No Hurry to Get Home: A Memoir

TO CHARLES

It is a comfort to re-read these lovely, lively stories. Our mother, Emily Hahn, died in 1997, and life is not the same without her. However, to accompany her again on her adventures is to rejoice in life itself.

My family and I are happy that new readers will discover Emily and her gifts—among these, humor, tolerance, compassion and a determination that women find equality with men.

Finally, to add to the words of one of her dear friends, What a woman, I say, and what a writer.

My special thanks to Laura Tucker who has brought about the reprinting of these stories.

Carola Vecchio

New York City

February 2000

FOREWORD

This wonderful book, No Hurry to Get Home, was originally published as Times and Places, a deceptively simple title for a book so packed with excitement and intrigue and adventure. Yet its very simplicity was typical of its author, Emily Hahn. She lived an extraordinary life that she wrote about in stories for The New Yorker and in the more than fifty books that she produced during her long career, and never projected a sense of overdone brio or embellishment. She just told the story simply, intelligently, delightfully, sometimes slyly and she drew us in and drew us on, generations of us, as though she were suggesting a quiet walk on a summer evening. But one could never be certain where that quiet walk might lead.

Emily, nicknamed Mickey by her mother and called that by friends and family throughout her life, produced in No Hurry to Get Home a memoir that seemed to contain more lives than any one person could have experienced. The individual chapters, all of which were originally written as pieces for The New Yorker, can stand alone as essays or be read novel-like, fascinating us as we follow her from her early days in St. Louis and Chicago, to New York—and then off and away through the wide, wide world.

One of the astonishing things about Mickey was that she was always a part of, sometimes even ahead of, her own time and place. Her first New Yorker piece appeared in the late twenties, when she was twenty-four, and her final contribution was published in 1996 when she was ninety-one, her amazing career at the magazine having spanned eight decades. She almost made it through a century, and yet she was always in the present, in the immediate. Her work stands up to time and has a strong, steady undercurrent of truth and reality like a secret subterranean stream. She maintained that she was not a feminist, but I believe that was because she disliked being labeled or pigeonholed. She steadfastly refused throughout her life to conform to anyone else's idea of how women, not just this particular woman, should be, or do, or become. There was an inborn and unyielding independence in her that must often have been difficult to maintain. She lived her life as she chose to and found certain conventions mere unreasonable nuisances and nothing to do with her. Yet there was no sign of flamboyance in her looks, nor in her demeanor, nor in her character. What she did, she did for herself, never for the impression it might make on the rest of the world. She made the unconventional seem ordinary by her very attitude toward it, and therefore made it more acceptable to those of us less brave or less honest.

The wide range of Mickey's curiosity and her refusal to accept boundaries in her work were reflected in the breadth and scope of her interests and accomplishments. She would not be put in a literary category. She wrote fiction, personal essays, reportage, poetry, history and biography, natural history and zoology, cookbooks and children's books. To say that her interests were eclectic would be a form of meiosis. She was fascinated by certain aspects of the everyday as well as by the exotic; even in old age her curiosity and the need to satisfy it never flagged.

I met Mickey my first day at The New Yorker. Returning from lunch, I stepped off the elevator and was instantly confused and lost in the rabbit warren that was the twentieth floor. I saw a very attractive woman emerging from an office that faced the elevators, so I approached her—she looked approachable, though I hadn't any idea who she was—and said, I just started today and I'm lost. I can't find my office. She reopened her office door and invited me in. I'm Mickey Hahn, she said, holding out her hand and smiling, Who are you? Half an hour later, after a good quizzing, before she led me back down the hall to my own cubbyhole, she knocked on a few doors and introduced me to Philip Hamburger, Joseph Mitchell, Brendan Gill and Lillian Ross. I realized later, when I was wiser to the ways of The New Yorker, that I might have been there for months without catching sight of any of them, let alone being introduced to them on my very first day. I thought then, as I think now, that her instinctive kindness to an apprehensive and nervous new girl made her my friend for life.

Except when one of us was away we saw each other every day at the office and visited one another at home. For more than thirty years I never tired of talking to her, listening to her, laughing with her. Her conversation was very like her writing, filled with a wire-strong thread of intelligence and a wonderfully humorous way of looking at the world with a slightly sidelong glance. We talked on the telephone—not long, chatty conversations, often just a question asked and answered or a topical joke that had to be told before it evaporated. These brief colloquies might have seemed abrupt, even curt, but they were an integral part of our normal and affectionate discourse, rather like those of two people reading their morning papers over a breakfast table and looking up for an instant to make a comment or ask a question. We weren't beyond amusing or mystifying one another with odd requests and serendipitous bits of acquired information, in a sort of amiable one-upmanship. On one occasion I answered my telephone at about eleven-thirty in the evening to hear Mickey's voice asking, without preamble, Have you any idea where I can lay my hands on a copy of Herodotus—not the new translation, the old one? Yes, I said, but not this evening. Will tomorrow morning do? Fine, said Mickey, and hung up. That very afternoon I had been at The Mechanics (officially The Library of the General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen), a wonderful old-fashioned, quiet, well-stocked library almost next door to The New Yorkers office and a favorite haunt for many of us; one of the librarians, while doing a little housecleaning in the extensive stacks, had happened upon an ancient two-volume edition of Herodotus that needed rebinding. He showed it to me as a curiosity, while remarking that it had last been taken out in 1909. When Mickey called I gleefully pulled a rabbit out of a hat for her, and she, with equal glee, cut me down to size with that one word, fine.

Mickey read every genre imaginable, including murder mysteries and crime stories, which she once described to me as dessert. We passed these back and forth over the years like so many playing cards. But beyond the dessert, the range of her reading was enormous and incredibly varied—-journals from learned societies, ancient and modern biographies, poetry, current novels, newspapers and magazines from everywhere. Though gregarious when she chose to be, enjoying the company and conversation of her family and friends, she also had a deep need for solitude. She found that solitude in books. At home, in the company of close friends or members of her family, with books stacked tantalizingly next to her armchair, she would often casually pick one up and immerse herself in it for a brief period, regardless of what was going on around her, and hide in plain sight. None of us thought this the least bit peculiar because we all knew she would eventually emerge and rejoin whatever was happening before she had decided to go away for a bit. Once, after a particularly mind-numbing soliloquy from a fellow-writer at a cocktail party, she whispered in my ear Gravina's definition of a bore, a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

In rereading No Hurry to Get Home, I am once again struck by how clear and true her literary voice is; the reader is hearing her as though she were sitting there telling the stories in a living room. This book is the essential Mickey and reading it gives a strong impression of what it was like to listen to her speak. The constructions, the cadences, the emphases, resound in my inner ear and bring her to life most amazingly, not just because I knew her but because her style is as straightforward on the printed page as it was in real life. This is not true of all writers, even the best of them. But it was certainly true of her.

Mickey had a lifelong fascination with words, in both the abstract and the particular and, since I shared that fascination, we often had long conversations that reflected that interest. Her sentences were peppered with quotations—she had an extraordinary memory and at the drop of a hat she could quote long passages of epic verse or her first-grade reader, or a song she'd heard just once decades before in an English music hall. She loved crossword puzzles and acrostics and was devilishly good at them. She could hear and smell and taste words. She knew their shapes and the very feel of them. Reading was Mickey's lifeblood and writing was her obsession. Writing was like breathing to Mickey; I don't think she could have not done it even if she'd tried. As far as I could tell, she wrote every day; if she was away from typewriter and paper, she wrote in her head and transcribed it later. But sick or well, tired or full of beans, Mickey wrote. And the articles and essays and books are there to prove how well she did it. Age, coupled with serious illness, was the only thing that slowed Mickey down. But that's all it did; it slowed her down but it never stopped her. Despite a couple of debilitating falls, even after having celebrated her ninetieth birthday, Mickey went on writing. When she broke her arm and was in a cast for a long period, she typed one-handed. The words I would use to best describe her are: talented—that was self-evident; intelligent—another glimpse of the obvious; she was certainly beautiful, even in age and on her ten worst days. But most of all she was indomitable. She went her own way and if her way happened to be our way too, why that was well and good.

Over the years, I had observed that in the Hahn family, particularly among Mickey's sisters, there was an expression that seemed to cover almost any contingency. If someone reminisced about a particular period in their lives or a major incident in the history of our country or the world, and somebody else wondered what Mickey thought of it at the time, another Hahn would inevitably chime in with, Mickey was away. Away she often was and to the great good luck of her readers, she would eventually and invariably take us with her, not in the style of travelogues but as though we were sharing every step of the way, every new experience. As each new book came out, we followed her to Africa, to China, to Portugal or Japan or England. She took us to the Philippines, to Ireland, to Pakistan, to Borneo or Singapore or Brazil. Sooner or later, because doing something meant writing about it—Mickey introduced us to her world, seen through her eyes, and made us a present of it.

After her death in 1997, I couldn't, at first, imagine what life would be like without Mickey in it. But the books, Mickey's books, are there; the hundreds of thousands of words, Mickey's words, are there; and the voice, Mickey's voice, is there, for all of us, forever. And as for Mickey—well, Mickey is away.

Sheila McGrath

New York City

May 2000

INTRODUCTION

It was the fall of 1970 when the original edition of No Hurry to Get Home, Emily Hahn's forty-second book, was published under the title Times and Places. The free-spirited author had turned sixty-five earlier that year, and although she was at an age when many of her peers were shuffling off into retirement, Hahn was as busy and prolific as ever. For better and worse. I think about everything that I hear or see. 'Could I use that?'... It's a bad way to be, she had once quipped in a letter to her mother. If anything, that tendency to regard every element of her life as grist for the literary mill grew more pronounced with each passing year. Emily Hahn, the writer, had no off switch.

For forty-seven years—from 1950, when she was hired as a staff writer at The New Yorker, until her death in February 1997—she lived a peripatetic and singularly unorthodox lifestyle. She moved from here to there and everywhere, like some kind of beautiful, multi-colored and quixotic literary butterfly. Hahn spent nine months each year in New York (where her older daughter Carola lived) or traveling to the far-flung corners of the globe on research expeditions. The rest of the time, she resided in England with her historian husband, Professor Charles Boxer, and younger daughter Amanda.

Travel was the nectar that fed Emily Hahn's literary imagination, an imagination that produced an astounding body of work. Hahn, who had been earning her living as a writer since 1929, was turning out books at the rate of at least one per year in 1970. In fact, in the preceding three years, she had written four—an informal history of American bohemians, a look at the great zoos of the world, and two volumes about the cooking and cuisine of China, where she had lived for eight crazy, wonderful years.

The range of subject matter that attracted Hahn was boundless, for her interests were as eclectic as they were unique. What's more, her writing mirrored the passion with which she tackled all things. Hahn's books included novels, short stories, biographies, history, juvenile literature, humor, travel and four autobiographical accounts. This latter quartet—China to Me (1944), Hong Kong Holiday (1946), England to Me (1949) and Kissing Cousins (1958)—vividly chronicled aspects of Hahn's globe-trotting adventures. Writing about people, places and events came second nature to her, for she had been doing it for most of her life. That made some people who knew her uncomfortable.

I use everything I find in my brain—experiences, impressions, memories, reading matter by other writers—everything, including the people who surround me and impinge on my awareness, she explained in China to Me. It isn't a question in my mind of being nice or not nice. I can't help it any more than I can help breathing. I am not apologizing or defending myself: there it is. I do it and I will always do it as long as I write. And write she did.

Emily Hahn was born January 14, 1905, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a family of Jewish-German ancestry. She was the fifth of six children. Her father, Isaac Hahn, was a dry goods salesman, her mother, Hannah, a suffragette who fervently preached the gospel of gender equality. While the Hahn household was perpetually abuzz with familial activity, it was also a place filled with books, music and the long-lost art of leisurely conversation.

As a toddler, Hahn—who was affectionately known as Mickey to her family and friends—wore a brace to straighten a spindly leg that had been twisted at birth; she had been a breech baby. When her siblings were outside playing, young Mickey often hid in her father's study, where she leafed through books. By age three, she had taught herself to sound out words and had become a rapacious reader. Soon Emily Hahn also began to record her own youthful thoughts and impressions, tapping away at an old office typewriter her mother owned. Being a shy, bookish teenager, Hahn stewed about her puppy fat, and she despaired of ever growing up. Writing became her emotional outlet, especially after the family moved to Chicago in 1920. [It] was something I did as naturally as playing games, but I never really said to myself, Tm going to be a writer,' Hahn recalled many years later.

After earning a degree from the school of mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin (she was the first woman ever to do so), Hahn spent a couple of unfulfilling years toiling in the guys only world of oil exploration, just to prove that she could do it. Then, in an abrupt change of career tack, Hahn settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There she became a horseback trail guide and greeting card verse writer. However, under pressure from her parents, in early 1928 Hahn enrolled in graduate studies in geology at Columbia University in New York. To make ends meet, she worked variously as a teacher, a telephone receptionist, a secretary and a freelance writer.

Throughout these desultory years, Hahn penned long, entertaining letters to family and friends back home in Chicago. Her brother-in-law, Mitchell Dawson, was an attorney by vocation, but a poet by temperament. He saw that his sister-in-law had a special way with words. Unbeknownst to her, Dawson submitted abridged versions of Hahn's letters to The New Yorker, which since its founding in February 1925 had earned a reputation as Americas smartest and best literary magazine. Editor Harold Ross rejected the first articles that Dawson sent him. They recounted Emily Hahn's experiences in New Mexico, and Ross felt that the themes were too far west of the Hudson [River], as he put it. However, Ross was also struck by the vitality and readability of Emily Hahn's prose.

For that reason, when Mitchell Dawson sent along some new submissions, these ones about goings-on in Manhattan's trendy cafes and nightspots, Ross accepted one of them for publication. Lovely Lady was a deliciously sassy vignette about a lunchtime conversation between two glib young women. The narrator was a thinly disguised Emily Hahn, the older woman was Leslie Nast, the lesbian wife of Vanity Fair publisher Conde Nast, who happened to be one of Ross's publishing rivals.

That sketch, which appeared in the May 25, 1929, edition of The New Yorker, proved to be the first of a hundred and eighty-one bylined pieces that Emily Hahn wrote for the magazine during her sixty-eight-year association with it—which included forty-seven years as a staff writer. During that period, she traveled millions of miles and lived, at various times, in Africa, China, the U.K., and the U.S. Through it all, the one constant in Hahn's frenetic life was The New Yorker. She was [our] roving heroine, our Belle Geste: a reporter inveterately at large, as her longtime friend and colleague Roger Angell recalled in his Hahn obituary.

It was also her work at The New Yorker that was the key to Emily Hahn's prodigious literary output. Many of the fifty-two books she ultimately wrote had their origins in the lengthy Reporter at Large pieces she did for the magazine. Hahn was a master recycler. This proved to be a lifesaver when she got bogged down in work on the original edition of No Hurry to Get Home.

Initially, at least, she had been receptive when her literary agent approached her in 1968 with publisher Thomas Crowell's request that she write a tell-all memoir. In the sunset of her career, Hahn was feeling introspective. Although she was still working at full steam and enjoyed good health, more and more of late she had begun to re-examine aspects of her life. At times she must have pinched herself to be sure that she really was still among the living. After all, she had come within a heartbeat of death on at least a half-dozen occasions—twice because of her quirky fondness for always following the uncertain path, as she put it.

Once, as a young woman in New York, Hahn had nearly died by her own hand, having overdosed on sleeping pills; another time, in 1940, she had been caught in a Japanese air raid on the Chinese city of Chungking. Both times, she had been hauled back from the eternal abyss by helping hands.

In quiet moments, such memories must surely have given Hahn cause to wonder why fate continued to smile on her. After all, by 1970, both of her parents were dead, as was her older brother Mannel, who had died at the still-young age of fifty-nine. Hahn's favorite sister Dorothy, gravely ill and blinded by the diabetes that plagued the paternal family, had been confined to a wheelchair since 1967; in less than a year, Dorothy would also be dead; her husband, Mitchell Dawson, had predeceased her in 1956.

The more Hahn thought about writing her autobiography, the less enthusiasm she had for the project. This is not surprising, for over the years she had already written in the pages of The New Yorker about many of the times and places in her life. It was not in Hahn's nature to revisit old ground, and so as her deadline approached she made only a perfunctory effort to fulfill the terms of her contract with Crowell. The story may be apocryphal, but many years later Hahn told me that she had spent her advance, produced no memoir, and was preoccupied with new projects: one was a book about angels and demons, the other, a history of Ireland. To fulfill her commitment to Crowell, Hahn hit upon recycling some of the autobiographical pieces she'd written for The New Yorker over the years.

The product was a book entitled Times and Places, which appeared in the fall of 1970. On the dust jacket, right next to the script title, was an asterisk that referred to a lower case subtitle (* a memoir), which appeared below in small script. The peculiar typography was no accident; this episodic memoir was an anthology of twenty-three articles that she had written between 1937 and 1970.

Hahn made no attempt to update the material or to tie the chapters together into a cohesive narrative. She provided no introduction or index, nor did she reveal—if she could still remember— the true identities of some of the characters who appeared in these pieces. For example, Harvard-trained anthropologist Patrick Putnam (the Murray Den of Hahn's wonderful 1933 travel book Congo Solo) remained Stewart Cass, as he had been when her story about the Belgian Congo appeared in the October 22, 1966, edition of The New Yorker. Patrick, who had gone native, had shamelessly exploited and abused the Africans he encountered, particularly the women. Hahn had shielded Patrick's identity as a favor to his widow, who was terminally ill with cancer at the time. By 1970, Anne Putnam was three years dead, and although there was no longer any reason to continue the ruse, Hahn did so. The identities of other misidentified people likewise remained uncorrected.

Despite its obvious shortcomings, Times and Places received favorable reviews. Janet Freedman of Library Journal voiced a common opinion when she wrote, While some of the anecdotes are merely amusing, most contribute to an extraordinary self-portrait of a determined woman who refused to let her sex or society's conventions block her aspirations.

Today, thirty years later, that assessment still holds true. Emily Hahn's prose has stood the test of time. Whether she was writing about her childhood adventures running away from home, being the only female in an all-male engineering class, savoring the ambience of the British museum, hiking solo across East Africa, or smoking opium, there's an irresistible charm and elegance to the writing. Hahn was an engaging literary voice and a master of that distinctly New Yorker style that her friend Roger Angell describes as the offhand first-person casual. She wrote exactly as she talked, something that all writers strive for, but few ever achieve.

For those who already are familiar with Hahn's work, rereading these pieces in No Hurry to Get Home is like a welcome visit with an old friend, and it is a fresh reminder of what an extraordinarily gifted writer she was.

For those readers who are encountering Emily Hahn in these pages for the first time, this book will be a delightful introduction to the writing of a woman whom one of her young female colleagues at The New Yorker justifiably hails as one of Americas lost literary treasures.

Ken Cuthbertson

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

May 2000

NO HURRY TO

GET HOME

THE ESCAPE

Not long after my family moved from St. Louis to Chicago, I ran away from home. It is only honest to admit that the affair didn't amount to much; indeed, nobody among my relatives remembers it, except my sister Rose, today a psychiatric social worker, who claims she does. She says I ran away because I was disturbed, and she adds that we were all disturbed at the time, and that the move to Chicago was bad for us. She speaks, of course, as a social worker, but when she talks like that I'm visited by the ghost of an old resentment. There they go again, I say to myself, crowding in on the act. But the annoyance really is only a ghost. It is nothing like the frustration and rage I felt back in 1920 at the slightest hint that any one of the rest of the family was as miserable as I was. Mother once tried to tell me that she was unhappy, too, but I only walked off, shaking my head. The misery was mine and mine alone. I was fifteen, and entitled to undisputed possession. Had I not been forced to leave St. Louis against my will? Wasn't I always being pushed around? No one but me had my sensitivity; no one but me knew how to suffer; the others were clods. It was clear that I had to run away.

There must have been something wrong with you, my husband said recently, when I told him the story. Girls don't usually run away from home.

All normal girls do, I said loftily.

But, having thought it over, I will concede that I may be mistaken about that. My family weren't really clods, and they weren't abnormal, yet out of five girls and one boy, of whom I was the next to youngest, I'm the only one who ran away.

Very likely it happened not so much because we moved to Chicago as because I had a hangover from books. I was a deep reader, plunging into a story and remaining immersed even after I'd finished it. Some of it was apt to cling for a long time, like water to a bathing suit. The Jungle Books clung, for example. Mowgli was a natural wanderer. I was surprised when he went back to his home cave once, after he'd grown up, to confer with Mother and Father Wolf. I assumed that he had forgotten them. I had. I was also a natural wanderer, or wanted to be. Mowgli was the real thing—the best example—but there were others. David Copperfield, for instance; he ran away, and a lot of Dickens' other children were admirably mobile, too. I was certain that Little Nell, though she thought she was sorry to slip away from home with her grandfather, must have felt some hidden enthusiasm for the road. Nor did I have to depend on Dickens for vicarious running away. I drifted downriver with Huck Finn, and got lost with Tom Sawyer, and sailed here and there, all over the world, with any number of other people, scorning the stale air of indoors.

At the same time, I much preferred to be indoors in fact; there I could read in comfort of the wild hawk to the windswept sky, the deer to the wholesome word. My mother was always sending me out to play, partly because the open air was healthful and partly because she thought reading, done to excess, ruined the eyes. We all had good eyes, and she was a keen reader herself, but she dreaded some future day when we might use up our allotted sight, so she instituted a rationing system: her children up to the age of twelve might read for pleasure only half an hour a day; when they reached their teens, they were allowed an hour. The rest of our leisure time had to be spent in the open air. This was the era of the sleeping porch, or, if you couldn't have that, of the window gaping wide all the winter night, which may have been a legacy of Theodore Roosevelt—himself a great one for wandering in the open air—or a reaction to central heating, which we rather overdid. At any rate, I found playing outdoors boring until I learned to hide books under the back porch or in a peach tree's cleft. After that, it was simply a matter of finding some spot out of sight where I could read in peace.

Later on, in Chicago, it suited me to mope as if I'd lost a paradise when we moved away from St. Louis, and I began to dream of running off—if not to that one, then to some other. And St. Louis was, in fact, a pleasant place. There must have been other towns along the Mississippi with a similar charm-places where cement had not yet tamped down everything and nature still showed through—but I thought mine unique. I firmly believed that the little girl from New York who came out every summer to visit her grandparents next door was as miserable, when the time came to return to the brownstone fronts of the East, as Persephone going back to the underworld. In New York, we children told each other, there were no back yards. That unfortunate Eastern child had to live in a flat, with no place to dig in the dirt. Actually, what should have bothered us was that St. Louis was a hell of a place for a summer resort. It rests in a topographical hollow, and the air is usually quiet, growing humid to an extreme degree in summer, except for the times when everything blows up all at once in a cyclone. Our cyclones and tornadoes were inconvenient, and even dangerous, but we were proud of them.

Fountain Avenue was where we lived, across the street from Fountain Park—an oval-shaped tract of land about three blocks long, with trees and paths and benches and trimmed grass. My parents often said contentedly that it was a splendid place for children, but I preferred our back yard—a much wilder place. I didn't know much about jungles, but I pictured them as something like the back yard. There were hibiscus bushes in it, and peach trees. Somebody else had a persimmon tree, not far off; I know it couldn't have been ours, because the fruit bounced on someone's coach-house roof when it fell, and we didn't have a coach house. A ripe persimmon that has hit a roof on its way down is a badly squashed persimmon, but those tasted wonderful, in spite of twigs and bits of dead leaf that had to be pulled off or spat out. Bitten at the proper angle, a persimmon seed puckers the mouth, and when it splits open, a little white spoon lies inside it in silhouette.

Our yard was divided from its neighbors by a high board fence, always in need of paint. It had an occasional knothole and looked like the cartoon fences through whose holes little ragamuffins steal glimpses of baseball games. The upright planks were reinforced near the top by a ledge, on which daring children walked, balancing. In time, the fence was replaced by a low wire one—everybody who was anybody was getting wire fences— and privacy was gone in our block. You could see both ways as far as the eye could travel, and I was sorry. Progress marred our alley, too. To begin with, when I pulled myself up to stand on the rim of our ashpit and peered over a wall into the alley, what I saw was almost rural. The alley was cobbled, bounded on one side by a vacant lot and a couple of wooden outhouses and a stable. In the stable lived a horse, who kept his head resting on the lower half of his divided door and always regarded me amiably. The whole place smelled of horse, cold ashes, garbage, and open ground. But one day men appeared and dug in the vacant lot, and practically the next day a tall red brick apartment building stood on it. About the same time, the stable, shed, and horse disappeared, to be replaced by concrete and brick and glass, with a lot of earthenware pots in evidence. It must have been the back of a flower shop. In the same abrupt manner—my memory moves as jerkily as an early silent movie—the rough alleyway became smoothly paved and