AND ANOTHER THING
Yankees should stop the cultural cringing and throw the Brit rascals out
PAUL JOHNSON
New York is at present suffering from a bout of cultural cringe, and assumes that British journalists make better editors of their publications than American ones. There is nothing new in that, of course. America began its independent existence with a cultural inferiority complex. Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1819, Sydney Smith argued that Americans, though fond of boasting, had 'during the thirty or forty years of their existence' done 'absolutely nothing for the Sciences, for the arts, for Literature, or even for the statesmanlike studies of Politics or Political Economy'. 'In the four quarters of the globe,' he asked, 'who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? Or looks at an Ameri- can picture or statue?'
The Americans agreed. Shortly before, in a famous essay in the Philadelphia Portfolio entitled 'On American Literature', George Tucker lamented that American writers fared badly even by comparison with those produced by two such tiny nations as Ire- land, and Scotland — America had put for- ward nobody to compare with Swift, Burke, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Berkeley, Thomas Moore, James Thomson, Burns, David Hume, Adam Smith, Smollett and James Boswell. The two most influential novelists of the age, he noted, were Scott and Maria Edgeworth, of Scots and Irish descent. As for England, with a population of 16 mil- lion it produced up to 1,000 new books a year; America, with six million, averaged 20. In 1823, Charles Jared Ingersoll, addressing the American Philosophical Society (then the equivalent of our Royal Society) on the theme of 'The Influence of America on the Mind', deplored the fact that the Edinburgh and the Quarterly out- sold their Yankee equivalent, the North American Review even in the United States. The first professional American writer of any significance, Washington Irving, was a cultural cringer if ever there was one, and modelled himself entirely on English proto- types. He proposed that the poet Thomas Campbell be hired to lecture in New York to give 'an impulse to American literature and proper direction to the public taste'.
That set a lot of writers chugging across the Atlantic in search of lucrative lecture contracts: Thackeray and his 'comic novel- ists', Dickens and his readings, Oscar Wilde, Arnold Bennett, Dylan Thomas the list stretches to the crack of our literary doom. American literature came of age in
the early 1850s, with Emerson's Representa- tive Men and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter in 1850, Melville's Moby-Dick and Longfel- low's The Golden Legend in 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 and Thoreau's Walden in 1854. But still the cringe continued. As late as 1876, Henry James made what he called his 'choice'. As a writer, especially as a novelist, he said he had to live in London. America was not complicated enough. A novelist lived on 'manners, customs, usages, habits, forms', and that was what England — London in particular — provided: it was 'the biggest aggregate of human life, the most complete compendium of the world'. America, he added, lacked the things and institutions he needed for his novels — it had no equiva- lent of Eton and Harrow, the court and the cathedral close, Oxford and Cambridge, Ascot and Mayfair. This makes us laugh today, but poor James was deadly serious. And, come to think of it, I suppose T.S. Eliot was a bit of a cultural cringer too. What strikes me as perverse, however, is that America should be cringing to us today in the print medium. That is one field where America got going early and soon caught up and surpassed us. The Boston Newsletter goes back to 1704, the New York Gazette to 1725, the Philadelphia Evening Post, the first daily, to 1783. By 1850 Amer- ica had many more newspapers than we did. Their list of newspaper heroes — Gor- don Burnett, Bryant, Greeley, Bowles, Ray- mond, Whitelaw Reid, Dana, Godkin, Wat- terson, Medill, Pulitzer, William A. White is longer than ours. By 1965 the United States had over 1,700 daily newspapers, well over ten times as many as we had. That total has since fallen, but ours has fallen faster. I should think there are 20 dailies in the US for every one here, and the number of week- lies is even more disproportionate.
So whence this cringe? I fear the expla- nation reflects badly on both our nations. Forty-five years ago, when I first started in journalism, I was overawed by the superior- ity of the American print medium. There were about 30 outstanding dailies, begin- ning with the St Louis Post-Dispatch and the San Francisco, Chronicle, which led the world for their coverage, accuracy, literacy, courage, moral integrity and, not least, for the absolute distinction they drew between sacrosanct news and free comment. We had perhaps three dailies in the same league and nowhere near the top of it. Nor could we compete with their great maga- zines, Life and Look, Time and Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's, For- tune, the New Yorker and so on. By compar- ison, we were a second-rate journalistic power.
If Britain was bad then, what are we now? The decline in British journalistic standards has been catastrophic, especially in the last ten years, above all in the last five. But the fall in standards in America, though it began later, is accelerating even more rapidly. There is not one US daily now fit to be ranked with the top 30 a gen- eration ago. Many good ones have disap- peared. Lack of competition has ruined papers like the New York Times, the Wash- ington Post, the Los Angeles Times and many more. Most of the best magazines have gone. The rest, like Time and the New Yorker, are shadows of their former selves.
In this deplorable state of affairs, the bad is imitating the still worse. America, in the process of losing its journalistic integrity, is taking its cue from Britain, where it has gone completely. The cultural cringe today is not to excellence but to vice triumphant, to sewer heroes and yellow Bonapartes, to top-ranking character assassins and prime purveyors of filth. In recent years America has taken from Britain some first-class journalists such as John O'Sullivan, editor of the National Review. But most of their Brit imports are rubbishy people, peddlers of pseudo-snobbery and synthetic chic and anti-ethics. One or two are downright liars. Worse still, the American print medium is now looking across the Atlantic for new ways of depraving itself by copying the sex strategies of our downmarket tabloids. This year's presidential election threatens to dis- play this kind of cultural cringing, or Yan- kee worship of British gutters, at its most odoriferous. Decent Americans should unite to sign a new Declaration of Indepen- dence, launch a new Revolutionary War and throw the Brit rascals out.
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