The Age of Defeat Read online

  The plays of Arthur Miller again reveal the same preoccupation with the individual who is defeated by society or by his own passions. Miller’s major work, Death of a Salesman, is interesting because it is about an organization man and his defeat. Its enormous success in America was undoubtedly due to the fact that so many Americans felt just like Miller about the organization, about the Protestant ethic of success, about the struggle to keep going and pay off the installments on the washing machine and the car and the mortgage on the house.

  The interest is centered on two characters: Willy Loman, the worn-out salesman who has devoted his life to the organization and the American success legend, and is now tired, perpetually nagged by money worries, and on the point of being cold-bloodedly fired by the organization; and his son, Biff, a Beat Generation character who doesn’t know what he wants out of life or how to get it, the “crazy mixed-up kid” who has been completely taken in by his father’s talk about material success and who now drifts from job to job, hopelessly lost.

  There is no action in the play. By various expressionistic devices, Miller reveals the complete bankruptcy—financial and spiritual—of this “typical American home.” Even so, it is doubtful whether the Great American Public realized that an attack on its way of life was intended. (Miller records hearing one member of the audience leaving the theater with the comment, “I always knew that New England territory was no good.”) And the cause of Biff’s embitterment, his resentment of his father, is obscured by having him discover Willy in a state of undress with another woman. The fact that it is Willy’s hitch-your-wagon-to-a-star philosophy that is responsible for Biff’s lostness is overlaid for the sake of a theatrically effective scene.

  The play is a gloomy indictment of the Protestant ethic of success, of the idea of society as hero. But Miller’s weakness lies in his lack of imaginative vision. He can condemn the Protestant ethic, but he has nothing to put in its place. He can reject the organization, but he has not shown a single example of fruitful individualism. This is even more apparent in his next two plays, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge. Both these plays, it goes without saying, are about defeat. The villain of The Crucible is society; its main theme is the Salem witch trials and, by implication, the McCarthy witch hunt. But the play also deals with one of Miller’s more dubious themes, the need for atonement for sin (or, rather, for wrongdoing, for I doubt whether Miller would like to be thought religious). Proctor, the “hero” of the play (insofar as it has a hero—Miller is more interested in its villains), has gone to bed with Abigail, the girl who starts the witch hunt. So when, at the end of the play, he prefers to be hanged rather than to sign a confession that will save his life, he goes to the scaffold feeling that he has atoned for his sin. (This theme of atonement occurs in an earlier play, All My Sons, where its relevance seems just as dubious—although it certainly makes for “good theater.”)

  A View from the Bridge has for its central character a sort of later version of the Hairy Ape. Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman who seems to be partly in love with his niece, Catherine. When she falls in love with Rodolpho, an illegal Italian immigrant, he becomes increasingly jealous, and when he knows she has had sexual relations with Rodolpho, his jealousy rises to a frenzy. He then betrays Rodolpho to the immigration authorities. But Catherine determines to marry Rodolpho: if she does so, he will be able to remain in America. In a final outburst, Eddie attacks Rodolpho’s brother with a knife and is stabbed himself. The play seems curiously pointless. One is left uncertain as to which forces have destroyed Eddie, or what it all amounts to anyway, except as another demonstration of a man’s defeat.

  But in the preface to his plays, Miller has at least one remark that goes to the core of the problem:

  Not only in the drama, but in sociology, psychiatry and religion, the past half-century has created an almost overwhelming documentation of man as a nearly passive creation of environment…. If only from the dramatic point of view, this dictum cannot be accepted as final… It is no more “real,” however, for drama to “liberate” itself from this vice by the route of romance and the spectacle of free will and a new heroic formula than it is “real” now to represent man’s defeat as the ultimate implication of an overwhelming determinism.

  This may be true, but Miller gives the impression that he belongs to the defeat tradition.

  For a writer who is regarded in America as an intellectual (or an “egghead,” as Time magazine called him), there is very little intellectual fiber in his plays. He emerges as an emotionalist, making his emotional protest against the Protestant ethic in Death of a Salesman and since then adding very little that is constructive to that protest. If his ultimate aim is to show men who are not “passive creations of environment,” he cannot claim to have accomplished it yet. Insofar as his characters react against environment, it is an emotional rebellion that has no more intellectual content than the revolt of James Dean or the “Beats.” When Miller spoke of “romance and the spectacle of free will and a new heroic formula,” he was probably thinking of a return of the old Drury Lane melodramas in a modern setting, something on an altogether less serious level than his own work. But one wonders whether Miller has thought carefully about the possibility of creating a more positive character of revolt than Willy or Biff Loman. As a symptom of free will and revolt, The Organization Man is more heartening than Death of a Salesman; certainly more constructive and analytical. Here, perhaps, is the direction that Miller has missed since Death of a Salesman.

  But if Miller has failed so far to create an inner-directed man, he is at least conscious of the necessity. He has started to break away from the tradition of man totally dominated by society or his own weaknesses. Elmer Rice had been the first American dramatist to catch this tone of total defeat, in his expressionistic fantasy, The Adding Machine, a sort of dramatized 1984 about a clerk who has worked for the same firm for twenty-five years and is now about to be replaced by an adding machine. At the end of the play, Mr. Zero (now in heaven) learns that he must return to earth for many more incarnations, and is destined to end as a slave working a super-adding machine in a coal mine. Rice’s later play, Street Scene, is about a New York tenement; its bewildered characters, in Miller’s phrase, are more helpless reflections of their environment. The basic assumptions of Rice—bewilderment and defeat—are the main themes of O’Neill and Williams. Even if Miller’s revolt is emotional and unconstructive, as it has been to date, the revolt in itself suggests that the Rice formula is out of date and that the time has arrived to consider some new hypothesis.

  When one surveys the total field of modern American writing, one sees to what extent the hero has become a passive figure. It is as if the Protestant ethic had drained literature of all vitality, of everything but an exhausted realism. As expounded by the American businessman, the Protestant ethic had emphasized the need for a man to better himself, to display energy and vitality; but the “bettering” was purely material, the vitality was to be directed solely towards money-making. No writer can work upon such assumptions; if he swallows them consciously, they will produce a state of emotional indigestion.

  This is perhaps what happened to American writing; Sinclair Lewis’s satire on the American businessman, Babbitt, was no bitter condemnation; Babbitt is a bumbling, pottering, American Mr. Polly, and rather lovable. Dreiser’s An American Tragedy shows the defeat of a man who has accepted the Protestant ethic, but Clyde Griffiths ends in the death cell as a victim of fate (in the Hardy manner) rather than as a dupe of the go-getter ethic.

  One other American writer, who could hardly be ignored in a survey of contemporary writing, I have left until this point because, to some extent, his work stands outside these trends. Hemingway’s cosmopolitanism seems to have saved him from the tone of utter defeat that pervades the work of most contemporary American writers. Because his subjects are the Canadian backwoods, the bull rings of Spain, fishing in Florida, hunting in Africa, he can command a more vital, individualistic
tone than most of his contemporaries and his younger American imitators. And he is interesting because he undoubtedly feels the need for a more heroic, individualistic tone. After the stunted heroes of Dos Passos, Anderson, Lewis, Sinclair, and the others, it is a relief to turn to The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms and to find men who are still enthusiastic about fine mornings, good wine, sex, sport, and being alive. Yet, as the years have gone by, Hemingway has shown himself to be a child of his time. In the early books there was a feeling of active revolt against the unheroic premise of his contemporaries (he wrote a satire on Anderson). In A Farewell to Arms, in the scene with the ants on the burning log, he gloomily concludes that it is impossible to win against life: “You died. You did not know what it was all about. You never had time to learn… Stay around and they would kill you.” It is almost as if this was Hemingway’s acknowledgment of defeat. After A Farewell to Arms, sensitivity seems to have disappeared from his work. Green Hills of Africa retains the optimism and refusal to be defeated, at the cost of complete insensitivity. It is a retreat from the complexity of life, a literary back-to-nature act. This is also true of his much-praised story The Old Man and the Sea, which seems to me to be a highly suspect work of fake simplicity, from which all his earlier virtues have been subtracted—the contemporary relevance, the sense of moral bewilderment. The individualism, the heroism, has hardened into a sort of dramatic gesture, which made one critic, reviewing To Have and Have Not, complain that she wished Mr. Hemingway would come out from behind the hair on his chest. Hemingway’s achievement and influence are undeniable, but to his younger imitators he must seem a walking declaration that defeat is unavoidable.

  Some of these younger imitators are studied in Edmund Wilson’s excellent essay, “The Boys in the Back Room” (in Classics and Commercials). He writes of James M. Cain, John O’Hara, William Saroyan, Hans Otto Storm, and John Steinbeck. As Mr. Wilson points out, the cultural foundations of these writers are altogether narrower than those of the older generation. Reading their work tends to produce a slightly stifled feeling. They add to the Hemingway sense of defeat a feeling of writing in a narrow room (hence, perhaps, Mr. Wilson’s title). There is no deep sense of Nature (as in Hemingway), and no sense whatever of man as an evolving spiritual being. Society comes first and last. Their work is all of people: people are its limit and its horizon.

  Then there is the Beat Generation. For English readers, its best-known representatives are the novelist Jack Kerouac and the poet Allen Ginsberg. There can be no possible doubt that they represent a kind of revolt: but it is difficult to discover a great deal more. Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, is dedicated to the sense of speed. It is told by a narrator who hitchhikes around the country, drinks too much, listens to jazz, tries to seduce girls (unsuccessfully), returns to his home town, and prepares to start all over again. It would seem to be the other side of the coin from Riesman’s Found Generation, a complete rejection of security. In an article in the Chicago Review, Kerouac says: “The new American poetry as typified by the San Francisco Renaissance (which means Ginsberg, me, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, McClure, Corso, Gary Snyder, Phil Lamantia, Philip Whalen, I guess) is a kind of new-old Zen lunacy poetry, writing whatever comes into your head.” After expounding his principle for half a page, Kerouac refers caustically to Eliot and “his dreary negative rules like the objective correlative, etc., which is just a lot of constipation.” Zen is often mentioned by these writers; apparently it symbolizes for them pure instinct, a revolt against intellect and the “higher criticism” that the Americans have shown such skill in developing over the past twenty years.

  The San Francisco school achieves vigor at the expense of content. Kerouac has further expounded his anti-classic principle in the Evergreen Review, in a piece called “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” which ends: “If possible, write ‘without consciousness’ in semi-trance.” He uses sexual symbolism, speaks of writing as an “orgasm,” and says, “Come from within.” T. E. Hulme has expressed the objection to this in a single clear image: “The bird attained whatever grace its shape possesses not as a result of the mere desire for flight, but because it had to fly in air, against gravitation.” In view of the freshness that the San Francisco school have brought to their writing, it seems a pity to beat them over the head with Hulme. But because their writing does seem to be a revolt, a pure reflex action against other-direction, it is difficult to feel much faith in its outcome. The successful revolutionist takes care to appear constitutional.

  American literature in the twentieth century, then, supports the analyses of Riesman and Whyte. It shows two main tendencies, which could be labeled Society as Hero and Society as Villain. In either case, the individual is reduced to a cipher to be defeated and crushed, or to fit in quietly and place his virtues at the service of the organization, like Prewett in From Here to Eternity. There would seem to be no third way.

  The English Scene

  J. B. Priestley’s Thoughts in the Wilderness, which I have already mentioned, might be regarded as raw material for a sociological study of contemporary England along the same lines as The Lonely Crowd. The salient point that emerges is that modern English society is more other-directed than a good Englishman might like to think.

  In England, as in America, the character of the younger generation is formed mainly by television and the cinema. When the rock-’n’-roll film Rock Around the Clock came to England in 1956, there were scenes of rowdyism in cinemas all over the country. Teen-agers jived in the aisles or on the stage and started fights when they were interrupted. (Similar scenes were reported from Germany.) The youth of England also showed itself in no way behind the youth of America in the hysteria with which it greeted visiting crooners, from Frank Sinatra to Johnny Ray. And local watch committees have made it clear that they believe that films depicting juvenile delinquency have an influence on teen-age audiences; Marlon Brando’s film The Wild Ones has been almost universally banned in the British Isles. (I have already quoted Harrison Salisbury on the influence of such films on American teen-agers.)

  The tendency to cater to the other-direction of adult audiences has been seen over the past ten years or so in such popular radio and TV programs as Mrs. Dale’s Diary, The Archers, Starr and Company. Such programs are concerned with ordinary people, and their level of interest is usually about that of a Girl’s Crystal serial story. It is true, of course, that there has been a magazine market for this type of material for the past thirty years; but the audience reached by radio or television is immensely wider than that reached by Woman’s Own. It is hardly necessary to point out the contrast with the popular literature of a century or more ago, in which the female reader was invited to identify herself with the heroine and to imagine herself in situations that required some degree of inner-direction. From Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa down through Byron’s heroines to the women of Victorian melodrama, the female reader was persuaded to imagine herself in extraordinary situations from which she could extricate herself only by strength of character. And perhaps the classic example is that favorite heroine of the silent film, the girl who, though tied to the railway line, still refused to surrender her maidenhood to the villain. This, of course, might be a mixed blessing (as Joyce’s portrait of Gerty Macdowell in Ulysses showed), but it undoubtedly encouraged a sense of idealism, of standards of conduct that are outside the personal interests of the reader. The Mrs. Dale’s Diary type of entertainment derives its popularity from a sort of flattery of its audience. “You may be ordinary, but you’re better off that way.” The everyday life of the audience is taken as the norm. The good characters are socially well-adjusted; the bad ones tend to be curmudgeons or are obviously self-centered. The conflicts portrayed are those of ordinary life, on a level of conscientious triviality. And yet the technique differs from that of the folk drama of the past in having no particular center of gravity; plays like Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Master Pathelin were uninhibited farces, while the Yorkshire Tragedy used its ma
terial in the manner of a modern thriller. The Mrs. Dale’s Diary type of serial takes care to fall into no category; its aim is to impress its audience as ordinary life.

  This is typical of England in the mid-twentieth century, and it is, perhaps, an English equivalent of the Main Street and Ten North Frederick trend in the United States. It is a sign of the all-dominating cult of the “ordinary chap” that has for many years pervaded English, as well as American, literature. Mr. Priestley has said of the young English novelists that as a rule their central characters are too deliberately unheroic. But the trend he is observing has been developing for several decades, and he himself has contributed something to it. (His family in Laburnam Grove are close relations of the Archers and the Dales.)

  In England in the 1950’s, there has been a certain movement of revolt among serious writers. Some critics have therefore felt that things may not be so bad after all. (Throughout the 1940’s, it was a critical commonplace to say that the novel was at an end, and some critics even expressed a fear that the work of the Joyce-Eliot generation had made it impossible for literature to go any further.) It is interesting to examine some of these new writers by the standards of Riesman and Whyte, and to see how far their revolt is actually a new direction.