Written for Travel & Leisure, 1987.
The most unknown countries are the ones everybody knows. Every inch of France has been meticulously mapped, but how many people know the Ardèche, dead center in the south? I told people I was wondering whether to go for several days, and they corrected my pronunciation drastically—these were my fellow countrymen—surely I meant somewhere else entirely? Ah, you must be talking about the Ardennes. Their conviction decided me. I’d read that the Ardèche, with Romanesque churches as stark as its gorges, and grey villages among green Herculean mountains, was one of France’s most beautiful regions. If no one but the French had heard of it, that meant I was getting somewhere.
The new Très Grande Vitesse (Very Great Speed) trains telescope half of France in two hours. Then the road takes over. From Lyon south the factories drop away, the woods resume, the stony hills rise wild. I followed a smaller road; the Ardèche began. Decaying villages with double-tiled roofs knotted the enormous hillsides, bearded with barbarous pines. It was early September, and still hot. In the sprawling vineyards by the road the men were barechested, checking the grapes for the coming harvest.
The Ardèche is naturally argumentative. The Romans passed through, the Reformation passed through, the Revolution soldered the divisions between Catholic and Protestant. The country is mostly rock: haughty mountains made fertile by extremes of climate. The peaks are snowbound for five months, eerie with mists and rain for three. For the long summer the Mediterranean heat comes up across the southern plains and helps the vineyards, the chestnut trees that were famous in Crusader times, and the Roman cypresses. There is the usual dissent between the landlocked highlanders gazinng inward and the Latinized southerners looking across the plains to the coast. The arguments are mostly ancient ones. The denizens have the superstitions of people born a century late, and the prosperity of the coal mines and the silk industry seems almost a story. But the people keep their privacy in a landscape of austere beauty, and the markets, once vast trade fairs, go on.
I planned a circuit of three days, starting at Lamastre in the north (good wine country), making my way southwest via the old spa town of Vals-Les-Bains as far as Les Vans with its castle-hotel. Then follow the great gorge of the Ardèche river down to the plains: then north via the road in the east to see the gargoyles in Bourg St.-Andeol. Like Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels With A Donkey, the route and the towns were my flimsy excuses. It was the countryside, and the peace of summer’s end, that I was after.
Lamastre’s town square looked as if it were expecting a coach-and-horses with news of the Corsican Bonaparte. After lunch, a brass band with brilliant golden instruments and proper white uniforms—stockings, pantaloons, berets—collected in the sunlight around a sour-faced statue of an unforgettable counselor general. An afternoon parade; the burps and buzzing of the band getting their horns warmed up; a hot blue porcelain sky.
I said to one young cornet-man, “Who are you? The Army?”
He looked like he didn’t know, himself. “I think we are. Just a minute, I’ll check.” He turned to a tuba player. “Hey, Henri, are we the Army?”
Blaaaat.
A clarinetist had fallen asleep at the café. Someone went to wake him.
“I think we’re called a fanfare. Yep, that’s it.”
When the parade started, several local clowns followed exaggeratedly behind, left-righting it as the band flowed around the slant narrow streets past the fruitseller’s and the baker’s and the candlestick-maker’s.
At Ponton there was a white wooden cross by the road and an irregular pile of stones waiting to be rearranged into the original wall. I stole three peaches from somebody’s orchard; his stone barn looked on resignedly. A wind bent the tall grass and the cicadas began winding their watches.
According to my detailed map Les Nourries, like so many of these villages, simply didn’t exist. Three men stood scratching their bald heads outside a little tabac. They were digesting the view: the passes fanned out to form steep valleys combed with cultivation—perhaps they were jealous of all that growth. Massive dark mountains shouldered behind. A pair of telephone lines crossed the valley, but otherwise it couldn’t have changed much in a century, just the odd non-existent villages dwindling below.
Now rounded stone walls started to hedge the falling road. La Chaise was deserted, all its red shutters firmly boarded-up, one emphatically toothless old man dozing in the shade with his mouth open. A natty fisherman, rod in hand, was making his way down to a creek with cracked bluffs. Somebody’s lambs bleated at him. Every village had laundry flapping and women in flopped hats seated, gossiping, outside tiny bistros. The men had narrow genial faces, they all wore caps. They also seemed doubtful of everything, as men who live among toppling stone walls might tend to be.
“Beautiful view,” I offered.
“Is it?”
Another just shrugged.
Every village’s entrance had a crucifix, and after a dozen I realized that each cross was a distinct clue to its village’s character. The only hamlets with people chatting had carnival-colored, circus crucifixes. Most villages looked virtually uninhabited, and the more empty the lanes, the more somber Jesus seemed. One was a kind of castiron sculpture, a forerunner of Postmodernism, by a wrecked barn full of hay.
But the cloistered hamlets held unexpected eccentricities. An auberge where I stopped for coffee because of a white pony nearby had an interior done up as if it were in Arizona—a Wild West mural of wagon wheels and ghost towns. It wasn’t for American tourists, since there were none. Why?
“I like cowboys,” said the owner.
The villages were like austere versions of Yorkshire, with smaller inns and better food, and the modest smell of woodsmoke as the day cooled and fires were started in hearths.In Andraigues, glued to the side of a hill, the square was called the Place de la Resistance. The old men were still talking about the war.Outside Lo Podello, probably the most famous café-restaurant in the region, the locals were playing at boules by an industrial-strength sculpture of Don Quixote and a fountain with a naked baby. The town was still full of the summer’s chic Paris theater crowd, but locals didn’t seem to mind.
A young dark-haired stonemason watching the game said to me, “People are completely different than in the southern Ardèche. They’re like a different race up here. The country’s harder, more savage. There’s not much to do, as you can see, and life is slow. These old men are here every day, all afternoon, back and forth across the square. They exercise the ground, but that’s all they exercise. Down south it’s even warmer, the country’s milder, the people are more open, there seems more to do, more places. Here there’s no more work, so all the young people have left for Lyon or Marseille. In July and August you see campers here, especially near the gorges, mostly Dutch and Germans. But now that it’s September— ” The stonemason paused. “It’s still hot, and it’s just the old people waiting for the young peopleto come home.”
So it was all a question of employment; but it made the land seem even more aged, these oldtimers wandering along the roads—as if the youngsters were off at a war, and their parents and grandparents, veterans of the last two, had not yet given up hope for a happy return.
Vals-Les-Bains broke my brooding. It was a cheerful spa town of parks and gazebos where people still came for the waters and went for walks along the esplanade and took snapshots. A splendid sprawling hotel with a great veranda had belle-époque chandeliers; supposedly there was a casino somewhere in the town.
I stopped a dignified elderly gentleman with a cane and cravate and asked him if he’d come here for the waters.
“I live here, monsieur.”
“For the waters?”
“The waters have been here since time immemorial. I have lived here all my life. I have never tried the waters.”
Good enough, I thought; and neither did I.
Aubenas was fortified, its ramparts looking out over the beetling crevasses. Now the houses changed, began to resemble villas in the more southern light, some of them moss-eaten and abandoned (not expensive, either). The mountains grew jumbled and black with the sunset, and when I drove through Joyeuse a floodlit boules tournament was in play, the town congregated past nightfall.
I was using the Château Le Scipionnet as a base for my journey, near the market town of Les Vans. A converted castle set in great trees by a river—with a gleaming, black-turreted château standing enormously, almost unbelievably, on the other side—Le Scipionnet looked as if its decor had been attentively preserved from the turn of the century. On its lawn was a swimming pool, and a sunstruck terrace above of white stone where you took fresh croissants each morning. Nearby were apple orchards and tennis courts. Attentively run by a couple named Dupouy, it seemed a proper setting for M. Hercule Poirot.
Indeed, there was a festival des voyantes for the weekend—a convention of spiritualists and palm-readers and the rest. They were really more like a traveling orchestra than a convention, mostly women “on tour” throughout the region, visited by eager locals all day and well into the evening in one of the château’s sitting-rooms. The Dupouys were dubious. “It’s cheaper than going to a psychiatrist, I suppose,” said Jean. One night there was to be a demonstration by the pool; we all kept waiting for phantoms to appear, but twilight brought only mists drifting around the château across the valley. And at dinner the mediums ate duck like everybody else.
In the morning, that château’s towers trembled in the sunlight, past a lilting stone bridge and seamed fields.
I wanted to devote a whole day to slowly threading the gorges of the Ardèche River, on the advice of the Dupouys. To the west of the Ardèche lie the slightly more famous Gorges Du Tarn. “But there you’re down below,” said Jean. “Here in the Ardèche gorges you’re on the heights, so you don’t feel cornered, and you can see everything.”
The road east to Ruoms ran beneath walls of cliff, carved in identical blocks so perfect they looked like the remains of ancient battlements. Their ragged heights were tufted with splotches of trees and their sides overgrown: they could’ve been the ruins of a race of castle-building giants with pretensions to imperialism. They marched along the valley. At one point, amid all this wildness, I had to halt for a traffic light set in the rock—a carved primitive tunnel so narrow that cars can only pass through in a single line.
Ruoms had a funny beachside feel (canoes, rubber dinghies, swimsuit stores) and a huge wine-bottling plant. Then a shallow river, barely a stream over pebbles, began furrowing its way among glistening trees. Prehistoric caves lined the cliffs; the river widened. Tents appeared, campers bearing canoes on their heads toward the river, fishermen. Le Font d’Arc was a chunky natural bridge muscularly arching across the meandering river by a sandy beach with bathers.
Then the road began to rise, and the gorges plunged. Always the little river remained in sight, a blue vein of life way below. The cliffs were by turns swarthy with brush, or scarred bare. On the heights the whole place took on a soaring desolation. I wanted to come back with more time on my hands to spend days paddling around on the river, to see the gorges from down there as well. There’s a special poetry to river gorges: a sense of slow, self-made miracle that cliffs have reconciled themselves to being shaped and ordered by mere water. Nature goes out of the way to conceal many of its important happenings, but a river gorge makes it clear there has been a great event, and no traveler can look on one without feeling an ancient wonder.
It was a Saturday, and I barely caught the market back in Les Vans—woven fabrics, carved olive-wood items, goat cheeses, dolls. It was over by two, and an hour later some of the merchants were sipping wine in the gardens of Le Scipionnet, waiting to have their destinies foretold and their handwriting analyzed. I thought of learning about my own—it was only fifty francs—but what would someone see in the crystal ball? “You will soon set off on a long journey.” I knew that already, so instead I went swimming in the sunlight while the rest of France got rained out.
The next day I threaded my way east again, but north of the gorges. The Romanesque church in Bourg St.-Andeol looked as if it might’ve been inspired architecturally by them. It loomed and muttered and swayed and from certain angles didn’t make sense, a fantastical thing. It had been begun in the 9th century and often rebuilt and added to thereafter. Victor Hugo, passing through in 1839, called the octagonal tower “one of the most beautiful of the Byzantine style that I have ever seen” though it didn’t look much like Constantinople to me. It was striking nonetheless, with a weathervane atop the bell and fanged gargoyles leaping off the stone pillars.
Just outside Les Baraques I met two old gents sitting on a stone wall by the road. One had a thatch of white hair and a kind idiotic smile; the other wore a heavy beret, a blue suit over a worn shirt, and a questioning expression. He was thumping a long stick on the ground. These were plainsmen, so I thought they might be open to conversation.
The smiling man kept silent; the other talked, punctuating every phrase with thwacks of his cane. In five minutes he told me the story of the French involvement in Algeria, how he’d met his wife there (she was of Moroccan blood, her family lived in the States, perhaps I knew—), his retirement from the gendarmerie a few miles up the road.
“Look at me. Thwack. I’m retired. Seventy-three. Do I look a day over sixty-two? Thwack. My friend here’s handicapped, poor gent, keeps smiling and listening but doesn’t say much. Lives over that way. I’ve got the house just behind you, across this field. Thwack. Lost my wife two years ago, what can you say about it? I’m still alive. Got an apartment in Viviers, too. When I get tired of the house, I’ll move. Thwack. I’m still alive. Now, when De Gaulle—”
I excused myself, saying I was expected back at the Hotel du Midi in Lamastre for dinner. My friend hadn’t heard of it (his accent was soft and drawly, the equivalent of Georgia perhaps). I got the sense the average Ardèchois is slightly suspicious of converted châteaus or fine restaurants in the countryside, places where your manners might be put on exhibit.
So I drove on through late afternoon, heading north at an in-between season. Soon I joined a familiar road. It grew cool; the region would in a month slide rapidly toward winter. Already the honeyed light carried a kind of nostalgia. On the cliffs the churches stood out in darkening silhouette, in some there were late services. The valleys deepened and a cataclysmic sunset transformed the sky into a heaven entirely of fire. As darkness settled the road led to Lyon and its factories, and a train, and the wicked lights of Paris.
Wednesday, October 14, 1987
Thursday, June 25, 1987
James Bond's Island
I visited Jamaica in June 1987, and soon write this for my excellent editor at East-West, Bill McCoy, one of the three fine magazine editors I encountered. (The other two were Chris Hunt of Travel & Leisure, and Kevin Buckley of Geo and Playboy.) East-West ran this piece the following year. Not surprisingly, Goldeneye is now a boutique hotel. Eric Ambler, the great British thriller author, wrote me that he "never stayed there, but heard it was damned uncomfortable."
The road to the beautiful little banana port of Oracabessa, along Jamaica’s north coast, takes one swiftly away from the tourist colonies of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. The fruit-stands by the roadside proliferate; dripping fish are for sale soon after their demise. The road breaks and expands and contracts in the jungle vegetation, the Blue Mountains steaming just inland. Oracabessa is part gimcrack shacks, part ramshackle Victoriana. There are no tourists, no foreigners in this tiny Caribbean village.
It was in this unlikely setting, deep in the heart of the Jamaica only Jamaicans know, that Ian Fleming—once commander in British naval intelligence, later foreign manager for a London-based chain of newspapers—decided to build a house shortly after the war. It was here, then, that James Bond was born.
“The shadows crept from behind the house and marched across the lawn and enveloped him. The Undertaker’s Wind that blows at night from the centre of the island, clattered softly in the tops of the palm trees. The frogs began to tinkle among the shrubs. The fireflies, the ‘blink-a-blinks’, as Quarrel called them, came out and began flashing their sexual morse. For a moment the melancholy of the tropical dusk caught at Bond’s heart.”
It is safe to say that, without Jamaica, there would’ve been no agent 007. When Ian Fleming built his simple house Goldeneye near Oracabessa in 1945, he was hardly a writer. After a respectable war career (in which his duties resembled M.’s rather than Bond’s) he settled down to the world of journalism, with the proviso that he be given two months’ leave each winter.
Fleming had passed through Jamaica during the war with a millionaire friend who owned property and, despite the seasonal monsoon, fell hard for the island. “I’ve made up my mind,” he announced. “I’m going to live the rest of my life in Jamaica.” He was to spend every winter there until his death, from 1946 to 1964.
The island’s dream-quality was to prove crucial in the incubation of the Bond thrillers. “I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here,” he wrote years later. “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.” It was only on his seventh sojourn, just before his marriage, that Fleming first conjured his secret agent, this man of action who was a vicarious dream-self.
As the late poet and critic Phillip Larkin has pointed out, Bond “was his creator in a way that Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes... clearly weren’t theirs. It was Fleming who smoked seventy cigarettes a day, wore dark blue Sea Island cotton shirts and loved scrambled eggs and double portions of orange juice for breakfast; Bond was a kind of doppleganger sent out to enact what Fleming himself never achieved….”
Of Scot ancestry, Fleming had been an energetic athlete on the playing fields of Eton, not a shining student. Soon outshone by his elder brother Peter, the explorer who wrote one of the great travel books of the Thirties, Brazilian Adventure, there was already a reputation for girls and cars by the time he left Eton. After a term he dismissed himself from Sandhurst.
Like most writers in the process of forming there was a good deal of the actor in him. For a year in the Austrian Tyrol, then Geneva and Munich, he skied and played at being a young intellectual on the way to a career in the Foreign Office. But he failed the exam. It was as a young Reuters correspondent that he traveled to Moscow and the seeds of “Smersh” got sown. By 1933 he was back in London, a junior partner in one of the better brokerage houses, where he remained until the war.
All this time he was known for his philandering ways; he was far less protective toward women than Bond. His brother’s success, his past as something of a black sheep still followed him about. But as John Pearson puts it in his extremely perceptive biography, The Life of Ian Fleming, “the trouble lay deeper even than this. It lay in that solitary dream world which he had constructed… in this world of unreality he could never risk revealing himself to another human being. Ultimately there was no relief from the interminable ego.” Until the war came, that is; for after the war he built Goldeneye.
There is a characteristically fine description of the house in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s classic book on the West Indies, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950. It must have made the ambitious homeowner (and designer) proud: “Here, on a headland, Ian Fleming has built a house called Goldeneye that might serve as a model for new houses in the tropics. Trees surround it on all sides except the sea, which it almost overhangs. Great windows capture every breeze, to cool, even on the hottest day, the large white rooms. The windows that look towards the sea are glassless but equipped with outside shutters against rain: enormous quadrilaterals surrounded by dark wooden frames which enclose a prospect of sea and cloud and sky, and tame the elements, as it were, into an overhanging fresco of which one could never tire.”
In these years Fleming had considerable work done on the property, originally the overgrown site of a donkey racetrack. He had part of the garden just before the blue-trimmed white house sunken-in, and stone steps cut down to the little horseshoe of private, cliff-held beach. Goldeneye became a modest fantasy, masculine in its plain creature comforts; it lacked only a wife.
It is significant that when Fleming’s shell finally cracked it was for another man’s wife, Lady Ann Rothermere, formerly Lady O’Neill, née Charteris. (For a time Fleming was nicknamed “Lady Rothermere’s Fan” in journalism circles.) And possibly to ward off the nerves brought on by her scandalous divorce and their impending marriage, in the winter of 1952 at Goldeneye, Fleming first sent forth James Bond. He got the name from “the cover of one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies, by James Bond, an ornithological classic.”
Fleming followed a writing regime inspired by the place itself, and nearly impossible elsewhere—certainly in sleeting London going to a newspaper office the other ten months of the year. As Violet, his housekeeper, described it to a recent visitor, Fleming would rise at eight, breakfast, stare at the sea until nine from his sunken garden, then go inside and write until twelve-thirty at the red bulletwood desk backed, curiously, with a mirror, that dominates a corner of the master bedroom. The long windows look spaciously out on the garden and the sea, but he wrote “with the jalousies closed….so I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside until I had completed my daily stint.”
He would bathe on his beach until one, lunch, then nap until four; take the standard bath of the Englishman in the tropics; then write until six-thirty, when it was time for the first drink of the evening. These evenings were clearly Fleming’s favorite part of the Jamaican day, most lovingly described in the books.
As Larkin puts it, “The ease with which Bond appeared (Fleming, forty-three, never having written a novel before, sat down and wrote Casino Royale in eight weeks) suggests the tapping of deep imaginative springs.” In fact Fleming had only limited personal experience to draw upon. He was energetic about turning to others for professional advice about the specifics of guns, cars, places. But he gave it all a sheen of deep realism, as if he’d lived it all himself. It is this instinct, the famous mania for detail (“shaken not stirred”) so easily parodied, that keeps the books alive. In part it arose from the sensual life that the writer’s paradise of Goldeneye allowed.
Fleming was to follow this daily routine for twelve more Bond books. Five have Jamaican settings, and they make clear Fleming’s deep love and knowledge of the island: the affectionate descriptions of real locations, the birds and flowers, the locals who were part of his life at Oracabessa. “I first learned about the bottom of the sea from the reefs around my property... and I learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people....” By the second book, Live and Let Die (written 1953), Fleming turned to Jamaica for plot inspiration, a search for the lost gold of the pirate Henry Morgan that leads to an invented Isle of Surprise along the coast by Oracabessa.
Though Fleming was a veteran clubman in London, and wrote knowledgeably of the colonial life in Kingston, he spent most of his holidays sequestered at his house, preferring the company of neighbors like Noël Coward. He often rented or loaned out Goldeneye when he was away. The Visitors’ book reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary English letters: Coward, Fermor, Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Stephen Spender, Cecil Beaton. After the 1956 Suez crisis, the Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife convalesced there.
One of Fleming’s paradoxes as a writer is that generally his characters are cardboard dummies, humorless Bond included; the women are all the same, each “a bird with one wing down.” After the vivid action scenes, it is the landscapes that, always, quicken to life. And, curiously, the background characters are vivid.
Perhaps the best of these, introduced in Live and Let Die and killed in Doctor No, is Quarrel, the Cayman Islander who acts as a sort of Man Friday for Bond on Jamaica. Fleming based Quarrel on an Oracabessan named Aubyn Cousins, whose father had previously owned Goldeneye’s property. In his bachelor years Fleming often snorkelled with Cousins on Goldeneye’s teeming reef; Cousins was particularly able at lassoing sharks. Undoubtedly Bond’s education undersea by the faithful Quarrel echoes Fleming’s by Cousins.
“He spoke exactly but without expertise,” Fleming writes in Live and Let Die, “using Jamaican language in which plants ‘strive’ or ‘quail,’ moths are ‘bats,’ and ‘love’ is used instead of ‘like.’ As he talked, he would raise his hand in greeting to the people on the road, and they would wave back and shout his name.”
The book is notable also for a brief description of Negril before the tourist developers came in. It would be scarcely recognizable now, as “...five miles of white sand sloping easily into the breakers and, behind, the palm trees marching in graceful disarray to the horizon. Under them the grey canoes were pulled up beside the pink mounds of discarded conch shells, and among them smoke rose from the palm thatch cabins of the fishermen in the shade between the swamplands and the sea.” Like all writers, Fleming wrote best about what he knew best, and in the Jamaican settings he didn’t have to rely on anyone else’s expertise or depth.
Doctor No begins with the Queen’s Club, “cool and quiet and withdrawn from the hot, vulgar sprawl of Kingston.” The book is unusual in its portrayal of Jamaica’s powerful Chinese community, rarely recognized in most local fiction. For the background of the girl, Honeychile Rider, Fleming turned to the vague histories of the many ruins of “great houses”—plantation mansions—that tumble along the coast. He was careful to work in a measure of contempt, on Bond’s part of course, for the workings of the British government on the island.
But after the first five thrillers Fleming was already starting “to run out of puff.” This was partly the old Fleming ennui and partly ill health; Bond’s smoking and drinking justified his creator’s bad habits. The short stories “For Your Eyes Only” and “Octopussy”—in books of the same names—have Jamaican locales (especially the latter, which is full of Goldeneye’s atmosphere). It was in his twelfth book, barely completed before his death from a massive coronary in 1964, that Fleming best portrayed his beloved second home.
Most of The Man With the Golden Gun takes place along Jamaica’s south coast, rarely visited by tourists and almost never in fiction. “It is a long hundred-and-twenty-mile hack over very mixed road surfaces from Kingston to Savannah La Mar,” wrote Fleming, and indeed it still is, though it takes you past some of the prettiest little forgotten townships on the island. The seedy bar/bordello in Sav’ La Mar where Bond made Scaramanga’s acquaintance may be found today, spruced up as a medical clinic. Fleming called the address “3 1/2 Love Lane,” but it is now officially Norman Lane. Though a lignum vitae tree still blossoms in the garden (across the lane squats a new police station), no one remembers the house as the Dreamland Café.
By Fleming’s death, film-Bond had inevitably caught up to book-Bond. Fleming had a hand in the first film, Dr. No, made largely in Jamaica—at the old Palisadoes Airport, Queen’s Club, and Government House (Kingston); at Morgan’s Harbour (Bond meets Quarrel); on Kinsale Street (Strangways). The mangrove swamps of Falmouth were used as Dr. No’s territory, and the film crew’s hotel, the Sans Souci, became the mountain cottage where Sean Connery seduced Miss Taro. It was on the beach of the private estate appropriately-named Laughing Waters, near Ocho Rios, that Ursula Andress did her impersonation of Botticelli’s Venus.
Goldeneye today, with its gate crowned by carved pineapples, is virtually unchanged since Fleming’s era. The curved desk still commands a corner of the master bedroom, the Doctor’s Wind and the Undertaker’s Wind graze the lawn, the path descends to the little beach. The mahogany furniture with seashell handles, the furnishings of great restraint, are as Fleming had them, preserved by the current owner, a record and film producer who rents the house by the week. The staff is still presided over by Fleming’s housekeeper, Violet Cummings, who fondly remembers ‘the Commander.” (Anyone wishing to rent Goldeneye should get in touch with the owner’s U.S. rep, Barbara Cuddy, at 212-535-4515.) I called, and it is a fax machine.
Often today the popular myth of a writer’s life overshadows his work. But the Bond myth has provided a worldwide role model for the man of action for twenty-five years now, thanks to the films. And in a sense Bond has erased Fleming. To visit Goldeneye, to imagine all that fuss starting at this unimportant lovely place, brings on a nostalgia for the simpler time when Anne Fleming could write of leaning over the cliff railing after sunset to watch “the spray of the reef or the high bright stars” and that “Ian remains longer than any of us,” having done his requisite 2,000 words that day.
Neither Fleming (never a businessman) nor his heirs would receive much of the big payoff, the film-money. But Bond has entered the realm of Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, of creations far larger than their creator; he is everywhere. In a recent Bulgarian bestseller, a bloc baddie bests Bond.
And not everyone has forgotten where it all started. Not too long ago, in a small Jamaican town, I heard the Kingston radio station play through a scratchy 60s record of themes from several of the films, anonymously souped-up for big band. The announcer referred to 007 as “our own.” Fleming may be gone, but Jamaica will always be James Bond’s island.
The road to the beautiful little banana port of Oracabessa, along Jamaica’s north coast, takes one swiftly away from the tourist colonies of Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. The fruit-stands by the roadside proliferate; dripping fish are for sale soon after their demise. The road breaks and expands and contracts in the jungle vegetation, the Blue Mountains steaming just inland. Oracabessa is part gimcrack shacks, part ramshackle Victoriana. There are no tourists, no foreigners in this tiny Caribbean village.
It was in this unlikely setting, deep in the heart of the Jamaica only Jamaicans know, that Ian Fleming—once commander in British naval intelligence, later foreign manager for a London-based chain of newspapers—decided to build a house shortly after the war. It was here, then, that James Bond was born.
“The shadows crept from behind the house and marched across the lawn and enveloped him. The Undertaker’s Wind that blows at night from the centre of the island, clattered softly in the tops of the palm trees. The frogs began to tinkle among the shrubs. The fireflies, the ‘blink-a-blinks’, as Quarrel called them, came out and began flashing their sexual morse. For a moment the melancholy of the tropical dusk caught at Bond’s heart.”
It is safe to say that, without Jamaica, there would’ve been no agent 007. When Ian Fleming built his simple house Goldeneye near Oracabessa in 1945, he was hardly a writer. After a respectable war career (in which his duties resembled M.’s rather than Bond’s) he settled down to the world of journalism, with the proviso that he be given two months’ leave each winter.
Fleming had passed through Jamaica during the war with a millionaire friend who owned property and, despite the seasonal monsoon, fell hard for the island. “I’ve made up my mind,” he announced. “I’m going to live the rest of my life in Jamaica.” He was to spend every winter there until his death, from 1946 to 1964.
The island’s dream-quality was to prove crucial in the incubation of the Bond thrillers. “I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here,” he wrote years later. “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.” It was only on his seventh sojourn, just before his marriage, that Fleming first conjured his secret agent, this man of action who was a vicarious dream-self.
As the late poet and critic Phillip Larkin has pointed out, Bond “was his creator in a way that Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes... clearly weren’t theirs. It was Fleming who smoked seventy cigarettes a day, wore dark blue Sea Island cotton shirts and loved scrambled eggs and double portions of orange juice for breakfast; Bond was a kind of doppleganger sent out to enact what Fleming himself never achieved….”
Of Scot ancestry, Fleming had been an energetic athlete on the playing fields of Eton, not a shining student. Soon outshone by his elder brother Peter, the explorer who wrote one of the great travel books of the Thirties, Brazilian Adventure, there was already a reputation for girls and cars by the time he left Eton. After a term he dismissed himself from Sandhurst.
Like most writers in the process of forming there was a good deal of the actor in him. For a year in the Austrian Tyrol, then Geneva and Munich, he skied and played at being a young intellectual on the way to a career in the Foreign Office. But he failed the exam. It was as a young Reuters correspondent that he traveled to Moscow and the seeds of “Smersh” got sown. By 1933 he was back in London, a junior partner in one of the better brokerage houses, where he remained until the war.
All this time he was known for his philandering ways; he was far less protective toward women than Bond. His brother’s success, his past as something of a black sheep still followed him about. But as John Pearson puts it in his extremely perceptive biography, The Life of Ian Fleming, “the trouble lay deeper even than this. It lay in that solitary dream world which he had constructed… in this world of unreality he could never risk revealing himself to another human being. Ultimately there was no relief from the interminable ego.” Until the war came, that is; for after the war he built Goldeneye.
There is a characteristically fine description of the house in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s classic book on the West Indies, The Traveller’s Tree, published in 1950. It must have made the ambitious homeowner (and designer) proud: “Here, on a headland, Ian Fleming has built a house called Goldeneye that might serve as a model for new houses in the tropics. Trees surround it on all sides except the sea, which it almost overhangs. Great windows capture every breeze, to cool, even on the hottest day, the large white rooms. The windows that look towards the sea are glassless but equipped with outside shutters against rain: enormous quadrilaterals surrounded by dark wooden frames which enclose a prospect of sea and cloud and sky, and tame the elements, as it were, into an overhanging fresco of which one could never tire.”
In these years Fleming had considerable work done on the property, originally the overgrown site of a donkey racetrack. He had part of the garden just before the blue-trimmed white house sunken-in, and stone steps cut down to the little horseshoe of private, cliff-held beach. Goldeneye became a modest fantasy, masculine in its plain creature comforts; it lacked only a wife.
It is significant that when Fleming’s shell finally cracked it was for another man’s wife, Lady Ann Rothermere, formerly Lady O’Neill, née Charteris. (For a time Fleming was nicknamed “Lady Rothermere’s Fan” in journalism circles.) And possibly to ward off the nerves brought on by her scandalous divorce and their impending marriage, in the winter of 1952 at Goldeneye, Fleming first sent forth James Bond. He got the name from “the cover of one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies, by James Bond, an ornithological classic.”
Fleming followed a writing regime inspired by the place itself, and nearly impossible elsewhere—certainly in sleeting London going to a newspaper office the other ten months of the year. As Violet, his housekeeper, described it to a recent visitor, Fleming would rise at eight, breakfast, stare at the sea until nine from his sunken garden, then go inside and write until twelve-thirty at the red bulletwood desk backed, curiously, with a mirror, that dominates a corner of the master bedroom. The long windows look spaciously out on the garden and the sea, but he wrote “with the jalousies closed….so I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside until I had completed my daily stint.”
He would bathe on his beach until one, lunch, then nap until four; take the standard bath of the Englishman in the tropics; then write until six-thirty, when it was time for the first drink of the evening. These evenings were clearly Fleming’s favorite part of the Jamaican day, most lovingly described in the books.
As Larkin puts it, “The ease with which Bond appeared (Fleming, forty-three, never having written a novel before, sat down and wrote Casino Royale in eight weeks) suggests the tapping of deep imaginative springs.” In fact Fleming had only limited personal experience to draw upon. He was energetic about turning to others for professional advice about the specifics of guns, cars, places. But he gave it all a sheen of deep realism, as if he’d lived it all himself. It is this instinct, the famous mania for detail (“shaken not stirred”) so easily parodied, that keeps the books alive. In part it arose from the sensual life that the writer’s paradise of Goldeneye allowed.
Fleming was to follow this daily routine for twelve more Bond books. Five have Jamaican settings, and they make clear Fleming’s deep love and knowledge of the island: the affectionate descriptions of real locations, the birds and flowers, the locals who were part of his life at Oracabessa. “I first learned about the bottom of the sea from the reefs around my property... and I learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people....” By the second book, Live and Let Die (written 1953), Fleming turned to Jamaica for plot inspiration, a search for the lost gold of the pirate Henry Morgan that leads to an invented Isle of Surprise along the coast by Oracabessa.
Though Fleming was a veteran clubman in London, and wrote knowledgeably of the colonial life in Kingston, he spent most of his holidays sequestered at his house, preferring the company of neighbors like Noël Coward. He often rented or loaned out Goldeneye when he was away. The Visitors’ book reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary English letters: Coward, Fermor, Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Stephen Spender, Cecil Beaton. After the 1956 Suez crisis, the Prime Minister Anthony Eden and his wife convalesced there.
One of Fleming’s paradoxes as a writer is that generally his characters are cardboard dummies, humorless Bond included; the women are all the same, each “a bird with one wing down.” After the vivid action scenes, it is the landscapes that, always, quicken to life. And, curiously, the background characters are vivid.
Perhaps the best of these, introduced in Live and Let Die and killed in Doctor No, is Quarrel, the Cayman Islander who acts as a sort of Man Friday for Bond on Jamaica. Fleming based Quarrel on an Oracabessan named Aubyn Cousins, whose father had previously owned Goldeneye’s property. In his bachelor years Fleming often snorkelled with Cousins on Goldeneye’s teeming reef; Cousins was particularly able at lassoing sharks. Undoubtedly Bond’s education undersea by the faithful Quarrel echoes Fleming’s by Cousins.
“He spoke exactly but without expertise,” Fleming writes in Live and Let Die, “using Jamaican language in which plants ‘strive’ or ‘quail,’ moths are ‘bats,’ and ‘love’ is used instead of ‘like.’ As he talked, he would raise his hand in greeting to the people on the road, and they would wave back and shout his name.”
The book is notable also for a brief description of Negril before the tourist developers came in. It would be scarcely recognizable now, as “...five miles of white sand sloping easily into the breakers and, behind, the palm trees marching in graceful disarray to the horizon. Under them the grey canoes were pulled up beside the pink mounds of discarded conch shells, and among them smoke rose from the palm thatch cabins of the fishermen in the shade between the swamplands and the sea.” Like all writers, Fleming wrote best about what he knew best, and in the Jamaican settings he didn’t have to rely on anyone else’s expertise or depth.
Doctor No begins with the Queen’s Club, “cool and quiet and withdrawn from the hot, vulgar sprawl of Kingston.” The book is unusual in its portrayal of Jamaica’s powerful Chinese community, rarely recognized in most local fiction. For the background of the girl, Honeychile Rider, Fleming turned to the vague histories of the many ruins of “great houses”—plantation mansions—that tumble along the coast. He was careful to work in a measure of contempt, on Bond’s part of course, for the workings of the British government on the island.
But after the first five thrillers Fleming was already starting “to run out of puff.” This was partly the old Fleming ennui and partly ill health; Bond’s smoking and drinking justified his creator’s bad habits. The short stories “For Your Eyes Only” and “Octopussy”—in books of the same names—have Jamaican locales (especially the latter, which is full of Goldeneye’s atmosphere). It was in his twelfth book, barely completed before his death from a massive coronary in 1964, that Fleming best portrayed his beloved second home.
Most of The Man With the Golden Gun takes place along Jamaica’s south coast, rarely visited by tourists and almost never in fiction. “It is a long hundred-and-twenty-mile hack over very mixed road surfaces from Kingston to Savannah La Mar,” wrote Fleming, and indeed it still is, though it takes you past some of the prettiest little forgotten townships on the island. The seedy bar/bordello in Sav’ La Mar where Bond made Scaramanga’s acquaintance may be found today, spruced up as a medical clinic. Fleming called the address “3 1/2 Love Lane,” but it is now officially Norman Lane. Though a lignum vitae tree still blossoms in the garden (across the lane squats a new police station), no one remembers the house as the Dreamland Café.
By Fleming’s death, film-Bond had inevitably caught up to book-Bond. Fleming had a hand in the first film, Dr. No, made largely in Jamaica—at the old Palisadoes Airport, Queen’s Club, and Government House (Kingston); at Morgan’s Harbour (Bond meets Quarrel); on Kinsale Street (Strangways). The mangrove swamps of Falmouth were used as Dr. No’s territory, and the film crew’s hotel, the Sans Souci, became the mountain cottage where Sean Connery seduced Miss Taro. It was on the beach of the private estate appropriately-named Laughing Waters, near Ocho Rios, that Ursula Andress did her impersonation of Botticelli’s Venus.
Goldeneye today, with its gate crowned by carved pineapples, is virtually unchanged since Fleming’s era. The curved desk still commands a corner of the master bedroom, the Doctor’s Wind and the Undertaker’s Wind graze the lawn, the path descends to the little beach. The mahogany furniture with seashell handles, the furnishings of great restraint, are as Fleming had them, preserved by the current owner, a record and film producer who rents the house by the week. The staff is still presided over by Fleming’s housekeeper, Violet Cummings, who fondly remembers ‘the Commander.” (Anyone wishing to rent Goldeneye should get in touch with the owner’s U.S. rep, Barbara Cuddy, at 212-535-4515.) I called, and it is a fax machine.
Often today the popular myth of a writer’s life overshadows his work. But the Bond myth has provided a worldwide role model for the man of action for twenty-five years now, thanks to the films. And in a sense Bond has erased Fleming. To visit Goldeneye, to imagine all that fuss starting at this unimportant lovely place, brings on a nostalgia for the simpler time when Anne Fleming could write of leaning over the cliff railing after sunset to watch “the spray of the reef or the high bright stars” and that “Ian remains longer than any of us,” having done his requisite 2,000 words that day.
Neither Fleming (never a businessman) nor his heirs would receive much of the big payoff, the film-money. But Bond has entered the realm of Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, of creations far larger than their creator; he is everywhere. In a recent Bulgarian bestseller, a bloc baddie bests Bond.
And not everyone has forgotten where it all started. Not too long ago, in a small Jamaican town, I heard the Kingston radio station play through a scratchy 60s record of themes from several of the films, anonymously souped-up for big band. The announcer referred to 007 as “our own.” Fleming may be gone, but Jamaica will always be James Bond’s island.
Tuesday, April 14, 1987
Sanctuary: A Great Writer's Hometown
I visited Mississippi in January 1987, so I must've written this soon afterward. Travel & Leisure didn't publish it until September 1989, with atmospheric black-and-white photographs by Alen MacWeeney, who was not there at the same time as I was. (This delay is normal in magazines.)
William Faulkner spent most of his life in the small university town of Oxford, Mississippi, which became the center of his imaginative life and the seat of his many-storied Yoknapatawpha County. It fed Faulkner as London fed Dickens and as India nourished Kipling. Intimate with local families in which ruin, pride and at times violence flourished, he saw in this remote corner of the South all the material he needed to create, in fiction, a personal territory and language. And despite changes in the town since Faulkner’s death in 1962 (when it had already embarked on the decharacterizing route of much of the South), Oxford still carries the atmosphere of the author and his work.
The countryside has not changed much. All the backgrounds of Faulkner’s land-rooted fiction are here: the thick woods, the fields punctuated by worn shacks, the Delta and the river. Oxford, like many small Southern towns, is governed by a courthouse square from which wide avenues and their tributary streets emanate. The square is still the heart of the town, of the commerce of daily life: low buildings that in Faulkner’s day had balconies and a central tiny park. Faulkner described it memorably in Requiem for a Nun:
“...a Square, the courthouse in its grove the center; quadrangular around it, the stores...school and church and tavern and bank and jail each in its ordered place.... But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the county’s circumference...musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable, tall as cloud, solid as rock, dominating all....”
Founded in 1837 in Chickasaw Indian territory, Oxford was soon incorporated as the county seat. The name was chosen to encourage the state legislature to establish the University of Mississippi there, and Ole Miss went on to become famous for its belles and its football team. The Union Army burned the town totally in 1864. Up until the war it had been a boomtown in cotton country, which accounts for its sense of grace, order, and prosperity.
It is impossible to account for Faulkner. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, he began school at eight in Oxford and left high school to work odd jobs (in one stint as bookkeeper at his grandfather’s bank). During World War I he joined Canada’s Royal Flying Corps, then returned to study briefly at Ole Miss. His writing, with its idiosyncratic punctuation, was blessed by being entirely self-taught and unformed by academic staleness.
A succession of jobs followed, until Sherwood Anderson, in New Orleans, promised to help get Faulkner’s first novel published if the young man would promise not to make him read it. Back in Oxford, Faulkner kept at the odd jobs: he was a house painter, the university’s post-master, deckhand on a shrimp trawler, boiler fireman and, for most of his life, a farmer. By the time he was forty, he had written Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
From the 1930s to mid-1950s he visited Hollywood annually, writing such screenplays as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and hurrying back to Oxford as soon as he’d made enough to keep the farm running. It is often forgotten that he wrote the script, for example, of Land of the Pharaohs (with Joan Collins, 1955) five years after he won the Nobel Prize. Hollywood worsened Faulkner’s depressive moods and bouts of heavy drinking; the heart attack that killed him in 1962 came at a Mississippi sanatorium where he’d gone to dry out.
Oxford’s mayor, John Leslie, knew Faulkner from the 1940s. Since politicians, especially local ones, are usually shrewd judges of character, even from afar, I asked what sort of fellow Faulkner had seemed.
“He was often in a kind of daze,” said Leslie. “His post-office box was near mine, so we’d run into each other when the mail came. I kept to a rule that if he spoke first I’d talk to him. Sometimes he’d walk past without noticing. You could generally see there was something going on in his mind. He wasn’t a large man; he was very graceful the way a moderate or slightly small man can be.
“I don’t know how many times I saw him in the square, leaning back against a building, propped up on one leg, just listening to people’s conversation. He could spend hours that way. In those days you saw horses and wagons filling the square. He liked particularly to listen to—or talk with—blacks. He was fascinated by their conversation; he had a look when you could tell he was following several conversations at once. I never saw him taking notes, though. I guess he remembered all he needed.”
“How did you meet him?” I asked.
“It really was through my brother,” Leslie explained. “This would’ve been in the 1940s. At that time Intruder in the Dust had just been published. My brother, who studied at Duke—the first American university where you read Faulkner’s books—knew his work and admired it greatly. That was during a lull in his reputation, so my brother was a bit of a rarity. I thought I’d try to get Faulkner to autograph a copy of Intruder so I could give it as a present. I was a student here at Ole Miss at the time.
“Sure enough, there was Faulkner leaning up against the department store, one foot on the wall. (To be truthful, sometimes I wasn’t too sure it was Bill and not his brother, who looked an awful lot like him.) But I went up to him with my copy of the book and I explained what I wanted. Faulkner looked me over and said, ‘Well, I’ve got an agreement with the publisher that I sign a number of books for him and that’s all.’ I guess he thought the value of his signed books would go up if he didn’t sign too many. Or maybe he couldn’t be bothered.
“Anyway, I thanked him and turned away, a little disappointed, and he gave a little laugh and said, ‘Come on, of course I’ll sign that book for you.’ And he did, and put the date right there, in his tiny hen-scratch handwriting.
“He was a funny man. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but Mississippians are among the craziest people you can find anywhere. They’ll shoot at anything that moves. Faulkner had trouble with people in his woods—he had more than thirty acres there. Full of squirrels and people trying to shoot them. One of the funniest things that Bill ever wrote was that notice in the Oxford Eagle.”
This was the paid advertisement, published October 15, 1959, which reads:
The posted woods on my property inside the city limits of Oxford contain
several tame squirrels. Any hunter who feels himself too lacking in woodcraft
and marksmanship to approach a dangerous wild squirrel might feel safe with
these. These woods are a part of the pasture used by my horses and milk cow; also,
the late arrival will find them already full of other hunters. He is kindly
requested not to shoot either of these.
William Faulkner
“Another time,” Leslie went on, “there was all sorts of trouble with a minister in Memphis who was trying to keep people from drinking beer and seeing films like The Outlaw, which had Jane Russell in it. This kind of thing—censorship of any kind, I suppose—made Faulkner hopping mad. He had a whole hilarious pamphlet printed up defending the right to drink beer. And in the novels Sanctuary and The Reivers, his last book, he gave the minister’s name to the head of a Memphis bordello. So Faulkner had the last laugh.
“I think Faulkner had real money problems nearly all the time. Once he had a bill at a local store and he sent the owner a handwritten letter that said essentially, ‘One day this piece of paper will be worth much more than I owe you.’ He had to take out an ad in the Eagle saying he wasn’t responsible for charges incurred at local stores by his wife. I believe he had as many as nineteen people living off him at one time or another, and he had to go out to Hollywood periodically and write films to pay his debts.”
My next stop, just off the square, was the former office of Phil Stone, the lawyer who had befriended Faulkner, lending him books and encouraging his writing. Most of Faulkner’s first half-dozen books were typed and retyped by Stone’s secretary until they filled half a filing cabinet. (The Snopes trilogy is dedicated to Stone.)
I was welcomed into the modest shaded brick building by Tom Freeland, a young lawyer who was a fund of stories about Faulkner and Stone and the people who come in search of a writer’s mystique. “Shoney’s, the burger place out on the highway, produces these stories all the time. I had a lady from New York come in the other day to look at Phil Stone’s office, and she said her waitress had never met Faulkner. She said, 'A writer? Does he live around here?' So he’s not as famous as all that, maybe.”
He also told me about a visit from Gabriel García Márquez, who'd gone unrecognized.
At the Ole Miss library, I wandered through an exhibit of Faulkneriania—first and foreign editions of his books, many awards, including the Nobel Prize—enough to make you conclude that Faulkner’s time of relative obscurity in this country wasn’t, as obscurity goes, all that considerable: even if most of his work wasn’t in print here at this low ebb; around World War II, his books were still being published. But America is hard on its originals, and one looks at the size of the achievement and wonders: How many more books if he hadn’t had to go to Hollywood?
On the way out to Rowan Oak, the Faulkner home (a ten-minute walk along South Lamar Boulevard from the square), I slipped in a detour to the enormous house on Buchanan Avenue at 13th Street that was the model for the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury. Understandably, it gives an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, for no writer bettered Faulkner at conveying a sense of place, once he’d realized that his “little postage stamp of native soil” was worth writing about.
On Old Taylor Road I walked down a path to the great house, aloof at the end of a colonnade of cedar trees, magisterial with its white columns and classic antebellum grace. When Faulkner bought the house it was in great disrepair; he added brick galleries and a stable. Inside, Rowan Oak has a comfortable pipe-smoke feel to it, like the home of a country doctor with an interest in riding and reading. The rooms have fireplaces, and there is a modest library, which contains mostly Great Books, Cervantes and Shakespeare and such.
The downstairs office, which Faulkner built in 1950, remains as it was: the old Underwood portable typewriter sitting in its case on a small table by the room’s only window, which looks out on a stable and back lawn and woods—a good empty view for a writer. On one side of the typewriter a lamp, on the other an ashtray. Here is a day bed, a half-filled bookcase, and pencilled carefully across the walls, day by day, the plan for A Fable (1956 Pulitzer Prize).
With characteristic independence, he approached each novel as if it were a technical problem no one had ever solved before, and found experimental solutions on which two later generations of writers have fed. No one can read his books without feeling that the mansion of the novel form is having its wall pushed outward and several extravagant wings added by a master carpenter, while a number of resisting old doors are being firmly kicked in.
He wrote unsentimentally about blacks, and time has made his achievement in this regard even greater. Faulkner was among the very first to use blacks as characters rather than caricatures. Though Faulkner’s experimentalism is always cited as the reason he was more popular abroad than at home, the reason might be more a social than a literary judgment.
Most delightful of all is his humor—to which no essay can ever do justice—in “Spotted Horses,” say, or The Reivers. His best books tend to be the most widely read, which is all any writer can hope from posterity. They are so persuasive that they constitute a serious problem for the novelist who wishes to write about the South—an act that no one wants to follow. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”
Whatever occasional reservations one may have about Faulkner’s writing, his books are difficult to forget, and they have a grip, an imaginative pressure in the mind, that only the greatest writers achieve. And—such is the force of Faulkner’s personality—in his books the rough spots can come to seem less like faults than like the mark of a lovingly handmade thing. In an age of minimalist dandies whose sentences regard themselves endlessly in a succession of mirrors, Faulkner’s writing, even at its moments of metaphysical groping, carries enormous force and sober poetry. Like the country that produced him, it is always vivid, eccentric and full of beautiful contrarieties. Like Faulkner, it goes quite contentedly its own way.
William Faulkner spent most of his life in the small university town of Oxford, Mississippi, which became the center of his imaginative life and the seat of his many-storied Yoknapatawpha County. It fed Faulkner as London fed Dickens and as India nourished Kipling. Intimate with local families in which ruin, pride and at times violence flourished, he saw in this remote corner of the South all the material he needed to create, in fiction, a personal territory and language. And despite changes in the town since Faulkner’s death in 1962 (when it had already embarked on the decharacterizing route of much of the South), Oxford still carries the atmosphere of the author and his work.
The countryside has not changed much. All the backgrounds of Faulkner’s land-rooted fiction are here: the thick woods, the fields punctuated by worn shacks, the Delta and the river. Oxford, like many small Southern towns, is governed by a courthouse square from which wide avenues and their tributary streets emanate. The square is still the heart of the town, of the commerce of daily life: low buildings that in Faulkner’s day had balconies and a central tiny park. Faulkner described it memorably in Requiem for a Nun:
“...a Square, the courthouse in its grove the center; quadrangular around it, the stores...school and church and tavern and bank and jail each in its ordered place.... But above all, the courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub; sitting looming in the center of the county’s circumference...musing, brooding, symbolic and ponderable, tall as cloud, solid as rock, dominating all....”
Founded in 1837 in Chickasaw Indian territory, Oxford was soon incorporated as the county seat. The name was chosen to encourage the state legislature to establish the University of Mississippi there, and Ole Miss went on to become famous for its belles and its football team. The Union Army burned the town totally in 1864. Up until the war it had been a boomtown in cotton country, which accounts for its sense of grace, order, and prosperity.
It is impossible to account for Faulkner. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, he began school at eight in Oxford and left high school to work odd jobs (in one stint as bookkeeper at his grandfather’s bank). During World War I he joined Canada’s Royal Flying Corps, then returned to study briefly at Ole Miss. His writing, with its idiosyncratic punctuation, was blessed by being entirely self-taught and unformed by academic staleness.
A succession of jobs followed, until Sherwood Anderson, in New Orleans, promised to help get Faulkner’s first novel published if the young man would promise not to make him read it. Back in Oxford, Faulkner kept at the odd jobs: he was a house painter, the university’s post-master, deckhand on a shrimp trawler, boiler fireman and, for most of his life, a farmer. By the time he was forty, he had written Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
From the 1930s to mid-1950s he visited Hollywood annually, writing such screenplays as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and hurrying back to Oxford as soon as he’d made enough to keep the farm running. It is often forgotten that he wrote the script, for example, of Land of the Pharaohs (with Joan Collins, 1955) five years after he won the Nobel Prize. Hollywood worsened Faulkner’s depressive moods and bouts of heavy drinking; the heart attack that killed him in 1962 came at a Mississippi sanatorium where he’d gone to dry out.
Oxford’s mayor, John Leslie, knew Faulkner from the 1940s. Since politicians, especially local ones, are usually shrewd judges of character, even from afar, I asked what sort of fellow Faulkner had seemed.
“He was often in a kind of daze,” said Leslie. “His post-office box was near mine, so we’d run into each other when the mail came. I kept to a rule that if he spoke first I’d talk to him. Sometimes he’d walk past without noticing. You could generally see there was something going on in his mind. He wasn’t a large man; he was very graceful the way a moderate or slightly small man can be.
“I don’t know how many times I saw him in the square, leaning back against a building, propped up on one leg, just listening to people’s conversation. He could spend hours that way. In those days you saw horses and wagons filling the square. He liked particularly to listen to—or talk with—blacks. He was fascinated by their conversation; he had a look when you could tell he was following several conversations at once. I never saw him taking notes, though. I guess he remembered all he needed.”
“How did you meet him?” I asked.
“It really was through my brother,” Leslie explained. “This would’ve been in the 1940s. At that time Intruder in the Dust had just been published. My brother, who studied at Duke—the first American university where you read Faulkner’s books—knew his work and admired it greatly. That was during a lull in his reputation, so my brother was a bit of a rarity. I thought I’d try to get Faulkner to autograph a copy of Intruder so I could give it as a present. I was a student here at Ole Miss at the time.
“Sure enough, there was Faulkner leaning up against the department store, one foot on the wall. (To be truthful, sometimes I wasn’t too sure it was Bill and not his brother, who looked an awful lot like him.) But I went up to him with my copy of the book and I explained what I wanted. Faulkner looked me over and said, ‘Well, I’ve got an agreement with the publisher that I sign a number of books for him and that’s all.’ I guess he thought the value of his signed books would go up if he didn’t sign too many. Or maybe he couldn’t be bothered.
“Anyway, I thanked him and turned away, a little disappointed, and he gave a little laugh and said, ‘Come on, of course I’ll sign that book for you.’ And he did, and put the date right there, in his tiny hen-scratch handwriting.
“He was a funny man. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but Mississippians are among the craziest people you can find anywhere. They’ll shoot at anything that moves. Faulkner had trouble with people in his woods—he had more than thirty acres there. Full of squirrels and people trying to shoot them. One of the funniest things that Bill ever wrote was that notice in the Oxford Eagle.”
This was the paid advertisement, published October 15, 1959, which reads:
NOTICE
The posted woods on my property inside the city limits of Oxford contain
several tame squirrels. Any hunter who feels himself too lacking in woodcraft
and marksmanship to approach a dangerous wild squirrel might feel safe with
these. These woods are a part of the pasture used by my horses and milk cow; also,
the late arrival will find them already full of other hunters. He is kindly
requested not to shoot either of these.
William Faulkner
“Another time,” Leslie went on, “there was all sorts of trouble with a minister in Memphis who was trying to keep people from drinking beer and seeing films like The Outlaw, which had Jane Russell in it. This kind of thing—censorship of any kind, I suppose—made Faulkner hopping mad. He had a whole hilarious pamphlet printed up defending the right to drink beer. And in the novels Sanctuary and The Reivers, his last book, he gave the minister’s name to the head of a Memphis bordello. So Faulkner had the last laugh.
“I think Faulkner had real money problems nearly all the time. Once he had a bill at a local store and he sent the owner a handwritten letter that said essentially, ‘One day this piece of paper will be worth much more than I owe you.’ He had to take out an ad in the Eagle saying he wasn’t responsible for charges incurred at local stores by his wife. I believe he had as many as nineteen people living off him at one time or another, and he had to go out to Hollywood periodically and write films to pay his debts.”
My next stop, just off the square, was the former office of Phil Stone, the lawyer who had befriended Faulkner, lending him books and encouraging his writing. Most of Faulkner’s first half-dozen books were typed and retyped by Stone’s secretary until they filled half a filing cabinet. (The Snopes trilogy is dedicated to Stone.)
I was welcomed into the modest shaded brick building by Tom Freeland, a young lawyer who was a fund of stories about Faulkner and Stone and the people who come in search of a writer’s mystique. “Shoney’s, the burger place out on the highway, produces these stories all the time. I had a lady from New York come in the other day to look at Phil Stone’s office, and she said her waitress had never met Faulkner. She said, 'A writer? Does he live around here?' So he’s not as famous as all that, maybe.”
He also told me about a visit from Gabriel García Márquez, who'd gone unrecognized.
At the Ole Miss library, I wandered through an exhibit of Faulkneriania—first and foreign editions of his books, many awards, including the Nobel Prize—enough to make you conclude that Faulkner’s time of relative obscurity in this country wasn’t, as obscurity goes, all that considerable: even if most of his work wasn’t in print here at this low ebb; around World War II, his books were still being published. But America is hard on its originals, and one looks at the size of the achievement and wonders: How many more books if he hadn’t had to go to Hollywood?
On the way out to Rowan Oak, the Faulkner home (a ten-minute walk along South Lamar Boulevard from the square), I slipped in a detour to the enormous house on Buchanan Avenue at 13th Street that was the model for the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury. Understandably, it gives an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, for no writer bettered Faulkner at conveying a sense of place, once he’d realized that his “little postage stamp of native soil” was worth writing about.
On Old Taylor Road I walked down a path to the great house, aloof at the end of a colonnade of cedar trees, magisterial with its white columns and classic antebellum grace. When Faulkner bought the house it was in great disrepair; he added brick galleries and a stable. Inside, Rowan Oak has a comfortable pipe-smoke feel to it, like the home of a country doctor with an interest in riding and reading. The rooms have fireplaces, and there is a modest library, which contains mostly Great Books, Cervantes and Shakespeare and such.
The downstairs office, which Faulkner built in 1950, remains as it was: the old Underwood portable typewriter sitting in its case on a small table by the room’s only window, which looks out on a stable and back lawn and woods—a good empty view for a writer. On one side of the typewriter a lamp, on the other an ashtray. Here is a day bed, a half-filled bookcase, and pencilled carefully across the walls, day by day, the plan for A Fable (1956 Pulitzer Prize).
With characteristic independence, he approached each novel as if it were a technical problem no one had ever solved before, and found experimental solutions on which two later generations of writers have fed. No one can read his books without feeling that the mansion of the novel form is having its wall pushed outward and several extravagant wings added by a master carpenter, while a number of resisting old doors are being firmly kicked in.
He wrote unsentimentally about blacks, and time has made his achievement in this regard even greater. Faulkner was among the very first to use blacks as characters rather than caricatures. Though Faulkner’s experimentalism is always cited as the reason he was more popular abroad than at home, the reason might be more a social than a literary judgment.
Most delightful of all is his humor—to which no essay can ever do justice—in “Spotted Horses,” say, or The Reivers. His best books tend to be the most widely read, which is all any writer can hope from posterity. They are so persuasive that they constitute a serious problem for the novelist who wishes to write about the South—an act that no one wants to follow. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”
Whatever occasional reservations one may have about Faulkner’s writing, his books are difficult to forget, and they have a grip, an imaginative pressure in the mind, that only the greatest writers achieve. And—such is the force of Faulkner’s personality—in his books the rough spots can come to seem less like faults than like the mark of a lovingly handmade thing. In an age of minimalist dandies whose sentences regard themselves endlessly in a succession of mirrors, Faulkner’s writing, even at its moments of metaphysical groping, carries enormous force and sober poetry. Like the country that produced him, it is always vivid, eccentric and full of beautiful contrarieties. Like Faulkner, it goes quite contentedly its own way.
Sunday, March 1, 1987
The Open City
Written in late 1986 for TWA Ambassador. Little did I suspect then that by the time it appeared, early the following year, my mother would’ve been diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor; I shut down my apartment in Amsterdam and moved back to the United States to look after her.
Nobody but the Dutch—or the many foreigners who have moved there—think of Amsterdam as the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. But after a year of living, and writing, in "the open city", I feel there is a convincing argument to be made. Shaped by the vulnerability of a small country continually overrun by foreigners, and the richness of a trading empire that fell gradually over three centuries, Amsterdammers were forced to adapt; and a city is, finally, its people. Smallness made them careful, hospitable, conversant; the world empire gave them balance, imagination, and a love of cash. The result today, if one follows Auden’s definition of civilization as "diversity attained and unity retained", is a splendid city, the most civilized I know.
I live in it as a stranger. A year ago, tired of New York and knowing I was ready for Europe but not wishing to take on another crashing capital like London or Paris, I chose little Amsterdam. My high-windowed apartment, full of the wet light that the Dutch landscapists made famous, looks out on a canal of swans and ducks and puffing tugs. It is inspiring and relaxing to live by water, a reminder of the sea and the world waiting out there; and this harmonic relation, a truce between land and water, has shaped the city’s philosophy.
It is an incredibly easy place for a newcomer, at least an American: inexpensive, even after a fallen dollar. Everybody speaks English, usually very well; the tourist season is only two months long and easily avoidable. Culture actually seems to matter, not as an expression of "high society" as in New York but as a daily, affordable pleasure—the Van Gogh Museum is full of businessmen with sandwiches during lunch hour. The trains, like everything else, run on time. There’s only one department store, but it is excellent. Not far away stretches probably the largest outdoor market in Europe. The city has no traffic problem; two out of three Amsterdammers use bicycles. I can leave my apartment, within the central necklace of five major canals, and check my bags at the airport ten minutes later—during rush hour. This, surely, constitutes civilization.
It is famous for Indonesian restaurants, a remnant of empire, but unsung for its variety, not equaled in Europe. Hard-to-finds like Mexican and Brazilian are numerous. The red light district is safe and self-contained; most of the women are self-employed. It is the smallest of the great cities, a place built to human scale: the flourishing London of Shakespeare’s day rather than some unchecked monstrosity of ours. Its people were very brave in the war and remain modest about it. The tenacity with which Jews (like Anne Frank) were hidden by Gentiles is well-known. Equally symbolic of the city’s sense of the commonwealth of humanity, and less celebrated, was a general strike of the entire city in February, 1941, when the Nazis began rounding up Jews. It was the only time the population of an occupied city went on strike, and the Germans had to declare a siege to break it.
Best of all for a writer, Amsterdam is an extremely good place to concentrate in, to listen to one’s inner echoes. This is partly because the Dutch are such good listeners themselves—Amsterdam is a city devoted to dialogue—and also because its watery calm seems to keep the place on an even keel. I am not the first foreigner to find the place an ideal work-spot. Spinoza, writing in Latin in the early 17th century, noted that "in this city second to none, men of every nation and every sect live together in the utmost harmony; and all they bother to find out, before trusting their goods to anyone, is whether he is rich or poor and whether he is honest or a fraud."
His emphasis on money, of course, is apt. The Dutch are commonly portrayed as merciless bargainers and frugal in the extreme. The Japanese had a saying that "where a Dutchman has passed, even the grass does not grow anymore." Bartens, a Calvinist poet contemporary to Spinoza, called the city "the whore. . . bought with anybody’s money / She is concerned with profit alone, profit alone! Profit alone!" Naturally, it was Amsterdammers who invented the stock exchange and the concept of the downward auction, in which the bid starts high and drops—so the first offered price is the last.
This reputation for financial shrewdness was earned in Amsterdam’s so-called Golden Age, the 17th century—the time of Rembrandt, and the playwright Vondel, and the expansion of the East India Company and West India Company to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Japan, South Africa, the Arabian Gulf, the Caribbean, Brazil, and New Amsterdam—later New York, traded to the British in 1673 for Surinam.
The "skinflint" stereotype misses the point, though. An Amsterdammer may be tight with money as regards himself—sometimes I feel I’m living in a cut-rate town, so earnestly is money being saved rather than squandered—but rarely cut-rate with other people. If a friend brings over wine it will be much better than he would buy for himself, and one has the same sense with most gifts. Amsterdam’s generosity toward artists—miles of paintings purchased by the government to subsidize young would-bes—is famous. But Amsterdam’s charity toward the old and the poor is more exemplary. Since the Golden Age there have been little villages for the elderly scattered throughout the metropolis, with interior greens and churches and houses; there are still seventy-five such hofjes. And it is a city unafraid to experiment. Some years ago an idea was tried to make thousands of all-white bicycles available that anybody could use and leave for the next person. It didn’t work (the first batch got promptly stolen, probably by some of the city’s addicts), but what other city would imagine such a provision?
One of Amsterdam’s peculiarities is that it’s not so very different for the visitor than the resident. A stranger immediately realizes he’ll never learn his way around the labyrinth of canals on foot or by tram, but only by bicycle. He notices the modesty of the individual houses, which bare their souls not via the well-lit windows looking into similar living-rooms but by the gables on top, every one different. Most of all, he sees the life of the café. If he walks around long after midnight, he catches on to the verve of the brown cafés and the night bars—strange sawdust-floored and nicotine-stained establishments that may open from one in the morning until three two nights a week, serve only beer and Dutch gin, and be instantly packed to the rafters with a discursive crowd of strangers who all act as if they know each other intimately, and have stayed up only for the sake of quick drinks and slow talk.
This sense of continual conversation—not "high talk" (Paris) or "clever talk" (London) so much as "good talk"—is the window on Amsterdam’s soul. The Dutch have a general word for it, gezellig, that can mean nearly anything you want—a word of approval to convey the sense of something being cozy and open at the same time, familiar and welcoming to strangers, most of all a sense of feeling at home even when you’re not at home. Thus a little lace what-not over a lamp may give the feeling of gezellig, but so, I suppose, may a bar of beery men yelling at a televised soccer game. Gezellig as an ideal produces a city that seems dedicated to clearheadedness and sociability, and that is a comfortable faith.
This openness to other people, other causes, other faiths, brought Amsterdam historically the fruit of other countries’ exiles. (The city’s twin mottos, represented by a statue on the dowdy Royal Palace on the Dam Square, are Trade and Peace.) The Dutch are predominantly Calvinist, and that creed’s tolerance made ousted Antwerp Jews, for example, feel welcome near the end of the 16th century; they brought with them the cutter’s trade, and since then Amsterdam has been the diamond capital of the world. More important, a visitor sees around him the true inheritance of empire, the mixed strains from all corners of what was once the Dutch world. In Amsterdam they’ve been absorbed, these Pernambucoans and Javanese, these Surinamers and Cape of Good Hopers.
In manners the Amsterdammers, who can be as class-conscious as any descendants of merchantmen, make a stranger feel welcome in a paradoxical way. They are more open at first than, say, the British, but careful to measure a distance. To drop in unannounced for coffee in the afternoon or evening and expect to be welcomed is normal—an unexpected Latin streak in the Dutch. To be invited over for dinner is a much more important occasion, though it would seem to imply a less familiar relation. To be a guest at dinner comes later in a friendship, I’d judge, than in the USA or most other European countries: the home is viewed as a private pocket of serenity and the dining table as a kind of inner sanctum. (There’s a local maxim that an Amsterdam girl will sleep with you before she invites you over for dinner.)
Outside the home, outside their country, they’re among the world’s great travelers, and the fact that so many come back to Amsterdam gives it a canny eye. The adventurous spirit of empire, that demands imagination as well as organization and greed, has been handed down, and the Dutch are pragmatic, fearless wanderers. That I’ve run across them in some of the most remote places in the world, on their slow way back to the cafés of the Leidseplein, has helped me understand the city better. Traipsing about with knapsacks and tents, speaking several languages easily, counting the pennies, curious, untiring, always somewhat unconvinced. . . for the Amsterdammer’s sense of coexistence, a marvelous welcome back home, manifests itself as skepticism abroad.
This love of travel for its own sake, so different from the American ideal—which is travel in search of something just like home, Indiana plus coconut palms—has cluttered some streets with dozens of cut-rate travel agencies. (It’s probably cheaper to fly to Asia from Amsterdam than from anywhere else in Europe.) An Amsterdammer thinks nothing of uprooting; my landlord and his girlfriend are planning to travel around the States for a year in a mobile home, in mid-life and mid-profession. In Amsterdam this isn’t unusual, and that kind of enthusiasm for flexible travel abroad makes for an open city at home.
I wonder sometimes if what attracts me so much about Amsterdam is really just a genius these people have for modesty. Modesty has kept them fascinated with the world at large, has made the city a haven for every outcast creed and people of Europe in times of bigotry; it has made the city enormously savvy in business, and open-handed and efficient in public affairs; it has even made the city, in a physical sense, last.
For one of the first things a visitor notices is how consistently and miraculously Amsterdam looks like it’s supposed to—so well-preserved it has a kind of fairy-tale beauty, a sureness in its own reflection in those canals. If this is a result of Dutch frugality it is a lesson well worth copying. The whole city is built on an estimated five million timber piles, still holding up after three hundred years. And part of Amsterdam’s attraction lies in being graspably similar to portraits from that time; Rembrandt would have little trouble finding his way around today. The vision of that town plan of 1609, calling for the creation of twice as many canals as in Venice and allowing for simple movement anywhere by cart, boat, or foot, was remarkable. It all still works because it was well-made in the first place, and because even in those expansive days an Amsterdammer was not a show-off in his choice of house. Modesty begets good sense and good workmanship, and this has kept Amsterdam intact.
This quality, a kind of directed smallness, is probably hereditary by now. (Anybody who’s gotten involved in a political discussion in Amsterdam will come away convinced these are the least modest people in the world.) One of the places I go to feel gezellig, to feel at home and not at home, is the great café of the Hotel American —where the Dutch spy and phony Javanese danseuse Mata Hari had her wedding party. It is actually part of a grand hotel (built in 1880) but mostly frequented by Amsterdammers, right on the Leidseplein. After the theater or ballet performances just next door, the artists may come in for a nightcap and it will be hard to get a table. But in the late afternoon, with the usual cloud-bottled light filtering through the stained-glass windows and turning the art-nouveau lampshades amber, all is peace and gezellig within. The newspapers of a dozen European capitals are laid out for the café’s patrons, voices are low; there a young girl is wondering what to write on a postcard, here an overcoated man is pushing his hair furiously back from his forehead and scribbling away at a novel. You can overhear conversations in five languages. The coffee is hot and extremely strong, a brew from somewhere far-off and tropical and once Dutch that makes the present recede. Now it is raining; a waiter turns up the lamps. Somebody you know, or will soon know, comes in. This is Amsterdam.
Nobody but the Dutch—or the many foreigners who have moved there—think of Amsterdam as the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. But after a year of living, and writing, in "the open city", I feel there is a convincing argument to be made. Shaped by the vulnerability of a small country continually overrun by foreigners, and the richness of a trading empire that fell gradually over three centuries, Amsterdammers were forced to adapt; and a city is, finally, its people. Smallness made them careful, hospitable, conversant; the world empire gave them balance, imagination, and a love of cash. The result today, if one follows Auden’s definition of civilization as "diversity attained and unity retained", is a splendid city, the most civilized I know.
I live in it as a stranger. A year ago, tired of New York and knowing I was ready for Europe but not wishing to take on another crashing capital like London or Paris, I chose little Amsterdam. My high-windowed apartment, full of the wet light that the Dutch landscapists made famous, looks out on a canal of swans and ducks and puffing tugs. It is inspiring and relaxing to live by water, a reminder of the sea and the world waiting out there; and this harmonic relation, a truce between land and water, has shaped the city’s philosophy.
It is an incredibly easy place for a newcomer, at least an American: inexpensive, even after a fallen dollar. Everybody speaks English, usually very well; the tourist season is only two months long and easily avoidable. Culture actually seems to matter, not as an expression of "high society" as in New York but as a daily, affordable pleasure—the Van Gogh Museum is full of businessmen with sandwiches during lunch hour. The trains, like everything else, run on time. There’s only one department store, but it is excellent. Not far away stretches probably the largest outdoor market in Europe. The city has no traffic problem; two out of three Amsterdammers use bicycles. I can leave my apartment, within the central necklace of five major canals, and check my bags at the airport ten minutes later—during rush hour. This, surely, constitutes civilization.
It is famous for Indonesian restaurants, a remnant of empire, but unsung for its variety, not equaled in Europe. Hard-to-finds like Mexican and Brazilian are numerous. The red light district is safe and self-contained; most of the women are self-employed. It is the smallest of the great cities, a place built to human scale: the flourishing London of Shakespeare’s day rather than some unchecked monstrosity of ours. Its people were very brave in the war and remain modest about it. The tenacity with which Jews (like Anne Frank) were hidden by Gentiles is well-known. Equally symbolic of the city’s sense of the commonwealth of humanity, and less celebrated, was a general strike of the entire city in February, 1941, when the Nazis began rounding up Jews. It was the only time the population of an occupied city went on strike, and the Germans had to declare a siege to break it.
Best of all for a writer, Amsterdam is an extremely good place to concentrate in, to listen to one’s inner echoes. This is partly because the Dutch are such good listeners themselves—Amsterdam is a city devoted to dialogue—and also because its watery calm seems to keep the place on an even keel. I am not the first foreigner to find the place an ideal work-spot. Spinoza, writing in Latin in the early 17th century, noted that "in this city second to none, men of every nation and every sect live together in the utmost harmony; and all they bother to find out, before trusting their goods to anyone, is whether he is rich or poor and whether he is honest or a fraud."
His emphasis on money, of course, is apt. The Dutch are commonly portrayed as merciless bargainers and frugal in the extreme. The Japanese had a saying that "where a Dutchman has passed, even the grass does not grow anymore." Bartens, a Calvinist poet contemporary to Spinoza, called the city "the whore. . . bought with anybody’s money / She is concerned with profit alone, profit alone! Profit alone!" Naturally, it was Amsterdammers who invented the stock exchange and the concept of the downward auction, in which the bid starts high and drops—so the first offered price is the last.
This reputation for financial shrewdness was earned in Amsterdam’s so-called Golden Age, the 17th century—the time of Rembrandt, and the playwright Vondel, and the expansion of the East India Company and West India Company to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Japan, South Africa, the Arabian Gulf, the Caribbean, Brazil, and New Amsterdam—later New York, traded to the British in 1673 for Surinam.
The "skinflint" stereotype misses the point, though. An Amsterdammer may be tight with money as regards himself—sometimes I feel I’m living in a cut-rate town, so earnestly is money being saved rather than squandered—but rarely cut-rate with other people. If a friend brings over wine it will be much better than he would buy for himself, and one has the same sense with most gifts. Amsterdam’s generosity toward artists—miles of paintings purchased by the government to subsidize young would-bes—is famous. But Amsterdam’s charity toward the old and the poor is more exemplary. Since the Golden Age there have been little villages for the elderly scattered throughout the metropolis, with interior greens and churches and houses; there are still seventy-five such hofjes. And it is a city unafraid to experiment. Some years ago an idea was tried to make thousands of all-white bicycles available that anybody could use and leave for the next person. It didn’t work (the first batch got promptly stolen, probably by some of the city’s addicts), but what other city would imagine such a provision?
One of Amsterdam’s peculiarities is that it’s not so very different for the visitor than the resident. A stranger immediately realizes he’ll never learn his way around the labyrinth of canals on foot or by tram, but only by bicycle. He notices the modesty of the individual houses, which bare their souls not via the well-lit windows looking into similar living-rooms but by the gables on top, every one different. Most of all, he sees the life of the café. If he walks around long after midnight, he catches on to the verve of the brown cafés and the night bars—strange sawdust-floored and nicotine-stained establishments that may open from one in the morning until three two nights a week, serve only beer and Dutch gin, and be instantly packed to the rafters with a discursive crowd of strangers who all act as if they know each other intimately, and have stayed up only for the sake of quick drinks and slow talk.
This sense of continual conversation—not "high talk" (Paris) or "clever talk" (London) so much as "good talk"—is the window on Amsterdam’s soul. The Dutch have a general word for it, gezellig, that can mean nearly anything you want—a word of approval to convey the sense of something being cozy and open at the same time, familiar and welcoming to strangers, most of all a sense of feeling at home even when you’re not at home. Thus a little lace what-not over a lamp may give the feeling of gezellig, but so, I suppose, may a bar of beery men yelling at a televised soccer game. Gezellig as an ideal produces a city that seems dedicated to clearheadedness and sociability, and that is a comfortable faith.
This openness to other people, other causes, other faiths, brought Amsterdam historically the fruit of other countries’ exiles. (The city’s twin mottos, represented by a statue on the dowdy Royal Palace on the Dam Square, are Trade and Peace.) The Dutch are predominantly Calvinist, and that creed’s tolerance made ousted Antwerp Jews, for example, feel welcome near the end of the 16th century; they brought with them the cutter’s trade, and since then Amsterdam has been the diamond capital of the world. More important, a visitor sees around him the true inheritance of empire, the mixed strains from all corners of what was once the Dutch world. In Amsterdam they’ve been absorbed, these Pernambucoans and Javanese, these Surinamers and Cape of Good Hopers.
In manners the Amsterdammers, who can be as class-conscious as any descendants of merchantmen, make a stranger feel welcome in a paradoxical way. They are more open at first than, say, the British, but careful to measure a distance. To drop in unannounced for coffee in the afternoon or evening and expect to be welcomed is normal—an unexpected Latin streak in the Dutch. To be invited over for dinner is a much more important occasion, though it would seem to imply a less familiar relation. To be a guest at dinner comes later in a friendship, I’d judge, than in the USA or most other European countries: the home is viewed as a private pocket of serenity and the dining table as a kind of inner sanctum. (There’s a local maxim that an Amsterdam girl will sleep with you before she invites you over for dinner.)
Outside the home, outside their country, they’re among the world’s great travelers, and the fact that so many come back to Amsterdam gives it a canny eye. The adventurous spirit of empire, that demands imagination as well as organization and greed, has been handed down, and the Dutch are pragmatic, fearless wanderers. That I’ve run across them in some of the most remote places in the world, on their slow way back to the cafés of the Leidseplein, has helped me understand the city better. Traipsing about with knapsacks and tents, speaking several languages easily, counting the pennies, curious, untiring, always somewhat unconvinced. . . for the Amsterdammer’s sense of coexistence, a marvelous welcome back home, manifests itself as skepticism abroad.
This love of travel for its own sake, so different from the American ideal—which is travel in search of something just like home, Indiana plus coconut palms—has cluttered some streets with dozens of cut-rate travel agencies. (It’s probably cheaper to fly to Asia from Amsterdam than from anywhere else in Europe.) An Amsterdammer thinks nothing of uprooting; my landlord and his girlfriend are planning to travel around the States for a year in a mobile home, in mid-life and mid-profession. In Amsterdam this isn’t unusual, and that kind of enthusiasm for flexible travel abroad makes for an open city at home.
I wonder sometimes if what attracts me so much about Amsterdam is really just a genius these people have for modesty. Modesty has kept them fascinated with the world at large, has made the city a haven for every outcast creed and people of Europe in times of bigotry; it has made the city enormously savvy in business, and open-handed and efficient in public affairs; it has even made the city, in a physical sense, last.
For one of the first things a visitor notices is how consistently and miraculously Amsterdam looks like it’s supposed to—so well-preserved it has a kind of fairy-tale beauty, a sureness in its own reflection in those canals. If this is a result of Dutch frugality it is a lesson well worth copying. The whole city is built on an estimated five million timber piles, still holding up after three hundred years. And part of Amsterdam’s attraction lies in being graspably similar to portraits from that time; Rembrandt would have little trouble finding his way around today. The vision of that town plan of 1609, calling for the creation of twice as many canals as in Venice and allowing for simple movement anywhere by cart, boat, or foot, was remarkable. It all still works because it was well-made in the first place, and because even in those expansive days an Amsterdammer was not a show-off in his choice of house. Modesty begets good sense and good workmanship, and this has kept Amsterdam intact.
This quality, a kind of directed smallness, is probably hereditary by now. (Anybody who’s gotten involved in a political discussion in Amsterdam will come away convinced these are the least modest people in the world.) One of the places I go to feel gezellig, to feel at home and not at home, is the great café of the Hotel American —where the Dutch spy and phony Javanese danseuse Mata Hari had her wedding party. It is actually part of a grand hotel (built in 1880) but mostly frequented by Amsterdammers, right on the Leidseplein. After the theater or ballet performances just next door, the artists may come in for a nightcap and it will be hard to get a table. But in the late afternoon, with the usual cloud-bottled light filtering through the stained-glass windows and turning the art-nouveau lampshades amber, all is peace and gezellig within. The newspapers of a dozen European capitals are laid out for the café’s patrons, voices are low; there a young girl is wondering what to write on a postcard, here an overcoated man is pushing his hair furiously back from his forehead and scribbling away at a novel. You can overhear conversations in five languages. The coffee is hot and extremely strong, a brew from somewhere far-off and tropical and once Dutch that makes the present recede. Now it is raining; a waiter turns up the lamps. Somebody you know, or will soon know, comes in. This is Amsterdam.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)