Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [120]
Naturally, our government agencies go in for questionnaires, and on a scale which amazes Europeans, used though they are to bureaucracy. One of the biggest post-Hitler best sellers in Germany was Ernst von Salomon’s Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire), an autobiography written in the form of answers to the stupefyingly complex set of questions by which the American authorities tried—and failed—to decide who had “really” been a Nazi. Refugees wishing to flee to the land of liberty must be able to supply an enormous mass of personal data, including every address they have had for the past twenty-five years. The inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty should be revised: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, provided they have satisfactorily filled out forms 3584-A through 3597-Q.”
Our popular fiction is curiously affected by our mania for information. We are fascinated by the lingo, the folkways, the techniques peculiar to a profession or a social group, and we want to get the inside dope on the way of life of a telephone linesman, a Renaissance nobleman, a professional game hunter in Africa. The charms of many a best-selling historical novel are not all to be found inside the heroine’s bodice. The late Samuel Shellabarger, for example, who made a small fortune turning out this kind of merchandise, had no success until he spent three years “getting up” the background for a heavily documented piece of nonsense called Captain from Castile. This was followed by three more erudite best sellers entitled Prince of Foxes (the author’s clever name for Machiavelli), The King’s Cavalier, and Lord Vanity; and Dr. Shellabarger—he was, fittingly, a professor of English—was at work writing, or rather researching, a fifth when he died in 1954. An obituary noted that he “did painstaking background research for his historical swashbucklers, studying the literature, the customs, and the other externals of the period. ‘I suppose I am a fool,’ he once said, ‘but if I have a character going from one side of the city to another, I want to know what he sees and hears.’” What he thinks and feels might also have been interesting, though probably not in this particular instance.
In the art workshops of the Renaissance, the figures in the foreground were done by the master, while the apprentices filled in the background, a sensible division of labor which has been inverted by the fiction hacks of today, who work up the background with great care and botch in a few lay figures to carry the story. The same process may be observed in the evolution of The New Yorker profiles, which began thirty years ago as brief studies in personality and have grown steadily more encumbered with documentation, until often the reader feels he has learned everything about the subject except what kind of a person he is. Or in the Luce magazines’ obsession with factual trivia—a huge and expensive research department produces a weekly warehouseful of certified, pasteurized, 100 per cent double-checked Facts, and everything is accurate about any given article except its main points. Or in Hollywood, which gives us miracles in “authenticity” of costume and furniture, all verified by experts, but doesn’t bother about the authenticity of the human beings who wear the costumes and sit on the period chairs, reversing Marianne Moore’s famous description of the poet as one who creates “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” (In Hollywood, the gardens are real but the toads are synthetic and all of them are named Natalie Wood.)
A case in point is the best-selling novel, Andersonville, a sprawling compost heap of historical research piled up by MacKinlay Kantor, one of our most diligent and successful literary artisans. Or cf., the typical Saturday Evening Post story. In one