Inventing Memory (16 page)
—Halina remembering, long after, in America.
[Halina was the protagonist of Salome Levitsky's second novel
, The Territory of Memory,
published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce in November of 1951. Ed.]
[The review that appeared in
Time,
December 1951, turns up somewhat later
in the file. I have placed it here. Ed.]
Existential Angst
Salome Levitsky
, that distaff Henry Miller, who like the latter shocked decent folk with her well-nigh-unprintable but extremely collectible—no trip to Paris was complete without it before the war—
A Bad
Girl in Paris
some years back, has now attempted seriousness with a capital S…. We preferred her as an insouciant flapper—full of
fins à
l'eau
, Pernod, and gin fizzes, making whoopee in Gay Paree. In this latest offering, Levitsky has attempted a bleak, existential look through the eyes of Holocaust survivor Halina W., a Polish-Jewish girl so doleful we might wonder why the Nazis spared her. Surely not so that she could narrate this depressing tale.
Once again, however, collectors may want this novel, because it threatens to become another
cause célèbre
. A stunning plagiarism lawsuit has been filed by Levitsky's Polish refugee-possibly-soon-to-be-exhusband, Aaron Wallinsky, who claims, among other things, that Salome stole not only his life story but his notes, drafts, and research while he was hospitalized for a chronic illness.
Surely the flapper we knew was not capable of a novel some avantgarde critics have called "the blackest chronicle to come out of postwar Europe." Written in stark, almost surreal prose that reminds some of existential poetry,
Territory
has become the most debated book of this literary season. In a pivotal scene, Miss Levitsky describes her heroine putting on coat after coat belonging to Jews who are being liquidated by firing squad. We say: The emperor has no clothes. Enough with these gloomy tendentious chronicles of Nazi atrocities! It's time for Americans to look to the future, not the past, and celebrate victory, not defeatism. Human nature is not as irredeemable as Miss Levitsky would have it. Maybe she is just missing her salad days—with plenty of champagne vinaigrette—at the Dôme! Come off it, Miss L. We liked you better as a member in good standing of flaming youth!
[The inveterate tendency of Time's lickspittle communal scribblers to diminish
anyone who, unlike them, dared to publish under her own name is obvious,
but there may also have been a political motivation behind this silly savagery:
Lev Levitsky had been called up before the House Un-American Activities
Committee and was debating whether to go to jail for principle or hire either
California attorney Martin Gang or former Nuremberg attorney O. John
Rogge and save his art collection and gallery. In Time's time-honored tradition
of brown-nosing dictators—the magazine had, after all, put Man of the Year
Hitler on its cover in 1938 and Stalin in 1939—its cultural toadies quickly
attacked anyone in any way connected to anything displeasing to J. Edgar
Hoover.
The HUAC witch hunt may, in fact, be the reason that Salome's diaries
continue from now on in mirror script of the sort used most famously by Leonardo da Vinci. Fortunately they are not in fifteenth-century Tuscan, and
Salome's fairly regular modern hand makes them legible with a pocket mirror.
Mirror writing became her habit from 1952 on. Ed.]
NOTEBOOK
4 January 1952
I thought I had reached the point where I was beyond caring about reviews, but the response to
Territory
has been shattering because it is so overtly anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and politically motivated. Of course, Howard Fast gave me a rave blurb and Edmund Wilson, Louis Untermeyer, and Lillian Hellman all went out of their way to praise the book. But even though I knew that those who attacked me (Ayn Rand, for example) were motivated by the most cynical of motives—the effort to distance themselves from me and my family and prove they were "loyal Americans," as Mr. Hoover would understand the term—it hurt like hell. To see my papa and all the intellectuals of this country groveling before John Wood, J. Parnell Thomas, and the other creeps on the committee, is nauseating. Those called up are a Who's Who of the arts: everyone who ever raised money for the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee or the Committee for the First Amendment, everyone who ever belonged to the Screen Writers Guild, every acting great from José Ferrer to John Garfield to Stella Adler—not to mention Sterling Hayden, Morris Carnovsky, and Edward G. Robinson. Artists: the Soyer brothers. Professors: Mark Van Doren. Writers: Budd Schulberg, Yip Harburg, Abe Burrows, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Dash Hammett, Howard Fast, Clifford Odets. Singers: Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, Pete Seeger…I am even nervous writing this backward!
Papa says that by now the only way to beat the committee and not go to jail is to mention a few names. He has convinced himself that if he mentions names
others
have already mentioned, he is not really being a stool pigeon.
He says that in his youth he believed in principle, but he now knows that fifty years from now no one will even
remember
the difference between Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Jr., and the rest of the Hollywood Ten—who actually
went
to prison for principle (as Howard Fast and Dash Hammett also have done)—or Elia Kazan and Sterling Hayden, who sang for their supper and got off with kudos from the committee. (Not to mention that scumbag Ronald Reagan, who, along with such right-wing worthies as Hedda Hopper and John Wayne, is busy saving the Screen Actors Guild from Communist infiltration! As if those sons—and daughters—of bitches gave a damn about anything but their billing and their bills!) Apparently all the committee wants is groveling. Groveling gets you cleared. That and payoff. There are "clearance experts" who will certify you anti-Commie for a fee. Papa has bartered a Braque I had my eye on for clearance.
Papa says that Americans have no interest in History but only in God and Free Enterprise—which they believe are the same deity.
"Having become an American myself by now," Papa says, "I see no reason to martyr myself, Mama, you, and Sally. Why? For the
illusion
of principle? Committees will come and go," he says, "but Picassos will continue to go up in value. I nearly lost your mother for politics once, and I'm not going to make the same damn mistake again."
And what about Mama? She also gave money to the Spanish Civil War relief, but apparently she used her
nom d'artiste
, and nobody has tracked her. Yet. She says: "I will support whatever he decides."
Sometimes I wonder why I don't have a marriage like theirs. They are joined at the hip, support what the other supports, never air their dirty laundry in public.
Papa says that the FBI has spent a fortune tailing him and that it's not safe to talk on the phone or send letters or telegrams. He says he never would have believed that America could be as idiotic as Czarist Russia, and he now includes Communist Russia in his denunciation.
"In Russia, Ivan the Terrible used to rule, and to mine opinion, Ivan the Terrible
still
rules. In America, it's Edgar the Terrible—oops, I didn't say that. I may have given money for Spanish Civil War relief, but once Franco won, I repented," he says, doing an imitation of all the guys who caved in to the committee. "I was never a Communist in my
heart
," he says, laughing.
"Sha, Levitsky," says Mama. "Not in front of Sally."
And what does Sally think of growing up in this terrible time? She is almost four and heavenly. So smart you could cry—because what kind of world is this for smart women? Yesterday she retold "Cinderella" for me, and in her version, Cinderella tells the prince she will marry him only if he will marry her mommy too.
"So that's what Cindar [that's how she pronounces it] says to the prince: You can't marry me unless you also marry my mommy and build her a big
liberry
."
"Thank you, darling, but when your prince comes, you don't have to take me along."
"Why not?" says Sally, boring holes in my heart with those big blue eyes. "Who will make the peanut-butter sandwiches?"
(Later) Aaron, with his phony lawsuits, doesn't scare me—but Ethan still does. I'm always afraid he'll come back, and then what will I do? I continue to dream about him. In my dreams, he is always about to make love to me and we are desperately searching for a place where we can be alone together. There are people everywhere! From room to room to room we go, through the Museum of Natural History (with its dioramas of elephants, gazelles, and jackals), through Madame Tussaud's (with its famous waxen murderers), through the Victoria and Albert (with its rooms of costumes), but nowhere can we find a place to lie down.
The dream continues, rambling through all these exhibition halls. I am hot and wet and longing to take him in my arms, starving for his hot stiffness. People are everywhere, waiting to trap us. Then we have found a private place and are ready to shelter each other, and suddenly I awake full of a painful yearning. Damn.
Damn
. DAMN. Then I always want to call him in real life, but I don't know his telephone number. I don't
want
to know it either—too tempting. How is it I can still have fantasies about a man I despise? Would I sleep with Hitler? With Ronald Reagan?
[Pasted into the mirror notebook is a yellowed clipping from the gossip column
in
Hollywood Life,
probably dating from 1951 or 1952—the date has been
cut off—and demonstrating the temper of the times. Ed.]
Commie Crummies Foiled in Attempt
to Put Red Noose Around Film Industry
The shameful and sickening story of how
Moscow
extended its tentacles into Hollywood's film industry in order to sell America down the river is finally being exposed. Dead set on cleaning out Communism in our country, the fearless Washington House Committee on UnAmerican Activities is bracing for its biggest sweep ever. Forget
José
Ferrer, Judy Holliday, Johnny Garfield
, and the
"Hollywood Unfriendly Ten"
(now cooling their heels in federal prison for contempt of Congress).
I have the proof
that others who fell victim to
commie
hokum
include:
Dashiell Hammett
, noted author and creator of the "Thin Man" stories and "Sam Spade";
Howard Duff
, alias Sam Spade; production boss at MGM
Dore Schary
, a serious schemer, and
Sam
Wanamaker
, who supported well-known fronts like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
Charlie Chaplin
, a card-carrying member of the CP,
Orson Welles, Howard Da Silva
, and of course the mythical art dealer who sells all these traitors the work of commie artists,
Lev Levitsky,
married to Hollywood portrait artist
Sophia Solomon
, whose famous semi-clad portrait of
Paulette Goddard
has been so often reproduced, scribbler
Dorothy Parker
and her husband, actor and commie symp
Alan Campbell…
[And so it goes. However absurd the tone of these columns may appear to us,
ca. 2005, they were, alas, no novelty in 1951. Ed.]
NOTEBOOK
25 March 1952
Odd how things often conspire to happen on the same date. Tomorrow is Sally's fourth birthday and I am selling the house I inherited from Sim. What a relief! Aaron gets the school in the divorce settlement. He wants it more than I do at this point. The heart went out of it with his breakdown and our divorce. At least for me it did. Aaron seems more stable now—though I am still not willing to leave Sally alone with him. Mama and Papa insist that I take the top two floors of their house on Fifty-sixth Street, since they are so often in California. With the money from the old house—the pathetic remains of the Coppley fortune—and the royalties from
Territory
, I can live for a while.
Papa spread his legs for the committee, neither took the Fifth (which they hate) nor denounced them (which they hate even more). He waved the American flag, recanted his belief in anti-Franco activities, said that he was never anti-American but some of his evil companions were. In his
heart
, he always loved Free Enterprise. (It's true, of course.) It sickened me to see him put through that and sickened me even more to see him denounce affiliations that were not considered anything but noble when he espoused them. He was saving his skin and swimming pool, so sick to death was he of having the FBI going through his garbage. But will they stop now? Who knows? It depends on China, the war in Korea—which I hardly understand—and the political opportunism of the committee.
Papa says, "Given the choice between Europe with its ovens and America with its committee, what choice is there? To mine opinion, they're all scoundrels."
Will I be that cynical at his age? I hope not.
Papa says, "Tell no one, but I have secured this family's future, whatever happens."
"Gold in the mattress? Buried treasure?" Remember I had seen what happened to the Coppley fortune. A white elephant of a house practically nobody wanted. Stocks sold at the worst moment of the Crash—and only a few shares, held almost by accident, that appreciated after the war. U.S. Steel wasn't such a bad deal unless it was sold late in 1929. (It eventually slid from 381 to 41, as Papa will never let any of us forget. It was the last time he invested in anything but art.)
"I stake my life on art," Papa says. "Art will keep us warm. It always has. It always will." And then he whispered in my ear about two safedeposit boxes—one in New York, one in Lugano—containing small but choice Picassos of the Blue and Rose periods, old master drawings, and a few other surprises.
