OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
435
HORACE GREGORY
The following notes on American culture need a word of
explanation. The first scene is drawn from an impression of the
Middle West. The Middle West cannot represent all of America,
or rather, it represents no more of it than any other region. The
Middle West happens to be my birthplace, and I can speak of its
frailties and merits with some authority.
I have just returned from delivering a lecture at one of the
largest and most prosperous of American state universities in the
Middle West. The town and the institution house twenty thousand
students, and the university is merely one of several institutions of
its kind in the state. The town is almost exclusively a university town,
and until one looks out over it from a
hill
(a number of trees obscure
the sight of buildings on the plain), it has the appearance of being
an air-conditioned, clean-swept, washed and then dehydrated factory
town. It has a large number of huge buildings in it, varying in style
from graystone Gothic to recent Bauhaus, and, as one looks up at
them from the street, all are in remarkably good condition, and
remarkably ugly.
If
one steps into a building, one's nostrils are
greeted by mixed odors of human sweat, sweeping compound and
disinfectant; fluorescent lights are everywhere and human com–
plexion takes on a greenish-whitish cast; the interiors vary in style
from dark-stained Tudor paneling to Cecil de Mille Alexandrian–
but the predominant note is that of the brilliantly lit, plate-glassed
interior of the American Executive Office with green, "indestructo"
fireproof filing cabinets lining the walls. The men who briskly pace
the floors of the buildings wear freshly pressed, ill-fitting "business
suits" that are guaranteed by their makers to stay "in press" beyond
the life of the garment; the women, who are as brisk in motion as
the men, wear brightly colored, " career girl" uniforms: bright
nylon blues, greens, yellows, pinks flash by-and older women have
white hair tinted with blue and purple. Male students stride by in
"sweatshirts" and in all varieties of "lumberjack" costuming; the
women students wear "sub-career girl" uniforms--and a few, like
their male companions, slouch through the town in costumes worn
by railroad trackmen and (for variety ) "lumberjacks."
