Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

June 1. Today I found the office door barred and the lock sealed by the authorities. Under the company’s nameplate was a small strip of paper with the typed message: “Closed down for bankruptcy by the courts.”

Berliner Börsen Courier, July 3, 1927

Renovation

AN ODE TO THE COFFEEHOUSE

Coffeehouses have something in common with well-played violins. They resonate, reverberate, and impart distinct timbres. The many years of the regular guests’ clamor have amassed their filaments and atoms in a singular way, and the woodwork, paneling, and even pieces of furniture pulse marvelously to the tunes of the visitors’ life rhythms. Malice and venomous thoughts of a decade on the blackened walls have settled in as a sweetly radiant finish, as the finest patina. Every sound, emanating from the faintest quiver, the most unremarkable brains, comes through and runs endlessly, in mysterious waves, across all the molecules of the magnificently played sound body, day after day, with the regulars playing the strings to attain the uplifting resonance that their lives, professions, or families generally fail to deliver. The molecular miracle that unfolds here, the phenomenon of metaphysical ensoulment of favorite pubs from the aura of their guests, has yet to be the subject of scholarly research.

But would it ever occur to any owner of an Amati violin to use sandpaper to scrub off the vintage, resounding finish of his instruments, the atoms of which are filled and fulfilled by the sonority of countless concerts, and coat the violin with fine gold bronze? This deplorable barbarity is being increasingly deployed to carry out a procedure of this sort in people’s favorite pubs! One day you go into the old familiar place and find the furniture gone, and you catch sight of men on high ladders with taunting paper caps using sharp tools to scrape your most precious essences and deposits off the walls. To your dismay you make out the best joke of your life, now reduced to fine dust along those walls, along with the uproarious laughter it occasioned, and you stumble across the apt remarks you once made about the nature of chess fans, and you’re standing there just as the lavatory attendant, taken away temporarily from her other duties, uses a rag to wipe up the tender words from the floor that you whispered in Amalie’s ears in 1916, and—with minor adjustments—Laura’s in 1918. His head tilted to size up the matter, his hand on his watch chain, the coffeehouse owner stands at my side, while I’m deeply moved, and says, “There! Have a look!”

So, now it’s going to be different. Somewhere there are two beautiful elephant heads with torch-bearing trunks, to be used as tasteful lighting ornaments for the two pillars. A family of fishermen, roof tiles from Lake Gosau, and farmers’ girls in richly carved Renaissance frames are awaiting their decorative destinations. Red and gold. Brocade and repp. The dancer Kitty Starling … a polar bear prowling around a block of ice bathed in light …

It’s the women’s fault, believe me, women with their horribly deficient sense of history, which manifests itself in such a blessedly disastrous manner as a love of tidiness and cleanliness; women with their endearing attachment to the present, paying no heed to the stream of time, but instead focusing determinedly on countering the passage of eons with cosmetics, apparel, and beating carpets. Their efforts are aimed at demolishing time. When would a man ever get the idea of repainting a foyer? When would a painter ever have imagined that the paintbrush in his practiced hand was a close relative of the powder puff standing up to the pyramids at Giza? But when, on the other hand, did a woman ever fully grasp the metaphysical outlook of the man that stops him from giving away his old hats, perched as they are atop his thoughts, or tossing them away, willy-nilly?

Blindly carrying over her ideals to venerable taverns, which are steeped in tradition, she is eager, as the wife of a coffeehouse proprietor, to enforce the principle of domesticity in the café as well as at home, doing a thorough job of it, tidying up, painting, in short, obliterating time and providing a squeaky-clean, cozy home for the guest. But, I ask you, who actually looks forward to heading home? She pressures her reluctant spouse to go with the times, remodel, alter the image, gild the place, add red, polish the furniture, and dye the pub’s hair.

The local pub, a site of extreme masculinity, is about to acquire an utterly feminine aspect that lends the concept of “passing the time” an odd and quite specifically feminine slant with tireless renovation and beaming disavowal of all the years gone by. Revered countenance of everyone’s favorite bar! With gold and red, time has been driven out of your features. The regular visitor is appalled by the destruction of his years, by the eradication of the bits of himself he has breathed into the place. But the woman in charge has taken on a new coffeehouse …

Berliner Börsen Courier, July 13, 1927

Why Don’t Matches Smell That Way Anymore?

I woke up at night. The rain beat against the windowpanes. A thin gleam slid across the wall. Someone had turned on a light in the building across the street, and at this moment it came my way. It was not merely a sensation of smell that took hold of me, it was more of an almost painful feeling rushing through my whole body, permeating every cell, and transforming it in some mysterious way.

So, how was it?

Well, it was like this: a match whooshed gently across the striking surface, and light blazed up. And silently, eerily, the blue spirits’ flame arose. Its fragrance blended with the last trace of the dying match. Now the aroma of a sweet hint of cocoa was added on, with a slow hum as it warmed. What was this wonderful symphony of scents that was