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By Root 1680 0

Geography had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least of these cultural peculiarities is the USA’s own sense of its strangeness (‘Only in America …’), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The question which preoccupies so many US historians of their own country, namely ‘What does it mean to be American?’, is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries. Neither national nor personal identity seemed as problematic to visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s, even those of complex central European cultural background, as they seemed in local academic discussions. ‘What is this identity crisis they are all talking about?’ Marlene asked me after one of them. She had never heard the term before we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.

Foreign academics who discovered the USA in the 1960s were probably more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today, for so many of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of US culture. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville’s day, not the passion for egalitarianism but an individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian though curiously legalistic anarchism, has become the core of the value system in the USA. What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors, which may account for the – by our standards – everyday crudeness, even brutality with which power is used in and by the USA to establish who can command whom.

It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country, in ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states simply were not with their own. American reality was and remains the overwhelming subject of the creative arts in the USA. The dream of somehow encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write ‘the great English novel’ or ‘the great French novel’, but authors in the US still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at ‘ the great American novel’, even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually, the man who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but an apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power, of whose significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol’s have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the USA, from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual arts tradition of the old world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of the USA to seize the totality of their country, Warhol’s vision is not that of the successful pursuit of happiness, ‘the American dream’ of American political jargon and psychobabble.

To what extent has the US changed in my lifetime, or at least in the forty-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we are constantly told, is not America and as Auden said, even those who could never be Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes to the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who in her twelve years in the city has never found it necessary to learn English. Like other New Yorkers Marlene and I would give tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the last time they had landed at JFK and where to eat this year, though (apart from a party or two) unlike the permanently resident friends – the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the Katznelsons,