The Very Best of F & SF v1 (47 page)

Wells decides to
try the Tarzan movie. He dresses for the sultry weather— Washington in May is
like high summer in London—and goes down to the lobby. He checks his street
guide and takes the streetcar to the Palace Theater, where he buys an orchestra
seat, for twenty-five cents, to see
Tarzan and His Mate.

It is a
perfectly wretched movie, comprised wholly of romantic fantasy, melodrama and
sexual innuendo. The dramatic leads perform with wooden idiocy surpassed only
by the idiocy of the screenplay. Wells is attracted by the undeniable charms of
the young heroine, Maureen O’Sullivan, but the film is devoid of intellectual
content. Thinking of the audience at which such a farrago must be aimed
depresses him. This is art as fodder. Yet the theater is filled, and the people
are held in rapt attention. This only depresses Wells more. If these citizens
are the future of America, then the future of America is dim.

An hour into the
film the antics of an anthropomorphized chimpanzee, a scene of transcendent
stupidity which nevertheless sends the audience into gales of laughter, drives
Wells from the theater. It is still mid-evening. He wanders down the avenue of
theaters, restaurants and clubs. On the sidewalk are beggars, ignored by the
passersby. In an alley behind a hotel Wells spots a woman and child picking
through the ashcans beside the restaurant kitchen.

Unexpectedly, he
comes upon the marquee announcing “Duke Ellington and his Orchestra.” From
within the open doors of the ballroom wafts the sound of jazz. Impulsively,
Wells buys a ticket and goes in.

Kessel and his
cronies have spent the day walking around the mall, which the WPA is
re-landscaping. They’ve seen the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the Washington
Monument, the Smithsonian, the White House. Kessel has his picture taken in
front of a statue of a soldier—a photo I have sitting on my desk. I’ve studied
it many times. He looks forthrightly into the camera, faintly smiling. His face
is confident, unlined.

When night comes
they hit the bars. Prohibition was lifted only last year and the novelty has
not yet worn off. The younger men get plastered, but Kessel finds himself
uninterested in getting drunk. A couple of them set their minds on women and
head for the Gayety Burlesque; Cole, Kessel and Turkel end up in the Paradise
Ballroom listening to Duke Ellington.

They have a
couple of drinks, ask some girls to dance. Kessel dances with a short girl with
a southern accent who refuses to look him in the eyes. After thanking her he
returns to the others at the bar. He sips his beer. “Not so lucky, Jack?” Cole
says.

“She doesn’t
like a tall man,” Turkel says.

Kessel wonders
why Turkel came along. Turkel is always complaining about “niggers,” and his
only comment on the Ellington band so far has been to complain about how a
bunch of jigs can make a living playing jungle music while white men sleep in
barracks and eat grits three times a day. Kessel’s got nothing against the
colored, and he likes the music, though it’s not exactly the kind of jazz he’s
used to. It doesn’t sound much like Dixieland. It’s darker, bigger, more
dangerous. Ellington, resplendent in tie and tails, looks like he’s enjoying
himself up there at his piano, knocking out minimal solos while the orchestra
plays cool and low.

Turning from
them to look across the tables, Kessel sees a little man sitting alone beside
the dance floor, watching the young couples sway to the music. To his
astonishment he recognizes Wells. He’s been given another chance. Hesitating
only a moment, Kessel abandons his friends, goes over to the table and
introduces himself.

“Excuse me, Mr.
Wells. You might not remember me, but I was one of the men you saw yesterday in
Virginia working along the road. The CCC?”

Wells looks up
at a gangling young man wearing a khaki uniform, his olive tie neatly knotted
and tucked between the second and third buttons of his shirt. His hair is
slicked down, parted in the middle. Wells doesn’t remember anything of him. “Yes?”

“I—I been
reading your stories and books a lot of years. I admire your work.”

Something in the
man’s earnestness affects Wells. “Please sit down,” he says.

Kessel takes a
seat. “Thank you.” He pronounces “th” as “t” so that “thank” comes out “tank.” He
sits tentatively, as if the chair is mortgaged, and seems at a loss for words.

“What’s your
name?”

“John Kessel. My
friends call me Jack.”

The orchestra
finishes a song and the dancers stop in their places, applauding. Up on the
bandstand, Ellington leans into the microphone. “Mood Indigo,” he says, and
instantly they swing into it: the clarinet moans in low register, in unison
with the muted trumpet and trombone, paced by the steady rhythm guitar, the
brushed drums. The song’s melancholy suits Wells’s mood.

“Are you from
Virginia?”

“My family lives
in Buffalo. That’s in New York.”

“Ah—yes. Many
years ago I visited Niagara Falls, and took the train through Buffalo.” Wells
remembers riding along a lakefront of factories spewing waste water into the
lake, past heaps of coal, clouds of orange and black smoke from blast furnaces.
In front of dingy rowhouses, ragged hedges struggled through the smoky air. The
landscape of laissez faire. “I imagine the Depression has hit Buffalo severely.”

“Yes sir.”

“What work did
you do there?”

Kessel feels
nervous, but he opens up a little. “A lot of things. I used to be an
electrician until I got blacklisted.”

“Blacklisted?”

“I was working
on this job where the super told me to set the wiring wrong. I argued with him
but he just told me to do it his way. So I waited until he went away, then I
sneaked into the construction shack and checked the blueprints. He didn’t think
I could read blueprints, but I could. I found out I was right and he was wrong.
So I went back and did it right. The next day when he found out, he fired me.
Then the so-and-so went and got me blacklisted.”

Though he doesn’t
know how much credence to put in this story, Wells’s sympathies are aroused. It’s
the kind of thing that must happen all the time. He recognizes in Kessel the
immigrant stock that, when Wells visited the U.S. in 1906, made him skeptical
about the future of America. He’d theorized that these Italians and Slavs,
coming from lands with no democratic tradition, unable to speak English, would
degrade the already corrupt political process. They could not be made into good
citizens; they would not work well when they could work poorly, and given the
way the economic deal was stacked against them would seldom rise high enough to
do better.

But Kessel is
clean, well-spoken despite his accent, and deferential. Wells realizes that
this is one of the men who was topping trees along the river road.

Meanwhile,
Kessel detects a sadness in Wells’s manner. He had not imagined that Wells
might be sad, and he feels sympathy for him. It occurs to him, to his own
astonishment, that he might be able to make
Wells
feel better. “So—what do you think of our country?” he asks.

“Good things
seem to be happening here. I’m impressed with your President Roosevelt.”

“Roosevelt’s the
best friend the working man ever had.” Kessel pronounces the name “Roozvelt.” “He’s
a man that—” he struggles for the words, “—that’s not for the past. He’s for
the future.”

It begins to
dawn on Wells that Kessel is not an example of a class, or a sociological
study, but a man like himself with an intellect, opinions, dreams. He thinks of
his own youth, struggling to rise in a classbound society. He leans forward
across the table. “You believe in the future? You think things can be
different?”

“I think they
have to be, Mr. Wells.”

Wells sits back.
“Good. So do I.”

Kessel is
stunned by this intimacy. It is more than he had hoped for, yet it leaves him
with little to say. He wants to tell Wells about his dreams, and at the same
time ask him a thousand questions. He wants to tell Wells everything he has
seen in the world, and to hear Wells tell him the same. He casts about for
something to say.

“I always liked
your writing. I like to read scientifiction.”

“Scientifiction?”

Kessel shifts
his long legs. “You know—stories about the future. Monsters from outer space.
The Martians.
The Time
Machine.
You’re the best scientifiction writer I
ever read, next to Edgar Rice Burroughs.” Kessel pronounces “Edgar,” “Eedgar.”

“Edgar Rice
Burroughs?”

“Yes.”

“You
like
Burroughs?”

Kessel hears the
disapproval in Wells’s voice. “Well—maybe not as much as, as
The Time Machine”
he
stutters. “Burroughs never wrote about monsters as good as your Morlocks.”

Wells is
nonplussed. “Monsters.”

“Yes.” Kessel
feels something’s going wrong, but he sees no way out. “But he does put more
romance in his stories. That princess—Dejah Thoris?”

All Wells can
think of is Tarzan in his loincloth on the movie screen, and the moronic
audience. After a lifetime of struggling, a hundred books written to change the
world, in the service of men like this, is this all his work has come to? To be
compared to the writer of pulp trash? To “Eedgar Rice Burroughs?” He laughs
aloud.

At Wells’s
laugh, Kessel stops. He knows he’s done something wrong, but he doesn’t know
what.

Wells’s
weariness has dropped down onto his shoulders again like an iron cloak. “Young
man—go away,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Go back to Buffalo.”

Kessel’s face
burns. He stumbles from the table. The room is full of noise and laughter. He’s
run up against the wall again. He’s just an ignorant polack after all; it’s his
stupid accent, his clothes. He should have talked about something else—
The Outline of History,
politics. But what made him think he could talk like an equal to a man like
Wells in the first place? Wells lives in a different world. The future is for
men like him. Kessel feels himself the prey of fantasies. It’s a bitter joke.

He clutches the
bar, orders another beer. His reflection in the mirror behind the ranked
bottles is small and ugly.

“Whatsa matter,
Jack?” Turkel asks him. “Didn’t he want to dance neither?”

And that’s the
story, essentially, that never happened.

Not long after
this, Kessel did go back to Buffalo. During the Second World War he worked as a
crane operator in the 40-inch rolling mill of Bethlehem Steel. He met his wife,
Angela Giorlandino, during the war, and they married in June 1945. After the
war he quit the plant and became a carpenter. Their first child, a girl, died
in infancy. Their second, a boy, was born in 1950. At that time Kessel began
building the house that, like so many things in his life, he was never to
entirely complete. He worked hard, had two more children. There were good years
and bad ones. He held a lot of jobs. The recession of 1958 just about flattened
him; our family had to go on welfare. Things got better, but they never got
good. After the 1950s, the economy of Buffalo, like that of all U.S. industrial
cities caught in the transition to a post-industrial age, declined steadily.
Kessel never did work for himself, and as an old man was no more prosperous
than he had been as a young one.

In the years
preceding his death in 1946 Wells was to go on to further disillusionment. His
efforts to create a sane world met with increasing frustration. He became
bitter, enraged. Moura Budberg never agreed to marry him, and he lived alone.
The war came, and it was, in some ways, even worse than he had predicted. He
continued to propagandize for the socialist world state throughout, but with
increasing irrelevance. The new leftists like Orwell considered him a dinosaur,
fatally out of touch with the realities of world politics, a simpleminded
technocrat with no understanding of the darkness of the human heart. Wells’s
last book,
Mind at the End of Its Tether
, proposed that the human race faced an evolutionary crisis that
would lead to its extinction unless humanity leapt to a higher state of
consciousness; a leap about which Wells speculated with little hope or
conviction.

Sitting there in
the Washington ballroom in 1934, Wells might well have understood that for all
his thinking and preaching about the future, the future had irrevocably passed
him by.

But the story
isn’t quite over yet. Back in the Washington ballroom Wells sits humiliated, a
little guilty for sending Kessel away so harshly. Kessel, his back to the dance
floor, stares humiliated into his glass of beer. Gradually, both of them are
pulled back from dark thoughts of their own inadequacies by the sound of
Ellington’s orchestra.

Ellington stands
in front of the big grand piano, behind him the band: three saxes, two
clarinets, two trumpets, trombones, a drummer, guitarist, bass. “Creole Love
Call,” Ellington whispers into the microphone, then sits again at the piano. He
waves his hand once, twice, and the clarinets slide into a low, wavering theme.
The trumpet, muted, echoes it. The bass player and guitarist strum ahead at a
deliberate pace, rhythmic, erotic, bluesy. Kessel and Wells, separate across
the room, each unaware of the other, are alike drawn in. The trumpet growls
eight bars of raucous solo. The clarinet follows, wailing. The music is full of
pain and longing—but pain controlled, ordered, mastered. Longing unfulfilled,
but not overpowering.