Mind of an Outlaw (7 page)

No, I will not be able to use obscenities—what a pity!—
because a little social fact which is too often forgotten is that obscene language, which is used at least once in a while by 95 percent of the people living in this country, would forbid the passage of this newspaper through the mails. And there are other restrictions, stories I cannot tell about unpleasant people in the daily news, people who are pusillanimous, or archly vicious, or hypocritical, or worse, or simply no good, stories I cannot tell because this paper would be sued for libel. (Ah, well, perhaps we will find a way yet.)

So these restrictions and all others sadden me, because I would like to express myself properly, and the true communication of soul to soul is speeded on its way, as every soldier and ex-soldier knows, by the foul language God gave our tongues, along with everything else He gave us including malicious stories, women, society, pain, pleasure, lights and darks, and all the other mysterious dualities of our mysterious universe.

Therefore, brethren, let me close this sermon by asking the grace for us to be aware, if only once in a while, that beyond the mechanical communication of all of society’s obvious and subtle networks, there remains the sense of life, the sense of creative spirit (we are all creative if it is for no less than to create new life itself), and therefore the sense no matter how dimly felt of some expanding and not necessarily ignoble human growth.

With this worthy homilectic come to a close, I promise next week to offer some diversion. Perhaps even some dialogue. If I say so myself, I am rather good at that.

UNTIL NOW
, I believe I have been fairly regular about covering some facet of what I promised to deliver the week before. This once, however, I would like to beg my readers’ all-but-nonexistent indulgence and postpone the fateful nomination of Democratic candidate until next week.

There are various reasons for this, but the most direct is the news-box which appeared on page 1 of the
Voice
last week. It went:

Now this was a trifle misleading, since there were no portentous clues in last week’s column. I had said to the gentleman who wrote the news-box that there might be a few hints in all my columns
taken together, but this was unfortunately garbled a bit in transmission. So, as an apology for neglecting to look at the news box in galleys, I will double the ante to $20, and give a few more pointed suggestions.

The greatest clues of course are buried in those parts of my character which have been revealed week by week. What it comes down to is who, by God, would that megalomaniac Mailer nominate besides himself? And of course the wise man—if there is one among you—would answer: “Why, even a bigger megalomaniac.”

Clue #2
. Last week I had a line in answer to Dr. Y. which went: “Sleep is wisdom for gladiators like yourself.” So your columnist demonstrated indirectly that in his cold bitter soul, he has respect for gladiators who are on their feet. Therefore, Candidate X must fulfill this condition as well.

Clue #3
. Candidate X would approve of slow readers.

Clue #4
. Candidate X must of course be Hip, and yet not display himself unduly as a hipster. Perhaps we can assume that he was one of the germinal influences in the birth of the hipster.

Clue #5
. (And this should be enough.) My passion, as a few slow readers may have realized by now, is to destroy stereotypes, categories, and labels. So Candidate X, who has never been considered (to my knowledge) as a political candidate for anything, by either party—as indeed was once true of Eisenhower—is nonetheless an important figure in American life. To a degree he has affected the style of American manners. If he were drafted as a candidate, the emanations of his personality might loosen the lugubrious rhetorical daisy chains of liberal argument which so deaden the air about all these Demo-bureaucratic candidates.

The rest of this column I wish to give over to a little talk about politics, most of which will be, as usual, in the first person. I have not voted since 1948, and I doubt if I will vote in 1956 even if, by some fantastic mischance, Candidate X would be drafted. (My sole motive in all this is to look for a good time. I want the next presidential campaign to be an interesting circus, rather than
the dreary set of opposed commercials it now promises to be.) In my time I have been consecutively a sort of fellow-traveler (as was fitting for my earnest youth), a radical-at-liberty, disenchanted by the USSR on closer study, yet never quite enthusiastic about our own glorious fatherland and flag; and at present I have ended temporarily as what I have always been by temperament, an anarchist, or perhaps more accurately, a rebel. So it is obvious to anyone who knows me well that for me to write about a Democratic candidate is pretty much a tongue-in-cheek performance.

Still, most of you will be taking your vote seriously, and to go on like this is only to offend you further. Most people, given their massage by propaganda, believe that a man who doesn’t vote is a little lower than a man who beats his mother, or, to be more psychically exact, a son who strikes his father. And perhaps even the Mailer would come off his mountain long enough to vote, if he felt any confidence that the Republican or Democratic Party was relatively the least bit more effective—for a given year—at going in historical directions one might think to be encouraging. But the curious contradictions of power and party politics are such that if I were to vote on this principle, I would be forced ever so slightly toward the Republicans. Not because I like them, mind you—I rather dislike them, they are such unconscionable hypocrites. Yet the disagreeable fact of power in these politically depressed years—like it or leave it—is that the Republican Party is a little more free to act, precisely because it does not have to be afraid of the Republicans, whereas the Democrats do. If the Democrats had the presidency, any relatively happy political action would be attacked by the Republicans as Communist-inspired; in power themselves, the Republicans find the objective situation (that is, the passive logic of events) pushes the same action and legislation upon them. So, reluctantly, they introduce what is necessary, and the predominantly Republican press and mass media accept it. (As an example, think of the end of the war in Korea, or the antisegregation efforts: I believe quite seriously that we would still be at war in Korea if the Democrats had won in ’52, for one can only begin to imagine the Republican fury at making peace—the hearty howling cries that for the first
time in America’s proud history we had lost a war, and so forth, and so forth. So, too, with antisegregation. If the Democrats had tried to carry it through, the Republicans would have been rather pleased to collect the various little Democratic parties in the South.)

I know this is unpleasant to all of you who believe that truth and untruth are separate, but then I have no particular desire to bring you pleasure. The antitheses of power are such today that I believe the party in power must adopt the opposite in office of what it announced as its desires when it was out of power. It is metaphorically similar to the change in personality which you may have noticed in some of your friends who came to marriage after living together for years.

YES, IT MAY SEEM
a trifle fantastic at the first approach, but the man I think the Democrats ought to draft for their presidential candidate in 1956 is Ernest Hemingway.

I have had this thought in mind for some months, and have tried to consider its merits and demerits more than once. You see, I am far from a worshipper of Hemingway, but after a good many years of forever putting him down in my mind, I came to decide that like him or not, he was one of the two counterposed aesthetic forces in the American novel today—the other being Faulkner of course—and so his mark on history is probably assured.

Now, what I think of Hemingway as a writer would be of interest to very few people, but I underline that I am not a religious devotee of his work in order to emphasize that I have thought about him as a presidential candidate without passion or self-involvement (or at least so I believe it to be). As for his merits and even more important his possibilities for victory, I will try to discuss them quickly in the limits of this column.

To begin with, the Democratic Party has the poorest of chances against Eisenhower, and whether it be Stevenson, Kefauver, or
some other political half-worthy, the candidate’s personality would suffer from his unfortunate resemblance to a prosperous undertaker. There is no getting around it—the American people tend to vote for the candidate who gives off the impression of having experienced some pleasure in his life, and Eisenhower, whatever his passive vicissitudes, looks like he has had a good time now and again. I would submit that this is one of the few healthy aspects of our unhealthy country—it is indeed folk wisdom. A man who has had good times has invariably also suffered (as opposed to the unfortunate number of people who have avoided pain at the expense of avoiding pleasure as well), and the mixture of pain and pleasure in a man’s experiences is likely to give him the proportion, the common sense, and the charm a president needs.

Hemingway, I would guess, possesses exactly that kind of charm, possesses it in greater degree than Eisenhower, and so he would have some outside chance to win. His name is already better known in America than was Stevenson’s in 1951, and his prestige in Europe would be no mean factor in the minds of the many overeducated middlebrows who think in such collectivized words as our-prestige-in-Europe. There are, after all, as passing examples, Hemingway’s Nobel Prize and his fluency in French, Spanish, and Italian.

In the small towns of America, where Eisenhower has such strong roots, Hemingway, by the grace of his thorough knowledge of hunting and fishing, would exercise a most human and direct appeal to the instincts of small-town men. On the other hand, city women would also be drawn toward him. It has been my experience that a man who has been married a few times interests more women than not. It is of course defeating to say this out loud, but then there would be no need for the Democrats to advertise it, the Republicans might consider it wiser to refrain from dirty politics, and the word would get around from living room to living room.

Another of Hemingway’s political virtues is that he has an interesting war record, and that he succeeded in becoming a man of more physical courage than most—and this is no easy nor
unexhausting attainment for a major writer. Whether the Village will like it or not, most Americans like warriors, indeed so much that they have been ready to swallow the bitter pill of an Army general in office. Yet I think they are not so far submerged into the hopeless conformity which plagues us, as to ignore the independent initiative of a general-at-liberty like Hemingway, who came so close to taking Paris in the last war with only a few hundred men.

Again, Hemingway might be inclined to speak simply, and so far as politics goes, freshly, and the energy this would arouse in the minds of the electorate, benumbed at present by the turgid Latinisms of the Kefauvers, the Stevensons, and the Eisenhowers, is something one should not underestimate, for almost never has the electorate been given the opportunity to have their minds stimulated.

Finally, Hemingway’s lack of a previous political life is an asset, I would argue, rather than a vice. Politics has become static in America, and Americans have always distrusted politicians. (Which distrust indeed accounts for a great deal of Eisenhower’s original appeal.) The glimmer of hope on all our murky horizons is that civilization may be coming to the point where we will return to voting for individual men (or individual women) rather than for political ideas, those political ideas which eventually are cemented into the social network of life as a betrayal of the individual desires which gave birth to them—for society, I will argue, on the day I get the wit, is the assassin of us all.