My journey and education were continued by a Japanese cargo vessel holding a dozen passengers in reasonable comfort. I was intrigued by the tact and persistence with which my steward overworked his inadequate English to find out why I had spent the first night on deck. The reason was simple. Ants were wandering about my pillow. I can endure fleas, bugs and cockroaches—since they share a familiar domesticity—and almost anything that has wings, but I intensely dislike the crawlers-in from the wild. The steward, however, suspected that I had deserted my cabin because I was sharing it with a Japanese; yet would have laid open his belly rather than ask if his guess, humiliating to both of us, were true.
So there we were—the East suspecting the West of haughty empire-building, and the West indeed so far guilty of it as to refuse to admit in the presence of the East that it was afraid of a few small red ants. His relief, when I at last confessed their presence, was delightful; so was the immediacy with which a force of little men descended upon that cabin, stripped it to its white-painted bones, and re-created it in half an hour.
San Pedro waterside was as depressing as Colón had been—the more so since a wireless message had miscarried and Marina was not there to meet me. Reunited with her later in the day, I discovered that her pleasure in seeing me was swamped by horror at my rashness. I was inclined to agree. It seemed extremely difficult to get a drink in Southern California.
Alien, too, were other aspects of the civilisation. Next door to her flat was a marvellous conceit of architecture, representing a miniature Mexican ranch-house complete with imitation well, and upon the coping of the well sat, pretty obviously posed, a girl of artistically Latinised but genuine beauty to whom I was careful to pay little attention. After nightfall the girl’s sister drove Marina and myself up the Hollywood Hills and then descended the hair-pin bends at fifty miles an hour with no lights on. I have often wondered whether it was her normal method of driving, or whether she herself was in love with Marina, consumed by jealousy and desperate at my insensitive reaction to pussy on the well.
I presented my letter to the producer who was melancholy and polite as some small rajah touching impossible orders to his forehead. He informed me at once that Hollywood needed the assistance of ‘gentlemen.’ I do not think he was being ironical. It was the heart-felt cry of one continually frustrated. Yet he must have known that if Hollywood started to indulge the over-developed modesty and the over-cautious taste of the English upper middle class, the only result would be no pictures at all.
While I was waiting for undeserved fortune to fall into my lap, Marina, bewildered, fled to New York. I stayed on for a week or two until it became obvious that there was no immediate use for ‘gentlemen’ even when as synthetic as I, and that producers were not so obedient to finance as I had expected. Indeed, I was reminded of that frequent fate of eighteenth-century writers: to wait in the patron’s anteroom until turned away by a footman. My sympathy had always been with the patron, and it still was.
So I followed Marina to New York, making a considerable hole in my remaining capital. I neither liked nor disliked the city. I simply could not get on terms with it at all—and how to extract a living from an unwilling world had been left out of my education altogether. A very proper omission in any university. I take it that a man who had passed high out of Harvard or Yale and gone straight into business would be as inexperienced as I, though the tradition behind him would be more helpful.
Meanwhile I had actually sold two short stories in England. I looked at my own printed work with dismay and astonishment, as if I had bound myself into slavery for ten guineas. However, I could now describe myself as a writer with truth in my voice rather than apology, and show my two tales as if they were mere samples of a hundred others. Slowly I was learning the American approach.
Not that it was to do much good to me, or to many thousands of native Americans, for the stock market crashed and the first wave of the Depression arrived. By the end of October 1929 my money had run out. Manual labour, if I could get any, looked the only possibility. But I hung on. Nobody—for an almost wartime kindness was general—wrote me a rude letter demanding the rent of my two rooms in Greenwich Village, and I found (believing my past propaganda) that a diet of bananas and biscuits was adequate though leading to comic prodigies of flatulence. There was, in my private life, little else to laugh at.
It was suggested to me that there might be a pittance of some sort to be obtained from Funk & Wagnall’s Dictionary. There was not. But Vizetelly, receiving me with a shaggy, donnish courtesy which made the exile homesick, told me of a children’s encyclopedia which needed writers to prepare the articles.
I went to see the editor and delighted him with my sample articles on the set subjects. The formula was simple. You looked up the facts in an adult encyclopedia and rewrote them—being careful to avoid plagiarism—in the plainest English, opening with a sentence which would catch the interest or arouse the curiosity of a child.
Month after month I turned out some fifty thousand words of this stuff, and earned my five hundred dollars. This was enough to give me a comfortable life, for in 1930 the cost of living in New York was by no means high. I formed a useful collection of Italian speak-easies with cooking too palatable and cleanliness too perfunctory to attract much non-Latin custom, where a meal and a half-bottle of drinkable wine cost a dollar and a quarter.
In the spring of 1930 I became a sub-editor in charge of the rewriting. Rewriting was very necessary. The editor, a weak, harassed and lovable little man, had been driven by his employer to commission and pay for half a million words a month of whatever quality. The poor employer could not help it; he had planned his encyclopedia before the depression, and now was in the hands of his bank, his printers and anyone who would lend him anything on the security of his face. Fortunately for us all it was an honest face.
But the result of his unavoidable impatience was that three-quarters of the material accepted was unpublishable and had to be rewritten in the office. The style we wanted should have been easy. It was not. The professional hacks were utterly unable to write simply. Newspaper training was largely responsible. The reporter has not the time to achieve absolute clarity. His stock-in-trade is vivid description in colloquial English—and colloquial English, when read for exact meaning, is very far from clear.
Having achieved a measure of respectability, I took a pleasant room in a brown-stone house of the East Fifties, and even moved a little in literary society. I was at last on terms with the alien culture and beginning to enjoy it. Any reasonable man can satisfy all his tastes and all his individuality in New York. My civil status was doubtful, for I had come to the United States on a tourist visa. The immigration authorities, however, were most lenient. When they would not extend my visa any longer, they merely told me to go, and to write to them from abroad that I had gone. I am always doubtful whether this was a humanely bureaucratic formula, or whether they did in fact put such innocent trust in a postmark.
Marina had long since returned to Los Angeles, and there her resistance at last collapsed. Why, only she could tell. Security I had none. My fidelity was not standing up very well under the delightful strains and stresses of New York. And she knew my tastes and prejudices too thoroughly to believe that a home in the United States was likely to be permanent. It may have been that either the irresistible force or the immovable object had to give way, and she preferred the latter.
The irresistible force, however, had burned out. I knew it, but I did not admit it. Still overwhelmingly fond of her, I was. Still in love with her, I was not. I cannot altogether blame myself for refusing to face the ironical ending which the weariness of the years had forced upon the fairy-tale. We are far too conditioned by what we read, and when in life we come to a last page, we cannot resist the temptation to put on the conventional ending. The swineherd should have ridden off, fearful with doubt and regret, but coldly imagining that his destined princess might
be still in the nursery—as indeed she was.
Immediately after our marriage I became a lame duck in good earnest. Without warning I was sacked. The reason was complex. Sub-editing had now advanced to the point where I was bound to recognise a handwriting, and could have questioned why work was being paid for twice—though in fact the minor racket would never have occurred to me. Later on, after some miserable months, I was called back by a new editor until all the sources of capital ran out and rewriting stopped.
Though I claim it myself, that encyclopedia down to the letter M—at which point the unfortunate publisher had to sacrifice his last dregs of idealism and send the rest of the material to the printer in its virgin state—was the best which has ever been produced for children in England or America.
Two years passed. I will not make the weary effort to reconstruct all the movements of Marina and myself between Los Angeles and New York. In the former I mostly lived on her; in the latter I may have barely supported her. A memory of incompetence and dejection remains. There were, of course, plenty of entertaining interludes, for she was always fun—if I did not spoil it—and her whole character was lit by courage and loyalty. She had as well a genius for friendship, even if her friends often seemed to me psychologically restless. Her human sympathy was so great that they were compelled to tell her whatever was wrong with them, and skeletons would begin to rattle within half an hour of the first cocktail. Had they remained decently in their cupboards, social intercourse would have been more to my English taste. On the other hand, when I want to go to the help of a friend through his Slough of Despond, the way is still marked by the posts put in by Marina and, I suppose, by her father whom I never knew.
By and large, through odd jobs of nursing work that she took and my very occasional free-lance successes, we managed to eat and pay the bootlegger, a charming Italian and dear friend who grew his own grapes and made his own white wine and brandy in spite of prohibition. And one of our furnished houses I cannot look back on with anything but pleasure. It was at the end of a valley in the Hollywood Hills beneath and hidden from the roads which terraced the escarpment. Though ringed by Tudor or Mexican bungalows and their stream of automobiles, the valley was much as it had always been, except for an old bee-keeper and his shack, and into it I could vanish.
I was now able to pose as an authority on juvenile literature—a most original authority for I could actually produce the stuff myself. A sample play brought me a small contract from Columbia Broadcasting to write for their educational service, and in the autumn of 1932 they ordered some thirty dramatisations of the lives of historical characters to which the schools of the entire nation would listen, provided teacher could forgo, for a quarter of an hour, the sound of his or her own voice.
This was a godsend. I could write the infernal things in London, and do my best meanwhile to get back into business. A perverted decision it may seem, since I was obviously approaching the hotter and more profitable regions in the hell of hack writing. But never for an instant did I think it more than a wearing and useless way of earning a living, or consider, even in rare moments of self-esteem, that I was any sort of author. I had proved myself débrouillard and that was all.
I took passage on a Norwegian freighter which was sailing direct from Los Angeles to London. To my relief nobody checked my passport—which, besides being out of date and invalid, showed that I had no right whatever to be in the United States. I went on board with a cheerfulness which, while hardly fair to Marina, at least enabled me to understand her flights from Europe.
It was a voyage of solid discomfort. The food was of hard and mysterious substances which no doubt would be edible in an Arctic farmhouse at the end of winter. For the first twelve days, until a launch came alongside in the Panama Canal and transshipped its precious cargo, we were out of liquor. Meanwhile the captain had fallen in love with his only other passenger—a young woman of sloppy good looks and spectacular inanity—and his efforts to avoid a hurricane which continually threatened and never quite caught us were un-Nordically agitated.
Except in drink, when he put on a hearty Viking frankness and quarrelled with his mate or his young woman or both, that man was like a sullen and innocent schoolboy. When in the fifth week of the voyage his passenger retired in some agitation to her cabin for three days, I was quite unable to persuade him that appendicitis was unlikely or to prevent him filling the air with appeals for medical advice.
The skimmings across the blue Caribbean three years before had been youthful, but that interminable voyage was adult. It had its moments of grandeur and none of enchantment—except when near Mona Passage I saw the full circle of the rainbow, ending, as it must, in the sea at my feet and giving the impression that it was only some hundreds of yards in diameter. The immense colourless swell on the edge of the hurricane heaved us day after day towards a sulphur-yellow sky which seemed prepared for the overwhelming of Gomorrahs; and in a gale off the Azores Leviathan at his most magnificent shared the same trough of the sea and sounded so that seventy perpendicular feet of him stood for an instant like a black tower built on unknown solidity. In that lashed world where one was protected from grey death only by the rail of the ship he was indeed Job’s tremendous symbol of the adjustment of life to its environment.
I settled into rooms in London and set to work on the broadcasting contract which I blessed and cursed alternately. The long voyage had left me with no time to spare. On Mondays and Tuesdays I would read up the character I had to dramatise, foreseeing a fairly easy task if his life involved drums and trumpets and desperate difficulty if he were merely one of those Good Influences upon the World beloved by educators. On Wednesday I would look through my notes and decide that the job could not be done at all; on Thursday and Friday I would do it—just in time to catch the mail at the General Post Office in St Martin’s and nowhere else.
Since Saturdays and Sundays were essential for recuperation, this schedule did not leave me much liberty. It was only in the early spring of 1933, when I had delivered the last play, that I could concentrate on the more genial task of getting myself back into commerce. Eleven years were too long an exile from London, and friends who might have helped were scattered. In any case I was far too proud to explain to anyone—in my own country—how desperate my situation would be if nothing turned up by the summer. There was good reason for diffidence. If I were asked why I had pushed away the ladder of a career and to what my life was clinging, the reply must involve far too many intangibles to be convincing.
I answered advertisements and myself advertised. I paid a large fee to an employment agency for supplying me with a circular letter and a long list of firms to which to send it. The letter was cunningly planned to show my value to any exporter, but the language was so weak and long-winded that I had to do a lot of tactful editing. The agency boss was startled by this concise expression of his ingenuities, and I could watch him hesitating whether or not to offer me two quid a week to draft the office correspondence.
Nothing came of it all. England was full of men with qualifications as good as my own who were out of work. In a bad business depression it is the more adventurous citizens who have to suffer; nor can they complain, since they willingly accepted insecurity for the sake of travel or quick profit. As rolling stones, they are bound to be hit by the rule of Last in, First out.
In London I felt lonely and déclassé, but it was a joy to rediscover my own country on foot. The best of these ecstatic walks led me over the Wiltshire and Dorset downs to Exmouth where my parents were staying. One night, footsore after twenty-eight miles, I tried to get a bed in Piddletrenthide, but it was the Whitsun week-end and the pubs were full. In the bar a pleasant fellow of about my own age pressed me to share his cottage room with the insouciance and courtesy of eighteenth-century road-travelling. He turned out to be the leading man in a fit-up theatrical company which was touring the villages, and next day he and the proprietor invited me to join t
hem. If I had not been a married man I think I would have done so.
Conjecture toys delightfully with what my destiny might have been. At Bucharest I did once play the juvenile lead in a melodrama organised for charity by the Anglo-American colony, and before the King and Queen of Roumania too. But only the royal sense of duty can have kept them in their box, and the throats of even my closest friends dried while they politely endeavoured to congratulate me. Never, I feel sure, could I have become an actor, but I might have sent for my typewriter and improved the fit-up’s acting version of Sweeney Todd and Maria Marten.
Refreshed by exercise and inspired by the beginnings of panic, I composed a really effective advertisement for the Appointments Wanted column of The Times. After giving my education and languages, I described myself as an ‘Englishman with no national prejudices.’
I was asked to call at the advertisement office. A senior clerk much resembling Strube’s Little Man, with the same straggly moustache and a stiff shirt, extracted himself from a bay of mahogany—the office suggests a saloon bar which has run out of drink and is in the hands of a very respectable firm of accountants—and examined me nervously. Did I not think, he asked, that my advertisement might be open to misunderstanding? I thought nothing of the kind, and condescended haughtily to explain why.
It was only years later, when experience as a security officer had worn away the last of my innocence, that I perceived what had bothered the senior clerk. Though British fascists were still considered comic and communists impractical dreamers, the era of treachery was beginning. A lack of national prejudice might imply an equal lack of loyalty. Such a reading was in fact vaguely justified, for among those who answered my advertisement was a highly intelligent Hindu with whom, in an obscure office, I talked for half an hour without ever discovering what he wanted. At the time I assumed that his reticence merely covered doubt as to whether I would willingly sell drugs and pornography, or whether I should inform the police. But he did not strike me as a man likely to be engaged in either traffic.
Against the Wind Page 6