A Writer's World
Page 11
By now the day had burst, so I took a bus to Harley Street: for there on any weekday morning, parked in lordly comity, you may inspect the best selection of Rolls-Royces in the world. The oldest of these cars is an orange coupé from the twenties, unashamedly antique; the newest is the 1958 model, a car fit for royal surgeons; and between these haughty extremes there runs the whole range of Rollses, an irresistible London assembly. There are upright pre-war Rollses, inclining slightly backward, as though they are uncomfortably laced; and there are faintly sporty Rollses, belonging to dashing cynical psychiatrists; and there are uncompromising heavyweight Phantoms, black and awful, into which the dread specialist stoops himself with a soft word to his chauffeur and a sigh of responsibility. To taste some of the ingrained hierarchies and pretensions of London, take a walk down Harley Street and inspect these splendid machines, the finest instruments ever devised for going one better than the Joneses.
I drove to Sotheby’s next, by way of Wipers and the Somme, for my taxi-driver had some lurid tales to tell of the First World War, of drunken attacks and incipient mutinies, and the unhappy shortcomings of the French – ‘I wouldn’t trust them no more than I would these Yanks – and there’s an uneducated lot for you!’ It was glass they were selling that morning, and smooth as Swedish crystal was the elegant young auctioneer who presided. There were the canny, hard-bitten dealers, huddled around the table beneath the desk; and there were the Americans, sitting in baffled attitudes on sofas around the perimeters; and one or two girls in the highest and brightest and shortest of fashions sat cross-legged on occasional chairs; and the suave auctioneer, observing the inexplicable flickerings and noddings around him, suavely sold each piece and suavely banged his desk.
And so to luncheon (as the auctioneer might say). In a little side street called St Martin’s Court, beside the stage door of Wyndham’s, is to be found Sheekey’s, one of the great fish restaurants of Europe. Here you may buy the Londoner’s fish, halibut and turbot and stewed eel, and you may eat radishes with your cheese, and wash them down with white wine. Every kind of person frequents Sheekey’s, and when I investigated the people who were sharing my table I discovered one to be a refugee from Bavaria, now a successful manufacturer; and one to be a designer of shoes; and the third told me modestly, eyeing my stewed eels with distaste, that he was a member of a vocal group called the Keynotes and was also engaged in the production of jingles for commercial television. I drank to his harmonies, and congratulated the Bavarian on his fortune, and complained about the price of shoes, and thought to myself, as my morning slid to a replete, if not greasy, conclusion: ‘London! A hodge-podge, a kaleidoscope, a secret cupboard, a regular old stewed eel of a city!’
There is one deliberate falsehood in this piece about the London of the 1950s. I could have had beer for breakfast at that pub in Covent Garden, and metaphysically, so to speak, I did. But the morning was very young, the sausages were fat, the coffee was steaming invitingly, and I said to myself as I peered wanly across the bar, no, I said, here’s one time where Art is more beautiful than Truth. It is the only lie in A Writer’s World.
Two Grandees
Two old European heroes of the Second World War still entered the news in the last decades of the 1950s. Charles de Gaulle, the charismatic leader of the Free French during the war, was still a formidable president of France. In 1958 he was facing not only a protracted colonial war in the French colony of Algeria, but also a military revolution there supported by the hundreds of thousands of French settlers, the colons, who feared he was going to sell them out to the indigenous Arabs. When he flew into Algiers that May he could expect a mixed reception.
Tonight was the moment of catharsis for the Algerian revolution, the moment when all the inflamed emotions of the past few weeks burst into something dangerously approaching madness. Pumped full of slogans, drunk with militarism, blind with patriotism, at once triumphant and embittered, anxious and hopeful, the colons of Algiers gathered once again in the forum on the hill. When they sang their patriotic songs the music was the loudest and deepest and most frightening I have ever heard, and it was carried away like thunder across the harbour and out to sea. They were honest emotions that were expressed as well as vicious ones, kindly as well as intolerant; but by and large, to an old-fashioned democratic observer brought up on bearskins and blanco, the forum at Algiers this evening stank unpleasantly of jack-boots and gun-metal. Into this hideous setting, instinct with force and chauvinism, sustained by 300,000 cheering, shouting, singing, clamouring colons, General de Gaulle entered with an air of almost innocent integrity.
He seemed as welcome and incongruous as a bishop among gangsters. His face is rather pudgy these days, and when he spreads his arms in his victory sign, it looks an effort. But his voice had a ring of honesty to it, and he seemed to look at us, all 300,000 of us, straight in the eye. He said that all the people of Algeria, whatever their race or creed, must be French citizens with equal rights and duties. They must be given the means to live a decent life, he said, and there must be a reconciliation between the French people of North Africa and the Muslims, whose rebel forces had put up a brave fight and must be brought back within the French fold.
Bursts of cheers and chanted slogans interrupted his speech, and repeated cries of ‘l’Algérie Française’; and you could feel the sensitive mass reaction of this complex-ridden crowd as he moved from subject to subject, from the Republican institutions to the future of Algeria, from integration to reconciliation. For there must be reconciliation between the peoples, he said again, and bracing himself behind his microphone while the crowd waited, he thumped his chest, surveyed the arena before him and proclaimed magnificently: ‘I, de Gaulle, open the door!’
The colons were left confused by this speech. What door had he in mind? ‘Je vous ai compris,’ he grandly told them before he flew away again, comforting many of them with the thought that he would never abandon a French Algeria, but he had really understood them all too well. He knew they had no intention of integrating with the Arabs, and within two years he saw to it that l’Algérie Française was Française no longer.
In the same year Winston Churchill, the most charismatic of all the war leaders, was living in retirement – as Prime Minister of Great Britain he had lost his last election in 1952. By 1958 he was very ill, and seemed about to die at the villa where he was staying in the south of France. Like much of the world’s Press, I was rushed there by the Guardian to be in at the end, but found myself more preoccupied by my colleagues than I was by the statesman’s impending demise (which didn’t in fact happen for another seven years).
Through the marbled magnificence of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo a thickened American voice exploded this evening. ‘Look, you lousy two-timing son of a bitch,’ it said, not without dignity, ‘I may be a goddam reporter but I’m a human being too, see, and this isn’t Marilyn Monroe we’re waiting for, it’s Churchill, see, Churchill! So I get mad!’
We always get mad on our big competitive assignments, but only rarely do we admit to humanity. When that angry American thumped the bar this evening, in the pursuance of some obscure and ephemeral grievance, he was expressing a historical truth. Waiting for Churchill, as he says, is something different, and to the long vigil at Roquebrune, maintained all day and half the night by a jostling international Press corps, there has been a suppressed undertone of something precariously approaching sentiment. Today’s communiqué on the patient’s health announced that his temperature was normal and that his progress continued to be satisfactory; but ‘you never know if you can believe these lousy doctors’, we all said, and only a few confident and self-disciplined reporters flew away this evening from the hardships of a Monaco expense account.
For the rest, the selfless vigilance is maintained. The watch begins early. ‘To the villa!’ the taxi-cab drivers are told, and up to the Villa la Pausa, high above Monaco, streams the morning caravan. A private road leads up to the house, and by midday it is blo
cked with cars and vans. A gaudy yellow saloon is emblazoned ‘Europe No. 1’. A covey of cameramen sits on a wall dangling its legs. A tall BBC commentator, wearing a very British blazer, stands in incongruous dignity among the miscellaneous ill-shaven photographers of the Paris weeklies. The gate is guarded by two sedate French policemen, and all is calm and quiet.
A pleasant dusty path runs around the ground of the Villa la Pausa, and along it there wanders a sporadic procession of photographers, elaborate with telephoto lenses. Somebody has littered the path with the torn pages of a vividly salacious magazine, and a few determined continentals squat in the sunshine earnestly trying to piece them together again. Around the corner a solitary cameraman stands like a statue at the garden wall: from this place he once caught a glimpse of Lady Churchill, far in the garden below, and he hasn’t budged since.
The best vantage point of all is on the seaward side of the house. From here you can see part of the villa clearly enough, from its shuttered upstairs windows to its closed out-house door. The trees are cool and shady, and a little knot of reporters is passing the time by throwing stones at a tin can. ‘You can’t see much from here!’ says an elderly English gentleman, passing laboriously up the hill. ‘Ha, ha, no,’ say the reporters politely, and add, sotto voce, ‘You’re all right, Jack, you’ve got your bread buttered already.’
So have they, for the moment anyway. Perhaps they will drive down to Menton for their lunch, or pass an hour or two in some agreeable little bar before gathering at the Hôtel de Paris for the afternoon communiqué. Mr Montague-Browne, Sir Winston’s secretary, delivers it coolly and precisely, and deftly declines to elaborate. No, he can’t explain the medical terms more exactly. No, he’s very sorry, but Sir Winston is a guest at the villa, and it would be impolite to talk in more detail of the ménage. Yes, he quite understands the difficulties of the Press. No, he much regrets he cannot say what book Sir Winston is reading today. ‘We’re thick-skinned up at the villa,’ says Mr Montague-Browne endearingly, as he escapes through the squashy armchairs and disappears in a cloud of unanswered questions.
Then the Press corps, only mildly simmering with its occupational disgruntlements, dispatches its cables and settles down for the evening. As always, our pleasures are spattered with shop talk. They say the Daily So-and-so tried to get hold of the villa housemaid. Lord what’s his name himself, one hears, has told his reporters to lay off. ‘What about Paris-Presse, hey? That guy overheard Winston talking in his sleep!’ A few hardy or nervous practitioners take a cab up to the villa after dinner, to peer staunchly through the darkness in the general direction of the statesman. A few have inconvenient deadlines to meet on the other side of the earth. The rest obey the conventions of the place, and presently plunge unerringly into the variegated salons of its pleasure domes. And up on the mountainside, the subject, object and predicate of all these constructions, old Sir Winston lies in bed.
The messages are pouring in from the four corners of the world, but he lies there in seclusion, the last of the giants, reading his newspapers and confounding his pleurisies. Some of my colleagues depict him demanding brandy, puffing cigars, writing his own health bulletins, reading Somerset Maugham, calling for splendid enormous meals. For myself, when I was up the mountain this evening I thought I heard a sound from the Villa la Pausa, above the sweetness of the birds and the distant sawing of a woodman. It came from an upstairs window of the house, and it sounded to me uncommonly like a chuckle: a rich, quixotic, irrepressible, ageless Harrovian chuckle.
‘How come you heard that and nobody else? You got influence some place? Hey, garçon, two dries.’
7
Orientalisms: The Far East
I spent much of 1959 in the Far East, writing for the Guardian, making some television films for the BBC, and preparing material for a book, The Road to Huddersfield, which I was improbably to write for the World Bank in Washington DC. It was before the astonishing economic explosion in Asia that was later to change the world.
Japan
Fourteen years had passed since the first nuclear bomb ever dropped upon a city had been dropped on Hiroshima, but the city was still in a state of shock and obsession.
Poised in the estuary of the Ota River, where a covey of islands meanders into the mists of the Inland Sea, lies the city of Hiroshima. It is a seaport, an industrial town, an old military base, a market centre: but to this day it lives and breathes and talks and thinks the atomic bomb that exploded over it on 6 August 1945. The city has long been rebuilt, and a new population has flooded in to replace the victims of the holocaust: but for all the bright new buildings and the broad boulevards, no Pompeii is more surely frozen in its attitude of disaster, and no Mont Pelée more permanently scarred. From the hillside above the city you can see how horribly plump and passive a target Hiroshima was. It lies compactly in a funnel among the hills, where the Ota flows pleasantly into the sea. Because it is built on a group of islands, it is criss-crossed by channels of water, and in its very centre is the T-shaped bridge that was the bomb-aimer’s objective. Today it has all been reconstructed. The usual straggly houses of urban Japan run away to the sea, and in the business district there stands a group of tall buildings such as you may often see, an earnest of commerce and hospitality, silhouetted upon the American horizon. A ship or two stands offshore. Traffic flows fairly thickly down the streets. Loudly striped advertising balloons loiter above the City Hall, and a homely hum of activity hangs on the soft damp air. It all looks normal enough from the hillside – even beautiful, with the city lying there so new and shining, and the deep blue of the high ground behind, and the placid island-speckled expanse of sea sweeping away to Miyajima and the Pacific.
A few days in Hiroshima, though, and you begin to feel oppressed by the hideous abnormality of the place. The soul was ripped out of this city and though the taxi-cabs may scurry about you, and the street-cars clang, and the neon lights blaze merrily enough, and the girls in kimonos bow you seductively into the night clubs, yet it somehow feels an empty city still. There is something obscurely pallid and muffled about it, for all the world as though the tall new buildings are not there at all, and the islands of the Ota delta are still blackened and smoking. Assured indeed must be the visitor who has not, just for a fleeting foolish moment, wondered if the stones of Hiroshima were still radioactive, or eyed the running water thoughtfully.
This inescapable presence of dread is partly artificial. The horror of the atomic explosion has been deliberately cherished in Hiroshima, and the memory is purposefully sustained. In the centre of the town you are trapped within this tragic and morbid cage. Outside the windows of your grand new hotel stands the Peace Memorial Museum, partly an exhibition of nuclear science, most compellingly a chamber of horrors, dominated by a huge circular model of the devastated Hiroshima, and ornamented with terrible photographs. From the cultural centre across the way there emerge at hourly intervals the saccharine harmonies of adagio hymn tunes, played with lush vibrato on a recorded carillon. There are shrines all about you, the Children’s Memorial and the inter-denominational shrine, and the celebrated Shadow on the steps of the bank, and the noble epitaph on the central memorial: ‘Rest in peace, for the error shall not be repeated.’ You must be pathologically callous or world-weary beyond cure to remain unmoved by the reminders of Hiroshima: but staying in the city today, nevertheless, is like spending a nightmare weekend in one of Evelyn Waugh’s California cemeteries, where the dignities of death were honoured with such sickly and cosmetic fulsomeness.
One could stomach it the more easily if this were a catastrophe of long ago, but there are many people in Hiroshima still directly suffering from the effects of the atomic explosion. There are unfortunates so hideously disfigured that they seldom emerge from their houses. There are the patients still, to this very day, in hospital. There are the sufferers from leukaemia. There are the mothers whose children, in the womb at the time of the attack, were born with terrible handicaps and distortions. And
there are those who experienced the thing, but were not injured by it, and who now seem like hollow men, haunted and devitalized, with something sucked out of them – ‘always tired’, as one man said to me, ‘I seem to have been tired ever since.’ Most pitiable of all, there are those many young people who are afraid of the genetic effects of the bomb. Cruelly cynical has been the exploitation of this foreboding, by Press and by politicians; wild and heartless have been the rumours of two-headed babies and strangely endowed goldfish, and a kind of eerie stockade has been erected about the young people of the place. Men look for their brides elsewhere. Girls try to hide their origins. Cruel reporters sniff about for horrors.
Yet one finds only kindness and common sense from the average citizen. The girl with the hideously disfigured face looks you straight and sweetly in the eye. The Man with the Bomb Story tells it with about the same wry relish as his opposite numbers in Bristol or Berlin. Except on the level of the newspapers and the museums, Hiroshima appears to harbour astonishingly little recrimination. So the skull-like emptiness of Hiroshima seems to be something organic, as though through all the reviving human activity some grim nuclear influences still permeate. I cannot describe the feeling of this place: but it is as though some indefinable essential element has been withdrawn from the ambiance – not colour, nor smell, nor sound, but something else, something which gives meaning and warmth to a city, like salt with your victuals, or eyes in a beautiful face.