Bifocal Two Roads to Dodge City

By Pico Iyer

Nicolson fils and pere, driving in separate cars across the U.S. in 1986, are not exactly typical tourists. Nigel is a historian, gentleman politician and professional amateur whose most celebrated book, Portrait of a Marriage, describes the unlikely partnership of his homosexual parents Vita Sackville- West and Harold Nicolson. Adam is a naturalist ready to take over the family business of belles lettres. On their American tours, Adam, 29, relentlessly covers the West, stopping in on rallies in Berkeley, hanging out at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and tramping through the rain forests of Washington. Meanwhile, his 70-year-old father makes his stately way through the drawing rooms, libraries and museums of the East and South.

Irony and astonishment are the orders of the day. In Pennsylvania, Nigel sits in on a college history class, only to find that the topic under discussion is how to cope with two children and a divorce. Adam, for his part, can only listen in bemusement as a woman named Ira Funk whisks him through her architectural folly in Venice, Calif., chuckling, "Those Tudors just could never have dreamed up even one small bit of this." The meeting of John Doe and John Bull is frequently incongruous. " 'What's the matter, Baby,' a nun with a beard and sparkle all over his eyelids said to me," Adam writes after attending an all-gay basketball game in San Francisco. " 'Got no date?' "

Nigel is something of an 18th century Tory, inclined by age and temperament to search in the world's youngest power for the country houses and formal gardens of the Old World. Adam, born into a world whose capital is more Los Angeles than London, is delighted to give himself up to the nation's peculiar enthusiasms, using culture shock as shock therapy. Nigel longs for history; Adam rejoices in its abolition. One typical day, Nigel inquires, "Why do I have to come to Kentucky to experience exactly the sensation of travelling through rural Hampshire in 1810?" Later he goes riding with a top-hatted "squire straight out of Fielding" near the Ohio River, which reminds him of "Cliveden's Thames." Adam, meanwhile, is rolling through the grasslands of Wyoming, sporting new shades, listening to Van Morrison on the stereo system of his beloved Catalina and exulting that in his "rubber-cushioned automobility I feel closer to America than in any amount of digging around for the fact and the detail."

This bifocal approach to the U.S. is hardly new: J.B. Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes did it in Journey Down a Rainbow 30 years ago. Nor is the Nicolson credulity a blessing: Adam describes a movie executive as "one dissertation short of a PhD at Harvard . . . Sometimes -- that was the crucial word -- he didn't think the hassle was worth the money." Generally, however, the men breeze through their missions with the jaunty patrician charm of the charmed. The cross fire of their letters -- a burst from Nigel, a counterburst from Adam -- is the British equivalent of the nautical exchanges between William F. Buckley Jr. and his son Christopher. And despite his occasional flaws, Adam remains a visitor to watch. In Texas he describes a horse proceeding with a "constant feather-taut agility, like a clever man arguing . . . the uninterrupted ease of something done right." Trust young Nicolson to discover a natural wonder: a champion mare that precisely mimics its British spectator.