There have been moments when the contradictions at the heart of the American dream have been too much to bear. These moments of political, social, and cultural crisis take different forms. Sometimes the discontent, like blood, spurts violently, and sometimes it oozes. It’s too early to tell where the Tea Party, and the new culture wars of this new century, will fit into the pattern. Maybe Philip Roth will write something to help us make sense of it all.
In three books – American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000) – Roth traced the agony of these contradictions through the second half of the last century. If the American dream says that through great struggle and hard work, each individual can transcend not only his own past but the whole society he lives in, and be free to make his own world for himself; Roth chronicles the tragic and inevitable failure of that ideal for each of his protagonists.
All three men follow similar arcs, from success to hubris to defeat. Swede Levov, in American Pastoral, had gone from high-school hero to successful businessman, a nice house in the country, marriage to a Miss New Jersey; ‘a shiksa. Dawn Dwyer. He’d done it.’ It is the war in Vietnam – in which young men and baseball stars are forced to fight for humanity’s right to be successful businessmen and marry beauty queens instead of living in a communist dictatorship – that brings ‘the Swede’ down. War as a social crisis, and a crisis of imperial confidence.
I Married a Communist deals with an earlier crisis, the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Ira Ringold, radio star, communist, destroys himself against the rocks of an American establishment. ‘Don’t let him fill you full of Communist ideas, kid. They’re all lies. Make money. Money’s not a lie. Money’s the democratic way to keep score.’ In other words, only a certain type of freedom is allowed, which is perhaps no freedom at all.
The Human Stain’s backdrop seems like an anticlimax in comparison to Vietnam and the Red Scare: it is Clinton and the Monica Lewinski scandal. But of course, the anticlimax of American development is partly Roth’s point. In this book the background of historical events is more muted, but deeper. It’s about race, and sex, and transcendence: from law, from decorum, from community, from past. It holds up the triumph of the individual, the stuff of the American dream, not just to scrutiny but to ridicule.
That same sense of the ridiculous has stalked the Tea Party since its creation. But, as in Roth’s stories, there is pathos too. The people who march for their freedom – freedom from state-funded healthcare, from the right to choose, from sexual equality, from welfare – have been trapped and duped by that powerful dream, that through hard work they can make their own worlds for themselves. The irony is that their collective action shows the opposite: we must make one world, all together, for each other.
World War 2 was over, and the American Dream was dead. So it goes. A generation of hard-eyed young men had arrived back in the States with crushing poverty, grim stubble and thousand-yard stares. Reality sucked, and these young men took refuge from it wherever they could find an escape route. Whiskey, the old favourite. The newly discovered Lysergic Acid Diethylamide – LSD-25. And, increasingly, science fiction.
You won’t find Kurt Vonnegut in any anthology of New Journalism, but Vonnegut was as fierce as any journalist in using a mixture of reporting and literature to attack the American malaise. ‘All this happened, more or less’ – the opening words of Slaughterhouse-Five – was the closest thing the New Journalism had to a motto.
Then New Journalism happened. Like differential calculus, it came to several people at once. Nobody really knows where it came from, but all of a sudden bored features writers started turning their interviews and law reports into short stories. Experimentation went viral, spreading through magazines and papers. Writers everywhere began using society pieces, sports reports, hell, brother, even news as springboards for their frustrated literary careers.
Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe – all the big names were at it, trying to work out just how far they could push the boundaries of reporting before they pissed off their editors. Hunter S. Thompson took a giant leap forward with his masterpiece of deranged gonzo writing, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, satirising high society, the racing world and himself with trademark irony.
The American Dream might have died, but the American Hallucination was in full riotous swing. Next, the novel. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night. Gay Talese’s grossly underrated Honor Thy Father, which tells the true story of a mafia family in every detail except the crime.
The New Journalism was irresistible. Your life, your ordinary American life, turned into a novel. Who could refuse?
But sometime after 1980, the new journalism died a lingering and painless death. The literary techniques were gradually phased out, like morphine from a patient with some terminal illness. But its impact was to last, and no American novelist today is wholly free of its influence. All of this happened, more or less, all of this actually happened, brother – the idea has a force entirely its own, and who could rule out its return?
