This is the grand and glorious cliché of America,
as the Acropolis is of Greece and the Taj Mahal of India.
A million tourists have said there's nothing like it, and they're right.
Many more millions got their first view of it
after the long steerage journey from Ireland or Italy or Russia.
I was lucky. I came by choice.
And I started from the opposite pole,
from the protected pastoral haven of Cambridge, England.
I had graduated from Jesus College.
Suddenly, in the spring of 1932, I was offered a fellowship at Yale University.
And I remember, one day, leaning on this bridge and wondering what America must be like.
I thought of myself as a sophisticated character,
but I must have realised dimly, even then,
that the preconceptions that you hold about a country, the ones that stick,
are the ones you learn practically from birth.
In the First World War, I was a very small boy in a seaside town in the north
where you could train soldiers on the sands.
And we had billeted with us - on us - seven American soldiers.
I learned later that the men who wrote the American Constitution
put in a clause actually forbidding the billeting of any soldier in a private house,
but with their uncanny foresight, they saw that this did not apply to England.
Well, anyway, their soldiers were taller than ours, but also paler, almost yellow.
My father explained - he had never been to America either -
that this was because of the skyscrapers, which kept the sun off their faces.
This completed my childhood picture of America.
New York City, with skyscrapers. Yellow men. Maybe red men on the fringe.
A prairie, through which ran the Mississippi, thrashing with steamboats and gamblers,
who were nudged aside from time to time by a man in a white suit
who kept rushing to the stern and dropping a plumb line and shouting, "Mark Twain!"
More prairie. The only mountains, the Rockies.
And the only other city, San Francisco,
which was founded by Australian convicts.
And it was with this mental baggage, and a few colourful additions from the movies,
that I set sail.
This is a personal memoir of what I found in America,
and of the institutions, the landscape, the people that I came to admire most.
In a word, what gave me the impulse to stay
and look into the origins and the history of the United States.
I sailed into New York late on a fall evening.
It was at once magical and sinister,
and better than anything that the movies had promised.
The latest thing, something you had to see,
was the George Washington Bridge, the new single-span across the Hudson.
This is today, with the riverside parks and the motorway.
In 1932, it was very different.
The fairyland of Manhattan was shattered with a nasty jolt of reality called the Depression.
The banks of the Hudson and of hundreds of other American rivers
were littered with tar paper shacks, the homes of a dribble of the 13 million unemployed.
I'd actually been warned by the sponsors of my fellowship
that in the winter we could expect a revolution.
In Germany I'd seen more hideous single sights, skeleton children with bloated bellies,
but I had never seen more poverty everywhere at your elbow.
Farmers with rotted crops that nobody could buy.
In the cities, the rich defaulting on their rent.
Middle-class people reduced to begging.
It was a very bleak winter.
But then America found a saviour.
I remember how his voice on the day of his inauguration sounded like a trumpet call.
Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.
This great nation will endure, as it has endured,
will revive and will prosper.
This was immensely rousing, especially to an Englishman fresh from, or tired from,
our own complacent and bumbling leaders crouching before the ranting of Adolf Hitler.
Roosevelt really gave the sense of taking over.
And I, for one, felt reassured, freed from guilt.
I was, after all, 23 and subsidised and maybe pretty callow.
I'd one American passion I was dying to indulge, so I headed for Mecca, for New Orleans,
the cradle of what was, to me, the American aristocracy -
King Oliver, Duke Ellington and Earl Hines.
(JAZZ PIANO )
(WHISTLING)
Well, this may seem to be a very strange place of pilgrimage,
here in a bar in New Orleans,
in a crummy section which, in those days, never saw a white man.
But, you know, travellers always find what they're looking for.
Englishmen may urge Americans
to go and watch the vital institution of Question Time in the House of Commons,
but Americans still trek off to the Changing of the Guard.
And I ought to have been looking at the beautiful houses in the Garden District,
and admiring Jackson Square,
but I beat it to New Orleans with one purpose, which was to rediscover the birthplace
of what, to me, was the supreme American invention,
the 12-bar blues.
(BLUESY INTRO )
The blues had a particular poignancy during the '30s because they're about depression,
infidelity, the money all gone,
taking a train to some greener pasture that you know isn't there.
I first heard the blues on a piano -
they come out of the country, out of work song, into the town, first onto a piano -
in this bar, where there was a little, very old, very raddled, bent-over negro,
just playing the chords of the blues and singing the lyrics that you could hear at nights
drifting out over the lattices of the prostitutes' cribs.
For, certainly, 100 years, New Orleans was a shambles of corruption,
and the most easy-going town in the United States.
At the bottom of the underworld, as usual, were the blacks.
At the top of it were the bordellos run by ferocious madams,
the gaudiest of whom was undoubtedly a lady who called herself, after several other tries,
Josie Arlington.
She had white girls, black girls and octoroons,
and their charms were advertised in a blue book that you could buy for 25 cents.
Now, there was one black man - only one - in these houses,
and he was the so-called "Perfesser".
The coloured pianist. At one time, Josie Arlington had the best, Jelly Roll Morton.
A man with a mouth like a clapper and diamonds actually inset in his teeth.
I saw him on his death bed. He maintained that he'd invented jazz. Of course, he hadn't.
But he said to me, "If you want to play the blues, boy, just chords."
(BLUES CHORDS)
"And...cut out that picture-show right hand."
His show closed, I guess, and Josie's house was closed when she got religion.
She bought herself a lavish tomb in the grandest cemetery in order to clinch her lease in heaven.
She herself posed for this figure, intended not as her likeness,
but to symbolise the only known species she never allowed in her house, a virgin.
Well, this was playing hooky. I had to get down to work and up north to Yale University.
There, in the next autumn, I discovered the most beautiful of the six New England states.
Vermont.
At first glance you'd never believe the geographer who said,
"If America had been settled from west to east, New England would still be uninhabited."
But this mellow beauty is deceptive. It cloaks the poorest, stoniest soil.
For every acre you plant, you have to plough up a hundred boulders.
To me, there were two great surprises.
One was the domestic architecture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The classical style done in wood. There were always dense forests, but no brick.
This is the courthouse in New Fane, Vermont.
The second surprise was better still,
something that the most grudging English visitors have conceded as a natural wonder.
Even Anthony Trollope's sourpuss mother broke down to say,
"In what they call the fall, the whole country goes to glory."
The fall colouring is something that everybody admires but nobody explains.
Well, on rich, rainy soils, the sap keeps flowing into the leaves
and they stay green till they drop.
But on the poor, rocky soil of Vermont, the dry autumn blocks the sap
with a new growth of hard cells at the base of the twig, and the greens fade.
In the oaks, abundant sunlight and the lack of nitrogen bring out the lemons and golds.
And the maples. In summer, they start like this.
But once the first frost sharpens the acid, the sunlight develops it out into yellow,
then streaks of red,
and so into the full scarlet of their prime,
before they turn and die again.
The glory begins quickly, with a blaze of ferns and blueberry bushes and sumach.
The fall is nothing more than the burning out
of what is poor in the soil and bitter in the leaf.
"It is," said a famous naturalist, "essentially death that causes all the brave show."
At the end of the college year, summer vacation,
Chicago the first stop on my grand tour of the West.
It was having a World's Fair.
That's me. 40 years ago, my hair turned black, maybe from fright.
I'd no sooner let my mother know where to write than I had her cable begging me to escape
from the incessant crossfire of the gangsters.
So I got out of town before it was too late,
and drove through the Midwest to the Prairie,
where men were men and boys had something called "get up and go".
And this was it. The high, flat land of broiling summers and Arctic winters.
With a few homesteaders. Simple, square, unlettered folk, I condescendingly assumed.
I was in for a shock. It was here, I learned, that "get up and go" was no myth.
Here, for instance, two farm boys had turned their small home town
into a capital city of world medicine.
I took an interest in medicine, partly because my two closest friends were medical students,
partly because I married a doctor's widow and inherited a medical library,
but mainly because of the great incentive that comes from being a hypochondriac.
The time came when I was invited to visit as a guest and a reporter
what, to me, is one of the most romantic and impressive of American institutions.
It's a story that any self-respecting publisher would turn down as fiction.
In 1862, the Sioux Indians of Minnesota
were denied their annual food allowance by a stupid government agent.
So they looted the stores and murdered and maimed the neighbouring families.
The local doctor who took care of the casualties was William Mayo,
an immigrant from Salford, England, who had some chemistry and an itch for medicine.
He'd worked in a run-down New York hospital, quit in disgust,
and got a medical degree of sorts from a Midwestern college.
He moved on to the Prairie, to Rochester, Minnesota, and became a doctor on horseback.
The frontier then was seething with malaria and typhoid and dysentery,
and he was a very busy young man.
And this is just about what remains of his meagre equipment.
This was his pride and joy.
A microscope, a great rarity then. It cost the fortune of $600.
To buy it, he had to mortgage his house.
Now, this was a time when doctors washed up, if at all, AFTER an operation.
Surgery was amputation, not yet repair.
And these are some of his rather grim and grimy operating tools.
You see, Lister and antisepsis and asepsis, microorganisms had never been heard of.
The smallest thing that could infect you was something you could touch and see,
say, a house fly.
Mayo operated in all weathers at all hours
in kitchens and farmhouses and shacks along flooded roads,
opening up gall bladders,
much more daringly, extracting tumours.
Often with this corkscrew.
And pretty soon his reputation spread and patients came in from 100 miles around.
Now, he had two sons.
Will, who performed farm chores with his younger brother Charlie.
Before they were out of their teens, they were off with their father on his rounds,
mixing drugs, dressing wounds, watching autopsies.
They took their first anatomy lesson
from the skeleton of this Indian killed in the Sioux uprising.
By the time they were ready for college,
Michigan had a compulsory three-year instead of the usual six-month course in medicine.
So Will went there.
Chicago had done the same thing, and Charlie was sent to Chicago.
From the start, they never meant to make their careers in the East.
They came back always to their home town. "We were green," said Charlie, "and we knew it."
The old man commanded them in their childhood to read at least two hours a day.
And they read and they bought and they borrowed
the medical literature of the great men in the world outside.
They did everything that a town and country doctor did, but they wanted to go on learning.
There was nowhere to go. There was no graduate school of advanced medicine.
So they kept in touch with their idols by writing and visiting.
They heard about an operation in Munich,
and they tried it out in one-horse towns called Henderson and Le Sueur.
No surgeon was too far away to visit.
They picked up the latest knowledge about perforated ulcers from Germany,
abdominal surgery from England, diagnosis from a Dane, Fallopian tubes from a Philadelphian.
And one day Charlie made a pilgrimage just to look at Louis Pasteur.
In all, they made over 80 journeys to Europe.
By the 1900s, their fame as surgeons was such that the traffic went into reverse.
The world's doctors came to Rochester. And so would the patients.
They flooded out the offices the brothers shared with their father in an old Masonic building.
Today, this Prairie town, population 50,000,
takes in an annual quarter of a million patients,
mostly medical puzzles coming not to a hospital for prescribed treatment,
but to a clinic for expert diagnosis, the Mayo Clinic.
Every Monday morning, extra chairs are set out for people who start lining up at 6am.
Some have appointments. Some come in hope or desperation.
Nobody, rich or poor, is turned away from this self-endowed and supporting clinic.
Over 70 years ago, the Mayos had come on an organising genius, Henry Plummer,
who devised a filing system, a layout of lights to indicate which specialists are on call,
a system which gave to the doctor the maximum possible time with his patient.
We will get a chest X-ray, an electrocardiogram, some routine blood tests and a urine analysis.
When these are completed, I'll see you again and go over these.
Six-five-eight. Calcified granuloma.
Plummer had the foresight to see that the filing of every patient's medical history
could be a priceless research tool.
And here they are, nearly three million of them, a huge memory bank
contributing to the aim of helping specialists unravel a skein of similar medical puzzles
and arrive at a new diagnosis and better treatment.
Yes, because there were fistulae like crazy, all over the place.
Um...there were multiple ulcers and multiple fistulae.
I think this is very probably Crohn's disease, rather than CUC, though it's recorded as CUC,
From the start, the Mayos had pioneered the practice of teaching as they operated.
What the doctors gained from seeing the minutiae of an operation in a ceiling mirror
was the sense of participation in a problem that could then be discussed at length.
If you all take your stethoscopes, please.
These are not medical students, but physicians come here to advance towards a specialty.
The patient must be on his left side. If you'll turn over on your left side, please.
Then, if you will find the point of maximum impulse.
Gently place the bell of the scope over that area.
You will then hear all the classical findings of mitral stenosis.
- (HEARTBEAT) - There you are.
A loud first heart sound. Second sound, followed by the opening snap.
And then the long, low-frequency hollow diastolic rumble,
ending again in the loud first heart sound.
Do you all hear that? You all do? Fine.
What it all means is that a baffling case
needn't go limping from Houston to London to Tokyo to Berlin.
He comes here and finds 100 variations of his problem filed and on tap in 15 minutes,
and international experts available on a single floor.
The possibilities are thymomas, teratomas and lymphomas.
And...it appears to be extremely large.
Well, things do look pretty bad for him,
but anything that you can do to help us would be appreciated both by the patient and by myself.
I'll introduce you to him. Meantime, take those other films for another patient.
Well, sir, everything looks pretty good on these tests we've been running for you.
The blood tests have come out very well. Your analysis is negative.
The only thing to mention are changes on the chest X-ray, probably due to tuberculosis.
Ah, that would be this, politely called swollen glands when it was taken out at the age of four.
- Due to raw milk? - It was.
We don't see very much of that since milk has all been pasteurised.
It's long-standing. We see it on your old films. We don't have anything but good news for you.
If you want to put your things on, we'll get you released.
Thank you very much.
Charlie Mayo, by the way, had as hard a time as anybody persuading the local farmers
to submit their herds to a tuberculin test or have the milk pasteurised.
They came through with the argument universal among farmers. Took the good out of the milk.
He persuaded them that it also took out the tubercle bacillus.
They yielded when they found it was economically profitable.
Charlie actually founded a demonstration farm which is now a great dairy-producing centre.
I hope you've seen enough to make you think again about the Prairie and its human products.
There's a legend which is accepted everywhere in the cities of Europe and the Eastern seaboard
that whatever's square comes from the Midwest,
that nothing but corn and bigotry are grown on the Prairie and through the rural South.
Well, it may be nauseating to sophisticates,
but they have to think of the hundreds of giants who imbibed their values here in the hinterland
and gave something good to this country,
from Andrew Jackson to Henry Clay,
Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain.
And in our own time, Senator Norris of Nebraska,
Eisenhower of Kansas, Admiral Nimitz of Texas, Frank Lloyd Wright, Sherwood Anderson,
not to mention the boy whose mother said that he ploughed the straightest furrow
in Jackson County, Missouri,
and who became a man able to shoulder the presidency with enough confidence
to coin two immortal political axioms.
"If you don't like the heat, stay out of the kitchen."
And "The buck stops here." Harry S Truman.
Back in 1933, I thought the Prairie was the West.
But after rattling over another 1,000 miles in a second-hand $60 Ford, this was the West,
and I still had another 600 miles to go before I came, at last, to look out on the Pacific.
I was relieved to find it was well named.
You see, I'd been exposed to the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst,
looked out from his castle across to the Orient,
and he seemed to live in a stew of apprehension about either the yellow peril or the red menace.
So much so that I half expected to see the Russian navy ploughing into Monterey Bay.
But I was fascinated to learn later something that may have haunted Hearst.
A century and a half before him, this coastline was really threatened by a Russian invasion.
And all because of this plump and comical animal, a Disney version of Colonel Blimp,
the sea otter.
The Russians were the first to hear about this precious animal,
and they sent ships down from the Aleutians to fish for him in Monterey Bay, his habitat.
Now, at that time, the 1760s, upper California, what we call California, was part of New Spain.
It had been vaguely explored, not settled,
and the only people known to live here were Indians so fierce
that the general who conquered lower California said that to subdue them
you'd need to hire 60 gorillas from Guatemala.
And he wasn't talking about foot soldiers. He was talking about GO-rillas, the beasts.
However, King Charles III of Spain, when he heard about the Russians coming into this bay,
assumed they were going to set up an empire.
All they were out for was the sea otter. When they fished him out, they left.
But King Charles ordered a military expedition to go up from Mexico, build a chain of forts,
and hold the coast of California.
The Spanish conquered California, and it remained Mexican till 1848.
Every spring we're reminded of them
by the mustard seed they scattered along their 600-mile march as a trail for later travellers.
If we follow it north today,
it brings us to San Francisco,
the one city every foreigner falls in love with,
an infatuation which San Franciscans themselves regard as sensible and inevitable.
First, it has a majestic site between an ocean and a spacious bay.
I know no other city so splendid from afar
and so cosy from close quarters.
Seeing it was built on precipitous hills,
the first thing I did was to see the city from its unique form of transport,
cable cars, so-called because they are tethered to a cable running through underground tunnels.
It was an exhilarating surprise to find that the capital of the West exploited its streets
as switchbacks in an amusement park.
What made it possible to build streets and houses all over the nine hills
is the fact that San Francisco is free of frost.
If it weren't, there'd be an unholy pile-up of trucks and cars worthy of a James Bond chase.
Admittedly, it's quite a strain teetering up and down the streets,
but it imposes in a frantic world an easy tempo of life,
not only on the halt and aged, but on you and me.
This leisurely pace gives you the sensation of living in a series of hilly villages,
which somehow compose a city that is huge, but unforbidding.
And it was from the start a polyglot collection of villages.
The Chinese came in to build the railroads.
The Gold Rush brought Yankees, Russians, Scots, Italians, Cornishmen
to rub elbows and to roost.
A tolerant city, where the oddity,
the old and young, the hobbyist, athlete, businessman, hippy and hobo
can, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, do their own thing.
You discover a garden which, somewhere else, would be in a quiet suburb,
but here it's on a rooftop bang in the middle of the city.
I think that's the main thing.
It's the least monolithic of American cities
because most of it was rebuilt in a hurry soon after the earthquake and the fire of 1906.
Not the best period for domestic architecture,
but families then had a prejudice in favour of having their own houses,
crazy, rambling little castles, by force of the geography on many levels,
where you can take the air or hide, garden, work, play, drink
and reproduce the species in an orderly manner.
They have not swept away poky little alleys and gardens.
This, for instance, is a public right of way where you can snooze or squat
and look out on Alcatraz, the old prison fortress for the nation's desperadoes,
who had only this narrow slip of icy water between them and freedom.
19 men tried to swim it. None of them made it.
If one had, he might have been a hero, because San Francisco has cherished far wilder types.
I don't suppose any other city ever brought out 10,000 people for the funeral of a dog.
And a mongrel, at that. It's quite a story.
The dog belonged to a really wild eccentric. An Englishman, naturally.
His name was Joshua Norton.
He was a trader who came here in the Gold Rush year, 1849, but he didn't need the money.
He had $40,000 in his pocket, and he parlayed it into a quarter of a million,
which today would be two or three millions.
Then he tried to corner the rice market, and failed.
And he went broke, and he went barmy.
One day he appeared at a newspaper office with what he said was a proclamation.
And this is how it began.
"At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of the United States,
"I do declare and proclaim myself Emperor of the United States."
Later he added, "Protector of Mexico".
Well, the paper printed it and the whole town rallied to this masquerade.
He was allowed to eat and drink free in all public restaurants.
He had his own currency printed, and it was honoured by the banks, up to 50 cents.
At the theatre, three seats were always reserved on opening nights for him and his two mongrels,
Bummer and Lazarus.
It was Lazarus who died,
and thereafter the Emperor and Bummer sat flanking an empty reserved seat.
He set out each morning to bow to his citizens.
Up at the Presidio, which is the San Francisco military fort,
he was allowed once a year to review his troops.
It was not an easy-going life. As King-Emperor, he conducted his own foreign policy.
He was very devoted to amicable Anglo-American relations,
and during a very sticky period he wired President Lincoln
and commanded him to marry Queen Victoria.
Just for the record, Lincoln let it go.
He had three ideas so insane that the city would not indulge him.
He proposed a league of nations, he urged the building of a great bridge,
he suggested that they pour land into the bay to provide hundreds of acres for new buildings.
All these ideas were considered preposterous until they were acted on.
When he died, 30,000 people turned out,
and today in the San Francisco Cemetery there is a simple grave and a headstone,
and on it, "Norton the First, Emperor of the United States, Protector of Mexico,
"1819 to 1880."
Most cities have some characteristic sound.
The theme song of San Francisco is the bellow of the foghorn.
(FOGHORN)
Far out in the Pacific Ocean is an icy patch of water which is 50 miles long.
And across it the west winds blow, and they condense into plumes of cold, white fog,
which come hurtling in through the Golden Gate Bridge at the speed of freight cars.
This gives the city its air-conditioning system
and guarantees an average temperature in the 60s all through the year,
varying very little more than 5 or 8 degrees,
so that anything over 70 here is a heatwave.
And when that happens, the natives, like Londoners, tend to panic.
Which reminds me of my favourite London newspaper headline.
"73 again tomorrow. No relief in sight."
(FOGHORN)
In the second and last year of my fellowship, I moved to Harvard University.
During my tour, something had dawned on me
that every Englishman since the 17th century has claimed as a personal discovery,
that the English of England and America are separate languages.
So I went to study the American language,
and soon was lucky enough to be corresponding with the greatest living authority.
One morning I had a letter, postmarked Baltimore,
which invited me to "come down here and share with me some of the gorgeous crabs
"that infest the protein factory of Chesapeake Bay."
A highly individual invitation that came from a man who, at one time,
was as influential in America as Bernard Shaw in Britain,
and was the most unforgettable American that I've ever met,
and remains, I believe, the most entertaining journalist of the 20th century, HL Mencken.
He was born the grandson of a German immigrant in Baltimore,
and was brought at the age of three to this typical row house by his father, a cigar maker.
He never left it, though he was offered fat money to move to New York,
which he dismissed as a third-rate Babylon.
He wanted none of his father's cigar business and decided to become a newspaperman,
and so lay in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant,
a bartender, a shyster lawyer and a midwife.
He was an unbeliever in every pillar of the establishment,
from labour leaders and chiropractors to bishops and presidents.
President Coolidge, for example, slept more than any president before or since.
When an excited reporter rushed in to announce that Coolidge was dead,
Mencken said, "How do they know?"
And he promptly sat down and wrote Coolidge's epitaph.
"He had no ideas and was not a nuisance."
Mencken was the terror of the churches, the politicians, all respectable people,
and the delight of college intellectuals.
There was a time in the 1920s when his campus followers carried this magazine around
as reverently as the Chinese, so we are told, carry "The Thoughts Of Chairman Mao".
He started this magazine, and in it he undertook his most serious and best crusade,
to destroy what he called "the marshmallow gentility" of the then current American fiction,
and to throw the doors open to the new and the young realists,
to Theodore Dreiser and James T Farrell and James M Cain and Scott Fitzgerald
and O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis.
In fact, he launched the first body of genuinely first-rate native American literature.
The odd thing about my friendship with him was that I amalgamated in one person
every human type he disliked.
He distrusted Englishmen, abominated radio broadcasting, which became my trade.
He said that broadcasters suffered from "perfumed tonsils".
He despised Methodists, and I had been brought up as one.
As for golf, which I regard as a holy exercise, if not a marvellous mania,
he wrote, "If I had my way, any man guilty of golf
"would be ineligible for any office of trust under these United States."
Well, human chemistry, as it can, prevailed over a lifelong prejudice.
And, like many another giant of idiosyncrasy,
he astonished his opponents by being in private so mild, so courteous,
preferring, as he said, "an opponent who fights like a gentleman in a duel
"to a sailor cleaning out a waterfront saloon."
Well, I, being terrified of violence, found a link in that. And there were others.
He taught me first, and I confirmed it many times on the road,
that there's no such thing as ideological truth.
To the extent that a reporter is a liberal reporter,
or a communist or a conservative or a republican reporter, he's no reporter at all.
Well, he was floored by the Depression.
To jeer at democracy when it paid off in steaks and a car in every garage was one thing.
To pipe the same tune in the unfunny days of 13 million unemployed, that was another.
His fame dwindled, and he devoted himself to his old hobby of the language,
adding two volumes to the incomparable original.
And then he sat down and wrote his memoir.
By now, he was no longer a reporter on the hop.
But every four years he pinned on his press badge
and he went off to cover what he called "the nine-ring circuses"
of the presidential nominating conventions.
I was with him at the last convention he ever attended - Philadelphia, 1948.
It was a third party convention of a renegade Democrat, Henry Wallace,
who assembled a very motley army of disciples.
When it was all over, we were sitting around in a hotel suite when the door burst open
and we were invaded by a posse of young radicals looking for the villain, Mencken.
It was a very touchy moment, but he solved it by getting down on his feet.
I say "down" because he was smaller standing up than he was sitting down.
He asked them to rise and honour his guest, me, by singing "God Save The King".
Which they did. Then he fed them beer and sandwiches.
I remember there was a...there was a girl, grim, sweaty, unpalatable.
And Mencken kept looking, and he put his glasses on and he goggled at her.
And then he leaned over and he whispered to me, "Look at that girl.
"Makes you want to burn every bed in the world."
Well, it was his last happy fling.
Three months later, he had a stroke, and he was never able to read or write again.
Through his last years, he sat at home, surrounded by an ocean of books,
like a castaway sailor, mocked by the one element that he had loved and mastered.
But while he was alive and kicking, he skinned everything in America
that he thought pretentious, shoddy, pompous and glossily second-rate.
And when high gifts are at hand, nobody can skin America like an American.
He didn't give a damn and he couldn't be bought,
though he was offered fortunes to do some other man's bidding.
When I was a starting newspaperman, he gave me this advice.
"Never accept a free ticket from a theatre manager,
"a free ride from the Chamber of Commerce or a favour from a politician.
"That way," he said, "you will find that shaving in the morning
"can be a relatively agreeable pastime."
He died in his 76th year, listening to his favourite composer, Beethoven.
He was a lifelong atheist, and we don't know where he is now.
But when someone asked him what would happen if he found himself in heaven,
he said, "If I do fetch up with the twelve Apostles, I shall say, 'Gentlemen, I was wrong."'
After the influence of this man, I realised at the end of the two years of my first stay
that the one indelible memory of America was the landscape of the West.
Most of all, those mammoth canyons
which white men stumbled on, and incorporated a century ago into a national park system.
Here in two canyons in Utah, Zion and Bryce, a geologist can think he's gone to heaven
and count the layers of gravel and lime and silica and iron
which were carved into these fantasies by nothing but water, wind, rain, snow and frost
through 20 million years.
But the rest of us don't even peer to look for the embedded fossils
of trees, snails and dinosaurs.
We simply stand dumbfounded before these natural cathedrals,
a visual expression of the straightforward grandeur of Johann Sebastian Bach.
(CHOIR SINGING)
Here, man himself is a Johnny-come-lately.
And it was here, I was amazed to discover, that America was settled.
Not in Florida or Virginia or Massachusetts.
It was in this sort of country that men who had come from Asia made the first American homes.
This is where it all started, and this is where we shall begin our history
of the land that became the United States of America.