Writings of Isabel Paterson

Culture & Liberty Culture & Liberty Writings of Isabel Paterson Stephen Cox editor O Routledge Taylor & Francis Croup LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2015 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2015 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014032470 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Paterson, Isabel, author. [Works. Selections] Culture and Liberty : writings of Isabel Paterson / edited by Stephen Cox. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4128-5600-3 (acid-free paper) 1. American literature-- Women authors. 2. Criticism--United States. 3. Libertarian literature. 4. Libertarianism--United States. 5. Paterson, Isabel. I. Cox, Stephen D., 1948- editor. II. Title. PS3531.A774A6 2015 818’.52--dc23 2014032470 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5600-3 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5679-9 (pbk) To the memory of Muriel Welles Hall Friend, scholar, individualist Contents Introduction ix A Note on the Text xxxiii Abbreviations and References xxxv People Mentioned xxxvii Part I Essays and Reviews 1 The True Individualist: Thoreau 3 2 The Reformer as Tyrant 11 3 What Is Known as a Practical Man 15 4 The Achievement of the Wright Brothers 19 5 American Concepts 21 6 But Is It True? 25 7 What Went Wrong 29 8 The Devolution of America 33 9 A Question of Privilege 37 10 Save Us, at Least, from Boredom 41 11 The Nobel Prize in Politics 45 12 The Culture of Communism 49 13 Freedom and Control 55 14 Whose Agent Is He? 59 15 Monkey-gland Economics 63 16 The Elusive Law of Wages 67 17 The Man with One Idea 73 18 What Do They Do All Day? 79 19 Adventures in Biology and Bunk 95 20 The Riddle of Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott Decision 99 21 Has the World Grown Smaller? 115 22 A Man of Destiny 125 23 Learning to Read: Child’s Play 131 24 What the Christmas Story Means 139 Part II Letters 25 Letters to 1940 145 26 Letters, 1940–1949 185 27 Letters, 1950 and After 209 Index 251 Introduction Today, Isabel Paterson is best known as an advocate of radical individual- ism, a prophet of the libertarian movement. She is known as a person who influenced (and antagonized) a wide variety of libertarian and conservative writers and public figures, from Ayn Rand to William F. Buckley, Jr. Her best remembered work is The God of the Machine (1943), which presents a theory of history and political economy from a libertarian point of view. In her own time, Paterson was noted as a literary critic and novelist, and as one of the most dangerously witty writers in America. It was said that some people loved her and some people hated her, “but everybody reads her.”1 She combined individualist ideas with an individual and provocative style, a style that made people look forward to whatever her next pronouncement on American culture might be. These various forms of fame, contemporary and historical, are monu- ments to a complex but strongly unified personality, always recogniz- able by a special approach to ideas and life. Paterson said that “only the most accomplished writers possess a sufficiently distinctive style for recognition.”2 The observation applies to her. She remains one of the most distinctive voices in American literary history—as this selection of her writings will indicate. Frontiers Isabel Paterson was born Mary Isabel (or perhaps Isabel Mary) Bowler on January 22, 1886. Her birthplace was a region of Canada that had only recently been opened to white settlement, Manitoulin Island in northern Lake Huron. The Bowler family was large and poor. There were nine chil- dren, a hardworking, intelligent mother, and a feckless, lazy father—“useless,” in Paterson’s estimation.3 Her childhood was spent on a series of frontiers: backwoods Canada, lumber-country Michigan, desert Utah, and ranch- land Alberta, where her family arrived in 1894. She had about two years of formal schooling and regarded its brevity as more of a convenience than a deprivation. She left home to work when she was seventeen or eighteen. ix Culture and Liberty Out on her own, she held a series of jobs—most memorably, to her, that of a “hotel diningroom girl”—and began to form her own compli- cated view of life, simultaneously romantic and wryly skeptical. Learn- ing shorthand and typing enabled her to get work with bankers and lawyers in western American and Canadian towns. One of her employ- ers was R. B. Bennett, the principal lawyer in Calgary, Alberta, and a future premier of Canada. She was one of many independent young men and women finding their way in the new civilization suddenly called into being by the Canadian Pacific Railway. She had no money, but with the help of a CPR pass she could travel down to Minneapolis- St. Paul whenever she wanted, just to buy a hat.4 In 1910 she married, for reasons that were probably uncertain even to her, one of the nice young men of her acquaintance in Calgary, Kenneth Birrell Paterson. The wedding took place on April 13; by midsummer, husband and wife had separated, seemingly without anger, except perhaps at themselves. By 1918, Isabel had lost track of Kenneth, but they were never divorced. Divorce was hard to get in Canada, and although Paterson enjoyed romances (and flirtations) and would have enjoyed having more of them, she never found anyone compatible enough for a second marriage. Not only did she remain Mrs. Paterson, but in her middle and old age she was known to most of her friends as “Pat.” The mystery of her husband haunts her last novel, Joyous Gard, completed three years before her death. After the breakup of her marriage, Paterson traveled to Spokane, Washington, where a job turned up with a newly started paper, the Inland Herald. She began as a secretary, but because her writing was so much better than her boss’s, she was soon transferred to writing editorials. She moved on to newspaper jobs in Vancouver, writing editorials, dramatic reviews, and short stories. Later she had jobs in San Francisco and New York, where she was on the staff of the World, the American, and Hearst’s Magazine. She worked as an assistant to Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor. Then, in 1922, she was hired as an assistant to Burton Rascoe, literary editor of the New York Tribune. This was the crucial event of her career. Rascoe was one of America’s most important young critics—an energetic exponent of modernist literature and a person who seemed to know and like almost everyone in the literary world. Paterson, as Rascoe put it, was much more “conservative” in her tastes; as she put it, she couldn’t “enjoy, for any length of time, a book in which it is impossible to be sure what the author means.” And on first meeting x Introduction Rascoe, she found it impossible to enjoy him, either. They had difficulty even being in each other’s presence. Still, she insisted on working for him, and he felt “afraid not to hire her.”5 From this strange beginning came a lifelong friendship, and a job that lasted to the end of Paterson’s salaried life. In 1924, Rascoe left the paper, and the Tribune joined with the Herald to become the Herald Tribune; but Paterson survived as a staff member and columnist for the Sunday literary supplement, Herald Tribune “Books.” Her weekly column, “Turns with a Bookworm,” continued until 1949. “Books” had a national circulation of about 500,000, and “Turns” was one of its most prominent features. It established Paterson as a literary personality. The Shaping of I.M.P. The column began as a collection of book news. The news element was present to the end, but very soon Paterson began shaping the acro- nymic signer of the column, “I.M.P.” (Isabel Mary Paterson), into an investigator of any issue, literary, philosophical, historical, or political, that happened to interest her. I.M.P. roved the literary world, asking unexpected questions and delivering her own unpredictable answers; she was a woman alternately bemused, sardonic, enthusiastic, nostal- gic; a woman who was sophisticated but down to earth, a woman who knew everything and wasn’t afraid to say it frankly. As I.M.P. pushed, then overwhelmed, the limits of her genre, she transformed the column into a miniature republic of letters, in which all issues of intellectual importance could be considered, and all authors or public figures accorded equal rights to praise or blame. In this community, Paterson herself was free to take any job she thought other writers weren’t doing well enough. She might appear as the modest inquirer into the truth of things (a common pose), the dutiful provider of information that leading intellectuals had somehow never learned, the insistent recommender of good books, new or old, that would otherwise have gone unnoticed, or the “little grandmother,” dragging erring authors to the woodshed to administer appropriate punishment.6 Readers came to expect all these forms of I.M.P.—and more, many more—to materialize within a single 1,800-word column.

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