Travel Book
Poet on the Road -Roger Harvey
1. Curtain Up: New York
Here I was in America about to embark on a coast-to-coast poetry-reading tour.
For years I had struggled to gain recognition and publication for my work; had enjoyed some success and suffered many setbacks; now, through a stroke of great good fortune, I was to make what looked like a considerable leap in my literary career. I was naturally excited and a little apprehensive. The way in which I conducted myself could make the most of this juicy opportunity or blow my chances. I was ambitious – nobody more so in the business of taking poetry to new audiences – but by nature diffident and cautious. So what I was about to do seemed rather brave. It may even have been impertinent, or downright foolish. But here, surely, was the first of perhaps many occasions on which to shake off my English reserve. So I went ahead and did it: I told the bus-driver he sounded exactly like Humphrey Bogart.
‘Sure,’ he lisped, as if about to kick the engine of his ‘African Queen’ to lumpy life. ‘You oughta see my sister – she looks like him. British? You want Manhattan? Nope – that’s a dime, and that’s a quarter.’
So it was I had my introduction to things American – and on the way to Manhattan, too. It was a classic place to start. But it all seemed rather loose. Nobody was very serious; nobody seemed to mind anything. The bus growled across flatlands guaranteed to depress the highest spirits and seemingly unchanged since Long Island Sound rang to the hollow laughter of Scott Fitzgerald’s doomed heroes; since ocean liners blew at the Ambrose Light; since JFK Airport was Idlewild Field. The familiarity with New York bred by films and television hadn’t prepared me for this. The place looked oddly desolate, and everything in it surprisingly old-fashioned – from the clothes and the manners to the buildings and the bus. It was disconcerting to feel as if I had time-travelled back to 1959. In England it might have had the quaint appeal of a nostalgic treat; here it was disturbing, and my future on the tour began to look uncertain. But one fact was inescapably obvious: this was a long way from Newcastle.
Two fat ladies in Newcastle: they had started all this, they and my old mentor Bruce Gillham. I have Bruce to thank for some wonderful things. Many years after the US tour I describe here, he helped to bring my play Guinevere-Jennifer before the public, and provided the magnificently carved Glastonbury Chair which served as Guinevere’s throne in Act I to the delight of the critics and the excellent actress Eileen Glenton, who would tell me with an alluring smile that she felt increasingly queenly each time she sat on it. Also, many years earlier he had unwittingly introduced me to a woman beautiful and loving in body and spirit: the girl who would become and remain a major force in my life and work, whose love was to bless me with happiness and whose wonder – although separated from me by my own cowardice and folly – has not failed to glow within me for a single day since our meeting.
Good on you, Bruce! You knew not what you did that hectic day at Newcastle Polytechnic when I just made it on to the postgraduate course and you ran down the list of names of my fellow students and I couldn’t spell ‘Melissa’ – a moment also recreated in Guinevere-Jennifer, you might remember. But I think you came to know, for you willingly arranged our first teaching-practice so Melissa and I could share it in the same school. If I didn’t thank you clearly enough at the time, I’m thanking you now.
Bruce and I kept in touch down what for me were exciting but sometimes long and difficult years, and he became generously interested in my developing career as a writer. When he played a part in organising an international conference of linguists, he suggested I might provide the after-dinner entertainment with a poetry-reading. And so to the ‘two fat ladies’. They sat in the front row and nobody could have helped but play to them, so hugely were they enjoying the show. If one was best described as generously proportioned, the other could only be called enormous. She started to spread out from the uppermost of her chins and kept on spreading. Positively conical. Both were passionate listeners: overcome with emotion at my poignant work; laughing openly at the funny bits; rapt and excited about everything I said and did. They were having two whales of a time, and when the performance was over they revealed themselves to be as intelligent and charming as they had been enthusiastic.
One was Professor of Literature at the University in Las Vegas, the other a teacher of English in Nevada. They had recently been in London, a quirk of circumstance had brought them North to this conference, and another had set me before them. In accents I cannot possibly reproduce on the page, they launched into long and avid praise of my work. The reading had been billed as The Secret of Room B103, that being its venue in one of the Polytechnic buildings. They waved the programmes at me with wide grins and one of them said the real secret was that you had fun in room B103 when you were expecting a rather serious poet. No, said the other, the real secret was the dramatic quality of my voice – or was it my lovable personality? Wasn’t I just cute? But strong with it, passionate, terrific. Well, only a saint or a sourpuss can resist this sort of stuff, and when they invited me to do the same reading in Las Vegas I accepted at once.
Of course there were practical problems. I couldn’t just drop everything and rush off to America for a single reading, much as I might wish to. Sure, they smiled with dismissive understanding, all I had to do was write to a few places and fix up a tour. They knew people who would put my show on, and other people who could offer me accommodation. And so the after-reading chat, which I had enjoyed or suffered at performances and literary festivals up and down the country, was tonight, in my home town, turning into a momentous opportunity. They knew people who would pay me generous fees, and others who would buy my poems. All I’d really have to pay for would be the flights to and from America; while I was a guest in their country, almost everything would be found for me. So, if praise of one’s own work was a temptation, the lure of foreign travel with a smattering of fame and financial reward proved utterly seductive. Some wag once remarked that the only person to benefit from being lionised was Daniel – but I thought I had done pretty well out of it, too.
Within a few months I had written my letters and received replies and secured eight poetry-readings across the States. That in itself seemed a considerable achievement and a triumph of logistics, especially since the plan echoed all those classic east-to-west journeys across America which are the stuff of history, legend, and aspiration. Then flights were booked, venues were settled, accommodation was arranged, and publicity material prepared. Some of the organisers produced a poster of me, others a leaflet on which everything about me looked brash and unbelievable. Although I had prepared my own handouts featuring biographical details and a list of publications for some of my readings in England, this was the first professionally produced publicity material I would have to live up to. When – at terrifyingly short notice – I was asked for something traditionally English to use on the poster, I looked frantically through photographs of myself for one which would fit the bill. It’s easy to get publicity decisions wrong, and on other occasions I have, but here I made a happy choice and the resulting poster was a marvellous thing, which most people seem to agree still looks good today. Even I can look at it without too much embarrassment and with a tinge of pleasure when I remember how effective it was in America.
It was based on an unashamedly flattering photograph taken by my mother on a trip to Wensleydale in the early 1980s. Wearing a checked waistcoat and leaning elegantly on the windscreen of my open-topped sports car, I look every inch the cliché of the English gentleman. Behind me twists a country road with a dry-stone wall and a brown vista of Yorkshire. When the printed version came back I saw big letters proclaiming: ‘ROGER HARVEY US TOUR – POETRY READINGS ACROSS AMERICA.’ It was brave stuff, and I couldn’t have asked for a better team of publicists. There was some truth in it, too, since – at least on the day the photograph was taken – I actually looked like that, and so did England. It would be easy for the Americans to believe that every day, sports cars came to a halt on moorland roads, young men in waistcoats smiled nonchalantly at the camera, and that Yorkshire was brown and cloudy – of course it was. English poets, gentlemen to the nibs of their pens, took time off from their literary endeavours and country pursuits to read across America whenever they could – of course they did, without once making an unseemly fuss about such things. It was all as perfectly natural as having one’s photo taken on a jaunt in the old car. No wonder the audiences turned out to see me.
The handout was a different matter, in the form of a grand invitation to my readings, giving a very detailed biography with a somewhat academic slant. But even so, it couldn’t resist billing me as an adventurer poet. If I could be as respectable as a man of letters, I could also be as swashbuckling as Errol Flynn. I had no power to stop it, so it was fortunate I didn’t want to. It was far better than a stuffy image, and thankfully miles away from the often seedy world of English poetry-reading in which I had never felt spiritually or artistically at home. This was showbiz, and I loved it. It was also good publicity, and I had already worked with advertising long enough to recognise powerful copy when I saw it.
One addition I made was to contrive for the handout to feature what I believed was the only drawing ever made of me: an energetic pen-and-ink sketch done by my friend Sian Watkin while I was writing a poem for her one night in 1974. I felt sure she had forgotten this incident and the sketch in the intervening years, but I certainly had not. The dramatic likeness seemed to distil all the passion of writing a poem into its vigorous lines. It was a product of Sian's vibrant and acute perception and excited much comment on the tour. I was to thank Sian for her skill many times in many strange places.
At last it was time to go, with the publicity material travelling ahead of me, hopefully preparing audiences for my particular style of poetry…although it was impossible to tell from the letters I had received how the organisation was shaping up. I would just have to go and get on with it. The first leg of my journey was down the A1 to London by luxury coach. The big double-decker was indeed smart and comfortable, offering splendid views of a favourite route. On other trips, this sleek and softly-sprung vehicle would have made for an exciting start, but as I said farewell to my mother I had to admit to myself I didn’t feel excited at all. I felt depressed. It was pouring with rain and very cold.
The longed-for insouciance of travel did not come to relieve my host of worries. It was April Fools’ Day, too. I wished I had not been so cruel and stupid as to end my relationship with Melissa, and that I was doing all this with her as my companion. In the scorching summers of the 1970s we had become lovers, gloriously against the odds of a tragic domestic situation and our being rather shy and quiet young people not likely to break the taboos which were expected to keep us apart. But it had to be, for this was a grand passion of the sort that comes only once in a lifetime, and then only if you’re lucky. We were lucky. I should have done everything in my power to continue that luck, cherished and nurtured it, let it run its sweet course into a long life together, not have broken it by submitting to the forces of weakness and evil I felt within and upon me. In deeper torment than I had ever known, I decided to leave Melissa – and thus brought about a ruin a thousand times more hollow than the freedom I believed I was creating for ourselves. It remains one of the very few decisions I truly regret, and on that journey to London I suffered the selfish but inescapable thought that if I were to meet with real success on this tour and encounter an adoring public, not one member of it could have any idea how lonely and guilty I felt right now, know any of the anguish which had gone into making a life and career by myself, or that my suffering and Melissa’s was largely my own fault.
I remembered the photographs of Melissa I kept at home, in particular one taken during the blazing July of 1976 when she was working as part-time teacher to a pair of children in Sandwich and I was her lover in our tiny cottage on the Kentish coast. Elsewhere she might have been the au pair or nanny; these employers were stately enough to call her a governess. If that title suggests a fuddy-duddy image, you can forget it. In this photograph Melissa is sitting seductively on our bed, wearing nothing but a low-cut summer dress and a real sparkle in her eyes. Her arms and ankles are beautifully tanned, and there is sunlight in a smile sexier than any you can imagine. Go on, imagine one. Hers is sexier. But more wonderful than that is the sheer love which shines from her and through the years: love which I knew was holy and glorious yet which I destroyed. As the coach hissed and droned down the Al with its litany of familiar place-names which had excited me since my boyhood, all I could hear in my head was the hauntingly beautiful song:
Gone is the romance that was so divine,
‘tis broken and cannot be mended.
You must go your way and I must go mine,
but now that our love-dream has ended –
What’ll I do.....?
From my bleak window of the hotel in Bedford Place the rain looked worse and I felt no better. I telephoned home to let my mother know I had arrived safely, but she wasn’t in and I felt doubly isolated. My mood was strange. I usually loved travelling. But today London was exceedingly glum, and this area around the British Museum – which had always intrigued me and been the setting for part of my novel The Dog-Headed Men – didn’t look at all inviting in the rain. However, I forced myself to go for a walk, ate in a crowded bistro, came back, and telephoned home again. This time my mother was in, and I told her everything was ready for my poetic adventure, setting her mind at rest that I was safe and well. As I talked to her about the ride out to Heathrow Airport and all the excitement of boarding the big jet to America, a sparkle of joy came back to me. She said she loved me and wanted me to have a wonderful time, but also to take tremendous care of myself. I told her not to worry, but knew that she would. Then, observing one of my own rules of travel, I checked all my kit before turning in for an early night.
Dazzling spring sunshine flooded down over London. Now this was more like it! The sky was a lovely blue, with a few perfectly-formed clouds sailing in a gentle breeze: ideal flying weather. I could hardly wait to get going. Riding out to the airport, my old travel fever returned to grip me. Bag between my legs and vital documents in the safety of my innermost pockets, I sat on the Underground, surfacing into a mild West London morning: spring flowers on the embankments; silver jets stacked lazily over the Home Counties. My progress through the airport was accomplished without let or hindrance, a feat owing more to luck and my own efficiency than the lofty promise from Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs so beautifully inscribed in my passport. Installed at last in the huge cabin of the 747, with passengers settling and hostesses securing bags and lockers, I found myself next to a handsome couple who turned out to be Mormons going home to Utah. They asked me about my plans, were duly fascinated, and begged for a poem. I gave them a signed copy of King John which had recently been published in booklet form and inscribed it ‘to Julia and Patrick Ryan’. Then the enormous jet trundled out and its long, exhilarating take-off brought that irrepressible grin of escape and excitement to my cheeks. We soared up through cloud into the magical blue.
No-one who loves flying calls these big jets jumbos, for they handle as sweetly as an aerobatic single-seater. Sleek as swallows, they are big birds of happiness on sharp wings of desire. The cabin filled with that blissful light which is the true tint of Heaven, and once more I ploughed the high white fields, my spirits riding to those invisible stars. The Ryans were charming companions and didn’t spoil the trip with the constant chatter I feared. Indeed they fell sweetly asleep on each other’s shoulders, oblivious to the parade of excellent food and drink which accompanied us across the Atlantic, and left me to my window-seat thoughts. Just before I guessed the Captain would become pre-occupied with the approaching continent, I sent another poem up to the flight-deck. This was Flying (also published as a booklet illustrated by the multi-talented Marka Rifa’at; I’ve been lucky with artistic friends), and I hoped the Captain would enjoy my evocation of a very different day in a very different aircraft. Then we crossed the coast at Nantucket Island and groaned down to a cloudy New York.
Desolate factories and cemeteries slid past the bus. I began to quail. This was a big tour, right across a continent; a one-man circus travelling on my slight shoulders, inflaming my passionate and ambitious nature and at the same time tweaking my more reticent heartstrings. Lots of people were expecting all kinds of wonders from me. In many ways it was the chance of a lifetime for an English writer and a dream come true…but however would this madcap adventure turn out in reality? It had started unbelievably, unfairly easily, proving yet again that one didn’t have to know the right things as long as one knew the right people. But my literary career had suffered quite enough already from my not having known them; having just met a few I was determined to grasp the opportunities they presented with both hands. Now we were passing through a kind of clapboard suburbia. The New World looked old-fashioned. Then we were rushing out of the East River Tunnel into Manhattan, that famous skyline hanging like an enormous theatre backdrop. A quick ride in a Yellow Cab completed my journey. My hotel was right on Broadway.
I was excited to find myself in what was supposed to be the showbusiness capital of the world. Sure enough, the current hits were playing the theatres all around me. Huge neon signs thrust famous stars and famous brand-names in my face. At night, all this was a glamourous dazzle of lights; by day, a tattier reality took over. Battered cars jostling through pot-holed streets awash with filthy rainwater, the howling of police and paramedic sirens, an unexpected babble of foreign tongues from Chinese to Yiddish, the constant surge of pedestrians forever at the trot, ‘cops’ everywhere, steam gushing up from scorching holes in sodden sidewalks, steel manhole covers so hot they burned dry in the rain, hot air pouring out of the subway gratings over which Marilyn Monroe had once fluttered her skirt, half-wild and starving dogs roaming skyscraper rooftops amid a jungle of fire-escapes and water-tanks – all this made me feel as if I had arrived in a run down sector of Hell.
The hotel was a good one, with a flurry of international arrivals and departures and fascinating views from my air-conditioned room; but there were surprising differences between what I found here and what had become familiar from hotels all over Europe. The fittings were desperately old-fashioned in ways to depress rather than charm: the door-handles and bath-taps wouldn’t have looked out of place in Philip Marlowe’s office – if Philip Marlowe ever took a bath, that is. He’d have probably just poured himself another bourbon and turned a world-weary eye to the rusty window frame, provided of course he’d negotiated the dimly lit corridor without someone slugging him from behind so that a black hole opened up in front of him and he fell headlong into it.
The 1940s atmosphere really was pervasive, and unexpected. I had naïvely imagined New York to be glittering, gleaming, and utterly modern, but of course it wasn’t. It was a seething madhouse, boiling and decaying at the same time, in design terms barely heaving itself from the middle years of the twentieth century despite the constant demolition and construction. And had the hotel breakfast room just been demolished? There wasn’t one anyway, which struck me as crazy. The dining room only opened for lunch or dinner, there was no other restaurant attached to the hotel, and not even the kind of twenty-four hour self-service cafeteria usually called (with some generosity of spirit) the ‘Coffee Shop’ in a British hotel of this size. Unless I wanted room service – and I didn’t – I would have to go out for breakfast. So I did, and with a mixture of excitement and trepidation ordered rolls and coffee in a nearby drugstore.
This happened:
BREAKFAST WITH A COP
With his nightstick on the counter
he lays all the cares of darkness down.
He takes his early breakfast in a tired peace.
‘Happy Easter, bud.’
I answer with an international raising of my cup.
He brings the dirtiness of crime up to the bar,
and yet is somehow cleansed in hot sweet coffee –
best I’ve ever tasted.
His beliefs and fears and sweaty ignorance,
his vast and sordid knowledge –
all are laid aside for breakfast.
At other times, my innocence of all these things
might stand against me, open
like a childish wound.
But here, at breakfast time,
all differences are put away.
When coffee is drunk in New York breakfast bars,
everyone is friends.
Before my readings began there was time to be a tourist and I walked all over Manhattan. I had heard all the tales of robberies and rapes, muggings and shootings, and I was careful to keep off the subway and out of Central Park, but in fact I never once felt threatened. I’d had more unpleasant encounters walking to the shops in Newcastle. On the other hand, it was impossible to feel at complete ease here. The sheer enormity of the metropolis and its relentless pace of life made all the European capitals I knew seem like provincial towns. Brash, exciting, and dangerous, New York might have an almost Gothic romanticism, but was anything but cosy and did nothing decorously. Even the divisions between ‘posh-end’ and slums – decently, hypocritically, or accidentally blurred in most European cities – happened here in the space of a block. This was something I couldn’t get used to. One moment I seemed to be walking up stylish Fifth Avenue with its exorbitant hotels and furriers’ shops, the next I was in Harlem with litter blowing about and disgruntled-looking black people sitting on boxes staring my way. The demarcation was very clear.
Had this been Europe, I should simply have hidden my bag under my coat and carried on. Here, like all the other white tourists strolling up Fifth Avenue, I turned around…to be swallowed up by an Easter parade. Persistent rain sloshed into the canyons of Manhattan, there were as many waterproofed policemen as sodden promenaders, and nobody looked particularly merry. Still, some fanciful costumes and ludicrous bonnets were being paraded, and of course I couldn’t keep the famous song out of my head. I wished my grandmother – who used to sing it to me when I was a little boy – were still alive and that I could somehow have brought her along for the experience, or at very least told her the tale afterwards. She would have loved all this and been pleased for her grandson who had ‘done so well’.
Later I went in to St Patrick’s Cathedral, said to have the biggest church interior in the world. It took a few moments to realise its true vastness. It was like a sunken city of dreaming darkness, unfathomably gloomy and filled with weird echoes. At first I thought it a wonderfully strange contradiction of the bustling city outside, then realised it was the perfect expression of New York’s spirituality: romantic, awesome drama made solid on a gargantuan scale; a nineteenth century concept wrought of twentieth century materials – and even these were looking dated.
In addition to soaking up the atmosphere, I had some business to conduct in the Cathedral. St Patrick’s – serving God and Thespis under the same roof – was developing a performing space, and I had attempted to secure a reading here. I had been politely turned down, but still invited to call in when I arrived in New York. I thought it might be profitable to make the most of the contact, so I found the office and met one of the Arts Administrators: a slender girl in jeans and sweatshirt so fresh from the laundry that the scent of fabric-conditioner overpowered that of the steaming coffee she brought me. She had dark Italianate looks and a ready smile; but charming as she was (and she was charming with an elegant friendliness and effortless good manners), she was absolutely useless in my quest for a reading or any kind of exposure for my work. She had no idea who I was, where I came from, what I did, what I wanted, or why I had written to her absent boss in the first place. Not surprisingly, she couldn’t find the letter. I doubt if she knew where to look. In other circumstances it might have been a thoroughly enjoyable experience to share coffee with a pretty young girl in an oasis of calm in the middle of a great city, but after what I had gone through for years it was just depressing. The situation here looked as bad as it was back home; it might even be worse: inefficiency, carelessness, and about as much concern for poetry as for sparrows’ tears. And this was a confrontation horribly like so many I had suffered in my long struggle to gain recognition in England: a brush with that figure of dread, the Arts Event Organiser. If female, she could be a one-woman monstrous regiment of feminism, committed to shabby local causes and determined to bend everything that way. If male, he could belong to that ignoble body of men, the Buggerall Skivers: ready, when granted the slightest authority, to seek promotion to the Devil’s Own Jobsworths and retire at the first shots of effort to the Corps of Malingerers. In fairness to this girl, she wasn’t like any of the stereotypes, but she inhabited hideously similar territory. She might be the little angel of this musty office with her spotless clothes and heavenly smile, but I really wanted nothing more to do with her or the organisation to which she didn’t quite seem to belong. Since I had neither the time nor the connections to thrust myself further into what I had hoped would be a spectacular venue, I gave it up as bad job and was pleased to regain the concrete valleys of Manhattan.
The sun came out. The place looked exciting again, even joyous and – in a sudden wash of golden light – utterly romantic. That was it: New York was a great romantic metropolis, romantic in the High German sense as well as that of Tin Pan Alley songwriters. I went down to the Battery for a sniff of the harbour and a sight of the Statue of Liberty. She looked very small from there and I contemplated taking the Staten Island ferry for a closer view, but I was running short of time and would have to be content with my gaze across the grey water. There stood the personification of liberty who had welcomed millions of immigrants to a new life, clutching her book of self-evident truths, holding aloft her torch of enlightenment. Even at this distance she was a moving and powerful symbol. The fifes and drums of freedom rattled the bars of my very soul. With liberty came responsibility, with opportunity came obligations. I might think of myself as clean and good and honest but already I felt full of European sophistications which might do me no good in what looked like a curiously uncomplicated New World. I had no right to foist them upon my generous hosts, nor to work out my personal angst in the public arena they were preparing for me, nor to enjoy their hospitality without giving my all. At the Battery I tried to promise myself I would remember that. As it turned out, that wouldn’t always be easy – tempted, strained, excited, and exhausted as I was to become. But as I stood looking at the statue, remembering the smaller version I had seen in Paris which gazes down the Seine towards her gigantic sister, a big wide ray of showbizzy sunshine swept over the harbour as if to acknowledge my good intentions. As soon as I headed back uptown, a sense of delight took over. In Times Square (which I repeatedly noticed wasn’t square at all but more of a long triangle) I discovered the statue of George M Cohan, composer of I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy and many another Broadway hit. I recalled James Cagney’s portrayal of him in what was reputed to be Cagney’s own favourite film – although I always preferred him in gangster mode. Cohan seemed to stand at the very heart of an American dream which, for a sweet and crazy moment, I was being allowed to share.
ON EVERY STREET, A SONG
To the statue of George M. Cohan, Times Square, New York.
Give my regards to Broadway,
remember that I passed this way.
It seems to me that in the throng
there is, on every street, a song;
at every intersection
and in every mad direction
choruses and big parades
and, on every tower top,
a crest of serenades.
From the crazy traffic surge
through the crowds that melt and merge,
from the dirty subway’s roar
to the public wanting more:
watch me, as I pass along
to hear, on every street, a song.
The day of my New York reading was also King Kong’s birthday, and an effigy of the famous ape was being hauled with some difficulty up the Empire State Building. I am very interested in architecture and walked all the way to the Empire State only to find my visit disrupted by the inflatable Kong. He had already broken an elevator and his lumpy progress up the exterior had effectively closed the building. All I got was a look around the impressively marble-clad foyer. King Kong is a fine film, and the final scenes where Kong climbs the Empire State radio mast, Fay Wray in hand, never fail to move me; but this undignified caper with the effigy didn’t do its spirit justice. With my theatrical turn-of-mind I secretly hoped the rubber Kong was holding a rubber Fay Wray; at the same time I doubted the organisers’ imaginations had gone that far. To spice the day with further drama news came of a murder just a few blocks away from my hotel. And then, in a small theatre in the Bronx, I gave my first poetry-reading in America.
In all fairness, I couldn’t expect this event to feature highly on any list of the day’s news stories, but I would have liked just a little more recognition for my not inconsiderable efforts. It felt like a disaster. I suspected half the audience didn’t understand me, and knew the other half didn’t care. Nobody actually walked out while I was on, but I got the impression some people wanted to. It was worse than playing the clubs in Middlesbrough. In truth, I’d never played the clubs in Middlesbrough – but if I had I should certainly have ‘died’ there, just as I seemed to have ‘died’ here. All the old favourites which had had the fat ladies on the edge of their own and half-way across their neighbours’ seats went down here like lead balloons. Worse, they didn’t even make a satisfying thud. I got nothing from the audience at all, and precious little from the sound of my own voice in what might as well have been an empty theatre. That it had actually been quite full amazed me even more. There must have been eighty people in front of me. To build an audience of that size at a poetry-reading in England would have been a triumph. Here, because of what felt like silent incomprehension, it was just depressing. Over eighty people had come to see me and as far as I could tell not one of them was going away anything other than mystified. That was infuriating. I had a popular and personally cherished reputation for being a clear and easily-understood poet whose work was accessible to anyone, yet from the way these New Yorkers had risen to go at the end and from the expressions on their faces I felt as if I might as well have read in Old Norse. Indeed Old Norse would surely have raised some eyebrows, and a raised eyebrow would have been better than nothing. Nobody came up to say anything, nobody bought a book or a cassette; they all just rushed out. The grinning black lady who had organised the reading flashed her teeth at me, thrust some dollars into my hand (at least they were paying me), and kindly saw that I got a cab. I sat in it glumly, feeling like a fool. How could I ever have been so arrogant as to believe I could carry off this preposterous adventure? How could I ever have thought I was any good as a poet or any use at entertaining people? There was nothing to celebrate as I rode down Broadway. It had become a boulevard of broken dreams, no less painful for being yet another cliché.
LIFE AND DEATH IN NEW YORK CITY
Dead today: a woman in an expensive apartment.
TV reporter: ‘Suicide or homicide?’
Detective: ‘It’s just an investigation, okay?
Just an investigation at this time.’
The ultimate metropolis:
madness come alive,
pre-occupied with death.
Death on every corner, death on every screen,
death in everybody’s mind and soul.
Yet all these people, lively in the streets,
are rushing to avoid it.
Six o’clock;
must eat soon.
My last day here.
On the other hand – come on, over eighty people had paid good money to see me. None of them had thrown anything. I had been handed a sizeable fee. What did I expect? To bring the house down on the first night? I was an unknown writer from the North of England in a foreign country; we would need time to grow acquainted. And if New Yorkers were habitually mugged in the streets and gunned down in their apartments, I’d have to consider myself lucky to be still on my feet. I woke up to a bright spring morning and saw clear skies over Manhattan. I should grow up and realise I was very lucky and blessed with a thousand good things coming true all around me. I decided it was time to shoulder the irresponsibilty and get on with enjoying myself. I went out to spend some of my newly-earned dollars in the biggest frankfurter bar in the world.
The last time I had had a hot-dog must have been in the 1960s, sitting round the kitchen fire at home when my mother and grandmother used to open tins of the finger-sized sausages and serve them for supper with mustard in little white bread-buns. They were delicious, and eating them was a homely pleasure forever connected in my memory with our much-loved Jack Russell Terrier, Pip – who seemed to enjoy the sausages even more than we did. There were also hot-dogs on boyhood visits to the cinema, notably the Odeon in Northumberland Street, but although I loved going to the pictures, the hot-dogs projected so hugely on the screen between the Pearl & Dean adverts and the main feature and served so unhygienically in the foyer looked and smelled so dangerous that I never dared eat one. So I wasn’t exactly prepared for the New York Frankfurter Experience.
I went through art deco doors into a hall as big as an airport concourse. An orgy of noise, colour, and smell filled it from marble floor to vaulted ceiling. I could scarcely come to terms with the fact that the crowd inside – and it really was a crowd – was being marshalled into lines of traffic by a tall black man. He waved a baton at me and directed me to join a line of hungry people shuffling towards the glittering serving areas. This was sausagemongering on a Wagnerian scale. Had there been a frankfurter-eating scene in Metropolis it would have looked like this.
With a ruthless efficiency of which any German industrialist could have been proud, we were issued with trays, plates, and napkins, and given the standard interrogation: ‘Small, medium, large, kingsize, superkingsize?’ Nobody was going to get out of here without a good meal. Then I saw the frankfurters: a veritable rolling-mill of them; small, medium, large, kingsize, and superkingsize, all turning merrily between hot steel rollers, grilled from above and below and from each side, basted with fat or brine or whatever frankfurters are basted with. Amazed, I hesitated…but hesitation was forbidden. The tall black man waved his baton, other black men brandished gleaming tongs. ‘Er – superkingsize’, I whimpered…and was duly processed to my table with a hot-dog the size of a hot-Dachshund – nay, a hot-Bassett Hound.
A few big fat men were sitting opposite me. I looked around. Everyone was big and fat – except me. I am small and thin. I had never felt smaller and thinner since I had delivered a message to the prefects’ room on my first day at grammar school. But my frankfurter turned out to be bigger than anybody’s, at least on this table. My fellow diners looked massive enough to be demolition workers, tugboat crew, or longshoremen. They were the kinda guys who sweated on construction sites in checked shirts and ragged vests, mixed concrete with their bare hands, drank scalding soup out of safety helmets, and went home to iceboxes full of six-packs and wives even tougher than themselves – but none of these big boys had had the guts to go for a superkingsize. Perhaps they all knew they were as fat as they could get without keeling over, and that just one superkingsize would mean certain, agonising death. Thus they regarded me with disbelief and baleful suspicion, then made a great show of tucking manfully into their smalls and mediums. For a moment I thought my temerity might excite dangerous comment which could escalate into the type of riot best set in a prison canteen, but the big men remained silent. At last one of them glared at me and said, ‘D’ya go to the ball-game last night?’
This was not the company in which to dissect a particularly disappointing poetry-reading.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I was working.’
The big man looked uncomfortable, then by lumbering stages hurt, ashamed, embarrassed, and deeply sympathetic. He’d have looked the same if I had told him my grandmother had just died. At last, riven with grief, he blurted out: ‘The guy was working!’ He cast an imploring gaze around his mates, then turned to me, almost in tears. ‘Shit man, you missed some ball-game. You’da loved it.’
From this I assumed I had been taken for a native, and kept my mouth full (not difficult with a superkingsize) to maintain the illusion.
THE SECRET LANGUAGE OF JUNK
New York City throws away
more than Zimbabwe makes in a day.
Poet on the Road: by Roger Harvey is published by Bluechrome (paperback; £7.99). It is also available through amazon.co.uk and all good booksellers.
