The Englishman’s Boy

movies. But his obsession with history went further. He argued that the motion-picture camera would end conflicting interpretations of the past. Eventually all significant events would be recorded by movie cameras and film would offer irrefutable proof as to what had really happened. Vast public archives of documentary movies would make history democratic; by viewing the evidence, citizens could check the facts, know the truth for themselves.

In the early years Griffith was always surrounded by admirers; people who never thought to laugh when the great man propounded his naive theories, or wore kooky straw hats with holes cut in them to prevent baldness, or declaimed ornately like a hillbilly Shakespeare. To them he was always Mr. Griffith, the Genius.

This is the man Chance begins to lecture me on in a style sounding a bit like an address to Congress. He says that he has made an intense study of Griffith’s films, pondered them, and drawn conclusions. Griffith is the man who has given America to Americans. America had cried out for bread and received stones until Griffith came along. It was he who had answered the cry for bread with bread, filled America’s spiritual emptiness with a vision of itself. He was able to do this because he was a simple, self-educated man who had never forgotten his roots in backwoods Kentucky, a man with similarities to that other self-made genius, Abraham Lincoln. If it had been Griffith’s misfortune to go to college, some half- baked professor would have made him ashamed of who and what he was, filling his head with Henry James’s traitorous nonsense about the ineffable superiority of Europe. Instead, Griffith had sat at his father’s, the old Colonel’s, knee, absorbing his stories of the Civil War, retelling them in The Birth of a Nation with all the passion of someone who felt he had been present at the great battles, the touching surrender at Appomattox. This primitive, rugged self-confidence had produced an American Iliad, and the American people had responded to it the way the Greeks did to Homer, responding to the poetry of conviction. Chance tells me this with a conviction which seems at odds with the rumours of his life spent abroad, as if a Henry James character were launching an attack on James himself.

He breaks off suddenly, as if embarrassed by his passion and enthusiasm, gives me a sly smile. “And then there is something else Mr. Griffith taught us by example. How to make a profit from fact. No motion picture since has approached the profitability of The Birth of a Nation. It was pure genius on his part to advertise his motion picture as fact. Americans are a practical people, they like facts. Facts are solid, they’re dependable. The average American feels foolish when he enjoys a made-up story, feels sheepish, childish, a mooner, a dreamer. But entertain him with facts and you give him permission to enjoy himself without guilt. He needn’t feel swindled, or hoodwinked, a hick sold a bill of goods by a carnival barker. He prefers to feel virtuous because he’s learned something useful, informed himself, improved himself.

“You mark my words, Harry, there’ll come a day when the public won’t swallow any of our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing, or thinks they do. Truth is stranger than fiction, someone said. It may not be, but it’s more satisfying. Facts are the bread America wants to eat. The poetry of facts is the poetry of the American soul.

“Of course,” he qualifies, “the facts in picture-making must be shaped by intuition.” He pauses dramatically. “I learned that at the feet of Bergson. I am a Bergsonian,” he declares, a little like Aimee Semple McPherson might declare she is a Christian.

I haven’t the slightest clue what a Bergsonian is, but it sounds vaguely like Theosophy, or something worse. “A Bergsonian?” I say.

“Before the war I attended his lectures at the College de France in Paris. A mesmerizing philosopher. His lectures were packed to the rafters – society ladies, students, writers, artists. Admission was by ticket only. I was one of those privileged to be admitted. Bergson taught that received ideas, habit, routine, turn a man into an automaton, a robot. What distinguishes a man from a robot is not intelligence – presumably a machine might some day be constructed that could outperform a man in the rational faculties – but intuition. The intellect, Bergson says, is designed to apprehend the external world but cannot plumb the inner world of things. It’s the wrong tool, Harry. Intuition has its roots in our deepest being, a being we are scarcely aware of, and because we are scarcely aware of it, it remains our truest, most uncorrupted self. My intuition, my will, is the clue to my hidden self. Through intuition it is possible for me to penetrate whatever shares my fluid and changeable nature – other human beings, all art… history. Analysis puts a man outside the thing he studies, while intuition puts him inside. Analysis therefore renders partial knowledge while intuition renders absolute knowledge.”

“Very interesting,” I say.

Chance scrutinizes me with a searching look. “Don’t gainsay intuition, Harry. After all, it led me to you.”

I shift uneasily on the sofa. “How is that, Mr. Chance?”

“I had a feeling about you. I used to watch you crossing the road. There was something about you… One day I pointed you out to Fitz and asked, ‘Who is that young man?’ He didn’t know your name. I told him to find out and bring me your file. When I read it, everything fell into place. I learned you were a scriptwriter, that you knew shorthand, that you had worked on a newspaper.”

“That’s right.”

Chance turns to where Fitz sits in his dark corner. “Denis, bring the bottle and join us in a toast.” The shadows part as Fitz wrenches himself up out of the chair and into the light; the floor groans under him as he makes his way to the sofa and replenishes our glasses. Chance lifts his whisky tumbler. “To the picture I hope Harry is going to help us to make. To the poetry of fact.” Our glasses chime against one another, we drink. I don’t know what it is I’m drinking to and so I feel counterfeit, ridiculous, but it’s good whisky, not to be wasted. Chance stares down into his glass and says, “Fitz has heard rumours about an old man, an extra and bit player in Westerns. It’s said the cowhands regard him as a tin god, the last bull buffalo of the old West. There are a lot of stories afloat about him. If he’s the genuine article he could be the basis for my movie of poetic fact. If Colonel Griffith gave The Birth of a Nation to his son, this old man may give me the picture I want to make. I do not overestimate the potential. Think of Al Jennings,” he says.

I do. Al Jennings was an Oklahoma lawyer who had gone off the rails and taken to robbing trains and banks until captured by United States Marshal Bud Ledbetter in 1897. After his release from the big house, he parlayed a reputation as a rough, tough, and hard to bluff desperado into a career in Hollywood. Riding his new celebrity hellbent for leather he offered himself as a candidate for Attorney General in his native state, running under the confidence-inducing slogan, “I was a good train robber and I’ll be a good Attorney General.” Failing in this campaign, he made a bid for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination where he made a shockingly good showing. Now, his political career on hold, he was back in Hollywood making more movies about – Al Jennings. And he wasn’t the only Western outlaw who had made hay with his notoriety. Emmett Dalton of the Dalton gang starred in Beyond the Law, a picture which in 1920 broke box-office records in New York and Los Angeles. Even the legendary Wyatt Earp had a walk-on in Allan Dwan’s The Half-Breed; but a one-eyed old man didn’t have much future in the acting business. He did, however, temporarily bask in a kind of reflected glory. Among his pallbearers at his 1929 funeral were the Western idols William S. Hart and Tom Mix.

“I see,” I say, “you intend to make this man the next Al Jennings.”

“Better. Al Jennings produced with money. Al Jennings turned into art.”

“All right,” I say, “but what do I have to do with Al Jennings and art?”

“You were a reporter. Reporters are supposed to be good at tracking people down.”

As a reporter on a small-town newspaper like The Sentinel I didn’t have much trouble tracking down the newsmakers. A walk down Main Street got you to the mayor; next door to the mayor was the office of the local constable. They furnished the newspaper with hard news. Nor did it take much digging to discover the woman who had grown the potato with the startling resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t say any of this, of course. It would sound flippant.

“I think what you want is a private detective. Not me.”

“No dicks,” Fitz growls. He has been quiet so long that this intervention startles me.

“I concur,” says Chance. “A man who sells information is not entirely trustworthy. He may sell it to somebody else. I would prefer to enlist a man who shares my ideals. Besides, there is more required than simply finding this man.”

“What else?”