The Cabin Read online

  And on that craven note of borrowed courage, I walked on and eventually discovered both the Embankment and a great hunger.

  I had a half hour before the theater curtain, and I sat down at a café facing the Thames. Tourist buses from Germany and France were filling up at the curbside, the café was closing, and nobody wanted to serve me, so I got up after ten minutes and discovered a take-out tea shoppe next door, where I bought a tasteless apple confection of some sort, mostly paste. I wolfed it down gratefully, and walked down the Embankment, trying to clean the remnants of the sticky paste off my hands, and holding a piping-hot Styrofoam cup of tea. There was a sidewalk artist working on a pastel of a snake charmer. I heard or read somewhere that these men learned one scene by rote, and then went around drawing it on the sidewalk in chalk for the rest of their lives, the one picture that they knew.

  I watched this man putting far-beyond-finishing touches on his snake charmer. The day was cold, there was pitifully little money in his hat, and he smoothed and resmoothed the border of his scene belligerently. I wanted to ask him if he knew only this one picture, but he radiated defiance. I threw some money in his hat and walked on. I felt a bit strange drinking on the street, a very un-British thing to do. The tea was wretched in any case, and tasted terribly of Styrofoam. I emptied the tea into the street, and threw the cup into a trash basket.

  I walked past monuments on the Embankment, all to the dead. Not TO OUR HEROES, but to THE DEAD, the dead of the navy, of the air force. A lovely monument to the dead of the air force in the Great War, with a pathetic addendum engraved on the pedestal, homage to the dead of the next Great War a scant twenty years later.

  There was a beautiful sculpted group—a mother herding her children—from A GRATEFUL BELGIUM. Her neck seemed out-of-drawing, until seen from the side, where we got the benefit of her great solicitousness.

  I climbed the stairs up from the Embankment, at Waterloo Bridge. On the landing, someone had spray-painted I HATE … And I climbed eagerly to see, as the view permitted me, what it was, in London, that one hated. I expected the traditional “niggers,” or “faggots,” or perhaps, “kikes,” and was rather surprised to find THE POLICE.

  Over Waterloo Bridge I went, and over to the National Theatre, and being some minutes early, to one of their great cafés for a cup of tea.

  CAMDEN TOWN

  I am on a mission, to get my laundry done. I also want to go see all the old clothes in Camden Town.

  It is a very rainy Saturday. I stuff my small clothes in my knapsack and set out for Camden Town by cab. The knapsack is a small black affair, and I have sewn onto it the patch of my partner’s film company, Filmhaus. The patch has a cow staring at a camera, and the legend NEW YORK/MONTANA. The sack is full of soiled underthings, and the presence of this most mundane phenomenon reassures and encourages me as I venture out into Unknown London.

  It is too cold and rainy to look at old clothes. The streets are mobbed with young people in Harley jackets, looking in at the stalls and shops, looking for that last perfect article of attire, that perfect suggestion which will complete them. I understand completely, and agree with Mr. Shaw that there is no peace in the world which surpasseth the peace of knowing that one is perfectly dressed.

  These people on the street are all twenty years younger than I. I remember myself at their age, scrounging the thrift stores of Chicago, looking for the perfect leather jacket (then priced around five dollars if one got lucky at Goodwill Industries), the perfect Harris Tweed overcoat (twenty-five cents—that’s right), the perfect barely worn white cotton shirt for a dime. That was our uniform in the sixties, as “children of the sixties,” and well into the seventies as empowered by our profession of the theater to dress casually in all circumstances. And there I was, twenty years later, and still pursuing, in Camden Town, that vision of elegant tragedy first promulgated by Mr. Brando and James Dean. No, I tell a lie, and have committed that solecism of the nonprofessional—the actors just wore the clothes, the designer created the clothes. And, as I most certainly feel that when the time comes for me to write my theatrical memoirs, the world will be far past being able to print them, let alone appreciate them, I will share a memory of a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988. The guest of honor was Lucinda Ballard, costume designer of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Sound of Music, Showboat, The Glass Menagerie, and many other Broadway shows, and the creator of many American looks. I was her dinner partner, and asked her first, as, I am sure, many had done over the years, about Brando and his torn T-shirt in A Streetcar Named Desire. And she told me that it had come to her in a flash, that each T-shirt was hand-stitched to form to his torso, that each shirt was hand-dyed a washed-out pink, and that she personally distressed (that is, created artificial signs of wear) each shirt with a razor blade until she got the desired effect. So credit where credit is due. And here we were forty or so years after the fact (Streetcar opened on Broadway in 1947), longing for that grace of Brando, and seeking it in sainted relics. I was dressed like every Limey bloke on the high street in Camden Town. As they were younger than I, they were a bit more driven to get out in the rain and find themselves through clothing. Or perhaps I had just become over the hill and had given up. But give up for the day I had, and I found a Laundromat, and changed some pound coins for coins of ten shillings, and deciphered and employed machines to sell me soap, and got the laundry going, and felt quite proud of myself.

  Down the side street was a shop that sold “aeronautical models,” and I looked in the window at the lovely things; I so adored them as a kid—those balsa-wood gossamers, those “thoughts,” which, powered by a gasoline engine the size of one’s thumb, took to the air. I suppose “planes” is the word I am looking for, and what American could walk through London without thinking of planes? No one who had ever been an American boy in the fifties, in any case.

  I stopped in at the Penguin bookstore, always charmed to see the different formats and titles of the books. Books in our Benighted States are getting so regimented, aren’t they? Fewer individually owned bookstores every year, less publication of the out-of-the-way or the questionable, and the benevolence of any present oligarchy must inevitably, must it not … oh well.

  I bought a book by T. H. White, The Goshawk, a memoir of several months White spent in the English countryside in 1939, training a large hawk with the aid only of a three-hundred-year-old manual. I took the book around the corner to an Italian eatery—prices scribbled on slate on the walls, very much a “lunchroom,” we would say in the U.S., or a “luncheonette.” Many students inside, reading, talking, eating what looked like and proved to be good hot food. I had a pizza “Neapolitan,” a designation the translation of which I cannot remember, but which I do remember was quite good. And I had, of course, a lot of dark hot tea, and the waitress suggested something for dessert that I could not understand, and no amount of repetition clarified it for me. After a pause, she averred: “It’s like a sponge,” and I decided to pass.

  I bought a copy of Time Out, the nightlife magazine, and took it back to the Laundromat, where I put my clothes into the dryer, then looked for something to do.

  I found a film I wanted to see at the ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Art, that evening, and called my friends Dick and Laura, Americans who had just shown up most unexpectedly in London, and we planned to meet at the ICA in an hour.

  I got a cab in the rain, and he took me down to the ICA on the Mall. It took a bit to get there, and the cabbie kept circling, and eventually leaned back to explain, “We seem to be caught in a one-way scheme,” so I got out, after asking directions, and walked under some rig that looked like the Brandenburg Gate, and arrived, in fifty yards, fairly wet, at the ICA.

  I browsed in their bookstore, and looked at a bunch of Soviet paintings by Erik Bulatov. Very serious things they were, too, quite poster-presentational and dealing, it seemed, with life in Soviet society. How fine, I thought, to live in an environment in which it is no
t incumbent upon things to mean anything. And there were very serious and attractive young men and women in the ICA café, playing chess and looking at one another. They could not have been more skinny, or have smoked tobacco more beautifully. We do not have their like in my land anymore. I, of course, drank tea, although my teeth were floating; but, like driving cross-country, it is easier to continue than to stop. Dick and Laura showed up. We found that the film we wished was off, I had misread Time Out; and some Eastern European semianimated thing was showing. We were wet Americans and had had enough meaning for the day, and so trooped over to Leicester Square and bought tickets for a late showing of Dangerous Liaisons, and killed the time before the show by going to a French restaurant across from the Duke of York’s Theatre and getting very very drunk, after which I believe we went to the film.

  ISLINGTON

  Much of my tourist career in London is spent waiting. I am out of sync with the life around me. Jet lag, sleeplessness, and cultural differences have unstuck me from any routine that could possibly be indigenous to the surroundings, and I spend a lot of time waiting for an event to occur, waiting to fall asleep, waiting for the city to come to life, waiting for friends to finish work. Today I am waiting in Islington. I don’t know where much of anything in London is in relation to anything else, but since the taxi has not crossed the Thames, I suppose that Islington is to the north.

  We drive through an area of antique shops, which disposes me kindly toward it. I love antique shops and antique districts, as they are, to my eye, a sign of healthy organic decay—usually of a lower-class district that has fallen on even harder times and is no longer capable of supporting its citizens, but offers very low rent to junk dealers. The junk dealers are supplanted by their high-rent artistic counterparts, and the antiques draw the adventuresome upper classes, who eventually gentrify the area with their very own abodes. A civilization eating and being eaten. Sounds good to me.

  I am also, by nature and profession, a browser, and so feel very much at home in an area devoted to browsing. I have several hours to kill while friends finish a recording session in Islington.

  I walk down the street and buy a FREE NELSON MANDELA button from a shop devoted to books and memorabilia supporting the ANC. I walk down the road through the midst of the antique stores in the high street, but they are all closed on this particular day.

  Farther up the high street are stores selling “retro” American clothing, and I mark down a tour of that enclave for the end of the day. But now I have found, one could hardly call it a tea shoppe—it is a hole-in-the-wall with four tables and an espresso machine in back. The radio is blaring, there are signs all over the walls about Irish events. Many of them refer to boxing. The woman behind the counter has an Irish accent so thick I cannot understand a single word she is saying, and no more can she understand me. I point to items on the menu, tea, minestrone soup, and toast. She nods.

  I take a seat in the front of the place; sunlight is streaming over the road. Across the street is the Islington library. It is open today. I feel a great sense of security. Here are, in fact, two places in which I can write if I so choose. I have the T. H. White book in my bag, my notebook and pen and ink are in the bag, this Irishwoman is about to bring me tea. The afternoon is, in effect, perfect. Even should the tea shoppe he forced to close, by some terrible mischance, I am free to go across the street and sit in what will certainly prove to be the most excellent library, and hang out there, a perfectly content man.

  She brings the tea. It is the best tea I have ever had in my life. She brings the soup. It is red water with two noodles in it. I smell it, and it smells like the food in prison. I drink it anyway. The toast is actually hot, and buttery, and I have two orders. I start working on a poem about a dream I had the previous night.

  The dream is one I have been having all my life. I am climbing a hill and, as I climb, the hill becomes steeper and steeper. I cannot walk another step. I have to make it up the hill, but I cannot climb. Why does the hill become increasingly steep? This is my recurring dream. I have had it hundreds of times. The night before, however, there was a change in the dream, the first change ever. I stopped halfway up the hill, and rested, and was joined by my stepmother and a beautiful naked young girl, who reclined on the grass and smiled at me.

  The change in the dream is, to me, a great reprieve, and I am absorbed in writing for two hours. Drinking tea the while. When I look up, it is beginning to get dark in the high street, and I am almost late for my meeting.

  I pay up and leave the little shoppe, and start off for the recording studio.

  I can’t resist stopping off at one of the used-clothing stores on the way. The gent behind the counter admires my leather jacket and asks where I bought it. (Vanson Leathers, Quincy, Massachusetts.) He asks what it cost and I tell him. I browse through his long-traveled American goods. He has a nice selection of stuff made by the Pendleton mills. I firmly believe that nothing in the world is better than an old wool Pendleton shirt that has been worn and loved and cared for and broken in over the years. Nothing is more comforting or more comfortable. The shirts he has on his rack are all these things, but they are too small. They are also cut on some strangely un-American pattern. The salesman tells me that they were a special order Pendleton did for Germany in the fifties. No, not for mine. And not for mine loden cloth. “Thank you very much, I’m sure,” as they say here.

  I hurry down the streets, armed with directions and a copy of London A to Zed, and find the recording studio, which is nestled in the back of an old church in a building that was probably the rectory.

  The band is due to conclude recording at seven. But having lived my life in show business, I know better. I arrive at seven-fifteen and have my book to occupy me until they conclude their session at midnight, when we all go home.

  CHELSEA FARMERS MARKET/THE KINGS ROAD

  Today I am meeting some actor friends for lunch. They are rehearsing on Old Church Street, “down by the Embankment end.” So down I go to someplace called Pytet House. Inside everyone is smoking tobacco (very refreshing, as virtually all of us Yank theatrical types have given it up), and talking trash and history in order to avoid rehearsing the play.

  The same the world over. I feel right at home, and settle back in the shadows. On the wall are paintings of the various houses on Old Church Street. I notice that the one supposedly next door to this Pytet House in which I now find myself was the home of George Eliot.

  The actors muck about for the best part of an hour, and we all go off to lunch. I pass by the house where Eliot supposedly lived, but find neither the number indicated by the drawing nor a plaque commemorating her presence there; and how would I have known, I wondered, even had I found it, if it was the house of her unhappy marriage, or the house of her content cohabitation with Mr. Lewes? What a potential misstep you have been saved from, I thought—-just think if you had waxed all sentimental over an abode in which your beloved Ms. Evans was miserable. We all troop off to the Chelsea Farmers Market, a surpassingly quaint collection of shops a couple of blocks away. We pass a palm reader, a perfumer, and then settle in a very good health-food restaurant, and we all have baked potatoes and tea and tell theatrical stories from two sides of the Atlantic and arrive back at the rehearsal hall ten minutes late. I am invited back to watch more rehearsal, but no, I have had enough Art for the day, and long for Life. I plead a previous engagement.

  I hurry back to the palm reader. He sits me down and tells me my life story.

  He tells me that these are the best years of my life. That I am in the process of changing everything that I believe in, that I feel frustrated, alone, frightened, and unsure, and what a wonderful thing this is. This period is wonderful, he explains, because God is protecting me. God is shielding me and preventing me from making a misstep. I try to go right. I cannot go right, I try to go left, I cannot go left. I will look back on this year, he says, as the luckiest year of my life.

  I drink in this information so gr
atefully. He goes on for an hour. I know he is giving me a stock “crossroads” reading; that he will give the same reading to virtually everyone who comes into his shop. I know that people come into his shop because and only because they find themselves at a crossroads. I know all these things, and I don’t care. I drink it in. I thank him. I pay him. I walk out of his shop, out of the Chelsea Farmers Market, and I feel drained but good.

  I walk down the Kings Road, past thousands of shops that all seem to be selling leather jackets.

  I feel inspired to live through this year gratefully and, if I can, gracefully. I wander into Rylands stationery store and buy a new notebook, with the humble hope that I may write things in it that will be well done.

  I am enchanted by the stationery store. I love office supplies. With their exception, everything in my line of work takes place in my head, which is to say, it is arguable whether it occurs at all. Office supplies are the only artifacts, and the choice of a pen or a notebook is a big deal to me. I discover very cunning medium-sized lined, bound notebooks. I suppress the urge to buy many (if I buy many I will feel taxed with filling them all, and I will become discouraged). I buy one and walk back out on the Kings Road.

  I have a wretched cup of tea in some French patisserie-chain outlet. I find that I am exhausted—probably by my hour with the reader. I take a cab back to my hotel.

  THE GOSHAWK

  That evening I go to the theater. And, after the theater I am alone.

  In my hotel I take off my suit jacket and hang it neatly in the closet.

  I set myself up at the desk in the hotel room. I prop my feet up on the desk and lean back. I am going to finish the T. H. White book.

  This is one of the best books I have ever read in my life. The prose is hard and clear as a crystal. It is unsentimental, it is simply written, it is a delight and an inspiration. I read for several hours. I get up to open the French windows onto the street. It is now around two in the morning. I order tea and burnt toast from room service.