PARTISAN REVIEW
fihn,
is
bursting with prosperity; explained things to me with a con–
descension that did not hide his awe at my ignorance. Funny to see
him
standing under the statue of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the latest
New Yorker
in one hand and that moneybag in the other, looking
like an Oklahoma Indian who has just discovered oil.
P. a sensitive guy, and a little pathetic-the medical degree is
indefinitely postponed, and his life at the moment is simply that of a
British planter self-exiled to Kenya, piling it up for the wife and kiddies
at home. He wants to make what he can in this
crazy
period and then
clear out. Yet despite some vague efforts to dissociate himself slightly
from his pal, at least in our eyes, there is no doubt that he is having
the time of his life. The thing's absolutely unreal: he's way up there,
in
that new American world in Europe. After years of being a nobody
at home, and no doubt a "Wop" to the Gentiles, he is now making
the most of his Italian-American background, dines with generals, and
with the best will in the world, patronizes the old country. Actually
he does not seem to like the Italians very much-says they "simply have
no character," and with a certain intellectual disapproval outlines the
black-market situation to me, specifying that the government does not
govern, that the whole economy rests on private buying and selling, and
that the political situation is absolutely hopeless, divided between the
priests and the Commies. Personally, he assures me, he is a democratic
socialist, and rails against Nenni for surrendering the Italian Socialist
Party to the Communists. But this with a blase, mocking air, as if to say:
what can you expect of these people? Funny to think of him among
the smart American promoters and finaglers who are here to pick up
some easy money, for with all his amiable commercial guile and know–
it-all air, he really
hates
Italy for letting him down, morally, so hard.
Isabel Archer and Christopher Newman and Hemingway's tough Amer–
ican ingenues: somehow the pattern never changes. How
could
Europe
be like this? Still, caught in between the two great blocs, a vacuum has
been created here, which obviously some natures do not abhor. There's
money in it. Yet notice how these two American types, P. and his pal,
respond to their opportunity-the pal frankly a good deal of a mug,
indifferent to those who cannot play it smart; P., with his typical
American intellectual's contempt for politics, yearning for democratic
socialism, but meanwhile unable to forgive "Europe" for destroying his
personal illusions-which,
if
he had saved them, would have left his
wife and kids at home in a precarious situation. What a difference from
those old British traveling salesmen, with their contempt for the natives
and their quietly expert managerial ways!
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