Heresies and Heretics
Page 7
By the end of the second world war in 1945, as I vividly recall, American writers were the rage of literary London, and it could be a proud boast for an Englishman in the late 1940s to have visited the United States and an embarrassment not to have done so. In a dollar-hungry age America was not easily attainable, and its charms in those days were the charms of forbidden fruit. Its creative talents were moving back to England, in any case, for the first time since the Depression had driven some of them home. In 1952 Raymond Chandler arrived in London, delighted to be received as an eminent novelist rather than as a pulp-fiction hack, and he returned in 1955 for an extended visit and far more hero-worship than he could ever hope to find at home. ‘In England I am an author,’ he wrote in 1952; ‘in the USA just a mystery writer.’ It was an expatriate Englishman, W. H. Auden, who had already announced in ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ that Chandler’s novels should be judged ‘not as escape literature but as works of art.’ The mood was little short of reverent. ‘I think only Americans can write nowadays,’ I remember an English literary lady remarking at the time, in superior tones. She meant Ernest Hemingway, along with exemplars of the great poetic tradition like William Carlos Williams, John Crowe Ransom and Wallace Stevens. The judgement seemed perfectly natural by then. An American called T. S. Eliot had been the acknowledged leader of English letters for a generation, and the new British novel and the new British theatre were yet to be born.
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By the early 1950s the American conquest was complete. In 1951 Edith Sitwell edited The American Genius, a poetic anthology stretching from Edward Taylor, in the seventeenth century, down to living poets like Theodore Roethke, with an appendix about prose and a disjointed but essentially enthusiastic preface. Drama came too, and in more recent times it has been easier to see the plays of Arthur Miller or David Mamet in London than in New York. The vogue went far beyond literature. To the wonderment and shame of some of their American friends, British film-buffs vastly admire Westerns; in fact Europe might be loosely defined as the place where intellectuals admit to liking them. ‘There is no such thing as a bad Western,’ the critic A. Alvarez once announced in a BBC broadcast. Americanophilia reached academe too. Professors who visited the United States for a term or a year could return enthusing over the American academic system; the graduate seminar, hitherto almost unknown in British universities in arts subjects, sprang up in open imitation of American practice. ‘We don’t realise how provincial we are,’ J. H. Plumb remarked after a time in a history department in New York; with The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950, Lionel Trilling became the most influential cultural critic of his age, without exception, and no less in Britain than at home. In the mid-1960s he was offered an Oxford chair, and seven years after his death, in 1982, the university press there collected his writings in twelve handsome volumes.
And so on, and on. The American song tradition from Jerome Kern through George Gershwin to Cole Porter was a cult in England long before the war, and Winston Churchill was among its most ardent adherents. American idioms came and went, too, as fashions; in 1958 Kingsley Amis, already an established novelist, went to Princeton for a year and started writing dialogue full of transatlantic phrases like ‘let it ride,’ usually put in the mouths of bright adolescents, adopting into his social life one or two regrettable habits like lighting cigarettes at dinner between courses. To be an americanophile, in those years, was to be in, and if you had been to the United States you liked it to show and you let it hang out.
All that, however, seems to have struck no chord in the American psyche, then or since, and European americanophilia came and went uncredited and unremarked. Americans still seem to have little sense of the sheer international prestige of what they achieved in the arts, and a British accent can be particularly unfortunate in speaking of such things, since it can easily sound patronising. In 1869 James Russell Lowell wrote a resentful article for the Atlantic Monthly called ‘On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners,’ complaining about the sense of superiority he encountered abroad. It is a sentiment to be nervously remembered, though young Americans nowadays seem little troubled by it. But some delicacy is called for here, and it may have been precisely that sense of embarrassment that has kept the question so long taboo.
The vast exception to all this was (and is) jazz, along with the rock music that succeeded it in the early 1950s. That tradition was always seen as American, and it was widely admired all around the world; but then not all Americans, who can be stuffy about such things, accept its artistic merits. When an editor of the Times Literary Supplement mentioned Fats Waller to Diana Trilling, it is said, she was not merely incredulous that he should admire a jazz musician but astounded that he should have heard of him. Which is typical. The failure to see what America accomplished amounted to a resolute refusal to listen or to look. I recall being amazed, on my first visit to the United States in 1957, to hear the phrase ‘the great American novel’ consistently applied to the future, as if nothing of the kind had happened yet. Anyone who mentioned Moby-Dick or The Great Gatsby or Light in August was greeted with a blank stare. Perhaps, as a British visitor, I was not supposed to have heard of such books.
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The high tide of American cultural prestige in Europe coincided, paradoxically, with a low point in American cultural confidence. In matters other than cultural the mood in the United States was buoyant. By the 1950s there were no doubts whatever about American military power, though perhaps there should have been. No doubts, either, about America’s technical pre-eminence, and I recall a crucial moment late in 1957 when Sputnik went into orbit: the sense of amazement and horror at the discovery that any other nation should be technically ahead of the United States, and the anxious and bitter education-debate it provoked. It counted for nothing that the Soviet Union was larger and more populous; it was axiomatic in those days that America, however culturally backward, was first (and easily first) in all things technical. I recall a moment of social embarrassment at a European lunch-party when an American visitor, on seeing instant coffee, rashly and (as she thought) harmlessly remarked, ‘Oh look, you even have American coffee.’ She was briskly informed by a Swiss lady that Nescafé had been invented on the Lake of Geneva in the 1930s. But then it was difficult to persuade Americans in the early 1950s, when television had just begun in the United States, that the British had TV before the war; harder still to persuade them that Britain was first to develop nuclear power for commercial purposes. If anything was new and technical, so the feeling ran, it must be American.
Contrast all that military and technical confidence with the crushing sense of cultural inferiority that prevailed in the United States two generations ago. Because it was widely assumed that foreigners knew nothing and cared nothing about American civilisation, cultural centres funded by the federal government were set up in foreign capitals, and eminent authors like Thornton Wilder and Allen Tate were bundled around the globe at the taxpayers’ expense, in a cultural offensive only briefly embarrassed by McCarthyism, to assure the world that America too had its poets, playwrights, novelists and critics. In other words, Americans did not know, or would not accept, that the world knew it already. Academic courses abroad on American literature were subsidised, and libraries funded, on the assumption that unless something is formally studied it does not qualify as a serious interest. A Radcliffe girl looked at me in utter amazement when I told her that Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty had been a cult movie in Oxford when it first appeared in 1955, its New York backstreet idioms (‘You want that I should hit you one?’) the vogue of student conversation there. Van Cliburn’s triumph as a pianist in Moscow in April 1958, when he won the Tchaikovsky competition, earned him a tickertape parade on his return to New York – the other side of the Sputnik coin. If it was astonishing that Russians should be technically ahead, it was equally astonishing that they should be artistically behind.
The significance of Hollywood among the so-called cinema ge
neration of the 1930s and 1940s, or those reared after the invention of the talkies and before TV, would be hard to overstate. One anecdote will do. Philip Larkin first met Kingsley Amis, his lifelong friend, in an impromptu mock rehearsal in an Oxford college of a gangster movie. In Larkin’s 1964 preface to his novel Jill he tells how in 1941 a friend pointed a finger at a young man standing in a college doorway in Oxford and uttered a short sharp bark, like a shot on a worn sound-track in a Saturday cinema. Amis took his cue:
Clutching his chest in a rictus of agony, he threw one arm up against the archway and began slowly crumpling downwards, fingers scoring the stonework. Just as he was about to collapse on the piled-up laundry, however, . . . he righted himself and trotted over to us.
So their long friendship began in freshman mimicry of the world of Al Capone. But then everyone echoed Hollywood in those days. In Rebecca’s Vest Karl Miller tells how his Scottish mother would imitate James Cagney in her kitchen.
To say that Europeans admire Hollywood may sound banal and pointless, especially since such admiration, it is often felt, is spiced with mockery or at best condescension. But that is a misunderstanding. Americans find Hollywood funny too; and I would hotly deny that my own admiration for the Marx brothers is or ever was condescending, and find it difficult to understand what such a charge might mean. I take the Marx brothers as they are meant to be taken. The same goes for Laurel and Hardy, who plainly count as an American cultural phenomenon even if Stan Laurel was an Englishman. In America in the Movies Michael Wood tells how, as an English boy in the 1950s, he greedily drank up the Hollywood world of the stylishly overdone, as he calls it – a world as coherent as Balzac’s – in films that ‘dreamed up an America all their own, and persuaded me to share the dream.’ Hollywood may have been absurd, among other things, but it was an absurdity that compelled audiences abroad no less than at home; and it persuaded them of an American reality, one might add, as well as of a dream. It is important to understand national stereotypes, after all, whether they are absurd or not; and a classic like Casablanca with its cynical but warm-hearted American played by Humphrey Bogart, its witty, womanising French police chief who turns out all right in the end, its brutal Germans and its silly, affected British, including (as always) a woman in a ridiculous hat, defines a range of national stereotypes that Americans seriously believed in when I first lived there a few years later. It was a fiction; but, like a lot of fictions, it was informative in a useful, even indispensable way. Like many millions around the world I first learned my America in cinemas, and the only serious misinformation I can report is that I was surprised to discover when I first went there that Americans do not live most of their lives in night-clubs. In fact most people I met had never been to one.
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Americanophilia was ultimately incredible to the American mind, however, and it was so, I suspect, because it was unimaginable.
I speak here of the mind of an intelligentsia, to be sure: of that small proportion of its people, as Henry James would say, that is in any way capable of giving a critical account of itself. The sample is no doubt unrepresentative, but it is all there is as quotable evidence, and it is a sample that is likely to be influential in excess of its size. There is a generalisation to be ventured here – that no nation in history has been so systematically and consistently abused by its own intelligentsia as the United States in the twentieth century. An American intellectual defines himself by such abuse, and the record is by now endless and, stylistically speaking, distinguished. H. L. Mencken said there was no underestimating the intelligence of the American public and called its democracy the art of running a circus from the monkey cage. That sets a high standard, but Gore Vidal, needless to say, tried to go one better, which is what he was for, and called American civilisation something the absence of which drove Henry James to Europe. No doubt Dorothy Parker said it too, and the critical reader is left with little to do and less to say. When Oscar Wilde, after a lecture-tour in 1882, called American life one long expectoration, or when Bernard Shaw said that in the United States an asylum for the sane would be empty, they were competing in an open race nobody can win, since it started early and goes on and on. There is no insult a foreigner can level against American civilisation that has not already been outdone by an American.
No doubt all this noisy self-contempt masks a secret elation; no doubt the assailant is drawing attention to the barbarism and stupidity of others, never to his own. To be an intellectual in America is to be different – or so the implicit claim goes. And the answer to the mystery surely lies here. Americans find it incredible that Europeans should admire American civilisation because the sheer weight of anti-American propaganda from inside America itself makes it impossible for them to believe that anyone ever could. The American intelligentsia may or may not be sincere in its abuse – it continues to live, on the whole, and by choice, in the United States – and it may or may not be right. But its abuse is heeded, quoted and even believed. Repetition makes it look true.
Cultural anti-patriotism goes back a long way. Sidney Lanier is said to have punctured Walt Whitman’s patriotic claims in Leaves of Grass with the devastating parody ‘Because the Mississippi River is long, every American is wise.’ Departments of literature in the United States before the 1930s scarcely thought American books worth teaching at all, and in 1946 T. S. Eliot revealed in Poetry Chicago that in his own student days at Harvard, before the first world war, the American literary scene looked ‘a total blank,’ Harvard men reading only English poets of the 1890s. The homeward shift of interest was uncertain and slow. F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), much of it about Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau, appeared just before Pearl Harbor and must have been largely written in the 1930s, being a big book. But it is not a nationalistic book; it allows Coleridge at the outset to limit the terms of the critical debate; and anyone who calls Melville’s Pierre an American Hamlet, as Matthiessen does, is plainly making a point for national humility. Its chief polemical claim was that as late as the nineteenth century the American literary tradition had still not shed the allegorical obsessions of early Puritanism. Hardly a recommendation, coming from a Harvard Episcopalian of pro-Soviet sympathies, and the book leaves you with the sense of a literature whose unhappy distinction was to be backward, unadventurous and provincial. After Matthiessen’s suicide in 1950 his disciples tried to make something fitfully patriotic out of all this, since by then the United States had miraculously emerged, with some suddenness, as a world power. But the claim was unconvincing. If classic American literature exists principally as a revelation of national character it cannot have been much of a literature; and true to form, the disciples did not remain patriots for long. ‘My country, always wrong’ was their natural state of mind, and in the 1960s many seized opportunities offered by the Vietnam War to revert to type.
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In a word, the American intelligentsia cannot hear what americanophiles have to say, or if they hear it they cannot believe it.
Where but in America does imported mean good and domestic inferior? Al Pacino’s film Looking for Richard sums up that resolute sense of cultural inferiority with compelling precision. American actors cannot speak Shakespeare, so the film insists, and they cannot do it because they are Americans. The paradox here is that Pacino, in the brief excerpts from Richard III that are shown, speaks well and makes an excellent king. No use trying to convince him, though. He would rather sound like Sir John Gielgud.
It might be instructive to contemplate how great civilisations regard the fascination of their neighbours, or its absence. Spain seems content with a modest intellectual role, for all that Spanish is the second language of the Western world. The French, by contrast, concerned with their place in the sun, demand and sometimes achieve a certain eminence for their language; but francophilia has been in decline for a century and its decline may be terminal. Germans, embarrassed by two world wars, have shrunk b
ack from a world role except in commerce and seek no place for German in international culture; while the British take the relaxed and unexcited view that if the world wants to use their language, that is a matter for the world. To Americans is reserved a stranger fate. For most of the century they unwittingly enjoyed the cultural admiration of the world and refused to notice it or even to acknowledge it. Busy, as ever, with their ancient tribal practice of intellectual self-contempt, they simply did not acknowledge it was there.
12. The Americanness of Poetry
England, as the world knows, has poets. America has American poets.
Why is this? I pose the question shyly, hesitantly, and out of nothing more than affectionate curiosity – certainly not in any aggressive spirit, being cheerfully at home in both countries and a native of neither. Why did American poets, until recently, think it mattered so enormously where they were born or raised: in a word, that they were American? Ezra Pound’s remark in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921) about having been ‘born in a half-savage country, out of date’ is so famous that it takes an effort of mind to recall that (strictly speaking) no one even notices where he was born. Why should he care, or expect others to care? Pound was raised in Philadelphia, as it happens, which to my casual eye is not even halfway savage; and he refrains from mentioning it, perhaps in the desperate hope we might remember he was born in faraway Idaho. Gertrude Stein, a resident of Paris, thumped the same old national drum, but this time the patriotic end of it: ‘It always seemed to me a rare privilege,’ she once remarked,