The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [175]
The stags line up against the wall, chat cursorily with one another, and cut in to dance with either a girl they know or the girl of a man they know. Hearn smokes a cigarette or two, quite bored, and then cuts in on a little blonde girl dancing with a tall blond clubman.
The gesture toward conversation:
And your name is Betty Carreton, eh, where do you go to school?
Oh, to Miss Lucy's.
I see. And then the barbarity he cannot forswear. And does Miss Lucy tell you girls how to keep it until marriage?
What did you say?
More and more often this inexplicable humor. Somewhere in the cavernous and undoubtedly rotten tissues of the collective brain of Al, of Jansen, of the magazine men, the college literary critics, in the aesthetes' salons, in the modern living rooms on the quiet back streets of Cambridge, there would be the unadmitted hunger to be bored and superior at a Brattle Hall dance, either that or go to Spain.
He thinks it out one night. He can be genuinely indifferent to the Brattle Hall thing because it is the Class AA minor league affair which all his training on the green lawns, at the dancing school, or riding at night in convertibles on the highways back of Cholive-oil, has satisfied. It is for the others, the salon men, to be tortured and attracted by the extra quotient of wealth, the elaboration of social fences.
And about Spain he knows he is never serious. That war is in its last spring, and there is nothing in himself he wants to satisfy by going there, no over-all understanding or compassion which he cares to satisfy. The graduation and class week is upon him, and he is cool and friendly to his parents, bored with them too.
What are you gonna do, Bob, don't you want any help? Bill Hearn asks.
No, I'm going to head for New York, Ellison's father promised me a job there.
This is quite a place, Bob, Bill Hearn says.
Yes, a funny four years. And inside himself he is straining. Go away, leave me alone. All of you. Only he has learned not to say that out loud any longer.
For his thesis he has been given a magna: A Study of the Cosmic Urge in Herman Melville.
He functions easily through the next two years, sees himself consciously, amusedly as The Young Man in New York. He is first a reader and then a junior editor at Ellison and Co.: Harvard, New York Extension, as he terms it, and a room and kitchenette in the East Sixties. Oh, I'm just a literary con man, he will say.
I can't tell you how I've slaved over the thing, the lady historical novelist says to him. I was so worried about the motivations of Julia, such an elusive bitch, but I think I achieved the effect I hungered for in her, the one who worries me, however, is Randall Clandeborn.
Yes, Miss Helledell, two more of the same, waiter. He lights a cigarette, revolving slowly in the leather arc of their round booth.. You were saying, Miss Helledell?
Do you think Randall comes across?
Randall Clandeborn, mmm. (Now which one was he?) Ay, yes, I think he's successful on the whole, but perhaps you need a little sharper definition on him. We can discuss that when we get back to the office. (After the drinks he will have a headache.) To be frank, Miss Helledell, I'm not really worried about your characters, I know they'll come across.
Do you think so, Mr. Hearn? Your opinion means an awful lot to me.
Oh, yes, it's a very successful job.
And George Andrew Johannesson, how is he?
Well, to tell you the truth, Miss Helledell, I should prefer to discuss it when we've got the manuscript between us. I remember the characters perfectly but I'm awfully bad on names. It's one of my faults for which you'll have to forgive me.
And there is always the game of mentally plucking, one by one, all the feathers in her hat.
Or the young serious novelist, not quite good enough, he has decided.
Well, now, Mr. Godfrey, I think you've got a damn good book there and it's a damn shame that publishing exigencies being what they are, this is not quite the season, perhaps in