Paul Goodman Archive
Written: 1960.
Source: Text from RevoltLib.com.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
December 12, 1959
Commissioner of Education
Albany
Dear Dr. Allen,
I understand that the case of James Worley of Croton Falls has come to you for review. Allow me to say something in his behalf.
In content, his original protesting action (refusing to prepare a two-week lesson plan) seems to me beyond doubt correct. I myself have taught every age from ten-year-olds through Ph.D. candidates and older adults; it has been my universal experience that formal preparation of a lesson plan beyond the next hour or two is not only unrealistic but can be positively harmful and rigidifying, for it interferes with the main thing, the contact between the teacher and his class. Worley’s disagreement with the administrative order is, to me, simply evidence that he is a good teacher and knows what the right teaching relation is. A teacher who would seriously comply with the order would likely be a poor teacher. (Our model must always be the Socratic dialogue, for the aim is not to convey some information but to get the information across as part of the student’s nature and second nature, so he can make an individual and creative use of it.) On the other hand, if the compliance is not serious it is a waste of time; and, as you know well, teachers are burdened with paper work, much of which is absolutely necessary.
In form, his protest was certainly insubordinate. But obviously each of us has the moral and social duty to draw the line somewhere against obedience to error. Worley has drawn it at a very crucial point, namely, where the order interferes with the right performance of the job. In the end this is the sacred and final obligation of every professional, to do the work and to defend the conditions under which the work can be done well.
The issue is of immense importance. Our country is being systematically emasculated by a sickening waste of human resources. The efforts of a Dr. Conant to salvage some scientific talent are ludicrously inadequate to the main problem, which is precisely the difficulties created by our social relations that keep the inventor from his materials, the workman from honest labor, the teacher from his students and subject matter, and the artist from his public. We cannot afford to throw away good teachers to save face for mistaken administrators. It is the glory of good administration precisely to smooth the path for objective work to proceed. Therefore I urge you to intervene in this case and reinstate Mr. Worley.
Copy to Gov. Rockefeller Sincerely,
Paul Goodman
New York City
(The appeal of Mr. Worley was rejected by the Commissioner who said that, though he was much in the right, he ought to have acted through the proper channels.)
I want to discuss a mistaken policy of certain theater craft-unions, and suggest a remedy. The matter has an importance in itself, because in recent years there has been a growth in new theater “off Broadway” that may, if it is encouraged, come to some real living theater. The union policy has been a discouragement—almost as bad as the unavailability of real estate—and it has been attacked with the usual jeering debater’s points by the tribe unsympathetic to unionism as such. But especially I want to discuss this question because it is, in parvo, a remarkably apt case of what is becoming the chief problem of our contemporary culture: how to live and breathe creatively in a society whose technology and organizations unavoidably make for conformity.
Without mentioning names, let me tell the story concretely in a case where I happen to know the facts. Here is a company devoted to new theater that has now for nearly ten years kept at work under arduous conditions, in larger or smaller quarters as it could get or build them by their own and their friends’ voluntary labor. The nucleus of the company is a group of theater-people, actors, musicians, dancers, and writers—some of them of great reputation—who have all of them, for from ten to fifty years, given themselves, often financially unrewarded, to the development of our modern art. They are a constellation comparable, for example, to the fine group that co-operated as the Provincetown Players. Nobody would question that they are devoted to the growth of theater and not to making money; they try to make enough to sustain themselves.
Now in casting their productions, they want to employ Equity actors. Many of those who voluntarily built the place they now occupy are Equity actors, and naturally, having laid the bricks, they want to act. By and large, professional actors belong to Equity and most of the best actors are professional, so you want to cast them. Now the situation among actors is as follows: (1) About 95 per cent are chronically unemployed. (2) Actors have a kind of hunger, a need, to act. (3) Understanding this, Equity permits its members to work, in certain circumstances, for as little as $40 a week, regarding this figure, I guess, as pretty near the decent subsistence minimum that a person must have, no matter what his enthusiasm or other satisfaction in the work. When, then, this company sends out a casting call in the professional journals, there are hundreds of responses from actors eager for any part, hoping to advance their careers by appearing and getting notices, and many of them glad to work in a cultured noncommercial atmosphere on intrinsically more interesting material, where they can learn something. That is, small noncommercial theaters of high standards, and trained professional actors, are mutually useful to one another; and Equity recognizes this obvious fact.
The professional theater, however, is organized also on the principle that Equity players may not act in a nonunion play, a play whose staff is not union. In my opinion this principle is a correct one (for reasons I shall briefly mention in a moment). But unfortunately it works out as follows: When the director of the company goes to the various craft and staff unions to get a countersignature to allow Equity players to play, he is told that he must employ 1 union stagehand at $137 a week, 1 union press agent at $145, 1 union scene-designer at $40 per day (for at least 3 days); and whenever there is to be a little live music, there must be union musicians at similar figures. All this amounts to a financial burden out of all proportion to the company’s other expenses, and to the profits they expect or even hope for; it is quite unfeasible. (The theater has less than 175 seats; some are kept at $1, so students can come; figure it out.) In the case here, the burden happens to be particularly galling because the director himself is a gifted and well-known scenic designer; like all other artistic groups, they prefer to couch their press releases and other public relations in their own style; the work done by stagehands is what almost everybody connected with a little theater is skilled at and does with pleasure; and everywhere in integral theater there is a need for live music—it can never be omitted, and canned music is deathly.
The unions are inflexible in their demands; the company cannot fulfill them. In this impasse there is at once generated enormous heat and idiotic remarks. “If you don’t have the money, stay out of the theater!” says a distinguished functionary of one of the unions. “You’re a painter,” he says to the director, “why don’t you stick to pictures?” On the other side, the Equity actors connected with the company are in a rage and about to tear up their cards. Those who are politically hep point out that organized labor has fallen into the hands of racketeers. And the paranoid demonstrate that there is a conspiracy among the unions, the critics, and the owners of theater real estate, to prevent anything new and better from happening.
Let me insist that the principle of total theater unionism, including Equity, seems to me to be correct. This is simply because of the nature of the theater arts and crafts. Our city abounds in people of artistic talent, eager to exercise their separate talents. By disposition such people are free lances; and the state of serious art in our society is such that, until they make a lot of money, free artists have little status or security and cannot easily maintain their rights and dignity. As a group, then, they are peculiarly subject to being taken advantage of and exploited by producers who can give them any work at all; and when taken advantage of, they act effectually as scabs and lower the standards of honest employment. That is, it is precisely the intrinsic virtues of the talented, their hunger to work and their solitariness, that make them socially weak and liable to lower social standards. Poor gifted musicians, painters, poets, dancers, and actors are severally weak indeed; by insisting, even inflexibly and intransigently, on their union, one can give them collectively some strength.
What then? The principle of unionism lays an unbearable burden on any new noncommercial company; it works to the disadvantage of Equity actors; and yet the principle itself is a necessary one. Nevertheless, dispassionately considered, the solution to this dilemma is easy. Briefly, if we carefully consider the nature of theater, we shall see that new theater in general cannot make money and must overcome great obstacles in order to exist; and yet eventually it must in turn become immensely popular and make a lot of money, becoming the exciting novelty in commercial theater. The process has two steps, and mindful of their own interests the unions must have a dual attitude: positively to foster the new and noncommercial, and to protect their standards in the commercial; and there ought to be a definite rule to mark the passage from the first stage of the process to the second. There is no doubt that it is a vague or clear understanding of this that, in part, has led Equity to its own more flexible policy.
Reflect a moment on the following commonplace observations:
The theater is a fine art for an immediate present public; and it is also a collaboration of many skills. Therefore, theater requires a large social effort, setting many people in motion, and a certain amount of social capital. (Not necessarily a large capital, compared, say, with architecture, where the very medium is expensive; but an even larger social effort than architecture.)
Radically new theater, like any new art, cannot expect a mass popular response, for it presents what is unfamiliar and is even actively resisted as meaningless, perverse, or dangerous. The sign of successful new theater is that the audience is torn between fascination and the impulse to walk out in disgust. The anxiety of new theater is greater than with other new art because theater demands a response in public, and its medium is exceptionally close to the animal and social behavior of life. The same anxiety, by the way, is felt even more by the players than by public, as any one who has rehearsed new theater with conventional actors can testify. Therefore, it is only from small, intensely personally involved groups, and a small public of the like-minded, that we can expect new theater to emerge.
But conversely, once a new theatrical advance has been made, it is likely to become immensely popular, for it is shared excitement. A new advance in some other art need not become popular in this way, for, although humanly important, it may be specialist and learned; but theater art is common and simple.
So-called “little theater” groups, making a great social effort and overcoming great obstacles, from real estate to interpersonal relations, and with little income to ease the path, are driven by an artistic fatality into the daring and the radically new. They are not dilettantes or amateurs; their aim is to achieve at least the excitement of the big professional entertainment—otherwise, why bother? Yet their means are limited. Therefore they explore new ways of handling limited means, to get as much meaning as if they had extensive means; this creates startling effects. Or alternately they make daring simplifications, and this creates startling effects.
Let me sum up these familiar propositions in a formula: The task of new theater is to find out and invent what must be unpopular and yet will soon be immensely popular; it is in this thorny task that it makes a great social effort against many obstacles. Naturally people are not too attracted by this prospect. Like most of the “off-Broadway” theater at present, people prefer the easier task of performing modern classics (the new theater of one or two generations ago); of importing European successes that are exotically safe; or of giving museum-like revivals, more properly the function of university players and dedicated amateurs. All that is off Broadway and fairly noncommercial, but it is not new theater. (I do not mean, by the way, that the company I am discussing is a pure model of new theater, but it is one of the best of a bad lot, and nothing is perfect here below.)
Bearing all this in mind, would not the wise, the statesman-like, attitude of the unions be for them to say something like this: “New theater! go to it and we hope you succeed. For if you do, there will be a new kind of immensely popular and paying theater; and if you don’t, there will be only a dying theater. The policy of Equity, distinguishing a commercial and a noncommercial theater, is a sound one; but we, of course, are in a different situation from the actors: for our carpenters, electricians, press agents, musicians, and so forth, there is no psychological necessity to perform in theaters; unemployed in the theater, they could get other jobs; and we see no reason, therefore, to lower their standards in any way. But as for the actors, directors, and creative artists of scene, word, movement and music, who need the theater public to exercise their talents, we shall not stand in their way. On the other hand, as soon as you free artists begin to get into the money, then the situation is entirely different, and we have a right to take our place in the enterprise and exact our fair shares. We have the right because all wealth is social wealth, produced by society as a whole, and it must be apportioned according to the rules that society has come to at the present time, to achieve which we in labor have fought and suffered much. Therefore we shall, by some reasonable rule of thumb, set a figure, perhaps an income figure, perhaps a profit ratio, at which we think your free art has entered the cash nexus, a dividing line, at which the excitingly unpopular is beginning to be the immensely popular; and when any of your enterprises crosses that line, it must be total union. We reserve the right to examine your qualifications and check your books, and so you affiliate with us as your friends and pay a nominal dues.”
This, I submit, is the wise, the statesmanlike, attitude that loses nothing for the unions, and that encourages the growth of theater. It can set a definite rule that fits the real nature of the case, unlike the present abstract “policy” or alternative nonpolicy of making “exceptions”; of sometimes being intransigent and sometimes shutting the eyes; of acting de facto as powerful critics and censors far beyond their competence. Instead, it gives the theater crafts a noble and protective role in the growth of the culture of the people.
I said at the outset that this small question contains a great question; without further ado, let me generalize. The case is with us in America that, by and large, vast organizations, of state, capital, production, labor, communications, education, urbanism, etc., etc., have preempted the means of life. This is currently inevitable and doubtless in many ways desirable, though not so unquestionably desirable as most people think. (When everything is done according to a certain pattern, it is hard to imagine how some other pattern could work at all.) At the same time, it is resulting in a conformity that is by now inane and boring and will soon be dangerous, for nothing revitalizing can occur in an organizational plan, and when something occurs outside the plan it may not have space to grow. All this has become a familiar complaint.
I want to suggest simply that with their power, these organizations have acquired a new, strange, and troublesome responsibility: to limit the exercise of their power more intelligently than they are accustomed to, to stand out of the way in order that there can be a future also for themselves.
I haven’t read John Keats’ The Insolent Chariots, but I can see that it and Manfred Macarthur’s critique of it provide an excellent example of a dual approach in recent sociology that is inevitable because we have a dual economy that is being analyzed. We have one society but two kinds of money: hard money and soft money, as somebody has called them (I don’t know who first). Hard money is the old-fashioned money that you “really” work for, that is measured by labor time and surplus value, and that applies on the market, including the market for labor according to an iron law of wages. Soft money is mad money or sailor money that has at present, however, skyrocketed in amount; it is not only given away on TV for “personal appearances” or for nothing, and as wild salaries on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood; but also, very generally, it pours into fringe benefits, into long vacations with pay, giveaway foundations to avoid upper-bracket taxes, and even, in an important aspect, social insurance. Naturally these two moneys have different moralities, and contrasting moralists like Macarthur and Keats.
It is inevitable that we have these two kinds of money, because we have a surplus technology. The American machine is working at a small fraction of its productivity, and nevertheless there is a vast surplus of not very desirable wealth produced that simply must be bought up with the soft money. At the same time there is always a core of subsistence production, for men need bread and shelter, and to get this you have to pay, and work for, hard money. It does not seem to me sufficient to discuss this unique historical monster in terms of class exploitation, reinvestment, and the falling rate of interest—for the soft money pours to all classes. Yet, in power and control, our institutions still do work according to the old economic principles. If you omit the old economic analysis, in either your theory or your behavior, you lose out; but if you think and behave in those terms, you are quite out of touch with the facts of life, where bureaucratic and leisure values are paramount.
So we have two grand streams of social writing that are fantastically uncommunicating. There are the more academic and post-Marxist analysts of institutions, say, Mills or Ben Seligman or Lerner or Lundberg or Farrell; and there are the more journalistic and Freudian analysts of mass culture, like Riesman or Leites or Larrabee and Lynes or Spectorsky. Curiously, each group would probably think the other group is rather conservative and neglects the most important levers of social change. I myself don’t know, I have not heard, a unified theory that avoids the overdetermination of these dual interpretations; and frankly, I don’t see the need for one, so long as each author honestly works at what seems to him to be the main problem. There is plenty of injustice and folly for all.
My bias is that Keats and Macarthur both are perfectly right about the automobiles with their huge girth and long tails. I do think, however, that by overlooking the crucial factor of our surplus productivity—the President’s anguished outcry that it is un-American not to buy, still rings in my soul—both authors are unfair and uncharitable toward our American problem. Keats seems (I have not read him) to neglect, or not sufficiently to stress, the basic need of the market for fashion and novelty that underlies the pandering to sex, speed, and prestige. There has to be some difference to make the year’s model salable. Put out the most efficient machine you want, and you will still have the problem of how to sell more of it than anybody needs. The experts at this problem are not engineers but “industrial designers.” And if you say, stop making the needless cars, then what are you going to do with the productivity of America? I don’t mean that there is no answer, but that this is the question.
Macarthur, on the other hand, seems to me to be very far from the reality with his puritanical remark about saving money and labor and taking trains and busses. Such Veblen-morals apply to an economy of scarcity. Why save the money and labor? To increase the time of leisure? But surveys (e.g., in Larrabee and Meyersohn’s anthology Mass-Leisure) show that it is precisely for leisure that precisely a workingman’s car is his chief salvation from absolute inanition. What if the car stands idle outside the plant because the lonely half-hour drive to and from work is the man’s most precious hour of the day at either work or leisure? The car is his share in the superabounding wealth; what share would this author give him? On sunny holidays, the workingman will spend long hours “fixing the car”—it is his freedom to Go, though indeed he has nowhere to go, but parks outside the movie.
“The waste,” concludes Macarthur, “is caused by lack of responsible over-all planning.” If by planning he means socialist planning of production and distribution, I think that this is nonsense (for the American scene). We are already too efficient for our cultural resources. If, however, he means by planning an organic consideration of means and ends, and the education of the souls of men to be able to use practically the wealth of God and man, then, to his surprise, he will have to begin to think of sex and speed and power and all that.
A special committee at Columbia University has worked for three years on the study of academic freedom, and here now are two books, by Richard Hofstadter and Walter Metzger, and by Robert MacIver, a history of the academic “freedom of inquiry” and a polemical defense of it against current attacks, especially in the social sciences. “Inquiry” is a term from the pragmatic vocabulary and denotes, roughly, a search to solve problems in the ongoing process of life; real, not “academic” problems, though not, of course, narrowly utilitarian problems. The question I want to raise is, to what extent do these authors seriously mean this and mean to defend it?
Let me start by taking an annoying and apparently unfair tack. In discussing the case of Bertrand Russell, Professor MacIver says, “Actually … Russell was dealing, forthrightly and sincerely, with the most problematic of all areas of social relationship [sex].” (AF 156)[4] This is an innocent passing remark in a relatively minor context in the book, but let is suddenly stop at it short and take the sentence at face value. If sexual relations is the most problematic of all areas of inquiry, we should expect that most or very many social scientists are inquiring and teaching here, or at least that the chairmen of departments are falling all over themselves to enlist experts for their staffs in this novel field; in the nature of the case much that these people are hypothesizing and affirming must be unconventional and socially unacceptable, for “in no other area of human behavior is there so unbridgeable a gulf between the officially sanctioned ethics and the socially accepted ways” (AF 157); and so there must here be lots of cases of infringement of academic freedom. But no such thing. In the three hundred pages of Maclver’s book, six are somewhat (mostly indirectly) concerned with such cases; in the five hundred pages of the history, none. Now this is not, I am convinced, because our authors are prejudiced on the subject or afraid of it; Professor MacIver, by his tone and remarks and the few times I have seen him, seems to me sensible and unusually frank. It is because indeed the most problematic area is not much an area of inquiry in the universities. Consider the following statement:
We know of no cases where an educator, clearly convicted of flagrantly immoral behavior, defended his position by appealing to the principle of academic freedom. Apart from the fact that such defense would be irrelevant, it is certain that his case would receive no support from his institution or from his colleagues. (AF 150)
If his case would certainly receive no support, the educator would certainly be a fool to press it. But I should like to question the “fact” that such a defense would be irrelevant. The Professor Emeritus knows as well as I that it is not sexual immorality that gets teachers sacked, for this is condoned by his peers, it is among the “socially accepted ways” but it is the publicity that sometimes accrues; and is this not tantamount to saying that it is not the thing but the proposition that is being penalized? (I know, for instance, of an even closer case, where a teacher in a small progressive college was refused reappointment not because of his delinquent behavior, which was at that place not uncommon and fairly public, but because of his “overt” claim to the right of it.)[5] Could not many such cases quite simply and relevantly be transformed into cases of infringement of academic freedom? But in this problematic area, the theory—in courses in anthropology—is kept far distant from the practice in the ongoing process of life.
In my opinion there is, in our times, a still more problematic area of social relationships: how to cope with war and the complex of issues around it, conscription, nuclear research, international diplomacy. Now in Professor MacIver’s book, pacificism is accorded three pages; in the history, more interestingly, the cases of the First World War are given a large number of pages, but “academic freedom was relatively little affected during the Second World War.” (Dev. 505) Why was it not? It seems to me that this area and the sexual area have an essential element in common: that in them a strong conviction tends to overt physical, not merely verbal, behavior; that is, the consequences of conviction tend to be dramatic and drastic, e.g., a young man may refuse the draft, a physicist may decline the job. Therefore these areas are sensitive, and therefore they are not much the objects of inquiry. But the suppression is not proximately extramural but intramural, and it is not forced by the president but by the faculty.
I am reasoning somewhat as follows: What is problematic for inquiry is always just beyond the known; in socio-psychological matters this is an area of confusion and anxiety, and of suppression and repression; then its exploration must involve interpersonal daring and personal risk, whether or not there is “acting out,” and in these matters there is a generic tendency toward acting out. The vital social questions for inquiry are those you are likely to get jailed for messing with. When you are threatened with academic sanctions, it is a good sign that you are on the right track; when you are fired, it is better; but when you are beyond the pale of the academy and “will receive no support from your colleagues,” then you are possibly touching the philosopher’s stone. My point is not that universities are worthless, nor that they should not or cannot be free, but that one cannot seriously regard them as primarily places of inquiry nor found the case for academic freedom on freedom of inquiry.
Of course it is unrealistic, and it would be uncharitable, to object to the dropping of a man who by his theory and practice makes his colleagues anxious; after all, they have to live and breathe too and feel themselves part of a team.
The situations with which we are mainly concerned are those in which an influential or power-holding group endeavors to make or succeeds in making its own predilections the official standards of fitness to teach, even though these predilections are particular to their own coterie or social class.… Where such groups exercise control, the freedom of education is seriously infringed, and the more independent and freedom-loving members of the institution are likely to suffer most. It is the teacher who sets the highest value on intellectual freedom who is the most obnoxious to the authoritarians. The higher his standard of responsibility, the lower the respect in which they hold him. (AF 147)
Professor MacIver is here precisely not talking about the faculties of universities, but about their extramural oppressors; would he not, on reflection, extend the censure to the academic coterie as well?
In the main these books seem to me to be written with a generous integrity and bona fides. They were occasioned, of course, by the recent investigations of communists and “communists”; and in such discussions, where every nuance of rhetoric and the penumbra of connotations are scrutinized by seasoned experts like Dr. Hook, it is impossible to satisfy anybody. But to my ear Professor MacIver’s sermons—his book has very many pages of long sermons—all ring solid nickel. There is, however, one major topic in treating which there is evident embarrassment, avoidance, difficulties hinted at but not explored, and letting sleeping dogs lie with one eye open this topic is the relation of knowledge and action. I do not find it credible that the meetings of so experienced a committee did not evoke more philosophic acumen on this subject than is here revealed.
On the one hand, Professor MacIver (the historians less so) lays great stress on “the intrinsic worthwhileness of the knowledge of things, the moral and spiritual values of the integrity of mind that steadfastly seeks the truth” (AF 14), the excitement of the infinite unknown, the grandeur of standing on the brink. He speaks of this with a religious fervor that makes us believe him but that also, I fear, takes it out of the context of a discussion of academic freedom at the University of Illinois or even the colleges of the Ivy League. For a seeker blessed and cursed with this much of the holy spirit will act accordingly with little help or hindrance from the opinions of presidents or from considerations of his own status and tenure; disciples will seek him out, and if we do not so much the worse for us. I think, too, the professor is too sanguine about the possibility of inculcating such an ideal by the ordinary processes of education in colleges; those who pick it up there have it in them to pick up.
On the other hand, all our authors are sold on the pragmatic theory of truth (I do not mean a utilitarian theory), namely, that truth is successful inquiry, and inquiry is an aggressive handling and coping with problems that claim attention; inquiry is experimental, it intervenes. This implies a close connection of knowledge and action. I am not here speaking of the consequences of inquiry but of the process itself. In the social sciences this must mean very often, must it not, sallying beyond the walls into areas that are trouble-some, or even to making trouble where all seemed quiet. Certainly if we consider the masters of the century prior to our generations—whether Comte, Marx, Proudhon, Durkheim, Kropotkin, Sorel, Veblen, Lenin, Freud, Dewey, etc., etc.—we are struck by their activism, their actual or projected experimentation on a civic scale. Some of these men are unthinkable as academics and some had uneasy academic lives. The present-day preoccupation with careful methodology is academically praiseworthy, but it does not lead to intensely interesting propositions. One cannot help feeling that a good part of the current concern with statistics and polling is a way of being active in the “area” without being actively engaged in the subject matter. There is a good deal of sharpening of tools but not much agriculture.[6]
Professor Metzger eloquently expresses the very point I am trying to make. He is distinguishing the cases of Richard Ely and Edward Bemis who got into trouble on the theory and practice of labor organization during the 90’s:
A … difference lay in the extent to which Ely and Bemis put their theories into action. For all his talk of the need for concrete reform, Ely’s criticisms of the social order tended to be general, not specific; hortatory, not programmatic. For all his warm humanitarianism, he made no intimate contact with the multitude. “Only twice in my life,” he wrote, “have I ever spoken to audiences of working men, and I had always held myself aloof from agitations as something not in my province—something for which I am not adapted.” Replying to the charge by Regent Wells that he had acted on his sympathies for labor, he issued a categorical denial. This author of a friendly history of the labor movement denied, at his trial, that he had ever entertained a walking delegate in his home, that he had ever counseled workers to strike, that he had ever threatened an anti-union firm with a boycott, or that he had ever favored the principle of a closed shop. Were these charges true, Ely wrote, they would “unquestionably unfit me to occupy a responsible position as an instructor of youth in a great University.” These were the words of a very academic reformer. (Dev. 433)
When Ely was academically vindicated, Bemis wrote to him:
“That was a glorious victory for you.… I was only sorry that you seemed to show a vigor of denial as to entertaining a walking delegate or counseling strikers as if either were wrong, instead of under certain circumstances a duty.” This was the difference between them: Bemis was not only a partizan … but an active party.… The subsequent careers of Ely and Bemis bear out the importance of this point. Ely survived (and in good part renounced) his spoken and written heresies. He remained in a state of academic grace for the rest of his life, taking a post at Northwestern in 1925 and one at Columbia in 1937. Bemis became an academic Ishmael with a reputation as a partizan and a malcontent that he was never able to live down. Except for his brief and ill-starred tenure at Kansas State, he received no further academic appointments. The trustees of the republic of learning could inflict on this kind of miscreant the terrible retribution of neglect. (Dev. 435)
All this is excellently and feelingly said. But it was an issue of sixty years ago, and today in this area a teacher has “the right to exercise the same political and civil liberties that are enjoyed by other citizens.” (AF 238) My bother is that our authors do not extrapolate to present-day areas that must have the same borderline characteristics, and then look a little harder for academic-freedom cases which might look precisely not like academic-freedom cases as reported to the American Association of University Professors.
On this same topic of knowledge and action, let me raise another difficulty concerning the action of teaching itself and the teacher’s responsibility for consequences. Our authors, especially the historians, are frequently scornful of the “assumption … that a young man yields to the imprint of ideas as easily and uncritically as wax.” (Dev. 411). They stress, rather, the development of freedom to learn, the opportunity to hear all and pick and choose. I do not think these are, in interesting cases, the real alternatives. The young mind is indeed not passive but intensely active, and its activity is to crystallize around an ideal, a system of ideas, or a nonfamilial personality, that serves as a parent substitute. Quite apart from sex, the relation of teacher and student is an erotic one, where for the student the attraction is in the excitement, particularly the rebellious excitement, of the system of propositions. The more excellent the teacher, the stronger the charismatic effect of his voice. In itself this is all to the good and is anyway inevitable; it cannot be prevented by doctrinal neutrality for then the very syntax of neutrality itself becomes adorable. But the attempt to prevent the effect or to disown responsibility for it, discourages the student and thwarts and embitters the teacher. Is not the situation familiar, that a powerful teacher is regarded by his colleagues, partly in envy and partly in anxiety, as a seducer of his students and indeed in a conspiracy with them to cast ridicule on themselves? On the other hand, if the strong teacher maintains his reserve, the student, whose needs are more frank, has indeed been rejected and will be either humiliated, disappointed, or angry, depending on his character. My guess is that every college term there is more infringement of the freedom to teach by academic timidity along these lines than in the whole history of cases here treated. Worse, is there not a great waste of natural human resources?
Our historians write of the liberation from “doctrinal moralism” (Dev. 353ff), the idea that if, e.g., a man is an atheist he is no doubt a drunkard and unfit to teach: “in scientific criticism the dissociation of the man from his work has become a cardinal principle.” This was indeed a great advance, for it heightened the respect for evidence and its accurate presentation and criticism. But I submit that the older theological view had the following merit: that a proposition was fraught with life consequences and had therefore the utmost seriousness; you knew a man by what he professed. I dislike appealing to the romantic and grisly past, but we must bear in mind that the adventure of inquiry has one quality when you are risking disgrace, imprisonment, and even death; and another when you are risking tenure; and quite another when you are risking nothing. Our secular society has great advantages, and even especially for inquiry, but its strong point is not the achievement of vocation or manliness. In his rhetoric of dedication to the Truth with a big T, Professor Maclver is harking back to Spinoza; I wonder if, by and large, he could comfortably use this rhetoric at the Faculty Club. Maybe I am wrong.
To sum up so far: I have tried in a quick and rude way to indicate that the professors fall short in two ways from a standard of inquiry as a phase of an experimental instrumental empiricism: they avoid problematic areas and they do not experiment their hypotheses. (Nothing of what I have said, let me remark, applies to more old-fashioned notions of academic freedom of inquiry. For instance, the notion of freedom of dialectic, as exemplified in, say, the Parmenides, where precisely the attachment and nonattachment to any proposition is used as a therapy of the soul. Or the Aristotelian freedom of curiosity, aimed at theoria as the highest happiness. Or the medieval libertas philosophandi, with its emphasis on disputation to let new air into an accepted world. Or finally to the Enlightenment’s concept of freedom of criticism in the Kantian sense (quo warranto?), where the faculty of philosophy serves, as Kant says, as a kind of loyal opposition from the left. All of these base their claim on the proposition that the university is different from, perhaps better than, perhaps a servant of, the rest of the world.)
I said I had started on an “apparently unfair” tack. Unfair because I chose an innocent sentence in a minor context, and I have been devoting myself to a matter of logic that Professor Maclver’s book is mostly not about. Now what it is about is the defense of such inquiry as does exist from the current attacks upon it, and specifically and explicitly the communist hunting of the Cold War by many parties, from government agencies to self-constituted vigilantes. Let us then turn briefly to the overt book itself and see if I can show the relevance of the tack I have been taking.
Professor Maclver’s findings on the Party and the investigations are the familiar ones of many liberals, and they warrant little fresh discussion here. Summarily: (1) The Party-communist teacher is unqualified, as authoritarian, suppressive, conspiratorial; but this disqualification is based on his activities, not on his theories. (Frankly, this distinction is idiotic, since what is a party that does not constrain to action?) (2) Past affiliation does not disqualify. (3) A communist, “whether he carries a Party card or not,” may be dismissed “if he injects propaganda into his teaching or relationships with students”; but conversely, if he teaches a noncontroversial subject and is otherwise circumspect, it is better to let him be. (4) Investigation should be done by the faculty, not by the administration or outsiders. (5) “Any general investigation to uncover possible communists is wholly undesirable.” (6) Loyalty oaths are “derogatory, injudicious, and futile.” (7) Student organizations should be permitted to invite C.P. speakers. (8) Communist ideas do not disqualify the student.
It is useful to distinguish two strata in such a list: judgments that could be called anti-McCarthy and those that are anti-anti-anti-McCarthy. Objections to highhanded and unfair pressures, to informing, to lack of due process, to almost all restraints on freedom of speech: this is simple anti-McCarthyism; and at it are leveled charges of political naïveté, of being duped, of not seeing that this is a unique conspiracy, of locking the stable after the horse is gone, and so forth. The response to these charges, in turn, is anti-anti-anti-McCarthyism: granting that there are grounds for the investigations, yet their effect is so productive of fear and withdrawal and inhibition of useful functioning that they weaken the body politic rather than purge it; thus they play into the hands of the enemy, etc.
I think that it is this latter attitude, the prevalence of academic anxiety rather than any righteous indignation, that has prompted the books we are reviewing. For the fact seems to be—at least so it is agreed by all sides in this controversy except the investigators themselves—that the communist infiltration has been trivial, was never large, and has steadily waned for years; that the furor of investigation has been out of all proportion. The question, then, is why anything so groundless and inappropriate has been met by anything but simple manly rejection, either quiet, derisive, or indignant, depending on one’s temperament. Why such big looks? Let me open MacIver at random and quote a few near-by passages:
There were evidences that in departments or faculties, here or there, disguised or subtle pressures had been applied to prevent the advancement of such noncomforming members or against the renewal of their appointments if they lacked tenure. It was not that the scholars who protested against the oath requirements were themselves nonconformists—there were very many good conservatives among them—but, whatever their economic viewpoints, alike they apprehended a growing peril to academic freedom. (AF 178)
No attack seems to be more disruptive than that which emanates from governing boards.… They rock the institution.… Governing boards are seldom prescient of the effect such edicts produce.… Often the disturbance that ensues comes to the governing boards as a complete surprise.… Censorial and inquisitorial action on the part of those who themselves are not devoted to the scholar’s search for truth is for the true scholar a vital threat. (Ibid)
What concerns us here is that the Tenney warnings and threats and proposals created the most serious apprehensions among leading educators. (AF 179)
This new exercise of authority by a board over a faculty contained implicit threats against the status of the educator, against the two most vital interests of the profession. The protesting faculty members saw in the new requirement on the one hand a threat to academic freedom, on the other a threat to security of tenure. The pro-oath regents denied that any such threats were involved … but this lack of understanding is one of the two frequent consequences of the lack of rapport that exists in this country between faculties and governing boards. (AF 177)
I quote at random from adjacent pages; the book is thickly studded with the like. One is ashamed to copy out the passages. What is one to make of this astonishing anxiety on the part of grownups, of professors, of supposedly dedicated scholars. “Disguised,” “implicit threats,” “rock the institution,” “vital threat,” “most serious apprehensions,” “lack of understanding,” “they are not prescient”; and all this syndrom where in many cases admittedly no danger existed, and where altogether at the worst no great danger existed. Is it so hard to clear up misunderstanding by bearding the lion? or to force implicit threats to become explicit and have a bang-up fight? Could these persons really be so concerned about losing their jobs? And if they are really concerned for freedom as a principle and a vital need, is this the tone of such a concern?
I fear it is rather the tone of subordinate bureaucrats ridden by self-doubt and with plenty of projected hostility, unable to withstand the least pressure without anxiety. Then I cannot believe in the devotion to inquiry that gives them so little strength of self as this. And I cannot believe in the aggressive intensity of inquiry that gets them into so weak a feeling for the state of things. The job-clinging itself is not so much base as a pathetic symptom. How easily they are deflated of their status! What shall we say of an elite of competence that has so little pride and self-confidence? Is this our proud academic freedom? If I felt it was only this I would tear up my doctorate.
The fear of actual investigation, the paranoiac suspicion of fancied investigation, the economic panic, need for status, clinging to security: these have been familiar in the American middle classes during the past couple of generations; there is no need to discuss in the context of the academic community the causes that have been operating in the whole community. What is specific, however, is that these are doctors, with a proud tradition, sacred symbols, a culture far broader than average, the inspiration of beautiful subject matters and grand authors: in short, a self-transcending responsibility to history past and future that they (we) cannot finally betray without shame and self-betrayal. They must rally, even though the form of the rallying reveals the inner conflict of these books.
It is remarkable how, in reading the vigorous and informative history of Professors Hofstadter and Metzger, one can see forming through the decades the lineaments of modern academic man, and an academic notion of inquiry defining itself. The authors call their book a “Development” and they rightly regard as an achievement the present concept of academic freedom with its bill of rights and its highly ramified national system of professional defenses. At the same time, being scrupulous and fairly philosophical and not at all homiletic, they note down the inevitable losses and sloughings-off that have occurred along the way. Now if instead of merely noting these losses, we accumulate them and form them into a picture: what a picture it is! so to speak, an ideal shadow of Western Academic Man that, we hope, haunts the modern American academic man, and sheds on him glory, and gives him a bad conscience. Let me collect half a dozen of these contrasts of development and loss.
(1) “At the time of their greatest independence,” says Professor Hofstadter,
the universities lived in the interstices of medieval society, taking advantage of its decentralization and the balance of its conflicting powers to further their own corporate interests. [They were guilds of masters or students.] They appealed to king or council against pope, to pope against king or bishop, and to king and popes alike against truculent town governments. Moreover, they had weapons of their own that put them above the level of mere appellants and gave them independent bargaining power. Among these weapons were the cessation or suspension of lectures, the academic equivalents of the modern strike. A still more powerful device arose, oddly enough, from their very poverty. Unhampered … by physical apparatus, great libraries, worldly goods, and substantial college foundations, they could and on occasion did migrate, taking with them their large numbers of students and profitable trade.[7] (Dec. 7–8)
I suppose this could be taken as the zenith of academic liberty; just as the nadir would be a faculty of science, saddled with its cyclotron, supported 80 per cent by the War Department of a centralized state that dictates the avenues of research, and with a “personnel” subjected to a clearance arrived at by secret investigation.
(2) More than half of this history of universities is occupied with the decline of sectarian control of academic selection, thought, and action; the secularizing of learning. The other side, the loss, is of course that thought and action tend to come to us more lightly; few of us, though some, spend sleepless nights of doubt about a detail of phrasing in theory leading to an inconsistency in behavior perhaps publicly unnoticed anyway. Professor Hofstadter charmingly recounts a touching story of the resignation of the first president of Harvard, Henry Dunster, who had found in his heart that no infant could properly be baptized and had to proclaim the same. (It seems to me, by the way, that this is an inevitable opinion for a college man who should set great store on learning and inquiry.) But Dunster was
not dismissed, and he could have kept his job if he had promised to be silent about his unacceptable convictions, for everything in the case indicates that the magistrates and ministers never lost personal confidence in him. Dunster, however, submitted a curious letter of resignation which made no clear reference to religious issues but dwelled at some length on the recent investigation of the college and the expansion of the powers of the Overseers at the expense of the Corporation. The General Court gave Dunster the opportunity to take a month to reconsider. Evidently they still hoped that he could be persuaded to swallow his heresy.… But a month later Dunster closed his presidency with the utmost finality when he interrupted a baptismal service at Cambridge with a startling speech against infant baptism and the “corupcions stealing into the Church.” (Dev. 89)
What is touching is not so much the president’s earnest and dramatic witnessing, exactly in the style of Hawthorne, but the way in which the others respect their brother’s right to wrestle with his god and their subsequent solicitude for him. It is unnecessary to mention contemporary contrasts.
(3) Again, in discussing the influence on America of the great German universities of the nineteenth century, the historian, Professor Metzger, beautifully analyzes on the one hand what was carried over, the methodic thoroughness, specific competence (but not the universality of interest), the freedom from utilitarian narrowness, dedication to absolute freedom of truth; and on the other hand what was sloughed off or suffered a sea change.
We come to the heart of the difference when we compare the American and German conceptions of inner and outer freedom.… The German idea of “convincing” one’s students, of winning them over to the personal system and philosophical views of the professor, was not condoned by American academic opinion. Rather, as far as classroom actions were concerned, the proper stance for American professors was thought to be one of neutrality on controversial issues, and silence on substantive issues that lay outside of their competence. Innumerable utterances affirmed these limitations. Eliot, in the very address that so eloquently declared that the university must be free, made neutrality an aspect of that freedom: “… It is not the function of the teacher to settle philosophical and political controversies for the pupil, or even to recommend to him any one set of opinions as better than another.… The student should be made acquainted … with the salient points of each system.” (Dev. 400)
Professor Metzger goes on to argue that this norm of neutrality itself springs from an American bias of thought, its empiricism, resistant to intuition, speculation, fantasy—in the end, a suspicion of deliveries not fairly quickly verifiable.[8] I do not think he sufficiently estimates the disadvantages of the limitation to “neutrality” as against the German freedom to “convince.” In the first place, with the American limitation, competence almost automatically becomes specialization, for what quickly verifiable fact is to connect the various parts of study? There is no system of facts, only systems of thought. Again, is Eliot’s ideal of neutral presentation something that can possibly exist in a classroom? Have you ever listened to a convinced Whiteheadian trying to present the philosophy of Kant? Then is the teacher to have no conviction of his own? It is plausible for the school to be neutral and present all sides, but how can the teacher be neutral? But most important, Eliot and Professor Metzger do not see realistically the situation of the student in the face of neutrality and competence: his moral nature must have some culture or other, and if no ideal or moral connections are made in the university, this culture—unless he has had an unusually lucky upbringing—will fall to the first extramural propagandist, or intramural but extracurricular propagandist, or even worse, it will continue in an infantile set of prejudices and unconscious conventionalities while his intellectual life will be correspondingly arid and without vital strength and prone to panic before Senatorial committees or rabble rousers. As I have said above, the teacher is responsible either way, whether he freely exerts his influence or withholds it; and I think he does better not to worry about a standard of scientific certainty and impartiality, but, relying on the sense of his own integrity, to act forthrightly according to probabilities, keeping an open mind and heart. Best of all, no doubt, that he have a wisdom and learning that cuts under controversy and relieves its sharpness, but this is not a “stance” but a fact. It is a fact if the professor’s urbane detachment, encyclopedic scope, urgent following-up, insistence on accuracy, or ability to make the controversy fascinating in itself (there are several admirable styles of teaching—none of them “neutral” ), if these continually provide a new unsettling challenge to the student’s wish to have an answer; but it is only a stance if the student feels he has come up against a limit of “no opinion.” I don’t think the majority of teachers are in fact this good. Finally, it seems likely that an important reason for the American standard of professorial neutrality has been the youth and sexual immaturity of our college students as contrasted with the German university students of that time; our students are more impressionable; but it is hard to see the logic of, on the one hand, dropping the older paternalism (or giving it over to administrative deans) and, on the other hand, discouraging discipleship; the students are told they are no longer children but young men, but they are forbidden the love affairs, both physical and intellectual, of young men. Yet where could such affairs be safer than at a university? Indeed, the contradiction is sometimes worse. There was a case at a famous Eastern college where in the aftermath of a sexual escapade the dean gave a student’s name to the police; a great foreign teacher, who had once served as Rector of a European school, exclaimed indignantly, “We were not in loco parentis and we protected them; you act in loco parentis and you do not protect them!” There spoke eight hundred years.
(4) Another grievous loss for academic man occurred with the abandonment of the liberal arts course of classics for an elective system geared more to adjustment to the changing social scene. Professor Metzger handles this as follows:
As the result of deeper social forces at work, the “conserving” function of the college no longer loomed so large. The unhinging of moral certainties by urban living, the fading out of the evangelical impulse, the depersonalization of human relations in the process of industrial expansion, were destroying that integral vision, that firm and assertive credulity, required of institutions devoted to conservation.… A good part of the pre-Civil War academic’s opposition to a more secular university and a more vocationalized curriculum stemmed from the desire to protect very fragile values from the crush of a rough society. He sought the freedom not to acquiesce in the philistinism of his age. (Dev. 317)
I think this is wrongly put; it sounds like Allen Tate, who could say, justifiably enough, “Undo it!” At the beginning of Academic Freedom in our Times Professor MacIver analyzes the climate of opinion unfavorable to academic freedom and finds a major factor in the want of a common culture and a deep-going communication. Given Professor Metzger’s analysis here, this is more and more inevitable, the University cannot cure it but rather tends to worsen it. What is common, integral, and humane is ipso facto out of date and fragile and needing conservation; meanwhile the University hastens on to new inquiry. Against this, the Great Books movement, associated with the names of Hutchins, Adler, McKeon, and Buchanan, has denied that the common culture is out of date; but they have made the contrary mistake, it seems to me, of claiming it is “eternal” and resides in the Great Books as “classics.” All this is topsy-turvy and looking in the wrong place. The true classics are the structures, whether propositions or methods or habits, that are in fact operative in the present juncture, urban, industrial, depersonalized, or whatever. There is always a classical curriculum to be found, because what is classical is simply what is central, concrete, causally operative, underlying; and indeed in any new situation, the classics never look like “classics,” nor, in the present state of literature, are they likely to be books. The Socratic dialogue is classic, and in our times it is to be found in the psychoanalytic group-session, where very soon one reaches what is integral, humane, and communicative. The experimental method is classic and chastens and unites us, but it must not be taught as a laboratory exercise nor in a course in logic, but rigorously applied to some real practical behavior. Eurythmics and sports are classic. Mathematizing experience is classic. It is not classic to teach grammar, but it is classic to define the grammar of your speech. The mistake has been to study monuments of classical ages—the Greeks, the Medievals, the seventeenth century—rather than to assume that we are presently creating classics. I propose that this is what Dewey meant by reconstruction, to find-and-make ourselves classical techniques and a common culture by a philosophical handling of just where we are on our way. This is not what the university has been doing, and now nobody can teach classics and we do not know what classics we have.
(5) Another loss occurred to Academic Man when he became, and agreed to consider himself as, merely an academic man, without some other function and status of his competence in the larger society. The historians relate with too much satisfaction, it seems to me, the development of a specialist “profession” from a group of clergymen who perhaps temporarily accepted calls as teachers. But teaching on the university level,[9] though it is surely a vocation and requires a special temperament and knack, is not a profession because it does not have a proper subject matter; it is a universal art applied to a proper subject matter; one might as well speak of a “professional orator.” To the extent that the teacher inquires into the subject matter proper, however, he is not a teacher, and then why does he hang around the campus so much? One’s suspicion is, alas, that the ancient maxim is true: “If you can’t do it, teach it.” Teaching is certainly a vocation and a responsibility of every expert; very few things are more beautiful to see than good teaching; perhaps nothing is more re-creative and enlarging for the expert himself, for he can teach with an integrity generally impossible in practice, and he gets to look at his habit of art with new eyes; even so, the scene of the same aging grown-ups hanging around while generations of youth pass by, has something in it that stinks in the nostrils. As for colleagues, the company of the like-minded is both stimulating and comforting, but to be immured with the like-minded is like—living at Princeton. A disadvantage of the professional situation, of course, is that the academic is economically tied; necessarily he is fearful of losing his tenure; he cannot, under stress, go off to his proper job where he is indispensable because he produces the goods. (In our society, of course, most of those goods do not fetch a price.) But perhaps a greater loss is that whole areas and provinces of science and scholarship have become merely intramural, they no longer importantly exist as the property of adult academies and learned societies, which in turn have tended to become merely honorary memberships that give prizes and sponsor social gatherings. Extramural science is bound to industry, extramural scholarship does not exist at all; yet it is simply by the accident that there are university libraries and laboratories and stipends that such activities are immured, with correspondingly irrelevant restrictions and duties that must be alleviated by claims to “academic freedom.” It is hard to know what to advise the scholar, hampered or often hampered by the atmosphere of colleges, in a society that does not much patronize the study of history, linguistics, and literature; nevertheless, to our ideal picture of the more heroic and free Academic Man we would do well to add the lineaments of the Humanist and the scientist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who were not professional academics. (Dev. 49, 195)
(6) Lastly, we must refer to a loss that has come with the coming of the Big University. Professor Metzger reads off the indictment from Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America:
Acutely, he discerned the trend toward bureaucratization was transforming the university’s personnel, structure, and behavior. This change was already evidenced in the army of academic functionaries—the deans, directors, registrars, and secretaries—who had come upon the scene to manage the affairs of the university. It was evidenced in the organization of the faculty as a graded hierarchy of ranks within which passage was controlled by a series of official promotions. It was evidenced in the writing of rules that defined the rights and obligations of professors and trustees. It marked, though it did not cause, the end of an academic era in which the college had been a community and the faculty a body of peers. (Dev. 453)
Dealing with this and the rest of Veblen’s jeremiad, Metzger seeks to prove, successfully enough, that Big Business as such was not the guilty agent, that the changes were socially pervasive and inevitable. But otherwise, I am baffled by the equanimity of his acquiescence. I should have thought that the faculty is the university, and if this university ceases to exist, what is there to write about as a continuing historical entity? We have come full circle from our first historical quotation, about the guild of scholars choosing the interstices of a plural society and willing to preserve itself by migrating bag and baggage; now we have, apparently, merely one wheel in a machine, that needs, to be sure, its own special oil and rules for successful operation, but we can hardly expect to hear from it any unique delivery of the creator spirit. This is not very interesting. If the brothers do not confront one another face to face and communally decide, nothing follows from their being brothers. Academic Man becomes the same as any other American man; this is just what one surmised from the passages of anxiety in MacIver’s book—professors behaving like all the other sheep; it is uncharitable to level at them any special charges or to subject them to any special scrutiny; but then what is all the talk about a peculiar dedication? But I am sanguine enough to believe that the case is not so desperate as this.
The case is, it seems to me—and it is expressed in the tone and matter of both these stimulating books—that there is a double Academic Man.
Looming ever in the background is this ghostly presence or absence that we have been figuring forth by the accumulation of lost causes that can never be lost. I have tried to cull traits that show him in his extramural and intramural relations, in his personal responsibility and community, in his curriculum and livelihood. He is part of a band “intensely self-conscious and self-important,” as Powicke said, and that carries colors and a coat of arms, not bashfully. He feels himself the carrier of Western culture and the champion of new invention. He has a deserved reputation as a stickler for antique tradition with excessive scrupulosity, and for stirring up entirely gratuitous innovations, just to make trouble. He is prone to terrible knockdown conflicts with his colleagues on the basis of mutual respect, and to erotic devotions, both lenitive and dangerous, toward his students. He goes abroad on his career in the world and sits on the faculty as an independent man of the world. This ghost, I say, is continually trying to break into reality and take over, but he is restrained—in many ways, let me hasten to add, fortunately restrained—by the circumstances of social history (very fully explained by our authors). Restrained and nonexistent, but he exerts an eerie fascination on the living body, rouses in him dreams, makes him touchy and irritable and suddenly ashamed and rebellious; and sometimes he gets hold of the speech and utters things like Professor MacIver’s somewhat mesmerized sermons.
In the foreground and with us, is the other academic man, frightened by a noisy politician. Caught in a bureaucracy, ridden by authority from above and bullying others from below, he is afraid of a black mark against him, because if he loses his job here he won’t have good references elsewhere; there is only one academic world and it is for him the only world. Weighed down by vast mortmain properties, corporately held and that make the living faculty a trivial force; and dependent for current expenses on alien interests that pay the piper and call the tune. Unerotic and at least publicly antisexual, naturally he is subject to anxiety. He uses lofty ethical terms to shame others, but gets remarkably little strength and animation from the reality pretended. He engages in plenty of intramural bickering and jockeying for position, but never in a bang-up fight. He does a good deal of obsessional counting and methodical busy work that is not very different from telling beads. He is not distinguishable, and circumspectly avoids becoming so by overt action. He and his fellows huddle together not as a totemic band but because it is cold. This is the academic man that speaks in Professor MacIver’s reportage.
In three hundred pages these fellows cross America eight times, usually camping on friends or relatives; and they have kicks. The narrator tends to become saddened by it all, but gives little evidence of understanding why. The fellows seem to be in their middle or late twenties (“not long after my wife and I split up” )—surprisingly, for the kicks are the same as we used to have less solemnly in our teens, between terms. Mostly they are from the middle class. Many other young men in their twenties and thirties call this book crazy and the greatest, as if it were their history: they were there. So let’s look into it.
To an uncritical reading, On The Road seems worse written than it is. There are hundreds of incidents but, throughout most of the book, nothing is told, nothing is presented, everything is just “written about.” Worse, the narrator seems to try to pep it up by sentences like, “That night all hell broke loose,” when the incident is some drinking sailors refusing to obey an order; “this was the greatest ride I ever had,” but nothing occurs beyond a fellow getting his pants wet trying to urinate from a moving truck; “this was exciting, this was the greatest”—but it’s not exciting. Soon, when the narrator or some other character says “The greatest,” we expect that he means “pretty fair”; but alas, he does not mean even this, but simply that there was some little object of experience, of whatever value, instead of the blank of experience in which these poor kids generally live.
For when you ask yourself what is expressed by this prose, by this buoyant writing about racing-across-the-continent, you find that it is the woeful emptiness of running away from even loneliness and vague discontent. The words “exciting,” “crazy,” “the greatest,” do not refer to any object or feeling, but are a means by which the members of the Beat Generation convince one another that they have been there at all. “I dig it” doesn’t mean “I understand it,” but, “I perceive that something exists out there.” On me as a reader, the effect is dismay. I know some of these boys (I say “boys”; Jack Kerouac is thirty-five).
Last summer I listened to Kerouac’s friend Allen Ginsberg read a passage from his Howl; it was a list of imprecations that he began pianissimo and ended with a thunderous fortissimo. The fellows were excited, it was “the greatest.” But I sadly asked Allen just where in either the ideas, the imagery, or the rhythm was the probability for the crescendo; what made it a sequence at all and a sequence to be read just like that. The poet was crestfallen and furious; this thought had never occurred to him. And yet, during those few minutes they had shared the simple-minded excitement of his speaking in a low voice and gradually increasing to a roar; it was not much of a poetic experience, but it was something, it was better than feeling nothing at all that night. What Kerouac does well, not just writes about, is his description of the jazz musician who has hit on “it” and everybody goes wild shouting, “Go! Man! Go!” But they cannot say what “it” is. These boys are touchingly inarticulate, because they don’t know anything; but they talk so much and so loud, because they feel insulted by the existence of the grownups who know a little bit.
“You can’t howl a gripe, Allen. You can howl in pain or in rage, but what you are doing is griping.” Perhaps the pain is too sore to utter a sound at all; and certainly their justifiable rage is far too dangerous for them to feel at all. The entire action of On The Road is the avoidance of interpersonal conflict.
One is stunned at how conventional and law-fearing these lonely middle-class fellows are. They dutifully get legal marriages and divorces. The hint of a “gangbang” makes them impotent. They never masturbate or perform homosexual acts. They do not dodge the draft. They are hygienic about drugs and diet. They do not resent being underpaid, nor speak up at all. To disobey a cop is “all hell.” Their idea of crime is the petty shoplifting of ten-year-olds stealing cigarettes or of teen-agers joy riding in other people’s cars. But how could it be otherwise? It is necessary to have some contact with institutions and people in order to rebel against them. It is necessary to want something in order to be frustrated and angry. They have the theory that to be affectless, not to care, is the ultimate rebellion, but this is a fantasy; for right under the surface, obvious to a trained eye, is burning shame, hurt feelings, fear of impotence, speechless and powerless tantrum, cowering before papa, being rebuffed by mama; and it is these anxieties that dictate their behavior in every crisis. Their behavior is a conformity plus royaliste que le roi.
One kid (age twenty-one) visited my home the other night, carrying his copy of On The Road. The salient feature was his expressionless mask-face, with the squared jaw of unconscious, suspicious watchfulness, the eyes in a fixed stare of unfelt hostility, plus occasional grinding of his back teeth at a vague projected threat. Even the hostility was hard to make overt, but his lips cracked in a small childish smile when he was paid attention to. “But nothing can be interesting from coast to coast, boy, if you do not respond to it with some interest. Instead all you can possibly get is to activate your rigid body in various towns, what you call kicks.” He explained that one had to avoid committing oneself to any activity, lest one make a wrong choice.
It is useful to place this inexpressive face and his unoffending kicks in our recent literary genealogy. Great-granddaddy, I guess, is the stoical hero of Hemingway: Hemingway’s young fellow understands that the grown-up world is corrupt and shattering, but he is not “Beat,” for he can prove that he is himself a man by being taciturn, growing hair on his chest, and shooting elephants. He has “values” and therefore can live through a few books. His heir is Céline’s anti-hero, a much shrewder fellow: he sees that to have those “values” is already to be duped by the corrupt adults, so he adopts the much more powerful role of universal griper and cry baby, to make everybody feel guilty and disgusted. The bother with his long gripe is that it is monotonous, there is a lot of opportunity for writing, but not even a single book. The next hero, and I think the immediate predecessor of being on the road, gives up the pretense of being grown-up altogether (a good case is Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye): he is the boy in the very act of being mortally wounded by the grownups’ corruption. This terrible moment is one book. But you can’t cry forever, so you set your face in a mask and go on the road. The adolescent decides that he himself is the guilty one—this is less painful than the memory of being hurt—so he’d better get going. The trouble is that there is no longer any drama in this; the drama occurred before “my wife and I split up,” before I lost my father.
Sociologically, the following propositions seem to me to be relevant: (1) In our economy of abundance there are also surplus people, and the fellows on the road are among them. There is in fact no man’s work for them to do. (2) We are inheriting our failure, as an advanced industrial country, to have made reasonable social arrangements in the last century; now when there is no longer a motive to work hard and accumulate capital, we have not developed an alternative style of life. (3) The style that we do have, “Madison Avenue,” is too phony for a young person to grow up into. (4) Alternatively, there is an attraction to the vitality (by comparison) of the disfranchized Negroes and now the Puerto Ricans; these provide a language and music, but this culture is primitive and it corrupts itself to Madison Avenue as soon as it can. (5) In family life there has been a similar missed-revolution and confusion, so that many young people have grown up in cold, hypocritical, or broken homes. Lacking a primary environment for the expression and training of their feelings, they are both affectless and naïve in the secondary environment. (6) The spontaneous “wild” invention that we may expect from every young generation has been seriously blighted by the anxieties of the war and the cold war (7) The style of life resulting from all this is an obsessional conformity, busy-ness without any urge toward the goals of activity, whether ideal goals or wealth and power. There is not much difference between the fellows “on the road” and the “organization men”—they frequently exchange places.
I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious of course. (Page 15.)
On other occasions, they eat franks and beans. More rarely hamburgers, malted milks, of course. That is, the drink-down quick-sugar foods of spoiled children, and the precut meat for lazy chewing beloved of ages six to ten. Nothing is bitten or bitten-off, very little is chewed; there is a lot of sugar for animal energy, but not much solid food to grow on. I suppose that this is the most significant observation one can make about On The Road.
For nearly two-thirds of this book one is struck, I have said, by the lack of writing; the book is nothing but a conversation between the buddies: “Do you remember when?” and, “Do you remember how we?” “That was the greatest!” Here is confirmation that they, like Kilroy, were there; but not much distilled experience for the reader. But then (page 173) there is a page of writing, not very good and not original—it is from the vein of rhapsody of Céline and Henry Miller—nevertheless, writing. The situation is that the narrator finally finds himself betrayed, abandoned, penniless, and hungry in a strange city. The theme of the rhapsody is metempsychosis. “I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember”—and this theme is a happy invention, for it momentarily raises the road to a plane of metaphysical fantasy. And this is how the passage climaxes:
In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco.… Let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick red roast beef au jus or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow mein …
Here, at least in wish, is a piece of reality that is not just kicks and “the greatest”; he wants to eat this food. Silone was right when he said that we must learn again the words for Bread and Wine.
COMPULSION, BY MEYER LEVIN. Simon and Schuster. 1956. 495 pp. $5.00.
NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT, By JAMES YAFFE. BOSTON. Little Brown Co. 336 pp. $3.95.
Here are two recent books about the Leopold-Loeb case which Meyer Levin calls “the crime of our century.” It occurred when Levin was in college (1924). James Yaffe is younger and takes the whole matter less seriously. Now the case is always considered the typical crime of the twenties, and I should like to set against these books for comparison a book of the twenties, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), which retells a typical murder of the time of Dreiser’s own youth, the case of Chester Gillette (1906). By this comparison I hope to say something about the twenties and the fifties, two decades of expansion.
I am not here making a literary evaluation, yet I must begin from a literary distinction. Of the two recent books, Yaffe’s is quite worthless; by bowdlerizing, up-to-dating, stereotyping, and juvenilizing the events and persons of the case, he contrives to lose both artistic probability and any other interest. But Compulsion is not a bad book; by its earnest selection of the journalistic, medical, and legal material, often given verbatim, it presents an interesting and believable report; and Levin makes something touching and significant of the narrator’s involvement in the action. Dreiser’s book, however, is of a different genre, it is a work of art; not (to my taste) a wonderful work, but a work of art in that it makes itself a world and this world is more important than the “case,” it is the real case. The questions that I would ask are these: what would a book about the Crime of Our Century be like if it were worked as Dreiser worked? Would such a work get itself written and received? What, contrariwise, are Levin and Yaffe doing? And what does this tell us about the fifties and the twenties?
What strikes one immediately and persistently, is how Dreiser is in his story, in a way that our writers are not. He works as though all the motives and behaviors were immediately plausible, unquestionable by either the author or the audience, and therefore needing no explanation, only presentation. He may or may not have a theory of causation—we know that he had several—but he does not need one and he does not offer one; simply he shows us how first undeniably Clyde Griffiths did and suffered so and so, and then he did and suffered so and so. Instead of causation and the imputation of responsibility or compulsion, we get a solid and stolid probability that adds up to a real world; that’s just how it was, like life only more so. (Dreiser carries this through admirably; the only episode that seems to me sketchy and a little fumbled is the temptation to the murder plan; but the author recovers.) Again, as a doctrinaire naturalist, Dreiser eschews every literary attitude except this narrowly selective “lifelike” presentation; there is no perspective, no irony, no wonder, no humor, no wisdom, compassion, admiration or contempt; no symbol, no formal surprise; certainly no sympathy. (But love, the love of undeviating attentiveness.) In all these ways Dreiser is not involved in the crime, but we shall see that just in these ways Levin and Yaffe are, each in his own fashion, involved. They cannot present the case as a naturalistic probability. Levin wisely makes little effort to do so and relies on the documents to move his story (that’s how it was because that’s how it was reported in the press); when Yaffe tries it, his story moves not at all.
When Dreiser succeeds in his art work of this kind, there follow two cultural consequences of the highest importance. In the first place he triumphantly vindicates the art act itself, for it is art and art alone that does human justice to Clyde Griffiths (and perhaps to his original Chester Gillette; but that no longer makes any difference). Here Dreiser is perfectly aware of what he is doing; he devotes his entire denouement to the varying attempts to understand and be fair to the young murderer: the trial, the appeal, the compassionate minister, the wise governor, the loving and sacrificing mother, and finally the confused boy himself trying honestly to assay himself. No one truly understands what occurred; but the author can say, “Nay, read here; this is what occurred.” (Indeed, my bother with this good book is that Dreiser does not bring this poignant problem to the forefront soon enough; he does not show us until too far along the confused youth, longing to be understood and told what he is. Dreiser shows us always his vacillation and cowardice, but not enough his confused integrity; he sticks so close to what is like that particular life that he misses one transcendent tragedy of every life.)
But even more relevant to our present theme, when Dreiser succeeds in making a probable crime by accepting every usual presupposition, the social effect is revolutionary. If people do not like the outcome, they cannot simply reject it; they must reject the whole sequence en bloc; and since they have been patiently led along step by step, accepting every step as sensible, plausible, and like their lives, they must—must they not?—be shaken in their whole way of experiencing as a viable way of life. See, says the author, here is how you make sense, and it is not viable. Something is wrong. At this level, simply to entertain an alternative morality to the one that doomed Clyde, is to disavow the morality you grew up in. Historically, Dreiser’s works were part of the revolutionary change in the sexual mores. The events of An American Tragedy would no longer be probable if retold today; this particular plot would occur today in a soap opera.
The authors of our books on Leopold and Loeb are not in those events, which are alien to them. There is no shared assumption of author and audience that this is, step by step, inevitable behavior leading up to what is quite unacceptable but must be accepted nevertheless or all our sense rejected en bloc. Yaffe’s book is merely manufactured on a causal theory, that such and such parental attitudes lead to such and such juvenile delinquency: the premises are stereotypes, and the esthetic effect is the frigid one of having established a possibility, for the sake of argument or to get a book written, that such and such might occur; but there is never any probability or internal motion. Levin, much more masterfully, makes the chief thing his own need to find out the cause, a fine theme, not unlike Proust’s; but then there is too much about Leopold and Loeb and not enough about Meyer Levin. The esthetic effect of the major bulk, the crime, is the harsh one of unpleasant newspaper reports. Both authors make the philosophical error of trying to present a living process by explaining it rather than by reliving it with us; their causes are ex post facto; at every moment the protagonists might do otherwise but don’t happen to; afterwards we can trace the trajectory they did follow, as if to say, “there must have been a compulsion”; we are certainly none the wiser about ourselves, or any urgent present matter.
Then there arises the question: What on earth makes two writers devote so much effort to a narrative they cannot get on with, and one of them to call it by such a title as the Crime of Our Century? Why do they treat with it at all? This is a crucial question. They are obviously fascinated. With what? It is fortunate that we have two books, for unlike as they are in most respects, they prove to have a couple of surprising attitudes in common, and these give us the clue to the relevance of these books at this time in the fifties.
As alien as they are to the case, our authors feel even more alien to the social milieu in which the case occurs. In Yaffe, who up-to-dates the story, the disaffection is blatant from the beginning. He is dealing with what would be normally a gloomy subject, yet with almost every character except the protagonists, his manner is usually satirical and often sarcastic. One father is a frigid ass, the other is a week fool; one mother is sickly and timid, the other is a domineering club woman and a fool; the principal is a pompous fool; the lawyer is a vain conniver; the psychiatrists don’t care; the judge is a sentimental fool. And as his story reaches its climax, Yaffe hits on the pattern he is after: that nobody is concerned with the one important thing, the case, but this one is interested in his golf score, that one in his new article, another in his business prestige, etc. To drive it home, the author runs through the routine a second time.
Levin’s disaffection is more touching; it is a slow growth to awareness of how pointless his own career as a man has been. Let me quote from his ending:
… As it happened, I never again reached the intense involvement and achievement—if achievement it may be called—of my first assignment. When something big comes to us early in our careers we have an expectation of exceeding and exceeding ourselves; yet for some this never happens, just as, for some, no later love has the quality of first love. I married, divorced, and during the war I was a correspondent with the Third Army. It was in the last weeks that the case came finally home to me.
Back in America he meets his first love.
… Looking at her, I was thinking, It could have been. It could all have been.… And I tended my job and married again, and we live in Norwalk.
But the social disaffection of both authors is evident also in their surprising attitude toward the two protagonists. They sympathize with, and admire, the dark funny-looking Jewish intellectual misfit (of course in Yaffe nobody is Jewish)—the one who wears the glasses and loses the glasses—the brooding one who has the fantasies of being a serviceable slave. They yearn to extenuate for him according to their own standards of decency, and Yaffe even contrives his metaphysical salvation. But toward the other, the fair good-looking youth, skilled in sports, dancing, and dramatics, sought after by the girls and boys, both authors are cold and even hostile; he is, somehow, to blame. What does this mean? Our authors look at themselves and at the world and its desirable roles, and they find nothing to admire and love—at most something to envy and be vindictive about—but certainly nothing that adds up to what you could be “intensely involved” in, or to “achieve” anything there. Yaffe, the younger, takes this pretty much for granted; Levin has learned it as he pursued his career and found that he, or it (it makes no difference), didn’t come across. But there were those two rich and bright boys back in the twenties who “had everything,” and they were wise to it already. They acted it out—it is fascinating—because one of them seduced the other into doing something spectacularly pointless, for the excitement; they committed the Crime of Our Century.
As is often the case, the opening page of Compulsion, before the author has a chance to develop his habitual defenses, tells more about the case and the real situation than all the rest. A professor is giving a brilliant cram lecture for the morrow’s entrance examination to Law School. Judd, who killed the boy the day before, takes no notes; yet he is paying attention, because he seizes the first occasion to interrupt and bother the teacher and the class with his theory of the Superman; but he feels they don’t understand his argument.… Levin here wants to portray the preoccupied youth, doodling a hawk, and unable to keep away from the area of the crime, and this is very well. But the salient psychological features of the scene are not these “unconscious” ones but much simpler and revealing ones: (1) What would seem to be “objectively” important, the cram lecture and the examination, is unimportant not only to Judd but also to the other students and to the teacher, for they rush at once into the time-wasting argument. (2) The aim of the young man is chiefly to claim attention, as if starved for attention, and to have something vital to him drawn forth and treated seriously, though not necessarily approved, even perhaps more to be refuted. (3) But since what he offers has no immediate practical content, there is no way to get himself understood. He wants to share his fantasy, which is his only creative act, but it is only a fantasy. We can be sure that, uninterested in the objective business of society—the examination—and unable to make contact with the other persons, he will pour his energy into lush fantasies indeed. (Of course I am not here speaking of Leopold and Leob but of how they exist as fantasies of Meyer Levin.)
Now let me revert to the first question above: if our author were going to artifice a real world of the case, as Dreiser did in An American Tragedy, it is in these scenes of social behavior and how the protagonists are in them, and how they are not in them, that half the substance of the work would be. This is especially true for the outgoing, the socially successful youth (Artie). The author tells us, for instance, that Artie is a fine tennis player. In Yaffe’s book the counterpart is manager of the baseball team. How is he in these sports? We get not a word. But Levin in one brief passage lets us know that Artie is impotent. Then we can envisage him on the field, or dancing hot jazz, throwing himself wildly into it for the relieving excitement of the muscular activity; excelling with the need to prove potency, and with the flash of triumph (and contempt) in doing so; but never, never with the total release of orgasm—having always something unfinished and the need, more fiercely next time, to repeat—and with this, the inability to get any of the quiet rewards of activity and success. He can do it and he proves it, but then it doesn’t mean anything and he turns on his heel; or—more deeply—he turns on his heel in full flight from the anxiety of losing control and bursting into tears. Levin is concerned with explaining, and he is compassionate; but if he envisaged the real scenes and simply constructed them, there would be no need for explanation—any more than Dreiser explains anything—and the work itself would repair something, make it whole again, and this is the act of compassion.
Now the other half of such a reconstruction of the real case would, I think, deal with the proliferating fantasies, especially of the inward-turning youth. It happens that in our generation, by no accident, writers have learned to reconstruct such masturbation fantasies as a literary form. Genet is the most masterly. Henry Miller is more pedestrian. The essence of such reconstruction is that the physical and social reality, the “other’s reality,” enters the presented world with apparent caprice or is there only on the fringes; its meaning and value is the use it plays in beginning, maintaining, and heightening the fantasy. Certainly this is not far from the Leopold-Loeb “case” as told in the books we are considering; but our authors do not stay with the fantasist’s world and therefrom lead us to the crime step by step as it really was; rather they persist in keeping the social valuation as their structural framework—and then the overt acts of fantasy occur as alien and require a causal explanation. And yet these same authors, as I have said, do not take that social reality seriously at all! Then what on earth are they doing? They are fascinated and they are avoiding.
In order to get something more nearly resembling what Dreiser did, we could structure this material as follows: On the one hand the scenes of the unsatisfactoriness of our social reality, made obvious and probable for us, the final pointlessness of the esteemed roles and careers, of the games and dates, the coldness of the families and fraternities, and the gnawing need to exceed. On the other hand, the rich reality of the fantasy world into which something looms from outside so that there begins to occur overt behavior continuous with the fantasy. It is in this matrix that the events occur that are reported in the newspapers as crime by those who have not gone step by step this whole road.
The youths kill a random boy for no reason, that is, for a trivial reason that would fit a trivial deed; but of course to them the deed is neither enormous nor trivial but of the order of their other acts; and their reason is not trivial, but to run the risk of being caught, exposed, punished. (It is hard to know what Levin means by “compulsion”—he seems to be saying that the death wish is compelling; but I think the usual psychological wisdom is that the thrilling excitement, the compulsion, is in the confrontation with the others. This is what the affectless repeat.) Yaffe and Levin seem to be peculiarly moved by the acts. They do not seem to understand how any principle of disaffection or estrangement, continuously operating, will take a person far afield; and not only negative principles, but such positive faculties as healthy lust or common sense in a crazy world will eventually lead a man to enormities of eccentricity; and the honest artistic need to touch a smug and debauched audience eventuates in dada. But these books keep the enormity of the act in the foreground; the crime is isolated. We continually feel their tug toward the crime as unfinished business for themselves—several times Levin says as much.
They cannot make the agents real and the act inevitable; they are too involved; they must explain it away. To sum up our comparison: in these books it is the crime we are to disavow and not the world of our assumptions; yet that world is not looked at squarely either, but avoided. But in An American Tragedy it was not the murder but the whole way of social life in which that murder was an incident that was recreated, and since our own experience of life allowed us to regard the sequence of events as probable, we had radically to disavow it, that is, to entertain alternatives.
Yet the book we have proposed in theory, portraying as plausible and probable so radical a disaffection from the accepted institutions and behaviors, and developing with sympathy the fantasies of perversity—such a book could not get itself accepted. People do not dare to disavow so frankly our conventionally desirable world, and therefore they would not admit the real scenes to be plausible; nor can they accept the fantasies of desire as what someone indeed might desire. It would all seem far-fetched and repugnant, rather than only too real and inadmissible en bloc. Yet the books that put the crime in the foreground—these exert a fascination.
Let me now generalize and compare the twenties and fifties as two periods of expansion. Both are marked by a booming productivity, much money to spend, a rising standard of living, and also by cultural adjustments to great technical innovations that offer exciting prospects; radio then and television now; flying the ocean and the geophysical year; relativity physics and psychoanalysis then and nucleonics and psychotherapy now. In both decades a vast increase in international travel and cultural exchange. Such things both support and give content to the expansion. At the same time the twenties and the fifties are marked by a profound disillusionment and disgust at the way our civilization has recently disgraced itself. No doubt the First World War was a more severe shock to moral preconceptions—we were inured by their experience of barbarism; yet we managed to turn up with crematoria and atom bombs. But these experiences, too, foster expansion in those who survive and in whom the shell shock thaws out, for people are purged, especially if there has been frank vomiting; and then more daring and radical notions can express themselves with a good conscience, since nothing an individual can think of would be so wicked as what everybody thought of collectively.
But there is also a dark contrast between the decades. The twenties were a time in which people thought (really believed) that there would never be another war. Great nations scuttled their warships according to a formula, and signed the Kellogg-Briand agreement. This element, of security, is of course capital to an expanding mood, for it is the absence of an external counterpressure.
If we consider the artistic creations of the twenties, they were indeed such as one would expect and hope for in a time of expansion and disgust. There was a flowering of advance-guard work, experimental, offensive, outrageous, bringing to a large public the esoteric efforts of several decades. And the standard style, as by that time An American Tragedy was in standard style, moved with serene self-confidence, immune from the need to explain, as if all the necessary radical positions had been securely conquered. In art as in politics, we had all the three elements necessary for the emergence of novelty: expanding energy, a rejection of the past, and security enough to tolerate confusion and anxiety.
Artistic creation today gives, rather, an impression of being balked, potential but unable to get along. There is a counterpressure that both opposes expansion and discourages it inwardly. Not only is there no peace, but no forth-right effort for it; the international community and even science are not free exchanges; and the increased standard of living no longer pays off in pride and joy, for people are avoiding some risk. There is not enough security, therefore not enough ability to tolerate anxiety, and therefore not enough risk of something startlingly new. At the same time; of course, there is too much disgust with the old, and too much new energy to burn, to allow for great conventional products. Instead there is a balked and teasing flirtation with something different, without daring to affirm it. It is in this ambiance, I think, that books like Compulsion and Nothing but the Night get themselves conceived in fascination, executed defensively, and widely accepted by an audience that will not thereby change. They are widely accepted because everybody is in the same boat. Everybody knows better, but few dare to believe it and witness it.
Finally, let me return to the Case itself. The twenties had Flaming Youth; the fifties have Juvenile Delinquents. Leopold and Loeb were not Flaming Youth, they were juvenile delinquents a generation ahead of their time, and therefore they seem now to have committed the Crime of Our Century. Flaming Youth is rebellious youth astoundingly careless of the wisdom it rejects, claiming to be grown-up and untrammeled even while admitting it might be making mistakes to which it claims a right; but its aims are positive enough: sex, speed, and liquor to relax inhibition, ideal political doctrines, and frank answers in words of one syllable for thorny moral dilemmas. These are kids (they recur) looking for an honest adult to refute them. Meyer Levin’s protagonists show some of this zeal, but I suspect that it is Levin who is looking for the honest adult. Our juvenile delinquents are not rebellious but resigned; and they are trapped and desperate. Since these young people do not know where to try to exercise their energies, they do mischief. The speed and liquor, and the PAL and the fan-clubs, are not the prelude to a quieter good time but to more desperate expedients toward excitement. Their philosophy would be Existenz and L’Acte Gratuite, except that to philosophize affirms an essence, truth, and it is not an acte gratuite but the property of a rational animal.
Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths is a dumb precursor of the rebel; he feels he is deprived, only he does not know how; and he is lovingly portrayed in a decade when they thought they knew what was wrong, and importantly did know, and were engaged in changing it. But our present protagonists “have” everything and it’s no good; there is no point in their rebelling against their fathers for they don’t have it either; and nobody demonstrates anything new for them in the best-sellers. They are rebels without a cause.
I am reminded of the commencement exercises some years ago at one of the superior academic high schools in New York: Music and Art. Senator Javits, then State’s attorney, addressed the class and urged them to help combat juvenile delinquency by interesting the tough kids of their neighborhoods in their own cultural pursuits. Abstractly this was not a foolish proposal—even meaty for a commencement address. But the teen-agers to whom I listened thought it was ridiculous; that the delinquents were much in the right and they were stronger and would influence the good boys rather than the other way around; also—with a certain purity—that music and art should not be degraded to do police work, for they impugned the State’s attorney’s motives.
Dev. refers to The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, by Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger N. Y., 1955. Columbia University Press. 506 pp.