Coast to Coast

Coast
to
Coast,
my first book, was first published more than half a century ago. It is not long in geological terms, but it is quite a chunk in the life of a nation, and since 1956 the passage of history has transformed the subject of the work, America.

The United States has experienced such triumphs and such traumas since then, such colossal challenges, such tragic and marvellous adventures, such shifts of confidence and reputation, that it has virtually reinvented itself. It has sent its rockets to Mars and the Moon! It has been humiliated in war! It has been loved and loathed, admired, abhorred, envied and distrusted. And in the years after I wrote the book the USA became so incomparably rich and powerful that it was the only Great Power on earth.

None of this I foresaw when, in 1956, I ended a year’s travelling fellowship in the United States, and offered
Coast
to
Coast
to
my sponsors in lieu of the report I was obliged to present. I had come from a Britain that was still war-scarred, poverty-stricken and disillusioned. I found an America bursting with bright optimism, generous, unpretentious, proud of its recent victories, basking in universal popularity but still respectful of older cultures. I did not know it then, and nor did America, but chance had brought me across the Atlantic at the very apex of American happiness. I doubt if there has ever been a society, in the history of the world, more attractive than this republic in the decade after the Second World War.

Of course it had its downsides. Crime and corruption was rampant. Racism was ugly. The bigot Senator McCarthy was on the prowl. But it was a simple, innocent time for most Americans. Television was in its infancy, personal computers were inconceivable, McDonalds and Starbucks were unknown, drugs were hard to come by, and the same popular music had a guileless appeal for almost everybody – the song ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ was the theme tune,
so to speak, of my introduction to the Great Republic.

Can you wonder that
Coast
to
Coast
was written in enjoyment? That year’s wandering in America, in the prime of my youth, through a country so buoyant with success and generosity, was one of the very best presents of my whole life. I have been back there every year since, and if the United States of America is not always so beguiling today, is not always regarded around the world with the same grateful affection, nevertheless I love it still, and look back to my first journeys there as to a dream of young times and aspirations.

No matter that the America of this book exists no longer. In my mind its soul goes marching on!

Trefan, 2009

A
t one time or another I have approached some splendid places, most of them distinct with mystery or age: Venice on a misty Spring morning, silent and shrouded, like a surrendered knight-at-arms; Moscow, its fortress barbarically gleaming; Everest, the watch-tower, on the theatrical frontiers of Nepal and Tibet; or Kerak of the Crusaders, high and solitary in the mountains of Moab. All are celebrated in history or romance; but none lingers so tenaciously in my memory as the approach to the City of New York, the noblest of the American symbols.

The approach from the sea is marvellous enough, but has become hackneyed from film and postcard. It is the road from inland that is exciting now, when Manhattan appears suddenly, a last outpost on the edge of the continent, and the charged atmosphere of the place spreads around it like ripples, and you enter it as you would plunge into a mountain stream in August. A splendid highway leads you there. It sweeps across the countryside masterfully, two white ribbons of concrete, aloof from the little villages and farms that lie outside its impetus, and along it the vehicles move in an endless, unbroken, unswerving stream. They carry the savour of distant places: cars from Georgia, with blossoms wilting in the back seat, or diesel trucks bringing steel pipes from Indiana; big black Cadillacs from Washington, and sometimes a gaudy convertible (like a distant hint of jazz) from New Orleans or California.

Through the pleasant country they pass, the traffic thickening as the big city draws nearer, and into the grimy industrial regions on its periphery; past oil refineries spouting smoke and flame, ships in dock and aircraft on the tarmac, railway lines and incinerators and dismal urban marshes; until suddenly in the distance there stand the skyscrapers, shimmering in the sun, like monuments in a more antique land.

A little drunk from the sight, you drive breathlessly into the great tunnel beneath the Hudson River, turning on as you do so the radio on your dashboard; the Lincoln Tunnel has its own radio station for the benefit of cars passing through it, and it seems churlish not to use it. You must not drive faster than 35 miles an hour in the tunnel, nor slower than 30, and there is an ominous-looking policeman half way
along in a little glass cabin, so that you progress like something on an assembly line, soullessly; but when you emerge into the daylight, then a miracle occurs, a sort of daily renaissance, a flowering of the spirit. The cars and trucks and buses, no longer confined in channels, suddenly spring away in all directions with a burst of engines and a black cloud of exhausts. At once, instead of discipline, there is a profusion of enterprise. There are policemen shouting and gesticulating irritably; men pushing racks of summer frocks; trains rumbling along railway lines; great liners blowing their sirens; dowdy dark-haired women with shopping-bags, and men hurling imprecations out of taxi windows; shops with improbable Polish names, and huge racks of strange newspapers; bold colours and noises and indefinable smells; skinny cats and very old dustcarts; bus drivers with patient, weary faces. Almost before you know it, the
mystique
of Manhattan is all around you.

There is a richness to the life of this extraordinary island that springs only partly from its immeasurable wealth. A lavish fusion of races contributes to it, and a spirit of hope and open-heartedness that has survived from the days of free immigration. The Statue of Liberty, graphically described in one reference book as “a substantial figure of a lady”, is dwarfed by the magnificence of the skyline, and from the deck of a ship it is easy to miss it. But in New York, more than anywhere else in America, there is still dignity to the lines carved upon its plinth, and reproduced sixty years later at the airport of Idlewild:

Here in the space of a few square miles all the races mingle, and the extremes of human nature clash. This is not the ail-American city, but rather (as Lord Bryce remarked) a European city of no particular country; enlivened, sharpened and intensified by the American ideal.

Everyone has read of the magical glitter of this place; but until you have been there it is difficult to conceive of a city so sparkling that at any time Mr. Fred Astaire might quite reasonably come dancing his urbane way down Fifth Avenue. It is a marvellously exuberant city, even when the bitter winds of the fall howl through its canyons. The taxi-drivers talk long and fluently; not so well or so caustically as Cockney cabmen, but from a wider range of experience, for they may speak of a pogrom in old Russia, or of Ireland in its bad days, or speculate about the Naples their fathers came from. The waiters press you to eat more, you look so thin. The girl in the drug store asks pertly but very politely if she may
borrow the comic section of your newspaper. On the skating rink at Rockefeller Center there is always something pleasant to see; pretty girls showing off their pirouettes; children staggering about in helpless paroxysms; an old eccentric sailing by with a look of profoundest contempt on his face; an elderly lady in tweeds excitedly arm-in-arm with an instructor.

Boundless vivacity and verve are the inspiration of Manhattan. In its midtown streets (away from slums and dingy suburbs) you are in a world of spirited movement and colour. The best of the new buildings are glass eyries, gay as cream cakes. One structure on Park Avenue has a garden for its ground floor and a slab of green glass for its superstructure. A bank on Fifth Avenue has creepers growing from its ceiling, and the passer-by, looking through its huge plate-glass windows, can see the black round door of its strong-room. Outside a nearby typewriter shop a real typewriter is mounted on a pedestal, for anyone to try. Once when I passed at two in the morning an old man with a ragged beard was typing with hectic concentration, as if he had just run down from his garret with a thrilling new formula or a message from the outer galaxies.

The traffic swirls through New York like a rather slobby mixture running through a cake-mould. There are fewer solid traffic jams than in London, but a more inexorable oozy progression of vehicles. Some seventy-five years ago an observer described New York traffic as being “everywhere close-spread, thick-tangled (yet no collision, no trouble) with masses of bright colour, action and tasty toilets”. The description is not so far from the mark today, and the colours especially are still bright and agreeable. The women are not afraid of colour in their clothes; the shop windows are gorgeous; the cars are painted with a peacock dazzle. From upstairs the streets of Manhattan are alive with shifting colours.

Sometimes, as you push your way through the brisk crowds (“
Pardon
me, I hope I haven’t snagged your nylons”) there will be a scream of sirens and a little procession of official cars will rush by, pushing the traffic out of its way, crashing the lights with complacent impunity, on its way to the Waldorf or the City Hall. The motor-cycle police, hunched on their machines, look merciless (but are probably very kind to old ladies). The reception committee, in dark coats and Homburgs, is excessively official. And there in the recesses of the grandest car can be seen the distinguished visitor, opera singer or statesman or bronzed explorer, shamefully delighted at being able to ignore the traffic rules. I once rode in such a cavalcade, and found that the psychological effect can be disturbing. A mild little man sharing my car was soon hurling vicious
abuse at the less agile of the pedestrians, and the wife of the distinguished visitor fainted.

There is a row of hansom cabs at the corner of Central Park, each with its coal heater (if it is winter), each tended by an elderly gentleman in a top hat, the horses a little thin, the wheels a little wobbly. Lovers find them convenient for bumpy dalliances in the park. If you wander down to the waterside on either side of the island you may stand in the shadow of an ocean liner, or watch a tug (with a high curved bridge, a nonchalant skipper, and an air of Yankee insolence) steaming under the black girders of Brooklyn Bridge. Outside Grand Central Station, through a grill beneath your feet, you may see the gleaming metal of a Chicago express down in the bowels; passengers on the smartest of these trains are ushered into them along deep red carpets. You could live permanently in Grand Central Station without ever seeing a train, for they are all secreted below in carpeted dungeons.

The stores of Manhattan bulge with the good things of the earth, with a splendour that outclasses those perfumed Oriental marts of fable. “Ask for anything you like‚” says the old waiter at the Waldorf-Astoria with pardonable bombast, “and if we haven’t got it we’ll send down the road for it.” Furs in the windows shine with an icy distinction. Dresses are magnificent from Paris, or pleasantly easy-going in the American manner. There are shoes for every conceivable size; books for the most esoteric taste; pictures and treasures summoned from every age and every continent; foods of exotic delight; little dogs of unlikely breed; refrigerators already stocked with edibles; haughty Rolls-Royces; toys of dizzy ingenuity; endless and enchanting fripperies; anything, indeed, that fancy can demand or money buy. It is a storehouse of legendary wonder, such as only our age could stock. What a prize it would be for some looting army of barbarians, slashing their way through its silks and satins, ravishing its debutantes, gorging themselves in its superb French restaurants!

Yet so obvious and dramatic are the extremes of New York that you still see many beggars about its streets. They stand diffidently on the pavements, decently dressed but coatless, asking civilly for help before they leave the bright lights and go home for the night to their hopeless squalid doss-houses. They are ambassadors from another Manhattan: the countless gloomy streets where Negroes and Puerto Ricans, Poles and poor Italians live in unhappy neighbourhood, fighting their old battles and despising one another. A suggestion of ill-temper, resentment or disgruntlement often sours the taste of New York, and it is an unpleasant thing to see the current crime register in a Harlem police
station. Page succeeds page in terrible succession, thronged with stabbings and rapes, robberies and assaults, acts of lunatic spite or repellent perversion. “Well‚” you say as casually as you can, a little shaken by this vast superfluity of Sunday journalism, “well, and how many weeks of crime do these pages represent?” The police sergeant smiles tolerantly. “That’s today’s register‚” he says.

You can sense a little of all this horror simply by driving through the dark back streets; or walking warily across Central Park at night; or buying a drink in an East Side bar, surrounded by companions of advanced animal instincts, funnelled from the slums of half a dozen countries. Or you can feel the tensions down at the dockside, where union clashes with union, docker with docker, with a frightening fervour. The dockers, speaking many languages, shuffle here and there like automatons. There is a feeling of cold incipient brutality, and if you make a habit of hanging around the docks you will never be surprised to read, as you often will, of bodies found in the water and bloody wharfside brawls.

These are the heirs to those millions of hopeful immigrants who crossed the Atlantic in the Victorian age, fleeing from despotisms or famines, looking for an Eldorado. The poor European immigrant is a dominant figure of American history, and his spirit still haunts the squares and streets of the Battery, at the tip of Manhattan, and loiters around the landing-places where the ferry leaves for Staten Island. He is the prime symbol of American liberalism, and it is a typical paradox that though politics drove him from Europe, often enough, it was material ambition that made him an American. America is the land acquisitive, and few Americans abandon the search for wealth, or lose their admiration for those who find it.

So the unassimilated New Yorkers, the millions of un-Americans in the city, however poor or desolate they seem, however disappointed in their dreams, still loyally respect the American ideal; the chance for every man to achieve opulence. Sometimes the sentiment has great pathos. An old man I once met in a cheap coffee-shop near the East River boasted gently, without arrogance, of the fabulous wealth of New York, for all the world as if its coffers were his, and all its luxuries, instead of a grey bed-sittingroom and a coat with frayed sleeves. He said: “Why, the garbage thrown away in this city every morning—
every
morning—would feed the whole of Europe for a week.” He said it without envy and with a genuine pride of possession, and a number of dusty demolition men sitting nearby nodded their heads in proud and wondering agreement.

All the same, it is sometimes difficult to keep one’s social conscience in order among the discrepancies of Manhattan; the gulf between rich and poor is so particularly poignant in this capital of opportunity. There is fun and vigour and stimulation in New York’s symphony of capitalism—the blazing neon lights, the huge bright office blocks, the fine stores and friendly shop assistants; and yet there is something distasteful about a pleasure-drome so firmly based upon personal advantage. Everywhere there are nagging signs that the life of the place is inspired by a self-interest not scrupulously enlightened. “Learn to take care of others,” says a poster urging women to become nurses, “and you will know how to take care of yourself.” “The life you save may be your own‚” says a road safety advertisement. “Let us know if you can’t keep this reservation‚” you are told on the railway ticket; “it may be required by a friend or a business associate of yours.” Faced with such constant reminders, the foreign visitor begins to doubt the altruism even of his benefactors. Is the party really to give him pleasure, or is the host to gain some obscure credit from it? The surprise present is very welcome, but what does its giver expect in return? Soon he is tempted to believe that any perversion of will or mind, any ideological wandering, any crankiness, any jingoism is preferable to so constant an obsession with the advancement of self.