What do we think of when we think of America? Fear, resentment, envy, anger, wonder, hope? With the country's potent cultural, economic and political influence almost everywhere, in every life, Granta magazine invited 24 non-US writers to describe how America has entered their lives.
Benoît Duteurtre
France
For several years now French conversation has been invaded by the same expressions for the US: "Disneyland", "Land of Coca-Cola and McDonald's". So-called intellectuals have denounced "America's subculture" as the supposed antithesis to Europe's "exception culturelle". And now a terrible tragedy striking the city of New York has been enough to trigger a resurgence - after the initial gestures of compassion - of the old leftist line about "American imperialism", according to which the attacks of September 11th are a logical outcome of US policies.
What worries me about this is certainly not that someone might criticise America, but that a pattern is emerging which is essentially nationalistic: one that entitles France, for instance, as a self-proclaimed bastion of human rights, to pass lofty judgment on Yankee power. It's as if, by adopting this stance, Europe hopes to disguise from itself the fact that it belongs to exactly the same world as America and is mired in identical contradictions: subject to the same economic tyranny and the same social turmoil, yet claiming to uphold all that is right and good.
Paradoxically, the neo-nationalism evident in the current European criticism of America is a nationalism of the left. In the 1960s, progressive movements were bitterly opposed to any shows of patriotism. Since they have come to power - in the media and, to a certain extent, in politics - they no longer hesitate to espouse a kind of national pride. They're not fighting for the French flag but for humanist values which apparently French society alone can defend (even when reality proves the opposite).
So America's aim is to impose its economic system on the whole world? In fact, Europe voluntarily chose this system and now in turn imposes it on countries that want to enter the EU. So the violence of American society couldn't be further from Europe's welfare system? Rhetoric aside, over the last 30 years France has allowed the growth of urban ghettos comparable to the worst of the American inner cities. So the European mind rejects the levelling-down effects of American culture? Yet it was a French socialist government that invited and financed the creation of Euro Disney. And besides, one might do well to wonder about the seductive power of American cinema or music, which have such a grip on the contemporary world, whereas European art can seem imprisoned in its cultural pretensions.
* Translated by Will Hobson
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Germany
The first time I saw an American was in 1945. He sat in a jeep, looking well-fed, confident and even dashing in his freshly pressed uniform, cruising through a landscape of rubble with his left hand lazily hanging out, holding a cigarette. An armada of benign aliens had finally arrived to deliver Germany from its 12 year-nightmare. Overnight, the rats had scurried away and hidden in the ruins, and suddenly some of us felt free to do as we liked. Why these liberators had first bombed us and then imposed democracy on a reluctant population was not quite clear to me.
Only later did it dawn on me that we owed the generous terms of the pax americana to the Russians and the beginning of the Cold War. Germany turned into an American protectorate. It was a huge relief and a respite from a long tradition of subservience to authority. For a few decades we lived under the American umbrella, and the place became, as they say, an economic giant while remaining a political dwarf. Only the most hardened Nazi could fail to feel gratitude and admiration for the invaders from outer space.
It was the Vietnam war which finally shattered this naive and rosy image. More or less reluctantly we had to take leave of the mirage we had embraced so eagerly. Our America was not the real thing, it was a projection in more than one sense: both a road movie and a psychological trick played upon us by our own delusions. The turbulent crowd of '68 lost no time in denouncing their former object of desire. "USA-SA-SS," they shouted. "Imperialism" was their rallying call, the CIA took the place of the Devil, and at the end of the day a few desperadoes on the left went so far as to throw bombs at the very US bases which had protected us from the Soviets.
Even the more level-headed of us began to realise that our friends from overseas had some embarrassing habits: a penchant for dictatorships in many parts of the world, a fair supply of double standards, a curious mix of ruthless self-interest and missionary rhetoric, and, at home, a bizarre gun cult and a relish for the death penalty. It took us more than two decades to discover most of these traits. We had only ourselves to blame for our disillusionment.
The silliest outgrowth of German and West European anti-Americanism had to do with Kultur. There were those who minded Coca-Cola more than Pinochet, and fast food more than My Lai. Rock-and-roll invaded the sugary world of home-grown kitsch, soap operas replaced brain trust programmes, and ads and TV spots were couched in an idiom aping English. A phantom called Americanization stalked Paris, Milan and Berlin.
I confess that it took me quite some time to realise that nothing of the sort was in the offing. Quite the contrary: our little continent actually became more European, and the US more exotic than ever. Gradually it dawned on me that the better I knew the place, the less familiar it looked. Just because they speak a language rather similar to the one we had listened to during the war, thanks to the BBC, and consume much of the same stuff from the same kind of department stores, it does not follow that we think and feel alike. And I find the strangeness of America a relief, if not a blessing. Different rules and habits, different cities, different beliefs and obsessions. Think of a place where cigarettes are perceived as more of a threat to human health than machine guns, where a casual acquaintance will offer you the use of their apartment with all their belongings included, where almost everyone believes in some god or other and where the outside world, unless it intrudes with bombs, is largely ignored! Surely we cannot pretend to understand such a society entirely.
John Gray
Britain
It's hard to think of a place that's less like the America we think we know than New Orleans. In the monocular vision of many Europeans, America is a nation of death-obsessed puritans, too overworked and too intimidated by risk to savour life's passing pleasures. It is a land of doctrinaires, naively devoted to a stupefying array of world-improving projects and life-changing therapies, where even politicians are judged by how sincere they seem to be, and literature and philosophy are used to inculcate an unyielding optimism about human possibilities. In this common European stereotype, America is a desperately earnest place, where irony and the tragic sense of life are as unfamiliar as the nonchalant pursuit of pleasure.
If so, New Orleans can only be the most extraordinary - and delicious - anomaly. When I began visiting the city in the 1980s, its hedonism and fatalism charmed me at once. It wasn't just the jazz and the recklessly spicy food. What captivated me was that no one took life very seriously. Meals could start late afternoon with cocktails and extend far into the night. Drinking and smoking were done with a passion that left no place for worries about health - or regrets. One evening, eating in a small restaurant I knew well, I was surprised to hear the plaintive tones of Edith Piaf. I asked the owner what she thought of the singer. She replied: "She regretted far too much." Her reply expresses an attitude to life that takes its pleasures more seriously than its tragedies, and views high-minded moralising with a disbelief bordering on disdain. I thought that an admirable stance then, and I do still.
Some will say New Orleans is only a singularity, an extreme case of southern alienation from the mainstream of American life, but to my mind this is to miss the point. It's not just that the European view of American culture is in many respects the reverse of the truth. After all, how do H.L. Mencken, Ambrose Bierce or Dorothy Parker fit the stereotype of a culture without irony? How does the American genre of film noir tally with an inability to perceive tragedy? Isn't Moby-Dick an encounter with nihilism and the limits of intelligibility that's superior to anything produced in Europe - precisely because it's more playful? In fact, as D.H. Lawrence recognised in his marvellous essays on American literature, it's in American writing that one finds the most intrepid exploration of the extremes of human experience. If there is a comparable European literature, it can only be Russian.
There is a larger point, which I think is more important. America is too rich in contradictions for any definition of it to be possible. For every attitude that is supposed to be distinctively American, one can find an opposite stance that is no less so. I suppose it's true that the right-wing Christian fundamentalist, Pat Robertson, is a recognisably American figure. But so are William Burroughs and Camille Paglia. Among philosophers, perhaps there is something identifiably American about William James, the brother of the novelist and the greatest of the Pragmatists. But it was an American philosopher, George Santayana, who produced the most devastating criticism made of American Pragmatism. In truth, there is no such thing as an essentially American world view - any more than there is an essentially American landscape. Anyone who thinks otherwise shows they have not grasped the most important fact about America, which is that it is unknowable.
Ivan Klíma
Czech Republic
Soon after the war, all American films disappeared from Czechoslovakia, the war films and the sickly musicals alike - it was the beginning of the communist era. Along with them went books by all modern American authors with the exception of the communist, Howard Fast. Nevertheless, in a lane not far from the Botanical Gardens in Prague I came across a sort of stationer's-cum-bookbinder's shop that had remained in private ownership. I used to chat to the owner about literature and one day he declared mysteriously that he had something to show me. From the depths of his shop he brought out two novels: one by Steinbeck, the other by Hemingway. In those days such books were something like contraband. I paid for the two treasures and took them away with me. I was hooked.
Later, when censorship was relaxed, I got to read Dos Passos, Faulkner, Wilder, Heller, Mailer, Roth and others. They had a lifelong influence on me. I know that for many people American culture means Hollywood films and endless TV serials. For me, American culture means above all its literature, which in the last century was undoubtedly among the most remarkable in the world . . .
I have been told many times how superficial Americans' relationships are - shallow because they are simply social convention. In my view, this is not true. The Americans mostly live at peace, but the moment an accident or even a disaster occurs, they act. It needn't be a terrorist attack. I once drove off the road into the ditch in a blizzard and got stuck in a snowdrift. It was about 20 degrees below zero and there was such a gale blowing that anyone out in the open would have started to freeze. Nevertheless, within moments a lorry pulled up and the driver ran over to make sure no one in the car was injured and to ask if we needed help. He gave one of my companions a lift to go and arrange for the car to be towed out. The next driver to pass by, a few seconds later, tried to pull us out with a chain. I don't think drivers in our country would behave with such concern and self-sacrifice . . .
For more than a century now there has existed a sort of American dream. For some it means boundless affluence, for others freedom. I am not a devotee of hypermarkets or of grandiose mansions containing dozens of rooms for just two or three people and a few pedigree dogs and cats. I've never yearned for more than one car, or a private plane, jet-engined or otherwise. I have an aversion to profligacy, but I don't share the view that there is an indirect relationship between America's affluence and Third World poverty. Without idealising the policies of the big monopolies (either American or European), I am convinced that America's wealth, which derives from the work of many generations, is chiefly the result of the creative activity of free citizens. The Americans are not to blame for Third World poverty, which is mostly due to the circumstances in the Third World and the demoralising lack of freedom that most of the people there endure.
* Translated by Gerald Turner
Doris Lessing
Britain
To talk about "America" as if it were a homogenous unity isn't useful, but I hazard the following generalizations.
America, it seems to me, has as little resistance to an idea or a mass emotion as isolated communities have to measles and whooping cough. From outside, it is as if you are watching one violent storm after another sweep across a landscape of extremes. Their Cold War was colder than anywhere else in the West, with the intemperate execution of the Rosenbergs, and grotesqueries of the McCarthy trials. In the 1970s, Black Power, militant feminism, the Weathermen - all flourished. On one of my visits, people could talk of nothing else. Two years later, they probably still flourished, but no one mentioned them. "You know us," said a friend. "We have short memories."
Everything is taken to extremes. We all know this, but the fact is seldom taken into account when we try to understand what is going on. The famous Political Correctness, which began as a sensible examination of language for hidden bias, became hysterical and soon afflicted whole areas of education. Universities have been ruined by it. I was visiting a university town not far from New York when two male academics took me out into the garden, for fear of being overheard, and said they hated what they had to teach, but they had families, and would not get tenure if they didn't toe the line. A few years earlier, in Los Angeles, I found that my novel, The Good Terrorist, was being "taught". The teaching consisted of the students scrutinising it for political incorrectness. This was thought to be a good approach to literature. Unfortunately, strong and inflexible ideas attract the stupid. . . what am I saying! Britain shows milder symptoms of the same disease, so it is instructive to see where such hysteria may lead if not checked.
Ahdaf Soueif
Egypt
The America we watched on television then was the America of Bonanza and The Virginian, neither of which, as far as I can remember, went much for the "Cowboy and Injun" stuff that I found troubling. My problem, at that early age, was that the "Indians" never got to put their side of the story. We were not expected to grieve when several of their yelling, galloping braves were cut down, nor did we ever see them in their "normal" lives which, presumably, they had. Or had had before the righteous, gun-toting (white) heroes came on the scene. At home in the 1960s, one seemed to have no need to be aware or beware of political America - except for the CIA. There was a general sense that an American you met in Egypt would most likely be working for the CIA, and the CIA was implicated in the murder of Che Guevara. But then you didn't really meet Americans around Cairo . . .
In the last two decades I've visited America many times and love its vibrancy, its variety, its playfulness. I've made strong and warm and - I hope - enduring friendships with Americans. But in the last two decades America's influence on the world and actions in it have become more and more distasteful. And what is unforgivable is that it is all done under the cover of "freedom", "democracy" and "peace".
Nowhere does the hypocrisy of American foreign policy seem more clear than in its unconditional support for Israel. This is generally explained by citing the power of the Zionist lobby, the misguided identification of "Jewish" with "Israeli" or "Zionist" - an identification which many Jews now openly reject - and the wish to make amends for the Holocaust. But maybe the affinity goes deeper than that. The US, too, is a (relatively) young nation; a state that came into being at the hands of groups of white Europeans who "discovered" a land and "settled" it - never mind that there were people already there. Maybe America's fondness for Israel is like that of a parent watching a child follow in its footsteps. And now it looks as though the parent will be taught by the child: airborne attacks on civilian populations, illegal detentions, use of torture in interrogation, targeted assassinations worldwide, these have been the stock-in-trade of the Israeli state for 50 years and now America looks to follow suit. But Israel has a free press and Israel would not dare suggest subjecting its citizens - its Jewish citizens that is - to the infringements on their civil liberties that America is now proposing for Americans.
At the moment the world dominated by America looks like a pretty nasty place.
I still love my American friends; like the music and stories that captivated me all those years ago, they're smart and funny and open and warm. Is it really the case that to be good for them, America has to be bad for the rest of us?
Extracts from six of the 24 essays in What We Think of America, which features in the spring edition of Granta, the magazine of new writing. Other authors include Ian Buruma, Amit Chaudhuri, Ariel Dorfman, Michael Ignatieff, Fintan O'Toole, David Malouf and Harold Pinter.