Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings Page 7

  Death of a Radical

  In Cleveland liberals and Jews are grieving for the death of Spencer Irwin, an old liberal journalist, a newsman on a local paper which although owned by isolationist conservatives allowed him to write what he wanted. I read his last article, on the swastikas in Germany: it is old, fiery democratic rhetoric, provincial-style. Herb went to the funeral: Irwin was a Quaker but the pastors of all the Protestant churches were there along with the rabbi, and each of them said something, and there were also black intellectuals as well as purple-faced alcoholics. Irwin was an ex-alcoholic who had recovered and was one of the heads of Alcoholics Anonymous, a self-help group for alcoholics of all classes.

  The Bar

  While waiting for Herb who has gone to the funeral I sit in a very tough-looking bar, a different side of America which I waited in vain to see in New York, with rough guys who look like something out of a film but who are in fact workers from the car factories in Cleveland, women who look like prostitutes but who are probably poor workers as well, jukeboxes (a guy in a beret dances with an old woman, then they leave), bingo machines which are really what we would call pinball (and which exist in New York only in a bar in Times Square), a kind of electronic shooting gallery. In short, our Americanized Italy is more like provincial, working-class America. In the toilet I think I’ve come across the first piece of obscene graffiti I’ve seen in America, but it’s not: it is a rant against the blacks, though in pessimistic vein (kick out the blacks then who’ll be the bosses? The Cucarachas). The bar is frequented by poor whites from the South who emigrated here to work in the factories.

  In Detroit I went into dodgy billiard-halls with gamblers at a table playing poker and eyeing up any strangers in case they are police. Small-time, unsuccessful gangster atmosphere like a Nelson Algren book (who I would have liked to be my guide in his home-town of Chicago, but we missed each other because in the days I was there he was not around, so I never got to see Chicago’s gangland).

  TV Dinners

  One also appreciates consumer culture better in the provinces, visiting the big Sears shops which are to be found in every town, and which sell everything, even Lambrettas (which cost more than cars) and motor-boats (in the lakeside towns now is the season when they launch the new motor-boat models for the summer). Sears were famous for their catalogue which allowed even the remotest farmers, in the days when communications were difficult, to shop by mail-order. In the supermarkets the most sensational novelty is the TV dinner: trays which hold a complete dinner, ready to eat, for those who are watching TV and who don’t want to interrupt their viewing for even ten minutes to prepare some food. There is a huge variety of TV dinners, each one with a colour photograph of the contents on the wrapper; you just have to take it out of the fridge and eat without needing to take your eyes from the screen.

  At the Israeli Temple

  Herb Gold gives a lecture on hipsters and beatniks in the temple at Cleveland Heights. It is his father who is really keen on it, because this is his son’s debut as a cultural personality in his native town, and it is also an acknowledgment of his own prestige: in the last few years Samuel Gold has become one of the leading lights of his church. The temple is not one of the twelve orthodox synagogues of Cleveland Heights, nor one of the temples of the reformed branch (a kind of Jewish Protestantism, with a very simple rite, adopted in order to reconcile Judaism with the American way of life), but it belongs to the ‘conservative’ cult, which is a halfway house between the two, retaining some of the formal aspects of the rite with an impressive, almost Jesuit openness towards other mixes. I accompany the jubilant Gold family to the service and even their most sceptical sons enjoy their parents’ satisfaction. I put on the little black cap, like all the faithful. There is a wonderful singer, both in terms of his voice and his solemnity of performance. He is accompanied by the organ, an innovation contrary to orthodoxy. The rabbi (no beard, a very open face) reads verses of the psalms and the congregation chant other verses in reply, reading from their little books, and I join in. Among the hymns in the little book there is also ‘God Bless America’, the famous patriotic anthem. The American flag stands on one side of the altar, as in all American churches, of any persuasion (here on the other side stands the flag of Israel). On the dais there are also young boys with sacred vestments and girls dressed in their best clothes who alternate with the rabbi and the cantor in reading the psalms. Halfway through the service, the rabbi commemorates those in the community who have died this week, including the journalist Spencer Irwin, and then announces Herb’s lecture. In order to give it a religious air, the conference had been advertised with the title ‘Hipsters, Beatniks and Faith’, but Herb does not mention faith, instead he says that the lack of revolutionary political ideals has led to the beatnik ideal of keeping cool, of indifference. Nobody, it seems, objects to this claim that political involvement is a feature of American culture that has been lost today; all that happened, apparently, is that some of the faithful protested to the rabbi at the frequent use of the expressions ‘making love’ and ‘fornication’. Once the lecture is over, the service resumes and Mr Gold is called upon to draw the curtain of the ark.

  For the First Time I Drive

  an American car, along a stretch of the road to Detroit. The automatic gear-change makes driving very simple, you just have to get used to the fact that you do not have to press the clutch pedal. The strict speed-limits on the motorways make the drivers careful. What is odd, though, is the lack of rules for overtaking, which happens either on the right or the left, as it comes, and nearly always without any signals.

  Wonderland

  In the motorway service stations, another typical American place, I discover further marvels in the men’s room. There is a gadget for relaxing, for those whose legs are tired from driving: you get up on a small platform, put in a nickel, and the machine starts up, making you vibrate for five minutes like someone tormented by St Vitus’s dance. Then there is also the automatic shoeshine with its rotating brushes. And in many men’s rooms now towels have been replaced by hot-air driers.

  American Poverty

  has a particular colour which I have now learnt to recognize: it is the burnt red colour of brick buildings or the faded colour of wooden houses which have become slums. In New York poverty seems to belong only to the most recent arrivals, and is something equivalent to a period of waiting; and it would not even seem right that any Puerto Rican should become instantly well-off just because he has landed in New York. In the industrial cities it is clear that the poverty of the urban masses is an essential part of the system, and often it is a poverty which has a European look: black houses which are little more than hovels, old men pushing handcarts (!) full of bits of wood recovered from slums that have been demolished. Of course there is the constant though slow progress of the various social strata as they move up the ladder of well-being, but new groups always take their place at the bottom. And the great vital resource of America, mobility, constant movement, is tending to decrease. The depression of ’58 was a huge setback for Detroit and since then Ford have been working in six-month shifts per year, resulting in a permanent state of semi-unemployment; the workers who have been there longest, those with a certain number of years of seniority, have priority over the others in being taken back on; that is, they have their job guaranteed, something new in the general lack of stability in American life, where the proletariat has always provided temporary labour.

  The Projects

  which means the working-class houses built by the towns or the state to replace the slums, are usually much more depressing than the slums themselves, which if nothing else have a touch of life and cheerful decay about them. Working-class houses, even those built at the time of the New Deal in New York, Cleveland or Detroit, are like prisons built of brick, either high or low buildings but always terrifyingly anonymous, looking out on to deserted squares. Now that the shops along the pavements have disappeared, every village uses its local sh
opping-centre for supplies. But in Detroit, in an area previously occupied by slums, there now rises the first section of Mies van der Rohe’s famous village, the one with the huge vertical and horizontal structures in the midst of greenery. I visit it: there are now showroom flats open for those who want to buy or rent. Up to now it has been all buyers, no one wants to rent. The prices are rather high: to rent a flat costs 220 dollars per month. In short these are dwellings for the upper middle class, professionals and managers; those who lived in the slums that have been demolished have to go and find other slums elsewhere. Among the buyers there are some blacks.

  The Classic American Photograph

  of the black Baptist church nestling in a shop-window is not a picturesque detail, it is the most common sight as you go around the streets where the blacks live in slums. The Baptist church, the church of the poor blacks, is split by a multitude of internal schisms, every black who has any histrionic-religious skills and the money to rent a shop sets up his own church and starts to rant. Their worship is always based on revival, the immediate emotional and physical presence of divine grace. Some of them become famous millionaires like Father Divine or the other one who died recently.

  In the huge, grim but not poor black area of Chicago I see an enormous street advertisement like the ones for Coca-Cola, only the young good-looking boy and girl, well-dressed and well-turned-out, are black rather than white. But as I am going by in a car, I don’t have the time to make out what it is advertising. Another day I go by and pay attention: the advertisement (‘Have your best comfort’) is for a funeral parlour. (Advertisements for funeral agencies are very common in black neighbourhoods.)

  Poor Shops

  In the land of consumption where everything must be thrown away so you can rush and buy new goods, in the land of standardized production, one learns, surprisingly, that there is a whole underworld market of goods which no one would ever imagine could be bought or sold in America. There are huge stores of second-rate goods, as in the Italian area of Chicago, which are the same as the stores downtown except that the goods are rejects which exude an air of poverty even when they are new. And then there is the whole business of second-hand goods which I thought was a prerogative of New York’s Orchard Street, that incredible market street in the poor Jewish quarter, but then you find it exists everywhere; there is a world in America where nothing is thrown away; in Chicago there is an area that is now Mexican, last year it was Italian, and the Mexican shopkeepers have taken over the shops with their own goods and along with Mexican things they continue to sell the old Italian stock. There are also bookshops for the poor where second-hand paperbacks and magazines are sold, as well as a whole range of specialist books, particularly in immigrant languages, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian (not Italian, because Italian immigrants usually don’t know Italian as a written language). What emerges as the common cultural denominator of these shops is superstition. In Detroit there is an incense shop, which displays in its window the different kinds of incense required by the various religions, as well as incense for voodoo and witchcraft ceremonies, Catholic religious images, sacred books, conjuring tricks, playing cards, pornographic books. Sidney G. tells me that once the owner, seeing him just browsing, chased him out of the shop: it is likely that in the back-shop they make love philtres or other magic potions for their clientele which is black-Italian-Mexican. In the Mexican quarter in Chicago, there is a shop in which a gipsy reads your palm.

  The Bowery

  is not unique to New York; every town has a street reserved for drunkards and human debris, where there are very cheap lodgings, really poor shops, restaurants where the alcoholic can, when he has a couple of dollars, obtain a card which entitles him to a certain number of meals for a few cents, so that he knows that he has something to eat for a few days and can therefore drink the rest of his money. Naturally such streets are full of the Salvation Army and other missions, where they can stay warm. I remember a St Thomas Aquinas Reading Room in Detroit, chock-full of down-and-outs pretending to read: a place with a huge window which you can see from the freezing cold street. You have to keep the meeting room locked – as I was informed by a Chicago trade unionist, a member of the U. E.45 – otherwise the hoboes come in and sleep on the floor. In America the man who leaves his family and job and ends up an alcoholic and on the streets is a widespread phenomenon, even among those in their forties, a kind of obscure religion of self-annihilation.

  Keep it Easy

  My host tonight in Detroit was a philosophy professor, now a radio disc-jockey (he introduces the records and makes witty comments in between), he earns a huge amount of money and is very popular. He writes, sings, and even makes records of (mild) protest songs.

  The Steel Crisis

  is on. The famous strike was caused initially by the industrialists who needed to keep prices high even though stocks were at an all-time high. Probably before the year is out the American economy will have to face, once the elections are over, a serious recession. According to certain left-wing trade-unionists (in Chicago I was moving mostly in those circles) the American economy, caught as it is in a vicious circle of sales on credit and forced consumption, appears to be very fragile, hanging by a thread.

  Chicago

  is the genuine big American city: productive, violent, tough. Here the social classes face each other like enemy forces, the wealthy people in the strip of skyscrapers along the magnificent lake-shore, and immediately beyond them is the vast inferno of the poor neighbourhoods. You sense that here the blood has drained into the pavements, the blood of the Haymarket martyrs (the German anarchists to whom a very beautiful illustrated book has been devoted, written by the then chief of police), the blood of industrial accidents which helped build Chicago’s industries, the blood of the gangsters. In the days when I was there, the famous police corruption case was discovered, which I think even the Italian newspapers mentioned. I would like to stay longer in Chicago which deserves to be understood in all its ugliness and beauty, but even the cold there is nasty, the local woman I have made friends with is trivial and not very chic (so, she’s fine for Chicago), and I fly off for California.

  San Francisco Diary

  5 February 1960

  You know what San Francisco is like, all hills, the streets rising up steeply, and a typical old cable-car running along some of the streets; and the scraping sound of the cable beneath street level is the distinctive sign of the city, just as the smoke coming out of the manholes signifies New York. I am living near Chinatown which is the biggest Chinese settlement outside China, now in full celebration mode with rockets being launched for the Chinese New Year which happens around now (the year about to start is the Year of the Mouse). The goods in the Chinese shops are nearly all made in Japan. The Japanese colony in SF is also very numerous, and this city with its mixture of white and yellow peoples looks the way all cities will look in fifty to a hundred years’ time. The blacks are outnumbered by the Mexican Indians. The Italians had their quarter in North Beach, near Chinatown, but now they have mostly moved, though the area is still full of Italian restaurants and shops and has become the beatnik quarter. The names and the writing on the shop-fronts are in Italian: as you know, the SFrancisco Italians are Ligurians, Tuscans and northerners, so the old generation knew Italian, unlike the New York Italians who have never known the language nor have they ever learnt English and have been inarticulate for centuries. The ones here also have surnames that are the same as Italian surnames today (whereas the New York Italians’ surnames are unknown in Italy, they belong to an Italy that never appeared in our nation’s history), and even their faces are similar to ours (while the New York Italians only resemble themselves). In this kind of Chinese-Italian-beatnik Latin Quarter there is a tremendous amount of activity in the streets in the evening, something unusual in America; an espresso-place has even put small tables and chairs on the pavement as though we were in Paris or Rome. I will realize later that this activity only happens on Friday, Satu
rday and Sunday evenings, and on other evenings everything is closed and deserted.

  The Longshoremen’s Union

  Naturally, the first thing I do is to go and visit Harry Bridges, secretary of the ILWU, the dockers’ union which is the only left-wing union with any clout in America, famous for its meeting with Khrushchev. (The ILWU is the West Coast union; as you know, the longshoremen’s union in New York is run by gangsters: remember On the Waterfront.) I did not find Bridges very interesting, but some of his colleagues were. The SFrancisco dockers have become a typical workers’ aristocracy thanks to their union’s industrial muscle. They earn about 500 dollars a month, a totally disproportionate salary for an unskilled workforce. In their headquarters – modern architecture which is not very beautiful but interesting – the famous recruitment of squads takes place, required by the ships to load or unload night or day. The dockers arrive, each of them in a deluxe automobile which they park on the grass; they come in with their loud-checked overalls of every different colour, working-clothes which are new and clean. Many are black, and many are Scandinavian. When a man has finished his shift, he tells the union how many hours he has done, so that the union always has up-to-date lists of the men, organized round the number of hours worked, and whenever the employers request workers, the union selects those with fewer hours worked. The result is that at the end of the year all of them have done more or less the same number of hours. All this happens through a system of numbers which appear on luminous boards, and announcements over the tannoy, a system that resembles the tote machine at a horse-race or a calculating-machine in the stock exchange. To be a docker in SFrancisco is the most sought-after profession, just as in San Remo it is being a croupier at the casino. This year the union had more than ten thousand requests to join, but only selected seven hundred men. These statistics give a clear idea of what working-class prosperity means in America, even in an area so full of advantages as California where poverty just does not exist. Choice is of course based also on physical strength and age: the majority of the longshoremen are giants. The organization takes enormous pride in the results it has achieved through its hard-line traditions which are really a lesson to ponder on for European trade unions. The other evening an old trade-unionist of progressive views was arguing bitterly with me over the lack of fight in French and Italian unions, who for all their political consciousness, which the American working class lacks, nevertheless have never managed through economic strikes to obtain what the American unions manage to extract (and have never managed to defend their political principles, we could add).