Nonconformity (2 page)

If they’re not, then we are. The great confident majority of Americans Adlai Stevenson described as “the generous and the unfrightened, those who are proud of our strength and sure of our goodness and who want to work with each other in trust, to advance the honor of the country.” If they’re not extinct, then the philosophy of strength through freedom of speech is being replaced, Justice Douglas warns, by the philosophy of strength through repression.

No people to date has obtained a corner on Truth. And when we elect a pair of ragged claws to the Senate of the United States we forfeit something of our own claim. It no longer suffices to doubt such war heroes privately. The out-loud kind of doubting that rescued American thought, in the twenties, from the files where the McCarthys and McCarrans
¹²
and Jenners of that decade had locked it, is what is most needful to the States in the fifties. For Dreiser and Mencken, Sinclair Lewis and Veblen and Steffens and all, all are down in the dust of the twenties.
¹³

And once again the little editorial fellows in the London collars, and the underwear unchanged for weeks, are hawking the alarm on every newsstand that only by napalm and thunder-jet may the American way of life be
saved. That no man may now call himself loyal who will not pledge allegiance to the commander of the closest American Legion Post and to that mob-mindedness for which he stands.
¹⁴
That by placing economic boycotts on dissenters we thereby ensure the liberties of conformists. That what is good for Jake Margarine is good for the country. That by hobbling our scientists and teachers we guarantee academic freedom. That if we can but build a space platform before anyone else we shall thus ensure national contentment for keeps. And that in its capacity to wage technological warfare across another people’s soil lies proof enough of any nation’s greatness. Babbitt has risen from the dust of the twenties, his fingers fit the levers of power and the lid is off on the price of nonconformity.

“Before long,” Mark Twain wrote, “you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with these stoned speakers—but do not dare say so. And now the whole nation—pulpit and all—will take up the war-cry and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.”
¹⁵
For every time you find an inquisition you find editors and politicians and preachers justifying it by saying, “We are imperiled.”

When we can make a half-hero out of a subaqueous growth like Whittaker Chambers,
¹⁶
and a half-heroine out of a broomstick crackpot like Hester McCullough, and then
place a government employee under charges because unidentified informants alleged that “his convictions on the question of civil rights extended slightly beyond that of the average individual,” it is time to call a halt.

“Risk for risk,” the wonderfully named Judge Learned Hand writes, “for myself I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust.…”
¹⁷
“I do not believe in democracy,” Mr. Herbert U. Nelson of the National Association of Real Estate Boards differed during a congressional hearing. “I think it stinks.”

Between the pretense and the piety. Between the H Bomb and the A.

R
isk for risk, for myself I had rather take my chance that some traitors will escape detection than spread abroad a spirit of general suspicion and distrust, which accepts rumor and gossip in place of undismayed and unintimidated inquiry. I believe that that community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose. Such fears as these are a solvent that can eat out the cement that binds the stones together; they may in the end subject us to a despotism as evil as any that we dread; and they can be allayed only in so far as we refuse to proceed on suspicion, and trust one another until we have tangible ground for misgiving. The mutual confidence on which all else depends can be maintained only by an open mind and a brave reliance upon free discussion. I do not say that these will suffice; who knows but we may be on a slope which leads down to
aboriginal savagery. But of this I am sure: if we are to escape, we must not yield a foot upon demanding a fair field and an honest race to all ideas
.

—Judge Learned Hand,

Speech given at the University of the State of New York, Albany October 24, 1952
¹⁸

L
EAVING AMERICAN WRITERS TODAY WITH a choice easier for some than for others. “I try to give pleasure to the reading public,” suggests Mr. Frank Yerby, smiling pleasantly: “The novelist has no right to impose his views on race and religion and politics upon his reader. If he wants to preach he should get a pulpit. I mean all this,” the Emmett Kelly of American letters adds, “from a professional, artistic point of view.”
¹⁹

“To think that it is the duty of literature to pluck the pearl from the heap of villains is to deny literature itself,” Chekhov has to put in his nickel’s worth. “Literature is called artistic when it depicts life as it actually is.… a writer is not a confectioner, not a cosmetician, not an entertainer.”
²⁰
Take your change and leave, Anton, there’s somebody knocking at the door.

“Now when I read
Anna Karenina,”
Mr. Yerby shows Chekhov out to have a fatherly chat with Tolstoy, “I find myself skipping the peasant-in-relation-to-the-land parts. That sort of thing just isn’t the novelist’s job.”

How come the Duke in relation to the Duchess,
that sort of thing, is the novelist’s job? How come Kelly never skips those parts? If the peasant in relation to the land isn’t the novelist’s affair, it must follow that the city man’s relationship to the street he lives on isn’t any skin off his hide either. What, indeed, comes of any inquiry into the street upon which humanity—including Kelly—lives? If it isn’t the writer’s task to relate mankind to the things of the earth, it must be his job to keep them unrelated—lest he find himself passing not safe and dry-shod, but in angry waters up to his ears and no shoreline in sight.

What Kelly is struggling to say, from “a professional, artistic point of view,” is that the chief thing is not to be seen in shabby company. Like Kafka’s advocate, he feels that “the only sensible thing was to adapt oneself to existing conditions.… One’s own interests would be immeasurably injured by attracting the attention of the ever-vengeful officials. Anything rather than that!”
²¹
To be, indeed, precisely the man Fitzgerald feigned so mordantly to admire, one of those who say “business is business” and “I’m not the person to see about that.” For Fitzgerald himself became so submerged in the waters that have no shore that he had at last in anguish and bewilderment to ask why he had “become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.”
²²

Thinking of Melville, of Whitman and Jack London and Stephen Crane, Bierce and Sandburg and Mark Twain, it would seem there is no way of becoming a serious writer in the States without keeping shabby company.
Thinking of Poe and Fitzgerald, Hart Crane and Vachel Lindsay, Lafcadio Hearn and George Sterling,
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it would seem there is no way of becoming such a writer without becoming a victim.

The flabbiness and complacency of American writing at the very moment when the Italians and the French have so much sinew and fire can be accounted for, in part, by this same scorn of shabby company. Our practice of specializing our lives to let each man be his own department, safe from the beetles and the rain, is what is really meant by “a professional, artistic point of view.” For it is not a point of view at all, but only a camouflaged hope that each man may be an island sufficient to himself. Thus may one avoid being brushed, even perhaps bruised, by the people who live on that shabby back street where nearly all humanity now lives.

A view that betrays an uneasy dread of other men’s lives; a terror, bone-deep yet unadmitted, of the living moment. Nothing could be more alien to our Stateside lives than Gide’s belief that every instant is precious because, in each, eternity is mirrored.
²⁴
To our businessman’s morality such a view is so repugnant it must be declared out of bounds; for it mocks the faith of all true believers that no virtues are greater than thrift, self-preservation and piety.

“If your God is forgetful of your life,” the novelist Jean-Baptiste Rossi puts it better than Gide, “keep your life. Your life is all that matters.” All that matters among the
things of man’s own earth. Where the life that does no more than maintain itself, denies itself.

The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.

The shortcut to comfort is called “specialization,” and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York. If he is already there, he will go to work for Fleur Cowles.
²⁵
We feel it to be only one more fact of our matter-of-fact morality that birds of a feather
ought
to flock together. Thus, out of a conviction that every man should be his own department we have specialized ourselves into a condition where every man is actually his own broom closet.

That “that sort of thing” is not the novelist’s job is true only in so far as it is the novelist’s primary consideration to be clean-shaven and well-pressed with the brass of all his little buttons sparkling. Mr. Yerby reduced the art of writing to a ballroom game of seeing who can serve the heaviest tipper the fastest. Like any hotel manager, he demands that writers disregard what is true in the world, and real, in order to dedicate their lives to the guests. What a bellhop here was lost to the world.

No book was ever worth the writing that wasn’t
done with the attitude that “this ain’t what you rung for, Jack—but it’s what you’re damned well getting.” “A novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling,” Conrad tells us.
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Not to say that an American writer cannot keep his faith that staying warm and dry-shod is the main thing, and still write honestly. Who can say that the works of Clarence Budington Kelland
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are anything but honest?

A line of reasoning that ought to bring an Academy Award this year to Zsa-Zsa Gabor and a Nobel Prize for Literature to Louis Bromfield. How do you know you don’t have talent till you try? Openings in a big new field for young people with pleasing personalities. Send for our Aptitude Test. Take our short easy course. Learn while you earn. You too can be an artist and go to parties with the swells.

“By a long, immense and reasoned derangement of the senses,” Rimbaud decided, “the poet makes himself a seer. By seeking in himself all forms of love, pain and madness, by turning himself into the great sick man, the great criminal, the great accursed, the poet reaches the unknown; and if, maddened, he should end by losing understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them.”
²⁸

“What I get out of it financially doesn’t come under consideration at all,” Kelly assures us. “I write what I feel and think.” Obsession remains the price of creation and the writer who declines that risk will come up with nothing
more creative than
The Foxes of Harrow
or
Mrs. Parkington
.
²⁹

So obsessed, he will perceive that the true shore lies against the tides of his own time. If he is not to betray himself he will have to move against that current. Even though aware that the hour he’ll find land will be that one when the waters toss his blue and bloated carcass up. Perhaps upon those very sands where those who play the safer game are drinking Cuba libres under beach umbrellas, murmuring contentedly, “I’m sorry, but I’m not the person to see about that” and “business
is
business.”

… A
novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling. To have the gift of words is no such great matter. A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a firearm; many other qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either one or the other. Of him from whose armory of phrases one in a hundred thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art, I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues. I would not have him impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors. I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. I would wish him to look with a large forgiveness at men’s ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social status, even their professions.… I would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he grows in mental power. It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found
rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception. Let him mature the strength of his imagination among the things of this earth.…