Paul Theroux - Saint Jack

It was awfully hard for me to be an American, but the hardest part was playing the dumb cluck for a feller whose intelligence was inferior to mine. The fellers at the Bandung reckoned they had great natural gifts; Yates, in his own phrase “an avaricious reader,” would say, “I’m reading Conrad” when he was stuck in the first chapter of a book he’d never finish; Yardley pointed to me one night and said, “I wouldn’t touch an American book with a barge pole,” and Smale ended every argument with, “It all comes down to the same thing, then, don’t it?” to which someone would add, “Right. Six of one and half a dozen of the other.” They were always arguing, each argument illustrated by anecdotes from personal experience. That was the problem: they saved up stories to tell people back home; then, realizing with alarm that they probably weren’t going home, wondered who to tell. They told each other. Stories were endlessly repeated, and not even the emphasis or phrases varied. The silent fellers in the Bandung were not listening; they were waiting for a chance to talk.

I was the only genuine listener — the inexperienced American, there to be instructed. But the funny thing was, I had a college education and almost a degree. It was no help in the Bandung to say a bright truth, for even if someone heard it he was incapable of verifying it. And on the job it created misunderstandings. I recall meeting an Irish seaman on one of my “meat runs,” as my ferrying of girls into the harbor was called. Hearing his brogue I said, “I’m crazy about Joyce,” and he replied, “That skinny one in the yellow dress?”

I said, “You guessed it!” and he went over and pinched her sorry bottom through a fold in her frock. Later he thanked me for the tip-off. He was right and I was wrong: education is inappropriate to most jobs, and it was practically an impertinence to the enterprises of the feller whom an Indian ship chandler on Market Street described as “having a finger in every tart.”

It was on the GI Bill; I was thirty-five, a freshman. I always seemed to be the wrong age for whatever I was doing, and because of that, paying dearly for it. But I was not alone. Older students were a common sight in every university in the late forties and fifties, army veterans from the Second World War and then Korea, wearing faded khaki jackets with the chevrons torn off, the stitch marks showing, and shoes with highly polished toes. My inglorious war — a punctured eardrum put me behind a desk in Oklahoma — ended in 1945. I came home expecting a miracle letter ( Dear Jack, It’s good to hear you’re home and I have some fabulous news for you …), but nothing happened. I helped my father in the tailor shop, blocking hats and putting tickets on the dry cleaning, and sometimes doing deliveries. My uncle said, “There’s good money in printing,” so I joined a linotype school, which I quit soon after. “They’re crying out for draftsmen” and “A good short-order cook can name his salary” sent me in other directions.

I was reading a great deal — the serious paperback was having its vogue in the early fifties (they were thought to be somewhat salacious: “He’s just reading a paperback” was considered mockery) — and I was encouraged by the biographical notes, less frequent today, which listed the previous occupations of the author on the back cover. “Jim Sidebottom has had a varied career,” they’d begin, and go on to list twenty back-breaking jobs. I imagined my own biographical note: “After his discharge from the U.S. Army, where he reached the rank of corporal, John (“Jack”) Fiori worked as a hat blocker in his father’s tailor shop, and then in succession as a printer, draftsman, short-order cook, bartender, dishwasher, lifeguard, baker, and fruit seller. He has always considered fiction to be his chief aim, and has this to say about the present novel: ‘I believe that mankind struggled from the sea to—’” It was a good biographical note, enhanced by an imagined photograph of me smoking a cigarette over a typewriter. I smoked. I bought a typewriter and learned to use it. I typed my biographical note. But that was all: there was no book. I had nothing to write. I knew nothing beyond my name and the face I practiced. I didn’t understand danger or regret; a book was an extensive biographical note.

Twenty years later William Leigh turned up and asked me urgent questions, and died with a foolish sentence on his lips before I could reply; and I burned him to dust. So this memoir was provoked. Writing a book is a splendid idea, but it was not mine. My notion was simpler, just a picture of my experienced face and the list of jobs that made the face that way. This memoir is not the book or the work I imagined; it was urged upon me, like a complicated, necessary enchantment I did little to inspire, made mostly of terror, which forced me to learn, laboriously, to conjure: an imprecise trick, half accident, half design, begun as a deliberate memory (“Mister Hing vaunting Mister Jack…”) and completed by the kind of magic that to discover thoroughly is to fail at.

I thought I could learn at college. It was my only reason for going. I found myself among a few earnest veterans and many fresh-faced kids. The older fellers never flunked out, but at the same time never excelled, resenting being lectured to and corrected by educated fellers the same age or younger, draft dodgers or fairies with leather elbow patches, whom they could only nag with the reply, “I’ll bet you don’t even know how to clean a gun!” The ones on the GI Bill lived with their harassed wives and children in gray Nissen huts, referred to as “married quarters.” Most of the older fellers were economics majors or engineers (the pocketful of pens, the slide rule in a scabbard) and had too much homework on their hands to take an interest in the college routine. Besides, they had problems at home, and so they treated their education as a job, being punctual and tidy, carrying creased lunch bags, and keeping regular hours. I saw them in the student union salting a hard-boiled egg and underlining a physics book.

Some, of whom I was one because I was unmarried and majoring in English, were accommodated by the fringe people, the art majors, would-be poets, weekend winos, hangers-on, and hitchhikers. That was the enterprise then, saying, “Aw shit, I gotta bust out” and hitchhiking in sweat shirts across the country, aiming for California or Mexico, and staying drunk the whole way by gagging down whole bottles of Tokay or Muscatel. These fellers would show up with stories of their travels (“I met this beautiful sad old man in Denver, and he says to me…”) and some poems about America which they’d shout, taking swigs out of a can of beer. The writers they respected had all been deck hands on freighters, and going to sea was the height of their ambition. Some hung around the Seafarers’ International Union in Brooklyn, hoping for a job, but few of them succeeded — they were too young and not strong enough for the work. They talked about Zen Buddhism, Ezra Pound, the atom bomb, mystical experiences. There was a little marijuana around, but the big kicks were in drinking three bottles of terpin hydrate cough syrup or washing down a can of nutmeg with a glass of milk. Or getting drunk like Dylan Thomas; or trying to grow a beard.

It was my beard that gained me entry. I had stopped shaving when I worked the night shift at the bakery and still had it the day I shambled in to register for classes. It was bright red, cut square across the bottom. They complimented me on it and I explained its redness by saying that Vivaldi’s hair was the same color.

I suppose I should have kept to myself, but I had been doing that joylessly for ten years, and I liked the company, the spirit of careless romance in the younger kids. People called them “beatniks,” already a dated word then, but they thought of themselves as “the folk.” I moved into the top floor of a coffee shop, and generally I stuck close to them, proving my friendship the only way I knew, buying beer for them, lending them money, trying to set them straight on Ezra Pound, who was a fake poet but a genuine fascist; and I kept my hot eyes on the long-haired girls who strummed guitars and wrote poems in black sweaters and dancers’ tights. I wrote poems, too, unfashionable rhyming ones: