The Arrangement

546 Pages·1968·12.14 MB·English

by  Elia Kazan

“ An exuberant and gutsy celebration of
life... Superbly earthy in its treatment of love
and sex, nicely offset by a prevailing mood of
tenderness.” Publisher’s Weekly
“For all its shock value (and its sex is frequent
and specific), this is a novel you will gulp
down and remember.”
John Barkham,
Saturday Review Syndicate
“It is impossible, in a short space, to give a
work so rich, complex and subtle, its due; here
is one of the finest novels out for a long
time. The New Republic
“ Chock-full of action, sex, punchy set-
pieces .,. rollicking zest.. . nice, subtle sur­
prises of observation.”
Eliot Fremont-Smith,
The New York Times
“THE ARRANGEMENT is a novel for
those who rejoice in the rare experience
these days of getting hooked by a master
storyteller.
“One may disapprove of Eddie Anderson. His
whole life is a series of phony arrangements:
his marriage, his work, his sexual escapades,
his friendships. But nobody can deny his hu­
manity. He is at the mercy of his gonads and
hormones as well as of his conscience and the
social gentilities. He is in the bind we all share.
He is never a bore. He has no self-pity. He
doesn’t disguise his son-of-a-bitch qualities. He
has a great sense of irony. He is often funny.
“By the end of the book he has achieved what
is most needed on this shaky planet—a new
working model of a human being. This is a
novel to change your life by.”
Eleanor Perry for LIFE
“ELIA KAZAN has written a novel bursting
with life .. . more pages of brilliant hi-jinks,
explicit sex and aching, tender reality than any
10 novels of recent memory. If you read only
one novel this year, make it this one.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The tone of the hook is extremely striking,
for it really does not depend on anything that
we think of as a literary tradition, but on some­
thing older than that: the tale being told by a
member of the tribe to the tribe. It has the
urgency of a confession and the stammer*
ing authority of a plea.”
James Baldwin,
The New York Review
“A moral odyssey of our times. Mr. Kazan
knows the terror of the flimsy pinnacle on
which a variety of representative Americans
sit. He has rendered the pitch of that terror
with compelling fidelity. We hear the dreadful
keening of the successful and the lost.”
Book Week
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arrange
AN AVON BOOK
«

To the girl from Makrikoy
AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019
Copyright © 1967 by Elia Kazan.
Published by arrangement with Stein & Day Publishers.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-10325.
All rights reserved, which includes the right
to reproduce this book or portions thereof in
any form whatsoever. For information address
Stein & Day Publishers, 7 East 48 Street,
New York, New York 10017.
First Avon Printing, March. 1968
Cover design by Milton Charles
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. EAT. OFF. AND
FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK—
MAKCA KEGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.À.
Printed in the U.S.A.
ONE
] still haven’t figured out
my accident.
I've gone over and over the events of that day, the day
of the crash, with all the hindsight I’ve gained in the years
since. I’ve gone over the events of the months leading up
to the crash, the events that should account for it But
there is still a mystery.
The riddle is not that a man as successful as I was
would try to kill himself. There were reasons why I might
have. I had everything, as they say, but still there were
reasons. The mystery is in the way it happened.
I don’t believe in ghosts. But even today, when Fm a
totally different man and live in a totally different way,
when I ask myself exactly what happened, I next ask
myself what hand and whose it was that reached in out of
the absolute blue, jerked the wheel of my Triumph two-
seater around, and, despite all my strength and all my
will, held the course that plastered me against the side of
a speeding trailer truck. It all happened in a short second
or two, but that is what I distinctly remember.
Success ought to provide some protection against ghosts
or the unconscious or whatever it was. That is the least'
you should be able to expect of success. Or of money. But
they didn’t, either one. I found myself helpless—I’ll say it
again-—against the strength of that “hand” or whatever it
was that wrenched the control of my Triumph TR 4 out
of my grip, held it unswervingly on course, and finally
packed it against the side of that trailer truck.
The events leading up to my accident don’t tell the
reasons. True, eleven months before, I had given up a girl
to whom I was very attached. But I had righted myself
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during those months; in fact I was doing great. My wife
Florence and I were the envy of every other married
couple in Beverly Hills and Bradshaw Park. The Golden
Couple! That nickname was awarded us during those very
eleven months between the day I gave up Gwen and the
day of my accident Besides, most of the men I know have
faced a similar painful choice at some time in their lives—
made it and in time recovered, feeling deprived perhaps,
but much sounder.
And I knew 1 had to give Gwen up. I knew the moment
was on me, that moment when you can still walk away
free and clear, without lasting injury to either side, and
just before that other moment when somebody’s going to
get hurt. I had a pretty damned good idea of die danger I
was running; in fact 1 bad said to myself again and again,
“Walk away, kid, before it’s too late!”
I had asked myself the basic questions. I mean if you’re
with a woman twenty-one years as I had been with Flor­
ence, there is something of value there. And not to mince
words, divorces are costly things. I didn’t even really know
this other girl, or to speak the truth, I knew one side of
her very well: every little flesh pad and pocket.
But hell, I thought, I have too much to lose. I mean I
was an established man, then; I was solvent, set for life. I
owned this beautiful house in the Bradshaw Park section
of Los Angeles, and I had there (this will seem absurd, I
know) the goddamnedest lawn in that whole area, and
some wonderful plantings that I had put in myself, and a
really great record collection, including many rare 78’s;
two valuable Picasso original drawings; a deep freeze that
held thirty-six cubic feet of food; and the three cars:
Florence’s Continental, my daughter Ellen’s Karman
Ghia, and the Triumph TR 4 which I was later to smash
up. All that and a swimming pool. It was a lot to give up
for a good lay, or even a great one! And when 1 looked at
all that stuff and my family too, I thought what the hell
am I getting into? Every man will know just what I mean,
especially Europeans, who despite general impression are
much less romantic than we are and really understand
property.
I'd begun to behave like a damned fool with this girl,
Gwen. At first I used to meet her two, maybe three times
a week, without rippling the surface of my respectable
existence. That was the way I wanted it. For instance I
used to stop at this motel on my way in to the office, and
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get a room. Then some time during the business morning
I’d call Gwen. She also worked (doing no one was quite
sure what) at Williams and MacElroy, where I was part of
the brass. 1 would tell her where and the number, say
room 535. Then we’d both make up some excuse to get
out for a couple of hours. Being a wheel, I had much
more leeway in this than she did. Even if it was only for
the lunch hour, in those days it was worth it to us. I’d go
to the place first, fix the door with the folded “Don’t Dis­
turb” card so it would close but not latch, pull the shades
down, undress, turn the lights off, and lie there and wait
for her. When she came in, she’d lock the door and
without saying a word undress, and—well, there’s nothing
to say about what went on then except there was very
little conversation. That coming together in the dark of
strangers was exciting to us. We cultivated that
Then something that I couldn’t control got into mf.
Men will know what I’m talking about; I mean that
desperate thing that happens at forty-three, which I was,
or forty-five or seven or nine. Anyway, before I realized
what was going on, it was a different dance done to a
different tune. No longer did I see her maybe a couple of
times a week in a motel room. I got real careless, necked
in the comers of bars where people inevitably saw us, or
drove to the beach and lay out there with her. Of course
it had to get back to Florence. I can’t answer this ques­
tion: did I subconsciously want it to get to her?
What was dangerous was not that I was seeing a girl so
often. After all, I had always had someone. Just before
Gwen, in fact when I met her, I bad a select little string
of creatures. The danger was—you’ve heard this before,
too—I was falling in love with Gwen. And I had made up
my mind, some years before, after an earlier such episode,
never again to expose myself to that. I had learned—or so
I thought—the importance of final indifference. But
despite this, there it was, happening again.
For one thing I was beginning to be obsessive about
Gwen, wondering where she was when she wasn’t with
me, and never daring to let her go for too long. Nature
loathes a vacuum, and the thought of an unattached and
unsatisfied Gwendolyn Hunt hitting the spots (with some­
one) in the Los Angeles jungle—well, it worried me.
Then there was another bad sign. It had to do with my
work. I lost interest in it. Before I knew it, my profession­
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