It must inevitably seem to some of us that Fitzgerald could not have set himself a harder task than that of whipping up a real and moving interest in Hollywood and its great and little men. Although the movie empire constitutes one of the hugest and therefore one of the most important industries in the world, it is a genuine feat, at least for me, to pull this appreciation of Bel-Air and Beverly Hills from the mind down into the emotions, where, for complete and satisfying surrender to a novel and its people, it properly belongs. It is a high tribute to Scott Fitzgerald to say that he would have accomplished this. I know of no one else who could.
Everyone will be glad to find “The Rich Boy” and “Absolution” included among the short stories in the volume. “Crazy Sunday” is perhaps of value to the student of Fitzgerald because it contains the germ of “The Last Tycoon,” but I find it impossible to sustain a permanent, or even a passing, interest in the personalities and problems of the Hollywood persons it is concerned with. A lot of us will always be interested in “Babylon Revisited,” even though it is the pet of the professors of English who compile anthologies; and I mourn the absence of “A Short Trip Home” whether you do or not.
If You Ask Me
(ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH)
The most disturbing book I have read in a long time is Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s little confession of faith, The Wave of the Future. If you have already heard about it, it won’t do any harm to hear about it again; anyway, I can’t write about anything else at the moment.
Mrs. Lindbergh’s prefiguring of what is to come gives me the creeblies; it sets the weeping wailwice scuttering along the edges of my dreams. She has no vision of a world of tomorrow in which Fascism has been overthrown. From her meditations, her travels, and her reading of Whitehead, she has constructed her own mystique of the course of history from now on. It goes something like this: out of Man’s sins and mistakes, out of his greed, his Godlessness, and his pride of possession has come a Reaching for Light known variously as Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. We must look beyond the petty aims of conquest and destruction, beyond the mad and bloody leaders, and discern a natural mutation in the story of people on this planet. The “goodness” and the “necessity” at the heart of this mutation is the wave of the future; on the New Order, purged of its evils and its atrocities, will be built the future life of mankind. To this clean and perfect foundation France will contrive, God knows how, to make her beautiful contribution and England, whether defeated or not, hers.
Mrs. Lindbergh believes that in this war the “Forces of the Past” are fighting the “Forces of the Future,” a sorry and futile fight for the Past. She hates to see the things she loved go, but they are dying. It is perhaps because of this that she always put the word “democracies” in quotation marks, and, once, the word “liberty.” It gave me the sickening feeling that, for her, these things as we have known them are already dead and buried.
Mrs. Lindbergh does not refer to Nazism and its allied tyrannies as “evil systems”; she uses such expressions as “the things we deplore in these systems,” “the things we dislike in Nazism.” This is because of her belief in the goodness of the Wave of the Future when what she calls the “scum” has been cleared away from it.
“No one today defends the atrocities of the French Revolution,” she says, “but few seriously question the fundamental necessity and ‘Tightness’ of the movement.” There is her parallel for what is going on today, necessity, rightness, and all. This is not a difficult parallel for a lady to draw who sees in her “Forces of the Future” “some new conception of humanity and its place in the world.”
Mrs. Lindbergh naturally wants us to stay out of a war which is not a Crusade against Evil but merely a foolish battle against the inexorable forces of History, Destiny, and the Future. What she wants us to do she describes in a patriotic and poetic passage full of allusions to the white churches of New England and so on. We must bring about, by some kind of domestic revolution or reformation, a spirit equal to the national spirit of Germany and the national spirit of England under Churchill. How this spirit, which was created on the one hand by a desire for vengeance and on the other by a necessity for defense, can be created in a country to which she leaves so little for anyone to fight for or against, I have no idea. You can’t start such a spirit by singing ballads or by thinking of Lincoln. You can’t start one by reading Mrs. Lindbergh’s sorrowful little book, or by listening to her husband.
The Odyssey of Disney
I have never particularly cared for the Odyssey of Homer. The edition we used in high school—I forget the editors’ names, but let us call it Bwumba and Bwam’s edition—was too small to hide a livelier book behind, and it was cold and gray in style and in content. All the amorous goings on of the story were judiciously left out. We pupils might, at that age, have taken a greater interest in T. E. Shaw’s recent rendering, the twenty-eighth, by his count, in English; for bang-off in Book I the third sentence reads: “She craved him for her bed-mate: while he was longing for his house and wife.” But there wasn’t any such sentence in old Bwumba and Bwam. It was a pretty dull book to read. No matter how thin Mr. Shaw has sliced it, it is still, it seems to me, a pretty dull book to read.
The fact that the Odyssey is the “oldest book worth reading for its story and the first novel of modern Europe” makes it no more lively—to me, anyway—than does the turning of it into what Mr. Shaw’s publishers call “vital, modern, poetic prose.” There are too many dreary hours between this rosy-fingered dawn and that rosy-fingered dawn. The menaces in ancient Jeopardy were too far apart, the hazards prowled at too great distances, the gods maundered and were repetitious. Ulysses himself is not a hero to whom a young man’s fancy turns in any season. The comedy of the Odyssey is thought by some students to be unintentional and by others to be intentional, and there must not be any uncertainty about comedy. But whatever may be said about it, the Odyssey will always keep bobbing up, in our years and in the years to follow them. The brazen entry into the United States of Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses has most recently brought the Odyssey again into view; as the magazine Time points out to its surprised readers, “almost every detail of the Odyssey’s action can be found in disguised form in Ulysses.” So, many a reader might naturally enough ask, what? So nothing—that is, nothing of real importance in so far as the Odyssey or Ulysses itself is concerned. The ancient story just happened to make a point of departure for Mr. Joyce. He might equally well have taken for a pattern Sherman’s campaign in Georgia. Nevertheless, here is the old tale before us again not quite two years after Mr. Shaw went over the whole ground for the twenty-eighth time in English.
My purpose in this essay is no such meager and footless one as to suggest that it is high time for some other ancient tale to be brought up in place of the Odyssey—although, if urged, I would say the Morte d’Arthur. My purpose is to put forward in all sincerity and all arrogance the conviction that the right Odyssey has yet to be done, and to name as the man to do it no less a genius than Walt Disney. A year or two ago Mr. Disney made a Silly Symphony, as he too lightly called this masterpiece, entitled “Neptune.” Those who missed seeing it missed a lusty, fearsome, beautiful thing. Here was a god and here were sea adventures in the ancient manner as nobody else has given them to us. The thing cannot be described; it can be rendered into no English. But it was only a hint of what Mr. Disney, let loose in the Odyssey, could make of it.
The dark magic of Circe’s isle, the crossing between Scylla and Charybdis, the slaying of the suitors are just by the way; and so are dozens of other transfigurations, mythical feats of strength, and godly interventions. Mr. Disney could toss these away by the dozen and keep only a select few. For one: Ulysses and his men in the cave of the Cyclops. That would be that scene as I should like my daughter to know it first, when she gets ready for the Odyssey, or when she is grimly made ready for it—I presume one still has to read it in school as I did, along with The Talisman and Julius Caesar. Picture Mr. Disney’s ver
sion of the overcoming of the giant, the escape tied to the sheep, the rage of Polyphemus as he hurls the tops of mountains at the fleeing ship of Ulysses and his men!
But I think my favorite scene will be (I’m sure Mr. Disney will do the Odyssey if we all ask him please) that scene wherein Menelaus and his followers wrestle with the wily Proteus on the island of Pharos. You know: The Old Man of the Sea comes up out of the dark waters at noon to count his droves of precious seals all stretched out on the beach. In his innocence of treachery or of any change in the daily routine, he unwittingly counts Menelaus and his three men, who are curled up among the seals trying to look as much like seals as possible. It doesn’t come out, by the way, in any rendering I’ve read, and I’ve read two, just what the Old Man thought when he found he had four seals too many. Anyway, at the proper moment Menelaus and his followers jump upon Proteus. In the terrific struggle that ensues the Old Man changes into—here I follow the Shaw version—”a hairy lion; then a dragon; then a leopard; then a mighty boar. He became a film of water, and afterwards a high-branched tree.”
How only for Walt Disney’s hand and his peculiar medium was that battle fought! His Odyssey can be, I am sure, a far, far greater thing than even his epic of the three little pigs. Let’s all write to him about it, or to Roosevelt.
Peace, It’s Wonderful
In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalists, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical Over-compensation. It is a defense mechanism used to cover up a lack of anything new and sound to say on their favorite subjects, and to make up for an inability to write simply and convincingly, or to think clearly. We find, in all these men and women, the raised voice, and the glib invention that so often accompanies it; we find, too, an easy fancy in place of a sound imagination; hence we are bound to find those broad glittering generalizations, based on any little specific instance which comes to hand, that distinguish the lecturer from the researcher. The desire to help, implicit in the very titles of these books, becomes so often merely the urge to startle.
Dr. Louis E. Bisch, whose book I set out to review, only to find myself turning now and again to some of my other patients because of a striking similarity of symptoms, is an italicizing multiple-interrogator (he has what I like to think of as Billy Sunday’s Disease: “Do you think God will let you? No! Do you know why He won’t let you? No! Shall I tell you why?”). This is a typical passage from Dr. Bisch’s book: “Do you wonder why I say that to be normal is nothing to brag about? The times are out of joint? I agree. But who knocked them out of joint? Besides, are these the first signs of demoralization in history? Can you name an era … etc., etc.?” In the first paragraph of his Chapter VII he starts off with eight straight questions, possibly a world’s record.
EDITOR’S NOTE: A review of Be Clad You ‘re Neurotic, by Louis E. Bisch, M.D.
I should like to turn for a moment to a few of the doctor’s contemporaries in the field of the mind. Mrs. Dorothea Brande, then, is an italicizing capitalizer (her preface to Wake Up and Live! is written in italics. She is fond of such capitalizations as “Will to Fail”). Mr. David Seabury, author of five books on “mentation,” is an itemizing multiple-interrogator (I turned at random to page 168 of his How to Worry Successfully and came to four sentences in succession beginning with questions: “Need we argue …? Why should we not recognize …? Why should we not see …? Is there any reason why …?” In one place he itemizes thirty-three forms of “mentation” and right beside them, thirty-three “varieties of obliquity”). Dr. Walter B. Pitkin is an itemizing italicizer (my favorite of all his italics are these, from his Psychology of Happiness. “I enjoy the simultaneous flight of a half-dozen trains of ideas, which run on parallel tracks for a certain distance, then disappear, arriving nowhere.” This arriving nowhere of a half-dozen trains of ideas is a characteristic of the mentationists).
I want now to submit an example of expression-complex, or typographical elephantiasis, in its last stages. I quote, exactly, from Mr. George Winslow Plummer’s Consciously Creating Circumstances: “In consciously creating circumstances we reverse the process of physical sight. Instead of seeing mentally a picture of what we know already exists physically, we use this giant power within us by impressing our individual subjective mind WITH THE PICTURE OF WHAT WE WANT TO SEE COME ABOUT PHYSICALLY.” This is an extreme case but it is by no means unique. Let us turn to the last page of Dr. Bisch’s book and examine an almost identical condition:
“In any case, follow these five simple rules. Remind yourself of them morning and night. If necessary, paste them inside your hat!
STUDY YOURSELF
STOP REPROACHING YOURSELF
BE PROUD OF WHAT YOU ARE
TURN YOUR HANDICAPS INTO ASSETS
PROFIT BY YOUR NEUROSIS
Then
BE GLAD!”
After laying down a book by one of these elated exhorters you have the calming effect of getting out into the open air from a stuffy room in which someone has been shouting at his deaf aunt and bawling out a little child at the same time.
I have neither the space nor the strength to go in detail into Dr. Bisch’s chapters, but I should like to quote a few passages, this time for content and not for form. If you want more, there is the Glad Book itself (and on the same counter you will find two dozen others just like it). Here we go: “I am claiming you should be glad you’re neurotic. All the great thinkers and doers were glad. Take Alexander the Great, Caesar and Napoleon. Consider Michelangelo, Pascal, Pope, our own Poe, O. Henry, and Walt Whitman.” “Fortify yourself against the emotional shock of the unexpected by reading literature and seeing plays and movies that actually depend for interest upon the unexpected. Mystery and detective stories are excellent. Shock yourself often in a vicarious manner and you won’t be so shocked when the unexpected of a frightening or even harrowing nature occurs in real life. For the time being it may not make you glad but you surely will be glad later.” “A man who mislays his hat either dislikes it, wants a new one, experienced unpleasantness when last he wore it, or he does not want to go out.” “If a person leaves an umbrella or any other article in your house, you may be sure that he enjoyed his visit and would like to return.” And my favorite: “But at least, and at last, sex has been fearlessly roped and thrown.” (The marvel is they haven’t broken its back.)
This will give you, I think, the flavor of the doctor’s message, mystic, wonderful. In the back of his book there is a test you can take to see whether you are neurotic or normal. I came out, in all honesty, 91 per cent normal, which means, for one thing, that I am the kind of person who would have bought—or maybe sold—one of those miniature ladders that were hawked in the streets of Flemington during the Hauptmann trial. It’s all right there in Dr. Bisch’s book.
Tempest in a Looking Glass
Dr. Paul Schilder, research professor of psychiatry at New York University, has his work cut out for him. I have cut it out for him myself. I hope he is a young man, for there is so much for him to do: What I am about to outline will take him at least ten years, if it is to be done properly.
First, I should perhaps introduce Dr. Paul Schilder to you or, rather, refresh your memory about him. He is the distinguished scientist who, some weeks ago at the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria, analyzed, for the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association in solemn meeting there, the unfortunate nature of the late Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known to the world under his escapist pen name of Lewis Carroll. Dr. Schilder had found in his researches, you may remember, that Alice in Wonderland is so full of cruelty, fear, and “sadistic trends of cannibalism” that he questioned its wholesomeness as literature for children. (Could it have been Alice that debauched the kiddies in Mr
. Richard Hughes’s High Wind in Jamaica? I suggest that Dr. Schilder set about the analysis of Mr. Hughes right now. Maybe he was debauched, as a child, by the works of Lewis Carroll.)
Dr. Schilder seems to have been pained and astonished by his belated discovery that everything in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass is out of joint. He spoke, according to the report of his lecture in the New York Times, of the “unwholesome instability of space” and the “tendency of the time element to be thrown out of gear.” He found, in a word, a world of “cruelty, destruction, and annihilation.” He also found cruelty inherent in Mr. Carroll’s “destructive use of the English language,” but that’s beside my point, that’s something to be fought out, man to man, between Dr. Schilder and some writer younger and stronger than I—I nominate Ernest Hemingway or Jim Tully.
As I said to begin with, I have some further researchers to suggest to Dr. Paul Schilder (after he gets through with the cruel and sadistic Richard Hughes). They will keep him even busier and shock him, I am afraid, even more severely than his work with Mr. Carroll did. I submit to him, as a starting-off place, the English Fairy Tales collected so painstakingly 42 years ago by Mr. Joseph Jacobs. With the exception of The Three Bears, which was the invention of the cruel and sadistic poet Southey, these are all folk tales. In getting at the bottom of the savagery, the mercilessness, the ferocity, and the sadistic trends of cannibalism of these tales, Dr. Schilder will be able to expose the evil nature not of one man, not of one race of men but of the whole of mankind, for there is, of course, scarcely a story in this compilation which has not its counterpart, parallel, or source in the folk tales of another country. Usually, each story may be traced to a dozen countries, from Ireland to India, from France to Russia, from Germany to Iceland. Let us examine, rather minutely, for Dr. Schilder’s enlightenment, just one of these tales, the one entitled by Mr. Jacobs The Rose-Tree. Dr. Schilder will surely want to analyze The Rose-Tree and the depraved soul of man which shines so darkly behind it.
Collecting Himself Page 6