Fiction Shorts
Burke, Tom
Man as a Commodity The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, by Bruno Bettelheim. Free Press. 309 pp. $5. Reviewed by George Mosse The ideals of human progress and of hope for a better life...
...The Girl on the Baggage Truck" revisits a second O'Hara province: the New York speakeasies, the bars, the hotels...
...Excellent though his actual analysis may be, his larger conclusions do not quite convince...
...It follows James Malloy in a somewhat resigned middle-age—but it does not provide quite the denouement that the reader expects...
...Imagine Kissing Pete" (first published in The New Yorker) is the most fully realized of the three stories...
...a tea dance at the club and a girl in a long black satin dress and my furious jealousy of a fellow who wore a yellow foulard tie . . . the tone in which her brother had said to her: 'Are you coming or aren't you?' and the sounds of his galoshes after she said: 'I'm going home with Mr...
...This is not an enumeration of that catalogue of horrors with which we are all too familiar, but a serious attempt to derive meaning from these horrors for our time...
...The narrative follows the couple's social and moral decline...
...The book's core concerns the "extreme" situation of man imprisoned in the National Socialist concentration camps...
...We're Friends Again" has not quite the force of the other two stories, though it offers some sharply defined portraits of O'Hara New Dealers on the World War II home front...
...His relationships to the other characters provide an excellent springboard for O'Hara at his vintage best...
...Though these themes and settings have been amply explored in American fiction, Swados brings to them at least a measure of freshness and a sturdy technique...
...The Man in the Toolhouse" is the story of a sincere author whose lifetime work, an historical novel, offers him an empty and tragic success...
...The father taught his children academic subjects instead of how to escape in case of danger...
...Harvey Swados' collection of short stories bears what is probably the most engaging title to grace the bookstore windows all season...
...Modern man is haunted by the vision of his own degradation...
...Thus Bettleheim explains the ultimate degradation of modern man: how thousands could be ruled by a few guards, how men and women could go to their death without protesting...
...The Peacocks of Avignon" is a skillful portrait of a girl seeking emotional roots...
...Man was deprived of his autonomy...
...To Bettelheim this seems to be of the essence: that the modern state now has in its hands the means of actually changing personality...
...The totalitarian concentration camp society changed the human personality of its victims...
...This is the world of the status seekers, and the world of the confident wealthy...
...Indeed, his conclusions spring from a repudiation of much of what he had hitherto accepted as part of psychological thought...
...She does not leave Pete, though she loathes him—and she regains stature at the end of the story when she watches, erect and smiling, as her son takes top honors at a 1960 Princeton Commencement...
...Moreover, it is always dangerous to generalize from "extreme" human situations, though this has, significantly, become the fashion in our time...
...Victoria, a former psychology major, has always hoped to marry "a cultivated man...
...everything was controlled by an external and uncontrollable power...
...They go to France soon after their marriage, and Victoria, who has felt inadequate in the face of her husband's intellect, begins to emerge from her Doll's House when she observes that the religious paintings, the language, and the literature of southern France are "far from the front rank...
...Bobbie" Hammersmith, a Gibbsville belle, marries homely Pete McCrea after being spurned by a more desirable beau from the East...
...Those who survived best were men and women who faced their situation and attempted to adjust to it while secretly keeping some attitudes of their former world intact...
...Except for this flaw, O'Hara has fused his three related novels into a literary whole...
...But Bobbie's moral disintegration is not complete...
...he brings "the losing, not the lost, generation" powerfully up to date, and reveals more in a phrase about the mood and feeling of the Thirties and Forties than do a hundred history books...
...It can even change that human nature which previous generations believed was entirely or partially impervious to the social process...
...Pennsylvania, for New York and a writing career...
...Modern psychology seems to him mistaken in two particulars...
...James Malloy is her press agent...
...Charlotte Sears is the girl, a movie star just past the height of her popularity and a realist...
...A Year of Grace" is a satisfying, if not very original, story...
...Social organization now has a demonstrable power over man...
...Belief in the goodness of man is an escape from the reality of the totalitarian environment, which can transform the central autonomy of human personality into a robot-like dependence upon a brutal ruler...
...Why, then, is Burton so absorbed in a field "of minimal interest even to cultured people...
...His hope is based on the better understanding by man of these dangers as well as upon his observation that men in the concentration camp situation did embrace death rather than live as a commodity...
...Moreover, psychology seeks to adjust man to society, but in a concentration camp there is no conventional society to adjust to, and the reality of evil cannot be sublimated...
...When Victoria recognizes her husband's fatuous ambition for what it is, her own intellectual freedom is born...
...Pete soon realizes that he has been chosen from spite, and makes life miserable for both of them...
...She works in her father's college-town drug store, and meets Burton, who cultivates the language and culture of medieval Provence...
...As if this were not enough, Bettelheim demonstrates that this childlike dependence involves taking on the very value system of the rulers, complete with brutality and racism...
...To Bettelheim, the dangers of such a society are a part of the industrial, social, and technological revolution in which we live...
...were geared to this end, chiefly by inducing in the inmates a childlike dependence upon their guards, and destroying their adult frame of reference...
...As James Malloy grows older, he explores the memories of his youth: "Moments would come back to me" [he says] "of love and excitement . . . the throbbing urging of George Gershwin's Do It Again...
...Yet the changes in personality under the extreme situation of concentration camp existence came about through a rigid control of the environment, consciously manipulated by the S.S...
...The rest of the stories lack freshness...
...Men hoping to improve society must not be sidetracked into searching for the recesses of man's soul but instead must realize that human freedom and social organization are inseparable...
...It is a brooding tale of thwarted marital communication...
...The play ends with Anne pro claiming her belief in the goodness of all men...
...Bettelheim is a psychologist, and while he applies psychological criteria to his observations, they lead him towards some fundamental criticisms of the Freudian approach in which he was trained...
...He lays bare the behavior and idiom of the characters and their milieu with scalpel precision...
...Bettelheim's critique of The Diary of Anne Frank is to the point...
...The lesson which men concerned with human progress and human freedom might draw from this book is somewhat different from Bettelheim's own point of view...
...Victoria is fully realized as a character...
...The operations of the S.S...
...they leave their baby in the hands of an aged sitter, with rather bizarre results...
...Malloy.' They were the things I knew before we knew everything, and, I suppose, before we began to learn...
...they are, therefore, ever present...
...Here was a family that shut its eyes to the National Socialist reality and its implications...
...A Glance in the Mirror," about a rather irresponsible but successful band-leader who returns to his home town for a long-delayed visit with his daughter and divorced wife, evokes a mood and atmosphere reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short works...
...That man can be good thus becomes beside the point...
...Men and women, living in an artificial society over which they had no control, became "living corpses...
...According to modern psychology, the inner man, not society, creates the personality...
...Those who shut their eyes to concentration camp reality were most easily made the victims of it...
...One of the best stories, "Year of Grace," concerns a young professor, abroad on a foundation fellowship, and his wife...
...To Bettelheim this shirks the very problems which the book raised...
...Reviewed by George Mosse The ideals of human progress and of hope for a better life through social reorganization have been severely tested in our own age...
...The society he analyzes existed at a point when a certain ideology was triumphant...
...There is no evidence that history repeats itself in an identical manner, even though the identical problems may still want solution...
...It is admitted by Bettelheim that even Soviet labor camps do not display the same extreme types of personality change...
...A Quezon of Loneliness" concerns a young ..ouple beset with financial difficulties who save enough money to afford an evening at a Broadway play...
...the family remained together instead of scattering, which might have saved their lives...
...Malloy is the narrator, but more than an observer...
...O'Hara achieves one of his finest pieces of writing in a Long Island prohibition house party scene—and provides his heroine with a satisfying, if compromised, final peace...
...The Informed Heart should be required reading for all those who are interested in reexamining liberal dogma in the face of the challenges Bruno Bettelheim raises...
Vol. 25 • April 1961 • No. 4
