Hermit in Paris (9 page)

In Short,

you do not really want me to tell you about the villas of the film stars along Sunset Boulevard, about the prints on the cement at the Chinese Theatre, about the inevitable visit to Disneyland and Marineland (which actually is something amazing: circus games not just with seals and dolphins, but with the most enormous whales!). This instalment of the diary has turned out a bit flat, since here I ended up being a bit of a tourist, partly because once I had become free of the company of my colleagues, on arriving here (I hate being in a group; only if I am alone and constantly changing company do I feel I’m travelling) I was constantly undecided whether to leave the next day or stay longer, forever allowing myself to become seduced by amorous adventures which the city doles out in generous quantities but which never succeeded in transmitting their excitement to the following days, and if I am not in a state of continual tension I do not enjoy my travelling, and so I am also unsure about the next stages of my trip, caught between the desire to see EVERYTHING and the desire to return as soon as possible to New York where I always have ‘a good time’.

Meantime I will now cross Nevada Arizona New Mexico, using airplanes, Greyhound buses and the train. Between the end of the month and the beginning of March I will be at:

C/o IIE
1300 Main Street
Houston 2, Texas

Otherwise I have always a reliable NY address:

C/o F. J. Horch Ass.
325 East 57
^th
St
New York 22, NY

Diary from the South-west

I arrive in Las Vegas by plane, late on Friday evening. In this city full of hotels and motels there is not a single vacancy to be found. This holiday weekend (Monday 22 February is Washington’s birthday) has ensured that everything was booked up more than a month in advance and not only by people from Los Angeles but all over the country, because a stay in the gambling capital is
de rigueur
for every American, like a trip to Mecca. You all know what Las Vegas is like, in the middle of the most squalid desert in Nevada, an old gold-diggers’ village, and even now it is not very large, consisting virtually of just two streets, the old Main Street with all the most famous gambling houses, and the new lengthy Strip, a road in the desert that is all neon signs, even more so than Broadway, with marvellous motels, casinos, and theatres which show the most famous nude women performers in the whole world, the
Folies Bergère
, Lido, etc., as well as the most famous Broadway singers and actors, except that on Broadway there are never more than five or six major revues on at any one time, whereas here there are around twenty theatres and you can even see three shows a night since they go on until four in the morning. As for gambling, it continues round the clock, twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, practically everywhere, because every public space is a casino and all you find here are public spaces, and where there are no roulette or baccarat tables there are rows and rows of those famous one-armed bandits from the time of the pioneers, so you see crowds of frantic people frantically playing these machines, like workers in a factory (Piovene’s image, which conveys the idea perfectly). As you know, Nevada is the only State where gambling is permitted, prostitution is legalized, divorce possible after six weeks’ residence, marriage possible at any time as long as you swear you are not already married. I arrive, climb into a taxi with a man from Washington, a navy employee and fanatic of these shows, and the taxi driver very scrupulously takes us round all the motels but everywhere there is the luminous sign saying No Vacancies, so he ends up renting us a room in his own house, a modest little house, which I share with the Washington employee, and I am happy at this rare opportunity to be able to see every now and again at close quarters the life of the average American. He is a serious well-behaved man, gambles very little and cautiously, is very careful not to go with women who in any case would cost a fortune, but his main ambition is to see as many shows as possible, he has come this far by plane for that very reason, he spends three practically sleepless nights in order to catch three shows a night, and you know how boring shows like the
Folies Bergère
are, and he sends the programme from every theatre (here you can send it like a postcard paid for by the theatre) to his friends and colleagues in the office to show them what fine things he has seen. The taxi man is also a good guy, with a good respectable little family, his wife is a Sunday school teacher, and in the taxi the first thing he does is to explain to us the benefits of legalized prostitution: ‘I believe in legalized prostitution.’ I have to say that Las Vegas has not been a disappointment: it is all just as you have read about so many times, with wedding chapels in the middle of the gambling-dens and the farce theatres with their advertisements for the quickest marriages (this is even more brazen than I had imagined: these little churches are really fair booths built like candy boxes with little statues of Cupid in front; they have names like The Stars’ Wedding Chapel and their billboards have Hollywood-style close-ups of happy couples kissing), but what is genuine here is a huge authentic sense of vitality, crowds of people with loads of money constantly on the move. I have to say I like Las Vegas; I seriously like the place. Not at all like the gambling cities in Europe, actually the complete opposite thanks to its plebeian, Western feel, and very different from places like Pigalle. Here you sense tremendous physical well-being, this is a productive, brash society enjoying itself as a community, between one plane and the next, and here you can genuinely sense that the pioneers, gold-diggers, etc. have shaped this absurd city-cum-gambling-den in the desert. I am aware I am saying things that are incredibly banal, but I am travelling through a banal country and I cannot find a better way to cope than living and thinking about this in a banal way. (I won’t tell you how all the local colour – Western, pioneer, gold-rush, and beyond that Indian and Mexican – is the object of tourist exploitation and rhetoric, and is chopped up into tiny souvenirs in quaint little shops, all enough to make you feel sated with it for the rest of your life.)

Contrary to What

I said in the previous instalment, there is no other way to tour America than the car. Trying to cross it on Greyhound buses, as I did through Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, means missing all the most famous tourist attractions, unless you stop in each place and try to organize local expeditions with guided tours or similar arrangements which would make you waste a lot of days to no end, since all the things ‘to see’ are never on the highways. But the fact is that the ‘monuments’ (nearly always here we are dealing with natural monuments: canyons, petrified forests, etc.) are never such awe-inspiring sights, and I have noticed that nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me: it is just a question of checking things you have seen in the cinema; so I ignore without regret Death Valley (which can be nothing other than a desert more deserted than anything I have seen in these last few days) and the Grand Canyon (which must only be a canyon that is more of a canyon than the others) and in a single stage of the journey I enjoy all the gradations of the Arizona desert and the romantic squalor of the Western villages and enter New Mexico.

Depressed Area

The bus crosses New Mexico and it is already dark and in the first village we stop at, at the usual bar where we have a snack, everything is already changed: the intangible colour of poverty (which I had completely forgotten about in California) here encloses everything, the people are nearly all Indians in Indian dress, poor women with children waiting for the bus, the drunk, the beggar, and the familiar, indefinable feel of underdeveloped countries. New Mexico, that tremendous reserve of escapist, Lawrencian exoticism for intellectuals and artists from the United States (though most of them prefer the more robust and genuine Mexico itself, which is by now an obligatory destination for all the holidays intellectuals take, and a rich source of decorative furnishings which means that New York intellectuals’ houses are all more or less small-scale Mexican museums; and Mexico has become for the USA something that fulfils the role Greece has for Europe), is in reality – in terms of the presence of its culture – not up too much (the pre-Hispanic remains are very few and not very big; and with neo-Spanish remains you never know where what is genuine ends and the fakes begin – I was not in the Hollywood studios for nothing! Albuquerque is not up to much, Santa Fe is very beautiful, though when you examine it closely it is above all well-presented) but it conveys the idea of what life is like in an underdeveloped area – in fact it is difficult to imagine anything more underdeveloped than this – that is tacked on to the least underdeveloped country in the world.

25 February

Today I went to Taos and liked it enormously: as a mountain area it is marvellous, and also as a place of refuge for intellectuals it is not a fake, the Indian pueblo is very genuine, the intellectuals here are nice and not just commercial, the literary appeal – D. H. Lawrence – is tangible since all his friends are still alive, there are wonderful collections of Indian and neo-Hispanic ware (the neo-Hispanic stuff is from the famous flagellant sect who are still alive out here) and there are two ski resorts just a few miles away: in short, a place where I would not mind staying at all. Tonight in Santa Fe I was invited to the house of a famous Franco-American furniture designer and architect who was born in Florence and whose house is full of simply wonderful stuff, genuinely from the Mexican people, completely unexpected: I’ve never seen anything like it before. Today there is an evening of great celebration in Santa Fe because at the theatre is the only show of the year: the Ballet Russe from Monte Carlo! I am not going because I passed up – in one of my rare moments of economic wisdom – the only chance to have a ticket that someone wanted to sell; none the less, I participate in the excited atmosphere of the little community of voluntary exiles: I really enjoy being in countries at unusual moments, when people are excited and happy. So, I was talking about underdevelopment: certainly this is a wasteland, farming consists of a few vegetables and fruit for local consumption, hardly any factories, yet the Indians enjoy the benefits they are allowed thanks to the New Deal and the Americans’ guilty conscience, and have unemployment subsidies, total tax exemption, lands, forests and fishing reserves (they live in a kind of primitive Communism and the authorities’ efforts to teach them the advantages of private initiative are pointless), hospitals with free healthcare, schools and priority in all possible types of employment (plus of course the exploitation of the fact that they are this State’s great tourist attraction). Don’t get me wrong, the poverty is still terrible, but when you consider the geographical conditions, which are much worse than any part of southern Italy, well the people of Basilicata could only dream of being able to live like them. A wise people, the Indians are perhaps the only poor people to live in a depressed area and not be prolific, and yet their population, which was heading for extinction, has in recent years been slightly on the increase.

The Pueblos

I go into the pueblo of San Domingo near Albuquerque and find myself in a familiar landscape: the poor suburb slums of Rome, identical. The low, squat little Indian houses are the double of those in Rome’s Pietralata or Tiburtino districts, except that here they are built in adobe (the mud bricks that the Indians learnt to bake from the Spanish and which form the essential building material for all New Mexican architecture) but they are then covered in whitewash so they all look the same. And the people all have the same look about them as they shelter from the cold in their blankets, the children playing in the mud (but staying clean) and coming up (amazingly!) to ask for charity (or rather to sell the usual coloured pebbles). (However, in this pueblo there is a church with amazing Indian paintings. As you know, the Indians in this formerly Spanish area practise both Catholicism and pagan rites: one really should stay here till a Sunday to see these famous fiestas but I haven’t really come to America to study primitive folklore.) At Taos where the biggest pueblo is, some of these flat houses are piled one on top of the other, and this gives the village an Algerian look (but of an earthen colour, not white) and the fact that in these cold, snowy days the Indians go around muffled up to their noses in multicoloured blankets contributes to this Islamic look. In any case, it is all just like Alberobello: even the interiors of the houses are just like inside a
trullo
. The Indians have cars, but because of the wishes of the elders they do not have electricity or any other source of heat or light in the pueblos except the fireplaces inside the little houses and the cooking-stoves in the street. Consequently they have neither radio nor TV. (It is clear that the Indian communities have no future and in the whole country there is a debate about what will happen to them, between those who favour conservation of the community at all costs and the supporters of assimilation. The fact is that the Indians rarely emigrate from their inhospitable lands and they are the ones who are most reluctant to assimilate; but now the children are studying at high school and are beginning to become Americanized. However, this is the only place in the United States where a dialectical element in the colonized people lives on – though it is hard to say to what extent. As my friend Ollier – an ex-colonial civil servant in Morocco – rightly observed, America is in everything a colonial country where what has been eliminated is the colonized people, the main characteristic, contradiction, vitality and significance of all colonies.)

Local Tradition

has been conserved admirably by the Anglo-Saxon Americans (but only in the last thirty years or so, I believe) and these museums, like the one of Navajo ritual paintings, for instance, are kept with the usual care and access to finance typical of the US in all things cultural, and the same goes for all the Hispanic antiquities and for the way that the old Hispanic-Mexican architecture is being continued by today’s architects. The people of Spanish origin, however, are not at all interested in the conservation of monuments to their own culture. Protestant architects construct beautiful churches in adobe and in the Hispanic-Mexican style and in them install surviving masterpieces of popular religious wooden sculpture; the Catholic priests fling in the usual tacky rubbish of current religious iconography.

Lawrenciana

Naturally, being in the Taos area, I went to see Angelino Ravagli, the husband of Frieda Lawrence, who died three years ago, and the man who is thought to have inspired the character of the gamekeeper in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. I speak to him in Ligurian dialect because (although he is from the Romagna by birth) he is really from Spotorno and he met the Lawrences when he rented them his villa there and then followed them across the world, all the way to Taos (to a ranch in the mountains which was given to D. H. by a female admirer who is still alive here and which Frieda decided to pay for with the manuscript of
Sons and Lovers
, but the ranch has now been left by Frieda in her will to the University of New Mexico which sends young writers there every summer to write), and then when D. H. died he married Frieda. Ravagli is the executor of Frieda’s will and co-owner of the rights for D. H.’s books (the few that are not in the public domain) along with Frieda’s children and her first husband, the German. He really regrets the money he could have made with
Lady Chatterley
in America but now cannot: however, perhaps he might be able to make this money if the literary agent, etc.; a question that I do not need to explain to you. (However, in fact nobody abroad really understands the question of the Lawrence literary rights.) Now he has sold this house where they came to stay after D. H.’s death and he does not know what to do with himself in Taos on his own and will go back to Italy where he has a wife to whom, according to Italian law, he is still married, and several children all in the professions, one a graduate in agriculture in Turin whose address he gives me. Angie is of course a very simple man but he is not plebeian, as the Lawrences certainly believed, but rather petit-bourgeois (he was a captain of the bersaglieri; is interested in Malagodi’s political programme;
⁴⁹
in his bedroom he has a picture of Eisenhower painted by himself because he has now started painting); however, he is of course very much a warm human being, as they say, and very friendly, what with all the chaos of this weird existence, and here in Taos he is very popular: many people have come to live here to be near the Lawrences, like for example a curious poet, Spud Johnson, who has taken over the Taos newspaper which is intriguingly called
El Crepusculo
. At Christmas Aldous Huxley came here with his wife and Julian and they spent Christmas with Angie; Aldous, through his Turinese sister-in-law, has bought a flat at Torre del Mare near Spotorno.