Moral Agents: Eight Twentieth-Century American Writers

Preface

THE DEDICATION OF

this book is literally accurate. I wrote these essays, in their original form, because Robert B. Silvers commissioned them for The New York Review of Books. My knowledge that he would read them provided much of the challenge and pleasure of writing them.

After completing two or three, I realized that they were beginning to shape themselves into a book, and I wrote the rest with something like this book in mind. In rewriting and rearranging, I have dropped almost everything in the originals that served as a review of a biography, edition, or critical study, and I have added much new material. Some of the chapters weave together material from two separate essays about the same author into a single narrative, and the introduction includes some paragraphs adapted from yet another piece I wrote for the Review. Every page has benefited from the vast learning, sharp eye, and profound good sense of Edwin Frank at New York Review Books.

All writers maintain a list of readers, not all of them still living, whom they most hope to please. At the head of my list, in alphabetical order, are David Bromwich, Barbara J. Fields, the shade of the late Frank Kermode, Cheryl Mendelson, and James Mendelson.

Introduction

THIS IS A

book about writers, morality, and power. It tells the story of eight twentieth-century novelists, poets, and critics who, in addition to practicing their craft, seized for themselves the power and authority to shape American literary culture. Some exercised their power as public intellectuals whose writings influenced the national agenda. Others worked unobtrusively as editors who imposed their taste on an audience that was largely unaware of them. All had mixed feelings about their own power, and each confronted moral tests and temptations that were inseparable from it. Each of the eight chapters tells the story of one writer’s response to those tests.

The word moral embarrasses otherwise intelligent readers who imagine it has something to do prohibitions, social codes, or supernatural decrees. In fact morality concerns the effect of one’s thoughts and acts, for good or ill, on others and oneself. It is a matter of the inner logic of actions and consequences, not of precepts and rules. It is descriptive, not prescriptive, in the way that the laws of thermodynamics are descriptive; however, one’s actions may be guided, in part, by an understanding of morality in much the same way that a knowledge of the basic laws of physics may persuade you that it is preferable to walk down the stairs than to jump out the window. As in most realms of action, definitions tend to falsify; morality is a matter of what one does, not what one is. The clearest statement of this view of morality is Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. As Thucydides portrays them, acts of vengeance, capital punishment, and imperialist war are all self-defeating, not because they are punished by fate or the gods, but because they bring about their own failure, always foreseeable by those who have some moral sense, always denied by those who imagine themselves exempt from morality’s logic. All societies try to translate morality, with varying degrees of unsuccess, into codes of law and conduct, but those codes inevitably lack the inner logic and coherence of morality itself.

A few years ago I wrote a book titled The Things That Matter, about seven novels from Frankenstein to Between the Acts. All five authors that I wrote about in that book were women. All eight authors in this one are men. The choice of authors in each case has nothing to do with any homogenizing fantasy that women and men have different essential qualities, or that one category is inherently deeper and wiser about one or another aspect of experience. In both these books, the selection of authors deliberately reflects nineteenth- and twentieth-century social realities that were the product of stereotyping and prejudice.

The unifying theme of The Things That Matter was individuality, and its subject matter was the unique inner life of individual persons. All five of the novelists in that book—Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf—knew they would be stereotyped as women writers, resented the stereotype, and rebelled against it by insisting on the unique meaning and value of individual life. This new book is a sequel to the earlier one, and it has a double focus on the inner life and the life of the political and cultural marketplace. Its subject matter is the effect of power on both private and public experience, and it describes a specific literary culture in which power was available only to men. Women writers from Katherine Anne Porter through Mary McCarthy to Sylvia Plath could be celebrated for their womanly insights but only if they held back from social and political subjects reserved for men—although an anthropologist like Margaret Mead was tolerated for her knowledge of powerless cultures far from the American empire. (The same tolerance extended to child psychologists and other experts in powerlessness.) One recurring episode in this book is the hate-campaign mounted against Hannah Arendt after she discredited many conventional pieties in Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, a campaign that would have been far more cautious had the book been written by a man.

This book, like its predecessor, is concerned with individual persons, but it focuses on the conflicts between the inward, intimate private lives of its eight authors and the lives they led in public, the choices they continually made between wearing a mask and exposing their face. Some wore masks of exemplary rectitude, others wore equally artificial masks of wickedness, but all were troubled by the discordance between a mask and a face.

The oldest of these eight authors, Lionel Trilling, was born in 1905, the youngest, Frank O’Hara, in 1926. All knew most or all of the others. The first to publish a book with a commercial press was W. H. Auden, in 1930; the last was Norman Mailer, in 2007. For much of their lives, all lived and worked in New York, the capital of twentieth-century American literary and artistic culture. Dwight Macdonald edited his magazine Politics, with its worldwide influence, from his apartment in New York; William Maxwell shaped the dominant style of American novels and stories from his office as fiction editor of The New Yorker; W. H. Auden set the dominant tone of mid-century American poetry from his Lower East Side flat where he edited the Yale Series of Younger Poets; Frank O’Hara molded fashions in American painting from his office at the Museum of Modern Art. The apparent exception was Saul Bellow, who spent only a dozen years in New York—where he wrote his best work—but Bellow seems to have left the city for the same motives of power that drew others toward it: he knew he could dominate the culture of Chicago in a way that no one writer could manage in New York.

These eight chapters serve as a highly selective cultural history of almost a century of American life. It is not a history of themes and issues, but of individual writers finding their own unique ways of responding to a shared world. Almost all recent thought about history and literature takes one side or another in a pervasive but unstated argument about what it means to be a person: whether one shapes one’s own life through individual choices, which may be conscious or unconscious but are primarily one’s own; or whether one’s life is shaped from outside by large impersonal forces of culture, history, gender, ethnicity, class, archetype, or myth. Both sides of the argument of course are correct—everyone is shaped by both inner impulses and outward forces—but it matters which side of the argument you believe in most.

If you think the most decisive facts about human beings are their choices, you also focus your intellectual and emotional attention on their individual freedom, on their ability to change over time, on the ways they exist as changing personal histories rather than as unchanging social or psychological types, and on the equal and unequal relations they have with other individual persons. You approach the world differently from those who think that what is most decisive in life is the shaping force of culture or history, or an ethnic or sexual category that people seem to fit into. Those who think this latter way tend to focus on their sense that they are driven by powers they cannot control. In their vocabulary and syntax they tend to be passive objects, and their tone is the inevitable melancholy of unfreedom. They seem preoccupied less with their individual relations with other persons than with their greater or lesser status in a cultural or social marketplace; they measure themselves (the academic phrase is situate themselves) along a scale or in a diagram.

Many books about the literature and culture of a historical period tend to treat individual authors as more or less interchangeable voices speaking for the culture a whole. (In another academic phrase, they perform cultural work.) In such a book, each chapter focuses on one common issue or theme, and various authors are quoted as typifying one aspect of a collective view of that theme. This approach, I think, distorts the reality of everyone’s experience. Everyone filters historical events or cultural trends through private experience and private emotions. The outbreak of war makes one person anxious or terrified, but makes another excited or exhilarated. A great historical cataclysm may be experienced, not as newspapers and histories report it, but as a welcome distraction from someone’s psychological complexities, or as an unwelcome intrusion on someone’s comfortable egoism.

All these eight writers responded to great events, among them the Great Depression, the rise of Soviet Communism, the Second World War, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and the upheavals of the 1960s and after. But these events did not make them think or react in any consistent or conventional way. Like everyone, they were provoked—not compelled—by the events around them. In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the heroine Oedipa Maas tries to convince herself that someone acted in an unpredictable way because something must have happened, some external event caused him to act as he did. Another character responds doubtfully: You think a man’s mind is a pool table?

American culture has always been troubled by the question of what it means to be an individual person. Two great myths have combined to shape American thinking about this question since the early nineteenth century.

One myth holds that you can only become yourself by insisting on being alone, unencumbered by entangling alliances, relationships, or obligations. This is an idea shared by writers as various as Mark Twain—Huck Finn lights out for the territory to avoid being adopted and civilized—and Henry James, whose heroes and heroines choose the lonely integrity of honor over the corrupting compromises of love. The distance between the Jamesian variety of this myth and the up-to-date variety that celebrates the outlaw-hero is not large, despite their extreme differences of manner and tone.

The second myth offers a solution to the loneliness inflicted by the first. It holds that the only relations worth having with other people are not the corrupting individual relations between Huck Finn and Aunt Sally, or between Lambert Strether and Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors, but those in which individual selves dissolve into something anonymous and collective. This myth is beautiful and moving in Walt Whitman’s poetry; less so in twentieth-century fantasies about everyone’s supposed need to live within a collective ethnic or sexual identity.

Some varieties of this second myth hold that everyone is already defined from birth by some collective ethnic or sexual identity, and that one can only become oneself by embracing that identity; the most pernicious such myth served as the primary justification for slavery. Ernest Hemingway spent his life divided between his public adherence to a myth about manliness and his private revolt against it. Four of the authors in this book were born into Jewish families, but they all thought differently at different times—and spoke differently in public and private—about the effect that their origins had, or ought to have had, on their lives.

In the American novel, on the whole, the goal of the plot is the liberation of the hero (Natty Bumppo, Captain Ahab, Jake Barnes, Janie Crawford) from other people’s values and demands, an escape from all relations of the kind in which individual persons find some accommodation with each other. In the British novel, the goal, whether or not any character achieves it, is more often a liberation from loneliness into marriage and family, a triumph that the hero (Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Dorothea Brooke, Leopold Bloom) can achieve only with the help of others.[1] The fantasy that someone might write the Great American Novel has no counterpart elsewhere in the world, because only writers who were Americans have imagined literature as a competition in which one book or writer can dominate all others, or have imagined that one writer can encompass a whole culture—that a single individual can be the voice of a collective national identity.

The mid-twentieth century was an era when American public intellectuals—such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacques Barzun, and John Kenneth Galbraith—appeared regularly on the cover of Time magazine.[2] The American public intellectual, unlike his counterparts in Britain and France, could serve as a reassuring secular spiritual adviser—Lionel Trilling’s public role when he became famous around 1950—rather than a despairing prophet in the nineteenth-century British mold of Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, or John Ruskin—or the French models of the literary monstre sacré like André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre or the palace insider like André Malraux. In England, T. S. Eliot made himself a guiding public intellectual in the American manner, but he was able to do so only because he shared in the lonely, isolating ambition special to Americans.

By the early twenty-first century, the American public intellectual had largely disappeared, surviving only in an academic shadow world where conferences are held about the role that public intellectuals might perform again someday. One theme of this book is the double life that the twentieth-century American public intellectuals could not avoid living. Torn between the simplifying demands of their public role and the complex realities of their private feelings, they either endured that division, or they escaped it by renouncing the falsehoods that their admirers insisted on hearing. Even those who escaped were scarred by the experience. Late in life, W. H. Auden gave readings after which, more than once, someone in the audience complained that he was no longer leading us as he did in the 1930s—while Auden stared straight ahead, ashamed that he had once made it possible for those who wanted a leader to imagine that he was one.

Each of the eight writers in this book knew that he enjoyed superior intellectual and artistic gifts; each was tempted by the thought that his gifts made him morally superior, that he was qualified and obliged to lead others. Another theme of this book is that, although the leader-figure is always a fantasy, wisdom and knowledge are real—and can be shared only among equals. The whole book is a study in that kind of sharing and in the ways in which a few writers, after many misjudgments and missteps, managed to achieve it.

[1] The only generalization I would dare to make about the French, German, Italian, or Russian novel is that they often differ from both the American and English model by liberating their hero from a personal relation into an institutional one, from the arms of a tempter into the arms of the church or the state (Stendhal’s Fabrice, Balzac’s Vautrin).

[2] Of the eight writers in this book, only Norman Mailer appeared on the cover of Time; the magazine had W. H. Auden’s portrait painted for a planned cover story, but it was vetoed because, Tennessee Williams having recently appeared on the cover, an editor didn’t want to honor yet another homosexual.

1

SAGE: LIONEL TRILLING

I.

WHEN LIONEL TRILLING’S

first book of essays, The Liberal Imagination, appeared in 1950, it sold seventy thousand hardback copies. Over the next decade it sold hundreds of thousands more in paperback, and set the agenda for intellectual life in the United States in much the same way that Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot had set it in Britain. Trilling was an English professor at Columbia, a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and poetry, who became an international celebrity. For the first and last time, a literature professor enjoyed public eminence and adulation of a kind unimaginable for intellectuals today, and reserved even then typically for an economist like John Kenneth Galbraith or a scientist like Jonas Salk.

Trilling wrote about American culture in a way that was both critical and comforting, and that spoke to the deepest anxieties of the age. Many of his readers—they tended to be thoughtful, educated, more or less liberal in outlook—had been sustained in the 1930s by the moral clarity of the class struggle and in much of the 1940s by the moral urgency of a war against Hitler that ended in triumph. By the early 1950s all this had changed. A cold war between two nuclear-armed superpowers could be won by neither; American culture and American arms now had vast international powers without a clear sense of purpose. Trilling, more fluently and persuasively than anyone else, clarified the mutual entanglements of the collective life of politics and culture and individual private lives.