‘Well, we have law and order here, and let me tell you, young man, I have seen more life and been to better places than you. We must have law and order; society cannot afford to go on with persons like you.’
‘Any society should be able to afford a maverick,’ I said softly.
‘No, that will corrupt other citizens who are regular in their conduct,’ ruled the Colonel.
‘Isn’t it because they are so regular that you get the mavericks?’ I asked slyly.
‘Now, don’t try your cleverness on me. I can’t argue with you.’ The Colonel drew the line.
Later, with him reclined and rocking every now and again in his chair, having first wiped off the specks of foam that had sprouted about the corners of his mouth, the Colonel listened soberly to my complaints about the abruptness of my leaving, why on earth this had happened to me at that point of my life, and what it was I was then supposed to be going back to when I left Princeton in disgrace and such haste.
‘You have your newspaper job to go back to, haven’t you?’ the Colonel reflected.
‘No, I resigned that, I told you, before coming over here.’
‘Of course, you can always pick up a job when you return home,’ he stood firm.
‘Well, that’s one of the misassumptions by people, especially of our programme; that once you have come over for some course of study or in-service training, then you become overnight an expert for every problem in your under-developed country. Unless you were already in the top positions that matter, like our own General from Somalia, for example, you cannot jump the junior post you were serving in to go and direct others because you have been at Princeton, and personally, I don’t see any job I can go into now without a whole board sitting over it first. You’ll agree these things take time.’
‘Well, you are a poet and playwright, aren’t you?’ he said with a mischievous cutting edge he could not succeed in containing inside its sheath.
‘Now it’s you saying so,’ I laughed.
The following day, in the midst of my packing and awkward explanations to curious colleagues at the Graduate College, I received this letter from the Colonel, written in his own masculine hand. It minced no words.
‘Mr Clark, you will receive, within the next few days, $100 (stipend for May) plus $25 (help for sending your heavy luggage home) plus $100 (for expenses incidental to your travel home). A total of $225.
‘Whenever your heavy (sea) baggage is ready, let Mrs Krulisch know and she will call the freight forwarder Harbourt, so he can make arrangements with you –
R. W. V.’
‘Well, there goes your $700 travelling money, and all because you won’t shut your bloody trap,’ someone said, handing the ejection note round the small group of friends not quite decided among themselves whether I should be pressed on to stay or be seen take off immediately as I already proposed to do.
‘It’s so mean of them.’
‘I told you Princeton is a lousy place.’
‘The Parvin Fellows ought to rise as a body and threaten them with going off with JP if they don’t behave more sensibly.’
‘There you are asking too much – $700 is no small money to forego.’
‘Mr Parvin himself I hear is coming from California to a farewell party of theirs next week. Now, that’s the man to tell how they are administering the programme he finances.’
‘Perhaps the Graduate College should do something before then.’
‘This treatment of JP, rude as he is, is a negation of all that programme stands for.’
All this, so genuinely sympathetic and indignant, was highly interesting and explosive stuff to come from my close circle of student friends, many of them Americans. But to have hoped that they or the Parvin Fellows would rise to a man and upturn by force or persuasion what the Princeton authorities had already decreed would have been like expecting America’s six million unemployeds and bums, not mentioning the twenty million Negro people burdened by their colour and history, actually forming a large portion of these ‘superfluous people’, as a TV commentator called those of the lower depths of America, to march in their tattered and starved hordes and columns upon Wall Street or Capitol Hill.
For that would be revolution indeed, and revolution of any type for the American is a state and an ideal already completely and permanently achieved at home by their founding and fighting fathers several centuries back; and today, it is an objective the Central Intelligence Agency may carry out in dictator-ridden Latin-American republics and Socialist-minded Afro-Asian developing states on behalf of Big Business, the powerful lobby with its hand on the steering-wheel of the diplomacy and foreign policy in Washington. The rub however, as its former Chief Allen Dulles put it with great bite and aplomb before a very amused Princeton audience, could well be that the Central Intelligence Agency might be effecting a coup in some Middle East country while the head of it is being entertained in Washington as an honoured guest by the President and Congress!
In a set-up like that, it is no wonder the American student is so well-contained and content inside his coarse tights and emblazoned jerseys. To pile up grades, he chews hard at studies just as he does at his sweet gums and ice-cream. Games at their best are the pre-occupation of the giant breed, cheered on equally by special athletics scholarships and a colourful thumping college brass band and chorus of acrobatic co-eds. On week-ends he will drive as far as the next state or beyond to reach his date who he may take out to the cinema, fondle and kiss good night at the parental or girl dormitory gates. But he may not slip out of that habit into the sloppy one of wanting to go to bed with her when they are not decently engaged and married. And the horror was great, if as happened often, the foreign students from Africa or even Europe expressed disappointment back in the hall of residence at the lack of accessibility of the American College girl who is so coy and sex-scared. Only at Princeton’s highly hierarchied set-up, falling into ranks of colour, wealth, education, and age, you could never quite tell whether your American colleague was horrified at your desires because you happened to be of another colour or country!
At Princeton’s Graduate College, for example, students, I found, were more or less satisfied, indeed were excited to the point of actually shouting yodels, by the mere presence in their midst of guests coming in from girls’ colleges like Bryn Mawr. ‘Mixers’ they call such meetings. Procter Hall often provided the setting for the idyllic picture of innocent mating and coupling. There with tall candles lit on brass stands on the heavy boards, boys and girls would sit and dine late of a Saturday night, sipping sherry and swapping know-how on the latest gadgets, car models, and smart ideas in astronomy or sociology. Those flickering candles, a wit once said unkindly, were to ensure that hosts did not see their guests too close in the face, for these often were most plain if not straight ugly!
Incidentally, woman-lover as I am, I too could not help noticing the determined manner most American girls, especially the college ones, set about making themselves look unattractive and in fact much like the males who, paradoxically, are a most good-looking people. But the American young female, in her court shoes and knee-high hose, when she is in a brief skirt and shorts and not in those ill-mended, rough-and-tumble tights, and with hair down or bobbed over a face, often chubby and irregular in feature, with perhaps a nose too stubby or veering to the crinkly or crooked, provided for me a constant object for sobering reflection far away from the over-painted synthetic models on parade on celluloid. My shock of discovery perhaps was equalled only by that expressed by a New York tube-rider during the newspaper black-out. There was then no wide double sheet for anybody to cover his face. My, the tube-rider had told Newsweek, who would have guessed New Yorkers were so ugly! I did not venture to go that far, except to express my silent gnawing hunger because –
The mannequins
in the windows,
Sure sirens
calling without
Discrimination
down the streets,
Do not make up for me
the Marilyn Monroes
I miss among the smart coffee
Sets and shops
Strange indeed that that extraordinary creation and destruction by Hollywood, long gone beyond the pale of death as they put it, but who in life was even farther away from my kind behind a more damning barrier of colour, and perhaps, celebrity, should have formed for me the heart of that hunger for beauty and love, shouted everywhere by America but which she really cannot satisfy. I made a humble wreath to her name that I strung out like this:
