The Laughter of Carthage - [Between The Wars 02]

by Michael Moorcock

  On our right, green and grey and seemingly far smaller than I imagined, stands Liberty; France’s grandiose gift to the New World. She is blind. She holds a stone torch which, presently at any rate, illuminates nothing in particular. Helen Roe enjoys my pleasure in these fresh sights. ‘Her head’s empty,’ she says. ‘You can go in there some day, if you like.’

  * * * *

  FOURTEEN

  A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER, a machine with a generous soul. New York cheerfully tolerates the horde of fools and rogues who seek the security of her deep canyons and cliff-like tenements. What was a virtue, however, is now displayed as a vice. Since the days of her Dutch founders she refused to fear those Catholic and Jewish elements who scrambled to her warmth, to suck her lifeblood and offer nothing in return. In 1921 she was still able to confine them to the Lower East Side, Harlem, Chinatown, the Bowery and Brooklyn, yet steadfastly refused to see how Carthage grew in the womb of the city all named New Babylon. Carthage devoured the kindly parent from within. It was this which D. W. Griffith attempted to show us in his much abused parable Intolerance. A subtle masterpiece, it was made a financial failure by the very Jews and Catholics it warned us against! Griffith’s company was ruined, his voice was effectively silenced and his own people turned a blind eye to his martyrdom. They had much, after all, to distract them: Tammany. Zion, the Vatican, Tatary were all scattering gold, erecting diversionary sideshows, setting up brothels and gambling casinos, providing every conceivable sensation designed not so much to exploit the poor as to seduce the rich: those old patrician families who had founded America’s wealth. Their sons and daughters were meanwhile lured to destruction by pretty baubles, negro jazz and bathtub gin.

  Griffith created the greatest work of its kind. Every line and scene, no matter how splendid, drummed home the same urgent message:

  beware the servants of rome and zion!!! follow only christ!!! ye shall find the enemy within your own walls! be wary of the priest and the rabbi - for one hand is extended in friendship while the other hides a knife!!! be forever alert! be deaf to false prophets and the temptations of lust, pride & greed!!! JUDA VERRECKE!! the day of thy judgement draws near! In the modern scenes we see a young man falsely accused, ruined by forces of international finance. We witness the treacherous betrayal and slaughter of the French Protestants by their Catholic Queen Catherine de Medici. We see the priests of Babylon destroying their own civilisation from within and opening their gates to the invading Persian tyrant! Also we have the spectacle of Jesus of Nazareth offering us both hope and the solution to all this terror. And they complained this was obscure! Obscure! Er macht die Tür auf! Lassen sie ihn hereinkommen! It is simply that they refused to see what was obvious. It did not suit them to let him in. It is the same old story. Ironically it is also Griffith’s own story, just as it is mine. I have sometimes wondered at the significance of the coincidence; his life and work frequently mirrored my own. I am sure it is not difficult for anyone, realising how much of my optimism and faith had become invested in Griffith and the America he represented, to imagine my horror when, almost as soon as I had passed the last immigration barrier and a porter was loading my trunks into a motor cab, I read in the New York Herald that the great director’s company must inevitably be declared bankrupt. This was a terrible blow, particularly since I had planned to offer my services to him as soon as my business in Washington was completed. Stunned, I climbed into my seat. I was borne off to the city’s heart, through densely crowded streets flanked by enormous skyscrapers and criss-crossed by the metal bands of an intricate elevated railway. At last, as my mind began to receive this profusion of new impressions, I tossed the paper aside, certain that Mr Griffith would find a means of resolving his difficulties. I had not been prepared for New York to remind me in the least of my Mother Country, yet somehow it was as if I had come home. It was all far grander and more highly concentrated, of course, but to me the city was nearer to being a blend of St Petersburg, Kiev and Odessa than it was of any European city I had visited. I had not, for instance, expected to be impressed by so much solid, old-fashioned good taste in buildings and decoration. As the cab at last drew up outside the Hotel Pennsylvania’s vast structure and the door was opened by a uniformed black man whose white glove saluted me in a most dignified manner, I almost thought to see my mother and Captain Brown waiting for me beyond the massive entrance. It made me long for them, for Esmé and for Kolya, to share this experience. Porters again took charge of my luggage. The interior of the Pennsylvania was even more impressive than the exterior. The lobby seemed more spacious than Notre Dame cathedral, with shops and restaurants around its edges. One restaurant alone boasted a full-size fountain. High overhead an elaborate balcony surrounded the lobby. Its columns and the richness of its materials gave it the appearance of a pagan Roman temple. If the staff had been wearing togas, rather than tasteful conventional suits, it would not have seemed incongruous. I was glad I had chosen my finest uniform. In it, I did not feel overwhelmed by the hotel’s magnificence. I made the long walk across mosaic and deep carpet to the reception desk. My reservation was confirmed by a polite, open-faced individual who softly told me his name was Cornihan, an under-manager. I must let him know if there was anything I needed or anything which did not suit me. Then, within an elevator so festooned with gilded wrought iron and carved oak it could have carried Zeus himself to Olympus, I was borne up to the eighteenth floor and escorted to a room which, in luxury and size, was the equal to the best I had known in Europe. Again, my Kolya had not let me down. I felt immediately secure, even though I had never been situated so high above the ground before. The porter was genuinely grateful for the tip. He said he was at my service. Here was another unexpected feature of this city: the good manners and cheerful helpfulness of her citizens. From my windows I could look down at the distant street to where a tiny Gothic church stood sandwiched between much taller buildings, its steps alive with miniature figures, constantly coming and going. This, I learned, was actually St Patrick’s Cathedral. I think it heartened me at the time to see this citadel of Papism so thoroughly overshadowed.

  It was immediately obvious that New York was a city consciously and vigorously dedicated to the Future, impatient with anything or anyone threatening to stop her march forward, her constant experimenting, her willingness to tear down the old in order to replace it with something newer and better. That she still cherished tradition was obvious from many of her interiors, which paid wholehearted tribute to our common culture; nonetheless she was unafraid of progress, as most European cities were. As soon as I was unpacked, changed and rested, I followed my old habit and plunged straight into her streets, to explore for myself the mysteries and wonders of Manhattan. In 1921 the Empire State Building was merely a vague notion, while the Chrysler, most beautiful of all skyscrapers, was still being designed. It would be these which would completely outshine New York’s great rival, Chicago, so that she finally refused further competition. Knowing nothing of any of this, I was sufficiently amazed by the strange proportions of the twenty-storey Flatiron Building, the gigantic classical majesty of the Times Tower. I had sailed on Leviathan to a city of Behemoths, and though one element in me was daunted by the sheer hugeness of the place I was primarily delighted. No photograph could prepare a European for that kind of scale or offer any understanding of what the city really is: a truly modern, unselfconscious, aggressively unashamed urban massing of steel, stone and brick, insouciantly balanced on a tiny slab of rock in the shallows of the Atlantic Ocean. As for what she had become, since the Carthaginians overwhelmed her, I shall not speak. In 1921 she radiated a convincing aesthetic, an authentic, boundless confidence in scientific and social progress. In her were quintessentially combined all the other cities of the Earth; she was a metropolis conceived as nothing more or less than herself, when millions of people might live together and work for humanity’s triumph over Nature, the Past, our very origins. I lay awake on that first night and heard her heart pounding as v
iolently as my own. I could believe, in some barely understood way, that she and I were the same entity, with an energetic, unsleeping mind, an active will to put a mark upon the world and leave it radically unchanged.

  Here was the sum of six million humans beings’ optimistic hopes for a better world. Here, mankind’s technology could defeat those ancient demons which enslaved its forefathers for uncountable generations. Here were fortunes greater than all previous fortunes, ambitions higher than any earlier ambitions, possibilities which until now had never been conceived. It was no longer any surprise that provincial minds, rural minds, the minds of small people, might draw back from this and brand it evil because it was so dramatically unfamiliar. Many Americans refused even to stand on the far side of a New York bridge to look upon this wonder from a distance. To them not only was she the new Babylon, she was Sodom and Gomorrah, Rome and Jerusalem all rolled in together. I was not to know that my mockery of their fears would one day prove foolish, that they understood something I, in those days, did not. New York was a mighty machine. Like any machine she had no morality. Her goodness or her evil depended entirely on the motives of who controlled her.

  She was a sensitive and highly complex machine. All she lacked was the capacity to move from place to place and one day, I thought, she might even have that. The astonishing geometry of fire escapes, water towers, elevated railroads, streetcar wires, baroque ironwork, telephone lines, power cables, bridges, lamp posts, illuminated signs and arches in combination with the buildings themselves formed a profoundly complex grammar of its own; the infinite variety of curves and angles made up the characters of a mysterious and scarcely decipherable alphabet. As many-levelled as the human brain itself, New York appeared to possess the same limitless potential for creativity and intricacy. Her traffic was unceasing, flowing like blood through a maze of veins and arteries, most of it motor-driven, though there were still a good many horses. Constantly moving, these trams, cabs, buses, cars and wagons possessed the boisterous momentum of logs in a torrent. The great avenues and cross streets, conduits of this vast machine, steamed and hissed from a thousand vents and grills; yet no one could claim her citizens were grey-faced automata, designed only to serve her, as Lang claimed in his film Metropolis. New York was then firmly under the control of her citizens, who were still primarily true born Americans or English-speaking settlers. They had made her, now they used her. For their own convenience. This was evident in the postures they struck in the streets, their easy familiarity with modern innovation. I had never seen fresh ideas treated with such amiably casual interest as in New York and I never would again. All the inventions pouring from the factories of Edison, Ford, Tesla and America’s other twentieth-century wizard-heroes, all the gadgets and marvels of our machine age, were taken by New Yorkers as available to them by right. Here every family appeared to own a motor car, a phonograph, a vacuum cleaner, an electric iron, a power wringer, while telephones, refrigerators and automatic washing machines were the property of quite ordinary people. Only the degenerate immigrants, the uneducated, jealous, desperately greedy sons and daughters of European gutters, of Asiatic opium addicts and African savages did not have these things (in such quantities at least) and this of course was largely because they had neither the intelligence nor the background to understand them: indeed, many developed deep superstitious terror of, for instance, washing machines, and would not allow them into their dens, even when they were offered.

  The city dazzled me with brilliant signs picked out in thousands of tiny coloured bulbs. Everywhere I heard the slamming of metal upon metal, the humming of motors, the clicking of cogs, the whirring of dials and indicators, while from the network of railroads, big and small, overground and underground, came a squealing of wheels on tracks, of warning horns, escaping steam and efficient airbrakes. To me this was a symphony whose themes emerged gradually, as in Wagner, forming a unity when sometimes one least expected resolution. Back and forth in the streets ran ragamuffins. They sold newspapers, soft drinks, ice creams, candy. They yelled impossibly garbled phrases; words I could not even begin to interpret. Moreover, this unceasing vitality flourished in a climate of pressing, almost tangible heat, making me sweat so badly I was soaked from top to bottom before I had walked a few hundred yards from the hotel.

  On my first morning I went nowhere in particular. I merely strolled from block to block, taking stock of my surroundings as I always did. I enjoyed the bustle and the anonymity. Somewhere around East 19th Street I stepped into a little café and ordered a cup of coffee. New Yorkers, generally thought ill-mannered by other Americans, seemed elaborately polite compared, say, to Parisians. When I had finished my coffee, I made enquiries and was directed to a large pawnbroking house only a block or two away. Here I was able to change a gold ring, inscribed and given to me by M. de Grion as a Christmas present, into a moderately good-sized sum. Next I walked on a little further until I reached Sixth Avenue and soon discovered a reasonably decent gentleman’s outfitters who provided me, within two hours, with a white linen suit, white spats and gloves, a Panama. I was now better equipped for the weather, if not for the dust and dirt. I had the feeling, on the question of style, however, that it would not have mattered much what I wore. Aside from Constantinople, I had never seen such a huge variety of racial types and national costumes. Some were strange, such as the Hassids or pigtailed Chinese, but others displayed their cultural origins more subtly, in Bavarian hats, Russian boots, Turin-cut trousers. What was most cheering for me was that I had been led to believe I should see swarthy aliens crowding every sidewalk but this was far from the case. There were no more of these in the ordinary parts of New York than in any cosmopolitan city. New York was in this respect little different from Odessa.

  That afternoon I walked down Seventh Avenue to the secluded tree lined squares and eighteenth-century houses of Greenwich Village. These relatively low apartment blocks and ordinary shops reminded me in their general respectability of my boyhood Kiev, though at that time, because the area was pleasant and cheap, increasing numbers of artists were moving in, giving the neighbourhood something of the quality of the Left Bank. Here and there it was possible for me to imagine myself suddenly transported to the country. The abundance of flowers and foliage pleased my senses as, sitting for a while in Washington Square, I watched children playing familiar games. These quasi-rural areas are required in any real city, I think. The tranquillity one finds in them is somehow more positive than anything discovered in the country itself. Here I used to visit the roof garden of Derry and Tom’s Department Store. I would go there two or three times a week in the summer, for this same sense of peace. The traffic could be heard, but it was in another world, so distant. On a fine day, listening to the fountains and seeing pink flamingoes wade from pool to pool, one could experience few greater pleasures. But presently of course Derry’s is sold to a Russian Jewess who refuses the consolation of her roof garden to lonely old men and women and makes it the exclusive territory of the fashionable and wealthy. Who cares if I have nowhere to sit now; no birds to feed; nowhere to throw a penny and make a wish?

  In New York, more than anywhere else, I developed an immediate sense of competency; the kind of security which comes from an instinctive understanding of one’s environment. The more complex a city, the better I felt. The country dweller retreats in confusion from the city’s images and noise, baffled by its millions of intersecting segments of information. To him it seems all contradictions, mystery, threat. As in Constantinople, I immediately relax. Dangers in the city are easily recognised or anticipated. In the country I am helpless. What does the crack of a twig, the angle of a leaf, the way a plant has been pressed down underfoot mean to me? If New York was, as many said, a jungle, then I was a beast naturally bred for that jungle. Within a few days of strolling aimlessly around and absorbing images, sounds, scents, I knew virtually all I needed to survive and, if necessary, conquer. Helen Roe saw me once or twice, but she was anxious to leave for Florida. S
he said New York was a filthy city and the people in it were scum. Our shipboard romance died immediately she reached land. Now that more familiar young men were available to her, cajoling her to speakeasies and nightclubs, she no longer had use for me. I was relieved, for I too was reluctant to continue the affair. I had written to Esmé, describing my arrival, the hotel and so on. I had written to Kolya and sent a postcard to Mrs Cornelius, mentioning William Browne, the film producer. I longed for all of them to be with me, particularly Esmé. She would have delighted in the city’s variety as much as I.