Coast to Coast (2 page)

But there, Manhattan is a haven for the ambitious, and you must not expect its bustling rivalries to be too saintly. Indeed, you may as well admit that the whole place is built on greed, in one degree or another; even the city churches, grotesquely Gothic or Anglican beyond belief, have their thrusting social aspirations. What is wonderful is that so much that is good and beautiful has sprung from such second-rate motives. There are palaces of great pictures in New York, and millions go each year to see them. Each week a whole page of the
New
York
Times
is filled with concert announcements. There are incomparable museums, a lively theatre, great publishing houses, a famous university. The
Times
itself (”All the News That’s Fit to Print”) is a splendid civic ornament, sometimes mistaken, often dull, but never bitter, cheap or malicious; at lunch in its palatial offices the following grace is said:

And the city itself, with its sharp edges and fiery colours, is a thing of beauty; especially seen from above, with Central Park startlingly green among the skyscrapers, with the tall towers of Wall Street hazy in the distance, with the two waterways blue and sunny and the long line of an Atlantic liner slipping away to sea. It is a majestic sight, with no Wordsworth at hand to honour it, only a man with a loudspeaker or a 50 cent guide book.

So leaving Manhattan is like retreating from a snow summit. When you drive back along the highway the very air seems to relax about you. The electric atmosphere softens, the noise stills, the colours blur and fade, the pressure eases, the traffic thins. Soon you are out of the city’s spell, only pausing to look behind, over the tenements and marshes, to see the lights of the skyscrapers riding the night.

H
old on, though, before you go for good, and make a brief detour to First Avenue, at the point where 45th Street debouches drably into the East River. The United Nations may not be there much longer, and if you never see it in its Corbusier palace beside the water, you will regret it always. For all its buffooneries, its presence is one of New York’s noblest claims to fame. It is an extra-territorial pride, for technically it is not on American soil at all, but in a diplomatic enclave of its own: but its precarious survival in this cut-throat keep has subtly affected the moods of Manhattan, sharpening the city’s deep-rooted cynicism, often acerbating its prejudices, and touching it with a new, if reluctant, grandeur.

There the great edifice stands, like a slab of fire, with its parade of white flag-staffs gleaming in the street-lights, and the humped black limousines patient at its doors. You lean your arms on a wooden barrier, perhaps, at the bottom of 45th Street, and beside you a policeman sits bored but vigilant upon his horse, and behind you the city traffic rumbles away in the dark, and to the west the last glimmer of day still hangs over New Jersey: and out of that severe but glittering structure there seems to emanate a kind of hum or pulse, like a beat of turbines, as
though it is some tall strange engine working away there in the night, or a missile primed for the count-down. It feels almost mystically aloof and preoccupied, shut off from its shabby surroundings by gardens, plazas and promenades; and when, after a moment or two of dazzled contemplation, you duck beneath your barrier and cross the road to the United Nations, it is like traversing some unmarked but crucial frontier, or a gulf between constellations. “Watch the lights, now‚” says the policeman from his horse, and instinctively you turn and offer him a diffident farewell wave, as an astronaut might bravely gesture to the last workman on the launching pad.

Sure enough, there is a cosmic flavour inside the place, when you have shown your pass to the guards at the gate, proved that your bag contains no bombs or phials of poison, and crossed the wide empty plaza to the entrance. You sense a sort of insulating miasma forming around you, as though you are being sealed in protective cellophane, and the moment you step inside the revolving doors, to see the great golden pendulum swinging from the ceiling, you feel hermetically removed from the very atmosphere of New York. The air is unfamiliar from the start, prim but pungent. A faint suggestion of scent and disinfectant lingers among the pillars. The attendants at the door wear a special blue uniform of their own, like republican Ruritanians, and down the hall towards you shuffles a man with a broom and a plastic dustpan, swishing away the last speck of human dust, the last atom of nationality, the last morsel of fallibility. There is a distinctly dedicated feeling in the air, making you wonder uneasily whether you ought to take your hat off. No razzle-dazzle of free enterprise informs these high halls, no bugle calls of empire echo through the marble. You must on no account whistle
Rule
Britannia
as you cross the foyer, and it might be worth checking, before you venture upstairs, that your buttons are all done up.

A new order of acolytes attends the shrine, presiding with icy competence over its information desks, delicately operating its elevators, standing beyond race or sovereignty, beyond error, beyond fatigue. It talks in a muted half-foreign English, such as a computer might utter, and it has to its manners some of the hush of the Ivy League, and some of the concentration of brain surgery. Its girls, in svelte blue skirts, saris or Chinese tunics, are all extraordinarily beautiful and unbelievably nice: if ever you spot one examining a colleague’s couture, it is only with an expression in her eyes of unfailing sisterly affection. Nor do the men seem to suffer from any of the usual human failings. They are splendid of physique, tireless of energy, never hot, harassed or impatient, and they answer your every query with unvarying, smiling, anonymous,
almost robot-like goodwill. They are a supernal breed. I once trod on an attendant’s toe, stepping off an escalator. He was six feet tall and pantherlike, but as I shied nervously away from him, “Pardon me, sir,” he said with an unearthly smile. “What a clumsy big ape I am.”

It is a futuristic world that these creatures inhabit. The aluminium escalators silently progress, the loudspeakers discreetly call for Mr. Komobo or Sir Lindsey Ashley-Willoughby, and at the end of every corridor, like the eye of God, there seems to shine a television set. The U.N. is laced and girdled with television, its own closed-circuit system reducing space to an archaic conception, blending upstairs with downstairs, inside with out. The General Assembly meets in the great auditorium on the north side of the structure, but down all the veins of the place, along its landings and its corridors, into its lounges and bars and press rooms, the postures and platitudes are relentlessly pumped, so that wherever you go Mr. Komobo or Sir Lindsey seems to catch you up, seize you by the scruff of the neck and swamp you with oratory. It is a foretaste of worlds to come. The air-conditioning is absolute. No breath of heat, cold or damp seeps through the windows. There are no draughts and no snug fuggy corners. I have never in my life felt so completely indoors as I do in this building, and when you look out through the plate glass to the grey river outside, with a tug thumping its way to sea and a sliver of smoke from the power-house chimneys— when you look out to a nostalgic glimpse of Manhattan, it is like peering back at the human race from the inside of an aquarium.

Against this sterilized background, this little world drained of impurities, humanity is etched with a new and awful clarity. Among their delegates at their seats the whole gamut of human type and experience is luxuriantly represented, from the lean fastidious aristocrat to the earthiest of yokels, from the super-civilized to the almost primitive, from the benign to the bullying. Seen in such a setting, all our failings are pitilessly emphasized. If we have a long nose, it looks longer. If we lean towards the pompous, we emerge quite ludicrously inflated. If we are a bore, all mankind sighs for us. If we are a liar, everyone knows it. If we want to embrace a well-wisher, the whole world experiences the cuddle for itself, winces to the prickle of a Caribbean beard, or feels the Order of Lenin digging uncomfortably into its stomach. It is like being stimulated by some heightening drug, to sit on a U.N. sofa and observe
la
condition
humaine.
Here all the archetypes of diplomacy prance by oblivious. It may be Sir Lindsey, sliding pomaded towards the Trusteeship Council with a perceptible creaking of costume, his face creased but undaunted by responsibility, his eyes unobtrusively on the watch
for fellers he’d rather not bump into. It may be Mr. Komobo, entering the room in a gorgeous striped liquefaction of robes, his sandals slip-slopping softly across the carpet, on his head a multi-coloured skull-cap, in his hand a very expensive fountain-pen, in his wake a covey of obsequious applicants. Perhaps some dour commissar, in sagging double-breasted grey, is morosely annotating a memorandum in a corner; or an exquisite Frenchwoman, in a cloud of Chanel and a Balmain suit, is charming the ideology out of an infatuated Rumanian; or a long-limbed American has taken an Indian cosily by the arm, and is telling him a funny story under his breath; or a small smiling Chinese tip-toes by, or an Israeli behind you disputes some of the tentative identifications in Painter’s biography of Proust, or a Canadian is expressing his inalienable conviction that this is Canada’s Century. And now and then you look up to encounter one of the universally familiar figures of our day: a Khrushchev or a Kennedy, a Nasser or a Tito, images so well known to all of us that when at last you meet them, face to face and in the flesh, they do not feel real at all, but look as though they are cosmeticized dummies, waxworks or impersonators. Yes, yes, you say to yourself, as one of these masters of the earth rolls in: and next in order of appearance will be Alice herself.

For it is part dream, the U.N., part wonderland, and part the most fascinating of theatres. None of it feels altogether credible, except perhaps the Martini at the bar, and sometimes, as the interminable debates wallow on, it seems the saddest and sorriest of farces. Great and true events are happening all around you, though, within this tall glass airlock. The assembly downstairs in the vast debating chamber, with the television cameras hungrily peering from their booths, like long-necked predatory birds, and the strong-arm attendants with their backs to the rostrum, watching for crack-pots and fanatics—that great chamber may not have achieved much yet, but it is still the nearest we have ever got to a Parliament of the world. Here the balances of power shift before your very eyes, as the white suprematist of last year shuffles with his notebook behind the triumphant African of today. The cold war, that vast and all-embracing tragedy, is here reduced to human size, represented not by armies, statistics and scorching missiles, but by a few dozen pitifully common-place men, doodling with their ball-point pens or scratching their noses. Suddenly you find that a Great Power needs a handkerchief to wipe its bald head with, or has a nice young wife waiting for it by the door, or gets caught up in one of those embarrassing minuets of politesse that occur when two fattish but sensitive pedestrians meet in a narrow corridor.

Suddenly, too, believe it or not, in this scrupulously rarified air, the world’s problems really do seem soluble. Surely, you think to yourself, if only they’d sit down over a cup of coffee they’d have the old place sorted out in a matter of moments. It is like one of those allegorical dramas of time and place, the kind in which six or seven people, thrown together in a lifeboat or a blizzard, discover the intermesh of their identities, and realize how precise a thing is eternity. Inside these walls one supreme quality is inescapable. It stems not from the strutting, squabbling delegations, but from the thing itself, its architecture, its style, and the integrity bequeathed to it by the noble Dag Hammar-skjoeld. It is the quality of aspiration. Down on First Avenue you feel all around you, in the hum of the air-conditioning and the mannered courtesy of the elevator girls, a striving for perfection: clinical, unyielding, scrubbed and wartless. Here, one feels, only the absolute will do. It is an environment where only the highest standards can have any meaning, where shady compromise can only lead to ignominy, where humanity is either going to purge itself, or bust.

“
Wazzamatterwidyoubud?
” hisses the angry cab driver, as you wander bemused out of the gates and stumble across to 45th Street. “Hey, you in the green hat,” says the policeman from his horse, “can’t you see them traffic lights?” “You must wait for the green‚” says the passing lady slowly and sympathetically, assuming that you speak only Welsh or Lithuanian, and are new to the mysteries of science. But it takes time to re-adjust, when you emerge from the glass-house into Manhattan, just as the returning astronaut, riding down from Jupiter, will probably look a little pale to his anxious mother, when he bursts at last into the sitting-room.