Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  Next, to consider what to do if I nevertheless failed. The worst blow would perhaps be to my self-confidence, for I would have been proved wrong and all those others, who waited with relish for me to fail, right. But would it be disastrous, really? I thought not — here. Here in the United States there were other jobs. I could shovel snow, or run a petrol station, or guard a bank, and though none of those was close to our object, perhaps farther west there were such jobs, in the National Park or Forest Services, or on a dude ranch, maybe. It was important that my background would not limit me. In England, if I had applied for a job as a bank guard, it would automatically be assumed that I was an incurable drunk, thief, or sodomite. Else why would I not be safe in one of those jobs the Establishment reserved for its indigent members — secretary of a golf club, steward of a small estate, bursar at a seedy prep school?

  There was no escaping the dangerous logical answer: I ought to try to become a writer. I wished again that Barbara were here, but this time I knew that to try to throw any of the burden of decision on to her would be only because I was funking it myself. She would have to say, however gently, that only I could tell whether I might become a writer; for her part, she would happily accept my decision, and whatever risks were attached to it.

  I grasped the nettle and made up my mind: I would be a writer. I wrote at once to Barbara telling her I had found a career. Then I recalled Nelson's dictum, just quoted: it was time to lay my ship alongside the enemy. I quoted aloud a drunken Sinclair Lewis's advice on the art of creative writing, given to an audience-hall full of would-be creative writers (and I quote his lecture in full): 'You stupid looking sons of bitches wanna write? Well, gwan home and write!' I could almost hear the money dripping out of my pocket as from a leaking tap. The last cents would tinkle out on December 31, 1950. I began to write.

  Chapter Four

  My interest in the New York Times shifted from the classified to the real estate sections. On Sunday mornings, after walking over to Lexington Avenue for breakfast and to buy the paper at a street-corner stall, I returned to my eyrie and began to search for a place where we could settle down while I wrote. We love the sea, so I looked first at the summer homes and camps on Long Island and along the Connecticut and Jersey shores. I found nothing of the size we would need, at anywhere near the price I could afford, except one on Shelter Island. After looks at the map and the railroad and bus timetables I decided that it would be too difficult and expensive to get to New York from there, so I regretfully turned my attention to the inland counties, and after a week or two of hesitations over places that were nearly right, but not quite, I found an apparently suitable house advertised for rent in Rockland County, New York, for a price I could afford to pay.

  Inquiries failed to unearth anyone who knew where Rockland County was, and I had almost given up, thinking it must be west of Niagara, or in a hidden valley of the Adirondacks, when a friend chanced to say that he not only knew where Rockland was, he had actually been there, and he had not needed a machete, a compass, or a native guide. Rockland was in fact the southernmost New York county that lies on the west bank of the river. It was therefore opposite Westchester, and about thirty miles north of the city. One got there by the West Shore Division of the New York Central Railroad from Weehawken, or by occasional buses from 163rd Street.

  Alice Mathews volunteered to drive me out to prospect. We went on a lovely day of early summer, apple trees in blossom everywhere and the grass very green. The house was built into the foot of a wooded hill. There was an upper balcony and a stone-walled dining-room with a low ceiling and a log fire. I took the place on the spot. Then Alice and I returned to New York and drank a toast to South Mountain Road, New City, New York, which was the address of the house. (I thought, we're going to have most of our mail finish up in New York City, with an address like that; and sure enough, we did, for the next twenty-two years.) I did not have time or inclination to find out about the neighbours. I presumed they would be farmers or small businessmen from the neighbouring towns of New City, Nyack, and Haverstraw.

  A thought crossed my mind. My visitor's visa would expire six months after I landed; i.e. on August 9. I went to the Immigration Bureau at 70 Columbus Avenue and asked that it be extended. The official I saw did not grant my request without asking a lot of questions: What was I doing? Why did I want to stay? How much was I earning, and by what means? These were legitimate questions, and in accordance with the law, but I became impatient. The official obviously found it hard to believe that I had suddenly decided, a few weeks before, to become a writer, at my age, just like that. After a sometimes warm exchange, the blame for which was mostly mine, he agreed to extend my visa a further six months, until February 9, 1949. I then foolishly asked whether, if I were in the throes of finishing a book at that time, my visa would be further extended.

  He said, 'I can't tell you. Probably not.'

  It was worrying. But I had no time to worry. I had asked my question because there was a possibility that I might indeed be finishing a book, for publication, in six months time. In the four weeks since becoming a writer I had written half a dozen articles and short stories. None had been sold or seemed likely to be. Studying them, I thought they were as good as I could make them, and as good or better than much I had read in English magazines. But we were trying to sell to American magazines; and as Desmond Hall, my agent, pointed out, there was a different point of view. There was a greater concern here over women's interest because the bulk of the magazine readership was female. Then, my writing was regarded as too impersonal because if I were describing a cobra wriggling up to sink its fangs into a man's leg I regarded it as unnecessary to describe what the man felt about it. Most people knew what it was like to have an angry cobra crawling towards them, I thought, and if they didn't, then their imaginations would fill the gap more vividly than my words. But it was those cobras themselves, the tigers, Sikhs, and masty elephants that were the real gulf between me and the editors and audiences. Desmond, Australian by birth and gentle by disposition, pointed out that there ought to be a sense of identification between the reader and some character, preferably the protagonist, in the story. The average reader of the average magazine was a woman living in Wichita, Kansas, with a husband, two children, and family income of $6,780. She, or the editors thinking of her, were finding it hard to identify with the Gurkhas, Pathans, and Englishmen I was writing about. I could not get into my head the idea that my world was exotic or adventurous. The people among whom I 109

  had lived would be interested to hear how I (or a fictional character) had shot a tiger, crawled down a mountain in a blizzard with a sprained ankle, hunted wild mountain goat in the middle of a battle; but only if I told it straight. If I were to attempt to emotionalize these events, or make something heroic out of them, they would have rejected both me and the story. Here it was different.

  Desmond advised me to study some of the U.S. men's magazines. I did, and after reading a few, decided that the purpose of the writers was not to bring out the reality of the drama, but to make a man reading in an armchair feel that he had taken part in a great feat of derring-do. Moodily re-reading my pieces from this angle, I saw that by adding a few more hungry leopards and drug-crazed orientals, and by describing the hero's reactions in an emotional manner I might sell to the men's magazines. Desmond gently pointed out that not all True Stories were literal statements of fact. One could make a living by turning out such 'true adventures' — rapes, robberies, seductions, murders, the single-handed strangling of giant water buffaloes in the Congo swamps. But I thought I would rather wash dishes than write true stories that weren't true.

  There was also the question of political outlook. In one of my stories the protagonist was a British police officer, who ambushed and killed three Indian terrorists. The theme of the story was the skill and bravery of the police officer. The editors wanted to know why he was shooting Indians. They could not, for themselves or on behalf of their readers, see my hero as a h
ero, or even as a good man. I offered to make him an Indian police officer, but that would not do. I offered to write the tale from the point of view of the terrorists; but that did not serve because, again, I wrote it straight and now the terrorists seemed like senseless murderers for whom the reader could summon no sympathy.

  What was really happening here, but I was too green to recognize it, was my first meeting with the American Establishment Liberal, whose virtues are always dimmed and sometimes totally obscured by a mixture of factual ignorance and a divinely inspired belief that his own views are the only ones permissible. The effect on me of this first clash was wholly to my benefit, for it made me try to see other points of view, and to appreciate other dimensions and values in what had generally seemed straightforward and simple to me.

  Here, in the case of my stories, the editors were going beyond the actions I described to the causes of the actions. Where was this supposed to end? In order to tell a simple adventure story would I have to go back to the childhood of everyone concerned and explain what brought them to this point, and with these attitudes? But were the editors really concerned with motivations, or with extra values? In reading my stories they were putting in an extra value, usually a political one. Political values in general I regarded as ephemeral, but the idea of the extra value or dimension was good. I must learn to tell a story always on two levels at once, so that by some means the reader would have not only a visual awareness of the action, but also an awareness of other feelings and motives simultaneously in play. Suppose, for instance, that the chief terrorist had had an affair with the policeman's wife, and the policeman knew it. The policeman could be put into a situation where he would not be sure whether he was only doing his duty, or taking a private revenge. Every reader would see the problem without my having to shout it in his ear every few lines. Such a device, very simple, would add enormously to the story.

  I rubbed my hands gleefully. My new-discovered 110

  Doctrine of the Second-Level would infallibly lead me to the heights.

  Desmond had been discussing the peculiarities of my talent with Burton Hoffman and George Joel of the Dial Press. By chance Hoffman and Joel were obsessed, at the time, with the idea that the world was hungry for a new Lives of a Bengal Lancer. Desmond persuaded them that I was the man to write it. We had a couple of meetings to discuss the project, I agreed to see what I could do about it. Nothing so coarse as money was mentioned at this stage.

  The idea of writing something to order was not at all foreign to me. Indeed, I thought that was how publishing houses obtained most of their books. They would get unsolicited manuscripts of course, and might take them if they were very good, but that would be a way to do business. I imagined that a publisher's main responsibility was to plan his next year's list, much as a cook would plan a meal or an individual dish — so much fiction, some hot, some cool; so much biography; a dash of uplift, a sniff of adventure, a pinch of education, so many dessertspoonfuls of women's world. When he had got a balanced and tasty list he would write to Somerset Maugham advising him to have a book of short stories, about rich people in the South of France, ready by December 8. Of course, an author of Mr Maugham's eminence was in a position to reply that he had thought of writing a novel about the Polish sub-culture of Perth Amboy; but that would not apply to me for some time yet. As to the writing, I had announced to the world that I was now a professional writer in the same way that I had once been a professional soldier. As a soldier it would have been unthinkable for me to announce that I could only attack towns, or defend swamps, or plan river crossings. I could do anything that was required, and now I must achieve that same competence as a writer.

  Very well then — autobiography. Talk of it being a 'successor' to Lives of a Bengal Lancer could mean only that it would be about India and life in a regiment there, because I did not particularly like Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and was incapable of deliberately copying its style or content. This was going to be my book, and I must set about it my own way.

  First, I defined the object of the book. After much search and rejection I fixed on: To make the reader share the joys and sorrows of a young man growing up in the old Indian Army.

  Next, as an important factor, I considered what shape the book should be. I had read very many books in my life and it was clear that every book had a shape, and that in good books the shape was no accident. Grand Hotel was shaped like a wheel, with the hotel at the hub. Picaresque novels such as Anthony Adverse were shaped like a road, a winding road, with the interest in the scenery and the tramps who popped out of hedges. Gone with the Wind was a river, in which one central character stood like a rock while events flowed past and over her, shaping her, and the interest was in the colours of the water and in wondering whether this or that uprooted tree would overwhelm her.

  Some books went like an arrow to the point, and some circled it as cautiously as though it was a dangerous animal to be pounced on at the last moment — only, often, at the last moment they did not pounce, but drifted away, and that was effective too, because it left you wondering (if you were still with them) what would have happened if they had pounced. Some books went up, then down; this left an impression of sadness when all was over. Others — certainly all magazine and movie stories — went down, then up, and, if the manipulation had been subtle and the overlay of treacle not too thick, you finished feeling happy with and for the people.

  The shape of my autobiography, I thought, must be true to life, and in life it had gone thus and so — first the excitement of the discovery; then disillusions and mishaps; then a new feeling, not excitement but love, for places, institutions, and people; later, a sense of moving to a point where all this must and would end, partly because I was growing up and partly because the war was coming, and that would be another story.

  So the book ought to go up, and then down, and then up again — but gradually, and on a different plane, in a different direction, moving towards something like a precipice.

  By mid June I had filled several pages of a large account book with scribbled notes, thoughts and aide-memoires, which would have to be sorted and evaluated later. Then I checked out of the hotel, moved my belongings to Rockland County, and saw that the house was in order and stocked with food. On June 22 the Mathews lent me their car and I went to meet the family at Pier 90, North River.

  They came down the Queen Mary's gangway at last and we ran to meet each other. Susan was in the lead and I noted again that after the first wild rush of greetings and kissing she hesitated over her words. We must settle down, for good. Then Nanny leading Martin in a harness, Martin staring from side to side and asking earnestly of everything 'Wassat for? Wassat for?' Then Barbara... We were together again.

  It was a hot day, typical of early summer in the Hudson Valley. Barbara, coming straight off the ship and before that from the temperate coolness of June in England, thought it was very hot. As we were swinging round the curves on 9 W south of the Long Clove, the sun glaring fiercely off the road surface, she said, 'It's just like the C.P.' I had been too busy to notice details of the countryside, either then or earlier, but now, looking at the untidy forests and the outcrops of red trap rock, I thought, she's right: it is very like the Central Provinces, the country of Kipling's Jungle Books. We felt more at home at once. 'And it's beautiful,' she added, as we ran into a road cut where for a hundred yards the sides of the cut were a cascading wall of deep red roses.

  Within the next week I had run over one copperhead (a poisonous viper) on the road, killed one on the lawn, and been shown another. This, I thought, is really overdoing the 'Welcome home, Indians!' theme. I had not seen so many poisonous snakes in twelve years in India. We brought India closer in a more material way when we unpacked the crates a few days later. Some of them had not been opened since we left Delhi, and we were able to manure the rose bushes of South Mountain Road with Indian straw and mule dung, exotically homogenized with British human milk.

  Then Barbara saw her first
American robin and laughed disbelievingly when I told her what it was. 'A Texas robin, you mean,' she said. I had felt the same when I was first told, for the American robin is a member of the thrush family, while the English robin is not much bigger than a wren, and is much friendlier to man. But Barbara's surprise reminded us that we were not really at home here, yet.

  South Mountain Road did not go in for welcome wagons, and no one called on us. Nanny took the children for walks down the road under the big trees with the pram. She came back one shimmering noon to report that she had met a Mrs Hill, who had two children and a nanny. 'They seemed very nice people.' Then she added, 'I think they're Americans!' We assured her that was likely, as we were now in the United States; but Nanny had no more idea of where she was, and what those five days on the big ship had meant, than if she had taken a day trip down the Thames. Soon the Hills's nurse, who was a Puerto Rican girl, brought their children round to play. The conversations between the two nannies were worth eavesdropping on, for our Nanny was 'simple' and Margarita totally uneducated. Margarita thought England was attached to the U.S.A. somewhere up in the top right hand corner and that the English obeyed the President like everyone else, because it was a sort of state, otherwise how would everyone speak English which she could barely do herself and she came from a mere Territory of the U.S.? Nanny knew that England was not a state, and she didn't think it was physically attached, but as she could not say where it actually was, or, hence, where we had come from, Margarita got the impression that we had descended direct from the sky.