How does one speak of it—of “America,” that is? To begin with, there is essentially no “it.” America, delocalized, a geographical convenience, America as it, was the invention of the great anonymizers—admen, speculators, road-engineers, builders of homesites and filling stations. This it has been growing of late, has filled in the foreground and is threatening all that lies beyond. But essentially it is not America, but the American’s way of escaping from the identity of his continent—from local America.
In local America one may look for evidence of those several Americas we are in danger of losing and that variety of human types we shall lose with them. For as certainly as we begin to lose the spirit of a place we begin to lose the spirit of its people. The shapeless suburbia that is replacing city, small town and village throughout the states creates the mould for a certain kind of human being, as standardized as his setting. And it is difficult to see what the writer is to do with such a setting. Novels about it seem as flat as the reality. They lack social stiffening, solidity and texture. Confronted by a world of standardized dreariness, the artist has often retreated inwards. A young abstract expressionist explained to me that he aimed “to escape the limitations of visual reality.” Looking at the face of his native American city, I saw what he meant. The escape has extended into literature. Where, for example, is the South of Southern Gothic? Certainly not in the United States. “Where are the deserted parks of Wallace Stevens’ poetry? They are in the France of Paul Verlaine. America, as men have made it, too frequently fails to nourish the eye, the spirit, the imagination.
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