Ode to a Nightingale

My third published short story. Around 1986. In East-West, the monthly in-flight magazine of the airline Northwest Orient. I was then very much under the influence of John Collier (1901 - 1980), the Englishman who wrote at least one masterpiece novel (His Monkey Wife) and dozens of wise, witty short stories. But Collier was inimitable. 

1

This is the story of a very bad man who came to a very happy end. Perhaps you have heard of him. His name was Henry Thackeray. He was famous, or infamous, for a brief time in those literary circles where reputations are swiftly made or unmade. He was also a distant relative of the other Thackeray, the honest one; and it would not be stretching the truth to say it was his illustrious antecedent who got our Henry into trouble.

You would never have guessed any of this to look at Henry. He was a steamed dumpling of a man, harmless and soft. He had a crop of wispy gray hairs that traversed his head like weeds struggling to gain foothold on bare rock. He had porcelain-blue eyes, ears like saucers, and a secretive smile that hinted at gossip. He was a touch overweight. He had somehow reached the age of forty-seven without ever being married or, it was whispered, having an affair of the other sort either.

He was not, however, entirely unencumbered by romance. There is no one more romantic than the man shielded from it by his work. Henry was the arts editor at one of the more successful Madison Avenue fashion magazines, of the sort that may be seen under the pretty arms of women in Paris and Milan and Hong Kong and Nairobi, and which ages more quickly and pathetically than any flower.

Every month Henry's duties were to review in brief the latest books, films, recordings, and television programs. Though Henry's life may hardly have been called boring, at least by 20th century standards, it did fall into a certain routine that was rather deadly to the spirit.

"Newness, Angela, is a debilitating disease," Henry said more than once to his secretary, a young brunette who was long-legged and sultry, as is the fashion among brunettes. She had flashing eyes and pouting lips, and she looked rather like a glowing creature from the magazine’s pages, suddenly given life.

"No, Henry, you're wrong as usual," she said, glancing at her long fingernails of polished crimson. "New is a wow. Old is a drag.”

Henry felt Angela was really talking about him. "Don't say that, you evil woman," he muttered. "Do you have any idea how many magazines I've worked for in my day? How many alone since you were just another cheerleader with big pom-poms and a short skirt at some awful Connecticut finishing school?” He sighed. "You're right. New is a wow. Old is a drag."

"Of course I'm right," she purred. "But you're not old yet. Jaded, yes. Old, no." And she gave him an affectionate kiss on his cheek, to prove it.

"I've been stung!" cried Henry, throwing up his hands in mock horror. "The kiss of youth!"

He retreated fussily into his office to scribble a review, in his slow and doubtful way, of an art opening he’d attended the week before. And that might have been the end of it had he not stumbled, on a rainy afternoon, into the presence of one J. Caractacus, proprietor and inheritor of Caractacus Books, on lower Broadway. On such small tides of chance are entire navies launched.

2

It happened on a Wednesday in the middle of October. Rain had pestered the city all week, and Henry went home during his lunch break that day to check on his two black poodles, who were cooped-up and idle.

Castor and Pollux were Henry's liberation. They gave him the freedom of a bachelor along with the companionship, without the sacrifices, of the married man. Castor and Pollux hated walking in the rain, of course, but Henry didn't. It made him feel a little Bogartian.

This particular drizzly afternoon a sudden cloudburst, violent and merciless, sent Henry scurrying into a decrepit and shadowy bookstall down near 9th Street. The place was a low-ceilinged rabbit warren, crammed to the rafters with crowded shelves and stacks of dusty, unorganized volumes.

Now, Henry was rarely seen in bookstores. Their lack of selectivity unnerved him; he felt the same sentiment toward museums. Besides, books were in the habit of coming to him, packed in thick envelopes and delivered by messengers and accompanied by whining, apologetic letters from the publishers.

He had no need of tradesmen.

The proprietor of this particular secondhand bookshop was a little older than Henry, and like most of his breed he was bug-eyed and perturbed, with the exasperated air of a man so unused to customers that he does not even bother to put on a charade of friendliness. As Henry entered, the old man accidentally knocked over a teetering stack.

"Damned books," he muttered, bending to re-stack them. "Old man Caractacus should never have gone into this fool’s racket in the first place. Easier to sell old Franklin stoves, and more value to the pound on top of it. Keep the fire burning with your secondhand literary rubbish, that's what I say.”

"I thought all booksellers liked books,” said Henry mildly. The proprietor's brown jacket sleeves were so dusty, thought Henry, that they would have to be vacuumed.

“Wha? You’re kidding, bub,” said Caractacus. "Think a hog butcher likes hogs? All books are lies, pal, no matter what name they travel under. Fiction, biography, fairy tales—it's all the same fib, for anyone who's got the loose change and gullible enough to swallow it. Still, you've got to hand it to those authors. They grind it out like hamburger, all day, all night. Probably churning it out in their sleep. Stick the stuff between two covers like a sandwich and the public eats it up. Me, I've had it up to here with the stuff. Try selling used hamburger, see how far you get. And lies, every ounce of it. Now, you ask yourself—”

"Excuse me," said Henry, who did not like being pummeled and had noticed that the rain was letting up. "Do you have any Thackeray?”

This was said partly out of sympathy.

“Thackeray?” said Caractacus. He rubbed his face. "William Makepeace?"

And it was then that a lightning flash of genius, closely followed by a loud thunderclap of resolve, sent its voltage down to earth in Henry's mind.

"No, not William Makepeace," said Henry softly. “Uh, Henry Wilder. H.W. Thackeray. Bit harder to locate, I’m afraid.”

"Classic?" said Caractacus, as if he could not believe there were more liars out there than he already knew. "Ancient? Contemporary?”

"Contemporary."

Caractacus sighed. “Sorry, bub. Never heard of him. Can't help you, or him for that matter. Another dishonest scribbler, eh, scribbling his way into obscurity?"

"Nope," send Henry jauntily, with new confidence. The sun was out. "The greatest liar of them all.”

3

The book took him a little over two months.

He worked on it every night, while pursuing his duties with a vengeance at the fashion magazine every day. Suddenly all the works he had to review, no matter what the medium, were like daring gauntlets flung down before him, challenges to his honor; he savaged them with a new consistency of purpose. No more could Henry the reviewer be called a meek pussycat. Now he was like a leaping Bengal tiger.

“Something's happened to Henry," went the whisper around the plush magazine offices. “Could he be in love? But with whom?"

Angela, who enjoyed fanning the flames of gossip, said, "Don't ask me, because I've been sworn to secrecy.” Then she would add mysteriously, as if she knew something, "All I can say is everyone's going to get real surprised by Henry one day." And she would examine herself in her pocket mirror.

Henry's boss, Martha Gladhorn—protected from most gossip by her position—noticed the change in Henry's copy. She was a rather severe, abrasive woman with red hair who gave herself orders as if talking to an underling.

"Love, honey," she said to herself. "Must be love. His stuff’s got edge, now. Edge. Never had it before. I don't care how he got it.”

She stuck her bullet head out of her office and bellowed to her startled employees, "Let's see a little more edge around here!”

Henry did not notice all the fuss he was causing. He was supremely, blithely, above it all. He had always considered himself a man with a rich inner life, who permitted himself to pass into the world of dreams without restraint: this allowed him to observe his fellow man with a certain creativity. While walking Castor and Pollux, he made up lives for whomever in the lemming crowd caught his eye. The man who served him coffee in a paper cup on the way to work each morning dreamed of being irresistible to women; it showed in the gallant way he poured. The bedraggled lady pushing all her possessions around the block in a shopping cart dreamed of being a rich contessa, and organizing her treasures in a palace by the water. There were multitudes of dreamers around him, dreaming away.

Unknowingly, Henry had discovered the secret of the truly great writers. He could tap into his fantasies at will. His dreams floated near the surface of his imagination, not buried too deep in the muck to be dived for, as with most people. The rest was merely setting words to paper.

"They want lies," he repeated to himself that afternoon. “So they do. Never thought of it, but that gnome Caractacus is right. Ought to get his jacket cleaned, though. Lies they want? I'll give them the best lies they ever tasted. Hamburger is it? Right. From Henry Wilder Thackeray they'll be served only filet mignon, and so tenderly cooked they shouldn't even be allowed to eat it.”

Henry went on muttering like this as he typed. Most writers are excellent conversationalists with themselves: it keeps the brain percolating while the flavor drips down. On occasion, as he ripped yet another fresh page out of his humming electric typewriter, Henry would exclaim, “They won't know what to do when they read this. They'll have to believe it. Have to!”

Henry's neighbor, a body-building instructor at the health club around the corner, heard the constant clatter of the keys and the litany of Henry's talk, and wondered if Henry had flipped, or taken a lover who enjoyed being dictated to.

Castor and Pollux, astonished by their master’s energy, took to watching television in the bedroom while Henry worked. Now he rarely had time to walk them, and they grew lazy and indifferent to all but the finest British programs.

He finished the great work in a burst of energy, staying up for three nights consecutively. No need had he for the trivial supports of common mankind—fired by his idea, he labored without nourishment or rest. When it was done, on the verge of collapse, he bundled the manuscript into a cardboard carton, bound it with string, and with criminal intent sent it off to a young man at one of the more prestigious publishing houses on Third Avenue, who constantly sent Henry books to review.

Then he took a day off, and waited for the phone call that was sure to come.

4

He did not have to wait very long. The call came, as requested in Henry's cover letter, not to the magazine’s switchboard but to Henry's apartment early one evening.

“Mr. Thackeray?” said the rather high-pitched, nervous voice at the other end. The voice of a sparrow, hopping from foot to foot, thought Henry. “This is, uh, Phillip Jasper, at—”

“Yes, yes," said Henry pleasantly. Get on with it, you credulous young man, he thought.

"Well, I've read your manuscript, and so have my superiors, and I must say, it is one of the most superb, gripping biographies I've ever read. It was really—I mean, it was like reading a great novel. By Tolstoy or someone.”

"Taut, strong-willed stuff, isn't it," said Henry, quoting from one of last month’s reviews.

“It certainly is,” said Jasper, "and to tell you the truth, we’d like you to come in, as, as, as soon as possible and sign a contract, tomorrow if you'd like but at your convenience of course, since Mr. Cranston thinks we should try to get the book out on the spring list, just in case anyone else is preparing to publish a biography of Dromieux—” 

“I don't think," said Henry with fiendish amusement, “there's much likelihood of that.”

“What a relief!" exclaimed the young man. “Still, you never know. Now, I'm sure you're wondering what terms we’re prepared to offer you. Let me just say, between us, that it's been a long time since a book has aroused this much—”

“Why don't we discuss it when we meet," said Henry, with muscular assurance. “I'm very busy right now. I have to walk my dogs. Three o'clock tomorrow? That will be fine.”

The next afternoon Henry was ushered into a meeting room with young Jasper and the overly friendly Cranston, who did not wait for Henry to sit before saying, "Mr. Thackeray, this is one of the most incredible books I've ever read. I mean, what a life this Dromieux had! It reads like Ian Fleming combined with Nabokov with a dash of Henry Miller thrown in! I mean, it's—”

"Those three are frauds and fabulists," said Henry with aplomb. "I am a truth teller, and that is all. Just a humble biographer. I have been working on the life of Hugo Dromieux since I was in graduate school. There is no one who knows his life the way I do, though I'm sure—”  Henry arched his eyebrows. “— a few of Hugo's mistresses may surface for interviews once the book is out. Let's not forget that every woman wanted to sleep with him, and many will say they did.”

“Great publicity," said Cranston, nodding profusely. "But what incredible energy the man had, eh? Really, an example for us all.”

"More like a dream, I would think," said Henry dryly. He wondered if he could be arrested for what he was doing. The thought made him feel dangerous.

Jasper interrupted. "The part I liked the best," he said excitedly, “was where he lived behind German lines for three years in the first world war, disguised as the postmaster. And even took a local wife! I mean how come she didn't find out? And then he has an affair with her sister—”

"Men like that," said Cranston, shaking his head, “they must know something the rest of us don’t. But really, Mr. Thackeray, you've done an amazing job of evoking that entire era. The whole café society business in Paris, with all the heavyweights—I loved, loved the way you dealt with the Proust gossip. Should open a few eyes at the universities. And Paris itself—I spent a couple of years there ages ago, giving it a try—I was a writer myself in those days, trying my hand in the game. Of course, it was a different Paris than the one you're writing about, but Paris will always be Paris—”

"Yes, of course," said Henry impatiently. "Now we must decide on terms."

Cranston named a figure seven times greater than the one Henry had, wildly, dreamed of. "Mr. Thackeray, we have a great deal—a great deal—of confidence in this book. You aren't, by any chance, a relation of—”

"Distant, very distant," Henry murmured. “I'm actually a relation of Dromieux, too, but even more distant, I'm afraid. I assume you're prepared to back up the book with an advertising campaign."

Cranston was effusive. “Of course we are. There are very few men who even dream of living like this—”

"Actually," Jasper began, then looked at Cranston for his approval. "Well, the only thing we are not happy about is the title. I mean, A Forgotten Life is good, but—”  He frowned. "It doesn't hum, do you know what I mean?”

"Doesn't hum?" said Henry. "But I thought it had edge.”

"Edge it has," said Cranston hastily, not wishing to offend. “Edge it certainly does have. But we thought—”  He braced himself. "We were thinking of going all the way, you see? And calling it Emperor of Dreams. What do you think?"

"I like the way it hums," said Henry. "With edge.”

“That's right," agreed Cranston. "And it fits, too, doesn't it? Because of those six months in the Congo with that wild tribe. And his life was so commercial!" Cranston ticked off his pudgy fingers. “Spy in W-W-One. Austro-French-Spanish background. Mother descended from Thomas Jefferson—that'll get us the book clubs. Herculean lover, hundreds of mistresses. Three wives. Painter in Paris. Friend of Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Nijinsky, all the big boys—”

"And then," crowed young Jasper, "the irony of it all! He saves his paintings, he moves into that castle in France, and then during the Second World War all his canvases get slashed or destroyed.”

"Don't forget," Henry interjected sharply, "by the son of a man he killed in the Black Forest in 1915. By suffocating him with postage stamps.”

“Right, Right," said Jasper impatiently. "But what I love is the way he just shrugs his shoulders and walks away from the flaming castle, and settles on his own island in the Mediterranean with all those women!”

"At his age," muttered Cranston.

"And how they floated his body," murmured Jasper, “out to sea in the gondola, till the currents took it….” His voice drifted away.

Cranston said, "I think that Hollywood is going to leap at this. Leap.” He pulled out a contract from his attaché case, and the paper rattled in an unexpected breeze.

"One proviso,” said Henry.

He had, for the last few minutes, enjoyed the sensation of blissfully ice-skating, by night, across a perfectly frozen lake under glittering stars, toward a white mansion that took on extra wings and majestic doorways as he glided closer.

He said, “My book must be published under a pseudonym. Let us say, the name William Paxton. Pax for peace. My real identity must be totally protected. My job, as Mr. Jasper knows, is dear to me, and I would not wish to draw undue attention to the magazine, or myself within the magazine. This means I cannot appear on any talk-shows, alas. No one knows, no one must know. Are we agreed?

"Agreed," said Cranston, shaking his hand vigorously. "Your name, Mr. Thackeray, shall be as unknown as, as—” He searched the attic of his mind for an appropriate simile. “As that of your friend Dromieux. Until the spring.”

"Well," said Henry quizzically, “I don't think anyone will ever want to write a biography of me."

And he waited for Cranston or Jasper, whoever was quicker, to hand him a pen.

5

It was not, of course, quite so easy as that. Nothing ever is. At the beginning of the next week Jasper called to ask if Henry could help him to locate all the existing photographs of Hugo Dromieux.

This sent Henry into a sleepless panic for two days, until he thought of searching the area where he'd been given the idea in the first place. It took him only a few hours of searching the hodge-podge stores of lower Broadway to find a cache of old photographs, for seventy-five cents, that showed the same ordinary-looking man, from a distance, in the proper European settings. He'd had the sense to describe Dromieux as a man who loathed having his picture taken—what spy didn’t? Dromieux had even called photography “the death-kiss of the modern age,” a phrase that Henry was rather proud of. He had a messenger take the photographs round to Jasper the next day, and that excited young man saw in the blurred and faded face, amid the glare from a beach somewhere along the French Riviera, all that he wished to see.

In the months before the book’s publication Henry was very busy. He opened a Swiss bank account of the anonymous sort. He purchased a beachfront house in a very secluded corner of the Caribbean. He set up a complicated series of mailing addresses, so Cranston could send him money without fear of being traced.

“No nonsense," he told himself. “Think Dromieux.”

Emperor of Dreams was published in April. Everyone wanted it, by the hundreds of thousands. Bored grandparents wanted it, bored husbands, bored wives. The reviewers exhaled relief that at last there was a decent book on this seminal figure, this mystery man. Bored teenagers, whose dreams were no longer nourished by the prospect of becoming world champion at manipulating blips on the electronic screen, wanted not only the book but also the attendant historical circumstances, so they could start living Dromieux for themselves. Bored scholars, individually and in teams, were happy to have a new subject for endless research and disagreement. And Hollywood, pockets bulging, stepped in and assured the public they'd have to wait only a year or two before Dromieux hit the screen.

Only children, it seemed, were protected from Henry's total lack of scruples. Their youth, their inability to read, left them untouched by the long arm of the book. Yet it would linger on their parents’ shelves, growing more powerful and valuable with the passing years, so that in some curious moment an innocent hand would pluck the thick, profusely illustrated volume down, a few cunning pages would be glanced at, and the figure of Hugo Dromieux would enter another consciousness insidiously forever.

Henry stayed at the magazine long enough to compose his own rave review. “At last," he wrote, "we have a great biography of a great man. William Paxton, whoever he is, deserves to be as famous as Hugo Dromieux.”

He saw the review through final galleys. It was a Thursday, the spring sun brilliant on the sidewalks, the city blooming. Henry waved to Martha Gladhorn as he walked past her office. He stepped into the elevator, and in two hours he and his dogs were on a plane south.

6

As it happened, the hoax was never discovered. But our story does not end here. The disappearance of Henry Wilder Thackeray turned out to be only the beginning for Hugo Dromieux.

A year later, on a fine Caribbean morning, Henry was floating lazily on his inflatable raft, splashing sun-dappled turquoise water across his knees with one hand. The beach before his house was expansive and private. With his other hand he was leafing through the pages of his former employer, whose issues he received two months late via a very expensive air-mail subscription.

By now Henry could easily afford the time and the money, and he read about the fashions of faraway cities with an amused detachment, rather like an anthropologist observing a tribe whose colorful customs are not quite strange enough to bear close investigation.

Henry was scanning his former domain, the reviews column, when something totally unexpected caught his eye. He was so astonished he nearly toppled out of his rubber raft into the shallows.

"Not a moment too soon," the review began, “The Letters of Hugo Dromieux have finally come to light. This first volume, with three more to follow, covers the early years (including the famous escapade with the houri in Istanbul) and leads up to 1919, with a thrilling account of how Dromieux smuggled the St. Petersburg jewels right from under Lenin’s nose.”

The review pronounced the book an instant bestseller.

"Why, they've gone and stolen my man," said Henry, chuckling to himself. “Looted my dreams. Old Caractacus was right. Fibbers all. Well, it'll boost sales on the paperback."

It struck him, then, that he had enough money now to actually become Hugo Dromieux, if he wanted. He could buy a castle; he could learn to paint; he could hobnob with the great, as a man of infinite mystery. Wasn't that what everyone wanted to do, after reading the book?

But people don't have to live out their dreams, he thought. It's enough to copyright them.

He threw back his arm, and in a curiously unrestrained gesture threw the magazine, its pages fluttering, across the shallows and onto the hot sand. He closed his eyes and let himself drift. He did not open his eyes again until he heard Angela calling him for lunch.

South of Marrakesh

 In April 1986 I left my studio apartment overlooking a wide Amsterdam canal for ten days in Barcelona, Madrid, Granada, and Tangier; I finished my journey with a week in Fez, courtesy Travel & Leisure magazine, which published both my articles that autumn. In Marrakesh I met the Frenchwoman who became my first wife; in Fez three years later, on our honeymoon, I met the Boston couple who introduced me to my second wife. So there was a greater point to all this travel. 

In Morocco everyone told us to keep going south. Tangier was not Morocco; Fez, that intimate labyrinth to to south, was Morocco. In Fez people said, “Ah, but you must see Marrakesh also. The great merchant crossroads. Berber traders from the mountains and valleys and desert. Head south.”

Most Westerners come to North Africa in search of atmosphere: a sensuous romance vaguely compounded of equal parts turbans, oases, casbahs, prayers, and props from old movies. In Morocco that postcard longing is easily and more deeply fulfilled. Having been independent (and practically lawless) until the first half of the century, when the French ruled briefly, it wears its originality well. For many visitors this longing casts a spell, just touched by the finger of our age, that more civilized climes cannot match. With a car and a little enthusiasm, a traveler in Morocco can safely see things nearly as strange as those the first outsiders saw a century ago, and still retire every night to a hotel’s comfort. It is the color and mystery the East is supposed to deliver, closer to home.

All places are imaginary, in the beginning and in the end. This is why we travel, and why we remember. And though the Djemaa el Fna, Marrakesh’s great square of storytellers, musicians, water sellers, and faith healers, was tumultuous enough, I was drawn to the image of a more authentic village life, far from the buzzing of a hundred would-be guides.

Beyond Marrakesh—past the towering red Koutoubia minaret that has dominated the walled palm-grove city for eight centuries, past the chaotic roofs—rise the mountains of the High Atlas. Sun-stunned, as unconvincing as a stage set, drowsing under snow in late April, they look remote and unattainable. Over those mountains, everyone said, the real Morocco might be found.

South of the High Atlas lie the first drifts of the Sahara and the mystic valleys of the Dades and Draa—twisting rivers of palms that finger their verdant way to the desert. Village after village follow that fertility south, and it is from here that many of Marrakesh’s trinkets and crafts come. My companion bought traditional spices and poisons from muttering old apothecaries in the Djemaa’s souks, but we dreamed of crossing those serene mountains.

With the helpful advice of Paul Bowles, the American writer and composer who has made Tangier his home for thirty years, we decided on our route. We would cross the High Atlas to the southeast, driving 125 miles to Ouarzazate, the French garrison town built in 1928. Then we would wind down the Valley of the Draa to Zagora (100 miles), where the Sahara begins—or ends. We would cut west, via Taliouine (220 miles) to Taroudant (60 miles), the oasis that was once the rival of Marrakesh as a southern crossroads, and finish at the famous rooms and gardens of the Hotel Gazelle’ d’Or. We would have a night in each place at an excellent hotel, with no more than four hours of necessary driving each day. That would leave time to stop and explore. It is a route hastily done in half a week; our four days sprawled easily into eight.

“For me, these are some of the most beautiful parts of Morocco,” said Bowles. At seventy-six, snowcapped himself, labeled by the critics as a “living legend.” Bowles seems from a distance as lordly and remote as the Atlas. In person he is modest, finely made, exact, and kind. “Most tourists keep away from the southern routes,” he said. “I don’t know why. It’s not a difficult journey by any means: you simply rent a car. The roads are good—far better than when I first journeyed! In those days few outsiders had ever seen those villages. Nowadays people fly to Marrakesh and think they’ve reached the south of the country. But in fact, all the palm trees in Marrakesh were transplanted there, brought up from the south, unbelievable as it sounds.”

Marrakesh began as a nomad camp, and it still retains much of that character. For centuries travelers from the south, the great Saharan camel caravans, reached up to Marrakesh to sell to the merchants of the town and the imperial cities like Fez to the north. Though the truck and the tarmac road have made the camel largely obsolete, the role of the city continues. On mornings in the central Djemaa you can sense this, as the souks go about their business as usual. The dyed cloths are displayed in a hundred bursting colors, the spices from the East overwork the air, the leather and tin bazaars are a din of repairs and insistence.

Like most trading crossroads, Marrakesh has had an uneasy history of changing hands through ruling dynasties. This is evident at the vast ruin of the El Badi palace. Built not quite four centuries ago by a Saadian sultan named Ahmed el Mansour, it was once the glory of the country. Mansour’s successor, Moulay Ismael, was jealous of the glory of the place (imported Italian marble, gold from the Sudan, mosaics by the finest workers of Fez) and ordered it destroyed. Now it looks like a bare stone remnant of a far more ancient time. Though the huge reflecting pools brim with water, save one that has been turned into an orangery, the only denizens are several families of storks nesting on the ramparts. The ruin seems to telescope a lot of Moroccan history into one scene: it took twelve years to wreck and strip the place, fulfilling a prophecy of the builder’s court jester. When asked by his sultan what he thought of the completed palace, the jester, no fool, said: “Well, one day it will make a lovely ruin.”

The tombs of the Saadian princes, from the 16th century, give an idea of what El Badi must have been. In the filigree of their carved-wood portals, so lacelike it seems to float, and in the delicacy of their mosaics, the tombs are reminiscent of the Alhambra. High-columned chambers with dignified marble slabs adorning the tiles mark the more important graves. A young Swiss architect kept bringing me back and forth down the mazelike stone corridor into the tombs. He said, “You see how they marked the passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead? With moments when you’re in neither one nor the other, only between.” 

One morning, for about fifty cents, I took a share-taxi out to a town called Amizmiz, built impressively in the green hills facing the Atlas. A share-taxi is the most sensible and efficient way to travel short distances in Morocco. For a half hour I wedged myself in with several Morroccan old ladies and children and a herdsman in one back seat, while three sheep bleated in the trunk. We coasted along toward the mountains. Amizmiz was emptying out after the day’s market, but kilns all through the town were busy turning out hundreds of tajins, the cooking pots that are the foundation of the national cuisine. They are simple and beautiful, they hold enough to feed five or six, and they are practically indestructible. Here they cost pennies.

An old gentleman took me aside and reminisced about being a young man and spending a night walking with a donkey to sell his tajins in Marrakesh. “Where the Club Med is now,” he said, “there was a great spreading tree, oh, forty years ago, more. I don’t know what happened to it. That’s where the Djemaa started—the travelers telling stories. It’s just a big place by the souks where people gathered. You mustn’t think we put this together on purpose. But the tree got cut down and suddenly the whole world  arrived. I loved spending the night down there after selling my tajins, listening to all the news from far away.” 

My friend and I were luxuriously quartered at the Hotel La Mamounia—the reason some people go to Marrakesh in the first place. (The French fly down for a long weekend of sun the way New Yorkers jet down to Florida.) The serene Mamouinia is famous for having been Churchill’s favorite hotel; he loved to paint in its vast private gardens, and his suite still contains an Olympic-size bed. The hotel itself, built in 1923 at the height of French rule and recently renovated, is considered one of the finest in the world: a polished-marble colonial setting of fine carpets, tapestries, and mosaics. When the day’s heat was at its summit and the rest of the town dozed, it was easy to spend an afternoon languishing by the pool and palms, waiting for Marrakesh to awaken again.

It is a city that lives for its late afternoons. At four o’clock a thrummimg murmer begins, the concentrated din of thousands of voices whispering and shouting and gossiping all at once, backed by furious drumming. You hear the Djemaa el Fna long before you reach it; the fellow plucking at your sleeve and admonishing you in five languages that you are heading the wrong way lets you know you are nearly there. Then the crowd is pulling you along, dividing into circles around a fire-eater, a soothsayer with cards, three chanting blind men tap-tapping canes—or a family of acrobats in white, whirling and leaping to the peroompety poom poom of a solemn drum. And if you have wondered how it feels to be flypaper, the Djemaa is just the place to find out.

“Hello, m’sieu. You are French? Espagnol? Want guide? American? German? First time in Marrakesh? Anglais? I show you Djemaa, come on. Sir. You are lost. No problem, this way.  You are French, m’sieu. This way. Very well, I spit on you. The French are a dirty race.”

There were more poetic approaches:

“Sir, my pockets are sick.”

“Sick from what?”

“Sick from being empty, sir.”

There was a public scribe who offered to trade me a pen with no ink.  A man wearing flip-flops on his ears—a clown—was chased by another brandishing a broom while a crowd howled at both. A cluster of toothless, grinning old lute-players interrogated ancient instruments. Robed men without shoes sat like yogis beneath huge umbrellas, waiting. Everyone in Marrakesh seemed to be waiting.

A cut-rate dentist squatted before a junkyard of teeth and waved gleaming pincers at passersby. A healer soothed a man’s sciatica by burning him judiciously with a poker heated on hot coals. And a monkey on a leash did a running leap and ended up with his legs around my neck and his arms around the top of my head. He let go only when I parted with a dirham.

There were boxing matches, a man dubiously slapping a suitcase and coughing at the gales of dust, and a medical professor explaining a photo of something half trout, half Hedy Lamarr. “In the old days,” he was saying, “before people ate antibiotics and deformed themselves....” Snake charmers swayed to whining music and wrapped sickly cobras—defanged and devenomed, eunuchs really—around the necks of frightened tourists.

Most popular were the storytellers, who spoke in such low voices that their audiences, straining to hear, looked like football teams in a huddle. They used the old trick of leaving a story in the middle, and the huddles groaned at having to come back tomorrow. According to Bowles these were mostly “rather grandiose stories about the Sultan and his daughter and the rich Jew who tries to get her. Very full of plot with lots of magic and transportation.” All the translators I engaged broke off after, “There was once a Sultan’s daughter...” getting too involved in the tale to care about being fired.

With dusk, dark birds flew across a swept sky toward the red Koutoubia. Men gathered on the corrugated tin roofs of the souks. Little lamps came on in the little eating stalls. The horse-buggies clopped and groaned, smoke and cooking smells swam upward from the open braziers; the throng ambled and pressed. Over the sand-colored houses flags fluttered, and the first strains of the minarets’ call to prayer moaned out, urged on by the dum! De-tam-tam of the black drummers from the southern oases. The Djemaa became an encampment of shuffling shadows carrying lanterns, hurrying toward the mosques—men who prayed five times a day and generally acted as if they never prayed at all. The mountains grew warm and soft as all light was sipped from the earth, the great yawning sky grew closer, deepening with gulfs of cloud; and then the heavens collapsed, and darkness closed on Marrakesh.

The next afternoon we drove through a colonnade of billowing firs, past fields made harvest-golden by the peaceful light. Climbing the sky ahead, riven with snow, stood the mountain walls. Nearer, on both sides, were sun-hardened villages like baked biscuits, a constant feature of the Moroccan landscape. As we stopped to watch the light change, stealing from pink to red and then to delicate blown-glass blue, we felt a prodigious solitude enclose us—and drove on, wrapped in day’s end and journey’s beginning.

As night followed us the mountains settled like some black animal fallen asleep, and the narrow road began to curve back and forth like a snake. The stars were precise and bright, but the moon was hidden by the cliffs and trees. We had picked the wrong time to drive this route’s paper-clip turns; luckily we had it to ourselves.

Every twenty miles or so the bare lights and warm mud walls of a village appeared, perhaps a dozen biscuit-houses facing each other across the road. There was always a fruit-seller open or a tailor working late, pumping his sewing machine with a foot pedal, scrutinized by his son. The shack-cafés in these mountain villages always have lavish names like the Fleur de Lis—Paris in the High Atlas.

We stopped, finally, at the Café Bellevue and sipped mint tea and ate rough hunks of bread and cheese as the night grew cold. (These hospitable cafés proved to be our lunch and rest stops. For dinner we were limited to each hotel’s restaurant, which was fine, too; Moroccan cuisine, like Italian, is almost always good wherever.) Watching us in the one-room café, as usual, was a portrait of King Hussan II. It is significant that portraits of rulers dominate countries where religion prohibits figurative representation in art—there is not a “legal” picture of a bird or man or beetle in Islam. But the ruler’s portraits cover every lamppost, every scrap of wall, every shop entrance; sometimes you even see them in bathrooms. It is as if Allah didn’t count on the arrogance of sultans and kings and sheikhs and ayatollahs, who come along and take advantage of the situation. In Morocco the portraits are invariably above eye level, so you have to look up to them.

It was after eleven by the time we crawled down from the mountains to Ouarzazate. By street lamp it looked like a surrealist movie set, a Dalí version of a Moroccan village. The buildings were of this century, and that made them seem futuristic. Our hotel, the Karam Pasha, was, like most of Ouarzazate’s hotels, gigantically new and built to accommodate tours; it stared out over the valley. In Ouarzazate, too, there was a distinctly French accent to the wide avenues—a reminder of the years from 1912 to 1956, when most of Morocco was a French protectorate. Up until this point in our trip, nearly everyone we’d met, from Tangier south, had been able to speak French. After Ouarzazate this was not true. 

Most conversations in Morocco have an oblique quality, as if all talk is allegorical or at least political. When we settled into our hotel, we found ourselves suddenly in a play by Pinter, outmatched by an enigmatic bartender.

“Can we get a drink?”

“Of course, sir. It is not yet midnight.”

I ordered gin fizzes.

“Ah, but we are closed. I am so very sorry.”

“I thought you said you’re still open.”

“Not at all. What would you like?”

My companion murmured, as if it were a new idea, “What about two gin fizzes?”

“It is now after midnight, mademoiselle,” said our tormentor graciously. “Beneath the moon I will bring them to you directly.” And under that lunar searchlight he did, by a huge turquoise swimming pool.

Leaving Ourzazate the next day, we immediately took the wrong road. For a couple of miles we headed north and east, toward Skoura. And abruptly the Sahara began—a jumbled hard land, rock-ridden, thick in the middle distance with mirages. Mountains galloped on our left, too fat to be real and punctuated with odd trees. They were upside-down reflections of the low hills on our right.

But it was a thrill to sense the desert beginning. Each one is different, and if you are sensitive to a desert’s particular music, it renews the spirit like no other landscape. This was nothing more than a glimpse, but I remembered what Bowles had written years ago in a classic essay, Baptism of Solitude: “There is a popular misconception of the Sahara as a vast region of sand across which Arabs travel in orderly caravans from one white-domed city to another. A generalization much nearer to the truth would be to say that it is an area of rugged mountains, bare valleys and flat stony wasteland, sparsely dotted with Negro villages of mud.”

Heading back through Ouarzazate we noticed that in our momentary absence all the street lights had come on. Since it was three in the afternoon and the sun was directly overhead and dizzyingly bright, this seemed an unnecessary gesture of support. The correct and excellent road out of town, through moderately rough rock desert, was lined with scattered human debris: the desert was being used as a haphazard garbage dump. The strange thing was that the trash didn’t look out of place or ugly. It was no more detritus than the rocks, and the burning light on blue plastic containers made them lovely against the sand.

Soon, dipping and meandering up to the Tizi-n-Tinififft Pass, the land grew harsh, the way one imagines the surface of the moon, with deformed peaks rising miles away, some like leprechauns’ hats, some like potters’ molds. Tracks led off in all directions from the road, signaling hidden villages, but the desolation seemed complete and beautiful.

High up the Tizi-n-Tinififft Pass was Aït-Saoun, a dusty little upland dorp with a windup public telephone that didn’t work (“Il est malade, m’sieu”), five bored men waiting to see what might happen next, a rusty Coca-Cola sign in Arabic and an amiable little café run by a look-alike of Snow White’s Doc in a gray nightgown and red woolen cap. It was breezy and very hot. We ordered two mint teas and an omelet, and they were served on a tin plate with epic grandeur.

Afterward Doc led us up to the roof, explaining his life in Moghrebi. He understood little French, and he left us alone to look out over the compact khaki village. With its interlocking house walls, it seemed more self-protected than the previous villages. It was built in a fascinating sand-castle style, immensely wise for the climate. The Moroccans have a natural genius for urbanism under almost any circumstances, and seen from above, each house was quite large, with a central courtyard like a well that was kept shaded and cool by the slightly inward-leaning walls. The design was expansive, simple, dignified, and private. In the courtyard below, six goats were bleating in a pen built from twisted tree branches and a severed old car door.

After the steep descent to Agdz, probably the best local market for Berber carpets, there came green mountains parading in an orderly row like chorus girls with knees lifted; then, rolling hills that looked as if someone had been using a hairbrush on them. We began to thread the Valley of the Draa now, and along the river the magnificent palm groves unrolled like green prayer mats spread across the valley floor. After the desert and the pass their green fulfillment seemed miraculous, and as the day advanced mists veiled the trees.

Villages sprang by the dozen from mountain niches, or hovered along the road. We passed men driving sack-laden donkeys, children playing soccer among the palms, old men seated by stone irrigation canals discussing the world in earnest. Dark-skinned women swathed in scarlet and black and yellow and indigo swayed past with grave dignity, great piles of thatch balanced on their heads, their bracelets jangling as they made their way to the communal stockpile.

What was frustrating was to be separated eternally from these people by language. They ran at the sight of a camera lens, but whenever we stopped, whoever was nearest in field or village would come over in greeting. We were limited to phonetic guidebook banalities (“How many children do you have?”); they, to requests for money, and the children, to a perpetual cry of “Bonbon!” (candy) or “Stylo!” (pen). But there can be few two-hour journeys by car as beautiful as that passage down the Draa.

One man did speak French, fluently. He materialized from a field while my companion was taking a photo of the mountains bathed in lavender light.

“Three dirhams for picture of mountains.”

“They’re your mountains?”

“They are.”

“Better make it five dirhams.”

“Five.”

“Nope.”

“You disapoint me m’sieu.”

“You disappoint me, too.”

This is the human lesson of Morocco: nothing is ever done without thought of reward. In a country with substantial unemployment, drought, and high military expenditures in the extreme south, this is not surprising. Still, such unrelenting opportunism is wearying.

Because we kept stopping—and always tried to drag out lunch to avoid driving in the hottest part of the day—we reached Zagora in darkness. A bearded majordomo in white assured us that the ksar hung with Christmas lights was indeed the Hotel Tinsouline. It was one of those lovely old Middle East Belle Epoque hostels that have vanished nearly everywhere except Syria, Egypt, and Istanbul, and that are always ranked with only three stars because they are missing things like telex machines and photocopiers. The Tinsouline had a beautiful pool and garden, and a lounge with attendant cats and chairs you could swim in. Our room was grand, with a huge Louis XV bed draped in crimson that looked as if it had entertained Mata Hari. Outside was an oasis of palms.

The next morning, after awakening to birds at dawn, we drove south about twelve miles. There stretched the first wind-whipped dunes of the Sahara, drifted in patches across the road as if deposited by a tide. Nearby, too, was Tamegroute, on the banks of the Draa, site of a once-great library. It held a few old Korans and a potters’ souk. Tamegroute had been extremely important for it was the home of the Naciri missionary brotherhood. From the 17th century until fairly recently the Naciri leaders were peacemakers whose civic role was to settle disputes among trading caravans coming from the desert.

We turned west, toward Taliouine, our night’s next stop, and at a gas station I fell into a conversation about my American trousers with a dark Touareg tribesman. He was tall, his face partly covered by a blue veil that he pulled back when he spoke, showing green and black teeth. He also wore Ray-Bans.

He said, “You are European. Are your pants European?”

“Yes.”

“From which country?”

“Tell me what you think.”

“Italy.” He paused. “And you? You are French?”

“Right.”

“What region?”

“Alsace. Strasbourg.”

He grinned. “That explains your barbarous accent.” It was a good joke: the word comes from “Berber.”

“That explains it, yes.”

He said firmly, “You are not French. Belgian?”

I said, ”The sharp ears of the Touareg. Are your robes Italian?”

“Touareg.” He laughed. “Bonne chance!” he said, and waved as he drove off in a cloud of dust.

He had come from many miles to the south, for the Touareg are a Saharan people who have held onto the plateau of the Hoggar in the center of the desert for centuries, despite countless Arab attempts to take it. Their name means “lost souls” in Arabic, but their own name for themselves is imochagh, “the free ones.” Of all the Berber-speaking peoples, they alone have a means of writing their own language. And though principally Muslim, they are known for their separatism and pride. And their dress: French settlers in Morocco dubbed them Blue People because their robes are colored with an indigo dye that gives their skin a blue cast. In Touareg custom it is the man who is veiled, to keep away evil spirits.

On our way west to Taliouine, a good five hours’ drive, the land was like southern Spain: clumps of trees like grazing sheep covered the dumpling hills. The villages were more scattered now, and wore spiky horns on their mud ramparts to keep flying devils from settling in for a landing. Most of these villages look hundreds of years old, but they aren’t. The walls must be continually repaired, and a heavy rain can wash away an entire settlement. But the ancient look is belied by sprouting television aerials. These men and women are farmers in wild valleys that were unplumbed by strangers a half-century ago, but their children watch Transformers and He-Man just like children everywhere else. Will they be content in a few years, to stay here and farm and accept the odd dirham handout?

The Hotel Ibn Toumert at Taliouine, abutting the ruined Claoui Casbah, was modern and empty. We had missed dinner and we barely made the closing of the bar. We were considering a night swim by moonlight—it was not yet ten—when the hotel clerk suddenly appeared and pressed two stubby lit candles into our hands. Just then the electricity went off.

“I inform you, madame and m’sieu, there will be no electricity until she is morning.”

The morning was breezeless and hot, and postponing the inevitable, we swam and watched the ducks potter about the casbah’s tiled terraces. A village shimmered deceptively near, at the foot of the chipped mountains—hours and hours away. It was like an image of the “real” Morocco, always out of reach, always within sight, alternately infuriating and beautiful. It seemed a country you could come back to again and again, if your patience held, and still not begin to understand: and I could see why Bowles had stayed.

On the road to Taroundant we learned the worth of a dirham—ostensibly about ten cents. Just back from the side of the road in a dusty field, we came across an impromptu market: a barber in a tent, a butcher with several carcasses, a steward serving bread and tea, a toothless fellow with vegetables and fresh fat oranges spread on a blanket, scampering children and a gray horse standing impassively by brambly trees. We wanted to buy only a few oranges. It was too hot to negotiate or haggle; Taroudant was still hours away. I asked for three oranges; he insisted on a kilo. Very well, I thought, be done with it.

He dragged out a rusted scale. Set it up. Started piling on oranges. They kept toppling off, for there wasn’t enough room in the pan, then skittering on the ground. The children were laughing. The gray horse flicked its tail. I said, “Enough, enough,” but of course I didn’t speak Moghrebi. In the end there were more than twenty oranges, most still on the vine. It was ludicrous; we wanted one for her, one for me, one to divide.

The merchant looked at me wearily, held up a moistened finger. “Un dirham.”

So this was what people were always demanding. It was real, living currency: it bought twenty delicious oranges that could take all the heat and fury off the day. Possibly it bought even more if one weren’t a stranger. Extreme poverty always shames the stranger who has not chosen to be wealthy. I tried to give the merchant the coin with as much dignity as he had shown when he asked for it.

Taroudant seemed a self-important place, with an air of great expectation: if at any moment all Marrakesh’s tourists came flooding in, it would be ready. A century ago it was a city entirely forbidden to Christians, but then its power and importance shrank, and in recent years it has become a center for Berber rugs and Eskimo-like sandstone carvings. Encircled by remnants of walls, it was designed for calamity. Simply trying to pass through town, we got inextricably lost, and trying to get simple directions we fended off two would-be guides who ended up in a fight. Every street was packed with dentists, their signs showing disembodied teeth grinning ghoulishly.

But the sky held whipped clouds, and the air had a new lightness: we were only forty-five miles from the sea. And we found our oasis just outside of town. An innocuous road led through a field to a great gate with an audaciously preening gazelle on it, and a robed sentry standing guard. Down the path, in a sequence of twenty pastel villas surrounded by lavish, tranquil gardens, was the Hotel Gazelle d’Or. It was hard to believe that beyond the stately palms with bunched heads like tropical islands, beyond the ardor of the birds’ liquid songs, beyond the honey-colored stone walls and the men working at the flower beds and the privacy of one’s own cottage, beyond the spread fans of travelers’-trees and the strains, so rich and strange, of Ravel dispersing across the gardens—hard to believe that beyond all this lay the mountains and deserts of North Africa. We had intended to pass only one night here; we stayed for four. It was as if the place were yours alone—if you ran into someone else, it was by accident. In those gardens seemed to be all the ease and elegance and calm of the world, and each afternoon when the turbaned bartender unlocked the grand piano to let me fumble through Mozart, he wore an expression of infinite patience, and he distracted me with a constant flow of tea.

Days later—a lifetime later, it seemed—on the road back north, we drove quickly down the High Atlas. Then lightning came, and pummeling rain: it was like crossing a frontier. The fields near Marrakesh were covered with frost—but this was early May! No wonder the palms had to be transplanted. Thick mists unfurled down the road, and phantom wagons pulled by phantom horses crossed the mists from field to field. As we neared the city, it grew hot again; the country seemed to evaporate. We ate our remaining oranges as the frost melted, all the way to Marrakesh.

The Real MacWeeney

I wrote this for a short-lived magazine called Vis-à-Vis in, I think, 1986. It's still true. 

Despite the automatic respect given to anyone who says he’s a writer, photographers almost always see more in a given situation.  They are more flexible, more inventive, better at getting what they want—most have a splendidly gentle impudence.  Writers work at home; the photographer’s rule is, “Get closer.” They are generally better at talking to people, for the writer is not by nature gregarious. Their equipment’s vulnerability gives them a sixth sense of physical instinct that most writers, even the finest journalists, often lack.  All writers hunt for explanations in thickets of words—a photographer knows to look at the face and the landscape, where truth is more evident.

I speak in such ideal terms because I’ve had the good luck to work with the superb Irish photographer Alen MacWeeney on numerous assignments, throughout the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the South Pacific, and I haven't stopped learning from him. Small, finely-made, with white hair, a doubting eye, and an unflagging sense of humor, he is a man of infinite resourcefulness. In Bahrain I saw him flap his arms like a bird to demonstrate to an astonished Arab that we were looking for some falconers. In Oman he kept his cool in terrible heat when we were completely lost in the Empty Quarter, and got us out alive. On Dominica, among the last of the once-cannibal Carib Indians, he so charmed that reluctant tribe—who simply wanted us to leave them alone—that we ended up being given a house.

"The problem," says Alen,“always is convincing people that your need to do the picture is greater than their resistance.” Difficult, though, to get sent to a place for a month, sometimes a week, and be expected to get under the skin of remote people who only want to see your back. Alen has always shown great patience, persistence, and humor—his famous photographs of the Irish tinkers were made after six months’ association with those gypsies without taking a single picture. This care seems to result in photographs of a rare candor and generosity—people revealing themselves without the photographer in the way. You never feel Alen in his pictures.

On a recent triple project in the South Pacific I saw him faced with several difficulties of different sorts. Tramping the Milford Track on New Zealand’s South Island—a place that is to the vegetable world what New York is to the concrete—the problem was to make its often bland beauty ("A green hell for a photographer”) stand out. Part of the solution was to approach it as many different landscapes, not one. On the Cook Island of Rarotonga he convinced half the timid island to let him take their pictures by asking to join an outrigger canoe race. His boat went round in circles, but he got all the photographs he needed for the next two weeks. And he saw in a shy island girl of sixteen a potential model who became absolutely riveting when photographed—it took several meetings with her parents to get photographic permission. (In the end, the travel magazine balked at using those shots; perhaps they were too sensual. The lesson of writing or taking pictures for magazines is that generally one’s best work is never used.)

His stroke of genius, though, was in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. There we were to do, as part of a town portrait, an interview with a local celebrity called the Wizard, a truly brilliant man who is garbed like Merlin, declaims every day in the city square, and is part William Blake, part stand-up comic—though the comedy masks a deep and original thinker. Everyone who reports on Christchurch talks to the Wizard; he is a dream interview, but he's also on the cover of the phone book, and hardly news. What was there new to find in the Wizard?

Alen knew. “Do Wizards have mothers?”

That's how great portraits are made.

That’s what a great photographer is made of.

Van Gogh

Written for Travel & Leisure in early 1986.

One January morning in Amsterdam, when an uncustomary snowstorm was adding a layer of meringue to the gingerbread-and-chocolate canal town, I went up a few wide steps before a glass-and-concrete building with a tall Christmas tree still standing in the lobby.  I shook snow from my jacket, handed it over, and walked into a glorious summer: golden cornfields vibrant with the fullness of the harvest, Mediterranean-blue seasides with boats lazed and cafés busy at dusk, trees exploding into blossom, bare luminous midnights, the eager faces of sunflowers and a turbulent sky raining daggers of color on a garden for young lovers.  I walked into a season finer, more lasting than my own, and put myself in Vincent’s hands.

Van Gogh is one of those rare artists now seemingly beyond reproach, presumably beyond fashion, almost beyond consideration or opinion.  He simply is, like Bach or Shakespeare, and he is so much a part of our culture—who comes more quickly to mind as a painter?—that it is a shock to see as many of his paintings as the Dutch National Museum Van Gogh has, there in one place, in the flesh. At the museum, on four floors, you have a comprehensive selection from 200 paintings and three times that many drawings and prints, the largest and most representative collection anywhere.  This is one of the easiest museums in the world:  you simply give in and let Van Gogh do it all.

What is difficult with Van Gogh is to consider him apart from the legend that surrounds and obscures him.  Van Gogh is the cliché of the painter’s life just as Bix Beiderbecke is of the jazz musician’s, and he is usually treated as a freak, though his instability had little to do with his painting.  One needs a comprehensive museum to see the constant impulse, the compelling unbroken themes in his work that lie with great calm beneath the bouts of mania.

He was always paradoxical.  He got started painting fairly late, he died at 37, and he produced a huge body of work in a short time.  Yet most of the paintings that we think of as supremely “his” came out of only the last two or three  years.  He took his cue from painters who were his inferior, like Millet, and learned (like many painters of his day) a great deal from copying—except Van Gogh copied from postcards.

Nor does he fit a convenient niche.  Is he Post-Impressionist? Expressionist?  One imagines him somewhere off to the side in Heaven. His paintings never flatter.  He found the celestial in the menial: though he wasn’t (as is sometimes written) the first to paint people at work, he was the first to paint “working people.”  He painted the night like no one else before or since, and in color he is thought of as something of a fabulist.  Yet at times he is eerily accurate, as any painter will tell you:  for example, if he paints a light bulb, he will paint with precision the halo around it.

A series of plaques at the museum entrance, basking in snowy light from the great windows, gave me glimpses of Van Gogh’s life. Born March 30, 1853, in southern Holland, a minister’s son.  Educated at boarding and secondary schools; by 1869 a clerk at Goupil, art dealers in the Hague. (As an art dealer Van Gogh was as unsuccessful at selling other people’s paintings as he was to be at selling his own.)  1873-5, at Goupil’s London offices; in 1876 to their Paris branch—a premonition, since it was in France that his painter’s destiny lay. But he was dismissed by April. All these years Van Gogh was worrying his family.  Already the manic depressive mood swings, the troubled withdrawals into himself were evident.  He began the voluminous, almost daily correspondence with his brother Theo, that would last until his death.  Vincent had shown little real interest in learning the art dealer’s profession; he did show deep religious leanings, but of a highly personal sort.  In England he became a teacher and assistant preacher.  He took the Gospel at its word and gave away what he had to the poor, living by choice as they did out of necessity. It would prove good training.

For the next three years he worked at a bookstore in Holland (the owner remembered him as being immensely strong, unsociable, always doing silly little drawings or translating the Bible into French, German, and English) and trained in Belgium as a minister. And then, in 1869, at the age of 26, having moved to southern Belgium to preach, he decided to become a painter.

I got quickly drawn away from biography by paintings on the walls. These were from his “early” years, meaning all but the last three.  On the ground floor you see what he was doing at 30—his brooding, his copying, his casting about for the right subject and tone.  Even five years before the end he had not found the right stylistic path for himself, had not yet created his own language; he was still borrowing the tongues of others. No wonder so many of his later canvases will show an allegorical path through fields.

Most of these early paintings are somber, innocent of human experience, restrained in feeling, completely unliberated and imprisoned not by lack of technique but by delberate artifice—where is the Van Gogh we expect?  Not to be found here; Vincent the late starter, then, bringing it all home just before the end.

Looked at from a distance you would never guess these paintings were by Van Gogh.  They are all brown and black, faces melancholy in shadows, mostly ill-lit still lifes and a moody house on a rise or in trees. Most are just plain dull. (Interesting, though, to see Van Gogh without his colors.)  Occasionally he finds his stride—a view over Paris in pale light, that makes you want to cheer—but usually he misses.

To put Vincent’s work in some kind of perspective, I decided to head up to the fourth floor, which holds some of his later paintings along with many by his contemporaries.  The museum’s airy open center holds an exposed staircase, and walking up you see the ingenuity of the design—as much rest area, with black curling metal sofas (suggesting Mondrian) as viewing area.  Because it was winter and morning there was nearly no one else in the museum, only a couple of blond boys with earrings who might’ve been art dealers.

The Van Gogh museum is rare in several ways.  To start with, there are no guided tours allowed.  And you are permitted quite close to the paintings—indeed, they look almost impregnable:  Van Gogh used so much paint that some of his canvases have a literal three-dimensional aspect. But the museum is so spacious and uncluttered that you can also see what the paintings look like from, say, fifty yards away.  This is not only relaxing, it is quite revealing, and because the rooms are not vast cathedrally caverns, but low-ceilinged and open, with masked fluorescent lights, you feel the real source of light and all color in the place is Vincent himself.

It is amazing, too, how effective Van Gogh is even at a distance.  In some ways you can even see the paintings better.  The whirlpool of sunflowers doesn’t drown you, for instance, and the boats pulled up on the beach look as if they are really there—and it makes you appreciate anew one of the greatest color-senses of all time, so much raw horsepower in that one brush.

On the top floor were several Caribbean and Polynesian scenes of Gaughin, plenty of Bernard, and several by an Italian named Monticelli who slathered it on like house-paint. How unkind it is simply to live in the present!  For the world has plumped for Van Gogh, not the lesser others, and apart from Gaughin they look dismal and (unfairly, perhaps) drab and workmanlike.

One painting was particularly fascinating, though:  the portrait of  Vincent by John Russell (1858-1931). Russell, an Australian, was at heart a realist, and the portrait shows Vincent as he probably was:  glancing over his shoulder at the world with the same baleful, suspicious eye as in his own self-portraits, paintbrush held delicately in one hand like a scalpel.  At this time (1883) Vincent was to write in a letter to Theo, who supported him:

“One wants to be an honest man, one is so, one works as hard as a slave, but still one cannot make both ends meet; one must give up the work, there is no chance of carrying it out without spending more on it than one gets back for it, one gets a feeling of guilt, of shortcoming, of not keeping one’s promises, one is not honest as one would be if the work were paid for at its natural reasonable price.  One is afraid of making friends, one is afraid of moving, like one of the old lepers, one would like to call from afar to the people:  Don’t come too near me, for intercourse with me brings you sorrow and loss; with all that great load of care on one’s heart, one must set to work with a calm, everyday face, without moving a muscle, live one’s ordinary life, get along with the models, with the man who comes for the rent, with everybody in fact. With a cool head, one must keep one hand on the rudder to continue the work, and with the other hand try to do no harm to others.  And then storms arise, things one had not foreseen, one doesn’t know what to do, and one has a feeling that one may strike a rock at any moment….”

There was also a Toulouse-Lautrec that looks more like a Van Gogh than some of Van Gogh’s do, showing a confident, slightly severe young woman seated at a table with her arms folded. Bernard, younger than Vincent, is almost uniformly dull, respectably of his time and no more.  In life he was encouraged by Vincent, as was Gaughin (who shared Vincent’s quarters in Brittany before the cutting-off of the ear).  It is a measure of Van Gogh’s soundness and control as an artist that, a year before his death, he could write to Theo, “I have written to Bernard and Gaughin too that I considered that to think, not to dream, was our duty, so that I was astonished looking at their work that they had let themselves go so far.”

This is what is so rarely talked of in Van Gogh’s work:  his solidity, his structure.  Stand ten yards away from a painting by one of his contemporaries and it seems to vacillate on the wall; Van Gogh’s are like Gibraltar. The portraits spin a face at you from a whorl of centrifugal color, the landscapes all have a solid center, and some (like his house at Arles or his bedroom or the boats on the beach) are so strong that the museum seems to have been constructed around them.  You notice this especially when you see one of Van Gogh’s copies (usually of Millet farm scenes—there’s a whole wall of them) and sense Vincent slightly uncomfortable in someone ele’s format.

I went downstairs to the third floor, where Van Gogh’s sketches, which demonstrate how carefully his paintings were planned, are usually on display.  But there was a special Munch show being hung, so I headed down to the second floor, one wall of which, for initial impact, I will back against any wall of any museum in the world.

What I saw first brought me up short—two huge Japanese paintings, after Hokusai or Hiroshige, but done by Vincent.  I’d known of his being influenced by Japanese painters, and certain beliefs they shared—the essential rightness of nature, their truthfulness in painting its effects, their sense of human life small against a landscape, their deep religious feeling without resorting to icons.  But I’d never seen his attempts at Japonaiserie. One was garish—I mean that unpejoratively, as a geisha is garish—and showed a courtesan.  The other, more effective, showed a bridge in pelting rain, the wood pilings slanting one way, the driving rain another, and blown against a blue sky, two human figures squirming amid the wet. The painting had caught, in a Japanese tone, the exact weight and feel of such a storm—a bridge inconsequential against a world teeming with water.  Beside the Japonaiseries were a self-portrait, staring at world with fishy eye, and a still life of fruit that may have given Cezanne a nudge.

Spoiled by having had the museum virtually to myself, I was startled to find a man (tweedy, professorial) and a woman (redhead, military kit) on either side of me.  Why do women in museums always look available, and men either bored or boring?  I felt surrounded, so I moved on to the main part of the floor, which holds only paintings from Van Gogh’s last years, 1887 - 90.

The banks of fluorescent light abetted by daylight from above, the blue-flecked gray carpet, the dozing guard in the corner, all gave the museum a tidy Dutch unobtrusiveness. This is why so many people come to Amsterdam:  it never says no to anyone, and yet a stranger will ask if  he is disturbing you before he strikes up a conversation.

This guard looked exactly like Goldfinger, and his ease made me think this must be a particularly pleasant museum to be a guard in.  And who, looking at one of those tranquil uniformed men seated on a wooden stool in a corner, watching everyone and no one, half-asleep, has not wondered what it would be like to have that job?  I always imagine it to be like sleepwalking, but I have found museum guards on the whole to be extremely knowledgeable people, with exotic hobbies and a meditative turn of mind. Certainly Van Gogh doesn’t ever grate—this same man would go out of his mind at the Whitney.  I decided to interrogate Goldfinger.

“What’s it like to be surrounded by Van Gogh all day?”

He looked as if no one had ever asked him that question before—at least not that morning.  Like most Dutch he spoke English perfectly.  He made a bubble-blowing expression, and said in a soft accent, “Well, I’ve been here nearly seven years now.  You have to have something to think about. Working here, seeing Van Gogh (he pronounced it Van Hohckh) and his handwriting all the time, I became very interested in graphology.  His letters are beautiful, noble, some of the most wonderful ever written. You can see the man’s whole soul in his handwriting—it varies wildly even in a single line or word.  You see the intuition and the intelligence and how hard he was trying to live with himself, knowing the difficulties.”

I said, “What happens to you after seven years here?”

He made an assessing gesture with one hand, as if talking of someone else.  “What happens when you stay here, even though you move around many times in the day, is you start to think of all the paintings as yours.  In a way, they are.  But they’re yours, too.  Anyway, you feel there’s a certain spot in the room, an area on this or that floor that you prefer, in which you feel more at home.  Maybe the four paintings nearest to you in one corner happen to sum up all the different flows in your life.  And then one day you realize, after many months, that there is one painting which is absolutely yours.  And you can’t say why.  It may not even be the best. But it just is a part of you, in a way that no other painting here is.  I knew an old guard who retired and never told me which painting was his.  He thought it was too great a secret to give away. Myself, I didn’t realize until one day I happened to look up, and there were some Italians talking away, and I thought, ‘Look at those Italians in front of my painting.’”  He gave a little ho-ho-ho laugh.  “I didn’t mind, but there it was.”

“Which painting is it?”  I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” he said.  “The one over there, of the almond blossoms in bloom.  The one with Americans in front of it.  That’s mine.”

I thanked him for his honesty (“Well, I am an honest man, ho-ho-ho.”) and went over to have a look at the snowflake petals splurging on frail fingering branches.  There were two middle-aged couples who looked, in rumpled sweaters, as if they’d flown in that very morning.

One husband, rumbling, shifting his glasses authoritatively, said, “Stand away from this and it’s ten times prettier.  Ten times, Corinne.”

His wife ignored him and moved closer.  He blinked and drifted off with the other husband. When the ladies were alone, Corinne said to her friend, “Did you see what Vincent did?  You can’t see from there, Martha.  Put your nose right up to the canvas.”

Martha said, “Why, he just left a lot of the canvas blank!  And put in creamy splotches for the almond blossoms.  They’re so thick you think he’s covered everything up.  Damn, here comes the guard.”

I caught just a hint of twinkle in Goldfinger’s eye.  “Back off,” he said amiably in Dutch, and indicated a line a foot back from the wall that  the American ladies had overstepped. Their husbands, triumphant again, were now discussing the implications of jet-lag. I moved on to the famous sunflowers, exuberant in a great vase with one of Vincent’s largest signatures across its belly.  In front of it stood two Frenchmen in berets, needlessly playing at trenchcoats—there is a free cloakroom downstairs.  One made that French sound of throaty delight that sounds like a dying fish gasping at air.  I moved on, trying not to let the wall drown me.  “I want to make decorations for the studio,”  Vincent had written his brother. “Nothing but big flowers fade so soon, and the thing is to do the whole in one rush.”

There was a view over Monmartre, one of those stately landscapes in which Vincent gives us a long sweep of hills and fields and sky, a hymn of human and natural life spread easily before our gaze. And a still life of piles of books, that remind one of what a great reader Van Gogh was, what a literary man, in fact: unusual in a painter.  And also a reminder of how often Vincent sought his subject matter in what lay simply close at hand—unlike Gaughin, who sought it a world away.

“As far as I know there isn’t a single academy where one learns to draw and paint a digger, a sower, a woman putting the kettle over a fire or a seamstress…The figures in the pictures of the old master(s) do not work.”  Van Gogh felt close to the people he painted, and he felt this sympathy unnecessary.  All this time, all these years brother Theo, working at a gallery, not a wealthy man, kept supporting him. Vincent, in Arles in 1888, would write to him, “My debt is so great that when I have paid it, which all the time I hope to succeed in doing, the pains of producing pictures will have taken my whole life from me, and it will seem to me then that I have not lived.”

Van Gogh wrote Theo sometimes twice a day, and Theo’s replies carried with them, twenty,
fifty, a hundred francs.  Never was art made so cheaply, nor at such a high human cost.  Van Gogh never lived past the level of a labourer, and often, strapped for cash, he would go several days living on coffee until the next hundred francs arrived.  Yet in his letters he never complains about insufficient money; if anything, it is for insufficient affection. Anxious, ablaze, alone, he received little of woman’s love either—though for a time he supported and sketched a prostitute and her child.  For at heart Vincent always remained the preacher, going among the people, trying to find out what their lives could teach him; his pictures, never iconographically religious, still communicate a feeling which is fundamentally religious.

In part this is because of his embracing honesty—“The man who damn well refuses to love what he loves dooms himself.”  Through these apprentice years he was learning to shed his skin, not to hide. After Vincent finds his style, he can communicate so directly because he seems in a painting to be revealing all his feelings about a scene (while concealing the artifice that allows him to portray them.)  He does not approach you delicately, on tiptoe, hoping you will like his work and have something nice to say about it.  He butts you in the stomach, he claps his hands on your shoulders and spins you round and conjures something miraculous and unexpected before you—a turbulent field wavering in a turning autumn wind of riotous color, a lone crow rising from the corn sheaves standing like a squadron of sentries, shoulder to shoulder in that season of memory.  Van Gogh is not asking for discussion, or explaining his sentiments of a landscape:  he simply offers himself to you, in nakedness, much as someone shares his daily bread.

It is this furious candor that is so appealing, especially in our age, in which self-proclaimed artists cower behind “theories” and peacock their lack of ideas before a gullible public waiting to die, instead of getting on with the job: to look with new eyes, to see an ever-renewed, ever unexplored world as it has never been seen before. That might suffice as a definition of the artist’s duty, in any age, and no painter did it more than Vincent.

He has so many strengths as a painter that it may seem a little absurd to list them as if he were a baseball player, but nevertheless worth trying.  First, an instinctive sense of subtle but constant surprise.  A color sense that still seems wholly original, of boundless vigor and flexibility and range.  A subject matter that is both daring and traditional, and a humility before it.  The ability to communicate, in a brushstroke, any passion—exultation, pity, repose, and (most difficult in a painting) danger.

That famous painting, near the end, of forty black crows rising against a tumultuous sky from a waving, whiskery cornfield with a path tortuously heaving around and through then vanishing, ending in the standing sheaves, conveys a sense of threat so great that there is no compromise to looking at it.  You either get as close as possible, trying to locate the source of danger, or you back away almost immediately, and move on to the next painting—a delighted empty landscape with a squiggle of cloud across an easy blue sky.  I spent ten minutes watching people back away from the crows, retreating as if singed.

“It’s getting closer,” muttered an Austrian girl.  She meant his death.

A curious absence in his work: virtually no nudes.

It was noon, and the museum was starting to fill up with businessmen on lunch breaks.  I went on to a late painting of the garden of the hospital where Vincent spent his last two years. An ethereal glow tranced the sky, just beyond the sanatorium wall, like the promise of a cure.  And then I came to one of my favorites:  Vincent’s house in Arles,  the Maison Jaune. Let me be foolhardy enough to try to describe it, since this is one of those paintings everyone knows which has more and more going on in it the more you look; and the apparent unrelatedness of everything in the scene is what gives its feeling of true life, of existence happening before one’s eyes.

Beneath a dark blue sky we are looking at a town corner.  A wide, tan street hugs a house with great green trees, left, and comes forward to meet another street extending away toward a railroad bridge in the distance, right.  A huffing locomotive is pulling black cars across.

In the center of the canvas stands a pale yellow house with a larger building behind it, four stories.  A couple of stories boast blue doors and balconies.  On the ground floor is a café, with figures clustered around a table. A gate leads (we suppose) into a courtyard.  An awning signals a bar or bakery inside.

Out front a man is sitting with his back to us, a plump woman in a long dress near him.  A man in gray trousers is walking fast, about to pass them.  In the long street to the right are a young woman and two children, holding hands.  Dirt is piled in the road. Look closely: a man watches from the upper story of the larger house, between chimneys.  As your eye goes down the street you see arched doors, a hanging sign, and another stone bridge just visible beyond the first.  Laundry is hanging from the little yellow house at the front, and a balcony is lined with plants.

The painting next to it is of Vincent’s bedroom in that house, and it holds all the details—washbasin and hat and towel and his own paintings on the walls—that let you reconstruct his life.  The ideal way to reveal anything is to invite; and Vincent is always offering his hand.

But time was running out for him.  In these months he was producing nearly a painting a day, working happily.  He invited Gauguin to join him.  They did not get along at all, there was the attack inflicted on his ear. Gauguin left, and Vincent went into hospital over Christmas Eve, 1888. By May 1889 he was in a mental home at Saint-Remy-en-Provence.  He would have about fourteen months more, including a final three under the sympathetic eye of the good Dr. Gachet in Auvers, before his suicide with a revolver in July, 1890.

His moods, of course, were swinging wildly, but he kept painting. In this time he would write, in his determination to keep working, “My sorrow will be stronger than my madness,” and “I think of it as a shipwreck, this journey.”  And in the final letter to Theo, that strange sense of reconciliation in the closing phrase:  “I tell you again that I shall always consider you to be more than a simple dealer in Corots, that through my mediation you have your part in the actual production of some canvases, which will retain their calm even in the catastrophe.”  Calm even in the catastrophe:  the artist’s mission.

Theo would be dead six months later, leaving a son, Vincent, who twenty years ago would set up the museum and the Van Gogh Foundation.

And amid all this tragedy—the great stormclouds hurtling across an urgent sky, as if the brain at its busiest were breaking down—why does one come out of the museum feeling so exalted, feeling the triumph in Vincent’s life?  To be touched so greatly and with such generosity, to be shown so much: it makes his suffering mortal. His boats are the idle boats of any childhood, his grand view of a harvest across swelling hazed fields a view we might have and forget but which, in retrospect, seems like pure happiness. It is the joy we remember that is immortal.

I kept returning to his painting of the two couples in the garden, that shaded peace at the end of a hot day.  Four young lovers, two seated, two standing, amid so much fervent blooming: a generation of love withheld from Vincent, beneath a falling sky.  So much sense of possibility in this canvas, you feel, Vincent the eavesdropping sharer of those private endearments; but not for him, never for him.

“I have a lover’s insight or a lover’s blindness for work just now.”  Vincent wrote his brother in September, 1888.  “I know quite well that I have already written you once today, but it has been such a lovely day again.  My great regret is that you cannot see what I am seeing here.”

But I could; I had been looking over his shoulder all day; and his greater vision persisted long after I left the museum and walked among the overcoated people, sharing a path through fields of weeping snow.

The Milford Track

Written for Travel & Leisure, 1985

There were forty of us on the steamer, heaving through the restless chop on the vast, glittering lake. Around us were mountains of every denomination—low forested hills, slate-grey slabs, mystic snowy peaks. Travelers of every denomination, too: an Australian sheep farmer, a jazzercise instructor, a New Zealand mother and zoologist daughter, an elderly Dutch international banker and his wife, a young California fisherwoman, a set of Connecticut investors, two physical therapists, a North Carolina airline pilot, a Japanese student, a New York school bus driver. The overweight, the hip, the reluctant, the trim.

We were crossing Lake Te Anu, the great waterway of New Zealand’s South Island. We were all signed up to walk the fabled Milford Track; we had knapsacks stowed inside, keeping dry; and for four more days we would be a part of each other’s experience of “the finest walk in the world.”

The Track—a thirty-three mile walk through staggering, uninhabited country—has been attracting trampers, as they’re called in New Zealand, for over a century. Few of us were experienced at this sort of hiking; in a sense, our inexperience had led us here. Our average age was nearly forty-five, and some were not keeping their doubts to themselves. “Weather’s packin’ it in. mate,” said a burly Australian. “Well, fun and games might as well get started right off, eh?”

Just getting south to Te Anu had been a decisive journey into the serene wildness of Fiordland, an area that from the air looks Himalayan. A propeller plane took us south out of Christchurch, through blustery clouds, to pause at Mt. Cook—its heights hidden by fog—and Queenstown, where the valleys and lake were green and clear.

Te Anu turned out to be a bundle of camping-equipment stores and a handful of motels beside the lake. At our briefing session the outline of our five-day journey was made clearer. Day 1 would take us north up the lake, where we’d be dropped for a 3/4 mile walk to Glade House, our first night’s rest. Day 2 would follow the Clinton River for about ten miles to Pompalona. Day 3 would be the hardest—up a mountain, over Mackinnon Pass, and down again to Quintin. Day 4 would be a fourteen-mile push to Sandfly Point, where another steamer would take us across Milford Sound to the Milford Hotel. Day 5 would be simply spent on a boat, seeing the sound and unknotting our muscles.

On that preparatory day at Te Anu, though we could see frowning clouds and muttering rain hurrying to meet us, our spirits rose at the thought of being so out of touch with the rest of the world for several days. On advice to travel as lightly as possible, we unpacked and repacked our knapsacks several times until the photographer’s heaviest lenses thoughtfully found their way into the writer’s load, and generally tried to reassure ourselves that all would go well.

It wasn’t just the walk—it was the prospect of spending several days in such proximity to strangers, and strange strangers at that. Australians and New Zealanders are to Americans approximately what Americans are to the rest of the world: too big to ignore, too incomprehensible to deal with. The prospect of so quickly making friends seemed improbable.

By morning the clouds had lifted and the lake and its mountains were chipped clean in the crystal light. At noon a bus took us out of town to board the steamer Tawera, which has been doing this run for nearly a century. “All fresh water beneath us, y’see,” the captain said. “That’s why she’s held up so long.” He showed me some old photographs of men and women dressed to the nines on a shore that looked remarkably unchanged from where we’d boarded. “There they are, waiting just like you were. Her name, Tawera, is the Maori word for Venus—the morning star, you might say.”

Below us the pure, glacial water dropped away for 800 feet. Those at the bow were getting soaked by spray. I moved back and a woman from the North Island said with concern, “I do wonder if this weather’s going to hold.” She sighed. “In this country you never can tell for more than a half hour at a time.” The passage through the mountains grew narrow, and the Tawera crept alongside thickly forested cliffs where the beeches grew right out of the dark, toiling water.

As we neared the true beginning of the Track, there were more easy introductions among the group. “I’m Vern, and I’m from nuclear-free Auckland,” commented one man amiably, referring to the latest U.S. dip into the shallows of international affairs. We landed on a beach of heavy rocks, by a dilapidated wharf. “Time for the repellent already,” said a stockbroker’s wife, slapping it on hastily. But the sandflies were mild, and didn’t keep up if you walked—so we walked.

A trail led off into green woods. Fifteen minutes’ tramp, our knapsacks adjusting themselves, brought us to Glade House. Hot tea and biscuits awaited, and Phil and Betty Turnbull, a white-haired couple who have run the place for sixteen years now. It had a gingerbread quality, and a long social room with fireplace, untuned upright piano, dining tables already set for an early dinner, and old pictures of Glade House from the Twenties. Most of our group stood around and made nervous jokes about how easy that kilometer had been, then set off to explore.

Along the narrow Clinton River the water was pebbly, and a breeze was moving its hand swiftly across the surface. The woods were thick, the writhing trees covered in hanging mosses (“old man’s beard”) and green velvet. There were groves of wrecked trees—chaotic driftwood ruins. Ferns were everywhere, the ground spongy underfoot (“It must rain a lot here,” said somebody sourly) so it was like walking on pillows. Sandflies were carrying on their usual dive-bombing attacks. Above us a furrowed cloud bank hung over the hairy scalps of the mountains. Rain tomorrow, I thought; rain and more rain.

Dinner at Glade House turned out to be roast beef, accompanied by a snapping fire and cards afterward, followed by a ceremony of introduction from all hands. Usually such rites have about as much appeal as the Academy Awards, but the act of trying to mark one’s home town with a pin on a wall map, and the Turnbulls’ geniality, made this the first step in the gathering circles of friendship that would grow at an astonishing rate. The map sprouted tight clusters of pins from New Zealand, the U.S.A., Japan, and Australia; a pin from New Caledonia, and from Poland too. There were a few words from tomorrow’s guide,  who’d be bringing up the rear. “Lights out at ten,” warned Phil Turnbull. (“After that,” murmured an Irishman, “it’s braille until morning.”) “We have a tradition here. Those in the upper bunks, the younger, serve tea in the morning to those elder statesmen in the lower.”

In the cozy men’s dormitory room somebody to the southwest of me began snoring with incredible vigor sometime after eleven. In frustration I got up around midnight to watch the steady rain, and rustlings in other bunks convinced me I was not alone. After another hour five of us took our pillows and, this being the wilderness, quietly smothered the snorer, and afterward we all slept soundly.

In the morning the wet light made all seem new: a world of moss and ferns, and trees of millennial height reaching up to grey and sickly clouds, mournful with falling mists. And, now, it began to rain in earnest.

Watching the group in their yellow slickers heading off in twos and threes over a wood-and-wire hanging bridge, Phil Turnbull said to me, “They look like taxis in New York, don’t they? Heading down Fifth Avenue in the rain.”

All morning we followed the course of the widening Clinton River. It kept raining, and the passive river was turned into a turbulent flood. The Track was flat and impossible to lose. We passed torrential rapids, crossed wood bridges past splayed ferns and fungi and undulating  meadows of silken grass. Underfoot, the Track was by turns gravelly rocks or glorious mud. The river kept winding. The rain made myriads of rivulets—spilling waterfalls far above us—tumble down the cliff face through trees. Clouds hung round the crags, and brought back a bit of melodious Tennyson from childhood—The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape / From fold to fold, of mountain and of cape. . . . 

We passed through heavenly glades, the fallen logs like an elegant woman’s crossed legs, and through the Black Forest, which should be renamed Rackham’s Forest, after the illustrator Arthur Rackham—for it looks just like one of his creations, a fabled wood in a child’s storybook, with braided limbs and demons and dryads in the trees’ bodies, cunningly dappled light, and a wicked river coarsely grumbling just out of sight.

Then, just as we came to Six-Mile Hut for lunch, early in the afternoon (for we’d taken our time, and fallen far behind), we came upon one of the most wonderfully eerie places on earth. It was the creation of an inspired 1982 avalanche, when hundreds of tons of trees and mountainside came crashing down, and carved out a beach and shallow basin across the Clinton River. A wedge of trees had been smashed flat, the land cleared for a quarter mile, and the mountainside was bare as if someone had ripped its surface violently away. Above, the clouds were lifting over snowy converging passes—though it was summer where we stood, even with a breeze.

On the beach of the basin the sight was even more astonishing, for the raging river had been made into a calm lake, with strange grappling leafless trees rising from the water’s edge of the lunar landscape. Around us a hundred waterfalls busily fingered their way down, and behind us blue skies made the grey mountains look lordly and remote. It was an incredibly complicated place—as if a dozen separate landscapes had decided to converge in this alien site to send the human spirit into a dazed confusion.

All ways meet here
No beginning, no end 
Only the constant becoming 

I wrote, in a paralysis of haiku. The place made one think of the world after everybody else was gone from it. A slightly forlorn beach, impassable mountains, a quiet river dozing, a few waterfalls twirling and pirouetting down into powdery mists. The sun glittered across the stunted trees standing in the crater like bonsais, and the mountains behind looked like beds for giants. We had the place to ourselves, and were glad we’d let the others go on ahead. The sky, reflected in little sandy pools, was bearing fog toward us rapidly. Exalted shafts of sunlight flashed around the passes and were gone in cloud.

At tiny Six-Mile Hut we sipped hot tea and devoured the lunches we’d carried on our backs. The rain stopped abruptly, and in two minutes it became a lovely day. All morning the birds—fan-tail, robin, yellow parakeet—had been the tamest I’d ever seen, alighting on branches at eye level for casual chats or occasionally gossiping from a camera tripod. Now a couple of wekas (pronounced like the basket)—fat brown birds the size of small cats, rather dumpy and matronly—came wandering over and waited patiently for scraps of food or abandoned notebook pages.

That afternoon, covering the four miles to Pompolona, we followed the river. Thus far we’d prided ourselves on keeping our boots dry, nimbly skipping over puddles or sidestepping rain pools like seasoned adventurers. But now our efforts became ludicrous. We came to several places where there was no choice but to slosh calf-deep through flooded streams on the Track. (“Ah. that’s nothing, mate,” a guide told me later. “Coulda been seven feet deep. No problem at all.”) And, inevitably, a half-hearted drizzle began.

None of this mattered, nor the chiding weight on our backs. All was compensated by passing through more different landscapes than I’d have thought possible. In a hundred yards we went from sheer rock, carved in slices like steaks, into deep Amazonian rain forest; then past shaded meadows of profuse ferns, through dense decadent Southern woods, and along the shore of a hidden lake, Alpine passes above us, amid cliffs sprouting waterfalls like a great leaky boat. It was nearly a parody of the travel agent’s dream—a dozen entirely different places in three minutes—and it made you wonder at the simple miracle of this beautiful planet, left to its own devices, working its poetry of constant surprise.

Pompolona that night was different from Glade House: only two years new, a connected system of little chalets with four bunks in each. It would be difficult to imagine a more efficient setup than the New Zealanders have, everyone carrying their own bed sheet for the three nights of the trek, and finding pillows, blankets and towels at each hut. Supper was waiting, and the forty of us were beginning to divide up into natural groups. There were jokes about the rain-flooded path (“The finest swim in the world,” muttered a lithographer) and we put our clothes in the drying shed, a heated metal hut that could drain the most waterlogged boots overnight and shrink anything else in several hours. The talk naturally turned to recent films; somebody mentioned Amadeus. An Aussie girl across the table looked up at the name and said, “Eye sore that. Funny bloke, wadn’t he? Mose-art.”

Lights out again at ten; and that night we found we were sharing our comfortable chalet with the two remaining snorers who, in tandem, sounded like most of the percussion section of the London Symphony Orchestra. Fortunately we were far from civilization, and with Darwinian justice the two offenders were easily dispatched. In the morning there was more breakfast for everyone.

We were all off early, knowing this would be the most grueling day since it meant going up to the Mackinnon Pass (3,835 ft.)—slung like a saddle between Mt. Balleon and Mt. Hart at 7,000 feet—then traversing the pass and heading steeply down the other side, a drop of 3,000 feet over three miles. At first we were rising gradually. The Track took us across a swinging bridge, through bowers of mossy hanging trees so thick that the light seemed deliberately secretive. Beyond the foliage came the murmur of rushing water. Across another bridge, we found ourselves on the floor of a gigantic valley. The cliffs rose steeply—so huge one attributed their size to nearness rather than height, until we saw the buzzing speck of a helicopter taking supplies up to Pass Hut, a smudge atop the mountains. We were climbing there? Surely not.

“My right leg would be more comfortable,” said the jazzercise instructor, “if it were over my shoulder.”

It was strange to be tramping in short sleeves near snowy mountains. The Track, now rocks, began to climb more steeply, and kept this up for a couple of strenuous miles, hugging the side of the mountain. The cliff was more exposed, the trees thinned and gave way to low bushes and flowers—mountain daisies, edelweiss, Mt. Cook lilies, and bursts of yellow known as Maori onions. It was like being suddenly transported to Switzerland.

“Four more zigs to go,” panted a plump American wife. The Japanese was far ahead.

It was a tiring climb, and the narrow track kept doubling back around the brow of the mountain. At the top was a cairn with a cross on it, and a plaque in honor of Quintin Mackinnon, who discovered the pass in 1888. Looking back, you could see all the way up the Clinton Valley—a succession of parading mountains in a defiant row, and the great swath of the narrow river. It seemed both too large and too small a distance to have come in a day and a half. The entire walk was this paradoxical: something seen packed in miniature, yet immeasurably vast to the mind.

At the top of the saddle it was warmer than in the shade far below, but only a long stone’s throw away was a glacier, and thick collars of snow just waiting for us to walk under them. It seemed unbelievable that such a short stretch could contain so many vagaries of landscape: that they should be modeled to such a gigantic scale made me feel I was crossing an entire continent, and on flat feet.

All through the trek I’d been referring to the account of Ella Adams, who made the journey at age eleven, in 1889. She’d done it with her father, the chief surveyor, in the opposite direction. They camped somewhere between the pass and Pompolona, “and all night long were kept awake with avalanches falling. Just over the pass above the heavy bush we went through acres of the large flowered houhere or ribbonwood—it was like a cherry orchard in spring.” She’d had a lake on the pass named after her. “Looking down the thousands of feet into the valley we had left was awe-inspiring. The only way I could look was to lie down flat and pull myself to the edge of the cliff and get my father to hold my ankles.” Little Ella had made easy friends, too, a century ago. “The native birds were so tame that the little robins would come and perch on our toes and hats while we had our meals, ready for my crumbs.”

It was extraordinarily peaceful up on the pass, and this belied the fact that violence had created it. The late William Anderson, who knew the Track for nearly forty years, wrote, “In our short lives we see mountain scenery as changeless, but here on the Track are plain signs of a constant movement in the longer and shorter cycles of destruction and regeneration. Here, too, we can read the longer chapter, beginning with marks left behind from the moving glacier, followed by the mighty forces of earthquake, avalanche, and flood.”

Up this high the grass round the rocks was like a well-trimmed lawn, and narrow slopes fell away to crags and sheer drops. Tucked behind an overlay of creases in the saddle, we came to Pass Hut, and company, and simmering tomato soup.

Over lunch we talked with a blonde warden, formerly a guide, named Margaret. She’d spent five months a year along the Track for seven years now, and her skin had the clean glow of someone so accustomed to pure air and mountain vistas that she’d taken on their light. She said, “You know, there are two types of hikers up here. The ones who do it the more comfortable way, like you—and it still isn’t all that easy—and then the independent walkers, who carry everything themselves. They’re the ones who think that if you haven’t done it the hard way you haven’t done it. I’m not putting them down, but it seems to me Fiordland is here for people to enjoy, and they should do it however they feel best, without trying to prove something. There’s always a rougher way.” She laughed; she’d climbed many of the surrounding peaks, like most of the guides, and she didn’t have to prove her own capability to herself.

On the blackboard, over a sign-in book, was written 3°c at 10 a.m. Weather fine today and Friday. Sign here for Prosperity. It sounded much more friendly than “posterity”.

Up on the Pass is where the weather can play the most havoc. Blizzard conditions are not unknown even in summer (January, February, March), and can come up very suddenly. Now we were enjoying a chill, breezy sunlight; and we realized that after our exhaustion at reaching the top had faded, an exhilaration had taken over which was not to leave for several days. It may have had to do with height, or a small sense of personal achievement; but I think it has more to do with the release of a corner of one’s spirit that happens only in such a place, under such circumstances, like light flooding an unopened closet.

Around Pass Hut the kea parrots, with their ululating cries, were swooping and waddling around, as hungry for lunch as we. These great green parrots, with their peculiar garbled language, were the true keepers of the Pass, and they had an enormous sense of mischief. They’d woken us at Pompolona amid a violent rainstorm by methodically dropping rocks on the roof, then cackling and shrieking over the rain. The keas on the Pass were even craftier. They were so used to trampers that they’d invented complicated team efforts at stealing one’s most valuable possession on these heights—lunch.

We watched a pair of keas, with infinite guile, con somebody in our group into giving up his food. One kea slyly ambled over, happy to pose for a photo; the tramper hastily fumbled at his camera, switched lenses; the kea continued to cooperate. But the beak is quicker than the eye, and while the tramper set his exposure and happily clicked away, the kea’s partner sneaked up and pinched the coveted sandwich from the tramper’s jacket pocket, and both flew contentedly off.

The route down took us two and a half hours, and was the toughest part of the Track. At first, on the mountainside, all was open, and we could see steeply down to the tiny matchbox of Quintin, our night’s hostel, with its visible airstrip. The Track wound down and soon took shelter in trees, and switched direction every three or four steps, descending rapidly. Underfoot were sizeable rocks and thick roots, and though it wasn’t slippery or dangerous, it was depleting. We’d heard that somebody had run the entire Track several years ago in seven hours—which seemed unbelievable, especially considering this part. Roaring and rushing beside us, and sometimes beneath, were great step-waterfalls, going down the mountain with such ease and speed they made us feel earthbound and slow.

“What’s the name of that bird?” asked one woman, pointing up. “Ralph,” said her husband shortly. “We saw his cousin Gilbert yesterday, remember?”

We were all trying to save energy, and despite the increasing pressure in our boots, once we reached Quintin and replenished ourselves with tea and biscuits. we all set off without knapsacks for another hour and a half’s tramp to see Sutherland Falls—at 1,904 ft., one of the tallest waterfalls in the world. The trail, lined with fuchsia, rummaged around in deep woods and followed a sound that, as we neared, resembled a squadron of jets simultaneously breaking the sound barrier. It was so loud that it pummeled thought and replaced it with sheer nervous excitement, for the light was waning in the trees and we saw dimly ahead only enormous quantities of mist and spray filling the air, blown through trees toward us.

Then the trees broke, and we were at the waterfall’s feet. It was like a massive fireworks display put on entirely by water, the jets exploding off the cliff in all directions with a main tubular mass coming down in three great leaps, hurrying to overtake each other so as to be the first to come crashing down in the swirling cauldron of a lake. Around us the air seemed composed wholly of water. We’d been seeing waterfalls ad infinitum; each was beginning to look like the last; but Sutherland Falls brought on an ancient wonder, and I decided that the drama and beauty of a great waterfall comes from its mingled qualities of extreme life and extreme death, so much water plummeting to such a calamitous end.

Later, when we flew over Fiordland in a single-prop plane, Sutherland Falls from above was almost more awesome, since we saw that it’s caused by a huge, flat lake on top of the mountain. From that height it looks like water being poured slowly from a jug.

At Quintin that night, flush with our coming success, the group took on a new unity. It was not the sense of achievement as much as the anticipation of completing the Track, seeing what it all added up to. “I believe I could do this for the rest of my life,” said the airline pilot to me, and everybody seemed in high spirits, full of resolve. That night we were suddenly conscious we were friends—it was something intangible but clearly felt in the room. People who’d said nothing to each other for three days were now chattering away. At such times people are more themselves than usual. There was wine with dinner, the promise of a first-rate meal tomorrow night, and we all felt ourselves unfolding like mountain flowers. Everything in our world today seems to take us further away from each other, and we knew we’d been part of one of the few experiences you can have (and in four days) that gathers you together.

I sat down by the potbellied stove, warmed by wine and fire, and started reading the Quintin Visitors’ Book. The entries, I thought, must be valid for nearly any group. “My shoulders are screaming,” read one. “I came, I saw, I marveled.” “Glub-glub. Mighty wet going.” “What marvelous fools we all are.” “101 waterfalls, and 44 people of the world have come a little closer.” “Your grand memento, Quintin, will take pride of place anywhere I may live.” And one New Zealander’s long entry began: “This is the end of the trail for the 6th successive year. I failed to complete a personal challenge I made with the Sutherland Falls. Am glad I failed. These falls are so beautiful and magnificent in all their fury that no man on earth is entitled to win every round.” And the most frequent entry of all was, “I shall return.”

That last day of tramping had the air of hurry, anticlimax, and summary. We left Quintin early, having sent our knapsacks on in the little supply plane, and unencumbered we walked more as a group than we had earlier. The track wound through mild woods, and all our sores—sore feet, sore backs—asserted themselves. “My feet feel like hamburger,” said a girl in ad sales cheerfully. An elderly woman moaned, “I’m a broken-down racehorse. Don’t let ’em shoot me.” But she kept moving.

We were headed for a mid-morning break at Boatshed, which sits placidly just up a lawn from a lake. By the time I got there tea was well under way, and several fishermen in our group, frustrated by the first day’s rough weather, were recklessly catching trout after trout and throwing them back.

“Want them?” said a grinning, mustached Track veteran named Peter. He looks after Boatshed, and has the amiable, weathered look a giant is supposed to have, brought down to normal size, “Not on your life. We caught sixty here one day.”

In the rafters above us was a dusty collection of old liquor bottles from more than a half-century past. One with skull-and-crossbones stood beside a bottle of Napoleon brandy. I named every drink I could think of and let Peter point out a version in the rafters. “Vat 69? Ah, the Pope’s phone number.”

A blackboard read:
Welcome To Boatshed! 
1) You only have 8 1/3 miles to go! 
2) Boat leaves Sandfly at 4 p.m. 
3) Mackay Falls and Bell Rock 3/4 miles
4) Giant’s Gate Falls (lunch) approx. 5 miles, you should leave there no later than 2:15 p.m.

Bell Rock, by a sloughing falls, was a giant dark rock hollowed out by eons of rubbing by a rock and the river, and several of us crawled under and stood up within it. But we had to hurry on; and my only complaint about the Track would be the suggestion that this final day be divided into two, not for ease but for enjoyment.

I passed a beefy Australian beside his wife. relying her bootlaces. He looked up, gave me a grin. “Road repairs. Lucky we didn’t blow a tire.”

At the falls where we stopped for lunch beneath a wood-and-wire bridge, many of us took off our shoes and froze our feet in the transparent, icy water in brilliant sunshine. Farther on, going over a rough section of twisted roots and packed rocks, I fell into step with a western Australian who had a thatch of sandy hair, a scarecrow body, and a boy’s tentative smile. I knew he was a chiropractor, and I saw he was heading smoothly along in sneakers. “Oh, these,” he said mildly. “Well, y’see—I didn’t wear any shoes ’tall till I was seventeen or nineteen or thirabaouts. Grew up on a sheep farm. Lots of sheep. So me feet is still pretty tough.”

We talked about his profession, and the Track. Would he want to do it again? “Oh, sure, yeah. Y’see, the problem with growing up is your profession, no matter what it is, takes you far away from who you really are. ’Cause you didn’t start out to be jist one thing. You can’t help but get involved, and then maybe y’start t’think you aren’t yourself any longer. Always that danger. So y’need to do something like this every now and again to bring yourself back to shake hands with yourself.” He smiled. “When I was a boy, though, I would’a done this in bare feet and thought nothin’.” Then he said something mysterious. “We got to be sure to meet the gardener at Milford. I heard about him. He’s not like us.”

We were passing through glades of golden light by brimming Lake Ada, and we parted, each to find his own spot to memorize; there were only two miles to go. I stood and listened to bird calls and thought how fortunate I was to have had this time. Most landscapes exist ultimately not as locations, but as states of mind—and it is as these that they move  in memory. Sequestered on the Milford Track, I’d felt utterly separate and at ease, as if I’d left my life behind with the boat where the trail began near Glade House. And soon I was to pick it up again.

Abruptly the Track began to take on a conclusive ease. Before any of us were prepared, we were out of the trees and onto a spit of land, a lake, a deck, a boat—and crossing Milford Sound for fifteen minutes, in the great pyramidal shadow of Mitre Peak, so perfectly poised it looks as if a society of photographers has put it there.

Dinner that night was festive and clamorous, everybody receiving certificates of achievement, making speeches, baiting the waitresses who considerately put up with this ruckus six nights a week. Finally we collected in the bar; tomorrow there would be a calm boat trip up the length of Milford Sound. But tonight there was a postscript: the gardener.

His name was Jeff O’Brien, he was compact and deeply tanned, with inquisitive eyes and a mustache. Had he climbed most of the peaks? Of course. He’d spent two years living by his wits and guts in Africa—“Y’keep moving or you die”—and as one of the finest young marathoners in the world at seventeen, now, a decade later, he’d taken it up again, winning the famous marathon across Antarctica last year. And, two weeks earlier, he’d set out to run the Milford Track, just for the fun of it. He’d carried a knapsack with a wool vest and a track suit, a big bundle of chocolate, and a camera. He’d called back to Milford from huts along the way, just to verify his time, which was slipping by. For he’d run the entire Track in five hours.

“I was getting a buzz off the scenery,” he said with a grin.“It’s easier than running in Antarctica, I’ll tell you that, mate. It was my day off and a fine one, so I went for it. Had tea and scones at Quintin. It was pretty cold up on the Pass—only twenty-foot visibility. The guys in the hut thought I was up a tree.”

He’d “drilled the old record into the dirt”—but I thought he must have the Track in his mind as I couldn’t, as a continuous iambic line. It didn’t matter—everybody’s Track was different. William Anderson had written several years ago, “I have heard many a tramper say, ‘Now I have seen the Track I am satisfied. I wouldn’t want to go over it again.’ These people, mostly fully appreciative of what they have seen, yet view it as a beautifully illustrated book but printed in an unknown foreign tongue. To see the Track is one thing, to know it another.”

To which I would add—and I am sure Jeff O’Brien would concur—the only way to do the Milford Track is to do it again.

One memory stayed with me and wouldn’t quit. It was in that last stretch, as the trees began to thin and I was looking out over the wriggling lake. An older New Zealand woman, a little dreamily, ambled up and said softly, “Are you a poet? I just had a beautiful thought, and I want you to write it down for me. I was thinking about how all the streams rush down the mountain. But they don’t collect. Not anywhere.” Then she was gone, heading down the Track—as we, not yet realizing it ourselves, were rushing on, with more around us than we could possibly collect—and it was all gone before we knew it.