The Drifters By James A. Michener
The Drifters
James A. Michener
“‘It’s no fun being a Jew in England. It’s not easy to be one in Israel, with the rabbis running everything and compounding all the errors of Europe. But in the United States, I think it would be most difficult to retain your identity. Because Americans want so desperately to absorb the Jews.’” (222)
“It was a great winter, with formal parties at which Bruce met the few young Jews of the Canterbury area, and he might have continued with this life if one day he had not seen, in the display window of a travel agency, the same poster advertising Torremolinos that had created such havoc in the mind of a Norwegian girl in Tromso/ some months earlier. He was walking home from the library, thinking of nothing in particular, when he saw this near-naked girl standing beside a windmill on a Mediterranean beach, and she seemed so real that he could have touched her, and all of a sudden he realized that what had gone wrong was neither Israel nor the Technion but the simple fact that he was eighteen years old, and though he had ventured to the Red City and had helped stand off six enemy tanks, he had never been really involved with a girl.” (224-225)
“’There’s one hell of a difference between strong men and pitiful men. Of course, my father could have punched him in the nose. In that way my father was strong. But between him and the minister there was a gulf so enormous…’” (230)
“I love America most when I am caught up in its politics . . . in the grubby battles whereby contending social groups try to hack out their unjust portion of the spoils. I like to see Catholics battling for a little more money for their schools, Jews fighting for a better relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, gasoline companies trying to defeat government supervision, and the developer of a new drug doing his damnedest to slip it past the health inspectors. To me, a place like Newark, where old Protestants surrender to new Italians who will not surrender an inch to new Negroes, is more interesting than the battleground at Troy, for this is real warfare, in my terms, in my day. That’s why I enjoyed the Democratic convention at Chicago so much. You could stare at your television and see the dinosaurs of the west plodding slowly toward the volcano of extinction without being in the least aware of their march. It gave me more catharsis than the fall of the House of Atreus, because public suicide is inevitably thrilling, as the Japanese learned long ago.” (238)
“Each day more of them die and more of us are born.” (238)
“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 throughout the United States who were gradulally 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 this 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.
I liked the young drop-outs I was with in Torremolinos, and when the last of Paxton Fell’s older group had quietly fallen asleep or had retired to unaccustomed partners in unaccustomed beds, I looked for my companions. I found them clustered together in a far corner of the garage. They were with the rustic musicians, and Gretchen was singing softly her ballad of the silkie, that overwhelming song of a man trapped in inescapable contradictions. Britta stood with the villagers, interpreting roughly the words Gretchen was singing, and I thought how appropriate that was, for the song must have originated with the ancient Norse invaders who had stormed the coasts of Scotland.
I was surprised at how easily they understood this rather difficult song, for when Britta explained to them that the seal had taken back his son and predicted that the boy’s mother would marry a huntsman who would one day shoot both the seal and her son, the villagers nodded. To them such outcomes seemed logical.” (342)
“Who was Clive? I never heard his last name, but he came from London and apparently elonged to a good family, for Monica had known him previously. ‘His father and Sir Charles did things together,’ she told me, ‘although whether it was in school or university I’ve never understood.’
At sixteen Clive had been a brief sensation in a musical group that had offered a series of new sounds; what they were I did not learn, but I did see a photograph of him at that period dressed in Edwardian clothes and seated at a harpsichord with twin keyboards, which must have been an innovation for rock-and-roll. When he was eighteen his group had lost its popularity and at twenty he was a used-up elder statesman. Now at twenty-three he was writing songs for others - very good songs, I was to discover - and to keep his imagination fresh he toured the centers of inspiration: Mallorca, Torremolinos, Antibes, Marrakech. On such trips he carried only a small handbag pus his purple carpetbag containing the latest records from London and New York.” (348)
“I was present when the infatuation started. (Don’t ask me how a young man could entertain four different girls in a pop-top during one week and at the same time be infatuated with the owner of the bed he was using; the young people didn’t think it strange.)” (350-351)
“Never refuse him anything he asks. Observe a certain amount of reserve and delicacy before him. Keep up the honeymoon romance whether at home or in the desert. At the same time do not make prudish bothers, which only disgust and are not true modesty. Never permit anyone to speak disrespectfully of him before you, and if anyone does, no matter how difficult, leave the room. Never permit anyone to tell you anything about him, especially of his conduct with regard to other women. Always keep his hart up when he has made a failure. - Isabel Arundel’s memorandum to herself on the eve of her marriage to Richard Burton.” (376)
“People who live in grass houses shouldn’t get stoned.” (376)
“Chicken Little was right.” (376)
“‘What you seek, Monica, is a vision of the world . . . not the world.’
‘And you?’
‘I want the world exactly as it is. If God wrote it in French, I don’t want it in Portuguese.’” (410)
“This time we did see the reclining couches and the nearly unconscious men drifting on clouds of their own making. They had retreated from reality and from all responsibility. ‘Regulars,’ the Chinese told us. He had a larger establishment, perhaps a dozen rooms, with not a woman in any of them, and I received then the impression which I still hold, that narcotics and sex are not good companions, in spite of recent propaganda to the contrary. We ended in a small, well-decorated room, where the Denver man said, ‘I’m going to smoke till something happens.’” (412-413)
“Since the young people were inviting my comment on their behavior, I had to crystallize my thinking on the matter. What did I believe about drugs? My reactions were divided into three categories: heroin, LSD, marijuana. To understand my total rejection of the first, we must go back to Tokyo, where pretty Hiroko-san continued to put on her helipon act. It continued to be amusing until that Thursday when the Denver man shouted in the hall, ‘Fairbanks, for God’s sake, help me!’ I ran to his room, where Hiroko-san, loaded with the drug, had piled his shirts in the middle of the floor, doused them with hair oil, danced the broken ampules into them, then thrown herself upon the heap and with a razor severed her throat. To me, heroin would always be the sight of Hiroko-san’s blood on the white shirts.
Looking back upon a fair number of cases, I never met anyone who took heroin for any extended period whose life was not ruined. There may be people who have broken the habit and returned to productive lives, but I didn’t know them. The penalty heroin exacted was so devastating that anyone who carelessly stumbled into its use was condemning himself to misery; those who knowingly entrapped others ought to be jailed. I would rather lose my left arm than risk the terrors of heroin, and when the young people asked me, I said so.
When LSD first appeared on the medical horizon, I heard hopes that it was to be the cure for certain specific types of mental derangement, but this did not eventuate, and its widespread abuce by young people, with devastating effect on many of them, convinced me that it should be left strictly alone. Monica and Cato might seem to be able to handle it with what appeared to be minimal effects, but it could have destroyed Gretchen. I myself would not touch LSD, principally because I would be afraid of its impact on my nervous system, but also because my mind was already so expanded with ideas and music and the joy of nature that if it were further expanded by LSD, it would probably burst.
Marijuana raised problems which were especially difficult, because we had so few hard facts about the drug, even though it had been used for more than two thousand years. I had now watched at close hand many marijuana users, and the effects did not seem destructive, but two nagging questions persisted: Did marijuana escalate to more dangerous drugs? Did it induce a general lassitude which destroyed will? Medical testimony appeared strong that cannabis was not itself addictive, and I had found no user who admitted that he had picked up a craving that could be satiated only by strongr drugs. But it was obvious to me that the social milieu in which it was smoked did encourage further experimentation. Monica smoked grass in Vwarda, preached the doctrine in Torremolinos, and actively looked for LSD in Albufeira, principally because she was in an ambiente which enhanced her mood. What I am trying to say is: Marijuana itself might not lead to LSD, but the gang with whom one smoked it, might.
As to the question of lassitude, I was something of an expert. I had worked in seven countries where the use of marijuana was so common as to be almost a national habit, and I was disgusted by the society these countries had produced. Where were the libraries, the child-care centers, the elementary education, the highways, the committees on social justice? I saw only lethargy, both in individuals and in the society as a whole, and I concluded that marijuana was antithetical to the good life. It did destroy will.
I was not much impressed with the argument that marijuana was to the young what a martini was to the adult, for this was a false analogy masking a discrepancy: the milieu of martini-drinking neither led to heroin now induced an anti-social lethargy. In other words, the martini drinker could still function constructively, even though he might be damaging himself personally. As for the repeated argument that taking opium did not prevent Thomas De Quincy from writing well, I had never been excited by his results.” (415-417)
“John Keats would have understood the photograph and would not have asked, ‘Why would a man do such a thing?’ The more pertinent question would be, ‘If any man finds such joy in a given act, why would he do anything else?’” (483)
“The fool wanders, the wise man travels. - Thomas Fuller” (485)
“When J. Edgar Hoover announced that no respectable citizen could trust men who wore long hair and beads, Claude told the local Associated Press man, ‘Well, that takes care of Jesus Christ and Ulysses S. Grant.’” (485)
“Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.” (485)
“Lie down, I think I love you.” (485)
“My old man shouts, ‘Goddammit, you should listen to my fifty-eight years of experience;’ but what he had was one year of experience repeated fifty-eight times.” (485)
“A great country cannot wage a little war. - Duke of Wellington” (485)
“This world has no leaders. Convert the ordinary man on your left.” (485)
“Around the four walls, on platforms eight feet above the floor, were ranged twenty-four great tuns of sherry, cheap red table wine, good white, poorly mixed rosé and powerful cognac. The casks were dark with age, their brass hoops shining bright against the well-polished wood. Beneath these impressive barrels ran a comfortable alcove in the confusion that filled the central part of the bar, and in the alcoves thus cut off hung ceramic tiles which summarized the rural wisdom of Spain:
If Wine Interfered with Your Job,
Quit Your Job.
A Night of Good Drinking
Is Worth a Year’s Thinking.
The Worst Thing in the World Is a Drinking
Companion with a Memory.
If You Are Drinking to Forget,
Please Pay Before You Begin.
To and Old Man, Even Musty Wine Is like Mother’s Milk.
He Who Eats Well at This Table
And Drinks Well at This Bar
Dies of a Terrible Disease: Old Age.” (489)
“How Sweet It Is to Do Nothing All Day Long
And After Having Done So,
To Rest.” (514)
“Of those listening to us, the one who seemed to understand best what Gretchen had in mind was Cato. He had a strong sense of pilgrimage. He told us, ‘I’m convinced I don’t come to a monastery like this by accident. It must be for a purpose . . . but what? I can’t even guess.’ When I reminded him that all young men of character experience this sense of making a journey to find themselves, he said, ‘I don’t mean that jazz . . . the old gig about identity. I know damned well who I am. What I mean is that somewhere - down that valley maybe - there has got to be a secret which will make this whole thing come alive . . . give it significance.’ I told him that significance could come only from within, but this he would not accept. ‘Somebody knows the secret . . . say the mystic word and the mountain opens.’” (526-527)
As we ate - stout cheese, sausages hefty with garlic, excellent bread - Gretchen nibbled and said, ‘I suppose if we knew the facts, we’d find there have always been young people wandering over the face of Europe . . . pretty much as we do today. I don’t think of myself as unusual. Or you, either, Monica. You could have been coming down this road and munching this same kind of cheese seven hundred years ago. In fact, I feel much closer to the girls of that age who were on a real pilgrimage of the spirit than to some nitwit in suburban Boston today.’” (527)
“Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!
The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,
One summer-morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn of gipsy-lore,
And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.” (528)
“God writes straight, but uses a crooked line.” (579)
“Where did non-violence get Martin Luther King? In the end.” (579)
“If one family of dinosaurs survived on earth, some son-of-a-bitch from West Oklahoma would claim he had a right to shoot the male.” (579)
“A barbecue pit in Alabama held this beauty contest and elected a cute colored chick to be Miss Barbecue 1970. So when she got back to her room she said, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?’and the mirror snarled, ‘Snow White, you black bastard, and don’t you forget it.’” (579)
“Young men should travel, if but to amuse themselves. - Byron” (579)
“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren.’ - Laurence Sterne” (580)
“Support mental health of I’ll kill you.” (580)
“Help bring back white slavery.” (580)
“Before the war I used to see this Arab striding down the road followed by his three wives carrying the bundles. After the war I see him coming down the same road, with the same three wives carrying the same bundles, but this time they are in front and he is in the rear. I stop and tell him, ‘Abou, this is progress.’ He looks at me with contempt and says, ‘Not progress. Land mines.’” (655-656)
“The I-Ching is the Bible without its capitalistic moralizing.” (656)
“Old boys have their playthings as well as young ones; they difference is only in the price. - Franklin” (656)
“As late as 1941, when travelers from the desert arrived in Marrkech without their harems, they stayed at this hotel, and in every room there was a little Arab boy to satisfy their accustomed sexual needs. I have some of the old bills. ‘Boy, thirty-six piasters.’” (656)
“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history. - George Eliot” (656)
“Death is nature’s way of suggesting that you slow down.” (656)
“Being educated means to prefer the best not only to the worst but to the second best. - William Lyon Phelps” (656)
“Youth is truth.” (656)
“I thought, as I surveyed this filthy room with its extraordinary freight, that these busted students represented a significant portion of the new world that was evolving. They stood for that legion of lost young souls in Paris and London and Tokyo and Berlin who had rejected their societies. It was they who populated the communes in the hills above Taos, the colonies in Nepal and the caves of Crete. They were a new breed, most difficult to understand, and as I looked at this selection I thought of the homes from which they had come. They must have been little different from the home that I had left when young; their parents surely had the same hopes for them that mine had for me. Each of these sleeping six had probably gone to college and had busted out, forgeiting the tuition his parents had provided, and I wondered what those parents would have felt had they been able to stand where I was standing. This was the new part of the world, and the reverberations it was arousing would echo for many decades.
Then I visualized that familiar other part, those millions of young people throughout the United States and all nations who had entered college on the same terms as these six but who had found it possible to accommodate themselves to traditional demands, and I knew that the future work of society - the factories, the hospitals, the art museums, the city councils - would be accomplished by those who were back home learning and working in the way most young people have done throughout history. The drop-outs of California and derelicts of Marrakech were spectacular; the stable young people working at their education were reassuring. It was inspiring to remember that Harvard and Michigan and Tulane were producing just as many well trained graduates as ever, and that by and large it would be these students who would ensure the continuance of our society. Young men who had to learn calculus were learning it; girls who required chemistry were mastering it.
But then I had the nagging suspicion that the spiritual leadership of the society - whose physical continuance was assured by the standard students who stayed on the job - would probably be provided by those more adventurous ones who had picked up a vital part of their education in such unlikely dormitories as the Casino Royale in Marrakech or the pads in Greenwich Village. I thought of St. Paul, who gave the Christian church its greatest impetus; he came not from the conservative yeshiva but from the sinks and alleys of his day. The singers who would best express the spirit of this age would come not from Harvard or Stanford or Tulane, but from less-structured centers of learning like Pamplona or Copenhagen or Conakry, for the true education of a probing mind occurs unexpectedly and in surroundings that could have been neither anticipated nor provided.
I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.
Standing in this mud-floored cubicle, with the stench of the latrine filling my nostrils and six unconscious scholars at my feet, I judged that of the young people then occupying the Casino, a good ninety per cent were already ruined for creative work. Of these doomed ones, a handful would escalate to heroin and become totally incompetent. Others would be content to move lazily from one marijuana session to the next, never completely incapacitated but never fully in control of their capacities. Some would acquire sex habits which they could not accommodate, and I would see them a decade from now haunting the Torremolinos bars or living in Algarve with some rich widow from London. And there would be others among the lost ninety per cent who would be stained by a terrible disease from which there was no recovery - memory - and these would repeat endlessly to the irritation of their friends, ‘You should have been with us that year in Marrakech.’ They would recall it as the high-water mark of their lives.
That left a group of about ten per cent from which would rise the survivors, the one or two who would come to see the world whole, who would comprehend life as a terrifying reality, a combination of accomplishment and failure, and who might provide some degree of spiritual guidance to the world. The education of such leaders is never easy, nor is it cheap or safe. No man with a precious son would educate him in the baleful way that Saul was educated, on the dicey chance that as an adult he might mature into St. Paul; no logical planner would require a crocodile to hatch a hundred eggs a hundred yards from water in hopes that one newborn reptile might make it to the river before hyenas and storks devoured him as they had his ninety-nine brothers and sisters, but that is the way nature has ordained it. The system is prodigal and tragic, but it functions.
As I looked at the disheveled crowd saying farewell to Claire and her Tarot cards, I would not have wanted to gamble that even one of that unkempt mob would ever produce anything, for apparently they were among the doomed; but I also knew that if I were given the job of finding the charismatic leader who could speak to the coming generation, I would stand a much better chance of finding him not in the antiseptic Mamounia where I slept, but here in the Casino Royale where they slept.
However, no sooner had I thought this than I realized that I was using the word leader in two senses. From the hard-working young people at home, who were completing their education in traditional fashion, would come constructive leaders like Aristotle, Pericles, Maimonides, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill, while from the Marrakech gang would rise meteoric figures like Saint Paul and Augustine, who had confessed to living in similar conditions, Byron and Dostoievsky, who had absorbed equivalent experiences, and Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, who had been nurtured on the same kind of confused political thinking. I suspected that for all centuries to come the world would continue to produce and follow this same kind of dualism in its leadership and that history would be the record of interaction between the two worlds of Michigan and Marrakech.” (696-702)
“’O little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
What lands I was to travel through,
What death I was to dee.’” (706)
“Most older people who visited Marrakech were surprised to find that among the young Americans, there were practically no oldstyle American liberals. This was true for obvious reasons. To get as far as Marrakech required real money, so that those who made it had to come from well-to-do families of a conservative bent, and throughout the world children tend to follow the political attitudes of their fathers. A boy of nineteen might rebel against Harvard University, country-club weekends and the dress of his father, and run away to Marrakech to prove it, but his fundamental political and social attitudes would continue to be those his father had taught him at age eleven. In my work I constantly met conservative adult Americans who, when they saw the young people with long hair and beards, expected them to be revolutionaries; they were pleasantly gratifies to find that the young people were as reactionary as they were.” (708)
“The second surprising aspect was religion. It was rarely mentioned. Occasionally Cato referred to his hatred of what Christianity had done to the Negro, but he was speaking sociologically; Yigal sometimes spoke of the problems faced by the Jews in Israel, but only their political problems, never their theological. I would go for a month without hearing God mentioned, not even as a curse word. With this generation He had become an expletive, used primarily by girls, as when Monica or Britta cried, ‘My God, look!” He was used to draw attention to camels of especially beautiful mosques, but His ancient relationship to eschatology or morality was not referred to. I think if some college girl from our Midwest, sitting on the bed at Inger’s, had asked, ‘Do you believe in God?’ the crowd would have passed out stone-cold, as if hit by an extra strong cookie. About half the young people, especially those from Australia and Canada, were Catholic, but they were as indifferent as the others.
There was talk of morality, but only in the form of ethical conduct; the old problems of sexual morality that had plagued us so much when I was young no longer existed. If someone in the night sessions happened to tell a friend that ‘Margot moved in with Jack from Glasgow,’ it was descriptive and not pejorative. In face, the news was disseminated principally so that others might know where to find Margot without wasting a trip to the third floor.” (710-711)
“‘What we do,’ Rolf said, ‘is what any sensitive person would do. We take one look at that kaleidoscope . . . then we hear Jemail shouting from the entrance to the souks . . . and we see Big Loomis paddling along . . . and tears come into our eyes . . . and we come through the alleys to this hotel . . . and Léon says, “Your room is waiting,” and when everything is unpacked and the kids have dropped by to welcome us back and we’ve read our mail, we send Jemail out for some real fine grass and we roll a joint, and se we hand it back and forth we say, “we’ve come home.” This is the reality. Stockholm is where go into exile to help you run your asylums.’
It was nearly morning. As the last cigarette passed between the two, I asked, ‘But doesn’t it dull your energies?’
‘Life does that,’ she said.
‘Then you admit they are dulled?’
‘Yes. I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.’” (738)
“‘You go on long enough,’ Holt growled, ‘you become a bum.’
Now there was extended discussion of what the term ‘long enough’ meant, and someone asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘I don’t know much about girls, but for a man it’s almost impossible to waste a year before the age of thirty-five. Now if he wants to enter some field with a highly defined training period - say, medicine or engineering - he’d obviously lose time and relative advantage if he dropped out for five years, so if he wants to be a doctor or scientist he’d better get to it, even though his prescribed course might leave him narrow or even uneducated. But for everyone else, no year can be wasted. Knocking around Europe may be the very best thing a young man can do if he wants to become a great lawyer. Working in a lumber camp may be the real road to a vocation for the ministry. Suppose you want to be a fine dramatist. Maybe the route lies through Marrkech. I think a man has till the age of thirty-five for exploration.’” (747-748)
“But Gretchen remembered: ‘In Alte you told us that if your father was ever forced to see Ceylon as it actually was, he’d collapse.’
‘I said so then,’ Britta confessed, ‘but now I believe that men ought to inspect their dreams. And know them for what they are.’” (768)
James A. Michener
“‘It’s no fun being a Jew in England. It’s not easy to be one in Israel, with the rabbis running everything and compounding all the errors of Europe. But in the United States, I think it would be most difficult to retain your identity. Because Americans want so desperately to absorb the Jews.’” (222)
“It was a great winter, with formal parties at which Bruce met the few young Jews of the Canterbury area, and he might have continued with this life if one day he had not seen, in the display window of a travel agency, the same poster advertising Torremolinos that had created such havoc in the mind of a Norwegian girl in Tromso/ some months earlier. He was walking home from the library, thinking of nothing in particular, when he saw this near-naked girl standing beside a windmill on a Mediterranean beach, and she seemed so real that he could have touched her, and all of a sudden he realized that what had gone wrong was neither Israel nor the Technion but the simple fact that he was eighteen years old, and though he had ventured to the Red City and had helped stand off six enemy tanks, he had never been really involved with a girl.” (224-225)
“’There’s one hell of a difference between strong men and pitiful men. Of course, my father could have punched him in the nose. In that way my father was strong. But between him and the minister there was a gulf so enormous…’” (230)
“I love America most when I am caught up in its politics . . . in the grubby battles whereby contending social groups try to hack out their unjust portion of the spoils. I like to see Catholics battling for a little more money for their schools, Jews fighting for a better relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, gasoline companies trying to defeat government supervision, and the developer of a new drug doing his damnedest to slip it past the health inspectors. To me, a place like Newark, where old Protestants surrender to new Italians who will not surrender an inch to new Negroes, is more interesting than the battleground at Troy, for this is real warfare, in my terms, in my day. That’s why I enjoyed the Democratic convention at Chicago so much. You could stare at your television and see the dinosaurs of the west plodding slowly toward the volcano of extinction without being in the least aware of their march. It gave me more catharsis than the fall of the House of Atreus, because public suicide is inevitably thrilling, as the Japanese learned long ago.” (238)
“Each day more of them die and more of us are born.” (238)
“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 throughout the United States who were gradulally 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 this 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.
I liked the young drop-outs I was with in Torremolinos, and when the last of Paxton Fell’s older group had quietly fallen asleep or had retired to unaccustomed partners in unaccustomed beds, I looked for my companions. I found them clustered together in a far corner of the garage. They were with the rustic musicians, and Gretchen was singing softly her ballad of the silkie, that overwhelming song of a man trapped in inescapable contradictions. Britta stood with the villagers, interpreting roughly the words Gretchen was singing, and I thought how appropriate that was, for the song must have originated with the ancient Norse invaders who had stormed the coasts of Scotland.
I was surprised at how easily they understood this rather difficult song, for when Britta explained to them that the seal had taken back his son and predicted that the boy’s mother would marry a huntsman who would one day shoot both the seal and her son, the villagers nodded. To them such outcomes seemed logical.” (342)
“Who was Clive? I never heard his last name, but he came from London and apparently elonged to a good family, for Monica had known him previously. ‘His father and Sir Charles did things together,’ she told me, ‘although whether it was in school or university I’ve never understood.’
At sixteen Clive had been a brief sensation in a musical group that had offered a series of new sounds; what they were I did not learn, but I did see a photograph of him at that period dressed in Edwardian clothes and seated at a harpsichord with twin keyboards, which must have been an innovation for rock-and-roll. When he was eighteen his group had lost its popularity and at twenty he was a used-up elder statesman. Now at twenty-three he was writing songs for others - very good songs, I was to discover - and to keep his imagination fresh he toured the centers of inspiration: Mallorca, Torremolinos, Antibes, Marrakech. On such trips he carried only a small handbag pus his purple carpetbag containing the latest records from London and New York.” (348)
“I was present when the infatuation started. (Don’t ask me how a young man could entertain four different girls in a pop-top during one week and at the same time be infatuated with the owner of the bed he was using; the young people didn’t think it strange.)” (350-351)
“Never refuse him anything he asks. Observe a certain amount of reserve and delicacy before him. Keep up the honeymoon romance whether at home or in the desert. At the same time do not make prudish bothers, which only disgust and are not true modesty. Never permit anyone to speak disrespectfully of him before you, and if anyone does, no matter how difficult, leave the room. Never permit anyone to tell you anything about him, especially of his conduct with regard to other women. Always keep his hart up when he has made a failure. - Isabel Arundel’s memorandum to herself on the eve of her marriage to Richard Burton.” (376)
“People who live in grass houses shouldn’t get stoned.” (376)
“Chicken Little was right.” (376)
“‘What you seek, Monica, is a vision of the world . . . not the world.’
‘And you?’
‘I want the world exactly as it is. If God wrote it in French, I don’t want it in Portuguese.’” (410)
“This time we did see the reclining couches and the nearly unconscious men drifting on clouds of their own making. They had retreated from reality and from all responsibility. ‘Regulars,’ the Chinese told us. He had a larger establishment, perhaps a dozen rooms, with not a woman in any of them, and I received then the impression which I still hold, that narcotics and sex are not good companions, in spite of recent propaganda to the contrary. We ended in a small, well-decorated room, where the Denver man said, ‘I’m going to smoke till something happens.’” (412-413)
“Since the young people were inviting my comment on their behavior, I had to crystallize my thinking on the matter. What did I believe about drugs? My reactions were divided into three categories: heroin, LSD, marijuana. To understand my total rejection of the first, we must go back to Tokyo, where pretty Hiroko-san continued to put on her helipon act. It continued to be amusing until that Thursday when the Denver man shouted in the hall, ‘Fairbanks, for God’s sake, help me!’ I ran to his room, where Hiroko-san, loaded with the drug, had piled his shirts in the middle of the floor, doused them with hair oil, danced the broken ampules into them, then thrown herself upon the heap and with a razor severed her throat. To me, heroin would always be the sight of Hiroko-san’s blood on the white shirts.
Looking back upon a fair number of cases, I never met anyone who took heroin for any extended period whose life was not ruined. There may be people who have broken the habit and returned to productive lives, but I didn’t know them. The penalty heroin exacted was so devastating that anyone who carelessly stumbled into its use was condemning himself to misery; those who knowingly entrapped others ought to be jailed. I would rather lose my left arm than risk the terrors of heroin, and when the young people asked me, I said so.
When LSD first appeared on the medical horizon, I heard hopes that it was to be the cure for certain specific types of mental derangement, but this did not eventuate, and its widespread abuce by young people, with devastating effect on many of them, convinced me that it should be left strictly alone. Monica and Cato might seem to be able to handle it with what appeared to be minimal effects, but it could have destroyed Gretchen. I myself would not touch LSD, principally because I would be afraid of its impact on my nervous system, but also because my mind was already so expanded with ideas and music and the joy of nature that if it were further expanded by LSD, it would probably burst.
Marijuana raised problems which were especially difficult, because we had so few hard facts about the drug, even though it had been used for more than two thousand years. I had now watched at close hand many marijuana users, and the effects did not seem destructive, but two nagging questions persisted: Did marijuana escalate to more dangerous drugs? Did it induce a general lassitude which destroyed will? Medical testimony appeared strong that cannabis was not itself addictive, and I had found no user who admitted that he had picked up a craving that could be satiated only by strongr drugs. But it was obvious to me that the social milieu in which it was smoked did encourage further experimentation. Monica smoked grass in Vwarda, preached the doctrine in Torremolinos, and actively looked for LSD in Albufeira, principally because she was in an ambiente which enhanced her mood. What I am trying to say is: Marijuana itself might not lead to LSD, but the gang with whom one smoked it, might.
As to the question of lassitude, I was something of an expert. I had worked in seven countries where the use of marijuana was so common as to be almost a national habit, and I was disgusted by the society these countries had produced. Where were the libraries, the child-care centers, the elementary education, the highways, the committees on social justice? I saw only lethargy, both in individuals and in the society as a whole, and I concluded that marijuana was antithetical to the good life. It did destroy will.
I was not much impressed with the argument that marijuana was to the young what a martini was to the adult, for this was a false analogy masking a discrepancy: the milieu of martini-drinking neither led to heroin now induced an anti-social lethargy. In other words, the martini drinker could still function constructively, even though he might be damaging himself personally. As for the repeated argument that taking opium did not prevent Thomas De Quincy from writing well, I had never been excited by his results.” (415-417)
“John Keats would have understood the photograph and would not have asked, ‘Why would a man do such a thing?’ The more pertinent question would be, ‘If any man finds such joy in a given act, why would he do anything else?’” (483)
“The fool wanders, the wise man travels. - Thomas Fuller” (485)
“When J. Edgar Hoover announced that no respectable citizen could trust men who wore long hair and beads, Claude told the local Associated Press man, ‘Well, that takes care of Jesus Christ and Ulysses S. Grant.’” (485)
“Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because if you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.” (485)
“Lie down, I think I love you.” (485)
“My old man shouts, ‘Goddammit, you should listen to my fifty-eight years of experience;’ but what he had was one year of experience repeated fifty-eight times.” (485)
“A great country cannot wage a little war. - Duke of Wellington” (485)
“This world has no leaders. Convert the ordinary man on your left.” (485)
“Around the four walls, on platforms eight feet above the floor, were ranged twenty-four great tuns of sherry, cheap red table wine, good white, poorly mixed rosé and powerful cognac. The casks were dark with age, their brass hoops shining bright against the well-polished wood. Beneath these impressive barrels ran a comfortable alcove in the confusion that filled the central part of the bar, and in the alcoves thus cut off hung ceramic tiles which summarized the rural wisdom of Spain:
If Wine Interfered with Your Job,
Quit Your Job.
A Night of Good Drinking
Is Worth a Year’s Thinking.
The Worst Thing in the World Is a Drinking
Companion with a Memory.
If You Are Drinking to Forget,
Please Pay Before You Begin.
To and Old Man, Even Musty Wine Is like Mother’s Milk.
He Who Eats Well at This Table
And Drinks Well at This Bar
Dies of a Terrible Disease: Old Age.” (489)
“How Sweet It Is to Do Nothing All Day Long
And After Having Done So,
To Rest.” (514)
“Of those listening to us, the one who seemed to understand best what Gretchen had in mind was Cato. He had a strong sense of pilgrimage. He told us, ‘I’m convinced I don’t come to a monastery like this by accident. It must be for a purpose . . . but what? I can’t even guess.’ When I reminded him that all young men of character experience this sense of making a journey to find themselves, he said, ‘I don’t mean that jazz . . . the old gig about identity. I know damned well who I am. What I mean is that somewhere - down that valley maybe - there has got to be a secret which will make this whole thing come alive . . . give it significance.’ I told him that significance could come only from within, but this he would not accept. ‘Somebody knows the secret . . . say the mystic word and the mountain opens.’” (526-527)
As we ate - stout cheese, sausages hefty with garlic, excellent bread - Gretchen nibbled and said, ‘I suppose if we knew the facts, we’d find there have always been young people wandering over the face of Europe . . . pretty much as we do today. I don’t think of myself as unusual. Or you, either, Monica. You could have been coming down this road and munching this same kind of cheese seven hundred years ago. In fact, I feel much closer to the girls of that age who were on a real pilgrimage of the spirit than to some nitwit in suburban Boston today.’” (527)
“Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!
The story of that Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at preferment’s door,
One summer-morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn of gipsy-lore,
And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.” (528)
“God writes straight, but uses a crooked line.” (579)
“Where did non-violence get Martin Luther King? In the end.” (579)
“If one family of dinosaurs survived on earth, some son-of-a-bitch from West Oklahoma would claim he had a right to shoot the male.” (579)
“A barbecue pit in Alabama held this beauty contest and elected a cute colored chick to be Miss Barbecue 1970. So when she got back to her room she said, ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?’and the mirror snarled, ‘Snow White, you black bastard, and don’t you forget it.’” (579)
“Young men should travel, if but to amuse themselves. - Byron” (579)
“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ‘Tis all barren.’ - Laurence Sterne” (580)
“Support mental health of I’ll kill you.” (580)
“Help bring back white slavery.” (580)
“Before the war I used to see this Arab striding down the road followed by his three wives carrying the bundles. After the war I see him coming down the same road, with the same three wives carrying the same bundles, but this time they are in front and he is in the rear. I stop and tell him, ‘Abou, this is progress.’ He looks at me with contempt and says, ‘Not progress. Land mines.’” (655-656)
“The I-Ching is the Bible without its capitalistic moralizing.” (656)
“Old boys have their playthings as well as young ones; they difference is only in the price. - Franklin” (656)
“As late as 1941, when travelers from the desert arrived in Marrkech without their harems, they stayed at this hotel, and in every room there was a little Arab boy to satisfy their accustomed sexual needs. I have some of the old bills. ‘Boy, thirty-six piasters.’” (656)
“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history. - George Eliot” (656)
“Death is nature’s way of suggesting that you slow down.” (656)
“Being educated means to prefer the best not only to the worst but to the second best. - William Lyon Phelps” (656)
“Youth is truth.” (656)
“I thought, as I surveyed this filthy room with its extraordinary freight, that these busted students represented a significant portion of the new world that was evolving. They stood for that legion of lost young souls in Paris and London and Tokyo and Berlin who had rejected their societies. It was they who populated the communes in the hills above Taos, the colonies in Nepal and the caves of Crete. They were a new breed, most difficult to understand, and as I looked at this selection I thought of the homes from which they had come. They must have been little different from the home that I had left when young; their parents surely had the same hopes for them that mine had for me. Each of these sleeping six had probably gone to college and had busted out, forgeiting the tuition his parents had provided, and I wondered what those parents would have felt had they been able to stand where I was standing. This was the new part of the world, and the reverberations it was arousing would echo for many decades.
Then I visualized that familiar other part, those millions of young people throughout the United States and all nations who had entered college on the same terms as these six but who had found it possible to accommodate themselves to traditional demands, and I knew that the future work of society - the factories, the hospitals, the art museums, the city councils - would be accomplished by those who were back home learning and working in the way most young people have done throughout history. The drop-outs of California and derelicts of Marrakech were spectacular; the stable young people working at their education were reassuring. It was inspiring to remember that Harvard and Michigan and Tulane were producing just as many well trained graduates as ever, and that by and large it would be these students who would ensure the continuance of our society. Young men who had to learn calculus were learning it; girls who required chemistry were mastering it.
But then I had the nagging suspicion that the spiritual leadership of the society - whose physical continuance was assured by the standard students who stayed on the job - would probably be provided by those more adventurous ones who had picked up a vital part of their education in such unlikely dormitories as the Casino Royale in Marrakech or the pads in Greenwich Village. I thought of St. Paul, who gave the Christian church its greatest impetus; he came not from the conservative yeshiva but from the sinks and alleys of his day. The singers who would best express the spirit of this age would come not from Harvard or Stanford or Tulane, but from less-structured centers of learning like Pamplona or Copenhagen or Conakry, for the true education of a probing mind occurs unexpectedly and in surroundings that could have been neither anticipated nor provided.
I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him.
Standing in this mud-floored cubicle, with the stench of the latrine filling my nostrils and six unconscious scholars at my feet, I judged that of the young people then occupying the Casino, a good ninety per cent were already ruined for creative work. Of these doomed ones, a handful would escalate to heroin and become totally incompetent. Others would be content to move lazily from one marijuana session to the next, never completely incapacitated but never fully in control of their capacities. Some would acquire sex habits which they could not accommodate, and I would see them a decade from now haunting the Torremolinos bars or living in Algarve with some rich widow from London. And there would be others among the lost ninety per cent who would be stained by a terrible disease from which there was no recovery - memory - and these would repeat endlessly to the irritation of their friends, ‘You should have been with us that year in Marrakech.’ They would recall it as the high-water mark of their lives.
That left a group of about ten per cent from which would rise the survivors, the one or two who would come to see the world whole, who would comprehend life as a terrifying reality, a combination of accomplishment and failure, and who might provide some degree of spiritual guidance to the world. The education of such leaders is never easy, nor is it cheap or safe. No man with a precious son would educate him in the baleful way that Saul was educated, on the dicey chance that as an adult he might mature into St. Paul; no logical planner would require a crocodile to hatch a hundred eggs a hundred yards from water in hopes that one newborn reptile might make it to the river before hyenas and storks devoured him as they had his ninety-nine brothers and sisters, but that is the way nature has ordained it. The system is prodigal and tragic, but it functions.
As I looked at the disheveled crowd saying farewell to Claire and her Tarot cards, I would not have wanted to gamble that even one of that unkempt mob would ever produce anything, for apparently they were among the doomed; but I also knew that if I were given the job of finding the charismatic leader who could speak to the coming generation, I would stand a much better chance of finding him not in the antiseptic Mamounia where I slept, but here in the Casino Royale where they slept.
However, no sooner had I thought this than I realized that I was using the word leader in two senses. From the hard-working young people at home, who were completing their education in traditional fashion, would come constructive leaders like Aristotle, Pericles, Maimonides, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill, while from the Marrakech gang would rise meteoric figures like Saint Paul and Augustine, who had confessed to living in similar conditions, Byron and Dostoievsky, who had absorbed equivalent experiences, and Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler, who had been nurtured on the same kind of confused political thinking. I suspected that for all centuries to come the world would continue to produce and follow this same kind of dualism in its leadership and that history would be the record of interaction between the two worlds of Michigan and Marrakech.” (696-702)
“’O little did my mother think,
The day she cradled me,
What lands I was to travel through,
What death I was to dee.’” (706)
“Most older people who visited Marrakech were surprised to find that among the young Americans, there were practically no oldstyle American liberals. This was true for obvious reasons. To get as far as Marrakech required real money, so that those who made it had to come from well-to-do families of a conservative bent, and throughout the world children tend to follow the political attitudes of their fathers. A boy of nineteen might rebel against Harvard University, country-club weekends and the dress of his father, and run away to Marrakech to prove it, but his fundamental political and social attitudes would continue to be those his father had taught him at age eleven. In my work I constantly met conservative adult Americans who, when they saw the young people with long hair and beards, expected them to be revolutionaries; they were pleasantly gratifies to find that the young people were as reactionary as they were.” (708)
“The second surprising aspect was religion. It was rarely mentioned. Occasionally Cato referred to his hatred of what Christianity had done to the Negro, but he was speaking sociologically; Yigal sometimes spoke of the problems faced by the Jews in Israel, but only their political problems, never their theological. I would go for a month without hearing God mentioned, not even as a curse word. With this generation He had become an expletive, used primarily by girls, as when Monica or Britta cried, ‘My God, look!” He was used to draw attention to camels of especially beautiful mosques, but His ancient relationship to eschatology or morality was not referred to. I think if some college girl from our Midwest, sitting on the bed at Inger’s, had asked, ‘Do you believe in God?’ the crowd would have passed out stone-cold, as if hit by an extra strong cookie. About half the young people, especially those from Australia and Canada, were Catholic, but they were as indifferent as the others.
There was talk of morality, but only in the form of ethical conduct; the old problems of sexual morality that had plagued us so much when I was young no longer existed. If someone in the night sessions happened to tell a friend that ‘Margot moved in with Jack from Glasgow,’ it was descriptive and not pejorative. In face, the news was disseminated principally so that others might know where to find Margot without wasting a trip to the third floor.” (710-711)
“‘What we do,’ Rolf said, ‘is what any sensitive person would do. We take one look at that kaleidoscope . . . then we hear Jemail shouting from the entrance to the souks . . . and we see Big Loomis paddling along . . . and tears come into our eyes . . . and we come through the alleys to this hotel . . . and Léon says, “Your room is waiting,” and when everything is unpacked and the kids have dropped by to welcome us back and we’ve read our mail, we send Jemail out for some real fine grass and we roll a joint, and se we hand it back and forth we say, “we’ve come home.” This is the reality. Stockholm is where go into exile to help you run your asylums.’
It was nearly morning. As the last cigarette passed between the two, I asked, ‘But doesn’t it dull your energies?’
‘Life does that,’ she said.
‘Then you admit they are dulled?’
‘Yes. I can no longer take war or promotion or big income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and income or a large house seriously. I reject empire and Vietnam and placing a man on the moon. I deny time payments and looking like the girl next door and church weddings and a great deal more. If you want to blame such rejection on grass, you can do so. I charge it to awakening.’” (738)
“‘You go on long enough,’ Holt growled, ‘you become a bum.’
Now there was extended discussion of what the term ‘long enough’ meant, and someone asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘I don’t know much about girls, but for a man it’s almost impossible to waste a year before the age of thirty-five. Now if he wants to enter some field with a highly defined training period - say, medicine or engineering - he’d obviously lose time and relative advantage if he dropped out for five years, so if he wants to be a doctor or scientist he’d better get to it, even though his prescribed course might leave him narrow or even uneducated. But for everyone else, no year can be wasted. Knocking around Europe may be the very best thing a young man can do if he wants to become a great lawyer. Working in a lumber camp may be the real road to a vocation for the ministry. Suppose you want to be a fine dramatist. Maybe the route lies through Marrkech. I think a man has till the age of thirty-five for exploration.’” (747-748)
“But Gretchen remembered: ‘In Alte you told us that if your father was ever forced to see Ceylon as it actually was, he’d collapse.’
‘I said so then,’ Britta confessed, ‘but now I believe that men ought to inspect their dreams. And know them for what they are.’” (768)