A Writer's World (11 page)

But when you wake up in the morning, with the brilliant white spread of Havana beneath your window, the blue bay ineluctably calm, and the rumble of the traffic along the splendid waterfront, then the dream takes over. Queer, queer things are happening here. This sugar and bikini state (‘the inviting island next door’, as the New York tourist brochures say) has lurched so far from the American ideal that people can seriously talk of it as a potential Russian satellite, like Czechoslovakia or Hungary. The city streets are almost indistinguishable from the boulevards of Miami or Tampa – the same kind of shop, the same kind of building, the same makes of cars, the same smells, sights, and sounds, tinged as southern Florida is with the sting of the tropics and a late flourish of Spain. Yet already, you will discover, there are to this island some first niggling reminders of People’s Democracies. There are Russian ships in port, bringing Black Sea oil to the nationalized refineries. There are Chinese communists about, and the papers are full of Mr Khrushchev’s paternal interest. There is a cartoon in one of the dailies, showing the United States spurned by a pious and unanimous world, that might have come direct from the pages of
Krokodil
. The city is heavy with banners and slogans, and only last night, so the grapevine says, a couple of Americans were arrested upstairs in my hotel.

To the simple newcomer, though, it is the hints and innuendoes that seem more ominously uncanny. The Havana Hilton hotel, for example, looks as fabulously vulgar as ever – vast and glittering and quintessentially capitalist. Yet it is already, like the plush old hostelries of Warsaw and Leningrad, a state enterprise. It is renamed the Havana Libre, its American umbilical has long been cut, and in the unemptied ashtrays and the echoing restaurants you may glimpse, as in a crystal mirror, the drab image of public management. Tucked away in the newspapers (still, in format and funnies, as American as blue jeans) are dark droppings of new philosophies. The Foreign Ministry announces that the former Ambassador in Bonn, who resigned this week, is a traitor. All citizens whose homes have been ‘requisitioned or confiscated’ are told that in future their affairs will be handled by the War Victims Aid Department. Captain Antonio Jimenez has returned from his commercial mission to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia and East Germany, announcing that he has obtained there equipment for thirty new Cuban industries. The Cuban Sports Commission wants to participate in the chess tournament at Leipzig. Three factories making toothpaste, soap, nail polish, and hair lotion have been seized by the militia ‘at the request of the Workers’ Union’. Forty-eight
lawyers have been dishonourably expelled from the Havana Bar Association by the Revolutionary Committee which took control last week. The university students’ federation demands that the university council and deans of all faculties – ‘the landowners’ culture’ – resign to make way for reforms.

Not, you may say, very immediately alarming. No wild crowds are storming through Havana this morning, no hairy fanatics are foaming on the balconies, nobody so far seems discourteous or revengeful. But if you want to understand how queer it feels, try to understand that, in externals anyway, this might almost be American territory. It is dollar country. It is as though a near-communist regime had seized control in Washington itself, and were toppling the loftiest members of the American system, from the great oil companies to the flashy hotels. It is like experiencing some catastrophic shift of circumstance – a virulently fought divorce, or even a change of sex – a harsh, grinding, infinitely disturbing procession, reversal and renunciation.

Some nightmares are like that. They place you in a fairly familiar situation and then subject you to some unimaginable ordeal. It feels almost incredible to me that this old Catholic island, linked by a thick mesh of intercourse and interest with its neighbour across the water, could really be joining the communist block, as so many of the pundits have it. It is like some awful hallucination even to read conjectures about a Russian military base in Cuba. But there we are. That’s the way people are talking in Havana today. If I am dreaming it all, please wake me quick.

Berlin is the centre city of Europe – some might say of the world – and its heart is the stark, scarred archway called the Brandenburger Tor: not because it stands upon the last great frontier of the West, but because, poised as it thus is between two overwhelming alien philosophies, it remains quintessentially German. It is a harsh and often hated monument, but at least it feels real.

For although Berlin is an exciting and an ominous place, divided as it is both by masonry and by method, yet for me it feels chiefly like a queer stage-city. In the east it reads its communist lines, in the west its libertarian, to a thump of dogmas or a tinkle of profit: but in neither role does it feel quite natural. Not so long ago its subject territories extended from the Atlantic to the Caucasus, and it had a brutal ideology of its own. Today it has become a kind of nightmare fair, where the two halves of the world meet to set up their pavilions. There is an emptiness and a pretence to its spirit, as though the meaning of the place had been forcibly ripped out twenty years ago, and only replaced by slogans and sealing-wax.

It is fashionable to say that Berlin is no longer neurotic, but I cannot agree. It feels to me a terribly mixed-up metropolis, tortured by old anxieties or inhibitions, and understandably shot through with fear. That the Berliners have guts, diligence and realism nobody can deny. They have an almost Cockney gaiety to them, an almost chirpy bonhomie, and they seem on the face of things undismayed by their ferocious ups and downs of fortune. But beneath their genial public veneer, I suspect, they cherish darker layers of emotion: cynicism, self-disgust, shattered pride, morbid resolution. Some people say the difference between East Berlin and West Berlin is the difference between light and shade. To me, though the transition from one to the other is shattering to endure, nevertheless they both feel at once dark and floodlit, like the scene of an accident.

Berlin is the capital of a lost empire, and its imperial past lies like a helmeted skeleton in its cupboard. It forms on one side the capital of the Democratic Republic of East Germany, on the other a province of the Federal German Republic: but the Germanness of it survives by sufferance, by suggestion, by retrospection. In the eastern sector the placards and the exhortations, the state shops and the slit-eyed arrogance of Lenin-allee bring to the purlieus of the old Unter den Linden an oily whiff of Asia. In the west all the gallimaufry of the American world prances and preens itself: neon signs, juke boxes,
Time
, apartments by Corbusier, hotel rooms by Conrad Hilton, paperbacks, pony-tails, dry martinis and Brigitte Bardot. The old Germany lives on underground, surfacing sometimes in a splendid opera, a Schiller play, a melody or a neo-Nazi.

On the one side the East Berliners find themselves remoulded, month by month, year by year, crisis by crisis, into a new kind of people – brainwashed, as it were,
en
masse
and by force of habit. On the other, the West Berliners have become walking symbols: inhabitants of a city that has no economic meaning, no geographical sense, no certainties and no security, but which is kept alive like some doomed and cadaverous magnate, just to spite the beneficiaries. Few Berliners seem to suppose that their city will ever again be the capital of a free united Germany. The East Berliners live for the hour, or the Party meeting after work. The West Berliners accept what a paradoxical fortune offers them, and move blithely enough through life, like fish in a glittering goldfish bowl.

It remains, though, a single city, and there is no disguising its traumatic quality, its mingled sense of ignominy, defiance, futility and pathos. Bitterly mordant are the comments of the Berliners when they show you
around their boulevards. Their jokes are coarse and often cruel, their allusions streaked with self-mockery. Caustically they tell you that each side of the Brandenburger Tor calls itself democratic – the east with a capital D, the west with a small one. Wryly they observe that the Perpetual Flame of Freedom uses an awful lot of gas. Almost apologetically they point to Tempelhof, still the most astonishing of the world’s airports, as ‘the one good job that Hitler did’. They sound resigned but secretly resentful. They know what you are thinking.

For the fact is that their city remains, to this day, a constant and terrible reproach against all that Germany has meant to the twentieth century. The Liberty Bell, no less than the gigantic Russian war memorial, is a reminder that in our times German values have been rotten values. Berlin, east and west, is a city built upon the ruins of Germany, watered with German tears, haunted by the shades of a million lost young men, a million lost illusions, the ghost of a dead and discredited patriotism. It is the most melancholy of cities. It has lost its soul, and is still acquiring replacements.

And for myself, I find its neuroses ever apparent: in the almost obsessive pride, for example, that Berliners have in their zoo, deposited in the very middle of the city and famous for its shackled elephants; in the passion for flowers that bloom so eerily in this most warlike and fearful of capitals; in the bizarre assurance of the nightlife – the placid composure with which, for instance, comfortable burghers and their homely wives accept their beers from a man dressed up as a waitress; in the flashy extravagance of the western sectors and the dulled apathy of the east; in the inevitable, ever-growing alienation of one side from the other; in the absolute stunned silence with which the cinema audience files out from the ghastly film
Mein
Kampf
, an appalling laceration of German pride and self-respect.

So it is I say that Berlin’s heart is the Brandenburger Tor, with its great Quadriga restored but hardly regnant upon the top of it. Around that symbol of old pomp the real Berlin still stands: the gaping Reichstag, the ruined Wilhelmstrasse, the shells of broken cathedrals and shattered palaces, Goering’s offices and Hitler’s bunker, the tumbled halls of the Third Reich, the grave of a lost empire. Anything may happen to Berlin in the second half of our century; but whoever rules it, until the shades of that dreadful capital are exorcized at last, until the very memory of it dims, all the brilliance and bluster of the new city will be sham, and its spirit will never be easy.

Gingerly the middle-aged Englishman, tilting his trilby, emerges out of the Gare du Nord into the streets of Paris. He has a couple of hours to spend before he rejoins his train at the Gare de Lyon, but he views the prospect with no wild abandon, for deep inside him, however hard he tries, however polite his French or cosmopolitan his past, deep inside him there stirs, like a rustle of bones in a dark cavern, an old English antipathy to the place. It stems from centuries of bloodshed and rivalry; from the bitterness of tragic alliance; from the puritan strain that still runs through the English character, and long ago stigmatized this incomparable capital as ante-room of Purgatory; from envy, and a sense of provincial origins; from the robust self-assertion of sea-going islanders, and the blinkered vision of history. Americans adore Paris, hasten there to write their novels or paint their violent abstracts, love her in the springtime, hire her same old taxi-cabs, set themselves up with slinky blondes in desperately expensive garrets. The middle-aged English approach, however, is altogether more wary and restrained, and the visitor looks sharply right and left, tucking his wallet more securely into his pocket, as he walks briskly through the maniacal taxis and settles at the corner café for what, he thinks with a wry smile, the French comically call a cup of tea. He knows he is in the wrong. He knows he ought to have coffee. But there is something about Paris that inflames his insularity, and makes the Channel behind his back feel very deep, wide and important.

It is partly the confounded foreignness of the place. To this Englishman nowhere in the world is more irrevocably abroad than Paris, which is a good deal nearer London than Newcastle is. If it felt a little closer before the war, four years incommunicado sealed it once and for all as a city beyond the divide. Danger and ignominy have hardened its arteries of pride, and spared as it is the burden of a common language it remains
today, in a world of fading frontiers, overwhelmingly and magnificently French. It is the fulcrum of Europe, but it is emblazoned with all the splendours of old-school patriotism. It shelters, as always, a vast foreign community, but its guests are clothed in the fabric of France. Hardly anybody in the Paris streets seems to speak English. Hardly anybody looks Americanized, or Anglicized, or Italianized, let alone Germanized. Paris is French all through, from
pissoir
to Academy, and the middle-aged Englishman, with all his inherited instincts of patronage, feels himself at an unfair disadvantage. Like the poet before him, he loves Humanity with a love that’s pure and pringlish, but he feels an obscure resentment towards the French, who never will be English.

Then, says he to himself, Paris is so damned pompous. A Mall or two is all right in its way, of course, and comes in useful for royal processions or emergency car parks: but a whole city drawn geometrically, in circles, arcs and right angles, offends the English taste for studied informality. Paris has, it is perfectly true, its vast rambling filigree of back streets, climbing over Montparnasse and through the warrens of Montmartre, but as the Englishman pays his bill and sets off through the city, he feels himself to be transiting endless acres of formality. The Champs-Elysées goes on and on. The Place de l’Etoile goes round and round. It feels a mile from one corner of the Place de la Concorde to another, and retreating through the Tuileries from the gorgeous severity of the Louvre is like retiring backwards, with frequent obsequious bows, down the interminable audience chamber of some royal presence. The very river of Paris feels artificial, like a long water-folly in an elaborate belvedere, and the Eiffel Tower looks as though it has been placed there by a divine landscape gardener, as a lesser practitioner might erect a wicker pagoda behind the rose-beds. All this upsets our Chestertonian, who, reflecting that Britannia needs no boulevards, no spaces wide and gay, feels it somehow irritating that the French should need them either.

He supposes, as he broods down the Rue de Rivoli, that it’s all part of the Frenchman’s
cleverness
. Everyone knows the Parisians are as clever as so many monkeys, and in this city nothing feels simple or unsophisticated. Everything is scented. Even the crusty door-keepers inspect you with a knowing air, and the fat market ladies of Les Halles do not look like proper working women at all, but rather like enormous eccentric dowagers slumming it for fun, or honouring some cracked family conviction. The worldly Parisiennes are not only unattainably elegant, but also dauntingly well read, and have a maddening habit of being good with horses, too. The
suave young men are rubbed smooth as almonds with the unguent of
savoir
faire
. The students at the Sorbonne blaze with politics and weird philosophical speculation, but never seem to ladder a stocking. Even the dustmen sip modish drinks, like Pernod, and eat fancy cheeses, like Camembert or Brie, and smoke strong tart cigarettes, and generally behave with an urbanity that seems to the middle-aged Englishman just a little presumptuous. He stifles the thought at once, of course, for he is a liberal sort of fellow: but it is there, it is there, as it was when the heads rolled.

He distrusts them, too. Yes, he does. He cannot restrain the sensation that he has fallen among thieves. There is something sly and underhand to the careful indolence of the little shops, those lovely clothes tossed into the windows like nightdresses in a bottom drawer, that calculated clutter of exquisite frivolities, that scalpel juxtaposition of the gay cheap and the ruinously extravagant. There is something very suspicious about the sullen brusqueness of the taxi-driver, as though he is swiftly summing his customer up with a view to disembowelling him. There is something horribly ingratiating to the waiter’s smile, as though he is secretly chuckling over false additions. Nothing feels quite straightforward to the middle-aged Englishman: and what’s more, he tells himself, as though this really were the last straw – ‘what’s more, I wouldn’t be surprised if these blighters
actually cheat each other
!’

For long ago, far back in his origins, he was taught to look twice at a Frenchman’s credentials, and in his own lifetime, he feels, the Parisian record has scarcely been impeccable. Philip Sidney could write of ‘that sweet enemy, France’, but later the feeling wore off. Who knows, the Englishman asks himself with a sniff, whether the French will be any better next time? Who knows when the next coup will occur? Who has not seen the gendarmes, in the land of Fraternity, bashing the poor students with batons, or spraying them with tear-gas? What about this fellow de Gaulle, and Laval, and Fashoda, and Old Bony, and the burning of Rye, and Agincourt? Who (says the middle-aged Englishman to himself, getting quite hot under his collar, which is made of the same heavy Sea Island cotton that his father always had) – who, says he bitterly, are the Parisians to talk?