«Well, to get back to their disgusting commercialism,» Bob said at last. «Let me give you an example. . .»
But I was thinking that the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence. Athena, the patroness of the arts, is also the goddess of scientific warfare, the heavenly Chief of every General Staff. We killed him because, after having briefly (and fatally) played the political game, he refused any longer to go on dreaming our dream of a national Order, a social and economic Beauty; because he tried to bring us back to the concrete and cosmic facts of real people and the inner Light.
The headlines I had seen that morning were parables; the event they recorded, an allegory and a prophecy. In that symbolic act, we who so longed for peace had rejected the only possible means to peace and had issued a warning to all who, in the future, might advocate any courses but those which lead inevitably to war.
«Well, if you’ve finished your coffee,» said Bob, «let’s go.»
We rose and walked out into the sunshine. Bob took my arm and squeezed it.
«You’ve been enormously helpful,» he assured me again.
«I wish I could believe it, Bob.»
«But it’s true, it’s true.»
And perhaps it was true, in the sense that stirring the mess before a sympathetic public made him feel better, more like the Romantics.
We walked on for a little in silence — past the Projection Rooms and between the Churrigueresque bungalows of the executives. Over the entrance to the largest of them a great bronze plaque bore the inscription, LOU LUBLIN PRODUCTIONS.
«What about that salary raise?» I asked. «Shall we go in and have another shot at it?»
Rob uttered a rueful little laugh, and there was another silence. When at last he spoke, it was in a pensive tone.
«Too bad about old Gandhi,» he said. «I suppose his great secret was not wanting anything for himself.»
«Yes, I suppose that was one of the secrets.»
«I wish to God I didn’t want things so much.»
«Same here,» I fervently concurred.
«And when you finally get what you want, it’s never what you thought it was going to be.»
Bob sighed and relapsed into silence. He was thinking, no doubt, of Acapulco, of the horrible necessity of passing from the chronic to the acute, from the vaguely verbal to the all too definitely and concretely carnal.
We emerged from the street of executive bungalows, crossed a parking lot and entered a canyon between towering sound stages. A tractor passed, pulling a low trailer, on which was the bottom half of the west door of a thirteenth-century Italian cathedral.
«That’s for ‘Catherine of Siena.’ «
«What’s that?»
«Hedda Boddy’s new picture. I worked on the script two years ago. Then they gave it to Streicher. And after that it was rewritten by the OToole-Menendez-Boguslavsky team. It’s lousy.»
Another trailer rattled past with the upper half of the cathedral door and a pulpit by Niccolo Pisano.
«When you come to think of it,» I said, «she’s very like Gandhi in some ways.»
«Who? Hedda?»
«No, Catherine.»
«Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about the loincloth.»
«I was talking about saints in politics,» I said. «They didn’t actually lynch her, of course; but that was only because she died too young. The consequences of her politics hadn’t had time to show up. Do you go into all that in the script?»
Bob shook his head.
«Too depressing,» he said. «The public likes its stars to be successful. Besides, how can you talk about church politics? It would certainly be anti-Catholic and might easily become un-American. No, we play safe — concentrate on the boy she dictated her letters to. He’s wildly in love — but it’s all sublimated and spiritual, and after she’s dead he goes into a hermitage and prays in front of her picture. And then there’s the other boy who actually made passes at her. It’s mentioned in her letters. We play that for all its worth. They’re still hoping to be able to sign up Humphrey. . .»
A loud hooting made us both jump.
«Look out!»
Bob caught my arm and pulled me back. From the courtyard in the rear of the Story Department a two-ton truck emerged into the roadway.
«Why don’t you look where you’re going?» shouted the driver as he passed.
«Idiot!» Bob yelled back; then, turning to me, «Do you see what it’s loaded with?» he asked. «Scripts.» He shook his head. «Taking them to the incinerator. Which is where they belong. A million dollars worth of literature.» He laughed with melodramatic bitterness.
Twenty yards up the road, the truck swung sharply to the right. Its speed must have been excessive; centrifugally propelled, half a dozen of the topmost scripts spilled out into the road. Like prisoners of the Inquisition, I thought, making a miraculous escape on the way to the stake.
«The man can’t drive,» Bob was grumbling. «One of these days he’ll kill somebody.»
«But meanwhile let’s see who’s been saved.»
I picked up the nearest of the scripts. » ‘A Miss is as Good as a Male, Screenplay by Albertine Krebs.’ «
Bob remembered it. It stank. «Well, what about ‘Amanda’?» I turned over the pages. «It must have been a musical. Here’s some poetry.
» ‘Amelia needs a meal,
But Amanda needs a man. . .»
Bob wouldn’t let me go on.
«Don’t, don’t! It made four and a half million during the Battle of the Bulge.»
I dropped «Amanda» and picked up another of the spread-eagled volumes. This one, I noticed, was bound in green, not in the Studio’s standard crimson.
» ‘Ape and Essence,’ » I read aloud from the hand-lettered front cover.
» ‘Ape and Essence’?» Bob repeated in some surprise.
I turned to the flyleaf.
» ‘An original Treatment by William Tallis, Cottonwood Ranch, Murcia, California.’ And here’s a note in pencil. ‘Rejection slip sent 11-26-47. No self addressed envelope. For the Incinerator’ — twice underlined.»
«They get thousands of these things,» Bob explained.
Meanwhile I was looking into the body of the script.
«More poetry.»
«Christ!» said Bob in a tone of disgust.
» ‘Surely it’s obvious,’ » I began reading:
«‘Surely it’s obvious.
Doesn’t every schoolboy know it?
Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man’s.
Papio’s procurer, bursar to baboons,
Reason comes running, eager to ratify;
Comes, a catch-fart with Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;
Comes, a pimp for Prussia, with Hegel’s Patent History;
Comes with Medicine to administer the Ape-King’s aphrodisiac;
Comes, rhyming and with Rhetoric, to write his orations;
Comes with the Calculate to aim his rockets
Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;
Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate
Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit.'»
There was a silence. We looked at one another questioningly.
«What do you think of it?» Bob said at last.
I shrugged my shoulders. I really didn’t know.
«Anyhow, don’t throw it away,» he went on. «I want to see what the rest is like.»
We resumed our walk, turned a final corner and there, a Franciscan convent among palm trees, was the Writers’ Building.
«Tallis,» Bob was saying to himself, as we entered, «William Tallis. . .» He shook his head. «Never heard of him. And anyhow, where’s Murcia?»
The following Sunday we knew the answer — knew it not merely in theory and on the map, but experimentally, by going there, at eighty miles an hour, in Bob’s (or rather Miriam’s) Buick convertible. Murcia, California, was two red gasoline pumps and a very small grocery store on the southwestern fringe of the Mojave desert.
The long drought had broken two days before. The sky was still overcast and a cold wind blew steadily from the west. Ghostly under their roof of slate-coloured cloud, the San Gabriel mountains were white with newly fallen snow. But to the north, far out in the desert, the sun was shining in a long narrow strip of golden light. All around us were the soft rich greys and silvers, the pale golds and russets of the desert vegetation — sagebrush, burrobrush, bunch grass and buckwheat, with here and there a strangely gesticulating Joshua tree, rough barked, or furred with dry prickles, and tufted at the end of its many-elbowed arms with thick clusters of green metallic spikes.
An old deaf man, at whom we had to shout our questions, at last understood what we were talking about. Cottonwood Ranch — of course he knew it. Take that dirt road there; drive south for a mile; then turn east, follow the irrigation ditch for another three quarters of a mile, and there it was. The old man wanted to tell us much more about the place; but Bob was too impatient to listen. He threw the car into gear and we were off.
Along the irrigation ditch the cottonwoods and willows were aliens, clinging precariously, in the midst of those tough ascetic lives of the desert, to another, easier, more voluptuous mode of being. They were leafless now, the mere skeletons of trees, white against the sky; but one could imagine how intense, under the fierce clear sun, would be the emerald of their young leaves three months from now.
The car, which was being driven much too fast, crashed heavily into an unexpected dip. Bob swore.
«Why
