A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  Glory to you all, praised and humble heroes,

  who have willingly suffered for your unselfish

  and passionate love of Irish freedom.

  I stood in the silence and copied the inscription in my notebook, and when I walked away I saw a hand forlornly waving me goodbye from one of those fortress slits.

  30

  Light and Shade in the USA

  I made repeated visits to the United States in the 1990s, and was often saddened to find that its old public character, which had so captivated me in earlier decades, seemed less stalwart every year under the impact of militarism, unbridled capitalism, national ambition and plain hubris. But I often loved it, too.

  Portland, Oregon

  I went to Portland to give a lecture – it is the only place where I have seen my own name go up in lights! – and having a day to kill set out from my hotel to saunter around the city. Downtown Portland seemed to me delightfully civilized.

  It is one of the few big American cities that never succumbed to the high-rise epidemic, and although the Portland Building, Michael Graves’ original exercise in post-modernism, cast a chill through me as an awful portent of what was going to follow it, for the most part meandering through the streets was very agreeable. The blocks are unusually short in Portland, making for pleasant serendipity, the architecture is mostly genial, there are plenty of coffee-shops, not all of them insisting that you drink their cappuccino out of plastic cups, and the gloriously rambling Powell’s City of Books must be one of the best bookshops on earth.

  Travel is free on the downtown public transport system, and what with the cleanness and sensibleness of everything, the evident prosperity and the prospect of a late lunch at the Heathman Hotel (red snapper, perhaps, with a glass of one of the excellent local whites), I thought what a lesson in civility Portland, Oregon, offered the world at large.

  * * *

  But following the tourist signs towards the Old Town District and Chinatown, and expecting the usual harmless flummery of restored gas-lamps and dragon-gates, I crossed Burnside Street and found myself in a corner of hell. Suddenly all around me were the people of Outer America, flat out on the sidewalk, propped against walls, sitting on steps, some apparently drugged, some evidently about to vomit and nearly all of them, it occurred to me, idly wondering whether it was worth while mugging me as I passed. They were of all ages and several colours. They did not look exactly hostile, or even despairing, but simply stupefied, as though life and history had condemned them to permanent poverty-stricken sedation.

  Every city has its seamy underside, and American cities more than most. The moment came as a shock to me in Portland because here the well-off and the poor, the hopeful and the hopeless, not to mention the whites and the coloureds, are more than usually separated. A languid stranger could spend a week at the Heathman, with intermissions at the City of Books, almost without realizing that poverty, crime or crack existed here at all, or any un-Caucasians except exquisitely urbane Asiatics. Portland has repeatedly been voted one of the most Liveable Cities in the United States, and if you choose the right part to live in, it undoubtedly is.

  When I withdrew across Burnside again to a restorative coffee in a more soothing part of town, I found myself paradoxically reminded of another country altogether. In India, within the scrambled millions of the poor, there exists a complete modern nation, rich, sophisticated, worldly, which if it could be isolated and moved somewhere else, would constitute a formidably capable state of the middle rank. This thought led me on to some uncomfortable conjectures: while educated India forms a small minority, civilized America is presumably a majority – but for how long, I wondered as I looked around me over my coffee cup at the kindly, comfortable faces of the American centre? And how civilized?

  The gods have loved America, but I sometimes think they are already making it mad. One expects insanity among those poor huddled masses of the sidewalk, but every time I come to this country I feel that the neuroses and paranoias are spreading, across all the Burnside Streets of the nation, into the amiable neighbourhoods over the way. Suburban nerves twitch ceaselessly, downtown eyes flicker, as the monstrous contrasts and energies of capitalism unalloyed tear away at the communal composure.

  The Americans, even those civilized Americans of the centre, have gone half-crazy already with legalism, feminism and political correctness. They are well on the way to the asylum with sexual obsessions. They are moonstruck by matters grotesque and macabre, from clowns to vampires. They are so addled by the allure of violence that in America now there are more federally licensed gun dealers than there are gas stations, and one of their incessant self-lacerating polls recently showed that half their school-children knew how to get hold of a firearm.

  On the front of the Portland Building there is a truly colossal female figure, whom I now know to be Portlandia herself. I asked three passers-by, two men and a woman, who she was. The woman said that, although she found the figure ‘pretty’, she had no idea of its identity. Both the men seemed never to have given the matter a thought. This struck me as odd, since the image is the second largest hammered copper sculpture in the world, beaten only by the Statue of Liberty, but I later reached the conclusion that it was only a symptom of the general alienation. If Portlandia were dripping blood, or in the process of being mutated into a dinosaur, everyone would know all about her: as it is, she is robustly healthy and well-balanced, and so hardly worth noticing.

  *

  I pick up a newspaper, and here is a plastic surgeon assuring potential male clients that for $10,000-odd they can have chest implants, abdominal liposuction and calf implants which will ensure ‘a fine looking physique for the busy executive without spending endless hours in the gym’. Buried away on an inside page is the news that a man who was about to be executed for a murder in Oklahoma has been temporarily reprieved because he first has to serve twenty years for a murder in New York. Almost every agony column displays self-questionings, religious ravings, breakdowns of trust, preposterous grievances of age, gender, race or condition; even some of the comic cartoons have moved into a disoriented kind of surrealism.

  You can be sure that at any hour of any day, one television channel or another will be showing scenes of appalling bloodshed, cases live from a criminal court, chat shows concerning child abuse, marital disharmony, sexual misbehaviour, predatory law-suits. No self-respecting best-seller is without its detailed evocations of couplings, masturbations, dismemberments or disembowellings, and nobody seems particularly surprised that an Oregon Senator presently stands accused of sexual malpractice (whatever that may mean in PC-speak) towards a sizeable number of his employees.

  Mad! Yet this is the Great Republic whose founding principles were nothing if not rational, and whose purposes were all harmonious. From the very beginning the United States has satisfied many of the universal human yearnings, and shared with all of us the recipes of its success. Declaration of Independence to Bob Dylan, Hollywood and John Cheever and the dry martini and the Freedom of Information Act – the list of American blessings is endless, and their adoption and imitation around the world has brought us infinite good.

  They have been, though, the gifts of a culture supremely confident and logical, recognizably the culture in fact that Jefferson and his colleagues created. What is emerging in America now, still to be exported willy-nilly around the globe, is a jumble of philosophies so distracted, so uncertain, that they seem to lack any cohesion at all, and are more like the nervous responses of hostages than any body of ruling values. The centre, it seems to me, is only just holding, and is patently showing the strain: yet still it stands as exemplar to most of the world, copied in blind faith everywhere, and especially among peoples like the English and the Canadians who share a language with the Americans, and whose own sense of identity is weakened or uncertain.

  And waiting just over the street there is the other culture, America Ulteria, or perhaps America Ultima, the inchoate slouching presence whic
h is giving the nation these disturbing jitters. It has no standards of its own. It has little to lose, and not much hope of winning. Its language is half-comprehensible, its reasoning is obscure, but one day America and the world may wake up to find that like the destitute masses of India, it is less the exception than the norm.

  *

  That evening I gave a reading in the Arlene Schnitzer Hall – the Schnitz for short, I believe – a splendid concert hall next door to the Heathman. I never enjoyed an occasion more. The audience was immensely quick, generous and entertaining, and at the reception afterwards people raised many penetrating points about the influence of travel upon the work of Virginia Woolf, and the proper place of the imagination in non-fiction.

  On the Zephyr

  The trains of America, which I had loved from the start, still cheered me up.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ were the very first words the sleeper attendant said to me, when I boarded Amtrak’s California Zephyr at Emeryville, Calif., on my way to Chicago. They seemed the mots justes, for the boarding process was an awful shambles – we had to walk through another train to get to ours, with a fearful confusion of bags and mystified passengers. ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked the attendant. ‘It don’t always start like this,’ he replied, ‘but it don’t take them but a minute to get it like this.’

  I didn’t mind. I was boarding the famous train just for the romance of it – for a taste of an older America. I had lately been dazzled by the futuristic virtuosity of young California, Internet, the information super-highway and all that. I had marvelled at its enthusiasm and inventiveness, but now I felt like taking a restful step backwards. I would be experiencing, so the brochure assured me, the utmost in train travel, ‘Enjoying On-board Accommodations That Pamper and Please!’ It is 2,420 miles from Emeryville to Chicago, a journey of three days and two nights, and I wasn’t a bit put out by that kerfuffle at the start (which was due, it was later explained to me, to the fact that the Coast Starlight had arrived from Seattle two hours late).

  The romance was certainly there. Our ten double-decker blue, red and silver coaches, with their two locomotives and four baggage cars, thundered through desert, prairie and mountain gorge just like in the movies, occasionally rounding so spectacular a bend that from my window I could see both ends at the same time, and half-expected to find goodies and baddies struggling on the roof. We glimpsed the mothball fleet of Suisun Bay. We went through Reno, The Biggest Little City in the World. We skirted Donner Lake where, in 1846, a party of stranded immigrants cast lots and ate each other. We passed Verdi and Elko and the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. For 238 miles we followed the banks of the Rio Grande, ‘the longest’ (said a train announcement) ‘any major railroad follows any major river in the world’. Unfortunately it was dark when we passed the water tower at Stanton, Nebraska, which is shaped like a coffee-pot, but we saw the Mississippi all right as we clanked over the bridge at Burlington.

  Sometimes our whistle authentically wailed. Sometimes, the Zephyr being a no-smoking environment, we made a smoking stop and a handful of tense-looking addicts climbed down to puff their cigarettes at some more or less deserted halt where they could do no harm. We spent an hour at the funereal railway station at Denver, which is monumental but which nowadays handles only two passenger trains a day. We bought fruit and bananas on the platform at Grand Junction, the farm-wives awaiting us at their stalls for all the world like babushkas on the Trans-Siberian. We paused briefly at small towns of the Middle West, Osceola and Mount Pleasant and Ottumwa (famous, so the brochure told me, as the hometown of Radar O’Reilly in M*A*S*H), where families waiting to board, with bags and excited children against a backdrop of clapboard houses and corner drugstores, made even the towering Zephyr feel like a local.

  However I cannot claim that the old America seemed to be working as well as it used to. The California Zephyr appeared to be run in a mood of elderly, but on the whole genial, resignation. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said my sleeper attendant once more, when I reported to him that my bed had collapsed beneath me, and he had to prop it up with an egg crate borrowed from the dining car. The loudspeaker in my compartment was not audible, so I was obliged to go into the corridor to hear the announcements. But I still did not mind. Stuffing a pillow in the lavatory door soon stopped it rattling and the shower never did flood the compartment, as I had been warned it sometimes did. The maximum legal speed of the Zephyr is 79 mph, only sporadically achieved, and I realized that the motion I had thought of as ‘pounding’ was really more like ‘plodding’; but hell, what was the hurry?

  And in any case my fellow-passengers were all I could ask for. Not a computer evangelist, hardly a cellular phone among the lot of them. ‘Oh, how I wish those trees would get out of my way, so I could photograph a real Iowa farmhouse!’ said my companion at breakfast one morning: she had never been on a train in her life before, she had seldom left Fresno, California, and she came straight out of a fifties movie. She couldn’t wait to see Chicago! She couldn’t wait to see her best friend in Akron, Ohio! She couldn’t wait to – and oh, look, there’s a Little League baseball diamond! ‘Isn’t that real neat? Don’t you guys think that’s real neat?’

  A former professional footballer (Green Bay Packers) taught me all I needed to know about pro football. Several passionate railroad buffs kept me informed about the state of the track. One woman engaged me in a challenging discourse about evolution, another had strong views on capital punishment. I commiserated with some of those pallid smokers – I thought they should have had a coach to themselves. I told an elderly lady that on the whole I thought I would not join her, as she kindly suggested, in her retirement home in Omaha. I loved them all. They were all one wants America to be: long-winded, opinionated and essentially good.

  But just as the Zephyr, labouring heavily eastward, seemed a quaint anachronism in the world of e-mail and TGV, so those dear people seemed left over from some different society altogether. Each morning my attendant slipped the morning paper under my door (I could have helped myself to morning tea, too, but the machine at the end of the corridor was defective). Every day it was full of anxieties and uncertainties almost inconceivable in that pleasant company: not just the horror of everyday violence that we have learnt to accept as part of the American way, but a vast broiling stew of distrust, foreboding and ethnic hostility through which the great nation passes, like the Zephyr, with incessant rattling and unexplained delays.

  Even as we sat so convivially over our plastic plates of salad in the dining car, we felt these toxicities intruding. Our conversation faltered as we found ourselves heading for some ethnic or feminist quicksand, the footballer being black, the lady from Omaha politically immaculate. We skirted them, of course, as the nice people we all were, but those moments were like jets of hot, unhealthy air suddenly penetrating the Zephyr’s cool air-conditioning.

  Outside our windows, as we all knew, beyond the splendid landscapes, things were by no means so genteel. Out there it was a battleground: rich v. poor, women v. men, the drugged v. the sober, black v. white v. Hispanic v. American Indian v. Korean v. Jew. The nation that used to think of itself as a melting-pot of all the peoples is more fissiparous than I have ever known it, with no grand leader or even common loyalty to unify it. A people preoccupied with role models looks no higher than rock stars, athletes, actors, miscellaneous two-bit celebrities and even criminals for its shots of charisma. Yet that other America is in turn a role model for the world.

  I travel in a different spirit from Paul Theroux, the prince of railroad passengers. He assumes, for professional purposes, the character of a curmudgeon. I am ingratiating almost to a fault – a literary Mary Poppins, as one of those damned Australian critics recently suggested. However, I did have one altercation on the Zephyr. My ticket, I had been told, entitled me to anything I liked on the menu, but when I asked for cornflakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast I was told that I was entitled to one or the other, but not both. I called for th
e supervisor to expostulate, as I thought Theroux would, but I did not get far. This was the old America after all, and the talk was straight. I had got it wrong, the functionary said, not unkindly, and I quote him word for word: ‘You’re not from this country. You don’t speak the lingo.’

  But the girl from Fresno said she thought that man had been rather rude, and one of the train buffs offered to share his scrambled eggs with me – only fair, really, because I had already urged upon him some of my Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade.

  West Point

  Once I found myself so dispirited by the state of America that I picked up a car in Manhattan and drove up the Hudson River, intending to wander for a few days in search of consolation. In the event I got no further than West Point, and this essay explains why.

  After dark I went down alone to the Plain, the great playing-field and parade ground of the US Military Academy at West Point. This was like an American fiction. A moon was rising, the Hudson lay dark and velvety below, and across the grass a solitary skunk came snuffling through the dusk. Now and then aircraft winked their way overhead. A train wailed somewhere. A tug and its barges laboured upstream towards Albany. A military police car coasted inquisitively by. There was not another soul about, down there above the river, but in the great monastic buildings of the Academy, dimly crowned by their chapel tower, myriad lights steadily and silently burnt.