The Temple of Gold: A Novel - Softcover

Goldman, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345439740 ISBN 13: 9780345439741

Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Acclaimed for such Academy Award—winning screenplays as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and such thrillers as Marathon Man, not to mention the bestselling classic The Princess Bride, William Goldman stands as one of the most beloved writers in America. But long before these triumphs, he caused a sensation with his brilliant first novel, a powerful story of reckless youth that was hailed as a worthy rival to The Catcher in the Rye.

THE TEMPLE OF GOLD

Ray Trevitt is coming of age in the American midwest of the late 1950s. Handsome, restless, eager to live life and to find his place in the world, Ray hurtles headlong through a young man’s rite of passage–searching for answers and somewhere to belong. What he discovers is that within friendships and love affairs, army tours and married life, victory and tragedy, lie the experiences that will shape his destiny, scar his soul, and ultimately teach him profound lessons he never expected.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Goldman is an Academy Award–winning author of screenplays, plays, memoirs, and novels. His first novel, The Temple of Gold (1957), was followed by the script for the Broadway army comedy Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole (1961). He went on to write the screenplays for many acclaimed films, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and All the President’s Men (1976), for which he won two Academy Awards. He adapted his own novels for the hit movies Marathon Man (1976) and The Princess Bride (1987).

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Acclaimed for such Academy Award—winning screenplays as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and such thrillers as Marathon Man, not to mention the bestselling classic The Princess Bride, William Goldman stands as one of the most beloved writers in America. But long before these triumphs, he caused a sensation with his brilliant first novel, a powerful story of reckless youth that was hailed as a worthy rival to The Catcher in the Rye.

THE TEMPLE OF GOLD

Ray Trevitt is coming of age in the American midwest of the late 1950s. Handsome, restless, eager to live life and to find his place in the world, Ray hurtles headlong through a young man’s rite of passage–searching for answers and somewhere to belong. What he discovers is that within friendships and love affairs, army tours and married life, victory and tragedy, lie the experiences that will shape his destiny, scar hi

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The Family

My father was a stuffy man.

That is not meant as criticism but rather to be the truth. It is the word that best fit him. Stuffy. He always wore dark suits and ugly ties, and was forever pursing his lips and wrinkling up his forehead before he said anything. “Is that you?” my mother would call when he came home. Then he’d purse his lips and there would go his forehead and after a while he’d say: “Yes, my dear.” He always called her that—“my dear”; never her real name, which was Katherine. And I was always Raymond.

It’s easiest to begin with my father rather than my mother or Grandmother Rae for the simple reason that I knew less about him than the others. We lived side by side in the same house for many years, but I never really got to know him. That again isn’t meant to be criticism; it was just the way things worked out.

Because, in the first place, he was a lot older than I was, being forty when I was born. And he was not the kind who enjoyed walking along the beach or playing catch out in the back yard by the ravine. He was a scholar, and I guess a good one, for he was far and away the most famous person at Athens College in Athens, Illinois, which is where he taught all his life. He got famous because he was an important figure in the Euripides revival that took place in the earlier part of this, the twentieth century, which should go a long way toward explaining how I happened to get stuck with the middle name I unfortunately possess. I suppose he had visions of me becoming a Greek scholar like himself, and if that had happened, my name would have been a winner: Raymond Euripides Trevitt. But such did not turn out to be the case.

My father didn’t have a sense of humor; he never laughed much, and there was hardly a thing about him you could call amusing. Except maybe the bedtime stories he used to tell me. Whereas most kids got Mother Goose or along those lines, I got the Greek tragedies. “Go to bed now, Raymond, and I’ll tell you the story of Medea.” Or Antigone. Or Hippolytus. Before I was seven, I knew the plots to all those Greek plays. And if you happen to, then you know that they’re not for kiddies, being crammed full of sex, blood, murder, etc. Well, those were my bedtime stories, but the way my father told them, with his careful, very clipped way of speaking, they never came out dirty at all.

As I said, he was a scholar and so were his friends, also teachers from the college and nice enough, I suppose, in their own way. We never had big parties at our house, but only small gatherings of three or four couples who sat around, chatting softly and sipping dry wine. At the start, when I was very little, my father used to trot me down for a visit, which always ended with me telling the plot of one of the Greek plays. “ ‘Gweat heavens,’ Oedipus scweamed. ‘My wife is my muvver.’ ” And I guess it was pretty cute at that, what with me being so young, because they’d always applaud before shipping me back upstairs.

All that ended, though, when I was six or seven, seeing as by that time they had heard me say all the plots and I hadn’t advanced much in my studies. I never was a scholar, especially about Greek plays, and it was at this time that my father and I parted company. For he was wise enough to know that I could never follow in his footsteps, so he just let me try to make my own.

But, of course, the thing for which I’ll always remember my father was what happened with the guppies.

Which isn’t fair, I know, since it wasn’t typical of him at all. I should think of him sitting in his study at his big brown desk, sucking on a pipe, his head almost lost behind the wall of books that was always piled up there. I should, but I don’t. I think life works that way, though. We are not remembered for what we are, not for an action that portrays us truly, but more often for some little thing, some one-time wonder when we crossed, just for a minute, outside of the natural orbit of our lives.

And so, I always remember my father and the guppies.

They were his guppies. There was never any question about that. He bought them for himself and he kept them in his study along with all the books. He put them against the wall in front of his desk and many is the time I walked by his open study door and saw him, sitting quiet, just staring off at something I knew to be them.

A guppy, and I haven’t seen one in fifteen years so therefore this is strictly from memory, is a fish. A little fish, I suppose tropical, and you keep them in a big rectangular bowl. They are beautiful, guppies are, being more than one color and sort of shiny when they happen to swim through a sunbeam.

And if my father loved those guppies, I know I did too. I loved them as much as I loved my first dog, Baxter—all my dogs I have named Baxter after that first one—but I couldn’t tell you why. Because there’s nothing you can do with a guppy but just sit there and watch it. Which is what I’d do on rainy afternoons when my father was away at the college. I’d go into his study, pull myself up in his big chair, rest my chin in my hands, and stare at them. And if they knew I was there, they made no show of it, for all they ever did was just swim around and around and around in their own little glass world.

In the years that have passed since it happened I have wondered and thought many times about why I loved them so much. The only answer I can come up with is this: they seemed so goddam happy just swimming around and around. I suppose a guppy knows what he is and never did one die of hubris which, by the way, is a Greek word that you can’t translate into English except by saying that it sort of means pride. Wanting too much. It’s the reason Oedipus got into all that trouble and why Antigone got hers. Hubris. That’s why. You could put guppies in a huge pool or in a little dish and they’d still swim around and around, happy, I think, and never complaining. They’d found the handle. Which is more than most of us can say.

And one hot, rainy afternoon I was sitting in my father’s chair, watching them. Having just eaten lunch I was feeling pretty at peace with the world when, for some reason, I got to wondering if guppies ever were hungry. I clambered down from the chair, walked over, and stuck my nose against the glass, staring at them cross-eyed. Then I ran and asked my mother, who was sipping tea with Mrs. O’Brien, a neighbor from a couple of houses down. When I asked her, my mother smiled at me, and I’ll never forget what she said: “Why of course they do, Raymond. Just like people, they have to be fed. Now run along.”

So I ran along, back to the study. And a little later, when I saw that big jar sitting high on a bookshelf, I knew, just as sure as God made green apples, that it was guppy food. So I took it down, looked at it and, after a while, I sprinkled some on top of the water.

Those guppies went wild, swimming around, zooming up to the water top, opening their mouths, zooming down, then up again. They were so cute I almost wanted to cry. I sprinkled some more food. They ate that too. So I took the lid off the jar and poured the whole thing on top of the water where it lay like a roof. And even now, the idea of living in a house where the roof’s made of food is pretty close to my idea of heaven. They were still eating away when I tossed the empty jar into the wastebasket, closed the study door, and left them.

Along about five that afternoon I was playing in my room when my father came home and a little later I heard him talking with my mother. After which I heard him coming upstairs, and then...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345439740
• ISBN 13: 9780345439741
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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