Main Street Girdles the Globe

And Babbitt Most Certainly Lives in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, and Vladivostok

DEEMS TAYLOR

IT was my lot recently to spend considerable time in a medium-sized city that was a striking example of the standardized, provincial minded community described so mercilessly in Main Street. Its inhabitants are a typical small town lot. They go to bed, on the average, between ten-thirty and eleven, and get up at seven. The town boasts a subway, into which such citizens as can find no standing-room on the trolley cars descend, packing themselves in sardine-wise on their way to business. There is a rather widespread suburban section consisting of cheap and badly built villas and cottages, which during the early morning hours disgorge an army of male commuters who are perpetually dissatisfied with the train service, and whose lives, outside business hours, seem to be spent in digging and watering their small gardens and microscopic lawns.

There are several restaurants in town, whose culinary standards are rather above the average, but whose business methods are still those of the old-fashioned country hotel. Except for a stray lunchroom or two, the "meals at all hours" system of the metropolitan centres is still unknown. Luncheon is served at lunch time, and dinner is served at dinner time, and God help the starving transient who tries to get a bite between meals. As a consequence of this condition, everybody goes to lunch at the same hour, including even the storekeepers, who not only firmly close their emporia between the hours of twelvethirty and two, but lock the doors and take the doorknobs with them—a refinement of provincial cautiousness that I had never before encountered.

THERE are several newspapers published locally, none of them containing more than six pages and all without exception badly printed, badly edited, full of patent medicine advertising, and so corrupt that their venality is no longer even discussed. These sheets are, as might be expected, largely given over to local news and gossip, sports, and heartthrob serials. It must be said, however, in justice to the local editors, that they give full satisfaction to their subscribers, who know almost nothing about world affairs and care less, and whose favourite reading matter is the latest murder trial or divorce suit.

The town supports—or, rather, tolerates— a symphony orchestra, which is praised regularly by the local newspaper scribes, is religiously shunned by the more solvent portion of the population, and escapes starvation by playing matinees at one of the local movie houses—of which latter, need one add, there are a score or so.

The American passion for official regulation of private enterprise goes to rather extraordinary lengths in this city. Hotels and restaurants are forbidden by law to deal in tobacco, cigarettes, and even matches, all of which can be bought only at certain officially designated tobacco stores. These shops are the only places where one may buy playing cards and—outside the local postoffice—postage stamps. Obviously, the post of tobacco dealer being a political appointment, these jobs are valuable party plums, and the politicians who control this patronage make full use of it to feather their own nests. One of the town "blue-laws" imposes a tax upon every ounce of food-stuffs and every gallon of gasoline that enters the city limits. An attempt to enforce this law to the letter last winter resulted in a riot that made it necessary to call out the police reserves.

In general, however, the citizenry are a docile crowd, who take what the politicians and big business-men hand them, obey laws that they have little hand in making, vote for candidates that are hand-picked for them, smoke Camels, Chesterfields, and Lucky Strikes, shave with Gillette razors, use quantities of Colgate's tooth paste, and drink too many cocktails before dinner.

I refer, of course, to the city of Paris.

THE fact of the matter is, this particular American is getting frightfully bored with the entire modern school of critical writing, domestic and imported, which, having discovered that certain provincial and undesirable habits of thought and living are peculiarly American, seems recently to have tried discovering, (a) that all provincial habits of thought and living are exclusively American and (b) all peculiarly American habits of thought and living are provincial and undesirable. When I read Mr. Luc Durtain's novel, Hollywood De passe (Prix de Renaissance, 1928), I suspect, even before I discover, that Mr. Durtain's knowledge of American life and customs is based upon a three weeks' visit to his brother-in-law in Los Angeles, plus a good solid background of French provincialism (in which, as in so many other matters, France leads the world); and when I read certain of the remarks that Mr. Lewis, Mr. Nathan, and Mr. Mencken have to make regarding the minds and deeds of the American bourgeoisie, I wonder why, on their last trip to Europe, they left their eyes and ears at home.

The average literary indictment of American middle-class civilization is simply no more nor less than an indictment of middleclass civilization, the adjective "American" being gratuitous and superfluous. Middleclass people are pretty terrible, en masse, anywhere in the world, and if ours seem particularly appalling, it is only because there are so many of them, and they travel so much, and thus get themselves seen. I wish some of our eagle-eyed observers of the American scene, after they have stifled their shrieks of laughter over the average dull American tourist in Europe, would try to imagine the same number of dull German or English or French or Italian tourists of the corresponding class turned loose in America. Or, if that is too much of a strain, let them make a hasty run over to Paris some early spring and eavesdrop the remarks of a party of French and German provincials doing the Pantheon and the Louvre.

I do not mean that there are not a great many things wrong with America. There are, and so many of them that life in his native land frequently becomes such a burden as to send many an American fleeing to Europe in search of a few Great Open Spaces. When he gets there, he frequently discovers that most of the things the matter with America are the matter with the world, or else that Europe has a different but equally numerous set of ailments.

One of the worst things the matter with us is our commercial-mindedness. Not only do our native authors rub that in, but every British and Continental paper runs a regular weekly cartoon showing a corpulent Uncle Sam grinding the face of an emaciated (Marianne, John Bull, Germania, Italia, Czecho-Slovakia, Russia, Jugo-Slavia, or what have you?) and saying something hypocritical about a dollar. I have not travelled extensively in Europe, but I have recent and extravagantly acquired evidence that if the average American thinks more about money than the average Frenchman or Italian he must have discovered a twenty-eight hour day. Roughly and unfairly speaking, I should say that the American thinks constantly of earning money, the Italian of extracting it, and the Frenchman of saving it.

WHEN the original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland was recently sold to an American for an enormous sum, the London Times carried one of those Times editorials, saying a great many things calculated to wound (with a dull instrument) the Yankee vandals, thieves, yeggs, highwaymen and grave-robbers who were despoiling England of her choicest art treasures. From the Times' tone, you would have thought that the American had struck Alice's owner over the head with a piece of lead pipe and fled in a waiting taxicab. I could not help wondering why the Times had nothing to say regarding the English ditto ditto ditto who had sold the manuscript. Whenever an American buys a chateau or a Watteau, France goes on about it as though the masterpiece had been acquired by Napoleon's methods of acquiring the bronze horses from St. Mark's. European indictments of American spoil-hunting seem always based, oddly enough, upon the assumption that if you only offer enough money to any high-souled, idealistic European, he will, of course, sell. He has to, apparently.

We are also, I hear, singularly and completely inartistic. There is hardly room here to go into that question at length and in detail. One might, however, ask a few questions. How about American painting? Is it better or worse than contemporary French painting? (If you saw this year's Salon, no fair answering.) Is it worse than English painting or Italian painting? Is American sculpture good or bad, judged by the standards of the world's output? Have you seen most of the French war monuments? The English? The German? The Italian?

Continued on page 116

Continued from page 70

The American theatre? Compare it, without smiling, with the French theatre. Compare it, without giggling, with the English theatre. Compare it, in fact, with any in the world. Does it hold a respectable rank, or not?

Is contemporary American literature much worse than contemporary British and Continental literature? Granted America's musical sterility, name two French, English, German, Spanish and Italian composers under forty who give evidence of being better than second-rate.

What about American architecture? In what country has originated the only apparently viable new school of architecture since the sixteenth century? Did you ever see a typical French suburban villa or a Paris office building? Did you ever see a modern Italian country home or a modern Italian apartment house? Compare American domestic architecture with any except possibly English, and American factory and office architecture with any in the world.

But our worst crime, to read our domestic vivisectors, is excessive standardization. Not only is our thought standardized and regimented —compared, I suppose, with the intellectual anarchy of the average French high-school history or the London Times or one of Mussolini's speeches —but, as Sinclair Lewis long ago pointed out in Babbitt, we eat the same foods, shave with trade-marked razors, drive standardized automobiles, brush our teeth with advertised tooth paste, bathe in regimented bathtubs. We are rapidly reducing domestic life to a science, a science that leaves no more room for individual vagaries of personal taste than, say, concrete mixing.

But God bless my soul, why on earth shouldn't we standardize such things? Domestic life is largely occupied with handling utensils and objects that are, in the last analysis, instruments of precision, and such being the case, I see no aesthetic crime involved in their being precise. When Mr. Lewis pillories Babbitt for shaving with a trade-marked safety razor he carries on about it as though shaving were an art that was being ruined by machinery. Shaving is—if anything but a nuisance—a science, and the more rigidly standardized and mechanized it becomes, the better. You could get a better shave, they say, with the oldfashioned hand-forged straight razor. I don't know. I tried to shave only once with an old-fashioned razor, and all I got was a bad case of mayhem. I do know, though, that the modern safety razor takes the beard off, and that its standardized blades are always the same shape and size, and always sharp. And the fact that it carries Mr. Gillette's trade mark, or Mr. Gem's, is offset for me by the fact that I can get blades for it in England, France, Germany, Italy, and points east.

The American automobile is made, grossly, and commercially, by machinery, instead of being hand-finished, like its foreign brother. On the other hand, when something breaks on an American automobile (and it breaks no sooner than on a foreign automobile) you can go into an accessories shop and pointing to a duplicate part, say coarsely, "gimme that." And that duplicate part, being machine-made, will fit your car down to the thousandth part of an inch. When your foreign car breaks, you send it to the factory and wait four years until they hand-hew another part, and fit it.

The roars of laughter over the American bathroom! For some reason, nothing seems so screamingly funny to a European as the fact that an American family in Europe will actually pay to have a whole bathroom to itself, and that in America some houses have two and even three bathrooms, and sometimes even one for the servants. What's so funny about that? Why shouldn't we scrub ourselves ever so privately, if we can afford it? If we like cleansed servants, rather than unwashed ones, why shouldn't we have them? Is there any particular virtue in the fact that the Englishman's bathtub has to be filled by hand, and that the Frenchman's bathtub has to have hitched to it an alleged automatic gas water heater that is clumsy, hideous, and inefficient, and blows up every other week?

Instead of making faces at our standardized and perfected instruments of household equipment, our commentators might better be calling attention to a fact that will be universally recognized about three centuries hence, namely, that the American mechanization of domestic routine is one of the twentieth century's outstanding contributions to civilization. There are times when we may appear to be a bit over preoccupied with our septic tanks and garbage incinerators and electric dishwashers and vacuum cleaners and oil-burning furnaces and tooth pastes and shaving creams and safety razors and typewriters and bathtubs and vegetable sinks and concealed radiators and automatic toasters and electric percolators. For all our conveniences we may not yet seem to have caught the trick of living. Nevertheless, I believe in us, and profoundly. For at least we are comfortable. And a comfortable man is halfway on the road to being a civilized one. The time may yet come when Europe will stop laughing and begin installing a few vacuum cleaners and Arcolas of its own.