Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [222]
It is not for me to agree or disagree with them. After all, they are the Latin America that I went to look for, and discovered, forty years ago, the one Pablo Neruda wrote about in the marvellous baroque poem of poems about his continent, the section ‘The heights of Macchu Picchu’ in his Canto General. It ends with the invocation of the unknown builders of that dead green Inca city, through whose dead mouth the poet wants to speak:
Juan Cortapiedras, hijo de Wiracocha Juan Comefrio, hijo de la estrella verde Juan Piedescalzos, nieto de la turquesa
(John Stonecutter, son of Wiracocha, John Coldmeals, son of the green star, John Barefoot, grandson of the turquoise.)
‘If you want to understand South America,’ they told me before I left Britain, ‘you must go to Macchu Picchu and read the poem there.’ I had not met the great poet then, a plump man whose natural element was not the mountains but the sea, on which his wonderful house still looks out, and who, asked what he wanted to see in London, had only one wish: the Cutty Sark sailing ship at Greenwich, He died of a broken heart a few days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. I did read his poem in Macchu Picchu in 1962, on one of the steep stepped hills, as the sun went down, in an Argentine paperback bought in a Chilean bookshop. Whether it helped me to understand it as a historian, I do not know, but I know what the poet wanted to say and the big-chested, coca-chewing, brown, quiet men and women whom he had in mind, who scrabbled a living in the thin air of the Andean high country where it is harder to be a human being than almost anywhere else between Arctic and Antarctic. When I think of Latin America these are the people who come into my mind. Not only the poet but the historian should give them their due.
22
From FDR to Bush
I
If all intellectuals of my generation had two countries, their own and France, then in the twentieth century all inhabitants of the western world, and eventually all city dwellers anywhere on the globe, lived mentally in two countries, their own and the USA. After the First World War no literate person anywhere failed to recognize the words ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Coca-Cola’, and very few illiterates could fail to make some contact with their products. America did not have to be discovered: it was part of our existence.
And yet, what most people knew of America was not the country itself, but a set of images mediated essentially by its arts. Until well after the Second World War relatively few people from outside the USA actually travelled there, unless as immigrants, and from the early 1920s to the 1970s US government policy made immigration extremely difficult. I did not step on its shores myself until 1960. We met North Americans elsewhere. I suppose my first real contact with what was not yet called ‘Middle America’ was when the Rotarians chose to hold their international convention in Vienna in 1928 and I, as a bilingual boy, was mobilized as an interpreter. I remember nothing about it, except the lobby of a hotel on the Ring containing herds of men dressed in brighter shirts than Vienna was used to, a kind anaesthetist from somewhere in the Midwest who subsequently sent me stamps for my collection, and puzzling about what exactly Rotary was supposed to be for. The official explanation (‘Service’) seemed to me to be short of content.
I find it hard to reconstruct the image of the USA formed by an anglophone continental boy before the 1930s. Oddly enough – for my uncle actually worked for a Hollywood company – for me it did not come from Hollywood films. The sort of Tom Mix Westerns we saw hardly counted, since it seemed obvious even to children