by William Boyd
And I do. I’m sitting here in sweltering air-conditioner-less London, England, in the front room of my flat in Turpentine Lane.
I hung up the phone. I packed my essential bits and pieces in three suitcases. I threw out all the food in the fridge. I put the plants on the fire escape and called a taxi. I went by the gallery and dropped off my keys, saying I had to make a sudden trip to Europe. I was driven to Idlewild13 and bought a ticket to London, TWA. I phoned Monday’s café to leave a message. Amazingly, she was there. They’ll come looking for you, I said: if they know where you live they’ll know where you work. I don’t care, she said. I told her what I was doing, gave her my address and telephone number in London and begged her to go back to her family until she was seventeen. Where are you from? I asked. Alameda, she said. Where’s that? Little place just outside San Francisco. Go home to Alameda, I said, write to me, tell me when you’re really seventeen. She was crying. I love you, Logan, she said. I love you too, I said, the lie slipping oh-so-easily off my tongue.
1Clement Greenberg (1909-94). The most influential art critic at the time, credited with ‘discovering’ Jackson Pollock.
2Frank O’Hara (1926-66), poet, then working at the Museum of Modern Art.
3Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), eminent critic and man of letters.
4Hart Crane (1899-1932), poet. His long poem The Bridge was published in 1930.
5Eisenhower was elected president by a landslide. Richard M. Nixon was his vice-president.
6For a fuller account of Nat Tate’s life, see Nat Tate: An American Artist by William Boyd (21 Publishing, 1998).
7Tate and Barkasian had visited Braque in his Varengeville studio in September 1959.
8Hemingway committed suicide on 2 July.
9‘When I hear the word “Culture” I reach for my revolver.’
10Actually only sixty-nine.
11Gail was seventeen in 1964.
12Lionel Leggatt died on 28 May 1964.
13Renamed John F. Kennedy Airport on 24 December 1963.
The African Journal
Logan Mountstuart spent the next few months in London trying to sort out, at a distance, the settling of his affairs in New York. Letters were written to friends; Helma packed up his apartment under his instructions, sold his furniture, crated up his possessions and had them shipped to London. Bank accounts were closed; bills paid and so on. No warrant was issued for his arrest, as far as he was aware, and there were no further rumblings of scandal or potential arraignment. Helma did say that, the Monday after he left, two gentlemen called round at the gallery looking for him but were told he had gone to Europe. He met Ben Leeping in Paris and recounted what had transpired. Ben was – typically – understanding, told him not to worry and swiftly set about trying to find a replacement to run the New York gallery. LMS sold Leeping Frères his private collection of paintings and drawings to provide some initial cash flow. He wrote to Naomi Mitchell and said he had suddenly been called back to London and received a reply of civilized regret. LMS’s heart was not broken and, clearly, neither was hers. All seemed to be more or less under control. But LMS was not relaxed or fully at ease, constantly expecting the long arm of US law to reach out across the Atlantic and pluck him thither. Thus it was, in the spring of 1965, that he applied for the post of lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University College of Ikiri in Nigeria. He was interviewed in London and was duly offered the job. His friends thought he was crazy, but he said he needed a change in his life. Apart from Ben Leeping, Jerry Schubert and the Schmidt family no one ever knew the real reason for his precipitate flight from New York. He left for Nigeria on 30 July 1965. The African Journal begins in 1969.
1969
Sunday, 20 July
David Gascoyne1 once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate on the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great and significant events in the world at large. The newspapers cover all that, anyway, he said. We don’t want to know that ‘Hitler invaded Poland’ – we’re more curious about what you had for breakfast. Unless you happened to be there, of course, when Hitler invaded Poland and your breakfast was interrupted. It’s a point, I suppose, but I felt it would be worth picking up this journal again today if only because I’ve just walked out into my African garden and looked up at the moon. Looked up at the moon to marvel at the fact that there are two young American men walking around on its surface. Even Gascoyne would grant me that.
It was a clear night and we had copious moonshine. The familiar old moon hung up there with a fuzzy corona around it, albescent in the soft black sky. I walked out into the garden away from the ring of light cast by my house and headed for the stand of casuarina pines at the end of the drive where the ground sloped up. A wind blew through the branches and set the huge trees whispering. I stamped my feet, suddenly remembering the risk of snakes and scorpions, and looked up, marvelling.
I had been listening to the news on the BBC World Service, crackly with the usual interference, and for the first time in my life wished I had a television set. Perhaps I should have gone next door to Kwaku’s.2 But in the end I prefer my imagination.
It was strange – vertiginous – staring upwards and thinking about those men on the moon. I felt sad and oddly humbled. Sad, because if there was ever an example, to someone of my age, of life’s galloping headlong progress, then this must be it. When I was born the first home-made wood and canvas flying machines had only been taking to the air for four years. And now I was standing in this African garden sixty-seven years after the Wright Brothers, looking up at our moon and wondering what it must be like to be up there looking back. Humbling also to think that we poor, forked creatures could manage such a feat. These observations are banal, I know – but are no less true for that. Still, they probably exemplify Gascoyne’s law about journal-keeping. Momentous events do lose something in the telling. Tonight I had a cheese omelette and a bottle of beer for supper.
I came back into the house and locked the door and have written this down sitting at my desk in the main room. Through the mosquito netting in the window I can see the glow of Samson’s cigarette in the garage entry [Samson Ike, LMS’s nightwatchman]. All’s quiet, all’s well with the world. Back to London at the end of next week, my first visit home in two and a half years. I suppose all legal worries can safely recede now. The Laura Schmidt affair must be over and done with, finally. I must be safe.
Friday, 25 July
Turpentine Lane. A garage has opened at the end of the road since I was last here and music blasts from its forecourt as the young mechanics panel-beat and poke around inside their clapped-out motor cars. I have to keep the front windows closed against the noise even though this is proving to be a hot and irritable summer. A Sikh family has moved in above me – charming and helpful people – but they have three young children who appear to do nothing but run to and fro through the rooms above my head. I long for my big African house with its shady veranda and its two-acre garden.
I’m having Turpentine Lane painted and am laying carpet over my rubberized-cork floor tiles. Apart from my Picasso above the fireplace the place still maintains its bare and functional atmosphere. But despite the hazards of city noise and city disturbance I do feel at home here. Was the purchase of this mean little flat the smartest thing I’ve done in my ramshackle life? At night I read in my armchair and listen to music. Over the weeks of my leave I’11 visit the few old friends I have left – Ben, Roderick, Noel, Wallace – settle bits of unfinished business. I’m relatively well off at the moment – I manage to save a fair bit of my U.C. Ikiri salary – but I am conscious, all of a sudden, of my dwindling supply of assets. Wallace has set up a meeting with the editor of a new current affairs/economics weekly called Polity (unfortunate name, but sententious enough). They need someone to write about Biafra and the war.3
Monday, 4 August
Wallace tells me he is retiring at the end of the year – he’ll be sixty-five. Good God. The ag
ency will continue to bear his name – and he’s going to remain loosely attached as some sort of consultant figure – but it’s going to be run by a young woman called Sheila Adrar. I met her: she’s in her mid thirties with a slightly fake, busy, bustly manner. And an unnecessarily firm handshake, I thought. Thin, skull-like face. Wallace did his best to booster me – ‘old, old friend’, part of that great generation’ and so on – but it was obvious she hadn’t a clue who I was and hardly rated me as an asset to the firm. I related my suspicions about all this to Wallace at lunch and he wriggled and squirmed a bit but had to concede I was right. ‘It’s all changed, Logan,’ he said. ‘All they’re interested in is sales and advances.’ In that case nothing’s changed, I said: it’s always been about sales and advances. Ah, said Wallace, but in the past publishers pretended it wasn’t. Anyway, Wallace brokered a good deal for me at Polity: £250 retainer and £50 per 2,000 word article, rates to be adjusted proportionally.
The editor was a bearded ex-don, a Scot, who looked a bit like D. H. Lawrence, called Napier Forsyth. Somewhat dogmatic and humourless, I thought at first, though he warmed up when I told him he reminded me of DHL and mentioned that we’d met a couple of times. DHL’s beard was more gingery, I said, and he couldn’t hold his liquor. I think that’s what’s landed me the job, in fact: Forsyth couldn’t believe he was hiring someone who’d actually met Lawrence. For good measure I told him I’d met just about everyone – Joyce, Wells, Bennett, Woolf, Huxley, Hemingway, Waugh. As the names tripped off my tongue I could see his eyes widening and I felt more and more like a museum piece, someone to be pointed out in the Polity offices – ‘See that old fellow over there? He knew… ‘Forsyth had great hopes for the magazine: good backing, good writers, a world in turmoil that needed to be explained sanely and rationally. I applauded his zeal – the zeal of new editors of new magazines the world over. As long as the cheques don’t bounce.
Thursday, 21 August
La Fucina. With Cesare and Enzo4 gone, one understands the limits of Gloria’s housekeeping talents. The garden is overgrown and the dogs have the run of the house. Everything looks battered, scratched and chewed. Gloria suddenly seems old, her face pasty and lined, her body racked by a loose bronchial cough that seems to start at her ankles. I made the mistake of walking into the kitchen and walked right out again. Every surface was smeared with grease and matt with dirt; enamel tins of dog food all over the floor.
Still, to sit in the cool shade of a terrace playing backgammon, drinking Camparis with the Tuscan sun beating down outside, always soothes the spirit. Two lady friends of Gloria are also staying – visitors from the Isle of Lesbos, I would say, but amusing company for all that. Margot Tranmere (fifties) and Sammie (?) Petrie-Jones (sixties). They have a house in Umbria and live comfortably, I would guess, on a handsome Petrie-Jones trust fund. They smoke and drink enough to make me feel abstemious. Sammie claims to have read The Girl Factory. (‘Disappointing: I was expecting something completely different.’)
One evening when they’d gone to bed Gloria said to me: maybe I should turn lesbo, what do you think? I practically dropped my glass in astonishment. You? I said. It’s not something you acquire, like a new hat, you have to have a predisposition for it. But I like the idea of a strapping young gel to look after me when I’m old and decrepit, she said. So do I, I concurred, remarking that she – Gloria – was burdened by the fact that she was possibly the most heterosexual person I’d ever met. I was alarmed to see tears shine in her eyes. But I’ve only managed to marry a swine and then a doddering aristo, she said. Well, look at me, I said, beginning to list my misfortunes. Who gives a shit about you? she said. You’ll be fine, you always have been. It’s me I’m worried about.
Sunday, 14 September
Ikiri. Term well underway. Gave my third lecture on ‘The English Novel’ – Jane Austen (preceded by Defoe and Sterne). Happy to be back in Africa, happy to be in my home, 3, Danfodio Road. The campus is generous in size and laid out with care, with some thought for grand vistas. There’s a main gate, then a wide palm-lined boulevard leading to the group of buildings clustered round a tall clock tower. Here you find the admin, centre, the refectory, the junior common room, the theatre. The style is modern-functional – white walls, red-tiled roofs. Four halls of residence line the main boulevard – three male, one female – and radiating out from this main axis are leafy roads leading to the university department buildings – humanities, law, education, science – and the houses of the senior staff. There is a clubhouse with a bar and a restaurant, three tennis courts and a swimming pool. And on the fringes of the campus lie the villages of the junior staff (for which, read ‘servants’). It is a well-tended, well-managed, slightly artificial world. If you want something more exotic, more real, more Nigerian, you have to drive three miles into Ikiri, or risk the death-trap road to Ibadan, an hour away, where there are other clubs, casinos, cinemas, department stores and some excellent Lebanese and Syrian restaurants – plus all the louche diversions of an African city.
My house is a low, two-bedroom bungalow set in the middle of a mature garden ringed by a six-foot poinsettia hedge. Casuarina pines, cotton trees, avocado pear, guava, frangipani and papaya flourish indecently, like weeds. The house has maroon concrete floors and a long veranda screened against mosquitos. I have a cook – Simeon – a houseboy – Isaac, his brother – a gardener – Godspeed – and a nightwatchman – Samson.
When I arrived back from Lagos Airport I was late. We had been stopped three or four times at military roadblocks on the way and the car had been searched. All four of them were waiting for me, anxiously. ‘You family welcomes you, sar,’ Simeon said, as I shook their hands. He was pleased to see me. He was worried that the war might have prevented me from returning.
Thursday, 25 September
Posted off my first piece for Polity; an article that tries to analyse and explain why a war that theoretically should have ended in September 1967 with the capture of Enugu, the Biafran capital, is still going ferociously on, two years later. Napier wants something from me every fortnight, he says, which is just about do-able. Cheques are paid to the agency, which banks them in my London account.
To the golf club in Ikiri this afternoon with Dr Kwaku. We play nine holes and Kwaku wins, three and two. He works the course with more intelligence than I do, firing low skittering iron shots into the ‘browns’ (tar mixed with sand, the truest putting surface in golf). Afterwards we sit on the terrace of the club house and drink Star Beer – big cold green bottles, misty with condensation. Pondering my article, I ask him why he thinks the war is still going on. He says that if you have a rebel army fighting for its life faced with another army that doesn’t want to fight – and, moreover, that can only be persuaded to go through the motions fuelled by free beer and cigarettes – then, by definition, you are going to have very protracted hostilities. He shrugs: which side has nothing left to lose?
The day is hazy and overcast. The sun, as it sets, is a fuzzy orange ball above the rain forest. Bats begin to swoop and jink above our heads. Dr Kwaku is in his forties with a wide strong face, balding. He’s a Ghanaian, he says, don’t ask him to explain Nigerians.
[October]
I miss New York more than I would have imagined. I miss those perfect spring days. Wraiths of steam rising from the manhole vents backlit by slanting early-morning sun. Cross-streets thick with cherry trees in bloom. The way time seems to slow to a crawl in diners and coffee shops. There was a coffee shop near the gallery on Madison where I used to go: I think they had a policy of hiring very old men with hardening arteries to be their waiters. These men moved with a particular slow, rolling gait and spoke very quietly. All hurry ceased, a curious calm pervaded this place – time moved at their behest, not vice-versa.
All these thoughts of my US years were prompted by a trip to Ibadan with Polly [McMasters]5 to see Shirley Maclaine in Sweet Charity. We went to a Syrian restaurant afterwards and ate lamb with raisins and spices. When I dropp
ed her back at her house she asked me in for a nightcap and I knew – you always know – that more was on offer. I said no thanks, gave her a peck on the cheek and went home to Danfodio Road.
Polly is an overweight, blowzy woman in her forties. Never married, bright (M. Litt on Restoration playwrights) and perhaps my closest friend out here. We are united in our loathing of the Desiccated Coconut6 but I don’t want to have an affair with her. However, it makes me realize that the last time I had sex with anyone was with Monday in August 1964. The memory is fresh but somehow I’m not missing it. Getting old? There is the wife of a man in the French Department whom I covet rather. A tall solemn Moroccan or Tunisian woman whom I see at the club with her young kids. She’s a regular on the tennis courts and plays a fierce, concentrated game. She comes into the club afterwards, her shirt soaked with sweat, the material semi-transparent, revealing her brassiere beneath. I’ve yet to meet her but she’s begun to acknowledge my smile with one of her own. You old goat.