Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  For myself, I did not think it would be wise to trust to outside germination. Suppose I remained uninterested, infertile? To be sure of becoming, and remaining, a novelist and carrying out my elementary responsibilities as a husband and father, I must make sure that I had the seeds in me, fertilized and ready to flower and fruit under proper husbandry.

  So the question, What is my novel to be about? had become, What are my novels to be about? The first requirement seemed to me to be that I should know my subject or subjects. Everyone knows something about people (though usually notably less than they think they do) and of course people and their development must form a large part of any novel; but the events and circumstances which do the developing are not universal, they are special to particular times, places... and people. To write about any one, you had to know that one. I could not write about Rockland County, for example, because I did not understand deeply enough the circumstances and events which helped to make our friends what they individually were.

  The American scene engrossed my peripheral awareness. No one locked his door, day or night. I had had three or four small jobs done on Troup's Chevy and every time the mechanic had waved away my proffered money with a curt, 'Forget it', but the charge for one bigger job was very high. Legend to the contrary, I had met only politeness from New York cops and U.S. customs officers; but in the nation and community graft seemed to be endemic and universal. The papers were full of kickbacks, gerrymandering, and payola — words that I had to ask the meaning of. Everyone talked lightly of fixing traffic tickets. Fixing a traffic ticket, or attempting to bribe a policeman, was a criminal action; how could the politicians be expected to keep their fingers out of the pie if the voters thought nothing of fixing a ticket? Both actions were equally disgraceful. But the country so throbbed with energy, there was so much doing, talking, acting, planning, so fiercely were fought the battles, that dead cats were always being stirred up to the surface, to be grabbed and hurled as ammunition.

  No, what I knew most about was the English: not the English in England, the English in India. There I had a personal knowledge extending over nineteen years and an understanding that stretched back, seeming to be bred into me, for four previous generations, a hundred-and-forty years. I had more appreciation of Clive than of Marlborough, and took pride that Wellington was called the Sepoy General. I admired Warren Hastings, 'the plain man in the snuff-coloured suit', more than either Pitt. In large part this was because I also understood and appreciated the circumstances that had shaped them. The breakdown of the Mogul Empire was far more real to me than the Industrial Revolution. I knew a great deal about jungles and jungle-dwellers and nothing about slums. I knew the difference between a Jain and a Sikh, but not between a Baptist and a Methodist. I admired Indian heroes, such as Asoka, Shivaji and Akbar more than any of the Napoleons, Fredericks, and Garibaldis who had managed to intrude themselves into the All-British history we were taught in school.

  So, I could write about India and, more particularly, about the British In India. Anything else? Military affairs, for one; adventure and mystery stories, probably. And would I enjoy it? Yes, in all three cases, but India the most. And who would enjoy the results — like, for instance, readers? Some writers did not give a damn whether anyone read what they wrote, or not; I had met several such in Rockland County. I could not agree, for to me there is no writing without a partner, the reader. If there are to be no readers, there is, for me, no writing. Classifying the three fields open to me I thought that military affairs, being a rather specialized area, would attract few readers, unless I became a military correspondent. 'India' could hold a general readership, if I did it well. 'Adventure and mystery' with perseverance, certainly would. But my God, a mystery writer's life! the hours creating — what? Anodynes. I did not want to go into the drug business.

  Little, Brown rejected Brutal. It was very well written and eminently readable, they said, but they couldn't think what category to publish it in, as it contained elements of travel, belles lettres, adventure, and military history, as well as autobiography.

  My novels would be on 'the British in India', then. This covered a 347-year period. How many novels were there in that? An awful lot. But it was no use saying glibly, 'an awful lot'. How many could I write, and on what precise subjects?

  Novels were made of conflict, growth, change. Good novels carried you along on a river of narrative, and as you went you learned, felt, thought, about the squabbles of the boatmen, or the life along the river banks. The best novels made you feel equally sympathetic with both sides to the conflict. There were no villains, there were only two good people brought into inevitable conflict by opposing philosophies. (This was what often lifted adventure and spy stories above the aspirin level: the 'enemy' was not a villain, he was a man doing his duty as much as the hero was.) There were, of course, many other ways of looking at the novel; but, for me, I thought I could make a novel about any real conflict.

  And the elections! Appalling accusations were being made every day. Either they were true, in which case all the major candidates on both sides ought to be in jail for about twenty years apiece, for felony, corruption, and treason; or they were false, in which case all the major candidates, together with the press and radio journalists, ought to be in jail for about twenty years apiece, for slander, blackmail, and libel. A majestic oak tree stood at the end of South Mountain Road, and someone had painted on it in ugly white letters — VOTE FOR DEWEY. That was bad taste, and it made us think less of Mr Dewey that his supporters should do such a thing. We wondered how many voters felt as we did. We read the papers, and studied the issues. We wondered whether we might, between ourselves, take sides. All my training was to keep away from politics; as a soldier my job was to carry out lawful orders from a constitutional government; the price of bearing arms was to stand absolutely aloof from politics, in order that no one could accuse you of exerting armed pressure on the state. But I was not really a soldier any more, and this election campaign, now being waged from end to end of the huge land, the communiqués plastered across every newspaper and blaring from every radio, affected our lives. We were not Americans, and God forbid that we should intervene in any way; but, supposing we were, what then?

  Suppose we were Americans: then we must think first of the good of America. A good many voters seemed to be more concerned with what was good for other countries, particularly Israel and Ireland. Others were concerned only their states, or even their own businesses and industries. All in all, we decided we would vote for Mr Truman. We had done a lot of listening by then, too, and we also thought that Mr Truman would win.

  I began to list the high points of conflict during the British period in India — of nation against nation, brother against brother, man against nature, wisdom against ignorance...

  The first words on the list were Indian Mutiny, 1857. Here was a conflict which became the physical and psychological hinge of all relations between England and India; and, I believed, between East and West. A hatred had been breeding under a surface outwardly calm, and in a prosperity and peace such as no living Indian had known, nor his father before him. That hatred had bred hatred. The resulting explosion had destroyed most of the good and some of the bad in the British-Indian relationship. Here was a theme with an inherent narrative of tremendous power, and strong enough to carry whatever insights or messages I wanted to give on the second level.

  Doubleday rejected Brutal: no comment.

  Next I wrote, Thuggee. This was the practice of strangling and robbing travellers by religiously motivated gangs. After flourishing for centuries, it was put down in the 1820s. It was of the same order of phenomena as sutteeism (the practice of Hindu widows burning themselves alive on their husbands' funeral pyres), and the fact that Brahmins could not be punished for capital offences. The British overturned all these, but what vital conflicts must have preceded and followed, for none could have flourished without the approval of millions of Indians? And what inner conflicts must ha
ve bedevilled the British, committed to leaving their Indian subjects in the free practice of their religions?

  Malaria, I wrote; for it was Ronald Ross of the Indian Medical Service who had discovered the method of transmission of the disease. It had been a long struggle — man against his environment, if you like. There must have been many setbacks. There may have been murmurs from some about the effect of wiping out malaria on a country so poor that it could hardly support its existing malaria-ravaged population.

  The names and purposes of small wars crowded into my mind. In all of them two ways of life had been in conflict. In all, something of value had been at stake on each side. Lake's 1803 campaign against the Mahrattas was an obvious choice, also the Nepal, Sikh, Sind, and Burma campaigns, later in the century. Then there was the geographical exploration of India, the work of the surveyors who had marched with theodolite and chain where armies could barely move. Who had discovered Everest, and how? Who had built the railways, the roads, the dams, against what human and natural enemies? Who had fought the great fights against famine, against illiteracy, and how? I knew there had been a tremendous struggle, vital to the future development of the nation, as to whether the higher education of Indians should be in English or vernacular languages. There would be a magnificent and universal theme in the conflict between a missionary, truly Christian in every way, and a Brahmin, also of the truest faith and morals. An ancestor of mine had been the first man to discover the tea plant growing wild in Assam; but who had first grown it commercially, and after what vicissitudes? One great-grandfather had been a Hooghly pilot; the tale there would be of perils at sea and in the great river, of graft and merchants and money, of insurance speculation, perhaps, against professional integrity...

  Everyone had an amazing sense of public duty, and, on public business, an apparent imperviousness to boredom. Our friends were constantly slipping off to attend meetings of the P.T.A., which we had come to believe was an American secret society dedicated to destroying the public (state) school system. When we were invited to a couple of meetings as guests, in view of Susan's imminent entry into that system, we learned that the letters stood for Parent-Teacher Association, and that our friends spent those long hours discussing the teacher shortage or the price of school lunches.

  Everyone's tolerance was phenomenal. Bumbling idiots who wandered miles from the point and at the end made a suggestion that had already been turned down were heard out with bottomless patience and good will. The result was that two hundred man-hours of our time was regularly spent in settling a point that really needed no more than five minutes thought by one democratically chosen representative. But it did involve all of us in our schools. My God, how involved we were!

  Everyone knew who was our State Assemblyman, and the names and voting records of the members of the Town Board. Many thought nothing of actually attending Town Board Meetings, where they kept close watch on the Board's allotment of sewer contracts and grant of variances from the zoning laws. Everyone knew who was on the School Board, and many worked hard to elect the members they believed best qualified to serve on it.

  'Do you realize,' Barbara said to me one day, 'that two out of three of the people round here have been in, are in, or are going to be in psycho-analysis? And they're bringing up their children not by what they believe is best, but out of books. Do you think they're all unbalanced?'

  Or was it we who were unbalanced? In our combined seventy-two varied years neither of us had ever met anyone who had been treated by a psycho-analyst or a psychiatrist. Was this phenomenon into which we had landed the wave of the future, or was it yet another fad of the unbalanced over-rich, probably imported from California along with Aimee Semple MacPherson and Rosicrucianism?

  Since over 30 per cent of South Mountain Road's artistic and intellectual community was Jewish one event from the outside world had a particular impact upon us. That was, of course, the foundation of Israel on May 14 of this year, the terrorism against the British mandate authorities in Palestine before it, and the war with the Arabs after it. We found ourselves in our usual schizophrenic position. All our friends professed the deepest admiration for the British people and their institutions, but some had been collecting funds for the Irgun Zwai Leumi, which would be used to murder British soldiers (who had, incidentally, captured the country from the Turks in the first place). Then, we found it very muddled thinking to make amends to world Jewry for what the Germans had done to them by awarding them lands belonging to Arabs. The Allies ought to have given them land they themselves owned, or carved it out of Germany, and guaranteed its boundaries. The war, itself, found us on the side of Israel because although we thought it should not have existed in that place the Arabs' purpose, like Hitler's, was to annihilate it and kill all its people, men, women and babes, while the Israelis' was only to survive. None of this made friendly argument easy but at least we were spared accusations of anti-Semitism. That the Road never used among its own.

  Putnam's turned down Brutal; no comment.

  In the course of a long day I listed thirty-five areas of conflict about which I felt I could write novels. They covered the whole period from 1600 to 1947. Taken as a whole they would present a large canvas of the British period in India. The British would be in the foreground, as they had been in actuality; yet I thought the canvas would show how they were controlled by their environment — India — even while they were ostensibly directing it.

  Such a large project would benefit from an imposed unity. Since I was going to cover all India, which is a large place, and 347 years, which is a long time, I thought that the only course left open to me was to put into the foreground of each book some member of a single continuing family. The family should have dominant, recognizable characteristics, which in turn should resemble the characteristics of the British as they showed themselves in India. The tragedies and dramas of my stories would not happen to 'the British' but to human-size people, who would also stand as measuring rods by which readers could judge the size of events.

  The whole would be larger and nobler than the sum of its parts, if I could complete it. At that moment I knew that I would like to... but what I liked was almost irrelevant. I had undertaken this search to find a field for novel writing. I had found it. Death might cut off the work at any stage. Other interests might turn me from it. That was to be expected, for as India receded from me (not that I would love her less), I would learn to love others as much, or more. I would be a sad specimen as a person, probably as a writer, too, if this were not true.

  So, a many-book novelist I would be; and a damned bad one if I didn't study the techniques more professionally before putting pencil to paper. I bought E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, and found it brilliant, giving the same stereoscopic clarity of insight as his A Passage to India. I did not much admire the latter book because, knowing India, I knew that the clarity was false. There is none in India, and it can only be imposed by shading greys to blacks, and uniting muddled chains of small hillocks into a single sharp mountain range. I thought that the clarity of Aspects was also probably bought at the price of real truth. But I needed a guide, and Mr Forster would have to serve until I learned my way about the crags for myself. Aspects of the Novel took its place on my desk along with the Concise Oxford Dictionary (which I very seldom looked at: if, with a personal vocabulary of about 60,000 words, I didn't know a word already, it would look out of place if mined from the dictionary and mounted uncut in my prose); and the Fowlers' Modern English Usage. The Fowlers were already out of date in places, but they were not didactic, and their principles — Be clear, be simple, be natural — were faultless, and their distinctions and explanations were like alum dropped into cloudy water.

  Under the glowing Sunday leaves we played the last Marching & Chowder Club's softball games on Alan Anderson's grass. After the last out Keith Jennison brought in the pitcher of beer he had carefully protected behind a pillow — second pillow, I believe it was called — and Joe Wright his shot
from the outfield. I stirred lazily under the tree and thought I'd never understand the game, even though I had thrown (Pitched, Jack, for God's sake') a couple of innings. Underhand! Like a girl's school! I was still blushing. We parted. Back to wives and children, hot dogs and hamburgers.

  Enabled to move about for that princely $1 a day, we went for the first time up into Bear Mountain Park, a few miles to the north. Martin was wearing a dark green wind-jacket and Susan a red shirt. I see them still at the water's edge, a maple in flame over them, the pines a dark curtain beyond the mirrored steel of the lake, the high pale sky, a sense of space, silence, wilderness, and winter coming.

  Sometimes we drove the Chevy over to Westchester and spent a lazy afternoon watching the New York Central steam-hauled expresses as they thundered along the river's verge by Croton-on-Hudson. At night when the wind was in the east or south we heard the distant breathing beat of West Shore freights making the long climb from West Nyack through the black earth truck farms of Valley Cottage towards the Long Clove tunnel, and the mournful minor key moaning of the whistles for the level crossing at Congers, and again, dying and vanishing, for the tunnel mouth.

  The night of the election found us in a state of secretive and guilty excitement, for we had Taken Sides. Neither of us could help it. Try as we might we could not see Thomas E. Dewey, President of the United States, as anything but a misprint. Mr Truman's dismayingly petty past in Missouri politics seemed to us to distort but not obscure the essential guts and quality of the man. So we sat up all night listening to the radio and in the morning went to bed marvelling, for the first time, at the American people's uncanny ability to make the right decision when the only sources of information available to them are either biased, doctrinaire, lying, ignorant, or all f our.

  Alfred Knopf rejected Brutal; no comment.

  Carrie Balaban sent for me and handed me a thick manuscript. Would I read it and advise her how to improve it, for a suitable stipend? It was called Aunt Hattie of Cripple Creek, and was the story of Carrie's Aunt Hattie in the wild west of the Colorado mining towns around the turn of the century. The story itself, of gambling and highlife, of fancy ladies, rough miners, and sharp operators, was magnificent, but the presentation was flat and boring. After three days hard work I prepared an analysis, the sum of which was that she had a beautiful piece of steak there, but it was badly cooked. I made suggestions for improving it, and would have liked to offer to ghost it for her; but my style wasn't hers. She had to develop her own. Collecting $42, I returned to my own work.