But there are other means of invasion. The native American would come in years ago across the continent to Hoboken and take the ferry where Hudson once had moored. They were fortunate: the Hoboken ferry, still running for commuters, is a fine specimen of nineteenth-century art, seemly in its lines, spacious in its curving deck, nicely foliated and unfunctional in its ironwork, and calming to the nerves. Speculators on the verge of breakdown should be prescribed a daily voyage on it and a diet of clams on the Hoboken side on the way back home. The remarkable water beetle docks downtown, there is a therapeutic noise of ratchets: one is released. Not here that long hysteria of the tiled white tunnels that connect Manhattan to the mainland and Long Island by a prolonged madhouse scream.
The foreigner coming into the John F. Kennedy International Airport has to endure one of these high-class sewers after about seven hours at thirty thousand feet of being closer to God than he could have wished. His plane, humming itself to sleep in the long suspense from life over the Atlantic, suddenly wakes up, sights the million puddles of Labrador, turns south at Gander over forested tracts, estuaries, and the little American lakes which were formed when the Ice Age melted away and the ice scoured the rock all the way beyond the palisades of jointed sandstone on the Hudson at Manhattan, and beyond it. The air traveler grasps, at least, the scale, the emptiness of the continent of which New York was and still is the key. The harbor of Halifax, like New York’s, can also hold a fleet and did so during the war. We drone south with America burning, sun-shot, under its cloud-smoke. We gaze down on the rich pathway of New England. We strain our necks trying to pick out the features of the hinterland and to name a town, to see Thoreau by his pond, Hawthorne shoveling manure at Brook Farm, those old men whittling by little harbors, or the schoolboys at Andover. We bucket over one of Boston’s frequent storms where the dear placid Christian Science ladies are praying to protect the pineapple on top of Mother Church from lightning. (How characteristically American: they call prayer “Doing their work.”) Jammed in with over one hundred other human sacks, our ears dulled, our heads splitting, our ankles swollen, our bladders arrested, and our brains reduced to the state of broken typewriters, we are tipped headfirst towards the marshy geography of Long Island, see with unpleasant exactness the ripples of the lagoons, hit some lucky stretch of tarmac, and slump back into the grateful smell of overheated rubber. We are led, mindless bodies that we are, in startling silence to what appears to be a glass hospital for forcing ailing plants.
Still, one recovers. Up in the air, when the first New York roads came into sight, one was aware of mysterious blue, green, and yellow beetles in winding procession; to this infestation one now belongs, but those beetles were rats. One is on the rat race of the American highway. In all countries of the world is there anything more dreadful than the road from the airport? It is the modern nightmare. It has been designed to shock the sky visitor with the full visual horror of the life of industrial man fighting for his place in the dormitory, choked by products. The sea is free of these indecencies.
What one wants is the city. And here, as one comes in from the airport, is another startling view, one that is palatial, ethereal, and also macabre. For coming across the hills of Queens one enters the huge estates of the city’s cemeteries. Their stones are black. A few miles away, beyond the hills falling to the East River, is the desired apparition of Manhattan, floating low in the air, rising through squalls of thundercloud, wraithlike in the winter snow, a string of faraway diamonds in the summer; but before one gets there, there is this glum, black parody of its life. The black stones are arranged in sizes, in rigid avenues and even streets on the pattern of the Manhattan grid. They extend on all sides to the skyline. Only monotonous lives or organizational existences could—one moralizes—have been so plain-spoken about the monotony, the treadmill probability of a money-conscious Hereafter. It is the occupational ill-luck of cemetery makers everywhere, if they are in the mass business, to mar the scene. What strikes one here is the barrenness of memory, the lack of piety, the absence of grotesque, the lack of family distinctiveness: instead, neutrality. The cemetery establishes and multiplies a fact. Yet, conscious or unconscious as the makers of this place may have been, and of what they were contributing to arrival, they did something immensely dramatic, and in some moods I find this the most impressive approach to the city. For one is taken through this deep and rigid region of peopled blackness, through the Shades, as it were, to see Manhattan set out in all its gaiety of line. From the Battery to Harlem, one sees the towers rise, fall away, rise again for miles in whatever disguise the weather is giving them for the hour of day: and if it is at night, one comes out of a double darkness to see the city like a collection of lighted lanterns hanging from the sky and not rising from the earth at all.
There remains one more major assault upon the eyes in Manhattan: the sight of it from above. As you came gravely into the wide harbor and that short distance to your berth you saw small colored insects buzzing over you in the skies. These little stingers are the helicopters. In your new life the vertical dimension is certain to prevail over the horizontal; you will be going up and down oftener than you are going along. In fact, suppose you could remove all the buildings from Manhattan but leave the people exactly where they were, you would see the fantastic sight of people sitting high up in the air or whizzing upwards and downwards; very few would be on the earth. It is cheerfully reckoned that in the new Pan American Building, 150,000 people whiz up and down per day at speeds of up to seventeen hundred feet a minute. The physical course of a New Yorker’s daily life is a preoccupation with right angles: he is a man conditioned to an automatic process of anxiously going along and inevitably going up. He returns to earth to go along and, at right angles, to cross on the flat. This is a drastically mathematical life, a training in precision that leaves a mark on his life, leaving him to think of his interests and his psyche geometrically. But once you have got into the bubble cabin of your helicopter, on the top of, say, the Port of New York Authority Building, once the windmill begins to roar and the thing to shake your bones and teeth—to your vast relief, for nothing would be more terrifying than a flight in unenthusiastic silence over the city—once the bubble rises and then takes that sickening dip over the edge into space and pitches you like some suicide going down from the fiftieth floor counting windows for the last time, you find yourself floating and joining the foolish life of the skyscraper tops, which makes the geometry below look endurable. Now those tall things stand up like sugar sticks. All the confections, all the follies of Manhattan (in the English sense of a rich man’s whim), occur at the tops of buildings. Or rather, they used to, before the flat-roof glass-case engineers started spoiling the game a few years ago. You rattle round these giddy banks and lightheaded corporations: you see the light change from white to blue, from pink to purple down the long slabs: at sunrise or sunset, you see the flush and the shadow. You fly out over the bay and go carefully round the cheeks and nostrils of the Statue of Liberty—rather sphinxlike at close quarters, staring from her great bland stone eyes and answering no questions; you see the beetles coming in from Newark; you turn back to resume your dance over the city that is roped by its East River bridges. You see the torn shapes of water high on the horizon, sad in the evening on the flattish eastern side, and the salty Hudson coming down, nobler than the Rhine, to freshen the concrete island with its water and green banks. From this height how poor Manhattan is in greenery, compared with other cities. There are little patches in Union and Madison Squares and around Gramercy Park, oases to the thirsty eye. Not until the enormous rectangle of Central Park, uptown, is the eye assuaged. That park saved the place from madness. For down below your feet you see that New York’s dramatic pride has deceived you. It has shown you its high buildings, but in fact it is a lowish city like any other. Only thirty years ago, Mumford says, at the height of the high period, eighty-five per cent of its millions of buildings were not more than eight stories high; the average n
umber of stories was lower than in Paris. No doubt the average is rising. As it is, the stranger can be recognized anywhere by his fixed upward gaze and his look of one with an aching neck.
But now from the helicopter, and indeed from any high building, you look and see the real Manhattan. It is at first a shocking sight. One is looking down into the pitted jawbone of some Megatherium, into the rotting stumps and cavities of the giant sloth. No doubt this is the morbid reaction to your immaterial altitude. When it passes, you look with some affection on the lower roofs, with increasing affection at roofs still lower, and then with a positive yearning for the little cracks between them which are evidently streets. In any case, the taste for the View is out of date, Ruskinian, a hang-over from German Romanticism and, going further back, from Rousseau and the cult of the high mountain. Good-by to all that. For myself, the middling altitudes of New York, with their sociable ups and downs, their surprising revelations of the hardware of other people’s rooftops and the minor follies of the penthouse are more enjoyable. There with some point—New York life being what it is at night—one can ponder those lines from Macbeth:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid.
The nearer ground level one is in this city the more one feels the intimacies of a place which are all the more intense for having so much that is unintimate to contend with.
You come down and down in your bubble. You see a collection of approaching rooftops: they are discarded by the pilot-fly; you waggle your way towards others. Somewhere here the landing is, surely? And then, to your horror, you see it. The yellow target circle, the size of a dartboard. You are now in the agonizing process of reversing your suicide, of praying for accuracy, of returning plumb in the middle of the sill you jumped from. My God, the fly has made it! How often in your right-angular New York life, going up and down, along and across, in elevators, at street corners, you will say that: after a few months the anxiety to “make it,” the absolute necessity of “making it” will have become an accustomed undertone in your life.
And that is what you are now entitled to say about your arrival on that shiplike, daggerlike, targetlike island, nearly thirteen and a half miles long and only two and a quarter miles across at its widest point, of a city that with four other boroughs across the waters has 7,781,984 inhabitants. In Manhattan alone, they are stacked, shelved, slotted to a density of seventy-five thousand to the square mile.
(1964)
FROM
Dublin: A Portrait
VII
The official commemoration of the Easter Rising has just been held in Dublin as I write. The British have astonished Dubliners by regarding the men of the Rising as heroes; it would be easy to say about this admiration that it is one more example of the English habit of forgiving those you have injured. Certainly the English have short memories and the Irish have long ones: in fact the admiration has two more serious sources. First: in this year the British are remembering the loss of an equally patriotic and romantic generation, tens of thousands of them Irish, who lost their lives on the Somme. Secondly: the mass of British people in 1914 found it intolerable that an Irish settlement should have been delayed by a powerful section of their ruling class who were as oppressive to them as they were to the Irish. The Rising and the War disposed of those troubles.
Only one act of violence preceded this year’s commemoration. Acts of violence are likely to last for ever in Ireland, for the Irish are privately vain of their taste for illegality and they enjoyed the gesture for its own sake. To commemorate the Rising, Kilmainham Jail, which had been in a state of ruin for years, was put into order and was opened as a sort of national shrine. In November 1965 I went to see how the work was getting on. Hundreds of tourists—mainly Irish-Americans—have visited the ruined jail every year. They scribble their names on the walls of the cells of this prison where so many Irish patriots were incarcerated, hanged or shot since the days of the United Irishmen. Here the leaders of the Rising were executed by the British. The jails of Ireland and especially of Dublin are old and brutal monuments. Kilmainham, in its rough granite, is the most horrible of them.
The driver who takes American tourists to visit the jail is eloquent about the brutality of British oppression; the British visitors are treated more guardedly. My driver, an old man who had fought against the British and who said his heart had been broken and his faith lost in the Civil War, was disgusted by my visit. The place, he said, was a monument to all the lies and betrayals of Irish history. He wanted the jail to be pulled down.
Inside, it was half-ruined. The roof had collapsed at one time, the grim little cells were rotted by damp, the floors had gone, one walked down freezing, dark, wrecked corridors, groping from plank to plank. One of the workmen, an old man who was doing some repairs, took me round the cells of the leaders of the Rising. We saw the broken gibbet on which (I believe he said) the Invincibles were hanged. He told the details of what each man had done. I saw the large cell which had two windows and which looked out on to a stone wall, where Parnell had been briefly imprisoned. His bust was there and there was an inscription cut into the sill. We went out into the exercise yard which is enclosed between the main block of the prison and the enormously high outer granite wall and then into the bleak yard where some of the men of the Rising were executed. In one corner was the spot where Connolly was shot. He had been badly wounded and carefully nursed in hospital—until he was well enough to sit up in a chair for execution! Nausea and hatred make the visitor wretched. The very fact that there are new granite chips in this death yard somehow appals. It is good for those of us who have escaped political imprisonment which, since 1916, has become a commonplace in our world, to consider the scene. Pearse longed to shed his blood: the British foolishly gratified his desire. From Tone and Emmet onwards the Irish patriot has always wanted to die. There is a most curious, obsessional desire in Ireland for “the last rites,” life having only a doubtful meaning.
And then, at the most wretched moment of my visit, the absurd occurred, as it does again and again in Ireland. I was just about to leave when another visitor got into the prison. He had found the door open and he wandered towards us, a well-dressed, cheerful, vigorous-looking man in, I suppose, his early sixties; he looked like a prosperous business-man. He was English.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I was passing by. I thought I’d like to drop in on the old place. God, they’ve let it go. What a mess! What a shame! It wasn’t like this in my time, the British kept it up, spick and span and proper. It’s terrible. Oh yes, I was here. I was a naughty boy. They put me up there—in number three or four was it?—in the top gallery.”
The old workman had been wary but at this he woke up.
“What was it?” he said.
“Well,” said the man, “I’ve led a bit of a roving life, all over the world you might say, back and forth. I was a deserter. I was stationed in Galway. I was only a kid and I got into a spot of trouble down there—nothing really bad, well, we won’t go into it now, it’s a long time ago. Nowadays they’d let it pass but those were hard times. That’s where they put me, up there.”
“Is that a fact?” the old man began to grin.
“Yes, that’s it, number three or four, top gallery. The man next door went mad and threw himself off and killed himself. There was no net in those days. What am I saying? I’m telling a lie. I was in here twice. That was when I was in Cork—more trouble, I deserted again. I deserted twice.”
“Did you now?” said the old man who had his hands in his pockets and was scratching his legs with delight.
“Let’s see the exercise yard,” the Englishman said. “It’s through there if I remember right.”
The old man said: “That’s right. Through this door.”
“Do you see that? He remembers it!” the old man whispered to me laughing. “Come on now, I’ll show you.”
“It’s a shame the way they’ve let it go,” said the English
man.
“No one seemed to care at all about it,” apologised the old man.
“Oh, here it is,” said the Englishman, aglow to be in the yard. “That’s it. I reckon I know every stone in that wall. They made you run close to it. I have run round that wall hundreds of times.”
“You’re right there,” said the elated old man.
“And the drummer—now where did he stand? Over there by the window in the corner, I think,” said the Englishman.
“In the corner it was. You see he remembers everything,” the old man said with admiration.
“Left, right, left, right, pick ’em up. The drum tap!” said the Englishman.
“Ah, the drum tap! The drum tap, it made you skip,” cried the old man.
“The drum tap! They knew how to beat it out fast.”
“Ah, they did that.”
Reluctantly the Englishman left his playground.
“Was it in the Devons or the Foresters you said you were?” asked the old man.
“The Foresters.”
“I was in the Fusiliers,” said the old man. “We were in the Curragh.”
They were charmed and they chattered. The Englishman gazed up at the cell.
“I think it was the third cell, perhaps I’m mixing it up with the second time. Or Arbour Hill Barracks—they had me there too. That was the third time.”
“Three times. Powerful,” said the old man whispering. And then, covering his mouth with his hand, he giggled: “I was in the bloody British Army too. I was a deserter myself. Ha! Ha!”
“Where were you then?” said the Englishman.
“I was in Solingen, never short of a razor blade there. And the girls cheering in the street when we got in,” said the old man.
“You’re bloody right. I was up there too!” said the Englishman. The two friends gazed at each other.
“It’s a pity, it’s a great pity it’s been let go,” the old man said.
The Pritchett Century Page 24
