Cathedrals on wheels

Imagine for a moment Harley Earl, head of design at General Motors, Detroit’s wizard of kitsch. Standing before him, in his studio, is the cetacean bulk, nipple-coloured pink paint, churrigueresque chrome ornaments and rocket-ship details of his 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham Seville Convertible. He is talking to his acolytes, as attentive as Rubens’ studio assistants in Antwerp 300 years earlier. Earl is describing his stylist’s art, the astonishing formal achievement of the pink Caddy. He says, pointing perhaps to a tail fin: ‘I want that line to have a duflunky, to come across, have a little hook in it, and then do a rashoom or a zong.’ Our language lacks a vocabulary to describe what cars do to us. So Harley Earl had to invent his own. It’s poetry of a sort.

Poets themselves have not much sung ‘The Age of Combustion’. The A23 has not found its Homer. And maybe now it never will.