58
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the religion of their purchases. Here before one's eyes was the mean–
ing of Trotsky's summarizing phrase for World War I, become much
truer now of World War II: "the victory of America over Europe."
Only this time it's the victory of America and Russia over Europe, and
maybe soon simply Russia's victory over Europe-with the witless aid
of America.
At the first shock, I felt like crying in the middle of the street:
"Long live Europe! Long live exhausted degraded Europe!"
(Ah, but instead, the instinctive fingers crept into the pocket to
fondle gratefully and comfortably the American passport.)
2.
The ATC trip is also arranged with an unconscious and frightening
suggestiveness: one no longer enters Italy through the Alps from Europe
but across the desolate Arab world of North Africa. Casablanca, Algiers,
Tunis-to Naples; the journey along the shores of the Mediterranean
world places the whole peril for Italy at this moment among the right
historical associations. My last day in Italy I spent in a small boat in
Naples Bay, from which point, under the incredibly perfect light and
weather, the city's squalor and filth disappear into the most beautiful
vision-of-a-city
in
the world; and my mind, going over everything I
had seen during my year in the peninsula, couldn't keep from crossing
incessantly the blue water to the Arab world on the other shore. The
ragged, economically depressed, inexpressibly debased Arabs, who look
as if they've fallen out of humanity, had been a good preparation for
the cities of Italy, which the Black Market has now transformed into
the appearance of oriental bazaars. Are the Italians to follow the same
historical curve? The people whom one must perpetually see through
the eyes of Stendhal and hear with the vocal love of Joyce-will they
sink from the energies of their past as completely as the Arabs, beyond
any situation of history's challenge-response? Stendhal would still have
seen signs of the Italian energy he loved: the
crimes passionels
in Italy
during the last year would have intrigued him as flickers of the old
"energia" of the past; but the nature of these crimes (usually stabbings
of wives for prostituting themselves to the Allied soldiers; no attempt
was made on the soldiers: it's assumed the male is a male and must seek
his pleasure, but the wife was pledged) was in itself a dismal sign of
the time and a decline from those
virginal
crimes which Stendhal
records. "The only oriental city without a European quarter," the Eng–
lishman Lord Roseberry once described Naples with a somewhat heavy
wit. But the juxtaposition with the world of the orientals and Arabs, and
through them with the perished civilizations of the Mediterranean, is
cm.fect-more frighteningly correct now than when he said it. Com-
