LONDON LETTER
In
the cities of Bavaria or northern Italy or the Ruhr, in
Milan, in Munich, in Cologne, the Americanization of life takes on
pretty obvious forms. There are large glass buildings that have been
snatched bodily, unscrupulously, from Park Avenue: smooth, identically
dressed executives move briskly through the squares and the air-con–
ditioned cafes: girls in the streets pause in front of large plate glass
windows to
try
and catch sight of the reflection of some film star whose
face and figure they have assumed. For the eye there are Coca-Cola
advertisements, for the ear there is the blare from juke boxes: and away
from the centres of animation, for miles around, town and countryside,
those old Europeans entities, have been homogenised into a kind of
meaningless suburbia constituted of blocks of flats, filling stations, villas,
parking lots, car dumps, flyovers, in which the only difference worth
discriminating is that between the new and the old, the glossy and the
ramshackle.
To
this
picture, films, books and articles have by now habituated
us: so that the very word "Americanization" has come to stand for and
just for this kind of visual transformation.
It
therefore isn't surprising
that the American influence over here, which is strong, should very
largely not be identified, because it manifests inself in subtler forms. Of
course it also manifests itself in crude forms: but it
also
manifests itself
in
subtle forms, and it's of them I should like to write.
There is a new preoccupation in English thinking,
in
English writ–
ing,
in
English criticism to-day. You find it in whatever you read or
listen to, and it might be called a preoccupation with "the way we live
to-day." For traditionally this country has been singularly unself-cons–
cious, singularly unself-reflective; it has shown itself more or less
in–
different to the richness or complexity of the social life it contains. Of
course, there have always been certain vague generalized images of
favored types and characters, invariably heavily overlaid with sentiment,
which have enjoyed a wide circulation and which in times of national
ERRATUM:
On
page 268 of this article, the third sentence in the second
paragraph should read: The tone which is not agreeable in "The Two Cultures,"
being excessively self-contented, became odious in "The Significance of C. P.
Snow," as it dipped into repetitive abuse.-Eds.
