The Englishman’s Boy

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Eccentricity is the privilege of rich men. They can afford it. I set my glass down carefully on the table. “Spiritual forces, Mr. Chance? I’m not sure what you mean. Are you talking about the League of Nations? Ethical principles ruling the conduct of states?”

  He smiles condescendingly. “No, Harry, the League of Nations is the furthest thing from my mind – Voltaire arguing that primitive impulses and bloodlust can be curbed by an appeal to reason. When I speak of spiritual forces, I am speaking of that side of man which the nineteenth century denied because of its worship of reason and science.”

  “What side would that be?”

  “Intuition, the life force, what Bergson calls the élan vital, the irrational. The night world of visions and fantasies and the waking world of fructifying daydreams. The lost primitive. Sudden insight, inspiration, impulse, imagination. Instinct, Harry! The flexing, the liberation of the will. The rich, chaotic, creative stew of the unconscious! But I speak only words, Harry, bare nouns, mere shadows of rich and complex impulses which words fail to properly describe.” He smiles, as if realizing he is getting too carried away, speaks more quietly. “I don’t want you to mistake my meaning, Harry. I am not suggesting we turn our back on the benefits science has conferred. Far from it. The question is not the rejection of technological and material innovations; the question is whether we Americans will summon up our as yet unawakened spiritual forces and employ them for proper ends.”

  “What ends are these, Mr. Chance?”

  Chance is not ready to answer my question. He leans back in his chair, relaxing in the warmth of a memory. “Can I describe for you one of the most momentous events in my life, Harry? It occurred in August of 1907 when I bought my first ticket to a nickelodeon. Do you remember what nickelodeons were like in those days? A couple of hundred folding chairs in a failed grocery store, pool room, bankrupt hardware store. Filled with poor immigrants – Irishmen, Poles, Russians, Scandinavians, Italians. Cheap entertainment for a nickel. The foreigners loved the new picture stories because you didn’t have to be able to speak English to understand them, pictures told the tale. The nickelodeons had a bad reputation among respectable people; they were rumoured to be dens of vice; people of my background spoke sneeringly of them as amusement for idiots. But one afternoon on a visit to New York my curiosity got the better of me; I paid my nickel and took my seat among the crowd in the dark. The stench was unbelievable! Week-old sweat, unwashed underpants, a cloud of garlic. Sickening. When the picture began, I was convinced it was nothing but idiotic tomfoolery, mind-numbing sentiment, crapulous melodrama. But then something happened, Harry. The hall was mesmerized, and I do not use the word loosely. They were moved. They wept over innocence outraged, they blazed with hatred for the unrepenting wicked. You recall what happened to Erich von Strpheim after playing so many evil Prussians during the war? It wasn’t safe for him to go out in the streets. When he was recognized, stones were thrown at his automobile. It was no different that afternoon. If the villain had appeared in the flesh, they would have torn him to pieces, limb from bleeding limb.

  “I’d never experienced anything like it. They roared with laughter, rocking back and forth on their gimcrack seats, heaving like the body of some great beast, mindful of nothing but the flickering on the bed-sheets nailed to the wall. And as I sat there among them, something began to move in me as well, Harry. I began to feel the wordless pressure of the crowd, the deep desire of the crowd to encompass, to swallow everyone up in a surge of feeling, to bespeak itself with a single voice. And as the minutes flew by, I could feel arise in me a deep longing to lose myself in the shielding darkness, to lose myself in the featureless crowd! And in the end I did let myself go, all the Puritan reserve and self-possession I had been taught from childhood dissolved, gave way like a rotten dam. I found myself laughing, laughing like I had never laughed before in my life! I shook with it, I rocked back and forth in my chair, banging my heels against the floor! Seconds later I wept, tears streaming down my face! When the crowd hissed their hatred, I hissed my hatred too! Hissed like a snake! A great release of feeling in the darkness, feeling which touched the lost primitive.”

  He looks pale now, drawn. His fingers toy with a forgotten champagne glass. Another log collapses in the fireplace, releasing a train of sparks, a cataract of glowing embers. He takes out a cigar, places it between his lips, and Yukio is there with a match. Chance takes a few tranquillizing puffs.

  “When I left that nickelodeon, I took something important away with me. The knowledge that the new century was going to be a century governed by images, that the spirit of the age would express itself in an endless train of images, one following upon the other with the speed of the steam locomotive that was the darling of the last century and symbolized all its aspirations. I knew that all those Boston Brahmins I had been raised among, the Cabots, Lodges, and Lowells who held themselves aloof from childish photoplays and who forbade their children to attend them, were nothing more than dumb fish insensible to currents which were capable of sweeping them to their destruction. And while they clung blindly to the past, their Irish chauffeurs and gardeners were learning the language of the new century in the nickelodeon, were learning to think and feel in the language of pictures. Have you noticed how many Irishmen direct pictures?”

  I don’t contradict him and state the obvious, that the Cabots, Lowells, and Lodges still seem very much securely in the seats of power, and that the Irish are still cleaning the Cabot crystal and driving the Lodges around in their swanky automobiles. All I say is, “The only Irishman I know in pictures is Mr. Fitzsimmons.”

  Chance doesn’t register this comment; he’s already pressing on. “When President Woodrow Wilson was given a private screening of The Birth of a Nation, he declared it was ‘History written in lightning.’ The metaphor is fitting. Think of what we all remember of that picture. Battle scenes. The assassination of Lincoln. Lee surrendering to Grant. The stirring ride of the Ku Klux Klan. Sitting through Griffith’s picture is like sitting through one of those dark summer nights when a thunderstorm breaks: instants of brilliant illumination when the things which flash before your eyes – a tree waving in the wind, a river in spate, your bedroom chair – burn into your brain in a way they never would in the steady, even light of day. There is no logical explanation as to why or how this happens. Images take root in your mind, hot and bright, like an image on a photoplate. Once they etch themselves there, they can’t be obliterated, can’t be scratched out. They burn themselves in the mind. Because there’s no arguing with pictures. You simply accept or reject them. What’s up there on the screen moves too fast to permit analysis or argument. You can’t control the flow of images the way you can control a book – by rereading a chapter, rereading a paragraph, rereading a sentence. A book invites argument, invites reconsideration, invites thought. A moving picture is beyond thought. Like feeling, it simply is. The principle of a book is persuasion; the principle of a movie is revelation. Martin Luther was converted in a lightning storm, a conversion accomplished in the bowels and not the mind. A lesson for all of us in this business to remember.”

  I am getting interested in what Chance has to say. It must show in my face; he leans forward in his chair, lowering his voice. “Birth became America’s history lesson on the Civil War. For the first time, everybody, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, native and immigrant, found themselves pupils in the same history class. A class conducted in Philadelphia and New York, in little Iowa theatres and converted saloons in Wyoming. The movie theatre became the biggest night school any teacher had ever dreamed of; one big classroom stretching from Maine to California, an entire nation sitting at Griffith’s feet. In New York alone, eight hundred thousand people saw Birth, more people than there are students in all the colleges in all the states of the Union. Think about it, Harry. If Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, Griffith is the Great Educator. Whatever bits of history the average American knows, he’s learned from Griffith. Griffith mark
s the birth of spiritual Americanism.”

  “And what is this spiritual Americanism, Mr. Chance?”

  “Perhaps it can’t be defined in words, Harry. Pictures come closest to capturing its meaning. I am a patriot. I was raised a patriot and I will die a patriot. But for years I was troubled by the question, Why have the American people produced no great art? The Germans gave the world their music. The Romans their architecture. The Greeks their tragedies. We recognize the soul of a people in their art. But where is the American soul? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. The American soul could not find expression in these old arts because the spirit of the American people was not compatible with them, could not be encompassed in them.” Chance shoots me a victorious look. “You see? The American spirit is a frontier spirit, restless, impatient of constraint, eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek around the bend in the river. The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum, an art form as bold and unbounded as the American spirit. A westering art form! It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!”

  “I see,” I say.

  “And yet,” says Chance with the air of a man divulging a great confidence, “everywhere I look, I see little evidence of that spirit in American pictures. Do you know the reason, Harry?” He reaches in his pocket and produces a piece of paper which he lays on the table, methodically smoothing out its creases. “I asked Fitz to do some research for me. Into the heads of the major studios.” He begins to read from the paper. “Adolph Zukor and Fox were born in Hungary. Warner and Goldwyn in Poland. Selznick and Mayer in Russia. Laemmle in Germany. There is the answer why the American movie industry is in such a sorry state. Europeans making our movies for us. Goldwyn hiring English writers. Adolph Zukor offering us Queen Elizabeth, with Sarah Bernhardt as star. A French actress playing an English queen. Which he follows with The Prisoner of Zenda. European kitsch.” He refolds the paper and tucks it out of sight under his plate. “The classroom of the American spirit is now located in the movie house. Americans go to the pictures two and three times a week. Griffith made the American Iliad, I intend to make the American Odyssey. The story of an American Odysseus, a westerer, a sailor of the plains, a man who embodies the raw vitality of America, the raw vitality which is our only salvation in the days which lie ahead. Perhaps Shorty McAdoo is my Odysseus. Do you think it’s possible?”

  I shake my head. “It’s too early to say – maybe.”

  Chance sits musing. “I have seen things abroad. I have seen Europe rediscovering the spirit of the primitive, the life source by which nations live and die; I have seen them grasping the power of images. Last year Mussolini marched his Blackshirts on Rome and the government, the army folded. The government possessed all the material force necessary to prevail, and yet they gave way to a few thousand men with pistols in their pockets. Why? Because Mussolini orchestrated a stream of images more potent than artillery manned by men without spiritual conviction. Thousands of men in black shirts marching the dusty roads, clinging to trains, piling into automobiles. They passed through the countryside like film through a projector, enthralling onlookers. And when Rome fell, Mussolini paraded his Blackshirts through the city, before the cameras, so they could be paraded over and over again, as many times as necessary, trooped through every movie house from Tuscany to Sicily, burning the black shirt and the silver death’s head into every Italian’s brain. Imagine if Lenin learns the trick. Imagine what would happen to us.”

  “You’re going too fast for me, Mr. Chance,” I say.

  “No, Harry,” he says firmly. “I believe you understand me. I believe you see beyond what others see. I know what they say behind my back. That I am a man whose father made his money for him. A ridiculous figure, a standing joke in Hollywood. ‘He can’t make movies, and unlike Kennedy, he can’t make actresses either. A eunuch.’ ”

  “No, Mr. Chance,” I falsely object, “I don’t believe anyone says such -”

  He interrupts me. There is a burden of melancholy in his words. “I wish this cup would pass from my lips. But there is no one else. No one else but Griffith and me to make the pictures this country needs.”

  The Hollywood style is grandiose. I am used to bombast and inflation, every picture described as “colossal,” “magnificent,” “unsurpassable,” “epic of epics.” But the people who make such announcements do not really believe them, you can hear the cynicism in their voices, sense it in their ridiculously purple prose. But in Chance’s voice there is a strength of conviction, of sincerity, which is almost moving.

  Suddenly Chance looks exhausted. He fumbles for the square of paper under his plate, picks it up, stares at it. Stares at it in the same queer way he had earlier stared at his empty plate, face vapid and waxen. Is it some kind of epileptic seizure?

  “Mr. Chance?” I say. “Mr. Chance?” Neither he nor Yukio moves. The houseboy remains standing behind his employer’s chair, face empty, blank as his master’s. “Yukio,” I say, “get Mr. Chance a glass of water. I don’t think he’s well.”

  Yukio does not move but Chance does. He raises his hand and holds out the scrap of paper to me. “I’d like you to have this. As a souvenir of the evening. I have no further need of it.” He rises from his chair and slips it into my palm, the way an uncle slips a nickel into the hand of a favourite nephew. I mumble an embarrassed nephew’s thanks. “Harry,” he says, “I want you to know how important this evening has been to me. I do not feel nearly so alone. You believe as I do, that the mind’s highest struggle is to interpret the world, in whatever guise that interpretation takes – science, philosophy, history, literature, painting…” His voice dies away. He clears his throat. “And we shall offer another. We shall make a great motion picture. Won’t we, Harry?”

  “Yes,” I say. And half-believe it.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m very tired.”

  We shake hands and Yukio leads me back through the bare house. I feel some guilt that I have not confessed to Chance that he is seeking help for making the great American film from a Canadian. But there is the question of money. And I have found that Americans, by and large, recognize no distinction between us. Why should I?

  I start the car and turn down the drive. As I do, my headlights sweep over a set of French doors which open onto the garden. It is only for an instant, but I believe I have glimpsed Damon Ira Chance alone, in that vast marble desert of a ballroom, standing upright on a chair, in the dark.

  11

  The rest of the afternoon the twelve rode with the Bear Paw Mountains hovering mauve, abrupt, stonily upright in the east. For the first hour after Hardwick’s desertion of Farmer Hank, each man was mindful to keep his thoughts and his counsel to himself. It was dangerous to do otherwise with Tom in one of his black and bloody moods. Still, a number did feel a trifle downcast and guilty they hadn’t put a word in for the farm hand, pled the case that he ought to be left with a horse, even a pack horse, in exchange for the one which Hardwick had blasted between its blind eyes. It wasn’t consequences with the law they feared, but the verdict of public opinion. In these parts, cutting loose a man on foot to fend for himself could be regarded as a mite high-handed, even if he was cast out in peaceable country and ought to be able to hike back without mishap to his employer’s homestead by tomorrow. If he could recross the river.

  And yet, there was no denying they were glad to have seen the last of him. If it came to an affray with Indians, settled men were not much use. Nobody knew for sure whether Hank was a settled man who owned a wife and children, but if he didn’t, he had the look of a fellow who wanted to own them, which was near as bad. You needed to have a little wild Indian rubbed into you to fight Indians. Which was why Hardwick was such a demon for warring with the red bastards – he’d been captured by Arapahos in Wyoming and seen hard use as a slave before he managed to pull foot and escape. Ever since this close acquaintance with
the Arapahos, Hardwick had been apt to kill Indians whenever they annoyed him in the smallest particular.

  The Englishman’s boy, like all the rest, had said nothing about casting Hank adrift. After a fashion, he was sorry for sorry-ass Hank, but watching him near drown the Scotchman confirmed that he was not only a fool, a shirker, and poisonous bad luck, but a man likely to drag anyone who tried to help him six feet under. Besides, the Englishman’s boy was in no position to hand around irritating advice, seeing as he had nowhere to take himself except back to Fort Benton, where trouble awaited him. He might smell trouble here, too, but maybe it was trouble that could be dodged. The white horse and Hank surely was a lesson. If Hardwick got down on you, God help you. If there came a time when he scraped up against Hardwick’s bad side, he knew now what to expect.

  It was necessary to make the best of the cards he’d been dealt, and as things stood, he’d seen worse hands. In a couple of hours he’d be eating bacon and hard bread, which was a damn sight better than his dinner of cracker dust the night before last. He had a warm coat, a good hat, and he was armed. A strong, sound horse was carrying him. All he lacked was a new pair of brogans.