Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘Now, when we made Congo Cavalcade, it was on a sound stage. We didn’t even think about shooting it on location. But then the fellows who made The New Adventures of Tarzan in ’34 really did take themselves off to Guatemala, because they didn’t have a studio of their own in Hollywood, and the public loved it. I say that’s the future and in twenty years I’ve never been wrong about that sort of thing. The trouble is, after Tarzan, the Guatemalans thought they’d struck gold, and now they want money for the use of their ruins. But there’s a place we can go in Spanish Honduras. It’s spectacular and it’s only just been discovered and it won’t cost us a dime. Don’t ask me how I know about it. We’ll throw everything together in a whistle and you’ll leave in two weeks. Understand?’

  Once again Whelt gathered his courage, which already had that crumpled quality of courage that’s been gathered too many times in a row. ‘But does Hearts in Darkness follow the Whelt Rule?’ he said.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Mr Spindler, there’s nothing I want to do in the world more than direct a picture. But if I can’t direct a picture that follows the Whelt Rule, I don’t want to direct a picture at all. Frankly, this offer of yours is the greatest opportunity I’ve ever had in my life. That’s why I don’t want to let you down. But when a scenario doesn’t follow the Whelt Rule, there’s nothing that you or I or anyone could do to prevent it from flopping. So I can’t agree to direct your picture unless I know that the action intensifies in a series of five or six regular increments, reaches its highest level before giving way to a thrilling interval of weightlessness or flight, and then returns safely to the status quo.’

  ‘Listen, Whelt, I respect your Rule. That’s why I brought you here. If you don’t like the ending, you can change it. Any other misgivings?’

  Whelt was telling himself that he shouldn’t be startled by what was happening here, because almost every time he went to the movies he felt one hundred per cent sure that he could have done a better job than the director, and for Spindler to have recognised these talents was an instance of exactly the sort of perspicacity that you would expect to find in the second richest studio boss in Hollywood. But however unruffled Whelt might originally have felt about the telegram, he could not now shake the niggling feeling that, for all his confidence in his Rule, it was quite hard to imagine any truly sane and rational businessman handing over responsibility for a four- or five-hundred-thousand-dollar movie on that basis alone. He felt the sort of doubtful pride you would feel if your son had just been put in charge of the Navy at age seven. Could this be right? ‘No misgivings at all, sir.’

  ‘Good. Tomorrow morning at eight you’ll report to the Kingdom Pictures lot on Formosa Avenue. They’ll be expecting you. Now, when you see your pals at the taproom tonight, what are you going to tell them about me?’

  Whelt never drank liquor and did not have any pals. ‘Uh, I don’t know, Mr Spindler, what would you like me to tell them?’

  ‘Are you going to tell them that I’m cracked? That I’m unfit for human company? That I’ve converted a perfectly good mansion into a carnival spook house?’

  ‘No, Mr Spindler!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I mean … yes? Should I say all that? I can say all that.’

  ‘You can say what you like. Already so much hogwash in the stockpot that nothing else you put in there could possibly affect the taste. But I want you to understand that there is a reason for the interior scheme of this house. There are many who wish me dead. Even within my own company. That’s the natural consequence of my position. And there is no bodyguard alive who I trust as much as a bell on a string. Understand?’

  ‘Right. I understand.’

  ‘But I can tell you’re still skeptical.’

  ‘No, sir, I’m not at all.’

  ‘I can tell that you are. I want you to look me in the eye.’ Those last few words came from just behind Whelt’s ear.

  He turned, his heart gonging in his chest. Spindler must have been as nimble as Jerome the cat because he hadn’t rung a single bell on his approach. Beside every article about Spindler they printed the last confirmed photo ever taken of him, from the Congo Cavalcade premiere a year or so after his accident. But that photo was in profile, so you couldn’t have seen that his eyes didn’t line up any more, the right eye socket having slipped about a quarter of an inch down his face and tilted over towards the nose, a permanent Cubist squint. His long tongue twitched around in his mouth even when he wasn’t speaking, and his breath smelled like cask-ripened foot bandages. For some reason he wore a loose boiler suit made from the same material as the stuffing of his mansion. ‘Here I am, boy,’ Spindler said. ‘Now that we’ve stood face to face, we shall be on more straightforward terms. We shall get the real measure of each other.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Spindler.’

  ‘Very well. Time for you to go.’

  As Whelt, relieved, began to back away, he stepped in the wrong place, lost his balance, and toppled over backward. But before his head hit the floor, another strand caught his shoulders, and he found himself reclining as if in a hammock.

  For the first time he saw that twenty or thirty feet above him, visible mostly by its corner glimmerings, some sort of long metal cabin was nestled like a treehouse in the canopy. He wondered if it might be a Union Pacific dining car. But then he understood the truth. This was the gondola.

  Spindler had made a nest from the carcass of the airship that almost ended him. The vessel’s envelope had been a heavy cotton varnished not only with iron oxide but also with the same cellulose acetate butyrate that was being introduced as a safer replacement for nitrates in photographic emulsions. That filmy hide had been reused as the basic material of Spindler’s hermitage: the hand-stitched boiler suit he wore, and the bell-ropes that supposedly kept him safe. Perhaps he even slept up there in the gondola, Whelt thought, although he’d have to be agile to make the climb.

  When Whelt righted himself he found that his new boss had gone. He was in such a hurry to leave that the network pealed left and right as he pushed his way through. But near the front doors he realised that there were a thousand questions he was an idiot not to have asked. Turning, he shouted, ‘Mr Spindler, do you have any, uh, advice on how to make a movie?’

  ‘Just keep it simple, Whelt.’ The voice didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular. ‘Introduce all the principle characters in the first scene and whatever you do don’t try to be clever. Remember that. Keep it simple.’

  Outside, the sunlight threw its arms around Whelt as if they hadn’t seen each other in years. Driving past the gates, he found that the blonde woman was leaning on the hood of her car smoking a cigarette, and this time it was he who couldn’t get past. It must have been obvious that he needed her to give way, but she didn’t, so he put on the handbrake and got out.

  ‘So is he crazy like they say?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is that what they told you to say?’

  ‘Nobody told me to say anything.’

  ‘Nobody told you to say anything and nobody swore you to secrecy either?’

  ‘He said I could say whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted.’

  ‘Gosh, now I feel churlish for assuming that just because a guy goes into hiding he might have something to hide. How do you rate my chances of getting an interview if I wait for the rest of the day?’

  ‘You’re a reporter?’

  ‘My name’s Meredith Vansaska and I’m from the New York Evening Mirror. Do you think he’ll talk to me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He absolutely won’t?’

  Whelt shook his head.

  ‘No, I thought not,’ Vansaska said. ‘Listen, would you answer some questions if I bought you a sandwich? I don’t know what sort of money you make so I don’t know if a sandwich is a big inducement but you’re the first person I’ve met out here who has spoken to Spindler in the last five years and will admit to it.’

  Normally Whelt would have dec
lined, because lunch with a stranger was nowhere on his schedule for the day and he did not care to squander his afternoons socializing with females. But he was hungry and he had something to celebrate. ‘All right,’ he said.

  *

  When a Cambridge undergraduate named Joan Burlingame took a train through the English countryside to visit her former tutor, about a week after the events I’ve just described, she was so nervous that she brought with her, like a protective amulet, a copy of Folklore of the Tucanoan-Speaking Peoples. This was the masterwork of ethnology that had made Dr Sidney Bridewall’s name when he was only twenty-nine. She felt that if it were fresh in her mind and heavy in her handbag she might in some occult way be able to establish a connection with the courteous young Dr Bridewall of the early 1920s, who was not nearly as daunting a character as the one she was about to visit. That morning, just after breakfast, a porter had come to her room at Newnham to tell her that she was wanted in the lodge to take a telephone call from America, his tone of voice suggesting that this was an act of inexcusable pretension on her part, as if she’d arranged for the delivery of a sapphirine pianola.

  ‘Hello?’ said the voice on the other end of the line, barely audible over the gale of interference. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘This is Miss Joan Burlingame.’ The porter stood there watching her as if to ensure that the extremely important young lady was satisfied with her extremely important telephone call. ‘May I ask to whom I am—?’

  ‘This is Elias Coehorn Jr. I want to know if you have any idea where to find this elusive Dr Bridewall. I’ve spoken to about a hundred people and all they could tell me was that a girl named Burlingame sometimes comes to pick up his mail. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t seen him in quite a while.’ Although Dr Bridewall had lost his positions at nearly all of the professional associations to which he had once belonged, he still received frequent invitations from various smaller bodies – the Winchester College Ethnography Club, the Amateur Archaeological Society of Southern Rhodesia, the Boston Conventicle for Ladies’ Edification – who hadn’t yet heard the news of his disgrace, asking him to deliver a lecture or contribute an article to a newsletter. There was no point referring them to Notcote Hall, because even if Dr Bridewall had received the letters he would have ignored them. Burlingame felt guilty for replying to the letters on her former tutor’s behalf, since he’d never given her permission to do so, but she also would have felt guilty for stopping, since each unanswered invitation was one more avoidable mar to his reputation. In other words, whatever she did, she felt she was doing the wrong thing, which was a familiar condition from every single other area of her existence. Well, she thought, ‘it can’t be helped’ – putting mental quotation marks, as always, around any phrase that had established itself in her mind because her mother used it so often at home: ‘it can’t be helped’, ‘it can’t be helped’, ‘it just can’t be helped’, as if life’s tribulations were a succession of dying animals being wheeled through a veterinary surgery.

  ‘If you don’t see him, Miss Joan Burlingame, then why do you pick up his mail?’ asked Coehorn. When she didn’t answer straight away, he said, ‘All right, never mind that. Where is he?’

  ‘He isn’t at the university any more. He lives near a village called Notcote.’

  ‘Does he have a telephone?’

  ‘No, but I can give you the address if you like.’

  ‘There isn’t time for me to write. Is this place “Notcote” far from wherever you are?’

  ‘Not far, no.’

  ‘Can you take him a message? I’m going on an expedition to the jungle in Spanish Honduras. Pozkito country, around the Río Patuca, about fifty miles inland from the Caribbean Sea, although we’ll approach from the other direction. I understand that the natives around there are chummy with Bridewall. I want him to come along as our guide and liaison. We leave at the beginning of next month. He’ll be extremely well paid – limitless resources – the Eastern Aggregate Company’s backing us. In fact, I specifically want you to use that phrase: “limitless resources”. All he has to do is get himself to a telephone and call me collect at Audobon 281 so we can make the rest of the arrangements. Audobon 281. That’s New York, obviously. Have you got all that?’

  Burlingame realised too late that the words ‘not far’ had been construed to mean a stroll across the fens rather than a return train journey that would take up a whole afternoon she could not spare. She wished she could make a clarification but it didn’t seem right to mention it because Coehorn might have thought she was shirking her responsibilities or even hinting she wanted some kind of compensation. ‘Yes, I’ve got all that,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much, Mr Coehorn.’ If she went to Notcote she’d be lucky to finish her translation of Montejo’s Las Curiosidades de Yucatán before two in the morning. Well, she thought unhappily, ‘it can’t be helped’.

  Among Buckingame’s younger cousins were several members of that irritating category of child who insists on showing you its entire collection of pipe stems or seashells or cigarette cards whenever you come over for tea. In much the same way, the view out of the window of the 13.38 from Cambridge would apparently not be satisfied until it had methodically exhibited every living cow.

  So that afternoon there was not much to distract her from Folklore of the Tucanoan-Speaking Peoples, even though she already knew the contents well. The quality of the scholarship was utterly invigorating – the patience and thoroughness with which Dr Bridewall, extending the methodology of Antti Aarne’s Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (Motif-Index of Folk-Literature), seemed at first to be working within the confines of Newton Mathers’s earlier work on the subject, but by the end had cracked that work open like a mere plaster mold, revealing the lustrous form of a more visionary understanding – and by the time the train got into Notcote, Burlingame felt as if she had established an affectionate bond with Dr Bridewall’s diligent and gentlemanly younger self.

  This was of no help, however, when she was greeted at the front door of grand old Notcote Hall by Lady Alice, eldest daughter of the late Earl of Notcote, naked but for a skirt of bark and a necklace of flowers.

  ‘Oh, I’m frightfully, frightfully sorry!’ Burlingame said, turning away and bringing her hand up to her eye as a blinder.

  ‘For what?’ said Lady Alice.

  Upon his return from an expedition to the jungles of Spanish Honduras in 1935, Dr Bridewall had cancelled all his obligations at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology in favor of traveling to fourteen different lecture halls across England to deliver a slide presentation entitled ‘What I Learned from the Pozkito People’. The natives of that region, he announced, were the happiest, wisest, sincerest people in the world. They had no gods, no kings, no wars, no private property, and, above all, no rules of sexual conduct. They spent most of their waking hours having strenuous intercourse with one another, often in trios or quartets, pausing only to pluck fruit from the trees or scoop fish from the stream. They used a safe and reliable form of natural contraceptive that they made from sap. Within a few weeks of his arrival, they had come to accept Dr Bridewall as one of their own, and he had come back to England only because he believed it was his duty to alert his countrymen to what they were missing. Once a devout Anglican, from now on he would be living as the Pozkitos did, and he invited men and women from any walk of life to join him, subject to an interview to determine that they were not merely journalists or sensation-seekers.

  At several of these lectures Dr Bridewall was shouted down by an outraged audience, and at Dudley Opera House he was taken into custody by the police. Then, as a result of the scandal, he was invited to dinner at the London residence of young Lady Alice, who liked to surround herself with decorative iconoclasts, and not long after that he was installed in Notcote Hall alongside all three of the late Earl of Notcote’s daughters. Society pals of Lady Alice were understood to travel regularly to Notcote to find out what they, too, could learn from the
Pozkito people. Her closest male relative, a botanist older cousin, was in northern Australia waiting for the Queensland udumbara to bloom and so could not intervene in the situation except by a series of unanswered postcards.

  ‘I’m here, er …’ Any two normal people in this situation, thought Burlingame, would instinctively conspire in the pretense that perhaps Lady Alice had been getting dressed after an early bath when somehow she mistook the doorbell for a fire alarm.

  ‘You’re here for Dr Bridewall?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Burlingame, relieved. She felt rude for talking to Lady Alice without looking at her but she also would have felt rude for looking at her.

  Lady Alice shouted behind her into the house. ‘Sidney, get out from under Gwyneth and come into the hall – a girl’s arrived.’ She turned back to Burlingame. ‘How long are you expecting to be with us? I see you haven’t any luggage. Sometimes that means people only expect to stay the afternoon and sometimes it means they expect never to leave. I’m afraid that isn’t very probable unless we all take a special shine to you.’

  ‘No,’ said Burlingame hastily, ‘I’m not …’ I’m not one of you, she wanted to say.

  ‘My dear, you won’t last very long around these parts if you can’t so much as bring yourself to contemplate a pair of charleys.’

  When you wished to defy someone who had just spoken to you like that, did you turn round and look her in the eye or did you literally turn round and look her in the aureolae? The latter did not seem possible to Burlingame, who found even the company of the marble nudes in the Fitzwilliam almost too mortifying to bear.

  But at that moment her former tutor appeared behind Lady Alice. He, too, wore only a kilt of bark and a necklace of flowers, and his face was as flushed and moist as an exposed gland. ‘Miss Burlingame!’ he exclaimed between deep breaths. ‘What an unexpected pleasure!’ This time, Burlingame was almost able to convince herself that perhaps while Lady Alice had been taking her early bath Bridewall had coincidentally been chasing a thief who ran off with his pajamas, since her only inkling of how a man might behave following sexual congress came from that Latin proverb, sometimes attributed to Galen, about how ‘all animals are sad after …’, so if he really had just got ‘out from under Gwyneth’ she would have expected him to be grave and soft-spoken like a witness to a hunting accident. Still, she knew that this was not the Dr Sidney Bridewall of Folklore of the Tucanoan-Speaking Peoples and that somewhere under that bark skirt there must nestle a malign procreative instrument. ‘My goodness, Alice, why haven’t you invited her in?’ he said.