Books: Sargasso Seasickness

MY AMERICA—Louis Adamic—Harper

($3-75).

In Laughing in the Jungle, the story of his first 15 years in the U. S. (1913-28), Slovenian Immigrant Louis Adamic called the U. S. “a vast socio-economic jungle.” His “bursts of laughter,” he confesses, were really a bluff to hide his fear. My America, running to 669 big pages of fine print, carries his story down to two months ago. “I am no longer ‘scared’ of the ‘jungle,’ ” says Adamic, “and so I do not need to ‘laugh’ as much as I used to. In fact, hardly at all.”

Author Adamic’s new name for the U. S. is a socio-economic “Sargasso Sea.” But if Author Adamic considers himself afloat in a socio-economic chaos, he also claims to have a navigation chart that explains it. How he discovered this chart is a long story, requiring 44 pages to tell. The story, told in Dynamite and here expanded, is that of the McNamara case and the Syndicalist dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times Building in 1910. For Adamic, who heard the story from an oldSocialist in 1928, violence “à la McNamara” is the chart that explains the conflict between Capital & Labor, between Right & Left, together with all other U. S. Sargassoan social incongruities. Put simply, says Adamic, “there is entirely too much snarling and snorting.” It was this discovery that determined Adamic to steer clear of all political entanglements, all fighting provocations. Threatened, for example, by violent fellow-Balkans who objected to The Native’s Return, Adamic merely moved to the 24th floor of a Manhattan hotel until they cooled off.

With one exception—his membership on the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky—Author Adamic has stuck to his wary code. As a “New American” this wariness has undoubtedly simplified his life. As a writer, it is sometimes a handicap. He is most interesting when he writes about experiences where he got involved. He writes better, for example, about a girl hitchhiker he picked up than about John L. Lewis; better about Manhattan radical-intellectuals as personalities than about their role as intellectual counter-parts of the McNamara dynamiters; better about Slovenian peasants than about C. I. O. The letters written to him by a Hollywood friend are interesting for their violence rather than for the sociological value he attributes to them.

“Watching other Americans,” declares Adamic, “I sometimes think I am more American than a great many of them.” Most readers will agree that he shows a curiosity and enthusiasm about the U. S. that is unusual, will be reminded of a man who loves the sea but cannot travel on it without getting seasick.