Anglo-America

Stephen Fender

• The London Yankees: Portraits of American Writers and Artists in England, 1894-1914 by Stanley Weintraub
  W.H. Allen, 408 pp, £7.95, November 1979, ISBN 0 491 02209 3
• The Americans: Fifty Letters from America on our Life and Times by Alistair Cooke
  Bodley Head, 323 pp, £5.95, October 1979, ISBN 0 03 703016 7

The London Yankees has been warmly and widely noticed in this country, and (up to now, anyway) literary editors have set their heavies to the task of reviewing it. Why the fuss over what is, after all, no more than a lively compilation of literary biographies, a descriptive rather than analytical account that adds little to published materials already familiar to the reader interested in the subject? Because literary biography always fascinates; because lively books do not appear all that regularly; and also because of a certain pessimism about the cultural horsepower of Europe, as compared to America, which has been fashionable ever since Stephen Spender’s Love-Hate Relations. Philip Toynbee, in the Observer, came right out with it: ‘by now it is hard to see any reason why an American writer or artist should wish to settle either in Paris or London.’