Changing the Past (28 page)

For the next several years he could write only incoherently or not at all. He began to drink heavily beginning at noon and continued drunk until he went to bed fourteen or fifteen hours later. On publication of
Jerry Claggett
he had taken an expensive apartment on the Upper East Side and had it decorated by a demonstrative man with a penchant for swagged lamps. Kellog was never comfortable there when alone, yet remained desperately lonely even when he threw parties, as a result of which the place was soon in tatters, the rugs and chairs stained. The neighbors complained about the noise of these events and sometimes called the police, who after a few such visits threatened (as they could in those days) to kick his faggot ass if they were summoned again, and having only just smoked his first joint at the time, he lacked the moral certitude to protest effectively, though he was anything but queer, nor were his guests, who were always in the bedrooms, fucking the sort of girls who were attracted to the literary life of the day.

Eventually these pleasures came to an end, for at last his publishers lost patience and threatened to take him to court unless he submitted a complete manuscript of the novel for which they had extended him an advance so many years before.

Under such pressure Kellog managed to keep away from the bottle for the first half of each day and, blanched of face and with shaking fingers, write a second novel. Once begun, this narrative proceeded so smoothly as to lead him to wonder why he had taken so long to get down to work. Again his life provided the situation and characters, with the difference that this time he would not draw so naively and literally on himself but rather make his hero a playwright. The supporting roles were all neat equivalents, a director having rather the moral weight of an editor; producer—publisher, and so on. He dropped the deserted wife and the importunate female agent: “Charles Koenig” was an unmarried satyr and was represented professionally by a hairy-nostriled, aggressive man named Sy. And “Sally Day,” the prominent actress and wife of producer “William B. Dolan” was rather a nymphomaniac than homosexual, and Cal Cavanaugh was at least partly concealed in the character of director “Stan Stanley,” a tasteless man when it came to stagecraft and in life a brute to women as well as an anti-Semitic bigot (Koenig and he quarreled incessantly and once came to blows in Sardi's men's room, a fight that the playwright won, as he prevailed in putting his own version of the play on the boards against Stanley's vicious opposition).

The novel was necessarily rejected by Foley & Nash, freeing Kellog to go elsewhere, though he must refund the advance before another publisher could bring out the book. Beyond that, Cavanaugh warned him that Foley might well consider bringing a libel suit if the book reached print with the same characters that appeared in the manuscript.

By now Kleinsinger was himself being tried, with his associates in the real-estate scheme, for conspiracy to defraud, and Kellog was acting as his own agent. His second novel,
Koenig's Ordeal
, was turned down by all the major publishers, and when it was finally accepted, by a small house named Karney Byrne
&
Co., the advance was no more than a fifth of what was owed Foley
&
Nash. Kellog was convinced that once in print it would sell at least as well as had
Jerry Claggett
, having more explicit-sex scenes (with the particulars that were now coming into vogue as censorship was on the wane) and a lot of authentic inside dirt on Broadway, furnished him by Lucinda Houghton, the actress he had ignored at the dinner when Molly Dye sat on his left. (Kellog provided the pretext for one of Lucy Houghton's simulated attempts at suicide, which luckily by then he had learned were routine in every one of her frequent love affairs and invariably brought on when her current companion failed to be as ardent as she in political passions.)

But
Koenig's Ordeal
was loathed by the reviewers. Some deplored its style. (“Kellog seems to have written this with a pen stuck between his toes. Characters are usually given two adjectives, no more no less, by way of description: e.g., ‘short fat Paul Wayne'; ‘slender, grim Mona Bingley'; a policeman is ‘robust and ruddy'; one actor is ‘unshaven and haggard,' another, ‘trim and rangy,' and on and on. But occasionally he assigns only one attribute to a personage and refers to it exclusively and incessantly. Jenny Langsam's red hair is never forgotten for more than a paragraph, though we're never told another thing about this woman, not even an approximation of her age.”)

Other critics found the novel morally offensive. (“Is
everyone
in the Broadway theater a greedy, unscrupulous sexual degenerate? Kellog's insufferable hero is the sole exception, and after some exposure to him, you long to be back with the scoundrels”), and there were some who attacked the book as a catastrophe in both substance and form. Gilligan Hurst, the most extravagant of the admirers of
Jerry Claggett
, was this time the most vicious of detractors, libelously (in Kellog's view, though not in the opinion of any of the attorneys to whom he applied) questioning the sanity of the publisher who would put such a piece of trash in print and in effect calling the author downright depraved. George Binson found it hilarious that Kellog was not aware that Hurst's wife had been a Broadway actress in an earlier era of genteel drawing-room comedies, when those of the legitimate theater, perhaps to differentiate themselves from tarty movie stars, at least kept up a decorous front.

Koenig's Ordeal
sold nowhere nearly as many copies as its predecessor. During the ensuing decade, those who admired Kellog's work were ever more difficult to find, and after his third book, a short novel about divorcing a lesbian wife, which was more or less ignored by the reviewers and purchased by few readers, he found himself for a long time unable to complete a fourth. The project to make a movie of
The Life and Death of Jerry Claggett
had long since been abandoned.

Kellog now taught “creative writing” at a suburban college, a job he had been given on the recommendation of Peregrine Vole, who after returning such good for the evil things John had said about him, finally went back to Britain, where he published a collection of lyrics that was lavishly admired throughout the English-speaking world, and some said he was a likely candidate for the next Nobel Prize. Kellog still had not read more than one or two examples of Perry's verse, which made no sense to him, and he assumed that Vole's high reputation was due almost solely to the Englishman's skill at literary politics.

Cal Cavanaugh retired and wrote a widely praised memoir of his many years as editor, in which all his writers were named, including a number who had never distinguished themselves either critically or in sales. With one exception: John Kellog went unmentioned.

After scanning the index twice again, Kellog threw the book into the wastecan beneath his desk, that receptacle into which so much of what he had written in recent years had been discarded hot from the typewriter, and spoke in the direction of Candy Budge, the student who was currently living with him out of wedlock, in a more enlightened time than his own era as undergraduate, for all the real good it did him: had he married Candy it might have been easier to get rid of her. As it was, this spoiled daughter of a prosperous family paid her share of the rent and food and thus felt licensed to bring other male friends to the apartment, often while he was in one room, writing, and go to bed with them in another. Not to mention that she was a godawful slob who clogged the washstand with her hair and the toilet with tampons and almost immediately on moving in had exchanged her previously sunny disposition for a sullenness occasionally relieved by tantrums. She was also given to belching loudly, something he had never known another woman to do, and scratching her crotch like a baseball player, which was appropriate enough given her style in bed, as manifested during the short period during which they had screwed, or tried to, for though sex with an eighteen-year-old was aphrodisiac in the mind, the physical experience of it failed to stimulate Kellog's genitals when Candy immediately insisted on his remaining supine while she vigorously entertained the illusion that it was she who penetrated him. Her odd idea of arousing him was to fend off his attempts to caress her and then painfully claw at his testicles.

And as elsewhere, so in bed: no matter what he did, however obsequious, it was by her assessment “degrading to women,” then a new nonce-phrase. When it got to the point that Candy blamed
him
for her “rape” at the hands of a husky football player she had brought home to copulate with in her own style, Kellog began to pack his possessions into the liquor cartons he had procured for that function.

Having no formal credentials or even a basic degree, he had never throughout the years acquired tenure in his job, but rather was hired by biennial contract, which meant he ever skated on the thin ice of academic politics and found it necessary to ingratiate himself with whoever served as chairman of the Department of English except at those times when a cabal of professors was working clandestinely for the ouster of a particular chairman disliked by his colleagues for espousing critical theories repugnant to them: in such cases Kellog had to choose the side which would emerge victorious though secretly despising all, and this constant drain on his faculties left him with insufficient resources for his own writing.

Therefore it proved to be a blessing, though not at first apparent as such, when after some years of correct choices, he at last put his money on a losing nag, and when T. Barton Spahn, a middle-aged Freudian, was outmaneuvered by a clutch of younger people who dressed as farmhands and called for a literature between which and social studies there was to be no distinction, Kellog's contract was not renewed for the following academic year.

But finally he had another usable theme for a novel: an affair between a college teacher of a certain age and a student two decades his junior. The time proved precisely right for such a narrative, youth being on a national rampage; adults, especially when male, either cowered in dread of denunciation by enraged striplings or seethed with resentment against parasites who had never earned a paycheck, who indeed had been reared and were still supported by those they attacked. In the original version “Martin Canning,” a widely respected novelist who, because of an instinctive attraction towards youth with its hope and vivacity and artistic potential, takes a post as a creative-writing instructor at Eastern State College and not long thereafter falls ardently in love with Clarissa St. James, a very young woman, gorgeous, statuesque, and superficially charming but, as Canning is eventually to discover, fundamentally of mean spirit and no feeling that is not ruthlessly self-concerned.

Though publicly successful, Canning in private has been the victim of more than one female in the past. Owing to his persistent need for love (and an enormous capacity for returning it) and learning nothing from his past mistakes, he puts himself at Clarissa's callow mercy and inexorably (what with rock concerts,
au courant
wardrobe and hairstyle, “demonstrations” that were sometimes tear-gassed) becomes an object of scorn by persons of all generations but more poignantly by the “kids” with whom he had thrown his lot. He begins to think of suicide…

The dénouement was subject to alteration. After all these years away from publishing, he could no longer trust his own judgment, and anyway his only success, as he could now admit, had been the novel so extensively edited by Cal Cavanaugh. Therefore when he submitted the current MS to Trudy Bolger, a current senior editor at Karney Byrne, whose name he had found in
Literary Marketplace
, he felt it necessary not only to explain that he had been a KB author back in the Dark Ages when she (who he imagined was slender, winsome, and poetic) was probably a toddler, but he would welcome any suggestions for revision of any part of the narrative, including the ending.

Six weeks later, Trudy invited him to come into the city, though not for lunch, just to the office. In person she proved to be not as young as he had assumed, oriented to students as he had been for so many years. Trudy was stocky and unusually short (perhaps not even five feet tall). Her graying hair was curly and cut very close to reveal large ears.

“Here's the situation,” said she, in the melodious voice that on the telephone had given him the impression of quite another person. “You got a story to tell all right, but the characters are all wrong for today's reader. She doesn't want to empathize with the problems of this Marvin.”

“Martin.”

Trudy shook her square face. “The whole point of view must be changed…”

Kellog went through many emotions before the issue was settled, but over the course of the next year, living in a furnished room on unemployment insurance and wretched fees for hackery, including book reviews in which he disparaged contemporary novels, he gradually with many rewritings transformed Martin Canning into the villain of the story: a monster of vanity whose predominant emotion towards himself was pity; to others, envy or contempt. Clarissa emerged as a sympathetic personage, a young woman of vivacious intelligence, generous to those deserving compassion, defiant towards misusers, even witty without a touch of malice. And, as Candy Budge hardly provided such a model, this was a triumph of original characterization all of which was Kellog's achievement, for Trudy had no hand in the creation of a woman she still considered as being far too passive.

When published, the novel received all manner of notices. Some, more or less favorable, were by persons who had never read his books of years before but pretended, welcoming him back, to have missed his presence on the scene. As always there were critics who had not actually read the one at hand and rather reviewed outlandish fantasies of their own making, finding in the novel only that which was everywhere in creation their respective exclusive concerns: e.g., the identification of transsexualism, the smelling out of crypto-fascist sympathies, the denunciation of the culture of television. But there were gratifying reviews as well, written by spiritual soulmates of whose existence he had been hitherto ignorant, including even one, from a New England paper and signed “Nancy Parkman,” making virtually every point he had made to himself in private reflection.