The other day, I was in New Orleans, just before Halloween, & I picked up a novel my friend there was reading, Walker Percy’s Moviegoer. Won the National Book Award some 60 years back, it’s a story about Mardi Gras, not an entirely unrelated thing… I talked the novel over with my friend, but I also thought to share some passages with my faithful PoMoCon readers. It’s a funny first-person novel, full of observations of American life, so here’s one about the problem of niceness:
I go to bed cozy & dry in the storm, snug as a larva in a cocoon, wrapped safe & warm in loving Christian kindness. From chair to bed & from TV to radio for one little nightcap of a program. Being a creature of habit, as regular as a monk, & taking pleasure in the homeliest repetitions, I listen every night at ten to a program called This I Believe. Monks have their compline, I have This I Believe. On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful & intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, state their personal credos.
The two or three hundred I have heard so far were without exception admirable people. I doubt if any other country or any other time in history has produced such thoughtful & high-minded people, especially the women. & especially the South. I do believe the South has produced more high-minded women, women of universal sentiments, than any other section of the country except possibly New England in the last century. Of my six living aunts, five are women of the loftiest theosophical pan-Brahman sentiments. The sixth is still a Presbyterian.
If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest & most generous feelings. & as for themselves: it would be impossible for even a dour person not to like them.
Tonight’s subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins:
I believe in people. I believe in tolerance & understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness & the dignity of the individual—
Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness & the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod.
I believe in music. I believe in a child’s smile. I believe in love. I also believe in hate.
This is true. I have known a couple of these believers, humanists & lady psychologists who come to my aunt’s house. On This I Believe they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.
I did not always enjoy This I Believe. While I was living at my aunt’s house, I was overtaken by a fit of perversity. But instead of writing a letter to an editor, as was my custom, I recorded a tape which I submitted to Mr Edward R. Murrow. “Here are the beliefs of John Bickerson Bolling, a moviegoer living in New Orleans,” it began, & ended, “I believe in a good kick in the ass. This—I believe.” I soon regretted it, however, as what my grandfather would have called “a smart-alecky stunt” & I was relieved when the tape was returned. I have listened faithfully to This I Believe ever since.
I believe in freedom, the sacredness of the individual & the brotherhood of man—concludes the playwright.
I believe in believing. This—I believe.
Here’s the Ed R. Murrow show he’s talking about:
Murrow is all solid realism, bold, yet modest, personable but worried about the state of the world—he really doesn't know he's a caricature. I guess liberals really believed that this substitute for religion, for the Nicene Creed, would work. They weren’t as serious as they thought they were…
Another friend tells me there was a volume to this effect earlier, edited by Clifton Fadiman, then a respectable figure.
There is a very funny stuff throughout it--from some riffs near the end on people who repeatedly visit Mexico, and some others who make a hobby of stealing ornamental deer statues from Westchester lawns, you can see how he was anticipating the bohemian explosion just around the corner.