Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  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.

  Brutal and Licentious began to make the rounds of publishing houses in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. I worked on short stories and articles, finding the medium constricting after a full leng
th book. While we had been away the autumn had secretly surrounded us, the forest behind us blazed and glowed with a brilliance that we found unearthly. The light, strained through the golden leaves, poured gold on the floors and made haloes of gold round the children's heads. Along the road the maples stood like ethereal flames, the sun afire in each transparent leaf. Up a disused cart track a hundred yards away, a single tree had turned deep scarlet. The heavy summer damp had dried out of the air, and every morning we breathed a light champagne, as sharp and exhilarating as the tang of evening woodsmoke from our fire. From High Tor ridge we saw Manhattan, opal and gold, rising out of the flat lands forty miles to the south like a presence created by a djinn, to vanish at his whim.

  Macmillan rejected the book: no comment.

  Forewarned that the Immigration authorities would probably not renew my visa when it came due in February, I had began to take action to defend our future on many fronts. The Dowdys were interceding with Congressman Harold Colley and Kenneth Royall, then Secretary of the Army, both North Carolinians. Colonel John Howard of Massachusetts, a Himalayan Holiday contact, was interesting Senators Cabot Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall. Through Vyvyan we had met the son of Senator Kilgore of West Virginia, who was approaching his father. An Immigration lawyer recommended by A. J. Balaban was studying my case...

  While at Rocky Mount we had been taken to see the North Caroline — North Carolina State game; or, perhaps more accurately, to see Charlie Choo-choo Justice and Chorus. We enjoyed the game and the special college football atmosphere, and now determined to see as many Army games as we could afford. I was army myself, even if it was a different one, and West Point was barely twenty miles up river from us. So one glorious Saturday we provided ourselves with sandwiches and a flask (I had seen at Chapel Hill that this was de rigueur) and drove up to watch the Army — Columbia game. The Hudson, similar to but considerably more magnificent than the Rhine, was a trench of liquid steel between the gold and scarlet banks of the forest. At the Academy the cadets were marching on to the grassy Plain, their Colours and guidons snapping, all around the oriflammes of the trees.

  The cadets drilled exceedingly badly to my eyes. At Sandhurst the whole lot of them, and whoever was responsible for their training, would have been rushed to the guardroom. After a time I realized that they weren't really drilling badly, they were listening to a different drummer. Each man slouched easily along, making no sound on the grass. There was none of the crisp crack and crash of British drill, but, from a distance, lounging against a rainbow at the edge of the Plain, the masses of them had grace, grace in the sum of the individuals, grace in the effortless unhurried step. The green cocks' feathers fluttered, the long rows of black stripes went back, forward, back, forward. Very nice... I was back in a familiar world. It was reassuring to know that it existed here, too.

  Later, we asked the way of a cadet busily hurrying somewhere. He stopped, saluted, called me Sir and Barbara Ma'am. When he had learned where we wanted to go, he turned, slowed his pace to ours, and began to walk with us. It took several minutes of arguing and counter-courtesy before I could persuade him to go about his business and leave us to find our way.

  We walked up to Michie Stadium in growing euphoria. The cadets' girls, the Columbia girls, the secretaries from New York, were as pretty and cheerful as so many bright birds. Red coats and dresses glowed like maples in the stands. The solid grey bank of cadets began to chant. The turf was bright green and covered with a hundred-and-fifty warriors in light blue, white, black, gold. The man behind us offered us his flask. The game began. We were seated behind the goal posts, high up, and could see little, but since we understood little, that was proper. The good temper of the crowd exhilarated us. Immediately in front of us a group of Columbia supporters, youngish and crewcut, probably lawyers or business executives, shouted outrageous remarks at Army supporters down the aisle. The man behind us explained that they were taunting Army with the previous year's famous Columbia upset victory over Army, then rated No. 1 in the country. A middle-aged Army wife near them responded with worse arrows at Columbia. Flasks were much in evidence, but only one man was drunk and he was in such good humour with himself and with his team, and so many people were looking after him, that it didn't matter.

  In England, I thought, no one took a whisky flask to a Rubgy International. The team would not have been called 'Army', either, because it wasn't; it was only the Military Academy. In England...

  I stopped short, thinking of a brief remark that Troup Mathews had made, without malice but with insight, the last time we met. 'You're in the comparing phase,' he had said. I realized that we were indeed not seeing events or circumstances in their own context, but in comparison with our own experiences. The tea was not as good as in England, the coffee better; New York was dirtier than London on the streets, but cleaner in restaurants and snack bars; just now I had been seeing the West Point drill not in itself but in comparison with Sandhurst's; Judge Medina's trial of the Communists in New York had prompted a continuous (and highly unfavourable) comparison between the courtroom chaos there and what would have happened at the Old Bailey... But Troup made us think that perhaps we should not compare; perhaps we should try to estimate things — even singing commercials — in their own terms, the terms of here: South Mountain Road, New City, Rockland County, New York, the United States of America.

  Chapter Five

  It would be exciting to try a novel. The major problem was the length of time that my capital — my writing hours — would be tied up in what might be another unproductive enterprise. A novel consisted of about 100,000 words, a short story of about 5,000. In theory I could write twenty shorts in the same time as one long. A novel was one big gamble, shorts a series of small ones. But the real odds were better on the novel, for the plain fact was that my short stories were not good, while the long book, (Brutal) was. Further I did not like writing short stories. And that settled it.

  Harper's turned down Brutal: no comment.

  I waited, biting my finger-nails, but Desmond gave me valuable advice. He said, 'A writer's time is always valuable. If you don't write anything I can't sell anything. While Brutal is going round the publishers, you should be starting something else.' I began to say that I had no idea for a short story, and that no one wanted the sort of articles I was interested in writing, but he cut in, 'Why don't you write a novel? You could, you know.' I settled down to work out the full implications of his suggestion.

  The writing of Brutal had given me confidence that the mere mass of words in a full length book was nothing to be afraid of. Indeed, Desmond and others told me that I wrote much faster than most writers do. I like the freedom of the full form and found that short story a strait jacket. This was partly through indiscipline and extravagance in the use of words, but it was obvious that some writers are better in one form and some in the other. Kipling only wrote one good novel, Kim (a short one); Hemingway only two or three; Maugham, one; while most of the great novelists seldom or never wrote short stories. Perhaps space had a special value to me in writing, as in living. Perhaps I was a 'spacious' writer.

  Very well. John Masters, who has written a volume of autobiography which no one will touch, is going to write a novel. O.K., what about?

  But, wait. If the novel were not taken, I would give up writing. I would have no time or desire left to go on beating my head against the wall. I had other talents and would have to turn to them. But suppose it were published, what would be the results? There would be an immediate but probably impermanent lessening of our financial stringency. And then? I would be expected to write another novel. I would want to do it, too, for the first publication would be success, and I knew that champagne tingle in the blood. And then? Another one, obviously. And another... In fact, without planning it, I would become a novelist. But the smallest inspection showed that writers fell into two categories: one-book authors, and many-book authors. As I had no other means of support, one-book success would be no use to me. Ther
efore I had to be a many-book man. Was I?

  John Day rejected Brutal. They said they already had a writer on Oriental subjects (Pearl Buck).

  The many-book authors could again be divided into those who linked their books into some form of coherent chain, and those whose subjects were not linked. With Hemingway, for instance, there was no continuity between one book and the next. The pressure that made him write each book came from events in the outside world. He saw a war, a fiesta, a civil war and each triggered him to say something about it. Faulkner and Forester did link their books (Yoknapatawhpha, Hornblower) and the themes seldom had a direct or obvious connection with current events. The pressure that made them write, therefore, came from inside. They were more independent, since their thought or feeling carried its own germinating impulse, and did not require fertilization from outside.