Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  We disembarked at Quebec, and I must say that for a whole day the stairs of Chateau Frontenac listed heavily under me, and I had to cling to the banisters. I had temporarily lost my balance.

  Quebec is weirdly entrancing. I was only disappointed by the Heights of Abraham, which seemed to me pretty small heights: I could not believe that Wolfe could have had much trouble in scaling them. But if I use the word ‘weird’, it is because it was a city even then so nationalistically out on its own, a French city, fiercely defensive of its language and traditions. In the upper town, much English was spoken, though most of the bookshops were filled with French literature: down the great steps to the lower town, to the lovely eighteenth-century square of Notre-Dame des Victoires, all was French. It was not so much like being in France, as being in a segment of France, cut off, and transported across the ocean.

  Charles and I were anxious to meet, and had made arrangements for doing so, a young Quebecois writer called Roger Lemelin, whose novel, in English translation The Plouffe Family, in French Les Plouffe, had greatly impressed us, if it had not impressed anyone else in England. He telephoned us, and made an appointment for lunch-time. Here, I say somewhat ruefully, we fell into error. It seemed to us that a French-Canadian writer, with a naturally limited public, could not be making much money. We even thought, presumptuously, that he might welcome a square meal.

  We could not have been more wrong. The telephone rang: he was in the lobby of the hotel. We went downstairs, to meet a tall, handsome, robust, and obviously well-fed young man. No, we were not taking him to lunch: he was taking us. We went outside. He had an enormous Cadillac which, to my dazzled eyes, seemed to take up the whole frontage of the hotel. Off we went, to a delectable French luncheon. Part of the way we walked, and it was like walking with the young Dickens: from every side, ‘Bonjour, Roger!’ ‘Bonjour, M. Lemelin!’

  What could it all mean? Eventually we found out. He had written several novels, of which Au Pied de la Pente Douce seemed to me one of the best: but with only local success. Les Plouffe was different. This had been turned into a television series, so wildly popular (like our own Forsyte Saga) that churches not infrequently altered the times of their services, so that parishioners should not be deprived of their viewing. It was about a lower town family of racing cyclists, and it had made him rather more than a small fortune.

  I was humbled when he arranged for me to view an episode. ‘English or French?’ he asked me. ‘French,’ I replied, airily. I was hardly able to understand a single word of Quebecois.

  He had a brilliant gift. But what has happened to him now? Is he untranslatable into English? Perhaps. I don’t know. I wish he would write and tell me, for we have by no means forgotten him, and never shall.

  We went from there to Montreal, then on to Toronto. That city I have a particular affection for, as my son Philip was to have many years later, when he attended a semester at Trinity College there before touring Canada and the U.S. A. Central Toronto is, as I suppose most people would agree, scarcely to be described as pretty. But its people – half Scotch, as far as I could tell – seem to have kept their identities: they are Scottish, they are English (nowadays there are immigrants from all over Europe), they are above all Canadian. In 1954, the influence of the United States was surprisingly slight.

  During the first forty-eight hours that we were there, the hurricane which had been pursuing us across the Atlantic struck the city. We were dining out with friends that night, and being aware only that there was a high wind and – on emerging from the house – that several boughs had been blown down – we thought nothing of it. Back in the steel-and-concrete fortress of our hotel, we were stupefied to receive from my mother a cable asking us if we were all right. We replied that we were. Only next morning did the truth come to us; there had been death and devastation throughout the area. People had been clinging to the roofs of shacks, bodies were floating in the river. It had been a horror.

  Let us return to Toronto in calm days. In 1954, Yonge Street on a Sunday night was the dreariest sight imaginable. Nothing to see, nowhere to go, nothing to drink. The hotel lobbies were often full of men who had overcome the third disadvantage – presumably in the privacy of their bedrooms. The restrictive liquor laws irked Philip in 1970, when, at seventeen, he was unable to buy a glass of beer. (The same obtained in San Francisco in 1960, where a boy taking his girl to the Top of the Mark was unable, if both were under twenty-one, to entertain her to anything stronger than Coke.)

  But as I say, I loved Toronto. The suburbs were leafy and delightful, though in the heart of the town there was hardly a decent piece of architecture to be seen. As the Due de Guermantes remarked, ‘If it was there to be seen, I saw it!’ Perhaps, like him, I missed something.

  All things that happened to me in Toronto were pleasant ones. Much later, in about 1963, we returned to stay with John Conway, whom we had first known as Master of Leverett House at Harvard. He had now become Master of Founder’s College, York University. He was a war hero, who had lost an arm at Anzio, and one of the most compellingly attractive characters I have met or expect to meet. At York University I received, with Charles, an honorary degree. My citation was of a kind that would have made a far more confident person than I blush with a sense of unworthiness. I received it, I hope, with dignity, but also with the dread fear that my ‘square’, or mortar-board, was going to fall off. It was far too big. I wisely removed it before I made my speech of acknowledgment.

  But back to my first visit to New York. Charles and I went there by train by way of Buffalo, arriving in a totally Polish quarter, and eating station hamburgers of an unsurpassable horror.

  New York! Who has not hallucinated a first visit? Those glorious sky-scrapers, by night all silver and gold, splitting the indigo skin of the sky? The overriding exhilaration? (Charles had made frequent visits, but this was my first. Now I reckon my score, in 1973, is about thirty-seven.)

  It was not at all like that. Pretty late at night, the train eased into a murky, smelly station. From there we rose to a dark and equally murky cab-rank. We were to stay at the hotel, No. 1 Fifth Avenue, just by Washington Square, which was to be our base for fifteen years or more. It was down-town and when we emerged into Fifth Avenue, it, too, was dark, apart from a few lighted shop-windows. Where was the glory and the dream? Nowhere, so far as I was concerned, in my bitter disappointment.

  Next morning was not much better. The great avenues (Park Avenue excepted, which has some breathing space) were monstrous canyons of stone, cold on the shadowy side. Fifth and Madison caught the bitter winds, and the overall impression was of a magnificent engineering feat which had achieved only pomposity and discomfort. On Park, the Seagram building was a glorious exception.

  I did not like New York then, even when it was a city in which (Central Park excepted) you had to seek for the dangers. Now, when it may be perilous to walk even the brilliantly-lighted streets at night, I like it less.

  But when dusk fell, it was all it had ever claimed to be. The vast towers of gold and silver rose in all their majesty: the wonderful work of man who, perhaps, had slipped into the error of making all things too large for his stature.

  Exhilarating? I did not find New York so. I found it too shut in. But intellectually stimulating – yes.

  Soon, on that trip and those that quickly followed, we made many and precious friends. Charles Scribner, our publisher, and his editor Burroughs Mitchell, Lionel and Diana Trilling, whom I loved, but always found a little intimidating. (My lack of a higher education contributed to this.) Jacques Barzun, who had ‘style’ if ever a man had it, and his wife Marianna, whose figure is like something from the Parthenon Frieze. By these two, I was not alarmed at all. Brooke Astor, who gave me surcease from anxiety by wearing clothes I could never live up to, so had no need to try. She is a clever woman and most attractive, with a marked literary gift. We had fairy-tale excursions to her estate at Rhinebeck. John and Cassie Mason Brown – all kindness – all ‘style
’ – but who seemed innocent of the latter quality. It just grew. Over the following years, we were to acquire more and more friends, who are too numerous to record here.

  Later, as Charles became well-known in America, we were to make friends in Harvard and Yale, to ‘sit on’ many campuses, in a semi-teaching capacity, and in 1960, to visit the University of California at Berkeley, with Philip and Lindsay, too young to be left in England, for six months. But some of that can wait.

  Charles and I, with Philip and Lindsay (eight and sixteen respec- tively), set off on the Queen Elizabeth for New York in August 1960, and after a spell (in intense heat) then went off to California by train. This was because we wished the children to understand from the beginning that the U.S.A. is a very large country indeed, and this they could not have grasped by air travel. I can’t say the train was very comfortable; one tended to bang one’s head on the iron ladders leading to the upper berths: but the discomfort was worth it. The sight of Salt Lake by sunset, like an ice-field illuminated by a rainbow, caused Philip to cry out: What a lot of marvels I’m seeing! The Rockies seemed endless. Hour after hour we went through their incandescent redness, until the excitement of them began to pall.

  Eventually we alighted at Berkeley. This was my first disappointment, for there was a thick mist and it was shivering cold. We were met by a friend who drove us to the top of Vine Lane, in which we had rented a house from a professor on a Sabbatical. All the way across the continent, I had been nursing a bottle of Scotch which had been given me as a farewell present on New York station. The moment I got out of the car, I dropped it: and had the chagrin of watching it stream away down the gutter.

  Suddenly the weather cleared, as I soon learned that it would do, about 11 a. m., and California was as bright and warm as I had always dreamed that it would be.

  The house was charming, the interior all of wood, with a large living-room above which was a Romeo-and-Juliet balcony, off which were the bedrooms. Behind it was a strange mountainous garden, full of rockeries, fuschias, hummingbirds and blue jays. Raccoons raided the dustbins by night, but I never caught sight of one. From the upper windows you could get a splendid view of the Golden Gate at sunset: I usually rushed upstairs not to miss this. The elderly, and as it turned out, wonderful, Irish housekeeper who had been found for us (here we were remarkably lucky to discover such a rare kind of help) came to greet us. We thought she would be deterred by the sight of such a large family: but not a bit of it. She had been working for one very old and sick woman, and the loneliness of it had preyed on her. She thought we would bring a little liveliness into her life – which I think we did. (Anyway, when we left in the dawn six months later, she cried to see us go, and we cried at parting from her.)

  Philip’s and Lindsay’s schooling was all fixed up: so in a very short time Charles took up his appointment as Regent’s Professor in the University, and we became acquainted, as far as one ever could, with the enormous campus.

  Hurricanes of trouble have blown through it since, but then it was relatively quiet. I only had one warning, and that was from the Dean of Students. ‘If I were you, I’d be careful whom Lindsay dates. There’s a lot of drug-taking round here.’ That was thirteen years ago. I must admit I never came across any evidence of it, though I don’t think I should have known marijuana if I had smelled it. In fact, I’m sure I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t now.

  Vine Lane was off Euclid Avenue, with a steep walk down to the campus, and a very stiff one back uphill. This I soon learned when I went to the shops at the foot, and tried to stagger back with the shopping. Our housekeeper soon found out where to shop, which was nearby and more or less on the level, so I soon abandoned my own Sisyphus-like attempts.

  To return to the campus. We made our first visit on Registration Day, which looked like the gathering on the Day of Judgment: white, black, brown, yellow. All races. How should we ever get to know – properly – a single student?

  We had an idea. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 4-6 p.m., we kept open house for any students, of whatever faculty, who wished to talk to us. We tried at first to confine the numbers to twenty-five at a time, but this never worked: either there were about forty, or there were three – because a big game was on. I learned later that the first batch were disappointed in me: it appears that they thought I was going to be very, very English, and dispense tea from a pot of Georgian silver. In fact, I put a baize cover on top of the grand piano: and what I did dispense were cans of Coke and beer, with accompanying can-openers. I think that once the disappointed romance had faded, they liked it far better.

  The discussions we had with our students were rewarding: they ranged from the desperately serious to the purely frivolous. But we did become aware that by some faculty members, we were regarded as blacklegs: we were setting a pattern that they had no desire (nor time) to follow. I can sympathise. However, I am quite sure our pattern has not persisted.

  Through all this, though, we did manage to see many individual students more than once, and it broke our immediate impression of helplessness in the face of such prodigious numbers. The complaint of many – and it was a true one – is that they rarely came in touch with a senior faculty member at all, until some years had passed. The numbers have so swollen that it must be worse now.

  Charles had an office down a long corridor, where his colleagues in the English Department had theirs. He had to keep his door open all the time – which he disliked – but it was the convention. All was pretty peaceful. Violence had not then become a way of life.

  One day a student did run berserk with a gun down that corridor, by-passed Charles’s room, but shot a friend of ours, in the room opposite, through the jaw, not killing, but seriously injuring him. However, this was not an everyday event.

  We made, of course, many friends. Neighbours who offered me that timeless and open-handed kindness that is typical of Americans. One lived just across the way, and we all went to her in times of need – or just because we loved to see her, her husband and her children. When we had to be absent she would keep a motherly eye on Philip and Lindsay.

  Nobel Prize-winners grew thick as daisies on a lawn. It was nothing to see seven of them at lunch together.

  In the mornings, and sometimes in the afternoons, Charles wrote in his office, at the same time available to anyone who wanted him, while I wrote at home, enjoying the glorious sunlight streaming through the window, and ate a solitary and invariable lunch of half an avocado and a slice of bread with peanut butter (salted and peppered, not with jelly). This seemed to me an admirably balanced diet.

  Then came the cat. Outside my gate one morning, I found a ginger kitten, perhaps two and a half months old, rolling orgiastically in a bed of catnip. Of course I stroked him. Immediately he followed me into the house, jumped purring on to my lap, and made it perfectly clear that if he had a home (we never found out that he had) he was certainly not going back there again. Never have I known such a delightful animal. He was superbly athletic: he would leap several times his own length into the air after a paper mouse. He was affectionate to a degree; while I was saying goodnight to Lindsay, he would sit outside her door yowling till I came out again. Naturally he shared the bed with Charles and me: if you love cats, you do not deny them this simple comfort. We called him Skipton.

  Our housekeeper, alas, didn’t like cats at all, and moved him around out of her way – gently – with the toe of her shoe. But she endured him, as she endured all things, for our sake.

  It was a sad day for us, due to return to England, when we had to part with him. A friend of Philip’s had found a home for him. When Skipton finally went off on the school bus, I wept. To me, he is inseparably bound up with my memories of Berkeley. Where is he now? Dead? Or is he a huge, thirteen-year-old in Sausalito? And has he any vestigial, shadowy memories of his youth? Sentimental, I know. But allow me to be. There is little enough to be sentimental about in this rough world, good sirs and madams.

  Andrew came out to us for a week or
so in the Cambridge vacation. A young man whom Lindsay had met on the ship came to stay with us for a week, and somehow she managed to wheedle the headmaster into letting her cut afternoon games, so that she could spend more time with her friend. They went often to San Francisco, ate on Fisherman’s Wharf, explored Chinatown. Once they bought Philip a really ghastly Hallowe’en mask, in which he nearly terrified Charles into a heart attack, by bending over him in the early morning and thrusting this hideous thing into his face. It was the product of a really nasty imagination.

  There were other excitements, perhaps the greatest of which was the Kennedy-Nixon election. We were all passionately pro-Kennedy, and I had to stop Lindsay involving herself too deeply in electoral matters. I used to explain that this was not our country, and we had no right to intervene in its politics. But my heart was not in this stern moral prohibition. (I did allow her, on election night – I had weakened – to help man the telephone at the Kennedy H.Q. in Berkeley.) Philip’s part in it all was unstoppable: every day, when he walked from the school bus home, he would tear Nixon stickers off cars and come triumphantly back with great dangling handfuls.

  Our housekeeper was worried because, having moved up two blocks to look after us, she was afraid she might have lost her vote in. our electoral district. She asked me to make enquiries. ‘It isn’t because I’m a Catholic, and he’s a Catholic,’ she said earnestly. ‘I just believe in Mr Kennedy.’

  I telephoned the appropriate Kennedy H.Q., put her case and got a delightful, if improper, response.

  ‘Who’s she voting for?’

  ‘Your man,’ I said.

  A pause. ‘Then she’s O.K.’

  This was the first American election campaign that Charles and I had ever been able to witness. On election night, we did not stir for hours from the television set, and pretended we had not noticed that Philip had crept down from his bed. Here we were lucky in our ignorance as to how the voting would fall. By the early morning all seemed over for Kennedy bar the shouting. We went happy to bed and slept soundly. What we did not realise was that, during our slumbers, the Mid-Western votes were coming in. If we had been awake for them, we should have been plunged into an agony of apprehension. In the morning, we woke to find that Kennedy was indeed President: it was only later that we were to know through what dangers we had passed. I should say that both Charles and Philip, who are political animals, consider with hindsight that their emotional investment in this election was quite excessive.