Youngblood Hawke, page 1
Youngblood
Hawke
Herman Wouk
Youngblood Hawke
Copyright © 1962, 1990 by Herman Wouk
Cover art and Electronic Edition © 2018 by RosettaBooks LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover jacket design by
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795351457
This novel is dedicated
to my wife,
with all my love
Works by Herman Wouk
Aurora Dawn
City Boy
The Caine Mutiny
Marjorie Morningstar
Youngblood Hawke
Don't Stop the Carnival
The Winds of War
War and Remembrance
Inside, Outside
This Is My God (nonfiction)
The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (play)
CONTENTS
Part One: 1946
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
Part Two: 1947
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
Part Three: 1948-1950
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Part Four: 1951
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Part Five: 1952
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
Part Six: 1952-1953
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Part Seven: 1953
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
EPILOGUE
Part One
1946
CHAPTER ONE
1
HAVE you ever known a famous man before he became famous? It may be an irritating thing to remember, because chances are he seemed like anybody else to you.
The manuscript loomed on the desk between the two men, a high pile of torn and dented blue typing-paper cartons. The yellow labels on the boxes had been scrawled over with thick red crayon, Alms for Oblivion, Part 1,Part 2, Part 3. Two of the boxes, overstuffed with manuscript, had split open. Dog-eared dirty sheets of typewritten manuscript showed through, mostly white, with sprinklings of yellow and green. Waldo Fipps had never seen a larger or more untidy manuscript—or for that matter, a larger and more untidy author.
He stared at the young man with peculiarly stirred feelings. The young man, who looked more like a truck driver than a writer, stared back. He had big piercing brown eyes, and the lower lip of his full wide mouth was curled and pressed tight over the upper, as though to say, "Try and stop me!" This part of Hawke's attitude was unconscious. He presented the usual agitated surface of the new author, bashfulness and fear struggling with pride, hope, and greed for praise, all this covered by stammering modesty and awkward shifts in the hard yellow chair. Young authors were all afraid of Fipps. Under the business-like smiles of the editor lay the fishy chill of a man who had read too many novels, and criticized too many. The odd thing was that Fipps felt a little afraid of Hawke, this hulking sloven of twenty-six who had written an ugly bellowing dinosaur of a novel, amateurish as it could be, full of imitation, crude, slopped-over, a horror of an editing task, the kind of writing Fipps least admired.
"Cigarette?" Fipps leaned toward Hawke, offering him the pack.
"Mand ef Ah smoke uh see-gaw?" said Hawke. It was the thickest Southern accent Fipps had ever heard.
He said, "Not at all. I'm sorry I don't have any. But I think Mr. Prince—" he broke off, seeing Hawke draw a glossy leather cigar case from the breast pocket of his shabby wrinkled blue suit.
"Ma one vass," said Hawke. It took Fipps a few seconds to realize that what Hawke had said was, "My one vice." Removing the cedar wrapping from an enormous cocoa-brown cigar, Hawke held a flaming match to the end until it was well scorched, then lit it up with expert puffs. A wisp of blue drifted to the nostrils of Fipps, reminding him unpleasantly of his employer, Jason Prince. This preposterous pauper, this scribbling hillbilly, smokes dollar cigars, he thought. He decided then and there that he did not like Youngblood Hawke. "Well, first things first," Fipps said amiably. "Everybody in the house likes the book. Or at least is impressed."
Hawke's attempt to be impassive was pitiable. The big cigar shook in his fingers. The joy that crossed his face was like a wave of powerful heat; Fipps almost felt it. Perhaps it was real animal heat given off by the blood that rushed into the broad thick-featured rustic face. Hawke stammered a little, trying to say lightly, "It's a—a little too long, isn't it?"
Fipps said, "Well, you are a very exuberant writer. I'm reminded of Dickens, of Dreiser. Perhaps a bit of Dostoevsky?" He paused, smiling.
Gloom, joy, fear, uncertainty: Hawke's look changed almost with every word Fipps uttered. "Mr. Fipps, you've nailed me. My three gods. The three D's."
"Yes. Well," Fipps said in a dry cutting tone, stabbing two fingers at the manuscript, "I think possibly we want a good strong dose of Flaubert. The art of leaving out, you know! From the first page to the last. Practically in every paragraph. Whole sections would have to go."
He savored the quenched, the staggered look of Hawke. No determination in the big mouth now; the open hanging pain of a man punched in the stomach. Fipps' mood improved, and he was ready to forgive this big, possibly profitable oaf for his power of tumbling out exciting scenes and vivid portraits in a muddy torrent of verbiage, full of recognizable flotsam and jetsam from standard authors. "We want to publish your book, Mr. Hawke," he said. "We're really enthusiastic. Providing, of course, that you'll meet us in the matter of revising."
Hawke stood. "You—you want to publish mah book? You goin' to publish it?"
Fipps was drawn to his feet by the fierce excitement in the young man's voice. "Of course we want to publish it. We expect to have a lot of fun with it, and we think—"
Youngblood Hawke put down his cigar, strode around the desk, and folded the elegant Waldo Fipps in a crushing hug. He bawled like a bull, pounding the editor's back. "Mr. Fipps, god damn it, you're a brilliant goddamn bastard. I've read about you, heard about you, read your books, you know everything about novels, everything, and you want to publish mah novel!" Fipps was astonished and not at all pleased to find himself being hugged and pounded, his face jammed against rough blue serge reeking of cigar smoke. Hawke was half a head taller than Fipps, and half again as broad. He was pasty-faced, he needed a haircut; there were flecks of dandruff on his suit; he had cut himself near his ear shaving, and dried blood stood on the gash. Fipps was skinny, brown, his suit was tweedy brown, he was immaculate to the last hair of his sandy little mustache.
"My dear fellow—" murmured Fipps.
Hawke shook him like a doll. "I'll write forty books, Mr. Fipps, forty goddamn wonderful truthful books and every one better than the last, and you'll publish them all. And we'll make millions. You'll see. I'm not just talking. I'm a goddamn genius, Mr. Fipps, or I'm nothing. God, I'm so happy! ee-yowww!"
Throughout the busy halls of Prince House, stenographers looked up from their typing, and shipping clerks halted in their tracks, and editors glanced at their secretaries, as the male bellow echoed down the soundproofed corridors.
Fipps disengaged himself from Hawke with a thin embarrassed smile. "Well, I'm glad you're pleased. I'd like to take you to lunch. We have a lot to talk about. First come and meet Jason." He added, at Hawke's puzzled look, in a humorous tone, "Mister Prince."
"Mr. Prince? I get to meet Mr. Prince?" said Hawke, retrieving his cigar and following Fipps humbly into the corridor. Fipps led the big clumsy young man through corridors and offices full of talk and typing clatter, a cut-up maze of partitions and desks, to a heavy door made of pearly wood, the only closed door Hawke had seen in the place. A girl at a desk by the door said to Fipps, "Mr. Prince is waiting for you."
Fipps opened the pearly door.
2
Take an ostrich egg, color it fleshy-gray, ink small shrewd features on it, attach a pair of large ears, and you have a fair likeness of what confronted Youngblood Hawke from behind the desk of Jason Prince. The egg hung between broad gray-clad shoulders, peering suspiciously upward. Very long powerful arms clutched a typewritten contract on an otherwise empty desk, the more strikingly empty because the desk top was a slab of glass, allowing a view of a huge empty leather wastebasket underneath, and of Mr. Prince's lolling legs. The office was very long and very wide. The windows were open, and the air was cold. Bare bleak modern furniture, and bookshelves too-smoothly lined with too-clean books from ceiling to floor on two walls, added to the cold emptiness. The other walls were mostly glass, looking out on downtown New York, the jagged skyscrapers in a gray midday haze under a low black sky that threatened snow, and the far muddy rivers, sloshing away the great city's dirt.
"This is Youngblood Hawke, Jay," said Fipps.
The suspicious egg changed into the face of a warm friendly man of fifty or so who happened to be very bald, whose pale blue eyes were not at all shrewd and veiled, but gay and candid. "Alms for Oblivion, eh?" he said in a strong throaty voice, all different from Fipps' controlled pipe. He stood and offered his hand. "No oblivion for you, my young friend. Quite an explosion of talent, that book. And only the beginning."
The long arms of the two men—Hawke's was a little longer—met in a powerful clasp over the desk; the two tall men looked straight into each other's eyes. There was a silence. To Fipps it seemed a long silence, and he was a bit surprised at the way Hawke met the glance of Prince. Then a blush spread over the young author's face, he shuffled his feet, and awkwardly dropped Prince's hand.
"Hope you get back the price of the printing job, sir," he said. "It's my first try."
"We'll get back more than that," said Prince. "And we're going to do a lot of printing, too." He pressed a button, and said into a voice box, "Bring me a box of cigars and the Hawke contract." He pulled a chair beside his desk, and motioned Hawke into it, ignoring Fipps, who lounged into a settee behind the publisher. "Long experience with artists," Prince said, "has convinced me that I can best minister to your sensitive spirits by discussing dough." Hawke laughed uproariously. The publisher smiled and went on, "Advances for a first novel generally run about five hundred to a thousand dollars. I've advanced fifteen hundred for a sure-fire first book." He named a best-seller of a few years back. "Turned out to be right. Been spectacularly wrong on occasion. Right often enough to stay in this chair and keep the rent paid. Why haven't you got an agent?"
"Should I have one?" Hawke said. "I don't know anything about all this."
Prince shrugged. "I can't advise you to give away ten percent of your bloodstained earnings to an agent. I can't advise you to trust yourself to my tender mercies, either." A girl came in with a box of cigars and a contract, put them on the publisher's desk, and left. Prince thrust the cigars toward Hawke. "I get these sent up to me from Havana. Try them."
Hawke opened the plain wooden box, and saw an array of unhanded brownish-green cigars, longer and thicker than his Romeos. He took one, slid the box to Prince, and found it abruptly pushed back at him. "All for you," Prince said. "The contract's ready. It's our standard form. The only blank in it is the amount of the advance. Take it away with you and have a lawyer or an agent look over the fine print. Or sign it and take our check away instead. Suit yourself. It's a good contract."
Hawke looked at the publisher for a long moment, his lower lip pressed over the upper one. Then he pursed his mouth like an old lady, and shrugged. "I'll sign it. Your business isn't to skin authors."
"No it isn't. Our business is to make them rich and pay our bills in the process. How about the advance?"
"I'd like five thousand dollars," Hawke said.
The suspicious egg briefly reappeared where Prince's affable head had been. It turned and glanced at Fipps, but by the time the glance came back to Hawke the egg was gone and there was a pleasant face again, wryly surprised.
"I'm sure you would like five thousand dollars," Prince said. "But it's ten times the going advance for a first novel. The chances against your earning that much in royalties are slim, in fact prohibitive. You'd better get an agent. He'll explain all that to you."
The young man said, "The thing is, Mr. Prince, I'm halfway into my second novel, a war book. It's called Chain of Command. It's much better than Alms for Oblivion. But I'm wasting time working on a construction job by day. I only get to write a few hours at night, and I'm tired." He spoke reasonably and winningly, with no hesitation, the soft Southern cadences giving his speech almost the beat of poetry. (Ah only git to rat a few ahrs at nat, an' Ah'm tahd.) "I figure I can finish it and start on a third—which I've got all blocked out in my head, a political novel—inside of a year if I do nothing else. You feel like gambling on me, fine. Otherwise let me try another publisher. Though I sure would like my first book coming out with the imprint of Prince House. To me that's always been a magic name."
Prince looked over his shoulder at Fipps again, his glance uncertain and amused. "Waldo, move around here where I don't have to break my neck to talk to you."
Fipps picked up a chair, brought it forward of the desk, and sat. Prince said, "What do you make of all this?"
The editor pressed his fingertips together, appraising Hawke like a dean looking at a delinquent college boy. "If I understand Mr. Hawke, he's actually asking for an advance on three books. But even at that the figure is absurd, Jay." He turned to Hawke. "Look here, it's always better to be candid. Mr. Prince cast the deciding vote for your novel. Several of us had strong reservations, though we all of us, myself included, admire your promise. You'll get your book published elsewhere—though they'll want you to work on it just as we do—but I very much doubt that anyone else will give you a bigger advance than a thousand, if that much. We're not the movies."
Hawke said with sudden boyish good humor, odd in a big man with such an intense look, "Well, look, Mr. Fipps, why don't I just try another publisher? I'm mighty encouraged by your interest, and grateful to you, and there's no reason to—"
Jason Prince had been sitting hunched over his desk, large knobby fingers interlaced, the knuckles blue-white. Now he sat up. "Hawke, five-thousand advance against three novels. Is that what you want?"
"I want five thousand advanced against this one."
"Suppose this one doesn't earn back the advance? If it does it'll be a real freak of a first novel. Do you want us to lose money on you? Your price is fantastic. You wouldn't ask for it if you weren't so inexperienced. Now look here. I'll give you five hundred dollars a month for the next ten months. That's meeting your terms. But for that I want the second novel delivered and an outline of the third before the period is up."
"Okay," said Youngblood Hawke, as casually as if he were agreeing to go for a walk.
Fipps said severely, "You'll sign a contract to that effect?"
"Sure."
"But what is this optimism based on?" the editor said. "Can you show us the outlines of your next two novels?"
"I don't work from outlines, Mr. Fipps, I just sort of go along."
"Well, can we see what you've written so far on this war book?"
Hawke said, "The thing is it's in a big mess and it's simpler just to finish it."
Fipps rolled his eyes at the publisher in exasperation.
Prince said, "All right, Waldo." He pressed a button, and through the voice box asked for a check book. "The usual thing, Hawke," he said, "is for the check to be handed over when the contract is signed, but this contract will have to be revised. Meantime would you like to see the color of our money? Sort of an earnest of good faith? If you take the check you're tying up three novels."
"I'll take it."
The book came. Prince wrote a check for five hundred dollars, and handed it to Hawke. "The first of ten," he said.
Hawke stared at the stiff orange slip of paper. "Well, doggone. I've been paid for writing prose," he said. "I've been paid for English prose."
Fipps said, "Haven't you sold anything before?"
"Nothing."
"The wrong kind of prose isn't worth the paper it's written on," said Prince. "The right kind is worth its weight in diamonds. Remember that, as you pound the typewriter. It's a great era for writers. There has never been such an era."
"Dickens and Balzac did all right," Hawke said. "Adjust your currency and I bet Dickens did better than Sinclair Lewis. No taxes. I'd like to phone my mother. My mother's in Kentucky. Can I use the phone in your office?" he said to Fipps.
Fipps, who was having a little trouble catching his breath, nodded. Hawke walked out. He came back instantly, picked up the box of cigars Prince had given him, grinned at the two men, and left.
The editor and the publisher stared at each other. Waldo Fipps, in a lifetime of writing, had never received five thousand dollars, or half that much, for a piece of work. At forty-five, at the top of his reputation, he had once drawn an advance of twenty-five hundred dollars for a clever but tenuous play which had remained unproduced. He said testily, "What on earth is this, Jay? So far as I'm concerned the main thing this man has is enormous energy. He has no style, no wit, just coarse humor, he's crude, imitative, in fact he frequently shades off into plagiarism. Possibly he has a good narrative sense, and a serviceable knack of caricature. You're being strangely generous with him."
