Thursday, July 15, 2010

Where to?


For the past year or so I've been working on our house here in Davis, turning it from a musty and nondescript ranch house into something more congenial. The first time the realtor opened the front door to the place I nearly turned and fled, for it reminded me of the tract houses from which I picked up a number of unfortunate dates in high school. I could all but see the coiled father seated in his armchair, the anxious mother peeking in from the kitchen, the sullen brothers hovering around the door to the garage, and my date for the evening emerging unrecognizable in full mufti from the hall. 


The house had been occupied for forty years by the same, the original owners: an ailing emeritus and his second wife. A large ranch house to which had been added a mother-in-law apartment in back, it had a stifling, congested atmosphere and a back yard that had been almost entirely paved over, and I immediately crossed it off my list. 


But that was when I still held out hope that a house of some architectural character might come on the market: even a 1920s California cottage with tapering porch columns would have sufficed. Every other town in the Central Valley was replete with foreclosed homes for sale, but not Davis, where the university has kept the local economy afloat and tenure limits the number of homes that come on the market. 


So I returned with my wife to the old professor's house, underwhelming and overpriced though it was, and, beaten down, perhaps, by the run of available houses available in Davis, which but for its core barely dates back to the 1960s, I began to see the house as a kind of tabula rasa, the concrete backyard as a potential pool site, the porch with its 4X4 posts as an Asian verandah similar to ones I had recently chanced upon in Thailand. 


After paring down the price and selling the house we had left in Seattle, I spent many long, hot months installing a pool, reaming out the living room,  knocking out walls, remodeling the kitchen and bathrooms, and installing throughout the house 4 inch wide black trim to try to give the place a Japanese teahouse quality commensurate with the tora gate the previous owner had installed in the front yard. 


I completed the interior some months ago, went to work on the verandah, and finally, last month, painted the exterior: a kind of deep marine green with red beams and yellow rafters and, as elsewhere, black trim.  


But now what? I feel as though I have created a set for a play I've yet to write. About an orientalist, perhaps, or some transplanted old Asia hand. It seems sometimes to say, "Davis? Please, God. Anywhere but Davis." But it's hard to complain about anything or anyone but myself, seeing as how I have, for instance, accomplished a lifelong dream of owning a pool. A small pool, certainly: too small to accommodate much more than a wallow. But a pool nonetheless. And I have planted citrus tree along two sides: dwarf citrus trees but nonetheless fruitful, or so they tell me. And I have a grandchild to look forward to, due in October and destined to frolic, or at least urinate, in the pool in another year or so. 


Maybe out of sheer restlessness I have begun to explore switching the house to solar power, and there are a few maintenance items I have yet to attend to, as there always are in the wonderful world of home owning. But even though I have three plays making the rounds of various theatre companies and a book or two in the offing, I haven't written anything in months, and it's time I climbed back on the literary horse or put him out to pasture; time I made up my mind what road to follow. 

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Hello, I must be going

It's unfortunate that the blog page that's been sitting unchanged over the past month sported a cartoon of a "Too Much Information" booth, as too little information has been more the theme since I posted it. 


Some weeks ago I finally managed to persuade my mother to come celebrate her 97th birthday to California from Connecticut to celebrate her 97th birthday with her west coast family. 


The whole family thought the trip was a fine idea: Mom was in great shape, and the proposition seemed to give her a new lease on life after years of grieving for my father. The whole family except my wife, the nurse, who thought it was a foolish and reckless idea but did not have the heart to tell me. 


Mom flew to Sacramento escorted by her grandnephew Garrett and his wife Beth, and after sleeping half a day to recover from the flight, ensconced herself on the verandah, where, as she visited with Garrett and Beth and Debbie and me and enjoyed the sight of the blackbirds bathing in our pool, she was her effervescent self.


My mother has been something of a miracle of nature. No-one who meets her suspects she's as old as she is, and some don't believe us when we tell them. Some thirteen years ago, during my son Jake's graduation from Wesleyan, my sister escorted Mom to the ladies' room the college had established in a field house. It was a sweltering day, and there was a long line of matrons waiting to get in. So my sister went to the head of the line and asked if the ladies would let her eighty-four year-old mother cut in line. "Of course, dear," they said, so Helen retrieved Mom and escorted her forward. But as she reached the head of the line Helen began to hear some grumbling, and finally overheard one woman say to another, "Eighty-four, my foot!" 


So it is understandable that her family -- some of whose members are hoarier than she - thinks she will live forever, or at least that she may be immune to the usual geriatric slings and arrows.  But then, in the wee hours of her birthday, Debbie and I awoke to the sound of a crash and ran in to find my mother crumpled up on the floor of the guest room, having slipped getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. Apparently she had grabbed an end table for support and it collapsed, and now here she lay in great pain. 


Soon the EMT folks arrived and transported her to the local hospital where she was diagnosed with that gravest of geriatric injuries: a fractured hip. It required partially replacing with a steel femur, and by two that afternoon she was under the knife. Once upon a time, a fractured hip was attended by clots and pneumonia and infection and amounted in most cases to a prolonged death sentence. But hip replacement surgery has removed a good deal of risk, and in fact, over the ensuing weeks, the hip was the least of her problems. 


She received extraordinary care: superior to anything she might have received back home. And though she greeted the physical therapists who attended her at the nursing facility into which we squeezed her as though they were the Spanish Inquisition, she made enough progress to be able to fly back east eventually and return to her apartment. 


Over the course of the five or six weeks she was here, I found I could not think of much else, and spent most of my time either visiting her or preparing to visit her -- collecting toiletries, checkbooks, mail, magazines, audio books from the library, snapshots off the web; writing various care givers back east; and reporting on her progress to the rest of the family. My errands and missives served the purpose of creating the illusion that I had some measure of control over something that was happening to someone else. That that someone else was my mother gave this purpose a special urgency, and the primal nature of my relationship, at 64, with my 97 year-old mother, left me with no extra energy to invest in this blog, and if the clumsy way in which this is written is any indication, I may in fact be returning to it prematurely. 

Sunday, May 16, 2010

The Slippery Slope of Joy

A few years ago I was invited to a fundraiser for a drug rehab facility by a friend of mine who was one of its alums. My friend, like most of the rest of the gathering, was African-American, and before we lit into our dinners, a minister stood up and began to clap on the upbeat and half sing and half preach a welcoming incantation that had the whole room on its feet, clapping and nodding and shouting amen’s.
     The whole room, that is, except me. I was fascinated by the spontaneous response of the other attendees. But I remained seated. This was in part because there was a lot of Jesus talk in the reverend's incantation, and I do not believe in Jesus. Even if I did believe in Jesus, I regard Christianity's persecution complex as unseemly among any but the persecuted, which I am not. 
     On the other hand, I do not wish to offend, and so at such times as this I never know how to respond, especially if the music is any good. As I remained seated, my host looked down at me and, seeing that I had begun to tap one foot slightly, gave me a wry smile. 
     “Easy now, Andy” he said.
      When Cordelia fatally refused to flatter her father, she declared that she could not "heave her heart into her mouth." I share this problem, though not her predicament, as my father was not King Lear: Dad distrusted flattery, dismissing its practitioners as people who, "you know, try to crawl in under your vest." 


But it's not just flattery I find difficult. It's joy, especially of the unalloyed variety.  
     This morning my wife and I went to the farmer’s market, where one of the University's marching bands was putting on a freeform concert at which, for a donation of $25, you could conduct the band in one of its numbers. I stood listening to the jolly racket they made and enjoying their line-dance moves as they blatted and blasted their way through seventies standards-turned-marching-songs.
     I began to imagine what would happen if I were to fork over $25 and climb onto the little stepladder that passed for the conductor’s dais. I began to choreograph the whole routine. I would identify myself as Arturo Bernstein, perhaps, and play the martinet maestro, commanding them in a German accent to play their pianofortes pizzicato, keep their allegros andante and their andantes al dente and so on, then tapping my baton and declaring, “All right, on seven,” to my wife's astonishment and the crowd's delight. 
     I remembered how Jerry Lewis and Danny Kaye used to take up the baton and lead whole choruses and orchestras in what seemed like spontaneous routines that were actually carefully rehearsed. I would try to follow in that tradition. So on and on I fantasized about my act and the gales of appreciative laughter from the crowd and the musicians, until my wife and I had finished buying vegetables and returned to the car.

Today was Whole Earth Day here in Davis -- not just Earth Day, mind ou, but Whole Earth Day. So this afternoon my wife and I headed off to join the throngs that had gathered on the university quad to celebrate the Whole Earth with whole drum circles, falafel, tie-dye booths, and didgeridus. 
     The crowd was full of people who seemed time-locked in the early seventies (which is the period most people mean when they say the sixties) with their long hair and gypsy outfits and beatific grins. Face-painted and beaded and bare-midriffed young persons in eccentric head gear and sloganeering T-shirts traipsed barefoot through the grass, hackey-sacking and hula hooping, romping and cavorting.
     A capoiera drum line wended its way toward the dance stage, with a large crowd bumping around in rhythm in its wake. My wife began to follow as well, and as I stumbled after her, I managed a couple of slight knee bends and maybe two sways and a few rhythmic shrugs as the drummers led us along. 
     But all this festivity only brought back to me how ill suited I was to my own era, how unfit I am for some varieties of human company, how much time and energy I have spent trying not to make a fool of myself, only to make a derisive ass of myself instead.
        Maybe I would have been better off in upper class 19th century England, when decorousness rather than disinhibition was one of the cardinal virtues. But I don’t really think so. I think that just as I felt stuffy and out of it in the 1970s, I would have suffocated in the 1870s.
     The great ballplayer Satchel Page once prescribed three roads to happiness: to work like you don't need the money, to love like you've never been hurt, and to dance like nobody's watching. 
     I don't know what the hell he was talking about. 

Sunday, May 9, 2010

As long as he needs me

My wife has been doing a lot of traveling lately, getting the word out about the new nursing school she's helping to found at the University of California at Davis. This leaves me to my own devices, which seem to deteriorate as the days go by. 
     At first I am the model single male: rising early; cooking myself a wholesome, well balanced meal; cleaning up as I go along (because isn't that half the fun?); buckling down to write. But then I forget lunch, unless the hunger pangs get too pronounced, in which case I pull out a bag of chips, a soda, and some dip, if I can find any. Suppertime passes into night, and around ten I may microwave a hot dog or call out for a pizza, then it's over to the television for some late night viewing, after which I resume writing, snack some more, leave a couple of lights on, turn in, read for an hour or two, and finally drop off around three in the morning. 
     I don't think I'm particularly sleep-averse, and Debbie's regime is not so oppressive that it's as though I must go romping around the schoolyard when she's away. But something truly giddy and juvenile comes over me during her more prolonged absences. 
     I am not entirely helpless. In fact I am handy, can cook my meals, keep my environs relatively tidy, and by the time she gets back I've usually managed to clear away all evidence of my delinquency. The dishes are done, the kitchen sink is spotless, the laundry is washed and dried and sorted, the garbage has been dumped; the recyclables have been, well, recycled; and if I took the opportunity that her absence afforded of taking on some handyman project I have usually completed it, put away the tools, swept up the sawdust. 
     In other words, I usually present a home that's in better shape than when she left it. But I myself am a mess -- malnourished, sugar-high, sleep-deprived -- and may well greet her with my fly open. 


Her homecomings are always marked by a close and bustling inspection of the premises. I call these her fault-finding missions. The more immaculate the home when she gets back, the more intense her scrutiny, as though by getting everything ship-shape I were merely trying to put one over on her. 
     When, inevitably, she does find something amiss -- a paint drop on the laundry room floor, an errant screwdriver, a bottle left uncapped in the refrigerator, a letter unmailed, a call to the furnace repairman unmade  -- it seems to be almost a comfort to her, a confirmation of her core belief that I am a nitwit. 
     I am in no position to argue with that. Nevertheless, these inspections of hers do tend to diminish some of the pleasure I take in her homecomings. 
     But there's nothing like a little belated insight to soothe my wounded feelings, so I have decided that I know what really lies behind these inspections. It is a need to believe that I cannot live without her: that she is necessary to me, so central to my life that without her I would spin off into the void. 

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Hyde Park Bred

I watched the Obamas at the Press Club last week, and enjoyed the comedy lesson the President gave a blowsy Jay Leno, especially when Obama followed a gentle jab at Michael Steele with a sly and perfectly timed, "My brother." 
     But what struck me again was the deep but wry affection in which Michelle and Barack Obama hold each other. It all seems to me utterly charming and entirely recognizable. 
     I was raised where the Obamas lived before coming to Washington: in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, where my father was Dean of the College at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. There is something in the cerebral atmosphere of my old neighborhood that seemed to nurture relationships like theirs. 
     My parents shared it, as did several of their married friends. It was passion enriched by intellect,  devotion garnished with humor, erudition with humility. 
     My father went on to work for the Ford Foundation in India and in Africa, and died three years ago, at the age of 96. But before his death, my mother read Obama's autobiography to him, and he would make her pause every now and then to ask why Americans didn't choose men of Obama's quality and complexity for their President. How he would have rejoiced in Obama's election, and taken pride in the way he has handled himself. 
     
When I was very small my mother would sometimes say, perhaps in part to comfort herself that the sacrifices she made on his behalf were worthwhile, that my father should have been president. 
     I sometimes wondered to myself what sort of president my father would have made. I used to invent scenarios in which my father would be appointed, say, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Then some catastrophe -- an electrical accident at a White House pool party, or a shipment of toxic hair dye -- wiped out the rest of the line of presidential succession, leaving my father holding the bag. 
     I suppose my father would have made a better, or at least smarter and better spoken and more honorable Chief of State than Nixon, Johnson, Ford, or either Bush. But would he have been crippled by his erudition and fair-mindedness, his sometimes lofty rationality and instinctive trust in the other guy's good faith? And would the country have forgiven him his sense of humor? 
     Though I could never really imagine it, Obama comes close. The Presidency is a terrible job to wish on anybody. But it has been fascinating, for better or for worse, to watch one of our own go about his business. 

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Bwanas and Sahibs

My brother Geoff is an amateur tiger conservationist, and he and I were talking the other day about a recent New Yorker article I recommended he read. It concerned a telegenic American couple named Mark and Delia Owens, whose passion for African elephants seems to have gotten out of hand. 
     Perhaps that is putting it mildly, as there's evidence that their troubled son shot an unarmed poacher to death as an ABC News team stood by, that Mark may have retrieved the body and dumped it into a nearby river, and that at least a portion of the ABC crew went along with the coverup.


There's less debate among conservationists than you might imagine about whether or not it is justified to shoot poachers on sight, especially when they're carrying AK-47's, and especially when whole species are being hunted to extinction for their parts, including several on which Chinese men are apparently willing to spend millions of yuan to avoid taking Viagra.
     But as Geoff and I got to talking, we returned to a beef we both have with Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and PBS, when it comes to nature documentaries. We were brought up on Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom with Merlin Perkins, and Walt Disney's Truelife Adventures, and both of us recognize the extraordinary improvements that have been made to the genre. 
    We are agreed that no-one ever wrote a better documentary script than David Attenborough, and we thrill to the footage intrepid teams of cinematographers have captured for such series as Nature, Blue Planet and Life, including, recently, astounding images shot through falling snow of that most elusive of cats, the snow leopard, dragging its kill up a rocky Himalayan slope.


But our complaint is with the producers of a lot of other wildlife documentaries who, like the writers of historical romances set in exotic places, center their stories around white people instead of the real heroes of animal conservancy: local game wardens and animal conservationists. 
     With little remuneration and no fanfare; at risk to their lives; and often in defiance of their own governments; they are the ones who strive most courageously to sustain the world's wildlife. And yet, at best, they are relegated in most animal documentaries to bit parts: as loyal guides and faithful sidekicks to the sahibs and bwanas who come rolling in from L.A. with their film crews, safari jackets, lomotil, and little bottles of Purell: peppy, entrepreneurial, self dramatizing young people who have narrowly chosen animal conservation over skydiving or bungee jumping.
     We know of a few steadfast indigenes who have been featured, notably Geoff's friends Fateh Singh and the late Billy Arjan Singh, both tiger wallas of irresistible charisma, and I suppose a producer would argue that Western viewers need someone on the screen with whom they can identify. But it seems unfortunate and shortsighted to neglect the real heros of animal conservation and to understimate our capacity to identify with them.

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Love Letters in the Sand

Before my grandmother died in 1976, she left instructions that my father burn all her correspondence with my grandfather. So when we found their love letters in an old trunk in the basement, my father duly consigned its contents to the flames.
     Both of my grandparents Ward had spent their childhoods haunted by scandal: my grandfather's father had embezzled millions of dollars as a financier on Wall Street: so many that the family is somewhat affronted that the sort of pyramid fraud Ferdinand Ward refined has been named after a piker like Ponzi. By rights, it should be known as a Ferd.
     Before he was sent to Sing Sing in 1885, my great grandfather had put large dents in several fortunes, and utterly ruined former President Ulysses S. Grant, whose son he had finagled into becoming his partner. It is to Ferdinand Ward that we owe Grant's military memoirs, which he wrote in an effort to dig himself out of debt.
    My grandmother was the daughter of Daniel Otis Eshbaugh, the President of New England Loan and Trust, who apparently committed his company to a disastrous investment. Temperamentally ill suited to the rough and tumble of turn-of-the-century commerce, he could not bring himself to face his Board of Directors and jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.
     Our family has fled from commerce ever since. But my brother Geoff has long been at work on a book about Ferdinand and his father, an almost equally odious Presbyterian minister, and I have always been fascinated by the mysteries of my ancestry. Geoff is an historian and I an erstwhile one, and we generally deplore the instinct among families to jettison their ancestors' correspondence. Researching various books, each of us has followed the trail of a cache of 19th century correspondence, only to be told by the latest heir to some family's archives that it was destroyed or discarded.


My father-in-law was a pathologist, and, upon meeting my father for the first time, handed him his monograph about his research into coccidioidomicosis, a disease peculiar to California's Central Valley. My father, who was not a man of science, duly opened the monograph and read the following passage: "The practice by laboratories of pouring pus down drains is to be deplored." 
     My father was at a momentary loss for words. But my father-in-law's point was that this was a great waste of pus: of material others could put to use in their research. I guess Geoff and I feel the same way about the ancestral record, no matter how rancid it may be, and recall the disposal of our grandparents' correspondence with grief.
     Recently my mother has begun to go through her correspondence with my late father, who, like his mother, left orders that it all be destroyed. Reading it, however, has brought my father back to life for her, restoring him from the difficult and confused old man he was when he died, to the dapper, brilliant, loving young man she married.
     My belief is that we all have a right to destroy any of our inanimate possessions, and keep private whatever intimacies we deem unsuitable for children. But not necessarily from the grave. 
      My father's instinct was always to clam up, to not make any sort of fuss or display that anyone might construe as egocentricity. When his children volunteered to write something for his mother's memorial service, his first response was, "I don't want to turn this into some kind of Ward family dog-and-pony show." But in the end we prevailed, and he loved what we had to say about his mother. Though his objections were sincerely felt, it was not always clear that they were sincerely meant, for whenever we overruled him he seemed glad we did.
     I come from an unusually happy family. My grandparents not only loved each other but enjoyed each other's company, as did my parents, as do my siblings and my mother's grandchildren and their spouses. It's really quite a family, and owes a lot to the standard my father and mother set.
     It seems to me that some future generation might like to understand the source of such felicity, to learn from my parents' love letters that such happiness was not accidental, but took nurturing, respect, wit, persistence, fidelity, patience, and a lot of coaxing into the light. 
     So with all due respect to my father, I have urged my mother not to yield to his extravagant reticence but to grant my parents' descendants admission to their courtship.

Sunday, April 25, 2010

But I did it for you

I have been married now, and to the same woman, for two thirds of my life. But then "the same woman" is a phrase that rebounds somewhat, for the woman I married is not by any means the same woman I am currently married to, nor am I the same man she married, and therein hangs a tale, perhaps for another time. 
     They may call it wedlock, but it's not gridlock. Stasis is not something you can expect from marriage any more than you can expect it from life, which is why we call it married life, I suppose. No matter how much we might want to sustain a particularly happy moment in our marriage -- "Oh, Darling, why can't it be like this forever?" -- it can't be like this forever, and that's just the way things are. 
     Now that may sound grim, but it isn't meant to. Because I am a better man than I used to be: grayer, shakier, deafer, more forgetful and more disabused, certainly; nevertheless I do occasionally have a game changing insight that keeps the ball moving down the field. 


My latest involves a longstanding pattern of our marriage that has occasionally sent us to our respective corners, bloodied, bruised and breathless after a verbal round of recriminations. 
     Here's what rings the bell. Debbie goes off somewhere on business, and I take the opportunity her absence presents of taking on some grandiose household project: tearing down a wall, building shelves, replacing the porch posts with columns, installing a hammock, clearing out a dying hedge -- you name it; I'm handy. 
     Now, I love to do this stuff. Nothing cheers me like slapping something together to delight Debbie on her return. The problem is that she is rarely delighted, or in any case, rarely delighted to a degree I deem commensurate to the wonderful thing I've just done for her. So I either sulk about this -- and I'm very good at sulking -- or I let her have it. "You don't appreciate all the things I do for you. And because you don't appreciate all the things I do for you, I am reduced to having to beg for your appreciation, and it's humiliating."
     But the last time around I prefaced all this with, "Now, I love doing this stuff, but -- " and then launched into my usual whine, to which she protested that she had thanked me, that she did say she liked the new raised bed I built for her. So what did I want her to do? Get down on her knees and throw up?
     I hesitate to reckon how many times we've had this argument, but something about my preface this time -- "I love doing this stuff" -- nagged at me afterward, and suddenly it occurred to me that as a matter of fact I don't do these things for Debbie. I do them for myself. I do them for the pleasure of doing them. 
     A little more thanks from her would be nice, sure, but not absolutely necessary if I simply absolve her of the expectation of tears of gratitude and whoops of appreciation I reflexively whip up as I go about my business. 
     I realize that I have done a version of this all my life: volunteering to be the go-to guy in family crises, making myself indispensable, and then resenting the hell out of everyone else for being insufficiently grateful, and for not stepping in more, when in fact I have left no room for them to step.
     I am much more likely to forget an insight than to have one, so I hurried over to Debbie with this one. From now on, I told her, I would not set us both up for another round or two of recrimination. She looked doubtful, but I meant it. Henceforward I will desist from pushing my own inner resentment button and stop setting her up for a fall. 
     I just hope she appreciates it. 










Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Nizamuddin Dhargah

The New York Times reports that quietly, even furtively, the American government has begun making what it calls "overtures" to the Moslem world. It seems to me that overtures are supposed to be at least audible to the naked ear, nevertheless it's about time we did something to recognize that it's Moslems that are the primary victims of Islamicist terror, not us.  
     I have been scanning and sorting through the photographs I took between 1966 and 1971, among them images of a complex of Moslem shrines in  New Delhi, India called Nizamuddin's Dhargah. When I lived in New Delhi, it was one of my regular destinations. With its walls and warrens and labyrinthian alleyways, the Medieval complex had been a refuge for New Delhi's Moslem population during the riots that attended the partitioning of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan, and it remained a haven whenever communal tensions in the city approached the breaking point. Here lay the tombs not only of the 13th century saint Nizamuddin Auliya but the musician and poet Amir Khusrow; Jehanara, the sister of the Moghul Shah Jehan; and the great 19th century poet Ghalib.  
     It is said that as a young man Nizamuddin had to struggle hard to be humble because he had so little to be humble about. He was by all accounts brilliant, handsome, charismatic. Chased from Bokhara by Mongols, he and his parents did not find refuge until they reached the Doab, the fertile triangle that lies between the Jumna and the Ganga, where his father promptly passed away. He and his mother lived in abject poverty, but Nizamuddin was so brilliant that local sages gave him a “turban of scholarship” while he was still a child. By the time he made his way to Sultanate Delhi in the mid 13th century, his mother had died as well, and he was rescued from starvation by the greatest Moslem scholar of his day. 
     At first, Nizamuddin had entertained ambitions of becoming a magistrate, but as he immersed himself in the Koran, he resolved he would renounce the world and live the rest of his life as a penitent. His teacher, however, was a Chisti Sufi who persuaded his pupil that true humility lay not in abstruse scholarship and self abnegation but in defending the oppressed and doing good works. Refusing  to attach himself to the ruling nobles of his day, Nizamuddin established a monastery about a kilometer from where he now lies buried, to which he welcomed people of all faiths. He stood up to the nobles who tried to seduce him into their service, kept company with the poor, and tempered Sufi doctrine with generosity and practicality. Much like Gandhi, he was a very Indian sort of saint, and a bur in the side of the powers-that-were, and it is no wonder that in the precincts of his dargah he is still believed to be a living presence.
   
Some places have been hallowed for so long that even an irreligious young man like myself could feel the reverberations from the hordes of pilgrims who for six centuries had found their way here from the farthest reaches of the Moslem world. I felt as though I had found a refuge there too, and made friends over time with the local mullahs who permitted me to photograph the beggars as they sought out spots of sunlight in the sandstone alleys; the water carrier as he made his rounds through the adjacent cemetery, slaking the thirst of the dead with water he dribbled from a goatskin sack; the scholars studying their texts on the cold stone tombs; the women come to confer with astrologers and sages; the singers performing Qawwali in their lovely hoarse voices before Khusro's tomb; and the penitents with their beads reciting the 99 names of God: Allah the Merciful; Allah the Protector; Allah the Provider; Allah the Just; Allah the All Forgiving. This is the Islam -- generous, humble, open-hearted -- that stuck with me.
     I don't know whether Radical Islam has infected the residents of Nizamuddin Complex. I like to think that the saint's devotees would be immune to it. But what I think is misunderstood about Islamicist terrorists is that ultimately they are not directing their fire at the West. Even the attack on the World Trade Center was, to them, merely collateral damage. Their real targets are the kind of moderate and ecumenical Moslems whom I encountered at Nizamuddin Complex and the Islamic scholars who befriended my father at Aligarh University in the 1950s. 
     The terrorists hope that in our fear and outrage we will turn against all Moslems, and thereby compel them to join the ranks of the extremists. Radical Islam does not care a whit about Western unbelievers. Their intention is to force us to set fire to our end of the bridge that moderate Moslems have been trying to traverse between East and West, Old World and New. 
     That Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet but Christianity does not show Muhammad the same respect will always divide the two religions. But then, that's what religions generally do, isn't it? Divide? It's only when religion is entirely separated from nationalism, and people like Nizamuddin, Buddha, Gandhi, and the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas show a way to reconcile their own faiths with not just tolerance but true acceptance and respect for individual creeds that religion even begins to make any sense to me. 

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Fartacus

I am happy to report that this season's last episode of Starz TV's Spartacus: Blood and Sand is over. My fascination with the Romans, which is of a piece with my fascination with the Mafia, the Romanovs, and the British Empire, kept me captive to what may well be the worst dialogue in the history of historical teledramas, and that's really saying something. In fact, to find writing this awful, you have to go back to before there ever was such a genre: back to The Robe, perhaps, or Samson & Delilah, or one of Cecil B. DeMille's tumescent epics.  


There were times when the script's syntax became so mangled that I wondered if the series had been written by a dyslexic local anchorperson. But no, it turns out it was the work of a committee headed by one of the show's producers, Stephen S. DeKnight, the very same Stephen S. DeNight who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And who better to capture the power and the glory of the great slave rebellion of 73 BC? 


DeKnight wrote the first and last episode, but left his mark on all the others. I offer some examples of his dialogue: all delivered within the first fifteen minutes of the season's final episode. 


Here's Spartacus's master Lentulus Batiatus introducing a woman whose husband couldn't make it to the party, but would have his remarks "delivered by pleasing tongue of trusted wife." Then we go to "Two Days Ago," when Spartacus is told that some of the boys won't be joining the rebellion. "Lisus and the others refuse to grab cock without Crixus calming their balls." "How can you bring him to cause," asks another, "if you cannot break words with him?" "Being champion yet affords privilege," Spartacus assures him. When Batiatus declares he is getting out of the gladiator business, his black slave, Doctore, standing in for Woody Strode from the Kirk Douglas version, wants to know if he "would see your family's heritage a thing of memory?" "I had thought to make announcement at a celebration," Batiatus replies, and tells him he intends to free Doctore, who takes the news gravely. "I had thought the news to please," complains Batiatus, but Doctore replies that he has "heard rumor: one that has vexed sleep." "The rumor is true," concedes Batiatus, "yet absent reasoning." His wife doesn't appreciate his good news either, but explains that "joy is restrained to lend clear mind to celebration." Arranging a duel between Spartacus and Crixus, Batiatus's wife insists "we must insure Spartacus victorious." Spartacus is perplexed by the venue and asks Batiatus,  "How will our guests have view?" After Spartacus insists that Crixus be given a chance to prepare for their duel, Batiatus exclaims, "Haha! You truly have fucking mind for this!" Doctore meets with Crixus and urges him to "delay talk of freedom until there are ears that would welcome the sound." When Spartacus compares his murdered wife to the sun, "never to rise again," his new squeeze replies, "Heavy thing to be denied its warmth." 


Heavy, indeed. Not even poor Jay Silverheels as Tonto had to speak lines that bad. The effect of such dialogue is numbing, or, as DeKnight might put it, "Such words benumb brain of men." It's like listening to a dormitory full of not very advanced ESL students argue politics in their adopted tongue. For some reason, DeKnight decided that since the Romans did not employ definite articles, he should leave them out of his English dialogue as well. If the translators of Tacitus, Ovid, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius and the like had only thought of this, they could have posted their work on Twitter. And Shakespeare could have shaved half an hour off Julius Caesar. "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend ears." 


There's a whole lot else wrong with Spartacus, and it may seem strange that I fixate on the dialogue instead of attacking the show's exploitation of the ease with which obscure actresses, including one of the producers' wives, will agree to take off their shirts; or the delectatious way it depicts all those beheadings and skewerings, floggings and flayings, and buckets and gouts and geysers of blood. But there is something truly insidious about bad dialogue when it is harnessed to a vehicle like Spartacus, which, not for better but for worse, is as compellingly gruesome a spectacle as anything the Roman's devised for their own squalid amusement: a marvel of special effects and gladiatorial gymnastics. Awaiting the next slashing swordstroke, the next jab of a trident, the next heaving assignation, viewers and maybe even the cast may cease to even notice how terribly written the damn thing is. 


Andy Whitfield is a charismatic lead, and the producers have attempted to ground the series in what little we know about the rebellion. But unlike the Kirk Douglas version, with Stanley Kubrick's sly direction and Dalton Trumbo's stirring populist script, Spartacus's tele-rebellion strikes a blow not for freedom but for nookie. Maybe it's a question of elective surgery, but the frequent sex scenes had a, well, numbing sameness about them (or the few I actually sat through. When I was a dismal teenager, I used to thumb through books for the "good parts," but here I did the opposite, hitting the fast forward button at the first drop of a toga. "Right," I kept telling the screen, "I get it. They screwed. They also probably went to the john. Get on with it.") 


Every episode opened with one of those basso profundo warnings about the scenes of "sensuality, brutality and language that some viewers may find objectionable," although I think law enforcement should monitor very closely any viewer who does not. The announcer goes on to explain that the "intensity" of Spartacus: Blood and Sand is intended "to suggest an authentic representation of the period:" presumably a period when pecs were square, nipples were in flower, and people suffered from such high blood pressure that the merest pinprick produced fountains of gore. 


At the close of the last sanguinary episode, Spartacus and his escaped comrades, each bespattered with Roman blood, set forth from Batiatus's collegium gladiatorium, presumably headed for a gym in the Castro. I wish well they whose brave heart and mighty hand do battle with ripped abs for honor and glory of . . . 


Oh, the hell with it.

The Bidet



Last year I spent four months noisily remodeling our house: so noisily that I felt I owed it to our neighbors to show them the results. One result was that we acquired something my wife had been hankering after for some decades: namely, a bidet. And apart from the walk-in closet, it was the hit of the open house: an object of many an ooh and ah from the women of the neighborhood.


I don't really understand what the fuss is all about. As far as I can tell there isn't anything you can do with a bidet that you can't do with a shower, a sink, a tub, or a garden hose. 


But I have my own curious history with the contraption. I first encountered one in Paris en route to the States on our first home leave from India. I was about ten at the time, and I remember checking out our bathroom and asking my mother what the extra bowl was for. "Oh, that?" she replied hastily. "That's just something French women need."


As a consequence of all those boyhood hoppings around the globe,  I have always tended to arrive at premature conclusions. "They seem a happy, contented people," I am wont to declare as I first step onto foreign soil. My wife and children try to call me on this, but jumping to conclusions is about all the jumping I'm fit for these days. And admitting the truth, which is that half the time I don't know where I am or who I'm with, is conversationally dead-ended. That and something my daughter calls M.A.S., or Male Answering Syndrome,  has condemned me to spend my life presiding over my own private kangaroo court. 


I sensed from the way my mother bustled around the hotel room afterward that she was not going to tell me anything more about the mysterious fauceted bowl in the bathroom. So I was left to my own devices. I had not yet entirely worked out in my own mind the Facts of Life, which seemed to me too incredible to be factual. "They put what where?" my friends and I would ask one another, and then shake our heads with doubt and disgust. 


I knew from the way my father and older brother ogled the young women seated at cafés along the Champs-Élysées, that French women were different, somehow. They did not resemble the American memsahibs of my acquaintance, who had modeled themselves after such bovine icons of Hollywood domesticity as June Allyson and Rosemary Clooney. French women were elegant, racy, slinky, held themselves with a certain sensuous hauteur. They sipped wine, walked in heels, double-crossed their legs when they sat, pouted adorably when they spoke. 


I suppose there are all kinds of stories about people who first encounter a bidet and employ it for some mistaken purpose. I know one person who assumed it was designed to facilitate the washing of feet, and another who concluded it was intended as a laundry basin. And no doubt others have put it to far more unfortunate uses. 


But all I did back then was think long and hard about it, and to conclude from my mother's hasty reply and what evidence I had thus far assembled, that French women, unique among their species, boasted an extra appendage which had to be kept particularly clean for some reason, and which they could lower at will, like landing gear.


I'm not going to say how long I clung to this conclusion. I just very much hope I was mistaken.





Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Chanakyapuri








Ever since we Wards returned to the States in 1959, our old house in New Delhi has been the object of periodic family pilgrimages.  A perk of my father's appointment as the Ford Foundation's Educational Consultant to the Union Ministry of Education, it stood in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi's Diplomatic Enclave, on what were then the outskirts of the city. 


Set in a kind of compound with a horseshoe driveway of red quartz, an expanse of parched grass and dusty hedges, and a complex of servants' quarters in back, in its whitewashed stucco glory it looked something like the stacked upper decks of a small ocean liner, with duplexed semicircular verandahs on each end. Behind us stood a dairy, directly across the street lay a large empty lot frequented by snakes, enormous lizards,  and jackals, and a few hundred yards away lay a ribbon of empty boulevards that the Government of India had cleared and paved to make way for rows of prospective embassies.


I first returned to India as a photographer in 1968, and as the beneficiary of my father's rise in the Ford Foundation, I actually had the opportunity of living there again for a few weeks as sole sahib. The house was much as I remembered it, and no fresh refugee from art school ever landed on softer upholstery. Some of our family's old servants -- to our astonishment, eleven had greeted us when we arrived from the South Side of Chicago in 1954 -- were still around, and it had not changed nearly as much as I had. Living there again as a young bachelor evoked some curious sensations for me: nostalgia, certainly, but also a weird sense of abandonment, as if the family had somehow left me behind. Where was my mother when the cook came in to go over his accounts? Where was my father when my driver asked where I wanted to go? Why were my brother and sister's rooms empty? I felt like the young heir to an extinguished dynasty, and when it came time to make way for the next educational consultant, it was almost a relief.


Another ten years passed, and I returned to research a novel. The day after the night I landed, my first stop was the old house, where I hoped to photograph a papaya tree my sister and I had planted. I imagined that it must have achieved the stature of a sequoia. 


By now the Ford Foundation had handed the house over to the Government of India which, in turn, had bestowed it upon the Government of West Bengal to serve as a rest house. As the local caretaker graciously escorted me around, I heard for the first time the whispering of mortality that twenty years later hisses in my ears like tinnitis. The verandahs had been enclosed, the living room divvied up into bureaucratic warrens, and the covered terrace my mother had constructed had collapsed. And as for the papaya tree, all that remained was a rotted stump.


On each of my subsequent trips I vowed not to put myself through that ordeal again, but the four years I lived there had been the happiest of my childhood, and I always surrendered to its gravitational pull. On my next trip five years later I was allowed into the kitchen my mother had overseen with Switzer vigilance. Here she had lectured the servants on germ theory, and her beloved cook Amiya had worked from recipes from her own frayed copy of the Joy of Cooking


It was late morning when I stepped through the dining room doorway and into the kitchen's once pristine, white-tiled precincts, and interrupted perhaps fifty large rats in their scramble for crumbs from the morning's preparations. One ran over my foot as I staggered back through the doorway to the verandah, where, years before, our bearer had organized a vigil by servants and neighbors of every imaginable faith to pray for my recovery from encephylitis. That's it, I told myself. Never again.


These revisits began to sap my appetite for Delhi itself, whose population had quadrupled since my boyhood. My old haunts had been subsumed by the bustle of what had turned from a kind of vestigial memorial to British Rule to a major world metropolis choked with motorized traffic. The old republican zeal of the 1950s seemed to me to have succumbed to a corrosive cynicism, and the city's best minds seemed focussed primarily on the best way to make money.


If all this strikes you as the grousing of an old man for the old days, the unseemly and perhaps nostomaniacal whining of an overprivileged chota sahib for all the deferences that devolved upon us in post colonial India, you are not entirely mistaken. Of course the population would grow, and the city with it, and my house would not survive in all its pristine glory. It was not a museum to our brief residence in it, but had turned into something else entirely, as had Delhi, as had much of India. 


If my disillusionment extended beyond Delhi, it was only to North India, as I had never been south of Bombay. But this past February, I traveled around South India with my wife's cousin, the sculptor Robert Taplin, who'd been after me to lead him on a tour of Indian temple sculpture. Suddenly I found myself in an India I could discover on its own contemporaneous terms, and by the time I had circled back to spend a few days in Delhi, my affection for India had been so thoroughly restored that I decided to risk another tour of the house, this time with my brother Geoff.  


So off we drove from the house he was renting in Golf Links to our old neighborhood of Chanakyapuri, along streets so changed that we were practically through the gate before I knew where we were. Where we were turned out to be a construction site, for apparently the West Bengal government, having been forbidden by the municipal authority to tear the old house down, had decided simply to subsume the old place in an engulfing structure straight out of a nightmare: a great brick and mortar maw with stairways seemingly leading to nowhere. 


We stumped around the premises for a while, revisiting my old bedroom, and my parents', and Geoff's, and going up to the roof where we once set out a stuffed owl one afternoon and watched as dozens of crows and vultures and kites attacked it. The house next door, once the Japanese consulate, was still in pristine condition. But everything else had changed. The dairy was now an army encampment, and the house on the other side of ours, once the home of our father's boss at the Ford Foundation, was surrounded by walls festooned with barbed wire. Half the kitchen had been entirely and perhaps mercifully closed off, and the construction had overwhelmed what little had survived of the terrace. 




Geoff and I gloomed around the house like ghosts, and we were pretty desolate by the time we got back to his apartment. After a couple of stiff drinks, we promised ourselves we would never go back. But that besieged old place is like a kind of gauge that indisputably measures -- should we sometimes lose track -- the inexorable passage of time. Besides, though there are not yet any rats in our kitchens, the house is probably not doing much worse than Geoff and I. After all, no-one has seen fit to encase us in a protective shell. The Delhi Municipal Authority would have no objection to tearing us down. So I doubt it's a promise we will keep.  

No, not the New Yorker

My godson Giacomo, among others, tells me that text is too hard to read when it's white against black, so I'm now experimenting with black against white. (Takes you back to the Sixties, doesn't it?) And my nephew Nathan suggests that I introduce my cartoons to my blog, or vice versa. 


Four years ago, I drew about a hundred cartoons as I awaited  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Jovanovich and Schuster's verdict on one of my manuscripts. I still don't know what came over me; maybe it was turning 60. But suddenly cartoons were popping up all over the place, and I had to sketch madly to keep up with them.


I had tried cartooning when I was younger, but I was too self conscious to hit on a style. Now a style seemed to derive organically from my incompetence as a draughtsman. In any case, I thought some of them were funny, and I ran them by a bunch of my friends who seemed to like them too. Though you never can tell with friends, they emboldened me to send five or six a week to the New Yorker. That the New Yorker, upon whose doors I had once knocked until my knuckles bled,  had recently published a piece by my son Jake suggested to me that perhaps a new era had dawned and that the doors might at long last creak open for his father as well.


On the other hand, I sensed that the cartoons I was doodling belonged, if they belonged anywhere, to the New Yorker's pre Mankoff period. Robert Mankoff has been cartoon editor for quite a long period, and despite certain dependables like Roz Chwast, his selections have often made me feel either awfully dense or terribly, terribly old. I also knew going in that Mankoff deeply resented dabblers in his profession, especially writers who regarded their backhanded scribbles as irresistible.


When I started writing I used to deal with the vicissitudes of submitting to magazines by displaying my rejection slips on the wall. Esquire's was elegant, and the New Yorker's were encouraging and always courteous, and I proudly amassed such a vast display that when magazines began to accept my submissions I sometimes caught myself sighing disappointedly because I had been counting on another rejection to fill a gap in the exhibit.


It took the sting away then, but not this time around. As I lined Mankoff's rejection slips on the wall over my desk, I found them disspiriting, and since the New Yorker is just about the only decent venue left for cartoons, it wasn't as though I had a backup plan. So in the end I shelved them and put away my drawing pad and went back to work.


But now, as Nathan points out, I have my own venue. So here's the first of my cartoons, this one on the subject of free range chickens, the inexplicable subject of my first post. I seem to be greatly exercised about free range chickens. I mean, what's the deal with free range chickens?

An Empire Relinquished by F.Champion Ward



One consequence of getting older is that you begin to run  out of mentors. By the time I turned sixty, three of mine had passed away, one just as he was about to turn a hundred, but the other two prematurely, of cancer. One of these was Meg Greenfield, the effervescent editorial page director of the Washington Post who moved down the street from me on Bainbridge Island, Washington, and encouraged me to write for her newspaper. This I did for a year or so, and I seemed to gain some traction, if such can be measured by the number of prominent politicians who took umbrage at what I wrote about them. But after a while I began to look down the road and see what a prominent column might get me if everything worked out well, and that was a seat among the gargoyles of The McLaughlin Group. 

So I balked and began to invest all my time in writing history. Meg was disappointed that her promising young man had decided to break his promise, and I'm still not sure I did the right thing, but we remained good friends and she still invited me to attend the parties she threw for the movers and shakers who came from all over the country to ingratiate themselves with this erudite and peerless opinion-maker at her beachside home. 

In the fall of 1998, I sent her an opinion piece my nonagenarian father had written about the end of empire as he had experienced it as a foundation executive in the 1960s. She liked it very much, and was about to publish it, when they discovered that she had cancer that had spread from her lungs to various reaches of her diminutive frame, and she died the following April. 

My father died in 2007 with his article still languishing somewhere in Meg's file boxes, and no inquiries could restore it to the batting order. So I've decided to publish it here. Dad had published several pieces in the New York Times, boasting to his writer sons that "there was still some life in the old bull yet." But I think this was the last piece of this kind he wrote before blindness overtook him. 








AN EMPIRE RELINQUISHED
Glimpses of the Departing Raj in India and Africa
by
F. Champion Ward  


The recent stately and cordial departure of “the captains and the kings” from Britain's last major colony was a reminder to me of how skilled the British became, after the Second World War, at beating dignified and amicable retreats from their overseas possessions. During the mid-century decade in which I first lived in India and then regularly visited Africa, former British colonies occupied themselves primarily with preparing for such imperial recessions and their aftermaths.
            Early in 1954, my family and I sailed for India, where I was to serve as a Ford Foundation consultant to the Union Ministry of Education in New Delhi. I soon found that the warm welcome that I received as a nongovernmental American was not extended to my official countrymen. As our ship (one of the last P. & O. liners) neared Bombay, the Eisenhower administration had announced its fateful decision to sell arms to Pakistan in order, as a  leading American policy maker later explained, “to shore up the eastern end of CENTO.” That decision abruptly cooled the warmth engendered in the first years of Indian independence by our first ambassador, Chester Bowles. Thereafter the American line — “We, too, threw the British out” — ceased to work with Indians, if indeed it ever had.
            Another surprise for American arrivistes was the good standing enjoyed by the recently departed Raj. India's former rulers were respected rather than reviled by the new leaders of India whom they had so often jailed. This apparent anomaly was explained to me by an Indian intellectual shortly after I had arrived. “We have settled our accounts with the British,” he said, “and are now free to admire them.”
            Unsettling, too, was the polished speech of many Indian officials. "Geez,” said one American agricultural expert, “these guys speak better English than I do.” The president and the prime minister were “Oxbridge” graduates, and my Indian counterpart in the Ministry of Education, himself widely known in India as the first Indian Secretary of the Oxford Union, once told me that there were eighteen Oxonians among his colleagues: “enough,” he added, “for an annual dinner.”
            Indeed, some of our hosts gave off more than a whiff of hauteur toward Americans that had presumably been inculcated by their British dons. This attitude was revealed in a number of ways. A ministry colleague first informed me that “the Sikhs are very energetic and superficial,” and then, on a later occasion, called them “the Americans of India," leaving me to complete the unflattering syllogism.
            But perhaps my probationary status was made clearest by our bearer. He had once served Jim Corbett, the fabled tiger hunter. When word reached Delhi of Corbett's death in Kenya, I tried to console him. “Yes, Sahib,” he sadly replied. “There aren't any sahibs like that any more.”
           
I returned from India in the Fall of 1958 and for the next five years directed the Ford Foundation's first program of “development assistance” in Africa.
            In contrast to India, where British rule had already ended, many African states were still colonies when the Foundation’s program began. Nor did all of their various European masters regard the prospect of their colonies’ independence in the same way. Indeed, Salazar’s Portugal, in its ahistoric way, saw no reason to accept the new Africa at all.
            On my first visit to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), my Belgian host conceded, with an air of reluctant discovery, that Belgian rule might last for no more than another fifty years. His estimate was off by forty-nine years. Soon after the Congo became independent, I was having tea on the lawn of a hotel overlooking Lake Victoria when I saw what the Congo's independence meant to at least one family of Belgian refugees. A Belgian woman sitting at the next table with her children and their African nanny rummaged through her handbag until she came upon her house key. She held it before her for a moment and then, with a bitter shrug, tossed it into the nearest bush.
            The French and British departures were less grudging. The French divorced and then remarried most of their former colonies through the single grand gesture of the pater familias of the French Community, Charles de Gaulle. The British disengaged through a sensible succession of planned devolutions and transfers of power extending over a number of years. (These serial departures by the British were sufficiently numerous and well spaced as to enable one enterprising British firm to specialize in the rental of bunting and other paraphernalia required for the proper celebration of the birth of each new state.)
            When I visited Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1960, it was a British-managed U.N. Trust territory. Julius Nyerere had already been designated as Tanganyika's first president. Against his populist instincts, he was living in the official residence on the edge of Dar-es Salaam, where, escorted by the American consul, I spent the evening with him.  After a number of brandies, someone mentioned the British-African constitutional talks then going on at Lancaster House in London in preparation for the independence of a number of East African states. The talks were moving slowly, but far from accusing the British of stalling and duplicity, Nyerere said, “One can't really blame the British. They keep drafting constitutions, bringing them to the meetings, and saying, ‘Why not try this one?’” The phrase, enhanced no doubt by the brandies, seemed to please him, and he repeated it several times. In addition to reflecting Nyerere's fair-mindedness, it was an early glimpse, lost on me at the time, of the rivalry and mutual wariness among the future leaders of East Africa on which the East African Federation would later founder.
            The realistic statesmanship displayed at this time by British officialdom in London was not always matched by British colonial officers still serving in Africa. “If it had not been for your Woodrow Wilson,” charged the British Permanent Secretary for Education in the then Eastern Region of Nigeria, “I'd still be ruling my natives in my district.” But judging by the sullen reception he was given by “his natives” when I accompanied him on a homecoming to his former district, the proximate cause of his loss of authority lay nearer at hand.
            Of course, it was galling for the run of colonial field officers to face the early end of their careers, despite the “golden handclasp” with which they were consoled as they left the service. The sight of uninformed Americans seeking roles in post-independence Africa only deepened their resentment. “How long have you been in Nigeria, Mr. Ward?” l was asked by one British wife. “Ten days? We've lived here for nineteen years.” The next day, as I toured government offices in Kaduna, I got a glimpse of the way of life which was now coming so reluctantly to an end. My hosts were on the phone to each other but not strictly on Her Majesty's business. They were putting together the afternoon's tennis doubles. “No, not Simpson,” I overheard one say. “I don't think his backhand is quite up to it.”
            Perhaps, as a general rule, it can be said that the smaller the imperial power, the meaner the spirit of its departure (although French Guinea, where the French were said to have taken even the light-bulbs with them after Guinea voted “Non!” to the French Community, was an obvious exception). Here I include, along with Portugal and Belgium, the Dutch in the East Indies. Perhaps it is simply a matter of the greater importance attached to their few colonies by the smaller European countries. One of the first strong leaders in Mozambique, Eduardo Mondlane, once told me that he had grown up believing that Portugal was infinitely large and rich. But once he got there and saw how small and poor Portugal really was, he said that he felt “much less resentful” of Portuguese rule.
            Although the imperial departure was often orderly and sometimes magnanimous, it didn’t necessarily follow that the colonies thus formally empowered were, in fact, ready to become successful nations. In the case of Zanzibar, the British were barely over the horizon before the Sultan fell from his unsteady throne. Here the contrast between Asia and Africa is striking and may prove fateful for Africa's future. On the whole, the new nations of Asia were co-extensive with old cultures, but in Africa, which had been wracked by the slave trade well before Europe colonized it, new nations and nationalism were themselves artifacts of colonialism. A case in point is Cameroon. Its very name derived from the Portuguese word for shrimp and its two principal components legacies of British and French rule. Indeed, during the Cameroon's pre-independence period, one nationalist party made a patriotic point of spelling the country's name with a "K" as the Germans had when the Kaiser ruled Kamerun.
            Geography, too, made for social indigestion within a number of African states. The combination of a savannah interior inhabited by austere and undereducated Muslims and penetrated less deeply by colonial rule, with coastal peoples — many of whom, as the British used to say, were either "Christians or bare-assed pagans” — proved as difficult in Africa as has the mixture of Bedouins and Palestinians within the single nation of Jordan.
            A number of countries in Africa — Ethiopia, for example — share with such non-African countries as Lebanon, Malaysia and the former Soviet Union the misfortune of being dominated by one ethnic linguistic or religious group which constitutes about half the population. It is as if every other American were a Texan or white or a Christian, or spoke Spanish. In most cases, the hegemony of the dominant group is maintained but the resentment it inspires in other groups chronically threatens national unity and social order. In Asia the breakup of Pakistan is in part explained as the resentment of the Bengalis of the East toward the hegemony of the West Pakistanis.
            The divisive effect of tribal loyalties and antipathies, often extending across national frontiers, is another and, by now, familiar obstacle to national cohesion in Africa. For a time, many Americans, ignorant of intra-African complexities, tended to see Africans as divided only by their colonial masters. With independence Americans expected them to speak, think, and act as one. I recall Thurgood Marshall's surprised dismay when, as an observer at the Lancaster House meetings on Kenyan self-rule, he asked a Kikuyu leader about opening-up the highlands to farmers of other tribes after independence. “Just let them try it,” came the grim reply.
            Sometimes, Americans who had come to know the pervasiveness of African tribalism would try to reduce it in small ways. A colleague in Nigeria started out bravely with one Ibo, one Yoruba, and one Hausa as his household staff in Lagos, but he finished with three Ibos after one member of the experimental trio took a knife to one of the others on the ground that, as he angrily explained, “That man is a stranger!”
            Not that tribalism is unique to Africa. Flemish and Francophonic heads were being broken in Brussels even as tribal conflicts broke out in the Belgian Congo. And the Congo, when I first visited it, reflected the linguistic, ethnic, and religious divisions of the home country. Louvanium University in Leopoldville was Catholic, and so the “Confessional” University in Elizabethville was Protestant; students in either university were entitled to be educated in either French or Flemish. The Belgians in Leopoldville told me that it had cost some fifty thousand dollars to educate the one student who had opted for Flemish. I have often wondered about that student's reflections when and if he got to Europe and tried to order lunch.
            Other barriers to successful development in black Africa, ranging from friable soil and unevenly distributed rainfall to widespread illiteracy, discouraged any illusions that early and smooth progress toward mature nationhood and economic prosperity could be expected in Africa's first decades of political independence.

Even these scattered and personal observations seem to me to support the conclusion that although all colonial empires began in evil, some have behaved better than others. Certainly, the first Vice-President of Indonesia thought so. He once told an Indian audience that his fellow Indonesians “had to use force to win our independence, as you would have had to do if you had been ruled by the Dutch. The Dutch would have hanged Gandhi long ago.”
            A comparison of the aftermaths of the British departures from India and Africa might suggest that Britain stayed too long in India and then left Africa too soon. But unless one regards the bloody partition of the subcontinent as the inevitable consequence of an imperial policy of Divide and Rule, it may be more instructive to point out that since 1947 India has repeatedly changed governments by means of free national elections, now has a huge and growing middle class, and feeds itself. (Other, less tangible gains, as a member once said of a proposal before the Indian parliament, “must await improvement in the national character.”)
            In the case of Africa, hindsight is more difficult. Events so often seem to have been inevitable, once they have happened. However, in the sixties, it did seem clear that the die had been cast. Most Africans (but not all) were not prepared to wait any longer for independence. Before the Gold Coast became Ghana, I heard Kwame Nkrumah, then Ghana's president-in-waiting, tell a New York audience, "They say we aren't ready for independence, but here we come, ready or not."

Can it be that the turnover of Hong Kong was the posthumous handiwork of Rudyard Kipling? Or is it only coincidence that Kipling's prescient “Recessional” was published in June, 1897, almost exactly a century ago? At the jubilant height of Victoria's Empire, Kipling's poem urged his fellow-countrymen to abjure the pomp and “far-flung battle-line” of empire in favor of “an humble and a contrite heart.”
            Although the Labour Party rightly receives the primary credit for Britain's successful disengagement from its overseas possessions, and although one does not quickly attribute humility and contrition to Margaret Thatcher, the Tory decision to enter into the Hong Kong agreement, however belated and reluctant it may have been, should be noted as one more example of that conservative practicality which has often helped to ensure the solidarity of Great Britain in uncertain times.
            Some future Gibbon, seeking to explain the decline and fall of the British Empire, may cite such causes as the struggle of indigenous independence movements, Britain’s post War economic and human exhaustion, and party politics at home. To these one hopes he or she will add the British people’s increasing discomfort with the contradictions between maintaining an empire and pursuing their own democratic aspirations. But whatever the “verdict of history,” the manner of Britain's leaving deserves respect for the practical wisdom and common decency that British policy makers and officers eventually brought to the task of dismantling the largest empire in history. Perhaps now, at long last, we too can be “free to admire them.”

F. Champion Ward is a former Vice President of the Ford Foundation.