Customs of the Country

INGLIS By BRIAN CliSi011iS officers are stationed at US ports of entry for your protection. You'll find them courteous, quiet and efficient . . . interested in clearing you and your belongings just as quickly and pleasantly as possible.

?THUS, a brochurJ on the airliner. The Idle- ] wild authorities have evolved a new system for getting luggage to the customs building; instead of bringing it through one hatch they bring it through half a dozen. This means that the passengers, instead of waiting dispiritedly in one place until it arrives, can stretch their legs after the long journey running from one hatch to another, beating each other out of the way with the little metal trolleys provided.

In the year since I was last in America there had been one decided shift in the climate of liberal opinion : Labour has become the bogy man, instead of Big Business. I arrived during the news- paper strike—with all its disturbing implications: When your luggage appears, you carry it to one of the moving belts which take it up to the court- eous, quiet and efficient customs officer. I got into a short queue at the head of which was a man returning from military service with no fewer than nine suitcases. As each was checked and passed, the belt moved on; and as soon as there was room the second man in the queue naturally lifted his own luggage on to it. At this the courteous, quiet and efficient customs officer sus- pended work to come over and tell him to keep his stuff off the belt, until told.

The officer then returned and, with care, finished his examination of the nine pieces; checked them out; picked an adjacent wastepaper basket off the floor; put it on the belt; and walked away without a word or a look.

We waited for a while, dazed, until a porter came up : 'It's no use youse staying there, he's gone off.'

'We think you'll agree,' the PAA brochure con- cludes, 'that your clearance through cusibins was an interesting part of your trip.' Yes.

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a few hundred men from a not very reputable organisation keeping the New York newspapers off the streets for weeks, only to accept in the end terms which were no better than those they had been rejecting all along. And hardly was the strike over than the new,s broke of Hotfa's design to recruit the New York police into the Teamsters. It was not clear whether he thought this would be an impressive demonstration of his power, or whether he had some wild notion that it would lend an air of respectability to his Union; but in- evitably the result was to alarm liberal opinion —never stronger, to judge by the election results. It makes Hoffa's chances of escaping justice much longer very slim indeed.

At the same time, a journalist attached to the Harvard Business School assured me, business- men are suddenly beginning to wake up to a sense of their responsibilities; tycoons who before did not know the School existed, or who thought it was a kind of front organisation for radicals (still a dirty word in the US) were now realising how it may help them to enlist public opinion on their side to stamp out the Hoffas.

I shall be interested to see if this change of mood is reflected in a change of attitude to the journals of opinion. In the past Big Business there has ignored the serious weeklies, which helps to explain why they have never flourished. There has been no counterpart of 'prestige' advertising; no recognition that it may be better for industry to help sustain journals of every shade of opinion so that—in John Philpot Curran's phrase—'by the collisiOn of intercourse . . . a sort of in- sensible perspiration takes place in the body politic, by which those acrimonies, which would otherwise fester and inflame, are quietly dissolved and dissipated.'

To their embarrassment, the newspapers found that their absence during the strike did not cause the economic dislocation that might have been expected. Christmas trade in New York was a record (though, of course, it was argued that with newspaper advertising to help it would have been better still). On the day the strike ended the repor- ters entrusted with the duty of explaining how much it had hurt the public had to do some barrel- scraping to find anything, other than institutions directly or nearly connected with the press, which had been hurt; surprisingly, the sufferers included funerals (attendance down 20 per cent.), and engagements. Apparently New York socialites deferred answering 'yes' until they could be sure of getting their pictures in the papers.

I was surprised to see how little use advertisers made during the strike of an obvious alternative medium : the subway. They do not normally make much use of subway stations, possibly because they are so dingy that, through association of ideas, people might feel the advertised product isn't much catch either. In the trains, though there are plenty of advertisements, quite a high propor- tion of them are either charitable' appeals (*Fight Nephrosis and Nephritis'), or warnings ('Cross at the Green, Not in Between), or puffs ('Salute to New York's Seasons), or homilies ('Worship Together This Week'). I would have expected these standbys to be replaced or supplemented for the duration of the strike by more urgently topical advertisements: but they were not—though one or two cinemas and stores stuck fly-posters over the maps of the underground systems (this mat- tered little to the travelling public; the scale is too small for the maps to be legible).

As I turned the handle of Mr. Ben Sonnen- berg's office in Madison Avenue, I felt a slight electric shock. It occurred to me to mention it to him, in case there was a short circuit somewhere; but I forgot.

Recalling this later in the evening. I referred to it at a party; only to be told that it is a common- place in New York. James Thurber's mother, who was terrified that electricity was leaking and drip- ping out invisibly all over the place, turns out to have been not so far wrong, at that. 'Static,' apparently. Somebody recalled that Gerard Philippe had complained at a press conference that he had the arm bounced off him, opening taxi doors; for a time there was agitation for laws to be passed about it.

A columnist among those present at the party remarked that every time he pulls his top blanket up over the underneath one, his bedroom is lit up by a fine display of pyrotechnics; and an actor said that whenever he crosses the pile carpet in his room in dry weather (it had been wonderfully dry and sunny for days) he knows all about it as soon as he touches anything on the other side. A doctor had the capping story. Visiting a patient, he said; he put out his forefinger to ring the apart- ment bell; when it was still a good half-inch away, a spark leapt between it and the bell push, and the bell rang itself.

Being an importunate Admirer of Scott Fitz- gerald, and having enjoyed Budd Schulberg's book The Disenchanted. I went nervously to the play which Schulberg and a collaborator have hacked out of the book; and found myself securely held. But there were irritations. The bad habits that American (and British) dramatists can slide into are neatly illustrated early on in the play when the young scriptwriter Stearns (Schulberg) expresses us delight at being told he is going to work with he once-cekbrated but decayed Halliday (Fitz- gerald) on a film story. 'As a matter of fact,' he tells Halliday enthusiastically, 'when I first heard, I didn't think you were still . . .' and his voice trails away effectively into embarrassment. Now, in the book (though I have not got The Dis- enchanted to hand) it may have been necessary for Halliday to add, as he does in the play, the words 'Still alive'?', to make the point clear. But on the stage the point is made by Stearns, in his voice.and his look; for Halliday to make it again only destroys the effect. An explained silence can be at least as destructive as an explained joke.

Halliday. Jason Roberts, Jr., has, a vague resemblance to Paul Scofield, in manner more than appearance; he gets the audience instinct with sympathy. But he bears no more resemblance to Scott Fitzgerald than does Brooks Atkinson. Robarts, as Kenneth Tynan suggested, would be. more likely to pass for a man of the Thirties —a disillusioned Commie, perhaps, from the Spanish civil wars returning; but the sadness which seems etched into his face was never the result of too' much whooping it up around St. Tropez. The play is further handicapped by the fact that the play- doctors slashed it on tour, removing the develop- ment and underlining the climaxes in the now accepted fashion; so that there are curtain lines like 'Manley, don't answer that telephone!' and recurrent melodramatics which pull it down, at times, almost to the level of Tennessee Williams.

* A year ago, it was 'sick' jokes—the prototype being 'Aside from■that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?' These have now developed into 'sick' cliches (very popular, the Irish Ambassador to the UN told me, in the UN building); 'Of course, I love the system, but I just loathe the people': and 'sick' slogans :

'Bomb the Church of your choice.' 'Have a,nigger for. dinner.' * For transatlantic travel, as a Dubliner would put it, the jet is your only man. I came and left by Boeing because it has an economy class; the Cornet has not. To pay £150 extra merely to sit in a more comfortable chair and be served more sumptuous meals is surely what Leacock called the Larger Lunacy. It is mildly galling, admittedly, to see the de luxe passengers up front putting away 'champagne and brandy free when you are not even allciwed to buy the stuff (something a sur- prising number of economyclass passengers do not realise, the hostess complained). But you can bring your own; the company provide soda and ice; and.. their 'sandwiches,' as soon as the quite awful bread has been removed, are convertible into an assieue Anglaise, with a choice of beef, 'turkey, cheese, egg and tomato, and even smoked salmon. The seats, too, are comfortable (though they arc close together—if any are empty it pays to sit behind an empty one; as it has no incumbent to put it into the reclining position, you gain a useful few extra inches for the knees).

The only irritant was that, as I had been warned but refused to credit, canned music was relayed throughout the entire trip to New York, on the ground as well as in the air. It was a recording of light, Cole-Porter-style music lasting, I judged, about an hour and a half. When finished, it started over from the beginning, so that 'Got me to the

Church on time,' Whistling in the Dark,' 'A Fine Romance' and the rest came up five or six times— sometimes soft, sometimes loud, for no discern- ible reason.

It was consequently distressing to find myself in the same aircraft on the flight back—or is the same recording used on all jets? But this time after it had been played through once it was turned off, and, mercifully, kept off.

Not that the music is offensive, unless you hap- pen to detest that style. It had a kind of tinny quality which reminded me of a time when, flying in four-piston-engined aircraft, I discovered that the -music of a phantom orchestra would occa- sionally emerge out of the noise and the pulse of the engines. This, I have since found, is not un-

usual; the present editor of the Irish Times once whiled away a transatlantic flight, in the old piston days, by listening entranced to part of a cycle of The Ring. I was less fortunate in my first concert. In the course of an officers' mess party some weeks previously most of the records had been broken, and of the few survivors the one most interminably played was 'Goodnight Children Everywhere.' It was this that the engines' orchestra was playing when I first heard it, and continued to play, pro- ducing a wonderfully eerie effect on the 'where,' which came out as a prolonged banshee wail.

The canned music in the Boeing was not so striking, but it did have something of the same. compulsive listening quality—all the worse, I de- cided after the fourth time round, for that.