Culture Watch
Are nicknames finished? I remember living somewhat enviously in a world of Billies, Bobbies, Howies, and other affectionate diminutives as a boy. (In my particular WASPville, “Benny” never had a run.) But for some time now great swarms of folk have been introducing themselves as Richard, Christopher, Nathaniel . . . young mothers seem to like being full and distant with their tads . . . and among strangers at meetings, I’ve noticed a reluctance, even upon solicitation, to strip down my handle to Ben. I know how it feels to be on the receiving end when, offering you his first name, somebody proposes you say William, not Bill. (It feels the same as being told you need to adjust your clothing.) But I’m less certain about exactly what Wholenamers are trying to tell themselves through these manners. After great pain, a formal feeling comes: Is the pain the reign of old-style Rotary bonhomie, excessive heartiness, instant palsmanship? (“Hi! I’m —,”
as convention nametags used to read.) Are mothers and fathers who rule out nicknames for their wee ones simply expressing a hope that the kid’ll clear out soon, no need for lengthy nurturing, practically a voter at birth?
My theory, tentatively held, is that the end of the nickname is the latest symptom of the latest plague— i.e., rampant self-importance, rampant self-love. Every man his own inviolable Somebody, zipped, locked, professionally reverent in his address to himself. But who can be sure? Nothing is certain except that the trend isn’t regional, some hard-nosed Yankee thing. I was provoked into these broodings the other day in a steamboatrestaurant called the River Queen, hove to at a Portland, Oregon, dock. Clubbable, into a second drink, I asked the (younger) chap opposite me at the table please to cut out Benjamin, and at once—no answering grin—I was set straight: “Nathan, if you don’t mind,” the youngster murmured, “I can’t stand Nat.”
Self-importance obtrudes occasionally in H. Bruce Franklin’s BACK WHERE YOU CAME FROM (Harper’s Magazine Press, $7.95), a “political autobiography” by the self-styled communist revolutionary who was sacked as a Stanford prof in 1971 for a speech inciting “disruption of University functions.” But it’s not Ego that’s made the book a troubling read for me. The author begins with an explanation of Stanford’s place in the military-industrial complex, a survey of public events preceding the behavior that turned this teacher’s colleagues against him, and an account of the “special [roles] in the preservation of the empire” played by the individual members of the select university advisory board that voted to dismiss him. Next come chapters about childhood in Flatbush, schooling (P.S. 99, Brooklyn Friends, Amherst), summer jobs, marriage, a hitch as a navigator in an air refueling wing of the Strategic Air Command, graduate school, academic success, first gestures ot
protest against the system. The pivotal period in the author’s political education was 1966, when he and his wife shepherded a Stanfordin-France group, attended Communist partv rallies addressed by, among others, peasant speakers from the north of Vietnam, and demonstrated in the Paris streets against the war and the United States. (The Paris chapter is the most interesting in the book.) In its closing pages, Back Where You Came From attempts to read the present mood of America, totting up 130 million citizens currently at the edge of revolution, likening their state of mind to that of the peasants Mao knew were stirring in the twenties.
I’m skeptical—but the problem that matters most is the unrelenting coherence of Bruce Franklin’s imagined world. Few hints of randomness in these chapters, no puzzles, no inexpressibles, no episodes of malignity or benignity minus malice; instead, a world of reasons, a place where everything adds up. “David Packard . . . gave $2.6 million to Stanford two days after I was fired.”Brooks and Ransom and Tate laid on the New Criticism as “a conscious counterattack on rising proletarian culture,”aiming to “blind us to social and moral reality.” Sociology and psychiatry were devised as bourgeois plots against nonconformists. Empson diddled with ambiguity, Ciano enjoyed the “beautiful" bombs he dropped, General Dynamics fattens its profits, all for the same reason, nowhere a loose end.
Coherence on this scale usually comes at a price, and it’s quite dear here. Twenty vears ago—sorry about the personal reminiscence, but it’s unavoidable—I used to see Bruce Franklin once or twice a week, as his tutor; he came by to chat about an undergraduate honors thesis. The project we worked on—comparisons of G. B. Shaw on class issues with proletarian playwrights of the thirties—looks “outlandish to him now (he could easily be right: I was in my twenties at the time, still finding my way as a teacher); we shouldn’t have come out, he says, admiring Shaw’s complexity and putting down the proles. But the comparisons had to come out that way. Bruce thinks, because of the class structure of our particular tutor tutee relationship. What we had going in my office those many years ago was, it seems, a social allegory, wherein I was Higgins to his Eliza. This lakes some doing. Fact says Bruce was in some sense a preppie. a full-time college boy Frisbeeing in the quadrangle sunlight. a member-to-be of the officer classes, while I was one of your high school Harrys. an enlisted man, a worked-his-wav-th roughnight-school type. Fact says Bruce visited me and my wife at home with his wife and babe, caught us making do in a collapsing house without indoor plumbing. Fact says Bruce’s Christmas cards and notes about promotions, articles accepted, books in progress, always communicated (in those days) awareness that his old tutor knew academic poverty and debt from inside. But not a whiff of this breathes in the book. I become a wellborn elegant gent.
there’s only one Jude the Obscure in the room, and coherence and simplicity are undisturbed.
A mythy work, in short: conspiracy never ravels out into honorable confusion and contradiction because the mythmaker. no Pynchon. can’t let it happen. Everything everywhere dovetails . . . Next up for the author of Back Where You Came From is a treatise on writers in prison, supported by a handsome, just-announced Rockefeller Humanities grant. I’ve heard people who’ve seen the proposalJohn Knowles, i he ft)undation’s head, a mong them -comment enthusiastically in public about its promise. Listening.
I thought of the bit in the Matthew Arnold poem that says you’re growing old when you “hear the world applaud the hollow ghost/ Which blamed the living man.” Bruce Franklin is a youngster still, no hollow ghost, and there’s an element of fresh start in the present project and in the life. Good luck to both.
Whole Truth Award: to David Riesman, for a discussion of college and sports that grows ever more inclusive, complex, and amusing, until at length it wins its way through to here: “I am inclined to think that the antijock hostility at Harvard . . . reflects the fact that many faculty members and quite a few bright students suffered in their school , . . days from envy of the star athlete and his prowess with women, perhaps from a sense of their own inferiority by old-fashioned definitions of competitive masculinity.” There are a dozen chapters of unassumingly penetrating comment on university life in EDUCATION AND POLITICS AT HARVARD (McGraw-Hill, $15.95; coauthor is Seymour Martin Lipset).
Correcting galley proof on the phone recently for an article not for this journal, I had a bumpy moment with an editor. The piece was a report on a conference about schools and society, and the bump came as I started complaining about the insertion in my copy, by the editors, of a snippet of Timestyle. The sentence I’d written began.
“Leonard Michaels, a writer and an intelligent man . .”The galley proof mailed to me by the magazine read differently: “Writer Leonard Michaels, an intelligent man . .
“Read us again what you’ve got in the galley,” said the editor. He listened and then interrupted: “What’s going on?” he said. “That’s not what I’ve got.” He proceeded to read another set of words altogether. “Writer Leonard Michaels, a handsome and intelligent man . . .” My turn. “What?” said I. “That’s not mine. I never wrote that.”
Sound of papers shuffling, and then came a chortle: “My God, it’s the Sabotage.” the editor said, laughing louder. “Don’t you get it? Go back a page. See where you have June Wilson? You say, ‘June Wilson, a beautiful . . . and articulate Manhattan matron—’ They hit you, that’s all, the libbies in the office. They do it all the time now. They rewrite. One sexist remark deserves another. If she’s beautiful. he’s handsome. (More laughter.) Aren’t you kinda ashamed?”
Two years ago, aiming to best the Today show, CBS teamed a young newspaperwoman named Sally Quinn with Hughes Rudd on its morning news program. Ms. Quinn, who quit the job after eight months, tells why it didn’t work in WE’RE GOING TO MAKE YOU A STAR (Simon and Schuster, $7.95). In theory, the tale ought to be harrowing: upper management promoted this anchorperson as a killer-lady sexbomb, taught her nothing about how to master her new’ trade, permitted middle-management thugs to shake her down in sexual bargaining as failure grew more evident. (According to Ms. Quinn, one producer was especially aggressive. “We’re going to make you a star,” she quotes him as saying, as he volunteered to choose her on-camera clothes and eyeglasses. Immediately thereafter, by her account, he began relentlessly propositioning her.) The evidence is overwhelming that few branches of show biz rate with telly in density of rascals and cowards.
But. appalling as some details are, the effect of Ms. Quinn’s chronicle of disaster is to concentrate the mind not on beastliness but rather on human resilience—the power of intelligence and unillusioned inner balance to stand off the meanest, cheesiest beleaguerer. Our heroine has a fault or two, to be sure, as she herself is aware—a touch of Army brat Smith girl posh, a share of the general appetite for quick fame, a tendency when wounded to slide off into fantasy (when Dick Cavett asked to come on her program to plug the Hepburn interview, “I started talking about him a lot, ‘Dick and I’ this and ‘Dick and I’ that, so everyone would understand that I had important friends”). But at her core she’s a brainy, forthright woman who, alone in a maelstrom, hung on to her wits and humor, and eventually made it to shore.
The key lesson for the victim appears uncomplicated: a decent night’s sleep is an undervalued thing. A key pleasure for the lay reader is the sight of underlings resisting the pretensions of the mighty. (It’s somehow heartening to know that among CBS commoners, the network’s London correspondent is spoken of as the Duke of Collingwood.) A key point for litcrit is the persistence of old-time forms. The Washington Post, for which Ms. Quinn yearned, may not qualify as the Heavenly City, and books like We’re Going To Make You a Star probably weren’t invented for the purpose of replacing sermons. But what we have here is, undoubtedly, a morality piay. temptation dueled and licked in the wasteland. I watched Ms. Quinn negotiate the Slough of Despond with more than a few tremors of dread, and was downright delighted by her escape.
Interviews with the stony mum and dad of the groom in a Royal Wedding . . . airplane crash . . . story about Vatican plans for combating porn flicks in Madrid . . . chat with the new seven-foot basketball millionaire . . . Remorseless Experimental Revelations of a loony, rich, California household called the Louds. . . . Suppose you decided to take arms against this TV assault on ordinariness, these news-show -documentary -shoot-’emup profiles of the world as Celebrities and Gunshot Wounds. How would you make your move?
Firsi (I should argue) you’d locate the contemporary film-makers— among the best are Richard Leacock and the Frederick Wiseman of High School, but there are dozens of talented others—who’ve shown how dailiness, the “unscripted” thing itself, can be tactfully and artfully filmed, shaped, interpreted. Next, you’d gather together a crowd of foundation and media folk to view samples of this work, much of which has so far been screened only by and for friends of the artists. To this gathering you’d invite a literary historian to review the processes by which middle life made its way into stories and poems, in particular the nineteenthand early-twentieth-century phases of the development, when books and writing mattered to mass audiences as film and TV matter now. (The processes in question are those that made it possible for literary men and women to write unashamedly and unsentimentally about, well, a sensitive, self-pitying father losing control while babysitting ... an adventure-hungry boy breaking up with his girl ... a wife asking her priest’s permission to fantasize about the identity of her bed partner of thirty years . . . a suburban dog owner touched by his dying puppy’s dutifulness in hauling himself to the newspaper to do his business . . .) You’d also ask in a psychologist of some sort to explain to the crowd why it’s dangerous for a population never to see itself clearly, never to experience representations and reorderings of its concerns and activities in works of art (as opposed to formulaic soaps or upbeat family mags).
What else? Possibly you’d need a man or woman of passion to hold forth on the obligations of everyone present to stop nattering about “what the people want” and begin dwelling on the truth that we don’t know what we want until we see what we’re regularly offered. And finally, you’d need a suggestion box— a place for dropping off ideas about people of special interest. (I myself am keen at the moment to see a film artist follow a transfer student from a community college as he or she works at doping out the scene at. say, Williams or Wellesley . . . Also: an hour about a Girl Scout leader’s preparations for a flying-up ceremony together with pieces of the evening, including the singing of “Barges.” couldn’t easily miss . . .)
At a meeting on another subject last month, media people present. I went on for a while as above, and when I arrived home I had a letter from a friend who’s an independent, award-winning TV documentary producer:
Dear Ben:
I didn’t have a chance to tell you Thursday—but the idea of a show about “dailyness” [my friend’s spelling] is not new.
Along with--, Jr.
of----, I own title to a show
called-. It has been making
the rounds at the networks now for two years (unsuccessfully). It is a live-on-tape show, daytime in nature, and wouid focus on special events in the lives of ordinary citizens—marriages, graduations, births, deaths, survival under extraordinary circumstances (floods, hurricanes), the first experience of a child being present at the birth of an animal on a farm, etc. etc. etc. Our list of possible events goes on and on, and although we never used the word “dailyness” to describe it, it is a show about ordinary people, real people, in real life situations. It you are bending the ear of any potential advertisers or network TV people, we’d be delighted to hear about it. I must tell you that TV executives have not shown much interest in dailyness to this point, except if that dailyness can be controlled under soap opera conditions. And we are promising to do an honest show —no hokeyness, basically unscripted . . .
I have an anxiety about “basically” (why not wholly unscripted?). I’m nervous too about putting this enterprise in the hands of a single producer possessing a fixed (with respect, conventional) documentary style. The value of the mirror in the roadwav resided in the variousness of the angles—Stendhal’s, Joyce’s, Hemingway’s, majors, minors, jokers. . . . Shouldn’t we be talking about a medium of expression for scores, maybe even hundreds, of new young workers in film? But alt this is fussbudgetry: the sane response is. Roll ‘Em. If anybody in the readership has a slice of guile about how to move my friend’s idea off the shelf, jot it to me, please, and I’ll see that he gets it quickly.
The good hi-fi is in my study and our current sophomore is home for the summer; hence we’re again proprietors by propinquity of a smoking pop & rock collection. Nights when the sophomore plays ball or improves his mind at the flicks, I check out old favorites—at an obscenely meek (says youth) decibel level—and probe items new’ to me. (I’m hot for The Wailers lately, still regard the witty vocal sounds in A1 Green’s “Call Me” album as this artist’s finest hour, and believe that, in “I’m In Love” and “Until You Come Back To Me,” Aretha Franklin is as variously splendid as she has been, in song, for ages.)
There is, as I admit, a mutability dimension to these pleasures. Summers end and, by experience, I know that after each passage through this musical cycle—learning in June to savor your youngster’s latest stuff; making a joke toward Labor Day as it’s packed back into the college-bound locker—the house seems stiller and emptier than before. (We’re now into our third sophomore.) But I’m miles from a downer at the moment. The real owner of these records heads south in a week or two to visit his friend, and while he’s gone there’ll be shameless larking hereway-out, ludicrously uninhibited midnight singalongs (with Ray Charles), possibly some wild dancing as well.
LIFE & LETTERS CONTRIBUTORS:
Edward Weeks began reviewing for The Atlantic almost fifty years ago.
Elizabeth Janeway’s most recent book is Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening.
Benjamin DeMott is professor of English at Amherst College.
Phoebe Adams contributes regularly to these pages.
POETS IN THIS ISSUE
Greg Kuzma (page 40) is a Nebraska poet whose What Friends Are For was published last year.
Marge Pierey (page 50) is the author of a book of fiction, Small Changes, and a book of poetry. To Be of Use.
Jarold Ramsey (page 63) is on the English faculty at the University of Rochester and is the author of Love In An Earthquake.