Herself (12 page)

Leaving Europe that first and fatally instructive time, I still prefer the vivid, brawling possibilities of our crude blue air. Though an enchanted visitor by every impulse I am not an expatriate. But I can see the damage and the limits on both sides. This is what happens to the traveler, and against it there is no amulet. In the white light of the American century, continental energies, which once bloomed so hardily into classicism, will often now seem to me either sere or cosy. But in testing the tone of our country, often our most energetic writers, sometimes our leading ones, will seem anti-intellectual, all too busy standing together with those who are. This will affect all of us. Sometimes our lives, sometimes our works, will go soft with the corruption of it. …

When in 1956 I want to go to England again,
The Reporter
agrees to take three of a proposed list of subjects. The first, which is to be on the New Towns built after the war (which with their green belts, Festival-of-Britain plazas and geriatric housing are of interest to planners here) I never write. As the social scientist Bernard Crick and others gamely take me about, and I gather fistfuls of mock-ups and statistical notes, the article seems doomed to come out good-and-proper sociological without my being orthodoxly equipped; in it I’ll be a writer lamely walking a researcher’s stilts.

One night before I know this, when I am about to leave for Stevenage, the largest of the towns, I am sitting talking, listening to music with two friends. Guy Wint, an editor of
The Manchester Guardian
, is suggesting I write for
Twentieth Century
, a magazine he is associated with. Patrick O’Regan, in whose flat we are, says “Don’t do it; it’s only recently changed its name from
Nineteenth
Century.” Chaff.

I’m emboldened to tell Guy, who begins every sentence with “Why—” or “Do you feel—” or “Would you say that—”—that I live for the day he comes out with a declarative sentence. (Except for this one characteristic not to be confused with Blount, the journalist in
False Entry
and
The New Yorkers
.)

Sitting on the floor, he blinks upward—I see I am learning—and begins another. “Why don’t you write about the Pakistani influx into Paddington? In fifteen years we’re going to have race problems there.”

I marvel—then and now—at how aware they are of themselves. Later, when we are talking of my “classless” nation, he explains that though the class levels may remain fairly rigid in England, there is always a mobility upward—and down, of course—which insures new blood at the top.

Pat, who is Anglo-Irish (and sufficiently on top) says “Don’t believe a word of it.” He and I have cut short a Sunday walk—ten miles, which is why I am stretched on the floor—so that he may soon get at his homework for milord his boss; he is private secretary to Lord Reading.

Viewing the mass of pamphlets, documents, I say Americanly, “I suppose you have to digest them for him”—bosses at home being conventionally lacking in intelligence, and milords also.

“Good God no, I have all I can do to keep up with him.”

Still later, when we are talking of the position of women in the two countries, he wonders why American ones are so uncertain of themselves, and why we take things so personally—including the American girl who, when that was put to her, said “
I
don’t.”

I tell them these characteristics are American generally, not feminine. “Especially when we’re around people like you. … Tell me—all those upperclass girls who don’t go up to the university even when they have the minds for it, and whose brothers always go, whether there’s money or not, or mind or not, doesn’t this bother them? And how come they’re still so confident? And when they marry brother’s chum from there”—which nine out of ten I know them to do—“how do they feel about the difference in education,
don’t
they feel it? How does it work out?”

Pat says “We-ell, after they marry, he raises her to his level—” He sees me rising like a meringue, and twinkling, finishes, very much through the nose “—and hmmm—after a hmmm—while, she raises him to hers.”

Yet when, playing the Mozart Requiem which we both find ineffable, he says “Yes, I suppose hearing it is the nearest we ever get to heaven,” I make a silent reservation. I suppose, I take it personally.

For sexually, they abash me. Either they seem to take it very much for-the-health-and-here-today—with anything from three whips to love-in-the-round and a lamb-chop supper afterwards—following which they are gone tomorrow to the steeplechase they really prefer (with horses). Or else they seem to have buried it like a dear dead bird, under a clump of marguerites at the bottom of the kitchen garden, on the other side of a stile which one is never quite sure they leap.

This article on their “nudie” Windmill Theatre (which bombing did not close but peace did) is one
The Report
e
r
has contracted for. When I get to England, they wire second thoughts. Since the magazine is shortly to come out in Britain, they don’t want to “offend”—and besides, Alastair Buchan has told them the Windmill has been journalistically done to death; there’s nothing more to be said on it. I wire back, on the first count that one sure way to lose British respect is to kowtow to it, on the second count—that I am not a journalist.

They take it, publishing it while I am abroad, with a zealous editor’s cuts and under a catchy title, a “mishap” which we both agree to ignore. I had called it “A Taste for Sweeties.”

It was a piece of chaff, of course. Which means—an exchange entered into for love of argument and perhaps love of subject, which often ends in love of opponent.

N
OTTINGHAM, ENGLAND,
July 1. (Reuters)—Two girls, posing in the nude in a lion’s cage at a theater here, didn’t move when the beast attacked its trainer. It’s against the law for nudes to move in a show.

When I saw that dispatch in a New York tabloid, a day before flying back to the London I had lived in for a year and hadn’t seen for three, it seemed to me that I had already been transported, without benefit of Pan American, to that corner off Shaftesbury Avenue where the Windmill stands—the theater where the art of the nude still, the still nude, or what the British, reaching guardedly and instinctively for French, call the “
tableau vivant,
” has been refined to a kind of high-tea perfection.

I grew up in the 1920s, when it first became chic to draw deadly inferences about a nation from its livelier arts, but I should be understandably wary, for instance, of any foreign attempts to analyze life in the United States on a pure basis of Disneyland and the Tootsie Roll. Nevertheless, as I held that clipping, I began to laugh as I remembered the first time I saw the Windmill’s selected pekoe blend of galvanized pony ballet, sweating comics, and stone cold nudes.

On a pedestal in the far center of the stage, a comely nude girl reared her classic cockney form divine. Under a great silver wig whose chignon streamed to windward in the general direction of Greece, her whole profile, powdered and Medusa-struck, stared sternly into the wings. Although she must have been there for quite a while, indeed since the beginning of the scene, I hadn’t noticed her immediately, first because downstage left a young man in dinner clothes was singing an innocuous song whose topical references were straining my newly arrived ear, second because four pretty young girls dressed in dance-team gear were doing an arduous tap routine in front of her. They bounced energetically but asymmetrically back and forth, wearing jolly soccer-team smiles varied now and then by an occasional
moue
. For the life of me I couldn’t decide whether their bobbing energy was there to call attention to her who could not move or to cover her up.

Their costumes had a similar combination of allusion and artlessness. Made of the usual stage stuffs—electric satins, flimsy tulles, and sparklers—they were cut to point adroitly to a thigh, a navel, or other interesting places. But effects that might have been daring were blotted out by confusion; each getup was composed of so many colors, textures, and foci that the final impression was that of a costume going off purposefully in all directions—exactly like a dowager’s Fortnum hat. Each girl wore something in her hair too, such as a string of artificial roses or a little coronet—one wore a butterfly-shaped parure with waggling antennae, the like of which I had not seen since my short stint, at the age of eight, in the De Braganza Academy of La Danse on the top floor of the Audubon Ballroom in New York.

Meanwhile the scene had shifted. We were at a hunt breakfast now—at least the soubrette, tenor, and chorus, all vigorously singing and prancing, were done up in smashing pinks, stocks, crops, and boots, and the tenor was spurred. But this was a hunt held, apparently, in the gardens of Versailles, or possibly in one of the Roman temples that had once underlain these streets. For, gradually, one became aware again of those pedestals in the rear, four of them this time, and it was interesting to note that while one immobile naked girl might be news, four sank to the level of scenery.

As it happens, nudity doesn’t startle me, but on this occasion I felt distinctly uncomfortable, because it did seem as if no one was noticing those girls except me. In the brown light, I glanced stealthily at the audience. This particular show had started at one in the afternoon, and in the queue outside (the queue starts around ten in the morning at the Windmill) there had been a fair number of bowler hats, striped pants, and tightly rolled umbrellas—City gents, I assumed, hesitating to believe they could be from Whitehall. We had arrived at change-of-show time (the Windmill has six shows a day), and as we came down the side aisle to the stalls we had been caught up in what still lingers in my mind as the ultimate example of the triumph of English disciplinary manners over human impulse. Silently, bumbershoots hooked on wrists, hats in hand, faces rigid with noninterest, the brigade oozed forward. Not an elbow dug, no bunion was trod upon, no whiting pleaded haste to the snail, but in the end the advance guard landed, as if its muscles had unwittingly carried it there, in the choice seats in the front rows.

Since then I’ve been to the Windmill many times: as a paying customer out front, as a hanger-on at rehearsals and canteen causerie, as an onlooker at auditions, and as a guest bidden to what surely must be the most
gemütlich
dress (or undress) rehearsal in show business—an every-seventh-Sunday-afternoon affair attended by a packed audience of the company’s parents and families, including small brothers and sisters, and friends.

This afternoon, however, we are late on account of the weather, without mention of which no study of the British would be complete, and this one not true. My train, bearing me away from more intellectual weekend society in East Anglia, has been delayed an hour by an August flurry that has, among other things, dumped two feet of hailstones on Kent. We find the street door locked, and must be led, via backstage, up and up through the flights of offices, wardrobe departments, canteen and rehearsal floors that make the Windmill a peculiarly self-contained theatrical organism and give it the air of a raffish home away from home.

We come out in the back rows of the dress circle to a view of the chorus that must have its own devotees—the kind of plunge-line perspective that a giant basketball center might have if he were ringed by an opposing team of lady pygmies in décolletage. It is interesting, but the audience, fanned out beneath and around us to the full capacity of three hundred seats, interests me more.

The front rows of the dress circle are lined with about thirty-five photographers. This is the Camera Club, which pays a sum to charity for the privilege and regards it “as a wonderful opportunity to try out various lens systems and high-speed grain-free film stock.” Elsewhere the audience is solid with middle-aged couples who may be parents or aunts and uncles; and just in front of me is a white-haired pair of a type more often seen near the band pavilion at a watering place or on a golden-wedding tour at Torquay.

There on the stage is Chastely Unclad, as usual, but everyone is watching the fan dance going on in front of her. As you must know, this consists of a bare girl manipulating two ostrich fans with a wingspread of at least five feet each, in such a manner that, although she and the fans are in constant motion, one never sees more than a small slice of girl. To this the Windmill has added two other girls with fans that, in flowing rhythm, cover the center girl just as her own fans rise.

From behind me, I hear a small voice say, “Coo, isn’t the red one lovelly,” and an even smaller one answer, “I choose the pink.” Turning, I see, sitting behind me under the duennaship of their mother—their starched skirts spread, their lapped hands prim—two little girls, ages about eight and twelve.

For the children who, as I now see, dot the audience, the time may be written off as educational: Art is present, all right, and a flicker of current events, as when the News Girls blame the scantiness of their leopard-skin panties on the credit squeeze. As for the book, there’s scarcely a leer in it, unless you count the tenor’s impassive castanet-charged singing, in the Spanish fiesta scene, of “The secret things we
did
(click click click) In
Madrid
(click click click).” There’s nothing else your daughter shouldn’t hear, really—unless you prefer yours not to pattern her metabolism on Albion’s damp version of a torch song: “I’ve taken a
slow-ow
burn, for a
fah-ast
man,” sung, with the faintest of struts, by an asbestos blonde.

When the ballerina, executing a comic version of Giselle, enthusiastically loses her costume to the waist and carries on bravely without it, I do steal a glance at the mother behind me. Better bred than I, she stares me down.
Her
girls, she seems to say, are not the sort to exclaim—if they notice—that some of the empresses down there have no clothes on at all, and I remind myself that they come of a nation where once almost a whole town did not look at Godiva.

As the afternoon wanes toward the cancan, I almost fall asleep to the innocent rustle of the girls’ candy papers and their gentle litany of “I choose the red one,” “I choose the pink.”