Making It in America

Though neither seems to have been aware of the other’s existence, Norman Podhoretz and James D. Watson were at Cambridge at the same time during the early 1950s—two highly talented young Americans eager to reverse the legendary pattern by making it big in the Old World. Each succeeded spectacularly: Podhoretz at twenty-one published a critical essay on Lionel Trilling in Scrutiny, “the notoriously hardest nut to crack of all the magazines of its kind in the world.” Watson at twenty-three discovered (with the assistance of Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins) the structure and method of reproduction of the DNA molecule. When in 1962 Watson received the Nobel Prize for this achievement, Podhoretz, now just over thirty, was established as the successful editor of the new Commentary. A half dozen years later they were to publish, with Making It and The Double Helix, unexpectedly frank accounts of their ambition for success. In a foreword to the latter, Sir Lawrence Bragg warned that “those who figure in the book must read it in a forgiving spirit.” Not everyone did: there was even talk of legal action on the part of Crick to enjoin the book. As might have been predicted, however, Watson was neither as widely blamed nor as slow to be forgiven as Podhoretz, who knew as he wrote that in confessing to a “dirty little secret” he was placing himself beyond forgiveness in some quarters.

And yet Making It is in a thoroughly respectable American tradition—that of the exemplary confession ol the successful man. The first great example in our literature is Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. It is not an easy book to get into focus, partially because we come at Franklin by way of later versions of the success story that have the effect of diminishing him, partially too because people like D. H. Lawrence have so fouled the air around Franklin that clear vision is impossible. In any event, Franklin is likely to come through to us as a smug, hypocritically venal, and meanly rational person who took snuff and “used” venery; if we catch any sense of the exemplary in his book, we are likelv to hold that against him also, since we find it hard to understand how a man can be genuinely honest and at the same time aware of his own exemplary qualities.

Podhoretz’ book is exemplary, too, but he is much more self-conscious about the issue of material success. Franklin is able to be at ease with it because lie writes in a world that sees no necessary contradiction between the selfish and the altruistic. Everyone remembers his famous footnote: “Nothing so likely to make a man’s fortune as virtue.” Probably there is irony in the remark, but the whole book proves that Franklin also means it seriously.

And even a transcendentalist like Emerson, who was quite aware of the menace of State Street, could sound very much like Franklin on the subject of making it. Thus, writing of the dead Thoreau, and remembering that “he seemed born for great enterprise and command,” Emerson could not help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party.

Emerson here is giving expression to the American fear of the missed opportunity to develop a potential to the fullest possible extent and in a manner sufficiently public so that there can be no doubt about the matter. Of course we have learned to say that Emerson had it all wrong, that Thoreau pounding his beans made it colossally, after all, without any of Emerson’s vulgar ambition. But if one goes along with the late Perry Miller (see his Consciousness in Concord) , Thoreau was no stranger to this fear of the missed opportunity; he knew himself born for great enterprise and command, and after the failure of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and later of Walden, had to confront (with what contained despair?) the “defeat of high expectations” and the realization that he was going to have to make it, if at all, in the isolation of his Journal. So we get that chilling image of him in the last year of his life packing the thirtynine notebooks of that Journal into a yellow pine box, not comforted by the knowledge that he would ultimately become “our” Thoreau and so make it as few Americans have.

We do the same thing for Melville: extend what is for us the triumph of Moby Dick back into Melville’s life, as if the ultimate certainty of that triumph more than compensated for the growing sense of failure after high expectations that must have been the preliminary to his final nineteen years of obscurity as a customs inspector. And who would have been better placed to appreciate the bitter irony and the coffinlike confinement of that yellow pine box than the man who created Ishmael?

In America, as Tocqueville observed, ambition is the universal feeling, and one might add the obvious corollary that the fear of not making it is no less universal. Certainly to be a writer in America is to be hounded by this fear, confronted as he is with the evidence that his society places a relatively low value on activities that do not make it. And his fear of not making it is in relation to his dream of making it—a relationship that helps to explain why it was that, at a time when Fitzgerald was making it big, all the stories that came into his head had that “touch of disaster” in them. The man who packed away the thirty-nine notebooks and the man who created Ahab must indeed have had Gatsby-like dreams, and their experiences of failure must have been correspondingly painful. Unlike Gatsby, they had to live on after their discoveries of illusion. Dreiser tells their story in Sister Carrie: Hurstwood is the dramatic analogue of the writer who, having been given every reason to expect success as his due, must then live with failure. Hurstwood’s declension from the glamorous affluence of the Chicago nightclub to a pauper’s suicide repeats Melville’s long decline into the oblivion of the New York customs; as he turns on the flophouse gas one hears Thoreau nailing the top on that yellow pine box, and perhaps between blows of the hammer catches an echo of that shot in Ketchum, Idaho, that rang around the world.

But if the writer in America is afraid of not making it, he is at least as afraid of making it, since to make it in America is to risk contamination by a value system that appears to threaten his integrity as a writer—and his chance to make it in a more enduring way. The ways of the Bitch Goddess are subtle: she even tempted Henry James (and who can say that if he had known how to sin he might not have fallen?). The Bitch Goddess means kitsch, and kitsch, as Clement Greenberg pointed out in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” is not only virulent but irresistibly attractive. Its traps are laid in the preserves of genuine culture; it exists deceptively on many levels, some of them “high enough to he dangerous to the naive seeker of true light.”

Greenberg’s thirty-year-old Partisan Review essay is useful background reading for Podhoretz’ book, concerned as the book is with the connection between the study and production of literature and that contempt for success that is the strong underside of the fear of making it. This is especially true given the part Partisan Review played in inducing in American literary intellectuals a pathology about kitsch that anticipated the Birchers’ pathology about Communism. Of course, to get the lines straight one must go back farther than this—at least all the way to Romanticism, with its glorification of the artist’s private and ascetically won vision and its discovery (in part creation) of the unbridgeable gap between the artist and the kitsch-hungry public that this vision entailed. But it we go back only to 1856 and Baudelaire on Poe we find this:

All the documents that I have read lead to the conviction that for Poe the United States was nothing more than a vast prison Which he traversed with the feverish agitation of a being made to breathe a sweeter air—nothing more than a great gas-lighted nightmare—and that his inner, spiritual life, as a poet or even as a drunkard, was nothing but a perpetual effort to escape the influence of this unfriendly atmosphere.

This sounds very much like a mid-twentieth century American writer (say James Baldwin, John Cheever, or Norman Mailer at an Esquire-sponsored symposium earlier in this decade) on the subject of the corruptions of the environment in which, and in part because of which, he has been able to make it.

The American writer in this mood may sound hypocritical, or at least downright ungrateful, to some of his supporting public, but his fear of being corrupted is nevertheless genuine enough, particularly given the extent to which he is compelled by the modernist tradition that requires the artist to serve beauty and truth with the same ascetic purity with which the Desert Fathers served God. He keeps his discipline at the cost of eternal vigilance, and yet ironically the always likely end of discipline (for a Hemingway no less than his Puritan forebears) is success and corruption. Affluence and ease make him doubt his identity and authenticity, for they are what he traditionally defines himself as against, the means he uses to experience his own virtue and authority. The Desert Fathers made a similar use of their image of a godless civilization and its tantalizing, discipline-destroying lusts.

When discipline goes, the artist, like the saint, is threatened by the most enervating of dreams—that of joy separated from anguish. In proportion as the artist allows this pair to separate he is left naked to adversity, which is how A. E, Hotchner represents Hemingway in their conversation outside the Mayo Clinic. In response to the question, “Papa, why do you want to kill yourself?" Hemingway answers “in his old deliberative way":

What do you think happens to a man going on sixty-two when he realizes that he can never write the books and stories he promised himself? Or do any of the other things he promised himself in the good days?

Toward the end of his confession Podhoretz recounts his four-day experience at Paradise Island, Huntington Hartford’s plush Caribbean resort. Here he begins to discover that in an affluent society and a post-middlebrow culture, not to expect was a way of not demanding what was now there to be had, and that not demanding was the surest way of not getting. I left Paradise Island resolving to demand.

No discovery could be more in the American grain or in the Alger tradition. The trouble for many of Podhoretz readers, however, is not that he makes this discovery, but that it isn’t followed by the expected further discovery: the ultimate illusion of the first one. What is unforgivable to them is that Making It doesn’t turn out to be a latterday version of Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up.”

For some of his contemporaries the lour confessional essays Fitzgerald published in Esquire and American Cavalcade between February, 1936, and October, 1937, were just as objec tionable as Making It is now, if for not quite the same reasons. There was no “new honesty" to support Fitzgerald. His story, nevertheless, lias become the classic statement of what we expect from the writer who has attempted to make it: and its central message is that behind the green light on Daisv Buchanan’s dock, there is nothing (the man who wrote The Great Gatsby knew Get ter than this) . The writer’s fear ol making it is in part a protection against tin’s discovery, as though he couldn’t trust the Jay Gatsby in himself out of his sight. Podhoretz may seem to be saying that we ought to have more faith in the green light: actually he is saying that in our nervousness about making it we have made the green light into a negative idol. It is easy to envy the world of James Watson’s Double Helix; it is apparently little troubled with green dock lights.

The writer-intellectual’s ambivalence about the ambition for success makes the recent work of George Plimpton especially interesting. For Podhoretz, the significant thing about Plimpton was that in the waning hours of the fifties he brought writers and intellectuals i no contact with the rich, the powerful, and the fashionable for tlie first time in any of their Uses, and thereby did much to increase the standing and power of the former, if not the comfort and happiness of the latter.

Tins reading casts Plimpton in the role ol a twoculture bridger, and would probably give Podhoretz’ old mentor, F. R, Leavis, as little comfort as G. P. Snow’s famous lecture did. But Plimpton functions much more .significantly as a tension-reliever for problems peculiar to the American writer. His three “out of my league" books, of which Paper Lion is something of a classic, are confessions of the writer-intellectual’s tailure to make it in a world ‘where the attention of participants and spectators is fiercely concentrated on making it in terms highly acceptable to the American public.

Plimpton (or that somewhat Active version of him that appears as the “hero" of the series) reconciles in a comic context the writer’s sharply opposed fears of making it and not making it. Because by accident of birth be already has it made, he can afford the therapeutic and ironic game of turning the Alger-Franklin legend upside clown; and since in the end he succeeds, as a writer, by failure, his storv is both revenge on that legend and a comic version of what has so olten been the grim historical case with the writer. At the same time he is himself a comic and relaxing version of a figure especially compelling to the modern writer: the hero who throws himself intrepidly into experience for which he has little or no preparation out of a conviction that to do otherwise is to risk spiritual death. He courts failure as Perry Miller helps us to see that Thoreau did, yet lie does not fail as Thoreau did (though he will probably not succeed as Thoreau did either) .

Podhoretz announces as the second purpose of his confession a diagnosis “of the curiously contradictory feelings our culture instills in us toward the ambition for success, and toward each of its various goals: money, power, fame, and social position.” So far as his diagnosis goes it is accurate, but in the end it is not sufficiently ecological, it is dominated by the image of a conflict between the writer and a society whose values threaten literature. This is a maplike view of the relationship; the territorial fact is much more complex. For if, as Greenberg says, “the avant-garde remained attached to bourgeois society precisely because it needed its money,” that society remains attached to the avantgarde because it is afraid of what will happen to it if it is cut loose from avant-garde values.

Podhoretz more than once reminds his renders that there are other ways of losing one’s purity than by pursuit of monetary profit; nevertheless, in America, the Bitch Goddess means money more than she means anything else. In American literature the good man is conventionally and lryperbolically defined by his disregard of money and his determination by some self-transcending commitment, usually love. Huckleberry Finn, with His utter carelessness about his six-thousand-dollar reward and his utter devotion to one of the wretched of the earth, acts out Thoreau’s intransigent formula: “Absolutely speaking, the more money the less virtue.” It is money that has corrupted the worlds in which we find Carrie Meeber, Clyde Griffiths, George Willard, George Babbitt, Nick Carraway, Dick Diver, Ike McCaslin, and Holden Caulfield. It is the rich with their belief “that every day should be fiesta” who break into the world of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to corrupt both the love and the writing. Therefore the writer as good man in the bad world will turn his back as dramatically on money as Sherwood Anderson represents himself turning his back on his money-making paint factory, risking all to save his soul. That Anderson’s account may be as much heroic fiction as history is beside the point; it is His version of the writer’s salvation story, his midrash, and it is an important means for maintaining the writer’s morale (of course it is also a powerful device for suppressing Podhoretz’ dirty little secret).

At the same time, the Huck Finn-Thoreau hard line about money is no less admired in the world of popular culture, in which the good man tends similarly to be defined by his willingness to put love or a commitment to some self-transcending value ahead of money. Alger’s heroes, for instance, always put virtue ahead of money; it is simply that the virtues they take a stand on are the ones that make money in Alger’s context (in Hemingway’s context many of the same virtues are on heroic display, but they are much less profitable—except for the author) . In conventional American romantic comedy true lovers define themselves by their saintlike rejection of money, as a consequence of which it is generally made clear that money will never be a problem: Cupid simply turns out to be Daddy Warbucks in disguise. The “business” fiction of the late Cameron Hawley was successful in part because it was able to update Alger’s subordination of acquisitiveness to virtue. Ayn Rand’s fictional world reeks of virtue, for all its emblematic dollar signs.

This “virtuous” disdain of money by a culture passionately devoted to its acquisition and accumulation strikes the writer-intellectual as tlie most palpable hypocrisy, one more sign of the corruption of the culture that threatens him on all sides. But there is more than hypocrisy in the popular disdain of money. There is exactly that effort to hold before itself exemplary models of the virtue most likely to protect it from dangerous excess that one would expect in an acquisitive society. Highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow approve of Huck’s carelessness about the reward money; the consequences of ceasing to give at least lip service to this carelessness are too frightening.

This ambivalence about money is repeated in the public’s ambivalence about tHe writer-intellectual. In so far as the latter attacks the Bitch Goddess, he attacks an idol intricately involved with public pieties and comforts; but at the same time there is a real public awareness, however unarticulated, of the writer’s necessary cybernetic function. Along with Hippies, Yippies, and Black Panthers, he is not only a luxury tire culture can afford (a luxury which will be dispensed with when the public becomes convinced that it is too expensive) but an absolute necessity if the culture is to keep itself under some kind of control and to mitigate the effects of the hypocrisies and self-delusions it is prone to while striving mightily to make it.

Part of the truth, then, is that the avant-garde is always a function of the bourgeois: its conscience, to put it in conventional terms, as well as an expression of its anxiety about order and the consequences of excessive specialization. The cultural assignment of the writer in America is to counter the culture lest it destroy itself, deny itself too much life, in tire pursuit of dangerously limited ends. The culture even demands an exemplary purity in the writer, which he is inclined to think of as strictly a matter of his own heroic choice, just as earlier cultures needed and demanded the purity of troglodytes and pillar-dwelling ascetics. In the grossest economic terms, this means that the public still derives great comfort from the image of the writer starving in a garret to bequeath to the world immortal manuscripts. Few of us can live without some kind of assurance that it is possible to make it in terms more permanent than those that immediately rule our lives. We need to believe that it is ultimately possible to walk out of the paint factory to a larger life.

The writer accepts this cultural assignment somewhat less meekly than Christ accepted his cross. In a way he is a trapped man; he cannot reject the assignment, however mixed his feelings about making it may be, for the disjunctive terms—either accept or be damned—are after all his own. How much of the virulence in the traditional avant-garde attack on kitsch, then, is an expression of his frustration at this entrapment and a desire to be revenged on the responsible forces? How much of Mark Twain’s eruption was actually rage at the predicament his authentic talent had gotten him into? It is, after all, the predicament not only of the writer but of the American, who is torn between his historic impulse to travel, however Spartanly, toward the light, and his impulse to affluence. When a writer makes this predicament his subject, as Fitzgerald does, he endlessly fascinates us.

In any event, the really subversive thing about Making It is Podhoretz’ refusal to be caught any longer in the trap of the traditional assignment, even though the full context of this refusal isn’t in the book. His own exemplary figure for this refusal is Norman Mailer, whom Podhoretz sees as performing an experiment on himself in public:

. . . trying to prove that the best way for an American to deal with the ambition for worldly success—an ambition the American male can as easily escape as he can get away with not going to school—was to throw himself unashamedly into it in the hope of coming up again on the other side.

Tins is a romantic formula, and it suggests Stein’s paradoxical philosophy in Conrad’s Lord Jim: “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet on the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.” But long before Conrad and Podhoretz the Fathers of the Desert had their own version (I quote from Helen Waddell’s Desert Fathers) : “If temptation befall thee in the place thou dost inhabit, desert not the place in the time of temptation: for if thou dost, wheresoever thou goest, thou shaft find what thou fliest before thee.” Wherever the American writer goes he finds before him the temptation to try to make it. Stein and Mailer may be right: one can easily waste one’s energies simply removing obstacles or fighting temptation, and then be forced to dignify this waste by making an idol out of one’s discipline. Sisyphus interminably rolling his stone can be put into a context where he is a figure of futility: a man bound forever to a preliminary action. Avant-garde writing has always been cursed with its preoccupation with the preliminary action of trying not to make it in the vulgar bourgeois world, just as the Fathers were cursed with the preliminary action of fighting off lustful thoughts in the interest of safeguarding an image of purity so extreme that it could only predispose them to lustful thoughts.

The melodramatic intensity of this conflict of lust and virtue (the conflict may now appear to have been much more clear-cut when Greenberg wrote his essay) is responsible for the “critical overkill" about which Podhoretz complains: the intransigent measurement of contemporary literature against impossible standards of purity in order to find it sadly wanting—especially if that literature makes it with the large audience, as Mailer’s fiction has. It is hard to distinguish critical overkill from the proper application of uncompromising standards (which, for instance, was Podhoretz’ own unfavorable but attention-getting review of Bellow’s Herzog?) . One important difference, however, is that critical overkill, like other forms of overreaction, is strongly determined by factors behind the scene for which the apparent subject of criticism is a convenient metaphor (as T. S. Eliot’s work has become a convenient metaphor for overkillers like Karl Shapiro) . Criticism of the sort that Podhoretz complains about is damaging to contemporary writers because it insists on treating them as preliminary to a crucial issue: the traditional necessity to hold the line against threatening lusts. The writer is in effect kept subordinated to the exigencies of a national cultural melodrama—and God help him if he happens to come on the scene at a moment when the villain is particularly menacing. Perhaps it was the pressure of such a moment that explains Greenberg’s observation to Podhoretz that Commentary had from the beginning been a middlebrow magazine.

In proportion as the writer is himself caught up in this melodrama he tends to be a compelled ascetic, overdetermined and perhaps driven half mad by the lusts of an affluent society; and the larger action he is part of inclines him to court failure as a sign of salvation. The ideal writer in this melodrama, the artist-saint, would have lived a completely anonymous life, so that when Ins yellow pine box is opened after his obscure death the rarefied contents can be valued in complete isolation from any contaminating historical context, since any conceivable historical context is bound to be unworthy of it. Flaubert must have had such an ideal in mind when lie wrote to his mistress, Louise Colet, about his dream of a “book dependent on nothing external . . . which would have almost no subject” since the finest works “are those that contain the least subject matter.”At this extreme, art is an act of mortification, the perfect image of which we find in Miss Waddell’s book. Here the Abbot Paul labors daily to fill his cave with salable merchandise woven out of palm leaves, then at the end of the year burns all that he has carefully wrought and starts over. Thoreau, who was intrigued with the idea of a periodic burning, and who once almost burned up Concord, would have understood and applauded the act.

Art, the product of the heroically isolated and alienated artist, turned in upon itself in pursuit of Flaubert’s ideal; it became abstract, “pure,” technique-conscious, arcane; and its compelling symbol became, as Frank Kermode points out in Romantic linage, the female dancer whose lace was utterly devoid of intellectual meaning and human expression. This was the extreme, of course, and few avant-garde writers could be this extreme since they had to survive as writers. Hence a favorite strategy involved not so much an avoidance of subject matter as a self-conscious avoidance of the subject matter the corrupt bourgeois world expected them to work with. It also involved an exploitation of subject matter calculated—because of its eccentricity, ugliness, morbidity, violence, or perversity—to shock bourgeois readers, and eventually to develop in them tastes that could be catered to profitably by both avantgarde and kitsch writers. One consequence is the void about which Irving Kristol speaks: a void into which “spills a debased version of avant-garde culture.” So we have our present confusion. Is Andy Warhol a jet-age Da Vinci or a honx which we use the media to perpetrate on ourselves? Is Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge kitsch or a mockery of the efforts of kitsch to be avant-garde? Is Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood kitsch trying to be avantgarde or avant-garde trying to be kitsch?

It is unlikely, at any rate, that either Vidal or Capote is much bothered by what Kermode calls “the twin concepts of the isolated artist and the supernatural image.” Here Thoreau is still our greatest champion. This is why, as Perry Miller makes clear, he came so close to having no subject. “He told himself,” says Miller, “that a man was fortunate who could get through life with no reputation.” But in the last years, Miller continues, “these exclamations on the bigness of the little become a nervous tic, cease to carry any conviction.” Hence Miller is led to wonder what would have become of Thoreau had he achieved at least such a modest success as Emerson did. Perhaps, captivated as he was by the image of himself as Apollo laboring in the fields of Admetus, he did not dare risk the effort, since any success less than that of a god would have been as intolerable as the attempt to realize it would have been selfdestructive. And Miller’s point is really Podhoretz’: the American writer’s fear of making it can be compulsive and crippling.

It can also have disturbing political consequences in a democracy in which making it always implies some determination by bourgeois values. Democracy provides an enclave in which a Thoreau can exist; nevertheless, as everyone knows, Thoreau occupies that enclave with a dim view of democracy, indeed of all political activity. He is as intransigent about politics as he is about making it, and so perhaps gives expression to democracy’s doubts about itself. His political position is not so much anarchist as Olympian and aristocratic. In fact, about the time that Walden was in the process of failing as a publishing venture, Baudelaire, outraged at Poe’s fate, was writing “that it must be difficult lo think and write readily in a country which has millions of rulers, a country without a great capital and without an aristocracy.”

The frank expression of a bias against democracy is hardly an available option to the American writer-intellectual: at this point in the twentieth century all namable alternatives to democracy have been too thoroughly discredited or appropriated by the right. His standing temptation, however, is to suspect that a society which so vigorously produces, consumes, and profits from kitsch cannot be trusted with political power. The negative attitude toward making it, and toward popular culture, which Podhoretz first encountered at Columbia, is one expression of this suspicion. It is inevitable then that his attempt to expose the dirty little secret should turn out to have a political dimension that becomes clearer as the book goes along and that culminates in the next to last chapter. Here Podhoretz defines his own attitude toward America against the uncompromising austerities of the New York Review, which he sees as mainly serving the “objective of proving how dreadful the United States was.”

Podhoretz is really making the point that too often the writer-intellectual’s preoccupation with the dreadfulness of an America in which material success is the overriding interest is the expression of a crippling concern witli his own virtue. It is also an expression of the breakdown of the traditional distinction between highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow that once made the world of the writer-intellectual so coherent. Kristol, like Susan Sontag, is convinced that these distinctions have ceased to be meaningful. Perhaps, however, it would be more accurate to say that the old distinctions have been transmuted, with some desperation, into political terms so that the ancient enemy can be attacked as intransigently as ever.

One of the virtues of Making It is its ironic awareness that an intransigent virtue, whether in art or politics, is tyrannous and therefore a vice. The book is written in the awareness that America, not simply culture, is threatened by tyrannies of virtue from the left and the right: from Jerry Rubin and Herbert Marcuse no less than from Robert Welch and George Wallace. Podhoretz is in the position of St. Augustine, who, knowing all too well how the lusts of civilization might drive one to the virtues of the desert, still resisted the lure of the desert as a distraction he could not afford. Podhoretz has come to believe that the dirty little secret hides a similar distraction. We really do not have to choose between Huntington Hartford’s Paradise Island and a cabin at Walden Pond, he seems to be saying, and the traditional conviction that we do have to choose disturbs our politics, our literature, and our private lives.

Mr. Sisk is a critic and essayist whose deepest concern is with contemporary American literature and culture. He is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington