The Writer I Live With

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IF YOU did not know who he was, the first time you saw him on a street corner in New York or Washington or Houston or Chicago, you would have a hard time trying to figure out from his appearance just where he belonged or what was his history. At the top of his six-foot-two you would find a GI haircut of a mousey color and with the soft and furry texture of a mouse, which adds to, rather than detracts from, the great charm and incongruity of his personality.

His ears are large and stick out on either side of a weather-beaten face covered by lines — particularly around the gray-blue eyes — which come from squinting at the sun, from being in the sun as much as possible, from never wearing a hat except in the city (the hat is a gesture to covention). The gray-blue eyes are deep set and not large. They can be at various times alight with laughter, gleaming with mockery (when he is winning a point in an argument, for instance, and waiting (or the kill), and quite suddenly, like gray pebbles, almost blank with what seems a helpless baff ement imprisoned within him, from which he cannot escape. His grin is both engaging and disarming.

In his buttonhole would be a ribbon of the Legion of Honor or the Croix de Guerre, and he would be wearing a tie given him either by his friend Max Krindler of Twenty One, or Sherman Billingsly of the Stork Club. His personal laste in ties is conservative (as is theirs), and the loud hand-painted variety is a wasted gift. When he buys for himself, he usually selects a dozen little dark blue bow ties with polka dots, rather too small for his face and stature,

His suit would probably be blue flannel and pinstriped, the shoes conventional and black, with faint traces of barnyard manure along the soles. The blue pin-striped suit would be one of six or seven all alike, which he purchases miserably in lots of half a dozen every five or six years, not because the suits on hand have worn out, but because of changes in his silhouette. He has some favorites for which he has a singular tenderness and which he will never throw away. He will suddenly appear at an Occasion in one of them — mainy sizes too small and shiny at the elbows — which he has inadvertently pulled from his closet and packed in his valise without so much as glancing at its condition. Because these pin stripes are all alike, he is saved the necessity of making up his mind when he goes to the closet. All he has to do is grab. He detests shopping and does it all in one horrid morning, outfitting himself in quantity, so that a long time will elapse before he has to go through the mean business of selecting again. He buys his clotes ready-made, as the very thought of a fitting would put him into a strait jacket and his entire family with him.

If you went through his pockets you would find an assortment of articles worthy of the pockets of Huckleberry Finn. First an expensive and tired wallet, filled with cheeks he has forgotten to cash, and stuffed with cards and addresses picked up all over the Uited States from new friends and acquaintances. This he cleans out only when the wallet gets so thick it won’t go into his outside pocket. Besides the wallet there would be a trick pocket knife, a cigarette holder, a cigarette lighter (he is a match addict, so this has never been used), part of a package of fruit drops, a pair of Stork Club dice, carried for luck or sometimes for use in a crap game, and an immense quantity of loose silver. (As a veteran traveler he has a wild fear of being caught without enough silver for tips and taxis.) There would also be lots of elippings from the ten or twenty magazines and newspapers he rends every day, as well as a collection of crumpled and soiled memoranda.

He has written some twenty-five books in as many years, some of them fiction, some on economics and politics, some on agriculture, some reminiscences. Most of them have been translated into fifteen or twenty different languages, including Chinese and Hindustani. And he is the author of countless articles for magazines and newspapers in the United States, dealing with economies, painting, politics, the ballet, geography, music, ihe theater, agricultures the movies, books, and writing, He is the author of three unsuccessful plays and one partly successful adaptation from the French.

His vision is first and last that of a novelist, seeing things, people, and events in terms slightly outsize of reality, colored and expanded by what some may call imagination and some call genius. This qualily gives both to his writing and to his talk, even on potentially dull subjects, a tremendous intensity and excitement.

Dullness is an agony to him, and when a person or an entertainment is suddenly reduced to dullness in some place where he cannot escape, he becomes literally sick, with brown blotches under his eyes and the look on his face of a cornered and desperale bloodhound.

He speaks good french and passable German, and has a definite talent for the pigeon English of any country, This, with his faculty for immediately gathering a motley group about him wherever he may be, makes him find himself at home anywhere surrounded by every imaginable type of person of every race, creed, color, situation in life, and point of view, and all at I the same time, He loves to mix his gang, and is no “respecter of persons.”He prefers to be with those who entertain and interest him, rather than with those who could advance him.

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His fiction deals with any subject ranging from humble farm life to what he refers to as “international white trash.”He writes of what he wants, when he wants and the way he wants, thus making him the despair of critics and, no doubt, of his publishers, who have never been able to place him in any category.

He writes a weekly newspaper column mostly on politics, agriculture, and economies, which appears in over sixty papers in the United States. Never once in the six years of its twist once has he missed a week or been late in delivering his copy, for he is a madman for punctuality.

Having a vivid pen and tongue, he is the white hope of both big political parties. He is also the source of deepest puzzlement to them, for his opinions have nothing to do with party lines or affiliations. He was born a Democrat, so the Democrats claim him for their own; but when he soured on some of that party ‘s more prominent protagonists, the Republicans surged forward with many a hope and much inner satisfaction, only to find that he was far from being one of them either in word or in deed. He is a persuasive and convincing speaker, but has no truck with saying what is expected of him, if he does not believe it. I fancy that psychologically the Democratic Party appeals to the scamp, the gaiety, and the progressive in him, while the Republicans mildly satisfy the conservative, puritanical side of his nature.

He is a very active speechmaker. Lately, his 150 to 200 speeches a year have dealt with conservation more than anything else; but the thealer, literature, the ballet, music, and politics come in for their bit of attention too. If he made all the speeches that he is asked to make, he would never stop talking. I imagine that there are some people who think that he never does stop talking, but they are fantastically wrong; for like so many who are talkative, argumentative, or floor-holders in a group, he can be almost taciturn when left alone with one other person. There are times, under such circumstances, when his silences are impenetrable; vast mountains of resistance, He can scarcely abide a têle-â-tête, and at a dinner party, when trapped inlo one, will often go to the expedient of calling across the table to his wife, in order to make the conversation general.

He is an inveterate reader, pouring over and digesting newspapers of all varieties from the highest in thought to the lowest, and magazines of all kinds which deal with his favorite subjects. He does not confine himself, however, to the reading of newspapers and magazines, as though there were something unmanly in the reading of a book, particularly fiction. Far from that, he absorbs every book of interest to him that he can lay his hands upon, enjoying particularly memoirs, biography, and novels, which, if good or great, give him the thrill and excitement of any great work of art. He reads books on farming, medicine, eating, and politics as well, and never forgets anything, He can always pull a fuel out of the bag in the midst of the most hefted arguments, a weapon far more formidable than the most clever and brilliant of rebuttals. Indignation, facts, fury, and derision pour out of him when discussion becomes a heated argument and he really warms to his subject. The opponent in the fray is often obliged to gather his forces and leap in fearlessly when he can find a moment or place. On the other hand. I have known him to discuss quietly and logically, listen and ask questions, even when the person or subject under discussion was the object of his particular abhorrence.

He is a lover of all beauty in nature or in art, the ballet being of the arts his favorite, probably because of its combination of music, motion, color, and theatrical quality, He loves to dance himself, and can execute many of the steps of his favorite ballets with a good deal of grace, gusto, and accuracy. His happiest evenings at home are those in which he, his three daughters, and his visitors act out bits of various ballets with a violence which has nearly sent some of the feminine members of the party to bed with broken ribs. He looks but fleetingly at Causes (when he does, it is usually out of indignation at the opposition), and turns his back on nearly every form of sport.

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TWICE in the fifty-odd years of his life, he has conceived and organized two establishments which acquired considerable fame. The first was the house, garden, and small farm in France where he carried on hybridizing of dahlias and the introduction of American vegetables. He received recognition from the French government for his work, and his proudest possessions are a diploma and medal from the Workingmen’s Gardens Association of France, for the excellence of his truck and garden vegetables. The farm, some thirty miles from Paris, was the gathering place on week-ends for people of all kinds from Gertrude Stein to the Maharajah of Baroda. There were times on these long-ago week-ends (which became at the end a trifle too popular) when there were as many as eighty for lunch on a Sunday, and the host and hostess were rather at a loss to know who some of the guests were. It was nevertheless a time which they look back upon with great nostalgia.

Later, in the United Stales, he set up a farm which is visited each year by some twenty thousand farmers, specialists, and research men from all over the United States as well as India, China, Russia, Palestine, and other African, Asiatic, and European countries. He takes an active part in the farming of this thousand-acre grass and livestock farm, and in the wide range of agricultural and nutritional experiments conducted there. He is at heart and in action a “dirt farmer,”working during the summer many hours a day in the field, on the plow, harrow, hay baler, and manure spreader, and knowing every head of livestock down to the newest calf, and every square foot of the thousand acres, the condition it is in, and what it needs.

He has a big house on his place which is filled most of the time with visitors of even more varied sorts and conditions than those who came to his house in France. During and after the war he took in three half-French, half-American boys and one Swedish lad who, he feels, are members of his family. which in it self is not small. One small wing of the house is given over to offices, library, and two ground-floor bedrooms which he shares with six dogs and his wife. “ The dogs don’t sleep With me,”he says, “I sleep with the dogs.”

Now that this farm is reaching its zenith and is very nearly in complete working order, he has other projects in other states under way: but I believe that the original farm and the big house will always be the center of his life, for it has a peculiar quality and beauty of its own, a certain spell and magic which could not be recaptured anywhere else.

His frequent comings and goings are always fraught with great excitement. There is a wild sense of hurry and busyness about the house all the day of his going away. Ten minutes before it is time for him to leave, he changes his clothes and begins packing.

He invariably takes with him two valises, one large and one small. At the bottom of both he piles magazines, books, unanswered letters, cartons of cigarettes, a pack or so of playing cards, writing paper, a pair of extra shoes, and occasionally a box of candy. On top of these are laid the inevitable pin-striped suit, some underclothes, too many shirts (some of which are never unpacked from one trip to another), one or two ties, and a very ancient toilet case. This toilet case has seen much life and travel in all parts of the globe and is filled with a few things which he does need, and with many which he might need, even to very old cold pills and dusty bottles of witch hazel and other liniments picked up here and there. On top of the case is sometimes thrown a dinner jacket with trousers which may or may not match it.

This medley of packing accomplished, he rushes through the house, grabbing hat and overcoat on the way, and throws himself into the car. Those traveling with him should be ready and waiting, and very much on the lookout, for more than likely he will forget about them and will plunge by, leaving them breathless with shouting and running after him. His hurrying is induced by terror of losing the train and by the fact that he must stop at a newsstand on the way to the station and buy some dozen or more magazines and newspapers to add to the mass already piled up in his valises. If it is possible to avoid it, there is never a good-bye said on these exits— which often bewilders guests who have not gone through one before and who stand around with outstretched hands and polite words of farewell dying on their lips. His departures are not supposed to be noticed or commented upon.

No matter how long or how short a time he has been away, the return is equally momentous. All of the day before becomes back, scrubbing, readying up, and extra cooking are going on although he never seems to notice whether there is dirt or dust about and will very likely take a bowl of crackers and milk at a meal in lieu of other food however delicious. The family, the household, and even the dogs arc agog with anticipation and excitement. They all appear to have put on a new set of clothes and made up their faces afresh. For a few days, and indeed until he goes away again, there is an extra tinge of zest and color to everything that happens, for near him drabness never sets in.

There is much more to be told of this story, but I feel that enough has been said to give an idea of the breathless feeling that sometimes overtakes those who live and work with my husband.