Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (47 page)

On the wider scene, we were registered Democrats, and did what we could to see that the party chose the best available candidates for public office. I occasionally wrote letters to the President on matters which deeply concerned us, or on which we had some special knowledge, because I thought it our duty to take part in the consensus which someone would analyse out of all the letters that people wrote.

In one small battle I led the mob to the barricades. The New York Trap Rock Company was suing the Town in court to try to break a town zoning ordinance. The Town was counter-suing to the effect that the Company's operations constituted a public nuisance and a menace to health and welfare in the area. In the middle of all this the Company was also opening a new and hugely noisy crushing-plant quite close to Centenary, the hamlet where our house stood. They invited Governor Dewey to come and make the formal inauguration of the new plant. I got a Rockland neighbour, an old-line conservative whom no one could possibly call a pinko-Jew-liberal, to join with me in signing a letter to the Governor in which we advised him that his appearance at the ceremony would look like taking sides for the Company against the Town and people. Whether because of the letter or for some other reason, he changed his mind at the last minute and did not attend. Later I and many neighbours spent hours in court giving evidence in the case against the Trap Rock Company. To protect their 'right' to befoul the environment they attempted to prove that we were a bunch of penniless bums who didn't have an environment worth preserving. In support of their case they produced photographs of old Mrs Mahoney's incredible shack, but did not show the $100,000 houses of the Caniffs, Housemans, Demings, and others along South Mountain Road. The whole demonstration of corporate morals made us realize that our leftist neighbours had a point.

As a person I hoped I would go on growing in the general direction indicated by my new profession and country, which was quite different from what I had expected at the age of twenty, or even thirty. One particular dream which we could now make a reality was travel. I am a born gypsy, Barbara a willing and delightful companion, for we shared the same attitude towards the outdoors, museums, sights, night-life, food and wine, and in other ways complemented each other: when we walked together, I saw and pointed out the long views, the grand scenes, while she saw and identified the flowers among the rocks, and the birds in the trees. We both loved meeting strange people, eating strange foods, and experiencing other ways of life, both for their own sakes and perhaps to take some part of the people's life style into our own. I spoke six languages — three well — and Barbara as many. We agreed that we would try never to go to any country without learning a little of the language beforehand.

Where to go first? We pored over the maps and agreed at last Corsica, to walk in the maquis; and Switzerland, to walk by the Matterhorn, perhaps in the upper Rhone Valley, preferably in the time of the grape harvest, the
vendange.

'Fondue! Rösti!' Barbara cried enthusiastically.

'The Brig-Zermatt Rack Railway!' I said. 'The Simplon Tunnel! The Loetschberg!'

Mrs Hallam was drying plates and glasses in the kitchen. 'Lord, I'm quite tiddly, sir,' she said. 'The gentlemen keep giving me drinks, and they swear there's nothing in them, but there's no green in my eye, now is there?'

The Girls were there, but not together. 'I wouldn't mind almost anyone else,' Vi said to me in the entrance to the barn, waving her glass energetically, 'but that Cindy she's taken up with... look at her! She's awful! Peg says she's marvellous in bed. Peg's infatuated, that's the truth.'

'Perhaps you might try the other side of the fence now,' I suggested, for I knew that a devoted neighbour, sensing the call of a duty higher than mere marital fidelity, had stayed late one night with her, in our house, after we had gone to bed, and proved to her the joys, or at least the acceptability, of manhood. Vi knew that I knew, and gave me a rather pleased leer. 'I might, at that,' she said, 'It wasn't at all as bad as I expected.'

Keith finished carving the last of the steaks he was doing — we had three grills out — and I said, 'Now it's time you ate something.'

He said, 'I've been nibbling all the time.' He settled his back against an old apple-tree and plucked the strings of his guitar.

'Oh, the Eer-i-ee was a-rising,' I cried. 'One more time!'

He grinned and laid his head back against the rough bark:

Oh, the Eer-i-ee was arising, and the gin was getting low I scarcely think we'll get a drink till we get to Buffalo
'You made it, Jack,' he said, strumming quietly.

'We did. Where did I start?'

Helen Taylor said, 'The new draft of
Coromandel!
is much better, Jack, though I'm still not sure that I really accept Jason's innocence. Something, somewhere makes me feel he's only pretending to be innocent. But I think we'll find it. It may be his confidence.'

Edgar Levy said to Henry Poor, 'So we bought it and are going to stick it on to the end of the house and use it as a dining-room. The only dining-room on South Mountain Road with stained glass windows.'

Henry chuckled. 'Aren't you supposed to deconsecrate a chapel before putting it to such a use?'

'It already has been,' Corcos said seriously. 'We could use it as a kosher kitchen now, with the Pope's blessing, if we wanted to.'

Colonel Vald Heiberg, Professor of Mechanics, said 'We've got to raise our academic standards at the Point, I know. They're all right in the sciences, generally. It's the humanities that we lag in. But there's a time factor. We have to teach the cadets so many things you don't in the civilian colleges.'

Charlie Frankel, Professor of Philosophy, nodded his heavy head. 'I think mental isolation may be the real problem at the service academies. Perhaps you could have more civilian instructors.'

Colonel Hamish Mackay, butler, said, 'You don't have any now, do you? I would think that would tend to isolate not only the cadets, surely, but the instructors too. Would they not run in a channel separate from the main stream of learned thought about any subject?'

I took him and Misha aside and we found Barbara. 'Is it still going all right?' we asked.

Misha said, 'Yes, really. I think Madame doesn't love us. She's actually jealous of us, you know, because the Master pays so much attention to us. She egged him on to see whether we were feathering our nest, I think.'

Hamish said, 'Oh, that wasn't the poor lady's fault. That was old General Neil Mackay's postcard.' He turned to us — This is an ancient warrior with whom we share common ancestors. Seven generations of them lived in Nansemond, Virginia, until they were dispossessed for a too-strict loyalty to His Majesty King George III. The old general wrote to us on this open postcard:
Interested to hear what you're doing. Hope you are getting our own back.

It would be a
Time-like
impertinence to sum up America after only four years acquaintance, and a mere two months of citizenship. But there were impressions which we would live with.

On the con-side we equally disliked the American superiority and inferiority complexes. The one would break out in a rash after an election with such cries as 'It could only happen here' — when 'it' was patently happening in a number of other places, and with a good deal less mayhem, noise, and corruption, than 'it' was happening here. The other caused a curious bending of the knee, a sort of nervous genuflection, before any article labelled 'Imported', and at any serious discussion a deprecatory cry of, 'But we're such a new country.'

American merchandise of all kinds, from shifts to aircraft, in fact compared favourably with that of any other country, and was often the best in its field. The United States is the second oldest continuous political entity in the world, nor is the idea of a national youthfulness tenable.

The American ideal, what the country collectively wanted, was different and new, and so was often derided as
gauche;
but other people's derision should not be taken as informed judgment.

We did not like the split in society, which we felt was growing, between the long hairs and the short hairs, the intellectuals and the football fans, the white collars and the blue collars. It had not been there in an earlier America, but it was obviously there now, and I thought the Liberal Establishment and the Business Man were about equally responsible. There was a vindictiveness and an unwillingness to accept others' good intentions which we thought new and foreign. Bill Mauldin's cartoons, often funny but usually motivated by a small-town divisiveness, epitomized what oppressed us.

As I have said already we thought that the Constitution badly needed re-writing, for it was designed
not
to work.

It was all very well to fear big government when outside enemies were 3,000 miles away across seas patrolled by the Royal Navy, but when America moved out into the world, about the turn of the century, and the problems became bigger and more urgent, the mechanism which was designed not to work did just that. In essence, in spite of Jefferson, the framers of the Constitution did not trust the people and so limited the powers of the people's representatives; and they made the fatal mistake of separating responsibility from power. A great change for the better would be wrought if, for instance, the defeat of any presidential proposal were to cause new elections, for then proposals and votes would always have real meaning, and not be mere political manoeuvres.

The country's judicial system was a farce, slow, inefficient, and widely disrespected.

The educational system was good, as far as we could judge, but there was something much too rigid about it, all the way from bottom to top. At the grade school level it seemed more concerned in adjusting children than in teaching them, while we thought that adjustment was the family's job. On the administrative level we thought that form changes should be made more often than once a year, and different subjects taught not by form or grade but in 'sets', to which children would be allotted according to ability. Much of this came from our background in English education, which seemed to work better than the American system.

The American Liberal had taught me much, above all to look afresh at institutions and ideas which I had held as fixed pillars of the universe. Without his abrasive presence and pressure around me, I could not have written anything better than potboiling thrillers. After six years of learning what he stood for and how he thought, I agreed with him probably less than when I arrived, for he seemed to me to be selectively blind seeing the obvious evil in Nazism, for instance, but not the equally large and equally obvious evil in Communism; and he was totally intolerant, particularly of the imperfections of democracy. The rule of the majority may not be very intellectual and it may not always seem fair, but it was the liberal himself who insisted that the power of kings and popes to dictate what is Right or Wrong must be abolished; and if there is a better alternative than the bumbling processes of democracy, many of us would like to hear about it.

We were continually amazed to realize that the American people had given commerce control of the air waves without a qualm or, as far as we could see, a quiver. The programmes which the huge advertising funds made available were often excellent; but at other times one walked through a waste land, when every network and every independent station was trying to grab the largest proportion of the audience at the same time, all the programmes were exactly similar, and all pure mush. The Canadian system, where there was a government-run network to set standards for the commercial stations, and commercial stations to prevent the government from having a monopoly or getting stuffy, seemed to be the right solution.

Would we get it? No — because of our last
bete noire
: special interests, lobbies — in this case the networks and perhaps the big manufacturers. Special interests riddled the fabric of the country to such an extent, and they had so much money with which to force their views, that it was often hard indeed to find truth in any situation. It was all very well to say that the national interest is the balance of everyone's special interests; but certain groups — I was thinking particularly of the American Legion, the Teamsters, General Motors, and a score like them — exerted forces that were multiplied by their central organization, and so overwhelmed the rest of us. Collective bargaining becomes meaningless when a union controls, say, all garbage removal, or all transportation, or all elevator operators. A strike by any of these is no different in its unanswerability from a strike by the army. The big corporations allied hypocrisy to ruthlessness, for while they bayed the moon on behalf of free enterprise they were secretly fixing prices and demanding government protection.

On the other side of the picture we thought that the greatness of America was, simply, as it must be for every country, its people. Since there are wonderful peoples everywhere — we knew and loved at least three others — we tried to pin down in just what this particular greatness of character lay. We thought, first, it was the sense of tolerance which I have already mentioned. Then we admired the earnestness of local responsibility; and it was perhaps this which gave the people as a whole their amazing power of making the right decisions when uninformed, misinformed, or both. Next, we felt a quality which I don't know the word for, but it was the opposite of materialism without being spirituality. Americans were not materialists. Their cars, boats, houses, and gadgets were designed to take them towards, or free them for, something else — the contemplation of still water from a still boat, the hunt of the deer in the heavy forest, the fierce campaigning on behalf of Joe Snooks for Dog Catcher. Of course there was some keeping up with the Joneses, but it did not seem to be basic to the character, perhaps no more than the throw-off of surplus energy. Certainly Americans were less materialistic than say Indians, and Mr Nehru's attempts to lecture the United States as from some peak of spirituality unattainable by us always raised a sour smile in me, particularly after his seizure of Kashmir.