Books in Profile; Max Lerner; WNYC

Presenting books in profile, your City Station's Peabody Award-winning series. Our hosts are the well-known critics for Julia Peterson and Harding Lemay. Here now to open this evening's transcribed discussion is Miss Peterson. A book has just come out with a rather frighteningly grandiose title, America as a Civilization. Its author is Max Lerner, professor at Brandeis University, columnist for the New York Post and author. This new book, Mr. Lerner's, is 950 pages, the fruit of seven years' research and writing. A vast compendium about our country as it is today. A compendium which, if a copy of it would be buried under some public building and exhumed as sensory from now, and this is what I think Mr. Lerner had in mind between you and me, would certainly be found to contain some sort of answer to any sort of question posterity could possibly ask about us. But well-or-all the answers are correct, is of course quite another question, or at any rate a matter of opinion. Many of the ideas we discuss on this program come from Mr. Lemay, as you can well imagine. He's a regular widow's cruise of ideas. But the idea of discussing Max Lerner's new book,

America as a Civilization, came, I have to confess it from me. After considering the size of the book and the limitations, not only of our poor intellects, but also of our time, as parents, earners of daily bread and professional readers, Mr. Lemay and I decided against even the attempt to read all 950 pages. So we've chosen certain chapters out of Mr. Lerner's book, and decided to confine ourselves to the kind of subject we felt best able to digest. That is, the usual questions of parents and children, women, love, morals, popular arts and culture, all our favorite themes, as Max Lerner sees them. I'm sure you will agree with us that these are important ingredients of American life anyway, and they certainly reflect as much as any single part can reflect the quality of the whole. What is your general impression of this book, Mr. Lemay, on the basis of course of what we read? Well, I'm afraid that I'm in a very bad position to evaluate Mr. Lerner's book because my feeling is not only that it may have been intended to be put down underneath the foundations of a building for later resurrection,

but that is only valuable to someone who hasn't read anything else on these subjects. That it seems to me that we have covered, we have covered actually on this program so many of these subjects. You mean you're setting us up with people with art? Not only. But if we have, if we have, how many other people must have in conversation and thinking? It seems to me this is a perfect book perhaps for the young college freshman that Mr. Lerner does teach, and I understand many of whom were given some of these chapters to use as source material during his classes. But it seems to me that we have all read from Margaret Meade to Ashley Montague to Simone de Beauvoir through writer after writer after writer since the Second World War. On every one of these themes, and I must say I didn't find, and I hesitate to say it, but I will say it, much of an original opinion or thought or really an original approach to anything in this book that I hadn't seen somewhere else. Well, I suppose to be fair to Mr. Lerner, we have to admit that it wasn't an original approach that he was looking for, nobody else has put it all together.

Here it is all between the covers of one vast book, which weighs horribly on your stomach if you try to read it in bed, and is uncomfortable at best in any position, but if you want to know what the thinking is about any one of these subjects, you can find it. Well, only what Mr. Lerner is thinking is I suspect to start. Well, and all the reading that he has done because he must admit he's done a vast amount of research behind it. Yes, oddly enough, I was reminded as I read this book over and over again of the Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, which dealt with women and in dealing with women dealt with almost everything else. And that book, which at the time irritated me, as a matter of fact, sent me right up through the ceiling from time to time, at least did touch me in where it hurt. But it's not fair to compare Mr. Lerner, who is one of our best intellectuals with a woman who is an intellectual, of course, in her own right, Simone de Beauvoir. Oh, I would take great exception to that. I don't think Max Lerner is that kind of intellectual at all. I think he's one of the great, great popularizers in the worst sense of everything. He says, to me, the book is full of things like this, which I'm going to quote because I can't use my words about Lerner somehow.

One is the final test of a culture lies in the quality of the setting it provides for the individual personality to form itself. And as I said on almost every page of this that I read, now what does he mean? What does he mean? What does he mean that cannot be said better, really, and make you understand what he means? Every culture sets a place for the individual to form itself. I assume this is where you start. Yes. Now the final test of a culture lies in the quality of the setting it provides. I don't understand this at all. Well, of course, it's one of those loose generalities in which you must deal when you're writing a book of this kind, because it's again a matter of taste, everything that's a generality boils down, who's going to judge the quality of the setting. When you're quite right, except that in Simone de Beauvoir's book, she would use these to me some rather shocking generalizations, but then, because she would really force you into a combative position, she would try to persuade you to her point of view. I don't find much of a point of view in Max Levin.

Well, one thing is certain, and that is that he does correct Simone de Beauvoir, not openly, but by inference, because what she felt was that the world was geared all around spoiled modern women and that they hadn't reached the proper level of dignity of men, whereas Levin says openly it's a man's world, and women are coming along and competing with men. It's hard for them, but they're doing all right. He's not got a twisted idea of not a dumb of women. No, as a matter of fact, I think that Levin is a very healthy writer in many ways. That may be why, in a way, he's much a dollar, and Simone de Beauvoir. Well, this may well be because there was a neurotic compulsion in Madame de Beauvoir to say certain things to make her point. In this, I find that he will start a section with, well, I'll take the feel I know quite well, and that is in the paperback field, in which he said that the paperback revolution in literature had made this nation a nation of readers. And then in the last sentence of the same section, he says 10% of the people buy these,

which contradicts the idea of that we're a nation of readers. But this goes all the way through everything I read in that book. Well, I suppose it would be literally impossible to try to do a complete coverage on the American society as it is today, and not contradict yourself with it practically every breath. Well, I think this is what I find a little irritating about the book, and that is that it seems well organized. It seems because he's broken it down into certain sections about the individual, about society, about the arts, that it seems as if he's organized it, but to me, it is not a well-organized book. It's not a book thematically organized at all. It's just subject-heading. Well, the subject's overlap. That's the trouble. I mean, it's quite impossible to do a separate chapter on morality, and then another chapter on sex, or on women's role. You must overlap. So, of course, it's repetitive. And so, there is also the dreadful feeling you have, as you're 600 pages deep in this, that you read it, 400 pages back. But let's not pretend we were 600 pages deep. Well, I skipped point to 300 pages at a time.

But there are certain things. There's one thing I would sit and eat quarrel with, because when he says, for instance, that the accent in our civilization, in the bringing up of children, and in the whole standard of what is expected of individuals, is to do well, to be a leader, to succeed, to be adjusted, to be happy. We recognize all this. But we are relatively unaware of intangibles, he says, such as wonder and mystery. I might even agree with that, but then he says that the American people are seldom dedicated to what will not pay off, that is his phrase. Now, I think one can see superficially looking at American society, an infinite number of proofs, of the fact that we are not nationally dedicated to what will not pay off. On the other hand, where in the world, in the rest of the world, in what other society do you find so many people dedicated to lost causes? Yes. There isn't a lost cause in this country, for which there are disinterested people battling perhaps through their whole lives, for lost diseases that no one pays any attention to, for unmarried mothers, for the Negro situation, for anything and everything you like. Oh, we must call the Negro situation a lost cause.

Well, for difficult causes. The cause is that the majority of people are not enough concerned with. You will find someone as a defender, some group everywhere in this country. I have never seen that in Europe, and I'm sure it doesn't exist in the Orient. No, I quite agree with you. I have a feeling that in saying the American, as he does, is forced to by the nature of his book. Mr. Learner leaves out the possibility of saying, and what he should be saying, some Americans, of course. But he leaves out the possibility of the exceptions who are always the drivers in our culture. So the average American is not a great creative artist. There's not a popularizer of... Yeah, average no one. Well, actually, they're not even popularizers of anything. The average American earns a living doing what he might not prefer to do, but he wants to earn a living so he can have his home paid for and so on. So this is missing from this book for me. To me, this is the average American, the individual. In his chapter called Life Cycle of the American, I felt very strongly that he had read Jacelle too much, and a number of other people who only... Well, he said everybody else read Jacelle too.

I'm sure he has too. And Spock too. Well, he has six children, I suppose. Yes, well, well, even with two, you read Spock all the time. But you would agree with him that there's an American over-evaluation on the child and over-emphasis on youth. Well, I don't know if it's an over-evaluation. There is an over-concern. I think Americans have a tremendous guilt about any relationship. I think part of it comes from people like Mr. Lerner who not quite so much in this book, as in his daily columns in the New York Post, certainly nourishes this feeling of anxiety. Are we treating our children right so they don't grow up to be gangsters, homosexuals and so on and so on and so forth? This is always the theme of much of his daily writing in the newspapers. It pervades this in a different way somehow. He realizes, I think, that this nourishment of all the fears and guilt in this country come from the great popularizers. And again, I don't say Max Lerner is a popularizer of Freud, of all the theories about government people, everything else to me. His matter of fact on this question of children, I think the Japanese as I remember them and even the Russians as I understand from reading about them,

give their children about a time than we do. But what he says is that our children are not suffering from economic deprivation but from emotional deprivation. And this I disagree with most strenuously. I don't know how you feel because it isn't a deprivation of emotion. Not at all. It's too much concentration of emotion on everything they think. I think they're overwhelmed by it. I also think that Mr. Lerner has made an error somehow in feeling that emotional deprivation is a bad thing in itself. There are some emotions that people should be deprived of. I know many people who have brought up very emotional households, but that doesn't mean this is a good thing. They're certainly not being deprived of emotion. He may mean affection, he may mean a number of other things. This is the one great quarrel I have with him as a writer, is that I could not very often tell precisely what he meant by his use of words. Every once in a while though, he says something that has to me a certain rings of bell, I must say definitely, for instance, there is a constant demand for vitality in season and out regardless of whether it is charged with meaning.

This surely describes at least superficially the aspect of American life. There is a terrible demand for vitality, very little respect for the lazy, for the dreaming, for the retired. For privacy. For the kind of quiet, ruminating out of which new ideas really come. You know it's very difficult to gauge any book that deals with America as a totality because I think when he talks about action and vigor and vitality, I think of the people I watch on the subways as I go to work and go back from work every day. When you go back from work, they're beating up. Well, they're beating up in the morning. You just wonder where they've been all night. But the difficulty with Mr. Lerner is that again, I don't think you can say Americans and leave it there. Well, it's a fallacy to generalize from a nation anyway because you're really generalizing from mankind. There's very little profound difference between one man and another all over the world. That's very true. There are other countries.

Other conditions, but the fundamental tendencies of human nature, after all, are the same. I would like to quote something from him, which it was in that life cycle of the American, which deals with children, which I think is a dramatic idea, but not necessarily a valid one. He said, all the frustrated hopes of men and women who have come to adulthood without fulfilling their dreams and drives are poured into the child's upbringing, which becomes a means of the curious living or reliving for the parents. They seek the fashion that child into their own cherished image using him eagerly to fill the emotional void in their own lives. I'm not sure this is true at all. I'm sure it's true of a great many parents all over the world. I'm not sure it's characteristic just of us. No, I'm also not sure that it's true of that many people. I'm sure these are the top level of the neurotic family situation. In the middle, there may be more permissive and less, I would call it, almost psychotic relationship. I hate that word.

I do too, but I hate both words, but they seem to be the two extremes today, and they seem to feed each other. But Mr. Lemay, you really must admit that parents, by and large, there is a tendency in parents to plan all their hopes in their children and try to force their children to go in the direction of their hopes. I don't know. All of us have to battle against this. Sometimes I have a feeling that people talk about American parents today, and then I look around at my friends who are young American parents and at ourselves, and I don't recognize the image that Mr. Lerner and other people are throwing at me of ourselves. I think this must be exceptional. No, I really don't think so. I think that he's talking about, and if you'll forgive me about the generation before us, I really do. I think that when Sidney Howard wrote the silver card and when O'Neill wrote those long, long, traumatic dramas about family relationships, this was very true. But today I find more easily casual living between parents and children within the same economic group, as he was talking about here. And to me, he is still projecting from his own young parenthood into his grandparenthood, if you'll forgive my saying so. I know he's also a fairly new parent to him, but he has both.

He has his grown up children and his infant children. Well, listen, what would you say about his treatment of the cult of love? Wouldn't you agree with that? I mean, haven't we a cult of love, and isn't it pretty well expressed when he says it's a combination of a conviction of uniqueness and a submission to fatality? Again, I think that- Because I did it as one person for you somewhere in the world, the right person, and you keep on changing partners till you find the right person. No, I don't think that's true. I think that's true. Again, I'll take it right and throw it right back at his generation, not at mine. I really think there are more young- I'm not sneaking feeling I'm part of his generation. Well, you see, it's dangerous to generalize about emotional things anyway, because the individual is so important that each man's emotional life is unique. And I think that this whole section of learner bothers me, because in dealing with children and parents and marriage, he deals with the individual emotional life that none of us knows anything about except our own. And I feel you can't generalize the kinsies to the contrary, everybody to the contrary. I'll say, we know each other, if we're lucky, we know just each other. We don't know many other people.

Well, we can only generalize from ourselves. Well, if he's doing that, then- Well, he's much more widely read than we are, let's say, on these general subjects, because he's been pursuing them for years. So I think he has grounds for generalization if anyone has. I don't think anyone has. I suppose this is what irritates me most. I think that's what you mean. That I feel very strongly that if people would only shut up about the way of being good parents and the way of being happy marriage partners and the way of being satisfied grand parents and just leave people alone and not write daily columns about it and not write a thousand-page books about what it all means, people would be able to adjust to this is normal relationships after all. People did it long before people knew how to write or how to read or how to write books this long. But it seems to me that there's just too much information and generalization and opinion being thrust at everyone today about things that really just take common sense. Well, you've got a point there that there's an awfully self-conscious awareness, a new kind of anxiety, living and watching yourself live. But I think some of the questions he asks of are perfectly fair questions.

He begins, for instance, the chapter called the arts and popular culture about which I think both of us have fairly strong opinions by saying is the kind of civilization America has developed hospitable or hostile to creativeness in the arts. Now, I think that is a perfectly fair question that creative artists are asking themselves. Well, you know, I don't think that the creative artists, the legends of the country have ever had an easy time. I think the mere fact that you prefer to sit somewhere and figure out what the man holding the fields next to you is life is like means that the man who holds the field is apt to hold you either in contempt or suspicion. This has always been true. It's not only in our present time. It was true, I'm sure, in the great periods that we think of as being so cultural Spartans, after all, in the Greek civilization didn't much care for the poets of Athens either. I mean, there's been little cultures. Well, but there's that new element in our civilization. And that is the mass means of communication. The popular means of popularization of art changes the aspect of the whole question for art time.

Well, of course, he talks and I agree with him very much about the fact that we distribute art much more. We distribute music and books and reproductions of great paintings. But that doesn't mean anybody's really listening or anybody's really reading or anybody's really looking at the art, the way the artist intended or what. It doesn't mean that the communication from the artist to the person who has the reproduction, for instance, is there. I think distribution itself doesn't mean a thing unless there's a receptivity to distribute. Yes, this is where I think Mr. Lerner does not, at least in that chapter, doesn't go deeply into what shapes receptivity in people or susceptibility to artistic stimulus. I think he has a point about it. He says there's a fear that the wide support of an art must taint its quality or destroy its fine bloom. And he doesn't seem to approve of that fear. I myself think the fear is eminently justified. Oh, I do too. And he says this is the great fear that one finds in American literary and art criticism. And one can match it only by the great contempt that one finds in turn on the part of the big audience, a contempt for the elite arts that can't understand and whose aestheticism it distrusts.

It divides us into a big and little audience, as opposed you and I are the little audience. Well, he does this. I think sometimes he makes some rather arrogant assumptions. And one of them is, and I'm going to quote this one because I do disagree violently with it. He says the painter cut off from his audience except for an inner circle of means and sensibility came to despise those whom he could not reach. Now, I don't think this is true to start with. I think there are very fine painters like Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, Ben Shawne, who have never despised the people they couldn't reach. As a matter of fact, they've painted them. Sloan would walk all down 14th Street, finding the quality of life of the people who wouldn't even know John Sloan painting if they saw it and they wouldn't recognize themselves. I think this assumption that artists despise those they can't reach is a dangerous assumption. They're not interested in a way. I think as speaking for themselves, I'm hoping that a lot of people will see what they're saying and they don't despise at all. No, I'm sort of shocked that Mr. Lerner would make this assumption that an artist because the real artist never despises anybody.

As a matter of fact, the raw material for most artists are the people he can't reach because he uses them as material over and over again. In another context, somewhere else, Mr. Lerner quotes Leje, the French painter, saying, thank God for American bad taste, which I found a very irritating remark, but it controverts what he said about the artist's contempt. This is quite the true throughout the book. There is another thing on the same section in which he says Americans are people with such varied ethnic origins that no one tradition could retain a hold on them for long. People in constant motion, physically and symbolically requiring arts that are swift, brisk, cohesive. Now, this is not true again. It's not true of any of the major writers. It's not true of Faulkner. It's not true of Cousins. It's not true of James A.G. People we've discussed this year in our program. It's not true of any of our popular arts. Basically, it's not true of the dance form. It's not God knows. It's not true of whatever it is those kids you're listening to all the time. Rock and roll. I don't find that I can orient myself to his generalizations very often on this.

There's one single thread that goes through this whole book and shows where he stands and which I find annoying and I don't suppose you do. He says the American novel flowered at a time. Instantly, he always uses the past tense, so that posterity will feel at home with it. When men saw that they had been cast out of the theological order of design into a natural order of chance and tragedy. In other words, he's continually brushing aside the religious context for the whole of the American people. He's brushing aside in so many words the concept of original sin as a bogie man that everybody is through with, at the same time that he talks about our dishonesty, our hypocrisies, our violence, the things that are our original sin. He is afraid of religion that man. Well, of course. But Americans are not. I think there's a great danger when you're as well-known a liberal as Mr. Learner is and that is that tolerance has carried much, much too far. We talked about this with Dorothy Thompson once here in this program. There are things you shouldn't be tolerant of. If we have violence in this country, the Nazis certainly showed the world the kind of violence we've never had.

So it's not just this country. I'm sure the Russians are showing it to people now. Violence is not American necessarily. Violence belongs everywhere there are people. I'm afraid. Oh, violence, of course, is not American. But I mean, he in a way condones a moral code that we, the fact that we've got an accepted moral code that we give lip service to, and then we also accept the circumventing of that code. Yes, I agree with you that he does this. I don't know. I don't quite know why. I don't quite know whether he approves of it or not. He's merely bringing it to our attention, perhaps. But he has not investigated carefully enough the moral tradition that he's saying we've discarded because I think we still have great moralists. I think all our major writers today are moralists. I don't care whether we want to identify them by specific religions, but you can't tell me Faulkner isn't a moralist. They all write within the framework of their own morals. One of the things that annoyed me most in this book was his attempt to explain our lack of reaction to superior works of art. It is important to understand that the corrupting principle does not lie in the machine principle. He says, at the core, he says, is the apathy of people who have never been exposed to quickening ideas and the slackness of thought which makes them victims of cynical and greedy men.

I do not believe we have never been exposed to quickening ideas. America is brimming over with quickening ideas every day of the year. You haven't listened to Books in Profile with Virginia Peterson and Harding Lemay. The book discussed tonight was America as a Civilization by Max Lerner. We are interested in your comments on this evening's program. Address them to Books in Profile, WNYC, New York 7. And join us again next Thursday evening at 8.30 for another transcribed edition of Books in Profile.