Trouble in Paradise

Someone once said that the worst thing in the world is not getting your heart's desire, and the next worst thing is getting it. One almost universal heart's desire is escape to paradise. People dream of moving to the French Riviera or fleeing to a Greek island, or of whiling their life away on a palmy island in the Pacific. I've had the occasion to do all three. It is dangerous to satisfy your heart's desire that way. It may destroy you.

I set out to see the world and find paradise at the age of 22. West Virginia and New Hampshire and Connecticut, where my life had been spent until then, seemed very humdrum to me. If I were going to be a writer, I would have to haunt exotic places, as Somerset Maugham had done. Even my literary idol, E. M. Forster, despite his secluded cast of mind, had found his passage to India and her mysteries. Beyond that, I knew there were a great many shut doors in my nature, inhibitions and self-deceptions and superficialities, and I counted on foreign atmospheres and emancipated peoples to relieve me of those. The summer I was 22 I found the enchanting town of St.-Jean-de-Luz, on the southwestern French coast just short of the Spanish border. It had its ornate Old Quarter, including the site of Louis XIV's marriage to the Spanish infanta. There were restaurants serving the excellent Basque cuisine--confit (continued on page 128) Trouble in Paradise (continued from page 125) de canard is the best-known dish. There were fast games of pelota (Basque jai alai to attend, a beautiful beach, all kinds of water sports and lots of young French and Spanish eager to make friends with an American. With them my school-learned French began to turn into French French. We made an excursion into Spain to see the bullfights, we explored deep into the Pyrenees. I went to sea for 24 hours with some Basque fishermen out for tuna and smuggling. That experience in its genuineness and novelty inspired the first good prose fiction I ever wrote, an extended sketch called Martin the Fisherman. It was slight in content, but it was vivid and true, and it had style.

My personal life among these people, my new French and Spanish friends, became more relaxed, more honest. They grew up faster than American young people, learned earlier to call a spade a spade. I remember one tiny but revealing example of this kind of honesty. On the beach one day, a boy playfully bit a girl on the stomach. "Doucement," she sighed. Not "Don't," but "Gently." I remember a very beautiful blonde Spanish girl, an aristocrat, gravely and sadly explaining to me that she would never be allowed to marry an American. I was the American she thought she wanted to marry.

But I did not want to marry her or anybody. I had learned to speak French and begun to take myself a little less seriously, less tragically, in St.-Jean-de-Luz. I was not hopelessly bottled up, sealed off from life, after all. The austere New Englander in me was beginning to unbend a little, my reflex defensiveness and reserve began to melt. If I let these people get close to me, I was not necessarily going to get hurt; on the contrary, I might finally be brought fully alive.

That much had paradise done for me; but I sensed that I had to go far deeper into it, and into myself, if I were to be the man, and the artist, I wanted to be, free in spirit, rich in experience and insight. In my mind's eye there was the image of what Tahiti had done for Gauguin. (Only later did I learn how miserable his life became there.)

So when I next got a chance to escape from America, years later, I headed for the perfumed gardens and emancipated souls of the other side of France, the Riviera.

I remember the first time I caught sight of it, this playground where I was destined to live, off and on, for a number of years.

I was in a couchette, a kind of half-baked sleeping compartment, on a train from Barcelona into France through Marseilles and, as dawn broke, clicking along that stretch of Mediterranean coast known as the French Riviera. It was June. A washed blue sky spread limitlessly overhead. The cliffs falling to the glittering blue sea were a shade of burned orange, with the shiny green circles of umbrella pines scattered across them. Villas, confections in white or pink or blue, hung dreamily over the sea in the sunshine. Now and then we flashed by a cove where a circle of little waterfront houses and cafs enclosed a boat-crowded harbor. Through the train windows on the other side, the land rose gradually toward the formidable, snow-covered peaks of the Maritime Alps. I thought it was all miraculously beautiful.

Getting off the train in Nice, I sat outdoors at a caé table and had the classic French breakfast, croissants with butter and caé au lait, which is so novel and so good at first. (If, two years later, you find yourself nervously throwing down two fast cognacs for breakfast, well, so do French truck drivers.) The air was crystalline, champagnelike. Every cobblestone, every awning and tree seemed to sparkle in the morning light.

And so I stayed, and stayed, and went away but came back to stay some more. Writers can do that.

Eventually, I joined a skindiving club in Antibes. Among its members was a beautiful American actress, married to a very rich man. (To protect the guilty, I am changing everyone's name in this article, except for Melina Mercouri, whom you will meet later. I would hate to hurt any of these charming, lost people; I liked them all, these victims of paradise.) I will call this actress Norma Grant. I was enchanted by her. Perhaps beautiful is not the word for Norma: light-blue eyes, the clearest features, small nose, ripe mouth, tawny hair, on the tall side, slender girlish-athletic figure. But Norma's strongest attraction was her personality; she was full of nervous vitality, artlessly candid about herself and everybody else. And Norma was funny, Norma could make you laugh till you cried, Norma could bring down the house. In her low-pitched actress' voice, she would describe her flying lessons and what it was like to effect her first solo landing with a giant hangover, putting her talent, her body, everything into it, and it was an experience not to be forgotten.

The hangover was significant in that story. At first I noticed only that a glass of Pernod seemed to be beside her very often. We all drank it, but Norma always seemed to be ahead. It only made her funnier, I thought.

The theory was that you could not skindive if you had been drinking heavily the night before. Descending to the depths we habitually reached, 100 to 150 feet, the intense weight of the water would push against your gaseous stomach and make you sick.

Norma, morning after morning, disproved that theory.

She had been here in the south of France for quite some time, living in one of the most fashionable situations available, a private villa on the grounds of the superelegant Hôtel du Cap d'Antibes. Actually, the villa was dark and gloomy and old-fashioned, the kind of place rich people rot in, but she didn't seem to notice.

After all, she had her yacht. I remember it as being 200 tons. In any case, it was a very large motor yacht, there was a grand piano in the main saloon and a crew of about ten. Her story of crossing the Atlantic on board and having to lie spread-eagled on the saloon floor to keep from being thrown around as the ship rolled and pitched was one of her best.

Norma's busy stage and screen career became more and more inert as the months passed. "I've got to get out of that," she would say over and over as the date to begin some new assignment drew near. And she always got out of them. She didn't leave. Her child came for a while, but went back to New York with the governess.

Norma's tenth wedding anniversary arrived. Her husband virtually never came to see her, but for the anniversary he sent her a $12,000 Aston Martin, and he also asked her to pick out whatever estate she wanted for herself here, since she seemed to like the Riviera so much. She bought, for $400,000, a curiously unattractive place, a dated, Thirties-style spread, all featureless marble floors and boxy furniture, mirrors all over the place, lots of uninteresting grounds around it but still crowded-in feeling, because it was on an overbuilt hillside. The most memorable feature of the house to me was a huge bathroom with two toilets, out in the open and right next to each other. Why, I asked myself, why?

Norma invited me aboard her yacht for an overnight cruise to St.-Tropez. One of her crew picked me up in the speedboat at noon and took me to the yacht anchored off the Hôtel du Cap. I went up the outside ladder and saw Norma sitting on the long cushioned bench at the rear of the stern deck. Her lady secretary was talking to her. The back of the secretary's head blocked my view of Norma's face. I could see she had on slacks and a white sweater. There was a small piece of food near the neck of the sweater. She clutched a glass of Pernod. Then I saw her face; she didn't notice me; the secretary gave me a meaningful glance. Norma was hopelessly drunk. She had obviously been drinking steadily all night and all morning.

I remember that the chef prepared a lunch of ham sandwiches and Coca-Cola. The crew couldn't be bothered giving Norma adequate meals and service. The excursion to St.-Tropez had been my idea, and so they gave me many dirty looks.

Somehow she sobered up enough to dance in the discothques of St.-Tropez that night, and there was the 17-year-old French boy she found, who sailed back to Antibes in her stateroom.

Norma's problem was simply that she didn't have anything to do in the south of France, and she was possessed of driving nervous energy and a need to be active. Skindiving was not an occupation. Yet she couldn't tear herself away from the ideal climate, the seemingly endless chain of perfect days and from the fun we all had together, and perhaps also from the myriad sexual possibilities of that part of the world. Sex in the south of France is treated the way farming is treated in rural areas. It is seriously, continuously cultivated, experimented with, analyzed.

So the Riviera got her down, but not, I am happy to say, out. Norma had too much class for that. She did leave at long last. She divorced the multimillionaire husband whom she did not love, and now she lives with her second husband in Scotland, of all places--Scotland the rugged, the dour, far from paradise.

Most northern natives hanging on too long here in the south seemed to suffer a decline and fall in the end. There was the jolly titled Englishman with the villa on Cap d'Antibes and the nonstop hospitality he provided there and on his big sailing yacht. One day he suddenly sailed away on the yacht, just before the police were going to arrest him for smuggling guns. After all, the Riviera is expensive. He had had to find some way to pay the bills in paradise. There was the very good-looking young Dutch couple who seemed happily married when they came to Antibes in June and were hopelessly, flagrantly unfaithful to each other by September. There was the American student, passing the summer before entering medical school, who lost all the money intended for his first year there in the inner room of the Cannes casino. There was the German lawyer who left his wife in the middle of the summer for a transvestite from Paris.

I myself did not go into one of these tail spins in the south of France. Quite simply, my work came first. I remember spending a summer there and late in August waking up to the fact that I was due to return to the States in a few weeks and I did not even have a suntan. I was working too diligently on a novel to get much time on the beach.

I found that I had learned all I could learn, felt all I could feel about the south of France, so on my next trip abroad, I returned to my explorations in paradise and pushed deeper into the Mediterranean world, to Greece.

Once again, my first impression of this particular escape hatch was overwhelmingly favorable. The Aegean Sea may not be the Homeric "wine-dark," but it is a shimmering sweep of tranquillity, seemingly endless and motionless and quintessentially calm. Rearing up all through it are hundreds of islands, many uninhabited patches of earth, others memorably beautiful, if rocky, stark and angular, their whitewashed fishermen's cottages glowing in the sunshine. There are olive groves, oleander, cypresses, dovecotes, all lulled by the monarchical sun and the unbelievably dry, pure air of the Hellenic world.

Of course, the Aegean can produce some of the most vicious storms imaginable, and stark beauty can become simply stark after a time, but I learned that only later.

I rented a fine white balconied house on the island of Synthos. It was halfway up the amphitheater of houses rising from the operatically picturesque port. There I settled down to write.

If the Spanish and the French had loosened me up, the Greeks broke down my reserve totally.

Life in Greece is hard for the Greeks, and has been for the past 1000 years at least. The land is stingy about producing crops, the sea almost fished out, there is little industrialization. The women are kept in seclusion, the men have to work incessantly at some usually boring job all their lives for a pittance. These rock-hard conditions of life produce people with a directness of approach, a downright attitude, a raw confrontation of the realities that, to me at least, was breath-taking.

I lived there during the years just before the current rulers, the military junta, took over in 1967. The Greek national heroine then, their new Athena since her world-wide success in Never on Sunday, was the untamable Melina Mercouri. As the result of a magazine article I wrote about her and of the affinity contrasting temperaments can create, she and I became the closest of friends.

Melina's tremulous warmth toward her circle of devoted friends made us feel that she was so vulnerable she needed our constant protection; her tigerish courage before anything she considered wrong or unjust in life made us feel safe and protected. There was a constant live interchange between her and us.

I saw Melina not only in Greece but in New York and on the Riviera as well. It was all the same; wherever she was was Greece. Her dedicated companions, Anna and Angeliki, prepared Greek food for her in Hollywood as in Piraeus. We had ouzo (the Pernodlike liqueur) and we had Greek wine wherever we were. In New York, Hadjidakis, who wrote the theme music for Never on Sunday, came to play her piano. We danced the Greek dances and we did not stop. The plates got broken underfoot and still we danced. My New England forebears were cowering in their graves as the plates crashed and still we danced.

I wrote a book about some of my Mediterranean experiences, Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad. It's very hard to evaluate your own writing, but the Greek section of this book has an unmistakable vitality. Life there had been an eye opener. I saw the basic bourgeois nature of what the French were and what they had taught me, and I enlarged my vision of life's possibilities among the elemental confrontations and realities of Greece. More of my hypocrisies and pretensions melted away under the ruthless sun of the Aegean.

But not every deluded northerner who wanders down there in search of salvation can have his destiny presided over by Melina Mercouri Much more typical were two Canadian writers I met on Synthos, Max and Peggy Harding.

Every evening around six o'clock, all Synthos descended to the agora, the cobblestoned waterfront with its shops and simple cafs. A glass of ouzo, which has the effect of a strong martini, cost four cents. Fishermen, shopkeepers and the unemployed of the island passed among us, but rarely was any contact established. The English-speaking contingent--about a dozen artists in all--socialized exclusively with one another.

An acquaintance took me up to the plain wooden table where the Hardings nightly presided as the self-appointed leaders of the expatriate colony. They took precedence by right of longevity: They had lived on Synthos for seven years. They had never been farther from it than Athens, and rarely had they been able to afford to go there.

Peggy Harding had a scrubbed, windburned, intelligent face, a face that reflected an interested and even distinguished personality. She was, I suppose, about 40 and must have been attractive B.S., Before Synthos. Now her teeth were rotting and her brown hair was dried out and her spreading figure was dressed in an old washed-out dress. Max, tall and emaciated to an alarming degree, compulsively smoked and, coughing, sat talking like a scarecrow in shorts. Both talked incessantly and often fascinatingly.

He had been an important foreign correspondent during World War Two; she had had the promising beginning of a journalistic career. They got married and had four children. But both of (continued on page 202)Trouble in Paradise(continued from page 130) them, in the tradition of journalists, wanted to write that serious book, that work of art. Unlike most journalists, they both had a real talent for it. And so one fine, fatal day, they took the plunge so many contemplate and so few commit; they sold everything, burned all their bridges and moved with their few belongings and their four children and their promise of literary talent to Synthos.

These Greek islands are sun-baked and vibrating with Greek and foreign vacationers during the summer. But through the long out-of-season months, they are almost empty, and almost stripped of distractions, and subject to one of the most obstreperous climates anywhere, the Aegean with its fearsome winds and monumental storms.

Here were the Hardings after seven years of this. Both had produced several books. At first they were well received, although not money-makers, but within a few years, neither had any real living material to draw upon except their life on a rock in the Aegean Sea (Truman Capote, cutting through the surface allure faster than most, landed on Synthos, exclaimed "Alcatraz!" and promptly re-embarked). Their later books, although they found publishers, failed to interest any public. They had just enough money to live on this exceptionally cheap island--I believe the family subsisted on about $3000 a year. They could not escape; they had no means of living in Canada again for even a few months. Max had drifted far from the world of foreign correspondents.

Neither learned to speak enough Greek for social closeness with the natives, and so relied on visiting foreigners and the few other English-speaking residents for friends. Day after day after day they sat on their rock. They had their writing, they gave the same dinner party a thousand times, they had their ouzo.

And after seven years of this, the bottom began to come at them fast. One drunken night, Max broke a wine bottle over the head of the chief of police. Their 14-year-old daughter was robbing them to give the money to her Greek lover. Peggy could no longer write at all. The dream of primitive beauty and art had shriveled to a nightmare of futility and suffering; but unlike real nightmares, theirs had no end in sight.

Then the miracle happened, the deus ex machina. Max desperately ground out one last book and it was selected by a major book club. Real money reached them at last.

They fled Synthos, they fled Greece as though the Furies pursued them. In Canada, they were curiosities--celebrities for a little while. But Peggy's teeth were too bad, Max's hacking cough too irritating for wholehearted acceptance. Moreover, they were no longer Canadian literati, they were Aegean wanderers, denationalized and defeated. They tried to make their Aegean years sound like an immensely romantic adventure, but their eyes and their skin and their nerves told a different story, the story of two more fugitives from paradise lost.

I was often tempted to buy a house on Synthos. All the expatriate colony there, desperate for someone new to talk to, urged me on. I wavered, I thought about it, never did. For, despite Melina, I might have ended up in a mental hospital like another American writer who settled there, or become a rattled drug addict like the lovely Swedish girl had, or retreated into a marble insanity like the painter from Des Moines, or castrated an English tourist like the youth from Boston. The Synthos message was written as large as, and echoed exactly, the words over the entrance to Apollo's great shrine at Delphi: Nothing too much. Taste paradise, sample Eden, and then go, flee, you were not born here and you do not belong here.

Melina's influence prevailed. No one danced later nor broke more plates than she did, but Melina was out for fun, not for self-destruction. "I was born Greek" was her proudest and truest statement: fun, not self-destruction, a Greek life is too painfully earned to be thrown away. A Greek island paradise could not destroy her for one simple reason: She was born Greek.

I was lucky. The Hardings were typical.

Their experience is as old as Judaeo-Christian culture. Adam and Eve were the prototypes of all I am describing. In every Eden there is a serpent, and those privileged beings who live there cannot in the end stand the perfection of Eden; the serpent in the end always forces them to face themselves and so be driven out.

Nor is the fact that one is sent in a professional capacity any guarantee of survival. The American journalists and businessmen I met in Beirut all seemed well on the road to some crack-up or other. Beirut, to be sure, is not everybody's idea of paradise. The war with next-door Israel may break out again at any moment; every male above the age of ten seems to be armed; it is worth your life to attempt to cross a busy street; the government commits such vagaries as running out of postage stamps; people in apartment houses throw their garbage out the window. But despite all these and other drawbacks, Beirut has its unique magnetism. A magical Asiatic flux and mystery, a flow of exoticism engulfs you there, as pervasive as the sensual whine of the Arab music, minor-keyed, insinuating as a lie. The life is loose, the habits are unhinged, the possibilities unknowable, and nothing really matters, because you are so very far from realities of home.

In Beirut you can lie on a palm-fringed beach and look up at the mountains not far inland, where skiers schuss in the sun. You can gamble your last piaster away in the glamorous casino. French restaurants, French stylishness, French quick-wittedness give a surface patina to the Asiatic substructure.

Here the American professional people were slowly going to pieces. Ralph Summers, correspondent for an important American publication, went skin-diving in the Mediterranean every day and filed only an occasional dispatch, which never seemed to see print. His beat was the entire Near and Middle East and he flew off to investigate some story or other in the interior now and then, but it was very hard to pin down a fact in this part of the world, next to impossible to get a straight, unequivocal story from anyone, so nothing much ever seemed to come from these excursions. Journalists who came in, found a story and got out before the ambiguities of the Arab world got them did better.

One day Ralph took me skindiving with him. After we had dived for a while, we returned to the rowboat and the boatman helped us clamber back aboard. Then, in the way that an American might offer us a beer, he offered us a cigarette. I knew enough about Lebanon to know that it would contain the local marijuana. I have never used drugs, but I had had marijuana once or twice with negligible results, so to be congenial, I took a few puffs. But this was not marijuana, this was kif dipped in opium, and in a matter of seconds I was high as a satellite.

The rest of that day and that night, as I added drinking to the kif and opium, I remember as a miasma of Oriental dancers in dark night clubs, of elegant houses of prostitution, of squalid back alleys, of roaming the dark streets, the whine of music and the rich, shadowy interiors of very private bars, and finally, because God takes special care of drunks and Americans, getting back to my room at St. George's Hotel, picking up a book in French, which I read haltingly, and sailing through it as though it were a first-grade English reader.

The next afternoon, when I woke up, my French was halting again, my head splitting, my body aching everywhere, and I wanted to die.

This kind of outing seemed to happen often to the Americans living there. Whether they were in journalism or public relations or oil, they dived deep into the Oriental undercurrents of the Levant; but because they were not used to such a caressing climate and to such powerful stimulants, they often went overboard, started breaking up bars and diving into the sea and driving off cliffs. The intrigue in Lebanon is as thick as molasses, and as sweet and slow-moving and sickly. You have to be born to it. It is heady and dangerous, tolerable to the Lebanese because they are fatalists; and if they break their neck or lose their fortune or their spouse, they have the phlegm to accept it. Others, the American, the Britisher, the Scandinavian, lost in the fumes of this portal to the East, suffer, alter, decline.

But the true, safe paradise is surely not these decaying Mediterranean haunts, people will argue. It is a smiling, simplehearted island in the Pacific. There you will be safe.

I arrived in Honolulu at three in the morning. Two nuns met me, threw leis around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. Then they drove me to my penthouse on top of the Hilton Hawaiian Village Hotel (I was a guest speaker at a convention of English teachers). Too overstimulated by my first whiff of the Pacific world to fall asleep, I sat out on my balcony and watched the dawn move in. It was spectacular: Clouds like galleons, like immense gray hanging vaults, dominated the sleeping ocean. Waikiki Beach, a golden strip far below, slumbered motionlessly as a curling silver surf murmured against it. Off to the left, Diamond Head extended into the sea with the profile significance of a face on Mount Rushmore. The air seemed full of flower scents coming across the water from far away.

And the fascination of this Pacific world deepened when I spent several weeks on the Kona coast of the Big Island of the group, also called Hawaii. Rural, serene, the Big Island has such elemental novelties as an active volcano, Mauna Loa, which flings geysers of yellow lava hundreds of feet into the air: there is plentiful wild-pig hunting, and off the Kona coast is reputed to be the best deep-sea fishing in the world. It rains a good deal on the other side of the island but just enough on the Kona coast to keep it brilliantly green and flowered; the natives are very friendly; everything seems conducive to an ideal life.

Why, then, does "rock fever" set in after a time? Sooner or later, mainlanders are overcome with an urge to drive their car straight ahead for hundreds of miles without drowning, with a desperate need for a chilly day, a terrible aversion to Lovely Hula Hands and the other overplayed, too restful songs, a longing for change. I believe you have to be born to the South Pacific islands in order to live on one of them contentedly. If they are not in your blood, they will sooner or later get on your nerves. The sameness will stifle you.

I had planned to push deeper into the Pacific world, to Samoa and Tahiti, but I found that I did not want to. A palmy island is a palmy island, sun is sun and surf is surf. I had a growing suspicion that I was now as emancipated as mingling with strange peoples and cultures would ever make me, and as much as I wanted to be. Also, while I had been pursuing personal liberations abroad, a large section of the American young and not-so-young had suddenly become, in terms of behavior, among the most liberated people in the world.

The dimension that life abroad brings to writers like me had penetrated my work as far as it was likely to. I turned my face back to East Coast United States, where my roots were, and where life now looked more interesting and challenging, as well as more difficult (inflation, assassinations, riots, crime, racial conflict, war-weariness) than anywhere else in the world. The United States was the cockpit of the world and, God help us, the wave of the future. Where else should a writer be if he was a native of and heir to that country?

After all, I had learned that it was not only futile but dangerous to settle in these idyllic places and attempt to function. I gave up the endeavor. So I thought. But in the course of writing this article, I got a fresh look at myself and my situation.

Right now I am at my writing table. Through the big window in front of me, one of my dogwoods is flowering. Birds are chirping around me in my woods. The house is cedar and glass, contemporary in design. It is next to a superb golf course, overlooking magnificent Peconic Bay and located in the Hamptons, the ideally beautiful eastern end of Long Island.

I have just faced up to the fact that this place is another paradise, recognized as such everywhere. I never thought of it before, but now I see that I am at it again. And as I recognized this, an uneasiness crept over me. There is a serpent somewhere in this gorgeous countryside. There is always trouble in Tahiti. Will I drink too much here? Will the world pass me by? Am I being lulled by this perfect fresh air, these postcard villages, the surf, the sun? There is only one word for those of us who are compelled to pursue these dreams of paradise. Beware.