Perennial Adolescence

by BERNARD IDDINGS BELL

1

THE late Albert Jay Nock used to remark that the most acute observers of the cultural pattern in America have been not social scientists, educators, clergymen, jurists, philosophers, but humorists. A strong case may be made out for this opinion. One can gain a good deal of pertinent information not to be found elsewhere about eighteenth-century New England, for example, from perusing the Johnnycake Payers and about colonial New York from Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History. The Civil War period and what preceded it and its immediate aftermath are illuminated by the comment of James Russell Lowell and even more by that of Artemus Ward. For the true significance of the eighteen-seventies and -eighties one may not omit a careful reading of Mark Twain. The turn of the century is most cannily interpreted by George Ade, by Bert Leston Taylor, most of all by Finley Peter Dunne, who for many years spilled a weekly column of pungent social analysis from the lips of Mr. Dooley, philosopher of Archey Road. The age of normalcy is revealed by the gentle irony of Booth Tarkington.

In our day we can add another name to the honorable roll of jesters sufficiently percipient to illuminate the passing scene. Like his predecessors, this wag is looked on by contemporaries as little more than a designer of drolleries; posterity may deem him more significant, as it gains from his productions a key to the understanding of that bewildering generation of Americans which lived and moved and for the most part made a mess of things in the nineteen-forties. His name is Clifford Goldsmith. He writes a program called The Aldrich Family and weekly on the radio has for years delighted with it a large and applauding public.

His Henry Aldrich is a teen-age lad, presented as the “typical American boy.” Henry is almost indecently adolescent. He never grows a day older. Even Penrod seems sophisticated beside him. Henry is undisciplined, self-assertive, bewildered by life. Educationally he is the victim of a high school system which underestimates him. He has acquired no facility in arriving at judgments social or artistic and he is apparently without religion of any kind. His time is spent chiefly in futile, pathetic, and undeniably laughable misadventures in the art of living. He is the creature of circumstance and moved about like a pawn by crowd opinion; his chief endeavor is to find out what are the mores and then to obey them; he is afraid above all things else to think for himself, to go against convention or in any way to criticize it. What a different boy this is from Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn! His sister Mary is his feminine counterpart, so without purpose and so truculent as to make Miss Alcott’s Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy seem by comparison vital girls, daring, creative, vastly desirable to have about the house.

More tragicomic still are the father and mother of this pair. Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich are as conformist as Henry and Mary, as given to clichés, as vague in self-direction, as incompetent to discriminate, as essentially irreligious. They too are adolescents, middle-aged adolescents, neither children any more nor able to grow up.

If these Aldriches are the representative American family they are recognized to be by the multitudes who listen in to this weekly exhibition of incompetency in living, and there is small reason to doubt it, only a miracle can save America from debacle. Such people are unequipped to create or to manage an effective nation, as unable to do that as they are to run their individual lives and face the challenges of home and neighborhood. Politically, they are sure to be easy dupes of any plausible demagogue who comes along with a slogan and a hillbilly band or its urban equivalent. They are not free men and women but base mechanicals. These four people and their neighbors are at once the products and the patrons of mass management, of a functionalized social structure, of a standardized press and radio, of slick magazines and book clubs, of vocationalized education, of pressure salesmanship. The glass held up by Mr. Goldsmith is a mirror in which we can see in epitome the America which once bred and reared daring dreamers, imaginative lovers, creative nonconformists, citizens who grew up, now become a homeland of perennial adolescents.

A discerning man, this Clifford Goldsmith! One may hope that transcripts of his broadcasts are being preserved for posterity in the Library of Congress; in the twenty-second century the social historian will find them valuable. They will help to explain why it was that, back in the middle nineteen-hundreds, the most powerful nation on earth was also the most fumbling and ineffective. They will make compassionate the understanding that Americans of our time had lived so long in adolescent terms that when they were called upon for leadership in a world crisis which demanded mature and wise decisions, they proved incompetent to make those decisions.

Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich are too untrained in the art of thinking to understand the cause of the world’s present misery and of the unanticipated fumbling of their own country in the post-war handling of its problems, foreign and domestic. They cannot understand why, in spite of material advantages beyond the dreams of man in former ages, they remain somehow so unhappy, so insecure, so restless. They are not what they are by intention. They are counters moved about by social forces which either blindly operate or are venally manipulated. They are what they are because no one has encouraged them, much less helped them, to bring their native intelligence, which is considerable, to bear upon the problem of ends and means in their own lives, in the life of the nation, in the life of the world in which America is a necessary coöperator.

The churches, from which instruction and example in mature living would, it might be thought, have been forthcoming, have gone in more and more for sociability, sentimentality, ceremonial without significance, and unctuous utterance of pseudo-ethical trivialities. The schools have taught them to cheer, and if need be die for, “my country, right or wrong,” and that it is man’s primary duty to get on in the world and keep up with the Joneses.

Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich are not too greatly to be blamed for rudimentary moral judgments; they are to be pitied and, if possible, rescued. They do at least begin to know that the world is all adrift; it may be, if we set ourselves to the task, that we can convince them it is they themselves who have slipped their moorings. But who is at work on this salvage?

2

IT might be well to take a brief look at the ends which are in fact being aimed at in this country. There are four of these; they are the very same life objectives which all inexperienced adolescents are apt to think supremely worth while. Two of them — the quest for money and the quest for pleasure — are the goals which increasingly, for a half century at least, have determined the cultural pattern in this country. The other two — the quest for power and the quest for erudition — are purposes equally inadequate, but to the pursuit of them more than a few are already turning as they find themselves increasingly bored by what has become the American way of life.

The Aldrichian civilization has been based largely upon an assumption that the great, significant, happy man is he who is able to acquire a superabundance of possessions; who lives in a house or flat larger and more ornate than he and his family need for reasonable comfort; who has a motorcar without good reason, or two of them when only one is needed, or three or four when two would do; who has more clothes than he can wear out and whoso wife dresses with conspicuous expenditure; who has everything his heart desires and money can buy, and cash in the bank wherewith to purchase more of the same. How great a triumph to lift oneself to such a state of being! Since this is assumed to be the target at which an individual should aim, it follows that this is the social goal toward which national policies must be directed. A rich America is a great America!

Such a concept of nobility may appeal, usually does appeal, to the verdant adolescent, but it looks more than a little absurd in the light of a mature experience. One meets many a man who has great wealth and yet to God, his fellows, himself, is manifestly worth nothing. One meets other men who are as rich as these pitiable fellows but who to God, their fellows, themselves, are worth so much that when one thinks of them one pays them the compliment of forgetting their money altogether. One comes to know women so simple, so good, so lovable, as to be indispensable to all who meet them, but who never had a penny, have not now, never will have.

A study of history backs up one’s experience. Those who in any generation have risen above the ruck of humanity to a place where they are honored as the great ones of the past, have almost never had money. There have been a few rich people who are remembered; but examination of their records shows that they are significant not because of their wealth but much more often in spite of it. Not a single outstanding teacher of moral wisdom has failed to warn that riches tend to isolate their owners, make them petty, vulnerable, a little ridiculous. Scarcely a social historian has failed to point out that the land fares ill where wealth accumulates and men decay.

Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich may have a faint memory of having heard something of this sort of thing when they were children; Henry and Mary have probably never had it called to their attention. Certainly the family is not likely to be reminded of it by contemporary books or magazines or newspapers, by the radio or the movies, by the billboards, by popular conversation, by the schools; even when they go to church, which is rarely, they seldom get a hint in the sermons that for the country, for their family, for themselves individually, abundance is far more dangerous than poverty. They go their teen-age way, admiring the rich man, aiming to become rich themselves, sure that with wealth comes happiness, certain that for America to fulfill its destiny it is necessary above all else that our physical standard of existence shall be lifted to ever more exalted heights.

It is likely to seem to Americans even more obvious, indeed unquestionable, that the great, significant, happy human being is the one who can have the best time, who can the most competently amuse himself. Most of the world’s moralists have agreed that this is indeed a better answer to life’s problem than the first one. Omar the Persian, underneath his tree with his book and his bottle and his lady friend, is obviously more commendable than Poor Richard, saving pennies all the week and gloating over his deposit book Saturday night.

When the usual American is charged with having a greedy, grasping soul he indignantly denies it, and with some justice. The usual American is concerned not so much with wealth per se as with what may be purchased therewith, a life full of entertainment. He is willing to spend money for fun. He buys books by the hundred thousands and magazines by the millions, and some of them he even reads, but mostly for distraction. He prefers either who-done-its or eroticism, He sits rapt while on the screen are entrancingly unfolded before his eyes the adventures of glamorous women and twofisted men. He pays high prices for seats in the stadium to applaud the gladiators. He buys hard liquor by the case. No man, he thinks, can with justice call him penny-pinching. What more can be asked for in the way of munificence than such prodigal expenditure for purchasable joys?

3

OMAR knew better than that. The Rubáiyát is a bewailing of the folly of all life, including that life which, despairing of better things, takes refuge in pleasure; if there is no answer but pleasure, there is no answer at all. This is a very different thing from saying that pleasure is the answer. Omar knew, as did that other cynic who wrote the book called Ecclesiastes, that pleasure palls, that the time soon comes when no matter how much of it one possesses, or how exciting, it no longer entertains, no longer distracts from an essential tragedy.

A playboy of twenty may be fun to gaze upon, even when we are moved to disapproval; but Heaven deliver us from having to look upon, much worse to be, playboys of forty-five. How hard they work at enjoying themselves and how little they get, and less and less, in return for their labor! The last stage in a search for entertainment as the summum bonum is that sense of being fed up which characterizes most Americans of middle age and older. They are restless, without inner security. A happy man has no need to be amused.

When men or nations get tired of dodging fundamental questions in a multitude of distractions, they turn to a search for something else that will, so they suppose, give them the sense of significance which they lack and know they lack. This does not necessarily mean, however, that in sophistication they learn wisdom. If they remain adolescent in their approach to life, they are frequently tempted to seek meaning for themselves and for their nation in terms of coercive power. They develop a Messianic complex. They seek to live other people’s lives for them, ostensibly for the good of those other people but really for the sake of their own desired fulfillment. They set out to attain greatness in terms of a supposedly superior understanding irresistibly imposed upon the less percipient. They are bitten by the germ of Herrenvolkismus.

Precisely to the degree that Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich, and even more their children, begin to get fed up with senseless accumulation of goods and a wearisome round of purchased amusements, they tend to become easy victims of a quite mad belief that America, which is themselves writ large, is called upon to impose its cultural pattern upon the lesser breeds without the Law. It is America which must solve the world-wide Jewish problem, and in the doing of it cover up its own failures in reconciling creeds and colors. It is America which must teach Europe and Asia how to govern themselves, and in the doing of it forget gross misgovernment in Memphis and Chicago and Jersey City and a thousand other boss-ridden communities, as well as the inability to face necessary issues that results from a two-party system in which neither party has unity of convictions and between which there are almost never clear-cut issues. We who cannot solve our own riddles must decide the issues facing humanity at large. We whose hearts are restless with discontent must bring peace to the world. And woe be to the cynic who doubts our competence so to act in the grand manner!

Who that observes with trained eye the current scene in America can fail to perceive how increasingly ready our people are to take refuge from the ignobility of greed and the boredom of pleasure in pursuit of power, disguised as fulfillment of a romantic destiny but in reality the escapist device of a disappointed folk?

Less socially significant because only a few are competent to follow it, but nevertheless deleterious, is the way of those among us who seek to arrive at significance by pursuing erudition for its own sake, pure scholarship, learning divorced from life. Nothing is more sterile. Man should seek to know in order to live, not to live that he may know. In our institutions of higher learning one finds with the passing years more and more departmentalized pedants hiding in the holes of research, seeking to run away from embarrassing questions, afraid of philosophy and scared to death of religion. It involves no disparagement of contemporary scholarship, no lack of affection for scholars of the moment, to recognize that many of them go in for learning as an escape device which they use to avoid facing what life is all about. With us Americans the more delightsome Ivory Towers are academic rather than ecclesiastical.

There is no real danger here for Henry and Mary (they seem to be too stupid even for the pursuit of pedantry), but there is danger for a number of their young friends, who are moved to seek significance by this sort of intellectual evasion.

We need to be rescued from teen-age pursuit of riches, comforts, amusements, pedantic preciosity, bragging strut. There is something vastly better to live for than these, as mature people have always known.

4

MAN exists to do creatively, as craftsmanlike as may be, all things that must be done: great things like government or mothering or the healing of minds and bodies; small things like making beds or hoeing corn or driving a truck; things in the public eye like making speeches or unleashing atomic energy or making peace; obscure things like selling groceries or running a bus or teaching school. He finds inner peace who works at whatever is in front of him not for the pay he gets or for what he can buy with that pay, not for applause or gratitude, but for sheer joy in creativity. There is a vast number of tasks to be performed, most of them not romantic. They may be done in one of two ways: just to get them over with as quickly and as painlessly as possible, in which case they become a monotonous burden hard to bear; or each as beautifully as possible, in which case life is good to the taste.

Our fathers knew the joy that lies in craftsmanship; they did not advocate it; they took it for granted. We have forgotten it, overlooked it Craftsmanship is not practiced, taught, or praised. That is why we are restless, unreliable, combative caught in a web of doubt and dismay. No salmagundi made of things, amusements, lust for power, can assuage our gnawing hunger to create. There will be no recovery of serenity, no mutual patience sufficient for fraternity, until we learn ourselves and teach our children that unless human beings become creative artists they remain petulant children, dangerous, predatory.

Our fathers also knew, but few of their progeny seem aware of it, that every man is made, and this is the highest art of all, to give to other men understanding, tolerance, clemency, not with design to get from those others any quid pro quo, not even to get from them understanding or clemency or tolerance, but just because this is the kind of thing that man can do and must, most humbly. Man was made to be a lover — not necessarily beloved but a lover. To be artist and lover, this is the destined end of man.

If Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich and Henry and Mary cannot be persuaded of the truth of this which the moralists and the religions all teach and to know which is the mark of maturity, if they persist in adolescence, are those of us who are adult tamely to acquiesce and conform? Have we indeed sunk to that most juvenile form of juvenility, the juvenility of grown-up people afraid to smack the children down when they seek to ride roughshod over parents and teachers? We dare not abdicate and make of these United States an autonomous nursery. If we do, we abandon our country to an infantilism which renders it rudderless in a stormy era in which shrewd judgment and serene sureness are required of any nation that would avoid enslavement.

In spite of the public school system and a vocationalized higher education, in spite of churches singing nursery rhymes instead of chanting credos, in spite of Hollywood and the radio chains and the newspapers, in spite of everything, it is still entirely possible that the Aldriches — possibly not Mr. and Mrs., who are pretty far gone in fatuity, but Henry and Mary and their children — may grow up. But that will happen only if those who have grown up use courage and a clear, strong voice.