America

"If Adolf Hitler ran on the Democratic ticket, the people of Amherst would vote for him!" said my friend Richard wearily. And there is something rather particular about this New England university town of 30,000 inhabitants and 25,000 students. It was the home of early feminists such as Harriet Beacher Stowe and the poet Emily Dickinson, whose house is a lovingly-preserved shrine to the emancipation of women (which in the 1800s she hardly represented). Everything in America is stylised in one way or another, even feminism. But Amherst has more than that: it has a thriving culture of guilt: a mea culpa a day keeps the doctor away. At a party in Amherst I once met a German woman who was so obsessed by the Holocaust that to listen to her talk (quite gratuitously, as no one else introduced the subject) one would think that she alone were responsible for it. The black playwright James Baldwin found a congenial home at the University of Massachusetts: there he could talk about the oppression of his people and his audience would practically beg to be forgiven for it.
Amherst, Massachusetts, my home for 22 years, is situated in the heart of Puritan New England. As H.L. Mencken wrote: "Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
On the whole, I found Amherst to be an orderly and quite pretty little town, except when large numbers of students were drunk--the nemesis of Puritanism. However, it could become oppressive and compel one to escape every so often. I had a minor job with a prestigious international publisher and could go down to New York and drop into the office in the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue (the oldest reinforced concrete building in North America). Occasionally I went west across the Berkshire Mountains (well hills, really, as the name over-glorified them) and into upstate New York.
Writing of the vast, sprawling state of New York, a visit to Niagara Falls is a rite of passage for everyone who lives for any period of time in the northeastern United States. From Amherst it is a seven-and-a-half hour drive along an endless interstate highway, straight as an arrow. First one passes Albany, then Syracuse, and then a series of smaller towns with exotic names like Amsterdam and Verona, all of which are exactly alike and completely uninteresting. They all have banks with Indian names--I mean Native American ones: 'The Nonotuck Bank', 'The Mohawk Savings Bank', 'First Huron Bank of Schenectady' and things like that. What it was that caused the founders of banks to connect them with the indigenous peoples is a mystery: the Puritan settlers were thrifty, whereas the Indians--sorry, the Native Americans--spent all their money on booze.
Amherst, founded in 1757, is named after Sir Jeffrey Amherst--"Jeff" to the locals, for Yankees are notoriously terse. He was an English general who commanded the motley collection of British forces, colonists and native allies who were fighting the French under Lafayette. His descendants still come across from England every so often and parade around the town. A full-length portrait in oils of Jeffrey Amherst hangs in the Lord Jeffrey Inn on Amherst Common (the 'Lord Jeff' to the terse locals). He bears a striking resemblance to Danny Kaye, the American comedian who starred in many rather wishy-washy films in the 1950s, for example as Hans Christian Andersen, the benign Danish raconteur of fables. But Lord Jeff is also notorious because it is said that he conducted biological warfare against the indigenes by selling them blankets contaminated with smallpox. As it happens this is a suburban myth--he did no such thing. But Amherstians love it, because it fuels their sense of guilt and outrage against the Majority on behalf of a downtrodden Minority.
There are, by the way, people who live in Amherst who are known as"valley types". They are the denizens of the alternative lifestyle. They decry the automobile but cannot do without it as they live in ramshackle houses in the beech and maple woods. So they have ancient, battered cars with wooden bumpers and these are parked in rows outside the organic supermarket in the neighbouring town of Hadley. The valley types either never wash but change their clothes three times a day or take frequent showers but never change their clothes.
Anyway, back to the other side of the Berkshires. After travelling through endless shallow, wooded valleys, industrial and commercial complexes begin to appear on the margins of the Interstate, and finally there are motels. Niagara Falls, that great natural wonder, sits on the US-Canada border amidst a tidal wave of heavy industry, snaking highways, apartment blocks, motels with blinking neon signs and all the other impedimenta of modern American urbanism. It is too far to go there and back in a day and so one has to stay in one of the gimcrack models, all veneer and flaking chrome. Then one drives down to the Falls, parks in an endless desert of a parking lot and parades around the catwalks and footpaths blinking in the mist and waiting for the first suicide of the day to fling himself into the raging waters and go over the edge. On the Canadian side it is a point of pride not to let anyone pay for anything in US dollars, even though the Canadian dollar is always worth less.
On other occasions I have taken the same road to go to the State University of New York at Buffalo. SUNY is widely distributed across a large and sprawling state. The campuses at places like Brockport, Stony Brook and Oneonta are as enveloped in the rural wilderness as the Lost City of the Incas. It is rather less of an adventure to go to Albany, Syracuse or Buffalo. In fact Buffalo is one of the largest campuses and serves a huge area of the Great Plains. It is situated in a different kind of wilderness.
On one visit I was hosted at SUNY by a Serbian girl called Serena and her husband Mikael. They lived in one of those streets where everyone vies to have the largest flagpole with the largest stars and stripes attached to it. I often wonder what would happen if one ran up the EU's circlet of stars on a blue field, or some other such heresy. Many Americans have only the dimmest idea of what the rest of the world is about, and they generally do not approve of it, or know where it is.
Serena and Mikael were thankful not to be in Serbia and instead to have gainful employment in America. The drawback was that it was in Buffalo. In the winter, storms rake the Great Plains, snow falls abundantly, the temperature plunges so far that petrol starts to freeze and people only go out if they absolutely have to. In the summer the city bakes and clouds of insects swarm around in the humid atmosphere. Mikael clenched his teeth and muttered that they were determined to like it there, absolutely determined. They were going to carve out a quality of life with their bare hands.
They took me out for a meal of the local delicacy--Buffalo wings. "Really?" I said, "I didn't know buffalo could fly". Serena winced ritually. They are, of course, chicken wings fried in the Buffalo style. They have to be washed down with gassy beer drunk straight from the bottle (which is unhygienic). So Buffalo wings were duly consumed. I honestly tried to enjoy them. Then we went to a bar where the waitresses were dressed as bunny girls and seemed to consist of nothing but stockinged legs. I wrote one an extremely rude note, but I made sure it was in Italian, knowing that she would not understand.
I gave a lecture at the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research on the SUNY Buffalo campus. Afterwards I was taken to the Bob Ketter building and introduced to Bob Ketter, the affable director of NCEER. It was the first and probably the last time I shall ever meet someone who worked in a university building named after himself. Apparently, he gave the money to build it and insisted on the name. He could not be accused of an excess of modesty.
And so to other parts of New England. The motto of the State of New Hampshire is "Live Free or Die". As it is emblazoned on the licence plates of cars at first I thought it was a warning about road accidents. As much of the state is hilly or mountainous, the climate of New Hampshire is colder and sterner than that of New York. People live in abject poverty in log cabins deep in the valleys. The sky is slate grey and the only entertainment is to go to other log cabins and drink gassy beer unhygienically out of bottles.
For some years I directed the theses of students who did their field research in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I can recall stumbling up forest tracks in these bleak mountains in May, with the snow falling fast upon us, along a ridge with a series of hummocks called The Three Agonies. Too right: they were indeed! At the end was a massive rock slide that had cut the Interstate highway from New Hampshire to Canada. Workmen were unloading repair materials from a large trailer which, rather anomalously had painted on the side "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day". I suppose the road-mending company bought it second hand and couldn't be bothered to repaint it, rather than using spaghetti to mend the road.
At the end of one of these trips I had another brush with the New England Puritan culture. The student said his family were Anglophiles and would like to invite me to dinner. His father was dean of a faculty at a minor college in New Hampshire and was keen to meet me. They were very friendly and hospitable, but they were a very busy family. They all rushed home at dinner time (which in North America is quite early in the evening). The meal was prepared by opening a gigantic freezer, getting out a series of packages of processed food and throwing the contents into a microwave oven. But before we started eating the results of this abrupt nuclear attack on the comestibles, the pater familias said a short prayer of thanksgiving for our daily rations. It was the only time I have ever heard frozen food blessed. Some months later I invited the student to a real Italian dinner, of the sort where we slave in the kitchen for four or five hours and seat at least a dozen people at table for at least six courses. His eyes bulged: he had obviously never seen or tasted anything like it.
Culture clashes tend to be the rule rather than the exception in the United States. On one occasion I was invited to a conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, slap bang in the middle of the Great Plains. I landed on the last flight from Chicago, got a minibus into Urbana and stumbled around in the dark looking for the hotel and the venue. Eventually it sorted itself out, but then the culture clash started. The venue was a German Schloss, the perfect Rhineland castle: panelled rooms, crackling log fires (fake ones, naturally), stags' heads mounted on the walls. And the other people at the conference were all from Bangladesh. Directly from Bangladesh, seventy of them. I had the pleasure of introducing three people I knew to each other: all three of them were called Haroun Rashid. So there we were, One Thousand Nights and One Night, on the flat-as-a-pancake Great Plains of the Midwestern United States in a German Castle.
On another occasion I flew to Detroit to attend a conference at the so-called Renaissance Center, a 98-storey building that cowers behind a tall earthwork that protects it from the rest of Detroit. The fun began when I took the airport bus to the downtown area. The six-lane Interstate goes straight as an arrow across the wide-open flatness of the Great Plains. On the horizon there is an enormous illuminated sign that flashes up the number of automobiles made in Detroit (about one every five seconds at that time). But so many were the cars on the road that we soon found ourselves facing a traffic jam of immense proportions. The chubby black lady who was driving the bus cursed volubly but did not slow down from the 70 mph she was propelling us along at. Instead she heaved the bus, a three-axle Americruiser, off the road, into the median ditch, and up again into the fast lane going the other way. I was terrified but we survived, although there was some fast swerving as we cut into the traffic.
When I became bored with the conference I decided to visit Henry Ford's renowned art museum on Detroit's Main Street. I knew that most of the city is a no-go area, but Main Street began at the Renaissance Center and so I decided to walk to the art museum. For three or four city blocks the going was good but then I started to encounter boarded-up buildings and hostile glances. Eventually the only white man on the street was a policeman who was festooned with radios, body armour and weaponry. After a while another white man appeared. Very white, in fact, as he was shaking with fear. I asked him how far it was to the art museum. He blurted "Get a taxi" and ran for his life. As luck would have it I found a taxi before anything serious happened and reached the art museum in perfect shape and good spirits. It was an island of culture in an urban sea of degradation and misery.
In this respect it resembled Columbia University, which is set amidst the squalor of upper Manhattan. It always amazes me how, during the bus ride from the George Washington Bridge to the Port Authority bus station on 52nd Street there are no white faces until 62nd Street; then there is one mixed block and finally the Caucasians appear in quantity. Manhattan is probably the true home of apartheid.
I once spoke at a conference on Bangladesh that was held at Columbia University. The theme was the Farakka Barrage, by which the Indians were abstracting the water of the Ganges and leaving the Bangladeshis with alternate drought and floods. Feelings ran high at the time. My talk was delayed when the organisers decided to call the Indian Ambassador to the United Nations to the podium to make a statement. She was an attractive lady in an electric-blue sari and she spoke with passion about how the Indians just love the Bangladeshis. When she had finished there was a riot. Enraged Bangladeshis stormed the podium, where I was preparing to give my talk, and tried to wrench the microphone out of the chairman's hands. When calm was finally restored I stood up and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, that was a hard act to follow", but the air of belligerence was such that even my innocuous talk on the geology of the Bengal Basin was treated as if it were an inflammatory political statement.
Undoubtably the most particular part of the United States is Texas, land of the steer, the ten-gallon hat and that unmistakable drawl. The first place in the Lone-Star State that I visited was San Antonio. It describes itself as "one of America's four unique cities", which left me wondering how four cities could simultaneously be unique and not all the others, what it could possibly have been unique for, and which were the other three. In San Antonio, one could go up the Tower of the Americas, look out to the hazy distance at the Mexican border and purchase a large plastic cigar with "Texas ah lurve yew" written on it. And the Texan businessmen really did wear ten-gallon hats. I have a rather more poignant memory of the perfectly rounded rear ends of the voluptuous waitresses in the Mexican restaurants of San Antonio. Perhaps the city was unique because it was the only place in the United States where one could get real Mexican food, rather than the hybrid 'Tex-Mex' fare that is standard everywhere else. Cilantro instead of ketchup.
My colleague Jon Paulson fetched up in San Marcos at the University of Southwest Texas. As a sophisticated San Franciscan he hated it there. Because firearms are prohibited in Federal national parks, every time he led a field course to one of them he had to ensure that the students left their guns behind. More of the female students had guns than the males did. In fact, every handbag contained its regulation pistol.
Every so often it was time for a trip to Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia is an odd sort of place (it is known locally, not as Washington, which could be confused with the state in the far northwest, but as 'The District', as there is only one of those in the United States). On one occasion we circled over Dulles Airport waiting for our turn to land and the pilot gave us a running commentary on what we could see and where we were. Every time he mentioned Washington by name with an air of reverence he added the suffix "Our Nation's Capital". I wonder why he felt the need to keep reminding the passengers that Washington was the capital of the United States. Had he perhaps just discovered the fact?
Washington is, of course, a city of extreme poverty and violence. Only the Northwest quarter, and some nearby neighbourhoods radiate power and wealth because of their proximity to government. The rest could be part of another continent. The inhabitants of the political city act as if the other three quarters do not exist and there are no daily drive-by shootings and so on.
After a meeting one cold, rainy February night I was walking back to my hotel when I decided to try a new route. It was very dark and blustery, but at a certain point a soldier leapt out and barred my way with a rifle. I realised I had been trying to take a short cut across the back lawn of the White House. Nevertheless, probably the most daring thing I have ever done in Washington was to have dinner in an Argentinian restaurant during the Falklands-Malvinas war. I was very discrete, however, and there was no bad feeling.