Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (42 page)

We floated on down the lovely river. I saw many wild duck, the sun went down into shimmering rapids ahead, twilight crept out of the misty earth, almost together I saw a cormorant and an owl. At last, in full darkness we reached the stage, eleven miles from the hotel. Here a truck would come and carry us and the boat back to Villarrica. Other fishermen, who had come down ahead of us, had been using dry fly only, so had caught brown trout, some considerably bigger than mine. I believe the record brown on the Token was over 30 lb. I learned that the fishermen, who had struck me as unusually dark-complexioned, were of Syrian descent, and all engaged in the carpet business.

The hotel truck did not come and, after talking around a big fire for an hour, we all picked up our gear, staked down the boats, and trudged a mile to the main road. Soon an empty truck stopped for us and we all piled in, fishermen, fishermen's wives, Indian guides, boatmen,
rotos,
trout, fishing rods, nets, creels, flasks full of pisco, and me. As cars passed us from behind their lights made a marvellous frieze of all those various heads, hats, and ponchoed shoulders across the back of the truck.

A storm that night blew down telephone and telegraph wires all over the country. The next day, April 10, dawned dull and raining, with showery intervals. The fishermen wrapped themselves in ponchos, and sou-westers and went off, their mutinous ladies staying behind. I wrote up my notes, and decided on the form and content of my article for
Life International.
I made up my mind I would come back to Chile one day, with Barbara. Then Herr Fritsch, the proprietor of the hotel, came in with a garbled message for me relayed from the travel agency in Santiago. They had a cable for me from William Strangways of New York, and they'd read it to me when they could.

Strangways? Strangways? I'd met one in India somewhere — but New York? I hung around in the lounge with the four Syrian ladies while Fritsch tried to get back to Santiago. Near one o'clock, after a couple of false alarms, he made it. The cable informed me that the motion picture rights to
Bhowani Junction
had been sold to M.G.M. for $150,000.

So Strangways must be a misprint for Helen Strauss and the William Morris Agency, I thought. Then the meaning of the cable hit me. It was absolute nonsense! Just before leaving Santiago the first time I had had a letter from Helen saying she thought there might be some movie interest in the book, at about $25,000: she asked for my instructions. I had cabled back telling her to use her best judgment, which was certainly more informed and experienced than mine.

Well, she'd sold the movie rights. I wondered where the mistake was in the figures. If they could read
Strang-ways
for
Strauss,
God alone knew what they could do with the figures. Perhaps Helen had got $50,000, perhaps $15,000. Quite enough to celebrate, any way. I ordered champagne, magnums of it, and invited the four ladies to join me. When they understood why, they accepted eagerly.

We drank champagne before lunch, through lunch, and after lunch, then had a few brandies. Then I packed and left quickly, for the ladies were rolling round under the tables like the drunken does in our orchard and I didn't want to be present when their husbands returned.

Next morning the train whispered towards Santiago through a heavy ground mist as the light spread. Gradually the proud Andes rose, snow-capped, to the east. At one in the afternoon we reached the capital and at half past one I saw a confirmation of Helen's cable. The correct figure was $155,000. I had achieved at least one part of that multiple object I had set myself when I first came to America. And then, I thought, I am a writer. So much to do, so little time.

Chapter Fifteen

Keith had said the reviews of
Bhowani Junction
were on the whole good. They were also perceptive, which reflected much credit on the reviewers, considering the remoteness of the theme from their experience. But one or two followed the pattern of Lewis Gannett in the
New YorkHerald Tribune.
At the end of a longish praising-with-faint-damns sort of review he wrote:
(Masters) has indeed something of Kipling's... belief in the white man's burden, the coloured man's problems and the overriding virtue of loyalty.

Well, I might, or I might not; but there was no way Gannett could learn what I believed by reading a novel written in the multiple first person of created characters. He was, in fact, transferring to me sentiments expressed by some of my characters. This is as ignorant as the Government of India complaining (which they did) because a character said he'd just as soon see Gandhi dead as not. A government cannot be expected to know the difference between a writer and his characters, but a book critic can, even in New York.

Then Gannett, quoting again from the book, wrote:

There was a young lady called Starkie
Who had an affair with a darkie
The result of her sins
Was an eightsome of twins
Two black, two white, and four khaki.
Apparently the colonel and Victoria both believed in the folklore genetics behind that vulgar verse. Evidently Mr Masters does, too.

Oh?

Gannett ended with the usual lazy assumption of the American Establishment Liberal that because I was an ex-imperialist I condescended to Indians. I made no reply or public comment on these and other biased remarks, for I still held to my old army credo:
Never explain, never complain.
A year or two later a good Indian novelist, Khushwant Singh, answered for me and for my work when he wrote:
Both Kipling and Masters understand India. Only Masters understands Indians.

Life
accepted my article on Cape Horn with enthusiasm, paid me, then marked the piece 'File and Forget', and stored it in a steel safe in the basement of the Time-Life building, where I presume it still moulders. I was not pleased, for I do not like being paid for talking to myself. Cal Whipple told me that one way and another the magazine bought about ten times what it used. Nothing came of my work for Korda, for his films ran into bad luck and the Prudential Insurance Company, out of which he had wheedled $20,000,000 was forcing him to curtail his productions.

I finished an article for
Holiday
magazine, and decided that my next book would be a volume of autobiography. In fact, I thought with grim anticipation, it would be the book the eleven publishers had rejected in 1948. There seemed little doubt now that Viking would publish
Brutal and Licentious.
What I had to do was first, as a minor pleasure, make sure that it did well enough to make all those eleven publishers wince; and secondly, as my will and duty, make sure that it was good enough to stand with
Bhowani Junction.
I got the typescript out of its drawer, and sent it to Helen Taylor for a thorough review and critique.

Martin, having discovered what Daddy did for a living, thought he'd try it, too. I told him he could use my typewriter whenever I was not, and that he must not worry about spelling. He showed talent, in nothing more than his way of getting into a story without fol-de-rol or fal-de-lay. Thus, a five-page story called ARMY began as follows:

One day in a pleasent army camp,

we were e-v evrything was still,

there was a very moldy colonel„,

and he was old to. suddenly the koreans came,

bang boom a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a

boom! banggang boom a-a-a-a-a-a-a-bam boom

whizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

bam bang boom aaaaaaaaaaaoooowwwwwwwwwwww

Barbara and I agreed that we must do something meaningful about using our sudden wealth, for when Lady Luck embraces a man, he who responds by taking out more insurance won't see her again. Barbara had no doubt what we should do — learn more of this America to which we had committed our lives and our children, and which had so amply repaid our faith. I agreed with her, and we planned a trans-continental camping trip, the children to spend a month on a ranch in Wyoming, while Barbara and I walked in the Tetons and went to the Pacific and back.

While preparations for this odyssey continued, I fired the penultimate shots in my battle with the Immigration service. I had filed my first papers for citizenship in December of the previous year. In January I found that considerable trouble getting visas, etc., attended my status as an Indian, and I asked Immigration if there was a way in which the processes of attaining citizenship, which seemed to be endless, could be speeded up. The answer was a simple No. Then, having had more trouble in South America (I couldn't get a visa for Peru at all), and seeing the certainty of more travel ahead, I wrote apologetically to Mr Rifkind, and asked him the same question. As before, he spoke a word on the telephone and an abject Immigration bureaucrat revealed what they had felt it their business to conceal: if I applied for naturalization in the Southern District of New York, rather than in the Supreme Court of Rockland County, my case would be much speeded. I did so, and on June 17 appeared at the Immigration bureau, with two witnesses, for the Bureau to acknowledge that I had filed my petition and that they had received it. There remained only the final hearing, so-called, which would actually be a swearing-in. I gave the Bureau Helen Strauss's address, and told her where letters and cables could reach me.

So, towards the end of June, 1954, we set off in bright sunshine for the west. We quickly developed and perfected habits which we have always since used in travelling in America. I set the alarm for 4 a.m., when I got up and lit the Coleman stove for coffee. Then, while Barbara helped get the children up and dressed, I took down and rolled the tents. They packed the bedding, and I gave everyone a hot drink and some Danish pastry (bought the day before). It was rare that we were not on the road by 4.30. Soon first light tinged the eastern dark behind us. The fading headlights showed rabbits on the verges, and deer in the forest, but no intrusions of man.

The roads were empty. We drove through small towns that might have been abandoned movie sets, so perfect of their kind and so still were they. We whispered down the endless aisles of the Great North Woods at a steady seventy, the children asleep in the back, and Barbara and I spelling each other every hour and a half. By breakfast we had done nearly 200 miles; by lunch, always taken in a small-town restaurant or diner, another 200; there we bought the supplies for supper and the next day's breakfast, and tried to be in camp (or a motel, for the sake of a bath, every few days) by 3 p.m., for at that hour one always found space in camp-sites and motels. Our afternoons were leisurely — a swim, a nap, a walk, a seeing of curiosities; and the evenings a leisurely cooking of steak or hot-dogs, putting the children to bed, a companionable drink by the light of the pressure lamp, a short stroll through the moonlit forest, and to bed in our double sleeping bag on the inflated air mattress.

After a couple of attempts at finding our own campsites, we settled for the state and national parks. The solitude we sought always had drawbacks — dubious water, no benches or table, no sanitation, and even the privacy unreliable, whereas at that time of year the parks were not full; also, we did want to meet American people as well as see American scenery. This last was particularly important for the children.

So faithful blue RK 1403 carried the explorers from the Empire State (New York's nickname) towards the sunset: the Delaware River and Pennsylvania Dutch sausages; Ohio, the shore of Lake Erie; the lower peninsula of Michigan... so far nothing unusual, the scenery no different from Europe. I was getting impatient for the West. In 1938 I had driven alone — also, by chance, in a Dodge — from Los Angeles to Poughkeepsie, via New Orleans. The West had impressed on my very spirit a sense of space, of sweeping wind and far water. I urgently wanted to share this with my wife and children, but it wasn't here yet. Still, we had the North Woods, and a feeling of endlessness, of virgin-forests-where-the-foot-of-man-has-never-trod (though someone told me that there isn't a stand of virgin timber east of Montana).

We crossed the Mackinac Strait, seven miles, in a ferry steamer, and camped on the north side. There was a little smoke house a mile up the road that sold excellent smoked whitefish; and half an hour after dawn the next day we were presented with an eclipse of the sun, the path of totality passing through us for a few minutes. On west... triumphant borders of the orange and scarlet Indian paintbnish along the road, and a heralding clarity in the sky; the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, glimpses of Lake Superior cold and without horizon on our right hand; the wonder of the children at a coppery torrent in Wisconsin; a majestic all-night thunderstorm outside Moorhead, Minnesota. Thcy took turns to come in front and huddle over the heater blowers that morning, for it had poured rain while we were loading. The trunk of the car, the ill-rolled tents and soggy bedding stuffed into it, looked like a swamp full of dead men. The same rain had flooded Bismarck and Mandan and under one railroad bridge the water was over our hub caps.

But suddenly the throb of the engine echoed farther and lighter, for the sky had flung back to an unimaginable distance. We had crossed the Missouri, we were there. The West! This was the West which Bud Guthrie made so magically real in his book and in the title he had given it:
The Big Sky.

'Look, look, children!' I cried, 'Look, Barbara!'

The sky was pale and undomed, the road stretched beyond distance. The country was not rich and fat but spare and lean, not dark green but the grey-green of thyme. The wind blew in our faces from the Rockies crouched under the curve of the prairie ahead.

At Billings, Montana, we equipped ourselves with cowboy hats, shirts, and boots and drove on. A mile or two south of Red Lodge, where the climb to the Beartooth Pass (10,940 feet) began, we found a perfect camping place just off the road, not in a park. We settled in to explore the stream, bathe, and cook a steak. It was July 3.