Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (15 page)

Rockland County used to be a part of Orange County, but in 1798 it was cut off and its capital set at the geographical centre of the county, the already-existing New City. (In Maine they would certainly have called it Rockland Center.) It is a triangle of roughly twenty-mile sides, the eastern boundary being the Hudson, and the southern the New Jersey border. Around us there were still a few farms and orchards, but most of the people lived by working in Haverstraw, Nyack, New City, or by commuting to New York. Until recently the crack Squadron A of the New York National Guard had kept their horses here and come out here to play polo. The Squadron lands were a rolling oasis of grass in the middle of the universal forest. During prohibition the area had also been a favourite breakdown point for liquor smuggled down from Canada and destined for the speakeasies of Manhattan; but the only relics of this when we arrived were a few taverns, bars, and restaurants whose owners maintained an astonishing affluence in the face of an almost total lack of clients.

On South Mountain Road a certain bohemianism, a relic from the past, hung in the air as cigar smoke from last night's party lingers in the curtains. A character universally known as Om the Omnipotent had only recently closed down his yogic-tantric resort in Nyack, an establishment which provided health foods, blah, and sex to the local ladies and eager devotees from New York. At a party we would be introduced to some middle-aged and slightly deaf lady, far from bacchanalian in appearance, and learn that she was a painter. An hour later someone would mutter, 'See her? On Christmas Day, 1925, she stripped herself and her husband naked and rode him down South Mountain Road, on all fours, in a snowstorm.' At the A & P the lady in front of us, buying groceries, would seem to be a portly countrywoman, red of face and simple of mien, and nothing more; but the friend behind us would hiss, 'See her? She was a farmer's daughter, and the first girl any artist here asked to take her clothes off to model. Her father came out with a shotgun the same night.'

In a different category was Mrs Mahoney, who was aged ninety plus and lived alone in a wooden shack among the trees, which at first the mind simply refused to accept as real: it was incredibly ramshackle, half roofless, holed, leaning, rotting — but that was her house, and she knew classical Greek, and had once been a
grande dame,
and spoke sweetly to Susan when we met her one evening, a grey wraith in a long ragged dress, gliding painfully through the dusk of South Mountain Road.

The Hills's home life was always in some confusion, because Ray's chief 24-hour-a-day avocation was drinking extra dry martinis. Martinis were as popular in Rockland as in Manhattan and, feeling that I needed some distinctively American parlour trick to counteract my accent and general foreignness I learned to make good ones. I used House of Lords gin, which I considered (and still do) the best gin, Martini & Rossi dry vermouth (it is not over-herbal, like most of the French-made ones), mixed 12 to 1, never shook, and kept the gin, vermouth, pitcher, glasses, stirring spoon, and lemons in the refrigerator. I returned to sanity when we heard about the lady (of South Mountain Road) who, confronted by another martiniac, said, 'Oh yes, my husband and I do all that... but we get into the icebox to drink them, too.'

One day Barbara came to me, perplexed, and said, 'Eleanor Hope's invited us to a weeny roast on Sunday. What's it mean? Dwarfs and midgets only? Or do they roast only very small things, miniature chickens, legs of baby lambs?'

I said, 'Ask Marion,' who explained that wienie was short for wiener sausages, which did not exactly mean the same as frankfurters, or hot dogs, but near enough.

Sunday was a still day in high summer, when the heavy dark green trees met in a tall arch over the road, and only a few spots of still, hot light dappled the grass outside the little cabin on our grounds (we called it the Chicken Coop), where Eleanor and Chester spent occasional weekends. Blue smoke drifted up towards the dense leaf ceiling, and we drifted like the smoke, mixing, blending, bourbon on the rocks in hand while Chester turned the franks on the grill. Here was Phil Morse, nodding to us. He was sweating, black under the arms, but not because of the weather; he was always sweating. He told us of a minor domestic mishap, but to him it was a disaster, a personal affront. 'That's what you get for marrying a
goy,'
he ended, between set teeth. But what was a
goy?
Phyllis Kauffmann was speculatively eyeing a lone man near the grill. She poured herself another drink, took a large gulp, and moved in purposefully on the man, her hips swinging.

Ralph Barker caught my arm, 'Hey, Jack, remember what I said about the Chicago & Northwestern last time we met?' I remembered; it was another week-end and Ralph was practically unintelligible, but nothing could diminish, though it blurred, his infectious enthusiasm for the carloading figures through Milwaukee. Now he was unintelligible again, or soon to be, but we were off on the pulp tonnage shipped out of Great Lake ports for the fiscal year 1947; and I was enthralled. Around us Doris Clark and Joe Wright danced a formal minuet we were already coming to recognize as being like the music of the spheres, in that it had no beginning and would have no end. She revealed, smiled, beckoned — but would never give. She needed only the reassurance of her youth (which was passing) and her beauty (which was fading). Joe was the favourite target of her performance because he had recently divorced his wife and was on the loose. He knew well that there would be no climax to the show, but was good-naturedly happy to play a gambolling suitor to her coy non-virgin. In any case, several other ladies here and in the big city kept in trim a phallic limb rumoured to be the most shapely in the county.

And here were the ageing artisan, hot-eyed still, and the long-haired young satyr. A voice behind me murmured, 'Old Mellors — and young Mellors, his successor. South Mountain Road has always been full of Lady Chatterleys.'

Eleanor brought us hot dogs and said, 'Have you met Keith and Emily Jennison? They lived in your house once.'

Emily was tall and slim and dark. Keith taller, blond, and strongly handsome. They both smiled easily. Keith said, 'Have you heard about the Japanese lady who peed in four streams?'

He told the story, very well, with a perfect Japanese accent and perfectly-timed gestures, to the moment where the doctor, bowing and murmuring 'So sorry', extracts a gentleman's fly button from the lady's plumbing. I have a low tolerance for dirty stories, not because they are dirty but because so few are funny. Keith had made this one good, and the four of us drifted away, talking. He told me he was with William Sloane Associates, a publishing firm.

One day a man with a limp and an English accent breezed in and soon had the children his slaves as he sat them on his knees and told them long and wonderfully involved stories of the sea and ships. This was Frank Laskier, an English seaman who had had one leg blown off by the battleship
Von Scheer
and had been torpedoed twice, after losing his leg. He had written one novel,
Unseen Harbour,
and was at work on another. He read the manuscript of
Brutal and Licentious,
and a couple of short stories I was working on, and gave me an encouraging opinion.

What impressed me was his innate grasp of rhythm and force in the putting together of words. He had had no formal education except what British reform schools could give; I was the end product of twelve years of expensive schooling — but he could put teeth into a phrase much better than I, and I tried to see how I could achieve his effects without restricting my much larger vocabulary. We drank a lot of beer together and he gave us a kitten, which we named Tomlinson. Frank liked to engage me or another friend in a realish-sounding quarrel in a bar. Once everyone's attention was thoroughly engaged on us, he would call me an unforgivable name. I would whip out a knife and pin his foot to the floor, amid the gasps of the other clients. Here Frank would cry, in his best Lancashire accent, 'Oah, doan't do that, Jack! It tickles, like.' and slowly work the knife out of his (artificial) limb. One place where we did
not
play this trick was the Mount Ivy Bar & Grill. Real fights and knifethrowings were common enough there, so that while one of the two owner-brothers served bar the other sat upstairs with a shotgun, watching through a large hole in the ceiling.

It was Frank who, as the autumn colours began to smoulder in the forests, strode down South Mountain Road calling on all his friends with the cry, 'Have ye heard the good news? Mr Squillini has had the change of life!'

Marian Hill found Susan making a lovely salad for her dolls, and rushed into the house pale as a ghost to tell us — for the salad was of poison ivy, unknown in Europe and to us. It was a shiny three-leaved creeper which contains an oil with effects much like mustard gas; it raises painful suppurating blisters that last for many days. We met American 'communalism' for the first time, in the form of a complaint from Eleanor that we were hanging out our washing at the front of the house. What in hell had it got to do with her, we asked ourselves. Or anyone else. An Englishman's house is his castle, etcetera. But the principle that what we do on our own property affects others and is subject to some sort of control from them we were gradually absorbing, as we learned about zoning and our neighbours' fight to protect the qualities of our life against commercial exploitation.

Vyvyan and Eugenie came to spend the week-end and we all listened to the World's Series on the radio. Vyvyan seemed to know what was going on, but in spite of her explanations Barbara and I remained as baffled at the end as at the beginning. We were still foreigners. The huge newspapers were still full of events meaningless to us. Much of the conversation we heard and overheard was like the song of birds, pleasant but not readily to be interpreted. Troup Mathews decided not to register his car for the winter. He rented it to us at the generous rate of $1 per day, and we drove down to North Carolina to visit friends Barbara had made on the
Queen Mary.

The cook at their house in Rocky Mount was large, cheerful, and black. When she went to hug Martin, aged just over two, he shrank back in horror. She burst into a great chuckle and said, 'There, you frightened, ain' you. You ain' seen no coloured people!' (He had, but he did not remember, for he was six weeks old when we left India.) He made friends with her later; while Barbara and I, walking round the town, watching the tobacco auctions, observing the signs,
Coloured — White
on the rest rooms, wondered what America was going to do about this anomaly. The shame was not
ours,
it was
theirs,
and we only observed as outsiders and with a certain grim satisfaction, remembering the lectures we English had received from the U.S. on the wickedness of our ways, particularly in India. There was no Jim Crow in India, except in the case of the clubs, and at least twenty years before independence the English had realized that they were in an untenable position there, and the clubs had desegregated.

Our hosts offered us their beach house at Nag's Head for a long week-end. We accepted gratefully. During August we finished the second draft of
Brutal and Licentious.
During September I went over it all again, making many more corrections, and again re-phrasing to bring out qualities that I knew were there, but still hidden; now only a hundred pages remained to be typed. Heartened by a telegram from Desmond, who had sold a short story to Argosy for $300, we drove east, and after several hours came to the ocean.

To the encouraging beat of the surf, while Nanny watched Susan and Martin playing on the beach, we finished the dictation in two days. In the evening the children brought in fulgurites and sand dollars they had found, both very common there; and Nanny said she had talked with a nice woman called Nellie Myrtle. She added cautiously, 'I think she's English.' She was wrong, we found later; Nellie Myrtle was American, of that Devon stock which inhabits the Outer Banks, still speaking a pure 17th-century West Country English.

On the third morning, the work done, we went exploring. The sky was bright and the water dark-blue, wind-whipped. I had a new sensation of America, stronger and more deep than any since I first bowed my head, nearly weeping, before Lincoln in his cold white chair ten years before. We stood by the reconstructed log wall of the Lost Colony. Across the ruffled water of Currituck Sound, where dune grass held the sand together in a low rise against the thieving wind, rose a winged stone column. It was the Wright Brothers Memorial, for that low sand dune was Kill Devil Hill.

Here, on opposite sides of this uninhabited inlet, where there was no sound above the sigh of the wind and the slap of the water, had taken place two events of final importance for mankind. It was not French, or German, or Danish sailors who had founded this colony (later lost, later replanted) — it was English. And there, man had first flown. He would have done it somewhere else soon enough; but he had not, he had done it here. The shrinkage of Earth, the inescapable irreversible compression of all peoples into one world, began here, not in a European capital or an Asian university.

Brutal
was finished — again. Considering that I should have a colophon (a writer's personal 'trademark': Kipling's swastika and Maugham's arch are examples), I designed one for myself by superimposing twin mountain peaks, snow topped, on the five rivers and rising sun crest of the Punjab, to symbolize what I hoped to write about. (I have used that colophon ever since. It is displayed on the title page of this book, below my name.) For the last night our hosts the Dowdys came out from Rocky Mount, bringing food and Southern Comfort, while we collected a huge pile of driftwood. The bonfire towered up on the edge of the ocean, Susan and Martin sat wide-eyed holding hands at the edge of the flames, we ate fried chicken, danced, drank, and prayed that
Brutal
would succeed. The next day we were on our way north.