w HEN the wise old kings of Egypt
decided tohave a ball, I’m as-
sured, they placed a mummy at the head
of the table to remjnd themselves, even
at the height of the festivities, of their
own mortality. We mighttodaywith
equal wisdom, in this our own season
of celebration, nod respectfully toward
She head of our own high-heaped board.
1 e proud.. .
.- . Lest- we also p r o ~too.
- -&or~$&.Lx o‘BaIl,
^$$season at all,
’ - xi liv6<&&j L- a laboratory of human
suffering as vast and terrible as that in
which Dickens and Dostoevski wrote,
the only real difference being that the
England of Diekens andthe Russia of
Dostoevski could not afford the sound
screens and the smoke screens with
which we so ingeniously conceal our
true condition from ourselves.
So accustomed hav‘e we become to the
testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed
by witnesses from radio and T V , es-
tablishing US as the happiest, healthiest,
sanest, wealthiest, mast inventive, fun-
loving, and tolerant folk yet to grace the
earkh of man thatwetend to forget
that these are bought-and-paid-fur wit-
nesses andthatalltheir testimony is
perjured.
FOR IT IS NOT in the afternoon in
Naples nor yet at evening in Marseilles,
notinIndian hovels half sunk in an
ancestral civilization’s ruined halls or
within lion-colored tents pitched down
the Sahara‘s endless edge that we find
faces debauched by sheeruselessness.
Not in the backwash of poverty and war
but in the backwash of prosperity aqd
progress.
Here in the back streets and theboule-
vards of New York and Chicago and
Los Angeles, unused, unusable, and use-
- lessfaces, so purposeless yet so smug,
harassed, or half-dehumanized, so self-
satisfied yet somehow so abject-for
complacency struggles strangelythere
with guilt. Faces of (the American Cen-
tury, full of such an immense irre-
sponsibility toward themselves,
As though the human cost OF our
marvelous technology has indeed been
much .too great.
Do American faces so often look so
lost because they are most tragically
trapped between a very realdread of
coming alive to something more khan
merely existing and an equal dread of
The condition of liberty is the
,capacity to doubt one‘s own faith and
to doubt it aut loud as well.
going down to the-grave without having T h e Out-Loud D’oubters who took
done more than merely exist? American thought out of the vault where
If so, this is truly ;the great American the McCarthys and McCarrans of their
disease, and would account in part for time
had locked it-Dreiser and
the fact that we lead ;the world today in Mencken and Sinclair Lewis and Lin-
incidence of insanity, criminality, alco- coln StefEens-are down in thedust
holism, narcoticism, cancer, homicide, of the ’20’s.
and pervers’ion in sex as well as perver- And again the anonymous little men
sion just fot. the pure hell of the thing. in the clean white collars will assure us,
througheditorialand rotogravure, that
NEVER BEFORE till here and now only by superbazooka and thunderjet can
have men and women been so divided our famous American way of li€e be
by the discrepancy between life and the saved.
representation of life. That if we canbut build a space
Nowherehas any peopleset itself platformbefore anyone else we shall
a moral code so rigid while applying it thus insurenational contentment for
so flexibly. keeps.
Never has any people been so out- A Carthaginian faith in the ships of
wardly confident that God is on its side trade and the chariots of war as sound
while inwardly terrified lest He be as Whittaker Chambers. As misleading i
not. as MacArthur. As complacent as Cape-
“It is as if we are being endowed hart. As suicidal as Forrestal. As false
with a vast .and thoroughlyappointed as McCarthy.
body,” Walt Whitmanprophesied, “and “NOWgitout of the way,” Mr.
lei% with little orno soul.” Dooley Once doubted out loud, “for
A consideration recently emphasized. here comes Property, drunk ’n raisin’
by William Faulkner when he observed, Cain.”
in accepting the,Nobel Prize for Litera-
ture,that“the young man or woman BUT BEHIND Property’s billboards
writing today has forgottenthe problems and Property’s headlines and Property‘s
of the heart in conflict with itself. They pulpits and Property’s arsenals, the peo-
write not of life but of lust. Not of the ple of Dostoevsb and Dickens yet en-
heart but of the glands.’’ durethe ancestral problems .of the
heart.
d PURELY DOUBT thatthe youngman It is therethatthe young man or
or woman writing today has forgotten it woman seeking t o report the American
thing. More likely, he is simply so in- Century ltmthfully today will have to
timidated by our souped-up h i v e mward seek, if it is the truth he seeks.
conformity that he declines any risk A Merry Chrjstmas to aI1. And to all
which might conceivably imperil his & good night.
livelihood. NELSON ALGREN
For howcan he write of the heart
and yet conform? There are no Broyles ,+ . [ M r . 2Lgren was ask&! recently by
bills for the heart. Its loyalty cannot be the editor of the Chicdgo Daily News
bomded by precinct or ward. The t o commentonthe st& of Ammican
hearthasbut one nationality andthat writing toddy. His reply uppear.& in ths
humanity’s. Daily News O B December 3 and ir ye-
-Yet, precisely as the Russians drive printedabove with the author’s and .the ’
blindly to penalize all independence of pczper’s permbion. Mr. Algren is .the
action and thought, our specialists press author of T h e MCW with the Golden
the stethescope of constituted authority Arm,” which won the N&iopzal Book
to the American breast in the hope of Award in 1949 us tbe most distia-
I
catching the faint murmur of dissent. gslished American novel of the yeczr.1