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Hollywood — The ^Authors
£3120 a year, and he had already earned another thousand pounds within his first six months of hired authorship. Hollywood might imagine that Sam was on the high road to success. To a man who was but recently a subordinate official in a New York social organization, who wrote his first novel in moments snatched during the evening after a laborious day, or on holidays, in a cramped flat disturbed by the boisterousness of two young children, this might well seem a leap into affluence. Compared with the work that he used to do, and in contrast with the actual conditions under which he had produced two books that the good critics had all recognized as very remarkable, this sitting in a cubicle and thinking out plots might seem child's play. Ornitz's situation might seem almost ideal to most people.
Yet since the day that he had arrived in Hollywood not one line of real imaginative prose had he written. A sense of exasperated sterility had fallen upon him, a feeling of sterility that drives many to a refuge so common in Hollywood that it may be in some sort considered as an index. This solace had already attracted young Isaacs, whom one rarely saw later than six o'clock in a sober condition.
One cannot be on the upper heights and the lower slopes of a mountain simultaneously — a fact that is as undeniable in aesthetic creation as in everyday life. One cannot take advantage of the financial reward for trivial work and spend one's spare time in creating masterpieces of literature. Young Mrs Ornitz, in spite of her love and sympathy, found this fact a most hard and unkind tweak of Fate's ironic humour. She had pluckily backed him up during their years of struggle ; she had borne him two vigorous boys. In New York she had seen her husband turn to his task after tiring days in the courts. Now, she imagined, should be the time of reward. Why, with all this, could one not be quite content ? Slowly she realized that in New York her husband could 1 [129]