At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  I have personally known a few people in England who go to psychiatrists. They do so for some serious reason—a real breakdown or criminal action. In America I have known many more who are on and off the psychiatrist’s couch for trivial reasons—business disputes, lack of social success and so on. I am told it’s the rage among schoolgirls. In Europe one goes to the psychiatrist in despair and, if the man is a Freudian, to face devastating revelations; but Hiawatha goes optimistically in search of the power more consciousness will give him. Hiawatha has removed the pessimism from psychology, just as some American religious sects remove the central idea of the drama of suffering from the Christian myth. Hiawatha is looking for more extroverted activity, more opportunity for the will, and he presses forward, even when he gropes, on the humanist’s path believing in perfectibility tout court.

  Hiawatha is not sad. I think sadness is not valued in America. Or rather, the only people who retain sadness are the immigrants; they are looking back on emotional losses. Their children will not know sadness. They may know disappointment; Hiawatha is often disappointed. Disappointment sits like a dismal bird on many shoulders in the crowd of the New York subway. I repeat there is no place for failure, for sadness and the tragic, but when these inevitably occur, the victims look discarded and superfluous. They have worked and willed too much, like those phalanxes of aging, pensioned men and women who pack the benches of the cross streets on upper Broadway in the summer, with the dust blowing past their expressionless faces, looking at the traffic. America is a kind country; but its ethos has no use for the casualty or the old. And age is premature.

  Hiawatha has built two fine cities: dramatic New York and beautiful San Francisco. I am told New Orleans qualifies also; I wish I had been there. Most of his other cities are not, frankly, a success; he has a fatal weakness for sameness. Compared with the European, the American urban scene is not squalid, but it is drab, uninteresting and impersonal. It does not surprise after the first encounter. His new small towns, run off the assembly line, are poor packaged goods. On the other hand his suburban architecture is intimate, charming, restful and gay; his nineteenth-century and early-twen-tieth-century domestic buildings are far more attractive than the same thing in Great Britain or in France. I hope Hiawatha’s passion for tearing things down will not destroy what he did well.

  In my lifetime I have seen America move out of the swaggering, self-righteous and hectoring mood of the twenties, into the humiliation and revolution of the thirties, and finally into the startled discovery that it had become a great world power. Great powers are always respected, even distantly admired, but they are not loved, as the history of Britain, Spain and Russia shows: they protect but they also limit the freedom and swamp the lives of weaker peoples. The desire to be loved for themselves is an anxiety of the rich; but in the famous American desire to be loved there is something else, and I am not sure what it is, except that Europeans are without it. Some American writers put it down to a desire for reassurance: to be unloved or only partly loved is a point marked up against one, a sign of failure. If this is an American trait, it is obviously childish; it may go back to the anxiety Americans feel for the prestige and success of their children and to the idealization of childhood. Europeans—but we must except the Italians—are usually accused by Americans of over-disciplining their children, yet children like authority, order and knowing where they stand. It has often struck me that Americans put a great strain on children in demanding success of them, and perhaps that success is demanded because the father’s role is secondary. Criticism is not liked in America; it is a masculine trait. Mother does not like it; she thinks it is an attack on her person.

  Since Americans enjoy being Americans, they must get something pleasurable and positive out of this anxiety—perhaps the feeling that anxiety and self-examination avert catastrophe. They are very patient and tender psychologists; very truthful in human relationships, almost laboriously so. The pursuit of truth is activity. It has the sanction of being work. “Why do we do it?” I have heard an American mother say when she was being martyrized by a spoiled child and had yielded once more. “It must be,” she said, “to satisfy some very deep need.” It does; as a troubled perfectionist she believed in the future, and the future is embodied in the child.

  Still, catastrophe cannot be averted. American history is the story of a great success at the cost of enormous casualties. Huck Finn is one. He is a vagabond child who has lived through horrors. There is even a romantic and anarchic American tradition—dating from the lonely forest and mountain life—that society itself is evil (see Fenimore Cooper and Thoreau), that the meaning of life is in its terrors and horrors (see American Gothic novels). There is an irreverent, sardonic enjoyment of disaster that is opposed to Yankee moralism. (As Josh Billings said, “Americans like Caustic Things.”) The pessimism of Ambrose Bierce, the anger of Mencken, the iconoclasm and comic diatribes of Henry Miller, the large number of Americans who enjoy giving you macabre hints of life’s awfulness from a highly cherished, suicidal, intensely private corner of themselves, are a refreshing and important corrective to the blandness and flavorlessness of standard American life.

  The nation’s films and its popular literature revel in violence, gangsterism, sadism, alcoholism, drug addiction and sexual misdemeanor, and these, when exported, give a horrifying picture of American life. It is no doubt not a real picture; but it is an account of fantasies that are going on in the hard-pressed public mind. Perhaps real life is dull.

  So my third American fundamental type emerges: Sebastian, descendant of the saint. He arrived on American shores with the Discovery, when he faced all the terrors, the moral chaos and the loneliness of those who leave established societies. As he courageously, ruthlessly, laboriously established himself his character changed. The original Saint Sebastian is usually shown by our sadistic painters suffering agony from a shower of shrewdly aimed arrows. The new democratic American Sebastian—he has dropped the aristocratic San or Saint—does not wait romantically or resignedly, posing for martyrdom. He is a technician. He has ingeniously invented an invisible apparatus for shooting arrows into himself.

  In the fifteen years preceding the Cuban crisis, the United States was loud with the cries of the self-wounded. A lot of this self-criticism was very healthy. Intelligent people had got sick of being called Communists just because they thought for themselves. People had got sick of that lie in the soul which, I’m afraid, I heard more than one respectable person utter in defense of the late Senator McCarthy: “I don’t like what he’s doing, but someone had to do it.”

  I remember hearing that sort of thing in Tennessee in the big-time days of the Ku Klux Klan. Self-criticism pointed out how preposterously the idea of freedom had come to mean almost exclusively “economic private enterprise.” The attack on the backwardness of American education up to the age of sixteen, and on the deadening, hectic cramming system at higher levels afterwards, is good, as is the current frenzy to catch up. My clever and charming students at American universities were almost all Sebastians, agonizing in a system they found frustrating. They had the usual American illusion that European life, especially the British, is more leisurely. The opposite is true: there is nothing more relaxed than automatic cramming; it induces the stupor of the hum of the machine.

  Ask any modern immigrant his first reaction to American life. “Everything is so easy here,” he says. It is. But the American Sebastian knows that life, to be creative, first has to be intense and difficult. He may fear to stick his neck out in a conformist society, but he at least begins to see he is a coward.

  There is a bad side to Sebastianism. That prayer one often sees in American hotels, printed on a card (generally beside a huge menu) and showing Uncle Sam on his knees begging for forgiveness, is an absurd piece of self-indulgence. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish Sebastian from Narcissus. “We are great bleeders,” says one of my New York friends; to call oneself a coward may be no more than self-protective. Such
a bout of self-criticism is likely to turn, in the end, into its opposite and become cock-a-hoop.

  Like the Mississippi, the main stream of American life does not seriously change. For myself, the first attraction of America is in the diversity of its peoples. The immigrants have electrified the nation. The hard Anglo-Saxon, who is money-minded, adventurous, politically austere, law-abiding, sternly conventional in his social life, is saved from his own conservative insensibility by the humanity of the Irishman and the Italian, the sensitive or dynamic Jew, the wistful Puerto Rican, the tragic or splendacious Negro, the intelligent Greek, and so on. They bring temperament, genius and vitality. Relatively new countries fall quickly into decadence—as the history of the South American nations shows—unless there is a steady renewal from outside in every generation. New countries work people to death: the stress on youth means early aging.

  The final attraction of America for me is in the popular tradition and the figures of American folklore—the gorgeous liars, the muckrakers, the storytellers, the homespun philosophers, and so on, who have created something of the Elizabethan spirit of Bartholomew’s Fair—and although they belong to the vanished world of the frontier, their spirit still walks.

  My last American type is, therefore, the shade of Barnum. In his sense America is, indeed, the greatest show on earth, and Barnumism is indigenous. He celebrates the “free-for-all” of American life. He conducts the colossal scandals. (The taste for the great scandal is one that binds Americans closely to the Russians.) Barnum has an instinct for circus; he runs elections, parades, the sporting crowd. His vulgarities always have a stylish, preposterous air. My American friends often reproach me for enjoying these shows which stop at nothing; in California, not at death itself. Barnum celebrates the enjoyment of total loss of dignity (the uproar when the Mona Lisa was exhibited) and exploits the native irreverence and exhibitionism (Father’s away: let’s have a party).

  Barnumism goes very far. I was often told in McCarthy’s time that I was quite wrong about the significance of McCarthyism, that it was just one more American circus, one more saturnalia. I cannot regard the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society or McCarthyism as circuses—and my list includes the Congressional investigation committees, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee, which are much more significant than the KKK today: they strike me as being illnesses. Perhaps, in Europe, we are too doctrinaire. These things apart, however, the genial hullabaloos are some sort of manifestation of folk culture, maybe also a perversion of it. In Britain we used to have bear-baiting.

  There is a certain American solemnity that calls for relief. Jazz is a triumphant American invention, and its appeal to the rest of the world has been irresistible. The Negro, the most serious casualty of American life, has after all done more for America in this sense than all the enlightened people of New England and the highbrow Middle West put together. Two generations ago Rudyard Kipling pointed to the enormous dynamic potential of the Jew in American life; his foresight has been exact. The despised Irish have produced a president.

  The European Ego eventually explodes and goes to pieces in the United States and has to be reassembled. It is only fair to add that the American Ego explodes and disintegrates in the same way in Europe; but it is never really reassembled. All one can say, in these days when the world is smaller, is that little groups of the like-minded, with the same tastes and affections, find it is easier to change places in both continents and to meet. They must not be deluded. An American friend in London says the difference between America and Europe is that “in Europe you prune your trees in order to train their growth; in America we let them grow.” Europe has grown by saying no, America by saying yes. Opposite points of view: foreignness is an important, life-giving and, fortunately, ineradicable essence.

  I never agree that the distinctive quality of American democracy derives from social equality, or that this exists no more strongly in America than in other advanced countries: the distinctive thing is equality of contact.

  “Lousy day,” says the chirpy New York waiter when he brings me my breakfast; he might be a cheerful brother who has suddenly turned up in the family. It is an old saying that there is more fraternity than there is equality or liberty in the United States.

  I enjoy the waiter’s greeting, but in enjoying it, I realize I lose something of my private identity, and so does he lose something of his. But this brotherliness is a pleasant, amorphous family feeling. I think of America, in the end, as a huge, scattered, mixed-up family from which father vanished years ago leaving no address. The family are on their own.

  [1963]

  10

  Across the Vast Land

  From San Francisco we flew north: out of the sunny city into the struggle with Nature. Clouds bowled over Oregon, darkened over Washington, the rainstorms began and, below, the forests came tramping down in endless wet armies to meet us. The sea turned gray, and it seemed that it, too, had its forests, for when we looked out over the water, innumerable wooded islands, like schools of whales, were nosing northward with us into dirty weather. The sea turned sallow and then rank ocherish where the Fraser River stained it far beyond its delta with the silt of the Rockies; until, in a sudden vertical mix-up of mountain, cloud, sea, forest and long, straight streets of bungalows and green lawns, we bumped down into Vancouver. From the runway Nature lowered stormily on the city and looked stupendously rockthighed and high. We were at the beginning of the four-thousand-mile journey across Canada, and the Rockies stood like a lion in the path.

  Were we in a new country? The immigration official had a Chinese face; the waiters at the hotel were Italian, German or Hungarian; there were Irish in the streets. So far, we might still be in the United States. But small things showed we were not: that first hot, full-bodied cup of tea in the hotel, tea drunk as a stimulant, not as a sedative; thicker, woollier clothes, provincial shops, an American accent softened by the quiet British intonation. A quiet, calm country, evidently not as rich as California. Anyone wanting to swear used British profanities. The girls with the “natural” European look, rather than the American artifice. Smaller cars on the streets. An impression of restraint rather than exuberance; of tidiness: Vancouver cares for its gardens. In general, a mingling of British and American traits. One could say, outwardly American, inwardly British, yet perhaps Canada is the reverse of that. Perhaps Canada would turn out to be Canadian? Would this identifiable, distinctive Canada be revealed to us?

  It was too soon to say. But a story by Thomas Carlyle and his wife came into my head, a good Scottish story, and almost anything Scottish has a bearing on Canada. An earnest metaphysical lady, in the midst of an argument with Mrs. Carlyle, had been driven into a corner. “All right,” she said, “I accept the universe.” This was reported to Carlyle, who said, “She’d better.” From the beginning of their history until even today, the inhabitants of northern America have been in a similar situation. They have had to accept Nature—not the mild, friendly Nature of Europe, but Nature wicked, relentless and hostile. And Nature has, on the whole, been far harsher to Canadians than to Americans.

  From the beginning the men of the northern pincer movement of exploration on the Saint Lawrence tended to move south or southwest, into a kinder climate. When the United States was prospering rapidly, with seaports open all year round and an easy contact with Europe and the wealth of the Indies, the Canadians were frozen in. The gods that rule the Canadians are the Greenland icecap, the frozen polar sea and the lasting effects of the Ice Age. Changeable as it may be, and very hot in the summer, the Canadian climate is rudely northern. Of the whole country the part of British Columbia where we stood was the only mild region, where the rose blooms in every season and the azalea and rhododendron flourish, where flowers can grow to the full. (All across Canada we were struck by the smallness of the flowers.) For an enormous portion of this second-largest country in the world is a barely inhabited Siberia. Until the great advance of modern technology, Canadians were l
ocked in a grinding struggle with the climate, with exhausting distances and, at last, with the Rockies. The Canadian passes were almost insuperable; Nature there was at her worst.

  For nearly a century longer than in the United States, life in Canada has been struggling to emerge from the epic stage; it is still pretty well in that stage in the Arctic, despite the airplane, the diesel engine, electric power and the opening up of enormous mineral wealth. Until the railway and the plane, Canada was opened up by the canoe and the heavy labor of portages; even now at Fort Smith Rapids, on the Slave River, they are carrying ships on trailers across country to rejoin navigable water. From west to east, the most thickly populated belt is only two hundred miles wide, and of the nineteen million people, the greater part live in the Toronto triangle and the province of Quebec; and trees, mountains, grass and the water of tens of thousands of lakes crowd down on man. The machine has conquered the climate now: the country people are moving into towns, but when one asks what is the distinctive quality of the Canadian, the old trauma is at the back of his mind. “It is,” as the historian Jean-C. Falardeau wrote, “the allegiance of the solitary to his solitude.” The winds come down the central corridor from the north into the cities; the north is always in people’s heads. The short summer and long winter impress Nature on the mind even in cities, where, one might think, Nature could be forgotten.

  So in June we stood in Vancouver, in the long, straight American-style streets, and could feel the north in our backs. The warm weather was late in coming—and Vancouver can do better than this, as one realizes when the sun bursts out. It is not a handsome town—what can one expect? Eighty years ago it was a rough little lumber port; now it is the third city of Canada and has a fine university. It has a stupendous situation. The fjords and channels of Victoria and Vancouver are one of the most powerful sights of North America. The clouds storm over snow peaks, the wild forests storm down to the sea, which here has a sort of herding, animal force. I do not mean storm in the sense of thunder, lightning and gale. I mean that they affect the senses and the imagination in that way, like wild, romantic poetry.