Authors: Hortense Calisher
I see that I have just escaped Friday the 13—perhaps that was the day that went over the line. What a satisfactory thing a journal is—or perhaps it is just the sensation of resolve fulfilling—I always wanted to keep one and never have. Then too, it is a companion when one is touring alone. And one forgets so quickly. I meant to put down, back there over the Aleutians yesterday (how I love such an off-hand phrase, flinging my still newfound cosmopolitanism over my shoulder like a scarf) that
back there
in Washington, Mr. Derr, the man to brief me on Japan, and I throw up our hands over the impossibility of same. Again I had the impression that he had no idea of why I was going, or whom sent by. I imagine (from the way I have heard Foreign Office gents refer to the Br. Council) that information services are usually viewed dimly by the official services. But, feeling that this was no reason for
me
to be embarrassed, I told Mr. D. that I supposed the IEES simply picked someone who cd be trusted to fare forth on his own, etc. Mr. D. quickly and relievedly seized on this, returned my own remark twisted neatly around a compliment, rather like a napkin folded over a hot roll that he had buttered for me, and said “Yes,” he imagined that most of the briefing had been done in Personnel, when they had chosen me.
Dick Kearney, in the Legal Dept. of the Bureau of European Affairs, friend whom, with his wife Peg I had met in England in ’52, picked me up and drove me down to their place in Bethesda for dinner. Nice evening with him and Peg, who appeared the next morning to see me off. NWA is the best airline I have flown—I remind myself that it is the first time I had flown first class. En route to Detroit, over the champagne, seat-companion Joe Maher (pronounced Marr) of the legal dept attached to the Senate. Very pleasant, interested in my “mission,” discussed, among other things Norman Mailer—he is an admirer of
The Naked and the Dead
. “Approved” my ideas on various subjects which he extracted neatly—(few people have trouble on this with me, I say, rather pointedly to myself) with the constant statement “Ve-ery good. Very good”—that somehow seemed to be already infinitely American. In a nice way.
As soon as I start a journey to another country I already find myself looking at my compatriots from a certain severe, measuring distance. Champagne floated me to Seattle, steadied by a ceaseless flow of food. Plane out of Seattle was to have had only a 2½ hr. stopover, however was delayed 4 hrs., so I slept in the terminal lounge intermittently, writing letters in my head to the designers of air-terminals (Seattle’s is a new and handsome one) asking why they persist in installing doors that must be PULLed instead of pushed by passengers and porters with hands already encumbered (why not the photo-electric doors that every supermarket has?), and why they do not have a room with couches and SHOWERS.
On plane to Tokyo sat with a Miss Vivian Denkhahn, whom I had seen in terminal and already tabbed as an old hand, probably a social worker. (Blue serge suit, sandals, frizzed gray hair, neat and durable all round.) Not far off, I—she turned out to be a regional director for Southeast Asia, of the World Health Organization of the U.N. (headquarters in Geneva) recently working out of New Delhi. Bits of info mostly on shipping—although I tried to get her to talk of her own work—by asking about yaws in S. A., where she may go, etc. In Bangkok said she, I must buy jewelry at Johnny Siam’s, silks at Jim Thompson’s, an American who came originally to install Amer. methods in their silk industry and stayed to open a store. We floated over the ocean, and sozzled by the omnipresent champagne—I began to feel, and at this writing still do, that if slit neatly down the middle I should appear like one of those Russian doll-puzzle-toys I had as a child—a wooden oval doll inside which is another slightly smaller, inside which is—and so on down to the infinitesimal. Or like one of those
cordon-bleu
recipes out of
Gourmet
, which starts with a large bird, say a duck, inside which is a Cornish hen stuffed with rice at whose heart there is an artichoke which contains a crabapple which contains an olive stuffed with, I was going to say a toucan, my still air-addled head having intended pecan. But perhaps “toucan” is what I meant after all—it feels rather like.
Shemya airport, our only stop, formerly an airbase, is one of the last in the chain of the Aleutians, a 2 mile island that served us tea and more snaks (Aleutian spelling—Alaskan influence?) in the middle-middle of the gray Pacific. It is so small that we seemed to hover dangerously over the waves, scarcely more than a few hundred feet it seemed before we glimpsed its mud and gravel. An hour and a half there, during which most of us wrote letters or cards on forms accommodatingly supplied by the airline, which will mail them on free. I sent cards, knowing that I wd never do so from now on, and because not to send mail from an island so situated, when one can, is to slap the face of wonder.
At Tokyo airport, the official tour began. Met by Nancy Downing, very pleasant assistant to the cultural officer—one of those poised, cool American girls with a prettily indented profile, charmingly assured clothes and a perfect, lissom, if slightly unripe figure—all of it with a businesslike femininity about it that seems only slightly related to a sexual quality, and is almost too trim and virginal for it. I had forgotten how this comes out in our women so much more clearly when they are abroad. (Miss D. is by Decatur, Illinois, out of Wellesley, six years in Japan, her first job with the service.) I suppose it is this quality—the boss-virgin in them, which draws them plenty of beaux—(one thinks of these as beaus, not lovers, although this may often not be the case) but about which European men ultimately complain. I imagine too, that if one took a census of American women working abroad, a larger number of them wd prove to be middlewesterners, in the same way that the majority of our good correspondents come from there. More intrepidity, plus more desire for coastlines and seas. Anyway, the combination of good—quite good, or “solid” midwestern family and an eastern education is unbeatable in this sort of job.
Miss D., with the help of the NWA rep—a Mr. Watsunabe or Matsumoto—some Jap. equiv. of Smith-Brown, got me thru customs with a smooth and very acceptable V.I.P. treatment—the customs officer questioning only the traveling-iron, still packed in its anonymous wrapping from Abercrombie’s. I wondered how I should explain the packet which Donald Keene had given me to carry to Mishima, Keene’s wedding present to him. Since M. had asked for “a Western antique,” and D. had left it for me at the Beekman already packed, while I was out, I cd not have told them what it was if asked, but was not.
Japan, which I had hoped to be already cool, and Donald said might, greeted me with a gray-green humidity, something thick and sweet about it. Used as I am to New York, this was different—and my knitted sheath was no help. As we drove on, the rains came; it is the typhoon season, but I am told should already be cooler than it is. This is my usual luck, especially about heat—I had the familiar sensation of trying not to sweat in my unsuitable clothes. Miss D. gave me my itinerary. Only my plane’s being late saved me from appointments that same afternoon with embassy officers (these therefore delayed until Monday); they waste no time.
I therefore had Sat. and Sunday free—Miss D. asked if I wd like to go to Hakone, the national park area around Fuji, or Nikko. Although I might—I thought it wd be too melancholy and wearing to do alone and at first and said so. (What a bad tourist I am—one year’s residence in England and a second visit, and I still have never seen the Tower. It wd be entirely in line if I got out of Japan without seeing Fujiyama, which of course was shrouded when we came in on the plane—the steward said he had seen it so only once in 8 yrs.) Miss. D. accepted this, questioned me very little in general—to her I was an entity in the business way, quite like the sports personality sent by my program last month—who “spent all his per diem on shopping and was difficult over being denied PX privileges.” I humbly indicated that I wd not be. Since I had no Jap. money and she had to be at an embassy reception at 5:30, she recommended that I wait to cash a check in the Imperial. They put “all their visitors” there, she informed me—again I had the sense that I belonged to a category which they were prepared to find unmanageable in some inconvenient way—Faulkner had undoubtedly got drunk, the sportsman had his Achilles heel—what wd be mine? I chatted with a heady air of competence and worldliness—when Miss D. got back to her own she wd be able to say “This one seems O.K.”
We drove first up to the Old Building—of the Imperial—regrettably I am quartered in the New Annex, not the old one, (Frank L. Wright design). Rivers of water came out to meet us—at least on this score I have been provident. Boots of light rubber and heavy in my bag, umbrella, raincoat. The Imperial is undoubtedly one of the great hotels of the world. Arranged for foreigners—almost all personnel speak some English—and now of course definitely oriented (in two senses of the word) toward Americans, as it might once have been toward Germans and then English. (Kippers still on the breakfast menu—I had them the next morning.) At the last minute Miss D. invited me to the reception—probably to her horror, and mine, I accepted. It was partly the inability to stop that comes from exhaustion, and partly habit begun on my first trip abroad in London—never, however weary, spend the first night in a foreign country alone in a hotel. Claustrophobia, even xenophobia, might set in. She lent me 200 yen, enough to get me to the Sanno hotel from mine, cautioned me, in answer to my question about dress, to wear nothing too barely cocktailish, no thin straps—the Japanese don’t and Mrs. MacArthur had so decreed.
The room was quite lovely in the J. manner to which our own recent craze for their interiors—the motel in Suffern, the house exhibited at the Museum, of Mod. Art, and countless lampshades in the houses of my friends and myself—had already accustomed me all too thoroughly. Once on the bed, released from the air-motion but with it still inside me, I placed my forehead on the sheet and all but conked out—“smiling, the boy fell dead.” Exactly so—a poem was never more convenient. Southey? Not what one wd have thought one wd think in Japan. But of course I was not really here as yet—or there. My atoms, streaming behind me, had still to be collected—from Washington, Seattle, from the house in Nyack, Josh’s place in New York, Mary’s with Curt, the Earle with Curt. Lulled by the motion of the DC7, hedge-hopping up and down through the last clouds of the voyage, and probably seduced by the penultimate glass of champagne, I dreamed of him, of making love. In my dream we did so, then still atom-confused, we met at the airstrip in Tabriz, I fell on his breast and said “I have come a long way to be with you,” and scanned his face for traces of Italy where, even in my dream, I knew he was at the moment.
I woke up on the bed, trifled with thoughts of calling Miss D., now dressing at her home whose number I had, and begging off. No. She had suggested a stole if what I had was too bare. Not sure it was—the black Lanz silk jumper without blouse—the white wool stole, though smart, was too impossible for the weather, the long black lace scarf, my grandmother’s, properly aristocratic but bad against black. I was too tired to be chic; went off draped in the lace, feeling rather—and looking, what with my black hair and gold earrings, as if I were about to tell fortunes. But I was glad I went—even though I began to feel ill from the standing. I had never before had the symptoms of real lack of sleep (very little in four days)—and I have the writer’s greediness to know all such sensations—rather like Colette’s insistence that she not be drugged even when dying of arthritis—although my version of it is pale beyond comparison—I shall never be that brave, when the time comes.
Went down a reception line, mouthing appropriately, in a sort of daze. Miss D. no where to be seen at first, but met people rapidly, Nickel of the embassy, an odd bird Joe “Skelly”—(certainly Irish-sounding, but he appears to have a somewhat-garment-district was it?—not quite—accent) turned out to be named Szekely—Hungarian, of the U.S. Information Service at the embassy. Many Japanese. An Army-Navy Club reception. I remembered one such at the A.N. club in London, with Mickey, where to her delight, when I got stuck with a Haw-haw who had to tell me, or let me know, that his daughter had married a lord, who had insisted on giving her a Bentley (“Dear me, the improvidence of the younger generation”—especially those who marry lords), I had let myself be chatted to for just so long—(it wasn’t the upmanship of the gent that bothered me but talk about cars, any cars—from a lifetime of it with H. I cannot bear it—and had then moved off with the airy statement—“Ah, well, you know, I am American, I have only a Cadillac.” A 1941, so I cd speak with truth, even if with my own upmanship. I thought of it now because embassy receptions must be the same world-over, though I have been to few. Here the Japanese ladies were bow-crouching, in the curve I knew from woodblocks and prints—graceful as they are, it does not go with the western dress most of them wore. With so many other Americans in the room I did not feel my height, as I had expected to, and may, when, if I am lucky, the company is all Japanese.
I say lucky, because part of traveling-luck is to meet as many of a country’s people as possible, as intimately as possible (and this will be hard in the Orient). Also, I know that even embassy Americans, who are trained to “meet the native” in a job way, and are often intelligent and adroit about it there, really continue socially to congregate with their own, (except for the really bright or freakish ones who do not and are rarer) and tend to regard with benevolent indulgence those, like me, who show signs of insisting on the other. “Jobwise” they are proud of knowing “the Japanese,” “the British,” etc., and “all about them”; they fancy the cosmopolitan touch as well as any, but it is only the rare and really top-in-the-field ones, like Donald, who do not to have to “let-down their hair” in the bosom of their own kind, etc. And already I had met several with the familiar practiced American bonhomie—too experienced of course to back-slap literally, but still the conversation, the manner, has a backslap about it.