Hermit in Paris (7 page)

For the First Time I Drive

an American car, along a stretch of the road to Detroit. The automatic gear-change makes driving very simple, you just have to get used to the fact that you do not have to press the clutch pedal. The strict speed-limits on the motorways make the drivers careful. What is odd, though, is the lack of rules for overtaking, which happens either on the right or the left, as it comes, and nearly always without any signals.

Wonderland

In the motorway service stations, another typical American place, I discover further marvels in the men’s room. There is a gadget for relaxing, for those whose legs are tired from driving: you get up on a small platform, put in a nickel, and the machine starts up, making you vibrate for five minutes like someone tormented by St Vitus’s dance. Then there is also the automatic shoeshine with its rotating brushes. And in many men’s rooms now towels have been replaced by hot-air driers.

American Poverty

has a particular colour which I have now learnt to recognize: it is the burnt red colour of brick buildings or the faded colour of wooden houses which have become slums. In New York poverty seems to belong only to the most recent arrivals, and is something equivalent to a period of waiting; and it would not even seem right that any Puerto Rican should become instantly well-off just because he has landed in New York. In the industrial cities it is clear that the poverty of the urban masses is an essential part of the system, and often it is a poverty which has a European look: black houses which are little more than hovels, old men pushing handcarts (!) full of bits of wood recovered from slums that have been demolished. Of course there is the constant though slow progress of the various social strata as they move up the ladder of well-being, but new groups always take their place at the bottom. And the great vital resource of America, mobility, constant movement, is tending to decrease. The depression of ’58 was a huge setback for Detroit and since then Ford have been working in six-month shifts per year, resulting in a permanent state of semi-unemployment; the workers who have been there longest, those with a certain number of years of seniority, have priority over the others in being taken back on; that is, they have their job guaranteed, something new in the general lack of stability in American life, where the proletariat has always provided temporary labour.

The Projects

which means the working-class houses built by the towns or the state to replace the slums, are usually much more depressing than the slums themselves, which if nothing else have a touch of life and cheerful decay about them. Working-class houses, even those built at the time of the New Deal in New York, Cleveland or Detroit, are like prisons built of brick, either high or low buildings but always terrifyingly anonymous, looking out on to deserted squares. Now that the shops along the pavements have disappeared, every village uses its local shopping-centre for supplies. But in Detroit, in an area previously occupied by slums, there now rises the first section of Mies van der Rohe’s famous village, the one with the huge vertical and horizontal structures in the midst of greenery. I visit it: there are now showroom flats open for those who want to buy or rent. Up to now it has been all buyers, no one wants to rent. The prices are rather high: to rent a flat costs 220 dollars per month. In short these are dwellings for the upper middle class, professionals and managers; those who lived in the slums that have been demolished have to go and find other slums elsewhere. Among the buyers there are some blacks.

The Classic American Photograph

of the black Baptist church nestling in a shop-window is not a picturesque detail, it is the most common sight as you go around the streets where the blacks live in slums. The Baptist church, the church of the poor blacks, is split by a multitude of internal schisms, every black who has any histrionic-religious skills and the money to rent a shop sets up his own church and starts to rant. Their worship is always based on revival, the immediate emotional and physical presence of divine grace. Some of them become famous millionaires like Father Divine or the other one who died recently.

In the huge, grim but not poor black area of Chicago I see an enormous street advertisement like the ones for Coca-Cola, only the young good-looking boy and girl, well-dressed and well-turned-out, are black rather than white. But as I am going by in a car, I don’t have the time to make out what it is advertising. Another day I go by and pay attention: the advertisement (‘Have your best comfort’) is for a funeral parlour. (Advertisements for funeral agencies are very common in black neighbourhoods.)

Poor Shops

In the land of consumption where everything must be thrown away so you can rush and buy new goods, in the land of standardized production, one learns, surprisingly, that there is a whole underworld market of goods which no one would ever imagine could be bought or sold in America. There are huge stores of second-rate goods, as in the Italian area of Chicago, which are the same as the stores downtown except that the goods are rejects which exude an air of poverty even when they are new. And then there is the whole business of second-hand goods which I thought was a prerogative of New York’s Orchard Street, that incredible market street in the poor Jewish quarter, but then you find it exists everywhere; there is a world in America where nothing is thrown away; in Chicago there is an area that is now Mexican, last year it was Italian, and the Mexican shopkeepers have taken over the shops with their own goods and along with Mexican things they continue to sell the old Italian stock. There are also bookshops for the poor where second-hand paperbacks and magazines are sold, as well as a whole range of specialist books, particularly in immigrant languages, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian (not Italian, because Italian immigrants usually don’t know Italian as a written language). What emerges as the common cultural denominator of these shops is superstition. In Detroit there is an incense shop, which displays in its window the different kinds of incense required by the various religions, as well as incense for voodoo and witchcraft ceremonies, Catholic religious images, sacred books, conjuring tricks, playing cards, pornographic books. Sidney G. tells me that once the owner, seeing him just browsing, chased him out of the shop: it is likely that in the back-shop they make love philtres or other magic potions for their clientele which is black-Italian-Mexican. In the Mexican quarter in Chicago, there is a shop in which a gipsy reads your palm.

The Bowery

is not unique to New York; every town has a street reserved for drunkards and human debris, where there are very cheap lodgings, really poor shops, restaurants where the alcoholic can, when he has a couple of dollars, obtain a card which entitles him to a certain number of meals for a few cents, so that he knows that he has something to eat for a few days and can therefore drink the rest of his money. Naturally such streets are full of the Salvation Army and other missions, where they can stay warm. I remember a St Thomas Aquinas Reading Room in Detroit, chock-full of down-and-outs pretending to read: a place with a huge window which you can see from the freezing cold street. You have to keep the meeting room locked – as I was informed by a Chicago trade unionist, a member of the U. E.
⁴⁵
– otherwise the hoboes come in and sleep on the floor. In America the man who leaves his family and job and ends up an alcoholic and on the streets is a widespread phenomenon, even among those in their forties, a kind of obscure religion of self-annihilation.

Keep it Easy

My host tonight in Detroit was a philosophy professor, now a radio disc-jockey (he introduces the records and makes witty comments in between), he earns a huge amount of money and is very popular. He writes, sings, and even makes records of (mild) protest songs.

The Steel Crisis

is on. The famous strike was caused initially by the industrialists who needed to keep prices high even though stocks were at an all-time high. Probably before the year is out the American economy will have to face, once the elections are over, a serious recession. According to certain left-wing trade-unionists (in Chicago I was moving mostly in those circles) the American economy, caught as it is in a vicious circle of sales on credit and forced consumption, appears to be very fragile, hanging by a thread.

Chicago

is the genuine big American city: productive, violent, tough. Here the social classes face each other like enemy forces, the wealthy people in the strip of skyscrapers along the magnificent lake-shore, and immediately beyond them is the vast inferno of the poor neighbourhoods. You sense that here the blood has drained into the pavements, the blood of the Haymarket martyrs (the German anarchists to whom a very beautiful illustrated book has been devoted, written by the then chief of police), the blood of industrial accidents which helped build Chicago’s industries, the blood of the gangsters. In the days when I was there, the famous police corruption case was discovered, which I think even the Italian newspapers mentioned. I would like to stay longer in Chicago which deserves to be understood in all its ugliness and beauty, but even the cold there is nasty, the local woman I have made friends with is trivial and not very chic (so, she’s fine for Chicago), and I fly off for California.

San Francisco Diary

5 February 1960

You know what San Francisco is like, all hills, the streets rising up steeply, and a typical old cable-car running along some of the streets; and the scraping sound of the cable beneath street level is the distinctive sign of the city, just as the smoke coming out of the manholes signifies New York. I am living near Chinatown which is the biggest Chinese settlement outside China, now in full celebration mode with rockets being launched for the Chinese New Year which happens around now (the year about to start is the Year of the Mouse). The goods in the Chinese shops are nearly all made in Japan. The Japanese colony in SF is also very numerous, and this city with its mixture of white and yellow peoples looks the way all cities will look in fifty to a hundred years’ time. The blacks are outnumbered by the Mexican Indians. The Italians had their quarter in North Beach, near Chinatown, but now they have mostly moved, though the area is still full of Italian restaurants and shops and has become the beatnik quarter. The names and the writing on the shop-fronts are in Italian: as you know, the SFrancisco Italians are Ligurians, Tuscans and northerners, so the old generation knew Italian, unlike the New York Italians who have never known the language nor have they ever learnt English and have been inarticulate for centuries. The ones here also have surnames that are the same as Italian surnames today (whereas the New York Italians’ surnames are unknown in Italy, they belong to an Italy that never appeared in our nation’s history), and even their faces are similar to ours (while the New York Italians only resemble themselves). In this kind of Chinese-Italian-beatnik Latin Quarter there is a tremendous amount of activity in the streets in the evening, something unusual in America; an espresso-place has even put small tables and chairs on the pavement as though we were in Paris or Rome. I will realize later that this activity only happens on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, and on other evenings everything is closed and deserted.

The Longshoremen’s Union

Naturally, the first thing I do is to go and visit Harry Bridges, secretary of the ILWU, the dockers’ union which is the only left-wing union with any clout in America, famous for its meeting with Khrushchev. (The ILWU is the West Coast union; as you know, the longshoremen’s union in New York is run by gangsters: remember
On the Waterfront
.) I did not find Bridges very interesting, but some of his colleagues were. The SFrancisco dockers have become a typical workers’ aristocracy thanks to their union’s industrial muscle. They earn about 500 dollars a month, a totally disproportionate salary for an unskilled workforce. In their headquarters – modern architecture which is not very beautiful but interesting – the famous recruitment of squads takes place, required by the ships to load or unload night or day. The dockers arrive, each of them in a deluxe automobile which they park on the grass; they come in with their loud-checked overalls of every different colour, working-clothes which are new and clean. Many are black, and many are Scandinavian. When a man has finished his shift, he tells the union how many hours he has done, so that the union always has up-to-date lists of the men, organized round the number of hours worked, and whenever the employers request workers, the union selects those with fewer hours worked. The result is that at the end of the year all of them have done more or less the same number of hours. All this happens through a system of numbers which appear on luminous boards, and announcements over the tannoy, a system that resembles the tote machine at a horse-race or a calculating-machine in the stock exchange. To be a docker in SFrancisco is the most sought-after profession, just as in San Remo it is being a croupier at the casino. This year the union had more than ten thousand requests to join, but only selected seven hundred men. These statistics give a clear idea of what working-class prosperity means in America, even in an area so full of advantages as California where poverty just does not exist. Choice is of course based also on physical strength and age: the majority of the longshoremen are giants. The organization takes enormous pride in the results it has achieved through its hard-line traditions which are really a lesson to ponder on for European trade unions. The other evening an old trade-unionist of progressive views was arguing bitterly with me over the lack of fight in French and Italian unions, who for all their political consciousness, which the American working class lacks, nevertheless have never managed through economic strikes to obtain what the American unions manage to extract (and have never managed to defend their political principles, we could add).

A Club

Could San Francisco’s secret be that it is a city of aristocracies? An old writer of local history books takes me to lunch at the Bohemian Club. This is the first club along English lines that I have seen in America. Everything, the wood-panelled walls, the gaming-rooms, the paintings from the beginning of the century, the portraits of famous members, the library, are exactly what they would be like in the most conservative clubs in London, which I find deeply moving – as always when I see some glimmer of Anglo-Saxon civilization in this country which is of all countries the farthest that could be imagined from England. And yet as its name suggests, this was eighty years ago the artists’ and writers’ club, full of heirlooms of Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Frank Norris, and even Stevenson and Kipling, who both lived in SF, the former for quite some time, the latter just for a few months, and also Mark Twain who was a journalist here when he was still known as Samuel Clemens. Nowadays the members are all around sixty, and they actually have an English look to them: maybe they are some of the few Anglo-Saxon descendants in San Francisco. So is San Francisco really a conglomerate of élites? The San Francisco publishing world does mostly numbered editions, The Book Club of California publishes editions of classics like Tallone in Italy, for instance collections of letters by Californians during the Civil War with reproductions of the manuscript letter, a fascinating new way of presenting history books by including exact reproduction of the documents. SFrancisco is the city where you find the typographers used by the New York publishers. Even the Italians, compared to the other Italian communities in America, have all the characteristics of an élite, although my lunch at Il Cenacolo, the Italians’ club, did not suggest a major difference in level from similar locales in New York.

Zellerbach

Near my hotel is the wonderful new skyscraper housing the headquarters of Zellerbach’s paperworks. Z. is from one of the very few Jewish families who lived in SFrancisco before the Gold Rush (1849 is always used as the watershed between California’s prehistory and history), Jews who did not mix with the subsequent waves of Central and Eastern Yiddish immigrants (who in any case are few in Calif.) and they constitute an aristocracy on their own.

Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti (who, as you know, is called Ferling and who added that ending out of his admiration for Italians, blacks, and other vital and primitive peoples) is the most intelligent of the beatnik poets (the only one with a sense of humour: his poems are a little like Prévert’s) and he has not left SF for NY. However, at present he is travelling in Chile so I missed the most authoritative guide to the city’s secrets, just as in Chicago I missed out on Algren’s guidance. Ferlinghetti has a bookshop, The City Lights, which is the best bookshop among SFrancisco’s avant-garde. He sells almost entirely paperbacks, as does Discovery, the other literature bookshop in Columbus Ave. The paperback range, however, covers a very broad price band: besides genuinely popular editions (which are almost always only commercial titles) selling at 35 or 50 cents, there is a whole range (vast numbers of books, reflecting an enormous breadth of interest and intelligence in titles) of soft-cover cultural books costing a dollar and a half or 1.75 or even 2 dollars, and which thus come remarkably close to the price for hardback editions which are around 3 dollars. But the paperback public buy paperbacks even if they are dear and would never buy hardback.

The Provinces

Life is not different from life in NY, just as the social make-up of the city is no different. But at parties here you sense something that is the archetypal provincial atmosphere: gossip here is no longer NY gossip, it already has a provincial inflection. This is particularly true of the small world and artificial paradise of the Berkeley professors, each one of whom lives in his little luxury villa: these all form a row along lengthy streets climbing up the mountain. Actually, more than provincial the atmosphere is colonial: we are on the Pacific.

Truth Is Stranger than Fiction

I chose this hotel, after going round seven or eight others, as it was the most suitable in terms of price, cleanliness and location. No one had recommended it to me. Two days later I discover that Ollier, Claus and Meged, three of my fellow grant-receivers, live there, having all arrived at different times: independently of each other, all four of us chose the same hotel from a thousand small hotels of the same type in this area.

The Monument

I always avoid in these notes any description of the landscapes, monuments or tourist trips in the city. But I have to put this one in. Going through a park near the Golden Gate, suddenly you find yourself facing a huge neoclassical construction, all surrounded with columns, reflected in a lake, a thing of immense proportions; it is in ruins, with plants growing inside it and this huge ruin is all made of papier mâché and rounded off with great care. It produces a surreal, nightmarish effect, not even Borges could have dreamt up anything like this. It is the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the PanAmerican exhibition in 1915. Tourist brochures, oblivious to its grotesqueness, point it out as one of the finest pieces of neoclassical architecture in America and maybe this is even true. There is in it above all a dream of what culture was in the eyes of 1915 millionaire America, and the building in its present state is well-placed to illustrate someone or other’s definition of America having passed from barbarism to decadence with nothing in between. Now that the building is falling to pieces, the San Franciscans, who are really keen on it, have decided to rebuild it in stone, with all the metopes sculpted in marble. The State of California is putting in five million dollars, the municipality another five million, the Chamber of Commerce another five million and the final five million will be collected from the public.

Sausalito

The sea in the bay and nearby is cold even in summer, and despite its latitude and vegetation (eucalyptus and redwoods) the beautiful marine and woodland areas near SF have nothing Mediterranean about them, because the colours, given the permanently cloudy and rainy sky and the fog which comes in daily, are not even like those of the most gloomy days in Liguria’s Santa Margherita, they are more like the colours of a Scandinavian fjord. Or of a lake: Sausalito, which of the various tourist villages and yacht marinas is the one that has taken on an intellectual hue, full of boutiques, and inhabited by writers, painters and homosexuals, is just like Ascona.

The Professor

Like nearly every young writer, Mark Harris (we read but rejected his comic novel
Wake Up, Stupid
months ago) teaches creative writing in a college, the State College of SFrancisco. What he is specifically expert at is baseball: he has three novels on baseball. When he speaks about American literature, of the difficulty of writing literature in a society which is so prosperous and where the problems still have to be discovered, he says some not unintelligent things. But he is totally devoid of any information about European literatures, of any inkling of what has happened and is happening across the Atlantic. Not that he is totally without interest: he listens in astonishment to even the most obvious information you give him. He does not know that there was a civil war in Spain. (He will certainly have read Hemingway, but in the way that we read about wars between maharajahs in the South Seas.) The philosophy professor in the same college, whom I did not meet but Meged did, knows about only one philosopher: Wittgenstein. Of Hegel’s philosophy he knows only that it is metaphysical and that it is not worth his while bothering about it, while of Heidegger and Sartre he says that they are essayists not philosophers.

Babbitt

Mario Spagna (pronounced Spagg-na, and known as Spag), whose family originally hail from Castelfranco d’Ivrea (but he does not know any Italian, just a few words in Piedmontese dialect), and who takes me in his car to see the surrounding country, was introduced to me by his neighbour Mark Harris as your typical, average American. At the age of fifty he took early retirement from his job with Standard Oil in order to cultivate his inner spirit. He writes mainly letters to senators and congressmen. He reads the papers, cutting out the items which concern in particular the local parliamentarians and giving them his advice and approval. He has also written an article which was published: ‘Facing the Mirror’, urging young people to look at themselves in the mirror not out of vanity but to examine their conscience. He has spent several years working out a project for a Temple of Peace and Beauty to be built on the slopes of Mount Timalpais and which should become the seat of World Government of the United Nations.

Do It Yourself

I never emphasize in my notes the fact that all of American life, and all their highly active social life, runs without any service personnel, and that American houses, almost always constructed with great efficiency and enthusiasm, have been painted (the walls, that is), and have had stairs put in, and all the various bits of carpentry, etc., carried out by the owners themselves, because of the non-existence or prohibitive cost of labour for such jobs. Tony O.’s beautiful, elegant house (he’s a professor at Berkeley) was entirely built by himself, both the masonry and the wood, from the foundations to the roof, but he is not the only one to have done so. For many of the well-off, middle-class intellectuals, making yourself a home means literally making it with your own hands.