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From The New International, Vol. XIII No. 3, March 1947, pp. 95–96.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Discovery Of Europe
edited by Philip Raby
Houston Mifflin Co. $5.00
Since the future of the world is certain to be international if it is not barbaric, Americans will be the solvent or insolvent heirs of the culture of ages. If, however, it is in the tradition of the Twentieth Century American bourgeoisie to be solvent in business, it is also in the tradition of American life to be bankrupt in culture. Modern European economy must be oiled with a stream of American credits; the American culture must be nourished on the stimulation of European art and writing. There is little more bleak than the credit outlook of a French bank or a purely American style in art.
If there are relatively few Americans who are aware of this today, there were even fewer Americans who were aware of this a century ago. The greatest forward spurt in the conscious American quest for the experience of European life and living occurred, if we are to accept the emphasis in Philip Rahv’s recently published anthology, immediately after the First World War, when, as Malcolm Cowley phrased it,
“young American writers were drifting everywhere in West Europe and Middle Europe; they waved to each other from the windows of passing trains.”
It is not completely true, however, that the discovery of Europe by American writers and artists was completely alien to the tradition of American bourgeois society. The visits of J.P. Morgan to the London branch of the family bank and the absurd expedition of Henry Ford’s peace ship are indications that nothing could completely break the ties between Europe and America, especially in periods of great stress such as occur during financial panics and world wars. The Puritan tradition in American culture, however, rejected not only the values of J.P. Morgan but the values of the European artists as well.
There were, of course, harbingers of the trend amonsr the American artists; one of these was Henry Adams, who first went to live in Paris in 1860 and returned to Paris in 1898. He discovered in himself the Parisian attitude of mind. He applied a word to himself from which the more timorous men of today recoil in horror. “Decadent,” he called himself and asked “Why can we decadents never take the comfort and satisfaction of our decadence?” His attitude resulted from a conviction that he was seeing “the downfall of our whole nineteenth century world, and its economical religion.” And he could foresee no way out for the world, not even Socialism.
“My life,” he said, “can at the utmost only reach into the collapse. I have lived through most of one Utopian life, and Socialism has no claim for me.”
Randolph Bourne was another harbinger of the trend; but Bourne was a Socialist He went to Europe in 1913 to attend a congress of the Second International. While there he caught the fever.
“Paris,” he wrote, “is a great spiritual relief after London, in whose atmosphere I began to feel suffocated. The impersonality, the deeply ingrained caste-system, the incorrigible moral optimism, the unproductive intellectualism, the lack of emotion or sensuousness, the barbarity of the outer aspects of English living, the in-sensitiveness to art ... Paris, democratic, artistic, social, sensuous, beautiful, represents almost the complete reversal of everything English. And the French writing, so personal and so human; intellectualistic, but with concepts that light up vistas of experience and do not confuse them, as most English thought does. The irony and vivacity of the French temperament delight me; their total absence in England made it seem the most alien of all the countries I had seen.”
In the Twenties, however, came the flood. The war experience had discovered and opened France to the American multitudes. Writers and painters came first as ambulance drivers and soldiers; later as intellectuals to discover the experience of the continental mode of life. The experience of Paris was repeated and confirmed.
The war opened another vista for the writers – revolutionary Russia – which John Reed, Lincoln Steffens, Vincent Sheehan and other journalists rushed to look at and to report to a goggling world: “I have seen the future and it works ...” If the inspiration for this cry has turned sour, the cry itself may yet be heard again. But the sound of this cry for the first time with all of its freshness and vigor was the harbinger of a new burst of freedom; the opulent, gay and expansive Twenties.
Rahv’s anthology is a well-selected and stimulating array of letters and essays by Americans on the experience of Europe. His comments are brief and to the point. His sense of literary values has led him to the best bits of writing on these themes. The one criticism which might be made of his selection is that if it is representative, it is also overly-inclusive.
As for Henry Steele Commager’s remarks that American business men who visited Europe are more capable of defending American culture against Europe than the intellectuals whom Rahv selects for his anthology, one can only say that those who have travelled to Europe to watch the eastward flow of the American dollar and to guard American culture from the European way of life, deserve to be included only in the passenger lists.
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