I

TALLIS

IT WAS THE day of Gandhi’s assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness.  In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the centre of the universe is here, not there.  Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself.

       ‘You’ve always been such a help,’ Bob assured me, as he made ready, not without relish, to tell the latest instalment of his history.

       But at bottom, as I knew very well and as Bob himself knew even better than I, he didn’t really want to be helped.  He liked being in a mess and, still more, he liked talking about his predicament.  The mess and its verbal dramatization made it possible for him to see himself as all the Romantic Poets rolled into one – Beddoes committing suicide, Byron committing fornication, Keats dying of Fanny Brawne, Harriet dying of Shelley.  And seeing himself as all the Romantic Poets, he could forget for a little the two prime sources of his misery – the fact that he had none of their talents and very little of their sexual potency.

       ‘We got to the point,’ he said (so tragically that it occurred to me that he would have done better as an actor than as a writer of screen plays), ‘we got to the point, Elaine and I, where we felt like … like Martin Luther.’

       ‘Martin Luther?’ I repeated in some astonishment.

       ‘You know – ich kann nicht anders.  We just couldn’t – but couldn’t – do anything but go off together to Acapulco.’

       And Gandhi, I reflected, just couldn’t do anything but resist oppression non-violently and go to prison and finally get shot.

       ‘So there it was,’ he went on.  ‘We got on a plane and flew to Acapulco.’

       ‘Finally!’

       ‘What do you mean, “finally”?’

       ‘Well, you’d been thinking about it for a long time, hadn’t you?’

       Bob looked annoyed.  But I remembered all the previous occasions when he had talked to me about the problem.  Should he or should he not make Elaine his mistress? (That was his wonderfully old-world way of putting it.)  Should he or should he not ask Miriam for a divorce?

       A divorce from the woman who in a very real sense was still what she had always been – his only love; but in another very real sense Elaine was also his only love – and would be still more so if he finally decided (and that was why he couldn’t decide) to ‘make her his mistress.’  To be or not to be – the soliloquy had gone on for the best part of two years, and if Bob could have had his way, it would have gone on for ten years longer.  He liked his messes to be chronic and mainly verbal, never so acutely carnal as to put his uncertain virility to yet another humiliating test.  But under the influence of his eloquence, of the baroque façade of a profile and prematurely snowy hair, Elaine had evidently grown tired of a merely chronic and platonic mess.  Bob was presented with an ultimatum; it was to be either Acapulco or a clean breach.

       So there he was, bound and committed to adultery no less irrevocably than Gandhi had been bound and committed to non-violence and prison and assassination, but, one may suspect, with more and deeper misgivings.  Misgivings which the event had wholly justified.  For though poor Bob didn’t actually tell me when had happened at Acapulco, the fact that Elaine was now, as he put it, ‘acting strangely’ and had been several times in the company of that unspeakable Moldavian baron, whose name I have fortunately forgotten, seemed to tell the whole ludicrous and pathetic story.  And meanwhile Miriam had not only refused to give him a divorce: she had taken the opportunity of Bob’s absence and her possession of his power of attorney to have the title to the ranch, the two cars, the four apartment houses, the corner lots at Palm Springs and all the securities transferred from his name to hers. And meanwhile he owed thirty-three thousand dollars to the Government for arrears of income tax.  But when he asked his producer for that extra two hundred and fifty dollars a week which had been as good as promised him, there was only a long and pregnant silence.

       ‘What about it, Lou?’

       Measuring his words with a solemn emphasis, Lou Lublin gave his answer.

       ‘Bob,’ he said, ‘in this Studio, at this time, not even Jesus Christ himself could get a rise.’

       The tone was friendly; but when Bob tried to insist, Lou had banged his desk and told him that he was being un-American.  That finished it.

       Bob talked on.  But what a subject, I was thinking, for a great religious painting!  Christ before Lublin, begging for a raise of only two hundred and fifty bucks a week and being turned down flat.  It would be one of Rembrandt’s favourite themes, drawn, etched, painted a score of times.  Jesus turning sadly away into the darkness of unpaid income tax, while in the golden spotlight, glittering with gems and metallic highlights, Lou in an enormous turban still chuckled triumphantly over what he had done to the Man of Sorrows.

       And then there would be Breughel’s version of the subject.  A great synoptic view of the entire Studio; a three-million-dollar musical in full production, with every technical detail faithfully reproduced; two or three thousand figures, all perfectly characterized; and in the bottom right-hand corner long search would finally reveal a Lublin, no bigger than a grasshopper, heaping contumely upon an even tinier Jesus.

       ‘But I’ve had an absolutely stunning idea for an original,’ Bob was saying with that optimistic enthusiasm which is the desperate man’s alternative to suicide.  ‘My agent’s absolutely crazy about it – thinks I ought to be able to sell it for fifty or sixty thousand.’

       He started to tell the story.

       Still thinking of Christ before Lublin, I visualized the scene as Piero would have painted it – the composition, luminously explicit, an equation in balanced voids and solids, in harmonizing and contrasting hues; the figures in adamantine repose.  Lou and his assistant producers would all be wearing those Pharaonic head-dresses, those huge inverted cones of white or coloured felt, which in Piero’s world serve the double purpose of emphasizing the solid-geometrical nature of the human body and the outlandishness of Orientals.  For all their silken softness, the folds of every garment would have the inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in porphyry, and throughout the whole we should feel the all-pervading presence of Plato’s God, for ever mathematizing chaos into the order and beauty of art.

       But from the Parthenon and the Timaeus a specious logic leads to the tyranny which, in the Republic, is held up as the ideal form of government.  In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship.  The Marxist calls himself scientific, and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet – the scientific poet – of a new mythology.  Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower.  They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard as inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favourite hypothesis, they consign to the waster-paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection.  And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered, and from morning till night a million school teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.

       ‘And after all,’ Bob was saying, ‘there’s no reason why a movie shouldn’t be a work of art.  It’s this damned commercialism …’

       He spoke with all the righteous indignation of an ungifted artist denouncing the scapegoat whom he has chosen to take the blame for the lamentable consequences of his own lack of talent.

       ‘Do you think Gandhi was interested in art?’ I asked.

       ‘Gandhi?  No, of course not.’

       ‘I think you’re right,’ I agreed.  ‘Neither in art nor in science.  And that’s why we killed him.’

       ‘We?’

       ‘Yes, we.  The intelligent, the active, the forward-looking, the believers in Order and Perfection.  Whereas Gandhi was a reactionary who believed only in people. Squalid little individuals governing themselves, village by village, and worshipping the Brahman who is also Atman.  It was intolerable.  No wonder we bumped him off.’

       But even as I spoke, I was thinking that that wasn’t the whole story.  The whole story included an inconsistency, almost a betrayal.  This man who believed only in people had got himself involved in the subhuman mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be superhuman, but actually diabolic, institutions of the nation-state.  He got himself involved in these things, imagining that he could mitigate the madness and convert what was satanic in the state to something like humanity.  But nationalism and the politics of power had proved too much for him.  It is not at the centre, not from within the organization, that the saint can cure our regimented schizophrenia; it is only from without, at the periphery.  If he makes himself a part of the machine, in which the collective madness is incarnated, one or other of two things is bound to happen.  Either he remains himself, in which case the machine will use him as long as it can and, when he becomes unusable, reject or destroy him.  Or he will be transformed into the likeness of the mechanism with and against which he works, and in this case we shall see Holy Inquisitions and alliances with any tyrant prepared to guarantee ecclesiastical privileges.

       ‘Well, to get back to their disgusting commercialism,’ Bob said at last.  ‘Let me give you an example….’

       But I was thinking that the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.  Athena, the patroness of the arts, is also the goddess of scientific warfare, the heavenly Chief of every General Staff.  We killed him because, after having briefly (and fatally) played the political game, he refused any longer to go on dreaming our dreams of a national Order, a social and economic Beauty; because he tried to bring us back to the concrete and cosmic facts of real people and the inner Light.

       The headlines I had seen that morning were parables; the event they recorded, an allegory and a prophecy.  In that symbolic act, we who so longed for peace had rejected the only possible means to peace and had issued a warning to all who, in the future, might advocate any courses but those which lead inevitably to war.

       ‘Well, if you’ve finished your coffee,’ said Bob, ‘let’s go.’

       We rose and walked out into the sunshine.  Bob took my arm and squeezed it.

       ‘You’ve been enormously helpful,’ he assured me again.

       ‘I wish I could believe it, Bob.’

       ‘But it’s true, it’s true.’

       And perhaps it was true, in the sense that stirring the mess before a sympathetic public made him feel better, more like the Romantics.

       We walked on for a little in silence – past the Projection Rooms and between the Churrigueresque bungalows of the executives.  Over the entrance to the largest of them a great bronze plaque bore the inscription LOU LUBLIN PRODUCTIONS.

       ‘What about that salary raise?’ I asked.  ‘Shall we go in and have another shot at it.’

       Bob uttered a rueful little laugh, and there was another silence.  When at last he spoke, it was in a pensive tone.

       ‘Too bad about old Gandhi,’ he said.  ‘I suppose his great secret was not wanting anything for himself.’

       ‘Yes, I suppose that was one of the secrets.’

       ‘I wish to God I didn’t want things so much.’

       ‘Same here,’ I fervently concurred.

       ‘And when you finally get what you want, it’s never what you thought it was going to be.’

       Bob sighed and relapsed into silence.  He was thinking, no doubt, of Acapulco, of the horrible necessity of passing from the chronic to the acute, from the vaguely verbal to the all too definitely and concretely carnal.

       We emerged from the street of executive bungalows, crossed a parking lot and entered a canyon between towering sound stages.  A tractor passed, pulling a low trailer, on which was the bottom half of the west door of a thirteenth-century Italian cathedral.

       ‘That’s for “Catherine of Siena.”’

       ‘What’s that?’

       ‘Hedda Boddy’s new picture.  I worked on the script two years ago.  Then they gave it to Streicher.  And after that it was rewritten by the O’Toole-Menendez-Boguslavsky team.  It’s lousy.’

       Another trailer rattled past with the upper half of the cathedral door and a pulpit by Niccolò Pisano.

       ‘When you come to think of it,’ I said, ‘she’s very like Gandhi in some ways.’

       ‘Who?  Hedda?’

       ‘No, Catherine.’

       ‘Oh, I see.  I thought you were talking about the loincloth.’

       ‘I was talking about saints in politics,’ I said.  ‘They didn’t actually lynch her, of course; but that was only because she died too young.  The consequences of her politics hadn’t had time to show up.  Do you go into all that in the script?’

       Bob shook his head.

       ‘Too depressing,’ he said.  ‘The public likes its stars to be successful.  Besides, how can you talk about church politics?  It would certainly be anti-Catholic and might easily become un-American.  No, we play safe – concentrate on the boy she dictated her letters to.  He’s wildly in love – but it’s all sublimated and spiritual, and after she’s dead he goes into a hermitage and prays in front of her picture.  And then there’s the other boy who actually made passes at her.  It’s mentioned in her letters.  We play that for all it’s worth.  They’re still hoping to be able to sign up Humphrey …’

       A loud tooting made us both jump.

       ‘Look out!’

       Bob caught my arm and pulled me back.  From the courtyard in the rear of the Story Department a two-ton truck emerged into the roadway.

       ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going?’ shouted the driver as he passed.

       ‘Idiot!’ Bob yelled back; then, turning to me, ‘Do you see what it’s loaded with?’ he asked.  ‘Scripts.’  He shook his head.  ‘Taking them to the incinerator.  Which is where they belong.  A million dollars’ worth of literature.’

       He laughed with melodramatic bitterness.

       Twenty yards up the road, the truck swung sharply to the right.  Its speed must have been excessive; centrifugally propelled, half a dozen on the topmost scripts spilled out into the road.  Like prisoners of the Inquisition, I thought, making a miraculous escape on the way to the stake.

       ‘The man can’t drive,’ Bob was grumbling.  ‘One of these days he’ll kill somebody.’

       ‘But meanwhile let’s see who’s been saved.’

       I picked up the nearest of the scripts.

       ‘“A Miss is as good as a Male,” Screenplay by Albertine Krebs!’  Bob remembered it.  It stank.

       ‘Well, what about “Amanda”?’  I turned over the pages.  ‘It must have been a musical.  Here’s some poetry:

                                                     ‘Amelia needs a meal,

                                                                   But Amanda needs a man….’

       Bob wouldn’t let me go on.

       ‘Don’t, don’t!  It made four and a half million during the Battle of the Bulge.’

       I dropped ‘Amanda’ and picked up another of the spread-eagled volumes.  This one, I noticed, was bound in green, not in the Studio’s standard crimson.

       ‘“Ape and Essence,”’ I read aloud from the hand-lettered front cover.

       ‘“Ape and Essence”?’ Bob repeated in some surprise.  I turned the flyleaf.

       ‘“An original Treatment by William Tallis, Cottonwood Ranch, Murcia, California.”  And here’s a note in pencil.  “Rejection slip sent 11-6-41.  No self-addressed envelope.  For the Incinerator” – twice underlined.’

       ‘They get thousands of these things,’ Bob explained.

       Meanwhile I was looking into the body of the script.

       ‘More poetry.’

       ‘Christ!’ said Bob in a tone of disgust.

       ‘“Surely it’s obvious,”’ I began reading:

       ‘Surely it’s obvious.

        Doesn’t every schoolboy know it?

        Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s.

        Papio’s procurer, bursar to baboons,

        Reason comes running, eager to ratify;

        Comes, a catch-fart with Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;

        Comes, a pimp for Prussia, with Hegel’s patent history;

        Comes, with Medicine to administer the Ape-King’s aphrodisiac;

        Comes, rhyming and with Rhetoric, to write his orations;

        Comes with the Calculus to aim his rockets

        Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;  

        Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate

        Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit.’

       There was a silence.  We looked at one another questioningly.

       ‘What do you think of it?’ Bob said at last.

       I shrugged my shoulders.  I really didn’t know.

       ‘Anyhow, don’t throw it away,’ he went on.  ‘I want to see what the rest is like.’

       We resumed our walk, turned a final corner, and there, a Franciscan convent among palm trees, was the Writers’ Building.

       ‘Tallis,’ Bob was saying to himself, as we entered, ‘William Tallis …’ He shook his head.  ‘Never heard of him.  And anyhow, where’s Murcia?’

       The following Sunday we knew the answer – knew it not merely in theory and on the map, but experimentally, by going there, at eighty miles an hour, in Bob’s (or rather Miriam’s) Buick convertible.  Murcia, California, was two red gasoline pumps and a very small grocery store on the south-western fringe of the Mojave desert.

       The long drought had broken two days before.  The sky was still overcast and a cold wind blew steadily from the west.  Ghostly under their roof of slate-coloured cloud, the San Gabriel mountains were white with new fallen snow.  But to the north, far out in the desert, the sun was shining in a long narrow strip of golden light.  All around us were the soft rich greys and silvers, the pale golds and russets of the desert vegetation – sage-brush, burro-brush, bunch-grass, and buckwheat, with here and there a strangely gesticulating Joshua-tree, rough-barked, or furred with dry prickles, and tufted at the end of its many-elbowed arms with thick clusters of green metallic spikes.

       An old deaf man, at whom we had to shout our questions, at last understood what we were talking about.  Cottonwood Ranch – of course he knew it.  Take that dirt road there; drive south for a mile; then turn west, follow the irrigation ditch for another three-quarters of a mile, and there it was.  The old man wanted to tell us much more about the place; but Bob was too impatient to listen.  He threw the car into gear and we were off.

       Along the irrigation ditch the cottonwoods and willows were aliens, clinging precariously, in the midst of those tough ascetic lives in the desert, to another, easier, more voluptuous mode of being.  They were leafless now, the mere skeletons of trees, white against the sky; but one could imagine how intense, under the fierce clear sun, would be the emerald of their young leaves three months from now.

       The car, which was being driven much too fast, crashed heavily into an unexpected dip.  Bob swore.

       ‘Why any man in his senses should choose to live at the end of a road like this, I can’t imagine.’

       ‘Perhaps he takes it a little more slowly,’ I ventured to suggest.

       Bob did not deign so much as to glance at me.  The car rattled on at undiminished speed.  I tried to concentrate on the view.

       Out there, on the floor of the desert, there had been a noiseless but almost explosive transformation.  The clouds had shifted and the sun was now shining on the nearest of those abrupt and jagged buttes, which rose so inexplicably, like islands out of the enormous plain.  A moment before they had been black and dead.  Now suddenly they had come to life; between a shadowed foreground and a background of cloudy darkness they shone as if with their own incandescence.

       I touched Bob’s arm and pointed.

       ‘Now do you understand why Tallis chooses to live at the end of this road?’

       He took a quick look, swerved round a fallen Joshua-tree, looked again for a fraction of a second and brought his eyes back to the road.

       ‘It reminds me of that etching by Goya – you know the one.  The woman riding a stallion, and the animal’s turning its head and has her dress between its teeth – trying to pull her down, trying to tear the clothes off her.  And she’s laughing like a maniac in a frenzy of pleasure.  And in the background there’s a plain, with buttes sticking out of it, just like here.  Only if you look carefully at Goya’s buttes, you see that they’re really crouching animals, half rats, half lizards – as big as mountains.  I bought a reproduction of it for Elaine.’

       But Elaine, I reflected in the ensuing silence, hadn’t taken the hint.  She had allowed the stallion to drag her to the ground; she had lain there, laughing and laughing, uncontrollably, while the big teeth ripped at her bodice, tore the skirt to shreds, grazing the soft skin beneath with a fearful but delicious threat, with the tingling imminence of pain.  And then, at Acapulco, those huge rat-lizards had stirred out of their stony sleep, and suddenly poor old Bob had found himself surrounded, not by deliciously swooning Graces, not by the laughing troop of rosy-bottomed Cupids, but by monsters.

       But meanwhile we had reached our destination.  Between the trees along the ditch I saw a white frame-house under an enormous cottonwood, with a windmill to one side of it, a corrugated iron barn to the other.  The gate was closed.  Bob stopped the car and we got out.  A white board had been nailed to the gatepost.  On it an unskilled hand had painted a long inscription in vermillion.

                                                     The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,

                                                                           The prurient ape’s defiling touch:

                                                                  And do you like the human race?

                                                                           No, not much.

THIS MEANS YOU, KEEP OUT

       ‘Well, we’ve evidently come to the right place,’ I said.

       Bob nodded.  We opened the gate, walked across a wide expanse of beaten earth and knocked at the door of the house.  It was opened almost immediately by a stout elderly woman in spectacles, wearing a flowered blue cotton dress and a very old red jacket.  She gave us a friendly smile.

       ‘Car broken down?’ she inquired.

       We shook our heads and Bob explained that we had come to see Mr. Tallis.

       ‘Mr. Tallis.’

       The smile faded from her face; she looked grave and shook her head.  ‘Didn’t you know?’ she said.  ‘Mr. Tallis passed on six weeks ago.’

       ‘Do you mean, he’s dead?’

       ‘Passed on,’ she insisted, then launched out into her story.

       Mr. Tallis had rented the house for a year.  She and her husband went to live in the little old cabin behind the barn.  It only had an outside toilet, but they had been used to that back in North Dakota, and luckily it had been a warm winter.  Anyhow, they were glad of the money, what with prices the way they were nowadays; and Mr. Tallis couldn’t have been pleasanter, once you understood that he liked his privacy.

       ‘I suppose it was he who put up that sign on the gate?’

       The old lady nodded and said that it was kind of cute; she meant to leave it there.

       ‘Had he been sick for a long time?’ I asked.

       ‘Not sick at all,’ she answered.  ‘Though he always did say he had heart trouble.’

       And that was why he had passed on.  In the bathroom.  She found him there one morning when she came to bring him his quart of milk and a dozen eggs from the store.  Stone cold.  He must have lain there all night.  She had never had such a shock in all her life.  And then what a commotion on account of there not being any relatives that anybody knew about!  The doctor was called and then the sheriff, and there had to be a court order before the poor man could even be buried, much less embalmed.  And then all the books and papers and clothes had to be packed up and seals put on the boxes, and everything stored somewhere in Los Angeles, just in case there should be an heir somewhere.  Well, now she and her husband were back in the house, and she felt rather badly about it, because poor Mr. Tallis still had four months of his lease to run and he’d paid everything in advance.  But of course in one way she was thankful, now that the rain and snow had come at last – on account of the toilet being inside the house, not outside, like when they were living in the cabin.

       She paused for breath.  Bob and I exchanged glances.

       ‘Well, in the circumstances,’ I said, ‘I think we’d better be going.’

       But the old lady wouldn’t hear of it.

       ‘Come in,’ she insisted, ‘come in.’

       We hesitated; then, accepting her invitation, followed her through a tiny entrance lobby into the living room.  An oil stove was burning in a corner of the room; the air was hot and an almost tangible smell of friend food and diapers filled the house.  A little old man like a leprechaun was seated in a rocking-chair near the window, reading the Sunday comics.  Near him a pale, preoccupied-looking young girl – she couldn’t have been more than seventeen – was holding a baby in one arm and, with the other hand, buttoning her pink blouse.  The child belched; a bubble of milk appeared at the corner of its mouth.  The young mother left the final button undone and tenderly wiped the pouting lips.  Through the open door of another room came the sound of a fresh soprano voice singing, ‘Now is the Hour,’ to the accompaniment of a guitar.

       ‘This is my husband,’ said the old lady.  ‘Mr. Coulton.’

       ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the leprechaun, without looking up from his comics.

       ‘And this is our granddaughter, Katie.  She got married last year.’

       ‘So I see,’ said Bob.  He bowed to the girl and gave her one of those fascinating smiles for which he was so famous.

       Katie looked at him as though he were merely a piece of furniture; then, fastening that final button, she turned without a word and started to climb the steep stairs that led to the upper floor.

       ‘And these,’ Mr. Coulton went on, indicating Bob and myself, ‘are two friends of Mr. Tallis.’

       We had to explain that we weren’t precisely friends.  All we knew of Mr. Tallis was his work; but that had interested us so much that we had come here hoping to make his acquaintance – only to learn the tragic news of his death.

       Mr. Coulton looked up from his paper.

       ‘Sixty-six,’ he said.  ‘That’s all he was.  I’m seventy-two myself.  Seventy-two last October.’

       He uttered the triumphant little laugh of one who has scored a victory, then returned to Flash Gordon – Flash the invulnerable, Flash the immortal, Flash the perpetual knight-errant to girls, not as they lamentably are, but as the idealists of the brassiere industry proclaim that they ought to be.

       ‘I happened to see what Mr. Tallis had sent in to our Studio,’ said Bob.

       Again the leprechaun looked up.

       ‘You’re in the movies?’ he inquired.

       Bob admitted that he was.

       In the next room the music broke off suddenly in the middle of a phrase.

       ‘One of those big shots?’ Mr. Coulton inquired.

       With the most charming false modesty, Bob assured him that he was only a writer who occasionally dabbled in directing.

       The leprechaun nodded slowly.

       ‘I see in the paper where that guy Goldwyn says all the big shots got to take a fifty per cent. cut in their salary.’

       His eyes twinkled gleefully, once again he uttered his triumphant little laugh.  Then, abruptly disinteresting himself from reality, he returned to his myths.

       Christ before Lublin!  I tried to change the painful subject by asking Mrs. Coulton whether she had known that Tallis was interested in the movies.  But as I spoke a sound of footsteps in the inner room distracted her attention.

       I turned my head.  In the doorway, dressed in a black sweater and a tartan skirt, there stood – who? Lady Hamilton at sixteen, Ninon de Lenclos when she lost her virginity to Coligny, la petite Morphilany, Anna Karenina in the schoolroom.

       ‘This is Rosie,’ said Mrs. Coulton proudly, ‘our other granddaughter.  Rosie’s studying singing,’ she confided to Bob.  ‘She wants to get into the movies.’

       ‘But how interesting!’ cried Bob enthusiastically, as he rose and shook hands with the future Lady Hamilton.

       ‘Maybe you could give her some advice,’ said the doting grandmother.

       ‘I’d be only too happy …’

       ‘Fetch another chair, Rosie.’

       The girl raised her eyelids and gave Bob a brief but intense look.  ‘Unless you don’t mind sitting in the kitchen,’ she said.

       ‘Of course not!’

       They vanished together into the inner room.  Looking out of the window, I saw that the buttes were again in shadow.  The rat-lizards had closed their eyes and were shamming dead – but only to lull their victim into a sense of false security.

       ‘It’s more than luck,’ Mrs. Coulton was saying, ‘it’s Providence.  A big shot in the movies coming here, just when Rosie needs a helping hand.’

       ‘Just when movies are going to fold up like vaudeville,’ said the leprechaun without raising his eyes from the page before him.

       ‘What makes you say those things?’

       ‘It’s not me that says them,’ the old man answered.  ‘It’s that Goldwyn guy.’

       From the kitchen came the sound of a startlingly childish laugh.  Bob was evidently making headway.  I foresaw another trip to Acapulco, with consequences even more disastrous than the first.

       Innocently the procuress, Mrs. Coulton, smiled with pleasure.

       ‘I like your friend,’ she said.  ‘Gets on well with kids.  None of that stuffed shirt business.’

       I accepted the implied rebuke without comment and asked her again if she had known that Mr. Tallis was interested in movies.

       She nodded.  Yes, he’d told her that he was sending something to one of the Studios.  He wanted to make some money.  Not for himself; for though he’d lost most of what he once had, there was still enough to live on.  No, he wanted some extra money to send to Europe.  He’d been married to a German girl, way back, before the First World War.  Then they’d been divorced and she had stayed on in Germany with the baby.  And now there wasn’t anybody left but a granddaughter.  Mr. Tallis wanted to bring her over here; but the people at Washington wouldn’t let him.  So the next best thing was to send her a lot of money so she could eat properly and finish her education.  That was why he’d written that thing for the movies.

       Her words suddenly reminded me of something in Tallis’s script – something about children in post-war Europe prostituting themselves for bars of chocolate.  The granddaughter – had she perhaps been one of those children?  ‘Ich give you Schokolade, du give me Liebe.  Understand?’  They understood only too well.  One Hershey bar now; two more afterwards.

       ‘What happened to the wife?’ I asked.  ‘And the granddaughter’s parents?’

       ‘They passed on,’ said Mr. Coulton.  ‘I guess they were Jewish, or something.’

       ‘Mind you,’ said the leprechaun suddenly, ‘I don’t have anything against Jews.  But all the same …’ He paused.  ‘Maybe Hitler wasn’t so dumb after all.’

       This time, I could see, it was to the Katzenjammer Kids that he returned.

       Another peal of childish laughter broke out in the kitchen.  Lady Hamilton at sixteen sounded as though she were about eleven.  And yet how mature, how technically perfect had been the look with which she greeted Bob!  Obviously, the most disquieting fact about Rosie was that she was simultaneously innocent and knowing, a calculating adventuress and a pig-tailed schoolgirl.

       ‘He married again,’ the old lady went on, ignoring both the giggle and the anti-semitism.  ‘Someone on the stage.  He told me the name, but I’ve forgotten it.  Anyhow, it didn’t last long.  She went off with some other fellow.  I say it served him right for going off with her when he had a wife back there in Germany.  I don’t think it’s right, all this divorcing and marrying somebody else’s husband.’

       In the ensuing silence I fabricated a whole biography for this man I had never seen.  The young New Englander of good family.  Carefully educated, but not to the point of pedantry.  Naturally gifted, but not so overwhelmingly as to make him want to exchange a life of leisure for the fatigues of professional authorship.  From Harvard he had gone on to Europe, had lived gracefully, had known the best people everywhere.  And then – in Munich, I felt sure – he had fallen in love.  I visualized the girl, wearing the German equivalent of Liberty dresses – a daughter of some successful artist or patron of the arts.  One of those almost disembodied, those as it were floating products of Wilhelmine wealth and culture; a being at once vague and intense, fascinatingly unpredictable and maddeningly idealistic, tief and German.  Tallis had fallen in love, had married, had fathered a child in spite of his wife’s frigidity, had been almost asphyxiated by the oppressive soulfulness of the domestic atmosphere.  How fresh and healthy, by comparison, had seemed the air of Paris and the personal ambience of that young Broadway actress whom he had met vacationing there.

                                                     La belle Américaine,

                                                                  Qui rend les homes fous,

                                                                  Dans deux ou trios semaines

                                                                  Partira pour Corfu.

But this one didn’t leave for Corfu – or if she did, it was in Tallis’s company.  And she wasn’t frigid, she didn’t float, she was neither vague nor intense, neither deep nor soulful, nor an art snob.  What she was, unfortunately, was a bit of a bitch.  And that bit had grown larger with the passage of the years.  By the time he divorced her, it had become the entire animal.

       Looking back from the vantage point of 1947, the Tallis of my imagination could see precisely what he had done: for the sake of a physical pleasure and the simultaneous excitement and satisfaction of an erotic imagination, he had condemned a wife and a daughter to death at the hands of maniacs, and a granddaughter to the caresses of any soldier or black marketer with a pocketful of sweetmeats or the price of a decent meal.

       Romantic fancies!  I turned to Mrs. Coulton.

       ‘Well, I wish I’d known him,’ I said.

       ‘You’d have liked him,’ she assured me.  ‘We all liked Mr. Tallis.  I’ll tell you something,’ she confided.  ‘Every time I make the trip to Lancaster for the Ladies’ Bridge Club, I go to the cemetery, just to visit with him.’

       ‘And I bet he hates it,’ said the leprechaun.

       ‘Now, Elmer,’ his wife protested.

       ‘But I heard him say it,’ Mr. Coulton insisted.  ‘Time and again.  “If I die here,” he says, “I want to be buried out in the desert.”’

       ‘He wrote as much in that script he sent to the Studio,’ I said.

       ‘He did?’  Mrs. Coulton’s tone was one of incredulity.

       ‘Yes, he even describes the grave he meant to be buried in.  All by itself, under a Joshua-tree.’

       ‘I could have told him it wasn’t legal,’ said the leprechaun.  ‘Not since the morticians lobbied that bill through the Legislature at Sacramento.  I knew a man that had to be dug up twenty years after he was buried – way out there behind the buttes.’  He waved a hand in the direction of Goya’s saurian rats.  ‘It cost his nephew three hundred dollars by the time he was all through.’

       He chuckled at the recollection.

       ‘I wouldn’t want to be buried in the desert,’ said his wife emphatically.

       ‘Why not?’

       ‘Too lonely,’ she answered.  ‘I’d hate it.’

       While I was wondering what to say next, the pale young mother came down the stairs carrying a diaper.  She stopped for a moment to look in at the kitchen.

       ‘Listen, Rosie,’ she said in a low, angry voice, ‘it’s time you did some work for a change.’

       Then she turned and walked towards the entrance lobby, where an open door revealed the modern conveniences of that indoor bathroom.

       ‘He’s got diarrhoea again,’ she said bitterly, as she passed her grandmother.

       Flushed, her eyes bright with excitement, the future Lady Hamilton emerged from the kitchen.  Behind her, in the doorway, stood the future Hamilton, busily imagining that he was going to be Lord Nelson.

       ‘Grandma,’ the girl announced, ‘Mr. Briggs thinks he can arrange for me to have a screen test.’

       The idiot!  I got up.

       ‘Time we were going, Bob,’ I said, knowing that it was already too late.

       From the half-open door of the bathroom came the squelchy sound of diapers being rinsed in the toilet bowl.

       ‘Listen!’ I whispered to Bob as we passed.

       ‘Listen to what?’ he asked.

       I shrugged my shoulders.  Ears have they, neither do they hear.

       Well, that was the nearest we ever got to Tallis in the flesh.  In what follows the reader can discover the reflection of his mind.  I print the text of ‘Ape and Essence’ as I found it, without change and without comment.