The American scene

The pursuit of happiness

Patrick Skene Catling

Sitting in the lotus position beside the grey waters of an Irish lake, I recently perceived that I had just spun the last trace of inspirational lint from my navel. In this extremity, I always find, like the late Peter Duval-Smith, it is necessary to travel.

I wrote to Tom White, a tolerant veteran Hearst man (not necessarily a contradiction in terms), who is now the executive editor of the Baltimore News American, a paper now operating so securely in the black that it can afford to make the occasional small mistake. I suggested that I should write some articles on the proposition that there are Americans living happily in the East Coast megalopolis even in the midsummer of this Presidential election year. The thesis was daringly original, entirely unfounded on anybody's recent experience in the United States. But a gimmick is a gimmick. White chivalrously replied that he was not unwilling.

I hurried over by Aer Lingus leprechaunpowered Jumbo and down by Amtrak Metroliner express (a train of almost Japanese modernity), and White testified to the importance of our enterprise by receiving me in his office immediately and immediately saying: "Let's go: we should be able to catch the fifth race at Pimlico."

In a previous incarnation, it seems, I worked on the Baltimore Sun, in Baltimore on and off, for ten years, until 1958. Now I felt like Rip Van Winkle after his long sleep or a Martian anthropologist on an exotic field trip. In these recent years of accelerating change, fourteen years are a long time. Baltimore is the sixth American city in population and, drastically checking its growth, the first city in the annual number of murders. On the average, there's one murder every day, and there are many near misses.

There are so many armed hold-ups, even hi daylight, that in the taxis there are signs informing passengers that the driver has only five dollars in change and the rest of the money is kept in a safe that the driver cannot open. Even so, drivers are often held up for the five dollars. There have been so many robberies with violence in the buses (there are no conductors) that two-way radios are being installed, to enable drivers to call for help. Nobody in his right mind can believe that help will be forthcoming in time; it is unlikely that the radios will do much more than make the drivers feel less lonely during assaults. People supporting a $100-a-day drug habit are desperate.

I was seeking happiness.

As in all other major American cities, central urban renewal during the past decade has been explosive and continues to be. Even the Chamber of Commerce smiles nervously. There is a communal identity crisis. Loving the ball-players paid tc, play football, basketball and baseball for local teams isn't quite enough. What old building will be the next to go? What blank monolith will arise overnight in its place?

Between Philadelphia and Washington, Baltimore is just south of the Mason-Dixon Line; technically, therefore, it is a Southern city. It always used to be a Southern Northern city or a Northern Southern city. The schizophrenia sometimes seemed, on a hot summer evening in the past, the romantic confusion of a Tennessee Williams' heroine of a certain age. In the brisk, productive days of winter, the schizophrenia usually seemed more nicely balanced. Now Baltimore has been cured of eccentric individuality, leucotomised by progress; now it's like all the others, equally efficient and equally noisy and. . .

Entire downtown residential districts,. not all of them slums, have been razed to make way for a grandiose Orwellian civic centre, with towering glass and concrete office blocks and the odd concessionary leafless plaza for people who selfconsciously contrive to enjoy the atavistic pleasure of ' walking ' — that is to say that they stroll a few yards during their lunch hour, sit down for a while, and stroll back to their airconditioned cubicles.

Many white Baltimoreans who can afford to do so have emigrated to the suburbs of the surrounding counties, which elect their own governments and levy their own taxes, thus depriving the municipality of much of its former revenue. The poorer citizens, including close to 10 per cent said to be dependent on welfare payments, have stayed. The Population of the city is now about 50 per cent black. Many white Baltimoreans, complain that the rising proportion of especially the elderly and the indigent, blacks is the cause of all the city's ills, even industrial pollution (how?) and the general disinclination of young people to say " please " and "thank you."

Mayor Donald Schaefer granted me an audience in City Hall soon after I arrived. One of his predecessors, Mayor D'Alesandro the Elder, had given me a key to the city; but since that time many of the locks had been changed. Mayor Schaefer is a 1972 Babbitt who looks more like a golf pro than a City Hall politician. He is sun-tanned and clear-eyed and what S. J. Perelman once called "a snappy dresser." The mayor could give lessons t•) Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham.

"In the last three months there has been a real upswing in attitudes," Mayor Schaefer said brightly. "We must reverse the trend of fear. We must bring the people back downtown. I'm sure we can."

He gave me a new key. It was made of some raw soft wood, unvarnished, and had a temporary look about it. I thanked him and asked whether he'd kindly give me the names of some reasonable, moderate black leaders whom I might meet.

"There aren't any," he said. This was the mayor, speaking about half the people of his city. He gave me instead the name of a black millionaire manufacturer of pork sausages.

Baltimore is a great port. Last year it handled 48 million short tons of cargo, worth more than $2.2 billion. The Maryland Port Administration took six visiting Polish mayors aboard a yacht on a sightseeing tour and allowed me to go along. The crab imperial and beer were delicious. A grateful Pole pinned a Polish municipal badge to my lapel and said that frank exchanges were good for trade between our peoples. Later, he added: " We, too, have pollution problem." Catering to merchant seamen and Washington diplomats on the spree as well as to escapistically inclined natives, Baltimore's night clubs near the waterfront have long been famous for their robust bawdiness. They used to be quite good fun. I was warned that they are now dangerous. But nothing could have induced me to stay away. I was not prepared to find that they have been partly ruined by the competition of pornographic book shops, whose most popular features are rows of private booths in which, at the rate of the equivalent of a shilling a minute, you may watch coin-in-the-slot peep shows' — blue movies that would make a Port Said madame or even a Piccadilly pimp blush for the decline of the aesthetic standards of his calling. But, in fairness, it should be added that these films are to traumatic that they may be of assistance to lonely travelling salesmen who wish to preserve their celibacy. Baltimore is noted also for its museums of art, its symphony orchestra, its institutions of higher learning, its azalea gardens, its . . . The weather had been like Calcutta's before the monsoon, with temperatures and humidities in the nineties. And then the rains came. The havoc was awful, and it spoiled a pair of my shoes. The Baltimore Magic & Novelty shop put up its steel trellis shutters. It seemed to be time to leave.

During my visit I had gone up to New York to consult David Frost. He said: People in England have some strange Ideas about life in an American city. I tell them it isn't all mugging and thirteentimes-married tycoons and electric toothbrushes for cats." Of course, he may be When I returned to the lake in Ireland the water was blue. The lake is beautiful and rather boring.