Review
A skilled observer of America's top people. -- Review
About the Author
Ward Just is the author of fourteen previous novels, including the National book Award finalist Echo House and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribunes Heartland Award. In a career that began as a war correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington Post, Just has lived and written in half a dozen countries, including Britain, France, and Vietnam. His characters often lead public lives as politicians, civil servants, soldiers, artists, and writers. It is the tension between public duty and private conscience that animates much of his fiction, including Forgetfulness. Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, divide their time between Marthas Vineyard and Paris.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Oral History
Wannsee, March 1999
Are you quite comfortable, Herr Greenwood? You seem to be in pain.
Comes and goes, Greenwood said. The cushion helps. Let"s
begin.
You may speak freely, Herr Greenwood. The tape goes into the
archive, under seal until the year 2010. If, later on, you want to
extend the release date, that"s your privilege. Your lawyer has the
agreement. Obviously I have made this arrangement in order to
encourage complete candor.
Obviously,Greenwood said.
So that students of film and other interested parties can
study the creative process, the way you worked, the choices you made,
and the choices that were made for you. What you were thinking day by
day.
Yes, Greenwood said.
I have told you of my admiration for Summer, 1921, a superb
American film, remarkable for the time it was made. I"m interested in
how it was made, where the idea came from, and how the idea was
translated into film. There"s been so much written about it and yet,
if you will forgive me, your interviews on the subject have not been
illuminating. I suspect there"s a mystery you want to preserve —
A dirty secret?
Is there one?
No, Greenwood said.
Begin with the title, if you would.
I wanted to call it German Summer, 1921 but the studio
refused. Any film with the word "German" in the title was poison.
They had surveys to prove it. They were very insistent. Loved the
film, hated the title. Of course they didn"t love the film. They
thought it was an interesting curiosity that might do well in
Berkeley and Cambridge, and with luck some legs that might carry it
to New York and Chicago. But "German" was poison. So they promised to
increase the promotional budget and we went with Summer, 1921. They
weren"t thrilled with that title, either, but their surveys had
nothing against either "summer" or "1921," so they agreed.
So the film began with a compromise, Herr Greenwood.
It certainly did, Herr Blum.
Inauspicious, wouldn"t you say?
Not at all, Greenwood said.
Why not? The title —
It was a miracle the film got made at all. This is Hollywood,
Herr Blum. And the title isn"t the beginning, it"s the end. The movie
is the movie, no matter what you call it. The audience is there for
it or it isn"t. The title doesn"t mean anything, it"s just a title,
convenient shorthand. If they"d called Casablanca Ishtar, it"s the
same movie, a classic movie either way. But if they"d called Ishtar
Casablanca — or Gone With the Wind or The Godfather — it would have
been the same bad movie. No clever title could rescue it.
Well, then. Begin at the beginning.
It has to do with my father, Greenwood said.
Your father?
Harry Greenwood. Not Harrison or Harold, Harry was his given
name, like Lady Di"s little prince. We were that kind of family,
North Shore bourgeoisie, Anglophile to a fault. Harry"s father, my
grandfather, was a banker. Church deacon, civic leader, married a
Gibson Girl from Rye, a union of opposites but apparently happy. She
died young and the old man never recovered. When he died, he left his
son a handsome trust fund so he"d never have to work, and he never
did.
And you were close?
Only at the end. He and my mother were divorced when I was in
school and before that he was often away on his travels. He called
them research. Later on, he retired to Los Angeles and I saw a little
more of him then. We"d shoot a round of golf and have lunch. He"d
tell stories, wonderful stories of the old days, when he was
footloose — his word, "footloose."
First memory?
He had a vague recollection of his father in Vienna, a long letter
written on Hotel Sacher stationery. It was the year before the war,
his father in Europe on unspecified business. His mother read him the
letter, an account of a night at the opera, a colorful parade, lunch
in a castle in the woods near the city, skiing by moonlight. When she
finished, she handed him the letter without comment, and then she
left the room. He took the letter to his room and put it in the
bureau with the others. The old man was a beautiful skier. Beautiful
skier, beautiful horseman, beautiful raconteur, every day a fiesta.
Harry Greenwood was a man who knew everyone. That"s what your father
does, his mother said. He meets people. And they become his friends,
so he"s never lonely wherever he goes in the wide, wide world.
You want to make movies, Dixon?
I know Gary Cooper. I"ll call Coop.
Watch out for the West Coast, though.
They"re desperadoes.
Have a lawyer with you at all times.
Harry Greenwood"s letters came from all over the world, Rome,
Rio, Singapore, Cape Town, Bombay, Cairo. They were written on boats,
in hotels, on café tables, from country houses and the libraries of
men"s clubs. They always contained advice along with an instructive
anecdote, riding an elephant with the maharajah, shooting pheasant
with the ambassador, dining al fresco with a ballerina or a polo
player or the governor of New York — or crossing the Atlantic on the
Normandie and meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald in the saloon bar. Gray-
faced Zelda remained in her stateroom, emerging only for meals. Harry
told the story many times, playing liar"s dice with "Scott," who was
then at the height of his fame. The great writer was handsomely
turned out in white ducks, a blue blazer with silver buttons, and a
yachting cap. This was the summer of 1927 or 1928, Harry a year out
of college, unmarried and taking the summer off. He was searching for
a good-time girl on the Normandie but abandoned the search when he
discovered Fitzgerald alone in the bar, morose because his wife was
bad company owing to seasickness. She"s got her head under the
pillow, wouldn" even say good morning to me, told me to clear out and
leave her alone . . .Harry was always good at cheering people up and
before long he and his new friend were inventing parlor games,
guessing the occupations of the men and discussing which of the women
were available.
Much later, Harry told his son to listen carefully always to
the stories that people told. Listen to the words and the music, too,
the cadence. That was the way you came to know people, by the stories
they told and the manner of their telling. Really, a good story was
a .lm scenario — not the action but the contours of the action, and
something left to the imagination. When you listened hard enough, the
stories became yours. A story belonged to whoever could tell it best.
Harry said that a great director had told him that a scenario had the
same relation to a screenplay as the shadow to the shadow puppet. The
angle of the light was salient, the source of the light more salient
still. The figures the puppets made were reflections of the skill and
compassion of the puppet master, and if they were artfully made —
unforgettable.
Dixon knew from the fifth grade that one day he would make
films, and that in each film there would be a meeting of strangers,
and stories exchanged.
Harry Greenwood was a great mimic and one night at a party
many years later he was telling the Normandie story, imitating
Fitzgerald"s Princeton-via-Minneapolis accent, and a woman walked up
to him and asked if he would please stop. She had tears in her eyes.
She said that when she heard his voice she thought poor Scott had
come back from the grave. He was such a lovely man. He wasn"t
anything like they said he was, you know. People told lies about
Scotty. He made it easy for them, too. And he was entirely different
from what you"ve heard or even seen yourself. I knew him well when he
was in college. He and my brother were friends. We dated for a while
but he was waiting for his Zelda so it never went anywhere. It was
only that he had no tolerance for alcohol in any form. He told me
stories, wonderful stories, and once he used my name for one of his
heroines, except she wasn"t much of a heroine. She was a tramp-with-a-
heart-of-gold, and when I wrote him about her and asked if that was
what he thought of me, he answered right away, apologizing that he
had hurt my feelings and explaining that he was only taking a name,
not my soul. Writers did that all the time. He said he had always
loved my name, April. And if I didn"t mind he"d use it again, next
time for a woman with a wholesome character.
So please don"t mimic him anymore because I can"t stand it.
And Harry complied at once. By then, he was complying
generally. When Dixon was a boy, his father read him F. Scott
Fitzgerald"s stories and novels. He assigned special voices to all
the characters. Bedtime was a performance, and it was only a
condition of their life together that the next morning he would be
gone to another continent; but he always remembered the story he had
been reading, and the place in the story, so that when he returned he
knew where he had left off. Dixon was so young, he thought the
characters in the stories were his father"s good friends, Anson
Hunter, Charlie Wales, and the others, come to life in Harry"s
ventriloquism. Daddy, is there really a diamond as big as the Ritz?
What"s the Ritz? Later on, Harry confided that Fitzgerald was his
personal beau ideal, a gallant gentleman who was roughly treated by
critics and contemporaries. That bastard Hemingway. They appreciated
Fitzgerald once he was dead, but isn"t that often the case? They wait
until you can"t do them any harm, because they"re still in the race
and you"re out of it. A man of exceptional charm, Harry said, though
not when drinking. Drinking, he turned himself inside out. It"s all
in the genes, you know. He got handed the drunk gene, along with the
talent and the gallantry.
Later still, Harry Greenwood moved to Los Angeles. Dixon was
just getting started in the movie business. Harry decided that his
traveling days were ended. His friends were dying. F. Scott
Fitzgerald was long gone. Coop was dead. Cancer and heart attacks
were carrying away his classmates, and twice in the past year he had
gone to services for the sons of friends. He had been everywhere and
done everything, so what was the point? He let his passport lapse. He
withdrew from the world, concerning himself mostly with his golf game
and the garden. Harry reminded Dixon of one of those slender film
stars from the 1930s, still well turned out, his cheeks pink from
professional barbering, but faded like a photograph left in the
sunlight, or one of Fitzgerald"s prematurely aged characters from
whom all emotion had been drained. He and Dixon saw each other once a
month but the visits were a trial because Harry wanted to talk about
his ex-wife, Dixon"s mother. She had remained in the house in the
horse country out near Libertyville, married to a property developer.
Never thought she"d choose a developer. Jesus, how boring.
Probably she had had enough excitement.
And a developer would be developing, wouldn"t he?
I was gone a lot, Dixon. Probably it wasn"t fair.
To her, or to you, either.
But I had a wanderlust. Every so often I"d need to travel,
someplace I"d never been or some other place I wanted to go back to.
I"d get a call from a friend in the morning and be gone by the
afternoon. Your mother got tired of it. I can"t blame her and you
shouldn"t. She wanted to settle down before I did. Your mother, she"s
a different breed of cat.
Still. What do you talk about with a developer?
Dixon went to Chicago for a shoot and learned there that his
father had died of a stroke. He had been dead three days when they
found him in the bedroom of his bungalow near the Bel-Air Country
Club. The house was in disarray, as if its occupant could no longer
be bothered; and Harry was always fastidious. Dixon found four
whiskey cartons filled with correspondence, including two postcards
from F. Scott Fitzgerald and a friendly letter from Gary Cooper.
There were more whiskey cartons full of shipboard menus, old dance
cards, and photographs, and an attaché case crowded with
wristwatches, expired passports, and billfolds. On his dresser he had
a little metal model of the Normandie, a child"s toy that went with
him wherever he traveled. Dixon had taken it from the dresser and
given it to a friend who collected ship models; and then he told the
friend the story, Harry and F. Scott Fitzgerald playing dice games in
the bar, gray-faced Zelda belowdecks owing to seasickness. Dixon
tried to tell the story the way his father told it, but he did not
have the gift of mimicry and somehow lost the thread, and his friend
only smiled mechanically, though he was happy enough to have the
model of the Normandie, and know its provenance.
He appears to have been an impossible man, Herr Blum said.
Not impossible, Greenwood said. Charming.
To you, perhaps.
Everyone liked Harry. Harry walked into a room and people
began to smile. Before the evening was over, they"d entrusted their
life stories to him. Probably responsibility was not his long suit.
His own father was responsible to a fault, and Harry was reacting to
that. His father died having spent his whole life accumulating a
fortune, and Harry spent the fortune.
You do not resent him, then?
I resent not having the gift of mimicry. Apparently it"s not
a gene you can pass on, like gallantry or dipsomania.
Perhaps you could be more precise about Summer, 1921 and your
father"s connection to it. When I asked you to begin at the
beginning, you began with him.
To explain that would take more time than you"ve got.
I have time. I have as much time as we"ll need.
He was an accidental man. His life, his fate, was an
accident. He meets a writer in the saloon bar of a ship. They make a
crossing together, and the encounter stays with him his entire life.
What did it mean to the writer? One encounter among many, memorable
enough so that a few months later he sends a postcard from Antibes.
Having wonderful time, wish you were here. Harry saves the postcard,
and over the years his shipboard encounter becomes the centerpiece of
his repertoire. He"s a storyteller after all; it"s what he does for a
living. He brings people to life! But his table is crowded. Cooper is
at it and Paulette Goddard and one of FDR"s sons, Eddie Arcaro, Henri
Matisse, Byron Nelson, Piggy Warburg, the Duke of Argyle, too many
others to list — and, late in his life, April. April who believes she
has heard the true voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a narrative from the
grave, and she can"t bear it. Please stop.
These people are his audience, here one day and gone the
next. Random encounters, they live inside his brain, in the hall of
mirrors called memory. This is the way he lives from year to year,
fashioning twice-told tales, and he likes it. He"s very good at it.
It"s footloose. It"s crowded, and he"s never lonely because there"s
always another trip to take and a party at the end of the day where
there are more stories. It"s fun-filled until the night in Winnetka
when he meets April. Listens to her rebuke, concludes that he"s run
dry. On that one occasion his narrative has failed to enchant. On
that one occasion his mimicry has been too successful.
Please don"t mimic him anymore. I can"t stand it. Poor Scotty.
This is cause for reflection. Storytelling is an illusion,
and now he begins to doubt the illusion, or his ability to master the
illusion. That which he saw as true is false. Like Don Quixote, he
slips into melancholy, a fugue state in which the counterpoint spans
but a single octave. He"s exhausted his repertoire and decides that
it"s time to ease into retirement. He takes up golf, attracted by its
repetitive motion. He takes a father"s pride in his son"s work, and
confesses to having seen Summer, 1921 a dozen times, finding
something fresh each time; the finish, he says, is heartbreaking but
not totally bleak. Disconsolate, perhaps. In the spirit of the modern
world.
Of course, he adds, his eyes alight with the old mischief,
it"s not the same as a story told in person. Film is only a
reproduction, one step removed from the stage. The lights, the sound,
the cameras, the direction. It"s not the same as the story itself, ad-
libbed pure, in front of your eyes in someone"s party room.
At lunch with his son, Harry Greenwood picks over the past
and seems filled with regret, an emotion new to him. Almost without
his noticing, the curtain has fallen. His audience has vanished — and
a little while later he vanishes, too, because, as he says, what"s
the point? The hall"s empty.
Very interesting, Herr Greenwood. But there"s something missing,
isn"t there?
And what would that be?
Forgive me. This is not a question we ask in our country. But
it seems worthwhile to ask it of you. What did your father do in the
war?
Heart trouble. He didn"t come in until the end.
And when he came in, what did he do?
Greenwood paused, thinking that Herr Doktor Professor Blum
was not as dumb as he looked, nor as affable as he pretended to be.
Greenwood stood, stretching his bad leg, and clumped to the bay
window that looked into a narrow courtyard fringed with box hedges.
Behind him, he could hear the whir of Blum"s tape machine. He stood
for several moments looking into the empty courtyard, thinking that
it had no cinematic possibilities at all. Herr Blum"s courtyard was a
dead end.
He said, My father was fluent in German. He had a grasp of
German history, as I do. In April 1945 he offered his services as an
interrogator and was immediately hired. He knew half the OSS crowd so
there were no difficulties. They were delighted to have him. You can
imagine the confusion in those days, so many Germans to question, so
few Americans or English with the background to question
successfully. Or the wish to do so. The chief apologized to Harry,
all the big fish were spoken for, Goering, Goebbels, Speer, and the
others, the real war criminals — why, they were the crown jewels and
reserved for the senior staff. Harry said he wasn"t interested in war
criminals, he was interested in marginal characters. He was
interested in the ones who went along, the ones who made the machine
work. Not the drivers, the mechanics. I"d like to debrief the ones
who changed the oil and cleaned the spark plugs, got the paperwork
from the In box to the Out box. I have no interest in the vultures at
the top of the tree, only those farther down.
Harry was rich in metaphor in those days.
So he spent the late spring and summer in 1945 in Berlin,
interrogating.
He told me later that he worked twelve-hour days in Berlin,
probably the first time he had ever worked. He felt guilty that his
bad heart had kept him from combat, so he was determined to make up
for it. He called his interrogations "auditions" and his
witnesses "my mechanicals." And at the end of it he had filled five
fat looseleaf notebooks,Q and A and Q and A and Q and A and Q and A.
And then he went home.
And that was it? What did his interrogations mean to him? And
to you?
He said the Germans were inspired mechanics, fanatical
attention to detail, no detail so small that it could be ignored.
They had the ability to ignore context. They had the ability to
ignore most anything unconnected to their specific job. One did not
take responsibility for what one ignored. And one step further: the
responsibility was assigned elsewhere. The Bolsheviks were
candidates, and naturally the Allies themselves bore some
responsibility for the excesses of the regime. Cowardice at Munich,
for example. When they talked about Hitler, it was to condemn his
deficiency as a military strategist. Of the camps they knew nothing.
When asked about the Jews, one of Harry"s mechanicals replied
casually that he knew no Jews. It was his understanding that there
were no Jews in Germany. They had emigrated to America, where they
were well cared for. He himself wished to emigrate to Milwaukee,
where he had relatives. He wanted no more to do with Germany. Germany
was finished.
Harry had a girlfriend in Berlin. She didn"t know about the
camps, either.
And there were others who knew quite a lot and were voluble
about what they knew. And still others who knew more and refused to
say one word, kept counsel behind a sullen façade and a smirk that
seemed to say, If you knew what I knew, you would not be asking these
foolish questions. They were easily dealt with. Taken outside into
the yard where the colonel spoke bluntly to them. He gave them a
choice. Those who cooperated would be removed to a detention camp in
Florida, and those who didn"t to a camp in Siberia. Of course it was
all bluff, but they didn"t know that. In any case, no one chose
Siberia.
Harry stayed on in Europe after his interrogations were
ended. My mother met him in Paris and he went on to Spain when she
returned home. She said he had changed in ways that were not
agreeable to her. He was drinking more, and showing it. He was
sleepless. He worried that he no longer fit in. The Europe he knew
was gone and America was newly triumphant. Harry was not attracted to
triumph — "hence," he said, "Spain." He showed up in Libertyville at
Christmas and at that time he told me a little of what he had done in
Berlin. I was very young and didn"t understand much of what he said.
But I remember this. He stated that Germany was prodigious. It was
subterranean, its soul hidden somewhere in the forests. Its people
were disciplined, yet given to savage moments of hilarity and
recklessness, and profound sorrow. You never knew which mood would
show up.
Yes, Harry concluded. A self-conscious people.
Herr Blum cleared his throat and opened his mouth to speak,
then thought better of it.
At last he said, Did your father ever return to Berlin?
No, he never did.
Disgusted with us, I suppose.
He preferred Mediterranean climates, France, Spain.
Benign climates, Herr Blum said.
Except for Spain, Greenwood replied.
But you —
When it came time to film Summer, 1921, there was no question
in my mind that I would film in Germany.
Herr Blum looked at him with a pained expression. He said,
You see, this is what I do not understand. I do not understand why
you decided to write a screenplay about Germans. German artists in
1921. And then film the story in Germany. Isn"t there material enough
in America, such a turbulent society with sorrows of its own. Why
Germany?
Greenwood continued to stare into the narrow courtyard.
Shadows advanced as the light failed, causing the courtyard to
diminish under its rectangle of pale blue sky. The walls were without
windows, and he could not see the entrance. Its purpose seemed to be
to provide a plot for the hedgerow. He heard Herr Blum stir and
wondered how you would live if you saw your fate tied to your
nation"s. And if for a hundred years that fate had been a deluge of
misery, would the weight of this not be intolerable? Yet it must be
tolerated. A Christian nation had an obligation to seek forgiveness,
but in the circumstances charity and compassion — the virtues of the
church — were ill fitting. In America the past was discarded as
tiresome, in some settled sense, impractical. He reached down to
massage his leg. The courtyard was now entirely in shadow, and the
sky a soft gunmetal gray. The little hedge had disappeared, and a
bird flitted from wall to wall.
Herr Greenwood?
As for the artists, they were finding their way in the
postwar world. Across the ocean, the war was called the war to end
wars. The artists were too smart for that. One of them had spent five
years on the Western Front, and knew in his bones that nothing good
could come from such a prideful struggle, its cost measured in
millions of souls. The artist knew that the war was not an end but a
beginning. Prelude, he called it.
Greenwood turned from the window and answered the professor"s
question.
It"s where the modern world begins, Herr Blum.
Copyright © 2002 by Ward Just. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
