by Paul Theroux
We left Falmouth Harbor in the early morning. It was a mile to the harbor mouth, where the breeze was just enough to stir the bottom half of the American flag on the flagpole there. Once past the jetty it was too rough for the long oars and the sliding seat. I put in the extra thwarts, handed Marcel a pair of oars, and using the two rowing stations we headed into the mist.
The Vineyard was hidden in the haze of a hot summer's morning. We pulled, talking a little at first, but in a short time fell silent. It was hard rowing, it took total concentration; and we were both nervous—but each of us was at pains to conceal it from the other. The waves regularly hit us on the starboard side, and the spray on Marcel's back dried to white smudges of salt. Now the Cape shore had a veil of mist across it, and out of it came the ferry Island Queen with a bone in its teeth. It was just astern of us and then it changed direction. I knew it was headed for Oak Bluffs, so I could guess where Vineyard Haven was, in the mist.
About an hour after leaving Falmouth Harbor we were rowing in the black water of the Sound, and neither the Cape nor the Vineyard was visible. In this misty isolation I felt a foolish thrill that was both terror and pleasure. I stopped rowing in order to savor it. Marcel said, "We'd better hurry." Another hour and we were off West Chop Lighthouse—the Vineyard had become gradually visible, like a photographic image developing on paper in a tray of water, acquiring outlines, then solidity, and finally color. A cabin cruiser went slapping past, and the bow of Goldeneye hit a four-foot curbstone of water, and we were drenched. But we had almost made it; and sheltered by the Vineyard, the water was flat enough for my long oars and my sliding seat. Marcel curled up on the stern locker and went to sleep as I rowed the two and a half miles to the head of Vineyard Haven harbor.
It had not been bad—I counted it as a small victory, and I was so heartened by it that I decided to row back after lunch. It was an ignorant decision. I had forgotten about the currents; I didn't know that the rising afternoon winds on the Sound can be devastating; I did not realize how tired we were from the morning trip. And I had thought that West Chop was just another comic Cape name.
I soon learned. The current had begun to run west, and the wind had picked up and was blowing to the east, fringing the three-foot sea with foam. About half a mile off the lighthouse we were powerless to resist the tipping wind, and the current took us into the chop—West Chop. The car ferry Islander went by, leaving vast corrugations on the water. We were no longer trying to get across to Falmouth; we were merely trying to stay afloat.
"Know what I think?" I said.
Bam went another wave, soaking us again.
"That we should turn back," Marcel said.
Immediately we turned the boat, and we rowed as hard as we could; but it was two hours before we were back in the harbor and on a friendly beach. Now the fear was gone, and all that was left of my worry was exhaustion. And the experience of the day was so strange it could only be compared to the abruptness of a nightmare—it was the experience of absurdity and danger, the surrealism of the unknown near home.
The next day the weather report was dire: a gale was expected, small craft warnings, heavy seas. Everything looked fine in Vineyard Haven, but I was unsure about a safe return to the Cape in the skiff. I decided not to risk Marcel's life and sent him back to the mainland on the ferry. As I felt I still had some time to spare, I rowed over to Bill Styron's dock.
He was sitting on the porch of his house with his son Tommy. The sun high in the clear sky exaggerated with brilliance the whiteness of his house and the green of his lawn. We talked awhile over glasses of lemonade. Tommy praised my boat, and I urged him to row around the harbor.
"He works among homeless people in New York—waifs," Styron said, after his son had gone.
Styron is the friendliest of men. He is watchful but unsuspicious, and not in the least severe. He is so human, such an imposing physical presence, it is hard to think of him as literary, or even bookish. He is happy, apparently unmethodical and patient; he takes his time. I think of him as living a charmed life, having had everything he has ever wanted. Easy-going people who have intelligence are usually merciful: Styron is that way. It gives him tremendous grace.
"I must say," he went on, "I'm fetched by the idea of someone his age who doesn't want to go into banking."
Tommy in Goldeneye was dissolved in the intense glitter of the sun on the water. It was a perfect day.
"I've been to France three times since I saw you in Paris," Styron was saying. "I've had my fill of it for a while. One of the times I was on the Film Jury at Cannes. That was a real circus. The Soviet juror wanted to give the prize to Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. It seemed to me a silly film. But that's what the English are best at, isn't it? They're good at farce and low comedy. They're through with tragedies, I guess."
I said that to succeed at writing tragedy you had to take yourself pretty seriously, and the English didn't do that anymore. We Americans took ourselves very seriously indeed, which was why tragedy was so common in our novels and plays: it was an aspect of our innocence and our optimism. We were still interested in the texture of our character, still wondering about the future. The English had just about ceased to care. Their cynicism had turned them into bizarre jokesters.
Rose Styron, dressed for tennis, crossed the lawn and walked onto the porch. We talked about bird watching, and India, and Northern Ireland. "Please stay for lunch," Rose said.
I said I had to row to Falmouth: I had set myself that task today.
"We're having sushi," Styron said.
"You must get sick of people dropping in all the time," I said.
"We love it," Rose said. "I encourage people to drop in. Oh, the other day my daughter said, 'Mother! Ricardo Montalban has just climbed up the dock—he's crossing the lawn!' I looked out and saw it was Senator Dodd on the grass!"
"Stay for sushi," Styron said.
But I said I had to go. We all walked down to the dock, as Tommy brought the skiff back.
"Sure you don't want to go to Falmouth?" I said.
"Not today," Styron said. He clapped his hands on his belly. "I'd just be extra weight."
"We'll both row," I said. "It'll take us three hours." I was getting into the boat.
Tommy said, "With him rowing it would take four!"
They waved me off and I rowed, watching them walk down their dock to lunch. It was one o'clock. An hour later I was at the buoy that marked the harbor entrance, and making no progress. I was pushed by the wind, pulled by the current. Within minutes I was in West Chop again, but much farther out than I had been the day before. I put in the short oars, but the chop was too fierce to row through—I couldn't row at all, I couldn't even steady the boat. The oars were bending and I thought it was likely that I might break one as I fought the current. Some boats passed me, riding high; they glanced at me and moved on. The wind was strong. Another hour went by: three o'clock—I was nowhere, still pulling. The Styrons had finished their lunch, and Bill was writing—he was an afternoon writer. He was working on a series of linked novellas, about the Marines. I thought of him saying, "I'm fetched by the idea..." I had never heard a northerner use that old word in that pleasant way. The waves thudded against my wooden skiff. "Stay for sushi." I'd said no. The Styrons had seen me go and probably said: That seems a good idea.
I was blown aside and tugged towards shore, and it was another hour and a half before I got back to Vineyard Haven. Then I admitted to myself that I had almost been swamped—and it wasn't seamanship but only luck that had prevented it. I might have drowned. I certainly had been frightened: they had been the worst waves I had seen all summer. But there was no link between anything out there among the seamonsters and lunch at the Styrons in this still harbor. It was almost six: I had spent half the day going nowhere. It would be dark soon—this sunset like the last hour of summer light for me.
I fretted in the harbor for a while, and then nerved myself and asked a boat owner for a tow back to the Cape. "I
'd be glad to," the man said, and tied Goldeneye to his cabin cruiser. I joined him at the wheel and he remarked on the high waves and strong wind. He wasn't bothered. He had a big boat and a deafening diesel engine: we were safe. I had been saved by the sort of boat I had been cursing all summer.
Goldeneye was crusted with salt again. Everything in it—the charts, the tide tables, my food—was wet and had to be thrown away. I found the boat ramp at Falmouth clogged with rubbish—plastic bottles, some rope, a smooth swollen rat. I winched the boat onto the trailer and headed home.
"Here he comes," Alex crowed. There were ten people in the dining room. "Big dramatic entrance! Look everybody, it's Ishmael! Aw, it was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea!'" And then he took me aside. "What the fuck took you so long?" he said. "You were supposed to carve the turkey."
* * *
Afterword
Soon after I went to Africa I began writing what I thought of as Letters from Africa to The Christian Science Monitor: "The Edge of the Great Rift," "Burning Grass," "Winter in Africa," "The Cerebral Snapshot," and "State of Emergency" all appeared in that paper. My editor there was a woman who rejoiced in the motto-like name Mrs Silence Buck Bellows. I mentioned in one piece that I taught night-school in the dark—English language lessons at any rate—in order to save lamp-oil; then checks were sent to me by Monitor readers—several thousand dollars. We started a scholarship fund with it. When Mrs Bellows turned down a piece I wrote about fishing ("We don't approve of killing fish," she said) I wrote no more for this newspaper.
"Leper Colony" appeared in Evergreen Review. "Scenes from a Curfew" was one chapter of a book I wrote about a month-long curfew that was imposed on Kampala, Uganda. The book was never published. A version of this piece was first published in my book Sinning With Annie (1972.). "Tarzan is an Expatriate" was published in the Ugandan magazine, Transition; it ceased publication when the editor, Rajat Neogy, was jailed for sedition in 1970. "Cowardice" appeared in Commentary. "Seven Burmese Days" was published in The Atlantic under the title "Burma". "The Killing of Hastings Banda" first appeared in Esquire; "A Love-Scene After Work"—thinking out loud about quitting my job in Singapore—in The North American Review; the first part of "V. S. Naipaul" appeared in the anthology, People (Chatto & Windus, London); the second part in The Telegraph Magazine (London); "Kazantzakis' England" in Encounter, under the title "You Orientals!", "Malaysia" in the English edition of Vogue, and "Hemingway: Lord of the Ring" in Encounter.
When I wrote The Great Railway Bazaar, I included a chapter on Afghanistan, but I was persuaded to leave it out. There are no trains in Afghanistan. "Memories of Old Afghanistan", this chapter, first appeared in Harper's under the title "In Darkest Afghanistan." "The Night Ferry to Paris" was published in Travel & Leisure; half of "Stranger on a Train" appeared in The Observer (London) and the other half was the first Thomas Cook Travel Lecture, which I gave in London in 1981; "An English Visitor" first appeared in The New Statesman, "Discovering Dingle" in Travel & Leisure; "The Exotic View" was commissioned by Mr Arthur'S. Penn in New York for a collection of nineteenth century photographs, which was never published; "Homage to Mrs Robinson" first appeared in Playboy. "My Extended Family" was commissioned by The Sunday Times (London) for their Pleasures of Life series, but was never published; "A Circuit of Corsica" was commissioned by Travel & Leisure but turned down by them and finally published by The Atlantic. "Nixon's Neighborhood" appeared in The Radio Times (BBC, London), and "Nixon's Memoirs" in The Sunday Times. "The Orient Express" was commissioned by Horizon, rejected by them, and published in Holiday.
"Traveling Home: High School Reunion" was written for my own satisfaction, and it later appeared in The New York Times Magazine. When I wrote a play about Kipling in 1979 and could not get it staged I decided to write about this American period in Kipling's life. It is appearing here for the first time. "John McEnroe, Jr" was first published in The Radio Times; "Christmas Ghosts" in The New York Times, "Henry Miller" in The Sunday Times, and "V. S. Pritchett" in The New York Times Book Review. "Dead Man Leading" formed the introduction to Pritchett's novel, published by Oxford University Press. "The Past Recaptured" was the Foreword to The World As It Was, a book of old photographs, edited by Margarett Loke, and "Railways of the Raj" was the Foreword to a book of the same name (Scolar Press, London). "Subterranean Gothic" appeared in The New York Times Magazine under the title "Subway Odyssey". I am grateful to Faber & Faber for permission to use an extract from T. S. Eliot's East Coker. "Easy Money—Patronage" was my Gertrude Clarke Whittal Lecture at the Library of Congress (April, 1981) and was later published in a slightly different form by Harper's magazine. "Mapping the World" was the Foreword to the Annual Report, 1982, of The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.
"The Last Laugh" was the Introduction to the posthumous collection of'S. J. Perelman's pieces, published by Simon & Schuster. "Graham Greene's Traveling Companion" was the Introduction to Barbara Greene's Too Late to Turn Back (1982, but first published in 1938 under the title Land Benighted). "His Monkey Wife" was the Introduction I wrote for John Collier's novel, published by Oxford University Press in England, and "Being A Man" first appeared in the column "About Men" in The New York Times Magazine. "Introducing Jungle Lovers " I wrote for a German edition of the novel (published by a Munich insurance company, Bayerische Rücksversicherung Aktien-gesellschaft, as a Christmas present for their clients). "Making Tracks to Chittagong" was published in The National Geographic in a different form, under the title, "By Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent." "What Maisie Knew" was my Introduction to the Penguin edition of the Henry James novel, and "Sunrise with Seamonsters" appeared in a shorter form in Vanity Fair under the title, "Rounding the Cape."
Most of the pieces here first appeared in a slightly different form. English magazines have the lightest editorial hand, American magazines the heaviest, occasionally making so bold as to rewrite one's work. "I think our readers would like it better our way," an editor at Mademoiselle told me once over the phone, as she ran her blue pencil through one of my paragraphs. For the Monitor of course I avoided all mention of death, a concept that is at odds with Christian Science. The New York Times is unexpectedly fastidious, and even at times prissy ("Please don't use the word 'stinks'"). In my subway piece the graffiti I noted, "Guzmán—Ladrón, Maricón y Asesino" appeared on my proofs without Maricón. "We don't use that word in this newspaper," I was told. I pointed out that it was in Spanish and that it was part of a true quotation. This did not matter: it was not fit to print. I agreed to the cut but was left to ponder this newspaper of record, in the most violent city in the world, averting its eyes when it saw something it did not like; and printing the words "thief" and "murderer," but not the noun "gay."
* * *
* Note: What Naipaul actually said was, "Sadly, I reject Mrs. Macmillan's consolation that electricity will put an end to 'the long dark evenings in which ... the only possible recreation is sex.' Electricity or no electricity, there will soon be two million Jamaicans. It is hard to see what anyone can do except eat more Jamaican bananas without complaining. And perhaps—who knows?—a banana a day will keep the Jamaican away." (New Statesman, 4 Jan., 1958)
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* see Coleridge's preface to "Kubla Khan" or the Robert Graves poem, which ends:
O Porlock person, habitual scapegoat,
Should any masterpiece be marred or scotched,
I wish your burly fist on the front door
Had banged yet oftener on literature!
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* "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion," Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote at the end of The Worst Journey in the World (1929). This masterpiece of travel writing, which is an account of the Scott Antarctic expedition of 1910–1913, describes many instances of severe hardship and a satisfaction in enduring it that amounts almost to pleasure. Another explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, wrote, "Without privation there would be no st
ruggle, and without struggle no life—" This was also Scott's feeling; in one of his last letters ("To My Widow") as he lay freezing to death in the tent on the Ross Ice Shelf, he wrote, "How much better it has been [struggling against blizzards] than lounging in too great comfort at home." Pritchett knew these sentiments from Stephen Gwynn's Captain Scott (1929).
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