CHAPTER ONE
WHY NOT GO?
A āYOUNG-MAN-GOING-SOMEWHEREā WAS THE WAY THE OLD-TIMERS at the Chicago Daily News described overeager cub reporters like John Gunther. In 1924, a couple of years out of the University of Chicago, John was dashing between bank robberies, fires, gangster shoot-outs and Rotary Club luncheons. Those were the sorts of stories the lowest guy on the totem pole got assigned at the cityās main afternoon paper, but John had already set his sights much higher: he wanted a job at the Daily Newsās bureau in London. He was fed up with America, its hypocrisy, philistinism and cant: the Prohibition that didnāt really prohibit, the moral regeneration spearheaded by charlatans like the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, the corruption and graft bubbling up under the veneer of postwar ānormalcyā.
But the postwar disillusionment that had settled over much of American youth was only part of what was ailing John. For more than two years ā two fruitless, unavailing years ā heād been trailing around after Helen Hahn, a local belle. He made small talk with her father, ate dinners with her family, sent her letters and books when he was away. John was constant but Helen, a blonde stunner, was fickle. Mostly she liked to string him along, touching his arm while they talked, her big blue eyes gazing into his. Heād paid for one of her abortions though the kid definitely wasnāt his, which even at the time struck him as the sort of thing only a chump would do. He knew he had to flee.
The arrival of the author Rebecca West in Chicago in November 1923 was a beacon from the sophisticated Old World beckoning to the New. West was Britainās most notorious modern woman, a novelist, journalist and feminist who had just wrenched herself free from an affair with the writer H. G. Wells, immensely famous, twenty-six years her senior and married.
When John and Rebecca met one evening at the University of Chicago, she was a well-seasoned thirty; he a decidedly tender twenty-two. She was on her first American lecture tour, addressing audiences on such racy subjects as polygamy. There wasnāt a man living who could gratify four or five women, Rebecca had insisted: āThere are many men who cannot make even one woman happy.ā
For years Rebecca had been eager to see America, but when she arrived in New York she wasnāt all that impressed. āThis whole place strikes me as a greedy childrenās party,ā she wrote to her sister, appalled by the relentless getting and spending. Chicago was different. In its swagger and newness, it wasnāt like any place she had ever seen. From her room at the Drake Hotel, she marvelled at the neverending lake, its grey-green wintry water tugged by millions of waves. The skyscrapers looked like enormous gasoline cans, stolid but lacking in grace. A wholly new shopping street, Michigan Avenue, had been whipped up as swiftly as a Hollywood set. Between the business district and the miles upon miles of identical brick houses rising raw out of the prairie wobbled an elevated railway north, south and west.
And the people, with their curious addiction to introspection and self-analysis. It was a midwestern quality, Rebecca thought: this touching eagerness to take one on a tour of their inner lives. Such a creature was John Gunther. Rebecca nicknamed the young man āJohn Silenceā because he never stopped talking during the weeks she spent in Chicago. John had the āvitality of seven cart-horsesā, she later wrote. A āGothic angel ā tall and slender and golden-haired.ā That was, she added, until he discovered European cooking. Sheād later introduce him to her friends in London by saying: āThis is John Gunther who comes from Chicago in fact he is Chicago, he is a moral imbecile but a darling.ā
It was all her doing, Rebecca always said, that John finally left his hometown. She didnāt know whether he had any talent at all, but heād be better off, she told him, if he ceased writing those atrocious short stories and novels and caught a steamer to Europe. Maybe he could earn his living as a foreign correspondent. She thought he was a little in love with her.
Johnās bosses refused his entreaties to go to London. He was much too green to be entrusted with a position abroad, his editor informed him. He decided to quit his job and leave anyway; the $150 heād saved would go further in Europe. He had a clutch of letters of introduction from powerful literary agents and publishers to writers such as Rafael Sabatini and Aldous Huxley. Rebecca had promised to show him the town. He booked his passage on the White Star Lineās SS Olympic, departing New York for Southampton in October 1924.
It was a lucky break that the Prince of Wales was on the same boat, returning home to England from his six-week tour of North America. Now John had a story to sell. With a $100 advance from the United Press, he traded up from steerage to a first-class cabin, a necessary luxury to track the princeās activities. The palaceās humourless courtiers tried to quarantine His Majesty ā ālike a Hindu virgin or a case of leprosyā, reported John. The prince needed guarding both from the reporters on board and from ambitious Long Island dowagers with unmarried daughters. Nevertheless, John found plenty to send the UP.
Who was that magnificent girl swathed in furs, who sat alone in the Parisian restaurant the first two nights and was seen with the prince every night thereafter? (John knew: it was a married American newspaperwoman, who caught the princeās fancy and reported their conversations to John every night.) The whole ship was abuzz, he wrote, with rumours that the prince might renounce his right to the throne. (As indeed, twelve years later, he did for Wallis Simpson.) If there was nothing in the rumour, John noted, the princeās courtier wouldnāt have bothered to issue an official denial. Johnās story ricocheted through the American and British papers.
John was running away from Helen, but still, he saw every sight through her eyes. How she would have laughed at the dress of the British on board. āMauve spats, taupe knickers wide enough to drive a Ford through, dinky caps, rugs for capes, monocles ā¦ā There was the ancient duke who promenaded on deck in his rose-coloured bedroom slippers, another who appeared in sparkly purple bow ties. Too bad she wasnāt there to stroll with him through the Olympicās vast acres of floating grandeur. Did Helen realise that there were palm gardens and swimming pools and tennis courts on the ship? Heād asked the one pretty girl on board to dance. The girlās family had country houses on Long Island and Rolls-Royces, too; her hair was marcelled and jet-black, her eyes wide-set, and she let him talk and talk.
In those years, the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of Americans set off from the New Worldās docks to live for a spell on the Continent. The trip from New York to Southampton was a swift five or six days by liner, short enough to return home if a parent became ill or the home office required managing, and with the money you saved over in Europe, where the living was cheap, you could afford plenty of return journeys. American entrepreneurs settled on the Right Bank in Paris, hoping to hook the French on imported sweet corn or shredded wheat biscuits or elastane corsets. American engineers struck out for the brand-new industrial cities proliferating in the Soviet steppes; theyād show Stalinās workers how to build harvesters and steel foundries. In Europeās leading cabarets, the music was jazz, and American performers taught the king of Spain and the Aga Khan the latest dance steps. There were American bankers who trumpeted Wall Streetās ever-buoyant securities and American heiresses who husband-hunted among Europeās titled but hard-up nobility. Everywhere there were American dentists who retailed New World methods for polishing and straightening teeth.
The writers who went to Europe, though, had a different purpose in mind. Theyād sell the experience of the Continent ā the condoms advertised in every pharmacy, the sewage stink of Naples, the Tanqueray cocktail, the long creamy sticks of French bread, the azure waters of the Riviera, the anti-colonial politics, the charred battlefields of Belgium ā back to an America that was scandalously isolated, moralised and teetotaling because of Holy Rollers, and raised on canned food and the Bible. John had gone to Europe because of Helen and maybe because of Rebecca and definitely because of his family. For those reasons, and because he wanted to write.
āALWAYS I HAD DREAMS of Europe,ā he wrote later, when recounting this part of his life. āThese must have started (my motherās influence) when I was a child.ā In the roomy kitchen of the old house on Chicagoās North Side, Johnās mother would read Keats, propping her book open with one hand and stirring the soup with the other. She cut a stately figure, tall and shapely, with soft, lovely hair and elegant long fingers. Lizette Schoeningerās family was cultivated, solid, German. The women played bridge in the long afternoons, had heavy, well-polished silver tea sets, and their houses smelled of beeswax and warm coffee strudel. For Christmas they gave each other stacks of leather-bound books, and their trees glittered with hundreds of candles.
Why had she married Eugene Gunther? It was a mystery to John. Could his mother really have loved his father? Eugene had once been handsome, even a little dashing. She was nearly thirty, getting old to be a bride. John supposed she must have once been fond of him.
But later, how she suffered the shame of the man. Eugene had one disreputable job after another: peddling cigars and fake liquor; fishy dealings in real estate; and, worst of all, managing a garage, home every night with grease-stained trousers. He was a cheat in poker as in everything else, and a glad-hander, the type who in low-down bars made a show of bonhomie by throwing his arms around the bartender. Crooked through and through, Eugene was nonetheless a stickler for decorum: he did not tolerate swear words at the dinner table and condemned the new fashions in underwear; funerals had to be arranged according to his rigid sense of correctness.
The house was outwardly peaceful, but the tensions within were impossible to ignore. Lizette cultivated herself and her children, John and his sister, Billi (but especially John), not just as defence but as a weapon against her husband. To the Art Institute or to improving lantern lectures at the local public library they went, sailing out of the house the three of them, Lizette and her two children, irreproachably attired. She read the Iliad to John and they cried together over the death of Hector.
Lizette kept John at home with her until he was nine. He couldnāt go to school yet because of his asthma, she said. There was never enough fresh air in his childhood, he thought in retrospect. His hobby was writing encyclopedias: drawing up entries for battleships and his favourite poems, for momentous dates in history and the animals of the world classified species by species. When his mother finally enrolled him in school, he worried that he would address his teachers as āMamaā.
As a small boy, John had pined when his father was away. āPapa, do you like me?ā he wrote when he was five and Eugene was travelling. āI wish you would come home.ā He sent samples of the colours of his Crayola box and listed all of the animals he could think of. But more and more, he took on his motherās fastidiousness, shuddering when his father mispronounced names or repeated his old stories. He saw that his father was a braggart who couldnāt stand to be wrong and didnāt want to be outdone by his son. Eugene used his pudgy fingers to push food onto his fork. He chewed his ice cream. He got heavy and ill with dropsy, chain-smoking cigars, so corpulent that he could no longer cross his legs.
One evening, when he was twelve, John broke the still surface of a family dinner to declare that he wished he had been born an Englishman. Not an American. His father stormed away from the table, detecting Lizetteās influence over the boy. To be English was to be high-toned, cosmopolitan, literary, better than Chicago. Eugene started to accuse his wife of turning the children against him. Like other German Americans caught between pride in their heritage and loyalty to the United States, the familyās claim to Americanness was fraying. The Guenthers, as they were known then, were too close for comfort to the Kaiserās Germans, with their spiked iron helmets and their rape of Belgium. A year or so after the dinner table incident, Eugene and Lizette changed the spelling of their surname. During the First World War, the Germanic Guenthers became the unobtrusively American Gunthers.
āYou must be a success, a success,ā Johnās mother urged him. By high school, John was devouring books, one every few days, an appetite that encompassed Edna St. Vincent Millayās A Few Figs from Thistles as well as Keeping Fit at 50, with plenty of cowboy stories and worthy classics in between. Arthur Conan Doyleās The Sign of the Four was āone peach of a bookā and Scottās Ivanhoe was the sort of story that āsuits me better than any other sortā. Tom Sawyer, by contrast, didnāt live up to Huckleberry Finn. George Eliotās Silas Marner was āalmost as badā as Dickensās David Copperfield, both dust-dry. āShaw may be pessimistic, unclean, too cynical for youthful minds, but believe me, Iām going to read him,ā he pronounced after a first encounter with the author of Pygmalion. āConrad at last!ā he noted on reading the novel Victory. āI never before imagined that such a concentrated, awful force of action could be wholly transmitted to the printed page.ā
He had his own opinions but the ones that mattered, he knew, belonged to other people: the scathing Chicago critic Burton Rascoe; the dramatist George Nathan, editor of The Smart Set, the literary magazine for fashionable youth; and most important, H. L. Mencken, the iconoclast of Baltimore, who flayed the sham moralism of the American ābooboisieā and the pettiness and provincialism of what passed for culture in the United States. To the young literary striver, devotion to Nathan and especially Mencken was as essential as a porkpie hat and a long raccoon coat. Even ...
