SOURCE: “Why Do Americans Live in Europe?” in transition, No. 14, Fall, 1928, pp. 97-119.

transition has asked a number of Americans living in Europe to write brief stories of themselves—their autobiographies of the mind, self-examinations, confessions, conceived from the stand-point of deracination.

The following questions were asked:

1.—Why do you prefer to live outside America?

2.—How do you envisage the spiritual future of America in the face of a dying Europe and in the face of a Russia that is adopting the American economic vision?

3.—What is your feeling about the revolutionary spirit of your age, as expressed, for instance, in such movements as communism, surrealism, anarchism?

4.—What particular vision do you have of yourself in relation to twentieth century reality?

GERTRUDE STEIN

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilisation. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

She is the mother of modern civilization and one wants to have been born in the country that has attained and live in the countries that are attaining or going to be attaining. This is perfectly natural if you only look at facts as they are. America is now early Victorian very early Victorian, she is a rich and well nourished home but not a place to work. Your parent's home is never a place to work it is a nice place to be brought up in. Later on there will be place enough to get away from home in the United States, it is beginning, then there will be creators who live at home. A country this the oldest and therefore the most important country in the world quite naturally produces the creators, and so naturally it is I an American who was and is thinking in writing was born in America and lives in Paris. This has been and probably will be the history of the world. That it is always going to be like that makes the monotony and variety of life that and that we are after all all of us ourselves.

HILAIRE HILER

When Albrecht Dürer was asked by letter why he remained so long in Venice he replied “Because here I am considered a gentleman; at home a loafer”. The accumulation of the combined thought waves of millions apathetic or hostile towards any form of creative graphic or plastic expression showing the slightest originality, naturally affects the mental life of a creative artist living in such an atmosphere.

In America there are no facilities for the enjoyment of leisure or apparatuses for reflection.

Considerable time must be wasted in self justification both verbally and introspectively and many questions settled which are otherwheres taken for granted.

The spiritual future of America appears too remote to allow of predictions of any value at the present moment.

My feeling about the revolutionary spirit of my age is pessimistic in the extreme.

I feel that a painter occupies a place of real unimportance in an age such as ours. So unimportant is the whole field of visual aesthetics that it is left as unworthy of the attention of any first rate minds as a refuge for morons, unbalanced neurotics, and dull nonentities.

ROBERT MCALMON

In response to your questionnaire: In general you assume much to be true that is yet in the controversial stage; yet to be proved by history. We, deracinated ones, if we are deracinated, may not all have come to Europe impelled by some motive of the heart and mind. I came, intending to return, or to travel much. I felt in America that Europe was finished, decayed, war- and time-worn out. There it seemed that in Europe the sense of futility would be too enveloping. However there is the rot of ripe fruit, and there is the blight and decay of green fruit.

1. I prefer Europe, if you mean France, to America because there is less interference with private life here. There is interference, but to a foreigner, there is a fanciful freedom and grace of life not obtainable elsewhere. From various Frenchmen I gather that these statements do not apply to French citizens in a strong sense. It may be well to live in foreign countries; and to be definitely “deracinated.” In that case the deficiencies of the land which accidentally gave us birth need disturb us no more than the legal, social, and human, infringments on our ‘rights’ bother us elsewhere. If by Europe you mean England, Italy, or Germany, I think America an exciting, stimulating, imaginative, country with the fresh imagination of youth and ignorance.

2. Is Europe dying, and is Russia adopting the American economic vision? Russia is a big and raw and primitive country with a mixture of many races. Before the war was the world accepting the German state-controlled standard of life? It's a quick judgment to make on Russia. And if Europe is dying, her various countries seem obstinately to cling to their convictions and rights. There seems not to be the breath of fatalism, shattered morale, or acquiescence, that goes with approaching death. By the few hundred years time that Europe is dead what may not have happened in America?

As to America's spiritual future, that is too involved a question to discuss, as religion, sentimentality, idealism, are so generally confused with an understanding of the word spiritual. Sensually Americans appear sentimental rather than aware, and childishly incapable of facing facts that France has faced for generations. England in this aspect may be decayed, as English people are aware, but ‘decorous’ to an extent that is unhealthy, publicly, whatever they are privately. As far as America's or Europe's future then, I visualize it as for the individual who does not look to a mass movement which lets him flow in its current on to victory. Possibly writers and artists in America will stop scolding about the state of society in their own country, once enough have become deracinated so that it is realized that all countries have their defects. Then art may ensue.

3. I don't feel that my age has a revolutionary spirit, artistically, or politically. The Declaration of Independence, a real revolution, took place sometime back. Impressionism, futurism, cubism, and abstract art -isms, were all pre-war concepts, and there does not appear on the horizon any new originative forces. Beneath the coerced acceptance of the machine age I sense fear and caution, reaction, and sentimentality which is worse than decay. Communism is the natural, temporary outcome of the democratic concept, and reaction against it may at any time force an aristocrat-political theory, and that won't be new or revolutionary. Surrealism may be like Dada, nothing. At least the works of various surrealists are unlike enough to furnish no clue, and Isadore Ducasse and Rimbaud preceded surrealism, utilized metaphysics, abstractions, darkness and madness and death, with perhaps greater force intellectually and emotionally, leaving aside the hysteria and commotion. Anarchism is temperamental and our generation did not invent the temperament. On the other hand our generation seems cowed and ready to conform, to submit or to run away. What it is they are conforming none of them, that is, us, know; not even the sixty-year-old peace conference gatherers.

4. My vision of myself in relation to 20th century reality is one of remaining myself, or hoping to. If that is impossible, what bad luck. By the time Menckens, Pounds, Enemies, and Surrealists give their messages on what is wrong and what should be done, transition comes along with a questionnaire. In any case, answers are contradictory, chaotic, and ineffectual with the wail of lost souls seeking a platform or expressing personal bias and frustration. I wouldn't dare mount one of the platforms in a rocky sea. Bad as it may be I'll do my own swimming. As to cosmic relationship, is there no God and isn't war hell, and there is the peace pact. May you, however, have answers from beings with more interpretive zeal.

LEIGH HOFFMAN

My principal reason for living abroad is that I prefer to live, insofar as such a thing is possible, with the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of friction. The struggle for existence in America, into which I early plunged, reached such an intensity that it finally became intolerable, hence I fled. Call it an evasion or what you will, but I, for one, can see little reason for remaining in a land where the people are dominated by a single and basic idea—that of making a living. This is the fundamental motive underlying all American life, despite the country's vaunted wealth, which, it seems at least, should make living comparatively easy there.

To me America represents an older, more neurasthenic, more dropsical, country than Europe. With no traditions or customs to overcome, America rapidly assimilated the tremendous industrial innovations of the past fifty years—the culmination of all the past centuries—while Europe today is only entering into the gradual process of adopting them. Probably a few years hence, all the combined forces that drove me out of my country will be just as prevalent here as they now are there. Already many farms surrounding Paris are being deserted by French peasants who are being lured to the city by the glamour of industrialism.

What America needs is a gospel of laziness. How can a country develop either spiritually or artistically until it has learned how to live and has evolved the art of social amenities? What can be expected of a people who know so little about the fine art of eating and drinking, who know nothing of the subtle and leisurely fashion of diverting themselves, and who have not mastered the art of relaxation and rest? Art can never flourish in such an environment. Not until America knows how to loaf, not until it has drawn that finer distinction between leisure and mere idleness, can much be expected from it. Meanwhile, until Europe has started going on that wild, hectic, jazz pace from which I fled, and has forgotten all about its once beautiful and leisurely art of existing—and such changes are now obviously manifesting themselves—I intend to make my home here. Perhaps by that time, the pendulum in my own country will have started to swing in the opposite direction. There must be some limit, surely.

Russia interests me but little. I think that in time it will become a sort of fat, complaisant, second-rate United States. It is rapidly adopting the American economic vision because the revolution cleared a way for it. When the country becomes properly Americanized, say in fifty years, it will be producing hordes and hordes of Russian Harold Bell Wrights and Edgar Guests, while the one-time Dostoievskys will have become mere classical legends, like Shakespeare in England today. I do not expect to live long enough to see anything but trash come out of the metamorphosis. The country will become industrialized, radioized, movieized, and standardized, the huge population of illiterate peasants will be taught how to read advertisements, newspapers, and bibles, the country will develop a huge belly, and the Russian populace will placidly settle down to the preoccupation of money grubbing.

I expect to see nothing more than novel experiments come out of the present age—or out of the next several generations—which above all is a time of change, transition, and experimentation. I admit my inability to find any great revolutionary spirit, except materially, being expressed today. These are the days of new values and inventions, of trials and tests. The world is undergoing many radical material changes, which are affecting its entire spiritual life, I grant, but which are throwing it more and more increasingly into chaos, bewilderment, and confusion.

Anarchism and communism are nothing more than what the tenets and theories of Christianity would have been, had the latter ever been put into practice—the fundamental teachings of Christ, if brought into actual play—but they have no more place in the world today than Christianity has, and will suffer the same fate, I fear. The little group of surrealists—fighting, groping, experimenting—are expressing the chaos of their age, which is a difficult and wholly transitory task. And their works are as temporal as the passing seasons.

As for myself, I would have much preferred to have been born before the introduction of the machine; in a slower, more leisurely, more graceful, and less cluttered age. Full, well-rounded, blossomed-out individuals are hard to find in this day of specialization, when practically everybody is preoccupied with the mere business of making a living and is directing the bulk of his energy in that direction. Somehow, it is difficult for me to adjust myself to the tempo of all this speed, noise, confusion and jazz. I am of this age but not one of it. That is why I left America.

GEORGE ANTHEIL

When I received your letter addressed to exiles, I was astonished to think that I was probably an exile, but it is undoubtedly true. The time flies to advantage in Europe, whereas much of it is wasted in America explaining battles that have been won years ago. My Polish origin means that I love the ground upon which I was born, New Jersey, with a love that it is difficult to explain, or understand.

Nevertheless musically it is absolutely impossible to live in America. I am a musician, a composer, and this type of artist needs vast organizations such as opera companies and symphony orchestras to write for to produce his works. It is not as simple or as inexpensive as printing a book, for example.

A young composer has absolutely no future in America, because, even if he attains the very peak of eminence, he cannot hope to make a livelihood, whereas in Europe he stands a chance of making anywhere from a decent three livelihood (after the early years of struggle) to even the accumulation of a fortune. This is because of the hundred first class operas in Europe which give performances every night in the season, a liberal amount of them being fairly modern. But America has only two first class operas, and it is seldom indeed that they give a really modern opera.

Moreover a young man casts his lot with that which is ascending, not descending. Europe is upon the ascent. Since the war forty new operas have appeared in Germany alone, while in the United States no new first class opera companies have appeared. Moreover instead of the three symphony orchestras that New York City had seven years ago, it now only has one. Contrast this with the four symphony orchestras that Paris boasts. Consider also the lavishness with which vast sums of money are thrown to old virtuosi; the absolute refusal to spend a penny upon any composer who can be called a composer, or who is even remotely recognized in other countries.

I have every hope that this condition in America will change, but I do not see how they can build two hundred operas overnight, or train the public to hear them, and as this will take some little time, I prefer to stay in Europe in the meantime, and learn how to write operas by actually hearing my own symphonies and operas for existing organizations. I trust that this will be no spot on my so far stainless Americanism for the New-York: 1928 group, but simply a very practical economic standpoint.

I think that answers your first, second, and fourth question. As to number three … I am emphatically for what I have seen of the surrealistic painters and writers. Eternal revolution, and eternal change … some day I may even turn traitor to these … but that day has not yet come, and those who again turn to say that youthful Paris is wrong, will again live to see the day when they will rue their words. The old fools never learn.

KAY BOYLE

Writing for an audience it is necessary to decide whether or not explanations are necessary. They are not necessary. Neither human, intellectual, metaphysical or scientific. Explanations murder like a knife the perception. Explanations are the lie making it possible to accept the truth. If I, let us say, am seeking to live an absolute revolt against superiorities which even the most restless abuse but do not question, a dissection of my peculiar honor is beside the point. Explanations are invented as the apology for the action; invariably a collection of words as important as a lace handkerchief in a slaughter-house.

Any froth that blew around the Winged Victory, Greek contemporaneous froth explaining, cannot put a head on the woman today. It was an act and not an explanation which removed the head, and to that the blood responds, permitting no outraging of it, while the explanation says no more than this: my own senses, experiences, appetites, my contemporaries have confused me let me explain myself.

For this I have turned Indian, in an attempt to catch the sound of my own kind. But the hoofs galloped in another direction. For this I turned American to understand, but there were no Americans speaking for themselves. As a class they speak for a situation. Beginning with the composite figure of the American intellectual expressed for the moment in Mr. Matthew Josephson, and ending with the Unknown Soldier, each citizen functions with pride in the American conspiracy against the individual.

Do you object to a white bath every morning before breakfast? No, I like a white bath every morning before breakfast. But I say that it is a white bath every morning before breakfast and it is nothing more than one way of getting clean water into a receptacle without spilling a drop. Thanks to the efficacy of plumbing. But get into it with a literature in your head and get out of it clean to write the literature. To me there is in America no conviction which questions the value of inventions that protect the flesh from everything except the importance of being cared for.

The mechanics of America have afforded its intellectuals the opportunity to find words for what somebody else did. They preach, but they do not predict, for it has already historically taken place. They invent a lyrical explanation for form, and form has none whatsoever mystic-outline following necessarily the structure of action and not of evasion.

(I do not speak here of those artists who have subjected invention and hence given it another value. Steiglitz, Antheil, Sheeler, Man Ray, would, as individuals, have brought importance to any matter.)

In France this identical leeching upon a situation exists in the Surrealistes. They, too, depend upon bewilderment and ignorance in the minds of their audience for their success. They are livelier than the American Composites and they have an honor for they leech upon a situation created by other artists—possibly the Académie Française—but at least by men who make use of the same medium. The Americans, with a bastardly recognition for a thing stronger and better-equipped for life than themselves, are explaining a situation which has forgotten them. The American artist is no product of America's zeal, but he is one of those who has chosen to get outside it. Some of them leave the background and accept simpler conditions: Ezra Pound of the first. And the question is still to be answered: to what can one return?

Americans I would permit to serve me, to conduct me rapidly and competently wherever I was going, but not for one moment to impose their achievements upon what is going on in my heart and in my soul. I am too proud and too young to need the grandeur of physical America which one accepts only at the price of one's own dignity. I am making a voyage into poverty because I am too proud to find nourishment in a situation that is more successful than myself.

Cling, gentlemen, to the skyscraper by toe-finger-eyelash, but do not come to Europe. Here nothing is done for you. You must write your own literature, you must walk up and down stairs, and you must drink like gentlemen.

A. LINCOLN GILLESPIE JR.

Expatracination

I. (a) because in Europe I find MeaningScurry in their Organise-Self-Divert—hours loll here all simmer-rife-Expect-lush-stat, GET is less-necessary.

(b) because of the absence of Tight-blank faces here. (European Maturity seems of the in-touch-with-YouthPulse ripe sort)

(c) Liquor-Gamme abroad somewhat breatheier.

(d) abroad, as if transplanted to an ideating DreamStanceIndef, the me-expatriate remenvisages America-the-Spectacle, initsensing its cosmintegrality, critifocaspecting its Univeering probably for a first time. (local Econs are so intrude-mussuppy.)

II. the Spiritual Future of America is not to evolve till a present diabetes is admit > removed, t'wit: America's total lack of parent-sagacity to exprimply an especially-while-correcting-them goodwill toward, and to cull an early admiration from the children.

(The EffectLoss into Personality is enormous!!—contrast the majority of French Parents' Methattitude.)

THEN—the American Spirit will commence-sing as naive-direct-elimgoalpursue-clearly as its present FolkMelod—“PopularSong”, frequently as blare-OutréFruct- freely as its dynaSaxophoneyc. Neo-Polite-ObserveRigors will scourge off-away the become-cloyuseless of our present SklafManners—survive-a tiff with Russian Defeatin-divid-become-CollectiMass output, our EconGrandees will have also residonned the surrealise raiment of skilledlaborer-integrality—the SportSense will have been furthalloted into a StreetPass-Calistheno (i. e. Fair, groove-compulsed into an inevitaBanter-Fair—we are a GoodWill-Collective—will assume social sensitude, a BodyClap-Razz-Courtly deft-joice-skew-Apply-akin (somehow) to the finesse of France's Golden Period.

The Busybody-GoodWill will have insidAmericanized Europe (thru Dawesian EcoHighPressures, “Galette”-addvice, constant-rub-away of Europeans' giving in to the squarepeg-insists of Fringlish-voice-stressing¹ travellers and resiDents, spillover-manifest of America's Nth degree-PRODUCE-Molochism, etc.) Semitised Russia will certainly psychYap doubly,its individuentsremainingscorn-evadedDefeatists, speaking their present flapdoodleNonDigninholdLiable'd rush-out-heedless-O-Self!-stuff. (Russia's soon-enormous CollectiOutput will yet lag indef-behind America's shrewd-ingeniuity'd Get-Rich-Quick-Fellers!'d individ-catalysing Produce-Outvent.)

III. Communism, Surrealism, Anarchism—degrees of LyriProtestism—since Lyrism is based in Individualism the BureauLyrism of C. is an obvious paradox.—A. 's hysterLyr will always ultimately grudge-pendule-reactionate, stay the destroy-(to-begin-over)-hand (tho subjectively A. 's applicable into a Recherche for the expression of the Consciousness betwixbeyond the Abstremities of Thought. S., a French (psychanal-filtfree) Try has obviously essayed to continue “correctness”, has but barely enlarged the GamutPossible of the Hithertooze-“Inadmissible”—enlargers Braque, Ernst, Michonze, obviously their Self; the rest, GoodManner'd Dada?—S. lacked gutsweat adherents collect-able to trek the toothsome of the Psych-RunningDown (In?) DreamStateProffClimbs-into-Reality which André Breton skim-the-FreudSoup-touchly impicts. Possibly S. failed to posit a NeoAgony-ProCreate.

IV. My work veer-expresses my relation to 20thCentury Reality, a relation I feel-think to be fillfuller than any hitherto CritiCommunicLiable, i. e., mine, the necessity of lending consciousative LOGICATING to the AromeClashBuild-innerising FORMTrends of Music's Melod-SyntheBuildAlong, the gradaccrue of which (both delib and acciByProd) may-will tot-add sub-et-Supra integerCollects for furthing the Context's Imputationise; at the same time possibuilding, in English—sole language evophonically free enuf to do so,—SensationForms rhapsintrest Composenuf to aesthConcomitate these neo-gather-imputes of Thought, i. e., the MarryMomeIntentsity matings of hovexpect Indeation & Vehicle-BecomePunct. My Article (transition 12) delineates the techBuild of this.

WALTER LOWENFELS

I

To see the ever-living spirit of man in terms of machinery, or “God in Electric Lights,” is often revolting to the man who revolves within the mechanism. He is liable to hate or love his surroundings per se or attempt an escape by a week-end in Arcady. On this basis American “revolutionary” art generally divides into reactionaries who have no contact with their environment, and those who either love or hate it for its surface qualities. The two latter would correspond to the “skin you love (or hate) to touch” school of art.

When the method is the transcendental use of the Machine or Einstein Age, not to glorify it, but to sublimate eternal values through and above immediate environment, the American artist, and this would include possibly a dozen or two men and women, is liable not to please many of his fellow countrymen who want their civilization praised with hymns to the machines as such, and want hymns to their gods in terms of apple blossoms.

From a position that can absorb his viewpoint, the European may see objectively and with perspective the values on which the American artist builds. Sympathizing with the use of environment for a purpose other than its immediate sublimation or detestation, he sometimes gives the young American artist his first appreciation. In this case the American usually chooses from three alternatives: he can follow illustrious precedent and become a foreign citizen, or live abroad as an exile, pursuing his own ideas and leaving his brothers in America to theirs, or—no matter where he lives nor how difficult the fight compared to the struggle to develop a European audience—he can attempt to make an audience for himself in his native country.

The American artist is interested primarily in intensity of emotion and only secondly, or lastly, as it is hate or love. He prefers, for example, hatred at 90° Centigrade to love at 50°. The patriot—the man who loves the country of his fathers and is zealous for its rights—feels that the American sceptic must be given a glimpse, or perhaps be forcibly given the right to see, what the artist knows to be true. He may find sanctuary in a foreign land; only in his own country can he enjoy hanging as a revolutionist. Preferring the danger of intense reactions, he dares hanging at home, gambling that a last minute may swing him from the gibbet to the White House of his countrymen's hearts. At any rate, he retains to the breathless end the secret hope that after life is extinct he will be brought home like Napoleon, or Columbus, to find a true resting place in the thoughts and soil of his fellow citizens, and perhaps some day have his picture in every school room next to George Washington.

II

Man thinks in terms of light but finds the concrete expression of his present in stone. His visions are realized in architecture, and through architectonics their baseless fabric is eventually incorporated as a reality in his life.

The present of architecture is always years and centuries ahead of most contemporary thought. So the Renaissance, and what is known as the modern world as opposed to the medieval, was forecast centuries before the 15th by early Norman and Gothic cathedrals, and Greek thought has its foundations in columns and urns. Characteristic of the things in which the American artist has faith, American architecture is today showing the way to the world as the Greeks or the Normans did centuries ago. It rises as a standard to measure the time of contemporary thought.

The new American Gothic, such as the University of Pittsburgh now building, is the expression of the purest idealism—the aspirations of a practical and material civilization that provides in stone the inspiration for the intellectual future of America and the world, as well as the method for its achievement.

“… a beautiful wedding of the modern with the supreme poetry of the medieval … planned for lines that should be almost parallel, meeting only when they reach the stars. The result is an impression of tremendous soaring force that speaks with an American accent in every inch of its tenth of a mile altitude … to portray the apotheosis of steel and of a civilization resting on it.” (R. L. Duffus, in The New York Times).

When man surrounds himself with truly modern buildings his thought is liable to move in and with a present rather than a past—reactionary, conservative, or decadent—where thought is conceived in terms of a yesterday that is static in relation to the immediate moving present to which it can never attain.

III

In the world of human affairs I presume that salvation, betterment, or the spiritual future depends on the thoughts and actions of those who are conscious of spiritual values; an intellectual is one who interprets such values, or constitutes an audience for their interpretation. I can only note here that consciousness varies with the degree to which impressions are coordinated and environment transcended.

The attitude of many intellectual leaders in America has become devastating to the expression of eternal values. The hope for the future lies in incorporating the bourgeois attitude with the intellectual one in a sort of super-bourgeois intellectualism. That will inlay a superiority complex in America over the inferiority complex many of the so-called intellectuals drive into the layman.

For America the age of purely destructive criticism has passed. The Babbit and the Rotarian are ready and begging for intellectual guidance for which the new American Gothic, built and paid for by the American business man, provides the inspiration.

The Man in the Office is a Prince. He is often right, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. He is America: moonlight, pilgrim fathers, jazz and co.: he is being interred by the overbearing obesity of pseudo-intellect as displayed by the majority of American professional serious thinkers whether they live in Brown's Flats, Kansas, or the Rue Vaugirard, Paris.

Revolution is the acceleration of the inevitable. In their current sense neither communism, anarchy, nor surrealism are revolutionary for America, but reactionary. In America, revolution would accelerate the incorporation of the architectural present into the social future. It would attempt to substitute for present false intellectual standards a cosmopolitan nationalism that may pave the way to a true internationalism.

Cosmopolitanism enjoys the advantages and cultures of all nations and improves through them the national culture, incorporating in it what other nations have discovered.

IV

With the strengthening of the national culture America wakens to a world consciousness. To paraphrase A. E., we shall get more honour for the national culture the more the American imagination is kindled about international affairs in the peace of the world.

Peaceful existence seems to many of us a sort of six-day bicycle race in which one goes round and around an endless saucer with nightmarish sprints to break occasionally the hysterical monotony of unvarying dreamlike rotation, until the race stops with the sudden static of death, or one awakes to the cold night air, not of Broadway nor the Porte d'Orleans, but of war. We find that someone has been executed by the state who we believe should still be living, or that we ourselves are being shot at in battle.

The Peace Pact was left mostly to the newspapers, and secretaries of states, and the business man in the street or in the club room. It was not an important topic around the studios of the world. It was brought to a signed agreement by voters and their political leaders—the classes that American intellectuals too often ignore or ridicule. Its interpretation and enforcement will depend on intellectual leadership fighting in a new way to incorporate the layman's vision into the spiritual consciousness of the world.

Peace is now an expression of the excitement of business that requires peace for its welfare. The intellectual must take advantage of this one phase of modern life that may be able to compete with war for thrills. With that for a beginning the direction may be maintained and the reasons for peace sublimated.

American business methods, architecture, and music are penetrating everywhere. American intellectuals must take their place beside the business man to guide the intellectual future of the world and provide a method for promoting and safeguarding the expression of spiritual values.

V

In America the millennium requires that the Oil King or the Motor Tzar become transfigured into the Messiah. The new Christ will differ from the Biblical one. His headquarters will be a 90 story skyscraper. He will have charts to the human species, thousands of secretaries to take orders, and a universe of machines and men to execute them. And He will not be crucified. Or if He is, He will descend from the Cross unharmed and whole as Houdini escaped from padlocks and sealed coffins. He will effect a Descent from the Cross but not as conceived by El Greco, nor Memling, nor us. The new Christ will achieve reincarnation through the control of efficient physical means. He will be an organized intellectualism operating at extreme and impeccable efficiency to formulate laws and principles whereby society's actions may be directed to provide for the intellectual a world where he will not be molested by his fellows—a world where people will be trained from the cradle not to interfere with their neighbors.

PIERRE LOVING

It is extremely difficult to write an autobiography of your mind when your mind, through an ordeal of trial and error, is in process of achieving its autobiography. The man who can write a perfect history of his mind is, I think, no man and, very likely, possesses no mind. Isn't this the reason why women in general make the best diarists and writers of confessions and memoirs? This absence of mind is apparent in those romantic writers who play the soulful mummers in order to get a confused emotional effect, writers like Rousseau and Marie Baskirtcheff. The Confessions of Ninon de l'Enclos on the other hand are very good, chiefly because they are not authentic and were forged by a man. In the Autobiography of Gibbons, generally accepted as one of the best of its kind, the author gives not the explicit chronicle of his thought or feeling, but the evolution of his literary and mental practise. In this method you recognize a man of irreproachable taste and good sense.

1. It is natural for men to travel or to live abroad. They have always done so with profit and pleasure. And since the instinct is natural, I see no reason to defend it beyond this statement. New York, I am told by a friend who has just come from there, is divided into two classes; those who can afford to buy a ticket to Europe and those who cannot.

2. A continent may be said to be dying when it ceases or is unable to give birth to new and fecundating ideas. For the brief moment we are living in, this appears to be overwhelmingly true of Europe. But it also appears to be true of America. No new ideas have come out of America, if by ideas you mean an event or a rational synthesis rooted in the mind. (America has not even created a new logic like the Arabs who gave us geometry.) Nevertheless, if you examine the matter closely, you will perhaps find that Europe seems to be moribund only when equated with its own extraordinary past. Civilization was born around the Mediterranean (where I now write this) and its typical modern expression sprang up out of a fusion of North and South. It is this that produced the Renaissance. If you affirm that no new thinker as great as Spinoza has arisen in modern times, no scientist as great as Descartes, no painter or personality as universal as Leonardo, no poet as great as Shakespeare—it does not follow that Europe is dead for ever. It may simply mean that there is an historical lull and a dramatic pause. (History is not fact, but merely a form of viewing the past).

As to the “spiritual future of America”, I see it only as an extension of the “spiritual” past of Europe. I can not quite agree that America has what is called “economic vision”. America is economic because she must be so, but her vision—once she grows conscious of the fact that she can with impunity and without shame cherish one—will be something totally different. When you use the term “economic vision”, what exactly do you mean? The vision of America's poets and artists is not “economic”. (The economic or industrial or skyscraperish conception of American civilization originates with Europeans and not Americans). I am forced to the conclusion, then, that Europe is not dying (the impulses set free by Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, Epicurus, the Greek dramatists, Saint Thomas, Spinoza, Descartes, Bruno, Vico, Leonardo, the whole Renaissance, are by no means dead yet). The “spiritual future” of America, taking new and unexpected forms, will be based, I cannot help believing, on the civilization created by this fertile European past. The combination of Europe-America and America-Europe may in time give birth to a new idea. But that is far away and extremely hard to foresee. Meanwhile we are living in a very dramatic and portentous lull. As for Russia—she is to me an enigma as yet, even if she adopts American economic forms, because I do not know whether it is proper as yet to align her with the East or the West.

3. None of the movements mentioned—Communism, Surrealism, Anarchism—are at the living moment, as I see it, revolutionary. Communism is still a constructive political and economic experiment, but not what you would call revolutionary in 1928. Surrealism, apart from one or two adherents who are good writers in themselves, is a new species of bousingots. It is even less important than the emergence of the bousingots (noisemakers) of 1830, who formed the hell-raising fringe of the Romantic movement. If you will read Petrus Borel, the leader of this Osage fringe (Osage was his own adopted name for the tribe) you will see that at least he had a great singleness of purpose, great ire, great venom (“As a child must spit out its spittle before it learns how to speak” he wrote “so I must spit out my venom against society before I write poetry”). The Surrealists of 1928 strike me as being far inferior in passion and force than the bousingots of 1830.

The sole revolutionary movement I can see abroad is one that is gradually driving toward a return to Reason, Order and Sequence in life. It is a genuine revolutionary movement to my mind because it is levelled against the outer forces of darkness and chaos launched by the war. You can, if you like, become a meek and timorous victim of these forces, calling yourself by such pleasant (or unpleasant) names as Surrealist, Communist or Anarchist. But since I believe in reason illumined by a fiery creative will—A Schopenhauer-Nietzschean will, perhaps—I cannot concede that man, seeking unity, fulfills himself save by the exercise of that will through reason and order.

Revolution of the destructive turn-over sort need not be justified. It comes, as we know, of its own accord because it is a cumulus of gathered events as irresistible as nature itself. But you do not for that very reason “espouse” revolution; being a man, presumably full-fledged, you put your faith rather in the essential qualities of Man; creative will guided by reason and a longing for harmony in the world. When revolution supervenes, you take the side that represents to you the greatest opportunity for reason in a perennially ailing world.

4. If by twentieth century reality is meant real reality and not abstract reality, the question becomes not only difficult but well-nigh impossible to answer. What is twentieth century reality, you may well ask, before the twentieth century is done and has perfected that reality? Obviously it can't be a reality until it is a reality. This reality, which can only be seen in perspective, is being created day by day by forces that are visible and by forces that are invisible. As to my relation to “twentieth century reality”, it is, I should say—in one way or another—the relation of an infinitesimal evolving event in nature to the whole creative event which nature is. Isn't this, also the relation that transition has towards that same reality? Every man and woman living to-day is helping to create in a less or greater degree, that “twentieth century reality” which is in the process of being born.

EMILY HOLMES COLEMAN

1. Because I am an incurable romantic.

2. I do not understand what is meant by a “dying Europe” and I do not think that America has a “spiritual future”. If she had, it could come only from the development of a civilization which might compare with the best of those which have gone before—from her learning to respect the fundamental concepts of art which have animated the world's great artists since the time of Pericles. Great art in the past has existed only when a medium was being struggled with; great literature has come generally in the early development of a language. America has her language bought and paid for—her material rise has happened at a time when there was nothing left to be done in music and painting—when it was necessary to return to the primitive to find health and vigor. America has drawn her population consistently from the doers of other countries—not the thinkers or the dreamers. She is the enemy of the artist, of the man who cannot produce something tangible when the five o'clock whistle blows. She has no use for craftsmanship and does not encourage it—the craftsmanship which made a European cathedral or a Botticelli or a Ulysses. I am afraid this will always be so—America's prosperity will be the death of her artistic impulses, and there does not seem to be any reason to suppose that this prosperity will decline. Art is first of all compensation, and in America compensation of that kind is not allowed. The genius must therefore leave—he must go where he can work out his own salvation unmolested by the self-conscious publicity seekers of his native land.

3. I am not interested in revolutionary movements, although I know they are healthy and although I am temperamentally on the side of every rebel. I do not believe that people who are occupied with changing the world can be artists. The artist's own problems are so profound and so bewildering that if he would solve them he must give himself to them completely and with entire absorption. All geniuses are revolutionists—they cannot be anything else—but they cannot ally themselves with movements.

4. I don't have any vision of myself in relation to twentieth century reality. I am interested in the development of my own talent, and this had led me into such conflicting ways that in order to find myself I have been forced to disregard everything else. To be able to write one poem that could compare with some of the best—admittedly there has not been any great poetry in English since the Romantics—is the most vital problem to me now. If I have it in me to do that, I will relate myself naturally and instinctively to my age, and to all the other ages, without thinking about it. If not, qu'importe?

BERENICE ABBOTT

To try to answer these questions seems only to sink one more and more into a maze of complexities, impossible to answer. However, I do not prefer to live outside America indefinitely. To live in Europe—in flight—as a solution can not satisfy. All this talk of deracination in this particular post-war exodus seems greatly overestimated. The very complex nature of America is, if possible, better understood from a distance than at close range. The extent of one's Americanism is put to a severe test, and that extent denotes the depth of the artist's capacity. What is more Irish than Joyce, more Spanish than Cervantes? To learn from Europe by affiliation-imitation and not by contrast is negation. America's artists must evolve from a civilization new-revolutionary in short, vastly different. The material at hand for artists should be limitless if they have the strength and vision to adjust themselves to a rapidly changing civilization, with or without the individuals, consciously or not, its very youthful energy will carry it on. In time, that dynamic momentum is bound to produce artistically and otherwise and when it has quieted down, become refined, it is in danger of becoming aesthetic. A spiritual future built on a material basis may be very great even if it is not the custom.

But why worry about the future? What about the engineers, the architects, Antheil, the comic movies, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”? What about our Scientists, in fact? Why Surrealism, for instance? Microbes! (question number three) the biggest movements are not named …

LANSING WARREN

When a careless cook stirs the soup too hastily, a good portion of the mixture follows the movement of the ladle and ends up where it started, but necessarily in this sort of catastrophe a good deal of it is scattered over the neighborhood—some goes on the floor, some on the stove, and the rest falls where it will. Substitute the great war for the ladle, and you have the reason why most of us are living here abroad. It is also the explanation of why we prefer to do it, for a course of action even involuntarily adopted is justification in itself and the reasons that one may think up later are so much supercargo.

I can think of scores of reasons why I prefer to live outside America. For example, I am one who likes to be well installed when drinking my liquor, and who is irritated by the furtiveness in patronizing a bootlegger. And I prefer good liquor to bad, and moderately good liquor at a reasonable price to abominable liquor at exorbitant cost. There are other reasons to prefer European surroundings—

But on the other hand, I can think of almost as many reasons why I should prefer not to live in Europe at all, which in my quality of guest in a foreign capital I refrain from enumerating in the presence of so many good people who might take offense at such allusions.

Man, being after all an infinitesimal animal with a limited vision at best, requires only a little space on one side or the other of the planet for his activities at any given time. So long as he is fully occupied, as are most of us now, with the four essential human preoccupations of eating, drinking, sleeping and propagation of the species, the question of milieu would be wholly indifferent, were it not for the fact that he is innately dissatisfied. The inescapable result has formed itself into the axiom, that I think all expatriates will admit, that when in Europe, the United States is best, and when at home, there's no place like Europe. This psychology may be at the basis of the continued enthusiasm for transatlantic flights and has made the fortune of the steamship companies.

This restlessness among Americans cannot be considered as a force for deracination when it is recalled that Americans, as nearly as they can be grouped as a people, must be regarded as nomadic. Excluding the vast number whose parents or grandparents were of European nativity and considering only those whose families like my own were Americans for several generations, one can find few who remained fastened to the family homestead. My grandfather was born on the Atlantic seaboard and in the course of successive westward migrations it has come about that his great grandchildren are now growing up on the Pacific coast. New Yorkers are all over America and New York is made up of Europeans and arrivals from the west. It is therefore with no particular wrench that an American finds himself transported across an ocean even among people of different language and customs.

That is one of the forces that will unconsciously foster that spiritual development of America to which you refer in your questionnaire. Non-absorbent though we may be, we cannot but benefit from our contact with “dying Europe,” and Europe perhaps can look to Americans for some part of the force of rejuvenation that she hopes for.

We are prone to resent America's indifference to the intellectual, but we are too impatient. America has produced Poe and Twain and Whitman. That is enough for the first hundred and fifty years that we have been a nation. There will be others, for we must not forget that art thrives on discouragements. It lies not in environment but within, and will out in spite of every obstacle. It will even out in the United States. And the greater the obstacles the greater the art must be to surmount them, which in the long run saves us from the consideration of a great mass of mediocre art. What is most deleterious to true art is too much encouragement. With one third of the world's population engaged as it is, under the prevailing inclement conditions, in artistic production in the form of novels, poems, drama paintings, outlines of knowledge, sculpture, short stories, operas, moving picture scenarios, new religions, and dance contests, imagine what would take place under the regime of an indiscriminate patron of the arts! Personally, I prefer the rule of the vulgar taste and the editor's rejection slip.

You ask me to give you my vision of myself and the twentieth century. But really, I would rather have my photo taken in front of the Sphynx or of Niagara, if it's just the same to you. What makes it the more delicate for me to discuss this matter, is that the twentieth century and I are not on very good terms. I object to it because I find it very disagreeable to persons not in the majorities. And it objects to me because I am always in the minorities. I realize that if one had wisdom in this age, one would golf and bridge and radio and motor and airplane and advertise and break records and one would be quite content. But one insists on consulting one's own tastes instead of those of others and directly one gets in trouble with the twentieth century. The only way one can live with it peaceably is to find a nice quiet minority and crawl into it and lie low. But woe to you if the twentieth century ever happens to run across that minority. That's why I avoid such subjects as you bring up in your question on communism, surrealism and anarchism. They are all too vigorous for me, and what I am looking for is some ism that's more latent, more unobtrusive.

No, I will admit, I am opposed to the twentieth century. To it I prefer almost any Other. I'm not so sure that it is actually any worse than they were, but for one living at this time, it must be taken with all its faults and foibles, whereas one can pick and choose just as one will when dealing with the other centuries. In the same manner, books are much better than people, than actualities—for you can shut up a book.

P. S. Not having heard anything about Russia in the past eleven years that I can entirely credit, I have hesitated to discuss it in this well-informed dissertation.

IVAN BEEDE

I dont feel a sufficiently conscious expatriate to qualify. I like to live in France, because I learned to write in France. Also there is such a mass of activity in America with such a lack of understanding and taste that it ruins anyone as easily affected as I am. But I dont have any definite ideas about the future, or the trend of the machine age, except the general nightmarish misgivings. However, I think we all feel much the same way, whether our ideas are conscious or emotional.

HARRY CROSBY

I

Why do you prefer to live outside America?

I prefer to live outside America

(1) because in America the stars were all suffocated inside

(2) because I do not wish to devote myself to perpetual hypocrisy

(3) because outside America there is nothing to remind me of my childhood

(4) because I prefer perihelion to aphelion

(5) because I love flagons of wine

(6) because I am an enemy of society and here I can hunt with other enemies of society

(7) because I want to be in at the death (of Europe)

(8) because I like tumults and chances better than security

(9) because I prefer transitional orgasms to atlantic monthlies

(10) because I am not coprophagous

(11) because I would rather be an eagle gathering sun than a spider gathering poison.

(12) because by living outside of America New York can still remain for me the City of a Thousand and One Nights

(13) because the Rivers of Suicide are more inviting than the Prairies of Prosperity

(14) because I prefer explosions to whimperings

II

How do you envisage the spiritual future of America in the face of a dying Europe and in the face of a Russia that is adopting the American economic vision?

In the pagan unafraidness of a Girl
          and because she is unafraid
                                        Chaste
and because she is constant to her
desires
                                        Chaste
                                                            but the men are afraid and self-righteous
                    and disordered in their minds
                    and weak
                    and sunless
                    and dry as eunuchs

III

What is your feeling about the revolutionary spirit of your age, as expressed, for instance, in such movements as communism, surrealism, anarchism?

The revolutionary spirit of our age (as expressed by communism, surrealism, anarchism, madness) is a hot firebrand thrust into the dark lantern of the world.

In Nine Decades
a SUN shall be born.

IV

What particular vision do you have of yourself in relation to twentieth century reality?

In relation to twentieth century reality and by reality I mean the real under-the-surface reality of our age I have the vision of myself as a spoke in the wheel of this reality moving

away from Weakness
toward Strength
away from Civilized Sordidness
toward Barbaric Splendor
away from Whimperings
toward Explosions
away from Ashes
toward Fire
away from Malted Milk
toward Straight Gin
away from Shame
toward Nakedness
away from Furnished Souls
toward Forged Souls
away from Canaries
toward Lions
away from Mesquinerie
toward Madness
away from Plural
toward Singular
away from Moon
toward Sun.

HAROLD J. SALEMSON

The one reason I prefer living outside of America is that I am able to live in Paris. But trying to define the charm of Paris would be about as futile as an attempt to fly to the moon (both of these may be accomplished in the future, but we are living today). The main reasons, however, for my choice of Paris as dwelling-place are two. First, it is today the center of the world as concerns the things which are of interest to me. The second finds its expression in this sentence of James Weldon Johnson's: “Paris practises its sins lightly as it does its religion …” And very selfishly, that is why I live abroad: to benefit personally by these advantages.

It is not unconsciously, though, that I chose a colored writer's words to portray my opinion. Paris is the most dangerous city in the world. It is the hotbed of future tolerance. And that is why no place is more livable. Its prejudices, too, Paris practises lightly, and if the Parisian's sins and religion are both on the fly so do preconceived differentiations hold little place in his life. He believes in living and letting live and moreover he does it with “esprit” and carefreeness. The best proof of that is that there is no one who is not allowed to take advantage of everything which Paris has to give in an intellectual way.

That is one of the things that makes me feel somewhat cheap in living here. Up to the present the spiritual existence of America has been just about naught and any intellectual life on our continent is yet to be created. Those who, like myself, feel that they are here to imbibe everything they can and then help to forge an American entity in the superior elements of life must feel, with me, that they are in a way spies. We will utilize all that the influence of our present environment brings out in us to make an American civilization (or, if one insists, culture), which we will then proclaim high and wide to have come out of our soil, entirely ignoring that we are a mere branch of Paris with a slight individual touch, of the kind that a manager gives to a separate branch of a store.

The spiritual future of America. That is what we will make and we will probably die in the attempt. Economic visions have little to do with intellectual manifestations, but the future of Russia is chiefly the same as that of America. And Paris is behind the whole thing. Tomorrow may see a return to classicism. At any rate, today, having fallen into the great in-between which follows death and precedes resurrection, will doubtless be ignored for some time. The “isms” of today, descendants on one hand of the socialism and on the other of the cubism of some years ago, have gone into blind alleys in which many of us will perish. Politics and economics as well as the arts are striving to continue upon a road which is blocked by a wall infinitely high and incalculably thick. The path of least resistance will be a great return backwards, as far as the crossroad from which today's trend has issued, and from there a different path will have to be chosen. When we have advanced far enough upon that highway we will find the few (ho! very, very few, four or five at the most) who will have been able to climb the infinitely high and incalculably thick wall. With those we will blend and that will be the future. But what that may mean, we can certainly not predict.

As for a revolutionary spirit, expressed in communism, surrealism or anarchism, these contain little, as such. None of the three movements named or any others are revolutionary. There is only one great idea of revolt, the one upon which rebellion and revolution of all time have been based. That is tolerance. Inasmuch as any trend is tolerant it is revolutionary. Every atom of intolerance in it is counter-revolutionary, and, therefore, absolutely against progress. The great revolutionary spirit of my age, I have said, is tolerance and the reason that Paris is the only livable place on earth, that it is nearer being tolerant than any other I know.

Whether we like it or not, everything, every idea, every means of expression, every vocabulary, every morality is tolerable. Only when we learn that shall we have progressed at all. Great machines do not make for advancement except inasmuch as they help to allow greater leisure to everyone for the gaining of education and the creating of an intellectual sphere. Knowledge, as is tritely said, alone makes for tolerance, and however many times the statement has been made, it remains true. Learning does not mean the ability to recall at will the happenings or customs of such-and-such a day or period, it means the comprehension of how to live and how to further the living of one's equals. Being the base of tolerance, it is the real revolutionary idea.

Yet, I am asked my vision of myself in relation to twentieth century reality. Before the question was put to me, I am afraid I had none or at least was not conscious of it. Now I cannot get rid of it. I am an ugly frog in an immense body of water. The frog is tiny and so terribly ugly but he is tolerable, though delectable to only a few. He swims feebly and can never reach any shore as there are powerful currents which turn him from his goal incessantly. Moreover, were there no adverse forces, his negligible power of comprehension is still capable of conceiving so many projects simultaneously that he can never persevere long enough to reach any of the shores that tempt him. Fortunately, unless my scientific instruction fails me, frogs are amphibious and do not drown. Therefore, he reasons with himself in his own small way and convinces himself that patience is a laudable virtue. As a result, the tiny ugly frog continues to swim around in the vast immensity that surrounds him and, if not sympathetic at least tolerant to all the animal life about him, he awaits complications.

KATHLEEN CANNELL

I do not prefer to live outside America. I would prefer to live in America if I could make enough money to do so. It happens that I have lived more than half of my life in Europe. During the war I spent a number of years in New York, where I had not been since the age of seven. In spite of the fact that I never made enough money to be even reasonably comfortable there, I have never been so much alive as at that period. I find the American life and climate stimulating. Americans in Europe are apt to go soft.

I am too self-centered to answer your second question. The only spiritual future which preoccupies me is my own and it leaves me no time for prophecy.

I was at one time an ardent and rather active Communist. I have since become convinced of the vanity of movements, preferring to turn my good old American instinct for reform upon the only person over whom I have any control—myself.

I love living in the twentieth century. It is full of everything that has ever been in the world and of some new things. People who pine for other ages would have pined wherever they lived. To wail against your age is a confession of weakness.

I prefer to live outside of America chiefly because I once had money enough to leave America with and the desire to leave America at the same time. It was a coincidence and I took advantage of it. There has never been a coincidence since. I have never had both the desire to go back and the money to go back with at the same time.

I first conceived the notion of leaving America because I was dissatisfied with existing conditions. I didn't like the grade of books the bookshops were selling. I bought a copy of Frank Harris, after saving my money for six weeks, and the bookdealer who sold me the book was arrested by a big-eared nitwit who stood around and watched the transaction. But what made me more angry than ever was that the janitress of my apartment house, or to put it more exactly the janitress of the apartment house in which I rented a two room back apartment, objected to my sitting on the front door steps and waiting for my wife to come home when I had lost the key to the door. It wasn't dignified, she said, it didn't look nice and the other people in the building complained.

Since I have come to know Paris I have become less irritable. I don't like the sound of the French language, I don't like the Russian taxi-drivers, I would like to have some good American coffee at the same time that I eat my meat, and I would like the newspaper for which I work to pay me enough to enable me to go to concerts when the notion strikes me. But I have come to the conclusion that there would be just as many irritable things in Berlin, or Vienna, or Moscow, or Hong Kong. Which doesn't mean that I don't intend to go to some of those places. I do. If, of course, I ever want to go and have the money to go with at the same time.

I am not particularly enthusiastic about America in any manner, shape or form. But I do have the feeling—Lord knows why—that the “spiritual future of America” is worth watching as it evolves. And I think Russia is worth watching. A little later than America, though. England is stagnant. The best that England seems to be capable of is the inane cleverism of Alduous Huxley and the not-so-clever stupidities of Wyndham Lewis. France has all the leeway in the world. Therefore the French are inclined to lean back and take things easy. France is a country of French. England is a country of English. Spain is a country of Spaniards. Therein lie their greatest weaknesses.

I hate to use the word “melting-pot”. But the American is a combination of half a dozen nationalities. After the ingredients get well mixed up I think some sort of result must burst forth. The first definite American result thus far has been a sort of dynamo-like powder blast. That is only a first result. It isn't enough. Something else is coming. A couple of years ago, way down on Hudson street, I saw a little circulating library in a confectionery shop. The best sellers there were Dreisers's An American Tragedy and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. The owner told me that most of his customers wanted to read the books but later inevitably told him they were “rotten”. Nevertheless, they read them. I may be a hopeless optimist. I cannot help feeling that if they read good books long enough, whether they understand them or not, whether they like them or not, sooner or later a bit of understanding will burst through. I cannot help feeling that if they buy good pictures long enough because they have the money and think it's the proper thing to do, sooner or later they will learn to distinguish between red and purple.

The critics brayed in their usual nearsighted fashion after listening to George Antheil in Carnegie Hall. But they ranted all over the front pages of the newspapers. The goddam fools didn't realise that what they were saying, in effect, was, “Here is important stuff that we don't like.” Otherwise, why pay so much attention to it?

No, I think America will some day sprout forth. If you mix blue and yellow you get neither color for some time. Then, after mixing long enough, you may get a beautiful green. Give 'em time. Here's how. But—here's how from across the ocean.

Note

1. very important, since the move-forward stress of English wordage is the more battle-survive-“dominant.”