Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Read online

  The journey to New York on the Pennsylvania Railroad involved a terrible five minutes while the train passed a huge piggery on the Jersey meadows. The pigs were fed, it was rumoured, on scraps from New York restaurants usually some days old. The sweet, sour rotting smell pervaded the train long after it had passed the piggery, and was about to plunge into the Hudson tunnels. But there were fantastic piles of abandoned cars to admire (New Jersey is the Junked Car Capital of the World); and the twisted spaghetti of steel and concrete where roads, railways, and canals passed through and around Newark; and, out there beyond the estuary of the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers, a curious world of tall brown marsh grass, hidden waterways, wild birds seen suddenly from the train, a man gliding hidden down a narrow channel in an old punt, fowling or trapping muskrats, who knew? So I took my MS to New York in person, handed it over, and returned to Milltown to debate with Barbara as to how we should spend all the money we'd soon be getting.

  About two weeks later a letter came from Desmond. I knew it contained bad news, for in that world people always telephone good news. Doubleday had rejected my book. Desmond was genuinely distressed; he said that the executive editor, Lee Barker, was all for Nightrunners but in a week of civil war had not been able to persuade the rest of the editorial board.

  My first reaction was to part company with Desmond.

  I know he understood why, and I think he approved. As I told him, our standards and ways of thought were too much alike. By now there was quite a backlog of optimistic forecasts leading to final failures. I wanted an agent who thought not like me but like the people I was trying to sell to. Carrie Balaban recommended a friend, Paul Small, then just leaving M.G.M., and after a brief interval I was taken over by Miriam Howell of Paul Small's new literary agency. Miriam accepted the chunky manuscript of Nightrunners and began to circulate it among the publishing houses.

  Macmillans rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

  The Palmers returned from their tour and we would have been homeless; but by good fortune the same South Mountai n Road house became available, and Eleaner Hope offered it to us, furnished, at the same reasonable rental we had paid before ($980 a year). We had met nothing but goodwill from our neighbours in New Jersey, who were mostly occupied in manual labour or mechanical trades in the nearby towns and factories; but we had had very little to talk about with each other. So it was with an unsuspected and surprising feeling of Going Home that we loaded the Crosley for the last time and drove up U.S. 202 to South Mountain Road and its special quality of leaving people alone to get on with their lives. There close friends might not see one another for a couple of years and, at the end, pick up the old relationship exactly as before. There no one lived under social pressure, no one was 'keeping up' with anyone else. The disparity between the world fame of some and the total non-fame of their neighbours, close friends, was such that the idea was ridiculous as soon as mentioned; nor can people keep records of whose turn it is to invite whom when some friends disappear abroad every few weeks to write for national magazines, some stay at home, and some spend parts of each year in Hollywood, London, or Rome.

  We were back. Here was the Hudson, the far bank dim in the heat haze. Here was Haverstraw, seedy and shadowed under High Tor. Here was Hook Mountain, towering so dark and steep over Nyack that it required no imagination, during one of the frequent thunderstorms, to see Henry Hudson's little ship tossing on the wide black water below, lightning in its rigging. Here were the artists and the artisans, the farmers and the carpenters. And here were some very unusual people generically called the Jackson Whites. They lived in the Ramapo Hills, the western border of the county, with a way of life as primitive as anything told of the Smokies. They lived by the rifle and trap, eating squirrels and woodchucks. They never sent their children to school, and never came down from their fastnesses except to sell their handcarved woodwork at Margulies' store on U.S. 202. They would not be paid in money, but in sugar and flour, salt and tobacco, and with these climbed silently back through the forest.

  Up there the deer died by the single shot, all year round, whatever the game laws said, for they were food; and if the game warden went up to investigate, he died too.

  (The Jackson Whites murdered two, about this time. No one was ever charged.)

  They were said to be descendants from three successive waves of refugees, who had sought shelter in these forested hills: local Indians, dispossessed by the first Dutch settlers; Hessian deserters from the British armies; and runaway slaves in the years before the Civil War. All this one could understand, but it staggered the mind to imagine the Jackson White of 1949, for, from his ridges he could easily see the ordered walks of West Point ahead, the Empire State Building on one side and the kosher pleasure domes of the Catskills on the other, while at his feet roared the endless traffic of Routes 17, 6 and 202, and the Erie and West Shore railroads.

  One of their patriarchs vanished that winter. He thought an enemy family were shooting into his cabin. His sons told him no one had fired, but he insisted, and took his rifle and went out after them. They found his body next spring, by the little church of St John's in the Wilderness, where his people worshipped, if they did. He had frozen to death.

  Our friends greeted us so warmly that our sense of Home was reinforced. Yet I found myself dreaming of granite cliffs and sandy coves, springy turf and the wild ascending song of skylarks. Was it really Cornwall and Wiltshire that called, or only my youth?

  We steadily widened the circle of our acquaintance, starting with Diane Fenwick, who had rented the Chicken Coop next door. She was a girl of startling beauty and a corresponding vagueness about the facts of life in the country. Soon after we had settled in again, and killed another copperhead for good luck, I awoke one morning, went to the bathroom and turned on the taps. Whooosh, out burst jets of superheated steam. I began turning hot and cold taps like mad to relieve the pressure. Steam hissed out from all of them. I ran downstairs to the water heater, thinking the thermostat must have failed. But no, the trouble was farther off than that, for the cold-water pipe leading up from the well was hot. We shared the well with the Chicken Coop. The cold pipe from the pump to the Chicken Coop was hot. I broke in through a window. The place was like the boiler room of a troopship in the Red Sea. Diane had left her heater (which did not have a thermostat) on, and gone away for the week-end. The steam had worked back down the cold pipe, to the pump in the well house, through that, up our cold lines...

  We forgave Diane with a gentle Monday lecture. Only her looks could also persuade us to forgive her habit of feeding exclusively on huge bowls of navy beans and raw garlic; but she had never found out how to cook anything else.

  The Milltown poltergeist seemed to have smuggled itself on board the Crosley (we couldn't think where it had found room), for now the rattlings and moanings troubled our nights in South Mountain Road. With cause, we decided it must be Nanny and sent her home.

  Little, Brown rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

  The Hills gave a cocktail party for us soon after our return. Ray was less than sober, Marian harassed, and Jim and Kathy more than usually disturbed, but what engaged our attention was Keith Jennison's feet. He was wearing slipper-socks. We thought it extraordinary that anyone should go to a cocktail party wearing such garb, though we were forced to admit that the slipper-socks were nothing out of the ordinary in that assembly, where some women seemed to have stepped out of Bonwit Teller's bandboxes and others out of wrestles with large shaggy dogs, while an eminent lady artist was wearing puce trousers and a cape made from an old bedspread.

  Some of the men were obviously of Wall Street and others no less obviously of the third sex — to which Rockland was as disinterestedly kind as it was to actors, plumbers, and retired lieutenant-colonels, Indian Army. But we eyed the slipper-socks with particular attention because Keith was not a man oblivious of his surroundings, not was he a rebel, so the slipper socks were a matter of choice. An hour earlier he must have sat barefoot, bu
t trousered, at his dressing-table and said to himself, 'Shall I wear the black oxfords or the brown loafers this evening?' After arguing back and forth for a while he had decided on the slipper-socks. Such a choice was not open to an Englishman, where for every function, time of day, and geographical location there was one correct sartorial response — and only one. I realized with a start that this was true of many other things besides dress. For English people of our class and type, in many political and social areas, most problems had pre-selected answers. Americans, it seemed, had to work out the answer each time. It must be difficult being an American.

  Norton's rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

  Another aspect of the lack of rigidly enforced standards was the general unwillingness to judge others. Some of our neighbours drank too much, and for this or other reasons sometimes committed acts considered outrageous by any standards. People shrugged, said, 'He was drunk,' and continued to accept the transgressor socially. In the society from which we had come judgment was automatic; a man attending a cocktail party in slipper-socks was showing lack of respect to his hostess; a man committing dreadful acts when drunk would lose his friends. We were guided by hard rules and infallible punishments, and they produced an obvious pharisaism among us, since none would be blameless if all private actions and secret thoughts were made public. Here there was less concealment, which was good; little judging, which was probably good; and, springing from those, a tolerance of many differing life styles. The dangers in non-judgment and tolerance were the concomitant lack of guidance to the young, and the risk of its extension to criminality and antisocial actions. The most alarming manifestation among South Mountain Road's liberals was hatred of the police, and sometimes of the judicial system — not because of brutality and venality, though they were sometimes mentioned — but because they were society's engines of judgment and punishment. We found this particularly ironical because these liberals admired the British system and attitude this side of idolatry. When we pointed out that respect and even affection for the police was an essential part of it, they could only shake their heads and say, 'It's not the same here.' They were right; and the fault was not in the police but in them. Some of our friends talked like those people in a lifeboat who demand that there must be tolerance for all... even for the fellow pulling out the bilge plug.

  Another aspect of the permissive society was the matter of bringing up children. It was, and is, a European commonplace that the American child is not brought up at all, but is allowed to do whatever he likes, and that this system produces the most spoiled, ill-mannered, selfish and slovenly youth in the world.

  Observing our neighbours, we thought that the basic fact was reasonably true; American parents, at least in our area, did allow their children considerable licence. In some cases we thought that this was a deliberate policy, of letting each kid find his own way to his own maturity; in other cases that it was the result of the parents' lack of confidence in their ability to guide their children. We were supported in this latter opinion by the number of articles in newspapers and magazines in which child doctors, psychologists, religious leaders, and assorted quacks of every kind told parents how to raise their young. In the rest of the world these articles would have been considered interfering impertinence.

  The results, however, were not as the European myth had them. The early teenage girl was apt to be awkward, unkempt, and rude. A few years later, at sixteen or seventeen, she was suddenly a young woman with a poise and sense that her English contemporaries would not gain for another three or four years. We did not know how this came about; we only observed that it was so. The boys seemed to start better but end worse. Up to about sixteen the American boy was basically in closer contact with the earth and sky than his European contemporary, freer in his enthusiasms and wider in his outlook. At about seventeen and eighteen his development seemed to be arrested. We knew it was foolish to try and pin down an exact cause of something so vaguely felt, so soon after our arrival in the United States, but we thought that the boys had to turn their minds to making a living, and that the school system had not equipped them with the means to develop the life they would live out of working hours. As a result, from eighteen on their business of professional stature grew fast, but their 'personal' stature grew much more slowly, if at all.

  We ourselves could not abandon our belief that it was our duty and pleasure — not Dr Spock's — to bring up our children in the light of our own experience, love and intelligence.

  Television came into our world about this time not in our house, but at friends' nearby — and after much talk we could not think it was good for children to watch it for long periods each day. The programmes were harmless enough, but even if they had been magnificent, we thought it was wrong to teach children to rely on a means of learning or entertainment that came from outside themselves. In childhood they ought to learn the value of solitary confrontation, oneself against the fact; and television was a constantly present escape alley. We therefore laid down a limit of one hour a day for TV viewing, to be reconsidered in a couple of years when the children, and TV, would have grown up a bit.

  Holt rejected Nightrunners; no comment.

  Still in the context of the children, we thought about citizenship. For ourselves, we could wait. A majority of British immigrants to America never became citizens. Our own mental attachment, at the moment, was to Rockland County, not to the United States. The question of the children was more urgent, but in a way simpler. Assuming that I would somehow win my war against the Immigration authorities, we intended to live in America.

  For the children it would be the only country they would ever have known. The idea of raising them as Englishmen Abroad, though tenable in India or even Chile, where differences in religion, culture, and language between the parents and the neighbours could be used as reasons to preserve the distant patriotism, was untenable here. We told them therefore, that though we were still English, and might remain so, they were Americans. We acted so early — Susan was five-and-a-half Martin three — because we had already noticed a built-in hostility between other first-generation immigrants who had made the big step and came to the United States, and their children who had been born here. All around us were examples of children refusing to acknowledge the language, culture, and habits of their foreign heritage. The process of Americanization, which could produce changes in build and colouring in a single generation, also involved the rejection of, for example, spaghetti, the Italian language, respect for elders, and whatever ancient customs the parents held dear. The situation of English immigrants was not quite the same, owing to the greater weight of the British heritage in American tradition, and also owing to the snobbishness of many Americans who would croon over 'a delightful English accent', while sneering heartily at an Italian or Polish-Jewish accent; but the problem was there, merely lessened, and we thought we must face it.

  Our plan worked with good success, and the children did not seem to despise us, although we had no idea why they wanted to put on masks and hollow out pumpkins on October 31 (this festival of Hallowe'en was replaced in England some 300 years ago by Guy Fawkes Day, November 5); or why we should eat turkey on some Thursday in November; or give presents to our mothers in May (I give my mother a present on her birthday, if I feel like it). They began to carve up their food with the knife and fork, and then transfer the fork to their right hands to eat, while we continued to eat with the fork in the left; and they reasonably agreed that we were too old to change our funny habits. And to save them embarrassment, we learned to pronounce ate as eight; the English usage is, of course, et, but Susan told us that was very uneducated.

  Susan began to rehearse the ceremony of swearing allegiance to the flag. We, also in the process of learning, saw how unnecessary, even obscene, were the national exclusions which for too many were the only substance of patriotism. The children were going to be Americans. So had been Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, and these had brought a heritage from England, wh
ich did not make them any less American. This our children could do. They would take to the schoolroom something of a household where Chaucer and Shakespeare, Galahad and Nelson were the stuff of beauty and bravery, and there barter those gems for the wisdom of the Talmud, the genius of Goethe and Tchekov, Homer and Leonardo: but in that marvellous exchange no one would lose what he had given. We were proud to be contributing to this noble experiment. What was lacking here, on South Mountain Road, was the inheritances from the Chinese emperors, from Asoka, Akbar, and the kings of Niger.

  We knew that the absence of Negroes and Chinese from our local school was due to the fact that almost none lived in the school district, though we had plenty of poor whites. Why this was so was a problem then beyond us. It should not have been racial prejudice, although it was already obvious that many who fought anti-Semitism did not seem to think the same rules applied to anti-Negroism.

  On South Mountain Road we did not for a long time get to know which of our neighbours were Jewish and which were not, or, for that matter, which were rich and which not. Where there was a community of interest, intimacy grew; where there was not, we had friendship and tolerance. Gentlemen's Agreement had recently been published and people were bending over backward not to be caught saying 'Some of my best friends are Jews'. (It seemed a valid statement to me, and I never did find out what I was supposed to say: 'None of my best friends are Jews'?) It was at this time that I was talking to Dave Itkin, whom I knew to be a Jew, in his store in Haverstraw. He held up a small musical instrument and said, 'What would you call this, Jack?'

  'A Jew's harp,' I said promptly; then caught myself up, and began to think how to apologize.