A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (11 page)

In the meanwhile, why not write one? I had plenty of time at Yale; preparation for the courses was not hard, and even if I kept an evening free for the movie with friends (Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Clark Gable seemed to dominate our lives), the afternoons were utterly unoccupied. The Linonia and Brothers Reading Room of the Sterling Library offered comfortable alcoves where one was never interrupted, and I started work on a novel that was partially inspired by
Madame Bovary.

My heroine, whom I called Audrey Emerson, was to be endowed with half of every human quality; she would be half ambitious, half erotic, half intellectual, half honest, half unscrupulous, and so forth. By never being a total anything, she would wreak havoc in the lives of others. She would be born the discontented member of a lower-middle-class family that had once been upper. Her particular prey would be an idle, impecunious, but popular extra man in the highest New York society called Beverly Stregelinus, a name supposedly suggestive of a certain silliness in his nature. Beverly was a bit of an ass, but I tried to endow him with a soul.

The book came swiftly; a few months completed it. I felt an intensity of happiness in writing it that may have been equaled in later days but was never exceeded. I am aware that joy has not always been associated with the creative process, and the reading public often likes to think of its authors as suffering as they compose. Indeed some may, but I still suspect that Shakespeare went to a bar and had several jovial drinks after leaving King Lear in the storm and Desdemona with Othello's pillow on her face. I had my manuscript typed and sent it to Scribner's.

My novel was rejected but with an appreciative letter urging me to send them my next book. At twenty I should have been delighted. But no, I was grabbed by the folly of youth and decided in a fit of depression that I must give up all idea of ever becoming a writer and immediately drown myself in the study of law in any creditable law school that would accept me now, on the basis of three years at college. The University of Virginia Law School was one such, and I applied and was accepted. My poor father who paid for everything uncomplainingly urged me to at least finish at Yale. But, backed by Mother, I insisted and the following fall found me duly enrolled in Virginia Law, from which I graduated in 1941.

I took a private oath that I would write no more, certainly never while law school was in session, and the latter part I kept, but in the two summers of my law school years I wrote another novel that I destroyed. I threw it in the garbage pail and later, too late, tried to retrieve it. As I remember it, it was no loss to letters. I did not write again until the last year of the war when my ship was undergoing extensive repairs in port, and then I wrote the novel that was ultimately published as
The Indifferent Children.

It is now time to describe the role that my skeptical mother, Priscilla, played in my writing career. She had thoroughly approved of my leaving Yale for law school. A woman with a firm sense of the necessity of one's filling one's proper role, she had always been obsessed with the notion that hers—assigned, I believe, by incomprehensible gods—was the maternal one, though it was the role for which she was least qualified. Instead of leaving her children blessedly alone she interfered reluctantly and unsuccessfully in their lives.

She took an early and unfortunate interest in my writing. She decided not only that I had no outstanding talent but that my efforts showed a worldly streak that if published would make me look vulgar and hurt me with serious people in any career that I adopted. She believed that the world needed second- and even third-rate lawyers, doctors, dentists, etc., but that it had no need of artists and writers except the very best, of whom I would certainly not be one. She had no doubt that I would do perfectly well in a nonartistic career, and she sincerely, even passionately, believed that she was sparing me misery in aborting any literary choice on my part.

She was so upset by the decision of Prentice-Hall to publish
The Indifferent Children
that she brought all her heat on me to use a pen name, and I weakly succumbed. She was convinced it would hurt me in the eyes of the partners of Sullivan & Cromwell. But, of course they didn't give a damn. Yet Mother was never convinced that I might make a go of writing as a career, even after I had brought out several books that sold quite well and were favorably reviewed. When I married she was afraid my wife's family would disapprove of the novel I published at the time. They didn't.

When she came around at last to my side it was much later with the appearance of the one novel I would have thought she would have most feared. In
The Embezzler,
published in 1966, many years after I was established as a novelist, I described in exact detail the crime of Richard Whitney, once head of the New York Stock Exchange and brother of the senior partner of J. P. Morgan & Co. I even read the text of his trial to get it right.

But the characters in the novel were not even remotely based on members of the Whitney Family. Nonetheless, Mrs. George Whitney, wife of the head of Morgan, and herself the daughter of a Morgan partner, a formidable social presence in New York and a friend of Mother's, got wind of what I was doing and asked me to kill the book, as yet unprinted. I told her that her brother-in-law's crime was an integral part of American financial history and available to all. She said yes, but people had stopped talking about it and that my book would be a bestseller and start them up again. This turned out to be true, but I could hardly give in and didn't.

Why wasn't
The Embezzler
Mother's nightmare? Both her family and Father's were tightly linked to the House of Morgan. She used to say that she was relieved of her concerns by Martha Whitney whom she apparently fancied looking over her shoulder when she read anything of mine. When Mrs. Whitney requested that my novel not be published, Mother snorted: "Who does Martha think she is that she can demand the suppression of Louis' book?" And she came down solidly on my side where she remained for the rest of her life, reading everything I wrote in manuscript and giving me wonderful advice.

At Yale, as far as preparing myself to write, there had been nothing for me to aim at. I had no interest in the
Daily News
or any fraternity or senior society. It was not until law school that the concept of competition entered my life. Admission to Yale had been easy and in those days cost my parents little. Like most of my friends I took the whole college business for granted. None of us really went to work until professional school or a first job. Then we did.

D
URING ALMOST ALL
of 1941 we were still at peace, although it was beginning to seem inevitable that we should enter the war. England, which had seemed fated to go under in 1940, had survived thanks to the heroism of the Royal Air Force, and most of my friends were either applying for military commissions or actually in training for them.

Much earlier I had applied for a commission as an ensign in naval intelligence on the theory (not yet wholly discounted) that we might never get into the war and that this would be the most comfortable way to avoid the draft. It was, however, widely regarded as a way of seeking a noncombat position, and I'm afraid this was a factor in my thinking. Mother was active in "America First" antiwar activity—anything to spare her sons the risk of gunfire—and I had tried to persuade myself that the best way to end the European conflict was by a stalemate. It would also be the safest and easiest solution for myself.

As the war clouds darkened the skies at home, I began to feel ashamed. A weekend spent with Bill Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania, convinced me that shame, indeed, was what I should be feeling. Bill's mother, a remarkable woman and a great Republican leader in her state, made no secret, although never offensively, of her poor opinion of men who in any way sought to avoid combat in the coming conflict.

Mrs. Scranton to me was a kind of saint. All the servants in her large household were ex-convicts for whom, when she deemed them ready to return to society, she used her considerable political power to get jobs fitting their skills. But her old butler refused to go, telling her, "When I leave your service, Ma'am, it will be feet first."

Returning home I put in an application to the navy to change the commission sought from IVS (Intelligence Volunteer Special) to DVG (Deck Volunteer General), which meant that I should be sent for sea training, with so many of my friends, to the old battleship
Prairie State,
moored up the Hudson. Its graduates were ensigns known as "ninety-day wonders," and I slept easier at night now that I thought I had removed a blot on my character.

But the imps of comedy, who are always on the watch, were not going to let me get away with anything as easily as that. Sea duty I should have, a couple of oceans of it, but I should pay first with a year of misery. Pearl Harbor struck, and with it came the unwelcome intelligence commission and orders to proceed to the Panama Canal Zone. To protest that I was waiting for a different commission would look like avoiding an overseas assignment and was impossible.

***

Before actually leaving for the Canal Zone I was briefly on duty at 50 Church Street interviewing persons who had endorsed applicants for intelligence commissions. Were such endorsements based on a true knowledge of the candidate or were they simply family or business favors? Often the endorsers were men or women of public importance whom we interviewers were anxious to meet, and there was a good deal of swapping of names behind the scenes.

I remember an eager young lawyer swapping the lyric soprano Geraldine Farrar for two justices of the Appellate Division. It was all mildly diverting, and I still hoped for a reprieve to the
Prairie State,
but no. Orders to the Canal Zone duly arrived and I found myself for wretched months in a tropical office, a bureaucratic nightmare, where my job was to check Americans passing through the zone to South America against lists of semisuspects, including people who had Japanese servants! And all the while my friends were transiting the third lock of the great canal nearest our office on their way to battle and sometimes to their death. Oh, the imps of comedy knew their job.

Even when they finally relaxed and let me go to sea, it was for some months a touch ludicrous, for it was aboard a former luxury yacht, essentially useless to the war effort. The navy didn't know what to do with us, so we were sent, in the interest of the Good Neighbor policy, to Guayaquil to train Ecuadorian midshipmen. While there, for some unknown reason, the cruiser
Concord
steamed in on her way to a Far East destiny, and we fell under her jurisdiction. As senior officer afloat, I was assigned the duty, with shore patrol of four sailors, of cleaning out the Guayaquil cathouses at midnight. Of course they were full of the
Concord's
crew. I would be entertained by the madame with a rotten native brandy while my men roused the sailors upstairs. It was easy work, for in wartime naval discipline really operated, and when it was over I and my foursome posed for a fine photograph, which I sent to my mother without explaining what it was.

Father had an aunt, Jane, widow of his mother's brother, Charles H. Russell. He had been somebody special to us as a founder of Stetson, Jennings, and Russell (later Davis Polk), Father's firm. Aunt Jane, a tremendous war hawk, was a great character and someone on whom it was incumbent for me to call when I came home on leave. All visitors had to view respectfully a huge cardboard hoisted on an easel in her living room, on which were pasted articles and photographs relating to the heroic deeds of her relatives and friends in the war. My photograph, taken in these somewhat compromising circumstances, soon appeared on Aunt Jane's easel. This led the imps, who knew the tale behind the photo, to laugh their fill, but by this time, my application for amphibious duty successful, I had more pressing concerns for I had been given a glimpse of reality on the Normandy beaches.

A
T SOME, NOW HARD
to place moment, I found myself in the Atlantic Ocean, part of a crew of 103, absurdly large for a vessel that was nothing but a sea truck that traveled in convoys protected by destroyers. The British LST, identical with ours, both having been made in the United States, was run with equal efficiency by a crew of twenty.

The navy didn't choose its best personnel for amphibious vessels, and we had onboard boys from the hills of Tennessee who had inherited prejudices originating in the Revolution and who hesitated to place foot on English soil even for liberty. We had four black sailors who under the navy's Jim Crow policy had to be officers' stewards, but they loved England where, as one of them told me, they were treated like human beings.

The oddest man I had onboard, appropriately called Valentine, informed me when we were actually under way for Normandy that his battle station had been changed to a 20 MM gun. "And I'm a conscientious objector!" was his outraged complaint. And indeed he was; some naval clerk had mixed up his papers. But he was a reasonable man and finally agreed he would not be helping the war effort if stationed in the laundry.

The officers, except for the captain and engineer who were mustangs, temporarily commissioned chief petty officers from the regular navy, were all young college graduates and pleasantly helpful to me. One of the difficulties college men had in the war was adjusting themselves to taking orders from men of obviously inferior intelligence. This difficulty did not affect any of my friends who had been to boarding school. The one thing that had been thoroughly taught there was that orders and reason have no necessary connection.

One of the most difficult things a man can suffer is fear. It is worse for a man than a woman, for in addition to the pain involved he is often disgraced, as a true man is supposed either to be above fear or able to keep it hidden. Courage is universally admired, and much decorated by the military, though it may be a free gift of the gods to the rare souls who are born with the luck to be fearless.