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Like his self-avowed prototype, Casanova, and like Marcel
Proust, Avraam Elia Kazan sits in a room writing down his
remembrance of things past. He has already published two
books, "Life of a Kazanova" and "Sixty Minutes Experience,"
and he has the material for several more. Kazan, who signs
his works and all his letters "A. E. (Joe) Kazan" and
frequently refers to himself in conversation as A. E., is a
little younger than the Venetian was when he finally got
around to remembering at Dux: Casanova was seventy-two;
Kazan is sixty-eight. The small hotel room on West
Fifty-eighth Street where, for the past few years, Kazan has
sat pouring out his recollections is not corklined, like
Proust's, but the intensity of his preoccupation with what
he has lost is the same. Like Proust again, he has had to
pay for the publication of his memoirs himself. The books he
has either published or only partly completed have various
titles, but, like the worldly recluse of the Boulevard
Haussmann, he has really written only one work; it is an
endless statement of what he has enjoyed and endured.
Spiritually, of course—and he would be the first to
acknowledge it—this latter-day A. E., who is of Greek
descent, is much nearer the Italian than the Frenchman; his
life is an astonishing span of the modern picaresque—from
rags to riches, and beyond that to disillusion and
moralizing. A seven-dollar-a-week messenger boy on the
streets of New York at twenty, Kazan became a millionaire
before he was thirty. However, the Algeric analogy will lead
you astray in any summary of the career of A. E. (Joe)
Kazan. Virtue was not its terminal, or idealism its motive
power. You will be on firmer ground if you stick, as A. E.
does, to Casanova. If he has regrets, it is because he has
not always done the expedient thing. The conscience that
hurts him is economic; the only guilt he feels is for not
having held on to his money. Toward his lapses from strict
rectitude, he is tolerant. What he cannot forgive is his
poverty, for which he holds himself directly responsible.
Like George Bernard Shaw, he looks upon poverty as a sin,
and, in a rather ducal way, he is contrite about having
committed it. His detachment about himself and his
contempt for his major failure are symbolized in his
invention of the name by which he is known in the circles he
frequents—Flat Tire Joe. "It's a good name, don't you
think?" he will inquire, without wistfulness. A. E. is never
wistful. He is stern, he is sardonic, he is zestful, and he
has reached old age without mellowness. This endows his
personality with a kind of clean jauntiness. You can take
him or leave him, but you don't have to be sorry for him.
In his appearance, Kazan sharply contradicts his
self-applied pseudonym of Flat Tire Joe. He looks like a
Morgan partner of the nineteen-hundreds (probably far more
so than the Morgan partners ever looked) on the way to
lunch on the Corsair with the head of the firm. His manner
of dress is invariable and impeccable: a somewhat outmoded
but impressive double-breasted black coat, very square and
long, gray-striped trousers, gray spats, stiff-winged
collar, and dark-blue bow tie with tiny white polka dots.
His shirt front is dazzling white and stiffly starched. He
carries a silver-headed cane. He wears a black bowler with
an old-fashioned square crown. He is tall, square,
white-faced, and bald, with snapping eyes and a somewhat
bleak and rugged aspect. His usual expression is austere. It
takes a lifetime of self-indulgence to produce a look so
ascetic. Kazan sits in his hotel room mornings and early
afternoons writing. About four, he usually walks to his
favorite haunt, the Café de la Paix, at the Hotel St.
Moritz, where he has a regular table. He is a striking
figure on the street. If you passed him on his way to the
Café de la Paix, moving slowly along, encased in his boxlike
garments, tapping the sidewalk with his walking stick, his
expression tense and unrevealing, his mind polishing up
submerged facets of his past, you would think that he was
the diplomatic representative of some strange country and
that his avocation was abstract philosophy, which, indeed,
it is.
Unless you have read his two published works, it is very
difficult to have a sustained conversation with A. E. (Joe)
Kazan. The full title of his first book is, somewhat after
the ample eighteenth-century manner, "Sixty Minutes
Experience: Modern Philosophy and Psychology: Joe Kazan's 50
Years' Experience." This one, which he wrote for children,
is bound in bright red. The second book is called, in full,
"Life of a Kazanova: I Lived, Loved, and Learned: Joe
Kazan's 50 Years' Experience," and is bound in bright blue.
It is necessary to be up on both these volumes. If,
undocumented, you ask him about some period of his past, he
will answer, with a benign testiness, "That's in the blue."
Should your question he in the realm of the philosophical,
the speculative, or the psychological, he will say, "That's
in the red." He is like the master of some esoteric science
who will not discuss it with you until you have learned at
least the fundamentals. If you ask him, for example, how he
got his start in America, he will simply say, "It's in the
blue." Illiterates just cannot converse with A. E.
The juvenile, "Sixty Minutes Experience: Modern Philosophy
and Psychology," is on sale in the philosophical section of
Macy's book department. Macy's would not stock "Kazanova."
Presumably the buyers were afraid of the effect of this
intimate autobiography on their customers. "Sixty Minutes
Experience" is prefaced, again in the eighteenth-century
manner, with a prospectus which says:
Father tells his experience to young ones —they do not
like it—and they do not take advantage. In later years
they wish they had. This applies also to sixty minutes
experience paragraphs.
This book is published by the Capano Press of New York. "Kazanova"
is published by the Alexander Press of New York. On the
first page of each volume is a ruled square, in which appears
"Compliments of," followed by a blank line. "Sixty Minutes
Experience" goes even farther than "Kazanova" in its
implications of generosity. The second inside page is
headed "To My Good Friend," below which is a blank line for
the name. The next line, waiting, like a blank check, for a
signature, has the word "Author" at the end. The modesty of
this device is ingratiating; it is as if A.E. could not
imagine that anyone but himself would make a present of
this volume. The Capano Press offers a further convenience
for the careful reader of "Sixty Minutes Experience;" the
last page is ruled and is headed "INDEX FOR PARAGRAPHS YOU
LIKE."
The two hooks differ in intent; "Sixty Minutes Experience"
is didactic, whereas "Kazanova" is sensationally
confessional. It is interesting, however, to note that the
author has numbered the pages of the two books as if they
were one outpouring. Thus, "Sixty Minutes," or the red, ends
on Page 120, and "Kazanova" begins on Page 121. It would
undoubtedly seem odd, if you innocently picked up "Kazanova"
in someone's library and found yourself, at the very start,
already on Page 121. Perhaps, in a shy way, Kazan is merely
trying to anticipate those hard critics of even more
prolific writers—of Somerset Maugham, for example—who say
that no matter how much these authors turn out, they really
write only one book. This is especially true of Kazan,
because he is a behavioristic rather than an imaginative
writer. He embosses what he knows, has seen, and has lived
through; he is materialistic and factual. Although nothing
could be farther from the child's world of "Sixty Minutes
Experience" than the livid realism of "Kazanova," there is
internal evidence that the two hooks are webbed together in
the obscure caverns of Kazan's unconscious. Thus "Kazanova,"
while not overtly a juvenile, is a long apostrophe to a
generic nephew named Bob; it is an avuncular fireside chat
from a sophisticated older man to a guileless boy. Almost
every admonition in the book is addressed to this imaginary
Bob. And it is not unusual, when Bob asks his uncle a
question, to find such a brusque answer as "Read paragraph
127 of Sixty Minutes Experience." A.E. won't talk even to
Bob unless he is up on the red. It should here be noted that
in the juvenile "Sixty Minutes Experience" there are no
cross references to "Kazanova." Obviously, Kazan belongs to
the rather old-fashioned school of pedagogy that does not
believe in pushing children too far beyond their depth.
On the title and facing pages of "Sixty Minutes Experience,"
Kazan, following Fielding and Richardson, permits himself to
revel in creative anticipation, as follows:
WISDOM OF EXPERIENCE
IF YOU WOULD BENEFIT
FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF THE
AUTHOR, AGED 67, READ THIS BOOK
SIXTY MINUTES EXPERIENCE
FULL OF TRUTH
ALSO
FOUNDATION FOR GROWN CHILDREN
THIS BOOK IS DICTIONARY OF
THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE ANYTHING
HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN;
READ IT AGAIN AND YOU WILL FIND
THE ANSWER AND THE REMEDY
Following is experience
(not advice)
Underneath this introduction is a box with the legend "This
Book is obtain able at: —" The promise of the colon is not
fulfilled; the emptiness that follows leaves you dangling
in an irritated suspense, unless you happen to find out
about Macy's.
Kazan urges anyone he meets to feed "Sixty Minutes
Experience" to the children. "If they cannot read," he will
say, "read to them." The book is written in the manner of
"Also Sprach Zarathustra," in chased aphorisms. Some of the
epigrams suggest that the children for whom Kazan intended
them must be not only grown but even precocious.
The aphorisms are all numbered. Aphorism 3 indicates that
A.E. has at least something in common with the progressive school
of educators: "Do not do anything you do not want to do.
Ignore forcing."
Aphorism 85 is evidently for incipient politicians:
"Question. What benefit does bribing bring in this world?
Answer. Plenty. Very few persons refuse bribes if they are
big enough and legal."
Aphorism 121 must be intended for children who are about to
go into business: "Any proposition comes to you, say 'No'
first, easy to change it to 'Yes,' not easy to change it to
'No.' This will protect you from better trader than yourself
in business."
Similarly, Aphorism 25: "If you write nasty letters, mail
them next day; you may change them. Mail all important
letters yourself."
Kazan seldom makes the concessions usually demanded of the
writers of juvenilia; he expects the tots to supplement
their experience with imagination, to fill in the void of
the present with the fullness of anticipation. Probably on
no other basis, for example, could he counsel: "The right
time to propose marriage to a lady is at a wedding. The
poor lady's heart is soft and trembling."
But occasionally A.E. forgets Chesterfield and remembers
Polonius, as in Aphorism 39: "Do not swear and do not use
vulgar language. Your tongue will get used to it. You might
call your family names."
For girl babies, A.E. has special advice: "Ladies, do not
fight with your man in the morning; he cannot attend to his
business and you will not have luxuries or automobiles."
Again: "Ladies and sweethearts, save your money, because for
no reason your man may switch his affection to another woman
with 50% less charm than yourself."
He can be hard: "Do not trust anyone until you find
him otherwise; an agreeable surprise. This means you are
protecting yourself."
There are echoes of Aesop: "Story: An old farmer's wife was
very fond of pigeons and erected a pigeon house in back
yard, and watched them every day. Neighbors asked her why
she was so fond of pigeons. She said, 'I like the billing
and cooing of the male pigeon and his love.'"
And echoes of La Rochefoucauld: "Definition of partner—prays
his partner will become extravagant so that he can own the
business himself."
And of King Lear: "Father spends thousands and lots of
trouble to bring up the youngsters; when father, mother, or
sister gets poor and the children get rich they do not look
after father, sister, or mother; they are beasts in human
clothes."
And of Cicero: "Before 50, if you just happen to be in some
risky business and accumulated a fortune, quit at 50 and
become 98 % honest. Otherwise, you will be caught doing
wrong. It requires youth, nerve, technique to do wrong. You
haven't got it after 50."
And of Montaigne: "Careless remark: Bill: 'Since when are
you taking all birds to a night club?' James: 'The blonde is
my wife.' Bill: 'Oh, I meant the brunette.' James: 'She is
my sister.' (You have embarrassed yourself.) Diplomat says,
'I saw you with two charming ladies at the club,' as ladies
are charming at any age."
And of Wilde: "What is the easiest thing in life to do?
Wrong."
Sometimes one suspects—and it is true of so many books for
children—that the inner message of "Sixty Minutes
Experience" is intended for adults, as when the author
ruminates, in Aphorism 259: "What is alibi of Philosopher?
When he becomes poor, he says to himself, 'Too much money
is no good anyhow!'"
Perhaps the most poignant moment in the hook is the author's
final paragraph, in which he reflects on the advantages
contemporary children have that he lacked as a child. This
is his envoi to his wandering in the child's world: "THE
AUTHOR SAYS: I wish this book had been printed 50 years ago
so that I might have read it and gotten the benefit."
The blue, or "Life of a Kazanova: I Lived, Loved, and
Learned: Joe Kazan's 50 Years' Experience," most of which is
written in numbered episodes, is surely one of the frankest
self-exposures in the long history of confessional
literature. In Kazan's millionaire period, he maintained
apartments in New York and in Paris and sported
Rolls-Royces and Isotta-Fraschinis on two continents.
Essentially (like so many bachelors) a homebody, he had
sweethearts in various capitals so that while he was
travelling he could enjoy the illusion the Staler hotels
have always striven to achieve of a "home away from home."
He also helped to make himself feel at home by taking with
him, wherever he went, his most prized possession, a
custom-built brown velvet sofa, on which he slept. He has
clung to this sofa; it is all that is left of his former
opulence. It stands now in his hotel room. A vanished and
fascinating world is opened for you in "Kazanova," a world
of uninhibited enterprise, of mighty fortunes made in
selling rugs, of sixty-four thousand dollars staked on one
hand in chemin de fer, of flying trips between
Constantinople and New York, of international business
amalgamations, of sybaritism in New York, Paris, Madrid,
Vienna, Budapest, and Cairo.
Under the statement "This Book Is a Lesson for Adults," A.E.
begins his autobiography with his birth:
Bob, I was born in the city of Cesaria in Turkey in Asia
Minor. There were three of us children. My mother passed
away when I was six years old. I don't remember anything
about her except that when I approached to her for a
kiss (she was sick in bed) they pulled me away from her.
What effect this earliest remembered trauma has had on the
career of A.E. it will remain for the psychologists to
expound. There is certainly no indication in "Kazanova"
that it made an introvert of him. Of the childhood incidents
he relates, the following is perhaps the matrix of what was
to come:
Bob, at the age of nine when I was going to school, the
best my family could do was to give me Turkish bologna
sandwiches for my lunch almost every day. Then I became
a racketeer, at the age of nine. (Compulsory.) A rich
parents' son (sissy) at school. His lunch contained
cheese, chicken sandwiches, cake, candy. One day I asked
him to give me some of his lunch. He said no. The next
day at noon I said to the rich boy, 'Let us go on the
roof and have our lunch in the sun.' (Only the two of us
were alone on the roof.) I grabbed his lunch box and ate
half of his lunch, and I gave him half of my bologna. I
also gave him a couple of slaps. I told him: 'If you
don't get me extra lunch every day you will be licked by
me.' The sissy obeyed me from fear. I had a delicious
luncheon every day for a year. He told his mother he got
awfully hungry at 3 o'clock and wanted more lunch.
Years after, returning to Constantinople from America
(having money) I met a young man at the Tokatlian
restaurant. From his name I recognized him as the boy
whose lunch I robbed every day at school. For days and
days I treated
him, dining him, champagne, girls, etc.—never allowing him to spend
money. He never guessed who I was.
The free-lunch racket waned (perhaps the sissy became
virile), but A.E. supplanted it with another. The boys in
Cesaria used to play a game called ashik, with
marbles that were made out of the little bones in the knee
joints of lambs. The young Kazan put lead in one of these
marbles, and with this he could, at a distance of ten feet,
easily break through a row of normal ones. For a season he
had a steady income of what came to two American cents a
week. But he was too consistent a winner, the device was
discovered, and, at the age of ten, he was expelled from
school. A.E. has never fought the temptation to gamble, no
matter how much it has cost him; he feels that the instinct
is both congenital and insurmountable. He does not believe,
he says, in fighting nature.
The young Kazan went to work, at the age of eleven, as a
messenger boy, carrying rugs around from one establishment
to another, but, after four years of it, Kazan, Sr., felt
that the boy was too smart for Cesaria and sent him off to
Constantinople, a four-day journey by carriage, to live
with an uncle and aunt and their children. There A.E. got a
job in a drugstore, at eighty cents a week. He noticed that
apparently no matter what the ailment, the doctors
prescribed the same medicines, so he took to filling
prescriptions himself, with an admirable uniformity. But the
atmosphere in his uncle's house was unfriendly. The family
slept together in one room, on wool beds—layers of matted
wool piled one on top of another. A.E. had brought a wool
bed with him from Cesaria, a parting gift from his father.
Gradually he became aware of a diminishing altitude in his
bed; he slept lower and lower, and finally he reached the
floor. He could only conclude that the layers had been
removed one at a time by his relatives while he was at
work—whether for mere gain or as a delicate hint that he was
unwelcome, he was not sure. In any case, he took to sleeping
in the drugstore. Avraam had grown up in the rug business,
and he soon felt the call to return to it. It was in his
bones. "I know the business so well," he says, "that rugs
are afraid of me." He got a tryout for a job with a leading
rug merchant in Constantinople, spreading out the rugs and
helping to show them, at a dollar a week. On his first day,
he saw a coin on the floor—a coin worth a quarter. He picked
it up and gave it to the boss. This evidence of honesty
clinched the job for him. He had been forewarned that this
dropped coin was a stratagem of the boss's, and he survived
this first test of his probity.
A.E. calls the years from 1887 to 1897, when he left Turkey
for America, his "chiselling days." It was while working in
the rug establishment in Constantinople that there came to
the Avraam the first impulse to go to America. Tersely he
describes, in "Kazanova," this turning point in his young
life:
Bob, one day a friend of my father's got me a job in a
rug store in Constantinople (my father's trade) at a
dollar a week. I slept in his warehouse. Every Saturday,
lots of Armenian merchants visited his office to talk
over business and gossip about America with my boss. I
used to listen. They would say: This man became a
millionaire in America. This man bought a chateau. This
one is wealthy. I said to myself: me for America. I
went to my rich uncle to get some money to go to
America. (No dice.) What next? My boss was paying loads
of money to have his rugs repaired. What could I do? I
learned how to repair rugs and I worked at night for
three years to save enough money to come to America.
Kazan was twenty when at last he sailed, by freighter. The
journey from Constantinople to Marseille took nine days. He
was quartered on the steerage deck, but as it was summer,
this was no great hardship. His capital was forty-two
dollars and several silk rugs he was to deliver to a brother
of his Constantinople boss who was in the rug business in
New York. The blandishments of Marseille were too much for
the young
adventurer. He left the freighter, squandered his capital,
and then sold one of the silk rugs for forty-five
dollars. When at last he got on a ship for America, he had
five dollars left. He gambled four-ninety-five of this
away. From a fellow-passenger, a lady, he borrowed a quarter
to wire his boss's brother from Ellis Island. For two days
he slept on benches there until the boss's brother appeared
and rescued him.
Kazan considers the time between 1897 and 1904 the happiest
of his life, because it was the only period of his business
career when he had no overhead. His faculty for cleaning,
repairing, showing, and selling rugs stood him in good
stead. He went to work for his boss's brother in his
establishment at Broadway and Seventeenth Street, and he
earned extra money repairing rugs at night. He lived in a
boarding house near Wanamaker's and got himself a girl. This
girl the boss coveted. The boss seems to have been something
of a Biblical student, for he sent A.E. on the road to sell
so that he could woo the girl with an easier conscience.
With A.E., he sent along another young member of his staff,
who had been stealing from him. The boss told A.E. that he
was sending him, A.E., along to watch the other fellow, but
the maneuver was transparent to A.E. However, not counting
the world lost for love, A.E. consented to go on tour. The
two young men left for New England with their merchandise.
Their procedure, after they arrived in a town, was to go to
a music shop, say, or a hardware store, and get the
proprietor to let them set up a temporary rug department in
return for a ten-per-cent commission on sales. The tour was
a triumph. In the communities A.E. and his companion visited
there appeared to be a hunger for rugs which they had
arrived in the nick of time to satisfy.
The first thing A.E. did after he sold a rug to a lady for a
thousand dollars in Concord, New Hampshire, was to send a
money order for fifty dollars to his father in Turkey. The
sensation caused by its arrival was recounted to him years
later, when he returned to Cesaria a rich man. A.E.'s father
looked at the money order with skepticism, and he was
assured by his neighbors that he could not get cash for it
at the post office. At the post office he asked for the
money in small silver coins, then brought it home and poured
it on the kitchen table. The neighbors crowded in to look.
The elder Kazan pointed with pride. "Didn't I tell you my
son is a genius?" he said. "Look, we are rich!"
Women were as helpful in furthering A.E.'s career during the
New England tour as they were later, with the assistance of
overhead, in helping to undo him. In Bridgeport, an elderly
lady came in and examined rugs for two hours. A.E.'s
patience long outlasted that of his partner, who was always
irritated by interminable shoppers. Finally the lady bought
a rug for thirty-five dollars. She asked A.E. to deliver it
to her house. The partner sneered, but A.E. stuck to
business. He delivered the rug at dinnertime and was invited
to dine. "After dinner," he recalls, "as I sat on my
hostess's lap, she got on the telephone and began making
calls all over Bridgeport." She sold fourteen thousand
dollars' worth of rugs for him to her friends. "American
women of that era," says A.E., "were very sympathetic if
you came from Constantinople and were poor." From this one
contact, A.E. got a fine dinner and three thousand dollars
in commissions. He promptly returned to New York and quit
his job. He approached a Fifth Avenue dealer with a proposal
that they sell rugs at auction, so that they could
influence the prices by bidding against each other when
necessary. The merger was a great success. A.E. recalls
vividly a pair of silk rugs of a crème-de-menthe color (he
dwells lovingly on these two rugs, after a lapse of nearly
half a century) which were bid up to seven hundred and
fifty dollars, though they had cost him and his partner only
sixty-two dollars. Those were wonderful years: America was a
new and hospitable and rug-hungry land; there was youth and
a growing intimation of genius in finance; there were women
of all ages, sympathetic to a good-looking boy from
Constantinople; and, above all, there was no overhead.
A.E. was soon averaging five hundred dollars a week, but he
continued to live in the boarding house near Wanamaker's.
Boarding houses, he says, were a symbol of respectability.
It helped establish credit to live in a boarding house; it
was an index of honesty and industry. During the panic of
1907, A.E. was occupying a large room for which he had paid
a year's rent in advance. When Wanamaker's began
discharging salesgirls, many of them came to A.E. for help,
and he helped. One of the more idyllic of his memories is of
this period. The girls used to come to his room in the
evening and talk and sing to him while he repaired his rugs.
He tolerated no indiscretion; it did not go with the
boarding-house facade; he was a Platonic pasha.
A. E.'s career, from this point, followed swiftly the
pattern set by many immigrants of those days. He was in a
world in which you outsmarted everyone you could, in which
you vowed revenge when you were outsmarted, even though you
could not help having a certain admiration for the
outsmarter. One example, taken from "Kazanova," will
serve as an illustration of this phase of his life:
Bob: At the age of 23, a poor boy, I sold at auction to
a lady one silk carpet for $1,700 costing me $550. This
was a profit of $1,150. An artificial gentleman dealer
saw this lady and spoiled the sale of the silk carpet,
and the lady returned it. This was a big loss for a poor
man. I registered this evil act of the so-called
gentleman in my mind. Fifteen years later I was sitting
in a fashionable cafe. This same dealer came in and sat
with me at a table. I bought him a drink. He bought me
three drinks and then he went out and bought me a cigar
which cost fifteen cents and one for himself which cost
sixty cents. Now what is the catch? He asked me to lend
him $25,000. "Yes, if you send all your rugs (worth
about $120,000) to my store I will lend you the $25,000
and charge you $12,000 commission whether all the rugs
are sold or not." I started working on the proposition
and in a month I sold $37,000 worth and thereby
collected my $25,000 and $12,000 commission. I sent the
dealer back the balance of the rugs. He cost me $1,150
fifteen years ago but I got back from him $12,000 in one
month. Bob, here is the benefit of not calling a fool a
damn fool to his face. Bob, if you are willing to give a
cigar to another friend, give same cigar that you smoke,
not a fifteen cent cigar to him and a sixty cent one for
you.
There began the period of A.E.'s life that he describes in "Kazanova"
as "Genius in Business and Technique." In this period he
acquired more partners and he acquired overhead. His success
was great, and he began to make quantities of money. His
years of wealth, characterized by him in a subtitle as "High
Living Days: Genius and Amoeba," lasted until the
liquidation of his fortune of several million dollars in the
crash of 1929. The first big step toward success came when
Orlando Jones, a bookmaker, introduced him to another
bookmaker, who wanted to buy some rugs. A.E. took the
prospect to the largest rug dealer in New York. One of the
salesmen there offered A.E. a thousand-dollar commission on
the transaction, which came to five thousand dollars, but
A.E., remembering the dropped coin in Constantinople,
refused, and asked only the customary ten per cent. The news
of this startling heresy reached the boss, who, overcome by A.E.'s spectacular honesty, gave him a job at four thousand
dollars a year, plus commissions. After four years of this,
during which, A.E. recalls, the boss "liked him every day,"
he was given an account of three hundred thousand dollars
and sent to Constantinople on a buying trip. He bought too
freely and when the home office heard about it he was
discharged by cable. He promptly formed a partnership in
Constantinople with a local banker named Castelli. In the
next few years A.E. was involved, first in Constantinople
and then back in New York, in a series of dissolving
partnerships. One of them had an almost immediate but
charming dénouements. A jovial partner, whom A.E. greatly
liked, was caught cheating after one week. A.E. reproached
him. "I have been a crook for forty years," said the candid
culprit. "You can't expect me to be honest in one week." In
spite of the sweet reasonableness of this argument, A.E.
dissolved the partnership.
From this period, too, comes an interesting account of the
pastime of "rug-walking," taken from "Kazanova":
Uncle, they tell me you used to chase customers from
your store. Is this true?
Answer: Yes but only those rich customers who were
egotists or better traders than myself . . . . For one
of my best customers and friends I spread a large rug
on the floor and he asked me what is the price. I said
$800. He says, "I'll take it." (Being a bargain for
him.) We were walking on the rug and I spoke to him in
jokes—stories to keep him walking to the good end of the
rug but he walked to the opposite end of the rug and
then he said, "No, I do not want it." I asked him what's
the matter with the rug. He said, "The rug is worn out."
"How do you know?" I said. ''You haven't touched it." He
said, "I felt with my feet that it is worn out." I said,
"Here's a cigar—but
we won't do business with anyone who knows that a rug is
worn out by touching it with his feet." But we wined and
dined many times after that.
In 1912, A.E. felt himself strong enough to do without
partnerships and founded his own firm, the Kazan Carpet
Company. The firm had a rating of AAA in Dun & Bradstreet's,
and he had so much money that it was not necessary for him
to be respectable. The boarding-house era was over. He moved
into progressively finer apartment houses and eventually
took an apartment at the Ritz Tower and had it furnished at
a cost of seventy-five thousand dollars. The "High Living
Days" period swung into its halcyon rhythm. It was then that
he had his sofa made, and when he went to Paris he took it
with him. (Can it be possible that this is the first record
of a man taking a bed to Paris?) One evening there, he went
to dine at the home of a count who was also fond of good
living. On the third floor of the count's mansion was a
bathroom which aroused A.E.'s envy; it had walls of
exquisite mosaic and a bathtub big enough for two. A.E.
couldn't get the magnificence of this bathroom out of his
mind. He was like an art lover who has looked at a
tantalizing picture and cannot rest until it hangs on his own wall. The next day he called the manager of
Claridge's, where he was stopping, and had him, with the
count's permission, visit the bathroom. A copy of it was
installed in his suite at Claridge's. He kept this
apartment, as well as the one in New York, all through the
High Living Days.
A typical high-living day is described in Episodes 621 and
622:
In the morning my customary coffee served in my room.
Masseur, osteopath or Turkish bath, alternately; besides
my own gymnasium in my apartment. Every morning the
barber comes at the same hour to shave me. Even if it is
only to talk, the manicurist comes now and then. No
worry for expenses (keep the change). A tailor comes
once a month with samples and I buy a suit of clothes or
an overcoat whether I need it or not.
Good organization at the store. Customers buying my
rugs at any price, as I am almost a monopoly. I look at
the newspapers—stocks go up. At one o'clock before I
go to lunch I stop in at the stockbroker and buy 1000
shares of some stock on which I already have a tip. (To
be sold at 1% point profit if it goes up. This profit
will pay for my luxurious expenses.) And they go up.
Arrive at 61st Street restaurant. Plenty of beautiful
girls. Of course I am welcome to these girls because
some of checks go on my account (and their sweeties are
working at the time) I go with some of the girls back to
the apartment, either to play bridge or dance or drink
(Prohibition). Some of them jump on my electric horse
and camel. Bob, I was very generous with my girls. If
they went out dining and wining with a nicer looking man
than myself, I forgave them. Otherwise, elimination.
This life of easy gymnastics occasionally has a more
astringent note. As in Episode 638, on "The Influence of
Heredity":
Bob, here's an example of how a person can inherit certain
habits from his parents. When I was in Constantinople, I
used to visit my father every Monday in the suburbs where
he lived. In his bathroom I saw a cake of soap which had
been made from little scraps of left-over soap. That was
economy! And I, the damned fool, had lost $5,000 the night
before playing poker. Did I learn anything? We shall see. In
New York, I lived at a Tower Hotel. I was wealthy and lived
very expensively. Yet I also had a cake of soap made from
little scraps of left-over soap. Even today I do the same
thing. These are the little things that you inherit from
your parents. And here's how it benefited me. A girl once
came to ask me for $125 for a Chinese dog that she wanted
to buy. When she happened to go into the bathroom and saw my
cake of soap which had been made from little scraps of
left-over soap—she left the room without carfare.
It is doubtful whether any man has ever been franker than
A.E. in disclosing his failures with women. He seldom
recalls an amorous episode that
did not have some economic aspect. This is very hard to
understand, because A.E. is a handsome, imposing man even
today. Possibly, if he had remained poor, women would have
been touched by his need for love, as they were in his
non-overhead days, but it is hard to be sorry for a very
rich man. If there is one idyl in the life of A.E., it is
his nostalgic worship of the lady whose identity is veiled
in his lavish numerology as Sweetheart No. 5. (He is
inclined to say less about Nos. 1 through 4.) He loved and
wanted to marry this girl and yet, even in this case, his
nostalgia is soured a bit by the fact that, although he
spent a fortune on her and wanted to send her to school and
to educate her, she left him, when he began to lose his
money, to marry a man who had had the good sense to remain a
millionaire. He still thinks with tenderness of Sweetheart
No. 5 and writes to her now and then, but she does not
answer his letters.
Some of Kazan's innumerable transatlantic crossings during
the high-living days were dictated by romance. Sensitive to
the merest inflection of infidelity, he once quickly
abandoned a Paris sweetheart because, in an absent-minded
moment, she called him by the wrong name. To salve his
wounded amour-propre, he sailed at once for New York,
only to have his New York sweetheart make a similar
unfortunate slip of the tongue. One incident in "Kazanova"
is reminiscent of a painful episode in "Of Human
Bondage"—when Philip gives his friend the money to go away
with Mildred—and is none the less poignant for being told so
pitilessly:
I made arrangements with a new manager to take care of
my business as I was sailing for Europe on the Majestic.
When I arrived on the ship I received from a real friend
the following telegram (4 words): "You are a
donkey—Bill." But after I got on the boat I changed my
mind—I wanted to get off—but the first whistle for
leaving had blown. The second steward, who knew me well,
said, "The only way you can get out of here is to get
sick"—and I got sick plenty. They had to lower the plank
and I got off. This cost me $100. Now what was my idea?
First, I was not doing justice to my business. Second, I
wanted to go and watch my exclusive sweetheart, for her
I bought a small house in the suburbs, and to see if she
was in love with someone else. On two occasions I went
around her house but did not have the courage to go in
and see for myself if . . . I never justified my
suspicions because I never found out. Damn fool—but this
is love.
Kazan attributes his failure in business and his present
impecuniosity to his gambling and extravagance and what
might be called the "flat tire"
quality in his character, but not for a moment does he
regret his romantic expenditures, financial and emotional.
He indulges in no sentimental what-might-have-beens even
about the practical Sweetheart No. 5. And toward all women
he still retains an attitude of incorrigible gallantry. If
his life has been an unending immolation on the altar of
Eros, he feels no remorse. In this sense he is a true
Casanova, the perennial Don Juan, a perfectionist in amour.
It is perhaps A.E.'s most striking and ingratiating quality
that he is detached and unregenerate. He looks upon his own
failings, as he does upon honor in others, with equanimity,
as eccentricities of character to be observed and catalogued
and appraised for their instructive value. He is constantly
contrasting his brother, who is the father of Elia Kazan,
the stage and screen director, with himself. This brother
has been successful in the rug business, but not so
spectacularly as A.E. He is respected in his business circle
in New York and in New Rochelle, where he and his family
live. In "Kazanova," A.E. refers to him as "my noble
brother." He applies this epithet not with irony but with
real reverence. "He is a good man," A.E. will say. "Never
did anything dishonorable. A good man, a thousand times
better than I." But he says it in a tone of casual
inventory, as if he were estimating the value of a rug or a
diamond. He does not envy virtue. For the good brother's
son, his nephew Elia, he has an admiring affection. He
repeats with relish conversational tilts he has had with Elia.
"Once," he says, "I asked him for five hundred dollars."
"You are always telling me," Elia answered, "to save my
money. How can I give you five hundred dollars and still
save my money?"
"Because," A.E. said, "when you give you get back more."
A.E. won the argument and the five hundred dollars.
His nephew's increasing fame and success have not been an
unmixed blessing for A.E. "Formerly, friends sometimes
helped me," he says. "Now they say, 'Why should we help you?
You have a millionaire nephew. Why don't you go to him?'"
(In A.E.'s circle you can't be merely affluent; you are a
millionaire or nothing.) There is a story that Oscar Wilde,
when he was living in poverty in Paris, wrote the synopsis
of a play called "Mrs. Daventry" and one day sold it to a
producer, promising to write the play. He didn't write it,
but he kept the advance. He repeated the process several
times with other impresarios, always using the same
synopsis. Finally, one of these men got someone else to
write the play around Wilde's synopsis and put it into
rehearsal. When Wilde heard of the impending production, he
wrote an indignant letter to this producer. "By producing
this play," he said, "you rob me of a certain source of
income "A.E. feels somewhat this way about his nephew's
success.
The small hotel room on West Fifty-eighth Street in which
A.E. has lived for nine years seems even smaller than it is
because most of it is occupied by the much-travelled sofa.
The sofa is the worse for wear, and its generous proportions
make living in the room somewhat of a maneuver. Pressed
against it on one side is a bridge table, on which A.E. does
his writing. The table is covered with manuscripts. Next to
the sofa, on the other side, is a huge wardrobe trunk
plastered with labels: "Berengaria 1926;" "Paris 1927 to
Hold on Arrival." Into the trunk, A.E. recalls, he once
threw fifteen hundred dollars after an alcoholic card game
and didn't discover it till five years later, when he was
rummaging for a collar button. The sofa, bridge table, and
trunk form a small triangle. In this little triangle, most
of A.E.'s existence is now confined.
Kazan's sofa was made to order by the Tiffany Studios in
1921. "I paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for it, but
now I couldn't get ten dollars," he says, not ruefully but
as a comment on worldly mutation. No other man has ever been
so faithful to an article of furniture. Even when he lived
in his apartment at the Ritz Tower, which had a magnificent
bed, he slept on the sofa. Whenever he was ready to go to
Paris, he would simply order his chauffeur to ship the sofa
ahead. When he arrived in his apartment at Claridge's, it
would be there. Now it is his workbench as well as his bed.
He lies on it, collecting his thoughts, and when he is ready
to set them down, there is the bridge table. The sofa, A.E.
says, is his pal. It is a relationship analagous to the one
between Elwood P. Dowd and Harvey.
A.E.'s degeneration into a writer took place in this way. In
1941, yielding to one of his rare bouts with apathy, he
didn't go out of his room for three days. On the fourth day,
the maid who does his room prodded him. "You haven't been
outside for three days," she said. "What's the matter with
you? You
must be a writer!" The writing germ, a non-filterable virus,
entered A.E. at that moment. By the end of a week, A.E., now
dedicated, was at work on his first manuscript. His new
avocation, he feels, has lifted him above the ordinary,
material plane on which he had always lived. On the floor of
his room are three worn rugs; he estimates their total value
at ninety cents. On Christmas Day of 1944, A.E. was alone
in his room with his work. He looked down at the rugs and
found himself remembering that once he had had in his store
two thousand rugs, each worth between five hundred and two
thousand dollars. He laughed. He went out to the Automat for
his Christmas dinner, and while sitting there, drinking a
glass of milk, he laughed again. It is his conversion to
art, A.E. feels, that gave him the power to laugh on that
Christmas Day.
A.E. takes a certain pride in the magnitude of his
downfall. In 1929, he went bankrupt for a million dollars,
and he still carries, and likes to display, a newspaper
clipping recording this handsome debacle. Since 1929, he has
done no formal work. He is an authority on the late sport of
horse racing. He had elaborate formulas for betting, the
most incomprehensible of which he called the "unit system."
Once he evolved an intricate scheme for a betting pool with
a capital of a million dollars. He perfected the plan with
patient lucubration and then offered it as a sort of
gesture to the Greek community in New York. It was turned
down. He was rather hurt by this, because he was prepared,
he says, to devote all his time to it. For a while, after
the crash, he lived in the Hotel St. Moritz, and he still
goes there almost every afternoon and sits on a
yellow-leather chair at his regular table in the Café de la Paix. He loves the Café de la Paix. The proprietor of the
hotel, a Greek by the name of Taylor, is an old friend. The
waiters and clientele also know him. When he tips the
waiters, they good-humoredly refuse the tips. They don't
want to be tipped by their friend, they say. When A.E.
arrives at the Café de la Paix, he sits down at his
Stammtisch in one corner. He talks to his regular
waiter in French. He has known this waiter for thirty years,
since the days of the old Café Martin. They inevitably
recall the night Stanford White was shot there. They were at
the Café Martin when it happened. A.E. puts on a pair of
horn-rimmed glasses, takes some long sheets of yellow
foolscap from his pocket, and asks the waiter to read to
him
from his work in progress, "My Life at the Café Martin."
"The proprietor, Martin, was like my brother," says A.E.
"What a man I was!"
Back in his room, A.E. puts in an hour before dinner at his
writing. The pockets of his double-breasted black overcoat
and of his jackets are stuffed with foolscap covered with
writing—newly remembered stories of his past, amplifications
of stories he has already told. Afflicted with graphomania,
he keeps adding and adding to his reminiscences and
speculations. If you visit him in his room, he insists upon
your reading his works aloud to him. He will reach into a
pocket and pull out a sheet of paper. "Read this," he will
say, in the voice of one long accustomed to obedience.
"Aloud!" When you start reading, A.E. tilts his head back
and a little to one side. A faint smile curves his lips and
the expression on his distinguished, strongly modelled face
softens to benignity. As the sentences set in motion the
stream of memory—of opulence, of power, of defeat, of
voluptuousness—the benign look deepens, and it is plain
that the voices he hears are mellifluous. At last the
passage is finished. There is a silence. The sun lights up
a column of motes rising from A.E.'s sofa to the window. He
gets up and adjusts his boxlike jacket against the back of
his collar. "Damn fool," he mutters. "Damn fool."
"What would you still like to accomplish in life?" his
visitor asks, to snap him from his past to the future.
"You will find the answer," he says brusquely, "in the
blue—797A."
It is there, on the last page, just before the addendum,
which is a little manual on horse racing. It reads:
Bob asked his uncle: "Why did you start writing this
book?"
Answer: "It is a good hobby, if you are lonesome, and an
education. You will become a better person reading your
own memoirs and experiences, and I am tired of
stretching a dollar as far as it will go. I am also
trying hard to make this book more successful so I will
be able to reciprocate favors which I receive from my
family and my friends, and will be able to establish a
small orphanage and live with the children and see them
happy. When they come and jump on my lap and kiss me,
that is the only genuine kiss in the world with no
hidden personal interest, except, of course, mothers'."
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