Coast to Coast (3 page)

V
ery quickly, when you finally leave Manhattan, you can find yourself in the country. I lived for a time with my wife and children in a little anachronistic village called Cranbury, New Jersey, that is almost in sight of the great highway, and within easy commuting distance of Manhattan. Tourists do not often go there, for it is off the beaten track. There are no “scenic wonders” (as Americans insist on calling any natural phenomenon, from a geyser to a precipice), few historical associations, little business, and no bucolic freakishness. It is just a small market centre, where farmers do their shopping and a few commuters have established their homes. But it is notable all the same, because so
far it has openly and successfully defied all those powerful influences of materialism that are always pulsing and pushing just over the hill. It cannot last, of course. Already there is a spanking new housing estate on the edge of the village, and the temptations of land prices grow more compelling every year; but at least Cranbury is aware of all the sorry dangers, and its Citizens Advisory Committee on Planning (“Getting the Jump on Progress”) will see to it, I have no doubt, that here the very worst will never happen.

The place is at its best on a frosty evening in winter, when the stars are sharp and the white weatherboard houses of Main Street shine in the moonlight. On such nights the people of Cranbury often go skating on the village pond, to the accompaniment of music from loudspeakers mounted on the roof of the fire station. The lake is illuminated by the headlights of cars, but it is a pleasantly old-fashioned scene—a compound of Grandma Moses and the elder Brueghel. Most of the villagers are skating. There are farmers in check shirts and ear muffs, moving with unexpected grace. Girls waltz pointedly in pairs, wearing blue ski trousers and white jumpers. A man who looks like an insurance agent steers a ponderous course over the ice, his black hat still sedately on his head. Small children totter in desperate instability towards the bank, and boys with toboggans shoot about like rockets. Various men with a tendency towards authority stand in municipal attitudes on the perimeter.

Across the road in the fire station the fire engines stand vigilantly gleaming. The man on duty pokes his head out of an upstairs window for a chat with a friend below, and one or two of the more daring children sneak in, when they can, to climb into the driver’s seat. The fire station is a centre of activity in Cranbury, following an old American tradition. For many years all fire brigades were amateur and voluntary, and it became a basic duty of the rural American male to join the local brigade; fire-fighting became a social function, and the fire brigade acquired the status of a team or club. In Cranbury this system still prevails. The fire chief is the local garage man, and very proud he is of the smartness and alertness of the brigade. Often and again he has told me of its prowess, and once he gave a lecture on the subject to the Lions’ Club.

All around the lake stand the comfortable houses of Cranbury. They are mostly built of white weatherboard, in vaguely Colonial style (those householders blessed with verandas have recently been tearing them down to heighten the eighteenth-century appearance). They are generally trim, clean and newly-painted, their smartness enhanced rather than spoilt by a few yellowing renegades with peeling paintwork. The nearest
thing to a mansion is a hilarious Victorian structure on an eminence, bursting with urns and ornaments, with a grand carriageway and multitudes of outhouses; the nearest thing to a slum is a little group of plain houses with cracked windows, where the Negro community lives. There is a row of unpretentious shops, and a couple of drug stores, and an eighteenth-century inn where the turkey is excellent, and where Washington is alleged to have spent a night. There is also a small school of music, from where you may sometimes hear, even on skating nights, the strains of thin and ill-disciplined melody.

It is a fairly well-heeled village, and there is a good deal of comfort in these white houses. Everyone has a refrigerator, of course, and a television set, and a washing machine; many people also possess dishwashers, gadgets for making waste matter swill away down the sink, toy buses that steer themselves electronically when you shout at them, radios that wake you up with a cup of coffee, pink telephones, devices that change the TV channel by a radio impulse from your armchair, microphones to transmit the sounds of sleepless babies. Almost every family has its new car, and the slimmest daughter handles it like a lorry driver. Almost every house has its central heating, and from time to time a truck arrives to pump oil through heavy pipes into the basement furnaces.

If you stand beside the lake and look to the west, you may see a constant scurrying stream of headlights. They mark our highway to Manhattan, a highway alive with energy and industry. Within a few miles that road will take you to the oil refineries of Elizabeth, acre upon acre of derricks and tanks and convoluted mechanism; to the steel plants around Trenton, fed on iron from Venezuela; or to the immense industrial complex that surrounds Newark and Jersey City. If you are imaginative you can almost hear the crashing of hammers and the whirr of machinery; but the skaters are mercifully deaf to it.

Go a little way to the other side of the village, and you may see the lights of Princeton, one of the great American centres of learning, a prime force in the development of American knowledge and culture. It is a historic place. In one of its old buildings Washington presided over the Continental Congress, after beating the British on a nearby battlefield. Later it was fashionable for Southern gentlemen to attend this university, and they would arrive there splendidly with their elegant clothes and fascinating accents, attended by personal slaves. Many famous Americans have graduated from Princeton, and Woodrow Wilson was once its president.

But Europe and modernity, twin watchdogs, guard its campus. Its
buildings are well-tuned echoes of Oxford, shady quadrangles and staircases and more than one Magdalen Tower. Its streets are full of foreign sports cars, and its young men wear hacking jackets by Brooks Brothers out of Leicestershire. One shop in the town hangs prominently in its window a framed reproduction of the regimental colours of the British Army. The bookshops are well stocked with paper-back Camus, Kerouac and Osborne. English comedies and Continental sophistications prosper in the cinemas.

All this is far enough removed from the spirit of Cranbury (only a few miles down the road) but it is only half of Princeton; for there is no community in the United States that reflects more accurately the undeviating American passion for material progress. Princeton is a positive powerhouse of research. The Institute for Advanced Studies is here, with its memories of Professor Einstein. At Princeton Dr. Gallup and his minions arrange their polls and analyse their findings with a touching confidence. Here the United States Navy has a laboratory concerned with guided missiles, rocket projectiles and the like. (These mundane if awful technicalities have transformed the U.S. Navy as a profession. I once asked a lady whether her son, a conscript Ensign in destroyers, intended to make the Navy his career. “Oh dear me no,” she said in a voice that might have amused Nelson, “oh dear me no, he’s a
young
New
York
intellectual!
”)

But it passes Cranbury by, this concentration of alien sympathies and advanced inquiry. The skaters are simple people still, with some of the qualities of the pioneers who founded Cranbury not so very long ago (in the 1780’s there was nothing here but an Indian village in a forest clearing). The predominant influence in Cranbury is not Princeton or the industrial regions around the corner, but the Presbyterian Church whose white steeple rises gracefully above the housetops. Religion in such a place as this is at once devotional, philanthropic and social. On Sunday mornings Main Street is crowded with the cars of the churchgoers, and the sidewalks (lined with trees) are full of people dressed very decidedly in their Sunday best. The children, in particular, shine with an unearthly hygiene, their hair greased or curled, their faces pink with cold and soap, their hands considerately gloved. The boys wear bow ties and coats with fur collars, the girls frilly party dresses.

You can hardly escape the advances of a lively American church of this kind. Almost before you have settled in your house, you find yourself irrevocably committed to one activity or another. It may be the Stitch-and-Chatter group, on Thursday, or the Helping Hand Club on Monday evenings. Perhaps there is a bazaar, or a discussion group, or a
Bible study class, or even dinner at the Minister’s (good company and fine food, not even spoilt by a monopoly of blackberry wine.) So friendly are these approaches, and so sincere, that you can scarcely object to them, even if you were brought up on scholarly canons, fan-vaulting and Stanford in B flat. For it is wrong to scoff indiscriminately at the American do-gooder, especially in these stable regions of the East. He is often unctuous, and sometimes asinine, but not usually a hypocrite. The group activities of such little American towns are generally hard on the side of the right and guided, all in all, by praiseworthy motives; and since they play an important part in the forming of national opinions, they should be taken seriously and given their due. By some involved delegation of ideas, rising through the gradations of public responsibility, a dam in Pakistan or a school in Peru may depend upon the views of one of these imperceptible Stitch-and-Chatter gatherings; so only a fool would laugh at them.

Here in Cranbury they not only contribute to a healthy (if slightly priggish) climate of thought, but also perform works of active good. Each year bands of migrant workers, mostly Negroes, arrive in the district to help with the potato harvest. They are very poor, and often ruthlessly bullied by the Negro contractors who have engaged them and brought them from the South in lorries. They live in shacks and huts provided by the farmers, communing only with themselves, strangers to the country, like Israelites in Egypt. Every year the good people of Cranbury, through their various societies, take care of these unfortunates, arranging for the schooling of their children, providing meals and occasional outings. They care little about racial antipathies. Indeed, any distinction that I could detect between black and white in Cranbury was purely economic, the blacks being mostly indigent and ill-educated, for even the Negroes resident in Cranbury migrated not long ago from the abyss of the South.

So life in Cranbury revolves around the church, the fire brigade, the drug stores; and the children. In a little town of this sort one can watch most closely the fabled American treatment of their young, and a very comfortable treatment it is. No soft Siamese, no quaint hamster, no irresistible Shetland has affection lavished on it quite so unstintingly as does the little American; no cossetted child of English fortune or Oriental splendour is more carefully cherished. “We love our children,” say the road signs outside many American towns; rather as a Tibetan hamlet might announce its belief in rebirth, for indeed it goes without saying. There is a cloying sentimentality to this devotion that repels many Europeans, and indeed there is something sickly about the
American inclination to think of children as being younger and more protectable than they are. Many an American child lives like a little gilded trinket in the bosom of its family, taking care to wrap up in innumerable warm woollies before venturing into the winter morning. Too often young Americans seem to lack the conventional spirit of adventure, of the Huckleberry Finn variety, and acquire an air (so overloaded are they with possessions, so warmly mothered through childhood) of blasé but barbarous fragility.

And yet I used to find in Cranbury, where it is true these methods are not carried to extremes, that the little American often and again belies his reputation. Ghastly though he sometimes appears (and the he, if anything, rather less ghastly than the she) he often turns out to be wonderfully good material. I remember the little boys of Cranbury, muffled to the ears, of course, in protective clothing, out in the snow with a shovel in their hands and a dollar in prospect, working hard and cheerfully (harder than their English equivalents) to clear the garden path. I remember with gratitude the girls who would come to our house, in between dates, to baby-sit with great care and competence. The truth is that American children develop national characteristics disconcertingly early. This is the land of opportunism, and the children realize it soon. The boys see no point in unnecessary hardship or risk, but are greedy for vicarious experience and useful knowledge, and will work well for fair reward. The girls seem to know before they leave the nursery that a good marriage must be their goal, and regulate their lives accordingly; so that to an American girl of 14 an English gym slip must seem a dreadful relic of old ignorance, like child labour underground, or Scutari. Who can blame them? The first clause of a “programme for education” produced by the National Education Association of America reads: “All youth needs to develop saleable skills and those understandings and attitudes that make the worker an intelligent and productive participant in economic life.” For the boy, this mouthful means a grasp of the methods of self-advancement; for the girl, a neat hand with a lipstick; and there are few to quote the Miltonic view, that “the end of Learning is to know God aright”.

Anyway, the Cranbury children are but little corrupted by these philosophies, and are both friendly and well-mannered. On the frozen lake in the moonlight they look enchanting, but then so does almost everyone (though nobody could claim ethereal charm for the man in the black hat). These eastern country occasions offer some of the best of American life. In the eighteenth century Crèvecoeur posed the celebrated question: “What is he, the American, this new man?” His shade
might well go to Cranbury for an answer, on a moonlit skating evening, and choose for itself a characteristic citizen—the elderly man leaning against the wall of the fire station, for example, chewing a harsh cigar and exchanging a few cryptic words with the fireman in the upstairs window. Such a man knows little of Europe and its values, but is quite willing to learn; dislikes and distrusts authority, but is ready to cooperate if nicely asked; likes to get a jump on progress, but resents progress jumping the gun on him; can be a fearful bore, but tries to reach his conclusions fairly; enjoys watching the skating, but will be up early next morning; cares not two hoots for smart Princeton or dazzling New York, owns a fine car and a sound bank balance, but still approaches life with some humility. This was the new man of Crèvecoeur’s century; now a hale survivor of the old America.