A Year to Remember Page 4

  I had in fact, become every bit as much a resident of New York as, one year earlier, I had been a resident of London, and here, every bit as much as there, I found it impossible to concentrate upon my work when I was leading an animated metropolitan life.

  In the early ’20s when I had a half-time job in my father’s publishing house, Chapman & Hall, spending Mondays and Fridays in his office, I used during the football season, between mid-September and mid-April, to catch a train every Monday night to a small town in Metroland called Radlett, two miles walk from which was the village of Shenley. In its local inn, The White Horse – my board and lodging cost eight shillings a day – I wrote solidly for three days. On the Friday morning I returned to London; I spent the night with my parents; on the Saturday I played football for Rosslyn Park. During Sunday I was a social Londoner. London in the winter, in those days, was a lively and animated city.

  This pattern had proved very satisfactory, and I realised that if I was to get my novel finished before I sailed for England I should have to find some equivalent for The White Horse at Shenley. It was not too easy. There is no equivalent in the U.S.A. for the English village ‘pub’ within easy reach of London which has a couple of bedrooms available for the casual motorist. Indeed, when American troops were in England during the Second War they found the village pub one of the most endearing as unusual features of English life. In 1931 the motel did not exist. In the end I found a comfortable hotel two miles from New London, where I put in three solid weeks of writing and had my novel finished by the second week in March.

  I was due to sail on March 24th. I was taking the ‘Lafayette’ — one of the French Line’s newest but slower ships. It sailed at 11.30 a.m., so there could be no ‘pouring’ on to her on the night before. I arranged to have a supper in my flat, then we could go down to the village, to the county fair. There were about twelve guests. Elinor Sherwin was there, the Langdon Posts, Carl Brandt – Carol was in London; I fancy that it was during that visit to London that they decided that they might as well get married – Claud Cockburn, probably Hope Hale, Henry Williamson, John Farrar and his wife, Alan Rinehart was away, but Stanley was there. And of course the girl whose omnipresence after January had decided me that if I was to get my novel finished, I must leave New York.

  They were the dozen out of the thirty people that I had been seeing most of in New York, of whom I had grown the fondest. Of the last eleven months I had spent five in New York, which was a greater time than I had spent in any city during the last six years. I had become identified with the city’s life, and these dozen people were the core of my life there. It was strange to realise that in eighteen hours I would have cut the threads that bound me to their lives. I had no idea when I would be coming back. I’ll be coming back soon, I said, and of course I should some day. New York was a base, an essential base for a writer. But should I ever be here for so long a time again?

  As I waited for the first guests to arrive, I reflected that several of them had not known each other a year ago; that though they were now good friends they had only become friends because I had been their catalyst. When I had gone, would half of them ever see each other again? They would return to the pattern of their own lives; when they met in the street or in a bar they would say ‘Have you heard anything of Alec lately? Have you any idea when he will be coming over?’

  I had no idea then that New York would become a second, if not a first, home for me so that I should become in my small way a centre of a group – so that people would be saying ‘we never seem to see each other except when Alec’s here.’

  I am always happier as a host than as a guest. I enjoy bringing friends into a life of my own: which is something that you can do in a city the size of New York, and which you have to be on your guard against in small communities like a West Indian island. I have several times heard West Indians complain that visitors arrive with letters of introduction to members of different groups. They are entertained by those groups, then they start entertaining back people who know about one another, quite like one another, but don’t want to meet each other at intimate dinner parties. Even in London you have to be careful. When I married, several old friends complained to my wife that ‘they never knew whom they would meet at Alec’s.’ I would have thought that was a compliment to my versatility as a man about town. But it was not intended that way. In New York that would not be true. New Yorkers are always ready to welcome the newcomer.

  Of the friends that I made during those four and half months, only four are still active in the city’s life – Carol Hill, Selma Robinson, Donita Borden and Benjamin Sonnenberg. Ben was then at the start of his spectacular rise to prominence. One of his many concerns at that time was the publicity of the Hotel Chatham. When I arrived in New York in April 1930 for the fating of Hot Countries it was in a suite there that I was installed. Our paths were to cross frequently during the next few years; then in 1950 when Lipton’s needed a book written on Sir Thomas, Ben, who handled Lipton’s publicity, thought of me. What a number of receptions at his sumptuous house in Grammercy Park have I not attended since. He is in as lively form as ever. I suppose I should be grateful that as many as four of my 1930 friends are still around. Forty-four years is a long time.

  On my last morning Janet Post drove down with me to the docks. I organised my luggage then we pushed our way through the crowded promenade to the upper deck. We found a corner sheltered from the wind. The sun was shining; the tall towers of Manhattan looked very lovely in its amber radiance against the blue expanse of sky. We gossiped casually and easily. We knew that we should meet again. Her sister-in-law was married to an Englishman. She came over to England every other year. Besides, nôtre tendresse – there is no word for it in English – had gone very deep. The siren hooted, a bellboy came along the decks beating upon a gong. ‘I’d better be on my way,’ said Janet.

  The Langdon Posts are no longer married, and Janet, now the wife of William Banning, lives in a ranch in Southern California, in Duarte. I have paid many visits there. Only a few months ago at Easter I was bathing in her swimming pool, when New York was recovering from the snow storm that had drenched the bonnets of the Easter Parade. Forty years have not marred her beauty. She is as slim and elegant as ever. The other day in London, at the Athenaeum, I showed a recent photograph of her to one of her Cambridge beaux. ‘She looks the same,’ he said.

  IV

  There are quite a few things that I miss in this ‘Brave New World’ – nothing more than transatlantic crossings. Whenever I can I still make the crossing by sea, but it is becoming increasingly hard to arrange one’s travel in terms of the sea. Ships nowadays make their money out of cruises. They provide holidays afloat – not transportation. Moreover, you meet nowadays a different class of traveller by sea. Up till 1939, anyone who wanted to cross from England to New York had to go by sea. You were likely to find on board a minister of state, a prominent actress, a socialite in the news, the heir to a Dukedom. You met on equal terms men and women whom you would not expect to meet in the ordinary routine of your life: and you were quite likely to have a real talk with them. Formal persons were ready to relax on board. Nowadays such people have not the time to go by sea. You are only likely to meet on board elderly and retired people for whom time is of no importance; and families who are moving their residences with not only luggage but furniture and possessions. Thirty-five years ago, during the three or four days before I sailed I would be making enquiries to find out who would be on board. New York friends would be saying, ‘What luck for you, you’ll meet Frank and Elsie.’ The seeing off and the meeting of ships was part of the city’s life, part of the city’s drama. Newspapers carried ‘on the gangplank’ columns.

  There was animated discussion as to which lines were the most attractive. The French line had the admirable slogan ‘You are in France the moment you step aboard.’ Personally, I rarely travelled by a British ship because I wanted to be in a foreign atmosphere. I saw enough of my compatriots a
t home. I usually travelled French, because of my love both of France and the French cuisine. Moreover, they served complimentary table wine which for me reduced the cost of a trip considerably.

  I usually travelled by the eight or nine day boats. They were cheaper, they were as comfortable, and – what was important – they gave me the length of time aboard that I needed to write a short story. I can only work when I live in an atmosphere of day to day eventlessness. A man friend of long standing told me that he rarely failed to have a love affair on board. ‘I don’t know how else one fills in the time.’ Though I met Ruth on a liner coming up from Tahiti to San Francisco, I have never had a romance on board, except when I have brought a travelling companion with me.

  On the first day out, I settle down to my manuscript directly after breakfast, and by the last day have completed the story that will pay my passage. On westbound trips when the clock goes forward, I would find myself waking later every day and after the second day would start missing lunch.

  The trip on the ‘Lafayette’ was no exception, apart from the fact that I was working on articles not short stories. Whenever possible I try to get a table by myself on board: that leaves me freer to make my own friends. This time it was not possible, but I am glad that it was not, because I found myself at a table alone with a very charming young woman called Sally Edmondson, whose parents ran the Coca-Cola plant in Anniston, Alabama. We had become friends by the time that the ship docked. We kept up with one another and a year later I visited her in Anniston. They arranged a picnic excursion that gave me a new angle on American mores. A group of about thirty, youngish men and women, drove out into the country, I should say some seventy miles away. We stayed in a barn beside a river. The men slept in one room, the women in another. We had brought mattresses. We cooked ourselves a stew with hamburgers and hot dogs. After the meal we sat round an open fire, with banjos, sometimes singing, now and again playing guessing games, ‘Truths’ and things like that. There was no hard liquor. No one brought a hip flask. We drank Coca-Cola. It was all very fresh and healthy; how different from the conventional picture of the average débutante’s wild party. On that picnic I met Sally Henderson Hay, the poetess, whom I was to find over twenty years later in the Macdowell Colony at Peterboro’ New Hampshire.

  In Washington, after the war, I was to re-meet my hostess, by which time her husband was a Colonel stationed in the Pentagon. She was to give me an amusing example of Anglo—American misunderstanding. She had had a mild attack of ‘flu in London and had asked the hotel to send a doctor. She had had the right medicine provided and a couple of weeks later had received his bill. It had been marked ‘with compliments’. She had taken this to mean that his visit was complimentary. She had thought how very gracious of him ‘to treat me free, because I am a lone American in London.’ It was not till a long time later that she learnt that it was customary in England to present bills marked ‘with compliments’ : by then she had forgotten not only his name but that of the hotel. She felt very badly about that. ‘He’ll think Americans don’t pay their bills’; I told her that Americans knew that a great many of the English never paid their bills.

  My friendship with Sally Edmondson was typical of quite a number of such friendships that I was to make in future years. Travelling around, for the most part, even in my married period, as an unattached male, I was frequently making contacts with attractive females whom I met in boats, in trains, and at parties. One of the pleasantest features of our emancipated modern world is the freedom that it gives to men and women to make friendships that have no ulterior objective. I do not suppose that any man knows exactly what is at the back of his mind the first time he asks a woman out to dinner; if he is wise he thinks: ‘This is someone I am sure that I could get to like. Let’s see how it turns out.’ Now and again of course he is on the brink of a romance, but very often he is not, and he is starting one of those friendships which have their own special quality because they are with a woman, and because the spark which starts them is a flicker of mutual physical attraction. Margaret Lane has written a very charming essay on this subject called Amitié Amoureuse. Such friendships enrich a man’s life, and a woman’s too, immeasurably. They have also in my case enlarged considerably my knowledge of the United States. I should never have gone to Anniston, Alabama, but for Sally Edmondson.

  A friendship started on the ‘Columbus’ in June 1930 has made Albuquerque one of my ports of call for forty years. I have not been limited to the towns to which my lecture agent books me or my publisher sends me in the interests of publicity.

  There was another enlivening fellow traveller on the ‘Lafayette’, the Saturday Evening Post short story writer Richard Connell: he was one of Carl Brandt’s clients and was a few years older than myself. We soon found we had a great deal in common. On the second or third day out he said, ‘I’ve read one or two of your books and liked them, I don’t suppose you’ve read a line of mine.’

  ‘I don’t often read the Saturday Evening Post I said.

  ‘If you did, I don’t suppose you’d remember me; that’s the worst of writing for magazines. No one’s ever heard of you. Which magazines do you read?’

  ‘The New Yorker and Cosmopolitan.’

  ‘You would. That’s not being rude. They both specialise in writers whom you’ve heard of through their books. No one knows by name anyone who writes only for magazines; immense though the circulation of those magazines may be.’

  He did not seem in the least bitter about it. He was simply stating a fact.

  ‘I’d have thought,’ I said, ‘that magazine readers would have their favourite authors.’

  ‘You’d think so. Editors would like to think so and agents persuade them that they must raise the prices for their favourites. But you can’t persuade any magazine writer that they have. I’ve hardly ever met a reader who has heard of me, and if I do, he thinks that I have written something that I haven’t.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever published a selection of your stories in a book?’

  ‘Who’d want to pay two dollars fifty for what he can get for a dime: all by the same author too!’

  As far as I knew I had never read one of Connell’s stories, and I never have. Whenever I turned over a copy of the Saturday Evening Post on a bookstall, it was not to find him there. He was a very successful writer in his day.

  I was planning to spend only a very short while in England, less than two weeks; I was anxious to reach Villefranche and get down to work on a solid contemporary novel. I needed to get down on paper both my experiences in the U.S.A. and my Californian romance: I had reached, I felt, the point when I could recollect that particular emotion in tranquillity.

  With only ten or so days available, I could make no attempt to pick up the threads of my London life. Experience of the past had counselled me how carefully I had to plan my returns in advance, issuing invitations from abroad for this luncheon or that dinner. When I had first begun to travel in June 1926, it had taken me a long time to break my threads with English life. There were so many things I wanted to do next month or the week after that. A few pages back I explained how interwoven was the pattern of English social life. The Londoner who returns to the city of his birth after a seven-month absence without previous preparation is met on the telephone by an unenthusiastic, ‘Oh, so you’ve been away? I thought I hadn’t seen you at the Savile lately.’

  You suggest that it would be nice if you could get together. There is a tepid agreement, then a pause. ‘Couldn’t you dine or lunch with me?’ you ask. ‘That’s very nice of you. I’m pretty booked this week, next week too for that matter.’

  You arrange a meeting for the Friday fortnight. Three weeks after that just when you are packing to take off again, he calls to ask if you can dine with him in two weeks’ time. ‘I’m so sorry,’ you say, ‘I am leaving for New York next Thursday.’