Dead Letters: "The Double"

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent
 

In the spring of 1944, I was in Los Angeles on an assignment I have mercifully forgotten and found myself, as one does in that city, drinking alone in a restaurant I could not afford. The restaurant was Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, which was and remains the place where screenwriters go to feel sorry for themselves in a dignified setting.

I was at the bar. It was a Tuesday. The room was half-empty. And then a man sat down two stools away from me and ordered a bourbon, neat, in an accent that did not belong to California.

He was small. Tweed jacket. A pipe he kept unlit, turning it in his fingers like a worry stone. A moustache I recognised, or thought I did — the same moustache that had regarded me with complete indifference through a post office window in Oxford, Mississippi, twenty years earlier.

I did not approach him immediately. I had learned, across two decades and three continents, that approaching famous writers immediately is the surest way to leave a room empty-handed. I waited. I drank. I watched him from the far end of the bar. He drank two bourbons. He did not speak to anyone. He stared at the mirror behind the bottles with the fixed expression of a man serving a prison sentence in a place with excellent liquor.

After his third bourbon, I moved closer and introduced myself. I told him I was a correspondent. I told him — and this was true — that I had once stood in the lobby of the University of Mississippi post office and listened to him type through a closed window.

Something changed in his face. It was not warmth, exactly. It was recognition — the look of a man who has met someone whose suffering rhymes with his own.

"You were the one who knocked," he said.

"I was."

"And I closed the window on you."

"You did."

He nodded slowly, as if confirming a memory he'd been carrying for years. Then he signalled the bartender for two more bourbons and said, "Well, I suppose I owe you half an hour."

What followed was the finest interview of my career.

He talked about Hollywood. He called it "a place where they pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." He talked about working under contract at Warner Brothers, writing screenplays for pictures he would never watch, adapting other men's novels because his own wouldn't sell enough tickets. He said the best scene he ever wrote for the screen was one that was cut. He said the worst was one that stayed in.

He talked about Mississippi. He talked about the heat and the red dirt and a house with cedars that he missed the way a man misses a limb. He said he wrote his novels in the early morning because by noon the world had started lying to him and by evening he'd started believing it.

He talked about writing. He said a writer's only responsibility is to his art, and that he will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He said he had a dream that anguished him so much he had to get rid of it. He said the best job for a writer would be to run a brothel, because the mornings would be quiet and you'd have the rest of the day free.

I wrote everything down. I filled eleven pages in my notebook. I shook his hand when we parted. I went back to my hotel and typed the piece in a single sitting — 2,400 words, the longest dispatch I had ever filed. I sent it to my editor with a note that said, simply, "Faulkner talks."

My editor killed the story three days later.

The man at Musso & Frank was not William Faulkner.

My editor had checked. Faulkner was, at that time, at his home in Oxford, having been granted a leave of absence from his Warner Brothers contract. He had not been in Los Angeles for weeks. The man I had interviewed was, according to a tip my editor received from a publicist at Warner Brothers, an actor named — and I wish I were inventing this — Clement Darcy, who had been hired to play Faulkner in a biographical segment of a studio promotional picture that was never produced. Darcy had spent three months studying Faulkner's mannerisms, his speech patterns, his biography, and, apparently, his preferred bar. When the picture was cancelled, Darcy kept going to Musso & Frank in character.

I was never able to confirm this. Darcy — if that was his real name — appears in no studio records I could find. The promotional picture, if it existed, left no trace. It is possible that the man I spoke to was, in fact, Faulkner, and my editor killed a legitimate interview on the basis of a false tip. It is also possible that a man I never met gave the most convincing literary performance I've ever witnessed, entirely for an audience of one, in a restaurant where no cameras were rolling.

Someone understood Faulkner's loneliness better than any biographer I've read — because the man at that bar was not performing genius. He was performing exile. And he was doing it at a level that suggests he may have been living it.

I went back to Musso & Frank three times that year. He was never there.

The eleven pages of notes are in a box in my office. I take them out sometimes and read them. The quotes are brilliant. Every one of them sounds like Faulkner. Several of them are Faulkner — lines I later found in published interviews and the Paris Review. One of them I have never been able to find anywhere: "A man doesn't write what he knows. He writes what keeps him awake. If it lets him sleep, it wasn't worth writing." It sounds like Faulkner. It may be Faulkner. It may be Clement Darcy, alone in a room, becoming someone else so completely that the someone else began to think.

I have a perfect interview with William Faulkner. It may not be with William Faulkner.

I got the quote. I just don't know whose it is.

— F.M.
 

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.