In the simplicity of our souls we thought that when all would come together we, the reason for the occasion, if one may so, would follow into the salon and also raise cups and eat small diplomatic sandwiches. But that is not what happened. We learned that we were supposed to stand on the landing until the last guest departed.
From the salons came gay laughter and noisy exclamations, while we stood endlessly, greeting the late-comers, seeing off those who were departing, and in every other way fulfilling the function of hosts. More than a hundred and fifty guests had gathered, and in the end we did not even manage to find out which of them was a governor and which the native of Proskurov. It was a notable company of grey-haired ladies in spectacles, pink-cheeked gentlemen, broad-shouldered young men, and tall thin young ladies. Since every one of the spirits conjured out of our envelopes represented an indubitable point of interest, we deeply regretted the impossibility of talking at length with each and every one of them.
Three hours later the stream of guests was directed down the stairway.
A fat little man with a clean-shaven head on which glistened large beads of icy sweat came up to us. He regarded us through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles, shook his head, and with much feeling said in fairly good Russian:
“Oh, yes, yes! That’s all right! Mr. Ilf and Mr. Petrov, I have received a letter from Fischer. No, no, don’t tell me anything. You don’t understand. I know what you need. We’ll meet again.”
He disappeared, small, compact, with a remarkably strong, almost an iron body. In the confusion of bidding farewell to guests we could not talk with him and puzzle out the meaning of his words.
Several days later, when we were still lounging in our beds, thinking about where at least we would find the ideal creature so indispensable to us, the telephone rang and the voice of a stranger told us that Mr. Adams was speaking and that he wanted to come right up to see us. We dressed quickly, wondering who Mr. Adams was and what he wanted of us.
Into our hotel room entered the same fat little man with the iron body whom we had seen at the reception in our consulate.
“Gentlemen,” he said, without any preliminaries, “I want to help you. No, no, no! You don’t understand. I regard it as my duty to help every Soviet person who comes to America.”
We asked him to sit down, but he refused. He ran through our small hotel rooms, pushing us now and then with his hard, protruding stomach. The three lower buttons of his vest were unbuttoned and the tail of his necktie stuck out.
Suddenly he cried:
“I am beholden for much to the Soviet Union. Yes, yes, very much! No, don’t talk; you don’t even understand what you are doing there in your country!”
He became so excited that by mistake he jumped out through the open door and found himself in the hall. We had quite a time of it, dragging him back into our room.
“Were you ever in the Soviet Union?”
“Surely!” cried Mr. Adams. “Of course! No, no, no! Don’t say, “Were you ever in the Soviet Union!” I lived there a long time. Yes, yes, yes! I worked in your country for seven years. You spoiled me in Russia. No, no, no! You cannot understand that!”
Several minutes of association with Mr. Adams made it clear to us that we do not understand America at all, that we do not understand the Soviet Union at all, and that in general we understand nothing of anything at all, like newborn calves.
But it was quite impossible to be annoyed with Mr. Adams. When informed of our intention to undertake an automobile journey through the States, he cried: “Surely!” and attained such a state of excitement that he suddenly opened the umbrella which he carried under his arm and for some time stood under it, as if protecting himself from rain.
“Surely!” he repeated. “Of course! It would be foolish to think
that you could find out anything about America by sitting in New York. Isn’t it true, Mr. Ilf and Mr. Petrov?”
Much later, when our friendship had deepened considerably, we noticed that Mr. Adams, after expressing any thought, always demanded confirmation of its correctness and would not rest until he received that confirmation.
“No, no, gentlemen! You don’t understand anything! We need a plan! A plan for the journey! That’s the main thing! And I will make that plan for you. No, no, don’t talk! You cannot possibly know anything about it!”
He suddenly took off his coat, pulled off his spectacles, flung them on the couch (later he looked for them in his pockets for about ten minutes), spread an automobile road map of America on his lap, and began to trace curious lines on it.
Right there before our eyes he was transformed from a wild eccentric into a businesslike American. We exchanged glances. Was this not perchance the ideal creature of whom we had dreamed? Was this not the luxuriant hybrid which even Michurin and Burbank together could not have brought forth?
In the course of two hours we travelled over the map of America. What an exhilarating occupation that was!
For some time we discussed the advisability ofdriving into Milwaukee, in the state of Wisconsin. There you find at once two La Follettes, one a governor and one a senator, and it was possible to get letters of introduction to both of them. An enviable situation! Two Muscovites sit in New York and decide the question of a journey to Milwaukee. If they like, they’ll go there; if not, they won’t!
Old man Adams sat there, calm, clean, self-contained. No, he did not recommend that we go to the Pacific Ocean by the northern route through Salt Lake City, the city of the salt lake. By the time we arrived there, the mountain passes might be in snow.
“Gentlemen!” exclaimed Mr. Adams. “This is very, very dangerous. It would be foolish to risk your lives. No, no, no! You cannot imagine what an automobile journey is.”
“But the Mormons?” we moaned.
“No, no! Mormons – that is very interesting. Yes, yes, Mormons are the same Americans as others. But snow – that is very dangerous!”
How delightful it was to talk of dangers, of mountain passes, of prairies! But even more delightful was it to calculate, pencil in hand, the extent to which an automobile was cheaper than going by railway, the number of gallons of petrol needed for a thousand miles, the cost of dinners, of a modest dinner for a tourist. For the first time we heard the words “camp” and “tourist-room”. Although we had not yet begun the journey we were already concerned about keeping expenses down, and although we had no automobile we were already concerned about greasing it. We began to regard New York as a dark hole from which we must forthwith escape.
When our elated discussion passed into the stage of incomprehensible shouts, Mr. Adams suddenly jumped off the couch, caught his head in his hands, squinted in dumb desperation, and stood like that for a full minute.
We were frightened.
Without opening his eyes, Mr. Adams began to knead his head in his hands and to mutter:
“Gentlemen, everything is lost! You don’t understand anything!”
And then what we did not understand became clear. Mr. Adams had come here with his wife and, having left her in their automobile, had run up to see us for just a second in order to ask us to his house for lunch. He had run in for just a second!
We raced down the corridor, frightening the old ladies who always populate American hotels. In the elevator Mr. Adams jumped with impatience, so eager was he to reach the protective wing of his wife.
Around the corner from Lexington Avenue, on Forty-eighth Street, in a neat but no longer new Chrysler sat a young lady who wore the same kind of protruding spectacles as did Mr. Adams.
“Becky!” groaned our new friend, stretching forth his fat little arms toward the Chrysler.
In the confusion his hat flew off and his round head glistened in the reflected light of New York’s autumn sun.
“And where is the umbrella?” asked the lady, smiling wanly.
The sun went out on the head of Mr. Adams. He forgot the umbrella in our room, he forgot his wife in the street, the umbrella was upstairs. Under such circumstances occurred our meeting with Mrs. Rebecca Adams.
With bitterness we noticed that it was not Mr. Adams, but his wife, who took the wheel. We again exchanged glances.
“No, evidently this is not the hybrid we need. Our hybrid must know how to drive an automobile.”
Mr. Adams regained his calm and normal state and talked about things as if nothing untoward had happened. On the entire trip to Central Park West, where his apartment was located, old man Adams assured us that the most important thing for us is our future travelling companion.
“No, no, no, you don’t understand! This is very, very important!”
We became sad. We ourselves knew how important that was.
The door of the Adams’s apartment was opened to us by a Negress to whose skirts clung a two-year-old girl. The little girl had a firmly moulded little body. She was a little Adams without spectacles.
She looked at her parents, and said in her thin little voice:
“Papa and Mamma.”
Papa and Mamma groaned from sheer satisfaction and happiness.
We exchanged glances for the third time.
“Besides, he has a child! No, this is most decidedly not the hybrid!”
7. The Electric Chair
THE AMERICAN, Ernest Hemingway, author of the recently published Fiesta, which evoked much discussion in Soviet literary circles, happened to be in New York while we were there.
And another American writer, John Dos Passos, who is even better known among us and who provoked even more discussions in connection with the polemics on formalism in art, came in to see us and introduced us to Hemingway.
Incidentally, whenever mention was made some years ago of a soulless formalist, he was always understood to be some house manager by the name of Nezabudkin who had insulted an old lady for no good reason or who did not provide needed information on time. Nowadays no one thinks of house managers, and the words “a soulless formalist” do not fail to call forth in memory the figure of some writer or composer or of some other hairy votary of the Muses.
The round-headed, broad-nosed Dos Passos stutters a little. He begins every sentence with a laugh, but he ends it seriously. He looked at us benevolently and said:
“I am writing a new book. It is called Big Money. I wonder how it will fare. Every one of my succeeding books has had a smaller circulation than its predecessor: 42nd Parallelled a circulation of twenty thousand copies; 1919, fifteen thousand; this one will probably have ten thousand.”
When we told Dos Passos that ten thousand copies of his 1919 disappeared from Soviet book counters in several hours, he replied:
“In your country people have been taught to read books, but with us here… Listen, we’ll have to get together some time and have dinner in the Hollywood Restaurant on Broadway. There you will see what occupies the average American while in your country people read books. You will see the happiness of a New York counter-jumper.”
Hemingway came to New York for a week. His permanent home is at Key West, a small town at the extreme southern tip of Florida. He proved to be a large man with moustaches and a peeling sunburnt nose. He wore flannel trousers, a woollen vest which did not come together on his mighty chest, and his bare feet were in house slippers.
We stood together, in the middle of one of the hotel rooms in which Hemingway lived, engaged in the usual American occupation. In our hands were high and wide glasses of highballs – whisky mixed with water. So far as we have been able to observe, everything in America begins with a drink. Even when we came on literary business to our publishers, Farrar and Rinehart, the gay, red-headed Mr. Farrar, publisher and poet, at once led us into their library. He had many books there, but also a large icebox. From that box the publisher took various bottles and cubes of ice, asked us whether we preferred Manhattan,Bacardi or Martini cocktails, and at once began to mix with such skill, as if he had never in his life published books, had never written verse, but had always worked as a barman. Americans enjoy mixing cocktails.
We happened to talk of Florida, when Hemingway at once passed to what seemed to be his favourite theme:
“During your automobile journey, don’t fail to visit me at Key West. We’ll go fishing there.”
And with his arms he showed us the size of fish one can catch at Key West. That is, like every fisherman he spread his arms as far apart as he could. The fish must have been about the size of a sperm whale.
We looked at each other in alarm and promised, come what might, to drop in on him at Key West so that we might go fishing and have a really serious talk on literature. But we were unreasoning optimists. If we were to carry out everything we had promised during our meetings and interviews, we could not have returned toMoscow before 1940. We wanted very much to go fishing with Hemingway. We were not even embarrassed by the problem of managing spinning and other involved tackle, especially since Dos Passos declared that by the time we arrived in Florida he would also be living in Key West.
Then we talked of what we had seen in New York and what else we wanted to see before going west. We happened to mention Sing Sing. Sing Sing is the prison of the state of New York. We had heard of it since childhood, having been then ardently interested in the adventures of two famous detectives, Nat Pinkerton and Nick. Carter. Suddenly Hemingway said:
“Do you know, my father-in-law happens to be here with me. He is acquainted with the warden of Sing Sing. Maybe he can arrange it for you to visit the prison.”
He went to the adjoining room and returned with a neat little old man whose thin neck was encased in a very high and old-fashioned starched collar. Our wish was explained to the old man while he impatiently chewed his lips and at last said vaguely that he would see what he could do. Then we returned to our previous conversation about fishing, journeys, and other excellent things; Hemingway and Dos Passos wanted to go to the Soviet Union, to the Altai. While we tried to find out why they had chosen the Altai and praised also other parts of the Union, we quite forgot the promise about Sing Sing. People are likely to say anything in the course of a pleasant conversation, highballs in hand.
But a day later we learned that Americans are no idle talkers. We received two letters. One of them was addressed to us. Hemingway’s father-in-law informed us respectfully that he had discussed the matter with the warden of the prison, Mr. Lewis E. Lawes, and that we might examine Sing Sing any day we chose. In the second letter the old man recommended us to Mr. Lewis E. Lawes.
We noted this American characteristic and more than once had convincing confirmation that Americans never say anything they do not mean. Not even once did we run across what we know as “idle chatter” or more crudely as “talking through your hat”.
One of our New York friends once suggested to us that we might go on a fruit company ship to Cuba, Jamaica,and Colombia. He said that the trip would be free of charge, and besides, we would be seated at the captain’s table. There is no greater honour at sea. Of course, we consented.
“Very well,” said our friend. “You go on your automobile journey, and when you return, telephone me. Everything will be arranged.”
On our return trip from California to New York we recalled this promise almost every day. After all, even this promise was made during cocktails. On that occasion it was not a highball, but some complex mixture with large green leaves, sugar, and a cherry at the bottom of the glass. Finally, from the city of San Antonio, Texas, we sent a telegram of reminder and quickly received a reply. Its tone was even a little bit hurt:
Your tropical journey arranged long ago.
We did not take that tropical journey because we did not have the lime for it. But the mere recollection of American sincerity and the American ability to keep a word comfort us to this day whenever we begin to torment ourselves with the thought that we lost an opportunity to visit South America.
We asked Mr. Adams to go with us to Sing Sing. After repeatedly calling us “Gentlemen,” he consented.
The next day we took our places in the Adams Chrysler; after a wretched hour with New York traffic signals we finally escaped from the city. That which is called street movement in New York might just as well be called street standing. At any rate, there is much more standing than moving.
After travelling thirty miles we discovered that Mr. Adams had forgotten the name of the city where Sing Sing is located. We were obliged to stop. At the edge of the road a workman was unloading some neat little boxes from an automobile. We asked him the road to Sing Sing.
At once he stopped his work and walked up to us. Here is another excellent characteristic. The most preoccupied American will always find the time to explain to a traveller, briefly, to the point, and patiently, what road he should take, and while doing so he will not get things mixed up and will tell no lies. If he tells you something, he knows whereof he speaks.
Having finished his explanation, the workman smiled and said:
“Hurrying to the electric chair? Wish you luck!”
Twice again after that, more in order to clear our conscience, we verified the road, and both times Mr. Adams did not fail to add that we were hurrying to the electric chair. And in reply we heard laughter.
The prison is located on the edge of the little town of Ossining. Two rows of automobiles stood at the prison gate. Our heart contracted at once when we saw that out of the machine which had driven up simultaneously with us came a stooped, pleasant old man with two large paper bags in his hand. In those bags lay packages of food and oranges. The old man went to the entrance carrying the “outside bundle”. What kinsman of his could be sitting there? Probably a son, whom most likely the old man had thought a well-behaved, splendid boy, yet he was a bandit, or maybe even a murderer. Old men have a hard time of it.
The tremendous entrance fenced off by a grille was as large as a lion’s cage. On either side of it wrought-iron lanterns were welded into the walls. In the doorway stood three policemen. Each one of them weighed no less than two hundred pounds, and these were pounds not of fat but of muscle, pounds used for suppression, for subjugation.
We did not find Mr. Lewis E. Lawes in the prison. This happened to be the day for electing representatives to the legislature of the state of New York, so the warden was away. But that made no difference we were told. They knew where he was, and would telephone him in New York. Five minutes later they received a. reply from Mr. Lawes. He was very sorry that circumstances did not permit his showing us Sing Sing personally, but he gave instructions to his assistant to do everything possible for us.
After that we were led into the anteroom, a white room with spittoons, polished and shining like samovars, and a grate was closed behind us. We had never been in prison as inmates, yet even here, in the midst of the shining cleanliness of a bank, the clang of a closing cage made us shudder.
The assistant warden of Sing Sing was a spare, strongly built man. We turned at once to the inspection.
This was visitors’ day. Three visitors could call on every prisoner-provided he had no infraction of discipline charged against him. Polished barriers divide the large room into squares. In each square, facing each other, are two short benches – the kind you find in a street-car, let us say. On these benches sit the prisoner and his guests. The visit
lasts an hour. At the exit door stands a warden. The prisoners are supposed to wear the grey prison uniform. They don’t have to wear all of it, but some part of it must be government issue, either the trousers or the grey sweater.
The hubbub of conversation in the room was reminiscent of a similar hubbub in the foyer of a motion-picture theatre. Children who had come to visit their fathers ran to taps to drink water. The old man we had previously seen did not take his eyes off his beloved son. A woman was weeping softly, and her husband, the prisoner, was looking sadly at his own hands.
The conditions of the visits were such that most certainly visitors could transmit forbidden objects to the prisoners. But that would be useless. Every prisoner, when returning to his cell, is searched immediately the door of the visiting hall is closed.
Because of the election, this was a prison holiday. Passing through the yards we saw small groups of prisoners who were taking a sun-bath in the autumn sun or playing a game of ball which was unfamiliar to us (our guide said that it was an Italian game, that there are many Italians in Sing Sing). However, here were few people. Most of the prisoners were at the time in the prison motion-picture theatre.
“At present there are 2,299 people in prison,” said Mr. Lawes’s assistant. “Of these, eighty-five have life sentences and sixteen are to be electrocuted. And all these sixteen will undoubtedly be electrocuted, although they hope for a pardon.”
The new buildings of Sing Sing are very interesting. Undoubtedly, the high general standard of American technique in building dwellings had affected its construction, especially the level of American life – what in America is called “the standard of living”.
A photograph would give the best idea of an American prison, but to our regret we were not allowed to take photographs inside Sing Sing. A prison building consists of six stories of narrow cabins, like those aboard ship, standing side by side and provided with vertical lion-cage grates. Through the length of every story stretch these metal galleries, connected with each other by metal stairways. It resembles least of all a place to live in, even a prison. The utilitarianism of the construction invests it with the appearance of a factory. The resemblance to some kind of mechanism is reinforced by the fact that all this is enclosed in a brick box, the walls of which are almost entirely occupied with windows. It is through these that daylight (and to a small extent sunlight) enters the cells, because the cells themselves have no windows.
In every such cell there is a bed, a table, and a waste can topped with a lacquered cover. On a nail hang radio earphones. There are two or three books on the table. Several photographs are on the walls— beautiful girls or baseball players or God’s angels, depending upon the inclinations of the prisoner.
In the three new buildings each prisoner is lodged in a separate cell.
This is an improved prison, Americanized to the limit, and comfortable, if one may apply such an honest, good word to a prison. It is light, and the air is comparatively good.
“In the new buildings,” said our escort, “are lodged eighteen hundred men. The remaining five hundred are in the old building, constructed a hundred years ago. Let’s go there.”
That was indeed a real Constantinople prison of the era of the sultans.
It was impossible to stand to one’s full height in these cells. When you sat down on the bed your knees touched the wall opposite. The two cots were one above the other. It was dark, damp, and frightful. Here were no shining waste cans, no soothing pictures of angels.
Something of our reaction was evidently reflected in our faces, for the assistant warden hastened to distract us.
“When they send you to me,” he said, “I’ll place you in the new buildings. I’ll even find you a cell with a view of the Hudson. We have such cells for especially deserving prisoners.”
He added quite seriously:
“I hear that in your country the penitentiary system has as its object the correction of the criminal and his return to the ranks of society. Alas, we are occupied only with the punishment of criminals.”
We began to talk about life terms.
“I have a prisoner here,” said our guide, “who has been here for twenty-two years. Every year he files a petition of clemency and each time his case is considered his petition is decisively turned down, so beastly was the crime which he committed. I would let him out. He is now quite a different man. As a matter of fact I would liberate about half the prisoners, for they no longer present any danger to society. But I am only a jailer, and I can’t do anything about it.”
We were shown the hospital, the library, the dental office, in fact, all the establishments of piety, culture, and enlightenment. We went up in elevators, we walked down beautiful corridors. Punitive cells and similar things we were not shown, of course, and out of quite comprehensible politeness we did not inquire about them.
In one of the yards we went to a one-story brick building, and the assistant warden himself opened the doors with a large key. In this house executions in the electric chair are carried out by order of the courts of the state of New York.
We noticed the chair at once.
It stands in a roomy chamber without windows, so the light comes through a glass lantern in the ceiling. We took two steps on the white marble floor and stopped. Behind the chair on the door opposite the one we entered is traced in large black letters the word: “Silence!”
The condemned are admitted through that door.
The condemned is informed early in the morning that his petition for clemency has been rejected and that the execution will take place that day. Then he is prepared for the execution. A small circle is shaved on his head to enable the electric current to pass without impediment.
Throughout the day the condemned sits in his cell. Now that the circle had been shaved on his head, he has nothing to hope for.
The execution occurs at about eleven or twelve o’clock at night.
“The fact that throughout the entire day a man experiences the torments of expectant death is very sad indeed,” declared our guide, “but we can do nothing about it. Such is the demand of the law. The law regards this circumstance as an additional punishment. On this chair two hundred men and three women have been executed.”
Nevertheless, the chair looks quite new.
This is a yellow wooden chair with a high back and arm rests. At first glance it seems innocuous, and if it were not for the leather bracelets with which the hands and feet of the condemned are tied, it could very well stand in some highly moral family home. A deafish grandfather might well be sitting in it to read his newspapers there.
But an instant later the chair was very repellent to us, and especially depressing were its polished arm rests. Better not to think about those who had polished them with their elbows.
A few yards from the chair stand four substantial railway station benches. These are for the witnesses. Here is a small table. A wash-stand is built into the wall. That is all there is to the furnishings in the midst of which is accomplished the transition from a worse into a better world.No doubt, young Thomas Alva Edison never dreamed that his electricity would perform such depressing duties.
The door in the left corner leads to a compartment larger than a telephone booth. On its wall is a marble switchboard, the most ordinary kind of switchboard with a heavy old-fashioned knife switch, the kind available at any mechanical shop or in the operating booth of a provincial motion-picture theatre. The knife switch is pushed in, and the current beats with great force through the helmet into the head of the condemned. That is all. That is the entire technique.
“The man who turns on the current,” said our guide, “receives a hundred and fifty dollars for each such performance. There are any number of applicants for this job.”
Of course, all the talk we had heard about three men switching on the current and that not one of them knows which of them actually is responsible for the execution proved to be an invention. No, it is all much simpler. The man switches on the current himself and knows all that happens, and fears only one thing – that competitors may take this profitable work away from him.
From the room where the execution is carried out a door leads to the morgue, and beyond that is a very quiet room filled to the ceiling with simple wooden coffins.
“The coffins are made right here in prison by the prisoners them-selves,” our guide informed us.
Well, we thought we had seen enough! It was time to go!
Suddenly Mr. Adams asked to be allowed to sit in the electric chair, so that he might experience the sensation of a man condemned to death.
“No, no, gentlemen!” he muttered. “It will not take very long.”
He settled himself firmly on the spacious seat and looked at us triumphantly. The usual procedure was being carried out on him. He was strapped to the back of the chair with a wide leather belt, his legs were pressed with bracelets against the oaken chair legs, his hands were tied to the arm rests. Again these accursed arm rests! They did not put the helmet on Mr. Adams, but he begged them so that they finally attached the end of the electric connection to his shining pate. It all became very frightful for a minute. Mr. Adams’s eyes shone with incredible curiosity. It was evident at once that he was one of those people who want to do everything, who want to touch everything with their hands, to see and hear everything themselves.
Before departing from Sing Sing we went into the church where at the time a motion-picture performance was going on. Fifteen hundred prisoners were looking at a picture entitled Doctor Socrates. Here we saw the laudable effort of the administration to provide the imprisoned men with the very latest motion picture. As a matter of fact, outside the prison Doctor Socrates was being exhibited that very day in the city of Ossining. What utterly amazed us, however, was the fact that the picture portrayed the life of bandits, and to show it to the prisoners was tantamount to teasing an alcoholic with a vision of a bottle of vodka.
But it was already late. We thanked the administration for a pleasant visit, the lion’s cage opened, and we went away. After sitting in the electric chair, Mr. Adams suddenly became melancholy; he was silent all the way back.
Returning, we saw a truck that had run off the road. Its rear part was entirely off. A crowd was discussing the accident. Another crowd, much larger, was listening to an orator who was talking about that day’s election. Here all the automobiles were carrying election stickers on their rear windows. Farther on, in the groves and forests flared the mad autumn.
In the evening we went with Dos Passes to look at the happiness of a New York counter-jumper. It was seven o’clock. A marquee the size of half a house was alight over the entrance of the Hollywood Restaurant. Young men in semi-military uniform, customary among hotel, restaurant, and theatre servants, were skilfully pushing people in. In the lobby hung photographs of naked girls pining with love for the populace.
As in all restaurants where it is customary to dance, the centre of the Hollywood was occupied by a longish platform, the floor of which was no more polished than the arm rests of the electric chair. On the sides of this platform and rising somewhat above it were the tables. Over all rose the tumultuous jazz.
Jazz may be disliked, especially in America, where it is impossible to hide from it. But, generally speaking, American jazz is well played. The jazz of the Hollywood Restaurant presented an amazingly well-composed eccentric musical intricacy altogether pleasant to the ear.
When plates of rather uninteresting and in no way inspiring American soup stood before us, from behind the orchestra suddenly ran out girls half naked, three-quarters naked, and nine-tenths naked. They began to dance zealously on their floor space, their feathers dipping occasionally into plates of soup or jars of mustard.
It must have been thus, no doubt, that the ruthless fighters of Mohammed imagined their paradise – food on the table, a warm place, and houris performing their ancient tasks.
Later the girls ran out again a number of times: in the interval between the first and the second course, before coffee, and during coffee. The proprietor of the Hollywood would not let them be idle.
This joining of primitive American cooking with the passion of service somewhat upset us.
The restaurant was full of people. The dinner cost about two dollars per person. That means that the average New Yorker can come here about once a month or less frequently. But then his pleasure is complete. He listens to jazz, he eats a cutlet, he looks at the houris, and he himself dances.
The faces of some of the dancers were stupid, others were pathetic, still others were cruel, but all were equally weary.
Three blocks away from the restaurant a black poodle with gay eyes was watching Dos Passos’ old machine.
We parted. We had become saddened by New York’s happiness.
“Good-bye, until Moscow,” said the nice Dos.
“Good-bye, until Moscow,” we replied.
8. A New York Arena
THE MEMBERS of the Dutch Treat Club meet every Tuesday in a white salon of the New York Hotel Ambassador.
The very name of the club gives a precise conception of the rights and duties of its members. Everyone pays for himself. On this powerful economic basis quite a number of journalists and writers joined together. Yet there is an exception. Guests of honour do not pay. But they are obliged to deliver an amusing speech. It does not matter what the subject is, so long as the speech is amusing and brief. If it turns out not to be funny, then at any rate it must be short, because the meeting is at lunch-time and the entire celebration lasts only one hour.
In reward for his speech the guest receives a light lunch and a large plaster-of-Paris medal of the club on which is portrayed a reveller, in a crushed top-hat, who has fallen asleep under the club’s initials.
While all applaud, the medal is hung around the neck of the guest, and all quickly depart. Tuesday is a business day. All the members of the Dutch Treat Club are business people. At the stroke of two they are already sitting in their offices and doing business. They advance culture or simply make money.
At such a gathering we met the manager of Madison Square Garden, the largest New York arena, where boxing matches of importance are held, where the very biggest meetings and the very biggest of everything take place.
On this particular Tuesday the guests were ourselves, the newly arrived Soviet authors, a famous American motion-picture actor, and the manager of Madison Square Garden whom we have just mentioned.
We prepared a speech, emphasizing chiefly not its humour but its brevity, and we attained the latter completely. The speech was translated into English and one of us, in no way embarrassed by the fact that he found himself in such a large gathering of experts of the English language, read it from a sheet of paper.
Here it is:
“Mr. Chairman, Gentlemen:
“We have come on a great journey from Moscow to see America. Besides New York we have had time to be in Washington and in Hartford. After living a month in New York we felt the pangs of love for your great and purely American city.
“Suddenly we were doused with cold water.
“’New York is not America,’ we were told by our New York friends. ‘New York is only the bridge betweenEurope and America. You are still on the bridge.’
“Then we went to Washington, District of Columbia, the capital of the United States, assuming thoughtlessly that surely this city was America. By the evening of the second day we felt with satisfaction that we were beginning to discriminate a little in matters American.
“’Washington is not America,’ we were told. ‘It is a city of government officials. If you really want to see America, you are wasting your time here.’
“We dutifully put our scratched suitcases into an automobile and went to Hartford, in the state of Connecticut, where the great American writer, Mark Twain, spent his mature years.
“Here we were again honestly warned:
“’Bear in mind that Hartford is not yet America.’
“When we began to ask about the location of America, the Hartfordites pointed vaguely to the side.
“Now we have come to you, Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, and ask you to show where America really is located, because we have come here in order to learn as much as we can about it.”
The speech was a great success. The members of the Dutch Treat Club applauded it a long time. Only much later we learned that most of the members of the club did not understand a single word of this speech, because the strange Russo-English accent of the orator drowned out completely the profound thoughts concealed in it.
Mr. Chairman, however, who sat near us, had evidently caught the sense of the speech. Turning his thin and clever face to us, he struck his little gavel and, stopping thus the storm of applause, said in the ensuing silence:
“I regret very much that I myself cannot tell you at the moment where America is located. Come here again on the sixth of November, 1936, for it will be clear then what is America and where it is located.”
This was a witty and the only correct answer to our question. On November 6th was to be held the presidential election, and Americans felt that it would determine the path along which America was to proceed.
Then the tall man whom the chairman called “Colonel” was given the floor. The colonel began to bark at once, looking ironically at those forgathered here.
“My business,” he said, “consists of renting Madison Square Garden to all-comers, and anything in the world that may happen there suits me. The Communists want it for a meeting against Hitler, so I rent the hall to the Communists. The Hitlerites want a meeting against the Communists, I rent the hall to the Hitlerites. In my building the Democrats may be cursing the Republicans today, but tomorrow the Republicans contend from the same platform that Mr. Roosevelt is a Bolshevik and leads America to anarchy. My hall is for everybody. I do my business. I nevertheless do have my convictions. Not long ago the defenders of Bruno Hauptmann, who killed the Lindbergh baby, wanted to rent my hall for agitation in favour of Hauptmann. I refused to rent my hall to those people. But anybody else is welcome to come. Pay your money and take your places, no matter who you are, Bolsheviks, anarchists, reactionaries, Baptists, it’s all the same to me.”
Having roared this out. the manly colonel sat down and took to finishing his coffee.
In Madison Square Garden, in this “hall for all,” to use the colonel’s expression, we saw a feature boxing match between the former world champion, the Italian Carnera, and a German boxer, not the best but a first-rate one.
The arena of Madison Square Garden is not a circle like the usual circus arenas, but an elongated rectangle. At a very sharp incline around the rectangle rise rows of chairs. Even before the match begins the eyes of the onlooker are presented with an inspiring spectacle – he sees twenty-five thousand chairs at once, he sees twenty-five thousand seats in one theatre. In the event of a boxing match, chairs are placed also in the arena, surrounding the entire ring.
A strong white light fell on the platform of the ring. The rest of the place was in twilight. Raucous cries of vendors in white two-horned caps resounded throughout the huge building. The vendors, making their way between the rows of chairs, offered salted nuts, salted biscuits, chewing gum, and small bottles of whisky. Americans are by their nature a chewing people: they chew gum, candy, the ends of cigars; their jaws are always moving, clicking, and snapping.
Camera appeared in the next to the last match. Amid deafening greetings he walked into the ring and looked around with that sullen and apprehensive glance which is the attribute of all extremely tall and exceedingly strong men. It is the look of a man who is constantly fearful of crushing something or of mangling it.
Carnera is not known in his native Italy by his surname. There he has a nickname: “Il Gigante”. “Il Gigante” is an exceedingly rangy and long-armed person. If he were a conductor of a Moscow street-car, he would very easily collect fares from people all over the car while standing on the front platform. “Il Gigante’’ threw off a bright-coloured robe and displayed himself in all his beauty – long, bony, looking like an unfinished Gothiccathedral. His opponent was a sturdy blond German of middle height.
The signal sounded, the managers ran out of the ring, and Camera quietly began to beat up the German. And he did not so much beat him as thrash him. The peasant Camera seemed to be performing the agricultural work customary to him. His two-metre-long arms rose and fell with the regularity of flails. Most frequently they struck the air, but on those rare occasions when they fell on the German the New York public shouted: “Carnera, boo!” The inequality of strength between the opponents was altogether too evident. Camera was much taller and heavier than the German.
The audience was excited, nevertheless, and yelled as if the issue of this fight had not been predetermined. Americans make a very noisy audience. At times it seems that they come to boxing and football matches not to look on, but to yell. The roar was constant throughout the match. Whenever the fans did not like something or thought that one of the boxers was not fighting fairly, was being cowardly or dishonest, they yelled in chorus: “Boo, boo!” and the auditorium was transformed into a drove of nice bisons in soft hats. The onlookers helped the fighters with their outcries. For the three and a half rounds of the fight between Camera and the German the fans expended so much energy, made so many motions, that had this potential been properly utilized, it would have sufficed to build a six-story house with a flat sun roof and a cafeteria on the first floor.
In the third round the German finished almost blind. His eye had been badly hurt. In the middle of the fourth round he suddenly swung out his arms like a card player who was losing and walked out of the ring, refusing to continue the fight.
A frightful “Boo! boo!” filled the vast spaces of the Garden. It was not considered sporting to walk out of the ring. Boxers must be carried out of the ring; which is exactly what the audience expects for its money.
But the German was evidently so nauseated by the prospect of being knocked out in another minute or two that he decided to stop fighting.
The onlookers booed all the time that the unfortunate boxer was making his way back-stage. They were so indignant at the behaviour of the German that they did not even bother to cheer the victor. “Il Gigante” clasped his hands overhead, then put on his beautiful silken robe, befitting a courtesan, dived under the ropes of the ring, and in a dignified manner returned to the dressing-room, walking like an old work horse returning to the stable to shove its long muzzle into a bag of oats.
The last pair presented no special interest, and soon with others we were walking out. At the exit the news vendors were selling the night editions of Daily News and Daily Mirror, on the first pages of which in large letters was printed the news that Camera won over his opponent in the fourth round. Between the minute this event occurred and the moment we bought the newspaper containing the news about the match no more than ‘half an hour had elapsed.
In the nocturnal sky flamed the electric sign “Jack Dempsey”. Having finished his career in the ring, the great boxing champion opened near Madison Square Garden a bar and restaurant where sport fans gather. It would never occur to any American to blame Dempsey for turning from a sportsman into a barman. The man is making money, he is doing business. Does it make any difference how he earns his money? That money is best of which there is most!
Boxing may be liked or disliked. That is the private affair of every man. Boxing is a sport, perhaps a rough and even an unnecessary sport, but still a sport. As for the American wrestling match, that is a spectacle which is in no way sporting, however astounding it may be.
We saw such a wrestling match in the same Madison Square Garden.
According to the rules of American wrestling… As a matter of fact, why speak of rules, when the peculiarity of this combat consists precisely in that it has no rules whatever? You may do anything you like: break your opponent’s arm; shove fingers into his mouth in an effort to tear it, while at the same time the opponent tries to bite off the fingers; pull the hair; simply beat him up; tear the face with finger-nails, pull off ears; choke his throat – everything is permitted. This form of combat is called wrestling, and there are actually people who evince a genuine interest in it.
The fighters roll in the ring, pressing against each other, and lie like that for ten minutes at a stretch. They weep in anguish and anger, they snort, spit, scream, and in general carry on in a disgusting and shameless manner – like sinners in hell.
The disgust is increased when a half-hour later you begin to understand that all this is the silliest kind of sham, that it is not even a street light between two drunken hooligans. When one strong man really wants to break the arm of another he can do it at any time with a certain twist. In wrestling, however, despite all the frightful gestures, there is never any harm done to the parts of the body. But Americans, like children, believe this naive deception and are frantic with delight.
Even if wrestling were carried on seriously it would merit nothing but contempt.
Certainly, this vulgar spectacle cannot compare with the competition of the cowboys! In this same rectangular arena, sullied by wrestling, we once saw a rodeo, a competition of Western cowherds.
This time there was no ring and there were no chairs. Clean sand lay from one end to the other of the huge arena. On a stand sat musicians in cowboy hats and blew for all they were worth into their horns and fifes. The gates opened into the wooden enclosure, and out came the parade of the participants.
On fine little horses rode the representatives of the romantic states of America, cowboys and cowgirls from Texas, Arizona, Nevada. The brims of the heroic hats swayed. The girls greeted the public by raising their arms in a mannish salute. There were already several hundred riders in the arena, yet more cowboys continued to ride in.
When the gala part of the performance was over, the artistic part began.
The cowboys took their turns in riding out of the gates atop short, but wildly jumping, steers. In all probability these steers had been hurt before and were brought into the arena because they bucked with incredible persistence. The task of the rider was to stay on the back of the animal as long as possible, without catching on with his hands and while holding his hat in his right hand. From the ceiling hung a huge stop clock which the entire hall could watch. One cowboy held on to an infuriated bull for seventeen seconds, another for twenty-five. Some riders were thrown to the ground after two or three seconds. The winner managed to hang on for something like forty seconds. The cowboys had the intent, bashful faces of country lads who did not want to disgrace themselves before their guests.
Later, one after the other, the cowboys rode out on their horses, swinging a lasso wound in a circle. In front of the horse, its little tail up, a calf hopped around in an exhilarating gallop. Again the stop clock went into action. Unexpectedly the rope flew out from the hands of the cowboys. The loop hung in the air like something alive. For a second the calf lay on the ground, and the cowboy hurried to it in order as quickly as possible to bind it according to all the rules of the Texas science and to transform it into a well-tied, although a desperately bellowing, bundle.
The rodeo fans yelled and put down in their little books the seconds and fractions of seconds.
The most difficult feat was left to the end. Here the cowboys had something to work on. An angry, bucking cow was led out of the gates. She dashed over the arena with a speed one would never expect of any domesticated animal. The mounted cowboy pursued the cow, jumped on her neck at full gallop, and, seizing her by the horns, forced her to the ground. The most important and the most difficult part was to throw the cow to the ground. Many did not succeed in that. Having felled the cow, it was necessary to bind all her four legs and to milk a little milk into a little bottle, which the cowboy hurriedly pulled out of his pocket. He was allowed only one minute for all this. Having milked the cow, the cowboy triumphantly lifted the little bottle over his head and cheerily ran behind the barrier.
