A Writer's World
Page 30
It is a calculating city behind it all, a city of intelligence agents, a matchless centre of political and military information. Its knowledge of the world is as exact and deliberate as ever it was in the days of empire. I was lunching one day with a chap from the foreign office, at Beoty’s, the Greek place in St Martin’s Lane, when he happened to mention, as foreign office chaps do, a hotel in Canton called the Ding Sang – formerly, as I might perhaps remember, the Yang Cheng, Goat City, a name he personally preferred. What did the new name mean? I wondered – ‘Ding Sang? Oh, it means “The East Is Red”. It’s actually the theme phrase, so to speak, of one of the best-loved Maoist patriotic songs, dear to every Chinese heart.
‘At least,’ he then added thoughtfully, laying down his knife and fork, ‘at least I think it’s the main theme,’ – and here a change came over his face, and for a moment he began to look oddly oriental himself. His eyes were screwed up at the corners, and his cheekbones seemed curiously to rise. Faintly over the buzz of the restaurant I heard him, in a high, cracked tenor, softly singing to himself an eastern tune, quavery and half toned. As he sang he mouthed the words. ‘Yes,’ he said presently, in a satisfied voice, returning to the squids, ‘I felt sure it was. It provides the principal refrain of the song.’
This is the London expertise, to adapt deftly, if necessarily surreptitiously, to the changing times. Tradition in front, utter pragmatism behind. In the past ten years or so some of this inner steeliness has, so to speak, been revealed by the dispersion of London’s smoke. Ever since the Industrial Revolution the nature of London has been masked by fog and murk. It has been a city of black suggestiveness, choked often in impenetrable mists off the river, against which the splendours of the kingdom were paraded in pungent contrast. The very name London used to sound echoing and foggy, and every Hollywood film about the place had it thick with murderous fog.
Now the smoke has gone, and with it some of the romantic mystery, the camouflage. The city has been steam-cleaned all over. The river has been so brilliantly cleared of pollution that in 1977 the first salmon ran upstream through London from the sea. There is a new glint to London now, and its clarity tells a truer story than the swirls and opacities of old. The best place to look at London is not in the Mall after all, where the Queen rides by, and certainly not in Knightsbridge or Lewisham Way, but half-way across London Bridge – new London Bridge. The previous one now resides in Arizona, the one before that – the one with the shops, houses and turrets on it, and the malefactors’ heads dripping blood at its gates – having been pulled down in 1832.
It is in fact the fourth London Bridge we are going to, completed only a few years ago, but still spanning the Thames in exactly the same spot as the ford by which, two thousand years ago, the Romans crossed to found their Londinium on the north bank. It is always, of course, an intensely busy place. The road is busy above, the river below. Distorted loudspeaker voices echo from beneath the bridge as the tourist launches chug their way to Greenwich or the Tower. Dirty squat tugs with lines of barges labour against the tide toward the Isle of Dogs. Downstream lies the superannuated cruiser Belfast, speckled with the unseamanlike pinks and yellows of tourists, while upstream indistinct flotillas of small craft seem to be milling purposelessly about in the distant haze of Westminster. But when we reach the middle of the bridge, and discover the north bank spread there before us, the Thames seems hardly more than a country stream, a pleasure pond, beside the gleaming vulgarity, the harshness, the concentration of the new City of London, the square mile that is the financial heart of the capital and its true core of constancy.
It is new, because most of it has been rebuilt since the Second World War; only now are the last bomb sites being filled in, to complete its sense of packed intensity. It is a cramped, ugly, jostling, bitter, clever square mile, jammed there on the waterfront. Its buildings look as though they have been forcibly hammered into the landscape in successive stages, century by century, forcing less virile structures back from the river or into the ground. It is a terrific spectacle, to my mind the most startling urban view in Europe, and it is given touches of nobility by its hoary landmarks: the majestic dome of St Paul’s, the austere fortress turrets of the Tower, the fairy-tale silhouette of Tower Bridge, the spires of all the City churches squeezed in there among the concrete.
But it is not a nice scene, not a nice scene at all. There is something vicious to it. Every street you see down there is full to its attics with money-men, bankers, stockbrokers, agents, accountants, exchange specialists, economists, financial journalists and entrepreneurs. History does not much faze these adept Englishmen, and they are inhibited by no ideological qualms. Once the very champions of laissez faire, they have adapted with consummate flexibility to the advance of socialism, and would soon adjust again, I do not doubt, if communism ever took over this state. The City of London is the most subtle and perhaps the most vehement of all the world’s financial bazaars, even now, and it emanates a sense not of power, or responsibility, but of unremitting self-interest. It is chock-a-block full, one feels, of gentlemanly cunning.
The poet Wordsworth, surveying London in an earlier century from another of its river bridges, was moved to ecstasy by the sight. Earth, he exclaimed, had nothing to show more fair! One could not say the same, looking out from London Bridge in 1978, but I’ll tell you this, for sure: earth has nowhere more capable of looking after itself, than this aged and incorrigible deceiver!
By now this essay is decidedly a period piece. Since its time London seems to have deliberately abandoned its old character, whittling away at its traditional institutions, smoothing away its quirks and anomalies, half-forgetting its past and becoming an overwhelmingly multi-cultural capital. The House of Lords is not very lordly now and racism has acquired a new dimension since that day my friend and I encountered it on the Lewisham Road.
As for the monarchy, it was soon to lose much of its arcane magic – and its remoteness. Years later I was a guest at a Buckingham Palace reception for publishers and writers, and at the end of the evening, wishing to leave, looked around for somebody to thank. Queen, princes, dukes and all seemed to have gone elsewhere, so I left anyway, and at the palace gates I found a policeman. ‘I was brought up,’ I told him,’ to say thank you for having me when I’d been to a party, so as I can’t find the Queen or anybody to say it to, I’ll say it to you instead. Thank you for having me.’
He replied stylishly, I thought, but in the new palace mode. ‘Not at all, madam. Come again.’
20
Post-Glory: The USA
During the 1970s I wrote about several American cities for Rolling Stone, and found the USA a very different place from the gloriously confident and benevolent republic I had first encountered in the 1950s. The founder and owner of the magazine, though, the brilliant Jann Wenner, still displayed the old American panache. When, at lunch one day in San Francisco, I expressed my admiration for the restaurant’s wicker chairs, he instantly summoned a waiter and asked for a pair of them to be sent to me in Wales.
Los Angeles
I had been to Los Angeles in 1954. I had introductions then to some of the Hollywood film community, had enjoyed its social whirl, but had gone away thinking of it as rather a silly and superficial sort of place. My responses twenty years later were very different.
Los Angeles is the city of Know-How. Remember ‘know-how’? It was one of the vogue words of the forties and fifties, now rather out of fashion. It reflected a whole climate and tone of American thought in the years of supreme American optimism. It stood for skill and experience indeed, but it also expressed the certainty that America’s particular genius, the genius for applied logic, for systems, for devices, was inexorably the herald of progress. As the English thought in the 1840s, so the Americans thought a century later. They held the future in their hands and this time it would work. Their methods and inventions would usher not only America herself but all mankind into another golden age. Know-how would be America’
s great gift to history: know-how to rescue the poor from the poverty, to snatch the coloured peoples from their ignominy, to convince the nations that the American way of free enterprise was the best happiest way of all. Nothing was beyond know-how. Know-how was, if not actually the substance of God, at least a direct derivative.
One city in America, above all others, came to represent this enviable conviction. There has never been another town, and now there never will be, quite like El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, Southern California, where the lost American faith in machines and materialism built its own astonishing monument.
*
Los Angeles, in the generic sense, was a long time coming. It is not a young city. Spaniards were here before the United States was founded, and I never get the feeling, as I wander around LA’s vast, amorphous mass, that it lies thinly on the ground. It is not like Johannesburg, for instance, where almost within living memory there was nothing whatsoever. Nor does it feel transient or flimsy, like some of those towns of the Middle West, which seem to have no foundations at all, but await the next tornado to sweep them away in a tumble of matchwood. In Los Angeles there are reminders of a long tradition. There is the very name of the city, and of its euphonious streets and suburbs – Alvarado, El Segundo, Pasadena, Cahuenga Boulevard. There is the pattern of its real estate, still recognizably descended from the Spanish and Mexican ranches of long ago. There is its exotic taste in architecture, its patios and its deep eaves, its arcades, its courtyards. There are even a few actual buildings, heavily reconstructed but still authentic, which survive from the first Spanish pueblo – swarmed over by tourists now, but frequented too, I like to think, by the swaggering ghosts of their original caballeros.
A sense of age informs the very setting of LA. From the air the city looks like some enormously exaggerated pueblo itself: flat, sprawling, rectilinearly intersected, dun-coloured, built of mud brick by some inconceivable race of primitives, and behind it the tawny mountains run away in a particularly primeval way, a lizardy, spiny way, their dry expanses relieved only by the flicker of white on a snow peak here and there, or the distant glimmer of a lake. In a huge amphitheatre the city lies, accessible only by passes through the surrounding ridges, rather like a gigantic mining camp: and through the veil of its own artificial mist, suggestively whirled about and blended with the California sunshine, it looks across its golden beaches toward that most enigmatic of oceans, the Pacific (never called the sea in Los Angeles, always ‘the ocean’).
There is nothing Johnny-come-quick to this scene. Los Angeles is a complex merger of separate settlements, containing within its scrambled presence eighty different municipalities, and sprawling district by district, decade by decade, over its central plain and into its foothills. Though I would guess that nine-tenths of its buildings were erected in the twentieth century, still Los Angeles is, like some incurable disease, a balefully organic phenomenon. Its streets are forever nibbling and probing further into its perimeter hills, twisting like rising water ever higher, ever deeper into their canyons, and sometimes bursting through to the deserts beyond. If the city could be prised out of its setting, one feels, it would be like a dried mat of some bacterial mould, every bump, every corner exactly shaped to its landscape.
This is partly because the landscape itself is so individual, so that unlike Chicago, say, or Paris, Los Angeles is inconceivable anywhere else. But it is also, I think, because this city genuinely springs out of its own soil, possesses a true genius loci and forms a kind of irreplaceable flashpoint: the point on the map where the intellectual, the physical and the historical forces of American history met to produce – well, combustion, what else? Whatever happens to LA, it will always be the city of the automobile and the radio, showbiz and the Brown Derby restaurant, the city where the American ideal of happiness by technique found its folk art in the ebullience of Hollywood. It is essentially of the forties and the fifties, and especially perhaps of the Second World War years, when the American conviction acquired the force of a crusade, and sent its jeeps, its technicians and its Betty Grables almost as sacred pledges across the world. Los Angeles then was everyone’s vision of the New World: and so it must always remain, however it develops, a memorial to those particular times, as Florence means for everyone the spirit of Renaissance.
*
Across the car park from the remains of the original Spanish pueblo, where the Mexican souvenir shops now huddle profitably along Olvera Street, there stands Union Station. This was the last great railway depot to be built in the United States, completed in 1939, and one of the most handsome. Cool, tall, elegant, and nowadays restfully unfrequented by trains, it has patios green with flowers and trees, shaded colonial-style arcades, and is rather the sort of railway station a multi-billionaire might devise, if he wanted one at the bottom of the garden. In this it is very proper, for while paying graceful respect to LA’s origins and pretensions, it honours too the first and fundamental quality of this city: organized, stylized movement.
It was not liberty that Los Angeles cherished in its prime, or at least not absolute liberty. A spiritual culture can be anarchical, a material culture must be disciplined. Implicit to the promise of technological fulfilment was the necessity of system, and LA soon became a firmly ordered place. The original Los Angeles public transport system, the electric trains and streetcars of the early twentieth century, drew together the scattered settlements of the time, bringing them all into cityness.
When the car arrived the mesh was tightened, and LA built its incomparable freeways. These remain the city’s grandest and most exciting artefacts. Snaky, sinuous, undulating, high on stilts or sunk in cuttings, they are like so many concrete tentacles, winding themselves around each block, each district, burrowing, evading, clambering, clasping every corner of the metropolis as if they are squeezing it all together to make the parts stick. They are inescapable, not just visually, but emotionally. They are always there, generally a few blocks away; they enter everyone’s lives, and seem to dominate all arrangements.
To most strangers they suggest chaos, or at least purgatory. There comes a moment, though, when something clicks in one’s own mechanism, and suddenly one grasps the rhythm of the freeway system, masters its tribal or ritual forms, and discovers it to be not a disruptive element at all, but a kind of computer key to the use of Los Angeles. One is processed by the freeways. Elevated as they generally are above the flat and centreless expanse of the city, they provide a navigational aid, into which one locks oneself for guidance. Everything is clearer then. There are the mountains, to the north and east. There is the glimmering ocean. The civic landmarks of LA, such as they are, display themselves conveniently for you, the pattern of the place unfolds until, properly briefed by the experience, the time comes for you to unlock from the system and take the right-hand lane into the everyday life below.
The moment this first happened to me, Los Angeles happened too, and I glimpsed the real meaning of the city, and realized how firmly it had been disciplined by the rules of its own conviction.
*
Confusing, nevertheless, the Santa Ana with the San Diego Freeway, missing the exit at Bristol, mistaking Newport Avenue for Newport Boulevard, getting in the wrong lane at Victoria, miscounting the traffic lights on 22nd Street, an hour late exactly I arrived for lunch with the world’s greatest authority on European naval history in the early twentieth century.
Through apparent chaos to unmistakable authority. This was a not uncharacteristic Los Angeles experience. Expertise is the stock in trade of this metropolis, and behind the flash and the braggadocio, solid skills and scholarship prosper. There are craftsmen everywhere in LA, craftsmen in electronics, in film-making, in literature, in social science, in advertising, in fashion. Here Lockheed makes its aircraft. Here NASA makes its space shuttle orbiter. Here is UCLA, one of the most fertile universities in the Western world. Here the McCulloch Corporation has patented a device to pop the golf ball out of
the hole, to save its owner stooping. This is no place for dilettantes. Even sport is assiduously, sometimes grimly, pursued: the tennis players of Beverly Hills joylessly strain towards perfection, the Malibu surfers seldom lark about, but take their pleasures with a showy dedication.
I went one morning to Burbank Studios to see them filming Neil Simon’s macabre comedy, Murder by Death. This is one of those movies in which everyone is a star, and the set was cluttered with familiar figures. There was Truman Capote, described in the studio publicity as ‘acclaimed author and international celebrity’, huddled with a young friend in a corner and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. There was Peter Falk, charmingly chatting with Elsa Lanchester. Alec Guinness looked truly gentlemanly, David Niven looked almost too elegant. Ray Stark the producer looked preternaturally successful, Robert Moore the director looked alarmingly gifted.