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

by George A. Birmingham

I had been told that before I left home. I had even been advised by an experienced traveler to jot down, during the voyage out, all the things I thought about America, and have them ready on slips of paper to hand to the interviewers when I arrived. This plan, I was assured, would save me trouble and would give the Americans a high opinion of my business ability. I took the advice. I had quite a number of excellent remarks about America ready in my pocket when I landed. They were no use to me. Not one single interviewer asked me that question. Not even the one who chatted with me in the evening of the day on which I left for home. I do not know why I was not asked this question. Every other stranger who goes to America is asked it, or at all events says he is asked it. Perhaps the Americans have ceased to care what any stranger thinks about them. Perhaps they were uninterested only in my opinion. I can understand that.

Nor was I tempted or goaded to talk about religion. The warning which I got to avoid that subject was wasted. No one seemed to care what I believed. I do not think I should have startled the very youngest interviewer if I had confided to him that I believed nothing at all. The nearest I ever got to religion in an interview was when I was asked what I thought about Ulster and Home Rule. That I was asked frequently, almost as frequently as I was asked what I thought of Synge's "Playboy of the Western World"; and both these seemed to me just the sort of questions I ought to be asked, if, indeed, I ought to be asked any questions at all. I do not, indeed cannot, think about Ulster and Home Rule. Nobody can. It is one of those things, like the fourth dimension, which baffle human thought. Just as you hope that you have got it into a thinkable shape it eludes you and you see it sneering at your discomfiture from the far side of the last ditch. But it was quite right and proper to expect that an Irishman, especially an Irishman who came originally from Belfast, would have something to say about it, some thought to express which would illuminate the morass of that controversy. I could not complain about being asked that question. I ought to have had something to say about Synge's play, too, but I had not. I think it is a wonderful play, by far the greatest piece of dramatic literature that Ireland has produced; but I cannot give any reasons for the faith that is in me. Therefore, I am afraid I must have been a most unsatisfactory subject for the interviewers. They cannot possibly have liked me.

I, on the other hand, liked them very much indeed. I found them delightful to talk to, and look back on the hours I spent with them as some of the most interesting of my whole American trip. They all, without exception, seemed to want to be pleasant. They were the least conceited set of people I ever came across and generally apologized for coming to see me. The apologies were entirely unnecessary. Their visits were favors conferred on me. They were strictly honorable. When, as very often happened, I said something particularly foolish and became conscious of the fact, I used to ask the interviewer to whom I had said it not to put it in print. He always promised to suppress it and he always kept his promise, though my sillinesses must often have offered attractive copy. Nor did any interviewer ever misrepresent me, except when he failed to understand what I said, and that must always have been more my fault than his. At first I used to be very cautious with interviewers and made no statements of any kind without hedging. I used to shy at topics which seemed dangerous, and trot away as quickly as I could to something which offered opportunity for platitudes. I gradually came to realize that this caution was unnecessary. I would talk confidently now to an American interviewer on any subject, even religion, for I know he would not print anything which I thought likely to get me into trouble.

I cannot understand how it is that American interviewers have such a bad reputation on this side of the Atlantic. They are a highly intelligent, well-educated body of men and women engaged in the particularly difficult job of trying to get stupid people, like me, or conceited people to say something interesting. They never made any attempt to pry into my private affairs. They never asked obviously silly questions. I have heard of people who resorted to desperate expedients to avoid interviewers in America. I should as soon think of trying to avoid a good play or any other agreeable form of entertainment. After all, there is no entertainment so pleasant as conversation with a clever man or woman. I have heard of people who were deliberately rude to interviewers and gloried in their rudeness afterwards. That seems to me just as grave a breach of manners as to say insolent things to a host or hostess at a dinner party.

Every now and then an interviewer, using a very slender foundation of fact, produces something which is brilliantly amusing. There was one, with whom I never came into personal contact at all, who published a version of a conversation between Miss Maire O'Neill and me. What we actually said to each other was dull enough. The interviewer, by the simple expedient of making us talk after the fashion which "Mr. Dooley" has made popular, represented us as exceedingly interesting and amusing people. No one but a fool would resent being flattered after this fashion.

The one thing which puzzles me about the business is why the public wants it done. It is pleasant enough for the hero of the occasion, and it is only affectation to call him a victim. The man who does the work, the interviewer, is, I suppose, paid. He ought to be paid very highly. But where does the public come in? It reads the interview—we must, I think, take it for granted that somebody reads interviews, but it is very difficult to imagine why. The American public, judging from the number of interviews published, seems particularly fond of this kind of reading. Yet, however clever the interviewer, the thing must be dull in nine cases out of ten.

My first interviewer, my very first, photographed me. I told him that he was wasting a plate, but he went on and wasted three. Why did he do it? If I were a very beautiful woman I could understand it, though I think it would be a mistake to photograph Venus herself on the gangway of a steamer at eight o'clock in the morning in a downpour of rain. If I had been a Christian missionary who had been tortured by Chinese, I could understand it. Tortures might have left surprising marks on my face or twisted my spine in an interesting way. If I had been an apostle of physical culture, dressed in a pair of bathing drawers and part of a tiger skin, the photographing would have been intelligible. But I am none of these things. What pleasure could the public be expected to find in the reproduction of a picture of a common place middle-aged man? Yet the thing was done. I can only suppose that reading interviews and looking at the attendant photographs has become a habit with the American public, just as carrying a walking stick has with the English gentleman. A walking stick is no real use except to a lame man. The walker does not push himself along with it. He does not, when he sets out from home, expect to meet any one whom he wants to hit. It cannot be contended that the stick is ornamental or adds in any way to the beauty of his appearance. He carries it because he always does carry it and would feel strange if he did not. The Americans put up with interviews in their papers for the same sort of reason. After all, no one, least of all the subject, has any right to complain.

Those were our two first impressions of America, that it was a country of boundless hospitality and a country pervaded by agreeable newspaper men. I am told by those who make a study of such things that the first glance you get at a face tells you something true and reliable about the man or woman it belongs to, but that you get no further information by looking at the face day after day for months. When you come to know the man or woman really well, and have studied his actions and watched his private life closely for years, you find, if you still recollect what it was, that your first impression was right. I knew an Englishman once who lived for ten years in Ireland and was deeply interested in our affairs. He told me that when he had been a week in the country he understood it, understood us and all belonging to us thoroughly. At the end of three months he began to doubt whether he understood us quite as well as he thought. After five years he was sure he did not understand us at all. After ten years—he was a persevering man—he began to understand us a little, and was inclined to think he was getting back to the exact position he held at the end of the first week. Ten years hence, if he and I live so long, I intend to ask him again what he thinks about Ireland. Then, I expect, he will tell me that he is quite convinced that his earliest impressions were correct. This is my justification for recording my first impressions of America. I hope to get to know the country much better as years go on. I shall probably pass through the stage of laughing at my earliest ideas, but in the end I confidently expect to get back to my joyous admiration for American hospitality and my warm affection for American journalists.

Almost immediately—certainly before the end of our second day—we arrived at the conclusion that New York was a singularly clean city. We are, both of us, by inclination dwellers in country places. The noise of great towns worries us. The sense of being closely surrounded by large numbers of other people annoys us. But we should no doubt get used to these things if we were forced to dwell long in any city. I am, however, certain that I should always loathe the dirt of cities. The dirt of the country, good red mud, or the slime of wet stems of trees, does not trouble me, even if I am covered with it. I enjoy the dirt of quiet harbors, fish scales, dabs of tar and rust off old anchor chains. I am happier when these things are clinging to me than when I am free of them. I am no fanatical worshipper of cleanliness. I do not rank it, as the English proverb does, among the minor divinities of the world. But I do not like, I thoroughly detest, the dirt of cities, that impalpable grime which settles down visibly on face, hands, collar, cuffs, and invisibly but sensibly on coats, hats and trousers. New York, of all the cities I have ever been in, is freest of this grime. You can open your bedroom window at night in New York, and the pocket handkerchief you leave on your dressing table will still be white in the morning, fairly white. You can walk about New York all day and your nose will not be covered with smuts in the evening. I am told that the cleanness of New York is partly due to the fact that trains running in and out of the city are forced by the municipal authorities to use electricity as a motive power and are forbidden to burn coal till they get into the country. I am told that only a hard, comparatively smokeless coal may be burned by any one in the city. If these things are true, then the City Fathers of New York ought to be held up as a pattern to Town Councillors and corporations all over the world.

As a matter of fact—such is the injustice of man—the municipal government of New York is not very greatly admired by the rest of the world. It is supposed to be singularly corrupt, and my fellow countrymen are blamed for its corruptness. When an European city feels in a pharisaical mood it says: "Thank God I am not as other cities are, even as this New York." European cities may be morally cleaner. I do not know whether they are or not. They are certainly physically much dirtier. And from the point of view of the ordinary citizen physical dirt is more continuously annoying than the moral kind. If I lived in a community whose rulers openly sold contracts and offices, I should break out into a violent rage once a year or so, and swear that I would no longer pay taxes for the benefit of minor politicians and their henchmen. All the rest of the year I should be placid enough, for I should forget the corruption if I escaped the perpetual unpleasantness of dirt, city dirt. No government, after all, is honest. The most that can be expected from men placed in authority is that they should not outrage public opinion by flaunting their dishonesty. But I cannot help feeling that men in authority, whom after all the rest of us pay, should do their business, and part of their business is to keep smuts away from our faces. If it is really true that we Irish govern New York, then men ought to give up speaking of us as "the dirty Irish." Dirty! It appears that we are the only people who have ever kept a city clean. I wish we could do it at home.