Issue 37, Spring 1966
I am surprised that no novelist of today has yet devoted a work to the automobile, to the modem highway, to road side inns, to gallant adventures of the road such as Casanova celebrated in his Memories, which were full of post-chaises and hostelries familiar to travelers at the end of the Eighteenth century; or as George Borrow in The Bible in Spain wrote of adventures and encounters along the road in Spain at the beginning of the Twentieth century (a little in the manner of L’Intineraire Espagnol of t’Sterstevens, except that Borrow hadn’t gone to Spain to write a book—that would never have occurred to him—but to distribute the book of books, the Bible, in Spain, and particularly to distribute it—queer idea!—to the gypsies). I am surprised that no poet of today has yet sung of the automobile as I sang of the railway in the Transsibérien on the eve of that other war. (Happily, aviators, captivated by their novel and dangerous trade, have written about it, bringing the airplane most naturally, not simply as a theme but quite naturally, into literature and poetry; but I very much fear that the auto will not gain any such place, for the Michelin Guide is certainly not—is it?—something that will make our grand-nephews understand what a discovery the car and the highway was for us, and understand the changes wrought thereby in our conduct and our clandestine morals). I am surprised that among these gentlemen, the painters of today, there is not one such as Constantin Guys, who in his day left us unique documents on the elegance of ladies and carriages in the Bois.
He was also a correspondent-illustrator of war in the Crimea and the revolution in Spain—he was a Monsieur, I take my hat off to him. Not one of these gentlemen, the painters of today, however affluent, has deigned to sketch the elegants of our epoch (to say nothing of war or of revolution) and their sumptuous motor cars that serve them as jewel-settings. I except the poster-makers whose works are in the street, but which a later day will collect in museums since it is in the ephemera of a period that posterity finds the living art. I will say nothing of the musicians of today. It is sufficient to tum the dial of your radio to realize how deep asleep in the lifeless past are so many of our composers, when a notch further on— why do I say a notch, the thickness of a hair will do—the same dial will bring pouring over you the jubilant and living sonorities and the exalted and consternating rhythms of American jazz which will tear you out of your chair... What are they all doing, these artists, my contemporaries? My word, you would think they had never lived! And yet there is only one thing in the world sublime for a creator: man and his habitat. God gave us the example when he came and lived among us; but they, seemingly they’ve never even taken a taxi...