American Experiment (339 page)

McCarthy’s assault on the Bill of Rights symbolized the USIA’s broader problem. Which America, what kind of America, should it seek to present abroad—America in all its variety, its freedoms and oppressions, its high culture and its barbarism, its noble principles and its often egregious practices? “France was a land, England was a people,” Scott Fitzgerald had written, “but America, having still about it that quality of an idea, was harder to utter.” America was liberty, individual rights, Freedom—these were the foundation stones. But then there was that spectacle of the long-tolerated McCarthy.…

By the 1950s private philanthropic foundations were deeply involved in international affairs, especially in the Third World. The Ford Foundation devoted over $50 million—about a third of its total spending—to international programs from 1951 through 1954.While much of this effort abroad was for practical economic development programs, it also had a strong ideological cast. For years Ford helped finance the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Ford officials defined as an effort “to combat tyranny and to advance freedom in Europe and Asia.” The tyranny was Marxism, Soviet style, and the freedom was the Bill of Rights, American style, but the implications of extending civil liberties to poverty-stricken peoples rather than helping them achieve social and economic freedoms were left largely unexplored.

The men and women who had the most influence, however unwittingly, on European perceptions of the United States were American writers and artists. The late 1940s and the 1950s brought an Indian summer of the
sparkling literary era that had stretched from World War I through the 1930s. Still shining or at least flickering in the afterglow of that era were the giants of the 1920s. Sinclair Lewis died at the start of the fifties but only after publishing a final volume of social criticism,
Kingsblood Royal,
an attack on racial prejudice. Although the best work of Robert Frost was behind him, he was still the most widely read serious poet in America. Ernest Hemingway published
Across the River and into the Trees
in 1950 and
The Old Man and the Sea
two years later, followed by the award of a Pulitzer Prize and, in 1954, the Nobel Prize in literature. William Faulkner, who had won the Nobel five years earlier, published
Requiem for a Nun
in 1951 and
A Fable
in 1954, and he completed his trilogy about the Snopes clan with
The Town
and
The Mansion
during the late fifties. Soon after the end of the decade, the pens of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Frost would be stayed for good.

Crowding onto the literary scene were younger writers who brought a springtime of creativity even while the Indian summer waned. Between 1947 and 1955 playwright Arthur Miller gave to the stage
All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge.
Ralph Ellison wrote a single stunning novel,
The Invisible Man;
J. D. Salinger published
The Catcher in the Rye
and
Franny and Zooey;
Saul Bellow contributed
The Adventures of Augie March
and
Henderson the Rain King;
playwright Tennessee Williams, after his brilliant
The Glass Menagerie
and
A Streetcar Named Desire,
wrote
The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
These five men were in their late thirties or early forties; even younger was Norman Mailer, who had brought out
The Naked and the Dead,
a war novel, at the age of twenty-five and wrote two significant works,
Barbary Shore
and
The Deer Park,
in the 1950s.

Of all the tests of great literature, two are most clearly measurable— longevity and universality. The permanence of the notable work of the Indian summer could not be tested for another century, but the universality of the older generation of writers had striking demonstration during the 1950s.

France had been the supreme testing ground abroad for American writers, in part because French critics viewed themselves as the ultimate tribunal of international letters. The literati of Paris had been peculiarly generous to American novelists, some of whom they had known during the novelists’ self-imposed exiles in France in the twenties. Lewis’s
Babbitt
had sold 80,000 copies in France within a few months of publication; at least thirteen of his other works were translated into French by the end of the thirties. During that decade, the “greatest literary development in France,”
in the judgment of Jean-Paul Sartre, was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Caldwell, and one or two other writers; at once, he added, “for thousands of young intellectuals, the American novel took its place, together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States.” Even André Gide, the grand old man of French letters, said that “no contemporary literature” excited his interest more than that of young America.

And of these “young” Americans, no one excited the French more than Hemingway. His subjects fascinated them—bloody prizefighters, hired killers, disemboweled matadors, crippled soldiers, hunters of wild animals, deep-sea fishermen, as André Maurois summed them up. They liked his style even more—the simplicity of word and deed, the flat unemotional perceptions, the code of courage and personal honor, the clean, hard writing style, the celebration of
nada
—nothingness. It was a style that was said to have influenced Camus. By 1952
For Whom the Bell Tolls
had sold over 160,000 copies in a French-language edition.

In the long run, the reputation of Faulkner in France surpassed even Hemingway’s. The literati liked the sense of tragic pessimism in the Mississippian, his metaphysical approach to time, his “magical, fantastic, and tragic” universe, as one reviewer wrote, inhabited by “a strange music, an unforgettable rhythm of incantation.” If Hemingway influenced Camus, Faulkner, according to Sartre, inspired Simone de Beauvoir’s technique of substituting a more subtle order of time for the usual chronology. Some French critics viewed Faulkner as America’s best—even the world’s best— novelist, much to the discomfiture of Hemingway, who at least had the consolation of vastly outselling Faulkner in France. Americans were wrong to treat Faulkner as a regionalist, Paris critics asserted; he was rather a “universal writer” in the fullest sense.

It was not only Faulkner and Hemingway that France celebrated, and it was not only France that celebrated American writers. Across the Continent there appeared a hunger for Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and others, and for Westerns and detective stories as well. A German writer told many years later of how he had cadged books from American GIs during the occupation and built his literary education on crates of Armed Services Editions, “courtesy of the American taxpayer.”

Why this transatlantic appeal of American writers? Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, who translated earlier American classics as well as Faulkner and Hemingway, said he had found “a thoughtful and barbaric America, happy and quarrelsome, dissolute and fruitful, heavy with all the world’s past, but also young and innocent.” Was this all there was to it—Europeans
in one of their recurring “discoveries” of a simple, innocent, youthful America, refreshing to jaded continental sensibilities? Were either the established or the rising American writers of the 1950s telling them anything about the heart and mind and soul of America? What ultimately did this big, bustling country stand for?

Hemingway did not answer this question—he had no intention to. He dwelt on men’s—it was almost always men’s—individual fear and bravery, desire and frustration, struggle and death. Like Robert Jordan in
For Whom the Bell Tolls,
he had no political beliefs except a furious antifascism and an all-embracing individualism. “You believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Robert is told by “himself,” but himself wants these good things for individuals, not nations. Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
superbly portrayed a man’s struggle against a personal adversary and a fated defeat by an inexorable environment, but had nothing to say about collective effort and frustration.

With his closeness to the land, his love of community and region, his feeling for the “presentness of the past,” his old-fashioned sense of religious morality, William Faulkner appeared far more likely than Hemingway to plumb the mind and heart of the country. He was very much in the American literary tradition—indeed, two traditions, as Hyatt Waggoner suggested: the romantic symbolism of Hawthorne and Melville, the naturalism of Howells, Twain, and Dreiser. The people of Yoknapatawpha County—their greed and cunning, their moral and physical vulgarity, and the struggles of some to break the chains of fate and rise to some kind of human stature—were lifted in his charged prose to the level of universality and tragedy that the French critics so praised. But Faulkner, like Hemingway, was far more concerned with private values and personal afflictions than with public substantive values like political and economic freedom. When he did call for individual rights and liberty in his books and public addresses, they were largely
his
kind of rights and liberty—a sphere of private space, artistic independence that no government could be allowed to invade. The broader picture of “what the country stood for” that emerged from his writings was murky, even muddled.

A marvelous line from Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom,
noted by Malcolm Cowley, summed up the eloquence and the despair of modern human existence: “moving from a terror in which you cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith.” This was the folly and impotence of America but by no means its essence.

Robert Frost even more than Faulkner defined freedom in his sayings
and writings as personal liberty against the state, whether New Deal bureaucracy or the compulsory public school. And his freedom too, on closer inspection, turned out to be the crucial but self-serving independence of the man of letters. “We prate of freedom,” he said. “All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.” And he wrote:

Keep off each other and keep each other off.

You see the beauty of my proposal is

It needn’t wait on general revolution.

I bid you to a one-man revolution—

The only revolution that is coming.

Many of Frost’s finest poems celebrated the independent, self-reliant, skeptical country man, who could say with the poet, “The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have.” But this was a negative freedom largely irrelevant to the human needs of millions of industrialized, urbanized, automated Americans. There was one thing Frost could not do, Granville Hicks had written earlier. He “cannot give us the sense of belonging in the industrial, scientific, Freudian world in which we find ourselves.” The poet never did, never wanted to.

What writer, then, did manage to present the essence of the American experiment in the realm of ideas and values? Surely not Norman Mailer, who in the 1950s was still preoccupied with self-promotion, self-definition, self-resolution, with orgasm as true love, ideology as illusion, the hipster as the “wise primitive.” Surely not Tennessee Williams, who epitomized the decade’s concern with personal trauma and private values, or J. D. Salinger’s adolescents in constant rebellion against the “phony bastards” around them, or Saul Bellow’s characters—unforgettable but largely preoccupied with their own psyches.

The writer who came closest to dramatizing the great public issues and values was a playwright. Manhattan-born Arthur Miller, the son of a garment manufacturer afflicted by the depression, rebelled against commercial values and middle-class hypocrisy much as his fellow writers did. But he used his characters to dramatize social as well as personal needs and failures. The “right dramatic form,” he wrote in 1956, “is the everlastingly sought balance between order and the need of our souls for freedom; the relatedness between our vaguest longings, our inner questions, and private lives and the life of the generality of men which is our society and our world.” His great plays—notably
Death of a Salesman
and
The Crucible
—were
in part direct responses to the threat to people’s hopes and dreams from a business civilization that degraded them and the threat to personal liberty from McCarthyism. Predictably Miller was attacked from the right; more significantly, he was criticized from the left for not being radical enough, for not being clear whether it was Willy Loman who was at fault or the society that produced him, for not tying his plays more explicitly to current issues.

Miller easily survived his critics. But even though his plays were produced in Europe, he had only a limited impact abroad. The ambiguities in his dramas—the ambivalences in Miller reflecting those in the larger culture—were enough to blur his powerful portrait of America’s yearnings toward both liberty and order, freedom and security, individualism and solidarity. The portrait was not clear to all Americans either. Miller himself wryly mentioned the man who came out of a performance of
Death of a Salesman
exclaiming, “I always said that New England territory was no damned good.”

If American writers were unsure of what their nation stood for, it was not surprising that Europeans were equally puzzled. European intellectuals had long labeled the country’s commitment to freedom as either self-indulgence bordering on anarchy or a boorish egalitarianism bending toward class leveling. “I am held to be a master of irony,” George Bernard Shaw had gibed. “But not even I would have had the idea of erecting a Statue of Liberty in New York.” On the other hand, Europeans had to and did admire the American commitment to some notion of freedom in two wars and the cold war. If Europeans, with their long exposure to Americans, were left uncertain, what could be expected of the Soviets, with their very different, very ideological conception of freedom?

A remarkable meeting in San Francisco in September 1959 between Nikita Khrushchev and nine American labor leaders headed by Walter Reuther helped answer this question. For two hours the two sides went at it, Khrushchev reddening, pounding the table, shouting out his arguments, the union men roaring back in a cacophony of indignant voices. More and more the argument narrowed down to the question of freedom—for workers in East Germany, for Hungarian “freedom fighters,” for West Germans, for Americans. Khrushchev was soon on his feet. Suddenly, according to the official record, he gave a burlesque demonstration of the dance he had witnessed during the Hollywood rehearsal of the forthcoming film
Can-Can.
He turned his back to the table, bent downward, flipped his coat up, and gave an imitation of the cancan.