Atlantic High (25 page)

The president of the University of Michigan at Flint writes to say that his guest as visiting lecturer, Alan Paton, thought that I devoted too much time to asking economic questions when we met at Flint, to tape an hour of “Firing Line” on the South African question. “Alan Paton’s interest in the theory of economic systems is very limited. He answered questions in this area because they were asked—but these questions do not rouse his deepest interest. Now one might argue that if they didn’t, they should. But that is another matter. He loves his country and all of its citizens—both black and white—very deeply and is anguished to contemplate what lies ahead if Christian charity does not prevail in that troubled land. He said to me on two separate occasions that he regretted not clarifying and asserting to you the motivating force behind his own will to change the country before it is too late—that it is the gospel message as he understands it. This is not to say that he believes that capitalism is inherently hostile to gospel values or that socialism has anything spiritual to be said for it.” How gentle, and how fluent the analysis. I reply (hastily), that “since [Paton] believes that economics is the instrument by which African blacks are most likely to experience relief, I thought it relevant to bring the subject up.”

I have the impression that four out of five subscribers to
National Review
who let their subscriptions lapse succumb to the invitation (it is really a publisher’s ruse) to give their reasons why. One highly literate reader says about
National Review:
“I read the magazine as if hearing story after introductory story from an after-dinner speaker who sits down before coming to any point. Too often I feel as if I’ve been listening to comments in the losers’ locker room rather than hearing a philosophy articulated. Why not legitimate poetry, ancient, modern, rather than the consolation-silliness of the verse that is published? Who selects the letters for publication? Do you really need filler? Is this the readership company I’m to see myself as joining? More bewildering are the cute replies, the demeaning buffoonery. I think of Ali making faces last night, the shame of Pindar, and of De Gaulle’s comments on the students in ‘68. You seem insistent on taking away the seriousness you offer in other sections…. Why not a full issue on Nozick and Rawls themselves, a symposium; or on Kenner. Now there is too much of the expensive playground to the product. Partisanship is merchandised skillfully, but little more. We are mirrored, informed, rather than educated.” I replied—I fear, too brusquely—saying, “The kind of publication you want would be read by you and a dozen other people. Which is not to say that it shouldn’t exist. You might undertake it.” He deserved a politer reply. But
time…
.

Speaking of time, there was talk at dinner that during the past three days, during which we had powered, there being no wind, the six-hour daytime watches have dragged. Why not, Tony suggested, bring in a dogwatch for two hours’ duty, one to three, shortening the two long watches by one hour each? I countered that during that period lunch is served, so that all hands are on deck in any event, and that since when we power we tend to use the autopilot, being “on-watch” as distinguished from “off-watch” is a purely psychological burden. I can’t remember when last my analytical powers so closely approached sheer poetry. It was greeted by dumbfounded amusement, followed by acquiescence, followed by cheering, followed by a flat refusal by Van to pass me the wine, advising me that the psychological burden of doing so was too heavy….

Was it Katharine Brush who wrote the short story about the attendant at the ladies’ room in the night club? The story, in any event, is appropriate to the editor. In the story a dozen women, coming and going in the course of the evening, powder their noses and exchange comments in the style of Clare Boothe Luce’s
The Women:
brilliant, frothy, mean, generous, trivial, melodramatic. The attendant, a middle-aged woman, tends abstractedly to the needs of her wards because she is preoccupied. Whenever the room clears, she rushes back to her
True Story
pulp magazine, experiencing therein great, exhilarating draughts of Reality—which she never noticed was taking place right about her, evening after evening. People of expansive impulse tend to write you their thoughts, describe their reactions, document their pains and pleasures: as an editor, you are the attendant.

“Alice,” who writes me frequently, was brought up in a most unusual household. Her father was—is—a pornographer. Now her young brother is receiving an award from the nation’s most select concentration of artists and writers, and Dad goes along, perforce, to the ceremony. “The only book I know my father’s ever read is
Exodus
. He was completely out of his turf, which is a condition my father never likes to find himself in, and it wasn’t like you could say, ‘Come on, Dad, cheer up…. Look, there’s John Updike!’” There is a short story there.

A Belgian-American toolmaker, Gus Renson, a worker in the tradition of Eric Hoffer, writes me perhaps his three-hundredth letter, this one on the eve of his retirement at sixty-five. “Circumstances beyond my control made this week’s paycheck the largest ever. Worked
1½ + 1½
hours overtime during the week, all day Saturday and twelve hours Sunday (double time). Could have declined, it’s optional, but with all that time for resting coming up, opted for the work orgy. I think today’s Americans have more cause for rebellion than at the time their forefathers dumped those tea sacks. Gross for sixty-four hours? $560. Net $342. For a change, on this rush job, I was paired with a shopmate called Pee Wee who, occasionally (i.e., without sneer from less serious mates), allows personal pride to prevail. An apotheosis of sorts for me: total cooperation, anticipating the other guy’s next move, readying his machine and needed tools, coming up with astute solutions when stumped temporarily; a joy, I could have kissed the sonofabitch. Why can’t it be like that all the time? When we got through Sunday at 7
P.M
., we both felt secretly that we deserved applause.” And, on the heels of that concupiscent brush with the Puritan ethic, he lets me have a nice taste of the dirty old man, in his native French of course. He notes the address in Paris of the publishers who brought out my novel in French. “Librairie Ar-thème Fayard. Arthème, you can hardly reek more from La Belle Époque. Dig the quaint location too: ‘rue des Saints-Pères.’ Once the den of rubicund padres switching from
enluminures
to green Chartrooze with the greatest of ease? Or flagellants wearing T-hairshirts with the picture of Joan of Arc imprinted in batik? Ah words, ah names.
Je ne puis me rappeler sans rire ma visite a Avignon en 1961 où je découvris un square entièrement consacré aux plaisirs de la chair
(awright,
you
never got lost in a strange city)?
Le nom de l’endroit: Place des Corps Saints”
It’s letters like that I want to be writing when I retire.

An old sailing buddy, Mike, puts it on the line. Look, he is negotiating with Mr. Nightingale, who fancies himself a
great
composer, and will send me a cassette of one of his songs. For an advertising account for Mike, would I acknowledge the cassette appreciatively via an inscribed book? I listened to the cassette-causing some concern in
Sealestial’s
saloon—did my duty, and wrote to Mike: “I put it on to your friend. I inscribed my book to him as ‘The new Noel Coward.’ It’s all very well for you to get an account, but has it occurred to you that I might go to Hell?”

And from my most indefatigable and versatile correspondent, first a translation of the letter written to Charles Lindbergh by Einstein in 1939, requesting that Lindbergh meet with Dr. Leo Szilard. Background: A couple of years ago I reviewed a book for the New York
Times
on Lindbergh, written by Brendan Gill. In it Gill reports that so many people wrote to Lindbergh that many of their letters still repose in the Yale University archives, unopened; for instance, a letter known to have been written by Einstein. I remarked this in my review and much later received from Yale, repository of my own material, an indignant reaction. The mystery letter is nicely catalogued, thank you very much, and enclosed is a copy. But it is in German, in which I am illiterate. My friend Sophie translates. Here is the world’s greatest scientist hinting to the world’s greatest aviator (and America’s most dedicated political isolationist) that a scientific insight has been achieved which …“Most honored Mr. Lindbergh: May I ask you to be kind enough to receive my friend Dr. Szilard and to consider carefully what he has to tell you. The subject he has to present to you may seem fantastic to a man not involved with science. But you will surely soon be convinced that a possibility here presents itself which must, in the public interest, be carefully kept in view, even though the results hitherto may not appear too impressive to the naked eye. With highest esteem and friendly wishes, Yours, A. Einstein.”

Sophie comments, “My God, what lovely restraint, care, modesty, sweetness, and what shaking in one’s scientific shoes behind all that impeccable cool.” She recalls an editorial mission to an already ailing Leo Szilard, some twenty years later, to induce him to write his memoirs for her firm. All she came away with was a short story he outlined for her (published later, elsewhere) based on the premise that the Russians had won World War III, and that he would be able to needle people in conversation without their being able to put their finger on just where and how they had been pricked. “Better the firing squad than such a castrate life, he decided.” She signs,
“Ave atque vale, con amore.”

On and on, about six hundred letters answered and enclosures scanned, working two or three hours a day in my stateroom, in that huge, sybaritic armchair—Dr. Papo’s ultimate touch. But I must quote one more, because it came in from Tom. Tom Wendel will be joining us in the Azores, where we lose Van. He is a historian, and the clipping he enclosed must have special appeal to a historian. I dropped everything and took it up on deck to give the watch extraconventional relief.

I suppose if you are a professional captain, eventually the landfall becomes routine stuff, even as—I guess—the symphony conductor, after thirty or forty years, coming home in the evening, picks up the evening paper….

Wife (preparing snack): “What did you play tonight, Arturo?”

“Huh? Oh …” (yawn) “Lemme see. Mozart’s Fortieth, Mahler’s Fourth, and Stravinsky’s Rite…. No, no cucumbers (burp), been (burp) burping since those onions at lunch. Did the Redskins win?”

But I’ll have to have many more landfalls before achieving insouciance. So after Allen spotted the great Pico, barely distinguishable from the surrounding clouds, it felt rather good when I left the helm to go to the chart, to call for a change of a mere five degrees in our course to take us down between the islands to the port of Horta.

What followed was one of those exasperating things that have a way of happening on boats. The night was moderately, though not immoderately, clear. We dallied, though not for more than fifteen minutes, when someone spotted what looked like a whale about three miles off our port beam. My instinct is to head in the opposite direction from whales, who have been known to be frisky in the vicinity of small boats. But after studying this one through binoculars
¹
we concluded that it was quite dead; so over I steered to take a close look.

We circled the great creature slowly, taking lots of pictures. The light was failing rapidly, and the whale was surrounded by the pinks of the sun, and pink from its own oozing blood diluted by the Atlantic Ocean. Two sharks, at least, were visible, chewing at the great hulk. The jawbone alone, had we had the means of salvaging it, would have fetched us over two thousand dollars at Horta, and no dollars in the United States, because whale teeth are among the things you’re not allowed to import, lest they move from scarcity to extinction.

Anyway, our ghoulish poking done, I resumed course confidently awaiting the three telltale lights to usher us in: one of them dead ahead, one on the island of Pico to the right, the principal (range, fifteen miles) light to port, on the western tip of the island of Faial. In due course we discerned three lights—indeed, six lights. But no one of them corresponded in characteristic to any of the lights described on the chart. Could we have caught an aberrational view of Pico? But we had got our heading, all right. Well, could there be a strange and fierce current that might have taken us down, south of Pico? Or up, north of Faial? Such things occur to you, so much do you rely on lights. Allen and Reggie were working on the radar, trying to coax life into it, and I kept doggedly on the course I had pre-plotted.