The London Embassy

by Paul Theroux

  ‘It’s about earrings,’ I said. ‘The other day I told you your earring was nice. I was being insincere. May I call you Charlie?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Charlie, I think your earring is fantastic.’

  His hand went to his ear. He looked wary. He did not let go of the earring or his earlobe. He sat fixedly with his fingers making this plucking gesture on his ear.

  ‘It’s a very handsome accessory,’ I said. His fingers tightened. ‘A real enhancement.’ They moved again. ‘An elegant statement –’

  I thought he was going to yank his ear off. His hand was trembling, still covering the earring. He said, ‘I’m not making a statement.’

  ‘Take it easy,’ I said, giving him the sort of blanket assurance of no danger that convinces people – and rightly – that they’re in a tight spot. ‘You’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about!’ He looked very worried. ‘You can relax with me.’ I ordered him a drink and told him there was no point in discussing the earring.

  ‘To be perfectly honest,’ I said, ‘I rather like your earring.’

  ‘I’m certainly not making any kind of statement,’ Hogle said. The word worried him. It had implications of being unerasable and hinted of hot water. ‘I got the idea from one of the delivery men – an English guy. He wasn’t making any statement. It looked neat, that’s all.’

  ‘It looks more than neat,’ I said. ‘It has a certain mystery. I think that’s its real charm.’

  He winced at this, and how he was pinching his earlobe. He lowered his eyes. He did not look up again.

  ‘I feel funny,’ he said.

  ‘Be glad you work with people who say yes instead of no.’

  I gave him a friendly punch on the shoulder, the sort of body English Horton would have approved. It made me feel uncomfortable and mannered and overhearty. It amazed me then to realize that Horton was always punching and hugging and digging in the ribs. Hogle was unresponsive, not to say wooden. His eyes darted sideways.

  The night’s clients had started to arrive in the pub – men in leather jackets, with close-cropped hair, and heavy chains around their necks, and tattooed thumbs, and sunglasses. Some were bald, some devilishly bearded; one wore crimson shoes; another had an enormous black dog on a leather strap. All of them wore earrings.

  ‘Have another drink,’ I said.

  Hogle stood up. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’

  He was breathing hard. A man encased in tight black leather was hovering near us and staring at Hogle. The man had silver chains with thick links looped around his boots and they clanked as he came closer.

  ‘No hurry,’ Hogle said. Now he was reassuring me in the way that I had reassured him earlier, giving me hollow guarantees as he backed away. ‘Hey, I had a good time.’ He stepped past the clanking man, whose leather, I swear, oinked and squeaked. ‘No kidding. It’s just that’ – he looked around – ‘I told this friend of mine, this girl I know, that I’d – I don’t know, I’d give her a call.’ He looked desperate. ‘Hey, thanks a lot. I really appreciate everything you’ve done!’

  Then he left, and then I removed my earring. That was easy enough to do – just a matter of unscrewing the little plunger and putting the foolish thing into my pocket. And I hurried out of the pub, hearing just behind me clanks and squeaks of reproach.

  In my report for Charlie Hogle’s file I recorded the earring incident as a minor infraction – Inappropriate Dress. I left it vague. What was the point in explaining? I noted the two meetings; I described Hogle as ‘compliant’ and ‘reasonable.’ There was no innuendo in my report. I spared him any indignity. It sounded no worse than if he had come to work without a necktie.

  Indeed, it was no worse than if he had come to work without a necktie. I had had no objection to the earring, nor had any of Hogle’s co-workers in the telex room. Horton had made it an issue; Horton was minister, so Horton was obeyed. And Hogle did not wear his earring again.

  ‘It’s for his own good,’ Horton said later, and he squeezed my arm. I was the team member who had just played well; he was the coach. He was proud of me and pleased with himself. He was beaming. ‘I feel a thousand times better, too! That really annoyed me – that kid’s earring. I used to go down to the telex room a lot. I realized I was staying away – couldn’t stand to look at it!’

  ‘Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?’

  ‘I’m completely serious,’ he said. ‘That situation was making me sick. I mean sick. I got so mad the first time I saw that thing on his ear’ – Horton turned away and paused – ‘I got so mad I actually threw up. Puked! That’s how angry I was.’

  ‘You must have been very angry,’ I said.

  ‘Couldn’t help it. We can’t have that sort of thing –’ He didn’t finish the sentence. He shook his head from side to side and then said, ‘You were too easy on him in your report. That kid had a problem. Incredible. I took him for a clean, stand-up guy!’

  I said, ‘He may have feelings of which he’s unaware. It’s not that uncommon.’

  ‘No,’ Horton said. ‘I’ll keep an eye on him.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Anyway, everyone’s safe now, coach.’

  He smiled and smacked my arm and sent me back to my office.

  In the following weeks I saw scores of young men Hogle’s age wearing earrings. They were English, and all sorts, and I was ashamed that I had been a success. It was not merely that I had succeeded by deceiving Hogle, but that I had made him think there was something dangerous and deviant in this trinket decorating his ear. And he never knew just how handsome that trinket made him. Hogle would be all right. But after what he had told me, I was not so sure about Horton.

  The Exile

  Everyone knows Ezra Pound’s funny name, but no one can quote him. This was also the case with the American poet Walter Van Bellamy, who – like Pound long ago – lived in England. Nearly everyone knew what Bellamy stood for, but I had never met a person who could quote a single line he had written. I wondered sometimes whether the people who bought his books actually read them. Certainly they went to his readings and listened to him reciting his poems. He did so in a whisper, but it was an amazing one. Most people whisper in a monotone; Bellamy could whisper over an octave and a half, a characteristic he shared with the best actors.

  His subjects were love, nature, humanity, and war. He also wrote frankly of how he had once lost the balance of his mind. That was the phrase he used. I liked ‘lost the balance’ very much, as if he had lost the little that remained and had none left. This confession of a recent bout of lunacy made him greatly sought after as a party guest, and it also conferred on him glamour and respectability. His poem ‘I Am Naked’ was about these very paradoxes.

  Inevitably, his war poems concerned politics. His readings had the flavor of political meetings and some had the heat and unanimity of religious get-togethers. That was what the clippings said in his Embassy file, which was all I knew at the beginning. (I had met him once at an Embassy reception and had found him deaf on gin – we got nowhere.) To a large extent, Bellamy’s audience could best be described as believers, and they were charmed by his music. He was famous for the sounds in his poems, what he called ‘my throbs and gongs.’ It was possible that people were so persuaded by him beforehand that there was little need afterward for them to remember anything. Still, it surprised me that no one could quote his poems. His presence was memorable, though: a broad chest, eyes as blue as gas flames, a stern bony Pilgrim Father’s face, and enormous hairy hands. He was also very tall – my height, about six-three. He walked with a slight stoop, a cringing posture that had probably evolved out of a fear of banging his head.

  His strong, distinctly radical views were well known – his position on South Africa, nuclear disarmament, NATO, and even such rarefied issues as the exploitation of nonunion labor in the wine-growing region of Northern California. He had led peace marches in the 1960s, when he had been regarded as the soul
of propriety in his dark gray three-piece suit and hand-knotted bowtie and gold watch chain. You might have taken him for a Tory politician or a banker or an Episcopalian preacher. He had a copper-bottomed look of authority, of solidity and trustworthiness; he had a good old name. The ragged, angry protest movements of the sixties needed his respectability, and they were probably surprised by how vocal he was on their behalf. He had the appeal of John Kennedy – in fact, the two had been classmates at Harvard. His ‘Elegy on the Death of JFK’ was celebrated for its intimate and unexpected details of the two men’s friendship. Within a very few years of this poem, Bellamy became a public figure, who stumped around the United States reading his poems and giving encouragement to the anti-Vietnam protesters. He was noted for his willingness to share a platform with a folksinger, a jailbird, or whoever. Most people agreed that he was the conscience of his generation. Bellamy seemed to have no fire, but that was not so surprising. A conscience does not shout – it murmurs.

  What else? Yes, he looked wonderfully well fed. This alone was an amazing characteristic in a poet, but he was a most unrepresentative figure. The more I found out about him, the more bewildered I was. He had a large following, but he was not only a poet. He was like a spiritual leader, like one of those bearded domineering Indian gurus; but for Bellamy poetry was the medium of instruction. His humility was so conspicuous and challenging it was like arrogance; but his sense of certainty, and the preachiness of his poems – and his physical size – attracted many people to him. He had considerable influence, and I was very glad it was for the good. His followers were a peaceful and romantic bunch on the whole – the college crowd – who perhaps trusted and liked this well-dressed father figure more than the middle-aged men who also wrote poems and carried banners and played to the gallery, and who dressed like chicken farmers and long-distance truckers, and who could be pretty embarrassing in the cold light of day.

  Bellamy had the strange privacies also of a spiritual leader. There were no rumors and stories of his excesses, but there were resonant and suggestive silences. To look like a banker and to be known for his nervous breakdown – that was what made him. And his marriages had also given him fame. He had been married three times. But he was no philanderer – he had been victimized and thrown into confusion by these messy affairs. Each of his wives had been extremely rich.

  It was some measure of his fame that he was known as a writer to people who did not read him, and a great writer to those who did not read at all. He was all the more celebrated for not living in America. When Walter Van Bellamy came to England from New York in the early seventies he was called an exile. It did not seem the right word to describe a man who was often on television telling lively stories, or else doing something public and political before a crowd. I thought of exiles as gaunt silent men, with red eyes, pacing the rocky foreshores of barren islands; or else unshaven men in hot overcoats who spoke in thick accents and slept on sofas. Bellamy did not fit my stereotype. And were you still an exile if you occasionally flew home first class in a jumbo jet to attend a New York party? I did not think so. Some years he taught at Harvard. He had money. His rich wives had been sympathetic. They were more patronesses than wives. He was lucky. He had always lived well – he was in his way a socialite, a party-goer, if a somewhat reluctant one. He had a house in the depths of Kent and an apartment in Eaton Square. Perhaps the most unusual thing about him was that, as a poet, he made money. People bought his books, even if they didn’t read them. The books were symbols or tokens of belief. Buying them was a political act, an affirmation that you were on his side – whatever side he was boosting at that moment.

  I had been introduced to him at Everett Horton’s house, when he was drunk and deaf. I was eager to meet him again, because I had read him at school. He too had been to Boston Latin, and his books in the school library and the thought that he had sat under these same windows, this whiff of literary history, fueled my own ambition to write, until I drifted into the State Department. I had wanted to talk to him. It is a natural desire to want to meet a writer and size him up. But I did not see him again until the Poetry Night of the London Arts Festival, where he was reading.

  His poems that night were dense and full of his personal history, but his reading was vigorous and gave life to what seemed to be little more than spidery monologues about his domestic affairs – how he had cleaned out a sink and swept a room and ordered a pint of milk and so forth – modern poetry, as a lady behind me said out loud. There is a personal tone in some poetry that is so intimate it gives nothing away – so private it sounds anonymous. Bellamy’s was a sort of general confession of practical untidiness with which any youngster might identify. I say ‘youngster’ because Bellamy seemed to be addressing younger people, implying that he understood them and offering them reassurance. This restrained snuggling was a popular approach. The audience clamored for more, and that was when I noticed how lonely he looked in the spotlight – how solitary and anxious to please.

  As an encore that night he read a long poem, called ‘Londoners,’ about Americans in London, starting with Emerson and Hawthorne and ending with himself. In between, there were references to Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Henry James. The personal note was struck in such sentences as ‘Tom Eliot told me –’ and ‘Cal Lowell used to drawl –’ Afterward, he said the poem was about language and culture. With a characteristic flourish, he added, ‘and schizophrenia.’

  What I have written so far will not be news to anyone who has followed the career of Walter Van Bellamy. He was a public man; the facts are well known – but wait: it is the public men who have the darkest secrets. They have the deepest cellars and hottest attics, and they are consoled by blindness and locked doors. It is impossible to guess at what truly animates these people whose surfaces we seem to know so well, and there is nothing in the world harder to know than the private life of a public man.

  The London Embassy had tried to cultivate Bellamy. We needed him. He had a powerful eminence among the writers in London – partly for being American and partly because his present wife was a patroness. She was an irascible Englishwoman who, for tax reasons (ah, the resourceful English aristocracy!), held an American passport.

  In the previous ten years Bellamy had signed petitions condemning our intervention in Vietnam and our arming small Central American countries; about our decision to build a neutron bomb – and more: public matters. Of course we needed his criticism, but it was unhelpful, not to say humiliating, to get it publicly. I had told Horton that I hoped there was a friendly way of gaining Bellamy’s confidence. It occurred to me at the poetry reading that in another age a man like Bellamy might have chosen to be a diplomat. Even today the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, chose poets as their cultural attachés and the Mexicans had recently sent one of their most distinguished writers to be Ambassador to France. Bellamy could, I thought, teach us a great deal. There were too few men at the London Embassy who were willing to criticize policy decisions – they felt their jobs were at stake. That sort of thing wouldn’t bother Bellamy. He had a reputation as a humane poet-philosopher; he also had a private income. I felt that someone like Bellamy might keep us from making stupid mistakes. And it would certainly be a very good thing for our image in Britain if Bellamy chose to associate himself with us, for there was no question but that British intellectuals regarded our London Embassy as a stronghold of corrosive philistines, reactionaries, anti-Communists, and America Firsters – a nest of spies. Bellamy would be a good corrective.

  True, he was a little unpredictable. He had been something of a prodigy; he had published while still very young and had attracted the notice of the really eminent – Robert Frost and Eliot and Pound. He had gained laureate status while still in his forties. Now, at sixty-three, and nearly always in the public eye – ‘the most visible poet since Yeats’ he had been called – he qualified as a bard. He was a complicated man – confused, vain, too many sleeping pills, too much wine – but he wrote like an an
gel. I was sure of it. I could never understand why no one remembered the lines of his poems – I don’t know why I was unable to recall a single line. But, then, who can quote Ezra Pound?

  When the reading – this Poetry Night – was over, Bellamy walked off the stage and was mobbed by people asking for autographs. I noticed that few people addressed him directly. They stood shyly, offering him his books, which were open to the flyleaf. He signed them without saying a word. The group around him was reverential. Out of politeness – but it might have been fear – they kept their distance and even averted their eyes as, not speaking, Bellamy scrawled his name in various editions of his books. When he was finished he saw me.

  Our height was all the introduction we required. Tall people often find themselves talking to perfect strangers, merely because the stranger is also tall. Tallness is like a special racial attribute.

  Bellamy spoke over the heads of his admirers: ‘I think we’ve met before.’

  ‘At an American Embassy reception,’ I said. ‘Months ago.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said and came over and shook my hand. ‘I remember you well.’

  His eyes were unsteady and his hair had the look of having been combed by someone other than himself. In his wincing, round-shouldered way he seemed wounded or drunk, but he was more likely just very tired after two solid hours on the stage.

  ‘How is your wife?’ he said.

  ‘I think you have someone else in mind,’ I said. ‘I’m not married. I’m the man from Boston. Excuse me, that didn’t sound right!’

  Bellamy said, ‘Is she still writing poems?’

  He had not heard me, and he had mistaken me for Vic Scaduto, whose wife wrote poems – or at least she said she did.

  ‘Not married,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘So am I,’ he said. ‘I was just leaving – why don’t you come along?’

  His tone was neutral, but this was the strangest thing about Bellamy. At a distance he was very friendly, but the closer you got to him the cooler he became. Giving a lecture or a reading, Bellamy had a very warm intimate tone; in public he was relaxed; but face to face, like this, he was deaf and almost completely indifferent. This I am sure will be news to many of his fans.