Left-Wing Middle-Brow
Act Of Faith: And Other Stories.
By Irwin Shaw.
New York, Random House, 1946. 212 pages. $2.50.
Irwin Shaw’s fiction, as Faulkner says of Popeye’s face, has “the depthless, vicious quality of stamped tin.” But Mr. Shaw must not be dismissed with a single sentence. One must be patient, persistent, willing to point out the faults of his kind of writing for all to se, in the hope it may do some good. Just what is it that makes Mr. Shaw’s fiction so bad and even, in a public sense, so dangerous?
There is his position to consider, though this is not the ultimate thing, for the fault ultimately is his own—his position as a representative of a generation of writers, and as a summary of a period in American cultural life. Mr. Shaw belongs to what has been called the “middle-brow movement,” a movement embracing such figures as Norman Corwin, Bennett Cerf, the editors of the New Yorker, the Luce publications, and the local geniuses of Hollywood. There are many differences among these men; I doubt if they have an altogether conscious program, and yet they are all united in their kind and quality of talent, and in the public which they seek to exploit. They direct their work essentially to the middle class, taking care not to offend too deeply the prejudices of their audience. They believe in writing for the people, in writing clearly and distinctly, that all may grasp their social message.
More specifically, Mr. Shaw belongs to the left wing’ of this movement. This left wing calls itself liberal, is opposed to discrimination and racial intolerance (how adroitly the New Yorker made it bon ton to be against anti Semitism—though it has not as yet been able to forego a peculiarly bourgeois pleasure in the charming malapropisms of colored maids); it is for the United Nations and for reaching an understanding with Russia, etc., etc. I find nothing objectionable in such ends. But the means which both the left wing and the movement as a whole have chosen are extremely vulgar, and exert an effect on literature not unlike that described by Gresham’s Law: bad money cheapens and drives out the good.
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What is so vulgar and harmful in this group, and in the member now under discussion? (Let it be understood—an essential point—that Irwin Shaw does not stand alone.) First there is its rationale: the belief that only the mass media, as presently constituted, can carry a message to the people. Thus, to criticize whatever they think deserving of criticism in American life, the middle-brows must begin by a defense of some of its worst aspects: Hollywood, after all, reaches millions of people, and so does the radio and the press, and there is no time to lose, no time for improvement now (come out of that ivory tower!), improvement must come when it can. So, to change anything, we must begin by accepting nearly everything as it is. Thus the condition for criticism is the suspension of criticism. This is one reason, among others, that these liberals have been called totalitarian: their habit of mind bears a great resemblance to the world outlook of Stalinism.
Irvin Shaw’s style is what is very loosely and inexactly called hard-hitting. It is of a familiar American genus, sprung from Hemingway and his forebears, but lacking their clear rhythms, cleanness, and skill. The following hunk of sentence is typical of Shaw (I am making it up as I go along)—“. . . with the sun coming straight at you, and the girls on the beach in their wide, flopping straw hats, casting a lace-work of shadows over their sloped, bronzed, sea-salted shoulders, remembered the taste of beer and the tuna-fish sandwich sharp to the tongue, now mocking it in the Italian mud, and the light in the hotel window and the clerk’s easy, complaisant grin, and later, on the way home, the wind at your back and the night lying slick in a puddle of neon in the wet streets.” The point in making this up, rather than selecting an actual quotation (e.g. p. 9, last paragraph; p. 128, antepenultimate paragraph; p. 179, last paragraph, etc.) is that it is so easy to do.
The stilted simplicity of this style keeps Mr. Shaw’s writing broadly popular, within reach of the people (who read the New Yorker); its underplaying of emotion enables him to convey his message without seeming to do so. Not that he is not forthright and outspoken; but as everything about him is forthright and outspoken, why distinguish his message from, say, his description of the juke box in a bar? Thus he can deliver a message without having to apologize for it—an old New Yorker trick, except that the method of delivery is already the most abject and groveling of apologies.
Another trait of Mr. Shaw’s delivery is its pseudo-sophistication. He knows everything; that is to say, sex and liquor. He has had all these commodities, not without enjoyment, of course, but nevertheless with just that properly arch touch of weariness, lest any one think him naive. Whatever one needs to keep well informed—a knowledge of Freud, politics, modem painting, and poetry—Shaw has it; his writing, so highly polished, reflects this knowledge at every turn. Never before has shallowness served sophistication so well. And what purpose does sophistication serve? It is the caste mark which the left wing middle-brow, going down among the peasants, never forgets to paste above the bridge of his nose. Aware of the risk in condescending so low, our leftwinger, by his smartness and his tone, assures himself of his place in the group a notch or two above the one for which he writes.
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Such is the style of Mr. Shaw and his colleagues. Yet it is not for style alone that Mr. Shaw is noted, but for the moral attitude which the style embellishes. Here, again, some subtlety is necessary to criticism, for his attitude, as made clear by the title of this collection of stories, as well as by the stories themselves, is one of faith, and faith is something that no one is against. It is in all cases preferable to cynicism—except, I should say, in the present case.
Irwin Shaw has faith in the people, in democracy, in America, the future, etc.—all excellent things to have faith in. Yet the faith in these things that reason would approve (for we are not speaking of sacred mysteries) is not unacquainted with cynicism. Our experience of politics and our knowledge of Marxism, to name only two of the many possible sources of a rational attitude toward the world, have developed in us the sceptical sense. We know that the Declaration of Independence (or the Atlantic Charter or the Communist Manifesto, or any such statement of ends) is a fine thing; we also know, on the strength of experience, that any claim for a political event in the present world, such as “x is a perfect example of end y,” is to be met with scepticism. Moreover, so far as certain claims go, claims, say, that might be made for platform promises in national elections, scepticism, while necessary, is far from sufficient; without a certain cynicism, one would be at the mercy of every party demagogue. (An excellent instance of the necessity of cynicism for understanding politics is afforded by the British Labor party’s campaign promises about the Jews.) Cynicism is of course deplorable; yet it is often justified by our common experience, and if not by common experience, certainly by extreme experience—the shock and destruction of war. Now what I hold against Mr. Shaw’s kind of faith is not that it is faith, but that it is such a prissy and careful faith. Mr. Shaw’s faith does have some apparent connection with cynicism; he does admit at least a reasonable doubt of some of the conventional articles of faith; what is objectionable is that he is so quick to quash it.
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Thus in the title story. Seeger, the Jewish soldier-hero of “Act of Faith,” wants to go on a spree with his Gentile buddies. They lack money. Seeger has in his possession a Lueger, taken from a German officer whom he killed. He can sell the gun for $65, enough to go to Paris. But he receives a letter from home in which his father tells him that his brother, discharged from the army on account of “combat fatigue,” imagines that the streets are full of armed mobs out to get the Jews. Perhaps, adds the father, and Seeger shares his doubt, he is not so crazy after all. Perhaps it is we who go on as if nothing has happened, nothing were threatened, who are the real madmen. What shall Seeger do? Shall he hold on to his Lueger? Who knows, he may need it some day—not as a plugged memento, but as a weapon in self-defense. But America. . . . Realizing that he will have to trust his buddies on the streets at home far more than he ever relied on them in the battlefields, he decides to sell his gun and raise the money they need. “Forget it,” says Seeger to his friends when they express their regret at seeing him part with his prized gun. “What could I use it for in America?”
The faith in America is admirable; it is the chance we all take, willingly, gladly, with our eyes open. But how much weight does Mr. Shaw really allow the alternative? It is presented through a ruined mind; the soldier who trembles in fear is, after all, psychotic. Yet what about the hypothesis that it is the rest of us, going about as though nothing had happened, who are the insane? Merely a gesture, not followed through.
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It is here that the fault lies in this all-too ready and too-fluent faith: it shows no appetite for struggle, for doubt. But no faith today can be so certain as to call doubt madness. It is in fact the mark of all genuine faith that while the affirmative choice is made, the struggle toward it is great and uneven, and the adversary is not slighted. All the rest is complacence.
It is precisely such complacence that exposes the moral pretensions of the school and the movement to which Mr. Shaw belongs. The criticism of society which proceeds from this direction is self-undermined, for it is full of the images, the rhythms, the poses, the easy values of the successful middle layer, the middle competence, the middle-brow. Conscience is troubled—yet whose is not these days? For which reason it is so simple a matter to satisfy it—a story of five thousand words in which the hero strikes the posture of easy fortitude does the trick neatly.
The left-wing middle-brow obtains the flattery of action, the illusion that something has been done, for himself and his audience, among whom, to the greater detriment of American taste, complacence spreads like a yawn. What does it matter that our hero is not a human being to begin with, that all those bravely faked words are choked off by mashed potatoes, and that that guts-and-Dry Martini attitude toward life is the very thing we must avoid in the interest of what is truly liberal and free? What indeed does it matter? It is not taste, not art, not truth that shall save us, but that advanced sophisticated vulgarity, always carefully a notch or two above the people for whom the good fight is fought.
