Mind of an Outlaw (12 page)

At any rate, if the hypothesis sketched here should prove to have any economic validity, the consequences are worth remarking. When the source of profit is extracted more and more (at one remove or another) from the consumer’s at-home working time, the consumer is paying a disproportionate amount for the desire to work a little less in his leisure time. Over the economy as a whole, this particular germ of profit may still be minuscule, but it is not at all trivial once one includes the expenses of the war economy whose costs are paid by taxation, an indirect extraction of leisure time from the general consumer, who then has noticeably less money in his leisure to pursue the sports, occupations, and amusements which will restore to his body the energy he has spent in labor. (To take the matter into its real complexity, the conflicting anxieties of living in a war-and-pleasure-oriented environment opens most men and women to a daily spate of psychic havoc whose damages can be repaired only by the adequate exercise of a
personal
leisure appropriate to each, exactly that leisure which the war economy must impoverish.) By this logic, the root of capitalist exploitation has shifted from the proletariat-at-work to the mass-at-leisure who now may lose so much as four or five
ideal
hours of extra leisure a day. The old exploitation was vertical—the poor supported the rich. To this vertical exploitation must now be added the horizontal exploitation of the mass by the State and by Monopoly, a secondary exploitation which is becoming more essential to a modern capitalist economy than the direct exploitation of the proletariat. If the origin of this secondary exploitation has come out of the proliferation of the machine with its consequent and relative reduction of the size of the proletariat and the amount of surplus value to be accumulated, the exploitation of mass leisure has been accelerated by the relative contraction of the world market. Through the postwar years, prosperity has been maintained in
America by invading the wage earner in his home. Nineteenth-century capitalism could still find its profit in the factory; when the worker was done, his body might be fatigued but his mind could look for a diversion which was relatively free of the industry for which he worked. So soon, however, as the surplus labor of the proletariat comes to be replaced by the leisure value given up by the consumer, the real expropriator of the wage earner has to become the mass media, for if the domination of leisure time is more significant to the health of the economy than the exploitation of the working time, the stability of the economy derives more from manipulating the psychic character of leisure than forcibly subjecting the working class to its productive role. It is likely that the survival of capitalism is no longer possible without the creation in the consumer of a series of psychically disruptive needs which circle about such wants and emotions as the desire for excessive security, the alleviation of guilt, the lust for comfort and new commodity, and a consequent allegiance to the vast lie about the essential health of the State and the economy, an elaborated fiction whose bewildering interplay of real and false detail must devil the mass into a progressively more imperfect apperception of reality and thus drive them closer to apathy, psychosis, and violence. Nineteenth-century capitalism exhausted the life of millions of workers; twentieth-century capitalism can well end by destroying the mind of civilized man.

If there is a future for the radical spirit, which often enough one can doubt, it can come only from a new revolutionary vision of society, its sicknesses, its strengths, its conflicts, contradictions and radiations, its self-created incapacity to solve its evasions of human justice. There is the root of social problem. An injustice half corrected results in no more than a new sense of injustice and suppressed violence in both parties, which is why revolutionary situations are meaningful and liberal situations are not, for liberal solutions end by compromising a society in the nausea of its past and so bog the mass mind further into the institutionalization of social habits and methods for which no one has faith, and from which one cannot extract the psychic marrow of culture upon which everyone in a civilization must depend. If this
revolutionary vision is to be captured by any of us in a work or works, one can guess that this time it will explore not nearly so far into that jungle of political economy which Marx charted and so opened to rapid development, but rather will engage the empty words, dead themes, and sentimental voids of that mass media whose internal contradictions twist and quarter us between the lust of the economy (which radiates a greed to consume into us, with sex as the invisible salesman) and the guilt of the economy which must chill us with authority, charities for cancer, and all reminder that the mass consumer is only on drunken furlough from the ordering disciplines of church, FBI, and war.

THE ONLY ONE
of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones. And he has also been the one writer of my time for whom I felt any love. We saw each other only six or eight times over the years, but it always gave me a boost to know that Jim was in town. He carried his charge with him, he had the talent to turn a night of heavy drinking into a great time. I felt then and can still say now that
From Here to Eternity
has been the best American novel since the war, and if it is ridden with faults, ignorances, and a smudge of the sentimental, it has also the force of few novels one could name. What was unique about Jones was that he had come out of nowhere, self-taught, a clunk in his lacks, but the only one of us who had the beer-guts of a broken-glass brawl. What must next be said is sad, for Jones has sold out badly over the years. There is not a man alive he cannot charm if he chooses to, and the connection of that gift to his huge success made him a slave of our time, for it handcuffed the rebel in him. Like Styron, like myself, like Kerouac, he has been running for president as well as sticking at his work, and it was near tragic to watch the process as he imprisoned his anger, and dwindled without it.

I do not know that one can judge him. His first virtues are an appetite for life and an animal sense of who has the power, and maybe it would have been worse for Jones to deny himself. So he spent years hobnobbing with gentlemanly shits and half-assed operators and some of it had to rub off on him, especially since he had no art for living with his weaknesses, and a blind vanity which locked him out of his faults and took him on a long trip away from anyone whose mind could see into his holes.

The debacle of
Some Came Running
is, however, more of Scribner’s fault than his own. They handled him like poltroons. There was no one in the house who had guts enough to say that
Some Came Running
was a washerwoman at twelve hundred pages, and could be fair at four hundred. So a little of Jones’s very best writing was lost in the dreary wastes and tiresome egotisms of his most accurate if caterpillarish portrait of the Midwest.

Next came
The Pistol
, a dud. More vanity. The God of Sir Jones looking for his nose and wondering about applause.

Yet Jones could do ten bad novels and I would never write him off, not even if it seemed medically evident he had pickled his brain in the gin. For Jones, like a bull, is most dangerous when almost dead, and with a rebel whiff of self-respect all hell might break loose. If Jones stops trying to be the first novelist to end as a multimillionaire; if he gives up the lust to measure his talent by the money he makes; if he dares not to castrate his hatred of society with a literary politician’s assy cultivation of it, then I would have to root for him because he may have been born to write a great novel.

So may William Styron have been born, only I wonder if anyone who gets to know him well could wish him on his way. I will try to be fair about his talent, but I do not know if I can, because I must speak against the bias of finding him not nearly as big as he ought to be.

Styron wrote the prettiest novel of our generation.
Lie Down in Darkness
has beauty at its best, is almost never sentimental, even has whispers of near-genius as the work of a twenty-three-year-old.
It would have been the best novel of our generation if it had not lacked three qualities: Styron was not near to creating a man who could move on his feet, his mind was uncorrupted by a new idea, and his book was without evil. There was only Styron’s sense of the tragic: misunderstanding—and that is too small a window to look upon the world we have known.

Since then only a remarkably good short novel,
The Long March
, has appeared by Styron. But he has been working hard over the years on a second novel,
Set This House on Fire
, and I hear it is done. If it is at all good, and I expect it is, the reception will be a study in the art of literary advancement. For Styron has spent years oiling every literary lever and power which could help him on his way, and there are medals waiting for him in the mass media. If he has written a book which expresses some real part of his complex and far from pleasant view of the American character, if this new novel should prove to have the bite of a strong and critical consciousness, then one can hardly deny him his avidity as a politician for it is not easy to work many years on a novel which has something hard and new to say without trying to shape the reception of it. But if Styron has compromised his talent, and written what turns out to be the most suitable big book of the last ten years, a
literary
work which will deal with secondhand experience and all-but-deep proliferation on the smoke of passion and the kiss of death, if he has done no more than fill a cornucopia of fangless perceptions which will please the conservative power and delight the liberal power, offend no one, and prove to be ambitious, traditional, innocuous, artful, and in the middle, breathy and self-indulgent in the beauty of its prose, evocative to the tenderhearted and the reviewers of books, then Styron will receive a ravingly good reception, for the mass media is aching for such a novel like a tout for his horse. He will be made the most important writer of my generation. But how much more potent he will seem to us, his contemporaries and his competitors, if he has had the moral courage to write a book equal to his hatred and therefore able to turn the consciousness of our time, an achievement which is the primary measure of a writer’s size.

Truman Capote I do not know well, but I like him. He is tart as a grandaunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm upon rhythm. I would not have changed two words in
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, which will become a small classic. Capote has still given no evidence that he is serious about the deep resources of the novel, and his short stories are too often saccharine. At his worst he has less to say than any good writer I know. I would suspect he hesitates between the attractions of Society, which enjoys and so repays him for his unique gifts, and the novel he could write of the gossip column’s real life, a major work, but it would banish him forever from his favorite world. Since I have nothing to lose, I hope Truman fries a few of the fancier fish.

Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty, and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is as pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollipop. Yet I think he has a large talent. His literary energy is enormous, and he had enough of a wild eye to go along with his instincts and so become the first figure for a new generation. At his best, his love of language has an ecstatic flux. To judge his worth it is better to forget about him as a novelist and see him instead as an action painter or a bard. He has a medieval talent, he is a teller of frantic court tales for a dead king’s ears, and so in the years of James Madison’s Avenue, he has been a pioneer. For a while I worried about him as a force from the political right which could lead Hip into a hole, but I liked him when I met him, more than I would have thought, and felt he was tired, as indeed why should he not be, for he has traveled in a world where the adrenaline devours the blood.