Report From the Interior Page 22
Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Everly Brothers … stacking the little 45s on their fat spindle and blasting up the volume when no one was around …
… it was the sight of a roomful of teenagers dancing to the music that kept you watching …
… the selected stories of O. Henry, and for a time you reveled in those brittle, ingenious tales with their surprise endings and narrative jolts …
… now that Doctor Zhivago had been translated into English, you went out and bought a copy for yourself … confident that this was most assuredly literature of the first rank …
… Carey and his wife, Louise, are sunning themselves on the deck of a cabin cruiser.
… Dr. Bramson … no longer smiling and confident …
… Carey sitting in what appears to be the largest armchair in the world.
… you are amazed … by the immensity of the telephone receiver he holds in his hand …
On October seventeenth, he is down to thirty-six and a half inches and weighs fifty-two pounds.
Because he is living in a dollhouse. Because he is no more than three inches tall.
… reduced to the size of a mouse …
… a thumb-sized man running for his life …
… making do with whatever objects and nourishment are at hand in that dank suburban basement …
… a man stripped bare, thrown back on himself …
… a minute Odysseus or Robinson Crusoe living by the force of his wit, his courage, his resourcefulness …
… the Freedom Riders traveling through the South on long-distance buses were beaten by mobs of white men …
… the Bonus Army was camped out on the Anacostia Flats …
Against Eisenhower’s advice (I told that dumb son of a bitch that he had no business going down there), MacArthur took charge …
… pushing out the interlopers at gunpoint as dozens of shacks burned to the ground.
Then, everything suddenly goes wrong.
The prisoners are no better off than slaves.
… they are rousted from their beds at four in the morning and work steadily until eight at night …
… smashing rocks with sledgehammers in a broiling, barren landscape …
… no one is allowed to talk back …
… the nightly ritual of arbitrary punishments …
If not a perfect scheme, Allen nevertheless has a plan …
The tact and grace of a fallen woman talking to a fallen man.
… trapped for the rest of his life …
Then, with another bundle of dynamite, he blows up a bridge and ends the chase.
… the riots in Newark … the spontaneous outbreak of race warfare between the black population and the white police force that killed more than twenty people, injured more than seven hundred, led to fifteen hundred arrests, burned buildings to the ground …
“I smoke ‘Parisiennes.’ You buy them for 18 centimes in tiny blue wrappers of four…”
“… begging is not much fun.”
… living across the street from a campus that would become a battleground of sit-ins, protests, and police interventions by the end of April …
“A desolation peopled with sleepless perverts, the decay of what is not yet old…”
“We ate hot dogs and clams at Nathan’s, a fluorescent receptacle of weary insomniacs.”
“Perhaps you understand the peculiar nature of the subterranean attitude. It is absolutely uncaring, absolutely ready to meet any challenge, to suffer any consequences. It is beyond worry, beyond exhilaration, beyond boredom.”
“… so we finish off the misadventure with sandwiches at Ratner’s.”
PHOTO CREDITS
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3. Science, Industry and Business Library, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
4. NASA Photo
5. Felix the Cat in “Oceantics,” Pat Sullivan Cartoon
6. “The Window Washers,” Paul Terry Cartoon
7. “The Window Washers,” Paul Terry Cartoon
8. “Felix in Hollywood,” Pat Sullivan Cartoon
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17. Baseball Boy by Guernsey Van Riper Jr., illustrated by William B. Ricketts
18. Ten Seconds to Play: A Chip Hilton Sports Story by Clair Bee
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33. Photo courtesy Ron Ramirez, Philcoradio.com
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51. Picture Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
52. Picture Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
53. Picture Collection, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
54. © Bettmann/CORBIS
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99. New York Times Co./Archive Photos/Getty Images
100. © Richard Howard
101. New York Daily News/Archive Photos/Getty Images
102. Anders Goldfarb, v1992.48.22, Brooklyn Historical Society
103. Anders Goldfarb, v1992.48.62, Brooklyn Historical Society
104. AP Photo
105. John Duprey/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
106. © Ron Saari
107. © Ron Saari
Photo research by Laura Wyss and Wyssphoto, Inc.
NOTES
Two Blows to the Head
1. The Incredible Shrinking Man. Released by Universal Pictures, April 1957. 81 minutes. Director: Jack Arnold. Writer: Richard Matheson (based on his novel). Producer: Albert Zugsmith. Cast: Grant Williams (Scott Carey), Randy Stuart (Louise Carey), April Kent (Clarice), Paul Langton (Charlie Carey), Raymond Bailey (Dr. Thomas Silver), William Schallert (Dr. Arthur Bramson), Frank Scannell (Barker), Helene Marshall (Nurse), Diana Darrin (Nurse), Billy Curtis (Midget), John Hiestand (TV Newscaster), Joe La Barba (Joe the Milkman), Orangey (Butch the Cat), Luce Potter (Violet). Music: Irving Gertz, Earl E. Lawrence, Hans J. Salter, Herman Stein. Cinematographer: Ellis W. Carter. Editor: Al Joseph. Art directors: Russell A. Gausman, Ruby R. Levitt. Costume designers: Jay A. Morley Jr., Martha Bunch, Rydo Loshak. Makeup: Bud Westmore. Hair: Joan St. Oegger. Props: Floyd Farrington, Ed Keyes, Whitey McMahon, Roy Neel. Sound: Leslie I. Carey, Robert Pritchard. Sound effects: Cleo E. Baker, Fred Knoth. Optical effects: Everett H. Broussard, Roswell A. Hoffman. Special photography: Clifford Stine.
2. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Released by Warner Bros. Pictures, November 1932. 93 minutes. Director: Mervyn LeRoy. Writers: Story by Robert E. Burns, Screenplay by Howard J. Green and Brown Holmes. Producer: Hal B. Wallis. Cast: Paul Muni (James Allen), Glenda Farrell (Marie), Edward Ellis (Bomber Wells), Helen Vinson (Helen), Noel Francis (Linda), Preston Foster (Pete), Allen Jenkins (Barney Sykes), Berton Churchill (Judge), David Landau (Warden), Hale Hamilton (Reverend Clint Allen), Sally Blane (Alice), Louise Carter (Mother), Willard Robertson (Prison Board Chairman), Robert McWade (Ramsay), Robert Warwick (Fuller), William Le Maire (Texan). Cinematographer: Sol Polito. Editor: William Holmes. Art director: Jack Okey. Costume designer: Orry-Kelly (gowns). Conductor: Leo F. Forbstein.
Time Capsule
1. Not the same Quinn who became the protagonist of City of Glass but another Quinn, who in fact was an early version of Fogg, the narrator of Moon Palace.
2. Young Törless, by Robert Musil.
3. The grown-up Lydia would go on to translate Madame Bovary and Swann’s Way. The grown-up Paul would go on to edit an anthology of twentieth-century French poetry—in which Lydia appears as one of the translators.
4. Almost certainly a reference to your last name, which means south wind in Latin.
5. “They’ve overstepped all the limits.”
6. Refers to one of Heraclitus’s best-known fragments: “The way up and the way down are one and the same.”
7. “But monsieur, in the bag like that I thought it was garbage.”
8. “I’m a thousand years old, and I’ll be here after you are gone.”
9. Peter was Peter Schubert, the friend who had shared an apartment with you in New York the previous academic year. He had signed up for the Paris program as well, and within days of his arrival he and his girlfriend moved into your small hotel on the rue Clément, directly across from the Marché Saint-Germain. None of you had much money, and the monthly rent of 300 francs (two dollars a day) was about all you could afford. The ever-droll, vastly talented Peter was a musician, and he was hoping to profit from his time in Paris by studying with Nadia Boulanger, the empress of French music teachers, while continuing to earn credits for his undergraduate degree. He got his wish and stayed on for two years working with her, returned to New York, finished up at Columbia, and for most of his adult life has been in Montreal, where he teaches at McGill and directs an orchestra and chorus that specializes in Renaissance and contemporary music. The fantastic Peter and his fantastically beautiful girlfriend, Sue H., were your closest friends during the months you spent in Paris, your neighbors, your constant companions, your family, and without them it is altogether uncertain whether you would have come through your turmoils in one piece. But Peter had an important role to play in another aspect of the story as well, since he was the person who introduced you to the wife of the film producer Alexandre Salkind, a woman named Berta Domínguez D., whom he had met during a year spent in Paris between the end of high school and the beginning of college. Berta is the “Mexican woman” you begin referring to in a letter dated September 25, the person who was responsible for involving you in the film project you discuss in various letters written in the closing weeks of your time in Paris. You stayed in touch with her after you returned to New York, and when you went back to live in Paris several years later (February 1971), her husband—the producer of The Trial, The Three Musketeers, and Superman—hired you to work for him on several occasions. You recounted those experiences in Hand to Mouth, in which you referred to Salkind and Berta as Monsieur and Madame X. They were alive when you published that book, and you wanted to protect their names. Now that they are no longer alive, you see no reason for them to remain anonymous. They are ghosts now, and the only thing that belongs to a ghost is his name.
10. It’s grim, it’s funny, but at the moment I have only ten francs. That is to say, two dollars. Not much. After today, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I hope my father sends the money soon.
11. I no longer know what to say. The rain falls constantly, like sand splattering against the sea. The city is ugly. It is cold—autumn has begun. Never will two people be together—the flesh is invisible, too far away to be touched. Everyone speaks without saying anything, without words, without sense. Legs move drunkenly. The angels dance, and dung is everywhere.
I do nothing. I don’t write, I don’t think. Everything has become heavy, hard, painful. There is neither a beginning to beginning nor an end to ending. Each time it’s destroyed, it reappears among its own ruins. I no longer question it. Once I have finished, I turn around and begin again. I say to myself, just a little more, don’t stop now, just a little more and everything will change, and I go on, even if I don’t know why, I go on, thinking each time will be the last time. Yes, I speak, I force the words to make sounds (what for?), these old words, which are no longer mine, these words that fall endlessly from my mouth …
12. French poet (1927–2012). You had discovered his work in New York the previous spring—three or four poems in a small anthology of contemporary French poets—and after your arrival in Paris, you tracked down his books and began translating him. For the pure pleasure of it—because you found him to be the best and most original of the new French poets. The two of you met in 1971 and remained close friends until his death this past October. In 1974, a book of your Dupin translations was published under the title Fits and Starts (Living Hand); a second book of translations, Selected Poems, appeared in 1992 (U.S.: Wake Forest University Press; U.K.: Bloodaxe). Two of the pieces in your Collected Prose are devoted to Dupin: a 1971 text about his poetry and a series of reminiscences written in 2006 as a surprise for his eigh
tieth birthday, “The History of a Friendship.” Jacques and his wife, Christine, are mentioned in your last book, Winter Journal (p. 76): “the very best and kindest of friends—may their names be hallowed forever.”
13. Allen Mandelbaum (1926–2011). Your uncle by marriage (the husband of your mother’s sister). Lauded translator of Virgil, Dante, Homer, and Ovid, translator of twentieth-century Italians (Ungaretti, Quasimodo, and others), poet, professor, master of tongues (ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and all major European languages)—without question the most brilliant and passionate literary intelligence you have ever known. He was your friend, your counselor, your savior during the early years of your writing life, the first person who believed in what you were doing and supported your ambitions. May his name be hallowed forever.
14. Alexandre Spengler, whom you met on your first trip to Paris in 1965. He figures prominently in the second part of The Invention of Solitude under the name of S.
15. Your stepfather, Norman Schiff, a labor lawyer and staunch liberal Democrat, was considering a run for Congress. Not long after, he abandoned the idea.
16. Contemporary Civilization, a course required for graduation.