Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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HENRY JAMES
I
ARRIVAL
However sedulously he may have avoided a preparatory reading of those
'impressions' of America which our hurried and observant Great
continually record for the instruction of both nations, the pilgrim who
is crossing the Atlantic for the first time cannot approach Sandy Hook
Bar with so completely blank a mind as he would wish. So, at least, I
found. It is not so much that the recent American invasion of London
music-halls has bitten into one's brain a very definite taste of a
jerking, vital, _bizarre_ 'rag-time' civilisation. But the various
and vivid comments of friends to whom the news of a traveller's
departure is broken excite and predispose the imagination. That so many
people who have been there should have such different and decided
opinions about it! It must be at least remarkable. I felt the thrill of
an explorer before I started. "A country without conversation," said a
philosopher. "The big land has a big heart," wrote a kindly scholar;
and, by the same post, from another critic, "that land of crushing
hospitality!" "It's Hell, but it's fine," an artist told me. "El
Cuspidorado," remarked an Oxford man, brilliantly. But one wiser than
all the rest wrote: "Think gently of the Americans. They are so very
young; and so very anxious to appear grown-up; and so very lovable."
This was more generous than the unvarying comment of ordinary English
friends when they heard of my purpose, "My God!" And it was more precise
than those nineteen several Americans, to each of whom I said, "I am
going to visit America," and each of whom replied, after long
reflection, "Wal! it's a great country!"
Travelling by the ordinary routes, you meet the American people a week
before you meet America. And my excitement to discover what, precisely,
this nation was _at_, was inflamed rather than damped by the
attitude of a charming American youth who crossed by the same boat. That
simplicity that is not far down in any American was very beautifully on
the delightful surface with him. The second day out he sidled shyly up
to me. "Of what nationality _are_ you?" he asked. His face
showed bewilderment when he heard. "I thought all Englishmen had
moustaches," he said. I told him of the infinite variety, within the
homogeneity, of our race. He did not listen, but settled down near me
with the eager kindliness of a child. "You know," he said, "you'll never
understand America. No, Sir. No Englishman can understand America. I've
been in London. In your Houses of Parliament there is one door for peers
to go in at, and one for ordinary people. Did I laugh some when I saw
that? You bet your, America's not like that. In America one man's just
as good as another. You'll never understand America." I was all
humility. His theme and his friendliness fired him. He rose with a
splendour which, I had to confess to myself, England could never have
given to him. "Would you like to hear me re-cite to you the Declaration
of Independence?" he asked. And he did.
So it was with a fairly blank mind, and yet a hope of understanding, or
at least of seeing, something very remarkably fresh, that I woke to hear
we were in harbour, and tumbled out on deck at six of a fine summer
morning to view a new world. New York Harbour is loveliest at night
perhaps. On the Staten Island ferry boat you slip out from the darkness
right under the immense sky-scrapers. As they recede they form into a
mass together, heaping up one behind another, fire-lined and majestic,
sentinel over the black, gold-streaked waters. Their cliff-like boldness
is the greater, because to either side sweep in the East River and the
Hudson River, leaving this piled promontory between. To the right hangs
the great stretch of the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge, its slight curve
very purely outlined with light; over it luminous trams, like shuttles
of fire, are thrown across and across, continually weaving the stuff of
human existence. From further off all these lights dwindle to a radiant
semicircle that gazes out over the expanse with a quiet, mysterious
expectancy. Far away seaward you may see the low golden glare of Coney
Island.
But there was beauty in the view that morning, also, half an hour after
sunrise. New York, always the cleanest and least smoky of cities, lay
asleep in a queer, pearly, hourless light. A thin mist softened the
further outlines. The water was opalescent under a silver sky, cool and
dim, very slightly ruffled by the sweet wind that followed us in from
the sea. A few streamers of smoke flew above the city, oblique and
parallel, pennants of our civilisation. The space of water is great, and
so the vast buildings do not tower above one as they do from the street.
Scale is lost, and they might be any size. The impression is, rather, of
long, low buildings stretching down to the water's edge on every side,
and innumerable low black wharves and jetties and piers. And at one
point, the lower end of the island on which the city proper stands, rose
that higher clump of the great buildings, the Singer, the Woolworth, and
the rest. Their strength, almost severity, of line and the lightness of
their colour gave a kind of classical feeling, classical, and yet not of
Europe. It had the air, this block of masonry, of edifices built to
satisfy some faith, for more than immediate ends. Only, the faith was
unfamiliar. But if these buildings embodied its nature, it is cold and
hard and light, like the steel that is their heart. The first sight of
these strange fanes has queer resemblances to the first sight of that
lonely and secret group by Pisa's walls. It came upon me, at that
moment, that they could not have been dreamed and made without some
nobility. Perhaps the hour lent them sanctity. For I have often noticed
since that in the early morning, and again for a little about sunset,
the sky-scrapers are no longer merely the means and local convenience
for men to pursue their purposes, but acquire that characteristic of the
great buildings of the world, an existence and meaning of their own.
Our boat moved up the harbour and along the Hudson River with a superb
and courteous stateliness. Round her snorted and scuttled and puffed the
multitudinous strange denizens of the harbour. Tugs, steamers, queer-
shaped ferry-boats, long rafts carrying great lines of trucks from
railway to railway, dredgers, motor-boats, even a sailing-boat or two;
for the day's work was beginning. Among them, with that majesty that
only a liner entering a harbour has, she went, progressed, had her
moving--English contains no word for such a motion--"_incessu patuit
dea_." A goddess entering fairyland, I thought; for the huddled
beauty of these buildings and the still, silver expanse of the water
seemed unreal. Then I looked down at the water immediately beneath me,
and knew that New York was a real city. All kinds of refuse went
floating by: bits of wood, straw from barges, bottles, boxes, paper,
occasionally a dead cat or dog, hideously bladder-like, its four paws
stiff and indignant towards heaven.
This analysis of fairyland turned me towards the statue of Liberty,
already passed and growing distant. It is one of those things you have
long wanted to see and haven't expected to admire, which, seen, give you
a double thrill, that they're at last _there_, and that they're
better than your hopes. For Liberty stands nobly. Americans, always shy
about their country, have learnt from the ridicule which Europeans, on
mixed aesthetic and moral grounds, pour on this statue, to dismiss it
with an apologetic laugh. Yet it is fine--until you get near enough to
see its clumsiness. I admired the great gesture of it. A hand fell on my
shoulder, and a voice said, "Look hard at that, young man! That's the
first time you've seen Liberty--and it will be the last till you turn
your back on this country again." It was an American fellow-passenger,
one of the tall, thin type of American, with pale blue eyes of an
idealistic, disappointed expression, and an Indian profile. The other
half of America, personated by a small, bumptious, eager, brown-faced
man, with a cigar raking at an irritating angle from the corner of his
mouth, joined in with, "Wal! I should smile, I guess this is the Land
of Freedom, anyway." The tall man swung round: "Freedom! do you call it
a free land, where--" He gave instances of the power of the dollar. The
other man kept up the argument by spitting and by asseveration. As the
busy little tugs, with rugs on their noses, butted the great liner into
her narrow dock, the pessimist launched his last shafts. The short man
denied nothing. He drew the cigar from his lips, shot it back with a
popping noise into the round hole cigars had worn at the corner of his
mouth, and said, "Anyway, it's some country." I was introduced to
America.
II
NEW YORK
In five things America excels modern England--fish, architecture, jokes,
drinks, and children's clothes. There may be others. Of these I am
certain. The jokes and drinks, which curiously resemble each other, are
the best. There is a cheerful violence about them; they take their
respective kingdoms by storm. All the lesser things one has heard turn
out to be delightfully true. The first hour in America proves them.
People here talk with an American accent; their teeth are inlaid with
gold; the mouths of car-conductors move slowly, slowly, with an oblique
oval motion, for they are chewing; pavements are 'sidewalks.' It is all
true.... But there were other things one expected, though in no precise
form. What, for instance, would it be like, the feeling of whatever
democracy America has secured?
I landed, rather forlorn, that first morning, on the immense covered
wharf where the Customs mysteries were to be celebrated. The place was
dominated by a large, dirty, vociferous man, coatless, in a black shirt
and black apron. His mouth and jaw were huge; he looked like a
caricaturist's Roosevelt. 'Express Company' was written on his forehead;
labels of a thousand colours, printed slips, pencils and pieces of
string, hung from his pockets and his hands, were held behind his ears
and in his mouth. I laid my situation and my incompetence before him,
and learnt right where to go and right when to go there. Then he flung a
vast, dingy arm round my shoulders, and bellowed, "We'll have your
baggage right along to your hotel in two hours." It was a lie, but
kindly. That grimy and generous embrace left me startled, but an
initiate into Democracy.
The other evening I went a lonely ramble, to try to detect the essence
of New York. A wary eavesdropper can always surprise the secret of a
city, through chance scraps of conversation, or by spying from a window,
or by coming suddenly round corners. I started on a 'car.' American
tram-cars are open all along the side and can be entered at any point in
it. The side is divided by vertical bars. It looks like a cage with the
horizontal lines taken out. Between these vertical bars you squeeze into
the seat. If the seat opposite you is full, you swing yourself along the
bars by your hands till you find room. The Americans become terrifyingly
expert at this. I have seen them, fat, middle-aged business men,
scampering up and down the face of the cars by means of their hands,
swinging themselves over and round and above each other, like nothing in
the world so much as the monkeys at the Zoo. It is a people informed
with vital energy. I believe that this exercise, and the habit of
drinking a lot of water between meals, are the chief causes of their
good health.
The Broadway car runs mostly along the backbone of the queer island on
which this city stands. So the innumerable parallel streets that cross
it curve down and away; and at this time street after street to the west
reveals, and seems to drop into, a mysterious evening sky, full of dull
reds and yellows, amber and pale green, and a few pink flecks, and in
the midst, sometimes, the flushed, smoke-veiled face of the sun. Then
greyness, broken by these patches of misty colour, settles into the
lower channels of the New York streets; while the upper heights of the
sky-scrapers, clear of the roofs, are still lit on the sunward side with
a mellow glow, curiously serene. To the man in the mirk of the street,
they seem to exude this light from the great spaces of brick. At this
time the cars, always polyglot, are filled with shop-hands and workers,
and no English at all is heard. One is surrounded with Yiddish, Italian,
and Greek, broken by Polish, or Russian, or German. Some American
anthropologists claim that the children of these immigrants show marked
changes, in the shape of skull and face, towards the American type. It
may be so. But the people who surround one are mostly European-born.
They represent very completely that H.C.F. of Continental appearance
which is labelled in the English mind 'looking like a foreigner'; being
short, swarthy, gesticulatory, full of clatter, indeterminately alien.
Only in their dress and gait have they--or at least the men among them--
become at all American.
The American by race walks better than we; more freely, with a taking
swing, and almost with grace. How much of this is due to living in a
democracy, and how much to wearing no braces, it is very difficult to
determine. But certainly it is the land of belts, and therefore of more
loosely moving bodies. This, and the padded shoulders of the coats, and
the loosely-cut trousers, make a figure more presentable, at a distance,
than most urban civilisations turn out. Also, Americans take their coats
off, which is sensible; and they can do it the more beautifully because
they are belted, and not braced. They take their coats off anywhere and
any-when, and somehow it strikes the visitor as the most symbolic thing
about them. They have not yet thought of discarding collars; but they
are unashamedly shirt-sleeved. Any sculptor, seeking to figure this
Republic in stone, must carve, in future, a young man in shirt-sleeves,
open-faced, pleasant, and rather vulgar, straw hat on the back of his
head, his trousers full and sloppy, his coat over his arm. The motto
written beneath will be, of course, 'This is some country.' The
philosophic gazer on such a monument might get some way towards
understanding the making of the Panama Canal, that exploit that no
European nation could have carried out.
What facial type the sculptor would give the youth is harder to
determine, and very hard to describe. The American race seems to have
developed two classes, and only two, the upper-middle and the lower-
middle. Their faces are very distinct. The upper-class head is long,
often fine about the forehead and eyes, and very cleanly outlined. The
eyes have an odd, tired pathos in them--mixed with the friendliness that
is so admirable--as if of a perpetual never quite successful effort to
understand something. It is like the face of an only child who has been
brought up in the company of adults. I am convinced it is partly due to
the endeavour to set their standards by the culture and traditions of
older nations. But the mouth of such men is the most typical feature. It
is small, tight, and closed downwards at the corners, the lower lip very
slightly protruding. It has little expression in it, and no curves.
There the Puritan comes out. But no other nation has a mouth like this.
It is shared to some extent by the lower classes; but their mouths tend
to be wider and more expressive. Their foreheads are meaner, and their
eyes hard, but the whole face rather more adaptive and in touch with
life. These, anyhow, are the types that strike one in the Eastern
cities. And there are intermediate varieties, as of the genial business-
man, with the narrow forehead and the wide, smooth--the too wide and
too smooth--lower face. Smoothness is the one unfailing characteristic.
Why do American faces hardly ever wrinkle? Is it the absence of a soul?
It must be. For it is less true of the Bostonian than of the ordinary
business American, in whose life exhilaration and depression take the
place of joy and suffering. The women's faces are more indeterminate,
not very feminine; many of them wear those 'invisible' pince-nez which
centre glitteringly about the bridge of the nose, and get from them a
curious air of intelligence. Handsome people of both sexes are very
common; beautiful, and pretty, ones very rare....
I slipped from my car up about Fortieth Street, the region where the
theatres and restaurants are, the 'roaring forties.' Broadway here might
be the offspring of Shaftesbury Avenue and Leicester Square, with,
somehow, some of Fleet Street also in its ancestry. I passed two men on
the sidewalk, their hats on the back of their heads, arguing fiercely.
One had slightly long hair. The other looked the more truculent, and was
saying to him, intensely, "See here! We contracted with you to supply us
with sonnets at five dollars per sonnet--" I passed up a side-street,
one of those deserted ways that abound just off the big streets,
resorts, apparently, for such people and things as are not quite
strident or not quite energetic enough for the ordinary glare of life;
dim places, fusty with hesternal excitements and the thrills of
yesteryear. Against a flight of desolate steps leant a notice. I stopped
to read it. It said:
"You must see Cockie,
Positively the only bird that can both dance and sing.
She is almost superhuman."
There was no explanation; Cockie may have been dead for years. I went,
musing on her possible fates, towards the pride and spaciousness of
Fifth Avenue.
Fifth Avenue is handsome, the handsomest street imaginable. It is what
the streets of German cities try to be. The buildings are large, square,
'imposing,' built with the solidity of opulence. The street, as a whole,
has a character and an air of achievement. "Whatever else may be doubted
or denied, American civilisation has produced this." One feels rich and
safe as one walks. Back in Broadway, New York dropped her mask, and
began to betray herself once again. A little crowd, expressionless,
intent, and volatile, before a small shop, drew me. In the shop-window
was a young man, pleasant-faced, a little conscious, and a little bored,
dressed very lightly in what might have been a runner's costume. He was
bowing, twisting, and posturing in a slow rhythm. From time to time he
would put a large card on a little stand in the corner. The cards bore
various legends. He would display a card that said, "THIS UNDERWEAR
DOES NOT IMPEDE THE MOVEMENT OF THE BODY IN ANY DIRECTION." Then he
moved his body in every direction, from position to position, probable
or improbable, and was not impeded. With a terrible dumb patience he
turned the next card: "IT GIVES WITH THE BODY IN VIOLENT EXERCISING."
The young man leapt suddenly, lunged, smote imaginary balls, belaboured
invisible opponents, ran with immense speed but no progress, was thrown
to earth by the Prince of the Air, kicked, struggled, then bounded to
his feet again. But all this without a word. "IT ENABLES YOU TO KEEP
COOL WHILE EXERCISING." The young man exercised, and yet was cool. He
did this, I discovered later, for many hours a day.
Not daring to imagine his state of mind, I hurried off through Union
Square. One of the many daily fire-alarms had gone; the traffic was
drawn to one side, and several fire-engines came, with clanging of bells
and shouting, through the space, gleaming with brass, splendid in their
purpose. Before the thrill in the heart had time to die, or the traffic
to close up, swung through an immense open motor-car driven by a young
mechanic. It was luxuriously appointed, and had the air of a private car
being returned from repairing. The man in it had an almost Swinburnian
mane of red hair, blowing back in the wind, catching the last lights of
day. He was clad, as such people often are in this country these hot
days, only in a suit of yellow overalls, so that his arms and shoulders
and neck and chest were bare. He was big, well-made, and strong, and he
drove the car, not wildly, but a little too fast, leaning back rather
insolently conscious of power. In private life, no doubt, a very
ordinary youth, interested only in baseball scores; but in this brief
passage he seemed like a Greek god, in a fantastically modern, yet not
unworthy way emblemed and incarnate, or like the spirit of Henley's
'Song of Speed.' So I found a better image of America for my sculptor
than the shirt-sleeved young man.
III
NEW YORK--(_continued_)
The hotel into which the workings of blind chance have thrown me is
given over to commercial travellers. Its life is theirs, and the few
English tourists creep in and out with the shy, bewildered dignity of
their race and class. These American commercial travellers are called
'drummers'; drummers in the most endless and pointless and extraordinary
of wars. They have the air and appearance of devotees, men set aside,
roaming preachers of a _jehad_ whose meaning they have forgotten.
They seem to be invariably of the short, dark type. The larger, fair-
haired, long-headed men are common in business, but not in 'drumming.'
The drummer's eyes have a hard, rapt expression. He is not interested in
the romance of the road, like an English commercial traveller; only in
its ever-changing end. These people are for ever sending off and
receiving telegrams, messages, and cablegrams; they are continually
telephoning; stenographers are in waiting to record their inspirations.
In the intervals of activity they relapse into a curious trance,
husbanding their vitality for the next crisis. I have watched them with
terror and fascination. All day there are numbers of them sitting,
immote and vacant, in rows and circles on the hard chairs in the hall.
They are never smoking, never reading a paper, never even chewing. The
expressions of their faces never change. It is impossible to guess what,
or if anything, is in their minds. Hour upon hour they remain.
Occasionally one will rise, in obedience to some call or revelation
incomprehensible to us, and move out through the door into the clang and
confusion of Broadway.
It all confirms the impression that grows on the visitor to America that
Business has developed insensibly into a Religion, in more than the
light, metaphorical sense of the words. It has its ritual and theology,
its high places and its jargon, as well as its priests and martyrs. One
of its more mystical manifestations is in advertisement. America has a
childlike faith in advertising. They advertise here, everywhere, and in
all ways. They shout your most private and sacred wants at you. Nothing
is untouched. Every day I pass a wall, some five hundred square feet of
which a gentleman has taken to declare that he is 'out' to break the
Undertakers' Trust. Half the advertisement is a coloured photograph of
himself. The rest is, "See what I give you for 75 dols.!" and a list of
what he does give. He gives everything that the most morbid taphologist
could suggest, beginning with "splendidly carved full-size oak casket,
with black ivory handles. Four draped Flambeaux...." and going on to
funereal ingenuities that would have overwhelmed Mausolus, and make
death impossible for a refined man.
But there are heights as well as depths. I have been privileged with
some intimate glances into the greatest of those peculiarly American
institutions, the big departmental stores. Materially it is an immense
building, containing all things that any upper-middle-class person could
conceivably want. Such a store includes even Art, with the same bland
omnipotence. If you wander into the vast auditorium, it is equal chances
whether you hear a work of Beethoven, Victor Herbert, Schonberg, or Mr
Hirsch. If you are 'artistic,' you may choose between a large coloured
photograph of the Eiffel Tower, a carbon print of Botticelli, and a
reproduction of an 'improvisation' by Herr Kandinsky. You may buy an
Elizabethan dining-table, a Graeco-Roman bronze, the latest dress
designed by M. Bakst, or a packet of pins. Or you may sit and muse on
the life of the employee of this place, who gets from it all that in
less favoured civilisations family, guild, club, township, and
nationality have given him or her. As a child he gets education, then
evening-classes, continuation-schools, gymnasia, military training,
swimming-baths, orchestra, facilities for the study of anything under
the sun, from palaeography to Cherokee, libraries, holiday-camps,
hospitals, ever-present medical attendance, and at the end a pension,
and, I suppose, a store cemetery. And all for the price of a few hours'
work a day, and a little loyalty to the 'establishment.' Can human
hearts desire more? And, when all millionaires are as sensible, will
they? In industries and businesses like this, where the majority of the
employed are women, it ought to be a pretty stable sort of millennium.
Men, perhaps, take longer to learn that kind of 'loyalty.'
In one corner of this store is the advertising department. There are
gathered poets, artists, _litterateurs_, and mere intellectuals,
all engaged in explaining to the upper middle-classes what there is for
them to buy and why they should buy it. It is a life of good salary,
steady hours, sufficient leisure, and entire dignity. There is no
vulgarity in this advertising, but the most perfect taste and great
artistic daring and novelty. The most 'advanced' productions of Europe
are scanned for ideas and suggestions. Two of the leading young 'post-
impressionist' painters in Paris, whose names are just beginning to be
known in England, have been designing posters for this store for years.
I stood and watched with awe a young American genius doing entirely
Matisse-like illustrations to some notes on summer suitings. "We give
our artists a free hand," said the very intelligent lady in charge of
that section; "except, of course, for nudes or improprieties. And we
don't allow any figures of people _smoking_. Some of our customers
object very strongly...."
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