Coast to Coast (32 page)

In the old days, I am sure, this dislike of alien systems stemmed largely from feelings of personal inadequacy. Now it is immensely bolstered both by America’s position of Western supremacy, and by her ignominious difficulties in keeping up with the Russians. To the Middle Westerner, work is sacred and efficiency is all. There is no virtue in leisure, as you will find at the end of your luncheon engagement in Detroit, when at the first stroke of two your companions gulp the last dregs of their coffee, grab their hats, and bolt for the office. If Britain is not producing enough, is not earning money, is not “making friends and influencing people”, it must be because she is lazy, and also degenerate. If Germany is selling her cars all over the world, is rich and energetic, is “delivering”, she must be “smart” and hard-working and therefore in every way a desirable ally for the American democracy. “Smart” is the ultimate commendation of this philosophy, and indeed the watchword of the new Americanism. “He’s a real smart boy, he’s making loads of money”. Or: “You gotta be smart if you wanta stay on top.” What a depth of arrogance, egotism and shady dealing is instinct in this horrible use of the word!

And anyone who looks askance at these criteria is necessarily suspect. It is intermittently fashionable, to be sure, to profess dauntless nonconformity, and at one Middle Western university there is a Society of Individualists, meeting weekly to concert its variety. It does not mean
much, though. McCarthy may be forgotten, but his attitudes linger on. You still must not be singular, long-at-lunch or agnostic. It is not only in politics that conformity is the rule. If you are wise, you do not differ often with your managing director, or your Dean, the president of your women’s club, the editor of your paper, the most popular member of your set, the head of your fraternity. The Yankee watchman of Gloucester would not fit easily into many Middle West societies; nor would multitudes of lounging careless Westerners, bitter and brilliant Southerners, or gentlemen of San Francisco, who are decidedly not amenable to having their opinions shuffled for them. You will still encounter more original opinions in a Dublin morning than an Illinois month. You will still discover, in the vision of these Central States, an absolute blind spot obscuring their view towards the Soviet Union, making them as crassly intolerant of everything Russian as any hidebound commissar is of capitalism.

The Middle West is not all like this, as we have seen, but it is the stronghold of the new Americanism. From here our wandering archetype sets out, to travel the world in his superior insensitivity, to bore the Kiwanis with his lantern slides, to shove his way (with a book of cheques, a pot of pills, and his familiar version of Thou) through a world whose nuances he fails to detect, and whose immemorial values he fails to understand. Alas! If old Crèvecoeur wants a truly contemporary answer to his question, he must go to the Middle West for his new man, and see what the years of struggle and prosperity have produced.

T
here, I have ended sourly: but I am always sad to leave America’s coasts—classically on a Yankee clipper ship, to sweep at 35 knots across the Atlantic, or numb in some reverberating jet, screeching and gleaming to mood music out of Idlewild.

I am sad because I love and admire America, respect her old values and honour her founding principles, yet know myself to be irrevocably more alien each time I visit her shores. I am sad because I believe her to be moving out of the vulgarity of materialism, but feel my own country rusted by her wake: because I honour the immense effusion of national will that has sent her astronauts into space, but cannot view it, to be frank, without a pique of envy. I am sad because I feel myself, as the years go by, ever less at home among her people, sincerely though I respect their qualities, and ever more eager to fly away to Paris,
Brazil or Zanzibar. Her new militarism makes me sad, her creeping obsession with power, her growing disregard for things simple and small, her hardening inability to see the other side, her intellectual delusion that only citizenship of a Great Power can give a man a full life, the first niggling traces of arrogance that have sidled at last into her attitudes.

And chiefly I am sad because it is not her fault. History has played her a cruel chance, forcing her into these unsympathetic postures in the full flush of her maturity. She was born to teach the nations how to live, but she is all embroiled in death or dubious glory. I am sad for us all, and sorry: for I have caught some glimpses of another America, and the Americans will always be half-brothers of mine.