Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (35 page)

Outside the barn a pair of small walnut trees stood on a tiny rise, inscrutably named by the children
White and White Star.
Under the mound they buried our second American cat. Tomlinson had disappeared, probably in an argument with a raccoon. This second, a kitten we called Natch, was killed by a car two months after we got him.

To the south there was an orchard of apple trees, so old and big that their gnarled branches scraped the ground. They bore good fruit, but worm-eaten, since we did not spray. The trees also supported some impressive poison ivy, the stems thicker than my thumb where they climbed the trunks. In the autumn the apples fermented on the ground and wasps, bees, and hornets gathered from miles about. There were many deer in Rockland County then. I had seen several in the trees behind the Hope house, and others crossing the road above Centenary. They also liked to cross from the forest along the Hackensack River behind our land to the High Tor woods. To do this they would work down the pine copse where we had seen the stag, and then wait for the traffic to die down. The apples sometimes tempted them to linger in our orchard.

One evening our solid applejack turned three respectable matrons, grown does, into suburban housewives on a bender. They got drunk on the fermented apples, and after a while they were standing on their hind legs, butting each other, kneeling to waggle their behinds in the air, and charging about like puppies. All the time a large stag stood in the corner of the wood and watched them with an expression of disgust. They cavorted about for half an hour before the stag made some sign or sound, which clearly meant, 'Come away, you drunken sluts'; then the ladies pulled down their skirts and staggered off after him.

The deer seldom made any serious attempt at concealment, for they knew the dates of the hunting season better than the game wardens. Young Mellors said the sight of the year was to lie up beside one of the game trails leading into Harrison Harriman Park, where hunting was forbidden, a day or two before the season opened. The deer went by in hundreds, trooping into sanctuary. We were all glad that they were getting rare in the flatlands, for the county was becoming heavily populated, and the hunters, apparently, more myopic. Up in the northern part of the State farmers used to write in large letter COW on both flanks of all their cattle, but the beasts still got hit; while shot and shell occasionally pattered against our shutters or bored through the barn wall. The first week of the season was always set aside for bow-and-arrow hunting only, and during it I hourly expected, with mixed feelings, the
thunk
of an arrow in the woodwork. It would be dangerous, yes... but think of the cachet of having an arrow, like Dr Rounds's, stuck in the front door!
Not Abenaki down here, old boy — Mohawk.

Our main activity in the orchard was starling-killing. The other small birds — wrens, tits, finches, and warblers — would start nesting in the marvellous holes in the old apple trees; then the starlings would arrive. Twice we found warblers' eggs thrown out, broken and eaten, and starlings installed. Once it was baby chickadees, dead on the ground. I bought a .22/.410 over-and-under single-shot gun and we began a campaign of extermination, in which even the sensitive Martin happily joined. We used the gun, hoses, cats, and worse — for the starlings were a local and national pest. They were originally brought into America by a romantic ass who had imported two of every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare. The other birds seemed to know what we were at. Once I turned a starling into a bloody pulp in the middle of a circle of cardinals, less than three feet from him. The cardinals barely left the ground in acknowledgement of the blast before settling back to continue their meal around the corpse. We killed about ninety starlings a year, their corpses going to join the condoms the high school kids dumped into the swamp across the road.

We saw many skunks — often at dusk, at close quarters, when we threw bread towards them. In the twilight Barbara almost picked one up outside the front door, thinking he was the black and white kitten. When he stood on his head, she recognized her error, for we had not taught the kitten that trick yet.

The only skunk who fired his main turrets nearby had been menaced by some fearful Thing in the middle of the night. We don't know what it was for we saw and heard nothing, but were awakened at 2 a.m. by a truly imposing smell which was occupying our second-storey bedroom to the point of pushing us out. Of course we saw many dead skunks on the roads, especially during the autumn mating season, for the skunk (British readers may not realize) is so confident in the power of his weapon that he fears nothing, and that includes cars; if he sees them it is only to raise his tail and murmur, 'I say, old boy, keep off a bit, will you?' But they don't.

We had a few opossums, mostly seen dead — really dead on the highway; a rat or two left over from the farming days, several slow-worms, garter snakes, and black snakes — but no copperheads; we were half a mile from the rocky High Tor terrain which they liked. We had rabbits and a fox or two somewhere out in the brush towards the Hackensack, where the remains of a farm bridge had fallen into the little stream during Garfield's administration. Once we came home to a real Nature-in-the-Raw-is-Seldom-Mild demonstration for the children. As we got out of the car we noticed several small birds hovering low over the long grass outside the orchard, all chattering blue murder. We hurried over, and heard a continuous high-pitched screaming. Under the birds, which hovered around still, we saw a very small rabbit, crouched wide-eyed, and screaming in terror. The children cried, 'What's the matter with it?' I didn't know, but as I stooped down to pick it up a sudden movement caught my eye. A three-foot black snake, which had had the rabbit's hind leg in its jaws, released its grip and began to wriggle away. The rabbit recovered its wits and also darted off on a diagonal course from the snake's. The children clapped and cried, 'He's escaped!' But when barely twelve feet off the snake turned and made to intercept the rabbit. If I had not run forward and balked him, he would have had him again. Black snakes are very useful beasts, and the children thought we should give the snake a starling in lieu of the rabbit we'd deprived him of; but I couldn't find one.

We did not bother the woodchucks which proliferated in the tangle of scrub and small trees (there was a derelict jungle-covered tennis court at the back, too) unless they bothered us, or unless Louise wanted one. Louise Samuels was our new cleaning woman. She was a Negro originally from Florida, who liked to eat woodchucks and knew how to cook them. She was not rich and for her sake I shot half a dozen woodchucks every year, with less compunction after Barbara showed me the ruins of her lettuce and petunias and said, 'Those damned woodchucks have been at my garden again.' When Louise settled in as a regular worker with us — she came once a week — we gave her a piece of land in the orchard to grow whatever she wanted on. Soon she too was accusing the woodchucks of every crime from arson to incest. With two women out for their blood the woodchucks didn't have a chance.

A row of big willows lined the road between the forsythia, and a huge black walnut guarded the drive. The best tree on the property was a big maple outside the front door. It gave shade in summer and in the autumn the light filtered like distant fire through it into the living-room. Under the warm shower of light we sat on the little terrace of brick, drank beer and Martinis, waved to passing friends and listened to football and baseball games. We went out seldom and when we did our friends' older children baby-sat.

The Auberjonois had a lovely downstairs kitchen like ours — their house was as old — but visits to them were saddened by Fernand's increasing strain under McCarthy's accusations. The Jennisons had the Toad and Throstle and a derelict track of the New York & New Jersey Railroad. The Andersons had a waterfall, and a piece of the Hackensack dammed up to make a pool for summer swimming and winter skating. The Fellers had moved into what had been the Balabans' garage, originally built by Waldo Pierce. Henry Varnum Poor fed us beer, and his wife Bessie Breuer introduced us to her brother, the composer Julian Freedman. 'He's a
Jew,'
she whispered, in a piercing aside. The Girls and the Young Boys came and drank and talked late, and we suddenly realized we had a lot of friends, many more than the gypsy life of an army officer had ever gathered in one place before. Among them were the Mackays, who had just arrived to take over as butler and cook for wealthy people on Long Island. 'They seem nice enough — so far,' Hamish said cautiously of his employers. 'When they asked me how I knew so much about a butler's duties, I had to say it was because I used to have one myself.'

We became members of the P.T.A., the North Clarkstown Civic Association, and (unwillingly) the Episcopal Church, where the children for a time attended Sunday School until their obvious boredom and a strong sense of our own hypocrisy made us pull out altogether. We sat through interminable meetings of school boards, town boards, planning boards, and zoning boards. Recommendations were made, laws passed... only to be bent double at the whim of the next developer. With us eternal vigilance was the price not of liberty but of existence.

In Korea the peace talks were broken off, and at home Eisenhower gathered much support by promising to bring the boys home. A neighbour with a son in the Marines expressed dismay at the casualty figures, which did not seem very high to me for a large country. There was a great deal of sneering at 'police actions'. We wondered uneasily whether America had the stomach or the patience for long wars undertaken on behalf of principles, not of survival.

In a westward-facing screened porch, which we had walled in for my study, I prepared for the forthcoming editorial battles over
Bhowani Junction.
The shape of the book had become clear early in the planning: it was a clock, the characters and situations steadily moving round like the hands. The protagonist, an Anglo-Indian girl, made particularly definite moves — from accepting her status (noon); to refusing to accept it (three o'clock); to trying to be an Indian; failing; trying to be British; failing; and finally, at midnight, finding herself back where she was at noon, an Anglo-Indian who has accepted herself. At the end, nothing had really changed, but it was twelve hours later and everyone had grown that much older, that much wiser. I tried, early on, to make the whole plot fit into those twelve hours, but soon saw it could not be done, and gave up any hope of achieving full Greek unity. But I knew I had a powerful book under my hand.

The Lotus and the Wind
was published to generally favourable criticism, and with that the reviewers and feature writers suddenly remembered that I had said I would write thirty-five novels about India. Till now they had, quite properly, ignored that statement as hyperbole, but with three books published in three years, and another in the works, they began to quote and marvel. To be accurate, they misquoted, for I had not said I
would
write thirty-five novels about India, I had said that before becoming a novelist I made sure I
could...

An incident that occurred at this time explains as clearly as I could do now, by hindsight, my differences with the Liberal Establishment. On January 18 the
New York Times Book Review
contained a critique of
A Brighter Sun,
which sent me rushing to my typewriter, with a letter to the editor.

Dear Sir,

It is a good and likeable quality that enables man to feel the hurts, the indignation, and the sorrows of others. The quality is called sympathy and it is happily common in America, more common than in other parts of the world that I know. But in some people, who would probably call themselves 'liberals', the capacity for sympathy has become a compulsion for resentment. This is not sympathy, but bias, and it is dangerous.

An example is Edith Efron's review of Samuel Selvon's new novel,
A Brighter Sun.
Note first that the author of the book is an (East) Indian. Then note the words of the reviewer: she thinks that the response of the book's protagonist, also an East Indian, to colonial race prejudice is 'oddly timid'; she accuses the author of 'the deliberate softening of painful realities' and of an 'anxiety to spare British colonialism'; she regards the book as likely to assure those readers who enjoy having their poetic notions about the childlike primitives confirmed; on these grounds and because the book's reaction to 'harsh racial conflict' is 'oddly non-corrosive' she dismisses it as having 'something of the official tourist pamphlet about it'.

The only excuse for such an assault on the author's honesty and courage would be for the reviewer to be, like the author, an East Indian domiciled in the West Indies. Perhaps Efron is one; but, even so,
a
developed critical faculty would have contented itself with pointing out that its own experience had led it to
a
different outlook.

Edith Efron dismissed the letter with an even more viciously 'liberal' riposte. The Editor of the
Review,
whom I saw a few days later, gave me an explanation which I fear is libellous. I said I thought it was particularly unfair to attack a new writer from an ex-colony in this way. Samuel Selvon wrote to thank me for drawing the sword on his behalf, and for understanding what he was actually saying in his book, not what Edith Efron thought he ought to be saying — but then he was only a poor native showing proper gratitude to his white master.

Correspondence between myself and a young Negro novelist from Jamaica put my position even more clearly. It took place a few years later, but this is where it belongs. The Atlantic people sent me
The Eye of the Storm
by John Hearne, for a blurb. I thought it was a good book, and said so, and added:
I would be glad if you would pass on to John Hearne my personal appreciation and best wishes. It is a real joy to find a writer who is in the classic tradition of the novelist, that is, he deals with people on the human level, and is stirred by them in their loves and hates and basic characters, not by them as symbols of lesser conflicts. Hearne also writes professionally, which means that you want to go on reading instead of saying gloomily, Christ, I suppose this inefficient lazy bastard has got a Message somewhere in all this crap and he expects me to take a spade and dig it out and thus acquire merit. Of course Hearne has something to say, too, but he is a novelist, not a pamphleteer in a poor disguise.