The unaccustomed susurration of the ventilators reminded me vividly of things I would sooner forget; and in any case, the enormous meals, the day-long indolence, had made great nature's second course unattainable. It was not the Company's fault, bless them. They tried, with the boundless but unimaginative good will of all nannies, to give their charges a routine which was what those charges wanted, and at the same time did them good. Nanny knew, (for she had been ashore once, when there was no servant problem and nice people had begun to accept the horseless carriage), Nanny knew that God had ordained the precise structure of Edwardian England, and that any change would be for the worse. She petted us. She prepared us for, then kept us in, that station to which the Company had called us. Moaning beneath the ventilator, I cursed the exactness of the social image which she called a ship.
Here the class system was axiomatic. You could not invade a plusher bar simply by readiness to pay more. Nor could you descend to a comfortable pub if you wanted to pay less. Where you were born, there you stayed. At the beginning — a sort of privileged babyhood — you could glimpse the other worlds. You could pass through doors marked First Class and see the wide bedrooms, the stupendous still lifes of sea food on the side tables of the dining-room. Perhaps this was a concession to our brief stop in republican France — for after that, the doors were locked. We had to be content with our middle station, right aft, where you got any vibration that was going. And I supposed there was some sealed-off hold where the base of our social pyramid rested; where tourists were chained to the kelson under the whips of savage taskmasters, while their flesh was subdued by a diet of weevily biscuit and stale water.
Nevertheless, I had to admit this was a Brave New World; for why should anyone repine at the more luxurious fate of another, or take thought for the unfortunate, when he was lulled by soft-foot service, by preposterous food and glitter into acquiescence? Turning restlessly beneath the ventilator, I fingered my belly again and understood why a photograph of an Edwardian shooting party is little more than a display of stomachs. Here, there were five courses for breakfast, with a coaxing steward who seemed genuinely disappointed if the master preferred only one; six courses for lunch; seven for dinner; in between times, cups of tea, bowls of nourishing soup; and all tendered with the gentle implication that you were convalescent after a long illness and should build yourself up. Then there was the bar — if you were inured to the bumble of a screw — where you could sit and subject the wake to an empty-headed examination.
Was it … not the sickness, but the sadness, the weltschmerz resulting from the constant movement of the ship which made me so drearily aware of our company? We were, as far as I could discover, the professional classes. We were doctors, lawyers, junior diplomats, supporting actors, scholars, writers not of best-sellers but of books with réclame. We were scientists — but not physicists, who by the logic of history, travel First. We had a fair share of American widows who had taken the trip because Elmer always wanted to go; and these were insultingly eager to get back to the States. We had many old people and few children. We could afford to fly, but either feared to or did not care to. Our drinking habits were abstemious, and if we had wine with our meals we generally ordered the half-bottle. Though full of good will, we did not make friends easily. We patronized neither the swimming pool nor the gymnasium, though we talked of doing both. Sometimes we went to the cinema, but with the avowed intention of passing the time. We knew we were not going to enjoy what we saw very much. We wore a darker lounge suit for dinner and found getting out of a deck-chair just that little bit difficult.
Dear Nanny — I thought, as I belched indelicately — should we ever escape from your lavender'd apron? There was Gala Night, for example, a festival for the whole ship. Perhaps deep in her bowels the tourists suddenly found their chains struck off, were given a double helping of pea-soup, a tot of rum and freedom till the clock tolled twelve. Down there, we had thought — with the nearest we permit ourselves to bitterness — down there, they were probably drinking Guinness and dancing Knees Up, Mother Brown, or doing The Lambeth Walk. Up there, on the other hand, and 200 yards nearer the bows, were lucullan orgies and neronian debauch. Film stars and directors, tycoons and Ministers of the Crown were vying with each other in gross expense. What gods and maidens loth? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
In our precise enclave we were hardly party-minded, for our migrant scholars were not wandering ones. Yet Nanny did her best. All her charges should have a party, like it or not. At the second sitting for dinner, each person was provided with a small paper hat. We wore miniature shakos, dunces' caps, bonnets and top-hats, while our eyes avoided all human contact and a confused, British silence deepened, broken only by the steady champing of 400 sets of false teeth.
Really, it was too much! I sat up testily, felt for my watch and then I understood.
Going from east to west across the Atlantic, you catch up an hour a day on the sun. The day is twenty-five hours long, a fearsome consideration to me who already find days quite long enough. But this midnight that had come upon us was a hiatus, a suffocating interlude when the clocks stopped and stayed so for an hour. I scrambled out of my bunk, dressed and made my way up to the promenade deck, through a blaze of deserted lights. What lights they were, with their interminable multiplication in veneer and mirror! Austin Reed's, the Library, the Main Lounge had everything but people. In the bar, when the ship felt a swell, a hundred cases of liquor clashed and rattled. This was The Strand Palace Hotel dumped on Brighton Pier and the whole cut adrift. Because there was no one about, the air was heavy with a sense of Grimm or Poe or SF.
'Don't you understand, Swithin? Formula X was too successful. We are the only men left alive in the universe!'
Was I the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail for ever without landfall? All the clocks, standing grimly to attention at midnight, had stopped time in its stride. Only one other thing moved. Astern, outlined against our stationary wake, a catwalk stretched from one side of the ship to the other; and here, a robot paced, its seaman's hat sliding along the upper edge of the canvas windbreaker as it moved from side to side and paused occasionally to inspect the sheer walls stretching 300 yards ahead of it. It saw my lonely figure and stopped. It watched me closely. Had I perhaps lost my all at Bingo? Had my brain been turned by an hour's talk with three aged widows? To reassure it, I tottered windy and splay-legged under cover again. I remembered those midnight liners one sees from the deck of a small boat. They draw their effulgent length across the night and seem so crowded, such a funfair, a town; but I knew now they were deserted automata with the minimum machine-minders about; and a robot pacing the catwalk astern lest one of the thousand sleepers should decide to end it all.
Still twelve o'clock. In the main lounge the headless chairs discoursed together. It would always be twelve o'clock and we were getting nowhere. We were going very fast on the treadmill, we were sitting immovably in the exact middle of that tilting, weltering, slopped seaplate which is all the sailor can ever know of the Atlantic Ocean or any other ocean. Up there, in the heights of our society at the captain's table, they might hope for reassurance, and see their pilot face to face; and down there, in the hold, they could not care less; but here, here in half-way house with its marshal for suicides——
I was sweating absurdly when every clock in the ship gave a hiccup. Time started again. Already, it was thirty seconds past twelve. We were getting somewhere, of course we were. Was it my fancy that the figure on the catwalk relaxed at that moment, as if knowing we had passed some indefinable crisis, some danger? Twenty-eight knots, westward ho, and all was well. The Master-at-Arms emerged from some cave, on his rounds. He walked busily, but stopped to greet me.
'Not able to sleep, sir?'
There was a shade of rebuke in the greeting, the implication that if Nanny could not rock you to sleep, your case was grave indeed. Firmly determined to be myself, in spite of Nanny, I returned to the promenade deck and started to stump up and down. Faster and faster I went along a hundred yards of careful caulking, from the open door at the afterdeck to the public-address system in the waist. Up and down I went — doing, after all, what Nanny would approve of — chasing, catching, outdistancing that ghastly procession of good meals, in puritanical fervour to crucify my belly — almost as though, since I was taking exercise, I might expect to hear from the public-address system my captain's loud 'Well done'. The clocks speeded up with me. Before I had noticed the trickles of sweat in the crooks of my knees, it was three o'clock. If I were not so learned a navigator, my trigonometry so spherical, I could have persuaded myself that the greyness over the wake was indeed the dawn. I was sleepy at last. Of course we were getting somewhere — onward, ever onward to some morrow which would be another today and so forth. In my bunk, the ventilators sounded positively soothing.
The Glass Door
I don't know how far the Alleghanies stretch. They are the small patch of brown, half-way up the map of America on the right-hand side. They consist of parallel ranges, and cover, I suppose, more area than the British Isles. They are not very distinguished as mountains go. They are relatively low, and tree-clad. They have no violence, but abundant charm. How should they not? They pass through Virginia, where charm is laid on so thick you could saw it off in chunks and export it.
Here, in Virginia, is none of the restless energy, the determined modernity, the revolutionary fervour, which in retrospect I see to have characterized my own country. I crossed the Atlantic from the passionate antagonisms of Salisbury traffic on a market day, to the controlled, silence of New York in a rush hour. New York traffic flows in a tide too full for sound or foam, and is peaceful by comparison. I thought then that the allegedly horrifying pace of American life was a European invention; and when I got to Virginia I was certain of it. Shout at Virginia, shake it, slap its face, jump on it — Virginia will open one eye, smile vaguely, and go to sleep again.
Our base of operations is Hollins, a rich girls' college, lapped about by fields, and set down in a fold of the Alleghanies. It is ineffably peaceful. Wherever you look, there are hills looped along the skyline. Every circumstance pleases, woos, soothes, and makes comprehension difficult. We arrived during the Indian summer, when every blade of grass, every leaf, was loaded down with cicadas, each of which seemed to be operating a small dentist's drill. Eagles and buzzards floated a thousand feet up in the hot air. Blue jays played in the fields and a delicately built mocking-bird balanced on the white fence by our window like a lady with a parasol on a tightrope. On the day of our arrival, a mountain bear — probably walking in his sleep — wandered into the nearby town, saw himself in the glass door of the library, panicked, woke up the neighbourhood, was anaesthetized and taken home again.
Hollins sits among its mountains and fields, remembering the eighteenth century. There is a sulphur spring in the grounds, surrounded by a sort of bandstand. In the old days, mammas would take pallid or spotty daughters here to have them cleared up; and the place became a spa. Judging by the pictures of strolling ladies and young bloods driving curricles, it must have been a thriving marriage market — an activity which it has never wholly lost. But in the 1840s the mammas left, social rooms and dormitories were built, and the place became a college.
Hollins, set in its estate of several hundred acres, grew to be an enclave of colonial architecture, all white pillars and porches, grouped round a quadrangle of grass and splendid trees. Lately, a most expensive chapel has taken the place of the old one. A magnificent library building has been added, modern to the last air-conditioned, glass-fronted detail, where the bookstacks have a most generous expanse of working space round them. It is typical of the almost parody southernism of the place that the laboratories are still inadequate. But I have to admit that this choice of what things come first seems splendidly liberal to me, who have suffered from the contrary conception.
Here, then, we work gently, with cushions under us, and plate glass between us and the rest of the world. It is pleasant to contemplate the clock on the administration buildings, by which we regulate our affairs. For the clock is a Virginian clock. The minute hand toils up, lifting the heavy weight of the hour until it totters upright. Then, as if that effort had exhausted the mechanism, the hand falls down to half past three and stays there, collapsed. Long may it continue so to make a mock of the arbitrary, enslaving time-stream! It is as useless and decorative as the carillon which tinkles out Mozart minuets, or hymns, or snatches of old song, from the chapel spire.
Under the trees, along the cemented paths, go the drifts of girls, sympathetic and charming, giggling or absorbed, shy of the bearded foreigner behind his plate glass, but courteous to the helplessness of old age. Some of them are northerners, but the most part southern, and some are from the deep South. Like all women students, they are inveterate, comically obsessive note-takers, who hope by this method to avoid the sheer agony of having to think for themselves. Often they have an earnestness before the shrine of this unknown god Education, which seems at odds with their careful make-up and predatory scent. They will propose a scheme of studies which leaves them no time to eat in the middle of the day; but 40 per cent of them leave to get married before they reach the end of their studies. They are intimidating, ingenuous, and delightful; and about the realities of life in the world at large they know absolutely nothing at all.
Yet how should they? Problems are smoothed over, and have the sharp edges blunted for them by space, prosperity, and the American capacity for presenting any situation in a series of ready-made phrases. Even that problem in the South, which has made such a stir in the world does not occur here so acutely, since the coloured population in this neighbourhood is only about 10 per cent of the whole. Certainly it exists; and an Englishman, who sees everything at one remove, understands not only the discourtesy of meddling with it, but the difficulty of dealing with the problem precisely because it is not acute. Hollins is an enclave, an educated and liberal one. It has preserved almost as an archaeological relic what was inoffensive in the white/black pattern, without perhaps noticing what was going on.
Across the field outside our window is a wood, under Tinker Mountain. In the wood, and partly visible, is a hamlet, a red church with a white, clapboard spire. This is a Negro village. In the old days, when girls came to Hollins, they brought their body slaves with them, and sometimes these slaves stayed on. They settled in the hamlet, and now provide the servants for the college. I see them every afternoon, making their dignified way across the field, large, comfortable women in bright clothes, young men who go whistling and with a dancing step. As your eyes grow accustomed to the light of this ancient country, you begin to see that the man who empties your ashcan is coloured; so are the men who sweep your road or work in the powerhouse, so are the girls who clean or wash or sew, or serve in the canteen. Yet at Hollins, because of its isolation, the relationship is a historical relic. What keeps a girl out of Hollins is not a colour bar but an economic one. It costs more than £1,000 a year to keep a girl there.
For the problem is smoothed over, is down out of sight. The servants, like college servants everywhere, have a long tradition of service. They seem proud of the college and the college is proud of them. Here, embalmed, is a tiny section, a left-over bit of history, which loyalty, education and kindliness have minimized until it has a sort of willow-pattern charm. Yet north of us is an area where the public schools have shut down to avoid integration. South of us, the railway has segregated waiting rooms.
The problem is at once too foreign, too vast, and too muted for my comprehension. At least there is a fund of human goodwill here, which makes the cheap jibes flung from outside seem blunted weapons. Let me do no more, therefore, than record a scene, before the adjustments, the manoeuvres, the shrugs of history have taken it away for ever. I emerged the other day from a book-lined room to the shock of autumn's air on the campus. A dozen coloured men stood by leaf-piles, with brooms and rakes in their hands. Some of them talked, and pushed the leaves about. Others stood motionless, leaning on rakes. They wore bright blue and red, rich brown. They worked, when they worked, with inspired slowness, under the Virginian clock. Silhouetted against the white columns, among thick trunks and clattering leaves, standing among drifts of girls who tinkled here and there with laughter, the dark men seemed a still life. They seemed happy to do this, as the girls seemed happy to do that. Passing among them in the brisker air, some obscure compulsion made me speak to the oldest man of all. He was small and gnarled, dressed in bright blue, his black face startling under a stubble of white hair. I made some inane remark about the weather, which woke him up. He laughed and crowed, and his body jerked. 'Yas-suh!' he said; and we both knew, with one of those psychic flashes that are so often wrong, that we were taking part in some ripe old comedy of the South — 'Yas-suh!'
I reeled on, conscious at last of my solid presence in this mild, foreign land, and struck myself a shattering blow on the invisible glass door of the library. I tottered inside as the carillon tinkled out a minuet by Mozart; and sank into a seat among the girls who were studying the mythological sources of Oedipus and Hamlet, or surveying Spanish Literature, or reading The Rights of Man.
For the problem has not yet come consciously to Hollins. Perhaps it never will, but be by-passed. Yet the enclave is not secure. As the town expands, the value of the Hollins land goes up and presently there will be pressure to sell. Moreover, now that America has inherited an ancient mantle, exotic students are coming to Hollins; Indian and Korean, like the business interests pressing south into Virginia, they are a sign of things to come. They are a colourful sight, in the national costume which is their only defence against the ancient intolerance of the countryside. Moreover, an inter-State highway is advancing across the land, majestically shouldering hills out of its way; and like it or not, that road will divide the estate not half a mile from the campus.
Yet for today, preserved, there stands the pattern; the friendly faculty, the girls, the tall, colonial columns, the dark servants and the quiet sun.
Body and Soul
East Coast blanked out from North Carolina right up to the Canadian border; a half-continent under a pat of fog; nothing visible but the extreme tip of the Empire State Building; planes grounded. Fog, the airman's common cold; all the resources of science are squeaking and gibbering under it; lights blink unseen, radar echoes quiver and ping; the gigantic aircraft lumber round the ramps and aprons like death's-head moths in cold weather; money leaks away. We, the privileged, sit in a sort of underground air-raid shelter, racked by public-address systems and blasts of furious air-conditioning. Evening drags into night. Everything is astonishingly dirty, and time itself is stale. We sit.
Most passengers drift away, to go by train, or try a night's sleep in the airport hotel. But I am going too far to get there any way but by jet. Tomorrow I give the first of three lectures in Los Angeles, on the other side of America. Here it is midnight, or past midnight, or feels like midnight. I am late already, and must go by what flight I can. I cannot telegraph anyone, even though I shall land at the wrong airport.
A loudspeaker honks and burbles. Incredibly, and for the next hour, we have take-off and landing limits. Our plane is getting through; and sure enough, presently it bumbles out of the fog from the runway. I go with our group to Gate Nine, shudder into a freezing night with a dull grey roof. The jet crawls towards us, howling and whistling with rage, perhaps at the fog or perhaps at the human bondage which keeps it only just under control. For a moment or two, it faces us — no, is end-on to us; for here there is no touch of human, or animal, or insect, no face — only four holes that scream like nothing else in creation. Then it huddles round and is still. Doors open and two streams of passengers ooze out. Their faces are haggard. They ignore the night that has caught up with them. They stagger, or walk with the stiff gait of stage sleep-walkers. One or two look stunned, as if they know it is midnight more or less but cannot remember if it is today or tomorrow midnight and why or what. Strange vehicles flashing all over with red lights come out of the darkness, not for the passengers, but to tend the jet. They crouch under the wings and the front end, attach themselves by tubes while all their lights flash, and lights on the jet flash, and the engines sink from a wail to a moan — a note, one might think, of resignation, as if the machine now recognizes that it is caught and will have to do the whole thing over again. But for half an hour they feed it well, while it sucks or they blow, and we stand, imprisoned by the freezing cold and our own need to be somewhere else. Jet travel is a great convenience.
Then we are in, fastening safety belts, and I peer out of the window with a naïveté which seems to increase as I grow older; and a succession of blue lights flick by faster and faster; and there is an eternity of acceleration at an angle of forty-five degrees, while the whistling holes under the wings seem no longer angry but godlike — see what we can do! Look, no hands! The 'No Smoking, Fasten Your Safety Belts' notice disappears. Cupping my hands round my face, squinting sideways and down, I can make out that there is a white pat of fog slipping by beneath us, and over it a few stationary stars. An air hostess demonstrates the use of the oxygen masks.
Comfort, warmth flowing back into rigid hands, comparative silence, stillness except for an occasional nudge as the plane pierces a furlong of turbulence; I try to think of what our airspeed means: it remains nothing but arithmetic. The interior of the plane is like a very superior bus. Am thawed and relaxed. They say that this is not the latest mark of jet — do jets come any faster or bigger or plusher?
Glasses tinkle. Air Hostess brings round drinks — not what happens in a bus. Select Bourbon. (Always live off the country as far as possible.) I also secrete the TWA swizzlestick as a memento. Do not cross America often this way. Another Bourbon. That makes the two obligatory drinks before an American dinner. Am cheerful now — but second drink did not contain swizzlestick and wonder if I am detected? Air Hostess approaches for the third time and I cower — but no. She is English and recognizes a fellow-countryman. Speaks Kensingtonian, which sounds odd at this place and altitude. (Note to intending immigrants. Kensingtonian despised in a man. Gets him called a pouf. Do not know exactly what this terms means, but cannot think it complimentary. On the other hand, Kensingtonian in a girl widely approved of, Americans think it cute.)
Peripeteia! English Air Hostess has read my books and seen me on English telly! I instantly acquire overwhelming status. Feel utterly happy and distinguished in a nice, diffident, English sort of way. Neighbour puts away his briefcase — we all have briefcases — then talks to me. Is physicist, naturally. Tells me about jets sucking air in at one end and blowing result of combustion out at the other. Encourage him, from a pure sense of joie de vivre. Rash, this, very. Tells me about navigation lights, navigation, fluids, including the sea, acceleration — Bourbon now dying down. Make my way forward to lavatory in diffident but distinguished manner, watched by all the unhappy briefcases who haven't been on telly, or haven't been noticed there by an Air Hostess. Lavatory wonderful, buttons everywhere. Push the lot, just to tell grandchildren. Tiny, ultimate fraction of our airstream is scooped in somewhere and directed to blow a jet vertically up out of the pan. Could balance celluloid balls on it and shoot them down with a rifle, as at fairs.
Return to seat and physicist continues course. American Air Hostess comes and talks. More status. Physicist goes to sleep. English Air Hostess comes and talks about London, Paris, Rome, Athens. American Air Hostess counters with Hawaii and Japan. Slight loss of status. I would like to go to sleep. Body here, can see it sitting in the seat. Soul still leaving Atlantic coast. Time? AHs have got on to books. It's the beard, I think. Beard down there on the deck, just beard. Beard in jet v. distinguished. Bourbon quite dead. Return to lavatory for a bit of peace in less distinguished manner. Jet still playing and cannot be bothered to push all the buttons. Return. Physicist says 'Di!' very loudly in his sleep. Die? Diana? Diathermy? AHs wander away. Nod. Have instant vision of Ann with sweeper on carpet. She switches it off, switches off all the sweepers in the world, they fade, whining — am started awake — oh my God, my God! 'No Smoking, Fasten Your Safety Belts' — briefcases stirring like sea-life under returning tide.
Am awake, dammit, or rather body is awake; soul two thousand miles behind, passing through Nashville, Tennessee, shall never be whole again, body mouldering in the jet, soul marching on towards Denver. Time? Bump, rumble, rumble, lights, lights! Los Angeles. Time? Enter Belshazzar's Hall. Body finds hall moving slowly, but they can't fool body. Body knows the movement is the world turning to catch up. More halls, enough for whole dynasties of Belshazzars.
Soul will enjoy this when it catches up. More halls, Mene, mene. Briefcases have vanished. Tunnels, fountains, lights, music, palms, lights, more halls — they would have to put Mene, mene out by roneograph, or use the public-address system. A message for Mr. Belshazzar! Am delirious, I think. Find broom supporting man in centre of hundredth hall. Body asks broom politely. 'Which way is out, Bud?' Broom answers politely, 'Don't arst me, Bud, we just built it.' More halls. Movement of earth deposits body in cab which hurls it ten thousand miles through lights to a recommended English-type hotel. Body recognizes bed as English. Has knobs at each corner. Body falls on bed, giggling at thought of soul now plodding through Death Valley. Body undresses so as to get an hour or two of sleep, telephone rings. Bearleader would like to show body the sights. Body dresses and descends. Nice bearleader drives body through sunny Los Angeles and up the Del Monica heights where the fire was. Body sees mountain road of burnt houses for film stars. Only thing left is row of swimming pools built on stilts out over the gorge, since there is nowhere else for them.
Descent to Pacific. Waves coming the wrong way — no, that was the Atlantic. Sherry in house. Lunch in university. Forty thousand students, or is it seventy? Own campus police and bus service. After lunch, body looks at lecture notes, but cannot bring itself to care. Body gives first lecture and hears its mouth making the appropriate noises. Soul not really necessary in this game. Has drinks beneath original Beerbohm cartoons. Has dinner with the Christmas Story lining the road outside, each tableau the size of a cottage with full-size figures in plaster and floodlit. Party after dinner. Body is told about the definitive Dickens and the Boswell factory. Body is nearly frightened to hear itself advise against the export of American novels. Stick to cars, it says. Soul would be very angry if it could hear that. Body finds itself getting smaller, or is it larger? Is led away, and falls on English-type bed with knobs at each corner.
At two o'clock in the morning there seemed to be a second person present. With the sort of effort one makes to achieve binocular vision, they united themselves; and soul in body, I was looking at the ceiling of a hotel bedroom in Los Angeles. The luxury of being whole was such that I could not sleep, but smoked till I felt like stockfish. The real trouble was that I had a defect of imagination which would not let me believe I was where I was, and yet I knew I was in Los Angeles. Being whole, I was immediately frightened at the vision of tomorrow's lecture and began to compose it in my sleepless head. That way the day dawned, and just as I ran out of cigarettes, my nice bearleader telephoned to set up the morning's sightseeing. We saw the Mormon temple, with a gold angel on the tower, far larger than any God has in heaven. We saw the colossal Medical Centre where the corridors run clean out of perspective to infinity at a point; where the patient is taken in at one end and can be served up as a complete set of demonstration slides at the other. We saw the beach — and for a moment I was really where I was — watching the waves turn over, and stunned by the acute realization that this had been here all the time, had not been created in Europe and exported to form part of a set. I lectured again, pleaded for an evening in bed, but sneaked off on my own — peccavi — and had dinner; filet mignon and a bottle of burgundy-type wine. (Note for wines-men: it was an Almaden '57; suffered like all California wines from that fatal inferiority complex — but once convinced you were a friend, it would offer you what it had.) At two in the morning carried my filet mignon and my burgundy-type wine back to my English-type bed, and lay with my head full of tomorrow's lecture. Dawn.
Nice bearleader came and took me to see the San Gabriel mountains with snow on them and the Chinese Theatre, its pavements with footprints, handprints, graffiti of film stars on them; showed me Hollywood, Gangster's Corner, Mae West's hotel, the William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library. For ten ridiculously exciting seconds I held the MS of The Importance of Being Earnest in my hands. (You, too, have been awarded an Oscar!) We finished that jaunt in a bowling alley, where the beer was good, the telly in colour and the machines for setting up the pins seemed, in their implacable devotion, to be much more intelligent than anything else in sight.
I lecture, meet students, and pack grip in a flash. Meet faculty. Party. Nth, I think. Now I am taken to dinner in an English-type restaurant to make me feel at home. Recognize it as English instantly, because the bartender and all the waiters are in full hunting kit. At one moment they gather round a table and sing 'Happy Birthday' in close harmony. Los Angeles is the mostest, am utterly happy. What other place et cetera. Am eating abalone, the local must, and talking in six directions at once, but am suddenly seized and rushed away to jet, leaving soul still continuing conversations. Body loses way down to plane and is nearly sucked through engine, ha ha. Acceleration and fifty miles square of lights tilts under us. This is the latest mark of jet, they say, can see no difference, that is the Pacific down there, time, eleven o'clock.
American Air Hostess brings round Bourbon. Secrete swizzlestick. Another Bourbon. American Southern Belle-type Air Hostess, v. pretty, guesses I am English and a writer (beard in jet), comes and sits! Immense status SBAH did Creative Writing Course at College. Said to her Prof.: 'Ah aim to be a writer.' Prof, said: 'What do you know about life?' SBAH said: 'Ah hev written a critical essay on Thomas Wolfe and a short story which ah would like you to read.' Prof, read story, said: 'Go and be an Air Hostess' — 'So heah ah em!' Delightful girl, there ought to be a lot more of them and there probably are. Supper. Go to lavatory and discover this really is the latest mark of jet. Tiny, ultimate fraction of our airstream is scooped in somewhere, led into the pan and merely chases itself round and round and round.
Am tucked up solicitously for the night, but am still able to see out of the window, my goodness me, no sleep with a view like that. America sliding by, 650 miles an hour airspeed with 150 miles an hour tail wind; 800 miles an hour over the ground — no cloud. Cities, gleaming, glowing ravishments slide under us six miles down, lines of phosphorescence scored at right-angles to each other. Moon and snow. Stars, perceptibly wheeling. More molten cities. Body understands that America is crust of earth with fire inside, must break out somewhere, hence these scores, these right-angled lava cracks, these chessboard patterns of luminosity (with here and there a wink of veritable incandescence like the white spark on a red coal), but all soft as the tiny lights of a shock cradle. Garish street lamps, Christmas Decorations, traffic signals, window displays, sky signs, now softened, softened. Body lines up jet-hole with city — sees it swallow a whole street six miles long in seconds, how to take the children to school, scoop! three blocks of run-down houses, park, Motel, Motel, Motel, parking lot, cemetery, jump the sparking traffic lights, scoop! Drugstore, Charlies Cheese-burgers, Eats, Frolic Fashion House, Beautician, Physician, Mortician, Realty, News Office WinnDixie MountjoyToy-TownSurplusWarStockCrossroadsChurchofChrist(Airconditioning)Square!MayoraltyFireStationPoliceStationHowardJohnsonSquare!LightsLightsLightsSquare!LightsLightsLightsRiverSquare! All sucked in and blown out, scooped up, hurled back, august, imperial, god-like, America, oh from up here and at this power, even unto weeping, America The——
SBAH is tinkling glasses and switching on lights. My God. BREAKFAST! Four hours out from Los Angeles — where soul is still engaged in fierce discussion of freedom, birth control, how to be happy though British, Emblems — four hours out, there is ahead of us the distinction between grey and black that betokens dawn over the curved Atlantic. Sure enough, the sweeper is switched off for a thirty-minutes' descent. Poor soul, no longer the centre of my sinful earth, but setting out just now on that long climb over the Rockies. Fasten your safety belts. And the time is….
Gradus ad Parnassum
It is perhaps fortunate, as well as understandable, that I have never held a position of authority in the educational world. Faced with an experiment or a new process in teaching I find myself wholly unable to make up my mind about it. During this last academic year in America I made my first acquaintance with Creative Writing, and still don't know what to think. As you revolve from campus to campus, it will be surprising if you do not find yourself booked to attend a Creative Writing class. It can be a frightening experience; for the visiting novelist finds himself among a group of people who seem to know more about the job than he does. Not only the presiding professor but all the students have a far closer grip on analysis, and a full professional vocabulary for the conduct of a post-mortem. From the mass-production lines of the state universities (50,000 students, perhaps) to the quasi-Oxonian gothic of Yale, the poems, short stories, plays, novels, come pouring out and are put through the critical machine. Nor should they be regarded entirely as juvenilia. Tough publishers take them and sometimes publish them. There are dozens of poetry magazines where the verse may find a home. From my standpoint as a campus visitor, it seemed as though the literary world was being geared more and more directly to the academic one. Among the many authors of standing whom I met in the States, I cannot recollect a single one who had not either been produced by these classes, or some time directed them, or both. This must surely intensify the gap between what is read on campus, and the few books sold in the public drugstore at the other end of the street. In place of mass sales, one of the rewards open to the author, is a university position — Writer in Residence — which gives him leisure, adequate pay, and prestige. But it also gets him in the net. Robert Penn Warren at Yale, Eudora Welty at Smith, William Faulkner at Virginia State — whether they needed the money or not, the position ensures that the academic world nibbles at them even if it does not absorb them; and in the States, the academic world, generous, international, complex, is very hard to resist.
The work produced in these seminars tends to fantasy, since it is guaranteed an educated and highly critical audience. It is produced slowly too. Three short stories is a good year's work. Only at Yale did I find something a little more down to earth; a class in which each member had to write so many words each day, just as a pianist does his scales. This means that the average class will contain a few students who have no business to be there at all; but they at least provide an audience for the dedicated writers and at the same time get themselves a credit towards a BA. There is another section, bearded and jeaned, which has ambition and no talent: but in the seminar they can discover this very early. The rest tend to have a spark of talent which is no more than a part of general intelligence. They would be fairly good at anything. Here and there occurs the genuine, bumbling, fettered, uncertain, groping writer, whose work may have none of the smoothness and finish of the student who is content to get by. These, potential authors I suppose, are helped. At least they seem to think so.
The actual classes can be entertaining, boring, moving, funny. At least once, a class achieved the level of embarrassing farce. Let me get the bile out of my system by describing this occasion, far from Virginia, which caused me such pain.
There are, shall we say, seven young men, three girls, a professor, and the peripatetic lecturer. The seven young men and the professor have identical crewcuts. One of the girls is homely and solemn — follows every word with the painstaking care of someone learning a language from discs. One girl is dark, and eager. The third is very pretty and says nothing at all because she does not have to. A choleric crewcut is reading his story in a harsh monotone. As the story goes on the lecturer finds his ears not so much burning as singing, with a high, nightmare note. He does not know where to look. He broods to himself. I am not tough enough for this game.
The monotone breaks off and the silence prolongs itself. The lecturer fancies he sees a faint afterglow in the air from the incredible last sentence of the incredible story.
Someone clears his throat.
'Jake, I didn't quite get the symbolism of the hair on the bathmat.'
'It's a sex image.'
More silence. From where he sits, the lecturer can see that the homely girl has written and underscored 'Sex image' in her notes.
'The cookie,' says the eager girl. 'I liked the cookie. I thought it was vivid. There was something about it kinda innocent.'
'It's a sex image.'
The homely girl does some more underscoring. Through the window the lecturer can see a lovely landscape, with a bathing pool and flowers. Suddenly his heart contracts and his eyes seem to come back in like a snail's. The flowers are not for him to pick. After all, this is what he is being paid for. He fumbles through his stock of newly acquired but already worn phrases.
'I was happy with your focal length. But isn't there some obscurity timewise?'
The choleric student turns beetroot.
'Guess I write for myself.'
The lecturer suppresses the unworthy thought that in this case it was perhaps illogical for the author to read his story to an audience.
'Another thing. Does it carry?'
Silence. Out of the corner of his eye the lecturer sees the homely girl record: 'Does it carry?'
The professor uncrosses his knees and crosses them the other way.
'I was a bit worried with the plumbing, Jake.'
'It's a sex image.'
The lecturer wades in.
'Let's get the picture clear. This girl, this student. She's making up her mind to have an abortion, isn't she? Motivated by her discovery — since she stopped writing her novel and read his instead — that her professor is really a homosexual and she's basically a lesbian? Yes. I see. Only what I don't see is why you had to make her a spastic.'
'I guess it gives us an extra slant on her professor.'
'It does indeed. Well. My own feeling is that your last two paragraphs are rather low tension. Oughtn't you to work them over again? Otherwise the whole story —'
The words stick in the lecturer's throat. The best he can do is to beam winningly at the author and nod. Everyone else nods too.
'Zing,' murmurs the professor. 'Right on the nose.'
More silence. The pretty girl yawns behind her fist.
'Well,' says the professor briskly. 'Next week….'
Of course there is a sense in which any writer attends creative writing classes. He has to learn the business somehow. What then accounts for my uneasy feeling that to attend these classes is inferior to the hard knocks of making your own way from scratch? Am I a literary rough diamond who insists on his wretched children being just as unhappy as he was? And to live with a class, rather than visit one in passing, is another matter; for I never felt my own students, Mark, Anna, Jane, Ben, Betsy, Geneli, could commit anything like these idiocies.
May it be my feeling that we live, not by the work of ten thousand adequate writers, but by the work of a few dozen at most? Creative writing classes are sometimes said to 'take the cork out'. How about the cases where the cork ought to be left in?
— The verses end.
Someone clears his throat.
'Bill. I don't quite get the symbolism of the stars throwing down their spears.'
The professor crosses his knees.
'Well, Harry, I think it's an obvious sex image.'
The homely girl scribbles.
The lecturer clears his throat.
'One small point. Who is "He"?'
'It's the super ego,' says the eager girl. 'I got that. He's controlling the id. He twists the sinews of his heart.'
The homely girl scribbles like mad. The professor is nodding.
'I felt there was some basic confusion in the psychology,' he says. 'You should reread Totem and Taboo, Bill. Mind, though, the verses have energy.'
'I'm sticking my neck right out,' says the lecturer, 'but I dare swear we all felt this. Can I have the paper, Bill — it is Bill, isn't it? Right. Mmm. You have a positive cascade of questions — what hand, what eye, what deeps, skies, wings, what hand, what shoulder, what art, what dread feet, etcetera: and no answers! Not one. Now. Technically, what we have here is the first half of a sonnet. Couldn't you recast it sonnetwise, getting all your questions into the octet? Then in the sestet you could come up with the answers.'
'Zing,' murmurs the professor. 'Right on the nose.'
The lecturer is inspired.
'Why not make it the half of a diptych,' he says. 'Then you could have another set of verses with all the answers to all the questions.'
Everyone nods. The lecturer chants:
'Framed was my fearful symmetry
By this immortal hand and eye….'
'Where are you going?' cries the professor. 'Hey! Blake! Come back!'
But the author has gone; and borne by some afflatus or other, the pretty girl has disappeared with him.
Yet when all is said and done, these classes are an easy target. And it is worth noting that for better or worse, when Blake leaves them, preferring his own road, he condemns his work to a hundred years of academic indifference. A balanced assessment seems impossible. By posing a paradoxical situation we have raised (like the author) questions with no answers. For the good in the method is obvious too. How can one convey a sense of the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of students who found in these classes a high road to the enjoyment of prose and poetry, a glimpse of the creative process? How can one go against the testimony of dozens of talented professional writers who all claim they were helped, produced even, by creative writing classes?
Well there.
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