Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [28]
But only made it smaller with their art...
And I have seen and heard you in the dry
Close-huddled furnace of the city street
Where the parched moon was planted in the sky
And the limp air hung dead against the heat.
Eliot echoes in the last four lines as Homer does in the section on Pickett’s charge:
So they came on in strength, light-footed, stepping like deer,
So they died or were taken. So the iron entered their flesh
Even Kipling’s ballad manner:
Thirteen sisters beside the sea
Builded a house called Liberty
And locked the doors with a stately key.
None should enter it but the free.
(Have a care, my son.)
Nor are humbler poetic models spurned:
She was the white heart of the birch...
Her sharp clear breasts
Were two young victories in the hollow darkness
And when she stretched her hands above her head
And let the spun fleece ripple to her loins,
Her body glowed like deep springs under the sun.
Mr. Benét is a master of the built-in reaction; it is impossible not to identify the emotion he wants to arouse. Sometimes solemn, sometimes gay, always straining to put it across, like a night-club violinist. Play, gypsy, play! One is never puzzled by the unexpected. The Wingates are Southern aristocrats and they are proud and generous and they live in a big white house with pillars. Abe Lincoln is gaunt, sad, kindly and “tough as a hickory rail.” John Brown is strong, simple, fanatical—and “he knew how to die.” Robert E. Lee does present a problem since no national cliché has been evolved for him. Mr. Benét begins cautiously: “He was a man, and as a man he knew / Love, separation, sorrow, joy and death.” Safe enough. But he still hasn’t found his footing by the end: “He wanted something. That must be enough. / Now he rides Traveller back into the west.” A puzzling figure.
The final judgment on the United States is ambiguous: “the monster and the sleeping queen.” For Mr. Benét on the one hand doesn’t want to sell America short but on the other he doesn’t want to make a fool of himself—the Midcult writer is always worried about those superior, sneering intellectuals, however he pretends to despise them. The ambivalence becomes a little frantic in the closing lines: “So when the crowd gives tongue / And prophets old and young / Bawl out their strange despair / Or fall in worship there, / Let them applaud the image or condemn, / But keep your distance and your soul from them.... / If you at last must have a word to say, / Say neither, in their way, / ‘It is a deadly magic and accursed’ / Nor ‘It is blest’ but only ‘It is here.’” The American fear of ideas (bawling prophets) and in fact of consciousness (If you must have a word to say) has seldom been more naïvely expressed. Or the American device for evading these terrors: Let’s stick to the facts; or, Say only “It is here.” For ideas might lead to conclusions.
XII
The Enemy is clear. J.B.’s three comforters are men of ideas—Freudian, Marxist, theological—and each is presented as a repulsive bigot. (In the ’thirties, Mr. MacLeish would have given the Marxist better lines.) Mr. Wilder does it more suavely:
Belligerent man at back of auditorium: Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?
Mr. Webb (editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel): Oh yes, everybody is—somethin’ terrible. Seems like they spend most of their time talking about who’s rich and who’s poor.
Belligerent man: Then why don’t they do something about it?
Mr. Webb: Well, I dunno. I guess we’re all hunting like everybody else for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome can sink to the bottom. But it ain’t easy to find....Are there any other questions?
Lady in a box: Oh, Mr. Webb? Mr. Webb, is there any culture or love of beauty in Grover’s Corners?
Mr. Webb: Well, ma’am, there ain’t much—not in the sense you mean....But maybe this is the place to tell you that we’ve got a lot of pleasures of a kind here: we like the sun comin’ up over the mountain in the morning, and we all notice a good