This comes from The Old Man and Me, Elaine Dundy’s out-of-print and hard-to-find sophomore (but never sophomoric!) novel. It followed her 1958 cult classic The Dud Avocado (which, now that I think of it, is also a title I wish I’d written).
There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again–leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.
It’s amazing to me that everyone in Hollywood runs around snapping up rights to any book that sells any copies at all, and nobody has yet thought to film either of Dundy’s darkly charming books. OK, so some of those movies–well, at least one–will probably be good, but that doesn’t mean I have to like this compulsion to film everything in print, as though what really ratifies a book’s worth is having one of its characters end up as yet another notch in Anthony Hopkins’s belt. (In fact, they’re filming David Auburn’s play Proof in my neighborhood lately, and I walk around alternating between craning my neck to try to glimpse Hopkins, la Gwyneth, or Jake Gyllenhaal, and despising myself.)