REFLECTIONS: Culture from America?

• Share

With the courteous horror of the Lilliputians for the oafish Gulliver, British commentators have recently felt obliged to pin down the invading monster of American culture, and examine it at close range. One of them, Sir William Haley, director general of BBC, began plans last fall for a series of talks by qualified intellectuals on the impact of America on European culture. BBC's five lecturers—three Englishmen and an Irishman, with Harvard Professor Perry Miller concluding in rebuttal a fortnight ago—seemed to pull up two stakes for every one they drove, but succeeded here & there in tethering a groping Gullivernian arm or a flailing leg.

Performance. Said Sean O'Faolain: "The influence of the United States on Europe is the influence of a grandchild on his grandfather. This possibly will, if all goes well, be known in time as the Aeneas-Anchises complex, in grateful commemoration of the bravery, or obstinacy, of Aeneas in carrying his purblind sire out of the crumbling city of Troy.

"In America this relationship is honored every 22nd of September on Forefathers' Day; though I fear that they let off many more rockets on June 17 to honor the Battle of Bunker Hill, on which date pious Aeneas is believed to have begun a successful war of independence to get rid of the old man on his back."

Said Publisher J. E. Morpurgo: "America had become Europeanized, and the Europe which she had taken as her model was the Europe of the 19th Century, the Europe of decay. But America had found more efficient means of spreading rottenness than had ever been known to the Europe she copied. America had Hollywood . . . We, in Europe, need to revive the habit of asking questions; Hollywood has taught us to be content with answers."

Martin Cooper, the Spectator's music critic, was almost angrily contemptuous of American creative music and its inability to influence Europe. America's forte, said Cooper, is the "smooth efficiency" of its big orchestras, "that concentration on performance natural among a people preoccupied with means rather than ends."

John Lehmann, editor of New Writing, while deploring the possible influence of a "spiritual emptiness" which he finds in today's American literature, predicted for the U.S. "a new generation of writers who are determined to find positive values not in the exploded myth of endless industrial progress, but in the heart and soul of man."

Inquiry. Bertrand Russell recalled-an older European attitude toward the U.S.: "The Duchess of Cambridge, at a garden party, examined my mother's skirts, saying in a loud voice: 'I want to see if they are dirty, because I hear you only associate with dirty radicals and dirty Americans.' " Of the present-day U.S., Russell continued: