The Kiln. William McIlvanney
And Cagney shrugs and Bogart's lip curls over his top teeth and Silvana Mangano is standing in a paddy-field and he would die to be standing beside her.
In his head the endless voices are talking like so many crossed transatlantic lines he will sometime unscramble and the endless images move in and out of one another like a phantom selfhood he will one day discover how to make flesh. There in the darkness he is secretly practising himself.
So he has already been in love with many women, though nobody knows it, not even the women. He must have the most promiscuous mind in the world. Their names are a private harem: Greta and Rhonda and Alida and Lilli and Viveca and Lana and Ava and Olivia and Paulette and Vivien and Hedy and Maureen and Silvana and Sophia and Gina and Ingrid and … He is a virginal roue, he realises with horror when he discovers the word ‘roué’. (He has hoped that Frank Sinatra never learns about him and Ava, for he seems to be an angry wee man.)
If they ever found out about him, he would have a board of censors all to himself. Even Margaret Dumont, the big woman in the Marx Brothers' films, has evoked some stirrings in him. There is something in that statuesque presence that makes him want to climb it.
But it is true that Marjorie Main has so far remained immune to his talent for falling in love. He likes Ma Kettle but he doesn't love her. This gives him some hope for himself. Hope that he may survive his own promiscuity (and avoid dying of mental sexual exhaustion before he is twenty) is further confirmed by the fact that, no matter how often his affections stray, he keeps coming back to Greta Garbo. He is not sure why this should be but it has something to do with the way her gaze seems to him like a continent he would love to explore.
He has been more faithful to the screen men in his life. James Cagney was probably the first actor he adopted as his secondary father, then Errol Flynn, then Bogart. But they have turned out only to be surrogates for John Garfield, his man of men. It isn't just that Garfield does look a little, it seems to him, like his real father. It is that Garfield exudes a style that might have come off the streets where Tam is living. Of all his heroes, Garfield translates most easily into his own idiom. Tam feels as if he's seen him at the dancing.
Recently, though, Garfield's pre-eminence has been under threat. When Tam saw On the Waterfront, he knew immediately that Marlon Brando was the best actor he had ever seen. In fact, he decided he knew that Marlon Brando was the best actor anybody had ever seen. And when James Dean loped through East of Eden, he became instantly iconic in Tam's thoughts.
Still, Garfield may be dead but he lives on, his place not quite usurped, there beside Greta Garbo. This summer is still theirs. When he feels he has been kidding himself about the significance of yet another girl, he thinks of Greta Garbo. When he senses himself threatened by the arrogance of yet another hard-case, John Garfield stands beside him.
—AFTERWARDS, he would be living alone in an attic flat in the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris. It was a bitter winter and lonely as a cabin in the Yukon. He shivered in his eyrie and went out into the cold for coffees and tartines beurrées to eke his money out and came back in to the novel he was working on and it sat staring at him silently as if it were a former friend who didn't wish to speak to him any more.
But Francois, the man who had loaned him the flat, had the French intellectual's passion to make a library of experience. He had one room full of books and tapes of old films and pornographic magazines. One of the books was a biography of John Garfield. Reading it, he knew he had been right about Jules Garfinkel all those years ago. He still loved this man, his trying to stay true to where he came from, the intensity of his political beliefs, the passionate dishevelment of his life, the dread of betraying his friends that finally burst his heart and left him lying dead in an awkward place before he had time to testify in front of the Un-American Activities Committee.
There were no tapes of Garfield's films, which was maybe just as well, for he feared looking at former magic and finding it had been reduced to a few tricks. But there was the book of John Garfield's life and it talked him through a part of that winter like a friendly ghost. If you're in the shit, it said, I've been there too. Remember the way I was? And he did. How he entered rooms as if he were challenging their contents; the jutting face that prowed bravely into whatever was happening like a ship cleaving unknown waters; the hurt puzzlement of the eyes looking into their own wrongdoing.
He faced a bad time and stared it down. John Garfield helped. But he was still left wondering how far he had travelled towards being whoever he really was.—
MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL, Who the hell am I at all? He wondered how many times he had looked in a mirror for confirmation of himself. He was doing it again. He saw the reflection of the open suitcase that was behind him on the bed. His attempt at packing was a mess. Not only had he never learned to pack, he suspected he had never learned to unpack.
‘What are you staring at. Dad?’
Megan stood in the doorway. She was giving him her own stare, those remorselessly innocent eyes that made him feel he was facing a plenary meeting of the Spanish Inquisition.
‘Nothing, Meganio.’
‘You were so.’
‘No. Ah was just lookin’.'
‘You were so. You were staring and staring. Into the mirror.’
‘Ah wasn't really staring and staring. Ah was just staring. I was just checking I was there.’
That seemed to make sense to her.
‘This it. Dad?’
She held up his toilet-bag.
‘It is, it is. You are a total cracker.’
She came across and handed him the bag.
‘I put things in.’
‘Thank you, Princessa.’
He dropped the bag on the bed and, as he turned back, he noticed the self-containment of her standing there. He felt the utter wonder of her presence and he lifted her up and spun her in the air, laughing. She was smiling calmly. He set her down on the floor.
‘Is that all?’ she said.
‘Well. Ah suppose it'll have to do. Where's Gus?’
She shrugged and walked out.
He picked up the toilet-bag. He smiled at how well Megan had done. Then he noticed that she had also included Gill's L'Air du Temps. He laughed to himself and put the perfume on the window-ledge. He looked at the open suitcase. Was that enough? He could never tell. At least he had his one formal suit in it. Just in case. Just in bloody case. He thought of taking the suit back out, for packing it felt like signing the death certificate already. You should never welcome the bad stuff. If it wanted to come in, let it beat the door down. No. The suit stayed. Superstition doesn't change the rules, it just lets you refuse to learn them. You have to learn them. Would he ever learn them?
He crossed to the window and looked out at Grenoble. He fingered the bottle of L'Air du Temps. Perhaps Megan thought his uncertainty about himself extended to gender. Or did she see him as inhabiting the same not quite reachable place of certainty where he had sensed his own father to be? He hoped not. He hoped it was different for girls. He hoped it would be different for Gus, too. He hadn't even been able to tell his father about Cran, though he had wanted to.
Two feelings had held him back, instinctively. The first was that it seemed unmanly. He was seventeen and had left school. He should be able to look after himself - too late to run home from the playground, picking hardened blood from your nostrils, to receive from your mother the sweet solace that the rest of the world is wrong and a plate of tattie soup that warms your insides like ointment for the soul, to receive from your father advice on the politics of fear and kitchen lessons on how to deliver a good left hook. There had to come a time when the womb was shut, owing to the fact of your being too big for effective re-entry. It was a pity, though.
The second was, paradoxically, that his father would have understood Cran and the cavernous brutishness where so much of his nature seemed to reside, littered with the bones of dead compassion. For part