Yestermorrow Page 8

“I’ve been working on a book called Dandelion Wine for ten years,” I said. “About my childhood, my folks, my friends in upper Illinois in 1929.”

  “Finish it!” said Berenson. “Let me see it. Now, later this afternoon—have you been to the Duomo yet? No? Out you go.”

  And out we went and the days passed and it was time to leave for Venice. Not a sad leaving, we discovered, for B.B. was heading for Venice the same week. Whether he came along to be with us, or whether he had planned the trip for himself months before, we never knew, and were too timid to ask. The great thing was—B.B. would be there, wandering the canals and streets, to welcome us!

  B.B. wasn’t there.

  Well, he was there, said the voice on the hotel phone, but he was gone. Gone where? Out. Out like a small child, unable to wait for one more encounter with Raphael, one more collision with Tintoretto!

  No one, not even Nicky, knew where he was. He would come wandering back soon, of course, and then we would lunch.

  We went out, hoping to find B.B., but found, instead, to his later delight, the special Veroneses he loved, plus the Bellinis, plus, plus, the list was endless, as was the after-lunch, high-tea, before-dinner, early bedtime talk, for our time was running out. We’d been away from America for eight months. Our families were waiting a long way off; it was time to go home.

  Meanwhile I had fallen in love with the theatrics of Tintoretto. I used the term in ignorance and found that it was absolutely center-target, on-the-nose. Berenson showed me some sketches of miniature theaters Tintoretto had built and lit so as to study and duplicate his experiments in chiaroscuro.

  Toward the end of our last drink together, B.B. let his eyes flash and his mouth work over a tidbit that he soon let forth: “You mustn’t mind me when I sometimes quietly insinuate you might grow better without all that machinery to hold you up.”

  “Mr. Berenson,” I said. “I—”

  “No, no, let me finish.” He waved his small hand and leaned forward. “For I suddenly remember a device whereby the Boy David was created. Ask me now: how was the Boy David hammered out of his rock, eh? Where does the mighty Michelangelo begin to cut such an incredible figure out of marble?”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Well, now—” B.B. leaned to refill my glass and sketch out the grand details. “Michelangelo built himself an inkwell twenty inches high and filled it to the brim with ink. In that inkwell he suspended an eighteen-inch-tall model miniature of the David. Each day he drained an eighth of an inch of ink from the well. The sides of the well were marked in measures corresponding to inches on the huge slab of marble from which the David would be summoned. Measuring in from the sides of the inkwell to the crown of the miniature of David’s head, Michelangelo then climbed up on the great stone and struck his first blow! Day-by-day, the ink was lowered, day-by-day the marble David emerged from the living rock!”

  I was tremendously excited by the concept, having never heard of it. The more I thought on it, the more excited I became.

  “I have always loved world’s fairs and the arts and sciences exhibitions there,” I said. “Someday, by God, someone will give me a chance to help design an Art Gallery of the Future. At the center of it, I want to act out the very process you’ve described, using three-dimensional models and film. Let a visitor press a button at the front of the exhibit and watch the ink go down an eighth of an inch in the inkwell, revealing the miniature David. Then, to one side show a twenty-foot-tall projected image of the waiting marble. As the ink lowers in the real well, the film moves, the rock shatters under an invisible hammer, and the top of David’s head thrusts high up out of the stone. In 60 seconds flat, your curious gallery-ite would watch head, torso, arms, legs, cut from the rock, even as he touched the button to drain the ink.”

  “Bravo!” said B.B. “Write it down. Someday—do it!”

  One day, I did. The idea has been fed into the concepts for a technological art museum to be built somewhere in the United States in the next few years.

  But meanwhile, the last wineglass was emptied, the last good-byes said. “And you’re not to call me Mr. Berenson anymore. It’s B.B. And you must write often and come back soon. Good-bye children, good-bye.”

  The next day, in the hour before leaving Venice on the train, I wandered a last time in the Academy, and, on impulse, hurried to B.B.’s hotel and sent twenty dozen flowers up to his room.

  Marguerites, they were, and I would have sent more, but I had bought out the supply.

  We sailed for home, thinking we would never see him again, But, as he said later, he had books to read and books to write and pictures to look at and honorary sons like myself to tend to.

  We began a tennis-match correspondence, which lasted, with Nicky’s help, to within a few weeks before his death.

  I cannot convince the reader how important these letters were. Remember, those were still lonely times for me. The Space Age, I repeat, was only a rumor beyond a horizon so far off it was ridiculous to contemplate. Science fiction was hidden away with the dust in the libraries. None of it, absolutely none, was taught in the schools. We writers of speculative nonsense were the lost tribe of literature, wandering the earth, begging for a crumb of attention. I got my precious crumb from B.B. when, in letters like this, waiting for me when I reached home, he spoke the needful words that made me want to go on writing and living for him:

  June 29th, 1954

  Dear Ray:

  Before leaving Venice today I want to tell you how much, while here, I have been thinking of you, and enjoying reading reviews of your writings, both in England and in France… all so favorable. Dear Boy, you have a wonderful future before you. Get us none of the wax, and let us have the bare bones of your gifts. You have such a clean and deep insight into human nature, and a talent for communicating it to others that your responsibility is great….

  Ever yours, B.B.

  Did ever such a son have such a father?

  What an army we made, he to lead, me to follow, he promising to read any damn thing I dared to write, and me storming my typewriter because of that promise.

  More letters followed, and I sent B.B. not only books but individual stories, one of which he responded to as follows:

  …Do you own my Painters of the Renaissance? If you do, turn to that section about Raphael in which I asked the same questions (as in your story).

  …I heartily approve of your keeping away from the critics… even though it may entail privations. I have never known an author who did not lose by it, in creative zest.

  …I long to see you and your beloved wife. You cannot come (here) too soon.

  Again and again in our writing back and forth, B.B. and I circled ’round the touchstone that was our constant center: the joy of creation, the passion with which I tried to do things born of pure love or pure hate (when something was truly worth hating), and the fact that I threw up, as I put it, every morning, and cleaned up after lunch. The creative explosion first, then the critical clearing of the concussion area. I told B.B. that I had had a sign by my typewriter for years that read: Don’t Think, Do!

  Plenty of time to think after your love is accomplished.

  B.B. approved.

  The praise he ladled on me, with intimations of his own mortality, could not but have caused a crisis in my life:

  August 18, 1955

  …You have imagination and psychology together, and when combined cannot fail to be suggestive of allegory, of prophecy…. How I wish I could live to see the full ripeness of your gifts.

  April 4, 1956

  …Dear Ray, if only you were here, what talks we could have. How absurd that you, who produce so much for the public, lack the money to come over. Let me hope that you will succeed in doing so very soon. Remember that I am within weeks of being ninety-one, and I neither expect nor want to live very much longer….

  This last did it. Tears sprang to my eyes. I took one look at my wife, as she read the letter. She nodded, reading my thoughts. I picked u
p the phone and called my film agent. “Get me a job, any job, anywhere in Europe,” I said. “We’ve got to make it to Italy this summer!”

  My agent called back an hour later with incredible news: “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “How would you like to go straight to Florence, Italy, and settle in to write a film based on the life of Lorenzo de’ Medici?”

  I was stunned, and gave a great shout. My agent filled in the details. It seemed that Tyrone Power was behind the project. He was working with a number of people whom my agent named. The more he talked, the quieter I became. With all the details given, I knew these were simply the wrong people to go live and work with.

  I thanked my agent, said no, and cabled B.B. to hang on, live! until we could make it over. I followed it with a letter. B.B. wrote back in July:

  …I am deeply disappointed that you are not coming over soon. Shall I ever see you again? I already am a month in my ninety-second year….

  …Very interesting the article on your script of Moby Dick…. I believe that any instrument can be used as the painter uses his brush, and the writer words, to produce a work of art… provided the user of the instrument is a heaven-inspired artist and not merely a day laborer…. My complaint against cinema and television is in the first place that I cannot linger contemplating over them—they pass so swiftly, and then that they are so bad for these eyes.

  …When I read, I can sip and gestate and stop to dream and wonder. The cinema is “Faster, faster, Circe Goddess. Let the bright procession, the eddying forms, sweep this, my soul!”

  …I want tranquility in enjoyment.

  …Do not cinema and TV contribute to the hideous pace of today, events crushed by those just behind them?!

  In January 1957 a note came from B.B.

  Dear Ray:

  Not even a Christmas card? Why, why, why?

  I cabled B.B. telling him that cards had been sent, but that the Italian mail service had a way of dumping mail off Capri if it suited them. A long letter to him followed. Then, a few months later I was able to write and tell him better news. Graham Greene had given a story of mine to Sir Carol Reed, the director of Odd Man Out and The Third Man. Reed had flown to Los Angeles to meet with me, and we were to return for a summer of screenplay writing in London.

  The summer was perfection with Sir Carol. The screenplay finished, we headed south to B.B., who, with his sister and Nicky, was avoiding the hot Italian weather in his retreat at Vallombrosa.

  We were reunited in joy, as if three years had not passed since our last fireworks. B.B. was, of course, even more the trembling grey moth now; the bones had thinned within the mother-of-pearl, crushed-flower flesh, but his spirits were good and his mind clean. The old testings, the gentle arguments bombarded me before, during, and after lunch, and took up again after a very long siesta, at late-afternoon tea.

  B.B. was harboring his strength even more now. He slept later, napped longer, and saved his energy for the various articles, not just one, that he wrote each afternoon before bedding down long before nine. Awake only a few hours a day, he made those hours burn and count.

  I had been a good son, of course, listening and doing over the years. I brought B.B. a copy of the first edition of my Dandelion Wine.

  “No Martians this time? Good, good. Not that your Martians aren’t fine company, good metaphor. But this, now—this—”

  He had come by happy accident on a chapter about an old man named Colonel Freeleigh. His eyes lingered and flashed.

  “You’ve caught some of me here, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  It was the story of an old, old man so packed with years and history that he was, to the town children, a Time Machine. But the Time Machine was in disrepair. The colonel, unable to travel, telephoned far places and had friends hang their telephones out windows in Mexico City, so he could hear the bright trolleys pass, or London as Big Ben struck midnight, or Paris to catch the maniac traffic coursing the Place de la Concorde.

  “The difference being,” observed B.B., “Time Machine that I am, I am still running, traveling, in spite of, did I tell you, falling over a precipice. Well, a small cliff. Well, again, into a small ditch. I was out of the car, bending over to examine some flowers, when the car backed up and the open door caught and tossed me head-over-heels!”

  “It terrified me to hear a cry,” said Nicky, “and turn and see B.B.—vanished!”

  “What a tumble. Nothing broken. Did we have a good laugh, Nicky?!”

  “We did!”

  “Now, listen,” said B.B. putting aside his teacup with hands that never stopped trembling now. “What else are you up to? Poetry?”

  “Very bad stuff,” I said.

  “Keep at it, it’ll go well one day. Plays?”

  “Mediocre one-acts.”

  “That will change! You have a good ear. More films?”

  “I’ve promised myself to do only one every four years.”

  “Fine. Keep it that way. I’m out of reading matter. Do me another novel!”

  “I will,” I said. And I did.

  Now there was the last hour of our last day with B.B. to finish out as the sun began to set. We played a game we had started years before of: “Who Owns What And Which and Why?” which has since become a small poem that I have just published.

  Who owns October, for instance? Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Wolfe. Among artists? Goya and Gustave Dore.

  Name your own writers, artists, reasons, and start the fight.

  Who owns Don Quixote? Dore, again. Think of the mad battler of windmills and his illustrations snap instantly in place. For that matter, Dore owns Dante and Milton and the Bible, too. And London, if you recall the scores of etchings he did in those teeming streets.

  Who owns the Beauty of Women in the world? B.B. opted for certain Raphaels, to be argumentative. I had just fallen in love with Botticelli’s creatures of autumn or the birthing seas. We compromised on da Vinci’s cartoon for The Virgin of the Rocks.

  Who owns winter? Whittier, perhaps. Perhaps Edith Sitwell.

  Christmas, Easter, summer, spring, old people, children, fairies, ghosts, kings, the list can be long and various and the nominations incredibly on-the-nose lovely or unacceptably ridiculous or grotesque.

  The last of the sun was gone. Wrapped in great blankets against a sudden chill, we said our good-byes. “And remember,” said B.B. “when you go to museums, only stay for an hour at a time! Don’t exhaust the body so as to exhaust the eye and tire the mind! Good-bye, young lady. Good-bye, dear boy. Remember this tired old man!”

  “Oh, B.B.,” I said. I embraced him and felt the trembling that was half age and half unspent ideas so much wanting to burst forth. “Oh, B.B., I always will.”

  His death was still two incredible years away. He had many journeys to go before his sleep, and he made as many as he could, dropping me cards along the way, glad for a son who was glad to receive them—the best of sons because I didn’t try to out-best papa or kill him for mom, or embarrass him before his peers. I professed my love to him and Nicky whenever I could. A last card came from them in October 1959, and a few days later the news broke that Mario Lanza, the singer, had died in Italy and, oh, yes, the same day, the art historian, Bernard Berenson. Long articles followed, of course, in every major newspaper and magazine. B.B. did not go quietly to join his friends in another century.

  In the late desert afternoon it came to me to think of him in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “What I do is me, for that I came.”

  If ever a man entered the world to become himself and know a time and declare its virtues and delineate its boundaries in terms of his own insatiable love and curiosity and light, it was this old man I had described as a Time Machine for us all. The machine had stopped now, but the territory it had mapped was still there, waiting to enhance our lives.

  I telegraphed Nicky the same dumb and inadequate words we always telegraph anyone at such a time. I wrote her a week later, recalling the good fact of
my last day in Venice when I had bought and brought to his hotel twenty dozen flowers, twenty dozen white marguerites for the living while they lived.

  All for B.B. All sent with joy and love from his now and everlasting son.

  1979

  FEDERICO FELLINI

  From sunlit midnights to moonlit noons

  Federico Fellini, may his films run forever! Federico Fellini, may the bulb burn out in his projector, may his film run dry.

  With a cry of joy you leap off a diving board, proclaiming his genius. Halfway down to what suddenly becomes an empty pool, you imitate those old newsreels, reverse sprockets and let yourself be flashed back up to stand dismayed at your cowardice, half-disillusioned but wanting to jump again.

  Such are the feelings when one turns the pages of the giant book, Fellini’s Films, about a giant autobiographical maker of films. And since Fellini is at odds with himself, you share his dichotomy.

  No matter what your delights or dismays with the films themselves, this tribute to the Italian genius contains 400 color and black and white stills from his fifteen and a half films, proving that he has a magician’s eye and an imagination born to be locked, if sometimes erratically, into a camera. Complementing the photographs are brief resumes of each motion picture written by Gilbert Salachas and Thomas Bodmer.

  In his foreword, Georges Simenon says Fellini is the cinema, “not the commercial or the avant-garde cinema, or that of any particular technique or genre, dramatic, comic or grotesque. He is a director who, using every means at his disposal—sometimes the most unexpected—communicates to us the humanity and the obsessions that seethe within him.”

  I agree with Simenon, even though it means an all-night brawl next time I visit a cinema-school’s after-screening beerbust.

  For he is indeed the grandson of Melies, the French-film fantasist, son and heir of Charles Chaplin, friend of Lon Chaney. When Fellini walks at night and calls, the gargoyles on Notre Dame waken to play parts. Quasimodo comes down and in new shapes speaks lines in La Strada and Satyricon, or lies a nameless monster on the beach in La Dolce Vita, surrounded by bored sophisticates who, momentarily touched by repulsion and sadness, wander off to their dooms.