PARTISAN REVIEW
151
(I insert today, 9 January 1972, this parenthesis occasioned by the
suicide yesterday of John Berryman, one of the great poets of
his
particularly tragic American generation. His posthumous voice sup–
ports,
over a hundred years later, the view
of
Baudelaire:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.)
So for Baudelaire "Americanization" signified the culmination of a
process far advanced in Europe
in
which all other values were super–
seded by those of "Progress," and where revolution and utopianism
had only led to the bourgeois society. America was that part of the
world where the European materialist revolution raced forward with–
out hindrance.
The idea of America as a place where there were no activities
but the practical, no values but the utilitarian, was advanced by
Chateaubriand in his account of his journey to America in 1792.
This chapter of
Memoires d
J
outre tombe
was written with consider–
able hindsight
in
1822, and revised
in
1849. It is not just the ideas
of a very young man who went to America on a madcap scheme
of finding the Northwest Passage - and who returned to France
after seven months. It is Chateaubriand's view of America formed
over a number of years, and corrected by the opinions
of
friends,
and further modified, in parts, after he had read de Tocqueville.
Chateaubriand is struck by the same characteristics as those
which made Americanization seem the end of the world to Baudelaire.
"It is no use," he writes,
looking in the United States for qualities which distinguish men
from other species
of
creation, for that which is the quintessential
immortality
(extrait de IJimmortalite)
in him and the ornament of
