Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Mr. Thurber’s portrait of the man who made The New Yorker is therefore worth serious attention. It is an admiring and friendly portrait—a “long fond view,” he calls it—but being by Thurber it does not leave out the warts. There are so many of these, that the portrait finishes by looking like one of those distressing medical phenomena, where the patient is entirely encased in a hard scaly hide. There is a story of Dorothy Parker’s called “The Old Gentleman” in which a sorrowing daughter tells a series of anecdotes about her late father, all intended to illustrate his lovable eccentricity and all in fact building up a picture of a selfish monster who had systematically exploited her. The Years with Ross is rather like “The Old Gentleman.” The editor of The New Yorker was splendidly uneducated (“Who’s William Blake?”) and impatient with foreigners for not understanding English (“Goddam it, I’m speaking slowly and clearly enough,” he yelled). He took an interest in the home lives of New Yorker writers; for example, he tried to stop Thurber marrying again, for fear “that if I became happily married something bad would happen to my drawings and stories.” He watched anxiously over the creative impulse (“if you pay a writer too well he loses the incentive to work”) and over morals (“… Ross, discussing some guilty pair, said, ‘I’m sure he’s s-1-e-e-p-i-n-g with her.’ He was the only man I’ve ever known who spelled out euphemisms in front of adults”). He had a limited gift for repartee: “Ross was better at parry than at thrust, and that is why he learned to use so often his familiar ‘You have me there’ and ‘A likely story’ and ‘That I’d have to see.’” Lovable though his character was generally, stress would occasionally bring out a darker side. A junior employee got married, had children, needed a raise, which Ross refused to okay. When Thurber remonstrated with him, “‘I haven’t got time for little people,’ Ross snarled”; later apologized and murmured something about his physical troubles. The same physical troubles were responsible for an impulsive rebuke to the near-blind Thurber: “Ross snapped, not out of his heart but out of his ulcers, ‘If you could see, you would know what we mean.’”

  David Cort began his review of this book in The Nation with the words: “It is incredible and outrageous, but nevertheless a fact, that the generation of American culture between the world wars was strongly affected by the character, manners and will of one Harold Ross, late editor of The New Yorker magazine, the nominal wheelhorse of American sophistication.” Whatever they may think about sophisticated wheelhorses, many readers of The Years with Ross will be likely, even if they do not share Mr. Cort’s indignation, to feel the force of the contrast which he points out. How could somebody like Ross invent something like The New Yorker? And how, having invented it, could he successfully edit it, and give it the stamp which it still bears? The answer, no doubt, is that nobody else could have done these things. The point about Ross is that he was an energetic lowbrow who knew how to hire the right highbrows and, having hired them, to see that they would write in a manner that would seem highbrow, but not offensively so, to lowbrows with highbrow leanings. He was a great editor because he effectively and shrewdly represented a great number of potential readers—whom the New Yorker writers, left to themselves, would have alienated. An important source of The New Yorker’s financial strength today is that great class which thinks itself entitled not merely to appear but actually to feel cultured, without undergoing any dull and painful preparation, such as being educated. The conquest of this class was Ross’s achievement. The achievement of certain New Yorker writers and artists—notably Thurber himself—was that, within the limits imposed by Rossism, they managed to produce so many extraordinarily good things. But some went under, and some of the best; Mr. Thurber has curiously little to say about Dorothy Parker. And the magazine as it is today, luxurious and air-conditioned, seems sterilized by money; not that it does not still carry good writing, but that its exclusion of controversy—not quite total, it dislikes bombs—gives a general impression of unnatural constraint, of something less adult, less honest and less free than, say, L’Express of Paris. It is true that it is not brainwashed like Krokodil—because Krokodil has its tiny cerebellum scrubbed with red carbolic—but it smells suspiciously clean. The worst result of the cleaning is the acceptance and even admiration of Rossism by good and intelligent men. “We were all asked, a hundred times,” Thurber tells us, “‘What will happen to the New Yorker now that Ross is dead?’ We had our separate answers to that, but Joe Liebling’s is perhaps the one that will last: ‘The same thing that happened to analysis after Freud died.’” It seems from the context that neither Liebling nor even Thurber saw anything ludicrous in that comparison.

  * The Years with Ross.

  A NEW YORKER CRITIC

  Mr. Dwight Macdonald was once one of the boldest of American political commentators, and is today one of the wittiest and—in detail—most lucid of American literary critics. The present volume is a collection of his critical essays—about half of them being reprinted from The New Yorker, on which the author has been a staff writer since 1951. It follows that Against the American Grain is not as much against the American grain as all that.

  The New Yorker is an established and highly esteemed part of American middle-class culture, and its 400,000 regular buyers—most of whom probably read some part of it—are assumed to include many of the leaders of American economic, political, social and cultural life. Now on many matters, such as art, music or literary criticism, these are, on the whole, very tolerant people. You could say almost anything about Mark Twain, James Joyce, James Agee, Ernest Hemingway, James Cozzens, Colin Wilson, the English of revised Bibles, or Webster’s New International Dictionary—to list most of Mr. Macdonald’s subjects—without causing a New Yorker reader or advertiser to wince. If, however, your favourite authors happened to be Mao Tse-tung and Fidel Castro and you tried to say so in The New Yorker, then you would be going “against the American grain” and you would not be likely to go very far. Even on Mark Twain etc. certain writers could, by making or implying certain kinds of radical criticism of American capitalist society, contrive to set some important American teeth on edge. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing on any one of Mr. Macdonald’s subjects, would be likely, from his first paragraph to his last, to rasp the nerves of most New Yorker readers and all New Yorker advertisers. In Mr. Macdonald’s case, however, the continuity of his association with The New Yorker suggests that his grating does not go beyond that threshold where “literary criticism” shades into “politics” and Mr. William Shawn becomes conscious of pain.

  This raises questions of varying degrees of interest. Why does so agreeable a critic want to go against the grain at all? Why, if he wants to go against the grain, does he not succeed in this comparatively simple enterprise? And why does he think he has succeeded where he has in fact so pleasantly failed?

  The answer to the first question is simple. Mr. Macdonald is concerned about the impact of “a novel kind [of culture] that is manufactured for the market”—which he calls Masscult—on higher forms of culture. This is the pressure against which he would rebel, the grain against which he would work. His remarks about the nature of Masscult do not now sound novel, as he is aware:

  As an earlier settler in the wilderness of Masscult who cleared his first tract thirty years ago … I have come to feel like the aging Daniel Boone when the plowed fields began to surround him in Kentucky.

  But what is interesting in this collection of essays is not his rather confused analysis of Masscult—confused by a tendency to run together “the masses” and those who manipulate them—but his detailed investigations in a middle area: “not,” as he says, “the dead sea of masscult but rather the life of the tideline where higher and lower organisms compete for survival.” Part of this tideline is taken up by Midcult, of which Mr. Macdonald analyses and exposes four “typical products … Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., and Stephen Vincent Benét’s John Brown’s Body.” Mr. Macdonald disp
oses of these hollow masterpieces—all “hailed” by most American critics in their day—mainly by quotation and comment. Thus he quotes a Wilder sage: “There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.” And he comments: “The last sentence is an eleven-word summary, in form and content, of Midcult. I agree with everything Mr. Wilder says but I will fight to the death against his right to say it in this way.”

  On this tideline “lower organisms” have the best of it. Here even good writers, like Twain and Hemingway, become corrupted; the English language is debased by the indiscriminate lexicography of the third Webster’s: even the classics are defiled by cultural wholesalers: “a hundred pounds of Great Books: four hundred and forty-three works by seventy-six authors, ranging chronologically and in other ways from Homer to Mortimer J. Adler.” Mr. Macdonald sees all around him “a tepid ooze of midcult” and feels that “there is something damnably American about it all.” If this indeed is “the American grain,” then the question of why a critic like Mr. Macdonald feels the need to go against it is easily answered.

  The second question is harder: why the American public so cheerfully supports Mr. Macdonald’s form of un-Americanism. The most obvious, but not necessarily the most accurate, answer is that the public for which Mr. Macdonald is writing, the New Yorker public, is “different,” Stendhal’s “happy few,” above both Midcult and Masscult. That, clearly, is how Mr. Macdonald would like it to be. He now—breaking with his socialist past—favours an “attempt to define two cultures, one for the masses and the other for the classes.” He adds in a footnote that by “classes” he doesn’t mean “a social or economic upper-class but rather an intellectual elite.”

  Now readers of The New Yorker undoubtedly belong to “a social or economic upper-class” (both, indeed). Do they also constitute an intellectual elite? Mr. Macdonald would not maintain that they do, but he is uneasily defensive about The New Yorker. At one point he maintains that it is “a Midcult magazine, but one with a difference. It, too, has its formula, monotonous and restrictive, but the formula reflects the tastes of the editors and not their fear of the readers.” Later, he speaks of The New Yorker as “a plot of artificial grass, fenced off from American mass culture” in which “some freedom of expression is possible.”

  The theory that the people who run The New Yorker are working in some kind of privileged sanctuary, where they can afford to be indifferent to the reactions of readers and advertisers, hardly belongs on the same intellectual level with most of the rest of Mr. Macdonald’s writing. The New Yorker is, in fact, an immensely successful commercial enterprise, and such successes are not obtained in the amateurish and absent-minded manner which Mr. Macdonald suggests. The key word in his remarks about The New Yorker is “restrictive” and this, significantly, he does not amplify. In practice, we know that “restrictive” means that politics are out, and that “politics” means the kind of politics that annoys advertisers and rich readers—the kind of politics in which Mr. Macdonald himself was once so passionately engaged. Within this enclosure, once this taboo is respected, the writer enjoys a certain kind of freedom. He is free, as Mr. Macdonald quite rightly says,

  to express himself without regard for the conventions of American journalism, taking the space he needs, using long sentences, interesting syntax, and difficult words, and going into all kinds of recondite by-ways simply because the subject seems to lead there.

  Indeed, he seems to be encouraged to do all these things—The New Yorker, above all, is a magazine of conspicuous leisure. More than this, the writer can even assail, as Mr. Macdonald repeatedly does, the general level of American culture. The New Yorker reader, knowing he is not as other men are, lends a complacent ear to this kind of thing, within limits.

  The limits are that no political remedy is sought or implied—Mr. Macdonald is sound on this—and that there is no implication that this form of decadence is peculiar to the capitalist world. Mr. Macdonald constantly reminds us that things are worse in Russia; this not merely keeps him right with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but also reassures his readers. His prose remains free to flow in just as leisurely a current as he wishes, channelled between those fat walls of advertising which symbolize the limitations of his freedom. I do not claim that Mr. Macdonald is in any way insincere in this—his anti-communism is just as sincere as his other attitudes—but I don’t think he fully realizes the coercive force of the restrictions which he has accepted and to which he has adapted himself. The New Yorker, which he tries to use as a vantage point, belongs precisely to that region which he is trying to study: “the tideline where higher and lower organisms compete for survival.” Mr. Macdonald, a higher organism if ever there was one, should watch out for faceless creatures in that tepid pool of his. He tells us in one of the most moving of his essays what Midcult did, through Time magazine, to so gifted a writer as James Agee. Mr. Macdonald stands in similar, but more insidious, danger from the particular organ of Midcult which has got hold of him.

  In Mr. Macdonald’s inability to dissociate himself from the New Yorker perspective is to be found the answer to our third question: why he feels he has succeeded in rebelling. By setting up the self-flattering idol of “an intellectual elite,” he feels that he has extricated himself, whereas what he has really done is conform to the totality of the culture against which he thinks he is in revolt. Although he cannot believe that his readers are such an elite, they believe it, and take comfort from him. They are not irritated by his words, which seem to them points well taken, at the expense of their social, and therefore their intellectual, inferiors. They are like prosperous parishioners listening to a sermon on the evils of drinking red biddy. He in turn, in the political apathy, or aphasia, which seems to have overcome him on losing his Trotskyite faith, has been visited by an illusion of social and economic weightlessness, believing himself to be outside the system which he is describing, and of which he is, apparently without knowing it, a functioning part.

  There was a time when Dwight Macdonald, in his prickly and indignant independence, might have been thought of as an American Orwell. Through accepting “restrictions” such as Orwell never accepted, he is in danger of turning into a critical dandy, the literary image of that “Eustace Tilley” who lifts his ridiculous monocle every year on the cover of the magazine for which Mr. Macdonald writes. Mr. Macdonald has not quite fallen for the kind of nonsense symbolized by “Eustace Tilley,” but his choice of “classes” against “masses” makes the monocle—emblem of pretentious myopia—a disturbingly appropriate symbol to appear above his recent writing. Like Burke according to Paine, this gifted liberal “kisses the aristocratical hand that hath purloined him from himself.”

  SERPENTS

  When Deganawida was leaving the Indians in the Bay of Quinté in Ontario, he told the Indian people that they would face a time of great suffering. They would distrust their leaders and the principles of peace of the League, and a great white serpent was to come upon the Iroquois, and that for a time it would intermingle with the Indian people and would be accepted by the Indians, who would treat the serpent as a friend. This serpent would in time become so powerful that it would attempt to destroy the Indian, and the serpent is described as choking the life’s blood out of the Indian people…. and he told them that when things looked their darkest a red serpent would come from the north and approach the white serpent, which would be terrified, and upon seeing the red serpent he would release the Indian, who would fall to the ground almost like a helpless child, and the white serpent would turn all its attention to the red serpent…. And Deganawida said they [the Indians] would remain neutral in this fight between the white serpent and the red serpent.

  Mad Bear, the Tuscarora Indian who related to Edmund Wilson the long allegory which includes the story of the serpents, is one of the leaders of a messianic and nationalist movement which has developed in recent years among the Iroquois “Six Nations” in New York State and Canada, and apparently affects in s
ome degree other Indians in regions as far afield as Florida, Wisconsin and even Arizona. Socially, this movement draws strength from the resentment created by the impact of industrial society—particularly the physical and legal impacts of great engineering projects, “thruways” and seaways—on the Indian reservations with their ancient treaty rights, never fully observed and never completely rescinded by the white man. Politically, the movement is strongly affected by the activities of the “newly emerging nations” not only in Asia and Africa but also in Latin America. Apologies to the Iroquois contains a photograph of Fidel Castro receiving Mad Bear in Cuba in 1959, and according to Mr. Wilson, Iroquois nationalists hope that Cuba will sponsor the admission of the Iroquois League to the United Nations. Culturally, the movement is traditionalist and pagan in tendency. The dances and ceremonies of the Longhouse are revived and there are even those—as yet a minority, it seems—who want to return to the Sacrifice of the White Dog. Other sacrifices are not altogether to be excluded. Brigadier Holdridge, a paleface sympathizer with the Indian nationalists, once campaigned in favour of hanging Harry Truman, General Bradley, Cardinal Spellman and John Foster Dulles. We have no means of knowing whether this program appealed to Indians more than to other sections of the population, but the Brigadier recently counselled violence to the Indians specifically: “to resist with all their power, even to gunfire, if necessary, in defense of their territory.”