The Vision of Europe
Invitation to the Voyage.
by Leslie Katz.
Harcourt, Brace. 253 pp. $3.95.

This is the simple and shocking story of an American tourist who went to Europe and actually saw what he looked at.

Leslie Katz, like the thousands or millions or whatever towering figure it is of innocents abroad each year from these shores, saved up his money and spent several months touring England, France, and Italy, and now has written a book about where he went and what he saw. The simplicity of his story lies in the fact that he went to the same places and stopped at the same shrines as most other tourists; the shocking part of his story is that he actually saw these things, and in describing them shocks us with the realization of how little the rest of us have seen of these—or for that matter, of any—“famous” sights.

This feat seems especially remarkable coming as it does at a time when even the majority of our writers and reporters are blinkered by clichés and befogged by what has been written before them. Last year marked another dismal landmark in this trend toward easy darkness when Max Lerner went to Europe for the New York Post, wrote installments numbering high in the xxxxvvv’s, and managed to see nothing new. This particular performance, only one of many turned in by our scribes, reached its climax in the installment called “What Is Europe?” in which, among a collection of observances that could have been made of Europe in an office in New York, Europe was “. . . the sun, shining on the masts of ships in a Greek fishing village.” The reader often wonders if there is, indeed, anything new to see in Europe—or anything new under the sun. The only Americans who have seemed to see anything new in Europe in the last decade are the poets, who can always be depended on. It was beginning to look as if the Prix de Rome was providing the only bastion between us barbarians abroad and the final immersion of the European continent into the vast ocean of our stereotypes. But now we have Leslie Katz’s Invitation to the Voyage, which offers us a new invitation to see.

We see, as the author sees, the room of Machiavelli:

We entered, blinded at first by the darkness, and followed her [the housekeeper] across a hallway into a large room. She swung open large shutters. Sunlight flooded the bricked floor and white walls, revealing Machiavelli’s study, recently dusted. The light burnished itself on the large table where he wrote facing the big window, and the chair where he sat was turned aside as if he had just risen. The sunlight poured on the green and gold velvet cover of a narrow bed. . . . The room was true to what you would imagine of Machiavelli. It was unostentatious, plain, spare, and modern, reduced to essentials, like a furnished room you would immediately want to rent. Only the necessities were there—the bed, the table, a clothes chest, a brass wash basin, a fireplace, and two stools with straight backs. Looking out the window across the desk you saw first a stone terrace on which laurels were growing in stone tubs. Past the terrace, in the far distance, the city of Florence could be seen far away, like the first inkling of a brilliant and wonderful idea. . . .

In the city of Florence, we see the old masterpieces of art which have become a foggy slide in our mind from the shade-drawn rooms of a college Humanities IA course. We see that

Michelangelo was drunk on energy and understanding, as drunk as his Bacchus, who holds balance while staggering. In the center of the Michelangelo room Bacchus was lurching with vine leaves in his hair in the direction of a wine cup the size of a triple martini he held in his hand, while a goat-legged boy-faun companion giggled behind him, face buried in clusters of grapes. The figures in the other statues and reliefs in the Michelangelo room were also intoxicated, drunk with experience. They looked as if they’d been back to Eden and left Paradise a second time of their own accord. Now they had nobody to blame but themselves. Real pros, veterans, they were not doing any blaming, and were taking what came. They had qualities of Job and Prometheus.

We see, besides works of art and people and beautiful landscapes, things that we have just never taken the time to imagine, for vision demands patience. Sitting in the warm summer rain in Italy, Leslie Katz sees this:

There in the park in Genoa you could realize that the rain and trees and human life exist in the thin charmed space where solid earth touches insubstantial sky. Articulate life could be seen to emerge and flourish where extremes meet, at the rich tangential borders of the different.

And finally, in the reflection of this rich and marvelous vision of Europe, we see something of our own country, for to go some place and really see it is to come home different, as Leslie Katz came home different:

Two months in Europe had made me more material minded. The trouble with America is: It isn’t material-minded enough right now. Nobody in my native land knows the value of a dollar. Everybody is too concerned with spiritual values such as what brand of cigarette do you smoke, the difference between a Ford and a Chevrolet, and how far you have gotten ahead. . . . But the material values I had come to love in Europe, such as a breath of fresh air, a quiet room with a tall ceiling, a stroll on a pleasant street in a big city, are disappearing fast.

The ability to see is the ability to learn and to enjoy and to live. It is the ability to be a human being. How badly our vision has been fogged with clichés and commercials, how much we have learned to live by rote, can be measured in the pages of this journal of one of us who still can see, and can tell the rest of us what he has seen. An invitation to see—and invitation to the voyage—is an invitation of civilization, and one that we can’t very well pass by.

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