January, 1952
IN JANUARY, 1947, SIMONE de Beauvoir, the leading French femme savante, alighted from an airplane at LaGuardia Field for a four months’ stay in the United States. In her own eyes, this trip had something fabulous about it, of a balloonist’s expedition or a descent in a diving bell. Where to Frenchmen of an earlier generation, America was the incredible country of les peaux rouges and the novels of Fenimore Cooper, to Mlle. de Beauvoir America was, very simply, movieland—she came to verify for herself the existence of violence, drugstore stools, boy-meets-girl, that she had seen depicted on the screen. Her impressions, which she set down in journal form for the readers of Les Temps Modernes, retained therefore the flavor of an eyewitness account, of confirmation of rumor, the object being not so much to assay America as to testify to its reality.
These impressions, collected into a book, made a certain stir in France; now, three years later, they are appearing in translation in Germany. The book has never been published over here; the few snatches excerpted from it in magazine articles provoked wonder and hostility.
On an American leafing through the pages of an old library copy, the book has a strange effect. It is as though an inhabitant of Lilliput or Brobdingnag, coming upon a copy of Gulliver’s Travels, sat down to read, in a foreign tongue, of his own local customs codified by an observer of a different species: everything is at once familiar and distorted. The landmarks are there, and some of the institutions and personages—Eighth Avenue, Broadway, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, Harvard, Yale, Vassar, literary celebrities concealed under initials; here are the drugstores and the cafeterias and the busses and the traffic lights—and yet it is all wrong, schematized, rationalized, like a scale model under glass. Peering down at himself, the American discovers that he has “no sense of nuance,” that he is always in a good humor, that “in America the individual is nothing,” that all Americans think their native town is the most beautiful town in the world, that an office girl cannot go to work in the same dress two days running, that in hotels “illicit” couples are made to swear that they are married, that it almost never happens here that a professor is also a writer, that the majority of American novelists have never been to college, that the middle class has no hold on the country’s economic life and very little influence on its political destiny, that the good American citizen is never sick, that racism and reaction grow more menacing every day, that “the appearance, even, of democracy is vanishing from day to day,” and that the country is witnessing “the birth of fascism.”
From these pages, he discovers, in short, that his country has become, in the eyes of Existentialists, a future which is, so to speak, already a past, a gelid eternity of drugstores, juke boxes, smiles, refrigerators, and “fascism,” and that he himself is no longer an individual but a sort of Mars man, a projection of science fiction, the man of 1984. Such a futuristic vision of America was already in Mlle. de Beauvoir’s head when she descended from the plane as from a space ship, wearing metaphorical goggles: eager as a little girl to taste the rock-candy delights of this materialistic moon civilization (the orange juice, the ice creams, the jazz, the whiskeys, the martinis, and the lobster). She knows already, nevertheless, that this world is not “real,” but only a half-frightening fantasy daydreamed by the Americans.
She has preserved enough of Marxism to be warned that the spun-sugar façade is a device of the “Pullman class” to mask its exploitation and cruelty: while the soda fountains spout, Truman and Marshall prepare an anti-Communist crusade that brings back memories of the Nazis, and Congress plots the ruin of the trade unions. “The collective future is in the hands of a privileged class, the Pullman class, to which are reserved the joys of large-scale enterprise and creation; the others are just wheels in a big steel world; they lack the power to conceive an individual future for themselves; they have no plan or passion, hope or nostalgia, that carries them beyond the present; they know only the unending repetition of the cycle of seasons and hours.”
This image of a people from Oz or out of an expressionist ballet, a robot people obedient to a generalization, corresponds, of course, with no reality, either in the United States or anywhere else; it is the petrifaction of a fear very common in Europe today—a fear of the future. Where, in a more hopeful era, America embodied for Europe a certain millennial promise, now in the Atomic Age it embodies an evil presentiment of a millennium just at hand. To Mlle. de Beauvoir, obsessed with memories of Jules Verne, America is a symbol of a mechanical progress once dreamed of and now repudiated with horror; it is a Judgment on itself and on Europe. No friendly experience with Americans can dispel this deep-lying dread. She does not wish to know America but only to ascertain that it is there, just as she had imagined it. She shrinks from involvement in this “big steel world” and makes no attempt to see factories, workers, or political leaders. She prefers the abstraction of “Wall Street.”
This recoil from American actuality has the result that might be expected, a result, in fact, so predictable that one might say she willed it. Her book is consistently misinformed in small matters as well as large. She has a gift for visual description which she uses very successfully to evoke certain American phenomena: Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, the Bronx, Chinatown, women’s dresses, the stockyards, the Bowery, Golden Gate, auto camps, Hawaiian dinners, etc. In so far as the U.S. is a vast tourist camp, a vacationland, a Stop-in Serv-Urself, she has caught its essence. But in so far as the United States is something more than a caricature of itself conceived by the mind of an ad man or a Western Chamber of Commerce, she has a disinclination to view it. She cannot, for example, take in the names of American writers even when she has their books by her elbow: she speaks repeatedly of James Algee (Agee), of Farrel (Farrell), O’Neil (O’Neill), and of Max Twain—a strange form of compliment to authors whom she professes to like. In the same way, Greenwich Village, which she loves, she speaks of throughout as “Greeni-wich,” even when she comes to live there.
These are minor distortions. What is more pathetic is her credulity, which amounts to a kind of superstition. She is so eager to appear well informed that she believes anything anybody tells her, especially if it is anti-American and pretends to reveal the inner workings of the capitalist mechanism. The Fifth Avenue shops, she tells us, are “reserved for the capitalist international,” and no investigative instinct tempts her to cross the barricade and see for herself. Had she done so, she might have found suburban housewives, file clerks, and stenographers swarming about the racks of Peck & Peck or Best’s or Franklin Simon’s, and colored girls mingling with white girls at the counters of Saks Fifth Avenue. A Spanish painter assures her that in America you have to hire a press agent to get your paintings shown. An author tells her that in America literary magazines print only favorable reviews. A student tells her that in America private colleges pay better salaries than state universities, so that the best education falls to the privileged classes, who do not want it, and so on. At Vassar, she relates, students are selected “according to their intellectual capacities, family, and fortune.” Every item in this catalogue is false. (Private colleges do not pay better salaries—on the contrary, with a few exceptions, they pay notoriously worse; family plays no part in the selection of students at Vassar, and fortune only to the extent that the tuition has to be paid by someone—friend, parent, or scholarship donor; you do not have to hire a press agent; some literary magazines make a positive specialty of printing unfavorable reviews.)
Yet Mlle. de Beauvoir, unsuspecting, continues volubly to pass on “the low-down” to her European readers: there is no friendship between the sexes in America; American whites are “stiff” and “cold”; American society has lost its mobility; capital is in “certain hands,” and the worker’s task is “carefully laid out.” “True, a few accidental successes give the myth of the self-made man a certain support, but they are illusory and tangential ...”
The picture of an America that consists of a small ruling class and a vast inert, regimented mass beneath it is elaborated at every opportunity. She sees the dispersion of goods on counters but draws no conclusion from it as to the structure of the economy. The American worker, to her, is invariably the French worker, a consecrated symbol of oppression. She talks a great deal of American conformity but fails to recognize a thing that Tocqueville saw long ago; that this conformity is the expression of a predominantly middle-class society; it is the price paid (as yet) for the spread of plenty. Whether the diffusion of television sets is, in itself, a good is another question; the fact is, however, that they are diffused; the “Pullman class,” for weal or woe, does not have a corner on them, or on the levers of political power.
The outrage of the upper-class minority at the spectacle of television aerials on the shabby houses of Poverty Row, at the thought of the Frigidaires and washing machines in farmhouse and working-class kitchens, at the new cars parked in ranks outside the factories, at the very thought of installment buying, unemployment compensation, social security, trade-union benefits, veterans’ housing, at General Vaughan, above all at Truman the haberdasher, the symbol of this cocky equality—their outrage is perhaps the most striking phenomenon in American life today. Yet Mlle. de Beauvoir remained unaware of it, and unaware also, for all her journal tells us, of income taxes and inheritance taxes, of the expense account and how it has affected buying habits and given a peculiar rashness and transiency to the daily experience of consumption. It can be argued that certain angry elements in American business do not know their own interests, which lie in the consumers’ economy; even so, this ignorance and anger are an immense political fact in America.
The society characterized by Mlle. de Beauvoir as “rigid,” “frozen,” “closed” is in the process of great change. The mansions are torn down and the real-estate “development” takes their place: serried rows of ranch-type houses, painted in pastel colors, each with its picture window and its garden, each equipped with deep-freeze, oil furnace, and automatic washer, spring up in the wilderness. Class barriers disappear or become porous; the factory worker is an economic aristocrat in comparison to the middle-class clerk; even segregation is diminishing; consumption replaces acquisition as an incentive. The America invoked by Mlle. de Beauvoir as a country of vast inequalities and dramatic contracts is rapidly ceasing to exist.
One can guess that it is the new America, rather than the imaginary America of economic royalism, that creates in Mlle. de Beauvoir a feeling of mixed attraction and repulsion. In one half of her sensibility, she is greatly excited by the United States and precisely by its material side. She is fascinated by drugstore displays of soap and dentifrices, by the uniformly regulated traffic, by the “good citizenship” of Americans, by the anonymous camaraderie of the big cities, by jazz and expensive record players and huge collections of records, and above all—to speak frankly—by the orange juice, the martinis, and the whiskey. She speaks elatedly of “my” America, “my” New York; she has a child’s greedy possessiveness toward this place which she is in the act of discovering.
Toward the end of the book, as she revises certain early judgments, she finds that she has become “an American.” What she means is that she has become somewhat critical of the carnival aspects of American life which at first bewitched her; she is able to make discriminations between different kinds of jazz, different hotels, different night clubs. Very tentatively, she pushes beyond appearance and perceives that the American is not his possessions, that the American character is not fleshly but abstract. Yet at bottom she remains disturbed by what she has seen and felt, even marginally, of the American problem. This is not one of inequity, as she would prefer to believe, but of its opposite. The problem posed by the United States is, as Tocqueville saw, the problem of equality, its consequences, and what price shall be paid for it. How is wealth to be spread without the spread of uniformity? How create a cushion of plenty without stupefaction of the soul and the senses? It is a dilemma that glares from every picture window and whistles through every breezeway.
If Americans, as Mlle. de Beauvoir thinks, are apathetic politically, it is because they can take neither side with any great conviction—how can one be against the abolition of poverty? And how, on the other hand, can one champion a leveling of extremes? For Europeans of egalitarian sympathies, America is this dilemma, relentlessly marching toward them, a future which “works,” and which for that very reason they have no wish to face. Hence the desire, so very evident in Mlle. de Beauvoir’s impressions and in much journalism of the European left, not to know what America is really like, to identify it with “fascism” or “reaction,” not to admit, in short, that it has realized, to a considerable extent, the economic and social goals of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and of progressive thought in general.