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PARTISAN REVIEW
logical mechanism of projection worked efficiently. In much the
same way, it would seem, American culture is thought to be the
source of the imaginative sins which the readers of these novels
commit during their solitary orgies. For most of them, the United
States is the land where these things happen, happen continuously,
for they have no facts to set against the falsification of the writers;
were American influence to spread, It Could Happen Here; the
temptation and the remorse would both be intolerable.
I think it is certainly purely coincidental with Raymond, and
probably so with Vian, that their fantasies are almost completely
congruent with the anti-American propaganda put out by the Nazi
and Soviet Propaganda Ministries. And there is just enough truth
for the picture to appear convincing. Compared with their European
opposite numbers, young Americans (whether in Armies of Libera–
tion or Occupation) do seek pleasure in sex and alcohol with great
openness and publicity. Lynchings do occur; Negroes are discrimin–
ated against; the police in most American cities do tend to greater
brutality and greater corruption than most European police.
These facts, I think, are not so disconcerting to European
"liberals," most of whom, like "liberals" everywhere, find sufficient
object of hatred in their own governments, as to the non-political,
who see lynching not so much as a horror but as an almost irresistible
temptation, just as the streetwalker aroused the indignation of the
respectable, not the libertine. To use a psychoanalytic metaphor, this
myth of the United States represents the disreputable forces of the
id in opposition to the restaints of the super-ego. The super-ego has
a hard enough battle to wage already, in the moral breakdown of
a great deal of contemporary Europe; any notion or set of circum–
stances which promises greater gratification to the id evokes panic
and repudiation from the super-ego. To the extent that America seems
to offer greater freedom from restraint, greater possibilities of gratifi–
cation, it is seen as a more serious threat to personal integrity than the
severe and puritanical restraints that a dictatorial regime would
impose. The quasi-masturbatory daydreams of the novels show the
nature and danger of this imagined threat. The spread of American
influence is terrifying because in America "anything goes"; I should
torture and lynch and fornicate to my heart's content, and I should
hate myself for doing so. Better a police state, which will stop me
misbehaving.
