But Murrow, unlike others, had a network to allow him the last word. And he had easy pickings: the ACLU had never been “listed” by any agency as a front; Murrow had simply never belonged to the IWW; and Laski, a rather confused on-and-off-again Marxist professor, had dedicated his book to Murrow for his valiant broadcasts from bombed London in the late war. As for the communists supporting Murrow, this consisted of a notice in the Daily Worker that his upcoming McCarthy telecast was a “Best Bet.”
Oddly, one lacked the urge to applaud Murrow at the end. He had been so persuasive because he had said what everyone had always known, that Joe McCarthy had merely been the master of the rhetorical style of lawyer-talk, an actor in love with the sound of his voice and his capacity to hold an audience in astonishment.
What ultimately undid McCarthy was hubris, his attacks on the patriotism of the leadership of the Army, on General George Marshall and Eisenhower himself. He may have gone mad with his power and too much booze. But Murrow’s broadcast had cut the bag open and it was empty. How could one applaud our having striven so long after wind? Still, there was no doubt that night that Murrow’s was the voice of decency, and if he and CBS had not struck at McCarthy until his decline had begun—if it was less a dragon slaying than a coup de grace—it still demonstrated, and would continue for years to come, the persistence of scruple as a living principle, one that had for so long been defied and doubtless would be again, and yet would live.
Murrow, in his summing up, said, “We are not a nation of fearful men,” and one knew that there are things that do have to be repeated as fact even when they are only hopes. But for that kind of hope this nation is in Murrow’s eternal debt.
1956 and All This
1956
I obviously can have no special competence in the field of foreign policy. I only know what I read in the papers, and the fact that I am a creative writer does not make my opinions either wiser or more persuasive than those of any other man. But it seems to me that there might be some good purpose in one of my profession expressing himself on this kind of problem. A certain awareness of attitudes outside our borders has been forced on me over the past ten years. My plays are regularly produced on the stages of Europe, Asia, Australia, and other areas. I have not traveled extensively abroad for some seven years now, but I do receive a steady mail from artists, producers, and audiences in foreign countries; there are visits and a steady correspondence with them and frequent newspaper reviews and articles concerning my work.
From all these sources I have a certain group of impressions, especially of Europe, which have at least one rather unusual basis, namely, the comparative foreign reaction to works written for the American audience.
Through these varying reactions to the same object, national attitudes can be examined in a perspective less turbulent and possibly of more lasting truth than purely political studies will elicit. In a theater, people are themselves; they come of their own volition; they accept or reject, are moved or left cold not by virtue of reason alone or of emotion alone, but as whole human beings.
A communion through art is therefore unusually complete; it can be a most reliable indication of a fundamental unity; and an inability to commune through art is, I think, a stern indication that cultures have not yet arrived at a genuine common ground. Had there been no Flaubert, no Zola, no Proust, de Maupassant, Stendhal, Balzac, Dumas; had there been no Mark Twain, or Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, or the numerous other American artists of the first rank, our conviction of essential union with France and of France with us would rest upon the assurances of the two Departments of State and the impressions of tourists. I think that had there been no Tolstoy, no Gogol, no Turgenev, no Chekhov or Dostoyevsky, we should have no assurance at all nor any faint hope that the Russian heart was even ultimately comprehensible to us. Just recently the new government of Ceylon, which has just replaced the avowedly pro-British, pro-American regime, was and is still thought to be anti-American. The program is to nationalize foreign-owned plantations, and for the first time in history they will exchange Ambassadors with Moscow and Peking. The Prime Minister, an Oxford graduate, took pains to correct the idea he was anti-Western. He said, “How could I be against a country that produced Mark Twain?”
There is more than a literary appreciation behind this remark, I think. Literature of the first rank is a kind of international signaling service, telling all who can read that wherever that distant blinker is shining live men of a common civilization.
Now, at the outset, I want to make clear that I disagree with those who believe the United States has entirely failed in its foreign policy since the close of World War II. But I think that the values this country has stood for in the past, more than in the present, have helped to keep alive a promise of a democratic future for the world. I do not believe, however, that our policy has stopped communism. I think that our armament has been a deterrent. But that is all. A policy of merely deterring anything is negative. I believe the time is upon us, and has been for some time now, when an entirely new approach has to be taken to the whole problem of what the future is to be. I base this upon the assumption that the atomic and armament statement is a historic fact which will remain for an indefinite period. In short, the policy was justified, if it was at all, on the basis of an imminence of war. I am proceeding on the ground that there will not be a war and cannot be. I summarize these conclusions at the outset so that the criticisms I may level now will be taken as they are intended—as guides to a positive foreign policy, and not an exercise in sarcasm. For good or ill, what the government has done in the world we have done; equally, what it will do in the future must represent, more than ever before, the real feelings and the judgments of the people. My quarrel, in fact, is that our policy has ceased to reflect the positive quality of the American people, and rests basically on their fears, both real and imaginary. We are much more than our fears, but the world does not often know that. And now to certain observations from my experience as a dramatist.
To begin with, I have often been struck, in foreign reviews of my plays, by the distinct difference in the foreign critic’s attitudes toward meaning in a play, toward the theater as an institution. Here, our critics and most of the people in our audiences are pragmatists. As in our scientific tradition, our industrial tradition, in most of the things we do, we are almost wholly absorbed by the immediate impact of an idea or an invention. A thing is judged almost exclusively by whether it works, or pays, or is popular. In the scientific fields, my understanding is that this has been both an advantage and a liability, because our traditionally meager interest in theoretical, pure science has held back our scientific advance. At the same time, of course, our concentration upon practical, applied science has helped to give us a highly developed industry and a profusion of consumers’ goods. The roster of those scientists who developed the atomic bomb is, as we know, very heavily weighted with foreign names, for this was a child of pure research. The opposing emphasis here and abroad is probably accounted for by the smallness of the European market for the products of applied science, for one thing. From this lack they have in this case made a virtue. But the irony remains that despite our enormous scientific establishment and our admitted superiority in many applied fields, there is evidently an impression abroad, founded until recently on fact, that we have little intellectual interest in science. I believe there is now a consciousness here of that need which is long past due.
In the field of the drama the same sort of irony prevails, and I think its operating principle has a certain effect upon a rather wide sector of European opinion. On the one hand, one feels the European writer, the critic, and from my mail the audience too are more interested in the philosophic, moral and principled values of the play than we are. One senses that they rather look askance at our lack of interest in these matters, and I often think that for this among other reasons they so often regard us as essentially a people without
seriousness. The truth is that while our plays move much more rapidly than theirs do, are less likely to dwell on long conversations woven around piquant paradox and observation for its own sake, and while they strive more to be actions than thoughts, it is often admitted that if there is a leadership in the contemporary play since the Second World War, at least in terms of international public appeal, America has it. Put simply, we write plays for people and not for professors or philosophers; the people abroad accept and love many of our plays, and in some cases, even the philosophers do too. The point I would make here is that without any special consciousness of the attempt, we have created in the past few decades a kind of American dramatic style. We have also created an American movie style, an American style of dress, and probably architecture, and a style of shopping, and a style of comic books, and a style of novel writing and popular music—in a word, we have spontaneously created methods of reaching the great mass of the people whose effectiveness and exportability, if one may use an ugly word, are not equaled anywhere else.
This has had a multiple effect and it is not easy to separate the good from the bad. But I know, for instance, that there is great resentment among thinking people in Europe at the inroads made by Reader’s Digest and comic books. One finds Dick Tracy all over the place. As a result of this particular kind of export, we are unwittingly feeding the idea that we incline ever so slightly to the moronic. The idea, for instance, of publishing an abridged novel is barbaric to them, and I’m not sure they’re wrong. At the same time, however, our best writers are in many cases their secret or admitted models.
It is time to interject here some word about the importance of what is vaguely called culture in our foreign relations, a matter to which our government, to put it gently, is stupendously indifferent. In 1950, I was interviewed by the press in Copenhagen. It was an entirely literary interview. But when the reporters had left, one man stayed behind. Unlike the others who were of an intellectual sort, he wanted to know where I lived, what sort of a house, whether I played with my children, owned a car, dressed for dinner, and so forth. He turned out to have been from a tabloid paper which was read mainly by what he termed shopgirls. Now, I have yet to be interviewed by the New York Daily News, for instance, so I asked him what interest his readers could have in a person who wrote such morose and dreary plays. “It is very important for them to know that there are writers in America,” he said. I could hardly believe they doubted that. “Oh yes,” he said, “they will be very surprised to read about you, that you exist.” But if they were that ignorant, I said, what difference would it make to them whether writers exist in America? What importance could the whole question have for them? “Very important,” he said. “They are not intellectuals, but they think anyway that it is necessary for a country to have intellectuals. It will make them more sympathetic to America.”
This is but one of many similar incidents which have made me wonder whether we are struggling, unknowingly, with a difference in cultural attitudes which may even warp and change purely political communication at any particular moment.
It is not that we are a people without seriousness. It is that we measure seriousness in an entirely different way than they do. They are the inheritors of a culture which was established, and I believe still exists, on an essentially aristocratic concept, which is to say, out of societies whose majority was nearly illiterate, education was for the few and the artist a kind of adornment to the political state, a measure of its glory and its worth. The artist for us, even as we may pay him much better than they do and cheat him much less, is more of an odd duck, and even among his fellow artists here he does not really exist except when he gains a great popular following. Again, our pragmatism is at work. I think that more Americans than not concede an artist his importance in proportion to his ability to make money with what he creates, for our measure of value is closely attuned to its acceptance by the majority. The artistic product has traditionally had little if any intrinsic justification for most of us. And this has presented our artists with a very lonely and frustrating life on the one hand, but on the other with a worthy if nearly impossible challenge. We regard it as our plain duty to make high art, if we are able, but to make it for all the people. More often than not, however, the art that is made sacrifices art for popularity partly because popularity pays fabulously among us. But the challenge is the right one anyway, I believe. The thing of importance now, however, is that even as we have produced some of the best works of literature of this era, we yet stand accused with perfect sobriety of being a mindless country. In this area the Russians have an inherited advantage over us. Despite all their differences from the Western tradition, their inherited attitude toward the artist and the intellectual has essentially the same sort of consciousness as that of the European. I think, for instance, of the time Dostoyevsky died. The entire Russian nation went into mourning for a novelist. I think of the endless lines of people who came to sit at Tolstoy’s feet in his later years. I think too of the time a few years ago when I visited the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm and saw an announcement of a forthcoming cycle of Strindberg’s plays. I asked the director whether Strindberg was a popular writer in his native Sweden, and the director said he was not. Still for at least one period in each season, Strindberg’s plays are regularly produced. “But why do you do this if he is not very popular?” I asked. “That isn’t the point,” he said. “He was our greatest dramatist and one of the best in the world; it is up to us to keep his plays alive and before the public.” Later, we walked through the vast dressing room area of the theater, and there was one which, he said, is not often used. It belonged to a great actor who was now too aged to play. Yet they kept his dressing room solely for his use just in case he might drop in to rest of an afternoon. They needed dressing rooms badly, but it was inconceivable to take this once-great actor’s name off his door until he had died.
This is not the occasion to examine the right and wrong of that system; I only wish to say that there is in Europe at least the strong remnant of the idea that the artist is the vessel of his country’s selfhood, the speaker who has arisen among his countrymen to articulate if not to immortalize their age. I believe, as well, that because this reverence remains, it leads them to believe that they care more for art than we do, and that it follows we have no real life of the spirit but only a preoccupation with commodities. I would go even further and say that often our immense material wealth is the cue for them to believe that we care less for people than for things. I will not comment here on how much we care for people or how little; I am trying to avoid the question of the civilizing value of this kind of reverence for art. I will only say that at least in one country, Germany, its alleged pride in its artists did not seem to mitigate its ferocity in two world wars. But this is not the whole story either, and I leave it to go on with my observations.
In the different attitudes toward art can be detected attitudes which may be of significance politically. The reviews and comments upon my own play, Death of a Salesman, are of interest in this connection. When the play opened in New York it was taken for granted that its hero, the Salesman, and the story itself, were so American as to be quite strange if not incomprehensible to people of other nations; in some countries there is, for instance, no word that really conveys the idea of the salesman in our sense. Yet, wherever it has been shown there seems to have been no difficulty at all in understanding and identifying with the characters, nor was there any particular notice taken of the hero’s unusual occupation. It seems to me that if this instantaneous familiarity is any guide, we have made too much of our superficial differences from other peoples. In Catholic Spain, where feudalism is still not a closed era; among fishermen in Norway at the edge of the Arctic Circle; in Rome, Athens, Tokyo—there has been an almost disappointing similarity of reaction to this and other plays of mine in one respect at least. They all seem to feel the anxieties we do; they are none of them certain of how to dissolve the questions
put by the play, questions like—what ultimate point can there be for a human life? What satisfaction really exists in the ideal of a comfortable life surrounded by the gadgets we strive so hard to buy? What ought to be the aim for a man in this kind of a world? How can he achieve for himself a sense of genuine fulfillment and an identity? Where, in all the profusion of materiality we have created around us, is the cup where the spirit may reside? In short, what is the most human way to live?
Collected Essays Page 43