IMPERSONALITY CULT
Mayer, Milton
IMPERSONALITY CULT MILTON MAYER Justice Holmes once spoke of "the deferred satisfaction of the man who knows that long after he is dead and gone men who have never heard of him will be marching to...
...Henry is the founder and editor and (as far as I know) writer, copy boy, and printer's devil of a singular eight-page weekly called Manas, and (just because he is anonymous) has the time to plow analytically through everything worth reading, even unto the contents of The Progressive...
...His hunger—to be unheard of—has been gratified every week for twenty-four years now...
...men on ahead, and hang tremulous on the ratings and the polls...
...Let the ideas stand on their own merits...
...I put it to you: Given the painful choice, would you not choose rather to be infamous Nero, who ruined Rome, than that forgotten Poplicola who (according to Plutarch) saved it...
...IMPERSONALITY CULT MILTON MAYER Justice Holmes once spoke of "the deferred satisfaction of the man who knows that long after he is dead and gone men who have never heard of him will be marching to the measure of his thought...
...Box 32112, El Sereno Station, Los Angeles 90032, will bring you a sample copy...
...In the magnificent Manas Reader, just published, the editors say in their unsigned Foreword that they adopted their policy of anonymity when they established the journal in 1948 because "personal identities were felt to be unimportant...
...Occasional contributors sign their pieces...
...And who do you suppose wrote the blurb and the plug and the puff...
...Your correspondent has just had a book published, not a bad book, perhaps half, or a quarter, or a tenth as good as the blurb for the jacket, or the plug for the catalogue, or the puff for the libraries says it is...
...Who wants to be unheard of...
...Who would not prefer to leave a good name behind him—or even a bad one, just so he be not nameless...
...Manas tries to be, and is, "a journal of independent inquiry, concerned with the study of principles . . . and with the search for contrasting principles that may be capable of supporting intelligent idealism...
...The Nixons and the Sinatras and the Grahams, so soon one with the nameless Pharaohs...
...Not I. Milton Mayer, the Roving Editor of The Progressive, calls himself "the man in the Brooks Brothers hair shirt...
...There is too much emphasis on personality anyway...
...and he can be relied on to tout himself more shamelessly than the publisher's people...
...Who's Who instead of What's What...
...One man, among all the men I have known, has chosen Holmes' deferred satisfaction and him I celebrate here today, to my own disparagement and that of all other ego-trippers...
...His name is Henry Geiger...
...The author clamors for a hearing—not (like Henry Geiger) for his ideas but for his ideas...
...The author, as usual...
...We strut our split-second—and fret lest another's name have a split-second more than ours or ours a type size smaller than his...
...not "the editors" (who don't appear on the masthead, either...
...The billing is the message—the size of the by-line or the credit-line on the title page or the marquee (or the number of split-seconds that it remains on the screen...
...P.O...
...Henry Geiger is the only man I have known without an identity crisis...
...but the satisfaction, under such conditions, sounds a little like oblivion and a little less than satisfactory...
...He teaches literature at the University of Massachusetts and the humanities at Windham College and is a consultant to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and the Great Books Foundation...
...And unlike the Nixons and the Sinatras and the Billy Grahams, he doesn't have to crawl the marketplace on his belly, and send his p.r...
...But I speak here of men whose profession, like Henry Geiger's, is public performance and whose survival (and the survival of their thought) depends upon their attracting a public to their product...
...What a wonderful work, then, is man, who alone names things and values the name instead of the thing...
...And panting along behind them, and panting the harder the farther behind them he falls, your correspondent...
...There are, of course, some men who are nameless through no fault of their own, and others who choose to give their labor and their lives (and, of course, their money) namelessly to the succor of the nameless needy...
...Who of us public performers wouldn't take the credit and let the cash go, knowing that there's more cash in the credit than there is in the cash...
...But fame is a frivol, and however we clown and caper for its kiss we are all of us (except for a handful of Homers) candidates for Unwho Was...
...A consoling notion, this, to a clamorous hack like me...
...When her agent came in to tell Fanny Brice that the morning papers had panned her vaudeville act, she said, "Did they spell my name right...
...Who would take three steps forward to volunteer for the everlasting glory attaching to the post of Unknown Soldier...
...You won't recognize it, and you won't see it soon again...
...Who among us is satisfied—who but Henry Geiger —with the deferred satisfaction of knowing that men who have never heard of him will march to the measure of his thought...
Vol. 36 • March 1972 • No. 3
