The Other Side

DISCOVERY OF EUROPE (743 pp.)--Edited by Philip Rahv--Houghton Mifflin ($5).

Some of the sharpest observation and writing about Europe has been done by U.S. visitors--diplomatic, literary or merely attentive to the ancestral scene. This big, intelligently edited book contains a selection of the best of it, from Benjamin Franklin to Gertrude Stein.

One striking conclusion is that it has been a one-sided love affair. Americans have always been under Europe's spell, but Europeans have not felt a similar fascination for the U.S. The attraction of Europe for U.S. travelers grew deeper during the first century and a half of independence, in spite of the contrary pull exerted on. the U.S. mind by the frontier, the West of "democracy, profanity, work and action."

"Nearly a hundred years ago," says

Editor Philip Rahv, "Margaret Fuller listed the Americans in Europe under three headings: the servile, the conceited, and the thinking Americans." The third class naturally did the best writing, or most of it, but there is a touch of the first in some of Washington Irving's reverent rhetoric about Old England, a cheerful exploitation of the second in excerpts from Mark Twain's bumptious Innocents Abroad. Editor Rahv believes that thinking Americans who are also artists will live at home, not in Europe, in the future.

"World War II has put an end both to the theory and practice of expatriation, for in a Europe shaken loose from its old foundations and chaotically moving toward a new and unknown future, there is plainly no room for Americans seeking to recapture the past or to discover a secure basis for the creative life."

Letters Home. Comparatively few of Editor Rahv's reports, however, were written by true expatriates. Most were simply travelers, U.S. writers and artists, who in writing home told as much about themselves as about Europe. Samples: P: "Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous; but keep this to yourself, or I shall be thought more than half deficient in understanding and taste."--Abigail Adams, 1786. P: "I have learned early to understand that wherever there is an Englishman in the question, it behooves an American to be reserved, punctilious and sometimes stubborn."--James Fenimore Cooper, 1826. P: "This English tenacity is in strong contrast with our facility. The facile American sheds his Puritanism when he leaves Cape Cod, runs into all English and French vices with great zest, and is neither Unitarian, nor Calvinist, nor Catholic, nor stands for any known thought or thing. . . ."--Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1848. P: "With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam engine [the conceited American.] seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are young and alive. . . ." --Margaret Fuller, 1847. P:"We have still an unspeakable yearning towards England. ... It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange people [the English], to compel us to be a great nation in our own right.. . ." --Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1863. P: "Rome is simply the most satisfying lake of picturesqueness and guilty suggestiveness known to this child. . . . Just a FEAST for the eye . . . the inconceivably corrupted, besmeared and ulcerated surfaces, and black and cavernous glimpses of interiors, have no suggestions save of moral horror. . . . Nevertheless the sight of them delights."--William James, 1900. P:" 'So you've been over in Russia?' said Bernard Baruch, and I answered very literally, 'I have been over into the future [in 1919] and it works.' This was in Jo Davidson's studio, where Mr. Baruch was sitting for a portrait bust."--Lincoln Stef" fens, 1931.

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