Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [123]
But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.
The quality that all these celebrations of the Fact, from the Satevepost to Moby-Dick, have in common is knowingness. “This is the way it is.” One could add The Red Badge of Courage, a tour de force of the Knowing (“You think a battle is a planned, orderly affair, but it’s really like this”) which has been overrated; Stendhal and Tolstoy did it first—and better, raising the knowing to the higher plane of understanding. There is Hemingway: “This is how you go about shooting water buffalo. You take a .44 Borley-Thompson express rifle with supercharger and you...” Or Fitzgerald: “Let me tell you just what it is like to be very rich in the United States in 1924.” Or their epigone, John O’Hara, who, lacking their passion and their sense of literary form, depends wholly on verisimilitude, which he gets by a magisterial “placing” of each character at his or her precise social level by means of carefully discriminated details, so that in O’Hara’s world (though possibly not in the real one) a Yale man gets drunk in a wholly different way from a Penn State man. Knowingness was the stock-in-trade of Rudyard Kipling, the only widely popular writer since Dickens who can be called a genius (though of course a much lesser one). The note is struck in the opening sentences of most of his Plain Tales from the Hills, as:
Far back in the seventies, before they built any public offices at Simla and the broad road round Jakko lived in a pigeon-hole in the P.W.D. hovels, her parents made Miss Gaurey marry Colonel Schreiderling.
Or:
There are more ways of running a horse to suit your book than pulling his head off in the straight. Some men forget this. Understand clearly that all racing is rotten—as everything connected with losing money must be. In India, in addition to its inherent rottenness, it has the merit of being two-thirds sham...Every one knows every one else far too well for business purposes. How on earth can you rack and harry and post a man for his losings, when you are fond of his wife, and live in the same Station with him?...If a man wants your money he ought to ask for it...instead of juggling about the country with an Australian larrikin, a “brumby,” with as much breed as the boy, a brace of chumars in gold-laced caps, three or four ekka-ponies with hogged manes, and a switch-tailed demirep of a mare called Arab because she has a kink in her flag. Racing lead to the shroff quicker than anything else.
Being Kitsch—though of the highest grade—Kipling’s Plain Tales exploit the realistic method rather than use it. His is a bright, dramatic, easily assimilated kind of naturalism, so entertaining that it brings out more clearly than more serious works could one reason for our thirst for the Facts: namely, that the modern world being vast, abstract, and hard to understand, there is something reassuring about a hard, definite Fact. Because we can understand the parts—the Facts—we have the comforting illusion that we understand the whole. And Kipling enhances the appeal of his Facts by limiting them to a very small world. All the folklore, the customs, the gossip, the social color and feel of British India in the late nineteenth century are there, handled with the affection and the untroubled mastery of the village historian. He invites us right inside, and we feel at home, as we cannot in the uncomfortably complex real world. The peculiar charm of Kipling’s India, like Gatsby’s Long Island or D’Artagnan’s France or Dickens’ London, lies partly in the knowingness with which it is presented.
May not much of Senator McCarthy’s puzzling success—how did he get so far on so little?—be laid to the mingled boredom and fear the American feels vis-à-vis world politics, the boredom being caused by inability to understand and the fear by inability to act. Like Kipling, McCarthy created a small, neat, understandable world—cops and robbers, to be continued in our next headlines—in which the issues were reduced to personalities, the shadings eliminated