574
PARTISAN REVIEW
Yorker,
a gnawing suspicion that this was a game at which you couldn't
win. This might do for a night at Las Vegas, but not for a spiritual
test stretching over a period of months. As long as she was' around col–
lecting material (but not yet writing), it was easy enough to assuage
this growing sense of anxiety by intensifying one's efforts of impressing
her by giving bigger and better parties or by thinking harder and harder
of more and more brilliant things to say. But, alas, the day would come
when she would leave or withdraw to write her piece; and what then?
Would anybody qualify for recognition by
The New Yorker?
Was it
humanly possible to pass this sort of a test? Perhaps for a week end
with the help of champagne and a hip flask of bourbon used by Mr.
Hemingway to stimulate his reactions to the paintings in the Metropoli–
tan Museum of Art; but for a period of three months or more, and
in
Hollywood? How long can anybody-even in Hollywood-go without
saying something that is just ordinary and mediocre? And how could
one ever be sure that whatever she wrote would elevate Hollywood
to the intellectual level to which it aspired.
If
she portrayed the movie colony as a harmless, average American
community, it wouldn't be enough.
If
she let herself go and wrote as
The New Yorker
sometimes would write, it would be too much. It would
just be another Hollywood expose.
If
she wrote "down" revealing the
human-all-too-human stature of Hollywood-as she had done ir; the
case of Hemingway-that would not do; for Hollywood, unlike Mr.
Hemingway, cannot afford to be written "dowri."
If
she wrote too
much about one person, this would make everybody else angry and en–
vious; if she wrote nothing, the person would not be recognized;
if
she
wrote a little, it might just be the wrong thing or (God forbid!) less
than what she might say about somebody else.
No, this was a game too much even for the better part of Holly–
.wood. Desperately and anxiously as its people tried to win the pleasure,
approval, and recognition of the girl from
The New Yorker,
they knew
all along that they were only her next victims.
Occasionally-at breakfast perhaps, looking over the wreckage of
last night's effort
to
please her-they might even admit to themselves
what and how they felt. They wished she had never come; they hated
her; they hated themselves for submitting to the indignity of
this
test;
they wished she were dead.
But, each time, someone would invariably reach for the phone
and, with a brave wan smile, set the stage for another little surprise
party for the girl from
The New Yorker.
Hans Meyerhoff
