A Writer's World Page 2
As Tenzing approached them they stepped forward, one by one, to congratulate him. He received them like a modest prince. Some bent their heads forward, as if in prayer. Some shook hands lightly and delicately, the fingers scarcely touching. One veteran, his black twisted pig-tail flowing behind him, bowed gravely to touch Tenzing’s hand with his forehead.
*
We moved into the big dome tent and sat around the summit party throwing questions at them, still laughing, still unable to believe the truth. Everest was climbed, and those two mortal men in front of us, sitting on old boxes, had stood upon its summit, the highest place on earth! And nobody knew but us! The day was still dazzlingly bright – the snow so white, the sky so blue; and the air was still so vibrant with excitement; and the news, however much we expected it, was still somehow such a wonderful surprise – shock waves of that moment must still linger there in the Western Cwm, so potent were they, and so gloriously charged with pleasure.
International competition for the news was intense, so I scuttled down the mountain that same evening, and by skulldug means sent my first report of the ascent off to London. When two days later I followed it away from Everest with my Sherpa helpers, I did not know whether I had secured my scoop, or whether the news had been intercepted and the story filched by some competitor even more unscrupulous than I was myself.
It was the evening of 1 June. The air was cool and scented. Pine trees were all about us again, and lush foliage, and the roar of the swollen Dudh Khosi rang in our ears. On the west bank of the river there was a Sherpa hamlet called Benkar. There, as the dusk settled about us, we halted for the night. In the small square clearing among the houses Sonam set up my tent, and I erected the aerial of my radio receiver. The Sherpas, in their usual way, marched boldly into the houses round about and established themselves among the straw, fires and potatoes of the upstairs rooms. Soon there was a smell of roasting and the fragrance of tea. As I sat outside my tent meditating, with only a few urchins standing impassively in front of me, Sonam emerged with a huge plate of scrawny chicken, a mug of chang (a sort of alcoholic porridge), tea, chocolate and chupattis.
How far had my news gone? I wondered as I ate. Was it already winging its way to England from Katmandu, or was it still plodding over the Himalayan foothills? Would tomorrow, 2 June, be both Coronation and Everest Day? Or would the ascent fall upon London later, like a last splendid chime of the Abbey bells? There was no way of knowing; I was alone in a void; the chicken was tough, the urchins unnerving. I went to bed.
*
But the morning broke fair. Lazily, as the sunshine crept up my sleeping-bag, I reached a hand out of my mummied wrappings towards the knob of the wireless. A moment of fumbling; a few crackles and hisses; and then the voice of an Englishman.
Everest had been climbed, he said. Queen Elizabeth had been given the news on the eve of her coronation. The crowds waiting in the wet London streets had cheered and danced to hear of it. After thirty years of endeavour, spanning a generation, the top of the earth had been reached and one of the greatest of adventures accomplished. This news of Coronation Everest (said that good man in London) had been first announced in a copyright dispatch in The Times.
I jumped out of my bed, spilling the bedclothes about me, tearing open the tent flap, leaping into the open in my filthy shirt, my broken boots, my torn trousers. My face was thickly bearded, my skin cracked with sun and cold, my voice hoarse. But I shouted to the Sherpas, whose bleary eyes were appearing from the neighbouring windows:
‘Chomolungma finished! Everest done with! All OK!’
‘OK, sahib,’ the Sherpas shouted back. ‘Breakfast now?’
It has often been suggested that The Times delayed publication of the news of the ascent in order to make it coincide with the Coronation. What a canard! We had no long-distance radios on Everest, and I nearly killed myself slithering down the mountain to get the news home in time. To safeguard my scoop I put the message in a code. I had devised it simply for a final announcement of success, and this is how it read: SNOW CONDITIONS BAD (= summit reached) ADVANCED BASE ABANDONED (= Hillary) AWAITING IMPROVEMENT (= Tenzing) ALL WELL (= nobody hurt).
My dispatch reached the paper safely, although it didn’t make the front page because it was another thirteen years before news stories were printed on the front page of The Times. Nor was it exclusive for long, because the editor magnanimously decided to print it in the first edition of the night’s paper, thus allowing all others to copy it. Stories were published anonymously in those days, so I got no by-line, and it was three years before I was able to publish a book about the adventure: Coronation Everest.
When we returned to London from Nepal we were invited to a celebratory dinner at Lancaster House, the government’s official place of entertainment. I found myself sitting next to the major-domo of the occasion, a delightful elderly courtier of old-school charm, while opposite me sat Tenzing Norkay, away from Asia for the first time in his life. The old gentleman turned to me half-way through the meal and told me that the claret we were drinking was the very last of its particularly good vintage from the cellars of Lancaster House, and possibly the last anywhere in the world. He hoped I was enjoying it. I was much impressed, and looked across the table to Tenzing, who most certainly was. He had probably never tasted wine before, and he was radiant with the pride and pleasure of the occasion – a supremely stylish and exotic figure. The lackeys respectfully filled and re-filled his glass, and presently my neighbour turned to me once more. ‘Oh, Mr Morris,’ he said in his silvery Edwardian cadence, ‘how very good it is to see that Mr Tenzing knows a decent claret when he has one.’
2
A Benign Republic: USA
After Everest I went to the United States for the first time, on a year’s Commonwealth Fellowship. America was still in a condition of benign exhilaration, rich and confident after its victories in the Second World War, but as unaccustomed to foreign visitors as we were unfamiliar with it. I travelled the entire country, sending dispatches to The Times throughout, and when it came to writing a report for my patrons I presented them with my first book, Coast to Coast. Its opening chapter, about Manhattan, was in effect the first essay I ever wrote about a city.
Manhattan
Suddenly in the distance there stand the skyscrapers, shimmering in the sun, like monuments in a more antique land. A little drunk from the sight, you drive breathlessly into the great tunnel beneath the Hudson River. You must not drive faster than thirty-five miles an hour in the tunnel, nor slower than thirty, so that you progress like something in an assembly line, soullessly; but when you emerge into the daylight, then a miracle occurs, a sort of daily renaissance, a flowering of the spirit. The cars and trucks and buses, no longer confined in channels, suddenly spring away in all directions with a burst of engines and black clouds of exhaust. At once, instead of discipline, there is a profusion of enterprise. There are policemen shouting and gesticulating irritably, men pushing racks of summer frocks, trains rumbling along railway lines, great liners blowing their sirens, dowdy dark-haired women with shopping bags and men hurling imprecations out of taxi windows, shops with improbable Polish names and huge racks of strange newspapers; bold colours and noises and indefinable smells, skinny cats and very old dustcarts and bus drivers with patient weary faces. Almost before you know it, the mystique of Manhattan is all around you.
* * *
Everyone has read of the magical glitter of this place, but until you have been here it is difficult to conceive of a city so sparkling that at any time Mr Fred Astaire might quite reasonably come dancing his urbane way down Fifth Avenue. It is a marvellously exuberant city, even when the bitter winds of the fall howl through its canyons. The taxi-drivers talk long and fluently, about pogroms in old Russia, about Ireland in its bad days, about the Naples their fathers came from. The waiters urge you to eat more, you look so thin. The girl in the drug store asks pertly but very politely if she may borrow the comic section of your newspaper
. On the skating rink at Rockefeller Center there is always something pleasant to see: pretty girls showing off their pirouettes, children staggering about in helpless paroxysms, an eccentric sailing by with a look of profoundest contempt upon his face, an elderly lady in tweeds excitedly arm-in-arm with an instructor.
Boundless vivacity and verve are the inspiration of this city. In its midtown streets, away from slums and dingy suburbs, you are in a world of spirited movement and colour. The best of the new buildings are glass eyries, gay as cream cakes. One structure on Park Avenue has a garden for its ground floor and a slab of green glass for its superstructure. A bank on Fifth Avenue has creepers growing from its ceiling, and the passer-by, looking through its huge plate-glass windows, can see the black round door of its strongroom. Outside a nearby typewriter shop a real typewriter is mounted on a pedestal, for anyone to try. Once when I passed at two in the morning an old man with a ragged beard was typing with hectic concentration, as if he had just run down from the garret with a thrilling new formula or a message from the outer galaxies.
The traffic swirls through New York like a rather slobby mixture running through a cake-mould. Some seventy-five years ago an observer described New York traffic as being ‘everywhere close-spread, thick-tangled (yet no collisions, no trouble) with masses of bright colour, action and tasty toilets’. The description is not so far from the mark today, and the colours especially are still bright and agreeable. The women are not afraid of colour in their clothes, the shop windows are gorgeous, the cars are painted with a peacock dazzle. From upstairs the streets of Manhattan are alive with shifting colours.
Sometimes, as you push your way through the brisk crowds (‘Pardon me, I hope I haven’t snagged your nylons’) there will be a scream of sirens and a little procession of official cars will rush by, pushing the traffic out of its way, crashing the lights with complacent impunity, on its way to the Waldorf or City Hall. The motor-cycle policemen, hunched on their machines, look merciless but are probably very kind to old ladies. The reception committee, in dark coats and Homburgs, is excessively official. In the recesses of the grandest car can be seen the distinguished visitor, opera singer or statesman or bronzed explorer, shamefully delighted at being able to ignore the traffic rules.
There is a row of hansom cabs at the corner of Central Park, each with its coal heater (if it is winter), each tended by an elderly gentleman in a top hat, the horses a little thin, the wheels a little wobbly. Lovers find them convenient for bumpy dalliances in the park. If you wander down to the waterside on either side of the island you may stand in the shadow of an ocean liner, or watch a tug (with a high curved bridge, a nonchalant skipper and an air of Yankee insolence) steaming under the black girders of Brooklyn Bridge. Outside Grand Central Station, through a grille beneath your feet, you may see the gleaming metal of a Chicago express down in the bowels; you could live permanently in Grand Central without ever seeing a train, for they are all secreted below in carpeted dungeons.
The stores of Manhattan bulge with the good things of the earth, with a splendour that outclasses those perfumed Oriental marts of fable. ‘Ask for anything you like,’ says the old waiter at the Waldorf-Astoria with pardonable bombast, ‘and if we haven’t got it we’ll send down the road for it.’ Furs in the windows shine with an icy distinction. Dresses are magnificent from Paris, or pleasantly easy-going in the American manner. There are shoes for every conceivable size; books for the most esoteric taste; pictures and treasures summoned from every age and every continent; foods of exotic delight; little dogs of unlikely breed; refrigerators already stocked with edibles; haughty Rolls-Royces; toys of dizzy ingenuity; endless and enchanting fripperies; anything, indeed, that fancy can demand or money buy. It is a storehouse of legendary wonder, such as only our age could stock. What a prize it would be for some looting army of barbarians, slashing their way through its silks and satins, ravishing its debutantes, gorging themselves in its superb French restaurants!
Yet so obvious and dramatic are the extremes of New York that you still see many beggars about its streets. They stand diffidently on the sidewalks, decently dressed but coatless, asking civilly for help before they leave the bright lights and go home for the night to their doss-houses. They are ambassadors from another Manhattan: the countless gloomy streets where Negroes and Puerto Ricans, Poles and poor Italians live in unhappy neighbourhood, fighting their old battles and despising one another. A suggestion of ill-temper, resentment or disgruntlement often sours the tastes of New York, and it is an unpleasant thing to see the current crime register in a Harlem police station. Page succeeds page in terrible succession, thronged with stabbings and rapes, robberies and assaults, acts of lunatic spite or repellent perversion. ‘Well,’ you say as casually as you can, a little shaken by this vast superfluity of Sunday journalism, ‘Well, and how many weeks of crime do these pages represent?’ The police sergeant smiles tolerantly. ‘That’s today’s register,’ he says.
*
America is the land acquisitive, and few Americans abandon the search for wealth, or lose their admiration for those who find it. Unassimilated New Yorkers, the millions of un-Americans in this city, however poor or desolate they seem, however disappointed in their dreams, still loyally respect the American idea – the chance for every man to achieve opulence. Sometimes the sentiment has great pathos. An old man I once met in a cheap coffee-shop near the East River boasted gently, without arrogance, of the fabulous wealth of New York, for all the world as if its coffers were his, and all its luxuries, instead of a grey bed-sitting room and a coat with frayed sleeves. He said: ‘Why, the garbage thrown away in this city every morning – every morning – would feed the whole of Europe for a week.’ He said it without envy and with a genuine pride of possession, and a number of dusty demolition men sitting near by nodded their heads in proud and wondering agreement.
All the same, it is sometimes difficult to keep one’s social conscience in order among the discrepancies of Manhattan. The gulf between rich and poor is so particularly poignant in this capital of opportunity. There is fun and vigour and stimulation in New York’s symphony of capitalism – the blazing neon lights, the huge bright office blocks, the fine stores and friendly shop assistants – and yet there is something distasteful about a pleasure-drome so firmly based upon personal advantage. Everywhere there are nagging signs that the life of the place is inspired by a self-interest not scrupulously enlightened. ‘Learn to take care of others’, says a poster urging women to become nurses, ‘and you will know how to take care of yourself’. ‘The life you save may be your own’, says a road-safety advertisement. ‘Let us know if you can’t keep this reservation’, you are told on the railway ticket, ‘it may be required by a friend or a business associate of yours’. Faced with such constant reminders, the foreign visitor begins to doubt the altruism even of his benefactors. Is the party really to give him pleasure, or is the host to gain some obscure credit from it? The surprise present is very welcome, but what does its giver expect in return? Soon he is tempted to believe that any perversion of will or mind, any ideological wandering, any crankiness, any jingoism is preferable to so constant an obsession with the advancement of self.
But there, Manhattan is a haven for the ambitious, and you must not expect its bustling rivalries to be too saintly. Indeed you may as well admit that the whole place is built on greed, in one degree or another; even the city churches, grotesquely Gothic or Anglican beyond belief, have their thrusting social aspirations. What is wonderful is that so much that is good and beautiful has sprung from such second-rate motives. There are palaces of great pictures in New York, and millions go each year to see them. Each week a whole page of the New York Times is filled with concert announcements. There are incomparable museums, a lively theatre, great publishing houses, a famous university. The Times itself (‘All the News that’s Fit to Print’) is a splendid civic ornament, sometimes mistaken, often dull, but never bitter, cheap or malicious.
And the cit
y itself, with its sharp edges and fiery colours, is a thing of beauty; especially seen from above, with Central Park startlingly green among the skyscrapers, with the tall towers of Wall Street hazy in the distance, with the two waterways blue and sunny and the long line of an Atlantic liner slipping away to sea. It is a majestic sight, with no Wordsworth at hand to honour it, only a man with a loudspeaker or a fifty-cent guide book.
*
So leaving Manhattan is like retreating from a snow summit. The very air seems to relax about you. The electric atmosphere softens, the noise stills, the colours blur and fade, the pressure eases, the traffic thins. Soon you are out of the city’s spell, pausing only to look behind, over the tenements and marshes, to see the lights of the skyscrapers riding the night.
Of course Manhattan greatly changed in the course of the century, from its cab drivers to its crime rate, but the responses it sparked in me in 1953 did not much alter, and I have been there every single year since.
The South