America 1959: A British View

...If so, how and through whom is that imagination finding expression...

...crime stories in which the police are no less brutal and only one degree more moral than the criminals themselves...

...Its conclusions were qualified and moderate...

...The new supplement has apparently set a much more definite "line" for its contributors, a line which some of the many display advertisements are happy to pick up and repeat in a simpler form...

...It also sought to give a "reasonably full and coherent picture of the problems which face the American writer today...

...Was it after the first Stevenson campaign that the spokesmen of this party began to fall silent, or after the defeated Hungarian rebels tossed bitterly back to us the meaningless phrases we had been sending them by radio...

...The present TLS has also the disadvantage of being a sequel...

...This is a deeply implicative fact of American history that the American imagination, for all its reputed scope and vigor, has never really been able to take in...

...Now the TLS has chosen to throw aside restraint and outdo the Americans in being brightly or courageously positive about almost every aspect of American life from musicals to motels...

...Who is able with any confidence to evoke in imaginative terms an American future which is different from and yet equivalent to and continuous with the best of the American past...

...In its darkness and its light the American imagination has become the most powerful stream of Western thought and culture...

...It found Henry Adams, Henry James and Ezra Pound as characteristically American as Walt Whitman, William James, Ernest Hemingway and—Gide's favorite—James M. Cain...

...Movies sent abroad seem "some gigantic act of sabotage, a conspiracy backed by foreign influence to parody rather than to reflect the soul and spirit of the nation...

...Its anonymous essayists repeat, in hyperbolic fashion, most of the things that American intellectuals (and the Voice of America) had been saying positively about our culture during the rediscovery or re-rediscovery of America which went on after World War II...

...It points out that a large proportion of the liveliest and significant writers of the middle and younger generation are Jews...

...That supplement celebrated the European recognition that American culture was not only distinct and independent but also artistically rich and complex...

...They have not let literature be sterilized or shut off into some purely autonomous realm all by itself...

...This is partly because of the assumption underlying the whole issue that American culture has now reached a stage of ripeness, completion, fulfillment...

...This imagination has grown in part out of economic and political circumstances, but as expressed through art can help to direct and control economic and political developments in the future...

...The British make themselves sound like a satellite country...

...It deals not only with the arts other than writing —theater, music, painting, architecture, dance—but also religion, history, education, the treatment of minorities and the sociological look of America as it strikes an appalled and fascinated visitor motoring, say, through Florida...

...It is strange to have some of our yea-saying, which has turned a little bitter in our own mouths, echoing back from across the Atlantic...

...But he transcends all this...

...Because he dealt with these basic issues in his own laudatory book, Image of America, R. L. Bruckberger was able to go to the heart of the matter as the TLS naturally cannot...

...Father Bruckberger knows what a misfortune it was for both America and the West that America was the first and only country to drop the atomic bomb on open cities, and what an added misfortune that it used the bomb against colored people...

...Kerouac and Melville, Allen Ginsberg and Whitman, Jackson Pollock and Tennessee Williams, Miami motels and the music of Leonard Bernstein—all seem equally and somewhat indiscriminately evidence of the vigor of America...

...Some of these American affirmations were made in response to the kind of captious and condescending anti-Americanism which used to flourish in the Times Literary Supplement itself...

...This is most striking in criticism and fiction but noticeable also in playwriting and poetry...

...Faulkner is described as containing within his work all the recurring themes, the sets of opposites that critics find peculiar to American fiction...

...Without the presence of that party in the dialectic of American development, America ceases to be itself...

...We seem to do better when they act superior and criticize us...

...But it is only at a few points like this that the supplement touches on the question of the current American imagination as a coherent entity, as something more than a mere aggregate of all the diverse and contradictory artistic activities going on within the country...

...These are "the different elements which have fused so miraculously into a single civilization...

...There are, of course, many separate characterizations of a discerning kind, and the piece on the movies, although it is almost alone in this, lets itself go in some good old-fashioned denunciation...

...without it we cannot understand either ourselves or peoples with modes of thinking very different from our own...

...Terms like "vigor," "staggering impact," "sprawling fecundity," "intensity," "high seriousness," "variety and splendor," "tremendous adventure," appear over and over again...

...We have had on the one hand the meticulous realism of John Hersey's Hiroshima, and on the other hand the blithe insensitivity of Harry Truman, and in between, so far as the American imagination is concerned—nothing...

...We need a shared imagination that can preserve, vitalize and extend those elements in the national tradition that give the word American a distinctive meaning...

...His most recent NEW LEADER piece was a review of Allen Drury's novel, Advise and Consent (November 2...

...This is only one of the services of a national culture, but in America it is an essential one, for it nourishes what R. W. B. Lewis in The American Adam called the party of hope...

...Whether the American imagination actually has such depth and vigor and truth to itself it would be impossible to guess from all these articles, despite their superlatives, their sympathetic characterizations and their richness of allusion...

...Christmas Book Issue America 1959: A British View By Robert Gorham Davis IN THE PRESENT national mood, an American inclined to be critical of his culture is more likely to be embarrassed than reassured by the excited tribute paid to our vigor and vitality by the London Times Literary Supplement in its huge laudatory special issue entitled, "The American Imagination: Its Strength and Scope" (November 6; 75 cents...

...It speaks of "the idiot ferocity of Hollywood," of "fictional reconstructions of war which show the American soldier as a subnormal sex maniac...

...from abroad much as we reacted against the earlier criticism...

...We may feel that the British have let us down a little...

...We can claim Moby Dick and The Wings of the Dove and Ideas of Order as proudly as ever, but has the national imagination shown itself capable in recent years of grasping the nature of the new world it lives in, and at the same time maintaining a clear sense of itself and, even more—for this is what has always been distinctively American—its future...

...It covers some of the same ground which was covered in a more detached and objective way in the earlier supplement entitled "American Writing Today: Its Independence and Vigor...

...In this issue the superstructure is observed closely, but not the substructure, not economics, politics, the labor movement, science and technology...

...But of course the British do not read the New York afternoon papers...

...It gives, one article concludes by saying, "a final sign of having grown up...

...But when these are largely ignored it is difficult to form a clear picture of the cultural whole...

...In most of the articles, though they are extremely comprehensive, no real coherence or sense of direction emerges...

...Their swing-over comes just when we are profoundly dissatisfied with some of the fruits of our democracy, when we are worried about our ability to see ourselves clearly any longer, when we are groping for quite new ways in which to come to terms with ourselves...

...Furthermore, it is the Jewish critics like Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler, and Jewish writers of fiction like Saul Bellow, Bernard Mala-mud, Herbert Gold, Philip Roth and Delmore Schwartz who have been most successful in keeping literature open to the moral and social concerns of a changing democratic society...

...Perhaps we will be helped by reacting against the present praise ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS, professor of English at Columbia, wrote the Institute for International Education's recent handbook, Meet the USA, and has frequently appeared in Partisan Review, Commentary and other journals...

...By them much more than by some of the lesser arts is the distinctively American imagination both influenced and expressed...

...Such questions are germane, for the purview of the present American issue of the Times Literary Supplement is far broader than that of its predecessor of five years ago...

...without it we have nothing by which to test the partial truths, the self-deceptions, the corruptions of consciousness which permeate much of our culture now...

...Many of the good things said here about the practice of the arts in America are true, of course, but the national imagination hardly seems to be distinguishing itself at the present moment...

...It says of Faulkner that he has, like all "the very great" novelists, a "superior grasp of reality...

...In him the contradictions and oppositions are resolved...

...The article which will cause most discussion and which comes closest to denoting a clear tendency is that devoted to "the Jewish part in American letters...

...Without it we cannot move in any but a blind way toward a future which is certain to be different from the past...

...Such an imagination is as necessary to a nation as to an individual...