In a curious way, her story had moved him. His perception had filled in so much that had not been told. Yet the story made her even more difficult to understand. ‘But now you can do as you please, Märta. You’ve spent a life trying to be yourself again. You’ve won. You are yourself. Why not love whom you wish and when you wish?’
‘Because avarice never ceases,’ she said with a smile, ‘and mine is the avarice of the ego. My monument is in people’s minds. To keep it there, I must continue building it. I have been idle too long. I must build again. And the materials I most urgently require are story properties. You have one such property, and I want it. Since I can’t have it for cash alone, I am willing to return to the market-place with my unique skills. But I am who I am, and I deserve to have what I want on my terms. Be sensible, Craig, I can dictate. You cannot. Despite this advantage, I am fair, because you are an artist as well as a man, and unless you are rightly rewarded you will not work happily, and I will suffer as well as you. So I offer you a fortune, and I offer you an experience, one that will be impressed upon your brain until it is senile, one that will mean more to your biographies than the silly prize. I am giving you all of me for a part of you. I’m leaning over backwards, and I don’t want to go on like this any more. Simply say yes, and we’ll seal the bargain with a kiss, and you’ll stay the night. Now, are you happy-?’
‘I’m revolted,’ he blurted out. The sympathy she had weaned from him had fled, as her cold bargaining had resumed. ‘For some money that can be earned elsewhere and some loveless convulsions in the hay, and a behind-the-hand conversation piece-you want a tooled novel, hammer and chisel and nails and plane, pounded and hacked out, slanted, a sham-’
‘Goddammit,’ she cried suddenly, ‘I’m sick of your friggin’ writer divinity-’
‘No, wait, wait-I’ve got to finish. I’m not putting my art above anyone on earth who accomplishes an honest day of labour honestly done, so that life is earned and deserved. I make no pretence of being touched by a heavenly hand, singled out for special treatment, stand back because he’s Muse-inspired-none of that. I’m not making myself out above a housewife who cooks a meal right and raises an infant well, or above a plumber who repairs the toilet efficiently, or the shoe assistant who gives you the right size. It’s not a hallowed creation of work I defend-but destruction of myself as honest and decent and already in debt for my place on earth. If I grind out your untrue book as the pretence of a book truly mine, to be peddled far and wide with my name on it, my book is a lie, and I am a pervert before every reader who reads me, because he or she trusts me.’
He caught his breath. ‘I am sorry, Märta, but I must write to please me, not you. That’s why my answer is flatly no, Märta, flatly no. I’m not worried about you. You’ll find fifty other properties, more suitable ones, or have them manufactured for you. And you’ll find men you won’t have to love to get them. And maybe someday you’ll find men-a man-you honestly love, without this barter, far from the market-place, although I doubt it. And as for me, I will keep my-I won’t say integrity-but my nerve and my self-respect, always regretting that I had to let you keep your money and your dazzling skill. Yes, Märta, I have no doubt, no doubt at all, you will find other men who can afford, better afford, your money and skill, who have a backlog of integrity that can survive one small corruption, but I no longer have that backlog, and I can’t afford you now. If I give you what little I have left, no reward of yours will help me survive as a man-because then, at last, I’ll be totally bankrupt.’
Where earlier had been her smile, he now saw her teeth bared. The drawn Nordic face gave him no satisfaction of emotion, but the teeth were bared, and she had never been more revealed.
‘No man has ever spoken to me this way,’ she said, ‘and lest you think you’ll get some satisfaction out of it, I’ll tell you right now why you’re turning me down-the real truth of it. I can tell-I can smell it-I always can.’
He waited.
Her throaty voice was a bullwhip, and she lashed savagely at him. ‘You’re quaking down to the crotch. You’re the boy without balls, and we both know it. You’re afraid of me, and that’s the beginning and end of it. You’re scared of sex, and you’re scared of a real woman, and it’s a thousand to one you’re afraid of my bed and my body, because you can’t get it up.’
It was then that he did a foolish thing. He had been controlled, but now, like a schoolboy taking a dare, he lost his control. ‘I wish I could save your face and say that’s true, but the truth is I’ve done all right by myself, and right here in Sweden, and with a woman who has the decency to give love for love and for nothing else.’
‘You’re a liar!’ she shouted. ‘I wouldn’t let you touch me now, if you were William Shakespeare and wanted to give me every word you ever wrote. I wouldn’t let myself be touched by a puny, running weakling-who’s got integrity instead of balls. Is that what you give your lady friend, your poor, starved lady friend, a hot injection of integrity? Get out of here, Craig, get out of my sight! Get your clothes and beat it, and stay out of my sight before I tell the whole world about their great masculine Nobel winner-the one man on earth who couldn’t get it up with Märta Norberg!’
She spun away from him, seething so furiously that the contraction of the muscles in her shoulders and back was visible. He remained a moment, looking at her, at the dishevelled hair no longer provocative, the slouched shoulders that would soon be old, the curved spine no longer lithe and slender but skinny and knobby, and the sparse folds of buttocks below the bikini strip no longer inciting but only grotesque and pitiful. The lofty, illusive female love symbol was, finally, only an embittered man-woman of the market-place, and no more. Wordlessly, Craig turned away from her and went to the cabaña.
He changed slowly in the confined room, without anger, with only an inexplicable burden of sorrow, and when he was fully dressed, he emerged.
The lanai was vacant of life. She had gone. He went into the living-room and found the yellow telephone. The number came to him at once. He dialed 22.00.00, and when the girl answered, he requested a taxi and told her where he was. As he hung up, his eyes caught the full-length oil of Märta Norberg on the far wall. As Manon Lescaut. The Trader, he thought-no, better-Trader in the Market-Place.
His hat and coat lay across a bench in the vestibule. No one came to see him out. He opened the heavy door and went into the cold and fog to wait.
After he had lit his pipe, he felt better and wondered why. He had lost something tonight. In the eyes of the world, he had lost very much. Yet he was certain that he had gained infinitely more. For the first time since the Harriet years, he realized that he was not only a writer of integrity, but a human being of worth. The evaluation had a pomposity about it, and he considered rephrasing it, reworking it, and then he left it alone, because it was true, and because the feeling deep inside him, in that recess where the soul crouched and watched, the feeling was good, and it had not been that way for a long, long time.
He smoked his pipe, and enjoyed the fog, and waited for the taxi that would take him back to the living.
10
AS each new day brought the climactic occasion of the Nobel Ceremony closer, the lobby and restaurants of the Grand Hotel became more and more crowded with new arrivals, largely journalists and dignitaries, from every part of Scandinavia and every corner of the world.
Now, at the noon hour of December eighth, with the Ceremony only two days off, the immense Winter Garden of the Grand was filled nearly to capacity. When Andrew Craig, wearing a knit tie, tweed sport jacket, and slacks, and carrying a folded airmail edition of The New York Times under an arm, entered the noisy indoor Garden, he found it difficult to make himself heard. The maître d’hôtel checked his reservation, then bowed across his folded arm and said, ‘Right this way, Mr. Craig.’
Craig followed the dining-room steward past a table of cultural delegates from Ghana, past another where American and English newspapermen conversed and several of these wav
ed to him, past two tables joined to hold eight members of the Italian Embassy staff, and past yet another white-covered table at which Konrad Evang was in deep discussion with several Swedish business types. The variety of foreigners, like the variegated shifting patterns of colour in a kaleidoscope, diverted Craig briefly from what had been uppermost in his mind, the scene with Leah just left behind and the scene with the Marceaus that lay immediately ahead.
The table that he had booked was on the carpeted higher level of the room, between two massive pillars. The maître d’hôtel removed the ‘Reserved’ sign, pulled out a cane chair, dusted it briefly with a napkin, and offered it to Craig.
When Craig was seated, the maître d’hôtel inquired, ‘Does Monsieur wish to have a drink or to order now?’
‘Neither one,’ said Craig. ‘I’d prefer to wait. I’m expecting guests.’
When the maître d’hôtel left, Craig drew his chair closer to the table and spread open the newspaper before him. He had not read a newspaper carefully in days, but today, because he had slept late and soberly, and his eyes were rested, and because he had recaptured some interest in his contemporaries, he intended to resume following the serial story of his time.
But when he bent over the front page, he told himself that the light was too poor to read by. Through the enormous latticed glass dome above, he could see that even at noon, the day was sunless and sombre. Then he realized that although the globular restaurant lamps on either side of him, and all about the room, were illuminated, the artificial lighting was diffused and yellow. Reading, he decided, would be a strain, and he knew that he was in no mood for it anyway. He closed his newspaper and slipped it under his chair. He tilted backwards, one hand fiddling absently with the table silver, and lost himself in thought.
In bed the night before, he had reviewed the astonishing encounter with Märta Norberg, had tried to remember what he could remember with emotional detachment, had sorted out one or two moments of it that he would have to relate to Lucius Mack once he was back in Miller’s Dam, and then he had recalled something said earlier that evening that he had almost forgotten. What he had recalled was Norberg’s bizarre revelation of Ragnar Hammarlund’s machinations-the secret recordings, the information on Claude Marceau’s affair with some mannequin, the plotting to snare the chemistry laureates into Hammarlund’s industrial web.
In bed, Craig had considered all of this detestable scheming. Generally, he did not concern himself with individual morality. Most often, he preferred to play the onlooker, to live and to let live all the earth’s cabbages and kings. Perhaps that had been his major defect as a human being. Last night, for once, he had determined to correct this defect in himself. He had detested Hammarlund for his cynicism, for his degrading of dignity by invasion of privacy. The Hammarlunds of the world, like the Sue Wileys of the world, he had told himself, must not go unchallenged. Moreover, Craig had identified himself not only with all victims of life, but, in this case, victims with whom he had a bond in common.
Somehow, he had seen that the Marceaus-like the hapless Garrett and distant Farelli and forever displaced Stratman-were, like himself, by chance, by circumstance, human targets. Through the prize, they had all become, with him, not only what Gottling had called democracy’s élite, but also democracy’s vulnerable ones. The six of them were, by birth and environment and interests, strangers before meeting in Stockholm, but with the awards, they had been pressed into eternal kinship. Forever after, they would be as one, the laureates of this year, and Craig had seen that if the Marceaus were harmed, so was he, and so were they all.
Once Craig had reasoned this out, and made his decision, he had acted. He had picked up the telephone and asked to speak to the Marceaus. There had been no answer in their room. This frustration had seemed to make the matter more imperative. Craig had left his bed, scrawled a note requesting Denise and Claude Marceau to meet him for lunch in the Winter Garden the next day, hinting at some private matter that would be of special interest to them, and had then summoned a page and sent the message down to their letterbox.
When he had awakened this morning, the luncheon invitation to the Marceaus had still seemed right, and he had not cancelled it. After dressing, he had taken his coffee in the living-room, alone, grateful that Leah had gone out earlier. After finishing the coffee, there had been more than an hour to spare before his date with the Marceaus. He had wanted to spend the time with Emily, and then remembered that she would be out, and that they were having dinner this evening. The anticipation of seeing Emily alone had heightened a desire, long dormant within him, to please and impress a member of the opposite sex. This had brought to mind a nagging duty-the formal acceptance speech that he was expected to deliver, after Ingrid Påhl’s introduction of him, before the King and a large audience during the late afternoon Nobel Ceremony, in Concert Hall on the tenth.
Ordinarily, Jacobsson had previously explained, these laureate addresses were made following the Ceremony, in the evening, in the Golden Room of the Town Hall. But owing to the King’s departure from the country immediately after the Ceremony, it had been decided to change the schedule and move the speeches up to the afternoon, out of respect for His Royal Highness. Because these addresses were widely quoted and read, Jacobsson had tried to convey to Craig the necessity of careful preparation. As a gentle reminder, and perhaps for use as guideposts, Jacobsson had posted Craig several addresses made by earlier Nobel literary laureates. They had arrived the morning before, and Craig had merely glanced at them and thrown them aside, putting off the disagreeable task of composing a speech.
But this morning, after his coffee, thinking of Emily and of how she would be in the audience at the Ceremony and how much he wanted to command her respect, he had taken up the English copies of speeches by his predecessors and painstakingly read them through.
The Eugene O’Neill speech, prepared in 1936, Craig found interesting. A footnote explained that O’Neill, recuperating from a ruptured appendix, had been unable to attend the Ceremony in Stockholm, but had had his speech read for him. In it, O’Neill had given all credit for his career to the inspiration of August Strindberg. ‘If there is anything of lasting worth in my work,’ O’Neill had written, ‘it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then-to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose.’ The ring of sincerity was in this, Craig had believed. It could not have been a mere sop thrown the Swedes, since the Swedish Academy had ignored Strindberg and found his name an anathema to this day.
Next, Craig had studied the address made by Albert Camus in 1957. One paragraph he read and then read again. ‘Probably every generation sees itself as charged with remaking the world. Mine, however, knows that it will not remake the world. But its task is perhaps even greater, for it consists in keeping the world from destroying itself. As the heir of a corrupt history that blends blighted revolutions, misguided techniques, dead gods, and wornout ideologies in which second-rate powers can destroy everything today, but are unable to win anyone over, in which intelligence had stooped to becoming the servant of hatred and oppression, that generation, starting from nothing but its own negations, has had to re-establish both within and without itself a little of what constitutes the dignity of life and death. Faced with a world threatened with disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors may set up once and for all the kingdoms of death, that generation knows that, in a sort of mad race against time, it ought to reestablish among nations a peace not based on slavery, to reconcile labour and culture again, and to reconstruct with all men an Ark of the Covenant.’
From the realistic splendour of Camus’s phrases, Craig had turned to the courageous power of William Faulkner’s uncharacteristic optimism in Stockholm during 1949. ‘I decline to accept the end of man,’ Faulkner had announced in his formal speech. ‘It is easy enough to say that man is immortal si
mply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom had clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past…’
The Prize Page 67
