‘1953: Like others I have met, they are surprised at my extreme youth and great maturity. Must it always be like that?’
No, you little drip, believe me, some day it will be your great age and extreme silliness that surprise them. But I must not be too hard on myself then, for judging every word I wrote, even more tellingly those I didn’t, was the phantom of my journal’s only likely reader, my most severe critic, my mother. Moreover, I suffered from the inescapable pretensions of late teen years, as well as the darned and ravelling yet distinctly bluestocking standards of Barnard College.
In the days after my journal came to light I began to consider and finally to plan retracing the journey that changed me for keeps. During the more than thirty years I have lived in Europe, I have travelled out of my neighbourhood, England, occasionally and only for a purpose generally connected to my profession of jobbing journalist and writer. True enough, I often go to France, but it hardly counts as a journey for I have a small flat in the Pas de Calais; I call it the ‘west wing’ of my equally small flat in London. Italy? I have been only once or twice in all these decades to visit friends in Tuscany; I’ve been to Mexico many times more than to Holland, and to Africa twice as often as to Germany. Soon, the idea of repeating the Grand Tour of my youth started to become compelling. Now that I am coming to the end of most desires, would I rediscover the joyous excitement of my first journal? Now that I am catching up in years with the stones of Rome, would I find the same enchantment in antiquity? Now that American tourists are two a penny, not the rare birds we were in the 1950s, would there be the same dawning sense not only of discovery, also of being discovered? And with the guide and talisman of my old journal in hand could I perhaps reverse time for a moment? Could I meet myself as I was at eighteen, sitting in the Tuileries gardens in Paris, weeping because I did not want to leave? I wish I could have begun precisely as I did the first time, sailing away from Manhattan, a jagged comb on the beach, to embark on a long, slow voyage over what I hear Americans now refer to as ‘the pond’. We did not take the Atlantic so lightly in those days. Many of us had living ancestors like mine who had crossed that great sea in terror and in hope. East-coast kids with itchy feet commonly undertook a pioneering trek into America’s alien inner spaces where a lot of them settled to raise local standards and money and children. Fewer of us, however, were called to a choppy crossing of the mighty ocean that separated us Americans from our history.
The Castel Felice was no insulated five-star liner, that’s for sure.
‘1954: We eat at long trestle tables. It looks like the set for a prison movie except it never stops moving and there are no attempted escapes. Where there is a strong breeze, hardly anyone turns up for meals. Ass-in-igned has hardly moved out of the lower berth and the Nothings are green. I haven’t felt a twinge of seasickness yet. But I’d better not crow about that until the journey is over. The food is surprisingly awful. But the Italian stewards are delicious. While he was serving the awful soup, one of them whispered in English that he was very fond of me. Alas, I love another. The man who makes the crew announcements over the loudspeaker has stolen my heart. “Subito, Adriano …” he says three or four times a day. Evelyn says Adriano must be a real good-for-nothing as he is never where he ought to be. I don’t know who Adriano is but isn’t it a lovely name? And I envy him being summoned to that dreamy voice.’
The Castel Felice was, in fact, an endearing old tub; in timorous, litigious times like these she would certainly be retired as unseaworthy. Her sort of no-frills ship for students was going to be replaced by cheap charter flights that turn the sea lanes into freeways and their crossings into airborne traffic jams. But the ‘Happy Castle’ was small enough to let us feel the Atlantic through her hull and to transmit every trill and tremor of the deep for good or very, very ill. The last person I expected to see on board such a maritime flivver was a member of Barnard’s exalted faculty, albeit a raffish one. Mr Sweet was the coach of our college drama society. I knew him on sight, of course, though he gave no sign of knowing me, or remembering my tremulous performance the previous semester when I read for Juliet. I have always been stagestruck; my main reason for choosing a Manhattan-based university was to stay near Broadway. From the time I had begun to know hazily that I had to escape the mild academic life followed by suburban domesticity on the cards for girls where I came from, the only way that presented itself as romantic, tragic, dramatic, sexy, comic, stand-up, bohemian, the only way to be all I dreamed of being without too much risk of dreaded parental disapproval, was to act the part. But I had neither the gift for acting nor the necessary determination, nor the required tolerance for repetition, and Mr Sweet gave Juliet to a more single-minded undergraduate.
Dolph Sweet still pops up occasionally on movies made for early TV. He plays craggy villains or policemen on the edge of retirement and his acting is a trifle too big to fit the small screen comfortably. He already seemed pretty old to us Barnard girls in those days, at least as old as Shelley when he gave up the ghost. Although Mr Sweet was affable on campus and as far as the young can ascribe emotions to old men he seemed happy enough, I realise now that it was all an act. Barnard College was hell for a ‘resting’ thespian. The bargain-basement trip to Europe must have been a treat he promised himself after a year spent trying to persuade self-conscious scholarly young women to let their hair down and perform.
‘1954: Odd to see Mr Sweet in the dining salon today. He was off to one side at one of the few small tables with a handsome Negro’ (politically correct form of the day) ‘who is certainement pas sa femme!’
The conclusion I jumped to that Mr Sweet was having an affair with his handsome dinner companion was understandable, I guess. Four kitchen chairs piled high had long before taken me to the top shelf of our bookcase at home where salacious literature was stashed optimistically beyond the reach of children. Teetering at that giddy height, I found sheet music for the ‘Internationale’, already in those pre-McCarthy days an inflammatory document, widely considered suitable for burning. It was crammed between Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre and Krafft-Ebing’s immensely instructive Psychopathia Sexualis. Thanks to vertiginous curiosity and older friends, among them plenty of young men who were queer – a politically correct form of those days for the current ‘gay’ – my knowledge of other people’s sexual conduct was as wide as experience of my own was narrow. Moreover, like many clever, liberal, passionate yet strangely virginal women, I was an incipient fag-hag. My assumption about the Sweet menage was pretty sophisticated, I must say, for the early 1950s; too sophisticated by half, as it turned out. That very afternoon the young man told me from a neighbouring deckchair that he was on his way to meet a girlfriend in Paris, not with Mr Sweet at all.
‘Quel dommage!’ wrote this little busybody.
Mr Sweet had his share of devotees among my classmates and an unorthodox liaison would have made resonant gossip in the halls of Academe. Also, my homosexual men friends were always thrilled, though they pretended not to be surprised, when any figure of even the slightest eminence was revealed to share their persuasion. Privately and in their cups they maintained that all interesting men – Shakespeare, Mozart, Da Vinci, Rock Hudson, only not Hitler, thank you very much, and who would have imagined J. Edgar Hoover? – were that way inclined. And the more butch a guy appeared to be, the more he was resisting the inclination. I have since observed that shoe fetishists, paedophiles, mild sadomasochists and practically all erotic minorities genuinely believe that if mankind were liberated from prejudice, it would choose their way, too, to a man. And to a woman, it follows; it never precedes. I know it has become unfashionable to the point of derision to say so, but the fact is when it comes to sex, we women have less time to fool around and more important things to do.
‘July 1954: Bored! Bored! Bored! I went to sea to see the world, and what did I see? I saw the