‘No, he isn’t in,’ I told her. ‘You saw him at the party, did you say? … I see … He stopped at yours … Yes, I am the guest just from Africa … You told him you’d come and keep me company? Wasn’t that real sweet of you! Oh, no, I can’t believe you are a tough nut at all … Really? You mean right now? How wonderful! Hold on, I don’t know the number off-hand … That’s good, I forgot you know the place yourself … Well, bye-bye then till ten.’
For what appeared the arrested hand of time I held up the receiver in the air gulping and ogling at it – just as soulfully as they do in the films. Here was a sudden burst of a torch out from the dark, and though blinking somewhat, I told myself I would follow it wherever it led, even at the risk of stumbling upon mound or pit. The sideboard of an expatriate, whether colonial or consular, is his sure comforter. So diving into my host’s which even by diplomatic standards was pretty well stocked, I poured myself a drink and settled down to watch television until the arrival of my surprise visitor.
A closer look, however, at the Maverick strip that was running then, one that showed the rascal bursting the ring of some ruthless bank-busters led by his old flame, who entertains the Wild West crowd in the pub below to belly dancing while the deed is being done upstairs, and I was sure I had seen the episode before on TV – months and months ago back home in Nigeria. I picked up the weekly programme to find something fresh to turn to. It told a similar story. Dr Kildare, Cheyenne, Laramie, Bonanza, The Loretta Young Show, People are Funny, and all the other drug-peddling, punchpacking, cow-poaching, bust-flaunting and dollar-spilling serials, exported as ceaselessly to stations in Nigeria as they are sedulously decried by Yankees there as anything but poor specimens of the real products at home, all of them filled the bills and were actually in many cases touted as the highlights of viewing for the teenager, the adult, and indeed the entire family. All of them which made me feel rather at home.
So that I felt more or less rattled when my mysterious caller turned up and said she was Australian. She asked me to help her out of her overcoat, a sort of ritual over here, I was to discover, expected of anyone playing host. A touch of winter was in the weather, she said, so she had had to wear a medium-weight one. By the time I had found where to hang it up, she had sat herself down on the couch, and turned off the TV set, saying, ‘Could we put on some records instead?’
I said, ‘Oh yes, and what will Madam drink?’
‘Scotch and no soda,’ she said, ‘and please no Madams either, the name is Grace, and what is yours?’
She turned out more curious than gracious, asking one question after another when I had not answered the first, at least, to my satisfaction. ‘So you are a journalist and dabble in poetry and plays?’ She gave me a squint-type of look. She knew a couple of poets down in Greenwich Village, and was it poetry I was going to teach at Princeton? I repeated again that the fellowship taking me there was not a teaching one, nor a studying one exactly, ‘but one, and I quote,’ I added, ‘aimed at bringing talented young men from the new and developing nations of the world so that they can improve on their capabilities and be better able to serve their countries –’
‘And the USA, of course!’ she laughed, teasing the words off my lips.
‘Aren’t you a real witch?’ I swept up to her, using the chance to plant myself more advantageously by her side.
‘Oh, nothing of the sort,’ she shook her well coiffeured hair, all brilliant and bronze, and which she was prompt to point out was all hers. ‘I have worked for one or two foreign missions here and come across that type of crap talk. Pretty catching stuff.’
‘You work for some mission here?’ I began.
‘Oh, nothing much, honey!’
She cupped my chin in her free hand, and holding out the other, asked if I wasn’t going to recharge her glass any more.
‘Of course, yes.’
I bounded up to where the bottles stood, each by now showing a decided drop in the level. In the meantime, however, her interest had shifted to the layout of the apartment, one of those extra-convenient and well-cushioned caves quarried out of square blocks of mountains of steel, stone and glass they call apartment blocks. She was thinking of moving out of hers into something still more padded from care. I offered to show her around, and although halfprotesting she already could tell her way about the place, she allowed herself to be led, and so it was we found ourselves in one of the bedrooms.
‘I wondered when you were coming to that,’ was all she said when I fell upon her. ‘Sex to the American,’ she said, taking off her jacket, blouse, skirt, chemise, corset, stockings and bra with a method and care that showed a mind most clear even at the moment of crisis, was the twin sister of the Almighty Dollar; and high and low, young and old, men and women over here were all slaves to it. ‘Why, only the other day,’ she went on ‘some big shot drove up in his Cadillac. He had his two kid sons with him, one a little over twenty and the younger just turned eighteen or thereabouts. ‘You make love to the boys,’ he offered, ‘and here’s two hundred bucks for your trouble.’
‘Two hundred for initiating two dumb kids?’ I started.
‘Oh, that’s nothing to them,’ she soothed my spine. ‘Sex is their highest commodity, and they have made the thing so synthetic and commercial, love has become a changeable ware. And the more perverted it is, the more expensive.’
‘Still,’ I began, but she cut into my stream of thoughts which at that moment was running down all sorts of grooves in an effort to determine if all this wasn’t merely a lead I was expected to follow.
‘Wait,’ she said, ‘you haven’t heard the really funny part of the story yet.’
‘And what’s that?’ I asked.
‘Oh, as he collected his kids to go back to his ranch, or some place, he stopped and whispered into my ear something to the effect that tomorrow would be Daddy’s own day.’
‘A very practical man,’ I said and switched off the bedlamp.
‘Yes, they all are,’ she agreed.
*
Of the antiques and antics that account for a great deal of Princeton I had had tips and hints well before arriving at the place. In fact, one day after my checking into campus, an American with whom I had made friends some time back in Nigeria asked me over to his home out in a wooded, prosperous suburb of New York.
It happened to be Culture Day. The Lincoln Centre, a multibillion dollar affair, was having its official opening with a big gala performance by Leonard Bernstein and his boys. Naturally, some of the heat generated there flowed into every true American family and home, as indeed was the case at the house of my friend Richard Detwiler, a vice-president at the Madison Avenue giant advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn Inc., who create public images for clients as different and as distinguished as former US Vice-President Richard Nixon and the Western Nigeria Government of Chief S. L. Akintola. So all that day at my host’s we heard Robert Frost read his poems, one of which, about a wall, written many years before, the shrewd old man had only just found fame for at an impromptu reading to Kruschev in Moscow; and we drank coffee with real English muffins, in the glow of a bright wooden fire struck up by the young heir-apparent of the house; and when some neighbour dropped in, we listened to him talk of the Newport boat race which had just ended with the Americans coming as it were from behind to beat their gallant Australian challengers. Apparently, the highlight of it all for the man, who was something of an expert in this time-honoured maritime event, was seeing President Kennedy watch the historic race in his own yacht.
The TV set in the living room wouldn’t work and equally temperamental was that upstairs. Anyway, for a few awkward sequences during which the sales stunts Dick’s firm did for a glass firm featured prominently, as part of their bargain for sponsoring the great civic ceremony, we were able to see the Lincoln Festival at that point when Governor Rockefeller or his brother, one or the other of whom was officiating, got lost somehow in the huge gleaming edifice, and the microphones and cameras, like prehensile equipment trained by men from Mars were kept purring and whirring in vain search of their target. And for supper, there was raw steak, rather redolent of human flesh, I told them, real fresh vegetable juice, with all the vitamins intact, iced in tall glasses reached by straws, and dessert of apple pie baked by the young daughter of the house, ten years old if a day. After which I was packed off to bed upstairs in my host’s spare pair of pyjamas in which I floundered all night. And the morning after, before we drove up to connect with the underground into the city, everybody said: ‘Oh, come again!’
All of which formed a fine prelude to Princeton. Yet I still was not quite prepared for the original thing. If New York is some overgrown, gross, ugly hostess, stalking on stilts, retiring to bed with her wig on, and with more than her bosom lifted and powdered freely, if she throws garden parties in and out of season while thousands hunger at the gates, Princeton is a regular bachelor, fortyish and therefore most foolish in his pretences and professions. He has more than two hundred million dollars stowed away safe in giltedge holdings on Wall Street and two or so panjandrums watch over the progress on the stock market. More, the stumping of over-opulent, cigar-chumping and very high blood-pressured uncles is ever present in his ears. About the time of my admission within his gates, some $64 million had just come into his purse and pocket by his mere appeal to relations that part of the family house needed extension. On top of this, one cranky uncle, directing his name be not made public, perhaps for fear of outsiders pestering him thereafter, gave all by himself a gift of $35 million for the rebuilding of the Woodrow Wilson sector of the estate. How many sovereign states today want but a fraction of that to feed their impoverished millions! And wide-girdled frothy-fronted aunts, several of them dowagers, when not visiting some hospital or home, inmates of which their own greed and graft had served to wreck, keep a vigilant watch on the ward so that no mean adventurer slips into the garden to sow seeds of corruption. And, gracious beings that they are, the old ladies are always sponsoring some bazaar in aid of the poor, always playing hostess at some tea party or another.
It was my great misdemeanour to miss one such high party, worse still, right at the beginning of my Princeton career. This was a welcome party given by some Hospitality Committee for the benefit of students and fellows from foreign lands and on behalf of Princeton University and community. And I failed to show up for it!
‘Where were you? Mr and Mrs So-and-So called to take you in their automobile to the party. You were looked for everywhere. Actually cabled to Lagos but lost track of you in Freetown or some such place. Every other person was there,’ Dr Robert Van de Velde who was to run my life for the rest of my stay in the States fired away at me. An old army colonel, with none of his colours faded, he gave me no quarter and actually manoeuvred my rout at the end.
I said I was sorry, that I didn’t myself know I would accept the invitation to come to Princeton until the very day I left home, that I had stopped over at Accra, Monrovia, Freetown, Las Palmas, but that none of them had caused my delay. The real cause was that some well-meaning American friends had stopped me in the city to perform initiation rites into the great American way of life. ‘Well,’ he growled, ‘you go and report to the Graduate School and have yourself properly registered. Your friends have all done so.’
My friends on the course, when I came to sift the list out of a fat sheaf of hand-outs left at the porters’ lodge for me, made quite a fine bunch. Besides my fellow Nigerian, there was a diplomat and cabinet secretary from Syria, an assistant editor of Warsaw’s political magazine, another journalist from South Korea, a young demi-semi diplomat from Yugoslavia, connected with some government research work in his country and whose father was Tito’s envoy to Indonesia, an army general in charge of police duties and security in the Republic of Somalia, a young graduate of Dakar University teetering between an academic life and a diplomatic career in the service of Dahomey, and a deputy director of agricultural extension services for Haiti who at the time of our parting was considering relinquishing his post at home in Duvalier’s domain for one in the Congo, Leopoldville. This was the talented group into which Princeton set out to instil the spirit and miracle of the American achievement while sharpening the individual skill of each for him to do a better job of work back home.
How did the old crotchety bachelor come by this brilliant idea? Such a healthy, outward-looking and productive seed does not derive from the masturbating dreams that an inward-turned, nail-pairing celibate enters into in the sufficiency of his self-milking estate. It is now the traditional story over there where customs form fast and as finely as cobwebs, and one often told with watery eyes and with a good smack of lips by those tending the remarkable culture, that the whole affair started when Mr Justice Douglas, an Associate Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, was invited to deliver some annual course of lectures at Princeton.
The theme he chose was America challenged, and it had thrown into sharp, fresh focus old queries such as: why had Americans slept while Senator McCarthy was spotting witches in every nook and corner of their homes? Why should American youth with all its heritage of George Washington who never lied and Thomas Jefferson who more than any single founder penned the famous declaration of independence be asked to take the oath of allegiance before being granted state bursaries? And can America sincerely and successfully continue projecting abroad, especially to the new nations of Africa and Asia, her image of a great democracy that guarantees to each citizen freedom, justice, wealth and more, when it appears cracking up right here at home?
It needed a brave, free mind to raise these questions right there in the tiger’s lair, for Princeton is the proud custodian of all that is America, beautiful and perfect. And there perhaps the matter might have died had not Princeton, in one of those rare quirks of mind that turn otherwise sedate, delicate dilettanti into intemperate and possessed champions of lost causes, decided to publish the lectures together in book form. The beautifully brought out volume got into the hands of a grand old man up on the West Coast who wrote to the distinguished author down in Washington, who apprised Princeton of the simple pointed questions asked by the man with the money: how can one American help to improve matters between the US and the world?
‘Several ways.’ The honourable judge tossed his grey mane.
‘Name one, and I have the money to pay for it,’ said the millionaire up in California. And so it was the Parvin Programme began, that these past two years has attracted to Princeton and the United States of America a steady stream of talented young men from all over the world.
The Graduate College of Princeton University, where members of the group were billeted, provides a fine specimen of the anachronistic set-up that is Princeton. The name, like many things here, is rather misleading as the place is nothing more than a hall of residence, although, as they are quick and proud to point out, the first residential graduate college in all America. Centred around a quadrangle cut off into an inner and front court, the Graduate College dates from President Woodrow Wilson. In fact, it was the building of it in 1913 where it stands today that drove the scholar Wilson to seek fresh new pastures, a step that took him first to the governorship of New Jersey and then to the presidency of the United States of America, from which aerial pedestal the man saw visions of a world that must unite at once to his call and under his lead or remain for ever beleaguered by division and distrust.
The heavy bust of Dean West, who won the day against the twice disillusioned President, all because he knew the way to the heart and purse of Princeton’s benefactors, sits solid and square today in the forecourt, dominating the lawn as if in perpetual grouse against all latter day masters of the hall. Over it hangs an air of solitary splendour, perhaps symbolic of the fact that the Graduate College, which he sired out in the woods and outskirts of the great estate, right out on the terrain where the Battle of Princeton was fought in 1777, remains today somewhat removed from the centre of things in the family – which is rather a pity, as a brush or two with his weather-beaten tenants, drawn from other climes, should prove a fine tonic for the young gentlemen who in the main campus delight a great deal in punch and punch-bowl.
Dinner for inmates at the Graduate College, all of whom live in entries, is quite an occasion. Gowns must be worn and these over anything from football jerseys to army and navy jungle shorts and boots. A French professor of mathematics, once doing a term at Princeton, is said to have carried the practice one night to its strict logical conclusion by appearing at dinner absolutely nude under his brief gown. Apparently, nobody was amused; the grand ritual has simply gathered more cobwebs since. Academic gowns are however a slight veneer. In this stronghold of Presbyterians and Unitarians graces are still proudly said in Latin, (which sounded like pidgin Latin to me). And Procter Hall for which all this homage has been ordained lacks but one thing: a moat on the outside. Its high-arched and vaulted ceilings, its stained windows, its great chandeliers, (which Dickens probably would have likened to tears of some ogrish woman had he stopped there on either of his two trips to God’s own country), its heavy oak-panelled walls with pictures, framed larger than life, of some dead that were no Bacon, Milton or Newton, all these and more are attributes and apparels that may sit well upon living matriarchs like Cambridge and Oxford. But upon a misogynist like Princeton gone completely bald although still hairless between the thighs, the effect appears terribly grotesque.
And to complete this noonday masquerade, there is the big gothic Grover Cleveland Memorial Tower, the tallest point in all Princeton. Its chiming bells sometimes require the services of experts, the last of whom was hired all the way from a dying guild in the Netherlands. Every Sunday and holiday, tourist crowds, from outside Princeton and beyond the State of New Jersey, flock to gaze at this famous structure, and the thrill sent through them is great indeed, even like the clear silver waves of the musical bells themselves, when those relics of a renaissant Europe, all hidden away in the heavenly heights of the tower, break over them into some quaint hymn, however out of key.
Princeton with its towers, cupolas, turrets, frescoes and columns is one grand museum of architectural titbits down the ages. A stop in front of any, and its ivy-covered façade clamours forth an epoch, and the brash visitor has but to knock on the heavy grimy double doors, and echoes of some epic known only to Princeton resound down the tall vaults and spacious corridors.
Nassau Hall deservedly provides the centre to the close circle of the college. Built in 1756, it easily is the oldest of the institutions, carries most history, and even in those early remote days offered the largest single academic structure in all the colonies. Bearing the royal name of William III, the building changed hands in quick turns between loyalist and rebel troops until its final fall to George Washington. And it was within its walls, still standing today after two fires and so many sieges, that the General received the thanks of that Congress which actually occupied the hall as the capitol of the country for six months. Although now mainly used for faculty meetings and special ceremonies, this famous hall, at one time containing all of Princeton, has not entirely shed its military character. Names of all Princetonians who have fallen in service of their country are inscribed there. Outside on the front steps bronze tigers crouch and growl at all intruders in true Princetonian fashion, and commanding the central quadrangle is a cannon, a relic of the Revolutionary War, and it is around it that seniors hold their last class exercises.
In contrast to this leathery and scarred colonial monster, both Clio and Whig halls, one formerly and the other currently the headquarters of the oldest student literary and debating club in America, may well be mistaken for ancient Greek and Roman temples with transplanted columns, façade and frescoes from across the Atlantic. And the twins do not go beyond the turn of the century.
Even younger still is the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library, a rambling, castellated castle with enough shelters to save the high-destined gentlemen of Princeton from the nuclear sacrifice they know will consume others. For me, however, Firestone gave no security. On my way to America, I had stopped in Liberia and seen the one huge rubber plantation Harvey Firestone has made of it. All that land had at one time been made over to the Pan-Africanist prophet Marcus Garvey. But the combined powers of the United States, Great Britain and France disapproved of his plan of settling the coloured people of America in the midst of subject Africans. So instead, Firestone inherited the vast lots, and Garvey headed for jail and oblivion. And for his co-operation, the great, interested powers were gracious enough to invest the President of Liberia with several honours and gifts.
Today it is Princetonians, and not young Liberians in any appreciable size, who enjoy part of the abundant harvest of Harvey S. Firestone. Yes, every book I plucked out of shelves in there brought the taste of ash to my tongue. But then for the owners, these are what they call endowments, benefits and donations. Indeed the gracious living of the rich and the civilized gives rise to the disgraceful conditions in the lower depths of the earth. But they also furnish those charms that have helped to earn for Princeton an honourable position in that holy American trinity whose other members are Harvard and Yale.
Considering all that ivy crawling over its face, Princeton is a place hardly in need of bouquets from an outsider and rustic. All the same I offered a couple, but these were thought brickbats by those who regard the place a shrine. Autumn in Princeton, the first of them, goes like this:
The leaves, so golden, shower
In the wind. And each tree,
