I’m a big fan of Louis Menand (see also here), so when his new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, came out, I immediately bought and read it. It had lots of interesting stories and thought-provoking ideas.

For example, on page 334:

On page 450:

That whole quote is great, especially the “surprising to outsiders” bit. Everyone thinks we’re poofs, but we’re not! Really!! A bunch of lumberjacks, they are.

On pages 466-467, Menand refers to a theory of poetry promulgated in the 1940s:

. . . the idea that all poems worth studying display certain formal features, specifically, paradox, irony, and ambiguity—devices that multiply and complicate meaning.

Oooohh, I hate that attitude! OK, don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with paradox, irony, and ambiguity—they’re great. But the idea that a poem has to be confusing, some sort of puzzle that needs to be decoded . . . that’s this crap they fed us in high school, where the literary heroes were T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. Did they ever give us poems by, say, Frost or Auden—poems with art and ambiguity but also some clarity? No! I guess if we want some poetry that isn’t a pure puzzle, we can just listen to pop songs. Anyway, I’m not blaming Menand for this—he’s describing a real cultural trend—it’s just a trend that annoys me.

Wow. That cookbook story is great. This story alone justifies the price of the book. I mean it! I’m gonna assign this exercise to my students next year. Not with a cookbook, I guess, but otherwise the same.

Then there’s this quote from pages 617-618. It comes from culture hero William Faulkner in 1956:

“But I [Faulkner] don’t like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation. If I had to choose between the United States government and Mississippi, then I’ll choose Mississippi . . . As long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it. But if it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the Unites States even if it meant going out on the streets and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going to shoot Mississippians.”

I have no idea how he’d be able to tell whether the “Negroes” he’s shooting are themselves Mississippians. It’s not like people go around wearing uniforms telling you what state they’re from! Menand continues, “Faulkner tried to retract [these words], hinting that he had been drunk.” But that’s even worse, no, to have a drunk guy going around shooting people?

From page 680, on movie critic Pauline Kael:

Kael’s contention that serious movies should meet the same standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. . . .

This sounds reasonable, and I don’t exactly disagree, but it reminds me of the discussion we had last year on the norm of entertainment:

It seems that we demand entertainment in some media but not others. We expect movies to be entertaining, and if they’re not, we’re annoyed. Even documentaries are supposed to be well paced. If not, they’ll be criticized as being boring, or “preachy,” or whatever. Most TV is expected to entertain also, except for certain special events such as official speeches, rocket launches, and Super Bowls, which it’s considered ok to watch out of ritual obligation.

Novels and plays, we usually expect to entertain us, with some exceptions. I might read Moby Dick because it’s thought provoking and has brilliant passages. It’s not entertaining, exactly, but reading it can be satisfying. We don’t always expect dinner to be entertaining either, but we do what it takes to fill us up.

What about textbooks and nonfiction books? Some of these are entertaining. In Regression and Other Stories, we try to amuse. The classic textbook Numerical Methods That Work is a flat-out fun read. Some scholarly works for the general public are highly readable. I’m thinking of The Origins of the Second World War. Hey, here’s a whole list of entertaining nonfiction books I’ve read. Entertaining is great, if you can have it. But I’ve read lots of completely unentertaining books that were great because they had important information. That would describe most of my textbooks, as well as various nonfiction books. If a textbooks entertaining, that’s lagniappe.

And then there are research articles. There are entertaining research papers out there—I’ve written a few, myself!—but most of the time we don’t expect journal articles to be entertaining. Indeed, there are times when we would feel that any effort made by an author to be entertaining is effort wasted, if it could be spent on content itself.

Menand’s book is pretty entertaining. I usually like it when a nonfiction book is entertaining.

What’s entertaining for one person can be boring for another. My impression is that the usual pattern for nonfiction “trade books” is to just have one idea and bang on it over and over. But I like my books to be more overstuffed. One thing I enjoyed about Freakonomics was that it had lots of ideas, and lots of ideas per page. Menand’s book is nothing like Freakonomics, but it also is just bursting with interesting, immutable stories and thought-provoking ideas.

Who’s in?

Menand’s book is structured as a series of mini-histories and mini-biographies. The topics are not the usual historical subjects of war, politics, and big business; instead he focuses on culture.

The question I want to ask is, how did he decide what to put in and what to leave out?

Here’s the list of cultural figures who Menand writes about. I’ve put an asterisk next to the people who get particularly long descriptions:

George Kennan*
Hans Morgenthau
George Orwell
James Burnham
C. Wright Mills
Jean-Paul Sartre*
Simone de Beauvoir
Maurice-Edgar Coindreau
Hannah Arendt*
David Riesman
Clement Greenberg
Peggy Guggenheim
Jackson Pollock
Harold Rosenberg
Lionel Trilling*
Allen Ginsberg
Claude Levi-Strauss*
Roland Barthes
Robert Rauschenberg
Josef Albers
John Cage*
Merce Cunningham
Jasper Johns
Leo Castelli
Elvis Presley
The Beatles*
Jann Wenner
Isaiah Berlin*
Barney Rosset
James Baldwin*
Aime Cesaire
Frantz Fanon
Richard Wright
Eduardo Paolozzi
Richard Hamilton
T. S. Eliot
Cleanth Brooks
Northrop Frye
Jack Kerouac
Charles Olson
Paul de Man
Jacques Derrida
Andy Warhol*
Marcel Duchamp
Fredric Wertham
Betty Friedan
Susan Sontag*
Jack Smith
Charlotte Moorman
Norman Mailer
Martin Luther King
Ralph Ellison
Francois Truffaut
Jean-Luc Godard
Pauline Kael
Tom Hayden
Mario Savio

Who’s out?

And here’s a (partial) list of people and topics who are mentioned in passing or not at all:

John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman
Shirley Jackson, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick
James Thurber, A. J. Liebling, Tom Wolfe, John Cheever, John O’Hara, John Updike, Saul Bellow
Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony West, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy
Alfred Hitchcock
W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien
Comic books and children’s books
Religion as culture (Reinhold Neibuhr, Billy Graham, Cardinal Spellman, etc.)
Military culture
Sports as culture (Jackie Robinson, Pete Rozelle, Bear Bryant, etc.)
Science, medicine, psychiatry (B. F. Skinner, the Salk/Sabin story, Linus Pauling, etc.)
Radio, TV, pop culture (Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, TV and movie Westerns, etc.)
Herman Kahn (the low-rent John von Neumann), actual von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Teller
Dr. Strangelove, Catch 22
Daniel Bell, Raymond Aron
Vladimir Nabokov, Ayn Rand
Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, Alger Hiss, Whitaker Chambers, Rosenbergs

In compiling this mini-list, I’m purposely excluding straight-up political news figures (JFK, Truman, Eisenhower, McCarthy, Nixon, etc.) as well as social and business stories without direct cultural connections (department stores, shopping malls, the rise of the suburbs, the postwar boom in factory production followed by decades of decline, etc.).

I’m not saying my list is better than Menand’s or worse. It’s just different. Menand is a literature professor so he includes some now-obscure literature professors such as Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man. If I was going to talk about critics, I’d be more interested in hearing about some on the more journalistic side, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, Anthony West, and Gore Vidal. Or take Mary McCarthy if you want someone with more of an intellectual bent. I find these authors to be much more interesting today than Trilling or the rest of that gang. When it comes to literature, rather than literary criticism, Menand focuses on some politically engaged writers such as Sontag, Baldwin, Mailer, and Wright—I guess that’s a choice on his part to not talk about social novelists and storytellers such as Bellow, Updike, Cheever, and O’Hara, or postwar literary journalists such as Thurber, Liebling, and Wolfe. I have my own biases, as I find the authors on my list to be more readable and interesting than those on Menand’s list. He’s choosing them based on social importance, though, or, more precisely, something about how they illustrate some point about the postwar intellectual climate, and I get that—but, to me, so much of the postwar intellectual climate is characterized by literary journalism and, ummm, I guess I’d call it upper-middlebrow literature, that I’m surprised he doesn’t get to any of that. Norman Mailer, sure, he was in the news magazines a lot, but as literature he’s no James Jones and for social relevance he’s no Joseph Heller. And then there’s genre literature. I’d argue that science fiction was an important component of Cold War culture, with authors such as Shirley Jackson (horror), Robert Heinlein (techno-optimism), and Philip K. Dick (paranoia) representing three poles of this discourse. You could start with the biographies by Ruth Franklin and Alec Nevala-Lee. Again, Menand is free to write about what interests him. To me, Shirley Jackson and Robert Heinlein are about a million times more interesting than John Cage and Lionel Trilling, but, sure, tastes differ. Beyond any personal preferences in what we like to read or look at or talk about, I just feel there’s something parochial and narrow about Menand’s focus. Menand is such a clear thinker and such a great writer that he kinda makes it work, but I’m left wishing he’d placed his focus on some more interesting subjects.

Which reminds me that there’s this whole huge chunk of Cold War culture that doesn’t come up in Menand’s book at all, which is the nexus of military culture, anti-communism, and the whole duck-and-cover fear of an impending World War 3. A chapter or more could’ve been devoted to influential and creative cold war artifacts such as Dr. Strangelove and Catch 22; cold war intellectuals and scientists such as Neumann, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and that figure of fun Herman Kahn; along with Cold War intellectuals such as Daniel Bell and Raymond Aron and emigre novelists such as Nabokov and Rand. If you’re gonna do Art and Thought in the Cold War, all these fit right in. At a more headlines-and-pop-culture level, you have famous spies and communists such as Hiss, Chambers, Rosenbergs, along with culturally significant spy novelists Fleming and Le Carre. Or you can just go to pop culture more generally. Why have Elvis, The Beatles, and a mini-history of the recording industry, but not the birth of commercial TV, the popularity of the Western in TV and movies, Bugs Bunny cartoons, etc.? Why give so much detail about the changing obscenity laws in book publishing and not, for example, an in-depth story about the use of the laugh track in sitcoms?

To go in a slightly different direction, consider some other major aspects of Cold War culture that Menand didn’t mention at all: science, religion, economics, and sports. I’m thinking here not just of various inspiring and scary stories (amazing scientific and technological breakthroughs such as vaccines, moon landings, and nuclear power; the spread and change of various religious denominations; decades of full employment and economic growth; and athletic feats such as the four-minute-mile), but also about the characters in these stories (Salk and Sabin, Cardinal Spellman and Billy Graham, Galbraith and Friedman, Jackie Robinson, etc.), all of whom to my mind are more interesting than Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and the like, in their accomplishments and also their relevance to art and thought in the Cold War. The Apollo program, the Gross National Product, the NFL: these were part of the American identity that developed after the war.

Again, I’m not saying Menand did anything wrong by including what he did in his book; I assume he’s genuinely more interested in Jasper Johns than in Philip K. Dick. Let me just say that I think his book, even while being filled with great stuff, is missing the bigger picture.

Maybe it’s just a packaging thing; if instead of being presented as a single coherent work, the book had been structured as a set of essays, I think I’d’ve had no problem. When a critic releases a collection of essays and reviews, we don’t expect anything comprehensive, we just to read some good stuff. The only truly comprehensive book of essays and reviews I can think of is the collected essays of V. S. Pritchett. Anthony West had a good range too, and I remain annoyed that there is no book of his collected essays, but I’m sure there are some gaps. I guess I would’ve been happier had Menand gone the collection-of-reviews route, but that kind of book may be close to unpublishable today. I’m happy with what he did produce, and I wonder if he has any response to the question at the top of this post, other than that he wrote about a bunch of people who happened to interest him.