Lolita Slept Here
By D. W. BROGAN WE are all familiar with the great legendary and unattainable figures, the Flying Dutch- man and Herne the Hunter. Modern American mythology has added a new one. For one hears constantly of friends of one's friends who have seen a motel bearing, under the neon light which says 'No Vacancies,' the more enticing legend 'Lolita Slept Here.' In the last two years I have travelled many thousands of miles in the United States, have inspected a vast number of motels, motor courts, cabins, etc., but have never seen this inscription. It may be that there is no such motel (although a very smart Washington girls' school was discovered to have a Lolita Club). But in my pursuit of the White Whale of the Lolita motel, I have been forced to study a great deal of the system of American transport.
I have already reported in the columns of this journal the decline and threatened disappearance of the Iron Horse. I have now to report on the possible disappearance of all local transport in the United States. Or perhaps one should say the disappearance of all useful transport. I have forgotten how many cars there are in the United States. I believe more than 70 million. And it is certainly one of the unexamined premises of the American way of life that all transport problems are solved by the fact that everybody has a car. Even if we translate 'everybody' into every family, it is not quite true. Much more serious, not every family by a long way has a car for each member of the family, and con- sequently in an area where local public trans- port has broken down (and these areas are very numerous) a family may find one or two of its members totally stranded at a critical moment. For example, in Connecticut when Governor Ribicoff was consul, his rigorous and very popular administration of the traffic laws meant that a good, many cars were immobilised be- cause their drivers had been suspended. Another problem affecting the horseless carriage in America is the sociological fact that young males cause far more accidents than more mature males or than young females. I realise (as was put in a famous unprinted speech by the late Governor Cross of Connecticut) that many accidents formally caused by young males are in fact caused by the proximity of young females. Nevertheless, insurance companies, as I have recently noticed in Virginia, are increasingly reluctant to insure young males at all and have put up the cost of insuring these enterprising characters to quite prohibitive heights. This, of course, does not prevent young males from driving cars and causing accidents. It merely de- prives their victims of adequate financial remedy.
Nevertheless, the horseless carriage has come to stay. It has even mounted the skies as was predicted in Where's Charley?, the musical ver- sion of Charley's Aunt. And I have been struck in many thousands of miles of travelling over the American roads how vulnerable the system is. The best American roads are wonderful. They make our Mls, etc., look childish. In the next ten years or so, we shall begin to get the kind of road system the Americans abandoned twenty years ago. I am told, for example, that one can drive from New York to Chicago with- out ever having to deal with a traffic light. I have not tested this assertion, but I have moved over a great many American parkways, thruways, turnpikes. American roads, like 'London policemen, are wonderful. They arc also in many states a source of political power and of financial profit.
I have been told, by one of the few Rhodes scholars who have not moved to Washington, that the real secret of empire in any American state is the road fund. Roads are as mysteriously and non-functionally sacred in present-day America as the pyramids were in ancient Egypt. I even met two or three years ago in up-state New York, in a snowstorm in a stranded bus, a commercial traveller for cement who told me in words recalling Mr. Harold Macmillan, that his business had never had it so good. He could sell concrete anywhere. But, he confided in me, as a private citizen he thought the United States had all the roads it needed and that most of the new road-building was a pure waste of money. Nevertheless, one must accept the; fact that most Americans move by road, and this involves the problem of where they stay when the car breaks down or dusk falls.
They stay in motels, like me possibly looking for the famous sign, 'Lolita Slept Here.' The motel is an American sociological phenomenon which I have seen grow from infancy to its present burgeoning maturity. Moving round the United States thirty-odd years ago, by car or bus, one was reduced to houses kept by elderly ladies, widows or spinsters, which announced 'Accommodation,' the equivalent of our 'Bed and Breakfast.' There were also in small towns old-fashioned hotels of which I retain an amiable memory. 1 stayed there because I was broke. But the leather-lined rocking chairs, the old-fashioned brass spittoons (your pardon's begged, cuspidors), the general air of resigna- tion to the wicked world, find little representa- tion today. San Francisco, that proud conserva- tive city, has a few fine museum specimens not far from Union Square. But almost everywhere 'You're like a sister to mel the answer to the vagrant American is the rnol I can remember the beginnings of the m° movement. In those remote days they were call 'cabins.' They consisted as a rule of a SO of wooden huts with somewhere in the bad ground what connoisseurs of American litc0 ture will recognise as a 'Lem Putt,' what a now called, pace Miss Mitford, earth toile'. How few are left! For various acciden reasons I had to make the journey fr Washington to Richmond, Va., several ti last summer, and I passed a cabin site 11' totally abandoned. It cannot have been la° than twenty years old, but for desolation a° decay, the statue of Ozymandias had nothing " A this set of cabins. What has replaced the cabins are the molel tt (or motor courts): And have they change(1. There are, for example, quite serious social d6 ferences in the tone and price of motels. It I, true that, a little to the north of Richmo0 one alleged motel advertises accommodati°, for two dollars a night. But this, I wa.E. assure' was catering exclusively to the Negro trael But in my experience of motels they are 09 just as expensive as hotels. In fact they are great rivals to hotels. This is illustrated by fact that whereas hotels in Washington, Isle York and other cities encourage parents bring their children and don't charge for the, in really smart motels, in the summer holi season, you are charged for a double ro whether you are accompanied by a lady fri or not. This, I should have thought, puts premium on immorality if the fact is krio in advance and a gentleman moving south, 1, us say, to North Carolina, realises he has r to pay for sin whether he enjoys it or a°, Indeed, I suspect that only persons of the strong est Scottish character can resist this temptati°n. If I remember correctly, Lolita had somethile; to be paid for, but while motels may be 411r, more morally rigorous than they were in t' Humbert's time, the motels are financiallY 0 a position to make conditions. They do 111°r' than that. They make a parody of their fuelcit tion. They are now very often two-storey two instances I know of, they are four-stool, They are, in fact, hotels, except for the fa': that they guarantee to provide parking sP3c, per car per customer or couple. There is son' 0 thing funny in seeing in Washington and 9 Francisco what are new hotels proudly b"`P, ing the fact of being new motels.
Yet relics of the slightly disreputable P remain. The literature that the smarter 111°Icoi issue shows a desire to live down the past . the business. I can remember how struck ``a`in western New South Wales, by reading th.t advertisement of an hotel in a very important provincial town in that state which boasted 0; the hotel was 'fully carpeted:' But havi/ looked into the literature of American motels, I feel less superior towards the hoteliers of South Wales. For a great many of the ra° lavish motels boast of 'carpets,' even of `ras. They boast of terrazzo floors. Most of then' boast of television. But almost all of them sal' firmly, 'No pets.' Pets obviously means (as does in England) dogs, because a few very ,; advanced places promise kennels. The same vet.' advanced motels promise 'efficiencies'—a "1°1 da
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c., I must admit, baffled me until I made :stigations. 'Efficiencies' means minor cook- facilities and, oddly enough, I stayed only ce in a place which provided `efficiencies,' ud that was in Roussillon, at Argeles-Plage. But motels not only have come to stay but re very good places to stay in. It is true they lletimes advertise two swimming pools and bigger of these would hold about half a en couples and the other about half a dozen dren. You may be forced or encouraged drink the local wine, and I should like to e Cyril Ray's opinion on 'Bronte' or lPpernong,' both of which I have drunk quite intly. And one does see a great deal of erican life in its more attractive and also More dramatic aspects in motels. I am told, for example, that when the American police look at the licence numbers in the car parks of smart and popular motels, they often dis- cover an astonishingly large proportion of local numbers. But I can testify that this does not always mean what the censorious would think. In at least one instance, a couple who go regularly to a motel near Washington and have a Washington number, are in fact a married couple escaping from the heat. I am, on the whole, all for motels, and Americans keep on asking me why we haven't more in England. I have found a conclusive• answer. 'We haven't very many motels, but there is one between Cambridge and London with a thatched roof.' I ask, firmly, `Can you equal that?' So far no one has taken up the challenge.
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