LAUGH AND LIE DOWN
47
begun to look on its consort more critically. But the marnage has
not been disolved.
The transition from the self-confident, magisterial satire of the
Scopes trial period to the gentle humor of a Thurber, self-confessed
ninny and know-nothing, simply reflects a similar change in the posi-
tion of the ruling class. The present
New r orker
formula for pathos
and humor is an expression of a deep-rooted uncertainty about itself
which this class has come to feel because of its impotence in the late
economICcnslS.
II
The clearest way to define the "tone" of the
New r orker
of to-
day is to contrast it with the old
American Mercury,
which in its time
had very much the same relation to the intelligents~a. The antithesis
holds at almost every point. The
Mercury
gloried in its lack of in-
hibitons. Its language was violent, bombastic, direct, impatient of
restraint and a stranger to nuance. Its humor was explo~ive and
shrill. Its realism was raw, crude, uncompromisingly frank about sex.
The
Mercury
would print almost anything
pour epater Ie (petit)
bourgeois.
The
New rorker,
on the contrary, is anxious to avoid
shocking anyone. Its literary style is subtle, oblique, its humor sub-
dued to the point of monotony.
What the
New r orker
has done to the realistic tradition of the
twenties is especially interesting. Superficially, its fiction remains with-
in the tradition. It is realism with a difference however: deodorized,
deloused, reminiscent of William Dean Howells rather than of
Dreiser. The sad, deftly unaccented, dullish little tales of Robert M.
Coates are the type examples of
New r orker
"realism." Coates, John
O'Hara, Kay Boyle, and other contributors have developed a pseudo-
realism which has all the advantages and none of the drawbacks of
the real thing. (In their
extra-New r orker
writing, these authors are
lessinhibited.) The reader, that is to say, enjoys the illusion of "seeing
life" without suffering the embarassment of actually doing so. These
writers admit the existence of sex, but they are at considerable pains
to protect the reader from its grosser aspects. They frequently describe
the life of the submerged classes, and always with sensibility. Here,
too, they are careful not to shock the bourgeois reader. Poverty is
suggested rather than bluntly described, and their underdogs are
drawn, not from the proletariat, whose sufferings are meaningful and
hence tragic, but rather from the ranks of the declassed. They write
of minor actors, of provincials drifting rootless in the jungle of the
city, of boxers and alcoholics and prostitutes. From these futile lives
they extract a facile pathos. The
New r orker
has formularized the
pathos as well as the humor of the inadequate. Treated subjectively,
