Fritto Misto, or Fried Micks
BY D. W. BROGAN DAVID CROCKETT THE MAN AND THE LEGEND. By THE AMAZING OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN: The Life and Exploits of an Impresario. By Vincent Shcean. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 25s.) POTTER ON AMERICA. By Stephen Potter. (Hart- Davis, 12s. 6d.) IN a restaurant-cum-speakeasy in Boston, that I was forced (for sociological reasons) to frequent thirty years ago, the Italian menus had a rough English translation. Thus 'Fritts misty' appeared as 'Fried Micks.' This may have been a specimen of art concealing art, like the English of a Dutch bulb catalogue, but have always thought that 'fried micks' filled a long-felt linguistic 'want and this round-up of books about America makes a fine 'fried micks.' We are, we should be, deeply interested in the society on whom so much depends and. in addition to knowing more facts, we want to get the feel of the people on whose own feelings and moral judgements so much depends. We also want to know something of the look of the country and this latest album, Days to Remember, gives both outward and inward eye. Messrs. Gunther and Quint are serious chroniclers and serious selectors of illus- trations. But it seems inevitable, in a book cover- ing a country so full of showmanship as is the United States, that what sticks in the memory are the minor but memorable and, possibly, slightly scandalous things. The ending of the Second World War on VJ-Day was a solemn enough affair. But the naked girls splashing in the San Francisco fountain (did they strip or were they stripped?) is. in its way, a fit offset against the horrible and memorable—and timely—picture of the last victims of that invisible German body, the SS. We have the late Dr. Kinsey conducting one of his famous interviews and also a jurisdic- tional dispute between two unions over the right to make lalsies.' (To offset this we have a close- up of Miss Faye Emerson, for time the Ameri- can Sabrina .as Sabrina was, for a time, the British Sabrin.) We have Marlon Brando in A Streetcar and Levi Jackson, the first Negro to be captain of the Yale football team. There is a vast Russian female throwing something; I presume she is Nina, but give me Marilyn any time. Liberace and Billy Graham are both presented to us and we have, possibly with unintentional humour, 'John Foster Dulles, Acheson's chief trouble-shooter abroad.' Where is Mr. Dulles's trouble-shooter? He sure needs one! Would Mr. Acheson do?
But what makes this great country tick? What we really mean is why and how are they so rich? Mr. Jones's admirably planned, clear, succinct economic history goes a !Ong way to telling us. He is conscious, perhaps too insistently conscious, of the waste involved in American wealth. 'Make do and mend' is a deeply. un-American activity and, possibly, American wealth is as great as it is because of this refusal to take too much thought for tomorrow. `Tomorrow is another day' is a very American attitude and Mr. Billington argues
that disorder, irregularity and all the things that irritate the law-abiding Briton are part of the price of American wealth and power. 'Sic fortis Etruria crevit.'
Mr. Billington, in a most masterly re- examination of the frontier story, doesn't see the necessity of imitating Europe. The 'mountain men,' rapacious, often savagely cruel, occasionally cannibalistic, were not a proletariat on the European model. The Mormons, highly co- operative, disciplined, conscious of their com- munity duties, were not easily reducible to a European pattern. Neither were the men of the gold rush. California in Forty-nine was not Engels's Manchester. There are modern parallels. Texas and, still more, Deseret, the theocratic State with Brigham Young as High. Priest, recall con- temporary Israel in its courage, discipline, self- esteem—and occasional crimes. But around Texas or Utah the enemies were less formidable than those that beleaguer Israel. Nevertheless Ameri- can sympathy with Israel is not merely a matter of the -Jewish vote. It arises froth a common experience.
But America is not merely masses, mass movements or mass media. It is highly idiosyn- cratic individuals. Where could, too, such diverse types as David Crockett (commonly known as Davy Crockett) and Oscar Hammerstein have come to full flower? Crockett ('King of the wild frontier' as we all learned a year or two ago) in a short life played many parts—bear-hunter, pioneer settler, Congressman, writer and romancer, tool of the 'interests,; enemy of Andrew Jackson and finally one of the Spartan band that fell at the Texas Thermopylae, the Alamo; Crockett was made for romance He got it: in life and death he was the carrier of legend and' no Ameri- cans, except possibly George Washington and Buffalo Bill, were so much exploited by the ancestors of the Madison Avenue geniuses. But there was a real David Crockett whom Professor Shackford has dug out of the legend with scholar• ship and critical acumen.
There is or was a real Oscar Hammerstein, but Mr. Sheean, although a more skilled writer than Professor Shackford, has not quite dug him out of the legend or even done all that might be done with the legend. Oscar Hammerstein was A Berliner who shipped off-to make his fortune in America and did so, but in an unorthodox way. For although he had great inventive and business talents, he had as his object not money but the control of theatres, above all of opera houses. He left Berlin just before it began to boom, but we can be sure that, had he stayed, he would have had a duller life, no chalice to run opera houses, to be innocently rude to kings, to insist that Lady Cunard give up her inalienable right to talk during all of an opera. In short, it took America to make young Hammerstein the startling figure tit whom we owe the Stoll in Kingsway and New York largely owes the centralisation of New York's pleasure quarter round Times Square. It is a fantastic story. One is inclined to suggest to the hero's grandson that it would make a good musical and Mr. Sheean brings to it knowledge and enthusiasm. But I, at any rate, wasn't as excited as I had hoped to be. It is easier to make accounts of opera performances more interest- ing and intelligible than accounts of theatrical performances. We can be told more of the sing- ing of Tetrazzini than of the acting of Sarah Bernhardt. But and but ! The list of roles, of suc- cesses. of flops. of the tantrums of Russtigwi
becomes cloying. Hammerstein was ,a showm rather than a musical director. He died brok
married to a shrew. His last fling, the Londo Opera House, houses Kismet instead of Salo and Times Square is squalid, drab, even the Ast has lost the noble simplicity of its name aq nobody knows or cares what is now lost found there. But Hammerstein was, for a time king of his wild frontier, just on the edge of th en, Indian country where Nathan Detroit roams. He like David or Davy Crockett, justifies America at But if it needed more justification, the twi du English books on the country provide another ha. What would our authors, with time on their hand ha do if they couldn't write travel books aboui ph America? If no books had been written about w America in the past ten years Mr. Creasey' Rc harmless travelogue would serve some purpose pa But in a year which has seen the publication o Mr. James Morris's most admirable book, thi. seems even more superfluous than usual. No suet criticism applies to Mr. Potter's book. For despit its title it is Potter on Potter. Unkind criti might say that Mr. Potter has been hoisted on h own upmanship, that while he could obvious! write a good book on America, that would claS with the Potter persona. What we get is anothe chronicle of the Potter way of life and som reporting of the impact of the Potter technique o America. But I fear that to score as Mr. Potte obviously wanted to do, you need more know ledge than he brought to the game. It is surel not first-class upmanship to misspell Hay-Adam as a way of snubbing the Adams family? An
since Mr. Potter has rather a thing about th Jefferson Memorial (which, in fact, dates fro the New Deal, not from the remote nineteenth century past), he might note, for his next visit
the possibilities of that much-neglected monu• ment, the James Buchanan Memorial in Washing- ton. To discuss that casually and contrast its size and magnificence with the humble birthplace cabin at Mercersburg is recommended to players of this game. And upmanshipwise, you never, never say 'Las Vegas,' but always 'Vegas.' But ni it is a tribute to the candour of the authors and 01 ft
to the fascination of the country that a lot of America gets past the Potter personality and seeps through the Creasey cosy prose.. Theirs is a world far from that of Davy Crockett and Oscar Hammerstein. but it is recognisably American all the same
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