Читать книгу A Visit to America - A. G. Macdonell - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Give me the faces and the streets—give me those phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!

Give me the interminable eyes—give me women—give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!

Let me see new ones every day—let me hold new ones by the hand every day!

Give me such shows—give me the streets of Manhattan!

Walt Whitman

In spite of the Rush, and the incessant telephone calls, and the hospitality, it does occasionally happen to the visitor in New York that his tireless hosts make a miscalculation in their plans for his entertainment. Nine times out of ten the error takes the form of providing six parties for the same hour on the same day. The tenth time—and how rarely does it seem to come along—is when they leave a whole hour unoccupied by meal, drink, dance, or personally conducted tour. This tenth time, this blessed blank, did happen to me once or twice during the four or five weeks I spent in the City, and I was able to carry out a small fraction of my original, illusory programme and stroll at leisure through the streets and watch the crowds go hurrying past. But although it is difficult to stroll at leisure through the streets of New York, it is fifty times more difficult to write about it.

For what is there to say about New York that has not been said a thousand times before? Descriptions may run into volumes or may be crystallized into a single phrase, as that great American crystallized it when he called it Bagdad-on-the-Subway. There was never a more perfect description of a town. Later American wits have followed in O. Henry’s path and have called Los Angeles “Twelve suburbs in search of a city”, and Waco, that queer Texan town with its single skyscraper amid the interminable ranges, “A totem-pole completely surrounded by Baptists”, but they have never come within miles of the profundity and wisdom of Bagdad-on-the-Subway. There you have New York. The splendour and the luxury and the wealth of the East live again in this city of the West. No Oriental palace could be more fantastic than the Chrysler Building which begins as a concrete skyscraper, develops into a specimen of loathsome fret-work in metal, and tapers off into a comic needle like the horn of a narwhal that is suffering from elephantiasis. Caliphs as wealthy as Haroun drive about the streets. Jewels as rare as the Timur ruby are on sale in the bazaars.

All the world meets in the new Bagdad. In an hour’s walk you can see men of China and Japan, of Africa and the primaeval jungle, of the Hebrews, that ancient race, of Europe and of Siberia, of the Arctic Circle and of the hot damp swamps of the Equator. The caravans of the Five Continents converge on the new Bagdad, as they used to on the old. The merchants and the money-lenders of the world listen to every faint ripple of sound in the markets that cluster where the old city wall once stood, and the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves is exactly repeated when two oil-kings join in the deadly combat of price-cutting competition. One or other of them dies a financial death when oil falls.

Mosques and minarets and cupolas are dotted over the island that lies, as Mesopotamia lies, between the two rivers, and the merchant princes have scattered over the city, with a lavish prodigality, their monuments to their own glory. Generally their monuments are buildings, in which men and women may toil at ledgers and typewriters nearer to God than ever men and women toiled before, and sometimes they are libraries or collections of art treasures that have been won in many a swift invasion into older and more effete countries.

And all the time there is the Subway, roaring, tearing, rattling swiftly, noisily, dirtily, underneath the palaces of the Latterday Caliphs. There is all the splendour of the East on Park Avenue, and all the squalor of the East below the bridges in Brooklyn. For every Bagdad palace there is a Manhattan palace, and for every Bagdad beggar there is a Manhattan beggar. Splendour here, and poverty there. That is New York. Step for one moment off the great thoroughfare and the slums are yelling round you. It is only a few yards from the swishing stream of the great automobiles to the howl of the elevated railway and the whine of the street cars. Stand on one of the great thoroughfares, Broadway for instance, which shares the fame of Piccadilly, the Champs Élysées, Unter den Linden, and the Appian Way, and watch the rich go past. Then stroll down the street till you come to a grating in the pavement and pause there. In a moment you will hear a roaring sound and feel a rush of disturbed air. The pavement will tremble and then the sound will die away. That is the noise of a train in the Subway. You have heard the poor go past. Rattling, swaying, jolting, jammed so tightly against each other that strap-hanging is unnecessary because it is impossible to fall, smelling, dirty, harassed, the poor go riding in the Subway. Nobody cares where they go or what they do. For a nickel the Subway is open to all. Stay there a minute or a month—nobody cares. A nickel has bought the Freedom of Sub-New York and you may live there or die there, whichever you please, and no single fellow human being will do anything more to you than jostle you out of the way. He will not even look at you as he jostles. He would not even look at you as he tripped over your dead body. There are very few indicators in the big stations to guide the inexperienced traveller to his correct platform because nobody cares two straws whether the inexperienced traveller gets to his correct platform or not.

The Caliphs never see the poor. The poor would catch a glimpse of the Caliphs if they had time to wait for a few hours at a street corner and could recognize a Caliph when they saw one. But the poor are too busy rushing hither and thither, either on their own obscure and humble little errands which do not really need such haste, or upon the tremendous errands of the Caliphs themselves, and these require most peremptorily all the haste in the world. So New Bagdad, the real New Bagdad, never meets its own Subway. It only vaguely knows that it exists, somewhere deep down in the earth, out of sight, and very unimportant. For the Latterday Caliph does not even wander the streets at night, like Haroun or Florizel, in search of the quaint, the bizarre, the picturesque. He has read too many stories in the newspapers (which he probably owns) of men who went out walking and were battered with sand-bags or perforated by submachine-gun bullets for their trouble.

On the first occasion when my hosts left a mysterious gap in the schedule, I spent it, naturally, gaping up at the skyscrapers. But this is no place to talk about skyscrapers. They have been spoken of before. In England they are usually described as tall but vulgar, and sometimes as vulgar but tall, and intending travellers are advised to have their hearts tested before ascending to the top of the highest ones. Needless to say, like almost all English theories about America, these ideas are quite wrong except the idea that they are tall. One or two of the earlier skyscrapers are over-ornamented and ugly. But the newer ones, with their severe, clean lines, are extraordinarily beautiful. After dark they turn Manhattan from a scramble of money-makers into a fantastical city of magic with squares of orange light that glow in the sky only an inch or two below Arcturus, and turn the dullest street into a fairy canyon, while in the daytime the glass and the glittering concrete, untarnished by grime in a smokeless town, make a far more brilliant decoration than any colour in the streets. For the streets themselves are drab in comparison, say, with the streets of London. The London buses, like crawling scarlet scarabs, brighten every yard of the main roads. The private automobiles are often sensationally painted. Telephone-boxes are gaily tricked out, and the scarlet pillar-boxes are like round, solid symbols of John Bull himself. (It is one of John Bull’s gnawing miseries that his favourite colour, the scarlet with which he splashes his streets, his stamps, and his Empire upon the map, is the very same as the scarlet of the Revolutionary miscreants of Moscow.) But in New York there are few buses, except a quaint and wobbly service of ancient green contrivances which ply up and down Fifth Avenue, beginning in Washington Square and fading away into nothingness, for all I know into complete dissolution, in the neighbourhood of West 150th Street. A small town in Connemara, Ireland, would turn up its nose at these veterans. The nearest approach to them that I have ever seen was a horse-drawn street car in Kovno, capital of Lithuania. It is left to the taxi-cabs to provide the colour in the streets of New York. The private cars (called automobiles for short) are almost always darkest blue or black or a rather dull brown. It is the rarest thing in the world to see a sensational pale-green racer, or a stately all-silver limousine. But the fleets of taxis somewhat redeem the drabness. One fleet consists of bright yellow cabs, each one labelled in large letters on each side, “Yellow Taxi”. This label is a remarkable piece of thoughtfulness on the part of the owners, for it can only be intended to enliven the dull lives of the colour-blind, who would not otherwise know that these taxis are yellow. No one can believe for a minute that the practical American would waste so much time, space, and good black paint in stating such an exceptionally obvious fact, if there was not some altruistic motive behind it. (It is a little more difficult to detect the altruistic motive which has inspired the notice “To the Lower Level” above a yawning abyss of descending stairs in the Grand Central Station. However colour-blind a man is, he surely could not fail to detect that stairs going downwards will probably lead to a place on a lower level.)

A second fleet of taxis is painted silver and equipped with radio loud-speakers. When I landed in New York it was impossible to hire a radio-taxi at all. The reason for this was very singular. It appears that the climax of the baseball season is a match between the champion clubs of the two baseball leagues. The match consists of a series of games which is continued until one or the other of the two teams has scored four victories, and is called the World Series. Why it should be called the World Series is not very clear. So far as I know, baseball is only played to any marked extent in the United States and in Japan, which cannot cover as much between them as one-tenth of the surface of the world. However, let it pass. There is that hotel in Paris called L’Hotel de l’Univers et Portugal, and in London there is a journal for stamp-collectors called “The World-wide Philatelist, with which is incorporated The Kensington Philatelist”. We are all tarred with the same megalomaniac feather.

The World Series on this occasion was to be played between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Giants. Everything was set for it. Business men from all over the United States discovered that the fate and fortunes of their Corporations depended upon an immediate visit to New York. Board meetings were arranged by the thousand in the neighbourhood of Wall Street. The ground floors of the hotels were crammed with middle-aged gentlemen demonstrating to each other with umbrellas exactly how such-and-such a pitcher could easily be dealt with, and with other middle-aged gentlemen demonstrating how impossible it was for any batter to hit the devastating pitching of so-and-so. Indeed during these wild days it was practically impossible to get from one side to the other of an hotel lounge without getting at least one crack in the eye or on the shinbone. And then a truly fearful catastrophe occurred. It was, to the tired business man who had struggled to New York for his board meeting, the equivalent of the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire. It destroyed his faith, never perhaps overwhelmingly strong, in the Divine Guidance of mortal affairs. For a young gentleman named Dizzy Dean, assisted by his brother Daffy, scored an incredible number of victories for the St. Louis Cardinals by his superb pitching, a miserable and obscure team called the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Giants twice in one week, and bim! the Giants were out and the Cardinals were in, and the World Series was abducted from New York and deposited overnight in Detroit and St. Louis. Dispirited bands of company directors found that they had no alternative but to attend their board meetings and then go sulkily home. The crowds in the hotels called sadly for their bills, declared a few dividends, or passed them, as the case may be, and returned to such places as Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, or Pittsburgh.

Now at last we come to the reason why the taxi-drivers of the Radio fleet were out of circulation during a whole week. Each driver parked his cab at the side of the street, lay down at full length in the back, switched on his radio and listened to the broadcast description of the baseball games.

Although I knew only so much about baseball as can be learned from the newspapers and a very occasional match between a visiting American battleship and the “London Americans”, I soon gathered that Mr Dean, senior, has a pretty wit and a nice sense of showmanship, besides being the greatest pitcher since the days of the great Christy Mathewson. It was his genial habit, during the World Series, to march into the dressing-room of the Detroit Tigers and explain to each one of his baffled and indignant opponents exactly how he proposed to deal with them in the forthcoming encounter. I never could quite fathom why someone of the tigrine camp did not sock him on the jaw, but apparently no one ever did. On the other hand, Mr Dean’s prose style was distinctly a grade or two below his pitching. This is a sample of it, and I cannot help feeling that it runs to vigour and crisp energy rather than to musical cadences. Asked by a reporter when a slight injury to his head would be sufficiently healed to allow him to pitch again, Dizzy replied: “I would be tickled to death to pitch to-morrow’s game. I think I would have my stuff to-morrow, and probably would shut the Detroit Tigers out, because after pitching to-day without my stuff, and they didn’t know I didn’t have my stuff, I could go out there to-morrow and shut the boys out. I think that if they pitched me the whole four days I would win all four of them.”

Mr Dean ultimately found his stuff and pitched the Cardinals into victory in the final game of the Series, and 1498 correspondents wrote to the Evening Sun of Baltimore enclosing a parody of Kipling on the refrain “You’re a better man than I am, Dizzy Dean”. The following week, a town in Florida called Bradenton changed its name to Deanville.

During this part of my visit to the United States I was greatly moved by the courtesy and tact of all those citizens who gallantly suppressed visible emotion when I explained that a single cricket match between England and Australia had been known to last for eight whole days, and that spectators have, on occasion, dislocated their jaws with a yawn.

But although I missed the great baseball series, I was in time for the football season, and at the earliest possible date I went to see a football game. My knowledge of this pastime had, up to this period, been exclusively drawn from the short stories about it in the Saturday Evening Post. The main point of the game, so far as I could gather from these stories, was that each College had its deadly rival College, and that at the end of each season the star quarter-back of one team invariably married the beautiful daughter of the hard-faced Coach of the other. In the last paragraph the star and the daughter fell into a sort of flying tackle, while the Coach sobbed once or twice, convulsively, over the happy pair. The two Colleges, I could only infer, lived on the happiest basis of good-fellowship for several months after this, until the approach of the next football season recalled them to bitterest enmity once more with the knowledge that the new star quarter-back was snooping around after the hard-faced Coach’s second daughter. That, roughly speaking, was the essence of football as I had grasped it. Obviously it was my duty to check this impression by a visit to the actual scene.

A party of young ladies and gentlemen of my acquaintance had promised to take me to Princeton to watch the lads of that University competing with the lads of Williams, a similar institution, and they arranged to call for me at my hotel at 11 a.m. on the Saturday of the game, and drive me to Princeton. The first intimation I had of their arrival was at 10.45, when the hall porter asked me politely whether I knew that some guests were down in the cocktail bar drinking whisky and charging it to my room number. I fled downstairs just in time to keep the score below five dollars and the drive began. We bowled along the Holland Tunnel and came out, on the New Jersey side, on to the most magnificent and awe-inspiring road I have ever seen. For miles and miles it is lifted clean above the ground on a great ramp of concrete and iron, and there is room for at least six lines of traffic. The moment we were on it, my young host put his foot down on the accelerator pedal and kept it there till we reached Princeton. The pace was fast but not dizzy. I found this almost everywhere I went in the United States, with one notable exception to be described hereafter. The power of the American automobiles is, comparatively speaking, standardized, so that almost all can do seventy-five miles an hour, and few can go faster, and fewer still have to go more slowly, so that there is not nearly so much passing and re-passing, cutting in and cutting out, as there is in Europe. Cars are more inclined to take station, like a warship on manœuvres, and stay there.

Once off the ramp, you are fairly in the State of New Jersey. It is a flat, dismal country, looking as if an army had passed that way and was even now entrenching against an enemy twenty miles further on. It reminded me of the back areas in France and Flanders. The fields were desolate. No plough had been there and no human beings walked there. Weeds and nettles and tall rank grasses quivered forlornly in the faint breeze. Here and there a ruined brick house, or a cluster of old wooden shacks, rotting, crumbling, moss-covered, were a reminder that at one time men had passed this way and lingered awhile before hastening from a solitude that was made the more intolerable by the nearness of a vast city. Sometimes the nettles were clambering over a heap of rusty tins and a bramble-bush sprouted through the chassis of a motor-car that was standing on its nose in an ancient ditch. This solitude stretches away for miles and miles to the right and left of the road until it reaches the horizons with their ghostly silhouettes of factory chimneys and of long iron bridges, hideous at short range, but, seen across the russety-green of the fields, far away, as lovely as dew on a spider’s web on a September morning. Sometimes a line of oil-tanks, poised upon steel tripods, marched across the flatlands looking like the Martians of H. G. Wells’ story.

It was a blessed relief when we left the desolation and ran into the more homely atmosphere of petrol stations and advertisements for Coca Cola.

The outline of Princeton, on its wooded hill, is very beautiful, but there is less beauty about the faked-Tudor architecture and interior decoration of some of the College buildings. One of the Fraternity Houses looks even more like the England of Queen Elizabeth’s day than many a petrol station on the English roads.

But there was no time for the consideration of aesthetics.

Princeton was to play football against Williams, and the Stadium was the magnet. After a few drinks of neat rye-whisky to keep out the icy wind, therefore, we repaired to our seats. Truly the Americans are a hardy race. There has been a considerable advance in the standards of comfort in arenas, amphitheatres, and theatres since the ancient Greeks sat huddled upon bare stones at Epidaurus, or the Sicilians at Taormina, but the American will have none of it. What was good enough for the Athenian is good enough for him, even though the winds of New Jersey in November are somewhat cooler than the breezes of the Isles of Greece, gilded as they are with eternal summer.

The seats in the Palmer Stadium are just slabs of concrete, and if you do not like them the remedy is entirely in your own hands. There is no compulsion on you to stay. The exits are clearly marked and someone else will be glad of the space you have vacated.

We wrapped ourselves in rugs, loosened slightly the tops of our whisky-bottles to ensure a freely-moving and prompt service, and lowered ourselves, some with enthusiasm and some with reluctance, and myself with active distaste, on to the icy slabs. A pale, wan sun peered over the rim of the Stadium and the wind wailed drearily from the direction of the Arctic Circle. The entertainment was due to begin.

First of all came the rival brass bands, marching, blowing, and banging with immense energy, and after them followed twelve beautiful young gentlemen in white shirts and white flannel trousers, each armed with a gaily-coloured megaphone. They took station in a line at about fifteen-yards intervals, between the field of play and the crowd, and facing the crowd, six on one side of the ground and six on the other. Then the six facing us began to behave in a most extraordinary way. Moving in perfect unison they faced east and slapped their knees, and then they faced west and slapped their knees. They shook their fists now hither, now thither. They waved their arms like men on a raft in mid-ocean who are attempting to attract the attention of passing ships. Finally they worked themselves up into an ecstasy of excitement, flinging their bodies about like demented dervishes, or the High Priests of some weird religion who are approaching the climax of a ritual, the human sacrifice, for instance, or the self-immolation of the youngest and strongest of the tribe for the greater glory of the tribe, until at last they brought their strange incantations to an end by leaping high into the air and uttering a great cry. Then they sat down on their megaphones.

In the meanwhile the six rivals on the other side of the ground had begun to do their stuff, and were obtaining much more gratifying results than our champions. For the serried ranks of the members of the Williams tribe, or perhaps I should say students and alumni, accepted their six young men as joint conductors, as it were, of a human orchestra, and they roared savagely in time to the leaps and gesticulations. An almost frightening din came echoing across the Stadium. I enquired why the supporters of Princeton did not do the same. Is it, I asked, owing to the superior gentlemanliness of Princeton students and alumni, that they refrain from competing in noise with the lads from Williams? Is there a tradition of good manners that descends from the days when Nassau Hall was being built in memory, for some reason, of Dutch King William the Third? Far from it, my young hosts replied. The Princeton lads were shouting as loudly as any. But owing to a curious acoustical quality in the Bowl, they went on to explain, it is only possible to hear the noise of the opposition. And after that long explanation it appeared that their throats had gone a bit dry, for they produced a whisky-bottle and passed it backwards and forwards a good deal.

Then the teams came out. The Princeton team consisted of about fifty young men, Williams of about thirty, but my expectation of seeing the grand, if somewhat one-sided, muddle of about eighty husky youths all playing together, was sadly disappointed. Only eleven on each side actually took the field. The remainder sat down in long rows on benches and relapsed into a sort of alert coma.

Football in the United States is a cross between, and combines most of the less pleasing features of, Rugby Football and the World War. The goal-posts and the shape of the ball are as in the former, the general attitude of the participants towards their opponents as in the latter. The object, as in Rugby, is to score a touch-down in the enemy’s territory, and then to kick a goal. But the two main weapons of the Rugby players’ arsenal are hardly used by the Americans. The swift series of lateral passes, from hand to hand, as the three-quarter backs come down the Rugby field in the long diagonal line, is quite unknown, and thus one of the greatest of all athletic spectacles is missing from the American game. On the asset side of the account, however, is the absence of Rugby’s most infuriating tactic—the deliberate kicking of the ball out of the field of play. Is there any other game in the world in which such a thing is permitted? Has anyone ever seen Tilden, temporarily out of breath and anxious for a short rest, hit all the tennis-balls over the grand-stand? Does Walter Hagen, finding himself in a tight corner, hit all his golf balls into an adjacent wood or ocean as it may be, and hold up the game until they can be retrieved and his opponent’s temper is nicely frayed? However, all that is a diversion from the topic in hand.

The chief method of advance in American football appeared to me to be as follows: one player hugs the ball to his bosom and flings himself into the thick of the enemy, what time his young playmates try to clear a path for him by selecting an antagonist and violently assaulting him. The antagonists either go down like ninepins, in which case the young gentleman with the ball is quite liable to advance several yards, or else they evade their would-be assaulters and, seizing the ball-carrier, hurl him to the ground, jump on him, kneel, lie, fall, or bounce on him, and the game is brought to a standstill. Umpires in white coats, white knicker-bockers, white shoes and white caps with enormous peaks, and black stockings which alone mar a perfect symphonie en blanc majeur, come racing up and the heap of bodies is disentangled. Corpses, if any, are removed and the game goes on. Sometimes there is doubt about the exact spot on which the gentleman with the ball was massacred, and a great deal of scrutinizing and peering goes on. At first I thought the reason was a sentimental desire to inlay a small memorial tablet into the turf after the game was over, enumerating the virtues, if any, of the deceased, recording his parentage and place of birth, and any scholastic triumphs that may have, improbably, come his way, and concluding with one of those simple and moving epigrams from the Greek of Simonides which praise the heroism of those who died for their country. And for that reason, I thought, there was this desire to fix the fatal spot. I was quite wrong, of course. It appears that if the attacking side can advance ten yards in four bull-like rushes, they are entitled to four more bull-like rushes, to try to gain another ten yards. When, therefore, there is some uncertainty whether ten yards and one inch or only nine yards, two feet, and eleven inches have been gained, officials come racing out with surveying instruments, chains, stakes, theodolites, sextants, quadrants, and all the rest of the apparatus necessary for the literal exercise of geometry.

In the meanwhile a staff of statisticians writes down the exact yardage that each young bull has gained in each battering attack, so that on the following day a million fans may read with a thrill how Mr Smith made football history by advancing from his forty-yard line no less a distance than eighteen inches, or how Mr Jones, by an unparalleled display of swerving, dodging, and side-stepping, carved an inroad into the enemy’s territory of a yard and a quarter.

But the supreme moment in football, for the irreverent spectator at least, is the Huddle. The team that has the ball and is about to try to bucket its way through, over, or under its adversaries for ten whole yards, goes into Conference, and this solemn affair is called the Huddle. They all go into a little circle, put their heads down, embrace each other round the shoulders, and generally give the impression that at any moment they may burst into Kiss-in-the-Ring, or dance with girlish charm round an imaginary mulberry-bush. It is a most engaging ceremony, and reminded me, for some reason, of many Council meetings of the League of Nations that I have attended. I am told that on these occasions of fraternal greetings, the quarter-back, or master mind of the team, whispers his orders for the next variety of tactics. For example, he may say “Sixty-six B”, and woe betide any of the team who, mixing up in his mind “Sixty-six B” with “A Hundred and Twenty-four and a Half”, ruins the whole play by scragging the opposing “guard” when he ought to have scragged the opposing “tackle.” There will be some pretty snappy words for him from the Coach afterwards.

Well, the game goes on. Now Princeton gain six yards and a half, now Williams recover a foot of the lost ground. The wind whistles a shriller note than ever and the concrete has turned to a slab of ice and the watery sun has given up its pallid competition with the flying horsemen of the clouds. The whisky-bottles pass from hand to hand and from lip to lip, faster and faster, backwards and forwards like a shuttle in a spinning-loom. From time to time a young man pitches forward from his slab and subsides, unconscious, among the feet of his neighbours. It is not for me to enquire whether his paralysis has been induced by an excess of external cold or internal warmth. He is carried out by his friends and deposited somewhere in safety. The cheer-leaders are still dancing frenziedly like crazy marionettes, and the substitutes, who have been delegated to relieve the incompetent, the halt, and the maimed, are warming up on the line, apparently trying to hit themselves under the chin with their knees. Princeton is leading handsomely, but the students and alumni of that great College are in despair. For Williams, with only a paltry little squad of about thirty warriors, have scored a touch-down, and it is the first time in many a long day that the Princeton line has been crossed. Shade of President Madison, once a student at Nassau! Shade of Woodrow Wilson, who went from the direction of the affairs of the College to the direction of the United States, and thence, for a brief hour, to the direction of the whole world except the United States Senate! Shade, if you like, of King William the Third (though his loyalties may have been divided between his Nassau and the lads from Williamstown!).

The minute-hand of the clock creeps to the hour. With three minutes left to play, the Princeton Coach stops the game and despatches a fresh party of players into the arena. They have only three minutes in which to win immortal glory, but at least they will be able to gather their grandchildren round their knee as the twilight falls and the lamps are being lit and the cows are coming home to the byre, and tell them once more the old heroic tale of how they played for Princeton against Williams way back in the ’thirties.

The game is over. The elegant young men have led their last cheer. The whisky-bottles flash from hand to hand for the last time, and then we join the long shuffle to the car park.

I was able to identify the Coaches of the two teams, but among all the charmingly pretty girls who applied their carmined lips with such daintiness and such precision to the necks of whisky-bottles throughout the game, it was impossible to detect the Coaches’ lovely daughters. Nor did the quarter-backs assist me by running true to Saturday Evening Post form. Not once did they neglect the game to glance up at bright eyes in the stand. Not once did they blatantly sell the pass by arrangement with their future father-in-law. Instead of yielding to the sweet allure of Romance, they confined all their activities to huddling and homicide.

Twenty-six players were killed while playing football in the year of my visit. During the last four years a total of exactly one hundred and fifty have been killed. And this in spite of suits of padded armour and helmets and shin-guards and thigh-pieces. Personally I would prefer the cold slab in the Stadium to the one in the mortuary.

When we got back to New York City (having, by the way, been pinched with extraordinary neatness for speeding in the Holland Tunnel; there was no fuss—simply a telephone call from some invisible watcher and a cop waiting for us at the other end) we bought the evening papers and found that a College called St. Mary’s had been narrowly defeated by the University of California at Los Angeles. As the St. Mary’s team was referred to throughout the report as the Gaels, I naturally took a keen interest in their fortunes. After all, we Gaels, members of a dying race, must stick together all over the world. The Tartan (except the Campbell Tartan) Against All Else must be the slogan of the Clans until there is no more Tartan left. The names of the footballing Gaels were:

Strub	Elduayan	Schreiber
Meister	Yezerski	Michelini
Kordick	Pennino	Kellogg
Jorgensen	Fiese

If anyone supposes that I have invented or exaggerated this list, let him write a respectful letter, enclosing a stamped and addressed envelope for the reply, to those ladies and gentlemen whose duty it is to keep the athletic records of St. Mary’s College, and ask for a list of the players in the games against the University of California in the ’thirties.

The main defence of this extraordinary game is that it is a reflection in miniature of the essential fundamentals of the American character. The spirit which drove the Pioneers into the prairies, the deserts, and the mountains, is the same which launches the flying tackle at the racing adversary and which accepts injuries and endures suffering with a stoic fortitude. There is much to be said for this argument, and much to be said against it. The bull-like quality of the short, and usually futile, rushes against the wall of the defence may be described as a microcosm of Washington’s tenacity at Valley Forge, of Lee’s frontal attack on the Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, of Grant’s dreadful battering at the impregnable defences at Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor, and of the heroism with which the new American armies flung themselves against the veteran machine-gunners in the Forest of the Argonne. All that may be true. And it might be added that there is also a dash of stupidity about it which slightly resembles the exploits of the brave but unfortunate General Custer. Certain it is that when a subtle and imaginative genius at last applied himself to the evolution of new and cunning devices in the game, the bull-headed rushers were completely baffled, and it took years before anyone else even faintly understood what the late Mr Knute Rockne was up to, or how he achieved his sensational results. Is it significant that this great football brain was of Scandinavian origin, and that his work of revolutionizing football was achieved in a Catholic College? I do not know. I merely ask the questions.

But the argument which, to my mind, demolishes the theory that football is symbolical of the American character is this: whatever may be said for or against it as a game, as a spectacle, or as training-ground for the youth of the country, no one can deny that it is, of all games in the world, in excelsis, the Team Game of Team Games. Every single movement, whether in attack or in defence, requires the active and instant co-operation of the entire eleven men. Each man has something to do all the time, whether it is just plain assassination or an intricate movement on the tips of his toes, and if one cog in the wheel fails to work, the machinery breaks down.

Now, go to any hundred-per-cent American and suggest to him that his great country was built up out of Puritanism and Prairies by the Team Spirit. Bridling with ill-concealed indignation he will inform you that America was built up by the exact antithesis of the Team Spirit. He will tell you that the watchword of the nation is, always has been, and always will be, Individualism. And that is not all. It is none of your ordinary Individualism, none of your decaying, sheep-like, European Individualism. No, sir. It is a Rugged Individualism. That is what it is. Rugged. And if you are prudent, you will hastily agree with him, for by this time there will probably be a wild glare in his eye, as though he had subconsciously reverted to the character of his great-grandfather, who was so individualistic that he walked by himself from Aroostook, Maine, to El Paso del Norte, and was so rugged that the tomahawks of the Piutes bounced off his skull and had to be sent away to have their handles straightened.

It would probably provoke a fatal catastrophe if you suggested that this rugged old gentleman would have played Kiss-in-the-Ring, or danced round the mulberry-bush, or whatever it is, with his colleagues, or would have unselfishly passed the ball to one of them in order to promote the fortunes of the Team, or would have allowed his movements to be dictated, his physical courage aspersed, the legitimacy of his birth called in question, and his private morals anim-adverted upon, by a hired Coach with however many beautiful daughters.

It is best not to embark upon such controversial matters, but simply to record the private opinion that American football, with its twin principles of Collaboration and War, has nothing whatever to do with the traditional American character, with its twin principles of Individualism and Peace.

As I write these words, another proof comes most opportunely to my hand, that this fierce game is alien to the peace-loving nature of the American citizen. It is the report, by one of the foremost sporting journalists in the country, of the Rose-Bowl game. The journalist, obviously trying to lash himself into a suitably militaristic frame of mind for describing the play, compares one of the players to a “human howitzer” who throws the ball “from his rifle-shot hand” and then, after countering a “main spear-thrust”, proceeded to “uncover his main double battery” and “smashed through the defence like an antelope”. Small wonder that Stanford “had no aerial net—no anti-aircraft fire to break up the Southern game”.

If that is not the language of a pacifically-minded gentleman, writing for a pacifically-minded public which knows nothing, and cares less, about the jargon of Mars, then I will eat a Stetson.