Again, I think it necessary to raise and reject the idea of rebellion, if one means by that word a thrust of any sort. For perspective’s sake it may be wise to remember another kind of youthful reaction to a failed society in a different era. In the Thirties, for instance, we were also contemptuous of the given order. We had been brought up to believe that if you worked hard, saved your money, studied, kept your nose clean, you would end up made. We found ourselves in the Depression, when you could not get a job, when all the studying you might do would get you a chance, at best, to sell ties in Macy’s. Our delinquency consisted in joining demonstrations of the unemployed, pouring onto campuses to scream against some injustice by college administrations, and adopting to one degree or another a socialist ideology. This, in fact, was a more dangerous kind of delinquency than the gangs imply, for it was directed against the social structure of capitalism itself. But, curiously, it was at the same time immeasurably more constructive, for the radical youth of the Thirties, contemptuous as he was of the social values he had rejected, was still bent upon instituting human values in their place. He was therefore a conserver, he believed in some society.
Gide wrote a story about a man who wanted to get on a train and shoot a passenger. Any train, any passenger. It would be a totally gratuitous act, an act devoid of any purpose whatever, an act of “freedom” from purpose. To kill an unknown man without even anger, without unrequited love, without love at all, with nothing in his heart but the sheerly physical contemplation of the gun barrel and the target. In doing this one would partake of death’s irreproachable identity and commit an act in revolt against meaning itself, just as death is, in the last analysis, beyond analysis.
To think of contemporary delinquency in the vein of the Thirties, as a rebellion toward something, is to add a value to it which it does not have. To give it even the dignity of cynicism run rampant is also overelaborate. For the essence is not the individual at all; it is the gang, the herd, and we should be able to understand its attractions ourselves. It is not the thrust toward individual expression but a flight from self in any defined form. Therefore, to see it simply as a protest against conformism is to stand it on its head; it is profoundly conformist but without the mottoes, the entablature of recognizable, “safe” conformism and its liturgy of religious, patriotic, socially conservative credos.
The Greenwich gang, therefore, is also doing as it was taught, just as the slum gang does, but more subtly. The Greenwich gang is conforming to the hidden inhumanity of conformism, to the herd quality in conformism; it is acting out the terror-fury that lies hidden under Father’s acceptable conformism. It is simply conformity sincere, conformity revealing its true content, which is hatred of others, a stunted wish for omnipotence, and the conformist’s secret belief that nothing outside his skin is real or true. For which reason he must redouble his obeisance to institutions lest, if the acts of obeisance be withheld, the whole external world will vanish, leaving him alone. And to be left alone when you do not sense any existence in yourself is the ultimate terror. But this loneliness is not the poet’s, not the thinker’s, not the loneliness that is filled with incommunicable feeling, insufficiently formed thought. It is nonexistence and must not be romanticized, as it has been in movies and some of the wishful Beat literature. It is a withdrawal not from the world but from oneself. It is boredom, the subsidence of inner impulse, and it threatens true death unless it is overthrown.
All of which is said in order to indicate that delinquency is not the kind of “social problem” it is generally thought to be. That is, it transcends even as it includes the need for better housing, medical care, and the rest. It is our most notable and violent manifestation of social nihilism. In saying this, however, it is necessary to short-circuit any notion that it is an attempt by the youth to live “sincerely.” The air of “sincerity” which so many writers have given the delinquent is not to be mistaken as his “purpose.” This is romanticism and solves nothing except to sentimentalize brutality. The gang kid can be sincere; he can extend himself for a buddy and risk himself for others; but he is just as liable, if not more so than others, to desert his buddies in need and to treat his friends disloyally. Gang boys rarely go to visit a buddy in jail excepting in the movies. They forget about him. The cult of sincerity, of true human relations uncontaminated by money and the social rat race, is not the hallmark of the gang. The only moment of truth comes when the war starts. Then the brave show themselves, but few of these boys know how to fight alone and hardly any without a knife or a gun. They are not to be equated with matadors or boxers or Hemingway heroes. They are dangerous pack hounds who will not even expose themselves singly in the outfield.
If, then, one begins to put together all the elements, this “social problem” takes on not merely its superficial welfare aspects but its philosophical depths, which I think are the controlling ones. It is not a problem of big cities alone but of rural areas too; not of capitalism alone but of socialism as well; not restricted to the physically deprived but shared by the affluent; not a racial problem alone or a problem of recent immigrants, or a purely American problem. I believe it is in its present form the product of technology destroying the very concept of man as a value in himself.
I hesitate to say what I think the cure might be, if only because I cannot prove it. But I have heard most of the solutions men have offered, and they are spiritless, they do not assume that the wrong is deep and terrible and general among us all. There is, in a word, a spirit gone. Perhaps two world wars, brutality immeasurable, have blown it off the earth; perhaps the very processes of technology have sucked it out of man’s soul; but it is gone. Many men rarely relate to one another excepting as customer to seller, worker to boss, the affluent to the deprived and vice versa—in short, as factors to be somehow manipulated and not as intrinsically valuable persons.
Power was always in the world, to be sure, and its evils, but with us now it is strangely, surrealistically masked and distorted. Time was, for example, when the wealthy and the politically powerful flaunted themselves, used power openly as power, and were often cruel. But this openness had the advantage for man of clarity; it created a certain reality in the world, an environment that was defined, with hard but touchable barriers. Today power would have us believe—everywhere—that it is purely beneficent. The bank is not a place which makes more money with your deposits than it returns to you in the form of interest; it is not a sheer economic necessity, it is not a business at all. It is “Your Friendly Bank,” a kind of welfare institution whose one prayer, day and night, is to serve your whims or needs. A school is no longer a place of mental discipline but a kind of day-care center, a social gathering where you go through a ritual of games and entertainments which insinuate knowledge and the crafts of the outside world. Business is not the practice of buying low and selling high, it is a species of public service. The good life itself is not the life of struggle for meaning, not the quest for union with the past, with God, with man that it traditionally was. The good life is the life of ceaseless entertainment, effortless joys, the air-conditioned, dust-free languor beyond the Mussulman’s most supine dream. Freedom is, after all, comfort; sexuality is a photograph. The enemy of it all is the real. The enemy is conflict. The enemy, in a word, is life.
My own view is that delinquency is related to this dreamworld from two opposing sides. There are the deprived who cannot take part in the dream; poverty bars them. There are the oversated who are caught in its indefiniteness, its unreality, its boring hum, and strike for the real now and then—they rob, they hurt, they kill. In flight from the nothingness of this comfort they have inherited, they butt against its rubber walls in order to feel a real pain, a genuine consequence. For the world in which comfort rules is a delusion, whether one is within it or deprived of it.
There are a few social theorists who look beyond poverty and wealth, beyond the time when men will orient themselves to the world as breadwinners, as accruers
of money-power. They look to the triumph of technology, when at least in some countries the physical struggle to survive will no longer be the spine of existence. Then, they say, men will define themselves through varying “styles of life.” With struggles solved, nature tamed and abundant, all that will be left to do will be the adornment of existence, a novel-shaped swimming pool, I take it, or an outburst of artistic work.
It is not impossible, I suppose. Certainly a lot of people are already living that way—when they are not at their psychiatrists’. But there is still a distance to go before life’s style matters very much to most of humanity in comparison with next month’s rent. I do not know how we ought to reach for the spirit again, but it seems to me we must flounder without it. It is the spirit which does not accept injustice complacently and yet does not betray the poor with sentimentality. It is the spirit which seeks not to flee the tragedy which life must always be but seeks to enter into it, thereby to be strengthened by the fullest awareness of its pain, its ultimate non sequitur. It is the spirit which does not mask but unmasks the true function of a thing, be it business, unionism, architecture, or love.
Riccio and Slocum’s book, with all its ugliness, its crudeness, its lack of polish and design, is good because it delivers up the real. It is only as hopeless as the situation is. Its implied solutions are good ones: reform of idiotic narcotics laws, a real attempt to put trained people at the service of bewildered, desperate families, job-training programs, medical care, reading clinics—all of it is necessary, and none of it would so much as strain this economy. But none of it will matter, none of it will reach further than the spirit in which it is done. Not the spirit of fear with which so many face delinquency, nor the spirit of sentimentality which sees in it some virtue of rebellion against a false and lying society. The spirit has to be that of those people who know that delinquents are a living expression of our universal ignorance of what life ought to be, even of what it is, and of what it truly means to live. Bad pupils they surely are. But who from his own life, from his personal thought, has come up with the good teaching, the way of life that is joy? This book shows how difficult it is to reach these boys; what the country has to decide is what it is going to say if these kids should decide to listen.
THE MCCARTHY ERA
Many Writers: Few Plays
1952
It is impossible for anyone living in the midst of a cultural period to say with certainty why it is languishing in its produce and general vitality. This is especially true of the theater, where we tend to compare our usually vapid present with “Chekhov’s period,” or “Ibsen’s,” or our own previous decades, much to our disadvantage, forgetting that the giants usually stood alone in their time. Nevertheless, even optimists now confess that our theater has struck a seemingly endless low by any standard. I cannot hope to try to explain the reasons for this but certain clues keep recurring to me when thinking on the matter.
We can find no solace in the fact that there never have been more than a handful of first-class playwrights in any one country at any one time, for we have more than the usual number in America now, but few plays from them, and fewer still of any weight. A lizardic dormancy seems to be upon us; the creative mind seems to have lost its heat. Why?
I think the answers will be found in the nature of the creative act. A good play is a good thought; a great play is a great thought. A great thought is a thrust outward, a daring act. Daring is of the essence. Its very nature is incompatible with an undue affection for moderation, respectability, even fairness and responsibleness. Those qualities are proper for the inside of the telephone company, not for creative art.
I may be wrong, but I sense that the playwrights have become more timid with experience and maturity, timid in ethical and social idea, theatrical method, and stylistic means. Because they are unproduced, no firm generalization can be made about the younger playwrights, but from my personal impressions of scripts sent me from time to time, as well as from talks I have had with a few groups of them, I have been struck and dismayed by the strangely high place they give to inoffensiveness.
I find them old without having been young. Like young executives, they seem proudest of their sensibleness—what they call being practical. Illusion is out; it is foolish. What illusion? The illusion that the writer can save the world. The fashion is that the world cannot be saved. Between the determinism of economics and the iron laws of psychiatrics they can only appear ridiculous, they think, by roaring out a credo, a cry of pain, a point of view. Perhaps they really have no point of view, or pain either. It is incomprehensible to me.
Recently a young Chilean director, who has put on more than thirty plays in his own country, and spent the past three years studying theater on a fellowship in France, in Britain, and in two of our leading universities, told me this: “Your students and teachers seem to have no interest at all in the meanings of the ideas in the plays they study. Everything is technique. Your productions and physical apparatus are the best in the world, but among all the university people I came to know, as well as the professionals, scarcely any want to talk about the authors’ ethical, moral, or philosophical intentions. They seem to see the theater almost as an engineering project, the purpose being to study successful models of form in order, somehow, to reproduce them with other words.”
All this means to me, if true, is that this generation is turning Japanese. The Japanese are said to admire infinite repetitions of time-hallowed stories, characters, and themes. It is the triumph of the practical in art. The most practical thing to do is to repeat what has been done and thought before. But the very liquor of our art has always been originality, uniqueness. The East is older. Perhaps this sterile lull is therefore the sign of our aging. Perhaps we are observing several seasons of hush and silence to mark the passage through our youth. Our youth that was Shaw and Ibsen and O’Neill and all the great ones who kept turning and turning the central question of all great art—how may man govern himself so that he may live more humanly, more alive?
Japanism, so to speak, took over Hollywood long ago, and now the movie is ritual thinly veiled. The practical took command. The “showman” won. High finance took sterility by the hand, and together they rolled the product smooth, stripped off all its offensive edges, its individuality, and created the perfect circle—namely, zero.
I think the same grinding mill is at work in the theater, but more deceptively because we have no big companies enforcing compliance to any stated rules. But we have an atmosphere of dread just the same, an unconsciously—or consciously—accepted party line, a sanctified complex of moods and attitudes, proper and improper. If nothing else comes of it, one thing surely has: it has made it dangerous to dare, and, worse still, impractical. I am not speaking merely of political thought. Journalists have recently made studies of college students now in school and have been struck by the absence among them of any ferment, either religious, political, literary, or whatever. Wealthy, powerful, envied all about, it seems the American people stand mute.
We always had with us the “showman,” but we also had a group of rebels insisting on thrusting their private view of the world on others. Where are they? Or is everybody really happy now? Do Americans really believe they have solved the problems of living for all time? If not, where are the plays that reflect the soul-racking, deeply unseating questions that are being inwardly asked on the street, in the living room, on the subways?
Either the playwrights are deaf to them, which I cannot believe, or they are somehow shy of bringing them onto the stage. If the last is true we are unlikely to have even the “straight” theater again—the melodramas, the farces, the “small” plays. It is hard to convince you of this, perhaps, but little thoughts feed off big thoughts; an exciting theater cannot come without there being a ferment, a ferment in the colleges, in the press, in the air. For years now I seem to have heard not expressions of thought from people but a sort of oblong blur, a reflection in
distance of the newspapers’ opinions.
Is the knuckleheadedness of McCarthyism behind it all? The Congressional investigations of political unorthodoxy? Yes. But is that all? Can an artist be paralyzed except he be somewhat willing? You may pardon me for quoting from myself, but must one always be not merely liked but well liked? Is it not honorable to have powerful enemies? Guardedness, suspicion, aloof circumspection—these are the strongest traits I see around me, and what have they ever had to do with the creative act?
Is it quixotic to say that a time comes for an artist—and for all those who want and love theater—when the world must be left behind? When, like some pilgrim, he must consult only his own heart and cleave to the truth it utters? For out of the hectoring of columnists, the compulsions of patriotic gangs, the suspicions of the honest and the corrupt alike, art never will and never has found soil.
I think of a night last week when a storm knocked out my lights in the country, and it being only nine o’clock it was unthinkable to go to bed. I sat a long time in the blacked-out living room, wide awake, a manuscript unfinished on the table. The idea of lying in bed with one’s eyes open, one’s brain alive, seemed improper, even degrading. And so, like some primitive man discovering the blessings of fire, I lit two candles and experimentally set them beside my papers. Lo! I could read and work again.
Let a storm come, even from God, and yet it leaves a choice with the man in the dark. He may sit eyeless, waiting for some unknown force to return him his light, or he may seek his private flame. But the choice, the choice is there. We cannot yet be tired. There is work to be done. This is no time to go to sleep.
The Night Ed Murrow Struck Back
1983
Fear, like love, is difficult to explain after it has subsided, probably because it draws away the veils of illusion as it disappears. The illusion of an unstoppable force surrounded Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin at the height of his influence, in the years from 1950 to 1954. He had paralyzed the State Department, cowed President Eisenhower, and mesmerized almost the entire American press, which would in all seriousness report his most hallucinatory spitballs as hard front-page news. His very name struck terror not only in the hearts of the several million Americans who in the previous decades of the Forties or Thirties had had a brush with any branch or leaf of the Left, but also those who had ever expressed themselves with something less than a violent hatred of the Soviets, Marx, or for that matter cooperatives—or even certain kinds of poetry. At my own hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a flank of the McCarthy movement, a congressman from Cincinnati asked me with wild incredulity, “You mean you believe that a man has the right to write a poem about anything?” When I confirmed this opinion, he turned to his fellow committeemen and simply threw up his hands.
Collected Essays Page 41