Cala Madona
Puerto de Pollensa
Mallorca,
Balearic Islands, SPAIN

1 March 1954

Editorial Department
Ebony
Chicago Ill. USA

Dear Editors:

Following is an extemporaneous account of my experiences
since leaving the U.S. April 1, 1953, which you may find
interesting.

There is little I can say about France that hasn't been
said with greater authority. I found Paris very pleasant in
April; the Chestnut trees were in bloom, the weather was
balmy, the cafes crowded along St. Germain, the students out
in all their many-nationed glory on St. Michel, book stalls
on the quai, fishermen on the Seine--just as everyone has
read about. No surprises; no discoveries.

There was an abundance of food, both cooked and raw.
I had brought an alcohol stove from America and I cooked my
breakfast in my room, the good smell of Nescafe and **jambon et oeufs brouillés** permeating the waxed corridors, watering the
**moths** of hungry lovers and early rising clerks.

There was a tale going about at the time on Stetson
Kennedy, the southerner who was going to write a sequel to
BLACK BOY to be called WHITE BOY. Kennedy lived in the market
district on Rue de Seine, and was dining daily on wonderful,
tasty filets which he was buying much less expensively than
other bargain hunters of the Quartier, to the envy of them all,
until one day he asked his **boucher** for a mess of calfs' liver,
and was directed to go outside and look up over the door, a
little thing he'd neglected to do. However, he did as directed,
and was greeted by the visages of two gilded horse heads,
showing all their fine horse teeth, either in sympathetic
smiles or Parisian horse laughs--hard to tell. But if horse
steak tastes like beef filets, why go to the horse's mouth? I
say.

I was introduced to a money-changer out on the Avenue
des Champs Elysées, a little gray-haired man occupying a
single room behind a heavy oak door with more locks than a
Harlem flat. Fat bundles of ten-thousand Franc notes were
piled like rubbish behind his cot. He gave me four hundred
and twelve francs to the dollar for the crisp new twenties I
had brought, when the official exchange was at three hundred
and fifty. Encircling two sides of the room was a shelf
containing a fantastic and priceless collection of lovely,
beautifully-dressed female dolls (rag dolls, boys). I was

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accompanied by a very respectable American woman, which did
not bother him in the least; he had been napping and received
us in his undershirt and shorts, making us welcome with an
easy aplomb while he entertained us with a grim story of how
he had hidden from the Nazis for two years in a hole underground
that building, after having seen his wife shot dead. But later
I heard some grim stories about him too; he liked his dolls
(flesh dolls, boys), blond, virgin and unwilling.

I found the taxi-drivers over-rated; compared to New York
taxi-drivers they were like old folks driving the family sedan,
and the boys who ply their maniacal trade up and down South
Parkway in Chicago would cause more consternation on the Paris
streets than Sugar Ray Robinson did in the mannequin circle.

The American colony in the Quatier Latin is dominated by
the bustling, confident personality of the "new" Richard Wright,
who holds court for his neophytes in a little cafe, the Monaco,
just back from the Odeon on St. Germain, and down Rue Monsieur
le Prince a block from where he lives with his wife and two
very lovely daughters. The Monaco is a hangout for the English-
speaking, student-artist types, Americans mostly, some British,
a few Scandinavians (tall blonde girls from Sweden who find
Latins lousy lovers), a few African colonials. It's a gossipy
little bistro, and if one wants to know the lowdown on any
compatriot in the Quatier, one has only to sit there for an
hour or so and keep out of line of fire. Wright stops by once
or twice a day and talks loudly of world politics, the American
Diloxema, the nature of communism, and the pitfalls of creative
writing. Most listen, and perhaps a few agree.

Ellen Wright, by the way, conducts a literary agency;
their home is well kept by an efficient French maid, their
children cared for by an efficient French governess. A long
way from Brooklyn, eh?

I lived on Rue Tournon, within sight of the Palais du
Luxembourg Senat, which fronts the Jardin du Luxembourg; and
down the street from me lived William Gardiner Smith, who
maintains his individuality by avoiding the Monaco and holding
his own court, smaller and lews wide-eyed, but perhaps better
informed than Wright's, in the Café Tournon.

The French writer, Yves Malartic (whose real name Jean
Lamour can not be signed to his books for obvious reasons),
who translated LONELY CRUSADE into the French, LA CROISADE DE
LEE GORDON, offered me the use of his villa in Arcachon, and
I lived there for two months following my month in Paris.

Arcachon is one of those French combinations of summer
resort and fishing village on the Bay of Arcachon, off the
Atlantic coast, about fifty miles south of Bordeaux. It says
in the novel, MOULIN ROUGE, that Toulouse Lautrec often
summeded there; but I saw very little of the beautiful pine-

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groved bluff beneath the famous sand dunes, overlooking the broad blue-watered bay that was so familiar to Lautrec--and I would never have seen it had not the young son, Jaques, of Monsieur le Docteur The, friend of the Malartic's (the elder runs a hotel and hospital in that vicinity--(separate, of course) driven me out to see the sand dunes. He pointed out the villa of Annabella, one time actress-wife of Tyrone Power, saying, "She lives there with Charles Boyer," and I let it go at that, which is the polite thing to do in France; and the villa of the French communist party leader, Maurice Thorez, who figured in the news at that time as just returning from Russia, where he had suffered an extended illness (lucky he got over it!).

Malartic's villa was at the other end of town, in the heart of the fishing village. There the bay runs out to the muddy shoals where the oyster beds for the famous Arcachon oysters are planted (slimy, misshapen, unsavory, protoplasmic species, I must say, more aphrodisiac than nourishing-which is maybe what makes them famous), where the fishing boats are moored, and where at low tide, you can walk across the bay without getting your belly-button wet and catch the big crabs trying to climb the fences into the oyster fields-that is if you can stand the thick black muck between your toes. Standing at the end of a street where it runs down into the water, especially at sunset when the tiny shell-fish frantically crawl over the pebbled-bottom near the shore in search of food, when the ships are anchored and the fishermen gone, there is ofttimes a peace and silence so profound it seems like another world; the ships silhouetted along the ragged shoreline, lights of the downtown promenade in the distance, the half dozen or so old derelicts, rotting hulls of wrecked fishing schooners, emerging from the water like dead, decayed skeletons, like "Shadow" coming out of the East River in a shroud of seaweed with six forty-five slugs in his body, it is so wierd, so lonely and forsaken, you get the feeling that the oyster farmers got their seed mixed and planted bits of rotten sail and this was the harvest.

I lived across the street from the washerwoman, a tremendous compact figure of a hundred and seventy-five pounds of bone and muscle and female, who all day long cooked the heavy, unbleached, homespun French sheets (long as a city block, believe me) in the boiling pot outside, rain or shine, beat out the dirt, hung them on the line, then had enough energy left to run up and down the street each evening like a sort of motherly gazelle with her three little girls. She had other children, too, older, beyond the playing age, a grown boy in the army, another in his late teens, a very lovely daughter about sixteen. I tried for a long time to get a glimpse of her husband but never did--dead no doubt, poor man, worn out, gone to his rest.

Here on this end of the town were the natives who lived by fishing, farming oysters, or building and servicing boats for the rich who lived at the other end: men who walked barefooted along the unpaved streets, got tipsy and quarrelsome on the red wine in the small dim cafes; their wives with the strong French voices who never wasted energy to walk as long as they could

[1 mar 54]

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be heard from one end of the street to the other, who raised
their pigeons and rabbits and lush vegetable gardens, kept the
neat, picturesque little villas spotlessly clean, and cooked
the goodsmelling Gallic food, good women who valiantly served
their menfolk in home and bed and never once thought of
bathing in the bay for the fun of it as the foreigners from
England, America and Paris were wont to do; and the young
swains who gathered in the evening down the street to play that
fascinating game of skittles with the heavy iron bowls, jeu de
quilles, and showed their admiration for attractive foreign
women by turning aside to urinate when they passed, conveying
the same meaning as American Bucks whistling, but somewhat
more to the point, n'est-ce pas?

In the early morning the fishwomen came by the house, some
pushing their carts, others pulling them at the backs of bicycles,
calling their wares in the plaintive, almost sobbing cries of
fish peddlers everywhere, and if I did not awaken immediately
and go out and make a purchase, they would stop in front of my
bedroom window and enter into loud altercations with the neigh-
bors until sleep was no longer possible and I had to face it,
stumbling out to the gate barefooted and half-robed and sleep-
stupid to have one of them put an eel down in the front yard and
let it run about like a frantic fat snake to show how fresh it
was which was all I needed for a good ripe hangover.

The Malartic's villa was built around a concrete court, with
a garage housing an ancient but quite serviceable sail boat, an
outdoor watercloset, a hydrant where the neighbors who did not
wish to walk the block to the public hydrant came noisily in the
early morning to get water, and many bedrooms of various shapes
and sizes to accomodate all the branches of the family who came
for the summers. Across the front was a large library-living
room with an old-fashioned iron fireplace that ate the expensive
French wood like a hungry monster. The walls were lined with
many books on all subjects in a great number of languages. Aside
from having written five novels, both Yves and his wife, Yvonne,
did translations, he from English and she from Spanish. Among
his translations were books by John O'Hara and practically all
of Upton Sinclair.

A very feminine and feline black-and-white cat, Madame
Berdoulas, who was then in an advanced stage of pregnancy, went
with the villa; and her husband, Monsieur Moon, a mangy, scabrous,
long, lean, white cat with dull, cynical eyes and all its
front teeth missing, was at home during most days, sleeping
lazily in some sheltered spot, but went abroad at night as is
customary for a French husband whose wife is enciente. Madame
Berdoulas was very affectionate with a lovely pelt (exceedingly
rare in that neighborhood) and big beautiful green eyes---the
neighboring women were always feeding her choice morsels
because she was pregnant-- but she was a very whiny cat, and I
did not blame Monsieur Moon for spending so much of his time
away from home. Monsieur Moon had a very assertive personality,

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and despite his lack of teeth was highly respected in the cat
world. He introduced himself to me by taking the sole I'd
bought for my lunch out into the courtyard for his lunch, and
when I pointed out it wasn't enough for us both, he looked up
at me as if to say, "So what?" But it must be said for
Madame Berdoulas that she had numerous visitors during Monsieur
Moon's absences (although sometimes he'd lie on the roof of the
house across the street and spy on her), and I received many a
start, feeling eyes on me, to look up at the kitchen skylight
and find a lean, gray, hungry cat staring down at me with silent,
unblinking, ravenous intensity.

My most intimate acquaintance of that time, Gerard Bégaud,
a young engraver and painter of considerable talent, often took
me sailing on an inland lake in a very fast little sailboat he
had made himself. In his opinion the greatest of all contem-
porary books is OUT OF THE NIGHT, by Jan Valtin. Someone had
loaned him a copy of the French edition of Ethel Waters' auto-
biography, with a picture on the cover of Miss Waters dressed in
a sequin spangled evening gown garnished with ostrich plumes,
giving out in a blues song. He asked me if I knew her. I said
I'd never had the pleasure, but that I'd often seen her on the
stage.

The natives of the fishing village were very curious. Each
time I walked down the street was like running a gantlet; every-
one stopped to stare at me until I was out of sight. But there
was nothing malicious in their curiosity, no resentment as I have
found in places in America, no artificial sneers as I have often
experienced in London. I don't think they ever consciously con-
sidered my race. I just looked strange and interesting, like
something from a zoo or a Paris nightclub, another species of
American--they go to see Bob Hope, too. And what is more, I was
free, admission free, it didn't cost a thing to stare at me; that
perhaps had the greatest appeal to those frugal French.

I didn't find any racial prejudice as such in France. A
great deal of anti-Americanism, yes; the old dingy brick walls
of the narrow, crooked, cobblestoned streets of the Quatier Latin
were liberally decorated with the chalked legend: U.S. GO HOME.
And strict class lines among the old families that automatically
relegated many Americans and African Negroes to the lower classes--
as happens among our own people in Liberia, the Gold Coast, and
America; we have our strict class lines too.

I found England quite different--London, that is, because I
didn't get out of it. I arrived at Victoria Station by boat train
from Paris late the night of July 7, 1953. Having no hotel
reservation, I checked my luggage with the exception of a bag
and walked across the street to the Wilton Hotel, a smaller and
less expensive hotel than the Grosvenor which adjoins the station.
I was refused a room by a red-uniformed flunkey, evidently the
night man, who seemed exceedingly angry that I should ask for one.
It was something of a shock. A man entered at the time, one of

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the guests, and overhearing the refusal started to say something
but thought better of it and hastened toward the elevator,
blushing crimson.

I wandered through the district, lugging my bag, until I
found a room in a walkup on Vauxhall Bridge Road where I was kept
awake all night by a psychotic drunk who kept chasing the
women guests up and down the steep narrow stairs until the
Bobbies came and put him in his room, right over mine, and he
spent the remainder of the night stomping on the floor and thr-ow-
ing his clothes, toilet articles and finally his suitcase out the
window. I saw them sailing past and expected him to follow at
any moment--but he wasn't that psychotic, unfortunately.

The next day I went to see Douglas West, proprietor of the
Aussie-Kiwi Accommodation Bureau near Earl's Court, who had been
recommended to me by a Canadian girl in Paris, Heather Chisholm,
a friend of Bill Smith's. I wanted a small, self-contained,
inexpensive flat. Mr. West's bustling organization found
thousands of such places for his big clientele at a fee of three
guineas. But Mr. West was hesitant at the sight of me.

"You are part coloured, aren't you?" he asked.

I replied that I derived from Negro stock.

He explained the difficulties of his organization in finding
residences for coloured people, because of which he did not
attempt to handle any placing of coloured at all. "It's not that
the British people are racially prejudiced like the Americans--"
he began.

"No," I interrupted. "You are more subtle."

He flushed slightly but maintained that impregnable equani-
mity of the British, stoutly affirming throughout our enlarged
discussion there was no parallel in terms of racial prejudice
between the British in two years killing over three thousand
native Africans in Kenya and American Southerners during eighty-
five years lynching over three thousand Negroes in the South.

The upshot of it was that he gave me free of charge the
addresses and telephone numbers of ten landlords who had available
flats whom I could contact personally, but he refused to contact
any of them in my behalf.

I thanked him and went out and consulted the telephone
directory, and next visited the S.S. Accommodation Bureau, at
224 Edgeware Road. The proprietor, a man of Polish descent with
a set of what looked to be socialized dentures, permitted me to
examine a tall stack of cards containing the listings of his
vacancies. In the lower lefthand corner of the majority of the
cards I found the letters, NO·COL. which I thought meant NO
COLONIALS until on one I found it spelled out for me: NO COLOURED.
In view of my previous experiences, a foolish assumption, I admit;

Editors: Ebony

but I didn't expect it to be quite so brutally explicit. I ignored it, however (I had paid his fee of two punds in advance) and made a number of selections. His secretary came in from lunch and began telephoning the landlords. A question caused her to hesitate; she looked at me and replied in a sort of stage whisper, "Yes, he's slightly coloured."

Eventually I was sent to see a Mrs. Murphy who had a basement flat to let on Randolph Crescent, in the Paddington Borough; a tall, very thin, colorless, grayhaired woman, also wearing a set of socialized dentures. My American passport proved an advantage (to most of the French I had met it meant either dollars or dislike, ofttimes both, and I presumed it meant the same to Mrs. Murphy) and I had an impressive letter of introduction from my London literary agency.

Mrs. Murphy could not see very well, in addition to which the shades were drawn in her livingroom to protect the furniture from the sunlight, although it was raining at the time as it had been continuously since my arrival, and the lights were off to save on electricity. I noticed her squinting curiously at me all during the interview, but her only remark was, "You're very dark, aren't you?" I thought nothing of it other than everyone must seem rather dark to her because she had that paper-white complexion of the newly dead. But we soon agreed on a weekly rental of five pounds, eleven shillings, and I moved in early the next morning.

She was waiting with a contract, written in longhand, for me to sign, I guaranteeing two months tenancy and agreeing to extra charges for linen, laundry, telephone, lights, and cleaning which added two pounds extra to my rent. I signed the contract; I was in desperate need of a quiet place to work.

The next morning she came down very early (she had only to descend the stairs from the two rooms she had saved out of the four-storied house for her own living quarters) and told me that her son and daughter-in-law were arriving unexpectedly from New Zealand and would require my flat. Of course she couldn't force me to give it up, there was the contract and all, but she was a very old woman and she hadn't seen her son for more than twenty years and perhaps this would be the last time she'd ever get to see him. I wouldn't mind, would I? She'd help me find another place, one more suitable to my needs. I told her I did mind and had no intention of moving.

Nevertheless, she put the flat up for rent again and I received many telephone calls (my telephone was an extension of hers) from people who wished to see it. In addition to which the S.S. Accomodation bureau began calling every few hours to give me addresses of other vacancies. Then one day when I was out, Mrs. Murphy took the opportunity to thoroughly examine my possessions and she came across the English editions of IF HE HOLLERS and LONELY CRUSADE. She was impressed in a manner which the American editions of all of Faulkner would never have done, and on my return greeted me with a fulsome, angular smile to give me the good news that her son and his wife were not coming

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after all and she would be happy to have me stay on as long
as I wished.

But Mrs. Murphy became such a nuisance with her offer-
ings of English cakes, English tea, and her persistant stories
of her late husband's great social prestige, I decided to
move after all. In addition to which I was freezing. Although
it was the middle of July, it was icy cold in that flat. I
kept the gas fires, with their greedy meters, going continuously
(which added another pound or two weekly to the rent), but only
when the sun shone brightly was there sufficient warmth to sit
comfortably by the fire. However each morning early Mrs.
Murphy would float down the dim stairway in her white cotton
nightgowns (she always wore several, one over the other) and
draw the shades and close the windows to keep the sunshine and
fresh air from ruining her furniture. We had many heated
(heated on my side, at least) debates about this, but she
persisted with true British doggedness. To make matters worse
the tenants in her upper stories began using my outside stair-
way for a trash dump. Among other unmentionables, a crumbled
prophylactic appeared there every morning, although it always
disappeared sometime during the day.

By then I'd had my fill of Accommodation bureaus. I
decided to try the advertisements in _Dalton's Weekly-House,
Hotel, Boarding House and Apartment Advertiser_ and in the
local borough papers which were published each Friday. I came
across a shocking number of advertisements which specified
"No coloured people," similar to the following taken from the
July 18, 1953, issue of _Dalton's Weekly_, page 37: "Earl's
Court. --Nevern Road, S.W. 5. Easy access to West End and City.
Spacious single and dble. rms. H. & c. wtr. cabinets. Very well
furnished. Newly dec. Singles from 12; dbles. from 13/17/6.
Business people only. No coloured people. Owner, phone:
Fro. 3168."

By means of the classified section in an evening daily, I
found a large, comfortable, front bed-sitting room in a
"Continental House" on Glenmore Road in Hampstead, N.W. 3., run
by two elderly Jewish sisters who had migrated from Poland
twenty years previous. It was an old house, somewhat shabby,
with a common bath, and there were numerous miniature paintings,
sculptures, and works in bas-relief decorating the lower hall.
I found it very pleasant. My immediate neighbor was a young
Chinese woman, whose conversations with her numerous dates (all
English) I could hear through the wall, the most annoying of
which was the whinnying, asthmatic laugh of a young chap who
could find nothing else to do with a comely young woman during
the early hours of the morning but carry on long, loud dis-
cussions. My other neighbors were a young Chinese man, her
cousin presumably, who daily received a volume of important-
looking mail from the Viet Nam State of Indo-China, two
young East Indian students, a young Pole and a middle-aged,
heavy-drinking English couple from Manchester. The latter were

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were unexpectedly raided one day by a hefty red-faced woman who claimed to be the lawful wife. She charged from floor to floor, dashing into every unlocked room before finally locating them, in their cubbyhole on the top floor. I did not learn the outcome of the ensuing rumpus--she gave me such a start I quickly locked my door--but I never saw any of them again.

There were many African and Indian nationals in my neighborhood. All Indian women and a few African women wore their native garb; some African men, no Indian men. African men in English clothes so resemble southern Negro migrants, it is difficult to realize that they've never seen America.

I did not go out often except for my dinners; I was working long hard hours on a book on which I was collaborating. There is a main public library on Finchley Road, not far from where I lived, and several branches including the Keats Library in the old Keats Homestead on Keat's Grove, and the Antrim Road branch which I patronized most often, but I did not see a single volume by an American Negro author in any of them, although there are many English editions of books by American Negro authors.

Only once did I go sightseeing, and that was down the Thames in an excursion boat for a tour of the Tower of London. The two things about that drab, walled prison that impressed me most were: (1) That so few prisoners had ever escaped, whereas it seemed so comparatively easy; (2) the small sizes of the Plate Armor worn by warriors of the past, my childhood heroes such as Richard the Lionhearted, most of which would be too small for me, and I am only five feet ten inches, and weigh roughly 170 pounds. Poor old Joe Louis would have had to do battle in a leopard skin.

I took long walks in Hampstead Heath, which seemed to be the favorite pasttime of most Londoners. It was free and young couples could smooch unmolested, and did, some putting the Bois de Boulogne back into second billing.

There is a sad lack of neighborhood movie houses in Hampstead, probably all over London, partly due to the bombing, partly due to British stubbornness. Very few good American movies are shown, mostly tachnicolor spectacles and war and western pictures with a high appeal to morons.

There was enough if not plenty of food when I was there, both raw and cooked, of the kind Britishers eat (a true Englishman will never slaughter <u>XXIX</u> stock live until it's middle-aged or over) and practically all rationing had just ended. But the musky, rancid, unforgettable smell of cooking mutton coming from the kitchen ventilators of the restaurants and permeating the outside atmosphere ofttimes took away my appetite and gave me a queasy stomach before I could get inside where the smells were relatively appetizing.

Compared to the American and French, the Englishman's approach toward the opposite sex is somewhat sinister. He inches up as close as possible, pressing his lean, hunched figure against the object of

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his desire, at the same time endeavoring to look as indifferent
as possible, more often than not succeeding in the latter, much
to his own frustration. In the parks on a warm day he will sit
as near to the girl as propriety admits and proceed to take off
his shirt, his undershirt, shoes and sox, and exhibit as much of
his manly torso and firm foundations as the law will allow.

I noticed that male clerks acted silly toward all female
customers, whom they invariably called "dear." During the seven
months in London, I never heard an Englishman say "Cheerio." I
have only heard that legendary British expression of parting
spoken by we Harlem Englishmen and the professional Britishers
employed by the Empire agencies in New York. All the Londoners
I saw said, "Bye-bye," "Bye-bye now," and "Ta-ta" on occasions.

I found the weather as bad as it is reputed to be; rain in
the summer, smog every night when it turned chilly enough to
light the coal grates that are the chief means of heat--but Eng-
lishmen love their miserable weather and would not consciously
have it otherwise, because it is different, like the righthand
drive, the dreadfully uncomfortable bowler, the afternoon tea
that stops work in all offices, shops, factories and ministrie/s.
There is nothing more awful to an Englishman than to be thought
to be resemble someone of another nationality, especially an
American; and one of their customs which helps maintain the
tradition that Englishmen are unlike any other race of people
on earth is their mode of dress. All true Englishmen wear neat
thick clothes at the height of summer, and thin raincoats with
thick scarves looped about their necks during the coldest days
of winter, and they always carry their huge black umbrellas.
English infants are kept outdoors during rain, fog, smog, and
black frost, under conditions that would fell an All-American
~ tackle with pneumonia on the first day, presumably to immunize
them to the weather, but possibly just to get the babies out of
their mothers' sight. Afterall, medicine is socialized, and if
the baby squawls all day in its carriage on the sidewalk in the
cold London rain, it will develop good lungs. (Incidentally,
boys, pigs' feet are known as "trotters" in case you have a
yen for this delicacy.)

One can get plenty of sleep in London; in fact, when one
finishes work there is blessed little to do except sleep.
All Londoners sleep a great deal, even alone.

I found a shocking amount of racial perjudice in London, as
I have previously noted, but more latent rather than overt, most
of it being released in forced mannerisms, resentful looks,
disdainful attitudes, underhanded spite; deliberate but petty
things to irritate you.

The four things about the English which made the deepest
impression on me were:

(1) The almost hysterical pretentiousness of the middle
classes, bordering on the ludicrous, equalled (but not surpassed)
only by that of a certain type of American Southerner, the kind

El Mar 543

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who hold the little finger extended in a slight crook when sipping a cup of tea, call the Big Four the Large Four, and eat icecream with a fork.

(2) The really shocking inferiority complex of the lower classes, who'd rather be a "Lydy" than rich, and who ape their uppers to the extent that all ditch diggers wear collars and ties and business suits at work.

(3) The studied, deliberate, underhanded anti-Americanism of the daily press which has substituted the technique of the small doubt for the big lie. The Manchester Guardian, the most objective and informative of the London dailies has a habit of publishing extremely stupid and moronic letters by American readers, of editorially damning all American policies with slight praise, and front-paging the snide, mannered column of Alistair Cooke when they are particularly sneering at some American tradition. The other dailies feature irresponsible & claims by half-witted extroverts, such as an Englishman flew the first plane, American cigarettes are treated with coal tar to make them poisonous; American economy is headed for a depression etc. The doings of McCarthy, the high cost of American meat, the embarrassing aspects of American crime--in fact, all the worst elements of American life are meticulously reported. But the press does not accept the responsibility for the validity of these stories; the implication is "I only heard, it was only told to me."

(4) The stolid, sheep-like quality of the London queues. Londoners queue for everything; the grocers, the butchers, the movies, the trams, the buses; everywhere you see the lines of placid people, seemingly bemused, sticking out of doorways into the chill rain, the dreary fog, the opaque smog, or strung from the bus-stp posts like limp shopwindow dummies in old clothes. But this dogged patience thus exhibited might be the quality that saves the British Empire in the end.

I didn't like London, but I found it an excellent place to write--very normal, sub-normal if anything, no distractions, no bright days to lure one out-of-doors; in fact, nothing to do but work. I received visa extensions by applying to the Home Office and registering with the Metropolitan Police, the first for three months, the second for one month, the Home Office doling out the latter as if every additional second spent in dreary, smog-bound, rapidly chilling London were a grain of gold.

I was happy to embark for Palma de Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain on 26 January 1954, where I expected to exchange my overcoat for a T-shirt and lie all day in the sun. However, I soon had that illusion knocked out of me. Three days later when I debarked, on the quai at Palma after a very rough crossing from Barcelona, it was so cold, so dismal, so drippy, in the early morning gloom my overcoat was the one thing I needed most. I was instantly mobbed by the hotel hawkers with that off-season, frantic persistence common everywhere. Most of them spoke some manner of English

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if only the preemptory yes--Go here, Yes! Do this, Yes! My
taxi-driver took me to the Tanger Residencia, a 1st class Pension,
without consulting me, merely asking when he pulled in at the
entrance, "You like--Yes!" It looked clean and new and comfortable.
"I like Yes!" I said.

For sixty-five pesetas a day, fifteen percent service charges
added, about two dollars American at the current rate of exchange,
I had an icecold room with a good bed and warm covers, coffee and
toast at ten, a four course lunch at two, a four course dinner at
ten. The food was excellent.

To me Palma seemed like any tourist city one might find in a
warm climate, a little picturesque with the whitewashed houses
rising in the hills about the bay, a little quaint with its
Toonerville Trolley cars and narrow market streets up from the
Plaza Olivar toward the big, two-storied brick building of the
Public Market, its decaying Cathedral on the bay and Castle of
Bellver on a hill dominating the city.

Bar drinks, the sweet Spanish brandies, the mild licorice
gins, the burnt-sugar tasting beers, and the really excellent wines
are from ten to twenty-five cents in American money, four to ten
pesetas Spanish; by the bottle from fifty cents to a dollar. Full
course lunches and dinners from fifty cents to a dollar also.
You can rent a house with telephone, modern bathroom, steam heat,
dining room, hall, kitchen, four bedrooms and several terraces for
fifty dollars monthly; or a smaller place in a smaller town for
five dollars monthly. From this one gets the idea that it is
incredibly cheap. It is cheap, yes, but they don't give it away.
It is geared to the tourist dollar, and I imagine that in season
one can spend as much in Palma as in Paris.

Late one morning I rode the Toonerville Trolley around the
bay to the Vich Agencia on the Plaza Gomila, to enquire about
rentals. I talked with Senor Vich himself (a privilege, I presumed from the attitude of the secretary), a small dapper man
who spoke English with a Virgin Island accent, a dead ringer for
a band leader, Mr. Bonelli (Eddie Bonelli's Society Orchestra),
with whom I once roomed in the Bronx. Senor Vich informed me that
he could get me any kind of house I wanted at any price I wanted
to pay, and he would send his assistant in a taxi to my pension
that afternoon to escort me to the Playas de Paguera, a very
lovely new development at the southwest tip of the island, where
I could find just what I wanted for about twenty-five hundred
pesetas (about sixty dollars) monthly. The taxi fare would only be
four or five hundred pesetas (ten to twelve dollars) for the round
trip and if I found what suited me he would employ for me a house-
keeper and a maid. Immediately on returning to my pension I
telephoned Senor Vich and canceled the engagement.

Early the next morning I set out for Cala San Vicente to see
a Mr. King, an American, to whom I had been directed by Short &
Sons, a British rental agency on the Borne. Mr. Short said that
Mr. King had found an American a house for two hundred fifty
pesetas a month--(about six dollars) with five bedrooms. I rode
second class in a tiny wooden coach resembling the first box car,
a dozen or so of which were strung together to form a train,
pulled by an unbelievably tiny steam engine with a one-wheel
drive and a high piping

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whistle that sounded a great deal like those found in boxes of Crackerjack popcorn, which the engineer blew continuously.

It was raining cats and dogs and we jolted through a wet flat landscape of very neat, stone-fenced fields containing rows upon rows of the skeletoned olive trees and of the filigreed almond trees just beginning to bloom, the red soil between carefully cultivated and planted to potatoes and corn, it all somehow reminded me of Long Island.

I had been directed by Mr. Short to change at Puebla to a bus that would take me to Pollensa, and anyone would tell me how to get to Cala St. Vicente from there. Mr. Short's directions were incorrect. Puebla was the end of the line. The bus connection was at Inca, through which we had passed sometime previously. I could not make myself understood. To the crowd of helpful peasants who surrounded me, I said, "Pollensa," pointing vaguely in what I hoped to be the right direction; to which they replied, "Inca," pointing in the opposite direction, adding a chorus of instructions, not a word of which I could understand. Finally I said, "Taxi." When in doubt, call a taxi, which is *taxi* in any language. After much telephoning, the station master, with a reassuring smile, spoke to me at great length. I assumed he said the taxi was on its way. I thanked him and pointed across the street toward a bedraggled cafe and said in English, "I will wait over there," to which everyone nodded assent.

It was a small native cafe, very dirty. Behind the bar a man was mixing pernod. A stout woman came from the kitchen at the rear to serve me. I drank several brandies and tried to ask for the rest rooms. Several customers who had entered to watch me drink my brandies endeavored to be helpful, pointing to various bottles on the wooden shelf. They were full bottles, unfortunately. I won't go into details of how I got the idea across, but everyone seemed immensely relieved and began laughing all over the joint, as I'd made a great joke. (Milton Berle, please note).

The taxi driver spoke only Spanish and when I asked what the fare would be to the Cala, he got out and opened the door. We drove down a muddy road full of holes and flooded in spots, alongside piles of crushed stone intended for a wall, no doubt, through an inconceivably fertile plain, planted in neat green rows of crops as far as the eye could see, and dotted with what seemed scores of windmills similar to the one which Don Quixote attacked so valiantly.

Then the taxi broke down. The driver got out and tampered with the motor in the rain. He took out the fuel pump and blew into it. He got inside and tried the starter again. It was a very old car that rode hard as a log and I doubted if it would ever run again. Finally he turned to me and said, "Mecanico," pointing toward Puebla. I nodded. He got out and started on

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foot down the muddy road in the rain. I sat and smoked and tried to keep warm on my brandies.

An hour later he returned, running behind a young man in coveralls who was riding a bicycle. The mecanico smiled at me, took out a screwdriver, lifted the hood of the car and gently tapped on something, then came around and banged the instrument panel with his fist. He spoke to the driver who got in and stepped on the starter. The motor started immediately. Some mecanico, I thought.

When finally we reached Cala San Vicente I found that some months previous Mr. King had moved to Puerto de Pollensa, the resort town where William C. Haygood, former Director of Fellowships for the Rosenwald Foundation, had lived for several years. I was directed to go to the Cactus Bar and someone would tell me where Mr. King lived.

Another hour and we arrived at the Cactus Bar. By then it was one o'clock. I entered the bar all unsuspecting and found a scene that resembled nothing so much as a Paris night club at two o'clock in the morning. Outside it was a normal rainy day; inside a wierd Paris night. The place was crowded, jammed, three deep at the bar, the tables loaded, everyone in party clothes, drinking strong drinks, many well along. There was an orchestra playing but I couldn't see it for the crowd, and the tiny dance floor at the back was packed with weaving dancers. I had the impression of having stepped into a nightmare. I went timidly to the bar and asked for Mr. King. The bartender called a young blond woman who turned out to be Mrs. King. She assured me it was only a Spanish wedding reception.

The Kings lived in the house on the bay formerly occupied by the Haygoods, who had returned to America. They helped me find a pleasant ground floor apartment on the street back from the quai. It is quite modern; it has electric wiring, a telephone, the typical whitewashed walls with knotty pine beams decorating the ceilings, many deep closets and builtin cupboards and shelves, three bedrooms, a modern American type bathroom with tub and shower, the Spanish hall and a big livingroom-diningroom, compact convenient kitchen, a wonderful English type fireplace, a small patio at back sheltered by a grapevine in season which I am told bears very tender grapes. I have no view, however. I pay seven hundred pesetas monthly, everything furnished, linen, kitchen utensils, dishes, etc--say, seventeen dollars and fifty cents. But I don't get the sun until late in the morning, a few hours at the front, and then a few hours in the patio at back during the afternoon, and inside it is always cold even when outside the sun shines brightly. If you don't get the sun, it isn't worth it no matter what you pay. You come here for the sun. And wood is very expensive, about one dollar for two hundred pounds. It costs me more to heat this place than it does to eat. But I have rainwater in my kitchen, water filtered through the red sandstone walls of a tiny handsome well--this in addition to city water which services the bathroom, sink, hot-water tank,

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etc.--and I have a charcoal brazier in addition to my wood range, good for charcoal broiling steaks and short-order cooking, should I wish to indulge in any such fancies. My land-lady, Senora Catalina Rotger (pronounced RoHare), a charming woman of great business acumen, runs a variety store on the quai, owns several rental properties for foreigners, preferably Swiss, English and American, knows everyone of consequence on the Island, sells me American cigarettes at about a dollar and eighty cents a carton, and informed me a couple of days ago that the American Ambassador to Spain, His Excellency, James Dunn, visited our little village and sat in the sun on the terrace of the Hotel Miramar, a couple of doors down from her shop. Nothing escapes Senora Catalina.

It is a beautiful bay with a yacht basin and concrete breakwaters, completely surrounded by ranges of grotesquely shaped, bald mountains of a peculiar rock formation as if they existed many ages under the sea. The Spanish Air Force has the best part of the bay for a base, the sunny side, restricted to tourists.

Here, as everywhere I've been in Mallorca, there are many soldiers, La Guardia, in full uniform. They police the cities, walk guard day and night, wearing sidearms, rifles, machine gunsp one gets the impression there is military occupation or martial law. You find them standing in the Plaza by day, walking the streets by night; you enter a deserted hut and find one eating lunch--everywhere. There are heavy stone blockhouses at regular intervals along the bay and all over the Island.

In this village there are sizable American and British colonies, among whom there are some very queer ducks indeed, some bitter-enders. For the most part the Americans term themselves writers and artists; the British claim to be retired army officers and government officials. It's a dream land for alcoholics. Above me live the Captain and his Lady, an elderly English couple, very debonair and British and correct, with a full-time, live-in maid, and an ornamented Siamese cat. I believe they dress for dinner every night. The natives are interesting, vital and quite pleasant; and I am convinced on the whole they have more money and live better than the pretentious foreigners--those of the same class. They dress very well and look very healthy; the children wear beautiful clothes (which I am told cost very little) and are very clean and neat and well-mannered.

Bicycles and motorbikes take the place of the American car; the motorbike being the Cadillac, the bicycles the Chevrolets and Fords. I still feel a slight sense of shock whenever I see a dignified, well-dressed business man, carrying a briefcase and wearing a Homburg, ride by astride a motorcycle looking at us hoi poloi as disdainfully as if he were riding in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.

The buses are of ancient vintage, but every trip, no matter how short--if only the seven kilometers from here to the city of Pollensa--has all the pomp and circumstance attendant with the sailing of an ocean liner. Bicycles and other luggage, including farm produce, livestock and mail must be loaded atop. Weighty conferences take place between the passengers, the local officials, mayor, undertaker, etc., and the bus officials before every departure.

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There are generally from five to seven bus officials at these conferences, although only three ride on the bus: the driver, the conductor who passes through the bus selling tickets and taking fares, and another official whose duty I have not as yet ascertained. The busses travel fairly regularly, five or six times a day between here and Pollensa, but every arrival and departure is an event.

Market Day on Sunday morning in the Square at Pollensa is an event also, the busses loading early with the produce for the stores in the outlying villages before the mob of customers arrive. Here in the port is a fish market every morning before nine o'clock, the big ones on Tuesdays and Fridays. The fish are displayed in wooden boxes along the curb of the Plaza and there is much loud wrangling between the fishwives and their customers. One sees on display many varieties of squids which are cleaned, sliced and French-fried like onions, (I ate them at the Tanger Residencia and they tasted fine when hot, a little rubbery when cool), many octupuses of various sizes, looking like blobs of yellow-brown mucous, still breathing, their tenacles wiggling, which are cooked in a number of ways. One of the storekeepers told me the best way to cook them was to take a stick and beat them to a pulp (he hopping about the store beating the octopus with an imaginary stick until it was a mass of jelly), boil them until the inedible part comes to the surface in a thick scum which is discarded, the remainder ground and mixed with chopped meat and cooked however you please. But some of the people just boil them whole and eat the inky pulp which I am told gives a piquant taste deep in the throat, like being slightly choked. There are other alluring fish, long, lean gray-skinned types that resemble baby sharks, small-headed eels with skins the color of rattlesnakes, fish of an indigo blue with bright golden sides; and there are some of the kind we know, white-fish, skate, sardines, etc. At nine o'clock the boxes are stacked on a rack at the back of the bus amid such a confusion and blowing of horns and a racing of the motor by the driver to get them to hurry and a shouting by those afraid they'll get left that by the time the bus finally gets started, generally ten to twenty minutes late, everyone is laughing and in good humor and the hot early sun is shining on the delicate pink and white blossoms of the almond trees in full bloom along the wayside and on the naked red cliffs and the scummy green slopes of the ugly sea mountains where nothing ever grew but seaweed. By this time the carts are out on the road.

Here, the two-wheel carts drawn by little gray burros with long ears and cunning eyes, the larger dark brown long-haired asses, the rather small mules and tiny brown horses no larger than Shetlands but sleek and short-haired, take the place of American trucks. The cart drivers are very individualistic people; neither man nor beast is ever impressed nor influenced to move over by the bleating Spanish horns which sound the same on all Spanish cars, trucks, busses, lorries, and motor-bikes. The horn is greatly blown in this country, and no doubt was designed in defence to the goats, which have the same thin bleat.

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The goat population here outnumbers the human population by far-- (If there is ever another revolution I'm going to be on the side of the goats). One finds them everywhere, in the fields, staked alongside the road to feed on the grass in the gullies, dotting the steep hillsides and high up in the rocky crags where only a goat can get. But they are all mother goats, either pregnant or with young, their long distended udders reminiscent of some of James Joyce's descriptions of women. One hears a thin bleat coming from atop a high sheer cliff and jumps to one side, thinking it's the bus to Pollensa, but it is only a month old kid standing on a ledge no wider than your hand, twisting its neck to stare at you with a profound and solemn curiosity. Mother goats are not so curious; they take people as a matter of course, giving you a cursory appraisal with that lidded look of indifference common to pregnant females and mothers of infants. With all the kids in evidence there must be some papa goats somewhere (as Richard Wright remarked about the mulatto children in the South), but I have yet to see one--although I'm looking forward to it with great expectations.

The dogs I have seen so far (all mongrels) are either part whippet and so thin one can discern light through their bodies between their corrugated ribs; or very small varieties of what Faulkner calls "fajice" dogs.

The sheep have orange patches on their backs as if they've been treated with Mercurochrome.

The women are dark, dark-eyed, rather pretty on the whole, and most I have seen wear their hair cut short.

Unlike the Americans who whistle and the French who urinate, the young men here break into tragic song when an attractive foreign woman passes. Probably they know best, after all. Here everyone has a great appreciation for and recognition of grief. After the age of thirty most women wear black continuously; they have so many relatives and mourn for so long it is useless to change.

There is one good Spanish artist in Puerto de Pollensa, Roque-Minuet. The Spanish people seem to have a greater understanding of and feeling for art than for literature.

I bought a second-hand bicycle for about fifteen American dollars, and when the weather is good I cycle to the other nearby villages, Puerto Alcudia, Cala San Vicente, Pollensa, Formentor, Lluch. There are many monasteries atop these bald peaks, including the one at Valldemosa where Chopin spent his declining years, where one can spend the night.

This is a nice little bay, very lovely, quiet now that it is off-season. Enough English is spoken to get along if one doesn't know Spanish. The religion is Catholic. The natives are nice, more honest than the French, less curious; they seem to admire Americans, on the whole, tolerate them anyway. I have found no racial prejudice among the Spanish as yet. I have seen no one with Negro blood since entering Spain--not even "slightly coloured".

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Circumstances permitting, I shall remain on this side--not here, for I intend to see much more of the continent and some of Northern Africa--until I have completed another book. One thing I like about the Europeans I have met, they understand the meaning of time better than Americans. They know that Rome wasn't built in a day--(although I'm sure there are American contractors who believe it could have been), my life has taught me to respect the profound conclusions of time. But for my part, judging from what I have so far seen (and I don't think anything I shall see henceforth will change it) I like America best; I like it despite its faults, and there are many; perhaps I like it because of them. I am what America made me, and the longer I stay away the more I discover how much of America is in me and how much of me is in America. I have a notion grown out of the little I have seen that America offers practically everything but antiquity to be found in the rest of the world. The tragedy for me is I can share only a small part of this great offering.

But my destiny, whatever it may be, is in America. I am an American as a Frenchman is a Frenchman and an Englishman is an Englishman; and I shall return (to quote MacArthur, another American) and fight it out in America until I die.

Chester Himes