A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (9 page)

I remember my mother's story of her first emotional contact with British history. It was at a school assembly on a January morning of 1901 when the headmistress, Miss Chapin, announced to the girls that the sixty-four-year reign of Queen Victoria of England had come to an end. And she added: "I am going to ask Priscilla Stanton to recite for us Lord Tennyson's dedication of the
Idylls of the King
to the memory of the Prince Consort, which I know she has by heart."

Mother, aged thirteen, suddenly inspired with a courage hitherto unknown to her, sprang to her feet and rang out the lines, ending with the invocation to the widowed queen: "Till God has placed thee at his side again."

Miss Chapin murmured reverently: "And now God has placed her at his side again." Mother used to say, not entirely in jest, that, like Pheidippides, she should have died then and there, at the peak of her glory, and that her whole afterlife had been an anticlimax.

We didn't go to England as a family until I was fifteen, and then I was thrilled as never before. To me it was like my history book illustrated. I saw King George leaving Westminster Abbey with the little princesses; I counted the double line of Rolls-Royce limousines, each with a coat of arms painted on its door, parked by the Ritz; I reveled in the grandeur of Windsor, and Blenheim. But there was one unfortunate occurrence. There was a drought on, and the newspapers urged their readers to emulate His Majesty and use only an inch of water in their tub. My room in Flemings Hotel on Half-Moon Street was directly over the reception desk, so that the scandal of the tub that I allowed to overflow while I was distracted with a movie magazine was apparent to all.

Standing with my father in the crowded elevator the next day I had to listen to the speculations of the outraged hotel guests. "Who caused that shocking flood?" "They say it was a Yankee boy." "Oh, of course. You might have known."

Father gave my ear a painful pinch. "Listen to them! And they're right, too."

The English are too polite to tell us what they often think of us. I had several experiences during the war while my ship, an LST (landing ship, tank), was operating out of ports in the English Channel. On liberty I would take myself sightseeing. Amphibious officers tended to dress carelessly, particularly when not on duty, and it was sometimes difficult to tell just what we were. As I have a bit of an English accent I was often taken for that by drivers who picked me up when I hitchhiked.

"Are they as bad where you are as where we are?" they would sometimes ask. "I suppose I should tell you I'm an American naval officer." "Oh, I beg your pardon."

I understood that it was a hardship for many to have two million GIs parked on them in the south of England. Our boys on the whole were fine, but American arrogance, particularly about their superior equipment, can be hard to take.

Certainly over the years of my adult life the old legend of the arrogant British has dwindled to almost nothing. But it was very real once. The possession of a world empire of "half of creation," as Kipling put it, and the assumed duty of policing "lesser breeds without the law" hardly engendered humility, and even a slight perusal of English nineteenth-century fiction gives one startling examples of just how superior the superior people used to feel. Jane Austen's Lady Catherine de Bourgh strikes us today as a caricature, but was she? A peer's daughter in
Jane Eyre
commands a footman to "Cease your chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding," and the Duke of Omnium, Trollope's model for the perfect British nobleman, finds it difficult to accept for the wife of his heir a beautiful and cultivated American girl whose father has been considered a potential presidential candidate. In my own day I knew an imperial relic in India who paid his help by tossing coins at their feet as they stood before him.

Trollope, whose important position in the post office carried him to all parts of the empire, was certainly one of the great reporters of his day. In his numberless novels he invariably defines the exact social class of every character, supplies his income and the origin of his family, and even lets us know whether he is content with his position in life or hankers to improve it. Class is never neglected. To what is called a gentleman, however, and this is never quite clear, except that it is more a matter of character than of wealth or title, more doors are open. He, as in
The Duke's Children,
may even aspire to Omnium's daughter, though it's going to be a struggle. And Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
tells Lady Catherine that the fact alone that she is a gentleman's daughter qualifies her to marry the millionaire grandson of an earl.

I would have, some years later, the chance to witness an instance of the disappearing arrogance of aristocratic Britain. I had been taken by a socially well-connected friend to a very swell house party in a great castle in Wales. It was my only such experience and I was much awed. Of course I knew nobody but the friend who had been allowed to bring me, and my hostess, who had a great title and even greater wealth, thinking that anything might be expected of an unknown and probably impecunious Yankee, took upon herself, perhaps as a kindness, for she was as charming as she was blunt, to warn me that her daughters would have only a pittance, that everything went to the heir.

She also referred to an American lady, also staying at the castle as a friend of one of her sons, as "common," which she certainly was, though it would have surprised me to hear an American hostess so refer to a houseguest. But English aristocrats of her day said what they pleased, when they pleased, and to whom they pleased. In a way it was rather attractive.

I
GRADUATED FROM
Groton School in 1935 with twenty-eight other boys. Their future was not undistinguished. I became a recognized novelist and president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. William McCormick Blair, the number one aide of Adlai Stevenson, would be our ambassador to the Philippines. John Brooks was president of the Celanese Company; William P. Bundy was an assistant secretary of state and close adviser to President Johnson. Marshall Green became ambassador to Indonesia and Australia. James Higgins was president of the Mellon Bank, and Eben Pyne of City Bank. Stanley Resor was secretary of the army, and Robert Whitney would have almost surely become president of J. P. Morgan & Co. had he not been killed in an auto accident. Arthur Gardner also would probably have been heard from in his very untypical Groton career as a Jesuit priest had he not succumbed early to polio, released from his vows so that, dying, he could wed the wonderful nurse who attended to him.

Not a bad showing for a small class, but what was even more remarkable was that all the others, if less spectacular, had successful business or professional careers. There was not a failure in the crowd.

Although, as I have stated, my years at Groton coincided with the worst period of the Great Depression, there was no instance of radical or revolutionary political activity on the campus. Alfred Kazin, the great literary critic and my contemporary, told me once that in his West side Manhattan boyhood everyone he knew had been a communist. I replied that in my East side no one I knew had been.

It was a bitterly divided society but the repercussions were not felt at Groton except when our Scottish history teacher, George Rickey, married on a vacation a radical girl from Greenwich Village and brought her to the school. She soon made her contempt for the smug faculty wives and the "stuffy, spoiled little boys" so manifest that her connection with both them and her genius of a husband had to be severed, and he was left free for the splendid artistic career that soon opened before him.

I, however, remained true to the family conservatism. A few years later, when F.D.R.'s presidential campaign motorcade came through New Haven where I was a Yale freshman, I waved a huge sunflower, Alfred Landon's symbol, in front of it and got struck in the face by a policeman. It was not until Jack Kennedy that I voted for a Democratic president.

The families of most of the Groton boys had not only been Republicans but were bitterly anti-New Deal and anti-F.D.R., though the president was a graduate of the school himself and had sent his sons there. We boys were less impassioned than our parents and enjoyed the hustle and bustle and circling of motorcycles that accompanied the presidential visits to the school. They seemed to put us on the map, and I was even proud of a relationship to the great man.

Father used to claim that the fact that the president's father's first wife had been a Howland cousin did not make us blood kin, but he didn't realize that there had been three Roosevelt-Howland marriages and that he and F.D.R. were indubitably third cousins. New York, however, unlike the southern states, pays little attention to cousins more distant than first, and as there were dozens of people in town in the same relationship to the president, many of whom were not proud of it, it was not a matter of note in our family.

Overall, I was not especially concerned with things political. At Yale I continued acting with the dramatic society there until I appeared in a Goldoni comedy as a girl disguised as a boy, and my father did not think that this exhibition of confused sexual identity would enhance my image in the college. No doubt I took his criticism too seriously. Father and his Yale classmates were rather what we called too bulldog, but in my disgust I gave up the dramatic society altogether.

I continued to be stagestruck and went to New York frequently just to go to the theatre. I remember with a particular thrill John Gielgud in
Hamlet
and Nazimova in
Ghosts
and
The Cherry Orchard.
Indeed Nazimova's Mrs. Alving was a unique dramatic experience for me; I went three times to hear her tell her true life story to the incredulous pastor, and I was fascinated at a later time to read Tennessee Williams had given Nazimova in this role as a factor in his becoming a playwright. I like to think that we may have attended the same performance.

Later in life, I would write several plays, but such was never my thing. The only one that was ever produced was a one-act piece called
The Club Bedroom
with a cast of three women. A production required only a set with one portrait (an empty frame would do for an imaginative audience). It was done on Channel 13 and several times off-Broadway. I attended every performance, and later, when my wife, Adele, asked me why, I replied with a quip from the
New Yorker:
"Infatuation with the sound of one's own words department."

The theatre is indeed a dangerous Lorelei combing her golden hair with a golden comb over the vessels wrecked on the rocky shore below her, and it took a real effort for me to give her up. The trouble is that one always sees one's unproduced drama as it is splendidly enacted in one's imagination. The rejected novelist sees only a manuscript and a bad one.

The would-be playwright may also be misled by associates in the trade. The theatre world is a world to itself; to some in it nothing else is real. I remember a cocktail party given by Worthington Miner, the producer who was then planning to do a play of mine about which he later changed his mind. The guests were all theatre people, except one, Mrs. Miner's uncle, whom nobody recognized but me. In any other gathering he would have been the center of attention as James Byrne, governor, ambassador, secretary of state, and U.S Supreme Court justice. But here he was nobody.

As I have said, perhaps too often, given my firm hold on the notion, that at no time in my youth was I an athlete. Far from it, I confess. Nor did I have any interest in or admiration for such greats. My father was an excellent tennis player and once scored a hole-in-one on the Piping Rock Club golf course, but in accordance with the extreme generosity of his nature, he never dropped even a hint that he was disappointed that I hadn't inherited any of his facility or interest in this area.

Very different were the men of my mother's family, the Stantons, whom I favored in appearance, and who shared some of my athletic disability without any of my compensating indifference to it. My brother John, for example, slaved over his tennis, and later golf, as if his very life depended on them, without achieving more than a decent competence, and Bill Stanton, who had moved to Hong Kong where he could afford to devote his life to horses and polo, became only adequately adept in the latter game, despite numerous nasty falls.

I'm afraid that I viewed these two men's obsession, as I saw it, on the subject of sport with a faint contempt, as if they were worshipping a lesser god than mine of literature. It has often struck me that, at least in their case, there seemed to be a relationship between the care they took over their personal appearance and the pains with which they trained themselves for their favorite sport. I was on a motor trip with Uncle Bill in Europe when he suddenly realized he didn't have the right suit for the club in Singapore to which he was bound and he cabled his "number one boy" in Hong Kong to put one on the plane for him. I could have almost lived on what my brother expended on shirts and cufflinks. Neither man was possessed of the least ambition for getting ahead in the world, but they both cared strongly about how they looked and how people with whom they associated looked, and whether the latter's manners were good and how they behaved, and what sports they played.

I
N MY YOUNGER
years I was subject to a severe emotional hang-up that had a purely negative effect on my personality. The problem was not immediately apparent to friends or family. Not surprising, as the concern was a strong tendency to reject indignantly any sexual approach to myself made by either girl or boy. It was as if I were actually defending myself from a blow.

With boys this was confined to an occasional nightly visit to my cubicle at boarding school where my angry refusal was quickly accepted, for those caught were liable to expulsion, and who wanted an unwilling partner, anyway? Later on, in college, such invitations ceased, because those so inclined had learned to recognize each other or make discreet inquiries. Only a very handsome male was propositioned without some checking, and I was not that.