Hermit in Paris (8 page)

Europe

The writer N. M. M.
⁴⁶
is the third of three famous English sisters, who were very beautiful in their day. One was Hitler’s lover, another is the wife of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the English Fascists. This one, who is a Communist, was the wife of Neville Chamberlain’s son, who died fighting with the republicans in Spain: after that she came to America where she is very active in all the democratic, anti-racial committees.

Public relations

The brochure that Mr C., public relations man, has given me about his agency, I only manage to read now, on the bus taking me to his vineyard in Moon Valley (of Jack London memory) where he has invited me to spend Sunday. God, what kind of a host have I ended up with? Here he is photographed with Cardinal Spellman, ‘his good friend’, being congratulated by the cardinal for the mission carried out for the State Department to save Brazil from Communism (thanks to Mr C.’s public relations initiative ‘within a year the tide had turned against the Communists’). Elsewhere the brochure defines public relations (which C.’s staff carry out on behalf of various corporations and occasionally for the State Department): ‘One branch of public relations may deal with creating news and getting it published. Another branch does quite the opposite, to prevent or reduce the impact of unfavorable news.’ We are in the heart of Americanness here: there is a naïvety in the way it presents itself so openly which is paralleled only by certain kinds of naïve Soviet propaganda. I foresee an afternoon of uncomfortable political discussions. But no: in his private life Mr C. is a sensitive, reasonable and discreet person, both in his beautiful house built entirely by himself and full of wonderful Mexican ornaments, and in his vineyard which is maintained without a labour force (there are very few skilled vine-dressers in the area: as is well known, there are no more peasants in America, except in the South; one of his neighbours who has a considerable wine-making firm as a side-line had to get someone over from France to prune the vines), while his vines are nibbled at by deer beneath a fine rain. In one of his books, on Mexico, which he gives me to read, alongside the usual anti-Communist discourse typical of the American press, there are also critical analyses of the Mexican Church which are serious and full of common sense. And the conversation on European and American political issues stays on a level of reasonable liberalism. He too is worried by the Catholic advance (‘And your friend Cardinal Spellman?’ ‘Well, he’s a good guy, but the other priests …’). But he does not dwell on Communism (apart from the inevitable question on the situation of Italian Communism that all Americans ask): public relations also features sensitivity and tact among its characteristics. The cuisine that he and his wife (an architect) prepare directly over the fire is the best that I have tasted in my whole trip.

A Beatnik Party

I am invited to a beatnik party. There have been police raids lately to stamp out the marijuana traffic, and someone is always on guard at the door in case the police arrive. (There have also been beatnik rallies in the streets to protest against the ‘Fascist systems’ and to advocate the decriminalization of drugs.) Here, in the house of someone I don’t even know, the only drink is wine, poor-quality wine at that, there are no chairs, nowhere to dance, there are blacks who play the drums, but there is no room, there are several good-looking girls but the nicest ones are usually lesbians, and in any case you don’t really get to know anyone, there is no discussion, and the inevitable drug-addict, who at similar parties in New York is a decent, clean person, here is squalid and filthy and goes around offering heroin or Benzedrine. In short, the ‘bourgeois’ parties are better, at least there are better drinks (I forgot to say that among the crowd at this party there was also Graham Greene, who now lives in SFrancisco, but I did not even manage to see him).
⁴⁷

Kenneth Rexroth

is certainly the most notable person I have met in America: I do not know his poetry (he has written about twenty books of verse and several works of criticism plus many translations from Japanese classics and other poets) but as a person he made a tremendous impression on me. An old anarcho-syndicalist, he acted for many years as a trade-union organizer. He is everyone’s enemy, and every now and then bursts out into brief bouts of scornful laughter. His favourite targets are the ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyites of
Partisan Review
, Trilling and company. He is a handsome old man with a white moustache, he was also a boxer in his youth, and he receives me dressed in an old soldier’s jerkin and a cowboy shirt. He is optimistic about the future: even though there are no political or ideological movements here, technical progress, etc. will bring in something new. In any case even if Hitler had won, if all the anti-Fascists had been killed and all the books burnt, etc., history would have started again from scratch, but everything would have turned out the same, only a question of time. But what are the new groupings, forces, tendencies which might allow us to catch a glimpse of tomorrow’s America? This is the question I ask everyone, always without any great results, and I also ask him it. He says that in the universities where he goes to read his poetry he is encountering a new generation, still rather amorphous, but full of interest and revolutionary urges. The beatniks are a superficial phenomenon, the rent-a-mob rebels of Madison Avenue. But the real young generation is to be found in the universities. There is also the black movement in the South, and Luther King is the great black leader who is now in Ghana (there is now an interesting relationship between the black movement here and the new African states): these are more or less things which I had heard people in NY say, and I’ve not yet managed to meet this famous new university generation, at least not in any illuminating way. Rexroth also talks to me (respectfully) about the groups of Catholic anarchists, Dorothy Day’s movement which I had heard about in New York, where she is active, publishing a magazine rather like
Témoignage Chrétien
. Also a part of this group is our own author J. F. Powers and the poet Brother Antoninus, who seems to me to be a bit like our Father Turoldo. Rexroth is writing a lengthy autobiography, which he says can be translated in Europe because he has done all the things that Europeans expect an American to have done. Now he works as a literary critic on SFrancisco radio (SF has its own independent radio station, which is very good, autonomous and offers excellent international news coverage. It is the sole source of information here, because the SF newspapers are of very low quality and the
New York Times
arrives here three days late. I have lived through and am still living through these days of the French crisis cut off from any source of information except the skeletal coverage in the local papers, which are all obsessed with the Finch crime).

The Chinese New Year

I was looking forward to the New Year parade (last night, 5 February), thinking it would be a great people’s festival with the famous dragons, but I was disappointed. There was a military parade of marines, local politicians went by in de luxe limousines, then leaders of the Chinese community who had the same gangsterish, Fascist look as the heads of the Italian community, young boys all in line like the GIL in Mussolini’s Youth Movement and similar organizations, the anti-Communist committee, and a huge number of young ‘Misses’ all very Americanized. At the end there was a dragon, very long and beautiful, but there was absolutely no sense of popular spontaneity, rather an ‘imperialist’ or if you prefer ‘American-Fascist’ atmosphere which is the first time I’ve come across it on my trip. (But other sources tell me of a very different spirit in Chinatown: in the Chinese cinema, which shows only films in Chinese, produced in Formosa or Hong Kong, they apparently showed films made in Communist China for two consecutive months, before the Americans realized.)

In Short

I expected so much from SF, I had heard so much about it, now that I have spent a fortnight here (also because I was waiting to arrange with my colleagues to leave by car with some of them), now that I am leaving, well, I cannot say deep down that I really know much more about it than I did before, that I have got to know it properly, and basically maybe I am not terribly interested. Life is monotonous here, I did not meet any exceptional people (apart from Rexroth), I had no success with women (not that the city is greedy with its treasures, it’s just the way it turned out, perhaps I am now entering a downward spiral). From the moment I left New York I have heard nothing but criticism of New York, rather in the same way as we criticize Rome (though of course it is totally different), yet this is all justified; however, New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

California Diary

Los Angeles, 20 February

Memories of a Motorist

I leave SFrancisco on 7 February with Ollier Pinget Claus and wife in a Ford that we hired and which we will leave in LA. We take turns at driving. It’s not difficult, just a bit laborious because it doesn’t hold the road perfectly. The traffic system of parallel lines instead of overtaking on the left is better and far less dangerous than in Italy. Of course where the road narrows, with just two lanes for traffic in either direction, overtaking happens practically just like in Italy. But the problem is always that of staying between the lines, and if you change lane you must be sure no one is coming up behind you. The speed limits are very strict and have to be obeyed because there are constantly police cars and motor-cycles with radar control. In built-up areas it is 25 or 35 miles an hour, while the overall limit in the State of California is 65 miles per hour. Our car is not an automatic (only the more expensive ones are), which means that out on the open road it is fine, but in LA with all the traffic that there is and the constant traffic lights you realize that not having to change gear is a tremendous relief. The problem of parking is very serious in LA as well. The minute we arrive we leave the car for just a few minutes in a no-parking area and when we come back we cannot find it: the police have already had it towed away by a little lorry with a crane and we are forced to spend half a day getting it back from a garage which is used for this purpose. All the systems to help traffic flow work with miraculous speed: one night in SFrancisco coming back with a friend from a party a little bit merry, the car ended up stranded, off the road; it was raining, we ran to a public telephone to call the emergency services, and we had not even got back to the car but the lorry was already there pulling the car out.

It Is Not True What Everyone Always Says

that the only way to see America is to go across it by car. Apart from the fact that it is impossible given its enormous size, it is also deadly boring. A few outings on the motorway are enough to give an idea of what small-town and even village America is like on average, with the endless suburbs along the highways, a sight of desperate squalor, with all those low buildings, petrol stations or other shops which look like them, and the colours of the writing on the shop signs, and you realize that 95 percent of America is a country of ugliness, oppressiveness and sameness, in short of relentless monotony. Then you go across even deserted areas for hours and hours, like those we crossed amid the forests and coasts of California, certainly among the most beautiful places in the world, but even there you feel a certain lack of interest, perhaps because of that absence of human dimensions. But the most boring thing about travelling by car is spending the evening in one of those tiny anonymous towns where there is absolutely nothing to do except to have it confirmed that the ennui of a small American town is exactly how it has always been described, or even worse. America keeps its promises: there is the bar with its wall adorned with hunting-trophies of deer and reindeer; in the public bar there are farmers with cowboy hats playing cards, a fat prostitute seducing a salesman, a drunk trying to start a fight. This squalor is not just to be found in the small anonymous towns but also, in a slightly more alluring form, in famous holiday centres like Monterey and Carmel; and there too in this dead season it is very difficult to find a restaurant that will serve dinner.

In These Earthly Paradises

where American writers live, I would not live if you paid me. There is nothing else to do but get drunk. A young lad called Dennis Murphy or something similar, who has written a best-seller,
The Sergeant
, which has now been translated and published in Mondadori’s Medusa series – he has just received a copy of it which he shows me, convinced that Mondadori is a small publisher – arrives in the morning with his wrists slashed. During the night he got drunk and put his fists through the windows of his villa. As for Henry Miller who lives here at Big Sur, we already know that he is not receiving any visitors because he is writing. The old writer (now over seventy) has recently remarried, and his new wife is nineteen years old, so all the rest of his energies are devoted to writing in order to finish the books that he still wants to write before he dies.

Hotels for the Elderly

My friends avoid motels convinced (completely wrongly) that they cost more so we end up in filthy, flea-ridden small hotels. A permanent feature of hotels are the old folk who live in them and spend their days and evenings in the lounge watching television. California is the great refuge for old people who have ended up on their own all over the United States: they come to spend their years in its mild climate living off their savings in a small hotel. But also in New York the majority of hotel guests are the elderly, particularly old women.

The Pacific

is a sea which is completely different, with these sheer coastlines formed not of rock but of earth, and these harbours with their high, wooden palisades. The marine vegetation is also totally different: the waves cast up on to the beach seaweed that has a wooden texture but is as pliant as a whip, three or four metres long, with a little bearded head. You can fight whipping duels with this incredibly long and robust seaweed. Just below the surface of the water and on the shore there is neither sand nor rocks, but rather a porous, breathing mass of marine organisms. The seabed is alive, made up of molluscs which are open like eyes, dilating and contracting with the beat of each wave. And even in the days of full sunlight there hovers over the ocean a shadow of mist and vapour.

Los Angeles

From the moment I arrived in America, everyone told me that Los Angeles was horrible, that I would really like SFrancisco but would hate LA, so I had convinced myself that I would definitely like it. And indeed I arrive and am immediately enthusiastic: yes, this is the American city, the impossible city, it’s so enormous, and since I only enjoy being in huge cities it is just right for me. It is as long as if the area between Milan and Turin were just one single city stretching north as far as Como and south as far as Vercelli. But the beauty of it is that in between, between one district and the next (they’re actually called cities and often they are nothing but endless stretches of villas, big and small), there are huge, totally deserted mountains which you have to cross to go from one part of the city to another, populated by deer and mountain lions or pumas, and on the sea there are peninsulas and beaches that are among the most beautiful in the world. Furthermore it is a really brash city, dull, with no pretence at having monuments or quaint features – not like SFrancisco which is the only American city to have a ‘personality’ in the European sense: there is no problem loving SFrancisco, everyone can do it – but LA, this really is the American landscape, and here at last the extremely high and widespread quality of life in California does not appear to be an island of privilege, but, linked as it is to a big industrial city of these dimensions, seems to be something structural. But after a few days in Los Angeles I realize that life here is impossible, more impossible than in any other place in America, and for the temporary visitor (who, on the other hand, can usually enjoy a city better than its residents) it is actually a source of despair. The huge distances mean that a social life is practically impossible, except for the residents of Beverly Hills who can socialize among themselves, as can those of Santa Monica or of Pasadena and so on; in other words, one falls back into a provincial existence, even though a gilded one. Otherwise you have to face car journeys of forty minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, and I always have to rely on someone to give me a lift, or I drive my friends’ cars but I get tired and bored; and there is no public transport except the odd bus, and the taxis are very rare and very expensive. To this lack of form there corresponds a lack of soul in the city: you do not even find that vulgar soul like you get in Chicago and which I hoped to find again here; in truth it is not really a city, but an agglomeration of people who earn, who have excellent conditions for working well but no links with others. In any case Piovene
⁴⁸
has described Los Angeles very well, so I will not dwell on it, but refer you to his chapter on it, which is excellent.

The Suburbs

When you see how these professors – both the good ones and the mediocrities – live in this paradise on earth, and also see the extraordinary money the university devotes to research, you say to yourself that the price of all this must be the death of the soul, and certainly here even the most robust souls, I believe, would soon start to perish. A city made of a thousand suburbs, Los Angeles is also the suburb of the world, in everything, even in cinema: in reality it is not so much that cinema is ‘done’ here as that ‘people come to do cinema here’. I who always am obsessed with living in the centre in every city, here too I go to stay in a hotel downtown, but here downtown is only a centre full of offices, nobody lives there, and my friends from the Department of Italian at UCLA persuade me to go and stay in a motel at Westwood, where I will be nearer them. I feel so at home in motels that I could spend my whole life there; and this is a Mormon motel, opposite an absurdly enormous Mormon temple, closed to everyone except the elders of the sect, next to a neat area inhabited by Japanese (who work cutting the lawns in front of the houses in nearby neighbourhoods) and Mexicans. However, I lose contact with other parts of the city, and to a certain extent I lose the desire to look up the many people whose addresses I have been given and for whom I have been given letters of introduction (even telephoning is complicated: each district has its own phone-book, you cannot find the other phone-books here, most telephone calls are made via the operator as though they were long-distance calls), and so for the first time since I came to America, instead of doggedly trying to multiply my contacts with the locals, I allow myself to be carried along in the routine of life enjoyed by the Italian professors who live in their own little world.

On Cinema, so I Have Nothing to Tell You

When I left New York Arthur Miller was here, but he has now gone, his secretary’s letter informs me, so I have missed the opportunity to meet the most famous woman in America (however, I hope to find them again in New York), and from my contacts in the cinema world I extract only boring official visits to the Walt Disney and Fox studios, with the usual Western villages which have been meticulously reconstructed. These months in Hollywood (I use the word Hollywood in the European sense: as you know, Hollywood is now a district of restaurants, theatres and night-clubs, a kind of Broadway, but it has nothing more to do with cinema production; the studios are elsewhere, in the country) are a dead season since in April in California everyone makes their tax return, and the tax officials come to check the number of film-rolls that have been shot and base their taxes on that. So the film-makers try to shoot as little as possible in these months, and send the rolls they have used to Arizona. When the tax inspection is over, they have them sent back: this is a trick that everyone knows about, but as far as the law is concerned they are in the clear. So at 20
^th
Century Fox there was only one film being shot, some science-fiction thing. The only interesting detail I noticed was this guy, among the technicians, dressed as a cowboy, with game-bags full of little stones and a sling in place of a pistol. He is the person whose duty it is to frighten the ducks (the scene was set on a tropical river) by firing stones when the director needs a flight of ducks in a certain direction.

In short, I’m telling you all this to say that I’m sorry but I was not invited to any party full of famous divas, directors and producers. Here is not like New York, here people plan important parties two months in advance, given the general dispersal. And in any case, since the Chaplins are no longer here, life is not the same, etc.

Tree-houses

I’m bathing in the swimming pool in Chiquita’s house, an acrobatic dancer, in Malibu. Her husband always plays a bodyguard in films. She has had herself built a wonderful house in a tree which sways in the wind. As a theorist of this kind of existence, I visit it and have myself photographed. I later discover that it is not the acrobat’s idea: the psychoanalyst I visit the next day also has one in his villa; tree-houses are very common in California.

I Am not Going to Mexico

from here, as I had planned, along with the other writers on the grant. I discover that my visa is valid only ‘for one admission’, so if I leave I cannot come back in again. The others, though, all have visas ‘for unlimited admissions’ and off they go. I could only go there when I leave the United States, before coming back to Italy, if my thirst for new emotions has not been satisfied.

The Best and Biggest Ranch in California

I have been able to visit is the Newhall family’s ranch. Huge orange and walnut groves. Again without any human presence, as always in American agriculture, everything is done by machine, even the walnut harvest. The picking of oranges, on the other hand, is entrusted to a union of specialized Mexican labourers. I also saw cowboys: they were passing between the palisades, behind which the cows are kept, in huge spaces, bored and chewing their synthetic feed which is brought to them by conduits and appropriately graded by a nearby windmill. They will never see a prairie in their life, neither the cowboys nor the cows.

Accidents of a Pedestrian

‘Here anyone going on foot will be arrested immediately’ was what we jokingly said on arrival in Los Angeles, where there are no pedestrians. In fact, one day I try to go by foot for a stretch through Culver City, and after a few blocks a policeman on a motorbike comes alongside and stops me. I had crossed a street – one that was narrow and deserted, what’s more – while the light was at red. In order to avoid the fine – ‘the ticket’ – I explain that I am a foreigner, etc., that I am an absent-minded professor, etc., but he has no sense of humour, makes a lot of fuss and asks a lot of questions because I do not have my passport with me (in America I have noticed – even before this – that documents are totally pointless); he does not give me a ticket, but he keeps me there for a quarter of an hour. A pedestrian is always a suspicious character. However, he is protected by the law: whenever one crosses the street at any point, all the cars halt, as they do in Italy but only at the zebra crossing. Since they are few in number, like the redskins, they are trying to preserve them.