A Writer's World (3 page)

The nature of the region itself contributes to the oppressive quality of the South. It is, generally speaking, a wide, dry, dusty, spiritless country; sometimes hauntingly beautiful, but usually melancholy; lacking robustness, good cheer, freshness, animation; a singularly un-Dickensian country. As you drive through South Carolina (for example) on a summer day the endless cotton fields engulf you. Here and there are shabby villages, dusty and
derelict, with patched wooden buildings and rusting advertisements, and with a few dispirited people, white and black, gathered around the stores. Outside the unpainted houses of the poor whites there are often decrepit cars, and washing machines stand among the cluttered objects on the verandas. Sometimes there is a little white church with a crooked steeple. There are frequent swamps, dark and mildewy, with gloomy trees standing in water. The plantation mansions are sometimes magnificent, but often in depressingly bad repair.

I called at one such house for a talk with its owner, and found it no more than a sad echo of a munificent past. Three generations ago the Parker plantation embraced some 10,000 acres, and was one of the great estates of the region. Now it is whittled down to about 150 acres, of cotton, tobacco, sweet potatoes and corn. The drive up to the house is a narrow one between pine trees, unpaved; a cloud of dust rose up behind us as we drove along it. Near the road there were a couple of small wooden shacks, one of them inhabited, for there was a string of washing outside it, the other filled to the eaves with straw; and far at the end of the drive stood the big house, crumbling and classical. It had a wide and splendid porch, with four pillars. Mrs Parker thought that only Washington or Thomas Jefferson could really do justice to it, but I felt myself better qualified to sit there when I noticed that its broad steps were rickety, that the frame of its front door was sagging, and that high in its roof there was a dormant wasps’ nest. Inside, the house was agreeably untidy; in the hall, which ran clean through the building front to back, there was an elderly harmonium, with a large hymn book propped on its music stand.

The planter, fresh from a tussle with his tractor, had greasy hands and wore a toupee and an open-necked shirt. But like most Southern gentlemen he had a talent for hospitality, and soon we were sitting on the balustrade of the porch, sipping long cool drinks and looking out through the pines. He told me that he ran the plantation almost single-handedly, with only a single full-time employee. His children go to the local public school and his wife does the housework. The five cabins on the estate are let to Negro families whose men work elsewhere, and ‘The Street’, the double row of uniform cottages where the slaves used to live, is empty and tumble-down.

While we were talking on the porch a great cloud of dust approached us from the drive, and there emerged in stately motion two large mules. They were pulling a kind of sledge, a cross between a bobsleigh and
Cleopatra’s barge, and sitting on it, very old and wrinkled, very dignified, was a Negro in a straw hat. Round the corner he came in imperial state, the mules panting, the sledge creaking, the dust billowing all round us; and as he passed the porch he raised his hat by its crown and called: ‘G’d evening, boss, sir; g’d evening, Missus Parker.’ ‘Good evening, Uncle Henry,’ they replied.

On my first evening I was taken down to the waterfront to see the lights of the city. Behind us Lake Michigan was a dark and wonderful void, speckled with the lights of steamers bringing iron ore from Duluth or newsprint from Canada. Until you have been to Chicago – crossing half a continent to reach it – it is difficult to realize that it is virtually a seaside city. It has its sea-storms and its rolling waves, its sunny bathing beaches, its docks; you can board a ship for Europe in Chicago, and see the flags of many nations at its quays. So wide is the lake, and so oceanic in aspect, that more than once I have been compelled to walk down to its edge and reassure myself that it really contains fresh water, not salt.

So, with this queer land-locked sea behind us, we looked that evening at the city lights. A glittering row of big buildings extends mile upon mile along the lake, brilliantly lit – some of its skyscrapers clean and clear-cut, some surmounted by innumerable pinnacles, turrets and spires, so that the generally functional effect is tempered by a few touches of the baroque. Beside this magnificent row there sweeps the great highway, following the line of the lake, and along it scurries a constant swift stream of lights, with scarcely a pause and scarcely a hesitation, except when some poor unacclimatized woman stalls her engine or loses her way, and is deafened by a blast of protest behind; then the line of lights wavers for a brief moment, until with a roar of engines and a spinning of wheels the traffic diverts itself and races away, leaving the poor lost soul behind, biting her lower lip and having a terrible time with the gears.

For in many ways Chicago is still a heartless city. The incompetent will meet few courtesies in these streets; the flustered will be offered no cooling counsel; it is necessary in life to get places, and to get there fast. Between the buildings that stand like rows of hefty sentinels above the lake, you may see numbers of narrow canyons leading covertly into shadier places behind. The façade of Chicago is supported by no depth of splendour; hidden by its two or three streets of dazzle is a jungle of slums and drab suburbs, a hodge-podge of races and morals.

In the daylight, indeed, the bright glamour even of the business district is not quite so irresistible, if only because of the din and the congestion. This must surely be the noisiest place on earth. The cars roar, the elevated railway rumbles, the policemen blow their strange two-toned whistles, like sea birds lost in a metropolis, the hooters shriek, the horns hoot; the typists, on their way back from coffee, swap their gossip at the tops of their tinny voices. Across the crowded intersections scurry the shoppers, like showers of sheep, while the policemen wave them irritably on and the cars wait to be unleashed. The tempo of Chicago is terrible, and the overcrowding desperate. Just as each new plan to improve the life of the Egyptian peasant is overtaken and swamped by the inexorable march of the birth-rate, so in Chicago every new parking place is obliterated, every freeway blackened, by the constantly growing flood of cars. Each morning the highways into the city are thick with unwearying cars, pounding along head to tail, pouring in by every channel, racing and blaring and roaring their way along, until you think it will be impossible to cram one more car in, so bulging and swelling is the place, so thickly cluttered its streets, so strangled the movement of its traffic. It is good business in Chicago to knock down offices and turn them into parking lots. And it is decidedly unwise for the nervous or over-considerate driver to venture into the turmoil of these streets, for in this respect, as in others, Chicago still ain’t no sissy town.

Crime and corruption are still powerful influences here. The Syndicate, the shadowy central office of vice, is still busy, and is said to have its agents in both local political parties. There have been many hundreds of unsolved murders since the days of Al Capone, but most citizens prefer to let such matters slide. People have too much to lose to meddle. The big man may lose a contract, the little man the dubious cooperation of his local police chief or petty boss. Extortion, on many levels, is still a commonplace in Chicago. Everyone knows that a five-dollar bill slipped to your examiner may well help you along with your driving test. Everyone knows
too, if only by reading the papers, that murders are still terribly frequent; but when I once talked to a senior Chicago police officer on the subject, he adroitly ducked away to the twin topics (for they seem to go arm-in-arm) of traffic congestion and prostitution.

All this sordid unhealthiness would be less intrusive if the city itself were spacious and wholesome of appearance. But despite the illusory grandeur of its lake-front, Chicago is a festering place. From the windows of the elevated railway, which clangs its elderly way through the city with rather the detached hauteur of a Bath chair, you can look down upon its disagreeable hinterland. The different sectors of slumland each have their national character – Italian, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Lithuanian – but externally they merge and mingle in a desolate expanse of depression. Here is a brown brick building, crumbling at its corners, its windows cracked or shattered, its door crooked on its hinges, a Negro woman in frayed and messy blouse leaning from an upstairs window with a comb in her hand. Here an old Italian with long moustaches squats on the steps of a rickety wooden tenement, its weatherboards a grubby white, its balcony railings sagging and broken. Slums are slums anywhere in the world, and there are probably areas just as blighted in Paris or Glasgow; but here the misery of it all is given added poignancy by the circumstances of the citizenry, people of a score of races who came to America to be rich, and have stayed on to live like unpampered animals.

Such a climate of existence has inevitably eaten away like a corrosive at the old blithe and regardless self-confidence of Chicago. Not so long ago Chicagoans were convinced that their city would soon be the greatest and most famous on earth, outranking New York, London and Paris, the centre of a new world, the boss city of the universe. During the period of its fabulous nineteenth-century growth, when millionaires were two a penny and the treasures of the continent were being summoned to Chicago, it was not unnatural for such an eager and unsophisticated community to suppose that the centre of territorial gravity was fast shifting to the Middle West. In a sense, I suppose it has; the railway tracks, the sprawling stock-yards, the factories of Chicago and its sister cities are the sinews of the United States, and so of half the world. But the blindest lover of Chicago would not claim for the place the status of a universal metropolis. Too much of the old grand assertiveness has been lost. Nobody pretends that Chicago has overtaken New York; instead there is a provincial acceptance of inferiority, a resignation, coupled with a mild regret for the old days of brag and beef. For one reason and another, the
stream of events generally passes Chicago by. Even the Chicago theatre, once a lively institution, has fallen into dull days, making do with the second run of Broadway productions and a few mildewed and monotonous burlesques. Despite the tumult and the pressure, Chicago sometimes feels like a backwater.

The impression is only partly accurate, for there are many wonderful and exciting things in Chicago. There are magnificent art galleries and splendid libraries. There is a plethora of universities. There is an excellent symphony orchestra. The huge marshalling yards lounge over the countryside, littered with trains. The bridges over the Chicago River open with a fascinating and relentless ease to let the great freighters through. The
Chicago
Tribune
, which calls itself the World’s Greatest Newspaper, is certainly among the sprightliest. It was for Chicago that Frank Lloyd Wright conceived his last marvellous effrontery, a skyscraper a mile high. It was in a Chicago squash court that Enrico Fermi and his associates achieved the first nuclear chain reaction.

But such driving activity no longer represents the spiritual temper of the city. Chicagoans are still pursued by the demon of progress, and haunted by the vision of possible failure, so that the pressure of their existence is relentless; but the strain of it all, and the persistent rottenness of the place, have blunted some of their old intensity and lavishness of purpose. They have accepted their station in life, no longer swaggering through the years with the endearing braggadocio of their tradition, but more resigned, more passive, even (perhaps) a little disillusioned. Chicago is certainly not a has-been; but it could be described as a might-have-been.

It was the railroads that made the West, and for me it is still the great trains, rushing by with their huge freights, or streaming past a level-crossing with a flash of white napkins and silver, that best represent the flavour of the place. We lodged one night at a small, cheap, cigar-stained hotel at a typical Western railway town, within sight of the lines, and within sound of the hoarse and throaty voices of the railway porters. During the afternoon the friendly landlord said to me: ‘If you like trains, don’t miss the
Rocky
Mountain
Rocket. The Rocket comes through here every evening 8.19 on the minute, and if you like railroads, as I say, it’s a sight to see.’ At 8.17 or so we crossed the road to the station. There was a little crowd waiting for the
Rocket
– a few travellers, with their bags and buttonholes, a few friends and a motley collection of sightseers like ourselves, some with children, some with shopping bags, some lounging about chewing and occasionally expectorating.