American Notebook America, the Country and the Myth
Howe, Irving
one frequently hears these days that socialists cling to a stereotyped picture of American life. Failing to see the subtle and even gross changes that have taken place during the past few...
...The many writers who, like him, proclaim the blessings of our material prosperity, even if they are not so rash as to invoke with him the Age of Pericles, seldom trouble to notice such limited and unexciting problems as trouble and disrupt the lives of millions of actual Americans...
...It is easier by far to write distinguished essays about "America...
...Often enough we do treat such abstract—yet useful because abstract—categories as "capitalism" and "class struggle" as if they were real objects or persons rather than tools for analysis...
...Perhaps...
...And meanwhile the millions of flesh-and-blood persons who work in factories and belong to labor unions seldom if ever appear in the works of those who talk about our changing "national character...
...And we hope that at least a few of these writers will care to know that nothing could please us more than to print such writings in DISSENT...
...but I disagree...
...escaped from Europe...
...Seldom made explicit, this assumption pervades the work of numerous American writers, with the result that a sociologist familiar with the manners of academic life is taken to be a student of American society as a whole...
...Some people may interject that it is not very profitable to take seriously the political writings of literary people...
...And it may even be a much less useful assumption, for the Marxist categories have, at the very least, the virtue of being comparatively public and open to verification, while in the recent literary celebrations of America every man makes up his terms as he goes along, so that one must try to correlate Mr...
...none thinks it worth the trouble to inquire what the production crisis in Detroit means to the life of thousands of people...
...None of the students of "American character" thinks to look into the gradual decay of the New England textile towns or the social disruption of New York City under the pressure of Puerto Rican migration...
...Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of an exhausted world, America has achieved not merely material plenty but also an exciting, adventuresome and free-wheeling style of life...
...Somewhat similarly, one sometimes feels in reading Leslie Fiedler's essays on "America" that Huck Finn, oblivious to time and man's works, is still floating down the river, Natty Bumpo is still loose on the prairie, and IshmaeI is still cozying with Queequeg rather than, as I happen to know, doing his basic training at Fort Riley...
...3) The assumption that America consists exclusively of the middle class or the academic and professional segments of the middle class...
...In an essay written by Mary McCarthy a few years ago, these notions received eloquent expression...
...America is unique, different...
...And there are also many significant areas of experience—e.g., the factory with its inner patterns of fraternity, discipline and chaos—in which the life of the workers is radically different from that of the middle class...
...But surely the assumption that one can talk usefully about "America" as if it were a graspable object, or as if it were a person waiting to be psychoanalyzed, is as much a reification as the habit of discussing America simply as if it were a "model" of capitalism...
...Failing to see the subtle and even gross changes that have taken place during the past few decades, they focus on an abstraction called "capitalism" and thereby neglect the variety, the complexity, the rich substance of American life...
...America the Beautiful" was her title, and for once she could hardly be suspected of irony...
...Perhaps it is worth noting two or three of these assumptions: 1) A refusal to analyze either the origins or prospects of our material prosperity...
...AND SO WHOLE STRATA Of the American population have been dismissed from the consideration of those who analyze and rhapsodize America...
...Merely to insist that everything about the past decade can be understood by a sweeping reference to "war economy" is surely to oversimplify a good deal...
...For in such writings one finds ex pressed, with whatever indulgence of the fancy, the assumptions that cut through almost all liberal thinking...
...Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, a book notable for its shrewd observations of middle class manners, no serious effort is made to relate the patterns of social life to the nature of our economy...
...none so much as dreams of writing a sequel to James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which we might learn what has happened to the life of the Southern sharecroppers during recent years...
...In the literature of liberal mythology America ceases to be a nation among nations, the major segment of international capitalist economy, and becomes instead an embodiment of the heart's desire which the brutish European intellectuals, in their malice or stupidity, insist upon maligning...
...IN A RECENT TRIBUTE TO DAVID RIESMAN, Mr...
...one frequently hears these days that socialists cling to a stereotyped picture of American life...
...This phrase about "opportunity and danger" may be taken as a summary of the numerous essays written on "America" (the idea, that is, not the country...
...but to write about Ameri 2F2 can life without recognizing that war production, with all of its economic and moral instabilities, has played a crucial role in Americn prosperity is to do something worse: it is to undersimplify the American scene...
...but this closeness of approach can be understood only if seen as a relationship between two distinct groups...
...Riesman is far from alone in this failure...
...Lionel Trilling has written that no American novel of the past period suggests to him so "brilliantly" as do Riesman's essays "the excite went of contemplating our life in culture as an opportunity and a danger...
...it is as if we were living at a time when the frontier was still a reality rather than an exploited memory...
...In Mr...
...Jolin Jay Chapman once remarked that in going to an Italian opera you might at least find out what could never be learned from reading Emerson's essays: that there are two sexes...
...Riesman's "other-directed community" with Miss McCarthy's "communion of ascetics...
...For * The "excitement" of reading Mr...
...escaped from the heartbreak house of capitalism...
...To feel any inter est in, let alone community with, the American workers is for most intel lectuals to run the worst of all risks— the risk of being thought sentimental...
...Like everyone else, radicals are mortal, and like everyone else they suffer from the shell-shocks of modern history...
...And in doing so we may fail to notice the many changes that have taken place in the structure, as in the quality, of American life, changes that do not, I think, add up to the removal of capitalism as a functioning system or of "capitalism" as a fluid category for social analysis, but which nonethe less merit some attention and study...
...But let me abandon the impersonal "they" and speak in the uncomfortable "we...
...Surely there must be a few young writers not so busy with exercises in national selfcongratulation that they will tell us, as once Edmund Wilson and Sherwood Anderson and James Agee told us, what the quality of American life really is...
...All that is needed—it is a very great deal—is what Edith Wharton once called "that sharpening of the moral vision which makes all human suffering so near and insistent that the other aspects of life fade into remoteness...
...The image of "America" that emerges from the writings of this school is as thoroughly abstract, reified, and unhistorical as any that may be charged against the 'most dogmatic radicals...
...One might say in defense of certain American sociologists that in their books, no matter how dreary, it is at least possible to learn what can seldom be discovered in the essays of the literary liberals: that there are two or more classes in America...
...escaped from atomic radiation (though its heart goes out to Japanese fishermen...
...For precisely this reason we must look for direct and simple reportage written by young writers who, with...
...But few segments of the popula tion interest the literary liberals and the impressionistic sociologists less than the workers...
...The "we" that appears in the impressionistic studies of "America" comes, upon inspection, to suggest little more than a very small segment of the population...
...To be sure, it is commonly said that the American workers are thoroughly middle class in outlook, but this statement is seldom anything but the result of intellectual carelessness...
...The patterns of our experience are not yet settled...
...Americans, she wrote, were the last idealists or non-materialists on earth...
...All the penalties of history, all the penalties paid and yet to be paid by Europe and Asia, cannot touch us...
...Few things are more dogmatic today than the anti-dogmatism of the liberal intellectual, few things more closed than his famous open mind...
...And Mr...
...It is profitable...
...the nation that was soon to choose Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles as its leaders she described as a "communion of ascetics...
...It is not very hard to put one's finger on the main stress of these writings...
...America is the land that has escaped...
...escaped, in short, from history...
...Riesman's current essays may be foundin passages such as this one: "Our intellectuals do not . allow themselves to praise Hollywood movies as much as, in my opinion, they deserve...
...as if the H-Bomb, the war economy, McCarthyism, the crack-up of Europe, the victories of Stalinism in Asia, while distressing enough, could not mar the immaculate essence of the American triumph...
...like Joseph in his many-colored coat, America is the invulnerable and prodigal son...
...In many areas of value judgment and style of life the workers of America do approach the middle class...
...out ideological preconceptions, will go into the cities and towns, looking, watching, responding...
...escaped from anomie and je m'en fiche...
...things here are still open and fluid...
...2) The assumption that America is a socially homogeneous nation...
...The criticism would, however, be much easier for us to accept if the liberals who advance it were not themselves so susceptible to it...
...One of the curiosities of our intellectual life at the present moment is the thoroughness with which the dominant school of liberalism—the school for which Sidney Hook is philosopherpolitician, David Riesman sociologist and Lionel Trilling literary moralist —exempts itself from its own analysis and recommendations...
...Under the pressures of the historical moment, the sense of social curiosity, to say nothing of the sense of social sympathy, has virtually disappeared...
...they are likepsychiatrists who do not dare give a patient a clean bill of health lest someother doctor find a hidden flaw...
Vol. 2 • July 1955 • No. 3
