PARTISAN REVIEW
353
escape. There were no hideouts abroad and at home, no holding back
the overflowing of individual consciousness by the inflooding day-to–
day forever shifting public "state of the nation ." The individual
might well feel that in order to resist this tide he had to make pro–
digious efforts.
Americans are conscious of the morale of their country in a
way that Europeans only are in times of extreme crisis, such as its
occupation by a foreign power. Living in the United States one often
has the impression of being crushed between the pages of a story
which is being written and whose latest installment is a summation of
the whole American past within the present moment. One hopes
nervously that among all the scandals, national and local, in the news,
one won't get snitched between the teeth of the typography. When
I asked a friend of mine who was leaving the United States after
having worked there for several years, what he would miss most
about
his
life there, he replied: "The sense of living in the middle of
a crime story."
In the minds of many Americans the concept of America is a
situation which changes from day to day, over which they often
grieve, and sometimes rejoice, but which - although they know it
will change again tomorrow - always has a certain up-to-date finality
about it. One does indeed, even as a foreigner, get caught up in this:
as though one's mind were a television screen upon which the country
was perpetually on trial and whose moral condition profoundly affects
one's own.
In the spring of 1973 (at the time of the opening up of the Water–
gate scandal) I read in the newspaper of a woman tourist visiting
Washington to see the cherry blossom, who suddenly, in the presence
of the newspaper's correspondent, burst into tears at the thought
(which she wailed into a microphone) of the contrast between the
beauty of the marble-columned capital and the ugliness of the scandals
swarming from the White House (President Nixon's personal Pan–
dora's Box). The newspapers reported the lady's reaction as altogether
appropriate. She was, indeed, acting as a barometer, registering the
moral state of the nation during the spring of 1973. It is difficult to
think of an English housewife being interviewed outside Buckingham
Palace at the time of one of our periodic ministerial sexual scandals
and publicly weeping at the thought of the contrast between the
