What Time the Good Life?

by JACQUES BARZUN

1

IN THE recent and deservedly successful collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary remains, The Crack-Up, the novelist harks back to an experience of his youth in order to characterize his lifelong dissatisfaction with himself, as well as to exemplify one of the causes of his crack-up in mid-career. The youthful experience involved two opportunities missed by ill luck: the first, to play in a Princeton football game when he was a member of the squad; the other, to serve overseas in 1918 after a year of officer training.

In the same volume with this confession, another novelist, Glenway Wescott, finds these two incidents too trivial for Fitzgerald’s regret or, as he says, too alumnal in feeling. He blames not only Fitzgerald’s but our national immaturity. Wit and plausibility carry the point, and in the midst of Wescott’s splendid funeral oration on his fellow artist, no one thinks of stopping to argue.

Yet with the true poet’s gift of seeing likenesses, Wescott, as he goes on, casually compares America’s sentimental hankering after collegiate glory with old Europe’s passion for military life. At this point in my reading, I felt as if suddenly brought up short and confronted with a huge, intricate, overhanging question, whose roots, deep in our emotions and our culture, move us to uneasiness. Why was it that in looking into himself after recovering from his breakdown, Fitzgerald recalled these two from the many disappointments in his past? Why was it that the expression of this nostalgia made Wescott think of bloody trophies and old armor? And why is it that so many men - especially older men — are now coming back from this war with a longing for a new life, at once active and altruistic — in short, heroic?

One middle-aged naval officer whom I recently spoke with — he called as a stranger who had read some words of mine — said: “ I feel restless and I need an unbiased opinion which I cannot get from my family and friends. Now that the war is over, shall I be doing all I can for the republic as a naval bureaucrat? The next twenty years are all-important to me. I want to make something of them — of myself. At sixty my turn will be gone. Should I go back home, in the South, and enter politics? Should I teach? Should I try to write? Lord knows there are millions of things needing to be done. But where to begin? What to fight? How far to compromise oneself for the sake of the good? And what is the good?”

As for the young whom I encounter daily, with a rather fuller knowledge of their abilities, they ask essentially the same question, worded in a hundred different ways. They feel as Fitzgerald did thirty years ago. and are afraid they may look back later, as he did, on lost opportunities.

The reason for this apprehension, this restlessness, is the same throughout: the perennial desire to put life to disinterested uses. For to most men, sooner or later in their development or in that of their social group, disinterested action comes to signify the good life. They first catch a glimpse of it at school, perhaps, or in reading, or possibly during an illness, frequently during the boredom and the dangers of war. The germ, once caught, cannot be expelled from the moral system, and the victim has no peace until, like Faust at the end of his life, he perceives his own utility to others than himself.

The schoolboy’s conception of the good life, to be sure, makes us smile, because we think — or profess to think — that one touchdown more or less for Princeton is of small moment. But to say that is to miss the point. What made Fitzgerald unhappy was that at a given juncture he had failed to realize himself through an act of power, and one which was to serve wider ends than his own. It was the pattern, not the instance, that mattered. And the sense of power here is as important as the sense of unselfishness: the disinterested life must in itself be interesting. Hence the virtue, however limited, of the collegiate ideal. So long as football teams exist and are rewarded with applause, the wearing of shoulder pads and the risk of concussion must seem to the nascent spiritual sense both socially good and individually satisfying.

Meeting this double test is what made valid the European ideal of military glory that Glenway Wescott deprecates. It also explains the paradoxical praise, throughout history, of actions usually held base — such as theft and murder — when they are transmuted by the conditions of war into self-sacrifice and heroism. It is not merely that defending the city or nation is useful, for baking bread and slaughtering cattle also help preserve the lives of one’s fellow citizens. No, the case for war, blind as it is to other consequences, is that it provides opportunity for individual feats that tax the energies of man as well as earn the approval of his peers. This mixture of qualities boils down to two — a meaningful risk freely incurred and scorn for gain. So true is this that in modern times we have made a hero of the physician who goes on his rounds regardless of plague, and of the research scientist who tries out his new-found bacillus on his own blood stream.

It sometimes seems as if nothing short of this — a whole life risked for another life gained — will satisfy the highest instinct for self-fulfillment. William James recognized the strength of this desire when he discussed the need for a “ moral equivalent of war,”both as a substitute for international bloodshed and as an outlet for irrepressible energies. But fortunately the passion to exercise latent powers, to win against odds or perish in the attempt, is not always awake and raging; nor is it distributed evenly among all men, or else we should all be at one another’s throats courting notable extinction for the good of the whole. Still, whatever the psychoanalyst may say about the death wish or atonement for guilt, the fact remains that the impulse survives all explanations. At its mildest we get Bernard Shaw’s express determination to be “used up and thrown on the scrapheap" when his work is done.

In the aftermath of war, in an age seeking organization, an age, moreover, when the many have been aroused to a sense of their individual dignity, only to be cast down in one way or another into all manner of indignities, we cannot afford to ignore this particular force of nature, nor to pooh-pooh its varied manifestations. Rather, we must take stock of the ways in which we personally and socially deal with it.

2

CLEARLY enough, war itself has lost most of its attractions for modern man. Not only is fighting harder and harder to relate to worthy purposes, but as an activity it has lost its charm in losing its versatility. When a late medieval chronicler like Froissart said that “to rob and pill" was a good life, he was thinking of the resourcefulness and daring brought out by the barons’ wars. But this handicraft, so to speak, has become industrialized like everything else and the consequent division of labor has made soldiering more and more of a mechanic’s job.

This is not to say that courage and intelligence may not continue to decide battles, but that the form they take — quite apart from moral considerations — lacks the qualities that once inspired the hero and the poet. The very instruments of war are industrial machines, wielded at a distance against anonymous “targets,” which are increasingly likely to be civilian masses or industrial plants themselves. Incredibly enough, the thrill has gone out of war, either through being magnified into psychic disturbance or through being diffused into a vast anonymous chaos, which leaves only the age-old horror, no longer masked.

This result is hopeful if it means a wide recognition that war is at best a poor last resort which convicts all parties to it of gross negligence and stupidity. But if William James was right forty years ago about the psychological inadequacy of the works of peace, the automatic self-debunking of war must create a still greater void in the souls of men. For the same ferces which have vaporized the pleasure and the glory of war have destroyed the pleasure and the glory of peaceful tasks. It does look as if the last refuge of the good life, disinterested and interesting, were the college football field.

Consider the alternatives. The largest part of every modern population is made up of workers in and around industry. The futility of routine paper work everyone knows, and it has passed into a cliché of the language that the white-collar worker is something less than a man. In industry itself, there is indeed man-sized exertion and risk, but each man labors under economic compulsion, for gain only, and at routines that involve no individual conquest of brain-and-brawn over matter. Whoever first went down into a mine to bring back coal was a hero, but 200,000 standardized coal miners no more constitute a company of heroes than the furnaceman deserves the title of Prometheus. And this is so despite the daily risks run and the indispensable services performed. What is missing is the pioneering spirit, the freedom of choice, the chance to fulfill capacities to the utmost. We may want all of the miners’ time or all of their strength, but we only want the smallest part of their minds and hearts.

All of which can be summed up by saying that ostensibly we live to consume and are forced to produce for others’ consumption, and so on in an endiess round. Our ideals are ideals of sustenance.

They may represent an advance over ideals of destruction; I do not doubt it for an instant, but even for the underfed, the exploited, and the overworked, they are not enough. In moments of reflection we may speak glowingly of technology “ giving the people leisure.” And after that? We are vaguely thinking of hobbies and recreation. We hardly seem to know that the duty of a civilization is to make life both real and important, which means that work itself must be such. Rest and play remain the side dishes of existence.

Contrast in imagination the possible condition of Utopian coal miners working foolproof machines only four hours a day with, let us say, an Order of Excavating Knights, or Pilgrims of the Mine, living frugally out of the world, dressed in a distinctive garb and singing bituminous hymns. Why would the same physical occupation wear in the two cases entirely different aspects, of which only the second could lay claim to any aesthetic, that is to say, self-justifying quality?

I need not answer the question, nor am I suggesting this kind of purely external transformation as a panacea. I am only using familiar symbols, both historic and modern, to show the potency of cultural forms and to exemplify a plight common to us all.

We must indeed all be aware of it, or there would not be so many efforts to dignify the trades and professions. The businessman, with his slogans of service and his convention speeches intimating that he dies hourly so that the world may live, deceives only himself, if so much. The merchant has always been at a disadvantage in the search for the good life because his object is so unmistakably and inescapably gain. And in America, the land of combined dreams and opportunities, the dissatisfaction led to the practice of early retirement from business, in hopes of “really living” one’s old age. But to see the fallacy of this solution one has only to read those stories of Henry James where middle-aged American magnates drag themselves wearily through European resorts. For the stay-at-homes there was only philanthropy, which turned into a business, or collecting objets d’art, which was expensive frivolity.

Only a few had their temporary innings as great entrepreneurs who opened up the wilderness, built railroads or “civilized” the distant jungle or veldt. Looking back, it is easy to see that in Imperialism, side by side with crass motive, lived a boyish ideal, typified by Cecil Rhodes and made into literature by Rudyard Kipling. But even if we did not know, as we do, that this form of self-expression was as destructive as war, the opportunities for it are over. There is no longer a new world, no western frontier to develop, no remote backward lands, no margin for expansion or waste. We are packed in tight like sardines, and feel equally beheaded, equally anonymous and powerless.

Perhaps we ought not to feel that way, perhaps we should be as contented and as mute as the sardine; but whatever our duty in the matter, the dissatisfaction is there, the restlessness, and therefore the social danger. If Scott Fitzgerald draws our attention to it for the writer and the artist, the veterans young and old remind us that the problem exists for the talented citizen with a sense of responsibility. And with our commitment to a democratic equality in education, in social life, and in standards of living, it is only a question of time until the hitherto inarticulate masses voice comparable demands.

Obviously, though these stirrings occur in many a heart, they remain dispersed, futile, possibly corruptive, until somehow channeled and institutionalized. At college — to revert to our starting point — the budding hero goes out for the team. The initial step is provided for; talent and good luck decide the rest.

The world can never be quite so simple, but it can also establish channels for ability and self-fulfillment by that intangible thing we call tradition. The aristocratic tradition, as we all know, regarded the church, the army, and politics as proper occupations. In all three the ideal was disinterested service. It was, of course, imperfectly realized, not only because men are imperfect, but because of the arbitrary limits imposed on talents by the dominance of a small class owning the land. Hence the ultimate explosion of new talents, new wealth, new peoples, which together established the middle-class tradition. Based on trade and manufacture, and expressed in Napoleon’s slogan of “careers open to talent,” it was long the chief American ideal. It produced the diabolical competition of the nineteenth century, and also that century’s recognition of greatness, of which it had a remarkable abundance in all fields.

Now with the extension of democracy — the vote, popular education, and industrial manners—we must revise or restate our traditional purposes. So far we have failed to make even a beginning. We have merely taken a negative position against the two previous ideals. Democracy, we think, means “no greatness needed.” We have borrowed from industry the notion of interchangeable parts. With our increasing repugnance to war we have foolishly repudiated the hero; and in pursuing ideals of production for consumption, we have thrown creative intelligence into the meat-grinder.

Fitzgerald’s career remains a symbol of our heedlessness, though it may be that his “rediscovery” today, and even the overpraise he has lately received in some quarters, show a dim and abashed recognition of our collective mistake. In the midst of our fear of undirected effort, we wish we could somehow make good to him our mishandling of his abilities, and we quite properly regret for ourselves that he did not give us more — more things on the scale and of the solidity of The Great Gatsby. We took his treasure in small change and we are the losers.

3

How did it come about? This “lag,” this “divorce” between the artist and society, is not an inevitable thing, nor is it so much a novel separation as an aspect of the general reduction of individual power through the mechanizing of communication and the assembly-line treatment of ideas. Theoretically these facilities should multiply the gifted individual’s power; actually they divide it, and the modern poet envies Homer, who, with only a dozen Greek revelers at his feet, could probably influence the minds of six. The movies and the radio reach millions, but since no powerful mind and no stirring idea can get through them, they are barriers to intelligence, mountains breeding endless generations of mice instead of men.

Everything conspires to the same end. An early and legitimate literary success, like Fitzgerald’s, brings the writer within reach of his people, only to have him snatched away and mangled by the machine. Everyone acclaims his “promise” and rushes to discount the note at the lowest interest rate while putting upon him a thousand bewildering pressures and temptations — to take the cash, to water his stock, to repeat or alienate himself. No wonder that the man has to break down, to cease to exist, before he can recapture control of his own powers. The amazing thing about Fitzgerald is not the crack-up, which he analyzed so accurately, but the comeback.

The misfortune for the nation at large is that the death of the hero occurred in mid-career. It is of course easy to say that Fitzgerald was weak where he should have been strong; that an artist should invariably resist the pull of money, friendship, and false praise; that others could and did resist. But we must remember the terms of the case: the man who holds aloof forfeits our attention; him also we heed only when he is dead. What we are asking for is an impossible hairline adjustment between yielding and holding back—a kind of artistic coquetting, as wasteful of the artist’s intellect as it would be repellent to his moral sense. He has enough to do nurturing his abilities, and if drawn one way by them, the opposite way by his public, publishers, and promoters, he must be made of oak not to crack. For the pressures keep piling up; everyone lends a hand, like children who swing from a bough until it splits, and hide their discomfiture by saying, “We knew it would break if we kept at it long enough.”

Meanwhile the branch is no longer part of the tree. The writer who breaks down like Fitzgerald — or who yields wholly like Booth Tarkington — is bound to feel at best balked, baffled, and unused; at worst resentful, morbid, and cynical. We think of the last years of Herman Melville’s life and shudder, comforted only by the thought that there is at least a kind of protection in not being readily marketable, consumable — and forgettable.

Why, it may be asked, so much concern about a writer or two? Do we not catch up with our past after all, and lose nothing in the long run? The answer to this plausible question is tied up with that other, more massive difficulty presented by the talented, responsible citizens of whom my naval officer was a fair sample. The difficulty is to tell them what to do with their abilities; how 'o serve the republic, both alone and in groups; where to seek the makings of the good life. All would agree that the collegiate ideal, the placing of the golden age before adult life begins, is an admission of failure, a make-believe. The warrior was better off, for he could look forward to at least one action after winning his spurs. There can be no argument: the good life, to be pursued, must lie ahead, not behind man at his maturity.

Now in the nature of things, neither the college boy hugging a pigskin, nor the confessedly bewildered citizen looking for a task, can be called upon to conceive fresh ideals or start new traditions. It would be like telling a man under a steam roller that he must help himself. The creation of new cultural forms is a specialty, the specialty of the seer and the artist. It is the poets, from Homer to the troubadours, who created the aristocratic ideal; it is another group of poets, aided by philosophers and sociologists, who created the middle-class ideal. The very notion of science as a career and technology as a noble art came from the minds of writers who were neither scientists nor technologists, but who sought and found satisfaction in shaping future life to the pattern of their imagination.

It goes without saying that these ideals and traditions are not invented out of the blue, in disregard of actualities. The successful ones are obviously practical in the fullest sense, since they lead men to act, and give a meaning to life which men are unhappy without. But neither are these ideals mere abstract statements like “the love of humanity” or “democratic good will.” They must, on the contrary, be recognizable images of a life possible now, artistic renderings of actions that seem as yet half conventional, half quixotic. For the setting up of such images we need artists, by which I mean writers, painters, musicians, philosophers, orators, and statesmen— makers, as the term “poet” originally signified.

A democracy, just because it permits cultural diversity, needs more of them than most societies so as to concentrate the scattered wills of the multitude. Hence we must cherish our Fitzgeralds, not consume them; make heroes of them while they are still alive, not weep crocodile tears over their graves; remembering always the meaning we must attach to hero-worship if it is to remain compatible with selffulfillment: love with a willingness to follow.