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.

There are some solitary wonders. E.E. Cummings’s 1926 poem ‘She Being Brand New’ treats clutch slip, piston slap, burning smells, shuddering motions and grinding gears exactly as if they are metaphors of sex. Which, of course, in a way, they are.

Forty years after Cummings, Tom Wolfe essayed his trademark sesquipedalian style when, on his first assignment as a journalist, he described what cars meant to street-racing Californian kids: ‘Freedom style sex power motion colour everything.’

But more often literature has been disdainful of the car. ‘Dark was the day when Diesel/ conceived his grim engine that/ begot you, vile invention…/ metallic monstrosity,/ bale and bane of our culture,/ chief woe of our commonweal’, wrote Auden. Maybe this is exactly what Auden thought on his frequent and convenient tipsy trips home in a taxi powered by Dr Rudolf Diesel’s Rational Heat Engine.