The New Confessions (59 page)

There were two baffling letters waiting for me on my return from Montezuma, both a fortnight old. One was from Hamish. It announced merely that he had recently arrived in the States and was working for a U.S. government organization called the National Research Institute, in Zion, New Jersey, not far from Princeton. He said he hoped that we might meet up soon, then he added, “I can’t tell you how sorry I was to see you vilified in that despicable way. I wrote several letters in your defense but none were printed. I suspect you have become the scapegoat for more eminent appeasers.”

What vilification? What appeasement was he talking about? The second letter was from my father and even more perplexing.

It was the “Dad” that shook me. He had never signed himself so affectionately before. But what was going on? Clearly some vile slander on me had been perpetrated in the British press. I wrote to my father and Hamish immediately asking for more information.

I didn’t have long to wait. I was in an editing suite at Lone Star working on
The Equalizer
when I received a call from a reporter on the
L.A. Times
. He would like to talk to me, he said. I assumed it was about the new film.

I met him in a bar round the corner. It was a sunny fresh morning and the place was quiet. Rumba music played gently on the radio. I ordered a Four Roses with ice and ginger ale in a tall glass. I munched some pretzels from the bartop bowl. The journalist arrived and introduced himself as Karl Shumway. He fanned out a series of newspaper clippings on the bar.

“What do you say to this?” he asked.

Let me summarize briefly the history of this particularly sordid campaign of character assassination. It had begun in a small-circulation British film magazine called
Cinema Monthly
, in an article entitled “Fun in the Sun: Our Absent Industry.” This purported to criticize the large number of British actors, producers, writers and directors who were living the high life in Hollywood while war was being waged at home. In fact, over three quarters of its length was given over to a sustained attack on me. Among the lies were these: I had been pro-Nazi before the war when I had made my name in Berlin during the twenties; I had stayed on long after Hitler came to power. I had been unable to further my career in Britain and had left for the U.S.A. when war clouds (predictably) “loomed” over Europe. In Hollywood I had consorted with Germans, married a German actress—one Mathilde Halte—and when the war began had fled to Mexico for several months
before sneaking back to Hollywood when I thought the coast was clear. Now I whiled away my time making worthless films and living in a loud and ostentatious style.

This might have traveled no further except for the fact that some cineast in the editorial department of the London
Times
read it, and on a quiet day wrote a third leader “deploring the example set by English artists and intellectuals who sat out the war in the Lotusland of the U.S.A., far from the hardship and suffering being endured by Europe.” Furthermore, “the example of John James Todd, an English director, is particularly unedifying,” the leader said and went on to adumbrate
Cinema Monthly’s
allegations, concluding with an exhortation that the government seize and impound all the said artists’ assets in this country until “they deigned to return to our beleaguered shores and defend themselves.”

This was the signal for the rest of the press to join in. Stories were run about me; photographs were printed of starlets and swimming pools, supermarkets and sunny beaches. Here and there an old photograph of myself, dark and grinning, looked out as if to say, “Too bad, suckers!” One caption read:

I felt first warm with shame, then this was replaced with a more general state of nausea. This must be Druce’s revenge. I went back to the original
Cinema Monthly
piece. The byline was “From our special Hollywood correspondent.” Old familiar feelings of helpless impotence returned. Dutifully I rebutted all the points to Shumway. I had left Berlin in ’34. I was and had always been anti-Nazi. I had been in an anti-Nazi organization in Berlin in the twenties and I was a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. I explained about Mexico and detailed the modest size of my house and the temperance of my life.

“What about this fight you had at L.A. Airport?”

“That was a personal matter.”

“Didn’t Zanuck throw you off the Fox lot?”

I refuted that one too. Druce’s features came to mind. I very nearly told Shumway about the self-inflicted wound, but wisely decided against
it. Shumway wrote everything down in a notebook. Two days later on page 4 of the
L.A. Times
a small two-column piece appeared, headed “Director Todd Slams British Smears.”

Nobody read it, or at least nobody commented on it. But the lies had their effect on me. Coupled with the failure of my reunion with Doon, they sent me into something of a nervous decline. I imagined people I knew reading these stories and believing them. I wrote to my family—even Sonia—asking them to spread the truth. I saw the way the world’s perception of a person could change so easily. Who would now recall the triumphs of
Julie
and
The Confessions: Part I
? What was Julian Teague’s letter against this huge tide of calumny and innuendo? I felt my life had been wasted, both as an artist and as a human being. All my films were forgotten. The emotional center of my life—Doon—had disappeared and abandoned me. The world and the future seemed dull, hostile, uninviting. I began to drink more than was good for me, not venturing out of my house for days at a time. I knew I had to do something soon or I would go under. Eddie, who was delighted with
The Equalizer
, was offering me a script about Jesse James. But the unfair stories about my craven absence from the war unsettled me. I began to feel guilty. Guilt infected me. Me, of all people … But that sort of accusation is insidious—it touches the very core of our self-esteem. I forgot about the Salient, the horrors I had endured in the Great War. Fool that I was, only one course of action seemed open to me: I began to plan my return to Europe.

But in what capacity? I was too old to enlist. And besides, I had no desire to kill anyone—except Leo Druce. Ramón Dusenberry solved my problem when I confided in him. I became an accredited war correspondent for the Dusenberry press syndicate. I would report the latest news from the European battle fronts for the
Chula Vista Herald-Post
, the
El Cajon Sentinel
, the
Imperial County Gazette
, and the
Calexico Argus
. I had my old job back. I packed my Leica, bought a portable typewriter and headed east to New York to embark for London.

For some reason Emilia didn’t come today. At lunchtime I went into the village to buy some oranges, but no one knew if she was ill or not. I cleaned up the kitchen, and washed the dirty dishes, partly to please her, partly to make her feel guilty. I’m alarmed at the rapid growth in the complexity of my feelings for her. She’s been working here for at
least three years and until recently I never gave her more than a passing thought.

This evening I take my drink out to the seat on the cliff edge and watch the sun set. I notice that although the hill on the crocodile promontory casts a shadow onto the villa, my small beach on the bay below still gets the sun for another half hour or so. Perhaps I will go down tomorrow. I feel like a bathe.

And so I took myself off to a war once more again for just as idiotic motives as led me off to the first. However, before I left for Europe I paid a visit to Hamish in Zion.

I had some spare days in New York before I embarked, and decided to spend one of them visiting Hamish. I telephoned him and made the arrangements. I caught a train to Princeton and from there took a taxi over to Zion. It took several inquiries before we discovered where the National Research Institute was. We found it eventually, situated in an old school on the outskirts of the small town. It was a pleasant red-brick single-storied building around a grassy quadrangle. I waited in a sort of porter’s lodge until Hamish came to collect me.

He hadn’t changed a great deal. He was even wearing the same clothes I’d last seen him in: gray flannels, stout shoes, a tweed jacket—still pervaded by his musty bachelor smell. I noticed he had some teeth missing. Hamish was not a man overburdened with vanity. His only concession to the warmth and American taste was the absence of a tie. His collar was open, exposing his white throat. We shook hands with some nervousness.

“I thought you’d be in uniform,” he said.

“Well, I’ve got one but I’m not comfortable wearing it, not yet.”

“Same here. I’ve got one too. It seems silly, somehow.”

We chatted a little awkwardly as we walked through the wide quadrangle. On the other side of the building were playing fields and tennis courts, but the courts were now covered by neat rows of new Quonset huts. Power lines looped from the main building. Some of the huts had whitewashed windows. Here and there were incomprehensible signs:
NRI
/77/
DEC
. 1/2 55
TH
.

“We’ve doubled our staff,” Hamish said. “Hence these rabbit hutches.”

“What do you do here?”

“Oh, government stuff. Mainly maths.”

He led me to his hut, which was raised on brick piles on the edge of the football field. On the door it said
NRI MAJOR H. MALAHIDE
.

“Are you a major?” I asked astonished.

Hamish laughed. “It seems they had to make me one, because of my work. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference; they just pay me more money.”

Inside the hut was an orthodox desk, a couple of old leather armchairs, a sink and a stove. Beyond them were row upon row of automatic electronic calculators. A small bespectacled man was bent over one of them, reading the numbers it had printed out.

“Fancy a dry martini?” Hamish asked. “The most wonderful invention known to man.”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Not for me, Hamish,” said the little man. “I must be going.” He had a strong mid-European accent.

“By the way,” Hamish said, “this is Kurt.” I shook hands with him. “Kurt, this is John—the friend I was telling you about.”

“
My God!
My good heavens! John James Todd.” My hand was re-shaken vigorously by Kurt. “I am honored to meet you, Mr. Todd. Truly honored.” He shook hands with delighted incredulity.

He had a high voice. He was very warmly dressed with a thick jersey under his gray suit and had an unwrapped woollen scarf around his neck. His dark hair had dramatic broad streaks of gray and was brushed straight back off his forehead. There was a marked intensity in his gaze: friendly but profoundly curious.

“I never forget that evening in Berlin. Never,” he said. “Nineteen thirty-two. Your film,
Die Konfessionen
.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes. Three times in one week. Gloria-Palast.… Mr. Todd, I tell you. The most extraordinary film. A work of genius.”

“Thank you very much.”

He tied his scarf and took a tweed overcoat off the back of the door. The sun shone strongly on the green of the playing fields. He buttoned the coat.

“My only regret is I never saw
Part II
and
Part III.
”

“They were never made. I started
Part II
—we had to abandon it.”

“That’s a shame.… But you must finish it, Mr. Todd, you must. It is most extraordinary work. You mustn’t leave it incomplete.” At this he glanced at Hamish and gave an odd, high yelping laugh. Hamish joined in.

“Good one, Kurt,” he said.

Kurt shook my hand for the third time. “I mean it, Mr. Todd. I’ve never seen a movie like it. Finish it. I would be the most terrible waste.” He folded up the collar of his overcoat and turned to Hamish. “It looks fine, Hamish. I think you’re on the right track. Good-bye, Mr. Todd. It has been a most memorable meeting.” He left.

I looked at Hamish. “Who the hell was that?”

“Probably the most brilliant mathematician in the world.”

“Really?… Amazing that he saw
The Confessions
. What a coincidence.”

Hamish put some ice in his cocktail shaker. “He produced this theorem, the Incompleteness Theorem—that’s why we laughed. It was quite devastating.” He shook the shaker. “Changed the face of mathematics for all time.” He poured out two drinks and looked at me. “In fact I was going to write to you about it, try and explain Kurt’s theorem to you. It’s quite uncanny how it all fits together. Now you’re here, I can tell you about it.”

“Super,” I said.

Hamish handed me a glass.

“Good to see you, John.”

“Cheers.”

That night we had dinner in one of Zion’s better restaurants. I think we ate a kind of pot roast followed by ice cream. I can barely remember eating. Hamish talked constantly, and with the single-minded intensity of all lonely people, of quantum mechanics and its bizarre world of chance and supposition. He mentioned names: Einstein, Bohr, the Copenhagen Statement, de Broglie, thought experiments, Schrödinger’s cat. But he kept coming back to Werner Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle and how everything linked up with Kurt’s Incompleteness Theorem. Absolute truth, he said at one juncture, had been finally exposed as a chimera, an utterly vain ambition. In the sum of human knowledge there would always be crucial uncertainties. And Kurt had shown how even in the most abstract formal systems there would be holes, gaps and inconsistencies that could never be overcome.