Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  Alas, the time came when the expedition account was down to $ to, and the nearest to a client I had was a lady in California, who wanted her two daughters to take the trip. And, although a Miss America (Bess Myerson) had hugely admired The Bra (giggling), and although Vyvyan had almost twisted the arms off all her many connections in the garment industry, that too remained unsold.

  It was April, a formidable month for the Englishman in the eastern United States. Since February he has been expecting spring to begin its slow appearance from behind the cold curtains of winter, as it does at home, at first leaving the secret white sign of the snowdrop in the bare woods, then a primrose in the hedge, then daffodils, while a subtle balm blunts the edge of the wind and a pale green 94 95

  presence creeps along the black branches over the garden walls. Here, it was different. The snow lay everywhere in February, and the Hudson ferries hooted mournfully in the river fogs. The snow lay everywhere in March and the wind blew down the bitter canyons. The snow lay everywhere, and a drawn breath of air was a chill bronze in the throat, the first days of April. Then thunderstorms marched across the city, systematically bombarding it as they passed. One caught me tramping down Lexington Avenue and for an hour I sheltered in a doorway while the rock core of earth shook, the explosions crashed and boomed among the skyscrapers and the sky darkened at noon. For an hour I watched lightning flashes sear the silvered narwhal's horn of the Chrysler Building, and rain poured down like a monsoon in Burma. Three days later forsythia flamed in every lot and yard and the temperature was 75 degrees! Had I known better, I would have rushed out into the streets crying Rejoice, today is spring! But I did not know. I waited cautiously for the daffodil, the narcissus, the sight of a chaffinch collecting twigs and grass. Then the continuing sun hit me on the back of the head, the arsonists fed more flame into the blossoms all over the land, and it was summer.

  Early one Sunday morning I took the subway up to Van Cortlandt Park and walked on the grass in the wet wind. I wished Barbara were here so that we could discuss the situation and decide what to do, for a decision had to be made soon now. Well, she was not; I was alone, and only I knew the 'feel' of New York and America, and the possibilities for our future here. So I must make the decisions by myself. First, the Himalayas, I thought I must give up that idea for the time being. It was not going to succeed without my putting more time and money than I could afford into it, and probably not even then. Conditions in the Indian sub-continent where the partition massacres still reverberated in the world press, and warlike bitterness increased between Pakistan and India, did not make it easy for me to persuade people that the areas where I intended to go stood in no danger of riots or religious disturbances. Nor could I, in my picayune one-man campaign, overcome the effects of the massive general ignorance, exemplified by the travel agent who asked whether the Himalayas were north or south of Miami. The travel agents, as a body, knew less about travel than about selling. If they did not go out on a limb to help me sell my trip, it was because they saw at once that it was unsaleable. Only a few of them may have been able to appreciate the extraordinary nature of the experience which I was offering, but all of them knew that people with the desire for such experience seldom had the means, and those with the means seldom had the desire.

  So I must turn to something else. One man wanted me to go gem-hunting for him in Nepal. Another had asked me to join him in his travel agency. I did not like either idea very much, but my family were due to move in six weeks time. Should I go back to England? Stay here? Move on to Canada, and start again there, without the incubi of the Himalayan Holidays, The Bra, and my status here as a time-limited tourist?

  Walking along the edge of the grass while the cars whizzed by on Sunday excursions to the country, I knew that I did not want to leave New York at this time. The city had excitement and wonder, and my opportunity was there somewhere. I had heard it scratching behind the wainscot in a hundred interviews, in the reading of a hundred newspapers. Nothing I knew about Canada led me to suppose that it could offer as much — to me — as New York. What was there might be easier to get at, and I would certainly be more generally accepted, but this was the face that launch'd the thousand ships...

  City of the world (for all races are here,

  All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)

  City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!

  City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede,

  whirling in and out with eddies of foam!

  City of wharves and stores — city of tall façades of marble and iron!

  Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!

  It was here I must stay, and hunt, and search, and never give up.

  I went happily back to the fleapit, and, a day or two later, out to lunch with a reporter from the New Yorker. Word of the English colonel hawking his unlikely expedition about the city had reached the topless towers on West 45th Street, and someone Up There thought I might make a good piece for the Talk of the Town. I knew about the New Yorker because I had been taking it since 1937, and I was much pleased. If my Himalayan Holidays were to get this sort of publicity, perhaps they would succeed after all.

  Rex Lardner met me at the Longchamps restaurant under the Empire State Building, and bought me a nice lunch, including two or perhaps three dry Martinis. The extra-dry martini, New York style, had been unknown to me before this year, but I had learned it was the only cocktail for the true New Yorker, and had been studying the technique of making them. These at the Longchamps were good — better than I knew, perhaps — for they loosened my tongue and gave it wings. The Himalayan Holidays were disposed of in short order, then Lardner drew me out on The Bra, my other plans and past history, and unobtrusively made notes. On my third, or perhaps fourth martini, I became fluent about Hollywood's India and Hollywood's England — the perpetual stunning heat of the one, the perpetual impenetrable fog of the other; the rajahs, snake charmers, sahibs, and chota pegs; the country palaces, dukes, cockneys and yokels — compared with the realities. My wit soared. Lardner listened, laughed, forgot his notes. Boy, was I brilliant!

  Over coffee, Lardner said that he found my remarks quite funny. My euphoria began to evaporate. Then he said, 'I think, if you cared to write up what you've been saying, you might be able to sell it.'

  'Really?' I asked, my spirits rising again.

  'One can't tell,' he said. 'But if you have nothing else to do, it's worth trying.'

  I had nothing else to do, as Lardner well knew. I returned to the lonely hotel room, pushed the Holidays file and The Bra into the bottom of the yakdan which was my office (a yakdan is a box, covered with red leather, designed to carry loads on a yak), and began to draft the article.

  I set about it in the way I had learned, and taught at the Staff College and at war. First, what was my object? To sell an article about Hollywood's views of India to an American magazine. Wait, that wasn't my object, was it, really? Wasn't my object to write it? To write it really well?... No, my object was to sell it. If my object had been to write it, I wouldn't be thinking about the form of it, or what language I used; I would be writing to please myself only. But this was not so; I wanted to sell it, so that must be my object.

  Now for the 'factors affecting the attainment of the object'. I wanted to sell it to an American magazine, so I must not use English slang, which would be unintelligible, and even if it were understood would give the American reader a sense of strangeness, so that he would be noting the language instead of doing what I wanted him to do, recognize my portrait and laugh at my humour. Still less 98 99

  must I use American slang, because there is only one thing sadder than an American telling 'English' jokes, and that is an Englishman telling 'American' jokes. I must use universal English, which would be fine, because that is the most powerful and most flexible instrument ever formed.

  What should be my style, my manner? Suppose I 'wrote down' to the readership of some im
aginary pulp magazine, in the hope of pleasing the editor? I knew from experience that the result would be bad, because the condescension would show. I had learned in my profession that a battle order needs a choice of words and a rhythm of phrase different from a paper on India's strategic airfields. I had learned that if I were trying to persuade a choleric general of the falsity of something he believed in, I must select phrases to arouse his reason, not his choler. But within such limitations, I must always write in the clearest and most powerful way I knew, because anything less always showed. Only those write well for the pulps whose mind and style, at their best, are pulpy. Only time would tell whether I fell into this category.

  And this, too, of writing my best, would solve another matter, that of self-satisfaction or, to give it the more pompous vogue-word of the time, self-fulfilment. I would not feel happy about work which was consciously inferior, however much money I made.

  To the drafting, then: do I want to have the reader waiting for a punch at the end, some great belly-laugh, or do I want him grinning from the start? From the start, I think: for surely this subject is not climactic, but panoramic, so the writing technique must conform. Next...

  These things, which take a lot of time to write about, took very little time to do, because the ways of thought which I have been describing were ingrained and automatic in me. In fact I had laid down the outline of the article in half an hour, and written it, some fourteen pages amounting to 3,500 words, in another two hours. The next morning I put on my hostile critic's hat and re-read it, sternly restraining my chuckles at the writer's wit and acumen. Had he done what he set out to do? Was the rhythm of the sentences right? Was the interest continuous? Was the humour in the situations (Thurber-like) rather than in the words (Perelman-like)? Had he written his best, i.e. could I find more pointed words, more powerful phrases, than he had used?

  I made many corrections, large and small, hacked out as many adjectives and adverbs as I could bear to part with (this is Dogma One of Good English, as taught me by my English teacher at Wellington in 1930), and sent the piece to Rex Lardner, asking him to read it and, if he thought it good enough, advise me what to do next.

  A day or so later he rang up to say he liked my piece very much. He would not submit it to his own magazine, because Hollywood was considered to be too much of a sitting duck for the New Yorker's poison-pen experts. But he had sent it to an agent he knew. The agent would get in touch with me if he had any luck with it.

  I put the whole business out of my mind, and returned to my questing-beagle patrols, cocking an ear to people's conversations, turning over garbage-cans of thought, and studying the classified columns of the New York Times as though my life depended on it... which, as far as I knew, it did. But still the jobs that were vacant in such stunning profusion had no reality to me.

  On the third morning the agent rang me up and told me that The Atlantic Monthly had bought my piece for $100. He, the agent, would be grateful if I could find time to visit him in his office. Yes, I thought I could find the time. My eye strayed over the empty room, the silent typewriter, the closed yakdan. No trouble at all.

  The next day I went to his office on Fifth Avenue. Without more ado he told me that in his considered opinion as a long-time and successful literary agent, I could make my living by writing professionally.

  An unearthly light filled the room. I had never in my life heard such an extraordinary and fundamentally meaningless collection of words. I asked him to repeat them. He did so. The light went out and I thought, good God, he means it.

  Pulling myself together I heard him ask to see anything else I had written. I thought of my Mountain Warfare Green Paper, generally considered the most cerebral ever produced by a Staff College D.S. on that arcane subject. I thought of my little 1937 monograph on Infantry dress in India; of the half dozen poems I, like every well-bred British officer, used to keep in my knapsack rolled round my field-marshal's baton; of my 1932 school essay on Judaism and the early Christian Church, with Mr Malim's 'very good' inscribed in the margin. But these were not what the agent had in mind; in any case, I had not thought to bring them to the U.S. with me, so I answered, No. He then asked whether there was anything else I proposed to write. I answered again, no, but that I could probably think of something. With this, and expressions of good will, we parted.

  Back in my room I considered the agent's suggestion. It seemed a strange and dangerous one. 'A living' meant a regular job. Writing, in the way the agent meant — that is, on my own, not as an editor or reader or employee of a publisher — would produce money obviously — I had a cheque for $90 in my hand to prove it — but it could hardly count as a living. It would be ridiculously precarious. There would be no pension. It was unsound, flighty, unfair to my wife and children. I ought to reject it out of hand.

  But did it not offer freedom of action, independence, a chance to be my own master, happiness in my work? Periods of intense effort followed by long holidays? Freedom to travel? Apart from the lack of security it met every one of our requirements, and security was something merely desirable, not essential.

  My earning power would obviously depend on how good, famous, infamous, or all three, I became. I knew that Kipling had earned $2.30 a word. In this Hollywood article I had worked for about five hours and been paid $100, less 10 per cent commission to the agent: $90.00 — or $18.00 per hour. But wait, I must have been mulling over those ideas about Hollywood in my mind for years. Perhaps I would need four martinis every time to translate an idea into words, which would add greatly to the cost and considerably shorten my writing career, not to mention my life. And I had had to go to India and see movies about India, to be able to write that piece. The expenses were really considerable.

  By now my mind was beginning to glow with banked fires. I recited our agreed object: To live as a family unit in a place that offers space, liberty, and opportunity to all of us and, to me, independence in a work that I liked... It couldn't have fitted better.

  For a time it might be necessary to live close to editors and agents — which meant, as far as my knowledge went, living close to New York — but even that was probably not vital, only desirable; and if I succeeded we could surely go anywhere: Arizona, Maine, wherever there was space. In truth, I was already getting the feeling of space, of room to expand, even in the deepest canyons of Manhattan, so there might be no need to pack a tent and search out a wild river, an empty sky.

  Did writing itself have 'space', or scope? That I could not see, but surely it was because I could not yet relate my own abilities to the scope of writing, which obviously 103

  had almost unlimited scope. The prospect, as yet dark to my sight, was like looking at the lower slopes of a huge something, fog-shrouded, lit here and there by flashes of light from a higher place. A Tale of Two Cities I saw momentarily, and Sons and Lovers, and Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, Richard II... Rifleman Dodd, Tom Jones, Hornblower, Huckleberry Finn... Sherlock Holmes, Becky Sharp, Major Barbara, and Gibbon's sonorous roll of the emperors... the white whale and the whale hunt, battles, searches, and climbs... love and music and wine, sadness, the outward face and inward eye, Proust and Stevenson, the golden bowl and the silver cord.

  Space! My God, I had not understood what the word meant till I began to look at this swirling, towering infinity in front of me. As long as I remained my own master, my scope as a writer would depend only on my scope as a human being.

  Putting aside for a moment the question of financial success or failure, would I be content as a writer? Suppose I stayed for ever on the lower slopes, digging out saleable lumps of mud when I was striving to find diamonds. Suppose the expression of my whole personality through just one channel was too limiting. Then, how was it that so many writers seemed to suffer from frustration, the nature of which I could not know and they could not explain? (It usually seemed to spring from the fact that they wished they had written something other than what they had.) What about the writers who accepted fortunes
in Hollywood, while wailing that it was degradation, prostitution? Worst of all, what if I got bored with writing, or succeeded too easily and found myself writing the same book over and over again, as, to my knowledge, half a dozen well-known authors were doing?

  Well, from the fleapit, with one short article to my credit, those questions were insoluble and, for all I knew, might also be irrelevant to my case. As Nelson said: Something must be left to chance. No captain can do very wrong if he lays his ship alongside that of an enemy.

  Good. Now to make a cold appraisal of my chances. It was impossible to know what kind of a writer I would be. Among the writers I most admired were Maugham, C. S. Forester, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Gibbon, Chaucer, Milton, Walter Pater, Macaulay, and George Orwell. I could not decide whether to class Lincoln as a writer or not, but I thought that his style was the best of all. If I thought these were good, my own style would probably be lapidary and objective, rather than chiaroscuro and subjective. The content, at least at first, would certainly be matter of which I had personal experience, which meant, apart from the universals of life and love: war, India, Gurkhas, tigers, and so on. Generally speaking, that sort of writing and that sort of subject did not please critics, but did make money. In terms of survival, this was a factor favourable to me.

  Assuming that I earned no money at all for a time we could, according to my now experienced calculations, live in New York for about two and a half years on my pension and gratuity alone. (The British Treasury had refused to give me the latter in a lump sum because I was asking for it to be transferred outside the sterling area; they were spreading the payments over five years.) This would still leave enough for us to return to England and survive a year or so on that part of the gratuity still due to me, while looking for a job. So I could invest about two and a half years in making myself a self-supporting writer. I did not hesitate a moment in deciding it was a reasonable investment.