A Beast in View

By Abraham Rothberg

WWII has just ended, and in the first postwar summer, a group of veterans come home bringing the war with them like a disease they have contracted and are intent on curing. A group of them arrive at a renowned Writers' Workshop in NYC in search of peace, purpose and meaning. In that workshop, under the tutelage of the strange and estranged Miss Whiteside, disappointed writer, and a veteran of her own wars, they try to come to terms with what they have done in the war, and what the war has done to them. These are veterans who are trying to put their experiences and insights down on paper for publication for others to read and understand. It is this "Beast in View" they all pursue, and it is in portraying that pursuit that Rothberg gives us a series of unforgettable events and characters who come to learn that peace is war by other means.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257370870

Book preview

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BEAST IN VIEW

Abraham Rothberg

Also by Abraham Rothberg

Novels:

The Thousand Doors

The Heirs of Cain

The Song of David Freed

The Other Man's Shoes

The Sword of the Golem

The Stalking Horse

The Great Waltz

Short Stories:

The Four Corners of the House

Non-fiction:

The Heirs of Stalin

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Major Novels

An Eyewitness History of World War II

Children's Books:

The Boy and the Dolphin

Abraham Who Sought God

For more information about

Abraham Rothberg

www.edteck.com/rothberg/

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BEAST IN VIEW

Abraham Rothberg

Edteck Press

Copyright © 2005 Abraham Rothberg

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

ISBN 1-4116-3200-1

eISBN: 978-1-25737-087-0

Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of fiction, its characters, events and language the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or actual groups, organizations, or occurrences is altogether coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Book and cover design by Peter Pappas

Published by Edteck Press

www.edteck.com/press

To:

My beloved son and daughter-in-law, Lewis Josiah & Shelby Nelson,

and

Their lovely children, my grandchildren Charles Reed & Vivian Joy

"All, all of a piece throughout:

Thy chase had a beast in view;

Thy wars brought nothing about;

Thy lovers were all untrue,

‘Tis well an Old Age is out

And time to begin a New."

John Dryden, The Secular Masque

A BEAST IN VIEW

A Novel

by Abraham Rothberg

The classroom was on the first floor of one of the university’s oldest buildings, one wall of windows, two — front and back — of blackboards, one of yellowing plaster. Its windows overlooked a small, semi-private court, a flight of broad stone stairs that debouched shallowly toward the less sheltered part of the campus and the other buildings from which it was partly hidden by frail ginkgo trees and dwarfed elms. Patches of earth, looking like afterthoughts in the concrete, were planted with rhododendron and azalea, and small evergreens, yew, ilex and hemlock. In the center of the square, rising huge out of the pavement, was a copy of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.

The first morning I’d gotten to class so early that I stood alone staring out of the window at that statue in the tattered July sunshine, watching pigeons waddle, scuffle and flap around nuggets of dried bread someone had scattered around its base, the hunched majesty, the brute bafflement, the almost hopelessly heavy strength of bone and sinew, the green patina black in the skin lines as if someone had rubbed dirt into the creases of naked flesh before casting the bronze; and on the bent head and shoulders the arrogant pigeons had spattered their white fecal stains. I felt suspended in time, as if I were hidden away in green shadows until someone behind me said, That’s a right pretty little courtyard.

I must have jumped, because she added, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for you to be startled.

By the time I’d turned to face her, two other people were coming through the door. I was shy about speaking, so I just nodded and sat down. I took an outside seat in the last row on the aisle near the window where I could, with only a little craning of my neck, see part of the statue and the courtyard. The girl remained at the window, looking out, her face half-averted, as if she still expected me to say something more. Slender, with black hair that fell straight and thick to her shoulders before turning up into a single black coil, she wore what had been a WAVE’s uniform, a navy blue suit, without insignia now, whose simplicity made her seem taller and more fragile than she was. When I didn’t speak after all, she turned her face away but remained at the window.

The classroom began to fill up rapidly, and I wasn’t surprised to see that the students were almost all dressed in modified uniforms, Army khakis and suntans, Marine greens, Navy blues and grays, WAVE and WAC uniforms, but mixed with civilian shirts, pants and jackets, as if no one seemed yet certain about which world he belonged to, military or civilian, war or peace.

A tall, powerful-shouldered man hovered over the seat next to mine, his left eye masked by a black eye patch whose elastic strip cut across his tanned forehead. Mind if I sit?

Hell, no, I said, and as I spoke, the girl in the WAVE uniform turned away from the window and sat in the row in front of us. The man sat too, his face split by the black patch, a thin black mustache, and two lampblack smudges of eyebrow, a darkness reinforced by a flying officer’s suntan shirt, and hair so black it seemed just to have been wetted.

That winter after the war, those of us who came back came back different, not knowing how or why, but sure the old ways wouldn’t take. A lot of us were making the big plans men make when they don’t expect circumstances really to afford the opportunities to fulfill them. If anyone and everyone around thought of us as home from the war, they were wrong: With us we had brought the war home, like a plague, an infection not only of our single cells and whole organisms but of the body politic entire. Many of us, like apocalyptic Typhoid Marys, never knew the germs we carried. All of us were busy trying to forget, and what many of us mistook in others for gentle unwillingness to remind us of our ordeal was in truth the simplest of indifference. We kept ourselves busy making plans about the things we were going to do, not altogether aware that the others had simply gone on with their plans too. Most of the plans failed, but then most plans do; and the men, once soldiers and now civilians, went back to the oldest war of all, doing what they’d done before, what men probably must do — planned or unplanned — working farms, manufacturing products, selling automobiles, building houses, shuffling papers.

But some of us didn’t go back.

I don’t suppose I should speak for us or for them, because I don’t know about the rest; in fact, I’m not altogether sure that I can speak with honesty and authority for myself. Perhaps that’s why I’m writing this, to see if I can make sense of all of it, to see if the mud will shape into something more than mud, and the stars look down and nod. I doubt that it will or they could, but by now I am, and even then I was, a skeptical man. Not that there weren’t believing men too, like Charlie Hatch, who became a Trappist monk. Charlie was more than a representative member of my generation coming back home with me; we were in the same platoon and he was my best friend. After he saw Essen, Cologne and Hamburg, with what he’d seen earlier, he didn’t have any plans either; and he didn’t care to make any. He’d had enough of almost everything, particularly men and their words, and he wanted out. Perhaps wanting out is a plan in itself but for a New England Protestant — his family had been Episcopalian for generations — becoming a Cistercian was a long step. He wanted quiet and peace; maybe he even wanted to die, the only place you can be certain of those two commodities. But silence and prayer were the last two things I was capable of then or wanted. I liked talk and I liked human beings, although I was skeptical of both; even now, so much later and after all I’ve seen, I think I still do. Not that I have or had much choice: What else is there? Hatch would have said earth and sky and the changing seasons, but twenty minutes of landscape, no matter how spectacular, was always about as much as I could take. I was there. I liked it. But I always began to ask, Who lives here and how? Hatch would also have said something about his own soul, but I don’t believe I’d have understood that either.

I came back wanting to be a great writer, a leader, a moral force, a name to be conjured with in my own generation and those which, if any, were to come after. I was certain I was a unique individual whose powerful vision of life gave force to my desire and purpose to my action. I knew I was destined to be such a man of power, not merely the power that was a law or decree, surely not that of the gun or the bomb, but the sort of power which was, the living word to burn green in the mind and flower crimson in the heart. What Shelley had called the Poets: the unacknowledged legislators of the world. And perhaps the unacknowledged part of that appealed to me least. So, in the late spring of that year after the war ended, I said goodbye to my mother, old and lost in the recollections of her early life with my father, long dead, and to my contemporaries in Providence — that is, those I had grown up with but with whom I now had little in common — and I came down to New York City to become a writer.

I came to New York because I was persuaded that all great literatures are products of great cities — Jerusalem, London, Paris, Athens, St. Petersburg — and that all great writing carne out of groups living, suffering and creating in those great cities, each artist catalyzing and fertilizing the work of other artists in the group, whether they were fifth-century Athenians, sixteenth-century Londoners, or nineteenth-century Parisians. New York was my country’s great literary city, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago notwithstanding, the center of America’s literary and cultural life, the fulcrum with which I would move the world.

My first step was to go to Amelia Whiteside’s writers’ workshop. I’d heard of Amelia Whiteside in Providence — she was, after all, a New Englander, even if she had lived in New York and Paris, London and Vienna, Moscow and Madrid — of her publishing house, her magazine, her editing, writing and her annual collection of short stories; but most of all I’d heard of her interest in and help to beginning writers. Because I was a beginner, in a June that was a green and yellow flame after the war, I came to Amelia Whiteside’s course at the university.

By a stroke of luck I didn’t appreciate until much later, I was lucky enough to find an apartment in the West 70s near the Drive — housing shortages were only one postwar problem that required postwar readjustment — moved in, then bought a second-hand typewriter in a Third Avenue pawn shop. When I inquired at the university admissions office, they told me that Miss Whiteside chose her own students personally, and therefore they couldn’t give me permission to register for the course. Yes, they understood my dilemma, but.... For ten days I haunted her office but no Amelia Whiteside. No one knew where she was or when she’d be back; in fact, one of the secretaries at the university English Department intimated that she didn’t know if Miss Whiteside would return. I tried looking her up in the phone book, but she had no listing. Finally, the Friday preceding the Monday the semester began, I went back to the admissions office, and since I was now a registered student on the G.I. Bill of Rights, with the United States government guaranteeing my tuition, they were a bit more sympathetic, and after prolonged debate, they gave me Amelia Whiteside’s unlisted phone number.

I can still remember that wet-hot summer afternoon, so bright you had to keep your eyes half-closed because the mica bits in the sidewalk glittered so sharply. In the telephone booth, as I dialed her number, the sweat ran down my armpits and the hollow of my back, and a small rubber fan in the corner of the booth blew hot air across my face and chest as soon as I closed the door, pasting my shirt to my skin. The phone rang for a long time but no one answered. I was in a panic. Suppose she didn’t return until Monday? She’d start class without me. I sat there sweating like an animal, letting the phone ring again and again until the jangling stopped and an abrupt voice answered, Well, what is it?

Miss Whiteside?

This is she.

A cool wind played over me and I saw a slender, beautiful woman standing next to a window overlooking the city, a telephone receiver cradled next to her ear held there by a quizzical shoulder so she could strike a match to a cigarette. Light curtains billowed around her like a halo.

Is anyone there? the voice inquired impatiently.

Yes, Ma’am, I fell back automatically into my Providence manners, or manner, my name is Leonard Drewes. I’ve been trying to get into your writers’ workshop.

Nobody’s called me Ma’am since I left Boston. Don’t you either! Why didn’t you apply the regular way and send me a manuscript?

I just got back from overseas.

I guess there wasn’t much time for writing over there. I heard queer high-pitched sounds on the line like the voices of other simultaneous conversations, and then, Do you want to write or be a writer? Amelia Whiteside asked.

I want to...to learn.

Okay, she said, you’re in.

Just like that?

What did you expect, the Nobel Prize?

Not quite yet, I replied, thinking how peculiar the whole conversation sounded. Thank you.

Whoa! Don’t hang up until I write down your name. There’s just one seat left and you’ve got it, so consider yourself in luck. You’ll be the only student in class whose writing samples I haven’t seen.

I did try to get in touch with you...

…what’s your name?

I gave it to her, she had me spell, and then she said, Monday, at nine, Mr. Drewes, and hung up.

My old infantryman’s superstition still with me, I thought, I’m lucky. And then I muttered my thank-yous to Miss Whiteside on that dead line. Things augured well.

A little after nine the class was full but the desk up front remained empty. By half-past nine, the silence had become a hum and the cigarette smoke a haze; there were audible comments about getting the show on the road and moving out, but still no Amelia Whiteside. At about ten, heels clopped in the corridor and even before she entered the room a high-pitched voice rang out: If you all want to be writers, what the hell are you doing here? Why aren’t you home writing? She came into the room with an unbelievably white smile on her face, as if greatly pleased with her entrance line, or her teeth, or merely with finally having arrived. But it was such a stagey melodramatic entrance of one so clearly shy that I was instantly taken by her. She was late; she’d kept twenty people waiting; she was truly sorry. About fifty-five, hers was a middle age that refused to come to terms with itself. She wore a pink hat with eight small artificial pink roses sewn to a stained pink pleated sash that looked as if someone had cut it from a candy box and tied it carelessly around a piece of pink felt. Three of the roses hung askew over strands of tea-colored hair, obviously dyed-over grey,that straggled from beneath the hat. As she walked to the desk, I was struck by the contrasts of face and figure. The top half of her had thickened, but her legs were beautiful and shapely, the legs of a young woman. Her face was a combination of upper-class English refinement in forehead, eyebrows and nose and Cockney sullenness in the cheeks and mouth, all illuminated by nearsighted sharp green eyes and that brilliant smile. She had on too much rouge, her powder had spilled like dandruff over the bosom of the garish silk green dress she wore. As she plopped down behind the desk, dropped a huge purse, books and two packets of cigarettes in front of her, I thought she might be drunk. She adjusted the silver-rimmed pince-nez and stared out at the class with a mischievous grin. Skillfully, she split one of the cigarette packs open with a fingernail and said, almost conversationally, in a high, New England schoolmarmish voice that carried to every part of the room: "Well, what are you doing here?"

Grinning conspiratorially, she lit the cigarette and told us we could smoke if we wished, but since it was against university regulations, we had to be careful not to leave butts or ashes on the floor because otherwise the janitors reported her to the Dean. A low chuckle and the rustling and scraping of people lighting up — again — seemed to please her.

Then she told us how she would conduct the class. We were all required to write four short stories or six chapters of a novel, and except for the first manuscript submitted, she preferred that we write new material during the semester. Obviously, she had no way of checking but the point was to see if we’d learned anything during the course. Manuscripts were to be typewritten in three copies, the original to her, first carbon to the author, and second carbon without the author’s name on it to be left in a special room at the Grosvenor Library where other class members were required to read it so that discussion would be general. Also, Amelia Whiteside stressed, because writers learn more from their peers than from lectures or books about writing.

She’s got it organized anyway, the black eye patch murmured.

I nodded.

There are two kinds of people in writing, she was saying, those who want to write, and those who want to be writers. I’m interested only in the first. The others want to make money, to be celebrities; well and good, but they’re not for this workshop, so if you’re one of those, you’d better leave now. She paused, surveying the class as if she really expected some staunch soul to have the temerity to get up and walk out. She told us how writing was one of the loneliest, most difficult arts, demanding and frustrating, that writers rarely made a living and still more rarely achieved any recognition of their work. Most writers took jobs as dishwashers, waiters, hotel night clerks, insurance salesmen, carpenters, to make a living. They wrote in their spare time, on lunch hours, on weekends, during vacations, while other people slept. Most of us, she warned, would have to do the same sort of thing. Mencken once said to me in the old days: ‘Amelia, if a writer can’t marry someone with money, he should at least marry someone who can typewrite.’

Everyone laughed.

But it’s worth it, she continued, I think nothing in life is worth more. Socrates said the life unconsidered was not worth living, and when you’re writing, you’re considering your life, and all life, in the best, most honest way. Writing wouldn’t come easily to most of us, and if it did, that might be a fluke. Most writers were what she called bleeders, and if any of us put half the time and energy into other professions, we’d make a hundred, a thousand times more money and reputation than we’d probably ever achieve in writing. Remember what Hemingway said. ‘The writer’s first duty is to survive; his second is to write.’ You’ve got to write every day, not wait for the Muse, because the Muse might never come. A little each day adds up. At the end of the year, even two pages a day will give you 730 pages, almost the length of three novels.

Eventually, Amelia Whiteside assured us, good writing did get published, and we ought not to worry about publication. It was important but what really counted was the writing. If she saw anything publishable or thought she knew where it would sell, she’d tell us. A story would, if it were good enough, find its own market, or make a market for itself, so we