Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

“Satisfactory?”

“Yes,” I say, stepping into the hallway and pulling the door closed on Miss Gish.

“I wish I could say the same of this. I went directly to the ending and skimmed it – it’s an abomination. Dreadful.” His tone is aggrieved, hurt.

“Well,” I say, taken aback, stumbling, “it’s only a first draft, Mr. Chance. A rough approximation -”

He cuts my explanation short. “I thought you were a man worthy of opening my mind to, a man with the intelligence to understand what is at stake in this enterprise. And then you give me this -” He breaks off. “The girl,” he says sharply, “the business with the girl just won’t do. It misses the point completely.”

What is the point? “But I wrote it exactly as McAdoo described it – at least as much of it as the audience could stomach and we could get past Hays’s people. I assumed it wasn’t possible to go any further.”

“Yes, you wrote it exactly as McAdoo described it. But where is the artistic intuition? You’ve assembled the facts like a stock boy stacking cans on a shelf. You must reach beyond that. The last scene, the most important scene in the picture, is all wrong. Disastrously wrong,” he pronounces contemptuously.

I scramble to apologize. “I realize it isn’t as good as it should be. I want to make it better. Please, just tell me what’s wrong and I’ll do my best, make every effort to fix it.”

“Wrong?” His eyebrows lift. “The psychology is all wrong. Absolutely wrong.”

This only confuses me more. “Psychology?”

“I want the girl to start the fire,” he states. “Surely you see she must start the fire.”

“The girl?” I say, stupidly.

His severity relents a little in the face of my obvious bewilderment. Assuming the manner of a kindly, patient teacher he begins to lead me through the lesson, step by step. “What the picture must convey, Harry, is the psychology of the defeated. And what is this psychology? A diseased resentment,” he says implacably. “The sick hate the healthy. The defeated hate the victor. The inferior always resent the superior. They sicken with resentment, they brood, fantasize revenge, plot. They attempt to turn everything on its head; try to impose feelings of guilt on the healthy and the strong. But our film will not fall into that trap. Our film will be a celebration of spiritual and physical strength.”

My mind, confused, clumsy, doesn’t really believe it can be following what he means to say.

Chance smiles persuasively. “The resentment of the weak is a terrible thing, Harry. The inferior always refuse the judgements of nature and history. They are a danger to the strong and to themselves. Resentment blinds them to reality, blinds them even to their own self-interest.”

“Self-interest? I don’t know what you mean.”

“The judgements of nature and history are impersonal,” Chance says calmly. “But the weak refuse to accept them. Think of all those quixotic lost causes of history. The Jews furnish a perfect example. All those futile, petulant rebellions against the Romans. A sick resentment drove them to become the authors of their own destruction.”

I stare at him dumfounded. Suddenly my face is hot, my belly cold.

“That is how we must present the girl,” he says. “I envision her as a sort of Indian Samson. To destroy his captors he pulled down the temple on his own head. If she were to set fire to the building, that would be entirely in keeping – psychologically speaking – with the point we must make.”

“Which is?” I can hear an undercurrent of challenge in my voice. The private falling back on what the army calls dumb insolence.

Chance doesn’t notice. He’s too absorbed in his lesson. “That the Indian tribes, like the Jewish tribes, would not face facts. Think of the Sioux uprising at Wounded Knee. No different than the suicidal Jews at Masada. But let us not be sentimental about what they brought down upon themselves. The weak wish the strong to be sentimental because they know it undermines their strength. But in the world we face at this moment, we must keep strong. Only the strong will survive.”

“But the girl didn’t set fire to the post,” I say stubbornly, clinging to the irrefutability of fact.

Chance’s mouth twists with impatience. “Don’t be wilfully obtuse,” he says angrily. “I have explained to you. This picture is about psychological truth, poetic truth. Poetic truth is not journalism.”

“But it’s not a lie either. It can’t be a -”

He cuts me off brutally. “This discussion is at an end.” And he walks away from me. Doesn’t let me finish. I start after him, determined to have my say. Down the hallway he strides, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

“Mr. Chance!” I shout.

Down the staircase he goes, feet quick on the steps, nimble despite his stoutness, fleeing me as I clump awkwardly in pursuit. He rushes past the costumed girls and Fitz’s friends in garish suits who greet him with drunken familiarity. One room and another room and suddenly there is nowhere further for him to fly, we’ve washed up in the chamber with the French doors overlooking the garden, the room with the single hardback chair placed like an altar under a cut-glass electric chandelier. Chance halts under this fixture, stands bathed in harsh, stunning light which fractures his shadow into a spiky asterisk on the marble floor.

Now I have him cornered, everything I meant to say suddenly evaporates. The best I can manage is, “Mr. Chance, I did as you told me. I wrote the facts.”

This claim only agitates him. He begins to pace the marble floor, flexing and unflexing his fingers like an arthritic. “I spoke of the dangers we face and you refused to hear. In Italy, Europe brings forth a new man, with a new rallying cry. ‘Avanti.’ Advance! ‘Ne me frego.” I don’t give a damn! The artists, the Futurists, anticipate. They carry pistols. The poet D’Annunzio leads an occupation force into Trieste. And we sleep. I lived abroad, I read the foreigner’s books, I listened to his music, I ate his food. But not as a tourist, no, not as a tourist. As a spy. Like Attila the Hun did when he was held hostage in Rome, I put my time to good use, I studied the enemy. Like a Hun seer I read the future in the scorched bones. I saw the danger in the bones of Europe scorched by the last war. Look at the Bolsheviks in Russia, hard men every one of them. The Asiatic brutality of the face of Lenin. And the Germans? Do we expect the Germans to lie down with the lambs? Never.” He rattles on, unstoppable. “The war to end all wars was a sham, a lie. Eighteen million dead – only the beginning. The League of Nations offers Sunday-school morality while the hard men gather outside our door.” He quits his pacing to confront me. “And the danger is not only outside America, but inside also. Two years ago Congress adopted a new immigration policy. Each European nation is allowed a quota of three per cent of the number of its nationals living in our country. But what of the millions we have already let in?” He moves to my side. “The only solution, Harry, is conversion. Convert the strangers with lightning! The way Luther was converted in the thunderstorm! The lightning of pictures! American pictures! Make the Sicilian living in New York American. Make the Pole living in Detroit American. Convert all those who can be converted – damn the rest!”

He stares at me intently. I want to look away, but don’t have the guts. His fierceness hypnotizes. “That is my argument with the Laemmles, the Mayers, the Goldwyns, the Warners, the Zukors,” he says. “The Jews will not convert. They are too full of resentment. They remain Jews first and always. For two thousand years they refused every overture. Whatever society, whatever country they inhabit, the worst of it sticks to their coats like a burr. The Russian Bolsheviks are all Jews. Like Trotsky. Trotsky commands the Red Army, refines Russian brutality as only a Jew could. The Jew Laemmle carries Teutonic burrs to us on his dirty coat, German sentimentality and kitsch taken to new heights of vulgarity. And so on. The examples are endless.”