Home Thoughts from Abroad

NOTEBOOKS OF A DILETTANTE by Leopold Tyrmand. 240 pages. Macmillan. $5.95.

As a pro-American foreigner attempting to convert anti-American Americans, Leopold Tyrmand has had remarkably grim grounds for comparison. He arrived here from Poland at age 45, after living through some of the worst experiences that Western civilization has had to offer. He survived stints in Russian and German prisons in World War II, and for a time was a member of the underground. He was equally opposed to the Communist takeover of Poland at the end of the war, and in his position as a popular novelist and journalist, he became one of the most outspoken opponents of the Gomulka regime.

After bearing close witness to these tragedies, Tyrmand feels the need to convince downcast Americans that their country is a lot better than they think it is. He takes ironic delight in discerning values in U.S. traits that have come to be generally deplored. "It's true, as American-haters say, that it is possible to sell everything in America." But, Tyrmand adds, generosity and the highest moral values are packaged here too. "Why," he asks, revealing that his book went to press before the present financial crisis, "should idealism overlook the advantages of a perfectly functioning, booming economy?" A European may smile condescendingly at the compulsion of elderly Americans to try to stay young. But we should remember, says Tyrmand, that "many of his elemental securities are dependent on the American, childish, stubborn denial of surrender." In America, "only death constitutes a positive end, an absolute and final break. While he is alive, man not only has the right to, but also the duty of, undertaking countless beginnings."

Self-Destructive War. After a number of uncomfortable brushes with New York City's alienated cognoscenti, Tyrmand concludes that the American intellectual yearns for power; but "all that is offered to him is influence; and that seems to him an offensive concession. Hence, he wages a self-destructive war. Hatred becomes his substitute for power." The Eastern European intellectual, on the other hand, "doesn't miss power. He knows too well what a leaden burden is perennially attached to it. All he dreams about is influence. He knows that in enlarging margins of freedom and human dignity, influence is more instrumental than power."

Tyrmand is particularly distressed by Americans who call for revolution. He lavishes on them the kind of contempt that can issue only from someone who has known revolution firsthand. Tyrmand, of course, takes words with a deadly seriousness because he knows that in a totalitarian state they can lead to death when used too freely. In America, revolutionary chatter seems both careless and frivolous.

Like other foreign observers, Tyrmand finds U.S. social tumult a sign of health and vigor. "European halls and auditoriums lack something that American campuses are filled with--a special kind of involvement in mankind's tormented present, crucial for the shaping of the future." His message to Americans is not to overlook the virtues of their social order while they concentrate on eliminating its vices. Not all problems can be blamed on the society. With their impatience and their faith in man's perfectibility, Americans tend to blame all problems on the malfunctioning of their society when many of them are part of life itself.

Americans critical of their country will not be appeased by arguments about the "human condition," or by assurances that the U.S. is better than other nations. The question is not how the U.S. compares to others, but whether it is living up to its own promise and potential. Still, Tyrmand's point is worth keeping in mind: beware that the quest for utopia does not destroy the freedoms that make such a quest possible in the first place.

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