An oil company may extend into transportation, or a food-processing firm invest its profits in magazines, but there is one thing the corporation cannot do. When it enters fields of individual creativeness it not only fails but it shrivels the creator. It cannot order the writing of good books and plays, the painting of great pictures, the composing of exquisite music. Where it has entered such fields, it has succeeded only in adulterating the product and eventually destroying the producer. In the production of food, clothing, shelter, minor entertainment, and the gadgetry of comfort the corporation has not only fulfilled our needs but sometimes created them. Only in our yearning toward greatness is it helpless.
While our rich men were growing richer and we were all living high on the hog in the nineteenth century—all equal, all common, democratic, mostly Protestant, materialistic and down-to-earth—there must have been a profound yearning for the flamboyance, the trappings, the ritual, the fancy titles and postures and litanies we had denied and cast out. There was, and we did something about it. We created unofficial orders, kingdoms, robes, and regalia and complicated forms of procedure and secret recognitions among the elect. The meeting hall over the fire-house in the grubby little town would be transformed—one night into Solomon’s temple, the next to a select and benign witches’ coven, the next to the chapel of an order of knighthood complete with regalia, shining swords, and ostrich feathers. For one night a week we became noble. I remember well seeing Louis Schneider, the good butcher of Salinas—a round and red-faced man, in a bloody apron most of the time—wearing a golden crown, an imitation ermine robe, holding the symbols of power in his hands and speaking ritual phrases I am sure he didn’t understand and would have laughed at if he had. His box-toed shoes peeped from under the gold and purple of his robe, but nothing could change his yellow waterfall mustache or his wrinkled and much-reddened neck. It was glorious. At every parade the noble knights marched, a little shy and very unmilitary, but with their plumes fluttering and silver-plated swords reflecting the light.
It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don’t have to. Every holiday draws millions of marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march, clad in any imaginable outlandish costume, carrying heavy banners with them too. Everything from Saint Patrick’s Day to the Grandmothers of America, Inc., draws milling marchers; but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers. Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed. He lives for the day when he can get out of uniform, and once out spends a large part of his future life at reunions, conventions, marching his heart out while his uniform gets tighter and tighter, and his collar and waistband torture him. Then the war he loathed becomes the great time of his life, and he can conscientiously bore his wife and children to death with it.
Along with the veterans’ organizations, Americans have developed scores of orders, lodges and encampments, courts—some simple insurance organizations, some burial agreements, some charitable associations, but all, all noble. Anyone who has lived long enough will remember some of these as an enrichment of his youth. Elks, Masons, Knight Templars, Woodmen of the World, Redmen, Eagles, Eastern Star, Foresters, Concatenated Order of Whowho, International—the World Almanac lists hundreds of such societies and associations, military and religious, philosophic, scholarly, charitable, mystic, political, and some just plain nuts. All were and perhaps still are aristocratic and mostly secret and therefore exclusive. They seemed to fulfill a need for grandeur against a background of commonness, for aristocracy in the midst of democracy. And the ritual perhaps satisfied the nostalgia of the Protestant for the fulsome litany and ritual of the denounced Catholic Church. A great many orders had rules against admitting any Catholic. And then the Catholics formed their own orders, their own knighthoods and clubs, and that kind of ruined the whole thing.
We are a very strange people; we love organizations, and hate them. I remember something that happened in Salinas at a time when the Hearst papers were whipping up anger against the Japanese, and when, in our schools—I guess I was about twelve or thirteen years old—at least thirty percent of the pupils were Japanese. Some of them were my good friends, but, stimulated by the ferocity of the Hearst campaign, we formed a little club for espionage against the Japanese. We had secret signs and secret message places and codes. We prowled about Japanese gardeners’ farms, peered in their windows, and found that they went to bed very early—and got up very early, too. But we were content to snoop, and we were happy. Then a terrible thing happened. Takasi Yatkumi, who was one of our dearest friends, asked to join. We were horrified; it tore the whole structure of racial dislike down to the roots. We explained to Takasi that his action was not cricket; that he was the enemy; that he couldn’t join an anti-Japanese organization. He thought about it awhile and said that if we would let him in he would help us to spy on his mother and father. And because he was our friend we had to take him in, but it ruined the fine, ferocious quality of our organization, just as the Catholic lodges in a way broke down the ferocity of the Protestant groups.
The desire and will to spy on, to denounce, to threaten, and to punish, while not an American tendency, nevertheless inflames a goodly number of Americans. The ones I have inspected at close range are people just past middle age, both men and women, who feel that life has cheated them or passed them by; the feeling may have something to do with the climacteric. They seem to believe that the blame for their own unhappiness lies in the nature of the society in which they live. The sexually dissatisfied are appalled at the immorality of youth. Those who have failed or not succeeded in business become convinced that a great wrongness directs our economy. Feelings of social inadequacy emerge in hatred of society.
All such sickness of the soul must find a target to shoot at—and the targets are available in the happy, the successful, the efficient, and the recognized. The attacker usually finds himself a high moral or religious purpose. He is not attacking something; he is defending something. Beautiful women, if publicized, must be whores, and attractive men lechers or deviates. The quality and direction of the attack diagnoses the failure or the sickness of the attacker. Politicians and statesmen are prime targets; and, above everyone else, our Presidents are sitting ducks. The letters of threat and denunciation sent to the White House are, in many cases, hysterical with hatred and jealousy. No President has escaped this deluge of rebuke, from Washington to Johnson. It is my firm belief that President Kennedy was murdered not for what he was but for what his murderer wasn’t; a man with a beautiful and loving wife, a high position, and the respect and admiration of his countrymen could not be forgiven by a man who had failed in everything he had undertaken—his marriage, his politics, and his aching desire to be accepted and admired.
Writers do not draw quite as much fire as those whose personal lives are publicized, but in my time I have received some ferocious letters accusing me of sins both of commission and of omission. I think my favorite was one which, after several pages of furious and vengeful attack, ended with the beautiful threat: “You will never get out of this world alive!”
To guard us against taste, judgment, and self-reliance in our critical attitudes—particularly toward the arts—the American species has produced a sport which may be unique in the world today. We have identified her and named her “Mom.” She seems to be related to the arachnids. She resembles Latrodectus mactans, and also the Salticidae and the Lycosidae, in their mating habits. The males of those species often dance for hours before the females
will submit to mating, although sometimes, as with the Pisauridae, the female will accept from her mate a present such as a fly wrapped in silk. After mating, of course, she eats her spouse. Our counterpart Moma Americana, sometimes known as the “Haywire Mother,” breathes fire and cries havoc while setting herself to defend her children from the withering effects of literature. She turns up to exorcise the pale and ghostly books from our haunted house of culture. Her victims, in effect, are not books but children.
The odd thing is that this March Hare mother need never have had children nor have read a book—indeed often has done neither. The object of her violence may be a little vague; sometimes morals are involved, sometimes politics, sometimes a confusion of both. It is her conviction that normal children, preoccupied as they are with normal and exciting thoughts and experiments with their own sexual potential, will learn to do what they are already doing by reading certain books. Again, a berserk mother gets into a belligerent panic in the belief that children, exposed to the turgid political litany of the last century, will become inflamed with uncontrollable revolutionary ecstasy approximating orgasm. It does not occur to this mother that the children are successfully resisting reading of any kind, and that she herself has never been able to read two paragraphs of Marx or Engels or Lenin even if she has heard of them. It is her conviction that the poison may even be fiendishly concealed in novels.
The field of action of this curious woman is the library of the public school, and her immediate victims are the teachers, the school board, and sometimes county or state officials, who are nervous of criticism of any kind. This noble creature infiltrates the school and demands that certain books be removed from the library shelves. Her action brings reaction. Defenders of the denounced books arise, newspapers are drawn in, stories are written, pictures taken. In many cases it develops that no one—supervisor, principal, teacher, student, or the Iron Mother herself—has ever read the books in question. The result is that school officials are forced to the dreary duty of reading the offending volumes and some of the children even dip into them briefly, just to be naughty. I don’t suppose these Saint Georgias are very destructive. When, as happens pretty often, one or more of my books is purged from the shelves of a school or library, the immediate effect is an increased sale in that community, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Once a number of years ago when a town wanted to make a burnt offering of an offending book of mine, they found to their horror that there was no copy to be had. It was necessary to order ten copies for the auto-da-fé, and that was more books than had been bought in that town for years.
America has its fair share of screwballs—we took the term from the kind of pitch in baseball which twists and turns in the air so that the batter can’t figure how it will come over the plate, and it is a very apt description. While some of our screwballs are charming, original, and theatrical, others are malign and vicious, and a few are downright dangerous. Of our people, the most timid and subject to passion are those—some old, some idle through retirement—who live on fixed incomes from investments. There are many thousands of these, and they are usually to be found where a bad climate does not further their anxieties. Southern California and Florida attract them in great numbers. They gather in tightly knit groups and share their fears with one another. Any fluctuations in the cost of living, changes in the tax laws, or international situations which cause variations in stock prices or in the real-estate market affect their immediate income, with the result that they live in a state of constant apprehension. This makes them fair game for the man or group with dictatorial desires.
Such leaders are surely screwballs, but they are wise in the uses of timidity. They have only to bring charges, no matter how ridiculous or improbable, of plots to disturb the delicate balance of the fixed and unearned income in order to arouse fear, which is the mother of ferocity. The poor, idle people sitting in the sun are drawn together in positions of furious defense. The leaders who feed and abet their anxieties are able to hit them with dues and contributions while adding new fuel to their fears. The stalking horror is “Communism,” with its thread of confiscation of private wealth, and “Socialism,” which implies that they might be forced to share their wealth with less fortunate citizens. Once they have been frightened into organization for self-defense, the Messiah who has planted the fear is able to use it for his own ends. He has only to bring some cruel, stupid, and untrue charge against an official, and particularly against any reform movement, to set these cohorts in noisy motion and to draw from them large amounts of money which, devoted to publications and radio and television programs, keep these poor people further off balance; and, as Joseph McCarthy proved, the more ridiculous the charge, the less possibility there is of defense.
What is the purpose of such leaders or stimulators or catalysts? Probably a simple desire for power. But their stated purpose is invariably patriotic—they promise to preserve the nation by techniques which will inevitably destroy it. They may even have convinced themselves of the virtue of their mission; and yet, over all such activities there is the smell that caused Doctor Johnson to say that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Even more cynical are the screwball organizations which teach hatred and revenge to the ignorant and fearful people, using race or religion as the enemy. One of the oldest, most primitive and surviving of human groupings, after the family, is the totem; and the rules of the totem have never changed, from the beginning, when the animal totems branded and scarred their initiates, to the most recent activities of the Ku Klux Klan. The totem has certain rules, almost natural laws. It must be secret, exclusive, mysterious, cruel, afraid, dangerous, and monstrously ignorant. The mask, whether it be animal, skin, or sheet, is invariably present. The initiate must take a new name, thereby magically becoming a new, brave, shining person as opposed to the frightened, confused thing he knows himself to be. Spectacular, half-understood symbols must be used; and invariably torture and human sacrifice are appealed to as stimulants to release fear into ferocity. The steps never change; it is true there is less of it than there once was, but it still exists as a memory of our savage past and as an instrument on which the witch doctor, the wizard, or the Kleagle can play for his own profit.
Such are some of the ugly and evil aspects of American screwballery; but we have also pleasant, benign, and interesting screwballs who contribute to our gaiety. Of such was the gentle Emperor Norton, who lived in San Francisco and called himself “Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.” Of such is the man who runs for the Presidency on a vegetarian ticket, and of such was One Eye Connelly the gate crasher, and Leaping Lena Levinsky the lady prizefight promoter; of such was Canvasback Cohen, the prizefighter who was maintained by the Marx Brothers because he lost all contests.
We have poets in flowing robes, inventors of new religions, people who spend their lives warning us and painting on fences that the end of the world is at hand. Such screwballs are very valuable to us and we would be a duller nation without them, as our economy and our means of production gently shove us nearer and nearer to a dull and single norm.
One kind of eccentrics are the show-offs, who by outlandish costume or unusual gesture or speech spend their time drawing attention to themselves—some foolishly and some with a terrible mock dignity. But one must be sure, in observing such people, whether it is a true eccentricity or simply a matter of advertising. A number of years ago when I was working on a New York newspaper the police picked up a pretty young girl walking naked on Park Avenue, leading a fawn with a collar and leash. She was brought into the precinct station, booked, and then brought before a magistrate, who said that he found it eccentric but he wondered if she might not be opening in some show someplace; and it turned out that she was.
In addition to the show-offs there are the hiders—those who secrete themselves from society. I was twelve or thirteen years old when I became deeply involved with my first real eccentric. There are verities beyond question when one is thir
teen—a haunted house is a haunted house, and there is no sense or purpose in questioning it. There is good luck and bad luck, and the penalty for inspection of these is bad luck. Then there are misers, and misers hoard gold. We had a miser; I shall call him Mr. Kirk. Kirk and his wife and daughter lived in a little, old, dark house in a five-acre orchard not far from the center of Salinas. Of course it had once been in the country, until the town crept out and surrounded it. The Kirk place was much too valuable as town lots to be left as a grove of apples and pears and plums, and even those trees so old that they were long past good bearing. The Kirks had been a decent, well-to-do farm family for generations, and it occurred to me only much later why Mr. Kirk was known as a miser. He couldn’t be tempted, or bribed, or threatened into selling his valuable acres, to root out his trees, take his profit, and build a white house with a wrought-iron fence and a grave-plot-sized lawn. He hoarded his five acres; and he was peculiar.
Kirk dressed in a blue shirt and overalls like all farm people, but he left his orchard only once a week. On Saturday he came to a little feed store my father owned and bought ten cents’ worth of middlings—about five pounds, I suppose. Middlings were simply ground wheat with the chaff left in; it would be called whole wheat now, but then it was sold for chicken and pig feed. His weekly purchase was remarkable because the Kirks had neither chickens nor pigs. Mrs. Kirk and the daughter were rarely seen. They never left the orchard, but we could peer through the black cypress hedge which surrounded the orchard and see two gaunt, gray women, so much alike that you couldn’t tell which was mother and which was daughter. As far as anyone ever knew, the ten cents’ worth of middlings was all Mr. Kirk ever bought. First the daughter faded and sickened and died, and soon after, Mrs. Kirk went the same way. The coroner said they had starved to death; we would call it malnutrition now—but there was no evidence of violence. People did mind their own business then. But I do know that after they died, Mr. Kirk bought five cents’ worth of middlings a week.
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Page 41