Che buffonata! You had the impression (to my keen regret, I assure you) that I was trying to make fun of you. I suppose you made the common mistake of misconstruing my ironic tone. Allow me to set matters straight: irony is not aggressive; it is the natural expression of a sad cur, not a biting cur. Especially when confronted with over-weening self-assurance, if you get what I mean.

Granted, my reactions are neurasthenic. But I live among Frenchmen; I am overwrought. To be fair, I must confess I’ve probably been this way for some time. A decade and a half on German soil, two thirds of it on the Baltic coast—that’s no bed of roses, either. But the French finished me off.

2

Now, what do you have to say, Jacob G. Brodny, full-fledged citizen of the U.S.A., with military and other honors in the European Theater of Operations, superman of the literary business in the finest neon-haloed American way—what do you have to say about this challengingly arrogant self-certainty of the French? Is it sclerosis? A sign of fossilization? Granted. Nevertheless: isn’t it a thorn in your world-ruler side? You can’t trust your senses anymore. Being French, as we are continually told here in Paris, is not simply having a nationality. Oh no: it is a divine right, a higher form of existence, sprung forth from a more valuable chthonic origin and precipitated from the mother liquor of a nobler national spirit. And this in your, in the American, century, Jaykob Gee!—when any form of existence other than the American form is scarcely possible in our part of the world! A phenomenal evolutionary obstinacy, don’t you agree?

In the past, we were used to this sort of thing. The unpigmented, rabbit-toothed arrogance of the British, for example. Or the furious national consciousness of the Balkanese—say, the Serbs. Germans too could afford to be overtly German. That was simply normal in the waltz-wave-welling concert of nations, and it was part of the European panorama. A grand medley of peoples, and each individual a proud something: a Briton, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Dutchman, Helvetian, Hutsul. The Serbs as well, when they thought of themselves as Serbs, regarded themselves as something far more important than when they simply thought, I, Miloš, or I, Yanko. Miloš the Serb was virtually a Miloš squared, an intensified, elevated Miloš. The individual is not lost in the collective; on the contrary, he is transubstantiated into a clearer form with a higher specific gravity. Nagel writes, “To belong to a people in body and mind, to represent a people in language, in appearance, and in character, is a kind of nobility!” A cheap truism that we ought to bear in mind. Schwab, being German, found it a bit suspect—understandably. As a German, one attains one’s best form by strictly disavowing Germanism (à la Goethe or Hölderlin). But that does not reduce the universal validity of Nagel’s statement. Certainly not for the French.

And isn’t it astounding in a time when there is scarcely a people, scarcely a nation that constitutes its own milieu, a product of which a member of that people might consider himself, so that now in fact no one can be a mold for national characteristics, no one can develop a specific style? Show me the stylistic difference between a Spanish and a Swedish gas pump. The scenic difference between a stretch of highway or an airport near Hamburg, Germany, or Rome, Italy, and Dallas, Texas. Today, all we have is a supranational style, and this style is American. A bit of highway near Pearris, Freanss, is already pretty American and thus no different from one near Tokyo, Jippan. Likewise the airports and gas pumps both here and there. Yet the French keep getting Frencher and Frencher. The Spaniards, the Swedes, the Japanese are visibly turning into gum-chewing, computer-trusting Americans. The French, however, have never been so intensely French as nowadays.