The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (38 page)

“Let us have a little private moment. I detest the American postprandial habit of knocking their President.”

Leslie swallowed half his brandy. He was ready now. “I have to tell you, sir, how upset I am that you should throw away your genius on the kind of hokum that Millstein churns out.”

“My dear fellow, you're very flattering. But I assure you there's no better place for my poor old ‘genius' today. Nobody wants to read my kind of novel anymore. It's passé. I've said goodby to fiction.”

“But it's only five years since
The Lifeline
was a national bestseller.”

“And only one since
Mary Bell
was a flop. With the critics, anyway. Oh, I have a following yet, I grant. There are plenty of old girls and boys who still take me to the hospital for their hysterectomies and prostates. But the trend is against me. The young don't read me. The literary establishment scorns me. It's better to quit before one is kicked out. Society is intent on becoming classless, and the novel of manners must deal with classes.”

“There still are classes! All over the world. Most of all at home.”

“Well, maybe there are. But not my kind. Oh, you know what I'm talking about, dear boy. Don't pretend you don't. I have always dealt with the great world. The top of the heap. How people climbed up and what they found when they got there. That was perfectly valid when the bright young people were ambitious for money and social position. But now they don't care about those things. They care about stopping wars and saving the environment and cleaning up ghettos. And they're right, too. When the world's going to pieces, who has time to talk about good form and good taste? What are such things but pretty little blinds to shut out starvation and mass murder? Do you know what I call the young people today? I call them the moral generation. They're the first that have ever showed a genuine social conscience.”

Leslie wondered if those bland gray eyes were laughing at him. “Even conceding all that, does it mean there's no more room for beautiful things? Must literature be confined to the politics of survival while Dana Clyde writes
Nero and Poppaea?”

“Oh, that's just a game I play. I do it for the money, of course. I confess to an incorrigible sweet tooth. I like all this.” Clyde waved an arm to take in the paneled library with its gleaming shelves of sets, the big table of glinting decanters, the softly talking, black-garbed men. “The
douceur de vivre
. I'm damned if I'll starve for a muse—or even go hungry for one. I like driving my Silver Cloud Rolls and seeing my little Boudin over the mantel in my den. I want my wife to be smartly dressed. When my children were young, I had to have them at the best schools. You don't do those things on a pittance, you know.”

“You could still write a great novel.”

Clyde's smile was glorious. “Still?”

But to Leslie the occasion was too rare and the issue of too high a seriousness for ordinary compliments. “Oh, you've written beautiful things, wonderful things—there's nobody like you. But you still haven't written your
Madame Bovary
. I may be just a lawyer, but all my life I've wanted to write novels. I can't. That's my tragedy—or my pathos, or bathos, if you will. But you can and must! And
now
is the time. Now is always the time!”

The other men had risen to join the ladies, and Clyde got up, too. In the intensity of his emotion Leslie remained seated, staring up at his client and new friend.

“It's not the time, it's far too late,” Clyde protested mildly. “And now we really must go into the other room.” Yet when Leslie rose, Clyde put out his hand to catch him and hold him back for one more moment. “I'll tell you one thing, my friend. I
could
have done it once. I could have been as good a writer as any in the world. So you see, I'm not modest. On the contrary, I'm vain indeed!” He still paused, hesitant. “All right. Tell me something, my brash young man. What would I write this great novel about?”

“Paris, of course!” Leslie stretched an arm toward the window. “Look about you. Where else do the individualists congregate: the artists, the movie stars, the maharajas, the ex-kings, the Greek shippers, the Texas tycoons, the supercrooks, the last saints? All over the globe equality in mediocrity triumphs. Even the East has succumbed to highways and supermarkets. What used to be called American vulgarity is a universal virus. America was the first victim, that's all. Paris, of course, is doomed, too. But Paris will be the last to go. There's your subject!”

“My God, it might be. It just might be.”

Leslie noted an odd gleam in his eyes, but only for a second, and then Clyde released him, after a friendly squeeze of his fingers, and sauntered across the parlor to their hostess.

***

After that night it was tacitly taken for granted that Leslie Carter should become an intimate of Dana and Xenia Clyde, or at least of the former. Xenia was a dark, small, silent, rather formidable woman to whom Clyde was ostensibly very devoted, but out of whose presence he seemed sometimes to skip with the bound of a schoolboy leaving his classroom. On the excuse of the lawsuit he lunched frequently with Leslie and took him afterward to private viewings of art shows or to galleries of museums not generally open to the public. He seemed determined to impress the younger man with the full range of his sympathy and wit, and indeed it was a rare performance. Even after the settlement of the lawsuit, premised, as Leslie had known all along it would be, upon Clyde's apology and retraction, the relationship continued.

Leslie was flattered by the great man's attentions without being overwhelmed. He understood perfectly that what Dana Clyde really wanted was a disciple. All Clyde's professed resignation at his own diminished role in the modern world was an arrant pose. Underneath he yearned, he panted, for the tributes of the young. And Leslie was perfectly willing to represent his own generation and to give Dana Clyde all the laudations that he could swallow. But on one condition: that Clyde should write the great work that Leslie could never write. For Leslie was perfectly clear now on the nature of the mission that had awaited his arrival in Paris. It was
not
, after all, to live. It was not even to write. It was to save Dana Clyde and make him compose his masterpiece.

Xenia Clyde regarded her husband's new friend with unconcealed suspicion. She had black bangs and thin, tight lips, and tiny hands that were always on the move—but her agate eyes seemed to indicate an intelligence quite the equal of Clyde's. One night at Mrs. Kenyon's she and Leslie had what was almost a row.

“I want to know what you're up to,” she began crisply.

“Do I make any mystery of it? I want your husband to go back to his real work.”

She appeared to consider this carefully. “He tells me that I should like you. That you help him.”

“Dana has charming manners.”

“He has to make up for mine. Somebody said that Dana always approaches a new acquaintance placatingly—on the presumption that he had probably, at one time or another, been insulted by his wife.”

“Do you always insult people?”

“Only when they have pretensions. What do you want Dana to do that he hasn't already done?”

“I want him to write a great novel. An immortal masterpiece.”

“You don't consider
The Lifeline
that?”

Leslie shrugged. “Then I want him to write another.”

“Why are you so sure he won't? Without your prodding?”

He glanced impatiently about the room. “Because he says he won't. And because he spends so much of his time at parties like this.”

“What about you? Don't you feed in the same trough?”

“But I'm not an artist!”

Xenia seemed mollified by this. Her countenance relaxed, and she resumed the needlework that she was never without. “Of course, you must think Dana and I are fearful snobs.”

“Not at all. I only wonder if you see the danger in the life you're leading.”

“I see what you see.” She paused to study her work with a judicious eye. “But I also see something you don't. This kind of party is not a bad compromise for Dana. Literary people drink too much and argue too much and never go to bed. He requires good food and regular hours. Social life like Mrs. Kenyon's is a kind of cordon sanitaire. It protects his genius.”

They were suddenly both aware of Dana Clyde standing behind their chairs. “It protects my genius to have a good night's sleep,” he said with an easy laugh. “Come, Xenia, it's time you took me home. I shall need all my energy for the great task that Leslie has set for me.”

“Does that mean you plan to embark on it?” she asked sharply.

“Shall I tell you both something? I just might. I really just might.” He put his long fingers on his wife's shoulders. “What would you say, my dear, if I asked you to hole up for a year in Vichy or Aix while I composed what Leslie likes to describe as the last great novel of manners of the western world?”

Leslie looked from Clyde to his silent wife. “You're making fun of me.”

“On the contrary,” Clyde retorted. “I have never been more serious. I shall retire, like Proust, into a cork-lined chamber to write my masterpiece. No more jokes, please! Do you remember, Leslie, what that delectable priest Talleyrand whispered to that fatuous ass Lafayette as he stepped forward to celebrate the revolutionary mass before the mob in the Champ de Mars?”

“What?”

“‘
Ne me faîtes pas rire.'
”

***

Dana Clyde was good to his word. He and Xenia went to Málaga, where they leased a little white house on the summit of a high hill overlooking the Mediterranean and for a year saw none but a few intimates. Leslie was not included in the latter group, although an early postcard had led him to expect an invitation. None came. There were two more cards, and then silence. He had the mortification of hearing only from others about the Clydes. Even a direct appeal remained unanswered.

Leslie at first assumed that the novel must be going badly, and that Xenia, holding him responsible for her husband's useless sacrifice and disappointment, had shut off communication with him. But then reports began to filter in that, on the contrary, the novel was going well. Xenia, apparently, was writing everyone that it would be his masterpiece. Leslie could now think of no other reason for his disgrace than that the Clydes did not care to be indebted to him for Dana's finest hour. He hated so to judge them, but no other theory seemed to fit. Disillusioned but resigned, he tried to dismiss the matter from his mind. Fortunately, a case involving the French government and the mining rights of an American company in Noumea came into the office and occupied all his time. For six months he was unable to dine out. Paris was like New York again. But at least he was distracted.

One morning, some eighteen months after the departure of the Clydes, Leslie found on his desk the galleys of
The Twilight of the Goddess
by Dana Clyde, sent air mail from New York by his publishers to be checked for libel. Leslie at once told his secretary that he would see and talk to nobody and locked his door while he read the novel at a sitting.

It was certainly Dana Clyde at his best. It was the story of the many husbands of a great American heiress: the handsome boy from next door in the early days before the fortune is made, the designing lawyer who handles the first divorce, the mortgaged Italian count, the stonyhearted French communist. With the communist the heroine moves to Paris, where she buys a vast hotel in the avenue Marigny and assembles at her international parties the world that Leslie had suggested that the author delineate. And there she meets her fifth husband, Gregory Blake, toward the end of the book.

Leslie's feelings, as he recognized the model for Gregory Blake, were not bitter. It was a relief, after all, to have solved the riddle of Clyde's silence. His involvement with the latter's “genius” needed at least the dignity of a third-act curtain. It was better to know that Clyde would not face him because he
could
not face him than to speculate that Clyde was ungrateful. It was better to have the novelist wicked than petty.

And wicked he had certainly been. He had torn his poor disciple to ribbons. The character Blake was an American lawyer in Paris, pathetically if absurdly in love with the glamour of the city's past. The old Duchesse de Foix, the heroine's social mentor, says of him: “I'm gonna wash that Proust right out of his hair.” But she can't. Gregory sees the other characters cleansed of all their tawdriness, arrayed in a glory appropriate to their wealth or tides or talents. For this reason he enjoys a passing popularity in the social world. He is a kind of panacea against revolution and taxes, against death and decay, against the gray future of a mechanized, socialized universe. It is as if by touching him they may save themselves, redeem their silly souls. The heiress, vicious but still beautiful, woos him and marries him. But Gregory is impotent. After his wedding night, he commits suicide.

Leslie finished the book by lunchtime and then reread the publisher's letter. Mr. Clyde, it informed him, was staying at the Crillon.

In the lobby of that hotel he ran into Clyde himself, but the latter hurried by him with averted eye. Leslie was not even sure that Clyde had seen him. The boy at the desk, however, informed him that Mrs. Clyde would receive him in her suite. He found her engaged, as usual, with her needlework.

“Why did he do it, Xenia? Why did he want to hurt me like that?”

“He always takes his characters from real life. You
knew
that, Leslie. Why didn't you stay away from him?”

“Oh, it's not being in the book I mind. It's not even being made such a fatuous ass. That was fair enough. But the impotence and the suicide! They seem to show actual malevolence, as if he was out to get me. Why?”