AMERICAN FICTION AND AMERICAN VALUES
687
New York, of course, is the nightmare from which we are all
trying to awaken. But New York is also only America become thorough–
ly urban, high-strung, and nakedly honest about the most powerful
drives in American life. Here the middle class as a moral entity disap–
pears into the middle-income bracket, there being nothing left to
characterize a class but its money, and the only value universally dis–
cernible is that of being desperately on the make. New York as a whole
has yet to be done in fiction, it is too many worlds at once; and
pos–
sibly the emptiest novel during the last decade was Merle Miller's
That Winter,
which dealt with the drinking, fornication, and petty
despair of the young careerists in midtown Manhattan. There would
be no point at all in remembering Miller's novel except that it illustrates
its period and place, and Aldridge so memorializes it as one of the
plainest statements of general futility. But the real message of the book
is something quite different from this: Miller's values are really the
values of making a career in midtown, but he lies about them because,
when he sits down to write, he remembers serious literature with its
older human norms and so must condemn the lives in his novel as
futile. For the thousands of Americans who come every year to New
York to take · their chances in Miller's world, success, sociability, and
drinking are the values that American life, stripped of all hypocrisy, pro–
vides; and these are no moral monsters, but people we all know, quite
typical Americans who take life very much as they find it, and unless
they crack up, most of them survive without ever needing any other
values; as America itself, unless it cracks, may yet succeed in doing.
In the midst of this strange but very representative island of
American civilization we come upon
The N ew Yorker,
a magazine of
many paradoxes, whose fiction Aldridge scores as one of the most
deleterious literary influences of our time. However that may be, this
fiction does tell its own truth about American life. One of the paradoxes
of
The New Yorker
is that it has very little relation to the city from
which it takes its name: fifty-two weeks a year this magazine, strug–
gling bravely to affirm its gentle values of urbanity, good manners, and
civilized good humor against the roaring life of New York, resembles a
man in a Brooks Brothers suit walking into the teeth of a gale. And
every week, alongside the brave editorial affirmations, in the hard
little cameos of stories we meet the faceless and nameless people who
are earning more than ten thousand dollars a year and dying of
emotional anaemia: snapshots of the nihilism of a middle class bored
with itself, tepid in its emotions, fighting the uncertain battle of cock–
tail parties, divorces, and fragile family memories. One is tempted to
say that the stories in
The New Yorker
show what the values of
The
