My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  Anita was working as a salesperson in a department store again, and John was having some undefined trouble with his eyes, so he couldn’t drive to shop for dinner. We walked to a small Italian restaurant nearby, and all was good cheer. The owner, Mario, with his pencil mustache, came to greet us; the two waiters were professionally polite. John studied the menu like a man panning for gold.

  The waiters were funereal and served the courses all at once. The dinner: soggy pasta and canned tomato sauce; the veal, like creamed rubber; the spinach, greenish mush; the after-dinner espresso, bitter and burned. John said he loved it from start to finish. Anita smiled weakly.

  “Hard to find great little places like this in LA,” John said. “Even in New York anymore.”

  “It’s really great,” I said, trying to muster up enthusiasm.

  Anita said, “Nothing like this place,” and winked at me, her fellow conspirator. “By the way, are you still with that girl who made you so crazy? The girl who looked like Elizabeth Taylor?”

  “They all make him crazy,” John said.

  “I’m married now,” I said. “I’ve forgotten everyone but my wife and you.”

  “I told you that he was married,” John said, and he and Anita went back and forth on whether he really had. Now they seemed like a sweet old couple, with the juicy sexual life drained out of them. I thought: Will this happen to me, too? Will I grow old and tame, become half of a cute elderly couple that bickers over where the remote was last seen?

  Slowly, after the second espresso, more bitter than the first, it leaked out that John’s eyesight was disintegrating and that he had sold his car—Anita now had to take a bus to work—but not only because of his failing vision. John had written one or two episodes for the Hitchcock show, and that was about the sum of his television career.

  “TV writing is drying up,” John said, “if it’s not already a Sahara, with no oasis in sight.”

  “What about your screenwriting projects?” I asked.

  Anita said, “No one is taking John’s calls anymore. His friends,” she said. “His great friends!”

  “Things change,” John said sweetly. “New writers, new studio heads, new fashions in everything.”

  “John always takes the Olympian view,” Anita said.

  “Freddy, you never talk about yourself. What’s the big mystery?” John asked.

  I was reluctant to talk about myself, feeling that my life was on the ascent and theirs was on the slide. Not that I was living in abundance and ease, but I was writing, married, living in a cozy apartment facing Tompkins Square Park, teaching at City College, and on the way to getting a PhD in literature. I was happy for the first time in my life; my happiness, I imagined, was a gulf between us. I hated myself for feeling that. A shitty little ingrate and a snob, I called myself. But the feeling of that separation between us still remained no matter how many times I repeated that.

  The restaurant’s eight tables were now empty, and, without asking, Mario brought us the check. I took out my wallet and said, “It’s my turn.” Anita was silent, but John said, “You are our guest, always,” and, to Mario’s obvious discomfort, John said, “Put it on my tab, please.”

  Anita left three singles for the waiters.

  We exited the restaurant with less cheer than when we had arrived. John said, “I owe them a painting in exchange for dinners.” Anita stayed silent.

  We waited for the cab I had ordered from the restaurant. We hugged, we kissed, we said, “I love you.” John gave me his warmest smile. My cab came, and soon I was on the way to my friend’s house in Beverly Hills with its Lichtenstein and Warhol paintings. There, in bed, I was wrapped in sadness. Sadness for John and Anita and sadness that I had no power to help them. And frightened of John’s failure and wanting to run from it and from him. Run from my fear of my own failure, of a future hand-to-mouth existence, of me alone, back in the Bronx, in an apartment with broken furniture and torn lampshades. I recalled what John had said to me long ago about my self-pity, whining about a girl who did not reciprocate my love: “What will you do when you have real problems, Fred?”

  I called John from time to time, and wrote to him with greater and greater infrequency. He was always cheerful; there were always projects looming—a film script, or maybe an art gallery, for real art and not the fashion of the moment.

  I phoned him from Paris in 1978. “John, how are your eyes doing?” I asked, remembering the trouble he had been having years ago.

  “I’m blind.”

  My heart sank and kept sinking. “John” was all I could say.

  “It’s all right, Fred, I’m so glad to hear from you.”

  Then, in 1981, my youthful dream came true: I was finally living in Paris—not in a tiny flat above a café, but in a large empty apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a quiet, elegant section of Paris. It was the apartment of the great writer Raymond Queneau, my editor at Gallimard, who had become my friend and whose family let me live there after his death.

  On impulse, I phoned John in LA. Anita answered in a cautious voice, but she brightened up when I said my name. She told me right off what I was afraid to ask: “John’s dead, Freddy. He had been paralyzed from the neck down,” she said. “He lasted that way for a few years. He wasn’t able to speak, but he smiled at me a lot.”

  I went silent, feeling that sickening darkness when someone you love has left you or has died, and you begin to realize that you will never see them again, ever. Feeling crushed for Anita, too, alone, old, in LA. With what kind of money? Feeling sad for myself, too. A link to my former life was broken, and more links would break until I was the last link to myself, and one day that link, too, would be broken.

  “He was a sweet man,” she said.

  “I loved him very much, and I love you, too, Anita,” I said, thinking as I said it what a selfish, stupid jerk I had been, so self-involved all these years not to have taken a minute to call to see how they both were. In my heart, I knew I had been afraid to learn he was sinking into poverty, blindness, isolation, mirroring my own self-doubts. I had not wanted to see him as a man in trouble: a father is meant always to be a hero who never ages and stays virile, potent, and never in need.

  “Where is he buried?” I asked, as if my visiting his grave one day would make up for all the calls I had never made and the letters I had never written.

  “You remember, he always said he would give his body to science. Well, he did.”

  He had always said he would donate his body to some medical school: “A cadaver for students to learn about the anatomy firsthand,” he said, “otherwise the corpse just goes to waste.” But his death had seemed so far away then, and I had never believed that he would die or that anyone I loved would ever die. I still found it inconceivable that my grandmother wasn’t waiting for me to come back from school with a bowl of café latte and some day-old semolina bread waiting for me on a plate.

  I saw John on a metal table, his body carved up, his face skinned to show the muscles to the medical students. All that life and thought gone, reduced to meat to be dissected by people who had no idea where he had come from, what long struggle he had had to leave a prison cage and to see the trees and the moon.

  “Do you need anything, Anita?” I asked.

  “Like what, Freddy?”

  It was hard for me to say it, fearing she would think I was pitying her. “Money. Do you need any?”

  “Oh! No,” she said. “I’m OK. Thanks, anyway. I have a part-time job in a luncheonette. I’m the morning cashier.”

  I remembered how beautiful she had been and how I had lusted after her. I remembered how affectionate and sexy she had been without putting it on. I remembered how much John had wanted to free her from working menial jobs—from working any jobs—and let her take acting classes. We said our good-byes. I could not bear to put the phone down.

  A few weeks later Anita sent me a package with several of John’s prison drawings, studies of guards and fellow convicts huddled in the pr
ison courtyard with no sky. I kept them in a closet until I had enough money to frame them. But then, when I did, I could not find the drawings in the closet or in the whole of the apartment. Had I disappeared them in my guilt?

  Years later, I published a novel about Van Gogh’s final three days before he committed suicide. I wanted to put into the book, Van Gogh’s Bad Café (1997), all the love I felt about Vincent and his work, and maybe something about John’s sweetness, his innocence, slipped into my portrayal of  Van Gogh’s character. When the novel was finished I dedicated it to John, using the last line of his memoir, when he steps out of the prison gate to freedom, for my novel’s epigraph: “The trees were so close I could smell them and the road began singing to me.” Even though he was dead and would not know it, Anita would. I sent it to her at the last address I had. It was returned, “Addressee Unknown.”

  Leonard and Belinda

  Manhattan, The City College of New York, 1955

  In the fall I returned to City College, my rescue ship. Fear of being thrown again into the open sea goaded me: I climbed down from my Olympian perch and I studied relentlessly. I got As on my exams; I got As on my papers. I sat respectfully in my seat and waited for class to be over before I went for a smoke.

  I took a fiction-writing workshop with Irwin Stark, a novelist, who conducted his class dramatically: He bellowed, he gesticulated, he threw little pieces of chalk at the students to emphasize a point. He told jokes. He did not wear a jacket and tie. He favored the gods of Realism and Verisimilitude—the sputtering sound a cigarette makes when it hits a wet gutter, the stink of rotting garbage in a knocked-over pail in the summer heat. I distrusted his flamboyant presentation—he strived to be loved—and his pedestrian, realist aesthetic was everything I disdained, despised. I wanted lead to be spun into gold, not gold into gutters and cigarette butts: I wanted ashcans to be pyramids to heaven. I studied with him a week or two before switching, within the time limit the school permitted, to Leonard Ehrlich’s fiction-writing class. His class was not popular.

  Ehrlich, the author of one novel, God’s Angry Man, about the abolitionist John Brown, was a trim, bespectacled man, soft-spoken, dapper in a conservative way. He wore dark gray flannel pants, a herringbone jacket, and a silent tie; his shoes had a golden burnish. He looked at you with his head turned to one side as if studying you with one suspicious eye while the other was doing who knew what. He was friendly but reserved. Unlike Professor Schlenoff, Ehrlich was not a Francophile; he did not carry with him the rare air of fin de siècle Europe, or of its literature and art. Irony did not seep through his speech or his demeanor.

  Ehrlich measured the students’ stories, and all writing, by its music, freshness, conviction, insight, clarity, wisdom, and—a word he frequently used—“dignity.” His most severe criticism of any author was that his or her work lacked dignity, meaning it was lazy, trite, ordinary, that the prose was cowardly. My stories got a B– at first; when I abandoned the junior Hemingway pose, they rose to a B+.

  Perhaps to please him, I tried to purge myself of Hemingway’s declarative sentences and his nuts-and-bolts view of life as simply something to endure with courage and grace. I also tried to write on a higher, more intellectual plane and with greater complexity of language.

  One of these lofty attempts was “The History of the Radical Movement,” a claustrophobic tale about a solipsistic youth in a rowboat who wonders whether he should drown himself or join with the radical Catholic Worker movement. In the margin Ehrlich wrote in a tiny, tight hand, “This indicates much potential talent, but the story as written is pretentious and overwritten and rather obvious in its treatment. This suggests, however, that the writer will in time do better and perhaps excitingly better work!” I was stung by his assessment but, on looking over the story, which I have kept with me these sixty years, I notice that the charge of pretentiousness was warranted, considering how I chose, for example, the word “fulvous” instead of “brownish,” thinking that the former might indicate my acquaintance with the dictionary.

  I also included on the title page of the story, which was all of ten pages long, two epigraphs, both from Albert Camus, the intellectual god of the moment, to further indicate my gravitas and the high level of my seriousness. Camus: “The unity of the world, which was not achieved with God, will henceforth be attempted in defiance of God,” and the other: “But no mind is impartial when confronted with life and death.”

  Ehrlich’s words “much potential talent” carried me along for years while I wondered when the “potential” might explode into the “actualized.” Of course, I need not have wondered for so many years if I had only sat and done the work. But there were too many terrors there for me to expel before I would come to that.

  One of the reasons I loved coming to Ehrlich’s class was Belinda, who never turned in a story. She sat straight, silent and beautiful. She seemed older than us, but that may have been because of her composure and erect posture, and because she came to class dressed like a mature woman and not in the uniform of just another bohemian student. She wore skirts and soft blue sweaters and high heels. Her black hair was beyond long and astonishing in its sexual power. I approached her after class.

  “Would you like to have a coffee with me?”

  She turned, smiled politely, and, in a heart-stopping Spanish accent, said, “Maybes other times.” One afternoon I saw her and Ehrlich enter a taxi and speed down Amsterdam Avenue.

  I went to the college library and read Ehrlich’s novel, wanting to find out what made him so smart as to brush Hemingway aside. I was impressed by his lyricism, the powerful sweep and charge of his sentences:

  “He walked with a long springing step and an inward air, his right shoulder thrust forward as though to meet life full on. He had a power of quickness and no fear; knew how to fade in a swamp or ride like a wind through hills; and he would stand and shoot against twenty.”

  I understood that Ehrlich was a fine writer and that his was an exceptional book, but as with other novels one respects but does not love, reading it felt like an act of literary duty. However beautifully written it was, this novel about John Brown and his murderous, moral righteousness did not draw me in. I was nineteen: I wanted Hemingway’s cool and sexy characters in cafés and bullrings, and I wanted prose as understated as the characters. I wanted Paul Bowles’s alienated wanderer under a vast, empty desert sky; I wanted Céline’s brave, solitary man journeying to the end of the night.

  When he was twenty-seven, Ehrlich was sprung into the literary world with his debut and only novel, God’s Angry Man. On October 30, 1932, the New York Times said: “It is a work of art, powerful and exciting.” The reviewer concluded: “To approach this novel critically after a day spent in abject surrender to its power and beauty is a difficult and ungrateful task. It is the kind of work which one should approach again after a space of time before defining. It does not yield itself to ready discussion. It is too disturbing. But that it is an outstanding novel by a new writer who has now achieved significance is certainly no more than a cold statement of fact.”

  He was soon famous and moved among the literary lights of the day; Carson McCullers was among them. He had a future and everyone was waiting for his next novel. He was writing it. He summered at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, to find the peace to do his work. He went to San Francisco to find peace, where there was not enough of it. He returned to Yaddo.

  In New York he rented a succession of large, roomy apartments in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He kept moving from one apartment to another. When he heard the flush of a toilet or the banging of a steam pipe or the rattling of a window or the sound of a child’s voice or a cat’s purr through the walls, or a footstep through the ceiling, he fled. He needed absolute silence, or else his writing day—his day—was ruined. He went into classical psychoanalysis five days a week. It was some years before the shrink finally spoke and said, “You might try dancing to loosen up.” Everyone was still waitin
g for his next book. Years passed, and then no one was waiting.8

  * * *

  8EHRLICH AND MY GUILT

  Leonard Ehrlich (1905–1984)

  In a letter from Truman Capote to the distinguished literary critic and poet John Malcolm Brinnin, Capote says, “Yaddo, yadddooooo . . . through the ages; don’t you ever get just a wee bit tired of going there? You’re going to end up like Leonard Ehrlich . . .” (Truman Capote, Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote [New York: Vintage, 2005], pages 179–80).

  I never sent Ehrlich my first novel after it was published in 1971. I look over my reasons and fail to find anything in our relationship our friendship that would justify my neglect. Leonard had always been more than kind to me. But I think I feared he would find that my novel, a great deal of it made up of a mosaic of quotations and literary parodies, lacked what he found paramount in literature: dignity. I feared that he would see in my pastiche a facile attempt to avoid the serious work of crafting sentences each with their own music and energy and conviction. Perhaps I also had a not-too-unconscious desire to break from exactly the kind of studied writing that Ehrlich—and my hero, Hemingway—had highly prized. Kill the father so that you can be free.

  We drifted far apart. Or perhaps it was I who had drifted, fearing that his aura of failure was catching, and now that I had become a published author of one novel, there would be no second and I would drown as he had.

  In my writing about him, and I hope lovingly so, I seek to address and perhaps, in some way, redeem my guilt for having abandoned him: he who was my friend and who had needed friends.

  Cocktail Party by the Hudson

  Manhattan, Riverside Drive, 1955