Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Read online

  Whispering susurrated in the lobby. I was fed up with spaghetti, and the children's clothes were in rags. A local lady's New York lover offered Barbara a job as secretary in the garment district. She would earn $60 a week for being genteel and Gentile, and — as a matter of fact — a damned good secretary, too. If she accepted, it would slow down my writing, for I would have to cook for the children and wash and iron Susan's dresses; but there was no help for it.

  We were down to $250, plus our tickets back to England. At my urgent request the law firm of Rosenman, Goldmark, Colin & Kaye sent me their bill for twenty months of legal services. It was $50. I suppose Jerry Plapinger had personally spent 100 hours on my case, not to count long distance telephone calls to Washington, and consultations with Sam Rosenman and other senior partners. This to help a stranger in need. It is hard to express gratitude at such times.

  After paying the bill, and a few other items, we had $143.87 left. Barbara promised to give her prospective employer an answer on January 2, 1950.

  Christmas came. It had been a bad year all round. In March East Germany had held elections on a single (Communist) list and in October formally proclaimed the Communist Republic. In March the Communists finished taking over the ruling Socialist party in Hungary. Our own troubles seemed a little less black in comparison.

  It was a balmy season that year, the forest like a leafless summer. Our Christmas tree was barely three feet high, and in deference to the fire regulations, we had replaced the bare candles of Camberley with a single loop of red electric bulbs and a great deal of tinsel. For dinner we invited the Girls, since they had no families — at least, none that wanted to see them. I made jugs of Tom & Jerry and, long before the turkey came on, we were ready to weep on each other's shoulders. Shortly before dinner was cooked Barbara retired to bed, but not until the Girls told us they had rewritten their wills, to leave their worldly goods, first to each other, then to Susan and Martin. Then we really did weep on each other's shoulders. Barbara left. I carved and served up the turkey and all the trimmings. When they were gone I went into the kitchen to open the canned plum puddings. Some error must have occurred in the cooking, for when I rammed a can opener into the first pudding it exploded. Under a steady drip and thud of pudding from the ceiling I opened the other can more carefully and returned to the table. Martin clapped enthusiastically at seeing the pudding all over my face, hair, and clothes, but the Girls were polite enough to affect not to notice. I next poured the pre-heated brandy on to the pudding, which now stood on warmed plates, and with a flourish, set light to it in the proper manner (by using a match to light a toothpick and using the toothpick to light the brandy: this obviates the unpleasant sulphurous taste of the match). The plates were perhaps too hot (a common failing of mine, this), for now the brandy exploded in orange flame, blackening the beams overhead and burning off most of my moustache and part of my eyebrows. 'Pretty, pretty,' the Girls murmured, while Susan broke into unfeigned applause. Soon after we had finished eating Barbara came down, fresh and cheerful, and I took her place in bed, for a few hours.

  I remember one of the Girls telling me that the Brimfields' marriage would be in trouble soon, if it wasn't already. 'how do you know?' I asked. She said, 'They had a party there the other night, and I ran into Sally Brimfield under the stairs. It was dark, and, well, a girl's a girl... I made a big pass at her. She loved it.' She shook her head sadly.

  The hours passed. Barbara took off her shoes and began to dance. The children came downstairs and begged us to make less noise. We drank more Tom & Jerry and finished two magnums of champagne the Girls had brought. At dawn of what we still called Boxing Day, we broke up, after agreeing that life was real, life was earnest, and it led but to the grave.

  The next morning I settled down seriously to my ironing class.

  Chapter Seven

  On December 30, with just over $100 available cash in hand, the Army Film Unit offered me a contract to write the script for a training film on Operations of the Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. The terms were $800, plus board, lodging, and transportation to the Armored School at Fort Knox and back. I accepted with what dignity I could muster, and we hurried into New York to kiss Vyvyan and Jack Luedekke. (In my case the latter salutation was, in fact, simplified to a handshake: Jack was a very heterosexual person.) Next day, Barbara turned down the secretarial job that had been offered to her, with thanks, for the film money would see us through until the next instalment of my gratuity arrived from England.

  The old Dodge's gas consumption was now down to 20 m.p.g., and bits kept falling off it at traffic lights. I decided to get a better car and went down to the bank in Haverstraw to see about raising some money for the purpose. I asked to see the manager, but apparently there was no such person, only presidents, vice presidents, cashiers, and so on. However I was finally sent to talk to a chap behind a desk in an inner room. I told him I proposed to get a better car — not a new one, just one that would go — and suggested that an overdraft of about $500 would do the trick. The chap asked me for collateral. I had no idea what he was talking about, and repeated that I merely wanted an overdraft to tide me over until I got the Army money. After asking some more impertinent questions, the chap regretted that his bank would not lend me any money. I began again, explaining in simple terms that I did not want a loan, only an overdraft. 'We don't give overdrafts,' he said quite nastily. I walked across the road to the First National Bank of Haverstraw, and on being referred to a Mr Bob Scott, told him I proposed to transfer our account to him as I had met a lack of co-operation on the opposite corner. Bob expressed his pleasure. I then told him I needed an overdraft. His face lengthened, but fortunately he had a sister married to a missionary in India and knew something of British ways. After more questioning, but this time sympathetic, he lent me the money to buy a three-year-old Chevy convertible.

  Leaving the car with Barbara, I set off for Fort Knox, my brain creaking as I dredged up any lessons I had learned about armoured reconnaissance in battle. When I began to think of the situations I must create to teach those lessons, I checked myself. Though the facts of war are common to all, different armies look at them in different ways. I must have a few sessions with the staff at the Armored School, and study their tactical doctrine.

  I spent a happy ten days at Fort Knox, the script came along well, the Armored School were happy, the Film Unit were happy... and that was that. I never heard whether the script was made into a film, or put in a drawer to moulder until changes in equipment had made it obsolete.

  Back on South Mountain Road I began again the weary round of getting fingerprints for other sub-committees of other branches of the Congress. The Kilgore — St George bill had been turned down and the Immigration people were in a position to deport me: but Mrs St George seemed to be holding them at bay for the time being.

  When not waiting in the corridors of police headquarters I worked on articles and short stories with an Indian background, glumly more aware each day that there was no market for them in the United States. In England I would probably have earned £20 or £30 for each from Blackwood's or similar magazines; here the payment would have been at least three times that, if... I was also working on the Thuggee book, which I had titled The Deceivers (a direct translation of the Hindi word); it was not a thrilling phrase, and it certainly did not meet the requirements I myself had laid down for a good title, but I was unable to think of a better one.

  South Mountain Roadhad a professional oldest inhabitant. Carroll French, the Girls' landlord, had come from Michigan bringing his bride in a horse-drawn cart across the country, paying for their food and lodging by giving puppet shows. He favoured a small white beard and had a lovely smile and was a great man with his hands. He painted and sculpted and designed and built. The open stairs and rough stone and odd corners of Alan Anderson's house (first enlarged by Max with the money from What Price Glory?), were Carroll's mark. He was not really that old, but when he told stories of his boyhood in Mi
chigan, and sleighs in the snow, and the early days on the Road, he made us feel that he had carried a fife at Lexington and crossed the Rappahannock in a covered wagon.

  Our doctor's son was bar mitzvah'd in Haverstraw, and we were invited. At the door of the synagogue I took my hat off with a reflex action, although I had been told one didn't. The usher there picked up a yarmulka and put it on my head instead, muttering, 'We stay covered in the house of the Lord.' It was a very orthodox congregation, so Barbara and the womenfolk sat on one side of the aisle, the men on the other. The boy's mastery of Hebrew, the crashing march-like music, the way old men wandered about, scarves trailing, eyes rapt, the passionate chanting, the sheer length of the service — four hours — so many people wholly absorbed in the bringing of this youth into Jewish manhood, all left a deep impression.

  An old friend of Barbara's, war-widowed, visited us in January on her way to spend a couple of months in the Bahamas. She used to be very highly sexed, Barbara told me. She hadn't changed, for in no time she found her way, like a bee to honey, to Joe Wright, he of the mighty equipment. When she came back briefly in the spring Joe was engaged, and kept away from her. She, poor simple English country girl, laid her snares for the Young Boys. She kept backing into one or other of them in dark corners, or under bushes in the garden (they were all helping us with the pruning), and in other alarmingly skittish ways advertising her availability. Were they not bachelors and therefore untrammelled by wives or conscience? We had to tell her the facts of life before she began to doubt her own attractiveness.

  We found a store in New York that had maps of the trails in Bear Mountain Park, and began to make a systematic exploration of them. The Appalachian Trail, a 1,400-mile footpath from Maine to Georgia, ran through the park, together with many local ones. We ate sandwiches or cooked corned beef hash in the shelters set at every few miles along the trails — Dutch Doctor, Big Hill, Island Pond, and half a dozen others. The trails were empty on weekdays, and it was a strange sensation to walk for hours alone in silent forest, sometimes seeing a deer, or from the edges of the escarpments to look out over the blue roll of the forests, the gleam of the Hudson, the sparkle of lakes, to realize that we were in the middle of the richest, most heavily populated part of the country — and see no works of man, not a house, or a spire, or a road.

  The Hargroves separated, after putting a great deal of money into the house they had bought. Bill Mauldin bought the house from them, and at once began putting more money into it. It was an odd coincidence that the proceeds from the two best-sellers of the war years should have gone into the same house on South Mountain Road.

  One evening Emily Jennison telephoned and said, Run outside. Look north!' We hurried out. The trees rising behind the house half obscured a strange wall of light along the top of the mountain. We took the children and walked across the road to the Balabans' lawn, where we could see without obstruction. The northern sky glowed with purple and green and blue light, as though covered by a curtain made of long pieces of glass of those colours. The curtain shimmered to an invisible wind, rose to invisible hands, lowered until only a band of colour crawled along High Tor, waved like celestial seaweed in a magic tide. After half an hour the colours first dimmed, then sank towards earth, and at last vanished. It was dark, and cold on the grass. We had seen the Aurora Borealis for the first time.

  Came Keith Jennison to the house with a guarded message. He and Helen Taylor, another editor at Viking, both liked Nightrunners enough to think it was publishable, if I would accept some editing suggestions from them, and work on it. What can I lose? I thought, and agreed. Keith introduced me to Helen Taylor, who did most of the work with me.

  She was a big blonde woman, craggy and kind. I still think she was the best editor in New York, and this not only because she was my first, when I needed one most and had most to learn. For the next six months we battled over Nightrunners like two rivals over the body of their mistress. At first every stricture discouraged me... and Helen balanced each criticism with a piece of praise. Her efforts to make me see her point of view seemed to me only an obtuse refusal to see mine... and Helen kept quietly, calmly at it until I myself saw that there were other ways than mine of reading what I had written. She soon recognized my main fault hitting the same nail too often, too hard — and by praising the effectiveness of the first stroke, led me to see that the rest were not necessary. She explained structural defects, economic considerations, and proof-reader's marks. We battled over taste and agreed over grammar.

  After the first couple of encounters, I understood that I did not have in her an enemy to my book, still less someone who was trying to write it for me, but a knowledgeable and experienced friend who was determined that Nightrunners of Bengal should be as good as I could make it. And oh, what bliss to have someone read and weigh every word as carefully as I had! Sometimes Keith sat in on these sessions, throwing yet another light on a character that we had seen only our own ways, sometimes mildly protesting at the explicitness of the sex, rape and murder scenes. And sometimes we all, Barbara too, met at Louis & Armand's or the Absinthe House, and had several drinks; and I wondered how publishers got any work done at all. For me it was a once a month occasion: for them, it was daily.

  One morning I told Barbara, 'Susan wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.' Barbara said, 'What an extraordinary thing! Still, if we have bacon, lettuce and tomato, I suppose we can't complain. Here are the peanuts and the butter, and there's a bowl of Jello in the icebox. You make it.' Susan took the sandwich and ate it, but with a vaguely dissatisfied look. It was several months before Alan Anderson, a peanut butter fiend, introduced us to the stuff; and not for years did 'jelly' mean to us what in England is usually called 'jam'. After that the revelation that most native born American males and many females slept in the nude hardly disturbed us. In England the poor slept in their underclothes and everyone else in 'pyjamas'.

  The beautiful but garlicky and absent-minded Diane returned to the city and Eleanor Hope rented the Chicken Coop to a young couple of immigrants from Tobacco Road, who worked at staggered hours, so that while one was at work, the other was asleep, and no one looked after the children. The kids made their own breakfasts, a healthy repast of hard candy (boiled sweets), and ran around all day in dirty underpants and nothing else. It was the little girl, to our disapproval, who offered Susan 5 cents to show her her Kelly's Eye.

  Ray Hill was fired from his job, and began to take the money for his drinking out of Marian's housekeeping, but he continued to be a very amusing fellow in public, and actually helped me make some money for the two of us. One evening, before the martinis shot him down, he told us a tale of his boyhood in Kansas, when he and a friend had tried to raise a young turkey buzzard they had found. It was warm, funny, and American, far from my rejected Indian jungles. I told the Hills I would try to turn it into a short story and, if I sold it, would share the proceeds with them, fifty-fifty. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve: Huckleberry Finn as told to James Thurber — a simple task. The character of the boy and his narrator — (obviously he had to have a Doctor Watson) practically defined themselves, and I set to with a will. After a week of hard work I gave the completed story a title, Lester Wimpy (the name of the buzzard) and sent it off to Miriam Howell. Then I returned to rewriting Night-runners.

  Easter came with its apology for spring, and I thought we must somehow get away for the summer. I had been doing desk work continuously and hard since September 1946, mostly seven days a week and often up to fourteen hours a day. Two hot, humid summers in the Hudson Valley had made us swear, not again. Our children had never known that chiefest delight of our own childhoods, a summer by the sea. There was no debate as to where we wanted to go. It had to be Maine, for we had a clear picture of it in our minds: a stern coast, like Cornwall's; a people with long weather-beaten faces, lobstermen all; slow green seas bursting in white foam on curved golden sands and towering grey cliffs. The problem, of course, would be money.


  We simultaneously advertised our house for a summer sub-let, and looked in the classified columns for a suitable house in Maine. The Maine Information Bureau also sent us a pamphlet listing hundreds of houses, camps, and cottages for rent. We eagerly scanned each line, and finally picked on the cheapest one listed that was on the sea. It was at Prince's Point, Yarmouth, and avowedly 'primitive' and so it should be, I thought, at $150 for the three-month season! We had had no bites on our house yet, but that Maine cottage would surely go soon, so, acting on my new American principle of doing what you want to do and later finding the money somehow, we applied for the cottage, and got it.

  Two days later we sub-let our house for three months to the bandleader at the local country club, for $550. Clearly, we could not afford not to go to Maine.

  Came Keith again to the house one evening on his way home from the station. I think he would have liked to adopt a sympathetic air to make us conclude, before he spoke, that Viking had refused Nightrunners; but he is a poor actor, especially where good news is concerned, because he feels it so directly himself. I could tell, as I saw him getting out of his car, his ears positively radiating joy, that he had nothing of sorrow for us.

  'We're going to publish it,' he said.

  I felt weak with relief, for I had at last won a grim, wearing, and painful campaign. Almost immediately, relief was replaced by scorn of the publishing fraternity as a whole. If my book was publishable, why had ten publishers turned it down? Was this passing from hand to hand some sort of ritual designed to starve writers into submission, a refinement of the Inquisition whereby all publishers worked from a secret rota which told them, on submission of a manuscript, how many times it was to be refused before someone took it?

  However, clarification of this and other matters could wait. Nightrunners would be published, in January 1951. Viking would negotiate a contract through my agent, but would probably offer an initial advance of $1,500 against royalties. I told Keith, after thanking him, that I hoped we could finish the editing process on Nightrunners soon, because I needed to concentrate on The Deceivers now.