From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

They were all wrong. In spite of the private anxiety which gnawed at our hearts, we did enjoy Atlantic City. We enjoyed it all the more because we went there out of season. It is our deliberate practice to visit places of this kind out of season, and the date of the production of our play at Atlantic City was a most fortunate one for us. We no longer want to revel. The time for that is past for us, but we do want to understand, and we seem to get nearer that when the chief side shows are closed, when the hotels are being painted, and when the sea has given up the attempt to sparkle and look cheerful. In one of Mr. Anthony Hope's novels there is a statesman of great craftiness who warns a Prince Consort that he must not think he knows the Queen, his wife, because he is allowed to see her in her stays. I daresay there is a good deal in the warning. But I cannot help feeling that you would understand a queen better if you saw her frequently, let us say in her dressing gown, than if you never saw her except in her robes of state, with the crown royal firmly fixed on her head with hairpins. It must be the same with pleasure cities. One knows them, not well, but a little better when they have tucked up their skirts, put on old blouses and turned to the task of cleaning up after the festivities.

It is more instructive to walk along the broad sea front of Blackpool through a fine chill mist of January rain than to stand there on a blazing August day when the colliers' week of holiday is in full swing. Deeper thoughts come to him who gazes at the forlorn rows of notices that lodgings are to let within than to him who hurries through street after street, looking for some place in which to lay his head. I am sure that I catch the essential spirit of the Lido when the November sea is brown, when the sands are drab, when the thousands of bathing boxes stand locked and empty, than I would if smiling wavelets enticed plump Germans to splash in them and bruat paars lingered, indecently affectionate, in the shadows behind. I did once, accidentally, see Portrush in the very height of its season, and it was a disappointment to me. Bevies of girls, hatless but with hair elaborately dressed, paraded the streets with their arms round each others' waists. Critical young men, in well-creased suits of the kind supposed to be suitable for yachting, watched other girls being taught to swim in a deep pool. Nursemaids helped children to build sand castles. Mothers of forty years of age or thereabouts sat uncomfortably knitting with their backs against the rocks. More than five thousand people carried hand cameras about. Lovers, united for a day or two, wrote each others' names in huge letters on the sand, where the retiring tide had left it smooth and dry. There was too much to feel, far too much to think about. I grew confused and desperate. I could not understand. Out of season the observer has a better chance. If Portrush confused me, Atlantic City, seen in its full glory, would have bewildered me utterly. Also out of season I am not tormented with vain regrets. I am spared the vexation of feeling that a yachting suit, carefully creased, would no longer lift my heart up to the skies. It is not forced upon me that my pulses no longer throb wildly at the sight of girls who smile. I do not think how sad it is that I shall never again want to win the applause of a crowd by taking a header into deep water from a giddy height. I am glad that we visited Atlantic City out of season.

I forget how many piers Atlantic City has, but it is unusually rich in these structures, and I have no doubt that the builders of them were wise. A pier makes an irresistible appeal to the pleasure-seeker. He would rather dance on a pier, under proper shelter, of course, and on a good floor, than in a well-appointed salon on solid land. He would rather eat ices on a pier than in an ordinary shop, though he has to pay more for them, the cost of the ice being the same and the two pence for entry into the enchanted region being an extra. A cinematograph show draws more customers if it is on a pier. The reason of this is that the normal and properly constituted holiday-maker wants to get as much sea as he can. When he is not in it he likes to have it all round him, or as nearly all round him as possible without going in a boat. Boats, for several reasons, are undesirable. They sometimes make people sick. They are expensive. They demand an undivided allegiance. You cannot have a cinematograph, for instance, in a boat. The nearest thing to a boat is a pier. It is almost surrounded by the sea. That is why piers are a regular feature of up-to-date pleasure cities, and why Atlantic City has so many of them. It is all to the credit of our revelers that they love to be near the sea, to feel it round them, to hear it splashing under their feet. The sea is the cleanest thing there is. You can vulgarize it, but it is almost impossible, except at the heads of long estuaries, to dirty it. It seems as if pleasure-seekers, who are also seekers of the sea, must be essentially clean people, clean-hearted, otherwise they would not feel as strongly impelled as they evidently do to get into touch with the ocean. And it is real ocean at Atlantic City. Far out one sees ships passing, the lean three-masted schooners of the American coasting trade, trawlers in fleets, tramp steamers, companionless things, all of these given to the real business of the sea, not to pleasure voyaging. The eye lingers on them, and it is hard afterwards to adjust the focus of the mental vision to the long wooden parade, itself almost a pier, the flaunting sky signs, the innumerable tiny shops where every kind of useless thing is sold. Atlantic City has, indeed, some boats of its own, boats which go out from a haven tucked away behind the north corner of the parade, and pass up and down across the sea front. Their sails are covered with huge advertisements of cigarettes and chewing gums. They are manned, no doubt, by the kind of longshoremen who cater for the trippers' pleasure. They have in them as passengers whoever in America corresponds to the London cockney. Among ships which sail these are surely as the women of the streets. But you cannot altogether degrade a boat. She retains some pathetic remnant of her dignity, even if you make her sails into advertisement hoardings. It was good to watch these boats, their masts set far forward, after the American catboat fashion, making short, swift tacks among the sand banks over which the Atlantic rollers foamed threateningly.

It is easy to understand why the shops along seafronts of places like Atlantic City are for the most part devoted to the sale of useless things. Picture postcards I reckon to be very nearly useless. They give a transient gleam of pleasure to the buyer, none at all to the person who receives them. The whole class of goods called souvenirs is entirely useless. The photographs taken by seaside artists are not such as can give any satisfaction to the sitters afterwards. Yet the impulse to buy these things and to be photographed is almost irresistible. We yielded, not to the seductions of the photographers, nor to the lure of the souvenir-sellers, but with shameless self-abandonment to the postcard shops. I found it very hard to pass any of them without buying. I still have many of the Atlantic City postcards, and I look at them whenever I feel in danger of growing conceited in order to reduce myself to a proper condition of humility. We also—moved by what strange impulse?—bought several instruments for cutting up potatoes. Under ordinary circumstances a potato-chopper has no attractions whatever for me. I could pass a shop window filled with them and not feel one prick of covetous desire. And Atlantic City, of all places in the world, was for us—I suppose in some degree for every visitor—most unsuitable for the purchase of kitchen utensils. We knew, even while we bought them, that we should have to haul them with us round America and back across the Atlantic, that they would be a perpetual nuisance to us all the time, and in all probability no use whatever when we got them home. Yet we bought them. If the dollar we spent on them had been the last we possessed we should have bought them all the same. Such is the strange effect of places like Atlantic City on people who are in other places sane enough. I can analyze and understand the impulse well enough though I cannot resist it. It is the holiday spirit of the place which gets a hold on visitors. All a whole long year we commonplace people, who are not millionaires, are spending our money warily on things of carefully calculated usefulness. We watch each shilling and see that it buys its full worth of something which will make life more tolerable or pleasant. Then comes the brief holiday, and with it the sudden loosing of all bonds of ordinary restraint. Our souls revolt against spending money on things which are any real good to us. We want, we are compelled to fling it from us, asking in exchange nothing but trifles light as air. In desperate reaction against the tyranny of domestic economics we even insist on buying things, like potato cutters, which will be an actual encumbrance to us afterwards.

Cowper represents John Gilpin's wife as insisting on taking her own wine on a pleasure party and writes of her that

"Though on pleasure she was bent

She had a frugal mind."

I refuse to believe that of any human being, and I count Cowper a good poet but a bad psychologist. The man who brought a load of potato-cutters down to Atlantic City was probably not a poet at all, but he had a profound knowledge of human nature. He knew that he would sell the things there. It was the place of all places in the world for his trade. It is a high tribute to Atlantic City as a holiday resort that it forced us to buy two of these machines. None of the other pleasure cities we have visited have had such a drastic effect upon us. Postcards we yield to everywhere. Even the dreariest of second-rate watering places can sell them to us. In Blackpool I found a paper-knife irresistible. In Portrush I once bought a colored mug. Atlantic City alone could have sold me potato-choppers, two of them.

In towns and rural districts where men and women live their ordinary lives, work, love and ultimately die, it is the rarest thing possible to see any grown person wheeled about in a perambulator or bath chair. Occasionally some pitiful victim of a surgeon's skill is lifted out of the door of a nursing home and placed tenderly in one of these vehicles. He is wheeled about in the fresh air in obedience to the doctor's orders, no doubt in hope that he will recover sufficient strength to make another operation possible. But a bath chair, even now when surgery has become a recognized form of sport, is a very unusual sight. In all pleasure cities it is quite common. In Brighton, for instance, or at Bournemouth, any one who can, with any chance of being believed, represent himself as an invalid, takes advantage of his infirmity to get himself wheeled about in a bath chair. At international exhibitions and in some of the greater picture galleries which are also pleasure resorts it is generally possible to hire a bath chair. Atlantic City, being, as I believe, the greatest of all such places, has devised a kind of glorified perambulator, something far more seductive than a bath chair. It has room for two in it, and this in itself is a great advance. It has the neatest imaginable hood, which you can pull over you in case of rain or if you desire privacy. It looks something like a very small but sumptuously appointed motor car.

You need not even pretend to be a cripple in Atlantic City in order to make good your right to enter one of these chairs. All sorts of people, brisk-looking young girls and men whose limbs are plainly sound, are wheeled about, not only shamelessly but with evident enjoyment. There are immense numbers of these vehicles, more, surely, than there are invalids in the whole world. Out of season, when we saw them, they are absurdly cheap, almost the only thing in America except oysters and chocolates, and, curiously enough, silk stockings, which are cheap judged by European standards. I longed very earnestly to go in one of these vehicles, but at the last moment I always shrank from the strangeness of it. Neither the taxi of the London streets nor the outside car of my native land ever made so strong an appeal to me as these perambulators of Atlantic City. I suppose it was the holiday spirit of the place again. Girls and young men, certainly middle-aged men, would feel like fools if they sat in perambulators anywhere else, but it is a sweet and pleasant thing—according to a Latin poet who must have known—to play the fool in the proper place. Atlantic City is the proper place. Hence the enormous numbers of perambulators.