Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  I wrote to the army offering my services in any capacity provided it was with a combat formation. (The thought of giving up my new career to administer a clothing depot in Fayetteville , Ark, gave me nightmares.) The army thanked me cordially and said they could get along without me. I did nothing more, and so remained obsessed — as I still am — with a sense of guilt. I ought to have pressed my offer of service on the country which had been so generous to me.

  My hands over my ears to shut out the distant mutter of the guns, I returned to The Deceivers. I had long since defined the object of the book: To tell an exciting story about the uncovering of Thuggee. The corollary, that I wanted to make the reader feel the reality of that time and place, hardly needed to be stated because it was inherent in the object. A second level, needed to raise the story above straight narration of mystery and adventure, was hard to find, so I started to write it on the one level only, hoping some depth would later reveal itself.

  For various reasons it was necessary that the Savage in this book (the Savages were my continuing fictional British family in India) should join a gang of Thugs and so discover their secrets. It had not actually been done this way: the real-life Captain Sleeman caught some Thugs in Central India, and the rest of the conspiracy was uncovered by extracted confessions, the following up of those, more questionings, and so on. But what I wanted was not impossible. During the Mutiny of 1857 the British Chief of Police in Bombay went about in disguise among the sepoys for many weeks, to find out whether any such explosion was brewing there as had rent the Bengal Army. But my Savage — and I — were slowly forced to realize that he would have to become a Thug if he wanted to find out the full scope of the conspiracy. Then what would he do if he were told to kill a traveller? Would he stand by while his companions killed? Would his conscience allow it? Or would he be in the position, say, of a spy placed in the German General Staff and there told to prepare the plan for a minor attack?

  The spy would know that he must produce a good plan (which would kill more of his own people) because if he did not, he would lose his place at the centre of affairs, where some day he might be able to take the decisive action, pass the vital information. Here was an important moral problem, that would be as relevant to the modern reader as to the 1820 Savage.

  As I got deeper in my study of the Thug rituals, I was struck by the extraordinary resemblance of some of them to the idea and practice of Christian communion. It was clear that these men, dedicated to murder, had a deep religious conviction, and received their sacraments as direct from God. God did not give them a mere licence, but a direct command, to go out and kill in the prescribed way. The rituals had an amazing power, for though they were purely Hindu, and dedicated to a Hindu goddess (Kali the Destroyer), many Thugs were Muslims. In no other branch of their life did these Muslims accept any god of the Hindu pantheon, but believed that there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God. If they were affected by the cult of Kali, I thought, why should not a Christian be affected? My Christian, the hero?

  Thuggee was not closely analogous to Hitler's Nazism, but there were enough points of resemblance to make the comparison clear to most readers: the mystique cutting across all other faiths; the ritual necessity to kill, to wipe out; the sense of being God's appointed right hand on earth; above all, perhaps, the arousal of a feeling in the non-Nazi, the non-Thug, that cried, How could these ordinary people be turned into such monsters?

  I tried to imagine the strains put on an ordinary not too-brilliant Englishman forced to kill and watch killing, forced to share in these sacraments and sacrifices, in circumstances of the utmost drama, surrounded by fanatical believers. It sprang out at me then that here was my second level. I began a new draft with enthusiasm. It was going to be hard to give the story continuous depth without slowing the adventure narrative; but I knew I could do it. This must be what Keith meant by growth in a writer. Nightrunners had gone much as I planned it. As I wrote, the characters stirred but little of their own volition under my hand; they did what they were supposed to do to arrive where I wanted them to arrive. But the people in The Deceivers were coming alive, and facing problems that I had not planned for them. I must loosen the rein, but not the curb...

  Life outside the work was pure joy. We explored the White Mountains and scrambled up rocky streams in the Pemigewasset wilderness; we built sand castles and rode the surf at Higgins beach, where I often found a friendly seal six feet off in the same wave with me; and dug up bushels of steamer clams from sandy pockets among the rocks; and watched our children meet and play with our neighbours'.

  The country was nothing like Cornwall, as we had expected it to be, and I took another step towards shaking off the habit of comparison. Cornwall faces the Atlantic with a wall of cliffs 50 miles long and 400 feet high. The ocean strikes with the fetch and force of over 3,000 miles of prevailing westerly winds behind it. The surf is heavy on the calmest days, and in a storm smashes up and over the top of the cliffs to blow in a fine spray miles inland over the moors. In Maine the cliffs were laughable little walls; but the pine forests marched to the very edge of the sea; in a thousand deep-carved inlets there was a stillness and a moving silence; and one man in a boat, far, mirrored between pine and muted ocean swell. A host of islands lay to seaward, rocky, low beckoning. There was a sudden shock in the water, and a haze where the icebergs glided along the horizon. Whales surfaced lazily among the icebergs and schools of seals swam down the coves at evening; huge black-backed gulls hunched on the rocks in the sea-wrack and, ten miles out, Jack Trefethrin rocked in his lobster boat, hauling in his pots, seventy above or thirty below.

  Our neighbours the Curtises, two brothers, both married, invited us to a clambake. We had heard the word often enough, but had no idea what it implied. A year ago we would have thought it meant that someone was going to bake a lot of clams, but we were getting wary. We went prepared for anything.

  Sonny Curtis's land ran down to the sea opposite Cousin's Island on Casco Bay, and we gathered there about three o'clock on a hazy Saturday afternoon. On the rocks at the edge of the sea there was a fireplace about three feet square, open fronted, the rough stone walls two feet high. A four-foot square sheet of cast-iron lay to one side. 'Driftwood!' Sonny shouted cheerfully, 'seaweed! Collect tons of seaweed, tons of driftwood. And there's the cellar.' He pointed to a large zinc tub full of ice. We stacked our contributions of beer and bourbon, stripped to bathing suits, and set to work. Others arrived. We drank, joked, swam, and pulled 50 lb. of seaweed; swam again, rested, took a can of cold beer, and dragged up a stack of wood. 'They must be going to bake a million clams,' I said to Barbara, as Oakley Curtis drove up in his station wagon and called, 'Give me a hand with the baysfeet.' We staggered over to the fire with crates containing forty-eight live lobsters on ice; then a barrel of clams; a crate of chicken legs and breasts; eggs; corn on the cob, still in the green ears.

  Sonny dragged the iron plate into position over the fireplace and Oakley and I built the fire under it, shoving in wood until it was a seething red furnace. Then, working quickly together, the two brothers spread a six-inch layer of seaweed on the plate, and on the seaweed laid out the chicken; another layer of seaweed, and the lobsters; another, and the eggs; another, and the clams; the corn. The pile now stood up three feet above the iron plate. We dragged a large tarpaulin, its edges scorched and burned and odd holes in the middle, over all, and weighted centre and corners with rocks. 'Two hours,' Sonny said. 'The women'll look after the fire.' There were twenty of us in all, men and women.

  We began to play softball on the patch of grass above the rocks. The women sat by the fire, putting on more wood, and singing part songs. We swam again, the sun sank into the pines and we put on sweatshirts. The bourbon lowered in the bottles and the mixed smells of woodsmoke and cooking seaweed drifted along the shore. Twilight came and we slipped again into the sea to call out and laugh with those on the shore by the fire. Betsy lit hurricane lanterns and Anna put little po
ts of butter round the edge of the fireplace, to melt. In the full dark I helped Sonny strip off the canvas tarpaulin. A smell indescribably Biblical and savoury burst out, to sighs and groans of pure animal contentment. Then Oakley began to take off the seaweed and Sonny to serve out the food. Anna showed us how to break and eat a baysfoot with the bare hands, and we settled back to a lazy enjoyment of the greatest eating experience I have ever known. Everything was done to perfection, each part distinctive in its own flavour, but welded by the savour of smoke and seaweed and the steaming juices of the other ingredients into a single, great whole.

  There were no lights on the bay, none on the island; only the stars, the lanterns, the firelight on the faces. Thirty days ago we had not known any of these people. What miracle of human alchemy made us now friends, trusting and happy in each other? It was a moment to live for ever.

  Three days later Mrs Rounds hurried over to the cottage. I was wanted, long distance, from New York. I went back with her to the big house and picked up the phone. It was Keith Jennison, his voice trembling with emotion. The Literary Guild had chosen Nightrunners of Bengal as the book they would distribute to their membership for the month of January 1951. My share of the guaranteed advance on royalties would be over $16,000. And Mr Beecroft of the Guild said that I had written a damned good book.

  Chapter Eight

  After a few days of euphoria we pulled ourselves together. Now that it looked as though we could not merely live here, but live well, the question of my status was more important than ever. The Immigration people had set no date for the hearing on my application, nor could I be sure of the outcome. Still, worrying would do no good. We returned to our routine of work and exploration.

  We met two people who gave us different but profound insights into the country. One was a storekeeper and one was a general. While filling our car at a little store outside Freeport, Maine, the owner asked us where we came from. We told him. He said his family had come from Portugal. Where were we going with the pretty kids? Fishing off Bailey's Island, I said. He stroked his chin, and looked up and down the road. 'Hell,' he said. 'You don't know the water. And you'll have to hire a boat. I got one out there. Hold on a minute.' He locked the pumps, dashed inside, and started loading his own car with hot dogs, rolls, ice-cream and canned beer from his store. Then, beckoning us to follow, he drove off. We had a marvellous day with George Freitas in his boat. He talked of his days running a rum boat during Prohibition, of hard times, of making and losing a couple of fortunes. He showed Martin how to bait a hook, and Susan how to kill a flounder (put its head in your mouth, while it is still on the hook, and bite it sharply behind the eye). He gave the kids cokes and told them jokes. We drank beer and trolled and fished all day, and when we drove back, sun-soaked and drowsy in the evening, he wouldn't take even the drink I tried to buy him, but slapped my shoulders and said, 'Welcome to America'

  The general was from South Carolina. His father had been a young Confederate brigadier-general killed at Chancellorsville, and he himself was a classmate of John J. Pershing at West Point. He was now ninety-one years old, brave, courteous, intelligent. He said he hoped we would become American citizens. I said that we were thinking of it, because we believed that the American ideal, that all men are born free and equal, was the only hope of the world, even though we were sadly far from living up to that ideal in the case of the Negroes. The old general leaned forward. 'Yes, but are niggras human?' he asked quietly.

  Meeting George Freitas and General Higgins almost on successive days made us realize that without more cooking the contents of the melting-pot might be an indigestible stew.

  From Viking came word that they had put my British affairs in the hands of the London firm of Pearn, Pollinger & Higham. After some delay, caused I believe by differing opinions about my book inside the firm, Michael Joseph Ltd agreed to publish Nightrunners in the British Commonwealth, and Pollinger's started contract negotiations with them.

  At the end of August we returned to South Mountain Road and the warmest greetings from a hundred friends who had heard our news and were almost tearfully glad that, financially at least, we had won our war. I bought my first Brooks Brothers suit, which was of an excessive correctness; and tickets for all Army's home football games, as well as the Army-Navy game; and a new Plymouth convertible (pale green); and swore we would never eat spaghetti again unless we actually wanted to. We threw a party for everyone we knew, and about 120 people came.

  Fried chicken was devoured by the bushel and beer by the barrel. Softer sensualities must have been aroused for on prospecting round the back of the house I saw, at the edge of the wood, an upturned and bare male behind covering but not altogether concealing a spread-eagled female body, which also appeared to be bare from the waist down. This at 3 p.m. on a sunny afternoon. They were pumping away in the finest stand of poison ivy on the property, but the damage in all sections had been done, and I said nothing but crept away, reflecting that one must never, never judge by appearances. The man was wearing his Bermuda shorts around his ankles (that was how he was easy to recognize) and affected an appallingly genteel British accent, and Barbara and I had decided he must be a faggot. Far — to the lady's obvious enjoyment — from it.

  'You know all those ghastly American jokes about Cholmondeley and Niffles?' I said to Barbara one day.

  'Well, I've found a place here we can fire back with. It's on Nantucket, and it's spelled SlASCONSET but pronounced Sconset. Helen Taylor's family owns an island off the coast there.'

  Though our accents were not changing our ways of speech and choice of words were. We who had sneered so heartily at 'Paris, France' and 'Manchester, England' were now saying 'Portland, Maine' and 'Fort Wayne, Indiana' with the best; and talking freely of cookies, sweaters, and pies instead of biscuits, jumpers, and tarts.

  Some American accents caused us trouble. In Haverstraw I went into a delicatessen and asked for Italian sausages.

  'Hearta nartheart?' the old man said. 'I beg your pardon?' I said, baffled.

  He repeated his chant, 'Hearta nartheart?' with a questioning inflection. To make his point clear he got out some sausages and showed them to me. One lot was redder than the other, I thought. I understood. One kind must contain heart and the other not. But whose heart? I went out to Barbara in the car and said, 'Do we want heart sausages, or no-heart sausages?'

  'Some of each,' she said Napoleonically.

  We learned fast, through our taste buds, that what the old ltalian-American meant was 'hot' or 'not-hot' sausages. That R, unpronounced in English — English often got us into trouble. (But in Maine they didn't pronounce it either, and words like Bar Harbor, car, and heart became Ba Habba, Ca', and ha't.)

  The Crosbys invited us to the annual grape picking at their vineyards under High Tor; Life Magazine were going to attend and would we please all look picturesque; we did, they didn't. The summer birds of the Dells country club winged back to New York; no more would they be seen in bright plumage pecking away at greens and fairways as we drove by on our way to and from New City. The colours showered down in brilliance on to the forests, and in the early mornings pheasants stalked down the misty road and called harshly in the fields.

  As they lay in their bedroom one night after some particularly foul misdeed and a correspondingly sharp spanking, I heard Susan sob; 'Sometimes I wish we didn't have Daddy'; and Martin's thoughtful reply, 'Me, too... but if we didn't we'd grow up into awful stinking little children.'

  In the Korean War the amphibious landing at Inchon turned the tide in our favour. Three weeks later we crossed the 38th parallel and carried the war to the enemy, to the accompaniment of considerable howling from our left flank. Apart from the ordinary logic of doing to an aggressor at least as much as he has done to you, it is a sheer impossibility to win a war — any war — by a defensive strategy. A war in which the enemy can retreat or prepare behind a sacred frontier will go on for ever. Three weeks later again the Red Chinese entered the war, and since th
eir frontier too was regarded as sacred, a bloody stalemate was ensured. It was a depressing prospect.

  The editorial process began on The Deceivers. There are three schools of thought on editing. Most British publishers belong to the Smoked MS School. They send manuscripts submitted to them to an outside reader whose judgment they trust. The reader reads the MS, curing it the while in pipe smoke, then sends it back to the publisher, well smoked, with a report to the effect, perhaps, that the MS is worth publishing, though a bit long, and disorganized in patches, and that the chief character is insufficiently developed. The publishers now send the MS back to the author, listing these defects and saying that if the author cares to see what he can do to eliminate them, and resubmit, they will be happy to consider the book again. The author does what he thinks best — works on it, puts it away, submits to another publisher — and sooner or later probably gets published. The resulting book is indubitably his own.

  All American publishers belong to one of the other two schools, the Compulsive and the Blood-Sweat-and-Tears. In the Compulsive School, a decision is first made that the MS is publishable, on the basis of its contents and what the editors think they can do to improve them. The author is told that the book will be published if he agrees to make changes suggested by the editorial staff. If he agrees, the compulsive editor tells him not only what he must do but within fairly narrow limits how he must do it. Writers throw a lot of abuse at the Compulsive School, and it is certainly packed with people who, themselves unable to create, live by distorting the creations of others. Still, the writer always has recourse to another publisher, and he is brought up hard against a fact of literary life, that in one aspect a book is a piece of merchandise, and the merchandiser has a right to shape it for sale.