The Golden Notebook (32 page)

long. It began: 'In the course of any year we receive hundreds of plays in our office. Many of these show an authentic feeling for the medium, but fail to meet our requirements through ignorance of the fundamental exigencies of our needs. We present a one-hour play once a week, etc., etc., etc. Clause (a) read: The essence of the Blue Bird series is variety! There are no embargoes on subject matter! We want adventure, romance, travel stories, stories of exotic experience, domestic life, family life, parent-child relationships, fantasy, comedy, tragedy. Blue Bird says no to no screenplay that sincerely and authentically grapples with genuine experience, of whatever kind.' Clause (y) read: 'Blue Bird screenplays are viewed weekly by nine million Americans of all ages. Blue Bird brings screenplays of living verity to the ordinary man, woman and child. Blue Bird considers it has a trust and a duty. For this reason Blue Bird writers must remember their responsibility, which they share with Blue Bird: Blue Bird will not consider screenplays dealing with religion, race, politics, or extra-marital sex. 'We are looking forward with eager anticipation to reading your screenplay.' Miss Anna Wulf to Mrs. Edwina Wright. Dear Mrs. Wright: Thank you for your flattering letter. I see however from your directive brochure to your writers that you do not like plays which touch on race or extra-marital sex. Frontiers of War has both. Therefore, I feel there is not much point in our discussing the possibility of adapting this novel for your series. Yours sincerely. Mrs. Edwina Wright to Miss Wulf: A telegram. Thank you so much for prompt and responsible letter stop Please have dinner with me tomorrow night Black's Hotel eight o'clock stop reply pre-paid. Dinner with Mrs. Wright at Black's Hotel. Bill: £11 4s .6d. Edwina Wright, forty-five or fifty; a plump, pink-and-white woman, with iron-grey hair, curled and shining; gleaming blue-grey lids; shining pink lips; shining pale-pink nails. A suit of soft blue, very expensive. An expensive woman. Easy chatty friendliness over the Martinis. She has three. I, two. She swallows hers down, she really has to have them. She leads the talk to English literary personalities, finding out which I know personally. I know hardly anyone. Trying to place me. Finally she pigeon-holes me-smiling and saying: 'One of my dearest friends...' (mentioning an American writer) '... always tells me he hates meeting other writers. I think he's got a very interesting future.' We go into the dining-room. Warm, comfortable, discreet. Seated she looks around, for one second off guard: her crinkling painted lids narrowing, her pink mouth slightly open-she is looking for somebody or something. Then she assumes a regretful, sad look, which however, must be genuine, because she says, meaning it: 'I love England. I love coming to England. I make excuses to be sent here.' I wonder if this hotel is 'England' for her; but she looks too shrewd and intelligent for that. She asks me if I'd like another Martini; I am going to refuse, then see she wants one; I say yes. A tension starts in my stomach; then I see it is her tension, communicating itself to me. I look at the controlled defensive handsome face and I'm sorry for her. I understand her life very well. She orders dinner-she is solicitous, tactful. It is like being taken out by a man. Yet she is not at all masculine; it is that she is used to controlling situations like this. I can feel how this role is not natural to her, what it costs her to play it. While we wait for the melon, she lights a cigarette. She sits, lids lowered, the cigarette dangling, surveying the room again. Her face flashes into relief, which she instantly masks; then she nods and smiles to an American who has come in and is sitting ordering dinner by himself in a corner of the room. He wags a hand back at her, she smiles, the smoke curling up past her eyes. She turns back to me, concentrating on me with an effort. She seems suddenly much older. I like her very much. I see, vividly, how later that night she will be in her room, wearing something over-feminine. Yes, I see flowered chiffon, something like that... yes, because of the strain of having to play this role in her working day. And she will even look at the chiffon ruffles and make some wisecrack about it to herself. But she is waiting. Then the discreet knock on the door. She opens it, with a joke. They are both by then blurred and amiable with alcohol. Another drink. Then the dry and measured coupling. In New York they will meet at a party and exchange ironies. She is now critically eating her melon; finally remarks that food in England has more taste. She talks of how she intends to leave her job and go off to live in the country, in New England, and write a novel. (Her husband is never mentioned.) I realise that neither of us has any desire to talk about Frontiers of War. She has summed me up; she is neither approving nor disapproving; she took a chance; the dinner is a business loss, but that's the racket. In a moment she will talk amiably but perfunctorily about my book. We are drinking a bottle of good heavy burgundy: steak, mushrooms, celery. Again she says our food tastes better, but adds that we should learn to cook it. I'm now as good-natured with alcohol as she is; but in the pit of my stomach the tension is steadily tightening- her tension. She keeps glancing over at the American in the corner. I suddenly realise that unless I'm careful I'll start talking out of that hysteria which led me, a few weeks ago, into comic parody for Reginald Tarbrucke. I decide to be careful; I like her too much. And she frightens me. 'Anna, I liked your book so much.' 'I'm glad, thank you.' 'Back home there's a real interest in Africa, in African problems.' I grin and say: 'But there is a race thing in that book.' She grins, grateful because I have, and says: 'But it is often a question of degree. Well, in your wonderful novel, you have the young flier and the Negro girl sleeping together. Well, now would you say it was important? Would you say their having sex together was vital to the story?' 'No, I wouldn't.' She hesitates. Her tired and extraordinarily shrewd eyes show a gleam of disappointment. She had hoped I would not compromise; although it is her job to see that I should. For her, I now see, the sex is in fact the point of the story. Her manner changes subtly: she is handling a writer who is prepared to sacrifice integrity to get a story on to television. I say: 'But surely, even if they are in love in the purest manner possible, it would be a breach of your code?' 'It's a question of how one handles it.' I see that at this point the whole thing might very well be dropped altogether. Because of my attitude? No; because of her anxiety over the lone American in the corner. Twice I've seen him look at her; I think her anxiety is justified. He is debating whether to come over, or perhaps go off somewhere by himself. Yet he seems to like her well enough. The waiter clears our plates. She is pleased when I say I want coffee, but no sweet: she has been eating business meals twice a day during her trip, and she's relieved we're cutting the thing short by a course. She gives another glance over at her solitary compatriot, who shows no signs of moving yet, and decides to return to work. 'When I was considering how we could use your really wonderful material, it crossed my mind that it would make a marvellous musical-you can get away with a serious message in a musical that you can't in a straight story.' 'A musical set in Central Africa?' 'For one thing, as a musical, it would solve the problem of the scenic background. Your scenic background is so good, but it's not for television.' 'You mean, formalised sets of African scenery?' 'Yes, that would be the idea. And a very simple story. Young English flier in training in Central Africa. The pretty Negro girl he meets at a party. He is lonely. She is kind to him. He meets her folks.' 'But he couldn't conceivably meet a young Negro girl at a party in those parts. Unless it was in a political context-a tiny minority of political people try to break down the colour bar. You didn't have a political musical in mind?' 'Oh, but I didn't realise... suppose he had an accident in the street and she helped him and took him to her home?' 'She couldn't take him to her home without infringing about a dozen different laws. If she sneaked him in, then it would be very desperate and fearful, and not at all the right atmosphere for a musical.' 'You can be very, very serious in a musical,' she says, rebuking me, but as a matter of form. 'We could use the local songs and dances. The music of Central Africa would be quite new to our viewers. ' 'At the time this story is set in, the Africans were listening to jazz from America. They hadn't started developing their own forms. ' Now her look at me says: You're simply trying to be difficult. She abandons the musical and says: 'Well, if we bought the property with an idea of doing the story straight, I feel the locale would have to be changed. My suggestion would be an army base in England. An American base. An American G. I. in love with an English girl. ' 'A Negro G. I.?' She hesitates. 'Well, that would be difficult. Because after all, this is basically just a very simple love story. I am a very, very great admirer of the British war film. You make such wonderful war films-such restraint. You have such-tact. That kind of feeling, we should aim for that. And the war atmosphere-the Battle of Britain atmosphere, then a simple love story, one of our boys and one of your girls. ' 'But if you made him a Negro G. I. you could use all the indigenous folk music from your deep South?' 'Well, yes. But you see it wouldn't be fresh for our viewers. ' 'I can see it now,' I say. 'A chorus of American Negro G. I.'s, in an English country village in wartime, with another chorus of fresh young English girls doing indigenous English country folk dances.' I grin at her. She frowns. Then she grins. Then our eyes meet and she lets out a snort of laughter. She laughs again. Then she checks herself and sits frowning. And just as if this subversive laughter had not occurred she takes a deep breath and begins: 'Of course you are an artist, a very fine artist, it is a privilege to meet you and talk to you, and you have a deep and natural reluctance to see anything you have written changed. But you must let me say this, it is a mistake to be over-impatient about television. It is the art form of the future-that is how I see it, and that is why I am so privileged to work with and for it.' She stops: the solitary American is looking around for the waiter-but no, he wants more coffee. She turns her attention to me and continues: 'Art, as a very, very great man once said, is a matter of patience. If you'd like to think over what we've discussed and write to me-or perhaps you'd like to try and write us a screenplay on another theme? Of course we cannot commission work from an artist who has not had previous television experience, but we will be happy to give you all the advice and help we can.' 'Thank you.' 'Are you thinking of visiting the States? I would be so happy if you would give me a call and we could discuss any ideas you might have?' I hesitate. I almost stop myself. Then I know I can't stop myself. I say: 'There is nothing I'd like better than to visit your country, but alas, I wouldn't be let in, I'm a communist.' Her eyes snap into my face, wide and blue and startled. She makes at the same time an involuntary movement-the start of pushing back her chair and going. Her breathing quickens. I see someone who is frightened. Already I am sorry and ashamed. I said that for a variety of reasons, the first being childish: I wanted to shock her. Secondly, equally childish, a feeling that I ought to say it-if someone said afterwards: Of course she is a communist, this woman would feel as if I had been concealing it. Thirdly, I wanted to see what would happen. She sits, opposite me, breathing fast, her eyes uncertain, her pink lips, rather smeared now, parted. She is thinking: Next time I must be careful to make enquiries. She is also seeing herself as a victim-that morning I had read through a batch of cuttings from the States about dozens of people sacked from their jobs, being grilled by Anti-American committees, etc. She says breathlessly: 'Of course things are quite different here in England, I realise that...' Her woman-of-the-world mask cracks right across, and she blurts out: 'But my dear, I'd never have guessed in a thousand years that...' This means: I like you so how can you be a communist? This suddenly makes me so angry, the provincialism of it, that I feel as I always feel in these circumstances: Better to be a communist, and at almost any cost, better to be in touch than to be so cut off from any reality that one can make a remark as stupid as that. Now we are suddenly both very angry. She looks away from me, recovering herself. And I think of that night I spent talking to the Russian writer two years ago. We used the same language-the communist language. Yet our experience was so different that every phrase we used meant something different to each of us. A feeling of total unreality came over me, and finally, very late at night, or rather, early in the morning, I translated one of the things I had said out of the safe unreal jargon into something that had actually happened-I told him about Jan, who had been tortured in a prison in Moscow. And there was the same moment when his eyes focused on my face in fright, and the involuntary movement away, as if to escape-I was saying something that, if he had said it in his country, would have got him into prison. The fact was, that the phrases of our common philosophy were a means of disguising the truth. The truth was we had nothing in common, except the label, communist. And now with this American woman-we could use the language of democracy all night, but it would describe different experiences. We sat there, she and I, remembering that we liked each other as women. But there was nothing to say: just as after that moment with the Russian writer, there had been nothing more to say. Finally she says: 'Well, my dear, I've never been more surprised. I simply cannot understand it.' It is an accusation this time, and I am angry again. And she even goes on to say: 'Of course I admire your honesty.' Then I think: Well if I was in America now, being hunted by the committees, I wouldn't be sitting at an hotel table saying casually I am a communist. So being angry is dishonest-all the same, it is out of anger that I say drily: 'Perhaps it would be a good idea to check before you invite writers in this country to dinner, because quite a number might cause you embarrassment.' But now her face shows that she has gone a very long distance from me: she is
suspicious: I am in the pigeon-hole communist, and therefore I am probably lying. And I remembered that moment with the Russian writer when he had the choice, either to meet me on what I was saying, and to discuss it, or to contract out, which he did by putting on a look of ironical knowledge, and saying: 'Well it's not the first time a friend of our country has turned into an enemy.' In other words: you have succumbed to pressures from the capitalist enemy. Luckily, at this juncture, the American appears, standing by our table. I wonder if the balance has been tipped for him by the fact that she had genuinely, and not from calculation, ceased to be aware of him. I feel sad at this, because I think it is true. 'Well, Jerry,' she says, 'I wondered if we'd run into each other, I heard you were in London.' 'Hi,' he says, 'how are you, good to see you.' Well-dressed, self-possessed, good-natured. 'This is Miss Wulf,' she says, and with difficulty, because what she is feeling is: I am introducing a friend to an enemy, I ought to be warning him in some way. 'Miss Wulf is a very, very well-known writer,' she says; and I see that the words well-known writer have taken some of the edge off her nervousness. I say: 'Perhaps you'll forgive me if I leave you both? I should go home and see to my daughter.' She is obviously relieved. We all leave the dining-room. As I say good-bye and turn away I see her slip her hand into his elbow. I hear her say: 'Jerry, I'm so happy you are here, I thought I was in for a lonely evening.' He says: 'My dear Eddy, when have you ever spent a lonely evening unless you opted one?' I see her smile-dry and grateful to him. As for me, I go home thinking that, in spite of everything, the moment when I broke the comfortable surface of our acquaintanceship was the only honest moment in the evening. Yet I feel ashamed and dissatisfied and depressed, just as I did after the night talking to the Russian. [The red notebook.]