The Electric Hotel E-Book

Dominic Smith

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 590

Beschreibung

From the award-winning author of the acclaimed bestseller The Last Painting of Sara de Vos comes a radiant new novel tracing the intertwined fates of a silent film director and his muse. The Electric Hotel winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey - America's first movie town - and the battlefields of Belgium during World War I. A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man's doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder. For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days taking photographs of Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel - the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose - the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude's memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him. The Electric Hotel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of movie-making, a luminous romance and a whirlwind trip through the heady, endlessly inventive days of early cinema.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Electric Hotel

‘A love letter to the early days of cinema … Smith writes with passion and detail about an extraordinary period in cultural history.’ The Times

‘radiant … a vital and highly entertaining work about the act of creation … so vivid we can imagine every frame’ New York Times Book Review

‘Smith has the historical grounding of E.L. Doctorow, the character discernment of Alice McDermott and the bold whimsy of Mark Helprin. He is a writer of elegance, rich imagination and propulsive plotting.’ Washington Post

‘a novel of … epic scope. […] He brings home … how complex silent movies were to make, and how innovative and daring their makers had to be.’ The Australian

‘Claude Ballard and Sabine Montrose’s “Electric Hotel” lives, sadly, only within the pages of this novel. It’s the ultimate lost film, unfindable and unseeable no matter how many drawers we open or vaults we scour – and yet so vivid we can imagine every frame, tiger and all.’ New York Times

‘The magic and mystery of cinema in its early days are brilliantly evoked in [this] absorbing, multilayered novel … Exhilarating in its evocation of the creativity of early cinema, and melancholy in its acknowledgement of the passing of time and the dying of dreams, The Electric Hotel is an impressive work.’ Sunday Times

‘Smith … blends history and fiction to create a world where a tale of hope, love and loss all seems real.’ The West Australian

Dominic Smith grew up in Sydney, Australia, and now lives in Seattle, Washington. He’s the author of the novels The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Bright and Distant Shores, The Beautiful Miscellaneous and The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Texas Monthly and the Australian. He has been a recipient of literature grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts. He teaches writing in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

A LSO BY DOMINIC SMITH

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

Bright and Distant Shores

The Beautiful Miscellaneous

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

First published in the United States in 2019 by Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Dominic Smith 2019

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2020 by Allen & Unwin

The moral right of Dominic Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Owing to limitations of space, illustration credits can be found on pages 445–449.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone: [phone]

Fax: [phone]

Email: [email protected]: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 91163 029 6

E-book ISBN: 978 1 76087 063 8

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother, who became my loving and dedicated first reader some time in the 1970s

The cinema is an invention without a future.—attributed to Louis Lumière

AUTHOR’S NOTE

According to the Library of Congress, more than seventy-five per cent of all silent films have been lost. Much of that is due to the unstable medium itself—celluloid nitrate is both highly flammable and prone to decay. Every now and again, a film thought to be lost forever shows up somewhere in the world, in an archive drawer or as a foreign print sitting in a far-flung attic or basement.

The Electric Hotel is the name of a silent ‘trick film’ made by the early Spanish director Segundo de Chomón and released as El hotel eléctrico in 1908. Thought to be lost for many years, the film was rediscovered and now resides in the Filmoteca Española film archive. I’ve borrowed the germ of the film, and the title, for my own dramatic purposes.

1

____________

The Knickerbocker

Each morning, for more than thirty years, Claude Ballard returned to the hotel lobby with two cameras strapped across his chest and a tote bag full of foraged mushrooms and herbs. His long walking circuit took in Little Armenia, where he photographed rug sellers smoking cigarettes in the dawning light or, more recently, the homeless college dropouts and beatniks along Sunset Boulevard, striplings, the doorman called them, the ambassadors of Hollywood ruin. This morning—a crisp sunny day in December of 1962—he’d also foraged up into the hills and canyons and now sat in his usual chair, leaning over a coffee table with a pair of nail scissors, trimming the stems of oyster mushrooms and the lacy fronds of wild fennel. He wore a threadbare glen plaid suit with Swiss mountaineering boots, a crumpled white handkerchief flaming like a moth orchid from his breast pocket.

•

His appointment was late so he began to delicately insert the trimmed plants into envelopes, the hotel manager’s English setter, Elsie, nuzzled and sleeping at his feet. Claude could remember a lineage of hotel setters and bloodhounds, purebreds that slept in the lobby and rode the lifts when they were bored or hungry. Speck, the first mascot, was a forager in his own right, moving between the eleven floors where residents and guests left out their breakfast dishes. D.W. Griffith, who’d made the first American epic, used to coax Speck into his room with bacon and eggs. When he died of a stroke under the lobby chandelier in 1948, all but forgotten, the dog kept vigil outside his room every morning for a month.

Claude watched Elsie breathe and twitch at his feet, transported into a dream chase, he imagined, by the smell of damp underbrush and ragweed that clung to his trousers and boots. He looked out through the glass doors for a sign of his visitor, but only the doorman, Sid, was standing there in his gold-trimmed cap and epaulets. From this vantage point, he appeared to Claude like a war-weary admiral standing alone on a dock, staring out to sea, hands clasped behind his back. He still dressed as if he opened doors for Bob Hope and Jack Benny.

But the truth was the Knickerbocker Hotel’s best days were far behind it. If the lobby had once resembled an elegant Spanish Colonial outpost, with its stencilled, hand-painted ceilings and Moorish tapestries, it now resembled a Madrid funeral home on hard times. Frayed cordovan carpets, dusty ferns in copper pots, velvet gondola couches marooned in pools of fifteen-watt lamplight. Celebrities once sat in easy chairs smoking cigars or reading Variety, but now an unemployed screenwriter was taking his pet iguana for a morning stroll and Susan Berg, an actress of the silent era, stood in her robe whispering a monologue to an empty chaise longue.

Over the rim of Claude’s bifocals, Susan appeared as a winking silhouette, a corona of daylight streaming in behind her from the street. Her words were mostly lost, her face turned away, her voice soft and worn. She delivered this speech a few mornings a week, always in the same alcove, where insurance clerks or secretaries on their way to the Guaranty Office Building might glimpse her through the front windows. These were the last lines she’d ever spoken on camera, dialogue intended not to be heard but to be printed on intertitle cards. Claude sometimes caught a single phrase or word from the murmured speech, and the line Why single me out for revenge? had stayed with him. She’d told him that it was from a 1922 Western called Comanche Bride, but Claude couldn’t recall it. By the time of its release, his directing days were over and the medium was dead to him.

There were other refugees of the silent era still living at the hotel—a one-time makeup artist who cut hair in her room, a master carpenter who did odd jobs around the neighbourhood, a widowed British actor who’d barricaded himself in his two-room suite during the Cuban missile crisis back in October. Claude kept an eye out for them, offered to pick up prescriptions or newspapers on his walks, brought takeout up from the lobby when one of them was under the weather, but although they were friendly they never talked about the old days. And they never mentioned Susan Berg’s lobby monologues or the silent era memorabilia Claude had stashed away in his small suite.

•

When Claude thought about the hotel’s heyday, he remembered the house band, the Hungarian Symphonette, playing out on the Lido patio while celebrities danced or, later, Houdini’s widow holding a séance on the rooftop to commune with the escape artist, or the time that Elvis recorded ‘Love Me Tender’ in room 1016. He’d witnessed and photographed the passing of a golden, burnished epoch. A passenger sitting at the window on a train at dusk, it seemed to him now. In 1954, Claude had met Marilyn Monroe in the lift after she’d eloped with Joe DiMaggio, a canvas bag of mushrooms hung over Claude’s shoulder, and she’d been kind enough to ask him about his foraging expeditions. Somewhere in his suite, he had an undeveloped negative of the actress holding up a black elfin saddle mushroom as if it were a dead mouse. Later, in the lobby, she blew him a kiss and called him the mushroom hunter from the lift, oblivious to the fact that he was a film pioneer.

When the newspapers reported Marilyn Monroe’s suicide in her Brentwood home back in August, he’d thought about her in the lift, imagined her forever rising between floors toward the sundeck. He remembered her holding a towel and a transistor radio, smelling of rose-hip shampoo and cigarettes, girlish and shy behind her oversized sunglasses. That was how history showed up at the Knickerbocker, fleetingly and behind smoked glass. The hotel was once a place to be seen and now it was a place to hide or disappear, sometimes forever.

For the most part, the suicides on the eleventh floor were gruesomely quiet affairs—barbiturate overdoses or the lancing of arteries in a bathtub. But in November, a costume designer had left the world noisily and it rattled Claude in a way he couldn’t explain. He’d been out on the footpath talking to Sid, returning from one of his walks, perhaps holding up an exemplary sprig of chervil into the sunlight, when he looked up and saw Irene Lentz—he would learn her name later—sitting on the ledge of a bathroom window on the top floor. She sat there calmly for a moment, kicking her bare feet back and forth, testing the air as if it were a swimming pool, and then she edged off the sill. She shot down toward the concrete awning, flailing and screaming, and Claude felt his hands rise involuntarily above his head as she fell. She landed right behind the neon Hollywood sign with a sound that left nothing to the imagination.

1962 had already featured a man going into space orbit and the Russians pointing nuclear missiles at Florida, but it was somehow the sight of Irene Lentz’s covered body being lowered by medics on a gurney with ropes that shook something loose in him. For months, he’d been reading but not responding to the earnest, flattering letters of a film graduate student, and it was the afternoon of the suicide when he finally wrote back to suggest a meeting. It was time to tell the story of how he’d ended up on this desolate shoreline, time to wave back at the spinning world.

In one of his letters, Martin Embry had referred to Claude’s first silent feature, The Electric Hotel, as a lost masterpiece, and now Claude found it difficult to square that phrasing with the fact that his correspondent was fifteen minutes late. Did one keep an eighty-five-year-old master waiting? As if summoned by this thought, Sid opened one of the glass doors for a shaggy blonde man in his twenties, wearing a tan suede coat and a bolo tie. The doorman pointed in Claude’s direction and then fell in behind the visitor. Claude busied himself with his mushrooms and fennel fronds because it was bad manners to be late but it was worse manners to notice.

Claude looked up and smiled when he heard the sound of boot heels on the terra-cotta tiles. He sometimes photographed this kind of apparition out on Hollywood Boulevard, among the music and creative types, the urban cowboy with the unruly sideburns and big belt buckle who’s just moved out of his parent’s basement in Van Nuys. To Claude’s mind he didn’t look anything like a Ph.D. student in film history. The doorman gestured to Claude, and the man in western wear grinned and nodded.

—Mr Claude Ballard, in the flesh, said Sid. Cinematic genius, forager of edible plants and permanent resident of this fine establishment since 1929.

—You’re making me feel like I’m part of a museum exhibition, said Claude.

—I’m Martin Embry. It is an enormous and distinct pleasure.

He extended his hand to Claude and they shook. Sid picked up a newspaper and returned to his post at the front doors.

—Please, have a seat, Claude said.

Martin sat in the armchair opposite and leaned down to rub Elsie’s rump. The dog quivered but continued to sleep.

—She is dreaming of chasing a rabbit, Claude said, which I am inclined to think always ends with a meal. Before she got so old I used to take her out foraging.

—I grew up with dogs. I miss them out here.

—You are not from here?

—Texas. I moved out here for graduate school.

A silence settled between them as they both watched the sleeping dog.

—I must apologise for not replying to your letters sooner, Claude said. You see, I have been out of the correspondence business for many years.

—I understand completely.

—Very kind. Would you mind terribly if I took some footage of you?

—Are you making a film?

—I like to document what happens to me each day. Call it an old habit.

Claude lifted the 16 mm Bell & Howell from around his chest and filmed several seconds of Martin blinking and smiling into the lens. Then he took out a small spiral notebook from his jacket and jotted down the date, time and subject.

—I wondered if I might take you out for breakfast. I’d love to ask you about your career.

—There’s a diner around the corner, Claude said. I have trained them to make omelettes the way I like them.

Claude rested the camera against his rib cage and attached the lens cap. He gathered his envelopes of herbs and mushrooms, stood up, stepped over Elsie, and continued to the corner of the lobby, where Susan Berg was looping through a second murmured run at the monologue. Claude heard Martin’s boot heels behind him as he delicately touched the arm of Susan’s robe.

—Wonderful, wonderful work this morning, Susan. I see something new every time. Now, I’m headed out for breakfast at the diner and I wondered if you would like me to see if they have any bones for your soup broth?

Her papery, girlish face lived inside a halo of silver-white hair. She blinked and swallowed, her eyes a startling blue that put Claude in mind of tropical fish darting behind aquarium glass.

—I’d like that very much, thank you, Claude.

Claude handed her a small sprig of lilac verbena and she brought it to her nose.

—Go on up to your room and I’ll stop by after breakfast.

Susan nodded and the scene dropped away from her face and hands as she headed for the lifts.

They walked into the high chrome of the Los Angeles morning and headed for Claude’s usual diner on Hollywood Boulevard. Claude took a few images with the still camera as they walked along—their own reflections in the chrome whorl of a hubcap, a sparrow standing up to a pigeon over a bread crust in the gutter, a cat sleeping on a sunny step. A few of the indigent men on the boulevard waved to Claude, and one of them, a dropout named Billy, a tall kid in overalls and an army surplus jacket, asked for his photo to be taken. Claude obliged and told his subject to look off into the distance instead of at the camera. Pretend you are staring back at Iowa, Claude said, snapping the image.

The diner straddled a corner, a wedge of checkerboard linoleum and two rows of booths forming a wide V along the big windows. A middle-aged waitress named Gail showed them to Claude’s favourite booth, in the apex of the V, where he could see the street as well as the rest of the diners. She handed them menus and he handed her a paper envelope of herbs and mushrooms for the kitchen. Claude cleaned his black-rimmed bifocals with a paper napkin—framing a distorted Martin briefly inside one smudged lens—before unstrapping his cameras and placing them on the leather bench. He watched Martin scanning the laminated menu.

—I am biased, but I recommend the omelette they call the Frenchman.

—Did they name it after you?

Claude smiled, gave a modest, Gallic shrug.

—It’s possible I gave them the idea of adding fresh herbs and mushrooms with grated Gruyère. They pay me a little for my foraged herbs and they give me a regular’s discount.

Gail arrived back at the table and they both ordered omelettes and coffee. When the coffee arrived, Claude took a meditative sip and lingered his eyes on the street. A few bright-scarved secretaries were coming out of the studio and record label offices for a cigarette break, walking a little dazedly into the sunshine. Claude picked up the still camera, took some shots of the women smoking at the kerb, wrote the details in his notebook.

—Strangers have always interested me, Claude said. The way they illuminate their own sorrows or joys when you least expect it. It might be half a second of staring into space, then it vanishes. In English, we say perfect strangers, which is very apt, I think.

He looked over at Martin, who was sipping his coffee.

—Nobody remembers my work anymore. How do you know it?

—I’m writing my dissertation on innovation in American silent film before 1914.

—And there is someone in existence who would read such a thing?

—Other film scholars mostly. Listen, my classmates aren’t going to believe I’m having breakfast with Claude Ballard.

Claude waved a hand dismissively.

—How did you come to these studies?

—My grandparents raised me and they owned a movie theatre out in the Hill Country, west of San Antonio. I was a certified projectionist by the time I was ten. You could say the silents are in my blood.

—I didn’t become a projectionist and cameraman until I was nearly twenty.

—I’m guessing cinema hadn’t been invented when you were ten.

—That’s correct. My first job with a camera was in a hospital in Paris where they were studying hysteria. Then I took a job as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers. I was the first agent to show projected images in America and Australia. The brothers sent projectionists all over the world . . . India, Cuba, Brazil, China, Russia . . . sometimes the locals treated us like gods, sometimes like heretics . . .

Before too long their omelettes arrived and they ate for a few minutes without talking.

—This is by far the best omelette I’ve ever eaten, Martin said.

—The secret is creating a little egg pouch around the cheese and herbs. And lots of butter. And the outside of the omelette should never be browned. Like most Frenchmen, I have opinions about food . . .

Martin took a bite and wiped his mouth with his napkin.

—They still teach you in film schools, you know.

A consideration of a smile played on Claude’s lower lip.

—And what do they teach?

—That you practically invented the close-up.

—Heavens no, that was not me.

—That you were the first one to use a professional stuntman and to shoot at night.

—More or less this is true.

—I assume that was before the first war?

—Yes, before we all drowned in our own excesses.

Claude looked out at the street across the rim of his coffee cup.

—And what do they teach you in film school about the end of my career? The dénouement?

—That you never worked again after The Electric Hotel. That you went to film in Europe during the first war and had some kind of nervous breakdown . . .

—No, no, there was nothing nervous about it. It was quite decisive. And after the war, I came back to America and supported myself for decades as a wedding photographer. For the most part, no one ever knew who the Frenchman was behind the viewfinder.

Martin used the edge of his fork to slice into the perfectly rolled omelette. Claude had never understood the American aversion to keeping a knife in hand during a meal.

—Your studio was in New Jersey? Where you made the first feature?

—Perched right above the Hudson, near the town of Fort Lee. A big production stage under a glass roof, like a greenhouse, right up on the Palisades. We used to haul in actors from Manhattan on the ferries and we could shoot melodramas and westerns out on the cliff tops. Did you know the term cliffhanger comes from those early films shot on the Palisades?

Martin chewed, nodded.

—I’d heard that. Or read about it.

—Sabine Montrose or Lillian Gish at the edge of a cliff with a bandit bearing down on her. Then cut, finis, come back next week to pay a quarter to find out whether Sabine lives or dies.

—Whatever happened to her?

—Who?

—Sabine Montrose. She never acted again after you made The Electric Hotel together.

Claude felt his mind slacken and go blank, as if someone had lowered an awning over his thoughts. He rested his hands flat on the tabletop, studied the whites of his knuckles, the sunspots that resembled tiny brown planets.

—Well, let’s see . . . Ah, I remember: she ate my entrails like a feral dog and then she vanished into thin air.

Claude dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, aware of Martin staring at him.

—Forgive me, it’s been many years since I’ve spoken of her. She wronged me, it’s true, but you might also say that I killed her off.

—What do you mean?

—That will take some explaining.

Claude flagged down Gail for some more coffee and asked if the kitchen had any extra bones they could spare for Susan Berg’s soup broth. Gail topped up their cups and said she’d check.

—Susan Berg is the woman back at the hotel?

Claude nodded.

—I am afraid that if she stops making her treacherous soups and coming down to the lobby to perform her monologue she will simply float away. She was a famous actress once but her voice didn’t make the transition to sound. She whispers a lot because I think she’s always been ashamed of her creaking voice. A director once said that her voice sounded like a burglar creeping down an old wooden staircase, and she never recovered. Poor Susan . . .

Martin finished his omelette and retired his fork.

—The silent era must seem like an eternity ago. Are there directors you still follow? Hitchcock? Didn’t he start out with some silent features? I seem to remember he made a silent in Austria called The Mountain Eagle that was supposed to be set in Kentucky.

—I must make a confession.

—Please.

—I haven’t seen a film since 1920.

Martin blinked and blew some air between his lips. It reminded Claude of Chip Spalding, the Australian stuntman from the New Jersey studio; a man who walked through his days blowing air between his lips and looking astonished. What had ever happened to Chip? Were there unanswered letters from him somewhere in Claude’s suite?

—How is that possible?

—I don’t own a television and I don’t go to the movies.

—So you’ve never seen a movie with sound?

Claude gave another Gallic shrug, this time with his whole body, and Martin laughed.

—What’s so funny?

—I would call that the biggest shrug in the history of shrugging. It was almost existential in its scope and delivery.

Claude smiled, moved his plate to the side.

—I have kept some prints and photographs and equipment from the old days in my hotel suite. Would you like to see them?

Martin drummed his fingers on the edge of the table, trying to contain a grin.

—Oh God, that would be incredible. Thank you so much.

Gail arrived with the bill and a brown paper bag of bones. Martin left some money on the table and they headed out into the street.

Back at the hotel, Claude gave one of the bones to Elsie in the lobby and took the rest up to the ninth floor. Susan Berg appeared in the darkened doorway of 905, her hair now in curlers. She took the bag, kissed Claude on the cheek, and retreated into a cluttered interior hung with bedclothes. In the clanking cage lift, Claude told Martin that he could remember Susan dancing a tango with Buster Keaton out on the Lido deck.

—It happened a lifetime ago. They sailed across the terracotta tile like a couple of Spanish galleons, Claude said, while we all just watched in awe.

They stopped in front of 1013 and Claude moved his cameras to one side to dig for his keys in a coat pocket. When he opened the door, he saw Martin flinch and hold the back of his sleeve up to his nose.

—Is something the matter?

—You don’t smell it?

—What?

—Vinegar syndrome, Martin said gently, in the old celluloid.

Claude said nothing, but he felt his jaw tighten as he switched on the lights in the living room and kitchenette. The décor hadn’t changed much since the 1930s—gold-and-green-flecked carpet, a tropically themed couch, art deco lampshades, a nest of walnut end tables covered in newspapers. Over the years, Claude had done his best to categorise the reels and press clippings and photographs. He’d organised the canisters into suitcases and metal trunks, arranged the issues of The Moving Picture World in chronological order and stacked them against one wall. The vintage projectors were in a state of disrepair, he admitted, and it was possible that he’d been using an early cinema camera as a plant stand for twenty years.

—How often do you handle the old reels?

—They haven’t been touched in decades.

Martin hummed nervously. Claude folded his arms, bit his lower lip.

—Do you smoke?

—Not anymore.

—Gas or electric stove?

—The gas stove doesn’t work anymore. I have an electric hotplate.

—Good. Please don’t ever light a match in here. The nitrates—

Martin crossed to the suitcases and reached into one to pick up a metal canister.

—May I?

Claude nodded. When Martin removed the canister lid, he pointed at the tiny silver shards of nitrate that were flaking along one edge of the reel.

—See how it’s already flaking and buckling in places?

Claude said nothing.

—I have a grad school friend who can duplicate and restore some of these.

—No, no, I cannot let you take them out of here.

—For some of the reels, it’s probably too late. They’re lost forever. But some of them can be salvaged in a lab.

Claude walked over to the window to escape the suffocating air of accusation. The sky above Hollywood was paling away into bands of washed-out blue and tin white. He couldn’t name the emotion that was cutting through him but he felt his throat thicken with it.

—I don’t think this was a good idea. I’m sorry, Claude said. I am suddenly very tired.

Martin carefully replaced the canister into the battered-looking suitcase and wiped his hands down his jeans.

—Perhaps just think about it. I’ll come back next week to see if you’d like to have breakfast again. I have lots of questions I’d like to ask you. I’ll leave a message with the front desk.

Martin headed for the door and Claude waited at the window until he heard the latch.

That night, and for a week after, Claude smelled nothing but vinegar in his hotel suite—in his bedclothes, in the icebox, on the backs of his hands. The phrase vinegar syndrome kept coming back to him with the euphemistic menace of nineteenth-century plagues—consumption, scarlet fever, typhus . . . Did vinegar syndrome affect humans, or just degrade the emulsion along a stretch of celluloid?

He found himself emptying his closet, laying his plaid and mustard-coloured suits and dress shirts across his bed. Along the white shirt collars he noticed a jaundiced seam of yellow and it made him think of photographic paper on the verge of exposure. He opened all the windows in the suite, but the noise of the street annoyed him during the day and kept him awake at night. He lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, picturing a chemical fog drifting from room to room, the way his breakfast bananas were spotting in the bromide atmosphere. He saw himself shambling down Hollywood Boulevard in his yellowed shirt collars every morning, Gail wincing at his briny smell when she took his order at the diner. A terrifying thought gripped him: I have been pickling myself for thirty years.

After Martin left a message at the front desk, Claude sat in the lobby in a dry-cleaned suit and a new white dress shirt, a single canister in his hands. Tiny starbursts and cankers of rust surrounded a flaking, foxed label that read The Early Reels. Handing it to Martin, he said that these were the images that launched his career. Will you see what can be saved? Martin carried the canister to the diner and kept touching it with one hand all during breakfast. He asked Claude to take him back to the beginning. Claude stared out through the big windows along Hollywood Boulevard, conjuring Paris of the 1890s.

—When I dream of that old life I see it like a strip of burning celluloid. It smokes and curls in the air, but it’s impossible to hold between my fingers.

2

____________

The Silver Quickening

When Claude remembered seeing those first Lumière reels in the basement of a Paris hotel in the winter of 1895, he closed his eyes and smelled the warming nitrates of the celluloid. He recalled the smell of damp wool as the photographic society members brushed snow from their coats, the high sweet chemistry of gelatin on his hands from the hospital darkroom. It struck him that the olfactory world was right there, burned into his memories, while the first glimmer of motion somehow evaded him. Was it a baby eating breakfast or a factory worker astride a bicycle? Was it a street scene or the sight of a woman and four boys plunging into the ocean?

He’d moved to Paris a year earlier, following his older sister as she began treatments for tuberculosis. He’d found a job not far from the consumption institute, working as a photographic apprentice for Albert Londe at La Salpêtrière asylum and hospital. The wards were full of women—hysterics, epileptics, lunatics, the destitute—and his task was to fix images of their behaviour. A team of neurologists wanted to uncover patterns and characterise the phases of hysteria and epilepsy or the mounting nervous tics of a compulsive. In the early evenings, when the workday was over, he walked to the consumption ward and sat with Odette and read to her from their father’s botanical letters, about his escapades collecting mushrooms and wild herbs in the woods. As her illness worsened, it was a comfort to picture their father out with the farm dogs and his leather satchel, pulling on his pipe, tramping through the same square mile of northeastern France he’d known all his life.

Claude thought of his widowed father, a fierce patriot, as the Lumière brothers told the gathered members that the invention began with their own father’s grudge against the American inventor Thomas Edison. Auguste Lumière did most of the talking, the older brother and commercial manager of the family factory in Lyon that produced fifteen million photographic plates a year. They stood on a makeshift stage in front of a canvas screen, their invention draped under a cloth down in the aisle between the seats.

—You see, friends, Auguste said, some years ago our father went to an exhibition where he saw Edison’s crude peepshow device . . .

—The kinetoscope, added Louis Lumière.

—Edison’s arcade novelty, Auguste continued, demands that the viewer drop a coin into the slot of a big wooden cabinet and watches through a viewfinder while a tiny motor churns the pictures in front of an electric light bulb. But who wants to hunch over a cabinet all by themselves? Our father heard that Edison wanted to start manufacturing and selling these kinetoscopes in France and he couldn’t abide it . . . so he comes to my brother and me with a sample of a kinetoscope reel and a proposition. Free the light, he says to us, and you will make Edison’s invention look like a child’s trinket and make yourselves rich in the process.

Claude wrote I believe you are already rich in his notebook, then he looked up at the younger brother launching onto the balls of his feet, suddenly brimming and boyish.

—Indeed, we asked ourselves, Louis said, why keep the images cooped up inside a wooden cabinet? What if there was a way to project the views onto a wall? The technical problem, alors, was the movement of the celluloid strip. How to thread at just the right speed, that was the question, and I am happy to report that we solved it as precisely as astronomers using mathematics to locate a new star or planet . . .

Louis put his hands into his pockets and looked down at the floor, as if he’d caught himself prattling to dinner guests.

—My brother is being far too modest and cosmique, said Auguste. During one of his bouts of insomnia, he has suffered nervous complaints and headaches his whole life, you see; regardless, one night he stumbled downstairs and took apart our mother’s sewing machine and began to copy the mechanism that pulls the hem of a garment under the grip of the churning needle. She was not very happy, I can assure you, but the claw mechanism Louis designed was our great huzzah! In a way, gentlemen, you could say that we learned how to stitch light together . . . heavens, now I am the one being cosmique . . .

An older society member in the front row, an optician from the Latin Quarter with a monocle, folded his arms and bellowed up at the stage.

—Perhaps, esteemed brothers, now that you’ve stitched so many words together, we can see the damn thing work?

Auguste smiled weakly and bent into a continental bow. He gestured for Louis to take his place down in the aisle with the covered contraption.

—The public exhibition will be after Christmas, said Auguste, so we’d appreciate your discretion until then. Behold, gentlemen, the cinématographe: a working camera, projector and printer. A photographic trinity, if you will. Amusez-vous bien!

Claude expected Louis to remove the cloth with a stage magician’s flourish, but the younger brother delicately lifted each corner and revealed the machine by degrees. Claude cleaned his spectacles with a silk cloth and put them back on. He was sitting on the end of a row, and as the gaslight sconces were dimmed he leaned into the aisle to study the device. It resembled a wooden sawhorse with a ten-inch box camera mounted on one end and a metallic lamphouse on the other. There was a hand-powered crank on one side of the camera and a narrow strip of silver-black film coiled onto a spool above. Louis Lumière opened a hatch on the lamphouse and lit the limelight, then he began to steadily turn the hand crank, the air sharpening with quicklime and emulsion. Claude would remember his eyes smarting and a swallow, a moment of suspension before everything changed.

A space opened out behind the stage, a catacomb of dappling motion and light. Dozens of workers came silently bustling through the wall of the hotel basement, surging between the enormous metal doors of a factory at the end of a day, a man astride a wobbling bicycle, women in hats and sturdy shoes with aprons and baskets, a brown dog circling and tail-wagging in the foreground. They were all suspended in midair, slightly jittered and staccato in their motions, accelerating toward evening, as if under the unwinding tension of a spring, toward dinners and children, toward taverns and lovers. Claude felt their humanity in his chest, the headlong plunge toward home, even as he thought of a million drops of mercury teeming on the surface of a daguerreotype, a chemical rain that somehow atomised and animated these figures to life.

When a horse-drawn carriage barrelled out of the factory’s darkened, gaping mouth, the optician in the front row gave a start, threw up his hands and dropped his monocle as the horse veered toward him. Another member, a funeral photographer not much older than Claude, stood up and began to ghost toward the screen, a sleepwalker roused by otherworldly music. He drifted down the aisle, right by Louis Lumière, and suddenly his monstrous shadow crossed into the projector’s arc and was pinned against the wall, blotting out the factory scene to a volley of French insults and expletives. The first matinee heckle, Claude would think in years to come. The forty-six-second reel came to an end and Louis began to thread another, looping the strip of shining celluloid between a series of spools.

Later, Claude would forget the exact sequence of the views. A prankster with a garden hose; a congress of photographers arriving by boat in Lyon with their equipment; a baby being held up to the rim of an enormous glass bowl filled with goldfish, a grinning, white-frocked monster wobbling above her watery domain. There was a reel, perhaps the final one, consisting of a woman and four boys, probably her boisterous, wiry sons, running out along a wooden plank in their bathing suits and jumping into the gunmetal sea. Each of the ten reels was less than a minute long, just long enough to peer into the crevice of a human life, but they would all run together in his mind, a confluence that came bursting over him like shards of recovered memory. And although the order of the images remained hazy, he would never forget the revelation that fell through him as he sat in the half light, the sound and smell of Louis hand-cranking the shimmerings of existence in front of the limelight.

O-mouthed, transfixed, Claude watched the screen, but he also felt some part of him pulling away to his childhood in Alsace, to the autumn his mother died of smallpox while he lay in bed with his own fever. The fever had distorted his vision and he could remember lying up under the eaves of the attic as the shapes of the room fell out of focus. For a month, while his mother slipped away in the room next door, the edges of objects began to slowly quake and fringe. When the village doctor finally sent him to an ophthalmologist, a bearded man who spoke gravely of the fever warping his corneas, Claude emerged with a wire-frame prescription wrapped behind his ears and it was suddenly as if he’d swum to the surface of a very deep lake. The world rushed back in as the coppered edge of an October leaf, the crinoline hem of his teacher’s skirt, the yellow-white flange of a chanterelle mushroom on his father’s foraging table. And with each new Lumière reel, that was the sensation he had now, of being startled from a haze. He was a diver emerging from the murky, myopic depths into a bell jar of crystalline edges and forms.

The fever and his mother’s death turned him into a devout watcher the year he turned eleven; the bespectacled, motherless boy at school who was always flitting his eyes between a sketch pad and the horizon, who fell in behind his father and the dogs as they collected and foraged some order back into the callous universe. Seeing the woman jump into the ocean in one of the reels, he thought of his mother’s habit of alpine swimming, the way she grimaced before the icy plunge but always emerged shivering and roaring with joy, and then he imagined her all these years later on a strip of celluloid, swimming, laughing, waving, forty-five seconds of her tenure on the planet. Nothing would ever be the same in the photographic world, Claude understood as he watched. Magic lanterns had been used for centuries to project mechanical slides, but they were glimpses through a keyhole, a shifting geometric pattern or resolving image. In each Lumière view, every inch of the screen was alive, and it was the background of fluttering leaves, or rippling waves, or drifting clouds that captivated the eye as much as the foregrounded subject. You burrowed into the screen, dug it out with your gaze. In the span of ten minutes, in a hotel basement, the still image and the projected slide had become the slow-witted cousins to this shimmering colossus.

•

At the end of the screening, while the members of the photographic society continued to sit in awed silence, the brothers turned up the gaslight sconces and discussed their plans for the invention from the stage. They wanted to hire a small army of concession agents to proselytise the cinématographe into the far corners of the world, a grand tour of sorts, to beat Edison at his own game of colonising human appetites and curiosities.

—The Lumière concession agents, Auguste said, will project views of Paris and London and Rome for the locals, but they will also make filmstrips of their new surroundings as they travel. They will sell the cinématographes and filmstrips to showmen and photography buffs alike. Imagine, if you will, a tribe of Esquimaux or the bushmen of the Australian desert or the philosophers of Buenos Aires seeing their own lives glowing back at them.

—Now, said Louis, we would be happy to take your questions.

Not a single member of the photographic society raised a hand. In a sense, they’d been levelled by what they’d witnessed. To ask how the sprockets fed the loop inside the box camera, or whether electricity could be used to fuel the lamphouse, or where the cinématographe could be purchased, was to quibble with wonder. To ask about the mechanics was to grind the air with so much noise. After a long enough silence, the members began to reclaim their coats and hats, the first cigars were lit, and Claude heard one of the veteran members say, I don’t know what that was, but it has weakened my heart considerably. Claude stayed in his seat, cleaned his glasses again as if it might polish his thinking, and stood in the aisle. As he came toward the Lumière brothers he realised there were tears on his cheeks, and he paused to dab them away with his sleeve.

—Were you moved by the views, young man?

Auguste asked it with a note of fatherly concern in his voice.

—More than I can say, Claude said.

Louis, who’d begun to roll up the canvas screen, looked over at Claude.

—I must learn how to make my own views.

There was a slight stammer in Claude’s voice.

—What is your name? asked Auguste.

—Claude Ballard, sir.

—Do you have any experience with photography? Louis asked.

The brothers studied Claude at the lip of the stage, his wrinkled stovepipe hat in his hands.

—I work as a photographic apprentice at La Salpêtrière, under Albert Londe.

Auguste gave an affirming nod and reached into his coat pocket. On the back of a business card, he wrote down the name of an optical shop on the Left Bank. Then he wrote Noon on March 1, 1896 and handed the card to Claude.

—Ask for Yves at the optical shop. He will make you a licensed cinématographe.

—And the date?

—If you come back here at that time, we will be hiring our first concession agents. Make some views for us to watch and we would be happy to consider you.

—What should I photograph?

—Surprise us, Louis said. That is the only requirement.

Claude noticed Auguste Lumière studying his scuffed shoes and the frayed felt of his hat brim. He felt himself flush in the sconce light and looked down at the floor. He put the card into a deep pocket of his shapeless coat, forced his eyes back up at the brothers, thanked them for their demonstration, and rushed for the stairwell. Auguste called after him.

—And tell Albert Londe that he might grace us with his presence sometime, instead of just sending his apprentice. Tell him that we just showed you the goddamn moon and stars!

Claude took the stairs two at a time, rushing out into the glittering cold Parisian daylight. His glasses fogged in the open air, and for a moment the street came at him as if through a sheet of ice, everything muted, the pedestrians living as dashes and daubs of colour. He stepped under a tobacconist’s awning to let his glasses defog. As he stared through his freshly cleared lenses, he found himself already auditioning passersby for reels—the shopgirls bundling along, arm in arm, their breath smoking in the chill as they gossiped, the butcher hauling a marbled side of beef over his shoulder behind a glass shopfront, the ravaged old flâneur idling along with a spaniel and a cane and a wilting flower in his lapel.

Claude entered the fray of the street again, wending his way back toward the hospital. In the photographic plate of a clothier’s window he saw his own image fixed, saw himself the way the Lumières or a Parisian passerby might—a tall provincial kid in a stovepipe hat too tight in the brim, a slouching sack coat and wrinkled black wool trousers, a bespectacled, unblinking expression that was earnest, if he was being kind, and hangdog if he was being honest. For a year, he’d wanted to believe his wiry build and high-bridged nose might distract Parisians from his mawkish clothes and big-knuckled hands shoved into his trouser pockets, but he understood now that he looked like he’d borrowed a fat uncle’s funereal suit. He peered into the shop window at a rack of tailored nankeen jackets, a walnut table of neckties, a wall of brogues the colour of brandy and oxblood. He combed through the voluminous pockets of his coat, counted out his money, including part of next month’s rent, and stepped through the clothier’s doorway. His prodigious future, he felt sure, involved a Nile-blue necktie.

________

When Claude returned to the hospital in a mushroom-coloured jacket with a blue silk necktie and caramel-coloured shoes, the doctors and nurses of the neurology wing took notice. As he walked down the long white corridor, one nurse called him Casanova, another called him a duke of the provinces, and a physiologist, a bespectacled, dapper dresser in his own right, said, Welcome aboard!

Albert Londe’s secretary said he was in meetings, so Claude decided to finish developing some plates in the darkroom. This narrow space was his sanctuary. Eyeglasses folded, moving by feel, rinsing and hanging exposures under an amber bulb. It always seemed to him in here that he was graceful and unencumbered, that there was someone with perfect eyesight moving inside him. Only once the prints were dry did he put his glasses back on and study the distorted postures of hysterics, the knuckled spines and bowed arms. He placed the better images into a dossier for Albert Londe to present to a panel of neurologists.

•

Today, while a woman’s buckled torso dissolved into view from a chemical bath, he felt a thickening line of dread in his throat. He saw himself in the darkroom for the next year while Albert Londe enlisted him to put the cinématographe to gainful medical use. He believed in science, in the photographic study of human movement and disease, but the idea of only making filmstrips of the hobbled and the stricken and projecting them for amphitheatres full of medical students was unthinkable. The Lumières had worked out how to reduce life to an emulsion and smear it onto a narrow strip of celluloid. To limit their invention to hospitals’ and lunatic asylums’ use was to miss its point entirely. It was to stage an opera inside a train station.

When Claude emerged from the darkroom, Albert Londe stood waiting for his dispatch from the monthly meeting of the photographic society. Bearded with his dark hair cropped close to his ears, his coat buttoned almost to the knot of his necktie, a clipboard in his hands, he carried an air of scientific heft and certitude. On the neurology ward, they called him the Walrus. Claude was still wearing an apron from the darkroom, but something about his appearance clearly bothered his employer, perhaps the blue necktie flashing above the small island of bromide on his white apron. He searched for something in Claude’s countenance.

—Have they done it? he asked. How does it compare to Marey’s photographic gun? I doubt they have bettered twelve consecutive frames per second in a single sequence. Am I right?

Claude hesitated, didn’t know where to begin. Londe had developed a camera with nine lenses that could render human movement to a tenth of a second. But compared to the cinématographe, it was a painting on a cave wall.

—Well, Ballard? What did you see?

For a moment, Claude wanted to tell him that he’d seen his own future etched into the basement wall of the hotel. He could also imagine telling Londe how the invention parsed the images into a continuous, seamless stream, that the study of the human figure would never be the same. But when he finally spoke it was to protect what he’d witnessed and felt, to keep it as his own.

—Sadly, sir, I don’t believe this will be of interest to your work. In one image, we see Auguste Lumière and his wife feeding their infant daughter a meal. Breakfast, I believe it was, out in the countryside.

Albert Londe broke into a smile, then a chuckle, shaking his head slightly. He touched a brass button on his coat.

—Vraiment, babies eating a bucolic breakfast? That is what all the fuss is about? I have long said that the brothers Lumière aren’t committed to scientific photography. They are commercialists, factory owners, businessmen . . .

He turned his attention to his clipboard, paged through a handwritten schedule.

—Now, Claude, can you set up the studio for tomorrow morning’s studies? We have a delegation of physicians arriving from Vienna.

Claude nodded and watched Albert Londe disappear down the corridor.

It wasn’t until he sat with Odette that evening in the consumption hospital that Claude grasped the magnitude of his lie. Within days, or weeks, Albert Londe would hear about the Lumière exhibition from other members of the photographic fraternity and wonder why his apprentice had downplayed its impact. He might hear of Claude coming forward, tears on his cheeks, to ask where to obtain a working cinématographe. He felt sure he had sabotaged his own chances at La Salpêtrière, jeopardised the wages that helped pay for Odette’s treatments.

He watched his sister as she slept beneath the blue windowpane, night descending over the rooftops of the thirteenth arrondissement. Snow flurries whirred above her head, a spinning halo that brought him back to the reels in the basement, to the beautifully calibrated mirage. Her eyes fluttered and she woke coughing, her chest shaking. In the last month she’d become feverish and weak and luminously pale, her long blonde hair turning flaxen. The attending physician had been a disciple of the doctor who’d invented the stethoscope, had travelled the world studying pulmonary consumption, insisted visitors cover their mouths and noses with cloth masks, kept the windows cracked to allow ventilation, but it was clear he’d run aground with Odette’s case. The disease was winning.

Claude poured her a glass of water from a jug beside the bed and propped her up with pillows. She took a sip of water, licked her lips, smiled through a sigh.

—Have you joined the circus, mon petit frère?

—I bought some new clothes.

—Father always said you’d become a dandy in Paris. Next it will be absinthe . . . and poems about the sadness of the moon.

On the nightstand lay a bible full of pressed wildflowers, a gift from their dead mother, open to the Book of Psalms. Claude glanced down at a vellum page and read the words, Let me know how transient I am.

—I saw something today, he said.

—A madwoman pulling her hair out?

Claude shot out a laugh, felt his breath hot against the face mask.

—The Walrus sent me to another meeting of the photographic society.

—Did someone bring back photographs of the North Pole again?

She coughed again, dabbed at her mouth.

—I’d rather see almost anything . . . than all that ice and whiteness, she said.

—The Lumière brothers from Lyon did a demonstration of something they call the cinématographe. I’ve never seen anything like it.

—Tell me.

—The machine projects images onto the wall. Only they’re not photographs, exactly, but something else entirely. You see people moving and going about their normal lives, as if you are watching them from a window. Everything is silver and quiet. They walk along, smile, ride bicycles . . . it’s as if you’re watching your own dreams or memories up there. Everything is moving before you, over you, all of it quickening along . . . and you could touch it, it’s so real. There was a woman and her sons running out along a wooden plank and jumping into the ocean. I thought of Mama . . .

He watched her staring out the window into the falling dark.

—This woman thrashed about in the waves like a happy dog in a mountain lake, Claude said.

She blinked slowly and smiled, her voice coming from far away.

—And what will they do with this silver quickening?

—The brothers are hiring concession agents to demonstrate the device all over the world.

—Will you join them? she asked plainly. After I’m gone?

Claude watched Odette’s eyes come back from the window and settle on him. Until now, they’d carried the possibility of her death in the gaps and silences that gathered around their words, in the lingering gazes they cast out the window onto the rooftops. Now she’d said it aloud and he couldn’t look at her. He had promised his father that he would take care of her, assured him that Paris doctors were a league above the country hacks in the north. And yet he surely must have admitted defeat the second he’d taken the business card and imagined showing his reels to the Lumières. As long as Odette was alive, there was no chance he would leave Paris. But if she died, he was suddenly and terrifyingly free. He looked down at his hands, then at the impossible vanity of his toffee-coloured shoes. He felt a tear well up and wiped it away with the back of his hand.

—Dear brother, I’m not afraid of it. I never have been. Who knows? Maybe death is its own silver quickening. You hate La Salpêtrière . . . photographing all those poor derelict women for men in white coats. You should work for the brothers from Lyon . . . travel the world. Do you know that I have always wanted to go to Brazil?

—If I wanted to apply, I’d have to purchase a cinématographe and make some views of my own.

—Views?

—The moving photographs.

She closed her eyes for a long time, then startled awake.

—I’m tired again. It’s like quicksand, always pulling me back down.

—You must rest. I will sit here with you while you sleep.

He watched as she closed her eyes, tried to imagine what rippled through her thoughts and fitful dreams.

•

Within a week, the optical supply shop had made Claude’s cinématographe and he’d parted with a month’s wages. The box camera, without the projection stand, was small enough to fit inside a carrycase, and he brought it with him wherever he went. He captured lovers in doorways, a juggler in the Tuileries Garden, a woman selling bread and hothouse roses from the basket of her bicycle. It reminded him of foraging with a satchel and a pair of hand shears, of excavating a copse of trees or a riverbank with his eyes. For a year, he’d pinned Parisians behind his eyeglasses, imagined their lives, and now he arranged them behind the brass-mounted lens. He liked the way the box camera felt in his hand or on a tripod, the mechanical click and certainty of its gears. But none of his initial views were novel. Like the Lumière reels, they were all filmed outside in daylight, and they captured strangers either going about their business or performing a feat for the camera. The camera glanced about but it didn’t reveal.

The Lumières, he felt sure, had underestimated their own invention and he wanted to show them what was possible. Louis Lumière had told him to surprise them, after all. The camera could be placed low to the ground in the street so that an omnibus appeared to be careening toward it. Or it could look down from a height, widening out the landscape and miniaturising horses and people. And what if it could film indoors, with the right lighting coming from outside the frame? During his second weekend with the device, he filmed a view from a tethered hot-air balloon, the Seine like a slate-grey ribbon. And he captured the otherworldly stares of the monstrous sea creatures at the Trocadéro aquarium, the dreadnought grace of a shark that loomed and then vanished into the underwater shadows.

•

At first, he’d bristled at the idea of putting the cinématographe to scientific use, but then he found himself re-creating one of Marey’s famous experiments that depicted a falling cat righting itself in midair. One night he flooded Albert Londe’s photographic studio with medical arc lamps and paid a nurse to drop one of the cats that perennially slept in the courtyard from a height of six feet onto a mattress on the floor. He filmed a dozen descents and sure-footed landings. And when Londe asked him to photograph an old hysteric after she’d undergone hydrotherapy, he positioned the cinématographe next to the regular plate camera. Under the direction of a neurology nurse, the woman removed her gown and walked back and forth along a Persian rug. Claude made the still images for Londe before repeating the exercise for the Lumières.