Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the USA does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world. As the football-coach said: ‘Winning is not just the most important thing, it is all there is.’ That is one of the things that makes America such a very strange country for foreigners. Stopping for a brief holiday with the family in a small, poor, linguistically incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal, on the way back from a semester in New England, I still remember the sense of coming home to one’s own civilization. Geography had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least of these cultural peculiarities is the USA’s own sense of its strangeness (‘Only in America …’), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The question which preoccupies so many US historians of their own country, namely ‘What does it mean to be American?’, is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries. Neither national nor personal identity seemed as problematic to visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s, even those of complex central European cultural background, as they seemed in local academic discussions. ‘What is this identity crisis they are all talking about?’ Marlene asked me after one of them. She had never heard the term before we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.
Foreign academics who discovered the USA in the 1960s were probably more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today, for so many of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of US culture. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville’s day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA. What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors, which may account for the – by our standards – everyday crudeness, even brutality with which power is used in and by the USA to establish who can command whom.
It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country, in ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states simply were not with their own. American reality was and remains the overwhelming subject of the creative arts in the USA. The dream of somehow encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write ‘the great English novel’ or ‘the great French novel’, but authors in the US still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at ‘ the great American novel’, even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually, the man who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but an apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power, of whose significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol’s have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the USA, from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual arts tradition of the old world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of the USA to seize the totality of their country, Warhol’s vision is not that of the successful pursuit of happiness, ‘the American dream’ of American political jargon and psychobabble.
To what extent has the US changed in my lifetime, or at least in the forty-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we are constantly told, is not America and as Auden said, even those who could never be Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes to the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who in her twelve years in the city has never found it necessary to learn English. Like other New Yorkers Marlene and I would give tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the last time they had landed at JFK and where to eat this year, though (apart from a party or two) unlike the permanently resident friends – the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers – we would not entertain at home. Like a real New Yorker I would feel the loss of a favourite establishment like that of a relative, I would exchange gossip at the regular lunches of the New York Institute of Humanities with the mixture of writing people, publishers, show persons, professors and UN staff which makes up the local intellectual scene – for one of the major attractions of New York is that the life of the mind is not dominated by the academy. In short, there is no other place in the world like the Big Apple. Still, however untypical, New York could not possibly exist anywhere except the USA. Even its most cosmopolitan inhabitants are recognizably American, like our friend the late John Lindenbaum, haematologist in a Harlem hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh for a project of medical research, had travelled there with a collection of jazz records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more Jews in New York, and, unlike in large stretches of the US, more people there are aware of the existence of the rest of the world, but what I learned as a New Yorker is not fundamentally at odds with what little I know of the Midwest and California.
Curiously, the experience, what in the sixties they used to call ‘the vibes’, of the USA has changed much less than that of other countries I have known in the past half-century. There is no comparison between living in the Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and those cities in 2002; even Vienna, which deliberately hides its social and political transformation by turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even physically the skyline of London as it can be seen from where I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill has changed – Parliament is now barely visible – and Paris has not been the same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind of social and economic upheavals as other cities – de-industrialization, gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World – it neither feels nor even looks like it. This is surprising when, as every New Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life such as the Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York lower-middle-class institutions as the Gimbel department stores, and the transformation of Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan skyline is still essentially that of the city of the 1930s, especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition has disappeared, the World Trade Center.
Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the USA is part of global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. These changes there looked less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass consumer society which did not arrive in western Europe until the 1950s, was not new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm divided the way Britons lived and thought before and after the middle fifties, for the USA the 1950s were, or at least looked like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of twentieth century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as before, though some sections of its citizens – mainly the college-educated – began to think differently about it, and, as the countries of the European Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which European tourists came into contact began to look less ‘advanced’, and even a bit tatty. California did not seem fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in 1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was London which became one after the 1950s. The details in the great carpet of the USA have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run.