Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  The proportions of the Memoirs are interesting. The first thirty pages concern the first thirty-three years of Mr Nixon's life; the next few hundred are a blow-by-blow about Congressman Nixon and Vice-President Nixon, and the last seven hundred pages are a detailed but disingenuous account of the last four years of his presidency. Out-of-office Nixon is a legal partner with a heavy mortgage, warming up TV-dinners, and in spite of his protests he gives no clear explanation as to how, a mere decade after his bleak TV-dinner period in 1961, he emerged a millionaire. Mr Nixon was keel-hauled and marooned. It follows that his book ought to have the loony fascination of a castaway's chronicle, but not even his Friday-like butler Manolo or his vulgar righteousness can lift him to the level of Crusoe. Mr Nixon—to quote Palmerston on Commissioner Yeh Ming Ch'en—is truly "an uninteresting monster" and his memoirs a self-serving monstrosity.

  One of the themes that runs through it is his strong identification with Kennedy, but having grown up poor, Mr Nixon implies that he was the more honest, the more temperate in speech (Mr Nixon presents Kennedy as incredibly foul-mouthed). He is Irish like Kennedy and makes much of his Irish pedigree; as junior senators they swop letters and share railway compartments; their wives buttress them (and later Jackie writes passionate thank-yous to Mr Nixon), their ages almost match, their fathers are similar (bad tempered, "combative"), and so are their mothers (peace-loving, "saintly"); the two men confer on important issues.

  But John Kennedy was assassinated, you will say. Of course, but the bullet was intended for Mr Nixon, who was in Dallas on Pepsi-Cola business (this was the TV-dinner period) the day before Kennedy was shot. "Months later Hoover told me that Oswald's wife had disclosed that Oswald had been planning to kill me when I visited Dallas and that only with great difficulty had she managed to keep him in the house to prevent him from doing so." If Mr Nixon has a literary counterpart who :an match him in chutzpah it is Charles Kinbote, the lugubriously vain character in Nabokov's Pale Fire ("I was the shadow of the waxwing slain...").

  He was not just poor, but poverty stricken—the most important splinter in any hunk of American Presidential timber. As late as 1934 he was eating candy bars for breakfast to save money (I would have thought in egg cheaper, but let that pass: this was before the chickens had come home to roost). Times were hard, Mr Nixon was unattractive, his feet were enormous (size I iE) and he had little to sustain him but the prayers af his mother who "went into a closet to say her prayers at night" because St Matthew exhorts us to pray "behind closed doors." Using the Republican slogan "Had Enough?" (the answer was "Yes!"), Mr Nixon entered politics to clean up "that mess in Washington." The mess in Washington is referred to again and again for the next thousand pages, but never once does Mr Nixon claim an iota of responsibility for it.

  His first great chance, and it was the making of him, was the Alger Hiss :ase. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Mr Nixon rehashes his Six Crises. Mixon pursued Hiss for a number of years and it paid off: Hiss was ruined, Nixon in the ascendant. He says his motive was not political, and yet it was virtually the only reason Eisenhower chose him as his running-mate, saying, "the Hiss case was the text from which I could preach". It seems odd that a man with the moral sense of Daffy Duck and the political enlightenment of a 25-watt bulb could build a career purely out of anti—communist spite and partisan infighting, but that is exactly what happened. It is also useful to remember throughout this book how very young Mr Nixon was: just thirty-nine when he was Vice-President, President at fifty-five, disgraced at sixty-one. In a party of geriatrics, Mr Nixon looked like one of the Beach Boys, and he always surrounded himself by men who had ruthless political savvy. "We made him President," Mr Ehrlichman told me. "He couldn't lose. But we could have made you President much quicker. For one thing, you're better looking."

  Mr Nixon's loathing for Truman is undisguised. He professes to admire Eisenhower, but slips in numerous allusions to Eisenhower's fickleness, laziness, authoritarianism and untrusting spirit—Eisenhower certainly did not trust Mr Nixon, but Mr Nixon was an untypically active and ambitious Vice-President, taking every opportunity to hog the limelight. Besieged by screaming Venezuelans, Mr Nixon returned to the United States a hero (the scars were evident on his Cadillac); heckled by Khrushchev, Mr Nixon wagged a finger at the camera and became known as someone who didn't stand for back-talk—politically, these scarcely significant encounters did him a world of good.

  Don't give up! groans his mother on her deathbed. She is dying, but the crisis is Mr Nixon's: he resolves to fight. When Eisenhower has a heart-attack, it is again Mr Nixon's crisis. It does not seem to matter that Ike has one foot in the grave: Mr Nixon has the solemn duties of President thrust on his shoulders. Mr Nixon has nerves of iron. If something untoward happens, it is the people around him who suffer: when Eisenhower wanted to dump him, it was Pat who fell ill and "The stress was so great that she had developed a painfully stiff neck and had to stay in bed"; after the so-called "Checkers Speech," "I found out that my proud and combative father had been reduced to bouts of weeping as each new smear surfaced." There are many more instances of this projected anguish; one wonders what a psychiatrist would make of it.

  The plumpest part of this book begins in 1970. This is the year that the microphones were installed in the Oval Office. One expects a bit of candor here, but when we arrive at the burglary of Ellsberg's psychiatrist all we get is waffle: "I do not believe I was told about the break-in at the time ... I cannot say that I had been informed of it beforehand ... I do not recall this..." Quite a lapse of memory for someone who can remember the brand of candy bar he ate in North Carolina in 1934—a Milky Way. Cambodia is bombed and Mr Nixon's reasoning becomes even more wobbly; his description of the war in Bangladesh is almost wholly muddle; and if anyone wonders why Mr Nixon's African policy was—to put it mildly—uninformed, one needs only read a Diary Entry of 1971: "Pat was obviously elated by her trip. She was particularly impressed by the President of the Ivory Coast. She pointed out that he did not believe in using force against South Africa, and I realized that this is the reason that many in the State Department don't like him ..." How can he have been so ignorant of French influence, of Ivory Coast trade relations, or the diplomatic hand-holding that existed between Vorster and Houphouet-Boigny?

  "It certainly is a great wall," Mr Nixon said on his China visit ("This was the week that changed the world"), but no wall in this book is greater than the one he builds around the Watergate episode and its aftermath. One reads it and one is no wiser. He knew nothing about it; he knew nothing about the erased tape. He paces the floor throughout the final four hundred pages of the book, back and forth on huge flapping feet, urging his henchmen to give him information. Who was involved? he asks. Why did they do it? He had two major objections: it was handled stupidly (the men were caught); and "I could see no reason whatever for trying to bug the national committee." He persists in his bafflement until the very end, when, threatened with impeachment and over a mammoth barrel, he resigned. His last speech was full of fobbed-off anguish, this time his mother was the victim: how she suffered, how no books would ever be written about her, how she was a saint. What a terrible thing it must have been, after that humiliation, to have to appear a good loser. Well, this book puts that right: it is a bitter piece of self-promotion.

  Where are they now, those scores of White House people? That's easy. They're nearly all in jail or looking for work. In America Mr Nixon is still a hated man. He is hated not because he proved his enemies right, but because he let down the millions of people who had given him a landslide victory. Mr Ford, who pardoned him, lost miserably against Mr Carter for that reason and was forced to abandon his political career. Meanwhile, what is the truth? It is not in this flatulent book—that is obvious. It might be in the tapes which Mr Nixon clings to and is fighting a court action to keep. At our lunch, Mr Ehrlichman said he thought they would eventually be released and then, picking up his fork, he grinned and rolled his eyes and said, "Murder wil
l out!" It might have been hyperbole, but he did not strike me as a man who was given to gratuitous literary allusion.

  The Orient Express

  [1978]

  It began with George Mortimer Pullman, whose sleeping car—scoffed at until it was used to transport the corpse of Abraham Lincoln from Chicago to Springfield—left a lasting impression on a Belgian engine-maker. The Belgian was Georges Nagelmackers, and his idea was to start a company in Europe operating Pullman-like cars to the Riviera, the Danube, and the Black Sea. In 1876, Nagelmackers founded the sonorously named Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits and by 1882 his "Grand Express"—all Wagon-Lits—had reached Vienna. The following year, on October 4, 1883, the highly publicized Express D'Orient made its inaugural run to Constantinople, its two sleeping cars full of distinguished journalists, diplomats and railway officials, and its dining car stocked with the vintage wine and gourmet food which, long after it had been removed from the menu, people would associate with the great train.

  Though its route, 1,800 miles, was much shorter than the Trans-Siberian's 6,000, its romance remained undiminished until the Second War. With the exception of James Bond's trip in From Russia With Love, all Orient Express fiction is set in the 'twenties and 'thirties, beginning with Maurice Dekobra's The Madqnna of the Sleeping Cars (1924) and including Graham Greene's Stamboul Train, Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, part of Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios, and Ethel Lina White's The Wheel Spins—this last became the Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes. The atmosphere is familiar, a blend of the cozy, the glamorous and the sinister: so many national frontiers are crossed, the possibilities for sexual stratagems and the occasions for disappearance, deception and surprise are practically limitless. Every feature of the train had a novelistic dimension; its route had a plot-like structure; its atmosphere was well-known. It was made for the novel and it matched fiction exactly. It could also have been the setting for a wonderful farce, since farce is so often a mockery of romance—very nearly a definition of The Orient Express's last days.

  The war disrupted service and there was still rationing in 1947 when Irving Wallace took it and reported his findings to the readers of the Saturday Evening Post. His was the first of many post-war pieces which, harking back to the good old days—Wallace dusts off the cliché and uses it to prop up one of his paragraphs—have the latecomer's resentment and the slightly fraudulent and elegiac tone of an obituary. Fifteen years later, when the by-now moth-eaten Grand Express Européen was scrapped, Time magazine (taking its metaphor from the Hitchcock film) said, "The only things that ever really vanished were the good service and the passengers." Joseph Wechsberg wrote in the Saturday Review in 1962, "Long before its last run it had become an anachronism." The "Simplon-Orient" ended in 1962, and the slower "Direct-Orient" took its place and has been visibly deteriorating since then. When the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits announced last September that the service was to be discontinued there was no sense of shock in anyone who had ever traveled on it; indeed, only a justified sigh of relief and regret, as when a geriatric distant acquaintance is overtaken by a lingering illness and the inevitable happens.

  The Orient Express had been fuelled by that most profitless of emotions, sentimentality, and like the Queen Mary, London Bridge, and Scollay Square, it had outlived its usefulness and lapsed into obsolescence. A different train was needed, to serve different needs, but the Wagon-Lits company did not even have the resourcefulness of Amtrak to understand what these needs might be. The only quaintness that is supportable is the quaintness that pays; and the idea of the Orient Express was always more enlivening to the imagination than a trip in one of its drab compartments. Latterly, the dining car—its last claim to fame—was abolished. It became a remote abstraction, a symbol of an age that was itself a symbol, and though travel-writers, eager for a whiff of romance, have chosen it as an occasion to empurple their prose style, even the most enthusiastic could not suppress his disappointment. The dullest and most dispiriting chapter of The Orient Express, "The Story of the World's Most Fabulous Train" (N.Y., 1967), by Michael Barsley, is the last, in which the author actually boards the train and goes to Istanbul. The thrilling pedigree, lovingly elaborated in the preceding chapters, does not quite prepare us for the spavined old war-horse that carries Mr Barsley eastward. But he is quick to point out, in indignation and apology, that for all its defects the train retains a certain charm.

  Charm is in the heart of the beholder. I took the train myself all the way to Sirkeci Station in Istanbul about three years ago, and I remarked in my own history of the event that it really was murder on the Orient Express. Poor Mr Duffill was left behind in Domodossola, the efficient salute of the Italian conductors had degenerated into a discouraging shrug, a pair of Bulgarians were frog-marched off the train at Dragoman for not holding a medical certificate, and mealtime was a hand-to-mouth affair, bringing back memories of school outings on rainy afternoons in the suburban trains of Boston. In spite of that, I liked the trip well enough to write about it, and I could report that the Orient Express had more than its share of friendly and mysterious passengers, because all long train journeys—no matter what the service—attract the adventurous and the affable—seekers after the unexpected: romance is part of their luggage. Still, the food is better on "The Van Gölü Express" (Istanbul—Lake Van), the proportions of "The Trans-Siberian" are much greater, there is a more bizarre assortment of travelers on "The Panama Limited" (Chicago—New Orleans); Japanese trains are more prompt, Indian ones a better bargain, and the features of Thai and Malaysian trains more convivial.

  Instead of lamenting the inevitable, we would do well to recognize the example of Pullman and Nagelmackers. A combination of poor service, the cheapness of air-travel and the short-sighted bickering of little countries in full cry killed the Orient Express. The great international train requires vision, diplomacy and cash; in a world fragmented by nationalism, a simple but brilliant scheme like the cross-Channel railway tunnel from England to France (started in 1872) becomes merely a series of false starts. Post-war bureaucracy has turned travelers into refugees: if you want to go to Istanbul from Paris now you will have to change trains in Venice and Belgrade. But we can't feel self-righteous about this until we can travel from, say, New Orleans to Mexico City without changing trains in Laredo.

  So the Orient Express is gone. It was for many years little more than a bewitching name. But the tracks are still in position and so is the rolling stock. As Mr Barsley says, in describing the many changes that have taken place on the route to Istanbul, "Le train est mort: vive le train."

  Traveling Home: High School Reunion

  [1979]

  When a childhood friend calls me now, it all comes back. I seé a freckly boy ûr a pot-bellied girl in the disc of the telephone receiver—the cowlick, the bubble-gum breath, the squint in the smeared glasses. The night before my high school reunion—Medford High's Class of '59—the telephone rang. It was Geoffrey Howe—or, more properly, "Humphrey". He had changed his name to that of a comic book character he liked and resembled, Humphrey Pennyworth. At the age of seven, we had both been in Miss Purcell's class at the Washington school and had sung "John Peel" to the parents. We had remained close friends until the high school graduation, and were still friends, though I had not seen much of him over the past twenty years. But he sounded unchanged—fat-faced, funny, wheezing with mockery. He would go to the reunion, he said, if I went. That was very Medford High, the timid adolescent dare: I will if you will.

  I said it was my sole reason for being in Massachusetts this October night, away from work, family and my London household. I did not tell him that I had spent the afternoon reading our year-book, The Blue and White, and rediscovering what a poor student I had been—not in the National Honor Society, not even in The Slide-Rule Club; no awards, no sports. What had I done? Humphrey had been on the football team, "The Mustangs."

  "Guess who won't be there?" Humphrey said, and quickly ad
ded, "Gagliardi. Guess why?"

  "No idea."

  "He's dead. Killed in the slammer, by another prisoner. The amazing thing is that about a year or two before he died, he killed someone in the slammer. Guess who? Albert DeSalvo!"

  "The name rings a bell. Was he at Medford High, too?"

  "You were probably in Fuckawiland—you usually are. Listen, Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler."

  So a Medford boy, a murderer from the Class of '59, had killed the Boston Strangler. And I remember Gag—sallow-faced Italian who, even at the age of fourteen, had a vicious scar over his eye. He was a merciless bully at the Milton Fuller Roberts Junior High, affecting the tough style of 1955; low-slung pegged pants, suede "spade" shoes, shirt collar up, a flick-knife in his pocket. He sneaked smokes in the boys' john, exhaling the smoke through the ventilator, so no one would know. He was halitotic with meatballs and nicotine. Once—we were both in the seventh grade—I walked past the gym and saw Gagliardi beating up another boy and hitting him so hard the boy was being stuffed into an open locker. Gagliardi turned from the boy's bloody nose and smiled at me. "Theroux," he said. "You don't see nothing, do you?"

  I said no, and walked away. I could have reported him to the principal, George F. Weston, who was known to everyone as "Poopy". Poopy had written a book, Boston Ways: High, By and Folk ("Copiously Illustrated"). He was an intelligent and learned Yankee and had made a study of the Chinese community in downtown Boston. What was a sensitive soul like this doing at such a foul school as the Roberts? He would have suspended Gag for fighting and, nipped in the bud, Gag's homicidal tendencies might have been curbed. I didn't report Gag, and I have never told this story before. But then, Gagliardi is dead.