THIS IS A REPORT about where one man stands on some matters of teaching, learning, writing, love, marriage, work, and the prospect of death, and how he came to this stand in the cities of America.
Setting out a few final, summary pages, I wish to try to call up what I have discovered in the pleasure of writing these interim communiqués, twelve years of voyages around part of the world and up certain of its dilemmas. Most of the sections of this book are aimed at specific and nonparallel subjects—Americans abroad, the hipsters, divorce, Miami Beach, Sherwood Anderson, the craft of fiction, the vocation of a teacher—and yet each seems to mark out part of the map, a place on a roadway. The map takes shape as I trace my way from one gathering of thoughts to the next. How can I total it up? What is the map of the map?
Well, to begin with, Plato was wrong. The life of contemplation is not sufficient. Neither is virtue enough. And for another thing, Plato was right. He knew that men must learn to come together in the practice of intelligence and moral privilege.
An instructive practical joke has been played on us by history since the time of Socrates. Now we know too much and we have had too much experience with evil ever to be long satisfied with the hope of ideal private purity in the quest of virtue and knowledge. To be alone in wisdom is to possess only the ghost of wisdom; it is like being a lover with no one to love. And as in love and understanding, so in the effort toward a moral life. We cannot accept the bondage of others without being ourselves enslaved. The separated soul moves inexorably from smugness to explosion. The contemporary literary parody of Diogenes is Hemingway, who turns out to be seeking good repute more than glory, formula more than wisdom, peace to his troubles and not a resolution to the challenge of mortality. Looking for an honest man in the market place, Diogenes carried a lantern, not a mirror. The autobiographical compulsion in a writer leads to a pathos which has the character of the sentences on tombstones; we do not stand moved by the stiff words—we weep to honor the body buried beneath. And when the words have been inscribed by a self-indulgent living corpse, we stand uneasy in our sympathy, we are excluded by self-pity, we have been had. The body is not even present. It is elsewhere, drafting new appeals before the mirror. Style, even the style of genius, shrivels to fashion in the paper fire of vanity. To save ourselves we must return to Aristotle’s sense of the good man—the man who exercises his power of intelligence in an effort to master time and mortality through works apart from building his own person. Out of this effort come tragedy and comedy in art, comes the labor of freedom in life.
Therefore, as an American and a writer, I have aspired in these essays to an active use of my strength within the terms of those possibilities available to me. Given my failings of wisdom and virtue, there is plenty of room for future risk and maneuver under this program.
And not only do I need changing, but my friends do too, and America, and the world. Everyone knows this. Not everyone knows that there is still quite a bit of life—freedom to create—left in America and the world. I now ask myself what everyone asks upon ritual occasions: Is there a better time coming? Is final disaster just ahead?
Well, the way to know and affect the future is not through stupefied waiting, solemn assertion, or viewing with alarm. Gravity of tone and deep seriousness of manner befit television announcers more than thinking human beings. We need all our sources of energy, including appetite and play, lightness of spirit and agility of body. We need a whole list of things. Let us pin the list above the breadbox:
We need to hold the flower of feeling in our hands without crushing it. American wives need to squeeze through the narrow gates of vanity and self-loathing; American husbands the same. They both need to give up trying to solve the problems of marriage by a pious worrying about “our relationship.” An active use of ourselves does not consist in panicking into fallout shelters, passive politics, make-do marriages, jobs defined by that dream world of “security.” We need to give up the fashion of having “insights,” which, in a society delighted by psychology because it is undelighted by most other things, has become a repulsive game of one-upmanship. I insight you; you insight me; together we know nothing of value. Instead, why don’t we engage in some common labor? It is mere vanity to go about the earth listening for the rattle in the throats of the dying, and a suicidal vanity to listen for it in our own throats. Let us stop congratulating ourselves on our subjectivity, trying to find the whole number in an infinite series of fractions, and start putting two and two together. Having “Healthy Goals” is not a proper goal, either; leave that to the insurance salesmen and the educationists; for if we are alive, goals arise beautifully, like the hypotheses of a scientist or the intentions of an artist, correcting themselves through continuous activity in the continuous here and now.
Nice hobbies for the retired and planned distractions for the adolescent cannot disguise the fact that intelligent participation in community life in America is increasingly difficult. We need more civil defense against the spirit of Civil Defense. The notion of intelligent participation in one’s own life also becomes a paradox when most of an intelligent adult’s waking hours are spent at a make-it, make-out, make-do job. An archetypical confession begins, “I was a teen-age senior citizen.” Who is old and who is young? When is motion a substitute for action, paralysis a substitute for patience? If we set out to examine the quality of American life in this time of happy problems, we must go forth knowing that every issue is in doubt. Fortunately, a fine old saying is just as true in its reversed form: Doubt moves mountains.
Perhaps, amid so much doubt about society and personality, we should be reminded again of the basic requirement for human life, once the primary demands of food, housing, and shelter are met. True, the Russians, the Chinese, Africa, world government, missiles, bombs, fallout, highway congestion, sex, and junk mail all present problems which fully qualify for personal reflection and action. (Mail it back! Return to Sender!) But as individuals, what we need first of all is to find a work we like; and as a nation, a future to believe in, contained within an immediate present worthy of respect, engaging our best energies. Then the problems of love and “communication,” boredom and anxiety, delinquency for the young and real-estate-promotion pensionvilles for the aged can diminish into larger possibilities. When the emphasis is put where it belongs, on creative personal and national activity, not on a succession of phony goals cranked out by a succession of disposable deep thinkers, we will be equipped to respond significantly to the great social and political challenges.
These are finally all metaphysical questions, questions about the meaning of human life on earth. There is no doubt that the whole concept of man and civilization is up for grabs. Military weaponry provides a dramatic symbol and advance scout of the enemy, but it is only one manifestation of the tendency within men to seek destruction. Wide awake, we find ourselves asking a nightmare question: Is humanity possible? An impious question; we must ask it. But before we can deal effectively “in general” with the menace of race suicide, we must first in particular, as individuals, not only believe we have a right to survive but also want to survive.
One of the most popular poems in contemporary anthologies of verse is that which concludes: “We must love one another or die.” Students and teachers enjoy this poem; it expresses a fine, elevating fantasy alternative; the proper choice can be made so nice and easy. But the poet who wrote it, overtaken by scruple, squirming, apparently an honest man, has long since revised his thought. In later editions of W. H. Auden’s work, the poem has a new conclusion: “We must love one another and die.” It remains in its lying form in the anthologies; editors have not yet corrected the soft text with the hard truth, which is so much more difficult to accept. For the sake of life we must try to love one another—moral imperative; but we shall all die—fact—no matter what we do. In the meantime, loving if we can, we send our lives down the roads of possibility, meeting the inevitability of final mortality when it comes and, in prospect, at every pause of joy and sorrow. And yet, despite death, despite suffering and murder, despite cruelty and vanity, despite stupidity and injustice—and perhaps, indeed, because of these natural enemies in the jungle of society which is a part of the jungle of nature—we can take joy in the power we are given toward recognition and remedy of defeat and toward the exercise of each possible victory of the human spirit.
This book, then, represents a going and a coming, in and out of the cage of self and the cage of the real world. I grant that it runs the risk of tourism; tourism, however, is a general condition of spirit in our time. Those Southern intellectuals who took their stand in an agrarian Dixie with a manifesto a generation ago are mostly presently bivouacked in the North. We carry as much tradition as we can bear, but look for our truths where they may wander. Both the world and the self are spinning in space. To find stable balance while in rapid motion is the dangerous modern endeavor.
An element of presumption remains. How dare we fret from our unique privileges about our personal dilemmas in a time of mass war, mass destruction, mass inertia, mass everything, when the will to death seems to be on the way to total and inane triumph? How dare anyone, how dare I? There seems to be no other way to think about the prime matters of life on earth than to gather the evidence from our own particular lives. Otherwise we fall victim to what I think of as the Uncle Distortion. “Let’s talk about things in general,” asked my uncle.
“What about?”
“Things in general.”
“But what about?”
“Things in general, didn’t you hear me? You’ve been to college,” he said irritably. “You should be able to talk about things in general.”
But I’d rather not; and I’d better not.
Instead, through place and situation, time and event, these essays attempt another sort of reckoning with the voyage projected through fictions and characters in my stories and novels. Truth is truth only by a defiant marriage of words and acts. (I mean here true statement about how we live and how we should live and why.) How can a conventional symbol, a word, be joined to a specific, never-to-be-repeated experience thrown up in time? That is a perpetual question in the history of thought about the act of thinking. The word, which is a distorting glass, is also the only means we have toward knowledge. Marriage, which is a distorting convention about love, wrenches two creatures out of one life and puts them together again in a new and altered one. There is an excuse for marriage. It builds as it distorts. There is an excuse for microscopes and telescopes (though they do indeed distort) and so there may also be an excuse for words in general and for these particular words, written to various ends in various places, over a dozen years, and yet coming round to some repeated general points about our lives together in America. There is a connection between a specific busted gambler in the Western Union office in Reno, writing that practical, insane, collect poem which goes RUN OF LUCK SEND MONEY QUICK, and the way we all live now, the anxious shuddering through our lives of politics, love, work, and expectations for the future.
Accidents of autobiography, observation in streets and books, generalizing theory, experimental hypothesis, the tentative and the evanescent—these are the accumulations of an effort at specific focus. I have not even excluded ideas about literature as a legitimate part of thought about the real world. Inconsistencies appear regularly; contradictions are a steady part of the enterprise; but I have hoped to give the evidence in experience for judgments; and in this, the habit of telling stories—the habit of the true lie —is of good service. Discreetly I warn myself, however, against the danger of seduction by what we can now recognize as the Nephew Distortion—an oblivious, dreamy trust in particularity and the intercourse of thought and event.
A note about the psychology of creation should be made here. Some poets commit suicide. But not in the middle of the working day. For the poet or novelist at work, even the most depressed one, a cock-crow of relish in nature sounds through the dawn air. He knows that if he tracks the cock by his call, he may find a bedraggled rooster howling from the top of a dungheap while the chicks pluck corn, the hens shuffle feathers. Which doesn’t mean that the cock’s song is not really triumphant. And the poet too, judging himself and the world most severely, nonetheless finds the world and himself worthy of the loud call of judgment, at least while he is at his labor of song. He keeps libidinous and happy with the hope of mastering his experience.
We have now touched upon a revelation which must seem shameful to the puritan heart. Let us give it away brazenly. The scientist, the philosopher, or the artist always takes a secret pleasure in the vividness of his feelings and the power of his invention, even if the occasions which elicit them are tragic. Trudging across the world with the common sack of morality on his back (“He still has that sack!”—Henry David Thoreau), the poet may condemn himself with the puritan’s shame. What right has he to make joyous explorations in suffering? But he does. Why should Dostoevski ease his guilt for even a moment by the monuments he erects upon his dark excavations? He does anyway. This self-love and/or self-hatred may be a flaw and is certainly an injustice viewed from the traditional ideal of democracy, in which privilege is won only as a loan or a mandate. But there is a justification in history and in democratic intention (Fortunate that there is a justification; otherwise it would go unjustified!) Life in the world and the life of art are alike in this, that we are awakened to reality by tragedy, dulled by inferior imagination and a clogged, eventless passage through experience. We need a deepening of the sense of reality more than we need an inflation of moral okayness. Anxiety is caused more by boredom than by any other sort of suffering. To see clearly, playfully, with sorrow, inventively—clearly—must be left as an individual option even in a tragic time. The fact of death has always been democratic; the chance of sudden death has never been so impartially shared; but no two deaths are alike. To act with love upon vision is still the best aim we can give the living soul.
And who knows if that modern faith may not yet be redeemed?—that to understand and to feel can make the condition of mortality habitable. Stoicism provides a leaky roof, but the best one available to the private citizen while, chortling furiously in his kitchen, weaving his fuses and dipping his time bombs, he plots the reform of the universe. He might start by venturing out into the rain; he might start with the holes in his own roof.
HERBERT GOLD
January 1962
San Francisco