I bedded myself down on this pallet. You know I’m a fastidious man, and I’m often amazed that I was able to do that. I’m even more amazed that it didn’t cure me of my fastidiousness. I lay there, and I thought, I’ll never sleep. Not that I was afraid – it was just damned uncomfortable, and it stank of goat hides and men who hadn’t washed in weeks. I thought, I’ll never sleep, and I lay down there in all that filth, and the next thing I knew it was a beautiful early morning and I woke up and I felt very well indeed because I’d put my trust in myself.
There was an old Coptic church on a hill nearby, a broken-down white wooden building with a domed roof. I went up there to look at it. I’m not a believer. A priest – a black, black man with a big beard and long robe – was standing out in front, and something came over me, and I went in. I don’t mean to suggest I had any mystical or religious experience, or anything like that. But I found a moment of peace such as I have rarely known in my life, in that quiet old church on the hill in Ethiopia. I didn’t pray. I wouldn’t have known who to pray to.
Just for a change of view, the first thing I did after leaving there was to get a flight back to Addis Ababa, where I moved into one of the best hotels. I showered, changed clothes, and played eighteen holes of golf at the Imperial Ethiopian Golf Club. I just had to get back to the flavor of western civilization after that sojourn with the fleas.
I went back to the States shortly after that. I didn’t want to stay away for too long at one time. I was getting involved in RKO and I had plans for TWA, and the usual financial troubles. When I think about that period now, it strikes me as amazing that I was able to juggle all these things at the same time, but I’ve done that all my life. The following year, however, I went back to Ethiopia. I still used the name Charles Maddox. On my previous trip I had stumbled across a leper clinic, and it really shook me to the depths of my being to see those deformed, suffering souls. It made me stop to think about a man who was close enough to touch them. This was Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the great healer. He was in Africa then – he had a clinic down in Lambaréné, in French Equatorial Africa. I didn’t stay long in Ethiopia that trip because I got some mild dysentery, not amoebic but damned uncomfortable – and I went back to California and had it looked after.
But on the flight back I started to think about Schweitzer. Here was a man who was universally respected. He was famous in any number of fields, and it seemed to me that we had something in common. He had reached the heights in his fields, and I had reached them in mine. I had gone right to the top of the heap, and so had he, and he had abandoned the whole show at an age not so much younger than mine. He became a doctor and he went down to Africa to serve humanity, but also, I’m convinced, to look for Albert Schweitzer.
Don’t get the wrong idea that I was placing myself on his level. We operated on different spheres, and his, I believed, were far more exalted than mine, but we did have this one thing in common. We were both in the middle years, men who had accomplished something of note, and yet we were lost and we were looking for something more. I thought: I’d like to talk to that man.
When I make up my mind to do something, I do it. When I was feeling better I flew back to Africa, to Cairo, and then down to Lambaréné. I took a canoe from there to Schweitzer’s clinic. The people who paddled the canoes were the most horrible collection of emaciated souls I’d ever seen. I’m sure some of them were lepers. I found out afterward there was a power boat I could have taken, but I didn’t see it around at the time, or my French wasn’t good enough to make myself understood and I had to get into this goddamn canoe.
I visited Schweitzer, and he reminded me of myself back in the States. Didn’t want to see any visitors.
I didn’t tell him who I was, because I doubt that it would have meant anything to him. The magic of the Hughes name didn’t penetrate to Lambaréné. But in any event I found it impossible to talk to Dr. Schweitzer. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with the man. He was totally brusque, indifferent to me and to any problems I may have had. I realized after a short time that this wasn’t personal – he acted this way toward everybody. He showed this Olympian detachment even toward the poor sick souls lying around in his clinic, which, incidently, was filthy. I don’t know what kind of doctor he was, but he sure as hell didn’t know much about ordinary hygiene. In that sense he might better have stayed in Germany and played the organ.
This place was a big establishment, not just a little clinic the way I imagined it would be. It was a compound, dozens of big buildings and lots of little barracks, like an army camp built in a swamp. The mosquitos nearly drove you crazy, and the heat, the humidity – well, it was hotter than Houston, and that’s saying something.
I don’t want to be too hard on Schweitzer. He looked awful, thin, and tired, and pale. I was there in the evening to see him. I was wandering about the compound, looking at the animals. There were a lot of African deer around, antelopes and other animals, and just before it got dark and I was supposed to go, I saw Dr. Schweitzer running around in a panic, shoving people into various huts and padlocking the doors. I asked myself, ‘My God, what’s happening?’ I thought for a minute there was a mad elephant on the loose, or a new leper had come to the clinic and there was something especially contagious about him.
I ran around myself, trying to find out what was going on, and it turned out that this was just his nightly routine. Schweitzer locked everything and everybody up because he was afraid they’d steal his medicines and his books and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. He wasn’t a very elevated soul. He certainly had no detachment.
I came back the next day and managed to talk to him. He pretended not to speak more than a few words of English, although I knew damn well that he did. I asked him a few questions, because I also knew he had built the clinic, all those buildings and huts, with his own two hands. I complimented him on that, and he said, ‘You can’t trust these people to do anything. If you want it so it won’t fall down, you have to do it yourself.’
That’s the sort of answer I’d expect from some redneck planter in Mississippi. It wasn’t what I expected from the great Dr. Schweitzer. You know, you can read all the Chinese philosophy in the world – he did, by the way, which is why I mention it – but if you come out of it with the feeling that you can’t trust anybody else to build a hut, and, more to the point, if you don’t choose to teach people how to do it, I don’t think you’ve learned very much.
That was about the extent of our conversation. The last time I saw him he vanished back into the depths of his clinic, padlocked his doors, and I got into the canoe and left – waved goodbye to a hippopotamus.
It was a long trip for a meeting that came to nothing. And since then I’ve taken a different attitude toward the famous seers and philosophers of this world. I’ve decided the best thing is to read what they have to say, but don’t meet them. They’re too human, or they’re not human enough. It’s disillusioning.