Fantasies of the new class: Ideologies of Professionalism In Post

“I am in a state of doubt and dismay about Vietnam,” Mary McCarthy wrote to Hannah Arendt on April 2, 1965; “if he [President Johnson] bombs Hanoi, that is the end, as far as I am concerned. I would not find it acceptable to be an American any more.”¹ For McCarthy, as for many other U.S. intellectuals, the escalating Vietnam War signaled that something was amiss with postwar liberalism. In the words of popular historian David Halberstam, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were supposed to represent the rule of “the best and the brightest”—government by experts, idealistically committed to reviving the progressive goals of the New Deal at home and to exporting American political freedoms abroad.² However, the advice of Kennedy’s and Johnson’s scholars in fact contributed to the further involvement of the United States in Vietnam; the best and brightest helped bring about one of the nation’s greatest military and humanitarian disasters. McCarthy thus felt compelled to use her newfound celebrity as a best-selling author to speak out against the war and U.S. intellectuals’ responsibility for it; it would have been hypocritical for her not to, given that her novel in progress, Birds of America, which wouldn’t be published until 1971,³ was about a young American of draft age. She set aside her novel to visit South and North Vietnam, and her experiences culminated in three books of nonfiction highly critical of U.S. foreign policy: Vietnam (1967), Hanoi (1968), and Medina (1972).⁴ She took aim, in particular, at the mainstream social scientists who helped direct counterinsurgency programs in the region: modernization theorists such as Walt Rostow, Eugene Staley, and McGeorge Bundy. These figures applied the cold war sociology of scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils to the problems of third-world development, envisaging the developing world as a collection of particularistic societies whose premodern peasants needed to be culturally reconditioned in order to help them evolve into modern, democratic citizens. In contrast, McCarthy highlighted the role of traditional humanists such as herself who were alienated from postindustrial society and therefore dedicated to preserving local traditions abroad against the onslaught of U.S. modernization.

In trying to understand the problems of the Vietnam era, McCarthy thus reiterated the disciplinary conflict between literary intellectuals and consensus social scientists that also shaped the work of John Crowe Ransom and Ralph Ellison. In McCarthy’s account, traditional humanists such as herself were critics of the instrumental rationality embodied in modern mass society. They were the new class’s saving remnant, dedicated to sheltering the nonrational in an era dominated by rational technique. Consensus social scientists, in contrast, were Panglossian optimists who celebrated American liberal democracy as the best of all possible societies and hoped to reshape other cultures in its image. As we have seen, this apparent conflict disguised the fact that both writers and modernization theorists were similarly invested in the idea that intellectuals would use the expanded cultural institutions of the welfare state to create a morally astute, critical citizenry. Nevertheless, for McCarthy, the conflict was fundamental, and she incorporated it into Birds of America, the fiction that she interrupted in order to speak out against the war. The novel describes the maturation and disillusionment of Peter Levi—an idealistic young man of upper-middle-class, professional background spending his junior year at the Sorbonne in the fall of 1964. Over the course of the narrative, he falls under the influence of two figures who embody the disciplinary fault lines that McCarthy identified in her reporting. The first is Peter’s mother, Rosamund Brown, a musicologist and concert harpsichordist with a string of academic exhusbands. She is the character who most resembles McCarthy, and she embodies the Arnoldian leftism of the New York intellectuals. The second is Peter’s academic advisor, Dr. Small, a sociologist who believes that the “market mechanism” (304) will usher in an egalitarian, global society. Through these two characters, McCarthy tries to take stock of the intellectual resources of her generation—to discover what, if anything, it should pass on to the next generation of New Left idealists represented by Peter.

Birds of America and McCarthy’s political reporting unfortunately marked the decline of her critical reputation. For most of McCarthy’s contemporary readers, both works seemed naive attempts to apply the culture criticism of the cold war era to the political problems of the 1960s. Helen Vendler, in a dismissive review, criticized Birds of America’s reiteration of 1950s anxieties about mass culture, as exemplified by Rosamund’s obsession with the decline of American cuisine. “Mary McCarthy again her own heroine,” the article announced, “frozen foods a new villain.”⁵ In general, McCarthy’s Vietnam-era work fell prey to the obliquity that overcame much New York intellectual criticism and fiction in the late 1960s—a period when, as David Laskin notes, “[t]he Vietnam War, the New Left, and Black Power cut their [the intellectuals’] politics to shreds.… Their culture was no longer the culture.”⁶ This sense of disconnection threatened the New York intellectuals’ new-class fantasies, which had been predicated on the notion that they communicated with a broad, educated public made possible by the expansion of the postwar university. It also contributed to the dramatic splintering of the anti-Communist consensus that the New York intellectuals helped establish in the 1940s and 1950s. McCarthy, pushed to the left by the events of the 1960s, wrote sympathetically about North Vietnam’s Communist government in her wartime reporting. Saul Bellow, pushed to the right by the perceived excesses of the counterculture and New Left, echoed the cultural attitudes of the emerging neoconservative movement.

As I argue here, Birds of America nevertheless offers a crucial meta-commentary on the new-class fantasies of the post–World War II era at a time when those fantasies were being put under pressure by the altered political landscape of the 1960s. In particular, Birds of America subjects the basic, postwar distinction between traditional humanists and establishment social scientists to a searching scrutiny, revealing many of the underlying affinities between the two positions. The novel demonstrates that the nostalgia for tradition that animates culture critics such as Rosamund and antiestablishment idealists such as Peter rests on a confused notion of traditional societies that renders their critique of modernization incoherent. The premodern customs preserved or recovered by the traditional humanist are always commercial constructs that easily fit into the world envisaged by the modernization theorists. This self-criticism is legitimated by McCarthy’s aesthetic theory as articulated in her career-spanning body of literary criticism. McCarthy, like other New York intellectuals, believed that fiction embodies a peculiar type of intellection inaccessible to the social sciences, which allows it to subject ideas to dialectical critique. This idea was crucial to the New York intellectuals’ efforts to create a literature of the cultural apparatus. Hence, Birds of America is a novel of ideas in which various ideological positions, embodied by different types of intellectuals, are dialectically played off each other in order to reveal their limitations and hidden affinities. However, the novel is also a metacommentary on this theory of fiction, one that reveals it to be mired in the same conceptual distinctions (nature, tradition, and the humanities versus technology, modernity, and the social sciences) that McCarthy puts into dialectical play in her narrative. In particular, as the book’s taxonomic title suggests, the New York intellectual understanding of fiction may be inseparable from the social scientific rationality it supposedly transcends. Once read in this way, the novel becomes one of the most penetrating explorations of the disciplinary conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s—at once a guide to the main varieties of U.S. intellectuals and a critical reflection on the possibilities and limitations of intellectual fiction.

McCarthy’s antiwar politics in the 1960s followed a path marked out by her early writings and immersion in the New York intellectual social milieu. In the late 1930s, she was one of the original editors of the reinvented, anti-Communist Partisan Review; as the journal’s theater reviewer, she played an important role in helping to push that journal away from the documentary naturalism and dogmatic Marxist criticism championed by the Stalinist Left. Like other writers associated with the journal, she instead sought to develop a new-class fiction focused on the mores and customs of America’s educated elite. McCarthy became the chief chronicler of the New York intellectuals themselves, writing scandalous romans à clef that satirized the group’s habits, intellectual conflicts, and sexual affairs. In constructing this fiction, she was influenced by the peculiar synthesis of Marxism and 1920s literary modernism that distinguished the New York intellectuals from other literary leftists in the 1930s. In Harvey Teres’s terms, many of the New York intellectuals were “Eliotic leftists”⁷ who tried to adapt T. S. Eliot’s cultural conservatism into a leftist critique of U.S. society.⁸ This cultural conservatism became particularly obvious in their critique of the instrumentalism of Marxist and progressive liberal thought. Through Eliot, Trilling argued in “‘Elements That Are Wanted’” (1940), we learn that “man cannot be comprehended in a formula,” that politics must be guided by a “sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth.”⁹ This sense of complication was a product of Eliot’s emphasis on the importance of tradition, which must guide a people if they are to recover the sense of complication and mystery obscured by modern positivism. For Eliot, this tradition was Christian—in his case, the Anglicanism of his adopted country, England. For the New York intellectuals, who were mostly secular Jews (with the exception of McCarthy, a secular Catholic, and Dwight Macdonald, an Ivy League WASP), it was literature and art, which they counterposed against the blandishments of American mass culture. What the New York intellectuals took from Eliot’s social thought, in other words, was his Arnoldian humanism. Eliot, Trilling argued, “continues the tradition of Coleridge and, after Coleridge, of Newman, Carlyle, Ruskin and Matthew Arnold—the men who, in the days of Reform, stood out, on something better than reasons of interest, against the philosophical assumptions of materialistic liberalism.”¹⁰

This Eliotic strand of New York intellectual thought was especially crucial to McCarthy’s Vietnam-era writing. As Sabrina Abrams argues, this work expressed “a disillusionment with American, capitalist culture and a longing to return to a pre-industrial, pastoral past.”¹¹ By the mid-1960s, McCarthy viewed the United States as an overtechnologized country that had destroyed its native traditions and replaced them with a debased mass culture that it was in the process of exporting abroad. In her hands, this argument took on an environmentalist emphasis; the worst feature of capitalism is its destruction of nature, which is the ontological basis of the world’s various traditional cultures. These cultures, McCarthy argued, acquire their distinctive characteristics from their immediate natural environment; traditional societies, in other words, are like animal species, each adapted to its ecological niche: “A peasant’s thatched cottage, like a bird’s nest, was not designed by an individual but by the species. And the form and materials of the dwelling at once identify the species of the occupant, just as with birds: the conical whitewashed trulli of Apulia, the bamboo and straw huts of Indochina, the chinked log-cabins of the North.… This is only another way of saying that the design is traditional and that local resources—brick, wood, tufa, reeds—have been taken advantage of.”¹² The threat of modern mass society is that it effaces these species differences, creating a culture that is worldwide in scope and nowhere organically linked to its environment. Once this connection between human beings and nature is severed, ethics and aesthetics—the means by which human beings articulate their sense of belonging in the world—begin to disappear. “If nature,” she explained in a 1971 interview, “in the beautiful form that we normally think of it: that of the outdoors, plants, farms, forests—if this were to disappear, which it is doing, there’d be nothing left to stand on, no ground for ethics. Then you’d really be in a Dostoevskian position: why shouldn’t I kill an old pawnbroker—because there’s no longer a point of reference or a court of appeals.”¹³ With nature dead, human beings fall prey to instrumental thinking, learning to treat others as means rather than as ends in themselves. By the late 1960s, this argument highlighted McCarthy’s affinity with parts of the American counterculture that similarly celebrated both nature and non-Western, traditional cultures.¹⁴ It also echoed arguments made forty years earlier by the most famous group of Eliotic social critics in the United States—the southern Agrarians. As we have seen, they too were concerned with the uniqueness and particularity of local cultures, which they argued were the products of a similar kind of natural adaptation.

In her political reporting from this period, McCarthy counter-posed this position, which she identified with the worldview of artists and writers like herself, against another position typical of the mainstream, celebratory social science of the cold war era: modernization theory, an approach that viewed modernization as a linear progression from traditional to modern societies. As Michael Latham argues in his study of this paradigm’s influence on the Kennedy administration, modernization theorists “placed Western, industrial, capitalist democracies, and the United States in particular, at the apex of their historical scale and then set about marking off the distance of less modern societies from that point. Convinced that the lessons of America’s past demonstrated the route to genuine modernity, they stressed the ways the United States could drive ‘stagnant’ societies through the transitional process.”¹⁵ The mainstream social science of the postwar years therefore seemed diametrically opposed to the cultural politics promoted by New York intellectuals such as McCarthy; it seemed like the epitome of the kind of positivism that humanists in the Arnoldian tradition had been fighting since the nineteenth century. In fact, as I have been arguing, postwar social scientists were involved in their own revolt against positivism, one that led them to place greater emphasis on cultural as opposed to economic factors in the development of first and third world countries. However, their theory was indeed a kind of reverse Eliotism insofar as it derided the traditional and the local as narrow-minded cultural identities that needed to be overcome in the transition to the superior form of culture embodied in Western liberal democracy. In particular, Talcott Parsons articulated the difference between traditional and modern societies in ways that ruled out nostalgia for the former. The two types of society, he argued, embody entirely different ethical systems. Traditional societies are particularistic, in the sense that individuals identify with circumscribed families, clans, or villages and exclude outsiders; modern societies are universalistic, meaning that individuals identify with the nation or the human species as a whole.¹⁶ This latter form of identification entails a radical change in the nature of modern ethics—the emergence of universalistic ethical systems that assert identical rights and obligations for all peoples.

This theory implied that the status quo should be maintained in domestic politics; the United States already embodied the cultural preconditions for its transformation into an ideal societal community. The same was not true for postcolonial development. As Nils Gilman explains, “the United States was deemed a modern country, and therefore in need of little profound reform… while colonial countries were considered ‘traditional’ and therefore in need of change.”¹⁷ For political scientists influenced by Parsons, such as Walt Rostow and Eugene Staley, cultural change from traditional to modern societies was both an effect of contact with Western democracies and a precondition for successful economic development. This change was perilous because the dissolution of traditional societies entailed psychological dislocation for third-world peasants as tightly knit, particularistic cultures disappeared. For this reason, the first world had to guide the third world as expeditiously as possible toward the superior form of social integration associated with Western universalism, reeducating the populace so as to prepare them for capitalism and liberal democracy. This careful guidance was especially important in regions menaced by communism, which for modernization theorists was a social disease that preyed on countries during the transition period.¹⁸ Consensus social scientists such as Parsons, Rostow, and Staley thus endorsed homeostasis at home, disequilibrium abroad.

In McCarthy’s first book of Vietnam reporting, she focused on one of the most notorious examples of this theory’s implementation as policy—the Strategic Hamlet Program, a response to the Viet Cong’s infiltration of peasant villages. The basic idea, worked out in tandem between the Ngo Dinh Diem and Kennedy administrations, was to relocate peasants forcibly from their villages into more concentrated settlements surrounded by barbed wire, ditches, and bamboo stakes. There, the peasants would be resocialized; aid workers would train them in modern agricultural techniques and liberal democratic attitudes and instill in them a patriotic identification with Diem’s government and its American supporters. The ultimate purpose of the program, as the Kennedy administration’s taskforce put it, was to “bring the rural people of Vietnam into the body politic,”¹⁹ to integrate them into the South Vietnamese state. The Strategic Hamlets were supposed to accelerate the process of cultural change described by modernization theorists; in a matter of months or years, participating peasants would be torn from their traditional culture and thrust into liberal democratic modernity. The program—half exercise in civic education, half concentration camp—inevitably led to draconian excesses. Hamlet residents were subjected to constant surveillance and control in an effort to ferret out Viet Cong sympathizers. Hamlets had strict evening curfews, and transgressors were sometimes shot on sight. Peasants, after having been forcibly evacuated from their ancestral villages (their houses and crops burned so that they could never return), were put to unpaid work constructing their hamlet’s defenses. The logic used to justify these excesses was that the temporary suffering of the displaced South Vietnamese was a necessary step toward their integration into the global capitalist economy. The very intensity of American violence in South Vietnam, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued in 1968, could be viewed positively as a catalyst toward that country’s modernization.²⁰

The Strategic Hamlet Program therefore seemed like the epitome of McCarthy’s fears about the effects of modernization on local folkways. Americans had tried to stamp their universalistic, modern culture on Vietnamese peasants immersed in a particularistic, traditional culture. In particular, one of the main purposes of the Strategic Hamlets was to introduce the Vietnamese to entrepreneurship and free-market economics. This effort was emblematized, for McCarthy, by one marine officer’s plan to build a seven-foot-high bronze dollar sign in the center of his proposed hamlet—a symbol of American values.²¹ The dollar sign highlighted, for McCarthy, the true nature of American universalism. It was not, as Parsons believed, the dissemination of a Kantian ethics embodied in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rather, it was the dissemination of an instrumental rationality that undermined all traditions and ethical systems and a missionary precursor to the intrusion of Western economic capital into the third world. At the same time, the Americans had fractured the Vietnamese’s relationship with their natural environment—most dramatically through their chemical defoliation of the jungles, but also through a more subtle destruction of the landscape. “Before the Americans came,” McCarthy wrote, “there could have been no rusty Coca-Cola or beer cans or empty whiskey bottles. They had brought them. It was this indestructible mass production garbage floating in swamps and creeks, lying about in fields and along the roadside that made the country, which must once have been beautiful, hideous.”²² These two types of destruction were intimately related for McCarthy; in changing the land, you simultaneously destroy a culture.

By way of contrast, in Hanoi McCarthy praised North Vietnamese efforts to improve their country. “This is a moral, ascetic government, concerned above all with the quality of Vietnamese life,”²³ she wrote about Pham Van Dong’s government, ignoring North Vietnam’s atrocities against internal dissidents throughout the 1950s. In particular, McCarthy was impressed with the intellectual leadership of North Vietnam—a group that, she noted, were mostly university-educated professionals from minor mandarin families. In a letter to Dwight Macdonald, McCarthy wrote that North Vietnam “[is] the only people’s democracy I’ve ever seen that’s run on aristocratic principles and largely by aristocratic persons with a traditional code of manners and morals.”²⁴ This ruling class was exemplified, for McCarthy, by a surgeon that she visited at Hanoi University Surgical Hospital, who was trying to fuse Western with traditional Vietnamese medicine. It was a case, he explained, of “progress through deliberate and controlled regression, i.e., by rediscovery,”²⁵ typical of the Vietnamese approach to developing their country. The modern innovations introduced by the Communists—new crop varieties, brick walkways, camouflaged schools and infirmaries—were incorporated aesthetically into the landscape and local hamlets. McCarthy saw the North Vietnamese elite as an ideal counterpart to the technocratic academics in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. They were, for her, an Eliotic elite, a clerisy attuned to local ecology and the traditions of their people. Indeed, McCarthy approvingly contrasted Vietnamese intellectuals to Western humanists such as herself. The latter could offer only fruitless criticism of an unchangeable social system: “a free press is livelier than a government-controlled one, but access to information that does not lead to action may actually be unhealthy, like any persistent frustration, for a body politic.”²⁶

In her Vietnam reporting, McCarthy thus offered a stark alternative between two models of intellectual influence. On the one hand, there were establishment social scientists such as Rostow and Staley, dominated by instrumental logic and a teleological model of historical development. On the other hand, there was the dictatorial elite of North Vietnam, whose wise guardianship of their land and people was enabled by their immersion in a shared tradition. This dichotomy is not as idiosyncratic as it may at first appear to be; throughout the late 1960s, writers and activists associated with the New Left idolized third-world, antidemocratic revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. These leaders’ harsh measures were supposedly justified by the fact that they were at one with their people, embedded in a common, nonrational tradition like an animal species in its ecological niche. At the basis of McCarthy’s idealization of North Vietnam, in other words, is a kind of identity politics akin to William Graham Sumner’s turn-of-the-century sociology; a regime’s worst atrocities can be excused as long as they are contextualized within a foreign culture. By this logic, condemning the North Vietnamese government for killing its dissidents would be like condemning the bird for building her nest; each is doing only what’s natural to the species. The differences between McCarthy and the modernization theorists she abhorred are therefore as follows: although both establish a fairly rigid dichotomy between modern and traditional societies, and, for both, the former transcend the cultural particularism of the latter, they do so in different ways. For the modernization theorists, this transcendence moves in the direction of establishing a universalist ethic rooted in liberal democracy; for McCarthy, it moves in the direction of a universal instrumentalism that destroys ethics altogether. Faced with this prospect, McCarthy’s solution is to affirm the cultural particularism rejected by Parsons and others like him—to embrace local cultures as natural adaptations to their time and place and therefore immune to outside critique. This is the position that McCarthy radically rethinks in Birds of America; she shows that her own nostalgia for the traditional and the natural is intimately related to the derogation of these things implicit in consensus social science.

At first glance, however, Birds of America seems like a relatively straightforward allegorization of McCarthy’s Eliotic leftism; in particular, the novel establishes a series of characters who mirror the main positions established in her Vietnam reporting. Hence, Rosamund Brown, a thinly veiled self-portrait, replicates much of McCarthy’s cultural politics. She is the focus of the novel’s first two chapters, which detail two visits that Rosamund and her son make to Rocky Port, New England—an isolated cottage community that Rosamund envisages as one of the last remaining bastions of America’s preindustrial past. These chapters, like McCarthy’s account of the Strategic Hamlets, demonstrate the impact of modernization on traditional folkways. Rosamund predictably discovers that Rocky Port has been absorbed into the modern world economy and has become little more than a tourist trap. Residents now insist on affixing historical notices to their homes—at once marking their disconnection from their past and their willingness to market it. Rosamund nevertheless tries to revive and preserve the village’s authentic New England traditions—ostensibly an act of resistance against the dissemination of mass culture. The other side of the novel’s dialectic is represented by Dr. Small, a technocratic social scientist akin to the modernization theorists that McCarthy criticizes in Vietnam. He is a Panglossian optimist who celebrates the process of modernization regardless of its effects on particularistic traditions. “Capitalism,” he explains, “has shown itself to be the most subtle force for progress the world has ever known. In its pre-industrial phase, an insidious, awesome force. Boring from within the old structures, leveling, creating new dreams, new desires, and having the technical know-how and dynamism to satisfy them” (301–2).²⁷ The novel’s central scene with Dr. Small takes place in the Sistine Chapel, which he is investigating as part of a sociological study of mass tourism. Like Rocky Port, the Sistine Chapel has become a tourist destination; once a site of worship and the expression of a particular culture, it has instead become an item of curiosity for international crowds of distraction-seeking tourists. Tourism thus exemplifies the process of modernization that Dr. Small celebrates and Rosamund abhors; by opening all parts of the world to commercial exploitation, tourism tends to make them all the same.

The figure who mediates between these two positions is Rosamund’s son, Peter, a young nature lover and political idealist with membership cards for various civil rights organizations. In the fall of 1964, he travels to Paris on a study abroad program and begins to distance himself from his mother’s politics. He does this by embracing a universalistic, Kantian ethic similar to the one that modernization theorists such as Parsons believed was the cultural endpoint of the modernization process. “Behave as if thy maxim could be a universal law” (131), Peter repeatedly tells himself. However, he finds himself drawn back into his mother’s orbit after several long discussions with Dr. Small. His universalist ethics continually comes into conflict with his distaste for modernity, and he eventually joins his mother’s quixotic struggle against modern conveniences. The novel ends pessimistically, with Peter learning that the United States has dropped its first bombs north of the seventeenth parallel and that he may soon be drafted into the war. This event coincides with a near-fatal attack on him by a black swan at the Jardin des Plantes, which symbolizes for him that the natural order has been thrown into disarray As he recuperates in a hospital bed, the spirit of Immanuel Kant visits him in a fever-induced hallucination. “Nature is dead, mein kind” (344), Kant tells him—the novel’s apocalyptic last words. This pronouncement echoes McCarthy’s concerns about the destruction of the natural environment and its effect on all ethical systems; she evokes the triumph of instrumental reason that, she argued in her reporting, is exemplified by the Vietnam War.

However, Birds of America in fact parodies Rosamund’s and thus McCarthy’s cultural politics, disarticulating the connection between nature and tradition that animates their shared nostalgia for the premodern. McCarthy’s strategy for carrying out this parody is announced in the novel’s epigraph from Kant: “to attempt to embody the idea in an example, as one might embody the wise man in a novel, is unseemly for our natural limitations, which persistently interfere with the perfection of the idea, forbid all illusion about such an attempt.” In the rest of this quotation, which McCarthy leaves out, Kant concludes by noting that such efforts cast “suspicion on the good itself—the good that has its source in the idea—by giving it the air of being a mere fiction.”²⁸ Throughout its pages, Birds of America illustrates this tendency for ideas to become unseemly when embodied in fictional examples; the novel’s continual movement is from Rosamund and Peter’s abstract ideas to the banal realization of these ideas. Hence, much of the novel’s comedy comes from Peter’s application of the categorical imperative to insignificant ethical dilemmas—for instance, whether to clean the excrement out of his hostel’s communal toilet. As in the Kant quotation, this example redounds on the theory it is supposed to illustrate. Peter realizes that the Kantian imperative gets stymied in this instance because whether the dirty bowl even registers as an ethical problem is mostly a function of each resident’s childhood training—an empirical factor supposedly irrelevant to pure practical reason. “Could humanity be divided into people who noticed and people who didn’t?” Peter asks. “If so, there was no common world. That thought really depressed me. If there was no agreement on a primary matter like that, then it was useless to look for agreement on ‘higher’ principles” (156).

McCarthy uses the same strategy to parody Rosamund’s nostalgia for tradition. Throughout the early chapters, Rosamund’s resistance to the modernization of Rocky Port takes the form of her trivial obsession with authentic U.S. cuisine; for her, the intrusion of processed and frozen foods into Rocky Port is the most damaging sign of its absorption into a national and international economy. She therefore establishes a regime of American cooking: “The rules of the Rocky Port kitchen were that every recipe had to come out of Fannie Farmer, had to be made entirely at home from fresh—or dried or salted—ingredients, and had to be, insofar as possible, an invention of the New World” (32). This food purism was an obsession that McCarthy shared with her character; indeed, it was central to her notion of tradition as expressed in her political reporting.²⁹ Echoing the southern Agrarians, McCarthy understood tradition to be ontologically grounded in its natural environment; local cultures adapt to their environment and are in turn shaped by it. Within this schema, food stands out as the most obvious interface between culture and nature; at the center of McCarthy’s cultural politics is the identitarian adage that “we are what we eat.” An ideal, traditional world would be made up of distinctive cultures, each defined by the sustenance it derives from the land. Conversely, the modern world is one in which foods and cultures are indiscriminately mixed together or else technologically processed beyond the point of recognition. Hence, McCarthy frequently draws on culinary analogies to describe what is wrong with American society and the industrial mass culture it exports abroad. Modernization, in her account, is like a blender or food processor. Many of the long sentences in her Vietnam reporting imitate its effects:

The samples of U. S. technology that had been showered on the North were mainly in bomb form, yet the simplest Vietnamese could perhaps see a connection that eludes many American intellectuals between the spray of pellets from the “mother” bomb and the candy hurled at children in the South by friendly G. I.’s, between the pellets and the whole Saran-wrapped output of American industrial society which can no longer (at least this is my conclusion) be separated into beneficial and deleterious, “good” and “bad,” but has been homogenized, so that “good”—free elections, say—is high-speed blended with commercial TV, opinion-testing, buttons, streamers, stickers, canned speech-writing, instant campaign biographies, till no issues are finally discernible, having been broken down and distributed in tiny particles throughout the suspended solution, and you wonder whether the purpose of having elections is not simply to market TV time, convention-hall space, hotel suites, campaign buttons, and so on, and to give employment to commentators and pollsters.³⁰

However, as in the case of Peter’s application of Kantianism to toilet etiquette, this application of McCarthy’s agrarianism trivializes the idea it is supposed to exemplify. Rosamund, in her efforts to institute her cooking regime, continually comes into conflict with the other residents of Rocky Port, who are eager to embrace the culinary conveniences of modern society. The novel highlights the relative insignificance of this conflict in comparison to the more important crises of U.S. society. In the midst of a failed effort to find tapioca pudding in local stores, Peter reflects, “in this sinister summer of race riots, church-burnings, civil-rights workers vanishing in Mississippi, in New York, a cop, off duty, shooting to kill at a Negro kid, the fact that tapioca pudding, his old love, had kicked the bucket ought not to matter. Yet if he said that to his mother, she felt he was abandoning her” (70). Indeed, Rosamund arranges her and Peter’s second visit to Rocky Port as a substitute for a planned trip, vetoed by his biological father, to join the Freedom Riders in Mississippi. Peter and Rosamund’s conflict with the townsfolk thus displaces the conflict that could have taken place between Peter and southern segregationists over the more burning issues of 1964. The triviality of this substitution is highlighted when Rosamund and Peter end up in prison on the last day of their visit. Rosamund infuriates her landlady by taking down the historical notice on her rented home in the midst of a commemorative jamboree, indicating that she will live in history rather than participate in a pageant. When the local constable demands that she put it up again, Peter has a chance to use the passive-resistance techniques he learned from the civil rights groups on campus. The incident exemplifies the way in which many cold war humanists’ focus on mass culture distorted their perception of the era’s more crucial problems of poverty and race discrimination.

Even more radically, Rosamund’s culinary experiment illustrates the incoherence of McCarthy’s identitarian critique of modernity; in particular, it illustrates the impossibility of recovering any tradition that does not already register within itself a history of commercialization, technological processing and cultural heterogeneity. Hence, when deciding what to cook from Fannie Farmer, Rosamund has trouble deciding what does and does not constitute a New World dish. She concludes that a dish “did not have its citizenship papers if it had been cooked in America for less than a hundred years” (32) and sends Peter on library research trips to determine when specific ethnic groups arrived in the country. Rosamund, in other words, tries to fabricate a tradition through an effort in artificial historicism that parallels Rocky Port’s own attempt to catalog and market its historical past. This research effort will never recover an original culture born out of the people’s relationship with their land; her own Puritan ancestors were migrants who brought foreign technologies and ingredients to New England, as did the Native Americans before them.³¹ The problem revealed by Rosamund’s failure to recover an original American cuisine is the arbitrariness of any cultural politics that tries to distinguish between traditional and modern societies on the basis of their geographical particularism versus their nongeographical universalism. These politics always end up defining and inventing traditions, arbitrarily delineating which technologies and customs do and do not belong in them. Hence, Rosamund reshapes the New England culture she constructs in her household. “She was strong for the traditional,” Peter reflects, “and whenever she made an innovation, it became part of the tradition, something that had ‘always’ been” (27).

This nostalgia for a tradition she can never inhabit highlights the fact that Rosamund, like all of the novel’s other peripatetic intellectuals, is a tourist. She is in many ways the ideal consumer of Rocky Port—someone who takes seriously its claim to embody New England’s past. Her problem is not that her demands for historical authenticity and cultural distinctiveness clash with Rocky Port’s efforts to market itself. Rather, it is that she is too discriminating in these demands. In terms of a distinction that Peter uses to separate himself from the other tourists in the Sistine Chapel, she is a “class” rather than a “mass” (284) tourist—a tourist who is aesthetically attuned to the place she visits as opposed to visitors who are less educated and thus supposedly undeserving. Class tourism, in other words, is a strategy whereby the educated tourist distinguishes herself from the masses who make every place look the same. However, as Peter realizes, mass tourism and class tourism are in fact inseparable; the promise of class tourism is essential to the ways in which tourist destinations market themselves: “There’s a logical contradiction in the whole tourist routine.… ‘Oh God, tourists!’ you hear them moan when they look around some restaurant and see a bunch of compatriots with Diners Club cards who might as well be their duplicates. Sort of a blanket rejection that, if they sat down and analyzed it, would have to include themselves. Only nobody does. They can’t. Instead, in the Sistine Chapel, you start thinking of the reasons why you have the right to be there and all the rest don’t” (294, italics in original). Once this distinction between class tourism and mass tourism collapses, an even greater problem arises with Rosamund’s critique of modernization. She is not only a consumer of class and therefore mass tourism, but as a concert harpsichordist and musicologist who preserves and performs music from an extinct musical tradition, she is also a producer of that tourism. Traditional humanists such as Rosamund and McCarthy, in other words, inevitably market cultural products to a select audience of fellow intellectuals, thereby creating the illusion that they are class rather than mass consumers of a cultural tradition. Traditional humanists thus embody a paradox implicit in the kinds of tourism that Rosamund derides—although tourism makes all times and places look the same, it always does so in the name of preserving local differences and making them accessible to others. Rosamund therefore misses an important moment of self-realization when her landlady reveals that she is an avid fan of Rosamund’s recordings. As in the case of Rocky Port’s use of historical markers, the very urge to preserve tradition is a sign that one is irrevocably alienated from it and engaged in its destruction.

This implicit critique of tradition in Birds of America means that its apocalyptic conclusion, Kant’s invocation of the death of nature in the face of the Vietnam War, opens itself to contrasting interpretations. The obvious interpretation, the one that corresponds to McCarthy’s nonfictional statements about nature and ethics, is that human beings have destroyed nature and with it the ontological ground for all ethics and aesthetics. This interpretation is suggested by the Kantian ethics that Peter expounds throughout the novel. In the Kantian system, the experience of natural beauty is supposed to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge of nature and practical knowledge of ethics—the respective domains of the first two critiques. As Peter sums up in his hallucination, the beautiful things in the world prove “that man is made for and fits into the world and that his perception of things agrees with the laws of his perception” (343). Natural beauty therefore undergirds Kant’s theoretical edifice. The problem, suggested by Kant’s cryptic remark to Peter, is that nature has been so ravaged by human beings as to have become unrecognizable to them. However, the full context of Kant’s warning suggests a different interpretation:

“Excuse me, sir, you have something to tell me, don’t you?” The tiny man moved forward on the counterpane and looked Peter keenly in the eyes, as though anxious as to how he would receive the message he had to deliver. He spoke in a low thin voice. “God is dead,” Peter understood him to say. Peter sat up. “I know that,” he protested. “And you didn’t say that anyway. Nietzsche did.” He felt put upon as though by an impostor. Kant smiled. “Yes, Nietzsche said that. And even when Nietzsche said it, the news was not new, and maybe not so tragic after all. Mankind can live without God.” “I agree,” said Peter. “I’ve always lived without him.” “No, what I say to you is something important. You did not hear me correctly. Listen now carefully and remember.” Again he looked Peter steadily and searchingly in the eyes. “Perhaps you have guessed it. Nature is dead, mein kind.” (343–44, italics in original)

This critique of the twin notions of nature and tradition is a thematic concern that goes beyond Birds of America. It also functions as a metacommentary on the New York intellectuals’ theory of the novel of ideas. This theory is adumbrated in McCarthy’s opening quotation from Kant about the unseemliness of embodying ideas in fiction. Pure ideas, Kant argues, continually run up against our natural limitations, which betray their perfection. As McCarthy explains in Ideas and the Novel (1980), the very strength of the novel is in fact its ability to test out and check abstract conceptual thought by confronting it with natural complexity. Ideas, she argues in the context of a discussion of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), “are formed in consciousness with a regulatory aim, which is to gain control of the swarming minutiae of experience, to give them order and direction.”³³ Hence, one of the efforts the novel makes is to debunk bad ideas that impose this control too tightly. Hard Times, for instance, illustrates the inadequacy of utilitarian philosophy through its parody of Mr. Gradgrind, whose name connotes his desire to grind up and destroy the confused welter of experience; in McCarthy’s account, he is the prototype for the social scientists she writes about in her reporting and fiction. The novel, in contrast, tries to remain true to the complexity of experience: “the novelist’s effort—any artist’s effort—to impose shape and form on that mass of particulars while maintaining their distinctness has something in common with the mind’s will to absolute rule through the synthesizing process. They are similar but they are not the same. The artist’s concern (and especially, I should say, the novelist’s) must be to save the particulars at all costs, even at the sacrifice of the perfection of the design.”³⁴ The novel thus tries to imitate natural beauty as defined by Kant in the Critique of Judgment; its goal is to become a legible reminder that the free activity of the human mind is not necessarily at odds with the phenomenal world. In Lionel Trilling’s terms from The Liberal Imagination, good novels reveal the “complexity and possibility” obscured by the ideological formulations of the intellectual class.³⁵ This theory legitimates McCarthy’s effort in Birds of America; she wrote the book in order to test both her own theories about modernity and tradition as well as the theories of modernization proponents such as Dr. Small. In the process, she discovered that both theories are overly intellectualized constructs that conflict with experience.

McCarthy’s theory, however, rests on the same distinction between tradition and modernity that she disarticulates in Birds of America; in all of her essays on the novel, she offers a historical narrative about the impact of modernization on the genre. This narrative aligns novels with the traditional folkways whose disappearance she laments in her political reporting. In “The Fact in Fiction” (1960), for instance, she describes the process whereby novelists incorporate the phenomenal world into their work by assimilating hard nuggets of social and natural fact. In particular, the novelist builds her fiction out of the facts of scandal—petty conflicts within a delimited milieu that reveal a society’s underlying class structure: “the scandals the novelists are primed with are the scandals of a village, a town, or a province—Highbury or Jefferson, Mississippi, or the Province of O–; the scandals of a clique—the Faubourg St. Germain, of a city—Dublin or Middlemarch; or of a nation—Dickens’ England; or of the ports and hiring offices—London or Nantucket.”³⁶ The novelist is therefore like the agrarian peasant that McCarthy describes in Writing on the Wall: her work is built out of local, found materials. The problem with the contemporary novel, McCarthy argues in “The Fact in Fiction,” is that modernization is effacing all local cultures, blending them together into one homogeneous global culture. In such a world, the relevant facts and scandals are no longer local. Rather, they are worldwide and as such resistant to literary representation; “it is impossible, except for theologians, to conceive of a world-wide scandal or a universe-wide scandal; the proof of this is the way people have settled down to live with nuclear fission, radiation poisoning, hydrogen bombs, satellites, and space rockets.” Instead, the task of representing the scandals of the world devolves on social scientists such as Dr. Small and Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, whose abstract discourse mimics the processed homogeneity of the new, global society. In the twentieth century, McCarthy complains, “Middlemarch becomes Middletown and Middletown in Transition, the haunts of social scientists, whose factual findings, even in the face of Auschwitz or a space-satellite, have a certain cachet because they are supposed to be ‘science.’” ³⁷

Moreover, McCarthy argues, this transfer of novelistic authority to social scientists has been facilitated by novelists themselves; in the face of the growing prestige of the world’s Gradgrinds, novelists have given up the effort to confront abstract ideas with the complexity of the phenomenal world. Instead, they have turned to various kinds of novelistic formalism. In Ideas and the Novel, McCarthy describes the decline of the European realist novel, beginning with the art novels of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. These writers modernized the novel by purging both nature and ideas from it, reducing it to splendid, meaningless form. For James, the novel “stood beautifully apart, impervious to the dry rot affecting the brain’s constructions and to the welter of factuality.”³⁸ McCarthy thus suggests a perverse affinity between social science and certain kinds of literary modernism, an affinity that she makes explicit in Birds of America. In the scene with Peter and Dr. Small in the Sistine Chapel, the novel contrasts their different reactions to Michelangelo’s fresco on the ceiling. Peter subscribes to McCarthy’s aesthetic. For him, what matters are the fresco’s details, each of which has iconographic significance and must be studied carefully in order to grasp the meaning of the whole. Works of art, for him, are rooted in their unique historical and geographical context; they are products of the artist’s immersion within a particular culture. Dr. Small, in contrast, champions an aesthetic akin to that which McCarthy attributes to James and Woolf, one that abstracts the work of art from its cultural context and voids it of all content. Small thus dismisses Peter’s use of guidebooks to ferret out Michelangelo’s historical meaning: “What he [Michelangelo] really cared about, being an artist, was form, line, color. For him, the whole cycle might as well have been an abstract design” (276). This attitude, McCarthy suggests, is one best suited to the era of mass tourism and modernization celebrated by Dr. Small. The conclusion that McCarthy drives toward is that she is one of the last exemplars of a dying art—one that has gone the way of butter churners and fresh fish and may no longer be possible in the modern world. “I’ve just finished the first section of my novel,” she wrote to Arendt about her progress on Birds of America, “which ought to make me cheerful. But I am sagging with doubts and apprehensions. The traditional novel, which this is, is so undermined that one feels as if one were working in a house marked for demolition.”³⁹

This conclusion, however, is complicated by Birds of America’s metacommentary on tradition. One of the difficulties involved in aligning the novel with tradition, rather than with modernity, is highlighted by its title, which refers to Peter’s Audubon field guide and to the pervasive presence of birds throughout the novel. For Peter, ornithology is one of the last remaining descriptive sciences, one that seeks to obtain knowledge from nature through pure observation; “birds in nature were left to themselves, apart from human interference. The most you might do was to band them or coax them to show themselves” (167). In contrast, the modern sciences seek to meddle with and transform their subject matter. As Peter’s first stepfather, a nuclear physicist, explains, “taxonomy, useful in its day, had no place in the curriculum of a modern university, where biology and genetics were acting on Nature, like modern physics and chemistry, disturbing its inmost processes, forcing it to answer questions, smashing its resistance” (166). McCarthy’s title similarly suggests that she wants to offer a naturalist’s guidebook to the various species of Americans that Peter encounters in his travels, one that lets them remain in their natural habitat and merely observes their habits and manners. The novel thus consistently analogizes human beings to birds. Peter describes Rosamund as being “like an American bird—the rose-breasted grosbeak, for instance, modest and vivid” (21)—and later refers to the “flyways” of American tourists, their patterns of migration and typical destinations (292). This comparison seems to reflect McCarthy’s interest in rejuvenating literary realism. Hence, in “Characters in Fiction” (1961), she laments that few contemporary novelists have tried to describe the various character types that have emerged in postwar U.S. mass society; “it is as though a whole ‘culture’ of plants and organisms had sprung into being and there were no scientists or latter-day Adams to name them.”⁴⁰

However, this comparison between novel writing and ornithology also entails a very different account of realism from the one that McCarthy offers in Ideas and the Novel. Although literary realism may be a taxonomic science, one that observes and preserves the various cultural species of the world, it is still a product of modern, secular rationalism. The novelist as naturalist is not really like the peasant who builds his hut out of local materials; she never immanently lives within a tradition, accepting its customs as self-obvious, natural, and therefore immune to analysis. Rather, the novelist is closer to McCarthy’s Dr. Small or Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind—a social scientist who collects the data of experience and imposes categories on them. She takes myriad, unique individuals and reduces them to a type: the mainstream social scientist or the traditional humanist. Indeed, Birds of America could just as easily be the title of Dr. Small’s sociological study of mass tourism, which similarly compares U.S. tourists to species of birds for analytical purposes. Homosexuals, Dr. Small explains to Peter, are “nest-builders” who travel in pairs; they have migration patterns that “could be understood in terms of the food supply, if that was interpreted in a broad sense to mean readily available adolescent boys” (293). Because of this analytical impulse, the realist novel is a modern, universalistic genre, one of the technologies used to destroy parochial village sentiment and instead create a more cosmopolitan consciousness.

Hence, Birds of America is not really an expression of the Eliotic leftism articulated in McCarthy’s nonfiction. Rather, it is a more complicated book about the traditional humanist’s underlying affinity with the celebration of modernization found in the mainstream social science of the 1960s. The culture critic’s nostalgia for tradition, the novel suggests, is inseparably linked to the social scientist’s Panglossian optimism—especially when the humanist ends up packaging this nostalgia for mass consumption. Novel writing, moreover, as a technique for describing the “manners and morals” of society, cannot be meaningfully distinguished from the social sciences. Both are empirical disciplines linked to the rise of modern, scientific worldviews. This affinity between the novelist and the social scientist was one with which McCarthy was intimately familiar. While she was writing Birds of America and criticizing U.S. modernization efforts in South Vietnam, her husband, James West, was director of information for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international agency that collected statistics on third-world development for the U.S. and other first-world governments. McCarthy’s husband, in other words, was a crucial participant in the U.S. government’s increasing use of academic expertise and especially modernization theory to guide foreign policy. Literally wedded to the social scientific establishment, McCarthy could not help but see that the disciplinary schisms that divided her generation of cold war anti-Communists were not absolute.