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INNOCENTS ABROAD
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deal with it, incriminating myself
if
necessary. The idea is as yet
only dimly present, but it stirs already a faint anxiety, for I am
aware I know very little about the subject. Nevertheless it is some–
thing to have an idea, any idea, working in one, so that now I
return cheerfully to this conversation in which I have already given
up any hope of being able to raise my questions.
But with Bellow I am able to raise these questions about the
"scandal," which now in our conversation acquires for me a sharp
and sudden focus. Having already been in Europe for more than a
year, and having seen many more Americans than I, Bellow is still
disquieted by the same observations: "That was the way I had be–
gun to feel too," he says to my opening question, "that America's
chief export to Europe had become its homosexuals." Suddenly I
am at home in this conversation in a way I have not been since I
left America, for all the time that Bellow is tenaciously sifting the
European experience he still seems to have
his
feet firmly planted
back in Chicago. With his big sensitive eyes he strikes me as half
Hebrew dreamer, the other half being a solid Jewish business man,
and yet the whole person is also the midwestern American who tells
me that every moment more he exists in Europe the more American
he feels. When he opines that "the American writer's great oppor–
tunity may be just to escape from culture," I am delighted, for he
has formulated for me something that had been floating around in
my own mind since I have been in this French atmosphere heavy
with its closed tradition, where I've even come to understand the
attraction for the French of certain kinds of American fiction that
I had too easily despised back home. Now Bellow confirms me also
in the uneasy feeling of being an alien among the American
in–
verts abroad. A deeper uneasiness comes to the surface as our talk
brings up an instinctive prejudice that we cannot disguise. Our
language has already acquired a certain edge of hostility, certain
derisive and even vulgar words have appeared; and now we are
a little ashamed and depressed for we have almost forgotten the
barbarism with which the third sex is still pursued in America. Weare
in the embarrassing conflict of a man who discovers in himself a
prejudice that publicly he must denounce. In the relation with cer–
tain friends this aversion does not appear, but now it cannot be
