The Players Come Again Read online

  “Nineteen seventy-seven,” Hansford began as though he were lecturing to a class, which in his imagination he probably was, or at least to a group of fascinated admirers, “was the Year of the Foxx, both in literary circles and spilling over into the popular press. Emmanuel Foxx had been dead twenty-five years, his masterpiece, Ariadne, had been (amazingly) published fifty years ago. People,” Hansford smugly remarked, “feel a certain security in the presence of round numbers. Conferences on Foxx’s oeuvre in general and Ariadne in particular were held in England, north and south, and in America from Toronto to Texas.”

  Kate nodded encouragingly. Her researches had revealed that attention at these conferences was neatly divided, as it had been since the publication of Ariadne, between male critics who considered Foxx a high modernist in the Pound, Eliot, Joyce tradition, and women who confronted him as the expounder of the female consciousness, whether limited to the male view of a female consciousness or considered to have surmounted the limitations of that male view to achieve true insight into the female mind and heart. There were women in the first camp (there are always women in the male camp), and some men in the women’s camp (there are sometimes a few brave men discovered there). That the men in the women’s camp were welcomed with more circumspection than the women in the men’s camp simply reflected the habits of the powerful and the less powerful in the world at large. Kate, of course, maintained her fascinated gaze and said not a word of this.

  “During the first decades after the publication of Ariadne,” Hansford went on with no more than a pause in which to swallow and munch, “a number of scholars had attempted to interview Emmanuel’s wife, Gabrielle. While she lived in Paris and then in London, she had turned them away, or bribed her landlady to do so. In 1955 she suffered something—a stroke, a heart attack, a brain hemorrhage—and was confined in a nursing home out of anyone’s reach; it was rumored that not even her family, neither her granddaughter nor members of the family who were related to her through Emile’s marriage, could get anything from her that could be called coherent speech. One diligent and remorseless scholar [of a type, Kate inferred, far inferior to Hansford], taking his cue from journalistic techniques, bribed his way into the nursing home to examine the files hoping to discover who had visited Gabrielle during the years she resided there.”

  Here Hansford rose to his feet and began pacing the living room, as no doubt he paced the front of the lecture room when he was teaching. His body language suggested that he had caught his audience with his story, and was adding an actor’s drama to it. Kate, who never paced when teaching, watched him with serious, attentive mien.

  “The only people, apart from those already known to have visited her,” Hansford told Kate, representing in her single person an entire student audience, “were Anne Gringold, a longtime friend of Nellie, Gabrielle’s granddaughter, and some nephew of Gabrielle’s. The intruder had, in time, managed to get interviews with both of them, but had come away with so little information that he could not even write an article for a minor journal. It had soon become evident even to his blunted sensibilities that both the nephew and the granddaughter’s friend had thrown up a most effective smoke screen, saying nothing while behaving like the most cooperative of interviewees.”

  Kate wondered how long it had been since he had had an audience as attentive, voluntary, and encouraging as she. Surely his students were often distracted from his antics. She watched, amused, as Hansford returned to the tray of drinks and refilled his glass while hardly pausing in his rendition.

  “Five years earlier,” Hansford went on, “anticipating the anniversary of Foxx’s death, a major publisher commissioned from me a biography of the great writer, on very good terms, I might say. It would hardly be the first biography, but, it was assumed, one sufficiently monumental to be unchallenged for at least two decades. I don’t know how much you know about the planning of biographies,” he added as an aside, “though I’m sure you will learn if you haven’t already, but the time required for research and writing always far exceeds the sanguine expectations of the publisher. In short: my biography was unlikely to be ready for this anniversary, and publishers, alas, are not the gentlemen they once were. Well, I was in a quandary, to put my condition at its mildest; the truth was, I was damn near beside myself with anxiety. For not only was I badly blocked, but my marriage had also begun to flounder. I don’t know if you’re a feminist,” he added darkly, daring Kate to answer; she declined the opportunity, wanting information above all. Hansford seemed satisfied with her encouraging smile. “I won’t say my wife is, but at this time she’d been reading too much feminist criticism. Anyway, her interpretation of my material, which she helped me to type in those days before everyone had computers, above all her theories about Foxx’s masterpiece, Ariadne, brought our relationship to the brink.”

  Kate had no trouble interpreting this last remark. No doubt his wife’s ideas, however much he had tried to attribute them to their failing personal relationship and her contamination by feminism, had badly shaken his faith in his own work.

  “You mustn’t think,” Hansford said, “that I wasn’t particularly diligent in my pursuit of those who had been acquainted with Emmanuel in his youth and during the years in Paris and in the other European cities.” Kate had read enough to know of the many spots on the map of Europe where the Foxxes had, with great hopes, alighted, and from which they had, until settling in Paris, soon moved on. Yet even in Paris, they had exchanged one apartment for another with a rapidity that was startling, if less so in that time than in this. Hansford, she knew, had visited all these people, had indeed spent close to five years at that task alone, speaking to those who had known Foxx in his boyhood, in school, at Cambridge before he got himself rusticated, in England before his marriage.

  “Of course,” Hansford said, dropping onto the couch and gesturing toward Kate to emphasize his point, “I talked to the Goddards and I visited Dorinda.” Here he paused to strengthen his drink and, Kate surmised, his nerve before launching into what she was beginning to guess was the crux of the matter. She remembered well enough that Dorinda’s pictures had been the heart of the book Hansford had eventually produced.

  “Rather to my surprise,” Hansford said, launching himself into delicate matters, “Dorinda hardly seemed to begrudge me the time for long interviews. She showed me the pictures she had taken of Hilda, Emile, and Nellie. Most of the pictures of Nellie showed her with Anne Gringold, which further sharpened my sense of her importance and my annoyance at her refusal to talk to me.”

  Kate could guess at Hansford’s frustration. Although he considered his interpretations of Foxx’s works superior to any others, and although his interpretations benefited hugely from the advances in literary theory, feminist theory, deconstruction, and the like, he profoundly suspected that his biography of Emmanuel Foxx, so thoroughly researched and painstakingly written, was in fact not only old hat but a colossal bore.

  “It was early in 1977,” Hansford continued. “I find the holiday festivities of Christmas and New Year’s, I’m sure not uniquely, depressing and conducive to marked irritability. It was just about this time that my editor became considerably less tolerant about my delays. This concatenation of the holidays and my editor’s impatience catapulted me into a violent row with Judith, my wife.” Kate interpreted this easily enough as well. Judith had told him that she was fed up with being his assistant, that she wanted to be his co-author, which role she fully deserved, and furthermore, she thought this biography dull, stupid, and uninspiring to say the least.

  What Kate did not realize was that Judith had dropped a bombshell. “You will never guess what my wife said,” Hansford added, unconsciously catching up with Kate’s thoughts, and by now acting the part both of himself and of Judith. “ ‘What’s more,’ she said when, just before marching out of the bedroom and after announcing that she wanted, above all else, a separation for as long a time as possible, but probably
forever, she stood at the front door in a stillness”—here Hansford assumed the pose of Judith as a statue—“remarkable after her stormy activities of renunciation, and announced that Emmanuel Foxx never wrote Ariadne, or at least that he didn’t write all of it. ‘Any woman could tell you that,’ she actually said, ‘but Foxx has been such a male domain, like Lawrence and Joyce and Pound, that no one’s even bothered to analyze his writing!’

  “Plenty of women have analyzed his writing, I shot back, as you can well imagine.” And indeed Kate could. “Women, I told her, are always deciding whether to condemn Foxx for being a male chauvinist pig or to praise him for having remarkable insight into the female psyche. At any rate, they certainly admit that the central character is not only a woman but the best part of the book.

  “ ‘They don’t go far enough,’ my wife insisted. She said that having spent so much time with this novel, not to mention his other works, that she was beginning to think she’d written it herself. That it was perfectly clear if Foxx didn’t watch his wife, observe her, listen to women, imitate them, he stole their work, or at least, the work of one of them. She was very churned up at this point, as you can imagine. I pointed out that there was not one shred of evidence for such wild accusations, but she insisted that if there were, I would ridicule it as the sort of evidence that has harmless lunatics thinking that De Vere wrote Shakespeare and Shelley instead of his wife wrote Frankenstein.” Hansford, having got sufficiently worked up himself, suddenly dropped back onto the couch and raised his glass as though he had been sitting there all along.

  Kate murmured that she had gathered that Hansford’s wife was very worked up.

  “I assumed she was not, unless she had gone completely mad, going to suggest next that it was a female friend of Richardson’s who wrote Clarissa.

  “I quietly pointed out that literary examples were on my side. You won’t believe this, but she actually insisted that it might have been. By now she was shouting about the way Lawrence used the words of women in Sons and Lovers and other books, at the way T. S. Eliot took his wife’s very words and phrasing in The Waste Land, at how many professors’ wives have written their husbands’ books, or all but written them, and then been thanked profusely in the acknowledgments a year before the author divorced said wife and ran off with a graduate student!” Hansford, who realized he had been rather carried away, stopped talking and began to fix himself a new drink.

  Kate was amused to realize that it must have come to Hansford as a belated and unwelcome revelation that his wife had learned a good deal about modern British literature in the course of “helping” him with his books. The thought must have angered and frightened him.

  “I don’t mind telling you,” Hansford said, “that I started wondering whether or not she was about to claim she’d written my biography of Foxx.”

  Kate, who was beginning to get into the rhythm of his argument while bringing to it considerable knowledge of contemporary academic marriages, supposed that Judith had answered that she would hardly want to claim the writing of a biography so dull. But Hansford did not say so. What he did admit was that she had claimed everyone had already read all about Foxx’s sexual exploits in previous biographies, and anyway, sexual exploits are less startling than they used to be, though no less exploitive.

  “To tell you the truth,” Hansford went on to confide in Kate, “I was rather hoping that my wife would get off on the emotional topic of sexual exploitation; it was one that was likely to engross her for some time.” And, Kate silently added, perhaps lead her away from other, more sensitive topics, such as how disappointing his current work was, or how much of his three earlier biographies she had written. But Hansford admitted that Judith had declined, as she was increasingly declining, to meet his expectations. “She actually told me that she was thinking of trying to write a book of her own on ‘my’ marvelous Emmanuel Foxx. I was told to put that in my pipe and smoke it, after which the door slammed behind her.”

  Hansford rose from the couch and moved to a chair somewhat nearer to Kate. His posture became different, more relaxed and buddy-buddy: Kate gathered that she was now to be offered some manly details of sexual derring-do. She braced herself.

  “Naturally,” Hansford confided, “this did not increase my confidence but it did give me an idea, or at least the opportunity to follow through on an idea I’d been thinking about. Dorinda, you see, came to my mind offering hope. I wondered if I hadn’t, after all, been rather impatient of her pictures, not the photographs themselves you understand, I didn’t think of them at first, but her extremely detailed accounts of how and where each had been taken? She was, if one stopped to analyze it, a pivotal figure in the greater Foxx saga: friend of Nellie, niece of Hilda, cherished only child of the Goddards. There might well be a clue in her admittedly less than compelling anecdotes. My wife, Judith, always accused me of paying too little attention to women and the subjects of their speech. She once gave me a story to read by Susan Glaspell, ‘A Jury of Her Peers,’ which, frankly, I found annoying, though of course I praised it. I felt that Glaspell had carefully contrived the story to make her point: that men were fools and saw only what they were looking for.” As though men did not “contrive” stories for their own ends, Kate thought, but did nothing to interrupt the by now torrential flow of his personal history.

  “But, I thought,” Hansford continued, “perhaps I should have taken the point more to heart. Might there be clues in Dorinda’s admittedly rather extended narratives that I had overlooked? It seemed worth a try, anyway, and the time I interviewed her, she didn’t make me feel that my presence was unwelcome. In fact, she invited me back.” He grinned at Kate in a we-guys-understand-what-I-mean way. It was not the first time that Kate, as the object of a colleague’s confidences, had found herself turned into one of the boys. Nor did she have any trouble reading Hansford’s further thoughts: Dorinda was not the sort to attract him—she was older than he was—but the attention of a man, a professor and author, would not, he felt confident, be rejected. And in some subtle way he chose not to analyze, such attentions would be getting back at Judith.

  “Well,” he continued in happy ignorance of Kate’s thoughts, “to my surprise Dorinda invited me to lunch at a restaurant near where she worked; frankly, I hadn’t been aware that she worked at all. Somehow, I had imagined our meeting in her living room, her plying me with tea, perhaps, or a drink, and something upper-class to eat, like watercress sandwiches. Isn’t it odd how we put people into pigeonholes before we really know anything about them?” He offered this bit of wisdom as though it were a breakthrough in human thought. Well, Kate reminded herself, he’s about to tell me the tale of seducing Dorinda and he’s not quite sure how to go about it. Another drink, perhaps? That always helps.

  Kate sipped her soda water. She liked to drink, but only in the right company and at what seemed to her appropriate times. Since her ideas of the appropriate differed wildly from most people’s, her drinking habits were, as she had often felt, ill understood. Hansford, sipping away, continued with his story, composed of occasional facts, frequent innuendos, and a certain abashed satisfaction. Kate filled it all in later for Reed.

  “If you ask me,” she told him when they were enjoying their end-of-the-working-day drinks, “he was startled at her picking a restaurant to meet in because he thought he might be stuck with the bill. He’s that sort of twit. As it turned out, the restaurant she had chosen was one of those Italian restaurants on the West Side where the food is excellent, the tables small and crowded together, and the service somehow characteristically Italian in that the waiters spend more time talking to each other and the barman than to the diners. Hansford thought this might interfere with their confidences, but they stayed so long the restaurant emptied out. You remember. Reed: it must have been like that place on Columbus Avenue some lawyers took us to, where everyone was lining up to get into, with the good food and lousy service.”

  R
eed did remember, and commented on the fact that food badly served and eaten without the full benefits of leisurely conversation was hardly worth it; but, he reminded Kate, they were not gourmets, they were talkers, and maybe there was a generic difference. Anyway, Hansford wanted to talk, didn’t he?

  “I guess he did; they ended up with a bottle of wine, which he had to persuade her to drink since she was not in the habit of drinking in the afternoon. He actually quoted, he admitted to me, ‘White wine eases the mind along,’ unconscious at the time, as he ruefully confessed, that he was quoting a line from a woman poet Judith admired and he had, at the time she read it to him, deprecated. Dorinda’s response was, I was emphatically assured, all that he might have hoped.

  “Hansford felt that she was getting into the spirit of the thing. He also reflected that she came from a very well-to-do family and might feel impelled to pay for the whole thing. The very rich, he assured me, lived in fear of being expected to pay for others, and always insisted on dividing checks, but the ‘comfortable’ were often generous, particularly in the company of academics. He was reassured to discover that Dorinda seemed to find him charming.

  “He didn’t even have to bring the conversation around to the Foxxes; she naturally supposed that was what he wanted to talk about, and she began to babble a good deal (his verb) about Emile, and Nellie, and Gabrielle. She reminded him that she had never met Emmanuel.”

  Kate interrupted herself. “The odd thing is,” she told Reed, “that I got a picture of Dorinda from his account. Oh, it’s probably no help to the biography, but his descriptions of her were the only remarks he made that I couldn’t have said for him without anyone noticing the substitution. He observed that she was one of those people who sipped her wine with deliberation, and infrequently, a habit that he detested. In addition, as though to confirm his direst expectations, she played with her bread, removing the soft center and molding it in her fingers until it became a series of dark, solid pellets. He had to restrain himself from removing the bread altogether from her reach. In an attempt to control his irritation he admired her fingernails. They were well within his gaze as his horror at her bread-molding seemed to keep his eyes riveted on her hands, as a rabbit is said to be transfixed by a snake.