The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  The principle he finally embraced could be described thus: For some people—all of them adults—it was important that potentially offensive pictures and language face no restrictions on circulation. But there were always the children to consider, and here William Allan Neilson understood and shared the concerns of mothers and priests and schoolteachers, even if he saw no simple way of addressing the problem.

  Chapter 9

  In the spring of 1929, a Yale friend helped Dwight Macdonald land a job writing for the business section of Time, the cheeky news digest started by Yalies Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, then only six years old but stunningly successful. Aside from his work in rayon, however, Macdonald actually had few qualifications.

  Not that Henry Luce cared. As Macdonald later put it, Luce would “hire poets straight out of Yale or Princeton and set them to work writing about the price of steel rails.”

  Knowledge was less important than talent. “A smart fellow can do anything he puts his mind to,” explained Macdonald, sympathetically, and “a brilliant amateur is likely to be more productive than a prosaic expert.”1

  This smart fellow also became part of the team planning a new magazine, which, he told his friend Dinsmore, would be “devoted to glorifying the American businessman”—work the twenty-three-year-old “intellectual-artist-man of ideas” found “not unpleasant” but ultimately unsatisfying.2

  Luce himself was not at all ironic about his new magazine, to be called Fortune. He stated its mission in a memo to the Time Inc. Board of Directors, using the breathless inverted phrasing that typified his preferred style of journalism. “Accurately, vividly, and concretely to describe Modern business is the greatest journalistic assignment in history.”

  It was a “saga” with universal appeal. It united Americans of all kinds. Business was “the single common denominator of interest among the active leading citizens of the U.S.”

  Fortune would be no simpering mouthpiece for industry; it would contain no “ghost-written banalities by Big Names.” It would be smart: “If Babbitt doesn’t like literature,” wrote Luce, evoking Sinclair Lewis’s well-known creation (whom Luce actually thought an unfair caricature of the American entrepreneur), “he doesn’t have to read it.”3

  Printed on large sheets of thick, expensive paper, with great illustrations and the classic photographs of Walker Evans, Fortune would also be gorgeous. But pricey: a dollar an issue at a time when newspapers sold for pennies and Time cost fifteen cents. Its writers would include Archibald MacLeish and Dwight’s Exeter buddy James Agee, whom he helped get a job.

  Proposed in November 1929, as the stock market was crashing—ending a bull market that had lasted six years—the plan for Fortune quickly won approval from Time’s corporate governors. The magazine debuted in February 1930.4

  In 1931, the phrase American Dream was first recorded—just as the idea was losing its purchase on reality. Macdonald took little notice of the degenerating economy, though he found much to complain of: women who gave him the “go-by” and his job, “8 hours of mental tension” each day that left him famished for reading, conversation, and leisure. There was the consolation of alcohol, which despite Prohibition the young writer had little trouble obtaining. “I went to dinner with the James Hamills, drank 3 cocktails, and just managed to stay above the table.”

  He berates his friend Dinsmore for being “one of these cover-to-cover readers of Time. I thought they were all automobile salesmen or professors of sociology,” naming two ultramodern types with a professional interest in American gullibility. He tells Dinsmore that he should be using his free time to read Dante, Cervantes, Plato, or even the great Russian novelists.

  The rhetorical conventions of magazine journalism irritate him: the chatty, lighthearted style, the crumbled form of predigested information, the phony familiarity. “Another rule: be personal!” This he thinks inspired by “all these cigarette testimonials written by dukes and sea captains, trying to kid the straphanger, the homo boobiensis, that he is entering into some sort of personal relationship with the dukes and captains.” But for all his contempt, he is very good at his work, and, increasingly, he earns a handsome salary. Success, however, is neither humbling nor entirely gratifying.

  Echoing the antidemocratic prejudices of H. L. Mencken, whose own magazine, the American Mercury, was one of several being eclipsed in the fullness of Time, Macdonald is drawn to those authors heavily favored by sensitive young men of worldly ambition. He reads Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and quotes approvingly Stendhal’s line that “the Tyranny of public opinion, and what opinion!, is as stupid in the small towns of France as in the United States of America.”

  Inevitably, Macdonald is soon reading Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy’s love poet to those tormented souls waiting to be hailed by a world they despise. Among a list of maxims he copies down for Dinsmore, one celebrates the spirited contrarian: “A sign of strong character, when once the resolution has been taken, [is] to shut the ear even to the best counterarguments.”5

  The magazine he worked for he called “Lousy Fortune.” Each month he wrote one article about four to six thousand words long—which is highly productive for a magazine writer. Paid seventy-five dollars a week, he decided to ask for a raise.

  Luce said, “You shouldn’t always be thinking about money, Dwight. You should trust us to look out for your interests and see you get well taken care of, so stop worrying and keep your eye on the ball.”6

  But it worked. A raise soon came through. And despite all of Luce’s hoorah spirit concerning the saga of American business, the staff, led by the young man of letters Archibald MacLeish, pulled the magazine left. According to Macdonald, “Luce was journalist enough to see that the New Deal was news and that big business, temporarily, wasn’t.”7

  Around the time Hooverville was coined as a name for the impromptu shack towns sheltering a growing number of homeless families, Fortune boldly staked a claim on the little-mentioned story of the growing economic and social crisis. The magazine ran an enormous feature piece, packed with photographs and reports from across the country, shaming the government for failing to address or even gather information on the crisis. Taking its title from Hoover’s callous and untrue remark that “No one has starved,” the article woke many other newspapers and magazines to the story of the Depression, which had until then been downplayed in the mainstream press.

  In 1933, a year of bank runs and bank closings, of plummeting values and diminishing sales, Franklin Delano Roosevelt takes office, the first Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, and, again like Wilson, a terrific speechmaker.

  With upper-class Ivy League diction familiar to someone of Macdonald’s education, the new president sounds like a consummate highbrow as he delivers his inaugural address. He drops his final r’s as he promises “this great nation will endure as it has endured” and sounds a bit Shakespearean as he flattens the second a in again.8

  He sounds not at all like Gertrude Stein when he repeats a word, but instead grand and classical: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Mixing the biblical and the social, he blames “the money changers” who “have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”

  As the New Deal begins to address the national tragedy of 23 percent unemployment, Macdonald develops a social conscience, or rather meets one. Nancy Rodman is a society girl with left-wing connections and literary tastes that complement her new boyfriend’s. They read Shakespeare together. A graduate of Brearley, the Manhattan prep school, and Vassar College, the former debutante has a grandfather who was president of the stock exchange and a brother who is a fixture on the burgeoning radical scene. “She’s a sweet girl,” says Dwight, “even if she does let me in for drearily long-winded, left-wing political meetings.”

  She persuades him to read The Communist Manifesto and Trotsky’s autobiography. At the same time Macdonald’s journalism heads
into the problems of labor and economics as a social issue. He has already adopted a stilted view of the great innovators of American business. “Take Ford out of his factory and Edison out of his laboratory, you would have two individuals indistinguishable in spirit, in taste, in intellectual scope, from millions of Americans.” Which, of course, is to say “spirit and taste” of a rather low variety. “If these men are the Lincolns and Napoleons of today, the human race has gone to hell.”9

  Chapter 10

  In May 1931, Sterling Andrus Leonard died in a tragic canoeing accident. He and another passenger hung on to their capsized boat for two hours before Leonard succumbed to the cold, shifting waters of Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. An associate professor of English, the forty-three-year-old scholar was on the verge of publishing a sensational contribution to the language controversies of his time.

  His paper, “Current English Usage,” commissioned by the National Council of Teachers of English, would be called by the New York Times “the most thorough overhauling the English language has had in years.”1 Work on the study was close to done at the time of his death, but it remained for others to finish and bring out the next year.

  The canoe’s other passenger was I. A. Richards, saved perhaps by his own athleticism. An accomplished mountain climber, Richards was better known as a prominent Cambridge University critic and author of Practical Criticism, a penetrating look at how we actually react to literature—as opposed to what we are taught to think. Richards was rescued and remained an active scholar for decades to come. Today he is best remembered for announcing the dawn of New Criticism, which in the 1930s and ’40s taught English departments to focus above all on the literary text through the process of “close reading.” Its motto—and Richards’s, too—could have been “Take nothing for granted.”

  Leonard was present at the dawn of a different intellectual development, one every bit as stirring: the new linguistics. In the 1920s and ’30s, American scholars of the English language staged a well-coordinated rebellion against traditional authorities of grammar and usage: British example and the rules of classroom grammar. From the time of the founding, America’s relationship toward its language suffered an inferiority complex—a term that dates to 1922 in the Merriam files. The new attitude was summed up (overstated, better yet) by the chest-thumping title of H. L. Mencken’s polemic, The American Language. But the new attitude was not genuinely anti-British, it was empiricist, concerned with how the language is actually used as opposed to how it is taught.

  The two men made a curious pair, and not because of their nationalities. Richards is known for his endlessly complicated account of what happens when a person reads a piece of literature and arrives at something called meaning. Leonard’s work on grammar and usage seems lighthearted and even a little naïve by comparison. Yet linguists and literary critics were departmental colleagues on most college faculties. They spoke a common language and reviewed each other’s work. A linguist might even see himself, as both Leonard and Charles C. Fries did, as not merely a student of the realities of language, particularly speech, but also as a scholar of, or even champion of, literature.

  The unlucky canoeists also had this in common: an interest in linguistic experiments that tested common assumptions against real-world experience. Every week for an academic term Richards had assigned his honors literature students at Cambridge poems to read. The poems—some great, some minor—were presented anonymously, without any information about the authors or periods. The readers were required to describe their reactions. What followed was, in Richards’s estimation, the queerest brew of nonsense: stock opinions, hopeless guesses, and a good deal of ignorant, defensive, interpretive flailing.

  Not only could the students not identify the authors, they could not distinguish important poetry from the commonplace. Richards used the word obtuse to describe their reactions. Few students evinced even the slightest feel for poetry. The technical clues of structure and diction were beyond the noticing of these young scholars. Evidence of genius, there on the page in black and white, went undetected. Their fancy education hadn’t actually trained these students to recognize Shakespeare by the quality of his writing.

  This exercise taught students, above all, to consider their almost complete dependence on past scholarship and received opinion when forming judgments about works of literary art. And, in turn, it helped inspire a new method of study whose goal was to reconnect literary scholarship to the simple act of reading carefully.

  Leonard’s experiment also concerned tricky questions of language and opinion. But instead of teaching a wary regard for received opinion and traditional standards, it sought to overturn them.

  He impaneled a distinguished cast of linguists, educators, authors, and businessmen. Henry Seidel Canby and H. L. Mencken were among its litterateurs, while its linguists included Edward Sapir, Otto Jespersen, and George Philip Krapp, all leading names in the study of language.2 And judging from the quoted comments of its businessmen, these smooth-tongued Babbitts were far from your average Rotarians.

  This was no bottom-up study organized to examine the language in the unrestrained variety of its au naturel state. Yet asking people what they believed instead of asking what the rulebooks decreed was, all by itself, considered radical. Said the Times about Leonard’s study, “The King’s English is going democratic nowadays, in a revolution led by no other people than some of the teachers of English themselves.” This last was a reference to Leonard’s publisher, the National Council of Teachers of English, which had come a long way from the cheery days of Good Grammar Week.

  Only the year before Leonard’s study came out, a Times reporter had collected much more typical material, in Milwaukee, at the annual teachers’ conference. The superintendent of English in the Newark, New Jersey, public schools had haughtily insisted there was but one way to pronounce vagary, and it rhymed with Mary. A teacher had rattled off—with his eyes closed, one imagines—a list of the most common grammatical mistakes made by students: ain’t, I done, I seen, them things, and the notorious double negative I didn’t do nothing.3

  With “Current English Usage,” however, the teachers’ association would join the vanguard of linguistic opinion in which words like “mistake” and “correctness” were, more and more, being handled with ironic quotation marks.4

  Leonard’s panelists were shown over two hundred English-language expressions “of whose standing there might be some question.” The goal was to show how far from the rules these VIPs of culture strayed in their own thinking about what was proper and acceptable. Another was to show how the opinions of linguists, singled out in Leonard’s survey as “expert” opinion, differed from lay opinion.

  Like Richards’s experiment, Leonard’s shone an unflattering light on many of its test subjects. The laymen just didn’t understand what the experts knew to be true. Their opinions were restrained by the prejudices of their educational background.

  Less intentionally, the study also showed that its well-known linguists were no cold-blooded rationalists, but in fact as capable of flip and catty comment as the ignorant snobs of old, whose authority they sought to topple.

  Shown the sentence One rarely enjoys one’s luncheon when one is tired, the linguists agreed the sentence was, alas, without blemish. But there is correct and then there is “correct,” not wrong exactly but too fussy to be considered worthy. One linguist called the sentence’s clothesline of ones “semi-literate straining for correctness.”

  The sentence The man was very amused was rebuked for its gratuitous very, with a linguist commenting, “There seems to be a touch of shadowy elegance about that which can be justified no more than the carrying of a stick or the wearing of spats.” Take that.

  In a footnote, Leonard himself commented on the use of an (instead of a) before historical as “one of a number of expressions among the ‘established usages’ which might be called hyper-urbanisms—artificial, trite
, pedantic, or stilted attempts at correctness.”

  Other examples might have been described as hyper-dubious: You was mistaken about that, John. On this occasion, dry humor and historical perspective won out, as a linguist commented, “Good 100 years ago.”

  An expression using different than (as opposed to the more respectable different from) made a British linguist quite irate. Not that he objected; he objected to the objections.

  The poor persecuted different than was, he said, “good as literary or formal (but wrong for colloquial use). ‘From, to, than, all in best authors’—Concise Oxf. Dict. Differs plus dative (Tacitus and elsewhere. Tell the purists Tacitus was a Roman historian and Latin was his native language).”

  And he wasn’t finished. “The reference to differ is as superficial as most puristic rubbish (speaking dispassionately). The logical analogies of opposite to, contrary to, dissimilar to, would never have occurred to those boneheads.”5

  “Current English Usage” did not examine the speech and writing of its subjects; it examined their opinions. Authors were “the most severe group of judges.” Businessmen were sometimes all about correctness, and other times, as with the split infinitive, as liberal as any linguist. English teachers, “possibly influenced by the pronouncements of sundry handbooks,” tended to puritanism, wrote Leonard, as when they condemned the slang but timely expression busted in “The stock market collapse left me busted.”

  The study was well designed to pose provocative questions, for instance, Did you know that over a third of linguists say don’t is acceptable colloquial English in Martha don’t sew as well as she used to? Well, it was true. And that six of seventeen prominent linguists gave the okay to ain’t, calling it colloquial and acceptable in educated speech in I suppose I’m wrong, ain’t I?