The Dumb and Joyful Masses
Staring at your phone won’t make for a rich or exciting life, but at least you’ll be happy for a while.
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who wrote the great Madame Bovary novel, among other lesser ones. A close friend of his once wrote to him asking for advice on happiness, and Gustave wrote back offering his fail-proof method to achieving joyfulness: “One needs good health, and also good luck. And of course stupidity, but if the last one’s missing, all’s lost.”
Good old Gustave, he certainly knew things. If he were around today, he’d be finding some very happy people in America, and I mean very happy people. Especially among the young glued to their contraptions. Aristotle insisted happiness was to be found by looking inward, something today’s youth does nonstop. Speaking for myself, I do not use social media, and I practically live in a pre-internet world. Things like Instagram, Twitter, Meta, and Facebook are total strangers, though I do use the internet to send my copy and in order to receive e-mails. Otherwise I am a very unhappy person reading print newspapers and books.
My Luddite tendencies include carrying no cell phone, except when I’m on a boat in the summer and up in the snows during winter. So, while millions tap away on their machines and look at screens nonstop, I think of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles, not to mention Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, and the great John O’Hara. Now, I don’t expect anyone youthful nowadays to have heard of these names, especially among the very happy multitudes who probably think they are names of fashion apparel. There is nothing to be gained by knowledge of this kind, in fact it’s counterproductive where happiness is concerned. Dumb down, as Gustave told us, and live happily ever after.
I wish my friend Norman Mailer was alive so I could show him this column. I will have to make do with his son Michael reading it, but Norman would have been amused. He was an arch contrarian, an intellectual who reacted like a truck driver when pushed to the brink. Papa was the same, as was O’Hara. Willie Maugham was not physical, he would look down his nose at the vulgar ones, whereas F. Scott would get into a fight he could not possibly win. Irwin Shaw would knock the bum out quicker than anyone, Irwin being a true toughie.
I was recently visited by a friend of this magazine’s Executive Director Curt Mills, Charles McElwee, a young man researching for his future book on Irwin Shaw. We mostly talked about writers and reading and how much we both enjoyed the latter. Airing one’s feelings about the past is not my strong point, but I let it all hang out about how nice Irwin and James Jones had been with me when I was starting out. It was a completely different world. Writers wrote, fought, boozed, and chased women. They frequented 21, Toots Shor’s, and Elaine’s. They held strong opinions. I know some of today’s crop, but they sure don’t measure up, and the female writers, fuhgeddaboudit.
I was once walking with a pretty girl in New York and ran into David Halberstam, a wonderful writer whom I had met in Vietnam. Out of the blue he asked me who my favorite American actor was. I said Robert Montgomery and William Powell. Nah, he said, William Holden, he represents the real America, or something to that effect. We were both wrong, past our time, thinking nostalgically. See what I mean about writers? They no longer exist as far as I’m concerned, like Montgomery, Powell, and Holden.
When Scott McConnell and I went up to Provincetown to interview Norman Mailer for our 3rd cover story of TAC in 2003, Norman warned us he had his head full because Gore Vidal had been staying with him and challenging every word. I liked Gore, whom the first time I met said, “I have read you about me…” “I wish I could say the same,” I countered.We became fast friends. He was like the Templeton character in The Razor’s Edge. Snobby as hell, but it was put on.
That writers have weird brains is nothing new. Mailer believed that writers’ heads were literally harder, hence the head butting. Is good writing born of suffering? Nah, although writers like to think so. Some man or woman recently wrote of “syntactic complexity,” something about pressing words into use. It’s unadulterated bulls—. Decorum forbids me from naming bad writers today, but reading about a rainy northern England town’s depressed homosexual teacher’s pining for some youngster is not my cup of tea. Here’s Papa Hemingway on style: Prose is architecture, not interior decoration… I was forced to learn to write a simple, declarative sentence. This is useful to any writer… Good writing is true writing.
See what I mean about syntactic complexity? It’s as phony as some of today’s writers. Papa also said that it was bad luck to talk about writing, with which I totally agree.
But let’s get back to stupidity, and how essential it is to happiness. A smart phone helps young people to see the world through a screen, rather than through their own eyes. Zoom classes in the solitude of their bedroom makes them even happier. I recently encountered a tattooed, self-absorbed, bearded youth talking about one of the great playwrights of the past. A line from an old movie came to me: “Whoever said the masses are ignorant and unteachable was wrong. They’re happy.”
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