The Englishman’s Boy

“And what is this spiritual Americanism, Mr. Chance?”

“Perhaps it can’t be defined in words, Harry. Pictures come closest to capturing its meaning. I am a patriot. I was raised a patriot and I will die a patriot. But for years I was troubled by the question, Why have the American people produced no great art? The Germans gave the world their music. The Romans their architecture. The Greeks their tragedies. We recognize the soul of a people in their art. But where is the American soul? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. The American soul could not find expression in these old arts because the spirit of the American people was not compatible with them, could not be encompassed in them.” Chance shoots me a victorious look. “You see? The American spirit is a frontier spirit, restless, impatient of constraint, eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek around the bend in the river. The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum, an art form as bold and unbounded as the American spirit. A westering art form! It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!”

“I see,” I say.

“And yet,” says Chance with the air of a man divulging a great confidence, “everywhere I look, I see little evidence of that spirit in American pictures. Do you know the reason, Harry?” He reaches in his pocket and produces a piece of paper which he lays on the table, methodically smoothing out its creases. “I asked Fitz to do some research for me. Into the heads of the major studios.” He begins to read from the paper. “Adolph Zukor and Fox were born in Hungary. Warner and Goldwyn in Poland. Selznick and Mayer in Russia. Laemmle in Germany. There is the answer why the American movie industry is in such a sorry state. Europeans making our movies for us. Goldwyn hiring English writers. Adolph Zukor offering us Queen Elizabeth, with Sarah Bernhardt as star. A French actress playing an English queen. Which he follows with The Prisoner of Zenda. European kitsch.” He refolds the paper and tucks it out of sight under his plate. “The classroom of the American spirit is now located in the movie house. Americans go to the pictures two and three times a week. Griffith made the American Iliad, I intend to make the American Odyssey. The story of an American Odysseus, a westerer, a sailor of the plains, a man who embodies the raw vitality of America, the raw vitality which is our only salvation in the days which lie ahead. Perhaps Shorty McAdoo is my Odysseus. Do you think it’s possible?”

I shake my head. “It’s too early to say – maybe.”

Chance sits musing. “I have seen things abroad. I have seen Europe rediscovering the spirit of the primitive, the life source by which nations live and die; I have seen them grasping the power of images. Last year Mussolini marched his Blackshirts on Rome and the government, the army folded. The government possessed all the material force necessary to prevail, and yet they gave way to a few thousand men with pistols in their pockets. Why? Because Mussolini orchestrated a stream of images more potent than artillery manned by men without spiritual conviction. Thousands of men in black shirts marching the dusty roads, clinging to trains, piling into automobiles. They passed through the countryside like film through a projector, enthralling onlookers. And when Rome fell, Mussolini paraded his Blackshirts through the city, before the cameras, so they could be paraded over and over again, as many times as necessary, trooped through every movie house from Tuscany to Sicily, burning the black shirt and the silver death’s head into every Italian’s brain. Imagine if Lenin learns the trick. Imagine what would happen to us.”

“You’re going too fast for me, Mr. Chance,” I say.

“No, Harry,” he says firmly. “I believe you understand me. I believe you see beyond what others see. I know what they say behind my back. That I am a man whose father made his money for him. A ridiculous figure, a standing joke in Hollywood. ‘He can’t make movies, and unlike Kennedy, he can’t make actresses either. A eunuch.’ ”

“No, Mr. Chance,” I falsely object, “I don’t believe anyone says such -”

He interrupts me. There is a burden of melancholy in his words. “I wish this cup would pass from my lips. But there is no one else. No one else but Griffith and me to make the pictures this country needs.”

The Hollywood style is grandiose. I am used to bombast and inflation, every picture described as “colossal,” “magnificent,” “unsurpassable,” “epic of epics.” But the people who make such announcements do not really believe them, you can hear the cynicism in their voices, sense it in their ridiculously purple prose. But in Chance’s voice there is a strength of conviction, of sincerity, which is almost moving.

Suddenly Chance looks exhausted. He fumbles for the square of paper under his plate, picks it up, stares at it. Stares at it in the same queer way he had earlier stared at his empty plate, face vapid and waxen. Is it some kind of epileptic seizure?

“Mr. Chance?” I say. “Mr. Chance?” Neither he nor Yukio moves. The houseboy remains standing behind his employer’s chair, face empty, blank as his master’s. “Yukio,” I say, “get Mr. Chance a glass of water. I don’t think he’s well.”

Yukio does not move but Chance does. He raises his hand and holds out the scrap of paper to me. “I’d like you to have this. As a souvenir of the evening. I have no further need of it.” He rises from his chair and slips it into my palm, the way an uncle slips a nickel into the hand of a favourite nephew. I mumble an embarrassed nephew’s thanks. “Harry,” he says, “I want you to know how important this evening has been to me. I do not feel nearly so alone. You believe as I do, that the mind’s highest struggle is to interpret the world, in whatever guise that interpretation takes – science, philosophy, history, literature, painting…” His voice dies away. He clears his throat. “And we shall offer another. We shall make a great motion picture. Won’t we, Harry?”

“Yes,” I say. And half-believe it.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m very tired.”

We shake hands and Yukio leads me back through the bare house. I feel some guilt that I have not confessed to Chance that he is seeking help for making the great American film from a Canadian. But there is the question of money. And I have found that Americans, by and large, recognize no distinction between us. Why should I?

I start the car and turn down the drive. As I do, my headlights sweep over a set of French doors which open onto the garden. It is only for an instant, but I believe I have glimpsed Damon Ira Chance alone, in that vast marble desert of a ballroom, standing upright on a chair, in the dark.

11

The rest of the afternoon the twelve rode with the Bear Paw Mountains hovering mauve, abrupt, stonily upright in the east. For the first hour after Hardwick’s desertion of Farmer Hank, each man was mindful to keep his thoughts and his counsel to himself. It was dangerous to do otherwise with Tom in one of his black and bloody moods. Still, a number did feel a trifle downcast and guilty they hadn’t put a word in for the farm hand, pled the case that he ought to be left with a horse, even a pack horse, in exchange for the one which Hardwick had blasted between its blind eyes. It wasn’t consequences with the law they feared, but the verdict of public opinion. In these parts, cutting loose a man on foot to fend for himself could be regarded as a mite high-handed, even if he was cast out in peaceable country and ought to be able to hike back without mishap to his employer’s homestead by tomorrow. If he could recross the river.

And yet, there was no denying they were glad to have seen the last of him. If it came to an affray with Indians, settled men were not much use. Nobody knew for sure whether Hank was a settled man who owned a wife and children, but if he didn’t, he had the look of a fellow who wanted to own them, which was near as bad. You needed to have a little wild Indian rubbed into you to fight Indians. Which was why Hardwick was such a demon for warring with the red bastards – he’d been captured by Arapahos in Wyoming and seen hard use as a slave before he managed to pull foot and escape. Ever since this close acquaintance with the Arapahos, Hardwick had been apt to kill Indians whenever they annoyed him in the smallest particular.

The Englishman’s boy, like all the rest, had said nothing about casting Hank adrift. After a fashion, he was sorry for sorry-ass Hank, but watching him near drown the Scotchman confirmed that he was not only a fool, a shirker, and poisonous bad luck, but a man likely to drag anyone who tried to help him six feet under. Besides, the Englishman’s boy was in no position to hand around irritating advice, seeing as he had nowhere to take himself