Faster, yes, Vivian had said, and simpler, too, but the odds of it being accepted would be close to nil, since over-the-transom submissions generally wind up in the slush pile—(both new terms to the uninitiated Ferguson) — and are almost always rejected without a proper reading. No, Archie, in this case the long way around is the better way, the only way.
In other words, Ferguson had said, two people have to like the book before it gets to the only person whose opinion matters.
I’m afraid so. Fortunately, those two people aren’t dumb. We can count on them. The mystery is Hull. But at least there’s a ninety-eight percent chance he’ll read it.
So there they were on the morning of March 10, 1966, standing in line at the local Pay-Tay-Tay in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, and when their turn came, Ferguson marveled at how quickly and efficiently the little man behind the counter weighed the package on his gray metal scale, at how eagerly he slapped the postage onto the large brown envelope and then proceeded to pummel those red and green rectangles with his rubber stamp, canceling the multiple faces of Marianne to within an inch of her life, and suddenly Ferguson was thinking about the wild scene in Monkey Business when Harpo goes crazy stamping everything in sight, even the bald heads of the customs officials, and all at once he was flooded with a love for all things French, even the stupidest, most ridiculous things, and for the first time in several weeks he told himself how good it was to be living in Paris and how so much of what was good about it came from knowing Vivian and having her as a friend.
The cost of the airmail stamps was excessive, more than ninety francs when the insurance and the certified proof-of-delivery receipt were added in (close to twenty dollars, or one-fourth of his weekly allowance), but when Vivian reached into her bag to find the money to pay the clerk, Ferguson grabbed hold of her wrist and told her to stop.
Not this time, he said. It’s my dead baby in there, and I’m the one who pays.
But Archie, it’s so expensive …
I pay, Viv. At the Pay-Tay-Tay, I’m the one who pays.
Okay, Mr. Ferguson, as you wish. But now that your book is about to fly off to London, promise me you’ll stop thinking about it. At least until there’s a reason to start thinking about it again. All right?
I’ll do my best, but I’m not making any promises.
THE SECOND PHASE of his life in Paris had begun. With no book to work on anymore and no need to continue going to the language classes at the Alliance Française, Ferguson was no longer bound by the rigid daytime schedule of the past five months. Except for his studies with Vivian, he was free to do whatever he wanted now, which above all meant that he had the time to go to movies on weekday afternoons, to write longer and more frequent letters to the people who counted most for him (his mother and Gil, Amy and Jim), to look for an indoor or outdoor court somewhere so he could start playing basketball again, and to make inquiries about rounding up some potential students for private English lessons. The basketball question wasn’t resolved until the beginning of May, and he never managed to find any students, but he did send off a steady flow of letters and saw a staggering number of films, for good as New York had been as a place for watching movies, Paris was even better, and in the next two months he added one hundred and thirty entries to his loose-leaf binder, so many new pages that the original binder from New York now had a French brother.
That was the only writing he did throughout the first part of the spring — letters, aerograms, and postcards to America and a growing stack of one- and two-page synopses and shorthand observations of films. While working on the final revisions of his book, he had also been thinking about the essays and articles he wanted to write afterward, but now he realized those thoughts had been fueled by the adrenaline driving him to finish the book, and once the book was finished, the adrenaline was gone and his brain was kaput. He needed a little pause before he started up again, and consequently all through the early weeks of spring he was content to jot down ideas in the pocket-sized notebook he carried around with him on his walks, to sketch out possible arguments and counterarguments on various subjects while sitting at the desk in his room, and to come up with more examples for the piece he wanted to write about children in films, the representation of childhood in films, from the stinging switch whacks delivered to Freddie Bartholomew’s rump by Basil Rathbone in David Copperfield to Peggy Ann Garner walking into the barbershop to retrieve her dead father’s shaving mug in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from the hard slap to Jean-Pierre Léaud’s head in The 400 Blows to Apu and his sister sitting first in a field of reeds to watch the train rush by and then perched in the hollow of a tree as rain pours down on them in Pather Panchali, the single most beautiful and devastating image of children Ferguson had ever encountered on film, an image so stark and dense with meaning that he had to restrain himself from crying every time he thought of it, but that essay and the other essays were all on hold for the time being because he was still so spent from working on his miserable little book that he scarcely had the energy to sustain a sequence of thoughts for more than twenty or thirty seconds without forgetting the first thought by the time he came to the third.
In spite of his joke about not being sure if he would ever be able to read another book, Ferguson read many books that spring, more books than he had read at any time in his life, and as his studies with Vivian moved forward, he felt more and more engaged in what they were doing together, more fully in it because Vivian herself seemed more confident, more comfortable in her role as teacher. So one by one they marched through six more plays by Shakespeare along with plays by Racine, Molière, and Calderón de la Barca, then tackled the essays of Montaigne as Vivian introduced him to the word parataxis and they discussed the power and speed of the prose and explored the mind of the man who had discovered or revealed or invented what Vivian called the modern mind, and then it was on to three solid weeks with the Knight of the Sad Countenance, who did for Ferguson at age nineteen what Laurel and Hardy had done for him as a boy, that is, conquer his heart with an all-embracing love for an imaginary being, the early seventeenth-century fumbler-visionary-madman who, like the movie clowns Ferguson had written about in his book, never gave up: “… and for a long while, stumbling here, falling there, flung down in one place and rising up in another, I have been carrying out a great part of my design…”
The books on Gil’s list but also books about film, histories and anthologies in both English and French, essays and polemics by André Bazin, Lotte Eisner, and the New Wave directors before they started making their own films, the early articles of Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol, a rereading of Eisenstein’s two books, the musings of Parker Tyler, Manny Farber, and James Agee, studies and meditations by old venerables such as Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and Béla Balázs, every issue of Cahiers du Cinéma from cover to cover, sitting in the British Council Library reading Sight & Sound, waiting for his subscription copies of Film Culture and Film Comment to arrive from New York, and then, after reading in the morning from eight-thirty to twelve, the afternoon excursions to the Cinémathèque just across the river, only one franc for a ticket with his old student card from the Riverside Academy, which the ticket taker never even glanced at to see if the card was still valid, the first and biggest and best film archive anywhere in the world, founded by the fat, obsessive, Quixote-like Henri Langlois, the film man of all film men, and how curious it was to watch rare British films with Swedish subtitles or silent films with no musical accompaniment, but that was the Langlois Law, NO MUSIC, and although it took Ferguson some time to adjust to an all-silent screen and a theater with no sounds in it but the coughs and sneezes of the crowd and an occasional crackling from the projector, he came to appreciate the power of that silence, for it often happened that he heard things while watching those films, the slamming of a car door or a glass of water being put down on a table or a bomb exploding on a battlefield, the silence of the silent films seemed to produce a frenzy of auditory hallucinations, which said something about human perception, he supposed, and how people experienced things when they were emotionally involved in the experience, and when he wasn’t going to the Cinémathèque, he was off to La Pagode, Le Champollion, or one of the theaters on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince or on or behind the Boulevard Saint-Michel near the rue des Écoles, and then, most helpful to furthering his education, there was the surprise discovery of Action Lafayette, Action République, and Action Christine, the triumvirate of Action houses that showed nothing but old Hollywood films, the black-and-white studio fare of a bygone America that few Americans remembered anymore, the comedies, crime stories, Depression dramas, boxing pictures, and war movies from the thirties, forties, and early fifties that had been cranked out by the thousands, and so rich were the possibilities offered to him that Ferguson’s knowledge of American films greatly increased after he moved to Paris — just as his love of French films had been born at the Thalia Theater and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.