Читать книгу The Writers Afterlife - Richard Vetere - Страница 11

“Who is that?” I asked as Joe and I walked along the sidewalk of a big city somewhere in the twentieth century. I’d just noticed a middle-aged man sitting alone in a park.

Naturally the city was deserted and only an illusion, as was all that existed in the Writers Afterlife. Joe nodded. “Sad story, his,” he replied. “He had five best sellers in America in the early twentieth century. He was the first person to ever make a million dollars for writing fiction. He was very wealthy and very, very popular. Only Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott have had more best sellers in the English language before him.”

“Who is he?”

“You wouldn’t even recognized his name if I told you.”

“Really?”

“Fifteen movies were based on his stories. Gary Cooper and John Wayne starred in two of them. He wrote plays and published nineteen novels. Hardly anyone reads his work anymore.”

“Please tell me who he is.”

“Harold Bell Wright,” Joe told me.

“Who?”

“Exactly.”

I was wobbly with all the information.

As we walked by I noticed the man look up at us. He spoke up, and his voice still echoes in my head. “Do you read me?” he asked.

Joe hurried me along. “Don’t respond. Whatever you say will be the wrong answer.”

Suddenly we were in another city, and another man was at a table alone sipping champagne with music from the Roaring Twenties floating through the air. A yellow Rolls-Royce was parked beside his table and he was eating caviar. The scene struck me as odd, as the man was alone yet trying to act as if he were surrounded by friends and adoring fans.

“Do you see that man there?”

I could very clearly see the slender man with thick hair, thick eyebrows, and a bushy mustache dressed impeccably in a grandiose suit and tie, doing all he could to make it obvious to anyone looking that he was enjoying himself.

“Who is he?” I asked, looking closely.

“He had a best seller the year The Great Gatsby was published. Every high school student knows that novel; hardly anyone alive remembers his,” Joe told me.

“What was it titled?”

“The Green Hat. It was about the same world of the Roaring Twenties as Gatsby but it lacked the style, execution, language, and perhaps the great storytelling of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But that author, he was on the cover of Time magazine!”

“The cover of Time magazine?” I repeated. “But I don’t know him,” I said. I said it too loudly, and the man looked at me with a deep sadness in his big, dark eyes, then looked away from us both.

“Michael Arlen,” Joe whispered his name. “The last ten years of his life he suffered from writers block and didn’t write a word. A few years after he died, he was nearly forgotten.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I remembered a saying I knew back when I was alive: “A best seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.” I turned to Joe. “So are we saying that the mediocre talents who are famous when alive fade into obscurity once time catches up with them?”

Joe shrugged. “Not entirely true but there’s a better chance of that happening than someone living in obscurity and being discovered later on.”

As we left the city I looked over my shoulder and there he sat on the park bench, the only man in the entire metropolis. He sat there for all eternity with the tall buildings as a backdrop. In a city of thousands, no one knew him. Though he felt no hunger, no lust, no need for sleep, and no fear of death, he did feel the deep anxiety and sense of loss of fame, now all but ignored.

Joe leaned in and said to me, “Henry David Thoreau had Ralph Waldo Emerson. This poor guy has no one. But there are so many wonderful writers of some wonderful books that no one knows or reads today and their books were not best sellers by a long shot,” he said. He noticed a man sitting at another park bench with a very thick moustache. He had eyes like dark beams of light and wavy hair combed back. “That’s George Gissing, a writer from the 1890s,” Joe told me. “His book The Odd Women is well loved.”

I had never heard of it.

Joe then gestured to a woman walking through the park. “There’s Olivia Manning. Her book School for Love got her up here.”

I thought I had heard of the book but wasn’t sure.

“We’ll see if she becomes an Eternal,” he said.

We walked around and Joe pointed out other writers to me. “There’s F. M. Mayor. She died when she was sixty, having never married after the man she was engaged to died of typhoid fever in India. Her Rector’s Daughter is considered a neglected classic,” Joe told me. “I enjoyed it, but it is such a devastating story of love lost.”

F. M. Mayor sat at the base of the Taj Mahal with a young, handsome British soldier who I thought must be her husband. She was reading her novel to him, and they looked happy despite the storyline.

Suddenly we were in Bermuda and I saw an interesting-looking woman sitting by a swimming pool, typing and wearing her sunglasses. “Who is she?”

“Oh, that is Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. She wrote The Blank Wall and Raymond Chandler called her the best detective and suspense writer of them all.” Joe grinned. “Look out for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“They just made a movie of her book a couple of years ago. She may actually make it out of the Valley of Those on the Verge.”

That’s when we saw an interesting statue. It was of an old man and it was in the middle of a square. The old man was asleep and looked a little like someone who had eaten a sour grape. “Who’s that?”

“Henry Roth,” Joe answered. “He wrote Call It Sleep. An American classic.”

“A great book no one reads,” I said. I looked at the marble statue. “Why is this here?”

“Well, Henry Roth wrote that wonderful novel, then he had the longest writer’s block in history. He had no interest in being famous, so when he died and first came here he built this statue as a reminder to all writers that fame is not the point. Then he went to the place where ordinary people go when they die and has never been seen since,” Joe told me.

I had had enough of writers who almost, might, and/or never will make it to the hill where the Eternals dwelled. “Take me to the Eternals, please,” I asked.

Leo Tolstoy was impressive. We found him standing on this huge archway in the center of a snow-covered field. Thousands of his admirers were sitting facing him on all sides of the archway reading War and Peace in unison, in Russian. It was so dramatic, so filled with great words, gloom and doom. Tolstoy looked like a prophet up there in the swirling snow, mouthing the words as his readers held their heads down in his enormous book.

“Very cool,” I said.

Joe smirked. “The Eternals have some peculiar needs. Would you believe Tolstoy hasn’t moved since he got here? That enormous crowd reads everything of his over and over again, and he just listens without a single reaction. But you can tell he loves every moment of it.”

Watching John Keats was a lovely experience. He sat on a small hill under a row of trees with golden leaves. It was autumn, and he was reading a small book of his own poetry; sitting beside him was a young woman as petite as he. I was beginning to realize that so many of the writers I had come across were small-boned men and women.

Keats looked like a child to me, yet managed to be elegant in his fame. Everything around him was so perfectly put together: the bushes, the green grass, and the golden trees. His companion had auburn hair and as they sat together on a blanket, she frequently smiled. I realized as we got closer that Keats was reading aloud his poetry to her, and she was listening intently. They held hands as he read.

We soon came upon Mary Shelley who was running wildly in the same woods, followed by Victor Frankenstein and the monster. But they were all laughing; there wasn’t any fear or anxiety in any of them.

I did notice that Mary was naked and her very pale English skin gleamed in the bright sunlight. Percy Shelley was not far away; he was lecturing a crowd of college-age coeds and he looked like a rock star as his lovely wife ran naked through the throng of his admirers. They seemed in love, though, as if they were spending eternity in a very odd sexual tease, happy despite their being competitive and so very famous.

Lord Byron was sitting on a rock below a Grecian ruin. He had curly hair and looked as if he had just finished playing a gig up in Woodstock. He was reading “She Walks in Beauty” to a small crowd of very sophisticated men and women all dressed as if it were the early nineteenth century. They gave the impression that listening to this poet read was all they wanted. As I drew closer, I saw that Byron had put heavy makeup on his face, which made him look more brooding and near death despite the big smile he had on his face and all his fans sitting at his feet.

Charles Dickens was also a petite man who hurried through the London streets followed by two happy boys: Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Joe and I followed Dickens into a large theater and watched him step onto the stage. In a few minutes he began to recite his own prose to the large crowd. He’d always been one of my favorite novelists and there he was, on stage reading his own work sounding like a pretentiously bad actor, but who cared? The audience was just happy to see him in person as he read aloud and acted out the characters of Uriah Heap, Pip, Amy Dorrit, Cratchit, Estella, Morley, and my all-time favorite, Ebenezer Scrooge.

And there in the front row were David and Oliver, living for every word Dickens pronounced. I sighed with gratification to see such a great talent being idolized in the Afterlife.

Just a few moments later, I came up on Lorraine Hansberry. She wrote one of my favorite plays, A Raisin in the Sun, and was the first black woman to have her play produced on Broadway. She was only in her mid-thirties when she died. There she was in the back of a Broadway theater watching a young man who I was sure was the character Walter Lee Younger.

“I always wanted to meet you,” I whispered to her.

She turned to me and shook my hand but didn’t say a word. I could see that she lived for every moment she had written. I was close enough to hear that she was not only mouthing the words as Tolstoy had done, but whispering them aloud.

At the intermission she stood in the middle of a crowd who barely acknowledged her and said to me, “I’m so happy to spend every night of eternity as if it were opening night. They will love the play and they will give it awards and though I will die soon, I am so happy. So very, very happy.”

I nodded.

“And I just love that young man.”

The lights blinked and she quickly went to her place in the back of the theater to watch her play and keep her eternal love of her wonderful character Walter Lee Younger in her heart and line of vision for all time.

Meeting Eugene O’Neill was quite interesting. He was in a bar, which made sense; he was drunk, which made sense, and he was sitting with the Tyrone family. I saw Mary and James and Jamie and Edmund all drinking with him. Well, Mary didn’t drink as much but she looked a bit dazed.

It was interesting how they all seemed taken with one another, though they never truly looked into one another’s faces. Only James looked right at O’Neill and said, “Look up at me, Eugene. Look me in the eye, son,” though James wasn’t much older, if he was even older at all. I could see that O’Neill himself was quite happy being in the glow of his family, possibly his real family, possibly his own fictionalized version of himself as well for all time and forever, et cetera.

I could even see a slight smile come to his face, when James recited a line from Long Day’s Journey into Night with a booming regional actor’s voice and filled the dingy bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was a play itself, watching the great playwright enjoying his own private hell. Also, somehow in the moment, I could see with my own eyes that O’Neill’s writing the play was clearly therapeutic and eased the agony of that hell—making it, in a way, a bit of heavenly comfort.

Joe and I found Samuel Beckett in what looked like a no-man’s-land of the First World War, leaning against a crumbling tree with a ray of sunlight lighting up his face. He seemed content while alone with his thoughts.

William Faulkner sat under a large willow tree, sipping a drink, dressed in a suit and tie. He was elegant, plain, and simple with his neatly trimmed mustache and his smoothly combed gray hair. He was alone, facing an Underwood typewriter, on serene display as if he were rarified and hailed. Indeed, his likeness adorned a U.S. postage stamp and he had won a Nobel Prize, which sat on display beside him. There was no hint of sound or fury in the Writers Afterlife for him. Though a heavy drinker, Faulkner never drank while he wrote and now that he was dead, he didn’t seem to allow chaos to intrude on his place in immortality.

I also got to see Robert Penn Warren, the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes for both poetry and fiction. He was at an old-fashioned picnic enjoying himself as if he were Willie Stark in All the King’s Men.

Mark Twain was not far off but though he was one of the Eternals, he didn’t glow in a warm light nor did he seem content or happy like the others. There was a cloud of sadness around him, a sense of tragedy that made no sense to me.

“He is thrilled to be here because of his literary recognition, but the sorrows of his personal life never seemed to leave him even in death,” Joe explained.

This is not what I expected of the man who was so famous for his erudite and self-deprecating quips, along with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

That’s when I saw a small but handsome and suntanned young man with sharp, dark eyes pacing back and forth, looking very anxiously around. “Who’s that?”

“Oh, that’s John Fante. He got asked up not long ago. He was in the Valley for a bit of time.”

“Yes, he wrote Ask the Dust!” I proclaimed. “He wrote some screenplays too, but I only learned about him when I was in Rome and found out that the Italians really love him,” I said.

Joe nodded. “Charles Bukowski helped get him into the Eternals. In fact, Time Out recently wrote it was ‘criminal negligence’ that Ask the Dust isn’t better known.” Joe walked on. After I caught up with him, he continued, “What’s interesting is that Fante got in, but look at Nelson Algren. His novel The Man with the Golden Arm was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra. He was one of the most famous writers of his time. Fought his way up from working-class Chicago and was so respected in his lifetime. And now who knows his name? Who?”

“I do.”

“That’s my point. You’re another writer.”

I walked over to Fante. He had picked his early twenties to be in while dwelling in the land of the Eternals. He was sitting on a beach, sipping a beer, expressionless, surrounded by pretty Mexican women. I was curious about that blank look on his face so I had to introduce myself. “How did it feel when you heard your name called?” I asked.

He eased back in his lounge chair and said, “It was the most exhilarating moment of my existence.”

“Anything you can share with me?” I asked.

His windswept hair blew across his forehead and the sun rubbed light across his strong features.

“Time spent in the Valley of Those on the Verge is time spent in hell,” he answered. “Living was a picnic compared with that place.”

I lowered my head and snuck away.

The last writer we saw also surprised me. He was sitting behind the wheel of a 1955 royal-blue Packard Clipper convertible. He was a thirty-year-old Jack Kerouac, tanned with a sharp jaw, a crew-cut, and a nerdy look that was very hip back in the fifties. I heard jazz playing from all around the car as it sat there doing fifty miles an hour without moving. Anything was possible here in the Writers Afterlife. Ironically, Kerouac never got a driver’s license when he was alive.

He was on the road, a highway actually, where the sun reigned over a cloudless sky. Everything about him was at ease, relaxed and serene now that he had made it. He was an icon of the Beat Generation, probably more famous than any of the others. He looked slim and healthy, nothing like that bloated body he inhabited when he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty-seven, having lived only three years longer than I had.

I expected to see Neal Cassady in the seat beside him or a few pretty girls he’d picked up as he drove across America but I was shocked when I saw his mother, Gabrielle, sitting in the backseat. He looked comforted and sedate. From where I stood, I could see that his round light-blue eyes filled with happiness.

I looked at Joe and said, “I bet he’s the only Eternal who sits in a car.”

Eventually Joe led me to a very strange place in the Writers Afterlife. It was where all the writers who’d committed suicide were.

“This is an odd place, so if you feel uneasy, it’s not you, it’s the place itself,” Joe assured me.

We were in a garden with so many colorful flowers and small trees and bushes everywhere. The garden had some metal and marble fountains and an occasional metal table and chair. Some writers sat at these tables and others milled around the garden.

I quickly recognized Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Ernest Hemingway, and then Thomas Chatterton and Sir John Suckling from famous portraits of them. All of these writers sat alone at their tables, reading their own works, their heads tilted down, their fingers turning the pages. They didn’t seem to notice one another at all.

“They achieved fame but at such an awful price,” Joe said softly.

I could see they were lonely and filled with regret. Hemingway, bullish and wide, was clearly cranky. Plath was pale and meek.

“Such an irony,” I said.

“Alone for all time. They are famous, yes, but alone for all time. A joyless eternity.”

Then I saw this southern man, John Kennedy Toole, who only became famous when he killed himself.

“I know what you’re thinking, and it’s wrong. His mother brought his novel to Robert Penn Warren after her son died and begged for his help.”

“Toole went back?”

“Yes, he had a week to persuade anyone that he was worthy of fame. So he convinced his mother, who had never read any of his work before that. She then took his unpublished manuscript to Robert Penn Warren.”

Just then, Hemingway’s head opened up right where he had placed the rifle. “What’s that?” I exclaimed.

“Their moment of death haunts them throughout eternity,” Joe told me. “The newbie up here is David Foster Wallace. Such a sad case. He was famous, loved, and admired, yet he took his own life.”

Then Plath grew green and yellow and coughed just like she must have done when she put her head in the oven. But it only lasted a few seconds. When it was over, she went back to reading her works.

I asked to see Herman Melville, and Joe took me to him. He was as stern as I’d expected and there he was on a dock. Ahab was standing beside Melville and they looked surprisingly similar. They were standing side by side in a very stiff way looking out to the ocean, and I imagined they were scanning the horizon to see if they could catch a glimpse of Moby Dick. At first I found it odd that Melville, with all his children and his long-suffering wife, had chosen Ahab, his own creation, to spend eternity with. But then I thought perhaps it made sense, as the two men clearly had a deep understanding of each other.

We went on to visit Hawthorne who sat in a picturesque cottage writing with a quill pen; outside his window all the characters who populated his short stories and novels enjoyed quiet conversation.

The next-to-last place Joe took me was to the top of a very high hill. I looked down and saw thousands and thousands of writers. “Sixty thousand to be exact,” Joe said. “Not one of them is famous. Not one,” Joe repeated. “And every one of them on the threshold. But they truly tip the other way into total anonymity.”

The thought of total facelessness, namelessness, and insignificance made me tremble. “I want to see them.”

“No, you don’t,” Joe said.

I could see a town with sidewalks and streetlamps. I saw men and women milling around. I slowly made my way down the hill and heard Joe call to me. “Don’t.”

But I did and I regretted it. I saw those thousands of souls on the verge of fame and I could see the one thing they had in common. They had no faces. Not one of them. They looked up at me, probably sensing my presence. They were exactly that: faceless.

Joe reached my side. “They do not have a chance of ever being recognized. They can leave their hell but they are all too stubborn to go. They wait for the impossible to happen. Sad thing is, some of them are truly talented and some of them wrote wonderful things in their lifetimes.”