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PARTISAN REVIEW
vorced himself from the crudities of main street in order to be married
with European finesse is, to say the very least, astounding. His brief
period of enchantment having ended, he cannot wait, it seems, to look
again on his native land-the virtues of which, if not less crude, have
also become, abruptly,
simple,
and
vital.
With the air of a man who
has but barely escaped tumbling headlong into the bottomless pit, he
tells you that he can scarcely wait to leave this city, which has been
revealed to the eye of his maturity as old, dirty, crumbling, and dead.
The people who were, when he arrived at Le Havre, the heirs of the
world's richest culture, the possessors of the world's largest
esprit,
are
really decadent, penurious, self-seeking, and false, with no trace of
American spontaneity, and lacking in the least gratitude for American
favors. Only America is alive, only Americans are doing anything worth
mentioning in the arts, or in any other field of human activity: to
America, only, the future belongs. Whereas, but only yesterday, to con–
fess a fondness for anything American was to be suspected of the most
indefensible jingoism, to suggest today that Europe is not all black
is to place oneself under the suspicion of harboring treasonable longings.
The violence of his embrace of things American is embarrassing, not
only because one is not quite prepared to follow his admirable example,
but also because it is impossible not to suspect that his present accept–
ance of his country is no less romantic, and unreal, than his earlier
rejection. It is as easy, after all, and as meaningless, to embrace un–
critically the cultural sterility of main street as it is to decry it. Both
extremes avoid the question of whether or not main street
is
really
sterile, avoid, in fact-which is the principal convenience of extremes–
any questions about main street at all. What one vainly listens for in
this cacophony of affirmation is any echo, however faint, of individual
maturity. It is really quite impossible to be affirmative about anything
which one refuses to question; one is doomed to remain inarticulate
about anything which one hasn't, by an act of the imagination, made
one's own. This so suddenly affirmative student is but changing the
fashion of his innocence, nothing being more improbable than that he
is now prepared, as he insists, to embrace his Responsibilities-the very
word, in the face of his monumental aversion to experience, seems to
shrink to the dimensions of a new, and rather sinister, frivolity.
The student, homeward bound, has only chosen, however, to flee
down the widest road. Of those who remain here, the majority have
taken roads more devious, and incomparably better hidden-so well
hidden that they themselves are lost.
