Nonconformity

T
HE STRUGGLE TO WRITE WITH PROFUNDITY of emotion and at the same time to live like a millionaire so exhausted F. Scott Fitzgerald that he was at last brought down to the point where he could no longer be both a good writer and a decent person.

“So … I would cease any attempts to be a person—to be kind, just or generous,” he planned. “I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuting train …, men who didn’t care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses …, who said: ‘I’m sorry but business is business.’ Or: ‘You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.’ Or: ‘I’m not the person to see about that.…’

“This is what I think now,” Fitzgerald continued: “that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are … only adds to this unhappiness in the end.…”
¹

An observation so melancholy as to recall Mark
Twain, after one of his last lectures, turning to a friend to say, “Oh, Cable, I am demeaning myself. I am allowing myself to be a mere buffoon. It’s ghastly. I can’t endure it any longer.”
²

The writer’s lot, like the policeman’s, is never a happy one. A hardy life, as the poet says, with a boot as quick as a fiver. But it isn’t till now, in the American Century as we have recklessly dubbed it, that tribal pressures toward conformity have been brought to bear so ruthlessly upon men and women seeking to work creatively.

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it,” William Faulkner puts it. “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.…”
³

I purely doubt that the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the heart in conflict with itself. I doubt he’s forgotten a thing. And knows as well as any man that he labors under a curse. But how can a young unknown be expected to risk that consultation of the heart from which the older hands flee? The spectacle of artists like Elia Kazan, Jose Ferrer and Maxwell Anderson
⁴
leaping through the hoop at the first sight of the whip doesn’t encourage the younger man to hold his ground. He knows enough of the heart to know it cannot conform. He
knows there is no Feinberg Law and no Broyles bills
⁵
for the heart; that the heart’s only country is the earth of Man.

But what, when Howard Hughes discovers that somebody on the payroll once belonged to ADA,
⁶
will the accused be able to say in self-defense? Whether he’s in writing, TV, radio, teaching or lecturing, he sees very well, the way things are going, that the main thing is not problems of the heart, but to keep one’s nose clean. Not to trouble oneself about the uneasy hearts of men. But to pass, safe and dry-shod, down the rushing stream of time.
⁷

Between the pretense and the piety of American business in praising peace everywhere while preferring profits in warplanes anywhere, between the H Bomb and the A, the young man or woman whom you remind of the eternal verities this morning will only reply, “You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.”

… O
ur tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands
.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he
stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail
.

—William Faulkner,

Address upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Stockholm, December 10, 1950
⁸

“I
F YE’D TURN ON TH’ GAS IN TH’ DARKEST heart,” Mr. Dooley liked to say, “ye’d find it had a good raison for th’ worst things it done, a good varchous
⁹
raison like needin’ th’ money or punishin’ th’ wicked or tachin’ people a lesson to be more careful, or protectin’ th’ liberties iv mankind, or needin’ th’ money.”
¹⁰

If you turn up the gas in the hearts of our business brass you’ll find a good reason—a good varchous reason—for investing more and more heavily in the Korean adventure. Such as protecting the liberties of mankind. Or needing the money. Just as the Russians employ various alarms—Trotskyism, Zionism, counter-revolution—to divert criticism, so do our air force magnates use the bogey of Communism to keep the war-orders mounting.

Charles E. Wilson, writing in the
Army Ordnance Journal
as far back as 1944, feels we ought to be less secretive about such orders: “War has been inevitable in our human affairs as an evolutionary force.… Let us make the three-way partnership (industry, government, army) permanent.” “Those nations that profess to fear our methods
most will soon be most closely imitating those methods,” was how Adolf Hitler put it. And echo answers: “What is good for General Motors is good for the country.” “So soon as you have a military class,” Woodrow Wilson agreed with Mr. Dooley, “elections are of minor importance.”

Five years have passed since we began, once again, to rearm. Do we therefore feel more free from attack than we did five years ago? Have we thereby established an abiding trust in the hearts of other peoples? Do we therefore find ourselves with more friends in the world? Are our rights as free men thus made more secure? Or have we not once more demonstrated that keeping industries that depend for profit upon war and the preparation of war (such as the aviation industry) in private hands is equivalent to putting a hot-car thief in charge of a parking lot?

So it must be that, in the present senatorial passion for investigation, the reason nobody investigates the men who are trading off our freedoms for private enrichment is that they are the very ones who are doing the investigating. The Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, reporting on Joe McCarthy’s bilking of Lustron and Seaboard Airlines,
¹¹
and his manipulation in futures, announced that “this is a matter that transcends partisan politics and goes into the very core of the Senate body’s authority and the respect in which it is held by the people of the country.” Yet not a single senator protested when the worst con man to be elected to the United States Senate
took his seat. Not a single one dared. “They know by this time they cannot turn me aside,” McCarthy explained—and for the first time he spoke the truth. Between the pretense and the piety. Between the H Bomb and the A.

Say I’m standing knee-deep, and sinking, in the muddy waters of the Little Calumet. Some anxious-looking patriot paddles up, identifying himself as the Washington correspondent of
The New Yorker
bringing men tidings of comfort and joy: namely, that if the Little Calumet were the Volga I’d be up to my ears. And paddles away as contentedly as if he’d really done something for me.

He hasn’t done a thing, this roving mercenary with the shaky gerund. Not even when he warns me that I better stop saying
Ouch
when McCarthy gives the screw another turn—lest the Kremlin overhear my yip and tape-record it for rebroadcasting to Europe. Who’s paying
him
for God’s sake?

The insistence of these long-remaindered intellectuals on the short leashes that, compared to the drive for conformity in the USSR, we don’t have any notion as yet of what the real thing can be like, reveals loyalty to nobody save Henry Luce. Whose dangerous dictum it is that it is now America’s part “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

“America does not go abroad,” John Quincy
Adams corrects him, “in search of monsters to destroy.” Monsters enough roam in the woods at home. And watching Luce and McCarthy battle is like watching a couple of dinosaurs go at it—it doesn’t make any difference which wins, because they’re both extinct.