Writings from the New Yorker 1925-1976 Read online

  Let us consider two or three of the sex concepts which the Bishop dug up in his investigation. First, he quotes from Russell’s “Education and the Modern World”:

  I am sure that university life would be better, both intellectually and morally, if most university students had temporary childless marriages. This would afford a solution of the sexual urge neither restless nor surreptitious, neither mercenary nor casual, and of such a nature that it need not take up time which ought to be given to work.

  Now, the suggestion that to live with a girl isn’t going to take up much of a student’s time seems to me as fantastic a bit of philosophical hokum as I have ever encountered. Russell is a Britisher, and of course I don’t know how things are in Eng-land, but I think I am safe in saying that in America nothing takes up more of a man’s time than living with a girl. It is the most time-consuming thing there is. Also, I resent the implication in this passage of Russell’s that sex is just something to get out of your system, that work is the important thing, and that sex is good just in proportion to the amount of a man’s time it doesn’t occupy. That’s a mighty unattractive report to spread among the young, who are (rightly, I think) romantically minded, and who tend to incorporate sex into the body of the romance.

  Then we come to the Earl’s remark that “if a man and woman choose to live together, that should be nobody’s business but their own.” If the Bishop were smart, he would simply point out to students that the word to watch out for in that sentence is the word “should.” Of course it should be nobody’s business but their own. But it usually turns out to be the business of the darnedest, most unexpected people, including a young man in the same building who has been secretly in love with the girl for three years, has sublimated his passion by tearing telephone books in two, and now seizes the opportunity to hang himself with a rope made out of dozens of college pennants. Students should certainly be informed that no man, since the beginning of time, has lived with a woman without it turning out sooner or later to be somebody else’s business.

  Finally, there is the Earl’s little essay on the psychology of adultery. “Suppose,” writes Earl Russell eagerly, “a man has to be away from home on business for a number of months. If he is physically vigorous, he will find it difficult to remain continent throughout this time, however fond he may be of his wife.” I think Bishop Manning should just tell the students that the matter of continence during a business trip has very little to do with physical vigor. An exceptionally vigorous man almost invariably spends himself in rather forthright, athletic ways—leaping up stairs three steps at a time, pounding on other men’s desks, and putting in long-distance calls from clients’ offices. It is the tired little fellow on his way home from a basal-metabolism test who is most likely to become hopelessly involved in some adulterous and unhappy circumstance quite beyond his puny control. In my professional life (I am a doctor), I have enjoyed the confidence of hundreds of adulterous per-sons; rarely have they shown evidences of any special vigor. As a group, they are on the anemic side.

  These are only a few of the points which the Bishop has been worried about. I merely wished to suggest to him that if he wants to spike Russell’s guns, he is going about it the hard way.

  Yours faithfully,

  WALTE R TITHRIDGE, M.D.*

  EDITORIAL WRITERS

  3/4/44

  GEORGE SELDES, in the Saturday Review, says he has never known of an editorial writer who wrote as he pleased. This makes us a kept man. We often wonder about our life in our bordello, whether such an existence erodes one’s character or builds it. An editorial page is a fuzzy performance, any way you look at it, since it affects a composite personality with an editorial “we” for a front. Once in a while we think of ourself as “we,” but not often. The word “ourself’ is the giveaway—the plural “our,” the singular “self,” united in a common cause. “Ourself’ is real. It means “over-self,” which reminds us that we should try to dig up a writer named Emerson for this page.

  At any rate, we have evolved (and this may interest Mr. Seldes) a system for the smooth operation of a literary bordello. The system is this: We write as we please, and the magazine publishes as it pleases. When the two pleasures coincide, some-thing gets into print. When they don’t, the reader draws a blank. It is a system we recommend—the only one, in fact, under which we are willing to be kept. Mr. Seldes can undoubtedly prove that it comes to the same, in the end, as if we deliberately shaped our ideas to a prescribed pattern, but in order to do that he will have to write another article, so at least we’ve made work for somebody and are not entirely frivolous and useless. Of course, a good deal depends on the aims of a publication. The more devious the motives of his employer, the more difficult for a writer to write as he pleases. As far as we have been able to discover, the keepers of this house have two aims: the first is to make money, the second is to make sense. We have watched for other motives, but we have never turned up any. That makes for good working conditions, and we write this as a sort of small, delayed tribute to our house. Anytime Mr. Seldes wants to see writers writing as they please, he can just step off the elevator and take a gander at us. By us, of course, we mean ourself. Emerson’s the name. Call us Ralph.

  RAINBOW WORKERS

  11/1/47

  THIS MAGAZINE TRAFFICS with all sorts of questionable characters, some of them, no doubt, infiltrating. Our procedure so far has been to examine the manuscript, not the writer; the picture, not the artist. We have not required a statement of political belief or a blood count. This still seems like a sensible approach to the publishing problem, although falling short of Representative J. Parnell Thomas’s* standard. One thing we have always enjoyed about our organization is the splashy, rainbow effect of the workers: Red blending into Orange, Orange blending into Yellow, and so on, right across the spectrum to Violet. (Hi, Violet!) We sit among as quietly seething a mass of reactionaries, revolutionaries, worn-out robber barons, tawny pipits, liberals, Marxists in funny hats, and Taftists in pin stripes as ever gathered under one roof in a common enterprise. The group seems healthy enough, in a messy sort of way, and every-body finally meets everybody else at the water cooler, like beasts at the water hole in the jungle. There is one man here who believes that the solution to everything is proper mulching—the deep mulch. Russia to him is just another mulch problem. We have them all. Our creative activity, whether un- or non-un-American, is properly not on a loyalty basis but merely on a literacy basis—a dreamy concept. If this should change, and we should go over to loyalty, the meaning of “un-American activity” would change, too, since the America designated in the phrase would not be the same country we have long lived in and admired.

  We ran smack into the loyalty question the other day when we got a phone call from another magazine, asking us what we knew about a man they had just hired. He was a man whose pieces we had published, from time to time, and they wanted to know about him. “What’s his political slant?” our inquisitor asked. We replied that we didn’t have any idea, and that the matter had never come up. This surprised our questioner greatly, but not as much as his phone call surprised us. When he hung up, we dialled Weather and listened to the rising wind.

  EXPEDIENCY

  1/31/48

  WE HAVE OFTEN WONDERED how journalism schools go about preparing young men and women for newspaperdom and magazineland. An answer came just the other day, in a surprising form. It came from California, via Editor Publisher. We quote:

  San Francisco—Public opinion polls are scientific tools which should be used by newspapers to prevent editorial errors of judgment, Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Division of Journalism at Stanford University, believes.

  “A publisher is smart to take a poll before he gets his neck out too far,” he said. “Polls provide a better idea of acceptance of newspaper policies.”

  We have read this statement half a dozen times, probably in the faint hope that Editor & Publisher might be misquoting Dr. Bush or that we had failed t
o understand him. But there it stands—a clear guide to the life of expediency, a simple formula for journalism by acceptance, a short essay on how to run a newspaper by saying only the words the public wants to hear said. It seems to us that Dr. Bush hands his students not a sword but a weather vane. Under such conditions, the fourth estate becomes a mere parody of the human intelligence, and had best be turned over to bright birds with split tongues or to monkeys who can make change.

  ACCREDITED WRITERS?

  12/11/48

  BEFORE A BOOK CAN BE PUBLISHED in Czechoslovakia, the publisher must submit an outline of it to the government for approval. Accompanying the outline must be written opinions of “responsible literary critics, scientists, or writers.” (We are quoting from a dispatch to the Times.) The question of who is a responsible critic or writer comes up in every country, of course. It must have come up here when the Algonquin Hotel advertised special weekend rates for “accredited writers.” We often used to wonder just how the Algonquin arrived at the answer to the fascinating question of who is an accredited writer, and whether the desk clerk required of an applicant a rough draft of an impending novel. It seems to us that the Czech government is going to be in a spot, too. No true critic or writer is “responsible” in the political sense which this smelly edict implies, and in order to get the kind of censorship the government obviously wants, the government will need to go a step further and require that the critic himself be certified by a responsible party, and then a step beyond that and require that the responsible party be vouched for. This leads to infinity, and to no books. Which is probably the goal of the Czech government.

  The matter of who is, and who isn’t, a responsible writer or scientist reminds us of the famous phrase in Marxist doctrine—the phrase that is often quoted and that has won many people to Communism as a theory of life: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” Even after you have contemplated the sheer beauty of this concept, you are left holding the sheer problem of accreditation: who is needy, who is able? Again the desk clerk looms—a shadowy man. And be-hind the clerk another clerk, for an accreditation checkup. And so it goes. Who shall be the man who has the authority to establish our innermost need, who shall be the one to approve the standard of achievement of which we are capable? Perhaps, as democracy assumes, every man is a writer, every man wholly needy, every man capable of unimaginable deeds. It isn’t as beautiful to the ear as the Marxian phrase, maybe, but there’s an idea there somewhere.

  SATIRE ON DEMAND

  1/8/49

  ONE OF OUR CONTEMPORARIES, the Russian humor magazine called Crocodile, has been under fire lately. Crocodile got word from Higher Up that it would have to improve, would have to bear down harder on “the vestiges of capitalism in the consciousness of the people.” This directive, according to the Associated Press, came straight from the Central Committee and was unusual only for its admission that there were any such vestiges. Crocodile was instructed to gird on its satiric pen and by “the weapons of satire to expose the thieves of public property, grafters, bureaucrats . . .” It has never been our good fortune to observe a controlled-press satirist who is under instructions from his government to get funnier, but it is a sight we’d gladly crawl under a curtain to see. A person really flowers as a satirist when he first slips out of control, and a working satirist (of whom there are woefully few in any country) careens as wildly as a car with no brakes. To turn out an acceptable pasquinade is probably unthinkable under controlled conditions, for the spirit of satire is the spirit of independence. Apparently the Russian committee anticipates difficulties in stepping up humor and satire by decree. Crocodile used to be a weekly. From now on it will appear only every ten days. Three extra days each issue, for straining.

  THE THUD OF IDEAS

  9/23/50

  AMERICANS ARE WILLING to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for the dying. Some critics say that a self-governing, democratic people don’t know what they believe; but that is nonsense. It is simply that a democratic people, who are also an impatient and restless people, feel no strong urge to define what they instinctively comprehend. Also, they do not delegate to government the power to speak for the individual. The disinclination to propagandize is characteristic. Thirty-six billions for a military program, a thin buck for a voice clarifying our aims and beliefs. Many people now think, and we agree with them, that if we are to compete successfully with the throaty call of the Communist heart-land—a call as brassy as that of a tenting evangelist—we shall have to develop a bit of a whistle of our own. We already have the Soviet voice at a disadvantage, and we should exploit it. The Russians limit themselves to spreading what they call the Truth and to jamming the sounds that come from the other direction. They cannot disseminate information, because information would too often embarrass their Truth. We can do much better. We can, and should, spread the material an American reads each morning in his paper—news, definitions, letters to the editor, texts, credos, reports, recipes, aims and intentions. We must reach and astonish with our kind of reporting the millions who hear almost nothing of that sort and who hardly know it exists. We can safely leave Truth to the Kremlin, and can broadcast instead the splendid fact of difference of opinion, the thud of ideas in collision.

  The Russian charge about us, which deliberately misleads so many millions of people, should be met by a greatly expanded United States Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse. Misinformation, even when it is not deliberate, is at the bottom of much human misery. We recall the recent ordeal of George Kuscinkas, the fifty-six-year-old delivery man who pushed his handcart thirteen miles, far into the Bronx, because his employer had written “23rd Street” so that it looked like “234th Street.” This was mere carelessness. But think of the journeys that are being made in the world by those who are pushing a heavy handcart in an impossible direction under misapprehensions of one sort and another!

  We saw a piece in the paper the other day by a historian who had decided that freedom was shot because frontiers were disappearing. Freedom, he reasoned, can’t survive in the congested conditions of a non-pioneering civilization. If there were anything to this theory, it would be the worst news of the week. We think the historian underestimates the vitality of the free spirit in the individual and exaggerates the role of geography. An iron curtain almost but not quite impenetrable is as challenging a frontier as a forest of virgin timber. Besides, it is perfectly apparent that freedom resides comfortably in areas of great congestion. We walked through such a street this morning.

  Somehow the letters-to-the-editor page, strange and wonderful as it always is, is one of the chief adornments of the society we love and seek to clarify for the world. The privilege of writing to the editor is basic; the product is the hot dish of scrambled eggs that is America. Take the Times the other morning: a resounding letter headed “Awareness of Issues Asked,” a studious appeal to protect forest preserves (“Let this long and difficult fight be a lesson . . .”), an indignant attack by a Gaines Dog Research man on the superstition that dog days are associated with hydrophobia, a thoughtful essay on world government, and finally a blast from a reader in Monroe, New York: “It just so happens that I attempted to transplant three plants [of orange milkweed] recently and they all had long, horizontal roots.”

  Such a page, together with the Times’ sense of duty in publishing it, suggests an abiding normalcy in democratic behavior and thought, and gives the reassurance that neither Korea nor the volume of the Russian voice can unsettle this land whose citizens’ torments and hopes, big and little, are aired daily in the press, this land whose roots are both long and horizontal.

  THE HUMOR PARADOX

  9/27/52

  ADLAI STEVENSON* has bee
n reprimanded by General Eisenhower for indulging in humor and wit, and Mr. Stevenson has very properly been warned of the consequences by his own party leaders, who are worried. Their fears are well grounded. We have had long experience with humor in the literary world, and we add our warning to the other warnings. Nothing is so suspect as humor, nothing so surely brands a work of art or politics as second-rate. It has been our sad duty on several occasions in the past to issue admonitory statements concerning the familiar American paradox that governs humor: every American, to the last man, lays claim to a “sense” of humor and guards it as his most significant spiritual trait, yet rejects humor as a contaminating element wherever found. America is a nation of comics and comedians; nevertheless, humor has no stature and is accepted only after the death of the perpetrator. Almost the only first-string American statesman who managed to combine high office with humor was Lincoln, and he was murdered finally. Churchill is, in our opinion, a man of humor, but he lives in England, where it doesn’t count.