Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey Read online

  As we glided through the Narrows the dawn spread up and out, and the magic city rose at the head of the Upper Bay.

  Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships

  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

  Only Marlowe's 'mighty line' came to me, and would not go. I did not try to analyse the application of the line, to wonder whether New York was the face, or the topless towers — and mine the face. The light slanted cold from the east across a bitter, cloud-streamered sky. The west sides of the buildings were dark exclamations, the east bright, the water black but aglitter with points of light on the thrown waves. We forged on through grinding floes and shattered blocks of ice, past the Statue of Liberty, past Governor's Island. For a moment Lower Broadway opened a long canyon, then the walls closed. We passed into the North River. We docked.

  I had arrived. Surely no immigrant ever greeted the city and the world with a greater exhilaration, a greater passion of excitement and determination.

  Alice Mathews, who had been Alice Westfeldt when her family were my hosts in New Orleans in '38, met me at the pier and took me off to Morningside Heights, where her husband was adviser to foreign students at Columbia University. After a few days there I moved to a small hotel in the east 30s, where I got a small room on the seventh floor for $19 a week. The cockroaches had left the place in disgust some years earlier, but it suited me. For $18 I bought a typewriter, which may have been Mr Sholes's first demonstration model, and opened my Himalayan Holidays file. I was in business.

  I took a day or two off to walk about the city and arrange my thoughts. The family were supposed to move — somewhere — by mid June, but I ought to have a firm plan by the end of April. That gave me three months to make good with the Himalayan Holidays, The Bra, or whatever else I could unearth. I must live as cheaply as possible; I did not know how cheaply that would be, but I thought I could get by on $42 a week, all in. Above that, I must obviously be prepared to spend something on pushing my two plans. $200 seemed a proper sum of money to allot to them. When that was spent, I would have to decide whether to allot more time and money to them, or turn to something else. What else, I had no idea.

  New York began to awaken at half past seven every morning, when I went out for breakfast. Dirty snow, left over from the Big Snow of December 26, 1947, lay packed along walls and sidewalks. Each morning, as the snow melted, new objects emerged from it — a pocket-book, a set of false teeth, an overshoe, a snow shovel. I ate at a tiny diner next door to the hotel, run by two Greek brothers. They closed at 3 a.m. and opened at 5.30 a.m. The food was not great, but it was acceptable, and I ate there because it made me feel good to think that the owners, whose accents were stronger than mine, could make a living by sheer determination. In the long reaches of the night one used to sleep under the counter, while the other stood sentry.

  The bars also were open all day and most of the night and though my drinking was severely limited I made a point of occasionally downing a beer at an hour when the pubs in England would have been shut, to confirm to myself the reality of this particular freedom. I also felt easier in my mind, as I watched the work done in bars and cafeterias, for I saw that with a little practice I could undertake any of it. It would hardly be the attainment of our life-object for me to become a quick-lunch artist, but the idea put a kind of backstop behind my fears. We would not starve.

  I began to hear the rhythm of the city. With each day's passing hours New York's life-flow shifted from some arteries to others. As Fifth Avenue congealed, Sixth and Second throbbed; 57th Street dozed and 14th Street awoke. All day steam hissed mysteriously and menacingly out of manholes in the streets, melting the snow around them, and at night the racing taxis hit the manhole covers with a double cl-clunk which, with the police sirens, was the music of the lonely hours. There were amazing neon-lit palaces where the packaged, cooked food was stacked in holes in the wall and you had to get it out yourself and take it on a tray to a sharp-eyed lady in a high chair. A dozen radio stations kept on the air twenty-four hours a day. The subways were ancient and filthy, and the streets full of blowing paper and junk of all kinds, but there were no girls offering sleazy delights from the doorways round Times Square, or anywhere else.

  The pace of New York was measured and dignified, and considerably slower than London's. The people on Madison Avenue and in Herald Square moved less hurriedly than the people in Regent Street. For every man I saw running to catch a bus or subway I would have seen twenty in London. I never saw a New York girl running at all; in 87

  London the pretty typists ran and scurried out of Victoria or Waterloo as frantically as the clerks. The elevators moved very fast once one had got into them; but that was not the New Yorker hurrying, that was a machine hurrying for him. The few escalators were narrow and old-fashioned, and seemed to be regarded as dangerous innovations. They moved so cautiously that in London everyone would have been running up or down them (in London one person in five on the escalators is always running, even at their fast speeds). So I went about my business, never stopping, at the even pace of the great city.

  Carrying the Himalayan Holidays file I began to visit travel agents. I walked over 100 blocks every day, and usually saw ten or twelve agents. They were amazingly good in giving me their time, for me to explain what I was about; but they were not encouraging. I quickly found that a chief obstacle was a well-concealed distrust of my abilities and honesty. This brought home to me, for the first time, how truly I had cut my moorings in leaving England. The social structure of England was such that with my accent and my army rank my honesty would be taken for granted until I did something to cause people to doubt it. In England I was never asked to produce references, give my address on a cheque, or make a deposit on a purchase. In New York my hairy tweed suit and my accent, though both genuine, seemed to arouse the opposite feeling in those with whom I was trying to do business. I moved in a strong aura of slightly mystified distrust. I could almost hear the men muttering to themselves, Well, this guy's a phony if ever I saw one, but he's picked a strange racket; he isn't going to make much money out of it whatever he does, so what's the deal? Beyond doubting my honesty they also clearly mistrusted my competence, for to them service in a regular army — any regular army — was automatically a mark of business ineptitude.

  To heighten these obstacles there was the unfortunate fact, now learned by me for the first time, that a well-known lady had taken a party of Americans to India not long before, and left them stranded in Bombay, while she came back with the money. Some of the agents I talked to had been bitten in that affair and did not want to get bitten again.

  In the outside world, which became dimmer and more unreal every day as I dug deeper into my own struggle for survival, the Foreign Office prophecies continued to come sickeningly true. In this month of February the Communists, protected by Russian troops, took over Czechoslovakia, and in March murdered Jan Masaryk, to remove the only figure round whom an opposition could have rallied.

  I learned of the existence of travel editors, and began to call on them. Snippets about Himalayan Holidays appeared in half a dozen newspapers and magazines. Then a letter of inquiry arrived from Boston, and I danced for joy in my seventh floor eyrie. Success!

  The writer of that letter came down to New York and we had a long talk. He was, I think, convinced of my good faith, but it turned out that my expedition was not going to fit into his schedule. However, he gave me introductions, I was invited to parties, met people, and talked continually about the Himalayas, and the wonders of the open air and the high mountains. My victims listened with tolerant mistrust — of the open air, I mean. (Was it not in New York that the cocktail party guest crept into the kitchen and opened the window a tiny fraction to get some air, to have the hostess rush in a moment later, crying 'I smell gas!'?)

  I allotted more time to The Bra, and found my way over to Seventh Avenue and the notions streets of the west 30s. Bra in hand, I explained its merits to many a wary denizen of th
e garment district. Their idiom was more sharply pointed than the travel agents', and they worried considerably less as to whether they were hurting my feelings; but they spoke their opinions honestly, and were in that way more helpful. Also, they didn't care what kind of a charlatan I might be. They confined their attention to the wonderful bra, and when that was dismissed, as it always was, chatted to me with no ill will. When I left these small, cluttered establishments we were usually on the best of terms, and I shared several kosher lunches in the district, but I wish I could have recorded in marble the expressions that accompanied our early dialogues, which went something like this:

  'Good morning. I'm Colonel Jack Masters. I have here a brassy-air that should interest you.'

  The chewed, unlit cigar swings slowly from the left to the right side of the mouth opposite, the ears prick forward like a hound's, the nose twitches, the eyes stray from my mouth, whence these strange noises emerge, to the tweed suit.

  'A brazeer? That?'

  'This strap here, and this, go round under the bosom, and by tightening, so...'

  The cigar rotates wildly: 'Who did you say you were, mister?'

  '... remarkable brassyair... patents pending...

  He gets up and fingers my suit, which has the texture of a grouse moor. 'Nice piece of material there. How much did that set you back?'

  '...supports sagging breast... firms muscles...

  'Jesus, a dame could strangle herself in this, you know... Now, this tweed...

  When I was there in February 1939, New York had seemed a cold, dirty city. It was still dirty, but the people I met now, on my improbable quests, showed me that it 90

  was not cold. And after the travel agencies and the sweat shops were closed, and I could do no more talking, I kept on walking, and knew no boundaries but those set by hunger, when my rumbling belly told me I must eat. I walked from the hotel up to Columbia and down to Fulton Street. I walked to Coney Island and the Bronx. In Manhattan I walked from river to river, knew every street between the Village and the Park, and never, never spoke of the 'Avenue of the Americas'. I gazed in every window and at every intersection paused to observe the traffic, for sooner or later I would have to take a driving test here, and I did not mean to fail it. (I hoped I would take the test in a Cadillac with the flirty little fins. I found them as dashing and distinctive as the Vauxhall's radiator gouges, or the Daimler's louvered grill top.)

  Of all the city, my favourites were the garment district by day, for its noisy energy, and by night the Armenian district Lexington in the high cos. The food there reminded me of far travels and was good and cheap, and the people were warm and outgoing. Several of the owners, waiters, and clients had not come from Armenia proper but from neighbouring Azerbaijan, in Persia. I had been close there in the war, so we shared bread and talked of the beautiful land where Turkey, Iraq, and Persia meet, the wild duck fly by Van Gol and the Kurdish snows bend down to Urmieh.

  The only trouble was that these long cellars were always being discovered. In several cases, when I first went I was the only outlander and everyone was talking in Armenian; a month later bright young couples in search of quaintery had discovered the place, their confident English had abashed the Armenians into silence, and the old men had vanished into the carpets.

  I thought, this is a good city. The people found me strange, because I had a strange product to sell, but that 9

  was all. Where I was accepted, as I was in many very disparate milieus, it was as me, John Masters, not for what I had done or become. Busy people gave me their time, and rich ones took the trouble to explain what I was up against, and why. A stranger paid my fare to Boston and back and made me his guest for a week-end at an exclusive country club, so that I could meet people who might be prospective clients. The New York manner was sometimes brusquer than I had been used to, but there was seldom any ill will behind it. I became annoyed only once, when I held open the heavy swing door of an office building for a man behind me, and he strode through without a word. I stepped up beside him and said, 'When someone holds a door open for you, it's customary to say Thank you.' He turned with a stare, at first angry; then he shrugged and said, 'Say, I didn't notice.' Well, he probably should have noticed, but there was enough generosity being shown to me so that I learned to ignore the minor forms of politeness.

  I met a marvellous variety of people. The first was Stanley Odlum, one of my closest boyhood friends, and this was a sad reunion. The cheerful boy with whom I had climbed trees and walked the downs in Wiltshire had become an embittered alcoholic at thirty-one. What had gone wrong? He was heir to millions, and had perhaps been given too much too soon. He had killed a woman with his car in California, but that was caused by the drinking. What caused the drinking? He had been shot down over Germany and spent two years as a prisoner of war. Perhaps that was the cause, but I doubt it. I spent more hours with him in the King Cole bar than I could afford, or wanted to, and once went home with him to his disgusted young wife. I had met her twelve years before, on their honeymoon in London, but now she took me aside and asked me to leave as soon as possible. Stanley was swaying in a chair, mumbling 'Siddown — have a drink,' but I was glad, and very unhappy, to go. He wasn't interested in her, or his kids, or his father's business, or me. I would probably fail. Have a drink.

  Then there was an Afghan prince, in whose apartment I attended an occasion of half-oriental, half-Park Avenue opulence. The other guests were all Americans, but mental expatriates. They didn't think much of the United States. It had little charm and no breeding, and nothing really good was made here. I wondered why they stayed.

  And a pair of young men in the east 60s, who had served in the American Field Service. The interior decorator's art — their own — had given their huge rooms something of the air of Nero's palace. They wore crew cuts and suede shoes, and their hands fluttered. Their voices were slightly nasal, the words long-vowelled. We parted on good terms, I with my virtue intact. I doubted whether they or their friends were likely candidates for a Himalayan Holiday, but perhaps I was wrong. There's no reason why gaiety should not reign on such a trip.

  The worlds of America continued to burst into existence, like new-cracked crystals, around me. Already the idea of speaking or thinking in generalizations was becoming ludicrous. The garment men were Americans, the Armenians were Americans, the Greek quick-lunch men were Americans, the seedy hotel porter with his seedy tales of life in Moline, Illinois, was an American. So were the members of that country club outside Boston, where flourished a way of life that made me blink from its exact resemblance to that in a good regiment of British cavalry. The wealth was there, but played down, the manners were casual, the tweeds only slightly less hairy than my own, and there was a pack of foxhounds in the kennels outside. The only real differences between that club and the mess of the 10th Hussars was a slight one of accent in the voices, and that the oil painting over the mantelpiece was of George Washington. But they too were Americans.

  And there was Vyvyan Donner, whose British cousin's wife was the inventor of The Bra. Vyvyan was in her mid-fifties at that time, I suppose, and was fashion director for Movietone. I presented my letter of introduction and she invited me to tea in her beautiful apartment in the Osborne. I told her what I was trying to do. She believed me, and in me; and from that day one for three months I often wondered how she and her cousin Eugenie Huckel got any other work done. They seemed to spend their entire time ferreting out people who could help me with my plans, and bullying them into inviting me to their houses. I ran from lunches to teas to cocktails to dinners, talking. Vyvyan knew everyone in New York, from O'Dwyer and Impelliteri to Believe-it-or-Not Ripley and Fernand Tappe, and didn't hesitate to enlist them. She tried to persuade Movietone to make a documentary in the Himalayas, with me as the narrator. She gathered groups for informal discussions; she thought up ideas by the score, wrote letters, made telephone calls. In that time I never heard her say an ill word about anyone, and I never heard anyone say an ill
word about her. She was amusing, she worked hard, she was a well-known figure in the movie industry, which is not noted for its gentleness; but nothing ever altered her smiling efficiency and grace. With her and Eugenie, almost invariably at her expense, I began to see something of a more luxurious New York than I could have seen on my own. I collected vast and exotic sandwiches from the Stage Delicatessen a little down 7th Avenue; and sipped cocktails in the Beekman Tower, where the lower buildings between 1st and Lexington Avenue offered the best view of the glittering towers of midtown Manhattan. We rode together, well wrapped, in a drosky through Central Park, and actually shook hands with Sherman Billingsley and Toots Shor; and took three or four Sunday week-end trips to the estates of her friends in New Jersey and along the Pennsylvania Main Line. It was not a world that I would ever want to belong to, however successful I might become, but it was a much needed change from the fleapit... and it was fun.

  Occasional visits to the Mathews' on Morningside Heights would strengthen my moral fibre and broaden my mind. Troup and Alice had four small girls by then, and I was amazed and encouraged to see how they could live on very little money, and with no servants at all, not even a Nanny. Troup's family came from Georgia, but he had been born in France and educated there and in England. He seldom finished sentences, and his talk was like flung crackers, exploding ideas to cast sudden light from unexpected angles. He thought my Himalayan Holidays plan was too pie-in-the-sky to succeed, but he did all he could to help. More important, he explained much, for his background enabled him to translate to me matters that I had no bearings on.