OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
295
The American writer soon learns that for the European intellec–
tual, as for him, there are two Americas. The first is the America
of ECA and NATO, a political lesser evil, hated with a kind of
helpless fury by those who cannot afford to reject its aid; the
second is the America invented by European Romanticism- the
last humanistic religion of the West, a faith become strangely con–
fused with a political fact. To the European, the literature of
America is inevitably purer,
realer
than America itself. Finding it
impossible to reject the reality of death, and difficult to believe in
anything else, the European is perpetually astonished at the actual
existence of a land where only death is denied and everything else
considered possible. Overwhelmed by a conviction of human im–
potence, he regards with horrified admiration a people who, be–
cause they are too naive to understand theory, achieve what he can
demonstrate to be theoretically impossible.
From Europe it is easy to understand the religious nature of
the American belief in innocence and achievement; to see how even
the most vulgar products of "mass culture," movies, comic books,
sub-literary novels are the scriptures of this post-Christian faith-a
faith that has already built up in Western Europe a sizeable under–
ground sect which worships in the catacombs of the movie theaters
and
bows
before the images of its saints on the news-stands. A hun–
dred years after the
Manifesto,
the specter that is haunting Europe
is-Gary Cooper! Vulgar, gross, sentimental, impoverished in style
-our popular sub-art presents a dream of human possibilities to
starved imaginations everywhere.
It
is .a wry joke that what for
us are the most embarrassing by-products of a democratic culture,
are in countries like Italy the only democracy there is.
It
seems to me that it has become absurd to ask whether a
democratic society is worthwhile if it entails a vulgarization and
leveling of taste. Such a leveling the whole world is bound to endure,
with or without political guarantees of freedom; and the serious writer
must envision his own work in such a context, realize that his own
final meanings will arise out of a dialectical interplay between what
he makes and a given world of "mass culture." Even the Stalinists,
though they thunder against American jazz and cowboy suits for
children, can in the end only kidnap our vulgar mythology for
their own purposes. The sense of an immortality here and now,
