THE VANISHING AMERICAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 12

THE VANISHING AMERICAN

COAST TO COAST, by James Morris; Faber and Faber, English price 21/-. Y nomination for the most tiresome subject in contemporary English letters is the enfant terrible of the postwar world, the Standard American. He

has been satirised by Evelyn Waugh, sentimentalised by Alistair Cooke, analysed by D. W. Brogan, panned by Priestley and imitated by Iddon. Journalists, philosophers, politicians, novelists, editors, essayists and poets have ground their well-worn axes to powder on his hapless head. What a blessed relief it was, then, to turn to James Morris, who set out from England two years ago in search of that forgotten man, the American individualist. The measure of his success is the freshest, sanest and most illuminating book on the United States which has come my way in many a day. Coast to Coast is the fruit of a 70,000mile tour, embracing every one of the 48 States, which Mr. Morris undertook with the assistance of the Commonwealth Fund of New York and The Times of London. It is not so much a travel book as a series of profiles of people and places; and there, in each picture, is the author, an ideal projection of ourselves, friendly, urbane and curious, but never obtrusive. Here he is, slipping quietly into the back of the tent at a hellfire-and-damnation Holy Roller meeting; there he ig in the stands on Kentucky Derby Day, not far from the prominent New Orleans businessman in the ermine suit studded with pearls and rhinestones. There is no "padding" in this book and not a trace of malice; Mr. Morris makes every paragraph count. He drops in on a Maryland oyster catcher, a Mississippi towboat pilot, a rural muralist, Mary Pickford and Harry. Truman; Indians, Amishers, Mormons, millionaires and uranium miners; a desiccated New England whaling community, a small New Jersey town, a wealthy Chicago suburb, a Wisconsin farm, an Oregon lumber camp and, of course, the big cities. And yet the book has an essential unity, supplied by the friendliness and generosity of Americans everywhere, together with a constant undercurrent of sadness, The American individualist, Mr. Morris makes only too clear, is living on little more than sentiment and_ borrowed time. The creeping tide of commercialism, the relentless drive of the internal combustion engine, the omnipotent new all-Americanism, cannot much longer be denied. This book could only have been written by an Englishman and probably only by a journalist. There can be few writers in either category with James Morris’s perception and gift for lucid expression. You may have been fortunate enough to visit America or you may never get there, but if the candid commentators and expert interpreters have left you an ounce of curiosity or a shred of doubt, then do read Coast to Coast.

Henry

Walter