It may take a long time before the damage done to play during the era depending on inner-direction can be repaired. In the meantime other-direction has added new hazards. The other-directed man approaches play, as he approaches so many other areas of life, without the inhibitions but also without the protections of his inner-directed predecessor. Beset as he is with the responsibility for the mood of the play-group, he might like to fall back on fixed and objective ceremonials, and to some extent he does so —it is a common mistake to assume that American city-dwellers are wholly without rituals. Our various drinks, our various card and parlor games, our various sports, and our public entertainments—all can be arranged in a series from the less to the more intimate, the less to the more fluctuating, innovational, and subjective. Even so, the responsibility of all to all, that each join in the fun and involve himself at a similar level of subjectivity, interferes with spontaneous sociability in the very effort to invoke it. Above all, perhaps, this groupiness shuts off the privacy which the other-directed man, engaged in personalizing in his work, requires (without often knowing it) in his play. Just because he feels guilty if he is not contributing to the fun of the group, he needs to learn to distinguish between the loneliness he understandably fears and the privacy he might occasionally choose.
We have seen that children learn early in their lives that they must have no secrets from companionable peers and adults; and this includes their use of leisure. This is perhaps to be expected from the other-directed, who care more for the mood and manner of doing things than for what is done, who feel worse about an exclusion from others’ consciousness than about any violation of property or pride, and who will tolerate almost any misdeed so long as it is not concealed from them. Presumably, parents who want their children to become autonomous may help them very much by letting them learn they have the right to make their choices (by lying if necessary) between those situations in which they wish to be intimate with others and those in which intimacy is merely the demand of an authority, parental or groupish. Obviously an individual who needs, for the autonomous use of leisure, both play which is private, reverie-filled, and fantasy-rich, and play which is sociable, even ceremonial, has a hard time combating all at once the privatizations we have inherited and the personalizations we have newly elaborated.
These are very general considerations, and they must be supplemented by reminding ourselves of the continuing consequences, both for work and play, of the Great Depression. The depression did not lead to a redefinition of work but on the contrary made work seem not only precious but problematic—precious because problematic. It is significant that we have now taken full employment, rather than full nonemployment, or leisure, as the economic goal to which we cling in desperation. This is not surprising when we realize how stunted were the play opportunities for the man unemployed in the depression. We could see then, in the clearest form, how often leisure is defined as a permissive residue left over from the demands of work-time. Even financially adequate relief could not remove this moral blockage of play, any more than retirement pay can remove it for the forcibly retired oldsters. For the prestige of work operates as a badge entitling the holder to draw on the society’s resources. Even the adolescent who is engaged in “producing himself” suffers emotional discomfort if he cannot demonstrate that he is at work or training assiduously for narrowly defined work aims. In sum, taking together the young, the unemployed, the postemployment old, the housewife, and the guilty featherbedders, not to speak of the “idle rich,” we may have a great number who more or less unconsciously feel some uneasiness in play—because by cultural definition the right to play belongs to those who work.
The same industrial advance which has given us a sometimes intolerable freedom from work has also operated to introduce unprecedented specialization into the area of play, with similar ambiguous consequences for many technologically unemployed players. The varied capacities of the medieval entertainer whose boast is quoted at the chapter head include some amiable virtuosities. But they would hardly get him a billing on the RKO circuit or television today, and he would certainly not be good enough for Ringling Brothers. The amateur player has to compete with professionals who are far more professional than ever before—can he tell Laurence Olivier how to play Hamlet, as Hamlet himself could get away with telling the professional players how not to do it? We saw in Part I that, while the inner-directed man held on tenaciously to his competence as a player at least in his downward escapes, the other-directed man is faced with and oppressed by virtuosity from the omnipresent media wherever he turns.
Thus it looks as if the task of restoring competence to play is almost, if not quite, as difficult as that of restoring it to work. While a change in income relations, or even in the organization of industry, might make for fairer distribution of leisure and a lessening of guilts, it could not of itself teach men how to play who have historically forgotten how and who have turned the business over to professionals. Are we right, then, in supposing that play offers any easier channels to autonomy than work; are not both equally “alienated”?
I think it is not unreasonable to believe that various types of competence, as yet hardly recognized, are being built up in the play of the other-directed, in the face of all the obstacles we have listed. Some of these skills, such as craftsmanship, have old foundations; others, such as consumership, have new aspects. Even taste-exchanging, that intangible product of the play-work of the other-directed peer-groups, can be seen as a training ground for leisure. Perhaps there is more competence at play than meets the eye—less passivity, less manipulation, less shoddiness than is usually charged.
II. The Forms of Competence
CONSUMERSHIP: POSTGRADUATE COURSE
The mass media serve as tutors in how to consume, and if we are looking for straws in the wind, we can begin there. To my mind, it is symptomatic that a number of recent movies can be interpreted as encouraging new styles in leisure and in domesticity among men—with the implication that freedom from their peers will help them to increase their own competence as consumers and encourage their development toward autonomy. In Letter to Three Wives and Everybody Does It the hero (Paul Douglas) is represented as a power seeker with hair on his chest who is making the “one-class jump”—the jump from lower-middle class to upper-middle class which still propels much of our economic and social life. The one-class jumper, caught as he is between a peer-group he has left and another he has not quite achieved, is usually too insecure, too driven, to be a good candidate for autonomy. Douglas begins with a stereotyped, inner-directed tone of toughness and insensitivity but ends up by discovering new angles in his own complex emotions when he learns (in Everybody Does It) that the singing talent being sought by his socialite would-be canary wife is actually his own. This discovery may constitute a commentary on the fact that men need no longer delegate artistic sensibilities to wives seeking culture as status or as career, but can if they wish enjoy them as part of their own competence—a new twist (and one that James M. Cain and the scenarists must have been perfectly aware of) in the old comedy-dilemma of the man who meets and surpasses the gentlemanly norms of his new, upper-class peer-group.
Still other comedies of manners of recent years tackle a similar theme of peer-free competence from a different perspective. They portray with sympathy the style of a man who allows himself the luxury of being a generalist at life, self-educated, eccentric, near-autonomous. In the Mr. Belvedere series, for instance, Clifton Webb is a thinly disguised intellectual and social deviant who is an expert at anything he cares to turn his hand and brain to. Yet, like Beatrice Lillie, he attains his range of skill and competence only in situations where society permits a high degree of individualism; and he is allowed to create his breath-taking personal style only because of his astonishing dexterity. On one level the message of the Belvedere movies is quite different from that of the Douglas movies, where a heightened expressiveness is suggested as an attractive extra in life to the ordinary upp
er-middle-class man and not to the nonconformist. But on another level the two types of pictures are very much alike. Both seem to be saying, among all the other amusing things they have, to say, that the power of the peers can be overcome. Both characterizations give the individual the right to explore and elaborate his own personality and sensitivity with a work-leisure competence that goes beyond the requirements of the peers.
Surely the great mass-media artists, including the directors, writers, and others behind the scenes who “create” and promote the artists, make an important contribution to autonomy. The entertainers, in their media, out of their media, and in the never-never land between, exert a constant pressure on the accepted peer-groups and suggest new modes of escape from them. The sharpest critics of American movies are likely to forget this too easily. In their concentration on the indubitable failures of quality in Hollywood movies, they sometimes miss the point that the movies have multiplied the choices in styles of life and leisure available to millions. Even the fan who imitates the casual manner of Humphrey Bogart or the fearless energetic pride of Katharine Hepburn may in the process be emancipating himself or herself from a narrow-minded peer-group. Or, to take another instance, it seems likely that the wild, fantastic suspiciousness of W. C. Fields may have served many in his audience as a support to their own doubts concerning the unquestioned value of smooth amiability and friendliness. I believe that the movies, in many unexpected ways, are liberating agents, and that they need defense against indiscriminate highbrow criticism as well as against the ever-ready veto groups who want the movies to tutor their audiences in all the pious virtues the home and school have failed to inculcate.
One of these virtues is activity as such, and much current rejection of the movies symbolizes a blanket rejection of our allegedly passive popular-culture. By contrast, the critics are likely to place their bets on activities that are individualistic and involve personal participation. For instance, craftsmanship.
THE POSSIBILITIES OF CRAFTSMANSHIP
The “Belvedere” movies happen to be flashing satire on competence and craftsmanship, in much the way that The Admirable Crichton is a satire on competence and class. Today the craftsman often seems eccentric because of his fanatical devotion to his craft or hobby; Mr. Belvedere uses his various craft-skills to flaunt and enjoy his eccentricity, to rub it in. In this sense, his style of life is a new commentary on the question whether competence in hobbies and crafts is on the decline in America. Certainly many people have the leisure and encouragement to pursue crafts who never did before. We are told that the employees at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company include thousands of active, eager gardeners; that they run an annual hobby show of considerable size and style; that the factory helps bring together amateur photographers, woodcarvers, model builders— the whole countless range of modern hobbyism—in addition, of course, to the usual sports, music, and dramatic groups. But there are no statistics to show whether hobbies that were once privately pursued are now simply taken over as part of the program of the active, indeed world-famous, industrial relations department. Beyond a few careful exploratory works such as the Lund-berg, Komarovsky, and Mclnerny book, Leisure: a Suburban Study, we do not even begin to know whether craftsmanlike leisure has developed new meanings in modern America.
It seems plausible to assume that the craftsmanlike use of leisure has certain compatibilities with the whole way of life of men dependent on inner-direction: their attention to the hardness of the material, their relative unconcern and lack of training for the more complex forms of peer-group taste-exchanging. Moreover, the inner-directed man who carries into his hobby some of his surplus work impulses might find the maintenance of his technical skill playing directly back into his value on the job, making him, for instance, a better and more inventive gadgeteer. Even today, among many skilled workmen, such interchange between the home hobby shop and the plant suggestion box is not by any means a forgotten folkway. But the craft-skill is valued more than ever before for its own sake, as in the case of the Sunday painter.
The dramatic turn toward craftsmanlike hobbies in an advanced economy, in which it pays to cater to the desires of those reacting against mass production, has its own peculiar problems. The conservatism of the craftsman—in this aspect, part of the conservatism of play itself—finds its ideals of competence constantly threatened by a series of power tools and hobby products that make it possible for the dub to appear like a professional. The home craftsman of high technical aspirations is better off with a power tool than without one. But how many can retain the spontaneous enthusiasm for craftsmanship in the face of the temptation to have the machine do it better?
Some of the ambiguities of contemporary craft hobbyism dependent on a power tool are illustrated by a study of automotive hobbyists—especially the hot rodders.1 In this field, a wide range of standards of technique and design gives room to both the green amateurs and the semi-professional car racers, while all the hobbyists have the comfort of working within an old American tradition of high-level tinkering. Competence and imagination are on the scene in force among the youths who race their quasi-Fords and quasi-Chevrolets on the Dry Lakes of the Far West, in a continuous competition with the mass-produced standards of Detroit. Among these groups there exists an active and critical attitude toward the Detroit car as it is now built, or as it was built until recently. Here, astonishingly enough, the top commercial product of the country, the Detroit car, far from driving out amateur performance, has only stimulated, perhaps even provoked it. Moreover, the individual who remakes cars according to standards of his own devising is obviously not exploiting any questionable social dividend in his pursuit of leisure but is “doing for himself” with what parts and help he can muster on a small bank-roll. The very economy of his means helps give the procedure its atmosphere of high competence and high enjoyment.
But this field too is becoming professionalized and standardized. The Hot Rod, a magazine founded to cater to the growing number of auto hobbyists (at the same time standardizing their self-image), reports that the business of supplying the amateurs with parts and tools is becoming a big business—some $8,000,000 in 1948. In the meantime Detroit has found its way to many of the hot-rodder power-plant notions, if not stripped-down body notions.
We see looming upon the horizon of the hot rodder much the same fate that has overtaken other forms of amateur competence, not only in the area of crafts and hobbies but, as we shall see below in the instance of jazz, in the area of taste-exchange and criticism. Those who seek autonomy through the pursuit of a craft must keep an eye on the peer-groups (other than their own immediate one) and on the market, if only to keep out of their way. But this in turn may involve them in a steady search for difficulties in execution and privacies in vocabulary (in some ways, like the “mysteries” of medieval craftsmen) in order to outdistance the threatening invasion of the crowd. Then what began more or less spontaneously may end up as merely effortful marginal differentiation, with the roots of fantasy torn up by a concern for sheer technique. The paradox of craftsmanship, and of much other play, is that in order to attain any importance as an enlivener of fantasy it must be “real.” But whenever the craftsman has nourished a real competence he also tends to call into being an industry and an organization to circumvent the competence or at least to standardize it.
The man whose daily work is glad handing can often rediscover both his childhood and his inner-directed residues by serious craftsmanship. An advertising man, involved all day in personalizing, may spend his week ends in the craftsmanlike silences of a boatyard or in sailboat racing—that most inner-directed pursuit where the individual racers independently move toward the goal as if guided by an invisible hand! And yet it is clear that these players may locate themselves in the spectrum of possible craft activities for reasons that have nothing to do with the search either for competence or for the more distant goal of autonomy.
It is important to see the limitations of
the answer of craftsmanship, because otherwise we may be tempted to place more stock in it than is warranted. This temptation is particularly strong among those who try to deal with the challenge of modern leisure by filling it with styles of play drawn from the past in Europe or America. Indeed, there is a widespread trend today to warn Americans against relaxing in the featherbed of plenty, in the pulpy recreations of popular culture, in the delights of bar and coke bar, and so on. In these warnings any leisure that looks easy is suspect, and craftsmanship does not look easy.
The other-directed man in the upper social strata often finds a certain appeal in taking the side of craftsmanship against consumption. Yet in general it is a blind alley for the other-directed man to try to adapt his styles in leisure to those which grew out of an earlier character and an earlier social situation; in the process he is almost certain to become a caricature. This revivalist tendency is particularly clear in the type of energetic craft hobbyist we might term the folk dancer. The folk dancer is often an other-directed urbanite or suburbanite who, in search of an inner-directed stance, becomes artsy and craftsy in his recreations and consumer tastes. He goes native, with or without regional variations. He shuts out the mass media as best he can. He never wearies of attacking from the pulpit of his English bicycle the plush and chrome of the new-model cars. He is proud of not listening to the radio, and television is his bugbear.
The vogue of the folk dancer is real testimony to people’s search for meaningful, creative leisure, as is, too, the revival of craftsmanship. The folk dancer wants something better but does not know where to look for it. He abandons the Utopian possibilities of the future because, in his hatred of the American present, as he interprets it, he is driven to fall back on the vain effort to resuscitate the European or American past as a model for play. Like many other people who carry the “ancestor within” of an inner-directed character and ideology, he fears the dangerous avalanche of leisure that is coming down on the Americans.
The Lonely Crowd Page 39