THE AMERICAN SCENE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22356, 29 February 1936, Page 9 (Supplement)

THE AMERICAN SCENE

A LAND OF CONTRASTS To the many books of " American impressions " written by Britishers from Charles Dickens onward, Mr. A. G. Macdonell, author of that penetrating satire, " England, Their England," has added a pleasant and readable one. It is not so funny as his magnum opus, perhaps because Mr. Macdonell had not time to see far below the surface of things. In a hurried tour he wisely kept to what was readily visible, and his comments on the American scene are fresh and amusing. He made a point of avoiding the places he was specially advised to visit and of not using the letters of introduction that were showered upon him in New York. In particular, he did not see New Orleans, Washington, the Century of Progress Exhibition at Chicago and the view from the Empire State Building, New York's tallest skyscraper. But he did travel across the continent, and found plenty to entertain him. What impresses the reader most is Mr. Macdonell's catalogue of violent incongruities: Wealth and poverty in New York; the magnificence of Chicago's lake front and the squalor and ugliness of the remainder; Stevenson's house at Monterey carefully preserved and the Spanish commandery, with its sixteenth-century bear-pit, neglected and ruinous; Alcatraz Island, the jewel of San Francisco Bay, used as a prison for " Eome of the most hideous scoundrels that ever lived "; the graves in New York's Trinity churchyard and the cemetery of historic Concord neglected and forlorn; posters urging the public to re-elect a wise and just judge beside whom he had just sat in a Chicago court; the vast number of aged and decrepit people in the streets of Los Angeles. " The | whole fantasy of America is in that mighty panorama (from the Presidio at San Francisco), the majesty and absurdity, the vast impressiveness and the comic triviality, the quality of eternity and the quality of an urchin." One strange thing that the traveller discovered was that while Americans take a painful, almost morbid, pleasure in asserting that theirs is a young country and in discussing that proposition from every aspect, the foreigner must listen in silence and not even by expression or gesture appear to assent. If ho does, he will cause deep offenfce. Another discovery was that the much condemned " American crime " is really " European and African crime in America." Mr. Macdonell was present at a " line-up " of notorious criminals in New York. At least half were Italians by birth or descent, next in numbers came men of mixed Slavonic blood, then negroes, then Germans and finally Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock. In lawlessness, he says, there can be no valid comparision between Britain and America, but when Europe is compared with America the picture falls into perspective at once. Mr. Macdonell has not written a ; guide-book, but intending travellers will be saved a good many surprises and disappointments by reading it. " A Visit to America," by A. G. Macdonell. (Macmillan.)