particular. I was one of the winners of one of his scholarships. He crossed the seas, as he did every year, to run his eye over the new crop. A meeting was arranged in the Master’s lodgings. Coolidge was an imposing and craggy man whose trousers, mercifully, seemed equal to the task of shielding his shin and ankle from the vulgar gaze. I rather stupidly asked him if he was related to the president of the same name. “Why no,” replied Bill. “I believe that he was one of the working Coolidges.” Once again, one found oneself dealing with something, or someone, “so large, so friendly, and so rich.”
A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?
At around this time I also met my first U.S. senator. Hugh Scott, the Republican from Pennsylvania, had been seconded to Balliol for some “special relationship” purpose and was occasionally wheeled out to put a respectable face on things. He’s rather forgotten now, but Norman Mailer had caught the tailor’s-dummy, all-things-to-all-men aspect of the senatorial mien in a thumbnail sketch from the fateful Nixon convention in Miami in 1968:
Scott had modest but impeccable aplomb as he explained that since only 12 per cent of the delegates had been in San Francisco in 1964, he did not expect bitterness from old Goldwater followers to hurt Rockefeller’s chances now. A fine character actor had been lost when Hugh Scott went into politics: he could have played the spectrum from butler to count.
Alarming though American politics and politicians seemed—especially as one devoured Mailer’s punchy and instant-paperbacked reporting from the street fights outside the Pentagon and the party conclaves—I didn’t fail to register the note of thwarted patriotism that he sometimes sounded when he was writing about himself in the third person:
A profound part of him detested the thought of seeing his American society—evil, absurd, touching, pathetic, sickening, comic, full of novelistic marrow—disappear now in the nihilistic maw of a national disorder.
In one way, this reeked of Mailer’s showbiz reluctance to lose a country that supplied him with such good copy. But I thought I could detect the pulse of patriotic sympathy in him, too, if only because I also felt it latently in myself. Experience with Communists and fellow travelers in Cuba and elsewhere had made me somewhat immune to the sort of propaganda that emphasized “Uncle Sam” or “the Yanqui,” let alone the sort that burned the American flag. This style, which usually warned one of the presence of the “peace-loving and progressive forces,” also reminded me of the snobbish and even chauvinistic anti-Americanism that I’d overheard on the British Right. Trying to keep all these reflections in balance, in late July 1970 I bought a bucket-shop ticket for a charter flight via Iceland to John F. Kennedy Airport.
Sometimes an expectation or a wish does come true. I have no faith in precognitive dreams or any patience for “dream” rhetoric in general, yet Manhattan was exactly as I had hoped it would be. I had to survive some very discouraging first impressions: the airport cafe where I ate my first breakfast was a nothingness of plastic and formica and the “English muffin” was a travesty of both Englishness and muffindom. Outside stood a paunchy cop with, on his heavy belt, an accoutrement of gun and club and handcuff of a sort that I had never seen in real life and had believed exaggerated in the movies. The bus into the city was sweaty and the Port Authority Terminal is probably the worst possible place from which to take your original bearings on Midtown. The next thing I actually saw in the city was a flag-bedecked campaign headquarters for the ultraright candidacy of James Buckley (brother of William F.) for the Senate. “Join The March For America!” it yelled. But I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and
In the streets and avenues of this amazing city, there was barely a crew-cut to be seen, and everybody’s trousers—if they wore any trousers—seemed equal to the task of covering the ankle if not indeed the entire shoe. (Bell-bottoms may have been involved.) With skirts, though, the reverse process applied. In some manner, the whole place was redolent of sex, but in a natural rather than a leering way. Three big differences between this culture and the English one began to disclose themselves at once.
The first was the extraordinary hospitality. Balliol College had equipped me with a list of former alumni who were willing to “put me up” and this comprised some fairly solid citizens all across the USA. But Americans to whom one had barely been introduced would also insist that one came for a weekend “on the shore,” or “upstate,” and would actually mean it. On the way to any destination, if you put out your thumb on the roadside you would almost immediately get a lift or a “ride” (to set this down now makes me bite my lip as I mourn the lapse of time and the passing of hitchhiking) and very often the driver would go out of his or her way to drop you where you wanted to go. Music on the radio would be loud and various as the trip progressed, and if there was any song more evocative of those days than “Go Where You Wanna Go” it was the schmaltzy, haunting “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Should you happen to be in need of a jet plane, you could go to the airport and try your luck. It cost nothing to acquire a standby “YouthFare” card and, once equipped with this proof of mere youthfulness, you could wait in the boarding area and snap up any unbought seat for a few dollars. I first flew across the Great Lakes from New York to Chicago in this manner, in brilliant sunshine, on a plane where I was the sole passenger and the tawny, lissome American Airlines hostesses treated me as if I had paid for First Class. In Britain, “inter-city” travel meant crummy station platforms and delayed and dirty trains run by resentful oldsters. To really feel the connection between youth and freedom (and somehow, nothing did this for me more than the experience of flight), I had also had to flee.
My trip to Chicago, where I was rather chilled to see the egotistic, minatory signs on the airport road welcoming me in the name of “Richard J. Daley, Mayor,” also happened to coincide with the first celebration of International Women’s Day. All through the downtown “Loop,” one sun-drenched lunchtime, a great avalanche of pulchritude filled the plazas just as music and fighting speeches moved the air. I felt the stirrings and yearnings of another civil rights movement, triggered by an earlier one that still had some distance to run. (In a distant undertone, I also felt the premonition of “identity politics” but believe me, to see the womanhood of Chicago
Hospitality, easy riding, and easy flying: Could it get any better? Mr. Coolidge had decreed that all those accepting his scholarship money should be unaccompanied by females. After voyaging up to stay with him in his magnificent home in Topsfield, Massachusetts, and putting in my time lying on his pool-patio and being discreetly growled and purred at, I felt somewhat released from this obligation. (He threw an all-male lunch which included the then-president of Harvard, a man with the near-perfect New England name of Nathan Pusey and perhaps a hint of austere attenuation in his gray pants-leggings.) My girlfriend was coming to the United States anyway, and in those days if you bought the ticket outside the country you could travel on the Greyhound bus system for ninety- nine days for ninety-nine dollars. This was even better than YouthFare. I told her to buy and bring two tickets. Seeing America by road turned out to be even finer than gazing at it from the sky.
For all the indifference I felt toward the shallow concept of a “Woodstock Nation,” there was in those days a sort of “underground” vernacular for people under the age of twenty-one. A brisk flash of the “peace” sign would get you a roadside lift even more quickly than the showing of a mere thumb, and if you needed to borrow a floor or a bunk there was a similar idiom, often to do with the verses of Bob Dylan. (It comes back to me that on one of those big smooth rocks on the edge of Central Park, someone had painted in giant letters: “He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying,” and underneath it the deranged Weatherman flash of a “W” with a superimposed lightning bolt and
