Where Life is Graceful

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 26, 1 February 1937, Page 11

Where Life is Graceful

America as a country, its habits, and its people, is the butt for a great deal of criticism, and comparatively few people have written in praise of it, states a writer in the Cape Times. Most of the articles published about America and Americans are written by journalists and travellers who have only spent a brief while, perhaps merely in New York, and who gather their impressions from the certain section of the public they happen to have met, which, in a town as cosmopolitan as New York, is absurd. Tho Americans as I know them—and I have lived among them and beside them for niauy years— are very different people from tho fast cocktail-drink-ing squanderers of money, or from tho roughtongued, uneducated crook or glib, slick business men we are supposed to reeognise as American types.

They say there are no homes in America, but I found homes there. There aro families living in Boston, Massachusetts, that are every bit as circumspect and birth-conscious as old English families. Families where things are “done ” and are “not done”—where life is graceful and there is an appreciation of beautiful things and intellectual pursuits; where evenings are passed sitting round tho fire and the spending of much money on lavish display is considered bad taste and ostentatious.

Even in New York there are homes where the solid business people live uneventful lives with their wives and children, to whom they are devoted—people who hardly know what cocktails aro and have never been in a club.

Out in - tho West and down in the South of America are graceful white homes, where the family gathers together on Sunday afternoons to sit on tho stoep. Where neighbours drop in for a chat and a corn roast or barn dance is the height of excitement. There are log cabins whero 1 have spent long summer evenings sitting on the rough stoeps, yarning and drinkiug coffee; there are summer houses out along the lake shores where the hospitality is genuine and simple, and whero you just feel at home. Tho password in America, and particularly iu tho West, is “Como right in.” Tho great mass of Americans live simply, although comfortably, and they spend their two or three weeks’ leave iu taking tho family for a motor trip. Even the moneyed Americans, and there are still a few of them left, if they are of good family and intellect, do not behave as the popular articles, films, and books would have us believe. A milliqnaire friend of my own, a widower, would leave a dinner party immediately after the coffee, to see that his kiddies were in bed and to say good-night to them. This presents a very different picture from the millionaire of fiction, who fills his house with noisy parties, while his children fret, unnoticed, upstairs.

There is a Jot of bunk talked about America and tho American people. The few who travel noticeably—tho loudvoiced, iguorant type, and those featured in tho magazines and newspapers, rican type—just as the affected Englishman, who went to America years ago as a remittance man, is doomed to represent England as a type in the minds of many Americans.