Occasional Prose (31 page)

If Revel does not mean what everybody else means by the word, why use it, unless to startle and amuse? Why not find another word, such as reform? Reform, in its root sense, is what Jean-François is actually talking about: a reshaping of society. He does not have in mind a violent overturn but a renovation brought about largely by legal means, such as strikes, marches, and boycotts, with little bloodshed and with a strong dose of voluntarism. Possibly this gradual evolution will take place in America. The trouble is, Revel does not say
how
in political terms, and that is what counts for us Americans.

Perhaps he expects politics to wither away. If in the future the young drop-outs of the counterculture do not vote, then voting will become a mainly ceremonial activity (which it is now, in a sense), engaged in by oldsters until they die off, and the Nixons of the future will be something like constitutional monarchs, useful for meeting their opposite numbers at airports, signing bills, redecorating the White House, throwing the first baseball of the year into the Washington stadium. ... The Agnews would preside over the slumbrous Senate, another honorific body, like the House of Lords, and give employment to jokesters and makers of hate-dolls. Meanwhile the real majority life of revolutionized America would proceed undisturbed in communes and on campuses in a polyracial, polysexual ambience.

The drawback to this fantasy (my own variation on Revel’s theme) is that the intervening steps are not clear. Who arranges the transfer of power? What do we do in ’72? If there is nobody possible to vote for, which seems likely, what action do we take? While the occupant of the White House is gradually being defused, he still has his enfeebled hands on the levers of destruction. There still is such a thing as capitalism.

Revel bases much of his hope on the fact, indeed impressive, that the protest movement drove Johnson from office. Yes. But it did not end the war. The sad truth seems to be that whatever else the protest movement can accomplish—organizing marches and student strikes, draft-card burnings, moratoria, sending resisters to Canada and deserters to Sweden, blocking defense-research contracts in universities, promoting beards and long hair, the sale of love beads, pot consumption—what it cannot accomplish is the very purpose that brought it into being.

It looks as if
nothing
inside the country can do that, short of revolution (and not the gradual kind Jean-François means) or a massive economic depression. Or the second leading to the first. There, again, is the rub. One of the factors he considers essential for the renovation he postulates—a steady high growth rate—is the obstacle to even such a small step in a forward direction as withdrawal from Vietnam. On the one hand, the certainty of American technical superiority rules out for the Presidential mind the very thought of defeat or “surrender.” On the other, American prosperity makes the country feel it can tolerate the war as it can put up with taxes, airport congestion, smog—the cost argument, repeatedly voiced by the war’s critics, has never made the slightest impression, and as for morality, the scaling down of U.S. casualties, the changing of the color of the body count have allowed Nixon to do practically as he pleases. If, as Revel says, a large section of affluent youth is disgusted by the consumer society, the great majority of the country is not. Until something more than moral dissatisfaction with the ruling values is felt, the war will go on and expand.

Besides, Revel is too intelligent not to perceive and point out the flaw in his own argument, which in logic amounts to this: if turned-off youth drops out in increasing numbers, the growth rate will fall to zero, and one of his necessary preconditions for successful revolution will no longer be present. If its numbers fail to increase, then drop-out youth will remain a marginal phenomenon, which present society can afford or else move to repress. Revel does not follow up on this reasoning, but the consequence, it seems to me, is to be driven back to one of the old Marxist models and trust that an upheaval leading to renovation will come out of a capitalist crisis and not as an accompaniment of steady capitalist growth.

Perhaps it will never come, by that route or any other. Yet I do not wish to be forced by Revel’s ineluctable logic into agreeing that if the revolution—whatever that is—does not take place in the United States, it will not take place anywhere. For an American, that is too discouraging a vista. And though Revel has proved to himself with dialectical relish that there can be no issue but that one, he is, again, too intelligent, too empirical, too in fact enamored of freedom not to be aware that any demonstration, no matter how rigorous, is only a demonstration.

If this little book is taken as a pamphlet, with all that connotes of provocation, surprise attack, deftness, rapidity, polemical sparkle, it will have done its work of disturbing—agitprop. But if American readers are led by it to believe that a Second Coming is materializing in the California desert, they will have misunderstood. They will be more right if they suspect that the “America” discovered by Columbus-Revel is an imagined and imaginary country, the antipodes of “France,” though having many points of coincidence, naturally, with the homeland they know.

Revel is a satirist in the tradition of Montesquieu’s
Lettres persanes
, Voltaire’s
Lettres philsophiques sur les anglais
,
Gulliver’s Travels
. Like these fabulists, he contrasts the institutions of his native country with institutions affirmed to exist among some ideal race of beings thought by the vulgar to be savages—the Persians, the English, noble horses. There is something of Moliere in him too (
Les Précieuses ridicules
); the French sections of the book constitute a delicious comedy of manners. That was true also of
En France
and
Lettre ouverte a la droite
. For Americans,
Without Marx or Jesus
can be the occasion for a reciprocal discovery—of Jean-François Revel as a writer.

September 2, 1971

*
Written as a postface to the American edition of
Ni Marx ni Jésus
by Jean-François Revel.

On F. W. Dupee
*

“I
HAVE
LIKED
BEING
miscellaneous,” Dupee roundly declares in the foreword to
The King of the Cats
(1965), sounding a note of defiance, of boyish stubbornness, where to the ear of a different author an apology might have been called for. “Fred” was taking his stand as a literary journalist, a
flâneur
, a stroller, an idle saunterer, in an age of academic criticism, of “field” specialists on the one hand and fanatic “close readers” on the other. The shorter pieces of
The King of the Cats
, originally written for magazines, seem at first to bear out the confession. He turns from the letters of Dickens to a life of Sir Richard Burton, to Behrman’s reminiscences of Max Beerbohm, to “the secret life of Edward Windsor,” to the letters of Yeats, to Kafka’s letters to a Czech woman he was going to bed with, to Chaplin’s autobiography. Quite a variety.

Yet Dupee was no butterfly, no moth singeing his wings at the flame of letters, no boulevardier. Or, rather, all that random sensuous delectation was both real and a masquerade.
The King of the Cats
was less miscellaneous than it appeared. It was not a series of peeps into literary shop windows where the mannequins were being undressed—stately Henry James, naughty Nabokov, Charlie the Tramp. In all its diversity that collection had a remarkable unity, which may or may not have been intentional—a unity of matter as well as of manner and style. Even the most fugitive of those essays (and there is always something fugitive, some touch of “light housekeeping” in Dupee’s approach) is pinned down by slender ties to its fellows like Gulliver stoutly bound by the Lilliputians. The point in common, the
trait d’union
, is that Dupee’s “remarks,” as he called them, tended to be about letters of authors, biographies of authors (La Rochefoucauld, Sir Richard Burton), autobiographies of non-authors (Chaplin, the Duke of Windsor), late works of authors (Thomas Mann, James Agee), rather than about the primary work of authors. The big exceptions were Gertrude Stein, Proust, Nabokov, and Robert Lowell’s
Life Studies
, which fitted, however, into the over-all Dupee pattern by being, itself, a prose-verse hybrid of autobiography and self-portraiture.

No doubt the unity I speak of was partly imposed by editors, who “typed” Dupee as they do any regular contributor. He was the right man to send a volume of Casanova to, a posthumous work of Jim Agee’s (he
knew
him; they were friends through Dwight Macdonald), anything marginally to do with James, Proust, or Kafka, and, above all, any curio coming to light in the collector’s corners of literature, e.g., a new, unexpurgated translation of Petronius’s
Satyricon
. The only misfit (from that point of view) I find in
The King of the Cats
is a review of J. F. Powers’s
Morte d’Urban
. Had I been an editor at
Partisan Review
then, I would not have thought of Powers as Dupee material. The Middle West, a golf-playing, Chevrolet-driving, go-getter of a Catholic priest?—I would have sent it to James T. Farrell or myself. But maybe Dupee
asked
for the book, seeing Powers as a
writer
rather than as a chronicler of Catholic rectories. Nevertheless the piece, even more so than its companion, a review of Bernard Malamud’s
Idiots First
, seems a bit out of place in a collection so unconcerned with grading current fiction. Malamud too would hardly have been a “natural” for Dupee were it not for a curious resemblance noticed by him (and by no one else, surely) between
The Assistant
and
The Golden Bowl
. But there was something else: in the Chagall-like, Orthodox Malamud, Dupee had found an intriguing quality that he had already sensed in the Roman Catholic Powers—that of being
by choice
an outsider, a marginal figure, a minority, in the contemporary republic of letters, whose insiders at the moment of writing were Heller, Burroughs, Pynchon.

The essential art of Dupee is defined by himself in the foreword to
The King of the Cats
as literary portraiture. His models for that, he tells us, were Sainte-Beuve and Macaulay. More generally as influences he cites Gide, Mencken, the early T. S. Eliot, and Edmund Wilson. That is clear; it shines through his work with a wonderful perspicuity, and the visible line of descent going back to a vanishing-point is a beauty of his criticism: every debt is gladly acknowledged, and if he with his favorites occupies a slightly larger space than his masters lined up behind, that is only the law of perspective, which requires the present to come forward.

Modesty is one of his critical traits, and he is mannerly too: in the new, augmented collection of his work there is only
one
unfavorable review (“Leavis and Lawrence”); it advances the mild, sidelong suggestion that Leavis is a philistine. “What arrogant nonsense, one is tempted to say, while at the same time remarking, on the amazing persistence and tortuous transformations of the philistine spirit in English letters.”

The virtual absence of adverse comment is no sign of laxity. Luckily too his reviews are not free of mischief, even of delicate malice, as when he observes of Robert Lowell that Boston became “his Lake Country” and that the prose of
Life Studies
is “malign and dazzling.” I am not sure whether it was mischief or malice that led him to say that there was something of the eternal bachelor in Yeats (and how true that was of Lady Gregory’s star boarder!). Certainly a gleeful mischief dictated the following: “There are old photographs of Burton—dark, beetle-browed, his left cheek deeply scarred where a Somali warrior had put a spear through it, his gaze intensified by what is surely the Evil Eye, his moustaches six inches long and good for twirling. Such photographs suggest those sometimes reproduced on the jackets of books by our scarier contemporaries, Fiedler or Mailer.” Blunter and less characteristic is: “
New Poets of England and America
[an anthology] assists us in penetrating the apparent anonymity, not to say nonentity, of the youthful band of men and women who make verse under these circumstances.”

“He’s French, you see,” Edmund Wilson used to emphasize in his roaring voice, meaning, I suppose, that continental sophistication ran in the Dupee blood, making him suaver than his fellow
PR
editors—Rahv and Phillips and Dwight Macdonald. I don’t know how much French blood Fred really had—perhaps a quarter or an eighth, certainly not as much as Wilson liked to imagine. In the distant past, Fred thought, the name had been “Dupuis.” A true Middle Westerner, from Joliet, Illinois, he had no more command of spoken French than Wilson and probably less of the written language. I doubt that it was his major field at Yale. Yet he was almost fatally attracted to French literature, starting with Stendhal. (I never heard him speak of the old authors, not even the likely ones—Montaigne, Louise Labé, Maurice Scève. The exception was Rousseau, maybe not surprisingly in view of the
Confessions
. And there was also, I suddenly remember, Chateaubriand:
Mémoires d’outre-tombe
.) For
PR
in the early days, his undisputed “field” was French culture and politics.

Our interest in Gide was spurred mainly by him. At least it was at his urging that in
PR
we published Gide’s second thoughts on his trip to the Soviet Union, which I translated. And he was very much aware of Sartre—the Sartre of
Le Mur
and
La Nausée
in preference to the philosopher. When existentialism came in, after the war, our French specialist turned into William Barrett, who knew philosophy, the modern kind, and was able to read
L’Etre et le néant
. But Dupee remained the magazine’s authority on Malraux and the aesthetics of action; I remember a very long article, in several parts, I think, that he was writing on Malraux and could not seem to finish. Composition was hard for him then. There was no question with him of a “writing block,” like the one Dwight Macdonald got when the wind of radicalism went out of his sails, but the act of writing was painful, and Malraux was his most agonizing subject. He did finally finish that study, shortly after we had despaired. But he did not choose to reprint it in
The King of the Cats
or schedule it for inclusion in the present collection.