by Derek Johns
You may well hate the South, but you can never accuse it of dull uniformity, for it is a pungent entity of its own. It is not simply a region; it is an amalgam of sensations, memories, prejudices and emotions; a place of symbols, where excesses of nostalgia can be prompted by the cadence of a voice or a glimpse of a crumbling mansion. Two races only dominate the Southern States – the Anglo-Saxon and the Negro. The white people, already homogeneous, were fused into a new unity by the Civil War, a disaster and humiliation which has bound them in resentful clannishness ever since. The Negroes, freed by the conflict, their reputation perverted by the subsequent horrors of Reconstruction, remained without cause of loyalty or pride, knowing no other home, but despised and distrusted everywhere; it is their presence, and the blind passions engendered by it, that gives the South both its sense of separation and its overpowering atmosphere of rottenness and menace.
For James the South is ‘oppressive’, ‘spiritless’. ‘What a wonderful country it would be, were it not for schism, fear and hatred!’
America’s other subject race, the Native Americans, are a lost nation, displaced and unutterably sad:
Side by side with the Spaniards of New Mexico live their predecessors, the Pueblo Indians. At Santa Fe you may see them in the shadow of the old palace of the Spanish Governors, squatting placid and impassive beside their wares – pottery and rugs and odd ornaments. They wear colourful blankets around their shoulders, and are cluttered with earrings and innumerable necklaces, not unlike carthorses in Regent’s Park. Their faces are a trifle lumpish and immobile, and they have no wild animation of gesture … I was once sitting in the lobby of a hotel at Taos, some way north of Santa Fe, when two men from a Pueblo tribe sauntered bashfully in, a little misty-eyed (for a fiesta was in progress) and walking hand in hand, for courage. They stood in the centre of the lobby, surrounded by palm trees, in their blankets and turquoise necklaces; and it was as if two fossilized sprites from a distant past, stiffened by the slow process of petrification, had detached themselves from a rock somewhere and come in to see us.
To describe these figures as ‘fossilized sprites … stiffened by the slow process of petrification’ is to set them both in their stony landscape and in their tragic historical reality in a single image. It is an example of Jan’s descriptive writing at its best – we see these men with the utmost clarity.
Invariably it is cities and citizens that interest James. His response to the natural world is not so lively, which seems strange in a country containing so much scenic beauty. In northern California he visited the Redwood Forest:
There is no more beautiful tree than the Coast Redwood; immensely tall, straight, slender and gracious, its branches intertwining high above you to form a dark and luscious canopy … [but] there comes a time as you motor north when each successive grove of Redwoods … begins to look astonishingly like the one before; until, having savoured the mystery of these ancient things for a good many miles … you detect in your reaction some slight affinity with that of the less scrupulous Pacific lumbermen, who would dearly like to chop all the Redwoods down and turn them into planks.
James’s high spirits were restored, however, by the Kentucky Derby at Louisville, the most glamorous horse race in America, and here he is in his element:
The bosomy film star stepped from her Cadillac with a rustle of silk, a casual adjustment of furs, and a wave to her entranced admirers. The cantankerous television performer, whose ill-temper makes headlines, beamed from his box, rather disconcerting those who loved him best when he was nastiest. The eminent businessman from New Orleans wore his ermine suit studded with pearls and rhinestones (‘His taste is terrible,’ remarked his tailor to the Press, ‘but it’s all in fun.’). There was the scholarly linguist, who comes to the Derby each year to enlarge his vocabulary of Rogue’s American, and whose hotel room is visited by a stream of co-operative criminals, old friends of his by now, happily dropping in to tell him the latest accretions to their argot, and not even pocketing a spoon or a fountain-pen as they leave with hoarse protestations of goodwill to pursue their duties elsewhere.
This is tremendous fun. But concealed below the shiny surface of the prose is the wiliness of the reporter who has discovered such improbable characters in the first place.
One of James’s beloved books in childhood was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (and in later life Jan was to be named a ‘Knight of Mark Twain’ by a descendant of the author’s, Cyril Clemens, in whose gift the bestowing of this splendid title appeared to be). Now James had a chance to see the Mississippi River for himself:
It is slow, sticky and yellow … but also huge and overbearing, powerful in character, aged, laden with memories, sometimes sleepy and placid, sometimes menacing, always rolling and changing its course, full of strange currents and drifts, twisting and tortuous, unpredictable, remote yet always familiar, awful but lovable; like some tough old wayward warrior, sprawling across half a room with a glass of brandy in his hand.
Many of the adjectives here might as well be applied to the United States as a whole. Coast to Coast inaugurated a lifetime of writings about a country James viewed with great affection and frequent exasperation. It also inaugurated his relationship with his publisher, Charles Monteith at Faber & Faber. After the Everest expedition Monteith had asked James to write a book about it. Such a book could not yet be published, however, given the limitation imposed by the arrangement with the climbers, and James instead offered Coast to Coast. This was the first of many Morris books to be published by Faber, and the first fruit of a professional relationship with a distinguished publisher which would later blossom into friendship.
It is a curious fact that Jan never wrote a definitive book on New York. Along with Venice and Trieste it is one of the cities she has been most powerfully drawn to throughout her life. She wrote about it many times, however, in books and essays, expressing her mixed feelings about the place. In Coast to Coast James describes first seeing it from a ship in 1953, in the way that until then most people coming from abroad saw it:
There is a richness to the life of this extraordinary island that springs only partly from its immeasurable wealth. A lavish fusion of races contributes to it, and a spirit of hope and open-heartedness that has survived from the days of free immigration. The Statue of Liberty, graphically described in one reference book as ‘a substantial figure of a lady’, is dwarfed by the magnificence of the skyline, and from the deck of a ship it is easy to miss it. But in New York, more than anywhere else in America, there is still dignity to the lines carved upon its plinth …
In later writings the ambivalence that lends Jan’s writings much of its tensile strength is clearly evident. She can write about New York as ‘in some ways the nastiest’ city on earth, but also say it is the kindest: ‘If I had to have a heart attack, the best place would be on Fifth Avenue. There’d be more good people coming to help than in any other city.’ And it is not simply a case of age conditioning her responses: she has been mixed up about New York all her life.
Both of the books Jan wrote about New York, The Great Port and Manhattan ’45, are hybrids, and neither is wholly satisfactory. The Great Port came about through a rather unusual commission. It is possible Jan felt that in its pages she had written so much about New York as to render another, Venice-like, book superfluous. But the nature of the commission itself led to something which in the context of Jan’s oeuvre is a bit of an oddity.
In 1967 James was contacted out of the blue by Austin J. Tobin, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York, an immensely powerful entity which runs the harbour, bridges, tunnels, airports and mass transit systems of the city. Tobin invited James to write a book about New York, one in which he might say whatever he wished but which was clearly intended to be a sort of advertisement for the virtues of the Port Authority itself. James was then finishing Pax Britannica, but this invitation appealed to him, and the next year he went to New York to begin work. Tobin made available an office and a
ll the facilities at his disposal, including tugboats and helicopters. Given James’s lifelong love of ships, this was a splendid opportunity:
My own conception of the port of New York was cast in a romantic-historical genre. I saw it peopled by swaggering Yankee merchants and schooner captains, and coloured by flying clippers from the East. I imagined it flavoured with bootleg mayhem and Brooklynese, and ornamented by Myrna Loys and Betty Grables, crossing their silken legs before trilby-hatted newsreel men on the promenade decks of Atlantic Greyhounds. High-bridged toffee-nosed tugs crossed my line of surmise, too, and ferryboats puffed towards New Jersey destinations with aboriginal names, and steam trains clanked across immense latticed bridges, and Harbor Precinct police patrolled set-jawed through ominous creeks. I imagined it mainly in the past tense …
It was very much in the present tense that James began work, however:
When I got there, in the fall, an indulgent helicopter pilot flew me to the geographical centre of my subject. Helicopters are the familiars of New York, its clanking Ariels. They slide and side-step among the office blocks, they chase their own shadows across the water, they airily alight, as though bringing pearls and bonbons to penthouse paramours, upon the high summits of skyscrapers.
The reader is bound to wonder what Austin J. Tobin thought of this classic piece of Morrisian rhapsodising. Throughout the first section of the book, entitled ‘Physical’, the city, or more properly the harbour, is seen through the ‘I’ of James. But the second section, ‘Functional’, is written in a wholly different and more objective way, full of facts and figures, no doubt much more what Mr Tobin had in mind. The third section, ‘Allegorical’, despite its title continues in this vein, so that readers may conclude that they have been reading two books, not one. In other writings Jan intricately weaves her own experiences and observations into a whole which contains great stores of information. There is something about the origin of this book that prevents James from doing so here. Nonetheless, readers may indulge often enough in the peculiar luxury of the writing:
In 1953 the New York Crime Commission reported that nearly a third of the local officials [on the waterfront docks] had criminal records. The daily ‘shape-up’ – the hiring session at which longshoremen were offered work – was a notorious exchange of skulduggery and criminal intelligence. Among the senior officials of the ILA [the International Longshoremen’s Association] were Vincent ‘Cockeye’ Brown, Joseph ‘Hells’ Murphy, Anthony ‘Tony Cheese’ Marchitto, and Frank ‘Machine-Gun’ Campbell of the Arsenal Mob, who disguised his own union authority by the use of other people’s names, so that Mrs Lucy Panzini, a Hoboken tavern proprietor, was distinctly surprised to be told one day that she was officially listed as president of Local 1478.
This is On the Waterfront Ealing comedy-style.
Planes as well as ships fall under the remit of the Port Authority:
The port’s second element is the air. The skies of New York are almost never silent or still, and on a fine day they seem to be alive with the streaks of jets. Aesthetically the air age suits the place: its vast brilliant skies receive the vapour trails like canvases before the brush of an abstractionist, and the svelte forms of the jets complement its architecture. New York is the only great city I know where these machines look altogether at home – not intrusive, nor anachronistic, nor impertinent, nor even remarkable.
James signs off The Great Port with a classic stroke of his own brush:
And so in the end I was left, like so many voyagers before me, trapped by the great port. I loathed it like a lover. The questions it asked I resented; the answers it gave I mistrusted; the spell of it, the chivvying of conscience, the temptations, the delight, I felt to be unfair. Damn you, New York! Damn the bright sweep of your spaces, and the ungainly poetry of your names! A curse on all your archipelago, and on those rough fresh winds off your bay – which, catching me like an embrace as I stepped out of the helicopter, so often ravished my spirits, and made my heart sing!
One can only hope that Austin J. Tobin felt he had got his money’s worth.
Manhattan ’45 is most definitely a love letter. It was published in 1987, but it represents a backward look at New York. Its stirring opening paragraph sounds its theme:
In the early afternoon of June 20, 1945, the grey-painted British liner Queen Mary, 80,774 tons, appeared out of a misty sea at the Narrows, the entrance to the harbour of New York City. She was the second largest ship in the world, and probably the most famous, and she was bringing home to the United States 14,526 of the American service men and women who had just helped to win the war against Nazi Germany – the first big contingent to return from the great victory. As she sailed past Sandy Hook the resonant boom of her foghorn, which sounded a note two octaves below middle A, echoed away triumphantly to Brooklyn, to the New Jersey waterfront, and past the Statue of Liberty to the waiting skyscrapers.
These vaulting words, besides setting the scene, demonstrate many of the characteristics of Jan’s writing: its authoritativeness, its attention to detail, its essential optimism. The pages of Manhattan ’45 are wistful in their enjoyment of the city at that moment.
If Manhattan ’45 is like The Great Port something of a hybrid, it is because the Jan of the 1980s often strays onto its historical canvas. She simply can’t resist interpolating observations about her Manhattan. Perhaps none of this matters, however, since Jan is at her delightful best in many of these pages, the verve of the city reflected in the verve of the prose:
Still, Manhattan had never been a very saintly place, and the out-of-towners who visited it were generally prepared for the worst. They expected urbanity, but they expected stridency too. If Rockefeller Center seemed reassuringly considerate and civilized, a few blocks away Times Square was the world’s epitome of splash – in those days you did not think of Vegas, when you wanted to conjure up the images of cheerful vulgarity, but first and always of Broadway. Back to their full glory after the wartime years of dim-out, the lights of profit and of show-biz flashed and flickered through the night – the dazzle of the theatres and huge picture palaces, the roof club of the Astor all ablaze, the tireless progress of the Motogram round and round – the cascading of the electric waterfall, showering pedestrians sometimes when the wind was wrong – the Camel man blowing his gigantic smoke rings – the perpetual golden showering of peanuts, the tossing heads of Budweiser horses – electric hands waving, electric feet tapping, forests of light bulbs winking, spinning, marching and pullulating.
All the great characters of New York are on display here:
But even the police got out of the way when, with a howl of sirens and a thrashing of 240-horsepower motors, the American Le France V-12 fire engines of the New York Fire Department came sweeping into an avenue. This was truly a spectacular force. Everywhere in America fire brigades meant more than they did elsewhere … Even in this exciting place nothing was more stirring than the charge of the fire engines through midtown on their way to a calamity. The firemen were still pulling on their jerkins, still settling their helmets on their heads, when the first of the great machines came howling and clanging out of 47th Street, say, into the line of Fifth Avenue traffic.
In 1945 the taxi drivers were willing, unlike today, to engage in conversation with their passengers. Indeed they were more than willing:
Folk-wisdom flowed freely from the front seat into the back: ‘What I say is, if a guy ain’t true to what he thinks, that guy ain’t worth thinking about,’ or ‘Like I say, there’s no use working your ass off if the meaning of life’s just passing you by.’ About Manhattan itself the cab-driver would generalize all day, if not discouraged – how there was nowhere else like it in the world, how it was full of jerks and bums, how the garbage it threw away would feed all Europe for a year, how all the cops were crooked … how Manhattan was the place where there was nothing, nothing, money couldn’t buy – ‘The city that never sleeps, that’s what they call it, the city that never sleeps. You never heard
that before?’
It is the Jan not sitting back in the taxi but leaning forwards, her arm over the seat in front, who elicits these platitudinous gems. Behind every conversation, every discovery of a recondite fact, is Jan the reporter, mining her sources.
Black New Yorkers were very much confined to certain areas of Manhattan then, and especially Harlem:
But there were still enough [music clubs] to lead a constant stream of hedonists to Harlem, and they still conducted their business with incomparable panache, laced with bitter irony – they were nearly all owned by white entrepreneurs, and even up there in Harlem some of them admitted only white clients. It was still a great experience, to enter one of these legendary pleasure-palaces after dark … The sense of gleam – black skins set against white collars, or rhinestoned silver lamé! The controlled raucousness of the music! The forbidden smell of marijuana! The particular oblique resonance of the voices! The endless innovations of dance step and syncopation!
Here is evidence of Jan the exclaimer. Her use of the exclamation mark increased gradually over the years, like a rising tide. Many who have received a letter or email from her will treasure the exclamation mark that comes immediately after their name in the salutation. If sometimes she overuses them, then this is one of the venial sins she may be forgiven.
As always, buildings fascinate Jan. In 1945 the glass-fronted skyscraper had not quite arrived in Manhattan, but skyscrapers there were in profusion:
The predominant look of Manhattan, then, was beguilingly idiosyncratic. A building might be made of bricks of a dozen different colours, or clad in artificial textiles, or decorated with Aztec motifs, or flaunt a big glass globe on top, or sprout with sculpture and abstract images. Skyscrapers of colossal technical accomplishment incorporated decorations from Gothic or Renaissance masonry, and exhibited craftsmanship that would perfectly have satisfied William Morris and his arts-and-crafts colleagues of the previous century. Ecclesiastical references were popular – the Paramount Building (1927) was the Cathedral of Motion Pictures, the Empire State Building (1931) was the Cathedral of the Skies, just as the Woolworth Building (1913) had long before been called the Cathedral of Commerce; gargoyles and quaint drip-stops were not uncommon, and in the public areas of many buildings the lights were kept low and reverent. All in all it was an architecture simultaneously fanciful, swanky and strong, and as such it perfectly suited the mood of Manhattan in victory.
