It would be a grotesque exaggeration to leave you with the impression that the primary domains of policy analysis are the social sciences. If policy-relevant ideas and methods are what you are searching for, then of course you have to go to the the humanities and fine arts as well. Biography, the republic of letters, the truth in fiction, poetry, literary criticism, other media and more are there.
Some very different examples will have to suffice. What follows is a long read, so you are encouraged to dip in wherever it might first interest you.
Table of Contents
- 1. Novelists, playwrights, artists, philosophers, literary critics
^Socrates, the Delphic oracle and a different public ethics
^What Shakespeare’s missing lines tell us about war
^Recasting 9/11 through a Gerhard Richter painting
^Rails, bluejays and clenched fists
^The entire point of revolt may be revolts
^One very important function of surprise
^Betterment and the brothers, William and Henry James
^Yes, no, but
^Christopher Ricks and the unimaginable (newly added)
- 2. Republic of Letters
^Our next Constitutional Convention
- 3. Youtube
^What the Thai BL series, “Bad Buddy,” tells us about “societal reset”
- 4. Contemporary poetry
^Analytic sensibilities and their policy relevance: poets A.R. Ammons, Jorie Graham and Robert Lowell
- 5. Biography and autobiography
^Recalibrating politics: the Kennedy White House dinner for André Malraux (long read)
- Novelists, playwrights, artists, philosophers, literary critics
^Socrates, the Delphic oracle and a different public ethics
I
What the Delphic oracle said about Socrates varies by the account of how Socrates defended himself at his trial for impiety and corrupting the young.
Plato’s version has Socrates’ recounting that the oracle pronounced no human being wiser than Socrates. Socrates then goes on to ask, Aren’t there others in fact wiser? In the process, he underscores knowing his own ignorance.
In contrast, Xenophon (a contemporary of Socrates and Plato) has Socrates saying the Delphic oracle pronounced no one freer, more just, or more prudent than Socrates. Socrates then proceeds by asking and answering nine questions which are meant to lead to that conclusion.
II
For my part, I like the updated composite version: wise enough to disagree, free enough to agree.
Though apparently not symmetrically so: Socrates being wise is entailed in Xenophon’s version, whereas being wise in Plato’s version also means knowing you’re ignorant of things. Or prudently put, just how free am I?
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^What Shakespeare’s missing lines tell us about war
The playhouse manuscript, Sir Thomas More, has been called “an immensely complex palimpsest of composition, scribal transcription, rewriting, censorship and further additions that features multiple hands”. One of those hands was Shakespeare–and that has contemporary relevance.
–The authoritative Arden Shakespeare text renders a passage from Shakespeare’s Scene 6 as follows (this being Thomas More speaking to a crowd of insurrectionists opposing Henry VIII):
What do you, then,
Rising ’gainst him that God Himself installs,
But rise ’gainst God? What do you to your souls
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you, like rebels, lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace; and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven.
Tell me but this: what rebel captain…
The last two lines had been edited by another of the play’s writers (“Hand C”), deleting the bolded lines Shakespeare had originally written,
Make them your feet. To kneel to be forgiven
Is safer wars than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot.
In, in to your obedience. While even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
What rebel captain….
What has been effaced away by the deletion is, first, the notion that contrition is itself a kind of war and a safer war at that.
–According to the Arden Shakespeare, “The act of contrition might be described as wars because the former rebels would enlist themselves in the struggle of good and evil, and would fight against their own sin of rebellion.” In either case—contrition or rebellion—obedience is required. Actually, nothing was less safe than rebellion whose “discipline is riot”.
What had been scored out, in other words, from Shakespeare’s original passage is the clear accent on contrition and peace over continued upheaval.
–But the absence of contrition by those involved in the formulation and implementation of war policies is precisely what we have seen and are seeing today.
For to prioritize contrition would mean refocusing obedience from battle to a very different struggle in securing peace and security, a mission in which our ministries of interior and defence are notably inferior, be they in Russia, the US, China or elsewhere.
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^Recasting 9/11 through a Gerhard Richter painting
In a 2002 interview, painter Gerhard Richter was asked if he would paint the 9/11 terrorists (as he’d done earlier with Baader-Meinhof members): “Definitely not. This horrific form of global terror is something I cannot fathom”.
“September 11 bothered me more than I expected,” Richter admitted later. By 2005, when an interviewer asked about a small painting appearing to show the World Trade Center’s towers, Richter said: “These here are only failed attempts. I couldn’t get this stereotypical image of the two towers, with the some billowing out of them across the deep blue sky, out of my mind.” He went on to say that the painting in question “couldn’t work; only when I destroyed it, so to speak, scratched it off, was it fit to be seen”.
–Below is his September, a 2005 photo-painting of the event and relatively small at approximately 28” x 20”:
The image you are seeing was rendered from a photograph showing the south tower of the World Trade Center as it was hit. The specific photo was, in Richter’s words, “very typical…Colorful—red, yellow, fire” “I painted it first in full colour, and then I had to slowly destroy it. . . ”
“I failed,” he told a friend; the painting “shows my helplessness. In German, my scheitern, failure.”
–Really? Is the painting in a failed state? Look at September again. Do you see the active, living absence of the deep red and yellow that initially tripped Richter up? By extension, do you see the active, living absence of the new democracies to come into being this century from presently failing states, including—dare we say—parts of the US?
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^The entire point of revolt may be revolts
–For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 18th century German Enlightener, the point is not for the sculptor or painter to portray a crisis at its climax, when visualizing a single moment. Better to choose a moment before or after the apex of destruction, so as to allow the viewers’ imaginations freer rein over what is to come. That way, Lessing argues, the narrative continues in an arc of reflection that is not cut short by any climax’s overpowering intensity:
[S]ince the works of both the painter and the sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated. . .it is evident that the single moment and the point of view from which the whole scene is presented cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which allows the imagination free play is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imagination, the more must think we see. In the full trajectory of an effect, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present to the eye what is most extreme is to bind the wings of fancy and constrain it, since it cannot. . .shun[ ] the visible fullness already presented as a limit beyond which it cannot go.
Instead of picturing Ajax at the height of his rage and slaughter, better he be depicted afterwards in the full realization of what he has done and in the despair leading him to what comes next.
–One problem with today’s crisis scenarios is the preoccupation with or fixation on a visual climax. Obviously post-apocalypse can be pictured as even deadlier, but the point holds: In today’s catastrophe scenarios, the worst is imagined and imagination stalls there–like shining deer at night–in the glare of it all. Our unrelieved stream of crisis scenarios is itself proof that a prophesied climax can’t do all the talking.
–So what?
Any disappointment that one or more revolts–Occupy, Yellow Vests, Hong Kong protests, Arab Spring, the Extinction Rebellion–have not culminated into “far-reaching substantive change” is but one scenario. Once only, because the climax scenario may not be the most fruitful, suggestive moment to focus on anyway, let alone be overawed by. The entire point of revolt may be revolts.
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^Rails, bluejays and clenched fists
Eudora Welty, American author, wrote a short story where “bluejays lighted on the rail,” which prompted one reader to reply: “Dear Madam, I enjoyed your stories, but bluejays do not sit on railroad tracks.” On further reflection, Welty conceded that this too had been her own experience. Yet there the bluejays still sit in the Library of America’s definitive edition of Welty’s work.
That’s the view from the inside out; there is also outside-in. We know through photographs that when Picasso was painting Guernica, he had a powerful image of a clenched fist raised high. That image, however, was painted away under what we see today.
To bring to light all these present-but-absent bluejays and absent-but-present clenched fists parallels the challenge of identifying what’s missing in major policy arguments. Clenched fists matter now more than ever, here; rail tracks without those bluejays still matter, there.
Yes, of course, this bringing to light is difficult, but less so than being in the dark might suggest. “Things shine more brightly to an observer who is in the dark,” conceded Diderot, the French Enlightener. A blank canvas, according to visual artist Gérard Fromanger, is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’’.
How different from the reactions of those confronting opaque policy. Let’s sweep the table clear, wipe the slate clean! As if it’s best to start over by missing what is already there.
———————
^One very important function of surprise
What I’m missing right in front of me is coming to see in the lines from a George Meredith poem
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
that “horse” and “shore” are anagrams, and then ask: To what effect or difference does this make for my reading? (E.g., as if “ramping hosts of warrior” reversed into a “faint thin line”.)
It’s also coming to see in the Hiroshige print–
that the waves of water and night-light are produced by the underlying grain of the woodblock, and then ask: To what effect or difference does this make for my viewing? (E.g., as if the female image is slipping side-ways out from the grain-waves.)
The vast majority of us, of course, are inexperienced and untrained in reading for anagrams or seeing the technique of kimetsubushi at work. We must instead be distracted to take at least a second look. For the inexperienced, the way to be sidetracked or distracted is by surprise—in this case, the surprise of finding the grain-wave pattern on your own or an oddity in the “ocean’s force” being contraposed by “horse” to “shore.” Even if afterwards Meredith’s lines remain mediocre and Hiroshige’s print astonishing, overlooking complexity is that simplification taken for granted which robs us of surprises that inform.
Note the most plausible reason for not seeing what is unseen—“Well, the reality is that it’s just not there at all”—turns out to be least plausible when living in a complex world of many components, functions and interconnections. In this world, new connections can and are to be uncovered all the time where not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty are ever present.
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^Betterment and the brothers, William and Henry James
I
In the first decade of the 20th century, sculptor Hendrik Anderson and architect Ernest Hébrard conceived of a World City unprecedented in scale and purpose. They promised a far better way to solve what was wrong with humankind and their designs and plans were eventually published as Creation of a World Centre of Communication.
In the final stages of preparing the volume, Anderson wrote his friend, novelist Henry James, seeking the latter’s help in reviewing and improving the work. James was appalled by the enormity of the project:
. . .[W]hen you write me that you are now lavishing time and money on a colossal ready-made City, I simply cover my head with my mantle and turn my face to the wall, and there, dearest Hendrik, just bitterly weep for you. . .I have practically said these things to you before—though perhaps never in so dreadfully straight and sore a form as today, when this culmination of your madness, to the tune of five hundred millions of tons of weight, simply squeezes it out of me. For that, dearest boy, is the dread Delusion to warn you against—what is called in Medical Science Megalomania (look it up in the dictionary). . .What I am trying to say to you, gentle and dearest Hendrik. . .[is] that you are extemporizing a World-City from top to toe, and employing forty architects to see you through with it. . .Cities are living organisms, that grow from within and by experience and piece by piece. . .and to attempt to plant one down. . .is to—well it’s to go forth into the deadly Desert and talk to the winds.
The language may not be yours, but the point remains all ours: Cities work only beyond design. More, they work because of their complexity. Betterment works where blueprints for progress and economic growth don’t.
Henry James also provides what may be the first glimpse of the importance Americans were to give to “high reliability” as the apogee of what can be achieved beyond design. He writes in the third person about his experience at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria early in the 20th century,
The amazing hotel-world quickly closes around him; with the process of transition reduced to its minimum he is transported to conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy, operating—and with the proportionate perfection—by laws of their own and expressing after their fashion a complete scheme of life….a synonym for civilization. . .[O]ne is verily tempted to ask if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and finding itself.
II
His brother, William James, American psychologist and philosopher, had a different take on what made him better off, but resonating with his brother’s letter to Anderson. For William James, “hotel-spirit” went too far:
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake…Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means of satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. . .You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and dark corners….And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: “Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage. . .to set the balance straight again.”
I’d like to think that somewhere just ahead of William James’s “set the balance straight” and just before Henry James’s hotel-spirit of “extraordinary complexity and brilliancy” is where you find betterment as good enough.
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^Yes, no, but
Lionel Trilling said of 19th century American writers “they contained both the yes and the no of their culture”. To the contrary, Gore Vidal said: Most Americans cannot tolerate yes and no; it always has to be yes or no. Though here as Robert Frost put it in his Notebooks, “yes and no are almost never ideas by themselves”. How might that be so?
“Education begins with the word no, and begins as the self-education that is called repression; this no has to be persuaded to turn into a yes,” Adam Phillips tells us, “and this requires another person.” Frost and Phillips are to my mind spot-on: Yes and no don’t go far enough, if they’re treated as ideas so much outside human interaction and contingency.
A character in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives asks of Mexican term: “If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?” This is difficult to answer because any answer must be difficult if it is to matter:
And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don’t worry, Amadeo, we’ll find Cesarea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north…And I insisted: don’t do it for me. And the one who was asleep…said: we’re not doing it for you, Amadeo, we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren’t they joking?…and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.
Simonel: not really yes and no, but rather not quite one or the other. I’d like to go where the term insists that “yes” and “no” matter only when followed by the qualifying “but. . .”
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^Christopher Ricks and the unimaginable (newly added)
The literary critic, Christopher Ricks, elaborates an insight from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):
‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.
Christopher Ricks (20210. Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240
This notion that humans started by making important what’s unthinkable is suggestive. Even though the OED finds “unimaginable” preceding “imaginable” chronologically, both record the meaning of making imaginable and making unimaginable.
So what? I work in a field where what is not imaginable is unimaginable. The thought that we start with unimaginable disasters and work our way to rendering them or others imaginable hasn’t really occurred to me.
Currently, we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then say, by way of comparison, the M9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. We don’t say in my experience: As unimaginable disasters are indescribably catastrophic, we must narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to frame what we know and don’t know about worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have already happened in the States.
Upshot? Frankly, neither term, imaginable nor unimaginable, is good enough for the present without going into details. The skills we are talking about are those of making more or less (un)imaginable.
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Principal sources
Bell, M. (2002). James and the sculptor. The Yale Review 90:4: 18-47
Bolaño, R. (2008). The Savage Detectives. Picador.
Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
Clark, T.J. (2013). Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica. Princeton University Press: Princeton & Oxford.
Ferris, W. (2013). A map of minds and imagination: An interview with Eudora Welty. The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) 89(4): 222-238.Flaubert, G. accessed online on August 12 2017 at https://www.scribd.com/doc/187244/Flaubert-Gustave-Dictionary-of-Accepted-Ideas-1954)
French, P. (1980). Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. Carcanet New Press: Manchester, UK.
Frost, R. (2006). The Notebooks of Robert Frost. (R. Faggen, Ed.) The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Gaiger, J. (2017). Transparency and imaginative engagement: Material as medium in Lessing’s Laocoon. In: A. Lifschitz and M. Squire (eds) (2017). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK: 279 – 305
Hall, D. (1979). Remembering Poets. Harper & Row: New York, NY
James, H. (1946). The American Scene: Together With Three Essays from “Portraits of Places”. W.H. Auden (ed.), Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York
James, W. (1900). On Some of Life’s Ideals. Henry Holt and Company: New York, NY
Linderborg, O. (2023). The history of the Socratic Problem. Antigone (accessed online at https://antigonejournal.com/2023/01/history-socratic-problem/)
Phillips, A. (2006). Side Effects. Hamish Hamilton: London.
————- https://www.thebambamblog.com/2012/01/gerhard-richters-september/ & http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/33188/gerhard-richter [at the time of writing, live links]
Ricks, C. (2021). Along Heroic Lines, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK: 19 – 55, 240.
Shatz, A. (2010). Desire was everywhere. London Review of Books, December 16, 9–12.
Sir Thomas More (2011), ed. John Jowett (Arden Shakespeare, third series. Bloomsbury, London)
Storr, R. (2010). September. A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. Tate Publishing, London
Trilling, L. (1957). The Liberal Imagination. Doubleday & Company: Garden City, NY.
Vander Waerdt, P.A. (1993). “Socratic Justice and Self-Sufficiency. The Story of the Delphic Oracle in Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates”. In: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 11. 1-48
Van Es, B. (2019). Troubles of a glorious breath. TLS (March 22) Vendler, H. (2015). The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on poets & poetry. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
2. Republic of Letters
^Our next Constitutional Convention
My entry point centers on an exchange of letters between critic, Edmund Wilson, and novelist, John Dos Passos, during the first half of the 1930s. Their interchange focused on the need for radical structural change in the US government and Constitution.
One of Edmund Wilson’s biographers calls the Wilson/Dos Passos correspondence “in its scope and dramatic interest second in American letters only to that of Jefferson and John Adams”. The picture I seek to recast with this interchange from the Republic of Letters is the entrenched institution of this US republic and its fifty states.
A start
The correspondence was provoked by Edmund Wilson’s 1931 Appeal to Progressives in the New Republic [NR], parts of which read:
Not only are the people in a capitalist society very often completely ignorant as to what their incomes come from; it is actually sometimes impossible or very difficult for them to find this out. And as long as a fair proportion of the bankers, the manufacturers, the middle men, the merchants and the workers whom their capital and machines keep busy are able to make a little more money than before, no matter how unscrupulously or short-sightedly, we are able, as a nation, to maintain our belief in our prosperity and even in our happiness….
Our society has finally produced in its specialized professional politicians one of the most useless and obnoxious groups which has perhaps ever disgraced human history—a group that seems unique among governing classes in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated and incompetent all at once….
1931 and outdated? Hardly, when the bankers have metastasized into global finance, when our public utilities have been sold off to corporate risk-takers, and when the best news we have is that the rich like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, wearying of empire, try to make good in the happy-talk of philanthropy what we once demanded and expected of government.
The interchange
“Just read your battlecry,” Dos Passos writes a few weeks after Wilson’s 1931 piece appears,
Of course all the [New Republic] can do is stir things up and try to smoke out a few honest men who do know something about industrial life as she is lived…If you can keep up a series like this you really will have started something—though I’m beginning to think that every publication ought to be required by law to print at the bottom of each page:
NB. THIS IS BULLSHIT
. . . .[T]he trouble with all our political economic writing and the reason maybe why it doesnt interest the ordinary guy who hasn’t joined the fraternity of word-addicts is that it is made up right in the office and springs from neither experience nor observation…
True enough, and Wilson eventually circulates a more urgent manifesto. “The present crisis of the world—and specifically the United States—is something more than a mere crisis of politics or economics; and it will not pass with the depression. It is crisis of human culture. What faces us today is the imperative need for new social forms, new values, a new human order.”
What is needed, Wilson feels, has moved beyond experiment to revolution. “Sure I’ll subscribe to it,” Dos Passos writes Wilson in reply to the new battle cry,
—but I don’t think it’ll cause any bankers to jump out of fiftieth story windows—what are you going to do with it?—post it up on billboards? it might go well on toilet paper like [a laxative] advertizing—or is it going to be laid on [President] Hoover’s breakfast table?….Where is it going to be used—?
Wilson ends up forwarding material to Dos Passos from another periodical, New Masses, and Dos Passos writes back in March 1934,
I think it’s very important not to add to this mass of inept rubbish on this subject—what is happening is that the whole Marxian radical movement is in a moment of intense disintegration—all people like us, who have no taste for political leadership or chewing the rag, can do, is to sit on the sidelines and try to put a word in now and then for the underdog or for the cooperative commonwealth or whatever….
The only alternative is passionate unmarxian revival of AngloSaxon democracy or an industrial crisis helped by a collapse in the director’s offices—That would be different from nazi socialism only in this way: that it would be a reaction towards old time Fourth of July democracy….How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.
Late 1934, Dos Passos writes to Wilson about recent events in the Soviet Union, including the murder of Stalin’s intelligence chief,
This business about Kirov looks very very bad to me. In fact it has completely destroyed my benefit-of-the-doubt attitude towards the Stalinists—It seems to be another convolution of the self-destructive tendency that began with the Trotski-Stalin row. From now on events in Russian have no more interest—except as a terrible example—for world socialism—if you take socialism to mean the educative or constructive tendency rather than politics. The thing has gone into its Napoleonic stage and the progressive tendencies in the Soviet Government have definitely gone under before the self-protective tendencies….Meanwhile I think we should be very careful not to damage any latent spores of democracy that there still may be in the local American soil.
These remarks provoke Wilson to respond in early January 1935:
…I don’t think you ought to say, as you do, that a country which is still trying to put socialism into practice has ceased to be politically interesting…One doesn’t want to give aid and comfort to people who have hopped on the shootings in Russia as a means of discrediting socialism. Aside from this, you are right, of course, in saying that Americans who are in favor of socialism oughtn’t to try to import the methods of the Russians….
Dos Passos fires back,
[N]o government is in good shape that has to keep on massacring its people. Suppose, when that curious little [Italian] Zangara took a potshot a Franklin D. [Roosevelt], the U.S. Secret Service had massacred a hundred miscellaneous people, some because they were [Italians], others because they were anarchists and others because they had stomach trouble, what would all us reds be saying…What’s the use of losing your “chains” if you get a firing squad instead…Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out—if the coming period of wars and dictatorships give anybody a chance to work anything out….
About Russia I should have said not politically useful rather than politically interesting….By Anglo Saxon Institutions I mean the almost obliterated traditions of trial by jury common law etc—they don’t count for much all the time but they do constitute a habit more or less implanted in Western Europeans outside of Russians….
Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do—and I cant see any reason for giving the impression of trying to induce others to engage in forlorn hopes one wouldn’t go in for oneself.
“Don’t agitate me, comrade, I’m with you,” Wilson countered at the end of that January,
Surely it’s entirely unnecessary to worry about the possibility of a Stalin regime in America. I can’t imagine an American Stalin. You talk as if there were a real choice between Henry Ford on the one hand and [American Communists] on the other; but who outside the Communists themselves has ever seriously entertained the idea that these individuals would every lead a national movement?
“But” responds Dos Passos in February 1935,
it’s not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that’s worrying me, it’s the fact that the Stalinist [Communist Party] seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in—all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made—and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism’s weakness and not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx’s work—but it certainly does influence one’s attitude towards a given political party. I’ve felt all along that the Communists were valuable as agitators as the abolitionist were before the Civil War—but now I ‘m not so happy about it.
Dos Passos then shifts his letter to a point Wilson had made to the effect that Marx belonged to a group of romantics that “came out of a world (before 1848) that was less sick, had much more spirit.” “By the way,” Dos Passos continues,
I don’t agree with you that a hundred years ago was a better time than now—they had a great advantage that everything was technically less cluttered and simpler—but dont you think perhaps in every time the landscape seems somewhat obstructed by human lice for those who view it? We have more information to go on, more technical ability to carry ideas out and ought to produce a whale of a lot of stuff—if I was a European I wouldn’t think so, but here we still have a margin to operate on—
Later that February Wilson writes Dos Passos another letter, the parting shot of which is its own “By the way,”
it is being rumored that you are “rubbing your belly” and saying that “the good old Republican party is good enough for you.” Maybe you ought to make a statement of your present position.
. . .which Dos Passos does. The month after, he writes Wilson,
I finally consented, against my better judgement, to put my name down on the [leftist] Writers Congress roster. I’m going to try to write them a little preachment about liberty of conscience or freedom of inwit or something of the sort that I hope will queer me with the world savers so thoroughly that they’ll leave me alone for a while. I frankly cant see anything in this middleclass communism of the literati but a racket….People haven’t any right to make a living out of politics—It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.
“It’s selling stock in a corpse-factory.” “Some entirely new attack on the problem of human freedom under monopolized industry has to be worked out.” “Intellectual theories and hypotheses dont have to be a success, but political parties do.” “How you can coordinate Fourth of July democracy with the present industrial-financial setup I dont see.” That said, at least here in the US, according to Dos Passos, “we still have margin to operate on”.
What margin do we have today?
My proposal
Start with the margin that the framers of the US Constitution saw fit to endorse in Article 5—a new constitutional convention. Oh no, no that won’t work, you say. How would most of our state legislatures or Congressmembers ever agree to hold a Constitutional Convention?
Answer: We hold it for them. We don’t wait. We start our own constitutional convention.
The idea here is this: We have 465 congressional districts, and 465 delegates to a Peoples’ Constitutional Convention sounds about right. Anyone on the voter rolls or adult able to show district residency would be eligible to vote and any voter from the district could run as a convention delegate. Party affiliation or endorsement would, of course, not be required. The candidate with the greatest vote plurality would be the district’s delegate. The cost of this nationwide election and delegate process would be, say, US$1-2 per person, or some $600 million, with another $50 million to hold the actual convention.
The US government won’t finance this, and corporate funding would for obvious reasons be ruled out. One can imagine a consortium of individuals, foundations and overseas governments willing to defray what we can’t pay ourselves. (To put these numbers in some kind of perspective, Forbes estimated in 2017 that the net worth of author and large charity giver, J.K. Rowling, was roughly $650 million.)
The charge of the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention: To redraft the US Constitution, e.g., through a series of amendments.
What a waste of time and money, you interject, since the real government—the states and feds—would just ignore the work of any Peoples’ Constitutional Convention.
Let them. Let them say the peoples’ mandate is illegitimate. Let them ignore a convention that represents no government, no court, no army, and none of the techno-managerial elites, just those elected to come together to hold our government, our courts, our military, and our techno-managerial elites to account. Let them ignore the Peoples’ Constitutional Convention and if they do, we’ll hold a different-premised one, and if that also does not work, we’ll go global and elect a World Parliament and then let them ignore that too.
Principal sources
The letters are in: Edmund Wilson (1977), Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY and John Dos Passos (1973) The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, Gambit, Inc., Boston, MA. I’ve followed their spelling and grammar throughout, while editing in one case still-offensive ethnic expletives.
Other key sources are: (1) L. Dabney (2005), Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY; and (2) G. Monbiot (2003), The Age of Consent, Flamingo, London: Chapter 4. (As some readers may have twigged, I am adapting and paraphrasing George Monbiot’s proposal in The Age of Consent.)
3. Youtube
^What the Thai BL series, “Bad Buddy,” tells us about “societal reset”
“Reset” is a popular term for our “starting over” (as if from clean slate) or “starting again” (as if restarting from where we are). But there are other ways to think about “reset” as it applies to wider society.
One such way will be unfamiliar to readers: the current response to a Thai BL (Boys’ Love), “Bad Buddy.” It’s a twelve episode series, now moving to the 11th “cursed” episode: According to the trope, things must get worse in the next to the last episode (just) in order to get better at last.
–I’m not going to describe the history of BL tv series (they’re not Greek boy’s love or pedophilia), nor how Thai series differ from BLs in, say, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea, which themselves differ. For those interested, a sinkhole of web-links awaits you (by the time you get to the history of China’s censorship of BLs and its current wink-nudge “bromances,” you’ll have learned a great deal).
What I want to focus on here is one major response of YouTube viewers to “Bad Buddy” (with its millions and millions of episode views and tens and tens of thousands episode comments): This series represents, right now, a “reset” of Thai BLs.
I want to argue that the “reset” talked about in YouTube comments (at least those in English) is an optic through which to think about calls to reset specific contemporary politics and society.
One of the first things “Bad Buddy” viewers comment about is the great acting and chemistry of the two male leads, Ohm and Nanon. Just say it’s astrophysical. The higher-quality of storyline, filming and direction, sound track, and pacing are also singled out for note. All and more are clear in Episode 5’s lead-up to roof-top scene, where in the language of many Asian dramas Ohm confesses his feelings and they kiss.
That last sentence in no way conveys the intensity of what we viewers actually saw and what that embrace conveyed. There is something very fitting in the reset being triggered the moment Ohm utters a mai (“no”) unlike any before.
One BL convention has been that these be straight actors kissing according to a storyline written by a female author for a largely female audience–where in the past the kiss would more often than not be two sets of closed lips compressed momentarily on to each other. Not so in “Bad Buddy.”
Other BL conventions have also been bumped out of the way by “Bad Buddy.” Most invidious to international viewers has been the question of “who’s the top, who’s the bottom?” or husband/wifey in the relationship. “Bad Buddy” makes it clear the protagonists see themselves as boyfriends. Nor is there’s the usual, “He’s the only guy I’d ever love.” Nor are the females cyphers for “funny” or “incidental,” as has been the case.
I could go on about why I’m such a fan, but suffice it here: At the time of writing, many of the YouTube viewers agree they are witnessing what they take to be a bigger reset of cultural conventions at least in the BL industry.
It seems to me that this type of “reset” is not one of resetting Thai society views of LGBTQ+ communities there or elsewhere. Nor is the reset one of setting a gold standard or benchmark for future BL tv series.
The reset I take away from the comments–that is, the reset I believe I’ve been witnessing through to Episode 10—is more akin to shaking the kaleidoscope of BL conventions and then making a new twist. The different colored shards—those conventions and tropes—don’t disappear but are being reconfigured. YouTube viewers of “Bad Buddy” are recording, participating in and energizing just such a reset. In conventional terms, expectations are notably changing and viewers are managing the changes and those expectations.
So what?
For someone living in the United States now, the economy is narrativized almost always into top and bottom. The top shafts the bottom; rich and poor are all having to take it up the ass. “A lifelong Democrat/Republican, this is the first time ever voting for my man, Trump/Obama.” This drama of ours is cursed to end early, without the final episode 12.
The notion that top and bottom could be “friends,” that the other half aren’t to be dismissed, that even when we’re fucked up and down, it’s more complicated, and that even if society can’t be remade from newer or altogether different shards, our current representations and configurations can be turned to make them work differently—well, that’s one imaginary too far in the US!
4 Contemporary poetry
^Analytic sensibilities and their policy relevance: poets A.R. Ammons, Jorie Graham and Robert Lowell
“There is no method but to be very intelligent,” poet and essayist T.S. Eliot wrote. By which I take him to mean “intelligence” being those unique analytic sensibilities we find in the humanities and fine arts. These too have policy relevance.
Read the better essays of George Steiner, John Berger, Adam Phillips—or if you will, Helen Vendler, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jane Hirschfield, Lydia Davis—and you encounter in each an analytic sensibility, sui generis. No need here for a collective or shared point of departure to understanding complexity’s implications for public and private.
Indeed, there are times when the very different analytic sensibilities posed by the poetry of A.R. Ammons, Jorie Graham and Robert Lowell achieve actual policy relevance. I say this knowing it’s outrageous to demand policy relevance from poets, let alone others in the humanities. But I suggest you also can read them and others that way.
Ammons and regulation
Policy types fasten to knowledge as a Good Thing in the sense that, on net, more information is better in a world where information is power. Over an array of accounts, A.R. Ammons insists that the less information I have, the better off I am—not all the time, but when so, then importantly so. (To be clear, he is not talking about “ignorance is bliss.”)
For those working in policy and management, how could it be that “the less we know, the more we gain”? More, in order to make our exercise here more interesting, what would that mean when it comes to the heavy machinery called official regulation? Is there something here about the value of foregrounding inexperience—having less “knowledge”—as a way of adding purchase to rethinking government regulation?
–By way of an answer, jump into the hard part—Ammons’s poem, “Offset,” in its entirety:
Losing information he
rose gaining
view
till at total
loss gain was
extreme:
extreme & invisible:
the eye
seeing nothing
lost its
separation:
self-song
(that is a mere motion)
fanned out
into failing swirls
slowed &
became continuum.
You may want to reread the poem once more.
Part of what Ammons seems to be saying is that by losing information—the bits and pieces that make up “you”—you gain by becoming less separate, your bits and pieces slow down, fan out, spread into a vital whole. We empty our minds so as to attend to what matters—emptying the eye to have the I.
So what? How, though, is this different from ignorance is bliss or, less pejoratively, seeking to know only what you need to know?
–When pressed by an interviewer, Ammons’s answer illuminates much about how knowing less is gaining more: “I’m always feeling, whatever I’m saying, that I don’t really believe it, and that maybe in the next sentence I’ll get it right, but I never do”.
Imagine policymakers and regulators, when pressed, recognizing that not getting it right today places them at the start of tomorrow’s policymaking—not its end but its revision of even the categories of “policymaking” and “regulation.” Ammons, if I understand him, is insisting that in the compulsion to “get it right the next time around” there is more importantly a next time to make it better. Again, not just to make a specific regulation better, but to revise what we mean by “regulating.”
To recast (revise, redescribe, rescript, recalibrate) the categories of knowing and not-knowing is to make room for—empty your mind for—resituating the cognitive limits of “regulation.”
Jorie Graham and the climate emergency
No one could accuse Jorie Graham of being hopeful about the climate emergency. There is not a scintilla, not a homeopathic whiff, of environmental optimism, techno-social-otherwise, in the poetry I’ve read of hers.
Which poses my challenge: Can we readers nevertheless find something to move forward with from her recent poetry? Is there some thing that I can see of possible use in my own response to the climate emergency?
In answer, consider the lines from her book, Sea Change:
the last river we know loses its
form, widens as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again, ever,
so that it's not a
dance-step, no, more like an amputation where the step just disappears, midair, although
also the rest of the body is
missing, beware of your past, there is a fiery apple in the orchard, the coal in the under-
ground is bursting with
sunlight, inquire no further it says. . .
There’s that tumbling out and after of words and the turns of phrase that deepen the rush. Witness though how the rush of phrases bounces off and back from, in this case, the hard left-side margins and that right-side enjambment.
Some might call her rush of words a compulsion to continue but for someone with my background and training, it’s difficult not to see this as resilience-being-performed in light of the dark messages all around. Like Graham, we make resilience happen.
Robert Lowell and alertness
“Design” too often assumes one macro-design the micro. Anyone who has tried to implement as planned knows how plug-and-play designs don’t work in complex policy and management, as contingency and context invariably get in the way. (For my part, it’s difficult to imagine two words scarier in the English language than business schools’ “designing leadership.”)
To see how this matters for policy and management, consider a late poem of Robert Lowell, “Notice,” and a gloss on it by Helen Vendler, the literary critic. Here’s the poem in its entirety, centering around Lowell’s leaving an asylum after a manic-depressive episode:
Notice
The resident doctor said,
“We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm –
how can we help you?”
I asked,
“These days of only poems and depression –
what can I do with them?
Will they help me to notice
what I cannot bear to look at?”
The doctor is forgotten now
like a friend’s wife’s maiden-name.
I am free
to ride elbow to elbow on the rush-hour train
and copy on the back of a letter,
as if alone:
“When the trees close branches and redden,
their winter skeletons are hard to find—”
to know after long rest
and twenty miles of outlying city
that the much-heralded spring is here,
and say,
“Is this what you would call a blossom?”
Then home – I can walk it blindfold.
But we must notice –
we are designed for the moment.
I take up Vendler’s gloss when she turns to Lowell’s last line:
In becoming conscious of his recovery by becoming aware, literally moment by moment, of his new capacities for the most ordinary actions of life, the poet sees that ‘we are designed for the moment’—that our consciousness chiefly functions moment by moment, action by action, realization by realization. Biologically, ‘we are designed for the moment’ of noticing.
–For my part, what Lowell is doing in the last two lines is also revisiting the second line, “We are not deep in ideas, imagination or enthusiasm” and making this point: The designs put upon us by ideas and enthusiasms differ from the noticing designed into us in at least one major respect: We notice the ideas-that-design because noticing is not an idea. It’s an alertness.
Knee deep in noticing is not being knee deep in ideas or enthusiasms because noticing is a kind of watchfulness—“Is this what you would call a blossom?” If you will, alertness in policymaking and management is, methodologically, first and foremost an analytic sensibility, whether or not the textbooks in policy and management call it that.
Sources
Ammons, A.R. (1996). Set In Motion: Essays, Interviews, & Dialogues. Ed. Zofia Burr, The University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, MI
—————— (2017). The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, Volume 1 1955 – 1977 and Volume 2 1978 – 2005. Edited by Robert M. West with an Introduction by Helen Vendler. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY
Graham, J. (2022). [To] The Last [Be] Human. Introduction by Robert MacFarlane. Copper Canyon Press: Port Townsend, WA
Lowell, R. Notice (poem accessed online on November 1 2022 at https://tastymorselsoflife.blogspot.com/2011/04/poem-for-april-7-2011.html)
Vendler, H. (2015). The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on poets & poetry. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
- 5. Biography and autobiography
^Recalibrating politics: the Kennedy White House dinner for André Malraux (long read)
The White House dinner on May 11 1962 for French Cultural Affairs Minister, André Malraux, is most often treated as a footnote to the Kennedy Administration and the Camelot White House. If mentioned at all, it places behind the Kennedy White House dinners for Nobel Laureates and another where celloist, Pablo Casals, who had refused to perform in the U.S. to the point, did play at the White House.
When mentioned, the Malraux dinner is seen as a key step in Mrs. Kennedy’s campaign to get the Mona Lisa to the United States (which did happen in January 1963):
Perhaps no other White House dinner had more personal meaning for Jacqueline Kennedy than the evening honoring French Minister of Culture [sic] André Malraux at the White House on May 11, 1962. Both President and Mrs. Kennedy shared an admiration of Malraux’s multi-faceted career as a novelist, art historian, explorer, Spanish Civil war fighter pilot, World War II resistance leader and advocate of the arts. The first lady and Malraux had developed a friendship following a tour of Paris art museums during the Kennedy’s state visit to Paris in June 1961. By according him all the courtesies normally reserved for a head of state, the Kennedys hoped to focus national attention on the role of the arts in America and encourage the development of Washington as a cultural center. . .At the end of the evening, Monsieur Malraux whispered a promise to Jacqueline Kennedy that he would send to her France’s most famous cultural treasure, the Mona Lisa , to be displayed at the National Gallery in Washington.
What I do here is dig deeper into the palimpsest we’ve been left for this dinner. Those attending were among America’s greatest living authors, playwrights, actors and artists—in other words, those whose profession was to speak or write well and who, fortunately for my purposes, wrote about being at the dinner. I want to see this event with fresh eyes, as if state dinner just happened. Why? Because all Americans are a party to White House events, high and low.
We find the President Kennedy using the dinner as a way to get Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh to attend. Kennedy also jawbones John Rockefeller, art patron and wealthy banker, about the U.S. economy. What would be the very scary Viet Nam War also makes an appearance that evening. And there in one place was the high and low gossip that is the molecular structure of American politics.
I’ll come back to the lessons for politics I take away form from the Malraux dinner at the end, but first read for the stories.
***
“They let us in, darlings! We’re here! We’re inside!” Thornton Wilder effuses, as he moves from table to table, embracing friends. The “new insiders” are America’s high-art grandees. The occasion is a White House dinner for André Malraux, French Minister of Cultural Affairs. Time: 8 p.m., black tie. Today: May 11 1962.
J.D. Salinger sends his regrets. So do Alexander Calder, W.H. Auden, Truman Capote, Jacques Barzun, Aldous Huxley, Martha Graham, and Marianne Moore. Those attending include Edmund Wilson, Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Agnes de Mille, Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Leonard Bernstein, Mark Rothko, Paddy Chayefsky, and Irwin Shaw.
In August 1961 Gore Vidal writes that Jackie Kennedy really “did look forward to getting Malraux to the White House. She had found him impressive. At De Gaulle’s reception for the Kennedys in Paris, Malraux had appeared with his wife, whose face was bloated from weeping…[T]heir son had just been killed in an auto crash. But he had taken Jackie around museums and theaters and completely captured her imagination.” Nicole Alphand, whose husband was France’s ambassador to the U.S., picks up the story:
Anxious to give heightened brilliance to the reign of the ‘New Frontier’, the President had decided to give a dinner at the White House for everyone who mattered in American culture—writers, novelists, musicians and men of the theatre. He asked us whether André Malraux would agree to lend his presence to this event, and it was at once arranged for the month of May 1962. We had long discussions about it with Mrs. Kennedy during a weekend spent with her in Florida at the beginning of the year. “We mustn’t allow André Malraux to be bored,” she said, “and since he speaks English badly, we should first of all invite people who speak French.” We replied that what principally mattered was to gather round her table the greatest artists in America, French speaking or not.
My husband was in Paris during April, and he discussed with Malraux the details of the journey. The Minister found it a fascinating prospect. Not only would he speak about culture, he would also talk to President Kennedy about politics in general, for this was at a time when our points of view were at variance in many ways. The General [Charles de Gaulle] was not prepared, in the immediate future, to return the visit which Kennedy had paid him in the previous year, “but”, added Malraux, “he is quite glad to send on his tanks—in other words myself—and to have them set on fire to light his path.”
As the event approached, Jacqueline Kennedy “scattered seating charts across the floor of her sitting room [and] knelt among them to work out an arrangement,” in the words of TIME. “Of all the social events held at the White House, the one that mattered the most personally to Jackie was the dinner honoring André Malraux,” writes Mrs. Kennedy’s social secretary, Letitia Baldrige.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh gives a flavor of the day and hours leading to that evening:
CAL [Charles A. Lindbergh] and I took a taxi to the White House after taking the shuttle down from New York, and after picking up CAL’s newly made “black tie” outfit on Pennsylvania Ave. It was about five p.m. and the downstairs rooms of the White House were full of people arranging flowers and moving chairs about. We waited in a small reception room (it had two Cézannes in it) next to the big cleared ballroom where the Isaac Stern Trio was practicing in their shirtsleeves for the concert they were to give after dinner. Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary then came and greeted us—a gay, informal, pretty woman with quite a line—and took us in the elevator up to our rooms: “The Queen’s room for Mrs. L. and the Lincoln room for Mr. L.”
“So far away!” I cried out in dismay, so we were both put together in the Queen’s room.
We then had tea, brought us by a nice Negro maid who took my dress to press it, and I sewed some brilliant buckles on my new evening shoes (bought in Stamford that morning). I was handed the list of guests to look over and decided there was no use trying to read any more Malraux—I would never get to speak to him!. . .We dressed and were ushered (“Call Usher’s Office”) to a small private upstairs salon where the house guests and French Embassy were having cocktails. M. and Mme. Malraux, the French Ambassador and his umpteenth wife (he urban, intelligent and very smooth; she blond, beautiful and hard as nails), Vice President and Mrs. Johnson, and various members of the French Embassy, the Kennedys, etc.
…The French ladies were all dressed up and made up like mannequins—rather terrifying. M. Malraux, a nervous and interesting white mask. Mme. Malraux less mask-like than the others, quite sympathetic. Mrs. Kennedy swept in like a queen, looking extremely beautiful in a long pink stiff gown, hair high and stiff—rather Japanese—with a diamond star set in it! I talked in English to Mrs. Johnson, who was kind and quite natural and American, and in French to the French women (not too well—but they were surprised to have me speak at all).
Then we went downstairs to the main reception hall—where all the other guests were…
Edmund Wilson calls the Malraux dinner a “big cultural blowout,” Saul Bellow “a sort of crazy fantasy evening,” S.N. Behrman “a mass dinner,” and Arthur Miller, “manifestly a show of American intellectual pride.” Gawping was palpable. “It was such a celebrity roster that I wished I had brought an autograph book and swallowed enough pride to use it,” writes Baldrige. “It was a little like ‘heaven’ in that you kept seeing people who looked rather familiar and you had never met: Is that Tennessee Williams? Or Arthur Miller? Or Edmund Wilson? (I would like to have met E.W.),” Anne Morrow Lindbergh tells a close friend two days later.
Tennessee Williams remembers Wilder, “bustling about like a self-appointed field marshal” (Wilder had been in the two world wars). Lining everyone up in alphabetical order for the reception line, “Mr. Wilder rushed up to me with the radiant smile of a mortician and shrieked, ‘Mr. Williams, you’re a bit out of place, you come behind me.'” “If I am behind you it’s the first and last time in my life,” assayed Williams. (Williams remembers Shelley Winters in the reception line. Her assistant tells me she didn’t attend.) A “nice little contingent in ‘W’s’: Penn Warrens, Wilder, Tennessee Williams,” writes Wilder to a friend. A week or so later, Wilder is on the road in search of a desert town far from Washington where he could stay “without neckties, without shoelaces and without cultivated conversation.”
Behind Williams in the reception line comes Edmund Wilson and his wife. “Elena feels such physical revulsion [toward Williams] that she says she cannot stand to be near him,” records Wilson. “She said something of this kind to me in Russian. Williams turned: ‘What language is that?’ ‘Russian.’ ‘Fine.'” Behind the Wilsons stands another loner, Andrew Wyeth, “who has become the official American painter” in Edmund Wilson’s estimation. “When the long alphabetical line had nearly all shuffled past the President and First Lady and had been presented to M. Malraux, it came my turn to meet him and I had actually never heard of him before,” insists Tennessee Williams. “I said to him, ‘Enchanté, Monsieur Maurois’—and this made Jackie smile, but did not seem to amuse M. Malraux.” “‘Good evening’ and that was all—and not even in French,” is how Thornton Wilder describes his interchange with Malraux. During handshakes, President Kennedy tells Wilder, “I want to thank you, Mr. Wilder, for what you said last week,” when the playwright gave a reading at the State Department.
That other American playwright, Arthur Miller, isn’t in alphabetical order. “I found myself at the very end of the line, as had been my fate since grammar school due to my height,” writes Miller,
and as I slowly moved forward, I saw one lone man remaining outside. Of towering height, wearing a ruffled pale blue shirt, he was almost demonstrably disdaining the occasion, standing with one knee raised and a shoe pressed against the immaculate wainscoting, studiously cleaning his fingernails with a file like an idler in front of a country store. He looked friendless, if not peeved. I only gradually recognized his face. He was Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice-president of the United States, and clearly not in his element tonight. It was the only time I ever felt sorry for a vice-president.
Other theater people cast the consummate insider, Lyndon Johnson, also in the stock role of outsider. “There was this tall guy standing off there in a doorway all alone with no guards, no Marine Corps adjutants, no secretary, aides, nothing,” remembers Lee Strasberg. “I walked right by him…[I]t was Johnson over there on the side by himself waiting to get his hand shook. I literally stiffed the Vice President of the United States!” “It was terribly embarrassing,” remembers Susan Strasberg, who accompanies her father.
“All these people,” Tennessee Williams says at the dinner, “were absolutely overwhelmed by being invited. If our mothers could see us now.” Arthur Miller tells the Washington Post, “All these people are used to earning their living by pushing a pencil or a fiddle…They are absolutely overwhelmed by being invited.” “I wish my mother could be here,” actress Geraldine Page tells Williams. “I wish all our mothers could be,” he returns. Saul Bellow remembers Mark Rothko whisper that “all of this was a lot of crap, and meant nothing to [Rothko].” “But my sister!,” Rothko says to him: “It’s a great day for my sister.” “What he meant,” Bellow said, “was ‘If Mama could only see me now.'” “In this crowd, [I] saw several novelists and poets at one time strongly alienated, ex-intransigent’s, former enemies of society, old grumblers and life-long manger-dogs,” writes Bellow, “all having a hell of a good time, their faces beaming, their wives in evening gowns (could they afford them?).”
“I’d like to dine at the White House every night!” Elena Wilson confesses. Allen Tate tells her that the dinner is the first time “a man of my [Southern] blood” has been to the White House since President Buchanan. George Balanchine arrives depressed over a forthcoming trip to Russia (Wilder tells Balanchine that evening, “plump, in his face all that I owed him”). Gail Jones, daughter of singer Lena Horne, is introduced to Sargent Shriver, the President’s brother-in-law and director of the new Peace Corps. He asks if she wants to join the Corps; she declines. (“Miss Gail Jones colored” says a handwritten note in one of the White House’s files on the dinner.) “There was not a single social occasion at the White House, whether it was for Pablo Casals, André Malraux, or a host of others, to which I was not invited,” Adam Clayton Powell writes.
Archibald MacLeish tells Robert Lowell that the White House’s “trumpets made his heart beat.” “Red Warren [and] I had a frantic search for the men’s room,” Lowell remembers about Penn Warren. “[W]e drank a great deal at the White House, and had to sort of be told not to take our champagne into the concert, and to put our cigarettes out like children—though nicely, it wasn’t peremptory.” By the end of the evening, Lowell was insulting playwright, Paddy Chayefsky. “Chayefsky does provide a temptation,” notes Edmund Wilson, who considered Chayefsky “cheap, conceited, and corny”. Chayefsky tells Wilson earlier “that he [Chayefsky] wanted to talk to me about the Russian Revolution—I could see what he was going to do with it: he had some stupid conception of Lenin that he thought would make him a dramatic character, and it was evident that Stalin was going to be rather a noble fellow, too. There were people at that White House dinner—Chayefsky, for example—who would certainly never have been there if they hadn’t been friends of Arthur’s [Arthur Schlesinger].”
Some 170 guests sit at 17 tables in the State Dining Room and the adjoining Blue Room. (“Gracious sakes, there were 162 guests,” Thornton Wilder puffed to a friend.) The table decorations include lilies-of-the-valley, baby’s breath, red and white tulips and blue iris, while the “food at dinner was delicious: soup with double crème in the middle and on top of that a dab of caviar,” recalls Edmund Wilson. “Since it was Friday with a Catholic President in the White House, this was followed by lobster and fish.” “Vendredi, maigre,” Wilder parenthesizes to a friend, meaning no meat served that day.
“Paddy was a deeply if erratically cultivated man, endlessly curious, widely read in literature, history, science,” writes Schlesinger. “My wife and I introduced him to the Kennedys…” For Wilson, “Arthur’s hand was everywhere visible” at the dinner, “and these parties are really vast expansions of the parties they gave in Cambridge.” (It is Schlesinger who requests Behrman be invited as well.) During the evening, Wilson consults Schlesinger on his (Wilson’s) tax problems. “It was only through President Kennedy’s intervention that the matter was settled as favorably as it turned out to be,” Wilson admits.
The President’s table includes Irwin Shaw, Agnes de Mille, Charles Lindbergh, Edmund Wilson, Andrew Wyeth, Geraldine Page, and Mme Malraux. Wilder sits at the Vice-President’s table along with Robert Lowell and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. At the First Lady’s table sit André Malraux, Julie Harris, Arthur Miller, and Elspeth Rostow (wife of W.W. Rostow). According to Shaw’s biographer: “So anxious was Marian [Shaw] about her appearance the night of the dinner that the Shaws arrived notably late to the White House; Shaw would rail about the embarrassment for years…President Kennedy professed to have read Shaw’s work; the two men had mutual friends…” Edmund Wilson spins it another way. Shaw “has been living in Switzerland to avoid taxes, and had flown over especially for the dinner. The New Yorker people, who don’t much like him, expressed surprise at his being there; but I found out from Alfred Kazin the probable reason: Kennedy has a friend who wants to make a play out of one of Shaw’s stories, and he must have been asked at the President’s [request].”
The President expresses interest in Wilson’s work. “Kennedy told me he had seen a review of Patriotic Gore and asked why I had called it that. He asked what conclusions I had come to about the Civil War. I answered that I couldn’t very well tell him then and there and referred him to the Introduction. He said something about its being unusual for an author not to want to talk about his book.” Kennedy doesn’t let the topic go, we see in a moment.
“I found myself at Kennedy’s Table between Agnes de Mille and Geraldine Page,” continues Wilson. “Kennedy had Mme Malraux, looking very beautiful, on his right, Mme Alphand on the other side, the wife of the French ambassador, a much less attractive lady. I didn’t know then who Geraldine Page was, but she took it very well. She is handsome and seems intelligent; is not at all like an actress, has no public personality for off the stage…Agnes de Mille explained to me that she [de Mille] was a granddaughter of Henry George, and we talked about [George’s] Progress and Poverty.” Wilson remembers Irwin Shaw “on Mme Malraux’s other side, talking vigorously to her in French.” As for Page, she had “such a good time,” according to Newsweek. She later enthuses in a thank-you letter to Jacqueline Kennedy,
I hope you are First Lady for the next three hundred years at least! I have been trying to write to you ever since I experienced the honor of my life – being present at your unforgettable dinner for Monsieur and Madame Malraux.
I may never recover.
I have tried to write a dignified expression of my gratitude but I invariably fall into uncontrollable gushing & have finally decided to gush and be damned. You see – it’s like a fairy-tale from my childhood come true. All the legends of sleeping princesses awakened – ugly ducklings turning into swans – beasts into princes – all the life renewing myths are brought to mind by the stirring and awakening and coming to life all over the country and all around the world that is taking place because you two are who you are.
You remind us all who we can be and the re-establishing of values is bringing us all to life again. I had the sensation at your party of being a single blossom in a huge field of flowers all basking in the sun so we could hold up our heads and be beautiful.
With profound and all-embracing gratitude. . . you make us believe in miracles.
Newsweek captioned Charles Lindbergh “ill at ease” at the President’s table. According to TIME, the Kennedys “scored a real social coup by the presence of reclusive Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.” At one point in the evening, Mrs. Kennedy took Colonel Lindbergh over to André Malraux, who had been in an animated conversation with Anne Lindbergh about French literature. Malraux was later asked what Charles Lindbergh had said to him. “He said, ‘I’m sorry I don’t speak French,’” Malraux reported. When reviewing the original invitation list for the dinner, President Kennedy had asked, “Where are the great Americans on this list? I mean really great Americans, like Charles Lindbergh.” Mrs. Kennedy, in turn, admired Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her writing. When she finally tracked the Lindberghs down, Letitia Baldrige remembers,
Anne Morrow Lindbergh answered the phone. That surprised me, but she was equally surprised to find Washington on the line. “My dear Miss Baldrige,” she exclaimed, “how did you reach us? No one knows our number. Oh, dear!”…I heard Mrs. Lindbergh whisper to her husband, “It’s the White House.” The next thing I knew, he was on the telephone…I managed to tell him that President Kennedy had said, “Of all the people who would do us the honor by coming to dinner, the Lindberghs would be number one.” “Did the President really say that?” asked Mr. Lindbergh skeptically. “He really did. I am telling you the truth.” There was a hushed conversation between husband and wife, then the general [sic] spoke into the telephone again. “We will come.”
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis reminisced:
The person that President Kennedy was most anxious to have attend the dinner was Charles Lindbergh, because of his life-long admiration for him and for Mrs. Lindbergh. We knew that Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh did not like to attend public functions and for that reason we invited them to stay in the White House where they might be spared some press attention. I will never forget how sweet the Lindberghs were to the children. Mrs. Lindbergh gave an inscribed copy of North to the Orient to Caroline and Colonel Lindbergh gave The Spirit of St. Louis inscribed to John. They treasure these books now, and that occasion will always remain one of my happiest memories.
Impressions were mutual. Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes: “The next morning [after the dinner]…Mrs. K. came up with the children and we talked informally in the hall—without a mask and quite real and simple…The children were refreshingly children and she was quite real and still beautiful…We also saw the President in his office as we left. You have a sense of great integrity and naturalness—no pose. We were both impressed.” For his part, however, Saul Bellow “was deeply amused at the White House by the presence of [Edmund] Wilson who had had a tax problem, by Charles Lindbergh who had been a Nazi sympathizer and by Irwin Shaw who had established residence abroad in order to avoid taxes.” Bellow later recalls Lindbergh that evening “would look at everybody with his furious blue eyes, and knock them down mentally and pass on.”
At Mrs. Kennedy’s table, “Malraux spoke in passionate outbursts of French at a speed that defied comprehension by the president’s wife much of the time and by me at any time,” according to Arthur Miller. “He was a star fencer flicking his foil before you had a chance to get set. He smoked almost violently and had a fascinating and disconcerting tic that made you wonder how he ever relaxed enough to sleep.” Elspeth Rostow remembers Miller as “almost apoplectic,” when he was unable to talk to Malraux directly, using Rostow as a translator.
“In the Blue Room, Jacqueline Kennedy, brilliant in a pink strapless Dior, chatted in confidential murmurs with Malraux,” reports TIME. “At the table, Mrs. Kennedy in ‘hot-pink’ silk by Dior, talked French with Malraux” is Newsweek‘s version. (Part of Marian Shaw’s anxiety was she had been warned by her Paris couturier that Jackie might wear the same dress Shaw had chosen for the dinner. Wilder described the First Lady as “glorious in a white and pale raspberry Dior.”) “Whenever a wife says anything in this town,” President Kennedy comments later, “everyone assumes she is saying what her husband really thinks. Imagine how I felt last night when I thought I heard Jackie telling Malraux that Adenauer was ‘un peu gaga‘!” Mrs. Kennedy had just taken Malraux on a tour of the National Art Gallery in Washington. When asked what were her favorite pieces, she replies: “Mine are whatever his are.”
One or two confidential murmurs seem to stick. “What’s so great about Malraux?” Jackie is asked a few weeks before the dinner. “He isn’t even attractive looking.” She shot back: “He happens to be a war hero, a brilliant, sensitive writer, and he happens to have a great mind.” In 1964, Mrs. Kennedy speaks about Malraux and that evening with Arthur Schlesinger in a taped interview,
[Malraux] is the most fascinating man I’ve ever talked to. But again, he’s rather disillusioning because he sort of admires the simplest things. I mean, that dinner at the White House, he—well, his most impressive moment was when they took the color—you know the color flags—the Honor Guard downstairs. And, then, who was it? Oh, Irwin Shaw told me his greatest moment in life was when he was the head of a brigade or something, in the Maquis [guerrillas in the French Resistance]
When asked if she understood Malraux’s French, Mrs. Kennedy says, “Well, he talks so fast, but I can. Or else he repeats—it’s like being taken over this incredible obstacle course at ninety miles an hour.” Malraux dedicates the American edition of his next book, Anti-Memoirs, to “Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy.” “We all thought she would marry someone like André Malraux,” a Polish writer is reported to have said after Jackie’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, “and here she goes off with a gangster.” But that disappointment comes later. The evening was still fresh and better captured by the then-editor of Art News, who also sat at Mrs. Kennedy’s table. He telegrams the White House beforehand: “PLEASE TELL [Mrs. Kennedy] THAT HER TV PROGRAM WAS IN SUCH EXCELLENT TASTE AND SCHOLARLY STANDING THAT I EXPECT SHE WILL HAVE AN OFFER FROM THE LOUVRE AS CHIEF CURATOR AFTER THE SECOND TERM. BEST REGARDS ALFRED FRANKFURTER”.
Little is recorded of conversations at other tables. “I was at the table with Thornton Wilder, Robert Lowell and Alexis Léger,” writes Anne Morrow Lindbergh. “I loved talking to Alexis—and Vice President Johnson was sympathetic and very, very tired! (He had just flown in from Seattle where he had opened the [World’s] Fair!)”. Letitia Baldrige recalls “that, in contrast to the merrymakers at the [earlier] Nobel Prize winners’ dinner, this was a subdued group of people”. Mark Rothko, according to one of his biographers, “feigned aloofness” at his table with Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. “I sat next to Mrs. Auchincloss, the mother of our hostess,” S.N. Behrman writes. “I had a play then on tour with Charles Boyer. Mrs. Auchincloss inquired about it. She was, she said, greatly interested in the theatre; she had, in fact, once written a play herself.” Elena Wilson sits next to Chip Bohlen and complains later that Bohlen “didn’t have the right reaction to Russia.”
What gets considerable press is President Kennedy’s dinner toast, as well as Malraux’s. Each causes its own stir. Edmund Wilson remembers: “The President, who had had paper and pencil brought to him and who had either been writing a message or making notes, now got up and introduced Malraux.” “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Kennedy begins,
I want to express a very warm welcome to all of you, and particularly to our distinguished guests Mr. and Madame Malraux.
This will be the first speech about relations between France and the United States that does not include a tribute to General Lafayette. It seems that almost every Frenchman who comes to the United States feels that Lafayette was a rather confused sort of ineffectual, elderly figure, hovering over French politics, and is astonished to find that we regard him as a golden, young, romantic figure, next to George Washington our most distinguished citizen. Therefore he will not be mentioned, but instead I will mention a predecessor of mine, John Adams, who was our first President to live in the White House and whose prayer on occupancy is written here. John Adams asked that on his gravestone be written, “He kept the peace with France.”
I am very glad to welcome here some of our most distinguished artists. This is becoming a sort of eating place for artists. But they never ask us out.
Earlier at the table, “I said to Kennedy,” writes Edmund Wilson, “that he had certainly done a thorough job of entertaining the literary world: ‘Maybe they ought to entertain me,'” Kennedy replies. But back to the President’s toast:
I want to tell you how very pleased we are to have so many distinguished writers and artists and actresses and creative thinkers.
You know, one of the great myths of American life is that nothing is pleasanter or easier than lying around all day and painting a picture or writing a book and leading a rather easy life. In my opinion, the ultimate in self-discipline is a creative work. Those of us who work in an office every day are actually the real gentle livers of American society.
We do not manage our cultural life in this country, nor does any free society, but it is an important part. It is one of the great purposes. And I would hope that this tremendous energy obtained in the intellectual life of America could be communicated not only to the people in this country but all around the world.
There are so many more people playing a musical instrument now, going to symphonies, going to the theatre, to art galleries, painting, than anyone realizes. And it is our hope that Americans will begin to look about them and realize that here in these years we are building a life, which, as I say, develops the maximum in each individual.
Now we have the best model that we could have this evening in welcoming Mr. and Madame Malraux. I suppose all of us wish to participate in all the experiences of life, but he has left us all behind. We are the descendants of early founders who were themselves men of great variety and vitality. But he has led an archeological expedition to Cambodia, been connected with Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Tse-tung—and has been active in the civil war—participated in the defense of his country—been involved with General de Gaulle—and has been at the same time a great creative figure in his own right. He has left, I think, most of us way behind.
So we regard him as an honored guest in this country, as participants in the cultural stream, and also as admirers of those who travel the far horizons of human destiny. So we are very proud to have him—and we are particularly proud to have him because of his association with a distinguished leader of the West—a good deal of which has been written by some of our distinguished correspondents about the difficulties that have occasionally come up between the President of the United States and General de Gaulle. But I want to say that there is a tradition in that regard, with Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and General de Gaulle continues on his way, and has built for his country and his friends in Europe a strength which is the most valuable source of comfort to us all.
I know that there are sometimes difficulties in life but I hope that those who live in both our countries realize how fortunate we are in the last two decades to be associated in the great effort with him. And we are glad to have Mr. Malraux and Madame Malraux here because we believe that they will go back to France and say a kind word for the United States—and its President.
So I hope you will drink to all of us, in the sense that you are leaders in our free society—and particularly to our distinguished leader whom we are very glad to have with us tonight—and most especially to drink to the President of France, General de Gaulle.
Malraux’s toast was calculated in a different way (the next day he concedes to Edmund Wilson that “Mon discours d´hier soir—c´était de la courtoisie” [“My speech last night—it was a matter of courtesy”]). For Robert Lowell, Malraux “refrained from saying anything objectionable.” Because Kennedy and Malraux are in separate rooms, a two-mike public address system is rigged for their toasts. At one point, the system fails, and Malraux begins his toast with
Mr. President, I believe [I am] to be the first guest you have received here who will have to reply to your speech without knowing what you have said. This may be difficult. It does not, however, make it difficult for me to thank you and to thank the United States for the hospitality with which I was greeted here, the hospitality with which you have greeted an artist and also a humble Minister of Cultural Affairs. You have greeted me here with the masterpieces of the world—and you have greeted me even better by having your masterpieces shown to me by Mrs. Kennedy.
I will say that I am greatly moved by it. And I will say that not only as something which is polite, I will say it because at one time I was in another country, in a country named Russia, and there in the enormous expanse of sorrow I felt something great—a great hope.
Here the situation is different. Here I feel also something great—we feel the very spirit of the Free World—we feel brotherhood, we feel the brotherhood of man, in this country. This is the brotherhood which so many people for so long had thought they would find elsewhere, in that other country, but which really exists and lives here.
And I believe that this shows to us a duty, a right, at the same time the right to give to every child, to every poor child, the riches of the mind and of the spirit in this country than can be hoped for by any poor child of Russia. This perhaps is a simple statement, but it is a statement of the very essence of our freedom.
I also wish to say that here in the United States of America is the only country which has become the leader of the world without having sought to become that leader, the country to which is entrusted the future—the destiny of mankind—and is the country, once again, to achieve this position without having sought it, without even having wished it.
History is full of great empires, history knows so many countries which have reached the first place in the world in their time, but they all did it through strenuous work, through strenuous attempts, through bloodshed—through thousands and millions of deaths. There was the Syrian empire, there was the Babylonian empire, the Roman empire. There is no American empire. There is the United States. There is the United States which has been the leader of the Free World without having conquered the word, without having conquered the world, without having sought to conquer it.
And it is really strange that in some many millennia there is for the first time today—that we find a country which has become the leader not through conquest but by seeking justice…
TIME quotes the last sentence approvingly. By this point in the toast, Edmund Wilson—described in the White House background notes as “responsible for Malraux’s early fame here”—has had enough of the “diplomatic absurdities.” He turns to Mme Malraux, “Dites à Malraux que je n´en crois rien” [“Tell Malraux I don’t believe anything he says”]. Kennedy, who had been taking French lessons, overhears. “You don’t tell us what you think,” the President says. Malraux continues,
…And so, ladies and gentlemen, I will raise my glass to the United States, to this country so great. And I would like also to reverse, perhaps, the order of precedence to thank you once again for having greeted me with your masterpieces…
“I couldn’t imagine at first what masterpieces he meant,” writes Wilson, “then realized he was referring to the pictures in the National Gallery,”
…and for having those masterpieces shown to me by Mrs. Kennedy. I will raise my glass to you, Mr. President, and to the first people in history, let me say, which has acquired a position of leadership without having conquered, without having sought it—without even having willed it. Thank you.
(Malraux said at the National Gallery that some of the Gallery’s “masterpieces” belong to humanity, while others belong to the U.S. Referring to a new acquisition, he adds archly, “I am glad to see that this one is here for the second reason.”)
Bellow sums up the toasts. “Mr. Kennedy’s after-dinner speech was very witty, and a witty President is worth more to artists than a congressional porkbarrel. M. Malraux, an impressive-looking man, spoke in greater earnest, saying that America had not sought imperial power and domination. In private, Mr. Edmund Wilson exclaimed irascibly, in tones of Mr. Magoo, ‘Hooey!’ There was an American empire! I felt it would be a pity to waste Mr. Wilson’s fine old rumblings on a lousy republic and that his eccentricities deserved at least an imperial setting.” (Later that evening after leaving the White House, Bellow meets up with Wilson, Wilder, Balanchine, Lowell and others for late night drinks.)
Kennedy’s toast did not pass without criticism. Robert Lowell sends Edmund Wilson a worried letter at the end of that May,
I meant to write you a little fan note after Washington. Except for you, every one there seemed addled with adulation at having been invited. It was all good fun but next morning you read that the President had sent the 7th fleet to Laos [New York Times headline: “US, Shifting Laos Policy,…”]…I feel we intellectuals play a very pompous and frivolous role—we should be windows, not window-dressing. Then, now in our times, of all times, the sword hangs over us and our children, and not a voice is lifted. I thought of all the big names there, only you acted yourself.
Laos may have been on the mind of others during that evening. One guest, Michael Forrestal, summarizes in a memo from that day an earlier conversation with former President Eisenhower: “If [Eisenhower] were sending troops into Laos, he would follow them up with whatever support was necessary to achieve the objectives of their mission, including—if necessary—the use of tactical nuclear weapons.” Almost three years later to the day, a letter of Lowell’s appears in the New York Times—this time to President Johnson—turning down his invitation to another White House event for the arts, with Lowell again objecting to a president’s military policy and statecraft in Southeast Asia.
But back to May 11 and this White House dinner. For Bellow, “Only Mr. [Adlai] Stevenson preserved a shade of intellectual irony. Everybody else seemed absurdly and deeply tickled” at being in the White House for the Malraux dinner. A few days afterwards, Thomas Hart Benton, the American painter, says his art “has nothing to do with high society,” nor did “a bunch of artists playing up to a social game.” He goes on and suggests that it was the artists rather than their work that the White House was putting on show. Whatever, “John Kennedy leaned back, lit an Upmann cigar and smiled” once the eating had finished, in the words of TIME.
Some look twice at the President’s smile. “[Kennedy’s] hard glazed eyes I found mechanized and a little frightening,” writes Arthur Miller. “He might have a quick mind, but I had to wonder about his compassion. Still the excitement and happiness with the company he had attracted tonight swept everyone.” Eugene Istomin observes: “I had never met a President before and was practically paralyzed with awe, but he was so likable. He looked at everyone so inquiringly, as if he really wanted to know what you thought. Sometime during our conversation, [Leonard] Bernstein said, of some policy matter Kennedy was considering, ‘Your problem is you don’t see the forest from the trees,’ and I saw Kennedy’s eyelids come down like the slamming of a gate.”
George Herman, the broadcast correspondent, remembers Kennedy “abandoned Mme Malraux once dinner was over, absolutely refusing to speak French to her,” presumably because he knew so little. “After dinner, there was a concert,” writes Edmund Wilson. “Schubert’s Trio in B Flat Major. The violinist was Isaac Stern. I had never heard it before—it was lovely, but I did not feel much like listening to music. Malraux, it seems, went to sleep. Marian Schlesinger said afterwards that he had had a little too much to drink; but I don’t think this was necessarily true.” Thornton Wilder remembers: “Stern-Rose-Istomin played the Schubert E-flat [sic] superbly but the audience, excited by all that glamour and a little tight, did not behave as it should…I sat next to Mrs. Sam Behrman—a lovely person she is—who is Jascha Heifetz’s sister. We listened.” “Three wines, champagne, Stern and Istomin playing a long Schubert trio,” remembers Robert Lowell.
From Saul Bellow’s vantage, “Even the drunks were well behaved, though at the end of the evening the Schubert trio seemed to be getting them and some were tapping the time on their neighbors’ knees.” Others were uncomfortable. Anne Lindbergh writes: “After supper…we went into the ballroom to listen to the concert. I found CAL, who was much disturbed by the numbers of press around and would not sit in the front rows as we were intended. We sat in the back rows and the music was heavenly, but I was concerned about C. and not entirely at ease.”
No encore followed. The President stands and thanks Isaac Stern and “those who accompanied them.” When George Herman asks Eugene Istomin if he felt slighted, Istomin says it was so wonderful just being there that the details didn’t matter. Stern remembers: “At the conclusion of the performance, when people were applauding, Kennedy rose, as was his custom, and said, ‘I want to thank Isaac Stern and his two accompanists.’ That didn’t go over too well with Lennie [Rose] and Eugene, and I wanted to sink through the floor.”
President Kennedy didn’t enjoy after-dinner concerts and he was apt to mistake the pause between movements as the end of the concert, when he “dashed up on the stage to congratulate the musician. Each time, the artist whispered—although the entire room heard it—‘But Mr President, the concert isn’t over.'” Letitia Baldrige continues:
We worked out an elaborate code system for the Malraux dinner concert: One of our military social aides, on loan from the Pentagon, was a music expert. I asked him to stand next to me, and when the concert was over, he cued me, I waggled my finger at the President through a slightly open French door close to him, and he jumped up to congratulate the artists, with Mrs. Kennedy trailing behind….The concert ended at about eleven-thirty and…[t]he Kennedys walked out of the East Room, expecting their guests to follow, but found themselves halfway down the hall with nary a guest in sight. White House aides urged the shy party forward, but no one wanted to make the first move. Finally a few brave souls ventured out and the rest followed.
This evening is not without the business of managing the economy. David Rockefeller, as president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, remembers: “During the reception the President took me aside for a brief conversation on the state of the U.S. economy. As we parted, he asked me to set down my ideas in writing, which I proceeded to do. The President then responded with a letter to me. Although there were obvious points of disagreement, both of us agreed a tax cut would help get the sluggish economy moving again. Henry Luce asked to see the letters and found them so intriguing that he published them side by side in Life magazine in July 1962.” (This interchange follows hard on the heels of the April 1962 steel crisis where Kennedy jawboned industry executives to rescind their price increases.) “So far as I know there have been no letters about the state of American culture,” gripes Saul Bellow.
American politics is nothing if not the personal on the public stage, and Rockefeller’s opening remarks in the Life interchange are little different. “Two weeks ago you were kind enough to suggest that I write you a personal and confidential letter concerning my views on the balance of payments problem confronting our country,” David Rockefeller begins. He then moves to the point: “Certainly one of the most critical tasks confronting you, as chief executive of our nation, is to cut down the persistent drain through military expenditures abroad, without doing damage to our essential military posture.” Even on an evening like this, the problem is defense.
Kennedy’s reply strikes a theme that he has worked out in discussions with Malraux and others—namely, the nation as a state can manage its way through economic difficulties. “I have said many times that we must meet this [balance of payments] problem with positive solutions,” the President writes to Rockefeller. Earlier, the President invites Malraux to luncheon, and
as Kennedy later described it [records Arthur Schlesinger], they fell into a discussion of the persistence of mythology in the contemporary world. “In the nineteenth century,” Malraux said, “the ostensible issue within the European states was the monarchy vs. the republic. But the real issue was capitalism vs. the proletariat. But the world has moved on. What is the real issue now?” The real issue today, Kennedy replied, was the management of industrial society—a problem, he said, not of ideology but of administration.
“This conversation, held through interpreters (Kennedy spoke little French), was quite vague,” in the view of Chip Bohlen, who also was at the luncheon. Schlesinger continues,
This conversation remained in [Kennedy’s] mind. A few days later, when he spoke to the White House conference on national economic issues, the “difference between myth and reality” provided the theme for his remarks. The old debates of FDR and [Woodrow] Wilson and [William Jennings] Bryan, the President observed, were increasingly irrelevant to the complex technical decisions of modern society…”[T]he fact of the matter is that most of the problems, or at least many of them, that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments which do not lend themselves to the great sort of “passionate movements” which have stirred the country so often in the past…”
The President spells out these themes in more detail a little later in his 1962 commencement address at Yale:
[The central issues of our time] relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals….What is at stake is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical issues involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.
Bohlen remembers the President in his discussion with Malraux “maintaining that in twenty or thirty years political problems would begin to fade away as economic prosperity grew.” Other discussions seem less weighty. Mrs. Kennedy remembered one private discussion involving Malraux and President Kennedy in these terms: “Malraux would talk brilliantly, and so would Jack, and [McGeorge] Bundy would always be there. So, you know, it was a wonderful exchange, but Malraux sort of off in a marvelous fog or—It was very interesting and they never you know, really got into policy or all that…”
Policy writ large worries others at the dinner. “If Mr. Wilson is right about the American empire,” writes Saul Bellow of that evening, “we must think the whole thing through clearly….A better understanding between writers and the imperial state has its dangers. I can foresee a bureaucratic situation, partly created by men of letters, in which the very call girls (who owe so many of their privileges to the Federal tax structure) may be required to pass Civil Service examinations administered by poets!”
The day after the dinner, Edmund Wilson and André Malraux meet for lunch. During their conversation, Malraux
expounded the difference between being an intellectual and being un homme politique. He had thought once that society would run all right if Marxists could be in control (I doubt whether he had really thought this); but to be actually in practical politics was something completely different, the problems and means of dealing with them were something altogether different. The intellectuals sometimes did a lot of harm through not understanding this.
Yet Wilson feels compelled to conclude that Malraux “sounded impressive without making much sense. He has, in fact, become a master of double-talk.”
At a French embassy party several nights later, Mme Malraux sits next to Arthur Schlesinger and tells him her husband was a great admirer of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. As for Ethel Kennedy’s get-together for Malraux, it turns into farce:
Ethel’s party, later in the week, also a black-tie, long-dress affair, was outdoors. Ethel’s guests always faced the same hurdles in the hall—a variety of animals. Malraux was no exception. He stumbled over two dogs, one a huge Newfoundland that was easily mistaken for a rug.
It began raining in the middle of the dinner, a heavy rain difficult to ignore. Astronaut John Glenn found the back legs of his chair sinking into the lawn and Ethel assigned someone to stand behind his chair to keep it upright. The more it rained, the more Ethel laughed about it. Malraux insisted he had “a perfectly grand time,” and told the story for years afterwards.
Back again to the White House dinner, August Heckscher, who was the Kennedy’s consultant on the arts, remembers the President engaging Heckscher’s wife in a short conversation as they are leaving that evening. She mentions to Kennedy that she had a chance to talk to Malraux. Kennedy then points his finger at her and says mock seriously that he wanted all the details. The Kennedys are such “magnificent people, very friendly, very warm,” recalls another guest. “When we said good-bye to the Kennedys,” Edmund Wilson notes, “[Kennedy] said something again about my not wanting to tell him about my [Patriotic Gore]: ‘I suppose I’ll have to buy it.’ ‘I’m afraid so.'” The Wilsons and others leave, though some, like Stern, Istomin and Bernstein, stay on talking to Kennedy in his private quarters. “We joined him for a last drink,” remembers Stern,” and he was charming. By that time, he realized he had made a gaffe [over treating Istomin and Rose as accompanists], and he was especially gracious to Eugene and Lennie.”
The Kennedys also had a long talk alone with the Lindberghs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh recalls: “After the concert, people began to leave and we found ourselves being ushered upstairs to the same private salon, where about the same group were gathered as before supper—chiefly the French set. C. and I talked to the French Ambassador but nothing very real was said. And rather quickly, goodbyes were being said again. We said goodbye tactfully and went to our rooms though apparently Isaac Stern went on playing the violin until late at night. I wished we had stayed up.” After saying good-night to the Lindberghs, Mrs. Kennedy whispered to her social secretary, “You know, these are the moments of history I will really remember the rest of my life.”
The “guests drifted into Washington’s midnight while around them the great White House fountains shot prisms of lighted water into the darkness,” wrote TIME. “For the New Society, it had been another marvelous evening.”
***
Should it need saying, the above sequence of recollections is my composite among many possible combinations. But what images does my mosaic leave? What might we now know that we didn’t before about state politics, or for that matter, “managing the economy”?
A few days after the dinner, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote a thank-you letter to Mrs. Kennedy,
It was an extraordinarily beautiful and stimulating occasion, which is not surprising. All parties—even big parties—I believe in some measure reflect the spirit of the people at their center. From this core radiates the beauty, vividness and good feeling which spread to the guests. That such an atmosphere was created, at such a party at the highest point of our government and in a formal and dignified setting, is a great tribute to you both and an inspiration to the people who were privileged to be witnesses.
As with so much in U.S. political culture, what is fresh astonishment, including the Malraux dinner, has a short half-life. Disappointment with the Kennedys was never far away, thanks in part to the likes of those at the dinner. Before long, the only thing unique about the Malraux dinner was its date.
Yet that falls very short of a point to be made here. I tried to find all the first-hand reports and personal recollections I could on the Malraux dinner (over several decades I also contacted a few living attendees left). That was to be my policy palimpsest—those scraps of conversation, over-heard remarks, and contemporary news reports—most if not all unfamiliar to the reader. My aim, as said at the outset, was to see this event—and in turn something of politics (also culture politics)—afresh in their complexity. I found I could only do that by seeing the evening in the present tense.
So what?
“Managing the economy” sounds so 20th century, but isn’t. What sociologist, Daniel Bell termed long ago, “the end of ideology,” is promised all the time, if not by administration and management, then through markets and technology. Yet a self-organizing economy is about as realistic as a self-organizing reception line of public intellectuals at the White House. Management depends on who has been let in and what those around the table are being distracted by, in a real time experienced then.
To see things afresh and in the present tense isn’t a faux innocence. It is to walk toward understanding that that some of the best parts of high politics is when it is distracted by low politics, that keeping the high and low contingencies together is the itinerant work of real time and about as far from trivializing the present as we can get.
Such is why the most significant episode of that evening, the one that I ask you to take as the exemplar for what this blog is all about, is the interchange between the country’s leading politician, John F. Kennedy, and the country’s leading literary critic, Edmund Wilson, over Patriotic Gore. It is perfectly legitimate for a policymaker to want a precis of the issue and what it offers; it is perfectly understandable for any type of advisor to say it’s more complex than a precis can indicate.
———————
Principal sources
Cindy Adams (1980), Lee Strasberg: The Imperfect Genius of the Actors Studio, Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York.
Nicole Alphand (1976), “Escorting the Mona Lisa,” (Translator, Robert Speaight), in Malraux: Life and Work (Editor, Martine de Courcel), Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Letitia Baldrige (1998), The Kennedy Style: Magical Evenings in the Kennedy White House, Doubleday, New York.
Saul Bellow (1962), “White House and Artists,” The Noble Savage 5, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland.
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WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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