OUR SEARCH FOR ROOTS: II
McCarthy, Abigail
OUR SEARCH FOR ROOTS: II Abigail McCarthy In A Need for Roots, Simone Weil expressed her fear about what the inevitable influence of America might do to post-World War II Europe. She thought of us...
...They'd lie right down and go to sleep in the afternoon-with a war to fight...
...Think of anything, of cowboys, or movies, or detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving...
...We are one in our collective shame and relief, no matter how much we try to blame each other, no matter how we try to fix past blame...
...Don't you understand the difference, she used to say angrily, any two americans, any twenty americans, any millions of americans can organize themselves to do anything . . ." (Stein) We have come through a civil war of purpose and opinion, but it was an American experience...
...We are shaped by the American sky, the navigable rivers, the horse crossing the plain, the railroad, the automobile, the plane...
...Even our angers and our discontents have their source in common (.Continued on page 159) Abigail McCarthy (Cont...
...Well, he had thoughts about the difficulty of fighting with "them...
...No one has sung of the American continent more beautifully than Thomas Wolfe with his litanies of American place names and American rivers...
...But, yes, he thought he could explain it to his son, that his son would understand "because I can tell him how it was to be there, not that he can know it the way I did...
...Concepts like these of work and time and combined effort are built into the self so subtly that we are hardly aware of them...
...The restless sound of the train whistle at night sounds through American literature...
...Or am I afraid of journeying any further with myself...
...Our institutions have been shaped by them...
...Oh he said because one of them says I am going...
...It is an attitude which James Baldwin questioned by inversion on the eve of returning from his European exile: "Am I afraid of returning to America...
...Hence, the effort to prevent them from dominating must be a constant one...
...We are shaped by place and experience...
...Would he have fought it differently...
...No one has sought a homeplace of the spirit more assiduously...
...We take these values for granted: we do not question them...
...The new ethnicists are only echoing the literary regionalists of the earlier part of the century...
...Can't Go Home Again...
...They're different from us, you know...
...The Americans" they say in Vietnam and Cambodia whether in reproach or despair or longing...
...I am always trying to tell this thing that a space of time is a natural thing for an American to always have inside them as something within which they are continuously moving...
...But when we insist on a separatism of blood lines and background and ask only for a community of economic and political opportunity we are taking the same point of view...
...She thought of us as a nation of the uprooted, united only by material values and sharing no common moral or spiritual heritage...
...To the extent that we continue the struggle we share the most American trait of all-the ability to live in the future...
...The Americans" are assailed in India, in Africa, in Moscow and Peking...
...But in the end he concludes with Simone Weil that roots must come from certain particular expectations as well as from the living past: "the home of every one of us is in the future: there is no other way" (You Can't Go Home Again...
...De Tocque-ville noted that Americans as Americans are encouraged to press for their objectives, not to accept their lot or hope for remedy from an established upper class...
...values-what Seymour Martin Lipset called the key American values- equality and achievement...
...the question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self . . . But my own experience proves to me that the connection between American whites and American blacks is far deeper and more passionate than any of us likes to think...
...We are, of course a nostalgic people...
...We were Americans, forming committees, organizing, organizing-somebody going over the contributors' list, somebody getting the speakers, somebody getting the permits, even somebody seeing to the "comfort stations...
...But, says Lipset in The First New Nation: "to build and maintain a free and equalitarian society is the most difficult task political man has ever set himself because there are tendencies inherent in social organization which seek to destroy freedom and to foster inequality...
...Why do the Americans not stay on forever," she asked the painter Sayen in Paris...
...An Italian who grew up on the shore of one of the gray Great Lakes, a Pole used to the bare Los Angeles hills will find his eye unsatisfied in the country of his fathers...
...In this she was wrong...
...Now in the dismal aftermath of Vietnam, we may indeed be divided, we may want to stress our differences, but the rest of the world sees us one...
...So, too, is our sense of space and the possibility of physical mobility-the fruit of being born in a land whose geography extends this promise...
...Expatriates and soldiers abroad have often been acute at sensing this likeness-or better, these likenesses...
...the Americans" they write in editorials in Rome and London and Stockholm...
...The very dark in our common experience unites us...
...Gertrude Stein, in her inimitable writing about America for non-Americans, wrestled with the peculiarly American concept so much a part of that black soldier from Omaha: ". . . this thing is an essentially American thing this sense of a space of time and what is to be done within this space of time...
...These aspects of character, these sensory images of our country, of which we are not conscious, often override our conscious definitions of self...
...Yes, it was a waste," said the black sergeant, veteran of Vietnam, to the TV questioner...
...The children left behind are the children of Americans: whether black or white does not seem a crucial difference...
...He could not have done that-he had been an American with a job to do...
...In relation to non-Americans Americans are very like...
...Gertrude Stein's America ed., Gilbert Harrison) Those of us who opposed the war will, in later years, also try to tell how it was: how it was in Chicago in '68, how it was at the Pentagon, at Kent State, at the Moratorium, on Mayday...
...It shows in curious ways...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 5
