Set This House on Fire (2 page)

The reply was a long time in coming. A month went by, then several weeks more, and I was on the verge of screwing up the nerve to write another letter when, sometime in July, I received an answer:

Dear Peter,

Naturally I remember you & was delighted to hear from you again. You were right, I dont guess there are many C. Kinsolvings. Glad you liked my cartoon & consider it fortunate that you ran across it in the Times if for no other reason than it prompted you to get in touch with me
&
write such a good letter. Im right proud of that cartoon which I think, despite my contempt for politics in general, took a good swat at D.C. hypocrisy. In regard to your question, these cartoons are gravy and not my actual metier, since I work half days at a cigar factory here in C’ton, & also teach a painting class though things go a bit slack both ways toward the end of Summer. However I dont look down on cartooning, who knows but whether its the American Art Form (not kidding), anyway consider myself in a direct line of descent from Daumier and Rowlandson & besides I get 35 bucks a piece
&
sometimes more, which as they say is not sparrow food. Also Poppy has a job sort of book keeping at the Navy yard & we have a very good coloured woman for the kids when theyre not at school so though maybe we are not eating as high off the hog as that other eminent Carolinian, B. Baruch, we are doing alright. Also, am painting in all my spare time & all that paralyzing death of the soul you must have seen is pretty much gone.

Peter, always wanted to thank you for what you did in Sambuco for Poppy & all. She told me everything you did & now I should apologize, using the weak excuse that I didnt know how to contact you in N.Y.C. But this would be a lie, so will only say now thanks again & trust you to understand.

Also, I can understand very well your interest in M. & your desire to know more of the situation down there in Sambuco. Myself I find it most difficult to talk or even think about M. & what went on, much less write about it. Yet its funny you know, just as you say youre in the dark about what happened in Sambuco, so from time to time I keep wondering who M. was, I mean really WAS & what was eating him & how he ended up the way he did. I dont guess anybody will figure that out & suspect that its all for the best any way you look at it. You are right in “surmising” that I had a rough time down there. I guess I drew pretty close to what is commonly described as the brink, but I seem to be O.K. now. Have not incidentally had a drop of beer, even, in going on to 2 years. It makes Sophocles much easier to read, and am now beginning to work my way straight through Shakespeare, making up at this advanced age for the deprivations of the U.S. public school system.

Anytime youre down this way, Peter, let me know. We live near the Battery in a 200-year-old house which doesnt rent for much & theres plenty room for a guest. Poppy remembers you with affection, also the kids.

Molti auguri Cass

I have never had much faith in that “Any time you’re down this way”—having used it several times myself in sticky situations when the true sentiment behind the phrase was all too apparent. It is polite and it is friendly, but it certainly does not plead or exhort. It is not the same as “It would be nice to see you again,” and it is as far removed from “Please come see me, I miss you” as simple civility is from love. There was some quality in this letter of Cass’, though, that made me believe that he would not take unkindly to a visit from me—actually, as regarding Mason, that he might even be as eager to see me as I was him. I had three weeks’ vacation due me in September. The first of these weeks I had planned to spend with my girl Annette (there is something foregone and conclusive about that word fiancee) in the White Mountains. The other two I had left aside for a visit with my parents down in Virginia: they were both old and ailing and, while we have never really been as close as some families, something weary and sorrowful in their letters made me long to see them again. What I proposed to do, then—and this I wrote Cass right away—was to discommode him to the extent of spending a week end with him in Charleston, flying down from Norfolk sometime during the visit with my parents. I would not expect to stay at his house, despite the implied invitation. Would such and such a week end be all right? Would he get me a room in a hotel? It should in no way have surprised me, I suppose, but it did: I got no answer from Cass at all.

The time spent in New Hampshire with my dazzling Annette was a total and sweeping catastrophe. I will deal with it only to the extent of saying that it rained, that we lasted two days, and that when we left our mountain cabin in a downpour we were unbetrothed. There were no sexual difficulties. We were just not meant for each other, we decided. Both of us put up a brave front about it all, but a love affair, like some prodigy of plastic surgery, is flesh laid on to living flesh and to break it up is to tear off great hunks and parts of yourself. I went down to Virginia feeling mournful, grim, indescribably bereft.

Of my sojourn in Virginia, however, there is a little bit more to say. Nothing in America remains fixed for long, but my old home town, Port Warwick, had grown vaster and more streamlined and clownish-looking than I thought a decent southern town could ever become. To be sure, it had always been a shipbuilding city and a seaport (visualize Tampa, Pensacola, or the rusty waterfront of Galveston; if you’ve never seen these, Perth Amboy will do), and in official propaganda it had never been listed as one of the ornaments of the commonwealth, but as a boy I had known its gentle seaside charm, and had smelled the ocean wind, and had lolled underneath giant magnolias and had watched streaked and dingy freighters putting out to sea and, in short, had shaken loose for myself the town’s own peculiar romance. Now the magnolias had been hacked down to make room for a highway along the shore; there were noisy shopping plazas everywhere, blue with exhaust and rimmed with supermarkets; television roosted upon acre after acre of split-level rooftops and, almost worst of all, the ferryboats to Norfolk, those low-slung smoke-belching tubs which had always possessed their own incomparable dumpy glamour, were gone, replaced by a Yankee-built vehicular tunnel which poked its foul white snout two miles beneath the mud of Hampton Roads. Hectic and hustling, throbbing with prosperity, filled with nomads and the rootless and the uprooted (
“Upstarts,”
my father said. “Son, you’re watching the decline of the West.”), the town seemed at once as strange to me yet as sharply familiar as some place on the order of Bridgeport or Yonkers. And, unhelmed, touched with anxiety, smitten with a sense of dislocation I have rarely felt so achingly before or since, I knew I could not stay there long; the fact is, I almost left on the same day I arrived, when, that evening, hunting in vague panic for a familiar scene, I wandered down to the river in the soft September dusk and instead of the broad, grassy field I had known so well (the “Casino” it had been called, shadowy at twilight with rustling sycamores, where there was a bandstand and a river view of the wide warm old James, mirroring stars: here we played baseball in the fading light and here, too, shirt-sleeved Negroes hawked peanuts and deviled crabs, until at last the tootling of clarinets faded and died, and all shut down, and lovers walked beneath the trees to the sound of sycamore balls plopping earthward in the stillness and the whistle of a freighter seaward-borne in the dark) I found a snarling Greyhound bus station and a curious squat lozenge-shaped building, greenly tiled, whose occupants numbered among them a chiropodist, a lay analyst and—of all things to tell about the fading South—an office full of public-relations counselors, or consultants.

But this is too familiar to go on about at length. In America our landmarks and our boundaries merge, shift, and change quicker than we can tell: one day we feel rooted, and the carpet of our experience is a familiar thing upon which we securely stand. Then as if by some conjuring trick, it is all yanked out from beneath us, and when we come down we alight upon—what? The same old street, to be sure. But where it once had the solid resounding sound of Bankhead Magruder Avenue—dear to all those who remember that soldier who stalemated McClellan—now it is called Buena Vista Terrace (“It’s the California influence,” my father complained, “it’s going to get us all in the end.”); an all-engulfing billboard across the way (the zoning laws have collapsed; we used to swing on grapevines there, in the ferny mornings) tells us to “Listen to Jack Avery, the Tidewater’s Favorite Disk Jockey,” and though we are obscurely moved by intimations of growth, of advancement, we feel hollow and downcast. Nor is our nostalgia misplaced. Only fools lament change in itself, but in this “pillaged town,” as my father called it, there was many a fool who on his deathbed would protest his innocence of total rape. “’Bring back the greenery, bring back the leaves!’ That’s what they’re going to holler,” my father said. “That’s what they’re going to holler when the light dims. And all they’re going to get is this here Avery.”

It must have been on the afternoon of my fourth or fifth day in Port Warwick that my father, retired now from the shipyard, took me for a long ride around town in his car. We traveled all the old avenues, many of them strange to me now (the largest and most venerable trees seem to be the first victims of a municipal renascence: not only the magnolias but the oaks and elms had fallen, in a process of rebuilding that made way for, among other things, the first Bauhaus-inspired Pentecostal Holiness church in Dixie), and we had beer and pigs’ knuckles behind the flyspecked glass of Jake Eisenman’s grill, which alone amid the Laundromats and Serv-ur-Selfs and Howard Johnsons resisted change, resisted neon and plastic and chrome, resisted sanitation and a new clientele (the old young gang was still at it, sallow-faced and now balding amid the pool cues and the verdigris-tinged spittoons, still yacking about poontang and pussy, white and dark, though now also about that contortionist legal maneuver, the pride of Byrd-land, called interposition, which would surely keep the niggers in their place), and afterwards, a touch beery and afloat in the bright September heat, we made a brief circuit of the harbor and drove slowly alongside the blue and spectacular bay. It was a clear day, slightly hazed far out where gray gigantic cruisers and tankers rode at anchor, but salt-smelling, transparent and magical, white with sparkling gulls. We went past a beach where muddy-legged boys were out digging clams, and children played on the sand within reach of plump bandannaed mothers, suntan-oiled and glistening like seals. A motorboat, soundless upon the far reaches of the water, cleft the tide between twin silver parabolas of spray. For a brief instant pleasurably lost, I felt caught up in a reverie of years long past—flapping sails and smell of tar and clamshells cool and gritty in the hand—which changeless childhood seascape, even here, even now, seemed to elude and deny the marauding clutch of progress. A stoplight halted us, precipitately: it was the old man’s spine-chilling knack always to slam on the brakes thus, with no margin for error and at the last moment of truth.

And as we stopped there, he said: “Son, you’ve been mighty down in the mouth since you’ve been home. What’s the matter? Woman trouble?”

What could I tell him? Yes and no; it was woman trouble, but it was some other trouble more profound and unsettling which was at the root of
that,
and, having told no one else about Sambuco, I could not force myself to speak to him about it, either. I murmured something about the humidity.

Then (psychic weatherman) he said: “I know. I know, Peter. These are miserable times.” The light changed and we heaved forth with a lurch. “They are miserable times. Empty times. Mediocre times. You can almost sniff the rot in the air. And what is more, they are going to get worse. Do you know that? Read Carlyle. Read Gibbon. Get times like these when men go whoring off after false gods, and the fourth or fifth best is best, and newness and slickness and thrills are all—and what do you come to at last? Moral and spiritual anarchy, that’s what. Then political anarchy. Then what? Dictatorship! We’ve already
got one
in this state,” he added, and spat out the name of that proconsul of the commonwealth whose works had kept him in a state of tense outrage for thirty years.

Rare and prodigious man, my father. Had he been born in the North I think he might very well have been an old-style radical. As it was—a good Episcopalian, whose circumstances had located him within the purlieus of the most stiff-necked parish this side of Canterbury—he had managed to work out a shaky compromise between his honest piety, on the one hand, and his enlarged human views, on the other, and the resulting tension had helped to make him the only true liberal I think I have ever known. To be one of this breed in New York is childishly simple; to be one in the South surpasses all ordinary guts. He had thirsted for understanding, for wisdom, in the same way that others yearn for money or prestige, and I think that at last he had found a large measure of both. He was one of the few men in Port Warwick who had ever read a book. Age had bowed and shrunken him a bit, but not life, and he had grown larger and larger in my eyes. I have never known a more decent man, and if during these later years he became here and there cranky or sententious or overtalkative, I could understand it, knowing that the hypocrisy and meanness at which he raged had become too much even for a man of his size. “Son, life is a search for justice,” this old draftsman told me once, betraying not a flicker of self-consciousness at the immeasurable phrase. I know now that he never found it, but perhaps that matters less than that he moved through dooms of love, through griefs of joy, in his lonely seeking.

“I guess I’ve near about become a pariah in this town, Peter,” he went on (we had been in second gear for two blocks and I had to nudge him to change it); “I guess I run off at the mouth too much, but I’ve been trying to tell these people the truth for going on to forty years now. And what happens?
Here’s
what happens. Along comes this ignorant general with a baby-faced smile, who
acquires
religion and reads cowboy stories, and they vote him into office. When who was it that got them their nice houses and got them their Buicks in the first place? It wasn’t any general. It was Franklin Roosevelt,
that’s
who it was, whose principles and desire for a better way of life they repudiate as soon as five stars and a big grin comes along, promising them that they’ll be all right, they’ll never have to relinquish those gadgets and gimcracks they’re tied to like an umbilical cord, and they can remain fat cats forever, getting softer and more silly and stupider as the years pile up. And to top it all, that isn’t enough for them. They want everything. So on the state level they’ll still vote in year after year this millionaire apple farmer who guarantees them good roads and miserable schools and above all that the nigro will never get an even break. Ahh!” he said, grim lips set as he shook his head. “Sometimes I think the Stoics were right, maybe. A good way out is to cut your throat, if you’ve got to.”