While England Sleeps
Read While England Sleeps Online
Authors: David Leavitt
.
.
. and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red busses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
—George Orwell,
Homage to Catalonia
Contents
In the early 1950s, history and politics conspired to create a circumstance in which it was impossible for me to ply my chosen trade—namely, writing. Because I had briefly been a Communist in 1937, the film studios on which I depended to earn my living now dared not hire me, the American publishers that had brought out my earlier novels let them lapse out of print. So I decided to take advantage of the situation by writing the one story I could never publish in my lifetime. When, after all, would such an opportunity arise again?
It was, coincidentally, the story of why I became a Communist in 1937. The answer—in brief—was love.
I have not always been a screenwriter, just as I have not always been an American. Once, in fact, in what seems now a very distant part of my life, I was English and a novelist, well respected, though in histories of the period I will probably be better remembered for the friends I made than I will be for what I wrote. Then one spring afternoon shortly after V-E Day I followed a young man into the public lavatory at the Tottenham Court Road tube station. Together we went into a stall, whereupon, before I could touch his cock—it was, I am pleased to report, prominently erect—this young man handcuffed me and announced that he was an officer of His Majesty’s police. Well-positioned friends managed to suppress the coverage of my arrest in the tabloids; nonetheless the incident left me ill disposed toward the country of my birth, with the result that three weeks after being found not guilty of immorality for lack of sufficient evidence, I boarded a ship bound for America, vowing that I should never return to England as long as I lived.
After a few aimless months in New York, I went to Los Angeles, where people invited me to a lot of parties. In those days being English had some cachet in Hollywood, as did being a novelist. Still, the ambition of intellectual dilettantes on the West Coast of America—as opposed to their brethren on the East—has never been so much to pedestal serious artists as to corrupt them. Vast sums of money were offered to me if I should do a screenplay; of course I accepted, and discovered, to my surprise, that I had a talent for “screwball comedies.” I wrote a total of twenty-two over a ten-year period, nineteen of which were produced. These days they are little appreciated, though a few—
Casino
and
Living It Up
, in particular—periodically feature on those programs that intercut old films with competitions in which viewers call in the answers to movie trivia questions and win toasters, vacuum cleaners and the like. Each time one airs I receive a small residual payment, a payment that once, by identifying what animal Paulette Goddard was likened to in the credit sequence of Cukor’s
The Women
, I managed to supplement with a La-Z-Boy rocker and a year’s supply of Lemon Pledge. “And so today’s winner on
Dialing for Dollars
is Mr. B. W. Botsford of West Hollywood. Congratulations! And now back to
The Prescotts Divorce
, starring Gloria Gallahue, Dick Maynard and Jinx Morgan.” And written by—I hesitate to add—Mr. B. W. Botsford of West Hollywood.
The Prescotts Divorce
. I watched that film the other night and it embarrassed me. So dated, so coy, so evasively homosexual only a fellow homosexual might recognize the subtext. As for the actors I made into stars, they are the sort who nowadays feature in that peculiar series of little paperback books called
Whatever Happened to . . .
, books in which you learn that Gloria Gallahue waits tables at a Denny’s in Tempe, Arizona, that Jinx Morgan, after fifty face-lifts, landed the role of Magenta Porterfield on
Secret Sturm und Drang
, that Dick Maynard became a washing machine salesman and disappeared into the suburban San Fernando Valley, the cultivation of which, along with the blacklisting of many good men and women, is what the nefarious decade of the fifties, at least in America, will chiefly be remembered for.
“Mr. Botsford, is it true that in 1937 you were a card-carrying member of the Communist Party?”
“I never carry cards. One is so likely to lose them.”
Suddenly the commissions ceased. Film stars, fearful of being blacklisted themselves, stopped inviting me to their parties (though privately, in anguished, guilty voices, they begged that I “understand”). I never ratted on anyone, but then again, I never stood up to McCarthy and his cronies, either. One exposure tends to lead to another. Being branded a Communist in Los Angeles in 1955 was bad enough; being branded a homosexual Communist in Los Angeles in 1955 would have been more than my English upbringing could have survived.
No one can say I spent those years unprofitably, however. Their profit was simply a secret, not to be shared.
Because, in that blackest spring of 1955, I wrote a novel I never published, a novel that, for the twenty years since, has sat moldering among candy wrappers and cat toys in my kitchen. Well, now I am an old man, poor and invisible, unappreciated except by a single eely-skinned film studies graduate student from the University of Rochester, so I am going to hide the manuscript behind the cuckoo clock in my living room. Yes, the cuckoo clock with the big bugged-out eyes that I always used to joke were the eyes of God. No one but God is going to be allowed to read the manuscript while I’m alive, though after I’ve passed on, some archaeologist of the obscure may unearth it and think it worth bringing to the attention of the public. Or not. Or perhaps the discoverer will be a maid or mover, who will take one look at the yellowed pages and throw them in the trash.
Supposing, however, that the manuscript survives, and that in some unimaginable future you, reader, have sat down to peruse it, I ask only that you be gentler with my memory than history has been. Because my incumbency in the halls of fame was brief, do not, like the editors of
Whatever Happened to . . .
, remember me merely for the long downward spiral it precipitated. I was a young man once, who smoked cigarettes on the Quai d’Orsay, who fell in love with a boy named Edward in a basement near the Earl’s Court tube.
Under no circumstances should the narrator of this story be construed as “reliable,” particularly where history is concerned; the politics of those times confuse me now as they confused me then; I was a social, rather than an ideological, Communist. More important, as a writer I have always valued the personal over the global, for who, after all, populate our globe but beings who are both ridiculous and beautiful? Memory may be an unreliable guide, but it is also the only guide I have. Be sure of this, though: I never altered anything to make myself look better.
Finally, if you perceive, in this frank admission of moral failure, some small belated modicum of courage, its author’s efforts will not have been in vain. We do what we can, even if usually we do it too late.
It began like this: a bird flying through the chambers of the underground, like a fly caught in a nautilus. No one noticed but me. First the wind blew—that smoky, petrol-smelling wind that presages the arrival of the train—and then the twin lights pierced the darkness, and then there it was, gray and white, a dove, I think, chased by the train’s smoking terror. It fluttered and hovered above my head for a moment, as if trying to figure out where the sky was, then sailed up the exit stairs and was gone.
The train pulled in. I got on. It was June 28th, 1936—my mother’s birthday. (But she had died six months earlier.) In Germany, flocks of
Hitlerjugend
bullied the customers at Jewish stores; in Spain, the infant republic battled the Fascist threat; in England, women in shops argued over the price of leeks. Worst of all, I could not write. A neatly typed copy of the novel I’d started the year before was sitting in a bureau drawer at my parents’ house in Richmond. I couldn’t even bear to look at it.
I was on my way to lunch with Aunt Constance, and as usual, I was late. Aunt Constance was a widow, and a novelist in her own right—much more famous than I could ever hope to be. Each April and November, with gratifying punctuality, she produced a tome, which unhappy women all over England flocked to buy. This was because her works, unlike mine, eschewed sex and scenes of high dudgeon in favor of the chronicling of small domestic transports.
She supported me in those days between the wars, though capriciously, sending checks that arrived according to no particular schedule and that were written for such wildly disparate amounts that my brother, Channing, and I had privately started referring to her as “Aunt Inconstance.” In return I was expected to meet her for a monthly meal at the Hotel Lancaster, a dreary establishment just off the Edgware Road, where she installed herself on the occasions of her visits to London. All the inmates at this institution were women, and most were permanent: widows without means, retired secretaries—in short, her readership. I remember it as a languorous, stupefied place, its lounge insulated from sunlight by heavy curtains, its lamps so dim you could barely read by them. The Lancaster’s pace was slower than mine, with the result that when I rushed in, I inevitably knocked over an ancient denizen on her way to the dining room, or startled the porter, who spent most of his day in a stupor bordering on catatonia. In the lounge, various soft, heavy figures sat or reclined in various soft, heavy chairs. An arrhythmic snore spiraled upward into a whistle before sinking back down to earth.
This afternoon Aunt Constance was dozing on a chintz sofa. Her eyelids fluttered when I leaned over her.
“Oh, Brian. Hello, dear. You certainly are prompt. I was listening to the wireless.”
“Hello, Aunt Constance.”
She sat up. “Let me look at you. Yes, you are too thin. Hasn’t your sister been feeding you?”
Hoisting herself out of her seat, she escorted me into the dining room. She looked splendid, as usual: florid and floral, her silky abundant hair pinned atop her head in the shape of a brioche. While we fiddled with our menus she inquired after my sister, Caroline, my brother, Channing, most especially after our poor besieged childhood nanny, whom we had dragged out of peaceful retirement to keep house in the wake of Mother’s death. Nanny had been the model for the heroines of no fewer than six of Aunt Constance’s novels.
Channing and Caroline were quarreling, I told her, because Caroline had reorganized the kitchen. Caroline believed in order and the future, while Channing felt that to move as much as a single spoon from the place Mother had appointed for it was to desecrate her memory.
“I have seen peculiar symptoms of grief before,” Aunt Constance observed. “My treasured housekeeper, Mrs. Potter, when her husband went, took to sleepwalking, while the Shepard girl became immoral. The strangest case, however, was Maudie Ryan. Do you remember Maudie Ryan? She was with your mother at school. Her fiancé was exploded in France during the war, after which she cooked and cooked. Cakes, puddings, hideous spicy stews.” She shook her head in disapproval at the mention of the stews. “You must be patient with your siblings, dear. They don’t feel as literally as you do.”