Books: These Strange Americans

AMERICANS ARE ALONE IN THE WORLD (209 pp.)—Luigi Barzini Jr.—Random House ($2.50).

Since the war, European intellectuals have been playing a game. It is called “Analyzing America.” Anyone can play, and firsthand knowledge of America is not required; in fact, too close an acquaintance with the U.S. is considered unsporting. There are no qualifications beyond a smattering of psychoanalytic vocabulary, an ability to generalize from the small to the big (e.g., the luxuriousness of American spittoons proves the wastefulness of the U.S. economy) and a limited awareness of U.S. social customs which need be no more recent than the novels of Theodore Dreiser. A typewriter and a subscription to Britain’s anti-American New Statesman and Nation help.

Following in the steps of such acknowledged masters as Britain’s Geoffrey Gorer and France’s Jean-Paul Sartre, several still little-known but promising rookies have recently reported that U.S. children are developing prognathy (“The lower jaw is thrust forward as a result of lying for hours on the floor in front of the TV screen, chin in hand”); that, when the air conditioning breaks down anywhere, “New York reverts to terror in the face of a hostile and uncontrollable nature”; and that “the female secondary sex characteristic is the dominant theme in current American culture.” Against this background of strange visions, Luigi Barzini Jr., a distinguished Italian journalist, has written a noteworthy book about a recent visit to the U.S. which is far above the usual off-the-French-cuff reporting. Even so, some of the book (a bestseller in Italy) is disturbingly close to the old analysis game. Like a cup of Italian caffe espresso, it stimulates but on occasion also sets the teeth on edge.

Jutting Conies. Newsman Barzini studied at Columbia in the 19203. worked for U.S. newspapers in the U.S.. is genuinely friendly toward America. He works with a very wide screen, and his camera cuts from Henry Ford to a Los Angeles lonely hearts club, from Ben Franklin to a skyful of paratroopers, sometimes with bewildering speed. There are the inescapable stock characters: the discontented taxi driver, the sharecropper with a washing machine who wonders whether he is really happy, the Hollywood starlet who drinks too much; and they are all forcibly made to stand for big concepts—fear, or uncertainty, or materialism—like the characters in an old morality play. The book is full of generalizations that might be fun as caricatures but are disturbing if taken seriously. Examples: the U.S. hates abstract thought; bullfighting is popular in U.S. literature because Americans are obsessed with death; most old-line tycoons drank half a quart of whisky every day. And in Newport, “in every house where I was invited [there was] a white-coated barman whom everybody called ‘Fido.’ ”

As for the female secondary sex characteristic. Reporter Barzini agrees that it is one of the sights of the U.S. “Many [women] sport long conic breasts jutting out like tents from blouses and pullovers . . . They carry them under their chins with the same indifference with which soldiers carry their packs on the back. Strange and unreal breasts they are … Symbolic appendages … a fiction . . .”

But beyond provocative half-truths and hyperbole. Reporter Barzini’s picture includes much sympathetic understanding and many brilliant flashes of intuition. He looks past the city skylines at the American heartland, at the prosperous farms and small towns which are the “living tissue” of U.S. strength. He has a lyrical feeling for the American countryside, “the only one in which one forgets the existence of man that is always at your elbow in Europe . . . Woods as old as the world, woods such as only children can imagine . . .” But he also understands the America of intricate machines, and he knows that an assembly line is not without heart.

Billions of Facts. Reporter Barzini is at his most interesting when he criticizes U.S. foreign policy. Barzini’s thesis is that the U.S. is both too empirical and not practical enough, too idealistic and too unprincipled.

American faith in trial & error Barzini believes to be a heritage from the iSth century, and in his mind its most notable present-day symbol is Charles Kettering, “the last great living American inventor” (who, among other things, developed the automobile self-starter in the face of theoretical calculations that such a gadget was impossible). One of Kettering’s favorite sayings is “Let the job be your boss.” This may work in technology, Barzini suggests, but it can be disastrous in other human endeavor. “Dean Acheson,” writes Barzini, “was the Charles F. Kettering of international affairs, the man . . . who reluctantly and experimentally had to invent American policy to avoid disasters . . . ‘We must decide nothing in advance,’ he once said. ‘There are no final solutions for all problems. All decisions must come from an analysis of facts’ . . . That problems could be solved day by day with decisions based on carefully gathered data, and that there was no such thing as a valid general principle . . . were the hopes he most frequently expressed.”

Achesonian empiricism, says Reporter Barzini, was reflected by the whole State Department, “undoubtedly the most impressive depository of information the world has ever seen. In its immense files, billions of facts sleep . . . irrelevant for any purpose other than the leisurely preparation of almanacs. From all this one rarely gets a general idea . . .” Empiricism, warns Barzini, “means leaving the initiative to the outside world.”

Poker & Politics. The essence of the “noble and somewhat sacrilegious” American Dream, writes Barzini, is that all man’s problems can be solved by intelligence and industry. When things go wrong, at home or abroad, Americans are like “the man who has dropped a penny in the slot machine and did not get either his chewing gum or his money back . . . He fumes, shakes, punches and curses . . . Americans [think that] if you put the right amount of money in the right place … if you sign carefully worded contracts . . . you must always get satisfactory results. When history does not deliver the gum . . . when injustice prevails . . . Americans are eternally surprised . . . Nothing ever surprised the British and the Romans, who considered the most desperate and illogical behavior on the part of foreigners only natural … At the bottom of these excessive [U.S.] hopes there may be apathy. Men who get out of bed only for the greatest crusades—to change the face of the world, and to right all wrongs forever—are apparently reluctant to accept everyday, nonrevolutionary tasks …”

Reporter Barzini wants the U.S. to buckle down harder to the everyday tasks of a great nation. He wants Americans to stop feeling contempt for “blocs,” “spheres of influence,” and “balances of power,” because these are the “technical means by which any policy, aggressive and imperialistic, or noble and disinterested, can be promoted.” He wants them to apply “to political transactions . . . the same knowledge of human nature which Americans use daily in their national card game, poker.” Above all, he wants the U.S. to stop taking the initiative only in emergencies, and adjust itself to the permanent crisis, “the psychology of the long pull.” The U.S. must build a “smooth-running system” for all the free world—”the American Empire.”

Barzini winds up in a significant self-contradiction: he tells the U.S. to be tough, fearless, self-assured and Europe’s leader; at the same time, he wants the U.S. to follow Europe’s advice and do things Europe’s way. His ideal America would be a kind of super-Europe, the successful, functioning substance of centuries ago, but equipped with all modern conveniences, its diplomats so many Metternichs riding to peace conferences in helicopters, taking its philosophy and manners (as Rome took Greece’s) from older and wiser heads, via teletypewriter. That is the sentimental dream behind the oft-heard European advice that the U.S. ought to learn how to be “realistic” from Europe.

Actually, Reporter Barzini knows that the U.S. does not fit that dream because its nature and its tasks are different from anything that ever went before. He writes: “We, in Europe, know little and decide nothing . . . They, the Americans, are alone in the world and carry war and peace on their lap, and . . . nobody can really advise, help or guide them.”