by Gore Vidal
The Reporter, July 11, 1957
SATIRE IN THE 1950’s
Malcolm Muggeridge has recently proposed that satire tends to flourish at those times when the Establishment is confident that its eternal truths and verities (to borrow Mr. Faulkner’s most famous redundancy) are indeed eternal and therefore impervious to ill-natured wit. Mr. Muggeridge concludes that in an age like ours (other-directed, hydrogen-haunted, artificially tranquilized and doggedly togethered) satire is more apt to take than administer a beating. He is right in one thing: satire has taken a beating. It hardly exists in the more public art forms, and except for an occasional timid appearance in the novel or on a night-club floor, satire has seldom thrived in our comfortable land. But I suggest that the reasons for this are precisely opposite to those Mr. Muggeridge gives. In the first place, he underestimates the very real complacency of our culture, which despite lowering political weather (those atom bombs again) traditionally holds that boats in any weather are best left unrocked. Secondly, it would appear to me that satire, historically, has been most useful—and most used—when the moral and religious assumptions of a people about itself are in a state of serious confusion because of some dramatic change for good or ill in that people’s fortunes.
As his world and city fell, Aristophanes attacked a demoralized war-minded Administration which did not long survive him. As the Roman Republic disintegrated, Cicero satirized radicals, Catullus satirized the mysteriously amiable Caesar, and Horace ticked off a number of highly placed bores; all this in a time of proscription and violent change. Later, under the Empire, Petronius and Lucan, though good courtiers, had the bad luck to find the Divine Nero irresistibly funny; and their satiric thrusts were rewarded with the optimum Roman prize, that ineluctable warm bath with open veins. Those were not, to say the least, complacent days. Nor can one argue that, fierce palace politics aside, the Roman imperium ever rested on certain common assumptions confidently held. Beyond a glum acceptance of law as necessary to commercial endeavor and the accidental discovery that government is largely a matter of filing and cross-indexing, the Roman state from Sulla to Constantine was gloriously confused in its morality, politics and religion. Confronted by so many rich absurdities and contradictions, satire became a high and useful art in the hands of such various men as Persius, Juvenal, Martial, even St. Paul; though between fatal baths and confinement upon disagreeable islands, the satirists themselves did not always have too good a time of it.
The Christian victory, though it did not bring peace on earth, did at least manage to put a severe leash on the satiric impulse. There are not many recorded attacks on the Church between the Emperor Julian’s death and the Reformation, a millennium which—though marked by the usual wars of aggression as well as a number of religious wars (something new under the sun)—qualified supremely, in the West at least, as a period of firmly entrenched spiritual values and therefore a seedbed, one would think, for satire. Yet it was not. And the truth of the matter, of course, is that no well-organized central administration, temporal or spiritual, is apt to allow its beneficiaries the license of laughter at its own expense. Cardinals are no laughing matter in Ireland or in Spain today. Even in America, they must write particularly bad verse to occasion a wary joke or two. Yet in France and Italy, two nations which have been for some time in a state of moral and political confusion, cardinals are stock figures of comedy, cropping up in numerous jokes, good and bad, malicious and amiable. I worry the Roman Church only because it is an elderly institution of great significance morally and therefore an obvious target for useful satire. At present, in America, it is not.
Now I would propose that the United States in its short history has been too preoccupied uniting and exploring, pioneering and building, inventing and consuming, to give much thought to anything not relevant to the practical and immediate. Not that we have lacked for harsh critics. In fact, most of our country’s good writers have been nay-sayers, deploring the day and resolutely pessimistic about tomorrow. On the other hand, our humorists have been jolly and ubiquitous. We all know, rather wearily, about frontier humor. Mark Twain’s jokes go on and on and some are funny but none is truly satiric because he was not one to rock the boat. It was his ordeal to be tamed, and the petulance and bitterness of his final book, What is Man?, answers as nothing else could why he did not dare question any of his society’s basic assumptions.
Henry James observed that it took a great deal of history to make a little bit of literature. I suspect it takes a far more homogeneous, more settled, yet more uneasy society to produce satirists. And if one is to be met by the argument that God forbid things should be any worse simply to make matters easier for one small department of literature, I would be the first to agree that the benign incompetence of the Great Golfer and his Team is certainly preferable to a touchy Nero or to an inscrutable Caesar.
Yet there is a real need for the satirist in our affairs, especially now. Since the Second World War and its horrors there has been a remarkable change in our society. Anti-Semitism seems happily to have vanished, except among the more irritable Jews, while anti-Catholics no longer smile, at least in mixed religious company, when the Vatican certifies that the sun did a dance over Portugal. Even my Southern relatives employ a certain tact in discussing the Problem. A profound tolerance is in the land, a tolerance so profound that it is not unlike terror. One dare not raise one’s voice against any religion, idea or even delinquency if it is explicable by a therapist. I suspect that much of the American’s hatred of Russia and Communism is simply a siphoning off of other irrational dislikes which, blocked by the stern tolerance of the day, can find expression only in Communist baiting. I do not propose that we return to the bad old days of holding people responsible for inherited characteristics. Yet I should like to have tolerance learned from within and not have it imposed from without. To put forward a recklessly unsympathetic proposition: As long as any group within the society deliberately maintains its identity, it is, or should be, a fair target for satire, both for its own good and for the society’s. Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one’s own cherished beliefs; witness the travels of Gulliver.
It is generally agreed and officially lamented that we are in a new age of conformity. Youth wants security, not adventure. The great questions are not asked because the realization that there are no absolute answers has at last penetrated to the bottom layer of society—and why be curious if the answers are only tentative? Now, if this time is indeed so bland, then according to Muggeridge’s law, satire must flourish. Yet satire hardly exists. In perfect comfort the squares grow ever more rectilinear. And to strike the minatory note, if ever there was a people ripe for dictatorship it is the American people today. Should a homegrown Hitler appear, whose voice, amongst the public orders, would be raised against him in derision? Certainly no voice on television: “Sorry, the guy has a lot of fans. Sure, we know he’s bad news, but you can’t hurt people’s feelings. They buy soap, too.” And elsewhere there would be the tolerant reflex: “Well, he could be right. After all, a lot of people seem to agree with him…” And then the iron fist closes, and we start our Empire.
I have often chided my Soviet friends on the naïveté of their country’s censorship. Newly literate and still awed by the printed word, the Russian governors are terrified of ideas. If only they knew what our governors know: that in a huge egalitarian society no idea which runs counter to the prevailing superstitions can successfully penetrate the national carapace. We give our solemn critics every freedom, including the one to fail to be heard. And fail they do: silence and indifference neutralize the irritant more effectively than brainwashing. Yet this age could be a marvelous one for satirists. Look at the targets: Christianity, Psychiatry, Marxism, Romantic Love, Xenophobia, Science (all capitalized and all regarded
with reverence if not admiration). You need only take your pick, and not worry about bad taste. If one can make the cautious laugh by clowning, half the work is done, for laughter is the satirist’s anaesthetic: he can then make his incision, darting on before the audience knows what has been done to it. But he must be swift and engaging, or the laughter will turn to indifferent silence, the ultimate censorship.
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Where can the American satirist operate today? Not on television, seldom if ever in the movies, and on the stage only if he is willing to play the buffoon. But the novel remains; and it would be good to see those writers with a talent for satire (Randall Jarrell for one) strike boldly at the large targets, without that vitiating diffidence peculiar to the contemporary American novelist. We don’t know very much, they seem to say; we are deep of course, often mystic, and we do know that love and compassion are the most beautiful things in the world and in our studies of loneliness we like to show the full potentiality of love (how Flaubert would have satirized these latter-day Bovarists!), but we don’t know or want to know any senators, bishops, atomic scientists; as for psychiatrists—well, we like ours: he is a Jungian. Shrinking each into his own skin, our novelists grow more private, and for those who lack genius (the majority) more dull. I do not suggest that everyone turns his hand to satire. It is, after all, only one of a number of ways to get the thing said. Nor do I echo those solid Forsyte Saga newspaper reviewers who maintain that what we need is a good novel about the wool trade or building a dam, but what I feel we do need is more engagement in the outer world. And daring. And wit. And, finally, satirists, who are needed as truth is needed—for is not satire, simply, truth grinning in a solemn canting world?*
The Nation, April 26, 1958
*Right on cue the “great” age of satire began. Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl in the cellars, dozens of absurdists and black comedians in print and on the stage. Everything was labeled satire until the murderous sixties really got under way. To date we still lack a Dante to commit to hell our villains (is it because our villains are beyond satire?); we even lack a Mencken…or a Vidal to write a piece on the need for satire in the seventies.
LOVE LOVE LOVE
“Love love love love love love love love love”—give or take a few “loves”—was the entire lyric of a song by Charlie Chaplin and I herewith propose that it be adopted as the American theater’s official anthem. Just name your problem, sit back and let love solve it: race prejudice, foreign relations—even Job reeling beneath the unkind attentions of a dubious Yale God gets off the hook at the end through Love, which has now replaced the third-act Marines of a simpler time. On those rare occasions when some other solution tries to creep into the popular theater it either fails or else survives only after whatever alien gold was in it has been transmuted to base Love by the alchemy of production. Granted, Arthur Miller worries his head about problems of the day; but as for his heart—well, scratched he bleeds Love. Even that attention we must pay his salesman is but a command to love him.
Our popular theater ponders, to the exclusion of ail else, the pathos of Love withheld, of Love lost, of Love found after three acts of jittery footling while the man learns Tenderness (never the woman, since according to commercial lore, Woman knows). Moon-guided, triple-crowned, inscrutable, the American Woman in our theater is never so wise as when she’s not thinking at all, just being, and listening with a tiny smile to the third-act speech of the man, who has had to learn Tenderness the hard way. “Gosh, Marge, I know how it was, but it won’t be like that no more, honest, baby, it won’t. No, sir, when I got knocked down in that fight with that two-hundred-pound woman in Salt Lake, I knew what we had was all there is and I’m gonna change, Marge, I swear, because that’s all there is, what we got…love.” And Marge, played by an actress weighing-in at ninety-seven tensely muscular pounds, opens her arms slowly as though semaphoring bad news to a foundering ship; she takes his great, empty buffalo head in her arms. “It’s all right, Walter,” she says in a voice meant to be tender, though aficionados will detect the approaching kill in this last veronica. “I’m here, Walter.” And the curtain falls.
Yet in all fairness to our commercial theater, the preoccupation with Love was thrust upon it by the society it reflects or tries to reflect. By Love the theater does not mean love in Rousseau’s sense (to employ him as a Romantic touchstone, pre-Agony). Nor is Love anything quite so simple as successful copulation, though that of course is of coeval (as Mr. Faulkner would say) importance. After all, one of the few goals our friendly society has set us is a more perfect union; the general failure to achieve it, of course, ensures full employment to mental therapists, causes dramatic religious conversions and, in the case of one talented theater director, has driven him to pad obsessively the crotches of the less flamboyantly hung actors (Aristophanes would have found a joke in that; we can’t). No, Love in our theater is not really sex though sex is part of it. Love is a warm druggedness, a surrender of the will and the mind to inchoate feelings of Togetherness. Thought is the enemy; any exercise of mind betrays Love, and Love’s vengeance in the theater is terrible, for mind must be broken and made to recant, and then to love Love. But before we score the silliness of our popular theater, we ought to recognize that it reflects, always more baldly than the novel, say, the superstitions and prejudices of the age. The flabbiness of tone in the theater differs only in its oversimplified effects from the same flabbiness in the popular (and sometimes “serious”) novel, and, to get to the root, it does no more than reflect the ubiquitous flab of the Great Golfer’s reign.*1 Whether Tocqueville’s worst fears have come true or not, democracy is too much with us. It has been duly noted how often people now say “I feel” such-and-such to be true rather than “I think” such-and-such to be true. To make that shift of verb unconsciously is to eschew mind and take cover in the cozier, more democratic world of feeling. I suppose there are some who say of others pejoratively, “His feelings are not deep.” But if pressed, they would admit that no one really knows what another’s feelings are, though it is of course agreed that we are all pretty much alike at heart: sensitive, warm, tender, our moments of bad behavior the result of the green twig’s early bending, sure to straighten and flower beneath Love’s therapeutic sun. In any case, in our theater feeling is all, and the deliberate exercise of mind is thought an admission of emotional poverty. Particularly mistrusted is Bernard Shaw, whose works are dismissed as displays of debater’s tricks, the plots suitable only for adaptation to musical comedy. He did not love Love; worse, he made the devil a Love-lover, and chose as hero Don Juan, a mere life-lover.
Now it is almost too easy to put down Broadway. So much of what’s wrong is so obvious that most attacks on our theater lose force because of the target’s size. It is impossible with a shotgun at three paces not to hit the Shubert Theater. Yet it is curious how often the serious-minded do miss the essential target. For instance, not long ago a lively young critic fired a familiar blast: no ideas in our theater, too many sensational productions épater le box office, too many writers revealing sexual obsessions of depressing singularity. All the usual changes were rung, but then the critic entitled his piece “The Theater Is Losing Its Minds,” and confused everything. I don’t know how far back his memory, both actual and learned, goes, but if there were ever any minds operative in the American theater it is news to me. Before Eugene O’Neill (whose mastery of ideas was second to none, unless it be his fellow Nobelist Pearl Buck), there was a wasteland of Owen Davises, Avery Hopwoods and Eugene Walters, stretching back to the egregious Royall Tyler, who started the American theater on its mindless way. Two centuries of junk. If anything, there are rather more signs of intelligence stirring now than in the bad old days.
A few months later, our critic was back again. This time he wondered why the better novelists did not bring “mind” to the theater. Or at least why hadn’t the theater produced playwrights as good as the novelists on today�
�s List, and he gave the List, betraying himself, I’m afraid, as an incipient Love-lover. Parenthetically, each year there is a short List of the O.K. Writers. Today’s List consists of two Jews, two Negroes and a safe floating goy of the old American Establishment (often Wright Morris*2), just to show there is no prejudice in our Loving world; only the poor old homosexualists are out. It is a list dictated not by any aesthetic but by Good Citizenship. That the writers on it happen to be admirable is irrelevant: Togetherness put them there and we all feel better seeing them belaureled. My young critic is not responsible for today’s List, but he showed a certain absence of mind in trying to beat the playwrights with it, because not one of the writers named could be thought of as an intellectual in the sense I assumed he meant (Gide, Camus, even the dervish Genet). They are all good, if fairly standard, writers, more or less in the naturalistic tradition, and, at least in their novels, betray no more mind than do the plays of Arthur Miller.
I find this sort of mistake (taking good writers of one sort and saying they are good writers of quite another sort on the grounds that to be good is good enough) yet another sign of the general corruption of aesthetic and intellectual values in this soft age. The language of criticism now tends to be as inexact as the prose of the works criticized. No one seems to know who or what anyone or anything is. Prevalent is a lazy permissiveness. Our literature as well as our theater seems at times like a terrible kindergarten. Jack is a great novelist because he feels he’s a great novelist. Anything goes. On every side counterfeit talents flood the exchange. This was always so, but in other times and places there were certain critics whose bite authenticated coinage. They are still with us—but outside the battle, in the Academy.