[...] The stories that I am interested in narrating are always stories about a search for human completeness, integration, to be achieved through trials that are both practical and moral at the same time, and that constitute something above and beyond all the alienation and division that is imposed on contemporary man. This is where any poetic and moral unity in my work should be sought.

[...] But this Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith is some place: it is a pity I am now too old, but something your children should do first thing is to work with them for a while to learn the trade (there is an enormous students’ office): send them for an apprenticeship with Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, then they can learn philosophy, music, and all the rest, but first of all a man has to know how to work Wall Street. They also do a huge amount of propaganda for investments, with brochures based on the principle that money breeds money, with maxims about money by the great philosophers, and this propaganda for the cult of money is constant in America: if by chance a generation grows up that does not put money above all else, America will go up in smoke.

[...] We discuss the sad state of American literature, which is stifled by commercial demands: if you don’t write as the New Yorker demands, you don’t get published. Purdy published his first book of short stories at his own expense, then he was discovered in England by Edith Sitwell, and subsequently Farrar Straus published his work, but he does not even know Mrs Cudahy, and the critics don’t understand him, though the book is, very slowly, managing to sell. There are no magazines that publish short stories, no groups of writers, or at least he does not belong to any group. He gives me a list of good novels, but they are nearly all unpublished works which have not been able to find a publisher. Good literature in America is clandestine, lies in unknown authors’ drawers, and only occasionally someone emerges from the gloom breaking through the leaden cloak of commercial production. I would like to talk about capitalism and socialism, but Purdy certainly would not understand me; no one here knows or even suspects that socialism exists, capitalism wraps itself round and permeates everything, and its antithesis is nothing but a meagre, childish claim to a spiritual dimension, devoid of any coherent line or prospects. Unlike Soviet society, where the totalitarian unity of society is totally based on the constant awareness of its enemies, of its antithesis, here we are in a totalitarian structure of a medieval kind, based on the fact that no alternative exists nor even any awareness of the possibility of an alternative other than that of individualist escapism.

[...] anyway this woman, who was young and Jewish but with a real feeling for nature, says a propos of The Baron in the Trees that she loves ‘to ride’, but never ‘rides’ because her husband never takes her, but that I must certainly know how to ‘ride’ well. I tell her that I have never been on a horse in my life, so we fix up to meet again the next day and they also lent me a pair of little Mexican riding boots. It is clear that this is ‘the right way of approach to America’, because one has to go through all the means of communication in historical sequence and eventually I will arrive at the Cadillac.

[...] On the 23rd IBM in New York put at my disposal a Cadillac with a chauffeur and a technical expert from Turin to be my guide at Poughkeepsie, up in Westchester where IBM’s huge factory is. This is a factory with 10, 000 employees, like a medieval city, and in front of it is a huge carpark for 4, 000 cars (these immense carparks full of grey and blue cars, that you see as soon as you leave New York, are one of the things that give you the most authentic feeling of America). I am received by a group of managers who explain to me first the way the whole organization is structured, and one of the first things they tell me is that there is no trade union. Naturally I ask why; ‘They don’t need them’ is their answer. In fact they are all paid better here than elsewhere, the paternalism is quite open, and the colour portrait of Mr Watson hangs everywhere; I will later learn that on Mr Watson’s birthday the employees were invited to the party with a cyclostyled letter explaining that if they did not have a car to go to the party with their wives, a car supplied by the management would come to fetch them at such and such a time; if the wife did not have an evening-dress the management would provide her with one, and a baby-sitter service was also assured for that evening, and at table number such and such places numbered such and such were booked for them, and when Mr Watson came in they all had to stand and sing the following song to the famous tune, etc., and there on the letter were the words of a song in honour of Mr Watson. [...]

Chicago, 21 January

I have spent ten days between Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago and in these few days I have had more of a sense of America than in the two months I spent in New York. More sense of America in that I continually found myself saying: yes, this is the real America.

The most typical image of an American town is that of streets flanked by places selling used cars, enormous lots full of white, sky-blue or pale-green cars lined up beneath festoons of little coloured flags, billboards showing not the price but the savings (you can easily get a car for a hundred and even for fifty dollars), and these car-dealers go on sometimes for miles, a bit like a horse-fair.

But Where Is the City?

The truth is that you can go around by car for hours and not find what should be the city centre; in places like Cleveland the city tends to disappear, spreading out across an area that is as large as one of our provinces. There is still a downtown, that is to say a centre, but it is only a centre with offices. The middle classes live in avenues of small two-storey houses that are all the same, even though no two are alike, with a few metres of green lawn in front and a garage for three or four cars depending on the number of adults in the family. You cannot go anywhere without a car, because there is nowhere to go. Every now and again, at a crossroads in these avenues, there is a shopping-centre for doing the shopping. The middle classes never leave this zone, the children grow up without knowing anything except this world populated by small, well-off families like their own, who all have to change their car once a year because if they have last year’s model they lose face with their neighbours. The man goes out every morning to work and returns at 5 p.m., puts on his slippers and watches TV.

American Poverty

has a particular colour which I have now learnt to recognize: it is the burnt red colour of brick buildings or the faded colour of wooden houses which have become slums. In New York poverty seems to belong only to the most recent arrivals, and is something equivalent to a period of waiting; and it would not even seem right that any Puerto Rican should become instantly well-off just because he has landed in New York. In the industrial cities it is clear that the poverty of the urban masses is an essential part of the system, and often it is a poverty which has a European look: black houses which are little more than hovels, old men pushing handcarts (!) full of bits of wood recovered from slums that have been demolished. Of course there is the constant though slow progress of the various social strata as they move up the ladder of well-being, but new groups always take their place at the bottom. And the great vital resource of America, mobility, constant movement, is tending to decrease. The depression of ’58 was a huge setback for Detroit and since then Ford have been working in six-month shifts per year, resulting in a permanent state of semi-unemployment; the workers who have been there longest, those with a certain number of years of seniority, have priority over the others in being taken back on; that is, they have their job guaranteed, something new in the general lack of stability in American life, where the proletariat has always provided temporary labour.

The Steel Crisis

is on. The famous strike was caused initially by the industrialists who needed to keep prices high even though stocks were at an all-time high. Probably before the year is out the American economy will have to face, once the elections are over, a serious recession. According to certain left-wing trade-unionists (in Chicago I was moving mostly in those circles) the American economy, caught as it is in a vicious circle of sales on credit and forced consumption, appears to be very fragile, hanging by a thread.

Chicago

is the genuine big American city: productive, violent, tough. Here the social classes face each other like enemy forces, the wealthy people in the strip of skyscrapers along the magnificent lake-shore, and immediately beyond them is the vast inferno of the poor neighbourhoods. You sense that here the blood has drained into the pavements, the blood of the Haymarket martyrs (the German anarchists to whom a very beautiful illustrated book has been devoted, written by the then chief of police), the blood of industrial accidents which helped build Chicago’s industries, the blood of the gangsters. In the days when I was there, the famous police corruption case was discovered, which I think even the Italian newspapers mentioned. I would like to stay longer in Chicago which deserves to be understood in all its ugliness and beauty, but even the cold there is nasty, the local woman I have made friends with is trivial and not very chic (so, she’s fine for Chicago), and I fly off for California.

Like nearly every young writer, Mark Harris (we read but rejected his comic novel Wake Up, Stupid months ago) teaches creative writing in a college, the State College of SFrancisco. What he is specifically expert at is baseball: he has three novels on baseball. When he speaks about American literature, of the difficulty of writing literature in a society which is so prosperous and where the problems still have to be discovered, he says some not unintelligent things. But he is totally devoid of any information about European literatures, of any inkling of what has happened and is happening across the Atlantic. Not that he is totally without interest: he listens in astonishment to even the most obvious information you give him. He does not know that there was a civil war in Spain. (He will certainly have read Hemingway, but in the way that we read about wars between maharajahs in the South Seas.) The philosophy professor in the same college, whom I did not meet but Meged did, knows about only one philosopher: Wittgenstein. Of Hegel’s philosophy he knows only that it is metaphysical and that it is not worth his while bothering about it, while of Heidegger and Sartre he says that they are essayists not philosophers.