You Can't Go Home Again, But You Never Give Up Trying - Thomas Wolfe And The Oases Of N'djamena

Berkeley Arnold had led a successful life - well not exactly Winston Churchill or Niels Bohr.  He had won no military victories, led a nation, nor probed the mysteries of the quantum world but he he could be proud of his minor achievements.  He had been a good father, a world traveler, a respected teacher, and popular writer, and that had to count for something. 

Or did it? When he was spending nights with Mme. Dolores' girls in Niamey, drinking G&T's with expatriate daughters in Mombasa, or golfing in the shadow of Chimborazo he could have been on the concert stage or in the operating theatre.  A life of leisure, la dolce vita, a que sera sera life led within some vague Hobbesian existential notion?  

 

Doing mattered little in a short, nasty, brutish life - there were no such things as happy anodynes only fictions, religious faith, progressive idealism, fairy tale mornings.  No, the best that the philosophical world could offer was Epicurus or Nietzsche, and he was no Ubermensch. 

Vladimir Nabokov was a self-styled memorist - a man who understood that the present was only a matter of microseconds and the future only a probability at best.  Only the past had some substance, some relevance, some clue to meaning and identity.  So, from a very early age he did his best to capture those moments of the present which he knew would be defining and essential to give meaning to his later life.  He deliberately fixed Cannes, Biarritz, St. Petersburg, and Paris in his memory, playing scenes over and over again until they were indelibly fixed to be recalled years later. 

And so it was that Berkeley Arnold, now an older man with few adventures ahead of him, embarked on his journey into the past.  He had not fixed events, lovers, scenes in his memory like Nabokov and relied only on mnemonic devices for recall - returning to N'djamena, Nairobi, Port-au-Prince, and St. Tropez would resuscitate the past and be the inspiration for recovering it. 

Lovers of course were at the center of his return journey.  What had happened to Artemis de Meuron a young Swiss cartographer in the mold of Almasy, the model for Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, a man mapping the desert but hoping to find a world without maps?  She had arrived in the Chadian capital without caravan, seconds, or equipment more than a compass, early 20th century maps drawn by German adventurers, and inspiration. 

She was brilliant, a prize, so far removed from the debutantes and Park Avenue arrivistes of his youth that she would have stood out anywhere; but here framed against the unimaginable beauty of the Sahara, she was a visitation. 

Their affair was brief - just a taste - before she went off into the desert, bound and determined to follow the old salt routes of Arab traders and find the mythical Wadi-al-Haroon.  Where was she now, Berkeley wondered.  Did she ever make it out of the desert? Was she still alive?

N'djamena today of course is not what it was.  Thanks to decades of corruption, mismanagement, and amoral disregard for the governed, the capital had become a palace and a sinkhole side-by-side in horrific irony.  The Hotel de la Paix, the small pension-like hotel run by French ex-colons from la France profonde no longer existed, nor did the Lebanese restaurant where Berkeley and Artemis enjoyed meze, grilled lamb and vin gris.  The streets of the capital had been paved but never maintained and were thoroughfares in name only, patches of asphalt amidst the potholes and ruts. 

Most importantly was the air of mistrust everywhere, an insecurity, the fragility of being a foreigner where foreigners were not wanted.  There would be no soft, Sahara wind, no courtesy, no affection for each other in this last outpost of civilization.  Whatever romance there had been, it was gone. What had he been thinking?  Why did he return, and why didn't he keep the memories as is, unbothered by what had come afterwards?

He thought of travelling to Bern where Artemis was from - a small chance of finding her but what worried him was not the failure of the search but the success.  Did he want to see an old woman scrubbing the stoop?  Better leave well enough alone.  It was bad enough that the images of their idyll had been ruined - defiled - by the reality of N'djamena.  If he were to see an old Artemis, the entire vision would be erased. Thomas Wolfe:

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood...back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame...back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory 

He had met Blanche de Castille, namesake and descendant of the medieval queen of France, in Port-au-Prince during the period of the Duvaliers.  He met her at the Olaffson, the old Victorian hotel made famous by Graham Greene in his novel The Comedians and as attractive a place as he described - rum punches on the verandah, the martinet Petit Pierre, the sounds of voodoo drums in the hills above Kenscoff...and the gingerbread houses, meringue, the dancehalls of Carrefour, and the beaches of Les Cayes. 

 

This cannot have changed, thought Berkeley.  This was the heart and soul of Haiti, the Afro-Caribbean culture, vestiges of Dahomey, candomblé and voodoo, zombies and mock funerals for the dead...It could not change; but of course it had.  Haiti today is as chaotic and lawless a place as Somalia - ruled by gangs and drug lords, a city in name only, a miserable, desperate, feral place. 

He and Blanche had stayed in the Douglas Fairbanks suite of the Olaffson and never left.  With the windows open, Haiti was there.  From the rooftop they could see the harbor, the downtown, the cruise ships and the port; and from their balcony see the far hills above the city.  

The affair was as it should be - brief, temporal, but permanent - the kind of affair that is indelible, a Nabokovian one, one easily recalled.  Berkeley knew that he could not go back to Port-au-Prince but certainly he would be able to find Blanche in Paris or Versailles where the family lived in the same chateau as their famous ancestor; but what would be the point?  

Of course there was the chance that they both could suspend disbelief, forget their old bones and relive the memories of the past.  That was all Berkeley was after, not a recreation of the past but to relive it in whatever way he could. Yet she might not have been captivated by the day and nights at the Olaffson as he had.  It might not have met the same thing, and the Lawrentian epiphany that he hoped for might be only his desire, not hers.  The successive years after the Olaffson might have intruded in ways that erased it completely. 

 

After his affair with Petra, he replayed it in detail in his head again and again.  It was like replaying a videotape, rewinding it, and replaying it again, stopping to correct a detail, recalling a smell, a view or words.  He did this for months until he forgot to do it, and when he tried again, things got muddled, events reversed, extraneous bits had intervened, disrupted the flow, turned it into a travelogue; and then he never bothered with it.  A trip to Copenhagen, like to Haiti or N'djamena might revive it, her, the place and time; but probably not, a hopeless vanity. 

'There are all kinds of love in the world', wrote Fitzgerald, 'but never the same love twice'. True enough thought Berkeley; but when age had take its toll and there were to be no more future, different, engaging loves; and when there was only the past to rely on, then what?

'The past is a flimsy excuse for the present' wrote Antiochus. Perhaps, but as life fades and the present is just 'a waiting room for eternity' what else is there?