It is not for me to agree or disagree with them. After all, they are the Latin America that I went to look for, and discovered, forty years ago, the one Pablo Neruda wrote about in the marvellous baroque poem of poems about his continent, the section ‘The heights of Macchu Picchu’ in his Canto General. It ends with the invocation of the unknown builders of that dead green Inca city, through whose dead mouth the poet wants to speak:
Juan Cortapiedras, hijo de Wiracocha Juan Comefrio, hijo de la estrella verde Juan Piedescalzos, nieto de la turquesa
(John Stonecutter, son of Wiracocha, John Coldmeals, son of the green star, John Barefoot, grandson of the turquoise.)
‘If you want to understand South America,’ they told me before I left Britain, ‘you must go to Macchu Picchu and read the poem there.’ I had not met the great poet then, a plump man whose natural element was not the mountains but the sea, on which his wonderful house still looks out, and who, asked what he wanted to see in London, had only one wish: the Cutty Sark sailing ship at Greenwich, He died of a broken heart a few days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. I did read his poem in Macchu Picchu in 1962, on one of the steep stepped hills, as the sun went down, in an Argentine paperback bought in a Chilean bookshop. Whether it helped me to understand it as a historian, I do not know, but I know what the poet wanted to say and the big-chested, coca-chewing, brown, quiet men and women whom he had in mind, who scrabbled a living in the thin air of the Andean high country where it is harder to be a human being than almost anywhere else between Arctic and Antarctic. When I think of Latin America these are the people who come into my mind. Not only the poet but the historian should give them their due.
22
From FDR to Bush
I
If all intellectuals of my generation had two countries, their own and France, then in the twentieth century all inhabitants of the western world, and eventually all city dwellers anywhere on the globe, lived mentally in two countries, their own and the USA. After the First World War no literate person anywhere failed to recognize the words ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Coca-Cola’, and very few illiterates could fail to make some contact with their products. America did not have to be discovered: it was part of our existence.
And yet, what most people knew of America was not the country itself, but a set of images mediated essentially by its arts. Until well after the Second World War relatively few people from outside the USA actually travelled there, unless as immigrants, and from the early 1920s to the 1970s US government policy made immigration extremely difficult. I did not step on its shores myself until 1960. We met North Americans elsewhere. I suppose my first real contact with what was not yet called ‘Middle America’ was when the Rotarians chose to hold their international convention in Vienna in 1928 and I, as a bilingual boy, was mobilized as an interpreter. I remember nothing about it, except the lobby of a hotel on the Ring containing herds of men dressed in brighter shirts than Vienna was used to, a kind anaesthetist from somewhere in the Midwest who subsequently sent me stamps for my collection, and puzzling about what exactly Rotary was supposed to be for. The official explanation (‘Service’) seemed to me to be short of content.
I find it hard to reconstruct the image of the USA formed by an anglophone continental boy before the 1930s. Oddly enough – for my uncle actually worked for a Hollywood company – for me it did not come from Hollywood films. The sort of Tom Mix Westerns we saw hardly counted, since it seemed obvious even to children that life in America was not quite like that. (This showed that we knew little of the US.) The Hollywood films set in America were not intended to be about life stateside but about a never-never land of moviegoers’ dreams. If our view of America came from anywhere, it was from technology and music: the one as an idea, the other as an experience. For we also got the technology at second hand. Most of us were unlikely ever to see an assembly line, but we knew that is how Ford cars were made.
On the other hand, the arts reached us directly. My mother and aunts shimmied and foxtrotted, and we listened to recognizably American music even when produced by English bands and vocalists. Radio and gramophone brought us Jerome Kern and Gershwin. ‘Jazz’, as then commonly understood – syncopated rhythmic music with saxophones and lacking bowed strings – was already the sound of urban middle-class leisure in the twenties. It meant America, and because of what the USA symbolized, it meant modernity, short hair for women and the age of machines. The staff of the Bauhaus had itself photographed with a saxophone. And so, when I came to England and was converted to jazz by my cousin Denis, this time to the real thing, the gates opened not only on a new aesthetic experience, but on a new world. Like Alistair Cooke, one of my predecessors as editor of Granta, who was then beginning his career as a lifetime commentator on the US with a radio series I Hear America Singing, I also discovered America by ear.
Jazz was as good an introduction to the USA as any, because in Britain at least the sound and its social significance – a very 1930s phrase – went together. To be a jazz-fan was not only, and for obvious reasons, to be against racism and for the Negroes (this was the era before they wanted to be described as Black and then African-American), but to gobble up all information about the USA even faintly relevant to jazz: and very little about the country was not relevant in some way. So all fans collected an endlessly fascinating bric-a-brac of facts about the USA, from the names of American cities, rivers and railroads (Milwaukee, the wide Missouri, the Aitchison, Topeka and Santa Fe) to the names of gangsters and senators. In the 1930s reputations could be made simply by knowing facts about the USA. Denis Brogan, a hard-drinking and eventually not quite so hard-working Glaswegian, teaching politics in Cambridge, was an expert on two countries, but he made his radio reputation – and he was one of the first media dons in Europe – not as a very knowledgeable historian and observer of France, but as the sort of man who could name all the state capitals of the United States and the title of every song by Irving Berlin.
The image of America is so powerful and all-embracing that it is easy to suppose that it has barely changed over what we now know to have been ‘the American century’. But for those of us who became conscious of it in the 1930s, especially if we were on the left, it was in some respects quite different. For one thing, it was not dominated by envy. We began thinking about America at the only moment when the US economy was not a triumphant model of wealth and productive potential for the rest of the world. In the decade of the Great Depression we no longer saw the world of Gatsby but that of The Grapes of Wrath. In the 1920s and early 1930s America was a by-word for the hard-faced pursuit of profit, for injustice, for ruthless, unscrupulous and brutal repression. But F. D. Roosevelt’s USA not only disclaimed this reputation; it turned it sharply to the left. It visibly became a government for the poor and the unions. What is more, Roosevelt was passionately loathed and denounced by American big business, that is to say by the very people who more than any others represented the evils of capitalism to us. It is true that, as usual, the Communist International, stuck in its ultra-sectarian phase, took its time to recognize what was obvious to everyone else and denounced the New Deal, but by 1935 even it had come round. In short, in the 1930s it was possible to approve of both the USA and the USSR, and most youthful communists did both, as did a very large number of socialists and liberals. Franklin D. Roosevelt was certainly not Comrade Stalin, and yet, if we had been Americans, we would have voted for him with genuine enthusiasm. I cannot think of any other ‘bourgeois’ politician in any country about whom we felt that way. During the more than sixty years since I got to know Arthur Schlesinger Jr in Cambridge, England, we have probably never agreed on any political issue except this one. I shared, and still share, his admiration for FDR.