Sunrise with Seamonsters (28 page)

Yet there is an advantage in the sheer numbers of people who gather on the Cape each August. One of my sisters had hesitated to introduce her new boyfriend to my parents. She couldn't face them and endure the silences, the awkward exploratory questions: he was divorced, he's from New York, a place my father regards as "full of fakers". But during one of these family parties—a soft-ball game here, my brother-in-law making hamburgers over there, some lost soul mowing the lawn, my father parked near a half-gallon of California sherry, seven oddly-assorted children playing Cowboys and Indians, my brother Alex doing his imitation of Sam Ervin, and Brother Gene countering with his Jimmy Carter impersonation, another group preparing to go to the beach, and Alex's girlfriend (her own parents about to arrive) wondering whether anyone is interested in a game of charades—it was during one of these parties, as I say, that my sister slipped her new boyfriend into the crowd. It was as good as his being introduced; he was tacitly accepted as one of the family, although many of us did not meet him, and there were some who were wholly unaware that he was present that day.

For a month, this family activity continues, from house to house, up and down Cape Cod. What makes it especially interesting is the fact that within the confines of the family there are dissenters from the manic day-to-day program. As the month wears on the imitations become personal: "Who's this?" someone says, and a cousin is imitated down to his tiniest mannerism; my brother Peter imitates my father putting on his trousers; Alex does his spectacular number about all of us going down in a plane—this requires his imitating each person's characteristic reaction, thirty seconds before the crash, in cruel mimicry; I hear a familiar echo and realize that someone is doing me on the porch, a know-it-all voice with
strangulated vowels. By the end of the month the impersonations are affectionate, and we part friends, or more than friends.

There are many children, I am not sure of the exact number, but many. It is never a question of liking or disliking them, or of being protective towards one's own. I think that children are one of the pleasures of life, but that is a small-family satisfaction. In an extended family it becomes hard to distinguish between one's own and one's nephews and nieces. It is better to keep away; to separate them is to spoil their fun. They are tolerated and they play by themselves, creating what amounts to a subculture in the garden or the next room. The more there are the less supervision they need, and already it has been possible for me to see that they have formed a family of their own, two cousins leading, the rest following—skills, information, cant words and dirty stories circulating among them.

Watching these children I am reminded of my own upbringing, how much freedom I had, how little privacy, how well I was defended and protected. These came as ideas to me quite early in life, for with so much variety around me—such an ideal version of the world—I was able to see the difference between freedom and privacy. I had a keen sense of these concepts, yet never felt that I was being closely watched. My solitude was seldom loneliness. And the idea of success in a family in which many had been materially successful, was merely to win the admiration of my fellow members. In twenty years of writing I have felt that in order to write well I would only have to please the family. It has not always been easy; they are severer critics than anyone would face in the literary world and they can be devastating mockers. After my fifth novel had appeared, a book set in Malawi, my brother Alex felt I was getting a bit above myself and he lampooned me in his next book,
Three Wogs:
"Then, of some notoriety, was bespectacled Paul the Pseudoplutarch, American oligosyllabicist and poet laureate of rural Malawi, who scuttled around in his pants of beaten wool and round cap, waving copies of his own
Velocity: The Key to Writing
(o.p.), a vade-mecum for gerundmongers and the sourcebook of his widely cited, narrowly appreciated, long-held theory that one's literary output should cease only when one ran out of possible dedications—and that remained, not a family, but a world away." Students of such things will be interested to know that I put Alex together with his family-airplane-crash skit in my next novel,
Picture Palace.
This family is a little like having a country; it is, in every way, like having a culture: art, literature, common memories, a private language.

For the first fifteen years of my life, or more, all my needs were met, all the society I required was available to me; practically and intellectually I was provided for within the family: books, clothes, conversation, jobs, medical care, spiritual comfort, even a girlfriend—they were all part of the
family paraphernalia. It seems like a recipe for insularity, an argument for never leaving home. But home was huge—not one house but a score of them in which one was always welcome. I was assured that the family was permanent and immoveable, that no matter what happened it would continue to exist and observe the informal rules. With this sense of membership, an identity more profound than nationality, it is not difficult to leave, for a year, or—in my own case—for sixteen years. Though I have returned nearly every summer and found the temper of the country a bit sourer on each visit, the family is bigger but otherwise unchanged. Great travelers seldom come from small unstable countries, and children who leave a house and two parents behind do not often return, since they seek to attach themselves to something greater or to find a new identity. One of the last things Alexander Selkirk (the model for Robinson Crusoe) did before leaving home was to kick his father down a flight of stairs. He was escaping; but the extended family is inescapable.

And living abroad I do not have to go through the contortions of adapting. My sense of familyhood—the Swahili word
ujamaa
is not easily translated—has kept me from any temptation to take out citizenship or to adopt that grotesque Anglophilia that is characteristic of loners in England (I would go further and say that Anglophilia is the hardest sentiment to sustain in England). Since I am, at every turn, reminded of my difference, I am content to live as a foreigner and expect no more than I would if I happened to be living in Costa Rica, treating my annual tax demand as something like a hotel bill. In any case, England operates like a small family, "a rather stuffy Victorian family," wrote Orwell in
England Your England,
"a family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase." Recruitment in Britain is selective and a man is considered a South African, or a Jamaican, or a Hungarian until he bats a century or knocks someone senseless in the ring or makes a million pounds selling mackintoshes. When a man is too rich or famous to ignore he is turned into an Englishman and given a place on the Honors List, but a "West Indian" here is like an "Asian" in Uganda—a poor slob who has lived for two or three generations in a country his color doesn't match. There is no real grudge in that sentence. I know I do not belong here, and when my bill gets too large I will go home. But if I were not a part of an extended family I think it would have been impossible for me to travel or stay away for any length of time.

My own tendency is to extend the limits of my family even further, partly for my own purposes—it seems more worthwhile and it is certainly much easier to write if one enjoys the affection of a large family—and partly to graft this branch onto the family tree. I would like my children to understand, that they can expect little from the state; that they will be
swindled by politics and short-changed by every authority except the family. It is even more important for my children than it was for me. My children, born in Singapore and Uganda, living in a country in which they are officially aliens, must feel that they are part of an extended family which is settled and which will never disown them.

If my notions of the extended family are exaggerated, it might be because no one in three generations of the family has cared a damn for status in America, where only status matters—not family esteem but public esteem. One can't dismiss public esteem without supplanting it with another system of values, and if a family has decided to go it alone it needs genuine love and loyalty. Numbers help, so does property—there has to be space. If we all lived in one house we would get on each other's nerves; even a village would not contain us—but who would want to live in that sort of village? The pleasure of the extended family is the knowledge that one is not alone, the visible proof of love, the faith in this happy nation—it is like a believer's satisfaction in religion.

In less settled places there are alternatives, but they are short-lived. The extended families of the hippies can only last one generation, though they are more complete in any definition of "family" than the inadequate nests that produced them, the small over-tidy households that were answered with communes. Still, I am not in favor of communal living. Life is easy if sentiments are shared; it is intolerable if one is expected to share one's radio—it was an incursion of just this sort that a very good friend of mine gave as his reason for fleeing a kibbutz. And few books get written or paintings get painted in communes, which seem little more to me than occasions for gardening or arguing or displacing natives. The separate households in my own extended family are not an example of joint ownership, though anyone in need of a car or a house will find it his for the asking. The item will be returned and the favor remembered, but it is a favor, not a right. When an extended family falters, or alienates a member, it does so because that member is carrying an unfair share of responsibility. Usually, if the sat-upon man does not make for another country (America was populated by these escapees from the extended families of Europe, some of whom resurrected the practise in order to establish themselves or defy their cultural enemies) he finds himself in a house bursting with sponging relatives.

So I was surprised last summer when my mother, announcing that she had bought a new plot of land, said that she wanted us to meet together to discuss it. She described its features. It was large, she said, a corner plot away from the road, a very choice piece of land. In my mind I saw a house, the kind of communal dwelling I have always loathed: the bathrooms never free, dishes in the sink, the family garden in need of a good hoeing,
nowhere to write, no peace, the clatter on the stairs, the washing machine continually sudsing, "Let me borrow your radio."

I had arrived a bit late and caught only her description of the site, the southerly view and "... room for all of us." I raised an objection. I said I didn't see why it was necessary for us to live on top of each other, or why, since we were all content in our own houses and with everything running smoothly, we needed another plot.

Someone guffawed, but my mother silenced him with a glance and my father said, "Hold on, Jack."

"Not a house, Paul," my mother said. "This is a burial plot, and we're very lucky to get it. The graveyards around here are filling up fast, and it's very unusual for something this size to come on to the market. They say it's designed for eight, but look at the plans"—she unrolled the map—"we could easily fit in more if we were buried a bit closer together."

Corsica is France, but it is not French. It is a mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera. In its three climates it combines the high Alps, the ruggedness of North Africa and the choicest landscapes of Italy, but most dramatic are the peaks which are never out of view and show in the upheaval of rock a culture that is violent and heroic. The landscape, which furnished some of the imagery for Dante's
Inferno
, has known heroes. The Latin playwright Seneca was exiled there, Napoleon was born there, and so—if local history is to be believed—was Christopher Columbus (there is a plaque in Calvi); part of the
Odyssey
takes place there—Ulysses lost most of his crew to the cannibalistic Laestrygonians in Bonifacio—and two hundred years ago, the lecherous Scot (and biographer of Dr Johnson) James Boswell visited and reported, "I had got upon a rock in Corsica and jumped into the middle of life."

The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty. On the west are cliffs which drop straight and red into the sea; on the south there is a true fjord, on the east a long flat and formerly malarial coast with the island's only straight road, on the north a populous cape, and in the center the gothic steeples of mountains, fringed by forests where wild boar are hunted. There are sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, boulder-strewn beaches; beaches with enormous waves breaking over them, and beaches that are little more than mud flats, beaches with hotels and beaches that have never known the pressure of a tourist's footprint. There are five-star hotels and hotels that are unfit for human habitation. All the roads are dangerous, many are simply the last mile to an early grave. "There are no bad drivers in Corsica," a Corsican told me. "All the bad drivers die very quickly." But he was wrong—I saw many and I still have damp palms to prove it.

On one of those terrible coast roads—bumper-scraping ruts, bottomless puddles, rocks in the middle as threatening and significant as Marxist statuary—I saw a hitch-hiker. She was about eighteen, very dark and lovely, in a loose gown, barefoot and carrying a basket. She might have been modeling the gown and awaiting the approach of a
Vogue
photographer. My car seemed to stop of its own accord, and I heard myself urging the girl to get in, which she did, thanking me first in French and then, sizing me up, in halting English. Was I going to Chiappa? I wasn't, but I agreed to take her part of the way: "And what are you going to do in Chiappa?"

"I am a
naturiste,
" she said, and smiled.

"A nudist?"

She nodded and answered the rest of my questions. She had been a nudist for about five years. Her mother had been running around naked for eleven years. And Papa? No, he wasn't a nudist; he'd left home—clothed—about six years ago. She liked the nudist camp (there are nine hundred nudists at Chiappa); it was a pleasant healthy pastime, though of course when the weather got chilly they put some clothes on. Sooner than I wished, she told me we had arrived, and she bounded towards the camp to fling her clothes off.