The Old Man and Me
Read The Old Man and Me Online
Authors: Elaine Dundy
ELAINE DUNDY
(1921–2008) grew up in New York City and Long Island. After graduating from Sweet Briar College in 1943 she worked as an actress in Paris and, later, London, where she met her future husband, the theater critic Kenneth Tynan. Dundy wrote three novels,
The Dud Avocado
(1958),
The Old Man and Me
(1964), and
The Injured Party
(1974); a play,
My Place
(produced in 1962); biographies of Elvis Presley and the actor Peter Finch; a study of Ferriday, Louisiana; and a memoir,
Life Itself!
The Old Man and Me
Elaine Dundy
With an introduction by the author
New York Review Books
New York
The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
At sixteen,
The Rubaiyat
ruled my life. Now at eighty-two I see it makes good poetry but bad sense. Re-reading
The Old Man and Me
forty years after its first publication, my Moving Finger has re-writ or, rather, edited my novel with, I hope, all my Piety and Wit. From today’s prospect, I was able to cancel a word or half a line throughout, understanding what I didn’t then: that in this novel, speech read is preferable to speech spoken. The latter is full of “um,” “oh” and “ah”—dead foliage that smothers the text. I eliminated most but not all of them. Some were too stubbornly embedded in the text. Words such as the all-purpose “just” that runs around this book as in “you just want to,” “just a moment,” “just in time,” “just the wrong way.” I cut some of the beginnings of sentences that use such weakening qualifications as “well” and “I’m afraid” followed by I, you, he, she, it. I cut “perfectly” and “definitely.” These, being eliminated, I felt released the core of the text to glow. I wanted the two protagonists to express themselves through exchanges that are brisk, crisp, direct and unadorned, sometimes to the point, often around it, even at times, soul to soul.
My first-person narrator, a young American girl, speaks a jumble of jargon
du jour
, college-speak, popular Madison Avenue
advertising idioms and basic black musician talk. Jazz great, Miles Davis, whom I had loosely based a character on, after he read the book, had only one comment: “Watch out for slang,” he said. “It dates fast.” I had occasion to recall that in the ’70s when a friend said the narrator’s slang was dated. Again in the ’80s, when another reader thought it was “period” (i.e., quaint). Now, in the new millennium, it is historic. The way we talked way back when we dug things, made the scene, went to Happenings and all that jazz. When the cigarette was not a prop but had a life of its own, an indicator of mood, a gesture denoting anything from seduction to boredom. Smoking round the clock was universally acceptable. In the novel, one Bright Young Thing with a long cigarette-holder smokes during the meal and nobody leaves the dining room.
Cigarettes and slang stay, I decided; dead weight vegetation goes.
Incidentally, the other protagonist, Englishman C.D. McKee, the narrator’s worthy opponent, described as “too distinguished to do anything,” speaks a brand of standard educated English which never went through the dated or period cycle but was and is historic.
My specific aim in writing this novel was to present an anti-heroine in response to all the anti-heroes so popular of the day, beginning with Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon in
Lucky Jim
, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in
Look Back in Anger
, and all the anti-heroes who followed in their wake. Loosely bound together as Angry Young Men, they hit out at everything phony, pompous, priggish, prudish, and pretentious. Their anger was exhilarating. To their delight (and to his later embarrassment), Somerset Maugham called them “scum.” Creating the female counterpart I knew would be tricky, as in those days when relationships between men and women were at an all-time low, females were depicted as passive and put-upon. (Then came the ’70s—Gloria Steinem and her
Ms
. magazine, Germaine Greer and her
Female Eunuch
, Carmen Callil and her all-female publishing house
Virago. And nothing was ever the same again.) Back in the ’60s I was aware that my anti-heroine might scare people off. But I did it anyway. And it was fun. After all, Cyril Connelly had advised me about my private life: “Make up your mind, you can either be a monster or a doormat.” I opted for the former.
My Angry Young Woman hates everything English—Soho, Mayfair, the West End, and country houses. She is a girl with a plan, with lots of opinions, operating on a short fuse. Almost everything about English people annoys her, her irritation at times boiling up to fury even as her adversary’s irony slides down into sarcasm.
But what I hope I had going for me is that Bad Girls are more interesting than Good ones. The Bible has an enchantment with them—Delilah, Bathsheba, Jezebel, Salome and then some. It does them proud. The nineteenth-century Bad Girls—Hedda Gabler, Becky Sharp and Scarlett O’Hara, whose bad girl deeds and misdeeds burst upon the world in 1936 but was yet a nineteenth-century woman—all live on in iconic glory. My narrator who plans to kill the Englishman because he has the money is thoroughly bad.
The time frame is 1962, with England not-yet-but-on-the-verge-of Swinging. London was not the Mecca for tourists it has become. It was however regrouping itself for its cultural explosion, its fashions of Carnaby Street, its playwrights’ invasion of Broadway, to say nothing of the Liverpool sound of the Beatles and the Glaswegian sound of James Bond. But in the ’60s, all good Americans skipped bombed-out London and rushed to Paris. I myself went straight from New York to Paris where I stayed happily for a while surrounded by new American friends. I didn’t have any in London and it occurs to me now that this feeling of isolation rubbed off onto the novel. Then too, America at the end of WWII was the richest country in the world, however much of its money went to rebuilding Germany and Japan, the defeated enemy, and none to brave England. Which, as my novel also reflects, didn’t make Americans very popular with the English.
Short digression—it didn’t work the other way around! The English coming to America were unequivocally ecstatic about everything in the New World and Americans, quick to return the compliment, rolled out the red carpet.
Another point: in the ’60s, publishers were giving writers the freedom to be explicit about sex—its longings, its cravings, its orgasms, its masturbations. I took advantage of this. Sexual matters combined with self-interest activate my two leading characters who, while they think they are guided by their reason, in
reality only use their logic to justify their passion.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I have also written a romance. At least according to
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable
, which decrees, “The modern application of the word ‘romance’ pertains to a story containing incidents more or less removed from the ordinary events of life.” That seems to describe my story too as the contenders fight, flee, reconnoiter, re-engage and fight on with fresh energy to the end—to justify their out-of-control passions.
—ELAINE DUNDY
2005
The Old Man and Me
Part One
There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again—leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.
I was having a drink there one sunny afternoon last year in the midst of a futile heap of hoboesques, although wait—that isn’t strictly true. I was standing there with a drink in my hand but I wasn’t drinking it. I was nursing it for dear life. Hovering over it, as we used to say at dear ole Bullsht Hall, where I was so gently schooled for four boarding-school years, and I was feeling utterly and completely demoralized—treading water and tiring fast.
The sun suddenly went out—in, that is—and the ensuing darkness tearing me from my vision of the outside world was claustrophobing me up with the Crypt and its inhabitants; ensnaring me in their knotted hair, hooking me on to their ravelled sweaters, leaving me haggard with concern for their buttonless jackets, their flapping shoes, their bent, bruised cigarettes smoked down to the nub. The Soho scene. I looked around and shuddered. I had nothing personally against these people, quite the opposite; I was most awe-fully impressed. It was simply, when I analysed it, my distress at finding myself in a room where I seemed to have more money than anyone else and this condition was especially intensified by the fact that though I was probably richer than anyone there, I was virtually broke. Not flop-house-lower-depths broke. But what I’d managed to save over the two years working on one of the better Quality Mags in New York was trickling through my hands at a terrifying rate.
And the irony was that I was in there suffering the poor only on the highly improbable off-chance of running into the very rich! I mean, precisely, C. D. McKee. For, in the entire month that I had been searching London for him, this was the only place I had heard his name even mentioned.
London had been alarming, distinctly alarming, in the way it could force me—a not unpresentable young woman—to spend one whole month in it and meet only the following people: two Portuguese (pick-ups, staying at my hotel), two Hungarians (pick-ups, not staying at my hotel) and two American boys (queer; exchange students at Oxford; on the plane coming over). The Portuguese had taken me on an excursion trip up the Thames. The Tower of London had been our original goal but when we got to the spot on the map where it was supposed to be and it wasn’t and nobody around knew anything about it, they eventually became too embarrassed to keep on asking about so large and obvious a landmark, gave up and took me on an excursion boat (there in plain sight though not on our map) in order to prevent the outing from being a complete bust.
I took the same boat up the Thames again about two weeks later with one of the American boys. I forget why. It was a Sunday, I think, and everything was closed. It was a hideous ride with warehouses and smokestacks on one side of the river and Bovril and Milk advertisements on the other but by then I wasn’t particularly in the mood to get upset about the looks of a river. It had rained almost steadily since I arrived and I thought London the ugliest city on earth. Marble Arch and Piccadilly Circus. Ugh. The dirty-green grass patch called Leicester Square surrounded by Movie Palaces, restaurant windows full of chickens revolving on their spits and the new Automobile Association Building—hardly Art Nouveau. Oxford Street. Ugh, ugh.
There had, of course, been that brief enchanted glimpse of the beautiful square at the end of which stood C. D.’s house where I arrived one morning, his address still clutched in my hand, steadied for the big confrontation scene only to be stopped dead in my tracks and swiftly brought to rout by nothing more than the sight of his butler ordering a delivery boy round to the tradesmen’s entrance.
The Hungarians took me to meet some more Hungarians in an Hungarian restaurant run by other Hungarians.
And then there were those few salty exchanges between me and various Espresso Bar attendants.
Anyway here I was back again in Soho in this terrible dive the Crypt because what had happened was that the night before one of the Americans, down from Oxford, had said, “Hey, someone gave me a list of literary pubs, did you ever? Isn’t it straight out of Shakespearian times? They’re in Soho, see, that’s where all the you know, sort of odd-ball Greenwich Villagey Left Banky off-beat In-group types”—(that was the way he talked)—“oh, artists and painters and all that jazz are supposed to hang out. So why don’t we give it a whirl, hey? Might be a fun thing.”
So I went. I had nothing better to do, had I, except recount my money and repaint my finger-nails and die of frustration?
The Crypt had been the place we’d decided to start at and it was here, at this very bar, that I overheard for the first time in England the magic Name.
“I say, Bollie, you were very smart last night. Very smart indeed. C. D. McKee, big as life! How did you manage to pull that off?”
“My dear, he came along with Alex who hates me of course but—”
“Alex? What was C. D. McKee doing with Alex?”
“Oh but McKee is
sweet
. You simply don’t understand him,” said Bollie, an enormous boy-shaped man with large sorrowful eyes and a headful of greasy curls, hermaphrodite breasts showing through his torn pullover. “I tell you he’s sweet. Not a bit frightening really. No side at all, when you get to know him. He and Alex were staying in Scotland at Perdita Gallow’s and I gather they both ended up in the Passing Out Room and then decided to motor back to London together the next day.” His voice was high and wavy and very loud and he had a delicate way of running his fingers through his greasy black ringlets as he spoke and patting them again fondly as they bounced back.
“Let’s get a drink and stay here,” I whispered to my friend. “I want to take this all in.” I pressed into the crowd that had collected around Bollie.
“Ah, the Honourable Perdita. How is she? Still mad as ever?” asked a youngish man with grey hair, his mouth twisted into an affectionate toothless grimace.
“As a hatter,” Bollie confided cosily to the whole crowd. “Alex says she came down to dinner one night all splendidly got up in lavender satin except for one breast hanging out, my dear, quite
casually.
He did wonder whether to spoon it back in. Not that she was in any state to mind one way or another, poor old bod. She’s been frightfully sad since Adrian left.”
Bollie was a sort of chain-talker, lighting one end of a conversation to another without letting the first go out. The ladies—God bless ’em—Kitty and Clarissa and Chloe and Cassandra—were all in pretty bad shape, I gathered. All mad, all poor, all sad.
A tall emphatically sloshed young woman whose hair entirely hid the upper part of her face was lurching around clutching a large drawing-folder which kept jabbing everyone in the stomach. She lurched up to Bollie demanding to know when he was going to paint her. “You said you would. You know you did.”
“I did not. Get away, you dreary old mizbag,” said Bollie indignant at the interruption.
“But you did. You promised. You swore on your mother’s grave.”
“Really? Well, that must make me Miss-I-Don’t-Care of this month because I’m not going to do it,” and he turned away from her and got back down to business. “No, about C. D. C. D.
McKee
. He was in here last night, you know, standing right where you are, and he said to Alex—I heard him, Alex will deny it of course, he’s so jealous of me—he
said
, ‘But I’m delighted to see Bollie, he always makes me laugh.’ Oh Alex was
livid
. That Alex. He’s madly jealous of me—of everything I do. For instance, the other day—”
“A
very
angry young man. He tells me his latest epic is going to be called B— the Duke.”
“How delicious. And I bet he’d love to.”
“So what’s
your
big ambition in life?”
“Seriously?”
“Of course.”
“To sleep with a sailor.”
“You mean you’ve never? How quaint.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask—who gave you that black eye?”
“My dear, it was the most...”
“Sordid, isn’t it?” said a voice in my ear. I looked around and saw that it came from a handsome, fierce-looking young man who managed to grin and glower at the same time, his scowling white face emoting beneath thunderous black hair. “Sordid Soho. Failed Soho. Failures. Yes you, I’m talking to you,” he went on, staring me straight in the eye. “You know what gives it its special mouldy atmosphere? These phonies have no connection with money. That’s all. Simple as that. Never touch the stuff. No contact between art and money for them, thank you very much. A shade unrealistic,
n’est-ce pas?
And what, do you imagine, brings these cretins converging from all corners of London together? Art? Literature? Painting? Don’t you believe it. You’ll never hear a bloody word about a book or painting or even a film pronounced by these prize stoics. Gossip, yes, that’s the stuff—that’s what brings them here, that and a common lack of money and a common desire to get drunk. I’m drunk,” he continued, leering a little, “but I’ve made the connection between art and money. I’m Scotty Schooner—ever heard of me? Highest paid script-writer in British films. God what an epitaph!” He giggled and then scowled again. “You can’t get drunk in London. Where can I go to drink? I’ve got my bloody principles. What do they want me to do? Join one of those jolly men’s clubs with all the other jolly clubmen slumped against the bar wading through each other’s anecdotes marking time till their next chance to blackball some prospective member? I’m not hanging around this country any longer, thank God. I’m off to India. That’s where the future lies. I leave tomorrow. Want to come with me?” he asked me suddenly. “Come on. I’m not taking my wife, either. She thinks there’s something sexual about my Indian kick. She’s damn right there’s something sexual. Matter of fact there’s something sexual about you too.”
“Schooner, old cock,” said Bollie, drawn away from his own group by the mounting ferocity of the other’s diatribe, “we all feel the untimely departure of your well-loved genius from these shores calls for a tiny stirrup cupette or two—a bijou drinkette...”
“Oh all right, all right,” said Scotty wearily. “Next round on me. Only ask for it like a man. Treat me like a person, will you, not some goddam celebrity.”
Bollie, a large whisky waving dreamily in the air, was toasting Scotty from a distance. And when I spotted him again the piano was playing
Avalon
and Bollie, his arms around the barman who was also trying to hold him up, was slowly and solemnly waltzing him round and round the tables.
Scotty Schooner closed his eyes against the sight. “Dear Christ, what whimsy. What typical English whimsy. It goes straight into my next Peter Sellers film. God how I hate the English! This is a wonderful place to hate the English in, isn’t it?” he added with relish. “Wait till you hear some of our bar chatter. Very sophisticated we are. Real Coffee House stuff. The journalists have their John Huston and the-late-Mike-Todd stories, the poets and painters their social swim stories, and each and every one, down to the last sod, his Dylan Thomas ones. It’s a bloody marvel. It’s like clockwork. Wait and see—”
Scotty had pushed his face into mine to see how I was taking all this. I had noted from the beginning, of course, that he was drunk but had decided that as it was the least important thing about him, I could ignore it. Quite suddenly it had become the most important thing.
“Well, what do you make of us? Don’t just stand there gawping.” His general truculence was focusing itself on me. “Haven’t you anything to say?”
I’d smiled a gracious Social Worker’s smile and the bloody drunk (as he no doubt would have referred to himself) saw right through it.
“What did you say your name was?” I asked nicely. “I’m afraid I didn’t...”
“Scotty Schooner, your ladyship. And don’t you be putting on airs. You’re an aggressive little bitch on the make if I ever saw one. I know your type, I could recognize it a mile away. I’ve been watching you ever since you came in. Slumming, eh? But you’re panting to get inside the circle. What goes on with you, anyway? What’s it all about? Come on, what have you got to say for yourself?”
“Hey, now look here. Now you look here just a moment. Now you apologize to this lady.” My nice little American friend was shocked and indignant and—in the circumstances—very brave.
“No, let me answer him,” I’d said, and I turned to Scotty Schooner. “I won’t talk to you because you won’t listen. You just want to fight. The only reason you attack people is because you want to be attacked back, isn’t it?” And taking advantage of his uncertain grin as he tried to reshape my words into some coherent meaning, I walked out.
“Gee, you were great,” said the American. “You really handled him. I should have punched him though,” he added wistfully, “shouldn’t I?”
“Not at all,” I said hugging him soothingly. “You can’t win with a drunk. But I was terribly touched that you sprang to my rescue.” I patted him on the head. “You’re a good little boy.”
“Thanks,” he said gratefully, “I like being mothered.” And then, a shade regretfully as he moved away, “Of course, I like being fathered too.”
It made me laugh all over again thinking of that remark as I stood sentinel at the bar of the Crypt the following afternoon ready to leap at the next whisper of C. D. McKee’s name. The inmates were all there as I had left them the night before: same clothes, same positions, same conversations.
Bollie, one elbow on the bar, his hand cupping his cheek, swung gently from side to side in an arc, delicate and dainty of gesture as ever, his greasy curls still bouncing gaily back through nicotine-stained fingers, his voice still contentedly singing to itself something about a Gate House and the Marquis of Oxall who was a duck. And then from his unspeakable trousers he pulled out two dog-eared Kodak snaps and went on about
Lady
Doone Leap Falls, aged seven, if you please, holding court in the bathtub. And then more about Alex who was furious, simply fi-yur-ious, Bollie’s eyes flirtatiously rolling upwards over the dry rot marks in the ceiling as if to entice them to come down and play with him. “...and the Marquis let out a
whoop
! Oh would we stay to dinner, what a wonderful idea, and we all got tiddly in the nicest way of course...”
