The Mind's Eye

TRISTAN VOX

Holiday Rituals in the Colonies: A Houseguest's Lament

Lying in a hammock in Eden, reading about Mr. Melville Stancy, I have begun to understand the futility of flight. Eden this time is a corner of the Caribbean rather heavily populated by people whose idea of a relief from the rituals of the city is the reproduction of those rituals somewhere in the sun; and Mr. Melville Stancy is the "lawyer in his leisure moments, and the Falstaff of a certain section of festive club life" whose social recreations had the consequence of pushing poor Miss Lily Bart a little closer to suicide. It turns out to have been a mistake, however, to bring Mrs. Wharton's novel almost all the way to South America for my holiday. It is quite redundant.

The penetration of the most isolate and irenic beach by the most detailed and devious features of the social life of the city comes as a surprise. On islands like this one, it is usually the sighting of the poor among the local population that returns me from a world of daiquiris to a more precise awareness of the power of circumstances. An unexpected wrong turn along an unfamiliar road, for example, puts me between rows of the most playfully painted shacks and shanties. No houses of mirth, these. With all the bad faith of which a common liberal is capable, I experience the appropriate emotions, and efficiently find my way out of the wretched quarter and back to the beach. Reassured that I have not forgotten what life is really like, I proceed to forget what life is really like.

The surprise this time is that it is not the poor who rudely disturb my fortnight's worth of false bliss. It is the rich. In fact, I seem to have stumbled upon a characteristic contradiction of nature's sought-after sanctuaries: the people stand in the way of the places. Upon simplicity, serenity, and beauty they have loaded complication, turmoil, and ugliness. Like true representatives of the civilization that produced them, and whose overripeness they often represent, the well-heeled men and women who settled for "the season" on these shores proceeded immediately to the building of the institutions of their manners, and generally to the transfer of their convivial culture in all its elements to their voluptuous new setting. It is the only form of colonialism I know inspired by hedonism. For that reason it ends up abusing only its own.

The most important institution of the colonies is invariably "the club." The primary purpose of the club is to provide an arena for conflict and competition in the absence of the customary arenas of the city. Since the colonists tend to inhabit large houses separated by gorgeous expanses of thickly grown grounds, they suffer a significant diminution of the occasions for social intercourse and intrigue. Outside the city, luxury has a certain atomizing effect. Not many days pass alone in the sun before the colonists become restless for their rites and their routines. Thus the club. Under a single roof a space is created that will stand in for all the cultural, culinary, charitable, and commercial meeting places that have been left behind. Mr. Melville Stancy may practice his arts.

A guest in the colonies quickly learns that he has not left the familiar world of games and duties. For example, there remains a code of dress. It takes account of the difference in the ways and the weather of the island, but it makes no concession in the matter of rigidity. The informality is formal. It is swift transit, at least twice daily, from the nakedness on the sand to the artful arrangement of the pocket square, from the wanton worship of the sun to the wary observance of the polite forms of speech. The senses are not the reason for coming here; they are the excuse. The senses do not require for their satisfaction the shipment of trunks. The rules do.

Evenings at the club are the holiday within the holiday, the respite from the respite. There all assemble following an afternoon of luxe, calme, et volupte to renew their less specific skills. I recall one such gathering in a rather exclusive cove along the southern edge of the English-speaking Caribbean. You walked across a grand Georgian portico and through the portals of a large house painted in one of the island's happy pastel colors to find yourself more or less in Mortimer's. (Of course, the club is an improvement on Mortimer's—not because of the azure sea and the infinite sky, but because there is no danger of strangers.) A wide array of ambition presented itself in a wide array of costume. Everywhere around, there were unsaid things perfectly understood. Occasionally a poorly disguised instance of desire or despair would make itself known; and more frequently, a poorly disguised expression of unreleased violence. Young men stood in attitudes of physical implication before older women who looked like so many forms of antique statuary. Young women suffered the hidden meanings in the chatter of older men out of a vague feeling of social advancement. The only innocent enthusiasms in the room were in the talk of tennis. Everybody was brown and knew whose was the power this season. In sum, had the bomb been dropped that fateful night directly upon New York, New York 10028, its culture would have survived.

Tennis is the most cherished instrument of continuity in the lives of the colonists. They consecrate ground to it everywhere. They say that they play the game for their physical well-being, but they are only partially correct. The time-honored attraction of tennis is owed to the fact that it repeats the structure of conversation, which is the real sport of the leisurely. The verbal exchanges which take up most of their time are given concrete form. Respect for rules, for example, is reproduced as faithfully as the right to triumph over your interlocutor in any way that the rules allow. The serve is the greeting. It ensures that the aggression with which the exchange begins will be inhibited by smaller, and therefore more cordial, bounds. In what follows, however, skill is all; and, of course, will. The tennis court is like the salon, a public theater of contests which purports to give pleasure but which permits the infliction of a quantity of pain. Hence the stubbornness with which the colonists play the game in these equatorial environs. In the afternoon, it appears that tennis is merely a more literal form of talk. In the evening, it is established that talk is merely a more abstract form of tennis.

The thicket of conventions that surrounds these people, then, is no more penetrable than the thicket of flora and fauna that surrounds their houses. As always, there is a problem for those of us who live among the rich but are not rich. Money has made these unsullied spots available, and money has made them unavailable; the rich have given them, and the rich have taken them back. Between the soul in search of happiness and the happiness in God's creation there has been interposed an almost insurmountable crust of customs, a system of social artifice that is a standing refutation of its setting. A conclusion seems warranted: there is no such thing as "getting away" to a place in fashion. Society seems always to overwhelm beauty; and so you take your choice.

Of course, I generalize. There are exceptions. They are usually my hosts.