Nonconformity Page 5

  That this is the same sickness as that of Salem, as has been indicated: one wherein we attempt to exorcise our devils by destroying the dissenters or odd fish of the tribe. Our fear that Fort Worth and Oconomowoc are in imminent peril until Iceland and Morocco are armored like Fort Knox is not our true fear. If it were, the acquisition of great bases encircling the globe would greatly lessen it. But after five years of stretching our arms from the South Seas to the North Atlantic, we feel not a whit more secure than before. All we’ve done is to lose the trust of other peoples. We have gained a world, and lost it. When we were small, and beset by greater powers, we were less afraid. For the fear is not from monsters who walk abroad, but from monsters who walk in our own hearts.

  Like Faust, we have two souls within a single breast. We profess to believe that a people may guarantee its happiness by military might, and in the same breath disclaim authoritarianism. We say the great word Democracy, and in the same breath align ourselves with Spanish, Greek, Chinese and Korean Fascism. We wish to inherit the earth, and yet have not learned to govern ourselves. We boast of our strength, yet display our fear. At the same moment that we set the world an example of corruption in our big cities unparalleled anywhere in the world, we cannot tolerate peoples governing themselves by other forms than our own. And support intolerance by plane and tank, by warship and bazooka. To paraphrase the old biblical saw, “The good that we would do we do not; but the evil which we would not, that we do.”56 And a fear of some disaster is companioned secretly within us by a yearning for that same disaster, swift and soundless. A padding dread within will not be still.

  We seem to be going on the strange assumption that if we can but put our fears on a mass scale, they will, belonging thus to all of us, be somehow wiser. We have come to the point where, in order to avoid the face of our own psychosis, we insist that all good men be psychotic.

  For if we have not, as a nation, gone psychotic, how is it that we now honor most those whom we once most despised? Now the professional perjurer is called an “informant”—we used to call them something else. Blackmail in the name of “anti-Communism” is now dignified by the name of “research services.” Though we always believed, by and large, in rugged individualism, we didn’t until now like the idea of dog eat dog. If we don’t, what is the odious hulk of Fat Pat McCarran doing in the Senate? What is a man like McCarthy, whose mentality never equipped him for anything more than dealing three-card monte, doing there? Never before in our history has a man so puny-minded as Jenner been dignified by the title of Senator.

  The late American humorist Jake Falstaff once did a prophetic little skit called Alice in Justice-Land:

  “ ‘I hope you will not be impatient with me,’ said Alice, ‘I’m really quite interested in this system, and I would like to know more about it.’

  “ ‘It’s very sane and very human,’ said the White Knight. ‘If you hate your neighbor as you love yourself, you don’t charge him with being a hateful person. You call up the police and tell them that his automobile is parked without a taillight. That’s our system exactly. Only we carry it a step farther. Our system has been made so perfect that the taillight doesn’t have to be out. It can be proved that it might go out—that it’s potentially out.’

  “ ‘The whole system seems to be predicated on the word might,’ said Alice.

  “ ‘Might,’ said the White Knight, solemnly, ‘makes right.’

  “ ‘If you charge a man with the crime he really committed, your prosecution is limited to one count. But if you charge him with something else, you have the whole book of statutes to choose from.’

  “ ‘Doesn’t it happen sometimes that a man gets free of everything?’ Alice asked.

  “ ‘Oh, certainly. But the system provides even for that. By that time he has spent all his money on litigation, his reputation is ruined, and he has spent as much time in jail as he would have spent on the original charge anyhow.’

  “ ‘Then,’ said Alice, in sad bewilderment, ‘am I to understand that most of the people in jail are innocent?’

  “ ‘Every one,’ said the White Knight tolerantly but wearily, ‘every one in the world, my dear child, is innocent of something.’ ”57

  We have come to a time, George Bernanos wrote, when evil is in its first beginnings. A time of the disaster swift and soundless. A time for the great gray wolves that run the winter wilderness. A time when suspicion has become an honorable trade.

  “There can be no doubt,” Kafka’s doomed wanderer decided, “that behind all the actions of this court of justice, that is to say in my case, behind my arrest and today’s interrogation, there is a great organization at work … And the significance of this great organization, gentlemen? It consists in this, that innocent persons are accused of guilt, and senseless proceedings are put in motion against them.…”58

  … Then one of them opened his frock coat and out of a sheath that hung from a belt girt round his waistcoat drew a long, thin, double-edged butcher’s knife, held it up, and tested the cutting edges in the moonlight. Once more the odious courtesies began, the first handed the knife across K. to the second, who handed it across K. back again to the first. K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast. But he did not do so, he merely turned his head, which was still free to move, and gazed around him. He could not completely rise to the occasion, he could not relieve the officials of all their tasks; the responsibility for this last failure of his lay with him who had not left him the remnant of strength necessary for the deed. His glance fell on the top story of the house adjoining the quarry. With a flicker as of a light going up, the casements of a window there suddenly flew open; a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and that height, leaned abruptly far forward and stretched both arms still farther. Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or was it mankind? Was help at hand? Were there arguments in his favor that had been overlooked? Of course there must be. Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living. Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the high Court, to which he had never penetrated? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.

  But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife deep into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them immediately before him, cheek leaning against cheek, watching the final act. “Like a dog!” he said; it was as if the shame of it must outlive him.

  —Franz Kafka,

  from The Trial

  1914-1559

  IX.

  “NOW GIT OUT OF THE WAY,” MR. Dooley once warned us, “for here comes property, drunk ’n’ raisin’ Cain.” When wise old kings of Egypt decided to have a ball, so I’m told, they placed a mummy at the head of the table to remind themselves, even at the height of the festivities, of their own mortality. We today might, with equal wisdom, in this our own season of celebration, nod respectfully toward John Foster Dulles.60Lest we too prove too proud.

  For ball or no ball, any season at all, we live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dostoevsky could not afford the soundscreens and the smokescreens with which we so ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves.

  So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV, establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured.

  For it is not in the afternoon in Naples nor yet at evening in Marseille, not in Indian hovels half-sunk in an ancestral civilization’s rui
ned halls nor within those lion-colored tents pitched down the Sahara’s endless edge that we discover those faces most debauched by sheer uselessness. Not in the backwash of poverty and war, but in the backwash of prosperity and progress.

  On the back streets and the boulevards of Palm Beach and Miami, on Fifth Avenue in New York and Canal Street in New Orleans, on North Clark Street in Chicago, on West Madison or South State or any street at all in Los Angeles: faces of the American Century, harassed and half-dehumanized, scoffing or debauched: so purposeless, unusable and useless faces, yet so smug, so self-satisfied yet so abject—for complacency struggles strangely there with guilt. Faces full of such an immense irresponsibility toward themselves that they tell how high the human cost of our marvelous technological achievements has really been.

  Faces to destroy the faith that a man’s chief duty in the world is to make himself as comfortable as possible in it, stay comfortable as long as possible and pop off at last, as comfortably as possible.

  The faith that the good life means coming into the world with a Ford in one’s future and leaving it at last with a Nash in one’s past. That success is a TV aerial on the roof, a faithful wife in the kitchen and a deep freeze in the cellar wherein she may keep his useless memory ever-fresh.

  (Let me hurriedly interpose that I am not opposed to TV, Fords, Nashes, refrigerators, nor fidelity. I favor all mechanical improvements about the modern American home. I wish only to voice a suspicion that a house full of functional goodies, and all in good working order at that, does not of itself tote up to happiness.)

  Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?

  If so, this is the truly American disease. And would account in part for the fact that we lead the world today in insanity, criminality, alcoholism, narcoticism, psychoanalysm, cancer, homicide and perversion in sex as well as in perversion just for the pure hell of the thing.

  Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder. Never has any people lived so hygienically while daily dousing itself with the ritual slops of guilt. Nowhere has any people set itself a moral code so rigid while applying it quite so flexibly. Never has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities. In no other country is such great wealth, acquired so purposefully, put to such small purpose. Never has any people driven itself so resolutely toward such diverse goals, to derive so little satisfaction from attainment of any. Never has any people been so outwardly confident that God is on its side while being so inwardly terrified lest he be not.

  Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic.

  “I say,” Walt Whitman prophesied, “we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States.… It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.”61

  Our assumption of happiness through mechanical ingenuity is nonetheless tragic for being naive. For the bulletins are as false as Mr. Whittaker Chambers, hand over heart, confessing, “I never inform on anyone but I feel something die inside me”—and in the same dying breath murmuring, “Thank you,” for $75,000 in magazine serial rights. To see life steadily, and see it whole, as a creature of the deep sees it, from below.

  Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.

  “Whin business gits above sellin’ ten-pinny nails in a brown-paper cornucopy,” Mr. Dooley decided, “ ’tis hard to tell it from murther.”62

  But behind Business’s billboards and Business’s headlines and Business’s pulpits and Business’s press and Business’s arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure.

  The lost and the overburdened who have to meet life so head-on that they cannot afford either the tweeds that make such a strong impression in certain business circles or the deodorant that does almost as much for one socially. The lost and the overburdened too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set.

  It is there that the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky are still torn by the paradox of their own humanity; yet endure the ancestral problems of the heart in conflict with itself. Theirs are still the defeats in which everything is lost, theirs victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope. Whose defeats cost everything of real value. Whose grief grieves on universal bones.

  And it is there the young man or woman seeking to report the American century seriously must seek, if it is the truth he seeks.

  I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings), nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south, and west, to investigate frauds, has talked much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and moneymaking is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the field. The best class we show is but a mob of fashionably dressed speculators and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are to be discovered, existing crudely and going on in the background, to advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less terrible. I say that our New World democracy, however great a success in uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic development, products, and in a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander’s, beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annexed Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.

  —Walt Whitman,

  from Democratic Vistas

  187163

  AFTERWORD

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p; NELSON ALGREN’S WRITING METHOD relied on accretion. He returned, year after year, to given situations and characters, building up the surface almost more like a painter than a writer, until he found the emotion he wanted. When he was writing The Man with the Golden Arm, through a dozen drafts in some places and “forty rewritings that still aren’t right”64 in others, the drug addiction of the drum-playing card dealer Frankie Machine didn’t enter in until nearly the very end. It was a wholly new element through which Algren gave the book, along with its title and narrative thrust, a different feeling—not the war now but the war’s aftermath, its unendingness. “I was going to write a war novel,” Algren would tell Alston Anderson and Terry Southern in a Paris Review interview in 1955, “but it turned out to be this Golden Arm thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and those people with the hypos came along and that was it,”65 speaking as if the composition of his finest novel relied on a chain of events, really this process of layering—as outside his control as if he were describing changes in the weather.

  Algren’s earliest published story began as a letter home. He was encouraged by an acquaintance to recast it as fiction and submit it to Story magazine; it was accepted, and that led to a contract for his first novel. Algren’s second novel, Never Come Morning, is a retelling of an early story called “A Bottle of Milk for Mother.” The last novel published in his lifetime, A Walk on the Wild Side, is a rewrite of his first novel, Somebody in Boots. Characters and situations recur from book to book—the police lineup is the classic example—with new layers of meaning and emotion.