Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (12 page)

I set about it in the way I had learned, and taught at the Staff College and at war. First, what was my object? To sell an article about Hollywood's views of India to an American magazine. Wait, that wasn't my object, was it, really? Wasn't my object to write it? To write it really well?... No, my object was to sell it. If my object had been to write it, I wouldn't be thinking about the form of it, or what language I used; I would be writing to please myself only. But this was not so; I wanted to sell it, so that must be my object.

Now for the 'factors affecting the attainment of the object'. I wanted to sell it to an
American
magazine, so I must not use English slang, which would be unintelligible, and even if it were understood would give the American reader a sense of strangeness, so that he would be noting the language instead of doing what I wanted him to do, recognize my portrait and laugh at my humour. Still less 98 99

must I use American slang, because there is only one thing sadder than an American telling 'English' jokes, and that is an Englishman telling 'American' jokes. I must use universal English, which would be fine, because that is the most powerful and most flexible instrument ever formed.

What should be my style, my manner? Suppose I 'wrote down' to the readership of some imaginary pulp magazine, in the hope of pleasing the editor? I knew from experience that the result would be bad, because the condescension would show. I had learned in my profession that a battle order needs a choice of words and a rhythm of phrase different from a paper on India's strategic airfields. I had learned that if I were trying to persuade a choleric general of the falsity of something he believed in, I must select phrases to arouse his reason, not his choler. But within such limitations, I must always write in the clearest and most powerful way I knew, because anything less always showed. Only those write well for the pulps whose mind and style, at their best, are pulpy. Only time would tell whether I fell into this category.

And this, too, of writing my best, would solve another matter, that of self-satisfaction or, to give it the more pompous vogue-word of the time, self-fulfilment. I would not feel happy about work which was consciously inferior, however much money I made.

To the drafting, then: do I want to have the reader waiting for a punch at the end, some great belly-laugh, or do I want him grinning from the start? From the start, I think: for surely this subject is not climactic, but panoramic, so the writing technique must conform. Next...

These things, which take a lot of time to write about, took very little time to do, because the ways of thought which I have been describing were ingrained and automatic in me. In fact I had laid down the outline of the article in half an hour, and written it, some fourteen pages amounting to 3,500 words, in another two hours. The next morning I put on my hostile critic's hat and re-read it, sternly restraining my chuckles at the writer's wit and acumen. Had he done what he set out to do? Was the rhythm of the sentences right? Was the interest continuous? Was the humour in the situations (Thurber-like) rather than in the words (Perelman-like)? Had he written his best, i.e. could I find more pointed words, more powerful phrases, than he had used?

I made many corrections, large and small, hacked out as many adjectives and adverbs as I could bear to part with (this is Dogma One of Good English, as taught me by my English teacher at Wellington in 1930), and sent the piece to Rex Lardner, asking him to read it and, if he thought it good enough, advise me what to do next.

A day or so later he rang up to say he liked my piece very much. He would not submit it to his own magazine, because Hollywood was considered to be too much of a sitting duck for the
New Yorker's
poison-pen experts. But he had sent it to an agent he knew. The agent would get in touch with me if he had any luck with it.

I put the whole business out of my mind, and returned to my questing-beagle patrols, cocking an ear to people's conversations, turning over garbage-cans of thought, and studying the classified columns of the
New York Times
as though my life depended on it... which, as far as I knew, it did. But still the jobs that were vacant in such stunning profusion had no reality to me.

On the third morning the agent rang me up and told me that
The Atlantic Monthly
had bought my piece for $100. He, the agent, would be grateful if I could find time to visit him in his office. Yes, I thought I could find the time. My eye strayed over the empty room, the silent typewriter, the closed
yakdan.
No trouble at all.

The next day I went to his office on Fifth Avenue. Without more ado he told me that in his considered opinion as a long-time and successful literary agent, I could make my living by writing professionally.

An unearthly light filled the room. I had never in my life heard such an extraordinary and fundamentally meaningless collection of words. I asked him to repeat them. He did so. The light went out and I thought, good God, he means it.

Pulling myself together I heard him ask to see anything else I had written. I thought of my
Mountain Warfare Green Paper,
generally considered the most cerebral ever produced by a Staff College D.S. on that arcane subject. I thought of my little 1937 monograph on
Infantry dress in India;
of the half dozen poems I, like every well-bred British officer, used to keep in my knapsack rolled round my field-marshal's baton; of my 1932 school essay on
Judaism and the early Christian Church,
with Mr Malim's 'very good' inscribed in the margin. But these were not what the agent had in mind; in any case, I had not thought to bring them to the U.S. with me, so I answered, No. He then asked whether there was anything else I proposed to write. I answered again, no, but that I could probably think of something. With this, and expressions of good will, we parted.

Back in my room I considered the agent's suggestion. It seemed a strange and dangerous one. 'A living' meant a regular job. Writing, in the way the agent meant — that is, on my own, not as an editor or reader or employee of a publisher — would produce money obviously — I had a cheque for $90 in my hand to prove it — but it could hardly count as
a living.
It would be ridiculously precarious. There would be no pension. It was unsound, flighty, unfair to my wife and children. I ought to reject it out of hand.

But did it not offer freedom of action, independence, a chance to be my own master, happiness in my work? Periods of intense effort followed by long holidays? Freedom to travel? Apart from the lack of security it met every one of our requirements, and security was something merely desirable, not essential.

My earning power would obviously depend on how good, famous, infamous, or all three, I became. I knew that Kipling had earned $2.30 a word. In this Hollywood article I had worked for about five hours and been paid $100, less 10 per cent commission to the agent: $90.00 — or $18.00 per hour. But wait, I must have been mulling over those ideas about Hollywood in my mind for years. Perhaps I would need four martinis every time to translate an idea into words, which would add greatly to the cost and considerably shorten my writing career, not to mention my life. And I had had to go to India and see movies about India, to be able to write that piece. The expenses were really considerable.

By now my mind was beginning to glow with banked fires. I recited our agreed object:
To live as a family unit in a place that offers space, liberty, and opportunity to all of us and, to me, independence in a work that I liked...
It couldn't have fitted better.

For a time it might be necessary to live close to editors and agents — which meant, as far as my knowledge went, living close to New York — but even that was probably not vital, only desirable; and if I succeeded we could surely go anywhere: Arizona, Maine, wherever there was space. In truth, I was already getting the feeling of space, of room to expand, even in the deepest canyons of Manhattan, so there might be no need to pack a tent and search out a wild river, an empty sky.

Did writing itself have 'space', or scope? That I could not see, but surely it was because I could not yet relate my own abilities to the scope of writing, which obviously 103

had almost unlimited scope. The prospect, as yet dark to my sight, was like looking at the lower slopes of a huge something, fog-shrouded, lit here and there by flashes of light from a higher place.
A Tale of Two Cities
I saw momentarily, and
Sons and Lovers,
and
Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, Richard II... Rifleman
Dodd, Tom Jones, Hornblower, Huckleberry Finn... Sherlock Holmes, Becky Sharp, Major Barbara, and Gibbon's sonorous roll of the emperors... the white whale and the whale hunt, battles, searches, and climbs... love and music and wine, sadness, the outward face and inward eye, Proust and Stevenson, the golden bowl and the silver cord.

Space! My God, I had not understood what the word meant till I began to look at this swirling, towering infinity in front of me. As long as I remained my own master, my scope as a writer would depend only on my scope as a human being.

Putting aside for a moment the question of financial success or failure, would I be content as a writer? Suppose I stayed for ever on the lower slopes, digging out saleable lumps of mud when I was striving to find diamonds. Suppose the expression of my whole personality through just one channel was too limiting. Then, how was it that so many writers seemed to suffer from frustration, the nature of which I could not know and they could not explain? (It usually seemed to spring from the fact that they wished they had written something other than what they had.) What about the writers who accepted fortunes in Hollywood, while wailing that it was degradation, prostitution? Worst of all, what if I got bored with writing, or succeeded too easily and found myself writing the same book over and over again, as, to my knowledge, half a dozen well-known authors were doing?

Well, from the fleapit, with one short article to my credit, those questions were insoluble and, for all I knew, might also be irrelevant to my case. As Nelson said:
Something must be left to chance. No captain can do very wrong if he lays his ship alongside that of an enemy.

Good. Now to make a cold appraisal of my chances. It was impossible to know what kind of a writer I would be. Among the writers I most admired were Maugham, C. S. Forester, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gibbon, Chaucer, Milton, Walter Pater, Macaulay, and George Orwell. I could not decide whether to class Lincoln as a writer or not, but I thought that his style was the best of all. If I thought these were good, my own style would probably be lapidary and objective, rather than chiaroscuro and subjective. The content, at least at first, would certainly be matter of which I had personal experience, which meant, apart from the universals of life and love: war, India, Gurkhas, tigers, and so on. Generally speaking, that sort of writing and that sort of subject did not please critics, but did make money. In terms of survival, this was a factor favourable to me.

Assuming that I earned no money at all for a time we could, according to my now experienced calculations, live in New York for about two and a half years on my pension and gratuity alone. (The British Treasury had refused to
give
me the latter in a lump sum because I was asking for it to be transferred outside the sterling area; they were spreading the payments over five years.) This would still leave enough for us to return to England and survive a year or so on that part of the gratuity still due to me, while looking for a job. So I could invest about two and a half years in making myself a self-supporting writer. I did not hesitate a moment in deciding it was a reasonable investment.

Next, to consider what to do if I nevertheless failed. The worst blow would perhaps be to my self-confidence, for I would have been proved wrong and all those others, who waited with relish for me to fail, right. But would it be disastrous, really? I thought not — here. Here in the United States there were other jobs. I could shovel snow, or run a petrol station, or guard a bank, and though none of those was close to our object, perhaps farther west there were such jobs, in the National Park or Forest Services, or on a dude ranch, maybe. It was important that my background would not limit me. In England, if I had applied for a job as a bank guard, it would automatically be assumed that I was an incurable drunk, thief, or sodomite. Else why would I not be safe in one of those jobs the Establishment reserved for its indigent members — secretary of a golf club, steward of a small estate, bursar at a seedy prep school?

There was no escaping the dangerous logical answer: I ought to try to become a writer. I wished again that Barbara were here, but this time I knew that to try to throw any of the burden of decision on to her would be only because I was funking it myself. She would have to say, however gently, that only I could tell whether I might become a writer; for her part, she would happily accept my decision, and whatever risks were attached to it.

I grasped the nettle and made up my mind: I would be a writer. I wrote at once to Barbara telling her I had found a career. Then I recalled Nelson's dictum, just quoted: it was time to lay my ship alongside the enemy. I quoted aloud a drunken Sinclair Lewis's advice on the art of creative writing, given to an audience-hall full of would-be creative writers (and I quote his lecture in full): 'You stupid looking sons of bitches wanna write? Well, gwan home and write!' I could almost hear the money dripping out of my pocket as from a leaking tap. The last cents would tinkle out on December 31, 1950. I began to write.

Chapter Four

My interest in the
New York Times
shifted from the classified to the real estate sections. On Sunday mornings, after walking over to Lexington Avenue for breakfast and to buy the paper at a street-corner stall, I returned to my eyrie and began to search for a place where we could settle down while I wrote. We love the sea, so I looked first at the summer homes and camps on Long Island and along the Connecticut and Jersey shores. I found nothing of the size we would need, at anywhere near the price I could afford, except one on Shelter Island. After looks at the map and the railroad and bus timetables I decided that it would be too difficult and expensive to get to New York from there, so I regretfully turned my attention to the inland counties, and after a week or two of hesitations over places that were nearly right, but not quite, I found an apparently suitable house advertised for rent in Rockland County, New York, for a price I could afford to pay.