Sheepish in Wolfe's Clothing
AFTERTHOUGHT
By JOHN WELLS
`DARLING, would you pass the tomahto salad?' She's a powder-pink Marilyn Monroe blonde in a white fur wrap and glittery razzle-dazzle glass dia- monds, with a smile like a Kolynos commercial in full colour, and anywhere else in the world there wouldn't be anything so remarkable about the way she pronounced that word, but we're sitting here at the 'Sultan's Table' on East 40th Street, all aggressive red wallpaper and concealed lighting and unleavened bread you dip in this yummy Arab food, and Tom Wolfe just sits there on the other side of the beautiful white tablecloth and listens to her across the restaurant with that shy kind of self-deprecating smile he has, as if he can't believe that any American in New York could possibly pronounce tomahtoes that way. But she can, she has, and time seems to stop for a second, the frame freezes, and a pink ectoplasmic miasma of embarrassed silence bleeds out across the velvet-red gloom of the celluloid picture.
Time's so strange in New York. Only a few moments before that, Tom Wolfe had pulled this lovely old gold pocket-watch out on the end of a looped golden chain and it had been half-past eight New York Time, and I'd taken out a terrible old chromium-plated turnip watch that cost about thirty shillings when it was new and it had been half-past one in the morning in London, and still exerting a powerful enough magnetic drag to pull down great bags under the eyes and make you feel as though you've been up for about forty-eight hours and so vacuously heavy-as-lead DULL you could fall face-forward in the yummy yummy Arab food if one of your fellow-diners didn't ram it down there first out of sheer banshee-screaming B-O-R-E-D-O-M at your conversation.
But somehow you have the feeling for all that that you aren't the only one in Manhattan with his watch set to GMT. Everyone tells you that New York is going to be so simulating, so new, so un-European, and then you get there and find that there's this marvellous restful feel about the whole city, and the impression all the time that those blood-red European roots are p-u-l-l-i-n-g down, pulling and dragging you back to remember those silent European cities where it's maybe three o'clock in the morning and some old bell in Vienna or in Munich or in Paris is tolling out over burial-grounds where the ancestors of every American white man who has ever lived lie dead and buried. But that's only if you happen to be a screwball.
Here you are walking along Madison Avenue at eleven o'clock in the morning after loafing around in your hotel bedroom watching colour television with a man who sounds just like Alvar Lidell reading the commentary over a colour travelogue on Rhodesia and the first three people you hear talking in the street, standing on those criss-cross pavement blocks they have in Munich or Strasbourg, and they're all honest to God talking French, real Parisian French. You turn the corner into 76th Street going towards Cen- tral Park, and there are these little houses with shutters on the windows, all crammed in between the high buildings—and the high buildings down where the big banks are go roaring and shimmer- ing up into the sky until your neck cricks—but there are these little houses in there that must be at least a hundred years old! I I And then you get out into Central Park, with the grey squirrels munching nuts down there so close you could let them bite your hand and those big bare heaps of bedrock showing among the rolling rough grass so you feel you're looking at some- thing out of Atala or Rene, or as if you were a seventeenth-century European maybe looking at this new country for the first time, and you forget all the high old brick buildings showing through the bare trees at the edge of the park, and you see these children running along the edge of the lake in white track-suits, and as the first child passes the winning-post, you know what the coach says to the winner? He says, `Alors, Jean-Pierre, je savais que to en etais capable.'
And if that wasn't enough, in the Metropolitan Museum there was this six-foot-high picture frame, all gilt and scrolls one side and silver-backed light bulbs on the other, just the hollow frame turning slowly on a great high plum-coloured dais, and a man testing the public-address system and making the numbers whisper and boom round the Egyptian Tomb and the reconstructed Bedroom from Pompeii, all round this great Victorian Morgue, and model girls waiting to go and stand up there in the rotating picture frame with their white stockings and their sun- glasses lodged up there on top of their heads just like they were wearing them in the Kings Road six months ago!!!
But coming back to Tom Wolfe, sitting there at the 'Sultan's Table' and listening to the girl in the white fur saying tomahtoes, I was just telling him that I'd been talking to the editor of Holiday magazine, and that he'd told me that the worst thing you could do as an English- man visiting New York for two days was to generalise, and that was why I wasn't going to write this article I'm writing now. But how can you parody a man like Wolfe, for heaven's sake —here he is, with this sheer charm that makes you think almost there could be something in this European crap I've just been writing about, and making these glittering helter-skelter rides of highly-polished platinum prose so you just go sliding down the column, smash clean through the advertisements, and flash on down the next paragraph as if you were riding a bobsleigh. And ever since old time-worn Robert Robinson came up to me last Saturday alongside the bananas and veal-and-ham pie in the BBC Club and implied in a roundabout way that my SPECTATOR pieces were lacking in enthusiasm!!! it struck me that the only thing to do with a man like Wolfe is to imitate him. But to go back to that magic moment at the 'Sultan's Table' where the pink stuff was bleeding over the plum- coloured celluloid, this girl asks for the tomahtoes, the film begins to run again, and there's this great roar of laughter from the table and 'everybody yells TOMAYTOES. It just occurs to me they might have been mocking my manner of speech. Next week it's back to the tortuously sculpted cliches. And boo sucks to Robert Robinson.
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