A COMMUNICATION
265
mind or one voice. There is a residual agreement and similarity, of
course, between the
N ew Yorker
and
Partisan
and the Actors' Studio,
but that is not the same thing. There is the 'American way of life,'
of course, but that's below the Plimsoll line of serious thinking. British–
ness isn't. Where is the
Sunday Times
of America, the map of the
American mind? One does not exist, because the American mind, in
that tyrannizing, limiting sense, does not exist. That, I think, is why
the American university graduate is apt to feel a kind of inferiority
in the presence of an Englishman.
It
is not that the latter knows more,
but that he seems to have a more general knowledge: he understands
more that he has not studied, he knows how to treat serious things
lightly, upon occasion, and light things seriously; he moves easily and
independently in the world of the mind. Why? Because he has a map,
a contour map even, showing heights and depths. Or, more exactly,
because he knows everyone else in his world has a map too, and so
does not regale fellow-travelers with the obvious. He does not think
he has discovered things for the first time. Nor, of course,
does
he dis–
cover things, ever, except some out-of-the-way corner of quaintness and
charm. The big things are all discovered and measured beforehand;
their bigness is banal.
There is one thing in the American environment that all Ameri–
cans do have in common, and that is just the variety of it. To an
Englishman the human geography of America is as fantastic and im–
probable as the physical. Cities like Phoenix, Arizona, for instance; lo–
calities like the Tennessee mountains; religious sects, even one so en–
lightened as the Dutch Reformed Church-all these are without parallel
in England. Crime, vice, poverty, riches, purity, prejudice, dedication,
energy-all these find expression which we have only read about, in
history books, which we have never known as our contemporary reality,
and which our minds are not really ready to accept. There is in Ameri–
cans, as contrasted with us, a sort of weatherbeaten quality, from hav–
ing been more exposed to sharper extremes of climate, which corres–
ponds somewhat to the bluff open-air effect they achieve at the hair–
dresser's and under the sunlamp. We are drawing-room creatures, by
comparison.
Going to America with a bunch of English Fulbright scholars is
quite an experience. These young Englishmen have such an air of
gilded youth about them, quite unrelated to their personal incomes,
and quite opposed to their actual eagerness to get something for noth–
ing. Their sense of style overrides everything else; they feel the true
