By dinner-time everyone was drunk on bad Madeira and the pink gin they called Coasters. The shipping agent sang The Old Homeland and The Floral Dance and I shot an Arrow into the Air and the fat traveller called Younger said, ‘Pass me some more eau de cow,’ spilling his coffee. The aliens went to their cabin, picking their way across the lower deck and up the iron stairs into the stern; she was seasick, but it only made her quieter; it didn’t alter her beautiful sensuous receptivity. The agent sang The Old Homeland again – ‘Far across the sea, I wonder will they pray for me’ – and everyone felt English and exiled and wistful, everyone except Younger, who climbed carefully up the stairs, clinging to the banister: ‘I’m going home by rail.’ He was more English than any of them; the north country was in his heart; he was firmly local and unsentimental and bawdy and honest. He drank because he needed a holiday, because he had heavy work before him on the Coast, because he loved his wife and had desperate anxieties. He had more cause to drink than anyone. The boom years were in his heavy flesh and his three chins; one couldn’t at first sight tell how the depression lay like lead in his stomach. If one were to paint his portrait in the old style of tiny landscapes and Tuscan towns, one would have given him as background an abandoned blast-furnace or the girders of a great bridge left a perch for birds.
Even when drunk, even when bawdy, he had an admirable sanity. ‘Eighteen months on the Coast. Tell me, doctor, what do people do about it?’
‘Insoluble,’ the doctor said.
‘But what do they do about it?’
‘Even the Governor has asked me that. There’s no answer.’
He was the last to go to bed, he would reel for ten minutes up and down the corridor, there was something common and royal about him which called for devotion, nothing he did could offend, ‘Kipper,’ he would shout outside the captain’s door, ‘Kipper,’ and obediently the Captain would emerge. He had the way of Falstaff with a woman, an absurd innocence that was quite content with a slap and a tickle. ‘You saucy little sausage,’ and even the young shy inhibited married woman who had never left Liverpool, who wouldn’t drink and wouldn’t smoke and wouldn’t look at the moon, slapped him back. There was a ballad quality about his bawdry. His words had the merit of children’s art; they were vivid, unselfconscious, uncorrupted.
Ballyhoo
The cinema in Tenerife was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental. If there was any truth in the original it had been carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap banal film.
There remained a connection between it and me. One had never taken the book seriously; it had been written hurriedly because of the desperate need one had for the money. But even into a book of that kind had gone a certain amount of experience, nine months of one’s life, it was tied up in the mind with a particular countryside, particular anxieties; one couldn’t disconnect oneself entirely, and it was curious, rather pleasing, to find it there in the hot bright flowery town. There are places where one is ready to welcome any kind of acquaintance with memories in common: he may be cheap but he knew Annette; he may be dishonest but he once lodged with George; even if the acquaintance is very dim indeed and takes a lot of recognizing.
Two Youthful Hearts in the Grip of Intrigue. Fleeing from Life. Cheated? Crashing Across Europe. Wheels of Fate.
Never before had I seen American ballyhoo at work on something I intimately knew. It was magnificent in its disregard of the article for which it had paid. Its psychological insight was either cynically wrong or devastatingly right.
The real Orient Express runs across Europe from Belgium to Constantinople. Therefore, you will go wrong if you interpret the word ‘Orient’ to indicate something of a Chinese or Japanese nature. There is enough material of other kinds to arrange a lively colourful ballyhoo, as you will see as soon as you turn to the exploitation pages in this press book.
Date Tie-Up. In the exhibitor’s set of stills available at the exchange are three stills which show Norman Foster explaining the sex life of a date to Heather Angel, passing dates to Heather Angel and Heather Angel buying dates from the car window. The dialogue is quite enlightening on the date subject at one point in the picture. Every city has high-class food shops which feature fancy packages of dates. Tie-in with one of these for window displays, and for a lobby display, using adequate copy and the three stills.
Another angle would be to have a demonstration of date products, the many uses of dates, etc. This would be quite possible in the much larger cities. And in cases where working with large concerns, patrons may be permitted to taste samples. These tie-ups must be worked out locally despite the fact that we are contacting importers of important brands.
Don’t underestimate the value of a real smart window fixed up with date products, baskets of delicious fruits and dates, and the three stills shown here with adequate copy for your picture. ‘Buy a package of delicious dates, and take ‘The Orient Express’ for Constantinople, a most thrilling and satisfying evening’s entertainment, at the Rialto Theatre.’
Do You Know That: Heather Angel’s pet kitten Penang had to have its claws clipped because it insisted on sharpening them on the legs of the expensive tables;
That the pet economy of Heather Angel is buying washable gloves and laundering them herself;
That Una O’Connor permits only a very few of her intimate friends to call her Tiny?
The blast of ballyhoo had not sold the film; to my relief, because by contract my name had to appear on every poster, it had kept to the smaller shabbier cinemas, until now it was washed up in Tenerife, in a shaded side street behind an old carved door like a monastery’s. This was what made it an agreeable acquaintance; it hadn’t the shamelessness of success; it might be vulgar, but it wasn’t successfully vulgar. There was something quite un-Hollywood in its failure.
The Canaries were half-way to Africa; the Fox film and the pale cactus spears stuck in the hillside, a Victorian Gothic hotel smothered in bougainvillaea, parrots and a monkey on a string, innumerable themes were stated like the, false starts and indecisions of a lifetime: the Chinese job from which one had resigned, the appointment in Bangkok never taken up, the newspaper in Nottingham. I can remember now only the gaudy poster, the taste of the sweet yellow wine, flat roofs and flowers and an arbour full of empty bottles, and in the small dark cathedral a Christmas crib (castles and little villages and women with baskets of carrots, a donkey and a motor-car and a comic man in a top-hat, little caves where hermits or gipsies sat asleep on moss-covered rocks, a man on an old-fashioned bicycle, and somewhere right up in a corner, dwarfed by the world, the flesh, those bright spring carrots, and the devil, the man in a top-hat, sat the Mother of God with an old-young child, wrinkled and careworn and cross-eyed, while Herod leant over a wall with his crown tilted).
Las Palmas
Of Las Palmas I can remember little more: a man selling women’s pyjamas from a rowing boat after midnight, the women in the ‘33’ with black theatrical eyes and heavy figures. It was half-past one in the morning before we got ashore and found a taxi. Nobody could speak a word of anything but Spanish; the drink was bad and dear, but Younger didn’t mind. His inevitable expression, ‘You saucy little sausage,’ could be heard through all the rooms, his progress was one long slap and tickle and free drink. The manager followed him round with bills he wouldn’t pay and Phil brought up the rear, the young shipping agent who was afraid there would be trouble, who had the unrequited devotion of a page in an Elizabethan play. Every now and again to keep the manager quiet Phil paid a bill and the manager tore it up and dropped it on the floor and wrote another. Then Younger stole the woman belonging to a man with a guitar and the man kissed him and had a dri
nk; the manager wrote a bill, and Phil plucked at Younger’s sleeve and said, ‘Go steady, old man. Go steady.’ A madman came up and threatened Younger, but Younger didn’t understand, didn’t care anyway, didn’t even hear perhaps. He sat on a chair playing pat-paw with his stout black bitch; sometimes he made a pass at her mouth, but she avoided that, nudging with her elbow, pushing forward her empty glass while the manager wrote out another bill. Then it began all over again, the refusal to pay, the arguments, Phil’s ‘Go steady, old man, go steady,’ another drink all round, pat-paw, ‘You saucy little sausage,’ another bill. On the way to the waterside he passed out altogether, had to be carried, fourteen stone of him, into the rowing boat in the dark, dragged up the rocking companion, undressed and put to bed. But no one grudged it him, he could do these things, next day he was as well as ever, bathed in a costume which wouldn’t meet across him, called ‘Kipper, Kipper’ in the passage, was drunk by lunch-time, explained it was his last drink before the Coast: he was going to work now. No one believed him, but we were wrong.
He had the stamina of a bull; he could stop drinking when he chose. The islands were past, next port of call was on the Coast, he had work to do. Nobody knew how far afield his work was taking him and of its importance; he was fat and boisterous, one couldn’t tell from his manner the anxiety of his journey. He was taking a big risk; he had to get orders; and yellow fever was not going to stop him. There was an epidemic at one of the points on his route; he didn’t know of it when he came on board; everyone laughed at him about the fever, and one could tell that he was a little scared; but one could tell too that it was not going to make any difference. He was like an old fighter who is forced back into the ring because he needs the purse; he may be out of condition, may be afraid of getting hurt, but he cannot afford to lose, even if the effort kills him. Younger talked about his wife; he had never before been to a place where he couldn’t ring her up at nine o’clock of an evening; he’d always done it when he was in Brussels, in Berlin, in Warsaw.
Graveyard
The day after Las Palmas, passengers in West Coast boats wake to a completely new air. It lasts for a day and a day only. My sheets were damp with a kind of dew; there was a warm wet wind and a haze over the sea. The air smelt as salt and fishy as the air on Brighton front. The sodden damp to a traveller back from the Coast with malarial infection in his blood is said to be dangerous, and among sailors this part of the Atlantic is known as the Elder Dempster Graveyard. But the tradition is older than the Line. Burton wrote of it in his Anatomy: ‘Such a complaint I read of those islands of Cape Verde, fourteen degrees from the Equator, they do male audire; one calls them the unhealthiest clime of the world, for fluxes, fevers, frenzies, calentures, which commonly seize on seafaring men that touch at them, and all by reason of a hot distemperature of the air. The hardiest men are offended with the heat, and stiffest clowns cannot resist it.’
It made Younger think of yellow fever at Kano. In the smoking-room that night, the first night of his new sobriety, he said that he thought death was a great adventure. But life, Phil said, was a great adventure too. Science was making great strides these days; you never knew; though of course Wells and Jules Verne had foreseen it all; what wonderful prophets they were. He said, ‘I thought Hannen Swaffer was a prophet too once, but he let me down.’
‘Isn’t Hannen Swaffer a woman?’ Younger asked.
No, he’s a man.’
‘Are you sure?’ Younger said. But Phil was sure. He’d seen him. He had even spoken to him one night when he came up to address their literary club. It was a change from bridge, that club; they got really famous writers to talk to them. Chesterton had been and Cecil Roberts. Then he went out to look at the moon, leaning over the side, waiting in vain for my cousin or the other woman on board to join him. If one did, he put his arm round her and talked about Wallasey or his wife or League results. He was only formally romantic; he had a great respect for women. He was really far more at home with Younger, looked after Younger when he was drunk, protected him, undressed him if necessary; when Younger became sober he was rather lost, looked at the moon more often, padding round the deck earnestly romantic, irritable because no one would play at tropic nights with him, disappearing at last into the little wireless room to talk about football to ‘Sparks’. One night his vitality which had no outlet overcame him and he began to throw glasses overboard.
Dakar
It must have been two days later that I woke to the grating of iron against stone, and there was the Coast. The world was already over-familiar. People said, ‘Eldridge. Of course, he’s an old Coaster,’ and Eldridge, the middle-aged shipping agent, at the beginning of every meal would say, ‘Chop, as we call it on the Coast,’ or handing a plate of onions, ‘Violets, we say on the Coast.’ One’s pink gin was called a Coaster. There was no other Coast but the West Coast and this was it.
On the quay the Senegalese strolled up and down, long white and blue robes sweeping up the dust blown from the ridge of monkey-nuts twenty-five feet high. The men walked hand-in-hand, laughing sleepily together under the blinding vertical glare. Sometimes they put their arms round each other’s necks; they seemed to like to touch each other, as if it made them feel good to know the other man was there. It wasn’t love; it didn’t mean anything we could understand. Two of them went about all day without loosing hold; they were there when the boat slid in beside the monkey-nuts; they were there in the evening when the loading was finished and the labourers washed their hands and faces in the hot water flowing from the ship’s side; they hadn’t done a stroke of work themselves, only walked up and down touching hands and laughing at their own jokes; but it wasn’t love; it wasn’t anything we could understand. They gave to the blinding day, to the first sight of Africa, a sense of warm and sleepy beauty, of enjoyment divorced from activity and the weariness of willing.
Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
One found it hard to believe at Dakar that Baudelaire had never been to Africa, that the nearest he had come to it was the body of Jeanne Duval, the mulatto tart from Le Théâtre due Panthéon, for Dakar was the Baudelaire of L’Invitation au Voyage, when it was not the René Clair of Le Million.
It was René Clair in its happy lyrical absurdity; the two stately Mohammedans asleep on the gravel path in the public gardens beside a black iron kettle; the tiny Syrian children going to school in white topees; the men’s sewing parties on the pavements; the old pock-marked driver who stopped his horses and disappeared into the bushes to tell his beads; the men laden with sacks moving rhythmically up and down a ladder of sacks, building higher the monkey-nut hill, like the tin toy figures sold in Holborn at Christmas-time; in the lovely features of the women in the market, young and old, lovely less from sexual attractiveness than from a sharp differentiated pictorial quality. In the restaurant, a little drunk on iced Sauterne, one didn’t trouble about the Dakar one had heard about, the Dakar of endemic plague and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the most unhealthy town on the Coast. Mr Gorer in his Africa Dances tells how in Dakar the young negroes simply die, not of tuberculosis, plague, yellow fever, but of inanition, of hopelessness. He stayed too long, I suppose, and saw too much; that sudden sense of happiness which came to one in Dakar doesn’t last, which came to one in Le Million, a happiness that tingles behind the eyes, beautiful and insecure, a wish fulfilment.
Do not expect again a phoenix hour,
The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining,
Sudden the rain of gold and heart’s first ease . . .
Undoubtedly the other Dakar (the Dakar of the four hundred and sixteen dead, of the despair and injustice) was there, but something else was momentarily shining through, something which was always stubbornly exciting. So in an early René Clair film one could believe that this was the life one was born to live, breaking through life as one had been made to live it, breaking through anxiety and irritation and financial depression and a lust which had go
ne on too long, these voices in the air, this chase of a lottery ticket among the flying opera-hats, this tuneful miniature love behind cardboard scenery: nothing was really serious, nothing lasted, you didn’t have to think about tomorrow’s food or tomorrow’s girl; you stuck up your leg in derision sewing pants on the pavement, you fell asleep among the flowers with your black kettle, you touched hands and felt good and didn’t care a damn.
One soon enough discovered, of course, that this impression was not the Coast. The hawks flapping heavily over Bathurst, a long low backcloth of houses and trees along a sandy beach; a swarm of figures in the native quarter like flies on a piece of meat; the not being allowed to land because of yellow fever; the sense of isolation that the woman had as she went off to join her husband in the quarantined town; this was more really the Coast – the seedy Pole in a singlet and a pair of dirty white trousers who came on board at Conakry, couldn’t speak any English or French and wanted to learn the name of the suits in bridge. The Captain took his gun and shot a hawk which sat in the rigging, the gulls scattered, twisting in the glittering air, and the dusty body plunged through them on to the deck, like a reminder of darkness.
The Shape of Africa
A reminder of darkness: the girl in the Queen’s Bar. I met her weeping across Leicester Square when the leaves had dropped and made the pavements slippery; she went into the vestibule of the Empire Cinema and veered violently away again (that wouldn’t do), settled at last on a high chair in the Queen’s Bar, made up her face, had a gin and tonic; I hadn’t the nerve to say anything and find out the details. Besides, it’s always happening all the time everywhere. You don’t weep unless you’ve been happy first; tears always mean something enviable.