He liked to talk about flying — his own experience of it had ceased around 1918. At his house in Connecticut he had a piece of glass about the size of a theater program with a bullet hole in almost the exact center of it — it had been the windshield of his plane when he flew with the French in the First World War. He had been an observation pilot. The bullet had only grazed him. Decades later he was invited with other old pilots to a screening of ancient footage. The film was disintegrating and the historians wanted to know who, in random scenes of various fields and swiftly moving figures, was who and what was worth preserving. “Well, Colonel,” his partner airily greeted him when he got back to the office, “how did it go?”
“All right, I guess,” Littauer said. “It was nice to see the golden boys come alive again for an hour or two.” He was referring to the fighter pilots, the now antique aces.
My being a flyer tipped things in my favor. He liked to hear my stories. If I were a passenger, he wanted to know, and the pilot and copilot of a jet airliner were both incapacitated by, say, a bird crashing through the windshield, would I be able to land the plane? I imagined myself calmly calling the tower and asking for someone to be summoned who could talk me through it step by step, flap setting, power, final approach speed. Made confident by the wine at lunch I assured him I would be able to, not a perfect landing perhaps, but good enough.
“If this book isn’t accepted …,” he said, to help prepare me for the possibility.
“I’ll start another.”
I felt he expected me to say it. He was a man of integrity, diligent and pessimistic. Max Wilkinson, in contrast, was a sport. Small finger extended, he would stroke his nose during conversation in a characteristic gesture of disbelief and thought. He dressed well, blazer, pearl-gray slacks. He was interested in shares, wealth, unconventional men, scoundrels.
There was something surrendered about him, the ghost of an earlier, finer world. His people had come here in 1623, he remarked carelessly. Doomed gallantry, vain hopes, it seemed to imply. He liked to tell of going, when he was a magazine editor, to see Scott Fitzgerald. “I had a manuscript of his that I wanted to sit and go over with him. When we arrived he was drinking a water glass full of gin.”
We were at the Century Club or Toots Shor’s, the drinks beginning to have an effect. Fitzgerald, he said, had disappeared that night, gone upstairs, and then come down again, completely naked, saying, “I know what you really want. You want to see me take my dope. Well, I’ll show you.”
I was inclined to believe his stories which were seldom repeated. They were like accidental memories.
“I want to be forgotten,” he would mutter. “My whole purpose in life is not to have lived. Just say … just say, he loved flowers, he used to stop on Third Avenue and buy their wretched blooms.” His voice trailed off.
The next day, as with men of long experience, he would be well turned out and unrepentant. By lunchtime there would be the springiness of a boxer who knows he will not have to fight. “One never gets old in here,” he would say, patting his chest. It is hard to think of a man for whom that was truer.
Of the agency’s other clients I knew little. Some were journalists, including faded ones, others wrote detective stories or westerns. In the office one day I was introduced to an Australian with a round, lively face and brown-edged teeth.
“My dear fellow!” he cried enthusiastically.
His name was Lindsay Hardy. He was a prodigal and to Wilkinson like a son.
He’d been in the war, in New Guinea and the desert.
“What was it like?” Max asked.
“We polished our rifles,” Hardy intoned, “and killed the Hun in the hills of Jesus.”
He was in New York to try to write a film script from a book of his that had been sold to the movies. Meanwhile he was living lavishly, a delight to women. They were crowded into his past as well. “The widow Woods,” he recalled, “in Brisbane. I was her lover. One day she said to me, ‘Lindsay, do you know anything about pruning?’ She’d an enormous apricot tree behind the house, a great thing, its branches touching the very sky. ‘Of course, my love,’ I said. I was eager to please her. ‘Will you prune my tree for me?’ ‘Anything,’ I replied. I went to the library and read up on pruning. Then I came back and cut the tree.
“It was disastrous. The tree bore not a single piece of fruit the whole year, it even shed its leaves. It finished me, of course,” he moaned. “She cut me dead when I saw her in the street.”
I don’t know what happened to his script. When the money ran out he would swim for the Narrows, he always claimed, and eventually he went back to England. A few years later I heard that his luck had gone bad. His wife had died of alcoholism and he had no money to pay heavy fines for speeding and reckless driving. “He was tough,” Max Wilkinson reminisced, “fond of drink. He had an old Rolls-Royce that he loved.” There was no word of him, however. He had vanished completely.
His name brought happiness, though, even to the children of those who had known him. I was talking to one one night, listening in awe to the story of her girlhood. She and her mother had been devoted followers of Wilhelm Reich and had experienced many sessions in an unconventional device that was called the orgone box. I knew only that it had something to do with sexual energy. She had also, perhaps as a corollary, been intimate with a man when she was seven, a lover of her mother’s. She had been openly flirting with him and her mother had finally told her to go and join him in bed.
I tried to imagine this mother but could not: a thick-wristed woman who loved pleasure and, dying, might whisper, “Burn my diaries,” or a woman with a splendid throat and pure face battered by years; in any case a woman, I knew, who had no difficulty attracting men, though most of them, her daughter told me, were no good. There was one, however, “A great guy. He was a writer.” Had I ever heard of a book called The Grand Duke and Mr. Pimm?
“Lindsay Hardy,” I said.
“You know him?” she cried ecstatically.
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe it! Whatever happened to him?”
He swam for the Narrows crossed my mind, but I said only, “I’m not sure.”
—
Kenneth Littauer remained my agent as long as he was alive, or nearly. He was seventy-four when I had lunch with him for the last time. It was at the Century Club and I had a presentiment it was the finale. He’d been obliged to give up his work — he forgot things, had no strength, he fell three times in one week, his wife had written to me. I expected to meet a broken figure, but he seemed the same as ever, stooped, untrusting, alert. We talked about travel and other things. We had often planned to meet sometime in Paris and have dinner at the Grand Véfour, which was high on the list of places he did not disapprove of, but we had never gotten around to it. I wanted to ask certain questions, those I had neglected to remember the answer to over the years: his favorite daughter’s name, her husband’s, the title of a book he had recommended to me, details of his father.
When we finished lunch he insisted on seeing me to the door. We walked down the five flights and in the entrance said goodbye. He had been a lieutenant colonel at twenty-four, in France. They had wanted him to stay in, but he decided not to. I would understand the reason, he said. “There was no one to talk to.”