Immigrant work ethic

I was going to begin by quoting the two kind gentlemen who called on Scrooge for a contribution to the fund for poor children. I think it goes: 'At this festive season of the year...’, but I'm not sure about 'festive' and I have no quick way of checking it.

It's true that at least two copies of The Christmas Carol are about 27 feet from where I'm sitting if I walk along an L-shaped route six yards to my study door and three yards to the left into the living room but Vincent is in sole possession of the living room. Vincent is the painter. And the bookcases are cloaked in sheets tied down so as not to flap around and trip him on his way to the paint pots. Anyway, he's slapping away there, at the moment, and I'd rather not burrow under the sheets to find that doubtful word and run the risk of being splattered with coral. With what? 

I think I ought to explain, just to bring you up to date on what's happening in America that the Cookes – or rather the only Cooke who gives the orders in this household – she's decided that we've had the green colour on the living room walls long enough. It was never meant to be green. For years and years we had a colour known to the experts as 'El Greco Bronze' but last time the man made it too green and the fanciest name you could give it now would be 'El Greco Jaundice.' So, it's giving way to what is called 'Coral' and I believe coral it will be since this time my wife, who is by trade a painter, not a Hitler-type housepainter but one whose works are framed and suitable for hanging or even selling, she mixed the coral and coral it will be. 

Vincent came from Italy long ago, though from the way he talks you'd think he'd sailed in from Florence last week. Vincent's troubles with the language have their compensations for us. At any rate, he has, I should guess, never heard of the work ethic and so he's never thought of ridiculing it. So Vincent arrived, two days ago, moved all the furniture out of an entrance hall which is 35 feet long and eight feet wide, stripped and prepared the walls, plastered the cracks, laid on the base coat and so on, and next day he painted what I figure must be about 700 square feet of surface (not counting the ceiling), say, a thousand square feet in all plus an extra glossy coat on seven doors. He couldn't use a roller all the way and proceed smoothly like a man mowing a lawn, because at regular intervals there are mouldings and inside the mouldings there are rectangular panels of another colour which have to be edged very delicately. 

Now this is the sort of project which, with a lot of delicacy and unstinting energy, I'm pretty sure I could finish in a month. Well, I went away on Wednesday when he was plastering cracks and preparing a tattered stretch of the ceiling damaged last summer by the spill over from our hurricane (we live next to the roof) and I came back next evening, Thursday, and the hall was finished with all the furniture, carpets and whatnot back in place. He'd by then moved into the living room. He'd done all the tedious preparation and today he's finished the primer coat which, I'm alarmed to tell you, is baby pink. But by tomorrow, he says, the dark coral will be on, he'll have glazed it and done a glossy coat on two doors and he promises to be out of the house by twilight tomorrow, with all the furniture and fixings back – by which time, if you can only wait, I can tell you what was the word the two charitable gentlemen used on Scrooge. 

However, I got on to Vincent because it strikes me he doesn't think of himself as a dynamo or the all-American working man. He's a gentle, roly-poly apple-cheeked, first-rate pro and – this you'll find hard to believe – very easy-going. Easy-going but expert going. Breaks, sure enough: on the dot of noon, is back on the dot of 1 p.m. and out of the house on the dot of 3 p.m. He certainly abides by the union rules, he's at it as the clock strikes 7 a.m. He doesn't whistle while he works, he props up on any available flat surface a little transistor radio and he keeps it tuned to one of our stations which plays nothing but classical music. So, today, for instance, he's been slapping and niggling away to bits of Mozart and stretches of Verdi. In short, here's a man who arrived on Wednesday morning, due to leave at 3 p.m. on Friday having painted in two colours a thousand square feet of surface, also a living room 25 feet by ten requiring preparation, primer coat, base coat, different top coat, and a glazing job, not to mention the separate glossy coat on nine doors, the whole works done without puffing, protestation or malingering in three stretches or 24 hours in all. 

Of course he suffers from certain disadvantages other than his shortcomings with the language. He's Italian by birth and prejudice and, luckily for us, he's never heard of a tea break. I can hear some bigots thinking aloud that he must be an extraordinary sort of Italian. The bigotry, I impute, comes from that old prejudice about national character which says that Italians are adorable, except in Sicily, and slap happy and far from expert in anything but laying old stone and brick and eating pasta. 

It reminds me of the time during the Second War which Eisenhower attested to in his memoir, when the advance up through the Italian boot was going too slowly, partly because the army engineers were proceeding sluggishly with the repair of bridges, viaducts and such. Now Eisenhower, and whatever you may say about him as a non-Field General, had one vein of genius in his character, if ever character can be genius. 

This man, born in deepest Texas and brought up in small-town Kansas, somehow grew up with absolutely no preconceptions about the innate virtues or failings of national character. He looked into the record of any given army division, battalion or whatever, was somehow able to ignore completely the natural prejudices with which we're all infected from birth, and gave a job to the people best able to cope with it. When the bridge building was going along badly in Italy, he didn't get off a gung-ho memo to the commander of the US Engineers and say, 'Ginger things up!' He sat down, looked over the forces available, the British, the Americans, some partisans I suppose and the Italian army and said of course the best army engineers are the Italians and handed the job over to them. 

Well, I don't mean to get trapped into the complimentary prejudice that all Italians make the best house painters. A few years ago, the man in this house – it's an apartment house, a block of flats if you will, with 70 apartments in all or 406 rooms – ah... Vincent, he has no helper, by the way, lives his working life moving up and down the building painting endlessly, like the men who clean the windows of the Empire State Building. Start at the bottom, go to the top, take a 103-storey drop to the bottom and begin again. 

I was saying, the painter, a few years ago used to be Sam, a Russian. He was a problem child the moment he looked the job over. He spotted every snag, every tiresome obstacle in the way of painting the place at all. He complained, he sighed, he grumbled, he'd do his best – a warning that it would be a pretty patchy job at best. And then he came back, started to sing in a continuous wobbly baritone and finished in just the same time as Vincent, never a wobble in the line dividing one colour from the next. 

Well, when I began, I hadn't intended to mention Vincent at all, I was going somewhere, though I can't think where, with that quotation from Dickens. But I kept hearing that Verdi which is not what I usually dream up the prose by and I just read a piece in the New York Times about a labour dispute which was laying down stipulations about making work and setting limits to double time and other niceties of pay scales and it struck me that maybe Vincent is an innocent. Maybe his sons and grandsons will have caught on and learn there's no obligation to do that huge painting chore in three days. 

I recall the bitter but true comment of Henry Frick, the steel king, who noticed the way immigrant labour was wonderfully satisfying to the employer when it was first generation, but how, when the next wave of innocence arrived, the last one began to get tough about working conditions, and rightly so. Mr Frick, seeing the mills idle in the middle of a long and fractious strike, said, 'The immigrant, however dumb, however illiterate, always learns too soon.' Vincent, evidently, hasn't learned. 

However, I also think of Mr Mencken's lament more than a generation ago that 'competence', just sheer competence was vanishing from the modern world and his sighing afterthought, 'The older I grow, the more I have come to admire competence in any field, from adultery to zoology.' 

Oh! I remember what it was now about Scrooge and Co. I had a letter the other day from an Englishman, I gather either a clergyman or a lay preacher, who wanted me to send him a quotation, or rather to recall and cable to him 'the explanation you gave to a small child on what Christmas was all about. You must have done this talk,' he says, 'about 15 years ago.' 15 years ago!! My dear Mr Scrooge that's at least 750 talks ago. I don't sit down and fashion these talks like medieval illuminated manuscripts. I don't make careful notes through the week, put together a set of orderly newspaper cuttings and then inscribe my thoughts in Tudor Gothic on vellum, I look at this microphone and say what comes to mind and, 20 minutes ago, Vincent was no more than a slight, if amiable nuisance next door, what with the pipings from Verdi and wrapping my books in bed sheets and all, he was just an interference with what I had thought of talking about – Jimmy Carter's Cabinet. 

Still, I thought of this optimistic parson who wants to tell his flock next Sunday what Christmas is all about. All I can guess is that long ago I made the quaint point, which has probably escaped the last two generations, that Christmas has nothing to do with office parties or boosting the economy or decorating department stores with a thousand light bulbs. It has to do, if I may be dogmatic, with the birth in Bethlehem of a Jewish child, who for 20 centuries transformed the thoughts and feelings of at least one-third of the population of the world. By now the origins of this festival are as forgotten as the myths of Odin or the Saxon gods. 

Having said which, may I send you the old-fashioned wish for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.