THE NEW MUCKRAKERS
Schickel, Richard
The New Muckrakers by RICHARD SCHICKEL LIBERALS lament and conservatives exult because the old fashioned businessman-villain has recently seemed to disappear from our fiction. Power-lusting octopi...
...Should he sell his soul to the devil in return for worldly power...
...The slick magazines have been examined in books like The Death of Kings and The Big Wheel...
...It is no wonder the write is both attracted and repelled by the devilish machine...
...All the wealth and power in the world just aren't worth it...
...Perhaps that is why their legend is told and retold...
...Not unnaturally, all this has a certain superficial appeal...
...For those who demand split level novels there is the moral question...
...We Americans like to be shocked—but we like decency to tri umph in the end...
...The hero makes the Faustian choice ("Never again, never would I stop at anything to get what I wanted in this business...
...he has transferred his activities from the stock market to the mass media of communications...
...Of course, the problem with which the newer novels deal—the effect of the communications machine on the creative individual it employs—is not one to be remedied by legislation or an aroused public...
...So for those not interested in the artistic soul there are local color, revels and debauches, bedroom antics, and just plain nastiness, to keep them interested in at least one level of the story...
...It is logical than the writers of these new protest' novels should, finally, after experi-encing the influence of the mass media on their work, come away con-vinced that the American communi cations network is a threat to their very existence...
...The new protest novels are written in the same shocked and angry voice, are as black and white in moral tonality, and are as simple and one-dimen-sinal reative achievements as their predecessors...
...They combine, on a slightly higher level, the appeals of those two favorites of the drugstore browser, the fan magazines and the "confidential" mags...
...Perhaps their anger and moral indignation have clouded their artistic judgment...
...a vision of wealth and power opens before him, not to mention the office Marguerite...
...It would not, in fact, be an overstatement to say that the public is profoundly indifferent to the problems of the artist in our—or any other—time...
...The fictional tycoon-tyrant has merely moved uptown from Wall Street to Madison Avenue...
...And his vehicle is the same one in which his cruder forebearer cut such a buccaneering figure—the muckraking novel of social protest...
...It is posed in terms of one of literature's classic moral dilemmas: the temptation of Faust...
...I'd beat the industry any way and every way I could...
...It is no ponder that the gagman-cum-novelist Jttrns out fairy tales rather than finished novels...
...TV's equally fallen sisters, radio and advertising, have been worked over in such volumes as The Hucksters and Aurora Dawn...
...Sometimes the narrator (almost invariably the books are written in the first person) is not forced to make the Faustian choice himself...
...The moment of crisis comes...
...If the stock in trade of the mysteries is suspense, it is, for these novels, glamour...
...Cash Mc-Call has replaced the gauche Babbitt...
...we know that Cinderella and the Prince will marry and the bad sisters will get their comeuppance...
...M Alfred Kazin has remarked, "for fifa years the ethos of American literatujj . . . has been resignation, atUKJl escape, but so rarely acceptance...
...He says, in effect, "Forget those bothersome scruples you picked up at Princeton and you too can be a big wheel...
...As it is our flat (but somehow appealing) heroes and heroines are always being saved, in the nick of time, from the maws of the machine...
...But one does wish that a few D League Fausts would enjoy their pacts with the Devil...
...And these are novels of protest, have noted that many of their pro tagonists are direct descendants of the muckraker's tycoon...
...liberal intellectuals and tired shopgirls continue to be alternately horrified and titillated by his carryings-on...
...Perhaps it is unfair to complain that the modern Fausts are permitted to escape the traditional penalty for soul-bartering...
...Below this level the pay may be good but the strain on the soul is in some cases, considerable...
...Often the books read like the autobiographies of genuinely tortured men...
...The aver age writer must write to the order or the producer, or the advertiser, 01 the agency vice-president...
...Moore's novel contains all the expected elements in profusion: the Pilgrim's Progress, the good girl, the bad girls (a sexual encounter either fully described or alluded to every 35.2 pages), the descriptions of the lost, hollow big men...
...Simultaneously they provide glimpses of an exciting world far removed from the hum-drummery of the average American's daily life, while providing us with the inside information on the manners and morals of those who are the new men of power...
...But there is comfort for those who yearn for the bad old days when "businessman" was a synonym for devil...
...He must write to please a mythical commas denominator and he must write pre lifically...
...A hook which honestly assesses that gaower would perform a real service...
...The genre threatens to become a minor mass medium itself...
...If it did not, our faith in progress might be shattered This faith, that reason will eventual ly triumph over the greatest of evils, is the rationale for the muckrakinig tradition in our literature...
...Writing, so goes the cliche, it lonely business conducted by md alone with their consciences and their typewriters...
...will he shake hands on the deal with the devil...
...It is possible that they have been so ruined by their excursions into the popular entertainments that they are incapable of writing in any other way...
...Pitchman, by Robin Moore, is about the television industry, like The Great Man, Who He?, The God of Channel One, Tubie's Monument...
...and, more recently, in such offerings as Prince Bart, White Hunter, Black Heart, The Fugitive Romans, and in Clifford Odets' play and movie, The Big Knife, which in theme and treatment is a perfect example of the genre...
...Only a few elite are able to write anything like what the please...
...In the case of the genre under discussion the choice is usually between artistic integrity and the power which goes with shaping the thoughts of a mass audience...
...I'd out connive them all...
...This new businessman, if not the reincarnation of the Robber Baron, is certainly the direct descendant...
...g$hd it might answer the most fas-pBadng question of all: do the mass pgdia create the heels, or do the ifttls create the mass media...
...He sees the bodies of men and women broken on the wheels of the Wheels...
...Sometimes he is merely Henry James' "foreground observer" watching someone else make it...
...Sardi's and 21 and Toots Shor's are the scenes of numberless propositions, business and otherwise...
...Our genre successfully combines 11 tack and escape...
...In the process he has been slicked up considerably, but at the new stand he continues to exert a strange fascination on readers...
...It is like the reassuring fairy tale of childhood...
...Faust realizes finally that neither his mind nor his stomach could take this sort of life very long...
...If the devil is really all-powerful, how can we be expected to believe in the triumph of goodness in the last twenty pages...
...This is the central failure of these novels...
...There are variants on this plot...
...The permanent literary jcontribution of the genre seems likely tp be a memorable gallery of one-j&mensional heels, ranging from Sam-ply" Glick of What Makes Sammy Runt to Herb Fuller, The Great Man...
...the obese, top-hatted tyrant with dollar signs embroidered on his vest has given way to the sleek man in the gray flannel suit...
...Withow it our writers would not attempt M ameliorate evils with their pens They would learn acceptance...
...Stories of this sort provide ample opportunity to paint a glamorous portrait of life among the sophisticated...
...Perhaps, though, we are dealing with that rare devil who can be beaten by mere mortals...
...Thinly disguised real-life celebrities (Arthur Godfrey and Henry Luce are favorites—and Moore gives us a quick glimpse of Micky Jelke) stalk about, animated cartoons uttering lines of the "aha, my proud beauty" school...
...The inner workings of Hollywood were exposed in the granddaddy of them all, Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run...
...Problem novels fail because laefl attention is paid to the problem the] to the requirements of the mm tend to be morality plays or ids rather than high achieve-ts in a difficult form...
...There is always coming, with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, an upbeat ending...
...Each of the mass media has served as a setting...
...With the exception of Charles Wertenbaker's The Death of Kings— an honest, literate attempt to present multi-faceted characters grappling with multi-faceted problems—and one or two others, the novels of the genre are slick, wise-cracking, pseudo-sophisticated, and rudimentary pieces of story telling, on a level with the historicals, westerns, and mysteries which vie with them for attention on the paperback display racks...
...This would be an easier thesis to support if their works didn't so often read as if they had at least one eye cocked on the box office...
...But the reverse of the proffered coin is now revealed...
...But if this is true, wll do they insist on dealing, even of an elementary level, with a fairr serious moral problem...
...Actually, honest documentation of a segment of society has gradually given way to a straining for sensationalism and a facile approach which forces the critic to consider these novels more as "entertainments" (see, especially, Pitchman) than as serious works of fiction...
...Faust is tempted...
...Perhaps he already controls a segment of the book business, insisting on his doctrine that the "squares" demand a happy ending to Jheir stories...
...In Moore's Pitchman, there is an interesting variation on the basic melody...
...Ostensibly these works have as their purpose the documentation "of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the Twentieth Century," as Budd Schul-berg phrased it in his 1939 best seller which stands as the pioneering study of the huckster-as-heel and the model for a hundred lesser works...
...Hero and Heroine leads a gay round of cocktail parties and first nights...
...t' might even be a novel of some Mtmanence...
...It would be difficult to believe in Divine Intercession on behalf of a tortured gagman...
...Curiously the values set in opposition to the new tycoons are the same as those set against their fathers—decent, nod very imaginative native liberalism We should bear in mind that virtue often triumphed in the muckraking era too...
...Moore and his colleagues miss no opportunity to splash on the bright details...
...Whatever the truth about his power, we don't learn it from the legends which have grown up around him in recent years...
...He is a basically honest, ambitious soul who conceals, under a thin veneer of cynicism, a conscience...
...Power-lusting octopi in human dress no longer inhabit the executive suites of our novels...
...This is just a sampling of titles...
...After all, Goethe finally let his Faust off the hook...
...Rather it is a moral problem of more interest to the creative minority than to a wider public...
...From a careful study of this modern mythology I have constructed a representative plot which should serve both to illustrate these prefatory remarks and to indicate the Faustian overtones which are available on the deluxe models at no extra cost: As the story opens, our Faust is a minor cog in one of the machines which prefabricates ideas and ideals for what one of the novels calls "the great unwashed...
...He sees the outlines of knives under the backs of the Brooks Brothers suits...
...Or maybe his power extends farther than we suspected...
...Of such stuff are fallen angels made...
...Sometimes he is privy to someone who has chosen wrong and we are favored with a blow-by-blow account of the monsterization...
...It would then be easier to believe in the latter's power...
...Then when I was big and important . . . I'd reappraise my standards and ethics...
...Enter Mephisto in gray flannel suit...
...The dialogue usually snaps, crackles, and pops like the sponsor's breakfast food (except in Pitchman, where it is pretty soggy...
...He quits, marries, and retires to the wilds of Connecticut to write that novel...
...Lest the reader be deceived by all this glamour into thinking that this is, if not the good life, at least the interesting one, these scenes of upper middle class hilarity alternate with material straight from the confidential magazines...
...It is these men who ari most affected by, and concern about, the mores of the mass com municators...
...Faust is given the opportunity to make a sort of Pilgrim's Progress through the back alleys of his industry...
...It is difficult to dismiss lightly these novels, whatever the ineptitude of their writers...
Vol. 21 • January 1957 • No. 1
