Memories of The Great and The Good (14 page)

Suddenly a sail moved up over the sea with the mechanical motion of a cardboard target in a shooting alley. It was a tiny ship, a ridiculous forty-odd-footer, but it ballooned over the horizon like Turner's
Fighting Téméraire
and through the glasses we saw its astounding captain, a small compact frame standing amidships, a peaked cap surmounting sideburns, thick glasses and the face of an aging lobster. Two hours later, when we had wriggled through all the nighttime horrors we had feared and were tied up at Staten Island, we drank a toast with him and saw him closer still, this iron little man who is imperturbable almost to the point of listlessness and looks like one of those carved wooden figures they sell in Broadway novelty stores or the papier mâché comics that rock outside the House of Nonsense at Coney Island. A very rum sort of hero, Popeye in the flesh.

Aside from the customs man there were only his wife and two others of us to greet him, and none of us dreamed that five years later a hundred thousand people would sit beside the flares on the ramparts of Plymouth Hoe, and a little after that the new Sir Francis would stand in the Quadrangle of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich while Elizabeth the Second repeated the ceremony of more than three and a half centuries ago and tapped him on the shoulder with the sword of Francis Drake. But sitting amid the ropes and bottles, sextants, sardine tins and all the mess of his little cockpit, he had done what he promised himself that night as he clocked his record time rounding Ambrose Light. To us he mentioned it casually as “the big trip.” To the reader of this petrifying and heroic journal
^*
he records the vow more gravely. “After (that) solo voyage across the Atlantic, I decided there was a chance of circumnavigating the world solo in an interesting and attractive way.” This must be the blankest understatement since Lord Melbourne, having just seen Othello strangle Desdemona, remarked, “How different from the private life of our own dear Queen.”

All the world now knows the plot of Chichester's mighty voyage: 29,630 miles alone, often in atrocious seas, one of the three small boats of eight to make it round the Horn; the longest passage ever made by a small sailing vessel—15,517 miles, from Sydney to Plymouth—without a port of call; twice as long as any passage ever made by a single-hander; the fastest voyage around the world—almost twice as fast as the previous best; only the third true circumnavigation round the Horn by a small ship where the track passed over two points antipodean to each other. The other records are listed (not by Chichester) in an epilogue. For him, there were two ambitions: to show that at sixty-five he had the reserves of character—of patience, ingenuity, intelligence and fortitude—to do it; and to do it with speed as a proof of good seamanship. And here, at last, is the journal of the whole adventure.

I have lately read two biographies by what you might call physical heroes, one of them a renowned flyer. They were so full of conceit and pretension, and the dreadful awareness of an audience looking on saying “Is he the hero we think he is?” that they are drained of all humanity. The genius of Chichester is his total unselfconsciousness. The detestable word “image” has escaped him. He is absorbed with whatever is absorbing him at the moment: whether to go below (in a Force 11 wind!) and rescue the gear lever throttle control from the incoming flood, whether to reject the Admiralty directions for square-riggers to pass southeast of the Horn (he went north in his battered ship in order to stay upright), whether baked beans would be better for him than gin and lemon. This naive absorption with whatever was happening—the failing self-steering mechanism or the ghastly smell of his cases of eggs—guarantees the reader the pleasure of a man talking to himself without any suspicion that the stuff is going into print or between hard covers or—so help us—into a Book of the Month selection. His style is as bald and majestic as Defoe describing in a few syllables some awful detail of the Plague Year. He has the wonderfully engaging simpleness and irritability (with himself) of Pepys, and in his humdrum acceptance of illness and misfortune he recalls some of the journals of the Forty-Niners. The man is, no question, an heroic throwback. At various times he has a bad leg, a raging toothache, blinding headaches, various cuts and pustules, depression and— a few hundred miles from Sydney—total exhaustion and delusions. All the while he is thanking God for the smallest mercies and checking his daily list of things to do—”fix tarred twine for anti-chafe tie backs, repair bolt of the sheave in the fife rail, examine crosstree leads at deck and fuse, dry out bag of winter woollies, sow wheat germ.” They amount to never less than seventy-five tedious duties a day, on top of the backbreaking chores of a one-man crew that rarely leave him more than an hour or two to sleep or eat. Round the Horn, with sixty-or eighty-foot waves yawning after him, he thinks, “Christ! What might it be like in a 120-knot wind?” and understands why the clipper ship captains told their men never to look astern. It took him two weeks to clean up the ruin from his capsizing, but he always wants to know why; from the fragment of a broken bottle, he is able to deduce that “the boat had turned through 131 when the bottle flew out of its niche; in other words, the mast would have been 41 below the horizontal.”

It makes
Twenty Years before the Mast
sound like an America's Cup log. To yachtsmen, it will be as invaluable as Izaak Walton to fly fishermen, as Blackstone to lawyers. To the ordinary reader it is nothing less than the record, told in fine masculine English devoid of eccentricity or jargon, of a sustained ordeal probably unique in human history. An astounding and noble book.

T
he road to Ronald Reagan goes northeast across San Francisco Bay, up through the postwar industrial litter of the San Pablo shore, over the brown foothills of the Coast Range, out across the broad farmlands of the Sacramento Valley, and along by the Sacramento River to its confluence with the American River, where Sutter's boss carpenter, James Marshall, sat down on a January day in 1848 and examined some little yellow particles that had flaked through the tailrace of Sutter's sawmill. They were gold.

It is an appropriate introduction to the hero of
Death Valley Days
, the decent young pioneer of many a ? Western who now finds himself the governor of California, the first choice of California, the first choice of Republican county chairmen, and the second choice of Republican voters for the presidency.

You are taken to him through corridors of exhibits extolling the bounty of the California counties, and then through a cabinet room newly done over by Mrs. Reagan as a handsome museum of Californiana with early Spanish furniture, watercolors, Indian prints, Argonaut memoirs. Beyond this bastion of nostalgia and flanked by the American flag on one side and the flag of the Golden State on the other, sits in his small study the fifty-six-year-old governor, a slim dark-haired man with the figure of a ranch hand, a college boy's grin, and an engaging manner quite his own. If you are a liberal or New Leftist spy expecting Everett Dirksen's senatorial piety, you are in for a disappointment. Equally, if you are a Birchite or other dinosaur hoping for the patriotic bellow and the double-armed ail-American embrace, the man is a letdown.

Contrary to the campus rebel's view of him as an executive smoothie, there is no gloss to his rather craggy complexion, no whiff of pine needle aftershave lotion. His clothes do not give off the static electric charge of Madison Avenue vice presidents grounded on ankle-deep carpets. He looks rather like a peregrinating secretary of a large union whose blue shirt and dapper suit have spent many a day squashed in the hold of a jet plane. He could be a
Guardian
correspondent!

This first impression is well taken, since for many years he was the president of SAG (the Screen Actors' Guild) and traveled the country on the chicken, pea and mashed-potato circuit organizing and contracting for thirty-one affiliate unions of the American Federation of Labor. There was a lot of wrangling and all-night negotiations and general bitchery and betrayal there, enough experience of the political grind, anyway, to discredit the rather tedious ribaldry about a B-film actor turned governor.

The truth is that an actor is a laborer, too, and in the Depression, through the war, and afterward, he bowed to what the studios decided was his worthy hire. So Reagan was “Ronnie,” the crackling young New Dealer, resisting goon squads, fighting the industry for livable contracts, an Americans for Democratic Action man, and later the keen helper of Helen Gahagan Douglas, the liberals' goddess, in her campaigns for Congress.

How come, you feel compelled to ask him, that an ADA liberal, a big Roosevelt man, and union organizer on the Clifford Odets model, turned Republican, and what's more a conservative Republican? Was there, over a time, some well-remembered trauma perhaps that profoundly changed his views? He knotted and unknotted his knuckles.

“Well, after the war there was a motion picture jurisdictional dispute between two unions. As president of SAG, I asked both unions to sit down with us. We met for seven months, twice a day, we had our own Pan-munjom, and once you thought you'd got an equitable settlement, one side would come in with seventeen new lawyers and seventeen new deals. You couldn't believe it, then friends of mine would say, ‘Come on, Ronnie, don't be so naive, we're simply following orders. You want us to show you the card?' I didn't even believe then there were such things as Communists, but they had the whole deal tied up. If we dug in, pickets were provided, homes were wrecked, and so on.

“Once I went to Washington on behalf of thirty-odd unions to expound our tax policy to the House Ways and Means Committee. When I got there I was handed a booklet—This is the AF of L's tax policy, this is what you read.' Of course, it had the government's support. When I got home I said to my wife: the tone of the speech is going to have to change, it's happening to other people. I'd been against trading our individual rights away to the industry. There came a time when I wasn't going to trade my rights away to the government.”

His old friends mentioned, too, his shocked discovery that once you decide to build a home, you can suffer union slowdowns, inflated contracts, featherbedding, and somehow fail to own the house you've saved for without an albatross of a mortgage. Of course, there is no Republican, as there is no Catholic, like a convert. He reacted all right, but he reacted back to Jefferson, reading him in his own context and not in the chosen bits the New Dealers used for special purposes. It explains, I think, his strong tie to Goldwater, who remains a fervent Jeffersonian, the twentieth century notwithstanding. Unfortunately, the twentieth century has been unloosed on Reagan in the shape of an avalanche, which is to say the modern California that spawns and compounds all the technological vitality and the social ills that will one day afflict us all.

So, for over a year now, he has been sitting in Sacramento, under the great white dome of the State Capitol, and, in the contrived intervals of a working schedule as tight as an invasion plan, he is off and around the country at rallies, college debates, and banquets, raising packets for the Republican campaign fund, a service that is done in an orgy of altruism or on the off chance, about which he is not quite able to convey the incredulity he mimics, that he might hold the trumping ace over the next Republican Convention, and panic it into nominating him for president.

For the time being, there's no doubt that he has his homegrown troubles. His handling of them is more significant than it would be in Vermont or, for that matter, in Ohio, because in twenty-five years California has developed from a lush fruit bowl, film studio, and sunny haven for retired farmers and playboys into the first state of the Union in more things than numbers. All the chronic social, industrial, and rural problems of America today are here in acute form. A man who can administer California with imagination and good order is one who, unlike anyone else, except perhaps a mayor of New York City, would hold powerful credentials to preside over the United States.

Once you have boasted about the power, the population, and the resources of the first state of the Union, you have to do something about the jungle growth of the cities; the turmoil on the campuses; the conflict about compulsory unionism between organized labor and the freewheeling labor force; the unceasing inflow of 1,200 new settlers a day, loading the relief rolls and straining the welfare budget; not to mention the bewildering mobility of hundreds of thousands of part-time workers, deadbeats, runaway hippies, “suitcase” farmers, and the shuttling agents of the Mafia.

All this is producing ruinous invasions of the treasury and subjecting a governor who campaigned on economy to the embarrassment of a record five-billion-dollar budget, which by state law he is bound to balance. “In the last eight years,” he says, “the budget has had a twelve percent annual increase. Last year it was sixteen percent.” He puts this down partly, of course, to the openhanded fiscal extravagance of his predecessor, the Democrat “Pat” Brown. But after a few months of a new administration the voters are indifferent to the sins of the absent: they ask the immemorial question of the incumbent, “What are you doing for me right now?”