by Paul Theroux
He smiled and smacked my arm and sent me back to my office.
In the following weeks I saw scores of young men Hogle's age wearing earrings. They were English, and all sorts, and I was ashamed that I had been a success. It was not merely that I had succeeded by deceiving Hogle, but that I had made him think there was something dangerous and deviant in this trinket decorating his ear. And he never knew just how handsome that trinket made him. Hogle would be all right. But after what he had told me, I was not so sure about Horton.
DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (II): THE LONDON EMBASSY
posture that had probably evolved out of a fear of banging his head.
His strong, distinctly radical views were well known - his position on South Africa, nuclear disarmament, NATO, and even such rarefied issues as the exploitation of nonunion labor in the wine-growing region of Northern California. He had led peace marches in the 1960s, when he had been regarded as the soul of propriety in his dark gray three-piece suit and hand-knotted bowtie and gold watch chain. You might have taken him for a Tory politician or a banker or an Episcopalian preacher. He had a copper-bottomed look of authority, of solidity and trustworthiness; he had a good old name. The ragged, angry protest movements of the sixties needed his respectability, and they were probably surprised by how vocal he was on their behalf. He had the appeal of John Kennedy - in fact, the two had been classmates at Harvard. His 'Elegy on the Death of JFK' was celebrated for its intimate and unexpected details of the two men's friendship. Within a very few years of this poem, Bellamy became a public figure, who stumped around the United States reading his poems and giving encouragement to the anti-Vietnam protesters. He was noted for his willingness to share a platform with a folksinger, a jailbird, or whoever. Most people agreed that he was the conscience of his generation. Bellamy seemed to have no fire, but that was not so surprising. A conscience does not shout - it murmurs.
What else? Yes, he looked wonderfully well fed. This alone was an amazing characteristic in a poet, but he was a most unrepresentative figure. The more I found out about him, the more bewildered I was. He had a large following, but he was not only a poet. He was like a spiritual leader, like one of those bearded domineering Indian gurus; but for Bellamy poetry was the medium of instruction. His humility was so conspicuous and challenging it was like arrogance; but his sense of certainty, and the preachiness of his poems - and his physical size - attracted many people to him. He had considerable influence, and I was very glad it was for the good. His followers were a peaceful and romantic bunch on the whole -the college crowd - who perhaps trusted and liked this well-dressed father figure more than the middle-aged men who also wrote poems and carried banners and played to the gallery, and who dressed like chicken farmers and long-distance truckers, and who could be pretty embarrassing in the cold light of day.
THE EXILE
Bellamy had the strange privacies also of a spiritual leader. There were no rumors and stories of his excesses, but there were resonant and suggestive silences. To look like a banker and to be known for his nervous breakdown - that was what made him. And his marriages had also given him fame. He had been married three times. But he was no philanderer - he had been victimized and thrown into confusion by these messy affairs. Each of his wives had been extremely rich.
It was some measure of his fame that he was known as a writer to people who did not read him, and a great writer to those who did not read at all. He was all the more celebrated for not living in America. When Walter Van Bellamy came to England from New York in the early seventies he was called an exile. It did not seem the right word to describe a man who was often on television telling lively stories, or else doing something public and political before a crowd. I thought of exiles as gaunt silent men, with red eyes, pacing the rocky foreshores of barren islands; or else unshaven men in hot overcoats who spoke in thick accents and slept on sofas. Bellamy did not fit my stereotype. And were you still an exile if you occasionally flew home first class in a jumbo jet to attend a New York party? I did not think so. Some years he taught at Harvard. He had money. His rich wives had been sympathetic. They were more patronesses than wives. He was lucky. He had always lived well - he was in his way a socialite, a party-goer, if a somewhat reluctant one. He had a house in the depths of Kent and an apartment in Eaton Square. Perhaps the most unusual thing about him was that, as a poet, he made money. People bought his books, even if they didn't read them. The books were symbols or tokens of belief. Buying them was a political act, an affirmation that you were on his side - whatever side he was boosting at that moment.
I had been introduced to him at Everett Horton's house, when he was drunk and deaf. I was eager to meet him again, because I had read him at school. He too had been to Boston Latin, and his books in the school library and the thought that he had sat under these same windows, this whiff of literary history, fueled my own ambition to write, until I drifted into the State Department. I had wanted to talk to him. It is a natural desire to want to meet a writer and size him up. But I did not see him again until the Poetry Night of the London Arts Festival, where he was reading.
DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY
His poems that night were dense and full of his personal history, but his reading was vigorous and gave life to what seemed to be little more than spidery monologues about his domestic affairs -how he had cleaned out a sink and swept a room and ordered a pint of milk and so forth - modern poetry, as a lady behind me said out loud. There is a personal tone in some poetry that is so intimate it gives nothing away - so private it sounds anonymous. Bellamy's was a sort of general confession of practical untidiness with which any youngster might identify. I say 'y° un g ster ' because Bellamy seemed to be addressing younger people, implying that he understood them and offering them reassurance. This restrained snuggling was a popular approach. The audience clamored for more, and that was when I noticed how lonely he looked in the spotlight - how solitary and anxious to please.
As an encore that night he read a long poem, called 'Londoners,' about Americans in London, starting with Emerson and Hawthorne and ending with himself. In between, there were references to Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Henry James. The personal note was struck in such sentences as 'Torn Eliot told me-' and 'Cal Lowell used to drawl -' Afterward, he said the poem was about language and culture. With a characteristic flourish, he added, 'and schizophrenia.'
What I have written so far will not be news to anyone who has followed the career of Walter Van Bellamy. He was a public man; the facts are well known - but wait: it is the public men who have the darkest secrets. They have the deepest cellars and hottest attics, and they are consoled by blindness and locked doors. It is impossible to guess at what truly animates these people whose surfaces we seem to know so well, and there is nothing in the world harder to know than the private life of a public man.
The London Embassy had tried to cultivate Bellamy. We needed him. He had a powerful eminence among the writers in London -partly tor being American and partly because his present wife was a patroness. She was .in irascible Englishwoman who, for tax reasons (ah, the resourceful English aristocracy! , held an American passport.
In the previous ten years Bellamy had signed petitions condemning our intervention in Vietnam and our arming small Central American countries: about our decision to build a neutron bomb
5 ;i
THE EXILE
- and more: public matters. Of course we needed his criticism, but it was unhelpful, not to say humiliating, to get it publicly. I had told Horton that I hoped there was a friendly way of gaining Bellamy's confidence. It occurred to me at the poetry reading that in another age a man like Bellamy might have chosen to be a diplomat. Even today the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, chose poets as their cultural attaches and the Mexicans had recently sent one of their most distinguished writers to be Ambassador to France. Bellamy could, I thought, teach us a great deal. There were too few men at the London Embassy who were willing to criticize pol
icy decisions - they felt their jobs were at stake. That sort of thing wouldn't bother Bellamy. He had a reputation as a humane poet-philosopher; he also had a private income. I felt that someone like Bellamy might keep us from making stupid mistakes. And it would certainly be a very good thing for our image in Britain if Bellamy chose to associate himself with us, for there was no question but that British intellectuals regarded our London Embassy as a stronghold of corrosive philistines, reactionaries, anti-Communists, and America Firsters - a nest of spies. Bellamy would be a good corrective.
True, he was a little unpredictable. He had been something of a prodigy; he had published while still very young and had attracted the notice of the really eminent - Robert Frost and Eliot and Pound. He had gained laureate status while still in his forties. Now, at sixty-three, and nearly always in the public eye - 'the most visible poet since Yeats' he had been called - he qualified as a bard. He was a complicated man - confused, vain, too many sleeping pills, too much wine - but he wrote like an angel. I was sure of it. I could never understand why no one remembered the lines of his poems - I don't know why I was unable to recall a single line. But, then, who can quote Ezra Pound?
When the reading - this Poetry Night - was over, Bellamy walked off the stage and was mobbed by people asking for autographs. I noticed that few people addressed him directly. They stood shyly, offering him his books, which were open to the flyleaf. He signed them without saying a word. The group around him was reverential. Out of politeness - but it might have been fear - they kept their distance and even averted their eyes as, not speaking, Bellamy scrawled his name in various editions of his books. When he was finished he saw me.
DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY
Our height was all the introduction we required. Tall people often find themselves talking to perfect strangers, merely because the stranger is also tall. Tallness is like a special racial attribute.
Bellamy spoke over the heads of his admirers: 'I think we've met before.'
'At an American Embassy reception,' I said. 'Months ago.'
'Yes,' he said and came over and shook my hand. 'I remember you well.'
His eyes were unsteady and his hair had the look of having been combed by someone other than himself. In his wincing, round-shouldered way he seemed wounded or drunk, but he was more likely just very tired after two solid hours on the stage.
'How is your wife?' he said.
'I think you have someone else in mind,' I said. 'I'm not married. I'm the man from Boston. Excuse me, that didn't sound right!'
Bellamy said, 'Is she still writing poems?'
He had not heard me, and he had mistaken me for Vic Scaduto, whose wife wrote poems - or at least she said she did.
'Not married,' I said, shaking my head.
'So am I,' he said. 'I was just leaving - why don't you come along?'
His tone was neutral, but this was the strangest thing about Bellamy. At a distance he was very friendly, but the closer you got to him the cooler he became. Giving a lecture or a reading, Bellamy had a very warm intimate tone; in public he was relaxed; but face to face, like this, he was deaf and almost completely indifferent. This I am sure will be news to many of his fans.
I followed him outside, not certain that I was really wanted.
He said, 'Have you eaten?'
'No.' But I was not particularly hungry. 'I don't want to intrude. We can meet some other time. You must be tired after your reading.'
'Time to eat,' he said. He waved a taxi toward us. 'You haven't eaten. You may as well come along. After you.'
It was off-hand, as plainly spoken as I have written it, not really an invitation but rather a nod to the inevitable. We rode in silence for a while.
I said, 'I don't feel right about this.'
it's dinnertime/ Bellamy said. 'Too bad about your wife.'
The wife-business had taken hold of him, but I had no idea what
THE EXILE
he was imagining. It seemed a ludicrous trip in this taxi, for the fact was that I did not want to go with him, and he probably did not want me along either - and yet here we were on our way to a restaurant. I wasn't even hungry!
It was Wilton's in Bury Street - expensive, English, dark brown, and joyless. Emma, Bellamy's wife - the third - was waiting for him at the table inside the restaurant. With her were the Poulters, man and wife. I recognized the name instantly.
'Like the mustard?' I asked.
Poulter's English Mustard had a green and yellow label, and an unforgettable royal warrant: By Appointment to HM Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, with her gold crest. I often stared at this label and tried to imagine the Queen Mother painting Poulter's mustard on a royal sausage.
Mr Poulter said, 'I am the mustard.'
It was clear, from the way Poulter had stood up and shown Walter Van Bellamy his chair and called the waiter over for a fresh drinks order, that he was the host. Poulter was paying. I had no business there.
Bellamy said, 'For God's sake, sit down!'
But they were one chair short. They had not expected me.
Poulter was tactful. He urged me to take his chair. This proved embarrassing. I sat and left Mr Poulter, the host, standing. Every other diner in the restaurant was seated. I quickly stood up again and offered him my seat.
Bellamy turned his back on us. He was drinking wine and - his hand shook badly - spilling it.
Mrs Poulter's hair arrangement was bright mahogany and so shiny and stiff it looked shellacked. She became suddenly flustered and said, 'There seems to be something wrong. There are too many people. Norman, there's one too many!'
And Mr Poulter said, 'No, no. Our friend here' - he beckoned a waiter over - 'will get us another chair.'
The table in the cubbyhole was still set for four, and, worse, it was designed for four, so throughout the meal the discomfort reminded me that Bellamy had had no right to bring me there and make me an unwelcome guest.
Bellamy did not explain my presence to the Poulters. For a time he spoke to the waiter, who did nothing but listen and agree ('Thar needs saying, sir!'). Emma spoke to Norman Poulter about the
DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY
treachery of postmen, and I spoke to Mrs Poulter about the weather in Indonesia.
The table jolted - Bellamy was shifting position. He stared at me and said, 'Learn of the green world what can be thy place.'
'I suppose that's good advice,' I said.
'Pull down thy vanity,' he said.
'Excuse me?'
'But to have done instead of not doing,' he said. 'This is not vanity.'
'No-'
'Here, error is all in the not done,' he said, 'all in the diffidence that faltered.'
The others, hearing this, had fallen silent and were watching me. Bellamy was smiling broadly.
'Ezra,' he said.
He was quoting Pound!
At eleven o'clock Bellamy stood up and took Emma by the arm and said, 'We have to go. We're in the country these days and our last train leaves in half an hour.'
I stayed uneasily with the Poulters.
Mrs Poulter said, 'Bingo's going through rather a bad patch.'
'Bingo?'
'Walter Bellamy, of course.' She had lipstick flecks on her teeth. 'Do you mean to say you're a friend of his and you don't even know his name?'
That was as far as I had got with Bellamy, which annoyed me, because I still admired him and we still needed him. A month later we had a request from our Binational Center, Amerikahaus in Berlin, asking whether Bellamy would be available to represent the United States in a seminar called 'Writing East and West.' Everett Horton, our number two, told me to take care of it.
I called his house in Kent. A housekeeper answered and said he was in London. I called the Eaton Square number. A tetchy voice said I could not speak to him.
'It's very important,' I said.
'He is very ill.' Was this Emma? 'In any case, he is not here.'
'May I ask where I can get in touch with him?'
'I am not obliged to answer your questions!'
The phone was slammed down.
THE EXILE
There were two more cables from Berlin, demanding Bellamy. My secretary tried but failed to discover Bellamy's whereabouts. There was another cable, and then I went to Scaduto. He was the cultural affairs officer, I said; surely it was his job to deal with Bellamy, the literary man, the poet -
'A binational seminar in West Berlin, with writers from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and you call it literary?' He laughed at me.
'"Writing East and West" - that's what it's called.'
'Guys from East Germany,' he said. 'You call them writers?' He tap-danced for a moment, then said, 'Face it - it's political. That's why we need Bellamy to represent us. The Ambassador's going to be there! Bellamy's got the right profile - he's old, experienced, liberal, well known, active in political protest. Did you know he was arrested in 'sixty-five on a peace march in Washington? Do you have any idea what that buys in terms of credibility with these so-called Marxist writers? Plus, he's well connected, lovely wife, and he wears these terrific suits.'
'And he's sick,' I said.
'So you say,' Scaduto said. 'It might just be a story - famous men often have people around to protect them. "He's sick" - it might be a euphemism for "Take a hike" or "Don't bother him."'
It was then that I remembered the Poulters and that awkward dinner at Wilton's. I found 'Poulter's Mustard Ltd' in the phone book and called the main office. My telephone technique, to reassure people, was to call very early in the morning and leave the Embassy number and my name. They always called back: a call from the American Embassy always seemed important. Poulter was prompter than most. Yes, he remembered me.
I said, 'I know Bingo's very ill. I wonder whether you can tell me where he is - I have something to give him.'
'Doesn't he usually go to the Abbey?' Mr Poulter said.