452
PARTISAN REVIEW
They have returned where they belong; for after a temporary disruption
of two hundred years, America and Europe again live
in
the same
cul–
tural ambience. America's past is Europe's present; and both are joined
to the same future of a universal culture.
A society whose fa thers are refugees from all corners of the world
and whose sons are now stationed, as soldiers, in all corners of the
world, a society whose technological apparatus has transformed the
face of the earth in the same image, so that even its avowed enemy can
appeal to no other standard of excellence than that of equa;lling or
exceeding the technical triumph of America, a nation which is a king–
pin in international politics, the center of international finance, the
master of international media of communication and entertainment, a
people united with at least half of the world by a network of treatises
and alliances, political, economic, and military, and "borne back cease–
lessly into the past" to attend coronations and ceremonies of the Holy
Year, two-world festivals, seminars, conferences, committees, and re–
search projects-such a society is universal and international. The Amer–
ican melting pot has become the cultural melting pot of the Western
world. The American way of life has become a universal way of life or,
as Mr. Levin puts it, "the human condition accelerated, amplified, and
projected on a wide screen." It is the same human situation everywhere,
the ideal case for an existential analysis.
Who is "more intransigently American" than Hemingway? Mr.
Levin asks. Yet most of Hemingway's fiction takes place abroad-in
Europe, Africa, or the West Indies. Who, one might ask, was more
intransigently Welsh than Dylan Thomas? Yet he fulfilled his destiny
in the bars on Third Avenue, and he has become an American legend.
Why? Because the fate of man, or the fate of literature, is universal
in a world in which the technical apparatus reigns supreme. The na–
tional state and cultural autonomy are anachronisms. Europe's "culture"
is also a thing of the past. Its "identity," like Gatsby's, lies "somewhere
back in that vast obscurity" into which the cultural symbols and the
"aesthetic contemplation" of nature have receded before the coming
of a new world. Just as America lived through this historical phase
as a part of Europe, so Europe is now reliving the historical experience
of America as part of the Atlantic Community.
The result is an international culture, perhaps not unlike the in–
ternational community established by the Roman Empire along the
shores of the Mediterranean. T. S. Eliot is by no means the only "in–
ternational culture-hero," as Delmore Schwartz aptly dubbed him some
time ego; so were Henry James, and Thomas Mann; and so are Ezra
