Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “You aren’t that much of a fool, Mart.”

  “Yes, I am! Yes, I fucking am!”

  “Oh!” he said, surprised as hell. He grinned his goofy grin and he said, “Well, that’s a different perspective on this.”

  We burst out laughing and he said, “I hadn’t realized I’d married an absolute fool.”

  “Well, what a fool you are for not realizing it, then, Bongie,” I said, and we laughed and laughed. What else could we do?

  “You were so fond of that China Rot ointment and those gloves, Mrs. Bongie, I do remember that.”

  “It’s just that there isn’t a single bottle of wine in this place with a snake in it.”

  “Don’t be silly, Mrs. Bongie Wine Drinker Fool, you never did like the snake wine. It was the bird wine you were crazy for.”

  “And the bedbugs,” I said.

  We talked about the bedbugs, how Ernest had wanted to shoot them, and about the thugs with their hair oil when we thought we were getting a diplomat’s house, and about Antoine de Saint-Exupéry handing out grapefruits at the bottom of the stairs at the Florida in Madrid and Lillian Hellman sticking her head between her knees while the rest of us watched the night bombing from Del’s balcony. It was all funny in retrospect, viewed from a safe, beautiful house in safe, beautiful Cuba, with everything you needed and no threat to your life.

  “You were sweet on Lillian, that’s what I remember,” I said.

  “Ah, I was only trying to keep your attention, Mook.”

  It was the way these arguments ended again and again, the way we blew off the stink of the juice not flowing, not for either of us. There was nothing but misery and darkness when the writing wouldn’t jell, unless we could pull ourselves out of it and make each other laugh.

  We determined, finally, in a fit of reasonableness, that a break would do us good. He would go on ahead to Sun Valley and his sons, and I would stay alone at the Finca for a week or two.

  I said, “You can call me when the snake wine has arrived from China.”

  “You can bring the grapefruit,” he said.

  We went to bed then, and we made love, and if it wasn’t amazing, it didn’t hurt much, and we curled ourselves around each other and fell asleep, and we slept late the next morning, and we didn’t either of us even try to write. We went out on the boat, and we fished, and Bug nearly caught an eleven-foot marlin, two hundred pounds if it was an ounce and a fair match for Ernest, but it bested him. We laughed about that too, about losing such a mighty and beautiful fish, and we felt better for the fish having won its freedom despite our best efforts, and for knowing we could still love each other even when neither of us could make the writing jell.

  Sun Valley, Idaho

  OCTOBER 1941

  I arrived in Sun Valley after our break from each other, resolved to cast off my anger and trouble-seeking and hell-on-wheels and settle down to the piles of clean white towels on the fence posts around the circular pools and to our room (not our usual suite but a simpler one, Averell Harriman having now made enough of a success of his new venture not to need to have photos of us to attract a crowd). Robert Taylor (“too thin to be given much weight,” Bug declared) and his wife, Barbara Stanwyck (“damn ugly, but damn smart”), were keeping Ernest company in the usual shooting and riding and partying at the Trail Creek Cabin, along with Robert Capa and Gary and Rocky. The director Howard Hawks was there to discuss Gary playing Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hawks had brought along his striking young wife, “Slim,” who was either completely taken with Ernest or doing a terrific job of pretending to be for the sake of getting him to agree with the director.

  The talk was largely of the war. “We’ll find it under the Christmas tree,” Ernest liked to say, “or wake up New Year’s morning with an unshakable war.” He was sure it would start in the Pacific, never mind that it was the Germans who were whacking us, shooting at another of our destroyers so that President Roosevelt had to order the Navy to destroy on sight anything in the waters necessary for our defense.

  Still, our own lives went on as ever in Sun Valley, with Jack and Gregory and Patrick joining us, and Ernest and I being kinder to each other with the boys there, and Bug trying very hard not to worry about Bumby and the draft.

  The one bright spot in that fall was the publication of The Heart of Another, my story collection Scribner brought out on October 27. When the first copy arrived, we took it out onto our terrace, and we sat in the warm sunshine with the long view of the plains and the mountains and a very good bottle of cold champagne.

  “Oh, Bug, it’s the most beautiful book in the world, isn’t it? Isn’t it the most beautiful book you’ve ever seen? Of my books, I mean. Yours are always beautiful.”

  He raised his wide, flat champagne glass and said, “To you, Mook. Aren’t you glad you broke with Dull, Slum and Pus? Didn’t I tell you you would be?”

  He’d bothered poor Max Perkins, who was now my editor too, over every detail of my book, the way he did for his own. He’d even taken charge of my photo, supervising my hair and my makeup and my clothing, and taking the photograph himself.

  I said, “It’s a much better cover than Elizabeth Bowen’s new one, isn’t it?” Bowen was a British writer who had inherited an Irish estate she rarely visited and was married to a man who, it was whispered, was about the only man in England with whom she never slept, but she lived in Oxford, and she knew everyone, and her latest short story collection, Look at All Those Roses, was getting a lot of attention. The New York Times suggested it ought to be read “prayerfully.”

  “It’s a fine cover, Marty, but not half as gorgeous as your author photo.”

  I said, “No bridge, though. Not a stone one or a spidery metal one,” and we laughed, and I said, “Do you suppose a book without a bridge on the cover will sell?” And we laughed again, and we drank more champagne.

  I said, “It usually makes me sick, Bug, this part. It always makes me sick that what’s inside will be disappointing, that I thought it was one thing all through the writing, and then it will all be something else, a disappointment.”

  Like What Mad Pursuit. I didn’t like even to say the name of that damned first novel. I liked to think it didn’t exist, that Dad never saw it, never told me how vile it was.

  “It’s a fine book, this one,” Ernest said. “You’ll be proud of it, always. Only you’ll regret it isn’t written by Martha Gellhorn Hemingway.” He laughed as if he were only joking, and he drained his glass of champagne.

  “But Bug, you do understand that, I know you do. Even publishing as Gellhorn, everyone thinks you’ve written it for me. They think Bowen and Kay Boyle and Katherine Anne Porter are great talents, when they only make a thing out to be a big mystery and then it all comes to nothing, they just leave you wondering what the hell that was all about. They’re the little literary darlings, while I’m just under your Svengali spell. My style is ‘aping into mush’—that’s what that cad from the New Republic says.”

  “You’re a fine mush, Marty, but you’re no ape,” he said, and we laughed again, and he refilled his champagne glass, then tipped the bottle to mine to top it up.

  “Didn’t Gigi shoot well today?” he said.

  “He always does,” I said.

  “But today especially.”

  It had been a dreadful day for shooting, actually. There were ten thousand ducks, but they were high as bombers. Only Gigi hit anything.

  “Today especially,” I agreed. “But really, Ernest, does Elizabeth Bowen write anything other than the same cross-class romance that women have been writing for a hundred years?”

  “She does all right,” Ernest said.

  “You don’t know how it is, Ernest. You’re like a boy with a new bicycle when your books come out. I’d like to be that way. I’d like to be something other than all scared inside, and regretting.”

  I opened the book to the title page, the letters slanted gracefully forward, with finely drawn shadow lines on the T and
H and A: The Heart of Another. My name all in capital letters, which I liked although I was a little sad that my A’s weren’t the A’s of the title or my whole name the font of “Charles Scribner’s Sons,” my favorite of the letters I suppose because they weren’t quite right, and they were beautiful in their wrongness. I really was beginning to perhaps wallow in smuggery when I turned to the table of contents and looked down the list of stories, the sick gloom edging into my gut at the sight of “Slow Train to Garmisch.”

  “I ought to have left out ‘Slow Train,’” I said. “I ought to have written something else.”

  “You’ll do better next time. You’ll do it sharper and tighter.”

  “Yes, I’ll do it better next time.”

  “But you’re happy with this one.”

  “It’s just a book of stories about people, about the human heart. But that’s the only thing that really lasts, isn’t it?

  “It’s a fine book, Marty.”

  “It’s a fine book, I know that.”

  “It’s better than this last one of Fitzgerald’s, not to speak ill of the dead, but really, if I die with a book only half finished, do us all a favor and burn the thing, will you? Old Scott still has the technique and the romance, but the dust has been off that butterfly’s wings for a good long time now even if the creature will still move.”

  “You’ll be more famous than Scott ever was, Bug,” I said.

  “His first two were okay, they sold okay, but what did he write after The Beautiful and Damned? That crazy thing about the bootlegger.”

  “The Great Gatsby.”

  “Gatsby, the not so great. That book hasn’t sold more than twenty thousand copies, that’s what Perkins told me. It’s only still in print because they can’t sell the damned copies they have. And Tender is the Night sold even less, only twelve thousand. And he never won that thing either.”

  That thing being the Nobel, or perhaps the Pulitzer. It was a way Bug consoled himself. Well, he hadn’t won any major award, but then, neither had Scott, not even for Tender is the Night, which Ernest truly admired.

  “Hollywood ruins a writer,” he said.

  I poured him another glass of champagne and then raised my glass and clicked it, searching for words to move him away from the subject of Scott before he sank into it. It made him dark, thinking that Scott and James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe were all dead. It made him dark that the three of them were now being spoken of as literary gods in that way one only gets when no longer here to enjoy it. Scott’s books weren’t selling any better than they had before he died, but two issues of the New Republic were dedicated to his memory, and one of the writers Ernest had satirized in The Sun Also Rises had written that Scott was always trying to promote Ernest as the genius when it was Scott himself who was the genius—or that’s the way Ernest read it. It oughtn’t to have mattered; Ernest had such a huge audience for his books. But it’s a funny thing about writers: If we sell well but don’t win awards, then we act like the sales are all that matter, but we know in our secret hearts that it’s the awards that do. If we win awards but don’t sell, well then, we can see that all the awards in the world mean nothing since we’re supposed to be moving hearts, and you can’t possibly move a heart that never picks up your damned book.

  I said, “Thank you for helping Max do such a beautiful job on my book, Bug.”

  He looked to the mountains as he sipped his champagne. “We’ll go out tonight and get happy drunk to celebrate.”

  “I wonder if the thing to do isn’t to stay in and have a fine time together, just us and Mr. Scrooby and no hangovers in the morning. Then maybe I could write.”

  “It’s the book coming out, Mook. No one can write with a book coming out.”

  “I’m becoming a measly good wife, and there’s nothing for me in that. Why don’t we go to Europe, Bug?” I said.

  He wasn’t writing anything either, really, and his book had been out for a year by then.

  He drained the last of the champagne and went to pour more, but the bottle was empty. “We ought to have another bottle,” he said.

  “Really, let’s think about it. About Europe,” I said. “It would give us the juice again. It would help us find the juice to write something grand.”

  “It’s a damned thing, this war bit, Marty. Neil and Sheepshanks and Johnson.”

  Neil and Sheepshanks and Johnson were journalists who had taken it when a shell hit their car in Spain, near Teruel where Ernest had been but on Franco’s side of the fight.

  “Yes, I do know that. Of course, we’d—”

  “There’ll be more too,” he said.

  More journalists dying in this new war.

  “But it’s—”

  “It’s not even our war, Marty. What’s the point in dying for someone else’s war?”

  “But Spain wasn’t—”

  “We’ll go out and get happy drunk and celebrate, and in the morning we’ll write. With both our books out now and that done, we’ll write sharper and truer. That’s what we’ll do, Mook. That’s the thing to do.”

  A few weeks later, we got the news that Ernest was to be given his first prize ever: the Limited Editions Club’s Gold Medal, to be presented by Sinclair Lewis. We’d planned to stay in Sun Valley until early December, then drive through Indian country—Utah and Arizona and Texas—to the Gulf on our way home to Cuba. But the trip really didn’t matter, and I said I could make the arrangements for us to go to New York for the award ceremony.

  “You don’t like New York,” Ernest said.

  “But this is different, Bongie. This is your swanky award. It would be lovely to go for that.”

  “We’ll not change our plans for an award that doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean it doesn’t matter, Bug? It’s a fine award, and Sinclair Lewis will speak all gushy over you before he puts the thing in your hands. Think of that. Sinclair Lewis, who is only the first American ever to have won the Nobel Prize in literature.”

  “I’ll have Scribner send a stenographer, and we can read about it.”

  “But, Bongie, we could fly to New York for the ceremony and come back if this driving trip means that much to you.”

  “We’ll not change our plans,” he insisted. “I’ve already written to Max that I’ve promised you this trip to see Indian country, and I won’t go back on my promise.”

  “Promised me?”

  “He’ll send a stenographer, so we won’t miss a word of the ceremony, and I’ll go up and fetch the thing when I’m there on some tax business I have to attend to after the first of the year.”

  Texas

  DECEMBER 1941

  Ernest and I sat in a scruffy little bar just over the border into Texas, drinking daiquiris on a hot afternoon and talking about cows, when a young boy came into the bar, the dust kicking up into the bright sunlight in the doorway.

  “La guerra! La guerra!” he called.

  “What’s he saying, Bug?” I asked, knowing in my gut what the boy was saying but unable to believe it even though we expected it. It was impossible that this poor kid who was far too young to have any idea what his words might really mean could be bringing us this news.

  “Boy!” Ernest shouted. “¡Chico!” But the boy was running to the man behind the bar, rattling excitedly in Spanish, and the bartender was already turning the radio to the CBS Sunday news program, The World Today.

  We listened, disbelieving. Every person in the dark, little bar listened.

  “The fucking Japs have bombed Hickam Field and that naval air base at Pearl Harbor,” Ernest said to me.

  The attack had to have come from aircraft carriers, someone on the program was saying. The Japanese had taken a great risk in the attack. It wasn’t clear yet how much damage they had done—how many ships had been sunk or damaged, how many planes had been destroyed from the bombing of the airfields. They didn’t yet know how many were wounded, how many parents would be opening telegrams in the days to come.

  “T
his is how we get into this war?” I said, remembering the planes wingtip to wingtip on the tarmac when we’d gone through Hawaii on the way to China, and so many ships all packed into the harbor with Japanese fishing boats slithering around them. It was the military’s favorite system, Ernest had said: get everything packed into one place in order to get the whole lot wiped out.

  John Daly, the CBS radio host, was now reporting that at KGMB, the CBS station in Honolulu, the sound of antiaircraft was incessant as perhaps a hundred planes continued to attack.

  Bug looked up at me, his face pale despite all the time in Sun Valley, his eyes red and watery. “Bumby,” he said.

  His son, a freshman at Dartmouth despite all Ernest’s attempts to get him to take the year off, had turned eighteen on October 10.

  We spent Christmas in Cuba with Bumby and Mouse and Gigi. We finished our tax returns and we wrapped presents, and Ernest took all his fear for Bumby out on Max Perkins. He wrote angry letters chastising Scribner for failing to send a stenographer to record Sinclair Lewis’s damn speech for the Limited Editions Club award Ernest couldn’t be bothered to collect. Even after Pearl Harbor, he charged Scribner’s failure to commit the speech to paper as the most horrendous thing that ever happened in the whole dang world. I steadfastly avoided the subject, which was ungenerous, I know, but it was tiresome, hearing repeatedly how Lewis’s speech was the only thing Ernest got from the book and now he never would be able to read it. Not that he cared for himself, mind you, but he’d sure have liked his children to be able to read Lewis’s remarks. “If they’d sent a damned stenographer they could have made a truckload of money publishing the speech and done me some good in the bargain,” he said over and over. “I wired asking them to do it, for God’s sake.” And my pointing out that he did have the medal itself only drew irksome insistence that the damned thing was a reminder of how thoughtless his publisher was.

  It was my fault sometimes too: if I hadn’t insisted on that drive through Indian country, he was quite sure he would have gone. Well, I hadn’t given a hoot about the trip. He’d used the trip as an excuse to avoid something that would make him uncomfortable. He was oddly and lovably uneasy with public accolades. But there was no saying that. So I just listened, and when I was the target of a tirade, I ducked as best I could and resolved to make him go the next time, even if it wasn’t the Pulitzer or the Nobel.