Hans J. Morgenthau

The Best of the 50s

Articles

November 1950 Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism Some reflections of ‘positive Jewishness.’ Clement Greenberg

January 1951 Will Technology Destroy Civilization? Why the prophets of doom are wrong. Franz Borkenau

June 1951 1930: The Year That Was New Year’s Eve The great binge and its leftist aftermath. Malcolm Cowley

October 1952 The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes Negotiations and armed power flexibly combined. Hans J. Morgenthau

April 1953 The Cold War Perspective Without Stalin Why Soviet expansion may now accelerate. George Lichtheim

September 1953 The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education Must all free men read them—or be slaves? F.R. Leavis

June 1954 Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham Communiqué on an unequal battle. Robert Warshow

February 1956 Returning to Dachau The living and the dead. Bruno Bettelheim

July 1956 The Theory of Mass Society A critique. Daniel Bell

December 1957 Self-Definition in American Literature Experience and fulfillment. Philip Rahv

January 1958 By Cozzens Possessed A review of reviews. Dwight Macdonald

February 2012 What It Feels Like To Be a Goy A poet’s talk in Tel Aviv. Robert Graves

July 1959 The Swamp of Prosperity A review of Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth Saul Bellow November 1950

Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism Some reflections on ‘positive Jewishness.’ Clement Greenberg

NE LOOKS into oneself and discovers there what is also in others. A realization of the Jewish self-hatred in myself, of its subtlety and the devious ways in which it conceals itself, from me as well as from the world outside, explains many things that used to puzzle me in the behavior of my fellow Jews. I do not think that in this respect I am projecting upon others faults I find in myself; it is only reluctantly that I have become persuaded that self-hatred in one form or another is almost universal Oamong Jews—or at least much more prevalent than is commonly thought or admitted— and that it is not confined on the whole to Jews like myself. The term “self-hatred” was first applied to what is better defined as the Jewish inferiority complex—which is, strictly speaking, more self-doubt and self-contempt than actual self-hatred—by the late Theodor Lessing, a German Jewish writer, in a rather un- satisfactory book on the subject called Der Jüdische Selbsthass which was published in the late 20s. The social causes of this self-hatred were dealt with more satisfactorily by the late Kurt Lewin, a sociologist who came to America from Germany, in an article that

Clement Greenberg, associate editor of Commentary from 1945 to 1957, was an essayist and art critic. Clement Greenberg appeared in the Contemporary Jewish Record of June 1941 under the title “Self-Hatred Among Jews.” Dr. Lewin wrote then: “It is recognized in sociology that the members of the lower social strata tend to accept the fashions, values, and ideals of the higher strata. In the case of the underprivileged group it means that their opinions about themselves are greatly influenced by the low esteem the majority has for them. This . . . heightens the tendency of the Jew with a negative balance [i.e., the Jew who finds his identity as a Jew too much of a psychological handicap] to cut himself loose from things Jewish. . . . Being unable to cut himself entirely loose from his Jewish connections and his Jewish past, the hatred turns upon himself. . . . ” This states the case well enough as far as my own experience is concerned. But when Dr. Lewin suggests that “a strong feeling of being part and parcel of the group and having a positive attitude toward it is, for children and adults alike, the sufficient condition for the avoidance of attitudes based on self-hatred,” he reveals that he did not go any further inside the problem than was required in order to describe it. He saw the signs of self-hatred too exclusively in an outwardly negative attitude toward fellow Jews and things Jewish, and took the absence of self-hatred for granted wherever a Jew made no bones about his “group belongingness” and accepted his Jewish connections. It does not seem so simple as that to me. Nor, perhaps, was it really so simple as that for Dr. Lewin. Otherwise he would not have reasoned in a circle. If to have a positive attitude toward the group is ipso facto to be without self-hatred, the positiveness is the result of the cure, not, as Dr. Lewin suggested, its means. Nor, for that matter, is feeling “part and parcel of the group” such a sure antidote. The pressure of the larger society within which we live, according to whose traditions the Jews as a whole do not cut an attractive figure (have we not been, as Felix Frankfurter says, “the most vilified and persecuted minority in history”?), is far too strong to enable one to escape self-hatred simply by feeling oneself 100 percent Jewish. On the contrary, such a feeling may even increase self-hatred. The pressure of the opinions of the larger society reaches everywhere, even into theological seminaries, and one may well resent oneself all the more for sensing oneself undilutedly Jewish.

HE CRUX of the difficulty presented by self-hatred, as it affects the American Jew, lies in the different ways that it is acted out. The “negative” Jew, fleeing his TJewishness, expresses his self-hatred directly, even if he rationalizes it in some cases by maintaining that there is really no other difference than that of religion between himself and Gentiles (forgetting that he is quite aware that there is more than a religious difference between Anglo-Saxon and, for instance, Irish Gentiles). Or, in other cases, he may express his self-hatred even more openly by admitting that he dislikes Jews and things Jewish even though he is a Jew himself; then he will argue, most likely, that he is not like other Jews and therefore hasn’t enough Jewishness in himself to cause him to Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism feel self-hatred. Either way the self-hatred is not diminished, for all the directness with which it is expressed, and remains to corrode one’s character. And it is compounded by a lie—namely, that Jewishness is a mere accidental detail, or that the Jew in question is less “Jewish” than other Jews. (No matter how much he may repeat this lie to himself, no Jew ever succeeds in believing it, whence stems that hidden anguish which is present in so many “inauthentic,” genteel, and Gentilized Jews—the anguish, that is, of not being able to believe something one wants very much to.) The “positive” or “affirmative” Jew is supposedly the opposite of this kind of Jew. Ap- parently, he, the “positive” Jew, has no self-hatred to express; he asserts, seeks out, and revels in his Jewishness. The question then is, ought his behavior be accepted at face value? Does he mean it all the way down? Was he free from self-hatred to start with? Or, if not, did he succeed in dealing with it in such a way that he became entirely free of it? If the latter is the case, then Jews like myself must sit at his feet and learn from him. But what do I see when I take a longer look? That the Jewishness of so many of these “positive” Jews is truculent, and very sensitive to criticism; that it is also aggressive and uncharitable; that it points to itself too challengingly and has too little patience with conceptions of Jewishness other than its own; that it is too prone to polemical violence and name-calling; that, in the end, it faces outward too much and seems to get too little satisfaction from its own self. Were these “positive” Jews really and truly in possession of themselves as Jews, would they not be more at ease—even a little complacent? It is this absence of ease that makes me suspect that a certain familiar psychological mechanism is at work here. By projecting it upon others and attacking it violently in others, these “positive” Jews may be exorcising from their own consciousness an image of the Jew that is no less “negative” than that in the mind of the most cringing “assimilationist.” *

OSITIVE Judaism” has been with us for quite a while now, but it has not yet succeeded in persuading me that it is more than a circumlocutory name for a new ‘ Pphase of Jewish nationalism in which it becomes more like other nationalisms, to the point of being infected with chauvinism. Chauvinism, or rabid nationalism, history tells us, is a means usually of compensating for a sense of collective inadequacy or failure. As a sentiment shared by responsible

* Witness, for example, that innocent and lamentable delight with which so many “affirmative” Jews call attention to the prevalence of blondness and blue eyes among the Israeli youth. The phenomenon has been noted with the greatest satisfaction in precisely the most nationalist Jewish magazines and books. Yet we are always quite sure that the high value the American Negro puts on a light complexion is a symptom of his self-hatred. Clement Greenberg people, it does not appear among nations that have enjoyed a successful history; thus it is not customarily associated with the national feelings of Americans and most Western European peoples. It is among the oppressed, frustrated, or backward peoples of Central and Eastern Europe that it has been most virulent. There we find Germans asserting Germanism, Russians Slavism, Magyars Magyarism, Lithuanians Lithuanianism as absolute ends in themselves and not needing generalization in terms of any broader value in order to be made the supreme criteria of all things on earth and in heaven. There we also find that self-consciousness about national traits which is preoccupied with de- termining, as the case may be, what is uniquely German or Russian, who is German or Russian, what makes Germans or Russians superior to all others, how one can go about becoming more German or Russian, and so forth. We Jews have known something of this kind of self-preoccupation for a long time, albeit without nationalism, and while it often betrays the fact that we simply find ourselves more interesting than Gentiles, it is also the symptom of a collective feeling of self- doubt. But the self-doubt has, usually, to become general and very uncomfortable before it can furnish the fuel for chauvinism, and it is also necessary for the people concerned to have had some first taste of success. It is with its first taste of success that a people musters up the nerve to begin actively compensating for its sense of inferiority—usually by arrogance and self-praise. Yet it continues to feel itself in the position of an upstart and is still afraid that it won’t be treated with sufficient respect. Along with this goes a suspicion that the success was accidental and unearned anyhow, and one has to discover virtues in oneself that prove the opposite and quiet the suspicion. Certainly chauvinism has nothing to do with self-confidence or a truly “positive attitude” toward one’s group. German nationalism became widely chauvinist only after the Franco-Prussian War, and the Germans still had—and have—one of the deepest inferiority complexes of any territorially unified people. It is not for nothing that Goethe, Thomas Mann, and others have seen similarities between the inner attitudes of Germans and Jews.

OWEVER real or unreal these similarities may be, some of the parallels that have appeared between Jewish and German nationalism—especially the post- H1918 variety of the latter—cannot at all be written off as “literature.” This, no matter how painful I, as a Jew, find any resemblance between German nationalism and things Jewish: which is all the more reason why Jewish chauvinism is distressing to contemplate. Nor is the possibility of these parallels decreased by the fact that there are many similarities in the pattern of the rise itself of the two nationalisms. Like the Ger- man, Jewish nationalism was born of a history of humiliation and defeat, and required a sharp blow or succession of blows in order to be awakened to action: The pogroms of czarist Russian and the growth of secular and doctrinaire anti-Semitism were for us Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism what subjection to Napoleon was to the Germans. The decisive shock, without which Jewish nationalism might still have remained the province largely of East European Jewish intellectuals, was Hitler’ destruction of six millions of us, which has been the equivalent (and much, much more) of what the 1918 defeat was for the Germans. How- ever, the victory in Palestine did for us after our disaster what their defeat of France in 1870 had done for the Germans before their disaster: It gave us a first taste of real success, of success won on our own. And it is only since then, apparently, that Jewish chauvinism has become a serious possibility. Are we to fold our hands and resign ourselves to Jewish chauvinism with the excuse that the same historical factors that produced chauvinism in other peoples cannot be prevented from doing so in Jews and that we might as well bow our heads to necessity? The necessity is not pleasant, especially when we see how much like German chauvinism the Jewish variety can be. Is not Jewish identity, as a mere fact, being made a primary virtue, as the Germans made their Germanness one? Is not a “Jewishness” defined almost entirely in terms of group loyalty and group conformity, and whose only content is its function as differentiation, being elevated as the supreme criterion by which everything and every Jew is to be judged? Worst of all, have not some of us become too quick to hate and too intemperate in our abuse of fellow Jews who disagree with us?

HAUVINISM has had a fairly long history by now, long enough to make us all familiar with its practical liabilities as well as its purely aesthetic uglinesses. And Cone might expect that, in spite of the historical factors that encourage it among us, we Jews might have become immunized to it by all the suffering it has caused us at the hands of other people. But even if this expectation is bound to be disappointed since human beings are what they are, surely a people as literate and rational as we should not at this late date be deceived by our own chauvinism. We should be able to recognize that it no more denies a collective inferiority complex in our case than it has in that of other peoples. * Actually, chauvinism—which in America means Jewish separatism—intensifies self- hatred by concealing and dissembling it, by sinking it into depths of the psyche where it becomes all the more malignant because out of sight. Remaining invisible, retreating at most, but not disappearing, self-hatred prompts us to go to ever greater lengths to convince ourselves that we have extirpated it—to strut and posture and boast. We become too prone to violent words if not violent deeds. Yet we succeed no better than before in

* “Among Negro—and Jewish—school children, it has been found, those who recognize their minority status most clearly are also those who feel most ashamed of the low status of their group; in them ‘group pride’ and ‘self- hatred’ seem inextricably mixed.”—From a review by Miriam Reimann of Arnold Rose’s book The Negro’s Morale: Group Identification and Protest that appeared in the October 1950 Commentary. Clement Greenberg coming to terms with ourselves, and only exchange one expression of self-hatred for another, more indirect and deceptive one.

III

UT I do not wish to argue that the self-hatred which the “positive” Jew hides is exactly the same as that which the “negative,” furtive Jew reveals. The “positive” BJew and his spiritual ancestors do, after all, embody the Jewish group consciousness more than do most other Jews. The “positive” Jew has accepted the burden as well as the rewards involved in that. He fights as best he knows how for Jewish self-respect, and whatever he wins redounds to the benefit of all other Jews. I am aware, moreover, of all that in Jewish history would justify an excessive nationalism on our part. The attitude of the non-Jewish world—the chief cause of our self-hatred—provides a strong practical as well as psychological argument for the uses of a Jewish national selfishness. Those of us who are sick of Europe after Auschwitz and want to have nothing more to do with Gentiles have a right for the moment to indulge our feelings, if only to re- cover from the trauma. But humanity in general is still the highest value and not all Gentiles are anti-Semitic. Self-pity turned a good many Germans into swine, and it can do the same to others, regardless of how much their self-pity is justified. No matter how necessary it may be to indulge our feelings about Auschwitz, we can do so only temporarily and privately; we certainly cannot let them determine Jewish policy either in Israel or outside it. Like the spokesmen of national consciousness everywhere, most nationalist Jews want above all else power for their people, or at least the show of power. And who can say that they are not justified? Power is essential at least insofar as it means being able to take more of our fate into our own hands instead of suffering it as passive objects. Yet the nationalist tends to accept too implicitly the decisions rendered by power. It is precisely because of his sensitivity to questions of power that the self-hatred of the nationalist Jew has been greatly aggravated by the scale and mode in which Hitler slaughtered us. The nationalist Jew wants more from, as well as for, his people in the way of self-reliance and force, and feels humiliated by the ease with which the Nazis were able to kill most of our six millions. And he cannot help fearing, whatever his reason may tell him, that the scale and, even more, the mode of that slaughter were somehow a judgment upon us. Unlike the “negative” Jew, however, who may fear the same thing, he does not flee the whole question and try to wipe it from his mind by pretending that he is not like other Jews and so does not have to regard the fate of the six millions as in any way a judgment on himself. He remains identified and he remains with his fear and shame, to struggle with them as best he can. The trouble is that he, of all Jews, is the one least equipped to think through the problem. Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism

It is, of course, more than time that we all began to make a real effort to digest the fact of Auschwitz psychologically, if only to eliminate a source of self-hatred that—unlike its other sources—is not deeply rooted in the fabric of the larger American society that sur- rounds us. But if the “positive” Jews don’t want to start the necessary discussion, none of us others seems to want to either. Not only is the mind unable to come to terms with the dimensions of the event and so resolve some of its oppressiveness, and not only does it prefer to remain numbed in order to spare itself the pain; as I have just said, the mind has a tendency, deep down, to look on a calamity of that order as a punishment that must have been deserved. How could it have happened, on that scale and in that way, if it were not? But why deserved? For what? The mind doesn’t know, but it fears—fears in an utterly irrational and amoral, if not immoral, way that we were punished for being unable to take the risk of defending ourselves. No moral considerations enter in, as there used to, to relieve our feelings when we were persecuted; we were not punished by God for having transgressed—for no people could have sinned enough against any moral code to draw down such a punishment from any just God. We were punished by history, and, given the extent to which we, and especially the nationalists among us, accept the standards of judgment upon which all the world acts, the recognition that history usually punishes people only for being helpless does not diminish the shame involved. Disaster becomes punishment, and punishment proves that one is inferior because one is not able to avert it. (André Gide says somewhere that the French too tend to feel that their defeat, in 1940, has made them morally guilty.) The rise of a militant, aggressive “Jewish nationalism is in large part an answer to this state of mind. There are, I repeat, other than psychological reasons to justify Jewish militancy in this period, but I think we really feel the psychological ones as more urgent. We have to show the world and ourselves that “Jews can fight.” Whether we shall ever succeed in proving this to our own satisfaction I don’t know. But to behave like chauvin- ists and view the matter wholly in terms of physical aggressiveness won’t do it. The main struggle, at least for us in America, still has to be fought inside ourselves. It is there, and only there, that we can convince ourselves that Auschwitz, while it may have been a historical judgment, was not a verdict upon our intrinsic worth as a people. Exactly how we can do this I am not competent to say, but I do know that it has to be done, and that in order to do it we shall have to be much franker with ourselves about self-hatred—and other things—than hitherto.

EWISH militancy has its enlightened as well as its obscurantist side, nevertheless, and I myself am all for applying a measure of militancy here as well as in Israel. JModern anti-Semitism, being what it is, gathers momentum instead of expending itself when it goes unresisted beyond a certain point. I believe that it is best coped with in this country, once that point is reached, by direct personal action on the part of indi- Clement Greenberg vidual Jews, and it would be all to the good if our new Jewish nationalism could move us to take such matters as Joe McWilliams into our own hands instead of calling the policeman. I also believe that this would contribute importantly to the lessening of our self-hatred. Then it’s a question of dealing with anti-Semites by individual force? It is—and more. It is also a question of releasing that pent-up, frightened, and festering aggressiveness which supplies the fuel for rabid nationalism, and shifting the emphasis of militancy from the mass, where it runs the danger of becoming chauvinist and irresponsible, to the individual. Jewishness, insofar as it has to be asserted in a predominantly Gentile world, should be a personal rather than mass manifestation, and more a matter of individual self-reliance. This does not mean overlooking one’s responsibility to one’s fellow Jews, but it does mean making Jewishness something other than a product of herd warmth and an occasion for that herd conformity out of which arise the ugliest manifestations of nationalism—as we saw in the German case. As a herd manifestation, nationalism becomes a means of enslaving rather than of liberating the group. The herd elevates mediocrities into positions of power and influence, for only mediocrity can express it to its own satisfaction. The abuse that some “positive” Jews—rabbis, journalists, and others—are so ready to turn upon fellow Jews who refuse to make a fetish of their, the “positive” Jews’, conception of Jewishness, is, among other things, a symptom of the kind of jealous fear felt by ambitious mediocrity, as it is also of a secret self-hatred. Only mediocrities, or people with hidden guilt, react so violently—and often irrelevantly—to criticism and dissent. The East European background of most of the present leaders and spokesmen of Jew- ish nationalism is another factor that tends to exaggerate it. They cannot, in their political function, wholly escape the effects of the backward environment in which they grew up. Politics in Eastern and also Central Europe was involved primarily with ethnic issues and therefore encouraged national fanaticism. At the same time the only counterpoise to the disorder of a decaying feudalist society was, and apparently still is, regimentation. The social responsibility that the individual has learned to assume as a matter of course in the West is there inculcated, it would appear, only by mass organizations and factional discipline. I can understand why there are “marching youth” in Israel, and party uniforms, and why loyalty to a political party often competes with loyalty to the state. These stigmata of political backwardness will probably not disappear until East- ern Europe becomes a less vivid memory, the Oriental Jews are successfully absorbed, and Israel herself has enjoyed a security like America’s or Britain’s or Switzerland’s for a generation. But to understand is still not to assent. Specifically Jewish political activity in this country is open to the same influences, since most of those who are “Jewishly” politically conscious among us come from East- ern Europe too, or have been formed by fathers and mothers who did. This, however, has Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism not been enough to secure the regimentation of Jewish political life in America because, fortunately, our larger society is advanced and solid enough to overcome transplanted backwardness in less than a generation. We do not have to pick our way through the wreckage and poverty of a dying feudal society; we do not live in ethnic enclaves; here bourgeois enlightenment has become a good deal of an official reality, and we are citizens rather than nationals. And most of us, Jews and Gentiles, are urbanized. This is why so much of what goes as Jewish political and cultural thought in this country—cultural autonomy on Mordecai M. Kaplan’s model and ethnic-plus-religious separatism on Abba Hillel Silver’s—is so utterly irrelevant to the lives actually led by American Jews— even more irrelevant than the imported Bolshevism of the 30s, another product of the political backwardness of Eastern Europe, was to the lives of Americans in general. This is why “positive Judaism” and all the other varieties of Jewish nationalism still remain nothing but fuel for oratory and journalism.

HAT the “positive” Jews have been unable to do so far is show us how the Jewish consciousness and Jewish belongingness they invoke would affect W the texture and fiber of our lives as we live them in New York, Detroit, and Dallas. We know from experience how observance of the 613 prescriptions would change them, but the “positive” Jews appear to mean more than that—and less. One can be a rigidly Orthodox Jew and still be as exposed as any other American to the effects of our machine-made culture; one can still rotate from Canasta to the movies, from the radio to the television set, from over-shopping to over-eating, even if there is time out on Sat- urday. The “positive” Jews want to urge something more on us. I applaud them for the desire but still wish to see them become more relevant and hear phrases that are less empty come from their mouths. They still do not confront our lives honestly and from any other fundamental standpoint than the abstract and basically irrelevant one of in- stitutionalism and politics. Nor, worst of all, do they confront themselves and recognize their own variety of “negative” Jewishness. They still say nothing, therefore, to those other Jews like myself, who make no claim to being “positive” and know that we suffer from insecurity as Jews.

* Rabbi Silver castigates the editors and writers of this magazine (without actually naming it) as “uprooted intellectuals” (The Day, July 16, 1950). I should like to remind the Rabbi that the term “uprooted intellectual” has been and is a favorite in the totalitarian (and anti-Semitic) lexicon of abuse, from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin, and that wherever we hear it we can be sure that we shall also hear demagogy and obscurantism. (And, incidentally, what is it that Rabbi Silver is “rooted” in?) Clement Greenberg

What we might ask of our new Jewish self-consciousness is that it liberate rather than organize us—liberate us from the pressure of that kind of self-consciousness which weakens us as individuals because it makes us define ourselves too much in terms of the group, whether positively or negatively. In so doing we do violence to ourselves as personalities and interfere with that self-realization which I conceive as one of the primary goals of human striving. The ultra-assimilationist Jew does violence to himself as a human being pure and simple, as well as Jew, because he tries to make himself more typically English, French, or German than any Anglo-Saxon, Gaul, or Teuton ever is. He over-defines himself, in group terms, in the effort to prove he is more English or French than Jewish—which means, really, that he always acts with reference to his Jewishness, even if it is an entirely negative reference. The nationalist Jew, too, always acts with reference to his Jewishness. But even though it is an ostensibly positive reference, by the too great strenuousness of his effort to assert his Jewishness he likewise over-defines himself in group terms. Both the assimilationist and the nationalist leave too little room for their native personalities. While there is no such thing as a human being in general, there is also no such thing as a complete Jew or a complete Englishman. What I want to be able to do is accept my Jewishness more implicitly, so implicitly that I can use it to realize myself as a human being in my own right, and as a Jew in my own right. I want to feel free to be whatever I need to be and delight in being as a personality without being typed or prescribed to as a Jew or, for that matter, as an American. I am both Jew and American naturally, simply because I cannot help being them, having been born and brought up what I am. But I do not want to make any more issue of being a Jew—unless I am forced to by such things as anti-Semitism—than an enlightened Eng- lishman makes of being English. And I want to overcome my self-hatred in order to be more myself, not in order to be a “good Jew.” For I don’t recognize “good Jews” any more than I do “good Americans,” “good Englishmen,” or “good Chinese.” Nor do I feel that Jews who are “positively,” nationalistically, or religiously Jewish are “better” Jews than I. I recognize only Jews who are more self-reliantly Jewish than myself and therefore more at one with themselves, and braver and more spontaneous. But what about my responsibility to fellow Jews, I shall be asked—what about the Jewish community and Jewish survival? My relation to the Jewish community should be as much a personal and spontaneous expression of myself as anything else; that is, it should be a natural one and not legislated to me by an ideology—not any more than my relation to the American community is. And my responsibility to fellow Jews is something taken for granted in the first place, and for a variety of reasons that do not have to be gone into here—and which hardly concern the self-hatred I want to get rid of. As for Jewish survival, all I can say is that if we can survive only by all of us becoming nationalists, then we Jews have lost all justification for persisting as a group. I feel, Self-Hatred and Jewish Chauvinism however, that we shall persist as Jews, no matter how assimilated we become in our customs and manners, as long as Jewishness remains essential to our sense of our individual selves, as long as it is the truth about our individual selves. And we shall have a better chance of surviving “Jewishly” if the truth that is our Jewishness becomes one that we prefer rather than one that is felt as due only to an unfortunate “accident” of birth. Which the “positive” self-hating Jew feels to be just as much an accident as does the “negative” one. . . .

SHOULD like to be more specific and concrete, but I cannot because I do not have the complete answer to self-hatred. The non-Jewish world, as long as it clings to its Iunfavorable notion of the Jew in general, will always make impossible the entire ex- tirpation of self-hatred in the Diaspora. All I claim is that we can rid ourselves of a good deal of it, despite the world’s attitude, by bringing it out into the open, and by becoming aware of what it causes us to do and say. Let us express our discomfort as Jews more directly, without falsifying it by an ineffective sublimation, as the “positive” Jew does, or by a spurious rationality or an equally spurious forgetfulness, as the “negative” Jew does. The sense of Jewish inferiority is there, but less of it will be there the moment we acknowledge it and begin to realize just how and where we act upon it. And the more we acknowledge it the less, I feel sure, we shall act upon it. Until then no amount of Jewish education or programs for Jewish cultural endeavor will help very much. These tend to become means rather of evading and hiding the problem. For though they are designed to combat Jewish self-hatred, their sponsors are too afraid of naming it to know where to seek it out. We fool ourselves with fine-sounding phrases. The problem has to be focused directly in the individual Jew and discussed in personal, not communal, terms. For self-hatred is as intimate a thing as love.q

* See in this connection an article by Yehezkel Kaufman, “Anti-Semitic Stereotypes in Zionism,” that appeared in English translation in the March 1949 Commentary. January 1951

Will Technology Destroy Civilization? Why the prophets of doom are wrong. Franz Borkenau

COMMON and increasing disillusionment with technology today marks contemporary thinkers of the most divergent tendencies. A classic expression of this feeling was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a Utopian novel portraying a world whose every problem and every difficulty has been solved by technology, but which for this very reason has become emptied of all meaning. Arnold J. Toynbee, though not envisaging any Utopian ultimate in technology, also seems to lean to theA view that modern technology is at bottom worthless—for “mankind’s serious business is religion”; all that we need in the way of secular culture was already produced by the Greeks—in our technological efforts we are only the bad imitators of a past civilization. The same tendency of thought has had such important representatives in Latin countries as Ortega y Gasset and Paul Valéry. But it has met with its strongest response in Germany. I mention here in particular only the Jünger brothers. Ernst Jünger, in his book The Worker, unlike Huxley, does not “reject” technics on aesthetic grounds or any

Franz Borkenau was an Austrian writer who specialized in totalitarianism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. The present article was translated from German by Martin Green- berg. Franz Borkenau other; but his positive conception of a perfect “Arbeitertum” (workers’ civilization) came very close to Huxley’s Utopia and yielded nothing to it in point of horror. Friedrich Georg Jünger for his part has launched an all-out campaign against technology—to what effect, we can see in Otto Veit’s Die Flucht vor der Freiheit (“Flight from Freedom,” Frankfort 1948), which by a startling simplification would hold technology responsible for all that endangers our culture today.

ET ME say at once that I do not deny the dangers of technology, which are tremendous. But what strikes one constantly about these lamentations over the evils L of technology is their minimization of its unique achievements in modern times, achievements by no means limited to the sphere of the “practical.” On the contrary, spiritual values of the highest order are inseparable from technology. Nor can you draw a line between technology and science—if only because without modern instruments there would be no modern science, as without science there would be no technology. No one will deny that our science, in the course of its development from Galileo to Einstein and from Boyle to Planck and Rutherford, has penetrated the “interior of nature” as never before. Even supposing that technology is in fact as destructive in its consequences as many now claim it to be—is that all there is to it? For my part, I believe that as surely as the human spirit exists to illumine the cosmos with its knowledge, so surely does the modern conquest of nature represent this spirit’s sublimest, most heroic achievement. However great the emotional price we have paid for the “disenchantment of the world” that inevitably followed on this conquest of nature, however dreadful our psychic distress—still, what does this matter against the fulfillment of an eternal task of the human race? In dismissing as an incidental matter the knowledge we have finally won of the basic structure of the material world, the critics of technology for the most part overlook the fact that these very insights have given us a glimpse into the basic structure of all existence, spiritual as well as material. Are these insights tragic in their refutation of cherished illu- sions?—well, all culture is tragic, all culture is paid for by the surrender of primitive con- solations of the human soul. And may one not ask whether the real threat to culture does not perhaps come from those who have not the fortitude to face up to the consequences of this greatest of human triumphs, and must therefore take flight from reason? But is the flight from reason and technology at all possible? We ought to put this question to ourselves, not in any aesthetic and Utopian fashion, but in complete and deadly earnest. Let us say, conditionally, “yes,” a flight is possible. The condition is: the reduction of the “white” population to a fraction of its present size; for the present European and American population levels, unlike the Asiatic, are dependent entirely upon technology. A sharp fall in our population is, of course, not out of the question. It is unfortunately more than merely conceivable that an atomic war should utterly destroy tens of millions Will Technology Destroy Civilization? of lives as well as our technological resources and abilities. In the absence of such an event, technology will certainly endure, so that we can only discuss the possibility of its disappearance by assuming an atomic catastrophe.

ERTRAND Russell recently suggested that such a disappearance might be effected by a destructive outbreak of mass hatred against technology following an atomic Bholocaust. This vision of an outraged humanity turning upon science is an ever re- curring one. Spengler, it might be remembered, held that technology was something specifically “Western”: Peoples of alien cultures mastered technology only in order to use it in their struggle against the West; with the downfall of the West, they would cast it aside as “a monkey would a walking stick.” Toynbee, too, would seem to expect much the same thing. But is not Spengler’s dark estimate of the future of technology intimately connected with his gross underestimation of what was really taking place in science? It was around 1914 that Spengler, himself originally a mathematician, disputed the possibility of any further significant advance in scientific theory, conceding a future only to purely practical technology. Obviously he mistook the actual depth of the current of science—mistook it grossly. Recent scientific developments, flatly contradicting him, have completely revolutionized our conception of the world. Hence a discussion of the problem cannot start out from any notion of a decline or “end” of science, but must begin by answering the question:Is it conceivable that, as a result of enormous material and spiritual catastrophes, all the knowledge and skills we have acquired in the last three hundred years should he lost? Pointing to earlier cases of cultural decline does not in itself mean very much. To draw a parallel between our own situation and the decline into barbarism and the “dark ages” that marked the end of antiquity is certainly misleading. As Spengler pointed out, there is always more than one parallelism to choose from. You have to have what Spengler calls a “physiog- nomic pulse” to understand which parallels are valid and which are not. The parallel with the decline of antiquity is not. Although it is true that there was a sharp falling-off of urban life at that time, no real deterioration took place in technology. One of the most important arguments against a too simple notion of progress is contained in the fact that from the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (3rd millennium B.C.E.) until the 11th century of our era, actually no real change occurred in technology—a state of affairs that speaks stronger than anything else for the Spenglerian thesis of the distinctively Western character of technology. But there are two sides to this coin of “Western science.” Not only modern machine technology, but also something so seemingly insignificant as the European method of

* Not long ago an extraordinary French cavalry officer, Count Lefèbvre de Nouvettes, a man gifted with the keen- est historical intuition, showed that at the beginning of modern Western culture, about the end of the 11th century, a new method of harnessing draught-oxen came into use that quadrupled their pulling power and led to a social revolution of the first order. Franz Borkenau harnessing draught-cattle, profoundly affects population growth, the rise of cities, etc.* Will other, “colored” civilizations cast this achievement aside as a monkey would a walking stick? If not, where is the point beyond which they will refuse to borrow from Western culture? Or, as in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, will some one year finally be fixed, and all technological innovations made prior to it accepted, and all those made afterwards rejected?

T THIS POINT Alfred Weber, the contemporary German historian, has attempted to offer us a way out of our difficulty. For the most part he accepts, if A not Spengler’s, at any rate Toynbee’s theory of culture cycles. But he limits the cyclical theory to that sphere which Spengler, in contrast to civilization (the technical arts), calls culture—the sphere of the spiritual. According to Weber, history shows that civilization, if spared from purely external disruptions, develops according to a law of linear progress. Progress in the technical arts of civilization, once made, is handed on and learned, and so can never be lost. This is a plausible theory, but it is difficult to verify: It is hardly possible to compare the course of technological progress in various recorded civilizations for the reason that only the earliest river cultures of the Orient on the one hand, and our own civilization on the other, ever made any decisive technological advances. Moreover, the technological achievements of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria, unlike our own, did not spring directly from the soil of these two cultures, but were end products of a technological revolution begun several millennia before these cultures arose, a revolution that consisted chiefly in the passage from the hunting economy of the Old Stone Age to the agricultural, pastoral, and handicraft economy of the New. And here we have stumbled on the key! This revolution leading from the Old Stone Age to the New, paving the way for all the high cultures of antiquity—this is the only event in the history of man’s conquest of nature that can compare in significance with that technological revolution which began in Western Europe in the 11th century, died out about the 13th, and sprang to life again in the 16th. Any opinion on the fate of modern technology has to reckon chiefly with this great parallel case from our pre-history. It is no good to say that we know the revolution of our own day well enough by observation from its very midst, without resorting to such doubtful parallels. We don’t know it. We know indeed whence it came, but in all likelihood its curve is still only at its beginning and we haven’t the faintest idea where it is headed, or how steadily or how fast. For the prehistoric Neolithic side of the parallel, we have a complete curve.

HEN ONE compares the Neolithic (New Stone Age) and Western technological revolutions, the first thing one notices is an extraordinary similarity in the W wealth of negative and positive consequences following from both. On the positive side, the Neolithic technological revolution created incomparably more favor- Will Technology Destroy Civilization? able conditions for the life of the human species. Cultivation of the land made possible a tenfold increase in population, led to a lengthening of the average life span, and brought about a substantial increase in comfort (huts instead of caves). But against this must be set an unmistakably sharp decline in culture. It is of course very difficult, because of the absence of written documents, to compare the spiritual life of late Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) times with that of the early Neolithic period. Yet such art works as we possess supply definite hints. The scanty geometrical ornamentation of Neolithic pottery cannot even remotely compare with the splendid cave paintings of the Magdalenians. In these two kinds of art one confronts the expressive forms of two entirely different kinds of “humanity”: in the cave paintings an art of restless boldness and the deepest inner freedom, in the pottery a narrow, timid botching of materials and forms. The wide-ranging hunt freed the spirit, the sod fettered it. As in its cultural, so evidently in its social results too, the triumph of husbandry was extremely disadvantageous. The hunter was “free and equal,” the husbandman became a slave and his master a despot.

HE FIRST result of the Neolithic technological revolution, then, was the almost complete disappearance of the Paleolithic cultural inheritance. But only appar- T ently and for a time. Much of it was preserved, especially among pastoral tribes, out of which developed the equestrian peoples. And these same bearers of a few musty and cramped traditions became the ruling classes of the high cultures that now arose, and which could have hardly come into existence without them. Thus on the new foundation of Neolithic economy the ancient, temporarily obscured spiritual traditions of Paleolithic times prevailed again. And this fusion of old cultural and new civilized values created the very high cultures of antiquity whose achievements in every respect far sur- passed those of Paleolithic times. As can be seen, the parallels with our own epoch are in many respects extremely close. On the other hand, it is vitally important that we should not view the gigantic crisis of our day crudely or narrowly, and it is narrow to regard it as simply one of many cyclical crises in human culture. The crisis of our age is much more than that: It is the second great phase in the development of civilization. Our crisis is not a duplication of an earlier crisis. It is, even when compared with that of the Neolithic Age, unique.

HE NEOLITHIC technological revolution came to a standstill early in the course of the Ancient Egyptian and Sumerian cultures, and it seems clear that no cul- T tural motive in the narrower sense was at work, but rather a new environmental problem. It was a revolution that grew out of the battle with hunger. Empirical investigation confirms this inference. Late Magdalenian man had brought the technique of hunting to such a pitch of perfection that his life acquired enough room for him to experience higher cultural needs. But with the end of the Ice Age, the earth’s last great geological Franz Borkenau revolution, game decreased and the amount of arable land increased. The hunting economy collapsed, and man was forced with ever greater rigor to devote all his energies once again to the simple struggle for survival, and to the building up of a village economy. The Neolithic revolution was a revolution from “without,” one compelled by nature; and the very rise of the civilizations born of that revolution made its continuation unnecessary, for the new large states possessed organizations that more than assured the physical existence of man. With the Western technological revolution, the case is reversed. Western science is a profound expression of Western man’s orientation toward life, death, and reality. It is not merely a response to an external physical stimulus. Western society in its early stages did not have to face any new and fundamental problems. There was the problem of over-population; but earlier societies, too, had been obliged to reduce their excess populations, and this they did by colonization and conquest. Western society is probably the first in whose early stages expansion did not play the decisive role. In place of colonization outward, there was followed a course of colonization directed within—the progressive clearing of woodland for the plough—facilitated after a few years by the first perceptible increase in the productivity of human labor through an increase in animal tractive power. This unique course, a revolution from “within,” was the result of the unique nature of Western culture, and is closely bound up with the West’s distinctive urge to freedom. The assertion of one’s individuality in society is intimately related to the assertion of one’s individuality against nature. And just because the Western technological revolution proceeded from “within,” from a cultural spiritual drive to know the universe and master it, and was not prompted solely by necessity, for that very reason it became, not peripheral, but central to the whole history of the West, and now stands as its greatest achievement. Precisely because of the deeply spiritual character of this technological revolution, precisely because of the intimate connection between technology and freedom, because of the inseparability of Western (and only Western) technological, economic, and political development, all aiming at freeing the life and spirit of the individual, it is an offense against our most precious values to exalt other aspects of our culture, such as literature, art, and religion, at the expense of science, technology, and the advancement of knowledge generally.

RANTING all this, is it still possible for something specifically Western in its development to continue to flourish outside the West should the example of the G West cease to exist? The Neolithic revolution, we now can see, just because it came only from without, consisted of easily acquired skills and devices that could be and were handed on indefinitely. The Western technological revolution, on the other hand, is so completely defined from within, is so specifically—even in its underlying moral ide- Will Technology Destroy Civilization? als—Western, that it is easy to doubt the possibility of its being transmitted. There is, for example, the enormous yet still hardly adequate violence—hardly adequate in so far as it does not achieve the ends for which it is intended—with which Russia is carrying out its policy of industrialization. Can something so patently artificial—that imitates the external and material sides of technology completely divorced from its deep cultural roots and impulse—endure, once its immediate stimulus—competition with the West—is removed? I need scarcely remark the falsity of Spengler’s belief in the complete destruction, with a culture’s downfall, of every distinctive value of that culture, the falsity of his doctrine of cultures as windowless monads. There is an enormous body of evidence to contradict Spen- gler on this point, evidence he never once tried to refute, but simply ignored. Not only the extrinsic values of civilization, but the most intrinsic cultural values too, have been handed on from society to society and epoch to epoch, and the fact that modern technology is intrinsic to the Western spirit, and not—as Spengler, Aldous Huxley, F.G. Jünger, Otto Veit, and countless others declare—a purely external body of knowledge and skills, is no argument at all against its transmissibility. It is only that the transmission of specific spiritual attitudes from one culture to another takes place according to different and more complicated laws than govern the simple learning of a quantity of knowledge and a number of skills. Anglo-American ethnology has collected a huge amount of material bearing on the transmission of cultural values, but, so far as I know, the only one to attempt to draw any general inferences from it as to the relation of high cultures to each other is Arnold J. Toynbee. His notion of “affiliated civilizations,” however, seems too narrow to me; he does no more than point to the fact that cultures follow one another in time and are the heirs of their predecessors. With Toynbee every later culture would seem to be the heir of some single earlier one. But the historical reality is much more complicated than that. True, there are cases—the “second” Chinese culture, for example, beginning with the older Han Dynasty—where a new culture is built almost exclusively upon a single ancient model (one is tempted to say that these “second” cultures fell considerably behind the “first” in creative strength). But what is much more frequently the case is that a new culture is first an amalgam and then a fusion of the basic elements of several older cultures. The Old and the New Testament cultures are classic examples of this. One arose in the borderland between Egypt and Babylon, and the other on the boundaries of Helle- nism and the Orient. The further analysis of such cases as these is bound to throw some light on our own problem as to the future of technology. Here we must first note that what distinguishes the rise of a new culture is the conscious opposition it puts up to the introduction of certain foreign values. Early Judaism leaned to a limited extent on Babylonian cultural tradition, but toward Egypt it felt only the bitterest hostility. Early Christianity had some affinities with the religious traditions of Near Eastern syncretism, but it strictly enjoined any traffic with Greek paganism. Naturally, it was inevitable that the Jews should borrow certain elements of higher Franz Borkenau political organization, and the Christians various formal elements of culture, from the hated neighbors, but the borrowing was strictly limited to “external” things. With time, however, there came a mingling and assimilation. In the very same way, one might say, Russia today cannot avoid adopting our technological methods, while at the same time she tries to isolate herself as much as possible, spiritually and politically, from the West. And it is this resistance to a foreign culture that makes her adoption of certain external values (external from the Russian but not from the Western point of view) of our civilization so artificial and forced. However, the upshot of this will in all likelihood be not at all as Spengler thought—Russia and Asia ultimately casting aside these temporary borrowings from Western technology “like a walking stick.” It is far more likely that, as in every analogous earlier case, the external borrowing of a foreign civilization will be succeeded by a centuries-long process of inner assimilation.

UT does this analogy hold up against the possibility that all of our higher culture will be swept away by a few hundred atomic bombs? Toynbee, with his particu- Blarly strong antipathy to modern technology, goes so far as to consider the possibility of our technological development leading to the complete destruction of all civilized peoples and the elevation of the Central African pygmies to the position of the chief bearers of human culture. Against such a view of things there is little one can say in the way of conclusive argument. But an examination of historical precedents will disclose another perspective. When one surveys all of human history, it can be seen that the periods in which cultures decline are indispensable intervals of cultural renewal. In the “dark ages” the modern Western spirit was gestative. The historical process just referred to, whereby a new culture results from the assimilation of elements from different older cultures, takes place without exception amid the catastrophic collapse of all the older cultures figuring in the process—takes place, that is, amid the upsurge of barbarism. Vigorous and independent cultures resist to the death the challenge of a different culture. In their late stages they do not undergo a process of change, but tend rather to harden and grow rigid. Only when this period of rigidity is followed by collapse, does the creative process of fusion begin. This mechanism of cultural renewal, the decisive connecting link in the chain of human history, can be unhesitatingly called history’s most universal law, admitting of not one exception. A chaos precedes every cultural cosmos. Chaos is not downfall, not ruin. It is the necessary connecting link between the end of one creative process and the beginning of another. We hear it said that, regardless of the outcome of the present struggle between East and West, the world is “entering an era of barbarism.” What in actual fact is “barbarism”? It is not the same thing as cultural primitivism, a turning-back of the clock. It is rather Will Technology Destroy Civilization? a phenomenon that manifests itself within the temporal and spatial boundaries of high cultures. It is a condition in which many of the values of high culture are present, but without that social and moral coherence which is the pre-condition for a culture’s rational functioning. But for this very reason “barbarism” is also a creative process: once the over-all coherence of a culture is shattered, the way lies open to a renewal of creativity. To be sure, however, this way may be through a collapse of political and economic life, and centuries of spiritual and material impoverishment and terrible suffering. Our own particular brand of civilization and culture may not survive unimpaired, but the fruits of civilization and culture, we may be sure, will in some form survive. There is no historical warrant for believing that the slate will be wiped clean. Let us try for a more balanced perspective of this whole popular question of “the threatened disappearance of civilization.” It is hardly to be doubted that we are now living at the beginning of a period of “barbarism.” It cannot logically be proven that, like every earlier crisis of its kind, it will be a creative transition and not the end, although an inner consciousness should tell us that the highest stage reached in the development of the human spirit could hardly be the immediate prologue to its final downfall. The legend of the Tower of Babel has indeed a point for us, insofar as it is true that, build we ever so high, an end is reached to all our building. Yet the truth of the legend is tempo- rally circumscribed: For the end was no end at all, but a new beginning—over and over again we build our Tower, and right now higher than ever. And here, if I may, I should like to take leave of history.

HAVE already expressed my repugnance to an attitude that, in dealing with the problem of technology, would ignore the truth of modern science. Spengler vainly Isought to demonstrate that Euclidean geometry was true only for antiquity. The fact is of course that it is true for all ages, only we have come to understand that it is a partial truth, that it is true when certain postulates are given. The same thing holds for modern technology and science. Once discovered, these truths are a universal possession of humanity, because they are not only human truths, but in accord with cosmic reality. Very possibly such truths can be lost sight of in chaotic transitional periods, but is it conceivable that they should vanish as if they had never existed? Or isn’t it far more likely that, after having been purged in the fires of a great cultural change, they should first really begin to shine forth? And now the cat is indeed out of the bag. I have gone and blabbed my faith in progress, that unpardonable sin. Yet I do not mean that automatically, steadily accelerating progress in which Condorcet, Hegel, and Buckle believed, not a progress that can dis- pense with cycles and relapses, not a progress on an ever rising historical escalator that one can commit oneself to with smugness and equanimity. Still, much has happened in the course of our evolution from primordial atom to amoeba, from amoeba to man, and Franz Borkenau from Peking Man to Planck and Rutherford; and it seems absurd to me to imagine that in all this there is little more that is worthy of philosophical and religious notice than is involved in lamenting the sins and sufferings of existence. We all know that the chief concern of the opponents of this qualified belief in progress is with the “timeless,” and it is to the “timeless” that I too am led. The kernel of the faith in progress, it turns out, is a faith in the effective significance of objective truth in human life. Is it an accident that all those who deny progress, from Spengler to Barth, are the very ones who deny the efficacy of all the truths that man perceives by his unaided intellect? And is not truth one of the chief aspects of the divine? And in this respect, on the same level with morality? To deny the truths perceived by man, is it not to deny the stamp of divinity upon creation? Is not faith in progress perhaps in the end only a faith in God’s positive working in history—and not outside of history? But in Germany especially, this faith in the positive significance of truths perceived by man’s unaided intellect is zealously combated. Is not this zeal perhaps only a disguised version of the old Lutheran belief in the devil’s domain over the world? And this belief in the devil as “Prince of this world,” reaching as it does by hidden ways from the Albig- ensians to Luther and ultimately uniting Lutheranism with Gnostic demonology—isn’t this belief ultimately the root of all German evil? Sapienti sat.q June 1951

1930: The Year That Was New Year’s Eve The great binge and its leftist aftermath. Malcolm Cowley

N THE LITERARY world as in the country at large, 1930 was the strangest year of the century. It was the beginning of an age and the end of an age and the country was living as if by two calendars: One was turned to March and the other to December. The jazz age was ending but it wasn’t tapering off; having survived the Wall Street crash it was rising to new heights of self-destructive hilarity. When we think of a song, a story, or an escapade that “expressed the spirit of the 1920s,” the chances are that it was written or happened in the year 1930. IMeanwhile the new world of the depression, whose first citizens were displaced farmers and factory workers, was creeping in from the industrial suburbs and was taking over the business section. The year went forward as if on two levels, an upper level of crazy ostentation and a lower level of hunger and protest. At the end of the year the levels met, like two slopes in a mine. Strange as it was in the end, the year began like any other. During the spring Wall Street recovered from its autumn panic and many stocks climbed above their 1928 levels, although they slumped again in May and June. Stock dividends were higher than ever be-

Malcolm Cowley was a novelist, poet, and critic. From 1929 to 1941, he was associate editor of the New Republic. Malcolm Cowley fore. Unemployment was increasing rapidly, but that was still a matter of argument and statistics, not of direct experience for the middle classes; even if they lost their jobs they were confident of finding others, as always in the past. The big newspaper story was pro- hibition and the lawlessness growing out of it. After that came other issues like the tariff debate that lasted all spring, the naval conference in London during the summer, the visit of Ramsay MacDonald to Mr. Hoover’s Rapidan camp, and the great drought in the upper South, extending from Maryland into Oklahoma. Newspapers were trying to stop the business decline by banishing it to their inside pages, but even in private conversations it was not yet the principal topic. “After a 3,500-mile journey through the Middle West,” Bruce Bliven reported in the New Republic, “I feel able to report with some confidence for the benefit of other parts of this gr-r-reat country what that important section is thinking about. It is thinking about Midget, alias Tom Thumb, alias Peewee, alias Tiny, golf.” While midget golf courses flourished in every vacant lot and in many showrooms vacated by jewelry stores and stock-selling outfits, life for the writers of the country went on as usual. In May and June there was the same exodus from the big cities toward all the countrysides where writers and painters gathered—Woodstock, the Cape, the Vineyard, Bucks County, and upper Connecticut. All summer there were the same shipboard parties for rich friends making another trip to Europe; in fact there would be more American tourists in France that year than at any time during the roaring 20s. In the fall there were the same reunions in New York and the same round of drinking and dancing parties and publishers’ teas. Liquor was cheaper than at any time since 1919: In the “cordial shops” to be found all over Manhattan four bottles of gin with Gordon labels sold for five dollars, and grain alcohol, 190 proof, was six or eight dollars a gallon. The punch was stronger at publishers’ teas, but otherwise they were a little less sumptuous and they were also less frequent; books weren’t selling well and advances were harder to get. Nothing else seemed to have changed.

ET EVEN in the literary world, which was separate from the business world but not so completely divorced from it as in later years, there were signs that an age Y was ending. The 1920s had been an era of pretty good feeling among writers. Now suddenly they began to quarrel, not merely about personal questions but about the meaning of literature and its relation to life. A battle that lasted all year was about the New Humanism expounded by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. It was different from the guerrilla warfare and banditry of the 1920s, being on a larger scale, with writers of many groups and two or three literary generations involved on both sides. The issues were confused, as might have been expected, but it was clear that they involved not only personal and aesthetic but also moral questions, such as the fashion in which writers should live and their relationship to society. There were overtones of politics, rising from the fact that most of the Humanists were conservative while all the radicals were anti-Humanist. 1930: The Year That Was New Year’s Eve

There was the suggestion that the 1920s were a definite period in literature and life and that their principal efforts might have been mistaken. Finally there was an unfamiliar note of acerbity in the discussion. Allen Tate had written an essay against Humanism for the Hound and Horn. In the January 1930 issue of the Bookman one of the Humanists answered him, partly with logic and partly with invective. “Not hastily or willingly,” he accused Tate of “deliberate misrepresentation,” of “puerile inconsequence,” of impudence that “could no further go”; and he ended unsmilingly by calling him “a mere talking mole! . . . A fellow so utterly nothing as he knows not what he would be.” Such language had sel- dom been used in the late 1920s, but within two or three years it would seem restrained. There were other signs of change in the literary world, although it would be hard to suggest them by quotations or reduce them to statistics. As I look back on the year 1930 it seems to me that there were never so many shifts in the personal relations of people one knew well or faintly or by reputation. Marriages that had endured all through the 1920s, though both partners had been indifferent to each other and in some cases notoriously unfaithful, now ended in sudden quarrels and separations. Old love affairs ended that had seemed as respectable as marriages. Friendships were broken off. People could no longer endure the little hypocrisies that had kept their relations stable; they had to set everything straight, like men preparing for death. There seemed to be more drinking than before, in literary and business circles; at least it was noisier and more public. It was a different sort of drinking, with more des- peration in the mood behind it. People no longer drank to have a good time or as an excuse for doing silly and amusing things that they could talk about afterward; they drank from habit, or to get away from boredom, or because they had a physiological need for alcohol. There was as much horseplay and laughter as before, but it was strained and at last hysterical; one began to notice shaking hands and white faces. The epidemic of nervous breakdowns was not confined to one’s friends: It seems to me now that every time I study the life of a recent literary figure—Anderson, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, it doesn’t matter who—I learn that the figure or his wife or both of them had breakdowns in 1930. If they recovered they wanted to lead completely new lives. Psychoanalysts were busy when every other profession except that of social service was losing its clients. One friend who was being analyzed told me that the doctor’s office was crowded with people he knew. “Why,” he said, “it was like a publisher’s tea.”

O UNDERSTAND what was happening in the literary world and elsewhere one has to go back to the last years of the Coolidge era. By 1927 the big boom was un- T der way and a great many prosperous Americans had started a frantic search for enjoyment that would afterwards be pictured as a sort of national orgy. It wasn’t that at all, having been confined to groups and classes in the nation. Working-class families simply hadn’t money enough to be affected by it, except insofar as they went into debt Malcolm Cowley for the same conveniences that all their neighbors were buying, or were scandalized by the stories that their children brought home from high school. Most of the business-class families lived very much as before, while yielding in minor ways to the new fashions: For example many of them now played golf instead of going to church on Sunday morning and more of them had begun serving cocktails to their dinner guests. But every city down to the smallest had its “fast set” that was gossiped about and a little envied and finally imitated by most of the other sets. When Robert and Helen Lynd made their second survey of Middletown, in the 1930s, a local businessman told them what had happened in that city of fifty thousand average people: “Drinking increased here markedly in ‘27 and ’28,” he said. “In the winter of ’29-’30 and ’30-’31 things were roaring here. There was much drunkenness—people holding those bathtub gin parties. There was a great increase in women’s drinking and drunkenness. And there was a lot of sleeping around by married people and a number of divorces resulted.” The same report could have been made from other cities all over the country. It was actually made in scores of the novels written during the early 1930s and it helps to explain the mood of revulsion and repentance that many of them express. The novels make one feel that the depression, besides being economic, was a sort of liturgical response to what had gone before. It was part of a sacramental drama that answered the human need for punishment after pleasure. Many of the younger American writers had tried to stand apart from the beginning of the drama. Act I. Scene I. A penthouse in the East 70s. Well-dressed people are talking con- fusedly in front of a large window that gives a view of the East River. Enter a butler bearing a tray of cocktails—that wasn’t their scene or their life. In the Coolidge era the country was rich but they were poor, and they were proud of living in tenements or along back roads in farmhouses renting for ten dollars a month. They were glad to eat plain food, dress in khaki or gingham, and drive the oldest Fords that would almost hold together, so long as not spending money helped them to keep their independence. Their excuse for going to Europe was that living was cheaper there. “My work’s the important thing,” they all said a little solemnly. But the boom continued and one by one they were drawn into the general frenzy. Sometimes it was because a novel of theirs had been chosen by a book club, bally- hooed into the bestseller lists, and bought by the movies, suddenly giving its author more money than he knew what to do with. Sometimes it was because, in the course of their travels, they met wealthier and idler Americans in Brittany or on the Riviera and imper- ceptibly adopted their standards. More frequently it was because of rich dilettantes who hoped to find some vigor or vision or purpose among writers and painters that they had missed among moneyed people, and now tried to buy themselves into the world of art by giving big parties. Most often it was the simple contagion of bad examples. Considering that writers of what was then the younger generation had trained themselves to question all previously accepted standards of conduct, there seemed to be no 1930: The Year That Was New Year’s Eve reason why they should now refuse to have a good time. Soon, by accepting too many well-meant invitations, they found themselves involved in the worst features of the society they had affected to despise. Their rather Puritan attitude toward art itself, and toward the need for working every morning on their new books, kept them somewhat more levelheaded than the others; but it sometimes happened that their work failed them, their books stopped in the middle, and then they were in danger of going to pieces. By the autumn of 1930 that had become a general complaint. In a little-known short story by Edmund Wilson, “What to Do Till the Doctor Comes,” the mood of the time is expressed in terms of the grotesque and hysterical. The story deals with a group of characters in the semi-literary, hard-drinking set, busy telling funny stories and making love in taxicabs, but unspeakably bored in the midst of their animation and each feeling an utter contempt for himself and all the others. After an evening spent in half a dozen strange apartments the narrator leaves in a taxi with someone else’s wife. “There was a sudden shattering crash, and great glass splinters fell out of the window. We saw a group of men milling around and somebody stopped the cab. It was the taxi strike. They made us get out. Lou gave them a piece of her mind.” And then, the narrator continues:

We were running down and rather glum, so we went into a little downtown bar that had funny blue lights in the windows. Lou told me that Will had a mistress and that he hadn’t lived at home for four years, and that the mistress had been a friend of the children’s nurse, and that she didn’t think he even liked the mistress, and that every time he decided to commit suicide she had to go and quiet him down, and that the children had gotten to loathe him, and that she was getting cross with the children, and that she had never taken a lover because the only man she liked was in Se- attle. She wept in the most horrible way.

Those were the sort of confidences that were being made late at night in downtown speakeasies. The recklessness of the 1920s, which had once seemed youthful and appealing, was dying away into nervous tears and drunken exasperation. There was the atmosphere of a party that had gone on too long, that had started with cocktails and spirited gossip, had continued through a big disorganized dinner in an Italian backyard restaurant, then adjourned to somebody’s apartment, where everything went well enough for a time—but nobody seemed to go home, everybody was getting tired and pasty-faced, and the young woman who used to be so funny after the third drink was sobbing and threatening to throw herself out of the window. The party would have ended anyhow; it couldn’t go on forever; but the depression was like a crash of breaking glass that let in the cold night air.

Y AUTUMN the breadlines in more than one American city had spread from the local skidrow into the district of chromium-fronted shops. The Communists were Bdemanding relief for the unemployed and the police were smashing their demon- Malcolm Cowley strations; everywhere one heard stories of bystanders, perfectly nice people, who were kicked or clubbed because they weren’t wearing hats and hence were mistaken for radicals. The National Apple Sellers’ Association had thought of a new way to get rid of its surplus, by selling it to the unemployed on credit at wholesale prices. When the weather turned colder there were men without overcoats shivering on every street corner, not only selling apples but also, in effect, crying out to passers-by that they were penniless, willing to work, and could find no jobs. The rich merchants had become disturbed; they were organizing charity drives and in a few cases were permitting the homeless to take shelter in their great empty warehouses. Stocks were falling again, after having risen during the summer. This time their decline was “orderly,” but that made the situation no less dangerous for the corpora- tions that had borrowed money against them and the banks that held them as security. Caldwell and Company, of Nashville, went bankrupt on November 14, 1930. It was one of the largest investment houses in the South, with dozens of affiliates, and its failure caused the closing of banks in half a dozen states. Soon afterward Bankers Trust, of Philadelphia, closed its doors and those of its twenty-one branches. When the Bank of the United States went under, on December 11, it was described by the New York Times as “the largest bank in the United States ever to suspend payments”; it had fifty-nine branches and more than four hundred thousand depositors. People began to say that the whole structure of American finance might crash to the ground. They looked for explanations and found them in books; even F. Scott Fitzgerald was reading Marx. Magazines were suspending publication and business houses were planning to reduce their payrolls by 50 percent after the first of the year. A new age would begin then, and writers were contemplating the possibility that they might be called upon to play a new part in it.

EANWHILE the round of parties continued, and those given to celebrate the New Year’s Eve of 1930–31 were the biggest and noisiest of all. There were so Mmany parties that people got invitations to six or eight of them and accepted all the invitations and went instead to parties to which they hadn’t been asked. They traveled about the city in caravans of taxicabs, then suddenly irrupted into a house that was strange to most of them, in a mass attack of rainbow silks and uniform white shirt fronts. Glasses ran out and the hostess brought paper cups that dripped on the rugs. Ev- erybody was laughing and screeching together: the friends and strangers and enemies, the cuckolds and the cuckolders, the wives and mistresses and the wives’ girl friends. Somebody was locked in the bathroom and somebody else was pounding at the bathroom door. In the hall bedroom a girl with an excessively innocent look was explaining to her lover why she had left him. “I love Harry,” she said, “and it doesn’t matter if he loves his wife more than me, I’ll live with him until he sends for her.”—“Maybe I’d better make time with his wife,” the deserted lover said. Back in the living room the punch 1930: The Year That Was New Year’s Eve bowl was empty except for the cigarette stubs that floated in a quart of pinkish liquor. The women had disappeared into a bedroom and were shrieking as they tried to pull their coats from under the girl who had passed out on the bed. “Does anybody know who she is?” a woman asked. Suddenly the crowd was gone, rushing off to another house in a great undisciplined body, while the host and hostess were left behind to take care of the drunken girl—or perhaps they forgot about her and, with the few remaining guests, piled into other taxicabs and joined the caravan. Curious things happened that night, quarrels of principle and declarations of eternal faith that people overheard in the confusion and didn’t remember until long afterward. But I was most impressed by the story of a friend, who told me that after attending four successive parties he found himself in a sub-cellar joint in Harlem. The room was smoky and sweaty; all the lights were tinted red or green and, as the smoke drifted across them, nothing had its own shape or color; the cellar was like somebody’s crazy vision of Hell; it was as if he were caught there and condemned to live in a nightmare. At last he broke the spell and, climbing to the street, found that it was bathed in harsh winter sunlight, ugly and clear and somehow reassuring. An ash-colored woman was hunting for scraps in a garbage can. “This is the new year,” he told me that he said. “This is my world now.”q October 1952

The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes Negotiations and armed power flexibly combined. Hans J. Morgenthau

INCE the prophets of the Old Testament read the warnings of God in the catastrophes of history, men have tried to discover what history can teach them. As Oedipus and Perseus once sought guidance from the Oracle, their empirically inclined descendants search through the record of the past. Yet the results have hardly been different. The more closely men listened to what history seemed to tell them, and the more eager they were to act in accordance with it, the less were they able to extricate themselves Sfrom the consequences of their actions, often succeeding only in bringing down the very catastrophes they were trying to escape. If it is true that the only thing history teaches is that it teaches nothing, should we not be done with the “teachings” of history and put our trust in action unencumbered by knowledge of the past? To reason thus, however, would be to misunderstand history in yet another way. Though we cannot look to history

Hans J. Morgenthau was a leading figure in the study of international politics and law. He contributed regularly to Commentary as well as the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the New Leader. Hans J. Morgenthau for ready-made rules of action, this still does not mean that it has nothing to tell us at all. Two recent books try to explain the mistakes that we and the enemy made in the Second World War. The way these books were written and then received, and the way in which the United States, in particular, has been trying to avoid and repair the mistakes made in the Second World War, afford illuminating examples of what history can—and cannot—teach.

HESTER Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe (Harper), by far the more important of the two, deals with the roots of our mistakes, as well as with the mistakes themselves. CIt has created a sensation in England and, to a lesser extent, in the United States. Mr. Wilmot writes the military history of the late war in Europe from the time of the Normandy invasion, and tries to ascertain the causes of the political failures that attended upon Allied military successes. It is in this last effort that the permanent value of the book lies. The conduct of the military campaign in Western Europe was dominated by the conflict between the strategic conceptions of General Montgomery, on the one hand, and Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, on the other. Montgomery wanted a decisive thrust from Bel- gium through the North German plain, destroying the German armies in one bold stroke and ending the war in 1944; the course actually pursued by Eisenhower and Bradley was a methodical advance on a broad front, sacrificing the chances of quick victory to the systematic elimination of all resistance. Mr. Wilmot and large sections of British public opinion take Montgomery’s side in retrospect, while most American commentators have indignantly rejected the suggestion that Eisenhower and Bradley might have been wrong. Some problems of strategy indeed deserve ex post facto analysis. The fall of France in 1940 might teach us a lesson about the value of Maginot Lines we might be building today. The demonstrated inefficiency of saturation bombing, especially in relation to the resources committed and the non-military damage caused, might teach us a similar lesson. That frontal attacks against defenses in depth are bound to be costly, and likely to be indecisive, and can only be justified by a proportionate military advantage, the Western Front during the First World War might have taught us; but we had to learn this lesson over again in Italy, and who knows whether we have really learned it even yet. But the controversy raised by Mr. Wilmot’s discussion of strategy is not concerned with fruitful questions like this. The question he asks is unanswerable by its very nature. It would be answerable only—and then indeed in favor of Montgomery—if Eisenhower and Bradley had known in the fall and winter of 1944-45 what everybody knows now, or if at that time Montgomery had known it and Eisenhower and Bradley had not. As it was—and as is inevitable in the conduct of foreign policy by peaceful or military means—all three generals proceeded on the basis of guesses. One made a guess as to the distribution of power between the Allied and the German armies, and suggested a line of strategy following from it. Different The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes people made different guesses and arrived at different strategic conclusions. Montgomery was ready to gamble on the weakness of the German armies, and captured German documents extensively quoted by Mr. Wilmot, as well as subsequent events, seem to prove him right. Eisenhower and Bradley, aware of the lives and issues at stake, preferred a slower and safer course. To blame them for this is like blaming a cautious investor for preferring slow yet sure gains to the bold and risky maneuvers of a brilliant gambler. There is little doubt that Eisenhower’s and Bradley’s strategy lacked brilliance and imagination and operated rather like a scientific engineering project, but only the most assertive amateur strategist will feel sure that they were therefore wrong; others will remember the brilliance of Napoleon and Ludendorff and how many costly battles they won only to lose their wars in the end. When Mr. Wilmot comes to the reasons for the political failures in a war so thoroughly won in the military field, his indictment of American strategy is, however, unanswerable. We fought the war, he maintains, without giving much thought to the relation between the kind of military victory we were planning to win and the political settlement that would follow it. Mr. Wilmot arrives at this conclusion after a minute examination of the military and diplomatic decisions of the period. Others, such as George F. Kennan and myself, have arrived at the very same conclusion, from an over-all examination of American attitudes toward foreign policy and war as revealed in our policies during and after the First and Second World Wars.

HE FUNDAMENTAL error behind all the individual blunders committed toward the end of the Second World War, and immediately afterwards, was the neglect of T Karl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means. The peaceful and warlike means by which a nation pursues its interests form a continuous process in which, though one means may replace the other, the ends remain the same. We also failed to recognize that foreign policy itself is a continuum beginning with the birth of a state and ending only with its death; isolationists and interventionists alike tended to believe that the “normal” thing for a state was to have no foreign policy at all. What separated the interventionists from the isolationists was the belief that certain crises might require, at least temporarily, an active foreign policy. But even the interventionists felt that after solving the given crisis one could try to return to a position of detachment, though developing and supporting in the meantime international institutions designed to meet the next crisis if and when it should arise. Foreign policy was thus regarded as something like a policeman’s nightstick, to be used only when it was necessary to bring a disturber of the peace to reason; war, in turn, was like the policeman’s gun, to be used only in extremis to rid the world of a criminal. But here the analogy ends: the policeman always carries his gun with him, but we threw ours away twice after it had done the job. War, we could see, did have a necessary connection with what preceded it—that is, with the criminal aggression that provoked it—but it had no organic relation with what Hans J. Morgenthau followed it. Its purpose was only to eliminate a disturbance by eliminating the disturber; once that was done, the world would presumably settle back into normalcy and order. War, then, was a mere technical operation to be performed according to the rules of military art—a feat of military engineering like building a dam or flattening a mountain. To allow considerations of political expediency to interfere with military operations was unwise from the military point of view and might well be considered an immoral subversion of one self-sufficient department of human action for the sake of another. (It might be added in passing that economic specialists — for instance, administrators of ECA—have shown a very similar reluctance, for similar reasons, to let political considerations “violate” the autonomy of economic operations.) Mr. Wilmot is fully justified in contrasting the a-political American approach to war with the continuous and generally fruitless insistence of Churchill and his subordinates on the political significance of military action. The British and the Russians knew from long experience that wars are not fought just to bring about the unconditional surrender of the enemy; wars are means to political ends, and military victory, if it is to bear political fruits, must be shaped to those ends. American military leaders were aware of this difference in outlook, both on the battlefield and afterwards. In April 1945, when the British wanted Patton’s army to liberate as much of Czechoslovakia as possible, and Prague in particular, for the sake of the political advantages to be gained thereby, General Marshall passed the suggestion on to General Eisenhower with this comment: “Personally, and aside from all logistic, tactical, or strategical implications, I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political reasons.” Marshall had nothing to worry about in this respect, for Eisenhower replied the next day: “I shall not attempt any move I deem militarily unwise merely to gain a political advantage unless I receive specific orders from the Combined Chiefs of Staff.” The matter rested there despite repeated and urgent appeals from Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff. Similar decisions were made on other occasions. General Bradley in his memoirs has this to say of the British insistence that the Americans take Berlin before the Russians: “As soldiers we looked naively on this British inclination to complicate the war with political foresight and non-military objectives.” This concentration on military objectives to the neglect of political considerations has one virtue: it is apt to win wars quickly, cheaply, and thoroughly. Yet such victories may be short-lived, and an enormous political and military price may have to be paid for them later.

HERE IS, however, another approach—extreme in a different way—that cannot even claim military advantages; this is to subordinate military considerations T entirely to political ones. Of this approach, F.H. Hinsley’s Hitler’s Strategy (Cam- The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes bridge), describes a classic example. Hitler thought primarily in political terms. Yet his thinking had two fatal weak- nesses. On the one hand, his political thinking was faulty in itself, for the objectives he set for Germany had no relation to either the power available to her or the power of the resistance to be overcome. On the other hand, far from using war as a continuation of policy by other means, he destroyed the technical autonomy of war altogether, using it as though there were no differences at all between war and policy. War became in his hands a political plaything, indistinguishable in its technical aspects from foreign policy— a foreign policy itself doomed to failure by its gross unrealism. Hitler had a pathological craving to involve in his struggle all the non-committed countries of the world. To see a great nation standing aside uncommitted, was a challenge to his lust for power that he could not resist. But another reason why he chose this suicidal course was his fantastic misconceptions about that part of the world which lay beyond his own personal experience. He knew virtually nothing about the United States; what he knew about the Soviet Union was mostly wrong; and he underestimated Great Britain. It is obvious from Mr. Hinsley’s book that the Soviet Union had no aggressive designs on Germany, and indeed went out of her way to be as accommodating as possible. The German diplomatic and intelligence reports that Mr. Hinsley cites are virtually unani- mous in the conviction that the Soviet Union would fight only if attacked. Nevertheless, Hitler was resolved to attack her. He voiced repeatedly his opinion that the Soviet Union would be a pushover, and that the campaign begun in June of 1941 would be over the same autumn. And he went ahead to make plans for autumn campaigns elsewhere to follow the defeat of the Soviet Union. As late as September 17, 1941, he was certain that “the end of September will bring the great decision in the Russian campaign.” To win a war without regard for the political consequences of the victory may create political problems as serious or worse than those that the victory was intended to settle; but such a victory leaves you at least in a position to learn and to try to settle political problems by peaceful means. To overrate the strength of your own country because it is yours and to underrate that of the enemy because you hate him, and to wage war as if warfare were a mere extension of politics and nothing more, can lead only to disaster.

III

AVE WE learned these lessons? On the face of it, it seems we have. Certainly we have been almost obsessed with the need to fashion our postwar policies Hso as to avoid the mistakes we and others made during the Second World War. We have learned that a power vacuum in the vicinity of a great dynamic nation will ex- Hans J. Morgenthau ert a well-nigh irresistible attraction. We have learned that in order to confine such a state within the limits necessary to our own security, it is not enough to show good will and reasonableness and to embody virtuous intentions in legal instruments. We have learned that the balance of power, far from being just an arbitrary device of reactionary diplomats and Machiavellian scholars, is the very law of life for independent units dealing with other independent units—domestic or international—that want to preserve their independence. Independent power, in order to be kept in check, must be met by independent power of approximately equal strength. In the effort to apply these lessons, we have now embarked upon a long-range policy of “containment” and rearmament. We have also learned that an imperialist power confronted with a coalition of powers of varying strength will attempt to eliminate the weaker members one after the other, until the most powerful member is left in the end outmaneuvered and alone. We have therefore developed an intricate system of alliances in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Asia, which, whatever the differences of legal language and institutional device, all amount to a declaration that we shall defend the territorial integrity of the members of these alliances as we would our own. We call this system of alliances “collective security,” and have put it into operation by defending the Republic of South Korea against aggression by North Korea. In these ways, we have obviously learned from history. Why, then, are we as uncertain as ever about the success of our policies, and still beset by doubts about the course we have been taking in recent years? Have we still missed one of the important lessons of recent history, or have we misunderstood what it seemed to teach us? The truth is, though we have learned the lessons of recent history chapter and verse, though we have memorized them and have never tired of reciting and applying them whenever faced with a problem which seemed to be similar to one of those that we failed to solve during the Second World War, yet we have failed to see that behind the specific lessons of history learnt from specific blunders, there standsthe lesson of history, of all history, which alone gives meaning to the lessons to be derived from any particular period. All political action is an attempt to influence human behavior, hence all political action must be aware of the complexities and ambiguities of the human factor, and must itself be ambiguous and complex—and in the right way. The political actor, conscious of history, must be aware of the malleability of the human will, yet he must also be aware of the limits of suasion and of the need for objective barriers to the human will. While he is making use of suasion, he must not be oblivious to the role of power, and vice versa, and of each he must have just the right quantity and quality, neither too much nor too little, neither too early nor too late, neither too strong nor too weak. He must choose the right admixture not only in terms of human nature, permanent as such but with the relations of its elements ever changing, but also in terms of the changing historical circumstances under which those elements of human nature confront each The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes other in the form of collectivities called nations. How much suasion and power, and of what kind, is available on my side at a particular moment in history, and how much of it and what kind is likely to be available tomorrow? How much and what kind of suscepti- bility to suasion and power is present on the other side at a particular moment of history, and how much and what kind, is likely to be present tomorrow? And how much and what kind of suasion and power is the other side able to bring to bear upon me and others today and tomorrow? Such are the questions posed by the ever-changing social environment. When, during the closing years of the past war, we thought that Stalin was a somewhat gruff old gentleman who could be charmed into cooperation, we relied on suasion to a greater extent than the teachings of history justified. We think we have learned our lesson from this failure of a policy of suasion pure and simple. Now we seem to have for- sworn suasion altogether and to rely exclusively upon force as a deterrent to the ambitions of the Politburo. We seem to forget that force as the instrument of a foreign policy aiming at the peaceful settlement of international conflicts must be a means to the end of foreign policy, not an end in itself. Force supplements suasion, but does not replace it. Secretary of State Acheson recognized this relation between suasion and force in the abstract when he proclaimed repeatedly that the objective of our foreign policy was the creation of situations of strength from which to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Soviet Union. In practice, however, our foreign policy, preoccupied as it is with rearmament, seems to have lost sight of this objective. Consequently, it has not faced up squarely to the all-important question of timing: when shall we consider ourselves strong enough in relation to the Soviet Union to be able to negotiate from strength? A positive answer is being postponed to an ever more indefinite future. Trying to learn from history, we have set out on an armament race that must lead to war if it is not subordinated to the professed objective of a negotiated settlement. Here again we have learned but half the lesson and have replaced one error with another.

OST often political blunders consist in this over-emphasis of one element in a situation at the expense of others. The 1920s and 1930s saw the underestima- Mtion by the Western world of the uses of power toward moral and legal ends. The Second World War saw but a seeming interruption of that trend, for power was used then in an effort to restore conditions of harmony and “normalcy” under which we could again rely on law and morality and, as it were, forget about power. We seemed at the time to have learned a lesson from our pre-war relations with the Axis powers: we had neglected power; now we would use it without limit until those who had compelled us to do so were forced to surrender their own power unconditionally. With that task accom- Hans J. Morgenthau plished, we would be able to return to the other extreme and build a new world, without power politics, on the foundations of law and morality. Consistent with this point of view, we treated our wartime allies, including the Soviet Union, with that same disregard of considerations of power which had characterized our behavior toward everybody in the inter-war period. Yet the same experience that had forced us into power politics against Hitler was to be repeated in our dealings with the Soviet Union. And here, too, we seem to have learned our lesson now. Having shown good will, we now “get tough.” Since one cannot deal with Stalin by legal contract and without regard for the realities of power, we will now deal with him with the instruments of power alone, without concern for legal stipulations to be agreed upon through mutual suasion. Just as the only alternative to appeasement of Germany, Japan, or Italy without power had been war, so the alternative to appeasement of the Soviet Union is another kind of war.

E ALSO learned from the experiences of the 30s what a blunder isolationism was, which would let one fight only in defense of one’s own country but not W in defense of allies. But in learning that lesson we are by way of falling into the opposite error: having realized the error of fighting for nobody but oneself, we are now willing to fight for anybody threatened by the common enemy. Collective security, after all, is as abstract and a-political a principle of action as isolationism, equally im- pervious to the complexity of all political issues which must be decided not according to abstract principles, but by the calculation of opposing interests and powers. We intervened in Korea because the principle of collective security required it, thus seemingly avoiding the mistake Great Britain and France had made when they refused to defend Ethiopia in 1935-36 and Czechoslovakia in 1938. Actually, we made exactly the same mistake, only in a different way. Truman in 1952 faces the same dilemma Prime Minister Baldwin could extricate himself from in 1936 only at an enormous loss to British prestige. Collective security as a defense of the status quo short of war can be effective only against second-rate powers. Directed against a major power, it is a contradiction in terms, for it inevitably means a major war. Of this self-defeating contradiction Stanley Baldwin was unaware in the 30s as Truman is still unaware of it today. Churchill put Baldwin’s dilemma in these cogent terms: “First, the Prime Minister had declared that sanctions meant war; secondly, he was resolved that there must be no war; and thirdly, he decided upon sanctions. It was evidently impossible to comply with these three conditions.” Similarly Truman had declared that the effective prosecution of the Korean War meant the possibility of a third world war; he resolved that there must be no third world war; and he decided upon the Korean War. Here, too, it is impossible to comply with these three conditions. In 1950, as in 1935 and 1938, the issue might better have been decided in terms of the interests involved and the power available as against the interests and power of other The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes nations. Instead, it was resolved in all three instances, either positively or negatively, in the abstract terms of collective security, a principle which could be applied against a major power only at the risk of world war. Before we went to war to defend South Korea in the name of collective security, we should have asked ourselves four questions: First, what is our interest in the preservation of the independence of South Korea; second, what is our power to defend that independence against North Korea; third, what is our power to defend it against China and the Soviet Union; and fourth, what are the chances of preventing China and the Soviet Union from entering the Korean War? We have been asking those questions—but only of late, after we are already committed and have lost the freedom of action which the right answers to those questions, posed at the right time, might have saved for us. By substituting an abstract principle of law for the calculation of the concrete conditions of interests and power, we involved ourselves in a war that, in view of these relations of interests and power, we can neither win nor lose. Such are the results of a foreign policy which tries to avoid the mistakes of the past without understanding the principles that should have governed the actions of the past. We realized what had been wrong with our policies, but in supplying what had been lacking we threw overboard what was no less essential than what we were trying to supply. Thus the very correction of past blunders created new ones. We had seen that diplomacy without power was not enough, so we added power and forgot about diplomacy. We had seen that a nation must stop aggression before it reaches her own shores, and we concluded that we had now to stop all aggression regardless of how our own interests and power were affected. We learned the specific lessons of the last two decades, but in the process we came to neglect the Lesson of History: that political success depends upon the simultaneous or alternative use of different means at different times, and the moderate use of all of them at all times.

AN IS never able to look at history with the same objectivity as at inanimate nature. The moral limitation upon his understanding of history is pride: pride Min his intellect, pride in his goodness, pride in the collectivity with which he identifies himself as against other collectivities. Pride in intellect shows itself in the persistence with which ideas once adopted are applied time and again, regardless of how discredited by experience. A general whose strategy brought victory in one war finds in success an additional reason for using the same methods in the next war. He did it once, and he is going to do it again. What Gen- eral MacArthur was able to do to the Japanese in the Second World War he must be able to do to the Chinese in the Korean War. Hans J. Morgenthau

Even if a certain strategy has been unsuccessful, there is a strong tendency to try it out again, especially if the general sluggishness of the human mind encourages it. The Maginot Line was a disastrous failure in the Second World War. But man is almost ir- resistibly attracted by the image of a wall behind which he will be safe from the enemy. Since the Maginot Line was a failure, as was the Chinese Great Wall before it, why not build a bigger and better Maginot Line? Or perhaps a bigger and better general will do what General Gamelin was unable to do with the Maginot Line in 1940. The most subtle perversion of the lessons of history is that which appears to heed the experiences of the past and discard its faulty methods, while continuing nonetheless to think in terms of the past. To build a line of static fortifications parallel to the Rhine was certainly a mistake that we shall not emulate. Instead, we shall create a Western European army that will defend Europe at the Elbe, at the Rhine, or wherever else it may be. We seem to have learned a lesson from history; but in view of the novel requirements of global strategy and the numerical superiority of the Russian land armies, have we really? Pride in intellect is joined by pride in virtue. All individuals and collectivities like to see their conflicts with others not in terms of interest and power determined by circumstances, but in terms of moral values determined by abstract principles. When our policies fail, as they did in relation to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, the explanation cannot lie in our having miscalculated our interests and power in relation to the interests and power of the other side. Our failure must be the result of the wickedness of the other side, which took advantage of our guileless trust. We trusted once and were deceived; from now on we shall be on our guard and see the enemy for what he is. Yalta then becomes a symbol, not of the legal ratification of errors of political and military judgment, but of a moral deception that the wicked perpetrated upon the good. Even so realistic an observer as Mr. Wilmot falls prey to moral pride when he inter- prets the Yalta Conference. But more than this, he suffers, like virtually everyone else, from the most pervasive pride of our time: pride in collectivity, that is, nationalism. When he tries to formulate the military lessons of the war, he almost automatically takes the side of the British against the Americans;* discussing the lessons to be drawn from Churchill’s Balkan strategy, he takes at face value Mr. Churchill’s own interpretation.

HILE such onesidedness, which impairs historical judgment and thus our ability to learn from history, seems inevitable in even the greatest of histo- W rians, there are specific manifestations of it that, as great statesmen have shown, can be controlled by moral discipline. One such manifestation is the habit of

* There exists also a contrary form of this pride, an anti-nationalism which sees all wickedness in one’s own country and all virtue somewhere else; the most conspicuous victims of this pride are the fellow-travelers of Com- munism. The Lessons of World War II’s Mistakes overestimating one’s own power and understanding the other side’s. The history of the relations between the Western world and the Soviet Union since 1917 could be written in terms of the underestimation of Russian power. From the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War through the debates on the implementation of the Franco-Russian al- liance of 1935, the Russian offer of support to Czechoslovakia in 1938, the AngloFrench military mission to Moscow in 1939, the German attack upon the Soviet Union in 1941, the first atomic explosion in Russia in 1949, up to the very present, we have always underestimated the power of the Soviet Union. We have done so because we are inflexibly opposed on moral grounds to both Communism and Russian imperialism. Thus our moral sentiment stands in the way of a correct appraisal of the realities of power. To separate our pride in our own moral superiority from our historical judgment, which might lead us to recognize the political and military superiority of the Soviet Union in certain respects, requires an effort at moral detachment which few, obviously, are willing to make. It is easier and more satisfactory to conclude that political and military superiority necessarily go hand in hand with moral superiority. Here again moral pride stands between our judgment and historical experience. The classic example of this kind of pride, and of its disastrous political and military consequences, is Hitler’s. Since Bismarck, it had been the basic axiom of German strategy that Germany could not win a two-front war. However, it was exactly such a war that she deliberately embarked upon both in 1914 and 1941. Hitler himself was resolved not to make this blunder, but he could not help making it, for he believed firmly that it was Germany’s “mission” to triumph over her enemies. Holding such a faith, he was led to assume that Germany had already won the war against the West when she had not yet done so, and could therefore safely invade the Soviet Union. If we find it so difficult to learn from history, the fault is not with history, but with the pride and the intellectual limitations of men. History, in the words of Thucydides, is philosophy learned from examples. Those who are morally and intellectually inferior to its teachings, history leads to disaster. Those who are philosophers in the moral and intellectual sense, it teaches.q April 1953

The Cold War Perspective Without Stalin Why Soviet expansion may now accelerate. George Lichtheim

TALIN’S DISAPPEARANCE from the scene he has so long dominated is the kind of event to which the term “end of an epoch” can be applied without overmuch exaggeration, and that for reasons which have nothing to do with his alleged status as Lenin’s successor in the realm of Communist theory and practice. The real reason why this event must be treated with extreme seriousness is that it comes at a time when the Soviet regime is both able and apparently willing to extend its bid for world domination. SUnlike other dictators of recent years, Stalin died in his bed. The fact may not seem very significant to those who think of Stalinism as merely the Russian version of modern totalitarian tyranny, forgetting that it has achieved the kind of stability and permanence- in-revolution which eluded its rivals. Hitler was a madman, and Mussolini a clown; that, too, is less important than the rapid crumbling of their respective systems of rule. Fas- cism has not stood the test of modern war. Stalinism has. The Third Reich was a bloody intermezzo in modern German history: horrible and destructive, but also grotesque and even (if one can permit oneself the thought) bordering on the farcical. It was never taken

George Lichtheim, a German-born thinker and writer, was a frequent contributor to Commentary. George Lichtheim seriously by intelligent Germans, but intelligent Russians take the Soviet regime seriously. They have to; it has become part of the Russian heritage.

HE EASE with which the succession was arranged, within a few hours of the dictator’s death, is proof of a kind of bureaucratic stability, a stability which Hitler’s Tcrazy regime never attained. The balance between party, army, secret police, and economic bureaucracy has been preserved, with the party formally in complete control of everything, and actually a step ahead of the others. That is the meaning of Malenkov’s elevation to the premiership, above Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, and the rest. Last October the reshuffle of the party directorate left Stalin and Malenkov as the only two leaders who were members both of the Secretariat and the inner ring of administrators—the effective “inner cabinet” within the Council of Ministers. Now the latter body has been streamlined and contracted, and Malenkov has officially taken Stalin’s place as chair- man. At the same time the party presidium has been sharply reduced in size; the tech- nocrats whom Stalin introduced into the inner circle last autumn, as a counterweight to the party bosses, are once again, with one or two exceptions, relegated to purely admin- istrative functions. Thus the party’s grip is tightened in both directions, and the effective controllers of the country’s destiny are more narrowly defined. A sign of weakness? Perhaps, but for the time being a sign that the Stalinist system is in operation—without Stalin, and therefore with fewer possibilities of one group’s being maneuvered against the other, but still in operation. Ever since last October’s 19th Congress of the Soviet Communist party it has become increasingly obvious that Stalin was, as it were, making his testament and arranging for the succession. Even his last “theoretical” pronouncement, the long article in Bolshevik published on the eve of the congress and miscalled “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” had the character of a testament addressed to the country’s rulers: the party bureaucrats and the administrators of the state economy. For in the guise of a curiously scholastic discussion of Communist theory it contained an implied justification of the party’s preeminent role in the Soviet planning system and Soviet life generally, and laid down the broad lines along which Soviet policy can be expected to proceed over the next few years.

F STALIN is destined to go down in history as the man who transformed the Com- munist party into an instrument of state planning and state despotism, it is likely Ithat his last formal pronouncement will rank high among the documents of the totalitarian age. For in it he has managed to define “socialism” in a manner which justifies the permanence of the despotic “revolution from above” that is the essence of the Soviet system; and he has done so at a moment when the Soviet Union is engaged upon an arms race which further distorts the industrial structure and emphasizes the preeminence The Cold War Perspective Without Stalin of heavy industry at the expense of the consumer. Moreover, he has left behind a gov- ernmental structure in which the planners, the soldiers, the policemen, and the party leaders are carefully balanced—but with the party in the central position of control. This central control exercised by the party over all the rest is the essence of Stalinism, and of the “permanent revolution” which has now been going on for thirty-five years. Last October’s congress was called together, partly in order to pass in general review the problems facing the regime at home and to explain to the six million members of the Communist party why there can be no immediate rise in living standards; partly to map out a long-term foreign policy, and indeed the entire perspective, for perhaps as much as a generation ahead. The “theoretical” basis had been laid with Stalin’s article in Bolshevik, which stressed the dissolution of the world market as the result of the Second World War, and the likelihood of ever sharpening capitalist crises owing to the steady shrinkage of the non-Soviet world. From this, Stalin deduced the certainty of worsening relations between the “capitalist” states: as the general crisis of capitalism accelerates, the rival states try to obtain the largest possible slice of the diminishing cake, and in the process they inevitably collide. Hence the certainty that at some point Britain and France will try to break out of the Atlantic system—if only because American policy favors Ger- many and Japan at their expense. And hence also the inevitability of wars between the “imperialists.” The question is how far this kind of doctrinaire restatement of primitive Leninism is really taken seriously by the new party hierarchy. During the sittings of the congress it was remarked that though Malenkov and Beria dutifully repeated Stalin’s prediction about the certainty of inter-imperialist rivalries and wars, they did so in a somewhat perfunctory manner, while most of the other speakers had hardly anything to say about it. It was left to Stalin to make a brief valedictory address to the assembled delegates of foreign Communist parties in which he exhorted them to rally their respective countries against the threat of American overlordship. This was the only attempt made at the congress to link internal and external policy. Stalin’s wait-and-see attitude, for which his long theoretical exegesis provided the justification, did not of course amount to saying that the Soviet empire was immune to foreign threats; but it did seem to imply that a long-term program of internal development was possible and realistic, and could be suf- ficiently flexible to allow for its extension to any country on the Soviet periphery where conditions might favor a Communist seizure of power. As for the possibility of foreign attack, he came close to brushing it off on the ground that war against the Soviet Union was too dangerous a game for foreign powers to risk:

It is said that the contradictions between capitalism and socialism are stronger than the contradictions between the capitalist countries. Theoretically, of course, that is true. It is not only true now, today; it was true before the Second World War. And it was more or less realized by the leaders of George Lichtheim

the capitalist countries. Yet the Second World War began not as a war with the USSR, but as a war between capitalist countries. Why? Firstly, because war with the USSR, as a socialist land, is more dangerous to capitalism than war between capitalist countries; for whereas war between capitalist countries puts in question only the supremacy of certain capitalist countries over others, war with the USSR must certainly put in question the existence of capitalism itself. Secondly, because the capitalists, although they clamor for propaganda purposes about the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union, do not themselves believe that it is aggressive, because they are aware of the Soviet Union’s peaceful policy and know it will not itself attack capitalist countries.

This passage has been much quoted and generally treated as an exercise in semantics, or as a crude piece of psychological warfare. But Stalin was writing his article mainly for home consumption, and he clearly meant it to be regarded as his political testament. In the context in which the above words appear, they give the impression of being addressed to the party rather than to the outside world. Taken together with the confident prediction of capitalist crises “on a narrowing basis,” owing to the shrinkage of the world market, and of inter-imperialist wars, Stalin’s testament amounts to a prescription for a long-term policy of continuing the cold war by all means, taking advantage of all local opportunities to seize power, but avoiding preventive wars. And if the capitalist world cannot unite against the Soviet empire, and is afraid to attack it, a preventive war on its part becomes less and less likely. On a purely rational calculation this is probably the safest policy for Stalin’s successors to follow, though not necessarily for the crude and superficial “theoretical” reasons outlined in his article. It is, however, somewhat unlikely that they will in fact take his advice. The party congress provided no direct evidence either way, although, as already remarked, the other speakers treated Stalin’s pronouncements on this subject with a ritualistic brevity which suggested a certain skepticism. It is more than likely that they thought him somewhat old-fashioned for attaching so much importance to the existence of inter-imperialist rivalries. In these matters one is reduced to guesswork, but the delicate balance between state and party can only be preserved by an individual dictator with unusual control over his environment, and with a certain conservative attachment to party dogma. As a theorist, Stalin has always been remarkable for his extreme con- servatism and his reliance on past experience. In the above passage he explicitly based himself on the experience of the years leading up to the Second World War. It is at least not an unreasonable conjecture that this viewpoint is now regarded in the Kremlin as somewhat old-fashioned. This does not mean that the cautious wait-and-see policy is to be shelved, but the likelihood of its being abandoned in some grave international crisis has probably increased somewhat. The enlarged role allotted to the military among the top policy-planners—signified by Zhukov’s return to the limelight and even by the deco- rative post bestowed upon the aged Voroshilov— should work in the same direction. The Cold War Perspective Without Stalin

In these matters the personal factor cannot be disregarded, for in the end the decision will be made by a few men. Most of them have long been in commanding positions, but their relations towards each other are no longer quite the same. One thing is already obvious: the Soviet Union is for the moment being governed by a committee rather than by a single dictator. In order to carry through his lightning reorganization of the government after Stalin’s death, and to preserve his place at the very top, Malenkov had to compromise with some of the other aspirants to power. The merging of ministries and party offices, the appointment of Beria, Bulganin, Kaganovich, and Mikoyan to “over- lordships” over entire groups of amalgamated ministries, the elevation of Voroshilov to the presidency instead of the colorless Shvernik, the promotion of Zhukov —the true representative of the officers’ corps—to a post of political importance—all these are signs that relations within the hierarchy are fluid. Presumably one group has entrenched itself at the expense of others. Some observers have even spoken of a silent coup d’état which may have deliberately flouted Stalin’s wishes, and perhaps Molotov’s too. However that may be, there is now no single personality strong enough to control all the others; and these others include men like Beria and Bulganin whose departmental concern with the safety of the Soviet Union may easily outweigh their reliance on Stalin’s prediction as to what is likely to happen ten years hence. Military planners are cautious and realistic by profession, and we have no reason to regard the first actions and statements of the new regime as proof that an adventurous policy is in the making; on the contrary, the emphasis for the moment is all on peace. That was to be expected, but it does not mean much. Uncertainty has grown, and with it fear. The wait-and-see policy was Stalin’s last gift to the party; it may turn out that someone like Stalin is required to carry it through. What the new system clearly lacks at present is the quasi-national character which the last war conferred upon Stalin’s personal dictatorship. It must for some time live upon the prestige the regime acquired by winning the war. But given time it may hope to obtain a more solid standing by achievements of its own. The probable direction it will choose is not hard to guess, and in any case it emerged clearly from Malenkov’s long and dreary address to last October’s party congress: the Soviet public is to be presented with an “unparalleled” success in the carrying out of the current Five Year Plan, with a general streamlining and overhauling of the cumbersome administration, and with a modest rise in living standards. Before he rose to the top, Malenkov made his mark as an efficiency expert. Efficiency, too, is the party’s weak point in the eyes of the planning bureaucracy, whose leaders were promoted last October and have now once more been excluded from the inner circle. The party is on trial in their eyes, and presumably Malen- kov knows it. Its monopoly of information-cum-interpretation in everything that regards the outside world has yet to meet the critical test of a conflict with America; meantime it must show that it can administer Russia’s bulging economy. To keep control, its leaders must beat the planners at their own game, while maintaining public confidence in the George Lichtheim long deferred improvement of living standards. Stalin’s great achievement was to get the industrial revolution under way, at the expense of the masses, while keeping the party under control and turning it into an effective instrument of his kind of “socialism.” If the party is to stay in power it must go on running the permanent revolution he started: the revolution which consists in forcing Soviet society into the mold prescribed by the plan. The Soviet Union is now in the middle of its Fifth Five Year Plan, the second since the war. The Fourth Plan (1946-50) was apparently successful in restoring agricultural production to the 1940 level and raising the total national income slightly above that level. The object of the present plan is more ambitious: it is intended that by 1956 the national income shall be some 60 percent above pre-war, industry alone rising by about 70 per cent and agriculture by 40-50 percent. And since the massive expansion of the labor force achieved in 1946-50 has now come to an end, the program depends on higher productivity from unchanged resources. If “Malenkovism” stands for anything in particular, it stands for this. One might say that it represents greater emphasis on intensification of the labor process, as distinct from the crude “extensive” methods applied under Stalin (as under early capitalism in the West). Not that forced labor is likely to disappear, but given time it may become slightly less important. Time, however, is just what the regime lacks. It is conducting an armament race, and any major letup is out of the question. Efforts are nonetheless being made to raise productivity by 50 percent during the current plan period, and though this aim is not likely to be achieved, some progress is being made: partly by new investment, partly by increased technical education, and partly by a general improvement in industrial organization. This process has been going on since the war, has recently been speeded up, and is best calculated to provide the new regime with the prestige it lacks at the moment. In personal terms one might say that the new men must try to sell themselves to the masses as modern-minded, efficient, and fast-moving disciples of the aged tyrant they have succeeded. In economic terms, crude exploitation of additional labor reserves is probably at an end anyhow, and the emphasis must lie on quality and better education. The success of these methods must largely turn on the availability of additional sources of motive power. Oil production is supposed to go up by 85 percent; the planned level is now 70 million tons in 1955. This is the first time that oil production is being expanded at a greater rate than coal; the coal supply is intended to be 43 percent higher in 1955. At the same time generating capacity for electricity is to rise by 80 percent. Output of heavy industry and building will continue to increase more rapidly than that of light industry or agriculture, and the combined share of investment and defense in the national budget will also continue to rise. These broad lines of economic policy were laid down in 1950, received their “theoretical” justification in Stalin’s pamphlet last October (which chided Communist ideologists for ignoring economic facts), and will certainly be continued under Malenkov. If successful, the plan should by 1956 have produced the The Cold War Perspective Without Stalin following results’, which may usefully be compared with the corresponding figures for Western Europe (i.e., the six EDC countries and Britain), for the year 1951:

Soviet Union Western Europe 1956est. 1951

Coal and lignite output (million tons) 372 530 Electricity (billion kwh) 163 196 Oil consumption (million tons) 70 56 Crude steel (million tons) 44 51 Cement output (million tons) 23 41

Between now and 1956 there will be some further progress in Western Europe, but probably not much. Anyone is free to feel reassured by these figures, but Europeans remember that Hitler started his war, and almost won it, on much less than Malenkov has at his disposal even now. It is true that he did not have the United States to reckon with, or thought he did not. It is also true that he was a madman, and that Malenkov presumably is not. Given these two additional factors, the world can probably look forward to some years of “peace”—until the balance changes decisively in Russia’s favor, or alterna- tively until the feeling gains ground in the Kremlin that time is no longer working for Russia and that it is now or never. In either event, the regime must try to justify itself in the eyes of the new Soviet hierarchy, including the marshals who won the last war. And it must do so in conformity with the Stalinist tradition. It is not a pleasant prospect.

T IS WELL, for this reason, to back away somewhat from the most recent events and look afresh at the cold war, as it presents itself in the light of basic Soviet doctrine, Ias well as official American doctrine. Of the latter, one can only say—speaking from here—that it seems to have changed much less than Republican campaign oratory might have led one to expect. The emphasis is still very much on caution, so that there has been little advance beyond the policy of “containment”; and the inescapability of military stalemate in Asia appears to have dawned on the central figures in the new administration—or so it would seem. What dynamism there is, is confined to Europe: as, in the European view, it should be. For the first rule of European thinking (Professor Toynbee’s inflated reputation notwithstanding) is still that Europe remains the world’s center of gravity, as well as the only area where the cold war can genuinely be won or lost. The partition of Korea can endure; that of Germany cannot, because it involves the partition of Europe and therefore an irreconcilable clash of cultures in the heart of one of the world’s great industrial areas. This is not to say that German unification can shortly be brought about; it probably cannot. George Lichtheim

In either case, however, the precarious equilibrium in the center of the Continent sets up tensions which may explode at any time. It is immaterial whether there was anything in the persistent rumor, before he died, that “Gottwald was getting ready to jump off the train”; it is even less material whether there is truth in the assertion that the entire Hungarian politbureau is to be “purged,” or that the other satellites may shortly attack Yugoslavia. The point is that such events are entirely possible, and that each affects one of the world’s neuralgic spots. The balance of power being what it is, an event such as the defection of the Prague regime from the Soviet bloc would be almost certain to set off the biggest detonation of all time; yet such an event is perfectly possible and could take place tomorrow if there should be an internal convulsion in Czechoslovakia and the So- viet Union. Compare this with the vast quagmire of Asia, where war over vast areas, and the destruction of millions, could conceivably go on for years without seriously altering the world balance of forces and without obliging either of the Big Two to make use of the “ultimate weapon.” If this analysis is correct, it follows that the internal dynamic of the Soviet regime is of vastly greater consequence for the world than any geopolitical con- test in or around China. For it is this dynamic which will determine the behavior of the ruling group—now narrowed down to a mere handful of people—in any one of a dozen hypothetical emergencies affecting the unstable equilibrium of world forces at five or six critical points. In this respect the present situation is much closer to that in Europe before 1914 than to the pre-1939 line-up, when there was a simple choice between stopping and not stopping Hitler in his tracks before he could start a general war. Today there is no such choice, and that is why the fashionable talk about “remembering the lessons of Munich” is so completely beside the point. There are no worthwhile lessons to be extracted from that experience, for the Soviet Union is much too vast to be placed in a straitjacket and rendered harmless by the Atlantic powers, as Germany, Italy, and Japan could perhaps have been rendered harmless if joint action had been taken in time. An uneasy equilibrium between two giant powers and their allies and satellites is a situation of a totally different sort, for then it depends on the internal dynamic of the two competing systems what the issue is to be. We know the nature of the American and Atlantic dynamic. What is the nature of the Soviet dynamic?

T IS HERE that one is brought back to the seemingly far-fetched and abstract considerations entailed by a study of recent Soviet developments. These can be summed up Iby saying that they are but another phase of that peculiar “permanent revolution” of which Stalinism is the practical (and to some extent the theoretical) expression; a “permanent revolution” which, unlike the one dreamed of by Trotsky, proceeds from above, not from below, and whose object appears to be the continuous remaking of society and the prevention of any kind of stability. This revolution has now been going on over The Cold War Perspective Without Stalin thirty-five years, and the momentum it has acquired, so far from slowing down, seems if anything to be accelerating. It is certainly spreading over a continually growing area, and there appear to be no internal brakes within the system which would allow it to settle down at some point and become conservative, in the sense that every post-revolutionary regime has hitherto become conservative once the original aim of the revolution had been achieved. The illusion of an imminent stabilization of this kind is probably responsible for most of the blunders committed since 1917 by those who have had to deal with the phenomenon— from Communist leaders like Trotsky to conservative statesmen like Winston Churchill. In one way or another, they all assumed that the familiar historical process would repeat itself, and that saturation, social or territorial, as the case might be, would set in. Thus Trotsky steadily predicted a “Soviet Thermidor”—the emergence of a conservative and saturated ruling class which would liquidate the Communist dictatorship. Thus Ameri- can and British statesmanship at Yalta tacitly assumed that the Kremlin would stop for at least a generation to “digest” its vast territorial gains; for, as Eden frequently reminded the Tory party with that engaging naivety which seems to be the hallmark of traditionalism, the Soviet government, unlike Hitler, had plenty of undeveloped territory at home, and therefore no need for “territorial aspirations”; which of course was true, only it happened not to be very relevant. In one way or another, they have all—anti-Stalinist Communists, socialists, liberals, and conservatives—been baffled and disappointed by the continuance of the “permanent revolution.” Indeed, it has become so permanent that even within the inmost ruling circle of Stalinism hardly anyone is safe from it. The mechanism of this unique phenomenon is still obscure in some respects, but it would appear that the state-party regime in the Soviet Union is at the core of the permanent revolution, which cannot be halted so long as the party has not been got rid of. For the party—and this comes out very clearly from Stalin’s last scholastic exercises— self- centered and self-operating to a degree which makes complete nonsense of the belief that it is merely the instrument of the new managerial class. If it were, the revolution would already be at an end, for the managerial stratum shares with all other classes of Soviet society an almost desperate yearning for quiet and stability. The systematic dis- tortion of the economy in the interest of capital investment in heavy industry, which is the core of the whole planning experiment, is certainly not due to managerial pressure, and neither is the drive to transform the collectivized peasants into inhabitants of “agro- towns.” These measures, and the constant social upheaval and transformation rendered necessary by them, spring from the inmost dynamic of a self-centered autocracy which obeys no impulse save that of constantly remaking society, keeping it in flux, and preventing the emergence of stable classes with well-defined interests that could threaten the operation of the transforming mechanism. This revolutionary autocracy, entrenched at the very heart of the all-powerful state George Lichtheim machine, transforms society in its own image. Where the process encounters resistance, it resorts to “purges,” and at the same time it expands into any vacuum which offers itself in Europe or Asia. At the moment, having more or less “digested,” i.e. transformed, the East European satellites, it is engaged on the gigantic operation of penetrating into China. The process never stops for a moment. When it is not churning up the living body of society at home, it transfers its dynamic abroad. The motor which keeps it going, and which for want of another term must be called the Stalinist system, also sees to it that a proper balance is kept between the party and the army—twin pillars of an over-expanded capital industry which must stand or fall together.

HAT IS to happen to this perpetuum mobile now that its chief architect has been removed from the scene, one can only surmise; but since its function- W ing had previously brought about an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a single individual, one may perhaps hazard the guess that the system will tend to become unstable, and even to disintegrate under the tremendous pressures stored up by its own operation. The task of holding the Communist party, the army, the secret police, and the economic bureaucracy in some kind of internal equilibrium seems beyond the power of the technicians who now have to operate the central mechanism. Something will have to give way, and though in principle the decision might fall in favor of relenting, of slowing down the inhuman tempo of investment and development, of allowing the tortured society some rest, it is in fact only too likely that relief will be sought in other ways. A measure of consolidation at home may well be accompanied by further expansion abroad. If the dynamic of the system cannot be broken, it can at least be shifted outward—away from the ruling bureaucracy, itself continually being churned up by “purges” to render it more obedient to its Communist masters. In this respect, as in others, Stalin’s last words offer few grounds for comfort. Though he adopted a wait-and-see attitude towards the outside world, his disciples may well be less circumspect, and they clearly share his fundamental belief in the impossibility of genuine coexistence. The recent frenzy of ultra-nationalist disruption of the last remaining links with the outside world is not a very hopeful sign. To interpret it as isolationism is to forget that we are not dealing with a stagnant, or even a stable society, but with a dynamic system torn by internal contradictions infinitely more violent than those characteristic of our kind of world. When one thinks of the people who must operate the le- vers of command now that Stalin has departed, with all his ruthlessness but without his authority, one may recall the state of Germany after Bismarck—and try to estimate the gap between the puny forces of destruction then at the disposal of European nations and the vistas now opening before us.q September 1953

The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education Must all free men read them—or be slaves? F.R. Leavis

.H. LAWRENCE’S would have been the commentary to have on The Great Books of the Western World, and the plan of democratic regen- eration through the “Study of the Great Ideas,” a study to be pursued with a life-long application and the aid of the Syntopicon (Volume I, Angel to Love; Volume II, Man to World’). It is easy to find in his writ- ings very relevant and suggestive things about Ideas, Idealism (and American Idealism in particular), Freedom, and Equality. Opening Studies in Classic DAmerican Literature I light at once on this, in the chapter on Benjamin Franklin: Oh Benjamin! Oh Binjum! You do Not suck me in any longer. And why, oh why should the snuff-colored little trap have wanted to take us all in? Why did he do it?

Out of sheer human cussedness, in the first place. We do all like to get things inside a barbed-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to get them inside the barbed- wire enclosure of Freedom, and make ‘em work. “Work, you free jewel, Work!” shouts

F.R. Leavis was a British literary critic. He was the author of The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948) and other volumes of criticism. F.R. Leavis the liberator, cracking his whip. I do not choose to be a free democrat. I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost.

R. ROBERT M. Hutchins in The Great Conversation (which explains the plan) addresses the free democrat, conceived as representatively the worker at the Massembly line. Work at the assembly line, Mr. Hutchins concedes, tends to be, intellectually and spiritually, neither stimulating nor exalting, but the triumph of industrialization it represents has liberated the free democrat into leisure. Or, rather, it has made it for the first time possible for him to be truly a free democrat. And to be truly a free democrat, Mr. Hutchins insists with stern logic, is an affair of sustained and resolute hard labor. If, as he says, “Work is for the sake of leisure,” then leisure, he immediately makes plain, is for the sake of work; for the sake, in fact, of what, for all but a conceivable handful of Leonardo da Vincis (and Members of the Advisory Board, with the Editorial Consultants—among whom I am impressed to see a member of my own university), must be incomparably more exacting and burdensome than what they ordinarily call work. The logic is inexorable:

If leisure and political power are a reason for liberal education, then everybody in America now has this reason, and everybody where democracy and industrialization penetrate will ultimately have it. If leisure and political power require this education, everybody in America now requires it, and everybody where democracy and industrialization penetrate will ultimately require it. If the people are not capable of acquiring this education, they should be deprived of political power and probably of leisure. Their uneducated political power is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrading and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable of achieving the education that responsible democratic citizenship demands, then democracy is doomed. Aristotle rightly ;condemned the mass of mankind to natural slavery and the sooner we set about reversing the trend towards democracy the better it will be for the world.

HE “liberal education” that the people must achieve in order to qualify, not only for leisure, but for exemption from slavery, is to be identified with the program of Tthe Great Books: this assumption, taken as virtually axiomatic, is of Mr. Hutchins’ logic, which I did not lightly call inexorable.* The Great Books include (among many others) the works of Plato and Aristotle; the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas; the works of Hipparchus, Galen, and Archimedes; the Enneads of Plotinus; the works of Pas-

* To be safe against the charge of misrepresentation I must report that Mr. Hutchins makes this concession: “On the other hand, the conclusion that everybody should have that education which will fit him for responsible democratic citizenship . . . does not require the immediate adoption in any country of universal liberal education.” The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education cal; Spinoza’s Ethics; Huyghens’ Treatise on Light; Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Knowledge and Optics; The Wealth of Nations; Kant’s three Critiques, together with four other works by him; Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History; Marx’s Capital; Faraday’s Experimental Researches into Electricity; the works of Freud. . . . Liberal education involves mastering these—and not only these—formidable trea- tises, together (of course) with Homer, the Greek tragic writers, Lucretius, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Faust, and so on; and a “liberal education is the education that everybody ought to have.” “We believe,” says Mr. Hutchins, “that it is a gratuitous assumption that anybody can read poetry, but very few can read mathematics.” There is no irony here: this is not, as you might suppose, a defense of poetry against a gratuitous assumption; it means that it ought to be possible to assume that the mathematical and scientific classics are acces- sible to all, and that we must assume it in laying our plans for universal liberal education. “This is not to say that any great book is altogether free from difficulty. As Aristotle remarked, learning is accompanied by pain.” So if the free democrat, faced with Pascal’s Correspondence with Vermat on the Theory of Probabilities, or Newton’s Mathematical Principles, or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, should feel that, so far as he is concerned, the probability of profit is not such as to make his applying himselfhere a good use of his time, the answer is, “Work, you free jewel, work!” One cannot expect to master a great book at one reading; education is a matter of a lifetime; and here, by the way of encour- agement, is a ten years’ program sketched. One is free to make one’s own approach and to arrive at one’s own understanding, since these works, “we hold,” are intelligible to the ordinary man. “The great books should speak for themselves, and the reader should decide for himself. Great books contain their own aids to reading; that is one reason why they are great.” As for the Syntopicon, it “will not interpret any book to the reader; it simply sup plies him with suggestions as to how he may conveniently pursue the study of any important topic through the range of Western intellectual history. And reading and understanding great books will give him a standard by which to judge all other books.”

FIND IT hard to decide which aspect of the whole extravagant and enormous unreality is the more astonishing; the idea that liberal education is, or should be, or ever Ihas been, this; or the fanatical illusion that one may hopefully set out to prove that this, or anything like it, could be made, by dint of example and leadership and exhorta- tion, the people’s way of using leisure (or life)—or a common way—in America or any country. But it is that illusion which has given the grotesque and solemn escapade of academic idealism its aspect of portentous fact: here are the volumes, expensively produced; the awe-inspiring catalogue of books is clearly no mere catalogue; the moral and the practical support have been abundantly forthcoming. I start, then, by asking my- F.R. Leavis self how an undertaking so utterly uncountenanced by observation and experience can have been entertained to such effect, commanding as it has done the devoted labors of learned minds and the financial backing of men of the world. And it is plain that the extravagance of this unreality of democratic faith is a kind of corollary of those disastrous consequences of “democracy” in education which are reported by Mr. Hutchins:

The products of American high schools are illiterate, and a degree from a famous college or university is no guarantee that the graduate is in any better case. One of the most remarkable features of American society is that the difference between the “uneducated” and the “educated” is so slight. The reason for this phenomenon is, of course, that so little education takes place in American educational institutions.

I merely quote Mr. Hutchins. The delicacy of an Englishman’s engaging at all in this commentary comes home to me afresh at this point, and I will only say about the facts in question that, going by a good deal of relevant reading and by what I have gathered in talk from American friends and informants, I take Mr. Hutchins to be expressing with extreme severity a dissatisfaction with American education as it is that (among those who may reasonably be said to have opinions) is generally shared, and for which there are good grounds. In so complex a matter it would be rash for anyone, whether American or foreign, to offer as an adequate explanation any simple account of causes. Nevertheless, when one considers what one has gathered about the problem and the grounds for discouragement facing the American educationist at the university level, it is impossible not to see the trouble as, in essential respects at any rate, an American interpretation of democracy. It is the interpretation assumed as unquestionable by Mr. Hutchins himself. This comes out strikingly in his way of replying to critics of the scheme he advocates:

Many convinced believers in liberal education attack the idea of liberal education for all on the ground that if we attempt to give liberal education to everybody we shall fail to give it to anybody. They point to the example of the United States, where liberal education has virtually disappeared, and say that this is the inevitable result of taking the dogma of equality of educational opportunity seriously. The two criticisms I have mentioned come to the same thing: that liberal education is too good for the people. The first group of critics and the second unite in saying that only a few can acquire an education that was best for the best. The difference between the two is in the estimate they place on the importance of the loss of liberal education. The first group says that, since everybody cannot acquire a liberal education, democracy cannot require that anybody should have it. The second says that, since everybody cannot acquire a liberal education, the attempt to give it to everybody will necessarily result in an inferior education The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education

for everybody. The remedy is to separate the few who are capable from the many who are incapable and see to it that the few, at least, receive a liberal education. The rest can be relegated to voca- tional training and any kind of activity in school that happens to interest them. The more logical and determined members of this second group of critics will confess that they believe that the great mass of mankind is and of right ought to be condemned to a modern version of natural slavery. Hence there is no use in wasting educational effort upon them.

Mr. Hutchins complicates the point a little by so gratuitously identifying liberal education with the Great Books program. But the unquestioning ease with which he assumes the identity must itself be taken as a mark of the decay in America of the tradition of liberal education. And in that decay it seems plain that the axiom assumed by Mr. Hutchins had a major part; the axiom that it is an offense against democracy to advocate for anybody anything that everybody can’t have. And now, answering his critics, Mr. Hutchins with emphatic deliberateness advocates his Great Books program as the education for everybody. He has indeed gone further; he has said that, if everybody cannot be proved to be capable of this education, then democracy is doomed.

F MR. Hutchins is right, then we can have no hope for democracy; for nothing is more certain than that very few persons indeed are capable of making even a plau- Isible show of submission to the regime of the Great Books—even with the aid of the Syntopicon. The conclusion, however, that I choose to dwell upon is that, until the “democratic” axiom is dropped, it is a poor lookout for liberal education in America. I won’t for the moment argue about the relation of the Great Books and the Syntopicon to any intelligent idea of education, but will state my firm belief in this form: it is disastrous to let a country’s educational arrangements be determined, or even affected, by the assumption that a high intellectual standard can be attained by more than a small minority. This belief has behind it a very different experience from Mr. Hutchins’; for the history of education in England has not been what he reports of America. Severe as would be in some contexts the criticisms I should pass on education in my own country, it would be misleading here not to say that English schools are good. I should be ungrateful if I said otherwise, seeing the profit that, as a university “teacher,” I get out of working with the undergraduates coming from them. These men, of course, are very highly selected. I will not here try to sketch the system by which the minority of the school-attending population ultimately judged capable of benefiting by university education gets to the university. The essential point I have to make is given in the words “selected” and “minority”: the attempt to establish a democratic educational system in Great Britain has gone on the assumption that far from everybody has the capacity to justify his or her presence at a university—if “university” is to mean anything—and that there must consequently be a severe sifting. My own observation and experience F.R. Leavis

(it seems odd to have to say so) assure me that that assumption is well grounded. And I will record my conviction that, for a good long while before the well-known postwar educational reforms associated with the Welfare State, very few in Great Britain capable of justifying their presence at a university had failed to get there. But I see that I must now, in order to convey the force of what I have to say, supply this informative note: Oxford and Cambridge cream the country; no one who can get into Oxford or Cambridge, and wants to go there, goes anywhere else (at least, this is true of England, and I know that the pull of the ancient English universities on Scotland is very strong). Under the postwar Labor government an attempt was made to “direct,” as of right and policy, those for whom the public funds were making university education possible—to direct, that is, to Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, or whatever other university the authorities judged proper, students whom Oxford and Cambridge were willing to admit; but the attempt met with strong resistance and was generally condemned and has been abandoned. So Oxford and Cambridge, as I said, still cream the country. My point is that there is a cream and that it is a very small proportion of the population of university age. Teachers in the provincial universities bear rueful testimony to the fact. When I compare notes with them I find them as a rule very ready to recognize that, in general, by the standards of Oxford and Cambridge, the work in their depart- ments—the education for the guidance of which they have to assume responsibility-is not really at the university level. They hope to find now and then an especially good man who, when they have done all they can for him, can be sent to an ancient university to qualify for an Oxford or Cambridge degree. The disadvantage under which they work is not a condition they would propose to remedy by diverting the best material from the ancient universities and sharing it out. They know—they have good reason to know— that the supply is strictly limited, and that only by the actual concentration can standards be maintained, and that unless they are maintained somewhere the cause is lost everywhere. What I am trying to convey is that in a country in which there has been no such collapse, and no such hiatus in tradition, as Mr. Hutchins reports of American education, it is impossible to question the clear fact: only a minority is capable of advanced intellectual culture. The situation I have briefly sketched amounts to this: Oxford and Cambridge (which, as I have said, cream the country) could become more “open” only by lowering standards, for no other discrimination than what is represented by these now regulates their hospitality. And if democratic equality of opportunity requires that standards should be lowered, then I am against democracy. The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education

T THIS point I have to confess that by . Mr. Hutchins’ standards I am not qualified to speak: I have not read most (I think) of the Great Books, and I shall never read A them. I know that it would be a waste of my time and energy to try. And yet I had what Mr. Hutchins (to judge by his account of the conditions he is familiar with) would judge a comparatively good education. I left school with a very good start in French and German. I spent a great deal of time as a schoolboy writing Latin proses, some of which were commended by my headmaster, Mr. Ezra Pound’s correspondent, Dr. Rouse. I could in those days (so soon left behind!) explain in Greek, observing quantity, stress, and tonic accent (the precise value of which Dr. Rouse knew), that I was late for school because I had a puncture in my back tire. With my Form I read through semi-dramatically the plays of Shakespeare. I worked enough at history (I remember reading, among other things, Trev- elyan’s History of the American Revolution) to win a university scholarship in that subject. At the university I took the Historical Tripos Part I and the English Tripos, both successfully. Then I was able to spend three years in post-graduate research. It will be plain that I was not, at the beginning of the last paragraph, subsiding into modesty—though it should be equally plain that I have a strong (it is often a painful) sense of my limitations. My aim in these personal notes has been to give due force to the avowal that I have not read the greater number (I suspect) of the Great Books and, knowing it could never be worth my while to make the attempt at working through any such program, shall never make it. Nor can I easily believe that Mr. Hutchins himself, whatever ideal schemes the optimistic zeal of unbridled academic intellectualism may have proposed to him in abstraction, has actually worked through anything like that program, or will seriously give himself to the attempt. He has had, and has, other things to do. I have just used the phrase “academic intellectualism”: that seems to me to describe aptly enough the whole ethos of the Great Books—the Great Books, the Great Ideas, the Great Conversation, and the Syntopicon. So extreme a form of academic intellectualism could be found, I think, or could at any rate be taken so seriously, only in America, the favoring conditions being those which I touched on some time ago in these pages* when referring to Mr. Eliot’s estimate of Irving Babbitt as against D. H. Lawrence and to the conceptions of Culture, Civilization, and Art represented by Pound’s Cantos (and his pam- phleteering). The conditions are those pointed to by Mr. Hutchins himself in his account of the past century of American education. Where the living tradition has been so weakened the higher culture that should be of it becomes a thing apart, insulated from the world of actualities, where “serious” living is done, in a kind of academic other-world. The ideal intellectual culture advocated by the promoters of the Great Books is plainly a monstrous unreality fostered by such conditions. The hypertrophied academic innocence, the utter remoteness from realities, the lack of all sense of how things are and what they could be, is

* See Mr. Leavis’s “The Americanness of American Literature” in Commentary for November 1952. F.R. Leavis proclaimed in the belief that this culture might, and must, be acquired by everybody. Let us not be academic and esoteric—let us bring it into full and living relation with actualities! Because the great bulk of mankind has never had the chance to get liberal education, Mr. Hutchins tells us, it isn’t proved that they cannot get it. The unintelligently intellectualist nature of the academicism is manifested in the belief that this is liberal education, and the astonishing ignorance going with the intellectualism in the belief that this, or anything like it, was the education of the educated in any past. There must be scores of scholars in America who can provide Mr. Hutchins with compelling corrective notes about the intellectual cultures, and the lines of the liberal educations, of a number of different pasts in which there were powerful educated classes. Always in these pasts there is the strong positive bent, the selective interest, the relation to specific contemporary needs and conditions and to the set of the current in the contemporary movement of life. The type member of the élite didn’t cover more than a fraction of the reading enjoined on the free democrat by Mr. Hutchins. If he had(incredibly) occupied his leisure in the prescribed spirit, that would have meant that, at the “educated” level, there was no living tradition. And where there is no living tradition there is in no real sense a contemporary higher culture and there can hardly be a liberal education.

ERHAPS the case today is not as utterly hopeless—not quite as hopeless—as the Great Books scheme would make it appear, even though such a scheme, fervently Padvocated with wide and powerful support, suggests that all notion of what a living tradition is like has been lost. But I will, at any rate for the moment, put aside talk about “tradition” (that tricky concept which needs such delicate and positive handling) and make some points that must have occurred to anyone who, as a “teacher,” is concerned with liberal education at a place where, in a modern community, liberal education is at least a recognized and institutional concern: a university. Thinking of correc- tives to academic tendencies, one tells oneself that there will be this mark of a student’s having spent his time not without profit: he will leave the university knowing to much better effect that there are renowned works he needn’t take as seriously as convention affirms, and others that, though they will repay the right reader’s study, are not for him. For an instance of the first class, there is Aristotle’sPoetics , a treatise prescribed among the Great Books. There may be some point in a student’s looking up the Poetics when he is going into Tragedy under the guidance of Gilbert Murray, Jane Harrison, Cornford, and the other anthropologizing Hellenists. But the man who leaves the university able to suppose that in the Poetics he has studied an illuminating treatise on the foundations of literary criticism has not used his time to real educational profit—even if he has won high academic distinction. It is characteristic of the academic conventionality of the Great Books ethos to endorse the conventional academic standing of the Poetics. I am not of course being foolish enough to question the importance and greatness of Ar- The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education istotle—which brings me to the second head of the proposition I threw out in the last paragraph. Every educated person must know something about the nature of that importance and greatness, but it doesn’t follow that he need have made a study of Aristotle’s works, or that it would have been good economy for him to attempt it. Every educated person must know something about Plato, and will undoubtedly have read some of the works, but it doesn’t follow that he must have read studiously through the oeuvre listed among the Great Books. And when it comes to prescribing that he must also have read the works of St. Thom- as Aquinas and Kant and Hegel (I confine myself to philosophers—to which, of course, the Great Books are not confined) it is plain beyond question that the promoters of the scheme not only have no notion of the limitations of the ordinary man (or the ordinary member of the intellectually given minority); they have no notion of the nature of a trained mind—or (shall I say) of that kind of training of the powers of thought which must be central to any real education. The student has to learn, as a matter of firm personal possession, the difference between real thinking and what ordinarily passes for that. It is a difficult and painful business, and one that is far from always forwarded—or even proposed—by the academic regime and environment. To the would-be self-improver faced with the Great Books program as something to be seriously attempted, the difference, unless he is a genius or has unusual luck, will never present itself in any challenging form. The difficulty of learning what it is will elude his apprehension in the ardors and endurances, the confident new assaults on Ever- ests of knowledge prescribed for him by Mr. Hut-chins. The typical product of that liberal enterprise, persisted in (if one can conceive of persistence on a big enough scale for there to be a typical product), will be that large, never-at-a-loss knowledgeableness, that articulate intellectuality, that happy confidence among large ideas, which condemns the possessor to essential ignorance of the nature of real—that is, of creative—thinking. And that is no real higher education which doesn’t bring the student some first-hand experience of creative thinking—enough at any rate for him to know what it is, and to know the worthlessness of mere confident articulate intellectuality. A man will hardly justify time and energy spent in reading the works of Aristotle (to take one instance of the many presented by the Great Books) unless he is committed to an intensity of sustained frequentation, and to a study also of the works of the relevant specialists, that will make him something of a specialist himself. Mr. Hutchins and his friends, in fact, have not formulated the problem of liberal education as it presents itself today to anyone who proposes really to grapple with it. We are irretrievably committed to specialization, and no man can master all the specialisms. The problem is that of educating a central kind of mind, one that will give the different specialisms a humane center, and civilization a center of consciousness. I will add at once, in order to counter- act any false suggestion conveyed by “a central kind of mind,” that the hope must be, for those who see the problem for what it is and feel its urgency, to work out different partial solutions at different places. F.R. Leavis

MYSELF have suggested, in Education and the 6/25/2008, how the opportunities presenting themselves in England at my own university might be taken advantage Iof for some such partial solution. I mention my book because, while intent on defining principles as sharply as possible, I aim there immediately at practice, and give my scheme in some detail: it is only so, it seems to me, that principle, and the nature of a proposed solution, can be made clear. But here, by the way of emphasizing that my criticism of the Great Books is no mere negative affair, I can only throw out some brief and general indications of the lines on which, I think, experiment should proceed—except that I add: “I have explained, in terms bearing directly on practice, precisely what I have in mind—and I have given my hostages.” That liberal education should be centered in the study of creative literature is a proposition that will perhaps meet with general agreement. When I insist that for English- speaking people it must be centered in the literature of the English language I have in mind in the first place the distinctive discipline of intelligence that literary study should be. And here I come to a place where, I know, without a particularity of illustration that is out of the question, I cannot be sure of not being misunderstood. It ought to be possible to insist that there is a real discipline of intelligence proper to the field of literary study without being supposed to be indicating the “New Criticism.” But I should, I know, be ill advised not to say that what I am thinking of is none of the things commonly associated with that description. The real, disciplined application of intelligence to works of literature is one in which intelligence is not distinguishable from sensibility and essentially involves value judgment. I may indicate the force of my insistence by saying Irving Babbitt, Mr. T. S. Eliot’s enormously learned mentor who hadn’t the beginnings of intelligence about the literature of his own time, does not exemplify the mind that a liberal education would point to as proof of its success. But the intellectualist inadequacy of the Great Conversation—of that conception of tradition and cultural consciousness and essential human history—comes out most strikingly, perhaps, in Mr. Hutchins’ attitude towards American literature of the past; bringing us to another aspect of the central place of literary study in liberal education:

We thought it no part of our duty to emphasize national contributions, even those of our own country. I omitted Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau and Mark Twain, all very great writers, because I felt that, important as they were, they did not measure up to the other books in the set. They carried forward the Great Conversation, but not in such a way as to be indispensable to the comprehension of it.

Heaven save us from any large supply of the kind of “comprehension” threatened here! It would be the end of all hope of any renewal of life. On that list of names one has to comment that, odd as it is as a list of the “very great” American writers, a study of the writers named, The ‘Great Books’ and a Liberal Education intelligently directed, would provide a better approach in liberal education than any represented by the Syntopicon. This is the more so because one of those named is truly a very great writer, and his masterpiece, not unreasonably reputed the greatest American classic, a peculiarly good opening for a study of civilization. Actually Huckleberry Finn, though excluded from the first list of the Great Books, was let in later. There is a commentary on it in that series of guidebooks (Symposia: five volumes ofA Christian Appraisat) which appears also to have been an after-thought (and since the commentators are all Roman Catholics, and from other hints, there would seem to be a curious history behind it). The commenta- tor on Huckleberry Finn pays as good as no attention to the aspects of the book that make it so peculiarly fitted for the purpose in question.Huckleberry Finn exemplifies with great force a kind of relation between “uneducated” living tradition and intellectual culture that the promoters of the Great Books know (one gathers) nothing of; Mark Twain’s art brings the folk culture of the frontier into something that is much more than “folk” and belongs to sophisticated literature. We have here (I make a second point) an unrivaled opening into a study of crucial importance for Americans: the part of the frontier in the history of European civilization in America (a study that, properly developed, would throw some light on the significance of the enterprise under review). Further,Huckleberry Finn illustrates supremely well how creative literature can provide, for the purposes of liberal education, the best kind of opening into ethical inquiry (and sociological); for the main theme of the book, abstractly stated, is the problem presented by the inescapable need for concrete ethical decisions in a society that, like any “Christian” society, has a complex tradition, and is far from univocal in its ethical imperatives and promptings. That the Great Books expositor should not have no- ticed this interest (the central one) in a great work of creative literature—presented, that is, in the concrete and presented by a profound student, not of the Great Ideas, but of life—constitutes a piquant comment on the intellectual education advocated (and aptly illustrates the force of the description, “academic intellectualism”). An intelligent study of Huckleberry Finn, of course, would go with a study of Mark Twain and Mark Twain’s America, And such a study (there is admirable guidance—I am thinking in particular of the work of Mr. Bernard De Voto) offers as good an entry into the study of civilized man, and of the problems of civilized living, as a scheme of liberal education could ask for. It is only when intimately related to living experience that thought and knowledge in general or historical terms can have any vitality—can be anything but merely “intellectual” and academic.

NE HAS to note finally that, in his preoccupation with the Great Ideas, the idea of a literature seems to have escaped Mr. Hutchins. “We thought it no part of Oour duty to emphasize national contributions, even those of our country.” By “national contributions” Mr. Hutchins means individual and separate Great Books. But a literatureis a necessary concept, especially for liberal education; and where a country F.R. Leavis has a literature, and a great one, that literature will, in any real liberal education, be very much emphasized: it will be at the center. And America has a classical literature, and one the central line of which explores with great subtlety the meaning of American history and the relation of America to Europe: important enough themes for any Western mind. It is a literature that has the advantage of being, while distinctively American, part of the greatest of all literatures. I cannot conceive of an intelligent attempt to solve the problem of liberal education in America that should not make a great deal of that opportunity. I am thinking in particular, of course, of the line of novelists: Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James, the line that (and we may associate Mark Twain) may be said to be the distinctively American way back to (or way on from) Shakespeare— Shakespeare who stands as the great presence in the background. I shall not, I hope, have been taken to be suggesting that liberal education will be merely a matter of literary studies. But the scheme of liberal education for America that assumes the reading of Shakespeare and the reading of Aeschylus (in translation—and “Great books contain their own aids to reading”) to be the same kind of thing must be judged to betray an ignorance of the nature of literature; and a scheme that hasn’t a sound notion of literature at its center has gone wrong. The syntopical ignorance (we may call it) that knows nothing of the nature of true literary study, or of the idea of a literature, goes with the intellectualism of the Great Books scheme. And the intellectualism has as a major aspect the pseudo-democratic optimism that pronounces: this is liberal education, and everybody should be capable of it, for it hasn’t been proved that he isn’t; this, or nothing, and the free democrat who doesn’t qualify deserves the slavery coming to him. It is pseudo-optimism; offered alternative slaveries, the ordinary man has no real choice, for very few could tread that intellectual mill, or make any sustained show of treading it. But actually, of course, it is very far from being this or nothing. And of no standard, or higher norm, of liberal education can it be said, it is this or nothing. The standard must be maintained somewhere, or everything is lost for the whole community. But if the standard is established and maintained, and it is a good and vital one, there will be possibilities of education, and of real participation in the cultural heritage, at many levels. What I have been really saying is that it must be intimately associated with a conception—one related to facts, or one that its servants are validly determined to make so—of higher culture as part of the whole community’s tradition of humane life.q June 1954

Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham Communiqué on an unequal battle. Robert Warshow

Y SON PAUL, who is eleven years old, belongs to the E.C. Fan- Addict Club, a synthetic organization set up as a promotional device by the Entertaining Comics Group, publishers of Mad (“Tales Calculated to Drive You MAD—Humor in a Jugular Vein”), Panic (“This is No Comic Book, This is a PANIC—Hu- mor in a Varicose Vein”), Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror , Weird Science-Fantasy, Shock SuspenStories, Crime SuspenStories (“Jolting TalesM of Tension in the E.C. Tradition”), and, I imagine, various other such periodicals. For his twenty-five-cent membership fee (soon to be raised to fifty cents), the E.C. Fan- Addict receives a humorously phrased certificate of membership, a wallet-size “identification card,” a pin and a shoulder-patch bearing the club emblem, and occasional mailings of the club bulletin, which publishes chitchat about the writers, artists, and editors, releases trial balloons on ideas for new comic books, lists members’ requests for back numbers, and in general tries to foster in the membership a sense of identification with this particular publishing company and its staff. E.C. Fan-Addict Club Bul-

Robert Warshow, managing editor of Commentary for eight years, was an essayist and film critic. Robert Warshow letin Number 2, March 1954, also suggests some practical activities for the members. “Everytime you pass your newsstand, fish out the E.C.’s from the bottom of the piles or racks and put ’em up on top. . . . BUT PLEASE, YOU MONSTERS, DO IT NEATLY!” Paul, I think, does not quite take this “club” with full seriousness, but it is clear that he does in some way value his membership in it, at least for the present. He has had the club shoulder-patch put on one of his jackets, and when his membership pin broke recently he took the trouble to send for a new one. He has recruited a few of his schoolmates into the organization. If left free to do so, he will buy any comic book which bears the E.C. trademark, and is usually quite satisfied with the purchase. This is not a matter of “loyalty,” but seems to reflect some real standard of discrimination; he has occasionally sampled other comic books which imitate the E.C. group and finds them inferior.

T SHOULD be said that the E.C. comics do in fact display a certain imaginative flair. Mad and Panic are devoted to a wild, undisciplined machine-gun attack on American Ipopular culture, creating an atmosphere of nagging hilarity something like the clown- ing of Jerry Lewis. They have come out with covers parodying the Saturday Evening Post and Life, and once with a vaguely “serious” cover in imitation of magazines like Harper’s or the Atlantic. (“Do you want to look like an idiot reading comic books all your life? Buy Mad, then you can look like an idiot reading high-class literature.”) The current issue of Mad (dated August) has Leonardo’s Mona Lisa on the cover, smiling as enigmatically as ever and cradling a copy of Mad in her arms. The tendency of the humor, in its insistent violence, is to reduce all culture to indiscriminate anarchy. These comic books are in a line of descent from the Marx Brothers, from the Three Stooges whose funniest business is to poke their fingers in each other’s eyes, and from that comic orchestra which starts out playing “serious” music and ends up with all the instruments smashed. A very funny parody of the comic-strip Little Orphan Annie, in Mad or Panic, shows Annie cut into small pieces by a train because Daddy Warbucks’s watch is slow and he has arrived just too late for the last minute; Annie’s detached head complains: “It hurts when I laugh.” The parody ends with the most obvious and most vulgar explanation of why Annie calls Daddy Warbucks “Daddy”; I had some difficulty in explaining that joke to Paul. One of the funnier stories in Panic tells of a man who finds himself on the television program “This Is Your Life”; as his old friends and neighbors appear one by one to fill in the story of his life, it becomes clear that nobody has seen his wife since 11:30 P.M. on the ninth of October 1943; shortly before that he had made some rather significant purchases: arsenic, a shovel, quicklime. Evidence piles up, including the actual bones of his wife (dug up by his old dog, Rover, who also appears on the program and will do nothing but growl at his former master). At the end of the program, of course, the man is arrested for murder; television’s assault on privacy has reached its logical conclusion. I understand that Mad is rather popular among college students, and I have myself read it with a kind of irritated pleasure. Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham

The straightforward crime and horror comics, such as Shock SuspenStories, Crime SuspenStories, or The Vault of Horror, exhibit the same undisciplined imaginativeness and violence without the leavening of humor. One of the more gruesome stories in Crime SuspenStories is simply a “serious” version of the story I have outlined from Panic: Again a man murders his wife (this time with an ax) and buries her in the backyard, and again he is trapped on a television program. In another story, a girl some ten or eleven years old, unhappy in her home life, shoots her father, frames her mother and the mother’s lover for the murder, and after their death in the electric chair (“Mommy went first. Then Steve.”) is shown living happily with Aunt Kate, who can give her the emotional security she has lacked. The child winks at us from the last panel in appreciation of her own clev- erness. Some of the stories, if one takes them simply in terms of their plots, are not unlike the stories of Poe or other writers of horror tales; the publishers of such comic books have not failed to point this out. But of course the bareness of the comic-book form makes an enormous difference. Both the humor and the horror in their utter lack of modulation yield too readily to the child’s desire to receive his satisfactions immediately, thus tending to subvert one of the chief elements in the process of growing up, which is to learn to wait; a child’s developing appreciation of the complexity of good literature is surely one of the things that contribute to his eventual acceptance of the complexity of life.

DO NOT suppose that Paul’s enthusiasm for the products of this particular publisher will necessarily last very long. At various times in the past he has been a devotee of Ithe Dell Publishing Company (Gene Autry, Red Ryder, Tarzan, The Lone Ranger, etc.), National Comics (Superman, Action Comics, Batman, etc.), Captain Marvel, The Marvel Family, Zoo Funnies (very briefly),Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and, on a higher level, Pogo Possum. He has around a hundred and fifty comic books in his room, though he plans to weed out some of those which no longer interest him. He keeps closely aware of dates of publication and watches the newsstands from day to day and from corner to corner if possible; when a comic book he is concerned with is late in appearing, he is likely to get in touch with the publisher to find out what has caused the delay. During thePogo period, indeed, he seemed to be in almost constant communication with Walt Kelly and the Post-Hall Syndicate, asking for original drawings (he has two of them), investigating delays in publication of the comic books (there are quarterly 15-cent comic books, published by Dell, in addition to the daily newspaper strip and the frequent paper-bound volumes published at one dollar by Simon and Schuster), or tracking down rumors that a Pogo shirt or some other such object was to be put on the market (the rumors were false; Pogo is being kept free of “commercialization”). During the 1952 presidential campaign, Pogo was put forward as a “candidate,” and there were buttons saying “I Go Pogo”; Paul managed to acquire about a dozen of these, although, as he was told, they were intended primarily for distribution among college students. Even now he maintains a distant Robert Warshow fondness for Pogo, but I am no longer required to buy the New York Post every day in order to save the daily strips for him. I think that Paul’s desire to put himself directly in touch with the processes by which the comic books are produced may be the expression of a fundamental detachment which helps to protect him from them; the comic books are not a “universe” to him, but simply objects produced for his entertainment.

HEN PAUL was home from school for his spring vacation this year, I took him and two of his classmates to visit the offices of the Entertaining Com- W ics Group at 225 Lafayette Street. (I had been unable to find the company in the telephone book until I thought of looking it up as “Educational Comics”; I am told that this is one of five corporate names under which the firm operates.) As it turned out, there was nothing to be seen except a small anteroom containing a pretty receptionist and a rack of comic books; the editors were in conference and could not be disturbed. (Of course I knew there must be conferences, but this discovery that they actually occur at a particular time and place somehow struck me; I should have liked to know how the editors talked to each other.) In spite of our confinement to the anteroom, however, the children seemed to experience as great a sense of exaltation as if they had found themselves in the actual presence of, say, Gary Cooper. One of Paul’s two friends signed up there and then in the E.C. Fan-Addict Club (Paul had recruited the other one into the club earlier) and each boy bought seven or eight back numbers. When the receptionist obligingly went into the inner offices to see if she could collect a few autographs, the boys by crowding around the door as she opened it managed to catch a glimpse of one of the artists, Johnny Craig, whom Paul recognized from a drawing of him that had appeared in one of the comic books. In response to the boys’ excitement, the door was finally opened wide so that for a few seconds they could look at Mr. Craig; he waved at them pleasantly from behind his drawing board and then the door was closed. Before we left, the publisher himself, William Gaines, passed through the anteroom, presumably on his way to the men’s room. He too was recognized, shook hands with the boys, and gave them his autograph. I am sure the children’s enthusiasm contained some element of self-parody, or at any rate an effort to live up to the situation—after all, a child is often very uncertain about what is exciting, and how much. It is quite likely that the little sheets of paper bearing the precious autographs have all been misplaced by now. But there is no doubt that the excursion was a great success. A few weeks later Mr. Gaines testified before a Congressional committee that is investigating the effects of comic books on children and their relation to juvenile delinquency. Mr. Gaines, as one would expect, was opposed to any suggestion that comic books be censored. In his opinion, he said, the only restrictions on the editors of comic books should be the ordinary restrictions of good taste. Senator Kefauver presented for Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham his examination the cover of an issue of Crime SuspenStories (drawn by Johnny Craig) which shows a man holding by its long blond hair the severed head of a woman. In the man’s other hand is the dripping ax with which he has just carried out the decapitation, and the lower part of the woman’s body, with the skirt well up on the plump thighs, appears in the background. It was an illustration for the story I have described in which the murderer is finally trapped on a television program. Did Mr. Gaines think this cover in good taste? Yes, he did—for a horror comic. If the head had been held a little higher, so as to show blood dripping from the severed neck, that would have been bad taste. Mr. Gaines went on to say that he considers himself to be the originator of horror comics and is proud of it. He mentioned also that he is a graduate of the New York University School of Education, qualified to teach in the high schools. I did not fail to clip the report of Mr. Gaines’s testimony from the Times and send it to Paul, together with a note in which I said that while I was in some confusion about the comic-book question, at least I was sure I did not see what Mr. Gaines had to be so proud about. But Paul has learned a few things in the course of the running argument about comic books that has gone on between us. He thanked me for sending the clipping and declined to be drawn into a discussion. Such discussions have not proved very fruitful for him in the past.

HEY HAVE not been very fruitful for me either. I know that I don’t like the comics myself and that it makes me uncomfortable to see Paul reading them. But it’s T hard to explain to Paul why I feel this way, and somewhere along the line it seems to have been established that Paul is always entitled to an explanation: He is a child of our time. I said once that the gross and continual violence of the comic books was objectionable. He said: “What’s so terrible about things being exciting?” Well, nothing really; but there are books that are much more exciting, and the comics keep you from reading the books. But I read books too. (He does, especially when there are no comics available.) Why read the comics at all? But you said yourself that Mad is pretty good. You gotta admit! Yes, I know I did. But it’s not that good. . . . Oh, the comics are just stupid, that’s all, and I don’t see why you should be wasting so much time with them. Maybe they’re stupid sometimes. But look at this one. This one is really good. Just read it! Why won’t you just read it? Usually I refuse to “just read it,” but that puts me at once at a disadvantage. How can I condemn something without knowing what it is? And sometimes, when I do read it, I am forced to grant that maybe this particular story does have a certain minimal distinction, and then I’m lost. Didn’t I say myself that Mad is pretty good? Robert Warshow

I suppose this kind of discussion can be carried on better than I seem able to do, but it’s a bad business getting into discussions anyway. If you’re against comic books, then you say: no comic books. I understand there are parents who manage to do that. The best—or worst— that has happened to Paul was a limit on the number of comic books he was allowed to have in a week: I think it was three. But that was intolerable; there were special occasions, efforts to borrow against next week, negotiations for revision of the allotment; there wasalways a discussion.

HE FUNDAMENTAL difficulty, in a way—the thing that leaves both Paul and me uncertain of our ground—is that the comics obviously do not constitute a serious T problem in his life. He is in that Fan-Addict Club, all right, and he likes to make a big show of being interested in E.C. comics above all else that the world has to offer, but he and I both know that while he may be a fan, he is not an addict. His life at school is pretty busy (this has been his first year at school away from home) and comics are not encouraged, though they certainly do find their way in. Paul subscribes toMad and, I think, Pogo (also to Zoo Funnies and Atomic Mouse, but he doesn’t read those any more), and he is still inclined to haunt the newsstands when he is in New York; indeed, the first thing he wants to do when he gets off the train is buy a comic. In spite of all obstacles, I suppose he manages to read a hundred in a year, at worst perhaps even a hundred and fifty—that would take maybe seventy-five to a hundred hours. On the other hand, he doesn’t see much television or listen much to the radio, and he does read books, draw, paint, play with toads, look at things through a microscope, write stories and poems, imitate Jerry Lewis, and in general do everything that one could reasonably want him to do, plus a few extras like skiing and riding. He seems to me a more alert, skillful, and self-possessed child than I or any of my friends were at eleven, if that’s any measure. Moreover, I can’t see that his hundred or hundred and fifty comic books are having any very specific effects on him. The bloodiest of ax murders apparently does not disturb his sleep or increase the violence of his own impulses. Mad and Panic have helped to develop in him a style of humor which may occasionally be wearing but is in general pretty successful; and anyway, Jerry Lewis has had as much to do with this as the comics. Paul’s writing is highly melodramatic, but that’s only to be expected, and he is more likely to model himself on Erle Stanley Gardner or Wilkie Collins than on Crime SuspenStories. Sometimes the melodrama goes over the line into the gruesome, and in that the comic books no doubt play a role; but if there were no comic books, Paul would be reading things like “The Pit and the Pendulum” or The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym—which, to be sure, would be better. Now and then he has expressed a desire to be a comic-book artist when he grows up, or a television comedian. So far as I can judge, he has no inclination to accept as real the comic-book conception of human nature which sees everyone as a potential criminal and every criminal as an absolute criminal.* Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham

As you see, I really don’t have much reason to complain; that’s why Paul wins the arguments. But of course I complain anyway. I don’t like the comic books—not even Mad, whatever I may have unguardedly allowed myself to say—and I would prefer it if Paul did not read them. Like most middle-class parents, I devote a good deal of over-anxious attention to his education, to the “influences” that play on him and the “problems” that arise for him. Almost anything in his life is likely to seem important to me, and I find it hard to accept the idea that there should be one area of his experience, apparently of considerable importance to him, which will have no important consequences. One comic book a week or ten, they must have an effect. How can I be expected to believe that it will be a good one?

ESTIFYING in opposition to Mr. Gaines at the Congressional hearing was Dr. Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist who has specialized in work with problem and T delinquent children. Dr. Wertham has been studying and attacking the comic books for a number of years. His position on the question is now presented in full in his recently published book Seduction of the Innocent. The most impressive part of the book is its illustrations: two dozen or so examples of comic-book art displaying the outer limits of that “good taste” which Mr. Gaines suggests might be a sufficient restraint upon the editors. There is a picture of a baseball game in which the ball is a man’s head with one eye dangling from its socket, the bat is a severed leg, the catcher wears a dismembered human torso as chest protector, the baselines are marked with stretched-out intestines, the bases are marked with the lungs, liver, and heart, the rosin-bag is the dead man’s stomach, and the umpire dusts off home plate with the scalp. There is a close-up of a hanged man, tongue protruding, eyeballs turned back, the break in the neck clearly drawn. Another scene shows two men being dragged

* The assumption that human beings will always follow out the logic of their character to the limit is one of the worst elements in the comic books, and is pretty widespread in them. If a man is a burglar, he will not hesitate to commit murder; and if he is going to commit murder, he is often as likely to think of boiling his victim in oil as of shooting him. In the radio serial Mark Trail, a program no longer in existence which was based on the comic strip Mark Trail, men engaged in such illegal activities as hunting beaver out of season would unhesitatingly shoot any game warden who came upon them. (The theme of the program was supposed to be conservation.) This kind of “logic” may seem very proper to children. When Paul was about four or five, a babysitter read him the story of Blue- beard. I was a little disturbed when he mentioned this to me the next morning and I tried to probe his reactions. I said something like: “An exciting story, eh?” “Oh, yes,” said Paul. “That Bluebeard was quite a nasty character, wasn’t he?” I said. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Paul. “What do you mean you don’t know? Didn’t he try to murder his wife?” “Well,” said Paul, “he told her not to look in that closet.” Robert Warshow to death face down over a rocky road. “A couple more miles oughta do th’ trick!” says the driver of the car. “It better,” says his companion. “These ****!! GRAVEL ROADS are tough on tires!” “But you gotta admit,” replies the driver, “there’s nothing like ’em for ERASING FACES!” And so on. Dr. Wertham could surely have presented many more such examples if he had the space and could have obtained permission to reproduce them. From Paul’s collection, I recall with special uneasiness a story in which a rotting corpse returns from the grave; in full color, the hues and contours of decay were something to see. Among the recurrent motifs of the comic books, Dr. Wertham lists: hanging, flagella- tion, rape, torture of women, tying up of women, injury to the eye (one of the pictures he reproduces shows a horrifying close-up of a woman’s eye about to be pierced by an icepick). If a child reads ten comics of this sort a week (a not unusual figure), he may absorb in the course of a year from fifteen hundred to two thousand stories emphasizing these themes (a comic book contains three or four stories). If he takes them with any seriousness at all—and it is difficult to believe that he will not—they surely cannot fail to affect his developing attitudes towards violence, sex, and social restraint.

HAT THE effects will be, and how deep-seated, is not so easy to determine. And here Dr. Wertham is not very helpful. When he tells us of children who W have been found hanging, with a comic-book nearby opened to a picture of a hanging, one can readily share his alarm. The fact that these children were probably seriously disturbed before they ever read a comic book, and the fact that fantasies of hanging are in any case common among children, does not relieve one of the feeling that comic books may have provided the immediate stimulus that led to these deaths. Even if there were no children who actually hanged themselves, is it conceivable that comic books which play so directly and so graphically on their deepest anxieties should be without evil consequences? On the other hand, when Dr. Wertham tells us of children who have injured themselves trying to fly because they have readSuperman or Captain Marvel, one becomes skeptical. Children always want to fly and are always likely to try it. The elimination of Superman will not eliminate this sort of incident. Like many other children, I made my own attempt to fly after seeingPeter Pan; as I recall, I didn’t really expect it to work, but I thought: Who knows? In general, Dr. Wertham pursues his argument with a humorless dedication that tends to put all phenomena and all evidence on the same level. Discussing Superman, he suggests that it wouldn’t take much to change the “S” on that great chest to “S.S.” With a straight face he tells us of a little boy who was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and said, “I want to be a sex maniac!” He objects to advertisements for binoculars in comic books because a city child can have nothing to do with binoculars except to spy on the neighbors. He reports the case of a boy of twelve who had misbehaved with his sister and threatened to break her arm if she told anybody. “This is not the kind of thing that Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham boys used to tell their little sisters,” Dr. Wertham informs us. He quotes a sociologist who “analyzed” ten comic-book heroes of the Superman type and found that all of them “may well be designated as psychopathic deviates.” As an indication that there are some children “who are influenced in the right direction by thoughtful parents,” he tells us of the four-year-old son of one of his associates who was in the hospital with scarlet fever; when the nurses offered him some comic books, the worthy child refused them, “explaining. . . that his father had said they are not good for children.” Dr. Wertham will take at face value anything a child tells him, either as evidence of the harmful effects of the comic books (“I think sex all boils down to anxiety,” one boy told him; where could he have got such an idea except from the comics?) or as direct support for his own views: He quotes approv- ingly a letter by a thirteen-year-old boy taking solemn exception to the display of nudity in comic books, and a fourteen-year-old boy’s analysis of the economic motives which lead psychiatrists to give their endorsements to comic books. I suspect it would be a dull child indeed who could go to Dr. Wertham’s clinic and not discover very quickly that most of his problematical behavior can be explained in terms of the comic books.

HE PUBLISHERS complain with justice that Dr. Wertham makes no distinction between bad comic books and “good” ones. The Dell Publishing Company, for T instance, the largest of the publishers, claims to have no objectionable comics on its list, which runs to titles like Donald Duck and The Lone Ranger. National Comics Pub- lications (Superman, etc.), which runs second to Dell, likewise claims to avoid objectionable material and has an “editorial code” which specifically forbids the grosser forms of violence or any undue emphasis on sex. (If anything, this “code” is too puritanical, but mechanically fabricated culture can only be held in check by mechanical restrictions.) Dr. Wertham is largely able to ignore the distinction between bad and “good” because most of us find it hard to conceive of what a “good” comic book might be.* Yet in terms of their effect on children, there must be a significant difference betweenThe Lone Ranger or Superman or Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on the one hand and, say, the comic book from which Dr. Wertham took that picture of a baseball game played with the disconnected parts of a human body. If The Lone Ranger and Superman are bad, they are bad in a different way and on a different level. They are crude, unimaginative, banal, vulgar, ultimately corrupting. They are also, as Dr. Wertham claims, violent—but always within certain limits. Perhaps the worst thing they do is to meet the juvenile imagination on its crudest level and offer it an immediate and stereotyped satisfaction. That may be bad enough, but very much the same things could be said of much of our radio and television entertainment and many of our mass-circulation magazines. The objection to the more unrestrained hor-

* I leave out of consideration a few comics like Pogo Possum and Dennis the Menace which I think could be called good without quotation marks, though it is possible Dr. Wertham might find grounds for objection to these also. Robert Warshow ror and crime comics must be a different one. It is even possible that these outrageous pro- ductions may be in one sense “better” than The Lone Ranger or Sergeant Preston, for in their absolute lack of restraint they tend to be somewhat livelier and more imaginative; certainly they are often less boring. But that does not make them any less objectionable as reading matter for children. Quite the contrary, in fact: Superman and Donald Duck and The Lone Ranger are stultifying; Crime SuspenStories and The Vault of Horror are stimulating. A few years ago I heard Dr. Wertham debate with Al Capp on the radio. Mr. Capp at that time had introduced into Li’l Abner the story of the shmoos, agreeable little animals of 100 percent utility who would fall down dead in an ecstasy of joy if one merely looked at them hungrily. All the parts of a shmoo’s body, except the eyes, were edible, tasting variously like porterhouse steak, butter, turkey, probably even chocolate cake; and the eyes were useful as suspender buttons. Mr. Capp’s fantasy was in this—as, I think, in most of his work—mechanical and rather tasteless. But Dr. Wertham was not content to say anything like that. For him, the story of the shmoos was an incitement to sadistic violence comparable to anything else he had discovered in his reading of comics. He was especially disturbed by the use of the shmoo’s eyes as suspender buttons, something he took to be merely another repetition of that motif of injury to the eye which is exempli- fied in his present book by the picture of a woman about to be blinded with an icepick. In the violence of Dr. Wertham’s discourse on this subject one got a glimpse of his limitations as an investigator of social phenomena.

OR THE fact is that Dr. Wertham’s picture of society and human nature is one that a reader of comic books—at any rate, let us say, a reader of the “good” comic Fbooks—might not find entirely unfamiliar. Dr. Wertham’s world, like the world of the comic books, is one where the logic of personal interest is inexorable, and Seduction of the Innocent is a kind of crime comic book for parents, as its lurid title alone would lead one to expect. There is the same simple conception of motives, the same sense of overhanging doom, the same melodramatic emphasis on pathology, the same direct and immediate relation between cause and effect. If a juvenile criminal is found in possession of comic books, the comic books produced the crime. If a publisher of comic books, alarmed by attacks on the industry, retains a psychiatrist to advise him on suitable content for his publications, it follows necessarily that the arrangement is a dishonest one. If a psychiatrist accepts a fee of perhaps $150 a month for carrying out such an assign- ment (to judge by what Dr. Wertham himself tells us, the fees are not particularly high), that psychiatrist has been “bought”; it is of no consequence to point out how easily a psychiatrist can make $150. It is therefore all right to appeal to the authority of a sociologist who has “analyzed” Superman “according to criteria worked out by the psychologist Gordon W. Allport” and has found him to be a “psychopathic deviate,” but no authority whatever can be attached to the “bought” psychiatrist who has been professionally en- Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham gaged in the problem of comic books. If no comic-book publisher has been prosecuted under the laws against contributing to the delinquency of minors, it cannot be because those laws may not be applicable; it must be because “no district attorney, no judge, no complainant, has ever had the courage to make a complaint.” Dr. Wertham also exhibits a moral confusion which, even if it does not correspond exactly to anything in the comic books, one can still hope will not gain a footing among children. Comic-book writers and artists working for the more irresponsible publishers have told Dr. Wertham of receiving instructions to put more violence, more blood, and more sex into their work, and of how reluctantly they have carried out these instructions. Dr. Wer- tham writes: “Crime-comic-book writers should not be blamed for comic books. They are not free men. They are told what to do and they do it—or else. They often are, I have found, very critical of comics. . . . But of course . . . they have to be afraid of the ruthless economic power of the comic-book industry. In every letter I have received from a writer, stress is laid on requests to keep his identity secret.” What can Dr. Wertham mean by that ominous “or else” which explains everything and pardons everything? Will the recalcitrant writer be dragged face down over a rocky road? Surely not. What Dr. Wertham means is simply that the man might lose his job and be forced to find less lucrative employment. This economic motive is a sufficient excuse for the man who thought up that gruesome baseball game—I suppose because he is a “worker.” But it is no excuse for a psychiatrist who advises the publishers of Superman and sees to it that no dismembered bodies are played with in that comic book. And of course it is no excuse for a publisher—he is “the industry.” This monolithic concept of “the industry” is what makes it pointless to discover whether there is any difference between one publisher and another; it was not men who produced that baseball game—it was “the industry.” Would Dr. Wertham suggest to the children who come to his clinic that they cannot be held responsible for anything they do so long as they are doing it to make a living? I am sure he would not. But he does quote with the greatest respect the words of that intelligent fourteen-year-old who was able to see so clearly that if a psychiatrist receives a fee, one can obviously not expect that he will continue to act honestly. And it is not too hard to surmise where this young student of society got the idea. Apparently, also, when you are fighting a “ruthless industry” you are under no obligation to be invariably careful about what you say. Dr. Wertham very properly makes fun of the psychiatric defenders of comic books who consider it a sufficient justification of anything to say that it satisfies a “deep” need of a child. But on his side of the argument he is willing to put forward some equally questionable “deep” analysis of his own, most notably in his discussion of the supposedly equivocal relation between Batman and the young boy Robin; this particular analysis seems to me a piece of utter frivolity. He is also willing to create the impression that all comic books are on the level of the worst of them, and that psychiatrists have endorsed even such horrors as the piercing of women’s eyes and the whimsical dis- memberment of bodies. (In fact, the function performed by the reputable psychiatrists who Robert Warshow have acted as advisers to the publishers has been to suggest what land of comic books would be “healthy” reading for children. One can disagree with their idea of what is “healthy,” as Dr. Wertham does, or one can be troubled, as I am, at the addition of this new element of fabrica- tion to cultural objects already so mechanical; but there is no justification for implying that these psychiatrists have been acting dishonestly or irresponsibly.)

ONE OF THIS, however, can entirely destroy Dr. Wertham’s case. It remains true that there is something questionable in the tendency of psychiatrists to place N such stress on the supposed psychological needs of children as to encourage the spread of material which is at best subversive of the same children’s literacy, sensitivity, and general cultivation. Superman and The Three Musketeers may serve the same psychological needs, but it still matters whether a child reads one or the other. We are left also with the underworld of publishing which produced that baseball game, which I don’t suppose I shall easily forget, and with Mr. Gaines’s notions of good taste, with the children who have hanged themselves, and with the advertisements for switch-blade knives, pellet guns, and breast developers which accompany the sadistic and erotic stimulations of the worst comic books.3 We are left above all with the fact that for many thousands of children’s comic books, whether bad or “good,” represent virtually their only contact with culture. There are children in the schools of our large cities who carry knives and sometimes guns. There are children who reach the last year of high school without ever reading a single book. Even leaving aside the increase in juvenile crime, there seem to be larger numbers of children than ever before who, without going over the line into criminality, live almost entirely in a juvenile underground largely out of touch with the demands of social responsibility, culture, and personal refinement, and who grow up into an unhappy isolation where they are sustained by little else but the routine of the working day, the unceasing clamor of television and the juke boxes, and still, in their adult years, the comic books. This is a very fundamental problem; to blame the comic books, as Dr. Wertham

* An advertisement on the back cover of recent issues of Panic and Weird Science-Fantasy strikes a loftier note:

Boys, Girls, Men, Women! The World Is On FIRE Serve The LORD and You Can Have These PRIZES! We will send you the wonderful prizes pictured on this page . . . all WITHOUT ONE PENNY OF COST. Crime, sin, graft, wars are the greatest they have ever been. Our leaders say a reawakening of Christianity is needed to save us. You can do your share by spreading the gospel into every house in your community. Merely show your friends and neighbors inspiring, beautiful Religious Wall Motto plaques. Many buy six or more. . . only 35¢ . . . sell on sight. . . . Serve the LORD and earn prizes you want. Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham does, is simple-minded. But to say that the comics do not contribute to the situation would be like denying the importance of the children’s classics and the great English and Euro- pean novels in the development of an educated man. The problem of regulation or even suppression of the comic books, however, is a great deal more difficult than Dr. Wertham imagines. If the publication of comic books were forbidden, surely something on an equally low level would appear to take their place. Children do need some “sinful” world of their own to which they can retreat from the demands of the adult world; as we sweep away one juvenile dung heap, they will move on to another. The point is to see that the dung heap does not swallow them up, and to hope it may be one that will bring forth blossoms. But our power is limited; it is the children who have the initiative: They will choose what they want. In any case, it is not likely that the level of literacy and culture would be significantly raised if the children simply turned their attention more exclusively to television and the love, crime, and movie magazines. Dr. Wertham, to be sure, seems quite ready to carry his fight into these areas as well; ultimately, one suspects, he would like to see our culture entirely hygienic. I cannot agree with this tendency. I myself would not like to live surrounded by the kind of culture Dr. Wertham could thoroughly approve of, and what I would not like for myself I would hardly desire for Paul. The children must take their chances like the rest of us. But when Dr. Wertham is dealing with the worst of the comic books he is on strong ground; some kind of regulation seems necessary—indeed, the more respectable publishers of comic books might reasonably welcome it—and I think one must accept Dr. Wertham’s contention that no real problem of “freedom of expression” is involved, except that it may be difficult to frame a law that would not open the way to a wider censorship.

LL THIS has taken me a long way from Paul, who doesn’t carry a switch-blade knife and has so far been dissuaded even from subscribing to Charles Atlas’s A body-building course. Paul only clutches at his chest now and then, says something like “arrgh,” and drops dead; and he no longer does that very often. Perhaps even Dr. Wertham would not be greatly alarmed about Paul. But I would not say that Paul is not involved in the problem at all. Even if he “needs” Superman, I would prefer that he didn’t read it. And what he does read is not even Superman, which is too juvenile for him; he reads some of the liveliest, bloodiest, and worst material that the “ruthless” comic-book industry has to offer—he is an E.C. Fan-Addict. I think my position is that I would be happy if Senator Kefauver and Dr. Wertham could find some way to make it impossible for Paul to getany comic books. But I’d rather Paul didn’t get the idea that I had anything to do with it.q February 1956

Returning to Dachau The living and the dead. Bruno Bettelheim

FF AND ON for close to twenty years, and beginning long before my own experience made them a very personal and immediate issue, the problems posed by totalitarian society have occupied my mind. A year (1938-39) in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buch- enwald made me realize what a central role the concentration camp (or prison) plays as an instrument of control under totalitarianism, and how essential it is in shaping the individual’s personality into the type such a society Orequires. At first, therefore, it was the psychology and the sociology of the concentration camp that interested me most. The result was a monograph published during the war, when information about the camps was still meager, which was met with skepticism in many places. In it, I described the ways in which the integrity of the human being was undermined by the camp regi- men and his personality radically changed. But a more important study remained to be written, one that would deal with the problem of reviving, restoring, and reintegrating the personality that had undergone the experience of the concentration camp. And this, the rehabilitation of traumatized or “destroyed” individuals, has been my vocation for many years. Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States, where he became a renowned psychologist and writer. He was a professor of educationl psychology for many years at the University of Chicago. Bruno Bettelheim

MONG the reasons I accepted a recent invitation to spend several months at the University of Frankfort was the knowledge that I would be working with a group A of sociologists who might help me to understand this process of rehabilitation. Originally, my plan of research was simple: I would interview Germans who had been in concentration camps in order to try and fathom the ways in which they had dealt with their experience. But a few weeks of careful observation made me realize that I had seen my problem much too simply. Although I myself had already said in print that the personality of no one who had passed through a concentration camp could be immune to the effect of its institutions, I had not realized how utterly true this was. After a few weeks of talking to people in all walks of German life, and observing the present-day forms of that life—whether in universities, on the street, or at places of work—the conclusion became inescapable that every German had in some way or other been an inmate of that wider concentration camp which was the Third Reich. Every German who lived under the Nazi regime, whether he accepted or fought it, had been through a concentration camp in a sense; some, the actual inmates, had gone through it as tortured slaves, others—the majority of Germans— had gone through it as trustees, so to speak. Down at bottom the German had had only two positions open to him under Hitler: to preserve his inner integrity by fighting all aspects of the Nazi state—which a small minority did—or to accept it to a large degree and shape his personality in accordance with its demands—which was what the vast majority did. This difference between minority and majority still exists in Adenauer’s Germany, and in all probability in the East Zone too. There are those who cannot yet extricate themselves from their struggle against the concentration-camp society, and those who cannot yet extricate themselves from having assented or been resigned to it. Psychologically speaking, one might say that both groups were severely traumatized. But since the nature of the traumas was antithetical, they have reacted differently. Those who more or less accepted the concentration-camp society deny the nature of the camps and their horrors; in their case it is obvious that real amnesia has set in. When broken through, such amnesia tries to reestablish itself by frantic denials, by alibiing and by reaction formations (complaints about what the Americans and Russians did to Germans, what Americans still do to Negroes, and so on); a whole repertory of defensive mecha- nisms are set in motion when the amnesia that is still needed by the individual in order to continue functioning is attacked from the outside.

UT THOSE who fought the Nazi regime are hardly any more able to go on living in tranquility. They do not deny, or block out by amnesia, the fact of the concen- Btration-camp society; on the contrary, they seem to go on reliving that trauma in an “unintegrated” way. I met a man who wanted, most devotedly, to build a better Ger- Returning to Dachau many; he was not an isolated individual but an active leader of German intellectual life. After a while our conversation turned to the concentration camps, whereupon he took a two-year-old newspaper clipping out of his wallet and showed it to me. It reported that a visitor to Dachau had been told by his German guide that none but criminals were confined in the camps, that torture was never practiced in them, and that what most people said about them was all lies—no decent citizen had ever been sent to a concentration camp. At the time, I did not know whether to place any belief in this report or not. But what struck me was that this man had carried the clipping in his breast-pocket for two years—over his heart, as it were—which suggested that he, too, was unable to forget the concentration camps, not for a moment. . . .

HAD TOYED with the idea of revisiting Dachau, which I had been told was being preserved as a kind of memorial. The clipping and the dramatic way it had been Ibrought to my attention increased my desire to do so. I had spent the spring and summer of 1938 in Dachau before being transferred to Buchenwald. In a way, I wanted to have the guide who would take me around deny the horrors of the camp; this would confirm me in my conviction that today’s Germans prefer to deny wholly what Nazism had been like. But reality, as so often happens, turned out to be entirely different. On my way to Dachau I stayed at one of the best hotels in Munich, registering as an American citizen and deliberately speaking nothing but English. When I asked how to make arrangements to visit the site of the concentration camp at Dachau, the desk clerk, who until then had been most polite and helpful, suddenly busied himself with another guest. Pressed, he told me that he didn’t know if one could visit Dachau or how, and that there was nothing of interest left there anyway. I insisted nevertheless, and again he turned away from me, with the indication this time that I was showing very bad taste. Af- ter waiting a while, I turned to another desk clerk with the same question and got more or less the same response. Finally, in the face of my persistence, they said they didn’t know how the camp could be reached, since it was quite far from the train station, and hiring a car and driving there from Munich would be very expensive. I answered that I would take the train and try to get a ride from Dachau station. This, they said, might be possible, but they were not at all sure I would be able to get a taxi there. I said I was willing to risk it. Was it not a memorable, though sinister, place that might be interesting to see? Icy silence. Then I asked for the train schedule, and was told that trains ran often to Dachau. What was the next one? I was shown a huge timetable giving all the trains leaving Munich in all directions. It was fastened to the desk facing the clerks, so I had to scan it upside down. Until then I had not felt very strongly about visiting Dachau, but these hotel clerks gradually awoke a cold anger in me, first at their implicit denial of the importance of the camp, and then at the attitude of disapproval they manifested to one who seemed interested in it. Bruno Bettelheim

So once aboard the suburban train from Munich to Dachau, I felt in more of a mood to relive the feelings I had known while in the camp itself. The easy, comfortable half-hour’s ride reminded me of the trip of seventeen years before, with all its brutality involving the murder of good friends and the maiming of others. By the time I walked out of sleepy Dachau station to one of the several waiting taxis I was ready for an emotional experience. I had planned the trip in the spirit of the newspaper clipping that partly motivated it. I had decided now to be a skeptical Austrian. In my best Viennese dialect I asked the taxi driver how far it was to the camp, whether there was anything to see there, and how much time it would take to visit it. The friendliness, the eagerness to do business with a sightseer, with which he encouraged me to visit the place and offered to point out all the interesting sights—claiming to be thoroughly familiar with them—was disarming. I mentioned casu- ally that I had heard a lot of contradictory stories and, having some time on my hands, had felt the impulse to find out the truth. I added that people tended to exaggerate and drama- tize things, whereupon he told me it was hardly possible to exaggerate Dachau’s horrors. He began to tell me about incidents some of which, curiously enough, I had witnessed myself. He spoke of the petty difficulties he had had with the SS men guarding the camp, and of the greater difficulties with them that peasants in the neighborhood had had. He described to me the killing of prisoners in ’38 and the incredibly callous attitude of the SS men involved—exactly what I myself had witnessed so many times. I was just beginning to wonder how it was that this man could accept the truth about the concentration camps with so much equanimity when he gave me the answer, or the clue to it. Suddenly he left his tale of Dachau to reminisce about his four years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia; how he had lived in fear of his life between the Russian guards and the cold, dirt, and hunger. It was as if a story about one prison camp naturally led to one about another.

ERE, then, was my answer. This German had suffered under Hitler—so he felt—just as much as those in Hitler’s concentration camps had. So he felt free Hof guilt. As a resident of the village of Dachau, he had not only known of the existence of the camp, but had feared its presence—this, more than most other Germans. True, he had been happy about German military successes as long as they continued, and he commended the greater equality in the distribution of earthly goods (particularly food) under the Nazis as compared with the years immediately after 1945 when some had plenty while he had starved. Nonetheless, he was full of hatred for Hitler; it was, however, mainly for very personal reasons. Before the war the SS men from Dachau camp had filled the taverns in town and mo- nopolized the free girls. Even worse, they had interfered with one of the great pleasures of his youth, which was to sit in the tavern with his friends and sound off about everything that displeased him in life. The constant presence of the SS men had prevented them from talking to each other as they wanted to. The cab driver became even more Returning to Dachau heated when describing to me how that scoundrel, Hitler, by locating the camp outside this nice home town of his, had given it a bad name in the world—so much of one that whenever he went elsewhere he preferred not to say where he lived, since that invariably led to an unpleasant discussion. If anything could be learned from this little incident, it was that a man like this one, who had had first-hand experience of the proximity of Dachau, could never be made to view it in a favorable light. Nor, unlike most other Germans today, could he put it out of his mind, living as he still did near its site. It had not been a unique experience, a nightmare that could be pushed out of memory; for him it was a reality with which he had had to learn to live over the years. Although Dachau camp had not originally turned him against the Nazi regime, which had, he felt, done a great deal of good for people like himself, he could never accept the camp itself. At the same time, since this same regime had brought him suffering that he could liken to that of the prisoners at Dachau, he did not need to feel guilty or to deny anything. In his own simple way, he had worked through the reality of Dachau and what it stood for, and his attitude was therefore a matter-of-fact one. His constant contact with the fact of the camp, so that its horror had impressed itself on him slowly, not suddenly, deprived it of the nightmarish qualities of a trauma that overshadowed all of life or needed to be denied.

S HE showed me around the place I felt quite comfortable in my role of naive visitor. He pointed out what he could, getting excited about nothing, but neither A omitting nor hiding anything he might have been expected to know. He told me about the tower over the camp’s entrance gate. He pointed it out from a distance, regretting the fact that we could not get closer because it was, as I could see, now part of an American army installation, and in a restricted area. Had I addressed myself to the commanding officer, I could probably have got permission to go inside, but it seemed pointless. I was not trying to revisit sites, or view buildings; I wanted to receive impres- sions. And the fact that the dreadful tower was now part of an American army installation removed all its dread. What we prisoners had not dared hope for, and had hardly dared to dream—that the Stars and Stripes would fly over the tower—had become an everyday reality. This being so, what use was there in looking at a collection of stones close up? We drove along outside the stockade, the live-wire fence, the watch-towers, the ditch that used to be filled with water. But the logs of the once formidable stockade were weath- ered, rotting, and askew; the cruel wire was torn and dangling; the bottom of the ditch was dry, its steep sides slowly caving in and overgrown with grass, weeds, and wildflow- ers. It was the same place, and yet it was not. Only by a deliberate act of memory could I re-create the past, which at every step was belied by the appearance of the towers, the stockade walls, and the grass-covered moat, all looking like ancient ruins—and by the presence of American soldiers and arms. We drove through what had once been the main street of the camp, which was lined Bruno Bettelheim with a double row of barracks. Slowly, we approached the one in which I had lived. For a moment I was tempted to ask the driver to stop and let me out, but children were playing in front of it, and I thought better than to disturb their play and privacy for the sake of what by now was empty curiosity. The camp now houses refugees from the East Zone, and they have tried to pretty up the place. The windows—through which rotating floodlights had glared all night into the eyes of prisoners, men trying to catch a moment of sleep or rest against the next day’s torture and threat of death—these same windows were now softened by curtains, by the effort of women to make homes behind them. It was just like any other DP camp, dreary in the main, but at least its inmates had some hope of getting out. This was not Dachau. It was as if the concentration camp had never existed. It was neither a monument by which to remember a terrible past, nor one that could promise a better future. It simply represented the practical utilization of available facilities, just as the American troops, for utilitarian reasons, are now making use of the excellent facilities the prisoners once built under the whip for the use of SS troops. I do not believe this erasing of the past was deliberate. The military occupation, and indeed the whole postwar history of Germany, lend themselves exceedingly well to the obliteration of the Nazi past—or rather the deepest wishes of the Germans themselves combine with history to do just that. In those surroundings and at that moment, it seemed as if only the cab driver and I remembered the past—if for very different reasons and with different, or again maybe not so different, feelings.

HAT ABOUT the memorial? We drove into a conspicuously marked-off enclosure, where two American soldiers on guard waved us on in friendly fashion. W There was a small space in which three cars were parked, clearly marked by their license plates as belonging to the American occupation forces. The omnipresence of U.S. army symbols, while most reassuring, in a way took the edge off one’s experience of the spirit of the place—or at least it did that for me. The clerks at the hotel in Munich and their reaction to my inquiries had reawakened my old anger; the displaced persons living in the camp and the presence of the American military had made it die down again. It was no use beating a dead dog, even though when alive it had mauled, maimed, and killed. The memorial covered only a small area, and included the old place of execution, the gallows, the gas chamber, the crematorium, and two or three (my cab driver was not quite sure) places of mass burial. In the center of all this stood the statue of a concentration- camp prisoner in typical uniform, his face and figure showing the ravages of physical and mental suffering. It was true to life, yet at the same time idealized. Not a great piece of art, but decent and well meant. Perhaps we are still too close to what happened in the camps to express it more symbolically, and hence in a way that would be more aesthetically valid. Returning to Dachau

In this pleasant grove, interspersed with well-kept flower beds, only the statue of the prisoner and my own conscious effort brought to mind what the memorial was there to commemorate. Of course, I saw signs explaining what each place of horror had been used for. Maybe what oppressed me was the smallness of it all. It was hard to imagine, looking at the neatness of everything, that tens of thousands of people had over many years suffered incredible degradation and pain here. True, in a way the orderliness and dispatch with which bureaucratic transactions in human lives were once effected here had been one of the supreme horrors of the place. But this, too, no longer came through from the present neatness and orderliness. The little box that had been the death chamber could not have held very many prisoners at once. There were only two openings, each admitting but a single corpse at a time to the oven of the crematorium. The two burial places, one marked with a wooden cross, the other with a Jewish star—pits into which the ashes of thousands of human beings had been dumped—were each not much larger than an individual grave. The wilted wreaths, with their faded inscriptions, added to the illusion that everything belonged to a remote past. The walls of the death chamber and the crematorium, covered with the penciled names and remarks of visitors—all so typical of the historical monument—not even these emblems of the tourist aroused more than a mild disgust in me. After all, most of the visitors had been Jewish and American. Why be angry at those who had defaced the walls of the memorial if they were in deep sympathy with those who had suffered here? That they inscribed their names and the dates of their visits meant only that they, too, felt they had been in a historic place, and one that had so little connection with their immediate lives that, far from being over-awed by the spirit of it, they had tried to establish some connection with it by leaving signs of their presence on its walls. Some inscriptions included angry remarks, but they, too, seemed out of place if not childish, because of the abyss between what they were meant to express and what they actually said. If my experience in the camp had been a single event, I could perhaps have recaptured the old feeling of the place. But what made Dachau memorable to me were innumer- able experiences: the day hundreds of my comrades suddenly went blind, the shooting of a friend, the suicide of another, who deliberately ran into charged wire; and, most of all, the constant, continuous petty suffering and degradation, and—perhaps even more deeply felt—the way one tried to maintain oneself in the face of them.

SMALL group was going around at the same time as we: an American major, a captain, and two or three ladies with them; probably they had come in the cars I A saw in the parking lot. The major looked grim and angry as he inspected the gas chamber and the crematorium, but the others seemed indifferent, even slightly bored, if I read their faces aright. To top it all, a teacher was leading a group of German children through the place, boys and girls of about ten or eleven, some twenty-five in all. I suppose Bruno Bettelheim they were from one of the local schools, since I saw no vehicle they might have come in. They seemed neither interested nor impressed. The teacher told them something about the number of those who had died here. The children joked, hardly glancing at the small building or the inscriptions. My impression was that they were enjoying their escape from the classroom, but that the place itself meant nothing to them, despite the teacher’s objective explanations—which amounted to no more than a flat recital of facts. He, too, seemed uninterested, and after a quick tour left with his charges. I do not know how others feel when something once part of their lives becomes a monument to be visited by sightseers. For myself it was not the right way to re-experience the past. Perhaps it is difficult to glorify human suffering outside the frame of a religion that vindicates and gives it meaning. I have avoided mass graves all my life because they have no meaning for me. The tomb of the Unknown Soldier, yes; the mass tomb at Verdun, no. Standing there in Dachau, the concentration camp was more over and done with for me than when I had thought of it in faraway Chicago. Maybe the importance of a historical event depends on numbers, or on the grandeur of suffering or that of achievement. But the significance of the sheer human fate is individual. I felt stronger emotion, a few days later, when relatives in Vienna pointed out where, to escape the Gestapo, this person had jumped from a window and another had hanged himself. These were single human fates and there was a great sense of immediacy in their loss. The mass commemoration of the tens of thousands of victims at Dachau gave to their deaths, as to their lives, the remoteness of a chronicle. . . . Driving back to the station, the driver unburdened his heart, and thereby reduced Dachau once more to the human experience it was for him. Why had the camp had to be located at Dachau, why not somewhere else? Why had it had to be in his hometown? It was all because of an old farmer and his good-for-nothing sons, who did not know how to till the soil. The site of the camp had once been a large farm; then it was sold to the government, which before the First World War had built a munitions or arms factory on it, he was not clear which. When the Nazis came to power, they used it for a concentration camp because it already had barracks on it, and a stockade and barbed-wire fence. Here, too, it had been a matter of sheer, utilitarian convenience, as with the American authorities now using part of the camp, and the Bonn government using the remainder to quarter DP’s. Actually, the presence of these refugees commemorates far better than does the monument the sufferings of human beings at the hands of their fellows. The extreme misery of Dachau belongs to the past, but misery in general survives: People are still being driven from their homes by fear and terror. The victims of the moment were German but I did not find any historical justice in that fact. If one believes, as I do, that our first concern must be for the living, it becomes understandable that for the Germans, too, the horrors of the concentration camp regime fade before the misery of the DP’s who have taken it over. Returning to Dachau

Leaving Dachau, we again passed the barracks, and then came my last view of the camp and of its awful gate, through which some jeeps were now rolling. A large Ameri- can army installation, a large DP camp, and a few small buildings as a memorial to the past—I could not quite accept it, but maybe it corresponded to reality, since the past must bow to the needs of the present. History (and the crematorium) had been relegated to a small area located, as if symbolically, at the farthest corner of the camp, away from the business of the present. For my own reasons, I wished they had preserved the camp just as it was when liberated. Then I would probably have been able to recapture my memories better; then Dachau, as it had been, might have come to life on the tide of old feelings of anger, degradation, and despair. Waiting at the train station, I listened to German DP’s who sipped beer and talked of how they had lost everything. On the ride back to Munich, I looked out of the train window over bombed-out areas. And then I realized that the present state of Dachau was more in keeping with reality, present-day reality, than if it had been preserved as it was at its liberation—as, I am told, Buchenwald is. Preserving a site intact removes it from the stream of history, makes it a monument that is no longer of this time and this place.

HIS, then, was what I learned from revisiting Dachau: that I could best preserve it in my mind, and its other surviving inmates who, like myself, had left Germany T could do the same because our lives did not need to continue in and around Dachau, because we had radically separated ourselves from the country of which it had once been a central institution. This the Germans themselves could not do. Keeping Dachau unchanged would have meant that they were separating themselves as radically from their past as if they themselves had emigrated. I could keep the old Dachau intact as an emotional experience. I could digest its impact by working it out emotionally and psychologically, and it would remain the impact of a Dachau that preserved its old physical reality unchanged because I was no longer attached to the physical reality of Germany itself. For me, Dachau had become a problem of human nature and a personal experience, but it was not a particular place in the country that was my home. The Germans, however, if they wanted to go on living as more than mere survivors of Nazism and defeat, had to deal with the place, Dachau, as well as with Dachau, the crime. If they had preserved Dachau in its entirety as a monument to the shame of Nazism, and to the immense suffering it inflicted, it would follow that they should have preserved their ruined cities as a monument to the suffering they themselves had experienced. I realized, when I left the station at Munich and saw the utter destruction still around me, that unconsciously I had wanted the Ger- mans to dedicate the old Dachau for all time as a monument to my sufferings and those of my fellow Jews and anti-fascists, but had not wanted them to dedicate any monuments to their own sufferings, which were almost equally a result of Nazism. Of course, the inmates of Dachau had been helpless victims of the Hitler regime, Bruno Bettelheim whereas the Germans, or nearly half of them, had embraced it of their own free will. Might it not be, then, that I had hoped unconsciously for the dedication of an unchanged Dachau more as a monument to the vileness of the torturers who established and ran it than as a memorial to its victims? So this was another lesson I learned: that one cannot dedicate monuments to the depravity of a system by tending carefully the graves of its victims. After all, it is the Christian martyrs themselves who symbolized their faith and religious creed; it was not the cruelty of their torturers, which was only incidental, or seems so to us now, that really counted. I realized that I had gone to Dachau in the wrong spirit. Dachau, to me, was now a symbol more of the cruelty that took human beings and converted them into ciphers to be processed in a gas chamber than of suffering mankind. One simply cannot look at the statue of a concentration camp prisoner in stone or bronze when one has been a prisoner oneself; the survivor cannot look at the graves of his fellows in suffering and say: Behold the greatness of my suffering, and admire it! About one’s own suffering, and that of others, one can do something only by living and acting. The Germans have had to live more closely than I with the memory of their concentration camps. During the war and most of the time since then, they have lived with it every day. They cannot detach themselves from the suffering brought about by Nazism by crossing an ocean and entering upon a new way of life. Perhaps they did the right thing when they set aside only a small enclosure at Dachau to the memory of the victims, while using the largest part of the place for DP’s, and letting the Americans use the rest of it for an army installation. “Letting,” I write. As I saw some vehicles roll by with the license plates marked “U.S. Forces in Germany” which one sees everywhere in West Germany, I wondered: Suppose the unthink- able had happened, and the Japanese had overrun the United States, how would Americans have met, dealt with, and worked through ten years of life with the symbols all around them of utter defeat, and with the victors everywhere on their streets? Would they have made a memorial of anything that reminded them of their defeat? I do not know. But I do know that the only way to live with such a past is not to keep it alive unchanged, encapsulated, but to confine it to an ever smaller place, as had been done with the memorial at Dachau. Sad as this is in view of my own experience and those of the friends and relatives of the millions murdered by the Nazis, we cannot expect present-day Germans to have a much different attitude toward their victims than they have toward their own devas- tated cities. Since they are much more matter-of-fact about the ruins of their own homes than I am, I must accept their being more matter-of-fact about Dachau. As if with a vengeance, present-day Germany is turning away from the destruction of the past toward the building of the present and the future. Yes, they do it with a will and a vengeance, as if they had a need to cover up, forget, and undo the past—including Dachau. So far only the frantic activity is obvious. Will it lead to a better future? This as yet is hard to say, but much will depend on their—and our—attitude to their past.q July 1956

The Theory of Mass Society A critique. Daniel Bell

HE SENSE of a radical dehumanization of life which has accompanied events of the past several decades has given rise to the theory of “mass society.” One can say that, Marxism apart, it is probably the most influential social theory in the Western world today. While no single individual has stamped his name on it—to the extent that Marx is associated with the transformation of personal relations under capitalism into commodity values, or Freud with the role of the irrational and unconscious Tin behavior—the theory is central to the thinking of the principal aristocratic, Catholic, or Existentialist critics of bourgeois society today. These critics—Ortega y Gasset, Karl Mannheim, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Gabriel Marcel, Emil Lederer, and others—have been concerned, less with the general conditions of freedom, than with the freedom of the person, and with the possibility for some few persons of achieving a sense of individual self in our mechanized society. The conception of “mass society” can be summarized as follows: The revolutions in trans- port and communications have brought men into closer contact with each other and bound them in new ways; the division of labor has made them more interdependent; tremors in one part of society affect all others. Despite this greater interdependence, however, individu- Daniel Bell was a sociologist and writer whose work focused on the postwar era. This article is based on a paper presented before the Conference on the Future of Freedom held in Milan in September 1955 and sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Daniel Bell als have grown more estranged from one another. The old primary group ties of family and local community have been shattered; ancient parochial faiths are questioned; few unifying values have taken their place. Most important, the critical standards of an educated elite no longer shape opinion or taste. As a result, mores and morals are in constant flux, relations between individuals are tangential or compartmentalized rather than organic. At the same time greater mobility, spatial and social, intensifies concern over status. Instead of a fixed or known status symbolized by dress or title, each person assumes a multiplicity of roles and constantly has to prove himself in a succession of new situations. Because of all this, the individual loses a coherent sense of self. His anxieties increase. There ensues a search for new faiths. The stage is thus set for the charismatic leader, the secular messiah, who, by bestow- ing upon each person the semblance of necessary grace, and of fullness of personality, supplies a substitute for the older unifying belief that the mass society has destroyed. In a world of lonely crowds seeking individual distinction, where values are constantly translated into economic calculabilities, where in extreme situations shame and conscience can no longer restrain the most dreadful excesses of terror, the theory of the mass society seems a forceful, realistic description of contemporary society, an accurate reflection of thequality and feeling of modern life. But when one seeks to apply the theory of mass society analytically, it becomes very slippery. Ideal types, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, generally never give us more than a silhouette. So, too, with the theory of “mass society.” Each of the statements making up the theory, as set forth in the second paragraph above, might be true, but they do not follow necessarily from one another. Nor can we say that all the conditions described are present at any one time or place. More than that, there is no organizing principle—other than the general concept of a “breakdown of values”—which puts the individual elements of theory together in a logical, meaningful—let alone historical—manner. And when we examine the way the “theory” is used by those who employ it, we find ourselves even more at a loss.

S COMMONLY used in the term “mass media,” “mass” implies that standardized material is transmitted to “all groups of the population uniformly.” As under- A stood generally by sociologists, a mass is a heterogeneous and undifferentiated audience as opposed to a class, or any parochial and relatively homogeneous segment. Some sociologists have been tempted to go further and make “mass” a rather pejorative term. Because the mass media subject a diverse audience to a common set of cultural materials, it is argued that these experiences must necessarily lie outside the personal— and therefore meaningful—experiences to which the individual responds directly. A movie audience, for example, is a “mass” because the individuals looking at the screen are, in the words of the American sociologist Herbert Blumer, “separate, detached, and anonymous.” The “mass” divorces—or “alienates”—the individual from himself. As first introduced by the late Ortega y Gasset, however, in hisRevolt of the Masses, the The Theory of Mass Society word “mass” does not designate a group of persons—for Ortega, workers do not constitute the “masses”—but calls attention to the low quality of modern civilization resulting from the loss of commanding position by an elite. Modern taste, for Ortega, represents the judgment of the unqualified. Modern culture, since it disowns the past, seeks a “free expression of its vital desires”; it becomes, therefore, an unrestrained “spoiled child,” with no controlling standards, “no limit to its caprice.” Still another meaning is given to the concept by some German writers, for whom mass society is mechanized society. Ernst Jünger asserts that society has become an “apparatus.” The machine impresses its style on man, making life calculable, mathematical, and precise; existence takes on a mask-like character: The steel helmet and the welder’s face- guard symbolize the individual’s disappearance into his technical function. The “regulated man” emerges as a new type, hard and ruthless, a cog in the technological process. Less romantic, but equally critical, are those theorists who see extreme rationalization and bureaucratization—the over-organization of life—as the salient features of the mass society. The idea of “rationalization” goes back to Hegel and Marx, and along with it the notions of “estrangement” or “alienation,” “reification,” and the “fetishism of com- modities”—all of which express the thought that in modern society man has become a “thing,” an object manipulated by society, rather than a subject who can remake life in accordance with his own desires. In our time, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim have developed and elaborated these concepts. In Mannheim’s work—notably in his Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction—the diverse strands are all brought together. Mannheim’s argument, put schematically, runs as follows: Modern large-scale organizations, oriented exclusively toward efficiency, withdraw all decisions from the shop floor and concentrate direction and planning at the top. This concentration of decision-making not only creates conformity, but stunts the initiative of subordinates and leaves them unsatisfied in their personal needs for gratification and esteem. Normally, the routinization of one’s job dulls the edge of frustration and provides some security. But when unemployment looms, one’s sense of helplessness becomes sharpened, and self-esteem is threatened. Since individuals cannot rationally locate the source of their frustration (i.e., the impersonal bureaucratic system itself), they will under these circumstances seek scapegoats and turn to fascism. While for Mannheim mass society is equated with monolithic bureaucratization, for Emil Lederer and Hannah Arendt it is defined by the elimination of difference, by uni- formity, aimlessness, alienation, and the failure of integration. In Lederer’s view, society is made up of many social groups which, so long as society is stratified, can exercise only partial control over the others. As long as this situation obtains, irrational emotions are thus kept within some bounds. But when the lines dividing social groups break down, then the people become volatile, febrile “masses” ready to be manipulated by a leader. Similarly, for Hannah Arendt, the revolt of the masses is a revolt against the “loss of social Daniel Bell status along with which [is] lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. . . . The masses [become] obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental incomprehensible aspects.” Because modern life sunders all social bonds, and because the techniques of modern communication have perfected the conditions under which propaganda can sway masses, the “age of the masses” is now upon us.

HAT STRIKES one first about these varied uses of the concept of mass society is how little they reflect or relate to the complex, richly striated social relations W of the real world. Take Blumer’s example of the movie audience as “separate, detached, and anonymous.” Presumably a large number of individuals, because they have been subjected to similar experiences, now share some common psychological reality in which the differences between individual and individual become blurred; and accord- ingly we get the sociological assumption that each person is now of “equal weight,” and therefore a sampling of what such disparate individuals say they think constitutes “mass opinion.” But is this so? Individuals are not tabulae rasae. They bring varying social conceptions to the same experience, and go away with dissimilar responses. They may be silent, separate, detached, and anonymous while watching the movie, but afterward they talk about it with friends and exchange opinions and judgments. They are once again members of particular social groups. Would one say that several hundred or a thousand individuals home alone at night, but all reading the same book, constitute a “mass?” One could argue, of course, that reading a book is a qualitatively different experience from going to a movie. But this leads precisely to the first damaging ambiguity in the theory of the mass society. Two things are mixed up in that theory: a judgment as to the quality of modern experience—with much of which any sensitive individual would agree—and a presumed scientific statement concerning the disorganization of society created by industrialization and by the demand of the masses for equality. It is the second of these statements with which this essay quarrels, not the first. Behind the theory of social disorganization lies a romantic notion of the past that sees society as having once been made up of small “organic,” close-knit communities (calledGe - meinschaften in the terminology of the sociologists) that were shattered by industrialism and modern life, and replaced by a large impersonal “atomistic” society (calledGesellschaft ) which is unable to provide the basic gratifications and call forth the loyalties that the older communities knew.1 These distinctions are, however, completely riddled by value judgments. Everyone is against atomism and for “organic living.” But if we substitute, with good

* This antithesis, associated usually with the German sociologist Tonnies, is central in one way or another to almost every major modern social theory: Weber’s traditional-rational behavior, Durkheim’s mechanical-organic solidarity, Redfield’s folk-urban society, and so on. The Theory of Mass Society logic, the term “total” for “organic,” and “individualistic” for “atomistic,” the whole argument looks quite different. In any case, a great weakness in the theory is its lack of history-mind- edness. The transition to a mass society, if it be such, was not effected suddenly, explosively, within a single lifetime, but took generations to mature. In its sociological determinism, the hypothesis overlooks the human capacity for adaptiveness and creativeness, for ingenuity in shaping new social forms. Such new forms may be trade unions whose leaders rise from the ranks—there are 50,000 trade union locals in this country that form little worlds of their own—or the persistence under new conditions of ethnic groups and solidarities.

ECAUSE romantic feeling colors critical judgment, the attacks on modern life often have an unduly strong emotional charge. The image of “facelessness,” for Bexample, is given a metaphysical twist by Gabriel Marcel: “The individual, in order to belong to the mass . . . has had to . . . divest himself of that substantial reality which was linked to his initial individuality. . . . The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cin- ema, the radio has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas, an image with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment.” Perhaps terms like “original reality” and “real roots in the deep being” have a meaning that escapes an empiricist temper, but without the press, the radio, etc., etc.—and they are not monolithic—in what way, short of being everywhere at once, can one learn of events that take place elsewhere? Or should one go back to the happy ignorance of earlier days? Some of the images of life in the mass society as presented by its critics border on caricature. According to Ernst Jünger, traffic demands traffic regulations, and so the public becomes conditioned to automatism. Karl Jaspers has written that in the “technical mass order” the home is transformed “into a lair or sleeping place.” Even more puzzling is the complaint against modern medicine. “In medical practice . . . patients are now dealt with in the mass according to the principle of rationalization, being sent to institutes for technical treatment, the sick being classified in groups and referred to this or that specialized department. . . . The supposition is that, like everything else, medical treatment has become a sort of manufactured article.” The attack on the mass society sometimes widens into an attack on science itself. For Ortega, “the scientific man is the prototype of the mass-man” because science, by encour- aging specialization, has made the scientist “hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations.” Ortega draws from this the sweeping conclusion that “the most immediate result of this unbalanced specialization has been that today, when there are more ‘scientists’ than ever, there are much less ‘cultured’ men than, for example, about 1750.” But how is one to verify such a comparison between 1750 and the present. Even if we could establish comparable categories, surely Ortega would have been the first to shy away from statistical com- parisons. Moreover, can we assume that, because a man specializes in his work, he is un- Daniel Bell able in his leisure, and in reflection, to appreciate culture? And what is “culture”? Would not Ortega admit that we have more knowledge of the world than in 1750—knowledge not only of nature, but of the inner life of man? Is knowledge to be divorced from culture, or is “true culture” a narrow area of classical learning in which eternal truths reside?

UT MORE than mere contradictions in usage, ambiguities in terminology, and a lack of historical sense are involved in the theory of the mass society. It is at heart Ba defense of an aristocratic cultural tradition—a tradition that does carry with it an important but neglected conception of liberty—and a doubt that the large mass of mankind can ever become truly educated or acquire an appreciation of culture. Thus, the theory often becomes a conservative defense of privilege. This defense is so extreme at times as to pose a conflict between “culture” and “social justice.” The argument (remi- niscent of the title of Matthew Arnold’s book, Culture and Anarchy) is made that any attempts at social betterment must harm culture. And while mainly directed against “bourgeois” society, the theory also strikes at radicalism and its egalitarian notions. The fear of the “mass” has its roots in the dominant conservative tradition of Western political thought, which in large measure still shapes many of the political and sociological categories of social theory—i.e., in authoritarian definitions of leadership, and in the image of the “mindless masses.” The picture of the “mass” as capable only of violence and excess originates with Aristotle’s Politics. In his threefold typology, democracy is equated with the rule of hoi polloi—who are easily swayed by demagogues—and must degenerate into tyranny. This notion of the masses as developed in Hellenistic times was deepened by the struggles between plebs and aristocracy in the Roman republic and by the efforts of the Caesars to exploit mob support; the image of the insensate mob fed by “bread and circuses” became deeply imprinted in history. Early Christian theory justified its fear of the masses with a theory about human nature. In the religious terms of Augustine—as later in the secularized version of Hobbes—the Earthly City bore an ineradicable stain of blood: Property and police were the consequences of the Fall of Man; property and police were evidence, therefore, not of man’s civilization, but of his corruption. In heaven there would be neither private property nor government. It was the French Revolution that transplanted the image of the “mindless masses” into modern consciousness. The destruction of the ancien régime and the rallying cry of “equality” sharpened the fear of conservative, and especially Catholic, critics that traditional values (meaning political, social, and religious dogma) would be destroyed.* For a Tocqueville and an Acton, there was an irreducible conflict between liberty and

* Nazism, in the view of modern conservative and Catholic critics, is not a reaction against, but the inevitable end-product of, democracy. Hitler was a new version of the classical demagogue, leading the mindless masses in nihilistic revolt against the traditional culture of Europe. The Theory of Mass Society equality; liberty guaranteed each man the right to be different, whereas equality meant a “leveling” of tastes to the lowest common denominator. For a Max Scheler, as well as an Ortega, the mass society meant a “democracy of the emotions” which could only unleash irrational forces. For the Catholic de Maistre, as for the Anglican T.S. Eliot, the equality of men meant the destruction of the harmony and authority so necessary to a healthy, integrated society.

MPORTANT as these conceptions are as reminders of the meaning of excellence, and of liberty, they reflect a narrow conception of human potentialities. The question of Isocial change has to be seen against the large political canvas. The starting point of modern politics, as Karl Mannheim has pointed out, came after the Reformation when chiliasm, or religiously inspired millennial striving to bring about heaven on earth, became an expression of the demands for social and economic betterment of the lower strata of society. Blind resentment of things as they were was thereby given principle, reason, and eschatological force, and directed to definite political goals. The equality of all souls became the equality of all individuals and the right of everyone, as enlightened by progressive revelation, to make a judgment on society. Comte, the father of modern sociology, expressed great horror at the idea of this universal right to one’s own opinion. No community could exist, he wrote, unless its members had a certain degree of confidence in one another, and this, he said, was incompatible with the right of everyone to submit the very foundations of society to discussion whenever he felt like it. In calling attention to the dangers of free criticism, Comte pointed to the decline in public morals as evidenced by the increase of divorces, the effacement of traditional class distinctions, and the ensuing impudence of individual ambitions. It was part of the function of government, he thought, to prevent the diffusion of ideas and the anarchic spread of intellectual freedom. Modern society, apparently, does not bear Comte out: Though the foundations of privilege go on being challenged in the name of justice, society does not collapse. Few moralists would now uphold the bleak view once expressed by Malthus that “from the inevitable laws of human nature some human beings will be exposed to want. These are the unhappy persons who in the great lottery of life have drawn a blank.” The most salient fact about modern life—capitalist and Communist—is the ideological commitment to social change. And by change is meant the striving for material economic betterment, greater opportunity for individuals to exercise their talents, and an appreciation of culture by wider masses of people. Can any society deny these aspirations? It is curious that in these “aristocratic” critiques of modern society, refracted as they are through the glass of an idealized feudal past, democracy is identified with equality alone. The role of constitutionalism and of the rule of law which, with universal suffrage, are constituent elements of the Western democratic structure, are overlooked. The pic- Daniel Bell ture of modern culture as debauched by concessions to popular taste—a picture that leaves out the great rise in the general appreciation of culture—is equally overdrawn. If it is granted that mass society is compartmentalized, superficial in personal relations, anonymous, transitory, specialized, utilitarian, competitive, acquisitive, mobile, status- hungry, etc., etc., the obverse side of the coin must be shown too—the right to privacy, to free choice of friends and occupation, status on the basis of achievement rather than of ascription, a plurality of norms and standards rather than the exclusive and monopolis- tic social controls of a single dominant group, etc., etc. For if, as Sir Henry Maine once put it, the movement of modern society has been from status to contract, then it has been, in that light, a movement from a fixed place in the world to possible freedom.

HE EARLY theorists of the mass society (Ortega, Marcel) focused attention on the “deterioration of excellence,” while the later theorists (Mannheim, Lederer, T Arendt) called attention to the way in which the over-organization and, at the same time, the disruption of the social fabric facilitated the rise of fascism. Recently, in the light of Communist successes, the argument has been advanced that the mass society, because it cannot provide for the individual’s real participation in effective social groups, is particularly vulnerable to Communist penetration, and that the mass organization, because it is so unwieldy, is peculiarly susceptible to Communist penetration and manipulation. (See Philip Selznick’s study, The Organizational Weapon.) Certainly, the Communists have scored enormous successes in infiltration, and their “front” organization may be counted one of the great political inventions of our century. But without discounting Communist techniques, the real problem here lies less with the “mass society” as such (aside from the excuse it affords disaffected intellectuals for attacks on modern culture) than in the capacity or incapacity of the given social order to satisfy the demands for social mobility and higher standards of living that arise once social change is under way. This is the key to any radical appeal. It is not poverty per se that leads people to revolt; poverty most often induces fatal- ism and despair, and a reliance, embodied in ritual and superstitious practices, on su- pernatural help. Social tensions are an expression of unfulfilled expectations. It is only when expectations are aroused that radicalism can take hold. Radical strength is greatest (and here the appeal of Communism must be seen as a variant of the general appeal of radicalism) in societies where awareness of class differences runs deep, expectations of social advancement outstrip possibilities, and the establishments of culture fail to make room for aspiring intellectuals. It is among industrial workers rather than apathetic peasants (in Milan rather than Calabria), among frustrated intellectuals rather than workers long unionized (e.g. India), that radicalism spreads. Resentment, as Max Scheler once noted, is among the most potent of human motives; it is certainly that in politics. It is in the advanced industrial countries, The Theory of Mass Society principally the United States, Britain, and Northwestern Europe, where national income has been rising, where mass expectations of an equitable share in that increase are relatively fulfilled, and where social mobility affects ever greater numbers, that extremist politics have least hold. It may be, as the late Joseph Schumpeter pessimistically believed, that, in newly awakened societies like Asia’s, the impatient expectations of key social strata, particularly the intellectuals, may so exceed the actual possibilities of economic expansion that Com- munism will come to look like the only plausible solution to the majority.* Whether this will happen in India and Indonesia is one of the crucial political questions of the next decade. But at any rate it is not the mass society, but the inability, pure and simple, of any society to meet impatient popular expectations that makes for a strong response to radical appeals.

ROM THE viewpoint of the mass society hypothesis, the United States ought to be exceptionally vulnerable to the politics of disaffection. In our country, urbanization, Findustrialization, and democratization have eroded older primary and community ties on a scale unprecedented in social history. Yet, though large-scale unemployment during the depression was more prolonged and more severe here than in any country in West- ern Europe, the Communist movement never gained a real foothold in the United States, nor has any fascist movement on a European model arisen. How does one explain this? It is asserted that the United States is an “atomized” society composed of lonely, isolated individuals. One forgets the truism, expressed sometimes as a jeer, that Americans are a nation of joiners. There are in the United States today at least 200,000 voluntary organizations, associations, clubs, societies, lodges, and fraternities with an aggregate (but obviously overlapping) membership of close to eighty million men and women. In no other country in the world, probably, is there such a high degree of voluntary communal activity, expressed sometimes in absurd rituals, yet often providing real satisfactions for real needs. “It is natural for the ordinary American,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal, “when he sees something that is wrong to feel not only that there should be a law against it, but also that an organization should be formed to combat it.” Some of these voluntary organizations are pressure groups—business, farm, labor, veterans, trade associations, the aged, etc., etc.—but thousands more are like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,

* As Morris Watnick has pointed out in a pioneering study (in the University of Chicago symposium The Progress of Underdeveloped Areas), the Communist parties of Asia are completely the handiwork of native intellectuals. The history of the Chinese Communist party from Li Ta-Chao and Ch’en Tu-hsu, its founders, to Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-Chi, its present leaders, “is virtually an unbroken record of a party controlled by intellectuals.” This is equally true of India, “where in 1943, 86 of 139 [Communist] delegates were members of professional and intellectual groups.” The same pattern also holds true “for the Communist parties of Indochina, Thailand, Burma, Malaya and Indonesia, all of which show a heavy preponderance of journalists, lawyers and teachers among the top leadership.” Daniel Bell the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, the American Jewish Committee, the Parent-Teachers Associations, local community-improvement groups, and so on, each of which affords hundreds of individuals concrete, emotionally shared activities. Equally astonishing are the number of ethnic group organizations in this country carrying on varied cultural, social, and political activities. The number of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, Czech, Finnish, Bulgarian, Bessarabian, and other national groups, their hundreds of fraternal, communal, and political groups, each playing a role in the life of America, is staggering. In December 1954, for example, when the issue of Cyprus was first placed before the United Nations, the Justice for Cyprus Committee, “an organization of American citizens,” according to its statement, took a full-page advertisement in the New York Times to plead the right of that small island to self-determination. Among the groups listed in the Justice for Cyprus Committee were: the Order of Ahepa, the Daugh- ters of Penelope, the Pan-Laconian Federation, the Cretan Federation, the Pan-Messian Federation, the Pan-Icarian Federation, the Pan-Epirotic Federation of America, the Pan- Thracian Association, the Pan-Elian Federation of America, the Dodecanesian League of America, the Pan-Macedonian Association of America, the Pan-Samian Association, the Federation of Sterea Ellas, the Cyprus Federation of America, the Pan-Arcadian Federa- tion, the GAPA, and the Federation of Hellenic Organizations. We can be sure that if, in a free world, the question of the territorial affiliation of Ruthenia were to come up before the United Nations, dozens of Hungarian, Rumanian, Ukrainian, Slovakian, and Czech “organizations of American citizens” would rush eager- ly into print to plead the justice of the claims of their respective homelands to Ruthenia. Even in urban neighborhoods, where anonymity is presumed to flourish, the extent of local ties is astounding. Within the city limits of Chicago, for example, there are eighty-two community newspapers with a total weekly circulation of almost 1,000,000; within Chica- go’s larger metropolitan area, there are 181. According to standard sociological theory, these local papers providing news and gossip about neighbors should slowly decline under the pressure of the national media. Yet the reverse is true. In Chicago, the number of such newspapers has increased 165 percent since 1910; in those forty years circulation has jumped 770 percent. As sociologist Morris Janowitz, who studied these community newspapers, observed: “If society were as impersonal, as self-centered and barren as described by some who are preoccupied with the oneway trend from‘Gemeinschaft’ to ‘Gesellschaft’ seem to believe, the levels of criminalty, social disorganization, and psychopathology which social science seeks to account for would have to be viewed as very low rather than (as viewed now) alarmingly high.”

T MAY be argued that the existence of such a large network of voluntary associations says little about the cultural level of the country concerned. It may well be, as IOrtega maintains, that cultural standards throughout the world have declined (in The Theory of Mass Society everything—architecture, dress, design?), but nonetheless a greater proportion of the population today participates in worthwhile cultural activities. This has been almost an inevitable concomitant of the doubling—literally—of the American standard of living over the last fifty years. The rising levels of education have meant rising appreciation of culture. In the United States more dollars are spent on concerts of classical music than on baseball. Sales of books have doubled in a decade. There are over a thousand sym- phony orchestras, and several hundred museums, institutes, and colleges purchasing art in the United States today. Various other indices can be cited to show the growth of a vast middlebrow society. And in coming years, with steadily increasing productivity and leisure, the United States will become even more actively a “consumer” of culture. (These changes pose important questions for the development of a “high culture,” but that problem lies outside the scope of this essay—see Clement Greenberg’s “The Plight of Our Culture,” Commentary, June and July 1953.) It has been argued that the American mass society imposes an excessive conformity upon its members. But it is hard to discern who is conforming to what. The New Republic cries that “hucksters are sugar-coating the culture.” The National Review, organ of the “radical right,” raises the banner of iconoclasm against the liberal domination of opinion- formation in our society. Fortune decries the growth of “organization man.” Each of these tendencies exists, yet in historical perspective, there is probably less conformity to an over-all mode of conduct today than at any time within the last half-century in America. True, there is less bohemianism than in the twenties (though increased sexual tolerance), and less political radicalism than in the thirties (though the New Deal enacted sweeping reforms). But does the arrival at a political dead-center mean the establishment, too, of a dead norm? I do not think so. One would be hard put to it to find today the “conformity” Main Street exacted of Carol Kennicott thirty years ago. With rising educational levels, more individuals are able to indulge a wider variety of interests. (“Twenty years ago you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York,” reports a record salesman. “Today we sell Pal- estrina, Monteverdi, Gabrielli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.”) One hears, too, the complaint that divorce, crime, and violence demonstrate a widespread social disorganization in the country. But the rising number of divorces, as Den- nis Wrong pointed out (Commentary, April 1950), indicates not the disruption of the family, but a freer, more individualistic basis of choice, and the emergence of the “companionship” marriage. And as regards crime, I have sought to demonstrate (in Fortune, January 1955) that there is actually much less crime and violence (though more vicarious violence through movies and TV, and more “windows” onto crime, through the press) than was the case twenty-five and fifty years ago. Certainly, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York were much rougher and tougher cities in those years. But violent crime, which is usually a lower-class phenomenon, was then contained within the ecological boundaries of the slum; hence one can recall quiet, tree-lined, crime-free areas and feel that Daniel Bell the tenor of life was more even in the past. But a cursory look at the accounts of those days—the descriptions of the gang wars, bordellos, and street-fighting in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, New York’s Five Points, or Chicago’s First Ward—would show how much more violent in the past the actual life of those cities was. At this point it becomes quite apparent that such large-scale abstractions as “the mass society,” with the implicit diagnoses of social disorganization and decay that de- rive from them, are rather meaningless without standards of comparison. Social and cultural change is probably greater and more rapid today in the United States than in any other country, but the assumption that social disorder and anomie inevitably attend such change is not borne out in this case.

HIS may be owing to the singular fact that the United States is probably the first large society in history to have change and innovation “built into” its culture. Al- T most all human societies, traditionalist and habit-ridden as they have been and still are, tend to resist change. The great efforts to industrialize under-developed countries, increase worker mobility in Europe, and broaden markets—so necessary to the raising of productivity and standards of living—are again and again frustrated by ingrained resistance to change. Thus in the Soviet Union change has been introduced only by dint of wholesale coercion. In the United States—a culture with no feudal tradition; with a pragmatic ethos, as expressed by Jefferson, that regards God as a “workman”; with a boundless optimism and a restless eagerness for the new that has been bred out of the original conditions of a huge, richly endowed land—change, and the readiness to change, have become the norm. This indeed may be why those consequences of change predicted by theorists basing themselves on European precedent find small confirmation. The mass society is the product of change—and is itself change. But the theory of the mass society affords us no view of the relations of the parts of the society to each other that would enable us to locate the sources of change. We may not have enough data on which to sketch an alternative theory, but I would argue that certain key factors, in this country at least, deserve to be much more closely examined than they have been. The change from a society once geared to frugal saving and now impelled to spend dizzily; the break-up of family capitalism, with the consequent impact on corporate structure and political power; the centralization of decisionmaking, politically, in the state and, economically, in a group of large corporate bodies; the rise of status and symbol groups replacing specific interest groups—indicate that new social forms are in the making, and with them still greater changes in the complexion of life under mass society. With these may well come new status anxieties—aggravated by the threats of war— changed character structures, and new moral tempers. The moralist may have his reservations or give approval—as some see in the break- up of the family the loss of a source of essential values, while others see in the new, freer The Theory of Mass Society marriages a healthier form of companionship—but the singular fact is that these changes emerge in a society that is now providing one answer to the great challenge posed to West- ern—and now world—society over the last two hundred years: how, within the framework of freedom, to increase the living standards of the majority of people, and at the same time maintain or raise cultural levels. American society, for all its shortcomings, its speed, its commercialism, its corruption, still, I believe, shows us the most humane way. The theory of the mass society no longer serves as a description of Western society, but as an ideology of romantic protest against contemporary society. This is a time when other areas of the globe are beginning to follow in the paths of the West, which may be all to the good as far as material things are concerned; but many of the economically underdeveloped countries, especially in Asia, have caught up the shopworn self-critical Western ideologies of the 19th century and are using them against the West, to whose “materialism” they oppose their “spirituality.” What these Asian and our own intellectuals fail to realize, perhaps, is that one may be a thorough going critic of one’s own society without being an enemy of its promises.q December 1957

Self-Definition in American Literature Experience and fulfillment. Philip Rahv

HARACTERISTICALLY American” is the phrase that occurs and recurs with virtually compulsive regularity in all the intensive discussions of the prospects and condition of the national letters conducted since the earliest years of the Republic. Quite often the phrase carries with it the suggestion that the user of it is far from certain in his own mind as to what the “characteristically American” actually comes to, and that ‘ he is in fact looking to the literary expression of his countrymen to provide him withC the key to the enigma. Thus it would seem that one of the principal functions of literature in America has been to serve as a vademecum of Americanness, if not of Ameri- canism. The latter term has by now acquired an unction compelling its surrender to the politicians; it is with Americanness, a category more existential than political, that our writers and critics have been concerned. There is little to be wondered at in the uncertainty that has prevailed from the start as to the actual constituents of the “characteristically American.” Henry James saw com-

Philip Rahv, a founding editor of Partisan Review, was a Ukranian-born American literary critic. This essay forms the basis of the introduction to an anthology he edited, Literature in America. Philip Rahv plexity in the very fate of being an American, and among the recognitions that this complexity entails is the fact that as a national entity we are uniquely composed of diverse and sometimes clashing ethnic and regional strains. Even more important is the fact that as a nation we are afloat in history without moorings in prehistory. Americans have no organic past, only ambiguous memories of European derivations. The decisive factor in the forming of American civilization, as the cultural historian F.G. Friedmann put it, is that “the American community had a beginning at a particular moment in history in contrast with the traditional communities that, far from having a precise historical origin, rose out of the bottomless darkness of time in that epoch of pre-history which is history, if at all, only in its latent and undeveloped stage.” Hence American society has the startling look about it of a human artifact, con- structed for specific socio-political and economic purposes in a given period, a period well known and thoroughly documented. It is a society established on contractual rather than traditional foundations, the very existence of which makes for the impression, that in the New World the legend of the “social contract” has finally been brought to visible life. And this very perceptibility, so to speak, of the national origins is not the least of the elements making for a profound sense of the problematical in the American awareness of cultural identity. This sense of the problematical, this sense of always verging on a definition yet somehow missing it, enters significantly into many of the critical approaches that Americans have made to their own literature—approaches tending to turn into a search for America that takes on the aura of a spiritual adventure or mythic quest. Now the problematical is surely not so far apart from the fascinating; and the more committed minds among those who embarked on this search form a vital band of native spokesmen to whom the American character presents itself as a fascinating problem. The effects of this fascination, of this tall measure of devotion, are writ large in our criticism. Most of the famous testaments of our cultural history owe to it their verve in undertaking successively fresh appraisals of the national experience. Its operation is everywhere manifest in such works as Emerson’s “American Scholar,” Whitman’s various prefaces and Democratic Vistas, Henry James’s biography of Hawthorne, Henry Adams’s Education, the letters and essays of Randolph Bourne, and the books full of passionate indictment that Van Wyck Brooks issued year after year before the change of front made evident in his Mak- ers and Finders series. Yet even this voluminous record of filiopietistic indulgence is quickened and given its rationale by the lasting fascination with the American character, a fascination which continues to serve at once as the goad and the charm of even such relatively late and sober-minded studies as F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance and Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds. In the latter work Mr. Kazin alludes with insight to some of the consequences of this absorbing commitment on the part of American critics when he observes that “from Emerson and Self-Definition in American Literature

Thoreau to Mencken and Brooks, criticism has been the great American lay philosophy, the intellectual carryall. It had been a study of literature inherently concerned with ideals of citizenship, and often less a study of literary texts than a search for some imperative moral order within which American writing could live and grow.. . . It has even been the secret in- termediary . . . between literature and society in America.”

MONG the earliest tasks that American critics set for themselves was that of locating and defining the differences between American and European writing. A All through the past century and, in fact, until the renaissance that transformed the American literary consciousness in the earlier part of this century, this effort at definition met with resistance from the more genteel and agreeable writers and critics. These worthies, from Washington Irving and James Russell Lowell to William Crary Brownell and George Edward Woodberry, entertained expurgated notions of the creative life, and they were unable to countenance “the snapping asunder,” in Poe’s phrase, “of the leading strings of our British Grandmamma.” This prolonged resistance is to be explained by the fear of learning that the differences between the literature of the Old and the New World were indeed acute and real. “It is hard to hear a new voice,” wrote D.H. Lawrence, “as hard as it is to listen to a new language; and there is a new voice in the old American classics.” This new feeling originated in the psychic shift that occurred in the movement to the Western hemisphere. Lawrence called it a displacement, adding that “displacements hurt. This hurts. So we try to tie it up, like a cut fin- ger, to put a rag round it.” Whitman and Emerson exulted in the displacement; Hawthorne brooded about it and made what he could of it by searching for its beginnings in the annals of New England; Melville was heroic in his striving to do it justice but soon suffered a breakdown because he could not sustain the pitch of intensity at which he expended himself. A more easeful or complacent reaction was evolved by Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and the other distinguished authors of a tame reflective literature. They recoiled in paleface fashion from the tensions and hazards of the fresh experience thrown up by the dynamism of American life; and insofar as this experience came within their purview at all, they saw it in its crude, exposed state, judging it to be unfit for imaginative treatment. Barrett Wendell, the Harvard professor who published A Literary History of America in 1900, was among the foremost exponents of the Genteel Tradition and one of those luminaries of the academy in America who could not bring themselves to treat Ameri-

* In his Days of the Phoenix (1957), Van Wyck Brooks recalls that even as late as 1920, when American writing had come to seem important, it was “still ignored in academic circles where Thackeray and Tennyson were treated as twin kings of our literature and all the American writers as poor relations. It was regarded as ‘a pale and obedient provincial cousin about which the less said the better,’ in the phrase of Ernest Boyd; and Christian Gauss at Princeton, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, chimed in with Woodberry at Columbia and Wendell at Harvard.” Philip Rahv can writers as anything but poor relations of the towering British figures to whom they looked up with reverence.* Yet even so, Wendell somehow hit upon the formula that accounts for the feebleness that affects us so discouragingly in studying the pre-modern period in American letters. (It has become habitual among us to regard Melville and Whitman as the representative creative types of that period. But this view indicates a loss of perspective on the past, for both were signally unsuccessful in gaining the esteem of the public of their time and in influencing the creative practice of their contemporaries. Whitman survived by making a fight of it, while Melville went under, his best work scarcely known.)

ENDELL’s formula is that this literature is in essence “a record of the national inexperience,” and its “refinement of temper, conscientious sense of form, W and instinctive disregard of actual fact” are its most characteristic traits. Thus he accurately noted, though with no objection on his part, the overriding fault— that of innocuousness—against which Melville warned in declaring that “the visible world of experience . . . is that procreative thing which impregnates the Muses.” And if a novelist like William Dean Howells is virtually unread today, then surely it is because of the lack in him of “that procreative thing.” Hence the failure of the recent efforts to stage his “revival.” Evidently the absence of the “procreative thing” cannot be made up for by the clarity of design of his fiction and by the considerable intelligence and attractiveness of the personality that informs it. It is plain that whatever interest we may have in How- ells today is not actual but falls somewhere on the borderline between the historical and the antiquarian; that is equally true of Longfellow, William Gilmore Simms, and others whose names are still honored in the textbooks. Now modern American literature has attempted to overcome the fault so fatal to Howells and his predecessors by at long last seizing upon what the native genius had long been deprived of, by finding, in other words, its major stimulus in the urge toward and immersion in experience.* American writers were able to accomplish this transformation, however, not merely by accepting experience in all its indigenousness but also by overturning the tradition of the palefaces and by frequently making the most, in true redskin fashion, of experience precisely in its crude, exposed state, thus turning what had long been taken as a defect into a virtue. The law of over-compensation is as opera- tive in art as in life. It seems to me that it is only by facing up to the fact of the enfeeblement of the greater

* The true initiators of the line of modernity in American writing are Whitman and James, because both adopted a positive approach to experience even while defining its value and content in diametrically opposite ways. Hence the specifically modern in the national letters cannot be said to have had its start, as is usually assumed, in this century with the onset of the “new” poetry and the movement toward realism in fiction. Self-Definition in American Literature part of the older American literature, by its negative relation to experience, that we can properly evaluate the complaint against the native environment typically voiced by so many of the worst as well as the best of our 19th-century writers. Let us attend only to the best of them, noting the virtual identity of the terms in which they state the case against their country’s capacity to provide them with imaginative substance. There is James Feni- more Cooper, for instance, asserting back in 1828 that among the main obstacles against which the native writer has to contend is sheer “poverty of materials.” “There is scarcely an ore which contributes to the wealth of the author, that is found, here, in veins as rich as in Europe. There are no annals for the historian; no follies (beyond the most vulgar and commonplace) for the satirist; no manners for the dramatist; no obscure fictions for the writer of romance . . . nor any of the rich auxiliaries of poetry . . . no costume for the peasant . . . no wig for the judge, no baton for the general, no diadem for the magistrate.” This complaint is substantially repeated by Hawthorne some three decades later in his preface to The Marble Faun, where he remarks upon the difficulty of “writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with our dear native land.” James, quoting these words in his biography of Hawthorne, is powerfully moved to enlarge upon them, and it is at this point in his book that the famous passage comes in (“No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army,” etc., etc.) enumerating the items of high civilization absent from American life. It is important to observe that James’s version, by stretching Hawthorne’s statement to the limit, no longer refers to “romance” alone but to artistic creation in general. Essentially he is duplicating Cooper’s complaint in a more elaborate and conscious manner; and where Cooper speaks of “the poverty of materials” available to the American writer, James speaks of “the paucity of ingredients.”

HE JUSTICE and pathos of this standing complaint have been more or less recognized by our critics and historians of letters. No doubt it is justified insofar T as we cannot but accept in some sense the Jamesian dictum that it takes “an accumulation of history and custom . . . to form a fund of suggestion for the novelist.” But there is nonetheless a fallacy in the argument so strikingly concurred in by Cooper, Hawthorne, and James. For what they are saying, intrinsically, is that it is impossible to write European literature in America; the necessary ingredients are missing. And so they were if we are thinking in terms of a Walter Scott romance or a Jane Austen novel or the poems of Byron; no part of the United States was then a center of high civilization. Still, what is wrong is the tacit assumption that the ingredients are of a fixed kind, given once and for all. But is it really true that the relationship between literature and high civilization is so completely binding? If that were strictly the case, we would be utterly at a loss to explain Philip Rahv the appearance in backward Russia, and so early in the 19th century at that, of so great a poet as Pushkin and a master of narrative prose like Gogol. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is in no sense a poem of high civilization, but it is a magnificent poem nevertheless. Is it not more to the point to acknowledge that the genuinely new and venturesome in literary art emerges from a fresh selection of the materials at hand, from an assimilation, that is, to imaginative forms of that which life newly offers but which the conventions of past literature are too rigid to let through? And in the earlier as well as the latter part of the 19th century, life in America certainly offered sufficient experience for imaginative treatment, though not the sort of experience marked by richness and complexity of historical reference and safely certified for literary use by the past conventions of authorship. Actually, in creating the character of Leatherstocking, Cooper did break through those conventions; as Lowell wrote in his Fable for Critics: “He has drawn you one character, though this is new / One wildflower he’s plucked that is wet with the dew / Of this fresh western world”; where Cooper failed in his Leatherstocking tales, however, is in being far too obedient to the established conventions in point of style and technique. As for Hawthorne, he appears to have attached a disproportionate importance to the question of “romance,” plainly because of his incapacity to come to terms with the kind of subject matter which is novelistic in essence. The fact is that in his time “romance” was a genre already far gone in obsolescence; it was the novel that was then full of promise and vitality. Let us recall, too, that some of “the follies” disdained by Cooper as much too “vulgar and commonplace” for literary exploitation served the French novel very well in the work of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. In his Comédie humaine Balzac intended to treat all strata of society, but in practice he assigned the major role to the trading and professional classes. There was no lack of such classes in the United States, and yet no indigenous version of a novel comparable to Balzac’s César Birotteau was ever produced by a writer who knew his New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. A subject so lowly as Balzac tackled in his commercial saga of a Parisian linen draper was entirely at variance with the “abnormal dignity” which then prevailed in American letters. Another example would be Madame Bovary. Can it really be claimed that the material fashioned by Flaubert into a work of art was unavailable a hundred years ago in America? After all, a pretty woman’s boredom, adultery, and suicide are scarcely a monopoly of French life. Yet the sort of imaginative transaction represented by the story of Emma Bovary is un- thinkable in mid-19th century America. It was not the absence of materials but the absence of writers prepared to cope with the materials actually at hand that decided the issue, and it is in this sense that the standing complaint cited above was misdirected. Allowing for Whit- man and in part for Melville as formidable exceptions, What stood in the way was the fixed stance of the writers, their lack of inner freedom to break with tradition so as to be able to say the seemingly unsayable. “The immense and vague cloudcanopy of idealism,” in Brooks’s phrase, which then hung over the national culture made any such attempts prohibitive. Self-Definition in American Literature

HE TRUTH is that there were no real novelists in America until the 80s and 90s, only pre-novelists and romancers. A conspicuous instance attesting to this fact T is Melville’s Pierre, the one work in which he undertook to possess himself of the forms of realism developed by his European contemporaries and in which he failed dismally. I am stressing this point in order to reinforce the contention in my essay “The Cult of Experience in American Writing,” that in that period American literature was not yet in position to adapt for itself “the vitally new principle of realism by which the art of fiction in Europe was . . . evolving toward a hitherto inconceivable condition of objectivity and familiarity with existence.” This principle of realism—which the late Erich Auerbach defines in hisMimesis as “a serious representation of contemporary social reality against the background of a constant historical movement”—requires above all a give-and-take relation between the ego and experience. It is only with the appearance of narratives like Henry James’s Washington Square (1881) and The Bostonians (1886) that we sense that this relation is perceptibly beginning to come into being. And if the former narrative, in its recreation of old New York focusing on the house in Washington Square with its chintz-covered parlor where Catherine Sloper is courted by Morris Townsend, still puts us under a spell, it is hardly because those young people are especially memorable or their case compelling, but because earlier American fiction is so poor in evocations of the actual in its time and place. It is a matter of the Americanness of a past age coming through as an aesthetic impression by virtue of the precision with which it is conveyed. But James was soon to settle in London, taking his American characters with him. It was to be a question for him of becoming either a novelist of high civilization, even if mainly of its impact on his countrymen, or nothing at all. He removed himself from the scene, exerting an uncertain influence from afar. Not till after the turn of the century, when the qualities of national existence changed radically and a native intelligentsia rose to the surface of social life, did American literature liberate itself from its past inhibitions. Of course, all through the 19th century the ideologues of nativity bent every effort to nullify the complaint against America’s “poverty of materials.” Whitman’s prose is one long counter-argument. And at an earlier date, apart from the Young America group in New York led by the Duyckincks and Cornelius Mathews, of whom a thorough and entertaining account has recently been given by Professor Perry Miller in his study The Raven and the Whale, powerful voices were raised in defense of America’s creative possibilities. There is Emerson, for example, writing in 1842 that

we have as yet no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incom- parable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods he so much admires in Homer. . . . Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Method- ism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder Philip Rahv

as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi. . . . Our log-rolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians . . . the northern trades, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

As usual, Emerson is being beautifully eloquent. His catalogue of materials is impressive, a splendid retort to disparagers and complainers. But a catalogue is one thing; the personal appropriation of materials is something else again. Only writers of a truly Balzacian grossness of appetite could conceivably have digested them. What was needed was not a “tyrannous eye” but a strong stomach above all; but unfortunately, the men of letters of that period were typically inclined either toward a morbid type of spirituality or toward a propitiatory and at bottom escapist jocosity. Whitman alone responded in programmatic fashion to Emerson’s challenge, though his master was sometimes depressed by his want of meters. Moreover the master, along with the lesser partisans of nativity, was not content to submit his inventory of materials without at the same time prescribing an attitude of patriotic glow as the condition of their assimilation. Note that Emerson says of America that it is “a poem in our eyes,” just as Whitman was to say in the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass that “the United States are themselves the greatest poem.” Thus dogmatic patriotism is turned into a prerequisite of artistic creation. Historically speaking, this is indeed the vulnerable side of nativism in literature, that it cannot advocate the use of the American subject matter without at once demanding of the writer that he declare himself in advance to stand in an affirmative relation to it. Na- tivists can never understand that any attempt to enlist literature “in the cause of America” is bound to impose an intolerable strain on the imaginative faculty. The real issue in the times of Emerson and Whitman was not between love of America and disdain of it; neither Cooper nor Hawthorne nor James disdained it. The issue was rather the availability at home of creatively usable materials; their availability was the point, and the writer’s readiness to benefit from it according to his lights, not the political or moral or philosophical valuation to be put upon them. It is through his achievement in his own medium that the important writer contributes to the spiritual development of his people. To ask that he commit himself to flattering the national ego is a proceeding as simple-minded as it is vicious. And it is a false idea of What affirmation comes to in the long run to believe that the literary artist who brings to his people not peace but a sword has failed in his spiritual task. As isolable qualities, neither pessimism nor optimism is definable as a value in art.

T THE PRESENT TIME, when the issue of “poverty of materials” can no longer arise in America, the habit of demanding affirmation still persists. We are living A in a period of renewed national belligerency, when pessimism is again regarded Self-Definition in American Literature as “un-American.” In many circles so recent a lesson as that taught us in the 20s, when American writing showed far more creative force than it does now even while engaging in a bitter assault on the national pieties, has been conveniently forgotten. As in the old days, so now the appeal to “the sanely and wholesomely American” is taken up as a weapon against the moral freedom of literature. It is true, as Mr. Henry Bamford Parkes points out in his essay “The Metamorphoses of Leatherstocking,” that a good deal of American writing, in the classic as in the modern period, is dominated by forms of flight from the organized pressures of society. Mr. Parkes brilliantly marshals the evidence to show that the Leatherstocking type of hero, who may be seen as a fugitive from society, reappears again and again in our fiction, which carries with it a specific emotion of disappointment in the consequences of civilization. In Huckleberry Finn, as in some of the novels of Sherwood Anderson, Dos Passos, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, an antagonism is demonstrated between individual integrity and institutional disciplines and mores. To the texts cited by Mr. Parkes one might add so signal an expression of the same tendency as Faulkner’s long story “The Bear,” in which the principal character, Isaac McCaslin, relinquishes the land he has inherited, in the belief that rapacity was the prime motive power of subduing the wilderness and that civilization represents a fall from goodness and innocence requiring strict expiation. One wonders, however, whether Mr. Parkes is right in the interpretation he puts upon the evidence at his disposal. Is not the pessimism which he perceives to be so strikingly characteristic of modern American literature to be found in even stronger ideological doses, though not expressed with the same heedless violence, in modern European writing? Are we justified in absolving civilization of sin and guilt while convicting writers of an impossible idealism derived from a Rousseauistic faith in natural virtue and natural religion? Is not discontent with civilization one of the major sources of the virulence of modernity? Literature, here as in Europe, has so long made a specialty of the depiction of evil in man that it can scarcely be said to tell us that he is good; but neither does it tell us that social institutions are admirable, endowed with “prescriptive” rights which the individual does wrong to challenge. Institutions are made and unmade by particular men under particular circumstances, and to confer a sacrosanct character upon their own handiwork is to turn them into idolaters and slaves.

CLOSE OBSERVER of the creative process once finely remarked that the honor of a literature lies in its capacity to develop “a great quarrel within the national A consciousness.” One has only to think of the outstanding Victorian figures who decried the state of England, or of the French and particularly the Russian novel in the past century, to realize the truth of that statement. In a somewhat different way the modern American novel is likewise implicated in a “great quarrel within the national consciousness.” To my mind, the principal theme of this novel, from Dreiser and Anderson Philip Rahv to Fitzgerald and Faulkner, has been the discrepancy between the high promise of the American dream and what history has made of it. The inner feeling of this novel is one of nostalgic love of nativity combined with baffled (and sometimes angry) disenchantment. That is what comes so tellingly through to us, with plangent lyrical force, in the wonderful closing paragraphs of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, when the narrator, Nick Carraway, wanders down to the beach at night:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shad- owy, moving glow of a ferry-boat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue dawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms further. . . . And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Art has always fed on the contradiction between the reality of the world and the image of glory and orgastic happiness and harmony and goodness and fulfillment which the self cherishes as it aspires to live even while daily dying. If reality ever measures up to that image, art would witness its own dissolution in a beautiful world. But the world is what it is, in the New as in the Old. And in transposing this reflection into a national key, one feels compelled to say that America, whatever it looked like in its fresh flower- ing to Dutch sailors’ eyes, is far more what its best artists have made it out to be than it is the achieved utopia invoked in our mass media and by officialdom in politics as in culture. In their relation to their native land those artists have never lost their capacity for wonder, and they are in no danger of losing it so long as they do not degrade wonder into submission, acquiescence, or an allegiance simple, uniform, and thoughtless.q January 1958

By Cozzens Possessed A review of reviews. Dwight Macdonald

HE MOST ALARMING literary news in years is the enormous success of James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed. It sold 170,000 copies in the first six weeks of publication—more than all eleven of the author’s previous novels put together. At this writing, it has been at the top of the best-seller lists for two months. Hollywood and the Reader’s Di- gest have paid $100,000 apiece for the privilege of wreaking their wills upon it. And the New Yorker published a cartoon—one matron to another: “I was looking Tforward to a few weeks of just doing nothing after Labor Day when along came James Gould Cozzens.” There’s nothing new in all this—after all, something has to be the No. 1 best-seller at any given moment. What is new appears if one considers Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, which was at the top for a full year, before By Love Possessed displaced it. Peyton Place is a familiar kind of best-seller, a pedestrian job, an artifact rather than a work of art (put- ting it mildly) that owes its popularity to nothing more subtle than a remarkably heavy charge of Sex; perhaps its best-known predecessor is Forever Amber, fabricated a decade ago by another notably untalented lady. But Cozzens is not of the company of Kathleen Winsor, Edna Ferber, Daphne Du Maurier, Lloyd C. Douglas, and other such humble,

Dwight Macdonald was a staff writer for the New Yorker and film critic forEsquire . He also wrote frequently for the New York Review of Books. Dwight Macdonald though well-paid, artisans. Nor can he be “placed” at the middle level of best-sellerdom, that of writers like Herman Wouk, John Hersey, and Irwin Shaw, nor even (perhaps) on the empyrean heights occupied by Marquand and Steinbeck. He is a “serious” writer, and never more serious than in this book. That so uncompromising a work, written in prose of an artificiality and complexity that approaches the impenetrable—indeed often achieves it—that this should have become what the publishers gloatingly call “a runaway best-seller” is something new. How do those matrons cope with it, I wonder. Perhaps their very innocence in literary matters is a help—an Australian aboriginal would probably findRiders of the Purple Sage as hard to read as The Golden Bowl. The requirements of the mass market explain a good deal of bad writing today. But Cozzens here isn’t writing down, he is obviously giving it the works: By Love Possessed is his bid for immortality. It is Literature or it is nothing. Unfortunately none of the reviewers has seriously considered the second alternative. The book is not only a best-seller, it is a succès d’estime. Such reviews, such enthusiasm, such unanimity, such nonsense! The only really hostile review I have been able to find was by William Buckley, Jr., of all people, in his National Review. Granted that he was somewhat motivated by a non-literary consideration—the book is lengthily anti-Catholic—still I thought his deflation skillful and just. Looking through Alice Payne Hackett’s Sixty Years of Best Sellers, I find among the top ten novels between 1935 and 1955 just seven that I would call in any way “serious,” namely: Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935), Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937), Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1941), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951). About one every three years, with a significant falling off in the last decade. It is a slim harvest, in both quantity and quality, but the difference between the least of these and By Love Possessed is the difference between a work of art on some level and to some extent achieved, and one that falls below any reasonable literary criterion. Yet the reviewers almost to a man behaved as if they were possessed. This sincere enthusiasm for a mediocre work is more damaging to literary standards than any amount of cynical ballyhoo. One can guard against the Philistines outside the gates. It is when they get into the Ivory Tower that they are dangerous.*

HERE seems little doubt that By Love Possessed has been selling on the strength of the reviews. (Word-of-mouth comment has probably worked the other way; T I’ve found only two people who liked it, and the most common reply is: “I couldn’t read it.”) All the commercially important journals reviewed it prominently and enthusi- astically. The Sunday Times and Herald Tribune book sections gave it front-page reviews, by Malcolm Cowley (“one of the country’s truly distinguished novelists”) and Jessamyn

* A similar case of demoniacal possession took place in London in 1956 apropos of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. By Cozzens Possessed

West (“Rich, Wise, Major Novel of Love”). Time put Cozzens on the cover—Herman Wouk was there a year or two ago—and pronounced By Love Possessed “the best Ameri- can novel in years.” Orville Prescott in the Times thought it “magnificent,” Edward Weeks in the Atlantic found it “wise and compassionate,” and Whitney Balliett in the Saturday Review divined in it “the delicate and subtle tension between action and thought that is the essence of balanced fiction.” The most extraordinary performances were those of Brendan Gill in the New Yorker and John Fischer in Harper’s. The former praised it in terms that might have been thought a trifle excessive if he had been writing aboutWar and Peace: “a masterpiece . . . the author’s masterpiece . . . almost anybody’s masterpiece . . . supremely satisfying . . . an immense achievement . . . spellbinding . . . masterpiece.” The mood is lyrical, stammering with heartfelt emotion: “No American novelist of the twentieth century has attempted more than Mr. Cozzens attempts in the course of this long and bold and delicate book, which, despite its length, one reads through at headlong speed and is then angry with oneself for having reached the end so precipitately.” Mr. Fischer was more coherent but equally emphatic. Speaking from “the Editor’s Easy Chair,” as Harper’s quaintly styles it, he headed his piece: “NOMINATION FOR A NOBEL PRIZE,” and he meant it. For one slip or another—sentimentality, neuroticism, subjectivism, sloppy plot construction, or habitual use of “characters who are in one way or another in revolt against society”—he faults all the other competitors (the habitual- use-of-deleterious-characters rap alone disposes of Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Algren, Mailer, Capote, Bellow, Jones, Paul Bowles, and Tennessee Williams) until finally James Gould Cozzens stands out in superb isolation, a monument of normality, decency, and craftsmanship.* The provincial reviewers followed their leaders: “COZZENS PENS ENDURING TALE” (Cleveland News), “ONE OF THE GREAT NOVELS OF THE PRESENT CENTURY” (San Francisco Call-Bulletin), “finest American novel I have read in many a year” (Bernar- dine Kielty in the Ladies’ Home Journal), “COZZENS WRITES ABSORBING STORY IN EXCELLENT AND PROFOUND NOVEL” (Alice Dixon Bond in the Boston Herald; her column is called “The Case for Books”—is there an adjacent feature, “The Case Against

* Actually, even according to Mr. Fischer’s absurd standards, Cozzens doesn’t deserve this eminence. He is not “a classic mind operating in a romantic period” nor does his novel run counter to “the Gothic extravagance of current fiction”; as I shall show, his mind lacks clarity, control, and form—the typical classic virtues—and his prose is as Gothic as Harkness Memorial Quadrangle (also as unaesthetic). As for the alleged normality of his characters— “ordinary people, living ordinary lives, in ordinary circumstances” with whom the reader “can identify himself as he never can with the characters of an Algren or a Mailer”—they are normal only on the surface; once this is broken through, they are as neurotic and fantastic in their behavior as other current fictional people. The chief difference is that their creator often doesn’t realize it. Dwight Macdonald

Books”?). Leslie Hanscom in the New York World-Telegram—there are provincials in big cities, too—was impressed by Cozzens’s “awesome scrupulosity as an artist.” Mr. Hans- com’s scrupulosity as a critic inspires little awe; “Hemingway and Faulkner, move over!” he summed up. The frankest of the provincials was Carl Victor Little in the Houston Press: “The N.Y. Times, Saturday Review and other publications have taken out of the ivory tower the most accomplished critics available to join in the hallelujahs. So about all I can do is ditto the dithyrambs.” The literary quarterlies have not yet been heard from, but the liberal weeklies have. They didn’t exactly ditto the dithyrambs, except for Granville Hicks in the New Leader: “ . . . a novel to which talk of greatness is not irrelevant.” But they didn’t exactly veto them, either. Howard Nemerov in the Nation, Sarel Eimerl in the New Republic, and Richard Ellmann in the Reporter were all critical but respectful. Mr. Nemerov’s review I thought especially interesting. He was much alive to the use of the novel by the middlebrow reviewers as a stick to beat the highbrows, but, like Ell- mann and Eimerl, not at all alive to what seems to me the chief defect of a very defective novel: the atrocious style. My first thought was that this is odd because Nemerov is a poet. My second was that perhaps that’s the trouble. Our taste may have been corrupted not only by mass culture but also by its opposite—as we learned in old Doctor Engels’s dialectical kindergarten, opposites are first cousins—the anything-goes subjective style which some of our painters and poets have evolved as a protest against, and an escape from, mass culture. After all, By Love Possessed is not much harder to read than most contemporary poetry.

ERHAPS we should now take a look at what Cozzens has to say in By Love Pos- sessed, and how he says it. The normative hero is Arthur Winner, a reputable, Pmiddle-aged lawyer and family man who is exposed, during the two days and nights covered by the action, to a variety of unsettling experiences, which stimulate in him some even more unnerving memories. Winner is presented as a good man—kind, reasonable, sensitive, decent—and so he is taken by the reviewers: “The grandest moral vision in all Cozzens’s work—a passionately good, passionately religious, yet wholly secular man, whose very failures are only bad dreams” (Balliett), “intelligent, successful, tolerant . . . the quintessence of our best qualities” (Gill). I’m unwilling to go farther than the Kansas City Star: “thoroughly honest, genteel, devoted to his work, and conscientious.” Passion seems to me just what is most obviously missing in Arthur Winner; he’s about as passionate as a bowl of oatmeal. He is, in fact, a prig. His responses to the many appeals made to him in the course of the story—he’s always on top, handing down advice and help, a great temptation to priggish- ness—while decent enough in form (“genteel”) are in reality ungenerous and self-protective. To a Catholic lady who tries to justify her faith: “Where there are differences in religion, I By Cozzens Possessed think it generally wiser not to discuss them.” To a seduced girl’s father, who has flourished a gun: “Be very careful! Return the gun; and meanwhile, show it to no one else. Don’t take it out of your pocket; and don’t consider pointing it. Pointing a weapon is a separate indict- able offense, and would get you an additional fine, and an additional jail term.” To his teen- age daughter, who wants to go dancing: “A real gone band? I believe I grasp your meaning. Clearly a good place to know. Where is it?” “Oh, it’s called the Old Timbers Tavern. It’s down toward Mechanicsville, not far.” “Yes; I’ve heard of it. And I’m afraid, whatever the reputed quality of the band, I must ask you not to go there.” “Oh, Father!” That he is right in each case, that the Catholic lady is addlewitted, that the father is a fool and a braggart, that the Old Timbers Tavern is in fact no place for a young girl to go—all this is beside the point. A prig is one who delights in demonstrating his superiority on small occasions, and it is precisely when he has a good case that he rises to the depths of prigocity. Although winner behaves like a prig, he is not meant to be one, if only because the main theme of the novel, the moral testing and education of a good man, would then collapse, and the philosophical tragedy that Cozzens has tried to write would have to be recast in a satiric if not a downright farcical mode. Here as elsewhere, the author is guilty of the unforgivable novelistic sin: He is unaware of the real nature of his characters, that is, the words and actions he gives them lead the reader to other conclusions than those intended by the author. His characters often speak brutally, for example, not because they are supposed to be brutes, but because their creator apparently thinks this is the way men talk. An elderly lawyer, civilly asked by a client to make some changes in the investing of her trust fund, replies: “You’re getting senile, Maud. Try not to be more of a fool than you can help.” A doctor, presented as a gentleman, meets the wife of a friend at a party, and, no dialogue or motivation given before, opens up: “What’s your trouble, baby? Or can I guess? . . . Tell Pappy how many periods you’ve missed. . . . You know as well as I do you’re one of those girls who only has to look at him to get herself knocked up.” She leaves the room “indignantly” (the adverb implies she’s a mite touchy) and he turns to Clarissa, Winner’s wife:

“I knew it as soon as I looked at her. Sure. One night she thinks: Too much trouble to get up; the hell with it! You two ought to trade apparatus. Then everybody’d be happy.” Clarissa said: “Reg, you’re not being very funny—” That’s right. I don’t feel very funny. Sometimes you get your bellyful of women—their goddam notions; their goddam talk-talk-talk; their goddam sacks of tripes.

No reason is given for any of these onslaughts, aside from the fact that all three re- cipients are women; this seems to be Cozzens’s idea of manly straight-from-the-shoulder talk. Curious. Curious, too, Winner’s pooh-poohing attitude when he is appealed to by the feminine victims. For Winner, too, is something of a brute, without his creator suspecting it. There is, Dwight Macdonald for example, that odd business on page 428 when Mrs. Pratt, after her silly, hysterical religiosity has beaten vainly for some thirty pages against the rock of Winner’s Episco- palian rectitude (Mrs. Pratt is a Roman Catholic), is finally checkmated. She has to go to the bathroom. For reasons obscure to me, this is presented as the decisive proof of hy- pocrisy: “At fact’s surely unkindest prank of all, Arthur Winner must protest, generously indignant.” (“Meanly delighted” would be more accurate.) For a page, Winner ruminates on his antagonist’s discomfiture, concluding: “But how in the world of fancy did you put delightfully the human circumstance whose undressed substance was that Celia, Celia, Celia shits—or even that Mrs. Pratt most urgently requires to piss?” Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much, and methinks that Swift’s allusion to Celia’s necessity was positively healthy compared to Cozzens-Winner’s resort to scatology to win an argument.

HIS LEADS us, in a way, to sex. The crucial episode, the one that more than any other shakes Winner’s faith in himself and in the uprightness of his life, is some- T thing that happened years before the action begins and that keeps coming back into his mind: his affair with Marjorie, the wife of his close friend and law partner, Ju- lius Pen-rose. On the day after his first wife’s death, Marjorie—another silly, hysterical woman—comes to the house and in a rush of emotion offers herself to him. He is about to take her, on his wife’s bed, when the phone rings. That time he is literally saved by the bell, but later, one summer when Penrose is away, they do have a frantic affair. At no time is love or even lust involved: “Far from coveting his neighbor’s wife, he rather disliked her, found her more unattractive than not.” The only reason given for Winner’s reaction to Marjorie is that she was there. Like that mountain climber. Or as Marjorie’s remorse- lessly philosophical husband puts it in his pidgin (or shall we say turkey) English: “I venture to assert that when the gadfly’s sting is fairly driven in, when this indefeasible urge of the flesh presses them, few men of normal potency prove able to refrain their feet from that path.” But then (a) why hasn’t Winner had dozens of such affairs instead of only this one—and for that matter, why was Marjorie able to seduce him only that one summer?; and (b) granted that some men do indeed so behave, why Winner? Does an Episcopalian lawyer, a rational, decent family man with no more and no different sexual urges than the normal ones, act like a dead-end kid? Cozzens insists that the best of us do so behave, but if we do, then we aren’t the best. There might be some individual quirk in Winner to explain it, but it is not given; on the contrary, Cozzens’s point is precisely Winner’s lack of such quirks—“few men of normal potency prove able to refrain their feet from that path.” This is neither realistic nor imaginative. It is the shocked revulsion of the adolescent who discovers that papa and mama do it. The formula for a best-seller now includes a minimum of “outspoken” descriptions of sexual activities, and By Love Possessed doesn’t skimp here. Its inventory includes rape, seduction, marital and extra-marital intercourse, with touches of sadism, lesbianism, By Cozzens Possessed onanism, and homosexuality. By Sex Possessed would be a more accurate title. There is very little love, which the author presents as at best a confusing and chancey business, to be patiently endured, like the weather. The provincials, for some reason, get the point here much better than their urban leaders did. The Chattanooga Times wonderfully summed up the theme as “the situation of rational man beset by passion,” adding: “Cozzens regards each form of love as a threat to Arthur Winner’s power to reason, to his ability to live life with meaning.” It’s too bad this acuteness in diagnosis was not accompanied by equal skill in evaluation; Cozzens’s notion of love was accepted as valid; but it isn’t, since love, even passion, is not an extraneous monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of life, but rather a prime mover which may burst everything apart but which must function if there is to be any motion at all. This is, at any rate, how the mak- ers of our literature, from Homer to Tolstoy, Proust, and James, have treated the theme; Cozzens’s efficiency-expert approach (Gumming Up the Works) is echt-American but creatively impoverishing. “The readers didn’t go much for Cozzens,” observed the Detroit Times, “until he wrote something with some sex in it.” This cynicism is not wholly justified. The literary prestige conferred by the reviewers was, I think, the chief factor. One of the consumer’s goods to which every American feels he has a right in this age of plenty is Culture, and By Love Possessed on the living-room table is a symbol of the owner’s exercise of this right. Granted that the reviews may have led many proprietors of living-room tables to think they could combine business with pleasure, so to speak, word must have gotten around fairly soon that the sexual passages were unrewarding. For even the sex is meager—perhaps the real title should be By Reason Possessed. I have the impression that Cozzens is as suspicious of sex as of love. Most of the sexual encounters he conscientiously describes are either fatuous (Winner and his first bride), sordid (Ralph and Veronica), or disgusting (Winner and Marjorie). Far worse—from a sales viewpoint— they are written in his customary turgid and inexpressive style. Take for example the two pages (264-65) on Winner’s love-making with his second wife, the most concrete description of the sexual act in the book and also the only place where sex is presented as one might say positively. This passage sounds partly like a tongue-tied Dr. Johnson: “the disposings of ac- customed practice, the preparations of purpose and consent, the familiar mute motions of furtherance.” But mostly like a Fortune description of an industrial process: “thrilling thuds of his heart . . . moist manipulative reception . . . the mutual heat of pumped bloods . . . the thoroughgoing, deepening, widening work of their connection; and his then no less than hers, the tempo slowed in concert to engineer a tremulous joint containment and continuance . . . the deep muscle groups, come to their vertex, were in a flash convulsed.”*

* “The passages having to do with physical love have a surprising lyric power.”—Jessamyn West in the N.Y. Herald Tribune. Dwight Macdonald

HE REVIEWERS think of Cozzens, as he does himself, as a cool, logical, unsentimental, and implacably deep thinker. “Every character and event is bathed in the T glow of a reflective intelligence,” puffsTime , while Brendan Gill huffs: “The Coz- zens intellect, which is of exceptional breadth and toughness, coolly directs the Cozzens heart.” In reality, Cozzens is not so much cool as inhibited, not so much unsentimental as frightened by feeling; he is not logical at all, and his mind is shallow and muddy rather than clear and deep. I think Julius Penrose may fairly be taken as Cozzens’s beau ideal of an intellectual, as Winner is his notion of a good man. If Penrose is meant to be taken ironically, if his pompous philosophizings are supposed to be burlesques, then the novel collapses at its center—leaving aside the fact they would be tedious as parodies—since it is Penrose who throughout the book guides Winner toward the solution of his problems. There’s a Penrose in Homer, but he’s not confused with Ulysses. His name is Nestor. The reviewers, of course, were impressed by this club bore: “a dark, supernal intelligence” (Balliett), “one of the most compelling [what does that critical standby mean, I wonder] and memorable figures in recent writing” (Jessamyn West), “the scalded mind of the archskeptic . . . a corrosive nonstop monologuist with a tongue like a poisoned dart” (Time). The intellectual climax—more accurately, anti-climax—of the book is a thirty-page conversation between Penrose and Winner—at their club, appropriately enough—about life and love. It reminds me of two grunt-and-groan wrestlers heaving their ponderous bulks around without ever getting a grip on each other. “How could she like these things [sadistic acts by her first husband]?” Penrose rhetorically asks at one point, immediately continuing in the strange patois of Cozzensville: “My considered answer: Marjorie, though all unknowing, could! She could see such a punishment as condign. She had to submit, because in an anguished way, she craved to have done to her what she was persuaded she deserved to have done to her.” Having got off this bit of kindergarten Freudianism: “He gazed an instant at Arthur Winner. ‘You find this farfetched?’ he said. ‘Yes, we who are so normal are reluctant to entertain such ideas.’ ” Ideas are always entertained in Cozzensville, though they are not always entertaining. After fifteen more lines of elaboration, Penrose again fears he has outstripped his audience: “You consider this too complicated?” To which Winner, manfully: “Perhaps not. But I’ve often wondered how far anyone can see into what goes on in someone else. I’ve read somewhere that it would pose the acutest head to draw forth and discover what is lodged in the heart.” Now where could he have read that? It is interesting to note that Penrose and Winner, the two “point-of-view” characters, are lawyers, and that the processes of the law occupy a considerable amount of the book. The reviewers marvel that Cozzens has been able to master so much legal know-how, but I think there is more to it than that. We Americans have always had a weakness for the law. Its objectivity reassures our skittish dread of emotion and its emphasis on The Facts suits our pragmatic temper. But above all the law is our substitute for philosophy, which By Cozzens Possessed makes us almost as nervous as emotion does. Its complicated, precise formulae have the external qualities of theoretical thinking, lacking only the most essential one—they don’t illuminate reality, since what is “given” is not the conditions of life but merely a narrow convention. Dickens, Tolstoy, and other novelists have written law-court scenes showing that truth is too small a fish to be caught in the law’s coarse meshes. But to Cozzens a trial is reality while emotional, disorderly life is the illusion. He delights in the tedious com- plications of lawyer’s talk, the sort of thing one skips in reading the court record of even the most sensational trials. On page 344 a clergyman incautiously asks Winner about the property rights of churches in Pennsylvania. “The difference is technical,” Winner begins with gusto, and three pages later is still expatiating. This fascination with the law is perhaps a clue to Cozzens’ defects as a novelist. It explains the peculiar aridity of his prose, its needless qualifications, its clumsiness, its defensive qualifications (a lawyer qualifies negatively—so he can’t be caught out later; but a novelist qualifies positively—to make his meaning not safer but clearer). And his sensibility is lawyer-like in its lack of both form and feeling, its peculiar combination of a brutal domineering pragmatism (“Just stick to the facts, please!”) with abstract fancywork, a kind of Victorian jigsaw decoration that hides more than it reveals. I, too, think the law is interesting, but as an intellectual discipline, like mathematics or crossword puzzles. I feel Cozzens uses it as a defense against emotion (“sentimentality”). Confusing it with philosophy, he makes it bear too heavy a load, so that reality is distorted and even the law’s own qualities are destroyed, its logic and precision blurred, its technical elegance coarsened. There’s too much emotion in his law and too much law in his emotion.

HE THREE earlier Cozzens novels I’ve read, The Last Adam, The Just and the Unjust, and Guard of Honor, were written in a straightforward if commonplace T style. But here Cozzens has tried to write Literature, to develop a complicated individual style, to convey deeper meanings than he has up to now attempted. Slimly endowed as either thinker or stylist, he has succeeded only in fuzzing it up, inverting the syntax, dragging in Latin-root polysyllables. Stylistically, By Love Possessed is a neo-Vic- torian cakewalk.* A cakewalk by a singularly awkward contestant. Confusing laborious- ness with profundity, the reviewers have for the most part not detected the imposture. There is some evidence, if one reads closely and also between the lines, that some of the reviewers had their doubts. But they adopted various strategies for muffling them. Messrs. Gill, Fischer, and Balliett, while applauding the style in general, refrained from quoting anything. The last-named, after praising the “compact, baked, fastidious sentences” went into a long, worried paragraph which inferred the opposite. “The unbending intricacies

* “CAKEWALK—a form of entertainment among American Negroes in which a prize of a cake was given for the most accomplished steps and figures.”—Webster. Dwight Macdonald of thought . . . seem to send his sentences into impossible log-jams,” he wrote, which is like saying of a girl, “She doesn’t seem pretty.” Jessamyn West warned, “You may come away with a certain feeling of tiredness,” and left it at that. Malcolm Cowley managed to imply the book is a masterpiece without actually saying so—the publishers couldn’t extract a single quote. With that cooniness he used to deploy in the 30s when he was confronted with an important work that was on the right (that is, the “left”) side but was pretty terrible, Cowley, here also confronted with a conflict between his taste and his sense of theZeit - geist, managed to praise with faint damns. One magisterial sentence, in particular, may be recommended to all ambitious young book reviewers: “His style used to be as clear as a mountain brook; now it has become a little weed-grown and murky, like the brook when it wanders through a meadow.” A meadowy brook is pretty too—it shows the mature Coz- zens now feels, in Cowley’s words, that “life is more complicated than he once believed.” A favorite reviewer’s gambit was that Cozzens’s prose may be involved but so is James’s. “One drawback is the style,” Time admitted, “which is frosted with parenthetical clauses, humpbacked syntax, Jamesian involutions, Faulknerian meanderings.” I am myself no foe of the parenthesis, nor do I mind a little syntactical humping at times, but I feel this comparison is absurd. James’s involutions are (a) necessary to precisely discriminate his meaning; (b) solid parts of the architecture of the sentence; and (c) controlled by a fine ear for euphony. Faulkner does meander, but there is emotional force, descriptive richness behind his wanderings. They both use words that are not only in the dictionary but also in the living language, and use them in conversational rhythms. Their style is complex because they are saying something complicated, not, as with Cozzens, because they cannot make words do what they want them to do.

UT THE MAIN burden of the reviewers was not doubt but affirmation. In reading their praise of Cozzens’ prose, I had an uneasy feeling that perhaps we were work- Bing with different texts. “Every sentence has been hammered, filed and tested until it bears precisely the weight it was designed to carry, and does it with clarity and grace,” wrote John Fischer. The sentences have been hammered all right:

Recollected with detachment, these self-contrived quandaries, these piffling dilemmas that young love could invent for itself were comic—too much ado about nothing much! Arthur Winner Junior was entangled laughably in his still-juvenile illogicalities and inconsistencies. Absurdly set on working contradictories and incompatibles, he showed how the world was indeed a comedy for those who think. By his unripe, all-or-nothing-at-all views, he was bound to be self-confounded. By the ridiculous impracticalness of his aspirations, he was inescapably that figure of fun whose lofty professions go with quite other performances. The high endeavor’s very moments of true predominance guaranteed the little joke-on-them to follow. By Cozzens Possessed

This is not a Horrible Example—we shall have some later—but a typical, run-of-the- mill Cozzens paragraph, chosen at random. It seems to me about as bad as prose can get—what sensitive or even merely competent novelist would write a phrase like “the ridiculous impracticalness of his aspirations”? “Mr. Cozzens is a master of dialogue,” wrote Orville Prescott. On the contrary, he has no ear for speech at all. “You answer well, Arthur!” says one matron. “But, to my very point!” And another: “They’re all, or almost all, down at the boathouse, swimming, Ar- thur.” A practicing lawyer, not supposed to be either pompous or balmy, uses the following expressions during a chat: I merit the reproof no doubt. . . . My unbecoming boasting you must lay to my sad disability. . . . I’m now in a fettle fine. . . . Our colloquy was brief.” In short, Cozzens’ people tend to talk like Cozzens. They’re out for that cake, too. “He has always written with complete clarity,” wrote Granville Hicks, “but here, without forsaking clarity and correctness, he achieves great eloquence and even poetic power.” On the contrary, malphony exfoliates, as our author might put it. As:

The succussive, earthquake-like throwing-over of a counted-on years-old stable state of things had opened fissures. Through one of them, Arthur Winner stared a giddying, horrifying moment down unplumbed, nameless abysses in himself. He might later deny the cognition, put thoughts of the undiscovered country away, seek to lose the memory; yet the heart’s mute halt at every occasional, accidental recollection of those gulfs admitted their existence, con- fessed his fearful close shave.

“Succussive” is cakewalking, since it means “violently shaking . . . as of earthquakes” and so merely duplicates the next word; a good writer wouldn’t use four hyphenated expressions in a row; he would also avoid the “occasional, accidental” rhyme, and the reference to unplumbed abysses; he would ask himself what a mute halt is (as versus a noisy halt?); and he would sense that “close shave” is stylistically an anticlimax to so solemnly elevated a passage. It’s all very puzzling. Here’s Richard Ellmann of Northwestern University, who has been perceptive about Joyce’s prose, findingBy Love Possessed “so pleasant to read,” while I find almost every sentence grates.* “Its author has become the most technically accomplished American novelist alive,”

* “Thinking last night of Ralph’s ‘Joanie,’ those Moores, all unsuspecting; whose ‘shame’ or ‘disgrace’ of the same kind (if more decent in degree) stood accomplished, waiting merely to be discovered to them, Arthur Winner had felt able to pre-figure, following the first horrified anger, the distraught recriminations, the general fury of family woe, a bitter necessary acceptance.” I find such prose almost impossible to read, partly because of an inexpressive, clumsy use of words, partly because the thought is both abstract and unclear, but chiefly because the rhythms are all wrong. Instead of carrying one forward, they drop one flat, and one must begin anew with each phrase. An artist creates a world, bit added to bit; each addition of Cozzens destroys what has gone before. Dwight Macdonald wrote Whitney Balliett. Let us say rather: the least technically accomplished. To list a few defects of style: (1) Melodramatics. “Deaf as yesterday to all representations of right, he purposed further perfidy, once more pawning his honor to obtain his lust. Deaf as yesterday to all remonstrances of reason, he purposed to sell himself over again to buy venery’s disappearing dross.” (Haven’t seen “dross” in print since East Lynne.) (2) Confucius Say. A queer strangled sententiousness often seizes upon our author. “In real life, effects of such disappointment are observed to be unenduring.” “The resolve to rise permitted no intermissions; ambition was never sated.” Like shot in game or sand in clams, such gritty nuggets are strewn through the book to set on edge the teeth of the reader—though not, apparently, of the reviewer. (3) Pointless Inversion. As Wolcott Gibbs once wrote of Time: “Backward ran sentences till reeled the mind.” Examples: “Unintelligible to them would be the law.” “Owned and operated by Noah’s father was a busy grist mill.” “Behind these slowminded peerings of sullen anxiety did dumb unreasonable surges of love swell.” “For that night, untied Hope still her virgin knot will keep.” The last is interesting. He must mean “tied,” since the “still” implies a possible later change, and a virgin knot, once untied, must ever remain so. I think the “un-” was added automatically, because Cozzens makes a dead style even deader by an obsessive use of negative constructions, often doubled, as: “unkilled,” “unhasty,” “not-unhelped,” “not-uneducated,” “not-unmoving,” “a not-unsturdy frame,” “a not-unhandsome profile.” May we take it the profile is handsome, the frame sturdy, or do they exist in some limbo betwixt and between? (4) Toujours le Mot Injuste. If there’s an inexpressive word, Cozzens will find it. He specially favors: (a) five-dollar words where five-centers would do; (b) pedantic Lati- nisms, strange beasts that are usually kept behind the zoo bars of Webster’s Unabridged. (a) Multisonous, incommutable, phantasmogenesis (having to do with the origin of dreams), stupefacients (narcotics), encasement (“snug encasement of his neck” for “tight collar”), explicative (“one of his characteristically explicative observations”), solemnization (“wedding” becomes “the solemnization’s scene”), eventuated (“acts of eventuated guilt,” a phrase undecipherable even with the Unabridged), and condign (“condign punishment”—means “deserved p.”). (b) I must admit that reading Cozzens has enriched my vocabulary, or, more accurately, added to it. My favorite, on the whole, is “presbyopic,” which of course means “long-sighted because of old age.” I also like the sound of “viridity” and “mucid,” though it’s disappointing to learn they mean simply “greenness” and “slimy.” But I see no reason for such grotesques as qualmish, scrutinous, vulnerary (“wound-healing”), pudency, re- vulsively, and vellications, which is Latin for twitchings. Perhaps the supreme triumph of Late Cozzenesque occurs on page 128, where, ago- nizedly entailed in the entracement of a bridegroom’s mazed tergiversations, as our au- By Cozzens Possessed thor might put it, he manages twice to use the phrase “piacular pollution.” The second time is specially impressive: “That concept of piacular pollution, much diminished as the idea of undressing Hope was entertained, received, with the autoptic fact of the undressed Hope, its coup de grace.” “Autoptic” is simple—an adjective made from “autopsy” or “personal inspection.” “Piacular” is more complicated. It means either (a) “of the nature of an expiation; expiatory,” or (b) “requiring expiation.” If it’s (a), then the pollution is an expiation, an atonement for some sin, which is absurd since the pollution itself is a sin; but if it’s (b), we are presented, by inference, with the interesting notion of a pollution that does not require expiation, that is, a so-to-speak pure pollution. Cozzens’ style is a throwback to the palmiest days of 19th-century rhetoric, when a big Latin-root word was considered more elegant than a small Anglo-Saxon word. The long, patient uphill struggle of the last fifty years to bring the diction and rhythms of prose closer to those of the spoken language might never have existed so far as Cozzens is concerned. He doesn’t even revert to the central tradition (Scott, Cooper, Bulwer-Lytton) but rather to the eccentric mode of the half-rebels against it (Carlyle, Meredith), who broke up the orderly platoons of gold-laced Latinisms into whimsically arranged squads, uni- formed with equal artificiality but marching every which way as the author’s wayward spirit moved them. Carlyle and Meredith are even less readable today than Scott and Cooper, whose prose at least inherited from the 18th century some structural backbone. That a contemporary writer should spend eight years fabricating a pastiche in the manner of George Meredith could only happen in America, where isolation produces oddity. The American novelist is sustained and disciplined by neither a literary tradition nor an intellectual community. He doesn’t see other writers much; he probably doesn’t live in New York, which like Paris and London unfortunately has almost a monopoly of the national cultural life, because the pace is too fast, the daily life too ugly, the interrup- tions too great; and even if he does, there are no cafés or pubs where he can foregather with his colleagues; he doesn’t read the literary press, which anyway is much less developed than in London or Paris; he normally thinks of himself as a non-intellectual, even an anti-intellectual (Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Anderson). It is a pattern of cultural isolation that brings out a writer’s eccentric, even his grotesque side.

N THE CASE of Cozzens, things have gone about as far as they can. At his country place in Lambertville, New Jersey, he leads a life compared to which Thoreau’s on IWalden Pond was gregarious. “I am a hermit and I have no friends,” he understates. According to Time, “Years elapse between dinner guests” and he hasn’t been to a play, a concert, or an art gallery in twenty years. (He did go to a movie in 1940). To those who wonder how he can write novels when he has so little contact with people, he says: “The thing you have to know about is yourself; you are people.” But he seems signally lacking in self-knowledge. He fancies himself as a stylist, for instance. “My own literary prefer- Dwight Macdonald ences are for writers who write well,” he says, pleasantly adding: “This necessarily ex- cludes most of my contemporaries.” The level of his taste may be inferred from the fact that he sneers at Faulkner (“falsifies life for dramatic effect”), Hemingway (“under the rough exterior, he’s just a great big bleeding heart”), and Lewis (“a crypto-sentimental- ist”), but admires—W. Somerset Maugham. He is similarly deceived about himself. He thinks he is a true-blue conservative of the old school: “I am more or less illiberal and strongly antipathetic to all political and social movements. I was brought up an Episcopalian, and where I live, the landed gen- try are Republican.” He is proud of his Tory ancestors, who had to flee to Canada during the Revolution: “To tell the truth, I feel I’m better than other people.” But this statement itself seems to me not that of an aristocrat, who would take it for granted, but rather of an uneasy arriviste. Nor does illiberalism make a conservative, as we learned in the days of McCarthy. Cozzens, like some of his sympathetically intended heroes—Dr. Bull in The Last Adam is an example—goes in for Plain Speaking, but it comes out somehow a little bumptious and unpleasant: “I like anybody if he’s a nice guy, but I’ve never met many Negroes who were nice guys.” His notion of a nice-guy Negro is Alfred Revere in By Love Possessed, the colored verger of the local Episcopalian church, which is otherwise Whites Only. Tactfully, Mr. Revere always takes Communion last: “The good, the just man had consideration for others. By delaying he took care that members of the congregation need never hesitate to receive the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ because a cup from which a Negro had drunk contained it.” This is not ironical, it is perfectly serious, and is followed by a page of contorted dialectic about God’s love. Years ago Cozzens married Bernice Baumgarten, a well-known literary agent. Although apparently it is a successful marriage, his remarks to the press about it have been rather boorish, even for him: “I suppose sex entered into it. After all, what’s a woman for?. . . Mother almost died when I married a Jew, but later when she saw I was being decently cared for, she realized that it was the best thing that could have happened to me.” Up toBy Love Possessed, Cozzens was largely supported by his wife. “It could have been a humiliating situation, but I guess I had a certain native conceit [those Tory ancestors] and felt that her time was well spent,” he says with his usual delicacy. Perhaps Cozzens is as inept with the spoken as with the written word. Probably he didn’t mean to define quite so narrowly and explicitly his wife’s role in his life, just as probably the slick, pushing, crafty Jewish lawyer, Mr. Woolf—he has even had the nerve to turn Episcopalian, to Winner’s contemptuous amusement—is not meant to stand for Jews in general, any more than the odious Mrs. Pratt is meant to stand for all Catholics. One only wishes that Cozzens’s mouthpiece weren’t quite so explicit: “Glimps- ing Mr. Woolf’s face in the mirror again, Arthur Winner could see his lips form a smile, dep- recatory, intentionally ingratiating. Was something there of the patient shrug, something of the bated breath and whispering humbleness?. . . Did you forget at your peril the ancient grudge that might be fed if Mr. Woolf could catch you once upon the hip?” By Cozzens Possessed

OW DID it happen? Why did such a book impress the reviewers? We know whodunit, but what was the motive? Like other crimes, this one was a product Hof Conditions. The failure of literary judgment and of simple common sense shown in l’affaire Cozzens indicates a general lowering of standards. If this were all, if our reviewers just didn’t know any better, then one would have to conclude we had quite lost our bearings. Luckily, there were other factors. It is disturbing it could have happened at all: By Love Possessed is the Sputnik-Vanguard of the literary world. But there were also specific reasons for the reviewers’ misjudgment, some of them also rather disturbing but at least limited in their implications. The two most important, I think, were related: a general feeling that Cozzens had hitherto been neglected and that he “had it coming to him.” And consequently a willing- ness, indeed an eagerness to take at face value his novel’s pretensions. It is difficult for American reviewers to resist a long, ambitious novel; they are betrayed by the American admiration of size and scope, also by the American sense of good fellowship; they find it hard to say to the author, after all his work: “Sorry, but it’s terrible.” In Cozzens’s case, it would have been especially hard because he had been writing serious novels for thirty years without ever having had a major success, either popular or d’estime. It was now or never. The second alternative would have meant that a lifetime of hard work in a good cause had ended in failure, which would have been un-American. So it had to be now. The other factor in the book’s success is historical. It is the latest episode in The Middlebrow Counter-Revolution. In the 20s and 30s, the avant-garde intellectuals had it pretty much their way. In 1940, the counter-revolution was launched with Archibald MacLeish’s essay, “The Irresponsibles,” and Van Wyck Brooks’s Hunter College talk, “On Literature Today,” followed a year later by his “Primary Literature and Coterie Litera- ture.” The Brooks-MacLeish thesis was that the avant-garde had lost contact with the normal life of humanity and had become frozen in an attitude of destructive superiority; the moral consequences were perversity and snobbishness, the cultural consequences were negativism, eccentricity, and solipsism.* The thesis was launched at the right moment. By 1940 the avant-garde had run out of gas—unfortunately no rear-guard filling stations have been opened up, either—while the country had become engaged in a world struggle for survival that made any radically dissident, skeptical attitude a luxury. Both conditions still persist, and so the counterrevolution has been on ever since.

* “Brooks and MacLeish assumed it was good for writers to identify themselves with their society, which in turn assumed the society was good. If it wasn’t, then the avant-garde was justified in isolating itself. Empirically, this would seem to be the case—at least most of the memorable art in every field produced between about 1890 and 1930 was done by artists like Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Stravinsky, and others who had rejected bourgeois society. But there’s no space to argue the question here. Those interested might look at my “Kulturbolshewismus—the Brooks- MacLeish Thesis” in Partisan Review, November-December 1941, reprinted in Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1957). Dwight Macdonald

Perhaps the first to see Cozzens as a rallying point was the late Bernard De Voto, who had a wonderfully acute instinct in these matters. De Voto was Cozzens’s Ezra Pound. “He is not a literary man, he is a writer,” he observed, a little obscurely but I see what he means. “There are a handful like him in every age. Later on it turns out they were the ones who wrote that age’s literature.” The wheel has comically come full circle: it used to be those odd, isolated, brilliant writers who were in advance of their times—the Stend- hals, the Melvilles, the Joyces, and Rimbauds—who later on were discovered to be “the ones who wrote that age’s literature”; but now it is the sober, conscientious plodders, who have a hard time just keeping up with the procession, whose true worth is temporarily obscured by their modish avant-garde competitors. This note is struck by the reviewers of By Love Possessed. “Critics and the kind of readers who start fashionable cults have been markedly cool toward him,” writes Gill, while John Fischer complains that Cozzens, unlike “some other novelists of stature,” has hitherto been denied “the reverence—indeed the adulation—of the magisterial critics whose encyclicals appear in the literary quarterlies and academic journals. Aside from a Pulitzer Prize in 1949, no such laurels have lighted on Cozzens’s head, and the fashionable critics have passed him by in contemptuous silence.” A highbrow conspiracy of paranoiac dimensions, it seems, is behind it all. Cozzens just won’t play our game. “It may be that his refusal to become a public figure—no TV or P.E.N. appearances, no commencement addresses at Sarah Lawrence, no night-club pronouncements recorded by Leonard Lyons—has put them [us] off. By devoting himself to writing, he has made himself invisible to the world of letters.” So, Mr. Gill. And Mr. Fischer: “Even his private life is, for a writer, unconventional. He attends no cocktail parties, makes no speeches, signs no manifestoes, writes no reviews, appears on no television shows, scratches no backs, shuns women’s clubs. . . . Few people in the so-called literary world have ever set eyes on him.” But doesn’t all this precisely describe Faulkner and Hemingway when they were making their reputations? Is the P.E.N. Club— have I ever met a member?—so powerful? Did Fitzgerald sign any manifestoes? Are we highbrows really so impressed by TV appearances, talks before women’s clubs, mention in gossip columns? Could it be simply that Cozzens really isn’t very good? Another hypothesis was advanced by Time: “The interior decorators of U.S letters— the little-magazine critics whose favorite furniture is the pigeonhole—find that Cozzens fits no recent fictional compartments, and usually pretend that he does not exist.” But there is, in fact, a recent pigeonhole for Cozzens: the Novel of Resignation. By Love Pos- sessed is, philosophically, an inversion, almost a parody of a kind of story Tolstoy and other 19th-century Russian novelists used to tell: of a successful, self-satisfied hero who is led by experiences in “extreme situations” to see how artificial his life has been and who then rejects the conventional world and either dies or begins a new, more meaningful life. In the Novel of Resignation, the highest reach of enlightenment is to realize By Cozzens Possessed how awful the System is and yet to accept it on its own terms. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be any System. Marquand invented the genre, Sloan Wilson carried it on in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and Herman Wouk formulated it most unmistakably in The Caine Mutiny. Wouk’s moral is that it is better to obey a lunatic, cowardly Captain Queeg, even if the result is disaster, than to follow the sensible advice of an officer of lower grade (who is pictured as a smooth-talking, destructive, cynical, irresponsible con- niver—in short, an intellectual) and save the ship. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be any U.S. Navy. In short, the conventional world, the System, is confused with Life. And since Life is Like That, it is childish if not worse to insist on something better. This is typically American: Either juvenile revolt or the immature acceptance of everything; there is no modulation, no development, merely the blank confrontation of untenable extremes; “maturity” means simply to replace wholesale revolt with wholesale acceptance.

T IS as if Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyitch ended with the hero, after his atrocious sufferings, concluding that, as a high official of the Court of Justice, it was in the na- Iture of things that he should die horribly of cancer, and that he must therefore bear his torment like a man for the good of the service. On the contrary, he is driven by his “extreme situation” to reject his whole past way of life. Only when he is finally able to give up “the claim that his life had been good” can he experience anything significant: love—the young servant’s gentle care of him—and then death. The ending of By Love Possessed strikes rather a different note. From Winner’s cli- mactic six-page interior monologue that ends the book we can take three formulations that sum it up: (1) “Freedom is the knowledge of necessity.” (2) “We are not children. In this life we cannot have everything for ourselves we might like to have.” (3) “Victory is not in reaching certainties or solving mysteries; victory is in making do with uncertain- ties, in supporting mysteries.” But what is the reality behind these unexceptionable bits of philosophy? It is that Winner, for complicated pragmatic-sentimental reasons, decides to cover up an embezzlement he has just discovered, an embezzlement of trust funds by his venerable law partner, Noah Tuttle, and that he has been eased of his guilt toward his other partner, Julius Penrose, about his old affair with Marjorie, Penrose’s wife. In both cases, it is Pen- rose who gives him the line: Exposing Tuttle would not only ruin Winner—who would be equally responsible for his partner’s defalcations—but would also mean the disgrace of Tuttle, who is after all paying the money back slowly. As for Winner’s liaison with Mar- jorie, Penrose has known about it all along and has never blamed Winner, considering that “indefeasible urge of the flesh.” In fact, Penrose is actually obliged to Winner fornot telling him: “I’ve always thanked you for . . . trying in every way to keep it from me.” In short, Ivan Ilyitch feels free because he is compelled to reject his past as “not the right thing,” Arthur Winner because he is allowed to accept his past, is even thanked by Dwight Macdonald his best friend for having concealed from him the fact that he had cuckolded him. The last words of the book are Winner’s, as he returns home: “I’m here.” It’s all right, nothing has to be changed: “I have the strength, the strength to, to—to endure more miseries,” thinks Winner, gratefully.q May 1959

What It Feels Like to Be a Goy A poet’s talk in Tel Aviv. Robert Graves

HAT DOES it feel like to be a Goy? Most modern Jewish fiction, or autobiography disguised as fiction, answers the complementary question “What does it feel like to be a Jew?” The goyim who surround each protagonist in these very similar dramas are described objectively; but the Jewish reader and the author himself can only guess what goes on behind their masks. Are they cruel, insensitive, or merely ignorant? WI am a goy, and the son of goyim: several generations at least on both sides of the family. It has recently become the fashion in the United States for young non-Jewish intellectuals to ransack their yellowing archives in search of a Jewish great-great-grandmother. The other day one of the Lowells of Boston told me with sparkling eyes that he actually has a Jewish great-grandmother. I cannot make any such claim. My father’s pedigree contains several medieval Kings of England, albeit through an illegitimate line, a Span- ish King of Cordoba maternally descended from the Prophet Mahomet, and—since we Graveses married into several Irish families—any amount of legendary Irish kings and heroes. No Cohens or Levis, not one! I did have a German great-grandmother named Schubert, but unfortunately she came of solid Lutheran stock.

Robert Graves was an English poet and novelist. This essay was given as a talk to the Israel and Commonwealth Association in Tel Aviv earlier in 1959. Robert Graves

Perhaps a closer investigation of the Spanish strain might be rewarding. Once Philip II—I think it was he—decided that all males of Jewish ancestry should wear a hat of peculiar design to distinguish them from men of honest Christian lineage. He did not specify “Aryan,” because most of the great Southern aristocrats boasted of their princely Moorish blood. The next day Philip’s court jester appeared before him with three such peculiar hats. “Who are to wear these, Fool?” asked the King. “Why, ‘nuncle,” the Jester answered, “this one is for me, that one is for thee, and t’other is for the Grand Inquisi- tor!” So the hat was never heard of again. . . . At all events, write me down as a goy and as a Protestant goy: than which nothing in the world could be more goyesque. Naturally, my family started with Catholicism, but a direct Graves ancestor was one of the two Round- head colonels appointed by Parliament to guard Charles I’s sacred person at Holmby House in 1647, when he had been captured; and from him descends a long line of Anglo- Irish Protestant rectors, deans, and bishops until I break the sequence. An early rabbi once declared that the worst day in Israel’s long history was neither that on which the ten tribes were carried off into captivity, nor those on which Solomon’s and Zerubbabel’s Temples went up in flames. It was the day when a group of seventy-two Alexandrian Sages (whom for some unaccountable reason we goyim call the “Septua- gint,” or “Seventy”) translated your Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. That makes sense. Israel’s very personal religious archives—containing frequent confessions of her back- slidings into idolatry, and gloomy records of her castigations—passed into enemy hands; with the eventual result that Christian goyim who cannot pretend even to be sons of Abraham, claim the God of Israel as their God and the Scriptures as their own Holy Writ; denying your stiff-necked and rebellious Jews any hope of the eventual salvation that your own Prophets had held out to you! And the Moslem goyim refuse you admittance to the Cave of Machpelah at Hebron, where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are interred! An equally bad day for us goyim was that on which the Latin Bible first appeared in English translation. The Puritanism which this publication induced proved a severer blow to us than King Harold’s defeat at Hastings in 1066, or the revolt of the American colonies in 1776. Puritanism set my ancestors off their balance—because the Bible (here at least I agree with the Catholic priesthood) is a most dangerous book for private reading by people of limited education—and England has never recovered from the widespread mental disorder that resulted. The real trouble lay in having adopted a cult which did not make simple, homely national sense.

OR SEVERAL centuries before this Protestant Bible-reading started, Catholicism had been a way of life rather than a religion, a prolongation of as much Greco- FRoman culture as the barbarians had spared; and fitted Europe like an old shoe. The heel might be split, the sole might let in water, but it was wearable. The princes of the Church had allied themselves with temporal monarchs, grown rich, studied clas- What It Feels Like To Be a Goy sical rhetoric, attended to their ritual duties, but interfered little with pagan holidays, customs, and popular traditions. If the people kept quiet, paid tithes, and reverenced the clergy, that was religion enough: Masses were said in Latin, which they did not understand, and the priest discouraged any close interest in theology—promising that he would see them all safely to Heaven. In 1534, when Henry VIII broke with Rome, he did so for political, not religious reasons. In fact, he was orthodox enough to have won the title “Defender of the Faith” from the Pope himself. But Henry would never have dared make the breach, had he not been supported by a large body of Englishmen who, while secretly studying the Bible in English, suddenly realized the immense difference between the teachings of Jesus recorded in the New Testament, and contemporary Church doctrine. They looked upon the Pope as anti- Christ, and his open sale of indulgences for sin shocked them. Hitherto their knowledge of the Scriptures had been carefully regulated. The priest chose only the more edifying passages for his commentaries; now at last both Testaments lay at their private disposal. Soon a multitude of non-conforming sects sprang up. Since the monarchy lagged behind these in theological speculation, and maintained the Divine Right of Kings, civil war became unavoidable. And representatives of such extreme Independent sects as Anabaptists, Old Brownists, Traskites, Anti-Scripturists, Familists, Soul-Sleepers, Ques- tionists, Seekers, Chiliasts, and Sebaptists—formed the fanatic Puritan spearhead. King Charles’s imprisonment and execution followed as a corollary. It was old Christian dogma that the Mosaic Law, entrusted by God to the Jews, remained valid only until the Messiah came—that the Messiah had come in the person of Jesus the Nazarene—that though the New Testament was inspired by him to replace it, the prophecies contained in the Old were authoritative proof of his destined Messiah- ship—that Christians were a New Israel, successors of the Old Israel which had denied Christ and been therefore rejected by God. So my Protestant ancestors, in order fully to understand their New Testament, pored over the Old, and came to remarkable and unsettling conclusions. Some, finding Jesus to have declared that the Law of Moses would never pass away until the end of the world, now regarded Jewish ritual obligations (so far as they could be observed without a Temple or priesthood) as still binding on Chris- tians. For instance, they wanted to keep the Jewish Sabbath instead of the Christian Sun- day, thought it wicked to eat blood-sausage, and would not remove their hats in church. The most famous Independent of all, John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, went further. He could find no evidence in the Bible of any curse on the Old Israel, and was plagued by a desperate conviction that, not being of Jewish stock, he would be burned to cinders by God’s avenging angels at the Battle of Armageddon. These Independents, among them the Pilgrim Fathers who had sailed to New England before the Civil War, lived in constant terror of damnation, as it were keeping Yom Kippur all the year round; and their so-called Sabbaths, instead of being days of rest and joy, spread a profound gloom Robert Graves over the week. Even Jesus, whom the medieval Catholics had softened into a gentle, kindly presence—born of a gentle, kindly, semi-divine virgin-mother, a revival of the ancient European Sea- and Moon-goddess—menaced them in dreams with continual reproaches and threats. They did not accept the ethical Law as a sweet burden, like the Pharisees, but made it a yoke of iron; and learned to hate the irreligious Catholics as much, or more, than they hated Jews. Instead of confessing their sins to a sympathetic priest, paying a small penance for a light-hearted absolution, and then cheerfully sinning again, the people acquired individual consciences and a soul-destroying sense of guilt. Merry England, which implied a romantic Virgin-worship (now heretical), perished with Cromwell’s victory at Naseby in 1645. The Crown has been Protestant, by law, since 1688.

HAT DOES it feel like to be a goy? Embarrassing, for careful students of religious history. The trouble began with Saul of Tarsus—later Paul—who once, W when in danger of his life from an angry pilgrim crowd, claimed Jewish birth. He certainly became a Jew by adoption early in his career, but according to the Ebionites (the austere apocalyptic section of Nazarenes) was the son of Greek parents; and the Ebionites can hardly be suspected of deliberate falsehood. His story of having sat at the feet of Gamaliel, Israel’s Supreme Court Judge, is implausible, if only because Gamaliel required of his picked law students a deep and accurate knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures; whereas Paul, in his Epistles, quotes only the Septuagint, even where the Greek wrongly differs from the original Hebrew text. Paul’s father was probably a Syrian-Greek God-fearer, the God-fearers being a Gentile fraternity who accepted the Ten Commandments and were well disposed to their Jewish mentors, but who “bowed in the House of Rimmon”—meaning, that they refused circumcision and obedience to the whole ritual Law, for fear of offending their Greek, or Ro- man, or Syrian city authorities. Those Jews controlled a great volume of Roman trade, and also international trade with Parthia, India, and beyond. The God-fearers wanted a share of this, and the Jews accepted them as business associates, though without the unquestioning trust that they reposed in proselytes who accepted the full burden of the Law. To judge from a confession of Paul’s in the Epistle to the Galatians, “to the Jews I became as a Jew,” it seems that he underwent circumcision—a sine qua non for his secret-service work as an agent provocateur employed by the Sadducees (collaborators with Rome) against the Nazarenes, to whom all Romans were unclean blasphemers. The Acts of the Apostles frankly describes how Paul, after assisting in the murder of a Greek-speaking Nazarene named Stephen, used this breach of the peace as an excuse for getting the Jerusalem Ebionites arrested and imprisoned; and how, after a spectacular conversion to their faith at Damascus, he once more changed his coat and, three years later, went about collecting God-fearers into a rival religious society of his own. Still later, when accused of defiling the Temple, he declined to be judged by the Supreme Court of Israel, which was famous for its lenity. Suddenly disclosing his Roman citizenship, he What It Feels Like To Be a Goy appealed to the Emperor: Well aware that no honorable Jew would dare to give evidence in a religious case judged by Nero. Nor would any pupil of Gamaliel’s, nor any Jew with the least pride in his race, have made such an appeal. Paul’s “Christian” Church became completely separated from the Jerusalem Church of Ebionites and other Nazarenes. The Jerusalem Church was presided over by Jacob of Bethany, an ultra-pious Temple priest, whom Christians call “St. James the Less,” and whose judicial murder, according to Jo- sephus, brought about the downfall of the Roman-appointed High Priest Hananiah II. Jacob’s Nazarenes regarded Jesus as the Messiah, but otherwise remained no less loyal to the Law and the Prophets than Jesus himself had been. Paul presently claimed that Jesus’s crucifixion totally annulled the Mosaic Law, and that an act of repentance and a confession of belief in his Messiahship was the only needful passport to Heaven. Mysti- cal accretions—some of them, like the Trinity doctrine, now given a Gnostic origin, others borrowed from paganism—expanded the Pauline faith. Yet Paul’s adoption of the Jewish ethic, as whittled down and reconciled by the God-fearers with obedience to their Roman overlords, stuck; and is still Christian dogma for Catholics and Protestants alike. When Judaism had been proscribed and nearly battered out of existence, the Chris- tians escaped by joining the hue and cry against their parent faith, accusing the Jews of Jesus’s murder, and rewriting the Gospels to present him as an original thinker who detested the Pharisees, knew better than Moses, and was honorably treated by Pontius Pilate, the Roman Procurator. To substantiate the Trinity doctrine, they even went so far as to make Jesus identify himself blasphemously with God. The Puritans could hardly repudiate St. Paul, whose epistles and life-story formed part of their Bible, and get back to the authentic Jesus. They chose a position somewhere between the Jews and the Catholics; but the diversity of their sects, and a great difference in opinion even within the Established Church of England, where they formed the Low Church party, made this “somewhere” an unhappily vague position. Catholicism never admits any sects; one is either a believer or a heretic.

O US English, all Jews were a mystery for over four hundred years before Crom- well invited them back. They had been expelled in an access of religious hysteria: T being accused of numerous unexplained crimes—especially the ritual murders of children, laid at their door, it seems, by members of a primitive pagan cult surviving in East Anglia, who actually committed them. Thus Shakespeare, who pilloried Shylock, the villainous Jew, in his Merchant of Venice, is unlikely ever to have met a Jew—unless perhaps a Sephardic physician attached to the Spanish Embassy in London. The tradition of wicked Jews who spat at Christ being endorsed by the Gospels, a Jew was a safe target; and Shakespeare borrowed his story from the Venetians, who had cause to be jealous of their Jewish trade rivals. An unusual feature in the case is Shakespeare’s sympathetic understanding of Shylock’s trouble. Robert Graves

Cromwell invited the Jews back for political, not religious reasons. They brought modern banking methods to London from Holland, and the City’s present financial strength rests squarely on the foundations they laid. Their descendants have met with little trouble since those days, always showing gratitude and loyalty to England. Yet although, a century ago, religious toleration reached a point where Jews could be enrolled in the British no- bility, and one even became Prime Minister and founded the Primrose League (the most true-blue Conservative institution of all), it would be foolish to pretend that they have been fully assimilated into British social life. Jewish dietary laws, and the yearly reminder at Pesach that their true home lay far away, made this impossible. They remained guests, albeit honored guests. Anglican church services are very odd, if one pauses to consider them. It cannot decently be denied that Jesus was a descendant of King David, rather than King Alfred; or that he was born in Judea of a Jewish mother, rather than in Wessex of an Anglo-Saxon one; or that he was acclaimed King of the Jews, rather than King of England. Yet he is always thought of as a blond, fair-skinned Anglo-Saxon wearing a Greek robe, like that of Socrates; and so are all his disciples—except perhaps Matthew, the converted tax-gatherer, and, of course, Judas. The oddest part of the service, as I look back to my country childhood, came when the local squire and his lady, the village worthies, and whoever else of the common herd attended Matins on Sunday, sang the Psalms of David: identifying themselves with the Israelites of old, and boasting of God’s help to them in Egypt and the wilderness. How unconvincing the psalm of the Babylonian captivity sounded from those bucolic Gentile lips!

By the waters of Babylon we sat down And wept when we remembered Zion. As for our harps, we hung them up Upon the willows that were thereby. How can we sing the Lord’s song In a strange land?

If only they could have celebrated King Alfred and the Danes, or the Battle of Agincourt, or something in their own glorious past! . . . I last attended an Anglican service (to please my mother) during the First World War, which the Church chose to support as a “Crusade Against Evil.” One of the psalms for that Sunday was Cur Fremunt Gentes? or “Why do the Gentiles so furiously rage together?”—an unanswered question which, since I had already come to suspect the Gospel denials of Jesus’s orthodox Judaism, provoked a bitter smile. My mother, a saintly woman, educated as a German Lutheran, pitied our Jewish neighbors for their miserable stubbornness—a great tactical mistake—and went out of her way to show them kindness. They did not repel her, but they must have read her like a book. How much guilt underlay this self-enforced pity is problematical: but I do know that the chief What It Feels Like To Be a Goy motive force in Protestant charity, when directed by the well-placed towards the needy or underprivileged, is guilt. The origins of our British Welfare State can be traced to a sense of guilt in comfortable 19th-century Protestant homes; charity was showered on ragged victims of the Industrial Revolution. It took the form of soup-kitchens, free education, and the vote—as a result of which the former governing class are today being slowly but surely evicted from their ancestral snuggeries. The famous Balfour Declaration purported to be an act of gratitude for the loyal services of Jews in the First World War, especially for Chaim Weizmann’s free gift to the British of chemical formulas that greatly assisted the Ministry of Munitions. But the very looseness of the wording “A National Home in Palestine” is psychologically suspect: It suggests a sense of guilt struggling with Protestant orthodoxy. A couple of generations ago other Puritans, John Bunyan’s successors, began to worry that they might not be the people celebrated in the Psalms of David. Yet the Church preached a New Israel chosen by God after the Jews rejected Christ. “Well, whoare these Jews?” some troubled inquirer pondered and, on consulting his Encyclopaedia, found that they were the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, plus a few Levites and Simeonites. The rest of Israel had been carried into captivity and never released. “But an Israelite, except in a fanciful sense, must be descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” he argued, “and Englishmen cannot sail under false colors!” Then a happy thought struck him. “We Christians are those lost tribes!” Hence the extraordinary pseudo-historic theories of the British Israelites, a sect which included a number of wealthy and influential Britons, among them (it was said) the late King George V, Head of the Protestant Church. He hopefully called his heir “David,” but David chose to be named Edward VIII; and a beautiful dream ended in tears.

HILE STILL a Protestant in faith as well as ethical conditioning, I could not feel at ease with Jews; but as soon as I grasped the historical implications of W being a goy, and took pains to undo all the knots in which my youthful mind had been entangled, everything changed. In fact, a negative anti-anti-Semitism became a positive pro-Judaism. When the State of Israel was proclaimed, I rejoiced; and imag- ined myself home at church in my childhood, where the same squire and his family, and the same village worthies, were singing cheerfully:

When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, Then were we like to them that wept!

But not meaning a word of it. . . . So at last you Jews won what you had always prayed for: a return to your own land! I foresaw that “What it feels like to be a Goy” would soon acquire a new sense. A goy, in relation to Jews dispersed all over the world, who are living on sufferance as guests in a generally hostile environment, is one thing; a goy in relation to a small though dy- Robert Graves namic nation of Jews, based on their original homeland, is another thing altogether. Until that miraculous day, most European Jews were taught from earliest infancy: “Be careful! Never listen to the goyim! Swallow insults, keep the Law! Be patient; you are one of God’s Chosen, and precious in His sight. One day He will make us a nation again!” It was a superiority complex, and difficult for a sensitivegoy to understand. Though he might be welcomed in a Jewish home and treated like a king, with all the extravagant hospitality of which perhaps the Irish alone are equally capable, he felt inferior and guilty; because he had not suffered a million slights and snubs and insults; and because he had been faith- ful to his national destiny. Often twenty generations of his ancestors had been around in those parts; but the Jews had been denied an ancestral home three times as long. Pity was not what he felt toward them, nor envy—it was a certain awe. And the Protestant in him said: “Not surprising; the Bible says that they are God’s Chosen People.” Even St. Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians had blurted out: “What advantage then hath the Jew? Much, chiefly that to the Jews were committed the holy oracles of God.” Of course, a “but” followed; nevertheless . . .

EN YEARS after the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, your government invited me to visit Israel. I answered in hot sincerity that it was the greatest honor T ever paid me. Whatever vicarious guilt I felt for the persecution of your ancestors by mine, was at last officially purged. Here in Israel I am agoy in the new, different sense. The awe remains: that Israel is a nation once more, and not a sentimental show-piece either, a mock-antique, but a strong, proud, energetic, well-disciplined nation—one that continues to welcome homeless Jewish immigrants into an already crowded country, and establish them as useful citizens. When I heard of the recent war with Egypt, I smiled a quiet historical, neutral smile: such as came to my lips the other day when I saw a “still” from the filmSolomon and Sheba, showing Solomon’s army in flight before a squadron of Egyptian Uhlans. In 1926, I was professor of English at Cairo University, and saw something of the Egyptian army. Officers were then selected for advancement by weight; and if one of them did not like the look of a subordinate, he would force open his mouth—and spit in it! My sense of awe has been heightened by the realization that Hebrew is again a living spoken language—the same Hebrew from which our vernacular Old Testament was translated at third hand, through Latin and Greek. And the blood-curdling life-histories of those who came here as ragged refugees, and can now hold their heads high again, seem to me a sufficient guarantee that the New Israel will endure. A friend named John, an officer in your merchant navy, though a member of a kibbutz at Caesarea—told me: “At first, my wife and I talked German in the home, but somehow we slid into Hebrew; it keeps us in touch with the children.” John, by the way, hates being parted from his family by going on distant voyages, What It Feels Like To Be a Goy and has no natural love of the sea. “Then whatever made a sailor of you?” I asked. “Dire necessity. All my family at Warsaw went into the gas-chamber, except me. But they helped me to escape, and I managed to buy the papers of a Polish sailor killed in 1939. I assumed his identity, and the Germans drafted me into their merchant navy. A week later I contacted the British secret service, so I did not have the crime on my conscience very long. Later, I was in a British prisoner camp on Cyprus, for smuggling arms to Israel. But I never cared to change my occupation. We are short of sailors.” “And your salary?” “High enough, though I don’t handle any of it. Everything goes to the kibbutz. Really, I’m an individualist, but the kibbutzim were needed to handle and organize immigrants, and I naturally show my gratitude, now that I’m well established. Besides, I have few wants except books, and the authorities indulge me in those.” Colonel T.E. Lawrence, whose official biographer I was, thoroughly approved of the Balfour Declaration, and wrote to me before he died in 1935: “It is a problem of the third generation.” If he meant “the third generation from now” (for the Rothschild settle- ments had already attained a fifth or sixth generation of “Sabras”), he was wrong. Unlike Moses, who kept Israel forty years in the Wilderness, you have not needed to await that third generation. The first generation has speeded up history. Most goyim are surprised to find that religious observance is not compulsory here; that, indeed, the orthodox are a minority and many Israelis seem to be free-thinkers. But you may remember what answer Hillel, president of the Sanhedrin, gave the young Roman who im- pertinently asked to be taught the Law in the time he could stand on one leg. Hillel quoted Leviticus: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself!,” adding: “The Law and the Prophets amount only to that.” And Hillel discouraged all mystical speculations about the nature of God; he held that the task of loving one’s neighbor was exacting enough for most men. Despite minor disputes inseparable from a nation still in its pioneering days, loving your neighbor is the main task you Israelis have chosen; or so I judge from visits to five kibbutzim, where friends of mine are members. A little freethinking, short of active anti-clericalism, can surely be forgiven. Our British Welfare State rests on a theory of social justice, and fair shares for all. But “Fair Shares For All” does not encourage overtime, or doing without luxuries so that as many poor fellows as possible can benefit from one’s own industry. “Love thy neighbor!” is a positive injunction—like “Six days shalt thou labor!” “Fair Shares For All” is negative. What advantage therefore hath a Jew? Much: chiefly that unto the Jews were committed the holy oracles of God! And, though there have been saints in every land, and under every religion, Israel was the first nation to make brotherly love and mercy head the list of moral virtues. So, if asked to pronounce on the knotty question: “What is a Jew?,” I should answer: “Anyone who feels himself a Jew and will faithfully obey that Levitical text.” All other considerations seem to me legalistic and unworthy of Israel’s historical role.q July 1959

The Swamp of Prosperity A review of Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth Saul Bellow

OODBYE, Columbus is a first book but it is not the book of a beginner. Unlike those of us who came howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, and teeth, speaking coherently. At twenty-six he is skillful, witty, and energetic and performs like a vir- tuoso. His one fault, and I don’t expect all the brethren to agree that it is a fault, is that he is so very sophisticated. Sometimes he twinkles too much. The New York Times has praised him for being “wry.” One such word to the Gwise ought to be sufficient. Mr. Roth has a superior sense of humor (see his story “Ep- stein”), and I think he can count on it more safely than on his “wryness.” His subject, to narrow it down for descriptive purposes, is Jewish life in suburban New Jersey and New York, the comfortable, paradoxical life of the Jew in prosperous postwar America. Neil Klugman, the hero of the long title story, twenty-three years of age, is different in many ways from the heroes of Jewish stories of the 30s and 40s. His appetites are more boyish, his thoughts more shrewd. He is strong on observation, a little less strong on affec- tion. His prototypes were far more sentimental. They were more doting, and also more com- bative. Neil is very little concerned with his parents, who have gone for the summer, or with his aunt who wants to fill him in their absence with pot roast and soda pop. He is something of an outsider; his fictional ancestor was a misfit, a sad sack, pure burlap, weirdly incompe- tent and extremely unworldly, as incoherent in the face of injustice as Billy Budd himself, a stranger to good manners, but for all of that easily moved, honest, and good-hearted. The Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the National Medal of Arts. Saul Bellow burlap hero could never keep a job or hold a girl. He was always sure to be shortchanged on the bus and if he went into the Automat for a cup of coffee he would scald himself. On the Jewish side he was descended from the shlimazl, obviously; on the Russian, from the poor clerk of Gogol’s story “The Cloak”; in American literature he takes his descent from the pure youth (relatively pure) of Anderson’s “I’m a Fool”—“Gee whiz! How could I pull such a dumb trick!” The burlap has gone out of fashion now, and in the stories of Mr. Roth there are only patches of the grand old fabric. It was during the depression that burlap had its finest hour. Before our present prosperous and bureaucratic era began, poor Feigenbaum belonged to the Jewish cafoni, the Little People. Now our more selfish desires and more complex motives have received a sharp stimulus. Possessions have a new glamour. Even burlap has changed. Madison Avenue people tint it and hang their windows with it, so it must cost more. Prob- ably nylon is no dearer. In any case, the hero of Jewish fiction two decades ago knew nothing of Jewish suburbs, country clubs, organized cancer fund drives, large sums of money, cars, mink, or jewelry. The burlap hero assumed that the social order was of course wicked, base, and harsh. But then the Mammon of Unrighteousness in those days had a smaller wardrobe. He might sometimes appear as Uncle Willie the haughty manufacturer from Riverside Drive, in spats, a cold Uppman cigar in his teeth. But now he wears Ivy League clothes, his hair is cut tight to his head, and his name is Legion. The stories of Mr. Roth show the great increase of the power of materialism over us. (I beg leave to remind you that I am neither Karl Marx nor the editorial writer for Life.) I don’t want to suggest that Mr. Roth simply ex- changes the burlap for the nylon, the rugged for the smooth, naivety for sophistication; only that he has a greater interest in society and in manners and is aware of a great change in the condition of the Jews. It is entirely clear that he is not satisfied with what Jewish life in the United States has become and though his criticism is usually made laughingly there are moments when it isn’t possible to laugh. A story like “Defender of the Faith” with its portrait of the scheming Private Grossbart dries up the grin on the reader’s face, and “Goodbye, Columbus,” pleasant and witty as it is, reveals something that is far worse than the corruption of an individual— the vacuity and mindlessness of Pig Heaven. There exist Jewish writers who think that ours are the best of all possible suburbs in the best of all possible Americas. In the final pages of Marjorie Morningstar, Mamaroneck is glorified. There we are shown a pious and wiser Marjorie, purified of her earlier follies. But to Mr. Roth all is far from well in Mamaroneck. He seems to doubt that the highest prizes of existence have really been moved from the ascetic foundation on which they have always before rested onto the new foundations of money and “normalcy.” I think that we must, on the evidence, doubt along with him.

HE CONDITION revealed in Goodbye, Columbus is really too grave for irony, and that is why Mr. Roth’s “wryness” appears to me inadequate. There’s a lot of T mileage to be gotten out of kidding costly Jewish weddings, plastic surgery, and The Swamp of Prosperity similar nonsense, but Mr. Roth wants to go deeper, farther, and the wryness after some time becomes the expression of his discontent with the inadequacy of his method. For, to put it as simply as I can, Mr. Roth wants to make a contrast of spirit and worldly goods. Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin, who are having a love affair during the summer vacation, come down to New York together, she to shop for clothes and to obtain a diaphragm, he to give her his support on such a difficult occasion. “The doctor’s office,” he says, “was in the Squibb Building, which is across from Bergdorf Goodman’s and so was a perfect place for Brenda to add to her wardrobe.” While she is being fitted, Neil wanders into St. Patrick’s and there he makes a little speech to himself. “Can I call the self-conscious words I spoke prayer? At any rate, I called my audience God. God, I said, I am twenty-three years old. I want to make the best of things. Now the doctor is about to wed Brenda to me, and I am not entirely certain that this is for the best. What is it I love, Lord? Why have I chosen? Who is Brenda? . . . If we meet you at all, God, it’s that we’re carnal and acquisitive, and thereby partake of you. I am carnal and I know you approve. I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my ac- quisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is you?” “It was an ingenious meditation, and suddenly I felt ashamed. I got up and walked out, and the noise of Fifth Avenue met me with an answer: “Which prize do you think, shmuck? Gold dinnerware, sporting-goods-trees, nectar- ines, garbage disposals, Patimkin Sink, Bonwit Teller—.” Brenda’s father is the manufacturer of Patimkin Sinks. A good enough old fellow at home, kindly and hospitable in an empty sort of way, he is formidable at business. He will buy split-level houses and new cars for his children when they marry but he will require Neil, should he become his daughter’s suitor, to give up his silly job at the Public Library where he has no prospects and to become capable of giving her garbage disposals and gold dinnerware. Certainly Neil’s meditation is curious. When I had finished the story I went back and read it again. It seems a little too cozy on the third reading. Why should it please God that we are carnal or acquisitive? I don’t see that at all. I assume Mr. Roth is saying that it would be a deadly offense to confuse God with Bonwit Teller and garbage disposals with goods and money. He doesn’t say it well; he is confused, nervous, wry, and somewhat too aware that this is a shocking way to address God. And in St. Patrick’s, too, perhaps displeasing the Catholics as well as the Jews. Had Mr. Roth plainly said “worldly goods versus the goods of the spirit” he might have avoided all this wry awkwardness. But now we have grasped his meaning: The world is too much with us, and there has never been so much world. For, in the past, what could money buy that can compare with the houses, the sinks, the garbage disposals, the Jags, the minks, the plastic surgery enjoyed by the descendants of those immigrants who passed through Ellis Island? To what can we compare this change? Nothing like it has ever hit the world; nothing in history has so Saul Bellow quickly and radically transformed any group of Jews. It is this change which is the real subject of “Goodbye, Columbus,” and not the love affair. Love, duty, principle, thought, significance, everything is being sucked into a fatty and nerveless state of “wellbeing.” My mother used to say of people who had had a lucky break, in the old Yiddish meta- phor, “They’ve fallen into the shmaltz-grub”—a pit of fat. The pit has expanded now into a swamp, and the lucky ones may be those who haven’t yet tasted the fruits of prosperity. The matter becomes even plainer in “Eli, the Fanatic.” * Into the suburban community of Woodenton comes a school for Orthodox children, refugees; the strange figure of a European Jew in black garments is seen in the supermarket and the Jewish residents are alarmed and angry. Eli Peck, the lawyer, writes to Mr. Tzuref at the school, “Woodenton is a progressive suburban community whose members, both Jewish and Gentile, are anxious that their families live in comfort and beauty and serenity.” Eli’s friend Teddie says to him about old-fashioned Orthodoxy, “It’s a goddam hideaway for people who can’t face life, if you ask me. . . . There’s peace in this town, Eli—and a good healthy relationship between its modern Jews and Protestants. . . . Last week, Jimmy Knudson took a group from Kiwanis to the Unitarian Church, and I sat there, Eli, and I was impressed. Nobody wailing or crying or any of that stuff. . . . And the priest, Eli, was dressed like you and me, Eli, and in his sermon he quoted from the Atlantic Monthly magazine, for Christ sake.” So, in rhythms that come straight from the Yiddish, Teddie states his case. Peace. Good healthy relationship. Nullity. Eli sends his own best tweed suit to the European Jew in black, and then, finding the old garments at his door, puts them on and frightens everyone. The little story is touching and funny, and it tells a great deal about the situation of the Jews in the Mamaronecks and Woodentons of this country. Not all Jewish readers have shown themselves pleased with Mr. Roth’s stories. Here and there one meets people who feel that the business of a Jewish writer in America is to write public relations releases, to publicize everything that is nice in the Jewish community and to suppress the rest, loyally. This is not at all the business of Jewish writers or of writers of any kind, and those touchy persons who reproach us with not writing the Jewish Elsie Dinsmore over and over again are very like the Russian authorities who created socialist realism. No quantity of Jewish Elsie Dinsmores from Mamaroneck will decrease anti-Semitic feeling. The loss to our sense of reality is not worth the gain (if there is one) in public relations. This is precisely what Mr. Roth is telling us in “Eli, the Fanatic.” What plagues Eli is the false image which fear and a hateful spirit of accommo- dation have created. The tweed suit is no more his than the black garments. He is false to himself in both, and it is this falsehood that does him the greatest harm. My advice to Mr. Roth is to ignore all objections and to continue on his present course.q

* Published in Commentary, April 1959.—Ed.