CHAPTER 1
The true past departs not; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die; but all is still here, and, recognized or not lives and works through endless change.
—Carlyle
"If you stick to the facts, Jack old bean, you can't go wrong."
(1980 Mt. Kisco, New York, The Whitehorse Tavern. This is Ogden Santee talking, and we are at a table in the White Horse Tavern in Mt. Kisco, New York.)
"Believe me when I tell you, you don't write a book, you do it. Like building an outhouse or a lobster trap or a roller coaster. A writer, if he's any good, is an inventor who makes something that works, a mechanic so to speak, and a blacksmith with grease up to his elbows, a wrench in his hand, his mind swimming with measurements, and a box full of nuts and bolts by his side. If you look in his toolbox, the first tool out is a hammer, which is the last one in—that's his basic instrument, though he might use it only once in a coon's age. That Goddamned hammer is his security, his last resort, and it's always right there on top of all the other tools."
Ogden Santee has already had too much to drink. I don't drink and never have, but I'm sitting here with him and buying drinks because I've had a notion that I might want to tell something about Parker's Crossroads and the war I was in, and I couldn't think of anybody else to ask about how I should go about it. Ogden Santee is a writer, a few years younger than me, with what seems to be a lot of time on his hands to sit like this with me.
"Listen, Ogden, I'm not saying I want to write a book, for God's sake!"
"A writer has his hammer, too. Do you know what his hammer is? It's indignation! When a part won't go together right, the writer takes out his indignation and bashes the shit out of it until it either goes together or crumbles. It's damned pitiful and shameless, I'll admit, to take a hammer to something you've worked so hard and lovingly to construct, but that's the way it goes ... or doesn't go."
"I'm a lousy mechanic, Ogden. I don't think I could ever be a writer."
"Let me give you an example, old bean. This part of Westchester is riddled with corporation vice presidents. In fact, they're as thick as cantaloupe seeds—the lieutenant colonels of business or, as a friend of mine calls them, 'telephone colonels.' You know, 'Hello. This is colonel so and so.' Well, now these guys are boxes in the organizational chart, for the most part, corporate toadies and hatchet men, memo shufflers and smoke-makers out to conceal all the pointless antics they go through to hold onto their 'name on the door and the Bigalow on the floor.'
"One of these guys squats in flaking palazzo down the road from here with threadbare Persian rugs on the floors and disintegrating, clogged-up bird baths in the garden. He's built like a septic tank and walks like a badger. Hell, you'd think he had crystal balls the way he favors them when he walks. Whenever he says the name of his company, he kind of licks his lips first as though he were getting ready to taste something he shouldn't. But it's hard as hell to find fault with him, though you know damned well he is the worst kind of smug toad. Of course, his wife used to be a party girl for the Nazis during the war, but judging a man by his wife is risky business. Once you get started, it's hard to stop. You could say that he has a philanderer's hairline, the kind that hasn't receded a millimeter in seventy years, but you can't really hold that against a man, since philandering is more of a sport than a vice.
"So, how do you write about this guy? Well, you've simply got to get out the hammer—your indignation. Thank God he has a short haircut or I'd still be searching for a place to focus my indignation. I found it in four square inches on the nape of his neck, a goddamned volume of indignation that I could distill into one inspiringly descriptive word. Do you know what that word is? What I saw, the volumes and volumes I reduced until one word said it all with the eloquence that gave vent to my indignation?"
Ogden Santee is glaring at me low over the table, one eye half-closed and a curl on his lips, looking for all the world like Popeye the Sailorman minus the corncob pipe.
"Well, what do you think that word is?"
"Search me."
"Weaseliness."
So this is the fellow I sought out to give me some pointers on putting together my war stories. Even at the best of times, Ogden Santee is hard to follow, but at times like this ...
"Listen, old scow, and make no mistake about it—why you write your book is just as important as how you put the words down. Hell! Sometimes it can be more important."
"Ogden, I never said I wanted to write a book. I just want some things for my grandchildren to—"
"Phooey! You want them to read? 'Hooray for Grandpaw! He's the big hero who licked the bad Germans single-handed!' Forget about your grandchildren! Let them find out what you did in the war the same as everybody else, by reading John P. Ebbott's book, not Grandpaw's book!"
"Well, I don't care. That is the reason."
"Not good enough, old bean. You've got to come up with a better reason than that for people to read your book."
"But how many times do I have to tell you? I don't want to write a book!"
"Now do you see how important the 'why' of your book is? If you don't have a good reason, then it's easy to give up."
I wonder if all writers have such a wide, "unreasonable" streak in them as Ogden Santee. What I mean is, do they all go along making perfect sense and then suddenly veer off into the tall grass, leaving you behind? One thing seems clear to me: you wouldn't want to spend much time around a person like Ogden Santee for fear his "unreasonableness" would rub off on you.
"You've got to make a decision and stick to it. Either you're going to write a book, or you're not."
"I'm not!"
"Poppycock!"
What do you do with a man like this?
"Okay, old bean, I'll tell you what. We'll just talk about it. I'll tell you a big secret: the books I haven't written are a hell of a lot better than the ones I have."
"I don't quite understand."
"I mean, the ones I've talked about, thought about, are the real doosies in my otherwise rather humble body of work. This can be one of those ... those doosies."
"You mean, we just talk about what happened to me in the war?"
"Have you got anything better to do?"
"Who? Me? No. What about you?"
"Seeing as how I spend a certain amount of my time in saloons, I can afford to spend that time with you and your ... book."
"Then we won't actually write the book ..."
"No, we'll do it."
Just as I think I'm about to see Ogden Santee's coattails figuratively disappear over the next hill, there he is, rushing toward me with a thought or idea I can grasp and hang on to. This one he has is, as he says, a doosie.
"But, Ogden, where do we start?"
"With a full glass, old bean. A very full glass."
For the moment, the White Horse is out-of-bounds for our first arranged meeting because Ogden Santee has been banned from the place by the bartender. On an evening after we had our first talk, Ogden Santee...
