Memorable days. In 1934, I took to the road with a pal. With three dollars between us, enough to keep us in cheese and crackers, we bummed the freights. We joined the multitude of men and boys that covered the boxcars like flocks of birds. In South Bend, Indiana, we passed the Studebaker plant and a crowd of sit-in strikers yelling and cheering from the rooftop and the open windows. We shouted and joked with them, rolling at about five miles an hour in summer warmth through the fresh June weeds, the Nickel Plate locomotive pulling us toward a horizon of white clouds. It now occurs to me that I didn’t know how hard I was grieving for my mother, who had died just before Roosevelt was inaugurated. With her death and the remarriage of my father, the children scattered. I was turned loose—freed, in a sense: free but also stunned, like someone who survives an explosion but hasn’t yet grasped what has happened. I didn’t know anything. At the age of eighteen, I didn’t even know that I was an adolescent. Words like that came later, in the forties and fifties.
Of course, I sympathized with the strikers. Thanks to Fish’s pamphlets, I was able to call myself a socialist, and the socialist line was that FDR’s attempted reforms were saving the country for capitalism, only the capitalists were too stupid to understand this. Radical orthodoxy in the thirties held that parliamentary European reformism had failed and that the real choice, on a world scale, was between the hateful dictatorships of the right and the temporary and therefore enlightened dictatorships of the left. American democracy would not in the long run prove an exception. So said the radicals. One of them, Edmund Wilson, had written in 1931 that if American radicals wished to accomplish something valuable, “they must take communism away from the communists and take it without ambiguities or reservations, asserting emphatically that their ultimate goal is the ownership of the means of production by the government.” And in a weird panegyric of Lenin written after his pilgrimage to the tomb on Red Square, Wilson told his readers that in the Soviet Union you felt that you were “at the moral top of the world where the light never really goes out.” He spoke of Lenin as one of the very highest products of humanity—“the superior man who has burst out of the classes and claimed all that man has done which is superior for the refinement of mankind as a whole.”
I was an early reader of Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castel. By 1936, I had also read his Travels in Two Democracies. Wilson had opened my eyes to the high culture of modern Europe, and on that account I was in his debt. Besides, I had met him in Chicago when he was hauling a heavy gladstone bag on Fifty-seventh Street near the university, hot and almost angry, shining with sweat and bristling at his ears and nostrils with red hairs. A representative of all that was highest and best on the streets of Hyde Park—imagine that! His voice was hoarse and his manner huffy, but he was kindly and invited me to visit him. He was the greatest literary man I had ever met, and I was willing to agree with all his views, whether the subject was Dickens or Lenin. But despite my great admiration for him and my weakness for inspired utterances, I was not carried away by his Lenin worship. Perhaps because my parents were Russian Jews, I was as distrustful of Lenin and Stalin as Wilson was of American politicians. I didn’t believe in Roosevelt as Wilson apparently believed in Lenin. I seem to have sensed, however, that Roosevelt was holding the country together, and in my obstinate heart I resisted the Wilsonian program for American radicals. I couldn’t believe, anyway, that liberal graduates of Harvard and Princeton were going to abduct Marxism from the Marxists and save the U.S.A. by taking charge of the dictatorship of the American proletariat. I secretly believed that America would in the end prove an exception. America and I, both exceptional, would together elude prediction and defy determinism.
You didn’t have to approve Roosevelt’s policies to be a Rooseveltian. Myself, I liked his policies less and less as time went by. I can recall the marks I gave him (in my helplessness). For recognizing Hitler as a great evildoer he rated an A. His support of England moved me deeply (high marks). In his judgment of the Russians he fell to a D. With Joe Kennedy in London and Joseph Davies in Moscow, one of the most disgraceful appointments in diplomatic history, he flunked out. For opinions on his dealings with Stalin I refer the reader to the Poles, the Czechs, the Romanians, etc. He did nothing to prevent the murder of millions in Hitler’s death factories, but of that we were then ignorant.
His most dazzling successes were domestic and psychological. For millions of Americans the crisis of the old order was a release, a godsend. A great gap opened, and a fresh impulse of the imagination rushed in. The multitudes were more mobile, diverse, psychologically flexible; they manifested new moods and colors; they were more urbane under FDR’s influence. What was most important, for those who had the capacity for it, was the emotional catharsis of making a new start, of falling and rising again. The thirties were more sociable, more accepting of weakness, less rigid, less idolatrous, and less snobbish.
The Roosevelt influence was especially gratifying to the foreign-born. Millions of them passionately hoped to be included, to be counted at last as true Americans. Certain of the immigrants were parochial. Poles and Ukrainians, for instance, preferred to keep to their own communities and customs. Others, catching the American fever, changed their names, made up new personalities, and, energized by these distortions, threw themselves into the life of the country. Who knows how many people became somebody else, turned themselves into jazz singers, blackface comedians, sportsmen, tycoons, antebellum Southern ladies, Presbyterian vestrymen, Texas ranchers, Ivy Leaguers, high government officials. It is not too much to say that these self-created people, people with false credentials, actors invisibly consumed by guilt and fear of exposure, were often empire builders. There’s nothing like a shameful secret to fire a man up. If Hawthorne had not understood this, The Scarlet Letter would never have been written.
For these fertile and productive impostors, it was bliss to hear FDR say that in this country we were all of us aliens. An actor himself, he put on the most successful act of all. He even had a secret: he could not walk. Behind this secret much deeper secrets were concealed.
Consider briefly, for the purpose of contrast, the career of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, a pretender who could not forgive himself. Born James Gatz, he was remade (should we say twice born?). Boy Scout motives of self-improvement and naive love-idealism kept him pure in heart and gullible. What Americans learned from Roosevelt’s example was that amour propre (vanity, secrecy, ambition, pride) need not give anyone a bad conscience. You could, as Yeats suggested, “measure the lot, forgive myself the lot.” Roosevelt, who, with his democratic charm, his gaiety, the dramatic nobility of his head, looked the great man, sent Americans the message that beyond pretending and theatricality there was a further range, in which one’s deeper nature could continue to live, its truth undamaged. We may pretend, he seemed to be saying, as long as we are not taken in by our own pretenses. That way schizophrenia lies. From memoirs written by members of his inner circle we have learned that he loved spoofing, he was a gifted comedian who made fun of himself, a practical joker. He was well acquainted with Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes and with The Hunting of the Snark. The irrational has its legitimate place by the side of the rational. OK. Life is real and earnest, but it is also decidedly goofy. With Roosevelt this was always clear. Others were more nebulous and more difficult. Compare, for instance, Roosevelt’s Fala with the little dog of Richard Nixon in his “sincere” Checkers speech.
In domestic politics FDR’s victorious intuition was that a president must discuss crises with the public in the plainest terms. Democracy cannot thrive if leaders are unable to teach or to console. A certain amount of deception is inevitable, of course. So many of society’s institutions stand upon a foundation of fraud that you cannot expect a president to “tell all.” Telling all is the function of intellectuals, supposedly. For Roosevelt it was sufficient to attack big business and expose malefactors of great wealth. He was not a philosopher. For his relations with the public he might, however, have take
n his text from Isaiah: “Comfort ye.” Among his successors in the White House, only Truman, in his different, “Give ’em hell,” style, took a personal line with the voters. Some of our recent presidents, sophisticated technicians, instinctively resisted the personal line with the public. To Johnson and to Nixon this was an abomination. They were not leaders; they were professional behind-the-scenes operators. The very thought of taking the public into their confidence was horrifying to them. Forced to make a show of candor and an appeal for confidence, they averted their faces, their eyes filmed, their voices flattened. Frightful for a man like LBJ, stuffed with powers and with secrets, to abase himself before the cameras. He was not a Coriolanus but a democratic technician. Under such technicians decay was inevitable.
A civilized man, FDR gave the U.S.A. a civilized government. I suppose that he was what Alexander Hamilton would have called an “elective king,” and if he was in some respects a demagogue, he was a demagogue without ideological violence. He was not a führer but a statesman. Hitler and he came to power in the same year. Both made superb use of the radio. Those of us who heard Hitler’s broadcasts will never forget the raucous sounds of menace, the great crowds howling as he made his death threats. Roosevelt’s chats with his “Fellow Americans” are memorable for other reasons. As an undergraduate I was fully armored in skepticism, for Roosevelt was very smooth and one couldn’t be careful enough. But under the armor I was nonetheless vulnerable. I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. The light held long after nine o’clock, and the ground was covered with clover, more than a mile of green between Cottage Grove and Stony Island. The blight hadn’t yet carried off the elms, and under them drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it. You had some sense of the weight of troubles that made them so attentive, and of the ponderable fact, the one common element (Roosevelt), on which so many unknowns could agree. Just as memorable to me, perhaps, was to learn how long clover flowers could hold their color in the dusk.
Literary Notes on Khrushchev
(1961)
Esquire, March 1961.
Khrushchev, the heir of Lenin and Stalin, Malenkov’s successor, and the evident head of the Russian oligarchy, has stamped his image on the world and compels us to think about him. It is hard, of course, to believe that this bald, round, gesticulating, loud man may be capable of overcoming, of ruining, perhaps of destroying us.
“It’s him, Khrushchev, dat nut,” a garage attendant on Third Avenue said to me last September as the fleet of Russian Cadillacs rushed by. This time Khrushchev was a self-invited visitor. He did not arrive with our blessings, and he did not have our love, but that didn’t seem to matter greatly to him. He was able, nevertheless, to dominate the headlines, the television screens, the UN Assembly, and the midtown streets. An American in his position, feeling himself unwanted and, even worse, unloved, would have been self-effacing. Not Khrushchev. He poured it on, holding press conferences in the street and trading insults from his balcony with the crowd, singing snatches of the “Internationale,” giving a pantomime uppercut to an imaginary assassin. He played up to the crowd and luxuriated in its attention, behaving like a comic artist in a show written and directed by himself. And at the UN, roaring with anger, interrupting Mr. Macmillan, landing his fists on the desk, waving a shoe in the air, hugging his allies and bugging his opponents, surging up from his seat to pump the hand of the elegant black Nkrumah in his gilt crimson toga or interrupting his own blasts at the West to plug Soviet mineral water, suddenly winsome, Khrushchev the charmer, not once did he give up the center of the stage. And no one seemed able to take it from him.
Balzac once described the statesman as a “monster of self-possession.” He referred, of course, to the bourgeois statesman. Khrushchev is another sort of fish altogether. And since his debut on the world scene shortly after Stalin died and Malenkov “retired,” Khrushchev—running always a little ahead of Bulganin—has astonished, perplexed, bamboozled, and appalled the world. If the traditional statesman is a prodigy of self-possession, Khrushchev seems instead to give himself away. He seems to be a man of candor, just as Russia seems to be a union of socialist republics. Other statesmen are satisfied to represent their countries. Not so Khrushchev. He wishes to personify Russia and the communist cause.
Timidity will get us nowhere. If we want to understand him we must give the imagination its freedom and let it, in gambler’s language, go for broke. Anyway, he compels us to think of him. We have him continually under our eyes. He is in China, he is in Paris and Berlin and San Francisco, and he performs everywhere. In Austria he inspects a piece of abstract sculpture and, with an astonished air, he asks the artist to tell him what the devil it stands for. Listening or pretending to listen, he observes that the sculptor will have to hang around forever to explain his incomprehensible work. He arrives in Finland in time to attend the birthday celebration of its president; he pushes the poor man aside and frolics before the cameras, eats, drinks, fulminates, and lets himself be taken home. In America, on his first visit, his progress across the land was nothing less than spectacular. And no fifteenth-century king could have been more himself, whether with the press, with Mr. Garst on the farm, with the dazzling dolls of Hollywood, or with the trade union leaders in San Francisco. “You are like a nightingale,” he said to Walter Reuther. “It closes its eyes when it sings, and sees nothing and hears nobody but itself.” In Hollywood with Spyros Skouras, he matched success stories, each protagonist trying to prove that he rose from greater depths. “I was a poor immigrant.” “I began working when I learned to walk—I was a shepherd boy, a factory laborer, I worked in the coal pits, and now I am prime minister of the great Soviet state.” Neither of them mentioned the cost of his rise to the public at large: Skouras said nothing of the effects of Hollywood on the brains of Americans, nor did Khrushchev mention deportations and purges. We who had this greatness thrust upon us had no spokesman in the debate. But then, people in show business have always enjoyed a peculiar monopoly of patriotism. The mixture of ideology and entertainment on both sides brought about an emotional crisis on the West Coast, and it was here that Khrushchev was provoked into disclosing some of his deeper feelings. “When we were in Hollywood, they danced the cancan for us,” he told the meeting of the trade union leaders in San Francisco. “The girls who dance it have to pull up their skirts and show their backsides. They are good, honest actresses but have to perform that dance. They are compelled to adapt themselves to the tastes of depraved people. People in your country will go to see it, but Soviet people would scorn such a spectacle. It is pornographic. It is the culture of surfeited and depraved people. Showing that sort of film is called freedom in this country. Such ‘freedom’ doesn’t suit us. You seem to like the ‘freedom’ of looking at backsides. But we prefer freedom to think, to exercise our mental faculties, the freedom of creative progress.” I take these words from a semiofficial Russian-sponsored publication. It does not add what some American reports added, namely, that the Premier here raised his coattails and exposed his rear to the entire gathering as he swooped into a parody of the cancan.
This, friends, is art. It is also an entirely new mode of historical interpretation, by the world leader of Marxist thought who bodily, by the use of his own person, delivers a critique of Western civilization. It is, moreover, theater. And we are its enthralled and partly captive audience. Khrushchev’s performance is, in the term used by James Joyce, an epiphany, a manifestation that summarizes or expresses a whole universe of meanings. “We will bury you,” Khrush
chev has told the capitalist world, and though it has since been said over and over that this is merely a Ukrainian figure of speech, meaning “We will exceed you in production,” I think that in watching this dance we might all feel the itching of the nose which, according to superstition, means that someone is walking on our graves. We would not be far out in seeing auguries of death in this cancan. The “culture of surfeited and depraved people” is doomed. That is the meaning of his brutal and angry comedy. It is also what he means when he plays villain and buffoon to the New York public. To him this is the slack, shallow, undisciplined, and cultureless mob of a decadent capitalist city. Still, life is very complicated, for if the Hollywood cancan is poor stuff, what can we say of the products of socialist realism with their pure and loyal worker heroes and their sweet and hokey maidens? Khrushchev himself is far above such junk. It is possible to conclude from this that in a dictatorship the tyrant may suck into himself all the resources of creativity and leave the art of his country impoverished.
It may, in fact, take not only Russia but the entire world to feed the needs of a single individual. For it can’t be ideology alone that produces such outbursts; it must be character. “I have often thought,” wrote William James, “that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: ‘This is the real me!’” So perhaps Khrushchev feels himself, or attempts to reach himself, in these outbursts. And perhaps it is when the entire world is watching him soar and he is touching the limits of control that he feels most alive. He does not exhibit great range of feelings. When he takes off the rudimentary masks of bureaucratic composure or peasant dignity or affability, he is angry or jeering. But fear is not the best school for expressiveness, and no man could be an important party functionary under Stalin without the ability to live in fear. We cannot therefore expect him to be versatile. He had, however, what it took to finish the course: the nerves, the control, the patience, the piercing ambition, the strength to kill and to endure the threat of death. It would be premature to say that he has survived all that there is to survive in Russia, but it is a safe guess that in the relief of having reached first place he is whooping it up. Instead of having been punished for his crimes, he has become a great leader, which persuades him that life is inherently dramatic. And in his joy at having reversed the moral-accounting system of bourgeois civilization, he plays his role with ever greater spirit.