When they neared Gibraltar, there was no way he was going to let them off. To dock in Gibraltar would have cost him five thousand dollars. He had been talking to them non-stop since he picked them up, and he went on talking to them as the Ro/Ro went through the Mediterranean. Without a doubt, they heard at least three times about each of the old skippers with whom Washburn had sailed when he was young, and on whose seamanship he had modelled his own: Leadline Dunn, Terrible Terry Harmon, Dirty Shirt George Price, Rebel Frazier, Clean Shirt George Price, Herbert P. High Pressure Erwin. Captain Washburn had saved the young men’s lives, and now he was talking them to death.
He let them off in Port Said.
The Valley
I am happy to say that I never took up a promising piece called “The Valley.” I achieved this ambiguously negative and positive attitude in 2016. The idea, and even the title, had come to me on a frozen lake in northernmost Maine in 1984. In a light plane equipped with skis, I was flying from lake to lake with a warden pilot named John McPhee (yes), who was checking the licenses of people fishing through the ice. On the small lake—near the Canadian border, which is also the St. John River—were two quite separate ice-fishing shacks, and while the warden lingered at the first one I walked on toward the other.
People who live on or near the St. John refer to their world as the Valley. Some are Americans, some are Canadians, but they call themselves and think of themselves as people of the Valley. They have more in common with one another than they do with the people elsewhere in their own countries. On the shelves of an American general store, you would see Mélasse de Fantaisie, Pure de la Barbade, Scott Tissue, Sirop d’Érable Pur, and Ivory Liquid Detergent. As I walked across the snow-covered ice, a kid came out of the fishing shack and walked toward me. He appeared to be teen-aged, an American high-school student, evidently alone there and glad to have some company. With a big welcoming smile, he said to me, “Parlez-vous français?”
Along the Rio Grande in southern Texas, people on both sides of the river refer to the place where they live as the Valley. What I thought of writing, under that singular title, was a composition of alternating parts from the American-Mexican and American-Canadian milieus. I let thirty years go by while I mused about it, then along came Donald Trump with his cockamamie wall, and instead of writing “The Valley” I found myself scribbling incoherent abstracts like “Trumpty Dumpty sat on a wall” and “Oh, say, can you see what my base sees in me?”
December 19, 1943
In Sunday school, in the fall of the year when I was twelve years old, I was told that I would be ushering and passing a collection plate at the Christmas pageant, an annual living crèche in the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton. I hated Sunday school. I resented having to attend. I learned nothing. I went to school Monday through Friday and that was enough. I was a spiritual wasteland, then as now. But I shrugged and didn’t think about the pageant until the day was nigh and Julian Boyd—who was thirteen, and did not go to Sunday school—told me about adventures he was having skating up the ice-covered Millstone River, and asked me to come with him on, as it happened, the afternoon of the Christmas pageant. With no hesitation, I said I would.
My mother saw this in a different light. She said, “You are not going skating with Julian. You are ushering at the Christmas pageant.”
I pointed out that I was just one of several ushers.
Her next remark was identical to the first one.
John Graham, twelve years old, had been invited by Julian to skate up the Millstone on the same afternoon. John was in no way burdened by religion, and planned to go. Charlie Howard, twelve, had already skated up the river with Julian, and would be coming along this time, too.
My mother was—in a word she liked—adamant. I howled and moaned and griped and begged. Adamant.
The afternoon came, and by now you may have guessed where I was. In church. Passing the plate. Mad as hell. Obedient.
John Graham had come down with a severe cold, and stayed at home in bed.
Julian and Charlie died at an isolated place called the Sheep Wash, where the current of the Millstone sped up and the ice as a result was thin. Next day, their bodies were collected off the bottom with grappling hooks. Each boy’s arms were stiff, and reaching forward, straight out from the shoulders. They had gone into the water through the thin ice, then clung to stronger ice closer to the edge of the river, but had not been able to climb out. Their arms reached over the ice, supporting them, until the cold killed them.
Their small coffins were placed side by side in the crossing under the choir loft in the Princeton University Chapel. Helen Howard, Charlie’s mother, was nearby, with Charlie’s father, Stanley Howard, a professor of economics; as was Grace Boyd, Julian’s mother, with her younger son, Kenneth, and her husband, Julian Boyd, editor of “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.” This was the second such funeral for the Boyds, who had lost a daughter some years before.
I did not know Charlie Howard well, and the impact of his death stopped there. Not so with Julian, whose future has remained beside me through all my extending past. That is to say, where would he have been, and doing what, when? From time to time across the decades, I have thought of writing something, tracing parallel to mine the life he would have lived, might have lived. A chronology, a chronicle, a lost C.V. But such, of course, from the first imagined day, is fiction. Actually, I have to try not to think about him, because I see those arms reaching forward, grasping nothing.
The Dutch Ship Tyger
The Tiger, or Tyger, a merchant vessel from the Netherlands, crossed the Atlantic in 1613. The skipper’s name was Adriaen Block, and the ship’s mission was to fill up with furs obtained from American tribes. Across recent decades, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have parsed its story to a fare-thee-well, but records are very limited and much of the Tyger’s story, while long thought to be true, is based on probability and conjecture. In repeating it here, I have been mindful of scholars’ facts and suppositions while preserving the story as I learned it. Furs collected, the Dutch ship was anchored in the Hudson River at Manhattan when it caught fire and burned to the waterline, and the crew were as stranded as they would have been had the island beside them been in Micronesia. After beaching the Tyger and removing some materials, the crew went ashore, marooned.
I first heard about the Tyger from Bob VanDeventer, in 1962, when he was working for the Port of New York Authority, on Eighth Avenue, and I at Time: The Weekly Newsmagazine, on Sixth. We had been friends and teammates in high school. He was now an inchoate writer of fiction and I the other way around. At lunch one day in Greenwich Village, I told him that I had written to The New Yorker asking to become a contributor, and had received a response inviting me to submit some sample writing at the length of the pieces in The New Yorker’s section called The Talk of the Town.
I have long meant to amplify this account as part of an anti-cautionary tale for young writers, as a chronicle of rejection as a curable disease, and as a reminder that most writers grow slowly over time, but so far I’ve preferred just to tell it to them. In short, I was in high school when I decided that what I wanted to do in life was write for The New Yorker, in college when I first sent a manuscript to the magazine, and in college when I filed away that first rejection slip and the second and the sixteenth, then on through my twenties and into my thirties, when the whole of that collection of rejection slips could have papered a wall.
The New Yorker person who wrote back to me in 1962 was Leo Hofeller, whose title was executive editor. I sent him a couple of pieces that I don’t remember, and a piece on an urban farmer who was growing sweet corn in a vacant lot on Avenue C, but the one I had the most hope for was about the Dutch ship. It was such a New York story. In my mind’s eye, I could see it under The New Yorker’s distinct Rea Irvin typeface. As the story unfolded, Adriaen Block and his crew built log cabins, about where the twin towers of the World Trade Center would be built. They lived in the cabins through the winter of 1614 and were the first European residents of Manhattan. They busied themselves building a small caravel, and in the spring went off to hunt for a ship to take them home. They sailed up the East River into Long Island Sound, and beyond Montauk Point they saw in the ocean—freestanding and imposing—the island that they named for Adriaen Block. Looking for a way home, they found it, probably on a merchant ship that happened upon them and picked them up.
In 1916, sandhogs digging a subway tunnel under Greenwich and Dey Streets—on the seventeenth-century shoreline of Manhattan—encountered the bow of an ancient ship sticking out from one side. They were about to destroy it when their history-minded foreman told them to cut it off and keep those eight and a half feet whole. Today, that piece is in the Museum of the City of New York. Long thought to have been the prow of the Tyger, it is now ascribed to a somewhat later era. The rest of the ship was not removed and was probably destroyed in the nineteen-sixties, during the excavation for the Twin Towers. In 1962, meanwhile, preparing my sample Talk pieces for Leo Hofeller, I visited the museum, on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, and I went to Brooklyn to interview James Kelly, the sandhog foreman who had caused the nautical artifact to be preserved. Amiable, informative, delightful, he was no longer digging subways, having become an official historian of the City of Brooklyn.
A couple of weeks after I sent in those sample Talk pieces, a note came from Hofeller. He would like to talk. Could I come to 25 West Forty-third Street at a certain time on a certain day. Could I! I found his office, on the nineteenth floor. On his desk were my sample pieces and the Daily Racing Form. He was colloquial, a little gruff. He said, “These pieces are pretty good.” He paused, and looked at me in a way suggesting that he had placed a bet and was feeling bettor’s remorse. Then he said, “Now, don’t misunderstand me. I said ‘pretty good.’ I did not say ‘very good.’ ” That the magazine had no intention of buying any of those sample pieces was clear without articulation, but Hofeller did finish off the meeting by suggesting that as time went along I might suggest to the magazine longer projects that I might do.
About then, Harold Hayes, an editor at Esquire, wrote to me at Time and asked if I would like to freelance a piece for Esquire, and, if so, we could talk about it over lunch. I had never met him, but he had apparently read a couple of my Time cover stories, probably the ones on Jackie Gleason and Sophia Loren. In Princeton, New Jersey, my home town, I had bought some property and was planning to build a house, and was therefore moonlighting feverishly to help pay for it. As a writer at Time, you could freelance not only for other Time Inc. publications but also for sections of Time itself other than your own. I was the writer of the Show Business section. So I reviewed books at a nervous clip. The extra pay was good. For Time-Life Books, I anonymously revised a manuscript that had made them unhappy. And I went to lunch with Harold Hayes.
I told him that I had once suited up to play basketball for the University of Cambridge against Her Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers in the central courtyard of the Tower of London, a venue that was shifted at the last moment because a lorry backed into and brought down one of the baskets. I had been thinking of writing the story on a freelance basis for some time. Now, said Hayes, happily commissioning the piece, but after I wrote it and sent it to him he rejected it. Depressed, thirty-one years old, I recklessly sent it to Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker simultaneously. A few weeks went by, another freelanced book review, and then my phone rang at Time. The New Yorker was buying the piece. Oh, my God. Breathlessly, I went to the elevator and down to Sports Illustrated and called on Jack Tibby, an assistant managing editor, who coördinated outside submissions. I had not previously met him. I asked him to return the manuscript to me, and I said why. A large pile of manuscripts was on a corner of his desk. He said that actually Sports Illustrated was quite interested in the manuscript and he could not give it back to me. Hunting for it in the pile on his desk, he needed some minutes to find it. As he searched, he was murmuring something, and it soon blossomed into a cloud of fury. How dared I—a Time Inc. writer—submit a piece to The New Yorker? He was going to see that this breach of loyalty was reported to Henry Luce and everybody else on the thirty-fourth floor, not to mention Otto Fuerbringer, the managing editor of Time. Above all, he would try to see to it that the sale to The New Yorker was blocked. Shell-shocked, I interrupted him. “Mr. Tibby,” I blurted, “I beg you not to do that.” I told him this was the most important moment of my professional life, that I had been trying to sell something to The New Yorker for fifteen years and everything had failed. “I beg you to give me that manuscript.” He looked at me for a long moment, his face softened, and he handed me the story. I never heard of or from him again.
