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America the Beautiful:
The Humanist in the Bathtub
- Abstract
A visiting Existentialist wanted recently to be taken to dinner at a really American place. This proposal, natural enough in a tourist, disclosed a situation thoroughly unnatural. Unless the visiting lady’s object was suffering, there was no way of satisfying her demand. Sukiyaki joints, chop suey joints, Italian table d’hôte places, French provincial restaurants with the menu written on a slate, Irish chophouses, and Jewish delicatessens came abundantly to mind, but these were not what the lady wanted. Schrafft’s or the Automat would have answered, yet to take her there would have been to turn oneself into a tourist and to present America as a spectacle, a New Yorker cartoon or a savage drawing in the New Masses. It was the beginning of an evening of humiliations. The visitor was lively and eager; her mind lay open and orderly, like a notebook ready for impressions. It was not long, however, before she shut it up with a snap. We had no recommendations to make to her. With movies, plays, current books, it was the same story as with the restaurants—Open City, Les Enfants du Paradis, Oscar Wilde, a reprint of Henry James were paté de maison to this lady who wanted the definitive flapjack. She did not believe us when we said that there were no good Hollywood movies, no good Broadway plays—only curios; she was merely confirmed in her impression that American intellectuals were “negative.”
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