A Writer's World (59 page)

Ever and again in this haunted country one comes across monuments to the dead, of one side or the other: here ten Protestants gunned down by the IRA at Kingsmills in County Armagh, remembered now in gold lettering on black shiny marble; there three young Catholics ambushed and killed by British undercover agents at Strabane in County Tyrone, commemorated by wooden crosses in the field where they died. In the churchyard at Scotstown, in County Monaghan, I stood before the grave of Seamus McElwain, a young IRA man whose whole life had been a succession of bloodshed and imprisonments, until he was killed by British soldiers in a nearby meadow. His epitaph was in Irish, and on the cross, together with the relief of a bird escaping through a mesh of barbed wire, was affixed a coloured photograph of him, a good-looking dark-haired boy in a dinner jacket. The tears came to my eyes as I stood there: (the wind rustling the hedges all around), and a gardener working near by asked me if perhaps I was a McElwain myself? But I said I was crying for them all, whatever side they were on. ‘That’s the truth,’ he said, ‘that’s the truth.’

In some places the fact of the contemporary Troubles is so much a part of life that the people continue their daily affairs apparently impervious to the bizarre and awful things happening all around them. In Belfast hardly anybody seems to notice the weirdly screened and armoured trucks that trundle around the city, or the infantry patrols that wander ever and again down perfectly ordinary city streets – I saw a patrolling soldier one evening, in Donegal Square, which is the very heart of Belfast, tuck his gun under his arm for a moment in order to draw some money out of a cash-card machine. In the country many villages seem able to close their eyes to the army installations hideously embedded in their midst, shut off from the community by barbed wire or high walls, their radio aerials protruding high above the rooftops. Eerie tall watchposts stand in the middle of the countryside, and on back roads along the frontier you may see white crosses painted on the tarmac – location signs for the army helicopters which perpetually prowl around.

The unhappiest place of all seemed to me the village of Crossmaglen, in south Armagh, made notorious over the decades by the many killings and bombings there. It stands in the heart of what the tabloids like to call the Bandit Country, or the Killing Fields, where the Irish Republican nationalists, though within British territory, are in generally unchallenged control, and on my way there I saw a large hand-written notice attached ominously to a telegraph pole, warning that somebody or other was an informer.

I would not like to be that man in Crossmaglen, for the whole village felt
privy to conspiracy. It was very silent, very empty, and people seemed to talk to each other generally in undertones. They tell me known Protestants, let alone members of the armed forces, are distinctly unwelcome in the town pubs, and even in the coffee shop where I stopped for a hamburger people responded to my bright enquiries kindly enough, but warily, avoiding my eye, I thought.

Poor Crossmaglen! A pleasant enough village, like many another, it ought to be a place of convivial merriment, and perhaps one day it will be, but for the moment it is terribly depressing. The large central square (in which at least seventeen British soldiers have been killed) is surveyed from one side by an indescribably sinister army post, thirty or forty feet high, surrounded by barbed wire and made of brownish concrete, through whose narrow slits silent figures, vaguely to be discerned, stare down upon the village – over their gun barrels, one assumes. It is like some monster of space fiction, or perhaps a robot. Immediately below this fort is a memorial erected by the populace to their own patriots, in Irish and in English:

I stood in the silence and copied the inscription in my notebook, and when I walked away I saw a hand forlornly waving me goodbye from one of those fortress slits.

It is one of the few big American cities that never succumbed to the high-rise epidemic, and although the Portland Building, Michael Graves’ original exercise in post-modernism, cast a chill through me as an awful portent of what was going to follow it, for the most part meandering through the streets was very agreeable. The blocks are unusually short in Portland, making for pleasant serendipity, the architecture is mostly genial, there are plenty of coffee-shops, not all of them insisting that you drink their cappuccino out of plastic cups, and the gloriously rambling Powell’s City of Books must be one of the best bookshops on earth.

Travel is free on the downtown public transport system, and what with the cleanness and sensibleness of everything, the evident prosperity and the prospect of a late lunch at the Heathman Hotel (red snapper, perhaps, with a glass of one of the excellent local whites), I thought what a lesson in civility Portland, Oregon, offered the world at large.

But following the tourist signs towards the Old Town District and Chinatown, and expecting the usual harmless flummery of restored gas-lamps and dragon-gates, I crossed Burnside Street and found myself in a corner of hell. Suddenly all around me were the people of Outer America, flat out on the sidewalk, propped against walls, sitting on steps, some apparently drugged, some evidently about to vomit and nearly all of them, it occurred to me, idly wondering whether it was worth while mugging me as I passed. They were of all ages and several colours. They did not look exactly hostile, or even despairing, but simply stupefied, as though life and history had condemned them to permanent poverty-stricken sedation.

Every city has its seamy underside, and American cities more than most. The moment came as a shock to me in Portland because here the well-off and the poor, the hopeful and the hopeless, not to mention the whites and the coloureds, are more than usually separated. A languid stranger could spend a week at the Heathman, with intermissions at the City of Books, almost without realizing that poverty, crime or crack existed here at all, or any un-Caucasians except exquisitely urbane Asiatics. Portland has repeatedly been voted one of the most Liveable Cities in the United States, and if you choose the right part to live in, it undoubtedly is.

When I withdrew across Burnside again to a restorative coffee in a more soothing part of town, I found myself paradoxically reminded of another country altogether. In India, within the scrambled millions of the poor, there exists a complete modern nation, rich, sophisticated, worldly, which if it could be isolated and moved somewhere else, would constitute a formidably capable state of the middle rank. This thought led me on to some uncomfortable conjectures: while educated India forms a small minority, civilized America is presumably a majority – but for how long, I wondered as I looked around me over my coffee cup at the kindly, comfortable faces of the American centre? And how civilized?

The gods have loved America, but I sometimes think they are already making it mad. One expects insanity among those poor huddled masses of the sidewalk, but every time I come to this country I feel that the neuroses and paranoias are spreading, across all the Burnside Streets of the nation, into the amiable neighbourhoods over the way. Suburban nerves twitch ceaselessly, downtown eyes flicker, as the monstrous contrasts and energies of capitalism unalloyed tear away at the communal composure.

The Americans, even those civilized Americans of the centre, have gone half-crazy already with legalism, feminism and political correctness. They
are well on the way to the asylum with sexual obsessions. They are moonstruck by matters grotesque and macabre, from clowns to vampires. They are so addled by the allure of violence that in America now there are more federally licensed gun dealers than there are gas stations, and one of their incessant self-lacerating polls recently showed that half their school-children knew how to get hold of a firearm.

On the front of the Portland Building there is a truly colossal female figure, whom I now know to be Portlandia herself. I asked three passers-by, two men and a woman, who she was. The woman said that, although she found the figure ‘pretty’, she had no idea of its identity. Both the men seemed never to have given the matter a thought. This struck me as odd, since the image is the second largest hammered copper sculpture in the world, beaten only by the Statue of Liberty, but I later reached the conclusion that it was only a symptom of the general alienation. If Portlandia were dripping blood, or in the process of being mutated into a dinosaur, everyone would know all about her: as it is, she is robustly healthy and well-balanced, and so hardly worth noticing.

I pick up a newspaper, and here is a plastic surgeon assuring potential male clients that for $10,000-odd they can have chest implants, abdominal liposuction and calf implants which will ensure ‘a fine looking physique for the busy executive without spending endless hours in the gym’. Buried away on an inside page is the news that a man who was about to be executed for a murder in Oklahoma has been temporarily reprieved because he first has to serve twenty years for a murder in New York. Almost every agony column displays self-questionings, religious ravings, breakdowns of trust, preposterous grievances of age, gender, race or condition; even some of the comic cartoons have moved into a disoriented kind of surrealism.

You can be sure that at any hour of any day, one television channel or another will be showing scenes of appalling bloodshed, cases live from a criminal court, chat shows concerning child abuse, marital disharmony, sexual misbehaviour, predatory law-suits. No self-respecting best-seller is without its detailed evocations of couplings, masturbations, dismemberments or disembowellings, and nobody seems particularly surprised that an Oregon Senator presently stands accused of sexual malpractice (whatever that may mean in PC-speak) towards a sizeable number of his employees.

Mad! Yet this is the Great Republic whose founding principles were nothing if not rational, and whose purposes were all harmonious. From the very beginning the United States has satisfied many of the universal
human yearnings, and shared with all of us the recipes of its success. Declaration of Independence to Bob Dylan, Hollywood and John Cheever and the dry martini and the Freedom of Information Act – the list of American blessings is endless, and their adoption and imitation around the world has brought us infinite good.

They have been, though, the gifts of a culture supremely confident and logical, recognizably the culture in fact that Jefferson and his colleagues created. What is emerging in America now, still to be exported willy-nilly around the globe, is a jumble of philosophies so distracted, so uncertain, that they seem to lack any cohesion at all, and are more like the nervous responses of hostages than any body of ruling values. The centre, it seems to me, is only just holding, and is patently showing the strain: yet still it stands as exemplar to most of the world, copied in blind faith everywhere, and especially among peoples like the English and the Canadians who share a language with the Americans, and whose own sense of identity is weakened or uncertain.

And waiting just over the street there is the other culture, America Ulteria, or perhaps America Ultima, the inchoate slouching presence which is giving the nation these disturbing jitters. It has no standards of its own. It has little to lose, and not much hope of winning. Its language is half-comprehensible, its reasoning is obscure, but one day America and the world may wake up to find that like the destitute masses of India, it is less the exception than the norm.

That evening I gave a reading in the Arlene Schnitzer Hall – the Schnitz for short, I believe – a splendid concert hall next door to the Heathman. I never enjoyed an occasion more. The audience was immensely quick, generous and entertaining, and at the reception afterwards people raised many penetrating points about the influence of travel upon the work of Virginia Woolf, and the proper place of the imagination in non-fiction.

‘Jesus Christ!’ were the very first words the sleeper attendant said to me, when I boarded Amtrak’s California Zephyr at Emeryville, Calif., on my way to Chicago. They seemed the
mots
justes
, for the boarding process was
an awful shambles – we had to walk through another train to get to ours, with a fearful confusion of bags and mystified passengers. ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked the attendant. ‘It don’t always start like this,’ he replied, ‘but it don’t take them but a minute to
get
it like this.’

I didn’t mind. I was boarding the famous train just for the romance of it – for a taste of an older America. I had lately been dazzled by the futuristic virtuosity of young California, Internet, the information super-highway and all that. I had marvelled at its enthusiasm and inventiveness, but now I felt like taking a restful step backwards. I would be experiencing, so the brochure assured me, the utmost in train travel, ‘Enjoying On-board Accommodations That Pamper and Please!’ It is 2,420 miles from Emeryville to Chicago, a journey of three days and two nights, and I wasn’t a bit put out by that kerfuffle at the start (which was due, it was later explained to me, to the fact that the Coast Starlight had arrived from Seattle two hours late).

The romance was certainly there. Our ten double-decker blue, red and silver coaches, with their two locomotives and four baggage cars, thundered through desert, prairie and mountain gorge just like in the movies, occasionally rounding so spectacular a bend that from my window I could see both ends at the same time, and half-expected to find goodies and baddies struggling on the roof. We glimpsed the mothball fleet of Suisun Bay. We went through Reno, The Biggest Little City in the World. We skirted Donner Lake where, in 1846, a party of stranded immigrants cast lots and ate each other. We passed Verdi and Elko and the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. For 238 miles we followed the banks of the Rio Grande, ‘the longest’ (said a train announcement) ‘any major railroad follows any major river in the world’. Unfortunately it was dark when we passed the water tower at Stanton, Nebraska, which is shaped like a coffee-pot, but we saw the Mississippi all right as we clanked over the bridge at Burlington.

Sometimes our whistle authentically wailed. Sometimes, the Zephyr being a no-smoking environment, we made a smoking stop and a handful of tense-looking addicts climbed down to puff their cigarettes at some more or less deserted halt where they could do no harm. We spent an hour at the funereal railway station at Denver, which is monumental but which nowadays handles only two passenger trains a day. We bought fruit and bananas on the platform at Grand Junction, the farm-wives awaiting us at their stalls for all the world like babushkas on the Trans-Siberian. We paused briefly at small towns of the Middle West, Osceola
and Mount Pleasant and Ottumwa (famous, so the brochure told me, as the hometown of Radar O’Reilly in M*A*S*H), where families waiting to board, with bags and excited children against a backdrop of clapboard houses and corner drugstores, made even the towering Zephyr feel like a local.

However I cannot claim that the old America seemed to be working as well as it used to. The California Zephyr appeared to be run in a mood of elderly, but on the whole genial, resignation. ‘Jesus Christ,’ said my sleeper attendant once more, when I reported to him that my bed had collapsed beneath me, and he had to prop it up with an egg crate borrowed from the dining car. The loudspeaker in my compartment was not audible, so I was obliged to go into the corridor to hear the announcements. But I still did not mind. Stuffing a pillow in the lavatory door soon stopped it rattling and the shower never did flood the compartment, as I had been warned it sometimes did. The maximum legal speed of the Zephyr is 79 mph, only sporadically achieved, and I realized that the motion I had thought of as ‘pounding’ was really more like ‘plodding’; but hell, what was the hurry?

And in any case my fellow-passengers were all I could ask for. Not a computer evangelist, hardly a cellular phone among the lot of them. ‘Oh, how I wish those trees would get out of my way, so I could photograph a real Iowa farmhouse!’ said my companion at breakfast one morning: she had never been on a train in her life before, she had seldom left Fresno, California, and she came straight out of a fifties movie. She couldn’t wait to see Chicago! She couldn’t wait to see her best friend in Akron, Ohio! She couldn’t wait to – and oh, look, there’s a Little League baseball diamond! ‘Isn’t that real
neat
? Don’t you guys think that’s real neat?’

A former professional footballer (Green Bay Packers) taught me all I needed to know about pro football. Several passionate railroad buffs kept me informed about the state of the track. One woman engaged me in a challenging discourse about evolution, another had strong views on capital punishment. I commiserated with some of those pallid smokers – I thought they should have had a coach to themselves. I told an elderly lady that on the whole I thought I would
not
join her, as she kindly suggested, in her retirement home in Omaha. I loved them all. They were all one wants America to be: long-winded, opinionated and essentially good.