A Visit to America

CHAPTER I

Approaching Manhattan up by the long-stretching island.

WALT WHITMAN

THE voyage was uneventful. My main impressions of it were the width of the Atlantic, which I had never before crossed, the number of references made by my fellow-passengers to the salutary effect of sea-air upon the human constitution, and the benevolent expression upon the face of President Harding, whose portrait presided, like a patron saint, over most of our activities. It is true, now that I come to look back upon it, that few, if any, Americans on the ship referred to Mr Harding in conversation as a saint, or seemed at all pleased to be sailing under his patronage. But perhaps they were political opponents, and therefore biased against the good man. At any rate they were unanimous, for some reason which I could not fathom, in the opinion that no ship connected in any way with President Harding was likely to run out of oil.

On the morning of the seventh day the first incident occurred since the evening at Cobh (née Queenstown) when dainty Irish colleens had tried to sell us genuine hand-made peasant lace from Manchester, and broths of boys had offered us unique bargains (mass-produced) in shillelaghs. We saw land. Long Island appeared on the horizon.

A few hours later we arrived at Quarantine and halted for the Medical Examination. It was a long business, but it incommoded us not a whit. For the Hygienic Theory of the United States appears to be based on a remarkable notion. Anyone who can afford to buy a first-class ticket is automatically presumed to be free from all contagious infection. A doctor coming from a campaign against bubonic plague in Turkey, a medical missionary from the yellow fever districts of Central Africa, an explorer from the typhus-infested villages of Turkestan, all these are exempt from medical inspection if they have taken the precaution of travelling first class. But let a man be as free from germs as an iceberg, and let him scrub himself in antiseptics three times a day, and let him travel in the steerage class, and by heavens! he will learn that Quarantine is no idle word.

For at least an hour we leant in a superior manner on the rail, while our poorer fellow-passengers were presumed to be suffering from the deadliest and most baffling diseases known to, or unknown by, medical science, and as we leant we affirmed and reaffirmed and stated frankly and repeated with the utmost emphasis at our command, to each and all of our charming American friends on board, that the skyline of Manhattan not only came up to, but far exceeded our wildest, our most hallucinatory—we groped frantically for bigger, taller words—expectations.

As the liner steamed slowly up the Hudson, the stream of expert pointers-out grew thicker and thicker, and better-and-better informed. The one on the left, Mr Macdonell, is the Woolworth Building, next to it is the Chrysler Building, and behind the Chrysler is the Empire State. But the building which you can’t see is Number One Broadway, the offices of the Standard Oil Company.

After I had duly pigeonholed this information, the next one would reverse the order of the buildings, and add that I couldn’t see Number One Broadway, the office of the Cunard Company, and then a third would substitute the R.C.A. for Woolworth, and the Irving Trust for the Empire State, and add that Number One Broadway was the office of Messrs J. P. Morgan. But all were agreed on one point, the invisibility of that mysterious building. (I never discovered whether they were right or not, but I should imagine that they were not.)

As we advanced closer and closer, the effect of the skyline was somewhat counter-balanced by the sinking feeling induced by the nearness of the Customs’ Examination. In Europe we hear more about the horrors of the latter even than about the magnificence of the former. Indeed, we have long grown accustomed to travellers’ tales in our club of the brutal Irish inspectors who, as soon as they hear an English accent on the quay, either scatter white waistcoats in the dust what time they mutter Robert Emmet . . . Wolfe Tone . . . Charles Stewart Parnell in a savage undertone, and fling shirts and ties about to the tune of The Shan Van Voght, or else stand for hours in a trance, murmuring verses from Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen and refusing to undertake so mundane a task as the inspection of baggage.

But it appears either that things have changed since our fellow clubmen crossed the Atlantic under sail, or else that they are confusing their recollections of the New York Customs with those of the spirited scenes at the capture of the Lahore Gate at Delhi during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. However that may be, I landed with some nervousness, for the quay was very dusty and I knew that my evening-waistcoats were very white. But within half an hour I had been passed through with perfect politeness and total absence of fuss.

A friend met me, threw me into a taxi, and within forty minutes of setting foot on American soil I was at my first party.

I had been assured that it would only be a small party, so that I should not be unduly confused at meeting too many total strangers all at once, and I was all the more grateful for this kindly consideration when I was shot out of the taxi into the middle of a mere two hundred people, of whom one hundred and ninety-seven were total strangers. Each one of them asked me how long I had been in America, and to each I replied, forty-five minutes, forty-six and a half minutes, forty-nine minutes, and so on, as time went on and my visit lasted longer and longer. At about 8 P.M., when I had shaken hands with about a hundred and fifty people, I began to feel more grateful than ever that it was only a small party. Luckily for me it turned out to be not only a small party but an early one. About thirty of us went on to dinner at the Plaza Hotel, and after a few hours’ dancing I got home to my hotel at about 4 A.M.

Next morning I awoke at about 8 A.M. and began to revolve plans for sight-seeing. It was clear that the first week or two in such a staggering colossus of a place as New York ought to be spent very slowly. It is the sign of an inexperienced traveller to race round from sight to sight, guide-book in one hand and pencil in the other, pockets bulging with note-books and picture-postcards, and with each hour of the day mapped out by stop-watch. The only way to absorb any sort of atmosphere is to loaf round in a very leisurely fashion, or, better still, to sit down and wait for the atmosphere to come for absorption. I decided, therefore, to lie in bed every morning until about 9.30 A.M. studying the daily newspapers, and to sally out for a gentle stroll at about 11 A.M. Luncheon would occupy the hours between 1 P.M. and 3 P.M., and for the rest of the day a bench in Central Park, or perhaps in Battery Park, would provide an admirable base for observation, reflection, and the general absorption of atmosphere.

This plan of campaign having been sketched out, and the hour being by now 8.30 A.M., I was about to go to sleep again when my bedside telephone rang, and, from that instant until I steamed out of New York Harbour several months later, I do not suppose that I had an aggregate period of leisure of more than one hour and forty minutes altogether. The nearest I ever got to a bench in Central Park was on a morning in December when I ran madly across the Park to a luncheon engagement which I had endeavoured to keep in East 81st Street when I ought to have been keeping it in West 81st Street, and I once had three minutes in Battery Park between two appointments. As for gentle strolls, I managed to bring off about half a dozen all told, but as they were usually on the way back from parties at about 6 A.M. I was seldom in a state of sufficient mental alertness to take notes or to jot down impressions.

From the moment that my telephone bell rang on that first morning, I was caught up in the whizzing, whirling, sky-rocketing Rush of life in New York. There was never time for anything except a frantic leap into a taxi and a furious drive to the next engagement. Sometimes when traffic was busy and I was in an exceptionally violent hurry, I used to run from engagement to engagement in order to arrive more quickly than was possible by taxi, and I used to notice that out of the crowds of pedestrians through whom I dodged and side-stepped, about fifteen per cent were also running and eighty-five per cent were walking as quickly as they could. Everyone was caught up in the Rush. At first I was enormously impressed by the scurrying masses and their zeal to be at something or other, and it was not until much later that I began to discover one or two peculiar features of the New Yorker’s haste to transport himself, whether horizontally or vertically, from one spot to another.

For instance, after accompanying many charming New York friends in swift dashes hither and thither through their City, I began to notice that the moment they reached their destination all the hurry stopped. They would save three minutes on the journey and then waste twenty in doing nothing in particular. One of the favourite topics of conversation, especially Downtown, is the prime necessity of getting down to business at once because of the incredibly short length of time at the disposal of the conversationists. Taxis and legs save minutes that minds do not seem to know what to do with. Even on that very first morning I ought to have suspected something of this, for the man who telephoned to me at the ungodly hour of 8.30 A.M. devoted the first fourteen minutes of his call to explanations of, and apologies for, his inability to ring me up any later in the day. He was too busy, he said. And naturally I was too civil to point out that he would have got the same telephonic results, achieved the same volume of business, saved several dimes on his telephone account, and allowed me another fourteen minutes’ rest, if he had rung up at 8.44 A.M. In any case I doubt if he would have believed me. It takes unpractical literary folk to see things like that.

The stock explanation of this perpetual physical activity of the New Yorker is, of course, the Air, which is generally conceded to be just like champagne by a nation that probably knows less about champagne, owing to long years of inexperience, than almost any other nation in the world. But if that be the true explanation surely the Air ought to stimulate him to perpetual mental activity as well. However, that is a speculation that is not only outside the scope of this work but is verging on dangerous ground.

After the first fourteen minutes of that telephone call, my business friend came down to the matter in hand, and by 9 o’clock, or it may have been a few minutes after, had invited me to a party and I had gratefully accepted.

The telephone rang fairly continuously all morning, and during the next four days I went to sixteen cocktail parties, four dinner parties, four supper parties, and four dances. On the fifth day I went to bed.

But cocktail parties were not the only form of hospitality into which I was thrown. There was, for instance, the Business Man’s Luncheon. This is a most impressive function. It begins, as a rule, sharp at 1 P.M. It concludes sharp at 2 P.M. Nothing is drunk except iced water and coffee, and when it is over the iron-jawed hustlers return to their offices and telephone to San Francisco or New Orleans or somewhere. It is an amazing contrast to the corresponding entertainment in England, which begins about 12.45 and goes on till about 3, to the somnolent accompaniment of sherry, tankards of beer, and liqueur brandies.

But although during those first weeks of wild helter-skelter it was very difficult to form any sort of impression about New York, its flora and fauna, for it was only rarely that I was allowed to rise to the surface for a moment’s breath before being ruthlessly submerged by another flood of kindness, nevertheless I did manage to pick up some useful bits of learning. One thing, for example, I learnt, and that was the injustice that is done to visiting British authors by the people of New York. At every party I went to, at least six people said to me, Why do British authors come over here for a fortnight and then go home and write an unkind book about us?

At first I could make no reply except a giggle or some sort of strangled noise of deprecation and apology at the back of my throat. After all it is not an easy question to answer until you know the truth, and then it becomes perfectly simple. This is the truth. British authors visit the United States with the full intention of staying five or six months, of studying sociological, political, industrial, and economic conditions, of talking earnestly to men and women in all walks of life, of visiting every State in the Union, and, in fact, of making a real job of it. Then, their investigations completed, their note-books bulging with notes, and their memories with impressions, they propose to return to Europe and compile a book that shall be a classic of sympathetic comment and impartial analysis. That is their intention, and not even the most bigoted adherent of the international theories of Big Bill Thompson could find fault with it. But what happens? The author comes bowling ashore at the Cunard quay, full of robust health, with clear eye and upright carriage. Three weeks later he sneaks back on board, trembling, bloodshot, jumping at the slightest sound, rapidly greying round the temples and thinning on top, peering furtively about him, hoarse, terrified. He is suffering from lack of sleep, incipient delirium tremens, loss of appetite, surfeit of oysters, gout, and cirrhosis of the liver. On the voyage home he stays locked in his cabin for fear that his so-called friends in New York may have acquaintances on the ship to whom they have recommended him for entertainment. He tries to avert the delirium tremens by abjuring all alcohol on the voyage, and arrives home in a fearful rage induced by stuffy air in the cabin, liver, lack of exercise, and the sudden cutting-off of stimulant. In a blind fury he sits down at his desk and writes 70,000 words of pure poison about the authors of his malaise. Thus have the kindly citizens of the United States defeated their own object. Intent upon giving a merry time to a stranger, and thereby giving him also a good impression of themselves, they reduce him from a well-intentioned Innocent Abroad into a surly and cantankerous wreck, and then are pained and surprised when the resulting travel-book arrives, sizzling with sulphur and brimstone, from the printing-presses.

Another discovery I made during this wild round of gaiety was the list of subjects on which Americans do not like being laughed at, however gentle and good-humoured the laughter. It is a list which every stranger in a strange land has to compile at the earliest possible moment if he is to avoid giving offence and being ignominiously kicked out, and it is a list which every country possesses. The French have the shortest, and at the same time the largest. It consists of one word, France. The English, as I have pointed out elsewhere, have two patches of consecrated ground, the Team Spirit at Cricket and Admiral Lord Nelson. The Italians, on the contrary, have a list as long as your arm, ranging from ice-cream to Caporetto. In America, at any rate north of the Mason and Dixon Line, there is only one real taboo for the foreigner, and, strangely enough, it is one of the things that Americans themselves take a painful, an almost morbid, pleasure in talking about. But the foreigner must keep off it. He may laugh at his hosts for anything else in the world—and they, being happy and good-natured people, will laugh gaily with him—but on this subject, alone of all subjects, he must preserve the most incommunicable of silences, not only of word and of laughter, but also of gesture whether of hand, shoulder, or eyebrow. Otherwise he will be utterly damned to all eternity, and will miss all the loveliness, all the strangeness, all the fantastic surprises, of this lovely, strange, fantastic, and surprising continent.

Even now, writing in the safe security of England, behind the yawning guns of the Royal British Navy, three thousand miles from New York City, I am nervously diffident of writing down the fearful secret. Wild horses, those legendary draggers of secrets would not drag it from me in plain word of mouth. It is quite dangerous enough to commit it to paper.

But the truth of the matter is, and I record it with misgiving, reluctance, and a sense of imminent calamity, that the American does not like strangers to say that America is a new country. He himself will say it, over and over again, but it is as much as your life is worth to say it yourself. It is risky even to agree with him when he says it. In fact, it is safer either to say nothing at all in answer to him, or to confine yourself to a muttered reference to Karlsefne or Leif Ericson.

It is a peculiar business, the American attitude to Antiquity. Of all the citizens of the world there is none so alive as the American to the value of Modernity, so fertile in experiment, so feverish in the search for something new. There is nothing, from Architecture to Contract Bridge, from the Immortality of the Soul to the Ventilation of Railroad-Cars, from Golf to God, that he does not pounce upon and examine critically to see if it cannot be improved. And then, having pulled it to pieces, mastered its fundamental theory, and reassembled it in a novel and efficient design, he laments bitterly because it is not old. The one great quality which America has brought to civilization is the very quality that Americans wring their hands over. Scotland does not admit the superiority of England because the clans were barbarous cattle-thieves when Alcuin was Archbishop of York and the friend of Charlemagne, nor do the English regard themselves as a lower order of humanity than the Italians because the English were facing the rigours of their climate in a coating of woad when Virgil was riding with Horace down the Appian Way. But the American has got this notion into his head and nothing will expel it, and he takes a morbid delight in trotting it out in public and wringing his hands over it. He has created a bogy and is cowed by it. But woe betide the foreigner who so much as hints at the existence of the bogy. A perfect example of this American indecision whether to worship a thing because it is New, or to worship it because it is Old, is to be found in the town-planning and street-naming of New York City.

It is an important boast of the citizen of Manhattan that his streets possess the simplest, the most logical, the most practical system of identification in the world. The Avenues run north and south and are numbered from One to Thirteen; the streets run east and west and are numbered from One to One Million, as the case may be. The corners are all right-angles, the intervals between the streets identical. Therefore, cries the New Yorker, raising his voice a little in order to be audible above the sound of a passing elevated train, a simple calculation gives you the exact distance which has to be traversed on any journey between two known points, and furthermore the mere mention of an address at once establishes the exact position of that particular spot on the island. Complicated explanations are unnecessary. How much simpler than the elaborate postal districts such as plague the Londoner! How much simpler than the arrondissements of Paris! To this cry of triumph is often added a gentle suggestion that such efficiency, such practical modernity, is characteristic of the nation which long ago swept away the ridiculous coinage of England and substituted the metric dollar.

Both claims are beautifully absurd. The American, a sentimentalist to