438
PARTISAN REVIEW
painters, sculptors, poets, writers of
all
variety, including people who
contribute to critical and professional journals as well as those who
lecture in universities) -he knows that an American can no longer go
abroad with the hope of escaping responsibilities he feels at home.
If
he travels behind "the Iron Curtain" he finds the Russians slavishly
imitating the worst features of Hearst journalism as it was practiced
forty years ago; and by order of the State, it must be regarded as
literal truth and -as "literature." Other signs of culture are stores that
resemble A
&
P "self-service" markets; subway systems under city
streets are encouraged, and so are large apartment houses which
have some of the appliances and all of the disadvantages of apart–
ment houses in the drearier sections of Queens, Brooklyn, and the
Bronx. And unless he can bribe his way out of Russia again, he is
doomed to live for the rest of his life cheering state-sponsored enter–
tainments (as well as military parades) with the same enthusiasm
as a crowd at the Yankee Stadium on Saturday afternoon. He will
probably not live too long.
Thirty years ago the American as artist went to western and
southern Europe with some assurance that he had actually left home ;
today, that illusion has grown considerably less assuring. He is far
more subdued; he is no longer the noisy, bragging American, some–
times eager to learn, and often painfully ignorant of what he sees.
Today, he is slightly less ignorant, and decidedly sober. He has no
place to hide. His responsibilities exist on a nearly world-wide scale;
after all, if he is a painter, his pictures must be sold in New York;
if he is a writer, his books must be published by New York publishers.
The center of whatever world he can conceive of- for the time being
at least-is the United States, and Europe is its museum. He is
be–
coming more and more like the British tourist of the nineteenth
century, unloved by Europeans, yet indispensable to their welfare.
He had better go home again; he begins to worry about European
enthusiasms for Coca Cola and Hollywood pictures and to be con–
cerned about translations of some of the worst of American fiction
into Italian and French.
And what of the American who stays at home, and one who
is not an artist? It would seem that he has grown more sober than
he was in 1939. He seems to be aware of what has happened since
1914, aware that
his
country
is
a "world power." He
is
not quite the
