When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state …
·
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang …
·
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past …
·
And peace proclaims olives of endless age …
I think that anyone who lives a long life carries with him or her a heavy baggage of memory and rules of thumb and old wives’ tales; mine was heavy indeed, and in some ways was perhaps a disadvantage, but it was composed of the creations of the best minds of past centuries, and the burden grew more treasured every year I bore it.
I spend almost no day without looking at some piece of art, and I am delighted at this moment to be at my typewriter with a handsome calendar on the wall before me showing a painting by my old friend Willard Metcalf—Gloucester Harbor, 1895, from the collection at Amherst College; it is as handsomely done as the first picture of his I saw back in 1914, and at my elbow hangs the Fabritius Goldfinch, which is increasingly recognized as a minor classic. On my record player I have ‘Lontano, lontano,’ and in the anthology beside my reading lamp a bookmark leads me to ‘The Eve of St. Agnes.’
These riches never die. The great songs echo still, the colors of the paintings do not fade. They accompanied me as I trudged the lower heights of Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas and comforted me as I stood lashed to the wheel while our small boat wallowed through the tail end of a Pacific typhoon. They have echoed in my mind when I needed consolation and been at hand when I required dedication to some old task or inspiration in a new. As I child I probed for the secrets of art; as a young man I tried to winnow the good from the bad; and as an adult I remain totally committed. Perhaps I have loved art too much and allowed myself to be made a prisoner of it, but from the manner in which I began my exploration it could have ended no other way.
How simply it started: a freezer of peach ice cream, a Caruso record and a copy of a George Morland painting.
* * *
* When I wrote Centennial forty years after first hearing ‘Whispering Hope,’ it served as an amusing leitmotif for a long section of the novel, and served well.
† Later I would find that scores of people, among them great experts, liked the painting as much as I did, and through the years I found many reproductions of it, and it was this experience that encouraged me to develop the concept of ‘a minor classic,’ which will appear later in this chapter as an idea of great importance to me. I also learned that Fabritius was the teacher of Vermeer.
IV
Travel
One of my earliest memories is of the road that ran before my house in the Pennsylvania village of Doylestown. It was remarkable, I thought, that whereas on the east it ended abruptly at a farm about a half mile from where I lived, giving it a wonderfully finite feeling, on the west it ran forever, leading to strange places and wondrous adventures that I could not even imagine.
It was a magical road, and often when I walked back home after finishing my work harvesting asparagus for the man who owned the farm at which the road ended, I would visualize myself continuing to walk westward, right past my house and on through the dusk toward the wonders that my geography books assured me existed out west. I always saw myself as traveling alone, moving into one great adventure after another, and never did my mind tire of that imaginary exercise. Back home in the light of the kerosene lamps that I had to clean and fill each evening before they were lit, I would pore over my maps and try to conjure from the little pictures of Iowa and Colorado visions of what those distant places must be like. Before I was nine or ten I could identify all the states on the blank maps we were given in school to test our knowledge, so that the distinctive shape of Nevada—our most beautiful state, geometrically speaking—was as familiar to me as our own Pennsylvania, which had classical rectangular dimensions. At that time, seeing the states purely as shapes, I remember wondering how anyone could take pride in states with shattered outlines like Michigan, Maryland or even Virginia.
There was in our town a delightful boy about my age who gave us much concern. His name was Ted Johnson, and like me he was an orphan, but unlike me some birth accident or unspecified defect had left him unable to do sums at school or read with any proficiency. He was a lovable fellow, everyone testified to that, and he fumbled his way along, never quite on target but constantly surprising us with his sudden bursts of keen understanding and ability to do things we couldn’t, like hearing birds sing before we did or seeing in familiar objects aspects that we had overlooked. Since neither Ted nor I had parents, we were thrown together often, and I came to know him better than most people did. As buddies we did many things together.
It was Ted who got me my first salaried job, at age eleven or twelve, cultivating flowering plants at the big Burpee Seed Company’s meadows west of town. But it was something else Ted proposed when we were thirteen that had a lasting influence on me. Although we were little more than children, we—Ted in particular—were sturdier than some of our classmates, so it would have been difficult for strangers to tell exactly how old we were. One summer day Ted astonished me by saying: ‘Nothing much doing in Doylestown. Why don’t we see what’s happening in New York?’ I deemed the idea sensible, so off we started on the first important journey of my life.
We started from Doylestown for the seventy-five mile trip to New York City with less than twenty-five cents each, and with not the slightest doubt in the world that we would make it. Later I would travel across much of the United States with even less financing, for these were years of innocence, for Ted, for me and for the nation.
The automobile had just fallen to a price range affordable by even ordinary families, and when they owned one they wanted to use it often. They enjoyed picking up adventurous young hitchhikers and talking with them and perhaps, if the boys proved interesting, even treating them to a meal. A boy with enterprise could, in those simpler years, travel where he wished without fear of criminals moving in on him or deviates molesting him.
At night a young hitchhiker had no trouble finding a place to sleep, for in most towns if he reported himself at the police station the officers would allow him to sleep in the jail and even perhaps give him breakfast before he started out in the morning. Or the car owners who had picked him up would invite him to sleep at their place, or he could always find a barn or an unused building. During most of the time I engaged in such travel I had not yet begun to shave, so morning preparations presented no problems, and by the time the sun was up I was on my way. They were years of wonder and enchantment, those early years of hitchhiking about the country, some of the best years I would know, and if I developed my basic attitude of accepting people pretty much as I found them, it was because I started my travels with a slow-witted lad of enormous courage, optimism and goodwill. And largely because of his genial way with strangers, I kept meeting American citizens of all levels who took me into their cars, their confidence and often their homes.
On that first trip we reached New York without trouble and without spending any of our capital, for a truck driver allowed us to ride free in his vehicle on the ferry that crossed from New Jersey into the city. And there we had a great time, cadging free food from the back doors of restaurants and seeing with wide-eyed wonder sights we did not understand and whose historical importance we did not appreciate. We had learned in school that Times Square was the center of the city, and we asked our way, marveling at the tall buildings as we walked. I wish I could report that on this first trip into the city I introduced myself to that most marvelous of American streets, Forty-second, which contained the three institutions which were to prove so crucial in my education: the New York Public Library, Gray’s Pharmacy just off Forty-second on Broadway, and that endless chain of inexpensive motion picture theaters that at that time showed the current popular films, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. If Forty-second Stre
et were to have been excised from my education, I might have ended up an unfeeling clod.
On my first acquaintance with the street I did not appreciate its power; indeed I cannot recall that I was even aware that it was there. After two wonderful days in the city, subsisting on what I do not remember, Ted and I headed homeward, still with a few cents in our pockets and also with engaging smiles that encouraged the owners of new automobiles to pick us up from waiting corners and drive us homeward, often with a hot dog or a soda thrown in.
Ted and I were so exhilarated by our first success that after we were back home for a few boring weeks, we set out again, this time with a little more money, and headed for Florida. I remember that trip as the best he and I would take, for it led us into states with romantic names and histories, such as Virginia with its battlefields and Georgia with its cotton. Again we met with unfailing kindness and assistance, and we slept in some fine homes, whose owners gave a new definition to the phrase ‘Southern hospitality.’
The roads we traveled this time were most often dirt, even between important cities, and we saw large expanses of the rural South, shuddering at some of the old-time slave shacks we passed and finding our sleeping places near cotton gins. Each of us carried a small cloth bag into which we crammed whatever gear we had collected for the trip; I had a toothbrush, a cake of soap, which I used for both hands and teeth, and some odd bits of clothing that I changed into when we washed our soiled laundry at night in some jail.
We gained a most favorable opinion of the South, especially certain stopping places in the Carolinas where our stays were almost story-book delightful. I can still remember one fine house we were invited into west of Charleston, whose row of trees leading from the road to the door were almost the epitome of the word welcome. If all this sounds somewhat incredible, you must remember that in those days—1920 it was or perhaps 1921—there were not many youths like us on the road, and people were enthralled to learn how young we were and how daring—they would keep us awake after supper so we could tell them of our adventures. In all the years I hitchhiked, usually alone, I never had an experience in which I felt menaced or even begrudged a favor. I corresponded with a few of the people I met when I returned home, for I remembered them as being gracious and the kind I would have liked to know better.
We did not get to Florida that first time. In a small Georgia town the police took a jaundiced view of us when we applied for an overnight stay in their jail: ‘How old are you kids?’ Ted said we were sixteen. ‘Your folks know you’re down here? Where did you say you was from?’ When Ted said Philadelphia, the policeman snorted and asked: ‘How much cash do you kids have? Spread it out, all of it.’
When he saw our pitiful treasury he summoned his superior, who was even gruffer: ‘What do you kids think you’re doing?’ When Ted told them we were heading for Florida, the chief officer growled: ‘Not through this state,’ and he did not invite us to stay in his jail; he threw us into a cell and turned the key. It was a gloomy night.
In the morning the first policeman we had talked to unlocked our cell, gave us hot drinks and some pancakes and told us we were to turn right around and head back to Philadelphia. But before we were ready to leave the jail he arranged for a truck being driven north by one of his friends to take us on as passengers clear to the Virginia border, from which another truck would carry us into Richmond. As we thanked him for taking care of us, he gave the truck driver fifty cents, with instructions to feed us on the way. And in this manner we said farewell to Georgia.
I have often recalled those policemen, and have appreciated how sensibly they behaved toward us; they impressed upon us the dangers we might run into on the road and the concern policemen had for penniless young boys wandering aimlessly on the nation’s highways. Also, one night in a locked cell had a salutary effect, for it made me swear I would never again give anyone cause to keep me locked up for even one day; and through the rest of my life I kept that boyhood pledge. I have seen a lot of jails and have successfully avoided being inside any of them.
Nevertheless, chastened though we were, later that year Ted and I decided that having almost seen Florida, we really ought to see Canada, so we set out again with finances similar to those before. When we went through New York City again, we greeted it as an old friend, and then got onto the exciting shore road along which even then was the uninterrupted city of New York-New Haven-Providence-Boston. It was a compelling experience, an introduction to a whole new concept of American life, and I was enthralled by the idea of an endless city. I did not see the ugliness, or the junkyards with discarded cars and sofas, or the areas in which the extremely poor lived; I saw only the boundless vitality of the region, the hundreds upon hundreds of little shops and factories, and the trucks hauling the products away to freight cars on the waiting railway line. I saw the power of America, the tremendous force of its efforts to make things and move them about. I saw wealth being created, and it shouted back a challenge: ‘Be part of this. Make something important and move it across the whole United States.’
Very shortly I would be seeing the immense industrial installations at Detroit, but they would not generate in me the profound excitement that the small factories along the New York–Boston highway did. Perhaps it was because I saw the lesser ones when my mind and my perceptions were clearer, or more impressionable or simply more receptive, but as would occur so often in my life, experiences of the greatest potential significance seemed to reach me precisely when I required them most, or was most attentive to them. Certainly this would happen again and again until at the end I had been effectively exposed to a score of different fields. But recently I have begun to think, in retrospect, that the experiences must have always been there and available to me, except that I was too naive to recognize their importance until the proper time. A wise friend who knew me during the formative years—say, twelve through twenty-two—described me as ‘dumb and happy,’ and that might have been accurate, for I was a happy warrior moving unawares through a succession of minefields. I came through remarkably unscathed, delighted with the world as I had found it, and always prepared to face gladly the next encounter it offered.
Our failure to enter Florida was almost repeated with Canada. We found Maine so much bigger than we had expected and its new-car drivers so few and cautious that our progress north was painfully slow. However we did ultimately reach the border, stepped across and could boast: ‘Well, we got to Canada!’ But we turned about and headed home. I did not grieve at our failure, for that New York–Boston exploration had been strangely powerful.
In Detroit I had a maiden aunt of great wisdom, with a distinguished career in public school teaching; when black students started crowding the Detroit schools, many delicately balanced and frightened white teachers, especially the women, quit the system, but Aunt Laura sailed right into the heart of one of most troubled schools and became a champion of black students and their problems, winning national accolades for the superior quality of her work. Years later, when she retired from her nearly all-black school in Detroit, she was resting on our porch in Doylestown when a young boy who was a student at a military school in Maryland stopped by to tell her how through lack of strong faculty direction his school had become ungovernable, with students raising a constant ruckus. After hearing his mournful story she said: ‘I could clear up a situation like that in one week.’ Back at school the young fellow told the administration of Aunt Laura’s boast and they sneered: ‘We’d like to see her try.’ The upshot was that at age seventy-one she became acting principal of the school, and she did tame the rebellious students within a week. You did not fool around with Aunt Laura.
When I was thirteen or fourteen she invited me to spend the summer with her in Detroit, and so with less than a dollar in my pocket and a big knapsack on my back, I hitchhiked out to Michigan. The journey was even better than it had been with Ted Johnson, for being alone I caught rides more easily than before. It was a marvelous trip along the beautiful roads an
d through the low mountains of Pennsylvania, but going through the cities of Cleveland and Toledo was equally interesting.
Detroit, especially as Aunt Laura showed it to me, was a fascination, for to my amazement Canada lay to the south of the city, not the north, and for the second time I edged my way into about six yards of our northern neighbor. I visited the big auto plants, rode out to Ann Arbor to inspect the campus of the University of Michigan, the first advanced educational institution I had ever seen, and explored the state rather thoroughly, hitchhiking here and there. But the big event of the summer was an extensive trip I took out to Iowa, again with less than a dollar to see me there and back.
I was headed to nowhere in particular, just drifting about to see what the West looked like. I skipped Chicago, but in the company of a family heading southwest I did come upon a highway that would be of considerable importance to me some sixteen years in the future in 1936. At that time our great national roads were not numbered, at least so far as I can remember, but in time this one would be U.S. 34, and I would spend many hours along it and five years at its terminal. I liked it when I first saw it, much of it still dirt, some of it paved in reddish brick. It climbed up and down small hills, darted through sleepy towns and revealed to me for the first time the open grandeur of the West, before the badlands and the Rocky Mountains intruded. It was a real voyage of discovery, an opening of grand vistas, never spectacular like those awesome parts of the Southwest where palisaded hills and deep canyons provide unique sights and sensations but quietly big and powerful. For many years, when I was more fully informed about the states, I would consider Iowa the most favorably, and it was a judgment I did not totally withdraw when later, after I had acquired more sophisticated data, Oregon preempted the apex.
Two questions naturally arise about such adventurous wandering by a young child. First, why did my elders, who loved me very much and who were most protective in all other aspects of childhood, allow me to take such trips? As I shall explain later, I came from an impoverished and in some respects a badly broken home, so there was no inclination on my part to stay there during vacation time, and indeed I never did after I landed my first summer job at Burpee’s. Invariably, come the end of spring, I was away either working or hitting the road. My mother, as I will later explain, faced far graver problems than keeping me at home and, having given me a sound foundation in knowing the difference between right and wrong, between good friends and bad, and between constructive and destructive behavior, as well as a love of learning, she may have felt that she had done all she could and that I was henceforth on my own. She also knew that I was far older in many important respects than I looked, and that I was essentially a prudent, conservative boy who was not going to be easily led astray.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 16