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STEPHEN SPENDER
United States and the Soviet Union. Poets sometimes nurse delusions
of grandeur.
* *
America has the inertia of its energy and the energy of its inertia.
The feeling that they are struggling through a viscous, gluey substance
made up of materialism, power, and public indifference, compels
writers and artists to dramatically strenuous efforts. The inertia is
countered by the energy, but too often it saps it. Ernest Hemingway
wondered why it was so difficult for American writers to develop
beyond the point reached in their often extraordimuily original early
work. The reason may be that struggling forward against the back–
ward pull of the forces of inertia, the writer or artist, having gained
some money, acclaim, and public approval, is in the position of hav–
ing to use all his energy to remain where he is. He has none over
with which to advance further.
One cause of inertia in the United States is that the country
does not have a center in which the creative life fuses with the
active economic and political life, as France and England have in
Paris and London. New York, as we are often reminded , is not
America. It is cosmopolitan and, although having accents, style, and
extraordinary vitality all its own, it is a host city to parasitic foreign
geniuses who become, as it were, honorary New Yorkers, but who
are not required to become Americans and who can, if they so wish,
happily remain foreigners , exotic gaily-colored parakeets perched on
this rock of Manhattan Island. Surrealist painters from France, com–
posers from Central Europe, conductors, actors, instrumentalists, have
all flaunted their feathers in New York. W. H. Auden was as much
a New Yorker as he was British, but he was not at all American.
There have been attempts, more or less serious, at various times
to establish centers of cultural life other than New York. For exam–
ple, in the 1950s San Francisco seemed about to become the center
of the West Coast culture, looking as much across the Pacific to Asia
as to the interior, the Great Plains and the Midwest. This did not
happen. The Beatniks and other near-mystics of the San Francisco
culture (or cults) found that it was simpler to go to India and Japan
than to set up their shrines in San Francisco. Similarly the effort to
make Chicago a great center of cultural life of the "real" America ,
which seemed so serious and so justified in the early part of the cen-
