582
JAMES GILBERT
on the Palmer House meeting of Radical Blacks and whites in 1967,
and the debacle of the New Politics Convention. Clearly, by then, she
had had it (the no-Ionger-New-Left was a "vulgar joke," and able
to
contribute as much to discussion of problems as a "mean drunk to the
workings of a fire brigade.") So much did she see this as the signal for
the end of the Left, which she scores for polarizing American society, that
in the end she doubts the future of New Politics at all. Of course, it
was impossible then to predict the Convention of the summer of 1968,
or the academic year of 1969 and 1970, and perhaps, also, to foresee that
this incredibly absurd gathering would not be the last reunion of those
who want to change American society radically. Adler makes much of
the breakdown of language and sloganeering. This is a useful gauge
for evaluating one level of political activity; but it is also the mark of
most politics.
In the end, it is her sense of herself as a writer that Adler puts
at the service of the "radical middle." With her stylistic weapons she
draws up the defenses of her own generation. She writes herself sty–
listically and ideologically ou t of the comer of the Average American.
She is closest to making sense out of the early sixties when she writes
of Kennedy's politics of glamour, and farthest when she writes of World
War II as the last just war of romantic possibility. Surely, from the other
side, that is what the Chinese, Algerian, Cuban, Vienamese wars have
been all about. Still it is language that Adler feels she is defending. But
when she has finished casting her proxy for clear thought and good
style, she speaks of the historical necessity of American internal recon–
ciliation, and to prove the immense possibilities for the future, she
writes of the "three of us" who have just come back from the moon.
Three men did come back from the moon, but courageous as that was,
it has nothing to do with preserving the bonds of social unity in Amer–
ica, and less with language and clarity of thought.
If
anything, the whole
moon extravaganza proved how far we will allow language to be ·debased
in the service of technology, with programmed surprise, historic first
words and gimmicky political exploitation.
In the end, one is inevitably convinced that Renata Adler is far
different from the middle class she mistakes for a radical middle. She
calls her values corny; but her strain of sophistication has no more
place in an Iowa cornfield than the
New Yorker,
for which her
essays
were written, resembles the
Prairie Farmer.
At one point she remarks,
"Lacking an idiom entirely our own, we cannot adopt any single voice
without a note of irony." Perhaps we must read her the same way.
Given the same experience during the last decade, political scientist
