The Ghost Writer (6 page)
Which isn’t to suggest that Felix Abravanel lacked charm. On the contrary, the charm was like a moat so oceanic that you could not even see the great turreted and buttressed thing it had been dug to protect. You couldn’t even find the drawbridge. He was like California itself—to get there you had to take a plane. There were moments during his public lecture—this was at Chicago, my last year there—when Abravanel had to pause at the lectern, seemingly to suppress saying something off the cuff that would have been just too charming for his audience to bear. And he was right. We might have charged the stage to eat him up alive if he had been any more sly and enchanting and wise. Poor marvelous Abravanel (I mean this without satire)—even what was intended to guard the great rose window of his inner brilliance was itself so damn beautiful that the ungifted multitudes and art lovers of the world could not but find him all the more alluring. On the other hand, maybe he wanted it that way. There is obviously no simple way to be great, or so I was beginning to find out.
After the lecture I had been invited to come along to a faculty-club reception by the professor whose protégé I was. When we were able at last to break through the rings of admirers, I was introduced as the student whose story would be discussed the next morning in the class Abravanel had consented to visit. Prom the dash of imperiousness in the photographed face I had never envisioned him quite so guarded-looking, or with a head a good size and a half too small for the six-foot plank that supported it. He reminded me, amid all those who would flatter and adore him, of a radio tower with its tiny red light burning high up to warn off low-flying aircraft. He wore a five-hundred-dollar shantung suit, a burgundy silk tie, and gleaming narrow black tasseled loafers, but everything that counted, all that made for the charm and the laughs and the books and the breakdowns, was stored compactly right up there at the top—at the edge of a precipice. It was a head that the Japanese technicians, with their ingenuity for miniaturizing, might have designed, and then given over to the Jews to adorn with the rug dealer’s thinning dark hair, the guarded appraising black eyes, and a tropical bird’s curving bill. A fully Semiticized tittle transistor on top, terrific clothes down below—and still the overall impression was of somebody’s stand-in.
I thought. In the novels nothing ever seems to get by him, so how come when he’s here, he’s not? Perhaps so much assails him that he has to close down ninety percent of himself to phenomena in order not to explode. Though men again, I thought, maybe he’s just out to lunch.
Abravanel shook my hand obligingly and was about to turn away to shake another obligingly when the professor repeated my name. “Of course,” said Abravanel, “N. Zuckerman.” He had read a mimeographed copy of my story on the plane from the Coast; so had Andrea read it. “Sweetheart,” he said, “this is Zuckerman.”
Well, where to begin? Andrea had maybe only five years on me, but five years put to good use. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, she had evidently continued her education at Elizabeth Arden and Henri Bendel. As we all knew—her fame having preceded her—Andrea’s father had been a dollar-a-year man in the first Roosevelt Administration, and Mother was Carla Peterson Rumbough, the loquacious liberal congresswoman from Oregon. While still a college student she had written the first of her portraits of “Men in Power” for The Saturday Evening Post, the series eventually collected in her best-selling book. Undoubtedly (as the envious were quick enough to point out), family contacts had got her going, but clearly what encouraged those busy and powerful men to keep on talking was the proximity of Andrea herself, for Andrea was a most juicy girl. Truly, you felt that if you pressed her, you could drink a glassful of refreshing, healthy Andrea for breakfast.
At the time, she was in residence with Abravanel at his Pacific Palisades retreat, a few miles from the home of his friend and mentor, Thomas Mann. (“The grand human discord” was how Mann had perceived Abravanel’s subject in the elevating preface with which he had consecrated the German edition of Properly Scalded.) After Abravanel’s latest divorce (and rumored emotional collapse), Andrea had come to interview him for the Post series and, as transcontinental literary legend had it, had never left. Legend also had it that Abravanel was not only the first man of letters to be named a man of power in America but the first man of power to whose advances Andrea had yielded. I myself wondered if maybe Andrea wasn’t the first journalist to whose advances Abravanel had yielded. He looked more like the one who would have had to be seduced.
“How terrific finally to meet you,” Andrea said, briskly shaking my hand. The briskness of the handshake was in disarming contrast with the soft voluptuous appearance. The face was heart-shaped and gentle, but the handshake said, “Have no doubts, I am the girl who has everything.” Not that I was about to argue. I was already convinced a month before laying eyes on her, when we had exchanged letters about hotel accommodations. As student representative of the University Lecture Committee, 1 had, per her instructions, reserved a room in their two names at the Windermere, the closest the neighborhood had to a grand hotel. “Mr. Abravanel and Miss Rumbough?” the desk clerk had asked. “Are they husband and wife, sir?” This question was put to me, mind you, in March of 1953, and so when I answered with the lie that I had devised to shelter a hero from scandal—”Mrs. Abravanel is the well-known journalist; that of course is her professional name”—I was sure that the end result of Miss A. Rumbough’s bohemian daring would be my expulsion from college without a degree.
“I loved your story,” she said. “It’s so funny.”
Grimly I acknowledged the compliment tendered my wit by the bosomy girl with the heart-shaped face and the milkmaid complexion and the soldierly self-assured grip. In the meantime, having passed me on to Andrea to dispose of, Abravanel found himself being exhibited by another of our professors to a huddle of graduate students waiting shyly beside their teacher to ask the writer serious questions. “Oh, well,” I heard him say, with a light annihilating laugh, “I don’t have the time these days to think about ‘influences*—Andrea keeps me pretty much on the run.”
“Felix,” she was telling me, “is nuts about the story, too. You should have seen him on the plane. He just kept throwing back his head and laughing. Where are you going to publish it? Maybe Felix ought to talk to—” She mentioned a name. It was Knebel, but for one whose stories had appeared previously only in the college literary quarterly, the effect would have been no more stunning if she had said, “After the reception I have to get back to the hotel to interview Marshal Tito in the bar—but while I do, Felix can rise unto Heaven from the lobby and discuss your funny little mimeographed story with the author of The Brothers Karamazov. We all met in Siberia when Felix and I did the prison tour.” Somewhere behind me I heard Abravanel applying himself to another serious question from the graduate division. “Alienation? Oh,” he said, with that light laugh, “let the other guy be alienated.” Simultaneously Andrea informed me, “He’s seeing Sy tomorrow night in New York—” (Sy being Knebel, the editor for twenty years of the New York intellectual quarterly that I had been devouring for the past two).
The next day Abravanel visited our advanced-writing class, accompanied—to the surprise of those ready to live only for art—by the bold Andrea. Her luminous, shameless presence in the very front row (and her white jersey dress; and her golden hair, out of some rustic paradise) led me to recall October afternoons half a lifetime ago when I sat like a seething prisoner, practicing my penmanship at my sloping school desk while the World Series was being broadcast live to dinky radios in every gas station in America. It was then that I learned what tore at the hearts of the delinquents and the dummies who loathed the classroom and the teacher and wished the whole place would burn down.
Hands plunged into his pockets, and angled casually against the professor’s desk, Abravanel spoke of my story with oblique admiration, defending it, largely with his laugh, from criticism brought by the orthodox Forsterites that my narrator was “two-dimensional” instead of being “round” like the characters they’d read about in
Aspects of the Novel
. But that day to all carping 1 was immune.
Andrea
, I thought, whenever one of those fools said “round.”
Afterward I was invited by Abravanel for a cup of coffee at a local luncheonette, along with Andrea, my professor, and a member of the sociology department, an old friend from Abravanel’s youth who had been waiting outside the classroom door to give Abravanel a nostalgic hug (which the author managed graciously to accept even while backing away). Abravanel had extended the invitation personally (as I was to write my parents) and with what sounded for the first time like real sympathy: “They’re a rough bunch, Zuckerman. You better come along for a transfusion.” I figured he would tell me over the cup of coffee that he was taking his copy of my story to New York to show to Seymour Knebel. For a hundred reasons I was in ecstasy. When he told me to come along for my transfusion, I could not remember having myself ever felt like such a round character before. What Mann had done for him he was about to do for me. Literary history in the making. Good thing Andrea was there to get it all down for posterity.
But over his coffee Abravanel said not a word: just leaned his long demi-emaciated frame back in his chair, looking smooth and strokable as a cat in his teaching attire of soft gray flannel slacks, a light mauve pullover, and a cashmere sports coat. With hands and ankles elegantly crossed, he left it to his buoyant young companion to do the talking—lively, funny stories, mostly, about Felix’s old father, an L.A. housepainter, and the winning remarks he made to her in his homely mix of two languages. Even the sociology professor was bowled over, though from campus gossip I knew he was a dear friend of Abravanel’s litigious first wife and disapproved of the writer’s treatment of her, first in the flesh, then in fiction. Moreover, he was said to disapprove of Abravanel’s way with women generally and, on top of that, believed that a novelist of his stature oughtn’t to have articles about himself in
The Saturday Evening Post
. Yet now the sociology professor began lifting his voice so as to get Andrea to hear him. As a boy, he also had been a great fan of Felix’s father’s malapropisms, and he wanted it known. “‘That fellow,’” shouted the sociologist, imitating the elder Abravanel, “‘he ain’t here no more—poor guy committed suitcase.’” If Abravanel thought the retired housepainter was so impressive for speaking cockeyed English all-his life, he didn’t let on. So genteel and assured and courtly was the posture he’d assumed to listen to Andrea tell her stories that I found myself doubting it Out in the open, Abravanel’s cup did not spill over with sentiment for the old days in L.A.; such effusions he left to readers of his novels who had come to love the super-charged emotional world of his childhood as though it had been their own. He himself seemed to prefer to look down at us from a long way off, like a llama or a camel.
“Good luck” was what he said to me when they got up to catch the New York train—and Andrea said even less. This time, because we knew each other, she took my hand in five soft fingers, but the touch of the fairy princess seemed to mean much the same to me as the garrison handshake at the faculty-club reception. She’s forgotten, I thought, about Knebel. Or maybe she’s told Abravanel and figured he’d take care of it, and he’s forgotten. Or maybe she’s told him and he said, “Forget it.” Watching her leave the luncheonette on Abravanel’s arm—seeing her hair brush his shoulder as out on the street she rose on her toes to whisper something into his ear—I realized that they’d had other things than my story to think about when they got back to the Windermere the night before.
All of this was why, from Quahsay, I had mailed my four published stories to Lonoff. Felix Abravanel was clearly not in the market for a twenty-three-year-old son.
Just before nine, having checked the time on his watch, Lonoff drank up his last drop of brandy, which had sat thirty minutes at the bottom of the glass. He said that though he must be off, I might stay in the living room and listen to music, or, if I preferred, I could retire to his study, where I would be sleeping. Beneath the corduroy cover I would find that the study daybed was already made up with fresh linen. Blankets and an extra pillow were in the closet there, on the bottom shelf, and fresh towels were in the downstairs-bathroom cupboard—please, I mustn’t hesitate to use the striped ones, they were the least worn and best for a shower—and also in the cupboard, at the rear of the second shelf, I would find a toothbrush in its original un opened plastic case, and a small new tube of Ipana. Any questions? Was there anything else that I would need?
Thank you, this is all perfect.”
He winced when he stood—lumbago, he explained, from turning one too many sentences around that day—and said that he still had his evening’s reading. He did not do justice to a writer unless he read him on consecutive days and for no less than three hours at a sitting. Otherwise despite his notetaking and underlining, he lost touch with a book’s inner life and might as well not have begun. Sometimes, when he unavoidably had to miss a day, he would go back and begin all over again, rather than be nagged by his sense that he was wronging a serious author.
He told me all this in the same fastidious way he had described the location of the toothpaste and towels: a blunt, colloquial, pointedly ungrandiloquent Lonoff seemed to take turns with a finicky floorwalker Lonoff as official representative to the unwritten world.
“My wife considers this a grave affliction,” he added. “I don’t know how to relax. Soon she’ll be telling me to go out and have a good time.”
“Not that soon,” I said.
“It’s only as it should be,” he said, “for somebody else to think I’m a fool. But I can’t afford the luxury myself. How else am I supposed to read a book of real depth? For ‘enjoyment’? For the hell of it—to put me to sleep?” Wearily—more ready for bed, I would have thought from the tired, irascible tone, than for one hundred and eighty minutes concentrating on the inner life of a deep book by a serious author—he asked, “How else am I to conduct my life?”
