Black and White, Read All Over

Once upon a time, when popular fiction admitted both Good Guys and Bad Guys, evil was a palpable force, waiting beyond the cottonwood trees in the draw. These days we have a more permissive universe, peopled only by Good Guys, a few of whom do not see the light until the closing chapters. Sin is asocial, and decidedly infra dig. There can be no real snakes in Eden any more; there must be instead, to account for unpleasantness and violence and Seconal, a Problem. A Problem is like a defanged snake in a bag, and can be exorcised, as sin cannot be, by A Liberal Education (words and music by Mark Van Doren). Since a Problem implies a Solution, the only task before us is to educate the benighted in that Solution. The idea of racial intolerance, precisely because it is fraught with undeviating simplicity, is an ideal Problem. If we are to believe what we read in the papers, large numbers of people live wrapped in the rosy knowledge that were we all to get along like tea-colored birds (the adjective belongs to Philip Wylie, an old-time social evangelist) in a nest, life from here on out would be blue skies, Salk vaccine, and two MG’s in every pot.

This Getting-Along-Together is the main tenet of James Michener’s faith, a social philosophy of such relentless intellectual difficulty that Oscar Hammerstein was able to encompass it in all its complexities in the lyrics for South Pacific; and man’s intermittent resistance to Getting-Along Together is the Problem in Mr. Michener’s new epic of the islands, Hawaii (Random House, $6.95).

JD

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Joan Didion

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Once upon a time, when popular fiction admitted both Good Guys and Bad Guys, evil was a palpable force, waiting beyond the cottonwood trees in the draw. These days we have a more permissive universe, peopled only by Good Guys, a few of whom do not see the light until the closing chapters. Sin is asocial, and decidedly infra dig. There can be no real snakes in Eden any more; there must be instead, to account for unpleasantness and violence and Seconal, a Problem. A Problem is like a defanged snake in a bag, and can be exorcised, as sin cannot be, by A Liberal Education (words and music by Mark Van Doren). Since a Problem implies a Solution, the only task before us is to educate the benighted in that Solution. The idea of racial intolerance, precisely because it is fraught with undeviating simplicity, is an ideal Problem. If we are to believe what we read in the papers, large numbers of people live wrapped in the rosy knowledge that were we all to get along like tea-colored birds (the adjective belongs to Philip Wylie, an old-time social evangelist) in a nest, life from here on out would be blue skies, Salk vaccine, and two MG’s in every pot.

This Getting-Along-Together is the main tenet of James Michener’s faith, a social philosophy of such relentless intellectual difficulty that Oscar Hammerstein was able to encompass it in all its complexities in the lyrics for South Pacific; and man’s intermittent resistance to Getting-Along Together is the Problem in Mr. Michener’s new epic of the islands, Hawaii (Random House, $6.95).