The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books

by Azar Nafisi

  The sounds of the city intrude on his sleep. There is the milk cart, the whistling paper carrier thumping the paper against the door, the neighbor’s car, and finally the alarm clock that puts a stop to his dreams. Before he is fully awake, that alarm clock is described in great detail: early in the novel we are invited to recognize that this all-American businessman, a defender of individualism and free trade, is best defined not by any peculiarity of temperament or cherished keepsake but by his ownership of the best of the “nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments,” making its owner “proud of being awakened by such a rich device.” In terms of social status, it is “almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires.”

  Once Babbitt begins to stir, we follow him from the sleeping porch through his bedroom to the bathroom. Every object he encounters along the way is described with the pointed detail of an advertising brochure. Like the city itself, everything in this house is “up-to-date” and of the moment, devoid of the messiness of personal taste or the burden of history. The shiny and meticulous quality of the surfaces produces a spooky refracted light of the kind we will later come across in films such as The Truman Show and American Beauty, where a fabricated reality intrudes on the protagonists’ souls. The objects Babbitt transfers from one suit to another—a fountain pen, a silver pencil, a gold penknife, a silver cigar cutter, seven keys all hanging from his watch chain—are of “eternal importance” to him, “like baseball or the Republican Party.” Without them, he feels “naked.”

  Next we meet Myra Babbitt, George’s loyal wife. We are told that she “no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences.” So she appears in a petticoat, unaware of her “corsets which bulged.” Although Myra is a “good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman,” no one but her youngest daughter really cares much about her or is “entirely aware that she was alive.” At breakfast we meet the Babbitts’ three children: the “dumpy brown-haired” twenty-two-year-old Verona, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and ardent advocate of social causes; Theodore Roosevelt, known as Ted, who at seventeen is a typically wild teenager; and finally Babbitt’s favorite, the ten-year-old Katherine, called Tinka, whom her father greets each morning with “Well, kittiedoolie!”

  Babbitt looks out the window and considers his city. Surveying the top of the Second National Tower, a building thirty-five stories high, he is inspired “by the rhythm of the city” and beholds “the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad ‘Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo’ as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.”

  4

  The first time I read Babbitt, during my college days, I associated it with E. E. Cummings’s poem “next to of course god, america i.” I loved Cummings and felt I had found the poetic equivalent of the “Babbitt experience.” At the time, I had little connection to the world outside my university, and I was too embroiled in its politics to care to know much about America beyond its precincts. Babbitt was a fun book to read, a critique of America, and that was enough. But something remained in the back of my mind, nagging me, or perhaps “beckoning” is a better word—something that made me return to Babbitt once I was more comfortably settled back in Iran. This time I saw things I had missed, the complications and paradoxes of being an American, or of life in a democracy, now that I found myself living in a totalitarian state. But it was not until I had returned to America and begun the process of becoming a citizen that I came to appreciate Babbitt fully. By that point I had come to feel as if certain aspects of that fictional universe were shimmering reflections of the reality I was then living. It was as if Lewis had perfectly captured our hollow, thing-filled times, as if the characters he created almost a century ago mimicked us, gloating over the fact that we had turned out to be their true progenies. Like the Red King in his confrontation with Alice, I am tempted to ask, Who dreamt up whom? Did the characters in Babbitt dream us up, or are we imagining them? I often find myself wondering: What is George Babbitt (or Myra or Ted) doing here, parading on my television screen, in new clothes, with a new haircut, using the same old words?

  “What the country needs—just at this present juncture—is neither a college president nor a lot of monkeying with foreign affairs, but a good—sound economical—business—administration, that will give us a chance to have something like a decent turnover.” This is not a speech by Mitt Romney, George Bush or a conservative talking head on Hannity; it is Babbitt’s neighbor and friend Howard Littlefield, responding to Babbitt’s question “Don’t you think it’s about time we had a real business administration?” Littlefield is “the Great Scholar,” with a B.A. from Blodgett College and a Ph.D. from Yale in economics. He is an “authority on everything in the world except babies, cooking, and motors.” His real job, however, is as the “employment-manager and publicity-counsel of the Zenith Street Traction Company.”

  There is a strict, if largely unspoken, hierarchy in Zenith. There are those above Babbitt in wealth and power, the ones he aspires one day to join—they belong not to the Athletic Club, as Babbitt and his regular cronies like Littlefield do, but to the Union Club, a notch above it, classier and more posh. These are men like Charles McKelvey, the contractor, and Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the Advocate-Times. Right above them is old money, represented by William Washington Eathorne, president of the First State Bank of Zenith. “Out of the dozen contradictory Zeniths which together make up the true and complete Zenith, none is so powerful and enduring yet none so unfamiliar to the citizens as the small, still, dry, polite, cruel Zenith of the William Eathornes; and for that tiny hierarchy the other Zeniths unwittingly labor and insignificantly die.”

  It is not politics that rules Babbitt’s world—this is not the Soviet Union or the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the state reshapes its citizens’ social, cultural and personal lives. A different, more generous if equally ruthless god controls this universe. It is Mammon, the god of buying and selling. Babbitt has made “nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry,” but he is “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” The word “calling” is significant, because business is Babbitt’s true calling, and he embraces it with the zeal of a new convert. He speaks about real estate in terms of vision and poetry; he is not a broker but a “realtor,” whom he defines as a “seer of the future development of the community . . . a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes.” Translated into more concrete terms, “a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow.” Babbitt calls this guessing “Vision.” He also helps elect the mayor, slandering and browbeating the antibusiness politicians and activists, talking about “Zip and Bang” and the “Standardized American Citizen,” his words for the model Rotarian. In short, his is not a world ruled by politics; if anything, politics is ruled by the business of selling. In Babbitt’s world, as in our own, a metaphorical Botox coats all walks of life: if a party loses an election, it will repackage itself and revisit its messaging rather than engage in meaningful reflection.

  Long before Mitt Romney’s closed-room expression of disdain for the 47 percent of Americans he branded as “takers,” George F. Babbitt had it all figured out. In Babbitt’s view, “all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism.” He opines that “the sooner a man learns he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce—produce—produce! That’s what the country needs.”

  Babbitt’s utilitarian philosophy is consistent with his attitude toward work. We are told that he is “conventionally honest,” and not kind. When Stan Graff, a lowly,
overworked, underpaid employee, complains about his working conditions and wages, Babbitt, seeking to justify refusing him a raise, wants to know whether Stan is the kind of fellow who “kicks about working overtime, that wants to spend his evenings reading trashy novels or spooning and exchanging a lot of nonsense and foolishness with some girl” or “the kind of upstanding, energetic young man, with a future—and with Vision!” He ends his fatherly admonition by asking, “What’s your Ideal, anyway? Do you want to make money and be a responsible member of the community, or do you want to be a loafer, with no inspiration or Pep?” If he were with us today, I have no doubt that George Babbitt would be a regular guest or consultant on Fox News.

  In a society like Iran, “Inspiration” and “Pep” come at the barrel of a gun, a very straightforward method of persuasion. There is nothing complicated about the brute force of an ideological state. Babbitt’s god wants to sell, not to kill; its main weapon is seduction. It is full of guile and promise and yet remains efficient and impersonal, like the up-to-date alarm clock gracing the Babbitts’ sleeping porch. Babbitt is persuaded that without that clock and his other gadgets, his life would be lacking, incomplete. “Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.”

  Sinclair Lewis’s genius was in capturing the spirit of modern advertising when it had not yet come to dominate the American landscape and define the soul of the nation. Advertising was in essence a twentieth-century phenomenon, and, like so many things belonging to that century, it was made in America. Its genius lies in its ability to hijack our “joy and passion and wisdom,” repackaging them and returning them to us as fantasies, transforming everyday instruments, from cars to vacuum cleaners, into exotic objects of desire. Novelists, who are in the business of joy, passion and wisdom, were the first to grasp the power of advertising and technology in their best and worst forms. From Jules Verne’s fantastic journeys to the macabre worlds of 1984 and Brave New World, they would become prophets (often Cassandras) of the modern world.

  Most of us citizens of the twenty-first century cannot simply mock and deplore Babbitt. Can we deny the fact that we feel a certain empathy for him, an uncomfortable sense of identification? After all, our iPhones, iPads and Kindles are sophisticated descendants of that up-to-date alarm clock. These and thousands of the other products we have come to depend on evoke passion, guilt, anxiety. We are told that Olay Regenerist will restore our youth, a Citi card will prevent us from being boring and Alcatel and Verizon will allow us to fulfill our dreams. Meanwhile, insurance companies think day and night about nothing but our well-being.

  I can imagine standing in one of those interminable lines with a Babbitt-like figure waiting for the latest iPhone and sharing his “enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices.” How many owners of a Mac who look nothing like Babbitt and might strongly disapprove of his lifestyle would feel, with him, that these devices are “symbols of truth and beauty?” Anyone who has gazed with longing at a clean, well-lighted Apple Store on her way to work may understand why Babbitt yearns “for a dictaphone, for a typewriter which would add and multiply, as a poet yearns for quartos or a physician for radium.”

  In fact, our relationships with our cell phones and iPads are far more intimate than Babbitt’s to his gadgets. These objects have almost become extensions of our physical selves, threatening to take the place of actual contact with others and with the world around us. They are our intimate companions: in the streets, in our cars, in supermarkets and at restaurants, even during family meals and in bed, we communicate with them and through them, we ask them for advice and direction, feeling lost, almost bereft, without them.

  Possessions have always been symbols of class and status, or mementos of love and friendship. But America has come up with a new role for them: they are now our pals, and although we may find ourselves addicted to them, they are ultimately dispensable. You love your iPhone, yet in the blink of an eye you can exchange it for something newer, better, more desirable. Excitement, free of commitment, is the basis for our most intimate relationships these days. This constant need—greed—for the new is both our strength and our vital flaw; it is what makes America a country of manufacturing dreams, or, more correctly, all kinds of dreams, and one that can also be shallow, unthinking, even fragile. What is surprising is not how much things have changed since the beginning of the last century, but how much they are alike. The gadgets in question have changed, but the mentality that packages them and buys them is basically the same. Are we all becoming Babbitts now?

  5

  It seems quite simple, this condemnation of consumer society, until one realizes that we are, of course, part of the problem. What are my exact grievances against my laptop, cell phone and now my iPad? How far am I implicated in the creation and preservation of the very world I find so easy to dismiss and despise? Babbitt is full of surprises, small complications, forewarning of future dilemmas. It is deceptively simple. We don’t like to think that innovation and vitality go hand in hand with complacent commercialism, and yet here we are, and it is this unexpected revelation that has made Babbitt gnaw at me for so many years. Much has been said about the corrosive nature of consumer society, its hazards and the inevitable conformity it generates. Babbitt does not merely condemn this consumerism; it lays open the paradox at the heart of American society: the urge (perhaps “addiction” is a better word) for novelty, for movement, for constant change that creates “Pep” and motivates “invention” while at the same time being an impediment to imagination and reflection.

  In her review for the New Statesman, Rebecca West wrote that Babbitt has “that something extra, over and above, which makes the work of art, and it is signed in every line with the unique personality of the writer.” She goes on to quote one of Babbitt’s public speeches, adding, “It is a bonehead Walt Whitman speaking. Stuffed like a Christmas goose as Babbitt is, with silly films, silly newspapers, silly talk, silly oratory, there has yet struck him the majestic creativeness of his own country, its miraculous power to bear and nourish without end countless multitudes of men and women. . . . [T]here is in these people a vitality so intense that it must eventually bolt with them and land them willy-nilly into the sphere of intelligence; and this immense commercial machine will become the instrument of their aspiration.”

  Interestingly enough, it is Seneca Doane, the radical lawyer, friend of the workingman and astute critic of Zenith and its corrupt leaders, who most understands and appreciates this intense vitality. Responding to a foreign friend who condescendingly criticizes American conformity, Doane reminds him that there is standardization in every country: in England (“every house that can afford it having the same muffins at the same tea-hour”), in France (with its “sidewalk cafes”) and Italy (where the “love-making” is standardized). For him, “Standardization is excellent, per se. When I buy an Ingersoll watch or a Ford, I get a better tool for less money, and I know precisely what I’m getting, and that leaves me more time and energy to be individual in.” Doane goes on to explain how when he saw, in London, the picture of an American suburb in a toothpaste ad on the back of a Saturday Evening Post, “an elm-lined snowy street of these new houses, Georgian some of ’em, or with low raking roofs and—the kind of street you’d find here in Zenith, say in Floral Heights,” he felt homesick. He thought to himself, “There’s no other country in the world that has such pleasant houses. And I don’t
care if they ARE standardized. It’s a corking standard!”

  “What I fight in Zenith,” Doane proclaims, “is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains . . . are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy.” This was Sinclair Lewis’s dilemma. The only way to prevent the harmful aspects of “standardization” is by cultivating its opposite, that which is unique and wayward, independent and individual: ideas and imagination. Unless we have independence of mind, how can we confront the illusions of advertising or see through the false promises of conformity?

  We may laugh at Babbitt as he irritates us and invites our sympathy, but what is at stake is not just a matter of socks, shoes, cell phones and alarm clocks; the real danger lies in the commodification of our souls. Now, mind you, Babbitt himself would in no way agree with this. He, like his latter-day descendants, has his own definition of the problem. “Trouble with a lot of folks,” he informs his son, Ted, is that “they’re so blame material; they don’t see the spiritual and mental side of American supremacy; they think that inventions like the telephone and the aeroplane and wireless—no, that was a Wop invention, but anyway: they think these mechanical improvements are all that we stand for; whereas to a real thinker, he sees that spiritual and, uh, dominating movements like Efficiency, and Rotarianism, and Prohibition, and Democracy are what compose our deepest and truest wealth. And maybe this new principle in education-at-home may be another—may be another factor. I tell you, Ted, we’ve got to have Vision.”