Advice to a Frenchman Going to America

SEPTEMBER, 1931

BY ANDRÉ MAUROIS

To prepare for this trip, you have read a hundred books about America: forget them. When a traveler describes a foreign country, he is tempted to exaggerate its strangeness. But I, whose business it is not to please you but to instruct you, shall tell you that the beings with human faces whom, after your six days on the ocean, you will encounter on the other side are not as different from your friends in Europe, or from yourself, as you imagine. They are men who, like us, work, suffer, eat, drink, and make love; read the poets; build temples and destroy them; are born and die. When you have noticed that some of them, like yourself, are fond of Proust and Valéry, when you have seen in their houses pictures by Degas and Renoir, and heard in their concerts Debussy, Dukas, and Ravel, I am sure that you will abandon, shamefaced, the extravagant panoply of the spiritual explorer, in which I now behold you. You are going to America, not to the moon. Be natural.

Don’t flatter yourself that you know American because you speak English. You would be deceived. You will understand New York women and Harvard professors. But when you encounter groups less impregnated with European culture, you will discover a new language. The presence in America of ethnic groups so important that they have preserved an independent racial existence has enriched this language with Italian, German, and Jewish words, which have mingled with the English, as Arabic with Spanish or French at the time of the Moorish invasions. When Babbitt was published for the first time in England, it called for a dictionary.

American is a much younger language than English. Its words still spring from images, as in primitive languages. Many of them are short-lived. In 1927, when I was in America for the first time, everything that charmed was ‘cute.’ In 1931, the word had become ridiculous, almost prohibited. You will tell me that ‘awful’ in England, formidable in France, have known a like vogue and decadence. But in the United States the cycle is briefer, and the vocabulary of each instant is more ephemeral.

You will be astonished to find, over there, the ‘yes’ of the English often replaced by a double grunt which is produced, without opening the mouth, by first expelling a delicate current of air through the nose, then by inhaling gently. One hears, thus, two very distinct notes, the second the higher, which, united, express a sort of approbation at once languid, passive, and kindly. Women, oftener than men, use these musical and barbarous sounds. I have long sought their origin. It is to be found, I believe, in the extreme nervous fatigue of human beings after an American metropolitan day. The double grunt has the advantage over an articulated sound in that it expresses polite indifference with physical effort reduced to the minimum.

Copyright 1931, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.

It is a commonplace that there is no conversation in America. Like all commonplaces, this one may lack niceties of shading. An after-dinner conversation between professors from Princeton, Yale, or Cornell is very like a conversation among professors in France or England. In New York I attended a dinner of what is called the Round Table, where the political conversation was worthy of Léon Bérard or Briand. A tête-à-tête with an intelligent American woman is one of the greatest pleasures one can have in America. But such happy moments are rare. And why?

Americans do not give cooking ‘considered as one of the fine arts’ an important place in life. Lunch is for them a kind of gratuity paid to the body. They hurriedly toss it a fruit, a fish, and go back to work. Certain writers, in rebellion, have founded the club ‘Three Hours for Lunch,’ but they are an agreeable exception. Even at dinner, general conversation is rare. Everyone talks to his neighbor. After dinner the men linger at table, a custom inherited from England. In New York your host will often propose taking you to the theatre, or else he will provide a pianist, a singer, a lecturer. The idea of leaving his guests to themselves, and expecting them to get pleasure out of meeting one another, astonishes and even appalls him. His excessive modesty does not permit his imagining that his friends can be happy merely in being in his house, with him and one another. He treats them like children. On Christmas Eve you will see, in some of the pleasantest homes in New York, Christmas trees for grown people. In other places, after a dinner at which you have met remarkable men with whom you would like to exchange ideas, there will be a prestidigitator who will do his best to amuse the oldsters. Thus, you must realize that the absence of conversation in America comes, not from absence of ideas or lack of intelligence or understanding, but from an unconquerable shyness and a prodigious self-distrust. In no other country will you find such impotence in self-expression. It is your business to beat down these barriers and to give the great ‘repressed’ a chance for rest and confidence.

Alcohol will help you. I know that in France you drink little. In America you will find it hard to keep sober. Almost everywhere you will be offered something to drink; it will be difficult for you to refuse. In American eyes, prohibition has given to the offer of a drink an importance which never used to exist. The man who fills your glass sacrifices for you a portion of a reserve, of a limited stock. He will be hurt if you appear to take his sacrifice too lightly. You will have heard much of dangerous drinks, of poisoned wine; if you abstain, you will give the impression that you lack confidence or courage. Console yourself with the thought that in the houses of the Drys the cocktail is replaced by a glass of tomato sauce.

But you must understand that there is in this struggle over alcohol something profounder and more noble. It is an overture to liberty and the first revolt of the American against the tyranny of custom. The American has greater need of alcohol than the Frenchman or the Italian. First puritanism, then bourgeois respectability, have made of him a being who dares not surrender himself to his natural instincts. Drink sets him free from age-long repressions. ‘It is only when I have had something to drink,’ said one of them to me, ‘that I can at last be myself.’ The ‘speak-easy’ is the only place in New York where men and women come together for the mere pleasure of companionship, without the need of a show, and without counting the minutes. Conversation is better there than in the drawing-rooms, and the food is better than in the homes of the rich. There the father gets to know his son and daughter. There family life is revived. Don’t miss it, and if you fear the confusion of mind that the cocktail begets in a Frenchman, do as I did: take a swallow, then forget your full glass on the table.

Of all the false ideas that you can bring with you, the most senseless is the legend of an American indifferent to the things of the mind. You will find in this country a literature and an architecture. A school of painting? I’m not so sure. What I have seen has seemed to me too much influenced by European modernism to be original. But America’s books are among the best of our time. What ought you to read? Among novelists: Ernest Hemingway, — he has the style of a tube of nickeled steel, — John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Glen way Wescott, Michael Gold; or, if you prefer a more classic strain, Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Louis Bromfield, Christopher Morley. I don’t need to mention the most famous: Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser, whom you already know. Among poets: T. S. Eliot, Stephen Benét. Among essayists: Walter Lippmann, Thomas Beer. Among philosophers: Santayana, John Dewey. Among critics: Edmund Wilson, J. W. Krutch. Among dramatists: Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice. I mention them haphazard from memory and perhaps forget the best, but the length of this sketchy list may give you some idea of the riches that await you.

I am not acquainted with the intellectual life of Pittsburgh or Detroit, but I believe that you will find New York one of the cities most exciting to the mind that there are in the world. New York is the ‘clearing house’ for the ideas of the universe. All the important books of every country are translated there. One finds there a public for Virginia Woolf, for André Gide, for Thomas Mann. The book most read in America to-day may be by a Swede; to-morrow it will be by a Frenchman, a Russian.

This universal curiosity is, naturally, not without its dangers. The life of the mind suffers, in the United States, from ills which are those of our epoch; but over there they have taken on a virulent form. The gravest is a swift exhaustion of ideas. It has been said that the American people, as a whole, adopt a scientific idea as they adopt a fashion in footgear. To a certain extent this is true. Freudism, Behaviorism, the humanism of Irving Babbitt, the relativity of Einstein, have successively, and in an elementary form, penetrated the middle classes much more deeply than in Europe. But the American wearies of systems as quickly as he gobbles them up. With him, intellectual fashions are transitory. Because the most brilliant minds of Europe come here to parade their paradoxes, the American brain, blasé, demands that its spiritual viands be highly spiced. The critical mind is lacking, not among the best, but among the masses. You will retort that the masses in Europe are sufficiently destitute of it. That may be, but in France they have common sense not free from impatience, a traditional distrust; in England, a splendid indifference and a profound contempt for ideas, which go flying through the brain and keep the motors of the mind from stalling. In the United States there is a greater freshness of spirit — a more naïve curiosity. All that is congenial, but carries the danger of formidable mistakes.

So, if you wish to make a swift impression upon the crowd in this country, you can do it. Be brilliant, be cynical. Burn what others have worshiped and worship what others have burned. Criticize America savagely. There will be violent reactions; these will enhance your ephemeral glory. The newspapers will quote your words. You will be a celebrity, and, in three months, forgotten. But if you desire, as I hope you do, to bring to these strangers the best that is in you, behave in quite the opposite fashion. Be natural, don’t press your ideas upon them, strive after precise and delicate shades of meaning, as you would if you were addressing the most cultivated and fastidious Frenchman. You will not make a great stir. The reporters, disappointed, not finding in your conversation the material for headlines, will write you up in three lines or not at all. But slowly shy, modest, impartial minds will find you out. There are many such in the United States. They will make you one of themselves. Though you may not be a man of genius, still you can give them what they lack, and what you owe to France: the taste for order in ideas, constructive skill, a long and skillful tradition in sentimental analysis. They will bring to you freshness of mind and a directness of approach to moral and metaphysical questions, as if these questions were quite new. You will show them what it means to be mature. To you they will reveal youth.

You have been told that the American does n’t know how to cat. But all generalizations are untrue. The American cuisine is monotonous (you will eat chicken every evening and ice cream twice a day), but this cuisine is excellent when it is simple. Why complain, in a country where fruit is abundant and fresh, where the morning grapefruit is followed by the midday persimmon; where the botanists, by intricate graftings, have produced a super-vegetable, a melon which they have named ‘honeydew’? In New England, ask for sea food. Boston has her fish, as Marseilles has hers. The clams of New York are tender, and melt in the mouth. In the roadhouses, ask for half a roast chicken and lima beans. Beware of salads. American salads are culinary heresies. In them you will find slices of fresh fruit criminally soaked in oil, cheese and cabbage gone astray, hearts of lettuce so tough that your knife makes no impression on them. The bread, almost always homemade, varies in form and flavor. You will miss the round French loaf, mildly salty, but you will like the rolls peppered with hard and fragrant caraway seeds. To conclude, do not be surprised to find many dishes decorated with strange and irrelevant trimmings. This young people has a taste for ornament keener than its appreciation of the pleasures of the palate.

Dress as you would in Paris. Suits sober and dark in New York and the large cities; tweeds, plus-fours, and golf stockings in the country. At the theatre, in the evening, a dinner coat is less necessary than in London. The roundabout does not offend, nor the light-colored overcoat. In the daytime, all the men assume that air of prosperous mechanics that permits the millionaires their soft collars. The American proletarian wears a soft hat, often a cap. At work he keeps it on his head and slips overalls over his suit. That gives him, in our European eyes, the appearance of an amateur who might by chance have been caught tinkering under his car.

But, you ask me, do not all Americans wear the same costume and the same hat at the same moment? So I have read. It may have been true once. It has not been my experience. I have seen caps, I have seen soft hats, and I have seen young people without hats. At Princeton, they told me of a time when to wear an open shirt collar, after the manner of Shelley or Byron, was a sign of revolt, punished by social ostracism. But these things happened three or four years ago — that is to say, in the far past. In 1930, a student was free to wear what he pleased. There were fashions, — a certain overcoat of beige cashmere, trousers of gray flannel, — but these were not more de rigueur than those of Cambridge or Oxford. Only, the freshman must observe a proper modesty; a dark cap was prescribed for him.

Because the United States is a democratic country, you imagine a life without restraint. This is because you have never studied the manners of primitive peoples. The younger a human group, the more rigid its formalism, because only by severe rules can men be tamed and made to conform to social life. It is in the most ancient aristocracies that we find the freest manners and the most gracious flexibility. In solitude, the pioneer becomes brutal. When he begins to live in society with his fellows, it is necessary to impose upon him a code of manners. The etiquette of Louis XIV was devised for the rude nobility of the Fronde. The formality of pioneers is astonishing.

If you should happen to live, as I have lived, in an American university town, the day after your arrival you will find at your door two hundred cards. The entire faculty calls upon you. Even those who find you at home put down a card on leaving; and you,

in your turn, if you have the strength for it, must return those two hundred calls. An invitation by telephone is rare, and is considered contrary to good usage. If circumstances have made it necessary, it is followed by a letter of excuse. The smallest happenings are pretexts for letters of sympathy or congratulation. An American friend writes to tell you that the dinner, last evening, was pleasant, and that he will cherish a special memory of it. On every occasion people exchange gifts, small, without money value, but which foster friendly feelings. When you are tired and driven, you will find these attentions superfluous. On second thought, you will see how, in this young society, they help to sustain life.

Beware of thinking that, because it is a country without an hereditary nobility, America is without a hierarchy. I know few countries where the etiquette of contempt is so varied. The Anglo-Saxons despise the other races, and these despise one another. The Southerners scorn the Northerners; the Easterners, those of the Middle West. Those who have been in America three hundred years look down on the two-hundred-year-olds, and these again upon the Americans of a century, who in their turn refuse to recognize the new arrivals. In the old families, where the eldest son bears the Christian name of his father (there is always a Cornelius Vanderbilt, a Percy Pyne, as there is always a Corisande among the Gramonts and a Francois among the La Rochefoucaulds), a numeral follows the name. One day we shall be saying John Jacob Astor XVII, as we say Prince Henry XXII of Reuss. At Hollywood the old families are those of the silent films: Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford. They have English butlers, lace tablecloths, a chef in the kitchen, old wines. Charlie Chaplin is the Swann of this obsolescent world, where they speak in whispers, with regret, of the good old times when the screen was dumb.

American snobbery clings to very strange symbols of nobility which would have delighted Marcel Proust. To have a telephone number as low as possible is a social advantage. A new multimillionaire will be ready to pay the employee who distributes the license numbers of automobiles a fancy price to obtain some number in the first hundred, which has been set free by the extinction of a great name. A box at the Metropolitan Opera House has its history, like a seat in the French Academy. The names of the successive incumbents are printed on each programme. At performances given for charity, when all the boxes are for sale, some nouveau riche will think it glorious and flattering to occupy the Astor box, or the box of the Cuttings.

If you want to be happy, refuse yourself to society hostesses, who will devour your time and strength. Choose a few friends. There are, in New York, some delightful and simple homes; flee the others. If, for particular ends, you must storm the town, that is different. Be more snobbish than the snobs. Your hauteur will astonish them; your silence will disquiet them; your caprices will enchant them. These people suffer from too narrow an existence; break the bounds.

You arrive convinced by the tales of your fellow travelers that there is great latitude in morals in America. Be prudent. This is the country in which woman is most rigorously protected. Adultery is rare. Its place is filled by multiple divorce. Young girls, beautiful, often intelligent, have made up their minds to marry. What they call their ‘technique’ is an art of love very different from that of Ovid. It is true that you, as a stranger, will be granted some immunity. The European is desirable as a lover or a friend, not as a husband. He would not be, like the American, at once generous and without jealousy. The marriage of a Frenchman and an American girl is a marriage of two spoiled children — an unstable compound. People here are more simple than with us. Passion does not play so great a rôle. You will be surprised to see how some young man, arriving on the scene with a young girl who, in your eyes, is his, will quietly stand aside and watch while she gives her attention to another. They do not cling, as we do, to those who flee them. It is better to renounce than to suffer.

‘How,’ they said to me, ‘can you picture in your novels men so occupied with women? Is it because your heroes have nothing to do?’

Theirs is a frank naïveté. But if you succeed in rousing one of these glorious creatures, the more unaccustomed she is to that uneasy love of Europe, the deeper her attachment to you will be. The American woman finds slaves; she seeks a master. If you are free, play the part. The stake is worth it.

I should like to speak to you further, of young men and sport, of colleges for young women which are paradise, and of party politics which are hell. But you are off; I can add but a word. You go to the land of timidity; forget not your sympathy. You go to the land of good will; never forget that you have a warm heart. You go to the land of youth; do not stifle your enthusiasm. A people is a mirror in which each traveler contemplates his own image. In America as elsewhere, remember, one finds what one brings. Create for yourself an America of which you may be worthy. That is the only one you will discover.