I caressed Marina with innumerable letters, trying to make of words an astral body, an extension of myself more powerful and more present than any her memory could supply. My own memory was obedient. I would not allow it to play me that trick, intolerable to lovers, of obliterating within a week the face of the beloved. Feature by feature I built it in air, for when I was with her I marked down the curve, the angles and the shadows like a draughtsman preparing a portrait upon the sale of which he must live a year.
How often I wrote I cannot remember, but it was never less than once a week. Sometimes I had as many answers, and my private life would be almost gay with hope. Sometimes there would be a gap of a month or more, and I learned to dread the letter which would end the silence more than the silence itself.
At last she mentioned a possible return to Europe, and I convinced myself she would stay. She had never made any conditions for marriage. She was far too generous a person. But certain minimum conditions were obvious. Financial security. A reasonable climate since her health was erratic. A standard of living sufficient to give her ease. Bilbao provided the lot. That accounted for my relentless energy in carving out a kingdom for myself.
I felt that an atmosphere of domesticity might be impressive, emphasising the new solids in my character and my work. So I took a flat in the coastal village of Algorta, half an hour from Bilbao by electric train, and proceeded sketchily to furnish it like a cock bird building his token nest in the mating season and ceremoniously presenting a twig to the suspicious hen.
It was my first attempt at creating my own living conditions, and memory dwells upon the result with mingled amusement and hatred. The purchase of furniture, linen and crockery left me with nothing for redecoration, with the result that I had to do my best with colours as I found them. The living-room was a lovely place, for one window looked across the sea to the faint red and white of Castro Urdiales, sixteen miles away, and the other to the green peak of Gorbea and the foothills of the Pyrenees. Give me that room today, a bucket of whitewash and a Bokhara rug, and I do not think I could go far wrong. As it was, I found a wallpaper of violet and brown surmounting a dado of imitation dark-oak panelling. Faced with the impossible, I settled for violet curtains as well. I am certain that the bouts of depression which later overcame me in that room were due quite as much to the colour scheme as to hopeless love.
The bedroom lent itself to more daring treatment. I decided that I could not offend the canons (whatever they might be) of interior decorating if I followed the colours with which nature had adorned the pomegranate, and I maintain to this day—though Marina would not, I think, agree with me—that if I had not set my pomegranate among such an unconscionable deal of bright green, it would have been a room of distinction.
In the dining-room taste was surer. A local cabinet-maker built and carved from his book of patterns a Chippendale table and chairs of solid Spanish walnut. His craftsmanship illumined the whole room. So did that of my cook. I can claim no credit for finding her. An agency sent her, hoping that a foreign bachelor would overlook the fact that she had no references. She was a respectable lady of middle age and middle class who had just run away from an unspeakable husband. But I did not then know it, and I am bitterly ashamed to remember that I took no interest whatever in her personal life or that of the little daughter who accompanied her. Our only common ground was my evening meal, which gradually became as much French as Spanish, for I had only to explain to that admirable woman how a dish appeared and of what it chiefly tasted for her to produce the original.
Marina, arriving duly chaperoned, was impressed. But no sooner was she assured by the obvious respectability of my life that I had learned discipline than the very dullness of that life appalled her. I was had both ways. She found less attractive than ever the prospect of marriage to a fruit merchant whose social and intellectual interests appeared to be dead, whose fixation upon the colour of ripe bananas was such that he desired the complementary violet to decorate the living-room.
The verdict was unfavourable, but a remission of my endless sentence, of which I had now served three years, seemed just possible. Nineteen twenty-eight was in its way an endurable year, for Paris, where she decided to live, could be reached for a week-end if one spent two nights in the train, and the second-class return fare was no great extravagance.
I remember setting out for a long Christmas week-end, to which I had looked forward for months. I arrived at Irun, the frontier station, and found that I had forgotten my passport in the office safe. It took me a mere quarter of an hour to satisfy the Spanish frontier officials—since the Irun Football Club had been enjoying a season of remarkable success, and I could recall the scores and the opponents.
Very well, they said, an Englishman of such sympathy and distinction could go, so far as they were concerned, to France or the devil without a passport, but the French would never let me in. The French frontier control officer, advised by his Spanish colleague that I was a known ornament of the Basque provinces and that I only wanted to go to Paris for Christmas to see my girl, agreed at once that the object was worthy and go I might, but added that the stationmaster would never give permission.
I could not see what the stationmaster had to do with it, but I was encouraged to try my hand with him. He was indeed the most difficult of them all. Railway Law laid it down that if there were an accident and if my body were collected with no papers of identification, then the stationmaster would be responsible. I cannot explain this, but as in so many arbitrary rules of French bureaucracy there is, somewhere, logic. I assured him that the Paris-Orléans had never been known to have an accident—the line had just had two spectacular smashes—and it so pleased him that the vulgar publicity had not reached me that he, too, let me through.
That was a civilised Europe. On my way back to Bilbao, the Spanish officials were so delighted by my success, to which they themselves had chiefly contributed, that we had a bottle of wine in the customs shed—their wine. At no point had there been any question of a bribe.
During that year of 1928 Marina and I became friends in love rather than strangers in love. She still believed that I ignored far too many human beings. I on my part had little patience with her marked sympathy for the worthless. Her values were exaggeratedly early Christian, and both emotion and the expression of it were important to her; a mandarin or stoic self-control she underrated. But we were each beginning to understand the reactions of the other to the outside world, and the store of common memories grew. There were more things to laugh at. My disappointment when I found that I could not hold her was worse than ever, for this time there was no very obvious reason.
She must have known that her loveliest quality was wasted on me, for I have never been a man who could be mothered. My instinct in trouble is not to lay my head upon a woman’s bosom but to get into a corner by myself. What then, in the absence of children, was to be her woman’s reward? In spite of all that casual travel, those crossings and recrossings of the Atlantic, venturousness had no appeal for her. For few Americans is it enough. Their men—if it is fair to judge by the mass of the soldiery in war—are capable of such monumental boredom in any foreign land that to engage the enemy is less hardship than to endure the ally; their women are unhappy unless they can create or persuade themselves that they have created the atmosphere of their own home town. Yet Marina would have accepted Bilbao and courageously faced her own homesickness if she had felt that I really needed her. I suppose few women have ever been needed more, and for the sake of her character and companionship as much as for her physical beauty. But I should agree that there was something wrong with the need. It lacked humanity. It had some resemblance to craving for a drug, though the drug was an ideal.
So long as she remained in Paris, I could disguise from myself the fact that the usual end was on the way to me. When she left for America, I had nothing. The trade which I had learned, the Bilbao office, the flat were all in rui
ns. I was twenty-eight. Where the devil did one start again and how?
I am now entitled to have the young man up for judgement, since I am just double his age. But what sermon to preach at him I do not know. Such obstinate purpose, such concentration on a single objective is generally thought laudable when the ambition is political or financial, and foolish when it is a woman. I doubt if there is much to choose between them. In both cases you force yourself to travel through the summer fields of life in a train with the blinds down. Failure to attain your love will give you far more misery than to be suspended from dealings on the stock exchange or passed over for a parliamentary under secretaryship. On the other hand the lover may spread his interests as the careerist dare not; his window blinds are continually jumping up.
They began to jump at random, though the train still raced along its single track to the horizon. Marina’s circle in Paris intersected with that of literary and artistic frauds who concealed their inability to think by taking in vain the names of Joyce, Stein, D. H. Lawrence and such obscure psychologists as had built improbable worlds of their own upon the enthusiastic misunderstanding of Freud and Jung. My visits were seldom long enough for me to be personally involved. I got the various gospels second-hand. But to this day I dislike to be called creative. Those international plagiarists bandied the word creation about, while approaching it no nearer than rest on the seventh day.
Some small part of this invective may have escaped me at the time, for Marina’s attitude was that if I found them shallow I could go and do better myself. A literary life had never even occurred to me as a possibility. When I went down from Oxford I had not for a moment considered journalism or letters as a profession, and I had never tried to write for publication.
It seems to me odd that I should have unhesitatingly assumed that Marina knew what she was talking about. But I acknowledged her to be well read—which I was not—in everything of importance published since about 1912; and, after all, she had some evidence on which to judge. She had been reading Geoffrey Household every week for three and a half years.
So when my plans for Bilbao and matrimony went up in smoke—a more intangible smoke than usual—I kept myself from a depression which might have verged on the dangerous by deciding to become a writer. I had no sense of conviction, not even any particular wish for the trade; but I saw that it stopped her last escape route. If I could travel and live wherever she liked, that was the end of excuses.
Back in that damned violet room I set to work. I had no doubt that my stuff was good—it had every amateur fault, but the illusion was protective—and yet grave doubts whether it would sell. I was right to be cautious. Nothing that I did then and for years to come had any effect on my final choice of profession. This beginning was a mere unfortunate flash in the pan. For that reason I dismiss it here. It does not belong to my third life as a conscientious craftsman.
I had no intention of cutting loose from commerce until I knew I could eat, but fate and my own impatience played me an uncommonly shabby trick. In the late spring of 1929 I sent to Marina a bundle of short stories. Through a journalist who was one of her lame ducks she submitted them for an opinion to Brandt & Brandt, the New York literary agents—then quite unknown to me and now my dear friends and providers. Through some misunderstanding (the journalist was seldom sober) I learned that Brandts liked them and could sell them—a most improbable claim for any agent to make, but how should I know it? That was good enough. I resigned from Fyffes. A fortnight later I heard that Brandts had no interest in such raw work whatever.
There were but two sources of comfort: that the vast majority of my fellow men was accustomed to insecurity, and that my father, who had the innocent heart of a romanticist, seemed to think I had done something sensible. He felt, I suppose, that I should waste less of my potentialities in literature than in bananas. He was quite wrong. I was far more likely to be a success in commerce.
I sold up the flat and went to live at a cheap pension in Bilbao, where my room was large and clean, and the society a joy after too many lonely evenings in Algorta. I was shocked to discover that for three years I had been living at twice the cost which was really necessary—though it is likely that only in the last year had my tastes broadened enough for me to enjoy the experiment.
About a dozen of us dined at a long table enlivened, once the carafes had circulated, by exchanges between a republican journalist and a secret policeman of the monarchy. That was the only occasion when I have seen Spaniards of fierce left and right opinions on terms of private friendship. It may have been because neither had any religion worth mentioning, or because they permitted themselves to be far ruder to each other than normal manners allowed. You cannot, after all, wish to shoot a man when you have been swearing every evening for years that you intend to.
During my round of good-bye visits a very typical Spanish characteristic appeared, which accounts for their attachment to the cacique or dictator in spite of a natural leaning towards irony and anarchism: the dog-like loyalty to any intelligent man whose ways have interested them. Their sense of deprivation went far beyond anything to be expected from mere mutual affection. They would give up bananas. They were alarmed. They had no trust. They would never be able to work with any other Englishman. All temperament, of course—but how I share it! I, too, attach myself to individuals. On the departure of a boss or a commanding officer or any close associate whom I like, I feel that the known world has come to an end and that all is insecurity.
The 700-ton iron-ore steamer, upon which some friend had given me a free passage, sailed north out of the mouth of the Nervion, and I suffered a little death as the green coast and the low, brown cliffs and the red gables of the Basque villages turned all to grey in the distant summer haze. That love for northern Spain, of which, while I was there, I doubt if I was fully conscious, broke surface, not in any exaggerated access of emotion but with a clarity of vision in which every ingredient of bitter regret was itemised. Is it general that those who can love greatly are so often deprived by not knowing that they do? Or is it, as I suspect, a particular curse laid upon the English?
Restlessly I stayed two or three weeks with my parents. My plan, so far as I had one, was to join Marina in Los Angeles and see whether the Hollywood studios, which had just turned from the silent to the talking picture, could provide a living. Since I had no notion how to sell myself nor indeed anything tangible to sell, it was the worst place I could have chosen. On the other hand I did not depend on anything so vague as proving my ability. I carried a powerful letter of introduction to a producer from the banker who was financing him.
My assets were about two hundred pounds, and a free passage to Colón at the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal which I asked Elders & Fyffes to provide instead of the small sum due to me from the pension fund. I am sure I could have had both, but my conscience was too guilty to beg for favours.
I might have reached California more cheaply, but I am glad I did not. To an open and romantic mind the excitement of a first ocean voyage in warm waters is unforgettable. The North Atlantic does not count. One is gently bilious from the whale-way wallowings of the liner, and that is that. But the passenger on a ship small enough to dance to the movement of the sea who meets enough bad weather in the first three days to acquire his sea legs may then swoop along the white and deep-blue track of the trade winds exhilarated as a gull. And to me, who thought myself a traveller, the New World was so gloriously new. There was the tropical forest of which I had read; and, since it clothed the precipitous slopes of uninhabitable little islands, the upper surface of the jungle gardened by flowering creepers, that rare and lovely sight, displayed its massed domes like dark-green, red-streaked thunderclouds.
It was impossible not to feel a gallant adventurer while racing the flying fish to Barbados; but when the ship discharged me, and me alone, on to the barren wharf at Colón far too early in the day for my liking, though the sun which unmerci
fully fried my diffident flesh against the concrete seemed well accustomed to such hours, I felt far from a picaresque character. A lost, small boy was a nearer parallel, and I knew it.
Colón impressed me as the least attractive town I had ever seen—and this was not due to depression, for later experience convinced me that the Atlantic ports of Central America are, none of them, places in which to linger. The shipping agents knew nothing of boats to Los Angeles, telling me I should enquire in Panama.
Taken aback by the discovery, a little too late, that tropical rain has the volume of a bathroom shower, I splashed on to a train for Panama City, put up at the Hotel Europa and restored equanimity with Planter’s Punch. A world in which so delectable a drink existed, as well as the thirst necessary to deal with two successive pints of it, could not be wholly bad. In the evening I set out to inspect North American civilisation.
I always wish that my first contact with it had not been at Panama. The full essence of Americanism in the Canal Zone is too overwhelming a contrast to the Spanish-American city. And that is a violent way to taste a new country. You might as well get your first impression of the British from the Gezireh Club in Cairo.
Clean, self-consciously bright, admirably ordered for the consumption of ice-cream in friendly surroundings—that was my melancholy impression. The result to this day is that when I think of the United States, its aspect as a respectable middle-class holiday camp dominates all others. And that is unfair. If I had entered by New York, I should have found the stronger living and coarser laughter to which I was accustomed translated across the Atlantic into a city of exquisite beauty, with green and peaceful farming country easily to be reached at need. But there it is. My emotions insist that every American lives in a well-ordered suburb, whereas statistics, let alone observation, prove he does nothing of the sort. I am closer, perhaps, to a spiritual truth—for it is undeniable that the nearer any foreign community approaches the ideal of a garden city run by a council of advertising managers, the more Americans are at home in it.
Against the Wind Page 5