by Alec Waugh
“Hullo, Mascot,” I called out.
“Not going to be your mascot much longer,” he called back. “In October I’m going home.”
There was not one of us who was not sorry that he was leaving. He had added a great deal to the enjoyment of the season’s football. He would be much missed. “Anyhow, before you go, you’ll have to come with us to a roast or boiled,” we said.
The “roast or boiled” is a feature of London football. An important club such as Rosslyn Park fielded at that time six or seven fifteens every Saturday. As there is a danger of the members of the various sides losing touch with one another, once a month a private room is booked in a Fleet Street tavern, where for half a crown you can have your choice of boiled mutton or roast beef. Six or seven people from every side turn up. After the meal there is singing and a speech or two.
To the Mascot it was something completely new. “This is fine,” he said. “It almost makes me wish that I wasn’t sailing Thursday.”
Opposite him was sitting a man from another side who was meeting Mascot for the first time. He was a young and rather briefless barrister. He loved argument. His argument took the Socratic method of cross-examination. He had been at Oxford. His voice was slow and languid, his manner supercilious. To a foreigner who disliked England without knowing it very well he would have seemed typically English.
“Indeed,” he said, “so you are returning to America. Now tell me, you will be glad to be in America again?”
“Naturally.”
“You have not been happy here?”
“Happyish.”
“But not more than that. Now tell us what it was that made you dislike England. The climate or the English?”
“I didn’t say I disliked England.”
“You implied you did. Now tell us which was it that you disliked.”
The Mascot hesitated; a hot, angry look had come into his eyes.
“Come now, please tell us,” the barrister persisted.
This time the answer came back pat.
“Oh, very well, the English, then.”
“And what is it about the English that you particularly dislike?”
The barrister was actually quite a pleasant fellow. His cross-examination had begun in a friendly fashion. He had thought he was being good-naturedly amusing. He had not the suppleness of mind to realise that the Mascot was being seriously annoyed. But even those who had realised and were waiting for the right moment to intervene, were unprepared for the suddenness of the Mascot’s answer.
“What do I particularly dislike about the English?” he retorted. “I’ll tell you. I dislike their standoffishness, their snobbery, their conceit. I dislike them for being envious of the United States and, instead of admitting it, pretending to despise Americans. I dislike them most of all for the way they behave to the foreigners who come to England, not of their choice, but in the interests of trade, interests that are England’s as much as they are America’s. There are a great many other things I dislike about the English, but those will do to carry on with.”
It was said so loudly that no one in the room could fail to hear it. Before he had spoken two sentences there was silence down the length of the two other tables. There were thirty seconds of complete stillness when he finished. Then on all sides a rattle of talk broke out, and we were all busy pretending that nothing had ever happened.
It had spoiled the evening. The Mascot was unspeakably depressed. “I can’t think how I can have done it,” he said. “Perhaps I’d been drinking. I don’t know, but the fellow just maddened me somehow. My word, but I feel bad about it, after all the fun I’ve had with you fellows.”
He was assured that it did not matter, that no one would think twice about it. But heads had been shaken afterwards. “They’re funny, these Americans, even the nicest of them,” it had been said. “They’re so self-conscious, they think everyone’s envying them or criticising them, and they get mad if you don’t flatter them.”
Later, I was able to understand that outburst, to appreciate how it sprang from loneliness. I was to know what it was to be lonely in strange places; was to know the unreasoning resentment that the lonely feel against the pleasures from which they are excluded. You sit in a hotel lounge, you have spoken to no one but servants for three days, you will speak to no one but servants for the four days that must elapse before the sailing of your boat. You know no one. There is no way of getting to know any one. On all sides of you there are people laughing and chatting together. You hate them for being happy and for having friends. That was how the Mascot must have felt. But it was not till later that I realised how lonely a foreigner can be in London; that loneliness explained the Mascot’s pathetic readiness to join the group of footballers who offered him an escape from loneliness, explained his resentment against the self-sufficiency of the English that had made him lonely, and his sudden outburst against a type who had seemed to represent everything that had made his stay in England wretched.
But at the time the incident seemed typical, just as other incidents seemed typical.
I had seen American soldiers behind the line lighting their cigarettes with local two franc notes asking “What was this chicken feed for anyway?” I had returned to a French hotel after an interval of a year to find the tariff doubled. “What was I to do?” the maitre d’hotel had complained. “Americans come here and ask for the best rooms. I have several best rooms, I show them one, I tell them it is eighty francs. ‘Oh, but you’ve got a better room than that,’ they say. So I show them a precisely similar room. That is a hundred and ten francs, I say to them. They ask for something better so I show them another. This, I say, is my very best room. It is one hundred and fifty francs. ‘Fine,’ they say, ‘we’ll have it.’ What am I to do if Americans will not believe that anything that costs less than a hundred and fifty francs is any good?” He had seen Americans boastfully and drunkenly flinging hundred per cent tips about in Paris restaurants. I had seen American women entertaining indiscriminately in Paris and issuing at sight drafts on Indianapolis. I had seen docile American husbands obeying a lifted eyelid. I had read of the power and prestige of the American woman’s clubs. Once it was explained there had been a shortage of women in America, he had been told. So women were highly valued. The American woman had had the sense to keep her value high. She was America’s biggest bluff.
Out of incidents I had built up in the same way that other untrained Englishmen had built up a picture of American life and manners.
§
It was by way of California that I came for the first time to New York.
It is strange; that first night in a strange city. You stay in a hotel so personally impersonal that you might be in any city in the world. Such a lounge as you have walked through innumerable times is full of such people as you have seen in London, Paris, Biarritz, Deauville. You are surprised to recognize no familiar faces among the crowded tables of the restaurant. You have a feeling of being where you belong, yet you know very well that this hotel lounge, this hotel restaurant, this chatter of voices is one facet of a city you know nothing of: where for one moment one section of the city has chosen to express itself.
That night after dinner I walked alone through the strange new city. Down the length of Park the red and green lights were flashing; with the flaming summit of the N. Y. Central Building suspended like a crown above them. Down Second Avenue the trains of the elevated were rattling. Broadway was a blaze of colour. It was all new to me; the elevated, the traffic signals, the flickering lights; the skyscrapers, the shoe-shine parlours, the cafeterias, the chop sueys. But it was not these so much that moved me as the thought that the New York that I was seeing now I should never see again.
At this moment I was a stranger here. But a time, I knew very well, would come when I should have taken a place in this city’s life; when the flashing on a London screen of Manhattan’s sky-line would release a cycle of associations; so that when I thought of Broadway and Park and Seventh Avenue, I should be think
ing not of so many architectural facts, but of the places where this happened and where that was said; in the same way that Knightsbridge is the stretch of pavement across which I have so often hurried to a window that looked upon the Park, and the many moods of elation, gladness, despair, and ultimately boredom with which through a long summer I crossed those twenty yards; so that Covent Garden is not for me a place where vegetables are sold and operas played but the domed landscape that for five years I had passed twice a week on my way to the publisher’s office where I worked; so that St. John’s Wood means the curve of road on which I have craned my neck from the top deck of a bus to catch a glimpse of the figures on the scoring board at Lord’s. A city is a chapter of your life. You remember the streets and houses where your life was lived; the doors you have knocked upon, the streets you have hurried down; the mood in which under a certain aspect of winter sunlight you have seen the weathervane of a church, silver grey against the sky. That night, as I trod its streets, New York was a blank page to me. I wondered in what terms and with what memories I should be seeing it in six years’ time.
It is thus very different from that I had expected that I have come to see it. The weeks that I had spent in the country club world—Pebble Beach, Del Monte and Monterey, had cleared my mind of a good many prejudices and misconceptions. I had always pictured America in terms of elaborate display. California’s combination of luxury and extreme simplicity was a complete surprise to me. The houses in which I was entertained made no parade of wealth. There was no formality of dress or servants. The meals were simple. Though there was an abundance of high-powered cars and horses, it was in the assumption that money did not exist that the only real sense of money lay. Money was never mentioned. In England I had listened to wearisome wails about income tax, death duties, servants’ wages, depreciated stock, land taxes and the tyranny of the dole from people who then complained that Americans thought and talked of nothing except money. In California money was mentioned only in the numerical way that cricketers discuss their averages. Dollars bore no real relation to skill or merit. It was dramatic that Marian Hollens should have made half a million in oil, as it was dramatic that Bradman had averaged over a hundred for the Test matches. One of the attractions of living in a small place like Villefranche or Tahiti is that one’s expenses are so much below one’s income that one is never presented with objects of jealousy; one is not being continually forced to think: “It would be fun to do that if I could afford it.” One has in such places a nice sense of freedom and independence. I had that same feeling in the Monterey peninsular. It was a life led by people of very varying incomes: from the big ranch owners to the Bohemians of Carmel. But it was a life in which one had the impression of a man running within his strength. It was in the spring of 1927 that I landed there. I was to find very much the same attitude in New York.
In the same way that I had pictured New York in terms of elaborate display I had thought of it from my own point of view as a writer in terms of business, as a place very full of dollars, in which if one played one’s cards carefully one would put one’s self across. During the first five years after the War, New York was as much a beckoning Eldorado to the English writer as the New World had been to Elizabethan privateers. The New World was a gold mine to be plundered: to winter in Capri and write for the Cosmopolitan was the ideal of the English writer, but once in New York dollars were, I found, the last thing I thought of. I was for a while living in a city beautiful architecturally, stimulating mentally, very full of jolly people who seemed to be putting themselves to a lot of trouble to give me a good time.
It was a world that puzzled me as much as it enchanted me: puzzled me because I had not been there a week before I had come to realise that New York is just about the one place in the world about which one cannot generalise; at any rate, a foreigner cannot. Though I am inclined to doubt whether even a New Yorker knows more than a fraction of his city. I said as much once to Charles Hanson Towne. He agreed. “I’ve lived in New York all my life,” he said. “There are some days when I feel that there’s not an inch of it that I don’t know and love. There are others when I feel that I’ve only touched on ten of its two thousand sides. I’m writing a book about it now, a kind of autobiography. I’m going to call it This New York of Mine. I’m going to put behind the title page a quotation from Somerset Maugham about the particular meaning of each city to each person. I’m not sure,” he added, “that New York isn’t a mirror in which one sees one’s own reflection.”
I think it is.
New York is so many things. It is composed of so many peoples; it has grown so fast that its component parts have not had time to become aware of one another. In one part you are in Italy. A few blocks further on you are in Sweden. You cross an avenue and you are in Germany. The word “standardised” is used in Europe as a label for American civilization, but without some process of standardisation it would have been impossible for so many people to see themselves as citizens of the same commonwealth. Some common denominator was essential. The foreigner sees at a first glance only the surface value of that common denominator. He sees the standardised efficiency and comfort, the Condé Nast civilization which has made rare the experience of entering a tastelessly furnished apartment, of sitting at a tastelessly set table, of meeting an ill-dressed woman. All that, he sees; and arguing from that, he may continue to draw parallels between a standardisation of clothes, food, architecture and a standardisation of thought and religion, art and literature. His parallels, however, will be false; for the standardisation of America is a surface value that conceals a vast diversity of backgrounds.
At the nature of these backgrounds the foreigner can only guess. An American meeting another American in a train can place that American after ten minutes’ talk. He can tell from what State he comes, what his education was, what his background is; he can tell what his ambitions and inhibitions are likely to be. He can spot his particular racket. But the Englishman can no more place an American in that way than an American could place an Englishman. He is in consequence very easily misled. At the same time the foreign visitor tends to base his opinions on a more ultimate standard because he begins his acquaintance unbiased by previously formed reactions to such labels as “Southern snobbery,” “New England conscience,” “middle-western inferiority complex.” Certainly his ignorance makes every party an adventure. In London where I can make a shrewd guess at the exact social setting of any new acquaintance, I know more or less the kind of people I shall meet when I go for the first time to dine at a new friend’s house. In New York I never have any idea whom I shall be meeting, nor in what kind of an apartment I shall be meeting them.
Chapter VIII
Europeans make the mistake, so Americans maintain, of generalising about the United States from their experience of American tourists. But in a sense all Amricans are tourists: of their own country as of ours. Five years is the average age of citizenship in the United States. There are, particularly in the East and South, many descendants of old colonial families. But an overwhelming majority of Americans settled during the last two generations. If not their parents at least their grandparents were born and have their roots in Europe. They have little feeling about Europe. They are Americans. The United States could not otherwise have taken part in the war. But the fact that their roots do not go deep into the place of their birth gives a restless quality to their life. They have not the same sense of being where they belong. They feel they might just as well be somewhere else. If what they need does not happen to be where they are, they are prepared to go elsewhere to look for it. They have come on a long search from the countries in which for generations their ancestors lived contentedly. They are not prepared to be satisfied with substitutes and makeshifts. “To build a sanctuary, you must destroy a sanctuary.” American life is a perpetual destroying and rebuilding. It is a life of search. Its air is rich to those whose lungs have the vitality to breathe it.
The city life of New York is the firme
st established in the United States. But you have there no sense as you have in London of growth from a common stock. London’s growth has been outwards. New York’s growth has been inwards. Manhattan has been colonised by every European people. The New Yorker is trying to find what manner of island he has colonised: where it is, what it is all about, who else is on the island. Of London one can say that everyone knows who everybody is and roughly what everyone is doing. In no sense did this seem to me true of New York. New York is full of sets. But no one lives in any one set for very long. Everyone within a particular set knows exactly what you are doing while you are within that set. Gossip circulates at a phenomenal speed. But the moment you are outside that set you might be in another country. Life in London is satisfactorily private. You need not, and very often do not know one person within a hundred yards of where you live. It is a life of private entertainment in private houses. At the same time life in London is so interknit that if anyone was sufficiently interested to want to know what you were doing, they would through the mutual friends of mutual friends be able to keep trace of you. In New York that would be scarcely possible.
It is an atmosphere that makes for restlessness, and it is only it seems to me, if one recognizes the fact and cause of this atmosphere that the European can understand the reactions not only of American political policy, but of those individual Americans with whom they are brought in contact. It is a truism, but a truism that in Europe is universally ignored, that the United States and the citizens of the United States must be seen in terms not of the static communities of Europe, but of a pioneer spirit that has remained fluid even after the actual pioneer work has been completed.
§
It was with such a formula certainly that one had to assess Marda Clainton. I met her in Pebble Beach. She was twenty-three years old; short, plump, with a dead white skin, a blue-black head, and dark, long-lashed, very lovely eyes. She might have belonged to any of three races. She thought she was more Spanish than anything but she was not sure. Her father claimed to be a native son. He had made a fortune in real estate. His offices were in Los Angeles. But he had, at Pebble Beach, by Cypress Point, what he called a bungalow but I should have called a country house. It was constructed on a Spanish model: a low exterior, with galleries opening on to a patioed garden. It was extremely luxurious and extremely simple. Marda, when I met her first was planning a trip to Europe; much to the grief of a young San Franciscan lawyer who had for three years been pursuing her with a persistent courtship. He could not understand why she would not marry him.
