Howard and I in Arizona during the filming of Billy the Kid with Val Kilmer. I play a minister whose specialty is—what else?—funerals. Over the years I’ve done several Billy the Kids, the first for live TV with Paul Newman in 1955. Others turned my work into the film The Left Handed Gun, a perfect mess almost as highly rated by the French as Jerry Lewis.
“Here” is the Hollywood Hills. “When” is today, December 31, 2004. New Year’s Eve is at hand and with luck—good or bad—tomorrow will bring the two thousand fourth year of the Christian era to a close. For several days television has been full of images of Southeast Asia drowning in tsunami tidal waves. As I watched the Thai island of Phuket being pummeled by wind, I looked in vain for the Royal Yacht Club (a hotel not a club) where we stayed a dozen years ago. It is now as gone as, indeed, are “we” reduced to the singular “me.” Rain has been falling for more than a week on Los Angeles. Since 1977 “we” have had a house here, usually rented out to others as neither of us ever had any intention of living here until the obligatory arrival of the Cedars-Sinai Hospital years which, finally, came two years ago, like a tsunami wind, for him. So now—“what?”
Barbara Epstein, editor of The New York Review of Books, has just rung to report a “what”: the death of Susan Sontag whose decades-long war with cancer is over. Years ago a celebrated guru of the day gravely admonished her: “What’s all the fuss about? Why don’t you just let go? After all, death is simply a natural part of life,” and so on. Susan was having none of this: “I don’t consider death at my age,” she said (she was still young—forties?), “to be just nothing,” echoing Tennessee Williams who once wrote: “I have never considered death to be much in the way of completion.” I last saw Susan when we acted in Norman Mailer’s production of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. I was the Devil; she was Donna Anna…What gifts Susan had for performance were reserved for her most successful portrayal—the autodidact who could play aspects of herself by ear, often universalizing them in the process.
According to Barbara, Susan, the winner of so many skirmishes in her long campaign against oblivion, had left no instructions about a “final resting place.” Surviving loved ones are now discussing her passion for Balzac and should they bury her near him in the Père Lachaise cemetery at Paris. If they do, I don’t envy them all that bureaucratic French paperwork. As it turned out, Susan was admitted to the Montparnasse cemetery where she will join Sartre and Beauvoir, not too bad for a graduate of Hollywood High.
“What?” In front of me on the desk is a copy of Palimpsest: A Memoir, published in 1995 and dealing with my first thirty-nine years. I’ve just read the opening pages, curious to see how I had dealt with the all-important problem of memory. Or is it how memory deals with me? I read: “I have always been curious to know where writers are physically situated when they write memoirs. Their placement during works of the imagination is less relevant because the true geography of a fiction is all in the mind but a memoir is set off by a thousand associations, even by objects in a given room.” At the moment, today, in front of me there are several novels by James Purdy on the desk. I’ve been writing about him, and wondering why so unique a writer has been so ignored. But then, “unique” will do it every time hereabouts. Nearby, a volume of Montaigne’s essays, the ultimate touchstone for anyone trying to recollect himself as well as others.
I resist opening Montaigne for as long as possible. I spent an hour once in his sixteenth-century Gascon tower and saw the same view that he saw from his third-floor study window. But where he tells us he had his chicken run, there are now ducks at ground level. Otherwise, inside that round tower room, one can imagine oneself inside his head, preserved in this room as his attempts—essays—inhabit his books. Unable to resist, I turn to the page where he frets about his poor memory. “I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realizing it.” Since I am now thirteen years older than the author of Palimpsest and since most of my contemporaries are vanishing, I am often drawn to Montaigne on the subject of memory and its lapses, not to mention on our common mortality. He is surprisingly sardonic on this last delicate subject: “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in,” he writes. “Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years.” Hardly a delusion of mine as I examine a new cancer on my forearm, all the while waiting for diabetes to do its gaudy final thing. I sometimes imitate Montaigne when he notes that: “I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips.” Hence, Susan; I am told that a failed marrow implant, not to mention a harrowingly painful chemotherapy procedure, ended her ordeal. Since “each man bears the entire form of man’s estate,” as Montaigne puts it, I can take part, at a near-remove, in her now abandoned estate so like that of all the rest ever born.
I grow homesick when I read where I was in 1992, my workroom in Ravello: “a white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks out across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum; at the moment, a metallic gray sea has created a white haze that obscures the ever more hostile sun.” As I quote these lines I will myself back to then where Howard is still alive and our world has not yet cracked open.
Where am I now? I am in a second-floor study that an old friend, Diana Phipps, copied from a picture of Macaulay’s book-lined study. Through the windows in back of my chair, a steady monsoonlike vertical rain has been falling for days, rattling the straight palm trees that hide the road which crosses over from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley.
I have also just found the deed to the house; apparently, I bought it March 24, 1977, not long after we had bought the villa La Rondinaia (“The Swallows Nest”) in Ravello. We moved back here after a routine physical examination; our doctor showed me the X-ray of Howard’s chest: at the top of the right lung was a round object like an eyeball with glaucoma, startlingly white against the black foil of the radiogram. A lifetime of smoking had finally done its work; every attempt to stop the addiction had failed and continued to fail. Even after two “successful” cancer operations, he kept right on smoking and that is how “we” ceased to be we and became “I.”
To my left, as I write this at the partners desk, there is a chair that bars entrance from the study to the door to Howard’s room. Norberto, our Filipino housekeeper, has placed in the chair a puppet Mephistopheles with a white skull-like head and pointed mustache—to ward off the evil eye? But surely that eye has already failed to do its work.
The books here in Macaulay’s study are neither mine nor his, alas, but those of an old friend who has finally gone back East. Apparently, during his Western hegira, he had acquired every Literary Guild book club choice of the last thirty years. They are now stacked in the glass-fronted bookcases until my reference books come from Italy…if I decide actually to live in a so-called “homeland” daily grown ever more repressive.
At work in the La Rondinaia studio with a white cat waiting for me to thank her for the splendid rat that she has just delivered.
I see that a writer in this morning’s Los Angeles Times chides Sontag for not telling all to everyone about her affairs with so many fascinating women. Rousseau made the same complaint of Montaigne who was equally reticent about his private life. In the decades that I knew Susan slightly I was dimly aware of her private life and had no interest in it—nor anyone else’s for that matter unless it was, in some way, comical. I was also not particularly interested in her meditations on subjects like photography. What did matter to the non-specialized world was her views on war and peace in the Balkans and on the civil war in the Middle East where she sometimes offended the right people. That’s enough of death for now.