SMILE AND
G~IN
295
been told that he could not hope to practice medicine because his
mother and father had gone insane. An
a~thor
like O'Hara is perfect
in
The New Yorker
because
The New York er
is in the most thorough–
going way devoted to a sense of the social milieu, the hopes, resentments,
frustations, and fears which the American scene creates or compels. And
if
there is a persistent nastiness and contempt for human beings in
much of O'Hara's writing, that is valuable too, because many people
feel like that without admitting it. O'Hara's explicitness is desirable,
just as candor is more desirable than hypocrisy, although one might
well prefer the compassion of Dostoevsky, or at least Scott Fitzgerald,
but let us not be Utopian, difficult to satisfy, and worst of all,
high–
brow.
If
the literary influence of
T he New Yorker
is pernicious, it is not
because O'Hara flourishes in its pages, but rather because there does
seem to be a kind of periodical style at work in it from week to week,
a style pervasive, intensive, comprehensive, and one that gets stronger
and stronger all the time. It we take prose style merely as a matter of
the choice of words, phrases, tones, and references, it is clear ,that in
The New Yorker
you are supposed to be chatty, relaxed, not very ser–
ious, and certainly never (God forbid!) intellectual. There is no reason
that anyone should not write in such a style, for whatever reason, to
earn an honest dollar, or to seem elegant, charming, sophisticated, full
of good manners and good taste. And it would soon become unbearable
if
everyone wrote in the style of Djuna Barnes, or Virginia Woolf,
or in the careful and composed prose which helps to make the short
stories of Joyce a succession of masterpieces. But the periodical style
which now characterizes
The New Yorker
excludes or dismisses various
important kinds of perceptions, attitudes, and values, no matter how
great the good will of the editors. And apart from writers like O'Hara,
Thurber, S.
J.
Perelman, Philip Hamburger, and Bemelmans, the prose
style of most of the fiction becomes increasingly nondescript and anony–
mous. When everyone begins to try to write in a style imposed from
without (imposed, whether or not it is true that the editors rewrite
sentences which seem inappropriate to them), then everyone sees and
feels, after a time, only those sights which can be expressed in the
periodical style; and in the end the readers, too, see, feel, hear, and
think of things in the same way. As it is common by now to say of some–
thing funny that it is just like a
New Yorker
cartoon, so we may con–
clude by finding all existence
New
Y
orkensh.
Perhaps this is one rea–
son for the disappearance of some authors: what's the sense of having
a mind and sensibility of your own,
if
you have to ulie someone else's,
