what is offered him roundabout. Had the stratifications of society over there helped?

  A neighbor, his editor, offers an introduction to him which I take, though fully intending, for the sake of all writers, to keep clear in my article the battered distinction between man and book. The Reporter has agreed to the piece only if it can be “tied to” a forthcoming book; luckily there is one. This is not my first encounter with what helps keep magazines transient; I had already been asked to change the weather in a story so that it might be printed at once, in another season. But I miss entirely the blunt warning that the business of writers, for business, is to be forthcoming (ten years later, with second book, an editor, bleakly looking past Parnassus to Brentano’s will say “You must remember, you’re an utter unknown at the bookstore.”) As a courtesy to The New Yorker, with whom I have a first-reading agreement, I check my plans with an editor there. The New Towns and The Windmill are passed on without comment. “Snow—do you really think he’s so important?” she says. “I don’t think he’s so important.” Now, Tippy O’Neill, an auctioneer I knew, could always raise a laugh by standing over some wildly awful antiquity—a camelbacked sofa, say—and prosing “Now this is an important piece.” When the word is used of a writer, I tend to see a sofa. “Well, I don’t know,” I say, “but sooner or later you’re going to have Jo deal with him. Maybe even in one of your long articles at the back.” (Snow later tells me that what I wrote had been the first piece over here to treat his work with more than review perspective if not length, and as a whole. The New Yorker has a much longer piece about him within a year.)

  It is odd, going down to Clare to lunch with another writer as the interviewer instead of the interviewed; I know I will not like to do it more than once, after which I would no longer be an amateur. But I am finally seeing the world by way of my own pen, as generations of pens have done, and I am almost relieved to be released of my provincial dignities … the sense of freedom, mobility within the language-world, of real dignity as a writer, that England gives me is the same as what my father has bequeathed me as a Jew; the virtue of being what I am.

  In the train, sitting next to a sweet, chatty Suffolk woman on her worried way to a hospitalized sister whose travail comes to me in bits through the dialect, gazing past her through the window, I vow not to ask Snow any of the queries which, even in my short career I knew are conventionally asked of a writer; to ask professional questions of an artist, even of another artist, was to be automatically asinine. I felt it with painters and composers, close friends or not. I suppose dentists and doctors feel it with each other. Some arcane processes are merely too simple to be intelligibly spoken of; do it smart-ass or dumb-ass, a Bottom was what you became. … “Eeeah,” says the woman, “they cut ’er from ear to ear.” Startled, I turned from the window. She is drawing a cutlass line across her diaphragm. “Eeeah. From ’ere to ’ere.”

  It was much easier than that. Snow, with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson, novelist too, biographer of Proust and at the moment member of a critic’s program on the BBC, clearly cover the scene between them, and at once flip me the proper professional tone; they ask questions of me. Mostly he does, and she, not at all the panjandrum that some female critics at home made of themselves, leaves us until lunch. Three again, we exchange tastes. If pushed to a choice, he asks, would I choose Dickens over Proust, as he would, or side with his wife? Such a juxtaposition has never occurred to me.

  I say that the division for me is more as between Dostoevski—in whose low-life depths of spirit I feel most human, and even the best of Tolstoi—in whom there always lurks for me the Kreutzer Sonata moralist and the apostrophiser of the norm. As for Dickens, I tell them that by chance only Barnaby Rudge and Little Dorrit were what I had read in childhood, in whatever the bound Harper’s editions of the 1860s on our shelves had pirated from his works. So I had escaped the Sairy Gamps, Pickwicks and all that other host who seem to be embedded like waxworks, or like Jungian archetypes, in the British childhood. Reading the rest of Dickens very late, what I prefer over his people are the great environmental passages everywhere in his books, like those on London in Great Expectations. But, if pushed—“Well then Proust. He’s no juvenile.”

  He shakes his head at both his wife and me. I scarcely know as yet that I am making a point conventionally made, often by the British themselves, on British character. Alone with Snow again, I ask after Christina Stead, whose work Randall Jarrell, and I and others, are hoping to have reprinted in the States; no, he is not familiar with it. I describe the early British praise of her, the parade of novels, her virtual disappearance from the “known” scene, adding that tracking her down some years before, I had briefly met her in London with her husband William Blake (originally Blech). Snow says ah well then, perhaps she has stopped writing; often women do once they are sexually satisfied. Neither of us blinks. Chaff?

  On the train back, my next seatmate, a burlapped woman with the foam-flecked voice and subhysterical stare of the born acquirer, reveals herself as a collector of Lord-of-the-Manor rights—which in England one may buy up as one does real estate—just returning from a successful purchase of several, which will allow her, among other things, such perks as the right to graze her sheep on a particular Village green. No, she has no sheep; she’s a Londoner. … I still think of her, after some purchase of my own. And apparently, once a reporter, these incidents flock as to some scent, for I never again find such quiddities on London trains. …

  Later that month, Snow takes me to dinner at the Jardin aux Gourmets, as it happens in the middle of my writing the article on him, not mentioned between us. That night, feeling the delicious oddity of me in forever England, I finish it. Next night, taking Angus Wilson and a friend to dinner at the Jardin, on their chancing to order the same entree as Snow and I had, I assume a host’s privilege of ordering the wine. Both my friends keep their eyes lowered as I deal with the sommelier. Deliberating, I order the same Volnay—no doubt exactly suitable, in vintage not too showy—which Snow had. Both look me in the eye; nobody says anything. But on the following night, when I turn the trick again with my friends the Gatehouses—I am leaving England and doing what women of my mother’s time called “reciprocating”—I burst out laughing and tell them. All this reportial insouciance, with its pretty predicates and conclusions linked by the quickest-to-hand copula, all this ready objectifying which I guess must be Grub street anywhere, no matter how close it seems to Parnassus—how enjoyable it is! I know I can’t maintain it i
n America. And I know I do best in my other work when humility overtakes me. “But there’s something hypnotic for me, in your air. I can make people choose their entree.”

  Doing the piece on Snow, I have made other discoveries.

  THE NOVELIST WHO MAKES his lifetime work the continuous chronicling of some closed world—one that is limited to a certain set of characters usually further confined by geographical or class milieu—has at once immense advantages of scale, unity and familiarity, if he can live up to them. If social historians are to be trusted, the actual world behind the shadow play of Barsetshire was almost as immutably fixed in its rules and as limited by congenially narrow horizons as were Trollope’s characters.

  My own opinion, which is no more likely to be confirmed than other estimates of the dead by the living, is that past eras were never quite so categorically neat as hindsight would make them. Nevertheless, in those days even so socially aware a novelist as Dickens both raised and solved his issues in terms of the sentimental situation, still sharing with his readers and characters more premises than many are likely to share securely in our time. The novelist, thus freed or healthily restricted, could preoccupy himself with human weakness in an environment already assessed, could still accept a great portion of his world as having been deeded him by a fiat for which he did not hold himself responsible.

  Since then, the world, and the novel with it, has been busy investigating its premises. Meanwhile, the pure national currents of literature have long since flowed together, until it is no longer possible to say whether the expression of our underground spiritual agonies derives from Dostoevski, Thomas Mann, or Céline, our erotic trends from Joyce, Lawrence, or Gide, or whether—as so often seems the case—present-day American writers inherit everything at once by nervously reading one another.