The Skin Read Free Page B

century. And when I asked him what, in his opinion, was the American Greece, he replied with a laugh: "The Greece of Xenophon"; and, still laughing, began to paint a remarkable and witty picture of Xenophon—"a Virginian gentleman"— which was a disguised satire, in the style of Dr. Johnson, of certain Hellenists of the Boston school.
    Jack had an indulgent and mischievous contempt for the Hellenists of Boston. One morning I found him sitting under a tree, with a book on his knees, near a heavy battery facing Cassino. It was during the sad days of the Battle of Cassino. It was raining—for a fortnight it had been doing nothing but rain. Columns of lorries laden with American soldiers, sewn up in white sheets of coarse linen cloth, were going down in the direction of the little military cemeteries which were to be seen here and there beside the Via Appia and the Via Casilina. To keep the rain off the pages of his book—an eighteenth-century anthology of Greek poetry with a soft leather binding and gilt edges, presented to him by the worthy Gaspare Casella, the famous antiquarian bookseller of Naples and a friend of Anatole France—Jack was sitting with his body bent forward, covering the precious book with his mackintosh.
    I remember his saying to me with a laugh that in Boston Simonides was not considered a great poet. And he added that Emerson, in his funeral panegyric of Thoreau, declared that "his classic poem on Smoke suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides." He laughed heartily. "Ah, ces gens de Boston! Tu vois ca? Thoreau, in the opinion of Boston, is greater than Simonides!" he said, and the rain entered his mouth, mingling with his words and his laughter.
    His favourite American poet was Edgar Allan Poe. But sometimes, when he had drunk a whisky more than usual, he would confuse Horace's verses with Poe's, and be deeply astonished to find Annabel Lee and Lydia in the same alcaic. Or he would confuse Madame de Sévigné's "talking leaf "with one of LaFontaine's talking animals.
    "It wasn't an animal," I would say to him. "It was a leaf—a leaf from a tree."
    And I would quote the relevant passage from the letter in which Madame de Sévigné wrote that she wished there was a talking leaf in the park of her castle, Les Rochers, in Brittany.
    "Mais cela c'est absurde," Jack would say. "Une feuille qui parle! Un animal, ca se comprend, mais une feuille!"
    "For the understanding of Europe," I would say to him, "Cartesian logic is useless. Europe is a mysterious place, full of inviolable secrets."
    "Ah, Europe! What an extraordinary place it is!" Jack would exclaim. "I need Europe, to make me conscious of being an American."
    But Jack was not one of those Americians de Paris —they are found on every page of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises —who round about 1925 used to frequent the Select in Montparnasse, who disdained Ford Maxon Ford's tea-parties and Sylvia Beach's bookshop, and who are said by Sinclair Lewis, alluding specifically to certain characters created by Eleanor Green, to have been like the intellectual fugitives who frequented the Rive Gauche roundabout 1925, or like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound or Isadora Duncan— "iridescent flies caught in the black web of an ancient and amoral European culture." Nor was Jack one of those decadent transatlantic youths who formed the Transition {1} clique. No, Jack was neither a déraciné nor a decadent. He was an American in love with Europe.
    He had for Europe a respect compounded of love and admiration. But in spite of his culture and his affectionate familiarity with our virtues and our faults his attitude to Europe, like that of nearly all true Americans, was conditioned by a subtle species of "inferiority complex", which manifested itself not, to be sure, in an inability to understand and forgive our misery and shame, but in a fear of understanding, a reluctance to understand which was due to a certain delicacy of feeling. In Jack this