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PARTISAN REVIEW
Faces in the Crowd
is a long, rather dull series of "portraits," meant
to give concrete examples of Riesman's character types. This work is
a "project"-expensive, pretentious, dubious. Questionnaires, interviews,
interpretations, all of this decoration in the end succeeds in giving us
merely a superficial psychoanalytical report on some elected persons.
(The only genuine reward of these heavy pages is a fantast named
Henry Friend. Friend is fifteen years old, goes to a progressive school in
Los Angeles, is being analyzed by a Reichian and at the time of the
interview was the founder of his local Young Citizens for Wallace
Club.) The interpretations are offered with quite a bit of authority and
relish, but nevertheless the dangers of triviality and pointlessness loom
up on every page. For instance, there is the following comment upon
a young "subject" who greatly admires the work of Thomas Mann:
"I am struck, moreover, by a certain surprising provinciality in the
judgments themselves; Mann has little standing with the avant-garde,
German or American, but only with middlebrows." This shows what
a din of static comes to one who listens with too eager an ear to the
buzz of some imaginary goddess of Fashion.
It seems likely that Riesman's projects and interpretations are
much more vivid than those one may expect from other sociologists.
Indeed the mind sinks into despair at the thought of the other projects
mentioned in this book: the Cornell group trying to define persons who
possess "social creativity"; a Brooklyn College group interviewing "self–
actualizing" individuals. These scholars, defiantly gay and busy, are
mad lovers of the moon-moonstruck, they follow the course of a smile,
trace the path of a sigh.
Freud and Veblen: Riesman is uncomfortably challenged by these
figures. Great they are, strange and wonderful, and yet a little unreal
somehow, a bit
impossible
with so much "askew" in their "character
structures," with their sudden explosions of mischief and selfishness.
Cocky, intransigent, insistent, they threaten the young with their re–
sistance to compromise, their unsuitability, like that of a brilliant but
unstable suitor one must reject for our present-day America, a land
dizzy with jobs and goods and "mobile" personalities, heroically con–
suming on the world's material and spiritual market.
The general impression one gets from Riesman's book on Veblen
is that Veblen was tiresomely simple. A brilliant goof, he didn't care about
clothes and wanted to prevent other people from enjoying them; he
built himself a log cabin in the woods; he was "provincial," not sure
of himself and therefore filled with the need to exaggerate and insist
