American Perspective; 3 & 4; Innocents Abroad; The International American Girl

OK. Hello! Oh, this is American perspective.

We've been talking for the last couple of weeks about American character, how it is reflected in what it sees in Europe, the geography, the people, the literature. For instance, here is an American commenting about the copious of paintings who sit always all day in front of great paintings in the museums of Europe. As usual, I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to the original. That is, to my inexperienced eye. Wherever you find a Raphael, a Rubens, a Michelangelo, a Karachi, or a Da Vinci, and we see them every day, you find artists copying them. And the copies are always the handsomest. Maybe the originals were handsome when they were new, but they are not now. Well, I should say that here is American materialism and progress at its most unenlightened.

Or, for instance, look at this picture over here. It is, as you no doubt, recognized the Baldicino in St. Peter's in Rome. It stands over what is supposed to be, the grave of St. Peter himself. And thus, it stands at the very center of the Roman Catholic Church. The Baldicino itself was designed and executed by the great barrel sculptor and architect Bernini. It's one of his masterpieces. It is thus described by the man I want to talk about today. Away down toward the far end of the church, I thought it was really clear at the far end, but discovered afterwards that it was in the center under the dome, stood the thing they called the Baldicino, a great bronze pyramidal framework like that which upholds a mosquito bar. It only looked like a considerably magnified bedstead,

nothing more. Yet I knew it was a good deal more than half as high as Niagara Falls. Well, here, obviously, I think we're dealing with a man who takes no nonsense from Europe, who takes his bases of comparison with him. His name, Samuel Langhorn Clemons. I'd like to harangue about his life for a minute. He was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, but when he was only four years old, he went with his family to Hannibal, which, as you know, is the St. Peter'sburg of one of his great books, Tom Sawyer. When he was only 12 years old, his father died, young Sam quit school, and went to work in a printer's office. In the 19th century, a printer's office was a good place to get an education because it contained great number of books. In 1856, he became a pilot on the Mississippi, and he himself said many times that this was one

of the finest disciplines in his life. He results some years later, as you know, in a book called Life on the Mississippi, which is thought by some people, including me, to be the finest thing he ever wrote. When the Civil War broke out, he was, for a very short time, a member of a group of Confederate volunteers, but his brother, his older brother, Orian, was then appointed secretary to the state of Nevada, and Mark went along, or Sam went along. He paid the expenses of the trip, it's a matter of fact. In 1862, he officially, not officially, but he adopted the name Mark Twain, which he kept for his writings for the rest of his life. It's about this time, incidentally, that he was working for the Virginia City territorial enterprise. He was already something of a frontier humorist, and certainly an egalitarian. As you know, this newspaper today is run by Lucius Bebe. I'm sure there's something symbolic about this,

but I don't really know what it is. In 1865, he wrote the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, and with it, he gained his first celebrity. In 1867, he took the trip, which was to result in 1869, in his first great literary success, Innocence Subroad. In 1870, he married Olivia Langdon, and of course it's no news to anyone that from this time until his death in 1910, he was not only a famous writer, but most of the time, he was a great one. He wrote a number of travel books, Innocence Abroad is won, then he wrote the tramp abroad, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, and following the equator. He made at least 12 trips to Europe, and at one time he was an expatriate for almost nine years. The subtitle of the Innocence Abroad is, or the New Pilgrims Progress.

The background of it is something like this. In 1867, for the first time, a steamship company decided to send a chartered steamer to the Mediterranean and to the Far East. Simply as an excursion boat, purely a pleasure trip. Cost, $1250 a ticket, time, five months, number of passengers, 67. Now the list of passengers was a good deal more distinguished before sailing than at the time of sailing, or at least a little more distinguished. Originally, General William Sherman was supposed to have gone, but he couldn't make it, and also Henry Ward Beecher was supposed to have gone. Of course Beecher, by this time, was more notorious than notable, having his difficulties with Mr. Tilton over Mrs. Tilton. But Mark Twain was there when the ship sailed.

The name of the ship, incidentally, was the Quaker City. He was there as the special correspondent of the Altau California, and the not so special correspondence correspondence, I'm sorry, of the New York Tribune. The trip, as I said, lasted for five months. During this time, Mark Rode and sent to the Altau Californian 53 letters, and he sent six to the New York Tribune. Average length, 4,000 words, total output, 250,000 words. Average per day, 1,500 words. I mentioned these statistics, not simply to add something up, but to show that this could hardly have been entirely a pleasure trip for Mark Twain. It was a tough job for him to boot. When he got home, he sat down and reworked the whole thing. And sometime in July, 1869, Innocence Abroad. This isn't the first edition, but it's

like the first edition. Sometimes in 1869, the book was published. The first year, it sold 31,000 copies, and within three years, it had sold 100,000 copies, because $3.5 for a single copy. And it's a lot of money in the 19th century. You can use as a rule of thumb in any century, 17, 18, 19th, even 20th, that a pretty good book and a pretty good dinner ought to cost about the same thing. You could buy an awful lot of food for $3.5 in 1869, in the data publication. The time of publication, Twain already had something of a reputation because of the jumping frog, the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County. But this book made him an international figure, and it really, in effect, made him a kind of spokesman for the new United States coming of age, United States. Well, what is it? Well, it's an account of a trip, a tour of the Mediterranean circuit, starting at the Azores and then hitting Spain, France,

Italy, Greece, Little Russia, the entire Holy Land, Egypt, and then back to the United States. There's really nothing particular about this. What's particular about it is that in its attitude toward the materials, especially in its attitude toward Europe, it is something new. Abigail Adams had a sort of an idea that things in this country, but were better than they were in Europe, but she was pretty different about saying so. Ralph Waldo Emerson, I think, really felt that only weak characters traveled because they had nothing better to do. And Nathaniel Hawthorne, it was sometimes at pains to explain the United States. Twain is really the first of what Philip Rob calls the red skins, plebeian, naturalistic, raucous.

He glories in his Americanism and his egalitarianism. I mean, it's no part of his responsibility to understand the United States in terms of Europe. There's Europe, and it's up to Europe to justify itself to him. It's a matter of fact, he writes in the introduction. The innocence of broad has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe in the east if he looked at them with his own eyes, instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretense of showing how he ought to look at the objects of interest beyond the sea. Other books do that. And therefore, even if I were confident to do it, there is no need. So we've got a new kind of American abroad. You've got to show me, and he was not only from Missouri, but he was from Nevada and California to boot. He already had a reputation as a frontier realist, and as a satirist and humorous to boot. And as you have seen, he clearly identifies himself

with the reader before he even gets started. So he uses the vernacular in writing about Europe. He keeps the anecdotal style. Everything is in a sense cut down to size. And so he can speak. He can describe the volcano in St. Peter's using such terms. That's mosquito bar and bedstead. Or he gets to Lake Como in Northern Italy. What do you think it reminds him of? Lake Como is clearly, clearly, clear, than a great many lakes. But how dull its waters are compared with the wonderful transparent of Lake Tahoe. I speak of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe, where one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of 180 feet. I have tried to get this statement off at par here, but with no success. So I have been obliged to negotiate it at 50% discount. At this rate, I find some takers.

Perhaps the reader will receive it on the same terms. 90 feet instead of 180. But let it be remembered that these are forced terms, sheriff's sale, prices. Twain is hard-headedly, unromantic, and realistic, about the almost legendary figures of European literature and of history. For instance, when he comes across the story of Petroc, the great Petroc in Laura, the story of the Sonnets, and so on, he's not so much interested in the story behind it, but he's interested in something else. He was in Milan at the time, and he wanted to go to the Ambrosian Library. And we did that, he says. We saw a manuscript of Virgil with annotations in the handwriting of Petroc, the gentleman who loved another man's Laura, and lavished upon her all through life, a love which was a clear waste of raw material. It was sound sentiment, but bad judgment.

It brought both parties fame and created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that is running yet. But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura? I do not know his other name. Who glorifies him? Who be-dos him with tears? Who writes poetry about him? Nobody. How do you suppose he liked the state of things that has given the world so much pleasure? How did he enjoy having another man following his wife everywhere and making her name a familiar word to every garlic exterminating mouth and Italy with his sonnets to her preempted eyebrows? They got fame and sympathy. He got neither. This is a peculiarly felicitous instance of what is called poetic or justice. It's all very fine, but it does not chime with my notions of right. It is too one-sided, too ungenerous. Let the world go on fretting about Laura and Petroc, if it will. But as for me, my tears and my lamentations shall be lavished upon the unsung defendant.

Now, it's one of the characteristics of Twain's writing to have a kind of snapper at the end of things. For instance, he writes somewhere, I was born modest, but it wore off. Now, this kind of thing is illustrated in something he says about Lucretia Borussia. They're still in the Ambrosian Library. We saw also an autograph letter of Lucretia Borussia, a lady for whom I have always entertained the highest respect on account of her rare histrionic abilities. Her opulence in solid gold goblets made out of gilded wood. Her high distinction is an operatic screamer and the facility with which she could order a sex-tuple funeral and get the corpses ready for it. He goes on, and he brings in for the first time comments about language. We saw one single-course yellow hair from Lucretia's head, likewise. And we saw it likewise. It evoke emotions, but we still live.

In this same library, we saw some drawings of Michelangelo. These Italians call him Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinci. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce and we reserve our opinion on the sketches. Well, when he's in Milan and he goes to see the picture of the last supper, what he notices mostly is that Napoleon's horses have kicked the legs off all the disciples. And Napoleon had quartered his private guard there when he was in Milan. On the complications of museum hopping, in the multitude of the variety of saints we see when we go museum hopping, he's, well, he's scandalous, really. But I think he's rather amusing at the same time. He's had a tough three or four weeks in museums. And he writes, humble as we are and unpretending in the matter of art.

Our researches among the painted monks and martyrs have not been wholly in vain. We have striven hard to learn. We have had some success. We have mastered some things, possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the learning. But to us, they give pleasure. And we take as much pride in our little requirements as to others who have learned far more. And we love to display them full as well. When we see a monk going about with a lion and looking tranqually up to heaven, we know that that is Saint Mark. When we see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranqually up to heaven, trying to think of a word, we know that that is Saint Matthew. When we see a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranqually up to heaven with a human skull beside him and without other baggage, we know that that is Saint Jerome. Because we know that he always went flying light in the matter of baggage. When we see a party looking tranqually up to heaven, unconscious that his body is shot through and through with arrows, we know that that is Saint Sebastian. When we see other monks looking tranqually up to heaven,

but having no trademark, we always ask who those parties are. We do this because we humbly wish to learn. We have seen 13,000 Saint Jerome's and 22,000 Saint marks and 16,000 Saint Matthews and 60,000 Saint Sebastian's and four millions of assorted monks, undesignated. And we feel encouraged to believe that when we have seen some more of these various pictures and had a larger experience, we shall begin to take an absorbing interest in them like our cultivated countryman from Amarek. Now that last word leads me to another one of Twain's dislikes. And that is the over-Europeanized Amarek which he discusses somewhere. Disguses are right here. The gentle reader he says will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now of course in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad

and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. On this subject, let me remark that there are Americans abroad in Italy who have actually forgotten their mother tongue in three months for God and in France. They cannot even write their address in English in a hotel register. I append these evidences which I copied verbatim from the register of a hotel in a certain Italian city and you'll simply have to pardon my accent. John P. Whitcomb, Ataz uni. William L. Ainsworth, Traveler, Ataz uni. George P. Martin, Afeis, Damarek. Lloyd B. Williams, Atwas Ami, V. D. Boston, Amarek. Amarek, J. L. Sworth Baker, Tutsuite de France,

Clostones, Amarek, Destinossio, La Grande, Batanya. Well, there's something else. These days you know the behavioral sciences give us terms for to talk about things which our common sense has told us so long. And one of the terms they've given us is a thing called the self-confirming stereotype. This old business of seeing what one expects to see before he even goes somewhere. An excellent example be illustrated by a little something that happened right after we got into the war 1942. In the winter of 1942 we sent the first GI's abroad to England. Each GI was given a little book which explained England, talked about it, and among other things warned him that from February of May, England was a pretty wet place to be, it rained a lot, and he should be on the lookout.

Well, as a matter of fact, in this particular year, England had its driest February of May period in over 50 years. In a matter of fact, had a regular drop. Nevertheless, a spot check of the letters that the GI sent home during this period indicated that somewhere between 75 and 90% of the GI's complained bitterly of the rain and the wet weather. I mean, the myth was simply greater than the fact. You see what you expect to see. Well, Twain's no fool on this matter. When he gets to the Holy Land, he gets around Palestine, and he sees that it's, well, let's show you what he sees. He says, I am sure from the tenor of books I have read that many who have visited this land and years gone by for Presbyterians and came seeking evidence in evidences in support of their particular creed. They found a Presbyterian Palestine,

and they had already made up their minds to find no other. Though possibly they did not know it, being blinded by their zeal. Others were Baptist, seeking Baptist evidences and a Baptist Palestine. Others were Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, seeking evidences endorsing their several creeds and a Catholic Methodist and an Episcopalian Palestine. Well, Twain is boisterously derisive of much that he finds in Europe. But the truth is, he is not so much anti-Europe. He's anti-Americans getting Europeanized, but he's not so much anti-Europe as he is pro-America. If you've read the first couple of hundred pages of life on the Mississippi, you know what a mastery is at description. Well, there's a good deal of this kind of thing also in innocence abroad. For instance, when he sees, first sees the Balliarrics. It's, you know, New York and Manorka

and other islands known only to quiz contest people. He describes the islands thus as hales in a fog, as it were. And he describes Gibraltar from Seaward in a really famous description, Gibraltar. It is pushed out into the sea on the end of a flat narrow strip of land and is suggestive of a gob of mud on the end of a shingle. Now, this, in fact, is an excellent description of what Gibraltar looks at from the Western approaches. And it is no way, actually, a derogation of Gibraltar itself. That's simply because the word mud is used. Now, it's true that Twain makes a good deal of fun of Europe and that he reflects a brash, new 19th century American confidence in itself. But he was a great man and he was a great writer and he was no fool.

So he saw many things that were fine and worthwhile in Europe. For instance, he's in a town and he goes for a walk. This is the kind of thing one could read today. Just a reason if he could find it. Afterward, we walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some time. This is actually, I think, it's a general. But it's in a European city. Afterward, we walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some time enjoying other people's comfort and wishing we could export some of it to our restless driving by talented consuming marts at home. Just in this one matter lies the main charm of Europe, comfort. In America, we hurry, but we don't know when to sleep. There's more, more of this. What is not so frequently noticed about Twain is that he is sometimes of two minds about the same thing. And I think that most of us are this way. I'm sure most of us understand that when, well,

this strange always seems to be hostile. I mean, what one does not know, one is suspicious of. Well, this is illustrated in two passages of Twain, which I'd like now to use. Twain must have arrived at Venice late in the afternoon, and he was tired. And he has a very famous passage on gondolas and the gondoliers. We reached Venice at eight in the evening and entered a hearse belonging to the Grand Hotel, Europe. At any rate, it was more like a hearse than anything else, though to speak by the card, it was a gondola. And this was the starry gondola Venice, the ferry boat in which the princely cavaliers of the olden time were want to cleave the waters of the moonlit canals and looked the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician beauties while a gay gondolair and a silken doublet touched his guitar and sang us only gondoliers can sing.

This the fame gondola, and this the gorgeous gondolair, the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sabel-hertz body clapped onto the middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted gutter snipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should have been sacred from public scrutiny. Presently, as he turned the corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of towering, untended buildings, the gay gondolair began to sing. I could stand it no longer. Well, this is a classic passage, and it is supposed to illustrate Twain's real savagery, some time. As a matter of fact, he went to his hotel. He had a good night's sleep. I guess he had something to eat. And like most Americans, he eventually became fascinated with the technical operation of the gondola. And so later, he writes, the Venetian gondola is as free and graceful in its gliding movement as a serpent. It is 20 or 30 feet long, and is narrow and deep like a canoe.

Its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from the water like the horns of a crescent, and so on. A beautiful description runs on for some time. And of the gondolair, he says, the gondolair is a picturesque grascal for all he wears, no satin harness, no plume bonnet, no silken tights. His attitude is stately. He is live and supple. All his movements are full of grace. When his long canoe and his fine figure towering from its high perch on the stern or cut against the evening sky, they make a picture that is very novel and striking to a foreign eye. And he goes on to point out that he became so fascinated with the gondolair that he spent most of his time in Venice simply riding around. Here I think is a fine example of getting used to something and getting fascinated with it. Twain's enemy was not Europe.

He spoke of it with the language of the far west and the non-respecting. His enemies were the culture vultures, the Europeanized Americans. And he insisted upon looking at Europe in the American way. Of this breed, he is the first American spokesman, although there is somebody riding down the same prejudices right now. They're not out of date. They're 90 years old. Twain beat him to it. When he said howdy to the great monuments of Europe, all the Americans said great. OK. This is N-E-T National Educational Television.

... . . . .

.. .. .. Hello, this is American perspective.

This time I want to talk about girls, well, one girl anyway. Here's how she's spoken of at various times. She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable, to which she added in a moment, also naturally the most innocent. And in another place, she might be cold, she might be austere, she might even be prim. For that was apparently what the most distant American girls did. They came and planted themselves straight in front of you to show how rigidly unapproachable they were. Or still another place? It might have been said of this wandering maiden that she'd shattered. She was very quiet. She sat in a charmingly tranquil attitude, but her lips and her eyes were constantly moving.

She spoke the most charming, innocent prattle he had ever heard, for by his own experience hitherto, when young persons were so ingenious, they were less articulate, and when they were so confident were more sophisticated. Or again, same girl. Certainly she was very charming, but how extraordinarily communicative and how tremendously easy was she simply a pretty girl from New York State, or was she also a designing and audacious, in short, an expert young person? She looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that after all American girls were exceedingly innocent. Others had told him that after all they weren't. This young lady's name is Daisy Miller. She is the heroine of something that's called a comedy, but she dies at the end.

In any event, Daisy Miller's a famous person. I was reading a book review the other day referred to Daisy Miller Land. I take it that this is the United States. And here's frequently the expression, Daisy Millerism. Now I take it. This has something to do with the assumption that one may behave the same way in Rome as she does in this connectivity and get away with it. Or even here's occasionally a young lady being called a Daisy Miller, usually a young American girl abroad, usually a junior year abroad, American girl. Whatever it is, whatever the expression, it all started with the novel by Henry James, Daisy Miller, published in 1878. Henry James is a man who has had a mixed literary reputation, although he's had a great resurgence lately.

There are very critical attitudes about him. H. G. Wells says that he was the culmination of the superficial type, someone else has written that he was a fat and wistful remittance man with a passion for elegance. And the great agrarian critic, Perrington, wrote that he was a self-deceived romantic. On the other hand, he has been called by critics as distinguished, the most intelligent man of his generation. And if our libous has written that he considers that he is inclined to consider James as the greatest novelist in English, which includes English literature, I suppose, and he is certainly one of the five or six greatest writers of any variety to be produced in North America. He is widely known for, well, I hope he's widely known for Daisy Miller, but he's also widely known for the turn of the screw, which has been a play and which I guess recently has been a television play.

And then he is widely known, I think, for the eras, which has been a play in a film, I think the film starred Olivia de Havilland, Ralph Richardson, and Montgomery Cliff. And I think of the really well-known works. This is about it, maybe the spoils of point, and I don't know. Actually he was a writer of tremendous productivity. The London edition of his work, published between 1921 and 1923, and which is entitled novels and tales, runs to 35 volumes. This does not include, then, most of the travel material, most of the notebooks, any of the plays, or very much, well, I guess quite a bit of the criticism, but by no means all of his literary criticism. And in addition to this, James kept adding to and revising his material all his life. He appears, sorry, comes on to this program because he is the exampler par excellence of the, it goes with this expression, of the international theme in our literature.

And if I may be permitted to mention a few things about his life, you might see the international theme in his life. He was born in New York in 1843. He was the younger brother of William James, the great 19th century and early 20th century pragmatist, psychologist, and philosopher. As an infant, really, both he and William were taken to Europe by their rich parents, and much of his, well, much of the period of his growing up was spent in Europe. And then he started going on his own when he was about 27 years old. He knew most of the most distinguished literary figures of Europe before he was 30. He knew Tennyson, he knew Browning, he knew Ruskin, he knew Flobaire, and he knew a number of others. When he was 33, I think it was, he really became what amounts to an expatriate. He settled down in London, and he did not return to the United States for 21 years.

And even then, he did not stay for very long. What I am trying to say is that he was an American who lived most of his life abroad. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he became, he was much upset, he became very interested in war work for the British. And finally, late in 1915, only a few months before he died, he became an English citizen. But before his death, he was awarded the Order of Merit by George V. So, in addition to everything else, he must have been one of the most traveled men of his time. He published seven books on travel, and as with Hawthorne, the real fruit of what he has to say about travel is in his fiction. With James, the International theme, which is what we have been talking about for a while, really becomes a way of life. The polls of the Axis remain the same.

Innocence and experience. Now you have a number of synonyms for innocence, ingenuousness, simplicity, ignorance, and so on, but this is it. Now, when Twain deals with these polls of experience, he simply opposes one to the other. I mean, he takes a look at a beggar in Naples, and he decides that the Neapolitans are indolent, and never for a moment enters his mind that you're dealing with a complicated economic situation. By and large, Twain, and the rest of the red skins, simply took a look at Europe, applied their nady preconceptions, and it was too bad for Europe if it didn't work out. Well, no, certainly there's nothing unusual about this, and it doesn't need to be talked about on literary terms. The social anthropologist discusses what he calls the effort optimism syndrome in Americans. That is, most of us feel, and we have some reason to feel from our observation that if we work hard, we're going to make it, and if we work very hard, we'll probably make

it very big. Well, Italy's a country that isn't really so different from our own. It's a country in which the total economy has improved over 7% in the last 12 months, nevertheless. As a serious population problem, it should have at least 100,000 immigrants a year. It has over a million families who may be said to live in absolute penure. It has another million who live in poverty. It has another million who never have meat, bread, or wine. In two large areas of the country, it's necessary for most of the people to work from dawn to dark just to stay alive. Well, how would you like to apply the effort optimism syndrome to this group of people? Now, I'm not trying to imply that with James, we get a kind of series of 19th century grapes of wrath, but what I am trying to say is that we do begin to assess, to perhaps criticize the old idea of the self-confirming stereotype, that is, you see what you expect

to see. And we begin, and it's about time, I should say, to have a little cultural empathy. We get understanding rather than rejection of things which are European, or in short, for better or for worse, James was a cosmopylite. Now, he says something about him, this himself, and I'm quoting, actually, from Morton's Abells, introduction to James' art of travel, but I think I've seen the passage in one of James' Paris letters, and this is the quotation. To be a cosmopylite is not, I think, an ideal. The ideal should be to be a concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopylite is an accident, but one must make the best of it. If you have lived about us, the phrase is, you have lost the sense of the absoluteness and the sanctity of the habits of your fellow patriots, which once made you so happy in the midst of them.

You have seen that there are great many native countries in the world, and that each of these is filled with excellent people for whom the local idiosyncrasies are the only thing that is not rather barbarous. There comes a time when one set of customs, wherever it may be found, grows to seem to you about us provincial as another, and then, I suppose, it may be said of you that you have become a cosmopylite. The best of it, and this is partly Zobel here, is the habit of comparing, of looking for points of difference and resemblance, of coming James to think well of mankind, and there is something to be said for that. Using the complications and the difficulties of foreign countries, of different social structures, can become pretty difficult sometimes. Let me take a contemporary example. One of the greatest successes of the 20th century theater, both on the stage and in the movies, is a musical about 19th century Siam called the King and I.

The star of this production, both on the stage and in the films, is an unlikely tie tie, who made obvious and certain what had hitherto been esoteric and doubtful. That is that egg bald men are sexy. This, of course, may have given confidence to a great many bald American men, but it infuriated the ties, why? Because in Thailand, the shaved head is a mark of the priesthood, and this isn't all. Dinner ran around the stage, and subsequently the film, the stripped of the waist, and patting people, he patted people on the head, for instance. This also infuriated the ties, and Thailand, the personality, resides in the head, and you don't pat people on their personalities. So the ties ban the movie, and we very nearly had an international situation. Now, I hope this example doesn't seem too frivolous, I'm sure it wouldn't seem frivolous

to someone from Thailand. And besides, whether it's frivolous or not, it really, in a sense, is the kind of thing that James is talking about, and Daisy Miller isn't an example. I think we may say, without fear, of much contradiction that James is one of the most self-conscious writers, whoever wrote, he writes, preface and so on. He thus describes the germ of Daisy Miller, it's a novella or a novella or a new veil, or a study, I mean, depending upon what you're affecting these days. Now, I'm going to quote throughout from the New York edition published by Scribners. This is how it all got started. I was in Rome during the autumn of 1877. A friend then living there happened to mention some simple and uninformed American lady of the previous winter, whose young daughter, a child of nature and of freedom, accompanying her from hotel to hotel, had picked up by the wayside with the best conscience in the world,

a good-looking Roman, a vague identity, a stonnaged-at-age luck, yet all innocently, all serenely exhibited and introduced. This at least, until the occurrence of some small social check, some interrupting incident of no great gravity or dignity, and which I forget. I guess I might say that this is a fairly late preface, that's a late Jamesian sentence. Daisy Miller is written in early Jamesian sentences, and there are very few that are as vexed as that one is. In any event, upon this small hint, James Spake, and he did it, he said dramatized, dramatized, and went about his business. An early reader of the manuscript considered the whole thing an outrage upon American womanhood.

But the truth of the matter is, the whole thing soon was published, and it became one of his few great popular successes. James himself says somewhere that Daisy Miller is about the eternal question of American snobbishness abroad, or to put it another way. If you want to see the rules of whatever game social game you're playing really enforced, then play it with some people who only recently learned to play the game, and only recently learned the rules themselves. Now James deals with all aspects of the international theme. At one point or another, he deals with all the dangers of a superstitious evaluation of Europe, or he deals with the treacherous European, or he deals with the American, palely loitering in Europe. He deals with just about anything you can think of concerned with the international theme. But in Daisy Miller, I think we are dealing with Europeanized upper-class Americans rejecting

a new middle class of their own country, rejecting those with presumption enough to think that they should travel simply because they have the money to do it. Well in any event, this is certainly not the only perspective to take on the novel, but it's one. In any event, the scene is Europe. First, Vave Switzerland and then Rome. And the story goes something like this. James takes what might in a way be called the omniscient point of view toward his material, that as he stands off from his little world and sees completely into it, however. We observe what goes on through the consciousness of a single character by and large, Frederick Winterborne.

He's a 27-year-old American, supposedly studying in Geneva. One might, I suppose, you all know that the Jamesian characters very seldom have to work for a living. We very seldom see them working for this world's goods, this boy's 27. He's still studying somewhere. He has come from Geneva to Vave to see his aunt, a Mrs. Costello, well-established socially, both in the United States and Europe, rich and somewhat difficult. James says she was a widow of fortune, a person of much distinction and who frequently intimated that if she hadn't been so dreadfully liable to headaches, she would probably have left a deeper impress upon her time. Well, there's somebody else at this hotel or whatever it is in Vave Switzerland. It's Daisy Miller from Schenectady, New York, with an impossible mother, a difficult

little brother, a handsome male servant with whom she seems to flirt and no social position, no social position at all. Well, Winterburn first meets Daisy when she is having a conversation with her very young child, really, brother Randolph. James throws the two together in an informal social situation, of which I suppose in the Europe of the 19th century, would have made it impossible to have any significant social exchange. And furthermore, we are made to understand right at the beginning of the novel that Winterburn has been abroad long enough so that he is, well, he's Europeanized. Now, I don't mean that he is a snob, as Mrs. Costello is, but that he has been away from the American, as you say, relaxed pattern for so long that he's likely to make mistakes.

James says of him, for instance, he had lived at Geneva so long as to have got morally muddled. He had lost the right sense for the young American tone. Or to put it another way then, the consciousness, the awareness, the single human sensitivity through which we see this story, it comes to us through someone who is no longer really qualified to judge the moral implications of any young American girls over an open social behavior. I mean, he's not a snob, he's simply bound, at least partially to Miss Judge Daisy, because he doesn't really understand what an American girl is like. I mean, after all, cultural empathy is a street that has two sides. Consequently, he's a little perplexed at Daisy somewhat pro-word behavior. And in a matter of fact, I suppose I might add that the Italian peninsula has been a little

amazed or a little baffled for, oh, 50 years or so anyway, by the difference between the illusion and reality in American young women abroad. Well, Daisy chatters on, announcing that she always had, and this is a quote, a great deal of gentleman's society, seeming almost to flirt with the servant and seemingly willing to make a trip to the nearby castle if she y'all, with Winterborne. All of this unescorted, this doesn't sound very daring, I know today, but I'm sure that it was intended to sound quite daring in 1878. The first encounter with Daisy over, Winterborne goes to Winterborne, goes to Visitors Aunt, Mrs. Costello, in her room, and he asks about the millers. He is told by Mrs. Costello that she has seen them, she's heard them, and she keeps out of their way, and then she goes on, I mean, it's too bad I can't act this, this is what she says, they're horribly common, they're the sort of American that does one duty

by just ignoring. But Mrs. Costello is a little baffled by socially unacceptable Daisy, I mean, it's perfectly clear that Daisy isn't in, but she has some disturbing qualities of inness, and Mrs. Costello says, she has that charming look they all have, I can't think where they pick it up, and she dresses in perfection, I can't think where they get their taste. In short, and this brings us to the third type of American abroad, Mrs. Costello is that kind of 19th century American abroad, American upper class abroad, who really turned away from the United States, the Europe imitators, so violently hated by twain, I talked about them last time, the Europe imitators which wander through the works of Edith Wharton refusing to speak anything but French.

This gives us then an innocent young American girl abroad, it gives us a Europeanized American, who really has no ill will, winter born, and it gives us Mrs. Costello the genuine snob abroad. Well Daisy knows what Mrs. Costello is like, and to a certain extent she knows what she herself is like too, she says to winter born, in a casual conversation, I want to know her ever so much, I know just what your aunt would be like, I know I'd like her, she'd be very exclusive, I like a lady to be exclusive, I'm dying to be exclusive myself, well I guess we are exclusive mother and I, we don't speak to anyone, and they don't speak to us, I suppose it's about the same thing. Well eventually the two do visit she on without incident, Mrs. Costello goes down to Rome and so eventually does winter born, and when he gets down there, turns out that, well

Daisy's become notorious, she's picked up with a young elegant but socially unacceptable Italian, Mrs. Costello is still scandalized, they're very dreadful people she says, winter burn answers, they're very ignorant, very innocent only and utterly uncivilized, and upon it they're not bad, Mrs. Costello says, they're hopelessly vulgar, whether or not being hopelessly vulgar is being bad as a question for the metaphysicians, they're bad enough to blush for it any rate, and for this short life that's quite enough. And by the rules of the particular game being played, I suppose Daisy has misbehaved, she meets Job and Ellie openly and unshaperoned on the Pinchio, and she arrives late and unshaperoned at parties, and then she proceeds to show off her young man. She commits really the fatal sin she manages to be talked about.

Winter born finally corners her for a little direct talk, he hardly loves her for the dangers she has passed and she hardly loves him that he does pity them, but finally what comes out is the amazingly, almost incredibly insulated feeling of the supposedly free swinging American girl abroad. If she really is well-behaved, it doesn't matter what it looks like. Winter born says to her, when you deal with natives, you must go by the custom of the country. American flirting is purely American silliness. It has in its ineptitude of innocence no place in this system. So you may be flirting, Mr. Job and Ellie isn't, he means something else, and then it goes on. Daisy says, he isn't preaching at any rate, and if you want very much to know we're neither of us flirting, not a little speck, we're two good friends for that.

We're real, intimate friends. And then winter born says, if you're in love with each other, it's another affair altogether. She had allowed him up to this point to speak so frankly that he had no thought of shocking her by the force of his logic. Yet she now nonetheless immediately rose, blushing visibly, and leaving him mentally to exclaim that the name of little American flirts was incoherence. Well, the situation deteriorates, I must say it deteriorates pretty rapidly. Daisy becomes virtually a social outcast, though we are given no evidence ever. You see that anything is really a mess, yet such is the quantity of circumstantial evidence that eventually winter burn, even winter born, sets her down as if, well, not lost, certainly hopelessly childish and not very sensitive. He's no snob, he's just culture bound, blind. At this point, and this interpretation is questionable, at this point the action is brought

to an abrupt end, and an eventually ironic conclusion. James presents us with an insect ex machina, and an awfulies mosquito, which bites Daisy, while she visits the Colosseum with Jobanelli in the moonlight. Winter born encounters the two there, concludes that Daisy is really a tart after all, and in effect tells her so. Daisy obviously is hurt by this, heartbroken, and shamed by his judgment. She goes home, she says she doesn't care if she has the fever, she does, she does. And at the grave side, after the funeral, it turns out ironically that Jobanelli, the handsome, the ineligible, the un-hoping, the sensitive Italian, was the only one who really understood her, because it is he who says she was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable, to which he added in a moment, also naturally, the most innocent, and

winter born realized that he had been too long in foreign parts. This is N.E.T., National Educational Television.