ADULTERY, THEN AND NOW
GELERNTER, DAVID
ADULTERY THEN AND NOW By David Gelernter President Clinton will not be thrown out of office. It takes leverage to make a throw like that; you'd better have solid ground to stand on, and there is...
...A few weeks ago Arthur Miller published a remarkable op-ed piece in the New York Times...
...Naturally some of his contributors disagreed with him...
...The group expands to include ladies who have never met the president but see a principle at stake...
...Our grand refusal to judge is the cynical hush-money we distribute at random by the fistful to make sure that our own misdeeds get overlooked...
...she says, ever so pertly and pointedly...
...This is America, for goshsake: You can't go around impeaching a man just for sexually exploiting some intern...
...The challenger is supported by a Mystery Woman who is assumed to be Monica, or possibly Mrs...
...Countless movies of the era share this idea...
...Disgust seems to be the order of the day, and that's just as well...
...There were first-rate artists among the leftist intellectuals whose view of adultery and morality prevails today...
...Just one honest punch," he shouts...
...unless they come down to earth, they have no hope of changing things...
...The White House is silent...
...Like the overwrought young ladies of Salem, he is trying to get something across...
...But the idea of Ross's magazine or his main men (such writers as A.J...
...Then it becomes heartening...
...That evening, many a young man puts the moves on Ginger—pulls her close or attempts to waltz her out the door...
...There's a simpler explanation: Americans regard presidential adultery as no big deal because they regard adultery in general as no big deal...
...The Mystery Woman turns out to be the challenger's girlfriend, hoping he will actually do something instead of proving himself yet another postmodern wimp intellectual...
...Granted, her best sentences are always about herself, and her prose has the unwavering cruelty of a dead-eye hunter killing easy marks for fun...
...Later on she gets to the nub: "I feel contaminated...
...He was one of the great men of American literary history...
...People are constantly looking askance at the ostensibly 12-year-old Ginger...
...And she wrote beautifully...
...Years later, Arlene Croce wrote about how the audience waits for Fred and Ginger to dance together, knowing that "until he dances with her he hasn't possessed her...
...How cheap," she growls, "how loathsome...
...Anyway, adultery was revolting...
...But perhaps this is not what Miller meant...
...As far as I can tell," Gibbs explains, "writers must not be allowed to imply that they admire either of these things"—drunkenness and adultery—"or have enjoyed them personally, although they are legitimate enough when pointing a moral or adorning a sufficiently grim story...
...She was interested in her own circle...
...Perhaps he meant that President Clinton is in imminent danger of being hanged...
...And she could make a sentence fly the way a breeze makes a kite fly, where today's earnest young feminists just huff and puff and get red in the face...
...But it is much easier to worm your way out of the whole mess by renouncing moral judgment altogether...
...Because they offered to drive...
...She slams a breakfast tray in his face...
...Here is a better interpretation: Miller is hysterical...
...That homosexuality poses no moral problem...
...But conservatives had better take stock of what they're up against...
...We can change the culture, or we can turn the page...
...Ross himself was a womanizer and never denied it...
...The plot calls for OUR PICTURE OF OLD-TIME, JUDGMENTAL AMERICA IS WRONG...
...But at least America used to be inhibited...
...He might be a lunatic, a hopeless romantic, or a mere self-promoter...
...Thomas Kunkel includes the memo in his fine biography of Ross published in 1995...
...Notwithstanding, all perjuries are not created equal...
...Nowadays most Americans see adultery in a way that is radically unlike the way we used to see it 50 years ago—but strikingly like the way left-wing intellectuals used to see it...
...So how could anyone be so stupid as to get upset about adultery...
...Our picture of old-time, judgmental America is wrong...
...Mary McCarthy was an occasional contributor...
...Of course Miller doesn't see it exactly that way...
...If you wear brown shoes with a blue suit and then perjure yourself and deny it, once again your perjury counts for little...
...Yet the Ross-type human being was no more censorious than we—arguably less...
...he was also an anti-intellectual...
...she had no interest in the public...
...Lemann is right to imply that we are no longer a nation of Christians and Jews...
...Clinton to come out and fight like a man...
...Americans on the whole found adultery revolting...
...It's possible to imagine a certain kind of man getting inspired to defend Miss Lewinsky's honor—or even the honor of American womanhood in general, and for that matter American manhood in general...
...We don't have the nerve to impose standards and reach moral judgments, because (in the end) we are worried about what other people will think of us...
...And then at last we may start to make progress...
...The thoughtful liberal Nicholas Lemann reviewed William Bennett's recent book The Death of Outrage in the New Republic...
...The Constitution does not prohibit a citizen from punching the president in the nose...
...Granted, she is a wronged woman and entitled to get emotional...
...The New Yorker printed an item about the theft...
...Conservatives have allowed American culture to revolve beneath them, as they wheel and drift and chat among themselves high overhead...
...Two moments in American history separated by 300 years—and yet in both cases, dozens of defenseless ladies are set upon by powerful males— and polite society, amazingly enough, rallies around the oppressor and not the ladies...
...She winds up in Ray Milland's sleeper compartment on an overnight train...
...We've taught you the one moral absolute, Thou shalt not be judgmental...
...Yet she was "all her life," as Peter Parker and Frank Kermode write, "the prototype of an American intellectual," and her view of adultery has become the standard view...
...Everyone knew what was happening in these dances...
...The '98 elections more or less confirm these claims...
...She goes to Milland's compartment, finds Ginger, and draws the obvious conclusion...
...We like to picture that bygone America as unsophisticated—but no one in his right mind would have called Ross's New Yorker unsophisticated...
...Mary McCarthy is not responsible for Bill Clinton, and there is no way a person can "disapprove" of her story or wish it had not been written...
...But it would be foolish to shrug him off...
...Milland is accused in tones moist with disgust of "acting like a traveling salesman," of behavior especially reprehensible in view of his "first duty," which is of course "to set an example of decency and discipline to 300 young people...
...There were first-rate artists among the non-leftists who lined up with Ross...
...Mary McCarthy's celebrated "Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt" appeared in 1941, an alleged fiction "scarcely thought by anyone to be a fiction," as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote later...
...And if you are not judgmental, how can you ever judge yourself...
...The average American may agree with John Kasich on taxes, but he is a follower of Arthur Miller on adultery...
...A nation that has transformed itself so dramatically in two generations under the leadership of a small, contrarian group of thinkers can transform itself back again—under the leadership of another small, contrarian group of thinkers...
...She never urged anything on the public...
...And then . . . Don't like this plot...
...And the public says amen...
...The would-be duelist, this believer in the saving power of an occasional punch in the face, sets up camp with a megaphone and picket signs in front of the White House...
...At first this is disheartening...
...He might challenge the president to a duel—or, failing that, to a plain old-fashioned fistfight...
...In modern America, the Arthur Millers are in the driver's seat...
...But changing culture requires that you produce some, and on the whole, conservatives don't want to bother...
...A NATION THAT HAS TRANSFORMED ITS MORAL ATTITUDES DRAMATICALLY IN TWO GENERATIONS CAN TRANSFORM ITSELF AGAIN...
...The society's sign had been stolen...
...Lying is a slipcover type of sin, whose significance depends on what you are covering up...
...The movie shows us, toward the end, a picture of antique mores that used to be wry but has become touching...
...The Lewinsky affair, for example, is a dramatic moral crux...
...Arthur Miller is disgusted with Starr and the Republicans and the press...
...But we took the Mary McCarthy road, and that has made all the difference...
...Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, James Thurber and E.B...
...We learned in Miller's op-ed that not merely one but "a number of" commentators have been struck by the Contributing editor David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University...
...The new sign was painted on a false front: You could pull out a panel and reveal a hidden picture, which showed the society's chairman getting his hat kicked off by a nearly naked chorus girl...
...Fifty years ago this would have been a stupid question, with an obvious answer: our moral code, America's, the morality of Christians and Jews...
...The Monica matter will be remembered for the story it tells about a huge shift in national attitudes...
...She bristles with revulsion...
...Along with a dozen other leading Democrats...
...In bygone America, condemning a sin did not mean that you had never committed it and never would...
...Granted, we can't shrug perjury off, or we risk destroying the legal system altogether...
...McCarthy describes how she met and slept with a married man on a long-distance rail trip...
...They were just the opposite...
...Republicans have offered to sit in the back seat and kibitz...
...It's a woebegone little gesture—until a bunch of women volunteer to have their honor defended...
...It did bind you to try hard not to—and (more to the point), if you failed, to own up to it...
...Whose moral code is it...
...Gibbs quotes Harold Ross, the magazine's founder and editor (Gibbs was a top Ross assistant): "The New Yorker cannot endorse adultery...
...She takes the lower bunk, he takes the upper...
...This used to be called "character...
...We see in Bill Clinton the nonjudg-mental man—who, just because he is nonjudgmental, regards himself as essentially perfect...
...You can see this in the movies, which are a good way to track mainstream morality...
...As Miller points out, the public is not upset about presidential adultery and clearly regards it as no big deal—which some people interpret as evidence of either the president's irresistible charm or the irrelevance of everything but the economy...
...He and the Republicans disagree on the real nature of the president's offense...
...Astaire in his flying tails, the pliant Rogers in one of her less-is-more gowns, were an erotic vision," she wrote apropos of 1938's Carefree, score by Irving Berlin...
...White) as priggish, censorious, or moralistic is absurd...
...the 31-year-old actress to pretend (part of the time) to be 12...
...She and Arthur Miller were both leftists, of course, but she never showed even a trace of his moralizing peevishness...
...Republicans insist that the issue is not sex but lying— under oath and to the nation...
...Fifty years ago, things were different...
...Republicans are disgusted with Clinton and the voters and each other...
...The New Yorker refused to tell, but offered a new sign...
...And then conservatives ought to concede a truth they dislike: You can't change culture unless you are willing to produce some...
...It is the seediest type of cover-your-rearism...
...She is so svelte and girlish, she almost pulls it off—but not quite, and the script never loses sight of its own implausibility...
...Ross speaks for 1937 middle-class morality...
...The society demanded to know the thief's name...
...Granted, we had better hold the president to a higher ethical standard than the average American, not a lower one, or we mock the honor of the presidency and the whole idea of leadership...
...So far, no one is disgusted with himself, least of all the man who started this...
...similarities between today's anti-Clinton operations and the Salem witch trials...
...Nothing happens, the girl being (evidently) a child...
...You Republicans are upset about a mere matter of perjury, they might have said, when the president has been caught in adultery...
...There is no moral consensus for a prosecutor or anyone else to rely on—the cultural leadership (the Arthur Millers, the mainstream intelligentsia) having long since abandoned Judaism and Christianity in all but name...
...If you commit murder and then perjure yourself and deny it, ultimately the murder and not the perjury counts...
...But Milland's character is a teacher at the Wallace Military Academy, where the head men (including the wronged girl's father) hold a meeting and concur...
...You could disapprove of adultery, disapprove of sexual explicitness, and yet (if you chose) take sex as your main topic...
...That unmarried motherhood poses no moral problem...
...And indeed the similarities are striking...
...She merely represents a worldview that has become dominant, no thanks to her...
...They are nothing to be light-hearted about...
...But sometime soon, we will look at Clinton and it will come to us that we are looking in a mirror...
...The public mainly aligns with Miller—disgusted with Starr and Congress, and a little bit disgusted with the president, too...
...There are many examples, but take Billy Wilder's first solo film, a 1942 comedy called The Major and the Minor...
...But today the answer is no longer obvious...
...A famous New Yorker incident of this era centered on an office plot to embarrass the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a minor New York institution...
...but she is prepared and nips the action in the bud...
...That way, you can never be held accountable for anything...
...White climbed a ladder one night and pulled the panel himself...
...Election '98 shows yet again that culture is more important than politics...
...He urges Mr...
...Must not...
...The author is straightforward about the whole thing (straightforward was her middle name), and moral qualms about adultery don't enter the picture...
...We see in her reaction 1942 America's view of adultery—or in this case not even adultery, because Milland is engaged but not married...
...But early next morning, when the train has been halted by a washed-out bridge, Mil-land's fiancée clambers aboard...
...There is no basis in public opinion for such a move...
...Miller the playwright peaked in the 1950s, but he is the sort of intellectual who made America what she is today...
...In modern America, adultery is a moral misdemeanor at the outside...
...There are dozens more...
...McCarthy was a fine writer, but her road has turned out to be a bad road...
...Americans of 50 years ago would have agreed with Miller: Today's Republican claims represent a shocking misplacement of emphasis...
...Ginger goes to a school dance...
...Postwar America could have gone either way...
...Yet there is such a thing as a moral turning point, and perhaps we are at one...
...It's a funny movie, because Ginger Rogers acts and watches herself simul-taneously—never taking herself too seriously, always finding herself hugely entertaining...
...What other choice has he got...
...He was typical of the age in considering himself against adultery but not above it...
...What does it mean that the New Yorker, back then, could not "endorse adultery...
...The year of Gibbs's memo was also the year Shall We Dance came out—an Astaire-and-Rogers classic with a Gershwin score...
...The action even achieves a certain minor kinkiness, roughly at the Starr-report level...
...to admit your guilt, apologize, and accept the consequences...
...Not that either...
...Miller says that sex is the issue, and he's right...
...I argued back in September (in the New York Post) that the public had no intention of treating the Lewinsky affair as important...
...But Ross made the rules and never waffled...
...Old-time America was judgmental and we are not, so we sometimes picture that society as priggish, censorious, and moralistic...
...usually it's more like a parking ticket...
...He might start out cynical and turn serious...
...you'd better have solid ground to stand on, and there is none...
...The Left and the Right have very different ideas about the Clinton scandal—and on certain key facts, the view from the left is clearer...
...Not all young men were so easily put off, even in 1942...
...More apt than impeachment, more eloquent than censure...
...Miller wants to say (but can't quite bring himself to): We've taught you—we intellectuals have taught you— that sex between unmarried people poses no moral problem...
...And in many respects he is right...
...The idea of a moral code that takes precedence over laws," Lemann writes, "even in the operations of a democratic government, is frightening...
...To refuse to "endorse adultery," to insist on absolute moral standards, was not to be priggish or censorious...
...But the difference between McCarthy and today's leftist sourpuss females is obvious: She always saw right through herself...
...Absolutely contaminated...
...But let's move to another railroad sleeping compartment, this one inhabited by an intellectual...
...There are a whole bunch of plausible stage-plays called Monica—farces, serious plays, half-and-halfs—but no one will stage them, so why should anyone bother to write them...
...An actual teenager tells her the rules beforehand: There are 23 "musts" and 24 "must-nots...
...But at least a girl had her own moves to set against a young man's moves...
...TO INSIST ON ABSOLUTE MORAL STANDARDS, WAS NOT TO BE PRIGGISH...
...We've taught you that marriage is not sacred, because nothing is sacred...
...Here is a final look at what she was up against in long-ago classical America: In 1937, Wolcott Gibbs wrote a memo called "Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles...
...that the real story wasn't presidential behavior, it was public indifference...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 12
