A Writer's World (32 page)

‘You’d better watch it, mate,’ said a shopkeeper, standing in the door of a store that appeared to specialize in second-hand saucepans. ‘That’s the National Front, that is. They’re not funny, you know. They don’t mind who they bash.’ But we walked gingerly on, and presently the flag disengaged itself from its dingy background, and the sensation of impending evil was embodied in a clutch of short-cropped youths in jeans, high boots and spangled leather jackets, holding the flag between two poles above their heads and striding northward towards the river with a certain jauntiness, like apprentice boys in Northern Ireland. Over and over again, as they drew nearer, they sang the same couplet of the song, as though they knew no more: Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves … ‘What’s happening?’ we asked as they passed, and they stopped at once, without resentment, and clustered around us as though they had discovered some street curiosity, and were about to learn something themselves. They spoke a particular kind of debased Cockney and tended all to talk at once.

‘Big rally dahn the High Street, innit? Us against the Socialist Revolutionaries, know what I mean? Coupla football games in tahn, too.’

‘What’s it all about, then?’

‘Well it’s a bit of a punch-up, innit? Look, the coons and the reds give us a bit of aggro, know what I mean? The Paks and them, the nig-nogs and the
football mobs, then we’re in there, aren’t we? Bit of violence, know what I mean? That’s what it’s all abaht, innit? Nig-nogs Saturday night!’

They laughed, but not maliciously – rather engagingly, as a matter of fact – and they clustered around us eagerly, as though we were visiting parents at a school match. There was a sort of chill innocence to their frankness. They were like moon children. ‘Wanna come and watch?’ they kindly suggested. ‘You won’t get no aggro. Just stand back, know what I mean?’

They laughed again, the laughter degenerating at the fringe of the posse into uncontrollable giggles, and for a moment we just stood and stared at them, and they at us. From the ear of one boy, I noticed, hung a small golden cross, and it swung rhythmically while its owner tunelessly whistled, occasionally nudged a neighbour in the ribs when something comical occurred to him or tapped a booted foot upon the pavement. I smiled at him wanly, and he responded with an inept wink, as though he had not quite mastered the knack; and then abruptly, with the Queen’s flag borne skew-whiff above their heads, off they swung again, raggle-taggle down the street.

They were pure riot fodder, a demagogue’s dream, thick as potatoes, gullible as infants, aching for a fight, not without courage, not without gaiety either. They were too slow to understand that the affray to which they were so boisterously heading – a clash between Right and Left, between the neo-fascists of the National Front and the frank communists of the Socialist Revolutionary Party – was more than just a Saturday afternoon bust-up, but an ideological confrontation which might one day ravage the capital. Know what I mean?

The riot, deliberately planned, turned out to be the worst in London for many years. I watched it on television that evening. By the standards of Paris, Berlin, Calcutta or Detroit, it was a modest disturbance. Nobody was killed. Only a few cars were set on fire. But in London, the city of so many ordered centuries, it came as a nasty shock: the muddle of billboards and banners in the shabby streets; the knots of youths, black and white, lashing out at each other like tomcats; the occasional scream, the sudden bloodstained figures; the thick, blue lines of helmeted policemen, sheltered behind their transparent shields from the showers of stones and bottles; the mass chanting; the smoke of burning cars. And the horsemen – especially the horsemen, who, suddenly appearing upon our screens and advancing at a deliberate trot upon that terrified and infuriated crowd, were horribly evocative of more terrible events elsewhere in history.

It was as though that certain indefinable malaise of London, that laser beam across the evening sky, was erupting just for an hour or two into
fulfilment, and in the middle of it all I noticed something odd. Three hatless policemen, ties askew, helmets half off, were struggling with a youth, whose ferocious writhings, kickings and mouthings made him look the very embodiment of a snarl. They dragged him off my screen in the end, but just before he disappeared, I saw, under the heavy arm of one constable, over the sweating forehead of another, a small gold cross in a horny ear, vigorously joggling.

A city between performances. Not The City – for that title, for so long the prerogative of Constantinople, must now go to New York, a world epitome – but still, to my mind, the most enthralling of them all. I have described the neuroses I sometimes feel in London now, and the air of resignation which, to my mind, attends the pageantry of crown and state these days. But I know in fact that these are only on the surface, and do not reflect the real meaning of this city. Behind its shifts of fortune and history, London is impelled by a sharp expediency very different from the accepted images of the place. V. S. Pritchett, a Londoner himself, once wrote that the chief characteristic of London was
experience
. I am from Wales, a place of sea and mountains, and to me the unchanging essential of the capital is an eye for the main chance. London is hard as nails, and it is opportunism that has carried this city of moneymakers so brilliantly through revolution and holocaust, blitz and slump, in and out of empire and through countless such periods of uncertainty as seem to blunt its assurance now.

It is a calculating city behind it all, a city of intelligence agents, a matchless centre of political and military information. Its knowledge of the world is as exact and deliberate as ever it was in the days of empire. I was lunching one day with a chap from the foreign office, at Beoty’s, the Greek place in St Martin’s Lane, when he happened to mention, as foreign office chaps do, a hotel in Canton called the Ding Sang – formerly, as I might perhaps remember, the Yang Cheng, Goat City, a name he personally preferred. What did the new name mean? I wondered – ‘Ding Sang? Oh, it means “The East Is Red”. It’s actually the theme phrase, so to speak, of one of the best-loved Maoist patriotic songs, dear to every Chinese heart.

‘At least,’ he then added thoughtfully, laying down his knife and fork, ‘at least I
think
it’s the main theme,’ – and here a change came over his face, and for a moment he began to look oddly oriental himself. His eyes were screwed up at the corners, and his cheekbones seemed curiously to rise. Faintly over the buzz of the restaurant I heard him, in a high, cracked
tenor, softly singing to himself an eastern tune, quavery and half toned. As he sang he mouthed the words. ‘Yes,’ he said presently, in a satisfied voice, returning to the squids, ‘I felt sure it was. It provides the principal refrain of the song.’

This is the London expertise, to adapt deftly, if necessarily surreptitiously, to the changing times. Tradition in front, utter pragmatism behind. In the past ten years or so some of this inner steeliness has, so to speak, been revealed by the dispersion of London’s smoke. Ever since the Industrial Revolution the nature of London has been masked by fog and murk. It has been a city of black suggestiveness, choked often in impenetrable mists off the river, against which the splendours of the kingdom were paraded in pungent contrast. The very name London used to sound echoing and foggy, and every Hollywood film about the place had it thick with murderous fog.

Now the smoke has gone, and with it some of the romantic mystery, the camouflage. The city has been steam-cleaned all over. The river has been so brilliantly cleared of pollution that in 1977 the first salmon ran upstream through London from the sea. There is a new glint to London now, and its clarity tells a truer story than the swirls and opacities of old. The best place to look at London is not in the Mall after all, where the Queen rides by, and certainly not in Knightsbridge or Lewisham Way, but half-way across London Bridge –
new
London Bridge. The previous one now resides in Arizona, the one before that – the one with the shops, houses and turrets on it, and the malefactors’ heads dripping blood at its gates – having been pulled down in 1832.

It is in fact the fourth London Bridge we are going to, completed only a few years ago, but still spanning the Thames in exactly the same spot as the ford by which, two thousand years ago, the Romans crossed to found their Londinium on the north bank. It is always, of course, an intensely busy place. The road is busy above, the river below. Distorted loudspeaker voices echo from beneath the bridge as the tourist launches chug their way to Greenwich or the Tower. Dirty squat tugs with lines of barges labour against the tide toward the Isle of Dogs. Downstream lies the superannuated cruiser
Belfast
, speckled with the unseamanlike pinks and yellows of tourists, while upstream indistinct flotillas of small craft seem to be milling purposelessly about in the distant haze of Westminster. But when we reach the middle of the bridge, and discover the north bank spread there before us, the Thames seems hardly more than a country stream, a pleasure pond, beside the gleaming vulgarity,
the harshness, the concentration of the new City of London, the square mile that is the financial heart of the capital and its true core of constancy.

It is new, because most of it has been rebuilt since the Second World War; only now are the last bomb sites being filled in, to complete its sense of packed intensity. It is a cramped, ugly, jostling, bitter, clever square mile, jammed there on the waterfront. Its buildings look as though they have been forcibly hammered into the landscape in successive stages, century by century, forcing less virile structures back from the river or into the ground. It is a terrific spectacle, to my mind the most startling urban view in Europe, and it is given touches of nobility by its hoary landmarks: the majestic dome of St Paul’s, the austere fortress turrets of the Tower, the fairy-tale silhouette of Tower Bridge, the spires of all the City churches squeezed in there among the concrete.

But it is not a nice scene, not a nice scene at all. There is something vicious to it. Every street you see down there is full to its attics with money-men, bankers, stockbrokers, agents, accountants, exchange specialists, economists, financial journalists and entrepreneurs. History does not much faze these adept Englishmen, and they are inhibited by no ideological qualms. Once the very champions of laissez faire, they have adapted with consummate flexibility to the advance of socialism, and would soon adjust again, I do not doubt, if communism ever took over this state. The City of London is the most subtle and perhaps the most vehement of all the world’s financial bazaars, even now, and it emanates a sense not of power, or responsibility, but of unremitting self-interest. It is chock-a-block full, one feels, of gentlemanly cunning.

The poet Wordsworth, surveying London in an earlier century from another of its river bridges, was moved to ecstasy by the sight. Earth, he exclaimed, had nothing to show more fair! One could not say the same, looking out from London Bridge in 1978, but I’ll tell you this, for sure: earth has nowhere more capable of looking after itself, than this aged and incorrigible deceiver!

Los Angeles is the city of Know-How. Remember ‘know-how’? It was one of the vogue words of the forties and fifties, now rather out of fashion. It reflected a whole climate and tone of American thought in the years of supreme American optimism. It stood for skill and experience indeed, but it also expressed the certainty that America’s particular genius, the genius for applied logic, for systems, for devices, was inexorably the herald of progress. As the English thought in the 1840s, so the Americans thought a century later. They held the future in their hands and this time it
would
work. Their methods and inventions would usher not only America herself but all mankind into another golden age. Know-how would be America’s great gift to history: know-how to rescue the poor from the poverty, to snatch the coloured peoples from their ignominy, to convince the nations that the American way of free enterprise was the best happiest way of all. Nothing was beyond know-how. Know-how
was, if not actually the substance of God, at least a direct derivative.

One city in America, above all others, came to represent this enviable conviction. There has never been another town, and now there never will be, quite like El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, Southern California, where the lost American faith in machines and materialism built its own astonishing monument.

Los Angeles, in the generic sense, was a long time coming. It is not a young city. Spaniards were here before the United States was founded, and I never get the feeling, as I wander around LA’s vast, amorphous mass, that it lies thinly on the ground. It is not like Johannesburg, for instance, where almost within living memory there was nothing whatsoever. Nor does it feel transient or flimsy, like some of those towns of the Middle West, which seem to have no foundations at all, but await the next tornado to sweep them away in a tumble of matchwood. In Los Angeles there are reminders of a long tradition. There is the very name of the city, and of its euphonious streets and suburbs – Alvarado, El Segundo, Pasadena, Cahuenga Boulevard. There is the pattern of its real estate, still recognizably descended from the Spanish and Mexican ranches of long ago. There is its exotic taste in architecture, its patios and its deep eaves, its arcades, its courtyards. There are even a few actual buildings, heavily reconstructed but still authentic, which survive from the first Spanish pueblo – swarmed over by tourists now, but frequented too, I like to think, by the swaggering ghosts of their original caballeros.

A sense of age informs the very setting of LA. From the air the city looks like some enormously exaggerated pueblo itself: flat, sprawling, rectilinearly intersected, dun-coloured, built of mud brick by some inconceivable race of primitives, and behind it the tawny mountains run away in a particularly primeval way, a lizardy, spiny way, their dry expanses relieved only by the flicker of white on a snow peak here and there, or the distant glimmer of a lake. In a huge amphitheatre the city lies, accessible only by passes through the surrounding ridges, rather like a gigantic mining camp: and through the veil of its own artificial mist, suggestively whirled about and blended with the California sunshine, it looks across its golden beaches toward that most enigmatic of oceans, the Pacific (never called the sea in Los Angeles, always ‘the ocean’).

There is nothing Johnny-come-quick to this scene. Los Angeles is a complex merger of separate settlements, containing within its scrambled presence eighty different municipalities, and sprawling district by district,
decade by decade, over its central plain and into its foothills. Though I would guess that nine-tenths of its buildings were erected in the twentieth century, still Los Angeles is, like some incurable disease, a balefully organic phenomenon. Its streets are forever nibbling and probing further into its perimeter hills, twisting like rising water ever higher, ever deeper into their canyons, and sometimes bursting through to the deserts beyond. If the city could be prised out of its setting, one feels, it would be like a dried mat of some bacterial mould, every bump, every corner exactly shaped to its landscape.

This is partly because the landscape itself is so individual, so that unlike Chicago, say, or Paris, Los Angeles is inconceivable anywhere else. But it is also, I think, because this city genuinely springs out of its own soil, possesses a true genius loci and forms a kind of irreplaceable flashpoint: the point on the map where the intellectual, the physical and the historical forces of American history met to produce – well, combustion, what else? Whatever happens to LA, it will always be the city of the automobile and the radio, showbiz and the Brown Derby restaurant, the city where the American ideal of happiness by technique found its folk art in the ebullience of Hollywood. It is essentially of the forties and the fifties, and especially perhaps of the Second World War years, when the American conviction acquired the force of a crusade, and sent its jeeps, its technicians and its Betty Grables almost as sacred pledges across the world. Los Angeles then was everyone’s vision of the New World: and so it must always remain, however it develops, a memorial to those particular times, as Florence means for everyone the spirit of Renaissance.

Across the car park from the remains of the original Spanish pueblo, where the Mexican souvenir shops now huddle profitably along Olvera Street, there stands Union Station. This was the last great railway depot to be built in the United States, completed in 1939, and one of the most handsome. Cool, tall, elegant, and nowadays restfully unfrequented by trains, it has patios green with flowers and trees, shaded colonial-style arcades, and is rather the sort of railway station a multi-billionaire might devise, if he wanted one at the bottom of the garden. In this it is very proper, for while paying graceful respect to LA’s origins and pretensions, it honours too the first and fundamental quality of this city: organized, stylized movement.

It was not liberty that Los Angeles cherished in its prime, or at least not absolute liberty. A spiritual culture can be anarchical, a material culture must be disciplined. Implicit to the promise of technological fulfilment
was the necessity of
system
, and LA soon became a firmly ordered place. The original Los Angeles public transport system, the electric trains and streetcars of the early twentieth century, drew together the scattered settlements of the time, bringing them all into cityness.

When the car arrived the mesh was tightened, and LA built its incomparable freeways. These remain the city’s grandest and most exciting artefacts. Snaky, sinuous, undulating, high on stilts or sunk in cuttings, they are like so many concrete tentacles, winding themselves around each block, each district, burrowing, evading, clambering, clasping every corner of the metropolis as if they are squeezing it all together to make the parts stick. They are inescapable, not just visually, but emotionally. They are always there, generally a few blocks away; they enter everyone’s lives, and seem to dominate all arrangements.

To most strangers they suggest chaos, or at least purgatory. There comes a moment, though, when something clicks in one’s own mechanism, and suddenly one grasps the rhythm of the freeway system, masters its tribal or ritual forms, and discovers it to be not a disruptive element at all, but a kind of computer key to the use of Los Angeles. One is processed by the freeways. Elevated as they generally are above the flat and centreless expanse of the city, they provide a navigational aid, into which one locks oneself for guidance. Everything is clearer then. There are the mountains, to the north and east. There is the glimmering ocean. The civic landmarks of LA, such as they are, display themselves conveniently for you, the pattern of the place unfolds until, properly briefed by the experience, the time comes for you to unlock from the system and take the right-hand lane into the everyday life below.

The moment this first happened to me, Los Angeles happened too, and I glimpsed the real meaning of the city, and realized how firmly it had been disciplined by the rules of its own conviction.

Confusing, nevertheless, the Santa Ana with the San Diego Freeway, missing the exit at Bristol, mistaking Newport Avenue for Newport Boulevard, getting in the wrong lane at Victoria, miscounting the traffic lights on 22nd Street, an hour late exactly I arrived for lunch with the world’s greatest authority on European naval history in the early twentieth century.

Through apparent chaos to unmistakable authority. This was a not uncharacteristic Los Angeles experience. Expertise is the stock in trade of this metropolis, and behind the flash and the braggadocio, solid skills and
scholarship prosper. There are craftsmen everywhere in LA, craftsmen in electronics, in film-making, in literature, in social science, in advertising, in fashion. Here Lockheed makes its aircraft. Here NASA makes its space shuttle orbiter. Here is UCLA, one of the most fertile universities in the Western world. Here the McCulloch Corporation has patented a device to pop the golf ball
out
of the hole, to save its owner stooping. This is no place for dilettantes. Even sport is assiduously, sometimes grimly, pursued: the tennis players of Beverly Hills joylessly strain towards perfection, the Malibu surfers seldom lark about, but take their pleasures with a showy dedication.

I went one morning to Burbank Studios to see them filming Neil Simon’s macabre comedy,
Murder
by
Death
. This is one of those movies in which everyone is a star, and the set was cluttered with familiar figures. There was Truman Capote, described in the studio publicity as ‘acclaimed author and international celebrity’, huddled with a young friend in a corner and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. There was Peter Falk, charmingly chatting with Elsa Lanchester. Alec Guinness looked truly gentlemanly, David Niven looked almost too elegant. Ray Stark the producer looked preternaturally successful, Robert Moore the director looked alarmingly gifted.

I am antipathetic to the famous, though, and I found that my eyes kept straying from these luminaries to the two sound technicians who, just off the set, sat nonchalantly over their equipment wearing headsets and reading the trade papers. One was called Jerry Jost, the other Bill Manooth, and they had both been in the business twenty years and more. How calm they looked, I thought, how sure of themselves, how easily aware of the fact that nobody in the whole world could do their job better than they could! They had seen the stars come and go, they had helped to make flops and winners, they had suffered every temperament, they had seen the film industry itself in boom and decline. Sometimes they looked up to exchange a pleasantry with a passer-by, sometimes they turned a page of the
Hollywood
Reporter
: but they were always alert when the moment came, always watching their quivering instruments, always ready to mouth the magic word ‘Speed!’ – which, with its assurance that they had got things right, gave the signal to that whole assembly, director, cameraman, actors, Capote and all, to proceed with their flamboyances.

For somewhere near the heart of the LA ethos there lies, unexpectedly, a layer of solid, old-fashioned, plain hard work. This is a city of hard workers. Out on the hills at Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the writer
Christopher Isherwood and the painter Don Bachardy share a house, sunlit and easy-going, with a view over the rooftops and shrubberies of the canyon. In such a place, with such occupants, in such warm and soothing sun, with the beach down the road and Hollywood up the freeway, it might seem a house for cultivated indolence, interminable wit around a swimming pool, long cool drinks with worldly neighbours before lunch. Not at all. ‘We are
working
people,’ Isherwood says, and so they literally are: each at his own end of the house, each with his art, the one surrounded by his books, the other by his brushes and pictures, carefully and skilfully they work through the day, friends and fellow labourers.

I very much like all this. It suggests to me, unexpectedly, the guild spirit of some medieval town, where the workers in iron or lace, the clockmakers and the armourers, competed to give their city the glory of their trades. All the mechanisms of Los Angeles are like apprentices to these matters: the robot lights and the TV cameras, the scudding helicopters, the labouring oil pumps bowed like slaves across the city, or the great telescopes of Mount Wilson, brooding among their conifers high above the city, which in the years before the Second World War more than doubled man’s total knowledge of the physical universe.

It is true that this expertise is sometimes rather dated, but then LA is essentially a survivor of earlier times, and one is constantly plucked back to that simpler world of the forties, when values were surer than they are now, and the attainment of wealth or fame seemed a true gauge of contentment.

Nostalgia blurs the realities of Hollywood, the Versailles of Los Angeles, and peoples it for ever with the royalty of another era, the Astaires, the Tracys, the Garbos, and nobles of even earlier vintage. Now as always the tourist buses circumnavigate the Homes of the Stars, and the touts peddle their street plans on Sunset Strip. Now as always Hollywood feeds upon narcissism, cosseted in sycophancy and sustained by snobbery. Scattered over the Hollywood Hills, and over the Santa Monica Mountains into the San Fernando Valley, the houses of the movie people stand sealed and suspicious in the morning, the only sounds the swishing of their sprinklers, the snarling of their guard dogs, or perhaps the laboured breathing of their gardeners: and in their garages the cars are profligately stacked, Jag beside Merc, Rolls upstaging BMW. Hollywood prefers its own world to ours, loving and living, generation after generation, its own fairly tawdry legend.