NEW INNOCENTS ABROAD
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Against this Italian background the foreigners
also
show up
more clearly in their true colors--or pigmentation. The English,
with their straw hair and blanched color, stick out like sore thumbs–
all elbows, haunched shoulders, and bad teeth. One senses the
difference between races with color and without it-a connection pos–
sibly between pigmentation and passion. At any rate, the rich
color of the Italians seems to be the visible emblem of their particular
eroticism. And the Americans?
Away from the bohemians of Paris, I could scrutinize more care–
fully the face of the
ordinary
American traveler. I told myself that
after all I had seen a rather special group in Paris; that they were
Americans who had perhaps come abroad for just this reason, and
therefore could hardly be taken as typical; that, moreover, most of
these people were connected in some way with the arts, where a
greater percentage of inverts is always found; etc. etc. I might thus
have dismissed Paris altogether as the antics of a few adolescents
except that now the face of middle-class America, against a foreign
background, seemed to tell its own story. Nearly always a soft youth–
ful face, it grows old by sagging, without ever seeming to show the
harsh masculine lines of cheekbone and jawline: older Americans
abroad look like aged boys in comparison with their European con–
tempories. Even the American negro's face shows the same soft con–
tours in comparison with the sculptural mask of the French Sene–
galese. Americans, it has been observed, are a race given over to soft
drink and soft food: the greatest drinkers of milk, Mother's food,
in the world, eaters of soft white doughy bread, ice cream, pie, and
doughnuts. Soft foods and soft faces-perhaps it is this diet that
shows
in
the facial contours. To be sure, it is nearly always an en–
gaging face, but when you see it surrounded by the faces of other
nations and look for the erotic line in it, it looks always a little
boyish, therefore less masculine, and so slightly effeminate, and,
one step further, pansy. The face of Alan Ladd, supposed to be the
cold tight face of
a
ruthless killer, is a good example of this American
face that can also be the pretty face of Mama's boy.
Physiognomy can be wrong, and sexual physiognomy particular–
ly, but still one has to ask what it is that enables one to spot an
American face so easily abroad. I remember spending three-quarters
of an hour
in
an excursion train on just this question while examin-
