Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (19 page)

I dug in behind my desk. The piled manuscript of the Mutiny novel grew.
Brutal and Licentious
lay in the bottom of the
yakdan.
Barbara said, 'One day you can do to the publishers what I did with my brigadier's silly messages.'

I said, 'What?'

She said, 'Return them, neatly folded, with a large pin through one corner, where I'd written THIS END FIRST.' (I should explain that the 'Women's Auxiliary Corps in India contained a part-time section manned or womanned — mainly by officers' wives whose husbands were overseas. Thus Sergeant Jones might be Brigadier Smith's personal assistant by day and his hostess that night. Discipline was good, but sometimes highly informal.)

Meanwhile there was the matter of eating. The money was going faster than I had calculated, and we always had to hold in hand that reserve for getting back to England, so that I could keep my promise never to become a public charge. It would be wise not to run the writing attempt too fine. I should allow a month or two to find some other job before finally deciding to go. Barbara was earning a little by doing typing for Mrs Balaban, who was reworking
Aunt Hattie of Cripple Creek,
in the ways I had suggested. This took her to New York twice a week, (where the Balabans were now living in the Dorset Hotel on West 54th Street) but as we still had Nanny I was able to keep working. We decided we could maintain this pattern of living for another six months, then we'd have to make the final decisions.

Winter passed and the wild asparagus began to sprout in the ditches and along the roadsides, to be gathered by the children, cooked by Barbara, and avidly eaten by all, except me: I can't stand the stuff. I decided I had to have a title for my novel. Writing without one was like aiming an arrow at air. Fashions in titles change from generation to generation. Sometimes the small whimpering phrase is In, e.g.
And the lights dimmed.
Sometimes it is the defiant exclamation:
Look homeward, angel;
sometimes the simple precis of the contents:
Drums along the Mohawk.
I wanted a title that would be fair to the prospective reader, and yet would attract his attention in the shop window — that Place Pigalle where lurid jackets take the place of hoisted skirts in catching the wandering eye. I also wanted to include in a single phrase the information (a) that the book was about India; (b) that it contained elements of adventure and suspense; and (c) that it was an action story. After many rejections I decided on
Nightrunners of Bengal.
I hand-lettered it proudly on a title page, and returned to the story.

Bill Lewis, a lawyer friend of Vyvyan Donner's, put my case to the firm of which Sam Rosenman was a prominent member. (Judge Rosenman had been a close confidant of President Roosevelt's, and kept considerable political
piston
in New York and Washington.) Whether privately persuaded by Rosenman or not the Immigration people extended the visas of Barbara and the children for another six months. In Washington the Attorney General's Department advised the appropriate committee against passing the Kilgore-St George bill for the admission of John Masters, on the ground that it would set a precedent. This was, of course, their stock advice on all the many bills of this sort which were put into the hopper every session. Nevertheless they also began to gather information about me for the committee's use. I had my first set of fingerprints taken at the Immigration Office in Newark, and obtained my first certificates of good conduct from the New Jersey State Police — and also from the New York State Police, to cover the period we had lived on South Mountain Road.

Getting into the spirit of things, the Immigration Service asked for Barbara's fingerprints, and the F.B.I. took mine a couple more times. The committee urgently requested good conduct certificates covering my residence in Camberley, England; Claygate, England; New Delhi, India; Ranikhet, India. Burma? The war? Good God, where had I
not
been? I wrote streams of letters, and spent a fortune on airmail stamps. During a visit to the New York Alpine Club a delightful quiet middle-aged mountain-lover and Wall Street lawyer called Oscar Houston offered me his help — which he gave without stint. Vyvyan Donner signed a pledge guaranteeing that she would be responsible for any charges incurred by the public on my behalf. I offered the immigration service a set of Martin's fingerprints...

Desmond asked urgently for a couple of chapters of
Nightrunners,
as he had aroused interest at Doubleday. I sent them off and redoubled my efforts on the rest. Early in April I had the first draft finished — just in time, as Desmond telephoned me that Doubleday liked the two chapters and wanted to see the whole manuscript at once. We were practically in the clear, he said joyfully.

The journey to New York on the Pennsylvania Railroad involved a terrible five minutes while the train passed a huge piggery on the Jersey meadows. The pigs were fed, it was rumoured, on scraps from New York restaurants usually some days old. The sweet, sour rotting smell pervaded the train long after it had passed the piggery, and was about to plunge into the Hudson tunnels. But there were fantastic piles of abandoned cars to admire (New Jersey is the Junked Car Capital of the World); and the twisted spaghetti of steel and concrete where roads, railways, and canals passed through and around Newark; and, out there beyond the estuary of the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers, a curious world of tall brown marsh grass, hidden waterways, wild birds seen suddenly from the train, a man gliding hidden down a narrow channel in an old punt, fowling or trapping muskrats, who knew? So I took my MS to New York in person, handed it over, and returned to Milltown to debate with Barbara as to how we should spend all the money we'd soon be getting.

About two weeks later a letter came from Desmond. I knew it contained bad news, for in that world people always telephone good news. Doubleday had rejected my book. Desmond was genuinely distressed; he said that the executive editor, Lee Barker, was all for
Nightrunners
but in a week of civil war had not been able to persuade the rest of the editorial board.

My first reaction was to part company with Desmond.

I know he understood why, and I think he approved. As I told him, our standards and ways of thought were too much alike. By now there was quite a backlog of optimistic forecasts leading to final failures. I wanted an agent who thought not like me but like the people I was trying to sell to. Carrie Balaban recommended a friend, Paul Small, then just leaving M.G.M., and after a brief interval I was taken over by Miriam Howell of Paul Small's new literary agency. Miriam accepted the chunky manuscript of
Nightrunners
and began to circulate it among the publishing houses.

Macmillans rejected
Nightrunners;
no comment.

The Palmers returned from their tour and we would have been homeless; but by good fortune the same South Mountai n Road house became available, and Eleaner Hope offered it to us, furnished, at the same reasonable rental we had paid before ($980 a year). We had met nothing but goodwill from our neighbours in New Jersey, who were mostly occupied in manual labour or mechanical trades in the nearby towns and factories; but we had had very little to talk about with each other. So it was with an unsuspected and surprising feeling of Going Home that we loaded the Crosley for the last time and drove up U.S. 202 to South Mountain Road and its special quality of leaving people alone to get on with their lives. There close friends might not see one another for a couple of years and, at the end, pick up the old relationship exactly as before. There no one lived under social pressure, no one was 'keeping up' with anyone else. The disparity between the world fame of some and the total non-fame of their neighbours, close friends, was such that the idea was ridiculous as soon as mentioned; nor can people keep records of whose turn it is to invite whom when some friends disappear abroad every few weeks to write for national magazines, some stay at home, and some spend parts of each year in Hollywood, London, or Rome.

We were back. Here was the Hudson, the far bank dim in the heat haze. Here was Haverstraw, seedy and shadowed under High Tor. Here was Hook Mountain, towering so dark and steep over Nyack that it required no imagination, during one of the frequent thunderstorms, to see Henry Hudson's little ship tossing on the wide black water below, lightning in its rigging. Here were the artists and the artisans, the farmers and the carpenters. And here were some very unusual people generically called the Jackson Whites. They lived in the Ramapo Hills, the western border of the county, with a way of life as primitive as anything told of the Smokies. They lived by the rifle and trap, eating squirrels and woodchucks. They never sent their children to school, and never came down from their fastnesses except to sell their handcarved woodwork at Margulies' store on U.S. 202. They would not be paid in money, but in sugar and flour, salt and tobacco, and with these climbed silently back through the forest.

Up there the deer died by the single shot, all year round, whatever the game laws said, for they were food; and if the game warden went up to investigate, he died too.

(The Jackson Whites murdered two, about this time. No one was ever charged.)

They were said to be descendants from three successive waves of refugees, who had sought shelter in these forested hills: local Indians, dispossessed by the first Dutch settlers; Hessian deserters from the British armies; and runaway slaves in the years before the Civil War. All this one could understand, but it staggered the mind to imagine the Jackson White of 1949, for, from his ridges he could easily see the ordered walks of West Point ahead, the Empire State Building on one side and the kosher pleasure domes of the Catskills on the other, while at his feet roared the endless traffic of Routes 17, 6 and 202, and the Erie and West Shore railroads.

One of their patriarchs vanished that winter. He thought an enemy family were shooting into his cabin. His sons told him no one had fired, but he insisted, and took his rifle and went out after them. They found his body next spring, by the little church of St John's in the Wilderness, where his people worshipped, if they did. He had frozen to death.

Our friends greeted us so warmly that our sense of Home was reinforced. Yet I found myself dreaming of granite cliffs and sandy coves, springy turf and the wild ascending song of skylarks. Was it really Cornwall and Wiltshire that called, or only my youth?

We steadily widened the circle of our acquaintance, starting with Diane Fenwick, who had rented the Chicken Coop next door. She was a girl of startling beauty and a corresponding vagueness about the facts of life in the country. Soon after we had settled in again, and killed another copperhead for good luck, I awoke one morning, went to the bathroom and turned on the taps.
Whooosh,
out burst jets of superheated steam. I began turning hot and cold taps like mad to relieve the pressure. Steam hissed out from all of them. I ran downstairs to the water heater, thinking the thermostat must have failed. But no, the trouble was farther off than that, for the cold-water pipe leading up from the well was hot. We shared the well with the Chicken Coop. The cold pipe from the pump to the Chicken Coop was hot. I broke in through a window. The place was like the boiler room of a troopship in the Red Sea. Diane had left her heater (which did not have a thermostat) on, and gone away for the week-end. The steam had worked back down the cold pipe, to the pump in the well house, through that, up our cold lines...

We forgave Diane with a gentle Monday lecture. Only her looks could also persuade us to forgive her habit of feeding exclusively on huge bowls of navy beans and raw garlic; but she had never found out how to cook anything else.

The Milltown poltergeist seemed to have smuggled itself on board the Crosley (we couldn't think where it had found room), for now the rattlings and moanings troubled our nights in South Mountain Road. With cause, we decided it must be Nanny and sent her home.

Little, Brown rejected
Nightrunners;
no comment.

The Hills gave a cocktail party for us soon after our return. Ray was less than sober, Marian harassed, and Jim and Kathy more than usually disturbed, but what engaged our attention was Keith Jennison's feet. He was wearing slipper-socks. We thought it extraordinary that anyone should go to a cocktail party wearing such garb, though we were forced to admit that the slipper-socks were nothing out of the ordinary in that assembly, where some women seemed to have stepped out of Bonwit Teller's bandboxes and others out of wrestles with large shaggy dogs, while an eminent lady artist was wearing puce trousers and a cape made from an old bedspread.

Some of the men were obviously of Wall Street and others no less obviously of the third sex — to which Rockland was as disinterestedly kind as it was to actors, plumbers, and retired lieutenant-colonels, Indian Army. But we eyed the slipper-socks with particular attention because Keith was not a man oblivious of his surroundings, not was he a rebel, so the slipper socks were a matter of choice. An hour earlier he must have sat barefoot, but trousered, at his dressing-table and said to himself, 'Shall I wear the black oxfords or the brown loafers this evening?' After arguing back and forth for a while he had decided on the slipper-socks. Such a choice was not open to an Englishman, where for every function, time of day, and geographical location there was one correct sartorial response — and only one. I realized with a start that this was true of many other things besides dress. For English people of our class and type, in many political and social areas, most problems had pre-selected answers. Americans, it seemed, had to work out the answer each time. It must be difficult being an American.

Norton's rejected
Nightrunners;
no comment.

Another aspect of the lack of rigidly enforced standards was the general unwillingness to judge others. Some of our neighbours drank too much, and for this or other reasons sometimes committed acts considered outrageous by any standards. People shrugged, said, 'He was drunk,' and continued to accept the transgressor socially. In the society from which we had come judgment was automatic; a man attending a cocktail party in slipper-socks was showing lack of respect to his hostess; a man committing dreadful acts when drunk would lose his friends. We were guided by hard rules and infallible punishments, and they produced an obvious pharisaism among us, since none would be blameless if all private actions and secret thoughts were made public. Here there was less concealment, which was good; little judging, which was probably good; and, springing from those, a tolerance of many differing life styles. The dangers in non-judgment and tolerance were the concomitant lack of guidance to the young, and the risk of its extension to criminality and antisocial actions. The most alarming manifestation among South Mountain Road's liberals was hatred of the police, and sometimes of the judicial system — not because of brutality and venality, though they were sometimes mentioned — but because they were society's engines of judgment and punishment. We found this particularly ironical because these liberals admired the British system and attitude this side of idolatry. When we pointed out that respect and even affection for the police was an essential part of it, they could only shake their heads and say, 'It's not the same here.' They were right; and the fault was not in the police but in them. Some of our friends talked like those people in a lifeboat who demand that there must be tolerance for all... even for the fellow pulling out the bilge plug.