Nonconformity (11 page)

It was, of course, the producer himself. And we were off to Romanoff’s. I dined with him unaccompanied that first evening, a bit self-conscious of my closed-in toes. The next, I took the liberty of inviting a newfound friend. The next I took two liberties and by the time we made the Brown Derby we were blocking traffic. With my senses by now so awhirl with the wonder and hurry of it all that I had no time for gratitude.

In the faint hope of fanning some sort of spark in that direction, the djinn inquired softly, during the course of some feverish carryings-on at the Beverly-Wilshire, and the wind whisking every which way, whether I’d care to meet Miss Sylvia Sidney. The entire course of my life having been determined by the 1931 version of
An American Tragedy
, that damned near did it. That an introduction so long sought should come at a moment when my eyes weren’t focusing was of no importance. Indeed, I bowed so low from the waist, in the direction I judged the lady to be, that I had just a bit of trouble straightening up. It wasn’t till the following forenoon that I learned, accidentally, that
Miss Sidney was in Brussels. I felt like a sprout.

I confronted Guru with his betrayal and he didn’t even redden. He was just hurt. The party to whom he’d introduced me, it turned out, was a highly effective writers’ agent—so why did I have to get so salty when somebody tried to do something for me? “We’ll get along better when you learn to trust others,” he counseled me—and topped the bit off with the hollowest laugh I’d yet heard in The Land of Hollow Laughter.

Then he put a contract before me and confessed all: “I’m not a businessman at heart”—placing one hand over the heart to indicate precisely where he wasn’t a businessman-at—“I’m just a frustrated writer.”

“At heart I’m not a writer myself,” I confessed in turn, placing Bernard Shaw’s hand over the place where my own valentine-shaped ticker throbbed—“I’m just a frustrated businessman and I don’t even trust myself.”

Again in a matter of moments, but this time more as in something by Howard Fast,
⁹²
I was evicted from the Garden of Allah where there was no Anitra near. And presented with a bill, per diem, which Guru just happened to have in his pocket. Itemizing, among other small comforts: one case of good scotch, one case of fair rye, one case of cheap bourbon. Nothing was free after all.

“Is there any relationship between my refusal to sign and my eviction?” I had just time to inquire.

He never so much as cracked. “What kind of a businessman do you think I am anyhow?” he demanded to know.

“What kind of a writer do you think I am anyhow?” was all I could think to reply.

Whereupon we locked, the terrible djinn in the open-toed shoes and I in my watertight ones, in a life-and-death struggle to determine, once and for all, who was the greater jerk.

I very nearly won. I was scarcely a ranking contender and I was up against the champ. Smart money would have said he wouldn’t even have to extend himself. Yet, on the morning he phoned to say, “After all, I
do
like you,” I felt I had him.

“I like you too,” I assured him. (To illustrate further the operation of affection in the Land of Hollow Laughter: while waiting in the office of a medium-size bigshot, to be introduced to a king-size bigshot, the latter entered and went directly into conference with the medium-size one without indicating awareness of a third party in the room except by a palm over his mouth and an occasional jerk of a thumb in the general direction of that party. Whispers, chuckles, thumb-jerks, a final backslap—and he had left quite as unceremoniously as he had entered. Whereupon the medium-size one assured me: “He
likes
you.” And he really meant it too.)

We had reached the tacit understanding that neither of us could afford anything less than affection for one another. He needed to make a million dollars and I needed to buy a house in Indiana. So though the very sight of me caused his features to be suffused by a disgust matched by
nothing earthly save the revulsion in my own breast, we clung passionately each to each: a friendship based on the solid rock of utter loathing.

He showed up with a flute of Johnny Walker on one arm and a male friend on the other. By the stardust in the friend’s eyes I immediately recognized an autograph-hunter. A hunter who inquired my name so shyly that I confessed, “You got me.” Whereupon he put a packet of blue papers bound with a red rubber band into my hand, and the only process-server in the world with stardust-eyes excused himself.

I was alone with the Great Guru. The Great Guru from Malibu. Riffling hurriedly through the packet it became clear that he was charging me with everything from piracy on the high seas to defrauding an innkeeper. I was secretly relieved to note that he didn’t have anything on me for the theft of the Stone of Scone.

“You see,” he explained with that smile that succeeded so wondrously in being at once shamefaced and self-satisfied, “every time I talked long distance to you I had a lawyer on the extension.”

The bird
really
liked me. Then, as if struck abruptly by the injustice of everything, he strode to the middle of the room, literally beating his breast with one hand and still clutching the bottle fiercely with the other, to turn the awful accusation upon me—“I’m a
nice
guy! Why do you make me act like a jerk?”

It wasn’t the real me that made the djinn give such
an effective interpretation of a jerk. Indeed it wasn’t myself at all. This impulse to do a creative job of work was genuine and pulled him hard. But the demands of the bank financing that impulse pulled him the other way, and harder. Still he stood at last with his fat toes showing, his legal threats in one hand and gifts in the other—the very personification of an industry at once predatory and propitiating. One that finds nothing untenable in going down on all fours one day crying mea culpa, promising to be a good boy and licking hands or whatever is in reach, and the next to be up and beating its breast with the terrible roar, “Movies are better than ever! Your money or your life!” A sort of kowtowing cannibalism, both abject and arrogant, sufficiently comical in either an individual clown or in a whole industry largely dominated by clowns.

Overwhelmed by what I had done to the man, I followed him about the room as hysterical as he was—“I don’t know
why
I make you act like this.” I broke down completely. “Everything is mixed up in my head—I don’t understand myself anymore. Back home people
like
me!”

He put the bottle in my left hand and a pen that writes under water in my right.

That Yogi sun had done me in at last.

1.
The Crack-Up
, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), pp. 81-4. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

2.
Mark Twain to George Washington Cable, recalled by Cable at a Twain memorial reading on November 30, 1910.
Mark Twain: A Biography
, by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), pp. 785-6.

3.
William Faulkner’s address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Stockholm, December 10, 1950. In
The Portable Faulkner
, Revised and Expanded Edition, edited by Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1946, renewed 1974), pp. 723-4. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

4.
Writer-director Kazan, actor Ferrer and playwright Anderson. All were blacklisted and were among the first to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in an attempt to clear their own names by testifying against others as former Communist Party members.

5.
The Feinberg Law, enacted in New York in 1949, required teachers to report on the loyalty of their colleagues in and outside the classroom. In Illinois, the Seditions Activities Investigating Commission was created in 1947, chaired by Paul Broyles. In 1951 Broyles persuaded both houses of the Illinois legislature to pass a bill requiring state agencies to ferret out subversives. Governor Adlai Stevenson vetoed the bill. Two years later yet another Broyles bill was vetoed by the next Illinois governor, William Stratton.

6.
ADA (Americans for Democratic Action), established in 1947 by establishment liberals, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reinhold Neibuhr and Hubert Humphrey. Identifying themselves as part of an intellectual elite, members of the ADA tended to be strong critics of Joe McCarthy on the one hand and fierce opponents of Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party on the other.

7.
In Act Four of
Peer Gynt
, Peer is mistaken for a prophet, and in that
guise he asks his disciple and love interest Anitra, “Do you know what life consists of? … It’s to be transported dry-shod down the stream of time, still unchangeably one’s Self.”
Peer Gynt
, by Henrik Ibsen (New York: Penguin, 1966), p. 139. See opening of Appendix.

8.
Faulkner, loc. cit.

9.
“Varchous” for virtuous, of course.

10.
“Hypocrisy” from
Mr. Dooley on Ivrything and Ivrybody
, by Finley Patrick Dunne (New York: Dover, 1963), p. 207. Chicago-based journalist and humorist Dunne’s Mr. Dooley was a fictional Irish saloonkeeper and amateur philosopher from Chicago’s West Side who pondered the subtleties of current events in essays published in the
Evening Post
and
American Magazine
.

11.
In the fall of 1952, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections compiled a report on McCarthy’s activities during 1948 as a member of the Senate Banking Committee and a joint committee on housing. McCarthy had accepted $10,000 from the Lustron Corporation, a builder of prefabricated houses and a regular petitioner for funds from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), and had authored parts of the Housing Act, which included a provision allowing the RFC to make a loan of seven million dollars to Lustron in 1949. McCarthy invested the $10,000 he received from Lustron in Seaboard Airline Railroad, another company indebted to the RFC. Prompted by Senator William Benton, McCarthy’s chief adversary and sponsor of a resolution calling for his expulsion, the Congressional committee labored on for a full year without managing to get McCarthy to respond to the charges. “I have not and do not intend to read, much less answer, Benton’s smear attack,” wrote McCarthy. The 82nd Congress ended, and McCarthy’s friend William Jenner was appointed chair of the 83rd. Jenner then made the report unavailable.

12.
U.S. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, a McCarthy supporter, was author of the International Security Act of 1950, known as the McCarran Act, which heralded a Communist conspiracy. He also co-authored the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which placed constraints on immigration.

13.
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was a prominent American economist, social philosopher and author of a number of books critiquing capitalism. In the early part of the century, American journalist Joseph Lincoln Steffens was the best-known of the muckrakers. Here Algren notes that all the old torchbearers of truth are long dead.

14.
During the McCarthy era the American Legion was a proponent of blacklisting.

15.
The passion and intention of this passage from Twain encapsulates
that of
The War Prayer
, which Twain dictated in 1904-5, although it is not a direct quotation. Twain’s
War Prayer
bore a similar relationship to his writing career as
Nonconformity
does to Algren’s. After reading it to his daughter Jean, who thought its publication would be regarded as sacrilege, and to at least one friend who clearly felt he should publish it, Twain finally decided against immediate publication: “I have told the whole truth in that,” he said, “and only dead men can tell the truth in this world.… It can be published after I am dead.” This famous story is told by Paine, in
Mark Twain: A Biography
.

16.
Whittaker Chambers, a Communist Party member turned informer, was the first individual to testify before Dies’ HUAC and name names, accusing Alger Hiss of sending secret federal documents to the Soviet Union. Hester McCullough was a Westchester (New York) housewife and amateur vigilante blacklister who became something of a right-wing
cause célèbre
when in 1950 she was sued for libel by the dancer Paul Draper and harmonica player Larry Adler.

17.
From
The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand, Collected and with an Introduction and Notes
by Irving Dilliard (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952; Third Edition, Enlarged, 1960), p. 284. See below.

18.
This passage appears towards the end of one of Learned Hand’s most famous speeches. The jurist delivered the address at the convocation of the University of the State of New York in his native Albany on October 24, 1952. His words were immediately carried across the country on the news wire services, and the
Saturday Review
made the speech its feature article in the November 22, 1952, issue. Given the political climate at the time, Hand’s words comprised an impassioned, if understated, plea against the status quo. See above. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

19.
Frank Yerby began his career as a writer of protest fiction, but turned to popular historical romance novels in the ’40s. Emmet Kelly was a famous American circus clown. For the rest of this section, Algren scornfully refers to Yerby as “Kelly.”

20.
1887 letter from Anton Chekhov to M. V. Kiseleva. From
Letters of Anton Chekhov
, Selected and edited by Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 41. Algren attacks Chekhov here under false pretenses, since Chekhov’s view of the writer’s responsibility closely approximated his own, and had little or nothing to do with the kind of dressed-up entertainments Algren is attacking.

21.
The Trial
, by Franz Kafka. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 121.

22.
Fitzgerald, p. 81.