Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine
Coyne, John R. Jr.
First Amendment. With respect to the particular Court decisions he singles out for discussion in this book, his criticisms also seems to me, in almost every instance, quite well taken. But one...
...Unfortunately, such types tend to dominate departments of English literature...
...Yet Wolfe's method--to tell us by showing us, thereby carrying out to the letter the injunction laid on novelists by Henry James--may be what causes certain critics to slight him...
...He spent years rationalizing the bestialities of the most repressive regime in history by attempting to separate Stalinism from Marxism-Leninism and by assuring us that true socialism had not yet evolved in the Soviet Union...
...The essays in both volumes are concerned with their subjects' technical work as theorists, their views on broader social and philosophical questions, and their individual life experience...
...Instead of reading the great books, he bought a couple of color television sets...
...First, "Funky Chic," something that "was flying through London like an infected bat" in 1969: "So it happened that one night in a club called Arethusa, a favorite spot of the London bon ton, I witnessed the following: A man comes running into the Gents and squares off in front of a mirror, removes his tie and stuffs it into a pocket of his leather coat, jerks open the top four buttons of his shirt, shoves his fingers in John R. Coyne, Jr., an associate of The Alternative, is author of The Kumquat Statement...
...In other respects, however, the two books differ substantially...
...But then came the day when in the United States the workingman in fact became liberated...
...v e r ~ : l r v .~f ~:.'~'a about how our age is just too complex to allow for the traditional novel of manners...
...He certainly has earned the right to be taken seriously as a serious literary artist, however...
...Nevertheless, Wolfe does what he does better than any novelist or social historian writing today, and one suspects that his work will prove to be a good deal more durable than his critics believe...
...each pose for the health of our democracy...
...At one point, discussing the manners approach to art--he calls it "fashion"--Wolfe says: "novelists who have dwelled on fashion...have usually been regarded in their own time as lightWeights--' trivial' has been the going word --scarcely even literary artists~ in fact...
...Journalists...
...All the good mannerists have had this problem...
...Is there anyone else writing this sort of thing...
...In describing the University of Chicago to which Friedman went at the end of the war, Silk uses the device of a lengthy, extremely negative quotation from Paul Douglas...
...In fact, almost all these alarming trends of the late '60s seem to have lost ground in recent years and the social atmosphere is perhaps now healthier, the prospects for American democracy now brighter than for some time past...
...With the exception of a few older novelists like Wallace Stegner, the genre has been taken over by mechanics out to make a fast buck from the movies or by that inwardpeering, can't-cope-with-it-all breed that is too preoccupied with fondling its pysche and other :Dings to look abou~ and t i t to record what's going on O12t [hC F...
...To a certain sort of critical mind, it is simply inconceivable that anyone as good a t sketching types as Wolfe is could also be a substantial artist and serious thinker...
...Silk rejects monetarism because its policy implications seem to him morally unacceptable, and he rejects Friedman because the latter argues that the moral implications of the doctrine are not relevant to the questions of whether it is true or false...
...But then, says Wolfe, along came Solzhenitsyn to demonstrate that Stalinism was an integral part of socialism and that Soviet socialism was indeed real socialism--as Wolfe puts it, "socialism done by experts...
...It should be said at once that Berns is not simply displaying crankiness or rigidity in warning about these trends...
...Friedman is unfairly portrayed as soft on Watergate and Chilean dictatorship, and possessed of a cynical disregard for the lot of the poor, the racial minorities, and the undereducated...
...To Silk, Friedman is only deceiving himself and others by appealing to positive analysis or empirical observation...
...When he comes to Friedman, however, he is frankly polemical...
...And "what really spurred Friedman...to attack the Keynesians was not the technical aspects of monetary theory but the Chicago tradition of conservatism and the ideology of laissez-faire...
...Today," says Wolfe, "it is precisely the most rational, intellectual, secularized, modernized, updated, relevant religions--all of the brave, forward-looking Ethical Culture, Unitarian, and Swedenborgian movements of only yesterday--that are finished, gasping, breathing their last...
...If anything, we live in one of history's simpler periods...
...But today, if you want to know what mid-Victorian England looked like and sounded like and felt like, you don't go to the historians...
...Ten years ago," says Wolfe, " i f anyone of wealth, power, or renown had publicly 'announced for Christ,' people would have looked at him as if his nose had been eaten away by weevils...
...Those eccentric utopians of the nineteenth century such as Marx, says Wolfe, "'lived for the day of the liberated workingman...
...Wolfe also does much of the work of the novelists, who have let us down badly...
...Part of the problem, says Wolfe, lies in "one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe...
...As Eric Hoffer points out, America has worked beautifully without the assistance of the intellectuals...
...At least not here...
...Wolfe makes no claim to literary greatness...
...You want to know what I did last weekend...
...But it is one thing to criticize the Court for closing its eyes to these trends and another to suggest that the Court somehow is complicit in them...
...There is no better description of what Wolfe has done...
...Berns is persuasive when he argues that the law acts by influencing opinion as much as by coercing conduct, but I doubt that many fair-minded observers will attribute this much influence to decisions of the Supreme Court...
...Silk concerns himself with Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Wassily Leontieff, and Kenneth Boulding, while the Machlup volume contains essays on Friedrich Hayek by William F. Buckley, Jr., Gotffried Dietze, Ronald Hartwell, Shirley Letwin, George Roche, Arthur Shenfield, and Machlup himself...
...She was to be found on the fashion pages in every city of any size in the country...
...The novelists simply did it better...
...The stuff of the novel is the stuff of social history--men moving in society during distinct historical periods...
...A little brown bread in the bread box, a lapsed pledge card to CORE, a stereo and a record rack full of Coltrane and all the Beatles albums from Revolver on, white walls, a huge Dracaena marginata plant, which is there because all the furniture is 28 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 so clean-lined and spare that without this piece of frondose tropical Victoriana the room looks empty, a stack of unread New York Review of Bools rising up in a surly mound of subscription guilt, the conviction that America is materialistic, repressive, bloated, and deadened by its Silent Majority, which reposes in the heartland, three grocery boxes full of pop bottles wedged in behind the refrigerator and destined (one of these days) for the Recycling Center, a small, uncomfortable European car--that pretty well got the job done...
...He doesn't galumph...
...Cold War Revisionists) and timorous footnote-crazed Ph.D.'s who fear to put pen to paper until everyone is dead and the trends are dear...
...I spent last weekend at the day-care center, looking after the most beautiful black children...and learning from them.' " In "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," Wolfe lists the criteria necessary for certification as an intellectual in the late sixties, when pride in status had replaced pride in function: "...by the 1960's it was no longer necessary to produce literature, scholarship, or art--or even to be involved in such matters, except as a consumer--in order to qualify as an intellectual...
...Precisely that...
...In a discussion of the first manners novelists, Wolfe says, "Early in the game they seemed to sense that fashion is a code, a symbolic vocabulary that offers a subrational but instant and very brilliant illumination of the characters of individuals and even entire periods, especially periods of great turmoil...
...And in the meantime, Wolfe seems to be doing much of it all by himself, a roving linebacker, utility infielder, and designated hitter...
...The columnists model themselves on Evans and Novak or Jack Anderson, and with the exception of George Will, there's not one among the new breed with the social eye...
...And if one is to deal in extreme formulations, there is probably less validity in some of Berns' bitter charges than in the oft-quoted dictum of Judge Learned Hand, who thought he knew at least "that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save...
...We have been taught by the lag' that they are not illegitimate and the legitimacy follows as a matter of course...
...And it may be that the rise of the novel accounts in part for the demise of social history" (the other major factor is undoubtedly the rise of the university...
...There she is in the photograph...
...Wolfe's thesis is that the American intellectual is frustrated because he is not and never has been oppressed, as is his European counterpart...
...Or at the least, he demonstrates that the courts cannot claim to be bound by the historical meaning of the First Amendment when they do so...
...The result...
...Yes, the vulgarity and at times the abusiveness of public discourse is cause for concern and yes, so too is the greater tolerance sometimes accorded extremist groups in the past decade...
...Initially his book appears innocuous enough, an effort by a distinguished journalist to discuss in layman's terms the work of five eminent academic economists...
...People are still people, manners are still manners, morals are still morals, society is still society, and snobs are still snobs...
...Leontieff comes through somewhat less successfully, despite--or perhaps because of--Silk's heroic effort to explain the nature of his input-output matrices without the aid of a single table or equation...
...You go to Trollope...
...In the end, it is perhaps best to admit that we do not know what law governs the spiritual resiliency of nations...
...The essay on Samuelson, whom Silk admires greatly, strikes me Edwin G. Dolan is assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth, and author of TANSTAAFL, a market approach to environmental problems...
...Intellectuals fascinate Wolfe...
...yet I doubt whether Prof...
...It's just that so few seem up to the task of showing it to us...
...IH Q Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...And imagine Adlai Stevenson's reaction...
...Wolfe seems to understand that he is frequently taken less than seriously by the poo-bahs, and one suspects it bothers him just a bit...
...as the best, followed closely by that on Boulding...
...And in like fashion, Berns suggests that the Court's "wall of separation" approach to the "non-establishment" clause is not only wrong in principle (certainly a plausible enough argument) but has somehow been a very significant factor in the decline of religion...
...this, notwithstanding the rather flexible application of the "wall" metaphor which has allowed the Court to sanction tax exemptions for church property and a variety of indirect financial aids (though, of course, not all that have been attempted) to religious institutions...
...But he deals with other things as well...
...It's extremely difficult to judge mannerists in their own day, and most contemporary judgments tend to be wrong...
...All sense of balance disappears...
...indeed he speaks quite soberly and sensitively about the dangers they...
...For him, each man's scientific theories are a projection of his normative predispositions...
...The intellectuals were wrong about religion...
...You can't summarize Tom Wolfe...
...It was only necessary to live la vie intellectuelle...
...And instead of fitting himself into the mold of the noble proletarian that the parlor socialists had constructed for him, he took his money and his leisure and ran...
...Wolfe will have to write thousands of pages before he plays in the same league with Trollope...
...BOOK REVIEW The Economists Leonard Silk / Basic Books / $10.95 Essays on Hayek Edited by Fritz Machlup / New York University Press / $10.00 Edwin G. Dolan Here we have two efforts to interpret the life work of some of the great economists of the 20th century...
...Bloomington, Indiana 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 he is so very good at what he does, thereby inviting total misunderstanding...
...There are some very good ones indeed, but they've been hypnotized by Vietnam and bitten by the Watergate bug, and today the best of them write almost exclusively about politics and Washington...
...Instead of emulating the sages, he models himself on Johnny Bench...
...They work upon the theory that what people look like, what they wear, what they say, tell us not only a great deal about the people underneath the social surface but also a great deal about the sort of society that approves of such surfaces...
...wearing her blue jeans and her blue work shirt, open to the sternum, with her long pre-Raphaelite hair parted on the top of the skull, uncoiffed but recently washed and blown dry with a Continental pro-style dryer (the word-of-mouth that year said the Continental gave her more 'body')...and she is telling her interviewer: " 'We're not having any "coming-out balls" this year or any "deb parties" or any of that...We're tired of cotillions and hunt cups and smart weekends...
...even those who have been judged to be the literary giants of their age...
...He just doesn't look substantial, doesn't sound serious...
...I know what he views as zany...
...The two sets of essays have certain points in common...
...For one thing, Silk forcibly rejects the idea of a value+free economics...
...BOOK REVIEW Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine Tom Wolfe / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / $8.95 John R. Coyne, Jr...
...Those critics of the manners approach, however, have difficulty distinguishing surfaces from superficiality and tend not to realize--perhaps because they simply lack artistic perception--that style is frequently substance...
...People are what they say and how they say it, what they wear, what they surround themselves with, how they act...
...But there are others--the New York Times Book Review types, for instance', who seem inclined to treat Wolfe with a certain condescension, as if it's all very well to be an amusing gadfly, but there are more important things in life, for instance, teaching drama at Yale...
...I'll go to Wolfe...
...Few thought that Trollope's reputation would outlive him, for instance...
...As such, much of the book succeeds quite well...
...Although Machlup, the volume's editor, contributes a fine review of Hayek's work as a technical economist, The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 31...
...e \Vrhc.,s' \\'ork51 .::" .,, <,t...
...Thus "the underlying motivation for Friedman's discovery of monetarism appears to have been his general dislike of Keynesianism and his aversion to any economics which...might undercut the intellectual preeminence of individualism and freedom of enterprise...
...Summaries can't adequately deal with style, and when you attempt to peel the style from a Wolfe piece, you take with it great swaths of substance...
...The drill was to secularize religion, to make it rational, to make it "relevant...
...On the other hand, the Supreme Court in recent years has also thought the better of some of its earlier, more extreme First Amendment decisions (as it did in redefining the scope of First Amendment protection for pornography in 1973...
...Berns would give (and I doubt more strongly whether he would be right to give) the Court, itself, much credit for the improvement in the nation's political climate...
...Wolfe, by the way, seems one of the very few writers around who seems to sense just how dated, how cranky, how 19th-centuryish something like dialectical materialism really is...
...That wasn't in Rexford Tugwell's intellectual game plan at all...
...Why does Silk have it in for Friedman...
...Praise God...
...The intellectual in America--or at least what passes as the intellectual--has, as Wolfe points out, been wrong about nearly everything...
...And although Wolfe doesn't say so, he understands that much of the frustration of that class which calls itself intellectual springs from an awareness of its own superfluity...
...But no longer...
...Still Berns concludes that "the cultivation of those virtues [decency and self-restraint] is not readily accomplished in a liberal democracy and it cannot even be attempted [emphasis supplied] until the Supreme Court is persuaded to forego its doctrinaire attachment to 'freedom of expression' and to complete separation of church and state...
...This brings us to what was, for me, the puzzle of Silk's book--his treatment of Friedman...
...i:err" i...
...But they also believe strongly in a standard of behavior, and I don't know what Wolfe's standard is...
...One cheap shot follows another...
...The intellectuals were wrong about the workingman...
...It would be difficult indeed to argue that the sixties and seventies were more complex than, say, the nineteenth century, when we were hit not only by the industrial revolution but by a revolution in the way we viewed the world and man's place in it, a revolution led by such people as Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche, to name just a few...
...This is what the novelists showed us so brilliantly through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century...
...Having got this far in understanding Silk, I was well primed for reading the essays on Hayek...
...If so, he's not being published...
...At another point: "...vulgarities expressed publicly...have become an accepted mode of discourse...
...ing _-,pewed o u , i l l : 1:~ s.q ro>rn.~ a t ~ t ' c h p...
...All of the economists under discussion have-how shall we say it--not precisely completed their life work, but have certainly gotten through enough of it to give us a fair basis for guessing what the completed edifice will look like...
...instead of living in a proletarian housing development (Wolfe calls the intellectuals' plan for proletarian housing "the Bauhaus vision of Worker Housing"), he moved out to the suburbs...
...First Silk...
...It is a piece about living with death, a piece about the nature of heroism, and it is written with restraint, respect, and that attention to detail that is Wolfe's great strength...
...But between the extremes, Berns argues persuasively that the courts need not provide the unhealthier trends in our society with a further push from the bench...
...Wolfe quotes Louis Auchincloss: "Why can we find a hundred professors eager to explore the subtleties of the court of the Empress Theodora," he asks, "and not one to plumb the depths of a party given by Perle Mesta...
...And the problem here for someone like Wolfe is compounded by the fact that There opportunity " Americd...
...Alone among his peers, he has illuminated the sixties and seventies and set their absurdities in amber...
...Indeed, that may be the primary reason that unlike Europe it has worked so well...
...Baloney...
...Well glory...
...Berns himself well knows, run much deeper...
...The root causes, as Prof...
...A few samplings...
...As for Galbraith--perhaps we can skip ahead a bit and quote Hayek: "Every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as 'progressive' views...
...He just may be, for instance, the only first-rate social historian of our recent past, the writing of history today having been taken over by muddle-headed abstractionists -ists (cf...
...Thus Berns tells us that " i t is no longer respectable for academics and 'intellectuals' to say" that Communist Party membership is incompatible with American citizenship "because it is no longer respectable in the law of the Constitution...
...And how the shades of those old genteel socialist-agnostics who shaped the New Deal must be moaning at the thought that a genuine, bona fide Holy Roller has taken over their party and sits in FDR's White House...
...Today, however, it's the thing to do...
...In his other essays, Silk is balanced, moderate, sometimes overly generous perhaps, but critical when necessary...
...Wolfe seems to be out there all alone, single-handedly keeping several of the best traditions and techniques alive, and in the process creating a whole new subgenre...
...Friedman represents everything Silk dislikes about economists, and he lets it show...
...Nonsense...
...In a passage beginning, "the best economists are aware of the importance of trying to observe life directly," Silk praises Samuelson, Leontieff, and Galbraith for the quality of their empirical work, while pointedly omitting mention of the man who is the most doggedly empirical of them all...
...There are many, of course, who simply hate him, among them that whole crew that clusters around the New York Review, those snobs that Wolfe so successfully skewers...
...The social and intellectual history of the past decadeand-a-haft has never been recorded better than it is in "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening," and "Funky Chic," three pieces in which, among other things, Wolfe dissects parlor Marxism and what passes for the American intellectual The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 29 movement in a way that should make Michael Harrington blush...
...that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save...
...The reporters these clays are all playing Robert Redford, the magazine writers have slid over the edge into politics, and today the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" reads like an elegant version of the late-sixties Berkeley Barb...
...There are certain problems, however...
...Wolfe is also superb at the character sketch, as with the writer in the title piece ("Mauve Gloves & Madmen" are caterers...
...Elsewhere Friedman is damned by omission...
...Yes, the decline of religion is a disturbing phenomenon for friends of liberal democracy and yes, the much celebrated revolution in sexual mores has some disturbing political implications...
...What the Urban Young People want from religion is a little ...Hallelujahi...and talking in tonguest...
...In fact, the intellectuals have been wrong about nearly everything...
...Clutter & Vine" are florists...
...Should I, in my dotage, desire to relive this wretched period, I won't go to the historians...
...In most of Wolfe's writing, in fact, style is substance...
...of tours-, a g,Tc~d de'a{ ,/{ g: :!.,age be...
...But there is no doubt that he has captured the manners and morals of the past decade-and-a-half in a way that none of his contemporaries can match...
...One piece of reporting here, "The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie," is perhaps the best account ever written of the men who carried out the air war over North Vietnam...
...But one cannot help feeling that the book is somewhat marred by its excessively polemical tone...
...But I don't know what he regards as sane...
...Complex...
...The best satirists always possess biting wits, as does Wolfe...
...under the hair on the top of his head and starts thrashing and tousling it into a ferocious disarray, steps back and appraises the results, turns his head this way and that, pulls his shirt open a little wider to let the hair on his chest sprout out, and then, seeing that everything is just so, heads in toward the dining room for the main course.' ' A year later, "Funky Chic came skipping into the United States...in the form of such marvelous figures as the Debutante in Blue Jeans...
...that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish...
...No longer...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
