The Blue Touch Paper (11 page)

Procedure in the classroom presented its own pitfalls. I realised that teaching, like journalism, is something which is dangerously easy to do badly. Thomas Jefferson said you should never quarrel with a man who owns a barrel of ink. In the same way, you should never quarrel with the man or woman who is holding the chalk. They have an unfair advantage. Theirs will always be the last word. As in journalism, there is an imbalance in the power relationship which needs to be admitted if it is to be kept in check. Janet Malcolm's resounding declaration in
The Journalist and the Murderer
that ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible' should also be pinned on every teacher's blackboard. On the whole I acquitted myself decently. I had a few outstanding students in the sixth form whom I could approach as equals. They were almost my age, after all, and no less bright. For them, I was running something more like a seminar than a class. And I also had junior classes of thirteen-year-olds, full of promise, whose eager desire to express themselves I would never have dreamt of abusing. But once or twice I felt myself, on lazy days, tipping over into something less pleasant, of which I was deeply ashamed. I still hated myself, after all, and teaching played to a flaw in my character – an ability to dominate a situation by showing off. Worse,
I was occasionally more concerned to press home and win an argument than I was to go after the truth.

These were ugly characteristics. I had known for some time that I had acquired a new role, and the role was that of a young man on the make. To be aware of this offered me no obvious way of dealing with it. Who was I? Julien Sorel? A scholarship boy, ascending through society? So it was a relief, after saving £80 from my eight weeks of teaching, to go and join Roger at Heathrow on 9 April 1965, before flying to Glasgow for the first hop to Reykjavik. There we deplaned from a shuddering prop jet at 3 a.m. to eat lukewarm fish and chips in the passenger lounge before continuing on the interminable journey to New York. Icelandic Air was known by everyone to offer the best bargains in the skies, if glimpses of the red-hot engine parts didn't put you off. We had both been supplied with green cards at the American Embassy. In those days they were handed out like jelly beans. So we breezed effortlessly through the recently renamed John F. Kennedy airport before flying on to LA.

I had been abroad a few times – a desolate family holiday in Ostend and Bruges, the educational stint in St Germain, a trip once to eat paella and meet my father's boat in Palma, Mallorca – but nothing in Europe had prepared me for this. The magnificent Californian light, the wide-open sky, the palm trees and, later, the dazzling surf hit me in an eye which was regulated only to English grey. My irises shrunk to pins. I arrived with no particular feeling for American culture. Yes, I read Kerouac and Ginsberg, but I was not one of those people who dreamed of diners and pony tails and barn dances. Europeans like Françoise Dorléac, Romy Schneider and Claudia Cardinale possessed my romantic imagination in a way Marilyn Monroe never could, accomplished comedienne as she was.
Bitter Rice
,
with Silvana Mangano among rows of Italian women labouring up to their knees in water in the fields, was insanely sexier than
Pillow Talk
with Doris Day. Only the upward inflections of Martin Luther King's aspirational voice had an American melody whose music touched me deeply. But even so, as Roger and I stood at the top of the aircraft steps, looking out at the bubbling tarmac, I did feel an uplift of spirits at visiting a world which was, in every aspect, so wholly different from the one I knew.

Virginia Johnson was there to meet us. A pioneering primal scream therapist and psychoanalyst in her mid-fifties, she was understandably touchy about so often being confused with the Virginia Johnson who was, with William Masters, all over the newspapers as a pioneer in the study of human sexual response. Our Virginia, considering her profession, was rather prim in that regard and, for someone regularly exploring the wilder shores of human depravity, lip-puckeringly right-wing in her social views. She was married to Ed Cornell, a short, silver-haired and tanned electrician who worked every day at Warner Brothers, humping lights and cables. Ed had a talent for chess which in better days had made him the regular on-set partner for Humphrey Bogart. His regular disquisitions, beer in hand, on the decline of the studios sounded pretty much like my father's on the decline of the navy. A few years later, his son from a previous marriage was killed pointlessly on a training exercise in Vietnam. Ed would not be able to recover. Henceforth, a tiny glissade of pain would pass across his face whenever Ed Jr was recalled. We were soon to hear of many such bitter bereavements, bereavements which did so much to change America's idea of itself. People who talk today about America losing its optimism in the new century have surely
mislaid memories of the 1960s. Together, Ed and Virginia lived in a house in West Hollywood too small to accommodate us, so Virginia had arranged that, before we started work as house-painters, we should stay with a couple of her patients in Van Nuys, Knute and Phyllis Fritz.

It was to be a continuing problem of our first visit to the US that almost everyone who open-heartedly received us as guests all over the country was either a patient or an ex-patient of Virginia's. Many had done primal therapy. They therefore believed that they had suffered serious trauma either at the time of their birth or soon after. Meeting a succession of such people may have given us a warped view of America, but it certainly gave us a distinctive one. Since, later, it had also fallen to us to reorganise Virginia's extensive filing system, we had acquired rather intimate knowledge of their current problems. We had often read out loud to each other the lurid details, sometimes of the patients' experiences, sometimes of their fantasies. Roger had a sense of humour no less callous than my own, so we would come to spend many of our vacant hours roaring with laughter at the neuroses of the people we were staying with. ‘Oh, so that's the guy who can only ejaculate in a plastic bag!' On our very first night in California, after a somewhat halting meal with the Fritzes, Roger and I were put up in bunk beds, where we spoke with misguided freedom about the social shortcomings of our hosts. ‘What a couple of weirdos!' Next morning we came down to a chilly reception and were asked to pack our bags. Knute, it turned out, was a technology freak and had wired our bedroom with microphones, no doubt in the hope of overhearing something rather more flattering.

The unexpected thing about this disastrous start to our trip was that it seemed to amuse Virginia rather than dismay her.
We reported back, luggage in hand, thinking she would be furious. But much to our surprise, she took the whole incident in her stride, as though this were indeed one of the acknowledged problems faced by anyone who stayed with the Fritzes. They bugged your conversation. What could you do? But it was also as if it had never occurred to her that the American preoccupation with yourself and the unique problems of your own sexuality – at that time so sharply contrasting with British reserve – was, among other things, hilariously funny. Far from resenting two English schoolboys who were so quick to mock her work, she began to see it through our eyes and to take as much pleasure in laughing at it as we did. Her sense of the ridiculous was liberated. At various times when we were rationalising her paperwork, she would actually call us through to witness the drug-induced birth re-enactment which was at the centre of the treatment. ‘Come in, boys, see this!' Virginia would roll her eyes at us as the adult ‘foetus' was delivered, bawling and oblivious, onto the carpet. She loved recalling that her most damaged patient had been traumatised for life, he said, by the embedded memory of the obstetrician saying casually to a colleague as the baby emerged, ‘Hey, this one's coming out like a pretzel.' How the baby had absorbed sounds he could only four years later translate into language remained unexplained.

At first, Virginia put us up on a sofa and a camp bed in her Westwood office, where we worked to repay her hospitality. We were both pale-skinned and painfully thin from the inadequate British post-war diet. Potatoes and milk had done little for us. Pictures show us looking like albino mice, wearing shapeless cardigans and sandals with socks. So it was a liberation to be moved out to the beach, and to spend the day stripped to the waist, paint-brushes in hand, doing a physical job and
admiring the unselfconscious Californian freedom of bronzed girls who cut their blue jeans off at the thigh. Wow, what confidence! Teenagers, owning Ford Mustangs! We slept on site, with the sound of the ocean nearby. We had both got bargain tickets from Continental Trailways, the rival bus company to Greyhound, which allowed us to travel as far as we wanted in the US, without limit, for ninety-nine days, all for ninety-nine dollars. Once the beach house was spick and span, our first trip was to San Diego, with a quick visit to the seedy Mexican border town of Tijuana. We then headed straight back up the coast to Santa Barbara because we had heard it boasted a campus, part of the University of California, which led down to the sea. There we made nightly visits to a disco where we watched an assured student who mesmerised admiring young women with his impressions of Marlon Brando as Terry in
On the Waterfront
. ‘You don't understand, I coulda had class, I coulda been a contender.' He was, we were told, the son of Kirk Douglas. His name was Michael. But even more impressively, in Santa Barbara we also went to a screening of
Shanghai Express
hosted by Josef von Sternberg himself.

At that stage in his life – he must have been seventy – the great imposter had forsaken the jodhpurs and riding whip which he had assumed in the 1920s to make himself look like a film director, though he had held on to the von. He could still demonstrate the techniques he had invented for the butterfly lighting which made Marlene Dietrich the most alluring of screen stars. You hang a hanky over a lamp. His dismissal of all cinema which had followed was absolute. Not a single film since 1937 had deserved his approval. ‘After my films, there is nothing! Nothing!' Roger, braver than I, stood up after a half-hour torrent of contempt by von Sternberg for everything
that wasn't von Sternberg, and observed that although he had enjoyed
Shanghai Express
very much, he felt that perhaps the performance of the leading man, Clive Brook, opposite Dietrich, had been a little wooden. Von Sternberg looked at Roger without pity. ‘Vooden? Vooden? Of course he's vooden, he's English!'

After a quick trip up to the redwood forests and Seattle via San Francisco, we set off in June on a U-shaped bus journey round the Southern States and on to New York. At an early stop in Texas we stayed with Chuck Bothner, another of Virginia's wilder patients, who worked on the White Sands rocket programme outside El Paso. Inside the house he had a machine for opening doors unaided. When, before a lightning trip across the border to Juarez in Mexico, I casually put my hand on the bonnet of his immaculate Mercedes, I received an electric shock which went through my whole body. When I asked, ‘What the hell?' Chuck told me he had wired it to stop anyone stealing the Mercedes symbol. ‘They get stolen all the time,' he said. Freeloaders, Roger and I were finding invitations multiplying with every stop. Each billet spawned five more. In those days British teenagers travelling through the more distant parts of America were a welcome rarity, so we were received not so much as individuals but as young ambassadors from a foreign culture. When we got out of the bus in Phoenix it was 112 degrees. We got straight back in. We lived for a week or so in New Orleans on a refined diet of doughnuts, oysters and traditional jazz.

It was only as we stopped going east and turned north that our trip began to become at once both more sinister and more serious. We tended to arrive in towns in the early mornings after fitful sleep on overnight bus rides. One morning we got off in Montgomery, Alabama, and walked straight into a
threatening atmosphere as we went to drink coffee in the diner at the bus station. There had been a big race demonstration the day before, and the air was still thick with police violence. The only white people in the area, we moved carefully. This was the South as represented in Michael Roemer's great film
Nothing But a Man
, shot in Birmingham only a couple of years previously. As some sort of joke, our hosts told us to go and say hello to the notorious Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, whose intransigent white supremacism was an international symbol of bigotry. Only two years earlier he had stood at the University of Alabama trying to stop the enrolment of two black students. We walked up the steps of the Capitol and told the attendants that we were a couple of boys from England who wanted to meet him. Wallace came out within a few minutes, and we stood in the splendour of the state legislature exchanging pleasantries. His social awkwardness matched our own.

The idea of meeting Wallace in person had been suggested by two of his most principled opponents, with whom we were staying for a few days. Together they impressed both me and Roger more than anyone we had ever met. Later, I would get to know a few American radicals, and to love them deeply, mostly for the courage they show in the sheer unlikeliness of their cause. Their powerlessness seems to bring forth realism. You find in them a toughness and a sense of humour often lacking in their more pampered British counterparts. The vastness of the challenge for an American socialist evinces a corresponding vastness of soul. That night, among the fireflies, we sat on a Southern balcony drinking mint juleps with Clifford and Virginia Durr. Virginia was the daughter of a Presbyterian preacher and a passionate advocate of equality and voting rights for African Americans. At one point she had been a schoolteacher, then had
run for the US Senate on the Progressive ticket from Virginia in 1948. Clifford, her husband, had been a New Dealer, a lawyer in the Roosevelt administration who had played his part in the life-saving financial reconstruction following the crash. He had later set up a law firm in Montgomery which represented civil rights activists. It was Clifford and Virginia together who had, in 1955, bailed out their good friend Rosa Parks when she had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Clifford had then represented Parks when she had brought her epoch-making case in the state court.