surrounded with columns, reflected in a lake, a thing of immense proportions; it is in ruins, with plants growing inside it and this huge ruin is all made of papier mâché and rounded off with great care. It produces a surreal, nightmarish effect, not even Borges could have dreamt up anything like this. It is the Palace of Fine Arts, built for the PanAmerican exhibition in 1915. Tourist brochures, oblivious to its grotesqueness, point it out as one of the finest pieces of neoclassical architecture in America and maybe this is even true. There is in it above all a dream of what culture was in the eyes of 1915 millionaire America, and the building in its present state is well-placed to illustrate someone or other’s definition of America having passed from barbarism to decadence with nothing in between. Now that the building is falling to pieces, the San Franciscans, who are really keen on it, have decided to rebuild it in stone, with all the metopes sculpted in marble. The State of California is putting in five million dollars, the municipality another five million, the Chamber of Commerce another five million and the final five million will be collected from the public.
Sausalito
The sea in the bay and nearby is cold even in summer, and despite its latitude and vegetation (eucalyptus and redwoods) the beautiful marine and woodland areas near SF have nothing Mediterranean about them, because the colours, given the permanently cloudy and rainy sky and the fog which comes in daily, are not even like those of the most gloomy days in Liguria’s Santa Margherita, they are more like the colours of a Scandinavian fjord. Or of a lake: Sausalito, which of the various tourist villages and yacht marinas is the one that has taken on an intellectual hue, full of boutiques, and inhabited by writers, painters and homosexuals, is just like Ascona.
The Professor
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.
Babbitt
Mario Spagna (pronounced Spagg-na, and known as Spag), whose family originally hail from Castelfranco d’Ivrea (but he does not know any Italian, just a few words in Piedmontese dialect), and who takes me in his car to see the surrounding country, was introduced to me by his neighbour Mark Harris as your typical, average American. At the age of fifty he took early retirement from his job with Standard Oil in order to cultivate his inner spirit. He writes mainly letters to senators and congressmen. He reads the papers, cutting out the items which concern in particular the local parliamentarians and giving them his advice and approval. He has also written an article which was published: ‘Facing the Mirror’, urging young people to look at themselves in the mirror not out of vanity but to examine their conscience. He has spent several years working out a
Sausalito
The sea in the bay and nearby is cold even in summer, and despite its latitude and vegetation (eucalyptus and redwoods) the beautiful marine and woodland areas near SF have nothing Mediterranean about them, because the colours, given the permanently cloudy and rainy sky and the fog which comes in daily, are not even like those of the most gloomy days in Liguria’s Santa Margherita, they are more like the colours of a Scandinavian fjord. Or of a lake: Sausalito, which of the various tourist villages and yacht marinas is the one that has taken on an intellectual hue, full of boutiques, and inhabited by writers, painters and homosexuals, is just like Ascona.
The Professor
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.
Babbitt
Mario Spagna (pronounced Spagg-na, and known as Spag), whose family originally hail from Castelfranco d’Ivrea (but he does not know any Italian, just a few words in Piedmontese dialect), and who takes me in his car to see the surrounding country, was introduced to me by his neighbour Mark Harris as your typical, average American. At the age of fifty he took early retirement from his job with Standard Oil in order to cultivate his inner spirit. He writes mainly letters to senators and congressmen. He reads the papers, cutting out the items which concern in particular the local parliamentarians and giving them his advice and approval. He has also written an article which was published: ‘Facing the Mirror’, urging young people to look at themselves in the mirror not out of vanity but to examine their conscience. He has spent several years working out a
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