Renata Adler - After the Tall Timber

I think that is our special note — we cut across. Across ages, idioms, stresses, cultural values, memories. At a moment of polarization, and other clichés that drain the language of meaning, the continuity of the American story seems to rest just now in us. The first age group to experience in its youth a murderous overvalue on precocity (which leads now to an idiot generational impasse), we held back. We grew up separately, without a rhetoric, drawing our ideas from age and cultural groups already formed, as we were not. The idiom of Another World is no more foreign to us than The Green Hornet , Joseph Conrad, The New York Review of Books , bourbon no more or less our own than marijuana is. Unaware of each other until now, we are in it all. Some of us have dropped a generation back, to lead a student movement that belies everything we are. Others have taken their positions quietly, in society as it was before we came and as, in the years of its most annihilating smugness, it nearly killed us off. But most of us, I think, were formed and remain one by one — formed by books and by the media, but, through the accident of our span of history, formed alone. And now I think we are a force.

In a way, in culture and in politics, we are the last custodians of language — because of the books we read and because history, in our time, has rung so many changes on the meaning of terms and we, having never generationally perpetrated anything, have no commitment to any distortion of them. Lacking slogans, we still have the private ear for distinctions, for words. I happen to know no one who regularly watches Another World (although millions of Americans clearly do), or who would watch it — except to do a piece on materialism, escapism, pop culture or something. But that is the point. I know of no one whose cultural and political experience I completely share. And yet there are elements of my soap hours that seem common to a particular, still unaccounted-for sort of activist in early middle years: on the set, a sense of the human condition and the rhythm of life, with endless recapitulations for those who have not been watching, going forward; in ourselves, the bouts of muteness, watching and inertia, the sense of work one ought to do in what is going on, the patience with continuity, even the nostalgia for a kind of corniness. And always a characteristic quality of attention, at a certain humorous remove from our own experience. Lacking an idiom entirely our own, we cannot adopt any single voice without a note of irony. (I can’t write about the soap operas, or anything that does not make specific, human claims for action on my part, with perfect seriousness.) A suspicion of glibness or fluency has made the generation immediately after us value the rhetorical and inarticulate. Not us. We all seem to view the world still in words, as writers, arguers, archivists — even, perhaps even especially, those who do not write. In strange times, we have kept our language, energies and heads. (It is no surprise that the disturbances at San Francisco State dissolved under police called in by one — albeit aging and not very profound — semanticist.) And we are here.

I think the historical bridge and the moral limits of our experience — mine anyway — were defined in World War II, which most of us still remember as The War. Totalitarianism, freedom, genocide, courage, passion, gentleness, a community of decent men, most of my conceptions of idealism, the monstrous and the public world date from that war, in which we were too young to have a part. And the bland repressions and unacknowledged disillusion of the succeeding years. Everyone looked alike or tried to, every sort of maverick was cut off and lost. Art was the province of ladies’ painting and lecture clubs; intelligence was subsumed in the grand idea of American know how. The schools were levellers for the general mediocrity; unions, parodying their origins and aims, were becoming entrenched forces for corruption and reaction. Odd cliffs were papered over. When, on his birthday in 1956, Adam Clayton Powell announced his support for Dwight David Eisenhower for president, the Republican candidate sent a birthday present to the people of Harlem — white trucks full of black cupcakes — and the present was graciously received. The dream everywhere was going flat. Teachers, who had begun in the Depression when, on the basis of their regular salaries, they could afford maids and were considered rich, were now poorer, embittered and threatened by any sort of difference. In small towns, in a travesty of the New Deal dream of education, teachers had risen above their own class to the extent that their brothers and their colleagues’ brothers — contractors and factory workers — were no longer good enough for them. They seldom married. They subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and Reader’s Digest and shared the general passion for the ordinary. Our rebellions then, in the years when the sum of hope was to be adjusted and popular, when boys still broke themselves at team sports on a military model, which would never be of use to them again (when, in fact, people still spoke of the Army for anybody as making a man of him), were separate and one by one, and threw us back, unknowing, on the past. Some of us cut school and invented juvenile delinquency, others read.

What I am trying to say is that if there is any age group that should loathe what is called the System in its bones that group is us. We had it, in spite of Korea, at its height — the years when society was going, to its own satisfaction, so extremely well; when telephones, neon signs, subways, Western Union worked, as they haven’t since; and when, through and after Senator Joseph McCarthy, the spirit of the redneck, the junior college and the drum majorette had spread so deep into the land. I think the first post-war jolt the System had in its complacency, in our time, was not social or humanitarian, but technological: in 1957, when Sputnik went up. After that, there began to be a little room for change and mavericks, who, when there is not a desperate community lie at the heart of things, are the rule. But in the interim, before the general boredom had begun to lift, we, one by one, had made some beginnings, some progress on all the public and private fronts that now exist — frontiers that polarization, paradoxically, obscures and language has to be hard won and individual to approach at all.

Accessible, almost by generational default, to all the idioms of America, we also went overseas. We were the first non-military age group to travel internationally on an almost national scale. We knew, since we had been at the mercy of institutions so utterly, what institutions were like at home, and what American tourists were like, and were treated like, abroad. But there is a particular totalitarian lie at the heart of political cliché too, and the simplicities of “imperialism,” “genocide,” “materialism,” “police brutality,” “military-industrial complex,” “racism,” tossed about as though they were interchangeable, and as though they applied equally to anything with which one is out of temper, are not for us. Neither are the simplicities of anti-Communism, free world, “violence,” and “radicalism” itself. We observed in The War the literal extreme of violence that men have done so far. Since then, bombs dropping on villages, cops beating kids on the head, kids throwing bottles at cops, the violence to the spirit of the McCarthy years, the violation of human dignity in exclusion and poverty — there is a degree of violence in them all, but a difference of degree, an extent of metaphor, and we still distinguish among literalisms, metaphors, questions of degree. Or radicalism. A radicalism that draws its terms from the System’s violence in Vietnam, then claims to be driven to revolutionary violence of its own, and, as an act of revolution, turns upon the liberal universities has an inauthentic ring, a ring of sublimation, theater. If revolutionary outrage over Vietnam had had a substantive thrust of Guevara courage on the line, there would have been American brigades fighting for Hanoi — a disaster for the country, surely, but a disaster in authentic terms. (The white revolutionary movement certainly left the American South, where the physical risk was high, fast enough.) There is an authentic radicalism in this country now, but it does not abuse the metaphor of revolution. It is not the radicalism of rhetoric, theater, mannerism, psychodrama, air. And it is not paralyzed in its own unconsummated moral impulses by viewing every human problem at a single level of atrocity.