Allegorizings

  All the more wonderful, I thought, that in such a society, at such a time of history, the people of Bolinas had exhibited their inalienable right to pursue happiness in their own way, totally disregarding all the conventions, and some of the values, of their own overwhelmingly persuasive society. What did they call themselves—hippies, beats, flower people? I forget, but next time I was in California I found my way to Bolinas, and discovered that it was everything I had imagined it to be.

  Sure enough, no road sign guided me there, and in the tumbledown little village the whole uproarious repertoire of 1970s radical America greeted me. It was all there—the idealism and the nonsense, the mystic cults, the pony-tails and the junkies, organic turnips and aromatherapy, bold feminism, socialist slogans, strumming Dylanesque guitars, all enveloped within what was, for my tastes, an exhilarating sense of live and let live.

  It seemed to me an admirably idiosyncratic enclave, there on the edge of the superpower, and when I returned to more ordinary demonstrations of the American Way, I did not feel that Bolinas stood in opposition to their ideals, but was only quite properly contributing a stitch or two to the most endearing of historical quilts.

  THIRTY YEARS ON, in the next century, I went to Bolinas again. When I drove up Highway 1 from San Francisco—past the redwood groves, past the strand where the seals and the pelicans sunned themselves—even then there was nothing to tell me where the turn-off was. And when, more by instinct than memory, I found my way once more into the hugger-mugger hamlet, I discovered that the beats, the aquarians, the children of the summer of love, the psychedelians or whatever they used to call themselves were still in residence.

  Nowhere is immune to the world’s corrosions, but if there is one small place where the ideas of those visionary, hallucinatory generations poignantly survive, it must surely be Bolinas, California. In the very centre of the place I found a Spirit House, a shrine which was erected only in 2000 to provide a focal point for the community. A few bikes were propped against it, some votive gourds and vegetables were disposed here and there, and the central effigy of glass and concrete, yearning skyward aspirationally, was identified as Spirit in the Physical Realm.

  Not many communities of the Western world, in our dawning Age of Uncertainty, would erect a public focus so unabashedly mystic. It is true that in the real estate agents’ window across the way the cheapest of the five houses on offer was $537,000, and the most expensive over $4,000,000, but a featured band at Smiley’s Schooner Saloon that week was named Huckklebuck and the What You Wants, and outside the saloon, in the middle of the morning when I drove in, a bearded man with an accordion was singing a not very politically correct folk song (Oooo! I don’t want her, You can have her, She’s too fat for me . . . ).

  Around the corner was the People’s Coop Grocery, the most absolutely green, most ineluctably toxic-free grocery store on earth, and next door there was a sort of exchange shack, where people could pick up a free T-shirt or a paperback, and drop off some rubbish of their own. On the door of a pick-up the word PEACE was spelled out in glued sea shells; in a shop window business hours were defined as “1-ish to 5-ish.”

  A few ageing drop-outs were hunched over the day’s papers at the Coast Cafe, sporadically grunting or exclaiming incredulously to people at neighbouring tables “D’ya see what these ass-holes are saying now?” Some of them were probably distinguished novelists (several had settled in Bolinas, over the years), others looked to me like elderly junkies or lay-abouts, but their coexistence was evidently amiable. On a nearby notice-board, I was comforted to observe, somebody was offering Humane Animal Removal of Skunks, Etc, and in the Bolinas Hearsay News I read that somebody else had FOUND a “very emaciated, tawny, hungry, sick, maybe old, friendly and unfrightened Cat. . . .”

  SO I FELT comforted by Bolinas? Well, in a way I did. I was comforted that the Skunks would be humanely Removed, and that the Cat was unfrightened. I was glad to see that Huckklebuck and his mates were prospering.

  For the America that I was travelling through had changed its character in thirty years. It remained the biggest of all the nations, and in my judgement still in many ways the best, but it had somehow lost its grandeur. To the world at large it no longer represented all that was hopeful and generous in human affairs; to itself, I felt, it presented an uncertain image. Gone was that wonderfully seductive confidence, gone the certainty that what was good for America was good for mankind. The endearing youthful swagger had become a paunchy strut. Hubris was in the air too, and with it a touch of unwitting pathos, for by definition hubris portends humiliation.

  So yes, it was a sort of comfort to find that in Bolinas, the funky little outpost of old American liberties that had excited me long ago, where Jefferson might well have felt at home, if perhaps not George Washington—in Bolinas, California, the style of things was recognizably still the same. The old flame burnt less brightly, mind you. Thirty years ago Bolinas was a vivid, preposterous sort of place. Now it is just a place without a road sign, where yesterday’s idealisms potter quietly on, deprived of their wayward brilliance.

  Once, to a European like me, its name evoked the spirit of a grand idea, a truly American idea, away in the distant west. Today it too is hazily groping, like the Great Republic itself, like the rest of us around the globe, towards some ever more evasive truth—towards the Spirit in the Physical Realm, perhaps, or perhaps even now, as a sadly nostalgic flyer outside the Bolinas village store suggested to me, towards “the Sacred World of Shamanic Mushroom Rituals.”

  Ah yes, remember the mushroom rituals?

  The Furrier

  ONE OF MY favourite people in life was Joseph Gluckstein Links, the London-born son of a Hungarian refugee. He was J. G. Links of Calman Links, the furriers, and he himself was actually the Royal Furrier.

  He was by no means just a furrier, though, and not being a great supporter of the fur trade, I got to know him through other channels altogether. When in 1960 I published a book about Venice, the very first letter I got about it was from J. G. Links. I had never heard of him, and he introduced himself simply as a fellow aficionado of the city. It turned out that he was much more than that. He was perhaps the greatest living authority on the Venetian painter Canaletto, and he probably knew Venice as well as any foreigner alive.

  But Joe Links was much more than that, too. He was an expert on German wines. He wrote books about Ruskin and about townscape painting. He devised a number of best-selling detective stories, with the crime writer Dennis Wheatley, which were really dossiers, including between their pages physical clues, like blood-stained handkerchiefs, or Scotland Yard fingerprints. The reader was never actually told who the murderer was—if you were terminally baffled you’d find the solution in a sealed envelope at the back. The books were a vast success around the world, except in Nazi Germany, where the censors forbade them—the moral values of these books, they decreed, “must be designated more than inferior, created for English living conditions, not German ones.” (Also, of course, Joe was a Jew . . . )

  He had spent World War II in the RAF, on some secret work, I have always supposed. He loved boats and fast cars, and before the war he was a regular on the Cresta Run at St. Moritz. But he was anything but flashy himself. It is true that he liked to live well. In Venice he always stayed at the Danieli Hotel—twice a year in most years, and when I once asked him why he didn’t buy a house there, he said what was the point of buying a house when you could stay in a house with 120 attentive servants. But he was a quite particularly modest, unassertive man, slight and stocky, quietly debonair, and he was at his very best when he was at home.

  He had married Mary Lutyens, a daughter of Lutyens the architect and a distinguished writer herself, and they lived together in devoted harmony for more than fifty years. I loved to visit them at their home in London. They lived in a building overlooking Hyde Park. Their rooms were on the top floor, and they had their library in the basement, so that if Joe wanted to look something up in a book
he had to take the lift down to find it.

  In all other respects they lived in enviable comfort. Joe would welcome me at the door wearing, as often as not, an exotic caftan, and Mary would be reclining in an armchair with a martini, stirred I would think rather than shaken, and Joe would listen to my not very interesting news with the most intense interest, hanging on my every word as though he were memorizing it all for an exam, and sometimes gently, almost increduously interrupting to say something like, “You really mean you had to have the plumber in?”—as if our petty domestic problems were of unsurpassable interest to him.

  HIS HAPPIEST PUBLIC memorial will probably be his book Venice for Pleasure. This has been in print for years and years, and it has given his relationship with the city a unique charm. His was a profound and guileless love of the place, and none of Venice’s innumerable chroniclers have portrayed the Serenissima’s character with quite such a combination of the scholarly, the informal and the intimate.

  You might think his attitude to Venice innocent, and in a way it was, because his book is not only called Venice for Pleasure; it really is a sort of pleasure manual, too. Its author describes himself as “the perennial tourist,” travelling purely for enjoyment, but it would be misleading to think of it merely as a work of hedonism. Joe Links was of course an allegorical man, masking his extreme sophistication in apparent simplicity. Over the years thousands of readers, starting to read his book, have been relieved to encounter its famously undemanding approach to the city—“Generally the first thing to do in Venice is to sit down and have some coffee”—but by the time they get to the end of it, all the same, they will have learnt virtually everything that an educated stranger needs to know about the place, its art and its history, besides being subtly entertained throughout.

  It has happened almost without their realizing it, for the Links literary style is at once deceptive and essentially considerate. He is the very opposite of those noisy tour guides we are sure to pass, brandishing their placards, as we follow his easy prose through the streets. He never pushes us, never bullies, never shows off, never condescends. We don’t have to be interested in fourteenth-century mosaics, and Venice for Pleasure is surely the only guidebook—if “guidebook” is the word for it—that occasionally confesses itself surfeited with wonders, or bored in a gallery of art.

  “If all the circumstances are propitious,” Joe says almost at the end of his book, “I can promise you the most delightful experience that even Venice has to offer.” He is talking about an out-of-season dinner at the Locanda Cipriani on the island of Torcello, and we can be sure that his own pleasure is tinged by the memory of some lovely evening of his own, long ago perhaps: but it is enriched, as well, by all the delights of Venice through which he has been guiding us since page one—delights sensual very often, but delights of the intellect, too, enhanced by his humour, and by the deep knowledge of history and art that he has been unobtrusively sharing with us.

  HE WAS A wonder. You would never for a moment guess that he knew all that there was to know about the fur trade, about Canaletto, about Rhine wines, about the Cresta Run, about heaps of other things he hardly ever mentioned. He was as kind, merry, and generous a person as you could ever hope to meet. His last triumph was the great Canaletto exhibition he organized for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and by then he was eighty-five years old. When he died, in 1997, his widow said simply of him, “Joe was everything a man should be,” and how could one disagree?

  Style in Adversity

  SOPHISTICATION THAT LOOKS like simplicity is my own idea of style, and one of its epitomes, to my mind, is a small hotel I know in rural France. It is remote, and not conventionally luxurious. Beringed tycoons might not think much of it, but as its proprietress once reminded me, dukes frequent it.

  Style shows at its best in adversity, and once I had occasion to see this little hostelry at its most imperturbable. A great storm had swept France, and when we came to check out, the electric power was off and none of the credit card mechanisms were working. We had no hard cash. We had no travellers’ cheques. We had a train to catch. What to do?

  The whole hotel staff, it seemed to me, assembled to deal with this crisis. There was the magnificent Senegalese lady receptionist. There were two or three Arab-looking maids. There was the curly-haired hotel terrier, and two refugee kittens loudly squalling in a nearby basket. On his knees on the floor was a young electrician, contemplating his fuses in a scholarly way, and sometimes a gently smiling middle-aged Frenchman drifted through with a watering-can. Now and then there sounded from somewhere out of sight the calmly authoritative voice of Madame La Patronne.

  We had four different credit cards between us, and we tried them all. None of them worked. We tried them back to front, inside out, we rubbed them on our skirts. The electrician on the floor took no notice at all as we swapped one card for another, but once Madame’s contralto offered comforting but totally ineffectual off-stage advice.

  Back came the man with the watering-can, the Arab girls crowded around the reception desk, the electrician hummed to himself, a woman in a bikini turned up to clean the windows, and suddenly there was a bleeping noise from a credit card machine. The receptionist seized one of our cards and jammed it in, and miracle! the machine responded. Limp with relief, we watched as it began to churn out its paper. It was like the resolution of a fugue.

  But no, it was better than that. It was the development of a farce, because whatever any of us did then, whatever buttons we pressed, inexorably that paper kept on coming out. It spilled all over the table, it curled all over the floor, and by the time I managed to grab it in passing and sign my name on it, we were all helpless with laughter, and the splendid Senegalese had collapsed hilariously shaking into an armchair.

  Presently Madame emerged into the chaos from her Olympus. “It has been a great pleasure to have you here,” she said, above the whirring of the machine, the barking of the terrier, the meowing of the kittens, the shrieks of the receptionist and the giggling of the Arab girls. “I hope we shall see you again.”

  “Au revoir, Mesdames,” said the electrician, looking up at last from his fuse-box—and there’s style for you.

  The Soil or the Soul?

  IN 2003, I think it was, they erected in the historic heart of Dublin a monument they nicknamed the Dublin Spike—a slim pinnacle of stainless steel, some 120 metres high, unadorned except for indeterminate markings near its base. It is a sort of metallic exclamation of the new Ireland, the startling Euro-­Ireland that came into being during the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  When I arrived in Dublin from Wales one day I chose a passer-by of particularly Irish appearance to ask what he thought of the Spike, and what its enigmatic markings meant. I chose well, for he replied grandiloquently, “It’s a grand conception, finely executed, an interesting idea, so it is. Is it those squiggles at the bottom you’re asking about? Why they’re to demonstrate that the object has been pulled out, dragged out, so it has, from the very soil of Ireland.”

  “The soil, did you say, or the soul?” I queried.

  “Ah, sure you’ve hit it on the head there, right on target, full marks—the soil or the soul, that’s the be all and end of it”—and laughing very Irishly, his coat flapping, off he strode towards O’Connell Bridge.

  “SO YOU’RE AWAY to Galway in the morning?” said my hostess that night. “Make it an early start, and the traffic situation will be convenient for you.”

  Was she joking? In my experience there is no moment of the night or day when the traffic situation of contemporary Dublin is convenient. The traffic situation of Dublin is permanently awful. If it is not the morning rush hour it is the day of the horse show. If the street is not closed because of a collision the bridge is under repair. Road works are never-ending, cranes, scaffolds and bulldozers are all over the place, and only the slinky new streetcars glide through the clogged hubbub with a maddening air of privilege. Yet the unexpected thing, to anyone mo
re accustomed to the movements of an older Ireland, is that it all happens without fuss or fluster. The Dubliners take it in their stride. It seems to me that modernity suits the Irish temperament, and against all historic expectations, thrives here like potatoes.

  That glittering Spike tells us so! Like the monument itself, the new prosperity of the Republic, shiny, brash and confident, seems to have erupted out of the very substance of the country: and having erupted, feels natural to the place. One year Ireland was a poor and picturesque backwater, weighed down by its history and apparently sustained only by high jinks and alcohol. The next year, as it seems, it had become a brilliantly successful young State, a natural leader for all the small and minority nations of the world, and the first in Europe—would you believe it?—to ban smoking from all public working spaces.

  It is a seriously rich country now, not only the second most expensive within the euro currency zone (after Finland) but the one most likely, economists say, to catch up with the United States in average personal wealth. The cars that fill Dublin fill all the cities of Ireland, and swarm into every last cranny of the countryside, so that wherever you drive, up the remotest mountain lane, down the narrowest track, there is likely to be another car in the rear mirror.

  Thousands upon thousands of new houses have transformed the look of Ireland. Around every town they lie in regimented swathes, housing the multitudes who have escaped the old rural way of life, and speckled all over the landscape are bungalows and villas of grander aspiration, with conservatories and portecochères and ornamental eagles on gateposts. One and all seem brand-new. Even ancient cottages are spanking with fresh whitewash, plastic window frames, and burglar alarms, and no new house in the world is half so white, neat and spotless as a new house in Ireland. This old country of peasant values is being transformed, even as we watch, into a country of the aspiring bourgeoisie. Gone the squire and the yokel alike! Bring in the middle management!