IN THE MID-1960S most people we knew who travelled to and from America went by sea because of the high cost of air fares, but it was typical of the generosity of the Harkness Foundation that they paid for Fellows to cross the Atlantic in cabin rather than tourist class. Mum accompanied us to Southampton by train and was allowed to spend some hours on board the Queen Mary before it sailed. According to a letter from Dad, she couldn’t stop talking to all her acquaintance for weeks about the size and luxurious appointments of the ship. We enjoyed the voyage, learning the quaint ways of shipboard life, which seemed to belong to a pre-war culture and class system, and managed to keep the children occupied and reasonably happy for four or five days. It was certainly the ideal way to arrive in America for the first time, watching the skyscrapers of Manhattan rise into view and sliding past the Statue of Liberty, with smaller ships and boats in the harbour hooting a welcome, before docking. The Director of the Fellowship programme, Lance Hammond, and some colleagues were there to greet us and some other new Fellows who had been on the voyage. They transferred the group to a hotel and gave us dinner that night, and a quick tour of Manhattan the next day, after which we took the train to Providence, and a tumultuous reunion with the Honans. How glad I was that we had these good friends to receive us and help us settle in.
Rhode Island is not an island, but is the smallest state in the Union, with a history that goes back to colonial days. By the mid-twentieth century its capital, Providence, was an economically depressed industrial city which sometimes reminded me of Birmingham on a smaller scale, the charming university campus and the tree-lined residential streets around it encircled by tracts of decaying property, disused factories and dull canals. The Honans had found us an apartment Park described in a letter as ‘just a few blocks from the campus’ and I had visualised the blocks as tall apartment blocks, whereas in fact our flat on Brook Street was on the first floor of a two-storey clapboard house, next door to a friendly Armenian shoe-mender’s shop. Our landlords were Italian immigrants who had converted, decorated and furnished the place in a cheerfully unpretentious fashion and we felt immediately comfortable there. There were three bedrooms, the smallest of which I could use for a study. On the floor below lived a group of postgraduates, one of whom, a physicist called Stuart, became a friend. He gave me a paperback copy of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in an effort to leaven my lamentable apathy towards science, but I’m afraid I did no more than glance at it: the aversion-teaching of this subject at St Joseph’s Academy still exerted its influence.
The Brown campus was only a short walk away. It is one of the oldest universities in America, and the original buildings are pleasing to behold, plainer and more dignified than the overdone neo-Gothic of some other historic American universities, while the tree-shaded spaces between them provided a useful place to take the children for an airing in the warm weather, since we had no garden in Brook Street. According to Park, Brown was at this time fairly low down in the Ivy League as regards academic distinction, and tended to attract students from affluent families who were mainly interested in having a good time, though it has since grown in stature and currently has a world ranking of 52. My status there was ambiguous. I was registered as ‘an occasional postgraduate student’, although in qualifications and experience I was equivalent to a young assistant professor, except that I did not have a PhD. We mixed socially with faculty, helped by our association with the Honans, and everyone we met was very friendly and hospitable. At the parties we attended we were startled at first by the casual use of expletives in conversation, especially the f-word never heard in similar gatherings at home, and Mary was so offended by one person in this respect that she reproached him to his face, much to his surprise. Another difference from Birmingham I noted was the passion with which people discussed politics, local and national, for I had no idea how most of my English colleagues voted.
The Harkness Foundation paid postgraduate fees to Brown so that I could take courses if I wanted to, but I planned to work mainly on my own – and not exclusively at acquiring knowledge of American literature. For that purpose I had brought with me a compendious just-published anthology edited by Geoffrey Moore, from which I got the basic historical outline and plenty of suggestions for further reading. I did, however, join a graduate course on modern American fiction taught by a colleague of Park’s, with whom he shared an office, Mark Spilka: a gentle, intelligent, somewhat depressive Jew, very quietly spoken – the absolute antithesis of the booming, boisterous, extrovert Yankee, so that it was surprising they were friends (and indeed the friendship came under severe strain later). Mark was very interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and had written, or would go on to write, esteemed books about Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence from that perspective. At the time we met he identified strongly with the eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, which had been recently published to great acclaim, and insisted that I read it. I did so with qualified admiration. To my mind Bellow was always straining a little too hard to impress us with his hero by saturating his consciousness with showy rhetoric and intellectual referencing. But this stylistic obtrusiveness, I discovered, as I extended my reading, was a typical feature of American literature from the nineteenth century onwards, because the ambitious American writer felt he had to invent a literary language that was distinctively different from the inherited British one. Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman – they all put words and phrases together that were never seen in company on the same page in canonical English literature. Mark Twain’s use of American vernacular was another, different way of resisting the stylistic decorum of the old world – one which, according to Hemingway, shaped the subsequent development of American literature.
A prime example of the American writer’s urge to ‘make it new’ (in Ezra Pound’s celebrated words) was the work of John (Jack) Hawkes, who taught creative writing at Brown, and was highly esteemed by aficionados of avant-garde fiction. He was quoted as declaring: ‘I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.’ Park was an admirer and personal friend of Jack Hawkes and had hoped to introduce us, but unfortunately he and his family left Providence for San Francisco on a year’s sabbatical leave just before we arrived. In another respect it was fortunate, because he wanted to sublet his rented apartment in SF in the summer of ’65 at just the time we would be in need of one, for our plan was to drive to California in easy stages in the spring and make San Francisco our last place of residence before returning home. The sublet was agreed by correspondence between Jack and me, during which time I read two of his verbally exciting, narratively baffling novels, The Lime Twig (set in an unrecognisable version of England) and Second Skin, while he read my conventionally realistic The Picturegoers, and we exchanged polite compliments about each other’s work. Not surprisingly, he was experiencing difficulty getting his books published in England.
My own luck was exactly the reverse. Early in September I was astonished and delighted to receive a phone call from a man called Tom McCormack, an editor at Doubleday in New York, saying they wanted to publish Ginger, You’re Barmy. I had had no inkling of this possibility. I wasn’t aware that the novel had been submitted to any American publishers, and it was a most unlikely book to appeal to them. I suppose Tom McCormack must have told me how it came to him when he invited me down to New York for lunch at the Ritz, but if so I have forgotten. It was certainly not from MacGibbon & Kee. Tim O’Keeffe communicated the news of Doubleday’s offer with his congratulations in a letter which was sent by surface mail and therefore arrived weeks after the deal was done. I wrote a little humorous piece about the difference between the way British and American publishers treated their authors, which was published in the American Saturday Review and entertained Tom McCormack hugely. I liked him a lot, and was very sorry when he told me in October that he was leaving Doubleday – whether he jumped or was pushed I don’t know, but his cheerful tone suggested the former – and handed me over to another editor. Meanwhile I was getting on well with the British Museum novel, and negotiations for the publication of ‘The Novelist’s Medium’ jointly by Routledge and Columbia University Press in New York were proceeding promisingly.
Life was not entirely trouble-free. I had to have a tooth extracted, the first since childhood, because I couldn’t stand the pain of the root canal treatment that was required to save it (so much for the vaunted American dentistry – or perhaps I was unlucky with the recommended dentist). Then Mary was stung in the foot by a wasp on the Brown campus on her way to the launderette with the children, and went into a state of cataleptic shock from which she might have died if the launderette’s attendant hadn’t noticed and called me in time to get her to a doctor, who administered the necessary shot of adrenalin. Otherwise we basked in good fortune. Lance Hammond came to Providence to check up on my progress, and told me that because we had two children the Foundation had decided to give us a hire car for nine months instead of the usual three. I went down to New York to collect the car, a brand new Chevrolet Bel Air, which I drove out into the honking, heaving mid-town Manhattan rush hour, struggling with the unfamiliar steering column gear-shift and peering nervously over the dashboard at the vast expanse of bonnet, which I steered down one of the infinitely long avenues for block after block, not daring to turn left or right, until I found a place where I could safely park. I spent the night in the tiny apartment of Charles Tomlinson, a charming and dazzlingly handsome theatre designer from North Carolina whom Mary and I had met years before as student hosts at a London University summer school for American students, and had kept in touch with ever since. Next day I took the turnpike to Providence, a drive of several hours’ duration. Oh, the quiet power of the engine, the smooth, bump-absorbing ride, the soothing sound of the radio, as the miles slipped effortlessly by. What a magical change from the Ford Popular!
As Mary had not learned to drive in England, she did so in Providence, where it was in fact easier to pass the test, for the driving school instructors and the examiners seemed to be on intimate terms with each other. Her own instructor guaranteed that she would pass the test at the first attempt, and he was right. When she had difficulty reversing round a corner in her test, the examiner put his hand helpfully on the wheel to guide her. The instructor also ran a funeral parlour and, amazed to learn that she had no knowledge of such a facility in England, insisted on talking about its merits all the time she was driving with him. Mary was soon a safe, confident driver, however, and coped well with the nearest thing we had to an accident in our American year – when a rear tyre blew out at about 60 mph on a highway in Nevada, and she controlled the resulting skid to bring the car to a safe halt on the central reservation. While we were still in our seats, recovering from the shock, a highway patrol car drew up behind us, the Stetsoned policeman approached and, not noticing the flat tyre, sternly warned us that we were illegally parked – but he soon helped us to get on our way.
Having the Chevvy immediately enhanced the quality of our lives. We could shop at big supermarkets, and make expeditions to places of interest, like New Bedford on the south Massachusetts coast, with its famous whaling museum. And we ventured further north to Boston and environs, staying for a weekend with Bernard and Gabriel Bergonzi, who were living there with their two children while he was a visiting teacher at Brandeis University, and also met the large, hospitable family of Bernard McCabe, brother of the Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, the inspiring mentor of Terry Eagleton and the Slant group back in England. We were introduced to the McCabes through Martin Green (not to be confused with my editor at MacGibbon & Kee), whom we had met in Birmingham on a couple of occasions as a guest of the Bradburys when he was in England visiting his parents, and who taught at Tufts University with Bernard. I now belonged to a network of British academics temporarily or permanently employed in America who kept in touch and helped each other in various ways.
Martin Green was a particularly interesting member of this group, a remarkable man of whom we would see a good deal in the years to come. Some eight years older than me, he came from a poor family in rural Shropshire, no member of which had had a secondary education until he won scholarships to grammar school and Cambridge, where he read English. He was a victim of what I called earlier the ‘First-degree culture’ of English academia, and its one-chance-only final examinations. If ever there was a true intellectual, who deserved to be paid to think, write and teach in a university, it was Martin. But he got a poor first degree. I’m not sure whether it was a Lower Second or a Third, or what the cause was – whether it was overwork or anxiety or recklessly opinionated exam scripts – but this result effectively barred him from postgraduate study and an academic career in Britain. After various forms of employment in England, France and Turkey, he got a PhD at the University of Michigan, which qualified him for an academic career. He caused something of a stir in 1961 with a book in the Angry Young Man mode called A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons, about culture and society in England and America and his personal search for identity between these two nations, in which he put forward as his ideal Englishman an unlikely combination of qualities possessed discretely by D.H. Lawrence, F.R. Leavis, George Orwell and Kingsley Amis. While writing that book he had read C.P. Snow’s celebrated attack on the anti-scientific bias of British education and the governing class it produced, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959), and was persuaded by it to spend much of the next four years studying science at MIT and Cambridge in order to make his own contribution to the debate, Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry, published in 1964. By the time we met him he had resumed teaching at Tufts, and was writing mainly about American literature in a provocatively independent way. The senior professor in the field at Brown, Howard Waggoner, told me that Martin’s recent book on Hawthorne, ‘though wrong’, was the most important thing written about the author that year. He could be a rather formidable person in company: serious, sardonic and disinclined to engage in small talk. He had a sense of humour, but his laughter seemed more like a physical effort than a euphoric release of tension.
As a young man Martin had been converted to Catholicism, which explained why he was intimate with the McCabe family. He had previously seemed to us to have a settled bachelor persona, but at the McCabes’ he was evidently an item with a handsome young woman called Carol, who taught at a local Catholic college. I recall discussing with her on that occasion the current speculation that there might be a change in the Church’s teaching on birth control, and she said that she knew several Catholic couples who had decided to make their own conscientious decision on the matter while continuing to go to mass and communion. This was the first time I had heard of such a course of action, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it. It is hard to convey to those who have not experienced the kind of Catholic education Mary and I had received how all-embracing and all-controlling was the faith which it instilled. This was more marked in northern European countries, where Catholicism had assimilated something of the spiritual scrupulosity of Protestantism, than in the southern Latin ones, where the laity had a more relaxed attitude to contradictions between principles and behaviour. To us the Church was like a club: it had a rule book which covered all the possible contingencies of life, and if you kept them, or received absolution for breaking them, you were assured of eternal life and God’s help in the trials of this one. It seemed obvious that you couldn’t ignore the rules which you found inconvenient without forfeiting membership, and for this reason many Catholics had ‘lapsed’ over the issue of birth control. Of all the mortal sins, contraception was one of the most deliberate and habitual by its very nature, and incompatible with ‘a firm purpose of amendment’ in the sacrament of Penance; therefore couples who took the conscientious personal decision route would have to either make confessions that were invalid and possibly sacrilegious according to the rule book, or stop going to confession altogether – which was what vast numbers of Catholics did in due course. Mary and I were not yet ready to take that step.
I was getting towards the end of my novel about Adam Appleby. I had put this character through a series of farcical and alarming experiences in the course of a foggy November day, and I had decided early on in the compositional process to relieve his anxiety that Barbara might be pregnant again before the single day of the action came to an end (it was, after all, a comic novel). But I was preoccupied with the problem of how to combine that resolution with the thread of literary parody and pastiche in the novel, which had become more and more prominent as it developed. Paragraph-length passages echoing D.H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad, for instance, had been followed by whole episodes in the style of Ernest Hemingway and Henry James. It was essential that the last chapter should raise this game to its highest level. But how? The rationale for Adam’s propensity to reveries or delusions coloured by the style of various novelists was that he is writing a thesis on ‘The Long Sentence in Modern Fiction’. It occurred to me belatedly that the longest sentences in all modern fiction must be in that greatest of all circadian novels (i.e. those with a one-day action), James Joyces’s Ulysses. Molly Bloom’s twenty-five-thousand-word stream-of-consciousness monologue which concludes it contains only two full stops, one in the middle and one at the end. Problem solved! I could switch the novel’s point of view from Adam to Barbara in the final chapter, and have her half asleep in bed when he comes home late (like Bloom to Molly), relieved that her period has started in the course of the day, musing drowsily on the problems and paradoxes of sex, marriage and human fertility. When I remembered that Molly also starts her period halfway through that episode of Ulysses, I realised that there is such a thing as writer’s luck. But did I dare take this liberty with the writer I revered above all others? I couldn’t resist, because I saw that this shift of perspective to the wife’s viewpoint was exactly what the novel needed thematically, to provide a balanced view of its central topic:
. . . well perhaps the church will change and a good thing too there’ll be much less misery in the world but it’s silly to think that everything in the garden will be lovely it won’t it never is I think I always knew that before we were married perhaps every woman does how could we put up with menstruation, pregnancy and everything otherwise not like men he has this illusion that it’s only the birth control business that stops him from getting sex perfectly under control . . .
And in place of Molly’s affirmative keyword, ‘Yes’, with which Ulysses ends, I gave Barbara the more tentative ‘perhaps’, recalling Adam’s forecast of their marriage when they were courting:
. . . he said it’ll be wonderful you’ll see perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won’t be like you think perhaps that won’t matter perhaps.
The air temperature dropped and the first snow came. Old Providence looked pretty under its deep white covering, and we enjoyed trudging through it as the sun shone from a clear blue sky. We drove to Toronto to spend Christmas with Mary’s sister Eileen and her family. She had married John, a technical draughtsman, in the same year as Mary and I got married, and they had two boys about the same age as Julia and Stephen. We had planned to have a look at the Niagara Falls on our way, but the weather turned unseasonably mild just before we set off, and they were swathed in fog, so we could only listen to the roar of the water as we stood at the rail of the viewing platform. Eileen and John entertained us kindly in their suburban apartment, and Christmas Day was enhanced by the excitement of four children opening their presents. On Boxing Day we went to an open-air ice skating rink in the centre of the city so that Eileen’s elder boy could try out his new skates, but the surface was wet with melting ice so that if you fell over you got soaked. Back in Providence, the cold high-pressure weather returned, and we skated a few times on a frozen river wearing borrowed and second-hand skates – one of the most exhilarating experiences I have ever had. Going round and round a rink never seemed worth doing afterwards.
The Columbia University Press publishing committee had finally decided that ‘The Novelist’s Medium’ was worthy of publication under their imprint, but only on condition that I changed the title. By ‘medium’ I meant ‘language’ of course, but perhaps they thought it might be interpreted as a reference to spiritualism. I offered a number of alternatives including The Language of Fiction, which they accepted – only to quibble again a month or so later. They thought it implied a more comprehensive study of the subject than the book actually attempted, and proposed that I should drop the definite article. To clinch the deal and speed the process of publication, I agreed, as did Routledge for the same reasons, but I regretted it later. ‘Language of Fiction’ on its own is an unnatural locution, and consequently the book is often cited inaccurately as The Language of Fiction. MacGibbon & Kee were delighted with ‘The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm’ when they received it in February from Graham Watson, but I would have trouble with that title too in due course, and meanwhile Graham was frustrated by a clause in my contract for Ginger, You’re Barmy, which he described as ‘a villainous document’, not only giving them the option to publish my next novel, but retaining subsidiary rights in it too. These rights he managed to prise from them eventually. I was just happy to have secured the publication of the two books before we set off on our trek to California.
In February I received disturbing news from Malcolm, with whom I had been corresponding at intervals by airmail. The new University of East Anglia had head-hunted him for an appointment there, with the prospect of early promotion to senior lecturer and the opportunity to design an American Studies programme from scratch. New universities were springing up all over the country, often on the outskirts of pleasant cathedral towns like Norwich, and there were plenty of such enticing job opportunities. In the same month I was approached by Ian Gregor about my possible interest in one at the University of Kent at Canterbury, to which he had just moved from Edinburgh, and which was about to open its doors, but I was not tempted, much as I liked Ian. Malcolm obviously was tempted, but said, ‘I’m in a state of great indecision: one thing it makes me realise is how attached I am to Birmingham and how if I went I’d miss you.’ I was dismayed at the prospect, and wrote him a long letter laying out all the reasons I could think of why he should stay at Birmingham. In March, just before we left Providence, I heard that he had accepted the job at UEA. He told me later that he agonised over the decision and when he had to make it he went out with two letters in his pocket, one saying Yes and the other saying No. At the pillar box he decided to post the No letter, but someone at UEA phoned him next day and said, ‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’ and he agreed that he didn’t. Malcolm hated to say no to any invitation, as many people in academia and the media learned to their advantage, though not always to his. I wrote back, ‘Oh Malcolm, how could you do it? How could you turn your back on Brum? We’re really desolated.’ I felt that if I had not been in America at the vital moment I might have persuaded him to stay in Birmingham, but as time went on it became increasingly clear that such a separation was inevitable and essential if we were to develop our careers as novelists independently. Even so, as two academics who wrote satirical campus novels we were confused often enough in the minds of many people, and were frequently congratulated on writing each other’s books, a compliment difficult to receive gracefully.
At the end of March 1965 it was time to leave Providence, to pack our belongings in the capacious boot, or rather ‘trunk’, of the Chevrolet, bid farewell to the Honans and thank them for all their many kindnesses. The last of these was a list of the names and addresses of friends living in California which Jeannette compiled; she had written to them, and assured us that they would be very glad to meet us and even put us up. She and Park were sorry to see us go, partly because we were a link with their happy years in London. Neither of them, for different reasons, really loved the American way of life, which for Mary and me, liberated as we were from the chores and frustrations of our existence in England, had all kinds of novel attractions. When I came to write my essay on our year in America for the Harkness Foundation I called it ‘The Bowling Alley and the Sun’, a phrase taken from a poem by the seventeenth-century American poet Edward Taylor which celebrates God’s creation of the universe by asking a series of rhetorical questions, e.g. ‘Who Spread its Canopy? Or Curtains spun? / Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?’ I explained:
The Bowling Alley, the modern bowling alley, that curious place of popular resort and recreation, where half the fun of the simple and repetitive game lies in watching the machinery reset the pins and return the balls – this stands for everything in American life that is designed to tickle and appease our appetites as consumers, everything that seems to make the ordinary humdrum business of life require less effort and yield more pleasure than it does in England: motels and supermarkets, big cars and big refrigerators, central heating and ice cubes, bathroom showers, urban expressways, heated open-air swimming pools. And the sun stands for itself (for one sees so much more of it in America), but also for all the natural wonders of that vast and infinitely various country . . . America is a country peculiarly rich in euphoria, and one becomes more conscious of this the further one drives west . . .
Since 1965 England has acquired bowling alleys and most of the other amenities I celebrated in that passage, and we take them for granted now, while America, after decades of wars, assassinations, terrorist violence and economic crisis, has become a less euphoric place, but that was how it felt to me at the time. America provided the perfect ‘Abroad’ experience for me. It was fascinatingly different from home in topography, history, architecture, politics, manners and many other respects, especially the ways people used the English language in speech and writing. But because their language was a variety of English, I quickly acquired its different vocabulary and idioms and was able to understand and interact with the natives as I never could in any European country.
We took about two months to drive to California, a journey of a scale we would never have contemplated in Europe with two young children, but which was feasible in America because of the ubiquity of comfortable motels and restaurants used to catering for families. From Providence we went first to Philadelphia and Washington, where we did some sightseeing, and then drove south into Virginia, visiting Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, where the American genius for making domestic life easier was manifested early in Jefferson’s interior design ideas. Here we stayed for a few days at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where we coincided by arrangement with a visit by Jack Hawkes, who was giving a reading there. We enjoyed his company, but it was the only time we ever met. Before his reading there was a reception at which black waiters served drinks wearing white gloves, an index that we were now in the South. We did not venture further in that direction because it was the time of Civil Rights demonstrations, which were violently resisted by local white communities, and we had been advised that to take a car with New York number plates into the Deep South was to invite trouble. Consequently we turned north into Kentucky and crossed the great plains through Indiana, Illinois and Missouri until we paused at Hannibal, Mark Twain’s boyhood home on the Mississippi. Then we made for the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, which rose up slowly and majestically on the western horizon, and specifically for the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Malcolm’s introduction had secured me an invitation to the Conference on World Affairs, an annual event which he had attended and enthused about. Still going strong, it consists of a week of panel discussions on every possible subject by a hundred or so guest speakers from all over the world, attended by large enthusiastic audiences. I was asked to speak on, among other things, ‘Camp’, a term lately appropriated by Susan Sontag in a celebrated essay to describe a wide range of cultural attitudes and practices. I felt I should explain that in Britain it applied more narrowly to a stylised kind of speech and behaviour especially associated with homosexuality (the term ‘gay’ was not yet in general currency), and amused the audience with a letter home describing the Boulder campus and conference from a visitor who was a cross between Oscar Wilde and Kenneth Williams.
There was a party every night that week, and at one of them Mary and I met a nuclear physicist from the National Laboratory at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where the atom bomb was designed, who invited us to visit him there after the conference. By this time I had lost my native caution and reserve and said yes to any offer of a new experience. It was a long drive through an arid empty landscape until we reached the oasis of the Laboratory and the large settlement that had grown up around it to house and service its population of scientists, technicians and their families. There was an air of anticlimax about the place, as if the inhabitants were aware it had passed its peak of fame and achievement, and my most vivid memory is of the disaffected teenage daughter of our host, who described it as being at night ‘like a graveyard with lights’. From this desert citadel of science we made a literary pilgrimage to the D.H. Lawrence ranch near Taos, which the writer’s wealthy admirer Mabel Dodge Sterne gave to him and his wife Frieda. Here he wrote The Plumed Serpent and here Frieda eventually brought his ashes after his death in the South of France. It is owned and maintained by the University of New Mexico, but was unattended and looked rather neglected when we made our visit, though the little whitewashed memorial building was open, and I signed the visitors’ book, noting the names of several writers I knew above mine. It occurred to me that I was making the twentieth-century equivalent of the Grand Tour of Europe.
On the other side of the Rockies was Arizona, with its natural wonders – the Painted Desert, the giant Meteorite Crater and the Grand Canyon. What can one say about the Grand Canyon? This vast cleft in the earth is beyond sublime – the Romantic poets who were moved to eloquence by the Lake District or the Alps would have been rendered speechless by it, it is so monumentally indifferent to the human beings who creep along its edges and peer nervously down at the ribbon of the Colorado River a mile below. From beyond sublime we went to beyond ridiculous in Nevada – to the surreal architecture of Las Vegas. We stayed two days, lounging round the motel pool by day, seeing extravagant floor shows in the evenings which the casinos put on at modest prices to lure customers, and left the town having gambled just once, with a 50-cent piece on a fruit machine, perhaps a record.
From there we went to Palm Springs, the Californian desert resort favoured by Hollywood celebrities and wealthy retirees, where we had a reunion with my aunt Eileen. After living for some years in San Francisco, and then in Vancouver, she had sought a warmer, drier climate, and Palm Springs certainly had that. One day I left a small transistor radio on the dashboard of the car in the sun, and when I came back the plastic casing had softened and curled so that it resembled something painted by Salvador Dalí. Eileen had found a job with a PR firm, her beautiful manners and perfect diction serving her well in this sphere. She was delighted to see us, and to meet the children for the first time, and we stayed for several days in the comfortable motel suite she had found for us, with the luxury of a kitchen and two bedrooms. We had a lot to talk about and catch up on. Eileen seemed pleased with her situation, but before long she would be on the move again: she went on holiday to Hawaii and was enchanted by the place, feeling that she had at last found the perfect climate – tropical sunshine cooled by the trade winds – and an ocean you could comfortably swim in all year round. She moved there, soon found a job in Waikiki, an apartment ten minutes’ walk from the beach, and was very happy until the impact of mass tourism made the location less idyllic.
Then we were off again, across the Joshua Tree desert to the Californian coast – to La Jolla, near San Diego in the extreme south, and then north to Los Angeles, where we visited Disneyland for the children’s sake, and for my sake Forest Lawn, the huge cemetery-cum-theme-park satirised by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One. In both locations we were hospitably entertained and escorted by friends of Jeannette’s. The generosity of the people we met in this way never ceased to amaze me and caused occasional twinges of guilt, but they showed no signs of feeling exploited.
A two-day drive from Los Angeles up the scenic coastal Route 101 took us to our home for the summer in San Francisco. The apartment was shabby, as Jack Hawkes had warned us, but it was spacious, with a room on the ground floor which I could use as a study, and the situation was superb, high up on one of the city’s many hills, above the Marina, where we sometimes went on Sundays to watch the yacht racing, and joined in a kite-flying competition on Independence Day. From the crest of the hill you could see the whole bay spread out between the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. The former took us to the green hills of Marin County, to the arty-crafty little port of Sausalito and the Pacific rollers breaking on Stinson Beach; the latter to Berkeley, and the vast University of California campus, which turned out to have a campanile almost identical to Birmingham’s, but built of white stone instead of red brick. Brian Cox, senior lecturer at Hull and co-editor of the Critical Quarterly, in which I had published some articles, was a visiting professor in the English Department and introduced me to its current chairman, Mark Schorer, whose essays on style in the modern novel had fed into Language of Fiction. We were invited to parties given by Schorer and his wife, a charming and hospitable couple, in a house perched on a hill so steep it had a chairlift to the front door; and Brian invited us to dinner to meet a rising young star in the English Department called Stanley Fish, and his wife Adrienne.
Stanley had written a well-received book on the sixteenth-century English poet John Skelton, and was now working on one about Milton. He and Adrienne had both grown up in Providence, which provided us with an immediate conversational topic, and had Jewish family backgrounds. One of the things that had struck me about American universities was the very high proportion of Jews among the faculty compared to England, but Stanley stood out from the crowd. Faculty who specialised in English literature, especially older English literature, tended to be Anglophile, took every opportunity to study or do research in England, cultivated English manners and even dressed like Englishmen, in tweed jackets with leather elbow patches. Stanley had never been to England or anywhere else in Europe, and appeared to have no wish to do so. He was typically American in all his tastes, enjoying movies, popular music, television, cars, shopping, baseball, and basketball – which, though short and slight in stature, he liked to play as well as watch. He was very ambitious and made no attempt to disguise it, and in argument spoke wittily and pungently in perfectly formed sentences. He was not loved by all his colleagues, but I found his openness engaging and stimulating, and the contrast between his character and his academic specialism fascinated me. Adrienne was less assertive, but had a sly sense of humour, sometimes turned on her spouse. We quickly became friends of this lively couple.
On my quite frequent trips across the double-decker Bay Bridge to Berkeley I observed with interest the nascent Free Speech movement organised by the students to resist attempts by the authorities to suppress political speeches, demonstrations and publications on campus. Initially focused on domestic civil rights, the FSM increasingly attacked the ‘military-industrial complex’ and its influence on US foreign policy, especially in Vietnam. I attended one of the first ‘teach-ins’ – occasions when students invited sympathetic celebrity speakers to address them in an open-air amphitheatre on campus – and heard Norman Mailer doing his oratorical stuff to a large and enthusiastic audience. I sensed that something of more than ephemeral import was happening at Berkeley, and wrote a report about this event for The Tablet.
After our long holiday on the road, I was keen to do some writing in the three months we were to spend in San Francisco. I had discovered that Columbia University Press published a series of pamphlets, about 15,000 words in length, on individual authors of the twentieth century. They were called Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, and I offered to write one on Graham Greene. In contrast to the Press’s previous leisurely pace, they accepted promptly and asked if I could deliver it by September, so I bought or borrowed Greene’s novels, re-read them, and set to work. I was distracted for a while by a crisis over my British Museum novel, which was going through the editorial process at MacGibbon & Kee, scheduled for autumn publication. Tim O’Keeffe wrote, rather late in the day, to ask if I had obtained permission to use the line, ‘The British Museum had lost its charm’, for the title. Inexperienced in these matters, I had not done so. I applied to the Gershwin Publishing Corporation for permission, which was refused. I pleaded and offered to pay anything within reason, but they were adamant, claiming that they might want to use the line themselves as a title. I learned later that the publishers of popular song lyrics are, of all their kind, the most jealously protective of copyright. Tim O’Keeffe asked me for an alternative title, and I suggested a line from Paradise Lost, ‘Adam from the cold sudden damp recovering’, which they didn’t like. I sent them a long list of other titles, of which my own preference was for ‘Wombsday’, which they rejected. The last on the list was ‘The British Museum is Falling Down’, and that was what we agreed on. There was a false fire alarm in the Reading Room in the novel which gave some warrant for this title, and there is a theory of some relevance that the nursery rhyme which inspired it was originally an apology to ‘my fair lady’ for erectile dysfunction, but I mourned the loss of my original choice. The best I could do to repair the loss was to use the first four lines of the song as an epigraph to the first chapter (every chapter of the novel had an epigraph referring to the British Museum), for which MacGibbon & Kee managed to get permission.
At the beginning of July, Doubleday’s representative in San Francisco took us out to lunch to celebrate the publication of their edition of Ginger, You’re Barmy, and organised some publicity. I was interviewed on local TV and donned headphones for a radio phone-in programme (a form of broadcasting as yet unknown in England) to answer questions about the British Army from people in the Bay Area who had nothing better to do. There was one rave review, in a Chicago paper, but the rest were mostly unenthusiastic. I was not surprised – the surprise was that Doubleday had bought a book which had not been very successful in England in the first place. I was not surprised either when later they turned down The British Museum is Falling Down. My new editor there, James Ross, loved it and described himself as ‘disturbed, distressed and depressed’ by the decision, which might have been different if Ginger hadn’t been a flop.
Meanwhile we made the most of the pleasures of San Francisco, about which I rhapsodised in my Harkness essay:
the sense of living on the very crest of civilization, serene and poised as a surf-rider, that graced the simplest experience: riding the steep, roller coaster hills, browsing in the City Lights Bookshop, seeing a ship slide past the end of a city street, having tea in the Japanese Tea Gardens, watching the white fog creep in through the Golden Gate like a living thing, wondering idly, what shall we do this evening, shall we go down to North Beach and see Lenny Bruce at the Hungry i, or hear Charlie Byrd play his guitar, or have a Mexican meal, or call up some friends and invite them over?
Then, suddenly, it was time to go home, first traversing those thousands of American miles. We chose a more direct and northerly route than our outward journey, aiming to cover it in about three weeks, with breaks of a few days at the Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks, and in Chicago. The Chevrolet was not air-conditioned – only luxury cars were in those days – and to avoid the summer heat of the day we developed a routine of going to bed early, getting up at three or four in the morning, and driving for five or six hours with the children in sleeping bags on the back seat, extended by an ingenious arrangement of luggage, and then looking for a nice motel with a pool.
. . . it was pleasant driving quickly along empty roads with the children asleep in the back, talking quietly and sipping black coffee picked up from an all-night café, the dawn spread across the sky as we drove straight into the rising sun. We saw many tremendous dawns, angry red and yellow over Nevada, sad pastel shades over South Dakota. We climbed the 10,000 foot Powder River Pass over the Bighorn Mountains, Montana, in the dark; but when we got to the plateau at the top it was dawn, and as we began to descend it was like being in an airplane, we were looking down on the cloud cover, and startled deer looked at us from the side of the road.
Sometimes Stephen would wake up and ask, ‘Where are we going?’ to which I would reply, ‘To a motel,’ upon which, apparently satisfied, he would fall asleep again. Poor Stephen! He was much too young to get anything out of our year in America, while Julia, though old enough to enjoy many things at the time, has little or no memory of them. Sometimes I feel a little guilty in retrospect on this account, but no regret. There are moments in life when you have to be a little selfish to make the most of it, and accepting the Harkness Fellowship was one.