Discovering America
The States through Irish Eyes. By E. OE. Somerville. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) The States through Irish Eyes. By E. OE. Somerville. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) New York. By Paul Morand. Translated by Hamish Miles. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) THE discoVery of America was not the prerogative of Columbus: sooner or later we all make the country our own, either by way of a ship or by some swifter journey of the iniagination.- Those
of us who have never beennthere in fact have, with picture postcards for tickets ' and the word of actual traVellers for
guide-book; explored in-• our own way. We have seen New York as an enormous Adding Machine and the Statei as a jigsaw puzzle of a' map. We know the people, cops, bell-boys, gangsters and rum-runners, darkies, soft-spOken Virginians
and movie-stars. Broadway is ours, and's() are the Woolworth Building and the Statue of LibertY.
The best of armchair travelling is that we are able to black `out, as it were, -oirr own particular discovery and to see the
places afresh through the eyes of more active explorers: 'Here are two new guides ready to take us across the Atlantic. Miss Somerville is the most astonishing. I have known, by virtue of books, many Americas, but never such a one as she has discovered.
Perhaps we may take it as an omen for the whole book that as she approached New York for the first time " a dense fog smothered the whole famous skyline, and Liberty was not only dead but buried in its wet folds," so that she was spared " the responsibility of either reactions or epigrams " and we, her fellow-travellers, of a conventional entry. Even better than the things she sees in the States are these she brings with her : so much of Ireland accompanies her, and Irish wit creeps slyly to her pen-point, so that she writes, of dinner parties, " Few to which we were hospitably invited failed of that trusty nourisher (or may one say " wet nurse " ?) of conversation, champagne," and of American hospitality in general that it is " like American homes, centrally heated and its warmth comes from the heart."
Miss Sotherville declares, and we are grateful, that she is not a good sightseer, and falls very short of the standard set by an American lady who ascended " all the principal church and other towers in Europe," yet she did go up to the thirty-first storey of the Whitehall building, and from there, facing the Woolworth and Singer buildings on equal terms, Saw " the great city, with its green spaces and spaces of bright water, and upsoaring spires and towers, displayed below, sparkling in the blaze of sunlight, spreading as far as we could see, till it faded on the horizon in pale blue mist." What a new New York for those of us who have only approached the place by way of Main Street.
It seems, as we read, as though the author had made a deliberate pilgrimage in- search of peace, dignity and home- liness, and-had found them all in the States. She mentions old Georgian houses, ehinehes of the school of Wren, and country, as " bland " as the English Midlands. She writes about drives in a buggy that were exciting as any in a jaunting car, and of hunting in Aiken, South Carolina, where the horse is the tutelary deity. About three quarters of this most com- panionable book deals with dogs, hounds, horses and drag hunts : the rest contains descriptions- of social functions, cities, talk, and little anecdotes of Ireland. Miss Somerville is a sparkling companion to travel with, and though, as she says, it may be a mistake to visit a place that fancy has made her own, nobody need fear her as a destroyer of dreams. She has given us the newest of worlds. .
M. Morand is a very different guide : he writes in staccato style that matches the internal clatter of the skyscrapers. Compare his glimpse of New York from the Woolworth Building with Miss Somerville's wider gaze—" How can one describe from such a height this miniature metropolis ? Before me the East River unfolds itself, spanned by its lithe metallic bridges which drop down into the shapeless immensity of Brooklyn. Each pinnacle is crested with smoke or steam like plumes on helmets. My eye passes down these long rows of cells, these glass accumulators—" Has New York as many faces as Truth ? It would seem that she has. Whereas Miss Somerville has concerned herself with people who arc able to live as they will, M. Morand hustles along with those who snatch meals from machines, whose family life is machin- ated. He is intoxicated by • crowds, and his ecstacy is dis- played in his manner of writing, which is too impressionistic for continuous effectiveness. With him it is hit or miss alternately : he writes like an erratic typist. Here is, or what I from my armchair believe must be, a perfect description of Brooklyn Bridge—" Brooklyn Bridge has also its inner beauty—its tremulous rhythm, its flexibility in strength : New York's traffic crosses it noon and night, and makes it throb like a lyre. . . . Some bridges- spoil a landscape, block it or scalp it ; but others, like this one, make the landscape their own ; Brooklyn Bridge controls the whole perspective ;- its steel meshes fix with deep dark strokes the shapeless haze of those far distances drowning in darkness." Surely he succeeds there, but he tries too hard sometimes, as when he writes of the streets of old New York being " tortuous as the brain of a European " and says " Fifth Avenue shoots through the hoop of Washington Arch like a lovely tulip."
Yet M. Morand can, and does sometimes, describe some quiet beauty. Mostly though be writes of teeming life and
noise and rattle. He tells of life in Sing Sing prison, whose ghastly walls are reinforced concrete, lined with barbed wire, whose convicts have cinemas, newspapers and wireless and who tend flowers in hot-house looking out on to the section for condemned men. He mentions, too, more civilized things, the English Manuscripts (" nearly everything of Byron and Scott ") in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, the ever-open dis- pensaries for animals, and the police courts which nightly and promptly deal with all minor breaches of the law committed after six o'clock in the evening. It is easier to make a list of what he does not say than of what he does, for his book is as crowded as the New York which armchair travellers have so often imagined. A word of praise is due to M. J. Vaquero frif his most effective black and white illustrations.
Neither of these guides should be neglected, for each is the more valuable by way of contrast : one has discovered for us so many lovely landscapes and the other innumerable Street
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