Elena Read online

  “We’re supposed to be celebrating Elena’s short story,” Mary said emphatically.

  Tom had sat glumly during all of the political discussion. Now he came to life. “Sam, are you really going to have a publishing house?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Well, do you mind if I ask you a question? Are you by any chance thinking of publishing poetry?”

  Sam stared coldly into Tom’s eyes. They had never really cared for each other, and Sam was particularly contemptuous of Tom. “He writes like a deranged schoolgirl, William,” he once told me. “All that idiocy about uniting with the forces of the universe. He’d be lucky if he could unite with a paying job.”

  “The thing is, Sam,” Tom went on, heedless of Sam’s lethal gaze, “the thing is, I’ve got some poems that I think are really good.”

  “I’m sure you do … think they’re good,” Sam said in a very measured tone.

  “Well, if you’d like to see …”

  Sam’s eyes slid over to Elena. “About that longer piece, a novel, that sort of thing. What do you say, Elena?”

  Elena shrugged. “I don’t really have anything, Sam.”

  “Well, if you think of anything, a story idea, something like that,” Sam said casually, “just anything that comes to mind, I’d like to hear about it.”

  Years later, at a cocktail party launching a new young author, Sam staggered over to me, somehow moved by his own past, his own success, and began a story about Elena. “So Elena’s manuscript came in, William,” he said, “this book she’d called New England Maid. We’d discussed what it was going to be about. Then I started to read it. I read the first paragraph and I thought, Oh, God, this is a disaster, this is not anything like we talked about. But I kept on reading, William, and when I was halfway through the manuscript, I picked it up and waved it in the air and I said to Teddy McNaughton, who was the only other editor we had at Parnassus at that time, I said, “Teddy, this book will be in print for a hundred years.” Sam was old by then, gray and full of too many leisurely meals. He lifted his glass in the air. “I knew what she was, William. I knew it from that first moment.” He touched his glass to mine. There were tears in his eyes.

  Harry flipped through “Manhattan” once again, then dropped the pages on the table. “When is Scribner’s going to publish it, Elena?”

  “Next month.”

  Harry nodded quietly. When he looked at Elena, the romantic longing in his eyes seemed a relic from an older time, like the shield of Lancelot. “Well, I’m sure we all wish you the very best,” he said.

  “Thank you, Harry.”

  “I’ve been submitting a few poems here and there,” Tom said, “but so far I haven’t gotten any responses.” He looked at Elena as if she were suddenly the expert on such matters. “Do you think that means they’re being read carefully, that they’re under consideration?”

  “I really don’t know,” Elena said. Several years later, when Tom’s first poem was published in an obscure journal, Elena wrote him a congratulatory letter, which he probably took as the height of saintly condescension and to which he never made reply.

  “We’re planning to publish a wide range of fiction,” Sam said to Elena. “Keep that in mind. Serious stuff, but also quality satire, humor, that sort of thing.” He lifted his copy of the story. “Like this, Elena. Longer, and with a plot, but more or less like this in tone.”

  “I see,” Elena said.

  “Would that interest you?”

  “It might.”

  Sam glanced down at the story, then back up at Elena. “Well, like I said, just something to keep in mind.”

  “I will, Sam,” Elena said.

  Sam proceeded to launch into a tedious explanation of the business of publishing. As he spoke, I could not help noticing something in Elena’s eyes, and I think it was, as Chesterton says, “in the deep sense of a dishonored word,” ambition. Jack MacNeill always believed that there was a bit of the hustler in Elena, that a bit of her heart was devoted to what he called “that charnel house ideal — making it in America.” But there is something called the ambition of the soul, and if it cannot be detected, say, in the canvases of Watteau, it is everywhere visible in the apocalyptic swirl of van Gogh. I believe that although Elena was never seized with the kind of feverish compulsion that drove van Gogh to paint his Starry Night or drove Gauguin to Tahiti, there remained within her always a deep longing to express the vision that had been rising in her for so long, and which she defined in Quality as “the sayable truth within a work of art, that moment when the statement and the artifice are one.”

  So if that calculating expression which overtook her face as she watched Sam wander through the labyrinth of literary entrepreneur-ship meant anything at all, I suspect it was something far less than the lighting of some flame, and far more than the meticulous accounting of one’s main chance. Perhaps it was simply the recognition that a sudden happy accident had occurred, that if literature were to be her ambition, then the agent of her success might well be sitting next to her, boring the rest of us with tales of financial connivance. There is no doubt that something happened at that table, and that Elena’s long silence was more than a gesture of politeness. The look in her face told everything. After a time even Sam felt drawn toward it, and his sentences trailed off into the air.

  “Are you all right, Elena?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Elena said. “Why?”

  “You looked a little out of sorts, in a daze, something like that.”

  Elena stared about, amazed by the sudden attention. “Absolutely nothing. What do you mean?”

  We could not answer that. Nor, at the time, I think, could she. But in a 1957 interview, she spoke of that moment in her life: “There may be a time in every artist’s life when he suddenly glimpses his possibilities. It’s all just a dream before that time. But then you sell your first painting, or hear your first score played, or see your first story published, and at that moment, things change, I think. You feel fear and elation. But more than anything, there is a sense of being cut loose from all the ties that seemed so very strong before.”

  Only a few days before she died, I moved Elena out to her study in the back of the house. She sat propped up in her chair and watched the sandpipers dodge the surf. I left her there for a long time, silhouetted against the tall window, her long white hair spread out over the back of her chair. When I came back in, carrying her lunch on a tray, she seemed oddly distant as she stared out toward the sea, hardly noticing my presence. Then she looked at me and smiled delicately.

  “What are you thinking, Elena?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing, William,” she said, in a voice that had grown tremulous by then. “Just that … well … I have no complaints.”

  On the day “Manhattan” was published, Elena asked me to dinner. We met at a restaurant in the Village, one of those small sidewalk arrangements, desperately imitative of the Parisian Left Bank. It catered primarily to that aging and increasingly desolate clientele who remembered the Village in its prewar incandescence and who muttered grudgingly about all the changes that had taken place since then. For them, the Village was a city of ghosts, haunted by the shadows of John Reed and Emma Goldman and dwarfish Randolph Bourne. I am struck now, remembering their outmoded clothes and low, complaining voices, by how much tenderness we must retain for all those who reside, however uncomfortably, at the very edge of living memory.

  It was early evening when Elena and I met, and the air had the peculiar passive blueness that will always be the color of New York in my youth. Elena was sitting at a small wrought iron table. She was wearing a white dress with red piping along the shoulders, open at the neck. She waved when she saw me, jostling the glass of lemonade in her other hand.

  “How are you, Elena?” I said as I sat down.

  “Fine,” she said. She drew a magazine from the bag beside her chair. “Here it is.”

  It was Scribner’s. I picked it up and flipped
quickly to the story. There was an illustration portraying a group of well-dressed young people at a speakeasy. The faces did not look anything like us, but the mood, a sort of somber biliousness, was well established.

  “It’s near the center of the magazine,” I said. “That’s a good position.”

  Elena looked pleased. “Is it?”

  “So they tell me.”

  I glanced back down at the illustration. “Not a bad rendering. Harry doesn’t really look like that, of course, but he would be more in character if he did.” I folded the magazine. “May I have it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you autograph it for me?”

  Elena smiled. “You want me to?”

  “I certainly do.” I opened the magazine to the story and gave it to her. She drew a pen from her bag, signed her name above the title, and handed it back to me.

  “I suppose you already know how pleased I am for you,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I hope it’s the first of many.”

  Elena took a sip from her glass, and I saw her face take on that strange seriousness.

  “In a way, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, William,” she said.

  “What is that?”

  “About doing something else, another piece of writing.”

  I smiled. “So, Sam’s put the spur to you, has he?”

  “He really seems to want me to do something, a book.”

  “Of course he does. Why don’t you?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  The waiter stepped up, and since liquor was still not available in public restaurants, I ordered lemonade.

  “Well, do you have any book ideas?” I asked after the waiter had left.

  “Only one, really,” Elena said. She put her glass down firmly on the table and leaned forward. “William, do you ever think about Standhope?”

  “Sometimes. In what way?”

  “About our life. Doesn’t it seem a little eccentric to you? Father away all the time, and mother in her own world. It’s peculiar, don’t you think?”

  “Not a typical childhood, certainly. Why?”

  “I’ve been thinking about writing something along those lines. Something about Standhope, our life — the whole thing there in that small town.”

  “You intend this as a novel?”

  Elena nodded. “Oh yes, absolutely. I’m sure that’s what Sam wants. They have a few nonfiction books already. Sam says they want to — he calls it ‘fill out the list.’”

  I smiled. “What are you doing, Elena, asking my permission?”

  “In a way, yes,” Elena said. “I wouldn’t want to write about all that went on in Standhope if you didn’t want me to.”

  I shrugged. “You’ll make a novel out of it. That’s fine with me.” I, of course, had no idea whether Elena could actually write a novel.

  “Good,” Elena said. She seemed satisfied.

  “What sort of novel are you thinking about?” I asked. “The material, how do you plan to handle it?”

  Elena thought about it for a moment. “Well, rather lightly, I think. Sort of like the story.”

  “That’s what Sam wants?”

  “More or less. He’s pretty open about it. But I think the style of the story is what he’s looking for.”

  “Whimsical. Breezy.”

  “That’s right,” Elena said, “that’s what he’s looking for.”

  The events of our lives in Standhope did not seem to lend themselves readily to such a treatment, but I didn’t think I needed to point that out.

  “I already have the first paragraph of the book,” Elena said brightly.

  “My God, Sam really has lit a fire under you.”

  “The fire was already there. I really enjoy writing, William.”

  “Perhaps it’s your destiny,” I said with a flourish of the hand.

  “Don’t you like it, too?” Elena asked. “The Cowper book, aren’t you enjoying it?”

  “Like protracted surgery, yes.”

  “Really? That bad?”

  “Only at times,” I said. “The unusual insight, the sudden turn of phrase — I like those moments. But the rest is very tedious, grueling. I don’t care for it that much.” I smiled and changed the subject. “But what about that first line of yours?”

  “It’s more like a first paragraph.”

  “Want to read it to me?”

  “Sure,” Elena said. She took a piece of paper from the pocket of her blouse and unfolded it on the table. “This sets the mood for the whole story. As you said, whimsical.”

  “Go ahead. No preface necessary.”

  Then, hesitantly, Elena read what she conceived at that time to be the opening paragraph of New England Maid: “I was born to a father who, though not a Christian parson, had his trials, and a mother who, though not a noble lady of the stage, had her quirks and crinolines. To their duo, I made a trio, and with Brother, a curious quartet.” She looked up slowly. “What do you think?”

  “Well, it’s breezy.”

  Elena folded the paper. “You don’t like it?”

  “I read Cowper, remember?” I said, smiling to allay Elena’s fears. “I really am sort of dour, Elena. Whimsical writing is for a different audience. But I’ll tell you this, Sam will love it, and so will many other people. I mean it. Go ahead and finish the book in just that style.”

  Elena placed the paper back in her pocket. I could tell that I had spoken hastily, unmindful of the sensitivity with which Elena regarded her work at that time, of the extraordinary need she must have felt that evening for my unconditional approval. Later in her life, having been wounded so much, she could no longer be wounded so easily. “There was a point in Elena’s life,” Jason wrote in his memoir, “when it became almost impossible to touch her. By then I think her soul must have resembled Rodin’s statue of Balzac, towering, monumental, as impregnable as a fortress on the Rhine. I am not sure, however, whether this invulnerability could be accounted loss or gain.” Nor, I might add, am I.

  But that evening in the Village, while the air grew dark around us and the first streetlights began to glow, Elena sat silently, no doubt wondering if she had gotten everything wrong — the whole tone of the story, the characters, the rhythm of the sentence, everything from the smallest detail to the overall structure of the novel, which, at that time, existed only in her mind.

  Finally she looked up. “I don’t know what’s right, William.”

  “The story’s fine, Elena. I didn’t mean to criticize it.”

  “It’s not just the story.”

  “What then?”

  “Maybe the way I’m thinking about it. Maybe that’s all wrong.”

  I touched her hand. “Elena, you shouldn’t let anything I said interfere with what you intended. You and Sam have obviously worked it out. It looks like he’ll be your publisher. It’s between the two of you. And that’s the way it should be.”

  Elena did not seem convinced.

  “It’s the narrowness of my taste, Elena,” I insisted, “it’s not what you wrote. Believe me.”

  Elena shook her head. “William, if you don’t mind, I’d just like to talk about something else.”

  “All right,” I said weakly.

  We ordered dinner and ate almost without speaking. Then I walked Elena to her bus stop and waited with her. She seemed intensely preoccupied, as if her mind were taking stock of itself, figuring the credits and debits of its own ability and measuring them against an ambition that could only be glimpsed at the time. When the bus came she stepped on quickly, took her seat, and waved to me with a faint, halfhearted movement as it pulled away.

  A year later, at this same bus stop, Elena would rush out, plunge a manuscript into my hands, then rush back onto the bus, saying only, “This is it, William, the best that I can do.”

  The year during which Elena wrote New England Maid was probably the single most solitary of her life. Still supported by my father’s tottering fi
nances, she had the luxury of spending her days holed up in her room at Three Arts. “You heard that little typewriter of hers going day and night,” a former resident of Three Arts is quoted as saying in Martha’s biography. “It was a constant clatter on the floor, like the knocking on the pipes when the heat came up, only the typing never stopped.” Martha called New England Maid an “obsession,” but I think that only a lazy, dilatory age would label such deep commitment and determined striving with a word that conjures up pathology.

  Sam was elated by Elena’s determination. “She’s working like a demon, William,” he told me over breakfast one morning, “like a demon.” But when I asked him if he had seen any of the results of all this labor, he shook his head glumly. “No,” he said. “And to tell you the truth, it makes me a little jumpy.”

  Elena’s nervousness about the book increased as the weeks of writing passed. Even Mary, normally so casual in the face of such things, grew concerned. “I would usually dismiss something like this as an affectation,” she told me. “You know, like Tom in his garret, nibbling at moldy Swiss cheese. But with Elena, it’s different.”

  It was very different, and at times a little grim. Much would be made of it later — those long days she spent alone, that ceaseless typewriter — all of it would finally enter modern literary folklore, another of those tiresome tales which place the artist in a separate realm.

  Still, the reality was curious enough. Elena really did go through something very intense during the writing of her book. Jason said that the work “blasted her out of Eden,” but this has always seemed to me grotesquely overstated. The physical evidence of her intensity, however, was perfectly obvious during the late winter and spring of 1932. She neglected herself to an alarming degree, grew thinner and more pale. She often looked as if she never slept, her eyes sometimes tired and watery, at other times almost glazed, as if a thin, diaphanous cover had been placed over them, shielding her from anything but her own inner lights.

  During those months, meeting Elena for dinner was a disquieting experience. She would pick at her food while I rambled on about the topics of the day. It was difficult to draw her into anything remotely resembling idle conversation. At times, I found it insufferably self-indulgent, and perhaps even pretentious, given that I thought she was writing nothing more significant than a whimsical treatment of a bizarre New England family.