BOOKS
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appears, for the Resistance itself is now more isolated, scattered, and
exposed to more treacherous internal dangers. Constance Rourke,
writing of Henry James, remarks that America's literary history has
always been a disconnected sequence of isolated battlements stormed
without the following-up occupation and consolidation by the main
body of troops. The transition from twenties to thirties is, in this sense,
a perfectly American chapter of history.
Max Weber, extending and modifying Marx, has perhaps made
the most comprehensive demonstration of the process of bureaucratiza–
tion as a widespread feature of modern society, and particularly of
capitalism in its corporate stage. Hollywood, Luce, and the radio
carry the bureaucratization of the writer furthest in this country. A
staff of writers is manipulated and strategically disposed like a group
of factory hands on an assembly line. The product evolved from this
communal labor becomes perforce of increasing slickness and shiny
metallic skill, but correspondingly more unauthentic as art (unauthen–
tic precisely because the bureaucratization removes all personal being
from the work), and of an ever flashier emptiness of content.
(As
the
style has become more adept and slick, we occasionally have to read
a piece in
Time
twice to see how totally inadequate and false it is to
its material. ) Moreover, the bureaucracies overlap and reinforce each
other: publishers now strive to "catch up with and surpass" Hollywood
in the wholesale manufacture of best-sellers from prefabricated parts
and prearranged designs, precisely as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer calculates
in advance just what plots and stars will register at the box office.
Following Hollywood, publishers know they can sell absolutely any
book-even a dull religious novel- by the millions through the press–
ures of social imitation induced by high-pressure advertising. The
writers themselves can now move easily and without a change of pace
from one to a•1other of the mutually reinforcing bureaucracies: notice
that the older Luce writers had an avant-garde pre-history and some
of them still seek to placate an uneasy conscience by occasionally
writing for the little magazines; the newer Lucemen very efficiently
eliminate both the detour and the uneasiness, and John Hersey can
pass from
Life
to the best-seller list to Broadway to Hollywood with–
out even so much as breaking stride at any point.
Though an international phenomenon, this bureaucratization of
the writer nevertheless exhibits a variety of pattern from country to
country. In Russia the political bureaucratization of the writer is com–
plete, . but he is still treated more or less as an individual producer
and has not yet been absorbed 'as completely into the system of the
