The Reich-Ranicki Flap

It was deja all over again, this unending brouhaha in the German media about Reich-Ranicki, the so-called Pope of German Lit Crit: in actual fact he’s a Polish Jew refugee now in his late eighties. Let me say, as a onetime Roman Catholic seminarian mercilessly kicked out of Detroit’s Sacred Heart Seminary by the Rector when discovered me after midnight in the Gothic Tower trying to learn how to smoke without suffocating—with my equally ignorant pal, Jim van Slambrouck, it’s bad enough having a human loose in the secular world who supposes he is infallible on all matters of faith and morals, let alone some glib refugee pretending to settle all literary questions posed to him apodictally.

Most of those queries in FAZ and Die Zeit are barely literate, even by my fairly loose standards. So I’ve been wildly amused by this Papist simulacra (the word itself makes me “smile” that he is truly “laughable”), especially when he returns an Award to a TV network whose allegedly low standards make him flinch esthetically!

It all reminds me of the Daedalus conference on Mass Culture held in 1960 in the Pocono Mountains between Philadelphia (my Heimat) and New York, location of the upper middle class caverns of Upper West Side New York eggheads who believed at the time (alas, still do, mostly) that their intellectual shit on the subject didn’t stink. I was the chosen offering to be sacrificed at this shameless reiteration of foregone conclusions. I mean they were from Harvard and Columbia and I was merely an untenured assistant professor of American Civilization at Penn (and worst of all, the writer of the first curriculum for the first Ivy League Graduate School of Communication and a lecturer on media history therein). If I may simplify their rhetoric, I was the first Trojan horse’s ass to infiltrate their precincts unsullied by the realities of mass culture.

Indeed, the three day conference, of which I was the concluding speaker, literally ended with the Isaiah like poet Randall Jarrell waggling his beard at me, thundering:”You’re the Man of the Future, Mr. Hazard, and I’m glad I’m not going to be there.” Alas, his prognostications were 180 degrees removed from those future realities, as I actually perfected ways of alienating the academically powerful by quickly and candidly identifying their intellectual contradictions. And he committed suicide a few months later, denying himself the pleasure of recognizing how wrong his predictions of my future would turn out to be! Indeed, I was doubly sad because I truly relished teaching his poetry. But I was not surprised that the issue of Daedalus appeared with nary a mention of my paper! Smug minds smother together.

What was so toxic about my ratiocinations about Mass Culture? Nothing. The “No’s” just knew absolutely nothing about the alternatives the new kind of society presented to their half educated students and their own total ignorance was no adequately hopeful propadeutic. I had received a Carnegie post doctoral fellowship in 1957( while the ink on my degree was still wet) to create a new course on “The Mass Society” in Am Civ. First semester on Mass Communication (print, graphics, and broadcasting, viz. from Gutenberg to Warner Brothers to Alistair Cooke), second semester on Mass Production, (industrial design, architecture, urban planning, i.e. Christopher Dresser to Charles Goodman to Jane Jacobs and Victor Gruen). The rationale was to identify creativity in the new genres, speculate on conditions to help them fructify and tell students what we had found and encourage them to do likewise. The humanistic Clerisy unfortunately was so consumed with despising Levittowns, they committed the greatest and as yet unrepentant intellectual trahison of the twentieth century. This simple rationale occurred to me while I was finishing my Ph.D. coursework at Michigan State University and teaching English at East Lansing High School (1952-55) for dissertation money.

The Reich-Ranicki’s of that era were prefiguring the antics of this Polish/Jew refugee. Mock the mass mush, and pretend to be above the battlefield. Yet, when I was not correcting misspellings in their papers, I began to notice certain instances of stunning creativity on TV, allegedly the grossest of the most massive media, e.g., the plays of Paddy Chayefsky and the documentaries of Edward R. Murrow. I’d assign those TV programs and then have the tenth graders write in-class essays on the previous night’s broadcast. I can truly assert over fifty years later than I had no greater class epiphanies than after watching Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame”--on the horrible conditions suffered by poor American farmers as their pain made the pleasures of Everyman's Thanksgiving Dinner possible, or by Chayefsky’s play,” The Catered Affair,” about a Bronx taxi driver’s conflicts over giving his daughter a fancy wedding.

I’ll concede my classes of these children of GM execs or MSU professors was ideal. But equally promising results have analogously accrued later in the most diverse situations: When Michigan State opened a PBS TV station, my twelfth graders fielded a weekly blatherama (Everyman Is a Critic) on their pop tastes in food, fashion, and leisure time commitments, from souped up cars to rock “Noise” (to my ears). As de jure MC I sat by, silently, to begin and end arguments, if and when they arose.

My first national publication, “Everyman in Saddle Shoes,” which Bill Boutwell printed in 1954 in Scholastic Teacher recounted these efforts . Its publication led to a Ford Foundation Fellowship in New York City 1955-56 to try out the ideas. Boutwell appointed me radio-TV editor of Scholastic Teacher where I devised a one-page Teleguide which teachers in the Boonies could use as a one-time teaching plan.

I served until 1961 when I was appointed the first director of the Institute of American Studies at the East West Center of the U of Hawaii. I had to quit Scholastic (sadly) because “Variety” couldn’t reach me in time out in the Mid-Pacific. NBC’s Pat Weaver was especially helpful in 1955-6 because my palaver legitimized his semi-Utopian concept of Enlightenment through Exposure (expose the masses to opera and soon you’d have a country of opera buffs. Roy Larson, publisher of TIME was so impressed he gave me an office at Time-Life to facilitate my access to busy media movers and shakers. (It’s astonishing what that Time-Life telephone number can do as a call back!) In short, the business community was eager to have the schools raise the standards of their audiences.

It was the Reich-Ranicki’s of that era who dragged their feet. An example: I organized TV, radio and film festivals at the annual conventions of the Modern Language Association. In 1964, the brilliant filmmaker David Meyers had stunned the MLAers with his new film on the poet, Theodore Roethke. The Brooklyn poet Marianne Moore was so moved she gave Dave a green light for a film on her work. I asked John Fisher, MLA’s Executive Secretary for permission to solicit the members for donations to finance the film. His gofer, Mike Shugrue replied: “It’s been a bad year for the members on Wall Street, Pat. Maybe later.” Later was too late. Marianne died the next year, unfilmed!

Incidentally, this also began the era of the $100,000 humanities professor, simultaneous with the peonification of the graduate teaching assistant. I’m ashamed to add as an American that the Brits and Scots and Irish were significantly more open to humanizing mass media when I became Time Life Film’s adviser on which BBC, Telifis Aerin. and Scottish TV media our American company should buy. A crucial difference was they had excellent poets making their TV films on poetry, such as John Ormond for BBC Wales and Maurice Lindsay for Border TV.

American humanists blew it while London's Royal College of Art eagerly made possible my retrospective of “Twenty Four Hours of Unseen American Television”-- just as Dr. Howard Springer, Commonwealth Education Secretary, cleared the way in Lagos in 1968 for me to show a film on Nigerian Lit at the Commonwealth Educational Ministers Conference so that other Commonwealth countries could eventually assemble a World Library of International English Lit. That’s what Literary Popes should be doing instead of whimpering helplessly about how bad TV is. It’s mainly lousy because of their short-sighted treason of abandoning it to commerce. My sense is that Reich-Ranicki has been Holocaust hustling for so long he’s forgotten how to think freshly about the future he’s so miffed about his past.

That’s an expected weakness of Popes, literary and otherwise.