Robert Penn Warren's "Segregation"
Goodman, Paul
The publisher's wrapper speaks of this little book as a "sympathetic, fair, and honest report." And so it is. Yet it is disingenuous and not disinterest. ed, and it is a conceited little...
...if he means his image to be taken less earnestly, he's a lousier writer than he is...
...There are tricks of rhythm and tricks of ordering...
...The collection of essays that make up this volume do not fall into the categories of the superficial, glib, trivial, nor are they the highly impressionistic and usually uninformed results of a quick tour of a foreign area...
...he only feels he is in the right, he rather knows he is in the wrong...
...I had said it for a joke...
...He is certainly an object of physicianly compassion (probably a more practical proposition than "a case for the police...
...Or are we...
...tion with our present one following the Supreme Court's decisions against segregation...
...And a state-official says...
...He is describing a 15-year-old who has come to inspect an old fort in Nashville...
...he creates an impasse and bypasses the present...
...End of Section...
...all the usual reasons are largely rationalizations...
...and generally in such cases the law must finally give way...
...PAUL GOODMAN UNITY AND VARIETY IN MUSLIM CIVILIZATION, edited by Gustave E. von Grunebaum, University of Chicago Press, 1955...
...The question is an important one...
...Whatever the merits of this contemporary theory—it has great merits—it is simply the bread-and-butter of any attempt to describe the kind of behavior we read from Clinton, Tennessee...
...And I guess it is the feeling that people who are not sick in this particular way experience when we meet with people who are crazy in this way, whether in New York or in New Orleans...
...its reaction to the impact of western civilization...
...But for heaven's sake, he is writing for Life magazine...
...of fine intelligence...
...What's coming...
...What's coming...
...but instead he stalks off (or drowns) in his dignity...
...Paragraph...
...For instance, the terse bang-bang isolated concluding sentence: "...A girl from Mississippi had said to me, etc...
...PENN WARREN understands perfectly that fundamentally we have to do with unassimilable and self-disintegrating sentiments...
...it therefore often eventuates in a passionate advocacy of a new something...
...Let me ask the reader to imagine himself back to 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law, and to compare that situa...
...What's coming...
...Then the resulting woeful emptiness is concealed by dramatizing the self-conceited reporter or photographer...
...A regionalism that defends its peculiar and unprofitable excellences is an honorable thing, and a regionalism that can make them exemplary and viable, is a wonderful thing...
...But the effect of what he does—I do not think it is his intention— is to stall the works...
...I had been talking to a lot of people...
...but my point is that the manner is not the cause but the result of the sterile attitude adopted...
...especially since this attitude dovetails neatly into the conceit and disingenuousness (much closer to dishonesty) of Life magazine for which the reportage was made...
...I have no novel information on this subject-matter and I do not intend to spin again these well-spun speculations...
...Penn Warren's disingenuousness is this: he sees, he cannot help but see, that the Negro problem in the south is a psychiatric one, a matter of irrational emotions and split identity...
...help us...
...and it takes a lot of loud shouting and banding together to feel right enough to act in such a case...
...Yet the author persists in striking the postures and sounding the rhetoric of being in an agonizing moral dilemma, as if a problem of medicine were a problem of ethics...
...and bad marks are scored against both...
...More helpful in this direction is a probing into the underlying aspects of Muslim civilization—its culture...
...but he does tend to make past tragedies a bulwark of present conceit...
...If we consider the author's handling of his Iist of reported reasons, he seems to warm to two: the kind of false pride that says, "They can't push me around," without having an idea to give true courage in Socrate's sense...
...Now if such passions, opposed to the ideal and beginning to Iose the sanction of conventional authority, nevertheless cannot be downed in a man and even break into overt action, then that man is going to be very sick...
...the boy is portrayed as particularly attractive, appealing, and manly— until suddenly he shies away with ugly suspicious anger because the reporter doesn't share his hatred for niggerbastards...
...that organ of decentralized integral culture...
...and on the other are only passions, and reasons of the blood, the gorge, and the jealous nightmare...
...Let me put it another way: If you examine the list of "reasons" quoted above, that the reporter is satisfied with having collected, you find that it is altogether blank with respect to the standard contemporary theory of Prej udice (and certainly we are dealing with cases of prejudice...
...What it says sheds no light, but its way of saying it happens to be an excellent brief example of a kind of southern literary attitude, and it is worth discussing...
...There is no use in multiplying types and examples...
...I know what she meant...
...384 pp...
...a century later, the Law, going the other way, offends many a southern heart and soul...
...None of this is in Penn Warren's little book...
...This is to be disingenuous, for he must have both more live impulses and better sense...
...On the contrary, they are thoughtful, often erudite and always penetrating analyses by scholars...
...End of Section...
...It is the difference between a lynch mob and personal moral conviction...
...Disinterestedness is nonattachment to one's particular interests and concentration on the truth of the case...
...Quite the contrary...
...These and, any other aspects of Muslim civilization are treated in this very timely and timeless volume in the University of Chicago's Comparative Studies of Cultures and Civilizations...
...and especially piety, in the sense of loyalty to our history...
...I look down the interminable row of dingy houses, over the interminable flat of black earth toward the river...
...The author remarks, "And somehow the hallowedness of the ground he stood on had vindicated, as it were, that hate...
...He asks me if I have been talking to a lot of peo ple...
...If he means to say that there is an intrinsic connection between the history and its present-day consequences, and the consequences are admittedly ugly and unfortunate, then how is the ground "hallowed...
...That is, the stronger Iaw and the better reason are on the one side...
...He himself lays a personal stress on one other factor, "piety," in the sense of sticking to grandfather's ways...
...but a regionalism that is jealous of its right to segregate, is conceit, a defense against being swallowed up by one's stupid betters...
...Now "history" is of course a big deal with southern writers ("he is a man of character and force...
...But let us look at the following remark of Penn Warren's...
...But the southerner who cannot stomach the black boy in the school is precisely inwardly betrayed by most of these same ideals and conscientious considerations...
...he reads Roman history...
...But what is remarkable now is that Penn Warren by no means goes on from this line of reasoning, to ask, for instance, the pertinent psychological questions, to ask for dreams and sexual fantasies, to notice the relevant character symptoms and obsessional defenses against anxiety, to explore (what is striking) the likeness of delusional jealousy...
...I am reminded of the tone of say, C. G. Bowers' The Tragic Era, where he lauds the beauty and virtue and learning and mores of his ante-bellum heroes, and he deplores with anguished sentimentality the evil days that have come and the offended womanhood, but never does he ask whether the infatuations of the former did not produce the latter (as the infatuations of the north have produced their own catastrophes, but nobody would boast of it...
...Impartial reporting" of the kind here is a conceited atti`ude to protect the writer and reader from experience, and to substitute conversation-pieces...
...and all of the other reasons readily group themselves in such a theory, both as causes and effects...
...If he thinks so, he's a fool...
...End of Section...
...but it is not hallowed, not hallowed unless the outcome is holy...
...Certainly the scene of any past epic or tragic event must evoke thought and even passionate concern and pride for ourselves if there is ground for pride...
...He seems to want to cry out "Help...
...rather, "the problem is to learn to live with ourselves...
...Paragraph...
...and the prejudice allows the consequent projections to alleviate tension, and spiteful aggressions to win small victories...
...The movies have much to answer for...
...any page of Life is a lead-mine for a prospector...
...Desegregation will come when enough people in a particular place cannot live with themselves any more...
...Yet it is disingenuous and not disinterest...
...Paragraph...
...In 1850 the man whose sentiment made him shelter the runaway and defy the law, felt himself fortified by all ethics, fairness, the golden rule, the spirit of the Constitution and the Declaration, Christian, deist, or transcendental metaphysics—all these were on the side of his sentiment...
...But he is not, as such, an object for tragic pity, for brooding with like Hamlet, or of whom to say, as this author does, that he has a "moral problem...
...Whatever it is,' the college student says...
...6.00.—With the Muslim world In a state of social convulsion as it seeks to adjust to the twentieth century, the western world seems at a loss to understand exactly what is happening in this vast area reaching from Morocco to Indonesia and having some 350,000,000 inhabitants...
...but I want simply to ask the question, how is it conceivable that this sophisticated author proceeds as if no such further avenues of analysis existed...
...I ask the handsome, big...
...In the same vein, he dwells a lot on the reasons springing from a defense of regionalism—resistance to the centralized constitution and the sociologists...
...and he climaxes this passage with an excellent example of a person not able to live with herself: a crazy old lady who hears non-existent voices of Negroes screaming in the night, being burned alive...
...More direct in method is the conceit of the "impartial reporter," given by impartially skipping from one immediate close-up to another...
...This is really too vulgar...
...Surely a Pulitzer Prize winner has heard of such things...
...Given these mannerisms it is obviously impossible to say a serious word...
...In 1850, the Law, written in the Constitution itself and strongly affirmed by the Court, offended many a northern heart and soul...
...and indeed he subtitles his book "inner conflict," a term picked up from psychoanalysis...
...What's coming...
...Penn Warren does not, of course, try to defend the southern culture, nor to suggest that there is any present culture to save...
...He suddenly takes a moral stance of exhortation to the good way...
...End of Section...
...To be sure, no one likes to be looked at as sick and "merely pathetic," and he puts it to himself otherwise, but that putting is conceit...
...for when, on the contrary, he pursues his analysis to the point of split identity and then suddenly jumps to ethics and justice—"one small episode in the long effort for justice"—then he does no good and some harm...
...Let me put it another way: in the present economy and culture, almost the only earmark of the South as a region is the segregation...
...Wkat's coming...
...ed, and it is a conceited little book...
...And the college student says...
...This occurs when there is an "objective" and "impartial" reporting of what cannot possibly be manfully confronted without indignation or grief or love or compassion or such...
...It is late afternoon...
...But more generally, in this kind of reportage there is a confusion between impartiality and disinterestedness...
...In this little report impartiality means that approximately equal space is given to white and black...
...he collects a list of responses: "Pridefulness [here meaning, you gotta be better than somebody], money [for instance, wage differentials], level of intelligence, race [miscegenation], filth and disease, power, hate, contempt, legality...
...This makes sense, a disordered personality, a psychiatric case...
...If it is a medical problem, one goes on to employ or indicate or at least suggest the not brilliant, but by no means empty armamentarium of social psychiatry...
...Like any other conceit, however, it does create a false security in the writer and publisher (and presumably in some readers) that something is going on...
...But had I? End of Section...
...End of Section...
...is not impartiality the virtue of a referee in an equal competition with strict rules...
...Or again, he makes use of the snap-to-attention italicized repetitions, punctuating a factitious on-and-on flow: "What's coming...
...In the center of a standard analysis would be the notion of "reaction-formation": that the prejudice is a means of bolstering the repression of the inacceptable parts of oneself ("one's own ape-like nature," the southerner's wishful suspicion that he is a nigger...
...and if that's the case, forget it and draw the line elsewhere...
...its unifying and divisive forces, its concept of law, its traditions...
...now the southerners are nullifying the law and have their mobs...
...I hear the remorseless juke boxes...
...And a man in Arkansas says...
...None of this is in Penn Warren's little book...
...Paragraph...
...And the Methodist minister...
...Frankly, if desegregation is a matter of justice, as the author says on his next to the last page, I find it hard to understand what he thinks he is doing by this mode of scoring...
...The publisher's wrapper speaks of this little book as a "sympathetic, fair, and honest report...
...Observing and analyzing these developments in conventional western terms of analysis do not help very much in bringing one closer to an understanding of the deep-rooted problems of this Muslim world with its different values and social goals...
...Does he really think that the crazy old lady of his image will be helped by that kind of talk...
...If it is an ethical problem (or a fortiori a political problem), one must address it with present indignation, determination, sacrificial love, enthusiasm, organization, or however one has the will and skill...
...Paragraph...
...the white close-ups and black close-ups are mixed as if at random...
...Of this beautiful intellectual virtue there is very little in Life magazine and not much in Penn Warren's Segregation...
...What the devil does that sentence mean...
...Yet there is a crucial difference between these two nullification (and there is an unanimous informed opinion that the southern popular sentiment will give way, it will not make law...
...The northerners nullified the law and ran their undergrounds...
...I hear the pullulation of life, the stir and new tempo toward evening, the babble of voices, a snatch of laughter...
...Reporting his informal interviews and asking his question, "What are the reasons for segregation...
...THIS BRINGS US BACK, I guess, to the conceit of a little southern book like this...
...By "conceit" let us here mean a fantastic concept of oneself that one clings to for fear of an intolerable feeling of emptiness or defeat if it is given up...
...and if he would be punished for his lawless act, he would be judged as a decent man or a martyr, depending on his enthusiasm...
...But in the end, none of these seems to him to be the essential thing...
...The reality is the fact of self-division...
...An alternative ending is the irrele vant long-rhythmed picturesque fade out, as: "Paragraph...
...In the present case there are two strands, the southern conceit, which is merely a bit trying (still fighting the Civil War), and the more virulent conceit of Life magazine, which is a pain in the ass...
...there are sympathetic specimens of each...
...They shake the air...
...In both cases, a direct clash between popular sentiment and law...
...Would it not be wiser sadly to reassess the history, rathen than to become pompous...
...This is a spurious seriousness, a confusion, as Aristotle would have said, between the tragic and the merely pathetic...
...FINALLY, I must, although it is boring, mention the specific conceit of style that is germane to writing for Luce publications...
Vol. 4 • April 1957 • No. 2
