Holiday in San Francisco - 30 March 1984

People have started to talk. I don’t know if that phrase is as rife among gossips as it was in my childhood, but whenever I heard the grown-ups use it, normally in a low confidential voice, it was as sure a signal of scandal on the way, as a police siren.

Well as I say, people have started to talk, friends of mine tell me that other friends, or, it would be better to say not friends but acquaintances, mutter among themselves, why does he keep going to San Francisco, has he got a girl out there? What’s the scam?

Well, the immediate answer is yes, he has, she is sitting about twelve feet away from me, and is reading The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s splendid account of the training of an astronaut crew which has been made into a less splendid movie, less only because you cannot transmit into movie, or any other medium, the prose genes of a man who writes as well as Wolfe.

Thirty-eighty years ago, she – the girl in San Francisco – was sitting at about the same distance in the identical location reading John Hersey’s A Bell For Adano, while I was here, beating out on the machine a new weekly talk which was then only a month old. It was, not to be too coy about it, called Letter From America.

We were here, on our honeymoon. San Francisco seemed an almost compulsory honeymoon stop for a girl – I’d better say woman if I don’t want to inflame the liberationists – for a woman who, having a Texan for a mother, had been in Texas surely but herself born in the east had, like so many of my eastern friends, never been west. It was then, as it is now, a glittering morning of the sort that makes you think your eyesight has miraculously improved, to the point where you could qualify as a pilot with a major airline.

Unavoidably I cannot help recalling that memorable visit here. We had for the first time flown across the country, an amazing experience, taking only I think fifteen hours for a journey which we did yesterday in five hours. But the wild, unforgettable memory is of the morning after our arrival here, and as I say, the silver glittering day and our deciding to drive over into Berkeley and up into the hills and picnic in a beautiful mountainous compound known as Tioga Pass.

Every town in every country the tourists flock to has some temple, monument, plaza, that has to be visited. San Francisco, to a stranger then, instantly tapped the image impressed by a score of movies of the sinister island in the middle of the bay, which in those days, housed under heavy lock and key, so to speak, the most ferocious and incorrigible criminals in the United States. The ones who had been caught, that is. Alcatraz.

And as we were driving across the four-and-a-half mile span that connects the mainland with the San Francisco peninsula, not the Golden Gate but the Bay Bridge, my new wife said, of course, "Where is Alcatraz?" I scanned the horizon back over my shoulder, and saw a plume or puff of smoke, rising no doubt from a chimney, on Alcatraz. I said, "You see that white puff of smoke way to the left there, that is Alcatraz."

We went on our way and we had our picnic and came back to the hotel to be stopped in the lobby by a thundering headline in the evening paper. It said, "Mutiny at Alcatraz. Guards shot, besieged". The puff of smoke was the whiff of grapeshot. Wouldn’t it happen to a journalist who had just received from his editor a blessing and a two weeks holiday? It was indeed, the famous, the never-to-be repeated, Alcatraz mutiny.

Next day, I wasted no time in dalliance with the bride, called the police and then the warden of Alcatraz and as soon as the mutineers had been as the papers put it, "Quelled", I was on a boat, with a posse of cops and one priest and heading for the island. The warden took me all over the wreckage (not much), indicated through bars the sulky villains, gave me lunch – the regular inmate lunch in the prison dining room, soup, sole, salad, pudding as I recall and very nice too. And by night I was back in the hotel room and beating out the story, which I remember filing with Western Union, by the dawn's early light.

Any baleful sceptic who doubts this whole story can rifle through the files of the-then Manchester Guardian and find it, as a lead piece for I am far from the records – some such date as May 2 or 3, 1946. So, to go back to the beginning question, muttered by acquaintances in the east, why does he keep going to San Francisco.

Well, I have decided to answer this question by pretending that I have a house in Bermuda. If you have a house in Bermuda or Jamaica or Saint Martin, or some other sun-drenched semi-tropical island, nobody asks you why you are going there. "Sorry," my secretary would say, "he has gone to his house in Bermuda" and nobody would follow up with why... obviously, it's the place he escapes to every so often, after a load of work has been unloaded.

Well, that's what I use San Francisco for. I do not myself care for holidays amid the lakes or the mountains, and for many years, I have been beyond the age when I long to stretch on a beach and turn into a lobster, and swim and eat and snooze and drink and otherwise run to seed. I have had the Bahamas, and the Caribbean, and all the other waterlogged islands in a thousand spots of the earth, where you live in the identical hotel, look down on the identical pool, lie spread-eagled by day in blinding sun and pick up skin cancer, and at sundown belly up to the identical bar and exchange excitable nothings with all the other identical patients.

I like cities, as holiday centres and among them all there are two favourites. You might not, as the old saw said about New York, you might not want to live there, but they are great places to visit, namely London and San Francisco. So then, I am here on holiday. Sharp linguistic scholars will be quick to notice that even after more than 40 years residence in this country, I still fall into the English usage about which Americans, still kid – the limey’s on holiday, in hospital.

Well it’s true that I have come through a batch of work and, what is more tedious, a blizzard of mail especially from insistent correspondents who think they are the only people whoever write, and this break was planned some time ago. But apart from the chief remaining aim of my life, to lower my golf handicap, there is another reason, much more than plausible, which persuades me to come out to this city by the bay, four or five times a year, not in pursuit of pleasure exclusively and the lowered handicap, but in pursuit of my job, the reporting of life, in these United States.

May I briefly remind you of the day now, almost 40 years ago, when my Guardian editor, the shrewd, unfooled little Lancashire man, Alfred Wadsworth, appointed me as the Guardian’s first full-time correspondent in the United States, when I assumed, as all foreign editors would assume, that their man should post himself permanently in Washington.

How I found this move awkward since the about-to-be wife, a war widow with two children, had those children already in New York schools with their roots and friendships there. I wrote a lacklustre letter to Wadsworth, saying with an infinite lack of enthusiasm that I suppose I ought to be packing for Washington, no head of a foreign bureau has ever lived anywhere else.

To my surprise and relief he replied, "Not at all, you can always commute to Washington from time to time. But our readers want to hear about America. Not about Washington." The strange and happy effect of this was not to make me settle complacently in New York, but to feel obliged fairly regularly to get up and go. Off on safari to all the regions, where I could meet every type of American and come close to their different lives.

Well, this hopping impulse has obviously flagged a little down the years, but it’s still necessary and I think it’s still a stimulant, to watch American life as far as possible from the insular preoccupations of the isle of Manhattan. San Francisco is so far – not, since Hawaii became the 50th state, as far as possible – but far enough away, from the political and ethnic and social mixture of the east, to remind you vividly and periodically that New York is not America. It is, of course, nowhere else.

So, for the next two weeks I shall revert to the tack of noticing what is on the mind of Americans who live in a climate different, thank the lord, from New York, who look across the Pacific and think of Korea and China as often as they think of remote Europe, and who do not spend their days and nights wondering if the inimitable Mayor Koch will stay with Walter Mundale for the presidency. Or fret about the hideous graffiti on the New York underground cars. Or believe, as all New Yorkers do believe, that New York is the capital of thought and food and literature and fashion, and who share Balzac’s view of the great metropolis when he said, "There are many sorts of Parisian; there is only one sort of provincial woman".

The first thing that strikes me here, then, and it must be for now the only item of this western chronicle, is the visit out here of Monsieur Mitterand, the French president. He came to visit the University of California at Berkeley, and also Stamford University. Why? Because he knows that in the past decade, more Nobel Prize winners in science have come from these two universities than from any other two on earth.

Or as he put it, this region has helped to produce the development in the scientific and technological fields that has hardly ever been equalled. His visit marked the setting-up of an exchange programme between French universities and Berkeley, for the main purpose of sharing this revolutionary knowledge in microchips in technology, in medicine.

I ought to add, by the way, that once Monsieur Mitterand was done with Washington officialdom he flew down to Atlanta, Georgia to visit the home of the late Reverend Martin Luther King. Because, he said, Dr King is one of those men whose message has left its mark on modern times. And, whose sacrifice gave a painful dimension to his life, and his message.

This, I submit, was an imaginative act which I wish some other western leaders had the gumption to think of. With or without the prodding of public relations men.

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