Not Home for Christmas

...You will not be astonished, then, to learn that we are sailing away to save a great deal of money...

...The doctor adds $1 to his $3 fee if he has to go up to the top of the moun tain to make a house call...

...The heart of the package—of any package—is the money...

...You are an American (or a Zulu or a Lapp) or you are nothing, and it is not a matter of a passport...

...Sure, the quality of American life has sunk to the level of Mr...

...I do not know what the Meyer Line of Oslo plans to do with its beautiful fleet of cargo ships, like the Havlom...

...But the Mayers did not get rich spending a great deal of money—or, indeed, any at all...

...140 is $100 less than we get letting out our place here...

...one man atop a sixstory behemoth loads a vessel, and a half-dozen men man it at sea...

...Containerization does away with the longshoremen...

...Time: time to read a whole book, or to write one...

...Time to play a little Corelli, to learn a little Greek, to take a little walk, arm in arm with your scrawny old sex-object...

...Oh, the sailorboys will hoist a few 'tweendecks as we cast off from Brooklyn at midnight, and you can't blame them...

...Inflated prices for fresh groceries~no great big beautiful double-strength paper bag that tastes better than the groceries-are a half to two-thirds of what they are here...

...Off the people...

...America is a wonderful place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there if, like me, you agree with Carlyle that of the three great goods, reputation, health, and money, the first two are of no account and the third is all...

...They're Away from It All because they have to be, and they get home to their fjords once in two years...

...The answer is that you've already got it...

...You get fifty-seven varieties of herring at every luxus meal...

...I can't help the Czechs or the Russians or even (as I do in my own country) pretend to help them...

...The H avlom is the only place left where not a creature is stirring the grog the night before Christmas...

...Time isn't money, not by a danged sight, but it is better than the classic American combination of no time and no money...

...I have never known a happy expatriate or a perfectly unhappy patriot...

...There are other delights involved, though none to compare with the money saved...

...For the winter crossing, when the North Atlantic is at its most bracing, the price of a round-trip ticket on the Havlom is $400...

...There is the absence of fellowpassengers and the company of a crew of herring-chokers who speak an unintelligible language—the last refuge of a man who is bent on discouraging communication...

...I sit snug in Prague and the Russian tanks roll through the streets—or, under the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty, the Czech tanks roll through the streets of Moscow and I sit snug in Moscow...

...A year later, December 24 at midnight, we sail home again...

...For your $200 one way you get nine or ten days of horizon —eleven or twelve if you're lucky enough to hit a gale or two...

...To save your money by splitting the Holiday scene twice in a row, you have, of course, to be unemployed, and how do you get the money for the fare when you're unemployed...

...Get cracking, landlubbers, for even the cargo ships are doomed...

...You can't blame them, and they can't blame you for curling up with a (or even The) good book and pondering the Second Coming...

...Not Home for Christmas MILTON MAYER "NEVER AGAIN," you say—and even ^ as you say it you know that next Christmas again you will be gulled and gutted...

...If I had a heart-I wouldn't be rich if I had one-it would go out to you all this midnight clear...

...Here are your responsibilities and your power to discharge them...

...If He comes at Christmas and sees Himself crucified on the cash register, He'll go back where He came from...

...One bell...

...But I am an alien, of no real or imaginary use...

...The containerizes don't want to bother with passengers...

...This last is something I had to abandon a half century ago for lack of time...

...There is the avoidance of Christmas and New Year's...

...The gouge, if you stay away from the cities, is nonexistent...

...You tell me "There is no way to spend money on top of the mountain • • ." that 1971 will be a perilous year— "the most perilous year we've had in this country," says Senator Charles Goodell...

...There is the North Atlantic in winter, which is always bracing and sometimes navigable...

...Here, in America, or Czechoslovakia or wherever, are your roots and your resting-place...

...on the sea, on land, in the sky, goods are the thing...

...But it leaves more sorrow behind than it takes aboard...

...You get a luxus cabin with beds, not bunks, in a vessel that doesn't corkscrew because it is built like an inverted pyramid...

...Sure, the country has gone to pieces...

...The Italian Line is quitting—no more Cristoforo Columbo to discover America...

...There isn't an American liner left on the Atlantic...

...There is no way to spend money on top of the mountain, and nowhere to go...

...You never see them at night unless the boats are being lowered preparatory to abandoning ship, and then all hands are too busy for much small talk...

...Out of Brooklyn, we make Antwerp nine or ten (or eleven or twelve) days later and hotfoot it (by cheap, fast, comfortable, train...

...There is, in addition, the Old World charm of the Old World, which is not as badly polluted as the New and, unlike the New, is not, at the moment, devoting all of its energies to killing people...

...To be Away from It All for a while is not to be an expatriate but to take a breather and return to the ravePd fray...

...Yours will sink faster than its and lower than his when you are Homer's homeless, rootless man, belonging everywhere and nowhere...

...Ring out, one bell...

...A passenger liner, or floating bingogame, is built like a pyramid...

...And I tell you that 1972 will be a more perilous year than 1971, and I shall be back to save the country in the year it needs m e even more than it needs me in 1971...

...The airplane has done to the ocean what it did to the land...

...here alone you have what little muscle you have...

...You got it by cheating your spawn out of their allowance and then sending them into the mines...

...Time: no telephones or tele-MILTON MAYER, the Roving Editor of The Progressive, is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, professor of the humanities at Windham College in Vermont, and a consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions...

...But these are all fringe benefits...

...On December 24 at midnight we (get that "we") cast off from the foot of 36th Street in Brooklyn as supercargo aboard the Norwegian (hence the nickel a glass) freighter Havlom...

...Homer's nephew, Aristotle, tells of the stranger who was asked what country he belonged to and replied, "I am one of the rich...

...I once asked a group of oppressed Czechs where they would be born again if they could be, and, of some twentyfive, two said Switzerland (none America) and the rest said Czechoslovakia...

...They are all converting to container-carrying...

...to the top of the mountain, where we have a small castle (who wants central heating...

...This is twice the price of the cheapest "charter flight" —they never go where or when you want—of six or eight hours of bonebending buttoned-up bore in a Procrustian chair...

...You got it by staying out of the market, by tying another knot in the broken shoelace, by being a sourpuss sourball skinflint and losing your reputation and keeping your money...

...grams or committee meetings, no parties, no weddings, no funerals, no way to respond to the distant cry for help whose crescendo mounts daily as the American do-gooder is called to the burgeoning barricades...

...That, my overheated, overeaten friends, strapped at Christmas, slopped at New Year's, and bled in between, is how you save your money and your health and lose only your reputation for Christmas cheer...

...But I venture that it won't be long before a generation of Americans grows up asking, "What's a boat, Pop...

...You get nine or ten days of actual air to breathe and nine or ten days of shatterproof solitude, nine or ten days of work, sleep, rest, and exercise as you toddle the frosty deck steady-on...

...Nixon's...

...Time to dream, time even to sleep...

...at $140 a month, including all such utilities as a man absolutely has to have...

...The family motto is Quidvis pro Pecunia—Nihil pro Quovis Alio, which is Norwegian for, Anything for Money—Nothing for Anything Else...

...No ship (said Horace) ever sails leaving sorrow behind, and that goes for the Havlom...

...what's a train, Pop...

...The Scandahoovians and the Dutch are shifting to the lonely-hearts cruise racket...

...Here are your troubles and your memories of your troubles...

...You will say that it is worth a great deal of money to escape the Holiday Season twice, and you will envy me my money, as well you might...

...You are here, where you came from, or nowhere...

...America—you can't love it or leave it...

...You exchange grunts with them or, when you are both in loquacious form, you say "God dag" meaning, "Good day...

...The "I have never known a happy expatriate or a perfectly unhappy patriot/1 ocean liners are tutto kaputto, and a good thing...

...Sans souciy as the Norwegians say...

...Laden low the Havlom (pronounced, naturally, Hovlam) with Baby and me and 8,500 deadweight tons of American-made crud of some sort for sale to the simple savages of Europe...

...You got it by marrying an unlibera ted woman and keeping her head in the stove where the bread is baking and driving her out to the berrypatch in the summer and taking her shoes away from her in the winter...

...It is all disappearing fast (and so, of course, are you, my friends...

...Here are the ashes of your fathers and the temples of your gods...

...It's fly (like a caged bird) or walk, and it has been 1970 years since anybody had what it took to walk the waters...

...And even as you say it, my sex-object and I will be tilting another glass of Tuborg beer, at a nickel a glass, and saying, "Ever again," knowing that next Chirstmas, like this one, we shall escape the Horrors of the Season in the only way there is left to escape them this side of the grave...

...You are the idle rich, afloat in the Havlom tonight, and they are the laboring poor sinking in credit cards and junk...

...I once had to ride one ghetto-class...

...Prague burns, Moscow burns, London, Paris, Rome—and I rub my fiddle with fiddle- grease to take the squeak out of it and then challenge my sex-object to a game of chess in which I generally permit her to overcome my male chauvinism by whipping me...

...To be Away from It All for a while is to possess the grand illusion of freedom from responsibility and the still grander illusion of powerlessness to discharge it...

...Expatriation is not for the birds—see them homing in the spring—or for man...

...You will go faster to pieces if you cop out and go from country to country looking for a country that has not gone to pieces...

...It is, I am told, even worse in the higher classes because you meet a higher class of a.) The Elizabeth and the France—dance bands, swimming pools, television, just like the Holiday Inn you left behind you—are all that are left of the grandeur that launched the Titanic and the gloire that was de Gaulle...

...There is, finally, a year Away from It All, a year in which to do one's duty as Roving Editor of The Progressive and, between stints, sit stock still and try to learn how to write...