Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  Nothing aboard the ship, though, gets as much exercise as the jaws. Indeed, devoted chowhounds could spend the waking hours of the entire six-day voyage doing little more than grazing the vessel, bow to stern, since, as the ship proudly boasts, there is somewhere to eat something twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. Not surprisingly, things British are done best. If fish and chips with mushy peas is your idea of spa food (and why not?), you’ll not be disappointed at the ship’s pub. Come four o’clock, the Winter Garden is packed with tea parties gobbling cucumber sandwiches made of regulation-issue white-bread triangles, while a tristful harpist completes recollections of rainy afternoons trapped in British seaside palm courts, even though the trees here are fake.

  Upmarket on the eighth deck, the Todd English restaurant pretty much lives up to the starry reputation of the chef of Boston’s Olives by offering potato-and-truffle love letters, succulent braised short ribs and the inevitable fallen chocolate cake. But the best food on board is probably to be had at the Chef’s Galley, where, in the style of a celebrity-chef TV programme, Sean Watier, an exuberantly wisecracking chef, talks a dozen or so diners through the preparation of the meal. As he was about halfway through a mango-and-crab salad, things started to get exciting in a Quentin Tarantino kind of way. Sean capped his demo about the importance of really sharp knives by gashing his thumb. Later, while he was blowtorching the crème brûlée, he was asked about problems of cooking in heavy weather and was about to offer a breezy reply when the answer came from a phantom guest who had been there all along – the Atlantic Ocean, which lifted us all up in its big cat’s paw and unceremoniously set us down again. It was exactly the ‘heave and shudder . . . as of the breast of a man in deep sleep’ that Evelyn Waugh has Charles Ryder sense in the midst of his transatlantic crossing in Brideshead Revisited. ‘Either I am a little drunk,’ Charles’s wife, Celia, says as the cutlery starts to slide, ‘or it’s getting rough.’ For me, back in the cabin, on deck twelve, with the floor at a tilt, and the bed the only safe place to be, the two conditions seemed mutually and unhappily self-reinforcing.

  Though huge ‘resort’ ships like the QM 2 come with acres of deck, big picture windows and balconies, they go to great lengths to allow passengers who may have mixed feelings about the ocean to ignore it. The planetarium, the casino, the umpteen watering holes, the golf simulator, the spa, the disco, the ballrooms, the unceasing frenzy of entertainment in big, dark spaces are all designed to keep the seawater well out of the way and even out of sight. But on this night old man Poseidon, evidently assisted by Tritons with serious attitude, was crashing the scene. On the Beaufort wind scale of 1 to 12, this one, howling around the ship like a marine banshee, was a 10, eventually getting up to seventy miles an hour, which is not far short of hurricane force. Likewise, the motion of the sea is measured by a range going from Moderate through Rough to High, the last being well beyond Very Rough. That night and much of the following day, our piece of the Atlantic was Very High, beyond which the only available term is Phenomenal, and by then your cabin is probably filling with water and men in tuxedos are ushering women and children to the boats.

  As the mango-and-crab salad and I became unhappily reacquainted, the gale certainly seemed to be turning phenomenal. Everything that could fall in the cabin did so, including me. The Queen Mary seemed to be locked in a frenzied dance with the elements, the ship reaching and rising and then, on the crest of the churned water, going into a wicked shimmy, its sides shaking and jangling like a belly dancer on spliff, before sinking back voluptuously into the trough. Eventually a message came over the PA system from the Officer of the Watch, whose voice, resembling that of a firm but fair English schoolmaster, had already established itself as authoritative. It was not reassuring: ‘Code Bravo, Code Bravo, Code Bravo.’ And then it added, ‘Control group to muster.’ True, it spoke without much inflection, as if reporting a cricket score from a sticky wicket. But since the same announcement had been made earlier that day, followed by the information that this was a practice, repeat practice, fire drill, a real Code Bravo was not what anyone wanted to hear in this situation. An hour later the announcement ‘Stand down’ was heard, and another announcement, a bit later on, referred to a ‘minor incident, now completely under control’.

  The thing about a crew of 1,300 – which includes, after all, masseurs, cabaret singers and wine waiters – is that not all of them are trained, in the British merchant-marine tradition, to keep mum about trifling things like a fire at sea on a maiden voyage in the midst of a Force 10 gale. It was, I was assured, a teeny-weeny fire, just a razor socket burning up in a crew cabin. At the time, however, it certainly made an impression.

  The next morning, the sea was still Very High, but Professor Schama, due to deliver a lecture at eleven-fifteen, was Very Low (and, for that matter, Very Rough). But I was billed to talk about the man who had given the very first lecture aboard a Cunarder, the Cambria, in August 1845: the African-American author and orator Frederick Douglass. Douglass was en route to what turned into a triumphal lecture tour of Britain and Ireland and had been befriended by the Hutchinson Family Singers (Asa, Jesse, Abby, John and Judson), from New Hampshire. Staunch abolitionists, the Hutchinsons had the inspired idea that Douglass might give a lecture on the iniquities of slavery, notwithstanding the fact that among the passengers were several slave owners from Georgia and Cuba. Douglass – with mixed feelings, one suspects – agreed, subject to permission of the captain, the famously capable Charles Judkins. Judkins, as it happened, was a former slave owner (perhaps a slave trader) who had seen the light, and was happy to oblige. Standing on the saloon deck, Douglass began to read from the brutal slave laws of the south, when, predictably, he was drowned out by heckling and threats of physical assault from the outraged slave owners. The Hutchinsons weighed in with inspirational songs but, until Captain Judkins called for the bosun and vowed to put the rioters in irons unless they desisted, the situation looked ugly. The captain’s gesture amazed Douglass, who began his tour of Britain (as he would end it) with an unrealistically awestruck view of British racial tolerance. About Cunard, however, he felt less charitable on the return journey, also on the Cambria, in 1847, since it accepted his forty guineas and assured him that he would be accommodated in cabin class, only to demote him to steerage when he boarded, a scandal that made the correspondence columns of The Times and drew from Samuel Cunard himself a public guarantee that this sort of thing would not happen again.

  Duty required that, unsteady or not, I offer this history to any hardy souls who managed to lurch and stagger their way to the theatre. But was there enough left of the lecturer to get the job done? A sympathetic programme assistant, Penny Folliott, had the answer: ‘Try the injection.’ I did, and whatever was in the nurse’s potent syringe not only banished the queasiness but effected a startling transformation, whimpering academic translated into approximation of Russell Crowe in Master and Commander. The talk got delivered, seated, and diagonally. I slid a bit. But the audience slid with me.

  The Atlantic had definitely got our attention; its illimitable breadth, the great kick of its kinetic energy registered in our groggy bodies. We offered it our sincere respects. All the seats in front of the big windows were now filled with people mesmerised by the immense opera of the deep-grey swell, the rolling waves as bulky and meaty as elephants in a temper. Every so often, beside ladies doing watercolours, a particularly angry, torn-up wall of seawater would slap and hammer against the window.

  After a day of respite, the Atlantic returned – another gale, less brutal, but serious enough for deck joggers to be ushered inside by the crew. Shuffleboard was postponed again. Quoits were out of the question. But by this time most of us had got our sea legs and had learned to respect the motion of the ocean, moving with it. Foxtrot was recommenced in the Queen’s Room, and disco caught a new beat. For that matter, the towering ship itself seemed to be having a ball, breezing ahead to the rough music of the wind and the swell. And as the QM
2 forged along, so it became, for most of the passengers, no longer a floating resort hotel drifting innocuously into Caribbean harbours under postcard skies. This one, we told ourselves, appropriating some of the credit for its performance, was a liner, made for crossing, not cruising. ‘Oh, the passengers would like it,’ Commodore Warwick said, smiling, ‘if I told them that was the worst weather I’d ever sailed in, but . . .’ The smile continued; the sentence didn’t. He wasn’t about to wreck our newfound talent for salty yarns. At the dockside celebrations in New York, he conceded that the crossing had been ‘turbulent’.

  When the Verrazano Bridge came looming through the gentle fog and the first tugs and pilots began to spout red-white-and-blue jets of water in dwarfish greeting, many of us were caught off guard by a sense of proprietorial affection. Emotions doubled. There was the catch in the throat as, right on cue, the morning sun picked out the Statue of Liberty and then travelled from plinth to torch with telegenic precision; there was the flood of memory, the empathy – even among the Queen’s Grill high-rollers – with the destitute millions who had come this way through their own storms and stresses; and the jolt of recognition, as we made the turn up the Hudson, that this, too, had been, and was still, America, perhaps the one that really mattered.

  All that, I suppose, could have been predicted. What took us by surprise, as we were ushered by Lydia and Gavin, kitted up in smart grey disembarkation suits, to the immigration desks set up in the ballroom, was a valedictory urge to wish the ship well, and to try and find the words to tell others who might normally opt for Newark Airport and the seven-hour air tube to Heathrow that they might want to give the QM 2 a go; that, mirabile dictu, there are worse things than being made to sit down and fill the eyes with nothing but sky and rain and wind-whipped water as 150,000 tons of big ship does what it can to ride it at thirty-five miles an hour. In fact, there are few things better.

  The Unloved American:

  Two Centuries of Alienating Europe

  New Yorker, 10 March 2003

  On the Fourth of July in 1889, Rudyard Kipling found himself near Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone with a party of tourists from New England. He winced as a ‘clergyman rose up and told them they were the greatest, freest, sublimest, most chivalrous, and richest people on the face of the earth, and they all said Amen’. Kipling – who had travelled from India to California, and then across the North American continent – was bewildered by the patriotic hyperbole that seemed to come so naturally to the citizens of the United States. There were many things about America that he loved – battling with a twelve-pound Chinook salmon in Oregon; American girls (‘They are clever; they can talk . . . They are original and look you between the brows with unabashed eyes’) – and he did go and live in Vermont for a while. But he was irritated by the relentless assurances that Americans seemed to require about their country’s incomparable virtue. When a ‘perfectly unknown man attacked me and asked me what I thought of American Patriotism,’ Kipling wrote in American Notes, his account of the journey, ‘I said there was nothing like it in the Old Country,’ adding, ‘always tell an American this. It soothes him.’

  The Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who spent two miserable periods in the American Midwest in the 1880s – working as, among other things, farmhand, store clerk, railroad labourer, itinerant lecturer and (more congenially) church secretary – treated the street parades of veterans ‘with tiny flags in their hats and brass medals on their chests marching in step to the hundreds of penny whistles they are blowing’ as if the events were curiously remote tribal rituals. The fact that streetcars were forbidden to interrupt the parades and that no one could absent himself without incurring civic disgrace both interested and unsettled Hamsun. Something ominous seemed to be hatching in America: a strapping child-monster whose runaway physical growth would never be matched by moral or cultural maturity. Hamsun gave lectures about his stays in the United States at the University of Copenhagen, and then made them into a book, The Cultural Life of Modern America, that was largely devoted to asserting its non-existence.

  Emerson? A dealer in glib generalisations. Whitman? A hot gush of misdirected fervour. For Hamsun, America was, above all, bluster wrapped up in dollar bills. ‘It is incredible how naively cocksure Americans are in their belief that they can whip any enemy whatsoever,’ he wrote. ‘There is no end to their patriotism; it is a patriotism that never flinches, and it is just as loudmouthed as it is vehement.’ It took a future Quisling to know this.

  By the end of the nineteenth century the stereotype of the ugly American – voracious, preachy, mercenary and bombastically chauvinist – was firmly in place in Europe. Even the claim that the United States was built on a foundation stone of liberty was seen as a fraud. America had grown rich on slavery. In 1776, the English radical Thomas Day had written, ‘If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.’ After the Civil War, European critics pointed to the unprotected labourers in mines and factories as industrial helots. Just as obnoxious as the fraud of liberty was the fraud of Christian piety, a finger-jabbing rectitude incapable of asserting a policy without invoking the Deity as a co-sponsor. This hallelujah Republic was a bedlam of hymns and hosannas, but the only true church was the church of the Dollar Almighty. And how could the cult of individualism be taken seriously when it had produced a society that set such great store by conformity?

  The face of the unloved American did not, of course, come into focus all at once. Different generations of European critics added features to the sketch, depending on their own aversions and fears. In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were sceptical of America’s naive faith that it had reinvented politics. Later in the century American economic power was the enemy, Yankee industrialism the behemoth against which the champions of social justice needed to take up arms. A third generation, itself imperialist, grumbled about the unfairness of a nation’s rising to both continental and maritime ascendancy. And in the twentieth century, though the United States came to the rescue of Britain and France in two world wars, many Europeans were suspicious of its motives. A constant refrain throughout this long literature of complaint – and what European intellectuals even now find most repugnant – is American sanctimoniousness, the habit of dressing the business of power in the garb of piety.

  Too often, the moral rhetoric of American diplomacy has seemed to Europe a cover for self-interest. The French saw the Jay Treaty, of 1794, which regularised relations with Britain (with which republican France was then at war), as a cynical violation of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France, without which, they reasonably believed, there would have been no United States. In 1811, it was the British who felt betrayed by the Americans, when Madison gave in to Napoleon’s demands for a trade embargo while the ‘mother country’ was fighting for survival. But the gap between principles and practices in American foreign policy was as nothing compared with the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality of a working democracy. Although nineteenth-century writers paid lip service to the benevolent intelligence of the Founding Fathers, contemporary American politics suggested that there had been a shocking fall from grace. At one end was a cult of republican simplicity, so dogmatic that John Quincy Adams’s installation of a billiard table in the White House was taken as evidence of his patrician leanings; at the other was a parade of the lowest vices, featuring, according to Charles Dickens, ‘despicable trickery at elections, under-handed tampering with public officers . . . shameless truckling to mercenary knaves’.

  A few transatlantic pilgrims, of course, saw American democracy haloed with republican grandeur. When, in 1818, the twenty-three-year-old Scot Fanny Wright, along with her younger sister Camilla, visited the Capitol, the congressional morning prayer – ‘may the rod of tyranny be broken in every nation of the earth!’ – cau
sed her to tremble with admiration. Only later did she concede that she might have mistaken the commercial bustle of the country for democratic zeal. And, indeed, for most European travellers extravagant idealism was followed by an equally unbalanced disenchantment. Nikolaus Lenau, a German poet who told a friend he meant to stay in the United States for five years, managed only a brief period, from 1832 to 1833. He could not tolerate a country where, he claimed, there were no songbirds. (In the eighteenth century, the Dutch naturalist Cornelius de Pauw, lecturing on America to the court of Frederick the Great, had solemnly insisted that dogs in the New World never barked.)

  Other characteristics of American life alienated the Romantics: the distaste for tragedy (a moral corrective to illusions of invincibility); the strong preference for practicality; the severance from history; and, above all, what the Germans called bodenlosigkeit, a willed rootlessness, embodied in the flimsy-frame construction of American houses. Europeans watched, pop-eyed, while whole houses were moved down the street. This confirmed their view that Americans had no real loyalty to the local, and explained why they preferred utilitarian ‘yards’ to flower gardens. No delphiniums, no civility.

  The British who arrived in the United States in the 1830s and ’40s had imagined the young republic as a wide-eyed adolescent, socially ungainly and politically gauche, but with some hint of promise. What they found was a country experiencing an unprecedented growth spurt, both territorial and demographic, and characterised by an unnerving rudeness, in both senses of the word. Ladies and gentlemen dodged quids of tobacco juice and averted their gaze from the brimming cuspidors that greeted visitors to steamboat saloons and hotel and theatre lobbies. The hallmark of Jacksonian America seemed to be a beastly indifference to manners, the symptom of a society where considerateness to others was a poor second to the immediate satisfaction of personal wants.