The Man Who Went Down With His Ship

by Hugh Fleetwood

  Whereas today, it had all been quite different. For one thing, he had been in a good mood when he had got up this morning and contemplated the day ahead. For another, it was only a month since he had come out of hospital, and never before had he started to slide back into darkness so soon after re-emerging into the light. And for still another, even if he had, exceptionally, had a sudden relapse, he wouldn’t, surely, have started at the bottom of the slope, so to speak; nor have been capable of going so relatively calmly into the hall as Dorothy was preparing to go out, standing there like a schoolboy who has been told to relay a message to the headmaster and isn’t certain how to put it, and getting that message out in such a, for him, bald and undramatic way.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ he had said when Dorothy had wished him a happy birthday, and had gone on, when she had smiled at him, and asked ‘What are you looking like that for?’, to say ‘I just got an anonymous letter. Someone’s planning to kill me.’

  No, he understood her, he told himself as he stood and looked down at the letter again; but she should have taken him seriously, and she shouldn’t have been so smoothly, so very thoughtlessly dismissive. I mean, if she told me she’d just received an anonymous letter—but then she wouldn’t, would she? Either tell me, or get one.

  It was a very nasty letter.

  ‘To the Jew Alfred Albers. It’s a shame they didn’t kill you when they killed your father. Or that Hitler didn’t make it six million and one. But don’t worry. We’re going to remedy those mistakes. In the meantime if you know what’s good for you you won’t write another word. Otherwise—how would you like it if something happened to your beautiful Dorothy? Or to her beautiful daughter? It might you know. And it should. Damned Jew lovers. From: a Jew hater.’

  The trouble was: if he didn’t get Dorothy to believe him this evening, and wasn’t able to convince her that he hadn’t composed the beastly thing himself, it was more than likely that he would have a relapse; and that he would find the shutters being banged shut again, though they had only recently been reopened, and it was still mid-morning in the day of his sanity. And if that happened—well, naturally Dorothy would never believe him. He might even start to doubt himself, and wonder if perhaps, it was possible, he could have …

  No, he told himself firmly, and once more stuffed the letter back into the pocket of his old woollen dressing-gown. Someone—someone who clearly knew him and his circumstances rather well—had composed that filth and sent it to him, and he was not imagining things. And now what he must do, before he allowed himself to start dwelling on its contents, or allowed that cold, sick feeling in his stomach that opening it had caused to spread up through the rest of his body, was take a shower, have some breakfast, and get to work. To resume his account of ‘The Wreck of the Chateaubriand’; and not reflect for a moment that it might be precisely this long-delayed, long-overdue account that had prompted someone to buy a newspaper or newspapers, and start searching for the words ‘To’, ‘the’, ‘Jew’; and for the individual letters that, pasted together, would spell the name ‘Alfred Albers’.

  Of course he would never permit his account to be published, he murmured silently as he made his way to the bathroom. Not in his lifetime, anyway. It was even possible that he would never be able to finish it entirely. All the same, he had to get as much of it down as he could. Because—well, because it was the truth; the truth about himself, and the truth of what happened that night. Because, too, if he did manage to tell the story, to his own satisfaction if not to anyone else’s—mightn’t he, albeit at this late stage, be able to salvage something from the wreck of his mind?

  Yes, he told himself now, still trying to be firm. He might. For as he had mentioned in that same newspaper interview in which he had alas let slip that he was engaged on writing about the wreck of the Chateaubriand—though had failed to say anything about not intending to publish it—all his mental problems had started that night.

  The night, as he liked to think of it, that all his dreams had gone down.

  *

  He had been twenty at the time; a shy, stuttering, portly young man with staring, short-sighted eyes and already thinning hair; and his pleasure at being shown to a first-class cabin when he had embarked at Cherbourg, having his photograph taken, and being asked by reporters who looked as if they could barely read or write about the little book of poems he had recently published, was hardly lessened by the fact that he felt that just by stepping on board this ship he was betraying everything his father had stood for, worked for and died for. Anymore than it was lessened by the fact that he knew perfectly well that if his father hadn’t been who he was, and died the death he had, not one of his fellow passengers in first-class would have given him more than a disdainful glance, nor would any of those reporters have so much as stepped out of his way, let alone asked him about a volume of poems.

  His father had been a hero; a martyr to the cause of liberty and equality; not to mention a romantically good-looking man with long, dark hair and, to judge by the photographs, a haughty expression. Whereas he—he was just a plump, none-too-attractive versifier; who, if he didn’t get used to the idea that he was not his father, would never be happy for a moment. All right, perhaps he was betraying everything Jean Albers had lived and died for. Yet hadn’t he also lived and died for the right of the gauche, overweight, unattractive and poor to be treated the same way as the sophisticated, sleek, beautiful and rich? Indeed, he had, the young Alfred answered himself, conscious of a certain speciousness in his argument, as he followed a steward down a corridor of polished wood. And what did it matter what had caused the eyes of some of those sleek and beautiful people to flicker with recognition as they saw him come on board, and would, he was certain, cause their lips to smile at him and issue invitations to him as soon as the ship had sailed? All right, they did it only because he was the son of a hero. Having greeted him, however, and having questioned him, might not one or two of those rich, titled and in some cases famous people, or one or two of those reporters, be tempted to go so far as actually to buy a copy of his little book, actually to open it, actually to read what was written there? There was at least a chance. Then if they did, and recognised that seed of truth he hoped was planted there, God willing that seed would take root, and grow, and put forth, however delicately, a flower. And if that happened—then his betrayal, if betrayal there had been, was justified, or even became an affirmation of all his father had stood for. So that far from feeling guilty about the way he was being treated, he would feel proud, and feel that he deserved such treatment; and feel that if his little flower in turn put out other seeds that scattered across the earth, and caused further flowers to grow, not only was he affirming his father’s life, but he was, in a sense, completing it for him. Through me, he told himself, as with a flush of excitement he recognised an American film star being shown to her cabin, my father might live again.

  This sense of pleasure mixed with a sense of betrayal, and a feeling that such betrayal could be reversed or annulled if only he was able to touch the souls of one or two of his fellow passengers, stayed with Alfred for the first three days of his Atlantic crossing; as he made his way towards a New York where he was being awaited—with flowers and a brass band, he’d been promised—by a man his father had helped escape from occupied France. A textile manufacturer who had, in the five years since the war had ended, made a fortune large enough to feel able to send a first-class liner ticket to a person he had never met, and promise that person the use of a duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue for just as long as he wanted to stay there. ‘And that means all your life, if you want, Alfred. Seriously.’

  Moreover, this feeling would probably have stayed with him for the entire duration of the crossing, if, for whatever reason, Alfred hadn’t been so thoroughly taken up by such a number of his fellow passengers that by the morning of his fourth day at sea he hadn’t told himself it would be futile hypocrisy to pretend any longer that he felt in the slightest degree guilty about the
treatment he was receiving. And as for touching the souls of his fellow passengers: he might or might not do so, for fifty people had sworn they would order his book the moment they arrived in New York. But whether they did or not no longer seemed to be any concern of his. As far as he could see, most of them, rich and powerful though they might be, and the sort of people his father would have excoriated, had perfectly fine souls already; and those that didn’t were beyond the reach of poetry anyway; his or anyone else’s. I’m enjoying myself, he told himself as he lay on his bed in his stateroom. I’m happy. Why should I feel bad about that?

  Alfred spent the whole of that day in a state of elation that bordered on hysteria. He had breakfast with a French millionairess who was going to New York to marry an American racing driver; he walked around the deck with the film star, who was on her way to make a film with Hitchcock. He had a drink with a plump American man who seemed to be as uncomfortable as he had been expecting to feel, but who was intelligent and funny despite his blushes and his—as someone muttered to Alfred—‘positively existential embarrassment’, and who was reputed to be, according to the same mutterer, ‘quite the richest person on board’. And he ate lunch with a man who said he’d been a friend of his father’s, took coffee with an American publisher who said he’d been amused by all these people swearing they’d buy a copy of his book since he was sure that most of them didn’t realise his poems were in French and the volume wasn’t available in New York (‘But if you write a novel, I’d really love to see it’) and spent the afternoon talking with a whole group of people whose names he’d never quite caught but didn’t like to ask for again because he felt he should know them anyway. And what made him most happy was that all of these people seemed to talk to him and yes, like him, not because he was his father’s son, but because they genuinely liked him, and found him, for all his lack of physical charms, bright, unaffected, fun and nice.

  That evening Alfred’s new friends gave, without really planning to or meaning to perhaps, a party for him; a party that was to remain in his mind ever after as the most enchanted occasion of his life. A little interlude—a mere couple of hours—in which nothing jarred, in which nothing was sour; and a moment of magic in which he, who had spent much of his first fifteen years in hiding, being smuggled from one place to the other in cardboard boxes, steamer trunks, or simply under cover of darkness, and who, as he absorbed the lessons his mother gave him every hour of the day and night when it was safe to speak, had come to think of life as a lonely curse to be endured and if possible redeemed by death, suddenly felt it was possible to live not cut off from the world, but attached to the world, and to everything the world contained. It was a party that both at the time and in retrospect seemed tinged with a mist of gold, at which everyone was young and healthy and happy; and throughout which Alfred wanted to embrace everyone, dance with everyone, and shout out to the world that to be happy means to be good.

  It was also a party that, having started at ten, would probably have gone on until the following morning, when the ship was due to dock in New York; if, at midnight, the S. S. Chateaubriand hadn’t collided with a Panamian tanker and been practically cut in two.

  *

  The general opinion was that Alfred had behaved badly. How badly, no one knew; though it was agreed it must have been pretty badly for him to be so severely traumatised that from then on, two or three times a year, in the words of some, he had a nervous breakdown, and in the words of others, went barking mad. ‘It must have been the contrast with his father,’ he knew people said of him. ‘You know, the father being a hero, and the son being—well, one doesn’t know quite what of course, but—a coward, I’ve heard, is putting it mildly. I mean, tossing women and children out of a lifeboat. Or wrapping a shawl round himself so he’d be mistaken for a woman. Or something like that.’

  ‘It was being so lionised by society,’ he knew that people said of him. ‘You know, he was nothing. Just some unappetising youth who’d published a volume of I’m told not very good poetry. Then, suddenly, because of his father, he was taken up by all these rich and famous people. Only when it came to it, he couldn’t behave properly. I mean I’ve heard—of course I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard …’

  ‘What do you expect?’ he knew that people said of him. ‘The son of a socialist and a Jew. Okay, so the father was a great resistance hero, and was tortured to death. But I mean frankly, if you ask me, the Germans only did what we’d have had to do, sooner or later.’

  ‘Ugly little … yid.’

  However if, particularly in the first few years after the disaster, this was what was said by those who hadn’t actually been on the ship, and possibly felt they didn’t quite belong to the inner circle of New York and Paris literary café society, not one of Alfred’s fellow passengers ever accused him of having behaved incorrectly.

  They didn’t deny it when people said to them, ‘I hear he did this or that,’ and they smiled indulgently when others muttered that they thought that under the circumstances going mad a couple of times a year was the least Alfred could do. But they never added any wood to the fire—indeed, as far as possible, most of them avoided any mention of the events of that night, as if they were too awful to remember—and it never occurred to any of them, as some said they should, to ‘drop’ Alfred. On the contrary, from the moment he stepped off the rescue ship in New York, wearing only a blanket over the remains of his dinner jacket, and was whisked off to the promised duplex on Fifth Avenue, which he found crammed with clothes of every kind that his host had bought for him as soon as he had heard of the tragedy, he was more than ever taken up by society; and through his father’s friend, and through the friends he had made on the ship, he soon got to know and to be invited to the dinners and parties of every fashionable publisher, writer, composer, painter, and actor and actress in New York. Not to mention the dinners and parties of those wealthy women who collected writers, painters and composers, and helped to make them fashionable so that they themselves could be considered so.

  For six months he kept it up; the fat, greedy boy let loose in the sweet shop. Until, one day, he found himself possessed of an urgent need to buy every available newspaper and scan them for reports of terrorist attacks, bomb outrages and the still continuing trials of war criminals. Possessed of such a need that that evening, for the first time since he’d arrived in New York, he had to telephone his hostess and say he was terribly sorry but he wasn’t feeling very well.

  He didn’t feel very well, and read the newspapers obsessively, for a week. Then, one morning, he woke up with the most agonising cramps in his stomach, and far from not feeling very well started to feel very ill; so ill that he telephoned his mother in Paris, and asked her to come over and take care of him. And a week after that he woke up in the middle of the night convinced that all those terrorists he had been reading about, and all those war criminals, were after him, were poisoning him, and were soon going to come and ‘get him’. He was whimpering and crying and backed himself into a corner of his bedroom; and when his mother and his father’s friend came to help him to the ambulance that was waiting downstairs to take him to a ‘rest-home’, he threw himself on the floor and begged them not to move him. He was screaming, squealing, choking with tears, and made his mother so afraid that he was going to fling himself out of the window that she sent for the male nurses who were in the ambulance, and had them come and take Alfred away by force.

  He was in hospital for a month; by the time he came out weak, humiliated, and frightened, and started, almost immediately, doing the rounds of his rich and fashionable friends again, people—people who didn’t know him well, the hangers-on of his actor, composer and socialite friends—had begun to mutter that the breakdown he had suffered was undoubtedly due to his having behaved—‘How shall I put it?… Badly’—the night the Chateaubriand went down.

  ‘Oh, poor Alfred,’ his friends and fellow passengers would murmur with a smile, before going off to tell Alfred wh
at such and such had said of him. ‘Poor little Alfred.’

  *

  So it went on as the years passed; with Alfred living between New York and Paris, producing the occasional volume of poetry and acquiring a degree of fame not only as a poet, but as an essayist and critic. He wrote in French and English, since his mother was half American and he had been brought up speaking both languages; and he wrote on every sort of subject. Literature, philosophy, art, politics, history, fashion, the difficulty of being the son of a famous father. In fact there was only one subject he did not write on; and that was, it was said, because everyone was too tactful ever to ask him to do so. That Alfred had his side of the story was beyond dispute. But frankly, isn’t it better to let sleeping dogs lie? Especially when they get up of their own accord every six months, and drive poor Alfred crazy with their howling. I mean, maybe one day, but for the moment; no, if we need something … What about the influence of Gertrude Stein on the Structuralists? Or an article on the rights and wrongs of war crime trials? Or—oh, I don’t know—a commentary on the changing shape of the Coca-Cola bottle.