2-b

Patriotism--hm? Why did a wise old codger like Dr. Sam
Johnson say what he said of patriotism:"...The last refuge of a
scoundrel?" And why did the worthy Edmund Burke once declare....
......(chk.B's speech) re military form of patriotism.

How many of the intelligent or truly educated persons among
my acquaintances are "one-hundred percent patriots"? I wonder.
I should say all
Yet most of these persons XXX as I recall their different personal
ities are honest, loyal and public-spirited citizens, and the kind
who make responsible members of the community. Some of them
gave most devoted service during the late war, never questioning that.
Can they agree that

their
skepticism, some critical
But I think all of them or nearly all would agree that it is a
good thing to mix some anti-patriotism--nay if you wish even some
un-Americanism--with their patriotism. The uncritical patriot
believes everything his newspaper tells him; he believes everything
the political government tells him. If his political government
says
tells him/that the foreign despot who threatens the peace of
the world should be appeased at all costs, as he was told some ten
years ago, in 1938, then he believes this. If the y now tell him
is as malevolent as our former enemies in the war, then
that the despotic government of Ruritania must not be appeased, but
must be curbed, contained, repulsed everywhere, that the Govt. of
only
Ruritania propagates misery, slavery and MANKIND, wickedness,
who does this? And is that not true? After all, that is the basis
of everything about the U.S.A. is white, he believes this.

I do not want my patriotism to be of that kind--perhaps Ruritanian
patriotism, too, is unthinking, unquestioning, but I do not see why I
am opposed in many ways to
should become like the Ruritanians because I do not agree with
their political-social philosophy.

The thought of patriotism recalls to me a discussion I had at
the home of Mrs. D. not long ago in which our present diplomatic-
political contest with Ruritania was thoroughly ventilated. Mrs.
D. is a handsome woman in her early thirties, and though she is
the mother of four children, none could be more tender and humane,

2-c

with a noble and commanding appearance and beautiful eyes and a deep contralto voice. It is not surprising that she has become very active and prominent in political campaigns lately, the head of all sorts of women's committees attached to the one of the major parties, and may go far in that direction. She speaks well in public and with an air of great earnestness and genuine emotion. She is the mother of four to whom none could be more tender or affectionate, fine children, but you would think this modern American matron was still in her twenties rather than in her middle-thirties.

We were speaking of the enemy Ruritania, and she suddenly burst forth, her fine eyes flashing, her breast heaving, her deep contralto throbbing passionately: "--Much as I detest the idea of welcome--today now another war I would willingly enlist in the most destructive struggle to crush that tyrannical power that breeds slavery and darkness in a third of the world--for it would be a crusade, a war for an idealxxx--a war od ideologies as we say, a war for liberty---" Andxxx That was why she found our "cold war" entirely justified at present and was willing and ready to see it become a murderous yes (in response to my question) shooting war. / She who loved children passionately would gladly rain Ruritanian atom bombs upon the mothers and children, And so on. There was the conventional form of terrorism, of Americann--

Now I am a strong admirer of Mrs. D.; and the fact that we do not entirely agree on our definition of patriotism or our political philosophy does not diminish my friendship for her. resorting to tounpleasant I do not believe in arguing with people, or appealing to epithets to x the xxx because I disagree with them, but rather in using reason patiently --for they are blind and where they seem blind to reason, and gently leading them by the hand to a logical precipice where they may proceed to tumble themselves over of their own free will.

"So it is an ideological cold war we are waging? But what is our ideology in giving loans to the police state of Slavonia; and why, at the same time do we prepare to give military help to the Fascist ruler of Hispaniola. What pattern of ideas does this make? Opposing communism, in Ruritania we help communism in Slavonia? Our ideological

1-a

To take a ship, to see the last lights of the shore fade away for a long time, is to put a period to a whole series of recent experiences, movements, memories. One says end of-the chapter to the last seasons of friendships or loves or hates, of pleasures or disgusts.

Even the radio in the passenger-lounge being out of order helps to separate me from the land, and adds to the weight of silence that hangs over the stead pounding of the ship's motors. Only a little wheeze of popular dance music now and then and it excites a feeling in me that I feel myself cut off from all the misinformation that is so freely disseminated in our free media of radio and press.

2-A

I am revolted by the post-World-War Two recrudescence of intolerance, chauvinism and patrilineering. The cold war is being waged at home as well as abroad, and many people, I feel are frightened. I show fright. Professors, scientists, movie-writers are being denounced, threatened, investigated, tried. And on the other hand, among my acquaintances there are a good many nice boys and girls from our best Eastern universities whowork in clean, stream-lined in stream-lined skyscrapers, publishing offices, and seem very interested in what content to play at being intellektual barbarians for good salaries. They are pleased because no one can denounce them as being communists or subversive, and they seem highly pleased at what is happening to the people on whom have been caught out on the Left. But, though I am not a communist, and nobody has been denouncing me for anything lately, I am not pleased. My middle-road or conservative friends are some of my best friends still being a middle-road and conservative-- are being both nearsighted and stupid. At this rate, their turn will come later. They are looking the other way.

Like Melville I enjoy taking ship for the "watery world"
when life presses me too closely. Here alone one feels "the calm,
the coolness the silent grass-growing mood, in which a man ought to c
ompose." In that watery world alone whose "landlessness alone resides
the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God--" Like Melville's
ship I am bent on keeping to the open independence of the sea.

--When 'too"many sad disappointments" directed him to the
"watery world" --"All deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid
effort of the soul to keep to the open independence of the sea."

included me in the group of "Expatriates" or "Exiles" who shook
the dust of America from their heels and went to permanent retreat
in France or Italy or Germany, or Spain. We were supposed to have
followed the lead or example of the late Harold Stearns, a former
editor of The Nation(?) and editor of "Civilization in America";
after judging that there was no such thing as his country, Stearns
had published a manifesto to this effect and departed forever to
live in exile on the Boulevard Raspail.

Endless nonsense along these lines has been written about
the alleged 'expatriates' and even about my poor self. The truth
was that I had barely heard of Mr. Stearns when I took ship for
France in 1921. I had no more desire to be an expatriate than did
Milton when he went to Italy to complete his education, or Geothe
who did likewise a century or more later. I desired only to go to
continue my own education or apprenticeship in the city where
the practice of letters seemed to find the most favoring soil and
climate, and where the practitioners (at that time) seemed most
adept, most thoroughly in command of their metier. I had no more
thought of exiling myself than did the young painters who studied
at famous schools in the Left Bank, or the sculptors who prepared
themselves in Rome.

Other Americans saw Europe from a train window, a cafe
Or they met other American travelers
terrace a hotel dining room./ I had really lived there.

Here insert some notes about the S.S. Nyhaug, the character
of Capt. M--his war experiences, being hit by submarines. The fear
of Russia by the Scandinavians and a new war--the fear of U.S.
intransigence--the sufferings of the Norwegians, a helpless little
country living by maritime trade, and fishery, wanting to be let alone.
One approach to the post-war impasse....

Mon Paris

Much has been written lately about the period of the
literary (or in Europe)
American/"expatriates" in Paris,in the 1920's,much that is
reminiscent and nostalgic,and also fallacious. There has also
been considerable speculation ~~also over the possibility of a~~
recurrence of this form of esthetic tourism,now that Western
~~gradually~~
Europe appears to be reviving. (I am convinced that Europe's
revival,its resourcefulness will surprise many Americans.)
I have thought to set down a few impressions,some recollections
of my own recorded as faithfully as I can recall them with the
purpose of correcting many errors ~~in American English~~ before they
become well rooted. An added impulse for me has been the
in a recent book of memoirs
fact that/every anecdote involving myself has been remarkably
effective: one was 3,000 miles wide of the mark,that being my
erroneous: ~~one was 3,000 miles wide of the mark, that being my~~
an actor.
distance from the scene at which I am described as participating

How much factual truth,how much accuracy then in all the
other compilations of memories and gossip? Not much.

There are key-words like "expatriate" or "Escape" which
must be dealt with first.

I believe that [American expatriate] American literary and artistic
perception pilgrimages to Europe will be resumed and upon
my
a very large scale. I propose here to set forth the reasons for
holding
this belief.

Many accounts begin with the example of the late Harold
editor
Stearns, author of the compilation "Civilization in America,"
[america]
a sort of round robin written by 30 intellectuals including
Lewis Munch
Stearns, Van Wyck Brooks, H.L.Mencken. On completing the editing

5

The amusing thing was that my own "initiation" was slight;
the writers whom I meant to steep myself in, were the Mallarme's
and Bourgets
and Gourmonts, the Huysmans and Sides, were being discarded
by the youth movement in literary France.

There had begun to be painters interested in cubism and other outlandish modes since the Armory Show at New York in 1919; there was a little "poetry renaissance" blooming around Chicago. Debate over "pure art" versus "commercial art" was spurring "socially-minded" art and letters to begin to be heard. But the discussion of such questions, their study, was always sparse in those days scattered and, so to speak, underground. The mainstream of American life flowed on vigorously/unaware of such issues which made not even tiny eddies.

even
And some of us were curious/about the "art-for-art's-sake"
people who had arisen in the generation after Flaubert and Zola,
Mallarme
in the 1890's We wanted to know something of Verlaine and Rimbaud
discovered
 revived in the '90s) Remy de Gourmont, Francis Jammes, Andre
Gide, even Apollinaire.

the expertise of
We went to study/our craft at one of its busiest and most
successful centers of production, just as men interested in
the technology of aviation or medicine would have traveled to
inspect factories or schools and their directors.

I speak not for others but for myself, but I am sure many
other Americans near my age felt similar impulses. There was
a very intense ferment here in 1916-17, interrupted by the war.
The young writers who had learned French in the army A.E.F. or
more
at college were eager for contact with the/advanced army figures
and European
of French/letters. There is no question that some of my gifted
contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner
were stimulated and in a measure "liberated" by their
European journey

furnished

Aragon came to see me at my shabby little studio in the Rue Campagne
Premiere, the next morning. We talked all morning; he had decided
to give up medicine and had not gone to the hospital that day.

Then, as a consequence, I met the rest of the circle, Breton Soupault,
the late)
Paul Eluard, Jacques Rigaut / and afterward Max Ernst, and Hans Arp.

Four or five of those men I came to know intimately, two of the
most talented among them were my fast friends for years. In this
circle of "nihilists," and "anarchists" and immoralists" I who
was like a poor student and my very young wife were received with
great warmth and generosity. They were mostly normal enough too;
that is, all but one were married, or even had young children (Soupault)
jobs, I wish I could convey the charm of their society at that
period.

Sept.1959

MonParis: or Why We Wanted Abroad --II

I ask myself again, returning to Europe ten years later, why?
we wanted abroad?

The whole relationship of U.S.A to Europe is changing."New York
is the dynamic world-center of modern civilizash." Europe is
only 6 hrs away; and a million tourists go for anything from a week
to 2 years.

Soon men will forget the immense prestige Europe, and especially
France, held as exercising leadership of world culture. Up to the 'Twenties.

✓ Young Dario Cecchi told H.J. last night that (Italy even) was being
americanized and cocolonized at a rapid pace. Stenogs did their work
with a radio playing beside them in an office; young students were taking
up the electric guitar. The streets where we used to flaner are so
thunderous with trucks and cars that (as in Paris) one is almost torn
to pieces by the vibration (old Quai Voltaire). The noise at the
Deux Magots is horrible, and the crowding. The young people look like
the prepschool boys in Brooks suits invading Greenwich Village. Is the
St.Germain and Montparnasse quarter a suburb of G.V.?

Will "quaint" OLD Europe become the appange of P.A.A. and TWA, the
purveyors of mass air transport. STendhal spoke of the most beautiful
spectacle of fireworks at night being "ruined" for him by the vulgar
observations of characters who accompanied him. Thus is not
"ruined" for us by the thundering herd of yokels; and I adua, and
Vicenza?

I must explain what the attraction was of a continent that is changing
that is becoming americanized rapidly! Soon no one will understand what we can for-

I must consider the likenesses, parallels--and contrasts between
the 50's and the Beats of the 50's.

Did we go to "broaden" ourselves? As they did in the 19th century,
with EMERSON GOING TO Germany, and Henry Adams, and H. Hapgood and Steffens)

We had a conviction that America was not an "artistic environemtn"
It was a society that was not favorable to original creative work

Still another motive in attempting this investigation: the movement
of the Twenties has been much misrepresented in my view. Many misconcep-
tions about it stem from M. Cowley's book in which he professes to speak
for a collective group, using an imperial "we". ("We did not read Henry
James"--but we did, I did, and Gilbert Selden, in 1926 I wrote a book 1/2 on it.)
James, and especially his Middle and Last Period.). We were not a 'lost'
generation; and we were not "e xiles," any more than Flaubert or Baude-
laire were exiles in the France of their time.

The more one reflects upon the history of ideas the more one feels
the continuity of determining influences and events. We did
not make a complete break with the recent past, or discover some wholly
new direction. We recognized the "break" or "new path" already opening up.

MON PARIS-ii

first and
In the second decade of the xxth. a whole school of Angry Young Men arose in America; in prose and verse they expressed their break with The Genteel Tradition that ruled American "literature".

They were our honorable fore-runners, and with great energy and courage, and at considerable personal risk, assailed the idols of their time, the whole religio-ethical structure of the Puritans and the Grundies.

The "nineteenth century" actually did not end until 1914. Victorian influences and moeurs were officially in charge, although at heart most persons adhered to those code more better in U.S. than in England.

SCrane reflected the influence of the French Naturalists of the Zola school, while Upton Sinclair by 1907, in The Jungle, reflected their social conscience as well as their realism. Dreiser was another; and Sherwood Anderson was one of the most notable by the time of World War I, 1914-1915. Sinclair Lewis was under way. Mencken was the great polemicist.

The "New Poetry" by 1911-12 was in full orbit. Frost and Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell (propagandist). The Magazine Poetry was founded in 1913 (?) and soon Carl Sandburg was sounding his barlic yawp; while Edgar Lee Masters one book, of ironic-realistic vers libre, made a profound sensation. E.A. Robinson, already long at work, was unearthed. And there was the Little Theatre Movement of my teens.

All these men--especially Upton Sinclair, Dreiser, Anderson, Mencken, and Ezra Pound and Sandburg, helped to open the big breach in the defense-lines of the Victorians through which the next crop was torush into make its great charge.

(In the Little Theatres of 1915-19, I saw the Gordon Craig productions, OF and those of others, featuring the work of Ibsen, Bernard Shaw, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Galsworthy, Oscar Wilde, Brieux ("Damaged Goods" re syphylis!); J.M. Synge. . . We were reading the 1890's. O car Wilde, Ernest Dowson ("I have loved thee Cynara in my fashion") the publications of that rare-edition press in Maine. (Mobley)

They were catching up with the naturalism of Zola in prose, and the great Russians (Though Tchekoff and Dostoievski were yet known well) In poetry Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell, the Imagistes, were abreast of the French Symbolistes of the 1880's and 1890's--

The "revolutionary writers" of the second Decade suffered many attacks, censorship, repressions--came under moral obloquy. Even as late as 1925 Dos Passos was bitterly assailed (explosion in a cesspool") by a leading critic, Sherman. But the battles the earlier writers fought permitted Hemingway and others to publish their novels describing such phenomena as adultery, with complete impunity.

So those men of the first and second decade were really the "lost generation" who stayed at home in America and took a beating. Hail to them! For they made things easier for the revolts of the 20's.

Mon Paris--iii

Up to the end of the nineteenth, ...

I truly believe that America was not even conscious of having
a culture of its own, or not having one, and needing such a culture
for the people who were after us.

A vast continental nation still busy "settling" in,
spanning its territory with railroad net, and serving it with
steel and machinery and electric current.

We had a Press of considerable size; books and music were
sometimes mentioned in the press; we had even literary magazines
like the N.A.Review, run by H.Adams, Scribners, imitations of
English literary magazines. We had Browning Societies and
Dickens Societies. Our culture was a colonial imitation of the
British article.

We had men of talent approaching genius; but the most gifted
of them (saving only Emerson the preacher) lived in isolation
from each other, without honor. Thoreau, Melville, Emily Dickinson, and
Henry James were ignored, or rejected; Whistler was lost to us...
Akins was ignored; and Ryder...

Mumford called those the Brown Decades.

America, typical America, despised "culture" and ignored
"Europe"--except when they wanted to import a European's invention
for making steel (Bessemer) or electrical transformers. improved dynamics.

To be a member of the Press was understandable, but to be a
writer, a poet indeed (dichter) was something decided outlandish.
A Mark Twain was part of the Big Press business; his books were sold in sets
like encyclopedias of home medicine. But O. Scarcy Wilde succeeded
in arousing interest in his lecture swing, as a freak. He confirmed
what America thought of decadent Europe and her dichter.

But when I was fifteen years old, at an impressionable age,
reading poetry day and night, we had a magazine devoted only to
poetry; we had a Little Theatre movement of wide sway, filled with
daring ideas, shockingly ideas even... We read translations and
of famous modern French and German authors, and also read
them in their original language.

A few Americans went "abroad" to study as students, to "broaden
themselves" in the recently ended nineteenth century (prior to 1914).
In World War I, a million American soldiers studied modern war
in Europe, and were given an introduction to the old continent, which was
Americans looked down upon, as retrograde, as they still do. But
a minority who came as soldiers on ambulance-drivers in 1916-17,
were interested and decided to return and renew the acquaintance.

Two developments took place: America got filled up, built up,
settled her frontier lands by the end of the 19th. century.

America won leisure for Culture. The children of culture...

By the accident of history, America around the same time
was involved (1914-1919) in the crisis of the European War and
our people became more closely acquainted with and some of them
more interested in Europe.

We said: THINK OF IT: FLAUBERT SACRIFICED HIS WHOLE LIFE
TO THE SEARCH FOR THE MOST JUSTE. Did any American ever do so?

Mon Paris-iv

and musical societies dedicated to the presentation of the most
advanced and recherche music.

Still more remarkable: in 1959, a branch of the U.S. Govt., expended $70,000 to an exposition: "Americans in Paris in the 'Twenties," showing the blown-up pictures of our poets and novelists, Hemingway, Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, etc. and their manuscripts and letters in glass cases...as an affair of his toric and cultural interest.

The Government, which more than any other, had ignored artistic and educational interests, now in effect boasted of our literary, artistic and musical output--which in fact exerts a powerful influence nowadays, even a dominant one, upon the culture of old Europe.

AS IF TO SAY, we produce not only automobiles, tanks and nuclear bombs--but we are preeminent in the arts of civilization also.

In France, in 1959, I was told that one could not hear good musical productions by the best orchestra conductors, nor the finest vocal and instrumental artists, for the reason that they were off to America--where they were well paid. The nation with the largest old hoard. The gold is no small amount in the shift of the artistic centre of gravity.

One of the interesting experiences of my fifth journey to Europe in my sixth decade, was to find that the cultural artistic world's center of artistic activities had actually shifted away from Paris.

Meanwhile some of the most objectionable phenomena of American life had been brought over to Europe; traffic snarls, Sunday mobs of cars, noise of motors, radio loudspeakers, bad movies from America, with dubbed in sound, ready-made clothes skyscrapers and apartment developments. Soon all EUROPE WILL look like the suburbs of Detroit and Chicago.

They have a bad imitation of Functional Architecture of plate glass, and concrete or steel, which makes everything look uniform and American...