A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  So I am never really deluded by the charlatan inanities of New York. I disregard the fatuous interviewers and repellent respondents of what we are gruesomely encouraged to think of as NBC’s Today Family. I sneer not at the sellers of Instant Ginseng. I am not deceived by the coarse-grained editors, hag-ridden by their own accountants, or the ghastly company of celebrities. ‘Creativity’ is so degraded a word in Manhattan that I hesitate to use it, loathing its translation into salesmen’s acuity or publicity gimmick. But creative this place truly is: not in the old audacious style perhaps, but in the quieter, introspective, muddled but honest way that is more the Manhattan manner now.

  It would seem inconceivable to Hood or John D., Jr, let alone Commodore Vanderbilt or Pierpont Morgan, but actually in 1979 Manhattan feels a little old-fashioned. The Titan City has come to terms, and recognizes that everything is not possible after all. They build more thrilling buildings in Chicago now. They do more astonishing things in Houston. There are more aggressive entrepreneurs in Tokyo or Frankfurt. It is no good coming to Manhattan for the shape of things to come: Singapore or São Paulo might be more reliable guides. In the days of the Great Vision the New Yorkers built an airship mast on the top of the Empire State Building almost as a matter of course, sure that the latest and greatest dirigibles would head straight for Manhattan: it was years, though, before New York was reluctantly persuaded, in our own time, to allow supersonic aircraft to land at JFK.

  Manhattan is no longer the fastest, the most daring or even I dare say the richest. For a symbol of its civic energies now, I recommend an inspection of the abandoned West Side Highway, the victim of seven years’ municipal indecision, which staggers crumbling on its struts above a wilderness of empty lots, truck parks and shattered warehouses, the only signs of enterprise being the cyclists who cheerfully trundle along the top of it, and the railway coaches of the Ringling Bros, Barnum and Bailey Circus which park themselves habitually underneath.

  The falter came, I believe, in the fifties and sixties, when Manhattan began to see laissez faire, perhaps, as a less than absolute ideology. Doubts crept in. The pace slowed a bit. The sense of movement lagged. All the great ships no longer came in their grandeur to the Manhattan piers; the New York airports were far from the island; today even the helicopters, which were for a couple of decades the lively familiars of Manhattan, are banned from their wayward and fanciful antics around the skyscrapers. Bauhaus frowned down upon Radio City Music Hall, in those after-the-glory years, and most of Manhattan’s mid-century architecture was, by Hood’s standards, timid and banal. The truly original buildings were few, and worse still for my taste, the swagger-buildings were not built at all.

  The fashionable philosophy of smallness has strongly appealed to New Yorkers, in their new mood of restraint, and nowadays when citizens want to show you some innovation they are proud of, they generally take you to a dainty little kerbside park with waterfalls, or Roosevelt Island, an itsy-bitsy enclave of sociological good taste. Suavity, discretion and even modesty are the architectural qualities admired in Manhattan now, and the colossal is no longer welcomed.

  *

  And believe it or not, quaintness approaches. Mr Philip Johnson’s latest building is to be crowned with a decorative device like the back of a Chesterfield sofa: so does old age creep up, all but unsuspected, upon even the most dynamic organisms – Time’s A-Train, hurrying near! Manhattan is no longer critical in the atomic sense: ‘No Nukes’ is a proper slogan for this gently decelerating powerhouse.

  It is not a sad spectacle. I find it endearing. If New York has lost the power to amaze, it is gaining the power to charm. It happened that when I was in Manhattan, Bonwit Teller, for generations one of the smartest stores on Fifth Avenue, closed its doors to make way for a building development. I went along there on the last day, and what a sentimental journey that was! Tears came to saleswomen’s eyes, as they pottered for the last time among the atrocious hats, unsellable ceramics, belts and bent coat hangers which were all that remained of their once-delectable stock: and an elderly customer I was buttonholed by in the elevators seemed almost distraught – something beautiful was going out of her life, she said, ‘a bit of New York, a little bit of me’.

  Bonwits was quick to remind us, in the next day’s New York Times, that they have plenty of stores elsewhere, but still the event really did touch some heart-cords in New York. Sentimentality, eccentricity, Earl Grey tea – all these are signs of a society growing old, but doing it, on the whole, gracefully. There is much that is jaded or curdled, of course, to the culture of Little Old New York. Violence really is a curse of the place, circumscribing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and blighting whole districts of the city – when the donor of the East River Fountain was asked why it had not been spouting recently, he said he assumed it was clogged with corpses. More people in Manhattan, as it happens, suffer from human bites than from rat bites – 764 recorded in 1978, as against 201 from the rats.

  Yet I am of the opinion all the same that Manhattan, whose very name is a byword for the mugging, the fast practice, the impossible pressure and the unacceptable vice, has become in its maturity the most truly civilized of the earth’s cities. It is where mankind has, for good or for bad, advanced furthest on its erratic course through history, and in unexpected places, in unforeseen situations, its mellowness shows.

  *

  They used to say of it that it would be a fine place when it was finished. I think in essentials they have completed it now. They are no longer tearing down its buildings, and throwing up new ones, with the fury of their youth. Whole districts are no longer changing character year by year under the impact of the immigrants. Manhattan has jelled, I think. A feeling not of complacency but perhaps of wry experience pervades Little Old New York now.

  Let me end with one more visit to the Park, that zipless blank at the heart of Manhattan, for a lyrical envoi to this piece. I chanced one day, off the joggers’ circuit, to come across a young black man fast asleep upon a bench below the lake. His overcoat was thrown over him, his boots were placed neatly side by side upon the ground. His head upon his clasped hands, as in kindergarten plays, he was breathing regularly and gently, as though bewitched.

  Even as I watched, a grey squirrel, skipping across the green, leapt across his legs to the back of the bench, where it sat tremulously chewing, as squirrels do: and suddenly, almost at the same time, there arose one of those brisk gusts of wind, tangy with salt, which now and then blow a breath of the ocean invigoratingly through New York. A scatter of leaves and fallen blossoms came with it, flicked and eddied around the bench. The squirrel paused, twitched again and vanished. The black man opened his eyes, as the breeze dusted his face, and seeing me standing there bemused, smiled me a slow sleepy smile. ‘Be not afeared,’ I said ridiculously, on the spur of the moment, ‘the isle is full of noises.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the man replied, stretching and scratching mightily in the morning. ‘Bugs, too.’

  The essays I wrote during the 1970s for Rolling Stone were later published as a book, Destinations, jointly by the magazine itself and by Oxford University Press. Its unusually matched patrons threw a joint party to launch it, at the Rolling Stone offices overlooking Central Park, at which half the hosts were bedecked in beads, talismans and all the paraphernalia of what was then known as the New Age, and the others wore collars, ties and pin-striped suits. In my memory the pin-striped gentlemen were all from Rolling Stone. The Oxonians wore the beads.

  21

  South African Black and White

  All Africa was in a mess in the 1970s, as its many young states struggled through a morass of poverty, corruption and historical confusion to find modern identities. In the Republic of South Africa, which I had first visited twenty years before, one could see working itself out that seminal human conflict, the antipathy of colour. There the supremacy of the white minority was being sustained, to the disapproval of the whole world, by the pseudo-ideology of apartheid
– literally ‘separateness’ – which made the Afrikaner whites politically supreme, the British-descended whites ever more uncertain of themselves, and the black and coloured citizens utterly impotent. Rolling Stone commissioned me to see for myself.

  High above Pretoria, the administrative capital of the Republic of South Africa, there stands a squat bulbous monument on a hill, commanding the wide windswept highlands of the Transvaal – 5,000 feet up on the high veld, 400 miles from the sea, in one of the most splendidly African parts of the African continent. This is the supreme shrine of the White Man in South Africa. Built into its massive stonework, as coins and newspapers are buried beneath the foundations of bridges, is the deepest rationale of apartheid, the intricate political device – part mysticism, part economics, part confidence trick, by which the white race maintains its supremacy over the blacks in the southernmost part of the continent. Everywhere else the white race, once master of half the earth, has withdrawn from its conquered territories, but in southern Africa it stands intransigent upon its privileges against the terrible and majestic swell of black unrest. The Voortrekker Monument explains and expresses that intransigence: for it stands there so uncompromisingly on its kopje, seems to be socketed so deeply into the soil, is so buttressed with vaults, arches and ceremonial steps that it looks as though nothing short of cataclysm could ever destroy it.

  On the face of it the monument commemorates the Great Trek, the legendary hegira of the Afrikaner people away from the coast into these remote and tremendous uplands, where in the early nineteenth century they established their own independent republics and rooted their culture in the soil. But its meaning is deeper. In withdrawing so far into Africa the Afrikaner were deliberately disavowing the values of the world outside, declaring their resolve to live in their own way in their own inviolate homeland: and in particular they were rejecting once and for all the thesis, pressed upon them by the pragmatic British on the coast, that all human beings were equal before God. It was basic to Afrikaner reasoning that all men were not equal, and in particular that the black indigenes of the country were divinely ordained to be inferiors, hewers of wood and drawers of water. The Great Trek of the Afrikaner zealots, lurching in their ox wagons ever further into the harsh hinterland, was a journey that led them and their little nation directly, against all hazards, with much splendour of spirit, toward the squalid racial impasse, whites balefully confronting blacks, which now engulfs their country.

  The monument is an arcane edifice, like a place of pledge or sacrifice. The Afrikaner Volk, it proclaims, have overcome the forces of Evil to achieve this hefty consummation on the veld, and they alone have carried the torch of true civilization into these savage territories There is an eternal flame burning in the crypt to prove it, and once a year, at midday on 16 December, a shaft of sunlight penetrates the high roof of the building and falls upon a great stone cenotaph which, like Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, stands sombre in its subterranean chamber, mystically to illuminate the oath inscribed enormously upon its granite: ONS VIR JOU, SUID-AFRIKA – ‘We for Thee, South Africa’.

  December 16th: the day when, in 1838, an Afrikaner force of fewer than 500 men utterly defeated an army of 20,000 black Zulus at the Battle of Blood River in Natal. They had made a covenant with Providence, and 16 December is celebrated as a day not just of military victory, but of spiritual commitment – statistical procedures, we are assured by the Monument Handbook, show that there was only a 1 per cent chance of Afrikaner success at Blood River, ‘supporting the belief that this Victory was an Act of God’. Over the years the historic meaning of Afrikanerdom itself came to be embodied in this divinely sponsored triumph over the Powers of Darkness, visibly and symbolically expressed in the black skins of the defeated adversaries, and the Voortrekker Monument was erected to perpetuate the message for posterity. The divine privilege of being white is demonstrated in a slaughter of blacks, achieved against all statistical odds by the direct intervention of God.

  Standing inside this portentous structure, with the Lamp of Civilization burning steadily in its glass reliquary, the images of battle and dedication all around, the wind of the high veld moaning through the casements and the sun shaft imperceptibly moving through its high orifice, minute by minute toward the next anniversary, one begins to understand the almost occult reluctance of the Afrikaner government of South Africa to admit its black subjects to equality. The Voortrekker Monument is no place for conciliations or second thoughts. It is more like a setting for Götterdämmerung, and all around it there stands a barricade of sculpted ox wagons, encircling the shrine in perpetual watchful laager, as if to imply that the Battle of Blood River is not over yet.

  *

  Today the white man is absolutely supreme. Not a single black or coloured man has a vote for the National Parliament in Cape Town, no non-European can rise high in business or in government, there are racial restrictions and discriminations so elaborate and so all-pervasive that they affect every facet of life, dividing the races absolutely and making it almost impossible for an ordinary black family to be friendly with an ordinary white. It is not a colonial arrangement, an elite of expatriates exploiting the natives. All these peoples are natives, and the racial order is something far more organic, deeply entrenched in history and religion, and supported paradoxically by the very riches of the country itself – riches which give the white man his power and make him so unwilling to change his style of life.

  It is the most tantalizing of countries – a country permanently denied serenity, it seems, by the fact of race. Even now, when its antagonisms seem to be sliding toward catastrophe, there are parts of it where one may experience a melancholy sense of might-have-been – especially in Cape Province where, not so long ago, blacks, browns and coloureds seemed to have established a congenial equilibrium. Cape Town still feels like a civilized city in a civilized country – a touch of San Francisco, a slight tang of Sydney. People of all races walk its streets, and there are flower stalls about, and bookshops, and a symphony orchestra, and four daily papers of varying views. Above the city Table Mountain gloriously crouches, often swirled in cloud, frequented by nature ramblers and lugubrious baboons. Offshore the supertankers of the world steam by, never pausing on their long pilgrimage to the oil countries, but supplied with mails and medicines, like passing sadhus accepting offerings, by helicopters from this munificent shore.

  And better still, you may glimpse the elusive idyll of South Africa in the delectable winelands to the northeast of Cape Town, where the Cape plain rises gently toward the summits of the Du Toit’s Kloof. Here is the enchanting university town of Stellenbosch, the oldest seat of the Afrikaner culture, all Dutch gables, oaks, stinkwood furniture and musty, vinous smells. Here the fields of Riesling, Steen or Pinotage stretch away, meticulously tended, to plain white farmhouses at the mountain edge, and the very names on the map have an Arcadian ring – Bonfoi, Sir Lowery’s Pass, the Jonkershook River or the Botterlary Hills.

  *

  Even here, though, up the winding dirt lanes, come rumours of riot, bloodshed and repression, for the inescapable reality of South Africa today, the truth around which all else revolves, is the suppression of the huge black majority by the whites, and the inescapable slow movement of the blacks toward revolution. The racial conflict dominates every conversation, as it dictates every political act and every economic decision. Every day its shadow grows more ominous, and every day its symptoms break into the newspapers – more deaths in the Cape Town black townships – another student riot – a militant black paper is launched – a policeman is killed by a grenade – another batch of black protestors is charged under the Terrorism Act, or the Suppression of Communism Act, or the Internal Security Act, or they are detained incommunicado without charge, or placed under house arrest, or banned from public life indefinitely. The segregated black townships, on the edge of the white cities, are littered now with the wreckage of arson and communal violence, and the country is tense with apprehension,
as though an enormous thunderstorm is brooding over it, sometimes spilling heavy raindrops on the sidewalk.

  The blacks are angry, and this is something new to South Africa. After generations of slights and injuries, voteless, propertyless, under-paid, overworked, confined to vast monotonous ghettos with rotten houses and second-rate schools – after generations of all this the black masses of South Africa have remained, until now, astonishingly good-natured. It is only within the past year, as news of the black risorgimento has filtered down from Angola and Mozambique, as Black Consciousness has at last fired the imagination of the African young, that the blacks have burst into open militancy and turned to violence. It is as though a monumental public patience has cracked at last, never to be soothed again.

  The Grand Plan of Afrikanerdom does not allow for anger, for apartheid is essentially an intellectual conception, theologically tinged. It postulates that if the coloured peoples of the country are allowed to integrate with the whites, they will presently take over the state and fundamentally alter its character. The alternative it proposes is the division of South Africa into separate, autonomous entities, one white and eight black, to be economically united but politically, socially and culturally distinct. This is a vision different in kind from the old American idea of segregation, and when it was first defined by the academics of Stellenbosch there seemed a certain nobility to it.