“Because I don’t believe there is a God.”
“Yeah? So what do you believe in?”
He was a bright boy, Elroy, not one to let things go by him. He was waiting for an answer and I realized I had never thought that deeply about it. I thought of something Hamish always said—“Anyone who can’t explain his work to a fourteen-year-old is a charlatan.”
I tapped the cover of Elroy’s math book. Coincidentally, we were working on prime factors and how to factorialize. I had a go.
“Well, I’m inclined to believe in this,” I said. “In science — maths and physics. I prefer to believe what they tell us about the world.” I paused. “They say that the world is a highly complex place but at its root, at its basic elementary level, it is a realm of random events governed by chance and uncertainty. It doesn’t make sense, any logical sense that we can understand. It can’t be figured out by what you and I would regard as commonsense ideas. This is what lies at the bottom, at the foundation of everything.
“But what we do, us human beings, in our everyday life, is go around pretending it does make sense, that there is a meaning and solid foundation to everything which we will discover one day.” I smiled. “Mind you, I think in our heart of hearts we have to believe whatever the mathematicians and physicians are telling us. People have various ways of pretending the world makes sense and believing in God — or a god, or gods — just happens to be one of them.”
Elroy was skeptical. “But couldn’t God have made the world like that? You know, to fool us?”
“I suppose that’s a theory, but it’s a bit feeble. There wouldn’t be much point in believing in God, then. You see, people like to think there’s a meaning in life and a hidden order in the universe. It would be a pretty strange God who made his presence known by arranging things so it looked like there was no meaning, and making the universe random and unpredictable.”
“I don’t know. He can do what He likes.”
“A very famous mathematician said, ‘God may be devious but he doesn’t play dice’—or something like that. I don’t think you can have a dice-rolling God. There wouldn’t be any point. In fact I think they’re mutually exclusive as ideas, dice and God. You see if—”
“Can we get on with these prime factors?”
* * *
Another thing I forgot to tell you is that while I was in town the other day I went into a bookshop. In the English-language section I found a book called The Movie Encyclopedia. There was an entry under my name. I copied it out.
TODD, JOHN JAMES: b. 1899, d. 1960? English director of the silent era (Julie, Jean Jacques!); reappeared briefly in Hollywood during World War II, where he made a number of indifferent B-feature Westerns.
16 The Kid
Between 1940 and 1943 I made eleven Westerns, all but one of them under an hour long. Among the titles I can recall are Gun Justice, Four Guns for Texas and Stampede! As always, the names tell you much about their quality. I shot them quickly, efficiently and wholly without passion. I might have been making deck chairs. All they had to do was work.
Eddie Simmonette had arrived in Hollywood in early 1940 with a considerable amount of money. I never knew how he became such a rich man again — it certainly wasn’t his Yiddish films. I think it was something to do with wartime currency restrictions and gold bullion. From time to time he made trips to South America. Once he went to the Bahamas. I asked him why.
“To see the duke of Windsor.”
“Oh yes, sure, Eddie.”
“It’s the truth. You don’t have to believe me.”
I laughed and told him of course I didn’t. I think if I had pressed him he would have told me then. But I thought he was having me on. Anyway, he bought a small company called Lone Star Films and doubled its output. We made cheap Westerns and a few thrillers. I have a feeling that Lone Star was part of this wider financial manipulation, but I could never figure out just how and where it fitted in.
I was glad to be working, albeit on such a reduced level. It was pleasant, also, to be prosperous again. I stayed on in Pacific Palisades; I liked the ocean. I bought a larger house on Chautauqua Boulevard itself and Monika and I settled down to some sort of domestic routine.
We were divorced, quite amicably, six months later. We were tolerable lovers but lamentable spouses. We needed our liaison to be illicit for it to flourish. I think we rather bored each other, married. I started sneaking off to Lori’s again and Monika took up with some young man she met. It soon became apparent that we should separate.
However, she told me one fact that clarified the recent past somewhat. Evidently, during a drunken argument with Faithfull she had taunted him with our affair and its more intimate details — size of Todd organ vis-à-vis the Faithfull member, ingenuity of position, stamina reserves and so on. Faithfull threw Monika out and went blustering round to my house to confront me and “teach me a lesson,” only to find I was away in Rincón awaiting my residency renewal. He got straight on to a crony at the British consulate and had him warn U.S. Immigration about me. Fuller investigation on their part revealed that I was a registered debtor in Scotland. It was enough to keep me in Rincón all those months.
One effect of this was to salve my patriotic conscience. If the British Diplomatic Service could connive at my being dubbed an undesirable alien, then I certainly wasn’t about to hurry back to serve my country. In any case, Hollywood was full of British actors, directors and producers — Korda was here, Wilcox, Olivier, Spenser, Bellamy, Norman and many others. I did not stand out.
I didn’t mix with the British community; I stayed with the émigrés, my Berlin friends. By now it was clear who was going to flourish in Hollywood and who was going to just make do. Eddie, I must say, was loyal to the Realismus boys. Hitzig, Gast and I were kept busy on the Lone Star B-features. Our fortunes had leveled out — at least they weren’t declining — while others’ ascended. Lang, Glucksman, Wilder, Strauss, Brecht — these were the feted and the high flyers. We wished them well. Honestly.
I had another reason for avoiding the British. In 1942 Leo Druce arrived with Courtney Young to film A Close-Run Thing, a torpid epic about the duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo, thinly disguised British propaganda to be directed at American audiences. I was walking along the beach one Sunday at Malibu and passed in front of the jutting deck of a beach house. A loud lunch party was going on and with a cold, spine-jolting shock of recognition I saw Druce’s face in the crowd. Someone leaned over the rail and shouted down to me to come and join them. I saw Druce’s head swivel round at the mention of my name. I made sure our eyes did not meet. For an instant I was tempted by the thought of reconciliation — we had been friends for close on twenty years, after all — but my charity was snuffed out by memories of that day he had so earnestly and altruistically advised me to turn down Great Alfred (a half success, like all his other films). I knew I could never forgive him. His own greed and ambition had lost me The Confessions and effectively driven me from my own country. There was no possibility of ever recovering our old warm friendship. I waved, shouted an excuse and walked on.
Around this time there was another arrival in Los Angeles whom I was, paradoxically, happier to see. Alex Mavrocordato turned up in the émigré community, impoverished and jobless. He didn’t look welclass="underline" his weight and bulk seemed a burden to him now, a slack load. He was still a big man but he had lost his big-man aura, if you know what I mean. Before, he had seemed to fill a room, as if his personality emitted some kind of force field. That was all but gone. A difficult journey through Vichy France and Spain, followed by a long wait in Lisbon for a boat west, seemed to have dispirited him, to have decanted his bullishness. He was staying with the Coopers and I went round to see him shortly after he arrived. We walked down to Lori’s and I bought him a fourteen-ounce steak with two fried eggs, french fries and a green salad on the side.