BOO KS
III
interviews" with typical middle-class people and that at one point he
thought of giving a lot of space to these. I wish he had. H ere we get
only
membra disjecta,
a few sentences here and there, plucked out to
illustrate a special point.
It
is Professor Mills lecturing, with exhibits, it
is the radio M.e. who gives the contestant fifteen seconds to tell why he
got married.
However, the author is at least democratic: he treats his peers with
an equal lack of respect. Just about "everybody" is quoted, usually
once: Peguy and Proudhon, K afka and Kautsky and Kierkegaard,
Reich (W., on repression) and R ahv (P., on alienation). As an attempt
to broaden the usual academic bounds, this is praiseworthy. But many
of the quotes seem rather dragged-in, as if to adorn the argument with
the plumes of the culturally chic, and most are mere snippets, a sentence
or even a phrase or two tailored to fit the author's needs of the mo–
ment. Nor does he give any references, so one cannot tell where or when
these truncated remarks were uttered, thus stripping them of their
identity and reducing them to bricks in
his
wall. Puzzling bricks, often.
Thus he quotes me (once), four words directly plus a lengthier para–
phrase he was kind enough to make; I suspect I wrote those four words
a long time ago, and should have been grateful for this fact being men–
tioned, for they don't seem to me now to make very much sense.
Like Veblen, Mills mixes moral judgments and aesthetic impressions
into his sociology, an old-fashioned custom it's good to see revived. He
makes it clear he thinks
ill
of the culture and the style of life of the
middle classes, and he prophesies ruin and disaster. H e is right,
though the gloom is overdone, in the heavy Marxist-apocalyptic style.
But he fails to plant these legitimate points in the reader's imagination
because he lacks the special talents for the job, talents which Veblen
so abundantly had: a sensibility that can select the essential details, and
an expressive prose style. His book is cluttered with miscellaneous
information, with facts and references that just get in each other's way
and trip each other up; one reason he doesn't give, as noted above,
enough space to anyone thing to let it make its own authentic impres–
sion is that he can't because he touches briefly on so many things.
Perhaps the chief trouble with the book, certainly what makes it hard to
read,
is
the style, which is inexpressive and monotonous in a vigorous
kind of way. It seems almost deliberately designed to keep the writer
at a distance from both his material and his readers. For one thing, it
is horribly abstract. I can take a certain number of abstract words in a
sentence and still keep my bearings, but when they multiply interminably
without being anchored to some concrete word, then my attention
