_The South Pacific Sailing Directory_
_67._ I cannot say the world greeted the end of the North American
continent with either rejoicing or regret. Relief, yes. When the news of
the last demolition was given and it was clear the Grass was unable to
bridge the gap, the imaginative could almost hear mankind emit a vast
sigh. The world was saved, they could go about their business now,
having written off a sixth of themselves.
I was reminded of Miss Francis' remark that if you cut off a man's leg
you bestow upon him a crippled mentality. For approximately two
centuries the United States had been a leg of the global body, a limb so
constantly inflicted with growingpains it caused the other parts to
writhe in sympathy. Now the member was cut off and everyone thought that
with the troublesome appendage gone life would be pleasanter and
simpler. Debtor nations expanded their chests when they remembered Uncle
Shylock was no more. Industrial countries looked eagerly to enlarge
their markets in those places where Americans formerly sold goods. Small
states whose inhabitants were occasionally addicted to carrying off
tourists and holding them for ransom now felt they could dispense with
those foreign undersecretaries whose sole business it had been to write
diplomatic notes of apology.
But it was a crippled world and the lost leg still twitched spectrally.
I don't think I speak now as a native of the United States, for with my
international interests I believe I have become completely a
cosmopolitan, but for everyone, Englishman, Italian, Afrikander or
citizen of Liberia. The disappearance of America created a revolution in
their lives, a change perhaps not immediately apparent, but eventually
to be recognized by all.
It was the trivial things we Americans had taken for granted as part of
our daily lives and taught the rest of the world to appreciate which
were most quickly missed. The substitution of English, Turkish, Egyptian
or Russian cigarettes for good old Camels or Luckies; the impossibility
of buying a bottle of cocacola at any price; the disappearance of the
solacing wad of chewinggum; the pulsing downbeat of a hot band--these
were the first things whose loss was noticed.
For a long time I had been too busy to attend movingpictures, except
rarely, but a man--especially a man with much on his mind--needs
relaxation and I would not choose the foreign movies with their morbid
emphasis on problems and crime and sex in preference to the cleancut
American product which always satisfied the nobler feelings by showing
the reward of the honest, the downfall of evildoers and the purity of
love and motherhood. Art is all very well, but need it be sordid?
As I told George Thario, I am no philistine; I think the Parthenon and
the Taj Mahal are lovely buildings, but I would not care to have an
office in either of them--give me Radio City. I don't mind the highbrow
programs the British Broadcasting Corporation put on; I myself am quite
capable of understanding and enjoying them, but I imagine there are
thousands of housewives who would prefer a good serial to bring romance
into their lives. I don't object to a commercial world in which
competitors go through the formality of pretending to be scrupulously
fair in talking about each others' products, but I must admit I missed
the good old American slapdash advertising which yelled, Buy my
deodorant or youll stink; wash your mouth with my antiseptic or youll
lose your job; brush your teeth with my dentifrice or no one will kiss
you; powder your face with my leadarsenate or youll keep your
maidenhead. I would give a lot of money to hear a singing commercial
once more or watch the neon lights north of Times Square urge me to buy
something for which I have no possible use. Living within your income is
fine, but the world lacks the goods youd have bought on the
installmentplan; getting what you need is sound policy, but how many
lives were lightened by the young men working their way through college,
or the fullerbrushman?
I think there was a subconscious realization of this which came
gradually to the top. In the beginning the almost universal opinion was
that the loss of the aching limb was for the better. I have heard
socalled cultured foreigners discuss the matter in my presence,
doubtless unaware I was an American. No more tourists, they gloated, to
stand with their backs to the Temple of Heaven in Pekin and explain the
superior construction of the Masonic Hall at Cedar Rapids; no more
visitors to the champagne caves at Rheims to inquire where they could
get a shot of real bourbon; no more music lovers at Salzburg or
Glyndebourne to regret audibly the lack of a peppy swingtune; no more
gourmets in Vienna demanding thick steaks, rare and smothered in onions.
But this period of smug selfcongratulation was soon succeeded by a
strange nostalgia which took the form of romanticizing the lost land.
American books were reprinted in vast quantities in the Englishspeaking
nations and translated anew in other countries. American movies were
revived and imitated. Fashionable speech was powdered with what were
conceived to be Yankee expressions and a southern drawl was assiduously
cultivated.
Bestselling historical novels were laid in the United States and popular
operas were written about Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson.
Men told their growing sons to work hard, for now there was left no land
of opportunity to which they could emigrate, no country where they could
become rich overnight with little effort. Instead of fairytales children
demanded stories of fortyniners and the Wedding of the Rails; and on the
streets of Bombay and Cairo urchins, probably quite unaware of the
memorial gesture, could be heard whistling _Casey Jones_.
But handinhand with this newfound romantic love went a completely
practical attitude toward those Americans still existing in the flesh.
The earliest expatriates, being generally men of substance, were well
received. The thousands who had crossed by small boats from Canada to
Greenland and from Greenland to Iceland to Europe were by definition in
a different category and found the quota system their fathers and
grandfathers had devised used to deny their own entrance.
They were as bewildered and hurt as children that any nation could be at
once so shortsighted and so heartless as to bar homeless wanderers. We
bring you knowledge and skills and our own need, they said in effect, we
will be an asset to your country if you admit us. The Americans could
not understand; they themselves had been fair to all and only kept out
undesirable immigrants.
Gradually the world geared itself to a slower tempo. The gogetter
followed the brontosaurus to extinction, and we Americans with the
foresight to carry on our businesses from new bases profited by the
unAmerican backwardness of our competitors. At this time I daresay I was
among the hundred most important figures of the world. In the marketing
and packaging of our original products I had been forced to acquire
papermills and large interests in aluminum and steel; from there the
progression to tinmines and rollingmills, to coalfields and railroads,
to shippinglines and machineshops was not far. Consolidated Pemmican,
once the center of my business existence, was now but a minor point on
its periphery. I expanded horizontally and vertically, delighted to show
my competitors that Americans, even when deprived of America, were not
robbed of the traditional American enterprise.
_68._ It was at this time, many months after we had given up all hope of
hearing from Joe again, that General Thario received a longdelayed
package from his son. It contained the third movement of the symphony
and a covering letter:
"Dear Father--Stuart Thario--General-- I shall not finish this letter
tonight; it will be sent with as much of the First Symphony as makes a
worthy essence when it goes. The whole is greater than the sum of its
parts, but there is a place (perhaps not in life, but somewhere) for the
imperfect, for the incomplete. The great and small alike achieve
fulfillment, satisfaction--must this be a ruthless denial of all
between?
"I have always despised musicologists, makers of programnotes, little
men who tell you the opening chords of Opus 67 describe Fate Knocking at
the Door or the call of the yellowhammer. A child draws a picture and
writes on it, 'This is a donkey,' and when grown proves it to be a
selfportrait by translating the Jupiter Symphony into words. Having said
this, let me stultify myself--but for private ears alone--as a bit of
personal history, not an explanation to be appended to the score.
"I started out to express in terms of strings and winds the emotions
roused in me by the sight and thoughts of the Grass, much as LvB took a
mistaken idealization of his youth as a startingpoint for Opus 55; but
just as no man is an island, so no theme stands alone. There is a cord
binding the lesser to the greater; a mystic union between all things.
The Grass is not an entity, but an aspect. I thought I was writing about
my country, conceived of myself in a reversed snobbishness, a haughty
humility, a proud abasement, as a sort of superior Smetana. (Did you
know that as a boy I dreamed of the day when I should receive my
commission as second lieutenant?)