Books: Scolding Cousins

The name of the game is Swotting the Americans for Fun and Profit, a sport for which the British are terribly keen, if not particularly adept. Two current swots offer little fun, less profit.

BEHIND THE GOLDEN CURTAIN, by Susan Cooper (244 pages; Scribner; $4.95), contends that American affluence and self-sufficiency have created a Golden Curtain that splits the West in half just as surely as the Iron Curtain divides it from the East. This, the author contends, permits Americans to go their merry, uncomprehending way while the rest of the world lives in ignorance of what the U.S. is really like. Americans, she says, suffer from an excess of earnestness, are deplorably fundamentalistic in religion, too insular, too prone to look for Reds under beds, and are basically anti-intellectual. Furthermore, Goldwaterism was an abomination that still lurks under the surface of U.S. life (along with frightening currents of emotional and physical violence), the educational system in the U.S. is lousy, the race problem is outrageous, and the Americans are politically too far to the right for their own good.

Notions of this sort were popular in Britain a decade ago. As to the present British view of America, Mrs. Cooper describes it as follows: “American scholarship is condemned as prolix, overearnest and trivial. The only genuine art form is jazz, produced by an oppressed minority. Most Americans are bores; nice people, quite often, but boring nonetheless. A first degree from an American university is worthless; an American Ph.D. degree in any nonscientific subject is laughable.”

A SHORT WALK ON THE CAMPUS, by Jonathan Aitken and Michael Beloff (208 pages; Atheneum; $4.50), is an exuberantly far-out pop portrait of America as seen by two young members of the Oxford debating team that toured

U.S. campuses in 1964. Unlike Golden Curtain, this book makes no attempt to be constructive, and indeed is patently false in many respects. Aitken and Beloff find it typically American for college coeds to approach perfect strangers with plowing descriptions of Negro sexual prowess (which, of course, is much greater than white). The authors also leave the impression that many U.S. churches use conveyor belts to serve worshipers with iced wine and neatly wrapped wafers during Communion service. Short Walk is only a youthful indiscretion, like roof climbing or too much sherry at an Old Lit dinner, but it may also disabuse some readers of the notion that all Oxford students are bright.