It’s rare, everyone knows, for an artist of any medium to surf the crest of the wave for very long. Yet across three decades Morty’s name never faded in esteem or recognition, though his prominence in book news waxed and waned according to his productivity. For several years after Colorquake, he alternated between publishing books all his own and illustrating the words of other authors, as if to spread his light around. He collaborated with a director at the Met, creating sets for Philip Glass’s opera The Juniper Tree. One Christmas, he designed a suite of department-store windows; the next, a collection of dinnerware for a Japanese ceramics studio.
And then he retreated—from fashionable consciousness, at least—emerging dramatically with the first novel of his trilogy for teenagers, which came out in the midnineties, winning him as much praise and as many awards as Colorquake had. Over four years, he produced the second and third novels; all together, The Inseparables had sold, in hardcover, more than ten million copies in English alone.
Tommy, who by then had been working with Morty for more than ten years, watched him struggle with his own burgeoning hubris. They would even joke about it. (She, to him, as he entered the kitchen after receiving the biggest royalty check of his career: “Your head still fits through that door?” He, after an invitation to the White House: “Do shrinks shrink egos? Maybe I need one after all.”) But Tommy also knew there were certain professional slights that, while hardly personal, wounded him cumulatively—and these were nothing to toy with.
Since the publishing cluster bomb detonated by the Harry Potter series—followed by the high-toned spiritual controversy of Her Dark Materials and the quasi-feminist siege of The Hunger Games—the kind of children’s books that succeeded in “crossing over” had risen to establish a ruling class from which Morty and his work were somehow exempt. Morty admired Rowling, Pullman, and Collins—he spoke glowingly about their books on panels at booksellers’ conventions and in radio and morning television interviews—but he drew the line at another rising group of artists he saw as impostors: not all graphic storytellers, no, but those he regarded as little more than scribblers of glorified comic books, stories he saw as rife with gratuitous violence and aesthetic anomie. “They’re a cancer on literature,” he said the week that Shine’s second novel (or “novel my royal Jewish ass,” as Morty put it) commandeered the first page of the New York Times Book Review, earned a gushing notice in Library Journal and a minor fanfare in Time magazine.
It didn’t help that Morty’s new book at the time, a spin-off of his trilogy called Moocho and the Afterlife, told from the dog’s point of view, did not replicate the popularity of its predecessors. Reviewers praised it, but a few hinted that, charming and uplifting as it was, its author might have left well enough alone.
So when, just a few months ago, Meredith Galarza let him know about the “split showcase” she and her colleagues had dreamed up as the heart of the new galleries dedicated to children’s books, Morty returned from the city in a rage so profound that he hardly spoke above a whisper when he told the news to Tommy. “ ‘The yin-yang of classic versus cutting edge’ is what she now envisions,” Morty said. “And she breezed her way through that lunch, chitchatting the notion up as if she couldn’t possibly imagine that I might find it benighted, stupid, I mean never mind fucking insulting!”
There was no point in Tommy’s pretending she didn’t see the insult—or how insulting the change in plans must feel. She asked if he had let the director know his feelings.
“Tommy!” he shouted, startling her. “Do I listen to you? Of course I do! I held my tongue. I smiled through my spaghetti. I even offered to pick up the tab. I thought I would vomit.”
“I’ve never suggested you not stand up for your interests. I only meant—”
“It’s a done deal, Tommy. I heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she buttered her goddamn bread—stop me before I call her a gluttonous cow. Oh sorry, did I just do that anyway? The point is, there are plenty of other institutions out there. Her pet museum is not the end-all and be-all, I don’t care if Frank Lloyd Wright rises up from the grave and wrests the gilded T square away from that vain metrosexual they’ve enlisted to build it. On the Gowanus Canal, of all places. Embalmers’ Canal is more like it.”
“So what are you saying? Are you going to just take back your promise, take your toys and go home?” Tommy regretted the words as soon as she’d said them.
“Do not talk to me like that, ever. Like I’m your child,” said Morty. “If I decide to leave my scrawlings to the Playboy Mansion, that is my goddamn prerogative and you will arrange their fucking first-class passage to Holmby Hills.”
She lowered her voice. “Morty, your work will outlast Stuart’s, if that worries you in the slightest.”
“Worries me? Worries me?” He laughed angrily. “Tommy, what worries me is whether I might die of a stroke standing next to that graffitied buffoon like I’m his lapdog at whatever circus they expect us to put on when they build their little palace by the cesspool.”
“Morty, stop. You need to go back and talk to her. Or one of the trustees. Go over her head. You can’t—”
“I can do anything I like,” he said. “I can also not do anything I don’t like. Maybe what I want is my own museum. Maybe I’ll change my will so that this place—this very house—turns into the Museum of Mort Lear when I die. Just think: my very own gift shop, filled with artifacts and mementos of me! Or maybe I’ll have a pyramid built on the back lawn and have it all buried around me like King Tut with his mummified posse of catamites and lapdogs.”
Before Tommy could think what to say, he rose abruptly from the kitchen table and made for the stairs without bidding her good night. The next day, neither of them mentioned his outburst. Tommy assumed he was embarrassed, that he hoped she would forget he had ever exploded. Apparently she was wrong.
So now this: broken promises, hurt feelings, an Everest of paperwork in two different time zones. So much for her timid, peacekeeping instincts, her make-no-waves advice, for a way of life that won her few friends of her own. This is how you end up a spinster in charge of a refuge for runaway children.
—
Dear Mr. Lear,
Where to begin? Obviously, perhaps, by thanking you for taking my telephone call and permitting me to poke and prod at your life. I write to you now from my underheated flat, where I am in a period of blessed, blissful solitude between projects—in fact, preparing for what I think of as “yours.” Preparing to become Mort Lear, to swim down deep into your story, even your self, as it’s been presented to me—but by others, by writers who have never even met you. Which is what I long to do—and am grateful you’ve agreed to allow when I come to New York in the spring.
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.
Nick owns a photocopy of his own letter and the posted reply from Lear, handwritten on four sheets of paper the color of sunflower petals. After that, their correspondence slipped into the ether of e-mail—but somehow (he wishes he knew how), Nick turned a key in Mort Lear’s psyche. And, to be honest, Lear turned a key in his own. Divided by some forty years, an ocean, and most of a continent, their boyhoods had been remarkably similar, at least in their emotional essence. With their single mothers too busy working—and Nick’s siblings so much older that their lives were almost self-contained—each of them had spent countless hours alone at home, creating and inhabiting other worlds: Nick in books and, later on, plays; Lear in drawing—with and on any materials he could find. (When the maids at the hotel aired vacant rooms between guests, he would sneak in and steal a single sheet of stationery, hoping that no one would notice such a minor theft.) Had either been a sporty lad, there would have been scant if any support from the sidelines. For you, a cricket bat, for me a Louisville Slugger, right? wrote Lear. Nick replied, Well, at school, I did take a whack at squash. A literal whack—my racquet landing on the back of my poor opponent’s skull! At which point I was banished to the poncy stage.
Lear confessed that he envied anyone who had siblings. Nick wrote back that while they practiced all the holiday-card formalities, he had seen his brother and sister only a few times in the years since their mother’s death. My fault entirely, he explained. I turned down one too many invitations. For about ten years there, I was terrified that if I stepped away from London—unless it was to step on a flight for New York or L.A.—I’d miss the Fateful Call. I’m still trying to figure out which call that was!
Lear assured Nick that his best family years were ahead of him: that he’d find a wife, have children, and even reconnect with Nigel and Annabelle. (Nick startled at seeing their names in Lear’s e-mail; he hadn’t recalled sharing them.) For obvious reasons, that wasn’t an evident path for me, wrote Lear. Nowadays, young homosexual men are pairing off with the very intention, from Day One, of furnishing and filling a nursery. I am in awe. I do not wish to stop and wonder if, given the chance, I might have gone that way myself. I suspect not. Certainly not with the men I kept company with. But the “company” was of a rather different nature than the kind that leads to sharing fatherhood.
Their initial dialogue comprised a cheerful volley of such observations, as if they were engaged in an old-fashioned epistolary courtship, eloquent yet timid and banal, touching by fingertips only. Nick, however, was alert to the proper moment when he might ask Lear to tell him more about the incidents in the garden shed.
Except that he did not have to ask. Nick was still in London, still in a low-key hiatus after convalescing from the cyclone of parties and awards
and talk shows and photo shoots and more parties, taking deep, savory drafts of a rather spartan indolence that, if you were lucky, could last a month or more between commitments. He was messing about with the friends he thought of as “civilians” (anything but actors!), reading everything he could find by and about Lear, and contemplating a future role in a new Alan Ayckbourn play while holding fast against accepting the sort of pretty-boy rom-com pirouettes that had funded the purchase of his flat. He was also holding fast against the urge to ring Kendra and patch things up. Late nights, alone in the flat, tired of skimming some half-cooked treatment of a Jane Austen remake or a script about space explorers in peril, trying to resist another whiskey, presented him with far too many foolish doubts.
He had also been avoiding e-mail all day. So when he finally broke down (as a desperate alternative to making that foolish groveling phone call), Lear’s message came as a rather seismic surprise.
You will receive this in broad English daylight, but I write to you in the godforsaken hours when even owls and foxes are well tucked in. Insomnia is having its way with my aging self. Not that I’m in pain, but the mental gears do not disengage as easily. I am never inclined to draw at this hour—I am spoiled by the daily luxury of working in natural light—and to compose narrative of any kind I consider the business of morning. My verbal acumen is the sort of flower that opens wide soon after dawn and begins to droop by noon. (Are these details useful to you? Your interest in my everyday habits could lead me to bore you silly. What I am going to tell you, I think—what I am about to type into this machine and suspect I will send—is, on the other hand, far from silly. I do not yet know how it will feel to “get it down,” but the urge to do that is upon me.)
For most of my life, I hewed to the belief that what happened in Tucson would stay in Tucson. And then it became clear to me, whether because of the age we live in or the age I was accruing, that when it comes to the sordid, just about nothing stays where it should. I finessed the story in that magazine interview. The cub reporter they sent out here might have spun the whole sorry thing from me like cotton candy from one of those centrifugal tubs at a county fair…but he was shocked (and satiated) by the bit he got. And perhaps I was only flirting with the truth; I wasn’t ready, as you youngsters say, to commit.