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PARTISAN REVIEW
Not answering, Henry cried: "All the same!
If
we don't all
learn how much they have bullied us into needing, we'll still have
subways even in the Socialist republic."
He took to wearing one suit and to living on the diet figured
out by the experts of the Relief agencies.
He was a 1940 urban Thoreau, but omitted the idea of indi–
vidual independence which to ihe transcendentalists had seemed
the highest good, but to Henry pure egotism. "I wonder what deep
desire to see their fellow-citizens doing without inspired
them?"
he asked himself; and with nervous joy read Hawthorne's biting
observations on Brook Farm; "yet Hawthorne was the first nihilist
of them all, too Calvinist to approve even of privation!"
DOING WITHOUT
All the same! N.I.B. gained a little headway and they began
to
nibble,
as they boasted, at the economy. Several thousand bour–
geois Americans, who were sympathetic to any and every effort to
destroy the existence for which all had the deepest unconscious
disgust, decided to keep their 1939-model automobiles for another
season! These cars, built to last one year and be traded in, soon
broke down; whereupon the manufacturers, by way of counter–
propaganda, instructed their mechanics to be insulting to all who
drove in for repairs, and even to be "out of stock" on 'those old
parts, and they waged a safety-campaign in the state legislatures.
There was a certain amount of chaos: fly-by-night mechanics set up
shop; some drivers, having used the omnibus once or twice,
neglected their cars altogether.
Likewise, among these same people, there spread a movement
to read the books on their book-shelves instead of buying new fic–
tion. All were amazed to discover the pages of Anthony Trollope,
etc., completely unopened; and soon there was much lay literary
criticism, contrasting in "meatiness" the 19th-century masters and
the 20th, represented by Margaret Ayer Barnes. Clifton Fadiman
loyally championed the modems, but soon lost his job anyway,
since the publishing business was so leaky that it couldn't survive
even this tempest.
But there were a few poor people who for a time were freed
by the suggestion not to want certain things obviously desirable.
They experienced an enormous relief of competitive tension-a
