Pierre Bayle's Notebook
by Keith Botsford
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But my subject is American anti-Americanism, of which there is an abundance. Europe is congested with our citizens who make a good living from denigrating their own country. Such American intellectuals are made to feel very welcome in the European media, and it is no surprise to notice, for instance, that the London Review of Books, which has never had a good word to say about the United States, is edited—or was when I last came across her—by a lady Yank. The case of D.D.—I use initials to spare him obloquy—is typical.

When D.D. was a young writer of some verve and energy, he built his career (like the many sons who inherited their fathers' foundations and proceeded—viz the McArthur Foundation—to subvert the purposes for which those foundations were created) on a visceral hatred of his father, a minor State Department official. Even back then, which is fifty years ago, he excoriated the "vulgarity" of our culture, its commercialism, its racism, etc. That is: he was too good for the place, and his friends—among whom I was included—were fools to have a certain liking for it. How could we? At the time, he had a charming (American) wife, sharp, funny and often sassy. No sooner his education finished, D.D. took off, with his wife, to Paris, where he could rant about the country to general applause. What he really liked, and in that order, was: ambiguous sex, surrealism, pornography and the whole Left Bank shtick. That this caused his wife suffering did not deter him—obsessive haters are seldom aware of their companions. Of course, when she left him, the America she hailed from was to blame.

It wasn't that D.D. exactly fitted in Europe either. The workmen who toiled for him thought he showed an excess of Yankee frugality, the tradesmen he dealt with complained of his exactions, and the intelligentsia neglected his considerable intelligence because sharing a meal with him was inevitably spoiled by a negativism that spilled over onto any subject he touched. He survived there, in short, only because he provided "proof" that the only good Americans were those who lived in fear and loathing of their own country. Luckily, he had money, didn't really have to work and never produced very much. Indignation, you could say, choked off his creative powers. A stint back "home" brought him a new and simple-minded wife who, in the course of time, also divorced him. Presumably tired of his dislike of anything and everything she and their children might have liked or wanted: how could they, in Europe! want to keep up with local baseball scores?

The trouble with D.D. was, in fact, that he wasn't very much au fait with anything going on in the real world. This is an occupational hazard for those whose reading is confined to writers who agree with their own views. I mean, would you read The Nation to be informed? No. You'd read it to get confirmation of your views that our country is Evil. Thus, there was hardly a pitfall that D.D. avoided. He managed to be always out of step. Only at predicting the Dire was he actually at home. Because, as we all know, s**t happens, and therefore sometimes confirms the worst suppositions of the likes of a D.D.

My own view is that it takes a certain soundness of judgment and a clear sense of oneself to be a citizen of a country ineluctably (and unwillingly) pushed into being an imperial power. You take the "some bad" for a lot that is good. In the case of D.D.—and many of his expatriated anti-patriots—a bad childhood, a bad hair day, an unloving parent, a personal insecurity, may all be projected on a whole society. It is far easier to hate than to love, though oddly, hatred is the less common.

I suspect that if you examine the biographies of Ms. Sontag and the black-hole of America-haters, you will find more than a few personal histories gone awry.

Keith Botsford is editor of TRoL.