The Experience of America

...The power of "The Westerner" arises from the way in which Warshow uses his experience as a moviegoer to illuminate a two-sided aspect of the American national character—the untragic optimism to which we are so deeply committed as a people, even when experience causes us to question it as individuals...

...In such crude fatuities, Warshow heard the death knell of American liberalism: Whether he cheers the Yankees or the Dodgers, whether he damns Franklin Roosevelt as a warmonger or adores him as the champion of human rights, the Communist is always celebrating the same thing: the great empty Idea which has taken on the outlines of his personality...

...Seven years later, Warshow's friends assembled nineteen of his essays, virtually the whole of his slender output, and Doubleday published the resulting book with an introduction by Lionel Trilling...

...Warshow was one of the first American intellectuals to pay sustained attention to those over-familiar genres, and what he had to say about them has not yet lost its ability to command our attention: The gangster is lonely and melancholy, and can give the impression of a profound worldly wisdom...

...Among the many undertakings of this unholy alliance was the manufacture of watered-down pop-culture artifacts intended to teach educated Americans the necessity of Soviet-style "anti-Fascism," which sympathetic critics duly praised as high art...

...David Denby describes Warshow as "one of the inventors" of the genre of pop-culture criticism...

...Merely to praise Warshow as a great film critic is to ignore the extent to which all his criticism was concerned with the long-term effects on American culture of the loose coalition of 1930s liberals, Stalinist fellow travelers, and full-fledged Communists known as the Popular Front...

...Conspicuously missing from this careful filleting of Warshow's thought is the word "Stalinism," an omission that would have enraged the man who wrote bluntly and fearlessly of the corrosive effects of "the mass culture of Stalinist liberalism" on American intellectual life: "In the 1930s radicalism entered upon an age of organized mass disingenuous-ness, when every act and every idea had behind it some 'larger consideration' which destroyed its honesty and its meaning...

...To the extent that Warshow is remembered today, it is for what he wrote about the movies...

...Warshow's love of genre films stands in stark contrast to the falseness of those who approved only of art that served their political ends...

...Simply written yet full of implication, "The Westerner" is a masterly example of the critic's art, as fresh today as it was a half-century ago...

...indeed, to dissent from that orthodoxy is to court excommunication from certain circles of academe...

...Nowadays, we take it for granted that the movies of John Wayne and Randolph Scott have something interesting, even important, to tell us about ourselves and our country...

...A man watches a movie, and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man...

...Certainly the anonymous author of the flap copy for the new edition of The Immediate Experience is unwilling to admit any such thing, saying only that, according to Warshow, "a 'disastrous vulgarization of intellectual life' [had] corrupted American liberalism from the 1930s to the 1950s...

...five years after that, Norman Podhoretz wrote vividly about Warshow in Making It, his memoir of life among the New York literati...

...The Grapes of Wrath was a great novel...

...The Westerner," for instance, is mentioned in The Oxford History of World Cinema, although the passage in question is both misquoted and wrongly attributed to "The Gangster as Tragic Hero...

...Orwell's pithy essays about such plebeian topics as boys' school stories and pornographic postcards taught Warshow's generation how popular culture could be used as a prism through which to view and interpret modern life...

...I have made plenty of mistakes in my life, but not that one: Robert Warshow inoculated me against it, forever...

...To have read The Immediate Experience as a young man was to know ever after, in the fullest possible sense, what it means to say—and to believe—that the personal is political...

...He resembles the gangster in being lonely and to some degree melancholy...

...His essays show how the Stalinist habit of mind not only survived its evil inventor but has become part of the very essence of postmodern thought...

...Stanley Cavell's epilogue to The Immediate Experience, as befits a professional philosopher, is more than a little bit turgid, but it starts off with a sentence with which I could not agree more: "Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience is one of those books whose discovery, early or late, can create so specific a feeling of personal gratitude for its existence that it is almost a surprise to learn that others know how good it is...

...He showed how it was possible to appreciate, say, the movies of Howard Hawks—even to love them—without jumping to the conclusion that the director of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not was just as good as Shakespeare: I have had enough serious interest in the products of the "higher" arts to be very sharply aware that the impulse which leads me to a Humphrey Bogart movie has little in common with the impulse which leads me to the novels of Henry James or the poetry of T.S...

...Everyone became a professional politician, acting within a framework of 'realism' that tended to make political activity an end in itself...

...His essays did not go entirely unnoticed beyond the tiny circle of readers of those legendary little magazines, and in 1955, he was invited to write for the New Yorker...

...Communists are still "idealists"— perhaps all the more so because their "idealism" is by now almost entirely without content—and the surprising degree of sympathy and even respect that they can command among liberals is partly to be explained by the liberal belief that "idealism" in itself is a virtue...

...In 1954, few critics were prepared to take lowbrow movies seriously, and fewer still wrote about them with Warshow's rigorous, laconic clarity...

...But now there has appeared an expanded edition of The Immediate Experience, containing the complete text of the original book together with eight previously uncollected pieces and a pair of newly commissioned essays by David Den-by, the film critic of the New Yorker, and Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who also writes about film...

...I know just what he means...

...He died the next day of a heart attack, aged thirty-seven...

...Ebert's collection was until recently the only volume in print containing any of Warshow's essays, and while that one, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," ranked among Warshow's best, it conveyed only a limited sense of what the man was about...

...I doubt it sold more than a couple of hundred copies, and I know it didn't go over big in Kansas City, because mine is a discarded library copy, and the faded date-due stamps on the first page indicate that between 1962 and 1979, the year I acquired it, The Immediate Experience was checked out just fifteen times, the last in 1972...

...To define that connection seems to me one of the tasks of film criticism, and the definition must be first of all a personal one...

...Eventually, Confessions of a Nazi Spy was a serious movie and 'Ballad for Americans' was an inspired song...

...Warshow's unfaked faithfulness to the immediate experience of the unpretentious genre films he loved stands in stark contrast to the falseness of the Popular Front liberals who, like the Rosenbergs, approved only of art that served their political ends—an attitude that has since metamorphosed into what we now call political correctness...

...Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times Book Review not long ago, called it "amazingly nasty...

...Warshow, like Orwell, was a left-wing anti-Communist, an affiliation which is (if possible) even less fashionable today than in the 1930s and early 1940s, although for a different reason...

...But it is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to the eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory...

...But as the subtitle of his book— "Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture"—indi-cates, Warshow was interested in a wider range of topics, though most of them, from the "sick" humor of Mad magazine to the middlebrow dramaturgy of Arthur Miller, fit more or less neatly into the pigeonhole of what we now refer to as "pop culture...

...Small wonder it took so long for The Immediate Experience to be reprinted...

...Hard as it is to imagine today, there was a time when second-rate propaganda-pushers such as Lillian Hellman and John Steinbeck were widely regarded as major writers...

...I can think of no essay collection of the past half-century more richly deserving of republica-tion—and none more likely to be misunderstood...

...But lasting critical reputations are rarely based on a single volume of essays, however brilliant, and Warshow's star soon faded to near-black...

...Eliot...

...And his loneliness is organic, not imposed on him by his situation but belonging to him intimately and testifying to his completeness...

...The mass culture of the educated classes— the culture of the 'middle-brow,' as it has sometimes been called—had come into existence...

...Back when I was still trying to decide what kind of writer I wanted to be, Warshow's plain speaking and sense of proporton hit me right between the eyes...

...Terry Teachout, the music critic of Commentary, is the author of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L...

...The insidious and inevitable result of such activity, Warshow argued, was to corrupt art as well as liberalism: "The whole level of thought and discussion, the level of culture itself, had been lowered...

...Today, one is hard pressed to find a leftist prepared so much as to acknowledge Stalin's existence, much less hint at the damning fact that his ardent admirers once played a hugely influential role in the shaping of American popular culture...

...The Western hero, by contrast, is a figure of repose...

...A New York Jew and second-generation socialist, he made his living as an editor for Commentary and a writer for Commentary, the Nation, and Partisan Review, mostly about film...

...But David Denby, for all his evident discomfort with Warshow's directness, is at least prepared to admit that at a time when many liberals "remained sympathetic to the Communist 'experiment' and were infuriatingly slow to comprehend that they were supporting the cause of murder," Warshow was dead right about the pernicious effects of Stalinism on American culture: "The horror of American Stalinism, he says again and again, is that it prevents its adherents from having any kind of direct and honest relationship to experiences...

...But his melancholy comes from the "simple" recognition that life is unavoidably serious, not from the disproportions of his own temperament...

...That The Immediate Experience was published at all is the unlikeliest of stories, for Warshow, though greatly admired by his colleagues, was anything but famous...

...Back then, a great many American artists and intellectuals were unabashedly in love with Joseph Stalin and happily blacklisted those who dared to disagree...

...Mencken, forthcoming in November from HarperCollins...

...But what the modern reader may not realize is just how unusual it was a half-century ago...

...For a long time, the only people likely to know his name were aging neoconservatives and abnormally well-read film buffs...

...Two of his pieces, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" and "The Westerner," continue to be cited in the scholarly literature on film, with good reason...

...From Orwell, too, they learned to write straightforwardly and personally, with a scrupulous, even self-conscious honesty made necessary by their increasingly troubled relation to an intellectual class enthralled by communism, a political movement built on lies...

...Fifty years after its original publication, the cold-eyed honesty of "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg" is still capable of making liberals squirm...

...Eleven of the nineteen essays included in the original edition of The Immediate Experience, and one of the newly collected pieces, are about film, and it seems fairly clear from the choice of Denby and Cavell to introduce it that Harvard University Press regards the book primarily as a contribution to the literature of film studies...

...Not that such folk are mutually exclusive, but they are rarely seen at the same cocktail parties, and it is a decided oddity that the man whom Podhoretz could call "one of the best essayists in the English language" would also figure prominently in the pages of Roger Ebert's Book of Film (an anthology whose other contributors include Rex Reed, Mario Puzo, and John Waters...

...The Experience ofAmerica Robert Warshow, the man who did pop culture right BY TERRY TEACHOUT Among my prized possessions is a battered copy of Robert Warshow's The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, an obscure collection of critical essays published in 1962 to no special acclaim...

...That there is a connection between the two impulses I do not doubt, but the connection is not adequately summed up in the statement that the Bogart movie and the Eliot poem are both forms of art...

...It was out of this insight that Warshow drew his finest essay, "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg," originally published in Commentary in 1953, in which he turned his unsparing gaze on the letters exchanged in prison by the martyrs of the postwar left as they awaited execution for having passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union...

...In addition, Warshow's name is misspelled...

...The culture that resulted from this effort—a spreading rot of liberal middle-brow kitsch—was also prevented by will and by habit from knowing that it was lying...

...the gangster is the "no" to that great American "yes" which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives...

...For Warshow, the Rosenbergs were the ultimate embodiment of the Popular Front, a robot couple incapable of harboring any unpolitical opinions whatsoever, even about baseball: "It's that indomitable spirit that has endeared [the Brooklyn Dodgers] to so many...

...In fact, it was more or less singlehandedly invented by George Orwell, the writer to whom Warshow can most usefully be compared (as Lionel Trilling did in his introduction to The Immediate Experience...

...He appeals most to adolescents with their impatience and their feeling of being outsiders, but more generally he appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the "normal" possibilities of happiness and achievement...

...The half-truth was elevated to the position of a principle, and in the end the half-truth, in itself, became more desirable than the whole truth...