So that was it. The new generation was so convinced of its values that it judged us older people not by our standards but by their own. I was a flop, but if they had got to me forty years ago I might have been redeemed. This attitude angered me, because although I saw their manifest weaknesses, I never felt that if they had had my education they might have been saved. They needed desperately some of the things I had acquired; surely Joe’s problems would have been simpler had he seen history as I did, and Cato would never have invaded the church had he acquired my attitudes toward social change, but never in my arrogance did I believe that I could have saved these young fellows—or Monica or Gretchen either—by training them in my pattern. It was this arrogance of youth, this precious insolence that set them apart. I think now that even if the Greek shipowners had settled their finances promptly, I would have remained in Torremolinos that spring, for there is nothing in the world more promising than the unfolding of youth, and I was privileged to witness it, even if the youth I was watching did consider me a harmless old fart.
They had several reasons for considering me a square. I kept asking questions about their music, and irritated them when I pointed out that their musicians seemed deficient in skills. ‘They simply don’t know how to end a composition. Listen to how many of your records trail off with the crude device of repeating the last phrase while the engineer turns down the volume. Listen to the inept manner in which you transpose from one key to the next. Where’s the modulation that makes a song palatable?’
‘We want it to be crude,’ Monica said as Yigal applauded. ‘The old tricks of da-da, dum-dum, dee-dee and you’re off in a new key are for the birds. You want a shift? Shift.’
They were also irritated, I think, because I refused to adopt their terminology and call them kids. Even Gretchen used this juvenile description: ‘Hi, Uncle George. You know where the kids went to dinner?’ Or, ‘The kids are throwing a picnic in the hills. Want to come along?’
I pointed out that young people their age were not kids, but I noticed that her group used the word even for people in their thirties, so long as the men had long hair and the women wore sandals. They insisted upon being kids—the gang, the mob, the girls, the boys—as if growing up were an ugly thing and responsibility something to be deferred as long as possible.
But mostly they thought me square because I would not join them in their marijuana. Cato and his black friends in Philadelphia had forced me to smoke that morning, and I had frequently sat with the group while they shared a round, but if they asked me, I never refrained from telling them that I disapproved. ‘You one of them cats who think that grass leads to heroin?’ Cato asked me late one night.
‘Yes.’
This caused an explosion, with Monica and Britta especially vocative in citing studies which proved that marijuana was neither habit-forming nor escalatory.
‘Do you reject such studies?’ Monica demanded.
‘Yes, because they refer only to chemical and physiological facts. I’m thinking of psychological.’
‘Meaning what?’ Cato asked with contempt.
It was not contempt for me, because he had worked with me long enough in the Philadelphia slums to know that I was not an automatic do-gooder. ‘Meaning that marijuana itself may not be escalatory, but the milieu in which it’s smoked is. The general social atmosphere of this room, for example.’
‘Leads to heroin?’ Gretchen asked.
‘Unquestionably,’ I said.
‘You mean,’ Joe asked slowly, that you expect one of us to move on to LSD?’
‘I do.’
‘But why?’ he asked. ‘We’ve proved it isn’t habit-forming.’
‘But Torremolinos is. You stay in this room long enough, or in this town …’
Monica got up and came to where I was sitting. She carried a fat lighted cigarette, which she handed to Britta, then asked me, ‘You think one of us in this room is going to try heroin?’
‘Without question.’
‘You’re wrong,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Because we’re all going to try it.’
For a moment no one spoke, then Gretchen said, ‘All but one,’ and Britta added, ‘Make that two.’
Monica turned to survey the room and said brightly, ‘Uncle George, it looks like I’ll have to make another bet. Everyone in this room will try heroin before the year’s out. And I’m including you, you dirty old man.’
Paxton Fell sent his Mercedes-Benz plus an English limousine to pick up his guests. Of course, the two cars couldn’t enter the alley leading to the Alamo, but a liveried chauffeur did walk down to the bar to announce that the cars were waiting in the public square. Joe threw his keys to one of the soldiers and we set forth.
It was a gala evening. Only Cato was familiar with Fell’s establishment, so that when we saw the graceful bovedas, creating the illusion of an endless heaven, we cheered. Monica cried, ‘This is the way to spend money … if you have it,’ and Fell’s other guests applauded.
Laura, who owned the castle at the water’s edge, was among them, no longer in tweeds. She wore an elaborate evening gown, as did an assortment of princesses from various defunct royal houses. An ex-Nazi general was in attendance; everyone called him ‘My General’ and bowed. There were also two barons, garnering their own bows, and an English baronet who had never heard of Sir Charles Braham, or Vwarda either, for that matter.
Among the five young people who were seeing this austere pleasure palace for the first time, reactions were varied. Monica took one swift survey of the statues and adopted the place as her own. Throwing herself into a deep chair, she accepted a Scotch-and-soda and told one of the barons, ‘It’s rather homey … with just a touch of …’ She shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
Britta was impressed by the expensiveness of everything, but she was determined not to show it. With quick glances she made appraisals of all the furnishings and the guests; she recoiled from the Nazi general but accepted the others with a kind of Viking superiority. She did not sit down, but moved slowly from one vantage point to another, apparently unaware of the magnificent pictures she was creating with her Nordic beauty set against this southern stone.
Joe was dumbfounded. Since that first meeting with Fell on the afternoon of his arrival in Torremolinos, he had often speculated on what life with the aging sybarite would be like, but his imagination had produced nothing like this. He was repelled, yet fascinated by the luxury, the sensuous perfection of the place. ‘Living here would be easy,’ he whispered to me as we looked out across the garden to where cargo ships were sailing toward the coast of Africa.
Yigal was not affected. He had seen more luxurious homes in Grosse Pointe, more stunning views from the hills in Haifa. To him the Nazi general was merely a military man who had lost his war, while the barons seemed less imposing than the presidents of the motor companies in Detroit. He was not even impressed when the general sought him out and said in good English, ‘So you are the brave young Jew who fought the tanks at Qarash!’ They talked amiably for some minutes, during which Yigal said that when the Egyptians found good leadership they were going to be formidable to which the German responded, ‘In the past it was the English and the Germans who monopolized stalwart leadership. Landed gentlemen, you know. But in the last war the Russians showed us how a group of peasants—lower-class stock, if you will—could also master the tricks … by sheer force of courage. You Jews did the same in Sinai. But what has the Egyptian to offer, I ask you? What tradition to rely upon? I’ve been there, Nasser invited me down. And what straw did I find to build my bricks? None. The country has neither gentlemen nor an educated lower class. You Jews are safe for another forty years.’ He bowed and passed on.
It was Gretchen who sensed most accurately the quality of this extraordinary room. ‘When do the revels begin?’ she whispered in the first moments. With growing distaste she inspected the furnishings and the posturings of the guests. One of the rewarding aspects of growing up in Boston was that one acqui
red unconsciously a sense of what was proper and distinguished, and when measured against this austere norm, much of the nonsense that one encountered elsewhere fell into place. She knew intuitively that several of the women who surrounded Laura did so because they were dependent on her wealth. She also guessed that the two handsome young Germans with broad shoulders would not be interested in either her or Britta … not while Paxton Fell was watching. And she knew without being told that Cato had once lived in this house as those two young men were now living, and that he was being brought back as a kind of exhibition, the way Radcliffe College brought back graduates who had written books or done well in New York. ‘Is this what the young people around here aspire to?’ she asked me in a low voice.
‘You don’t. And Britta doesn’t. And surely Joe doesn’t. Yigal? Look at him fending off the barons.’
‘Did you ever have this as your ideal, Uncle George?’
‘The luxuriousness, yes. The sense of delightful depravity, yes. I’ve thought about it, but never strongly enough to inspire action.’
‘You’re a fraud! You find this as ridiculous as I do.’
Paxton Fell had imported from one of the mountain villages a group of singers, who now appeared in rough country costume, accompanied by a guitarist, and the lights playing upon the bovedas were extinguished and the guests lowered their voices as the singers took over. They were a lively lot and gave a good performance, but while they rested, I had an idea that turned out well. I said, ‘You know, Mr. Fell, one of your young ladies has talent with the guitar.’
This occasioned much chatter, during which I projected Gretchen into the area where the singers were collected, and after much urging from the guests, she took the guitar, asked for a high chair, and played a few proficient notes. The guitarist applauded, which encouraged her to play an intricate number for him alone; he seemed to be honestly impressed by her skill. Then he took the guitar to show her what he could do. After some flashy passages, he returned the guitar, and she strummed softly, saying in a quiet voice, ‘Child 209.’
I was apparently the only one in the audience who knew what this signified, for most of Fell’s guests were either European or too old to understand what had been happening in American music. Cato knew nothing of the ballads, and while Joe had heard Gretchen sing once in Boston, he knew little of her music. And even I did not know what she was about to sing, for I knew only two of the Child numbers, 173 and 113.
Gretchen had chosen wisely, for ‘Geordie’ dealt with a young wife whose husband has been caught poaching sixteen of the king’s royal deer, and for this crime, must hang. She has come to the judge to plead for her husband’s life, and her words convey powerful emotion:
‘ “I have seven children in the north,
And they seem very bonnie,
And I could bear them a’ over again
For to win the life o Geordie.” ’
The judge looks over his shoulder, can find no reason for clemency, and Geordie hangs.
Gretchen sang with such a combination of intensity and authority that the crowd fell silent; the diverse group had to listen because the strongly played guitar commanded their attention and her lovely voice their interest, but none attended to her words with more obvious appreciation than the Spanish singers, who could understand none of them, except that in some curious rural way they understood them all. When she finished, the musicians clustered about, asking many questions, which Britta translated.
The guests applauded and demanded more songs, so in the interval of noise and chatter I went to Gretchen and suggested that she sing either ‘Mary Hamilton’ or that noble song about the seal, but she placed her hand on my arm and said, ‘You would not waste the best on such an audience,’ and she launched instead into a rowdy Scottish ballad I had not heard before. She told us the Child number, but I forget what it was.
The song was well chosen. It contained a rollicking chorus which Gretchen tried to teach the guests, but they could not catch its intricacies and mangled it at the end of every verse. The villagers, on the other hand, seemed to understand its broken rhythms and nonsense words instantly, so that they tore into it with admirable gusto whenever Gretchen pointed the fingerboard of her guitar at them and belted out the first words:
‘With his tooran mooran non ton nee.
Right ton mooran fol the doo-a-dee,
Right ton nooran nooran nee,
With his tooran nooran-eye-do.’
We got a pretty good idea of what his tooran nooran was supposed to be from some of the lusty verses Gretchen sang with a high-school innocence; they dealt with a supposed beggar who stops by a farmhouse near Aberdeen, seduces the oldest daughter in the middle of the night, and disappears with her before morning. Seven years later he returns as a beggar once more, and the good wife castigates him for having stolen her daughter, whereupon he throws aside his tattered garments and discloses himself as a prince. The rowdy verses dealt with what transpired prior to the flight:
‘The lassie then she did get up to bar the kitchen-door.
And there she met the jolly beggar, standing naked on the floor.
‘He gript the lassie by the middle jimp, laid her against the wa,
“O kind sir,” she said, “be civil, for ye will wake my dadda.”
‘He never minded what she said, but carried on his stroke,
Till he got his job done, then he began to joke.’
This ballad was a notable success, and the guests demanded more, but Gretchen had sung enough. Returning the guitar to its owner, she thanked the musicians for their support and wandered into another part of the marble room. Several aging gentlemen tried to engage her in conversation, but she drew away.
Paxton Fell served his dinner at twenty-three minutes past one in the morning, not unusually late for a Spanish meal, and as the night progressed, his customary guests, one by one, began to show signs of drunkenness. Since none had jobs and would be able to sleep as late as they wished, not rising till three or four in the afternoon, they were prepared to drink enormously; amounts that would have put an ordinary man under the table seemed to affect them little, but by three in the morning they had consumed so much, and so uninterruptedly, that even they began showing signs of collapse. When incapacity overcame them, they quietly moved away from the table and fell asleep in some chair, or stretched out along the edge of a carpet. There was no boisterousness, only the sound of musicians playing in the background and the subdued chatter of voices around the big table.
During this part of the night I lost sight of the six young people; they were with the two young Germans somewhere else in the lavish quarters, so that I was left with the older group, and as I watched them gliding gracefully toward oblivion, continuing to drink when they had no further need or desire for alcohol, I reflected that every age produces its drop-outs, every nation. The percentage remains constant; it is only the manifestation that varies.
The people around Paxton Fell had dropped out of normal competition as surely as the most bearded young man from Oklahoma who despised Tulsa and believed that he had found a superior alternative in Haight-Ashbury. These elders had despised Berlin and Brussels; they were expatriates from London and Paris; they used cocktails the way the younger group used marijuana, and with identical effect. The Nazi general had been forced into exile; had he stayed in Germany he would have been executed by a Russian court-martial. The others had abandoned their societies willingly and had dropped out from their normal responsibilities. Only their good fortune in having had wealthy uncles and indulgent fathers permitted them to live as they did. Even now Laura, speaking in her rough voice, was telling some amusing incident that had happened on the plains of West Texas … how far away it seemed, how impossible those bitter winters in Dalhart.
But it was not only this conspicuous group of expatriates that I compared with the drop-outs of the younger generation; it was also those sturdy, cautious types I had known as a boy in Indiana. Of a hundred average young people I ha
d grown up with, a good forty had dropped out from all reasonable competition by the time they were twenty-five. Some, of course, had become town drunks or obvious wastrels; a few had stolen money and gone to jail; one or two of the girls had become prostitutes of a more or less genteel type, slipping into hotel rooms or staying with businessmen when their wives were absent on summer vacations. It was not these inevitable drop-outs that I referred to in my estimate of forty per cent; it was, rather, that constant group of Americans who avoid difficult tasks and grab onto the first job offered, clinging to it like frightened leeches for the remainder of their unproductive lives. It was the girls who marry the first man who asks them, building families without meaning or inspiration, producing the next cycle of drop-outs. It was the adults who surrender young and make a virtue of their unproductivity, the miserable teachers who learn one book and recite it for the next forty years, the pathetic ministers who build a lifetime of futility on one moment of inspiration entertained at the age of nineteen. These were the drop-outs that concerned me most.
Paxton Fell’s group, now amiably incapacitated and waiting the dawn, did little harm to themselves or society, just as the wilder young people we saw passing through Torremolinos accomplished little that was reprehensible; it was the great silent minority that aspired to nothing and achieved less that worried me. There must have been, that night when the guests were falling asleep around the table, a hundred thousand or more young college students throughtout the United States who were gradually dropping out from any meaningful role in their society—but they were not people like Cato Jackson, who had taken a stand, however misguided, at the church at Llanfair; they were not the brilliant young girls like Gretchen Cole, who had tasted the core of a system and found it unpalatable; they were not young men like Joe, who found his nation conducting itself immorally and could no longer support it; nor were they men like Yigal Zmora, who saw the contradictions of two societies so clearly that he was incapable of bringing them into balance—not yet, not at eighteen, but perhaps later, if he maintained his questioning.