The image man ode iss20

THE IMAGE MAN

By Owen Dudley Edwards

But if the Magi, then the vocative rather than nominative singular, in Latin. I addressing myself as Magus.

English Lexicon, was the father of the Alice who inspired Lewis Carroll to imagine her in Wonderland, and Through the Looking Glass; whenever someone pointed out a mistake in the Lexicon to him, he is supposed always to have answered ‘Scott wrote that part’.) The verb here is intransitive, and seems to work on the principle of the Greek Middle Voice, in which the verb considers what a person does to themselves, or simply is, where the Latin has only Active and Passive, the Romans being concerned only with what they did to someone or what was done to them by someone, a contrast which seems to explain a great deal about the Greeks and the Romans. Liddell and Scott also supply a meaning for the verb µ∂¥∑Úπ when transitive: ‘to enchant, bewitch, charm’.

(Thinking about Alice, I don’t believe Scott wrote that part.)

Professor Daniel J. Boorstin, author of The Image (l962), sticks to the Latin when he permits himself to waggle a toe beyond

The first time I saw the word ‘image’, whose meaning in any language I did not know, was in a book of stories from Greek

United States shores. (Why he needs the permission we will see later.) Behold him, at p. 201 of his British, Penguin (then Pelican), edition:

Mythology, ‘How Narcissus loved his own Image’, prefaced by the prophetic diagnosis (or curse) that the boy would be all right ‘if he never recognises himself’. We duly went on to the account of the boy’s rapturous discovery of his own reflection in a pool to whose contemplation he then devoted his life, dying of malnutrition until nothing remained of him but a flower. (Undertakers have been trying to enlist metamorphosis ever since.)

Image.

I - mage.

I as in ego, ich, moi.

Mage, maybe, as in the first volume of Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, The Apprentice Mage, and hence as the poetic creator, craftsman, artistic fashioner singular of the Wise Men receiving the Epiphany of Baby Jesus.

The English word ‘image’, which comes from the Latin imago, is related to the Latin word imitari, which means ‘to imitate’.

It might be that a professor of more linguistics than those professed by Boorstin might have a dirty look or two at that, but the Oxford English Dictionary thinks they contain ‘the same root’, so let’s leave it on its rickety legs to await its sequel: According to common American dictionary definitions, an image is an artificial imitation or representation of the external form of any object, especially of a person.

(Oddly enough, those are Oxford’s exact words, and Oxford, England – not Oxford, Mississippi.)

It may be said of Boorstin before we start serious hostilities that deep down, he’s superficial (unlike OED, which makes the first of 10 definitions). It is an elementary rule that defining from Latin is best begun with Greek whence the Romans plundered so much. µ∂¥∑Úπ (MITCH – I could only come up with this as a direct translation in Greek: μάγος) means ‘to be a Magus’, or, add Liddell and Scott helpfully, ‘a magician’. (Liddell, the senior co-author of the great Greek-

‘When Narcissus died,’ Wilde would tell his hearers: ‘the pool of his pleasure changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, and the Oreads came weeping through the woodland that they might sing to the pool and give it comfort.

And when they saw that the pool had changed from a cup of sweet waters into a cup of salt tears, they loosened the green tresses of their hair and cried to the pool and said, “We do not wonder that you should mourn in this manner for Narcissus, so beautiful was he.”

“But was Narcissus beautiful?” said the pool.

“Who should know that better than you?” answered the Oreads. “Us did he ever pass by, but you he sought for, and would lie on your banks and look down at you, and in the

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mirror of your waters he would mirror his own beauty.”

And the pool answered, “But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.”’

When Wilde had finished telling that story he would roar with laughter and say it was called ‘The Disciple’.

He also remarked (when book-reviewing) that every great man has his disciples and it is usually Judas who writes his biography.

All of this, it is to be feared, takes us to rather profounder depths than could be penetrated by the diving-mask of Daniel Boorstin. But if ‘image’ has a standard work, it is Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image or,What Happened to the American Dream.

We must not expect him to answer by way of the billions of bubbles reflecting some symbolic old man, the American Narcissus, fed by the colours of what Image must have if it is to mount in the sun – imagination – happiest when the imaginative artist is a master of prose, poetry, paint, pedagogy or peace.

(Wilde wrote an essay called ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’.)

Nor must we expect inspiriting accounts of Images that ruled the Classical World, the Christian centuries that followed it, or even the coinage – which duly came to rule its own sanctifying images. Boorstin’s longest academic tenure was a quarter century at the University of Chicago where he ended up as Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Professor of American History (before Directorship at the Smithsonian Institution 1969-73, being its Senior Historian 1973-75, and Librarian of Congress – ie. ruler of the largest Library in the world – 1975-87), but such history as The Image flashes before our eyes is largely limited to the mid-20th century.

The American Dream, in any case, is a commodity in much greater demand on this side of the Atlantic, at least by now, and probably its best customers have never been to the USA at all. It’s leading American dissectors are fictionists of tolerably recent immigrant stock – Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller – and they are unlikely to suffer much looting from Boorstin, whose use of literature seems largely limited to the occasional apposite epigraph credited to its original author and uncredited to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

It seems to have been Penguin Books of Harmondsworth, Middlesex (how English can you get?), who inspired the

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subtitle, where his American readers were given The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. Given the book’s emphasis on selling as the most urgent agency in the image traffic, its repackaging for the British market might have invited a thought or two from its author. It’s an analysis that cries out to be made. Sometimes it arose from one country being less civilised than the other, as when Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers (1940) was marketed in the U.S.A. as And Then There Were None. Sometimes it arose from marketing preference for different prejudices, as when the same work was rebranded for American readers Ten Little Indians. Sometimes forms of snobbery are deemed necessary in proportions not found in the other culture: the American Rex Stout’s In the Best Families (1950) takes its title from a remark about murder (made by the still undetected murderer) ‘It happens in the best families’: Collins Crime Club evidently found this insufficiently respectful to the aristocracy and thus liable to offend the aspirant bourgeoisie, so the British title was Even in the Best Families.

Having done time as Rhodes Scholar in Balliol College Oxford (England) 1935-36 and, more unusually, followed it up the next year by a call to the English Bar (Inner Temple),

Boorstin felt entitled to a few kind souvenirs to preface the British edition of The Image though at more rarified levels than the nitty-gritty research I advocate among the booktitles: Despite their habit of self-deprecation, the British have not suffered from an excess of cultural humility. The self-criticism that has interested them most is that of other peoples. They have liked to read Frenchmen criticizing the French, Germans criticizing the Germans – or Americans criticizing the Americans. The British themselves have been adept at taking apart these other cultures …

The British ... have come to rely on Americans to provide them the vocabulary of their self-criticism. With some exceptions like the pop-gun attack on ‘the establishment’ the phrases with which British censure their modern ways (‘organization man’, ‘hidden persuader’, ‘affluent society’, ‘man in grey flannel suit’, ‘egghead’, ‘McCarthyism’) are borrowed from America. I am well aware that many American products are not suited for export, yet I will be glad if this volume can somehow help diffuse a spirit of self-scrutiny.

And, of course, up the British sales while so doing. Today that preface has pathological value, much as Ian Fleming’s pictures of the 1950s U.S.A. in Live and Let Die (1954), Diamonds Are

Forever (1955) and even (or especially) The Spy Who Loved Me (1960) are actually images from the 1930s. Boorstin may have been the most present-conscious historian who has ever written and thus, like Fleming, could incorporate some much bruited-phenomenon of the time he was writing to flavour his wisdom of past years, thus he knew that the satirical fashion born at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (and Beyond it) was now calling its targeted pillars of political society ‘The Establishment’ which became the name of one iconoclastic group of performers in London and of another in San Francisco in the early 1960s. But British interest in French critiques of France was firmly inter-war, in German critiques of Germany even more firmly World War II. Inter-war British welcomed Fitzgerald, O’Neill, Mencken but the vocabulary they borrowed from America in the 1950s they largely restricted to America: Britain had no Joe McCarthy and it kept its repertoire of witch hunt and character-assassination within government and club circles, on corridors rather than in public assemblies, among dons and grandes dames rather than mere creatures elected by the vulgar.

It seems probable that Boorstin was a better prophet when not prophesying, and that The Image won its British admirers for what they saw as American rather than potentially British or imminently universal ailments. The Pelican jacket quoted John Wain (then still Angry Young Man rather than the Bitter Old Man into which he sank): ‘it is the book to end all books about “the American image”’ (Observer review), thus simultaneously quarantining Boorstin’s thesis and obituarising it. But it was not so dead as that. In The Image in particular Boorstin wrote an agreeable, accessible prose, less condescending than his British critics, less convoluted than his American rivals. For all of his past legal and present historical profession, he was invading the social sciences with a commodity few of them in 1961 seemed to possess – intelligibility. In many respects, indeed, he had translated the findings of popular sociologists into academic language, and of jargon-ridden academics into human speech. It might be argued that his admirable lucidity possessed, at least by contrast, the merit of originality: if so, it was its high point of same. In the fashionable English academic cliché of the day, it contained much that was true, and much that was new, but what was new was not true, and what was true was not new.

Or, as W. S. Gilbert wisely qualified, hardly ever.

Even if it was no more than a résumé of the work of others appetizingly warmed over and served up with a sauce sufficiently piquant to stimulate and not enough to repel, The Image merited some popularity. What was not to be expected was that the résumé took wings once translated into French (in which the title must have had a punning significance for mirrors) and, as Google and its Wikipedia now inform us, was ‘considered by some to be an early landmark attempt to describe aspects of American life that would later famously be termed hyperreality and postmodernity’. It found affinities in, and presumably influences on, the work of the French postmodernists Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord, a doubtful compliment in the case of the latter, who ultimately blew his own brains out. It must have startled Boorstin, whose book in its way had been something like an Alistair Cooke Letter from America, summing up a very prevalent phenomenon of the time, the cascade of popular books pointing out to Americans that their society had become a self-destructive materialism (although Boorstin refused to call it that). Even Boorstin’s bright phrases for Brits in his preface echoed

the titles supplying so much of his data and analyses; even Penguin advertisements at the end of its edition of The Image.

There were such best-sellers as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, The Status Seekers,The Waste Makers, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, W, H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, and above all MAD magazine, perhaps the most profound anatomist of capitalist America in these years (very properly credited by Boorstin, whose massive bibliography is the best thing in The Image and ironically a fine credential for his ultimate apotheosis as Librarian of Congress). Boorstin’s first chapter enshrined the ‘pseudo-event’ but was in fact simply a thoroughly reliable classification and relabelling of recent American introspections.

The US sub-title’s word ‘Guide’ might indeed be self exculpatory: is Boorstin to be booted if some unstable Frenchmen translate his pillage into philosophy? Are we to blame Baedeker if military historians confuse him with Clausewitz? The problem is that our Baedeker of the image only retains his reliability as résumé for his first chapter. We are in for derailment from the opening of the second chapter (later quoted by worshippers of Boorstin’s lmage): ... Two centuries ago when a great man appeared, people looked for God’s purpose in him; today we look for his press agent. Shakespeare, in the familiar lines, divided great men into three classes: those born great, those who achieve greatness, and those who have greatness thrust upon them.

It never occurred to him to mention those who hire public relations experts and press secretaries to make themselves look great.

Two centuries from Boorstin’s book was 1760. Who was the greatest American at that date? Pretty clearly, Benjamin Franklin. Did people look for God’s purpose in him? If they did, they have left little indication of it. They might – and did – enquire how far policies or purposes Franklin favoured were likely to please God. As for his press agents, no man of his time, and of few other times, made more use of a press agent: in his case himself. Much of modern American press agency shows tolerably clear descent from Franklin. Back in Mother England they had another form of press agency, to wit lickspittles in literature currying bouquets for bastards.

Less than 20 years after 1760, Sheridan’s The Critic and The School for Scandal filleted press corruption spreading applause for favoured clients and destruction for their opponents.

MAD repeatedly pointed out how the social sins it saw around it had been anticipated by supposed golden ages of history: Boorstin should have studied it more.

As for Shakespeare, Boorstin fell into the vulgar error of quoting him out of context, ie. forgetting the words in question are spoken by a person in a play and frequently mock their user. In this case the play is Twelfth Night, and the division of great men is made by Maria in the letter she has forged to make their Malvolio think it a love-letter to him from their employer Olivia. So far from its not occurring to Shakespeare to mention the hiring of public relations experts, he is in fact showing how a public relations expert can advance herself and her friends at the expense of someone she gulls into thinking himself to be a public relations success.

Boorstin goes on to notice how down the ages writers from

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Carlyle to Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr have deplored the disappearance of the great man. My mother used to quote the Irish patriot who bewailed from the public platform: ‘All the great men are going, Wolfe Tone is dead, and Robert Emmet is dead, and I’m not feeling too good myself.’ Yet 50 years before Boorstin’s Image Stephen Leacock in Literary Lapses sent up the whole thing rotten: The lives of great men occupy a large section of our literature, The great man is certainly a wonderful thing. He walks across his century and leaves the marks of his feet all over it, ripping out the dates with his galoshes as he passes. It is impossible to get up a revolution or a new religion, or a national awakening of any sort, without his turning up, putting himself at the head of it and collaring all the gate-receipts for himself. Even after his death he leaves a long trail of second-rate relations spattered over the front seats of 50 years of history.

Kennedy was President when Boorstin was writing, and The Image hints at more independence of its author’s mind than was shown by the flock of job-snouting intellectuals who swarmed over Washington, D.C. in The New Frontier. But what, from a salesman’s viewpoint, was New about the New Frontier? Kennedy showed his historical sense by grabbing a brand name deliberately intended to recall heroic presidents and a heroic identity. It was patently synthetic, and while Boorstin was too shrewd to cite it directly, it was plain that he was thinking of it. After Kennedy’s assassination made for a public relations coup beyond even the wildest nightmares in Boorstin’s image-dissection, it was impossible to have such a connection made. But if Boorstin meant Kennedy, had not Kennedy answered him? The New Frontier as a Presidential brand-name was synthetic: so was Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, so was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, so was Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, all going back to the Presidency of the man who dwarfed all his predecessors and successors in transforming the public relations possibilities of his office: Theodore Roosevelt, he of the Square Deal, who shook more hands in one day in 1906 than any human being is known to have done in the history of the planet. This last activity is of course part of what Boorstin would call a pseudo-event, since a handshake implies an honourable non-belligerence between two persons and hence a policy of mutual sustenance: yet while few if any of the 6,000-odd handshakings could be the prelude to lifelong comradeship with the President, the pseudo-event, or the 6,000-odd pseudo-events, were also a real event, Roosevelt showing if only by the martyrdom of his hand that the President was henceforth a visible public servant, instead of merely a figure seldom seen even more seldom touched. Of course in the dim 19th century people might have thought they possessed knowledge of their President, and did so on the strength of the hagiographies peddled in his campaigns. We may tell ourselves today that more lies have been told attributing integrity and intellect to George W. Bush by Pavlov poodles from Tony Blair to Condoleezza Rice – or at least lies of greater magnitude and mischief – than was done in the service of any previous President. But look at what Nathaniel Hawthorne – an individual of far greater value to humanity than either Blair or Rice – wrote in the cause of his beloved friend President Franklin Pierce. All Pierce had done in the Mexican War was apparently to get drunk and fall off his

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horse, but the Hawthorne version suggested a combination of Alexander the Great and Florence Nightingale.

A few pages later Boorstin’s curious lack of historical dimension went into hyperspacial movement (p. 69): In the democracy of pseudo-events, anyone can become a celebrity, if only he can get into the news and stay there.

Figures from the world of entertainment and sports are most apt to be well known. If they are successful enough, they actually overshadow the real figures they portray. George Arliss overshadowed Disraeli.Vivien Leigh overshadowed Scarlett O’Hara, Fess Parker overshadowed Davy Crockett.

One wonders how many of his 1961 audience remembered George Arliss, who had died aged 78 in 1946. He had played Disraeli in 1921 and 1929 in silent movies which had presumably impressed the seven-year-old and/or I5-year-old Danny Boorstin when they appeared, but Disraeli held his own through sound movie portraits by Derrick de Marney (Victoria the Great (1937), Sixty Glorious Years (1938), by John Gielgud (The Prime Minister (1940)), by Alec Guinness (The Mudlark (1950)). If anything this was evidence of Disraeli’s enduring theatrical quality, certainly one of his most real features. Davy Crockett had in fact been a public relations creation himself, manipulated by the Whigs in the 1830s to caricature their enemy in the White House, Andrew Jackson, but whatever the merits of Fess Parker’s three films in the 1950s they have been utterly eclipsed by John Wayne as Crockett in The Alamo, and God knows poor Crockett needed all the help from Wayne he could get. But Boorstin hits the jackpot on Gone With the Wind (1939). He had grown up in Atlanta, Georgia, although when the movie came out in 1939 he was a lecturer in Legal History at Harvard. But had Margaret Mitchell’s novel made so profound an impression on him that that he remained convinced that Scarlett O’Hara was a historical person as real as Disraeli, regardless of all the training in scholarship he had assimilated at Harvard (AB summa cum laude, 1934), Oxford BA Juris, BCL, double-first, 1937), and Inner Temple (requisite total of dinners eaten, 1937) and Yale Law School (Sterling Fellow, JSD 1940)? In its way this was a startling tribute to the victory of the image, but the image emerged from reading rather than from cinema’s more flamboyant but evidently less durable impact.

Are we to infer that among Scarlett O’Hara’s interminable conquests the teenage Boorstin was so passionate a votary that Hollywood had profaned his private vision? And how far can the reality of figures built up in our minds from reading become real? Certainly Boorstin’s inescapable conviction that the Scarlett he had known and (presumably) loved was real suggests something of a far higher order than a mere pseudoevent. Apart from anything else, a pseudo-event assumes deception: none was intended by Mitchell, and certainly – in this case – none by her evidently devout accomplice Boorstin.

It is the same sort of lunacy as the Sherlockian game assuming Holmes and Watson are real, but the participants in that are merely playing with ritual they know to be fictional.

Scarlett O’Hara’s last known victim fell from a deeper wound.

But was Boorstin right in lamenting the dearth of heroes any more than he was in affirming the endangered reality of Scarlett O’Hara? Kennedy undoubtedly was a hero, in the PT-I09 episode in World War II. Granted, he seems to have initially endangered the lives of his subordinates before going on to save them, but any hero is entitled to initial blunders

before ultimate triumph: that is humanity’s way of keeping its heroes human. Granted also, that the Kennedy publicity machine was as amoral and ruthless as all the other Kennedy machines: he remains a hero, even if he, like most fairy-tale heroes, won somewhat excessive rewards culminating in a hero’s quick death. Apart from Kennedy, 1961 was choca-bloc with heroes: at home, Martin Luther King, abroad, Churchill, de Gaulle, John XXIII, Khrushchev, Tito, Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh.Yes they did some quite nasty things, in most cases. Even the beloved John XXIII clamped down on the Singing Nun. But heroes they certainly were, and in most cases heroes of the kind humanity has most revered, the hero-kings. There were other heroes in the making, eg. John Lennon. Boorstin went into some detail on the synthetic hero-making of Charles Lindbergh (worked up, as he frankly admitted, from Kenneth S. Davis’s recent The Hero): even here he conceded too little to Lindbergh’s actual heroism, and he might have made more of Lindbergh’s excellent manners. James Thurber’s ‘The Greatest Man in the World’ raised the question of a bad-mannered hero who flies solo round the world and is ultimately murdered on a nod from the President of the United States. The point is that heroes have always been partly synthetic, whether trained in deportment by centaurs or by scoutmasters.

Boorstin admits existence of contemporary heroes, but only if they remain anonymous, complaining: ‘As soon as a hero begins to be sung about today, he evaporates into a celebrity’ (p. 85). A nice phrase, but why today? No doubt some cult of Odysseus snarled at the ruin of their hero in the coarse poem of Homer, though Sophocles might later argue Homer gave Odysseus far too generous a press.

Horace, with an eye to business, remarked that great men lived before Agamemnon but all lie unwept, unknown, lost in the long night for want of a sacred poet; and little did he reck the future bewailings of Boorstin against his trade. Anyway Horace was wrong: if they existed at all, Perseus and Orion lived before Agamemnon and their memories have blazed before us in their constellations ever since. For durability in the heroic image trade, what you want is a good astronomer.

But even that is not enough. Despite the embarrassment of its pronunciation Uranus a name survived (as the logical neighbour to Saturn and Jupiter) while its discoverer’s effort to name it Georgium Sidus after George III, perished: perhaps because it also invited posterior synonymities. Similarly vanished the fawning attempt to have parts of Andromeda renamed after Frederick the Great: they might have done better to attach his name to the dog star since he was surely the supreme bitch in Europe.

Following this, Boorstin points out to his readers that their various travels are packaged Cook’s or American Express tours. (As he was writing I was hitch-hiking across the USA: I was packaged, perhaps, but the packages were slow to arrive, uncertain in navigation, and unknown in destination.) Travel

books ain’t what they were. (p.123): Most travel literature long remained on the pattern of Marco Polo. Since the mid-19th century, however, and especially in the 20th century, travel books have increasingly become a record not of new information but of personal ‘reactions’.

From ‘Life in Italy’ they become ‘The American in Italy’.

People go to see what they already know is there. The only thing to record, the only possible source of surprise, is their own reaction.

And what is Marco Polo but a fascinating book about the personal reaction of a man to countries through which he claimed to have passed?

The great topographies and invasion narratives of Gerald of Wales in the 12th century have their supreme interest and importance in our getting to know the author, who is thus a far more real figure to his readers than anyone else of his time. Even Herodotus’s Histories reach their supreme value when he is saying how and where he learned something and whether or not he believes what he has been told and if not, why not. Personal reaction is the primary basis of most historical sources, and the more frankly such activity is displayed, the better. ‘Life in Italy’ has less claim on our credence than ‘My Life in Italy’: the writer can disguise her/ himself more easily and hence less reliably.

Boorstin saw the endless adaptations and accessories spun out for popular products as proof of the chains of falsity with which we entwine ourselves, although here again MAD took it farther, insisting that those who bought Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, saw the movie (and the play and the musical), and bought the Zhivago tablenapkins (and jigsaw-puzzles, and scarves, and ties, and lavatory-paper), had still not read the book. Boorstin brought God into it (p.126): Art has often been identified with divinity, precisely because the artist gives his work a unique, inimitable embodiment.

Like a man, a work of art has a soul, a life all its own. It used to be taken for granted that every work of art possessed a mysterious individuality. A picture could not be made into a poem, a play was not to be found in a novel. Unit recently, there were surprisingly few dramatizations of novels.

OK, since God has been brought into it, let’s keep Him in.

The Book of Kells is one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in existence. Its content is the four gospels. The gospels have their ‘mysterious individuality’; the Book has its.

They still delight their viewer over a millennium since the Book, and nearly two since the gospels. Nearly 400 years ago the gospels were translated under the patronage of James VI and I into some of the finest prose in the English language. As for adaptations, most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were spin-offs of Homeric legend and its cousins.

The novel was scarcely in existence in any great quantity by Shakespeare’s time, but that did not prevent him plundering

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Boccaccio any more than considerations of artistic integrity forbad him to pinch prosopography from Plutarch or hive off history from Holinshed. Sometimes Boorstin cannot even realise which art-form has become the classic (p. 172): The increasing popularity of the ‘popular’ book (or best-seller)... reinforces the mirror effect and makes it increasingly difficult to learn from our literary experience. ... the most popular book in the short run is apt to be that which most effectively tells us what we already know. The reason why T. S. Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room tells us more about what most Americans were thinking in 1854 ... is precisely that ... Arthur ... reflected rather than amplified the experience of [his] readers.

Now, I do not know the reactions of. every single American who read The Nights in a Bar-Room in 1854 or, more to the point, those (probably far more in number) who saw the staged version by William W. Pratt in 1858, or those who sang or heard or wept over the additional lyric introduced into

the play in 1864, viz.: Father, dear father, come home with me now, The clock in the belfry strikes one.

But I think it exceedingly improbable that most of the readers/viewers/hearers had experienced 10 nights in a bar-room, especially one so firmly on the skids as Sam Slade’s saloon, ‘the Sickle and Sheaf’. The play (I have not read the book) does not confine itself to pious reproaches to the landlord for filling the flowing bowl and his customers for consuming it. If the appetites of the audience for alcohol remain parched through the performance, they are compensated by three murders (one a patricide), the landlady’s collapse into insanity, the death of little Mary who gets in the way of a glass thrown at her father by the landlord, and the townspeople’s destruction of whatever small portion of the saloon’s stock had survived its patrons’ drouth. Anyone whose experience remained unamplified by these spectacles must have had reminiscences worth the price of many a pint.

Nevertheless all of this is supposed to bear Boorstin out in his insistence that ‘Whether we seek models of greatness, or experience elsewhere on the earth, we look into a mirror instead of through a window, and we see only ourselves’ (pp. 124-25), or ‘Public opinion becomes

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filled with what is already there. It is the people looking in the mirror’ (p240). Of course much of this is valid, if only because The Image necessarily offers its readers Boorstin himself finding in a mirror what he intends to have us see.

Sometimes his own observation may be sound or at least stimulating, and certainly many of his sources are. Even as observer, his attention-span seems to have been a little short, as indeed the vast swathe of the centres and subjects of his education lead one to suspect. One example is his use of the Kennedy-Nixon Presidential debates in 1960.

They were not simply a pseudo-event for the most part, they were also an attempt at historical musical chairs, in hopes that one contestant would trap the other as Abraham Lincoln trapped Stephen Douglas in 1858 into promises which would rule him out as a candidate from Southern support for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1860, and in fact thus split the Democratic Party ensuring the Republicans would win the 1860 election. Boorstin was right that the pseudo-event would normally swamp any reality in the candidates’ confrontation, and good debating skill in turning an opponent’s argument into a lethal shaft seldom appears. The best case of that was in 1988, when Democratic

Vice-Presidential candidate Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas answered Senator Dan Quayle’s insistence that he was as well qualified for the Presidency as Jack Kennedy with the killer line ‘I knew Jack Kennedy, I worked with Jack Kennedy, I was a friend of Jack Kennedy, and, Senator, let me tell you, you are no Jack Kennedy’. Bentsen, as a good debater, had anticipated that Quayle might be fool enough to make that plea, and was waiting for his victim with all the blood in his eye of a Texas marksman, but there was no pseudo-event in the whimper from Quayle: ‘Senator, that was uncalled for’.

It did no good to Bentsen and his Presidential candidate Mike Dukakis, but like Lincoln facing defeat in the Senatorial election of 1858, he knew his best work would be an investment for the next Presidential race. Bentsen had driven the first nail into Dan Quayle’s electoral coffin, ensuring that if Bush won in 1988 he would face 1992 with a running-mate beyond credibility. Kennedy in 1960 had all his work cut out for that year: unlike Lincoln he had no future if he faltered (he had been nominated with his potential as a winner as his main claim, and his grim rivals for the Democratic nomination in 1960 would have given him no second chance). Boorstin was right that the first debate’s result in Kennedy’s favour turned on Nixon’s bad face make-up, though he found it wise not to add that this was pronounced Nemesis since Nixon was widely regarded as a political operator permanently changing his disguises. (MAD stated that if Nixon were endorsing a brand of razor-blades he would use the lather

to project an image of himself as Santa Claus.) But the big issue between Kennedy and Nixon was: Was there any difference between them? Kennedy was more chauvinistic than Nixon on Cuba (and, it turned out,Vietnam), both were McCarthyites before Joe McCarthy himself, Kennedy seemed faintly more liberal on civil rights, &c. But in the third debate Kennedy, with an instinctive and quite genuine good humour, told a questioner that he could not possibly rebuke Harry Truman for using bad language while supporting him (damn, hell &c, to the decided pleasure of the press in a boring campaign) since Truman was old enough to be his father.

(Neat, because before the nomination Truman had said that Kennedy’s greatest drawback was his father – ‘It isn’t the Pope, it’s Pop!’) And then Nixon pulled a Tartuffe and said how disgraceful it was that Kennedy could treat Truman’s bad language so lightly and how proud Nixon was to have served in a cabinet with President Eisenhower who had never once used bad language because every American father should have the right to lift up his son on his shoulder and tell him that was the President and he (the father) wanted him (the son) to grow up like him (the President) and how could he do that if the President was using bad language?

So the debates had shown there was a difference between Kennedy and Nixon, and a real one. It may have played a part in Kennedy’s win.

But the major weakness of The Image lies in its extraordinary lack of the subject Boorstin professed: history. There was no distinction between the results of modern technology and the long-term propensities of human nature.

Like the old joke about Punch –and a better one than most of Punch’s jokes – the USA wasn’t as good as it used to be, and it never was. Boorstin could never allow for the possibility of the second. (The point is equally valid for the rest of the human race, but Boorstin had a little difficulty in equating the Americans with the rest of their species, be the context favourable or otherwise.)

Boorstin’s most valuable historical work to date had been The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948), a serious attempt to chart the philosophical framework in which Jefferson and some of his contemporaries and correspondents thought, though it had only one reference apiece to some of the most notable political protagonists with whom he warred or allied, including Hamilton, Madison, Marshall and Monroe.

History is one damn’ thing after another; The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson was one damn’ thing on top of another.

Essentially the long rivalry with Hamilton from their days in Washington’s cabinet (Washington got three mentions), or with Marshall when Jefferson as President faced that hostile cousin as Chief Justice, or the alliance with Madison in building up party and government, were things that developed, changed, matured, climaxed, soured. It was as though the book had firmly seen itself as static ‘then’ much as

The Image would see itself as static now.

But Boorstin himself, as a human being, had necessarily experienced one damn’ thing after another. There was a time when history had meant something more to him than the produce for whose provision he received status and salary.

Let us recall John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963): ‘... what do you believe in?’

‘History.’

He looked at her in astonishment for a moment,

then laughed.

‘Oh, Liz ... oh, no.You’re not a bloody Communist?’

She nodded, blushing like a small girl at his laughter, angry and relieved that he didn’t care.

Somewhere in the Autumn (or Fall) of 1938, Boorstin joined the Communist Party, his Inner Temple dinners digested, supporting himself by tutorial work at Harvard and its women’s college, Radcliffe. From that time in his life emerged a co-authored pamphlet, Anti-Semitism, a Threat to Democracy (1939). It looks as though his British experience had him both enemies and friends. Anti-Semitism was not particularly strong in the American South, whose priorities of bigotry naturally went against African-Americans, and in the newly revived Ku Klux Klan secondarily against Catholics, although in Boorstin’s native Georgia shortly before his birth a Jew, Leo Frank, had been lynched while jailed awaiting trial on a charge of murder and rape. On the credit side, the first Jew to enter an American Cabinet, Judah P. Benjamin, had sat in the Confederate Cabinet under Jefferson Davis, while Jews had to await the 20th century for places in the Cabinet of the United States (under Theodore Roosevelt) and Supreme Court (under Woodrow Wilson). Danny Boorstin may have met some redneck Jew-baiting when at school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, or he may have encountered its genteel version at Harvard or Oxford. But it was the London of Oswald Mosley and William Joyce which would have first shown him Nazi brutality in its English edition. The Munich agreement may have decided him on joining the Communists but if his entry was to the C.P. (U.S.A.) where at least some party comrades were also F.B.I., Britain probably gave him the perceptions and, probably, associates supplying the main impetus. Boorstin would not have known of the persecution of the Jews under Stalin but Hitler’s record already stank to high Heaven, and American Communists may well have seemed the only resolute anti-isolationists. All that changed with the HitlerStalin pact of August-September 1939 which readily accounts for Boorstin’s leaving the party.

None of this was to Boorstin’s discredit, but F.B.I. informers had long memories and on 26 February 1953, very much the height of the McCarthy era with McCarthy’s party victorious in Presidential and Congressional elections, Daniel J. Boorstin appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities and proved whole-heartedly cooperative. Names were given, relevant documents produced, and associates disclosed. It seems likely that no witness before the committee had a more distinguished subsequent history. The obvious contrast is with the blazingly uncooperative Arthur Miller, Boorstin’s fellow-Jew, and his ideals of fidelity to endangered friends and integrity in the honour of one’s name. Compared to The Crucible,The Image seems threadbare and tawdry in its conclusion (p. 261):

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We should try to reach outside our images. We should seek new ways of letting messages reach us; from our own past, from God, from the world which we may hate or think we hate. To give visas to strange and alien and outside notions.

Notions of which neither we nor the Communists have ever dreamed, and which we can never see in our mirror. One of our grand illusions is the belief in a ‘cure’. There is no cure.

There is only the opportunity for discovery. For this the New World gave us a grand, unique beginning.

In its way it reminds one of H. L. Mencken’s diagnosis of yahoo reactions to President Warren G. Harding’s Inaugural Address in 1921: You have got, in brief, to a point where you don’t know what it is all about.You hear and applaud the phrases, but their connection has already escaped you. ... Glad of the assurance, and thrilled by the vast gestures that drive it home, you give a cheer.

And when the New York Times replied sniffily that: In the President’s misty language the great majority see a reflection of their own indeterminate thoughts Mencken answered: In other words, bosh is the right medicine for boobs. ... Harding in his mist is bad enough, but Harding crystal-clear might be a great deal worse.

But if Boorstin warred on the image by preaching the mirage, it was, like Harding’s mist, pumped out from 100% Americanism. Never again would a Congressional Committee sub poena Professor Boorstin for Un-American-ism. If Boorstin had briefly become Communist in rejection of isolation, he would now give isolation intellectual credentials of which it scarcely dreamed, in or out of mirrors. The signs were already evident in 1948 with The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, pointedly preferring Jefferson (whose most popular biographer of the day, Gilbert Chinard, subtitled him ‘The Apostle of Americanism’) to his more Eurocentred rivals.

Jefferson could flirt with French Revolution to his electoral advantage but, as Conor Cruise O’Brien has shown, when advantages were no longer obvious, France was left to shuffle itself beyond the horizon. The real Jefferson was the one who thought climbing a hill in western Virginia was more valuable than crossing the Atlantic.

In 1958 Boorstin produced the first volume of a three-part work The Americans, which would duly receive Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes. Its message was simple: the Americans had succeeded by being American. He took the leading American nationalist historical thesis, in which Frederick Jackson Turner, a Wisconsin midwesterner justly irritated by Eastern snobbery, found the USA unique, with its democracy resulting from the dependence on environment in the frontier. As an ideology this was first-class: promulgated in 1893, it supplied Americans with an identity no longer reducing them to the fag-end of European developments, and it did so with a form of historical enquiry, via the environment, which pronounced European historical writing stale in its obsessions with legal institutions and diplomatic despatches. The new method was

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to its credit, though the thesis itself could not explain why the same thing had not happened elsewhere in the Americas (including Canada) where the frontier had lasted much longer (Turner’s point of departure was that in 1891 the Censustaker had declared the US frontier as closed). Boorstin had opened up the interpretation for himself by making much in The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson of the interest of Jefferson and some contemporaries in ecology, which he certainly put to impressive use by sending out Lewis and Clark to report what kind of territories the USA had added to itself in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Then, in The Americans, volume I, The Colonial Experience (1958), he launched the full thing. The USA had become what it was by discarding what European clothes it had brought. As he put it in The Image (p. 241): America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. ... Only the stagnaters of America – the prophets of rigid Puritan theocracy, of Southern slaveocracy – ever mistook the dream for reality.

Only profitless visionaries – the utopians in narrow ideal communities like New Harmony and Brook Farm – ever thought they could make the dream a mould in which to live.

If America was also a land of dreams-come-true, that was so because generations suffered to discover that the dream was here to be reached for and not to be lived in.

So out go nasty European ideologies such as Marxism (not in its entirety, perhaps: it would be Marxism which had taught Boorstin to sneer at utopians, whose moral sense was a rebuke to Marxist conduct). The Image, indeed, at the climax of its litanies of greed and the tempters it spawns, hastily clears its skirts of any Marxist definitions (p. 246): Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism – from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us.

Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism – the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples.

The brazen non-logic of this may be a legacy of Boorstin’s brief Marxism, though Uncle Karl might be inclined to liken it to a pickpocket who accuses those he has robbed of materialism in being concerned with his thefts. Billy Bunter, indeed, frequently twits those whose confectionery he has stolen and eaten, with being sordid in their complaints about it.

The 1950s saw a vast amount of American historical writing arguing that the American Revolution could never have been so unAmerican as to be a Revolution, and that the colonies were fighting for the status quo which subversives like George III and Lord North were seeking to overthrow.

There were some problems attached to this. The men of the time had called it a Revolution even when the French Revolution led its American critics to insist their Revolution fundamentally differed from the French: if, so to speak, it was a horse of a different colour, it was still a horse. But many of the 1950s writers had their own revolutionary pasts to repudiate, if usually less blatantly than Boorstin had. And the deEuropeanization of American history, while tempting, came too close to isolation to be wise in a world power. R. R. Palmer knocked this aspect very thoroughly out of the

ring in his The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1957, 1960) when he linked the revolutions on each side of the Atlantic, won or lost: it may have offered a revolutionary inheritance for NATO, but it kept the USA in the human race, historically speaking. Boorstin held to his isolation. In denouncing American image-obsession, he also denounced concern about American prestige abroad, or about the image of America overseas: Our thinking has become so blurred, we have so mixed our image and our reality, that we assume our place in the world is determined by our prestige – that is, by others’ respect for our image. (p. 250) In writing this article I have surprised myself by developing a certain liking for Boorstin, for his style and the warmth of his affectionate allusions to his wife and sons, for instance; so it is with genuine regret that I proclaim that quotation the early steps on the road to the sadistic pleasure in Guantanamo torture so evident on the sneering lips of Donald Rumsfeld.

Ironically, Boorstin as historical enabler was to have a very different career from Boorstin as historical writer, almost as though his internationalist past declined to let him go. He edited the Chicago History of American Civilization, probably the best overall multi-volume history of the United States, and for its individual volumes he chose some of the best British writers of American history – Marcus Cunliffe on the USA’s first half-century, Maldwyn Jones in what was then and may still be the best single volume covering American immigration, Henry Pelling on American labour. The breadth of selection of American writers also ran far beyond the confines of Boorstin’s own theses. Boorstin near the close of The Image brought in Narcissus, but this time with Ovid’s implication that Narcissus was being punished for slighting the love of Echo. Thus he makes it his parable (p.58): As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned.

We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our own making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

But Echo is not simply ‘our ancestors, the Virgin America’, who in any case were not ‘ours’ unless Boorstin and his American readers number the first inhabitants in their genealogical tables, which few can do. Echo is of course history. Echo has already been torn to pieces by Pan (the environment strikes back?) according to Longus, and by Juno (for letting Jupiter know Juno was about to catch him among the nymphs such as Echo herself) again according to Ovid; and this also is history, whose survival is fragmentary. Echo captures bits of voices from all over the globe and all over time, and Narcissus will only be saved if he can return her love. History thus becomes the dimension which makes our mirror image a thing nearer reality. But we are unlikely to free Narcissus if Echo is only allowed to talk American, and then only when Narcissus is asleep.

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