Nikita Khrushchev should be given Golden’s two books to read as he travels through America. Golden accomplishes on paper what Norman Rockwell does on canvas; a living, breathing, everyday America, with its glories, and always first, its people. Khrushchev could have no better primer of the American way of life.

—Fort Worth Texas Star-Telegram

In early October, 1958, the ladies of the Delphian Club of Forrest City, Arkansas, met for one of their literary afternoons. The “theme” of the program was “Americanism,” which the club members illustrated by the floral arrangements and refreshments, and by the book that had been chosen for discussion—Harry Golden’s Only in America. Since a considerable portion of this book was occupied by Golden’s unabashed stand in favor of integration, it is interesting, to say the least, that it should have been so honored by the ladies of a state which only a year before had responded to the threat of integration by calling out the national guard. And no less interesting is the fact that the recollections, attitudes, and tone of an unregenerate Lower East Side Jew should have been taken by these small-town Southern Protestant women as an exemplary expression of Americanism. But—though striking—the enthusiasm in the Delphian Club for Golden’s liberal wit and Jewish wisdom, was hardly exceptional, and by this time, hardly surprisingly. Published three months before, Only in America—a risky publishing venture at the start—had been the spectacular hit of the summer season. And the rush to the bookstores for this collection of snippets from the Carolina Israelite, Golden’s one-man newspaper, seems to have been matched by the rush of the reviewers into print to praise it. Stamped across the cover of the 1,750,000 copies of the paperback edition sold in the first year (the sales of the trade edition ran to 250,000) was the legend: the “best seller which has taken all America by storm and which all America has taken to its heart”—and for once these time-worn canards appear to have been perfectly true.

Out of some several hundred reviews this writer has examined of Only in America, exactly two declined to participate in the love feast between Golden and his audience. This “miracle . . . of receptivity”—as Nathan Ziprin, a syndicated Jewish columnist, called it—transcended not only regional prejudices but political, social, and intellectual ones as well. On the far left, the Communist Worker rejoiced in Golden’s “lusty” way of “ridiculing Jim Crow hypocrisy and know-nothingism,” while on the far right, the Chicago Tribune was delighted by the “sympathy and humor” with which Golden handled minority group problems as well as the “approval,” “tolerance,” and “tart wisdom” with which he surveyed the American scene generally. He was praised as fulsomely by the Nation as by Hearst’s Chicago American, just as he later charmed the skeptics both of Time and of the New Yorker. In the middle of a food column in the New York Town and Village (a solid, middle-class paper from Stuyvesant Town), the writer interrupted describing an experience with Italian sausages at the home of a friend to marvel at Golden’s “warm and loving and thought-provoking philosophy”; meanwhile, across town in Greenwich Village’s off-beat Voice, a writer applauded the acid satire with which Golden put down the hypocrisy of Brotherhood Week in the South. In the trade journal Best Seller, a writer liked Golden’s book because “there are no innuendoes, no darker corners of sordid, insidious thought.” The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican concurred, “there’s still a lot of us who are neither eggheads nor beatniks, and Harry Golden says right out in print what we’ve been thinking.” At the same time, intellectuals elsewhere were claiming this “urbane,” “erudite” journalist as their own, in their own terms. Writing in the Saturday Review, Joseph Wood Krutch spoke of Golden’s “amiable Rabelaisian streak,” and wound up saying that “as a debunker . . . Mr. Golden is closer to Montaigne than to Mencken.” Gerald Johnson found Golden to be less sentimental than Dickens, before running him through a battery of flattering comparisons with Socrates, Montaigne, and Anatole France. Adlai Stevenson recommended this favorite of his to “all those who seek light and joy,” while Carl Sandburg, in his introduction to Only in America, proclaimed it the “most interesting pro-Semitic book that I have ever read—barring possibly the Old Testament.”

And so it has gone with For 2¢ Plain and Enjoy, Enjoy!, Golden’s next two collections of miscellaneous pieces from the Carolina Israelite and from the widely syndicated newspaper columns he began to write following the success of Only in America. Today, some two years after his rise to national fame, the tide of affection and approval shows signs of falling slightly, but Golden’s influence and authority are still such that Life selected him from among all the Jewish intellectuals and leaders in the country to stamp its publication of the Eichmann confession as kosher. It is also clear that Golden looms as the most widely attractive literary personality to emerge in recent years. Now, such an across-the-board success has the force of a profound comment on the society in which it takes place—Golden surely reflects and speaks for a national condition of mind. To understand his appeal is to begin to understand a good deal about our culture today.

_____________

 

But before looking into the more immediate sources of Golden’s success, one ought to note that it probably owes something to the traditions of native American humor. From the Farmer’s Almanac to Will Rogers, from Peter Finley Dunne to Sam Levenson, there has been a continuous stream of humorists who, both in their kinds of wit and popularity, anticipate this “Yenkee Tarheel.” American humor has, until fairly recently, been largely a marginal group humor. Its leading practitioners have thrived on an ability to imitate the vernacular, delineate the behavior, and project the point of view of one out-group or another. During the 19th century such humorists mainly exploited the idiom and folkways of the Yankee farmer, the Southwest hunter or adventurer, the Far West prospector and gambler. The tradition of out-group humor was so strongly entrenched that highly literate New Englanders like James Russell Lowell and Harriet Beecher Stowe and a host of bookish Southern lawyers like Augustus Longstreet, Joseph Baldwin, and Johnson J. Hooper, inevitably turned to it when they were trying to be funny or satirical.

Toward the end of the 19th century, a parallel tradition developed as the European immigrants settled in and began to produce their own comic spokesmen, who cast upon the American mind the exotic, incongruous images of the new form of marginal life. Relying upon ethnic rather than regional coloring, and creating a city rather than a rural humor, the Irish and Jewish comedians followed their native American prototypes in bringing their Gallaghers and Sheeans, Potashes and Perlmutters into some sort of problematic relation with the world outside, and using the immunity of the clown to make some telling hits on that world’s political, social, and intellectual follies. Also, they continued the traditional role of native humorists in keeping alive the sense of individuality and diversity, of a common touch and an uncorrupted shrewdness, all regarded as particularly American. It is important, in assessing the significance of a Harry Golden, to realize that the peripheral worlds of the redneck and the greenhorn have not only provided America with most of its laughs but also with a considerable amount of self-criticism and even of self-definition.

These two parallel traditions of humorists—the regional and the ethnic—have remained alive through the past five decades, becoming modified, to be sure, as regional and ethnic differences weaken and blur under their rapid assimilation into the surrounding norms of the middle class. However, many of the major characteristics have continued to be fairly distinct and to maintain their appeal. For example, in the 1920’s, a champion long-run hit, Abie’s Irish Rose, was manufactured by bringing together the two leading strains of immigrant life; and Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Sam Levenson, among others, have gone on amusing a large audience by their comic presentations of the Jewish margin of the American scene. And now, there has emerged the humorist who—if one is to accept the common description of Harry Golden as “the Jewish Will Rogers”—seems to have combined the native and immigrant traditions.

Golden’s appeal can indeed be viewed in the perspective of a tradition of marginal wit which has deep roots. Anyone who is at all familiar with the history of American humor will not be surprised at the delight Golden calls forth by his demotic readings of history and literature (Cleopatra was the greatest call-girl in history, the Roman empire fell because the women were left home with the “Senators and the 4-F’s”); or by his serio-comic nostrums for social ills (ending school segregation by removing the chairs from Southern classrooms and destroying anti-Semitism by having the Jews threaten to convert); or by his good-natured inventory of the oddities and odd-balls of the ghetto and of the quirks and foibles of American society generally; or by the relish he takes in pointing out the chicaneries of politicians and in deflating a stuffed shirt; or, finally, by a homey tone which manages to merge Jewish “understanding” and American horse sense.

_____________

 

But when all this is said—that Golden carries on a tradition which has been successful and valuable in the past, and that his amalgam of the two dominant strains of that tradition is surely unique—still, the volume of his sales and the measure of his prestige remain unexplained. For the main clues for an explanation lie not in the past but rather in the present state of American culture. And since the reviewers of Golden’s three books have been largely preoccupied with the question of why they and their constituencies find him so pleasing and useful, a number of these clues can readily be picked up from them.

Of the several areas of consensus, the leading one, perhaps, has to do with the reviewers’ interest in and respect for Golden as an American Jew and as a raconteur of the delightful, instructive world of the erstwhile Lower East Side ghetto. Sandburg’s point about Only in America being an outstandingly “pro-Semitic book” was echoed repeatedly in the newspaper reviews. The Chicago Tribune sugguested that Golden’s “tart wisdom” is “rooted in the mores of an Old Testament society.” A writer for a Baptist Sunday school book service in the South attributed not only Golden’s delicious nostalgia but also his wisdom and penetration to his “Yiddishe heart.” And his “lovely Jewish slant on the world” was related by a host of reviewers to his grasp of history, to his compassionate understanding of the modern problem of Negroes and other minority groups, as well as of “the proud, embattled, defensive Presbyterians of Charlotte” because (according to Harry Ashmore) Golden himself is “the unapologetic product of a close-knit, embattled, defensive community.” Other connections were made between his Jewishness and his reverence for family relations, his faith in the brotherhood of man, his optimism, his whimsical humor, his sense of paradox, his humility, his individuality, his perseverance, his erudition, his righteousness, his politics, and his appreciation of good food.

Telling its Jewish readers that Only in America “will make you proud to be a Jew,” the Worcester (Mass.) Sunday Telegram left its other readers with the thought that Golden’s pieces “increase your respect for the folk who have been with us since approximately the landing of the Mayflower.” Here as elsewhere Golden’s unabashed Jewishness was taken as the leading sign of his most widely celebrated quality—his “sincerity.” A writer in the New York Village Voice best summed up the over-all reaction, saying that “Golden’s most important asset is that he presents his Jewish heritage in a manner that arouses admiration, amusement, and even envy.”

And even envy? Certainly, the attitudes reflected by Golden’s reviewers toward his Jewishness—and I have so far been using only the general press—are another indication, perhaps the strongest yet, that to be a Jewish writer in America today is an asset, that the Jewish writer possesses something the culture needs and wants. Whatever else one might wish to say about the matter, the Jewish mind seems decidely in vogue at different levels of our society—whether in the suburban ethos presented by Herman Wouk, or the tough, brooding moral imagination of Bernard Malamud, or the inspirational theology of Buber, or the folksy simplicity of Leo Rosten and Sam Levenson, or the sophisticated wit and candor of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. In this context, it is significant that the attraction Golden exerts even touches, here and there, the prose of his reviewers, for the Baptist woman in the South who uses the phrase “Yiddishe heart” is not just characterizing Golden; in a small and subtle way, she is reaching out for what she believes he possesses. To be sure, there is a hint here and there of the old condescension, as in Time’s faintly patronizing puns about Golden as a “leprecohen” who is waging a “blintzkreig.” But the “Yiddishe heart” phrase is far more typical. One finds a critic like Leslie Hanscom of the New York World-Telegram, among many others, using Jewish locutions that not only emulate Golden’s prose but indicate the kind of quasi-identification with the Jewish mind itself I have already noted.

_____________

 

None of this seems to have come as a surprise to Golden. In one of his more expansive interviews, for the Jewish Post, he remarks: “I knew the Jews would be lukewarm but that the goyim of America would go nuts over it.” And he continues: “The names of the Americans who are pleading with me to accept them as Jews would amaze you.” Golden was no more at a loss for an explanation of this phenomenon than he is for most things that happen in America. In the same interview he attributed the fascination of his Gentile readers as being partly

due to the fact that I have eliminated the “Jewish joke” of Sam Levenson and the dialect of Mr. Kober. These fellows are anachronisms. They will thrive for a little longer but basically they are on the way out. . . . The “Jewish” humor on the American scene is part of the humor involved in the entire American middle-class. I have eliminated the ghetto for good, I hope.

Golden’s point is fairly accurate. His prose has only a flavoring touch left of the pungent Yiddish influence and is pretty much the English spoken by the older generation of American Jewish businessmen, particularly those who like to read. Similarly, Golden’s humor tends to be flat and obvious: a middle-class humor that strains for effects and softens the edge in contrast to the older Jewish humor with its abundant supply of natural, resonant incongruities. Golden will describe in detail the long, involved process by which a family finally bought a suit for their son, but it isn’t really very funny because he is much more interested in explaining the Jews to the Gentiles than he is in portraying the special comedy and pathos of the ghetto for their own sake. As for the ghetto itself, whether or not he has managed to “eliminate” it, he certainly has bent the shape and feeling of its life to his special uses.

If his treatment of the Lower East Side has been one of the great selling points of his books, one reason seems to be that he has taken care to make the ghetto easily comprehensible to his Gentile readers—less ghetto, in fact, than a kind of incipient suburb where a steady stream of immigrants settled down to live family-centered, healthy, and serious lives for the sake of their children. A review in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch offers a representative reaction:

Most of his subjects make delicate but jolly humor of the heavy duty to Jewish family life that has been the subject of tragedy by so many other writers. And best of all, most of them carry a wonderfully gay and well-remembered picture of the immigrant Jewish family life in lower East Side New York.

There are, to be sure, occasional references in Golden to the overcrowding and the poverty, the sweatshops and the tuberculosis, but in his benign and invigorating Rivington Street, Golden portrays a satisfying way of life that both Gentiles and Jews today find to be instructive, and—again judging by the reviews—inspiring. I suspect that Morris Rosenfeld, the great East Side ghetto poet, or my grandfather, would be a little startled by the New Yorker’s review of For 2¢ Plain which finds that Golden “recalls a romantic, vanished world full of drama and gallantry, something like the mythical Dixie . . .”

What distinguishes Golden’s Rivington Street from the so-called suburban “picture window ghettos” of today is not so much the noise, the grinding penury, the wear and tear on the nerves, but rather the vividness, energy, aspiration, discipline, and finally the warmth of its life—that is, precisely those qualities which are often said to be declining in the modern middle-class family and suburb. The most frequently noted passage from For 2¢ Plain was the one in which Golden describes how as a boy he came home after staying away all day because he had lost five dollars on an errand; instead of punishing him, his mother kissed him and said, “It’s better than giving it to a doctor.” The fact that in Golden’s childhood the title phrase Enjoy, Enjoy! meant “tomorrow” has also had a highly appreciative press. A writer for the Chicago Tribune, for example, commented that such sentiments and ideas illustrate “a character pattern prevalent in the 1900’s that gave these groups [of Jews] the stamina to rise above poverty and discrimination.” And, of course, that kind of “character pattern” is felt to be seriously wanting today.

Other reviewers have thought that the value of Golden’s recollections is that they let us look briefly at “a world we might not otherwise know.” As a writer for the ILGWU Justice puts it: “No place else but in Harry Golden’s wonderful book can the reader find essays on boiled-beef flanken . . . two cents plain and secondhand pants.” Golden’s anecdotes are crammed with the little details of what the Lower East Side Jews ate and slept on and took for medicine, of how they courted, voted, and shopped. His strong sense of detail, in fact, is one of the best things about him, and with its help he has been able to satisfy both Jewish nostalgia and Gentile curiosity. But what also sells his product, it is clear, is the packaging—the inspiriting morals drawn from Jewish experience in which he manages to wrap even such sordid happenings as the famous Triangle Shirtwaist fire. After describing how 146 girls perished and how the owners were then exonerated, Golden ends in a typical surge of up-beat moralizing by claiming that the disaster produced “fire-prevention legislation, factory-building inspection, workmen’s compensation, liability insurance, and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union.”

The reviewers and their readers, then, were much taken by what the Houston Post calls the “aspiration,” “wry humor,” “enthusiasm,” and “togetherness” of Jewish immigrant life, and, like Golden himself, tended to mourn its slow disappearance. “Gradually,” the Houston critic goes on, “this concentration has been diluted, as it must in America. . . . In full bloom, however, [the Jewish immigrants] formed a culture . . . that was unique.”

_____________

 

Another leading motif that runs through the reception of Golden is the lament for the decline of ethnic variety, and the related loss of individualism, in America. A good many writers quoted Golden’s statement that “we are heading for a ghastly sameness in our country, in which the magnificent Latins from the Mediterranean, the wonderful Swedes from Scandinavia, the brilliant Jews from Eastern Europe, and the effervescent Irish from the Auld Sod, will soon be indistinguishable from the Cape Cod Yankees. This is good?”

The reviewers didn’t think it was and they jumped at the chance to corroborate this and other of Golden’s criticisms of American sameness and conformity and to celebrate him as a notable exception. Martin Levin, writing in the Saturday Review, explained the appeal of Only in America as “offering an individual point of view . . . a refreshing phenomenon in a decade that has been thirsting for the humor of ideas and finds instead squibs on such yeasty themes as the rigors of commuting.” In papers across the country, from the New York Times to the Detroit News to the Sacramento Bee, Golden’s reviewers hailed him (in the words of William Du Bois) as a striking asset “in an era when the urge to conform is taking on the aspects of an epidemic.” Taking their cue from Carl Sandburg’s introduction to the book, in which the poet uses Emerson’s remark that “Whoso would be a man must first be a non-conformist” in order to praise Golden for being both, the literary press made this evaluation of Golden, in fact, the dominant theme of their reception of Only in America.

It goes without saying that Golden’s popularity was at the same time held to be an encouraging sign of life. William Hogan of the San Francisco Chronicle summed up this side of the reaction by suggesting that

the most interesting point about the popularity . . . is that in the ambitious, selfish, increasingly uninteresting middle-class society we inhabit today so many people should turn to Harry Golden’s simple honesty and warmth for some relief. Not since Will Rogers has there been such a people’s philosopher.

Neither Golden’s “unorthodox’” opinions—as several reviewers characterized them—nor his attacks upon the “platitudes and shibboleths” of American conformity were able apparently to deprive him of being “the voice of unassuming millions.” As the Springfield (Mass.) Republican went on to say, Golden’s great following had been drawn by his “reassurances that there still were plain, sensible, kindly citizens . . . [who] wanted to be told that quiet, loving, family life wasn’t out of style, but actually was rather well thought of in some circles.” Heavily mixed in with the clippings that applauded Golden for the originality and independence of his thinking, were also those which, like one from the Evansville (Indiana) Press, asserted that “what Harry Golden thinks usually you think too, only you’ve been a bit shy about coming right out and saying it.”

_____________

 

But how, then, does an outspoken nonconformist in a highly conforming society become the voice of its “unassuming millions”? To raise the question is to lead one to the central ambivalences in American culture at present: the simultaneous hungers for individuality and “togetherness,” for variety and uniformity; the felt need—both public and private—for independent criticism and reassuring approval. Just recently we saw how the psychic appeal of Kennedy’s campaign was directed to one side of this contradictory combination, that of Nixon to the other; the relatively small distance between the actual politics and political personalities of the candidates themselves, and the virtual 50-50 split in the vote bear out the drift of the American psyche toward a misty equivocal blend of self-images and needs.

Harry Golden’s appeal derives quite clearly from the successful way he confronts and bridges the two images. Just as his version of the Jewish East Side both stimulates and soothes his middle-class audience, so does he soothe and stimulate by his musings upon the state of America. Here he tells us that our society is in trouble—it is bored, materialistic, frivolous, apathetic; there he tells us that this or that sturdy accomplishment of democracy or social progress could happen only in America. His collections are, indeed, a handbook of contemporary bourgeois confusions; except for an occasional piece of direct and meant protest, his unorthodoxy, on examination, is seen to reside largely in the Jewish and the plain-truth-from-honest-James colorations of his tone. He speaks of America as being on “a huge breast binge,” and says the “whole thing is psycho”—“the instinct to seek the safety and comfort of a ‘mother.’” This, of course, is nothing new—even to readers of Coronet now. But a few pages later Golden imperturbably defends Mother and America against the denigrations and warnings of Phillip Wylie: “As long as the American boy continues to be dreamy-eyed every time he thinks of mother, just so long will our American freedom be safe.” Here he talks about the sexual angst that gnaws away at the bourgeoisie; there he tells us that “if it were strictly a matter of virile, normal sex, all the pin-ups combined are not equal to one spinster school teacher with eyeglasses.” If he is not forthrightly damning Governor Faubus and Senator Eastland, he is likely to be praising the “warm-hearted people of the South” who vote for them; if he is not telling us that popular culture today is corny and commercial, he is likely to be recording his “deep admiration and respect” for the “wonderful” way Robert Montgomery and Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne televised President Eisenhower’s birthday party: the family sitting around the President while from off-stage came his favorite song, “Down Among the Sheltering Palms.” Worried about the crude exploitation of learning represented by the quiz programs, Golden also suspects that the Great Books clubs may be gulling their members.

And so it goes. The American public, he says, is forever trying to escape from the realities that impinge upon it, but it is right and proper that the most important event of the next decade for most families will be getting the kids off to school. For the human story, as he tells us, is “a man and a woman and the love of a home.” “The ‘Big Story’ is about people who struggle to pay the rent and get up the tuition for a girl in college . . . about people who lose jobs and find better ones.” Also it is about the home town, and Golden draws a bead on the New Yorker for failing to realize that home means “father, mother, sweetheart, past, present, future, and Parnosseh.” The use of the Yiddish term for livelihood is fairly typical of Golden’s approach and appeal: garnished with a little Manischewitz horseradish the perplexed banalities of the middle class come back to them as the wisdom of the ages.

That Golden’s own “platitudes and shibboleths” should be as immensely popular as they are is not too startling, then, for they occur on both sides of practically every issue that worries Americans today, without ever disturbing the desperately held notions that our society is fundamentally fine, and the future, in any case, will somehow deliver us from our dilemmas. What arises, finally, from both his own pages and from the reviews of his books, is a staggering sense of public confusion, in which points of view and standards jostle tolerantly and randomly against each other and in which no uncompromising distinction that threatens any large interest can be preserved long enough to act upon—or against. Yet Golden and his reviewers cannot help but reveal, all the same, anxieties endemic in our culture today—the loss of national energy and imagination, the conformity, soft-headedness, and even the joylessness of the people—before managing to gloss them over. The reviewers’ glossing over is in their pointing to how many people read and swear by Golden; his is in applying the varnish of his much-admired “optimism.”

It is perhaps to be expected that so many members of the American middle class—feeling that they have somehow lost the way despite what they tell themselves—should turn for pointers to the minority groups who they believe still possess some special vitality and individuality, some esoteric wisdom about how to live. For one group—the restless young—the supposedly “cool” self-contained style and highly instinctual behavior of the Negro have become the objects of envy and emulation, just as the Jews—to judge by the success of Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar and of Golden’s essays—are currently thought to have the secret of why and how to lead the good, American family life, whether on Rivington Street or in Mamaroneck. So Golden says himself in the introduction to his latest book. Pointing to the thousand letters a week he receives these days, he tells us of the loneliness they testify to, the “unhappiness in a rootless society”; the most important meaning they disclose, he says, is that “the strongest memory of life is the family” (his italics). Thus his anecdotes of a family-centered childhood are a sedative, and offer hope as well, for as he put it in a previous introduction, “I know with all my heart that whether you look down a path leading from a farmhouse near Fountain Run, Kentucky, or out of one of the magnificent residences in the Myers Park section of Charlotte . . . these pleasures and joys await you, too—‘for 2¢ plain.’”

_____________

 

Yet another source of Golden’s appeal as a commentator on American manners is his projection of success as natural, healthy, and deserved—disencumbered of its highly problematic nature today. For Golden’s Jewish immigrant story is also the American success story writ small and concrete. As the prose-poet of upward mobility, Golden once again translates the values of the older, parochial Jewish culture into terms that his success-conscious audience can find satisfying. Though he speaks now and then of the penalties of success, he nonetheless worships it about as uncritically as the first Jewish immigrants did. His essays are studded with accounts of how this lawyer and that doctor, this comedian and that song writer, climbed to fame and fortune from the ghetto—accounts which are redolent of his persistent confusing of success with merit. Within this compulsion for touting winners, virtually all distinctions collapse: “The New York Times . . . is one of the finest American institutions, along with Harvard, the New York Yankees, and the Supreme Court.” Or on his favorite actress, Joan Crawford:

From there she went up and up; was married to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Franchot Tone, and through it all she never muffed a line. . . . It takes genius and character to stay on top of your profession for thirty years, and it even takes more than that to stay on top in the most cutthroat, dog-eat-dog profession of them all—Hollywood—and to stay beautiful at the same time.

When Golden tells us about an East Side boy who is now a lawyer, whom “the oldest families in his city make . . . the administrator of their estates,” there is nothing else to say, nothing further to add. To be on top is to be on top, which is a wonderful place to be. This is a dose of the good old soothing syrup in the America of today, where the problem of getting ahead has begun to make everyone nervous. An omnipresent value, success is increasingly received with guilty desire, with distrust, and with the feeling that no one has quite enough of his share. Whether or not one wishes to relate this to some final assertion of American Puritanism, to the frequency with which success in America is revealed to have begun or ended in some form of fraud, or to the mass frustration of a people who at a vast cost to their pockets and their souls are constantly buying the symbols of success, but never achieve its substance—the fact remains, as Leslie Fiedler has been telling us, nothing fails in America like success. But by his examples and by his tone, Golden reaffirms the unsophisticated, guiltless ideal of success which has been characteristic of immigrant groups; and he does so most effectively, perhaps, when he prefaces his point that we were happier when we had iceboxes instead of status symbols in the kitchen, by saying that he learned this from all “the people who wrote me after they saw me on Ed Murrow’s Person to Person, and on the programs of Dave Garroway, Jack Paar, and Arthur Godfrey.”

What also makes Golden’s presentation of success attractive, of course, is that—true to form—he occasionally debunks its more outrageous manifestations, poking fun, for example, at Elvis Presley or Elfrida; once he even downgrades Albert Schweitzer for not having been “on the firing line during the past two or three decades.” But what he generally concentrates on is the more superficial problem of status, which, in most cases, can be handled as a humorous consequence of the magic American carpet of upward mobility, or as a less noxious and alarming by-product of the frustration, tension, and apathy that result when the possibilities for meaningful achievement are reduced or compromised in our society. In any case, Golden produces a nice, relaxed, undisturbing mode of social criticism at the expense of the status-seekers, which confirms his readers’ sense that life in America is not quite right and that they are being very mature in reading a writer who is “intelligent” and “critical” and “independent” enough to come right out and say so.

_____________

 

In his critique of status-seeking Golden depends as much on present-day Jewish life to make his points as he does upon the vanished ghetto to provide him with his morality and sample of success. “I use Jews as examples and rely upon Gentiles to get the point,” he told one interviewer. Thus every ten pages or so there is some mention of bobbed noses or Ivy League yarmulkes or the quest for a blond rabbi, or the social ironies involved in the organization of a Jewish temple, or a fund-raising drive, or an assault upon a restricted resort. This is all very amusing to Golden and now and then a bit disturbing; for as he says, “they’re worrying about a country club when Abe Ribicoff has gotten to be Governor of Connecticut.” Golden claims he is not indulging in the invidious and anachronistic humor of the ethnic joke, for the “blond rabbi” is equally applicable to the Protestants’ strange requirements these days for a minister. But it seems quite clear that the eager-beaver foibles and pretensions of the Jewish middle class provide him with another safe way of giving himself a critical voice. Golden’s reviewers in the Jewish press do not appear to take offense over his gibes at middle-class Jewish life, and the Gentiles can examine their own silly search for status through an innocuous analogy. Also in this way, Golden emerges as a Jew who is not above criticizing his own people—another occasion for the reviewers to praise him for his “fearless honesty.”

_____________

 

What is, finally, most interesting about all this, is the success with which Golden has made the Jew seem entirely representative of the middle-class American—representative of a pattern that holds for the multitudes of Americans who in the course of their life have traveled from the lower to the middle class, from the closely knit enclave of the slum or the farm or the small town to the thinner, more mannered life of the suburb. This, as Paul Pickrel has pointed out, is perhaps the main force of his appeal.

And here, as elsewhere, Golden reinforces the cultural situation he describes by the example of his own personality and career: the big-city boy who has settled in the provinces, the Jew who has had to make his way in the Protestant culture of the South, the son of the slums confronted by a highly organized pattern of middle-class life. Now, while he points to the Jews of today to evoke everybody’s anxieties, he uses his frequently conveyed relish for the disparities and incongruities of his own position to allay the same anxieties. What makes the rest of the Jews nervous about their marginal status merely makes him rock with laughter; they wrestle foolishly and gloomily with the problem of identity, he stands fast in his happy acceptance of what he was and is; they trade their “marvelous” heritage for the dubious consolations of pseudo-Gentile attitudes and interests, he uses his heritage to make himself a respected, if offbeat, member of the community.

Moreover, in his “ease and naturalness in accepting joyously the fact that he is a Jew”—a trait, as I have already said, much admired by his reviewers generally—Golden is able to exploit the traditional opportunities and immunities of the American humorist as the wise “original,” whose very marginality arms him with the sensible, unvarnished truth. At the same time, as the “Yenkee Tarheel,” Golden revives and flatters the declining notion of American variety and of free society that is invigorated and kept on the beam by its robust minorities. (When Golden asked in his North Carolina newspaper whether he was a “Tarheel,” he was answered by editorials all over the state which hastened to assure him that he most certainly was. And when Golden asked Governor Luther Hodges at a press conference how it “felt to be governor of a state where one-third of the population is embittered,” Hodges turned to the other reporters and said, “Gentlemen, I think Harry Golden is one of the most valuable citizens of this state.”)

As the freedom-loving Yankee in rigidly hierarchical Dixie, Golden is, in fact, as useful and appealing in his way as Mark Twain’s energetic, ingenious,, progress-minded emigré was to the tradition-ridden court of King Arthur. Unlike the hero of Twain’s satire, Golden does not bring to his new home the industrial know-how and its social benefits that came to Camelot, but he does his part by celebrating the South’s “day-to-day industrialization without parallel in the history of our country.” In his role as a kind of one-man Chamber of Commerce reporting on Dixie’s progress, Golden is also reminiscent of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in having to rely on some “stretchers” here and there. While one is willing to concede that “Tobacco Road today is full of TV antennas, with electric washing machines on every back porch,” he may have trouble swallowing Golden’s further claim that “Mrs. Jeeter Lester is getting dressed up for the Tuesday afternoon Garden Club or the League of Women Voters.” This happy ambience of an up-and-coming South arises repeatedly from Golden’s portraits of enterprising Southern manufacturers who are doing “more to end segregation than the NAACP” and of the states which are “spending fortunes to bring in new industry.” Meanwhile the Southern Negro, according to Golden, no longer tips his hat as he walks “briskly along the street on his way to pick up his little girl at the dancing school, that is, if he’s not arguing a new writ before a Federal judge.” Here, too, Golden’s “lovely Jewish slant on the world” can be seen in operation as a transforming agent, for the energetic, aspiring, problem-solving South he evokes on one page reminds the reader, as the New Yorker review suggested, of nothing so much as the Lower East Side that he evokes on another.

_____________

 

It is within the context of a healthy, liberalizing society that Golden places the Negro question, a context that flatters the South while criticizing or lightly lampooning its intransigence on the matter of integration. Since Golden’s reputation as a social critic is largely based on the intelligence and courage with which he has made the liberal case against segregation, it is worth asking how he has managed to do so while winning the approval of people presumably as far apart as the reviewer for the Worker and Kenneth Whitsett, the head of North Carolina’s most avid white supremacist group. Also Golden’s treatment of the racial question offers the most striking example yet of what his readers want and get from him.

I suspect that even the white supremacists must take a certain satisfaction from Golden’s frequent references to the Southerners as “some of the kindest people in the world.” There is also the good-natured blandness that operates along with the widely praised trenchancy of his ridicule. If Golden’s famous plan for “vertical integration” was reprinted, as John Barkham claims, “in virtually every paper and magazine south of the Mason-Dixon line,” it was surely not because the proposal to take the chairs out of Southern classrooms was—in the words of a Southern reviewer—“as mordant as, if slightly less savage than, Dean Swift’s modest proposal for a solution to the Irish problem.” Swift proposed that the Irish kill their starving children and sell them as delicacies to the English who kept the land in poverty; Golden’s satire is a fairy tale by comparison. When the Greenville (North Carolina) Daily Reflector reflects a dozen Southern newspapers by speaking of this plan as “one of the best solutions to the segregation problem we have heard yet,” it becomes clear that Golden’s value to the South lies largely in permitting a tolerance for the integrationists that comes easily because it costs nothing and endangers nothing. “If we were as impossible as we are often told we are,” writes the Asheville (North Carolina) Citizen Times, “we wouldn’t put up with this outsider coming here and poking fun at us.”

Of course, Golden repays tolerance with more tolerance, constantly assuring the Southerners that he “understands” and respects their viewpoint He understands, for example, how a young Southern engineer cannot reconcile himself to his children’s attending an integrated school, though once he had driven a school bus and had had “‘a very bad time of it’” whenever a Negro mother had to train her child to sit in the back: “‘She would mount the bus again and again and lead it to the back again and again, until it understood.’” “Somehow I felt very close to that man,” Golden concludes, “but I was anxious to see him go before we both started to bawl.” His schmaltz along with his humorous ribbing of the incongruities of the segregationist position both end by leaving the nastier roots of Southern attitudes undisturbed (such as the one implied by the engineer’s use of the neuter pronoun in speaking of a Negro child). “His barbed pen,” according to the. New York World-Telegram, always has “a soothing ointment as well”; the total effect is that of satire with the stinger removed—somewhere between a bite and a kiss.

Then there is the unction of his famous Jewish “understanding.” “The segregationist needs your respect more, perhaps, because what he believes is less deserving,” wrote Golden in Pageant. This trait is seen by Northern liberals and reactionaries and Southern traditionalists alike as a great virtue—the virtue of tolerance, concern, and “open-mindedness.” “Golden has an open mind about practically everything except treason and dishonesty. He doesn’t wait for the egg-head butcher paper weeklies to make it up for him,” writes the arch-conservative Chicago American. “Golden keeps his opposition off-balance by practicing the respect for other’s racial, religious, and national heritage that he preaches,” writes the arch-liberal New York Post. “You know he is concerned. Never does he stand outside and accuse,” states the Greensboro (North Carolina) Record. But what this comes to in the pages of Golden’s books is a tolerance that is so soft that any heavy commitment is unable to stand upon it for more than a paragraph, and his mind is usually so far open that it is unable to close firmly and decisively on the realities of racism. As one of Golden’s rare critics put it—“with equal equanimity, he singes Klansmen’s sheets and sings the praises of Southern White Protestants, liberals and otherwise.” He is at his best in making a clear, convincing case of what segregation costs the South economically and morally; but otherwise one tends to find him explaining the South just as he explained the Jews.

All of which is not to say that Golden’s approach is craven or that his opposition to segregation is ineffective. He has to live in the South and if he chooses to stop far short of making the kind of all-out offensive that is being waged by that heroic figure, P. D. East, editor of the Petal Paper in Mississippi, I see nothing to blame in that. I am told by Southern friends that liberals such as Edward P. Morgan are right in saying that Golden’s genial satire helps “to loosen the preposterous rigidity of the segregationists’ stand,” while P. D. East himself admits that his own satirical efforts, which have cost him every subscriber and advertiser in his town, have so far only helped to get the Southerners’ backs up higher. My point is that I do not find Golden to be the “wise and altogether unafraid” social critic that he is made out to be by the Cleveland Press, nor that the “truth” he speaks, as the Kalamazoo Gazette puts it, is “the hurting, troubling kind.” On the contrary: the truths he speaks about segregation, like those he speaks about America today, neither hurt nor disturb. Instead they flatter and tranquilize by making the reader think that he has come to grips with social problems when all he has done is to watch while the issue of segregation or conformity or apathy is nudged lightly before he is hurried on to a joke about chocolate-covered matzos or to a plug for Shakespeare or for the Jewish authors of songs about Dixie, or to another rousing affirmation that Nixon’s adoption of proposals which once landed their Socialist backers in jail is something that “could happen only in America.”

_____________

 

Going through the bundles of enthusiastic reviews of Golden’s books, one comes upon an occasional lonely voice, usually in an obscure newspaper, raised in dissent. Aaron Epstein, writing in the Santa Rosa (California) Press Democrat points to the “specious wrestling match between the author and his subject” in which Golden relaxes his grip whenever there is any chance of a fall. Meier Ronnen, a visiting Israeli journalist, turns up in a Louisville newspaper to smile at Golden’s knack for presenting “the obvious as philosophy,” and adds that “as a philosopher, his sharp stylus does little more than scratch the surface of his schmaltz-covered tablet.” Mortimer J. Cohen in the Jewish Exponent notes the “sameness” of Golden’s three collections which he convincingly argues comes from “the relatively narrow range of his emotions.” Cohen also finds that Golden is a little “too full of love for people,” that for all his highly touted “sweetness and light,” there is “an obsequiousness in his voice.” And a brave young man in Park Forest, Illinois, begins a review: “This is tantamount to being un-American or something” and goes on to say that Golden “is to prose all that Edgar Guest is to poetry.”

Much else might be added. There are the superficial or highly opinionated or sometimes idiotic discussions of history and literature: Brutus was “a neurotic who spent his entire life worrying about whether Caesar was his father”; The Merchant of Venice is, in reality, a philo-Semitic play; modern poetry is so a-historical that only Benet and Sandburg have given us “a sense of time and place” to match Longfellow’s “Listen my children and you shall hear,/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” There is also the complete unoriginality of Golden’s thoughts and the skewing of relationships that allows him to relate Jewish history or “ideas” to almost anything under the sun. Jews and Gentiles alike have hailed the goodwill toward the Jews that Golden has elicited, but a more extended treatment would want to show how he has accomplished this by presenting the Jewish mind in an advanced stage of vulgarization, which possibly explains why his stiffest critics have been Jews.

But what is most disheartening about the Golden case is not the books themselves nor the mindless praise of them but rather the actuality of American life which these books and their success reflect. For Golden is not just another folksy Jewish humorist who has hit on a bestseller formula; he represents with depressing clarity certain very real problems and conditions of our society in the past decade—a society characterized by its well-intentioned but soft, sloppy, equivocal thinking about itself. “The wonderful progress of science has brought no improvements in the hearts of men,” says Golden. Where do we seem to have heard that platitude before, that special quality of affable flatulence? Golden has been described by several reviewers as “the court jester of American democracy,” but I would be more specific and call him the court jester of the Eisenhower Age. He is very much a phenomenon of a period in which great national success came to bland, homey Americans who could best soothe anxieties, provide a confident if vague sense of direction, and preside over the evasion of issues. For all the supposed vitality and alertness in Golden’s writing, there is a softness in his prose and in his thought, a steady veering away from complexity and controversy to the safe banality or the nice sentiment, and a power of accommodation that eventually occupies both sides of the question, which give his books much of the eery feeling of an Eisenhower press conference or a Nixon speech. Well, perhaps, the narrow election of Kennedy and the fact that some of Golden’s admirers in the press are becoming mildly irritated, both point to the same impending change in our culture. As two different people said to me this week, he should call his next book “Enough Already.”

_____________