Westlake, Donald E - NF 01

by Under An English Heaven (v1. 1)

  "He said, 'I hear there is an ad running and I want you to stop it for a day.'

  "I said, I certainly will not.'

  "He continued, 'I am going to call the Times and tell them not to run it.'

  " 'Be my guest,' I said. 'Be prepared to see me in court.'"

  Newhall then explained to Fisher that the "timing was crucial" on the ad because of that British frigate. He doesn't seem to have been aware that the British frigate was going to be landing not British soldiers but Caribbean policemen. In any event, he reports Fisher at last giving up with the words, "I'm unhappy about this." If Fisher tried to explain anything about the U.N. and concepts of dignity and taste, Newhall doesn't mention it.

  So the ad was run on August 14, 1967. That was a red-letter day for the Anguillans. They had a full-page ad in The New York Times; they had a Harvard professor pleading their case at the United Nations; the two Caribbean Civil Servants from the second Barbados Conference were on Anguilla itself, in the process of being discomfited by that large and noisy crowd; and Jerry Gumbs became the first Anguillan ever to be "Man in the News" in The New York Times. All on the same day. Not bad for six thousand people who for 145 years hadn't been able to get anybody to listen to them. Things were looking up.

  But not for the San Francisco Group. Once they had put their ideas down on paper the game was up. The theories of Professor Kohr had glittered through the wording of "(The Anguilla White Paper)" like the gilt border on a Peruvian bronze-mine stock certificate.

  On Friday, August 18, The New York Times ran an interview with Ronald Webster under the headline "Anguillan Leader Seeks Visitors and Hotels," and the subhead, "Disputes Ad Saying Island Will Attempt to Block Tourism." Webster was quoted as saying, "We cannot depend on rain any longer for produce. Tourism is the only source of money-making on the island." He was also quoted as saying he had no objection to resort hotels; it was only gambling casinos the Anguillans would refuse. But the harpoon that really struck "(The Anguilla White Paper)" in its vitals was Webster's comment on the passport gimmick: "It sounds so cheap," he said. He told the Times he hadn't known a thing about that part of it in advance.

  All of this was both baffling and painful to the San Francisco Group. They must have felt like the ventriloquist whose dummy suddenly turns against him. Hadn't the Anguillans wanted a city-state that would rival, some day, the glories of Greece? Hadn't Peter Adams heard Leopold Kohr loud and clear? Hadn't the whole thing been both great fun and essentially goodP Or had some sort of ghastly mistake been made somewhere along the line?

  No. Scott Newhall discovered the true explanation: "I had rather expected this reaction from the Times—no newspaper will sit by passively and let itself be attacked in its advertising columns." And referring to the peacekeeping force —"the seeming imminence of a forcible landing on Anguilla" is the way he phrased it—he consoled himself with the thought that, "I still feel that the ad played a part in stopping precipitate action." But the second Barbados Conference, which had been called because of "snags in the plan to send a Peacekeeping Force," had taken place the weekend before the ad appeared.

  The San Francisco Group soon had more pressing problems to think about than the betrayal by Ronald Webster of Leopold Kohr. The Chase Manhattan Bank office in St. Thomas, where the ad had told the customers to send their cash, refused to give them a bank account. Then the Virgin Islands National Bank did the same thing.

  Absolutely nobody wanted to have fun. There were rumors that checks were coming in, checks were being sent back, checks were disappearing. Nobody knew precisely what was happening; the only clear fact they had was that their Congressman had talked to the people at the Post Office, who had checked with St. Thomas, and there wasn't any Anguilla mail in the St. Thomas Post Office.

  And it was Howard Gossage's birthday. They were having a party, described by Newhall as "a glorious affair on a remodeled San Francisco Bay ferryboat." But it was impossible for the gang to really have fun at the party with all this mess hanging over their heads. For all they knew, they had giggled themselves into a mail-fraud rap. As Newhall says, "All our fun, our good intentions, had somehow turned to a horror."

  At least they didn't lose their sense of humor. They decided the only thing to do was go down to Anguilla themselves, and Gossage describes the trip: "It was hilarious enough. We were all so tired and this whole venture had become so disastrous that there was nothing to do but laugh."

  They didn't laugh to the firehouse this time; they laughed to the Caravan Hotel on St. Thomas. Gossage again: "A lot of people had gathered for this meeting. Ronald Webster was there, the banker Clifford Rogers, and a few other assorted Anguillans. Leopold Kohr was there, too, talking about Andorra and Liechtenstein. A little later Roger Fisher arrived with another lawyer. We had engaged a corner suite for the meeting, and it was pretty full."

  Of course they'd engaged a corner suite.

  Henry Giniger, The New York Times reporter who had interviewed Ronald Webster, was also present in St. Thomas, and they met at the airport. Gossage says, "I patiently explained to Henry how all our frustrating efforts on Anguilla's behalf were made because we believed in Leopold Kohr's theory of smallness, which the Anguillans believed in, too." Giniger suggested that maybe the Anguillans didn't share this belief in the glories of minuscule isolation, and suggested further that Gossage ask Webster about it, since Webster was at that moment nearby. Gossage did, and reports his brush with the truth tliis way:

  " 'Hey, Ronald, Henry Giniger here thinks that you want hotels or a shipping port or something big like that on the island. Tell him what you really think about remaining small.'

  "Webster looked up at me and smiled. Well, now, Howard,' he said, I've been thinking it over, and maybe it wouldn't be all that bad an idea to have just maybe one hotel or so . . .

  After that, the downhill plunge was steep and bumpy. But there was no great enlightenment on either side. The shift was merely to a new set of misapprehensions. Anguilla had seceded from St. Kitts in order to be reunited with Great Britain, a fact too non-romantic for the San Francisco Group ever to understand. Their first misapprehension was that Anguilla had rebelled against the onset of twentieth-century civilization and was both spiritually and intellectually united with Leopold Kohr's craving for a return of feudalism. Once that notion had exploded itself, all they could see was that the Anguillans had prostituted themselves, had succumbed to the lure of modernism, and had betrayed both the ideals of Leopold Kohr and the selfless activities of the San Francisco Group.

  As to the Anguillans, they had started by believing the San Francisco Group were philanthropists. When that idea fizzled, some Anguillans decided they must have been the other thing after all—profiteers. So far as I have been able to determine not one Anguillan has ever understood that the San Francisco Group was neither.

  The bitterness came first to Howard Gossage. After his climactic exchange with Ronald Webster at the airport he went back to the hotel and "they were still talking and drinking. I blew up, I said that we had financed the whole damned enterprise; we brought their missions to the United States; we paid the bills for the Ambassador-at-Large and sent a man to help him out. And what had they done? Discredited us. After my speech they handed me the bar check to sign, for $32."

  Gossage was feeling so betrayed that he slipped into bad language. He says that when one of the people in the hotel suite asked what he was going to do next he replied, "I'm going to get a big boat and tow your fucking island out to sea and watch it sink." At least he knew it was their fucking island.

  The checks in response to the ad were found in the St. Thomas Post Office after all—never believe your Congressman, that's the moral of that story—and turned out to total twenty-two thousand dollars. Feigen and Gossage turned it all over to the Anguillan Island Council. Gossage says, "There was, of course, no gratitude, though I have learned not to expect gratitude. Feigen was disgusted."

  Gratitude. In the first issue of the Beacon, six w
eeks later, Atlin Harrigan described the San Francisco Group this way: "They are a group of professional and business men, inspired by high ideals, who hearing of the needs of Anguilla, have thrown in their time and resources to help Anguilla. Without their help, we would never be in the healthy position we are to-day. They have inspired us with their altruistic ideals, and have been instrumental in focussing the attention of the United States, and the whole world on the cause of Anguilla."

  It came down at last to divvying the loot. Three thousand dollars' worth of checks weren't good, leaving nineteen thousand in response to the ad. All from people whose imagination had been touched, and who had sent money from their own pockets to a romantic dream in Howard Gossage's head. But when the envelopes were opened the dream wasn't there anymore; the pot was split up among people financing a rebellion on the one side and people recouping their expenses on the other; five thousand dollars to the San Francisco Group, fourteen to Anguilla.

  And the Anguilla Liberty Dollars? Newhall says, "We sent 500 coins to Anguilla, about 300 to send to the donors of the money—or were supposed to be—and the rest they could do with as they like. The other 9,500 we hope to sell, slowly, to recover as much of our tremendous expenses as we can." They figure their tremendous expenses at fifty thousand dollars.

  But what are these tremendous expenses? Well, fifteen thousand in fun-loving one-dollar bills was money given to the Anguillans in connection with the Liberty Dollar proposition, but that still leaves thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of tremendous expenses in six weeks' time. What are they?

  Why, they're a suite at the Lombard^ in New York, a suite at the St. Francis in San Francisco, a corner suite at the Caravan on St. Thomas. They're Howard Gossage's butterfly net, and the boys controlling the situation. They're receptions, airline tickets, lamb chops, long-distance telephone calls. They're flags, letterhead stationery, bordelaise snails and tape recorder.

  The San Francisco Group used the fact of the Anguillan rebellion to live a Technicolor movie full of mad dashes, zany ideas, wonderful guys, breathless arrivals—and the whole thing paid for by money generated by the existence of Anguilla. The San Francisco Group spent thirty-five thousand dollars in six weeks of fun, and paid for it with schemes that were supposed to be getting money for Anguilla.

  And which did get money for Anguilla. Fifteen thousand dollars in one-dollar bills. Seven hundred and fifty Anguilla Liberty Dollars. Fourteen thousand from the ad. Something over thirty thousand, all told, and money that was very sorely needed. So the San Francisco Group, despite all, did no harm and did quite a bit of good.

  It's just a pity about the bitterness at the end. Two years later, Scott Newhall did a series of three articles in the San Francisco Chronicle and the bitterness is teeth-rattling. He did them under a pen name, F. Scott Valencia, but at the end of the last piece ripped off his mask and revealed himself, explaining, "Newhall did not wish to use his own byline because he has preferred to keep his own name out of the paper." But he said this in the paper. There's a consistency of style in the San Francisco Group that becomes recognizable after a while.

  The San Francisco Group does not exist in the Anguilla story as it unfolds in Newhall's Chronicle chronicle. In a parenthetical sentence, for instance, he refers to the Anguillan Liberty Dollars—which were his own brain storm—this way: "(Earlier, the Anguillans had arranged for the minting as coinage of 10,000 silver 'Liberty Dollars,' which already have achieved collectors' prices of up to $100 for the rare items.)"

  (If I may be parenthetical myself, the San Francisco Group kept 9,250 of the coins to cover their enormous expenses. At one hundred bucks a shot, that's within spitting distance of one million dollars. Even in one-dollar bills, that would take care of a lot of enormous expenses.)

  In the Chronicle Newhall comes as close as the libel laws allow to calling Jerry Gumbs a crook: "He became 'Mr. Anguilla' and formed an association of Anguillans who donate various sums to aid the homeland. Jeremiah Gumbs was the funnel through which these funds were poured. There has been some debate about the size of the downspout."

  A little later, in parentheses again, Newhall explains another reason for his bitterness toward Gumbs: "(Gumbs even designed a new flag to replace that used by the first independent government.)" He forgets to mention it, but the first flag was the one he designed himself. (Jerry Gumbs didn't design the current Anguillan flag; it was done by an American firm that specializes in that sort of thing.)

  Newhall is also bilious about Ronald Webster. Here's a typical sentence: "The spear-carriers in this pageant were a pair of Anguillans—Ronald Webster, a thin, seemingly-devout Seventh-Day Adventist, and an Americanized Anguillan from Perth Amboy, N.J., who has the delightful name of Jeremiah Gumbs." It's interesting that he still thinks the Anguillans are the spear carriers in the Anguillan rebellion.

  Roger Fisher also gets gummed by Newhall. "Fisher is a gangling Harvard law professor who could play successfully the lead in Charley s Aunt. He has capered about in the background of this Caribbean pageant as the 'legal adviser' of the Anguillan government." And, "Fisher somehow ferreted out Gumbs a couple of years ago, and has had him in the pouch ever since."

  But this sort of thing isn't entirely one-sided. Jerry Gumbs is himself one of the Anguillans who came around to the idea that the San Francisco Group, having failed to be philanthropists, must be profiteers. About the ad, he told me, "They were here again, trying to create this ad, figuring that if it went over big they would maybe make a million dollars, clean up, and just use the people of Anguilla. It was another form of exploitation."

  And so it goes. Dr. Kohr, the gentle and not-entirely-practical man who was described by Scanlan's Monthly as "theoretician of the Anguillan revolution," is no longer connected with Anguilla, nor with the Caribbean. He left the University of Puerto Rico and went to the University of Wales, where he got involved with the Plaid Cymru, Welsh nationalists with whom the San Francisco Group would feel right at home; Dr. Kohr has described them as "beloved friends and fans of mine."

  The isle is full of noises,

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  13

  After a summer as jam-packed with incident as Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, the fall and winter of 1967 passed with placid serenity on the island of Anguilla, as free from action as a Saul Bellow novel. Colonel Bradshaw had demonstrated his inability to mount an invasion of the island, and all his potential allies had demonstrated their unwillingness to help him, so the danger of military conflict had at least temporarily receded.

  All Anguilla's diplomatic overtures to Great Britain had met with the same dense response. The United Nations was or was not considering the problem, but in either case there was nothing left for Anguilla to do on that front either. Other countries—the United States, Canada, various Caribbean islands, and so on—were consistent in their refusal to get involved without an okay from the U.K. Nothing was being done to Anguilla, and there seemed to be nothing for Anguilla to do, so the island merely settled into the independence it didn't want and waited to see what would happen next.

  It was obvious that something would have to happen sooner or later, since the island's economic problems weren't getting any better. Colonel Bradshaw was still holding back the mail and blocking bank accounts and refusing to pay Civil Servants' salaries or pensioners' pensions. (The United States was routing Anguillan mail through St. Thomas, so that some expatriates could still send their remittances home, but Great Britain was blandly accepting mail for Anguilla and then sending it to St. Kitts.)

  Walter Hodge, formerly Chairman of the Peacekeeping Committee and now in charge of island finances, was keeping the island government solvent—mostly through postage-stamp sales and customs collections—but as he explained to me in the spring of 1970, they had kept in the black only by eliminating all capital expenditure—no road building, no school construction, virtually no expenditures e
xcept salaries and necessary supplies. This could be nothing but a short-term arrangement, and the Anguillans knew it but couldn't find anything to do about it.

  They were getting some financial help from outside. Medical supplies came from the United States and the U.S. Virgin Islands and other places. Money came from a couple of American foundations. And there were also some real-life philanthropists involved.

  One of these was Herbert B. Lutz, a New Yorker who lives most of the year at one or another of his homes in the Caribbean. (His New York operations include coproducing a 1970 off-Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, a play which is in many ways a perfect summation of the Anguillan rebellion). Lutz had taken an interest in Anguilla a few years before the rebellion and, seeing how skimpy medical care was on the island, had at that time tried to give the Anguillans a mobile operating unit. (This was a complete operating room, fully equipped for most general operations and containing its own electric generating equipment, mounted on the frame of a Dodge truck. Incredibly expensive, and incredibly generous.) Since this was before the rebellion, the gift had to go through St. Kitts, and a representative of the St. Kitts Government told Lutz, "What you want to care about those bubber-johnnies for? Give it to us here on St. Kitts." "Bubber-johnny" is the contemptuous Kittitian word for Anguillans; some say it is a bastardization of the Dutch word for "monkey," but whatever the source, it means "hick." The people of St. Kitts, most of whom never in their lives travel more than twenty miles from the shack of their birth and most of whom still work the same sugar fields their grandfathers worked as slaves, call the Anguillans, who build the boats and travel around the world, hicks; it seems a strange sort of insult.

  Lutz had been forbidden by the Government of St. Kitts to give the mobile operating unit to Anguilla, but after the rebellion he dealt directly with the Anguillan Island Council, and gave them the unit.