STRAY LEAVES

Southland Times, Issue 20496, 26 May 1928, Page 13 (Supplement)

STRAY LEAVES

IN NEW YOKE

(by

Hector Bolitho.)

You may be one of those earnest people who like the old romantic tradition of the sea-crossing the Bay of Biscay in a scurvyridden barquentine or drifting down the Amazon in a frail canoe. If this is true, I commend you for your valour, but still I prefer the way of the sybarite, crossing the Atlantic on a rich and tremendous liner, with the safety and steadiness of the earth, the facetious pleasures of a great city and the prospect of New York at the other end, New York of hurry and gush, frivolity and tragedy, New' York where mystery is destroyed and where people never sit down; New York of drunkenness and fun and generosity and money. I am on the Berengaria—big, luxurious, decorated, with a lounge in which Solomon might feel at home and a ballroom and garden Cook and Tasman never imagined, over the most potent rum that ever mulled within their hands. There is an ocean outside, so they say—indeed one does go to the upper deck and see the magnificent circle of sky and s&, but it seems to be a subdued sea, afraid of this Cunard monster in which three thousand people live. Columbus and his little boat and the floating branches! The running seas that smashed the first craft into timber are merely a passive floor over which these mammoths glide. Oh little I boats that took me around the Antipodean coasts, poking your nervous bows into the open seas. Oh stinking schooners of the south, lethargic cargo steamers drifting up past Africa, you are not ships. See this floating Babylon, with the rolling millionairies and the glittering women and the slim, I sophisticated girls and the georgeous din--1 ners and the band drowning the ghosts of old sea shanties that may still pass, with the Atlantic winds. Give me this splendour and comfort! Throw' your rum kegs into the sea and give me my Bacardi cocktail, iced and shining in a -frail glass, with a thousand miles of sea stretching each side of us, and my caviare, where poor sailors once gulped lime juice with genuine relish. Give me my hot bath, in porcelain, and let me feel sophisticated behind immaculate linen and let me dance with a movie star who says ‘Oh I love reading Mr. Bolitho. Have you read ‘The Constant Nympth?’ And I haven’t and I don’t mind if she is a fool because a pretty fool is better than a wise frump. And I want a moon, just one of those common, vulgar moons they have in ballads, and I don’t mind sighing out into the black night. Why, I find myself thinking of old songs and gondolas in Venice! Gondolas in Venice are my lowest ebb, so I go to bed. Not a bunk with cockroaches, moving exclamation marks punctuating the wall. No! A wide bed with a shell pink eiderdown, silver and ivory on my dressing table and a chicken sandwich and a bottle of Spanish w'ine, like diluted rubies, on the table. New York to-morrow! MY FIRST AMERICAN. The chaos of this arrival! And this dear earnest man at my elbow. “Mr 80-lith-o, do you know there are more Italians here than in any city in Italy and that we have 110,000 people in New York w'ho can’t write or speak English'?” “No” I answered, wrangling with the Customs man in the next breath. “Those are prints, old prints. You are not going to charge me on those!” The little man: "And there are more Galitians than in Galitia.” “Really, w'hat fun!” The Customs man drew’ one of the prints out—at random. “Ah, you know something about prints or you wouldn’t choose that one. You are obviously a connoisseur!” “Yeh, I know prints.” “Obviously” I said. “It is wonderful to arrive like this and find somebody who understands art!” “Yeh,” he said and let me off paying the duty! “And do you know that there are 1,300, 000 Jews in New York? “No, how dreadful!” “Yes, and thirty members of the New York Stock Exchange died last year; that’s three per cent!” “Amazing” I answered. And then I ran away. Taking a man from New York or any American city and critising him as an American would be as absurd as taking a Neapolitan and judging him as a typical European character. There are very few aspects of American character to be found in all its cities and all its classes of society. Sweeping away the common interests of language and commercial ruthlessness, the man from Boston is as different from a Philadelphian as the Prussian is different from a Sussex farmer. Boston is the butt of American humour. Her snobbishness feeds the American humourist as the illusion of Scottish meaness has fed generations of English wits. But Boston has the courage of its conventions and if it does sit apart from the rabble, thinking itself specially elected to that isolation by a divine edict, it does its trick elegantly and with a certain finesse. New York is a vortex from which you may grasp few tangible truths. If you feel that you are beginning to ‘place’ the New Yorker, to see him as an individual, travel from Wall Street to 84th Street by subway and see the conglomeration of humanity pressing in and out of the doors, the hard, cruel and bitter faces.

London has everything to learn from New York as far as the theatres are concerned. The Theatre Guild productions of ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ and ‘Porgy’ gpve me a new conception of what the stage could mean in the culture of a city. In all the theatres, the lighting was a revelation, and I cannot pass the Theatre Guild without paying my little tribute to ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ and ‘Porgy’. Those pathetic people who imagine Mr Shaw as a ‘highbrow’ tyrant, should be driven into the Guild Theatre and shown this play, perfectly acted, perfectly produced. I used to be a dramatic critic. It is a job that slowly undermines one’s appreciation of the play for the play’s sake. But here the illusion of the theatre came back to me for there was not a moment or a movement or a word in the production which broke the rhythm and beauty and intellectual power of this great play. True, they have to call on the English theatres for many of their best players in New York. But we have no beyond Miss Marie Tempest and Miss Edith Evans to compare with the eight or ten brilliant players in New York at the present time. I saw Miss Helen Hayes in ‘Coquette;’ a perfect performance. Mr Walter Hampden seemed to be very convential in “An Enemy of the People” and I thought the popular success ‘The Baby Cyclone’ to be rather vulgar, obvious, and lacking in sensibility. But even in the inferior plays, the lighting was so clever that I engaged my attention with technicalities and learned many things which London could never teach me. I think the productions at the Metropolitan Opera House are disappointing. I heard Jeritza in ‘Die Walkure.’ She was so lovely that the rest of the production did not matter. But I was overpowered by the luxury of it. There was too- much oriental splendour about the opera, and in the last

scene, the closing movements of the opera were drowned in production. People come in and go out during the scenes, and on the whole, I have never seen a worse behaved audience.

When I was in New Zealand our prejudice against America and Americans was almost an obsession: an unintelligent obsession of which I am ashamed. How affectionately we clung to English influences and English things, and how well I remember the disgust of my contemporaries over the fantastic Americans who came off the mailboat, with their loud voices and their hornrimmed spectacles. But the Englishman in Italy is just as ludicrous and pompous as the American in New Zealand. They must be met and judged in their own habitat. The Americans are materially generous and socially friendly: two virtues which make me feel that there is a good deal of priggishness in the Englishman’s contempt of American gaucherie. Their hospitality is overwhelming. They invite ten people to meet you at lunch and then apologize for not arranging a party. The idea that any visitor should eat a humble chop, alone in a hotel, is nausea to them, and their entertainment is so lavish that one can never hope to return it.

Prohibition is a pretty and unconvincing gesture in New York, and every time I go to dinner in house, hotel, or restaurant, wine is produced in abundance. Prohibition has been abandoned, even as a topic of conversation.

When I arrived here I was interviewed by many reporters; one of them, who has become a good friend to me by now used the cuff of his trousers as an ash-tray, and another asked me who was King of England before George V. Seven photographers telephoned me in the morning. I was photographed by flashlight in my bedroom, and in various positions about a palm-stand in the lounge. But I reached my complete and final <truimph when one of them said “You must look lit-er-ary,” pushing a roll of newspaper into my hand and posing me in such a way that I felt like a statue of Carlyle!