But this period of smug selfcongratulation was soon succeeded by a strange nostalgia which took the form of romanticizing the lost land. American books were reprinted in vast quantities in the Englishspeaking nations and translated anew in other countries. American movies were revived and imitated. Fashionable speech was powdered with what were conceived to be Yankee expressions and a southern drawl was assiduously cultivated.
Bestselling historical novels were laid in the United States and popular operas were written about Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson. Men told their growing sons to work hard, for now there was left no land of opportunity to which they could emigrate, no country where they could become rich overnight with little effort. Instead of fairytales children demanded stories of fortyniners and the Wedding of the Rails; and on the streets of Bombay and Cairo urchins, probably quite unaware of the memorial gesture, could be heard whistling Casey Jones.
But handinhand with this newfound romantic love went a completely practical attitude toward those Americans still existing in the flesh. The earliest expatriates, being generally men of substance, were well received. The thousands who had crossed by small boats from Canada to Greenland and from Greenland to Iceland to Europe were by definition in a different category and found the quota system their fathers and grandfathers had devised used to deny their own entrance.
They were as bewildered and hurt as children that any nation could be at once so shortsighted and so heartless as to bar homeless wanderers. We bring you knowledge and skills and our own need, they said in effect, we will be an asset to your country if you admit us. The Americans could not understand; they themselves had been fair to all and only kept out undesirable immigrants.
Gradually the world geared itself to a slower tempo. The gogetter followed the brontosaurus to extinction, and we Americans with the foresight to carry on our businesses from new bases profited by the unAmerican backwardness of our competitors. At this time I daresay I was among the hundred most important figures of the world. In the marketing and packaging of our original products I had been forced to acquire papermills and large interests in aluminum and steel; from there the progression to tinmines and rollingmills, to coalfields and railroads, to shippinglines and machineshops was not far. Consolidated Pemmican, once the center of my business existence, was now but a minor point on its periphery. I expanded horizontally and vertically, delighted to show my competitors that Americans, even when deprived of America, were not robbed of the traditional American enterprise.
68. It was at this time, many months after we had given up all hope of hearing from Joe again, that General Thario received a longdelayed package from his son. It contained the third movement of the symphony and a covering letter:
"Dear Father—Stuart Thario—General— I shall not finish this letter tonight; it will be sent with as much of the First Symphony as makes a worthy essence when it goes. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but there is a place (perhaps not in life, but somewhere) for the imperfect, for the incomplete. The great and small alike achieve fulfillment, satisfaction—must this be a ruthless denial of all between?
"I have always despised musicologists, makers of programnotes, little men who tell you the opening chords of Opus 67 describe Fate Knocking at the Door or the call of the yellowhammer. A child draws a picture and writes on it, 'This is a donkey,' and when grown proves it to be a selfportrait by translating the Jupiter Symphony into words. Having said this, let me stultify myself—but for private ears alone—as a bit of personal history, not an explanation to be appended to the score.
"I started out to express in terms of strings and winds the emotions roused in me by the sight and thoughts of the Grass, much as LvB took a mistaken idealization of his youth as a startingpoint for Opus 55; but just as no man is an island, so no theme stands alone. There is a cord binding the lesser to the greater; a mystic union between all things. The Grass is not an entity, but an aspect. I thought I was writing about my country, conceived of myself in a reversed snobbishness, a haughty humility, a proud abasement, as a sort of superior Smetana. (Did you know that as a boy I dreamed of the day when I should receive my commission as second lieutenant?)
Boston, Massachusetts