Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (34 page)

By breeding or ancestry then? Again, partly. But there is a proverb, 'Clogs to clogs in three generations.' Ah, by wealth, of course? Well, there is another proverb: 'Rank is but riches, long possess'd.' This is true, but personally acquired wealth may be a positive obstacle to gentlemanliness.

Education? Much nearer. It is almost axiomatic that a man who has attended one of the twelve or so 'right' public schools (in England 'public' means 'private') is a gentleman. A man who went to one of the others, called 'minor', is not a gentleman, he is a quivering mass of schizophrenia, because nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the population admire and envy his tie, while the thousandth sneers at it; rather, he hides his sneer in the way only a Right-public-school-boy can. This fact highlights the First Principle of gentlemanliness: a miss is much worse than a mile.

And we are now so close to another truth that an exercise in intuition will bring us to it in one bound. Gentlemen are made by institutions; institutions are made by gentlemen. The Marylebone Cricket Club is such an institution: the M.C.C. is the governing body of cricket, and therefore every member of it must, by definition, be a gentleman; so the M.C.C. possesses the constitutional power to make gentlemen. This is also true of the Royal Navy, certain small London clubs, and one or two regiments of the British Army.

The old 60th Rifles, for instance, could take a slum boy without a penny or an acre or an aitch to his name and if they accepted him as an officer, he would become a gentleman from that moment. But
(First Principle)
it is illusion to imagine that if rejected by the 60th, the 59th or the 61st would have been as good. They were excellent and battle-worthy regiments, and full of gentlemen; but they did not have the power to
make
gentlemen.

A gentleman can be of any faith although it is much better (again
First Principle)
to be a Buddhist than a Baptist. He can be of any race because, in matters of taste, he is infallible and could not therefore have chosen to be born in a wrong one. By the same reasoning he can be of any colour, although an unusual choice of tribe, creed, or pigment would make the gate a little more strait. On this, as on so many other subjects, the last word rests with Mr Winston Churchill who on October 14, 1939, minuted thus to his colleagues at the Admiralty:
There must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour
(in the employment of Indians or Colonial natives in the Royal Navy).
In practice much inconvenience would arise
if
this theoretical equality had many examples... I can not see any objection to Indians serving on H.M. ships where they are qualified and needed, or, if their virtues so deserve, rising to be Admirals of the Fleet. But not too many of them, please.

A gentleman's amusements are divided into two classes sports and games. All games, except court tennis and cricket, rank below all sports, except greyhound racing and the breeding of racing pigeons. Greyhound racing is trade; pigeon racing is not done. Court tennis is mentioned with a reverence all the more impressive because there are only three courts in England, and no one has ever seen the game actually played. Playwrights who have implied that a gentleman's only sports are foxhunting and adultery are guilty of over-simplification. Salmon fishing is more correct than either, and just as expensive. Nor is it true,
vide
Maugham
passim,
that East of Suez a gentleman merely substitutes polo for hunting, and adds alcoholism.

After cricket, Rugby football is the best game, because it is played at nearly all the Right schools; but a rugby-playing gentleman has to be wary of falling into trouble by association, because the game also attracts a hearty crowd of beer-drinkers, ale-quaffers, and backslappers from Wrong schools. Eton protects its alumni from this danger by playing a game of such stunning boredom that no one else plays it, or wants to.

When I became an American it would be a shock to find that I was no longer capable of wearing the right clothes, applauding correctly at cricket, or eating in a civilized manner; but more important were the privileges I would be losing, and the responsibilities I would be shedding. A gentleman's most useful privilege is the right of first refusal to certain jobs. Golf clubs descend to the level of
sportvereins
unless the secretary is a gentleman, preferably a retired commander, R.N. Sir Alan Herbert has pointed out that the quality of tea depends on the quality of the people growing it. I think he gave the best recipe as one Old Harrovian to two Old Cheltonians for the lighter Assam teas, with an Old Rugbeian to be substituted for one of the Old Cheltonians for the stronger South Indian and Ceylon varieties.

The responsibilities are: to keep the highest possible standards of dress and conduct; to lead public opinion in peace, cautiously; to lead the soldiery in battle, incautiously; to make no display of emotion; to keep calm. A gentleman can be dismissed from the class for persistent evasion of these duties. And — this is where the rub came — he would be automatically disenfranchised for going abroad to live. Whoever heard of an Australian gentleman? Oddly enough, American gentlemen are recognized. They live in Boston, row for Harvard, are very rich
but without ostentation,
and would really
rather
have been British. One admires them for their stiff-lipped loyalty in not saying so.

Well, I thought, there it is. The tea will have to grow without me. I hope I don't have to lead any more soldiery into battle, and if I set any examples they will be strictly private. So, farewell, my past, with thanks and appreciation for all that you did for me and were to me, once.

I returned to my work:
Sinbad is a great character. Suppose I make him the hero, substituting him for the actual men in my chosen Nights tales. I must try to get Scheherazade herself in...

Counsel from Bill Oaten, my railway expert: The
driver would close the regulator and open the drifting valve and coast. Steam would not be blowing off through the safety valve... It is always the practice where there is sabotage to run pilot engines in front of trains, or an armoured truck with machine-guns manned by the A.F. (I)…

If Sinbad, as prince, grants the mysterious old beggar one wish, and the old man asks for one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, two on the next, four on the next, eight on the next, and so on, he'd bankrupt the kingdom, wouldn't he? Could use that to have wise old man teaching young prince to think before he acts. Also good visual incident to have chess game played out on black and white marble floor with harem girls as chessmen; something important must depend on the outcome. Sinbad's life? He, captured, tied to a pillar, watching?... Alex says, when he's reading a book with the idea of making it into a movie, he tears out the pages where his attention has been held, and then tries to stitch them into a script. H'm.

Bill Oaten wrote of a partial draft of
Bhowani Junction: I like the book very much but it is a bit descriptive in parts as you say from the sex point of view, also the words. I think you should visualize your books being read and put into the bookcase, do you think that would happen to this one, and you do not want to lose your public.

Helen Taylor was often sniping at me about the same thing. It annoyed me, because I could not find a solution. The word 'obscenity' has a selective meaning, but I could not select my readers. I have always tried to choose the exact word to convey my meaning. But the correct word for some act, if I were talking to a rifleman of the Cameronians, was not the same as if I were talking to my proper maiden aunt. It was not my intention to make the one laugh, or shock the other, simply to inform, to paint a picture. But how could I do that when the colours appeared different to different eyes? Well, I'd just have to take each case as it came, but if Bill and Helen thought I would have the foul-mouthed Rodney Savage cry, 'Gee whiz., Taylor...', or talk about 'agreeable intercourse' when in the middle of a lusty mating, they were wrong.

As for descriptiveness, they wanted me to stop outside the bedroom door. On what grounds? If I any not to describe what goes on in there, why do I describe what goes on in the storeroom, the engine shed, the barracks? There must be a reason for the inclusion, of course, but showing a sexual compatibility can be just as important as showing a technical skill. But the damnable core of the problem is that what titillates one reader shocks another, informs a third, and bores a fourth. My lights must be my own.

The summer ended, my work for Alex ended, and we trooped down to Southampton. First class in the
Caronia
was full of Republicans praising Joseph McCarthy, an unspeakable self-seeker, liar, and cad. Since it soon became
obvious
that he was all these things, the people of Wisconsin incurred a grave responsibility in re-electing him to the U.S. Senate. His anti-Communism was as bogus as everything else about him (except his rascality) and Barbara and I had several brisk arguments with his admirers. I wished the English denigrators of America had brought him up more often, for he was something we could have got our teeth into as a real American problem. He was particularly real to us because he had gone after the Voice of America, where two men who had befriended us were now responsibly employed — Fernand Auberjonois and Troup Mathews. In those
Caronia
arguments we agreed vehemently that Communism was a menace; we agreed that the American Liberal Establishment either did not appreciate the menace or deliberately played it down. We knew more about this than the Republican bankers on that ship did, for in Rockland County many did not want to believe that the Russians had massacred just as many of their own people as the Germans had massacred Jews; and it was terribly bad form to mention the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. But, we said, American Communists must be gone after by constitutional means, inside the law. If the law wasn't tough enough, make one that was. The bankers laughed and said we had a very English point of view. We looked forward to escaping to West Point and the company of young men trying to live up to a simple, difficult credo:
Duty, Honour, Country;
and in those very words standing firm between the lunacies of the right and the astigmatism of the left.

But these angers and uncertainties disappeared in that dawn when the engines slowed, we held our children close on the forward deck, and Miss Liberty rose like a promise out of the mist. The ship glided silent across the flat silver towards the land. We were home, and in that draughty graceless barn of a pier at the foot of West 50th Street I wanted to kneel down and kiss the concrete.

When we came to Rockland County, a stag was standing in the edge of the pine copse below our orchard. We stopped, and looked at each other, then he shook his heavy antlers, crossed the road, and trotted round the pond and up into the forest.

Chapter Thirteen

Every day the children walked hand in hand the two hundred yards up Route 304 to the corner of South Mountain Road, keeping carefully to the left of the road. There they waited for the bus to Street School. Usually I had walked up earlier to get the newspaper from the Centenary Community Store beyond the corner, but sometimes I went with them and when I passed on my way back, the
New York Times
under my arm, the kids were scuffling and shouting. Once I saw Susan fell to the ground, with one swing of her book-laden satchel, a boy called Evvie Burger, who was a year older and three times bigger than she. He had been pulling her hair and was probably madly in love. The headmaster told us that Susan and Martin were both exceedingly bright. They seemed to be happy, though Susan withdrew rather more often with comics and Island Stallion tales than seemed normal. Martin, starting kindergarten, read aloud to the class in the teacher's absences, since Susan had long since taught him, and also gave the teacher many useful hints on car recognition.

We had birthday parties in the kitchen, which was floored with brick from Haverstraw brickyards that went out of business about 1845, when Haverstraw was Sodom-on-the-Hudson. There was an old bread oven in the wall down there, and a Franklin stove against a central chimney, for it was dug into the slight slope, the house standing tall above, barn-red, white-shuttered, with an indomitable wisteria trying to pull down one side. There were plenty of mice, but they were rural fellows who bothered us little. When they became too numerous they obligingly trooped into the traps we set. Bats sometimes flew down the chimneys and, once, so did an owl. Cars and timber trucks passed close in front, but after a month no one heard them any more. It was quiet, except for the noonday sounds of teenagers from Clarkstown High fornicating in their lunch-break around a pond on vacant land across the road. The roar of engines, and shriek of tyres as they gunned out afterwards was like the mating call of triumphant wapiti. Well, the school was three miles away and they had no time to waste.

We had to make a few minor changes, such as shoring up the beams supporting the children's bedroom (we got suspicious when their beds kept rolling down to meet in the middle of the floor). In the process we found, nailed to the underside of the old wide planks with a square hand-made nail, a faded note:

Please pay Mr Stagg the sum of fourteen shillings if you will oblige your most obedient servant Abm. Stauches.

Stagg's Corners was the old name for Centenary, which was our address. The date of the note was February, 1812...

Five acres of land surrounded the house, though it was set close to the road, as all farm houses were in the days when it was built. Barbara's green thumb was allied to a physical love of the new land and guided by a considerable knowledge of gardening, and she soon had our three hundred feet of road frontage lined with forsythia, and the untidy bridal-veil bush at one corner of the house well trimmed. Beyond the bush was a big barn, its interior hung with cobwebs, mildewed saddlery, broken horse furniture, sleds, and tools. In the far corner there was a well, the mouth seven feet in diameter. A huge wheel, perhaps ten feet in diameter, hung on the wall beside the well. A long rope was wound round the wheel's thick wooden axle, which was worked by a handle and ratchet arrangement. From the rope hung a round platform, which normally rested on the wooden well-cover. But when this had been a working farm, the full milk churns were put on the platform in summer and the whole lowered on the rope into or just above the water, which was seven feet down and ten feet deep. That was how they kept the milk cool and that was why our place was called Well Wheel Farm — though we called it just 269 Route 304, as we thought the old name would be cutesy and presumptuous when it was no longer a real farm. Several pairs of phoebes and swallows nested in the barn in spring, and though the kids liked to swing on the rope and raise and lower the platform, the birds didn't mind.