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By Root 1588 0

secure for the moment from the constant need of showbiz performers to put on an act in public, combined the quiet confidence of the soul close to Jesus with that of the successful pro. They were people such as ‘Lord Buckley’, then in the last months of his life, a plummy-voiced combination of Victorian circus ringmaster, hipster and reciter of Bible and Shakespeare in flawless black street-corner language, who played the two a.m. set at the Gate of Horn. They were people such as Bill Randle of Cleveland, who had introduced Elvis Presley to northern audiences, disc jockey by profession, amateur scholar of radio history, Indians and other Americana by vocation. (Why Cleveland, that endless strip along Lake Erie, has played such a large part in the promotion of rock and roll, still puzzles me.) The least one can say is that the America I got to know through such men and women was not boring.

The academic America which framed my professional experience of the USA over forty years was nothing like as good an introduction to the country, if only because the lives of university teachers, villagers within their small national and global villages, are pretty much alike in most developed countries, and so are the lives of students. American academics establish relationships with newcomers with great ease, since geographical mobility is built into their career structure, as, indeed, it is into the local lifestyle. The USA remains a country of men and women who change places, work and relationships to a far greater degree than elsewhere. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions universities were self-contained communities attached to small and medium-sized cities not much concerned with academic affairs, at least until the last third of the century, when it was discovered that the information revolution had turned universities into major generators of economic wealth and technical progress. They were communities into which immigrants used to university life could be easily, if superficially, integrated, provided they spoke enough English, which by the 1970s had become the usual international second language. An Indian physicist at Cornell, brother of a former student at Cambridge, told me: ‘If I were to take a chair in Britain, I would always feel a foreigner. I don’t feel a foreigner here, because in a sense everyone is a foreigner.’ Permanent communities largely composed of transients develop patterns of instant sociability, neighbourliness and everyday mutual help, but, as communities, do not tend to throw much light on what happens outside.

Looking back on forty years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: to know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though Marlene joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the USA teaching, reading in its marvellous libraries, writing or having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa Monica, but what I learned from personal acquaintance with America was acquired in the course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America , the best book ever written about the USA, was based on a journey of not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the USA the same as his.

III

If written today, de Tocqueville’s book would certainly be attacked as anti-American, since much of what he said about the USA was critical. Ever since it was founded, the USA has been a subject of attraction and fascination for the rest of the world, but also of detraction and disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the Cold War that people’s attitude to the USA has been judged essentially in terms of approval or disapproval, and