by Louis Begley
The scene in DerondaI have just described, for all the light it casts on Grandcourt, is minor. But there is something else that has haunted me since I first read Deronda—I guess when I was still in college. It’s the sailing accident. You see, Gwendolen marries Grandcourt—let’s say for his money, although it’s more complicated than that. He carries her off on an interminable and, for her, appalling cruise aboard his yacht in the Mediterranean. Grandcourt is fond of sailing and the absolutism with which you can order life aboard ship. It drives Gwendolen nuts. In the course of a squall, the yacht is damaged, and they are forced to put in at Genoa for repairs. A week will be needed. The prospect of a week ashore seems bright to Gwendolen. Grandcourt cannot bear it. It will be too boring. You see, when he is not active, not exercising minute-by-minute mastery over his entourage, he is bored. That he is a colossal bore is another matter. It’s altogether astonishing how boring English gentlemen were allowed to be. Therefore, he hires a sailboat. He can handle it alone, but insists on Gwendolen’s going out with him, ostensibly to hold the tiller while he looks after the sails. The real reason is that he will not leave her ashore alone. He is too jealous to endure it. On one of their outings, all of a sudden they jibe; the boom, swinging violently, smashes Grandcourt on the head. He falls overboard. Guess what: apparently, this is a rat who doesn’t know how to swim. He calls out to Gwendolen: “The rope!” It’s at her hand, but she doesn’t throw it to him, and Grandcourt drowns. I cannot tell you the resonance of this scene within me.
North fell again into one of his reveries, during which I think he sometimes forgot my presence. After a while, he shook his head, as though to rid himself of a persistent and annoying image before his eyes, and began to speak again.
I’ve resolved to tell you, North said, even the shabby sub-texts of my story. Therefore, I will confess that my eagerness to do the adaptation was not unrelated to the taste I had developed for the money you can earn from working on a movie. This is the kind of sordid reason for my actions that ordinarily wild horses couldn’t drag out of me, and you may be sure that I didn’t reveal it to Lydia. Whether she guessed it, when I explained the demands work was making on me just at that time, is another matter. If she did, she must have taken my decision as an insult. You see, she truly believed that we—she and I—were bound together completely, so that to make such a choice for such a reason I must be either stupid or indifferent to her happiness. She knows that I am not dumb, so why at the cost of time we might have together would I seize the opportunity to earn a sum of money that she would say I absolutely didn’t need? I fear, though I am not certain, that Lydia had measured the extent of my egotism and envy and knew how resentment of her and her family’s wealth made me incapable of generosity and equal partnership with her. I do not think that she despised me for these feelings. You see, she loved me too much. Instead, she pitied me, and tried with all her strength to forgive. But on this occasion the result of my obstinacy and sour pettiness may have been too much even for her.
To make matters worse, I advanced another reason for not accompanying her—an outrageous reason, though not without some bits of truth in it, that I had cooked up on an impulse. I claimed specific aversion to the idea of going to Japan. I stuck to this position, although I knew it upset her, because she is too utterly honest and rational to tolerate that sort of stuff, and because it put me in a bad light. I carried on and on about how I feel lost in countries where I can’t even make out the newspaper headlines, street signs, and so forth, much less the spoken language. I also talked about having observed the entire spectrum of Japanese tourists, on the one end in their bizarre versions of Western casual attire swarming over every tourist attraction in the United States and Europe, and, at the other luxury and power-play end, tight little groups of Japanese businessmen in lobbies of the best hotels, bowing interminably to one another or sleeping on armchairs, heads thrown back and mouths open. These field observations, I asserted, had led me to the unshakable conclusion that the Japanese were a people I could never understand or want to understand even if that were possible. Why should I, in that case, expend a great deal of effort and cash to find myself in their midst? I asked. The photographs of the gardens and temples of Kyoto, many of which I had seen and admired, were quite sufficient. That was the windup of my peroration. Ordinarily, disagreements between Lydia and me were set straight right away; they did not survive to cast a shadow. This time it was different; Lydia stopped speaking about Kyoto, but I could sense her disappointment. She may have thought there was a touch of racism in my bombast. She is extremely sensitive about that, and rightly so. Perhaps it was just as well, therefore, that I was able to advance my starting date in Hollywood. She left for Kyoto, joylessly, I fear, some weeks after my own departure.
To close this long parenthesis before I return to the main thread of my story, said North, I should add that I was not sorry to slow the writing of Loss—a novel I continued to like even as its hold over me caused me great discomfort. I have told you that my views on marriage had been in flux. That condition continued. I kept asking myself why things on both sides of the line—the line by which I divide the good from the bad—that seemed easy to others were so difficult for me. For instance, adultery, the wrong I was doing to Lydia. Why was being unfaithful to a wife or husband a matter of so little concern for the many ostensibly decent men and women I knew, and such a torment for me? I am leaving God out of this, because I have no use for God or religious faith, but one is aware of apparently serious believers on whom the sin of adultery, the scandal of betrayal, does not seem to weigh heavily. Or how difficult, if not impossible, it was for me to accept what Lydia had to give and wanted to give me in such abundance: her love, bestowed unconditionally although her personal qualities are so far superior to mine; her infinite patience with my eccentricities and selfishness; her wealth and the carefree material comfort it purchased for both of us. Any other man, I kept saying to myself, would fall on his knees and give thanks, while I, immobilized by my contradictions, squirmed like a moth pinned to a preparation board by some bastard who won’t use ether.
Writing a screenplay based on a great novel is foremost a labor of simplification. I don’t mean only the plot, although particularly in the case of a Victorian novel teeming with secondary characters and subplots, severe pruning is required, but also the intellectual content. A film has to convey its message by images and relatively few words; it has little tolerance for complexity or irony or tergiversations. I found the work exceedingly difficult, beyond anything I had anticipated. And, I should add, depressing: I care about words more than images, and yet I was constantly sacrificing words and their connotations. You might tell me that through images film conveys a vast amount of information that words can only attempt to approximate, and you would be right, but approximation is precious in itself, because it bears the author’s stamp. All in all, it seemed to me that my screenplay was worth much less than the book, and that the same would be true of the film. The best I could say, to comfort myself, was that I had avoided pushing Eliot’s work toward melodrama. Somehow, my camaraderie with the director survived this operation—miraculously, in my opinion. I worked as rapidly as I could, and left for New York after six weeks, exhausted and sick. The studio doctor told me I had nothing more than a bad cold. Rest and sleep, he said, rest and sleep. I got off the plane with a cough worthy of La Traviata, uncontrollable and loud. I was grateful that Lydia was still in Japan and would not return for another week or ten days. I decided to move into the guest room when she arrived unless I was really better, even though we have always slept in the same room and in the same bed. In fact, I doubted that she would allow me to move, but what with the noise of my coughing and wheezing I thought she would never get any sleep. A day or so after I returned, I was reminded of a meeting of my old school’s twenty-fifth reunion committee. It would be indecent, I decided, to miss it on account of a cold. I dressed warmly and drove up there.
A classmate, with whom I
was later at college, a Manhattan internist, was also in attendance. We had been friends. He had been on the wrestling team and I was glad to see how compact and quick he showed himself at forty-three. Since we were staying at the same inn, I had a nightcap with him and his wife after the committee dinner. As we were leaving the bar, he asked whether I was taking antibiotics for whatever it was that had made me spit my lungs out at the headmaster’s table. I told him about the Hollywood doctor’s prescription. That’s odd, he told me, I will come to your room and listen to your lungs. I didn’t believe that in this age of telephone medicine there were doctors left who still traveled with their little black bags, but he certainly did, and from it he produced a stethoscope that he applied to my back. Which hurts you more, the right lung or the left? he asked when he had finished. Neither, I told him, whereupon he said I had pneumonia. Then thirty miles away he found a pharmacy that was open on Saturday night, and drove there himself to get the pills. I should make clear that in keeping with what my city physician has called my nihilistic attitude toward medicine, I had not consulted him when I returned from the West Coast. After church the next day I went to the meeting and to the lunch and was very pleasant with everybody, mostly, I think, because I knew that I was quite sick. Having seen that I could rise above it somehow put me in a good mood. I didn’t bare my claws for one second. The good mood continued in New York. I sent a case of wine to my doctor classmate, put aside the screenplay of DerondaI had agreed to revise one more time, as well as Loss,and hung around the apartment, allowing myself unlimited naps. There was no question of taking to my bed. The last time I did that I was ten with a bad case of measles. I don’t count the business with my flu in Paris. This last observation provoked a fit of laughter in North.
Seeing that I did not share his amusement, North raised his eyebrows and continued. Finally I felt good enough to make a short visit to my office. There were messages on the answering machine, all from Léa. The only other person who regularly leaves messages at the office is my literary agent, and he knew that I was in Hollywood and had my number at the hotel. You may wonder why I didn’t listen to messages from home, like everybody else. It is more a matter of my modus operandi than of some Luddite conviction. Quite simply, I do not want messages that I have consciously channeled to my office to follow me around when I am not there. They and the people who left them can wait. Lydia and Ellen, the only people alive who mustn’t be kept waiting, don’t need to leave messages. And my parents’ keepers always know how to reach me if they can’t find Ellen. Didn’t I love Léa once, you want to ask. Whatever the answer to that question might be, by this time I probably didn’t. But even earlier, I had instinctively decided that she could always wait. Léa’s recorded voice was even more breathless than usual, and some of what she said I couldn’t understand: there were words she had swallowed, moments when she was incoherent or quite inaudible. Normally, I erase her messages as soon as I have heard them. I did not do so this time. In fact, I listened several times to the entire series, trying to put the events she talked about in some order. By the way, I realize now that I did not tell you that following the shoot of The AnthillI had returned to Paris three times, though never for more than a couple of nights. I would call Léa a day or two in advance, half hoping that she wouldn’t be there, or that she would have appointments, work, anything at all that might oblige her to say she couldn’t see me. That never happened. She came to my hotel room only after dinner, like a call girl, as she put it, and we went through our repertory which, I have to hand it to her, we somehow managed each time to enrich. Her unfailing availability, the body so unquestioningly offered, the pleasure she manifestly took—all of it unnerved me. As for my pleasure in our lovemaking, on the most primitive level it had never been greater because it was sex in its undiluted state. No courtship, no preliminaries, no hesitations; rather like one’s body functions when all is going well. I stopped giving her presents. There seemed to be no point. There was nothing she seemed to want that she didn’t have, and there was nothing I particularly wanted to offer. Besides—harden yourself against another sordid confession—I preferred not to spend the money.
The story that emerged from the messages remained confusing. It seemed that there was a new great love in her life, one whom she could marry in the sense that there were no obstacles such as a wife he was unwilling to leave. It was possible that she might even want to marry him, but she wasn’t sure. It was also possible that she and this man, whom she didn’t identify, were formally engaged. As to the meaning of that, in her case, she gave no clue, but she asked herself whether she should go on sleeping with me and her physicist monsieuronce she was engaged. Was this a hypothetical question or a problem that was actually presenting itself? I cannot tell you. And what to do after she got married? Would she still want to sleep with me, or her monsieur?Or men that she would meet in the future? Would marriage make her more attractive or less? She was also making plans for her wedding, at the Crillon in Paris, and wanted me to promise to come. All her loves would be there, so she could dance with them. Midway through the series of messages, I learned that the marriage was postponed. It also seemed possible that she had broken with her intended. Her career took center stage. She had decided to leave Vogueand either devote herself exclusively to painting or to go on with journalism, but as a free-lancer, so as to be able to spend more time in the studio. Obviously, there was a good deal of turmoil in her life. I wondered whether she had all of a sudden inherited a round sum of money. I didn’t think that her father or her mother had died— she wouldn’t in that case be so cheerfully scatterbrained—but aren’t there always, in French bourgeois families, childless aunts, uncles, and cousins whose fortunes are parceled out, in strict obedience to the civil code and the guiding spirit of family loyalty, to nephews, nieces, and other cousins, however distant? I had told her I would not check my messages while on the West Coast and had refused to give her my number there. But she knew I would be back around this time. I dialed her number in part because I was curious about these developments and, more important, because of the policy I had adopted of avoiding anything that might drive her over the edge. Shutting down communication between us could become such a provocation, I told myself. This time it was she who didn’t come to the telephone. I hung up without leaving a message, because I didn’t want her to own recordings of my voice any more than I wanted her to have letters from me, but called her every other day or so, without success.
