A Writer's World (61 page)

One evening I was taken to a venerable mid-town club, and was persuaded by a mature and most courtly waiter to sample its celebrated inhouse cocktail, which seemed to be something to do with rum and was served in a silver tankard. ‘When I was a little boy,’ said my host, ‘I used to be brought here by my father, and he always let me have one.’ How touchingly Old New York, I thought: the kindly Exeter-and-Harvard Daddy, the eager boy in his best suit, the smiling avuncular servants, the happy sense of continuity and complicity – for the boy’s mother, I’m sure,
would not have approved. Draining my tankard, and unwisely accepting a second, I presently staggered out into 49th Street feeling decidedly sentimental myself (and realizing that, as usual, Mother had been right).

Scarf-wrapped, woolly-hatted, gloved and ear-muffed, all mid-Manhattan becomes rather Old New York at this time of the year – and not least when some appalling weather-front storms out of the ocean. Then the inhabitants of the place become almost Norman Rockwellian in their manners. Of course behind the rosy cheeks and frosted whiskers all the usual malice lies dormant. The pickpocket, we need not doubt, wistfully eyes our handbags. The rapist reluctantly stifles his passions. The intolerable dogmatist harbours her political correctness. The serial killer takes a hold of himself. The racialist smiles companionably enough at the laughing ethnic family, as they all slither together across the frozen intersection, but still secretly wishes the motherfuckers would all go back where they came from. But for the moment the villainies are suppressed. In this Manhattan, I assure you, evil-looking youths really do come to the help of elderly ladies, murmuring improbable mantras like, ‘It’s a pleasure, ma’am, now you watch how you go …’

I have been helping to make a television film here, and those old boots have often been in my mind. As we have stumbled here and there through the snow, lugging our damned equipment from site to site, climbing over frozen fences, explaining ourselves to inquisitive cops, Manhattan has often seemed a homely kind of place – in the English sense of the word. We filmed on a tug in the harbour one bitter squally dawn. The coffee was always on the boil, the assistant engineer was the son of an African king, the deckhand was very entertaining, the captain was infinitely relaxed, and as we nudged the
QE2
into her moorings, apparently almost without thinking about it, I felt myself in the amiable company of all the hundreds of tug-men and pilots who have nudged ships into these quays since Manhattan was born.

We filmed from a helicopter, too, after the pilot had excused himself for a moment to fly off and find some gasoline. We filmed the annual meet of the Central Park Hunt, scrupulously red-coated ladies and gentlemen taking a stirrup-cup at the Inn on the Park (‘What do you hunt?’ I asked one amiable old cove. ‘People, of course,’ he cried). We would have filmed in the foyer of the Seagram Building, if it had not been for the cheerful choir of office-workers who were giving a lunchtime concert there.

And we filmed in a bus. What homely fun that was! What bonhomie! Only two passengers were unwilling to say something into the camera: the tiny old lady in front of me, who was busy reading the poems of Terence in Latin, and the chalk-faced youth behind, in shades and a woolly cap, who gave me the strong impression that he might be the serial killer I mentioned a few paragraphs back.

There is no affectation to all this. It is true, if temporary. Long ago in New York a friend of mine expounded on American and European varieties of sincerity. The European kind, he theorized, was spontaneous, but did not always run deep. The American kind was embedded under layers of calculation and opportunism, but lay there true and profound beneath. As everyone knows, New Yorkers are Americans only more so, and at desperate moments of winter they cast off the national veneers to reveal the real kindness below. Anyway, even at the worst of times they are spared a particular pretence which has seized most of the rest of the Western world: they do not have to pretend to be Americans. It does not look silly when a New Yorker, white, black, brown or yellow, wears his baseball cap back to front. The New York rock singer sings his lyrics in his own dialect, not in a pastiche of somebody else’s, and the slang of the streets is home-grown, fresh from local sources. The mass culture of this city, as of America as a whole, is altogether indigenous.

God knows the Americans have never evolved a single racial identity, as the old melting-pot idea used to envisage, but as to national identity, no problem. Occasionally I do come across a Lebanese, a Haitian or a Jamaican who wants to go home to die, but for the most part, melting-pot or no melting-pot, nearly all the immigrants I meet in New York are very happy to be American. They are eager to adopt all the traditional American attitudes, from working immensely long hours to exploiting the social security system or wearing their baseball caps back to front.

They are not pretending to be Americans. If not in actual citizenship, or even all too often in legal residence, in true Jeffersonian essentials they
are
Americans. No doubt this organic confidence is partly multi-ethnical. America, and especially its dazzling epitome New York, has a hundred different traditions to draw upon, absorbs them all, and makes nearly everyone feel at home. England, Germany, or even perhaps Australia, have not had much time to adjust to the idea of a nation-of-all-the-races; not only are they uncomfortable with their newcomers, they are uncomfortable with themselves. America has been welcoming its tired,
poor and huddled masses for centuries and, however awful its racial problems, at least offers a sense of national membership to all.

But it has another great advantage, when it comes to a sense of assurance: the advantage of being a superpower. Power is not only an aphrodisiac, it can be a tranquillizer too. It makes people easy with themselves. Manhattan, the greatest of American cities – the
only
American city for me – does not need to ape any place else or reject any place either. It is altogether itself. It speaks a dozen languages, and they are all its own. In the bounty of its self-esteem, as the snow comes down, it can even make a stranger from a small and distant country feel that this most opulent, terrible, magnificent, demanding, alarming, squalid and spectacular metropolis has all the allure of a pair of old boots.

An acquaintance of mine down here, overhearing an exchange I was enjoying with one of the most formidable of the Sydney media bosses, said it reminded her of a confrontation between a Christian and a gladiator. Which of us was the Christian she did not say, but I can guess – Sydneysiders can be a tough bunch, and none come much tougher than your high-powered, high-tech young business people, well-travelled, highly educated, clever, rich, whose steel so often glints a warning beneath a not very velvet glove.

I tread warily in the presence of these people, suspecting that an argument with one of them might be only a step less perilous than actually being thrown to the lions. Not that they are ever discourteous. They have no need to be. Their strength is of the coiled kind, like a whip held in reserve; just when you think it is about to lash out, it is pre-empted by a smile of wolfish charm, deceiving nobody but undeniably disarming. In fact I know of no city whose people, even the most rapacious of them, are more exuberantly welcoming. They may despise your guts, but they seldom let it sour the panache of their hospitality. Foreigners often say that Sydney reminds them of an older America, before the innocence faded. I think this a misinterpretation. The lost American innocence was founded upon a profoundly simple sense of rightness and permanence, supported by lofty ideals and by a conviction of power. The Sydney attitude, I think, reflects a national identity altogether more fragile.

All the more delightful that even in times of economic difficulty Australia, which has so long liked to think of itself as The Lucky Country, still feels the happiest place of all. Every morning I leave the Regent Hotel before breakfast and take my exercise in the Botanic Gardens, beyond the
Opera House gleaming there in the early sun, along the edge of the harbour where the ferries are already foaming past Pinchgut Island to Manly. I speak to nearly everyone I meet. ‘What a marvellous day’, I throw at them in passing, or more often ‘What a marvellous country!’ And everyone seems to answer ‘Yes!’ Not only the stalwart joggers sweating by, and the anglers at the waterfront with their tangles of lines and buckets, and the occasional eccentrics ambling around in comical hats or gum-boots, and the man who practises his trumpet there before the day’s work begins, but the very egrets themselves, foraging spindlily under the foliage of the gardens. It is hard to find a Sydneysider who is not fond of his city, and glad to be an Australian.

In this way it is like an older America. Your new immigrant here generally seems enviably laid-back and optimistic, as though he has fallen among friends. It is true that he may complain about racism among old-school Australians, but he can generally afford to ignore it, and may indeed indulge in a little racism himself, concerning Abos or Poms. The chances are that he has a thriving ethnic community of his own to support him, speaking his language, sharing his heritage and bolstering in him the conviction that he has chosen the right place to come – no problems, take it easy, sit back and enjoy yourself, as Sydney taxi-drivers sometimes say to me.

During my present stay I have employed taxis six times, and I have kept a record of my drivers. One was born in Beirut, and showed me with pride the long row of Lebanese restaurants we passed. One was a Welshman from Bangor. One defied me to identify his origins, and turned out to be from Ecuador. One I rightly guessed to be from Lahore. One came out here on a £10 subsidized fare from England, and one was a Sydney-born financier, temporarily incommoded by the recession. All were helpful, merry and inquisitive (this is a very inquisitive city), offering me no grumbles and not much caring whether I tipped them or not; while the ex-financier, dropping me off for dinner at a private house, sent his kind regards to my hostess, an old acquaintance of his.

I sense a certain unreality about all this, as though Sydney from the very start has been able to ignore unpalatable truths about itself. Even the earliest settlers, dumped on this inconceivably remote and awful shore in the most cheerless of circumstances, seem somehow to have been jolly enough, when they were not being flogged. Perhaps it is the Cockney strain that makes the citizenry so incorrigibly blithe, or perhaps the inherent improbability of the whole situation, the mere survival of this
glittering city on the underside of the globe, makes for a kind of illusory existentialism.

I find myself that after only a few days I am perfectly used to Sydney’s unlikely ambience – those recondite birds pecking and squawking about the gardens, the big black fruit-bats that flap out at night, trees which seem to be growing upside-down, bits of wild bush-land which penetrate the genteel suburbs, and are perfectly likely to have koalas and duck-billed platypuses in them. In no time everything seems perfectly normal, all co-existing easily with the life of a modern European city.

I say ‘European’ advisedly, because the cosmopolitanism of contemporary Sydney is of a decidedly European kind. A century ago James Bryce called Manhattan ‘a European city, but of no particular country’, and the description now fits Sydney just as well. Of course its sub-stratum is aboriginal, its structure is still British, and like all English-speaking cities it has American overtones. More and more of its citizens are Asians. However, for the moment anyway its superficial flavour seems to me vaguely Mediterranean, Italianate, Greekish, Portuguesy, Lebanese-like – cappuccino after its oysters, street cafés, the lights of fishing boats passing beneath the Harbour Bridge in the dark – tinged, though, with the Irishness that has been so potent a part of it since the beginning.

Sydney never strikes me as a very religious city, but largely because of the Irish, Catholicism is resilient here, and now and then, on a day that might be in the Aegean, to a Neapolitan smell of coffee, over a Provençal kind of meal, one is suddenly jerked back to Dublin or even to Knock. I had such a moment only yesterday, crossing the harbour on the elderly ferry-launch that runs between Blues Point and Circular Quay. A very Irish lady, sitting beside me as the boat chugged crab-like across the water, told me sadly that her car had just been stolen, and deliberately driven over a bluff. Never mind, I said, it was only a thing. ‘Only a thing!’ Her eyes misted. ‘Only a thing! Sure that’s the way to look at it. Only a thing! I must look at it that way. God bless you, God bless you for that!’ ‘God bless you too,’ I responded lamely, not knowing, as so often happens in discourse with the Irish, anything better to say.

But that gladiatorial media executive offered me no blessings, nor did I want any from him. It was his hardness I relished, the touch of malevolence behind the charm. Nearly everybody likes modern Sydney, but nobody could call it nice. It is no place for the loser, even now, and if I were a stranger in trouble I would feel more sure of compassion in downtown Manhattan than I would in this fortunate city. Gossip in Sydney is by no
means forgiving, still less discreet. Sometimes making dinner conversation can be like riding a roller-coaster, so dizzy are the revelations, and expressed with such ruthless and hilarious gusto.

It is a city that brings out the reckless in me, and this is partly because I always feel it to be in some sense transitory. It never feels built to last. That gossip is particularly ephemeral and kaleidoscopic, and each time I come here the colours have changed, names in the news have shifted, and I am presented with a new cast of ‘identities’ – Sydney’s word for ‘personalities’.

Identities! Doesn’t it sound like a police-station word? Sydneysiders, once so testily sensitive about the original purpose of their city, are now rather proud of its beginnings, and they will not be resentful when I say that for me one of the fascinations of the place is the feeling I sometimes get – in discourse with one of its more predatory brokers, say, or across the table from some appallingly overpaid and brilliant lawyer – that I am in touch with the irrepressible ebullience of the convicts.