by James Salter
London was his refuge and his sea. He had gone to Europe originally only a year or two before I had, but with different eyes and inclinations. He knew literary as well as architectural and social London, people like Jane Portal Welby and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, Airey Neave. He knew the glories of the National Gallery and writers for The Times. The hall porters at Claridge’s and the Connaught pronounced his name “Jinnuh.”
I had grown to love him, his unbreakable spirit and style. He lived in beautiful houses, one year high above Salzburg, the ancient meadows falling away on either side. The first cathedral in Salzburg had been built in 774. Eight times it had suffered the great scourge of such edifices, fire. Finally it was demolished. I learned this listening to his wife, Margaret, giving their children lessons at home. Below us, Salzburg was invisible, drowned in a silvery mist.
He had lived with Margaret in Paris, in the old Hôtel Alsace, in a room with hideous wallpaper, the very room in which Oscar Wilde had died. He had lived alone in Rome at the American Academy, in Dublin, and New York. They had almost been married in Dublin, where, despite the romance of it, there were difficulties since he, a Catholic, had been married before. Friends interceded for them, among them Brendan Behan and his wife. Celebrating the nuptials in advance, Ginna, with Margaret in tow, unwisely began with the Behans what became a colossal binge. By noon they were, Margaret excepted, dead drunk. Ginna somehow managed after lunch to go up to his room in the Dolphin for a few minutes of rest, hands crossed on his chest. As a wedding gift that morning, Behan and his wife had given the couple a beautiful Waterford flask they had picked up somewhere for a few shillings as it had no stopper. It stood on the mantel. When Ginna woke, there was a note in the top of it. So long, it said. It was from Margaret—surveying the wreckage she had gone back to America.
They finally married. It had already been called off twice. In her family’s view it was an unacceptable thing because he was a Catholic. His family saw it as impossible because they did not recognize divorce.
During the years we were closest he lived in painter’s country, far out on Long Island; the flatness of the land, the incredible light. He had a small house in Sag Harbor—she did, actually; she had bought it before they were married with money she earned herself. The house had once been a brothel with men of every color lying in the street outside in the morning.
They lived in this house from time to time—from necessity to necessity, one might say—but also in fine houses on the bay or near the ocean, the finest of which stood at the far end of a long lawn that in back became pasture running unobstructed to the sea, a house they owned and that, tragically, burned. There was no place in the world I loved the evening meal as much as there.
He was then and remains the most successful man I have known, successful in his apprehension of life and in his values, untarnished after everything, even when reverses came and the tide was running against him, the phone in the office ringing and he not daring to answer. The secretary had been let go, the credit cards recalled. He would go through the morning letters. Like a gambler looking at cards, he glances, throws them unopened into the trash. But still a dinner for friends, which he prepares himself, fresh flounder fillets, a cold white wine. Outside it is winter and raining. The fire dies, the brandy is gone. We go to bed at two, the walls are icy but the bed soft and warm.
On a final trip to Europe we are sitting farther back in the plane, and as it lands and decelerates, he reaches around near his feet. His shoes have disappeared. “Anyway, they’re in first class,” he says wryly. They had been handmade, though now a nail was coming up through the sole of one.
We stayed for a time in London in the house of an old friend of his, Elizabeth Furse, beaming and unpredictable, in Chapel Street, sleeping in the coat-piled study like impoverished salesmen, the bath three floors above. Elizabeth Furse no longer had a restaurant—to which, above a small pub, one had gone, in any case, only by invitation—but the impulse survived. At Sunday dinner a crowd—there were members of Parliament, London editors, daughters of earls—sat in the basement kitchen with its large table, shelves of cups and saucers, piles of magazines, and flowers.
Flats, visas, jobs, were staples of her conversation. She was the fierce but generous matron of many lives, around whom animals purred and weaker spirits crumbled. “Robert,” she had warned Ginna, “I want to know about any lady friends you plan to bring in.”
She had earned her intractability, at the very least by her actions during the war, when she worked for British Intelligence in occupied France. Her son had been born while she was a prisoner, and she jumped off a train with him when they were on their way to the death camps. Later she had come to England. “Listen,” she explained, “I learned languages.” She’d been born in Latvia. She was instructing us all in the art of survival; the lesson was wideranging. “I knew all those people: Gide—he was kind, he was a kind man. Thomas Mann, God. His children … it was all incest, constantly.”
She was like a figure from the Old Testament, her sternness, her prejudices. On a large plate being passed was the fruit for dessert. She had gotten it at Covent Garden. “Lying in the gutter,” she said. “There were some bad spots on it but it was perfectly good. While I was picking it up they were insulting me and throwing fruit at me. Do you know what they did in the end? They came and began stamping on the fruit, crushing it! Perfectly good fruit. Wasting it. That’s what’s wrong with this country, I tell you. That’s why the Communists will sweep over you!”
There was still the threat of this at the time. She was like a commissar herself, whatever her politics, and one felt the chill of her warning: The waste will come back to haunt you.
Ginna knew her well and had lived through too many prophecies to be disturbed. He had his own formulas. In the evening, looking through the refrigerator, he discovered a bottle. After reading the label, he handed it to me. Polmos Zubrowka, I read.
“It’s vodka,” I said.
“Keep reading.”
It said something like, flavored by an extract of Zubrowka, the fragrant herb beloved by the European bison. I remember especially the word “beloved.” “Have you ever drunk this?” I asked.
“Very well known,” he assured me.
I did not know whether to believe him, but in such matters I hesitated to dispute his knowledge. I had seen him many times sign his name laboriously to bar checks late at night though in the morning he was always lucid and fresh.
The many nights and glasses. They were ritual, above all with old friends, Harry Craig, who had been, was it Beckett’s secretary?, back from somewhere and signaling for another bottle of Haut Brion—Château O’Brien, he called it. His old friend, Jules Buck, at the Bibliothèque, over near the United Nations. It’s late, the restaurant is empty, in a hush that its name suggests. They know the bartender, Roger, however; they recognize him and pound on the glass door. He unlocks it, polite and tough-looking, like an Algerian boxer. They greet him in French. At the vacant bar Roger asks, “Que désirez-vous, messieurs?”
“Cognac, Roger,” they say.
“Oui, monsieur.”
He lays three large brandy glasses on their side and fills them until the amber-colored liquid is ready to pour over the rim. Then he sets them upright and places them in front of us. A quarter of an hour passes, perhaps more.
“Cognac, Roger.”
They have missed the place, they tell him. It’s good to see him again—c’est bon de vous revoir. Jules Buck is wearing an expensive trenchcoat, the belt unfastened and hanging down. They are talking about Peter O’Toole, with whom Buck has made films and who starred in one of Ginna’s. The deeply aromatic smoke from Ginna’s French cigarettes tints the air. One last cognac. They are so drunk they are looking at things with great discernment, as if discovering them. Finally it is time to leave. The bill is thirty-five dollars. We tip him fifteen and thank him. At the door, hands are raised in warm farewell, “Au revoir, Roger.”
He nods. “Bonne nuit.
Je m’appelle Gérard,” he adds wearily.
We part with Jules Buck at the corner. Ginna’s speech is clear, but his thoughts seem to slide off into the ditches. “What time is it?” I ask him.
“A lot,” he mutters, then, “What the devil is this?” at something found in his pocket. He becomes difficult to steer. At last a cab stops. We head uptown. “Your old copain is torpedoed” are his final words.
——
You recall, perhaps, the three actresses the studio had named, any one of whom would have been a bottle of champagne across the bow, and down the ways, majestic and large, we would glide.
One of them was Maggie Smith. Ginna had given her one of her first movie roles in a film called Young Cassidy, taken from Sean O’Casey’s autobiography. She would remember that—it was easy for him to transfer to her his own sense of loyalty. We went to see her and she turned him down. He managed to hide his disappointment.
We had moved to the Cadogan Hotel, the hotel where Wilde had been arrested, and on a June evening drove out to Chiswick to see Vanessa Redgrave. It was a house facing a small green park. The tall Greek Revival windows had no drapes. We waited in the large sitting room. There was a shabby couch with a huge framed mirror leaning behind it, books and records strewn about, seashells, toys, a kind of bar, and pillows on the floor by the garden window. It was the house of all suburban women with unraveling lives. Here and there a bare nail was driven into the plaster wall.
Then she came in, tall, very nearsighted, in a mauve jersey dress with no sleeves and a slit skirt. Near her shoulder was the glint of a white, embroidered brassiere strap. She was completely natural. She could not find ice to put in our drinks. One liked her immediately.
She was thirty-four years old and already at the pinnacle of a celebrated life, playing the lead in Mary, Queen of Scots, then being made. Her young son came in and began climbing over her. Glass beads and part of her drink spilled onto the floor. Later her two daughters, plump and with dirty feet, came to say they were going to bed, they wanted her to read to them. She promised them two chapters. We had imagined a smooth seduction but the distractions were hindering us. I asked about some reel cans stacked near the couch. They contained a film she liked very much, she said; “It’s Italian. It’s called The Policeman. It’s about a young man from a village who becomes a policeman—is recruited—and how, slowly, bit by bit, he is changed and grows away from all the things that formed him, becomes less human, less kind, and in the end … well, the end is a little too much—that’s not the point of it.”
I felt that familiar moment of unhappiness; I realized I had written the wrong script. All one could do was not think about it or perhaps suggest some similarities between that one and ours.
She would read our script, she said, although the script she enjoyed most, she added cryptically, was one that was read to her, by the director.
Driving back to town, Ginna remarked how deeply the story of the movie she described had affected him. “Yes,” I agreed.
“The Interpreter,” he said, naming the original story on which a movie he had produced, Before Winter Comes, was based, “was that kind of story. But we never made it,” he confessed.
By now Max Schell had agreed to be the director. He, too, liked a script read to him, and in the luxury of his London house, rented from a maharanee, he listened, proposed changes, acted out portions, and told stories. One of his examples I remember, to illustrate character, was from Anna Karenina. In the railway carriage, he said, when the old woman comes in with her coat all bundled up and complains that it’s cold. “It’s cold, isn’t it,” she says, to one person after another, but they ignore her. At last she turns to Anna and says, “It’s cold.” “Yes, it’s cold,” Anna says.
His cook made lavish lunches that week, and often there were interruptions from visitors, telephone calls, unexplained matters. Late one afternoon a flawless Nefertiti appeared in simple, expensive clothes; long nose, perfect skin and hair. “Miss Bode,” Schell introduced her in a low voice with pointed brevity. Work was over that day.
I wrote in the mornings according to what we had sketched out, variations on scenes, additional pages. In the end Vanessa Redgrave came to dinner. She was to give her answer.
She arrived wearing workman’s overalls and a railroad engineer’s cap, a woman of convictions. Over her shoulder was a large canvas bag filled with books on Chinese communism. She began talking about politics and the evils of bureaucracy. With his famed charm, Schell attempted to divert her from these subjects. He had only limited success.
At the table she ate very little—she was not hungry, she said—and continued along the lines of her interests. What was the political significance of the script? she asked.
Heads turned towards me. Though I knew every word and meaning of the film we hoped to make, politics was not part of it. Falteringly I talked about human emotions and their greater importance and summoned up classics like Les Enfants du Paradis, though from the first moment I could see this was not the response required.
Ginna and I sat in gloomy silence for a long time until Schell, having seen the unfed Maoist to a taxi, came back up the stairs. We wanted to voice our despair, but like the good captain he was, perhaps springing from his role in The Young Lions, he prevented it. His face filled with warmth, in purest movie talk he said confidently, “I think the last goodnight kiss did it.”
It did not.
There was still Ingrid Bergman, who was appearing in a play at the time, but for other reasons, including, I think, the health of her husband, she too said no.
——
The best scripts are not always made, just as the hardest fought campaigns may not end in victory. I say this merely as an observation, beyond any experience of mine. There are so many factors: timing, impulse, frivolity, accident. The films that are made are like menhirs, standing amid the rubble of everything broken or lost, the pure lines, scenes, the great effort lavished like milt over roe. The agents and stars kick through it idly. Perhaps it is this waste, this vast debris, which nourishes the glory.
As a producer, Ginna may have had limitations. He was scrupulously honest. He was a classicist—his interests were cultural, his knowledge large—and unequivocal in his statements and beliefs. His past was filled with figures who, rising on the wings of his telling, assumed legendary status: Behan, of course; the ballerina Pat McBride; Neville Cardus, the old writer of cricket; Carol Reed; Jack Nugent, solitaire-playing owner of the Dolphin; Kennaway; John Ford; and the two Swedish girls, sisters, who were waitresses at Durgin Park, fabulous girls, unattainable, as he said—they were picked up after work in large cars. There was a quality of Fitzgerald in his stories, of the romantic and unpossessed.
We never parted. I am going into the city on the morning train with him, the sun still flickering in our faces, people boarding sleepily at the stops, the beautiful coastal country, Southampton, Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Bay Shore. I guard his heroes, among them Jacques Callot, one of the greatest of printmakers—Rembrandt collected him also—Goya.
In the late 1970s, returning to journalism, he became a magazine editor. The circle was closing. Midnight. We return to the office. There is some final checking to do. He sits correcting the piece of a writer he likes whose telephone has been disconnected for nonpayment. The restaurants are being swept, beneath us the traffic along Sixth Avenue is thinning out. The life of reporters, writers. The night is their noon. On the couch, curled amid books and papers, a woman in a white suit, whom we have had dinner with, is sleeping.
Ginna gave me my first work in journalism, a field which eventually supported me. I was sent to Europe to interview writers: Graham Greene, Nabokov, Antonia Fraser. When I reached Paris there was a telegram from Greene, who was famously reclusive, saying he could not meet me. Then word came that Nabokov had canceled as well. Disaster loomed. I was more concerned with disappointing Ginna, who had faith in me, than with being rejected. Late at night I walked up a sepulchral Boulevar
d Malesherbes and slipped a note, humble though not abject, under Greene’s door, and later I found the courage to call Montreux and plead with Mme. Nabokov. “Montreux Palace Hotel,” a voice said in English. “Mr. Nabokov, please.” “One moment.”
I don’t recall if I heard the operator ringing or not, but the next word was “Hello.” It was Véra Nabokov. When, after consulting her husband, she finally invited me to meet him the following Sunday, she repeated his preference that interview questions be written by reminding me, “My husband does not ad lib.” All my efforts were finally successful and Graham Greene, I think taking pity on me as a journalist, arranged to have a novel of mine, Light Years, published in England. His opinion of it was higher than the English critics’.
Ginna afterwards became editor in chief at Little, Brown. The offices of the firm faced the Boston Common and no city or location could have suited him better. Among the many books he published was one of mine, written at his urging and with his encouragement, Solo Faces. Although I knew enough about the subject, mountaineering, in the end I liked the title more than the text, perhaps because there was nothing ecstatic about the writing, as there had been in the two previous novels.
The place in the world he was made for he perhaps never fully occupied, but the places, Locke-Ober’s, London, the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, the trout streams upstate, all the museums, the Scottish salmon rivers, he managed to make fabled. He read and saw, tasted and drank, and with him one knew the joy of doing the same.
Perhaps I have given the impression he was less drawn to work than to conviviality, but in fact the two in him were stunningly combined. Not all men are so handsomely made.
