The Laughter of Carthage (44 page)

As the
Mauretania
slowly approached the harbour, Tom Cadwallader offered me one of his Havana cigars and said that much as he had enjoyed the voyage he would be glad to get off the ship. ‘The worst part of the journey is crossing New York to the railroad station.’ He hoped we would berth at a reasonable hour since he would hate to spend a night in ‘Synagogue City’. I asked him if he was familiar with New York and what was his opinion of the Hotel Pennsylvania. He had heard it recommended. ‘I’ve never spent more than eight hours at a time in the city. And most of that was in a friend’s apartment. I don’t know New York and never wish to. There are almost no Americans there.’ He believed he had made a blunder and added, ‘Not that I have anything against people from abroad. New York is bad Irish and worse Jew. When it isn’t either, it’s the sweepings of Naples, peasants from the poorest parts of Sicily. It’s the chief breeding ground of Anarchy. And it believes itself superior to the rest of the country. New York, Colonel Pyat, is not America. You should never confuse one with the other. Come to Atlanta if you want to know the real America.’ I already had his address. I thanked him. I would try to visit him after I had decided on my itinerary. My main intention was still to visit Washington. Mr Cadwallader understood I had no plans to make a permanent home in America and this made him I think all the more affable. He had already convinced me that the legislation limiting immigrants was the best new piece of Law since the War. But, as usual, the tolerant Christian is too late. The Jew is already past the gates and settling down to his business. He says he wants only to live and work and do no harm.
Ikh kikel zikh fun gelekhter!

The great city slows to half speed. Twice she sounds her long operatic greeting. Outside is the angry crash of water displaced by tremendous screws; officers shout to their working parties; the jangle of signals from the wheelhouse makes it impossible to understand a dozen voices already distorted by speaking tubes. Her wood panelling dances on her inner bulkheads; her smoke grows dim. She is held in check now, pulsing and panting, as the captain awaits his orders. Just beyond the horizon lies New York. We move forward, hundreds of us, some with binoculars, wishing to be the first to glimpse our destination, but it is not yet possible. A steward advises us to take lunch. He assures us it will be several hours before we enter the Hudson.

A mood of impatient excitement spreads throughout the huge vessel. People are suddenly more animated as they eat. They order caviare, they drink champagne; already they are celebrating their departure. These women are so beautiful in their marvellous clothes, in silk and ermine, the men so confidently elegant. With my back straight, I stand on the upper boat deck, proudly wearing my own white uniform, an uprooted Son of the Don, smoking a cigarette as I watch the crew rapidly making ropes fast, preparing our anchors and lines. I am alone for the moment. I am filled with a sense of well-being. The ozone is good in my nostrils. The cocaine works at its best to clear my head and sharpen my senses. I am completely alive and without fear. I have been accepted by the aristocracy of the Anglo-Saxon world, by great men and women whose ancestors, holding a fundamental belief in the rule of Law, spread their language, their customs and religion across half the planet and continue, even now, to spread them further still. The horizon darkens. A slender line. The whole ship murmurs. It is land. Steadily, mile by mile, we move into a wide harbour until there, directly ahead, are the unbelievable towers rising taller and taller from the ocean itself. It is unique. It is Manhattan: a city without a past. A city with only a future. A dream.

On our right, green and grey and seemingly far smaller than I imagined, stands Liberty; France’s grandiose gift to the New World. She is blind. She holds a stone torch which, presently at any rate, illuminates nothing in particular. Helen Roe enjoys my pleasure in these fresh sights. ‘Her head’s empty,’ she says. ‘You can go in there some day, if you like.’

* * * *

FOURTEEN

A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER, a machine with a generous soul. New York cheerfully tolerates the horde of fools and rogues who seek the security of her deep canyons and cliff-like tenements. What was a virtue, however, is now displayed as a vice. Since the days of her Dutch founders she refused to fear those Catholic and Jewish elements who scrambled to her warmth, to suck her lifeblood and offer nothing in return. In 1921 she was still able to confine them to the Lower East Side, Harlem, Chinatown, the Bowery and Brooklyn, yet steadfastly refused to see how Carthage grew in the womb of the city all named New Babylon. Carthage devoured the kindly parent from within. It was this which D. W. Griffith attempted to show us in his much abused parable
Intolerance.
A subtle masterpiece, it was made a financial failure by the very Jews and Catholics it warned us against! Griffith’s company was ruined, his voice was effectively silenced and his own people turned a blind eye to his martyrdom. They had much, after all, to distract them: Tammany. Zion, the Vatican, Tatary were all scattering gold, erecting diversionary sideshows, setting up brothels and gambling casinos, providing every conceivable sensation designed not so much to exploit the poor as to seduce the rich: those old patrician families who had founded America’s wealth. Their sons and daughters were meanwhile lured to destruction by pretty baubles, negro jazz and bathtub gin.

Griffith created the greatest work of its kind. Every line and scene, no matter how splendid, drummed home the same urgent message:

beware the servants of rome and zion!!! follow only christ!!! ye shall find the enemy within your own walls! be wary of the priest and the rabbi - for one hand is extended in friendship while the other hides a knife!!! be forever alert! be deaf to false prophets and the temptations of lust, pride & greed!!!
JUDA VERRECKE!!
the day of thy judgement draws near!
In the modern scenes we see a young man falsely accused, ruined by forces of international finance. We witness the treacherous betrayal and slaughter of the French Protestants by their Catholic Queen Catherine de Medici. We see the priests of Babylon destroying their own civilisation from within and opening their gates to the invading Persian tyrant! Also we have the spectacle of Jesus of Nazareth offering us both hope and the solution to all this terror. And they complained this was obscure! Obscure!
Er macht die Tür auf! Lassen sie ihn hereinkommen!
It is simply that they refused to see what was obvious. It did not suit them to let him in. It is the same old story. Ironically it is also Griffith’s own story, just as it is mine. I have sometimes wondered at the significance of the coincidence; his life and work frequently mirrored my own. I am sure it is not difficult for anyone, realising how much of my optimism and faith had become invested in Griffith and the America he represented, to imagine my horror when, almost as soon as I had passed the last immigration barrier and a porter was loading my trunks into a motor cab, I read in the
New York Herald
that the great director’s company must inevitably be declared bankrupt. This was a terrible blow, particularly since I had planned to offer my services to him as soon as my business in Washington was completed. Stunned, I climbed into my seat. I was borne off to the city’s heart, through densely crowded streets flanked by enormous skyscrapers and criss-crossed by the metal bands of an intricate elevated railway. At last, as my mind began to receive this profusion of new impressions, I tossed the paper aside, certain that Mr Griffith would find a means of resolving his difficulties. I had not been prepared for New York to remind me in the least of my Mother Country, yet somehow it was as if I had come home. It was all far grander and more highly concentrated, of course, but to me the city was nearer to being a blend of St Petersburg, Kiev and Odessa than it was of any European city I had visited. I had not, for instance, expected to be impressed by so much solid, old-fashioned good taste in buildings and decoration. As the cab at last drew up outside the Hotel Pennsylvania’s vast structure and the door was opened by a uniformed black man whose white glove saluted me in a most dignified manner, I almost thought to see my mother and Captain Brown waiting for me beyond the massive entrance. It made me long for them, for Esmé and for Kolya, to share this experience. Porters again took charge of my luggage. The interior of the Pennsylvania was even more impressive than the exterior. The lobby seemed more spacious than Notre Dame cathedral, with shops and restaurants around its edges. One restaurant alone boasted a full-size fountain. High overhead an elaborate balcony surrounded the lobby. Its columns and the richness of its materials gave it the appearance of a pagan Roman temple. If the staff had been wearing togas, rather than tasteful conventional suits, it would not have seemed incongruous. I was glad I had chosen my finest uniform. In it, I did not feel overwhelmed by the hotel’s magnificence. I made the long walk across mosaic and deep carpet to the reception desk. My reservation was confirmed by a polite, open-faced individual who softly told me his name was Cornihan, an under-manager. I must let him know if there was anything I needed or anything which did not suit me. Then, within an elevator so festooned with gilded wrought iron and carved oak it could have carried Zeus himself to Olympus, I was borne up to the eighteenth floor and escorted to a room which, in luxury and size, was the equal to the best I had known in Europe. Again, my Kolya had not let me down. I felt immediately secure, even though I had never been situated so high above the ground before. The porter was genuinely grateful for the tip. He said he was at my service. Here was another unexpected feature of this city: the good manners and cheerful helpfulness of her citizens. From my windows I could look down at the distant street to where a tiny Gothic church stood sandwiched between much taller buildings, its steps alive with miniature figures, constantly coming and going. This, I learned, was actually St Patrick’s Cathedral. I think it heartened me at the time to see this citadel of Papism so thoroughly overshadowed.

It was immediately obvious that New York was a city consciously and vigorously dedicated to the Future, impatient with anything or anyone threatening to stop her march forward, her constant experimenting, her willingness to tear down the old in order to replace it with something newer and better. That she still cherished tradition was obvious from many of her interiors, which paid wholehearted tribute to our common culture; nonetheless she was unafraid of progress, as most European cities were. As soon as I was unpacked, changed and rested, I followed my old habit and plunged straight into her streets, to explore for myself the mysteries and wonders of Manhattan. In 1921 the Empire State Building was merely a vague notion, while the Chrysler, most beautiful of all skyscrapers, was still being designed. It would be these which would completely outshine New York’s great rival, Chicago, so that she finally refused further competition. Knowing nothing of any of this, I was sufficiently amazed by the strange proportions of the twenty-storey Flatiron Building, the gigantic classical majesty of the Times Tower. I had sailed on Leviathan to a city of Behemoths, and though one element in me was daunted by the sheer hugeness of the place I was primarily delighted. No photograph could prepare a European for that kind of scale or offer any understanding of what the city really is: a truly modern, unselfconscious, aggressively unashamed urban massing of steel, stone and brick, insouciantly balanced on a tiny slab of rock in the shallows of the Atlantic Ocean. As for what she had become, since the Carthaginians overwhelmed her, I shall not speak. In 1921 she radiated a convincing aesthetic, an authentic, boundless confidence in scientific and social progress. In her were quintessentially combined all the other cities of the Earth; she was a metropolis conceived as nothing more or less than herself, when millions of people might live together and work for humanity’s triumph over Nature, the Past, our very origins. I lay awake on that first night and heard her heart pounding as violently as my own. I could believe, in some barely understood way, that she and I were the same entity, with an energetic, unsleeping mind, an active will to put a mark upon the world and leave it radically unchanged.

Here was the sum of six million humans beings’ optimistic hopes for a better world. Here, mankind’s technology could defeat those ancient demons which enslaved its forefathers for uncountable generations. Here were fortunes greater than all previous fortunes, ambitions higher than any earlier ambitions, possibilities which until now had never been conceived. It was no longer any surprise that provincial minds, rural minds, the minds of small people, might draw back from this and brand it evil because it was so dramatically unfamiliar. Many Americans refused even to stand on the far side of a New York bridge to look upon this wonder from a distance. To them not only was she the new Babylon, she was Sodom and Gomorrah, Rome and Jerusalem all rolled in together. I was not to know that my mockery of their fears would one day prove foolish, that they understood something I, in those days, did not. New York was a mighty machine. Like any machine she had no morality. Her goodness or her evil depended entirely on the motives of who controlled her.

She was a sensitive and highly complex machine. All she lacked was the capacity to move from place to place and one day, I thought, she might even have that. The astonishing geometry of fire escapes, water towers, elevated railroads, streetcar wires, baroque ironwork, telephone lines, power cables, bridges, lamp posts, illuminated signs and arches in combination with the buildings themselves formed a profoundly complex grammar of its own; the infinite variety of curves and angles made up the characters of a mysterious and scarcely decipherable alphabet. As many-levelled as the human brain itself, New York appeared to possess the same limitless potential for creativity and intricacy. Her traffic was unceasing, flowing like blood through a maze of veins and arteries, most of it motor-driven, though there were still a good many horses. Constantly moving, these trams, cabs, buses, cars and wagons possessed the boisterous momentum of logs in a torrent. The great avenues and cross streets, conduits of this vast machine, steamed and hissed from a thousand vents and grills; yet no one could claim her citizens were grey-faced automata, designed only to serve her, as Lang claimed in his film
Metropolis.
New York was then firmly under the control of her citizens, who were still primarily true born Americans or English-speaking settlers. They had made her, now they used her. For their own convenience. This was evident in the postures they struck in the streets, their easy familiarity with modern innovation. I had never seen fresh ideas treated with such amiably casual interest as in New York and I never would again. All the inventions pouring from the factories of Edison, Ford, Tesla and America’s other twentieth-century wizard-heroes, all the gadgets and marvels of our machine age, were taken by New Yorkers as available to them by right. Here every family appeared to own a motor car, a phonograph, a vacuum cleaner, an electric iron, a power wringer, while telephones, refrigerators and automatic washing machines were the property of quite ordinary people. Only the degenerate immigrants, the uneducated, jealous, desperately greedy sons and daughters of European gutters, of Asiatic opium addicts and African savages did not have these things (in such quantities at least) and this of course was largely because they had neither the intelligence nor the background to understand them: indeed, many developed deep superstitious terror of, for instance, washing machines, and would not allow them into their dens, even when they were offered.