Sunrise with Seamonsters (33 page)

The few hundred who were missing, someone said, must have stayed away because they thought they were physically repulsive: men and women who could not bear to face their old friends who remembered them as handsome and agile, and who didn't want to disappoint them. There is a kind of distress that changes people, more than time or bad food does—a slight agony, a hint of despair, the abrasion of grief. No one here looked desperate. And there is snobbery. Six members of the Class of '59 had gone to Harvard; only one turned up at the reunion. He said to me, "I didn't expect to see you here," and he spoke to me in a faintly conspiratorial way, as if we did not belong in this mob. His impertinence was in talking about the present. It was bad form. We were here to toast the past and to celebrate the fact that we were still alive.

Many I had met at the age of seven, in the first grade. Not only Humphrey and Travers, but Tom Drohan, who remembered beating me in a spelling bee at the Washington School, and Linda Rice, my first girl-friend. What a land of lost content; but there was a new contentment now, and at last I could say to the girl I had taken to the Prom, "Do you know how badly I wanted to go to bed with you ?"

Twenty years ago we had all been innocent—or most of us. Kissing was the most that any of us had done. I did not sleep with a girl until I was nineteen, and when I mentioned this at the reunion it turned out that this was the age when most of the others had begun. Sex, unlike most other sins, was inconvenient for the urban high school student in the fifties: you needed a car, you needed money, you needed a place to go, and most of all you needed a willing partner.
She fucks
, we used to whisper, but we regarded such girls as priestesses, and we were implausible and timid. For this generation, sex was a harrowing bargain, implying penalties and vows. It was not shameful, but it was horribly serious. Most of us went without, and suffered, and now feel an envious admiration for the young, who have been spared all this longing. The great difference on this reunion night was a new look of experience on the faces of these old friends. The look of experience is slightly weary, a wince that is both sheepish and knowing, and it is practically indistinguishable from a look of disappointment.

We were now, in the best sense, shameless. We could not kid anyone, but also—now—sex between us was as unthinkable as incest. We knew each other too well to be able to play the sexual game with any spirit of conviction. We had grown up in post-war dreariness and repression, expecting a cataclysm. The cataclysm came: after high school everything
happened—Vietnam, Ban-the-Bomb, drugs, race riots, casual sex, Black Panthers, the John Birch Society, draft-card burning, Nixon, political assassinations and junk food. No wonder we looked weary. In twelve years of school the only world event that impressed me was Sputnik: nothing else mattered. It had been a busy two decades since, but now things were much as before—indeed, the rock-and-roll we had listened to in 1959 was back in vogue, Buddy Holly, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley.

There was a banquet, but that was no more than a hectic interval of yammering and face-searching; and then prizes—Cunha and I got bottles of wine for having traveled so far. Someone—no one was quite sure of his name—got a bottle of wine for having fathered eight children. Walter Buckley said it ought to be a bottle of Geritol.

The class members we had spotted as future Rotarians had become Rotarians. Most, it seemed, had been on course from the start: Paul Chalmers, the class president, was a businessman in Seattle; Marotta was the mayor of Medford, Paul Donato was deputy mayor. Kaloostian, a bagger in his father's grocery store, now owned a string of supermarkets ("Ever go to Armenia?" he asked me. "If you do, let me know, what it's like."). Position had come naturally to most: the saloon, the Dunkin Donuts franchise, the Toyota dealership—they had been preordained. Jean MacSweeney, one of the more literate among us (lovely handwriting, a good speller) said she owned "a bunch of newspapers." Peter Thompson, whose father was a truckdriver, now ran a fleet of trucks, and Pat Shea, my fishing friend and fellow canoe-builder, owned a bait shop. Many had become teachers. It was perhaps the last high school generation which went willy-nilly into high school teaching: it was respectable, it was a familiar routine, and the jobs were still available.

What about our own teachers? Few people mentioned them, because this was not a night for churlishness (the mood of a high school reunion is hilarious or nostalgic; it is not stuffy, it is seldom sour—it is too late to settle old scores). Our school had been run in an authoritarian way—no back-talk, no sass, no dungarees. The teachers were peevishly elderly—at least they seemed that way to us—and they kept discipline but imparted little wisdom, They were not readers. They were too busy for books. They were certainly underpaid. Some moonlighted in other jobs—Mr Orpen worked at the race track, but we regarded this as stylish. Mr Finnegan sometimes acted in Boston plays—he was Hickey in
The Iceman Cometh
—but by the time we graduated he was a failed actor and had taken to drink. Mr Flynn (who swore to us that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty) carried a hip-flask. I can't remember the name of the teacher who had the wooden leg, but I recall that at the end of the afternoon he used to lean
back in his swivel chair and rest it on his desk: I can see the yellow polished wood, and the bolts in his hip. Miss Dole the guidance counselor shrieked at me once (I was seventeen), "You'll never go to college—you'll never get in! You're not going anywhere!" And another teacher said to me sorrowfully, "Why do you run around with Berkowitz—why do you always pick up the lame and the halt?" These teachers had lived in another age; the two qualities they valued in education were silence and order. They were willfully uninspiring.

None of us at the reunion had had a poor high school education, but for all of us it had been mediocre—non—intellectual rather than anti-intellectual. It had been decent, social, sporty, strict, but that bookworm image I had had of myself had been inaccurate. Meeting these people, all of whom were pushing forty, reminded me of all those idly-spent years—no goals scored, no girls slept with, no books read, nothing achieved but a prize at the Science Fair—the toad-hunting and frog-sticking had paid off in a small way. Who had I been all those years ago? The answer was easy, and at last I could find it bearable: I had been a punk.

I think I am an optimistic person, but that night, traveling home to my house on the Cape, I had a dreadfully hollow feeling. Things had not seemed so black since high school.
What is going to happen to me?
I used to think. I had wanted to write. I did not have the courage to say I was going to be a writer. A doctor, a teacher, a forest ranger—it did not seem to matter what I said, because it would never happen. I knew only one thing for sure. It was this: Nothing will happen to me in Medford—worse, I will fail here. High school was proof of that. Was my brain teeming with schemes and fantasies? I think it was. I had a riotous imagination, but even that worried me into secrecy, for I had done nothing, and I certainly had not used it. Going home now was like going home from high school, and it provoked the same reflection:
We are all riding into the dark, alone.

An October mist hung over the Cape. It was late. We had stayed up drinking and talking until three am. Now I passed a watching raccoon at the roadside. Twenty years ago I would have wanted to put a bullet between his bright yellow eyes. Dead leaves lay thick on the road; there was no other car here to scatter them. I was lonelier than I had been for years. But that was how I had felt in high school—impatient and a bit lost and mournfully horny. In high school I was still ungrown, with my home-made bombs and my gun and a horror of adulthood. The reunion was a celebration of youth and violent innocence that had been in me. I had been right to be fearful in 1959, for everything was about to happen. I had not known—how could I?—that my education was about to begin. I had good friends, but I was nagged by one thought: the world was elsewhere. I left Medford the first chance I had, and Medford became part
of the dark beyond, as I converted my memories into fiction. But I was lucky in this brief reunion. It didn't damn me the way dreams do. It was worthwhile and funny and a relief, and I was reassured. Now I knew I could go back. Such, such were the joys.

One of the more grotesque falsifications of taste, and it is usually propounded in schools, is the pious belief that a work of literature must be morally pure and right-minded before it can wholly satisfy us. No villain can enthrall us, the argument runs; no sinful passion can make us happy or inspire us. And yet if this were so, half of literature would be lost to us in our self-denying refusal to see, as Angus Wilson puts it in
The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling,
"the difficult truth that aesthetic satisfaction is not one with ethical satisfaction." There are morally disgusting stories that one reads with absolute enchantment, and from the Jacobeans onward villains who are truer and vastly more enjoyable than saintly heroes who never put a foot wrong.

Kipling embarrasses critics, and even his biographers have felt the necessity to suppress stories they have found morally untidy or politically dubious. We have had to endure the preposterous suggestions that Kipling wasn't really an imperialist, or vindictive in his fictions, or that he didn't scoff at some races and hate others. But he did believe in the salvation of imperialism, and any number of his stories and poems indicate his hatred for certain races or groups of people. No, not Indians, though he made Kim's companion a Buddhist rather than a Hindu; but apart from his approval of "Fuzzy Wuzzy" in his home in the Sudan he never referred to Africans as other than "Hubshis" (a neat Hindi evasion derived from "Abyssinians") and he believed that the Germans were satanic. These views in fine and subtle works have caused confusion and have made Kipling one of the most misunderstood writers in the language.

Long before he died (he died comparatively recently, in 1936) he was praised, mocked and hounded in about equal measure. After his death he was ignored for a decade, then pounced upon—so vigorously that a book published in 1945, Hilton Brown's
Rudyard Kipling,
proclaims that its intention is for Kipling "to be restored to his throne." Orwell's defensive and indignant essay was mainly a response to Eliot's saying (in his selection of Kipling's poems) that Kipling was "a versifier." In America, Randall Jarrell tried with a certain amount of success to make sure that
"the Kipling that nobody read" (the title of Edmund Wilson's essay) reached a wide public. In England, Somerset Maugham edited a companion piece to Eliot's, a selection of stories he prefaced with the view that Kipling was the greatest short story writer in English. More recently, V. S. Naipaul has discussed—but not dismissed—Kipling as "a club writer," and Philip Mason in an enormous book of critical chat (
Kipling: The Glass, the Shadow and the Fire)
has directed our interest to the later stories. Charles Carrington's official biography (it appeared in 1955, but has been reissued with corrections) started a new Kipling boom; it is a politely factual book, plodding and reverential, that goes its earnest way, buffing up the slightly tarnished halo. Both J. I. M. Stewart and Angus Wilson have improved our understanding—Mr Wilson in particular—but some bafflements have persisted.

And no wonder, for Kipling himself was no help. In his lifetime Kipling actively discouraged anyone from invading his privacy. He had a mighty distrust of journalists, and in his poem "The Appeal" he wrote,

And for the little, little span
The dead are borne in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

Fine, you say, and you pause at the Kipling shelf. Here it is, nearly as long as The Grand Trunk Road and with much the same motley traffic: kiddies' stories and "Mary Postgate" (one of the nastiest stories ever written), poems about Puck and poems about whores and sergeants, fables about immortality and one disagreeable ode about the Kaiser dying of throat cancer; a great knowingness about adultery and divorce and spooks in cupboards, written when he was in his twenties, and some later stories that are positively boyish. There is the precise technical detail of railway engines and radios, and the hilarious photographic gaffe in "The End of the Passage" where a character snaps a picture of the bogeyman printed on a dead man's retina. He never saw Mandalay, and yet it is the title of his best-known poem; he suffered in America, but wrote remarkably little about it. His India, which has become our India (and even many Indians' India—the scholar Nirad Chaudhuri ranks
Kim
as far greater than Forster's
Passage to India),
he imagined from just seven years of working on colonial newspapers and mooching in Simla and the bazaar. From year to year he is reassessed. He has never, I think, gone unread; but a wilder combination of traits—philistinism and fine-feeling, vulgarity and clear-sightedness, militarism and mercy, public serenity and private sorrow, fierceness and gentleness—is hard to imagine. Could there be a better subject for a novel or play?

I wrote a play about Kipling in 1979, calling it "The White Man's Burden." This play seems to me (but I hope to no one else) like the sort of Chinese pot I have seen reassembled in a museum case. A dozen or so fragments of porcelain, big and small, are dug up; they do not make a whole pot, but a careful person studying the breaks and curves in the pieces begins to fathom the design. With new clay and old fragments he makes his vessel, the plain biscuit-colored clay holding the opaline fragments in place. It is the right shape, but a strange mixture of styles and tones, a work of collaboration, the past informing the present. Sometimes, if it is done well, you hardly notice the patches. In a sense, most writing is like this; the writer is usually working with vivid splinters and trying to make their shine indistinguishable in his creation.