reflections on an Old Frontier

...In Barcelona, traditionally the most prosperous city of Spain, wages are so low that the industrious Catalans customarily take two jobs...

...On Quai Voltaire, we passed a hotel bearing a sign which informed the world that Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Richard Wagner had once honored the dwelling with their presence...

...You soon learn that the army is assumed disloyal until proven otherwise and that General de Gaulle has let his popularity dwindle to an ominous low...

...Despite imperial distractions, the British have far outstripped us in the art of managing local affairs...

...fortunately, it misfired as de Gaulle's car sped by...

...the omnibuses are so well marked and routed that a stranger can grope...

...When and if that tunnel under the British Channel is completed, this final act of union will only seal the victory already won in the powder-room...

...Assuming that the French find some way out of their present impasse, the prospects seem exhilarating for the new grouping that is taking form...

...Ordonez, obviously nettled, became reckless and the bull unexpectedly threw the matador and began to gore him...

...You are instantly aware of crossing the border because the fine French roads give way to the ersatz Spanish brand...

...As these notes suggest, we didn't quite elude politics, but Washington became blessedly remote...

...Since business hours are eccentric, this means that a head-of-family may work from nine until one, return home for a siesta until four and finish his first job at seven p.m...

...There is no doubt, however, that the Franco dictatorship has been unable to stifle the desire for liberty in this most rebellious province of Spain...

...But it is a matter of emphasis...

...The airport is one of the vilest I have encountered—ugly, sprawling, and thrown together with an inspired disdain for the traveler...

...In the headline, he was "His Excellency, the Chief of State...

...The taxis may be homely and chunky, but they zip through the city like skeeters on oilslick...

...after a few days in Spain it was possible to guess why Franco could not seal his countrymen's lips...

...And there is plenty to grumble about...

...Bombings by terrorists are so frequent that they are recorded on the inside pages of the press...

...Impressionist paintings leap from the canvas and Gothic tapestries acquire the solidity of stone in the form of castles and cathedrals...

...It happened that this was the hotel where Oscar Wilde was arrested for indulging his wayward tastes...

...When we arrived in Barcelona, we were told that the execrable roads in Catalonia were part of Franco's punishment for the Catalan's love of liberty...

...We said we would be privileged to see him there...

...Yet, runs the lament, what is the alternative...

...But it is impossible to remain in so bleak a mood in traveling through Southern France into Spain by way of the Costa Brava...

...The Spanish press, at least what we saw of it in Barcelona, ranks with the most supinely mediocre in the world...

...But the wounded Ordonez came back to kill his bull and was awarded a hoof and horn...

...But Kodachrome cannot convey the pleasures of exploring the side roads that thread through medieval towns —nor, let it be added, can the camera recreate the pleasures of exploring the Guide Michelin...

...in the body of the story, he was simply El Jefe—"the Chief...

...The slang for "hat," our informants explained, was originally "tit for tat," but over the years had become abbreviated into the cryptic "titfer...

...As SOON as the wheels of our jet touched the ground in London, we were struck by a certain perversity of the British...

...he chirped (if Times editorial writers can be said to chirp...

...Then, after snatching a few mouthfuls, he may work from 7:30 p.m...

...One strolls down streets named for Victor Hugo, Montaigne, and Stendahl, and it is impossible for anyone who cares about freedom not to feel braced and fortified by the questing spirit of France...

...Like a god, his name apparently cannot be committed to the profanity of print...

...Crossman, chairman of the Party...

...It is possible to grumble in the cafes about how dreadful conditions are...

...A particularly shrill heckler behind us accused Ordonez of performing a "cha-cha-cha" with the timorous beast...

...He was about to appear before the court for menacing the public order by protesting too strenuously against nuclear bombs...

...Other British traits seem more immune to change...

...T h e Caudillo has come upon a shrewd solution...

...Out of deference to the memory of Hemingway, we attended a bullfight in Barcelona in which the fabled" Ordonez appeared...

...In other respects, the visitor feels right at home...

...Whatever the cause, it is an agreeable revelation to stroll on Regent Street as the British working girl departs from her office, balancing a beehive hairdo with an aplomb that would swerve eyes on Fifth Avenue or the Champs Elysees...

...But will it be able to resist television...

...Oh," he added drily, "I am afraid Her Majesty's Government would not approve of that...

...One mark of an authentic Cockney is his mastery of slang which involves a rhyming phrase to describe an otherwise unrelated thing or person, e.g., "trouble and strife" is the code for wife...

...There is a buoyancy that transcends politics, an essential optimism even in the face of the crises in France and Berlin...

...to mfdnight on a second job...

...This estimable volume, published by a tire company, lists the restaurants and hotels of France, grading them with exquisite care as to quality of cuisine and service...

...An assertive independence is the mark of the Spaniard...

...As we were bidding farewell, the husband confided, "You know, if you were English, we would have sat through the whole bloody ride without exchanging a word— just like a pair of sticks...

...and "dicky dirt" is a shirt...

...For a leader who has drained so much economic aid from the United States, Generalissimo Franco has shown an exceptional talent for keeping his country poor and the mass of his people in poverty...

...Meyer, an editorial writer for the Washington Post, writes frequently for The Progressive...

...Rising right up from Printing House Square was the framework of a slab done in the approved esperanto style of international architecture...

...We wondered as we watched in the hotel lobby whether Laurel and Hardy and Brando would not erase the lingering cultural remnants of feudalism just as effectively as the cannonball reduced the political walls...

...Even the revered Thunderer, the semi-official voice of Her Majesty's Government, will henceforth rumble from a sanitized spire, no doubt with Muzac piping in God Save the Queen...

...As a community, St...

...In Paris, a gilded plaque would have immortalized the scandal—but then, in Paris they would never have arrested Oscar Wilde...

...Part of the pleasure of exploring the sites is the absence of commercialism...

...Back on the plane, heading home, we returned with the heartening feeling that Europe, by wisely borrowing from the United States, is finding regenerative strength through a federal framework...

...Certainly the British are concerned, but they are looking beyond the perturbations of the moment to debate the island's destiny within the Common Market...

...After the reserve of the British and the prudent calculation of the French, Spanish exuberance makes an especially vivid impression on a visitor...

...It used to be a dank and dubious appendage, but today there is all the delighted shock of original encounter...

...Who is to say that our preoccupation is the mark of a higher civilization...

...While organized political activity is forbidden, the regime in Madrid shows a grudging tolerance to spoken dissent...

...Here, to sate an amateur's thirst for archaeological knowledge, we delved into the caves where prehistoric man left an enduring imprint...

...The talk about shelters in the United States baffles and alarms the British...

...walls are scarred with the ugly slogans of the ultras...

...Yet, looking at the leathery faces of the French farmers who were trying to decipher Marlon Brando's mumbles, there was a reassuring sense that it would be a long time before the little black box would work its effect on the ancient regions of France...

...a sense of impending calamity lends an edge to political conversations...

...There is scarcely a village that does not have a better restaurant than can be found in the best districts of our bigger cities—and ours is the affluent society...

...In L'Express, the weekly associated with Pierre Mendes-France, there is talk of an impending civil war...

...The oddest sight was to see television aerials in the shadow of the crenelated medieval wall...

...What makes the calm especially impressive is the matter-of-fact way Britons remark, "Of course, if there is a war this island will be vaporized in half an hour...

...Somehow this stoicism chills the blood less than the every-man - for - himself - and - the- devil - take-the-shelterless mania now being promoted here at home...

...The chief concern this fall is the Common Market...

...the jottings might be entitled Reflections of a Temporary Exile from the New Frontier...

...There is a good deal of sap on the Old Frontier...

...only a handful of weathered patriarchs looked as if they had been around to twit Bernard Shaw...

...it is one area where forty million Frenchmen are invariably wrong...

...one hopes there is a real-life Professor Higgins to collect it...

...Once the dowdiest female specimens in the West, they are now as distracting as French perfume, as alive with color as an aviary...

...Paul's on Fleet Street, and on Park Lane, these aseptic monoliths are beginning to cleave the British sky...

...It is a vast relief to leave a capital beset with fears of Armageddon and arrive in a country where there is so little expectation of a nuclear war...

...Nothing seems safe from the onrush...

...The French countryside glows in September, and a drive through the Loire Valley to the Dordogne is like riding through (to borrow a phrase from Malraux) a museum without walls...

...Surely one reason that the roads in Spain are so bad is that there are so few cars to use them...

...The familiar chug of the bulldozer is heard as picturesque byways are cleared to make way for slab-sided office buildings...

...He came, he hunted, and he left behind paintings worthy of a master...

...How unlike America, where we excel at airports but have yet to find a way to penetrate midtown traffic or to take the agony out of a trip from Brooklyn to the Bronx...

...Yet appearances can deceive...

...A clutter of beer cans, a few corpses, a transistor radio— and a shotgun intended to keep the neighbors out...

...Momentarily, there was a rush of emotion, but the fervor for de Gaulle seemed to vanish in hours when it became apparent that nothing really had changed...

...The murals of Lascaux are widely celebrated, but no less en: thralling are the simpler caves—the parish churches to the Lascuax cathedral...

...The British woman," a sober colleague on The Economist intones, "has discovered that she has hair...

...In the brief sixty years since the authenticity of cave art was established, a respect for our "primitive" ancestors has notably increased...

...In London, we chanced to stay at the Cadogan Hotel, which sits like a wellpreserved Victorian matron on Sloane Street...

...and the Underground makes the New York subway look like an artifact of mesolithic times...

...The grottoes of Combarelles, Font-de-Gaume, and Rouffignac contain an extraordinary menagerie of fabulous beasts, some engraved and some sketched in sooty black...

...It was sad to learn that rhyming slang is fading away...

...Michel Gordey, the astute diplomatic correspondent of FranceSoir, remarks that for all the talk about violence no one seems really willing to risk his own skin...

...All this was stuff for reflection as we left Britain on the Golden Arrow, the luxury train which glides from London to Paris, with a choppy Channel ride in between...

...reflections on an Old Frontier by KARL E. MEYER "In a dogged attempt to escape both Washington and politics," says the author, "my wife and I took a month's vacation in Europe, touring Britain, France, and Spain...

...The transformation is altogether astonishing...

...past crises have tempered the country's nerves...

...We were reminded of the saying that one half of Spain would never be really happy until the other half was dead...

...An amendment to the above: One form of urban scrofula can be detected in London...

...The crowd then turned on the heckler, and if Ordonez had perished one felt that a certain loudvoiced aficionado would have been lynched on the spot...

...The Spaniard's nobihty of spirit has its darker side, yet a visitor becomes so instantly fond of Spain that he cannot feel that the country deserves the wretched government now saddled upon it...

...To an American accustomed to the indifferent pablum of Howard Johnson, the French roadside affords an endless and unbelievable feast...

...Our fellow passengers were British, of respectable middle-class background, a couple who for some reason had made a hobby of collecting Cockney rhyming slang...

...We place the stress on one end of the digestive system...

...Manifestly, the mysteries of plumbing have baffled the French genius...

...in mastering a continent, we Americans have floundered in the simpler task of keeping our cities livable, likable, navigable...

...Flour seems to retain something of its feudal flavor despite the thousand pressures of the modern world...

...The Parisians, a visitor senses, are weary of a remote god who appears unwilling or unable to use his prestige to stamp out mutiny in the army and bring an end to the Algerian war...

...Look over here...

...It is less a press than a company house organ for the ruling elite...

...The weather (inevitably) was wet, and so were the passengers as they scurried to the drafty bus which took us to the terminal, where we found that the jet age has not staled the infinite inefficiency of British customs...

...In most cases, you apply at a farmhouse for a guide who, like as not, comes straight from the field to lead you through a labyrinth below your feet...

...We visited a friend who works for The Times and he was suitably ensconced in an office which looked as if it had been built in the days of William the Conqueror...

...Gunpowder brought an end to feudalism as an economic system by enabling the king's army to level the walls of stubborn nobles...

...On to the Dordogne...

...The day we arrived, the President was nearly assassinated by a bomb planted on the roadside...

...The vistas on the rugged Costa Brava are as captivating as the roads are bad—so bad that it seems likely that the ruts left by Roman chariots still remain unrepaired...

...In Barcelona, it is possible to buy the New York Times and Herald Tribune and the better British papers...

...If worst comes to worst, and a blaze of bombs levels our cities, what will future diggers find...

...Flour in the Auvergne...

...pot and pan" is old man or husband...

...One returns with a renewed sense of urgency of the need to avoid mutual extermination...

...One hopes that he is right...

...All this has, I suppose, been said ad tedium, and everyone has a neighbor with a projector and the inevitable batch of color slides...

...It gives one pause...

...The one thing that seems to unite this grievously divided country, M. Gordey contends, is the desire to avert a bloodbath...

...Republics may come and go, but Paris seems to retain its luminous liberating magic...

...We attended a meeting of the Fabian Society at which Labor's new domestic program was presented by R.H.S...

...At our hotel, a television set was planted in the lobby and in the evening townspeople gathered to be edified by Laurel and Hardy and Marlon Brando in vintage films dubbed with French...

...But, we were told, whenever any of the foreign papers publishes a story deemed unflattering to Franco, the offending issue is mysteriously absent from the kiosk...

...in years past American liberals have borrowed heavily from the British economist, Lord Keynes, and the debt is now being squared with the export of Kenneth Galbraitn and his Affluent Society...

...Besides les girls, a Washington visitor finds another immediate surprise in Britain: Berlin and fallout shelters are not the dominant political topics...

...Lord Russell, who, as one friend put it, speaks through the telephone with a trace of Victorian distrust for the instrument, explained that the press of legal business ruled out time for an interview...

...He noted, quite accurately, that he would probably be sent to prison...

...Returning to Paris, we stayed the night in the ancient walled town of St...

...The froth conceals a bitter brew...

...A Cockney, we were reminded, is defined as a person born within hearing of the bells of Bow Church in London's East End...

...Ask the hotel help about the famous episode and you are greeted with shocked professions of ignorance...

...Yet, once in London, we marveled anew at the superb organization of municipal services...

...Now that man has come full circle and is again pondering a descent into the caves, one muses about the verdict of future archaeologists...

...the French on the other...

...This may be gossip...

...The only attempt I made to seek an interview was with Bertrand Russell, who seems as enduring and impressive a part of the British landscape as Trafalgar Square...

...Equally contemporary was a central theme of the Labor program which contrasted "starved community services and extravagant consumption, summed up by a famous American in the phrase 'private affluence and public squalor.'" This ideological lendlease is satisfyingly just...

...Around St...

...We reached the Earl in his remote home in Wales and had a frustratingly brief telephone conversation...

...But the most readily apparent change to the visitor who has not been in London for a decade are the girls, or rather, les girls...

...The women in Britain, one must conclude, have joined the Common Market long before the politicians...

...But others see some glimmer of hope in the fact that no civil war has yet occurred...

...For all the surface buoyancy in the cafes around Saint Germain des Pres, there is a sickly and depressing mood in France...

...the lead story, invariably, seems to chronicle a ceremonial appearance by the Caudillo at a dam or school dedication...

...Fairness compels one qualification...

...T h e audience was younger than we expected...

...Have you seen our new building...

...There is so much worth saving...

...He is the author of The New America, published earlier this year by Basic Books.—THE EDITORS...

...Curiously, the papers we saw never mentioned Franco by name...

...To pursue the familiar, the typical refrain among tourists is to complain about the lamentable state of French plumbing...

...The crowd let nothing escape its comment, and when one bull appeared wanting in virility there was a good deal of hooting...

...In Paris, less restrictive traditions prevail...

...his way around after two days...