Countless Blessings

By S. Wok (formerly John Skow)

ON BECOMING AMERICAN by Ted Morgan (Sanche de Gramont); Houghton Mifflin; 336 pages; $10.95

First the bad news: Sanche de Gramont is not a French count any more. Now the good news: he became an American citizen last year and, in the process, shed his title and the name his family has borne since "the morning hours of Western civilization." He is now Ted Morgan. Big changes: De Gramont, says Morgan, was the strict, rather European father, for instance, and something of a male chauvinist; Morgan, says Morgan, is a permissive American father of two, and an earnest believer in feminism. De Gramont kissed the slender hands of titled ladies, the rascal; Morgan, 45, helps his wife Nancy with the dishes and is not likely to be invited to dinners where footmen stand behind each place.

The author's good sense in becoming an American is readily apparent, especially to Americans. To him France is all but fossilized, and his highborn relatives there are wholly so, as the funniest parts of his account maliciously attest. (Ted Morgan's Uncle Armand once brought Marcel Proust to lunch. Afterward the due de Gramont, Armand's father, handed his guest book to the already famous author "and with the total disdain of the nobleman for the artist, said, 'Just your name, Mr. Proust. No thoughts.' ") The U.S. he sees as still an open society, free and easy, rambunctious, optimistic, cheerfully ready to build on both its successes and its mistakes. He likes American lingo and quotes a lot of it (Harry Truman on Jack Kennedy: "He had his ear so close to the ground it was full of grasshoppers"). He likes interstate highways, supermarkets, fast-food shops, fast talkers, the entire "discardo" culture. He likes the chanciness of the San Andreas fault, on which he now lives in California.

There is more; he likes the way U.S. society is forever jumping on its horse and riding off in several directions (example: "Saccharin would be banned in prepared food and beverages, where the unsuspecting consumer might not know it was an ingredient, but it would be sold as an over-the-counter drug in containers warning that it could cause cancer"). He cannot fathom American Puritanism but admires the national trait of altruism. He cherishes our chronic forgetfulness and blithering unawareness of history (talkshow gabber to ex-Premier Cao Ky of South Viet Nam, who now runs a liquor store in California: "We still have a minute left. Could you tell us what went wrong?").

Ted Morgan is a man loopy with love for his new country, and the result is a book that is both refreshing and breathless. It has been a long time since anyone serenaded the present reality of the U.S. in such a hyperbolic manner. He cheers on conservatives who roar for less government and more cops, grumpily defending a dream of frontier capitalism. He applauds liberals--writing their concerned letters to the editor, demanding more government and less repression, peering worriedly at the future. To Morgan these factions do not reveal a paralysis of opposed fears but a lively and profitable ferment. Wonderful! he marvels, as environmentalists and exploiters ambush each other in federal court. The system works!

Yes, it does, the reader thinks, his eyes opened by Morgan's perception of Americans as "the true existentialists ... Anxiety is the price that must be paid for boundless opportunity, including the opportunity to cheat the system, and not everyone can handle it." But passion does not improve the reasoning process, and when the author supports his arguments with windy civics lectures and careless unravelings from U.S. history, he can be more provocative than illuminating. Cases in point include a lame paragraph that seeks to prove "a high incidence of breakdown among men and women in public life" by linking the troubles of Explorer Meriwether Lewis (who died in 1809, probably a suicide, in "a seedy tavern"), Major General Edwin A. Walker (arrested in a Dallas men's room in 1976 for public lewdness), and Pat Nixon ("stress-related stroke"). This is simply idle, and a spongy chapter relating the life of New York City's Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who was neither an immigrant nor a name changer but is gathered into Morgan's embrace anyway, is not much better.

Still, the book is so amiable and loose-jointed, perhaps like the U.S. itself, that the reader is happy to wade through balderdash to the next bit of good storytelling or good sense. Meanwhile, what about this name change? Why Morgan? Why not Carnegie or Rockefeller? Why not Svensen or Von Humboldt or Verrazanno or Sun Yatsen? Well, Morgan explains, he threw away his first name, Sanche--a contraction of St. Charles --and scrambled the letters of De Gramont. Among the anagrams that resulted were Dr. Montage, R.D. Megaton and Ted Morgan. Morgan, he felt, was someone you would lend your car to. Dogs and small children would like him.

Nancy Morgan objected that the anagram was a "remuddling of an already felt confusion." His brother George, both a De Gramont and a brand manager for Lipton Tea, said that Morgan was throwing away a valuable brand name. (Sanche de Gramont had written several books, including an astringent national portrait, The French, and a good popular history of the Niger River, The Strong Brown God.) The author ignored all this and became Morgan.

Is he displaying a Gallic idiosyncrasy or an American one? Both. Is that his business, not anyone else's? Yes. Is name changing an American quirk? Absolutely, says this SuperAmerican. Look at Natasha Gurdin (Natalie Wood); Marcus Rothkowitz (Mark Rothko); Michael Igor Peschkowsky (Mike Nichols). If Columbus had hung around, he might have called himself Collins. By the end of the volume does the reader feel a giddy temptation to throw away his own first name and mess around with the letters of the rest? As De Gramont-Morgan proves, that requires a lot of thought. -- S. Wok (formerly John Skow)

Excerpt

"Things change so fast that historians, who used to study the meaning of centuries (eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century England), now scrutinize America decade by decade: what were the sixties about? Are the seventies a return to the fifties?

There is room in America for the whole spectrum of lifestyles. If you take the generation that came of age in the sixties, some of them are still groping, tunneling inward in a trough of hope, experimentation, apathy, and self-analysis, tentatively circling the void of their old commitments. They have chosen the inner voyage. But some of those undergraduates who were screaming Marxist slogans and disrupting the campuses are now public servants. It turns out that the guerrilla tactics of the sixties were a training ground for the establishment. John Froines, one of the Chicago Seven, is the official who supervises industrial health regulations in Vermont. Paul Soglin, who in 1967 organized a protest against Dow Chemical at the University of Wisconsin, is now mayor of Madison. These are the little ironies of American life. One year you are clubbed by the forces of law and order, and the next year you are responsible for the police budget."

--S. Wok (formerly John Skow)

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