It’s a rather outlandish livelihood, the one I’ve lucked into. (To be honest, I’ve also stubborned into it, survived into it, endured into it; perhaps, in your own endeavors, you’ve sometimes felt the same way? I am ridiculously far behind you, of course.)
As I told you on the phone, I remember your book Colorquake from my childhood. (Hardly the only literate or even semiliterate adult who does, I know!) I wasn’t an only child, but I might as well have been—my two older half siblings were a pair, close in age, with the same father—and, like you, I never really knew my own father (though the circumstances were different, mine probably being alive somewhere out there today, simply having opted out of fatherhood, at least of me). So the creative boy with the preoccupied, unmarried mother—somewhere unconsciously, I saw Ivo as an alter ego of myself. (Again, I know I was far from the only one who did. But when you’re small, you don’t think of yourself as part of a collective, a statistical mass, an average anything.) And your Inseparables series—I remember the thrill of walking into the bookshop the very day the second volume went on sale, the even greater thrill of carrying it out, wrapped in brown paper I couldn’t wait to tear open.
You receive volumes of flattery, so I will stop the gushing there. But you see, to penetrate that aura of “greatness” surrounding you, the Man as Living Legend, is my challenge—especially because your greatness is so aligned with the innocence, yet also the terrible vulnerability, of being a child. This is the irony the film will portray, and no one, believe me, is more qualified to make it than Andrew Zelinsky. Both you and I are in the hands of a genius (another living legend!).
There are actors who would consider it a violation of pure craft to be in touch like this, but I am not one to squander the chance of meeting the man I will become.
I do want to say, again, vis-à-vis the interview, that I admire you enormously for coming out with such difficult truths about where you come from. This is a story that will move everyone who sees it, and make people talk, and think, and return to your books with a fresh eye. The more I can know of you, your history, the more powerful this project will be. Truly!
I have written far more than enough, and I expect you to respond only if and when you wish.
Yours in admiration,
Nick Greene
Dear Nick Greene,
Your repeated allusions to my “greatness” are a bit excessive, even off-putting. But I will take them as a mark of your genuine enthusiasm for the (yes, I agree, OUTLANDISH) work you have ahead of you, and I thank you. Who wouldn’t bask, speechlessly, in the glow of such compliments from a certified star? I intend to become more familiar with your past work, as clearly you are familiar with mine.
I would like to say something, right off the bat, about the article, which came out so long ago (practically in another century) that the thought of its being an inspiration for any new creative venture I find rather Wonderlandesque. To think about that moment in my life is to plunge down a rabbit hole. Different times, different motivations. Not that I had any particular motivation I can remember in making that disclosure when I did.
But you want history? I’ll give you history.
I have to disabuse you of the notion that my mother was unmarried. She was married to a man who was twice her age and doomed, before she even met him, by grave illness. His lungs had been burned and scarred by mustard gas in World War I. That part was cut out of the published interview you read, although to me it’s the crucial tragedy in my mother’s life, the poor choice she made that only spawned others. Damaged men hold an allure for so many women, I have no idea why. I don’t mean to sound cold. I loved my mother, and she loved me even more, but here’s something sad I concluded a long time ago: she married my father because she felt sorry for him—and probably because she had so few choices in that godforsaken part of the world. Even if she had lived somewhere more populous, remember how many men that war wiped off the face of the earth. She did not love him: she resorted to him. How do I know? Because she displayed no pictures of him after he died, and she spoke of him only when I asked. What little I know about him is what you might call “the facts.” And they are few.
Tucson, Arizona, in the early decades of the last century was a backwater in the extreme (or a backdesert? not much water!), peopled by libertarians, prospectors, social outcasts, a whole lotta nogoodniks…and, among other technicolor characters, a benevolent heiress-cum-denmother who decided to provide solid occupation for a few dozen severely damaged men who could no longer breathe any air but the warmest and driest. She trained them in woodwork (not personally, I assume) and set them up in a shop. Yes, making furniture! And when they’d made so much furniture that she ran out of rich friends to buy it, and the Depression gutted the hell out of the urban department-store market, she bought it all herself and constructed a sprawling hotel to put it to use. (A fairy tale, right?)
My father, Myron Levy, was one of those damaged men. He made tables and desks and chairs with the best of them. In 1935 he met my mother, a laundress at the hotel. In 1940 I came along: me, Mordecai Levy. Of course, this part you know from that ancient interview over which you and your colleagues have been poring, dissecting and deconstructing. Two years later, the father I never knew—technically, can’t remember—expired from terminal suffocation. He lived his entire adult life struggling to breathe. I can hardly bear to think of it. It’s the reason I never took up smoking. Not even ganja.
So: my mother. A woman with parents to fall back on would have done so, gone to them with this pink-cheeked little boy, started over however she could. Mom had no parents—or none she’d divulge to me. My grandparents stand behind a curtain that’s never been lifted. (Other than saying they were dead, she was so tight-lipped on the subject that even back then I was skeptical.) So she stayed at the inn and by that I mean literally. After my father’s death, we moved into an annex, a nearby outbuilding where some of the more itinerant workers lived. It was small but bright. Two rooms. My mother kept it tidy. She messed up a number of things in her life, but never her domicile. I suspect my little shirts and coveralls were pressed to the nines.
Work calls me. I look forward to hearing from you again. Present me with the blanks and I will fill them in. I’m at that stage of life when simply being able to remember this much is a source of comfort. You intersect with me at a propitious time, Mr. Greene.
Yours,
M. L.
P.S. I am an acolyte of e-mail, happy to correspond by that means.