A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  Four thousand four hundred young American men and women, I knew, were hard at work in there: steadfast before computer screens, deep into ballistic theories, economic principles, translations from the Russian, comparative equations or historical relevances. They were being prepared as an elite, an officer corps to lead the armies of the Republic into a world subject more than ever to American power and decision – the world of the Pax Americana. My few minutes alone there seemed to me an almost transcendental experience: one of those moments of travel when history, place and circumstance all seem in collusion to proclaim some truth or other, if we can only discover what it is. The police car came back again. ‘You OK, ma’am?’ Sure, I said, quite OK: just watching the skunk.

  *

  It was true that I had never seen a skunk in the wild before, but in fact I was contemplating the moment. I cannot deny that I was greatly depressed just then by the condition of the United States, which seemed more than usually sunk in crime, corruption and hypocrisy, bewildered by racialism and enervated by crackpot introspections. West Point was like a world of its own, a place where the old American values counted still, honour and duty were watchwords and to tell a lie was to betray one’s heritage: a place too, so it appeared that evening, where purpose was so exactly matched by appearance that the whole scene became an allegory.

  Next day I went back in daylight, and saw the future elite for myself – classes of ’92 to ’95. Every day at noon the entire Corps of Cadets parades in its grey working uniform between the statues of Eisenhower and MacArthur, with Washington on his high plinth in the middle. Some of the West Point mystique, accumulated since the Academy’s foundation in 1802, is then on display for any passer-by to see. Ensigns flutter. A band plays. Swords flash. Tradition’s Long Grey Line is regimentally massed. And one of the place’s better-known peculiarities is publicly demonstrated.

  The quizzing of the ‘plebes’, or freshmen (freshpersons, as the world outside West Point would probably call them) is a demanding ritual. There in the open air, on the parade ground, first-year cadets are orally examined by their seniors in anything from the dates of presidents to the contents of that morning’s New York Times. I watched it all through my binoculars, and alarming indeed were the attitudes of the examining seniors, testing the responses of the apparently terrified freshmen, as with military severity snap questions were put and answers offered. Sometimes lists of names were demanded. Sometimes they seemed to be reciting poems, or perhaps military regulations. Sometimes songs were compulsorily sung.

  ‘Is that some patriotic ballad?’ I asked of a senior cadet, as a not very musical salvo of melody reached me from the other end of the ground. ‘Ma’am,’ he replied (courtesy is endemic at West Point), ‘Ma’am, I believe that is the national anthem’ – and hardly had he spoken than the band struck up, orders were barked, swords were shouldered, and the whole grey seething mass swarmed up the steps into Washington Hall, where a plain but nourishing lunch awaited it.

  Actually they were bellowing, so I later learnt, the second verse of the National Anthem. Everyone knows the first verse, after all, and almost nothing about West Point is easy, or exactly simple. Hanging around the place another time, when the cadets were coming out of class, I noticed that whenever juniors passed badged seniors, they uttered a kind of mantra. What they were saying was this: ‘Beat Louisville, Sir’ – ‘Beat Louisville, Sir’ – ‘Beat Louisville, Sir’. Louisville was West Point’s next football opponent, and having to remember the fact, and mouth this esoteric spell time and time again as they walked across the campus, was one of the subtle ways in which the Academy brainwashes its recruits. Brainwashing it undoubtedly is. The West Point System, as it is constantly called (reminding me uncomfortably of the names they used to give especially horrid Victorian methods of penal discipline) – the West Point System presupposes that the new recruit has to be recreated from scratch. All the high-school swank has to be scoured, all childish pride expunged, and since this is achieved not by members of the staff, but by the endless harassing and criticism of cadets only a few years senior, the whole nature of military discipline and hierarchy is experienced. Now you are the unfortunate underdog, now you are in command: you know the bitter trade from both sides.

  At the same time the pressure of daily life is merciless, the pace terrific, the standard of everything frighteningly high. A cadet graduates from West Point not only with a science degree, but with a military education both theoretical and practical, and a physique transformed by endless exercise. There is no slouching about on this campus. Everybody moves at a spanking pace, left right, left right, head up, eyes often a bit glazed, generally sunk in thought – trying to remember differential calculi, perhaps, or what the Times said that morning about economic conditions in Sumatra.

  It is a hard, calculated regime, and some of those plebes look tired enough to wring a mother’s heart. Observe though some of their seniors, as they prepare for the afternoons’ exercise! Handsome and amiable young giants jog down to the football field. Astonishingly energetic girls do violent aerobics. Sweating toughs lift enormous weights, throw themselves around exercise bars, or do so many press-ups, with such enthusiasm, that it exhausts me just to watch them. ‘Let’s go!’ cry the coaches, ‘Lift those knees!’ ‘Carry that ball!’ – breaking off sometimes to offer me a polite ‘Hi’ as I meander flabbily past.

  I was seeing it only from the outside, but nevertheless I was greatly cheered up by all this. A quarter of West Point’s cadets drop out, and I don’t blame them, but the ones who survive seem to me just fine. I tried hard to detect symptoms of fraud, hypocrisy or Rambo arrogance in the ones I met, but they seemed to me, to resurrect a phrase, ladies and gentlemen every one. If it is an elite that West Point produces, it is a very attractive elite, and hardly homogeneous: there are cadets black, brown and yellow, Jewish cadets, many bespectacled cadets, cadets short and even cadets who look to me a little plump for press-ups. They come from all backgrounds, posh to poor, and the one thing they have in common, so West Point likes to think (me, too) is the devotion instilled to them, during their four years in the place, to principles that the Founding Fathers would have approved of.

  I am anything but a militarist – more of a pacifist-anarchist, actually – and I was surprised to find myself, as I pottered around West Point, so attracted by its atmosphere. Partly, of course, it was the contrast between this place of old-school values and the contemporary squalors outside. Partly perhaps it was the aesthetic appeal of order and tradition, set against the glorious landscape of the Hudson valley. But perhaps it was chiefly a sense of nostalgic déjà vu. In the days when we British were masters of the world we too consciously produced an elite to keep it straight, and West Point has a lot in common with the schools that educated the English governing classes. Mens sana in corpore sana, a healthy mind in a healthy body – that was their ideal, as it is the Academy’s now, and they too liked to suppose that they were educating a band of brothers, united in trust and loyalty, to organize a New World Order, in those days called the Pax Britannica.

  Hyped up as I was by these conjectures, West Point never let me relax, just as it never lets the Long Grey Line drop its guard. Everywhere I went trophies and symbolisms prodded me: rows of captured artillery, benches inscribed with ‘Dignity’, ‘Perseverance’, ‘Responsibility’, eagles and crossed swords, the flag on a flagpole forty feet high, the Cadets’ Prayer (‘guard us against flippancy and irreverence’) the Academy motto (‘Duty, Honor, Country’), the sundial presented by the Class of ’33 (‘From its Time and Place in the Long Grey Line’), the vulgar gold and ivory baton surrendered by Reich-Marshal Goering, the very antithesis of a West Pointer, to the forces of Truth in 1945. ‘Beat Louisville, Sir,’ mumbled the plebes. ‘Duty, Honor, Country’, thundered the text around General McArthur’s statue. ‘To be good officers, you must be good men’, said the shade of General Sherman. ‘If you admit you’re wrong,’ I heard a coach assure his perspiring footballers,
‘you’re already right, and you don’t get yelled at.’

  Best of all, most genuinely inspiring, was a little cameo I saw on my last afternoon at West Point. It was a Saturday, and many of the cadets were preparing to receive visitors, or go out. I saw one vigorous plebe emerging from her barracks in what I took to be her semi-dress uniform – not the famous ceremonial one that we always see in West Point photographs, with the cross-belting and the plumed hat, but a trim grey trouser suit with a shiny-peaked cap, very smart and very flattering (if one may dare say such a thing, in such a context), to her lithe figure.

  I followed her down the path towards the Eisenhower statue – left right, left right, head up, arms swinging, brisk as could be to where her father was waiting to meet her: and then – talk about symbolisms! He was your very image of a kindly homespun countryman, a figure from an old magazine cover, wearing boots and a floppy brown hat, his face shining with pride and happiness. She broke into a run, her cap went skew-whiff for a moment, and into his strong American arms she fell.

  Manhattan

  And there was always Manhattan …

  It’s been rough weather in Manhattan, but I haven’t cared. I’ve wrapped up warm and enjoyed myself. In the Colombian seaport of Cartagena there is, or used to be, a big bronze sculpture of a pair of well-worn boots, recalling the remark of a local poet that he loved the city in the way he loved some old familiar footwear. After four decades of knowing Manhattan I have come to feel the same about this legendary sink and summit of the world.

  Old boots as a metaphor of Manhattan! You may well laugh. They are not very smart boots either. They need soleing and heeling. They leak a bit. They creak. They could do with a polish. I’ve got used to them, though; and in the winter especially, when the city is so often snarled up in catastrophe, I can almost see them standing there, scrawled about with graffiti, beloved and familiar among the snows of Central Park. Manhattan in the cold has always been a sentimental sort of place. Miracles happen on 34th Street. The other day I saw a young man at the Rockefeller Center ice-rink actually fall on his knees before his partner to press his ring upon her finger: the girl performed an ecstatic pirouette of acceptance, and the crowd fondly applauded.

  One evening I was taken to a venerable mid-town club, and was persuaded by a mature and most courtly waiter to sample its celebrated inhouse cocktail, which seemed to be something to do with rum and was served in a silver tankard. ‘When I was a little boy,’ said my host, ‘I used to be brought here by my father, and he always let me have one.’ How touchingly Old New York, I thought: the kindly Exeter-and-Harvard Daddy, the eager boy in his best suit, the smiling avuncular servants, the happy sense of continuity and complicity – for the boy’s mother, I’m sure, would not have approved. Draining my tankard, and unwisely accepting a second, I presently staggered out into 49th Street feeling decidedly sentimental myself (and realizing that, as usual, Mother had been right).

  *

  Scarf-wrapped, woolly-hatted, gloved and ear-muffed, all mid-Manhattan becomes rather Old New York at this time of the year – and not least when some appalling weather-front storms out of the ocean. Then the inhabitants of the place become almost Norman Rockwellian in their manners. Of course behind the rosy cheeks and frosted whiskers all the usual malice lies dormant. The pickpocket, we need not doubt, wistfully eyes our handbags. The rapist reluctantly stifles his passions. The intolerable dogmatist harbours her political correctness. The serial killer takes a hold of himself. The racialist smiles companionably enough at the laughing ethnic family, as they all slither together across the frozen intersection, but still secretly wishes the motherfuckers would all go back where they came from. But for the moment the villainies are suppressed. In this Manhattan, I assure you, evil-looking youths really do come to the help of elderly ladies, murmuring improbable mantras like, ‘It’s a pleasure, ma’am, now you watch how you go …’

  *

  I have been helping to make a television film here, and those old boots have often been in my mind. As we have stumbled here and there through the snow, lugging our damned equipment from site to site, climbing over frozen fences, explaining ourselves to inquisitive cops, Manhattan has often seemed a homely kind of place – in the English sense of the word. We filmed on a tug in the harbour one bitter squally dawn. The coffee was always on the boil, the assistant engineer was the son of an African king, the deckhand was very entertaining, the captain was infinitely relaxed, and as we nudged the QE2 into her moorings, apparently almost without thinking about it, I felt myself in the amiable company of all the hundreds of tug-men and pilots who have nudged ships into these quays since Manhattan was born.

  We filmed from a helicopter, too, after the pilot had excused himself for a moment to fly off and find some gasoline. We filmed the annual meet of the Central Park Hunt, scrupulously red-coated ladies and gentlemen taking a stirrup-cup at the Inn on the Park (‘What do you hunt?’ I asked one amiable old cove. ‘People, of course,’ he cried). We would have filmed in the foyer of the Seagram Building, if it had not been for the cheerful choir of office-workers who were giving a lunchtime concert there.

  And we filmed in a bus. What homely fun that was! What bonhomie! Only two passengers were unwilling to say something into the camera: the tiny old lady in front of me, who was busy reading the poems of Terence in Latin, and the chalk-faced youth behind, in shades and a woolly cap, who gave me the strong impression that he might be the serial killer I mentioned a few paragraphs back.

  *

  There is no affectation to all this. It is true, if temporary. Long ago in New York a friend of mine expounded on American and European varieties of sincerity. The European kind, he theorized, was spontaneous, but did not always run deep. The American kind was embedded under layers of calculation and opportunism, but lay there true and profound beneath. As everyone knows, New Yorkers are Americans only more so, and at desperate moments of winter they cast off the national veneers to reveal the real kindness below. Anyway, even at the worst of times they are spared a particular pretence which has seized most of the rest of the Western world: they do not have to pretend to be Americans. It does not look silly when a New Yorker, white, black, brown or yellow, wears his baseball cap back to front. The New York rock singer sings his lyrics in his own dialect, not in a pastiche of somebody else’s, and the slang of the streets is home-grown, fresh from local sources. The mass culture of this city, as of America as a whole, is altogether indigenous.

  God knows the Americans have never evolved a single racial identity, as the old melting-pot idea used to envisage, but as to national identity, no problem. Occasionally I do come across a Lebanese, a Haitian or a Jamaican who wants to go home to die, but for the most part, melting-pot or no melting-pot, nearly all the immigrants I meet in New York are very happy to be American. They are eager to adopt all the traditional American attitudes, from working immensely long hours to exploiting the social security system or wearing their baseball caps back to front.

  They are not pretending to be Americans. If not in actual citizenship, or even all too often in legal residence, in true Jeffersonian essentials they are Americans. No doubt this organic confidence is partly multi-ethnical. America, and especially its dazzling epitome New York, has a hundred different traditions to draw upon, absorbs them all, and makes nearly everyone feel at home. England, Germany, or even perhaps Australia, have not had much time to adjust to the idea of a nation-of-all-the-races; not only are they uncomfortable with their newcomers, they are uncomfortable with themselves. America has been welcoming its tired, poor and huddled masses for centuries and, however awful its racial problems, at least offers a sense of national membership to all.

  But it has another great advantage, when it comes to a sense of assurance: the advantage of being a superpower. Power is not only an aphrodisiac, it can be a tranquillizer too. It makes people easy with themselves. Manhattan, the greatest of American cities – the only American city for me – does not need to ape any pla
ce else or reject any place either. It is altogether itself. It speaks a dozen languages, and they are all its own. In the bounty of its self-esteem, as the snow comes down, it can even make a stranger from a small and distant country feel that this most opulent, terrible, magnificent, demanding, alarming, squalid and spectacular metropolis has all the allure of a pair of old boots.

  31

  Sydney 1995

  My book on Sydney was published in 1992, and later in the decade I returned cautiously to the city, for I had not forgotten its original reactions to my journalism …

  An acquaintance of mine down here, overhearing an exchange I was enjoying with one of the most formidable of the Sydney media bosses, said it reminded her of a confrontation between a Christian and a gladiator. Which of us was the Christian she did not say, but I can guess – Sydneysiders can be a tough bunch, and none come much tougher than your high-powered, high-tech young business people, well-travelled, highly educated, clever, rich, whose steel so often glints a warning beneath a not very velvet glove.

  I tread warily in the presence of these people, suspecting that an argument with one of them might be only a step less perilous than actually being thrown to the lions. Not that they are ever discourteous. They have no need to be. Their strength is of the coiled kind, like a whip held in reserve; just when you think it is about to lash out, it is pre-empted by a smile of wolfish charm, deceiving nobody but undeniably disarming. In fact I know of no city whose people, even the most rapacious of them, are more exuberantly welcoming. They may despise your guts, but they seldom let it sour the panache of their hospitality. Foreigners often say that Sydney reminds them of an older America, before the innocence faded. I think this a misinterpretation. The lost American innocence was founded upon a profoundly simple sense of rightness and permanence, supported by lofty ideals and by a conviction of power. The Sydney attitude, I think, reflects a national identity altogether more fragile.