Collis Clay
A pleasant young Georgian studying architecture in Florence — harmless company for the young actress Rosemary Hoyt, and the accidental source of the story that poisons Dick Diver.
Rosemary's attention, and a longer stay in Europe before the predictable life waiting for him at home closes in.
The book
At a glance
- Young American acquaintance of Rosemary's
- Georgia — educated in the North, at New Haven
- Architecture in Florence
- Repeating the Hillis story to Dick in Rome
- The Paris screening of Daddy's Girl, and the Rome chapters
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeCollis is Rosemary's young man from New Haven: a Georgian with the peculiarly regular, even stencilled ideas of Southerners educated in the North. Last winter she thought him attractive, and they once held hands in an automobile going from New Haven to New York. By Paris he no longer exists for her, which does not stop her telephoning him to come to the screening of Daddy's Girl, where he sits on one side of her and Dick on the other.
He turns up again in Rome, still cheerful, now studying architecture in Florence and staying on for the races. Over drinks he tells Dick about a train journey involving Rosemary and a young man named Hillis and a locked compartment door. To Collis it is a good story about a girl he knows. To Dick, who has spent four years keeping Rosemary in a particular shape, it is the discovery that she had a life of her own the whole time.
How the book draws them
- StencilledThe book's one-line placement of him. His manners are sincere and his opinions arrive pre-formed, and he is recognisable within a sentence of appearing.
- Suitable and irrelevantYoung, single, respectable, and genuinely fond of her. Rosemary regards him with friendly familiarity and nothing else, and the qualities that ought to recommend him are exactly the ones that make him uninteresting to her.
- The Hillis storyTold without malice or any sense of consequence, complete with the door and the conductor. Dick's jealousy does the rest, and the phrase goes on repeating itself in his head for days.
- Bar-room bookkeepingHe runs a tab in the hotel bar like a stock-market report, and Dick has to restrain him from adding the round to it.
- Roman boys tied up in bagsHis register for talking about women he admires. It is meant as praise, it lands as slang, and it tells Dick more about Collis than about Rosemary.
- Useful when it countsFor all that, he is the one who goes for help after Dick is arrested, fetches Nicole's sister Baby Warren, and stays until a doctor has been found.
His last service is unglamorous and real. After Dick is beaten and taken to the police station, , then waits with her until a doctor arrives. He does not get Rosemary, and he does not get a larger place in the book.
In a novel driven by charisma and damage, he is the healthy alternative that nobody is capable of choosing. The book does not sentimentalise that: his decency is genuine and dramatically insufficient, and it is also the thing that is still standing at the end of the worst night of Dick's life.