Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (16 page)

Brutal and Licentious
began to make the rounds of publishing houses in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. I worked on short stories and articles, finding the medium constricting after a full length book. While we had been away the autumn had secretly surrounded us, the forest behind us blazed and glowed with a brilliance that we found unearthly. The light, strained through the golden leaves, poured gold on the floors and made haloes of gold round the children's heads. Along the road the maples stood like ethereal flames, the sun afire in each transparent leaf. Up a disused cart track a hundred yards away, a single tree had turned deep scarlet. The heavy summer damp had dried out of the air, and every morning we breathed a light champagne, as sharp and exhilarating as the tang of evening woodsmoke from our fire. From High Tor ridge we saw Manhattan, opal and gold, rising out of the flat lands forty miles to the south like a presence created by a djinn, to vanish at his whim.

Macmillan rejected the book: no comment.

Forewarned that the Immigration authorities would probably not renew my visa when it came due in February, I had began to take action to defend our future on many fronts. The Dowdys were interceding with Congressman Harold Colley and Kenneth Royall, then Secretary of the Army, both North Carolinians. Colonel John Howard of Massachusetts, a Himalayan Holiday contact, was interesting Senators Cabot Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall. Through Vyvyan we had met the son of Senator Kilgore of West Virginia, who was approaching his father. An Immigration lawyer recommended by A. J. Balaban was studying my case...

While at Rocky Mount we had been taken to see the North Caroline — North Carolina State game; or, perhaps more accurately, to see Charlie Choo-choo Justice and Chorus. We enjoyed the game and the special college football atmosphere, and now determined to see as many Army games as we could afford. I was army myself, even if it was a different one, and West Point was barely twenty miles up river from us. So one glorious Saturday we provided ourselves with sandwiches and a flask (I had seen at Chapel Hill that this was
de rigueur)
and drove up to watch the Army — Columbia game. The Hudson, similar to but considerably more magnificent than the Rhine, was a trench of liquid steel between the gold and scarlet banks of the forest. At the Academy the cadets were marching on to the grassy Plain, their Colours and guidons snapping, all around the oriflammes of the trees.

The cadets drilled exceedingly badly to my eyes. At Sandhurst the whole lot of them, and whoever was responsible for their training, would have been rushed to the guardroom. After a time I realized that they weren't really drilling badly, they were listening to a different drummer. Each man slouched easily along, making no sound on the grass. There was none of the crisp crack and crash of British drill, but, from a distance, lounging against a rainbow at the edge of the Plain, the masses of them had grace, grace in the sum of the individuals, grace in the effortless unhurried step. The green cocks' feathers fluttered, the long rows of black stripes went back, forward, back, forward. Very nice... I was back in a familiar world. It was reassuring to know that it existed here, too.

Later, we asked the way of a cadet busily hurrying somewhere. He stopped, saluted, called me
Sir
and Barbara
Ma'am.
When he had learned where we wanted to go, he turned, slowed his pace to ours, and began to walk with us. It took several minutes of arguing and counter-courtesy before I could persuade him to go about his business and leave us to find our way.

We walked up to Michie Stadium in growing euphoria. The cadets' girls, the Columbia girls, the secretaries from New York, were as pretty and cheerful as so many bright birds. Red coats and dresses glowed like maples in the stands. The solid grey bank of cadets began to chant. The turf was bright green and covered with a hundred-and-fifty warriors in light blue, white, black, gold. The man behind us offered us his flask. The game began. We were seated behind the goal posts, high up, and could see little, but since we understood little, that was proper. The good temper of the crowd exhilarated us. Immediately in front of us a group of Columbia supporters, youngish and crewcut, probably lawyers or business executives, shouted outrageous remarks at Army supporters down the aisle. The man behind us explained that they were taunting Army with the previous year's famous Columbia upset victory over Army, then rated No. 1 in the country. A middle-aged Army wife near them responded with worse arrows at Columbia. Flasks were much in evidence, but only one man was drunk and he was in such good humour with himself and with his team, and so many people were looking after him, that it didn't matter.

In England, I thought, no one took a whisky flask to a Rubgy International. The team would not have been called 'Army', either, because it wasn't; it was only the Military Academy. In England...

I stopped short, thinking of a brief remark that Troup Mathews had made, without malice but with insight, the last time we met. 'You're in the comparing phase,' he had said. I realized that we were indeed not seeing events or circumstances in their own context, but in comparison with our own experiences. The tea was not as good as in England, the coffee better; New York was dirtier than London on the streets, but cleaner in restaurants and snack bars; just now I had been seeing the West Point drill not in itself but in comparison with Sandhurst's; Judge Medina's trial of the Communists in New York had prompted a continuous (and highly unfavourable) comparison between the courtroom chaos there and what would have happened at the Old Bailey... But Troup made us think that perhaps we should not compare; perhaps we should try to estimate things — even singing commercials — in their own terms, the terms of
here:
South Mountain Road, New City, Rockland County, New York, the United States of America.

Chapter Five

It would be exciting to try a novel. The major problem was the length of time that my capital — my writing hours — would be tied up in what might be another unproductive enterprise. A novel consisted of about 100,000 words, a short story of about 5,000. In theory I could write twenty shorts in the same time as one long. A novel was one big gamble, shorts a series of small ones. But the real odds were better on the novel, for the plain fact was that my short stories were not good, while the long book,
(Brutal)
was. Further I did not
like
writing short stories. And that settled it.

Harper's turned down
Brutal:
no comment.

I waited, biting my finger-nails, but Desmond gave me valuable advice. He said, 'A writer's time is always valuable. If you don't write anything I can't sell anything. While
Brutal
is going round the publishers, you should be starting something else.' I began to say that I had no idea for a short story, and that no one wanted the sort of articles I was interested in writing, but he cut in, 'Why don't you write a novel? You could, you know.' I settled down to work out the full implications of his suggestion.

The writing of
Brutal
had given me confidence that the mere mass of words in a full length book was nothing to be afraid of. Indeed, Desmond and others told me that I wrote much faster than most writers do. I like the freedom of the full form and found that short story a strait jacket. This was partly through indiscipline and extravagance in the use of words, but it was obvious that some writers are better in one form and some in the other. Kipling only wrote one good novel,
Kim
(a short one); Hemingway only two or three; Maugham, one; while most of the great novelists seldom or never wrote short stories. Perhaps space had a special value to me in writing, as in living. Perhaps I was a 'spacious' writer.

Very well. John Masters, who has written a volume of autobiography which no one will touch, is going to write a novel. O.K., what about?

But, wait. If the novel were not taken, I would give up writing. I would have no time or desire left to go on beating my head against the wall. I had other talents and would have to turn to them. But suppose it were published, what would be the results? There would be an immediate but probably impermanent lessening of our financial stringency. And then? I would be expected to write another novel. I would want to do it, too, for the first publication would be success, and I knew that champagne tingle in the blood. And then? Another one, obviously. And another... In fact, without planning it, I would become a novelist. But the smallest inspection showed that writers fell into two categories: one-book authors, and many-book authors. As I had no other means of support, one-book success would be no use to me. Therefore I had to be a many-book man. Was I?

John Day rejected
Brutal.
They said they already had a writer on Oriental subjects (Pearl Buck).

The many-book authors could again be divided into those who linked their books into some form of coherent chain, and those whose subjects were not linked. With Hemingway, for instance, there was no continuity between one book and the next. The pressure that made him write each book came from events in the outside world. He saw a war, a fiesta, a civil war and each triggered him to say something about it. Faulkner and Forester did link their books (Yoknapatawhpha, Hornblower) and the themes seldom had a direct or obvious connection with current events. The pressure that made them write, therefore, came from inside. They were more independent, since their thought or feeling carried its own germinating impulse, and did not require fertilization from outside.

For myself, I did not think it would be wise to trust to outside germination. Suppose I remained uninterested, infertile? To be sure of becoming, and remaining, a novelist and carrying out my elementary responsibilities as a husband and father, I must make sure that I had the seeds in me, fertilized and ready to flower and fruit under proper husbandry.

So the question,
What is my novel to be about?
had become,
What are my novels to be about?
The first requirement seemed to me to be that I should know my subject or subjects. Everyone knows something about people (though usually notably less than they think they do) and of course people and their development must form a large part of any novel; but the events and circumstances which do the developing are not universal, they are special to particular times, places... and people. To write about any one, you had to know that one. I could not write about Rockland County, for example, because I did not understand deeply enough the circumstances and events which helped to make our friends what they individually were.

The American scene engrossed my peripheral awareness. No one locked his door, day or night. I had had three or four small jobs done on Troup's Chevy and every time the mechanic had waved away my proffered money with
a
curt, 'Forget it', but the charge for one bigger job was very high. Legend to the contrary, I had met only politeness from New York cops and U.S. customs officers; but in the nation and community graft seemed to be endemic and universal. The papers were full of kickbacks, gerrymandering, and payola — words that I had to ask the meaning of. Everyone talked lightly of fixing traffic tickets. Fixing a traffic ticket, or attempting to bribe a policeman, was a criminal action; how could the politicians be expected to keep their fingers out of the pie if the voters thought nothing of fixing a ticket? Both actions were equally disgraceful. But the country so throbbed with energy, there was so much doing, talking, acting, planning, so fiercely were fought the battles, that dead cats were always being stirred up to the surface, to be grabbed and hurled as ammunition.

No, what I knew most about was the English: not the English in England, the English in India. There I had a personal knowledge extending over nineteen years and an understanding that stretched back, seeming to be bred into me, for four previous generations, a hundred-and-forty years. I had more appreciation of Clive than of Marlborough, and took pride that Wellington was called the Sepoy General. I admired Warren Hastings, 'the plain man in the snuff-coloured suit', more than either Pitt. In large part this was because I also understood and appreciated the circumstances that had shaped them. The breakdown of the Mogul Empire was far more real to me than the Industrial Revolution. I knew a great deal about jungles and jungle-dwellers and nothing about slums. I knew the difference between a Jain and a Sikh, but not between a Baptist and a Methodist. I admired Indian heroes, such as Asoka, Shivaji and Akbar more than any of the Napoleons, Fredericks, and Garibaldis who had managed to intrude themselves into the All-British history we were taught in school.

So, I could write about India and, more particularly, about the British In India. Anything else? Military affairs, for one; adventure and mystery stories, probably. And would I enjoy it? Yes, in all three cases, but India the most. And who would enjoy the results — like, for instance, readers? Some writers did not give a damn whether anyone read what they wrote, or not; I had met several such in Rockland County. I could not agree, for to me there is no writing without a partner, the reader. If there are to be no readers, there is, for me, no writing. Classifying the three fields open to me I thought that military affairs, being a rather specialized area, would attract few readers, unless I became a military correspondent. 'India' could hold a general readership, if I did it well. 'Adventure and mystery' with perseverance, certainly would. But my God, a mystery writer's life! the hours creating — what? Anodynes. I did not want to go into the drug business.

Little, Brown rejected
Brutal.
It was very well written and eminently readable, they said, but they couldn't think what category to publish it in, as it contained elements of travel, belles lettres, adventure, and military history, as well as autobiography.

My novels would be on 'the British in India', then. This covered a 347-year period. How many novels were there in that? An awful lot. But it was no use saying glibly, 'an awful lot'. How many could
I
write, and on what precise subjects?