Elena

by Thomas H. Cook

  “I once read a book called New England Maid,” I said. “It was written by an artist. I wish the author well. I really do. But I have my fears.”

  And with that, I walked away.

  I refused to go to the little farewell party the staff of New Masses threw for Jack and Elena when they left on their American tour. Nor did I help them pack the car the morning they left. But Miriam did, and she told me that Elena took her hand and squeezed it very hard as she got into the car, and smiled sadly and said, “Tell William that I love him.” As the car pulled away, Jack threw his gray rumpled hat out the window into the air.

  She was gone a year and a half, relentlessly touring the low spots of the era, until, from the portrait of wretchedness her letters detailed, it sometimes appeared that she had fallen in love with the nation’s misery. Week after week she wrote of almost nothing else, and eventually I came to dread her letters as one fears a phone call in the dead of night.

  But Elena’s letters were not the only bad tidings of that time. All Europe seemed to be sinking toward a frightening abyss. The belabored businessmen and their snarling wives who were the travel agency’s best customers increasingly decided to stay in the United States. As a consequence, I lost my job.

  For a while, I had no idea what to do. The prospect of hunger and homelessness became far more real than the sort described in Elena’s letters. I had no savings, having squandered my weekly pay on books or on eating out when I should have been cooking at home. Of course, I knew I could always go somewhere, to someone, if I really hit bottom. Harry, at the very least, could find me some kind of job. Because of that, the bottom for me was far above the bottom for a great many other people.

  Still, without a job I felt helpless. I wandered the streets, joining that gray army which stood staring at the chalkboards on Sixth Avenue, hoping for something to come my way — a job, any job. I applied for everything from short-order cook to president of a small women’s college in the South. But the weeks passed, and my landlord began to eye me warily each time we met in the lobby. I grew more and more depressed. Even the prospect of publishing my Cowper book, which Sam had scheduled for September, could not lift the pall that had come over me. No one knew better than I did that something had to give.

  Finally something did: a suggestion from Sam that I apply to the newly created Federal Writers Project in New York. “You can say you’re a writer, William,” Sam urged me. “Hell, your book’s been bought.”

  So I trudged down to the enormous armory at Lexington and Twenty-sixth, where a horde of “writers” gathered each day, chewing their nails and yapping irritably at each other, all hoping to snatch a federal job from the stale, smoky air.

  To my astonishment, I was hired as an editor, at a salary of a little over twenty-three dollars a week. And so, on a cold, rainy Monday morning I appeared at the offices of the New York Project. They were located at the Port Authority on Eighth Avenue and were accessible only by freight elevator, which had been designed to lift ten-ton trucks rather than this motley, griping, and insistently political assembly of writers, or people who, on the flimsiest evidence, claimed to be writers.

  Once on our floor in the Port Authority building, I discovered that layers of disorganization had been built into both the project and the personnel. The hierarchy of administration was always shifting, the writers almost always moody, sometimes bitter, and often divided in their loyalties, some primarily committed to the project, some to their particular political persuasion. Yet despite the factionalism, the strikes and sit-ins and slowdowns, the drunkenness and sloth and endless political wrangling, especially between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists — despite all of this, a great deal was accomplished during my short tenure there, and I came away after six months with a curiously tender feeling of camaraderie with that intransigent and interminably bickering lot of scribblers who finally turned out a decidedly odd list of publications, everything from the wonderful New York Guide to Who’s Who at the Zoo. Years later, when Elena was working on the section of Quality that deals with the radical literary atmosphere of the thirties, she asked me what I had thought of the New York Project. I told her that I had come to think of it as being much like a zebra Marianne Moore had described in one of her poems, “supreme in its abnormality.”

  Three months after I’d starting working at the Project, my Cowper book was published. I had delivered the manuscript to Sam several months before, under the title The Poetry of William Cowper: A New Study. Sam, sitting at his desk, looked up from the manuscript and asked me if I expected anyone to buy a book with a title as dull as that. I stared at him helplessly. He thought a moment, then scratched out my title and penciled in his own: Method in Madness: A Study of the Bizarre in William Cowper. And with that lurid title, the book was published in November of 1935, “to share the highbrow Christmas trade,” Sam said to me with a wink.

  The Cowper book — I would always call it simply that — limped along for a few months, selling primarily, as Sam pointed out, “in the sort of shop that sits between an opera house and a museum specializing in medieval artifacts.” Then it disappeared entirely, inhabiting now only the most remote corners of university libraries and brought out only by desperate graduate students in search of an aged thesis for their bright new scholarship to annihilate.

  When the book appeared, Sam, indicating the difficulty of the times, said that Parnassus could not afford either a publishing party or a single penny of advertising. Thus it fell to some of my colleagues at the Project to throw me a small party. Miriam provided her cramped apartment, and Harry provided the booze. As a celebration, it was certainly subdued. Sam couldn’t make it, nor could Tom, who was busy on a poem he described quickly over the telephone as being a cross between Milton and Whitman. Hearing this, Miriam simply shook her head and walked away, while Harry poured himself another drink.

  The party droned on for several hours, though the mirth drained away quickly. There was hardly cause for any to begin with. I was broke; the book was a dud. It was being published as a personal favor, perhaps to me, perhaps to my sister. I never learned Sam’s thinking on that matter, but I did discover that Parnassus could not possibly have published my book had not New England Maid been such a towering success. This bit of information, which Sam confided rather offhandedly a few days before my book was published, further darkened for me what would have been under any circumstances a drab occasion.

  Finally, toward midnight, the last of my weary guests left Miriam’s apartment and it was just the two of us, picking up the disordered cups and saucers, snatching floating cigarette butts from glasses before pouring the now-tepid whiskey down the drain.

  “I suppose I should have tried to be a better sport about things,” I said.

  Miriam smiled and pulled me into her arms. We were standing by the kitchen sink, not the most romantic of settings; yet it was somehow extraordinarily romantic at that moment, suggesting the gentle domesticity we had finally reached.

  “Perhaps it’s time we got married,” I said.

  Miriam looked at me skeptically. “Really?”

  “Or maybe we should just hop in a station wagon and head to parts unknown, like Jack and Elena.”

  Miriam shook her head. “No, you’re not that type, William.”

  Half joking, I said, “Bring a cushion from the living room, and I’ll get on my knees.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “Well, will you, Miriam, marry me?”

  She said yes, but that she did not want to do it immediately, and that is how we left it.

  A month later, Teddy McNaughton’s nerves got the best of him. He promptly left New York, and Sam offered his job to me. We were sitting in a bar on lower Broadway. It was snowing heavily outside, and the trolleys were pushing waves of white fluff before them like plows.

  “So,” Sam said, “with Teddy gone, the job’s open. The money’s not great, but it’s better than you’re getting with the government.” He lowered his voice cons
piratorially. “And you know as well as I do that your salary amounts to a handout. That whole Project business is just a form of being on the dole.”

  I rankled a bit at that. “We work quite a lot over there, Sam.”

  Sam shook his head. “I don’t want to get into that. You have a job offer; not much money, but a lot of opportunity. You can take it or leave it.” Years later, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Sam would claim that in his heart he had been so opposed to what he then called “the Lefty programs of the New Deal” that he had actually offered jobs to Project writers “in order to allow the private sector to generate honest labor for these struggling artists.” One of the names he offered the committee as evidence of this activity was mine.

  Sam continued to stare at me. “William, I have a hundred guys would take this job in a minute. You want it or not?”

  I took it, gladly. On Monday of the following week, I took my seat behind Teddy’s old desk, emptied its drawers of his random notes and curious sketches, and in doing so, I suppose, chased his lingering spirit from the room.

  For the next month I worked on whatever book Sam assigned me. It was generally agreed that I would not be asked to do any editorial work on anything written, now or in the future, by Elena Franklin.

  Accordingly, when the first few pages of Elena’s new novel arrived at Parnassus, they went directly to Miriam’s desk. She read the pages immediately, her eyes fastened on the manuscript as if it were a holy text. Then for a long time she was silent. Finally, unable to bear the suspense, I marched up to her desk.

  “That manuscript you were reading,” I said, “it was from Elena, right?”

  Miriam looked up at me. “Yes.”

  “Well, is it any good?”

  Miriam hesitated. “It’s different.”

  “What does that mean, ‘different’?”

  “Different from her usual work.”

  “May I see it?”

  “I thought you and Sam had agreed that you’d keep away from Elena’s work.”

  “I don’t want to edit it, Miriam, I just want to read it. Surely I have that right.”

  Miriam considered this for a moment, then she handed me the manuscript. It was no more than twenty pages long. “It’s what she proposes as the opening chapter,” she said.

  I nodded. “Thanks. Do you want to know my opinion of it, once I’ve read it?”

  “Not really, William,” she said.

  I took the manuscript back to my desk and began reading the introductory chapter of The Forty-eight Stars.

  I was, to say the least, astonished by what I found. Structurally, it was pure chaos, a maelstrom of randomly selected images: disgorged eyes falling down blackened mine shafts; fingers digging beneath prison walls; trees tumbling through space with nooses swinging from their limbs. It was as if Elena had taken the most hideous scenes from her letters, cut them out, and thrown them into the air. The writing seemed to have been blown out of a blast furnace, wild and overheated.

  After about five pages, however, this lurid whirlwind began to slow. A parade of caskets passes by, each draped with a flag — red and blue stripes with a single white star — the slow-motion funeral march to the grave of America. Somewhere in the distance a bugle is heard, and suddenly the caskets pop open and a series of American types haul themselves out of their coffins. There is the soldier, the sturdy yeoman, the teacher, the businessman, the politician, the liberal reformer, the cowboy … the list is long. It is also exact: there are forty-eight types. These ghostly personages proceed to engage in a good old American hoe-down, dancing and prancing and grouping themselves in various combinations probably meant to convey natural alliances, the farmer with the urban worker, for example, the politician with the rich industrialist. As time passes, the dance becomes more frantic, the spinning and whirling more desperate, until we are once again in the maelstrom with which the book began. And it is there, spinning madly, that Elena leaves us on page twenty: America as a wildly whirling top.

  When I had finished reading it, I took the manuscript back to Miriam and dropped it softly on her desk. I lingered, waiting for her to ask me what I thought. She never did.

  For the next few weeks, scattered sections of The Forty-eight Stars drifted into the office. Miriam always read them first, while I waited in the adjoining office, staring intently at her, trying, always in vain, to determine what she thought about this book, which seemed to me, as I read one section after another, increasingly strident and disordered.

  Finally, after what appeared to be approximately half the novel had come to us, I asked Miriam bluntly what she intended to do about it. She told me that she intended to do nothing at all until Elena returned home.

  Elena came back to New York in February of 1936. I was walking along the sidewalk toward my apartment when they pulled up in that same old battered Model A, Elena on the passenger side, Jack, smiling brightly, at the wheel. She bounded out of the car the instant Jack brought it up to the curb, and I swept her into my arms, relishing the feeling of having my sister back.

  “I missed you very much.”

  “Oh, William,” Elena said excitedly, “it was a wonderful trip. I’ve never learned so much in my life.”

  “Good,” I said, carefully avoiding any mention of her book. “I’m glad it was a good experience for you.”

  Jack sauntered up and shook my hand. “Well, Bill, why don’t you ask us up for a drink? We’re what they call road tired.”

  “Of course. Please, come on up.”

  In my apartment, I made coffee for the three of us, spiking Jack’s with a touch of whiskey.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for the party, William,” Elena said.

  “What party?”

  “For your book.”

  “Oh, that was nothing. Just a little get-together at Miriam’s. Even Sam didn’t make it. Just mostly some of the people from the Project.”

  “How is the Project?” Jack asked.

  “Interesting,” I said. “But I prefer working at Parnassus.”

  “I guess you know I’ve been sending in parts of my new novel,” Elena said.

  “Yes, Miriam told me.”

  Elena smiled brightly. “Have you read it?”

  I shook my head. “No. Miriam likes to keep things like that to herself.”

  “Do you have any idea what she thinks about it?”

  “No, I don’t, Elena,” I said, which in a way, at least, was true.

  Jack slapped his leg. “Wait until you read it, Bill. It’s amazingly imaginative. Not that old Socialist realism stuff at all. It’s like a painting by Hieronymous Bosch, a word painting, you might say.” He took a quick sip from his cup. “Oh, and by the way, congratulations.”

  “For what?”

  “Engagement to Miriam,” Jack said. “You’re a lucky man.”

  “I think so,” I said. I turned to Elena. “So, now you’re back for a while?”

  “Yes,” Elena said. “More or less indefinitely.”

  “Not me, though,” Jack said. “I’ve got a piece to write for New Masses, then I’m going down South. Got a hell of a lot going on down there.”

  I looked at Elena. “You’re not going with him?”

  Jack shook his head. “No, she needs to finish the book. That’s the most important thing. And you can’t write the Great American Novel from the back of a Model A.”

  “No,” I said quietly, “I suppose not.”

  “I guess you’ve been following the events in Spain?” Jack asked.

  “I read the papers,” I said, “that’s about all. There’s a lot of talk about it around the city.”

  “Really?” Jack seemed surprised. “Who’s talking, the liberals?”

  “Communists, mostly,” I told him. “A lot of my old colleagues at the Project.”

  Jack nodded. Then, without being asked, he launched into a lengthy discussion of the issues involved, predicting the civil war that would break out only a few months
later. When he had finished, the conversation turned to subjects closer to home. Elena mentioned that she had managed to keep in touch with Elizabeth while on the road and that all seemed well with her in France. She had also gotten several letters from our father, mostly having to do with his itinerary.

  All of this clearly bored Jack to death. He fiddled impatiently with the little doily on his chair or allowed his hands to flop about randomly, never suspecting that this might prove a distraction to anyone but himself.

  Finally the conversation wound its way back to Parnassus Press and the fate of my Cowper book. Elena was sorry to hear about the poor sales but argued that the book was not yet dead.

  “Oh, yes it is,” I said. “As a doornail.”

  “I think the trouble may be Cowper himself,” Jack said, unsuccessfully concealing a yawn. “He’s not modern enough to attract attention.”

  “He attracted William’s,” Elena said, defending me.

  Jack laughed. “Well, you must admit that William is a special case.”

  I smiled. “Jack’s right. Cowper is slow going, even for the most plodding scholar. I’ve been thinking about another book though, about Coleridge.”

  “That’s better,” Jack said. He stood up, stretched, walked to the window, and stared out idly.

  “I’ve been thinking about a full-scale biography,” I told Elena.

  “Yes, William, that might be —”

  “Used to be a soup kitchen down on the corner,” Jack said, still gazing out the window. He turned to me. “Did that dry up?”

  “It moved over to Twenty-third Street,” I told him. “Every Thursday.”

  Jack nodded dully, then turned back toward the window.

  “Anyway,” I said to Elena, “the Coleridge book would have more natural interest if only because Coleridge is so much more famous than our dear friend Mr. Cowper.”

  Jack abruptly left the window and took a seat across from me. “Coleridge sounds fine to me, Bill.” He glanced back at the window, drowsily watching as the curtains drifted back together, leaving only a slant of light on the living room floor. “I’m working on a migrant-labor piece.” Jack smiled at me knowingly. “I guess that sounds terribly topical to you.”