America, here we come!
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Colorado Springs—Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, i.e. the American West, but I never get used to the size of the country. I suppose I flew about 30,000 miles in the United States last year and perhaps I have flown half a million over the years, but I still make my first serious American air journey with a cer- tain incredulity that I'll leave Washington in the late afternoon and in the darkness arrive at my destination as far from Washington as Moscow is from London, without passport trouble, currency controls, change of planes at frontiers, etc. And I had forgotten that Ameri- can air routes are not simple east to west lines on a Mercator projection map and that to get to Colorado Springs I had to go via Tulsa and Oklahoma City.
Below me in the darkness, the uniform chequer-board pattern of American cities was laid out. The blaze of city lights suddenly ends and there is the dark and lone prairie. The most dramatic example of this is the sight of Las Vegas (or as `with-it' people say, Vegas) from the air, for all around the pleasure city is the desert. Vegas is exactly the example of capitalist degradation predicted by Jack London and H. G. Wells. The only thing wrong with their prophecy is that the capitalist degradation is shared and enjoyed by so many oppressed proletarians and that one great union (yes, the Teamsters) is, or until very recently was, one of the exploiters of human weakness that causes such pain to the modern disciples of William Morris, Eric Gill, etc.
I reflected on this as I contemplated the hostesses on the Braniff plane. I had never flown Braniff before. It was a line founded by a highly idiosyncratic Irish-American, later killed flying one of his own planes, and there was an agreeable air of Hibernian oddity in the costumes' on, the _hostesses. No bogus naval or RAF uniforms for them. There were comic little turbans and gay semi-mini skirts and one of them wore long and elegant trousers such as you sometimes see on high-class Moslem women in Northern India. And, all the hostesses were what the French call jolies laides. Unfor- tunately, I have not yet found any way of getting an American woman to accept as a compliment the statement that she is a bone laide. American advertising uses jolies laides models a great deal (see any number of the New Yorker), but they are not called that. Yet how superior they are to mere jolies flues whose prettiness doesn't last; and, as we all know, great beauties tend to price themselves out of the market till the market has closed. Then jolies !aides tend to be more cheerful, less tense in 'the war between men and women' (to borrow from the great Thurber) and to go more places more often. They are the real `Go-Go girls.'
But I have found Colorado Springs full of jolies laides of the most engaging kind. The girls in this expensive hotel greet you as if your comfort really was important to them. More extraordinary, in a vast drug store, afflicted with self-service, failing to find anything I wanted, just as in a cash chemist's at home, a cheerful blonde, with a most attractive saucy face, walked round the store, found everything I was looking for (none of them in her department) and wished me well. Behold, I have not found such service in Israel (I mean England or even Scotland). In our dire straits we shall have to train our languid and in- different young ladies at least to appear as if they wanted to help the customers.
Colorado Springs has grown fourfold since 1940 when it was a smallish resort town known as 'Little England.' It has now over 200,000 inhabitants, mainly because of that all-pervad- ing power in modern America, `the military' (in this case, the air force). In my hotel there is a Little London section which has a Picca- dilly Bar and a London Grill. Neither is like any grill or bar known to me in London (England). For one thing the waiters are dis- guised in eighteenth century costumes,- quite plausible in the grill, not so plausible in the bar. One thing wrong was a mixture of genres. A very aged Negro doorman wore an odd com- bination of the uniform of a Chelsea Pensioner and a Yeoman of the Guard. The absence of wigs destroyed the plausibility of the costumes of other waiters (one of whom was a Japanese). The only one who really looked the part was a magnificent and very handsome Negro who didn't need a wig. He looked as if he might have been a house servant imported from Virginia as in Thackerays novel. But I suddenly realised why he looked real. He alone wasn't wearing a wrist watch. As we may be reduced to exporting, under licence, footmen, Abigails, butlers, eunuchs and all the other service experts whom we are supposed to have, per- haps a training school under the aegis of Jeeves might be more profitable than more colleges of advanced technology? A thought for Mr Jenkins.
Meanwhile, in the campaign to save the dollar, attention is being given to reversing the travel flow; instead of Americans 'doing Yurrup,' as we used to say in my childhood, Europeans will be doing the us with the dollars that the us is no longer kindly issuing to Euro- peans. But what can induce Europeans to spend money in the us as tourists? For myself, it's simple; I have quite often been a tourist in America at my own expense in the free days before the Second World War and would be again if I could spend my own money where I want to spend it. But the others? A great deal of American tourist advertising directed at Europeans is misdirected. They have, as a rule, all the history at home that they can digest (far too much in fact). They don't want to see Williamsburg or Mystic Village. True, the Americans have the secret of successful antiques: build them now. Williamsburg looks a lot more authentic than modern Bath and
both Yale and Princeton are far more Gothick than Oxford or Cambridge.
But if you ask Europeans in.-the us 'what came ye forth to see?,' it is very seldom monu- ments of American history. Tourists would rather see General Eisenhower alive at Gettys- burg than the ghosts of Generals Lee and Meade. I have swum in Walden Pond, but for no literary piety provoked by the memory of the overrated Thoreau. Mark Twain's Hannibal is another matter; so is Prophet Joseph Smith's Nauvoo. But the real attractions are elsewhere. There is the mats-ere d'Amerique, the legend of the West. Here, in Colorado. I am in the midst of it. I know how bogus most of it is, how brief the reign of 'the Indian and the Scout.' Snow, if not quite the cash crop it is in Vermont, brings in more money than does cattle raising. Yet, the drug stores and hotel lobbies are full of western magazines that, the buyers must know, tell mainly bogus stories of the times 'when men were men and women were wide open spaces.'
But the magic lasts. Going in search of a post office. I saw approaching me a stocky man with a peculiar horseman's roll to his walk. I accosted him and saw that, despite his standard bogus western costume, he was in fact an Indian. He directed me in correct but highly accented English. I was thrilled. I remembered the time, about twelve years ago, when my daughter was deeply involved in Indian lore, in which she was really learned. On my return from one of my American trips, she asked me, anxiously, had I seen an Indian? I could truth- fully say that I had and had talked with one. I didn't tell her that my Indian had introduced himself to me at a drug-store counter in Salt Lake City where we were both breakfasting. He wore 'store clothes' and had all the proper opinions of a lesser Republican businessman. Indians, real Indians, will have to be provided, even if it is necessary to teach them how to ride and use a bow or a Winchester.
But there are other American attractions that might be exploited. There are the gadgets. I'm living (not at my own expense) in a very modern, very admirable hotel that is full of them. The waitresses and the waiters have noticed that I don't like the encircling gloom of American restaurants and bars, so they show great ingenuity in providing artificial light. But I like the number of brilliant technological im- provements that have been put in regardless of expense. I am a sucker, like the Prime Minister, for new technological triumphs. Few people have bought more fountain pens, hoping I'd at last learn to write; new typewriters, hoping I'd learn to type; razors, hoping I'd learn to shave. I have twice bought the latest shaving wonder but, not only can I not shave myself with it, I can't even cut myself with it. My Washington host has kindly taken these models of ingenuity from me and I'm back with the old invention of Mr Gillette.
The ingenuity that pleases me most in this hotel is the electric eye, or whatever it is called, that sends lifts up and down. You approach it and point your finger at a dial and the door opens; inside you do the same and the lift mounts. It is true that the effort of holding your finger-away from the button, and not just pushing in the old pre-electronic way, takes more time and effort than was needed in the bad old days. But I am with it. The gadget- lovers of Europe would be delighted to come to a country where simple things are done in brilliantly novel ways with hardly any serious loss of time.
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