Elena by Thomas H. Cook
“The world is wide, Jack,” I said. “There’s room in it for both my Coleridge and your migrants.”
“Certainly is, Bill.” Jack looked at Elena. “And by God, there’s sure going to be room for Elena’s book.”
“I’m sure there will be,” I said. But I concealed my steadily growing fear that my sister would prove to be only a flash in the literary pan, the sort about whom she herself later wrote in a passage on Delmore Schwartz in Quality, mourning “that early incandescence which precedes nothing but the slow and steady dying of the light.”
Jack left for the South only a few weeks after he and Elena returned to New York. New Masses was interested in knowing the latest on the class struggle in rural America and dispatched Jack to the most intransigently reactionary region of the country. Even Jack failed to romanticize it in the reports he later wrote, essays as austere as James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men would later prove grandiloquent. But in Jack, as Elena once said, Twain was always at war with Howells. It was a contradiction that even found its way into his dress, and I remember thinking, as Elena and I said good-by to him at the bus station the afternoon he left for North Carolina, that Jack’s floppy hat was all gallant vagabond, while the leather briefcase he carried and the carefully arranged notes spoke of a perfectly ordered bourgeois professionalism.
“Take care of yourself, Jack,” I said, offering my hand.
Jack slapped it away and embraced me instead. “You’ll never change, Bill,” he said. “Don’t you know that I don’t shake hands with friends?”
Elena smiled as she watched us. In a letter to Elizabeth, which Martha published, she wrote that “William sometimes seems to think that an embrace impinges upon his rectitude.”
If this was true of me at that time, it certainly was not true of Elena. She almost dove into Jack’s arms as the bus drew up beside the ramp. They held each other for a long time, Elena clinging to him with a desperate physical urgency.
“I’ll miss you, Elena,” Jack said as he drew himself from her arms.
He turned to me and held out a stack of papers he had been carrying. It was loosely bundled in brown paper and ragged twine. “Sam said I should give you this. My novel, for what it’s worth. You’re to be my editor.”
I glanced down at the bundle. “I see.”
“Sort of puts you on the spot, I guess,” Jack said. He placed his large hand on my shoulder. “But remember this, William, whatever you think about the book, I won’t hold it against you.”
“I’ll do the best I can on it, Jack.”
“Good,” Jack said. Then he turned and pulled Elena into his arms again.
“Take care of yourself,” he said. “And don’t run off with any sweet-talking medicine man. I’ve hired a private eye to keep tabs on you, so you’d better keep straight with me.”
Elena smiled weakly.
Jack bent forward and kissed her. Then he disappeared into the bus, purposefully sitting on the side away from us so that Elena could not see him.
Elena and I lingered for a time after the bus had pulled away. Elena was preoccupied with Jack’s departure, no doubt meditating upon all the particular joys that had departed with him. Finally we made our way slowly down Thirty-fourth Street.
I lifted the bundle of papers. “Have you read this?”
“No,” Elena said. “Jack prefers to keep his work to himself before it’s finished, then he likes an editor’s opinion before any other.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I’ll be a very good editor for Jack. I’m not very political.”
“You’re worse than that, William,” Elena said, “you’re a little smug about politics in general.”
This assessment was not news. “Maybe I am,” I said casually.
“But does it ever bother you, this business of not being really committed to anything?”
“I’m committed to a great many things, Elena,” I said. “I’m committed to you and to Miriam. I’m committed to Jack, I suppose, at least as far as doing a good job on his book is concerned.”
“But do you think you can be fair to a book like his?” Elena asked. “Do you think you can judge it properly?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. Elena’s questions were beginning to annoy me, simply because they hinted at something else, something that did not concern Jack, or even politics.
Finally it came out. Elena stopped and turned toward me. “You’ve read The Forty-eight Stars, haven’t you?”
“No,” I said immediately.
Elena stared at me steadily.
“Don’t lie to me, William,” she said. “Don’t do it to protect me. And, by the way, don’t do it to protect yourself.”
Once again I denied knowing anything about The Forty-eight Stars. I even added a little laugh for effect. “What makes you think I’ve read it?”
“I know you’ve read it,” Elena said. “I knew you had the moment you told me you hadn’t that day I got back to the city. You said you hadn’t read it, but your eyes got sort of distant, and the little finger on your left hand twitched, and you tried to turn away from me but caught yourself in time.” In her short story “Jordan,” Elena would write of a man “whose body kept telling me the truth even though his voice was lying.”
“I don’t like being lied to, William,” Elena said fïrmly.
I cleared my throat. “All right, Elena. I have read it.”
“And hated it?”
I took a deep breath. “Yes.”
For a moment the two of us seemed suspended, as if in water. Then Elena simply put her arm in mine and tugged me forward. We continued slowly up the street, the heavy traffic whizzing by us, until finally, under the canopy of Macy’s, we stopped.
“I’m going to take a taxi back home,” Elena said. She smiled, but rather wanly. “It’s Bargain Monday for the cabs, you know, one-third off.”
I nodded but said nothing. Once again we simply stared at each other.
“Elena, I … I …”
Elena put her finger to my lips, silencing me, then turned and walked to the street, hailed a cab, and disappeared into it.
I did not hear from her for almost a month. I worked steadily on Jack’s novel, trying to divest the story, about a strike in the Midwest, of those elements which debased it. Jack was fine on physical detail, deftly rendering the look of corn silk in the air, the playfulness of children as they built a small mud dam outside the factory gates, the chatter of women as they hoisted food into the factory, using broom handles and baskets tied with apron strings. But in describing human beings and the relations between them, Jack often foundered, romanticizing in fiction what he would never have romanticized in his straight reportage, and thus saddling his novel with what Elena later called, in connection with the proletarian fiction of the time, “the unreality of Socialist realism.”
As for Elena, I assumed that she was once again moving into that seclusion she had previously insisted on while writing New England Maid. Thus when I found out that in fact she was whirling about the city, primarily with some of Jack’s cronies from New Masses and the John Reed Club, I was surprised and more than a little dismayed. It was a feeling I could not suppress when she finally called me at my office one dreary Friday afternoon. I was still busy with Jack’s book when the phone rang, my red pencil flying over his manuscript like an angry witch.
“William,” she said, “I’ve decided to move from Three Arts.”
“I see.”
“I need a little help.”
“Like you did when you left Hewett Hall?” I said, unable to keep my sense of being poorly used from my voice.
There was a moment of silence while Elena tried to figure out what she could say to soothe my wounded pride.
“I’ve not been avoiding you, William,” she said finally. “It’s just that I’ve been very busy.”
“Really? I think it’s something else. I think that if you hadn’t really wanted to hear what I thought about your book, then you shouldn’t ha
Elena said nothing, so I continued. “Maybe we should just come to an understanding about things like that, about your work. I think that I should not read anything you write, perhaps until after it’s published, perhaps never.”
“That would not be a solution, William,” Elena said.
“Why not?”
“Because I will always want your advice.”
“I don’t want to be flattered, Elena.”
“Look, William, I want you always to give me your frank opinion. How I deal with that opinion is my business. I’ve been busy gathering more notes for my book, the one you don’t care for. I listen to you William, but I don’t follow you blindly.”
“Of course not.”
“Then let’s just leave it at that. You tell me what you think is the truth. I will listen with an open mind.”
“And not avoid me for a month?” I asked.
“Not avoid you at all.”
It seemed almost like a contract, but it was the sort of thing upon which Elena tended to insist — clear understandings, the rules stated and agreed upon. It was, perhaps, one of her failures that she could not endure prolonged ambiguity or irresolution. When I said as much to Martha, she looked up from her notebook, her eyes wide with sudden understanding. “So that’s what she did that night with Elizabeth,” she said. “She laid down the law.” And all that I could do in response was lower my eyes and mutter my answer. “Yes.”
At Three Arts the day after Elena called me, I waited while a troop of young women helped her move her accumulated possessions down the stairs into the lobby, where, and only where, a man’s assistance was allowed. Then we laboriously hauled boxes of books and papers and clothes out onto the street. Several cabs passed us by, but finally one pulled over and agreed to transport the whole works to Brooklyn Heights, where Elena had taken a new apartment.
Once we were in the cab and moving down Broadway, I asked her why she felt the need to move.
She shrugged. “Just something about the atmosphere,” she said. She added nothing else, but in Calliope Raymond Finch adds a great deal as he delivers his assessment of a women’s residence very similar to Three Arts, where he has just dropped off his date for the evening:
I knew Sherry was heading back into a dream world. I had shown her where the people slept under the bridges, but she’d had other ideas about what constituted a great date. She’d expected the works from a wealthy young plutocrat like myself, the whole works — wine and steak and dancing with the big bands. She wanted the dream, but I’d done my crazy routine and taken her to the sewer. She was pretty huffy after that, and had wasted no time in telling me to take her right back to this little fantasy world on upper Broadway. Here you bought dreams by leaning back on your bed and closing your eyes. It was as simple as that. You buffed your nails and listened to the radio, waiting for the phone to ring in the hall, the call from some producer or publisher, the one with that big break.
But the real world was where I’d taken her, down on the wharves, where men guard their shacks against the rats and throw bricks at the herds of cats howling and scratching and screwing in the alleyway, where they think of the places they left as if those places no longer existed, as if the wind had blown them away, like the harvest. And they lean back in their shacks and wait for a job or a meal or a word that will set them on a new direction, they puff on stubby cigarettes and blow the smoke toward the hole in the roof, and they wait, I suppose the whole damn country waits … for the phone to ring in the hallway with the big break.
By moving into an apartment of her own, Elena had finally broken from an atmosphere that had never agreed with certain aspects of her character, that New England wintriness which is so suspicious of easy enthusiasm. To Elena, too much hope always seemed as deadly as too little, and as the Depression deepened and her commitment to its exploration in The Forty-eight Stars continued, Three Arts must have represented the epitome of all that was callow and mindless and self-absorbed in American life.
Her new apartment was on Columbia Heights, not far from Plymouth Church, where, some seventy years before, Henry Ward Beecher had enthralled a packed throng with tales of moral uplift. The church itself was magnificently understated, and Elena often went there during the years that followed. There was something in the irony of its physical somberness — the small windows and dark-hued pews combined with the shuddering rhetoric Beecher had hurled across it — that attracted Elena’s attention.
Her apartment, on the other hand, was rather spare. It had a small kitchen, a long, narrow bedroom, and a somewhat larger living room, complete with a modest marble fireplace.
“Well, it looks quite cozy,” I said as I walked in.
Elena nodded, her eyes moving from one window to the next, then over to the hearth. “I should be able to work here.”
Within an hour we were staggering up the stairs to the third floor with the last of Elena’s boxes.
“I’d like to offer you something to drink,” Elena said, “but I haven’t done any shopping yet.” She smiled. “The cupboard’s bare, I’m afraid.”
She walked to the window and glanced out. From the back of the apartment, she could see all of lower Manhattan and, beyond that, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
“Quite a nice view,” I said as I stepped up beside her. “Windows at the back and front, lots of natural light.”
Elena nodded, her eyes randomly scanning the gray waters of the East River and the equally gray skyline that rose above it.
“I’m having a little trouble with the book,” she said.
She was approaching me almost warily, cautiously making a vague inquiry but unwilling to go further than that.
“Well,” I said offhandedly, “it’s a difficult thing, writing a novel. You can expect trouble, especially with something as complex as the whole nation at a particular moment.” I smiled. “You are after greatness, aren’t you?”
She faced me slowly. “It has a sour sound, doesn’t it? To be ‘after’ something. It’s so predatory.”
I shrugged. “Only a work endures, Elena, not the reason for making it.”
“You make it sound as if all I’ve seen, all the poverty and misery, are just grist for the mill of my ambition.”
I shook my head. “You’re not that callous.”
“No, I’m not. But I can’t feel the distress of the times the way Jack does. With him it’s all an open wound.”
“It’s a simple thing to explain, Elena. You’re not Jack.”
“But I believe, honestly believe, William, that his way is superior to mine. I mean, the feeling he has for suffering, that intense feeling — I don’t have it.”
“And if you try to fake it, Elena, in your work, I mean, everything about it, every word, will ring false.”
Elena left the window and made her way pensively to the center of the room. “We were outside Seattle once, in a shantytown, a small one, just a tiny village of shacks with a few homeless men in it. They were freezing. The wind was blowing right through those little hovels, and Jack was feeling something terrible for those men, feeling, actually feeling, how cold they were. I could see that in his eyes, I could see their pain in his eyes.” She looked at me very intently. “I understood intellectually what they were going through, those men. I could understand the cold and their helplessness and their anger, all those things. But to feel the way Jack felt … I couldn’t do that.” She smiled sardonically. “You know what I noticed? I noticed how the whole landscape seemed to have been bled of color, so that everything, even the trees, looked like frozen bodies, pale or grayish blue, like cadavers.”
“And that makes you feel what, Elena? As a writer, I mean. Inadequate?”
Elena said nothing. She seemed to be thinking about my question.
I repeated it. “You feel inadequate as a writer?”
She shook her head. “No. As a person.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’re just suffering fr
Elena nodded. “There is a difference between them, isn’t there? It’s not just a sophomoric notion. There is a difference.”
All her life, Elena would observe the various implications of this difference. In Inwardness she sided with the mind, and in To Define a Word, the heart. In Quality she would choose Billy Budd over Moby-Dick because, as she wrote, “In this work alone, Melville walks with perfect balance, and for an extended time — not for the short stroll of a sonnet, but for a breathtakingly intense length of time — on that line which does not so much divide thought from feeling as define the place where they merge.”
But that day, standing in her new apartment, Elena seemed adrift among questions a good deal larger than her experience, and too young to take control of the wheel. Certainly she was not then, as Martha later described her, a woman moving through “passages” but ever in control, steady at the helm, beyond the false steps and misspoken words that, one later learns, give to life a kind of baffled heroism. According to Martha, Elena moved to Brooklyn Heights with the certain knowledge that a great book was in her. Perhaps she did know that; but even if she did, she was still very far from knowing that such a book could actually be written. On the day she moved into her new apartment, I believe that Elena was very close to abandoning not only The Forty-eight Stars — that misbegotten work she did, in fact, abandon — but her own sense that there were depths within her, thoughts and sentiments, which were fine and authentic and deserving of expression. A writer, as Jason once told her, can lose a hundred books and be freer for it; but he cannot lose the sense that what he knows is real. Elena, I think, was on the verge of just that sort of loss.
“Your book, the one on Coleridge,” she asked just before I left her. “You’re still working on it?”
“Yes.”
“It must be hard, since you have a full-time job.”
“Yes, it’s hard.”