by Carson, Tom
Once I could fructify on my own hook, I didn’t see much point in campus meetings about the world crisis when more consequential rallies were milling just a subway ride away: Vito Marcantonio’s amplified squawk scaring the pigeons right out of Union Square, with newspaper umbrellas over everyone’s heads in the rain, or the Lincoln Brigade’s Robert J. Baker, no less militant in civvies, making a fist at Franco beside Garibaldi’s statue after the fall of Madrid. Didn’t see much point in sitting through lectures in bumble-behinded classrooms when livelier teachers held office hours in Village coffeehouses, Manhattan’s buildings seeming to rear like dragons whose quarreled-over prey was sky when I’d totter back uptown after my latest attempt to find the gibbet in flibbertigibbet. Above all, I didn’t see much point in wasting my Pam-prose on term papers when it looked like my best chance to join the hurlyburly.
While still notionally attending classes, I made myself the trad pest at the old Republic and OC. Did it help that the new gal ready to fetch coffee and handle correspondence was a Barnard willow among broader-beamed CCNY shrubs, spoke French, and had gams up to Sunday? I can’t say it hurt. Going through Alisteir Malcolm’s “Maybe” pile each week on what we called Grab Day, I’d crowd my arms with up to half a dozen books. Once I’d sorted my best bets on the IRT, I’d bash out one or even two reviews on spec as “‘The Iron Gates of Life’: Which Side Was Marvell On?” went unwritten for English 241. The first one Alisteir printed was a pan of a politically comatose novel by a Twenties mummy named Lady Brett Ashley, and the $25 I got paid bought the drinks at Pam’s twentieth birthday party. You bet your ass I’m proud.
The proof Alisteir had a kind side was that he never told anyone I’d first come to his office toting the 1937 and 1938 Purcey’s yearbooks as writing samples. But not, of course, the Fall 1934 edition of Pink Rosebuds, lair of the now hated “Chanson d’automne.” In my days as a book reviewer, I always turned down poetry, though Alisteir stayed fond enough of his vestigial self to cover a good deal of it. Pam worried she’d wrong some real poet by seizing the chance to mete out the same treatment in print I’d met in Purcey’s corridors.
I could handle damn near anything else, though, being a quick study. That got me tagged by some, not inaccurately, as glib. My ace in the hole was that I was funny, a quality then as now in even lower supply than demand in left-wing book reviewing: “Given the current world situation, in the exceedingly unlikely event of a second printing for Farewell the Sun, Lady Ashley’s publisher might perform a public service by restoring to the ‘Paris’ and ‘London’ through which her titled characters cavort their proper names of Lutèce and Londinium, as well as retranslating their arch chitchat into the original ungrammatical Latin.” Maybe you had to be there, but that squib made Addison DeWitt ask Alisteir who I was.
The review by Pamela Buchanan that caused the biggest flap in the old Republic’s offices didn’t appear until the spring of 1941. Alisteir had given me the assignment in the full expectation of a demolition job, not only because that was more or less my specialty. From our point of view, shooting might be too good for the inviting fish in this gilded barrel.
In our crowd, the movies weren’t taken seriously. I’d spent my Purcey’s years flocking to anything Myrna Loy was in, but by ’39 I’d been reeducated—by my own aspirations, always youth’s cruelest and least foresighted commissars—to the point of turning up my nose at joining the crowds bleating to see Gone with the Wind. Hollywood was a preposterous place to us—ironically, given Mrs. Gerson’s eight mostly enjoyable years there in a later Pamcarnation—and the vulgarians who ran the studios were obviously beneath contempt. So I sat down to read The Producer’s Daughter with my pencil sharpened to a dueler’s edge.
Nothing could’ve prepared me for the kinship I felt. In East Egg, Pammie Buchanan had used to wonder what it might be like to have a sister, and Celia Brady—or Celia Brady White, as she was by then—was the closest approximation I had or would ever come across. The last time I’d felt my own identity slithering out of my grasp this way, I’d been an eight-year-old in a Swiss sanatorium and a madwoman with chopped hair and strange hawk’s eyes had been insisting I was her Scottie.
It wasn’t an exact resemblance. She was Los Angeles born and bred, and our frames of experience were very different. She’d had oodles of money all her life and never thought twice about why, not true of me since the Crash. By 1941, I scarcely identified myself to myself as having been a rich girl, since it didn’t seem to me wealth counted until you were in a position to make decisions about it and I hadn’t. As a result, my twin’s politics—the prism of prisms for me then—were undeveloped at best.
Yet the tone, not only the provocations for amusement but its manner, stirred up a maddening illusion of sibling rivalry. On the page, Celia Brady sounded more like me than Pam herself had yet managed to in print—if only, I daresay, because I hadn’t realized that was a priority. As a sample of how I wrote then when deeply affected by a book, here’s the conclusion Alisteir printed with considerable suffering:
From a socialist perspective [yes, I still cleared my throat that way; we all did], not the least of the many delightful surprises here is the interest Miss Brady takes in Hollywood’s labor situation circa 1935. While this child of privilege is blinkered, she’s not blind. Nor can one dispute the poignancy given these light-hearted “memoirs” by their appearance so soon after the death of her actual father last December. Surely, if we automatically scorn the perceptions that can be gleaned from mindsets unattuned to Marxism, we only deprive ourselves of useful knowledge of the world; and the moment we deny even the most affluent a claim equal to our own on life’s universal emotions, we risk abandoning one small but vital crag of a moral high ground otherwise ours for the asking.
You’ll be incredulous, but that turgid last sentence—especially on top of all the praise I’d heaped on The Producer’s Daughter earlier—made me the Antichrist of the week at the old Republic. Your Gramela’s shame at the style is offset by pride that I didn’t falsify my reaction to give them the rap sheet they wanted, and my duffer of an editor deserves credit for printing the review in full despite formidable pressure to at least cut my counterrevolutionary ending. Even with my one concession to his woeful countenance—“risk abandoning” instead of “have abandoned”—that savagely cleavaged secretary of his refused to park her forked hams on Alisteir’s lap for a week.
Posted by: Pamique
No longer a member even in poor standing of Barnard’s Class of ’42, by then I was sharing an apartment with another single girl on Bank Street. Still years from Nenuphar’s robes, my guardian had been troubled when I wrote him in May of 1940, just as the Battle of France began, that I was a) staying in New York that summer and b) didn’t plan on returning to college. I needed his agreement to keep sending me the $15 per week he’d been paying out from the tiny inheritance I was due to come into at twenty-one: the last of the Buchanan gelt, mostly generated by the sale of dead Daisy’s minor Dali.
Since that basically meant he’d be staking me for a year before the whole unmagnificent sum was mine anyway, also because his scruples told him his writ didn’t extend to forbidding the apple to fall close to the tree, Nick gave in after three paragraphs of thoughtful counter-arguments in the same sloping hand that had once announced a perfect little Paree-sienne’s arrival. Since there was no other man I’d have put up with hearing Like mother, like daughter from, I’ve always been glad I didn’t hear it from him.
The joke was that my new digs weren’t that different from the dorm I’d left behind. The décor of twin beds, communal nightstand, and mingled stockings on the radiator was augmented only by one novelty—a small but not badly stocked bar—standing in a corner of another: a living room.
As for the other name on the lease, Murphy had hit close to home. Dottie Idell was Vassar: Vassar ’39, not ’33 as her recent WashPost obit claimed. By day, she was
the receptionist for a West Side psychiatrist—a new breed then, at least in having chosen the career from the start rather than having helped invent it. By the Forties, Freudians were as keen on evangelizing in the face of popular benightedness as had been aviators a decade earlier.
On the ledger’s plus side, he let my roommate take acting classes and go to auditions on weekdays and paid well enough to let her pillage Village vegetable stands and downtown fish markets for her great weekend passion, which was cooking. That was for pure love, since back then women didn’t make a career of it except maritally and Dottie was too busy enjoying the frisky life to be on the lookout for a husband. So I ate well instead.
To be as honest as I can, daisysdaughter.com readers, I hardly remember what Dottie Idell looked like. Three inches shorter than Pam, she had hair the uncertain color of spring’s first warm sun, a deviant nose that pulled up short just in time to avoid going seriously thataway, a jolly little body she was pretty jolly unabashed about in private, and a smile that turned her upper gum into a happy orchestra pit whose bright enamel music stands were waiting for players. That’s really about it. She had as little interest in left-wing politics or writing as I did in acting or cooking, giving our little Bank Street nook the clemency that comes of knowing up front the twain shall never meet for long.
Unexpectedly, our truest and most playful bond was poetry. She’d declaim it with flourishes that reveled in exposing the fustian streak in Victorian sonorities—T.S. Eliot’s included, and not much beat Dottie’s rendition of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” at making the shoe fit. One of her, well, dottier whims was to invent dishes based on poetic figures of speech: “I’m going to come up with a recipe for Ragged Claws if it kills me,” she sunnily greeted me over a book from our living room sofa on my return from the old Republic’s office one day, leading Pam to reflect that August was August and I liked Boucher too. Auditioning to play Louise O’Murphy in the altogether would still make more sense if there were, in fact, a play about her to audition for.
Dottie being Dottie and Pam being me, I’d’ve felt remiss not teaching her St. Clair Sinclair’s old jingle: “To eat an oyster/You crack it foister,” and so on. She was delighted, but I hardly expected to hear it burst from her lips on TV almost fifty years later. As for real poetry, even Purcey’s hadn’t killed Pam’s private affection for the stuff so long as I wasn’t asked to provide any execrable samples of my own. While I’d have died sooner than share “Chanson d’automne” with her, I got drawn into the recital game; she’d do Matthew Arnold, back I’d come with “Jabberwocky.” That’s how we fell into the inanity of calling our two beds Dover and Calais, as in “I left the book on Dover” or “Your laundry’s on Calais.”
Of course, bikini girl, you’d better believe there were nights when only one or even neither of us slept there. Bank Street didn’t really suit for our dates with men. We both knew girls who’d do the you-take-the-living-room-and-I’ll-take-the-bedroom bit, had signals like a shifted vase to let the roommate know she had the couch tonight and so on, but somehow it wasn’t us. The aversion was to tawdriness, not candor. Three years older than I, Dottie herself had introduced me, via the name of a woman doctor, to the rubbery, unguentine world of pre-Pill birth control.
Ah, yes: the lurid sexual confessions begin. Signal event though it’s supposed to be, Pink Thing’s archives are vague about the circumstances under which and the perp with whom I first became trite—some more than usually aggressive Columbia boy, I do recall that. I haven’t thought about it in forever.
The crushed corsage and more than usually strenuous attempt to do something about my damned hair are clues I could follow if I thought they mattered. That my mute reaction on taking cognizance of Pam’s half masted, then one-ankled unmentionables was “Let’s get it over with” tells me I was probably blotto.
I know I was standing up. Bump, bump. Like the hair and ear scrubbing my cheek, the chin gouging my left collarbone—bump!—stays anonymous. My back was being ground against painful, ranked protuberances—oh, my God. An elevator.
It’s just as well I never told Murphy. He’d have columned firth on the spot.
Posted by: Pam
So there we are in the cab—see, youse guys? My future hubby has just unloaded a flagrantly anti-Semitic remark. Pam has done her best to riposte. If you’re wondering why I didn’t stop the cab instead, end this future before it began—ah, well.
I repeat: June 1941. I was four years away from seeing my radio colleague Eddie Whitling, the most cynical man I’ve ever known, break down in tears as we were led by the nose—you never forget that stench, never—into Dachau. I was eight years from marrying Gerson, fifteen from my first sight of Israel, and verbal anti-Semitism (we knew no other kind) was a social drawback at worst. To put it in 2006 terms, Panama, it was viler than littering but not nearly so awful as, say, smoking. Not an attractive warp, but to all but a few goys’ minds, not a decisive one.
Besides, my decision had already been made. And in a flash too, which all bragging aside I’d hardly have you think was typical of me in those days. Dottie Idell and I had spent more nights and cloistered Bank Street weekends being just-us-gals than I probably want to admit.
“Do you really have people to meet downtown?” I asked, gauging my chin’s upward tilt with finesse. High enough for the dipping Buchanan lashes to turn my eyes wry simply indicated sophistication about these white fibs. High enough to let him glimpse the flaring Buchanan nostrils would’ve been whorish.
The Murphy canines joined his incisors in the smile club. “Hell, yes. Couple of Spanish War vets who want to have at me over Prom in Madrid.” He checked himself: “I really shouldn’t call it that to civilians, but it ran so damned long. We got tired of saying ‘Pro-mee-theus’ every time.”
“I’m no theater critic, but I have to tell you”—out of belated loyalty to Jake Cohnstein is my guess—“even I had a hard time swallowing that Parnell Mulligan would send his own brother to the firing squad, and honestly! Was Maria supposed to have been in love with him and not Fred all along, or just a sort of sensible gal who didn’t see the point of putting off until tomorrow what you can do today? I mean, the body wasn’t cold yet—Bran.”
“Crap. You weren’t there, Snooks.” He hadn’t been either, but the only one to point that out had been Orwell, a less than awed witness to the London production. “Anyhow, we lost the damned war. That’s all the proof anyone needs I was right.”
Far from bridling, Murphy was aglow with complacency at my familiarity with his masterpiece. It hadn’t yet closed when I’d hit Manhattan in the fall of ’38. Neither had the Spanish Republic, but the play’s prospects looked better and the young Margo Channing had still been playing Maria.
Then he looked at that eye-catching Rolex of his. “You know what, though—the hell with it. I already know the line they’ll peddle, and they probably got tired of waiting.”
“When were you supposed to meet them?”
“Yesterday. But around this time.”
“Then where are we going?”
“Why don’t we have a drink at my place? If you like theater, Snooks, I can show you a piece of Broadway history. Did you ever see my play The Mighty Tower?” Even Bran knew that not prefacing that title with “my play” in this context risked bringing on an outburst of Snooksian laughter.
“God, no! I was twelve.”
And in Paris, with a plump, depressed Daisy not Browninged yet up in Brussels. Before Purcey’s, “les grands blés sanglotants” and that cruel little scene with poor Hormel, before—oh, who cared? I was in a cab with Brannigan Murphy, and you might not see immediately why what I’d just said was not only flattering but flirtatious.
So think about it, Panama. I was declaring that I knew exactly how old I’d been when The Mighty Tower was on Broadway. The delicate revelation that I’d been twelve
just nine years earlier turned the Murphine masculinity from saturnine to taurine.
“If I’d had my way, Snooks, it’d have still been running when you were eighteen,” he grunted, cupping my knee with one championship paw. (Two Pulitzers, eight public fistfights, “Shucker of the Month” his second Pascagoulan summer.) “The hell with the critics! Tower was the one. I’ve had better luck since, but you know that swell line of Mary Tudor’s. ‘When I am dead and opened, you shall find—’”
“Yes, yes! Of course I know it.” I waved my hands—well, how to put this? Airily. “I’m just surprised you do.”
“Hell,” he said, putting the long arm of Rolexed coincidence around my shoulders. “Is that really how people think of me?”
“Why not? It’s how you want them to,” I managed to get out before my first Murphine kiss, as crushingly manly as a diesel truck in a barbering school.
Windows facing the river, his Sutton Place digs told the story of a bear who’d caught on too late bears don’t hatch from eggshells. He’d had it done in Deco on moving in soon after the first Pulitzer, when “successful playwright” as a generic category had more sway over him, and had been trying to wrestle it back into reflecting his threatened Branhood ever since. The decorator’s Bakelite and lacquer shrank from the flea-market bric-a-brac commemorating his nonexistent career in the Merchant Marine, the autographed painting, not photo, of Dolores Ibárurri—innocent of English if not much else, Spain’s fabled La Pasionara had rendered “No pasaran” as “No pass around”—and the undeniably crowded and much used bookshelves. In a clench-browed way, Murphy did take himself seriously as a literary man, making it rather sad that today almost nobody does.
