The Innocent Eye
THE ambiguous or, at any rate, puzzling impression made by Mr. Hodson's title conveys very well the special flavour of the book, as the long sub-title conveys its general character. (" Being some accoant of a journey to the United States of America in the winter and spring of 1943-44 and of meetings there and of what was said to me.") The " yet " reflects the second thoughts provoked in Mr. Hodson ;.the first thought is one of irritation, mounting at times to anger, at the discovery he made in America, the discovery that a great many Americans do not like this country and a great many actively dislike it. The irritation is so genuine, the anger so under- standable, that it seems rather unkind to stress the fact that it reveals a great handicap under which Mr. Hodson suffered, his preliminary ignorance of the United States. Again and again, he notes with amazement, or with pride in discovery, things about America that the experienced traveller fails to notice or relegates to a minor place in his picture of the country. To learn, after you are in America, that Lincoln did not fight the Civil War primarily to free the slaves can only be a shock if you have gone to America remarkably free from preliminary knowledge. And'Mr. Hodson, like a good many other tenderfeet in the native land of the tall story and the booster, has been told fairy tales and has believed, or at any rate has not checked, them. This combined with carelessness about names and dates
(one which I am sure will startle all Spectator readers is " Rosalie Russell "), make the book one to be read with caution. As a descrip- tion of America at war, it is far less adequate than Mr.,Menafee's Assignment U.S.A., but then Mr. Menafee was writing of his own country and he might not have done as good a job reporting England as Mr. Hodson has done.
Yet there is another side to Mr. Hodson's innocence. It is so good a side that it more than redeems his drab style, his repetitions, his occasional parochialism. The innocent eye sees and stresses things that the more sophisticated traveller misses. It sees, for example, the pathological sides of American social life ; there is an interview here with a rabid female Roosevelt-hater that rings painfully true ; there is a dogmatic condemnation of " Niggers " from a middle- western lawyer that is alas, only too typical. There are many ex- amples of shrewd moral observation and at the end of Mr. Hodson's journey the reader has got a lot of information, been provoked to thought and can understand the odi et amo attitude that his visit has bred in Mr. Hodson.
What mainly irritated Mr. Hodson was what he considered gross, ill-mannered and unjust hostility to his own country. There is a great deal of it ; in many ;mays, modern American complacency is perfectly comparable with the attitude of Victorian Englishmen like Mr. Podsnap. It can be profoundly irritating, and I entirety agree with Mr. Hodson that the policy of polite ignoring of this state of affairs is mistaken. Silence is taken to show both contempt and guilt. And there is no use murmuring a polite disclaimer in the face of a hurricane of calumny such as that which blows from the Chicago Tribune. Faced with this phenomenon, Mr. Hodson re- acted rather like Martin Chuzzlewit ; it is not the worst way to react. But mere honest indignation is not enough. For example, Mr. Hodson returns again and again to the disturbing fact that few British movies get much of a showing in America. He thinks there ought to be a law about it. Perhaps there ought, but what kind of a law? It is easy to plan a system of differential taxation that will keep down the number of American films shown here, but will it prove a very effective bargaining weapon to force British films on to the American market? Mr. Hodson does not give the impression of being much of a movie-goer. The movies he has in mirld are documentaries or war movies. It is a great pity if Desert 'Victory
• did not get adequate bookings in America • it will be a great pity if The Way Ahead does not get adequate bookings. But the problem is not the injustice done to such war films by the American renters any more than the problem of the American movie, here, is the flooding of our cinemas by Mr. Frank Capra's documentaries. The problem is the regular movie to which cash customers go for fun. And when all is said and done, Hollywood in addition to its other advantages has this one, its greater efficiency at nearly all levels. At the very top there are a few British movies that make the same impression as the most successful American movies, but below that the scales are heavily weighted in favour of Hollywood by more than mere financial power. Securus fudicat orbis terrarum. I fear, too, that Mr. Hodson is a highbrow ; he uses the word " culture " and "cultural" too often for my taste ; he seems to have an hostile obsession with comic strips ; he underestimates the amount of more or less conscious comedy and kidding in American dealings with visiting firemen. But his eye and ear have been used to good purpose ; thus he notes the strong element of conscious sexuality in American advertising and amusements. He approves warmly of the modern American equivalent of the English inn or the Paris café, the drug store. His book might not have been as good if he had been better equipped with information and had been less free to make his own rather naive picture. The chief advantage of more knowledge would, I think, have been more understanding and affection. Then he could have called his book "I Like America
Previous page
