B007RT1UH4 EBOK (26 page)

And I am an American, I know that. It is a damn’ lot of work being one. And grave responsibility? I had a splendid and long letter from Katherine Anne Porter, she the writer. I have filled her cup for her though, sent her five pages of my vagaries to ponder. I feel fine, am healthy, teeth and bones and eyes, shoes shined, slightly nervous (you see I am being honest), full of food. Also (also indeed! Eminently:) I have a little money and when I have to go there you’ll have to take me in.

Will write—and love,

W.

Seabrook: William Seabrook (1884–1945), author of
Adventures in Arabia
(1927).

some disruption: The Costa Rican legislature’s annulment of the results of the 1948 presidential election resulted in the 44-day Costa Rican Civil War (12 March–24 April 1948), in which rebel forces led by José Figueres defeated government forces (with the tacit approval of the U.S.) and took control of the capital, San José. About 2,000 people died in the conflict.

when I have to go there you’ll have to take me in: from Robert Frost’s memorable definition: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in” (“The Death of the Hired Man,” 1914).

To Edith Gaddis

Gran Hotel Costa Rica

San José, Costa Rica

8 April, 1948

Dear Mother.

Just to say that San Jose is quiet, and cool—about like NY in September—and the only signs of trouble here in the city are truckloads of soldiers who seem to me to be smiling and waving at the girls most of the time. It is a comparatively new city, and so there is none of the temptation to stand about gawking at ancient cathedrals &c, and the mountains around it fine and still not especially alarming as mountains so often are (I can imagine looking out of a window in Interlocken and seeing the Jungfrau!); simply a cool quiet city, with a great sense of dignity about it.

And I have just come in (it is 7:30am) from three cups of splendid cafe-conleche, so rich that one hardly needs sugar. The exchange is around 5 to 1, which sounds fine except that everything seems quite 5 times its price for this foolish American, though of course things are always so on arrival. Am glad to have got out of Panama, still as fond of it, but there is something hurley-burley and hot about that city which was beginning to set me a little on edge. Made my plane here with 7minutes to spare (one is suppose to arrive 1hour early) and of course managed to lose a notebook on a bus, those are the sickening things. But Juan Diaz was such a friend, such a kind fellow; he writes (is 32, the lawyer I have mentioned) and I so hope that there will be some way I can repay his kindness.

Anyhow don’t write to this address; I am paying 6$ a day (without meals) and don’t plan to hang around this lobby much longer. Today hope to go out into the country for a further look at Costa Rica, and shall probably soon enough send you an address. If my letters have sounded distraught about coming up here, you know how one gets all kinds of disturbing word about a country in such a state as this one is; but they seem to regard the little war as simply another piece of necessary business which is being negociated by the proper authorities, and with, as I say, a nice dignity about it.

Love,

Bill

To Edith Gaddis

Western Union Cablegram

Cartago, Costa Rica

17 April 1948

SORRY LETTERLESS NO POST COLD WET UNWASHED
UNSHAVED BAREFOOT BUSY HAPPY LOVE=

W.

To Edith Gaddis

[
From “In the Zone”: “The fighting was out around Cartago, where I was handed over to a young captain named Madero and issued a banged-up Springfield that was stolen from me the same day. We leveled an airstrip out there for arms coming in from Guatemala.
Life
magazine showed up and rearranged the cartridge belt for an old French Hotchkiss over the blond sergeant’s shoulders before they took his picture beside it, and when the arms came in we celebrated with a bottle of raw cane liquor and the sergeant took us home for dinner where I met the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen and passed out at the table” (
RSP
37).
]

Hotel Pan American

San José, Costa Rica

[26 April 1948]

dear Mother.

Have been for the two weeks past with the army of Figueres, outside in the now pretty battered town of Cartago. Now the revolution is over. And probably when I see you will have much to tell you about it, but right now don’t feel awfully like chattering, have a slight return of the I suppose it is dysentary from Mexico, also painful business with a dentist here, and finally am lying on my back trying to explain the whole thing out to myself. Except for the internal ‘disorder’ and the tooth am in good health.

Let me tell you about the tooth; it is a small subject. In the Canalzone I had some aching in the one next to the excavation of last summer, it is a molar. And so was very pleased with myself when I went to the dentist there without prodding and had him fix it and fill it &c. But the idiot had no Xray machine, and sent me out with all assurances and what I—and I must suppose he—thought was a finished job. Of course a few days ago it started badly again, I got in to San Jose as soon as possible and to a fine young bright well-equipped dentist, whom I left about two hours ago. His Xray showed that the CZ practitioner hadn’t done the whole job, and was ready to extract. Anyhow he says that I may let it go for another 6 or 8 weeks and by then if in NY go to a root canal (
that
word) specialist who might save it. Or we may take it out here. This business of going through life losing things. I lost my raincoat in the revolution.

Anyhow the Costa Ricans are a splendid people, are handsome, and they don’t dislike Americans as so many Latins do and have reason to. The country here is high and cool, and this city a model of order and organisation.

Forgive me if I don’t go on. This will assure you of my for the moment quiet humourless condition, and give you an address—the one above—where I shall be I think on and off for the next 5 or 6 weeks.

Love,

Bill

To Edith Gaddis

San José, Costa Rica

4 May 1948

dear Mother.

Many thanks for your letter(s), which I had this morning. And pleasant reading on my bed of pain. Yes, I must tell you. Finally, after a rousing night—nothing equals a toothache—I went to call on Dr Saturnino Medal (University Loyola, Honduras, &c) and told him I realised that the foolishness had to stop. (Now remember the NewTestament: (or maybe it is the Old One) —plucking out offending members in order to be whole) Or AE Housman: ‘If it chance your eye offend you, Pluck it out lad, and be whole. But play the man, stand up and end you, When the sickness is your soul.’ At any rate, we plucked out the offending member. Dear heaven, how we worked. And sure enough, the damn’ thing was absessed, and no wonder that my pain had not been simply toothache but usurping other realms as well. To tell the truth, for this past two months I haven’t been feeling great, and (awful truth) have done such painfully little writing that there is that guilt too. Though I have been fairly consistent in taking notes on thought and happening, and now have a horrid accumulation of that. And to assure myself that I not waste all this time given me, have been steadily toiling through AJ Toynbee’s
Study of History
; losing much of course, it being an abridgement of the original 6 volumes and so many of the references have little meaning to me, with my vacuous background in history. But many revelations too, it is a magnificent book; and of course I want to settle down now and go through the whole 6. Because that brilliant man has somehow the meaning of meaning, and never in a smart way, you know, like so many of the books now: how to be free from nervous strain, how to write, how to read, how to be a Chinaman like Lin Yutang, &c &c. No this man is very humble before knowledge, never pedagogic.

Well. I think it was rather dim of Chandler and (I suppose it was Constance Smith) to not call you, but go busting into the house. Not angry about it of course, it was Chandler’s work and I had told him he could leave it there until anytime he wanted to take it. But that manner of conduct seems to me presumptuous, and above all I cannot abide that. And thoughtless, which makes it all a little sad.

Certainly Hartley Cross had a better life than most men; but I do now wish that I had managed to see him again, or reply to his and his wife’s kindnesses. (But even here I must add that a memorial fund sounds a bit thick to me; and even so far as the subject of the preceeding paragraph.) I have been thinking

To Edith Gaddis recently about Robert L Stevenson. You know, I used to think he was a healthy cultivated and rather satisfied Englishman; and only recently have learned or rather realised, what a wanderer. And in bad health; but still a tramp,
vagamundo
. Romantic, incorrigably so. And his lines which I think ended up on his stone: These be the lines you wrote (grave?) for me: Here he lies where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. I like him. (No memorial fund.)

Now I gather you are enjoying the perennial wonder of spring. And I immediately feel that I should be there, helping you to ‘set the house in order’ and doing all of the things that a man should do and I seem to have avoided since I was six. (Good age.) All of it is thoroughly strange. First, let me say, I have found in this country one of the best societies I hope ever to encounter. And the climate, the countryside itself. The people is of course Catholic, thoroughly. And the way to see it now is not as Granga does with shudders of ignorant horror but you see it here as the foundation of a traditional society. The family is very important, and so unlike our country eminently successful. This is the sort of thing that has happened to most young Americans. That they are profoundly impressed by a self-sufficient society. It is the reason that the people have been so wonderfully hospitable to me: because they could
afford
it. Then comes the problem that foolish Chandler thought to solve in going to Italy, whose culture he admired from a distance for just these reasons. But he went in a time of troubles, and in addition immediately after the American (soldiery) had got done (or more miserably has not yet finished) setting a thoroughly bad example of Americans. And so (I gather from letters to others) Chandler who had intended to become integrated in that society instead met in Rome some Bulgarians and some French and some somethingelses and saw Lucky Luciano in a bar and—with the inestimable help of the language barrier—was defeated. It is always so.