The Organization Man Page 30

  In many similar instances subordinates have found ways to protect themselves without overtly questioning the system—they can make requests for mass transfer and thereby discipline the superior, control him by mass blackmail, and the like. Wouk, however, proceeds to build a climax in which such reconciliations are impossible. He places the Caine in the midst of a typhoon.

  Terrified, Queeg turns the ship south, so that it no longer heads into the wind. Maryk pleads with him to keep it headed into the wind as their only chance for survival. Queeg, now virtually jabbering with fear, refuses to turn the ship around into the wind. The ship is on the verge of foundering.

  What shall Maryk do? If he does nothing he is certain that they are all lost. If he takes advantage of Article 184 in Navy Regulations and relieves Queeg temporarily of command for medical reasons, he is in for great trouble later.

  Maryk makes his decision. With as much dignity as possible he relieves Queeg of command and turns the ship into the wind. The ship still yaws and plunges, but it stays afloat. As if to punctuate Maryk’s feat, the Caine passes the upturned bottom of a destroyer that hadn’t made it.

  Eventually there is a court-martial for Maryk and his fellow officers. The defense lawyer, Barney Greenwald, makes what appears to be highly justified points about Queeg and, through skillful cross-examination, reveals him to the court as a neurotic coward. The court acquits Maryk. Queeg’s career is finished.

  Then the author pulls the switch. At a party afterward, lawyer Greenwald tells Maryk and the junior officers that they, not Queeg, were the true villains of the piece. Greenwald argues that Queeg was a regular officer, and that without regular officers there would be no going system for reserves to join later. In what must be the most irrelevant climax in contemporary fiction, Greenwald says that he is a Jew and that his grandmother was boiled down for soap in Germany and that thanks be to the Queegs who kept the ships going. He throws a glass of champagne at Keefer.

  “I see that we were in the wrong,” one of the junior officers writes later, with Wouk’s blessing. “The idea is, once you get an incompetent ass of a skipper—and it’s a chance of war—there’s nothing to do but serve him as though he were the wisest and the best, cover his mistakes, keep the ship going, and bear up.”

  Here, certainly, is an astounding denial of individual responsibility. The system is presented as having such a mystique that apparent evil becomes a kind of good. What would have happened if Maryk hadn’t relieved Queeg? We are asked to accept the implied moral that it would have been better to let the ship and several hundred men perish rather than question authority—which does seem a hell of a way to keep a ship going. True, Wouk doesn’t extend his premises to this blunt a point, and after it’s all over suggests that somehow things would have worked out all right even if Maryk hadn’t turned the ship around. But the lesson is plain. It is not for the individual to question the system.

  An extraordinary point of view, but did Americans gag on it? In the critical reception of the book most people got the point—and most of them agreed with it.* Partly this was a contemporary reaction to the spate of war books which in lazy anger personified the evil of war in officers and discipline. But the larger moral was not overlooked. The Caine Mutiny rationalized the impulse to belong and to accept what is as what should be. If we can be shown there is virtue in following a Queeg, how much more reason to welcome the less onerous sanctions of ordinary authority! The “smart” people who question things, who upset people—they are the wrong ones. It was Keefer, with his clever mind, his needling of authority, who led the ordinary people like Maryk astray. Barney Greenwald was too smart for his own good too, and to redeem himself he had to throw a glass of champagne in Keefer’s dirty intellectual face.

  It could be argued that the public’s acquiescence was only apparent and if people had bothered to think about the moral they would have protested it. To get some idea of what would happen if people had to think about its implications, I tried a modest experiment. In co-operation with the authorities of a small preparatory school, I initiated an essay contest for the students. The subject would be The Caine Mutiny. Prize winners would be chosen for the literary excellence of their essays and not for their point of view, but it was the moral issue of The Caine Mutiny that was their subject. Here are the ground rules we announced:

  The essay, which should be between 500 and 1,000 words in length, should consider the following problems:

  I. What is the central moral issue of The Caine Mutiny?

  II. How does the author, Herman Wouk, speaking through characters in the book, regard the resolution of the moral issue?

  III. How do the resolution of the moral issue and the author’s judgment of that resolution accord with life as you know it?

  At length the essays were finished, and when we sat down to read them we were pleased to find how well they had grasped the essential issue. In a sense, it was a highly nondirective test; not surprisingly, they had gone to some effort previously to cadge some hints from the teachers, and it was obvious they tried hard to cadge hints from Wouk. How they felt about the mutineers depended considerably on how they thought he felt; and, understandably, they were somewhat confused as to what side they were meant to disapprove. On the whole, however, they did grasp the essential issue at stake. Each interpreted its relevance to his life somewhat differently, but most of them saw the problem as that of individual independence versus the system.

  With one exception they favored the system. Collusion may have fortified them in this, but their phrasing, and their puzzlement over Wouk’s position, left little doubt that their feeling was genuine. Several disagreed with Wouk, but the grounds on which they disagreed with him were that he was too easy on the mutineers. Here is a sampling of final paragraphs:

  In everything we do there are certain rules and regulations we have to abide by, and, like Willie Keith, the only way we will learn is through experience. We have to abide by the rules of our particular society to gain any end whatsoever.

  I cannot agree with the author in that I believe that one should obey orders no matter what the circumstances.

  It seems that life in general is like a baseball game; everywhere there are rules and laws set up by many people for the ultimate benefit of all. Yet there are people who think as the young rookie that their actions should be directed by what they feel is right, not by what everyone else has determined. True, there may be partly extenuating circumstances; but unless the reason is more than subjective, the one who breaks society’s laws will be punished by fine, jail, or even death.

  This is another example of why a subordinate should not have the power to question authority.

  Morally, however, the very act that Maryk committed is against the law.

  The underlying causes of the Caine mutiny have their parallel in everyday life…. The teacher who allows personal dislike to enter into his grading; the politician who blames his mistakes on others; both of these are examples of fraudulency…. Greenwald, Maryk’s lawyer, confused Queeg and twisted his words so that Queeg was made to look stupid.

  Men have always been subjected to the whims of those in command; and so it will be in the future. This plan must exist or anarchy will be the result.

  The student who dissented was not rebellious; like the others, he pointed out the necessity for codes and rules and regulations if society is to have any collective purpose. Unlike them, however, he put these points before, rather than after, the “but.” “Is a man justified,” he asks, “in doing what he truly thinks is right under any circumstances?” After pointing out the dangers of individual conscience, he comes to his conclusion: “A man must realize that a wrong decision, however sincere, will leave him open to criticism and to probable punishment. Nevertheless, and after weighing all the facts, it is his moral duty to act as he thinks best.”

  It is his moral duty to act as he thinks best. Has this become an anachronistic concept? Fifteen students against, to one for, constitute, let me c
oncede, very few straws in the wind. Nor do they mark any sudden shift in values. Had the question about Queeg been asked in, say, 1939, my guess is that a higher proportion of students would have voted for Maryk than would today; but even then it is probable that a majority would have voted against him.

  It is a long-term shift of emphasis that has been taking place. So far we have been talking of only one book and one decade, and, while this gives some sort of fix, it does not illuminate what our popular morality has changed from. To this end I would now like to take a look at popular fiction in general—as it used to be, and where it seems to be going.

  * Save for a few articles in the smaller magazines, critical reaction has been overwhelmingly favorable, and, to judge by my sample of reviews, only a handful of critics caviled at the moral. Theater and movie critics, possibly because the three-year time lapse between the book and the screen and stage versions gave them time for a double take, entertained more doubts than book critics. (John Mason Brown in The Saturday Review:”… he suddenly asks us to forgive the Queeg he has proved beyond doubt unfit for command.” Martin Dworkin in The Progressive: “Wouk wants us to think less and obey more…. There are voices stating this view more clearly than Wouk … he, at least, is still confused.”) As in the case of the book reviewers, however, the majority applauded, including even such usually perceptive critics as Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr. (Kerr: “… we are exhilarated by a ringing, rousing, thoroughly intelligible statement in [Queeg’s] defense.”)

  CHAPTER 20 Society As Hero

  I have been talking of one book and one decade. Now I would like to broaden the angle of view, for the The Caine Mutiny is only one more step in a development that has been going on for a long time. Let me at once concede that much of what seems contemporary in popular fiction is fairly timeless. Black has always been black and white has always been white, with few shades of gray in between; coincidence outrageous and the endings happy, or at least symbolic of a better world ahead. The very fact that fiction does tell people what they want to hear, however, does make it a fairly serviceable barometer. Whether fiction leads people or merely reflects them, it is an index of changes in popular belief that might be imperceptible at closer range.

  If we pick up popular fiction around the 1870s, we find the Protestant Ethic in full flower. It was plain that the hero’s victories over his competitors and his accumulation of money were synonymous with godliness. The hero was shown in struggle with the environment, and though good fortune was an indispensable assist, it was less an accident than a reward directed his way by a just providence. This didn’t always go without saying, but it could. As late as the turn of the century the ethic remained so unquestioned that the moralizing could be left out entirely. Heroes were openly, exultantly materialistic, and if they married the boss’s daughter or pushed anyone around on the way up, this was as it should be.

  For a farewell look at this hero we have “Ottenhausen’s Coup” by John Walker Harrington in McClure’s magazine, March 1898 (several years before McClure’s muckraking phase). Young Carl Ottenhausen is sent by his company to take charge of an iron furnace, where, it so happens, the boss’s blue-eyed daughter is giving a house party at near-by Eagle’s Nest, the boss’s palatial summer house. After a brief brush with the daughter, Ottenhausen hears there is a crisis down at the furnace at the bottom of the hill. Some anarchist has gotten the men to revolt. Ottenhausen rushes down to the furnace, pulls out two guns, and advances on the workers. The surly devils cower before him. “The men of Laird’s Furnace had met their match.”

  As Ottenhausen stands triumphant before the workers, the house party group comes down in evening clothes to see what’s going on. The president is among them. The last paragraph of the story:

  In the top of a tall building, in Columbus, there is a door bearing a porcelain label which reads, General Manager; behind that door sits Carl Ottenhausen, who now directs the destinies of the Mingo Coal and Iron Company. He owns a handsome house in the West End which puts Eagle’s Nest to shame. There presides over that household a blue-eyed woman whose very look is merriment.

  As time went on the materialism became more muted. Only a few years after “Ottenhausen’s Coup,” McClure’s articles were roundly denouncing people like Ottenhausen for their avarice. Fiction was much slower to respond to the changing temper, but once Veblen and Steffens and others had set to work, fiction heroes could not savor riches with the old innocence. By the twenties, money-conscious as they may have been, heroes who married the boss’s daughter married a girl who turned out to be the boss’s daughter. Not so many years later there wasn’t much point even in that; and now, with the social changes of the last two decades, stories are just as apt to have the hero who marries someone who turns out not to be the boss’s daughter. In a recent Saturday Evening Post story, for example, the hero falls in love with a rich heiress who owns a near-by boat. Actually, she’s a secretary who is taking care of her boss’s boat. A happy ending comes when the hero finds this out.

  But this does not mean that our fiction has become fundamentally any less materialistic. It hasn’t; it’s just more hypocritical about it. Today’s heroes don’t lust for big riches, but they are positively greedy for the good life. This yen, furthermore, is customarily interpreted as a renunciation of materialism rather than as the embrace of it that it actually is. The usual hero of the postwar rash of “New York” novels, for example, is overweeningly spiritual on this score. After making his spurious choice between good and evil, the hero heads for the country, where, presumably, he is now to find real meaning in life. Just what this meaning will be is hard to see; in the new egalitarianism of the market place, his precipitous flight from the bitch goddess success will enable him to live a lot more comfortably than the ulcerated colleagues left behind, and in more than one sense, it’s the latter who are the less materialistic. Our hero has left the battlefield where his real fight must be fought; by puttering at a country newspaper and patronizing himself into a native, he evades any conflict, and in the process manages to live reasonably high off the hog. There’s no Cadillac, but the Hillman Minx does pretty well, the chickens are stacked high in the deep freeze, and no doubt there is a hi-fi set in the stable which he and his wife have converted. All this may be very sensible, but it’s mighty comfortable for a hair shirt.

  Of late, sanctimonious materialism has been taking a somewhat different tack. Writers have been affected by the era of good feeling too, and heroes are now apt to stick around the market place. But they still have it both ways. Ponder the message of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In this story of a man “heroically reconverting” to civilian life, hero Tom Rath is offered a big-money job by his boss. Tom turns it down; indeed, as we heard earlier, he virtually scolds the boss for so much as offering it to him. He’d have to work too hard and he wants to be with his family. Sacrifice? Blessed indeed are the acquiescent. The boss says he will give Tom a good job which won’t ask so much, and grandmother’s estate Tom inherited, it also transpires, can be chopped up into a development that will make lots of the money that Tom and Betsy so patently covet, (“One of the rare books of recent vintage,” an ad quotes a grateful reader, “leaving one with a feeling of pride to be a member of the human race.”)

  In Patterns, another, equally curious business tale, the hero doesn’t mind work so much but he is similarly sanctimonious. He is appalled by the ruthless tactics of an industrial buccaneer. When the buccaneer offers him a top spot the hero says he wants no part of it. He is a moral man and he gives the boss a tongue-lashing. Having thereby saved his soul, he takes the job (at twice the salary). In a masterpiece of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it finale, he tells the boss he’ll punch his face if he doesn’t act right.

  Not in the materialism of heroes but in their attitude toward society is where the change has taken place. In older fiction there was some element of conflict between the individual and his environment; no matter how much assisted by coincidence, the hero h
ad to do something—or at least seem to do something—before he got his reward. Rarely now. Society is so benevolent that there is no conflict left in it for anyone to be rebellious about. The hero only thinks there is.

  Stories must have at least the appearance of a conflict if they are to be stories, but contemporary writers get around this by taking a chunk of environment and then in some fashion disguising its true goodness from the hero. Since this means that the hero’s troubles stem from a false image of life, the climax is easily resolved. The author simply tears the veil away. It was really okay all along only the hero didn’t know it. Relieved, the hero learns the wisdom of accepting what probably would have happened anyway.

  We have the small-town girl planning to marry good, safe old Joe, or already married to him. Just about the time she’s getting bored with Joe and the small-town life, an actor or celebrity of some kind comes to town from the city for a short stay. He gives her a mild rush, and she dreams of a glamorous life with him. Then some minor crisis comes up. Who rises to it? Surprisingly, safe old Joe. We leave her as she gazes at Joe, with his briar pipe and his lovable idiosyn-cracies and his calm, quiet strength. She would be stuck with him in any event, but now she is swept by a deep inner peace to boot.

  It is a churlish critic who would gainsay people the solace of fairy tales. But good fairy tales frankly tell the reader that he is about to enter the land of make-believe and to relax as we go back once upon a time. Current slick fiction stories do not do this; the tales are not presented as make-believe; by the use of detail, by the flagrant plainness of their characters, they proclaim themselves realistic slices of life. They are much like the “situation” magazine covers and the pictures of American family life featured in ads like the “Beer belongs—enjoy it” series. The verisimilitude is superb—from the frayed cord on the bridge lamp to the askew hair of the young mother, the detail is almost photographically faithful to middle-class reality. But it is all sheer romance nonetheless; whether the scene is taking the first picture of the baby, a neighborly contretemps over shoveling snow, or a family reunion of one kind or another, the little humorous squabbles merely serve to high-light how lovable and conflict-less is the status quo beneath.