The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  John Updike

  OCTOBER 24, 1959 (“NOTES AND COMMENT”)

  OR A LONG time now, we have suspected that there was something fundamentally wrong with the American political system, but we weren’t sure what it was until the returns from the recent election in Great Britain had been analyzed. “Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain’s Fascist leader of prewar years, was trounced in North Kensington so badly that he forfeited his deposit,” said a short paragraph toward the end of a dispatch from London that appeared in the New York Times a day or two after that election. And the next day the Times noted that a number of Communist candidates had been similarly humiliated. In other words, these candidates had lost not only the election but their deposits. Ladies and gentlemen, friends and fellow-Americans, we give you the Deposit Plan. It would make every single one of our politicians think twice before deciding to take a chance. Whether a man wholeheartedly desired to be a candidate or was drafted by a reckless crowd of admirers, he would have to put up or shut up. And he would know that if he put up, he might he obliged to forfeit his deposit. Details, of course, would have to be worked out, but in general we favor a high deposit for all candidates for all public offices—equal, let us say, to the percentage of annual income that a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year worker has to contribute toward the support of the federal government. A candidate shouldn’t be penalized for excessive unpopularity, though. Under the Deposit Plan, a man who lost by a whisker would forfeit his deposit right along with the man who was badly trounced. What should be done in the case of the winners is, as they say in political circles, a question that requires further study.

  · · ·

  The mysterious and awful thing about the television quiz scandals is not that the jaded souls who ran the show were hoaxers but that dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of contestants, almost all of whom must have applied in the simplicity of good faith, were successfully enrolled in the hoax. Now, as we remember the flavor and ethos of that innocent era, we realize that the contestants, aside from their freakish passion for Hittite history or skeet-shooting statistics, were meant to be us—you and me and the bright boy next door. This was America answering. This was the mental wealth behind the faces you saw in a walk around the block. The appeal of the programs, with the rising challenge of Soviet brain power as a backdrop, was ultimately patriotic; the contestants were selected to be a cross-section of our nation just as deliberately as the G.I.s in a war movie are. There we bravely sat in our living rooms, sweating it out with this or that Shakespeare-reading poultry farmer or chemistry-minded chorus girl, and there they were on the other side of the blurred little screen, patting (not wiping) their brows with handkerchiefs, biting their tongues as instructed, stammering out rehearsed answers, gasping with relief at the expected cry of congratulation. And we sat there, a nation of suckers, for years. It’s marvellous how long it went on, considering the number of normal Americans who had to be corrupted to keep the cameras whirring. In all this multitude, not one snag, not one audible bleat, not one righteous refusal that made the news. The lid didn’t blow off until, years afterward, a winner, disgruntled because he had not won more, was moved to confess and purge his guilt.

  We are fascinated by the unimaginably tactful and delicate process whereby the housewife next door was transmogrified into a paid cheat. We picture her coming into the studio, a little weary still from yesterday’s long plane trip, a bit flustered by the noise and immensity of the metropolis—Dorothy Dotto, thirty-eight, happily married for nineteen years, the mother of three, a member of the Methodist Church, the Grange, and the Ladies’ Auxiliary. She lives, and has lived all her life, in the town of Elm Corners, somewhere in the Corn Belt; as a child, she won seven consecutive pins for perfect Sunday-school attendance, and she graduated with good grades from a public school where the remarkable truthfulness of George Washington and the durable axioms of Benjamin Franklin were often invoked. Her father, Jesse, who is retired but still alive (bless him), for forty years kept above his desk at the feed mill a sign declaring, “Honesty Is the Best Policy.”

  Our heroine meets the show’s producer, dapper, dimpled Leonard Blough (pronounced “Bluff”), who takes her into a little room walled with aluminum and frosted glass:

  BLOUGH (smiling and lifting from her arms a bundle, containing her lunch, that she has been clutching awkwardly): Well, Mrs. Dotto, you did very well on the qualifying tests. Very well indeed.

  MRS. D. (blushing): Thank you. My dad always told me I had a good head for books; he wanted me to go on to normal school and be a teacher, but then I met Ralph, and—well, one thing led to another…(Blushes more deeply)

  BLOUGH: Ah, yes. Young love, young love. Well, Dorothy— You don’t mind if I call you Dorothy?

  MRS. D.: Sakes, no!

  BLOUGH: We look forward to having you on our show. We know you’re going to be a wonderful contestant.

  MRS. D.: Well, I hope so. It’s a wonderful honor for me. When I think of all those folks back in Elm Corners watching, I’m afraid I’ll get so nervous I won’t be able to make a word come out of my mouth. We all watch, you know, every day, fair weather or foul.

  BLOUGH (dimpling profusely): That’s the kind of tribute we value most. Dotty, I know you won’t be nervous; we’re a very close and friendly family on this show. By the way, the capital of Paraguay is Asunción.

  MRS. D.: Eh?

  BLOUGH (consulting a paper on his desk): A-s-u-n-c-i-o-n. Asunción. Better practice the Spanish accent in your hotel room tonight.

  MRS. D. (flustering): But— But— You think I might be asked that?

  BLOUGH (his eyes narrowing thoughtfully): Let’s put it this way, Dot. The odds on your being asked the capital of Paraguay are as good as the odds on your being asked anything else. Do you follow me?

  MRS. D.: I— I— I’m not sure.

  BLOUGH (looking her right in the eyes—a devastating effect): I think you do. And—oh, yes—an animal that carries its young in a pouch is a marsupial. M-a-r-s—

  MRS. D.: Yes, I know that. But why are you telling me?

  BLOUGH (leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling, which is one great fluorescent panel): Let me try to express myself. I like you, honey. I think you have what it takes.

  MRS. D.: But you mean that all this is a fake—that all those people answering questions are told the answers ahead of time?

  BLOUGH: Come, come, let’s not be nai-eev, dear. That’s show biz.

  MRS. D.: But I thought— The whole idea— I mean what made it interesting—

  BLOUGH (cunningly): It is interesting, isn’t it? I mean it’s a good show. Now, it wouldn’t be a good show if the clucks out there knew, but they don’t know, so they’re happy. Aren’t they?

  MRS. D.: Well, but my daddy always had this sign over his desk—

  BLOUGH: And we don’t want them to be unhappy, do we? We don’t want them, say, to have their own Mrs. D. show up as a dope tomorrow, do we? Listen, Sister, we can lace questions into you you won’t even know what they mean. Now, listen to reason. Be a doll.

  MRS. D.: Well, I’ve come all this way—

  BLOUGH (jubilant): That’s the girl! You’re on! And when the time comes to take your dive, you’ll take it, won’t you? Huh?

  MRS. D. (growing fairly cunning herself): Not this side of three grand I won’t.

  BLOUGH (standing up, arms akimbo): Baby! It’s a deal! (They embrace, and, as the Curtain Falls, the West Declines noticeably.)

  A NOTE BY ADAM GOPNIK

  HE NEW YORKER began in the 1920s as a magazine of reporting and humor, and then, in the thirties, evolved into a magazine of reporting, humor, and serious, if mostly short, fiction. Only over time did it become what most of its readers think of it as now, a magazine of reporting, humor, longish short fiction, and serious—at times, strenuous—criticism. The 1950s, the decade we have under inspection here, was the time when that big change, already in motion the decade before, got fixed in place—the moment when a weekly dose of ambit
ious criticism became integral to the magazine’s identity. But it is also nice to recall that in the fifties the magazine’s original vein of cabaret criticism still flourished.

  For a long time, criticism sneaked into the pages mostly if it could pass as humor. It often did, sometimes unforgettably so. Robert Benchley on the theatre, Dorothy Parker on books—these very good things were essentially there to entertain, certainly not to argue a professorial point, and much less to make a scholarly argument available to a bigger audience. They were fun in the first instance, and wise in the second. Wolcott Gibbs, who remained The New Yorker’s theatre critic throughout most of the fifties, at a time when this was generally considered the top critic’s job, is here as a remaining master of that kind of criticism, and exhibits its special virtues. Critics like Gibbs are sometimes patronized as mere joke-makers, although in truth making the right jokes about the right works is even harder than making the right judgments about them, since the right jokes have to contain the judgments and be funny, too. What is easy to miss is the ease of the erudition underlining the entertainment: Gibbs’s rapturous review of the opening night of My Fair Lady is credible because Gibbs knows Shaw inside out, and so can register what’s tinny or un-Shavian in the show while taking true joy in something as purely Broadway as “The Rain in Spain.”

  Edmund Wilson on books and Lewis Mumford on architecture, along with the slightly-later-arriving Dwight Macdonald, were something different, actual big-league highbrows. They were men of letters (and of seminar rooms) in a way that their predecessors were not. This crucial passage in the magazine’s life had already begun, best marked by the moment, in 1944, when Wilson replaced Clifton Fadiman as the magazine’s most visible book critic. (Fadiman, it should be said, was by no means the mere book taster of later dismissals; Wilfrid Sheed remembered him as the most highbrow of the Book-of-the-Month Club judges. But he did become a Book-of-the-Month Club judge.) Wilson’s mission, more or less openly stated, was to bring to the magazine serious discussion of the monuments of modernism—of the kind that he had already done so much to advance, in books like Axel’s Castle. To read some of his admirers, one might imagine him to be a bilious and beetle-browed writer. In truth, Wilson was at his best when he was on fire and when he was having fun. Though not a particularly poetic writer—the basic Wilson sentence is foursquare to the point of sometimes being flat-footed—he remained a terrific judge of true and false poetry in others. In his specific judgments, he now seems to have batted around .300, which is the best anybody ever does (he got Tolkien and Kafka wrong; Dawn Powell and the Marquis de Sade exactly right), but his values seem nearly perfectly tuned. Though very much a man of the old school, he was an instinctive feminist, full of praise for and discernment regarding Powell and Edna Millay and Anita Loos.

  Wilson was a distinguished literary historian—the kind of critic for whom historical criticism is always the most interesting kind of criticism. The publication in English of Pasternak’s samizdat novel Doctor Zhivago was a big occasion: he rose to it, and pulled the magazine up with him. He had lots of historical work to do, explaining the evolution of the Russian state and its transformation by Leninism; and he had lots of literary work to do, too, explaining Pasternak’s remnant Christian symbolism and Russian sources. Though many readers now might agree with Wilson’s friend and correspondent Nabokov that Doctor Zhivago isn’t as good as Wilson wanted it to be—he had a weakness for Big Books that expressed Significant Crises—the occasion was, in a way, even bigger than the book. His review was a milestone in the life of The New Yorker, the moment when the magazine became the place you went to find out how to start thinking about the big book everyone was talking about. If, in the forties, such criticism came in the side, it was soon walking right through the front door.

  · · ·

  A question that must have kept William Shawn up nights, as editors are kept awake by such worries, was what to make of the popular culture that had taken such a surprising turn in the fifties. The magazine had always been up to its armpits in pop culture, being the source, addled or not, of a great many movies, from Mister 880 to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, not to mention Broadway hits like Life with Father, My Sister Eileen, Wonderful Town, and so on. What was new in the fifties was that pop culture now was becoming youth culture, a different thing. In a curious way, you can see an attempt to grapple with that youth culture in the playwright and diarist S. N. Behrman’s review of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—one New Yorker regular reviewing the work of a younger regular, who was already one of the magazine’s stars, and struggling to grasp a style and a sound as new to him as Brando’s acting and Elvis’s voice would soon become to everybody else. What comes through is both Salinger’s originality of tone (the passages from Catcher that Behrman quotes seem to be coming from some completely new, contemporary planet) and Behrman’s good will in coming to grips with it.

  If there is a common preoccupation in the magazine’s criticism during this decade, it is a distinctly American one, the great “middlebrow” question. Addressing that question is exactly what those big-browed critics were doing there in the back of the book. The fifties were a time when middlebrow culture, or “midcult,” as Dwight Macdonald had dubbed it, was a living, even a dominant, form. What did “middlebrow” mean? These pages suggest that it referred to two things. One thing it meant was the fossilized reverence for relics of the literary and philosophical past, seen as monuments to admire rather than as living things to relish. This is the middlebrow of the once bestselling anthologist Mortimer Adler, and it is one that Dwight Macdonald mocks in a famous review collected here. Macdonald makes fun of the respect given to works of prestige, where most of the respect derived from the prestige and the prestige from the respect, in a hall-of-mirrors genuflection where no real art objects could be seen or touched or explored, or get much love or real attention for the charm or mischief or magic they contained. But then there is a second sense of what middlebrow could be, equally alive in the pages—a belief that art and ways of living once restricted to the rich should be available to the aspiring middle classes. It was this other form of middlebrow—the one that made Leonard Bernstein’s conducting the Philharmonic front-page news—that The New Yorker itself was a part of. So, in the constant back-and-forth on middlebrow culture, we actually have a kind of civil war among its sects, with Macdonald our Josephus, the Jew turned Roman.

  As with other things much mocked in their decade—train travel and piano bars belong here, too—this kind of midcult looks a lot better now that it’s largely gone than it did when it was the one thing going. This midcult (which is as visible in the cartoons making puzzled fun of modern art, and in the magazine’s ad pages of the era, where French perfumes and English riding boots are on sale for all) had its silly side, as aspirational cultures always do. But it helped to make a coherent whole that we look back on only in envy. Bad middlebrow makes people feel bad about what they don’t know; the good kind makes people feel happy about what they can know. The first kind of middlebrow may be, as Macdonald believed, only a form of salesmanship, but the second is a base for citizenship. A country where people are expected to admire hard texts and remote authors, to read books they don’t know and find that they like them more than they thought they might, is a country in pretty good shape culturally. One kind of middlebrow culture in the fifties produced dead volumes sitting on the shelf; another produced My Fair Lady and a readership desperate to know what to think about Russian dissident literature. The first, status-anxious kind of middlebrow helped to create the conditions for the second, aspirational-minded kind—anxiety about status helped feed an appetite for art.

  The right tone was everything, as it always is. Like most cultural moments, the good and the bad in the fifties are all mixed up, with Mortimer Adler’s Aristotle and Lerner and Loewe’s Shaw singing from essentially the same hymnbook, though one sings solemnly and the other sings sweetly. Back in the fifties, many kinds of critics struck tunin
g forks of different notes. John Lardner pioneered television criticism for the magazine, and found a tone of sardonic disbelief nicely mingled with surprised appreciation. Lardner was Ring’s son, and, as with the father, the son’s newspaper background helped him toward a wise-guy style not too infatuated with itself, rather like that of Murray Kempton later on. (Lardner later devoted himself to an understandably unfinished history of drinking in America.)

  Whitney Balliett, just beginning his five-decade career as a nonpareil jazz writer, simply assumed that jazz was art. He set himself the task of fine description, for which one needed the gifts of a poet and the patience of a private eye on a stakeout. Sitting in the back of bars and nightclubs, Balliett returned with the essential id of several generations of jazz musicians. Robert M. Coates, meanwhile, wrote art criticism with an astonishing clarity of eye. His forte was not the historical dimension—the grasp (which his successor Harold Rosenberg notably possessed) of how the avant-garde picture stands in relationship to what came before it and what now comes after it—but his grasp of what’s before you when you actually look at a Pollock remains thrilling.

  Finally, Kenneth Tynan, the Angry Young Man arriving from London to take over the theatre job after Gibbs’s death, in 1958, turned out to be a cavalier dandy, showing himself, against expectations, to be a passionate lover of that quintessential middlebrow form, the musical comedy. One of the things that made the young men so angry in London, it seems, was that all the British musical shows were so creaky, compared with the American ones. In his review here of the Sondheim-Styne masterpiece Gypsy, Tynan shows that he was aware that he would need to think and write about these things in a self-conscious way that his predecessor hadn’t, but the thoughts he had weren’t so far removed from where Gibbs, the cabaret critic, ended up in writing on My Fair Lady. Tynan’s judgment on Gypsy is simple and right and solves the midcult equations perfectly: “a machine has been assembled that is ideally fitted to perform this task and no other,” he says, and “since the task is worth while, the result is art.” It was then, and remains now, the only sure sanity on the subject.