Changing the Past

by Thomas Berger

  Elaine chuckled and said patronizingly, “How lucky you are!”

  John was tired of writing stories. Continuing to produce them until several more were sold seemed an interminable labor. Why not put the effort into a novel? He had always seen that as likely at some time in the future, but if people were already clamoring for one…He needed a plot, a pretext. Forrester had once said in class that first novels were invariably autobiographical. In writing short stories John had avoided the one subject of intense personal reference, whatever it was he had felt for Cissy. He had now got far enough beyond it to consider whether it might have been rather a form of erotic enchantment than love—and of course the irony was that he had proved incapable at the moment the ideal became carnal. Then there was Daphne, whom he did not love and whom he had never desired. Were these the makings of a novel?

  As soon was proved, indeed they were, and he was writing well when Daphne phoned with the news that she had had a miscarriage. Overwrought as she was, she was in no mood to hear his warning that negative intrusions from the real world might throw him into the celebrated writer’s block, with disastrous results for the ambitious work on which he was at last successfully under way. When she hysterically threatened to divorce him, his only feeling was relief.

  Elaine had now begun to take John along to publishing parties, at which she introduced him to certain specially selected persons amongst the crowd that always included a good many people of no utility, lesser writers and other inconsequential types, some of whom came for the free drinks and an illusion of literary fellowship, and if they deigned to learn for whom the party was being held, derided him or her and not even, if they drank enough, that quietly.

  It was by such means that John met Calvin Cavanaugh of Foley & Nash, who was to be his first book editor; Gilligan Hurst, the best-known daily reviewer in the U.S.A., who, starting as a friend of his work, eventually became its most virulent enemy; and several other writers now or formerly represented by Elaine, among them George Binson, whose latest, assumed by his publishers to be another in his lengthy list of cult-novels, had proved to be a surprise best-seller; Molly Dye, who looked too beautiful to be a writer; and an English poet, now teaching at a local university, Peregrine Vole.

  Binson had an unfriendly manner at the outset, telling John he had read the story in Budding and thought it pretty dull except for certain sentences that were plagiarized from his own novels. But when John innocently insisted that could hardly have been the case, for he had never read a line of Binson’s, George’s scowl became a grin.

  “Good for you,” said he. “In fact, I’ve never opened a copy of that fucking thing. Who wants to see who’s up-and-coming? I’ll go further: the wise writer never reads any of his contemporaries: either they’re better or worse than oneself. If worse, why read them? If better, you’d only be envious, so why read them?”

  Binson was at every party to which John ever went in those days, and they became the sort of friends who meet only at such gatherings and have no other sense of each other. What Binson got from John was a listener who would laugh at his cynicisms, which bored those who had known him for years, and all the more so now that he was making a lot of money. For John’s part, he assumed, for a while anyway, that Binson dispensed a unique wisdom, e.g., claiming his recent novel had sold so well only because it was viciously attacked by Gilligan Hurst.

  “But I’m out of luck for my next,” he added, “given his practice of saying something good about the book that comes just after the one he’s savaged.”

  When Hurst later wandered by, with his pasty complexion and baggy suit, Binson said, in a genial tone, “Fuck you, Gil.” To which the critic answered, “Come on, George, you know it’s nothing personal.” “Fuck you.” Hurst shrugged and plodded on. Binson told John, “I don’t want him to like me. It’s the kiss of death.”

  Vole, the British poet, spoke in a voice with extreme rises and falls, he giggled while raising and compressing his already narrow shoulders, and when seated he often tucked one leg under a buttock in a quaint way. But when John mentioned as much to Binson, he was told, “Perry’s not queer. In fact, he’s quite a swordsman. He screws all his pretty students and gets away with it because he’s a literary star. He’s got the administration and the parents bluffed. If some young girl’s mother complains, he quiets her with a fuck for herself.”

  When Elaine introduced John to Vole, the poet scarcely brushed his hand before turning away with no facial response apart from the twitching of a nostril. But later on, when the party had thinned out, and most of the guests who remained, including John, were at least partially drunk, Vole was not, or if he was, he didn’t show it. And he was the only other person at the gathering who remembered John’s name.

  “Lookyeah, Kellog,” said he, “Russ Philbin tells me you’re a damned fine writer, and I’ll take his wud for it. As it happens I cahn’t read narrative prase—just cahn’t fahsten my mind to it if it has characters who are suppased to be recognizable as human beins and things happen to them within some sort of plut.”

  John considered whether Vole was making fun of him. “Funny,” he answered, “I haven’t been able to read much poetry precisely because it doesn’t usually have characters or a plot.”

  Vole nodded solemnly. His sandy hair needed a trim, and the points of his collar were bent upwards. “I’m familiar with that sort of thing, though it’s always seemed so curious. Why is make-believe understandable while reality is nut?” He shrugged in the seemingly pansy style, his shoulders virtually touching his earlobes.

  At first John believed that such a question was of a piece with virility masquerading as effeminacy—viz., bogus—but when he got to know Vole better and not only respect but like him, he understood that the Englishman, as befitted a poet, was more theoretically minded than he. Kellog could admit to himself, though he was shrewd enough never to tell anyone else, not even Elaine, that his own primary motive was to become a celebrity in a wider culture than the restrictively literary stratum in which Vole was a known name though movie stars and statesmen would never have heard of him.

  Not a hack of course, whose books were seized by the herd and devoured like some salty snack, but rather that sort of writer who is read for his penetrating depictions of society and the implications thereof, which will perhaps be of influence on public policy, e.g., as would pertain to the Negro, who was still relegated to the back of the bus in that day. American Puritanism with regard to sex was another such issue. Babbittry was everywhere still regnant, despite victory in another world war. John was embarrassed to have an Englishman like Vole hear President Ike’s disjointed syntax. Stevenson, with his felicitous verbal style, got only the votes of superior people, which meant an overwhelming defeat. Sociopolitical interest was new to John but a concomitant of literary life in the city. In the first draft of The Life and Death of Jerry Claggett, the hero suddenly became a Negro at about the midpoint of the story. The idea worked perfectly, and the preceding chapters would be easy to fix, the differences between Negroes and whites being, after all, accidental and not of the human essence, and it really gave Jerry’s hopeless love for Cindy another dimension, as well as removing it even further from the narrowly autobiographical.

  He continued to keep the novel a secret from Elaine, but he found himself finally in need of someone else’s reaction to the work-in-progress—with which he had to admit he was himself pleased to the point of ecstasy. All the same, it seemed too good to be true.

  He showed his manuscript to Peregrine Vole, which he felt was not so presumptuous as it would have been had Vole not been a foreigner. He also disregarded Perry’s announced disdain for fiction, but was furious all the same when the poet’s response was less than enthusiastic. “With all respect, old fellow, this is twaddle. What would a sensible nigguh see in such a silly tart—unless of course he was a ponce!” The Englishman emitted his high-pitched giggle.

  John was now certain Vole was queer. He slammed the phone down.<
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  A few moments later the poet rang back. “Bloody telly-phone! I was all at once speaking into the void. As I was about to say, Jerry doesn’t seem at all Negro except for being so identified à propos de rien. He seems to have had no experiences of whites-only facilities. Would there be no color bar in this small provincial university town? Would nobody even scowl at Cindy and him eating together in the restaurant? Then it would differ markedly from those I’ve known. Do you know I was sacked once, in Ohio, for having a bloody drink in public with one of my female students? Good job I wasn’t colored into the bargain!”

  By now John had cooled down, but he did say sullenly, “I forgot you don’t care for fiction.”

  “Because whenever I read any, I am invariably distracted by such foolish questions as this. I’m much too literal. Forgive me! Ectually, it’s quite an interesting story, and you’ve told it rather well.”

  He awoke next morning with the conviction that Vole was right about Jerry Claggett. Were he to make him Negro, he must return to the first paragraph and begin another book, furthermore, one that was not about himself.

  Nowadays he slept at home as often as possible and not with Elaine, with whom he was subtly trying if not to break it off, then to tone down their personal association without threatening the professional. He needed Elaine for his career, but as time went on, her sexual appeal, never great, diminished to the degree that he feared soon he would find her downright repulsive, fascinated as he was by Molly Dye, the established novelist, another of Elaine’s clients.

  In age Molly was about midway between him and their agent. She had straight auburn hair that framed a faultless face. Her limpid eyes were remarkable: knowing, but generous all the same; and though she invariably wore loose clothing, her figure was probably the lush sort John favored. He did not even mind a certain plumpness. Elaine currently was looking more skinny than slender, perhaps even somewhat withered. It was more and more unpleasant to see her on first waking up in the morning, before her eyes were on but not before she had lighted the first cigarette of what would be the two-and-a-half packs she would inhale that day.

  The problem with Molly Dye was that she was married and, to all appearances, happily enough, to Joseph P. Foley, who with M. Robert Nash owned the publishing firm that bore their names. Indeed it was the very house that John hoped would publish his novel, for he had observed that Foley & Nash books tended to get respectful reviews, and while he wished to become conspicuously successful, thus offering a target to all, he had a horror of being abused in print—as much as he enjoyed the hatchet jobs done by the critics on other writers: even, or perhaps especially on his friends, e.g., George Binson’s current surprise critical and commercial success demonstrated that not everybody could be pleased simultaneously by any given novel: at the dentist’s office John read, with a frank, involuntary smirk, an unattributed review in a newsweekly that called Binson’s work in general that of a spoiled child, and in the example at hand, one that had furthermore noisomely soiled his diapers.

  But Molly was younger, taller, and more robust than the powerful publisher who was her husband, a slight, short, and bald man in late middle age: she could hardly be satisfied by him in bed. Whereas amongst the other things done for John by Elaine Kissell was to train him to be an inexhaustible sexual performer. Simply being young was not, of course, sufficient, though it did supply the necessary physical capacity. But much instruction by Elaine (always gently and generously provided, so as not to shrivel that resolve which she would hearten) was needed before he could refrain from climaxing as soon as he could, always his practice heretofore in life. Nowadays it was routine for him to astonish himself with his endurance.

  On the other hand he did not want Molly to see him as no more than a potential lover. In fact he was a better writer than she, who was greatly overrated. Her view was parochial, her characters being invariably educated married people living in either cities or in the immediate suburbs thereof and reading books, going to the theater, picnicking on wine and cheese, and having genteel illicit love affairs. John had actually forced himself to read one of Molly’s novels, in preparation for his seduction of her, and its style tended towards preciousness, with its frequent resort to the subjunctive, “were she” and “should we,” references to oloroso sherry and Pont l’Évêque cheese, and men who spoke in exactly the same idiom as the females and wore such clothing as espadrilles and hacking jackets.

  Unfortunately, Molly persisted in ignoring him so thoroughly on at least three meetings, at two of which he was introduced to her as the most promising of up-and-comers, that it was likely she had not so much as heard his name. “I don’t think she likes me,” he told Elaine. “Molly’s like that with everybody,” Elaine replied. “Whenever she wins a prize, she just says ‘Thank you’ and sits down.”

  Two of Molly’s novels had won literary honors; all three had sold well. These facts must be added to her eyes and full breasts as aphrodisiac to John, whose best access to Molly was provided by an invitation to dine, without Elaine (who was not as miffed as he had expected, for she could seldom be hurt by a lucrative client), at the handsome apartment belonging to Millicent Clegg, a wealthy young woman with whom George Binson was having an affair, and who in lit-erarily social matters accepted his direction.

  The meal was brought, course by course, by servitors and included several things John had never tasted before—e.g., an appetizer of poached eggs sealed in aspic, which when cut into exuded a still molten though cold yolk. He was seated between Molly Dye and a young woman whose name he had not heard and in whom, given the person on his left, he had no interest whatever.

  “I’ve read your books,” he said to Molly, as soon as he could, having been delayed by the arrival of filled plates and then the pouring of the wine, and added, “I like them a lot.”

  She put her glass down, said “Thank you,” and turned to the man seated to her left.

  But John patiently waited for his next opportunity and when it came said, “The names you give your characters: they’re very striking. Xenia Smith, for example, and Russell Footling, Harvey Wilson Pucket, Glendora Green.” He had consciously memorized the list. In truth such names annoyed him, he who in his own fiction preferred simplicity in this area, so as not to distract from the important issues.

  Molly said levelly, “You have to call them something.” Again she spoke to the person on her left, who responded with a murmur that rose and fell.

  Obviously John was not getting anywhere. Next time Molly reached for her wineglass, he said, in a mixture of truth and falsehood, “I admire your novels, even if what I’m trying to say about them might not be the right thing.”

  Molly finally looked at him with those luminous eyes. “I’m afraid I don’t respond well to compliments. I never know what to say about my work. After all, I write fiction so I won’t have to say anything. My commenting on my own work would therefore suggest that it had failed.” When she produced more than a polite mumble, the words came too rapidly, and she breathed as though having made some strenuous physical effort.

  John was thrilled to believe that he had broken the ice, but when he was ready to respond, Molly again turned away to make what would seem animated chatter with the person on her left, a sallow, craggy-faced man wearing a plaid necktie. She spent most of the meal so occupied, and when dinner was over she rose quickly and, joining her little old husband, the powerful publisher, bade goodnight to the hosts and left the party.

  John found the experience sufficiently chagrining as to make an early departure himself, without having spoken to anyone aside from Millicent Clegg, whom he thanked en route to the door.

  “Oh,” said she, “can’t you wait till George is off the phone? Those Hollywood producers call at all hours, and usually for silly reasons.”

  “I reallv have to eo.” It seemed better to leave it at that: at the moment he was incapable of inventing some glamorous excuse. Millicent was young and rich and exquisite, with pale gold hair, a
perfect nose, and a flawless complexion. She was obviously devoted to Binson, who had just published a critically successful best-selling novel that had been bought by the movies.

  John was taken by surprise a week later when, at a reception for a visiting French man-of-letters to which Elaine took him, he was chided by Binson. “I seat you next to a lovely girl who has read your quarter-inch shelf of collected works and for some reason thinks you’ve got talent—and you didn’t look at her!”

  To apply “girl” to Molly was to alter its meaning. “I tried to strike up a conversation, but she had to rush home with that little bald-headed husband of hers.”

  “I’m talking about Lucinda Houghton,” said Binson. “She’s an actress, currently playing in Strindberg. She actually wanted to meet you.” He snorted. “It must have been a waste of time to speak with Molly, who’s an egomaniac as well as a raving bull dyke, and if you think you can get her old man to publish you by flattering her, you’re in error. She uses her influence only for scribblers with pussies.” He gestured with his empty glass. “C’mon, let’s get a refill before somebody tries to introduce us to the visiting Froggy, who I’ll bet can’t wait to go back home and write maliciously of the land of the fee and the home of the knave.”

  Finding it unbearable to be without any money but that which he borrowed from his agent, John turned on the heat, writing all day and even some evenings, and completed his novel within only another few weeks. It had been his original intention immediately to show the finished product to Elaine. He was aware that she would be offended by his having written it in secret, but counted on the book itself soon to distract her from such considerations of vanity: it was a marvelous piece of work, about which he could be completely objective, for he reread it as though it had been written by someone else. The characters had a vivid existence of their own, and the emotions, always rich and authentic, at times were truly shattering.

  It was really too exciting a triumph to take to Elaine and have corrupted by some selfish reaction of hers. He decided therefore to send out the manuscript on his own. Then he could confront her armed with a publisher’s acceptance. She was much too professional to make trouble at that stage, at which point she could take over the monetary negotiations and earn her commission.