Read A Writer's World Online
Authors: Jan Morris
A Writer's World (2 page)
This was the first of the postwar decades, when the world
was still getting its breath back after the cataclysm of the
Second World War. In a Europe half shattered by the
conflict Soviet forces still dominated the eastern part of
the continent, and American armies were stationed
throughout the west, while both powers sent their first
satellites into space. A defeated Japan was steadily
regaining some national assurance under the
compulsory tutelage of the United States; communist
China was emerging as a potential rival to the Soviet
Union. Elsewhere events were dominated by the
protracted abdication of the British Empire, for so long
a principal arbiter of the world’s affairs. India and
Pakistan were flexing their muscles in their first heady
years of national independence, and in the Middle East
Arabs and Israelis, released from British restraint,
brooded over each other’s futures.
It was a euphoric decade in many ways, though, and
not least for the British, who basked in the glory of
recent victory, however impoverished it had left them,
and still thought of themselves as uniquely privileged
among nations. I was particularly preoccupied during
these years with the steady withdrawal of their power
and influence from around the world, and I spent the
decade reporting for their two most distinguished
newspapers: first
The Times
of London, which
considered itself the greatest newspaper on earth, and
later the
Manchester Guardian,
which considered itself
the most enlightened.
M
y professional life really began with an imperial exploit. On 29 May 1953
Mount Everest, Chomolungma, the supreme mountain of the world, was
climbed for the first time by Sir John Hunt’s British expedition, including
two New Zealanders, a famous Sherpa mountaineer from the Everest
foothill country and a team of Sherpa high-altitude porters. I went with
them on behalf of
The Times
, as the only reporter with the expedition, and
the experience provided me with my one great scoop (as we called it in
those days). The ascent was the last such achievement of the British
Empire, and it was capped by the circumstance that my report of it was
published in London on 2 June 1953, the very morning of the coronation of
Queen Elizabeth II – the start, as it was fondly thought then, of a new
Elizabethan age.
On the afternoon of 30 May I was with Hunt and most of the climbers
some 22,000 feet up in the Western Cwm, awaiting the return of the New
Zealander Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norkay from their
attempt upon the summit. We didn’t yet know whether they had got ther
e.
‘There they are!’
I rushed to the door of the tent, and there emerging from a little gully, not more than 500 yards away, were four worn figures in windproof clothing. As a man we leapt out of the camp and up the slope, our boots sinking and skidding in the soft snow, Hunt wearing big dark snow-goggles, Gregory with the bobble on the top of his cap jiggling as he ran, Bourdillon with braces outside his shirt, Evans with the rim of his hat turned up in front like an American stevedore’s. Wildly we ran and slithered up the snow, and the Sherpas, emerging excitedly from their tents, ran after us.
I could not see the returning climbers very clearly, for the exertion of running had steamed up my goggles, so that I looked ahead through a thick mist. Down they tramped, mechanically, and up we raced, trembling with expectation. Soon I couldn’t see a thing for the steam, so I pushed up
the goggles from my eyes; and just as I recovered from the sudden dazzle of the snow I caught sight of George Lowe, leading the party down the hill. He was raising his arm and waving as he walked! It was thumbs up! Everest was climbed! Hillary brandished his ice axe in weary triumph; Tenzing slipped suddenly sideways, recovered and shot us a brilliant white smile; and they were among us, back from the summit, with men pumping their hands and embracing them, laughing, smiling, crying, taking photographs, laughing again, crying again, till the noise and delight of it all rang down the Cwm and set the Sherpas, following us up the hill, laughing in anticipation.
As Tenzing approached them they stepped forward, one by one, to congratulate him. He received them like a modest prince. Some bent their heads forward, as if in prayer. Some shook hands lightly and delicately, the fingers scarcely touching. One veteran, his black twisted pig-tail flowing behind him, bowed gravely to touch Tenzing’s hand with his forehead.
*
We moved into the big dome tent and sat around the summit party throwing questions at them, still laughing, still unable to believe the truth. Everest was climbed, and those two mortal men in front of us, sitting on old boxes, had stood upon its summit, the highest place on earth! And nobody knew but us! The day was still dazzlingly bright – the snow so white, the sky so blue; and the air was still so vibrant with excitement; and the news, however much we expected it, was still somehow such a wonderful surprise – shock waves of that moment must still linger there in the Western Cwm, so potent were they, and so gloriously charged with pleasure.
I
nternational competition for the news was intense, so I scuttled down the
mountain that same evening, and by skulldug means sent my first report of
the ascent off to London. When two days later I followed it away from
Everest with my Sherpa helpers, I did not know whether I had secured my
scoop, or whether the news had been intercepted and the story filched by
some competitor even more unscrupulous than I was myself
.
It was the evening of 1 June. The air was cool and scented. Pine trees were all about us again, and lush foliage, and the roar of the swollen Dudh Khosi rang in our ears. On the west bank of the river there was a Sherpa hamlet called Benkar. There, as the dusk settled about us, we halted for the night. In the small square clearing among the houses Sonam set up my tent, and
I erected the aerial of my radio receiver. The Sherpas, in their usual way, marched boldly into the houses round about and established themselves among the straw, fires and potatoes of the upstairs rooms. Soon there was a smell of roasting and the fragrance of tea. As I sat outside my tent meditating, with only a few urchins standing impassively in front of me, Sonam emerged with a huge plate of scrawny chicken, a mug of
chang
(a sort of alcoholic porridge), tea, chocolate and chupattis.
How far had my news gone? I wondered as I ate. Was it already winging its way to England from Katmandu, or was it still plodding over the Himalayan foothills? Would tomorrow, 2 June, be both Coronation and Everest Day? Or would the ascent fall upon London later, like a last splendid chime of the Abbey bells? There was no way of knowing; I was alone in a void; the chicken was tough, the urchins unnerving. I went to bed.
*
But the morning broke fair. Lazily, as the sunshine crept up my sleeping-bag, I reached a hand out of my mummied wrappings towards the knob of the wireless. A moment of fumbling; a few crackles and hisses; and then the voice of an Englishman.
Everest had been climbed, he said. Queen Elizabeth had been given the news on the eve of her coronation. The crowds waiting in the wet London streets had cheered and danced to hear of it. After thirty years of endeavour, spanning a generation, the top of the earth had been reached and one of the greatest of adventures accomplished. This news of Coronation Everest (said that good man in London) had been first announced in a copyright dispatch in
The
Times
.
I jumped out of my bed, spilling the bedclothes about me, tearing open the tent flap, leaping into the open in my filthy shirt, my broken boots, my torn trousers. My face was thickly bearded, my skin cracked with sun and cold, my voice hoarse. But I shouted to the Sherpas, whose bleary eyes were appearing from the neighbouring windows:
‘Chomolungma finished! Everest done with! All OK!’
‘OK, sahib,’ the Sherpas shouted back. ‘Breakfast now?’
It has often been suggested that
The Times
delayed publication of the news of
the ascent in order to make it coincide with the Coronation. What a canard!
We had no long-distance radios on Everest, and I nearly killed myself slithering down the mountain to get the news home in time. To safeguard my scoop
I put the message in a code. I had devised it simply for a final announcement
of success, and this is how it read: SNOW CONDITIONS BAD (= summit
reached) ADVANCED BASE ABANDONED (= Hillary) AWAITING IMPROVEMENT (= Tenzing) ALL WELL (= nobody hurt)
.
My dispatch reached the paper safely, although it didn’t make the front
page because it was another thirteen years before news stories were
printed on the front page of
The Times
. Nor was it exclusive for long,
because the editor magnanimously decided to print it in the first edition of
the night’s paper, thus allowing all others to copy it. Stories were published
anonymously in those days, so I got no by-line, and it was three years before
I was able to publish a book about the adventure:
Coronation Everest.
When we returned to London from Nepal we were invited to a celebratory
dinner at Lancaster House, the government’s official place of entertainment.
I found myself sitting next to the major-domo of the occasion, a delightful
elderly courtier of old-school charm, while opposite me sat Tenzing Norkay,
away from Asia for the first time in his life. The old gentleman turned to me
half-way through the meal and told me that the claret we were drinking was
the very last of its particularly good vintage from the cellars of Lancaster
House, and possibly the last anywhere in the world. He hoped I was enjoying
it. I was much impressed, and looked across the table to Tenzing, who
most certainly was. He had probably never tasted wine before, and he was
radiant with the pride and pleasure of the occasion – a supremely stylish
and exotic figure. The lackeys respectfully filled and re-filled his glass, and
presently my neighbour turned to me once more. ‘Oh, Mr Morris,’ he said in
his silvery Edwardian cadence, ‘how very good it is to see that Mr Tenzing
knows a decent claret when he has one.
’
A
fter Everest I went to the United States for the first time, on a year’s
Commonwealth Fellowship. America was still in a condition of benign
exhilaration, rich and confident after its victories in the Second World War,
but as unaccustomed to foreign visitors as we were unfamiliar with it. I
travelled the entire country, sending dispatches to
The Times
throughout,
and when it came to writing a report for my patrons I presented them with
my first book,
Coast to Coast.
Its opening chapter, about Manhattan, was in
effect the first essay I ever wrote about a city
.
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. You must not drive faster than thirty-five miles an hour in the tunnel, nor slower than thirty, so that you progress like something in 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 black clouds of exhaust. 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 and bus drivers with patient weary faces. Almost before you know it, the mystique of Manhattan is all around you.
* * *
Everyone has read of the magical glitter of this place, but until you have been here 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, about pogroms in old Russia, about Ireland in its bad days, about the Naples their fathers came from. The waiters urge 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 eccentric sailing by with a look of profoundest contempt upon his face, an elderly lady in tweeds excitedly arm-in-arm with an instructor.
Boundless vivacity and verve are the inspiration of this city. 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 strongroom. 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 the 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. Some seventy-five years ago an observer described New York traffic as being ‘everywhere close-spread, thick-tangled (yet no collisions, 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 City Hall. The motor-cycle policemen, 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. 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.
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 grille beneath your feet, you may see the gleaming metal of a Chicago express down in the bowels; you could live permanently in Grand Central 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 sidewalks, decently dressed but coatless, asking civilly for help before they leave the bright lights and go home for the night to their 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
tastes 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.
*
America is the land acquisitive, and few Americans abandon the search for wealth, or lose their admiration for those who find it. Unassimilated New Yorkers, the millions of un-Americans in this city, however poor or desolate they seem, however disappointed in their dreams, still loyally respect the American idea – 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-sitting room 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 near by 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.
But there, Manhattan is a haven for the ambitious, and you must not expect its bustling rivalries to be too saintly. Indeed you may as well admit that the whole place is built on greed, in one degree or another; even the city churches, grotesquely Gothic or Anglican beyond belief, have their thrusting social aspirations. What is wonderful is that so much that is good and beautiful has sprung from such second-rate motives. There are palaces of great pictures in New York, and millions go each year to see them. Each week a whole page of the
New
York
Times
is filled with concert announcements. There are incomparable museums, a lively theatre, great publishing houses, a famous university. The
Times
itself (‘All the News that’s Fit to Print’) is a splendid civic ornament, sometimes mistaken, often dull, but never bitter, cheap or malicious.
And the city itself, with its sharp edges and fiery colours, is a thing of beauty; especially seen from above, with Central Park startlingly green among the skyscrapers, with the tall towers of Wall Street hazy in the distance, with the two waterways blue and sunny and the long line of an Atlantic liner slipping away to sea. It is a majestic sight, with no Wordsworth at hand to honour it, only a man with a loudspeaker or a fifty-cent guide book.
*
So leaving Manhattan is like retreating from a snow summit. The very air seems to relax about you. The electric atmosphere softens, the noise stills, the colours blur and fade, the pressure eases, the traffic thins. Soon you are out of the city’s spell, pausing only to look behind, over the tenements and marshes, to see the lights of the skyscrapers riding the night.
Of course Manhattan greatly changed in the course of the century, from its
cab drivers to its crime rate, but the responses it sparked in me in 1953 did
not much alter, and I have been there every single year since.
My first experiences of the American South left me less buoyant. I happened
to be in Atlanta the day after the Supreme Court in Washington declared, in
the seminal
Brown
v.
Board of Education
decision, that racial segregation
in state schools was illegal.
* * *
When the decision was announced all the simmering discontent of the white Southerners boiled over in bitter words. I spent the day listening to angry men and women. The abuse they used was at once so theatrical and so repetitive that I could scarcely believe it had not been plucked wholesale from some common phrase-book of prejudice. I joined a conversation, in a coffee-shop, with the manager of the place and a man who told me he was a senior officer of the police. They spent some minutes reminiscing about race riots of the past, talking comfortably of ‘niggers’ baited and beaten in the streets, and of one especially, hounded by the mob, who had thrown himself into the doorway of that very coffee-shop, only to be pushed back on to the pavement. ‘The only place for a nigger,’ said the manager with finality, ‘is at the back door, with his hat in his hand.’
Other, gentler Atlantans, as horrified as anyone by these expressions of brutality, advocated other ways of sustaining white supremacy. Drugged by the sentimentality of the Old South, they would say, like sanctimonious jailers: ‘Leave the matter to us. We understand the Negroes, and they understand and respect us. After all, we’ve lived together for a long time. We know them through and through, and believe me, their minds are different from ours. Leave it all to us.
The South takes care of its own
.’ If I were a Southern Negro, I think I would prefer, on the whole, the loud-mouthed to the soft-spoken.
*
As to the country Negroes, they seem identical still with those pictures in old prints of the slave-owning times; still toiling half-naked in the fields, still addicted to colour and gaudy ornaments, still full of song, still ignorant and unorganized; a people of bondage, infinitely pitiful. Few of them appear to think deeply about their social status, but they reflect it often enough in a sad apathy. I talked once with a Negro farmer in Alabama, and asked him if things were getting any better for the coloured people. ‘Things ain’t gettin’ no better, suh,’ he said, ‘and things ain’t gettin’ no worse. They jess stay the same. Things can’t ever get no better for the coloured people, not so long as we stay down here.’