16
PARTISAN REVIEW
labeled it "modern," in the style which in the Sixties had begun to
replace the traditional architecture of London. The Warburgs lived on
an upper floor and to reach their flat we had to entrust ourselves to a
lift so tiny that we felt that we were being propelled skyward in a coffin.
It was a small party they had put together for us, two other couples
in addition to them and ourselves: Goronwy and Margie Rees and the
playwright John Osborne and his then wife Penelope Gilliatt. In the in–
terval before the other guests gathered, the Warburgs proudly took us
out on the strip of balcony which bordered their sitting-room - one
looked down on a dim spread of scrubby field, dotted here and there
with a low-lying house . and a scattering of trees. Awaiting the other
guests I sipped my pre-dinner sherry and pondered the width of ocean
that separated the publishing life of England from that of the United
States. Where, I wondered, was an American publisher who would be as
content as Warburg with his small show of worldly success: his three–
room apartment and his scrap of a view?
I had not been in England since early childhood and I was being
regularly surprised in my first confrontation with the differences between
our two countries. We shared a language and a substantial portion of
our cultural heritage, but then what? Lionel and I could not have been
more cordially welcomed than by the people we were meeting, yet
strange barriers rose between us which didn't have to be perceived as in
any way hostile for us to experience them as divisions to be noted, and a
chasm bridged. Later, after living in Oxford for several months, Lionel
and I would go on holiday to France or Holland or Italy: we would
find it strange that in these other countries we were more at home than
with our new British acquaintances. Long ago, H . G. Wells had mocked
the idea of national traits, dismissing them as governess talk, the unexam–
ined formulations of the nursery, but how, other than as tokens of na–
tional character, was one to explain the reiterated appearance of patterns
of speech and conduct so distinct from our own, the prevailing taste, for
instance, for self-dramatization which seemed to impel the British, even
in their most commonplace occupations, choosing, say, a tomato at the
greengrocer's or cashing a check at the local bank, to wring the last bit
of theater from these prosaic routines or, at another and more troubling
extreme of social habit, the readiness of the English to forget their still–
recent war and forgive the enemy, as if the contest had indeed been only
a game and their bombed-out city its playing field? In 1964 a mere
twenty years had elapsed since Hitler's defeat. The scars which the blitz
had left upon London were still visible. The fact that flowers bloomed in
the craters which still marred some of the less prominent streets of
London didn't camouflage their wartime origin. Yet we heard no men-
