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PARTISAN REVIEW
ALLAN DOWLING
Having been an exile myself, one of the numerous
"Americans Abroad," during the late twenties and early thirties,
perhaps the best way for me to add something to our understand–
ing of the American artist's attitude to his own country is to give
a brief account of what my own attitude was then and what it is
today.
In November, 1932, while living in Nice, I wrote a preface
to a new collection of poems, and in this preface gave expression
to what was then my opinion of the United States with a faith–
fulness to the mood of that period which it would
be
difficult for
me to recapture today. Today I am less hot under the collar, and
a little less self-confident. But, allowing for the exaggerations and
exaltations of youth, the following fragment probably gives a fairly
good idea of what many other American artists were feeling at about
the same time. Remember that this was 1932, when Herbert Hoover
was still in the White House, and the New Deal was undreamed of.
Mter a few pages dealing with earlier publishing ventures and
failures, the following passage occurs: "My countrymen have too
little respect for the soul. They have never honored a poet or a
painter as they honor Ford and Rockefeller and Lindbergh, or a
nonentity like Coolidge. When Clemenceau died nearly all the
French papers remarked on the fact that he had been for many
years the friend of Monet, the painter. Have we in America had
a single leader in the last sixty years, with brains enough to have
been Monet's friend? Not one! And what is the result? That France,
with its genial culture and its appreciation of the fine arts, is in the
forefront of the world today, and life in it is higher and pleasanter
than in any other Western country. Those poor United States, so
full of promise, are headed for more terrible days than they have
known already. It seems impossible to keep them from even worse
stupidities than the farce of prohibition and the hypocrisy of the
war to end war. They will not listen. They despise everything that
is noble and beautiful. They put Debs in prison for quoting Jesus.
They treat my friends Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman
as dangerous criminals unfit for their sublime country of gangsters
and corrupt politicians. And when, once in a lifetime, they are
