Tom Fool

by David Stacton

  The melancholy of Tom Fool arises from its titular protagonist’s unrequited love of country and sense of its spiritual fall. ‘The land is enormous, noble, settled, compact and proud’, he reflects. ‘Would that the people who live it on were.’ He finds his tour of thirty-one states ‘heartbreaking’ in that regard – there is no communion with the electorate, only his advanced suspicion of being one among a smaller number, ‘those who have been made foreigners in their own country, the people who remember the way it used to be’. Tom Fool’s conservative romance of the American landscape would seem to call for fellow Americans who feel the same near-spiritual connection to it. If you remember David Stacton’s comments quoted earlier about a ‘sensuous and then unspoilt’ American landscape, ‘whose loss has made my generation and sort of westerner a race of restless wanderers’ – then you may gauge the degree to which Stacton and his imagined Tom Fool were comrades in exile.

  Richard T. Kelly

  Editor, Faber Finds

  April 2014

  Sources and Acknowledgements

  This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  Prologue: 1942

  Part I

  Colorado Springs

  Philadelphia

  Colorado Springs

  Elwood

  On the Train

  Chicago

  Illinois

  Coffeyville

  Tulsa

  The Texas Panhandle

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  San Diego

  Long Beach

  Los Angeles

  Claremont

  Fresno

  San Francisco

  Portland

  Seattle

  Montana

  Missoula

  North Dakota

  Madison, Wisconsin

  Later the Same Afternoon

  Omaha

  Yonkers

  Michigan

  Detroit

  On the Train

  Michigan

  Near Pittsburgh

  Cleveland

  Pittsburgh

  Hyde Park

  Coatesville, Pa.

  Chicago Again

  Somewhere

  Upstate New York

  Moving into Massachusetts

  Providence, Rhode Island

  On the Train

  On the Train

  A Radio Station

  Springfield Illinois

  Bull Run, Virginia

  On the Train

  Chicago

  Leaving Winnetka

  On the Train

  On the Train

  Over the Radio

  A Speech from the Platform of the Pioneer

  Iowa

  The Mohawk Valley

  Headed for New York

  New York

  All Over the Country

  At His Own Place

  Part II

  A Short Wait Between Planes

  Part III

  Puerto Rico

  Brazil

  Natal

  Ascension

  Accra

  Kano

  Khartoum

  Cairo

  El Alamein

  El Alamein

  In the Desert

  El Alamein

  In the Tank Garage

  A Dinner in Alexandria

  A Prisoner of War Camp

  On the Plane

  Beirut

  Jerusalem

  What He Hankered For

  Turkey

  Saratoga Springs

  Bagdad

  Tehran

  In the Plane

  Russia

  Hyde Park

  Washington

  Russia

  Kuibyshev

  At the Opera

  On the Volga

  Rzhev

  In the Kremlin

  Moscow

  At the Stormovic Factory

  Kuibyshev

  Yakutsk

  Tashkent

  On the Plane

  Urumchi

  In the Plane

  Chengtu

  Chungking

  Unsolicited Letter From a Chinese Schoolboy

  Chungking

  The National Military Council

  Chungking

  Chungking

  Near Chengtu

  Chungking

  Near Chungking

  On the Plane

  Sian

  Chengtu Again

  Chita

  Seimchan

  On the Plane

  Fairbanks

  In the Plane

  Epilogue: 1942

  Copyright

  Prologue: 1942

  All this happened twenty years ago. It is about a man called Tom Fool. At least, that’s what he called himself sometimes, others called him far worse, and it is as good a name as any.

  He was at the airport outside Edmonton, Alberta. It is not a beauty spot, Edmonton; he was tired; and as for airports, they have the same unnerving atmosphere everywhere, the atmosphere of the cretonne and coloured etching type of private hospital down whose corridors the chronic patient is wheeled to yet one more operation, while the stewardess, or is it the nurse, walks alongside, radiating professional confidence, but ready for any emergency, before handing us over to the anaesthetist, or is it the pilot? Whoever it is, we go away for a while‚ the specialist takes over, and sometimes we even come back, slightly improved, so we are told, but with something missing. A hospital is full of waiting. So is an airport. We can’t help envying the other patients: for those who sit listening, surrounded by cut flowers and private telephones, behind the swinging half doors of their rooms, usually know more about our mortality than we do. We only know if we pull through. They know when we do not.

  It was not a pleasant thought. There was something wheeled, he decided, and four-footed, something surgically hushed, about an airport. Too many things are moved about on dollies, and one of them is us. And he’d always been amused at the way the people in the bar were so firmly determined not to jump when the public address system came on. But then, sophistication in America is like that. Nobody wants to be caught out, everyone wants that ease to be found only in full-page colour advertisements, everybody’s waiting for the bell, and nobody wants to admit it.

  Edmonton airport didn’t even have a bar.

  “You know,” he said to himself, that tired old sheepish friend he’d hauled round with him all these fifty-one years, the best friend he’d ever had, old reliable, the guy who’s always glad to see you, even if you have changed, “I know what’s wrong with me. I just haven’t the heart to go back in.”

  A disloyal thought.

  Is that what it had come to? Must we always come to resemble the enemy we are fighting? Must we always be defeated by the enemy within? Sometimes, when he was tired these days, he thought so. He even thought he knew the name of the enemy within. It was Patterson.

  He had not been downed by what had happened. He was not a man downed easily. But to anyone still naïve enough to believe that people still had some of their original rectitude and guts, it had been an awful experience, so awful that the only way to survive it was to regard it as a comedy, and himself perhaps the most comic member of the cast. He had always been good-humoured by nature. It was the way of tolerance. But now, he saw it was the only way to keep one’s head.

  A poor thing, but mine own.

  Part I

  Colorado Springs

  He must have met the Pattersons in Colorado, but he was not aware of them until much later, on the train. So much was happeni
ng, that he could not remember everything, and besides, his memory was given to sudden landslips. He forgot the names of people he had known for years. He could not remember faces. It was often held against him, chiefly by those who had no faces worth remembering, which of course was why he forgot them, and why they never forgot the injury.

  What he did remember was hands. Thousands of hands. Hands slim, dry, wide, red, white, maculated with senescence, well-bred or thrusting, moist, sweaty, chapped, sudden, or insincere. A politician, which is what he was taken for, shakes a million hands. What the gesture reminded him of was the peculiarly blind satisfaction with which, in the old days, when the car broke down, you fitted the hand crank into the hole below the radiator and gave it five or six quick spins. The engine then sputtered to life. The constituents said a few words. But with a really early model, the sort of car his father had had when he was a boy, you had to jump aside, because the car began to shake, the brakes were unreliable, and the damn thing was apt to jerk forward at you angrily to run you down.

  It was disturbing. In Europe, there was something called a war. The Nazis were in the Lowlands. The problem, as he had said publicly, was not so much to keep America out of the war, as to keep the war out of America. But you couldn’t make these people understand that. They had obsolete minds, minds that shook you up as they bumped over the same ruts. And yet, unlike him, they didn’t seem to remember the old cars. What they remembered was the old hostilities.

  So he was in Colorado. After a Presidential candidate has been nominated, he is supposed to go into retreat, and that is what he had done. The term is religious, but the event is not. The event had about as much spirituality as a locker-room conference twenty minutes before the big game. It also had the same jockstrap, hard soap, sheep dip, and sweaty armpit smell. Not that he was taken in. He knew they didn’t want him, any more than he wanted them. But he thought that if he played his cards right, and did his own dealing, he could change their minds, even if he couldn’t change them.

  So far, he had to admit it, he seemed to be wrong.

  Yet he liked Colorado. He liked the way the rose and orange crags went straight up, the stars at night, the clear air, the sense of exaltation there.

  The whole thing had begun with money, of course. Most things do. He could no longer remember when, or by what stages, he had become the Presidential candidate. But he liked the challenge. He liked to be exalted. His conjoiners here in Colorado did not. That was clear. They liked a smaller, safer altitude, and no more wind in their faces than could be provided by an expensive and well-controlled air-conditioning. Senator Taft, in particular, had the habit of blinking when he came out of doors, an Easterner’s way of sneering at the mountains apprehensively, as though to say he had better, safer things at home. And no doubt he had, but where did Taft live, anyway?

  And yet, thought Tom, he had once seen a careful picture of Taft, that perennial candidate, goloshes on his feet and an umbrella over his head, against a spring shower, his glasses glistening with rain, bending cautiously, but with a certain austere joy, over a bed of daffodils. So you never knew. You never knew about any man. No doubt even cheese-parers derive a certain illicit joy from the private paring of the cheese.

  But Tom was not like that. He was still exalted by the crusade, for that was what it was, a crusade, though he could no longer remember how it had begun. He did know what had made it possible. Two things are required in America if one is to lead the sort of respectable life which, come to think of it, he had never given a moment’s thought to: to be Episcopal, and to be Republican. The first had been taken care of for him at birth. The second had been explained to him by old Harvey Firestone, the rubber tycoon.

  “Young man, I like you,” Firestone had said, “but I don’t think you will ever amount to a great deal.”

  “Why not?” asked Tom.

  “Because I understand you’re a Democrat. No Democrat can ever amount to much.”

  It was the simple creed of a man whose only complexity was the extent of his income. And it turned out to be almost meaningless, for Tom had amounted to as much as most men ever do. He had managed to fight the government to a standstill. He had become chairman of one of the country’s larger corporations. If not rich, he was at any rate well-to-do, which was all he wanted. He had power. He had luck. He had in some manner become spokesman for those businessmen who were not too cowed to speak out, nor too reactionary to realize that in the interests of their own survival it was no longer wise for them to keep their hands under the table while the cards were dealt in the great political poker game. He had even become Republican, which was why he was now surrounded by people whose only concept of the rules of the game was that once they got their own dealer in the White House, they could euchre as before, and who refused to realize that time had doubled the pack, abstracted several cards, changed the odds, and modified the rules.

  So Tom, whose chief recreation was history, and chief hobby the instructive misfortunes of eighteenth-century British prime ministers, was not taken in either by the Grand Old Party or by its Old Guard. That seemed reasonable. There is no reason why the younger members of even the best club have to think much of the Board of Directors. He had read Morley on Walpole: “People assume that when men are concerned in high affairs, their motives must lie deep and their designs reach far. Few who have ever been close to public business, its hurries, chances, obscurities, egotisms, will fall in with any such belief. These very transactions drew from Swift the observation, so obvious, so useful, so constantly forgotten, what a lesson of humiliation it is to mankind to behold the habits and passions of men, otherwise highly accomplished, triumphing over interest, friendship, honour, and their own personal safety as well as that of their country.”

  He had read it, and he had been impressed by it. His own life had taught him that it was true. What the Old Guard wanted was something like the Bourbon Restoration in Naples. They wanted to be reactionary. They wanted to punish. And though King Bomba compromised with the present sufficiently to inaugurate the first railroad in Naples, all that meant was that when the Bourbons were flung out for good, they could flee the country by steam-engine, rather than be put to the final humiliation of crossing the border in a bumpy diligence.

  Instead of in the Old Guard, therefore, Tom put his faith in the Junior Republicans. It was they who had gotten him the nomination, or so he thought. It was they alone who would elect him, or so he believed.

  It had been exciting, that Nominating Convention.

  Philadelphia

  He had arrived there at noon on June 22nd, a Saturday. The crowd to receive him consisted of his own supporters and some newspapermen. The professional Republicans had stayed away. The world was too much with them. They did not intend to yield an inch. It was not a happy time for them. They had been saddled with a great man once before, in the person of Lincoln, and had no desire to repeat the experience. They could remember Wilson, the First World War, and the League of Nations, and they didn’t want to go through that again, either. In fact they didn’t want any part of anything, except the next four years in Washington. They opened their newspapers at breakfast, read about the invasion of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, and kept-mum. It must be admitted that the Democrats did the same thing. It was the eve of a National election, which was no time to speak one’s mind about anything, even had one been inclined to do so.

  Tom did not keep mum.

  “Ask me any damn thing in the world, and I’ll answer it,” he told the press. He liked the press.

  They asked him where his staff was. He said he hadn’t any. They asked him where his headquarters were. He said, under his hat. They asked him if he would accept the vice-presidential nomination. No, he wouldn’t. “Politics isn’t a career with me, and if I can’t win I would just as soon go back to my old job.”

  That was, thought his advisers, quite enough talking for the time being. Everybody clambered into an automobile and went off to the local hea
dquarters of the Clubs named after him. By the time he left the building, there was a crowd outside, and he got an ovation. He smiled, waved, and knew exactly what to do about that. He crossed the sidewalk, took the centre of Broad Street, and marched right down it. Cheering, the crowd fell in behind, and, as he walked on, got bigger. Nothing quite like that had ever been seen in Philadelphia before, and nobody much liked the look of it. Politics was an orderly affair. First, the party bosses chose the candidate to be voted for, and then the citizens voted for him. That was democracy. Politicians did not interfere with the electorate in any other way or at any other time, and the electorate was not supposed to interfere with the choice of a candidate. That was understood. But here they were, doing it; the word rabble was not a word unknown, though this was cheerful for a rabble; and as the procession passed the windows of the Union Club, the noise eddied through those quiet rooms to such effect, that the members put their heads out to watch. Most of them had been waiting for some kind of revolution for the past eight years, but they had not expected it in Broad Street.

  The crowd cheered. At his hotel he received another ovation. Though all cigarettes had been carefully removed from informal photographs of him by an astute retoucher, as a sop to the descendants of Frances Willard and other pious female curtain-shakers, and though even he knew better than to be photographed with a drink in his hand, as a sop to all those voters who might still be dry, Tom, who smoked three packs of Camels a day, and who felt remarkably dry, went into the bar and said he’d take a whisky and soda. It seemed a simple, unaffected, manly thing to do, the crowd did not seem to mind, and so he had another. Then he shook hands all round. This was not part of campaign strategy. He just felt like it.

  There was then an incident.

  Mr. Taft, who was always presidential timber at nominating conventions, though always felled in the end by some other candidate, would never have been seen either with cigarette or liquor in his hand, but had sent one Walter Tooze into the lobby, to try to trick Tom with a few loaded questions.