86
PARTISAN REV.IEW
MELANCHOLY TO THE END
THE WILD FLAG.
By E.
B.
White. Houghton Mifflin.
$2.
T
HE NEw
YoRKER at its best provides the intelligent and cultured col–
lege graduate with the most comfortable and least compromising
attitude he can assume toward capitalist society without being forced into
actual conflict. It rejects the vulgarity and inhumanity of the public
world of politics and business and provincial morality, and it sets up
in opposition to this a private and pseudo-aristocratic world of good
humor, intelligence, and good taste. Its good taste has always been ques–
tionable, to be sure, but the vulgarity of the
N ew Yorker
is at least more
subdued and less persistent than the ordinary vulgarity of journalism.
The
New Yorker
has always dealt with experience not by trying
to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it.
This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a
way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable
attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with
it adequately. The gracelessness of capitalism becomes an entirely external
phenomenon, a spectacle that one can observe without being touched–
above all, without feeling really threatened. Even one's own incompetence
becomes pleasant: to be baffied by a machine or a domestic worker or
an idea is the badge of membership in the civilized and humane minority.
The maintenance of this posture demands a delicate balance of
insecurity and security; the
New Yorker
can exploit its nervous distaste
for modern society only so long as the distaste does not grow into fear.
Any strong shock therefore requires a readjustment: this is why the
Second World War and the atomic bomb have forced the
New Yorker
to
become "serious.". But the readjustment does not alter the magazine's
function. On the one hand, the "seriousness" of the
New Yorker
is an
expression of panic: they never dreamed that the world's inelegance
could become so dangerous. On the other hand, it is a substitute for
humor, a special technique for handling what is directly threatening, and
its function is the same as the function of the humor: to reduce every–
thing to the point where the assumption of a simple attitude will make it
tolerable.
The publication of John Hersey's
Hiroshima
was the
New Yorker
equivalent of a desperate attempt to change the course of history, and it
is the measure of the
New Yorker's
inadequacy that this effort should
have turned out to be simply a journalistic
coup.
The real sensation was
the fact that one article was permitted to take up a whole issue of the
magazine-what could be more drastic? The article itself, as Mary
McCarthy has pointed out, took Hiroshima out of history and politics
and made it a familiar and somewhat reassuring picture of disaster.
