EXCLUSIVE : Act 1 scene 2 'Contentious Minds'

Contentious Minds: The Mary 

McCarthy/Lillian Hellman Affair.

By Ben Pleasants &

Jennifer Gundy

WRITER’S COPY FOR TECH RUN THRU

Act one: Scene Two

Laura says:

Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace.  Waldorf Astoria March 27, 1949.  Ladies’ room.  Mary enters.

Mary

(Mary is seated before the mirror putting down a large umbrella, she begins to fix her hair.  Laughs.)  All this for what?  (Looks at the lines around her eyes.)  Spring?  It never comes until April.

Laura

Lillian rushes in tipsy with cigarette smoked all the way down, hair is wild and makeup smeared.)

Lily

Goddamn snake.  There you are.

Mary

(Sees her through the mirror.)  You followed me in here, Miss Hellman?  Lillian!  (Halfway between a question and an exclamation.)

Lily

Miss Hellman will do fine.  (Grabs her in the chair and spins her around.)  You bet your sweet ass I did.  (Puts down drink, holds up umbrella.)  Who the hell have you and your hoards the idea of banging these fucking elephant umbrellas up and down at the end of the sessions?  Dwight McDonald?

Mary

(Rises calmly.)  I’m afraid I don’t name names.  (Continues primping.)  We did have something important to say.  The Partisan Review crowd!  (Smiles in mirror.)  Poor Louis Untermeyer.  He was taken aback.  (Turns to face her grasping umbrella.)  He’s not used to thumping.  (She strikes umbrella on the floor close to Hellman’s feet.)  But if it’s names you want, here are a few:  Osip Mandelstam, disappeared poet, Isaac Babel, murdered novelist, then there’s Boris Pilnyak, Andrey Platonov.  All guilty of (Beat) potential crimes…Stalin simply (Gestures) erased them…

Lily

(Her drunkenness makes her wobbly.)  I suppose that’s that critics do.  Make things up to suit their politics.  Then smack down umbrellas on the floor to make sure they are heard.  Is that what they taught you at (Not sure)  Wellesley?  I thought I recognized the mannered sneer.

Mary

Vassar.  No.  They taught me to stand on my own feet without a sneer.  To have an opinion.  I should think that an educated woman like yourself who attended…

Lily

NYU…Just two years…(Incompletion bothers her and she can’t understand why she blurted it out.)

Mary

…Would take the contrary view when hearing that exsanguinate, Harvard Professor Mathiesen, extolling poor Thoreau as a potential supporter of Henry Wallace.

Lily

(Turns to face her.)  The war against Germany is over.  What happened to our truce?

Mary

(Methodically and without passion.)  Yes, the war with Germany is over and Hitler is dead.  Stalin is not.  He continues to imprison and murder poets and playwrights and novelists and actors and painters and composers and workers for their beliefs, while you and Hammet and VJ Jerome speak of him as though he were Jesus Christ instead of the gangster…

Lily

You sooooooo miss the point.  What was the purpose here today?  A cultural and scientific conference for world peace!  Between East and West!  America and Soviet Union!  The two great powers.  Allies.  We’re here today so there can be no more World Wars… Not to smack down umbrellas.  (Does so – then grabs her.)  Have we learned nothing after fifty million deaths?

Mary

(Pushing her off, but calmly.)  Whenever Stalin’s name comes up, you change the subject.  Don’t break my umbrella; it’s raining… (Aside.)  It belonged to Edmund.

Lily

You heard Dmitri Shostakovich address the conference.  The world’s greatest living composer.  Did he appear to you to be a pawn of Stalin?  Did he look oily to you?

Laura

(Enters and looks around.)

Mary

No.  He didn’t look too comfortable to me, Miss Hellman.  But then, he’s Russian!  Where are the Poles, the Czechs, and Hungarians at the WORLD conference on culture and science?  Too busy jumping out windows, like Jan Masaryk?

Lily

Haven’t you heard?  It’s in all the papers.  The poor man was depressed.  Over a failed love affair with an American novelist.  Not you, for a change.

Mary

From what I’ve read, he landed feet first three yards out from the window he jumped from his underwear.  Masaryk was a formal man.  He never would have jumped out the window without a suit and tie.

Lily

Poor Masaryk.  Poor, conflicted man.  Poor Czechoslovakia!

Laura

(to herself.)  Poor Poland.

Lily

What?

Mary

Here in America among the intelligentsia, there is hardly a sound about Eastern Europe.

Lily

Really.  Out there in the streets are two thousand protestors with signs reading REDS BACK TO MOSCOW, PUSH SHOSTAKOVICH OUT THE WINDOW, and STAMP OUT HARVARD!  I can’t be responsible for Eastern Europe, but if you have ANY evidence that writers here in America are being persecuted by anyone, by the government, especially by communists, I’d like to hear about it.  Miss McCarthy!

Mary

Jan Valtin.  OUT OF THE NIGHT.  The US Government tried to deport him.  You never said a word.

Lily

He should have been deported.  His book was all lies.  He was never part of the Comintern.  The 1 Soviet Police Force!

Mary

And then there’s Hollywood.  The list of writers they won’t touch.  Erased for their politics.  All anti-Stalinists.  Koestler and Farrel and John Dos Passos.

Lily

(Laughs.)  Hollywood is not guilty of censorship, Miss McCarthy.  Just goot taste.  (beat.)  As if book like “Darkness at Noon” could ever be a commercially successful picture.

Mary

But I have written proof.  From Commissar Trumbo of the Screen Writier’s Guild when he assured the public in print that Hollywood had no plans to do Koestler or Valtin or Farrell or John Dos Passos.  Or that book by Krevchankop… called… (Can’t recall it.)

Laura

I CHOSE FREEDOM…. (Turns to them both.)

Mary

Thank you.  I CHOSE FREEDOM.  And he was murdered right here in the USA!

Lily

Not by the Screen Writers Guild.  (beat as she calms down._  I believe he died a suicide.

Mary

Like Masaryk, while you, Miss Hellman, would hurry back to Hollywood at the height of the Depression with the other Stalinist playwrights of the New York to gather up your $500 a week for Louis B. Mayer.

Lily

Samuel Goldwyn, or do all Jews look alike to you? (beat)

Mary

… Renting mansions in the pacific Pallisades, drinking cognac at the Ambassador Hotel, while writing screen plays for the Proletariat.  Fred and Ginger as they danced on an ocean liner off Bora Bora!

Lily

I never wrote for Fred and Ginger.  I was, a dedicated Marxist.  I was in Spain when you were on your train to Reno.  I was on the Russian Front when you were pulling weeds at Wellfleet.  You and your thumping umbrella.  Our truce is finished!  Eastern Europe should be thankful it has a friend like Comrade Stalin.

Mary

Hollywood too.  For all the dead in Eastern Europe killed by silence, I thumped my umbrella!  And I’ve been told you all had wine cellars and underpaid your Negroes!

Lily

(Collapses into a chair and begins to restore her make-up.)  How would you know?  You’ve never seen a Negro (Beat) close up.

Mary

I hope your next play will be a comedy, Miss Hellman, I really do.  Your recent morality dramas are more of less moral-less.  (Exits.)

Lily

GODDAM FUCKING BLUEBLOODS.  The first time I heard that woman speak I should have strangled her! (to audience).

*(Fade out.)

Almost in the audience’s lap on both sides of a mirror slips:

(Between Acts I & II Hellman adds the lines on her cheeks that show age.  She works hard to add colour to her cheeks, but her lips get no lipstick.  McCarthy adds colour to her lips and cheeks, and just a little powder to her nose.  Her hair is pulled back in a bun.  Mary is in a troubled state thinking of Clem, who repulsed but may have gotten her pregnant.  Lillian is mournful over the abortion of the child she could have had with Hammett.  We should see in their faces the fact that the childbearing years are over and their bridges have been burned.  Hellman here is the melody, while McCarthy is the angry base.  She allows anger only in private.)

Laura

Mary and Lillian are alone in their dressings rooms, dressing for the theatre.  Mary is in a troubled state.

Mary & Lily

                                                                                         So.

                                                                                         The thought of it

                                                                                         We shared a disease together.

                                                                                         God

                                                                                         Mother’s baby

                                                                                         I look hard…

                                                                                         Fathers maybe.  (Pause.)

                                                                                         As if it were feces

                                                                                         One child

                                                                                         To be flushed away.

                                                                                         Was just right.

                                                                                         Fetus, not feces

                                                                                         The second…

                                                                                         And dash…

                                                                                         God

                                                                                         What VD didn’t he have…

                                                                                         It might have been Clem’s

                                                                                         Still

                                                                                         Just the thought of it

                                                                                         It was ours

                                                                                         Suckling an infant

                                                                                         And I had to look…

                                                                                         With that leer of his…

                                                                                         Maybe

                                                                                         That snicker and his sarcasm…

                                                                                         Five months…

                                                                                         A child

                                                                                         With hooded eyes

                                                                                         His features and mine combined…

                                                                                         Half resembling Clem

                                                                                         Not my only chance

                                                                                         (Pause) with Philip…

                                                                                         I’ve flushed others away…

                                                                                         But then

                                                                                         Men know nothing about women…

                                                                                         He never would have wanted any…

                                                                                         Still…

                                                                                         With him it would have been a thing of 

                                                                                          beauty…

                                                                                         I looked at the face

                                                                                         Maybe I was close to driving off the  

                                                                                         road that night…

                                                                                         The aloneness of being

                                                                                         It was

                                                                                         Between two men…

                                                                                         A boy…

                                                                                         So

                                                                                         Now

                                                                                         To hell with babies…

                                                                                         Here I am at 52…

                                                                                         I gave birth to books… (To mirror)

                                                                                         Who would have been

                                                                                         Not so bad

                                                                                         Holding him

                                                                                         At 45

                                                                                         As if

                                                                                         Almost

                                                                                         I could ever be a mother…

                                                                                         Young…

                                                                                         It’s bad enough just to be a lover…

EXCLUSIVE: 'Contentious Minds' serialized on MM Centenary - Act 1, scene 1

Contentious Minds: The Mary McCarthy/Lillian Hellman Affair.

By Ben Pleasants &

Jennifer Gundy

WRITER’S COPY FOR TECH RUN THRU

PROLOGUE: Laura stands in front of a dark stage dressed as she will appear in Act IV Scene II. She is instructive, a tour guide. She holds an unopened umbrella.

Laura

Storms in literature are often caused when the cool dry winds of reason and analysis meet the torrid wetness of passion and imagination. This storm, between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, had been building for forty years before it exploded into a celebrated lawsuit in 1980. Such subjects, borne along over such a great length of time, defy the definition of modern theatre, with its single set and confining unities – but there’s another theatre better suited to the storms and sweeps of history, where peasants once stood but a sword’s length from Kings and the roof was open to the light of day, to the wind and rain. There where the comic often verges on the tragedy and forests moved across the stage, I choose to take you now. There is no living room to settle down in, no coffess table comforts, just a battlefield set out between two women in full armour. (Umbrella opens.) So, hold tight to your umbrellas and we’ll venture out togetherinto a rainy autumn night on Cape Cod, where Puritans once lived, uncomfortable beside Bohemians. The year is 1946. World War II is over and there is peace in the land, but other struggles are still going on, other conflicts that never seem to end; they’re with us today, in a place where minds don’t meet.

(Laura _____________________)

                                                                                        

Act one: Scene One:

The set is a suggestion of a rundown restaurant on Cape Cod. It’s autumn. They year is 1946. There is a booth upstage right and another downstage left. Radio is on and then fades as lights go off.

Mary McCarthy

(Mary McCarthy is dressed in a gray suit. She fumbles around in darkness, then sits down. She’s thirty - four but looks nineteen.)

Tom

(He’s twenty - one in a mock sailor suit and enters with a flashlight.) Where did YOU come from? What are you doing out on a night like this?

Mary

I’m supposed to meet my husband here. My ex - husband.  (Rises.)  I’m Mary McCarty.

Tom

Thomas Richard Harold Polk III. Tom, Dick and Harry. Drink?

Mary

Martini. (Pulls out a cigarette. He lights it and then lights a candle.)

Tom

Where’s he coming from? Your ex - husband?

Mary

Wellfleet. He had our son for the weekend.

Tom

(Mixing a drink in a Martini shaker.) The road from Wellfleet is washed out.

Mary

I suspect he’ll try to call. If the phone’s still working.

Tom

(Spills the drink on Mary’s arm.) I’m so sorry.

Mary

You’re a bit unsteady for a waiter.

TOM

War wound. Want to see my scar? (Wind comes up again.)

MARY

I’ll pass on that. Sounds like the roof might come up. I love storms. They are the imperative sentences of weather.

TOM

You’re funny. How’s your drink?

MARY

Quickly effective. Which way is the ladies’ room?

TOM

(Points and hands her the candle?)

MARY

Thanks. (She heads off into the darkness stepping cautiously.)

LILLIAN HELLMAN (Laura hands Lillian umbrella)

(Bursts in all wet with a battered umbrella. She’s forty and fighting it.)

Goddam little four-eyed chink cab driver left me out in a mud puddle up to my ass in freezing water. (She wipes her glasses and looks around.) Where’s Arthur? He was supposed to meet me here. I can’t see a thing.

TOM

Would you…(Shines a flashlight)

LILY

(Hitches up her skirt and tries to pull down one stocking). Help me off with this FUCKING thing.

TOM

(Bends down to pull off garter).

I don’t know where to start!

LILY

Just yank it off!

TOM

Like this? (Pulls it down and hands it to her soaking wet).

LILY

Little goddamn nips! (She flicks the stocking into the air and hits Mary in the face as she re-enters.)

TOM

(Overlaps Lily.) Would you like a…drink?

LILY

You’re goddamned right I’d like a drink. Double scotch. (Pulls out a wet pack of cigarettes but throws on the floor.) Lucky Strike. (To Mary) What the hell are you looking at?

MARY

I believe I’m addressing Miss Hell man.

LILY

What of it? (She sits down and pulls off the other stocking handing it to Mary).

TOM

All we have are Chesterfields. (He opens the pack and extracts a cigarette).

LILY

Good enough. Chester feels me, who feels you. Light me.

TOM

Sure.

LILY

(To Mary.) You look familiar. (Wipes glasses again.)

MARY

I was married to a friend of yours. Till he beat me.

LILY

(faces her squarely and then takes a good luck.) where’s the goddam scotch? Hmmm. (Remembers something). Oh yes. The girl who worked her way across the circumcised landscape of the Partisan Review. Bunny’s wife. Mrs Wilson! (Satisfied with herself).

Mary

I was married to Edmund, but I’ve always been Mary McCarthy!

Lily

Oh yes of course. Maybe I met you once in the Thirties. At a party. The very partisan Review Crowd. You and Rahv and Clem and James T. Farrell. One big Trotskyite family, till they axed him. Poor Leon. But I do recall…You write about the theatre. Reviews.

Tom

Here’s your scotch. Johnny Walker Black. Still hard to get. (He wobbles the glass, but doesn’t spill it.)

Mary

(Holding her own.) Criticism. Not reviews. (The lights go on.)

Lily

(Lights go up.) (She touches Mary’s hair – send a shiver through her body.) We look like two lonely broads in a typhoon on the North Atlantic. The war is over and WE won. (To Tom) I’d like a chowder, if you can bring it in without spilling any on my shoes.

Tom

I’ll try. (Exits, flouncing to annoy her.)

Lily

(To Tom.) Girls seldom make passes at men who wear dresses. Sit with me dear. The Thirtoes are over. Long over. We’re on the same side now.

Mary

(They sit down together.) I wouldn’t go that far. But the war is over and we did win. So I guess you could say we’re on the same side. For now. (Offers her hand.)

Tom

(Interrupting handshake.) Hot chowder coming through.

Lily

You spilled it on my dress.

Tom

(Reaching for water with a napkin.)

Lily

Never mind. Go back to the kitchen.

Tom

(Exits.)

Mary

(Laughs and gives him a wink.)

Lily

(Still worried about her face. Takes compact from purse and opens it.) My face looks like a piece of driftwood.

Mary

Driftwood can be beautiful!

Lily

Let me look at you. So you’re Edmunds wife.

Mary

I was for seven years. Now I’m…not.

Lily

(Looks at her face as a playwright looks at an auditioning actress.) So lovely. Mary. That’s a plain name. How old are you dear?

Mary

Thirty – four.  (With and edge.) And you, Miss Hellman?

Lily

(Choosing to ignore the question.) How amazing you could be nineteen.

Mary

It can be a concern. Especially with students. Edmund had a problem with it. I think he would of preferred a wife of nineteen who looked thirty – four. You choose not to tell me how old YOU are.

Lily

Don’t be impertinent. You can look it up in Who’s Who if you really care. So…(takes a wider look at Mary.) that’s why I never matched the face with the blazing prose. The way you do your hair is a little odd.

Mary

Sometimes driftwood can look just like iron.

Lily

A little school – marmish, aren’t you?

Mary

Not to the men in the circumcised landscape of a Partisan Review. Or those I recall who had a foreskin. Even Edmund.

Lily

Making love to Edmund must have been a bit like fucking the Oxford English Dictionary.

Mary

(Laughs.) The OED is sexier!

Lily

(Returns the laugh.) What was I saying? Oh yes that you were married to Edmund Wilson.

Mary

And we managed to procreate. A son. He’s seven. And you?

Lily

Me? Oh…no. No child. Just dogs. I’ve been unlucky with husbands. Too weak. I could never take them seriously.

Mary

My first husband died in a fore trying to rescue his unproduced pay. An actor. He was too old for me and besides, he was losing his hair.

Lily

I can think of one produced play of mine that should have burned up in a fire before it was produced. I suppose with men, Tallulah had it right. All things being equal, she preferred a tall man.

Mary

She was quoting from the French. They get it right so often about men. Choosing a man is like choosing a dress. It keeps you happy for a few days and then goes out of fashion. (She reflects.) I saw your play, “The Children’s Hour” and liked it much.

Lily

(Boring in.) Did you? What did you like about it specifically? I mean as a theatre critic?

Mary

I liked the way it took chances. You wrote about something Broadway fears: a women’s sexuality. What happened to those two women…

Lily

(Shows pride in her creation.) Karen and Martha…

Mary

That was a real tragedy. It was based on something factual… Something …true, yes?

Lily

Yes, but not in my life. From long ago in Scotland. Hammet found it in a book. I just mixed it all together in a good Martini.

Tom

(Crosses to their table.) Another drink?

Mary

Martini sounds splendid. It just rolls off my tongue. MARTINI.

Tom

And you, Miss Hellman?

Lily

I could do with a Lucky Strike. And take away this chowder if that’s what you call it.

Tom

We only have Chesterfields. (Exits.)

Mary

I recall in 1935, I think it was, when Lucky Strike was on the boycott list. We all smoked Walter Raleighs.

Lily

I remember that. Sir Walter Raleighs. (Exacts name. Tries to get this right-) Now you in your stories, the two or three I’ve read, DO write about personal things. Very personal things. Am I right?

MARY

(Laughs). Yes. (Seeing if she can trust her.) At times.

LILY

Sleeping with a businessman on a train on your way to Reno while waiting for a divorce. I was told that really happened. (Beat.) To you.

MARY

(Laughs.) Well…some of it…(Drinks) I was on my way back from Reno…to New York. Most of it did happen, if I were to be truthful, but then…life isn’t Chekhov, is it?

LILY

No, life isn’t Chekhov. (Laughs.) But…the story I’ve always wondered about…was the one about the dogs…where they shipped them through the mail to have their portraits done in miniature…live dogs…(Laughs) and some of them arrived crazy…

TOM

(Enters) More drinks. (Puts them down. Exits)

MARY

(Impressed with the face that Lillian gets miniature right – the detail). And some of them, arrived dead…(Laughs at the thought of it.)

LILY

(Belts back another and roars with laughter.) no really…was that true?

MARY

All true. I was the office manager of the gallery for a brief time. Deep in the Depression. Took me months to get my salary. (Money is always short.) and you, Miss Hellman, as long as we are letting down out hair together before the fire (She does.) did you ever…you and Hammey…want a child? (Studies her carefully, waiting for the reply.)

LILY

(Suddenly frosts over.) Why would you ask that?

MARY

Well…it’s just…logical…to ask a woman who loves men…who writes about…passion…if she ever wanted to be (Beat) a mother.

LILY

When I was in the USSR during the war I kept a journal out there in all that mud on my way to Poland. I showed it to Dottie when I got back. But what I remember most was not in my journal.

MARY

Dottie?

LILY

Dorothy Parker. My closest friend. Do you have…close friends Miss McCarthy? Women, I mean?

MARY

Mrs. Parker of the nineteen twenties. I saw her once in the thirties. She rallied the guests at the Waldorf in support of a waiter’s strike. The best dressed strikers I’ve ever seen. Cole Porter played the Internationale. (He didn’t).

LILY

That was almost before your time.

MARY

So was Mrs. Parker, though she struggles to keep her nose above water these days.

LILY

We all have our moment to shine. If the talent is there. Did you read Dorothy Parker while you were in college, Miss McCarthy? I assume you want the best….institution.

MARY

Vassar. Yes, I read her with delight. She could write of love with wit and elan.

LILY

She writes what she knows.

TOM

Two more martinis. (Thunder comes up.) And one for me. If waiters can strike, they can sit with the customers. (Lights up another cigarettes, but doesn’t smoke it.)

(There is an awkward pause)

LILY

I see (Touching her cheek) you have bruises on your face. Yes. (Thinking.) Yes, I wanted to have a child once. I was pregnant (Hesitantly) a few times. (Pauses in pain) But…(she fumbles for a cigarette and Tom lights it).

MARY

Men can be such children about sex. As if children were the object of all that passion. One way to own you, I suppose. We women are always contending for our place in their world. What men fear most is out…intelligence. Go on.

LILY

(Extends her hand and McCarthy shakes it.

When I drink too much I usually get a call from someone like my friend Dottie, but of course she drinks too much and talks too much and then we laugh at…being women. That’s the thing. How to contend with men and still remain…

MARY

Feminine. (That strikes a chord with her as the rain comes down hard again.)

LILY

I’ll tell you a little bit of what I didn’t write in my Russian journal. Under bombardment for on hundred days. (She stops to consider – tries to remember the feel of it – but breaks the thought.) and where was Rahv and where was Edmund and where was Dwight McDonald? On the sidelines. All pacifists. Well, I was there. A woman out in the mud in fucking Poland. And I did drink and I did fuck the soldiers. One great big Georgian officer would tug on the flap of my tent and drag off my awful wool nightmares. He’d fling his great boots out into the mud after I tugged them off and then he’d put me down on that squeaky little cot…

TOM

(He does, but picks up his, looks at it, and puts it out.) (To Lillian -) God. This is fun.

MARY

That’s interesting. I am impressed. (Phone rings.)

LILY

It’s just that in desperate times love seems hopeless and sex is more real than life. Sex like that is not about having children.

TOM

Miss McCarthy. You have a call.

MARY

Me. (Stops to look at herself in the mirror then goes to phone.)

LILY

(phone)

(Looks at compact as Tom lights her cigarette). Wait. Oh well. We can’t all look like a John Singer Sergeant painting.

MARY

Yes. I got here with some difficulty. You’ll never guess who’s here with me. I’d rather not say. If you can’t come by tonight, he’ll drive me home. Poor dear. Let him sleep. Yes. The Near You Café. No hard feelings? Good. (Hangs up, then dials again.) Edmund can’t make it. Yes darling. You’d better come and pick me up. The rain’s slowing down. Love you too. (Hangs up phone.) Bring me a champagne cocktail. (Goes back to table.) One for the road.

LILY

And I’ll take a scotch neat. If this is one of those dinner I have to pay for myself, I’d rather drink it.

MARY

Not like being in the old Soviet Union where everything for the American writer was provided free. Paid for by the State. You speak Russian?

LILY

(She doesn’t) I’m translating Chekhov. His letters. I’m sure you’re fluent in something.

MARY

(Quotes Verlaine).

Hier, on parlait de choses et d’autres,

Et mes yeux aliieant recherchant les votres;

French. I’m not bad in Latin either. Catholic school.

TOM

Here you are ladies. (Spills them both.) I’ll only charge you half price.

LILY

Very impressive. Tallulah speaks the filthiest French. Like sailors. (To Tom.) No offense. (Tom exits.) They should put her in the Flapper Museum when she dies. Along with Zelda Fitzgerald. (Laughs.) The last time I saw Scott…

MARY

You  knew Scott Fitzgerald?

LILY

Of course I knew him. In Hollywood. He needed money. His stuff will never make it back! Never. It seems so juvenile in 1946. I suppose Edmund spoke of him.

MARY

You mean at night when we were making love between the covers of the Oxford English Dictionary? I met him too. Scott. After the world had worn him down. He was just a shadow of himself. I never Zelda. Better bring my bill.

TOM

(Exits)

LILY

Losing her train of thought.) Hmmmm…

MARY

After Scott died, Edmund spoke of him as though he’d been a friend of Keats. It’s hard to believe the two of us could ever have pro-created. (Accent on the last syllable to emphasize creation.)

TOM

(Brings bill.) Your bill. I’ve deducted for spillage.

MARY

I’d take up a new occupation if I were you. Television.

TOM

I’ll probably end up owning this place. The Cape gets into your blood, you know. (Exits.)

MARY

(A car honks.) Well.  It has been interesting.  For me.  Tell me this… Why do we spend so much time contending with men, when both of us know we’re smarter than they are?

LILY

(They laugh sadly together – it’s almost a sigh.)  You tell me.

MARY

Well.. (Thinking.)  Who knew George Elliott was a woman?  It was all there on the page…better than Henry James.

LILY

What was all there on the page?

MARY

Brilliance!  Fame!  Logic!

LILY

Fame is an elevator ride up the asshole of time.

MARY

A line from your new play?  That’s absolutely…Quoteable.  Yours?

LILY

All mine.  Sorry I can’t sit here trading quips with you all night.  I don’t know your work that well.  Only the story about sex on the train and the one about the dead dogs shipped through the mail.  But I’ll look for your name Miss McCarthy.

MARY

Call me Mary.

LILY

Mary.  It might be a name worth remembering.

MARY

I do hope so, next time I get into an elevator.  (Pays bill.)  Goodbye, Miss Hellman.

LILY

Lillian.

MARY

Lillian.  It has been fun.

LILY

(Touches her arm.)  Before you leave…since we’ve been so chummy, you and I, the Stalinist and the Trotskyite, tell me something bourgeois about Mary McCarthy.  Something small.

MARY

(Putting on her coat.)  I do hate cleaning.  I was not brought up to be a chambermaid.

LILY

Me either.  (Helps her on with her coat.)

MARY

And you, Lillian?  What is there bourgeois about Lillian Hellman?

LILY

I love fur coats.

MARY

So did Stalin’s wife till she shot herself.  (Exits.)

LILY

Young man, please come here.  Show me your arms.  You might have to carry me out over that river out there.  Poor Arthur couldn’t carry a bag of potatoes from the car to his door.

TOM

See.  Want to see my scar.  (Shows her his muscles.)  Did you really make that up?

LILY

What?

TOM

Fame is an elevator ride up the asshole of time.

 LILY

Oh that.  No.  The elevator operator in my New York apartment said that.  He’s a nobody, and I have a good ear for dialogue.  Now light me another Lucky Strike.  Chesterfield.  (As he holds up the pack.)  Maybe Arthur won’t show up at all.  (Paws his good arm.)  Maybe I’ll just have to make do with you.  Do I know your name?

TOM

Thomas Richard Harold Polk III.  Tom, Dick and Harry.  (Counts his money.)

LILY

Something wrong?

TOM

Women never tip well.

*(Lights fade.)

"Settling the Colonel's Hash"

Mary McCarthy, "Settling the Colonel's Hash" 1954
		Seven years ago, when I taught in a progressive college, I had a pretty girl student in one of my classes who wanted to be a shortstory writer. She was not studying writing with me, but she knew that I sometimes wrote short stories, and one day, breathless and glowing, she came up to me in the hall, to tell me that she had just written a story that her writing teacher, a Mr. Converse, was terribly excited about. “He thinks it's wonderful,” she said, “and he's going to help me fix it up for publication.” I asked what the story was about; the girl was a rather simple being who loved clothes and dates. Her answer had a deprecating tone. It was lust about a girl (herself) and some sailors she had met on the train. But then her face, which had looked perturbed for a moment, gladdened.“Mr. Converse is going over it with me and we're going to put in the symbols.” Another girl in the same college, when asked by us in her sophomore orals why she read novels (one of the pseudo-profound questions that ought never to be put) answered in a defensive flurry: “Well, of course I don't read them to find out what happens to the hero.” At the time, I thought these notions were peculiar to progressive education: it was old-fashioned or regressive to read a novel to find out what happens to the hero or to have a mere experience empty of symbolic pointers. But I now discover that this attitude is quite general, and that readers and students all over the country are in a state of apprehension, lest they read a book or story literally and miss the presence of a symbol. And like everything in America, this search for meanings has become a socially competitive enterprise; the best reader is the one who detects the most symbols in a given stretch of prose. And the benighted reader who fails to find any symbols humbly assents when they are pointed out to him; he accepts his mortification. I had no idea how far this process had gone until last spring, when I began to get responses to a story I had published in Har-per's. I say “story” because that was what it was called by Harper's. I myself would not know quite what to call it; it was a piece of reporting or a fragment of autobiography-an account of my meeting with all anti-Semitic army colonel. It began in the club car of a train going to St. Louis; I was wearing an apple-green shirtwaist and a dark-green skirt and pink earrings; we got into an argument about the Jews. The colonel was a rather dapper, flashy kind of IrishAmerican with a worldly blue eye; he took me, he said, for a sculptress, which made me feel, to my horror, that I looked Bohemian and therefore rather suspect. He was full of the usual profound clichés that anti-Semites air, like original epigrams, about the Jews: that he could tell a Jew, that they were different from other people, that you couldn't trust them in business, that some of his best friends were Jews, that he distinguished between a Jew and a kike, and finally that, of course, he didn't agree with Hitler: Hitler went too far, the Jews were human beings.All the time we talked, and I defended the Jews, he was trying to get my angle, as he called it; he thought it was abnormal for anybodv who wasn't Jewish not to feel as he did. As a matter of fact, I have a Jewish grandmother, but I decided to keep this news to myself: I did not want the colonel to think that I had any interested reason for speaking on behalf of the Jews, that is, that I was prejudiced. In the end, though, I got my comeuppance. Just as we were parting, the colonel asked me my married name, which is Broadwater, and the whole in was cleared up for him, instantly; he supposed I was married to a Jew and that the name was spelled B-r-o-d-w-a-t-e-r. I did not try to enlighten him; I let him think what he wanted; in a certain sense, he was right; he had unearthed my Jewish grandmother or her equivalent. There were a few details that I must mention to snake the next part clear: in my car, there were two nuns, whom I talked to as a distraction from the colonel and the moral problems he raised. He and I finally had lunch together in the St. Louis railroad station, where we continued the discussion. It was a very hot day. I had a sandwich; he had roast-beef hash. We both had an old-fashioned. The whole point of this “story” was that it really happened; it is written in the first person; I speak of myself in my own name, McCarthy; at the end, I mention my husband's name, Broadwater. When I was thinking about writing the story, I decided not to treat it fictionally; the chief interest, I felt, lay in the fact that it happened, in real life, last summer, to the writer herself, who was a good deal at fault in the incident. I wanted to embarrass myself and, if possible, the reader too. Yet, strangely enough, many of my readers preferred to think of this account as fiction. I still meet people who ask me, confidentially, “That story of yours about the colonel-was it really true?”It seemed to them perfectly natural that I would write a fabrication, in which I figured under my own name, and sign it, though in my eyes this would be like perjuring yourself in court or forging checks. Shortly after the “story” was published, I got a kindly letter from a man in Mexico, in which he criticized the menu from an artistic point of view: he thought salads would be better for hot weather and it would be more in character for the narrator-heroine to have a Martini. I did not answer the letter, though I was moved to, because I had the sense that he would not understand the distinction between what ought to happen and what did happen. Then in April I got another letter, from an English teacher in a small college in the Middle West, that reduced me to despair. I am going to cite it at length. “My students in freshman English chose to analyze your story, ‘Artists in Uniform,’ from the March issue of Harper's. For a week I heard oral discussions on it and then the students wrote critical analyses. In so far as it is possible, I stayed out of their discussions, encouraging them to read the story closely with your intentions as a guide to their understanding. Although some of them insisted that the story has no other level than the realistic one, most of them decided it has symbolic overtones. “The question is: how closely do you want the symbols labeled? They wrestled with the nuns, the author's two shades of green with pink accents, with the ‘materialistic godlessness' of the colonel…. A surprising number wanted exact symbols; for example, they searched for the significance of the colonel's eating hash and the author eating a sandwich….From my standpoint, the story was an entirely satisfactory springboard for understanding the various shades of prejudice, for seeing how much of the artist goes into his painting. If it is any satisfaction to you, our campus was alive with discussions about 'Artists in Uniform.' We liked the story and we thought it amazing that an author could succeed in making readers dislike the author-for a purpose, of course! ”I probably should have answered this letter, but I did not. The gulf seemed to me too wide. I could not applaud the backward students who insisted that the story has no other level than the realistic one without giving offense to the teacher, who was evidently a well-meaning person. But I shall try now to address a reply, not to this teacher and her unfortunate class, but to a whole school of misunderstanding. There were no symbols in this story; there was no deeper level. The nuns were in the story because they were on the train; the contrasting greens were the dress I happened to be wearing; the colonel had hash because he had hash; materialistic godlessness meant just what it means when a priest thunders it from the pulpit-the phrase, for the first time, had meaning for me as I watched and listened to the colonel. But to clarify the misunderstanding, one must go a little further and try to see what a literary symbol is. Now in one sense, the colonel’s hash and my sandwich can be regarded as symbols; that is, they typify the colonels food tastes and mine. (The man in Mexico had different food tastes which he wished to interpose into our reality.) The hash and the sandwich might even be said to show something very obvious about our characters and bringing-up, or about our sexes; I was a woman, he was a man. And though on another day I might have ordered hash myself, that day I did not, because the colonel and I, in our disagreement, were polarizing each other. The hash and the sandwich, then, could be regarded as symbols of our disagreement, almost conscious symbols. And underneath our discussion of the Jews, there was a thin sexual current running, as there always is in such random encounters or pickups (for they have a strong suggestion of the illicit). The fact that I ordered something conventionally feminine and he ordered something conventionally masculine represented, no doubt, our awareness of a sexual possibility; even though I was not attracted to the colonel, nor he to me, the circumstances of our meeting made us define ourselves as a woman and a man. The sandwich and the hash were our provisional, ad hoc symbols of ourselves. But in this sense all human actions are symbolic because they represent the person who does them. If the colonel had ordered a fruit salad with whipped cream, this too would have represented him in some way; given his other traits, it would have pointed to a complexity in his character that the hash did not suggest. In the same way, the contrasting greens of my dress were a symbol of my taste in clothes and hence representative of me-all too representative, I suddenly saw, in the club car, when I got an “artistic” image of myself flashed back at me from the men's eyes. I had no wish to stylize myself as an artist, that is, to parade about as a symbol of flamboyant unconventionality, but apparently I had done so unwittingly when I picked those colors off a rack, under the impression that they suited me or “expressed my personality” as salesladies say My dress, then, was a symbol of the perplexity I found myself in with the colonel; I did not want to he categorized as a member of a peculiar minority-an artist or a Jew; but brute fate and the colonel kept resolutely cramming me into both those uncomfortable pigeonholes. I wished to be regarded as ordinary or rather as universal, to be anybody and therefore everybody (that is, in one sense, I wanted to be on the colonel's side, majestically above minorities); but every time the colonel looked at my dress and me in it with my pink earrings I shrank to minority status and felt the dress in the heat shriveling me, like the shirt of Nessus the centaur that consumed Hercules. But this is not what the students meant when they wanted the symbols “labeled.” They were searching for a more recondite significance than that afforded by the trite symbolism of ordinary life, in which a dress is a social badge. They supposed that I was engaging in literary or artificial symbolism, which would lead the reader out of the confines of reality into the vast fairy tale of myth, in which the color green would have an emblematic meaning (or did the two greens signify for them what the teacher calls “shades” of prejudice), and the colonel's hash, I imagine, would be some sort of Eucharistic mincemeat. Apparently, the presence of the nuns assured them there were overtones of theology; it did not occur to them (a) that the nuns were there because pairs of nuns are a standardized feature of summer Pullman travel, like crying babies, and perspiring businessmen in the club car, and (b) that if I thought the nuns worth mentioning, it was also because of something very simple and directly relevant: the nuns and the colonel and I all had something in common-we had all at one time been Catholics-and I was seeking common ground with the colonel, from which to turn and attack his position. In any account of reality, even a televised one, which comes closest to being a literal transcript or replay, some details are left out as irrelevant (though nothing is really irrelevant). The details that are not eliminated have to stand as symbols of the whole, like steno graphic signs, and of course there is an art of selection, even in a newspaper account: the writer, if he has any ability, is looking for the revealing detail that will sum up the picture for the reader in a flash of recognition. But the art of abridgment and condensation, which is familiar to anybody who tries to relate an anecdote, or give a direction-the art of natural symbolism, which is at the basis of speech and all representation-has at bottom a centripetal intention. It hovers over an object, an event, or series of events and tries to declare what it is. Analogy (that is, comparison to other objects) is inevitably one of its methods. “The weather was soupy,” i.e., like soup. “He wedged his way in,” i.e., he had to enter, thin edge first, as a wedge enters, and so on. All this is obvious. But these metaphorical aids to communication are a far cry from literary symbolism, as taught in the schools and practiced by certain fashionable writers. Literary sym bolism is centrifugal and flees from the object, the event, into the incorporeal distance, where concepts are taken for substance and floating ideas and archetypes assume a hieratic authority. In this dream-forest, symbols become arbitrary; all counters are interchangeable; in can stand for anything else. The colonel's hash call he a Eucharist or a cannibal feast or the banquet of Atreus, or all three, so long as the actual dish set before the actual man is disparaged. What is depressing about this insistent symboli -zation is the fact that while it claims to lead to the infinite, it quickly reaches very finite limits-there are only so many myths on record, and once you have got through Bulfinch, the Scandinavian, and the Indian, there is not much left. And if all stories reduce themselves to in and symbol, qualitative differences vanish, and there is only a single, monotonous story. American fiction of the symbolist school demonstrates this mournful truth, without precisely intending to. A few years ago, when the mode was at its height, chic novels and stories fell into three classes: those which had a Greek myth for their framework, which the reader was supposed to detect, like finding the faces in the clouds in old newspaper puzzle contests; those which had symbolic modern figures, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, and cripples, illustrating maiming and loneliness; and those which contained symbolic annuals, cougars, wild cats, and monkeys. One young novelist, a product of the Princeton school of symbolism, had all three elements going at once, like the ringmaster of a three-ring circus, with the freaks, the animals, and the statues. The quest for symbolic referents had as its object, of course, the deepening of the writer's subject and the reader's awareness. But the result was paradoxical. At the very moment when American writing was penetrated by the symbolic urge, it ceased to be able to create symbols of its own. Babbitt, I suppose, was the last important svmbol to be created by an American writer; he gave his name to a type that henceforth would he recognizable to everybody. He passed into the language. The same thing could be said, perhaps, though to a lesser degree, of Caldwell's Tobacco Road, Elliot's Prufrock, amid possibly of Faulkner's Snopeses. The discovery of new s ymbols is not the only function of a writer, but the writer who cares about this must be fascinated by reality itself, as a butterfly collector is fascinated by the glimpse of a new specimen. Such a specimen was Mme. Bovary or M. Homais or M. de Charlus or Jupien; these specimens were precious to their discoverers, not because they repeated an age-old pattern but because their markings were new. Once the specimen has been described, the public instantly spots other examples of the kind, and the world seems suddenlv full of Babbitts and Charlus, where none had been noted before. A different matter was Joyce's Mr. Bloom. Mr. Bloom can be called a symbol of eternal recurrence-the wandering Jew, Ulysses the voyager-but lie is a symbol thickly incarnate, fleshed out in a Dublin advertising canvasser. He is not like Ulysses or vaguely suggestive of Ulysses; he is Ulysses, circa 1905. Joyce evidently believed in a cyclical theory of history, in which everything repeated itself; he also subscribed in youth to the doctrine that declares that the Host, a piece of bread, is also God's body and blood. How it can be both things at the same time, transubstantially, is a mystery, and Mr. Bloom is just such a mystery: Ulysses in the visible appearance of a Dublin advertising canvasser. Mr. Bloom is not a symbol of Ulysses, but Ulysses-Bloom together, one and indivisible, symbolize or rather demonstrate eternal recurrence. I hope I make myself clear. The point is transubstantiation: Bloom and Ulysses are transfused into each other and neither reality is diminished. Both realities are locked together, like the protons and neutrons of an atom. Finnegans Wake is a still more ambitious attempt to create a fusion, this time a myriad fusion, and to exemplify the mystery of how a thing can be itself and at the same time be something else. The world is many and it is also one. But the clarity and tension of Joyce's thought brought him closer in a way to the strictness of allegory than to the diffuse practices of latter-day symbolists. In Joyce, the equivalences and analogies are very sharp and distinct, as in a pun, and the real world is almost querulously audible, like the voices of the washerwomen on the Liffey that come into Earwicker's dream. But this is not true of Joyce's imitators or of the imitators of his imitators, for whom reality is only a shadowy pretext for the introduction of a whole corps de ballet of dancing symbols in mythic draperies and animal skins. Let me make a distinction. There are some great writers, like Joyce or Melville, who have consciously introduced symbolic elements into their work; and there are great writers who have written fables or allegories. In both cases, the writer makes it quite clear to the reader how he is to be read; only an idiot would take Pilgrim's Progress for a realistic story, and even a young boy, reading Moby Dick, realizes that there is something more than whale-fishing here, though he may not be able to name what it is. But the great body of fiction contains only what I have called natural symbolism, in which selected events represent or typify a problem, a kind of society or psychology, a philosophical theory, in the same way that they do in real life. What happens to the hero becomes of the highest importance. This symbolism needs no abstruse interpretation, and abstruse interpretation will only lead the reader away from the reality that the writer is trying to press on his attention. I shall give an example or two of what I mean by natural symbolism and I shall begin with a rather florid one: Henry James' The Golden Bowl. This is the story of a rich American girl who collects European objects. One of these objects is a husband, Prince Amerigo, who proves to be unfaithful. Early in the story, there is a visit to an antique shop in which the Prince picks out a gold bowl for his fiancée and finds, to his annoyance, that it is cracked. It is not hard to see that the cracked bowl is a symbol, both of the Prince himself, who is a valuable antique but a little flawed, morally, and also of the marriage, which represents an act of acquisition or purchase on the part of the heroine and her father. If the reader should fail to notice the analogy, James calls his attention to it in the title. I myself would not regard this symbol as necessary to this particular history; it seems to me, rather, an ornament of the kind that was fashionable in the architecture and interior decoration of the period, like stylized sheaves of corn or palms on the façade of a house. Nevertheless, it is handsome and has an obvious appropriateness to the theme. It introduces the reader into the Gilded Age atti tudes of the novel. I think there is also a scriptural echo in the title that conveys the idea of punishment. But having seen and felt the weight of meaning that James put into this symbol, one must not be tempted to press further and look at the bowl as a female sex symbol, a chalice, a Holy Grail, and so on: a book is not a pious excuse for reciting a litany of associations. My second example is from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Toward the beginning of the novel, Anna meets the man who will be her lover, Vronsky, on the Moscow-St. Petersburg express; as they meet, there has been an accident; a workman has been killed by the train. This is the beginning of Anna's doom, which is completed when she throws herself under a train and is killed; and the last we see of Vronsky is in a train, with a toothache; he is off to the wars. The train is necessary to the plot of the novel, and I believe it is also symbolic, both of the iron forces of material progress that Tolstoy hated so and that played a part in Anna's moral destruction, and also of those iron laws of necessity and consequence that govern human action when it remains on the sensual level. One call read the whole novel, however, without being conscious that the train is a symbol; we do not have to “interpret” to feel the import of doom and loneliness in the train's whistle-the same import we ourselves can feel when we hear a train whistle blow in time country, even today. Tolstoy was a deeper artist than James, and we cannot be sure that the train was a conscious device with him. The appropriateness to Anna's history may have been only a felt appropriateness; evens thing in Tolstoy has such a supreme naturalness that one shrinks from attributing contrivance to him, as if it were a sort of fraud. Yet he worked very hard on his novels-I forget how many times Countess Tolstoy copied out War and Peace by hand. The impression one gets from his diaries is that he wrote by ear; he speaks repeatedly, even as an old man, of having to start a story over again because he has the wrong tone, and I suspect that he did not think of the train as a symbol but that it sounded “right” to him, because it was, in that day, an almost fearsome emblem of ruthless and impersonal force, not only to a writer of genius but to the poorest peasant in the fields. And in Tolstoy's case I think it would be impossible, even for the most fanciful critic, to extricate the train from the novel and try to make it say something that the novel itself does not say directly. Every detail in Tolstoy has an almost cruel and viselike meaningfulness and truth to itself that make it tautological to talk of symbolism; he was a moralist and to him the tiniest action, even the curiosities of physical appearance, Vronsky's bald spot, the small white hands of Prince Andrei, told a moral tale. It is now considered very old-fashioned and tasteless to speak of an author's “philosophy of life” as something that can be harvested from his work. Actually, most of the great authors did have a “philosophy of life” which they were eager to communicate to the public; this was one of their motives for writing. And to disentangle a moral philosophy from a work that evidently contains one is far less damaging to the author's purpose and the integrity of his art than to violate his imagery by symbol-hunting, as though reading a novel were a sort of paper-chase. The images of a novel or a story belong, as it were, to a family, very closely knit and inseparable from each other; the parent “idea” of a story or a novel generates events and images all bearing a strong family resemblance. And to understand a story or a novel, you must look for the parent “idea,” which is usually in plain view, if you read quite carefully-and literally what the author says. I will go back, for a moment, to my own story, to show how this can be done. Clearly, it is about the Jewish question, for that is what the people are talking about. It also seems to he about artists, since the title is “Artists in Uniform.” Then there must be some relation between artists and Jews. What is it? They arc both minorities that other people claim to he able to recognize by their appearance. But artists and Jews do not care for this categorization; they want to he universal, that is, like everybody else. They do not want to wear their destiny as a badge, as the soldier wears his uniform. But this aim is really hopeless, for life has formed them as Jews or artists, in a way that immediately betrays them to the majority they are trying to melt into. In my conversation with the colonel, I was endeavoring to play a double game. I was trying to force him into a minority by treating anti-Semitism as an aberration, which, in fact, I believe it is. On his side, the colonel resisted this attempt and tried to show that anti-Semitism was normal, and he was normal, while I was the queer one. He declined to be categorized as antiSemite; he regarded himself as an independent thinker, who by a happy chance thought the same as everybody else. I imagined I had a card up my sleeve; I had guessed that the colonel was Irish (i.e., that he belonged to a minority) and presumed that he was a Catholic. I did not see how he could possibly guess that I, with my Irish name arid Irish appearance, had a Jewish grandmother in the background. Therefore when I found I had not convinced him by reasoning, I played my last card; I told him that the Church, his Church, forbade anti-Semitism. I went even further; I implied that God forbade it, though I had no right to do this, since I did not believe in God, but was only using Him as a whip to crack over the colonel, to make him feel humble and inferior, a raw Irish Catholic lad under discipline. But the colonel, it turned out, did not believe in God, either, and I lost. And since, in a sense, I had been cheating all along in this game we were playing, I had to concede the colonel a sort of moral victory in the end; I let him think that my husband was Jewish and that that “explained” everything satisfactorily. Now there are a number of morals or meanings in this little tale, starting with the simple one: don't talk to strangers on a train. The chief moral or meaning (what I learned, in other words from this experience) was that you cannot be a universal unless you accept the fact that you are a singular, that is, a Jew or an artist or whathave-you. What the colonel and I were discussing, and at the same time illustrating and enacting, was the definition of a human being; I was trying to be something better than a human being; I was trying to be the voice of pure reason; and pride went before a fall. The colonel, without trying, was being something worse than a human being, and somehow we found ourselves on the same plane -facing each other, like mutually repellent twins. Or, put in another way: it is dangerous to be drawn into discussions of the Jews with anti-Semites: you delude yourself that you are spreading light, but you are really sinking into muck; if you endeavor to be dispassionate, you arc really claiming for yourself a privileged position, a little mountain top, from which you look down, impartially, on both the Jews and the colonel. Anti Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly, in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility. The enlightened person who lunches with the colonel in order, as she tells herself, to improve him, is cheating herself, having her cake and eating it. This attempted cheat, on my part, was related to the question of the artist and the green dress; I wanted to be an artist but not to pay the price of looking like one, just as I was willing to have Jewish blood but not willing to show it, where it would cost me something-the loss of superiority in an argument. These meanings are all there, quite patent, to anyone who consents to look into the story. They were in the experience itself, waiting to be found and considered. I did not perceive them all at the time the experience was happening; otherwise, it would not have taken place, in all probability-I should have given the colonel a wide berth. But when I went back over the experience, in order to write it, I came upon these meanings, protruding at me, as it were, from the details of the occasion. I put in the green dress and my mortification over it because they were part of the truth, just as it had occurred, but I did not see how they were related to the general question of anti-Semitism and my grandmother until they showed me their relation in the course of writing. Every short story, at least for me, is a little act of discovery. A cluster of details presents itself to my scrutiny, like a mystery that I will understand in the course of writing or sometimes not fully until afterward, when, if have been honest and listened to these details carefully, I will find that they are connected and that there is a coherent pattern. This pattern is in experience itself; you do not impose it from the outside and if you try to, you will find that the story is taking the wrong tack, dribbling away from you into artificiality or inconsequence. A story that you do not learn something from while you are writing it, that does not illuminate something for you, is dead, finished before you started it. The “idea” of a story is implicit in it, on the one hand; on the other hand, it is always ahead of the writer, like a form dimly discerned in the distance; he is working toward the “idea.” It can sometimes happen that you begin a story thinking that you know the “idea” of it and find, when you are finished, that you have said something quite different and utterly unexpected to you. Most writers have been haunted all their lives by the “idea” of a story or a novel that they think they want to write and see very clearly: Tolstoy always wanted to write a novel about the Decembrists and instead, almost against his will, wrote War and Peace; Henry James thought he wanted to write a novel about Napoleon. Probably these ideas for novels were too set in their creators' minds to inspire creative discovery. In any work that is truly creative, I believe, the writer cannot be omniscient in advance about the effects that he proposes to produce. The suspense in a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist himself, who is intensely curious too about what will happen to the hero. Jane Austen may know in a general way that Emma will marry Mr. Knightley in the end (the reader knows this too, as a matter of fact); the suspense for the author lies in the how, in the twists and turns of circumstance, waiting but as yet unknown, that will bring the consummation about. Hence, I would say to the student of writing that outlines, patterns, arrangements of symbols may have a certain usefulness at the outset for some kinds of minds, but in the end they will have to be scrapped. If the story does not contradict the outline, overrun the pattern, break the symbols, like an insurrection against authority, it is surely a still birth. The natural symbolism of reality has more messages to communicate than the dry Morse code of the disengaged mind. The tree of life, said Hegel, is greener than the tree of thought; I have quoted this before but I cannot forbear from citing it again in this context. This is not an incitement to mindlessness or an endorsement of realism in the short story (there are several kinds of reality, including interior reality); it means only that the writer must be, first of all, a listener and observer, who can pay attention to reality, like an obedient pupil, and who is willing, always, to be surprised by the messages reality is sending through to him. And if he gets the messages correctly he will not have to go back and put in the symbols; he will find that the symbols are there, staring at him significantly from the commonplace.