LOOKING AT AMERICA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 307, 28 December 1935, Page 2 (Supplement)

LOOKING AT AMERICA.

MR. MACDONELL'S IMPRESSION NO GENERALISATIONS. The number of books by English writers about the United States must by now run into scores. Some of them, as-A. G. Macdonell remarks in "A Visit to America" (Macinillan), have contained comments that were not onlv hasty and unkind, but impertinent. Mv. Macdonell, who recently spent three months in America, says that for this Americans must blame their own hospitality, which results in the visiting author boarding his ship suffering from "lack of sleep, incipient delirium tremens, loss of appetite, surfeit of oysters, gout and cirrhosis of the liver." His hosts have reduced him "from a well-intentioned innocent abroad into a surly and cantankerous wreck." Mr. Macdonell escaped this condition by leaving New York when he felt that continuous hospitality was overwhelming him, and visiting places where the tempo of life was slower. He returned to England to write a book which is informative about things that matter, critical but fair, and frequently witty.

0. Henry, says Mr. Macdonell, crystallised all descriptions of New York by calling it "Bagdad-on-thc-Sub-wayi" He dwells upon the extraordinary diversity of the people, and the contrast between the splendour and the poverty to be seen about its thoroughfares. As for its diverse population, lie read that a college called St. Mary's had been defeated in a football game, and the team was referred to as "the Gaels." Being a Scot, he was interested, and presently found that the names of the footballing "Gaels" were: Strub, Meister, Kordick, Jorgenscn, Elduayan, Ve/.ersky, Pennino, Fiese, Schreiber, Michelini and Kellogg!

After leaving New York he discovered the importance of the Mississippi Valley.

"The cities of the east and of the long Pacific slope are important, but they are not the heart of the country. They talk more, but they mean less." He had thought that the Middle West was "supremely ignorant," but actual experience of its remoteness changed his opinion. "The whole outer world fades away. Nothing seems to be of any importance except the spring cowing or the fattening of cattle. What does it matter to you, as you stroll in the shadow of the cotton-woods, what the people of Memel think of the people in Lithuania?"

Of the cities he visited Mr. Macdonell seems to have admired San Francisco most. He describes it as a metropolis with its own traditions, carefree, gay, without an inferiority complex, and without parochialism. Ho marvelled at the breadth and „ magnificence of Salt Lake City. ("They were better at town-planning in 1847, those rough, hardy men, than anyone is nowadays.") And, surprising as it may seem, he found that while all Americans that he met deplored "the lack of historical antiquities in America," and men like Henry Ford buy ancient buildings in England, and re-erect them on the other side of the' Atlantic, a number of irreplaceable buildings of historic interest are neglected and threatened with destruction. This serves to impress the reader with the fact, which the author continually emphasises, that it is impossible to make, truthful generalisations about America. It cannot be compared with any one other country, though in its vastness and extraordinary diversity -it ■ may perhaps be compared with Europe*. Mr. Macdonell is careful to describe only the things that he saw, and to admit'the many things he did not see, and in consequence the leader has confidence that within the limits of its canvas his picture is a true one.