In the street I jotted down the name of the book, Disenchantment, by C. E. Montague.
He died a few months later, on Bastille Day, as it happened. I was in France at the time and felt a shock as I read it in the paper. In the obituary there was something I had forgotten or never knew: He had the DSC.
—
In a black shirt and Texas tie with a beaded steer’s-head holding it, John Masters appeared. It was in the country, New City, on South Mountain Road. He was tall and stern of appearance as befitted a former English officer. High on his cheeks were clumps of long, untrimmed hair, a mark of caste. “Bugger tufts,” he explained without elaboration. He had served in the British Indian Army. Eventually, in a history of the war in the Pacific, I came across an account he had written of a battle in Burma, his battalion in defense of a hill in the jungle against overwhelming Japanese attacks, an episode, like many others, of which I never heard him speak. They were part, perhaps, of his authority. It was to his house one would hurry in case of grave danger. He would know without hesitation what to do.
There was a night we had invited people to see a film never shown in theaters but nonetheless legendary, the hymn that Leni Riefenstahl had created of the Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934. It opened with Wagner, and a Junkers transport flying through ethereal clouds, bringing the German leader to the ancient city. Masters and his wife arrived late. They were standing in the doorway as Hitler was seen, deep in his thoughts, looking out one of the aircraft windows. “I don’t think I want to watch this,” Masters said, and with his wife he turned and walked out.
Behind his best-selling books, Bhowani Junction and Nightrunners of Bengal, there was the organization of a military campaign. On large index cards were written detailed descriptions of his characters — date of birth, schooling, color of hair and eyes. On larger paper the chronology of events was laid out. He had studied the business of writing in a very methodical way. He had worked out firm principles. Never lose focus or take the spotlight from where it belongs, he told me. If a main character is a woman, say, and she is going up in an elevator, don’t begin to describe the elevator operator. That would loosen the grip.
My own methods seemed negligent when I listened to his. Their failure might be predicted. On the other hand, I was not trying to write Bhowani Junction. I had the rapturous dreams of an opium addict, intense but inexpressible. I wanted — someone in Rome supplied the words for me a few years later — to achieve the assoluta.
I was still thinking in this immodest way when I met, entirely by chance — it turned out he lived in an apartment next door to one I was using in the city — a writer who I at first felt was traveling, though in a different manner, a similar path. He lived alone, with a small dog, in a long, darkened room pricked with white lights, pinpoint lights, strung along the bookshelves. There were expensive art books piled on the tables — he would go to Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue and buy them whenever he happened to have some money — and high on the wall three or four large framed photographs such as one might see of movie stars except these were of a woman’s gleaming black chose, as Pepys liked to call it, her furnace, as if what lay beneath the satin evening gowns and soft skirts of Vogue were made bare.
His name was Davis Grubb. He had written a book called Night of the Hunter. One of the first things he asked me was whether I had read an article — an entire issue of The Nation, I think it was, had been devoted to it — denouncing J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. I had to read it, he said in a low voice. The FBI had been involved in the assassination of Kennedy. Surely I knew there had been a conspiracy? Had I read Mark Lane, who provided proof? No, but I had seen him on television.
“When?” he asked.
“Oh, a couple of months ago. It wasn’t here. It was in Toulouse.”
“Toulouse.”
“You know. In France.”
“I know. I was there last night,” he said. There was the stare of a man willing to be thought mad.
His dog, a Lhasa Apso, may have been named Laddie. They often went together, late at night, to Clarke’s, a bar where Grubb drank with men who were unquestionably off-duty policemen. How did he know they were? I asked. “White socks,” he said. I could see the dog sitting patiently near his feet, Grubb, the drunken father, careless but loved.
It was said that he was an addict. Looking back, it makes sense, the nocturnal habits, the surreal remarks, the continual need for money. One morning he asked me to help him carry a suitcase filled with remaindered copies of his book. He was going to try to sell them to a store a block or two away — did I think he could get a dollar apiece for them? I did not give an opinion. The store was not even a bookstore.
I believe he was lonely. I never saw visitors. I saw him in the hallway, poorly dressed, locking the door to his apartment. He was in desperate shape, he told me. He needed money for the rent, otherwise he would be evicted. I had thirty dollars and gave him twenty; he thanked me with some embarrassment. We walked out together, down Park Avenue, then over to Madison. There was a luxurious restaurant on the corner.
“Do you have time for lunch?” he asked casually.
“Lunch? Not here,” I said.
“Another time, then,” he replied, adding that he thought he’d go in for a bite. I watched in disbelief as he passed through the doors of shining glass.
It was his final image, though I saw something that made me think again of him once in England: a footpath across wide fields and on it, gray-haired, alone, with a staff in his hand and a pack on his back, a man walked, a soiled dog trotting behind him. The years were gone and all possessions. The villages did not know him, nor would he ever be known. He had only what was crazed and unbroken inside him, and he would be well as long as his dog was alive.
—
Of those years, the 1960s, I remember the intensity of family life, its boundlessness. It was an art of its own — costume parties; daring voyages in an old sailboat, a leaky Comet, far out on the river; dogs; dinners; poker on Christmas night; ice skating. We were in a world of families, all young, unscarred: the beautiful Dutch girl and her husband; the painter and his wife who unexpectedly opened a restaurant on the highway, named for one of his heroes, del Piombo; the psychiatrist and his wife who were our first close friends. It was all an innocent roundelay, a party of touching originality being carried on in the midst of real-estate transactions and countryside that was slowly falling, field by field, to builders.
We lived, for the most part, in a half-converted barn near New City, about thirty miles from New York. Of all the houses this remains the clearest — the cozy room that was made into a study just off the front door, the long bright bathroom with a row of windows above the sink looking down on trees and a shed that served as garage, the stone fireplace, the rough wood floors, the huge kitchen. There was a terrace of large squares of slate that had once served as sidewalk in Nyack, and in back, through woods, was a stream. Still farther one came to a long, slanted field planted each year with tomatoes, the mere gleaning of which was a harvest. Fingernails black with earth we brought basketfuls back to the house in the fall.
Not far away, on South Mountain Road, was the aristocracy. The early artists had settled there, and Maxwell Anderson, the playwright, had owned a house designed by Henry Varnum Poor. Of the latter I knew only that his name was attached to certain structures like a particle. The one I was most familiar with had blue walls and rooms of inherited art, Bonnards and Utrillos, Vuillards, and Cézannes. “Callas just left,” they might have said.