A Writer's World (9 page)

Civis
occidentalis
sum
, and so I do not feel altogether abroad in Tel Aviv. The air is Asian, the sun oriental, the buildings are white and the trees tropical, the beer of the sidewalk cafés possesses a curiously chemical quality, far removed from the vegetable grandeurs of European ale: but if you feel yourself to be a Western man, you will always be half at home in this, the principal city of the Jewish State.

Jerusalem is the official capital of Israel, and Haifa up the coast is a more serene and elegant city, but in the streets of Tel Aviv are enshrined, once and for all, the formidable efforts of the Zionists to achieve a homeland of their own. Here, better than anywhere else in the world, you may consider what it means to be a Jew, ponder the tragic significance of this astonishing people, and wonder whether this smallish seaside town, half resort, half business centre, will ever be a great city in a great nation, or whether the heart of Jewry lies elsewhere still. There was to the energies of Zionism, before the Israeli State became a fact, a mystical, biblical, tribal force, like the shifting of a season or some enormous celestial truth: but Tel Aviv is one of the deflations of history, for today it feels an essentially provincial, hopefully prosaic town, where the nice young women promenade down Allenby Road with their babies, and the conversation at the next table is generally concerned not with dark fundamentals of truth and cruelty, but only the cost of cucumbers or why little Moshe can’t spell.

Tel Aviv, indeed, wants to be an ordinary town, and to any Western visitor nowadays it seems half familiar from the start. The climate is a dream, and all along the city’s waterfront run heavenly golden sands, with the long slow swell of the Mediterranean curling up to the esplanades: but though the setting is exotic, this is almost a European city, inhabited by people who, though handsomely bronzed by the perpetual sun, are almost
Europeans. You hear English, German, Polish or Yiddish almost as often as you hear Hebrew, and time and again you will see someone walking down the street who seems at first sight to be somebody you know, a publisher in Paris or a musician in London, but who turns out to be familiar only because he is a Jew and a man of the West. Just as America was once called, by the poet Philip Bailey, the ‘half-brother of the world’, so Tel Aviv is distantly related, through the blood-brotherhood of Jewry, to all the greater cities of the West.

It still feels a city of the thirties, as do those London suburbs where the refugees from Hitler’s Europe chiefly settled. There is little to show of the British who were its rulers between the wars – a street name here, a police station somewhere else: but its architecture smacks heavily of watered Bauhaus, its undistinguished squares, trim and symmetrical, look like town-planning designs in architectural reviews before the Second World War, and even its sea-front, though it has its glittering new hotels and raucous coffee bars, mostly retains a demure but determined period flavour. Tel Aviv was founded in 1910, but it was really born after Hitler came to power: the refugees who came then stamped it with the mark of their times, and beneath its housewifely exterior you may still detect, if you think long and hard enough about it, some of the art or sadness of fugitives, and the nostalgia of exiles.

Tel Aviv wants to be an everyday city, but can never quite achieve it, for Israel is not an everyday state. It has mellowed since its most defiant days of resentment, lost some of the chips upon its shoulders, but it still lives by the slogan of Ein Brera – ‘No Alternative’ – and is still precariously isolated among a ring of enemies. Moreover, every now and then the Israelis are halted in their tracks by a declamation out of the past, a reminder from State or history that they are no ordinary people, but a nation still apart, a nation of awful suffering genius, beyond the normal processes of the time. They are still confronted by a unique dilemma, apparent sure enough to the thoughtful stranger in the country: either they can abandon their Jewishness, their separateness, and become ordinary healthy citizens of a second Lebanon, or they can deliberately preserve their sense of persecution, superiority and detachment, and attach their new State to the dark and splendid centuries of the Jewish past. They can contract out of genius, if they please, and live as a small but gifted Levantine republic: or they can remain within the prison-palace of their magnificent heritage, and make this place not simply a city of the Israelis, but a city of the Jews.

In Tel Aviv you may feel that they have already made their choice, for there is nothing very gilded or terrible about this city, and here all feels plump and satisfied. Watch them closely as they saunter down to the beach, so tall and fit and laughing, with their gay sun-hats and brief shorts, their picnics and their plump babies – watch them with a detached Gentile eye, and you will see that Tel Aviv is already moulding, as Crevecoeur said of America long ago, a new kind of man. A generation is maturing that was born in Israel, and never knew the horrors of the ghettos or the lesser humiliations of Jewishness: and it is both the triumph and the tragedy of Tel Aviv that though its younger citizens are unmistakably Israeli, they do not feel like Jews.

Is this a worthy function for such a city, born out of the genius of such a people? Many Jews think not, and for myself I cannot suppose that Tel Aviv properly represents the Jewish future, faithfully though it may reflect the prospects of the Jewish State. Such an end to a supreme story does not ring true to history, to prophecy, to art, or to Judaism itself. The longer I spend among the cosy comforts of Tel Aviv, the more it seems to me that the Jews are, in a towering and inexplicable sense, some kind of Chosen People. So often, if you pursue a human activity to its source or its conclusion you end up among the Jews. They will never be quite the same as us, however happily humdrum they manage to make this city, and will perhaps never be restful, serene or ordinary for long. They are a nation doomed but exalted, lapped perpetually in the divine twilight.

Tel Aviv will fructify, I have no doubt, and play a worthy part in the affairs of the lesser states: but the only proper conclusion to the tale of the Jews is the victory of the selfless over the selfish – and sure enough, in the heart of that conception too every Christian finds a Jew.

This was one of the oddest and nastiest of African phenomena, and it had an obscurely aboriginal flavour to it, as of recalcitrant chieftains dragged before their paramount ruler, or slaves examined
en
masse
before their absorption by cannibal kings in Dahomey. The Drill Hall had been built in the old days of British South Africa, and it had a low veranda and lots of notice boards, and a varnished brown orderly-room air. In this place the accused assembled each morning in attitudes of bored or truculent resignation. There was a suggestion of punch-balls and puttees to the big dun-coloured hall, a sort of leathery, gym-shoe smell, and a large notice above one door proclaimed incongruously: ‘Escape Door: Not Locked’. The light was rather dim those cold winter mornings, and beside the entrance a policeman sat at a deal table holding his thriller to the sunshine, the better to find some excitement in life.

This is one place in South Africa where racial segregation is tacitly abandoned. The audience is separated, to be sure, into the usual white sheep and black goats, but the accused are herded together huggermugger in their wire pen. Some are white, some are brown, some are proudly black. One or two read newspapers, some write letters, a few usually seem to be asleep. One man wears a green, yellow and black blazer. A tall elegant Jew sorts his colour slides with detachment; a young African girl, in a green beret and black-and-white flowered skirt, spreads
her papers around her on the bench and works upon a thesis. Here a merry little Indian giggles with his neighbours, and here a lean bearded black man, inexpressibly sinister of appearance, stares coldly at the ceiling like an upturned idol. Every shade of leftist opinion is represented here, sometimes in awkward proximity. The handsome black giant with the silver hair and the benign smile is Chief Luthuli, a great man of the Zulu people and the most remarkable black leader in the Union. There are lawyers and clergymen and students and taxi-drivers and writers and wives and political activists: all are enemies, from one motive or another, of apartheid; all are opponents of the Nationalist Government, and all are, in theory anyway, candidates for the gallows.

South Africa is an odd amalgam of tyranny and liberty, about equally compounded, and to this strange hearing there is an unexpected element of old-school fairness. The magistrate is scrupulous, the police treat their prisoners kindly, there is something faintly academic or even recreational about the hearings. The Crown’s evidence, presented by semi-literate plain-clothes detectives, is sometimes downright comic; one Presbyterian clergyman of communist leanings, for example, is alleged to have been received by the Pope in audience ‘at his church in Moscow’. The defence lawyers are often witty. When the court adjourns for its tea break, at eleven each morning, there is usually quite a cheerful atmosphere to the scene. Thermos flasks emerge from baskets. An eager African hawks group photographs headed ‘Treason Trial, 1956’, in which all this assembly sits in smiling rows giving the thumbs-up sign – the salute of African nationalism. The Presbyterian parson shows his neighbour the manuscript of next Sunday’s sermon, already stamped with the cachet of the Special Branch censorship. The defence lawyers, who have volunteered their services, stroll among their clients or chat with Crown counsel (as they are still laughably called). A couple of reporters doodle at their table, and one or two Africans from the audience talk to their friends through the mesh of the wire. The unacclimatized visitor, fresh from the logicalities of Europe or America, feels his head whirl as he talks to a Zulu chief, a taxi-driver’s wife from Durban, a rich Marxist lawyer, an Afrikaner police officer, and a schoolgirl from the audience in the gymslip and long black stockings of an almost forgotten England. Lear and Carroll would often feel at home, at tea break in the Drill Hall.

Now all the poor black workers of Johannesburg, forbidden to live within the precincts of the city, rush for the buses that will take them to their locations, to the slums or sprawling estates of the Western Areas. Each evening as dusk falls, and as the bitter night wind begins to whistle through the buildings, a vast tattered queue moves in raggety parade towards the bus depot. It encircles the entire square outside the Drill Hall, so that the tail of the queue meets its own head, and all those thousands of Africans shuffle their slow way in double file towards their shabby buses. It is the longest, and saddest, and coldest queue I have ever seen. The bus service is frequent enough, and the black people do not usually have to shiver in the cold for too long: but there is an air of unutterable degradation to the scene, so heartless and machine-like is the progress of the queue, as the white folk hasten off in their cars to Hillbrow and Parktown, and the lights glitter in windows of the department stores, and these poor lost souls are crammed into their buses and packed off to their distant ill-lit townships. Many of them are half-starving. Most of them live in fear of robbery and violence when they step off the buses into the dark streets of the locations. Half of them spend almost all their leisure hours travelling between the city and the far-flung patches of high veldt in which they are, by law, forced to live. They reach their homes long after dark at night, and they start for work again while the morning is still only a suggestion. You can hardly watch such a scene, and ponder its implications, and collate it with that dotty trial in the Drill Hall behind you, without the stirring of some crusading instinct, some Byronic impulse, or at least a stab of pity.

But when you get back to your hotel again, and are drowning the memory in a Riesling from the Cape, perhaps you will hear some tinny twangs of music from the street outside: and there beneath the arcades of President Street some solitary black man will be lounging by, in a tattered brown hat and blue dungarees, plucking away at a guitar as he walks, humming a high-toned melody and expressing in his every gesture, in the very swing of his shoulders, the spirit of carefree indolence.

Few Europeans stand astride the racial divide. Only a handful can without self-consciousness share the confidences of educated, politically minded blacks, so sooner or later nearly every foreign inquirer finds his way to Christopher Gell. He probably knows more than anyone about the strengths and weaknesses of African defiance. His articles appear all over the world, and within South Africa his name is almost legendary. To his stuffier Port Elizabeth neighbours he is a fanatic and a freak. To many Africans he is magic. To the reporters and commentators of the world, he is a unique source of guidance and information. To the Nationalists he is anathema. His telephones are tapped, his visitors observed, his mocking trenchant opinions no doubt preserved in the vaults of Afrikanerdom. He is one of the symbolic figures of the South African tragedy, exerting from this dull provincial port a peculiar and incalculable influence upon the national affairs. And all this is the more interesting because, as it happens, Gell is crippled by poliomyelitis and lives in an iron lung.

He is an English-born South African of a truly inspiring force of character. I disagree with much of what he says; I find him often intolerant and sometimes unfair; but I have never met a man I would more willingly follow into the inferno. His father was a British naval officer, and Gell himself is a former member of the Indian Civil Service. He talks in the racy, sometimes expletive idiom of the English gentleman, and nobody could accuse him for a moment of any fuddy-duddy muddle-headed liberalism. He knows exactly where he stands, and so does everyone else. ‘Don’t ring off!’ he says, when you telephone and introduce yourself. ‘Wait till I put my telephone down and then listen, and you’ll hear a kind of click when these stiffs stop tapping the line. Ready? OK, I’ll ring off now – you listen!’ And sure enough, when his laughing voice has gone and you have waited for a moment or two, you may fancy you hear a muffled embarrassed click, as some unseen censor, his ears burning, adds an entry to the Gell dossier.

In such a gay spirit Gell cocks a perpetual snook at the authorities and contributes manfully to his chosen cause, the emancipation of the African. A well-trodden path leads to his little house (where his remarkable young wife supports them both with a physiotherapy practice). Here the African
politicians come, and the editors of the local newspapers, innumerable visiting investigators, a stream of people interested in the African risorgimento and anxious to meet this strange Byronic figure. Gell receives them in his lung or in his bed (he can leave the machine for three hours every day). He is very tall, painfully cadaverous, immensely vivacious. He wears glasses and has one of his arms suspended above him in a kind of sling. Books and elaborate filing cabinets line the room. There is a painting of the battle cruiser
Hood
, one of his father’s ships, and the table beside the bed is littered with proofs and pamphlets and letters and open books. Sometimes an African servant wanders in with coffee, carrying a baby slung to her back: Gell treats her with affectionate unsentimentality. Often the telephone rings and Gell, making a grimace at you, launches himself into a torrential farrago of opinion and prejudice and argument, until the voice of the man at the other end sounds breathless and dispirited, and Gell’s face is wickedly aglow, and the conversation ends in an intellectual annihilation.

Then, like a swivelling gun or a fire-hose, he turns to you. ‘Now then, let me put you straight about these bloody Nats …’ He talks with tremendous energy, animated, witty, outrageous, caustic, irrepressible, interspersing his diatribes with devastating confidences, pausing sometimes to scribble a name down for you or dash off a letter of introduction, swearing, laughing, quoting Schweitzer, in a most extraordinary flood of stimulation and conviction. Slowly, though, his damaged physique runs down. His breathing becomes heavier and more difficult, his conversation more gasping and spasmodic, his face more strained with effort, and the gusto drains from his body before your eyes, like the symbolisms of a Gothic painting: until at last his wife comes cheerfully in and moves him back to his iron lung. He will still be talking as you leave him, and his anxious humorous eyes will be following you in the little mirror above his head. ‘Of
course
we’re intolerant,’ he says as you go. ‘We have to be. We’d never get anywhere with these stiffs if we weren’t!’ Some people believe Christopher Gell to be a saint. Certainly his presence at Port Elizabeth gives it, to my mind, a strong lead over the Voice at Midnight in the immortality stakes.