Somehow one knew in these words that one’s vision of a future as an author was slipping from one’s grasp. Even as I persisted to say to Wheelock that in yet reworking through the manuscript that the novel might possibly undergo much change in amendments and rewriting. We agreed that I would stay in touch. But that day, as I left Scribner’s and walked back up Fifth Avenue with the manuscript under my arm and having now encountered such a glowing opinion from what could only be regarded as one of America’s most revered publishing houses, famed for editors such as Maxwell Perkins and Wheelock himself, and not to have been offered an advance and contract, I was made to realize that there was little chance of finding a more liberal publisher and that instead of cataclysmic glory, The Ginger Man’s future in America was to be bleak.
Perhaps not so strangely, John Hall Wheelock bore an uncanny resemblance in both looks and behavior to the Wheelock I had encountered at the Naval Academy Prep. And whose English class provided its wonderful hour of pleasure with this marvelously entertaining gentleman, a chief petty officer, opening up the day’s proceedings by telling his latest received risqué jokes, which, despite their banal simplicity, always reflected a verity of life. His suggestions of subjects to write upon were always original, and one responded to them. And from these assignments, he chose a selection to have read aloud by his visiting friends at gatherings at his house. Aware that I was ghostwriting several other students’ themes, he never brought me to book or complained. Instead he seemed to be amused and encouraging, several times suggesting I let him show copies of my class essays to publishers with whom he had been associated in civilian life. And I had the temerity to think, as Izzy did, that he was in fact referring to me when he said that there was someone writing in the class that they would hear of one day.
However, in already presuming I was a writer, I was shy to put myself forth as one. Branded and called Shakespeare in navy boot training camp, I had been the acknowledged company poet, which mostly involved writing requested love letters to fellow seamen’s girlfriends, to whom, with cynicism reeking between the lines, I would unleash salvos of marvelously sentimental endearments, which brought forth equally fervent replies. However, my similar attempts at flowery embellishment on behalf of my fellow Naval Academy prepsters often embarrassingly resulted in highly disgruntled customers, who would, chagrined, present me with a loved one’s unnice response, telling them in more flowery words than mine, to fuck off and to go shove their crap up some other gullible girl’s ass. Even I myself, getting such a reply from a sophisticated young lady, Joy Calverton Corbett, with whom I had attended the Ford Theater in Baltimore and who later wrote from Antioch College that if I wanted to continue my ridiculous letter writing to her, I would be getting back the same ridiculous replies.
But while there was a growing dissension to my letter writing, when instructor Chief Petty Officer Wheelock alluded to overtones of James Joyce in my ghostwritten efforts, I was alacrity itself in repairing to the Tome School library. This always singularly empty place was where I often foraged alone and on this occasion went to find out about this man Joyce, who might be imitating me. When after a long search, I finally found mention of him, it was with a certain sense of mystical awe that I read that his obscene work was banned and that he had been a dissolute undergraduate, who, frequenting houses of ill repute, consorted with medical students and led a drunken existence, carousing through the streets of the ancient capital city of Dublin. With it being three thousand miles away across the Atlantic and the country of origin of both my mother and father, news of this alleged dissolute writer aroused my first interest in Ireland. Plus the awareness that someone somewhere was producing literature banned as obscene.
But all was but a miracle in my getting an appointment to Annapolis and arriving at the Naval Academy Prep in the first place. My naval career being full of recalcitrant behavior of an almost insane and suicidal kind, ruled by my nearly hysterical refusal to do anything I considered menial, and an assault upon one’s dignity. In such resolve I was helped by being a mile runner and my ability to cover any training obstacle course in pronto time. At boot camp, I had won extra leave by winning races over these prescribed hurdles and hazards. Not that difficult, as no one else was looking to overly strain himself. However, there were bases offering twenty-five-dollar war bonds as prizes, and on these I would try to break the obstacle course record. In any event, when arriving at an amphibious base located on a barren sand flat at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay at Little Creek, Virginia, my escapes from receiving unit working details recruited for the day became legendary. Effected as they were following morning muster in front of thousands of men. Rather than have some sadist co
18
AND NOW in the warmth of a New York June, six years had passed since my days in the navy, and, following a totally different life in Europe, a whole new and different world of America was being revealed. Valerie, Philip and I were being ferried by the Pratts’ chauffeur northward from the Bronx through Westchester’s richer suburban enclaves and sixty or so miles into Connecticut. Leaving the massively spread coastal conurbation to pass through the green, cloistered peace of these small rural New England towns and villages.
Growing up, I had visited numerous times in the miles of this spacious hinterland and spent a couple of summers in this part of the world when milk was fetched from cows down the road and it was an event to hear of a motorcar passing by. We rented a mansion behind three great pine trees at Paynes Corner on Route 22, where it met Middle Patent Road. Atop the Revolutionary period house was a cupola full of hornets. From the kitchen ran a servants’ staircase up to the narrow hallways and bedrooms. Beneath my corner bedroom window, where I pasted together model airplanes on the floor, snakes sunned below on the grass. Ghost stories were told by night on the big porch when visitors would come. We went to swim in a large lake in the middle of the woods behind the mansion with giant bullfrogs and big black snakes along its shore. And with our dog Chess and brother T.J., we would walk the uninhabited and seldom-traveled Middle Patent dirt road and would pass a lily pond, where a girl who lived on the nearby horse farm would, unperturbed, sun herself bare-assed on a float among the reeds.
Now one was traveling much further afield from New York City, which always seemed to exist in one’s young imagination as an uninhabited wilderness reaching all the way to the North Pole. Crossing the Housatonic River and turning into a large spread of forest, one passed odd fields with woodchuck mounds. Then coming off the blacktop road and entering upon a winding dirt track, we drove nearly a mile through a thick plantation of pines, finally arriving at a cabin in a little clearing enfolded by an impenetrable wilderness in every direction. The cabin consisted of one large living room, a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Two bunks on either side of a massive stone fireplace. On a wall hung a telephone operated by eccentric signals, which finally got you through to whom you wanted to speak. Disconcertingly massive spiders seemed to occasionally crawl across the bedroom ceiling. And one piece of furnishing standing in a corner was an enormous radio which, with much patient fiddling, could tune in to Europe.
Valerie went with Philip each day during the afternoons to mind Mrs. Pratt’s grandchildren while she, Jane, a gracious and retiring lady, took a nap. Following a marvelously simple driving test in New Milford, I got a license to drive an eight-cylinder gray Chevrolet coupe car put at our disposal. Compared to the feeble horsepower of my European cars of the time, which even to start, I often had to crank by hand and push, this wondrous machine caused me no end of delight. When one drove out through the plantation of pines, to deliver or go fetch Valerie, it was like being on the bridge of a great battleship. Under its vast bonnet, a massively powerful engine could effortlessly move this vehicle off in third gear and propel it nearly silently along the dirt tracks and quickly accelerate it to speed on the blacktop roads. Occasionally at six P.M., one had a predinnertime cocktail with the Pratts. With George, or Gid, as he was known, turning out to be a st
range, introspective bird, indeed. Who, as he sat in his sitting room in his khaki shirt and trousers, had mulled over statements of mine, which perhaps had been said a week or more previously and which he said had set his mind to thinking.
Gid Pratt too had set my mind to thinking as to who this man was or could be, who seemed not in the least to be worried about my beard nor my nonconformity, nor the communist scare raging across America. One heard he was widely known throughout these parts of Connecticut as a benevolent employer and generous benefactor, who was also accused of being liberal. But clearly he was unafraid to indulge the luxury of having his own opinions. Aware that our cabin had been newly provided with bedding and mattresses and that an amount of other furnishings had been just acquired for our comfort and finding that his supply of other and recent model Chevrolet cars was extensive, and as one would pass his brand-new combine harvesters in the fields, one could not help but become accumulatively conscious of Pratt’s wherewithal. Especially after one’s years in Ireland. Driving once with him to the local town of New Milford and as we passed land where I noticed cedar trees growing, I asked about them and was told he’d planted them as an amenity of beauty on what must have been many hundreds of additional acres of his estate, which I began to realize must have amounted to some thousands of acres. And one day I said to Valerie that despite the Pratts’ simple, unostentatious and very private way of life, and with their positively pleasant way of presenting the existence of a chauffeur disguised as the man who got the post and the newspapers and the butler as the man who helped fix the vegetables, that the Pratts could be nothing but very rich.
Although I was at first unaware and not to say indifferent, there seemed to be a growing friction between myself and Gid Pratt. But hardly necessary to look far to find out why. As she was herself, I was also somewhat unaware of Valerie’s quietly spectacular beauty, which, with her shy charm, became an irresistible attraction for anyone coming into contact with her. And that she should be in the company of, and worse, married to an impecunious and unpublished writer who could, if provoked, let you know unequivocally that not only was the work he was writing going to be published but that it would blast its way through a resisting literary world for whom the author held nothing but the deepest disregard. In America’s then mood of oppressive suspicion, such words were hard even for a liberal to stomach. But I could be incited to say something resembling them to whomever I met whose sour resentment and indifference to my resolve was obvious. And meanwhile poor and unknown as I was, I remained unconcerned as to the contrast of my condition with that of having a beautiful young wife who had already quite happily endured three previous years in peasant circumstances at Kilcoole, where some folk seeing such a lady as Valerie performing the menial task of carrying a pail of water down a mucky lane dared to think I was a reprobate. But dared not at the time to call me one.
Valerie in the long grass of one of our fields at Kilcoole prior to becoming a mother and our going to America.
George Pratt’s photograph of Valerie with Philip on the Pratts’ lawn in Connecticut.
However, Pratt, if shy and retiring, was of a more candid kind. His days seemed to be spent overseeing his farm and sometimes helping his men in his fields, and he did, by his tendency to reclusiveness, intrigue me. A keen photographer, he took pictures of Valerie and Philip playing on the lawn. But signally none of me. Although I was not especially keen to be noticed or photographed, I probably would have reacted quite civilly to an invitation. Pratt said that in earlier days he did socialize somewhat and would occasionally hold a barn dance in a complex of buildings which formed his rather elegant farmyard. The impression one got of the then invited were as an assortment of folk who might be referred to as socially registered Bohemians and whose interests Pratt thought might be as intellectually introspective as were his own. But he said he soon formed a less than flattering opinion of such folk and ended up preferring to avoid their company. One of course had no idea of whom he spoke, but one assumed they were your more upper-crusted of arty-crafty poets, painters and philosophers who hailed more from Park Avenue than Greenwich Village. But who perhaps might also easily fit the description of being a not too transparent bunch of rabid materialists. Rather than folk like Pratt, who had more philosophical intent and seemed to isolate himself in his own company and farm work. But had he held another barn dance, they were something I had always dreamt of being at and I would have desperately wanted to have been invited.
Although Pratt was one of the first genuinely liberal voices I was to encounter on this my return to my native land, he made me realize that despite his antipathy expressed about so-called society and the socially registered, that Pratt himself before his hair-shirt withdrawal to his rural life, and disposing of his former house with gold taps, which had been acquired by the Russians for an embassy, was himself precisely from this socially registered stratum of American life. But it was completely without warning that our evening cocktail hour was soon to be with sparks flying. My somewhat uncommunicativeness and rigid regimen of sobriety coupled with my country gentleman Trinity College anglicized accent finally seemed to have got to Pratt, who chose one moment in a prolonged pause in our conversation to announce,
“You know what I think you are. I think you’re a stuffed shirt.”
In the summer silence of the sylvan thousands of acres surrounding us and my face having gone several shades paler than ashen, and my fists knotted white, this statement produced in me an astonished shock of such momentousness that one could hear your proverbial flea fart out somewhere on the edge of the universe. Pratt, one was nearly sure, having no idea he was making his remark to someone who could erupt across the room in instant violence. And had done so on many a previous occasion found pointedly insulting. However, as there seemed to be much early American delicate furniture about which I admired and as an end was soon coming to our sojourn in Connecticut and for diplomacy’s sake, I was prepared to use words in reply to words. But which further words could be taken as a warning. And such words meaning, say that, or anything like it again, and I’ll break your ass.
“What makes you think you can say that to me.”
As I rose and discontinued my presence at the cocktail hour, Pratt, at the realization that I was leaving, did murmur a few further words of polemic. For one thing was for certain. That if America was designed to make you conform, and to knock the shit out of your self-esteem, I was having none of it. And especially not from someone I thought liberal and tolerant and should know better. But I had no option but to add Pratt’s personal opinion to the growingly alien world of America, and although fissures were already showing and no doubt big fractures were on the way, there was no chance of my acquiescing to the mealymouthed, who were everywhere behind their corporate shiny desks, ready to suppress, squash and snuff out any original voice who wasn’t saying what they thought should be said in order that they could keep their job till retirement.
However, both the Pratts were as kindly and well meaning as they were well bred. And the matter of this falling out was over ensuing days diplomatically negotiated between Valerie and Jane Pratt, and enough words of apology were said to at least make passing confrontation not too embarrassing. Following such reconciliation as there was, Pratt came one evening to the cabin in the woods for dinner and for something as prosaic and un-stuffed shirtish as sauerkraut and frankfurters. He seemed on his most immaculate behavior to the extent that one almost preferred his previous rudeness. However, he did inquire if the cabin was populated by a variety of enormous spider, and I said I had seen an occasional one cross the bedroom ceiling. To which Pratt, a touch apologetically, said he wondered when we were going to notice them. And one could not hold any grudge against this man. He was at least one American who had listened to and thought about what I had to say. And in saying such, I could be overbearing in tooting one’s own horn. In any event, Pratt was an example of the best sort of American that America can produce. And the fact that he may hav
e been possessed of more than a modicum of the wherewithal to which most Americans aspire had not deprived him of introspective cerebration.
In the cabin in the woods, I had already written the words of The Ginger Man, describing Dangerfield's first day at Trinity, which was as my own, when upon that cool October first morn in that optimistic year 1946, after the war, I stepped out of the green upholstered tram, and there was the university through my apprehensive eyes. And one could, secluded in this wilderness, and while hearing the snakes glide over the previous year’s dead leaves carpeting the rough ground and the muted roar of the Housatonic River below through the impenetrable forest of trees, relive walking past those college squares of flat green velvet. And as one would occasionally hear the plaintive whistles of the New York, New Haven and Hartford railway train passing just across the valley and on its way to New Milford through Brookfield and Still River, one sensed upon the ether, and muffled distant drums beating that Gainor Stephen Crist had arrived and was abroad somewhere in America. And I wondered more than a moment or two if that intrepid traveler who, with his rapid birdlike walk and nervously twiddling his thumbs, might finally be making his way through the forest lane to appear at this cabin door, his hand held out in welcome relief to grasp mine, which would be trembling in apprehension. But instead the iconoclast and dream breaker A. K. Donoghue came to be picked up from New Milford station. And in his friendly, accommodating way, to help make us feel at home, he immediately assessed our situation and informed us that we were working as servants. This made us feel swell. And when Donoghue was briefly put on display at the Pratt cocktail hour, he lost no time in capitalizing on any embarrassment that could be sniffed out of the occasion. His pièce de résistance presented when he conspicuously lit a match on the sole of his shoe to light Pratt’s cigarette.