"What's TV Doing to English?" Part II

A scene from the Americanization of Emily by Paddy Chayefsky

The Public Arts: "What's TV Doing to English?"--Part II Author(s): Patrick D. Hazard and Mary Hazard Source: The English Journal, Vol. 48, No. 8 (Nov., 1959), pp. 491-493 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Last month we raised a question as to what is a "natural" for the English teacher on television. Is it Bergan Evans' "The Last Word" where that witty Northwestern University English professor draws a great deal of his charm by being an "untypical" English teacher, i.e., one, who instead of guarding the language over his own dead body, gaily makes a thing out of being permissive about linguistic usage? The trouble is that Bergan Evans is a welcome antidote to the kind of lady I met on the train who would mark off a theme that used "dilapidated" in reference to anything but a stone house because of the Latin root.

But in the kind of wild and wooly contexts that most of us teach in, a good stiff dose of standard English ain't gonna scar anybody's psyche. But instead of the cocktail party approach to language characteristic of Bergan Evans' show, I would rather students develop an ear for style and appropriateness-which they might get more quickly from Mad magazine's "translation" of "The Night Before Christmas" into Variety-ese, Time-style Confidentialisms, and that semantic glue otherwise known as a Presidential press conference. The last word on language is style not repartee.

Well, then, what is a "natural" for the English teacher? Is it Shakespeare, Shaw, and any other accepted classic? Is it "Hallmark" or "DuPont"? Is it Greek tragedy on "Omnibus"? I think not. I have always felt and still do that every cultural gesture, no matter how ill conceived, deserves the careful attention if not the uncritical support of the English teacher. But we can never let the TV programmers salve their consciences or try to lull our sensibilities with a systematic looting of the creativity of other media. Robert Sherwood once noted that it took TV only five years to run through 500 years of literature.

The primary criterion, and we must never forget this, is how well is TV serving the contemporary artist and audience. As long as "Camera Three" is just a substitute for church on Sunday mornings, we've got something to gripe about. Ex-English teacher Jack McGiffert, by the way, is the producer of that program which constantly experiments with TV as a medium for the familiar visual essay. Better an average Sunday with "Camera Three" than any ninety-minute thumbnail version of Shakespeare.

But even "Camera Three" is less original than it wants to be because of low budgets. The real "naturals" for English teachers are original TV playwrights like Paddy Chayefsky, Tad Mosel, J. P. Miller, and the whole Philco-Goodyear Theatre group who have had lean years on TV lately but who kept the tradition alive in "Playhouse 90" and may become more visible in NBC's new "Sunday Showcase."

For a serious weakness with the arts in America is a tendency to make them compensatory for the dreariness and barrenness of a half-mature industrial society. And the English teacher historically has been as powerful as any other group in encouraging this dispirited play. A brilliant examination of this tendency to erect Culture as something over and above society is in a new book by Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Columbia University Press, $5.00).

Mr. Williams is talking about England, but given our occupational tendency to Anglophilism, this fact just makes his comments more pertinent to us. Alfred Kazin has succinctly stated the theme of this seminal book in his review for The Reporter, "What's Wrong with Culture?" (July 23, 1959, pp. 43-44): "I once met in a German university a professor of English literature who thought it 'uncultivated' to discuss the concentration camps. Admittedly, this was an extreme case (though not untypical of German professors) of what 'culture' has come to mean. But as Raymond Williams shows in this remarkable study of the different uses to which English writers have put this term since 1780, the distinctly modern conception of culture as something 'higher' than society is itself extreme-a desperate response to the Industrial Revolution and modem mass society.

"Oddly enough, the term came into usage as a way of handling new social facts, not of escaping them. Romantic poets like Blake and Coleridge, who are now symbols for the cultivation of private fantasy, were concerned with every conceivable social abuse in a way that would stagger many American writers today. The great succession of literary salvationists in Victorian England-John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Ruskin, and William Morris offered different gospels of what 'culture' should mean; all of these were nothing but indirect reports on the ugliness, poverty, and despair of industrial England.

"But these ideas of 'culture' were always rivals to industrialism and democracy, alternatives to them rather than means of social change based on an acceptance of them. And step by step, this conception of culture as a rival party to society, as the ideal realm of value opposed to the dreary actuality of industrialism and mass culture, has led to our present idea of culture--not as a way of creating a good society but of escaping from society altogether."

The Regents Exam concept of cultivation--just memorize enough of the right stuff and you are ipso facto civilized-is our American variant of this sterile substitution of Culture for culture as a total way of life. So the real "naturals" for the English teacher on television are the original plays about the moral ambiguities of private and social life in American industrial democracy. We must never be satisfied with mooning over the glories of preindustrial excellence; Miniver Cheevys are passe.

We must ask of TV that it help create a new industrial community by having what every responsible patron must have: guts to give real artists head and a faith that intelligent support is more reliable over the long haul than hypersensitivity to the residue of smalltownishness that still afflicts America. What we need rather than puppetlike genuflections by the networks to the "safe" classics of the past is a gradual subsidization on TV of artists by businessmen who want to have their own and the "sovereign" customers' formless experience of mid-twentieth century life given the kind of shape that Paddy Chayefsky gave it in The Catered Affair, Middle of the Night, Marty, and Rod Serling in The Velvet Alley and The Rank and File, and J. P. Miller in The Rabbit Trap and The Days of Wine and Roses, and Tad Mosel in Five-Dollar Bill, and Adrian Spies in A Trip to Paradise.

Until TV becomes a patron of new art rather than a robber baron who strip-mines the past for Cultural curios like the tycoons who used to transport whole castles to America to show their peers, until then, we can give it only half our heart. The answer to our editor's question, "What is TV doing to English?" turns out to be another question: "What are English teachers doing with and for TV?" From where I sit, much--but not nearly enough, with more in the offing.