A Peculiar Liberal Voice
The Unfinished Country.
by Max Lerner.
Simon and Schuster. 733 pp. $7.50.
One may clasify the nature of Mr. Max Lerner’s work in many ways (none of them quite satisfactory). He is a journalist or contemporary historian or sociologist or interpreter—vague word—of that still vaguer thing, American civilization; his own description of himself is “a cryptographer of our time.” This work he carries on in several capacities—teacher, lecturer, scholar—but none, I would guess, is more liberating, more congenial to his preoccupations and his kind of perception than that of columnist in the New York Post. Certainly The Unfinished Country, a selection of his columns of the past ten years, testifies to a perfect coming together of calling and occasion. The columns get written, he tells us, here and there—in his lap, as it were—usually in the small hours of the morning, and are about anything that happens to interest him at the moment: a book, a play, a death, a news story, a public figure, occasionally a family matter. Read in bulk, they convey an enviable picture of Mr. Lerner as a man who has a feeling for everything (aroused, perhaps, because he has a column to write, but so much the better for him) and who is not only permitted but expected to express it. A man who, as the literary critics say, has with little trouble found his voice—and is not displeased at the way it sounds. The picture of a man doing what he so much enjoys doing is as rare as it is enviable.
Mr. Lerner is unique among American columnists, not only because his “field” is practically indefinable, but because of the very special relation he sets up with his readers. He does not tell them, as all other columnists do, what lies behind the news or what is going on else-where in the world; his readers are the subject of his columns, and it is they themselves he interprets. Ranging easily from the marital difficulties of Ingrid Bergman to the multiple murders committed by a psychotic boy to problems like McCarthyism, desegregation, academic freedom (while stopping now and then to make a plea for tolerance toward homosexuals), Mr. Lerner gently but earnestly lectures, prods, explains, always acting as the middleman and message-bearer between the professional students of American civilization—primarily the sociologists and social psychologists—and their subjects. But he is less a popularizer than a counsellor. He wants Americans to know that there are pundits and professors and authors and playwrights who have found significant methods by which to understand their behavior. And he wants to persuade them to look at their own lives and the world around them in the special terms he is making available. “The fact,” he says, “that the intellectual climate of America was beginning to shift from the public to the private made it easier for me to reach my readers with these columns than it would otherwise have been.” By this bit of Riesmanesque analysis, he finds conditions right and the role he has conceived for himself justified.
To play the role of middleman, Mr. Lerner has found it necessary to be part professor, part “psychoanalyst,” and part trusted old friend:
Here are a few conclusions that thoughtful people may draw from the Kinsey Report on the American female. . . . one thing that women can learn from [it] is not to set impossible standards for themselves, to accept themselves, their bodies and their mode of response—and relax. To the American men Kinsey seems to be saying, ‘Don’t feel too superior and condescending.’
In a column about the case of Authurine Lucy, the Negro girl who was stoned on the University of Alabama campus, Mr. Lerner has this to say:
Every mob, in its ignorance and blindness and bewilderment, is a League of Frightened Men that seeks reassurance in collective action. This rabble tried to reassure itself by enacting the ritual of white supremacy. . . . The tragedy is that no one really stood up to them.
About mothers who kill their children:
Yet there is also an element of pathos in the love the mother feels for the children in the very act of killing them. She dresses them neatly before she takes them into the auto to asphyxiate them, or she combs their hair carefully before she strangles them. It is part of the ambivalence by which so often each man kills the thing he loves.
In his characteristic rhythm of thought and rhetoric—describing some baseness, stupidity, or horror and at the same time undercutting it by the use of a literary or psychological insight—the author of these passages strives to express a complexity of intelligence that will be superior to both the simple-mindedness of moralizing and the follies of passion. What he achieves instead is a kind of bloodless formula for “understanding” everything in the same way. He is a man for whom tolerance is no longer a principle by which to judge what he sees but has itself become his only method of seeing.
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Mr. Lerner is entitled to the satisfaction that seeps everywhere into his tone. What other newspaperman in America could throw his once-hot daily pieces into a book and feel that while time had cooled them it had thereby only enhanced their value as comment on the world? Moreover, after ten long years that were as troubled and confused for the America he was analyzing as any decade in history, he had neither to shift his perspective in looking back nor make apology for a single important mistake. There were no problems of perspective for Mr. Lerner because though he was writing about daily things for daily consumption he was also writing in a small way for history—in ten years, say, and be a document); he was summing up as he went along. Nor, it must in truth be acknowledged, did he make any important mistakes. He has indeed mastered the “one art” he set out to master in writing these columns—“the art of the general proposition.”
Generalizing about a culture from discrete, casual details—particularly about American culture—is a chore; done even by the most graceful hands (Lionel Trilling’s, for instance), it usually shows some strains of the sweat that brings it forth. But you will not find the smallest hint of labor in the 700-odd pages of Mr. Lerner’s book, which suggests that he has done even more than master the art of the general proposition: it may be that he has stumbled on some secret of its application. This secret, the principle on which Mr. Lerner operates so fluently, might be called “the law of the excluded judgment.” It is what accounts for his virtues as a columnist (which are considerable), his weaknesses as a prose stylist (which are not great, but crucial), and his rather depressing failure as a liberal critic of American society. This principle depends on the ambiguity of the word “culture” and implies the following argument: things are bad in this country today, maybe worse than they have ever been, but they do have a genuine correlative in what Americans are really thinking and feeling and so are neither bad nor good, and therefore good. The ambiguity that attaches to Mr. Lerner’s use of the term culture carries over even into the title of this book. No one, except maybe the most hard-bitten ideologue, would dispute the applicability of the word “unfinished,” or would deny that things will change, develop, happen in America’s future. What Mr. Lerner intends by this word, however, is some essence of the quality of American life. All right, fair enough; but from this descriptive point Mr. Lerner arrives in his introduction at the following elegiac one: “Always striving, always hungry, never satisfied, the American spirit jibes well with the inner meaning of a world of process and continuity . . . an open universe of tragedy and conflict and choice.” Mr. Lerner is free to believe that motion by itself is a good thing, but it seems strange that one of the leading spokesmen of American liberalism should assume so easily that the direction of this motion must necessarily be good.
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Or perhaps not so strange, for what we have here is a liberalism that has been sophisticated out of its former belief in the efficacy of energetic opposition to social ills and psychoanalyzed into a belief that social “welfare” of some kind will follow directly from human self-knowledge. Thus, the high rate of juvenile murder in this country Mr. Lerner attributes to a bad cleavage between the generations that can be repaired by greater understanding. Thus, he blames the ever-accelerating breakdown of the family on the “false” and excessive demands that Americans make on life and suggests that the trend toward disintegration will be reversed when people grow “mature” enough to stop making them. Thus, instead of advocating that the senseless and anachronistic abortion laws of this country be abolished, he proposes to alleviate the misery and waste and suffering these laws are responsible for by extending the definition of “therapeutic abortion” to include the psychologically therapeutic. Thus, he instructs the American worker, squeezed between the bosses of capital and the bosses of labor, to fight “for a chance to develop himself as a human being, with his own stamp and uniqueness but with a special quality because he is a worker and therefore close to productiveness.”
What Mr. Lerner continually does in these columns is to demonstrate that the institutions of our society are an embodiment or expression of “consciousness” (which can mean either “national character” or “the universal unconscious,” depending on which meaning happens to serve his purpose). He therefore cannot criticize the society, as did his old-fashioned liberal forebears, in terms of criteria like “just,” “equitable,” “equal,” “sane.” The meaning of such terms, and the values they express, can no longer be taken for granted; they must now grow out of some definition of the needs of the human personality (about which, of course, the “scientists” are learning more and more each day). The difference here may seem merely methodological, for on specific issues of politics Mr. Lerner stands where a liberal would be expected to stand. But his departure is in fact more than methodological, and his trahison to the tradition from which he claims his identity—though it will never show up in the polling booth—is blatant and active. By pinning his moral judgment to his anthropological sense of American culture, he has transferred his primary loyalty from a vision of what that culture ought to be to a loving fascination what what it is.
Unlike an old-fashioned liberal, “a cryptographer of our time” is not, it would seem, a man devoted to an orderly and rational and legal assault on the evils of his society but a man devoted to explaining them—finally, one fears, to explaining them away.
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