Changing My Mind_ Occasional Essays Part 7

4.

Friday night brings a private party in the hills. The house is in the prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright; wide, low and elegantly extended. At the end of a wide vista of lawn lies a dimly lit swimming pool, a long thin rectangle cut out of plain white stone. Steam rises off the water. The many connecting doors are wide open: you can stand outside the bathroom and see right through the building to the garden, two hundred feet away. Freshly cut purple poppies are in their simple stone vases. Saul Steinberg is on the walls. Everyone is cold-even for the desert, this is a chilly night. People gather under heat lamps and squeeze four to a bench, keeping close for warmth. It is an effort to be continually amazed; these are humans, after all, and in a celebrity party without any press, the celebrity aspect fades, having nothing to contrast with. After pa.s.sing through the shock of their normal human scale and all that Photoshop obscures-smallness, wrinkles, slightly smeared mascara-you are left with something like a golden wedding anniversary party at which no one can identify the happy couple. The young actors goof off, tease their elders, threaten to play the piano. Elder statesmen greet one another with respectful formality, listing one another's achievements, discussing future projects. The nominees are, by now, battle-scarred companions-they've been through half a dozen award shows since January. People drink little and eat less. Music plays and an infamous wild-child starlet tries to encourage dancing but gets no takers. The atmosphere is civilized to the point of suffocation. In two aspects it is reminiscent of a party in a university town. First, it is entirely self-referential. People talk about Hollywood in Hollywood as they speak of Harvard at Harvard. Second, there is a great fear of the ridiculous. People take care not to say anything that might make them look foolish. This fear manifests itself in a strange impulse to narrate events as they happen and thereby hold fast to a shared understanding of their meaning. Jokes are met not with laughter but with the statement "That's hilarious. That is so so funny." Interesting or risque anecdotes are neutralized by saying "That is darling. She's funny." Interesting or risque anecdotes are neutralized by saying "That is darling. She's completely completely darling." People are friendly, polite, but never frivolous. Joan Didion, a West Coast believer but a Hollywood skeptic, has the last word on such events: "Flirtations between men and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of character actors out from New York, one-shot-writers . . . and others who do not understand the darling." People are friendly, polite, but never frivolous. Joan Didion, a West Coast believer but a Hollywood skeptic, has the last word on such events: "Flirtations between men and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of character actors out from New York, one-shot-writers . . . and others who do not understand the mise mise of the local of the local scene. scene."

5.

At about one in the morning, the young waiters, who have worked discreetly all night, now begin to approach: "I just wanted to say, I really dig your work. I think you're totally amazing. Good luck on Sunday!" The actors, caught midway through conversations about their families, their dogs, a book they've read, a good restaurant in New York, now have to put their game face back on and become whoever it is the waiter thinks they are. They do this, for the most part, graciously. Confronted with such an embarra.s.sment of riches, each waiter has chosen his virtual intimate to hara.s.s-that special actor who made him cry in the cinema, the singer whose tunes he plays when he clocks off work.

Outside the party the paparazzi have arrived. They do not have to chase anybody-there is nowhere to run. We are on a dark hillside in the middle of night. "And what would happen," asks a rueful young director, "If an actor just stood out there all night? Took a photo from every possible angle, naked, told them every last thing they wanted to know. Would that be it? Would they be finished then?" It's a long process; the huddle under heat lamps, the wait for cars. The actors themselves are relaxed about both the wait and the photographers outside; it's their drivers who are anxious and defensive, projecting desires onto their charges that don't seem to be there: "Can I get this guy out of the way for you? Shall I move him out of your face?" An actor goes out into the scrum and then comes back a minute later. "They don't recognize me-I got fat for a role and now they don't recognize me. I'm fasting now. Eight days so far." To which comes the reply, "Me too! I just did five. Isn't it great! great!"

6.

A few of the nominees adjourn to Canter's, a sprawling Jewish diner where you can get good chicken soup at two in the morning. I order one such soup with a matzo ball the size of my fist swimming in the center. The nominees order a plate of pickles and corned beef sandwiches; they drink beer and joke with a gang of teenage girls behind them. They talk about an actor's distant family correction to the poet Wordsworth, about Hollywood, the house prices in Brooklyn and who has the largest fry on their plate. How to explain the fact that the same kinds of kids who on Sunday will scream their lungs out on the bleachers outside the Kodak Theatre are, right now, at two in the morning in Canter's, sitting perfectly calmly while several globally famous actors eat home fries in the booth right next to them?

7.

On morning TV, some of the human beings from the night before are being described in Olympian terms by a pretty girl with a microphone. The detail is obsessive and alienating: what they might wear, eat and drink this coming Sunday is carefully itemized and salivated over; how they exercise, what they think about, whom they kiss, how they speak, where they go. The answers to these questions are all different, but one truth reigns: they are other. In relation to them, the only correct position is incomprehending awe. One cannot imagine their world, their ways.

I take my laptop out in an attempt to work by the water. A hot girl is loudly telling another hot girl that "Brokeback is so f.u.c.king awesome," which is the consensus of the town, though little satisfaction can be drawn from this. That is so f.u.c.king awesome," which is the consensus of the town, though little satisfaction can be drawn from this. That Brokeback, Capote Brokeback, Capote and and Crash Crash are f.u.c.king awesome is neither here nor there for Hollywood: these films were all privately funded. This pool, like every pool in town, is now more frequently visited by excited young writers with laptops who have been cheered by the year's "maverick" wave. This is the time for telling the world how Harpo Marx met Armand Hammer. Up in the hills the mood is less joyous. Strung up all over town are giant posters for Paramount's new romantic comedy are f.u.c.king awesome is neither here nor there for Hollywood: these films were all privately funded. This pool, like every pool in town, is now more frequently visited by excited young writers with laptops who have been cheered by the year's "maverick" wave. This is the time for telling the world how Harpo Marx met Armand Hammer. Up in the hills the mood is less joyous. Strung up all over town are giant posters for Paramount's new romantic comedy Failure To Launch, Failure To Launch, which is exactly the kind of underperforming, studio-made film that is causing the problem. These posters, with their airbrushed, smiling stars, flutter above the highway like the standards of a king who has been deposed, at least for this weekend. which is exactly the kind of underperforming, studio-made film that is causing the problem. These posters, with their airbrushed, smiling stars, flutter above the highway like the standards of a king who has been deposed, at least for this weekend.

8.

Brunch with the nominated writers. Like everybody else, I have my Hollywood fantasy, and this it: a 1920s Spanish-style villa with original Mexican red and blue tiles in the fountain, with a living room Jimmy Stewart may have sat in once. It's next to a golf course; every few years a ball breaks a window. The weather is darling: eggs and bacon and omelets are served in the courtyard. Being with writers instead of actors is like sitting in the pits instead of in the G.o.ds-one can speak freely, without fear. This is not their lives, but only an interlude. They make sure to tell you how they have kept their Manhattan apartments. Occasionally you meet a delusional Hollywood screenwriter who believes that without people like him there would be no movie business at all. Factually, of course, this is true-but it is delusional to draw any real conclusions from it. Scripts will be written, if need be, by fifteen people and the producer, or one million monkeys and a typewriter. Most screenwriters understand this and are wry about their Hollywood interludes. They are full of warnings and horror stories. "Do a first draft, but don't touch it after that-unless you want your heart broken." Or, alternatively, "Do the final polish, but that's it. You'll never write another novel if you get in too deep." One writer nods and smiles encouragingly as some structural plans are outlined. "That's very nice. But it doesn't mean s.h.i.t once an actor gets hold of it." There is a campy relish for the Hollywood experience among the writers that is inaccessible to the "front-of-house" actors, who must live every day with the fantasies that are pressed upon them. "I weigh myself four times daily!" a man screeches, laughing as he says it. His companion wants to know if he has ever found that he weighs something different by the end of the day than he did at the start.

"Frequently!"

9.

Oscar morning arrives and it is impossible not to succ.u.mb to the thrill of the thing. A man comes to do my makeup. Here is his a.s.sessment of my dress: "If you were collecting the all-time queen of Hollywood lifetime achievement award, you would be overdressed." A c.o.c.ktail dress is subst.i.tuted. At four o'clock in the afternoon, I get in a car and pick up two writers who are writing a film that actually has a shot at getting made. We are going to the Vanity Fair Vanity Fair dinner at Morton's to watch the ceremony on video screens, eat some great tuna and then wait for everybody to leave the Kodak Theatre and join us. The Oscar ceremony most resembles Christmas in its sense of anticlimax. Everyone was so excited earlier; now they are subdued, and grow more subdued as prizes are won and the potential web of alternative futures gets smaller and smaller, until there are only the people who won and everyone else who didn't. There is a chorus of "Well, that's just dinner at Morton's to watch the ceremony on video screens, eat some great tuna and then wait for everybody to leave the Kodak Theatre and join us. The Oscar ceremony most resembles Christmas in its sense of anticlimax. Everyone was so excited earlier; now they are subdued, and grow more subdued as prizes are won and the potential web of alternative futures gets smaller and smaller, until there are only the people who won and everyone else who didn't. There is a chorus of "Well, that's just hilarious hilarious" from every table as the Oscar host makes his jokes, although few people actually laugh, and everyone is made tense by occasional jibes against individuals, studios or Hollywood itself. When it is over people seem relieved. The consensus is that it wasn't as bad as it might have been. One girl text messages through the entire event.

And then they come. We are told to vacate our tables and walk forward, where we will find Morton's magically extended by the addition of a huge tarpaulin tent. At the mouth of the tent, the same TV girl with the microphone interviews the stars as they appear. Her MO is extreme naivete: "What goes on on in there?" she keeps asking, although she is as famous as many of the people inside and will soon join the party. "Can you just give us in there?" she keeps asking, although she is as famous as many of the people inside and will soon join the party. "Can you just give us some idea some idea of what kind of thing happens at a party like this?" Most of the invitees are at a loss to answer this question. An action star thinks about it and then indulges her: "It's like Vegas: what goes on in there stays in there." But "in there" there is only a charming, if tame, c.o.c.ktail party, with a good deal of free booze and stilted conversation and a Porta-Potty. Everywhere people are trying to get introduced to other people, and feel glad when they are. These are melancholy victories, though. At a normal party we befriend people with the hope of seeing them again, of having a friendship, even a love affair. A "celebrity" encounter is more like a badge to be collected and then shown to other people. A whole night of collecting such badges grows demoralizing. You begin to understand the angry people you meet in Hollywood, who by choice or necessity regularly submit themselves to these one-way charm offensives, speaking with other human beings whom the world believes to be more than that. Yet there are people who seem to enjoy it; who work the room collecting all the badges and have no time to waste. At this party, a very short man who had been talking to a star and then, through a subtle shift in the circle, got stuck with me, actually asked to be released from his bondage. "Is it okay if I talk to someone else over there?" of what kind of thing happens at a party like this?" Most of the invitees are at a loss to answer this question. An action star thinks about it and then indulges her: "It's like Vegas: what goes on in there stays in there." But "in there" there is only a charming, if tame, c.o.c.ktail party, with a good deal of free booze and stilted conversation and a Porta-Potty. Everywhere people are trying to get introduced to other people, and feel glad when they are. These are melancholy victories, though. At a normal party we befriend people with the hope of seeing them again, of having a friendship, even a love affair. A "celebrity" encounter is more like a badge to be collected and then shown to other people. A whole night of collecting such badges grows demoralizing. You begin to understand the angry people you meet in Hollywood, who by choice or necessity regularly submit themselves to these one-way charm offensives, speaking with other human beings whom the world believes to be more than that. Yet there are people who seem to enjoy it; who work the room collecting all the badges and have no time to waste. At this party, a very short man who had been talking to a star and then, through a subtle shift in the circle, got stuck with me, actually asked to be released from his bondage. "Is it okay if I talk to someone else over there?"

This party is fun, all are beautiful, except for the old men who are powerful. People are drinking, finally, and the room is full of indiscreet conversation, much of it about where people will go next. Are you following the rappers with the thirty-thousand-dollar grills on their teeth and their newest accessory-a gold statuette in the palm? Or are you following the Frenchmen holding plush toy penguins above their heads? Committed badge collectors follow the whisper of the hope of an invitation up into the Hollywood Hills, in someone else's car, with no clear idea of how they will get home.

Outside Morton's, waiting for my car back to the hotel, I meet an old actor, a favorite of the late John Ca.s.savetes, smoking a cigar and explaining how things are with him. "He chose me, you see?" he says of Ca.s.sevetes. "Me. It was a thing to be chosen by him, I can tell you that." He is full of soul, and his eyes are rheumy and beautiful. "This town's treated me well. I was never a star, no one knows my name, but I always worked, and now it's given me a retirement plan. I'm the old dude in any movie you care to mention. Make nine or ten a year." He smiled joyfully. We stood together on the forecourt with a lot of other people less joyful: losing nominees, yesterday's news, TV stars, hungry models and people so famous they couldn't get to their car without causing a riot. Of all the fantasies and dreams people have of a life in Hollywood, it seemed odd that no one had thought to dream a career like the one just described.

10.

The next day I woke at eight. In the name of research I watched an hour of fantasy television about the Oscars that in no way described the evening I had just had. I went back to sleep and woke at eleven. I checked out and dragged my hangover and my laptop down to the pool. It was empty. I ordered a quesadilla, but the speedy service that had been in place only yesterday had vanished. It took half an hour to get some Tabasco sauce. And then it began to rain, softly at first and then dramatically. I moved in under the gla.s.s roof and thought of nearby San Fernando Valley, where the American p.o.r.n industry-a fantasy industry even larger and more remunerative than Hollywood-is located. The pool boys packed up the loungers around me. The rain drummed the surface of the pool and forced water over its edge, soaking the feet of the waitresses as they cleared the tables.

I packed up myself and went outside to wait for a cab. Three New York hipster kids ran into the hotel with their coats above their heads, one of them complaining: "It's not supposed to rain! rain!" The dream persists, even as reality a.s.serts itself. I looked to my right and for the first time that weekend spotted someone I actually knew: Bret Easton Ellis. He asked what I was doing in L.A. and I told him. I asked what he was doing, and he looked at me with a kind of beatific insanity, as if he didn't quite believe what he was about to say: "I'm moving back to L.A.!" I wanted to a share a novelist's joke with him: what if you got a.s.signed to write about the Oscars and you didn't mention a single actor? You know, as a kind of demystifying strategy? How about that? But he had to get in his car. Anyway, Bret's been there, done that: his own Glamorama Glamorama tried another demystifying strategy, with fifty celebrities name-dropped in the first five pages. But the fantasies of fame cannot be dislodged by anyone's pen. It'll have to be a collective effort; we'll have to wake from this dream together. It'll be darling. tried another demystifying strategy, with fifty celebrities name-dropped in the first five pages. But the fantasies of fame cannot be dislodged by anyone's pen. It'll have to be a collective effort; we'll have to wake from this dream together. It'll be darling.

FEELING.

Fourteen.

SMITH FAMILY CHRISTMAS.

This is a picture of my father and me, Christmas 1980 or thereabouts. Across his chest and my bottom there is the faint pink, inverted watermark of postal instructions-something about a card, and then "stamp here." Hanging from the tree like a decoration more mirror writing, this time from my own pen. Does it say Nothing Nothing? Or maybe Letting Letting? I've ruined this photo. I don't understand why I can't take better care of things like this. It's an original, I have no negative, yet I allowed it to sit for months in a pile of mail on my open windowsill. Finally the photo got soaked, imprinted with the text of phone bills and Post-it notes. I felt sick wedging it inside my OED OED to stop the curling. But I also felt the weird relief that comes from knowing that the inevitable destruction of precious things, though done in your house, was not done by your hand. Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret of all kinds-no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your heavy stuff. Christmas is heavy. to stop the curling. But I also felt the weird relief that comes from knowing that the inevitable destruction of precious things, though done in your house, was not done by your hand. Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret of all kinds-no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your heavy stuff. Christmas is heavy.

Anyway, it's done now. And this is me and my dad one Christmas past. I'm five and he's too old to have a five-year-old. At the time, the Smiths lived in London in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens, one black family squished between two tribes at war. It was confusing. I didn't understand why certain football games made people pour into Biddy Mulligan's pub and hit other people over the head with chairs and bottles, and I didn't get the thing about people pouring into the Prince Charles the next day and repeating the procedure. I didn't get the men who came around collecting for the IRA on Christmas Eve, and I didn't have to give them anything either-once they saw my mum, with her exotic shift dress and her cornrows, they respectfully withdrew, thinking we had nothing to do with their particular argument. In fact, my parents were friends with an Irishman who gave us a homemade fruit bowl this same Christmas and then the following winter betrayed the spirit of Christmas by making a different kind of homemade gift with which he tried to blow up No. 11 Downing Street. We knew nothing about the bomb until years later, but we all knew about the ugly fruit bowl, ceramic and swirly and unable to stand straight on a tabletop. This was filled with nuts and laid on the carpet to limit the wobble. It's out of the frame in this photo, on the floor by Dad's feet. My brother Ben, a little fat thing back then, has it between his legs like Buddha with his lotus flower. Ben was always on food detail in the war that is Christmas. I did, or overdid, the decorations (as you will note, the tree is bending to the left under the weight of manga-eyed reindeer, chocolate Santas, swollen baubles, tinsel, three sets of lights and the presents I tastefully nestled in the branches). Dad cooked. Mum marked out television schedules with a pen. Ben ate the food. Just as Joseph tended to the Virgin Mary, we tended to Ben, making his comfort our first priority. He ate what he needed, and whatever was left we ate. I think it's Carole King's Tapestry Tapestry on the record player. But which song? "It's Too Late" would make thematic sense-my dad's smile has the let's-just-get-through-this tension of a code-red marriage. As for the "Natural Woman" Christmas or the "You've Got a Friend" Christmas-these predate my consciousness. But they must have existed, what with Ben being a September baby and me October. Those were the s.e.xy Noels, delivering babies like presents nine months later. By contrast, Luke, my youngest brother, came in July and is still unborn in this photo. I've always a.s.sumed he was the result of awe-haven't-had-s.e.x-in-five-years birthday treat (Dad's birthday is in late September), and by the time he turned up, on the record player. But which song? "It's Too Late" would make thematic sense-my dad's smile has the let's-just-get-through-this tension of a code-red marriage. As for the "Natural Woman" Christmas or the "You've Got a Friend" Christmas-these predate my consciousness. But they must have existed, what with Ben being a September baby and me October. Those were the s.e.xy Noels, delivering babies like presents nine months later. By contrast, Luke, my youngest brother, came in July and is still unborn in this photo. I've always a.s.sumed he was the result of awe-haven't-had-s.e.x-in-five-years birthday treat (Dad's birthday is in late September), and by the time he turned up, Blood on the Tracks Blood on the Tracks had replaced had replaced Tapestry Tapestry as the family Christmas soundtrack. Maybe you wonder about the black man in the pink hat. I wonder about him, too. I think he's an uncle of mine by the name of Denzil (spelling uncertain). My mother claims an uncertain number of siblings, certainly more than twenty, most of them-in the Jamaican parlance-"outdoor children," meaning same father, different mother. Denzil must have been one of these, because he was six foot seven, whereas my mother is five foot five and shrinking, as I'm sure I will, and as my grandmother did before us. as the family Christmas soundtrack. Maybe you wonder about the black man in the pink hat. I wonder about him, too. I think he's an uncle of mine by the name of Denzil (spelling uncertain). My mother claims an uncertain number of siblings, certainly more than twenty, most of them-in the Jamaican parlance-"outdoor children," meaning same father, different mother. Denzil must have been one of these, because he was six foot seven, whereas my mother is five foot five and shrinking, as I'm sure I will, and as my grandmother did before us.

This Christmas was the only time we ever met each other, Denzil and I. He was the gift that kept on giving, with his strange patois and his huge feet and the piggyback rides he conducted out on the balcony because the ceilings were too low. Outside was where he wanted to be anyway-you can tell that much from the look of infinite weariness he's giving my dad's left elbow. Poor Denzil; off the plane from Jamaica into bitter England, and stuck in the most cultish, insular day in the nuclear-family calendar. Families speak in semaph.o.r.e at Christmas; the falcons are the only ones to understand the falconer, and something dismal is slouching toward Bethlehem. It's called The Truth About What Happens to Your Family When No Member Is Allowed to Leave the House The Truth About What Happens to Your Family When No Member Is Allowed to Leave the House. Outsiders do best if they seeketh neither enlightenment nor the remote control.

Denzil found this out when he attempted, on this most sacred of days, to do the things we could not do because we'd always done them another way, our way-a way we all hated, to be sure, but could not change. Denzil wants to open a present on Christmas Eve-don't do that, Denzil. Denzil wants to go for a walk-I'm so sorry, Denzil, that's impossible. We'd like to, but we just can't swing it. Why not? Because, Denzil. Just because. Because like the two parts of Ireland, because like the Holy Trinity, because like nuclear proliferation, like men not wearing skirts, because like brandy b.u.t.ter.

Because that's the way we do things around here, Denzil. We don't eat till four o'clock, we open the smallest presents first, we have to watch two MGM musicals when we wake up, followed by a Jimmy Stewart movie, and then settle down in front of a feted sitcom's "Christmas special," which is also the time-read my lips-when we begin the search for batteries to go into the many things we have bought that require batteries we forgot to buy. Don't mess with us on this, Denzil. The Smiths are not for turning. It's our way or the highway. We want Christmas, dead or alive.

I make it sound bad. In truth, we had great times. As great as anybody's. Certainly better than Denzil's the year he got his own place and phoned us to say he'd killed a partridge in the backyard with a slingshot and just finished eating it like a proper English gentleman (it was a London pigeon, of course). Oh, we Smiths are ardent seekers after the spirit of Christmas, and we do not listen to Iris Murdoch's sensible a.n.a.logical advice: "Good represents the reality of which G.o.d is the dream." We're chasing the dream, baby.

But we do sense the more difficult truth: that Family represents the reality of which Christmas is the dream. It is, of course, Family (messy, complex, miserable, happy, so many gradations of those last two words) that is the real gift, beneath the wrapping. Family is the daily miracle, and Christmas is the enforcement of ideals that, in truth, do not matter. It would be tempting therefore to say, "Well, then ditch Christmas!" the same way people say "Ditch G.o.d" or "Ditch marriage," but people find it hard to do these things because they feel that there is more than a ghost in these machines; there is an animating spirit.

Santa help me, but I believe this, too. You know you believe it when you start your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and then he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that's what he did in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh. It is a moving and comic thing-a Murdochian scuffle between the Real and the Dream-to watch a young couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid internecine festive warfare.

Of course, sometimes the angel of history gets the better of you; one part of your family simply secedes from the other. When my parents divorced, seven years after this photo, the Christmas war became briefly more violent (which day, which house, which parent) and then grew subdued, because peace is what you want, in the end, at Christmas. On that one day you value it more than your life. Nowadays, we all get into a car with presents in the trunk, quietly drive to my father's in Felixstowe, where two people divorced fifteen years ago rediscover that cycle whereby "It's Too Late" doubles back onto itself and becomes "You've Got a Friend." It's called a cease-fire.

Then, last year, out of nowhere hostilities resumed. Not with my dad, who is beyond such things now, but between mother and brood. That ancient battle poor Denzil couldn't understand, the one about not b.l.o.o.d.y leaving the house on Christmas Eve, which is the one day you're meant to spend with your b.l.o.o.d.y family, the one day your mother asks for a little quality time, et cetera, hit the house like a grenade, and everybody yelled a lot and walked out and I spent Christmas Eve sleeping in my friend Adam's bath.

I see now the mistake we made. We thought that because we'd reached adulthood, Mum wouldn't mind if we ditched Christmas-the ritual, the dream, the animating spirit, the whole shebang-and just paraded around town at nightclubs and other people's dinner parties as if we were individuals living in the free world. Don't ever think that. Where women are concerned (mothers especially), Zora Neale Hurston had it right: the dream is the truth. After all, for 364 days of the year you live in the Real. Your mother is asking you only for this one day. It's nothing, it says on my photo, nothing but letting; it's about letting Christmas in, letting go of that Kantian will of yours, getting freaky like Iris, giving it up to a beautiful, insane, mystical idea. So you damaged the photo of Christmas Past-well, let's try it again: Christmas Present, Christmas Future. "War is over, if you want it," sang John and Yoko. So let it happen.

Fifteen.

ACCIDENTAL HERO.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the BBC asked members of the public to submit their personal war stories. These were to be placed online as a historical resource. I helped my father to write his account and then, using the material I had gathered, expanded it into a newspaper article, of which this is a revised version.

I knew my father had "stormed the beach at Normandy." I knew n.o.body else's father had-that job had been wisely left to their grandfathers. That's all I knew. As a child, the mildewed war came to me piecemeal through the usual sources, very rarely from him. Harvey never spoke about it as a personal reality, and the truth was I didn't think of it as a reality, but only as one of many fictional details woven into the fabric of my childhood: Jane Eyre was sent to the red room, Lucy Pevensie met Mr. Tumnus, Harvey Smith stormed the beach at Normandy. Later, in my twenties, small facts escaped, mostly concerning his year spent in Germany helping with the reconstruction. But Normandy stayed as fictional to me as Narnia. "Stormed!"-this made no sense. A sentimental man, physically gentle, pacifistic in all things and possessed of a liberal heart that does not so much bleed as hemorrhage. It is perfectly normal to phone my father around 6:30 in the evening and find him distraught, reduced to tears by watching the news.

Then one recent adult summer, I happened to find myself in Normandy, visiting an American poet. She was writing a verse sequence about the layers of social history in the area and took me on a day trip to the beach, where we swam and sat in the sun. It was stupidly late into my swim before it occurred to me that this might be the beach Harvey had landed upon, fifty-nine years earlier. I mentioned it to the poet, and she asked after details I was shamed to admit I didn't have. Our day turned historical. She showed me Juno Beach, the cliffs in which the snipers crouched, the maze of hedgerows that proved so lethal. Finally, the American cemetery. Thousands upon thousands of squat white crosses, punctuated by the Star of David, line up in rows on the manicured gra.s.s. You can't see the end of it. I'm my father's daughter: I burst into tears.

I returned home, full of journalistic zeal. I bought a Dictaphone. This seemed like half the job done already. I was the gutsy truth seeker, uncovering the poignant war story of a man who found it all too painful to talk about. Except I found my father not especially resistant to the idea. True, he had never really spoken about it-then again, I had never really asked. He laid out a fish lunch in his garden in Felixstowe and carefully set up the microphone on its little stand.

"It's funny you mention it, actually." Why was it funny? "Well, I've been thinking a bit about it, what with the anniversary. It's only now that I've started thinking: I would like my lost service medals back . . . you know, for next year. Just be nice, wouldn't it." But why didn't you ask for them back, years ago? "Well . . . they charge you for them, don't they," said Harvey doubtfully, and returned to filleting his grilled sole.

A struggle my father has always had: between hating war and having been in one, between being committed to, as he puts it, the future, and at the same time not wanting to be entirely forgotten. I think he was surprised, at this late hour, to find he wanted his medals back. I was surprised I wanted to see them. A kindly veteran who lives opposite helped us send off the necessary paperwork. When the medals arrived, I came up to Felixstowe and we sat about staring at them. These moon rocks laid out on the kitchen table.

I was a bad journalist to my father, short-tempered, bullying. He never said what I wanted him to. Each week we struggled as I tried to force his story into my mold-territory previously covered by Saving Private Ryan Saving Private Ryan or or The Great Escape The Great Escape-and he tried to stop me. He only wanted to explain what had happened to him. And his war, as he sees it, was an accidental thing, ambivalent, unplanned, an ordinary man's experience of extremity. It's not Private Ryan's war or Steve McQueen's war or Bert Scaife's war (of whom more later). It's Harvey Smith's war. If it embodies anything (Harvey's not much into things embodying other things), it is the fact that when wars are fought, perfectly normal people fight them. Alongside the heroes and martyrs, sergeants and generals, there are the millions of average young people who simply tumble into it, their childhood barely behind them. Harvey was one those. A working-cla.s.s lad from East Croydon at a loose end. At seventeen, he was still too young to be drafted, but when he pa.s.sed the recruiting office on the high street, he went inside. They took his details and told him he'd be called up when he was seventeen and six months. "Made me feel a little bit special-and when you're a teenager, that's what you want, isn't it?" In November 1943 initial training was completed. They moved to Suffolk, where Harvey joined the 6th a.s.sault Regiment RE and was mobilized the week after Christmas. "That meant our unit were officially at war. I think that's right. It meant that they could shoot you if you deserted, or something."

There followed six months of regimental training and tank training, how to ride in one, how to sleep under one, how to service it when it broke down. Harvey was still not expecting to see action before 1945. You had to be nineteen. When the rest of the unit moved to Calshott, he went to Felixstowe. (He ended up there once again, in the late 1990s, after his second divorce. Sometimes he refers to his life's journey as "the round-trip.") "I was with the old b.u.g.g.e.rs, like Dad's army. But I was only there three weeks. The law changed; suddenly you could be eighteen. So that was me." Harvey's war was on. He spent that last month hiding in the Fawley woods with his regiment. You can't see the stars like that in Croydon. On June 3, he listened to the final briefing with the rest of his regiment. "That's when they told us the truth, where we were going, King Beach, and when. I was hoping to be in one of the tanks. But last minute, I was a.s.signed to be the radio man for the CO's truck. All the boys thought that was pretty funny. Me stuck alone with the CO."

On the fifth of June at about 11 P.M., they set off. They were meant to land on the morning of the fifth, but the conditions had been too dreadful. They were still dreadful-everybody was sick. In the middle of the crossing, Harvey saw his first British warship, a huge shadowed beast, moving through the water. As he watched, it shot off a broadside from its sixteen-inch guns, rocking sideways in the recoil. "I knew then. I hadn't known before. I knew this was serious."

It was not to be as serious for Harvey as it had already been for thousands. He didn't land at 6 A.M., he didn't land in a tank (many of these had grenades thrown into them and "brewed up," exploding from the inside) and he didn't land as an American at Omaha. Though he didn't know it, already he was steeped in luck. He approached the relatively quiet King Beach at midday and waited while his CO argued with an American general onboard who was convinced it was too dangerous to land. It was two hours before he drove onto the beach. So much experience that should be parceled out, tenderly, over years, came to my father that day, concertinaed into twenty-four hours. First time he'd left England. First time he'd been at sea. First time he'd seen a dead body.

"I was looking out from the back of the truck. Young dead Germans were everywhere. They looked like us; they could have been been us. It was gruesome. And we'd heard by then that Major Elphinstone, our major, had died the minute he hit the beach. He stuck his head out of the tank to look about and-pop-a sniper shot him in the face. But you must write that I had an easy day. I had absolutely an easy day. The work had been done, you see. It'd been done. I wasn't like Bert Scaife." us. It was gruesome. And we'd heard by then that Major Elphinstone, our major, had died the minute he hit the beach. He stuck his head out of the tank to look about and-pop-a sniper shot him in the face. But you must write that I had an easy day. I had absolutely an easy day. The work had been done, you see. It'd been done. I wasn't like Bert Scaife."

Who?

"He was this bloke, he was a legend by the end of the day-caught so many men, shot all these mortars off-he got decorated later. I was no Bert Scaife. Not by a long way."

Harvey's truck rode up the lanes, unharmed. There were dugouts everywhere and people shooting at him, but with the help of the radio and excellent information, they made it safely through the worst. They stopped at a monastery that had been commandeered by the n.a.z.is and now stood abandoned. There was a dead man in n.a.z.i uniform lying in the hallway. My father bent down to turn him over and would have joined him in oblivion if it hadn't been for his CO stopping his hand just in time. The body was b.o.o.by-trapped. Coiled within it, my future, and that of my brothers, and the future of our future children, and so on, into unthinkability.

He slept that night in a fragrant orchard. And what else? "Well, I stopped in Bayeux a bit after that. Bought a pen." At this point, my patience with my father bottomed out. He looked at me helplessly. "It's so hard to remember. . . . I only remember the obscure stuff."

So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991, forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at the time, EMF had a hit with "Unbelievable" and I was wearing harem pants. If he'd come home and told me he'd been a waiter on the t.i.tanic t.i.tanic it couldn't have seemed more fantastical. it couldn't have seemed more fantastical.

"Oh, that was different. That was just after I bought the pen."

A few days after the pen incident, then, my father was again in an orchard in the middle of the night. He decided to make tea, the way you did during the war, by filling a biscuit tin full of sand and a little petrol and setting that alight. He shouldn't have done that. The flames were spotted and a mortar bomb sent over. He doesn't know how many men died. Maybe two, maybe three. I leaned forward and turned up the volume. For hadn't I brought this little contraption here for my own purposes? Not to record my father's history, and not even to write this article, but precisely for this revelation, precisely for this revelation, for this very moment or another like it; in the hope of catching a painful war secret, in the queer belief that such a thing would lead to some epiphanic shift in my relationship with my father. There is such a vanity in each succeeding generation-we think we can free our parents from experience, that we will be their talking cure, that we are the catharsis they need. I said, But, Dad, it was a simple mistake. We all make so many at the same age, but in a normal situation, they can't lead to anybody's dying. I put my hand on his hand. "But it was my fault." "Of course it wasn't. It was a mistake." "Yes, yes," said Harvey, humoring me, crying quietly, "if that's how you want to say it." for this very moment or another like it; in the hope of catching a painful war secret, in the queer belief that such a thing would lead to some epiphanic shift in my relationship with my father. There is such a vanity in each succeeding generation-we think we can free our parents from experience, that we will be their talking cure, that we are the catharsis they need. I said, But, Dad, it was a simple mistake. We all make so many at the same age, but in a normal situation, they can't lead to anybody's dying. I put my hand on his hand. "But it was my fault." "Of course it wasn't. It was a mistake." "Yes, yes," said Harvey, humoring me, crying quietly, "if that's how you want to say it."

He woke up on a stretcher in a truck, two dead Germans either side of him, picked up from some other incident. That was the end of his war for a few weeks while he recuperated in England. When he went back, in the final months of the war, he did some remarkable things. He caught a senior n.a.z.i, an episode I turned into idiotic comedy for a novel. He helped liberate Belsen. But it's those weeks in Normandy that are most significant to him. The mistakes he made, the things he didn't do, how lucky he was. To finish up, I asked him if he thought he was brave in Normandy.

"I wasn't brave! I wasn't asked to be brave. . . . I wasn't Bert Scaife! I wasn't individually individually brave; that's how you should say it for the paper." Is that why he never spoke about it? "Not really. . . . I s'pose when you realized you were playing your part in killing ordinary people, well, it's an awful thing to think about . . . and then, well, I spent a year in Germany after the war, you see, working for the army and making friends with ordinary Germans. I almost married a German girl, from the country, with a strong jaw. Lovely girl. And in her house there was a photo of her brother, in a n.a.z.i uniform, about eighteen. He wasn't coming home. And my mate who came to visit her with me, he turned the photo to the wall. But I said no. These were just country people. There was so much evil in that war. And then they were just people like that, simple people." brave; that's how you should say it for the paper." Is that why he never spoke about it? "Not really. . . . I s'pose when you realized you were playing your part in killing ordinary people, well, it's an awful thing to think about . . . and then, well, I spent a year in Germany after the war, you see, working for the army and making friends with ordinary Germans. I almost married a German girl, from the country, with a strong jaw. Lovely girl. And in her house there was a photo of her brother, in a n.a.z.i uniform, about eighteen. He wasn't coming home. And my mate who came to visit her with me, he turned the photo to the wall. But I said no. These were just country people. There was so much evil in that war. And then they were just people like that, simple people."

That's the end of our interview on the tape. Afterward, he phoned me up several times to reiterate one point. He wasn't brave. I said, okay, Dad, yes, I've got that bit.

During one of these conversations, I revised my earlier question to him. If he wasn't brave, is he at least proud? "Not really. If I'd been one of the medicos on beach. Or done something like Bert Scaife did, then I'd be proud, I suppose. But I didn't."

Harvey Smith is not Bert Scaife-he wants me to make that very clear to you. When he caught that senior n.a.z.i, his fellow soldiers wanted to kill the man. It was my father who persuaded them to settle for a lesser punishment: he set the n.a.z.i walking in front of their tank for five miles before handing him over to the authorities. It is characteristic of Harvey that he was somewhat ashamed to tell me that story. He feels he behaved cruelly.

In sum, Harvey thinks pride a pale virtue. To his mind, an individual act either helps a little or it does not, and to be proud of it afterward helps n.o.body much, changes nothing. Still, I am proud of him. In the first version of this article, I wrote here: "He was a man able to retain his humanity in the most inhumane of circ.u.mstances." Later I scratched it out because humanity humanity is these days a vainglorious, much debased word and is these days a vainglorious, much debased word and inhumanity inhumanity is a deceitful one. My generation was raised with the idea that those who pride themselves on their humanity are perfectly capable of atrocity. I think I'll put instead: he didn't lose himself in horror. Which is a special way of being brave, of bring courageous, and a quality my father shares with millions of ordinary men and women who fought that miserable war. is a deceitful one. My generation was raised with the idea that those who pride themselves on their humanity are perfectly capable of atrocity. I think I'll put instead: he didn't lose himself in horror. Which is a special way of being brave, of bring courageous, and a quality my father shares with millions of ordinary men and women who fought that miserable war.

Sixteen.

DEAD MAN LAUGHING.

My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in reruns and on video. We knew the "Dead Parrot" sketch by heart. We had the usual religious feeling for Monty Python's Life of Brian. Monty Python's Life of Brian. If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons' "I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas" got an airing all year long. We liked to think of ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick's easy laughs-Benny Hill was beneath our collective consideration. I suppose the more precise term is "comedy sn.o.bs." If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons' "I'm Walking Backwards for Christmas" got an airing all year long. We liked to think of ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick's easy laughs-Benny Hill was beneath our collective consideration. I suppose the more precise term is "comedy sn.o.bs."

Left unchecked, comedy sn.o.bbery can squeeze the joy out of the enterprise. You end up thinking of comedy as Hemingway thought of narrative: structured like an iceberg, with all the greater satisfactions fathoms underwater, while the surface pleasure of the joke is somehow the least of it. In my father, this tendency was especially p.r.o.nounced. He objected to joke merchants. He was wary of the revue-style bonhomie of the popular TV double act Morecambe and Wise and disapproved of the cheery bawdiness of their rivals, the Two Ronnies. He was allergic to racial and s.e.xual humor, to a far greater degree than any of the actual black people or women in his immediate family. Harvey's idea of a good time was the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, Steptoe and Son, the grim tale of two mutually antagonistic "rag-and-bone" men who pa.s.s their days in a Beckettian pile of rubbish, tearing psychological strips off each other. Each episode ends with the son (a philosopher manque, who considers himself trapped in the filthy family business) submitting to a funk of existential despair. The sadder and more desolate the comedy, the better Harvey liked it. the grim tale of two mutually antagonistic "rag-and-bone" men who pa.s.s their days in a Beckettian pile of rubbish, tearing psychological strips off each other. Each episode ends with the son (a philosopher manque, who considers himself trapped in the filthy family business) submitting to a funk of existential despair. The sadder and more desolate the comedy, the better Harvey liked it.

His favorite was Tony Hanc.o.c.k, a comic wedded to despair, in his life as much as in his work. (Hanc.o.c.k died of an overdose in 1968.) Harvey had him on vinyl: a pristine, twenty-year-old set of LPs. The series was Hanc.o.c.k's Half Hour, Hanc.o.c.k's Half Hour, a situation comedy in which Hanc.o.c.k plays a broad version of himself and, to my mind, of my father: a quintessentially English, poorly educated, working-cla.s.s war veteran with social and intellectual aspirations, whose fictional address-23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam-perfectly conjures the aspirant bleakness of London's suburbs (as if Cheam were significant enough a spot to have an East). Harvey, meanwhile, could be found in 24 Athelstan Gardens, Willesden Green (a poky housing estate named after the ancient king of England), also by a railway. Hanc.o.c.k's heartbreaking inability to pa.s.s as a middle-cla.s.s beatnik or otherwise pull himself out of the hole he was born in was a source of great mirth to Harvey, despite the fact that this was precisely his own situation. He loved Hanc.o.c.k's hopefulness, and loved the way he was always disappointed. He pa.s.sed this love on to his children, with the result that we inherited the comic tastes of a previous generation. (Born in 1925, Harvey was old enough to be our grandfather.) Occasionally, I'd lure friends to my room and make them listen to "The Blood Donor" or "The Radio Ham." This never went well. I demanded complete silence, was in the habit of lifting the stylus and replaying a section if any incidental noise should m.u.f.fle a line and generally leached all potential pleasure from the exercise with laborious explanations of the humor and said humor's possible obfus cation by period details: ration books, shillings and farthings, coins for the meter, and so on. It was a hard sell in the brave new comedic world of a situation comedy in which Hanc.o.c.k plays a broad version of himself and, to my mind, of my father: a quintessentially English, poorly educated, working-cla.s.s war veteran with social and intellectual aspirations, whose fictional address-23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam-perfectly conjures the aspirant bleakness of London's suburbs (as if Cheam were significant enough a spot to have an East). Harvey, meanwhile, could be found in 24 Athelstan Gardens, Willesden Green (a poky housing estate named after the ancient king of England), also by a railway. Hanc.o.c.k's heartbreaking inability to pa.s.s as a middle-cla.s.s beatnik or otherwise pull himself out of the hole he was born in was a source of great mirth to Harvey, despite the fact that this was precisely his own situation. He loved Hanc.o.c.k's hopefulness, and loved the way he was always disappointed. He pa.s.sed this love on to his children, with the result that we inherited the comic tastes of a previous generation. (Born in 1925, Harvey was old enough to be our grandfather.) Occasionally, I'd lure friends to my room and make them listen to "The Blood Donor" or "The Radio Ham." This never went well. I demanded complete silence, was in the habit of lifting the stylus and replaying a section if any incidental noise should m.u.f.fle a line and generally leached all potential pleasure from the exercise with laborious explanations of the humor and said humor's possible obfus cation by period details: ration books, shillings and farthings, coins for the meter, and so on. It was a hard sell in the brave new comedic world of The Jerk The Jerk and and Beverly Hills Cop Beverly Hills Cop and and Ghostbusters Ghostbusters.

Hanc.o.c.k wasn't such an anachronism, as it turns out. Genealogically speaking, Harvey had his finger on the pulse of British comedy, for Hanc.o.c.k begot Basil Fawlty, and Fawlty begot Alan Partridge, and Partridge begot the immortal David Brent. And Hanc.o.c.k and his descendants served as a constant source of conversation between my father and me, a vital link between us when, cla.s.swise, and in every other wise, each year placed us further apart. As in many British families, it was university wot dunnit. When I returned home from my first term at Cambridge, we couldn't discuss the things I'd learned; about Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, or G. E. Moore, or Gawain and his stagger ingly boring Green Knight, because Harvey had never learned them-but we could always speak of Basil. It was a conversation that lasted decades, well beyond the twelve episodes in which Basil himself is contained. The episodes were merely jumping-off points; we carried on compulsively creating Basil long after his authors had stopped. Great situation comedy expands in the imagination. For my generation, never having seen David Brent's apartment in or G. E. Moore, or Gawain and his stagger ingly boring Green Knight, because Harvey had never learned them-but we could always speak of Basil. It was a conversation that lasted decades, well beyond the twelve episodes in which Basil himself is contained. The episodes were merely jumping-off points; we carried on compulsively creating Basil long after his authors had stopped. Great situation comedy expands in the imagination. For my generation, never having seen David Brent's apartment in The Office The Office is no obstacle to conjuring up his interior decoration: the risque Athena poster, the gigantic entertainment system, the comical fridge magnets. Similarly, for my father, imagining Basil Fawlty's school career was a creative exercise. "He would have failed his eleven-plus," Harvey once explained to me. "And that would've been the start of the trouble." When meditating on the sitcom, you extrapolate from the details, which in Britain are almost always signifiers of social cla.s.s: Hanc.o.c.k's battered homburg, Fawlty's cravat, Partridge's driving gloves, Brent's fake Italian suits. It's a relief to be able to laugh at these things. In British comedy, the painful cla.s.s dividers of real life are neutralized and exposed. In my family, at least, it was a way of talking about things we didn't want to talk about. is no obstacle to conjuring up his interior decoration: the risque Athena poster, the gigantic entertainment system, the comical fridge magnets. Similarly, for my father, imagining Basil Fawlty's school career was a creative exercise. "He would have failed his eleven-plus," Harvey once explained to me. "And that would've been the start of the trouble." When meditating on the sitcom, you extrapolate from the details, which in Britain are almost always signifiers of social cla.s.s: Hanc.o.c.k's battered homburg, Fawlty's cravat, Partridge's driving gloves, Brent's fake Italian suits. It's a relief to be able to laugh at these things. In British comedy, the painful cla.s.s dividers of real life are neutralized and exposed. In my family, at least, it was a way of talking about things we didn't want to talk about.

When Harvey was very ill, in the autumn of 2006, I went to visit him at a nursing home in the seaside town of Felixstowe, armed with the DVD boxed set of Fawlty Towers Fawlty Towers. By this point, he was long divorced from my mother, his second divorce, and was living alone on the gray East Anglian coast, far from his children. On dialysis for a decade (he lost his first kidney to stones, the second to cancer), his body now began to give up. I had meant to leave the DVDs with him, something for the empty hours alone, but when I got there, with nothing to talk about, we ended up watching them together for the umpteenth time, he on the single chair, me on the floor, cramped in that grim little nursing-home bedroom, surely the least funny place he'd ever found himself in-with the possible exception of the 1944 Normandy landings. We watched several episodes, back to back. We laughed. Never more than when Basil thrashed an Austin 1100 with the branch of a tree, an act of inspired pointlessness that seemed a.n.a.logous to our own situation. And then we watched the DVD extras, in which we found an illuminating little depth charge hidden among the nostalgia and the bloopers: It was probably-may have been-my idea that she should be a bit less posh than him, because we couldn't see otherwise what would have attracted them to each other. I have a sort of vision of her family being in catering on the south coast, you know, and her working behind a bar somewhere, he being demobbed from his national service and getting his gratuity, you know, and going in for a drink and this . . . barmaid behind the bar and she fancied him because he was so posh. And they sort of thought they'd get married and run a hotel together and it was all a bit sort of romantic and idealistic, and the grim reality then caught up with them.