A Writer's World (60 page)

But just as the Zephyr, labouring heavily eastward, seemed a quaint anachronism in the world of e-mail and TGV, so those dear people seemed left over from some different society altogether. Each morning
my attendant slipped the morning paper under my door (I could have helped myself to morning tea, too, but the machine at the end of the corridor was defective). Every day it was full of anxieties and uncertainties almost inconceivable in that pleasant company: not just the horror of everyday violence that we have learnt to accept as part of the American way, but a vast broiling stew of distrust, foreboding and ethnic hostility through which the great nation passes, like the Zephyr, with incessant rattling and unexplained delays.

Even as we sat so convivially over our plastic plates of salad in the dining car, we felt these toxicities intruding. Our conversation faltered as we found ourselves heading for some ethnic or feminist quicksand, the footballer being black, the lady from Omaha politically immaculate. We skirted them, of course, as the nice people we all were, but those moments were like jets of hot, unhealthy air suddenly penetrating the Zephyr’s cool air-conditioning.

Outside our windows, as we all knew, beyond the splendid landscapes, things were by no means so genteel. Out there it was a battleground: rich v. poor, women v. men, the drugged v. the sober, black v. white v. Hispanic v. American Indian v. Korean v. Jew. The nation that used to think of itself as a melting-pot of all the peoples is more fissiparous than I have ever known it, with no grand leader or even common loyalty to unify it. A people preoccupied with role models looks no higher than rock stars, athletes, actors, miscellaneous two-bit celebrities and even criminals for its shots of charisma. Yet that other America is in turn a role model for the world.

I travel in a different spirit from Paul Theroux, the prince of railroad passengers. He assumes, for professional purposes, the character of a curmudgeon. I am ingratiating almost to a fault – a literary Mary Poppins, as one of those damned Australian critics recently suggested. However, I did have one altercation on the Zephyr. My ticket, I had been told, entitled me to anything I liked on the menu, but when I asked for cornflakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast I was told that I was entitled to one or the other, but not both. I called for the supervisor to expostulate, as I thought Theroux would, but I did not get far. This was the old America after all, and the talk was straight. I had got it wrong, the functionary said, not unkindly, and I quote him word for word: ‘You’re not from this country. You don’t speak the lingo.’

But the girl from Fresno said she thought that man had been rather rude, and one of the train buffs offered to share his scrambled eggs with me –
only fair, really, because I had already urged upon him some of my Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade.

After dark I went down alone to the Plain, the great playing-field and parade ground of the US Military Academy at West Point. This was like an American fiction. A moon was rising, the Hudson lay dark and velvety below, and across the grass a solitary skunk came snuffling through the dusk. Now and then aircraft winked their way overhead. A train wailed somewhere. A tug and its barges laboured upstream towards Albany. A military police car coasted inquisitively by. There was not another soul about, down there above the river, but in the great monastic buildings of the Academy, dimly crowned by their chapel tower, myriad lights steadily and silently burnt.

Four thousand four hundred young American men and women, I knew, were hard at work in there: steadfast before computer screens, deep into ballistic theories, economic principles, translations from the Russian, comparative equations or historical relevances. They were being prepared as an elite, an officer corps to lead the armies of the Republic into a world subject more than ever to American power and decision – the world of the Pax Americana. My few minutes alone there seemed to me an almost transcendental experience: one of those moments of travel when history, place and circumstance all seem in collusion to proclaim some truth or other, if we can only discover what it is. The police car came back again. ‘You OK, ma’am?’ Sure, I said, quite OK: just watching the skunk.

It was true that I had never seen a skunk in the wild before, but in fact I was contemplating the moment. I cannot deny that I was greatly depressed just then by the condition of the United States, which seemed more than usually sunk in crime, corruption and hypocrisy, bewildered by racialism and enervated by crackpot introspections. West Point was like a world of its own, a place where the old American values counted still, honour and
duty were watchwords and to tell a lie was to betray one’s heritage: a place too, so it appeared that evening, where purpose was so exactly matched by appearance that the whole scene became an allegory.

Next day I went back in daylight, and saw the future elite for myself – classes of ’92 to ’95. Every day at noon the entire Corps of Cadets parades in its grey working uniform between the statues of Eisenhower and MacArthur, with Washington on his high plinth in the middle. Some of the West Point mystique, accumulated since the Academy’s foundation in 1802, is then on display for any passer-by to see. Ensigns flutter. A band plays. Swords flash. Tradition’s Long Grey Line is regimentally massed. And one of the place’s better-known peculiarities is publicly demonstrated.

The quizzing of the ‘plebes’, or freshmen (freshpersons, as the world outside West Point would probably call them) is a demanding ritual. There in the open air, on the parade ground, first-year cadets are orally examined by their seniors in anything from the dates of presidents to the contents of that morning’s
New
York
Times
. I watched it all through my binoculars, and alarming indeed were the attitudes of the examining seniors, testing the responses of the apparently terrified freshmen, as with military severity snap questions were put and answers offered. Sometimes lists of names were demanded. Sometimes they seemed to be reciting poems, or perhaps military regulations. Sometimes songs were compulsorily sung.

‘Is that some patriotic ballad?’ I asked of a senior cadet, as a not very musical salvo of melody reached me from the other end of the ground. ‘Ma’am,’ he replied (courtesy is endemic at West Point), ‘Ma’am, I believe that is the national anthem’ – and hardly had he spoken than the band struck up, orders were barked, swords were shouldered, and the whole grey seething mass swarmed up the steps into Washington Hall, where a plain but nourishing lunch awaited it.

Actually they were bellowing, so I later learnt, the
second
verse
of the National Anthem. Everyone knows the first verse, after all, and almost nothing about West Point is easy, or exactly simple. Hanging around the place another time, when the cadets were coming out of class, I noticed that whenever juniors passed badged seniors, they uttered a kind of mantra. What they were saying was this: ‘Beat Louisville, Sir’ – ‘Beat Louisville, Sir’ – ‘Beat Louisville, Sir’. Louisville was West Point’s next football opponent, and having to remember the fact, and mouth this esoteric spell time and time again as they walked across the campus,
was one of the subtle ways in which the Academy brainwashes its recruits. Brainwashing it undoubtedly is. The West Point System, as it is constantly called (reminding me uncomfortably of the names they used to give especially horrid Victorian methods of penal discipline) – the West Point System presupposes that the new recruit has to be recreated from scratch. All the high-school swank has to be scoured, all childish pride expunged, and since this is achieved not by members of the staff, but by the endless harassing and criticism of cadets only a few years senior, the whole nature of military discipline and hierarchy is experienced. Now you are the unfortunate underdog, now you are in command: you know the bitter trade from both sides.

At the same time the pressure of daily life is merciless, the pace terrific, the standard of everything frighteningly high. A cadet graduates from West Point not only with a science degree, but with a military education both theoretical and practical, and a physique transformed by endless exercise. There is no slouching about on this campus. Everybody moves at a spanking pace, left right, left right, head up, eyes often a bit glazed, generally sunk in thought – trying to remember differential calculi, perhaps, or what the
Times
said that morning about economic conditions in Sumatra.

It is a hard, calculated regime, and some of those plebes look tired enough to wring a mother’s heart. Observe though some of their seniors, as they prepare for the afternoons’ exercise! Handsome and amiable young giants jog down to the football field. Astonishingly energetic girls do violent aerobics. Sweating toughs lift enormous weights, throw themselves around exercise bars, or do so many press-ups, with such enthusiasm, that it exhausts me just to watch them. ‘Let’s go!’ cry the coaches, ‘Lift those knees!’ ‘Carry that ball!’ – breaking off sometimes to offer me a polite ‘Hi’ as I meander flabbily past.

I was seeing it only from the outside, but nevertheless I was greatly cheered up by all this. A quarter of West Point’s cadets drop out, and I don’t blame them, but the ones who survive seem to me just fine. I tried hard to detect symptoms of fraud, hypocrisy or Rambo arrogance in the ones I met, but they seemed to me, to resurrect a phrase, ladies and gentlemen every one. If it is an elite that West Point produces, it is a very attractive elite, and hardly homogeneous: there are cadets black, brown and yellow, Jewish cadets, many bespectacled cadets, cadets short and even cadets who look to me a little plump for press-ups. They come from all backgrounds, posh to poor, and the one thing they have in common, so West Point likes to think (me, too) is the devotion instilled to them, during their four years
in the place, to principles that the Founding Fathers would have approved of.

I am anything but a militarist – more of a pacifist-anarchist, actually – and I was surprised to find myself, as I pottered around West Point, so attracted by its atmosphere. Partly, of course, it was the contrast between this place of old-school values and the contemporary squalors outside. Partly perhaps it was the aesthetic appeal of order and tradition, set against the glorious landscape of the Hudson valley. But perhaps it was chiefly a sense of nostalgic
déjà vu
. In the days when we British were masters of the world we too consciously produced an elite to keep it straight, and West Point has a lot in common with the schools that educated the English governing classes.
Mens
sana in
corpore
sana
, a healthy mind in a healthy body – that was their ideal, as it is the Academy’s now, and they too liked to suppose that they were educating a band of brothers, united in trust and loyalty, to organize a New World Order, in those days called the Pax Britannica.

Hyped up as I was by these conjectures, West Point never let me relax, just as it never lets the Long Grey Line drop its guard. Everywhere I went trophies and symbolisms prodded me: rows of captured artillery, benches inscribed with ‘Dignity’, ‘Perseverance’, ‘Responsibility’, eagles and crossed swords, the flag on a flagpole forty feet high, the Cadets’ Prayer (‘guard us against flippancy and irreverence’) the Academy motto (‘Duty, Honor, Country’), the sundial presented by the Class of ’33 (‘From its Time and Place in the Long Grey Line’), the vulgar gold and ivory baton surrendered by Reich-Marshal Goering, the very antithesis of a West Pointer, to the forces of Truth in 1945. ‘Beat Louisville, Sir,’ mumbled the plebes. ‘Duty, Honor, Country’, thundered the text around General McArthur’s statue. ‘To be good officers, you must be good men’, said the shade of General Sherman. ‘If you admit you’re wrong,’ I heard a coach assure his perspiring footballers, ‘you’re already right, and you don’t get yelled at.’

Best of all, most genuinely inspiring, was a little cameo I saw on my last afternoon at West Point. It was a Saturday, and many of the cadets were preparing to receive visitors, or go out. I saw one vigorous plebe emerging from her barracks in what I took to be her semi-dress uniform – not the famous ceremonial one that we always see in West Point photographs, with the cross-belting and the plumed hat, but a trim grey trouser suit with a shiny-peaked cap, very smart and very flattering (if one may dare say such a thing, in such a context), to her lithe figure.

I followed her down the path towards the Eisenhower statue – left right, left right, head up, arms swinging, brisk as could be to where her father was waiting to meet her: and then – talk about symbolisms! He was your very image of a kindly homespun countryman, a figure from an old magazine cover, wearing boots and a floppy brown hat, his face shining with pride and happiness. She broke into a run, her cap went skew-whiff for a moment, and into his strong American arms she fell.

It’s been rough weather in Manhattan, but I haven’t cared. I’ve wrapped up warm and enjoyed myself. In the Colombian seaport of Cartagena there is, or used to be, a big bronze sculpture of a pair of well-worn boots, recalling the remark of a local poet that he loved the city in the way he loved some old familiar footwear. After four decades of knowing Manhattan I have come to feel the same about this legendary sink and summit of the world.

Old boots as a metaphor of Manhattan! You may well laugh. They are not very smart boots either. They need soleing and heeling. They leak a bit. They creak. They could do with a polish. I’ve got used to them, though; and in the winter especially, when the city is so often snarled up in catastrophe, I can almost see them standing there, scrawled about with graffiti, beloved and familiar among the snows of Central Park. Manhattan in the cold has always been a sentimental sort of place. Miracles happen on 34th Street. The other day I saw a young man at the Rockefeller Center ice-rink actually fall on his knees before his partner to press his ring upon her finger: the girl performed an ecstatic pirouette of acceptance, and the crowd fondly applauded.