A Writer's World (13 page)

Through the marbled magnificence of the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo a thickened American voice exploded this evening. ‘Look, you lousy two-timing son of a bitch,’ it said, not without dignity, ‘I may be a goddam reporter but I’m a human being too, see, and this isn’t Marilyn Monroe we’re waiting for, it’s Churchill, see, Churchill! So I get mad!’

We always get mad on our big competitive assignments, but only rarely do we admit to humanity. When that angry American thumped the bar this evening, in the pursuance of some obscure and ephemeral grievance, he was expressing a historical truth. Waiting for Churchill, as he says, is something different, and to the long vigil at Roquebrune, maintained all day and half the night by a jostling international Press corps, there has been a suppressed undertone of something precariously approaching sentiment.
Today’s communiqué on the patient’s health announced that his temperature was normal and that his progress continued to be satisfactory; but ‘you never know if you can believe these lousy doctors’, we all said, and only a few confident and self-disciplined reporters flew away this evening from the hardships of a Monaco expense account.

For the rest, the selfless vigilance is maintained. The watch begins early. ‘To the villa!’ the taxi-cab drivers are told, and up to the Villa la Pausa, high above Monaco, streams the morning caravan. A private road leads up to the house, and by midday it is blocked with cars and vans. A gaudy yellow saloon is emblazoned ‘Europe No. 1’. A covey of cameramen sits on a wall dangling its legs. A tall BBC commentator, wearing a very British blazer, stands in incongruous dignity among the miscellaneous ill-shaven photographers of the Paris weeklies. The gate is guarded by two sedate French policemen, and all is calm and quiet.

A pleasant dusty path runs around the ground of the Villa la Pausa, and along it there wanders a sporadic procession of photographers, elaborate with telephoto lenses. Somebody has littered the path with the torn pages of a vividly salacious magazine, and a few determined continentals squat in the sunshine earnestly trying to piece them together again. Around the corner a solitary cameraman stands like a statue at the garden wall: from this place he once caught a glimpse of Lady Churchill, far in the garden below, and he hasn’t budged since.

The best vantage point of all is on the seaward side of the house. From here you can see part of the villa clearly enough, from its shuttered upstairs windows to its closed out-house door. The trees are cool and shady, and a little knot of reporters is passing the time by throwing stones at a tin can. ‘You can’t see much from here!’ says an elderly English gentleman, passing laboriously up the hill. ‘Ha, ha, no,’ say the reporters politely, and add,
sotto voce
, ‘You’re all right, Jack, you’ve got your bread buttered already.’

So have they, for the moment anyway. Perhaps they will drive down to Menton for their lunch, or pass an hour or two in some agreeable little bar before gathering at the Hôtel de Paris for the afternoon communiqué. Mr Montague-Browne, Sir Winston’s secretary, delivers it coolly and precisely, and deftly declines to elaborate. No, he can’t explain the medical terms more exactly. No, he’s very sorry, but Sir Winston is a guest at the villa, and it would be impolite to talk in more detail of the ménage. Yes, he quite understands the difficulties of the Press. No, he much regrets he cannot say what book Sir Winston is reading today. ‘We’re thick-skinned up at the villa,’ says Mr Montague-Browne endearingly, as
he escapes through the squashy armchairs and disappears in a cloud of unanswered questions.

Then the Press corps, only mildly simmering with its occupational disgruntlements, dispatches its cables and settles down for the evening. As always, our pleasures are spattered with shop talk. They say the
Daily
So-and-so
tried to get hold of the villa housemaid. Lord what’s his name himself, one hears, has told his reporters to lay off. ‘What about
Paris-
Presse
, hey? That guy overheard Winston talking in his sleep!’ A few hardy or nervous practitioners take a cab up to the villa after dinner, to peer staunchly through the darkness in the general direction of the statesman. A few have inconvenient deadlines to meet on the other side of the earth. The rest obey the conventions of the place, and presently plunge unerringly into the variegated salons of its pleasure domes. And up on the mountainside, the subject, object and predicate of all these constructions, old Sir Winston lies in bed.

The messages are pouring in from the four corners of the world, but he lies there in seclusion, the last of the giants, reading his newspapers and confounding his pleurisies. Some of my colleagues depict him demanding brandy, puffing cigars, writing his own health bulletins, reading Somerset Maugham, calling for splendid enormous meals. For myself, when I was up the mountain this evening I thought I heard a sound from the Villa la Pausa, above the sweetness of the birds and the distant sawing of a woodman. It came from an upstairs window of the house, and it sounded to me uncommonly like a chuckle: a rich, quixotic, irrepressible, ageless Harrovian chuckle.

‘How come you heard that and nobody else? You got influence some place? Hey, garçon, two dries.’

Poised in the estuary of the Ota River, where a covey of islands meanders into the mists of the Inland Sea, lies the city of Hiroshima. It is a seaport, an industrial town, an old military base, a market centre: but to this day it lives and breathes and talks and thinks the atomic bomb that exploded over it on 6 August 1945. The city has long been rebuilt, and a new population has flooded in to replace the victims of the holocaust: but for all the bright new buildings and the broad boulevards, no Pompeii is more surely frozen in its attitude of disaster, and no Mont Pelée more permanently scarred. From the hillside above the city you can see how horribly plump and passive a target Hiroshima was. It lies compactly in a funnel among the hills, where the Ota flows pleasantly into the sea. Because it is built on a group of islands, it is criss-crossed by channels of water, and in its very centre is the T-shaped bridge that was the bomb-aimer’s objective. Today it has all been reconstructed. The usual straggly houses of urban Japan run away to the sea, and in the business district there stands a group of tall buildings such as you may often see, an earnest of commerce and hospitality, silhouetted upon the American horizon. A ship or two stands
offshore. Traffic flows fairly thickly down the streets. Loudly striped advertising balloons loiter above the City Hall, and a homely hum of activity hangs on the soft damp air. It all looks normal enough from the hillside – even beautiful, with the city lying there so new and shining, and the deep blue of the high ground behind, and the placid island-speckled expanse of sea sweeping away to Miyajima and the Pacific.

A few days in Hiroshima, though, and you begin to feel oppressed by the hideous abnormality of the place. The soul was ripped out of this city and though the taxi-cabs may scurry about you, and the street-cars clang, and the neon lights blaze merrily enough, and the girls in kimonos bow you seductively into the night clubs, yet it somehow feels an empty city still. There is something obscurely pallid and muffled about it, for all the world as though the tall new buildings are not there at all, and the islands of the Ota delta are still blackened and smoking. Assured indeed must be the visitor who has not, just for a fleeting foolish moment, wondered if the stones of Hiroshima were still radioactive, or eyed the running water thoughtfully.

This inescapable presence of dread is partly artificial. The horror of the atomic explosion has been deliberately cherished in Hiroshima, and the memory is purposefully sustained. In the centre of the town you are trapped within this tragic and morbid cage. Outside the windows of your grand new hotel stands the Peace Memorial Museum, partly an exhibition of nuclear science, most compellingly a chamber of horrors, dominated by a huge circular model of the devastated Hiroshima, and ornamented with terrible photographs. From the cultural centre across the way there emerge at hourly intervals the saccharine harmonies of adagio hymn tunes, played with lush vibrato on a recorded carillon. There are shrines all about you, the Children’s Memorial and the inter-denominational shrine, and the celebrated Shadow on the steps of the bank, and the noble epitaph on the central memorial: ‘Rest in peace, for the error shall not be repeated.’ You must be pathologically callous or world-weary beyond cure to remain unmoved by the reminders of Hiroshima: but staying in the city today, nevertheless, is like spending a nightmare weekend in one of Evelyn Waugh’s California cemeteries, where the dignities of death were honoured with such sickly and cosmetic fulsomeness.

One could stomach it the more easily if this were a catastrophe of long ago, but there are many people in Hiroshima still directly suffering from the effects of the atomic explosion. There are unfortunates so hideously disfigured that they seldom emerge from their houses. There are the
patients still, to this very day, in hospital. There are the sufferers from leukaemia. There are the mothers whose children, in the womb at the time of the attack, were born with terrible handicaps and distortions. And there are those who experienced the thing, but were not injured by it, and who now seem like hollow men, haunted and devitalized, with something sucked out of them – ‘always tired’, as one man said to me, ‘I seem to have been tired ever since.’ Most pitiable of all, there are those many young people who are afraid of the genetic effects of the bomb. Cruelly cynical has been the exploitation of this foreboding, by Press and by politicians; wild and heartless have been the rumours of two-headed babies and strangely endowed goldfish, and a kind of eerie stockade has been erected about the young people of the place. Men look for their brides elsewhere. Girls try to hide their origins. Cruel reporters sniff about for horrors.

Yet one finds only kindness and common sense from the average citizen. The girl with the hideously disfigured face looks you straight and sweetly in the eye. The Man with the Bomb Story tells it with about the same wry relish as his opposite numbers in Bristol or Berlin. Except on the level of the newspapers and the museums, Hiroshima appears to harbour astonishingly little recrimination. So the skull-like emptiness of Hiroshima seems to be something organic, as though through all the reviving human activity some grim nuclear influences still permeate. I cannot describe the feeling of this place: but it is as though some indefinable essential element has been withdrawn from the ambiance – not colour, nor smell, nor sound, but something else, something which gives meaning and warmth to a city, like salt with your victuals, or eyes in a beautiful face.

Kyoto means Capital City. For a thousand years this famous place, encouched in mountains upon the Kamo River, was the capital of Japan and the emblem of Japanese civilization, and even today it remains to the Japanese something special among their cities, far more than just an elderly provincial metropolis in the central hills. It reigns still as the supreme repository of their ancient traditions, their culture and their custom, their religion and their high-flown patriotism, their golden heritage and their resilient pride. To ninety million Japanese it is the very soul and melody of Nippon.

To the foreigner, though, bouncing in by bus from Osaka, it seems at first sight something less than lovely: for though its setting is magnificent and its pose perennially imperial, yet the face it shows to the world is sadly coarsened. The frenzy of the new Japan has fallen upon Kyoto, cramming its streets with wild-driven traffic, tainting its old wisdom with doubt and disillusion. Kyoto was spared the worst tragedies of war, but it shares with the rest of Japan a sense of causes lost and ideals soured, of warped emotions and passions suppressed. The shape of this town was decreed by the Emperor Kammu eleven centuries ago, but Kyoto has long since lost its symmetry and pattern, and seems to lie there, as your bus lurches through the faceless streets, floundering and inelegant, a city of lost style.

Both views are right: the impassioned Japanese, the disappointed alien. Kyoto as a whole is a plain place, shabby and shanty-like, but like other of the world’s great cities it is a place of reticent enchantment, a private place, a place behind walls, a place whose beauties you must search out, and whose meanings, like the exquisite subtleties of the Japanese tea ceremony, lie hidden beneath layers of innuendo. Kyoto is the most conservative of Japanese cities, still half living in its gilded heyday, when its monarchs and shoguns luxuriated in cultivated splendour, and the four great sects of Japanese Buddhism settled beneath its hills in ritual and meditation. The patricians of Kyoto are aloof and lofty still. The ultimate treasures of the place are jealously guarded. The tourists may click their shutters, the traffic may rage, the radios deafen: but away beyond the tawdry façade, even beyond the temples and the incomparable gardens, the spirit of this deep city lies unruffled, like a carp in a sacred pool.

Temporal consequence abandoned Kyoto a century ago, when the emperors left it, yet for all its faded majesty it feels unmistakably a great city still, a city of lingering power and paramountcy, and sometimes even of menace. All that is most deep-rooted in the Japanese character persists in this introvert community: some of it enchanting, some of it hideous, some of it alarming, some of it delicate and fastidious beyond compare, some of it (to Western minds) perfectly inexplicable. In Kyoto you may observe, still extant and vigorous, an advanced and elaborate form of society that has no real contact with the ways of the West. It has its department stores and its television studios, of course, its airline offices and its air-conditioned hotels, yet it remains at heart among the most oriental of cities, looking at the world like some heavy-lidded potentate peering across the fun-fairs from a high window of his castle.

A myriad shrines, temples and mansions powerfully fortify this sense of hidden strength and exclusivity. They are scattered across the city like gems in mud, unexpectedly at the ends of culs-de-sac, magnificently among pine groves on hillocks, splendidly in flamboyant courtyards. In Kyoto there are nearly two thousand Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and palaces of importance, giving to every corner of the metropolis oblique suggestions of sanctity, delicacy and wisdom. Some are vast and portentous, their steep cypress-bark roofs (fuzzy with moss) rising high in grandeur above the houses, their ceremonial gongs gigantic beneath their wooden shelters, their spotless passages meandering interminably through gilded screens, painted ante-rooms, gardens of infinite sophistication, tea-houses of faultless proportion. Some are no bigger than garden chalets, flickering small shrines of contemplation, reclining in rotting silence beneath high garden walls, or balanced beside rushing rivulets. Some are the empty palaces of the emperors and the shoguns, soaked in grandeur and symbolism: their wonderful gardens representative of the ocean, or the Inland Sea, or peace, or Paradise, or a fleet of treasure-ships, or the cosmos, their chambers rich with painted tigers, bamboo groves, sea-birds, turtles. Some are the great prayer-houses of monks and holy men, mysterious with candles and slow movement, the tinkle of bells, the fluttering of sacred papers, the fragrance of incense, the murmured incantations that will bring the Jodo brethren, in their after-life, infallibly to the Western Paradise. Some are the storehouses of mighty treasures, like the thousand images of the goddess Kannon in the Temple of Sanju-sangendo – a fabulous phalanx of glistening golden figures, silent, many-armed, sad-eyed, accusatory, each one stuffed with Buddhist scripts, rank upon rank, eye upon eye, attended by the Gods of Thunder and Wind, the Spirit of Merciful Maternity, the Spirit of Devotion, the Spirit of Exorcism. Some are airy gems of lucidity, like the little golden pavilion called Kinkakuji, which was once burnt down by a mad monk, but now stands again featherweight above its lake, with one room reserved for poetry-reading and incense parties, and a rustle of conifers all around. Some are shrines of awful solemnity, poised upon high places, approached by tall breathtaking steps, with pagodas lonely among the larches and mountain streams rushing by below. The great buildings of Kyoto are inexhaustible and inescapable. It would take weeks only to glimpse them all, and because they are distributed through every ward and every suburb, they give the city dignity in depth, and clamp its drab sprawling fabric powerfully together.

The quiddities and idiosyncrasies of the Japanese tradition, surviving here more potently than anywhere else, contribute no less to the intensity of Kyoto. This is a knobbly, enigmatic kind of entity, a city for initiates, streaked with eccentricity, rich in grace-notes. Jammed beneath the eaves of one great temple you may see an old umbrella, dropped there aeons ago by a divine personage, and preserved there for ever as a sign of holy favour. In another you may admire a painting of Fujiyama whose perspective falls into accuracy only if you kneel before the canvas. In a third you may hear the floor-boards, squeaking beneath your tread, ‘emitting a sound’ (as the guide-book says) ‘resembling the song of a Japanese bush warbler’. You may walk the soft paths of a garden clothed entirely in moss, a padded shadowy retreat for contemplatives; you may hear the hollow rhythmic clatter of a deer-scarer, a hinged wooden tube animated by the passing water of a stream; or you may wonder at the great chains hanging down the rooftops of the Imperial Palace – placed there for the convenience of fire-fighters, but ‘also forming’, says the guide hopefully, ‘a kind of ornament’. If you are specially privileged you may even catch sight of the slightly improper medieval picture which, wrapped in innumerable silks and stored in impenetrable caskets, is regarded as so precious a possession that only twenty people are allowed to view it each year.

The rice-paper windows of the Kyoto palaces are often pierced by children’s fingers or the beaks of inquisitive birds, but they are mended characteristically: over each hole a small piece of paper is meticulously glued, cut by eager fingers into entrancing flower patterns, every petal of perfect symmetry.

Everyday life in Kyoto is patched with similar fastidious grace. Of all the big Japanese cities, this remains nearest to the water-colour Japan, the Japan of the print-makers and the flower-makers. The main streets are dreadfully banal, but beyond them are alleys of seduction. Here the butterfly kimono, the white stocking, the cloven boot and the flowered kerchief may be seen down any back street, and the fringes of the city are full of brawny country folk, brown as goblins and wreathed in grins. Often you will hear, as you pass beneath some towering wall, the shrill whistling of strange flutes, or the pad of a Japanese drum. Possibly you will encounter, on the grassy sunlit verge of the river, a wandering monk in a grey robe and a bulbous basket-work hat, begging his way to immortality. All around the city, on the high mountain skyline, the pine trees stand in willow-pattern
silhouette, and sometimes you may catch the local students, in their peaked caps and drab serge uniforms, entreating a Shinto shrine for good marks in their examinations.