Narrating My Grandfather's Book--and Being Him In Love!

When I took on the challenge of narrating my grandfather, Charles Brackett’s, 1934 novel, Entirely Surrounded, I was not prepared for the emotional jolts hiding, ready to leap out to shock my sensibilities in many of story’s dialogues and scenes. I’d read the book often enough over the past fifty years—it sat on our family’s bookshelves, along with Charlie’s four previous novels and his Academy Awards—and I was familiar with the overall story line:

It is 1934. Red-headed Henry Cook, fresh out of Amherst and excited about working on his first book at an infamous writers’ colony, arrives at the Vermont island retreat at the invitation of its owner, Thaddeus Hulbert, a boisterous, bellowing, bloviated curmudgeon, whose reputation as a novelist, columnist, and radio commentator has vaulted him to national prominence.

Additional island guests include Clarence Fitch, the editor of a prominent New York magazine; Agnes Sterner, an elegant, mature woman, also an author and close friend of Hulbert’s; Daisy Lester, a nationally-known nightclub singer also known by Hulbert and friends to be a heavy drinker if not watched carefully; and Leith O’Fallon, an artist, writer, and liberal cause protester for whom Henry falls hard.

Among the supporting characters are Mr. Veitch, the slow-drawling Vermonter who navigates the mail boat to and from the island, and Jenny, the shrieking housekeeper and cook who tends—genially if not loudly—to the needs of Hulbert’s guests.

Entirely Surrounded is a slightly venomous roman à clef poking satirically at the habits of several of the Algonquin Round Table notables: Alexander Woollcott (Hulbert), Alice Duer Miller (Sterner), Dorothy Parker (Lester), Harold Ross of the New Yorker (Fitch), and Neysa McMein, popular magazine cover illustrator (O’Fallon). The novel’s author and narrator, my grandfather Charles Brackett (Cook), had been a regular at the Algonquin for several years before leaving for Hollywood at the peak of the group’s notoriety.

 

Through Entirely Surrounded, Brackett deconstructs the Round Table’s core elite and re-assembles them on their lake-encircled hideaway to endure each other’s company, play croquet, backgammon, cribbage, and anagrams, all under the withering, snide and cutting bombasts of their host, Hulbert.

My grandfather’s avatar, the story’s narrator Henry Cook, is written in as the mean gang’s naïve foil, surrounded as he is by the idols of his literary dreams, viper-toothed gods who pick petty fights over silly games, and chide each other, and Henry, mercilessly over points of literature and social graces. And yet, there is compassion and love to be found on the island, and a twist to the tale that brings Henry face-to-face with his deepest insecurities. 

Brackett, one of the earliest New Yorker drama critics, prolific magazine columnist, and short-story author and novelist, brings to Entirely Surrounded elements of his own New England upbringing, his Ivy League education, his curious marriage, and his not-well-concealed need for social and professional approval. Brackett knew all the players quite well, and though the book is a biting commentary on the group’s interrelationships and foibles, Brackett received grudging congratulations even from Woollcott and Parker who took most of Brackett’s jabs. Long after my grandfather moved to Hollywood to write and produce movies, his Algonquin playmates often called on him, or visited him in California. 

The one bit of license I did take in narrating the character of the real-life person, Alexander Woollcott, was to change the register of Woollcott’s voice, and rough it up to make him sound brutish, cranky, and bellowing. In real life, Woollcott’s voice was higher, thinner, almost Truman Capote-esque in its softer edges and slight effeminacy.

The real trick to narrating the story was in suspending my relationship with my grandfather just enough to read his character well, but not so much as to cut the emotional tie completely. There are two scenes in which Henry Cook connects with his love interest, Leith O’Fallon—modeled after my grandfather’s close friend, Neysa McMein, of whom my grandfather was smitten. That the Cook-O’Fallon relationship could go from flirtation to bedroom passion challenged me to step inside my grandfather’s affection for McMein to narrate the path of the consummation of the characters’ relationship—which was never formally acknowledged in either Brackett’s or McMein’s later diaries or histories.

The foreshadowing of their intimacy begins with a mid-story scene in which Henry is about to go for a late-night walk by the lake, having been forced out of bed by the loud snoring of two other cabin guests in nearby rooms.  Henry goes downstairs to find Leith O’Fallon napping on the main room’s couch, in front of the fireplace. She rouses, they talk for a moment about the snoring companions, then Henry takes a closer look at Leith.

Henry Cook was standing in front of the fireplace. The top of the blanket wrapped around Leith had fallen back. She was wearing a sheer nightgown which half revealed the loveliness of her breast.

Henry’s eyes must have betrayed their direction, for she tossed the stub of her cigarette into the fire and pushed up the blanket around her shoulders.

“Well, run along,” she said. “Good night.”

As Henry let himself out, he could see her head settling into the pillow with drowsy sensuousness.”

Henry return from his walk, chilled by the cold fall air. The encounter continues:

He tiptoed to the hearth.

Leith was asleep. Her lashes were dark against her cheek; one arm had slipped down.

Henry stood gazing. He would do no more than gaze, he knew. That he might do even that was because, in a sophisticated group, one pretended that one knew no urgencies.

Leith O’Fallon opened one eye, looking funny for a moment, then the other.

“So you’re back.” She smiled at him.

“Yes.”

“Frozen?”

He nodded; then fighting wildly against the impulse, he took the two steps which brought him to the couch.

“I can’t stand it any longer,” he choked.

“What can’t you stand?”

He could only fall on his knees beside the couch and repeat what he had said before.

“I can’t stand it any longer.”

Leith put out her hand and touched his cheek, then leaned from the couch and pressed her lips against his.

Henry Cook’s heart beat with a wild happiness. He stretched out his arms.

“You must remember,” Leith whispered, “that this room is practically Grand Central Station. Good night, sweet.”

As I narrated these scenes and dialogues, I found myself, at first, withholding the emotions of the moment, trying to stand away from the relationship I knew had once been very real to two very important people in my life—my grandfather and a woman he desired from not so far away, someone he had written about, and treated, with great affection. He was married at the time of the novel, and was much older than his character, Henry Cook (Cook was written as about 21, Brackett, in 1934, was 42) but still younger than McMein who was 46 in real time, but 33 in the story. Fitting one’s grandfather into the body of a young man half his age does require a bit of vocal and emotional license.

But as I recorded, then re-recorded the flirty banter between Henry and Leith, I started to settle into the relationship, I began to absorb and give back to the narration the young man’s eagerness and the mature woman’s smoky caution.

As the story approaches its peak action—a possible suicide—Henry and Leith are once again brought together, miserable in their fears for the victim, alone with their thoughts in the middle of a rainswept night in the middle of a small island in the middle of Vermont. Earlier in the day, Leith had rebuffed another of Henry’s attempts to increase the depth of their relationship, and he was crestfallen. 

Let’s pick it up after Henry has retired to his room:

Rain beat on the roof that slanted above him, a disconsolate wind bemoaned its grievance without surcease. But it was neither wind nor rain that kept Henry from sleeping.

Leith! Leith! Leith!

He was sorry about Daisy, but regret hadn’t numbed his other emotions.

He remembered his exultation of last night, when he had thought Leith’s kiss was a promise—remembered it with a groan.

Evidently the blood of that mysterious father of his was strong in him. It throbbed and pounded. He had never before suspected what proportions desire could achieve.

Leith! Leith! Leith!

Clarence Fitch began his regular snoring.

Henry tried turning over on his stomach, burying his head in his arms. It was uncomfortable. There was no use twisting and turning all night.

Flat on one’s back was the way to sleep.

There was the faintest of sounds, the turning of a bolt. The stir of air.

Henry sat up.

“Who is it,” he whispered.

“It’s Leith. I don’t want to stay in that room.”

“Oh, my God!”

Her hands were cold, and her teeth were making little cold noises.

“I want to be alive.”

Henry pushed back the blankets, and she slipped in beside him.

The storm beat on, implacable as a rage that feeds on itself.

Narrating my grandfather’s book was one thing—his voice and mine have many similarities according to my family, so reintroducing his sound so many years after his death is rather comforting—but giving his very young avatar an older lover, a lover my grandfather pined for in real life, that was a voice challenge unlike any other I’ve attempted.