Burning the Days (29 page)

In the end the self is left unfinished, it is abandoned because of the death of its owner. All the exceptional details, confessions, secrets, photographs of loved faces and sometimes more than faces,
precious addresses, towns and hotels meant to be visited given the time, stories, sacred images, immortal lines, everything heaped up or gathered because it is intriguing or beautiful suddenly becomes superfluous, without value, the litter of decades swirls at one’s feet. The memory of Ernest at Rambouillet outside Paris in 1944 when they were about to enter the city—the room, you remember, was filled with guns—he’d killed 183 men in his lifetime, Hemingway boasted, and there were people who said he’d participated in executions in Spain. None of that, nor of many other things, a
biblios
of things, an era of them. They had wanted Shaw to write his autobiography, he said, but he could not decide. Too difficult. “All the love affairs …,” he mumbled.

Somewhere the ancient clerks, amid stacks of faint interest to them, are sorting literary reputations. The work goes on eternally and without haste. There are names passed over and names revered, names of heroes and of those long thought to be, names of every sort and level of importance. Among them is Irwin Shaw’s.

It was not really Shaw, any more than Neruda was Neruda or Henry Green Henry Green. Curiously enough, he did not change his name himself. His father’s name was Shamforoff, and the decision to change to Shaw was made at a meeting when the family began a real estate business in 1923. He was ten years old then, didn’t like the shortened version, and clung to the name he was born with through high school.

The writer defines the world, however, and his name grows to be part of it. His legend, also. The book and the man who wrote it become confounded, just as real incidents and people become part of a truth that has been revised and clarified. At a certain point all stories are true, the question never arises. The characters in Dreiser, Cervantes, and Margaret Mitchell are eminently real, the possibility that someone only imagined these figures as well as what they said and did is at first intriguing, but we cannot for a moment doubt the existence of Lady Ashley or even Ahab. They
rank with historical personages, and it is to the glory of their creators that they achieved, if they did not in the ordinary sense possess, actual life. Krapp, Swann, Lady Dedlock, lived and died and have the chance of living always.

He knew this, of course, but spoke of it rarely, if at all. He talked about writers, books, public figures, football games. He talked about fame, humility, the French, about once meeting John Horne Burns and being told by him that he, Irwin, didn’t know anything about Jews. He talked about his own work and that of others, and he was usually generous, though he could be tart. “Well, I’ve done it again,” a writer who’d had a great early success remarked to him. “Don’t say that,” Irwin said, “you didn’t do it the first time.”

He could be equally tributary. At a party once he beckoned to a writer he saw who was nervously awaiting publication. “I read your book,” he said. “It’s a great book. A masterpiece.”

One remembers such things. “Those were his words,” the writer said long afterwards—it was Joseph Heller, the book was
Something Happened.
“He didn’t say it’s a good book. He said great. A masterpiece.”

Discussing what had come from his own hand, he was uncritical. He gave the impression he was well satisfied with it all. He seemed not to prefer one thing he’d written over another, and never really permitted himself to be put on the defensive. One night a woman was shamelessly praising him to his face—he wrote marvelously about women, she said, no contemporary writer knew women so well. She loved
Lucy Crown,
it was almost her favorite book. That was a hard book to write, he recalled. His wife had begged him not to write it.

“That’s right,” Marian said.

He had the most difficult time of his life with that book. It had taken four years. He wrote it as a play first but it was no good. Then he wrote a hundred pages of the book and again gave up, but his editor at Random House, Saxe Commins, persuaded him to go
on. It eventually sold more copies than anything he ever wrote. The idea for it had come from a story told to him by a Viennese man. “It was a true story. When he was a boy he caught his mother having an affair with the tutor. He told his father, and the mother never forgave him. She refused to live in the same house with him, and he had to go and live with his aunt. He only saw his mother once or twice more in his life. I heard the story in 1938. I put it in my notes and carried it around for more than ten years.”

“Why didn’t you want him to write it?” Marian was asked.

“I hated the woman,” she said.

“She fought me tooth and nail every foot of the way,” Irwin muttered. He got letters about the book all the time. It had been translated into every language.

——

They went to Europe in 1950. That summer, at the urging of an old friend, they had rented a house in Quogue, on Long Island, and then found that they couldn’t play tennis or go into any of the clubs—Jews weren’t admitted. Although Marian was not Jewish she considered herself to be, so they went to Europe, where the ashes of some six million Jews lay, to escape anti-Semitism in Quogue, Irwin liked to say. And there, almost to the end, they remained.
The Young Lions
was a great triumph; they were in their thirties, the glowing decade that will never end, anything can be dared.

It was the Europe still very much of the 1930s, emerging from the ruins of a nightmarish war. There were yachts in the harbor at Cannes with names like
Feu Follet
and
Dadu,
the sea was blue again, the white sails beginning to flutter. One can be rich in France, you cannot imagine, travel the stunning countryside and sit at tables in graveled gardens.

Fame, soundness of body, a beautiful wife. He had met her in California. They had a passionate life. Young, tanned, unwed, driving
across the country together with the top folded down. Her mother was scandalized; in those days to run off with a man you weren’t married to was nearly unimaginable. They lived in New York on Forty-fourth Street. She was an actress, he was writing plays, and on this street of theaters their entire life was lived. For a while he was a drama critic but gave it up, he said, because as a critic he could no longer leave after the first act. He had to run six blocks to the theater. Marian would be late, the cab would be stuck in traffic, and he’d have to jump out and run. He arrived with sweat pouring down his face, even in midwinter.

The marriage was in 1939, the year the war started, as someone remarked. The difficulties he had with his wife! He would constantly talk about them, almost to himself, as if they were unexampled. One night in St.-Jean-de-Luz, during an argument in a restaurant, she took off her wedding ring and threw it away in a fury. The next morning she went back to look but couldn’t find it; as she left, miraculously she saw it in the street.

Encouraged by a friend, Irwin, in late December 1951, drove down from Paris to a place in Switzerland called Klosters, then an unspoiled village with ancient farmhouses and the mountains piled with snow. The people were friendly. Eventually he and his wife moved there. It was perfect and they stayed. He took up skiing. A circle of interesting people began to appear regularly, people who would not have come there except for him. They were always in a crowd, it seemed. It was the best time of his life, and probably the most ruinous. Perhaps it would have been so anywhere, and this is only my idea of what he did and what he might have done. I never said it, but I felt it strongly, and of course what I blamed him for was the very thing I was afraid I was doing myself: living in a world that was not truly mine.

There could have been a number of children, but Marian had miscarriages, four in fact, and only once was she able to complete a pregnancy. That was with the help of a specialist in New York
someone had told her about and to whom she had come from the south of France. He instructed her to go to bed and stay there. She was allowed up for only fifteen minutes a day. Six months later a child was born in Columbia Presbyterian and named for the first man on earth, Adam, who grew up to be, like his father, a writer.

Conjugal years, of
mutual and unexpressed understanding,
as he wrote,
private jokes, comfort in adversity, automatic support in times of trouble and hours spent in cordial silence in the long and tranquil evenings.
You never saw these evenings, of course. You saw them on the move, sheathed in glamour like movie stars. Irwin flew back to the States one time to attend a dinner Jackie Kennedy was giving for Malraux. John Cheever described him in a letter, blowing into Rome to pick up an Alfa Romeo and give a dinner party.

He never mentioned women, but it was impossible that so grand, so errant a nature should not be drawn to them, and there was also the theme of that first, central story, “Summer Dresses.” The great engines of this world do not run on faithfulness. “Many?” I often wanted to ask him. I doubt he would have been revealing.

One night a faded blonde was going on about the luster of it, their wonderful life. “Have you ever,” she asked him ingenuously, “I just wonder, have you ever really loved anyone besides Marian?”

He shifted his gaze to her, uncertain of her motive.

“Has he what?” someone said.

“I mean it,” she insisted. “Have you ever—I don’t mean while you were divorced—have you ever loved another woman?”

In the awkward silence, from across the table, Marian said, “I’ll give you the list.”

“No, I really mean it,” the woman said.

“I’ll have it alphabetized if you like,” Marian offered.

Sometime around 1969 the marriage had begun to break up. Irwin, it was said, only had the nerve to leave a note on the pillow—he
wanted a divorce. Not long afterwards she moved out, although in the end it was he who lost the house. It was eventually sold. Chalet Mia, it was called—Marian had built it, supervising the construction herself, one of the many beautiful houses she made for them. All the stories from this period I heard later, his living with another woman, a blonde who liked books; drinking even more than usual; sinking, friends told me, to the lowest point of his life. He came lurching into the small bar of his favorite hotel in Klosters, the Chesa Grishuna, cursing his wife, who was on the floor above having a peaceful dinner with other people. It was unlike him; he never used obscenities. He had supported her all his life, he roared. He had paid for this thing and that thing, even for her mother’s burial, with these hands, he shouted. It was awful; he was slurring his words.

Everything dissolved, the palaces, the cloud-capped towers. He went unshaven. His shirttails were out, his pants hung loose on him like an invalid’s.

The divorce, to me, was a surprise, it seemed an error of Providence. Whatever his transgressions or hers, there was something completely domestic about him. He was married and meant to be. In his world all the main figures save one, Capa, were married and family was the only untarnishable fact.

At the same time, remarkably, having lost house, wife, his utter foundations, he sat down and wrote, determined to be restored,
Rich Man, Poor Man,
a popular novel which was sold to television and resulted in a new fortune. What he had lost with one hand he retrieved with the other.

——

Now I must turn backwards for a missing thread that has not been woven in, the cause of a long unraveling between us.

Sometime around 1959 I had made a short film with a friend, Lane Slate, a man of taste who lived near me in Rockland County
in a kind of indulgent squalor, an expert on painting, automobiles, and Joyce. It was called
Team Team Team
and was only twelve minutes long. It was about football, and one idle day, sitting in the country, we were dumbfounded to receive the news that it had won a first prize at Venice. Doors would open everywhere, we realized. They did not, but after I had gotten to know him I mentioned the film to Irwin, who later saw it and liked it. He was, at the time, more or less engaged in producing movies himself from his short stories—one,
In the French Style,
had been made—and he impulsively suggested that I write and direct the script for another. The story he had in mind, “Then We Were Three,” was not outstanding but I felt I could make something of it nevertheless. I was laden, like a swollen-legged bee returning from the meadows, with knowledge, little of it practical, of films and the European directors, not far into their careers, who were the idols of the moment. I knew that John Huston had been a boxer and was said to have told his secretary when she was typing up the script for
The Maltese Falcon
to just take the dialogue out of the book. The miscellany gave confidence.

We eventually made the film,
Three,
which, though it had admirers among the critics, turned out to be of negligible interest to the public. Irwin did not like the movie. We had started out with optimism. Through expensive lunches with very good bottles of wine I had felt his confidence in me begin to slip, and also seen him, after I left the table and was near the door, mechanically pouring what remained in other glasses into his own. He was not involved in the actual production. The difficulty, he had told me at one point, was that I was a lyric and he a narrative writer. “Lyric” seemed a word he was uncomfortable with. It seemed to mean something like callow.

And so I missed the day in 1977 when, weary perhaps of the joys, and feeling the pull of phantom roots, he had lunch with his ex-wife. It was foolish after all these years to be angry with
her. The meeting led to their being reunited. They prudently retained separate apartments, like Beckett and his wife or Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but finally, at Irwin’s insistence, they remarried.

I had seen him only once or twice in a long time. One summer afternoon towards the end of the decade he had come across the lawn at a party to say hello, ask what I was working on, and add, “That was a lousy movie you made.” I didn’t bother to argue. It would not be long before he lay beneath the surgeon’s unbrilliant knife.