Pompey’s Head and the Middle Class Hero

The American residing in Europe seems always to be confronted with the perennial attempt to sum up America in a word. The word used to be gangsters or skyscrapers; today it is often McCarthyism.

This insistence on reducing the irreducible to an easily digestible quantity has changed since the war in at least one major respect. The shift in the nature of European misconceptions about the United States has been accompanied by a shift in the status of those holding them, from the working classes to the “educated” classes. After a while one begins to wish that the latter had ready access not just to Communist falsification, or to Hollywood movies, or even to Faulkner, Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett, but to some of the popu...