VARIETY
489
historically, with "popular reform–
ism" at home. But this new Amer–
ican imperialism, appearing so late
upon the scene (a scene to which
another determining element, the
fascist technique, has been added),
can be expected to produce an
abortively "original" reformism.
With our nineteenth-century cap–
italism fading into a museum–
piece, the formal expression and
design of the social order will be–
come increasingly "modern," all of
it catching up with Hollywood.
PM
is simply one of the more ob–
noxious outcomes of this special
historical situation.
PM's
relation to Stalinism is
significant because of the latter's
dual-reformist and totalitarian–
character. The newspaper general–
ly adheres to the Stalinist line,
though at times it is "critical" of
both program and leadership. It is
under no compelling bond to use
the more extreme absurdities of a
line created by remote control. Be–
cause of their totalitarian source,
the Stalinists operate with a more
rigid logic than the
PM-ers,
who
are closer to the tradition of slop–
py liberal thinking. (They have
retained very little of the good in
that tradition-aside from the use–
ful habit of muckraking; and some
fancy words from the democratic
dictionary, which, unless one has
never heard them before, are about
equal to zero.)
PM
is a local varia–
tion of Stalinism, representing its
sensitive rather than its mechanical
adaptation to the American
milieu.
Sam Grafton and Max Lerner
are, I believe, the main stylistic
sources of
PM.
The former is the
fount of that cute "simplistication,"
or sophisticated baby-talk, which
has crept into so much liberal writ–
ing-an attempt to make banali–
ti es palatable. His column appears
in the
Chicago Sun,
but not in
Marshall Field's New York outlet.
PM
reprints the really good ones,
though: "We have reached the
stage now where a good sneeze
will finish off the Vichy govern–
ment in France." He's quite
talented at this sort of thing. I
wish he'd do
Barnaby;
or Eve Mer–
riam's
Short Snorts.
But Grafton is seen to be a light–
weight indeed, compared to Max
Lerner. Max Lerner writes books
about ideas; he also engages in
other intellectual pursuits. For ins–
tance, he makes up fairy tales. He
recited one over the radio, not long
ago, called "Fable of the Skulls."
It begins: "Once upon a time there
was a man in Germany," and it
tells a:bout how this little fellow
wanted to be big. "And so he built
himself a mound of skulls" and
then little guys "in a lot of countries
did the same thing, "but there was
one country, the United States,
that had a peculiar prejudice
against letting people build mounds
of skulls." But I had to change the
station just when the fairy tale got
to the part about Don't cash in
your War Bonds, you're cashing in
your country (or something), and
didn't hear the end.
Max Lerner is not simply "fan–
tastical," though. When the gods
conferred at Cairo and Teheran,
he wrote one of those editorials of
his. I'm sorry to say it was largely
devoted to enthusiastic nonsense.
