by Paul Theroux
Its geography is simple and explicit. It has the odd flung-out shape of a sandbar, with an excellent but boring canal at one end and at its furthest, wildest shore, Provincetown, the haunt of extroverts and practitioners of the half-arts such as soap-carving and sandal-making, where women with mustaches stare stonily at men with earrings. The Mid-Cape Highway, Route 6, runs through woods and salt marsh and dunes to Provincetown. To the right of this highway, and parallel, is Route 2.8, with a bar or a pizza parlor, or a fast-food joint, or a motel, every ten feet; to the left of the Mid-Cape Highway is Route 6A, "The King's Highway," with its roadside orchards and cranberry bogs, its antique shops, and pretty churches. The town of Hyannis is in the middle of all this. Hyannis is partly rural and partly honky-tonk; it has the airport, the seaport and the shopping mall, and most of the Cape's better restaurants. But Hyannis is the ugliest town on the Cape—it is hard to tell where it begins or ends, it is such a blight on the landscape—and it is one of the ugliest in the world, though it may be the only place in the world where you can buy a potholder with the late President Kennedy's face printed on it. Cape Codders forgive Hyannis its gimcrack look, because Hyannis is so useful a place—it's where you rent things, buy things and get things fixed and go to the movies. You can't have movie theaters and charm, anymore than you can have condominiums and rusticity. "What a place for a condo!" is the developer's war cry. The Cape is under assault at this moment and there is no question in my mind but that in time the Cape will be nothing except mile after mile of tasteful cluster development, so tasteful you will want to scream and go away.
The motels along Route 6A are straight out of Psycho. Cabins, the signs say, and nearly always, Vacancy. Strange gray outhouse-looking buildings lay huddled in the pines, each one solemn and weather-beaten, as if concealing the victim of a late-night strangulation or Prom-goers who have just discovered the facts of life. It is my belief that the most comfortable restaurants may be found along Route 6A, the liveliest auctions, the best second-hand bookshops, golf courses, and the freshest fish. It is possible to spend the whole summer on Route 6A without ever leaving it—shopping at the supermarket in Sandwich, swimming on the northside beaches, eating and drinking at any one of a score of places. The best whale-watching boat on the Cape, the Speedy VII leaves from Barnstable Harbor. "I suppose you could call this non-directive whale-watching," the on-board naturalist says as he urges the pilot towards a quartet of leaping fin-backs, or the geyser-gasps of whale spouts in the distance, or the magnificent sight of a humpback whale thrashing its vast tail against the green Atlantic. The whale-watchers are almost always successful; only one trip in fifty fails to uncover at least one whale. Long ago, there were so many whales in Cape Cod Bay they were harpooned from the beach off Sandy Neck and at the mouth of Barnstable Harbor. They were dragged ashore and flensed and boiled in the dunes.
Cape Codders are not particularly hospitable people, and yet in spite of this resentment of outsiders, it is noticeable that most activities on the Cape are designed for the amusement of visitors. The golf courses and tennis clubs and fishing outfits invite the enthusiastic tourist to join them. From Memorial Day until Labor Day, the Cape is a hive of activity, and most things are possible: you can charter a boat or a plane, hire a Gatsby-like mansion, go windsurfing or eat great meals. In the fall and winter it is different. Closed for Season signs go up, and the streets and the road-shoulders are messier. There are no tourists around, so why should we pick up the litter? That seems to be the reasoning. Cape Codders know that they live off tourists and so, in an offhand way, they welcome them; the Cape Codder does not become really fearful until he meets someone who wants to take up residence. In general, the Cape Codder is an inbred and rather puritanical skinflint, with a twinkle in his eye. An old Barnstable man once tried to win an argument with my brother by howling, "My family's been here for four-hundred years!"
Never mind. The only thing that matters on the Cape is that you stay a while. A week is not enough, two weeks are adequate, three are excellent, a month is perfect. This isn't travel, remember; this is a vacation. After a week or so, it is possible to develop a routine. Working in the morning—I write until noon in my study, undisturbed; then lunch at the beach, a swim, a sail; a trip along the shore in my rowboat at sundown; then a shower, a drink and the evening meal; lobsters or spaghetti at home, or a trip to a nearby restaurant. On the Cape, every good restaurant makes its own clam chowder (or even better, scallop chowder). On the whole, it is plain cooking with sensational ingredients: what could be plainer than a starter of steamed clams, a main dish of boiled lobster with salad, and dessert of strawberries? It hardly qualifies as cooking, and yet it is a wonderful meal.
After dinner, it is part of our routine to play parlor games. We have a card game in which each side must cheat to win ("Kemps"), a coin game for eight players ("Up Jenkins"), a word game for ten ("The Parson's Cat") and the most elaborate game of all, called simply "Murder", which requires up to twenty people and—ideally—a fifteen-room house for proper play—younger contestants can get the collywobbles in this frightening game. If there is an auction on—there is an auction in practically every town in the Cape—it is worth going to. The Sandwich Auction and Robert Eldred in East Dennis are two of the best; inevitably, some of the items are junk, but just as many are valuable, and some are treasures.
Morning is the best time for blueberry picking, and the best place is at the corner of Route 6 A and Willow Street in West Barnstable. On rainy days, most people take to their cars and drive slowly towards Provincetown, stopping at antique shops. This is a fairly dreary way of passing the time—dreary, because everyone else is doing it, and Cape traffic on a rainy day can be maddening. Much better, if the weather is foul, is to leave the Cape altogether for the Islands, where the sun might well be shining.
An ideal Island trip is the one to Martha's Vineyard. Boats leave from Hyannisport and Falmouth. The lazy or infirm can take a bus or taxi to Gay Head at the other side of the Vineyard; the energetic—but it doesn't take that much energy—ought to rent a bike and cycle to Edgartown, among the prettiest villages in New England. It is just a twenty-five cent ferry ride from here to Chappaquiddick, and about five miles across this wooded sandbar to the long beaches which are marvelously empty. Nantucket is distant; there is not much point making the long boat trip unless you spend a few days. But Martha's Vineyard is easily accessible, full of interest and beauty spots. What difference does it make that the locals are cantankerous rustics and sailors, and the summer people are howling snobs from New York?
As the summer passes, the odors of the Cape become more intense, the sting of salt marsh, the gamy smell of tomato vines, the mingled aromas of ripe grapes, cut grass, skunks and pines. Plovers begin to appear on the shore, feeding side by side with the Greater Yellowlegs and the Ruddy Turnstones. The snowy egrets are watchful on the tidal mudflats and by riverbanks. Cars with Florida licence plates pass by, full to the windows with suitcases and clothes: they'll be back next year. Through the thinning foliage—the Gypsy Moths have left their mark—comes a train whistle of the Cape Cod and Hyannis Railroad winding along from Hyannis to Sandwich—this is the best glimpse of rural Cape Cod, and the train is run proudly and well. The beach plums have swollen, and the marsh grass is high and local stores are holding "Back-to-School" sales—and I get sad thinking that the summer is about to end.
At the end of the summer I find myself surrounded by some very strange objects. There is a pewter teapot that wasn't here in June, nor was the rifle, nor the rocking chair with geese carved on its arms. Nor the telescope, the miner's lamp, the ewer. It is all auction loot. Why did I buy that commode? Here is a bird's skull from the beach, some feathers and green glass sucked smooth as a stone by the tide. Around Labor Day I think: How lucky we are to know this place!
In July last year I bought a 192,5 "Angelophone" wind-up phonograph at an auction for $50. This was a great bargain, and so were the records—a stack of them I bought for a
few dollars. I have the original album of Oklahoma, Bing Crosby singing "Danny Boy" and "MacNamara's Band," Cab Calloway singing "Chattanooga Choo-choo" and the Andrews Sisters' version of "One Meat Ball." I also have Peggy Lee singing "Mañana." A fortune in memories for fifty bucks! But no, I don't have the one called "Old Cape Cod" and it's just as well, because I hate the song anyway. But I do have Gene Autry singing "Mexicali Rose." I wind up the machine and put it on, and notice a slight blush of autumn in the maples. A perfect summer is a dream of childhood: idleness, and ice cream, and heat. Everyone deserves summer pleasures, before the seriousness of September.
The Cape in the summertime is a resting place for the imagination, a release from the confinement I feel in London, and a way of verifying that the excitement I felt during childhood summers was not illusion. I hope my children will have the same fond memories.
In the first week of September, there is a faint chill in the air, the foretaste of what is always a bitter winter of paralyzing snow; the surf is higher and whiter, and the hermit crabs swarm more boldly from the jetty. Yellow school buses appear on roads where there were only dune buggies. We hose down the sailboat and put it in mothballs. Then the flight to London, to the clammy airport where, one September I heard a nasty porter snarl "You're not in America now, mate" to a mildly complaining tourist. I am reminded again that I am a refugee for the winter. I have always associated leaving the Cape with going back to school, and now that I think of it, it was probably my pleasant summers that made me hate school so much. As for the Cape: I'll come back to you some sunny day...
His Monkey Wife
[1983]
"This is a strange book," the man wrote of His Monkey Wife, beginning the review on a small rectangle of notepaper. It was unlined paper but his sentences were set out in an orderly way, as if his copperplate was for someone at a linotype machine. He went on, "It clearly sets out to combine the qualities of the thriller with those of what might be called the decorative novel. Like most things which are extremely far apart, these two are also surprisingly near to one another." He continued in this elliptical way for four pages and then found the novelist wildly inexact. "From the classical standpoint his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humour is too hysterical, too greedy and too crude."
On the other hand, this review of the novel was written by John Collier himself in 1930, when the book first appeared. It was titled "A Looking Glass," and one of its more bizarre aspects was that though it was carefully written it was very much a private joke: it was never printed anywhere, nor has anyone ever mentioned it before. Furthermore, it was rather dismissive—it contained faint praise but was generally belittling. It must have been the result of an impulse, but when you think about its backhanded generosity, its self-mockery and its extreme poise it is impossible not to be curious about its perpetrator.
What sort of a man writes a masterpiece and then writes a sniffy review of it and slides it into a drawer to be found fifty years later by his widow? It is not an easy question, because John Collier is one of the great literary unclassifiables—it is another synonym for genius. Collier had a generous man's modesty, and a great imagination, and no airs. Towards the end of his life he said, "I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer."
He was a poet, editor, reviewer, novelist and screen-writer. He was also unknown to the general public. "He eschews fame and has a horror of publicity," Anthony Burgess wrote in his Introduction to The John Collier Reader (1972). Like many other people who have no appetite for celebrity, John Collier was a happy man, who lived a rich and contented life. I am not speaking of books but of passions and pleasures. He was an attentive friend and a traveler; he was enthusiastic about boats and food. He liked to cook. He grew roses. He was asked by Sight & Sound magazine in 1976 why he had become a script-writer. He admitted that he had been "abysmally ignorant of the cinema ... I had seen scarcely a dozen films in my life". He had gone to Hollywood because he had fallen in love with a fishing boat in Cassis, near Marseilles in 1935, and so he wrote the script of Sylvia Scarlett in order to buy the boat.
There is another aspect to his anonymity that is interesting. He seems faceless and ungraspable and then, after a little probing, you discover his involvement in all sorts of well-known contexts. Mystery men are often like that. Collier was poetry editor of Time and Tide in the 1920's, and in the 1930's published a number of short stories in the New Yorker. Collier it was who first suggested that Jack Warner buy The African Queen to film—and he wrote the first script for it. Some of his macabre stories were dramatized in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Sandy Wilson made a musical out of His Monkey Wife, and it was Collier who introduced "the magical-Druidical element" into Franklin Schaffner's film, The War Lord (1965). He also wrote the script for the film I Am A Camera. So, though he may have been somewhat hidden, the fact remains that he spent the best part of his life working magic.
"John Henry Noyes Collier was born May 3, 1901," his widow Harriet wrote to me, when I asked for the details. "His parents were John George Collier and Emily Noyes Collier. His great-grandfather was physician to King William IV, a great uncle was a physician connected with the Hospital for Nervous Diseases, and there were other doctors, artists, and an Uncle Vincent, who was an unknown novelist (he published Light Fingers and Dark Eyes in 1913), who tutored John and was a great influence on him and his career. His mother, a teacher, taught him to read at the age of three, and he read an average of a book a day for the rest of his life. Except for kindergarten, this was the extent of his formal education. He read at the Bodleian and spent a great deal of time in the Reading Room of the British Museum."
His early writing was poetry and reviews. This was in the 1920's—in 1922 he received the poetry prize from This Quarter. In the 1930's he published thirteen books—poetry, novels, short story collections, an edition of John Aubrey, and a piece of collaboration entitled Just the Other Day: An Informal History of Britain Since the War. His early life divides almost by decades, for after his literary beginnings in the 'twenties, and his assured and varied writing in the 'thirties, he was occupied in the 'forties with films—"a mixed bag," one critic wrote, for they included Elephant Boy, Her Cardboard Lover, Deception and Roseanna McCoy. "I suspect that what I wrote was far too wordy and far too literary," Collier once reflected, with his customary humility. The 1950's were the beginning of a happy period that lasted until his death in 1980. During this time he wrote more stories and more movie scripts, and with the proceeds he bought a house, Domaine du Blanchissage, in Grasse, France.
His last project was his favorite, a movie script of Milton's Paradise Lost. In an interview, Collier said, "I think the theme of Paradise Lost is singularly suited to attract a wide audience, and especially the young audience, of today. It is quasi-religious, quasi-scientific, and deeply humanistic, being the thrilling story, with which we can all identify, of how innocent, vegetarian, Proconsul or Pithecanthropus was caught up in the guerrilla war waged by Satan against the authoritarian universe, and how he emerged as moral and immoral, curious, inspired, murderous and suffering Man." The film was not made but the script was published as "A Screenplay for the Cinema of the Mind" in America in 1973. It is an astonishing thing—not quite what Milton intended—and Satan is the hero.
Collier loved unlikely heroes. His stories are full of them, and so are his novels—not only Willoughby Ollebeare in Defy the Foul Fiend, but a whole marauding gang of savages in his novel of our tribalistic future, Tom's A-Cold (the American title was Full Circle)—set in the 1990's. And what is less likely than the main character of His Monkey Wife?
"The chimp is civilized"—the flat statement appears in the first chapter. Very soon we begin to realize its implications, for Emily is no ordinary chimp. The laugh is on the scientists "who have chosen to measure the intelligence of the chimpanzee solely by its reactions to a banana." Collier implies that it might be far b
etter to test a chimp's reaction to the poetry of Tennyson or Frances Crofts Cornford. Emily is tremendously well-read—no one in the novel, not even the aesthetes or writers, is so knowledgeable as she or possesses her range of reference. She knows she has no dowry but "she brought with her the treasure of a well-stocked mind ... which, all the books said, was infinitely to be preferred." She has a good nose for literary style, finding in the prose of the divorce laws a stark simplicity of greater merit than the exoticism of the marriage service. On the ship to England from Africa the other passengers want to feed her nuts and they urge her to smoke and do tricks. She tries to engage them in a mute discussion of Conrad's understanding of the sea. She can't win.
That she is a monkey is of small significance to the other characters. (She is not, we know, a monkey, but rather an anthropoid ape. Collier uses the words interchangeably, and I have followed his example.) There are many references to the fact that Amy, too, looks like a chimp. I once heard that in the seventeenth century a monkey was found in the north of England and was hanged by the locals, who suspected the poor beast of being a French spy. Emily is taken to be Arab or Chinese or Irish; most onlookers conclude that she is probably Spanish—dusky and hot-blooded. On several occasions men try to pick her up. It is the humans in the book who behave like monkeys, gibbering and indulging their frivolous passion for fancy dress. This has the effect of making Emily a deeply sympathetic character and of giving force to the love story in the satire. If Alfred Fatigay were not so clownishly obtuse and such a jackass in all his dealings with Emily, it might even have been a touching love story.