Et Tu, Mrs. Miniver

Ina flurry of genteel publicity the London Times Literary Supplement not long ago produced a kind of monument to transatlantic misunderstanding: a special number, its first in five years, on what its editors seemed in good faith to think was The American Imagination. “Man’s mind makes shorter work of the Atlantic than Comet or Boeing,” says the Times by way of introduction, in a prose peculiar over here to Bryn Mawr undergraduates and fashion copywriters.

The eighty-four pages that follow this pronunciamento offer ample evidence that the Atlantic is still a long job, man’s mind and BOAC notwithstanding. Most of the twenty eight pieces, all unsigned in the Times tradition, are an indelibly British blend of gross clichés, vapidity, and startling misconceptions about the nature of American experience—one more round in that old Anglo-French game, Understanding America.

JD

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Joan Didion

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Ina flurry of genteel publicity the London Times Literary Supplement not long ago produced a kind of monument to transatlantic misunderstanding: a special number, its first in five years, on what its editors seemed in good faith to think was The American Imagination. “Man’s mind makes shorter work of the Atlantic than Comet or Boeing,” says the Times by way of introduction, in a prose peculiar over here to Bryn Mawr undergraduates and fashion copywriters.

The eighty-four pages that follow this pronunciamento offer ample evidence that the Atlantic is still a long job, man’s mind and BOAC notwithstanding. Most of the twenty eight pieces, all unsigned in the Times tradition, are an indelibly British blend of gross clichés, vapidity, and startling misconceptions about the nature of American experience—one more round in that old Anglo-French game, Understanding America.