Other Americas

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 313, 22 June 1945, Page 5

Other Americas

NLY an American could have given the answers to our questions to Dr. Canby reported on page 10; but only, most of our readers will think, a special kind of American. No one but an American soldier could have made the "humble pride" speech attributed to General Eisenhhower in the Guildhall; but again, only an unusual American soldier, after proclaiming his undying Americanism, would have claimed "basic kinship with the people of London." That is to say, such men seem unusual to those who judge America by motor-cars and movies. There are other Americas, not one or two but several, but it is worth pausing for a moment or two to think of the America_of Dr. Canby. Firstly, let us remember that Dr. Canby came here to talk to us about books and the men and women who write them; not only American books, but books in general, and especially the books of England; even our own books to the extent to which they express a- national culture. It was a new experience to have an American here selling nothing, buying nothing, borrowing nothing, taking nothing material away: just talking to us and listening to us in friendship. Well, there are thousands of Americans who, if they came to New Zealand, would behave in precisely the same way: scholars, artists, philosophers, poets, of whom most New Zealanders know nothing. America’s is an older Civilisation than ours, three times as old, and if the shoddier things of civilisation have found easy lodging there, culture’s roots have driven far deeper. Dr, Canby, for example, is the biographer of Thoreau and of Whitman, and though one. has been dead for 83 end the other for 53 years it is not easy to name two English contemporaries whose influence is still as wide and as deep. If serenity were the deciding factor, the confidence that is calm acceptance of human life and® fate, Thoreau at least, with one other American, would have to be placed ahead of all modern philosophers who have thought and expressed themselves in English.