Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [26]
Manuel Garcia climbed the stairs to Don Miguel Retana’s office. He set down his suitcase and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Manuel, standing in the hallway, felt there was someone in the room. He felt it through the door.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and the harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
The contrast continues—disciplined, businesslike understatement v. the drone of the pastiche parable, wordy and sentimental (“the flag of permanent defeat” fairly nudges us to sympathize). And all those “ands.”
“Undefeated” is 57 pages long, as against Old Man’s 140, but not only does much more happen in it but also one feels that more has happened than is expressed, so to speak, while Old Man gives the opposite impression. “Undefeated” has four people in it, each with a name and each defined through his words and actions; Old Man has no people, just two Eternal, Universal types. Indeed, for three-fourths it has one only one, since The Boy doesn’t go along on the fishing trip. Perhaps a Kafka could have made something out of it, but in Hemingway’s realistic manner it is monotonous. “Then he began to pity the great fish”—that sort of thing. At times the author, rather desperate one imagines, has him talk to the fish and to the birds. He also talks to his hand: “How does it go, hand?” In “Undefeated,” the emotion arises naturally out of the dialogue and action, but in Old Man, since there’s little of either, the author has to spell it out. Sometimes he reports the fisherman’s improbable musings: “He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought....Thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them, although they are more noble and more able.” Sometimes the author tips us off: “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it.” (A humble man who knows he has attained humility seems to me a contradiction in terms.) This constant editorializing—an elementary sin against which I used to warn my Creative Writing class at Northwestern University—contrasts oddly with the stripped, no-comment method that made the young Hemingway famous. “I am a strange old man,” the hero tells The Boy. Prove it, old man, don’t say it.
Our Town is an extraordinarily skillful bit of craftsmanship. I think it is practically actor-proof, which is why it is so often given by local dramatic societies. With that literary sensibility which has enabled him to fabricate each of his books in a different mode, a miracle of imitative versatility, Mr. Wilder has here made the final statement of the midbrows’ nostalgia for small-town life, as Norman Rockwell has done it for the lowbrows in his Post covers. Our Town’s combination of quaintness, earthiness, humor, pathos and sublimity (all mild) is precisely Rockwell’s, and the situations are curiously alike: puppy lovers at the soda fountain, wives gossipping over the back fence, decent little funerals under the pines, country editor, family doctor, high-school baseball hero, all running in their well-worn grooves. What gives the play class, raising it into Midcult, are the imaginary props and sets and the interlocutory stage manager, devices Mr. Wilder got from the Chinese theater (he always gets them from somewhere). Brecht used similar devices to get his “alienation effect,” to keep the audience from being hypnotized by the stage illusion—an original and hence