by Alec Waugh
It is not till the novel is finished that a writer realizes how big the strain has been. And to Gordon there had been upon that strain, the superimposed strain of Faith, of lecturing, of living in an unfamiliar world. If it had been in England that he had finished the book, he would have gone on a cricket tour; or taken a voyage somewhere; or gone to the sands and sunshine of Southern France. In New York, in the tense atmosphere of that cold, clean air, with the noise of parties, caught up in a cycle of parties, with prohibition dramatizing the atmosphere of drink, he found an increasingly restless need of noise with the need of alcohol to support that noise. He found himself, ordinarily a quite temperate person, drinking more and more.
Drinking in New York is something that only those who had been a part of New York’s life can understand. It is a rhythm beating through every aspect of its life. It is not that one drinks more in New York than in London. On the whole one drinks considerably less. One rarely drinks before the late afternoon. One often does not drink at dinner. Whole days will pass without one drinking anything at all. But prohibition has made the whole problem of drink dramatic. Fifteen per cent, of conversation turns upon it. It is a political issue. People will solemnly discuss hangovers. Reasonable people who in other countries rarely mention what they eat or drink at a dinner party will recount in the certainty that it will be found interesting, the Odyssey of a day’s drinking. ‘First of all,’ he will say, ‘I went to a speakeasy on Thirty-ninth Street. I had two cocktails there. Then I went on to a party where they served us rye. After that. . . .’
Liquor comprises the small talk of New York. It is what the weather is in England. To understand drinking in America without having been a part of American life is like looking at a stained-glass window from the outside. It is not only prohibition that makes drink dramatic. It is the uncertainty as to what one drinks: the absolute impossibility of gauging the effects of what one drinks. Gin and whisky are the only unstandardized commodities in the States. In Europe where you know exactly what you are drinking, you gauge the exact effect of the liquor on you. You know when to stop and what the effect of not stopping is going to have on you.
In New York one cocktail can have the effect of a sledgehammer blow between the eyes. Without warning you pass right out. Or again, you may be caught up by a sea of liquor. You will be lifted on crested waves of rye and juniper out of the trough of successive hangovers, till suddenly the liquor dies on you and you will be tossed like a log of driftwood on the beach.
It was on such a sea that Gordon found himself caught up, during those days of early March when with his novel finished, with no new work to occupy him, he rushed from party to party with Joan Malcolm. He was dazed; but at the same time every nerve was preternaturally acute. He knew that there were dates marked upon the calendar: that on the twenty-first Joan would be taking a train westward to Los Angeles, that at noon on the twenty-fourth the Lafayette would sail from 57th pier; that the American chapter would be over, that he would have to begin life again. Until then he could not bother. He relaxed to the stream.
It would end anyhow on the twenty-fourth.
It ended, however, eight days earlier than that. During the last week-end before Joan’s leaving. Ended thoroughly, in the way things do end in New York. It began in a penthouse on Riverside Drive that looked out on to the Hudson River. Gordon had been taken there during the previous summer. ‘If you want to see what a modernist apartment really can be,’ he had been told, ‘I’ll take you up to see John Mavio’s.’
John Mavio was an artist: a Greek who had settled and married in New York. His apartment was as good an achievement in coziness as existed. By raising the floor, by manipulating lights, by arrangement of bookshelves and window seats, one not very large rectangular room was made to serve as a dining-room, a studio, a drawing-room, a cocktail bar. Though there was no open fire to sit before, you felt no lack of coziness. It was that rare thing, a modernist apartment that was not an exhibition piece; that was something to be lived in.
But though it had been to see the apartment that he had for the first time been driven westward down Eighty-first Street, it had been for its owners’ sake that he had returned. There was nowhere in New York that he could be more certain of finding fun. In this marriage between a Greek artist and an American woman with her own career was symbolized a union between the old world and the new: that was capable of confronting confidently whatever situation might arise. They were artists, who enjoyed life and accepted life: who by taking a long view knew how to take a short; who could live in the present because they had lived in the future and the past.
‘What! you’ve never met them?’ Gordon had said to Joan. ‘We must do something about that. Let’s invite ourselves for cocktails and then take them on to dinner.’
There were usually people at the Mavios round about half-past five. The Mavios worked hard and played hard. Their parties were informal. They had a very admirable coloured cook. When dinner parties were arranged they were beautifully stage-managed. But usually the parties were picnic ones. People were asked to look in at six, and at half-past eight they would be still there; dancing, or chatting, or shooting crap. Sandwiches would have been sent out for. By eleven o’clock the party would still be moving.
‘We’ll have fun there,’ he said to Joan, as the taxi swung round the long curve of Riverside. For a week he had not been to bed before three o’clock. Every morning with his mail settled and his papers read, he was at the racquet club. Knowing that in a week’s time he would be leaving New York, he had crowded his days with engagements for lunches, teas, dinners. His telephone bell had been ringing all day long. He was grateful for the mauve cocktail that Ruth Mavio poured out for him from the vast glass jar that was set like a heathen idol, with glasses and sandwiches grouped round it like suppliant priests and penitents, on a stool in the centre of the room. He drank it in a gulp, felt better, held his glass out for another. He felt better then.
‘I can’t really believe you’re going so soon,’ Ruth said.
‘I can’t myself.’
‘You’ve been here so much this last year that one’s begun to think that you belong here.’
‘A part of me does,’ he said, and saying it remembered how he had talked with Faith of the way in which the traveller leaves pieces of himself in this and the other place, so that in no place can he find himself complete.
It seemed centuries ago since that first talk. Yet he had met Faith after he had met the Mavios. And that spring afternoon seemed only an hour or so away. He had the feeling that different sections of one’s life moved at different paces.
‘What are you going to do?’ Ruth asked him. He did not know. There was a vacuum waiting on the other side of March 24th. Faith had taken his whole life into her hands. Now she was handing it back to him. There was nothing he wanted to do, nobody he wanted to see, nowhere he wanted to go, nothing he wanted to write.
‘I often wish I were a person working in an office,’ he said, ‘with a month’s holiday a year. One wouldn’t have these gaps in one’s life then.’
‘You’re going to be in London though?’ He supposed he was. And he would be glad to be there. And he knew perfectly that within a few weeks of his return an idea for a new book would have come to him and with that idea would come a zest for living. But at the moment Joan Malcolm was the one link he had with living.
‘Oh, Joan,’ he said, ‘I’m going to miss you so!’
‘I’m going to miss you, Gordon.’ She stretched out her hand to his and pressed it. Their hands clasped, they sat in silence; while the gramophone played and a couple danced to it, while John Mavio, dark, little, alert and vital, argued about modern art; while Ruth Mavio, crumpled on the floor, rolled dice to a chant of a ‘roll on seven’; while one by one the guests began to take their leave. It was eight o’clock before the last guest had gone.
‘Where are you taking us?’ Ruth asked.
There was a place on Seventeenth and Third. They had German
food there, Gordon said. It was quite amusing. There was German music. And one drank out of great glass mugs, beer that was almost beer.
‘I’ll get the car,’ said John.
It was a fast, low car: a two-seater.
‘We’ll get in the back,’ said Joan.
It was very cold. A clear, starlit, moonlight night. They huddled close to one another as the car rushed eastwards through the clattering avenues, to the long bare expanses of the Park. Through the frosted air the towering splendour of Fifty-ninth Street stood in its proud blaze of light and shadow. It was beyond speech beautiful. He would be saying good-bye to it so soon. In a week Joan would be on her way to California. He would be in the vacuum.
‘Oh, Joan,’ he said.
She turned towards him. She was very lovely. Their shared troubles had brought them very close. The car swung westwards through the Park scattering its light between the leafless trees.
‘Gordon!’ she sighed.
Desperately, in a kiss that was more than anything an attempt to annihilate their unhappiness, they clung together.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you,’ Gordon said.
It was hot and crowded in the lower room where the music played in soft, sentimental strains. It looked for a moment as though they would not be able to get a table. Ruth turned slowly round, looking at the walls with their odd photographs and prints of muscled Sandows.
‘I’ll choose that one,’ she said at length.
‘Here’s a table,’ the waiter said.
It was wooden and narrow and rectangular. It looked small when the four of them were seated round it. It looked smaller when the large plates piled high with dumplings and sauerkraut and heavy, pink-looking boiled meat had been arranged about the glass mugs that contained a greater cubic content of glass than beer.
‘This is a squeeze,’ Joan remarked.
‘It’ll be all right when that’s cleared away,’ the waiter retorted, pointing contemptuously at the plates of meat. He clearly regarded food as a necessary but irritating interval between drinks. Within five minutes he had swept away the plates, and brought four unordered steins.
‘Now you’ll be comfortable,’ he said.
‘It’s nice here,’ said Joan. She stretched out her hand to Gordon. They sat silent, listening to the slow tender music. ‘It’ll be nice when one’s old,’ said Joan, ‘and one’s done one’s work and doesn’t mind what one looks like, and can sit in a garden by the Rhine, drinking beer and listening to music.’
‘I’ve insured my life for sixty,’ Gordon said.
‘How old are you now?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘Then you’ll be sixty in ‘58. I’ll be fifty-three then.’
‘You’ll have done enough acting by then, won’t you?’
‘Oh, darling, I do hope so.’
‘We shall get very fat, shan’t we?’
‘We’ll just do nothing then.’
‘I shall tell everyone how beautiful and slim you used to be.’
‘None of them will believe you.’
‘I shall challenge them to duels.’
‘I wish it wasn’t such a long way off.’
‘How long will it be before we meet again?’
‘Not too long.’
‘No, not too long.’
And they laughed and sat holding hands while the music throbbed and swelled and sobbed.
‘I know some quite amusing people who live three blocks away,’ said John.
‘I’ve got to make a speech tomorrow,’ Gordon said.
They asked him where he was going to make a speech.
‘At one of Eve Stuart’s dinners,’ he told them.
They asked him what it was going to be about. He didn’t know, he said. That was what he was worrying about. They told him that that was silly: that tomorrow was a long way off.
‘I ought to go home and think it out,’ he said.
‘You can think it out at the night club we’re going to take you on to.’
It was like every other night club. It had a bar; a couple of coloured musicians; a minute square of floor; a number of tables were packed close together round it.
‘I feel like death,’ said Gordon.
‘You’ll feel better after this,’ they said.
It was straight rye. And he did. There were ten people at their table. He did not know any of their names. They were throwing a party next week-end. They wanted Joan to go to it. She was sorry, but she was going to Hollywood, she said. Gordon would be able to, though.
‘No I won’t,’ said Gordon. ‘I’m going to Hollywood.’
‘But I thought you were going back to London?’
‘I was.’
‘When did you decide to go to Hollywood?’
‘This minute.’
‘Do you usually plan things that way?’
‘Invariably.’
He did not know who was asking him the question. He had decided to go to Hollywood. He must make his plans to go to Hollywood. One needed money to go to Hollywood. He had no money.
‘I want to telephone,’ he said. ‘I want to telephone a night letter.’
He took Joan and led her to the hall. ‘You must back me up in this. You know Stanley.’
He got on to the Western Union. He wanted to send a week-end letter to London: he had just finished a novel he said. He wanted to accompany ‘Ganymede’ to Hollywood. What was the maximum he could be lent? He handed the telephone across to Joan. ‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea if Gordon came to Hollywood?’ she said. ‘That’s settled, then,’ he said.
‘I’m so sorry I shan’t be able to come to your party,’ he said on his return.
‘I wonder what Stanley’ll say,’ said Joan.
‘Something typical.’
‘How long’ll you stay in Hollywood?’ Ruth asked.
‘As long as my money lasts,’ he said. He would book a passage back by the French Line through Panama. He would stay on in Hollywood till his last dollar had gone. Then he’ld get on the boat. It would be a five weeks’ journey back. He’ld work the whole of it. ‘Or I might go back to the islands,’ he said.
Sitting there, in that noisy, smoky, stuffy New York night club, his head heavy with jazz and rye, he felt homesick for the wide Pacific: for the palm trees, and the schooners becalmed within the coral reef of a Paumolus atoll: for the red and white of the pareo: for the sweet scent of the tiare: for the singing and the dancing: for the wash of water upon the reef. He would ship from San Francisco for Samoa. There were the Gilbert Islands.
He had met a missionary from the Gilbert Islands in a trading schooner from Port Vila that was paddling its way round the lagoons of the New Hebrides. It had been a lazy little boat where you paid a hundred francs a day, which included food and as much as you could drink; it was the kind of boat where you found whisky set out beside your coffee on the breakfast table. For three days they had talked: he and that missionary, about the Gilbert Islands. It would be fun to go there.
And there was an island called Bellona he was curious to see. It was the kind of island that only gets marked on a very large-scale map. It was next door to Rennell Island, south-east of the Solomons. They had told him about it in New Caledonia. It was only inhabited, they had said, by women. When a girl child was three years old, she was sent there from Rennell Island. When the young men of Rennell Island grew to manhood and the time came for them to take wives, the chiefs sailed across to Bellona to bring back such women as were needed. It was from a group of New Hebrides planters that Gordon had learnt that. He had never known whether they had been pulling his leg. They had been very pleasant fellows. ‘Now, are you telling me the truth?’ he had said. ‘Because I write, and I shall go back to England and put all this in a book. And I shall look very silly if none of it is true.’ They had assured him that it was true. That the last thing they would think of doing would be to pull the leg of their ‘young romantic’; some of them they maintained had
been there, the women had swum out to their ship and had proved most exacting. But Gordon knew to what extent a writer was fair game. He had heard planters boast of the way they had fooled journalists, which was the planters’ retort for the manner in which writers had abused the hospitality of planters. He never had been sure about Bellona. He had never mentioned it in any of his books. He would be curious to go there and make sure.
He began to talk about Bellona Island. He told Ruth Mavio that it was quite likely that there should be such an island: that primitives would be likely to take the only sure precaution that would keep women chaste. There was no other way, he thought. A woman would cry her heart out on your shoulder, would promise to fly with you to the far world’s end: would say that she could not live without you. Then, after a three months’ interval, the first thing that she would do would be to start talking to you about some other man. ‘Women were happier in the days when they were treated as chattels,’ he went on. ‘They haven’t enough work to do nowadays. Women,’ he said, ‘can be only kept faithful by having three meals to cook a day and a fresh baby every eighteen months.’
He developed the theme with the lightness and sureness with which one can develop those themes alone in which with a third of oneself one believes. He was sustaining himself, he knew, solely upon the rye with which every quarter of an hour or so he found his glass replenished. But he had never been in a more complete control of his faculties. Every nerve was tightened. He saw everything very clearly. He remembered the description a fellow officer had once given him of a shot of morphia.
‘I walked back from the M.O.,’ he had said, ‘and everything was lovelier than I had ever seen it. I had never seen such golden sunlight, or such green leaves.’ He had never seen the brass buttons glitter so, he thought, as he passed the sentry; he had never heard such a rattle as the wrist hit the magazine in the present. For an hour it had been like that. Then suddenly, without warning, the bottom had gone out of everything. It would be like that sooner or later with himself, Gordon knew. But for the moment he had rarely been more vividly conscious of his personality. It was four o’clock before Joan asked to be taken home. ‘In six days’ time I shall be on my way to Hollywood,’ was Gordon’s last thought, as he fell asleep.