294
PARTISAN REVIEW
art that this country first created and did so much to develop
technically, the one great new
popular
art, potentially the finest art
form ever devised, the talking motion picture.
Either the federal government, or some enormously wealthy
organization such as the Ford Foundation, should buy or build–
and maintain-a film studio in which every talent connected with
the making of films could be developed. This would give steady
employment to writers, actors, singers, musicians, painters, com–
posers, and people in many other crafts, and would surely improve
the quality of American pictures. What too many people fail to
realize
is
the importance of the propaganda factor in American
pictures seen abroad. Deliberate propaganda usually defeats itself.
The quality of a country's products is what really makes an
im–
pression. So far this country has won a place for itself in the con–
sideration of educated people in other parts of the world mainly
through its early political leaders and its later writers-from Emer–
son, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Melville, to our own group today,
Faulkner, Hemingway, etc. It should, in the future, take a high
place in the other
arts- if
those arts are encouraged. There
is
hope
in America, but it is still only a hope, not a real fulfillment.
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
The end of the American artist's pilgrimage to Europe
is the discovery of America. That this discovery
is
unintended
hardly matters; ever since Columbus it has been traditional to dis–
cover America by mistake. Even in the days when it was still fash–
ionable to talk about "expatriation," the American writer was re–
discovering the Michigan woods in the Pyrenees, or coming upon
St. Paul in Antibes. How much more so now when the departing
intellectual does not take flight under cover of a barrage of mani–
festoes, but is sent abroad on a Fulbright grant or
is
sustained by
the G.I. Bill. The new American abroad finds a Europe racked
by
self-pity and nostalgia (except where sustained by the manufac–
tured enthusiasms of Stalinism), and as alienated from its own tra–
ditions as Sauk City; he finds a Europe reading in its ruins
Mob
y
Dick,
a Europe haunted by the idea of America.
