"Great & Absurd Suspicions"

What do Europeans think about America? And who cares?

Americans must care, not because they hanker to be loved by all the world (as some probers of the American psyche have suggested), but because the U.S. is engaged in a crucial contest with Soviet Russia for the world's faith and allegiance. Russian-born Newsman Andre Visson (now a U.S. citizen, columnist for the Washington Post and international affairs consultant for Reader's Digest) has tackled the task of exploring Europe's view of the U.S. His findings appeared last week in As Others See Us (Doubleday; $3). Visson reaches the conclusion that a lot is wrong with Europe's vision. He writes: "Europe looks toward America with such great hopes! But at the same time she harbors such great and .. . absurd suspicions."

Three Drinks & a Dream. At the root of Europe's misconceptions about the U.S. is what Visson calls the "Athenian complex." Europeans, he thinks, regard the U.S. somewhat as the Greeks regarded the rise of muscular, uncultured Rome. The Greeks told themselves (as Europeans do today) that these new barbarians across the water might have more money--but they would never be really civilized. European intellectuals have always claimed that those American nouveaux riches are uncouth. They have now made the damning discovery that Americans are also unhappy. America in their eyes is the playgirl of the Western world--and not even a pretty one--with plumbing instead of arteries, ice water instead of blood, neuroses instead of a heart and a radio instead of a brain.

The chief trouble with European intellectuals, says Visson, is that they are bothered by "... a society which believed that to raise the living standard of the masses was more important than to bring to an even higher perfection the literary, philosophic or artistic achievements of the intellectual elite." Author Visson devotes much of his book to a rogue's gallery of brilliant and not-so-brilliant Europeans who have lately explored the U.S.

First, there is Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre who, in The Respectful Prostitute (TIME, March 24, 1947), depicted the U.S. South on a lynching bee. He describes Americans as suffering from "an obscure malaise to which no name can be given." One of the symptoms: ". . . After dinner, [American men] leave their chairs, radios, wives, pipes and children and go to the bar across the street to get drunk alone."

There is British Novelist J. B. Priestley, who drew a harsh picture of New York (in which all too many New Yorkers could recognize themselves): "The lonely heart of man cannot come home there. It [New York] is filled with people who, after three quick drinks, begin to dream of somewhere else ... [It is] the expression perhaps of some titanic strain in the soul of modern man, making him feel uneasy when he remembers the gods."

Next in Visson's gallery is esthete Editor Cyril Connolly, peering beyond his ice-blue Horizon, deploring "American brashness, music at meals, and racial hysteria." Connolly pointed, accurately, at the high American consumption of liquor, also to the "immense rush to psychiatry, high rate of madness and suicide." He thought the trouble was that the American way assumed "a world without God, yet a world in which happiness is obtainable."

The Man You Can't Call Harry. To diagnose America's mysterious malady further, a new pseudo-science has been developed by Europe's intellectuals. It is national psychoanalysis. It consists of applying something resembling Freudian methods to an entire country.* An outstanding practitioner in the field is a British anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer, whom Visson quotes extensively and disapprovingly.

To begin with, Gorer declares, Americans are in constant rebellion against Father. He conjectures that generations of immigrants have turned away from their fathers as symbols of the Old World. America's view of Father (i.e., men in general) is incarnate in the comic-strip character Dagwood, who is kind and well-meaning but totally ineffectual. America's rejection of Dad (in favor of Mom, of course) results in distrust of authority. Gorer thinks, for example, that anti-Catholicism in the U.S. is based on the unhappy consideration that the Pope is the only person in the world ". . . whom one cannot slap on the back and call 'Harry!' "

The Joint Tomorrow. Europeans tend to believe, reports Visson, that the U.S. is morally not ready for world leadership (although whenever the U.S. asserts her principles, a lot of Europeans accuse her of hypocrisy or naivete). Certain Europeans also regard the U.S. and Russia as expressions of the same evil--materialist civilization. ". . . Americans, they say, 'are merely Russians with clean fingernails' ..."

Above all, Europeans think (and are constantly told by the Communists) that the Marshall Plan is merely an American device for dumping surplus production and for interference in Europe's internal affairs. Even most Britons cannot quite get over that suspicion. Nevertheless, Visson thinks Britons understand the U.S. far better than other Europeans. "The Englishman," explains Visson, "likes, indeed, to think of the American as his 'nephew,' the son of his younger brother who developed a most successful enterprise abroad and married a woman of mixed nationality ... But, thank God! there is enough English blood in the boy's veins ... The boy lacks experience and polish, and is rather mercurial, but he is extremely able, enterprising [and] subscribes to most of the family principles ..."

Visson also quotes Geoffrey Crowther, brilliant editor of London's Economist: "The American people have to learn the responsibilities of their strength; the British people have to learn the limitations of their weakness." That applies not only to Britons, but to all Europeans, whose culture has created Western civilization.

There are millions of Europeans who, in their own way, realize Europe's limitations. They are the kind of people who have lived in narrow towns and on thinly parceled lands--not since any particular war, but always. They know, regardless of what the intellectuals tell them, that there is a wider and freer land across the ocean.

Visson's personal conclusion is that American civilization is an inextricable part of Europe's. "Contrary to what has so often been said . . ." he writes, "America is [not] anxious ... to turn her back to Europe ... All I was asked by the naturalization officers [when I became an American citizen] was to reject allegiance to any European 'Prince and Potentate' ... I was not made to feel any break between my European past and my American present. And that is why I have such unbounded confidence in an American-European tomorrow."

* Edmund Burke, in the 18th century, had already laid low that kind of generalization. Said he (in his famed speech On Conciliation with America): "I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people."

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