Death in the Fifth Position Read online

  DEATH IN THE

  FIFTH POSITION

  Gore Vidal

  as

  EDGAR BOX

  Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-four novels, six plays, two memoirs, numerous screenplays and short stories, and well over two hundred essays. His United States: Essays, 1952–1992 received the National Book Award.

  Books by Gore Vidal

  NOVELS

  Williwaw

  In a Yellow Wood

  The City and the Pillar

  The Season of Comfort

  A Search for the King

  Dark Green, Bright Red

  The Judgment of Paris

  Messiah Julian

  Washington, D.C.

  Myra Breckinridge

  Two Sisters

  Burr

  Myron

  1876

  Kalki

  Creation

  Duluth

  Lincoln

  Empire

  Hollywood

  Live from Golgotha

  The Smithsonian Institution

  The Golden Age

  AS EDGAR BOX

  Death in the Fifth Position

  Death Before Bedtime

  Death Likes It Hot

  NONFICTION

  Inventing a Nation

  SHORT STORIES

  A Thirsty Evil

  Clouds and Eclipses

  PLAYS

  An Evening with Richard Nixon

  Weekend

  Romulus

  On the March to the Sea

  The Best Man

  Visit to a Small Planet

  ESSAYS

  Rocking the Boat

  Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship

  Homage to Daniel Shays

  Matters of Fact and of Fiction

  The Second American Revolution

  At Home

  Screening History

  United States

  The Last Empire

  Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

  Imperial America

  MEMOIRS

  Palimpsest

  Point to Point Navigation

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, MARCH 2011

  Copyright © 1952, 2011 by Gore Vidal

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, in 1952.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Box, Edgar, 1925–

  Death in the fifth position / by Gore Vidal as Edgar Box.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74271-1

  I. Title.

  PS3543.I26D4 2011

  813′.54—dc22

  2010042347

  www.blacklizardcrime.com

  Cover design: Evan Gaffney Design

  Cover photograph: Superstock

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Introduction to DEATH IN THE FIFTH POSITION

  E. P. Dutton, an ancient New York publishing house, issued my first novel, Williwaw, a wartime sea story. This was my first novel, and I was nineteen. It was set in the Aleutian Islands, where I served during World War II aboard a U.S. Army freight supply ship stationed at Dutch Harbor.

  The book did reasonably well and was much praised by the daily book reviewer for the Sunday New York Times, one Orville Prescott. He ended his review by saying that he suspected that I would have a very long career. But of course, when I later wrote a novel that he opposed on moral grounds, The City and the Pillar, he refused to review my next four or five novels. In response, I wrote a small piece saying how little I regarded book reviewing in the great city of New York, an opinion that I still hold. But at the time, as an unknown writer, it was very dangerous to take on the New York Times.

  The City and the Pillar was about a love affair between two young men who had been in the war, a forbidden subject in those days. I knew that this was the sort of thing that caused many devout Christians and other solemn folk to burst into hives. So I was unpleasant about Mr. Prescott in the press and went my way. Soon, however, I realized that I was being blackballed by the New York Times, thanks to Mr. Prescott.

  The wisest man in American publishing at that time was someone called Victor Weybright, who published an extremely adventurous paperback series and had become something of a leader in the publishing world when he took the most untrashy of American novelists seriously as a mass paperback author: William Faulkner.

  Victor was a Maryland squire of rosy countenance, very much a bon vivant, and we became friends even though he knew that I was under a cloud, thanks to the Times. I complained to him about my predicament. I lived by my writing, and not to be reviewed ever again by the New York Times is a terrible fate. Mr. Prescott continued to flourish, but I did not until Victor asked me to join him for lunch one day at the Brussels Restaurant. (One nice thing about him as a publisher is that he only went to the best restaurants.) I joined him, and he had a proposition, suggesting that my tactlessness with the New York Times had perhaps slowed my career down. Noticing that I had written one or two other books under another name, he asked if I would consider taking on the mystery story. I said that I hadn’t read many mystery stories, though I did know the work of Agatha Christie pretty well. He said, “Well, try something. We made a fortune off another Dutton author, Mickey Spillane, who is nowhere near as interesting as you.” I said that I didn’t think I was sufficiently stupid to be a popular author, but he said, “You’ll find a way.”

  At the end of lunch Victor and I went to a publisher’s party. The party was for a husband and wife named Box. I should say that before the cocktail party Victor and I were discussing names for this new writer, and Victor said I should use the name Edgar because Edgar Wallace invented the mystery story so many years ago. Then we met Mr. and Mrs. Box. At the end of our meeting I turned to Victor and said, “He is born, Edgar Box.” The angels serenaded us from their radiant paradise.

  And so it came to pass that I was able to put to use a winter I had spent taking ballet lessons because my left knee had, thanks to hypothermia experienced in the Aleutian Islands when I was drenched by water from the Bering Sea, ceased to be of much use to me. Only the ballet lessons sufficiently thawed me. So I embarked on a path that I had seen just ahead of me, but wondered if I could do anything about it. There were experiences in life when most of the writers at that time would rush into print to describe their latest marriage, latest divorce, or the tenure they had achieved at some university; I wasn’t about to do that sort of thing, but at the same time I thought what fun it would be to show what life was like inside a ballet company.

  The book you have before you is a very popular novel called Death in the Fifth Position—about a ballet company more or less based upon the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Victor joyously published it and did well with it, and I was encouraged. In fact, I worked very hard at b
eing a mystery writer, somewhat heavily reliant upon Agatha Christie. There were three Edgar Box books in all, each written in eight days at the rate of ten thousand words a day, and I lived on them for the next dozen years until I discovered live television, where I wrote a great many plays for NBC, CBS, and so on. In the end, I suspect I owe a great deal to Mr. Prescott’s spite. To write really as oneself and yet be pretty much anonymous is a strange and dislocating experience. But many things start to become easy for you when you are not in the rat race for that most peculiar of prizes: to be considered the great American novelist of any given time. I have seen so many of them come and go in what has proved to be my very long day.

  Victor Weybright is long since dead, but with some gratitude I feel obliged to dedicate these humble stories to him, whose mischievous gift as a publisher saved me for a decade or two while gaining a Nobel Prize for Bill Faulkner of Oxford, Mississippi.

  —Gore Vidal, 2010

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  “You see,” said Mr. Washburn. “We’ve been havig trouble.”

  I nodded. “What sort of trouble?”

  He looked vaguely out the window. “Oh, one thing and the other.”

  “That’s not much to go on, is it?” I said gently; it never does to be stern with a client before one is formally engaged.

  “Well, there’s the matter of these pickets.”

  I don’t know why but the word “picket” at this moment suggested small gnomes hiding in the earth. So I said, “Ah.”

  “They are coming tonight,” he added.

  “What time do they usually come?” I asked, getting into the spirit of the thing.

  “I don’t know. We’ve never had them before.”

  Never had them before, I wrote in my notebook, just to be doing something.

  “You were very highly recommended to me,” said Mr. Washburn, in a tone which was almost accusing; obviously I had given him no cause for confidence.

  “I’ve handled a few big jobs, from time to time,” I said quietly, exuding competence.

  “I want you for the rest of the season, the New York season. You are to handle all our public relations, except for the routine stuff which this office does automatically: sending out photographs of the dancers and so on. Your job will be to work with the columnists, that kind of thing … to see we’re not smeared.”

  “Why do you think you might be smeared?” The psychological moment had come for a direct question.

  “The pickets,” said Mr. Washburn with a sigh. He was a tall heavy man with a bald pink head which glittered as though it had been waxed; his eyes were gray and shifty: as all honest men’s eyes are supposed to be according to those psychologists who maintain that there is nothing quite so dishonest as a level, unwavering gaze.

  I finally understood him. “You mean you are going to be picketed?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Bad labor relations?”

  “Communism.”

  “You mean the Communists are going to picket you?”

  The impresario of the Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet looked at me sadly, as though once again his faith had been unjustified. Then he began at the beginning. “I called you over here this morning because I was told that you were one of the best of the younger public relations men in New York, and I prefer to work with young people. As you may or may not know, my company is going to première an important new ballet tonight. The first major modern ballet we have presented in many years and the choreographer is a man named Jed Wilbur.”

  “I’m a great admirer of his,” I said, just to show that I knew something about ballet. As a matter of fact, it isn’t possible to be around the theater and not know of Wilbur. He is the hottest choreographer in town at the moment, the most fashionable … not only in ballet but also in musical comedies.

  “Wilbur has been accused of being a Communist several times but since he has already been cleared by two boards I have every confidence in him. The United Veterans Committee, however, have not. They wired me yesterday that if we did his new ballet they would picket every performance until it was withdrawn.”

  “That’s bad,” I said, frowning, making it sound worse than it was: after all I had a good job at stake. “May I see their telegram?” Mr. Washburn handed it to me and I read:

  To Ivan Washburn Director Grand Saint Petersburg Ballet Company Metropolitan Opera House New York City: WE HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THAT JED WILBUR IS A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THAT COMMA TO PROTECT OUR CHERISHED WAY OF LIFE AND THOSE IDEALS WHICH SO FINELY FORGED A NATION OUT OF THE WILDERNESS COMMA THE SUBVERSIVE WORK OF ARTISTS LIKE WILBUR SHOULD BE BANNED PERIOD SHOULD YOU DISREGARD THIS PLEA TO PROTECT OUR AMERICAN WAY WE WILL BE FORCED TO PICKET EVERY PERFORMANCE OF SAID WILBUR’S WORK PERIOD IN A TRUE DEMOCRACY THERE IS NO PLACE FOR A DIFFERENCE OF OPINION ON GREAT ISSUES CORDIALLY ABNER S. FLEER SECRETARY.

  “A poignant composition,” I said.

  “We’ve had a bad season so far this year. We’re the fifth ballet company to arrive in town this spring and even though we’re the original Russian ballet it’s not been easy to fill the Met. Wilbur is our ace-in-the-hole. It’s his first ballet for this company. It’s his first new work in over a year. Everyone is going to be on hand tonight … and nothing must go wrong. That will be your job, too, by the way: to publicize the première.”

  “If I’d had a few weeks of preparation I could have got Life to cover the performance,” I said with that modesty which characterizes my profession.

  Washburn was not impressed. “In any case, I’m told that you’ve got a good many contacts among the columnists. They’re the people who make opinion, for us at least. You’ve got to convince them that Wilbur is as pure as …”

  “The driven snow,” I finished, master that I am of the worn cliché. “But is he?”

  “Is he what?”

  “Pure as … I mean is he a Communist?”

  “How in the name of God should I know? He could be an anarchist for all I care. The only thing I’m interested in is a successful season. Besides, what has politics to do with Eclipse?”

  “With what?”

  “Eclipse is the name of the new ballet. I want you to go over to the Met and watch the dress rehearsal at two-thirty. You’ll be able to get some idea of the company then … meet the cast and so on. Meet Wilbur, too; he’s full of ideas on how to handle this … too damn many ideas.”

  “Then I am officially employed?”

  “As of this minute … for the rest of the season, two weeks altogether. If we’re still having trouble by the time we go on tour I’d like you to go with us as far as Chicago … if that’s agreeable.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  “Fine.” Mr. Washburn rose and so did I. “You’ll probably want to make some preparations between now and two-thirty. You can use the office next to mine … Miss Ruger will show you which one.”

  “That will be perfect,” I said. We shooks hands solemnly.

  I was halfway out the door when Mr. Washburn said, “I think I should warn you that ballet dancers are very temperamental people. Don’t take them too seriously. Their little quarrels are always a bit louder than life.” Which, in the light of what happened later, was something of an understatement.

  2

  Until my interview with Ivan Washburn I could take ballet or leave it alone and since in earlier days I was busy writing theater reviews for Milton Haddock of the New York Globe, I left it alone: besides, the music critic always handled ballet and what with doing Mr. Haddock’s work as well as my own I had very little time for that sort of thing, between eight-thirty and eleven anyway. Mr. Haddock, God knows, is a fine critic and a finer man and it is a fact that his reviews in the Globe were more respected than almost anyone else’s; they should have been since I wrote nearly all of them between 1947 and 1949 at which latter date I was separated from the Globe, as we used to say in the army. Not that I am implying Mr. Haddock, who was writing about the theater th
e year I was born, couldn’t do just as well as I did … he could, but there is a limit to the amount of work you can accomplish on Scotch whisky, taken without water or ice, directly from the bottle if he was in the privacy of his office or from a discreet prohibition flask if we were at the theater: he on the aisle fifth row from the stage and I just behind him in the sixth row, with instructions to poke the back of his neck if he snored too loud.

  In a way, I had a perfect setup; Mr. Haddock was fond of me in a distant fatherly way (he often had a struggle recalling my name) and I was allowed all the pleasure of unedited authorship for he never changed a line of my reviews on those occasions when he read them at all. The absence of public credit never distressed me; after all I was Harvard class of 1946 (three years must be added to my age, however, during which time I served the nation on at least one very far-flung battlefront) and most of my classmates are still struggling along in the lower echelons of advertising firms or working anonymously for Time and Life and worrying about their integrity as liberals in a capitalistic organization. Anyway I knew a good thing when I saw it but after three years of being the real drama critic for the Globe I began to feel my oats and I made the mistake of asking for a raise at the wrong time: a fault in timing which must be ascribed to my extreme youth and natural arrogance, to quote Mr. Haddock quoting the managing editor, and since I had unfortunately phrased my request as an ultimatum I was forced to resign and Mr. Haddock looked very sorry and confused the day I left, saying: “All the best, Jim.” My name is Peter Cutler Sargeant II, but what the hell; I shook his hand and told him that everything I knew about writing I had learned from him … which pleased the old fool.

  For over a year now I have been in public relations, with my own office, consisting of a middle-aged lady and a filing cabinet. The middle-aged lady, Miss Flynn, is my official conscience and she has been very good to me, reminding me that money is not everything and that Jesus is my redeemer. She is a Baptist and stern in the presence of moral weakness. I firmly believe that the main reason she consents to work for me is that I constitute a challenge to her better instincts, to that evangelical spirit which burns secretly but brightly in her bosom. She will save me yet. We have both accepted that fact. But in the meantime she helps me in my work, quite unaware that she is a party to that vast conspiracy to dupe the public in which I and my kind are eternally engaged.