After the Tall Timber (2 page)

Her own prose, on the other hand, is quite unlike any journalism being written today. It exists in service to itself, as its own standard, as its own force, and not in support of political or commercial positions. It is a depressing realization that writing like this is really no longer practiced, that journalism is not a writer’s game anymore, that the language of most journalism is as dead and meaningless as the language of politics and of pop culture, from where so much of it comes.

Adler is often writing about a writer’s position in the larger world. Hers is a meditation on the power that journalists accrue, often falsely, as a product of media rather than language. A successful journalist graduates from being a writer or a reporter into being a politician or adroit entrepreneur—a fundamentally different business than pushing sentences.

Adler herself is an example of another kind of writer, a writer’s writer, if you will. One without institutional protection, or even self-saving restraint. The ability to write with financial and emotional support—the sine qua non of being able to write—is predicated on a successful relationship with a media power, a devil’s deal almost every writer gladly makes.

It is possible perhaps for an indomitable fighter to go it alone, to face down the cultural bishops of the moment. But Adler, except in her prose, is as indomitable as a mouse.

Fortunately, her writing speaks for itself.

—M
ICHAEL
W
OLFF

INTRODUCTION

IN MAY, 1969, as I was watching
Another World
, Lee Randolph died. I had bought my television set more than two years before, after going to California to do a piece about the Sunset Strip. Buying the set had nothing to do with the piece at all, or any piece. But on assignment, in the sunny upper rooms of the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, I had had a case of laryngitis so extreme that I couldn’t speak, even whisper on the telephone, and when I was not following the flower children of the Strip about, I stayed in my room watching daytime television—the soap operas, and when they were not on, the quiz programs. I became seriously preoccupied by them. The NBC peacock, with the announcement “the following program is brought to you in living color,” was frustrating, even reproachful on a hotel room’s black and white. When I got home, I bought a color set, my first TV, a Zenith Space Command with remote control, which I could operate from my bed.

For two and a half years—until now, in fact—I watched
Another World, The Doctors, Love of Life, Search for Tomorrow, Days of Our Lives
, and later
Hidden Faces
(I have never cared for
Secret Storm
or
Edge of Night
) whenever I could, and nearly always when I thought I should be doing other things. They had their tired stretches. I missed some crucial episodes. But when Lee Randolph died, a suicide who had lingered on for weeks, I watched her face being covered by a sheet, and I was ridden by the event for weeks. I suppose the script for Lee had run out, or that the actress had found another part. But it was not at all like losing a character in fiction of any other kind—not just an event in a two or ten hour imaginative experience, and then in memory. The soap operas ran along beside life five days out of seven. I saw the characters in them more often than my friends, knew their relationships, the towns. It had a continuity stronger even than the news, where stories and characters submerge and reappear—or don’t—depending on where the limelight is. I know of no more constant, undisjunct narrative than the soap operas. Perhaps they are what personal life was like, before the violent, flash discontinuities of media news and personal air travel came along.

I had thought of my soap hours as a total waste of time, not a joke, not camp, not for a piece, not critically, a serious waste of time. But when the loss of Lee became such an important thing, I found that those two-and-a-half-year, open-ended narrative experiences define a lot of what I am and what I think, what I would like to write, what I think America, particularly a certain age and voice group, is, and what I think the American radical and intellectual communities are not. I guess I am part of an age group that, through being skipped, through never having had a generational voice, was forced into the broadest possible America. Even now (and we are in our thirties), we have no journals we publish, no exile we share, no brawls, no anecdotes, no war, no solidarity, no mark. In college, under Eisenhower, we were known for nothing, or for our apathy. A center of action seemed to have broken down in us. Lacking precisely the generational tie (through the media, mainly, kids now know about other kids) and just after the family unit began to dissolve, we knew what there was of our alienation privately, and not yet as a claim or a group experience. We now have vertical ties, loves, friendships, loyalties to people older, younger, other than ourselves. We are unnoticed even as we spread clear across what people call, without taking account of us, the generation gap.

I think that is our special note—we cut across. Across ages, idioms, stresses, cultural values, memories. At a moment of polarization, and other clichés that drain the language of meaning, the continuity of the American story seems to rest just now in us. The first age group to experience in its youth a murderous overvalue on precocity (which leads now to an idiot generational impasse), we held back. We grew up separately, without a rhetoric, drawing our ideas from age and cultural groups already formed, as we were not. The idiom of
Another World
is no more foreign to us than
The Green Hornet
, Joseph Conrad,
The New York Review of Books
, bourbon no more or less our own than marijuana is. Unaware of each other until now, we are in it all. Some of us have dropped a generation back, to lead a student movement that belies everything we are. Others have taken their positions quietly, in society as it was before we came and as, in the years of its most annihilating smugness, it nearly killed us off. But most of us, I think, were formed and remain one by one—formed by books and by the media, but, through the accident of our span of history, formed alone. And now I think we are a force.

In a way, in culture and in politics, we are the last custodians of language—because of the books we read and because history, in our time, has rung so many changes on the meaning of terms and we, having never generationally perpetrated anything, have no commitment to any distortion of them. Lacking slogans, we still have the private ear for distinctions, for words. I happen to know no one who regularly watches
Another World
(although millions of Americans clearly do), or who would watch it—except to do a piece on materialism, escapism, pop culture or something. But that is the point. I know of no one whose cultural and political experience I completely share. And yet there are elements of my soap hours that seem common to a particular, still unaccounted-for sort of activist in early middle years: on the set, a sense of the human condition and the rhythm of life, with endless recapitulations for those who have not been watching, going forward; in ourselves, the bouts of muteness, watching and inertia, the sense of work one ought to do in what is going on, the patience with continuity, even the nostalgia for a kind of corniness. And always a characteristic quality of attention, at a certain humorous remove from our own experience. Lacking an idiom entirely our own, we cannot adopt any single voice without a note of irony. (I can’t write about the soap operas, or anything that does not make specific, human claims for action on my part, with perfect seriousness.) A suspicion of glibness or fluency has made the generation immediately after us value the rhetorical and inarticulate. Not us. We all seem to view the world still in words, as writers, arguers, archivists—even, perhaps even especially, those who do not write. In strange times, we have kept our language, energies and heads. (It is no surprise that the disturbances at San Francisco State dissolved under police called in by one—albeit aging and not very profound—semanticist.) And we are here.

I think the historical bridge and the moral limits of our experience—mine anyway—were defined in World War II, which most of us still remember as The War. Totalitarianism, freedom, genocide, courage, passion, gentleness, a community of decent men, most of my conceptions of idealism, the monstrous and the public world date from that war, in which we were too young to have a part. And the bland repressions and unacknowledged disillusion of the succeeding years. Everyone looked alike or tried to, every sort of maverick was cut off and lost. Art was the province of ladies’ painting and lecture clubs; intelligence was subsumed in the grand idea of American know how. The schools were levellers for the general mediocrity; unions, parodying their origins and aims, were becoming entrenched forces for corruption and reaction. Odd cliffs were papered over. When, on his birthday in 1956, Adam Clayton Powell announced his support for Dwight David Eisenhower for president, the Republican candidate sent a birthday present to the people of Harlem—white trucks full of black cupcakes—and the present was graciously received. The dream everywhere was going flat. Teachers, who had begun in the Depression when, on the basis of their regular salaries, they could afford maids and were considered rich, were now poorer, embittered and threatened by any sort of difference. In small towns, in a travesty of the New Deal dream of education, teachers had risen above their own class to the extent that their brothers and their colleagues’ brothers—contractors and factory workers—were no longer good enough for them. They seldom married. They subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and
Reader’s Digest
and shared the general passion for the ordinary. Our rebellions then, in the years when the sum of hope was to be adjusted and popular, when boys still broke themselves at team sports on a military model, which would never be of use to them again (when, in fact, people still spoke of the Army for anybody as making a man of him), were separate and one by one, and threw us back, unknowing, on the past. Some of us cut school and invented juvenile delinquency, others read.

What I am trying to say is that if there is any age group that should loathe what is called the System in its bones that group is us. We had it, in spite of Korea, at its height—the years when society was going, to its own satisfaction, so extremely well; when telephones, neon signs, subways, Western Union worked, as they haven’t since; and when, through and after Senator Joseph McCarthy, the spirit of the redneck, the junior college and the drum majorette had spread so deep into the land. I think the first post-war jolt the System had in its complacency, in our time, was not social or humanitarian, but technological: in 1957, when Sputnik went up. After that, there began to be a little room for change and mavericks, who, when there is not a desperate community lie at the heart of things, are the rule. But in the interim, before the general boredom had begun to lift, we, one by one, had made some beginnings, some progress on all the public and private fronts that now exist—frontiers that polarization, paradoxically, obscures and language has to be hard won and individual to approach at all.

Accessible, almost by generational default, to all the idioms of America, we also went overseas. We were the first non-military age group to travel internationally on an almost national scale. We knew, since we had been at the mercy of institutions so utterly, what institutions were like at home, and what American tourists were like, and were treated like, abroad. But there is a particular totalitarian lie at the heart of political cliché too, and the simplicities of “imperialism,” “genocide,” “materialism,” “police brutality,” “military-industrial complex,” “racism,” tossed about as though they were interchangeable, and as though they applied equally to anything with which one is out of temper, are not for us. Neither are the simplicities of anti-Communism, free world, “violence,” and “radicalism” itself. We observed in The War the literal extreme of violence that men have done so far. Since then, bombs dropping on villages, cops beating kids on the head, kids throwing bottles at cops, the violence to the spirit of the McCarthy years, the violation of human dignity in exclusion and poverty—there is a degree of violence in them all, but a difference of degree, an extent of metaphor, and we still distinguish among literalisms, metaphors, questions of degree. Or radicalism. A radicalism that draws its terms from the System’s violence in Vietnam, then claims to be driven to revolutionary violence of its own, and, as an act of revolution, turns upon the liberal universities has an inauthentic ring, a ring of sublimation, theater. If revolutionary outrage over Vietnam had had a substantive thrust of Guevara courage on the line, there would have been American brigades fighting for Hanoi—a disaster for the country, surely, but a disaster in authentic terms. (The white revolutionary movement certainly left the American South, where the physical risk was high, fast enough.) There is an authentic radicalism in this country now, but it does not abuse the metaphor of revolution. It is not the radicalism of rhetoric, theater, mannerism, psychodrama, air. And it is not paralyzed in its own unconsummated moral impulses by viewing every human problem at a single level of atrocity.

I think what has muddled terms, what has emptied vocabularies into rhetorics and made generations out of what are only persons after all, is, in the end, a major implication of The War. Ours was the first age group to experience the end of the Just War as a romantic possibility. There are no justifications for group violence in this country any more—no outlets for aggressive physical courage, irrational fervors, the fraternity of the barricades and the decent human war. And there aren’t likely to be any. Technology has made the stakes too high. We knew that separately, saw the last great romantic group fight to the death, and knew we could never have one of our own. That sounds like a blessing, and perhaps historically it is, but it puts a tremendous strain on any generation of young. From now on, it is all patient effort, unsimple victories. In this, the Vietnam War was a hiatus in moral terms. The System lifted the vocabulary of the just war, in the name of the free world, to Vietnam, and found it did not work. Radicalism lifted essentially the same vocabulary and turned it, in the name of revolution, against the System, where it does not work either. The very fact that radicalism leans so comfortably, half-consciously, upon the System and its laws, goes on almost risk-free, beside
Another World
, confirms that the System’s thrust is still, on an unprecedented scale, democratic and benign. No famous or privileged white revolutionaries have gone to jail for long just yet. But obscure and black radicals have, in numbers—which raises questions, I think, not so much of politics as of fame, privilege and the inauthentic revolutionary.