America Cliche by Cliche
RORTY, JAMES
America Clich? by Clich? America Day by Day. By Simone de Beauvoir. Grove. 337 pp. $4.00. Reviewed by James Rorty Author of "His Master's Voice"; contributor to "Commentary" "Commonweal" Soon...
...For American readers—even those who, like the present writer, will plod through from cover to cover in the wistful hope of encountering the occasional flash of a de Toqueville or even an Andre Siegfried—the book is practically worthless, and for French readers it is unilluminating at best and in spots positively misleading...
...Her pages are padded with the devastating international clich?s of the current socio-psycho-analytical patter—stuff that she could have written just as well without leaving home...
...For example: "Each individual existence has a flavor of death...
...Yet, Mile, de Beauvoir means well and is quite without malice...
...Everybody, she says, was most kind...
...But they end by going back to that from which they tried to escape: The arid basis of American life is boredom...
...A professor is soon out of a job if his opinions are held to be subversive, and if a book airing such subversive ideas is written, it is banned by both publishers and critics...
...As a reporter, our latest Young Visitor lacks both the sensitivity and the literary skill that might have made her surface impressions interesting, and the experience, humility and sophistication—especially the political sophistication—required to select, organize and interpret her material...
...I know there is no political life in America," she remarks airily, and then, on the next page, gives us this example of her own political sapience: "Those who spoke to me were conscious of the pretense, and of all the pretenses of American democracy...
...We'll welcome the next one with the same hopeful cordiality...
...When, to compound these handicaps, she elects to write her book in the form of a retrospective diary, elaborated from notes and memory after her return to France, the result is distressing...
...This makes an overwhelming case against American democracy...
...Her book is unfair, not so much to its large, opaque subject as to its author...
...The demand for new things and ever newer things is feverish, since they find no rest in anything...
...some of her student audiences would appear to have ribbed her, after the irreverent manner of our young...
...This defeat, they say, makes all action impossible: Social pressure is far too crushing...
...Having written this, I am immediately filled with compunction...
...Although many of her facts and opinions would seem to have been clipped from l'Humanit?, she has made them peculiarly her own...
...for Mile, de Beauvoir, I am told, has written better books when she was working under less formidable handicaps...
...Meanwhile, one is sure that few Americans will be so unkind as to think that Mile, de Beauvoir is a representative French intellectual...
...nor will any American publisher, one hopes, be so unintelligent as to print a similarly inept performance by an American traveler in France...
...It is reported that, now and then, one of the Americans to whom she talked would try to interrupt the French lady's tirades with the mild observation that there are at least as many kinds of American life as there are regions and social classes, but rarely was anybody able to gel a word in edgewise, except at the universities where she lectured...
...Some of these handicaps, however, are subjective and insuperable...
...The professor was right...
...It must constantly be filled anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself...
...They deplore the fact that the forces of capitalism are hastening the fall of democracy at such a violent pace...
...that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, horror films and sensational news...
...Of course...
...To conclude from this and other passages that Mlle, de Beauvoir is a Stalinist would be a mistake...
...Boredom and solitude...
...contributor to "Commentary" "Commonweal" Soon after Simone de Beauvoir arrived in New York on a visit which was to last four months, she encountered a French professor who begged her, whatever else she did, not to write a book about her experiences...
...from one moment to the next, the present is merely an honorary past...
...Sport, the movies and comic strips are distractions...
...one is even convinced that she is sincere when she writes, just before she departs, that she has learned to "love sorrowfully" the country that she has neither truly seen nor in the least understood...
...she arrived with her head full of them, confided them to everybody with deafening candor, and returned with them unchanged...
...Intervention of an intellectual nature is forbidden by private dictates, which are in turn prescribed by capitalist interests...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 3
