Abroad in America
Rocca, Francis X.
rri he inevitable question," Jessica Mitford and her newlywed husband discover, is: "Do you like America?" This always stumped us a bit at first. "It would never occur to us to ask a foreigner if...
...The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom...
...is second to none in commercial affairs but that, since the "best men" are otherwise occupied, America's "political growth" is comparatively stunted...
...The Pilgrims and their successors, he says, came here in order to be "masterless...
...Our compensation is a look at ourselves through foreigners' eyes, a view of the familiar as if it were the strange...
...Neither "vulgarian" nor "idealist," Goldman marvels, this man is "an entirely new type...
...He casts himself as sovereign over domestic beasts and god-like arbiter of the wild...
...How well could he have been listening...
...This is gratifying, yet an even more touching and more telling encounter is described by the anarchist Emma Goldman...
...John de Crevecoeur, an eighteenth-century "farmer of feelings" who gathers "food for useful reflections" from the prosaic challenges of tillage and husbandry...
...We overheat our rooms, Tchaikovsky and Dylan Thomas complain, though the agreeable Mitford finds the high temperature a delightful novelty...
...She tells of her decision to become a prostitute, in order to finance the assassination of industrialist Henry Clay Frick...
...a lot more fun than Freud's...
...in a spectacular description, he shoots a kingbird to set free the swarm of honey bees in its craw...
...Perhaps Americans nowadays are more jealous of our liberty than that...
...Crevecoeur's compatriot, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin de Gouvermet, a refugee from the French Revolution, also takes to the land...
...Since the snobbery of the Mother Country is legendary, and our desire for her approval is enduring, American readers ask "the inevitable question" of British writers with particular apprehension...
...Coerced by Stalin to attend a Peace Conference in New York and to lie on behalf of the Soviet regime, the composer is appalled at our credulity: "in order to live and sleep soundly, they'll believe anything...
...Which, it seems, is to miss the point of the whole precious conceit...
...D. H. Lawrence perceives not so much decadence as spiritual vacancy in this country...
...rr hese pages also contain occasions 1 for patriotic pride...
...And if he didn't there would be nothing one could do about it...
...Nearly two-thirds of the authors Blow anthologizes are British...
...Editor Robert Blow has chosen with discrimination and whimsy...
...A most ecstatic witness to this phenomenon is J. Hector St...
...Touchy Americans will brace themselves for Evelyn Waugh on Hollywood...
...These are aspects of America that we so take for granted, we often fail to see them...
...It would never occur to us to ask a foreigner if he liked England," Esmond pointed out, "because, if he did, so what...
...It is easy to countenance this sort of sniping when it is aimed at privileged, and historically remote, targets...
...We "eat round the clock," warns food critic Derek Cooper, and our country is "a breeding ground for clinical obesity...
...Not when they are escaping to some wild west...
...As evidence, he reports the submissive response to martial law: citizens gladly tolerating, even proudly embracing, the abrogation of habeas corpus—not to mention thesuspension of the peculiar guarantees in the U.S...
...Oscar Wilde, for example, preaches a democratic Aestheticism for this country, which he envisions as a haven for craft artisan-ship, where the common man can live every day amid practical beauty...
...In contrast comes Nicholas Coleridge, riding the train across latter-day Nevada and dumping on the "lowlife" aboard...
...the indispensable impressions of Dickens and Tocqueville dovetail curiously with those of GI brides and a London taxi driver...
...Less exalted, but no less historically significant (to say the least), has been the profit motive for coming to America, yet it is not fairly represented here...
...T he laughs in this book come large- 1 ly at our expense...
...It is a catalogue of the uncouth: ubiquitous spitting, cursing, and deployment of the knife as the all-purpose dinner utensil...
...Easy to see how it infuriated her contemporaries on this side of the Atlantic, however amusing it is to read now, in a more gracious day...
...In part they tell the story of a uniquely American spiritual accomplishment, the sublimation of work—the realization of what pastors call "the dignity of labor...
...He is worse than unfair, he is inaccurate: his citations of American English are marked by suspicious anglicisms...
...he can be pedantic and flippant at once, as when he informs us that "Jungian theory is Francis X Rocca writes for Wall Street Journal Guides to Business Travel...
...This is an international phenomenon, according to Waugh, but by implication one for whose propagation America bears special culpability, given the influence of the movies...
...It is left to Arnold Schwarzenegger to praise the land of economic opportunity, and to Al Capone (in an interview with Claud Cockburn) to defend "the American system" ("call it Capitalism, call it what you like") from its attackers among the "goddamn radicals...
...he reveals nothing more shocking than that glamorous movie stars actually lead lives of upper-middle-class dullness...
...Domestic Manners of the Americans, her bestselling 1832 travelogue, might have been titled Bad Manners of the Americans...
...Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom...
...Yet we know that many have come to America holding up something more than a "negative ideal...
...A hopeless sort of constraint...
...It does not overlook less gross offenses: overwrought diction, overdressed ladies, and a moribund high society...
...They speak eloquently for themselves, which is why many of Blow's introductions are gratuitous...
...The shout is a rattling of chains, always was...
...An expectedly sordid tale turns farcical and ends with a humane twist: before she can solicit her first customer, the hapless neophyte gets picked up by an old capitalist who buys her a beer and gives her $10 to quit, as she is clearly not cut out for the racket...
...In fact, an American...
...The classic Ugly Anglo is Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony...
...Apparently she found this thought an appetizer...
...In the early years of the Republic, William Cobbett gripes that "this country is good for getting money . . . in every other respect the country is miserable...
...She learns pride in dairy farming, charms and patronizes the Indians ("my friends the savages") and, after her little daughter dies from a rural epidemic, Madame finds God...
...And then there are matters we ignore for more painful reasons...
...The negative ideal of democracy," he writes, has no value but freedom—freedom as the flouting of Old World traditions of authority...
...Rather the reverse...
...Rife with invocations of "polarities" and "terrestrial magnetism," Lawrence's criticism nevertheless cannot be shrugged off...
...This is a secular trope on the preaching of Roger Williams who, like his seventeenth-century counterparts of sundry sectarian stripes, regards the Indian "gentiles of America" as nations well-suited to Christianization...
...This is the most discomforting asseveration in the book...
...We are forever trying to sell each other something, marvels Malcolm Muggeridge, and this is corroborated by a transplanted English wife horrified to find grade school kids peddling magazines...
...Yet we stand more recently, and quite justly, accused of complacency about the liberty of others...
...21.95 Francis X. Rocca THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 39 One), which he interprets as a monument to the death-denying, infantile, irreligious piosity of the twentieth century...
...Malcolm Muggeridge observes that the "great distinction of Americans in menial employment" from their Old World equivalents is that the Americans do not resent their jobs...
...Bill of Rights...
...Waugh writes charitably and very sadly, particularly of Forest Lawn Cemetery (later satirized in The Loved ABROAD IN AMERICA: LITERARY DISCOVERIES OF THE NEW WORLD FROM THE PAST 500 YEARS Edited by Robert Blow/Continuum/348 pp...
...Americans in 1990 will also be amused by Bertrand Russell's recollections of the American intelligentsia in 1896, whom he portrays as humorless parochials...
...For instance, about a wealthy in-law officiating at a national rite, Thanksgiving dinner: Just as we were about to eat the first mouthful, she said: "let us pause and think of the poor...
...Another conspicuous omission is the Soviet emigre Vassily Aksyonov, whose 1987 memoir In Search of Melancholy Baby is droll, irreverent, and admiring—a superb addition to the genre...
...Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief...
...His anecdote is from a Phineas Fogg redux, 80-day global circumnavigation, in the course of which escapade Coleridge is perfectly glad to rent a car or "dial a minicab...
...The Americans don't give a damn about us," despairs Dmitri Shostakovich...
...Saint Brendan) to 1988 (Martin Amis...
...also a bibliography, which is an especial shame in such a tantalizing sampler...
...Russell can be nasty, and in larger doses repellent, but his three pages here are redeemed by mordant quips...
...Trollope fils, touring during the Civil War, acknowledges that the U.S...
...It is never freedom until you find something you really positively want to be...
...It is also the inevitable question for an American reading this pastiche of news reports, diaries, lecture notes, letters, autobiographies, and travelogues, in which 120 authors recount visits to the mainland United States from the sixth century A.D...
...On the other hand, Amtrak is arguably a handicap that excuses exceptional measures...
...What is missing is an index...
...Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom...
...When a "lift man" tells Muggeridge that he likes his job, because it lets him meet a lot of people, the elevator operator is claiming a small share in the legacy of Crevecoeur and Madame de la Tour du Pin...
...But he is not writing an expos...
...Americans (except those freshly returned from Junior Year Abroad) do not normally say "cocktail bar," or "coach" for "bus...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
