Living With Books

...After my passport had finally been stamped, I remarked casually...

...Naturally, the radicals and nationalists in Asia, Africa and the Middle East regard this careful preservation of barriers with some impatience...

...the universal language is not that of politics but of science...

...Three years ago, this had been remarkable chiefly in Italy and Germany...

...The pressure of our materialism is so gross that it is not certain that we can succeed...

...As the liberals in the United States and Europe accept more and more the political status quo in their own countries, and especially a non-partisan foreign policy, they are more and more debarred from the luxury of feeling that materially self-interested political arguments or ideologies are the attributes exclusively of the Right...

...The definable progress is technical, medical, mechanical...

...New blocks of flats represent a very tangible kind of progress, especially for urban intellectuals on small salaries who—in most big cities—have a hard time finding a decent place to live...

...Now, partly as a result of an understanding derived from Marxism, we can no longer exempt our own compromised views from this charge...

...Obviously, Americans are in no position to scorn such material aspirations...

...They mildly resent the fact that the numerous Negro students from French possessions in Africa dress more fashionably and have more money to spend than do most French scholarship students...

...but there is no sign of positive exhortation, in the expected Communist manner...

...What could one say...

...The two main rooms were small but well designed and insulated against the weather, so that heating by stoves in each room is cheap...

...Having established an apparently orthodox Communist regime, Yugoslavia won and maintained its independence of Russia, despite continuing threats and pressures...

...In most advanced countries today, even liberals and social democrats cannot honestly invoke, without qualification, the consoling universals of liberty, equality and fraternity, or of the rights of all peoples to democratic self-government...

...The city once had been entirely surrounded by barbed wire...

...Factories and government agencies build houses for their employes and pay for their higher education in technical schools and universities...

...or of sufficient money for drinks, the movies, ice-cream parlors, restaurants and vacation resorts...

...If we limit our rhetoric and acknowledge our uneasiness of conscience, this will not weaken our position before the rest of the world...

...In the fairly large kitchen, an upholstered wall bench was neatly made up with sheets and a blanket for the maid who "sleeps in...

...Another friend in Ljubljana, however, has just moved into a new building erected by the agency for which he works...

...It is our fate to feast while others starve...

...Despite the intense Yugoslav experience, there is no discernible "new man...

...The buildings themselves were well supplied with study rooms, libraries and elevators, but the interior had the impersonal, roughly-finished style of a garage...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Robert Gorham Davis Notes from a European Journey: Small Ambitions and Great Ideals Salzburg, Austria The day the executions of Imre Nagy and General Pal Maleter were announced, my wife and I visited the huge new dormitories of the University of Paris at Croix de Berny, on the outskirts of the city...

...From habit, these young Frenchmen criticized America...

...Here is a unique combination of the most intensely relevant forms of modern political experience...

...The movie houses feature Gloria Swanson and Brigitte Bardot...

...I do not mean to say that in Yugoslavia or France political questions were ignored, that we talked only of refrigerators and motorbikes...

...The nations of the world seem like so many locks in a canal...

...Economic decentralization continues...

...would be nongovernmental, highly paid, and of considerable prestige— earns about $50 a month...

...With this feeling gone, America will have to strive very hard to find an adequate identity in the other components of its culture...

...In the ebullient period of the '20s and '30s in America, it was always the other fellow, the conservative, the reactionary, whose views were a rationalization of particular interests...

...The difficulty for Americans is that the national sense of life at its richest and noblest has been bound up less with "monuments of art and learning and taste" than with universalist ideals of democracy, freedom, equality and self-fulfillment...

...This is especially painful, because the political creeds to which we are so deeply committed emotionally, the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, are so explicitly universalistic, referring to all men and any nation...

...But the more we concentrate on material and scientific progress as the principal good, as the universal which we can most readily share with others, the more conspicuous become the differences in degree...

...Rows of hostages with placards hung from their necks were executed in the streets...

...Now it was evident in Austria, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and, to some extent, France...

...Paris landlords outrageously overcharge them...

...An official answered sharply...

...They want to get their degrees and begin their professional careers...

...One cannot "accept' the suffering of others, no matter for what ideal, no matter if one's own suffering be also accepted, without incurring . . . the guilt in which every civilization is implicated...

...the elevator itself was "for the future...

...Nothing in the history of the last thirty years could lead us to suppose that it would...

...You make it rather difficult to travel to Yugoslavia...

...The husband, with a responsible Government job—one which in the U.S...

...They sincerely want to see improvement in the conditions of the non-European peoples of the Middle East...

...Our prosperity has a high wall around it...

...the bookstores offer translations of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tom Jones and Ulysses...

...However mixed with illusion and self-deception, it enabled us, in our wealth and power, to face in good conscience a world of suffering and injustice which we did not "accept...

...Hyacinth is ready to abandon the revolutionary movement to which he had deeply committed himself, but he exchanges one kind of guilt for another...

...Those on the upper levels like to see the lower levels rise, but only as long as their own levels continue to go higher...

...It was strange to have bright young Frenchmen, readers of L'Express and France-Observateur, half-apologizing to an American for their own reluctant acceptance of General de Gaulle and for their feelings about North Africa...

...On July 4, the country celebrated the 15th anniversary of a decisive defeat of the Germans which led to its self-won liberation...

...There is censorship, certainly...

...A discussion of housing is as good a place to start as any if one wants to confront the troubling relationship between economics, politics and ideology which prevails in the world today...

...The day Gamal Abdel Nasser came ashore at Dubrovnik for conversations with Marshal Tito, we were taken to a friend's apartment in a housing development in Ljubljana, one of the larger Yugoslav cities...

...One may compare their attitude with that of the Israelis toward the Palestinian Arabs, or our own Southerners to the Negroes who wish to enter integrated schools...

...This is a period of atomic stalemate, when our principal allies are holding their positions by acts of coercion, and when we ourselves, so rich and heavily armed, are forced in fact, if not in words, to accept the injustice and poverty suffered by others in both the Communist and non-Communist worlds...

...Hyacinth's passion for life at its richest and noblest "leads him to consent to the established coercive power of the world, and this can never be innocent...

...But now it was for having too simple an anti-colonial policy, for not understanding the complexities of the Algerian situation and what the French— who now think of themselves as North Africans and are more at home in Algeria than in the mother country— have achieved there...

...But not at a speed or in a political form that threatens their own economy or national culture...

...Nagy and the Freedom Radio in Hungary were well aware of such inclusiveness when they quoted these documents to us in the last desperate hours of resistance to the Russians...

...One can hope that the mood I have been describing reflects merely a temporary political situation, and that it does not mark the end of an epoch in America's image of itself...

...He now "recognizes that 'the fabric of civilization as we know it' is inextricably bound up with injustice...

...Yet they are able to afford a full-time maid...

...But they were able, at least, to eat Government-subsidized meals in the cafeteria of the dormitories for 85 francs (20 cents...

...The welcoming lines of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty have long been a lie, except for Puerto Ricans...

...It has created a life-giving sense of tension, of movement toward an open and different future...

...But what are the results in political and cultural consciousness...

...They themselves lived in a wretched, over-priced, privately-owned hovel nearby...

...We were not out to study housing, but one can hardly help noticing the amount of new building going on in Europe...

...We could sympathize, but we could not risk giving any help...

...The couple had to live apart until one was available...

...In the last forty years, several forms of socialism have been tried, but the new man has not emerged, except as it is embodied in Nikita Khrushchev, Janos Kadar and Mao Tse-tung...

...In the impressive war museum in Ljubljana, the sufferings and courage of the Yugoslavs during the German and Italian occupation were fully documented...

...most personal ambitions seem fairly acquisitive and "bourgeois...

...Everywhere, people "like ourselves" are working earnestly to progress along a sequence which begins with adequate food and moves on to adequate living space, modern plumbing, more fresh meat, a refrigerator...

...In his preface to The Princess Casa-massima, Lionel Trilling describes how Hyacinth Robinson, having felt at Venice the glory of its art and beauty, came to equate art with power...

...We have indeed been willing to help with technical assistance and funds...

...To obtain my visa to Yugoslavia, I had to stand for nearly two hours in the hot courtyard and corridor of the consulate in Graz...

...This was the necessary counterbalance to our materialism and bourgeois individualism...

...It has always been identified in the past with the belief that new social forms, created in a spirit of liberty, equality and fraternity, would produce a new type of man and of culture...

...Romantic American progres-sivism, however much it seemed contradicted by the actuality of American life, kept steadily alive a sense of possibility, a belief that American ideals, not so much on a national as on a world scale, could help bring into being a higher type of individual and communal life...

...Both our friends attributed the economic improvements to the break with Stalinism...

...They sounded like New Yorkers bewailing the influx of Puerto Ricans...

...But the political discussion was curiously qualified, and half-hearted...

...With the help of their parents they also had bought an electric refrigerator, of about two cubic feet, for which they paid $200...

...We saw many commodious and well-built new single dwellings near quite small towns, and a few private automobiles...

...It offered norms of magnanimity, of generosity of spirit, very different from the superbia of classic and Renaissance models, but still indirectly a creative inspiration for our imaginative writers and men of ideas...

...Our friends in Paris also spoke of the violence among me Moslem Algerians who have come to the city in large numbers, of what happens when these dark-skinned strangers move into a district or begin patronizing a neighborhood cafe...

...If one gives up the idea of the "new man" and the "new culture," countries all over the world, on different economic levels, have almost identical economic aspirations...

...For 180 years, this has been an essential part of our ego or ego ideal...

...The long, blank corridors with their hundreds of doors were an almost total negation of the traditional colorfulness and individuality of life in the student quarter of Paris, now some 25 minutes away by metro...

...In Yugoslavia we talked of politics, too...

...Nothing seemed worth discussing except the terms on which we might, in our contest with Russia, risk the total extinction of the human race...

...here they can manage, by strict economies, to get by on their tiny stipends...

...The defeat of the Hungarian rebellion, with these its last words, meant the end of something in our consciousness of ourselves as Americans, and suggested necessary limitations in our rhetoric...

...Individuals, also, can erect houses with their own labor or secure loans to help with the construction...

...But creative political idealism has been in abeyance before in our history...

...Our international anti-Communist policy often requires particular actions which can hardly be presented to the people suffering under them as fraternal, libertarian grants of equality...

...There was a glassed-in elevator shaft...

...Around the residences, gardens and playgrounds were being prepared...

...How long would the cost of an expense-account meal in a New York restaurant feed an Indian family...

...We know that until birth rates go down sharply in most of the world, profound disparities in consumption of food, energy and raw materials are hound to increase...

...He was eager to have us see it...

...There are no speeches on loudspeakers, no marching groups of young people, no displays of Party pamphlets or books about Tito...

...When I left New York, I was still haunted by the nightmare of the Bertrand Russell-Sidney Hook debate...

...the wife, a pharmacist, works in a drug store, at presumably a lower salary...

...1mention these limited practical and rather bourgeois ambitions of young married intellectuals because they helped restore my perspective a little...

...the monuments of art and learning and taste have been reared upon coercive power...

...The students, however, are not interested in being picturesque...

...But there is another, stronger reason why our traditional progressive ideology has become moderated and qualified...

...or along a sequence of bicycle, motorcycle, small automobile, large automobile...

...It is a sign of maturity, or moral realism, of the "end of innocence," to be honest about national purposes, to realize national limitations, to know that it is not easy to make over man...

...Not nearly as difficult as it is to get into the States...

...They pointed out what would happen if the 8 million non-French in Algeria were given the rights of French citizenship, including not only the vote but the benefits of the various social-security laws...

...They were waiting anxiously for space in the married-students quarters of the dormitories...

...If the pattern of life does not fit the requirements of Lenin or Khrushchev, neither does it accord with the dreams of Rousseau or Whitman...

...This is possible because the apartment costs only $2.50 a month, and the couple pays nothing for various social-security benefits...

...German soldiers, inveterate photographers, left no atrocity unrecorded, and the pictures are there for all to see...

...But it will be very difficult for America to get along without an unqualified expression of devotion to liberal universals, and the belief that our principal purpose as a nation is to work toward their realization...

...Town and city communes have considerable power of initiative...

...Though we do not use universalistic formulas of democratic freedom as cynically as the Russian Communists, Americans cannot, if they are honest, use these formulas without qualification and considerable uneasiness of conscience...

...A friend in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, newly married to a chemistry student, was also waiting for a flat...

...A French student and his American wife showed us the new residential city of the University of Paris...

...Now few people seem ready to believe that the "new man," the new Adam of Emerson or Whitman is likely to appear soon in the United States or anywhere else...

...Even in the matter of the Algerian tortures, which they condemned, they explained that we did not know what French-Algerian farmers had suffered at the hands of nationalist raiders...

...The French feel they are legitimately defending their economy and way of life against a people living in the same territory on a much lower economic and cultural level...