You Can't Go Home Again (50 page)

Randy saw how it was with George, and felt that almost any decisive act would be good for him. So now he said:

“For God’s sake, George, why don’t you pack up and clear out of all this? You’re through with it—it’s finished—it’ll only take you a day or two to wind the whole thing up. So pull yourself together and get out. Move away somewhere—anywhere—just to enjoy the luxury of waking up in the morning and finding none of this round you.”

“I know,” said George, going over to a sagging couch and tossing back the pile of foul-looking bedclothes that covered it and flinging himself down wearily. “I’ve thought of it,” he said.

Randy did not press the point. He knew it would be no use. George would have to work round to it in his own way and in his own good time.

George shaved and dressed, and they went out for breakfast. Then they returned and talked all morning, and were finally interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

George answered it. Randy could tell by the sounds which came from the transmitter that the caller was female, garrulous, and unmistakably Southern. George did nothing for a while but blurt out polite banalities:

“Well now, that’s fine…I certainly do appreciate it…That’s mighty nice of you…Well now, I’m certainly glad you called. I hope you will remember me to all of them.” Then he was silent, listening intently, and Randy gathered from the contraction of his face that the conversation had now reached another stage. In a moment he said slowly, in a somewhat puzzled tone: “Oh, he is?...He did?...Well”—somewhat indefinitely—“that’s mighty nice of him…Yes, I’ll remember…Thank you very much…Good-bye.”

He hung up the receiver and grinned wearily.

“That,” he said, “was one of the I-just-called-you-up-to-tell-you-that- I’ve-read-it-all-every-word-of-it-and-I-think-it’s-perfectly-grand people—another lady from the South.” As he went on his voice unconsciously dropped into burlesque as he tried to imitate the unction of a certain type of Southern female whose words drip molasses mixed with venom:

“‘Why, I’ll declayah, we’re
all
just so proud of yew-w! I’m just simply thrilled to
daith!
It’s the most wondaful thing I
evah
read! Why it
is!
Why, I nevah
dreamed
that anyone could have such a wondaful command of lang-widge!’”

“But don’t you like it just a little?” asked Randy. “Even if it’s laid on with a trowel, you must get some satisfaction from it.”

“God!” George said wearily, and came back and fell upon the couch. “If you only knew! That’s only one out of a thousand! That telephone there”—he jerked a thumb towards it—“has played a tune for months now! I know them all—I’ve got ‘em classified! I can tell by the tone of the voice the moment they speak whether it’s going to be type B or group X.”

“So the author is already growing jaded? He’s already bored with his first taste of fame?”

“
Fame?
“—disgustedly. “That’s not fame—that’s just plain damn rag-picking!”

“Then you don’t think the woman was sincere?”

“Yes”—his face and tone were bitter now—“she had all the sincerity of a carrion crow. She’ll go back and tell them that she talked to me, and by the time she’s finished with me she’ll have a story that every old hag in town can lick her chops and cackle over for the next six months.”

It sounded so unreasonable and unjust that Randy spoke up quickly:

“Don’t you think you’re being unfair?”

George’s head was down dejectedly and he did not even look up; with his hands plunged in his trouser pockets he just snorted something unintelligible but scornful beneath his breath.

It annoyed and disappointed Randy to see him acting so much like a spoiled brat, so he said:

“Look here! It’s about time you grew up and learned some sense It seems to me you’re being pretty arrogant. Do you think you can afford to be? I doubt if you or any man can go through life successfully playing the spoiled genius.”

Again he muttered something in a sullen tone.

“Maybe that woman was a fool,” Randy went on. “Well, a lot of people are. And maybe she hasn’t got sense enough to understand what you wrote in the way you think it should be understood. But what of it? She gave the best she had. It seems to me that instead of sneering at her now, you could be grateful.”

George raised his head: “You heard the conversation, then?”

“No, only what you told me.”

“All right, then—you didn’t get the whole story. I wouldn’t mind if she’d just called up to gush about the book, but, look here!”—he leaned towards Randy very earnestly and tapped him on the knee. “I don’t want you to get the idea that I’m just a conceited fool. I’ve lived through and found out about something these last few months that most people never have the chance to know. I give you my solemn word for it, that woman didn’t call up because she liked my book and wanted to tell me so. She called up,” he cried bitterly, “to pry round, and to find out what she could about me, and to pick my bones.”

“Oh, look here now—” Randy began impatiently.

“Yes, she did, too! I know what I’m talking about!” he said earnestly. “Here’s what you didn’t hear—here’s what she was working round to all the time—it came out at the end. I don’t know who she is, I never heard of her before—but she’s a friend of Ted Reeve’s wife. And apparently he thinks I put him in the book, and has been making threats that he’s going to kill me if I ever go back home.”

This was true; Randy had heard it in Libya Hill.

“That’s what it was about,” George sneered bitterly—“that woman’s call. That’s what most of the calls are about. They want to talk to the Beast of the Apocalypse, feel him out, and tell him: ‘Ted’s all right! Now don’t you believe all those things, you hear! He was upset at first—but he sees the whole thing now, the way you meant it—and everything’s all right.’ That’s what she said to me, so maybe I’m not the fool you think I am!”

He was so earnest and excited that for a moment Randy did not answer him. Besides, making allowances for the distortion of his feelings, he could see some justice in what George said.

“Have you had many calls like that?” Randy asked.

“Oh”—wearily—“almost every day. I think everyone who has been up here from home since the book was published has telephoned me. They go about it in different ways. There are those who call me up as if I were some kind of ghoul: ‘How are you?’—in a small, quiet tone such as you might use to a condemned man just before they lead him to the death chamber at Sing Sing—‘Are you all right?’ And then you get alarmed, you begin to stammer and to stumble round, ‘Why, yes? Yes, I’m fine! Fine, thanks!’—meanwhile, beginning to feel yourself all over just to see if you’re all there. And then they say in that same still voice: ‘Well, I just wanted to know…I just called up to find out…I hope you’re all right.’”

After looking at Randy for a moment in a tormented and bewildered way, he burst out in an exasperated laugh:

“It’s been enough to give a hippopotamus the creeps! To listen to them talk, you’d think I was Jack the Ripper! Even those who call up to laugh and joke about it take the attitude that the only reason I wrote the book was to see how much dirt and filth I could dig up on people I didn’t like. Yes!” he cried bitterly. “My greatest supporters at home seem to be the disappointed little soda-jerkers who never made a go of it and the frustrated hangers-on who never got into the Country Club. ‘You sure did give it to that son-of-a-bitch, Jim So-and-so!’ they call me up to tell me. ‘You sure did burn him up! I had to laugh when I read what you said about him—boy!’ Or: ‘Why didn’t you say something about that bastard, Charlie What’s-his-name? I’d have given anything to see you take him for a ride!’...Jesus God!” He struck his fist upon his knee with furious exasperation. “That’s all it means to them: nothing but nasty gossip, slander, malice, envy, a chance of getting back at someone—you’d think that none of them had ever read a book before. Tell me,” he said earnestly, bending towards Randy, “isn’t there anyone there—anyone besides yourself—who gives a damn about the book itself? Isn’t there anyone who has read it as a book, who sees what it was about, who understands what I was trying to do?”

His eyes were full of torment now. It was out at last—the thing Randy had dreaded and wanted to avoid. He said:

“I should think you’d know more about that by this time than anyone. After all, you’ve had more opportunity than anyone else to find out.”

Well, that was out, too. It was the answer that he had to have, that he had feared to get. He stared at Randy for a minute or two with his tormented eyes, then he laughed bitterly and began to rave:

“Well, then, to hell with it! To hell with all of it!” He began to curse violently. “The small two-timing bunch of crooked sons-ofbitches! They can go straight to hell! They’ve done their best to ruin me!”

It was ignoble and unworthy and untrue. Randy saw that he was lashing himself into a fit of violent recrimination in which all that was worst and weakest m him was coming out—distortion, prejudice, and self-pity. These were the things he would have to conquer somehow or belost. Randy stopped him curtly:

“Now, no more of that! For God’s sake, George, pull yourself together! If a lot of damn fools read your book and didn’t understand it, that’s not Libya Hill, that’s the whole world. People there are no different from people anywhere. They thought you wrote about them—and the truth is, you did. So they got mad at you. You hurt their feelings, and you touched their pride. And, to be blunt about it, you opened up a lot of old wounds. There were places where you rubbed salt in. In saying this, I’m not like those others you complain about: you know damn wel! I understand what you did and why you had to do it. But just the same, there were some things that you did not have to do—and you’d have had a better book if you hadn’t done them. So don’t whine about it now. And don’t think you’re a martyr.”

But he had got himself primed into a mood of martyrdom. As Randy looked at him sitting there, one hand gripping his knee, his face sullen, his head brooding down between his hulking shoulders, he could see how this mood had grown upon him. To begin with, he had been naive not to realise how people would feel about some of the things he had written. Then, when the first accusing letters came, he had been overwhelmed and filled with shame and humility and guilt over the pain he had caused. But as time went on and the accusations became more vicious and envenomed, he had wanted to strike back and defend himself. When he saw there was no way to do that—when people answered his explanatory letters only with new threats and insults—he had grown bitter. And finally, after taking it all so hard and torturing himself through the whole gamut of emotions, he had sunk into this morass of self-pity.

George began to talk now about “the artist”, spouting all the intellectual and aesthetic small change of the period. The artist, it seemed, was a kind of fabulous, rare, and special creature who lived on “beauty” and “truth” and had thoughts so subtle that the average man could comprehend them no more than a mongrel could understand the moon he bayed at. The artist, therefore, could achieve his “art” only through a constant state of flight into some magic wood, some province of enchantment.

The phrases were so spurious that Randy felt like shaking him. And what annoyed him most was the knowledge that George was really so much better than this. He must know how cheap and false what he was saying really was. At last Randy said to him quietly:

“George, of all the people I have ever known, you are the least qualified to play the wounded faun.”

But he was so immersed in his fantasy that he paid no attention. He just said: “Huh?”—and then was off again. Anybody who was “a real artist,” he said, was doomed to be an outcast from society. His inevitable fate was to be “driven out by the tribe.”

It was all so wrong that Randy lost patience with him:

“For Christ’s sake, George, what’s the matter with you? You’re talking like a fool!” he said. “You haven’t been driven out of anywhere! You’ve only got yourself in a little hot water at home! Here you’ve been ranting your head off about ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’! God! Why in hell, then, don’t you stop lying to yourself? Can’t you see? The truth is that for the first time in your life you’ve managed to get a foothold in the thing you want to do. Your book got some good notices and has had a fair sale. You’re in the right spot now to go on. So where have you been driven? No doubt all those threatening letters have made you feel like an exile from home, but hell, man!—you’ve been an exile for years. And of your own accord, too! You know you’ve had no intention of ever going back there to live. But just as soon as they started yelling for your scalp, you fooled yourself into believing you’d been driven out by force! And, as for this idea of yours that a man achieves ‘beauty’ by escaping somewhere from the life he knows, isn’t the truth just the opposite? Haven’t you written me the same thing yourself a dozen times?”

“How do you mean?” he said sullenly.

“I mean, taking your own book as an example, isn’t it true that every good thing in it came, not because you withdrew from life, but because you got into it—because you managed to understand and use the life you knew?”

He was silent now. His face, which had been screwed up into a morose scowl, gradually began to relax and soften, and at last he looked up with a little crooked smile.

“I don’t know what comes over me sometimes,” he said. He shook his head and looked ashamed of himself and laughed. “You’re right, of course,” he went on seriously. “What you say is true. And that’s the way it has to be, too. A man must use what he knows—he can’t use what he doesn’t know…And that’s why some of the critics make me mad,” he added bluntly.

“How’s that?” asked Randy, glad to hear him talking sense at last. “Oh, you know,” he said, “you’ve seen the reviews. Some of them said the book was ‘too autobiographical’.”

This was surprising. And Randy, with the outraged howls of Libya Hill still ringing in his ears, and with George’s outlandish rantings in answer to those howls still echoing in the room, could hardly believe he had heard him aright. He could only say in frank astonishment: