`A Way of Taking Things Particularly Hard'

“True humor is least of all a way of taking things lightly; on the contrary, it is a way of taking things particularly hard, for it looks always at our saddest humiliations and it does not compromise….the true humorist is not so embarrassed in the face of death and suffering – death and suffering are his subjects.”

Who was Robert Warshow writing about in this excerpt from a review published in The Nation (where you’re unlikely to find such sentiments in 2008) in 1946? No, he wasn’t being remarkably prescient about the work of Samuel Beckett or Flann O’Brien. He was reviewing Hotel Bemelmans by the insipid Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeleine books. In his review, “The Working Day at the Splendide,” Warshow takes on Bemelmans as an individual and as a representative of “his fellow [unnamed] humorists of The New Yorker.” I wonder about the identity of these “humorists.” I trust he didn’t mean S.J. Perelman. And while both were very funny, few would describe A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell as humorists.

A clue comes in another review collected in The Immediate Experience (find the enlarged edition published in 2001 by Harvard University Press): “E.B. White and the New Yorker,” a review of White’s The Wild Flag published in Partisan Review in 1947. I find most of White’s work impossibly precious, excluding his children’s books, so I’m a sympathetic audience for Warshow’s eviscerating of White’s “editorials about peace and world government.” Like most of us, White was a sap when it came to politics. Warshow writes:

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

I hear echoes of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell, and pre-echoes of Theodore Dalrymple. I think it’s important to understand that The New Yorker was never the single-minded monolith its critics have often lambasted. The just-quoted passage tells us nothing about Liebling, Mitchell, William Maxwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Cheever, among many others. In the White review, Warshow rightly takes on another New Yorker sacred cow, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and its self-satisfied moral and literary posturing:

“…the trouble is not that the New Yorker treated Hiroshima like any scene of death and suffering; the trouble is that the New Yorker has always treated death and suffering the way it treated Hiroshima.”

Warshow seems not to have read Liebling’s World War II reporting, but quotes seven excerpts from White’s silly book to damning effect. This is White:

“Read the men with the short first names: Walt Whitman, John Donne, Manny Kant, Abe Lincoln, Tom Paine, Al Einstein.”

This is cringingly folksy and embarrassing, especially from a writer who in some quarters has been beatified. Here’s Warshow’s gloss:

“The purpose of this writing is not to say anything about democracy or the nature of the war or the possibility of permanent peace, but only to arouse certain familiar responses in the liberal middle-class reader….And there is the facetiousness of the `Manny Kant’ and `Al Einstein,’ to keep one from being taken in, even by one’s one side. In this humane and yet knowing atmosphere, history and destruction and one’s own helplessness become small and simple and somehow peaceful, like life back home on the farm….History may kill you, it is true, but you have taken the right attitude, you will have been intelligent and humane and suitably melancholy to the end.”

Warshow was a deeply serious man whose humor, for that reason, is mordantly precise and devastating. He took things “particularly hard,” and his words sound so usefully contemporary. He died in 1955, age 37.