A Letter From the Tropics

To Munson Havens
25 December, 1936
MY DEAR HAVENS: Christmas at 92° in the shade is still Christmas, I suppose, so I send you the season’s wishes in all affection. Probably the first Christmas came off like this, for I imagine the region around Bethlehem is no improvement on the sun-blistered landscape that stretches out interminably before me as we lie at anchor off the Venezuelan coast. I have no heart to go ashore. We are getting horse-doctor’s doses of Venezuela, and as Panurge said when he saw the Pope, the sight of it hath not much bettered me. After touching Haiti and Curaçao, this ship turns itself into a Bummeldampfer, doing a sort of ferryboat business for a week among six or seven Venezuelan outports before going on to Amsterdam by way of Trinidad, Surinam and Madeira. The return trip includes the same stops, so I decided to go down as far as Trinidad, stay there a week, and take a returning boat to Haiti, where I shall make a longer stay.
It is a good enough itinerary for once, anyway, but the week’s doings off Venezuela are nothing to be recommended, except for the rather barren privilege of seeing how the other half lives. As the captain says, they are fearful to go through, but fine to talk about afterward. I am old enough to have learned not to judge a people by what one sees at a nation’s ports; otherwise I would take my Bible oath that the Venezuelans are a race of natural-born murderers and horse-thieves. You never in all your days saw such people as come out in rowboats and infest the ship at these outports. The other evening a posse of fantastic scallawags swarmed aboard, armed with pistols and knives, and in a dispute over a drink one of them hit the barkeeper in the eye. The Hohepolizei were sent for, but in true American fashion they did nothing until the local political boss arrived; he cleared up the situation very summarily. I asked the barkeeper why he did not shut up shop when he saw such vermin approaching, and he made the illuminating reply that one could never tell who were officials. He had got into trouble once, he said, by refusing a drink to a man who turned out to be a minister-plenipotentiary, and ever since then he had played safe.
Aside from freight, we carry local third-class passengers on the overnight runs between these outports. They snooze and luxuriate on the lower deck, sometimes dancing to the strains of whatever instrument somebody happens to have, and thus they pass the night as best they can. They carry a most extraordinary assortment of dunnage; potted plants, seedlings, chickens, fighting-cocks, family portraits in huge gilt frames, jardinières, goldfish, macaws, empty tin cans — nearly anything one can think of as unlikely for anybody to be traveling with. Tin containers are in great demand among the populace, for some reason; also empty bottles, the larger the better. In Trinidad I saw a lively curb-market trade in bottles going on. I am told that the inhabitants use these things to carry water in, but no one could tell me where they carry it, or why, or what they do with it when it gets there, so I had my doubts. Still, these containers must have value, for yesterday I saw a man in a rowboat bargaining for them with Negro roustabouts in our forecastle, offering fresh fish in exchange at the rate of six fish per, which seemed right smart of a price, considering.
Some young Venezuelan girls are on board with their families, evidently high-life. They are beautiful — beauty is no name for it — but I should say about as companionable as one of Artemus Ward’s miscellanyus moral wax statoots. They seldom speak, seldom smile, never laugh, never read, never do anything more arduous than examine their faces in pocket-mirrors and primp, and their habitual expression is morose. If they are a fair sample, one can’t help thinking that the chivalry of Venezuela are content with very little, especially as I hear that the depreciation on this type of beauty is ruinously high, and from the looks of the elder women in the party I should say it is even so. The social restrictions on womankind here breed this sort of critter, so I suppose she must be in great demand, though I can’t for a moment imagine myself in such an unexacting state of mind, or account for it in anybody else; so I fall back on the maxim that for those who like that kind of thing she is probably about the kind of thing they like, and let it go at that.
The ways of the Venezuelan bureaucracy are a sublime and impressive marvel, and well worth an American’s study, as showing what we are rapidly coming to in our own land. So many nagging laws, decrees, regulations and restrictions come forth from day to day that the administrators are in the same plight as our jobholders and corporation lawyers, knowing neither what they mean nor what to do about them. Going, say, from Guanta to La Guayra by steamer is like going from New York to Fall River on the night boat; and I was told that in order to do this t he Venezuelan has to be documented by four different officials and have his luggage examined in the customs before starting. We got into a great tangle of red tape at Guanta by anchoring there on the day the census was taken, for it turned out that, under the law, everybody on the ship, from the captain down, was liable for registration as a resident of Guanta. There was a tremendous to-do about this, chiefly caused by Venezuelans from other parts of the country. Being in transit on census day, they had no papers to show that they had been registered in their home town, and apparently being registered at Guanta would make all kinds of trouble for them when they went back. Not understanding Spanish, I do not know if or how the mess was finally straightened out. Maybe I am now officially a resident of Guanta and a full-fledged Venezuelan, but nobody has said anything about it, and the day is too hot for investigating.
At Guanta you see a perfect miniature of what organized government comes to, sooner or later, everywhere. You see a fine imposing two-story customhouse ornamented by a dozen or more well-fed, prosperous-looking officials lounging on the porch, and surrounded by a cluster of squalid hovels inhabited by people apparently as far gone in wretchedness and dereliction as it is possible to go; and that is all there is to Guanta. You never forget the sight, for it shows so faithfully the final state of things towards which our modern development of Statism, nationalism and corporalism is tending — a flourishing parasitic State which has sucked dry the vital forces of society around it, and is therefore itself on the verge of a violent and loathsome dissolution, such as is already taking place in Spain. Don’t go to Italy to study Fascism, my dear friend, or to Germany to see how long they are on submarines and how short on grub, or waste your time on statistics of the New Deal. Go to Guanta, and you will see what they all finally come to, and you won’t even have to land. You get the best view of it from the deck of the steamer; and as she lies there all day, you have plenty of time to reflect on what you see.
I have a good deal of respect for Venezuela nevertheless, or rather for the statesmanship that made it the only nation in the world that does not owe anybody a single bean. It has no debt of any kind, national, provincial or municipal, external or internal; and it pays as it goes, operating on a cashand-carry basis, and issuing nary a bond. Coming from our tax-ridden, debt-infested, bond-blighted country, I had hard work to get this through my head, but there the fact is.
Old Gomez found Venezuela blanketed with the usual litter of paper obligations, and he immediately set himself to paying them off out of current revenue, as Mr. Jefferson did with the national debt that Alexander Hamilton had piled up. Gomez was no Hamilton ; he had no notion whatever of using a national debt as an instrument for welding the interests of ‘the rich and well-born’ in support of a strong centralized government. Gomez was a peasant, with a peasant’
With all the talk about the bad dictators, have you ever wondered why nobody says anything about the good ones? Columns of rubbish about Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, are printed every day, but I never hear anything about Salazar, nor did I hear much about Gomez until his death a year or so ago. Yet the old man must have been quite a fellow, and a middling fair patriot, according to his lights. As for Salazar, I spent some months in Portugal not long ago, and for all I could see he was giving the country about as good and cheap a government as it could hope for. There is said to be a fairly decent dictatorship of a strongly paternalistic type in Haiti, and I shall presently have a look at it. Of course you understand that these terms are purely relative. What they mean is that on the perfectly sound assumption that all professional politicians are common rogues, wherever found, some dictators show a surprising amount of moderation, considering their opportunities, and they should have due credit for it.
I contend, however, that there is a vast lot of humbug about the importance we attach to political systems, for in the end they all alike come back to the kind of folks you have. As William Penn said, there is hardly any system so bad but that in good hands it would do well enough, and the best in bad hands can do nothing great or good. Given any kind of system, no government can stand for any length of time either above or below the moral and cultural level of the rank and file of people behind it; and just that is what makes the future of government in our country so extremely unpromising — we hain’t got the folks, my dear fellow, and that’s that. Some day, if I were not so old and tired and —mère de Dieul — so lazy, I could write a treatise on government that would rank me with old John Adams and John C. Calhoun as a student of the subject. If I did, would you read it? Would anybody read it? I trow not. In fact, once written, I doubt I would read it myself.

The Greek Orthodox Church seems to be doing some business down this way, which is a surprise to me. A colored brother on the down-bound ship, dressed up in all sorts of gorgeousness, introduced himself to me as an archbishop of that persuasion, on his way to his headquarters at Barbados. In return for a contribution, he gave me a picture of his cathedral, and one of a local saint and martyr, Reverend Stanislaus Egyptié McGinley Jack, who was slain at Pointe-à-Pitre — I do not know why — and subsequently canonized under the name of Saint McGinley. The cathedral is named for him. Saint McGinley’s Cathedral! — the name can hardly be matched in church history. Delegations of the faithful meet the archbishop at every port, bearing great quantities of flowers. They and their offerings make a rather showy picture on the wharves, enlivening a dead and dingy setting in an agreeable way.

You would be pleased to see how well all hands hereabouts get along with almost no news of the outside world. It makes one wonder how much, really, the wholesale dissemination of news has added to the sum of human happiness. Two weeks ago the Dutch news service sent out a four-line report that the King of England had jumped his job and left the country, which I was glad to hear, for there are so few of us, men or women, willing to give up something desirable for the sheer sake of some person of the opposite sex. If he had done it of his own motion in the first instance, instead of so late and under pressure, he would have shown himself a real gent, and I believe his sportsmanship would have had a grudging commendation even from the irreconcilable old retired colonels in the West End clubs, who no doubt have been on the verge of apoplexy for a month or more. But better late than not at all, of course; and the more highly civilized part of mankind, which does not busy itself with frivolous curiosity about the doings of kings and princes, may now be permitted to forget him. My only thought is of his having been so long the arbiter of taste and fashion for our lower order of Anglophiles that I am afraid Baltimore has been bought clean out of livestock by now.

In the English colony of Trinidad, a week after the news broke, whatever interest there had been in it had apparently evaporated. Only once I heard the incident mentioned, and the local press gave it very little space. I could imagine what our ‘cannibal newspapers,’ as Mr. Jefferson called them, were making of the affair, and I then realized what it was that I had been vaguely missing ever since I left New York — vulgarity. Commonness, das Gemeine, instinctive and inbred bad taste and bad manners, seem to be as scarce in Trinidad, especially among the Negroid population, as they are commonplace among our newspapersodden public. I would suppose you must go about as far to find a native cad, male or female, as in France, Belgium or Holland to find a native snob; and this makes one’s most casual associations a rewarding and salutary experience. As you so well know, the hardest thing that a person bred in our civilization has to do is to keep himself able, when the time comes, to say with Perdican in de Musset’s dull drama, ‘C’est moi qui a vécu, et non pas un être factice, créé par mon orgueil et mon ennui.’ Hence it is good for one to get out of the current of our normal life, which is so strongly against that, long enough to retrieve one’s entity, take stock of it, straighten out its deformations, and get a new measure of the forces which disable and vulgarize it.

No doubt the sense of this, which seems to have run deep through all humanity, is what gave birth to legends like those of Avalon, Lyonnesse, the Ilha Verde and the island of the Phæacians. I have often wished that some writer like de Stendhal had treated the romance of the Island from the historical point of view. It was the last romance left for the modern spirit to destroy, and aviation has destroyed it, as Mr. Aldous Huxley shows; his hero could not be let live a day in decent isolation, or even die in it. But what an entrancing history that romance has! The Happy Islands were a folk-myth long before Homer’s time. Hesiod speaks of them, and my dear friend Cassandre, whom you no doubt remember meeting, tells me she ran across a reference to them in the scolion attributed to Callistratus, which Athenæus cites. The Roman general Sertorius heard of them while serving in Spain in the year B. C. 97, from a sailor who said he had been there and had found them a place of perpetual summer, great peace and great plenty, quite up to the mythical prospectus. Plutarch says Scrtorius was all for chucking up his job and going out to find them, but apparently the stern Roman sense of duty stood in his way.

A gifted artist like de Stendhal could do wonders with the Island, but I doubt he would get much inspiration here. There are plenty of islands about, but they are arid, eroded, giving rise here and there only to a sort of sagebrush which at a distance looks like stonecrop, and at best they have no more than three or four centuries of rather prosaic history behind them. Cartographers of the sixteenth century located Saint Brandan’s Island, ‘the promised land of the saints,’ in the West Indies, probably following Columbus’s somewhat vague report that it lay west of Madeira, but nothing I have seen hereabouts looks like it. In fact, islands and coast-line alike have the look of aridity and inhospitableness which one associates with the south coast of Spain. The first European land I ever saw, many years ago, was the Cabo de São Vicente, which for sheer hideousness is probably unsurpassed anywhere; and this coast revives something of my sensations at beholding it.

No wonder Spaniards gravitated towards Venezuela; it must have seemed like home. When you see Curagao, wind-swept, flat as a pancake, with its immense inland harbor and waterways, you know the Dutch would pick it out. Trinidad, on the other hand, with its corroding humidity and lush vegetation, was clearly designed by nature for a British colony. The place is uninteresting, on the whole, as a British colony should be, and what I saw of its civilization in a week’s time impressed me as equally uninteresting. In fact, the only place on my itinerary, so far, which has showed anything like a congenial civilization is Curasao. An American in the oil business in Trinidad, who had spent, some years in the Dutch East Indian colonies and in India itself, told me that the Dutch, formerly about the worst colonial administrators in the world, have now become the best. The English, he said, police a district extremely well, but in other essential respects their administration is by no means so good.

If I were in these regions any length of time, I should come to have a great opinion of my countrymen. I have seen only half a dozen Americans in all; they were engineers, drillers and the like, doing long terms in the oil-fields, and were as fine men as I ever met, sympathetic, surprisingly reflective, with a first-rate sense of the right thing, the just thing, in all circumstances. I have met many more of other nationalities, and I have as yet seen none to compare with those of my own.

One young man who had lived three years in the hinterland of Surinam told me that once, with a great deal of trouble, he had managed to see a native fire-dance. These natives are descendants of slaves who long ago revolted against the Dutch and took to the bush, where their tribal life has gone on undisturbed ever since; so now that Africa has been so largely exploited by invading nations, they are more African than the Africans. The story of the dance was nothing new; many travelers have reported it, the latest one being Dr. Heiser, of the Rockefeller Institute. The point of it is that at a certain stage of exaltation the dancers swallow live coals, shower themselves with them and let them rest on their flesh, all without any sign of burning. As one man lay exhausted, with a live coal resting on the crook of his arm, my informant bent over him and examined the arm closely without being able to detect any consequence that we should call normal; no charring, no blistering, nothing.

However often this phenomenon has been observed, accounting for it is something else again. I was interested mostly by reason of the similar demonstration given by an Indian in London two years ago, under what you might call laboratory conditions, and in the presence of various scientific wallahs of credit and renown. No doubt you read of it. The young American also told me of observing some sort of effective curse put upon one person by another, whereby the victim’s legs and arms withered and became useless; and this sort of thing too has been observed before, and is likewise unaccountable. These phenomena seem to imply a mode of exercising volition apparently inexplicable, and I believe permanently so. I believe scientific investigation has already gone as far on that quest as anyone will ever make it go, though of course there is no harm in trying. But as the mathematician Poincaré said, ‘ we do not know everything about anything,’ and I for one am vastly content that it should be so. I will expound my reasons some day, if you care for them; perhaps when we next meet at Lüchow’s, under the eye of our superb major-domo, Tiberius Cæsar.

The worst thing about sojourning here is that even in the subtropical belt, after a day or two, one not only degenerates into poor-white-trash, too lazy to lift a hand, but also finds oneself insensibly sliding off into vegetarianism. I don’t know why this should seem ignominious, but it somehow does. Vegetarianism, as Alfred Henry Lewis’s hero would say, ‘ is low and onendoorin’ to a gent with pride to wound.’ One can do a little something with fish for a while, but only indifferently, which is a pity, for the fish are so good that one hates to meet them with a queasy appetite. Likewise lobsters; they are of the Mediterranean type, of enormous size and superb flavor. The Trinidad oysters, grown on mangrove branches bent down under water, are about the size of a silver quarter, and delicious as the Malpecque oyster used to be, and perhaps still is — I have not tasted one in twenty years — or the Charlestown oyster of Rhode Island. But what’s the world to a man when his wife’s a widdy? The curse of Nebuchadnezzar is on one, and one eats grass like an ox, as the Good Book says. Devouring great quantities of garbage — swill — sculch — day after day, one feels bloated and undernourished all the time, and is correspondingly irritable, but what is one to do?

Still, the fruits and vegetables are pleasant enough to cat, though now that there is no such thing as a seasonal product left in the world — our world, anyway — I suppose they are not worth describing; no doubt you could find most of them in the Washington Market. Commercial enterprise has robbed us of so many delightful anticipations; why should a New Yorker who eats raspberries in November care to live until spring? Gott weiss he had little enough to look forward to even before the evil day of refrigeration and air-borne freight; and now what has he?

The rum made in these parts is famous, but I can say nothing about it, for it is always served as a mixed drink, usually a punch or cocktail, and I loathe mixed drinks, especially cocktails, and distrust the miserable people who guzzle them. I also detest canesyrup rum, which is now so popular. I like the fine old rank kind which the Hudson’s Bay Company still puts out from Jamaica, and which makes the room smell the way the corner grocery used to smell when the bung blew out of the molasses barrel. Put two tablespoonfuls of that in a bell-glass and play with it for a full half-hour, as Hollanders play with a thimbleful of gin-and-bitters, taking it mostly by inhalation — treating it, in short, with the respect that good liquor deserves — and you know you have had something which you could really call rum. But don’t waste it on the cicatrized palates of your cocktail-swilling friends; any kind of firewater, wood aleohol, fusel oil, benzine, is plenty good enough for them, and they won’t know the difference. In all my American acquaintance there arc but four persons, yourself and three others, to whom I would unbosom myself on this subject of rum with the faintest hope that they would know what I was talking about.

Trinidad’s architecture is not gracious, in fact ugly, but convenient and serviceable; that is to say, it is English. As Lord Frederick Hamilton said, in whatever quarter of the globe you choose to build, an Englishman will run you up something very ugly in which you can live comfortably and healthfully, while a Frenchman or Spaniard will build you something very beautiful in which you will probably die. One marvelously beautiful mansion on the outskirts of Port-ofSpain is now tenanted by a country club. It was built by a French family a century or more ago, and it is the only structure I saw in Trinidad that had any character worth mentioning. A swanky dance was held there one evening, to which I was bidden, and I went for the sake of seeing the house and gardens lighted up and at their best. All the beauty and chivalry of Trinidad were out in full force, contributing an added touch of elegance to the scene, so that I went home much impressed. The dancing was, as one might say, decorous; not exactly perfunctory, perhaps, but nothing to turn one’s head and tempt one into any indiscreet avowals. The evening air was that of a good hot soggy Turkish bath, and I believe it was only the dogged British sense of doing the right thing that kept the beauty and chivalry going at all. I would not have done it. Not Helen of Troy could have got me on my feet that night, nor could Aspasia herself have sweat ary avowal out of me.

It is ten degrees hotter now than when I began this letter, so I shall end it and curl up under an electric fan with the Irrgarien der Liebe of Otto Julius Bierbaum until lunch-time. I don’t know how German critical opinion regards Bierbaum’s work, but, speaking as an outsider, I consider it the finest modern poetry I have read in any language. His lyrical gift seems perfectly to stand comparison with Heine’s and Goethe’s, and his verse has an abounding spring and vitality worthy of Burns. It is full of sound sentiment which is never excessive, never ingrowing — a great thing in a German versifier. Moreover it has what Indian criticism, according to Professor Edgerton, regards as the distinguishing mark of poetry of the very first order; it is able powerfully to intimate an emotion, a state of mind, without describing it, thereby inducing precisely the corresponding emotion in a reader. But don’t take my opinion, take a sample — no extra charge. I ’ll give you his Song of the Young Witch. You recall the impression you got from Wiertz’s great treatment of the same subject on canvas, his beautiful neophyte sorceress with the burning eyes, half-frightened, half-fanatical, and her expression overcast with a thin and fleeting shade of reminiscence — well, see if you do not get somewhat the same from this: —

Work like Bierbaum’s sets one thinking anew of how ludicrously an age misjudges the contemporary things which count so little for the best reason and spirit of man, as against those which count so much, and how regularly the self-preserving instinct of humanity in succeeding ages steps in to correct its misjudgment. Most of old Frederick’s Realpolitik has long since gone to the devil, but the Brandenburg concertos and the flute sonatas are still with us. Elizabeth’s dream of a ramshackle empire has turned into a nightmare, but Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Co. are still doing a good business. ‘The fashion of this world passeth away,’ said Goethe, ‘and I would fain occupy myself with the things that are abiding.’ Why, indeed, should you and I get ourselves all worked up over the merits and demerits of political systems, or over the doings and misdoings of pitiful mountebanks and scoundrels who appear for a little time in high places and then vanish away? The answer is actually, of course, we don’t. We pretend to, often try to, sometimes go through the motions fairly well, but we are really not interested; the Oversoul always comes back, thank God, and gives our thoughts a better direction.

But with Western civilization in the state it is, and its prospects no better than they are, I wonder whether Bierbaum will be another Claudian or Cometas Chartularius in literary history, a brilliant flash of classical purity and power lighting up the deathbed of a great literature and a great civilization, after a long petering-out period of sickly decadence for both. He may be; his verse was written mostly between 1885 and 1900. But speculation aside, if you asked me to describe the spirit and character of the old Germany, Germany at the turn of the century, I would content myself with handing you the Irrgurten der Liebe and saying simply that they were what you find there.

Good-bye for the moment. I shall write you again from Haiti if I am not impounded or assassinated before the ship leaves these regions, which I hope may be soon.