5. AN AMERICAN ABORIGINAL
GOES ABROAD
From New York to Europe and Mexico,
1956–1960
So let them all wait, and pay their two pounds each to follow the wordy little trail of a North American aboriginal.C. Wright Mills, letter to Ralph
Miliband, dated April 13, 1957To write is to reason; […] to fight against chaos and murk.C. Wright Mills, "What It Means to Be an Intellectual"
Mills wrote the next letters in his temporary homes—in Copenhagen, Denmark; Innsbruck, Austria; New York City; and Cuernavaca, Mexico—and from his new home in Rockland County, New York.
Although we're not sure exactly when Mills began writing his letters to Tovarich, he dated the first letter 1956–57, during his first extended stay in Europe. He probably wrote most of these autobiographical letters to Tovarich during 1957, 1959, and 1960.
While in Europe in 1956–57, Mills completed much of the work on the manuscript for The Sociological Imagination. In the spring of 1957, he presented early versions of that book at a seminar in Copenhagen.
Not long after his return to New York City at the end of 1957, Mills embarked on his first mass-market paperback "pamphlet," The Causes of World War Three, which grew out of articles and lectures on the topic of the Cold War and the urgency of political efforts to foster peace. During the time covered by the next section of letters, Mills also began work on his two other mass-market publications: The Marxists, which included Mills's critique of Marxism and selections from classic Marxist writings, and Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. His writing for periodicals included "A Pagan Sermon to Christian Clergy," in The Nation (March 8, 1958); "The Cultural Apparatus," in the Listener (March 26, 1959); and "The Intellectuals' Last Chance," in Esquire (October 1959). And in 1959 he completed the work of selecting, editing, and introducing a reader of classic works of sociology entitled Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking.
The prospect of living and working abroad was stimulating to Mills for many reasons; he loved to travel and appreciated a continent in which relatively short physical distances brought the traveler in touch with a great variety of cultures, not to mention delicious foods and high-quality liquor. Mills mentioned the possibility of writing a book about his experiences in Europe, and at one point he even wrote a rough
Munich, June 6, 1956
I.
In Europe, it has been said, an American discovers America. But to do that he must first discover himself. It may be an old self long buried, or a new self in the making, but if he is trying to be honest, the first question he must ask is not What Are You but What Am I? Or rather to ask those questions together is the psychological meaning of travel.
In a small Munich hotel one June morning in 1956, after an evening spent in the apartment of a young German technician, I woke up with an unexplained feeling of guilt. I didn't reason about it; it was merely there to feel, but I was glad that I could feel it, for it is through such unexplained tremors in ourselves that we may often discover something about the world and about our own selves as well. If we resist such feelings—as the whole push and shove of how we live tries to get us to do—we will understand neither.
This guilt had to do with money and with work. He—the German technician—worked and had no money or very little. I did not work, not really, but I had money. It was as simple as that, but it ran very deep, this feeling, and I cannot resist exploring it. In fact, it seems necessary that I attempt to explain how this situation, along with the guilt, came about, and what it may mean in the world of nations in which we live.
II.
My favorite restaurant in Europe or America is the third-class one in the Bahnof in Munich. My favorite dish is two glasses ½litter of dunkel beer with some "Goulash mit Beilage" and five German rolls (for DM5 or $1.25). You're a little unsteady after that but very full indeed. And you also get a friendly pat on the back by the old woman waitress. You've gotten a bit more too: the faces of some people. My god, they are the human range. There is the bent old
To Lewis A. Coser and Irving Howe (Dissent magazine), from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated July 7, 1956
Dear Lou and Irv:
We are nicely settled; the address until next May is on the envelope. I've just returned from a week's tour of Norway, and am preparing to migrate! Later I'll write you about what goes on, but it is a little hard because I've started to write a sort of European log and it is not yet properly focused and I don't want to see it too clearly as writing until I've seen at least a bit of the south … which we'll do later this month and in August.
I write now to query you about the following: I've now seen reviews of PE [Power Elite] by Rovere (Progressive), Lynd (Nation), Rodell (Sat Review), Time, Newsweek, Berle (NY Times), S. Chase (Herald Trib), Lee Miller (Reporter). At first I did not want to "reply" but now I feel the urge to do so. I'd like to make it a little essay "on reading reviews" and use the occasion to throw light on our wonderful intellectual community and their standards of criticism. It would be as impersonal as I can make it: I do not write in anger. The book sells well, and apart from the reaction of friends, that's all I care about after it is published. Do you think the idea sound? Would you like such a piece? Let me have your ideas on it. If you do like it, or even if you don't, I'd be so grateful if you'd send me clipping of [the] review, if any, when it comes, if it does, from Partisan Review. My clipping service might not cover that medium, and it is not available here. The same for Commentary. Any one of the reviews I've seen isn't worth replying to, but taken altogether, they might make a little pattern that's interesting enough in itself to stand as a piece.
Ordinarily, I've made it a rule never to reply to reviews, certainly not in "letters to the editor." But these people are really being so arbitrary and silly it might be well for once to crush them verbally. Perhaps I've been wrong and ought to fight back explicitly. If only for the
[1] The Power Elite was eventually translated into fifteen languages.
I've the feeling the damn thing will get around despite the reviews. Well, we'll see in a year from now. After all, if all these liberal types had acclaimed it, I'd know that I had failed.Let me know what is going on the world. I've not seen a newspaper since I left!
Yours as ever, Wright
Mills's response to reviews, entitled "Comment on Criticism," was published in the winter 1957 issue of Dissent. The piece was reprinted a decade later, along with essays by Ralph Miliband and G. William Domhoff and reviews of The Power Elite by Robert Lynd, Richard Rovere, Dennis Wrong, Talcott Parsons, A. A. Berle Jr., Paul M. Sweezy, Daniel Bell, and others in C. Wright Mills and The Power Elite, compiled by G. William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
To Harvey and Bette Swados and William and Virginia Miller, from Copenhagen, Denmark, undated (summer 1956)
Dear Swadoses and Millers:
Well, it's been a great summer and it isn't over yet. One more trip to Munich, to see the Six Day Trial at Garmish in mid Sept. Start teaching 25th Sept. It's the first summer since I can remember when I haven't written anything or at any rate not much. I have just completed a 20 page "answer" to all the reviews of Power Elite, which Dissent will print in winter. Am letting it sit awhile. I've thought a lot about the idea of doing it, and I think I should, if only for the young men coming up! It's kind of a nice thing, but if any of you think the idea horrible, let me know and I'll send the current draft to you for criticism. OK? I really mean that
I went to England alone, ferrying across the Ejoserg to Newcastle.
I've also just done a brief review for NY Times of William White's new book, The Organization Man
[2] The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956)
I cut him down to size with some real mean cracks—what a schlemiel. And what [a] thief. But no matter. Let the dogs bark, the caravan passes by anyway.I've begun to think about my thing on Europe as I ride along: what do you think of the title, First Impressions? It is going to be a very strange kind of book, I'm afraid, and maybe I can't get away with it but I've just got to try and see if I can do that sort of thing. You see I am trying—if I may express it so grandiosely—I am trying to make some kind of form out of all that part of my life that has no chance to get into the kind of book I've been writing. Motorcycles and why Swedish women look like they do and why you know as soon as you spend one afternoon in London that Blighty has had it and why I've quit collecting bags and now collect pots and why a krenit bowl on a teak table gets you the way it does and why loden cloth outranks all British woolens and how a woman, any woman, looks best at her prayers but after that in [a] loden cloth cape (you ought to see Ruth in it; of course I've got one too but it don't look the same). Why a Norwegian pack (by Bergan) is one hell of a lot better than Austrian packs. And above all, I guess, why not be truthful … above all, how it is, exactly how it is if possible, that an American in Europe, if he got the energy and throws himself altogether into it, how this American discovers what the hell he's all about, or anyway part of it, only in Europe, in Europe where so many things began and where so many things are now ending.
I'm not writing this way for show or even for show-off purposes but to make this point. It isn't merely romantic; it is also a necessity for me just now to get on top of all that bubble, to make it into something more than an enthusiastic letter to some friends.
[3] Mills corresponded with Esquire about writing an article on his experiences while motorcycle touring in Europe, but as far as we know he did not complete the piece.
Of course that takes an enormous discipline, I know that, but in doing it I really feel that for the very first time I'll be facing the problems of a writer. I think I have to take that seriously now. Don't you, or is all this merelyM. Mills
To Frances and Charles Grover Mills, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated September 5, 1956
Dear Mother and Dad:
I
You ask whether Katie walks?
[4] She was then thirteen months old.
I really wouldn't say she walks. But she does waddle across the face of the earth, her toes out, her belly out, her back straight up, both arms rigid. If she looks down, the whole apparatus totters and is likely to fall.She doesn't talk; she does better than that. She squeals. Deliberately and gleefully and often she squeals. I think it is realization of the absurdity of the world. She will look at someone on a streetcar, peer into their face and squeal inquiringly. They all laugh. The Danes, I think, know all about the absurdity of the world and they all laugh.
II
We buy pots and tables, prints and filing cases—all of which are cheap here. Yesterday I bought a Picasso for $5.00: a woman, a man, a child—in rather bright pink and gray, but every line of it somehow indicates how foolish such a grouping really is! I've a worktable for $35.00, with oak legs and teak top: that combination is what we'll stick to. We've a saddle leather armchair. It's quite neat and altogether simple, but the leather on it is ⅛ inch thick. And all sorts of little
We think seriously now of buying land in Rockland County and building a weekend place—the same foundation size as the final house, 24′ × 40′, but using the second floor as the roof for several years, and keeping an apartment in NYC. No reason why that wouldn't work until school age. Might even pay for itself in summer rentals.
III
We are very much undecided as to whether we'll remain in Copenhagen next summer or move for 3 months to Austria. I'm afraid the trouble of moving—storing furniture here or freighting it ahead, etc.—will be too much. We're also undecided as to whether we'll get a car or not over here for the summer. Everything is now up in the air.
What are your plans as regards Europe? When do you think you'll come and for how long will you stay? You really must plan it now—especially if you decide to come by boat: reservations ought to be made right now.
[5] As it turned out, Mills's parents did not visit him in Europe.
I teach from Sept. 25th until Dec. 20th, then begin again Feb. 5th until late May.
Let us know your plans,
Mills
To Harvey Swados, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated Sunday, September 23, 1956
Dear Harvey:
I am so very glad about your job at Iowa. Ten years ago I told you—teach; it's the only half-free way of life in the US because despite everything, it allows you freedom and a physical chance as it were, to write as you like. Do let us know how it goes—and do attend a regional convention or two and meet the silly people: join the racket, boy.
― 214 ―The expansion of higher education during the next two years will give you a chance to make it despite no graduate degree.[6] Swados did teach at Sarah Lawrence College for many years, as well as at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Or hell, pick up a Ph.D.Just back from Munich, my European hometown, and Garmish-Partenkirchen for the Sechtstagefahrt (six-day trial). Marvelous stuff in the Bavarian hills, getting up at 5:30 and going out to a good mud hole or hill shining with mist and knobbled with crankcase busting rocks, to watch the Italians, Russians, Bulgarians, Swedes, Germans, Englishmen take the Gelande Machinen motocross. A real test of men and machines.
Stopped at BMW factory and took old faithful apart again with the Renndienst [repair service]. Coming back, made 1, 300 km in one day's run, from 6 A.M. to 9 P.M. on the north German plain at dusk the little bugs splattered all over my face and Barbour suit and goggles. Simply filthy with grime and dizzy with speed and the splitsecond decision at 160 km an hour.
Oh well, tomorrow it begins, the teaching again. It's the same everywhere, the same pretense: to talk hundreds of hours and to do it on the assumption that you know that much. To maintain your self-image while doing that, and at the same time admit puzzlement to yourself in order to think you can write a bit. I've no taste for it this year. Want to take a woods machine down through Yugoslavia; next summer I will.
In January Ruth and I go to Munich and the factory takes my BMW, selling it for me at the proper season in March. In January we pick up the Isetta
[7] A subcompact car that could carry only two passengers.
(new US export model) and go to Paris for 10 days.In June we go to Munich with Katie, pick up my Gelande machine (R26—a lighter model BMW for rough country) and then we tour—Ruth & Katie in the Isetta, me on the motorcycle. I explore ahead and get cheap pensions in Austria, Italy, France. Staying a week to 3 weeks at good spots and touring out of there. Hub-touring the British call it.
Goodbye; got to build lectures.
C. W.
To Bette and Harvey Swados, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated October 10, 1956
Dear Bette and Harvey:
Re your account of highways and slop buckets. Yes, it breaks your damned heart to think what America could do—or even more, what Americans—including oneself of course—might be. Of course, you're right—it's the surplus that makes for the kindness, etc.—but still it's there. The worst thing about Denmark is the petty bourgeois tone. I never really knew the meaning of that before. But my own greatest disappointment was in Italy. You see, from Norway down through Austria, in all of Germany and Sweden, there are no road signs (billboards). One day going along in Sweden, I suddenly realized this was half the charm of the scene. So we came out of those Austrian Alps into Italy and the first thing we see is the Dolomite peaks. Even with the Alps fresh in the eye, the Dolomites are impressive. Then you let your eye climb slowly down into the valley, and you suddenly are brought up with a real jerk. Road signs! My God. Maybe it's a small thing but it brought back the true horror of the American desecration of lovely American nature. It really ruined north Italy for us, that and those unpardonably silly little frontier guards and soldiers with carbines hung all over them. What childish idiocy.
Anyway, it should be a ten year prison term in any nation to put up outdoor advertisements in any shape. When you think of the shitheel types who think up that stuff and are allowed to educate the senses of children for shock, and ruin all possibilities of really experiencing a roadway—one of the best things in the whole world of experience. Fuck them all. But nobody cares, you know. We're just stray cranks.
So glad to hear of completion of factory stuff—both the stories and the experiences.
[8] Swados's book On the Line (originally published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 1957) is a collection of fictional portraits inspired by Swados's experiences while working on an auto assembly line. Dell Publishing brought it out in paperback with an introduction by Daniel Aaron in 1978, and the University of Illinois reprinted it in 1990 with an introduction by Nelson Lichtenstein.
Yes, of course I like The False Coins better than[9] False Coin, a novel by Harvey Swados (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1959). One of the book's epigraphs is the following quotation from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Maxim Gorky: "Of science he said: ‘Science is a bar of gold made by a charlatan alchemist. You want to simplify it, to make it accessible to all: you find that you have coined a lot of false coins. When the people realize the real value of these coins, they won't thank you.'"
You'll think us mad, but we're sitting over here designing a house. Won't bother you with details now except that it's a radical idea that we think is just the nuts. We're building a little 18″ model of it to exact scale next week, fitting in furniture and all. That's really the only way to design stuff. We'll (Linguanti and I) use standard windows and all but fit them into shapes they've never known before.
So that's what we do—this week. We can't get out on the road again until Christmas—from 20th Dec. until 5 Feb., we're free. I think we told you, Ruth and I then go to Munich to pick up BMW Isetta, on to Paris for a week. […]
In the meantime all these goddamned lectures!
Mills
The following letter was written soon after the historic uprising against the Sovietstyle regime in Hungary. On October 23 Hungarian soldiers supported a large demonstration of workers and students in Budapest; a prominent statue of Stalin was torn down. Rebels supporting Hungarian socialism and democracy won a temporary end to the one-party system.
To Harvey and Bette Swados, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated November 3, 1956
Dear Harvey and Bette:
Your good letter of 30 October just arrived, catching me in the proper costume and mood for writing out the tough anti-all-nations speech I'm giving later this month to the passive, calm, judicious, smug, civilized and dull student assembly. (Why in God's name am I not in Hungary? Always on the edges when the center doesn't hold.)
― 217 ―The mood is induced by rereading Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages. It's been 15 years since I read it; all the time he must have been a model for me but I'd forgot. Magnificent. By all means read it or reread it. Notice the lead chapter especially. That's the way to do it, boy. O, yes, the costume: I've got on big, thick, tan corduroy bloomy knickerbockers from Munich, medium weight climbing shoes from Innsbruck, green wool hose from Oslo, navy blue zipper turtleneck sailor's sweater from the Hamburg docks! I look magnificent, sitting here at my little slab of Danish teak, with the Swedish pots on it and the Italian flask.Not a bad lead paragraph?
Your report on the stereotyping of your On the Line as "Thirties" is just the nuts. You must know that I've fought that with every book I've done. (See Stuart Chase's NY Tribune review of The Power Elite.) What happens, of course, is that publishers believe they live by being up-to-date. That means only being up with the gossip of their own circles, as is the way with all fads. The most killing comment on writing that is itself OK, is "old hat"—merely because all the commentator has is a sequence of new hats borrowed from that little gossip circle he identifies as "our times." It worried me with New Men—perhaps rightly so, for guys like us were too young for the Thirties and, in my case, in the wrong part of the country. So maybe we've had to get some of the Thirties a little later. But it doesn't worry me anymore. I'm sure it doesn't worry you either—especially with On the Line, which was derived from so close up.
It's good to know you've run into some decent people in Iowa. Above all, a duck hunter. A wonderful sport, goes with lots of whiskey and lots of equipment (best source near you: Gokey & Co., Minn.). (Why do I keep playing up to this absurd stereotype of me you've got? Hope you know how merely playful it is.) Yes, I saw [Paul] Sweezy's review as well as [Herbert] Aptheker's in Mainstream. Of course they're doctrinaire, but also no less so than all the liberal stuff and much more generous as well. Of course one knows why, but nonetheless, I enjoyed both reviews. When I get back I'm going to write a solid, tight little critique of "Marxism today"—about 80 pages. You see, I've set my stuff always against various forms of liberalism because those are dominant. But it could just as well—in fact easier for me—be set against Marxism. What these jokers—all of them—don't realize is that way down deep and systematically I'm
― 218 ―a goddamned anarchist. I'm really quite serious and over the next few years I'm going to work out the position in a positive and clean-cut way. In the meantime, let's not forget that there's more [that's] still useful in even the Sweezy kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of J. S. Mill put together.Our travel plans for midterm and summer have been changed—because Ruthie went downtown yesterday and bought herself a VW Bus (8 passengers). It's without the rear seats and we're going to fix up the back end and make bunks. We figure, or rather Ruth does, that it'll be easier to travel with Katie this way than dragging her in and out of pensions for 3 months. As you know, the camping grounds of Europe are marvelous so I don't see why it won't work. We'll tick along and spend a week here, two days there, etc. Eat dinner out, to sample the country, but picnic the other meals. If it works even half time, we'll easily save the difference in cost between a regular VW and the Bus (which costs, with papers and all about $1, 700). Besides, when back in NY we'll need a truck if we build again.
Now you really must write us and tell us, on the basis of your own experience here and talk with others, where you'd definitely go in a rig like this. In particular, do you know a good camping ground on the French coast […] where we could stay a couple of weeks? You see, we don't have to worry about a place to sleep, because with the curtains Ruth makes and all, we can park overnight damn near anywhere.
Of course I'm keeping my BMW (18,000 km on it now!—new tires next week) and I'll do side trips from the moving hub of the Bus. Got to do that because many places I can go only by motorcycle due to roads and cost of auto shipping being so high. Also I can't take Katie all day for three months because although I love Katie I dislike children and don't really approve of anything about them at all. Of course I've thought of going to East Europe; damn near left for Budapest the other day when (coming back from Hamburg) I saw a big convoy of Swedish army trucks with Red Crosses on them going down. God I could have joined it; the Swedes are friendly fellows. All the time they sing instead of talk. A pleasure to be with, altho all Danes hate all Swedes. In fact, Danes hate damn near everybody except all Englishmen and some Americans. A peculiar people, the Danes. It is all due, you know, to the glottal stop in their language.
― 219 ―Kill a lot of ducks. And write. You all and Wakefield and Business Week are the only sources of information we've got on USA.
Yours as ever,
M.
Mills
cc: to Dan W. [Wakefield]
To Dan Wakefield, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated November 5, 1956
Dear Dan:
Hope you don't mind the enclosed carbon which gives you the news.
Yes, of course I think the Puerto Rican book is good and I think you could do it too.
[10] See Dan Wakefield, Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
[…]Yes, I got the egg head clips, for which many thanks. Didn't you get my reply about not ever worrying about somebody else beating you to a book? (mailed c/o Stone to Washington). No, there's no bourbon here—at less than $10 a bottle. Got to smuggle in brandy from Germany. That's $3.75 and almost as good as the French, which costs $9 here! Beer—and weak stuff at that, although tasty with food—is the only cheap drink available, along with Spanish wines which are medium in price.
Thanks so much for reference to Auchincloss. Will try to get from here. About your Israeli book: you see, it's like I always said. In serious writing, journalism by itself is being replaced by sociology. In books you've got to get a little way back and spread out in time—a span of 2 or 3 years at least. The PR [Puerto Rican] deal will allow that if you can get 5 or 6 good solid themes and carefully generalize topics and events. The knife-edge present isn't for books. You've got to get the trends so set up that readers for several years can fit a lot of knife-edge presents into them. You've got to let the readers do that. The faith that they will is what is meant by "serious" writing of a social and political sort. Isn't that so? And that's why we've got to
― 220 ―work out a new form of writing—using some fictional techniques and some reportage tricks and some sociological stuff. Of course all that's nothing without some really big view into which all the little stuff fits and makes sense. That's why this kind of writing I'm talking about can't be done in essays. It takes a book or maybe a sequence of them to create such a world. I guess the rule is that no matter what you are writing about, you're also writing about the whole goddamned world. Huizinga does that—it's easier for the past, less risky. Agee touched it on those sharecroppers. Dos Passos did in USA.The trouble is when you try it, you can fall so very, very hard. It's easier not to try. Go detailed scholarly. Go clean journalist. Disguise it—I use the word advisedly and hope Swados hears—in fiction. No fiction nowadays that I know is "about the world" in this sense. For example, what compares on east Europe with Milosz?
[11] Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish writer who authored The Captive Mind (essays, 1953) and The Seizure of Power (a novel, 1955), as well as many books of poetry known for the interweaving of personal experience with historical events. His literary works earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.
Etc.I'm not doing so much intellectually these days. Reading a lot, a mixed lot, but all the European history and geography I can get hold of. But I'm not prodding myself. I figure you've got to fuel up from time to time; turning 40, as I've just done, is a good time for that. And Copenhagen, in its easy, relaxed way, is a good place for it. Of course you can work anywhere, but somehow I don't think of Copie as helping you get down to it. It's not that it's exciting; on the contrary it's very quiet. And not knowing the language—and having no impulse to study it
[12] Mills did not have a facility for learning to speak foreign languages. As a result of formal study, he had some reading knowledge of German and French, according to his transcript from the University of Wisconsin.
—makes it all the quieter of course.
Take care,
Mills
cc: to Swados
To Mr. Lee E. Grove, editor, Trade Department, Oxford University Press, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated December 1, 1956
Dear Lee:
It's so kind of you to ask about addresses for the royalty check of January 1. I think it best if you mail it directly to my American bank with a covering letter indicating that it is to be put in my checking account (not the savings).
[…]
Everything goes well. We've got a VW microbus—fixed up with neat Danish bunks in the back. Leaving December 15 for 50 days in Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy with wife and child. Then back here for spring term, Feb. 4th to June 1. […]
Denmark's a bit dull, but a good base, and [there's] the Ballet every week. All this writing is just a hobby. I'm really a ballet man—with delicate ponderosity I am dancing.
Take care, Wright C.Wright Mills
Mills took an imaginative leap of another sort in 1956 when he wrote letters to Tovarich,
[13] See the preface for more background on the unfinished manuscript "Contacting the Enemy: Tovarich."
his imaginary friend in the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was reelected president in 1956, and much of that year's news had been dominated by tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.To Tovarich, from Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, winter 1956–57
TOVARICH, WHY I WRITE TO YOU
I. Our Own Separate Peace
Tovarich, I am continually told that you are my enemy. Well, I am trying to get into contact with the enemy. I am trying to contact you—my opposite number in the Soviet Union. I want to bring you into a conversation so we can make our own separate peace. In doing so I am of course assuming that there are—or that there will be
These letters should be some kind of combination answer to Lenin's question: "What is to be done?" and Tolstoy's: "How should we live?" Much of what I at least mean by politics and culture is indicated by these two questions, especially when you take them together. I want to write specifically and personally about culture and politics as they affect the ways you and I may be able to live for the rest of our lives—or even for how long.
I'll admit too that I'm using you for ulterior purposes. I feel the need to say a few things about myself and so to straighten out some points that are personal and hazy. Saying them to you is just the thing because—forgive me, but isn't it true?—I don't think you'll readily understand a lot of the things I feel the need to say. I'll have to try very hard to make them plain.
Self scrutiny, of course, is an old American habit. I think it may be an old Russian habit too. Anyway, isn't it the case that neither of us today has the kind of ready-made identity many Europeans seem to have? The worse for them, Tovarich! (In this respect, probably we are more like the Mexicans and Brazilians I happen to know, or more generally, in several curious ways, probably more like the more selfconscious men of any of the underdeveloped worlds.)
Tovarich, please don't take these letters to be some curious kind of American propaganda. Let me say it once and without qualification: I am no spokesman, official or unofficial, for any nation or for any nationalism. In fact, I am against all prevailing nationalism—whether it is found in the United States or the Soviet Union.
The idea of writing to you came to me in the fall when I was here in Europe. Traveling in foreign countries, of course, turns you in upon yourself; you get away from your routines; and you begin to sort yourself out. At the same time, it makes you feel the need to tell the strangers around you what you are all about. You want to look at self and world together before the strangers. Do you understand? But I have to add: all that's when you're young; after a while, when you're a stranger in your own country, you do this both at home and abroad.
Without quite realizing it, all during the first months I spent in Europe I felt the need to write a "Letter to Europeans." I wanted
Western Europe—I'm sure you'll agree if you've seen it—is a truly wonderful variety of landscapes and peoples in a human-sized area. On the other hand, I also have come to believe that Europe is all too often a cluster of petty squabbles, of local and nationalist varieties, which dreadfully hamper many Europeans. To maintain their nationalist and regional peculiarities often seems to take up all their moral energies; it's hard for them to think in larger terms about the world. Many Europeans seem unable to gain the self-confidence, the presumption, the wide-ranging curiosity that are so necessary for creative thinking about public affairs and private lives.
At any rate, I never wrote any such Letter to Europeans; I tried to, but each time I began to write to them, I found myself writing to you, Tovarich—at first alongside Europeans and then only to you, although the Europeans were listening. That I feel so strongly the need to write to you is all the more curious because I have not yet been to Russia. Of course I have read something of most of the really big men of your country. For example, once for an entire summer I was up in the Canadian woods on Lake Temagami, reading nothing much but a set of books by Dostoyevsky; it nearly killed me. I think I can say that Dostoyevsky is as much mine as he is yours. Maybe more, if you've never happened to earn him. I do not know what kind of a Russian you are, but I know that Dostoyevsky is no more yours than Melville is mine.
By the way, probably I am going to be writing most of these letters while traveling, while I'm away from my books and files, and from those American friends whose criticisms I value. I do this deliberately in an effort to isolate myself, but also because I can't help it. Every time I travel outside America, I just start writing to you. I suppose it is because I want to find out what I think when I'm without my usual scholarly equipment for thinking.
II. The Difficulties and Importance of Writing
Tovarich, there are so many things I want to tell you and ask you. Some of these feelings are now quite vague; I want to make them less so. Is it any use to cling to vague feelings? Many of them, as you will soon see, are ordinarily thought "utopian" in the sense of futile. I think it is of use. If you feel something, you ought not deny it merely because it is only a feeling; it is also yours.
Feelings, however vague, are the infant beginnings of a political traffic when you start to interchange them. Or they may be. Or I hope they may still be. At any rate, this is the only political traffic you and I might have; maybe we cannot have even that. I am trying to find out. My idea is to ignore the general and to be a bad soldier. The only truly good soldier today is a bad soldier. Or must I be an idiot if my generals are? Maybe you find that necessary, but I don't—not yet at least.
Above all, with all the mythmakers about and many intellectuals
Of course, we know the world today largely through communications we receive about it; we are always depending upon what others tell us, and more often than not we don't know who those others are or what their biases and interests might be. As for current events and trends, well, obviously it is becoming more and more difficult to cling to some sense of reality. It is a full-time job and one could easily use a large staff;.
I have to tell you that last year I read three or four dozen books by American and British specialists on Russia—and I am going to continue reading such books—but I still didn't get a real answer to the ultimate question I want answered: What kind of a man are you? It occurs to me that you might also be reading books by Russian specialists about America. I shudder to think of them. They are probably as bad as those I've read on Russia.
Let us forget specialists and experts for a while; they have their uses, no doubt, but how relevant are they to our doubts and purposes? I don't know. Let us talk to one another "naively"—each telling as honestly as he can, who he might be and how he thinks he got that way; how he lives and what he believes and how he thinks he has come to believe it. And, of course, let us talk politics. I'll begin our conversation, Tovarich, and I hope you will help me turn it into a little drama. Toward that end I'm going to put a great many questions to you but only after I have answered them myself as fully and frankly as I am able.
To Lewis A. Coser from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated January 27, 1957
Dear Lew:
To answer your smaller questions first:
Yes, I enjoy "Europe" enormously; but "Europe" means—can only mean—continuous traveling about and I am a natural-born traveler. As for specific locales inside Europe, I'm arranging my policies, as if I were all to myself a little nation, and I can't go making off-hand comments, even to good friends.
Did I write you that we (Katie, Ruth and I) just got back from a month's trip—in the VW microbus—through Yugoslavia, across to Bari, Italy, and up through the peninsula via Naples and all that? Thousands of images remain. The Yugs are like cowboy movie ruffians wandering up and down their bad-land gulches. You can give Italy to Clare Luce, the Pope and Mary McCarthy,
[14] McCarthy's book Venice Observed had been published in 1956 (New York: Harcourt Brace).
for all I care.I'll be glad to see the "answer to critics" [of The Power Elite] when my copy arrives. I worked on it very hard, and—good or bad—I had to do it. Also glad you're getting out so many publications. Just now I'm not writing anything but I hope to get something done in the spring. I've been asked to give a lecture at the London School of Economics in March, and to go to Salzburg Seminar for two weeks in late May.
As for your major questions:
By all means were I you I'd go to California
[15] The University of California at Berkeley.
—on a secure leave of absence from Brandeis. It's perfectly silly to think of it as "far away"—far away from exactly what? As I've told you, it's the one place I'd leave the East for.As for Columbia College, the situation is more fluid than ever. My impression—from a distance this year—is that the policy will be to hire only young men as assistant professors and gradually raise them. Although a big fight may develop when Casey retires in several years. I just don't know how it will look. You know as well as I how sticky and slow and arbitrary things north of 116th St.
― 227 ―seem always to be. At any rate, I won't know how it is going to be until several months after I return in September.
Take care,
Charlie
To William Miller, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated February 5, 1957
Dear Bill:
I'm so glad you think the Dissent essay came off all right
[16] Mills's response to critics of The Power Elite.
I was worried that your (justified) reaction to the earlier version would make it impossible for you to see the effect of your criticism on the final! I worked on it very hard and learned something about writing. I just couldn't let all these silly people say all that and then sulk in my corner. So it was necessary for therapy.I do not mind telling you (altho I hope you will not mention it to anyone) that "criticisms" of The Power Elite hit me very hard indeed. I suppose the whole thing coincided with a lot of self-criticism I've been giving myself and for a while I damn near lost my nerve for writing. It is hard to carry a load as big as Luther's when damn near all the world tells you it's only a bag of peanuts. But enough. I'm over it now. Or almost. Anyway do write Coser you think the piece came off OK; he was naturally worried about your reaction.
About your plans to move in '58 to the western NJ area (which I don't know): I want to tell you that when we return to the US we're going to live on Morningside Heights (if Herpers can give us a University apt.), but I do intend to build a sort of weekend place somewhere within an hour or two of NYC. I want a quite small but quite elegant little place and do not need much land. Although there is plenty of time, I hope you will consider our looking around together for a neighborhood. The great point with me—and I suppose with you—is regardless of initial costs, to keep the monthly costs (taxes etc.) very low. Rockland [County] is by no means out of the question. Anyway, keep the possibilities of a joint search in mind as I'm quite serious about it.
I've not worked much at anything for some months. Now
― 228 ―suddenly I began to "work at" the little book on "The Sociological Studies," a quite technical book of 150 pages or so.[17] This became The Sociological Imagination (1959).
I think it's time I wrote something about my own kind of sociology and against the current dominant "schools." I'm not in any hurry about it, but it comes along. I look forward to telling you about it when I return and, I hope, showing you some manuscript—to establish the right tone—and I think you'll enjoy it as much as I.My other project is this book on The Fourth Epoch,
[18] Mills did not obtain a publishing contract for this book, and he never completed the manuscript, but see his essay entitled "Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch," Listener 61, no. 1563 (March 12, 1959).
which I find I cannot give up but which I cannot focus. It is, after all, a philosophy of history as well as an explicit taking up and carrying forward of the old sociological tradition of Germany, which was at all times concerned with "the nature of our epoch."The Intellectuals book I have dropped—temporarily at least—it just doesn't interest me now,
[19] Mills's original contract (dated August 22, 1955) with Oxford University Press for a book on American intellectuals was renegotiated in December 1959; the project was then tentatively entitled The Cultural Apparatus. When Mills died in 1962 this work was still unfinished. He did publish an essay entitled "The Cultural Apparatus," Listener 61, no. 1565 (26 March 1959).
although it may become a long essay on "the role of reason in human affairs."[20] See his lecture entitled "On Reason and Freedom," read to the London School of Economics and Politics and broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Third Programme (February 1959).
At least that's going to be its major theme—rather than being empirically set by the intellectuals. So that one is up in the air for now.Much lecturing ahead: London on March 2, Frankfurt May 2. Salzburg asked me (finally!) for two weeks in late May and June—I wrote them a very superior little note saying it depended on who else was going to be there! To hell with that propaganda outfit. I hope to be asked to Oslo for a lecture and of course I've things set up for around Denmark. As you know, it is very hard to lecture on America in Europe. On every side there are all these stereotypes and try as you may anything you try to say falls into them. I think it is largely having to talk in English, which many Europeans understand much less than they suppose.
It isn't true that I am "disgusted" with Europe. I don't know
― 229 ―how Hofstadter got that impression. "Europe" can only mean continuous travel, which at all times I love. Only specific parts of Europe can be the object of "disgust." Italy, for example, I do not at all like: give it to the Pope, Clare Booth Luce and Mary McCarthy. Yugoslavia is obviously an altogether fascinating place, and I intend to motorcycle through it again this summer on the way to Athens and Istanbul. (RH [Ruth Harper] will be camped in the VW bus in Austria.) Germany and Austria—as I've told you—are continual sources of pleasure and agreeable puzzlement to me. Of course I don't know much about any of them: these are simply impressions of a fast-moving traveler.All the news of your writing plans—especially the economic history—is quite exciting. I think it's fine you've got the possibilities of such solid endeavors. What else keeps a man on the level? It's only when we don't have such programs that we lose touch with our own center; only when we do that we feel we might be making our own groove (unmix that one if you can).
Keep in touch,
Take care.
As ever,
Mills
[P.S.] A heart doctor told Wright yesterday that he had Angina Pectoris.
R. [Ruth]
Mills's case of angina pectoris was mild, and after a few days of bed rest at home, he continued his usual practice of ignoring his high blood pressure.
[21] Notes from Ruth Mills, undated (1984).
To William Miller, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated March 14, 1957
Dear Bill:
One of the amusing features of any exchange of letters is the fact that the answer to one's last letter, if prolonged, reveals so clearly the ups and downs of one's mood. I've just read yours of 11 March, which
I mean this literally. Never have I written so continuously (yesterday I wrote for 15 hours) and, I do believe, turned out such [a] well-written first draft. These are short books. The first runs to some 220 typed pages, and is a statement of the promise, the tasks, the nature of the social sciences Ch. 1). It is at once a "defense" (without appearing to be such) of the kind of stuff I've done, and a really detailed criticism of "the methodological inhibition" Ch. 2) a la Lazarsfeld, and of "the fetishism of the concept" Ch. 3) a la Parsons. It also contains a complete, and I believe first-rate, rewrite of a never-published essay "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" Ch. 4)
[22] Published as an appendix in The Sociological Imagination.
and a brand new version of "The Political Promise" Ch. 5), which is set within a neat little view of the role of reason in human affairs, in history. Within it I have also finally been able to state the central role of historical studies in the social sciences as a whole. I am very excited about it all, and can't conceive of any sudden shift in my evaluation of it!I must ask that you not mention any of this to our friends, especially those of Morningside Heights. I want it to be just one big, dandy surprise: as from a prophet who comes in from a desert.
The other book I won't write about now, for I am too much inside it still. But it too is to be a short book, and on "The Intellectuals." Here again I think I've found a way to avoid both the moan and the simple denunciation.
You'll be glad to know, I think, that I've shifted my view of London, after being there a week to give a lecture at the London School of Economics. The truth is, I suppose, that I was very glad indeed to find out how well my stuff has been received in those circles, and how much their own work there is in line with it.
In April, Ruth and I go, without Katy, to Paris for 10 days. In late May, with two books out of the way, all three of us close up here, go to Salzburg for two weeks. Then I go alone, by motorcycle, across Czechoslovakia to Poland—if it can be arranged. Then, come back
Yours as ever,
Mills
[P.S.] Keep in touch and take care.
To William and Virginia Miller, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated March 22, 1957
Dear Bill and Bucky:
I do want very much to read the new history book, but airmail is prohibitive in cost and sea mail for books is about 6 weeks. (In six weeks, or very shortly thereafter, all the contents of this apartment that won't fit into the VW bus are going into storage.) So your judgment not to mail the book is, alas, correct. Without having seen it, I share your hunch and hope that it will make some real money, and I want to read it not only for history but for writing.
Your brief characterization of crime fiction is enticing: "The gambit is the relation of respectable institutions and disrespectable society, not all of it underlying." But you did not complete the cross-tabulation, which is, of course—now don't be upset, study this:
SOCIETY INSTITUTIONS, Respectable Not Respectable Respectable 1 2 Not Respectable 3 4 The world as commonly—and erroneously—assumed is confined to 1; the world of most criminal fiction is 3, especially in its relation to 1.
The world of nihilism is 4—there is some crime fiction about this world too, but the fascinating world is 2. That is the world of moral men in immoral society, of the private eye as really the only tough moral center in a universe in which even that center will not hold: see Yeats, but also the best of Dashiel Hammet. No one has done more than fumble with it. What you could do, after you've
― 232 ―[got] the technique of crime fiction really slick and have thought out the world of two, is to give it form and meaning. I do not at all see why crime fiction of such a sort could not become a wonderful instrument with which to think about the world of the USA. Society as a network of rackets does not mean that all individuals are necessarily racketeers. Who is, and who isn't? Why it's the best way to raise the problem of guilt, of original sin, of Kafka's K, and it's why I, for example, sometimes work so hard.That sort of thing (about which by the way I'm quite serious) in my new book I will call "the sociological imagination." In the above, of course, we play with only two "dimensions." We need only a few more, the chief of course being I: the individual. Upon a few of these the crime fictioneer must focus. II: institutions are the more immediate milieu in which these individuals are seen to act. III: society, in most crime fiction, quite vague, but in some, like that wonderful Tucker's People by Ira Wolfert, it becomes more of a framework.
The job of crime fiction, apart from making money by entertaining—also important jobs—is the same as the job of all social science worth the name: to make society become as alive and as understandable and as dramatic as the best fiction makes the individual seem. And the job may be done, first, by realizing how individuals must be understood in milieu and how individuals and milieu and society [interrelate]. Second, by a technique of presentation which presents the relations between the three up close and as intrinsic. Such a technique, I believe, is not now available.
But go one more step.
| society | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good | Bad | |||
| Institution | Institution | |||
| individuals | Good | Bad | Good | Bad |
| Good | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Bad | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
the goody goody world
the big world is OK but here's a good kid in a bad neighborhood which he transcends
the goody good hero: he alone is good in a world altogether bad
the goody goody crime story: only the criminal is bad
is probably a "null" cell, although I'm not sure
nihilism is total
But 3 and 7—there ought to be novels about them,
[23] Mills left 3 and 7 blank on his list.
especially 6 and 7. I'll keep a carbon of this to make transaction of ideas easier in case it stimulates you.I wasn't loafing and merely getting drunk in bed when I spent all that time, months of it, reading paperbacks and Balzac. All the above is obviously part of a theory of fiction which, I just now realize, I've been working on for years.
Yours,
M.
CWM
[P.S.] Have lost 24 lbs in last 5 weeks, and feel better for it.
To Lewis A. Coser, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated April 4, 1957
Dear Lew:
Thanks for the letter with all the news, good and bad. Yes, I've lost 28 pounds in the last six weeks or so, and will probably be about right—at 185—by midsummer. Everything seems all right, and I work 15 hours a day at my desk.
Congratulations on reviews, promotion and California
[24] Coser was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, 1957–58.
which is wonderful. Try to stay. Get me there.My own news is mainly this: I have just about completed a little book of 10 chapters on "The Social Sciences."
[25] The final version of The Sociological Imagination has ten chapters, but only a few chapter titles match the ones in the working outline presented here. The phrases within quotes for numbers 4–7 were Mills's handwritten annotations to his typed outline.
Here are the chapters:PART ONE: THESIS
The Promise
The Methods
PART TWO: ANTITHESIS
Deviant Cases
Abstracted Empiricism—"anti-Lazarsfeld"
Grand Theory—"anti-Parsons"
Liberal Practicality—"social pathology"
Illiberal Practicality—"industrial relations"
On Bureaucracy—political meaning of chaps. 4 & 5
PART THREE: SYNTHESIS
The Political Role
Major Problems
You remember, I told you I was going "to return" to the profession. Well, here it is. Next fall I'll of course ask you to look it over. In the meantime, believe me, it is really quite an exciting little thing, about 90,000 words, I'd guess, in print.
I have also begun a 5-ch5apter little book called "Politics & Culture," which consists of 5 lectures I am to give in late May-early June at Salzburg: it is now in the form of a "Letter to Europeans"—about USA and Europe, and also about many of our little stuffed-shirt friends and colleagues. That's also the subject of another little book half done on "Intellectuals"—again some 5 or 6 chapters.
At the London School of Economics a few weeks ago, I was much enheartened by the way my kind of stuff is taken up there. My God, it is nice to know it makes a difference somewhere. Well, it damned well does there. Naturally, I'm nuts about the place and everyone I met there.
April 15 Ruth and I go to Paris for 10 days, then back; then I fly to Frankfurt for a lecture, then back. About 15 May we close up here and go to Salzburg seminar for 2 weeks. Then I go alone, by motorcycle, to Poland, if I can clear everything, for 3 weeks; come back and join Ruth and Katie in Austria—to loaf slowly toward Lisbon, from where we fly to NYC on 3 September.
It's becoming quite a year. A pivotal year, I think, for me. Suddenly,
Yours ever, Mills
When Robert Lekachman, who was then an economist on the faculty of Barnard College, reviewed William H. Whyte's Organization Man for Commentary in 1957, he included a critical discussion of Mills's New Men of Power (1948). Responding with the following letter, Mills took the opportunity to set the record straight concerning his position in relation to Marxism.
To the editor of Commentary, from Copenhagen, Denmark, spring 1957
[26] Published in Commentary 23, no. 6 (June 1957): 580–81.
To the Editor of Commentary:
Little unpleasantries I always try to ignore.… But now comes Mr. Lekachman whose errors of statement in [his] "Organization Men" bring him into view. He asserts that I have analyzed Fortune; that I have found it to have "a unity of outlook"; that I think it a "consistent and sure-footed organ" of one ideology; that it goes international in order to put down leftward tendencies at home; and he implies that I believe its editors omniscient conspirators.
I have not read Fortune with any regularity for many years—so superior on economic fact and business opinion do I find Business Week. I have never "analyzed" Fortune magazine, nor the strange varieties of ideology which at any time may have possessed its assorted editors, whoever they may be. I have never assumed that it is "a consistent, sure-footed organ" of any ideology. In fact, I should have characterized it as inconsistent and stumbling. With one exception: although seemingly informed by often radical backgrounds, whoever produced it appeared consistently to lack omniscience.
My major use of Fortune in the book cited by your writer is based upon explicit quotation. […]
In [New Men of Power] I also cite Fortune as an example of "sophisticated conservatism." This little phrase, so often kidnapped and abused, cannot be properly understood without its twin brother, "practical conservatism." Among other terms of definition, "sophisticated conservatives" seem more aware of the political conditions of money-making and corporation-maintenance, which of course include the international. This I contrasted with an older vision of a more utopian capitalism: the "practical conservative," in his outlook and drive, is immediately economic and less aware of larger political realities.
When I wrote this book, a decade ago, Fortune had been for some time a vehicle of the sophisticated rather than the practical variety of business ideology. I do not see how this can reasonably be denied. Mr. Lekachman fails to mention the contrast without which either term loses much of its meaning. He does not name the date of my publication, which, however convenient for him, is surely a disservice to your readers. What he has done, in brief, is mistake my explicit use of one ten-year-old article in Fortune for an "analysis" of the magazine's "ideology"—which he presumably takes to be permanent. Having made this up, he then uses it in spurious and invidious contrast with what I suppose must be called his own analysis of "Fortune's view of the world," which turns out to be conveniently and ambiguously expressed by one writer, Mr. William H. Whyte, Jr. I cannot imagine what Mr. Lekachman takes all this to be in aid of.
As for the statement, alleged to be mine, that "Fortune's stand in favor of international aid [is] motivated by a desire to stave off" leftward tendencies in America: I do not know the motives of the editors of Fortune as of ten years ago: and I think them of small importance. But as for the general idea, so crudely stated by Mr. Lekachman: certainly I have believed, and do now believe, that since World War II any sound business ideology is likely to be relevant to international expenses as well as to domestic politics. The motive indicated above, however, is nowadays not likely to be important, if only because in the United States there are no leftward tendencies to "stave off."
I do not believe that U.S. foreign policy can be adequately explained,
― 237 ―as in the current formula, by (a) the numerous and evil actions of the Soviet Union, plus (b) the numerous proclamations of ideals by America. (a) + (b) = the wearisome voice of America. There are perhaps other elements those who would understand the world must consider. The relations of domestic and international problems are most intricate; I do not know of an altogether adequate statement of them. But I have been and I am trying to confront such problems.Rather than doing so himself, Mr. Lekachman adopts a tone and with it covers up the issues—a fashion often displayed in your magazine. It is a way to stop thinking by the use of such easy phrases as Mr. Lekachman's "Marxist and Hobsonite echoes." I am less interested in echoes, Marxist or otherwise, than in explicit statement. It is less important that your writer imputes to me opinions I do not hold than that he obscures serious problems by such fashionable superficiality. Let me say explicitly: I happen never to have been what is called "a Marxist," but I believe Karl Marx one of the most astute students of society modern civilization has produced; his work is now essential equipment of any adequately trained social scientist as well as of any properly educated person. Those who say they hear Marxian echoes in my work are saying that I have trained myself well. That they do not intend this testifies to their own lack of proper education.
I need comment only briefly upon Mr. Lekachman's rather ungenerous review of The Organization Man—my own view of which was printed in the New York Times of December 9, 1956. As readers of White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956) will have immediately seen, both Mr. Lekachman and Mr. Whyte agree with much of what I have written about bureaucracy and the higher business life. About the general run of the facts and about many of the meanings, that is. The political judgments involved on all sides are divergent. For I have, of course, in my several discussions of these matters, taken a consistently critical and altogether independent view.
C. Wright Mills
Mills was planning a research trip to Poland to conduct interviews for his book-in-progress on intellectuals when he wrote the following letter to Ralph Miliband, whom Mills had met at a London School of Economics seminar that year. Miliband was a
To Ralph Miliband, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated April 9, 1957
Dear Miliband:
I do not see why you don't come to Poland with me! As I think I told you, I lecture at Salzburg 26 May to 8 June. On the 9th or 10th of June, I plan to leave my wife and child camped out in Austria and by motorcycle (BMW-R-50: international six days trial model) cross Czechoslovakia to Poland. Total time of trip—well, ten days or 2 weeks. I don't know. Why don't you come along?
It should not cost much—your trip to Austria & back from London. We'd stay at the cheapest places and picnic for most of our food.
If it's possible and you're interested, let us know and we'll arrange details.
I've finished 9 of the 10 chapters of the little book on the social sciences. Last night in drunken celebration, it seemed a wondrous book. This morning, very sober, by god it may well be.
From the 17th to about the 25th of April, my wife and I will be in Paris. [Edgar] Morin, I think, is loaning us his apt,
[27] Morin, the French sociologist and political commentator.
but I can't altogether work out his French. Is the fellow a foreigner of some sort? Anyway, if not there, we'll perhaps be at one of the hotels Norman [Birnbaum] gave me the names of.[28] Birnbaum, a sociologist from New York City, was then teaching at the London School of Economics.
Sincerely, Wright Mills
To Ralph Miliband, from Copenhagen, Denmark, dated April 13, 1957
Dear Miliband:
I am not able to see why the LSE [London School of Economics] cannot this year close up shop earlier in order to suit our convenience. Perhaps it is due to some local peculiarity, some curious inability to reason properly and to act well. But no matter. That it is unreasonable is no reason for us to be. What is the very earliest date that you could be in Salzburg? As I think I've told you, I love Austria, much more than Texas, and if I tarried there I might well write another little book, in some Baroque way, on some mountainous topic.
[29] He spent several months in Austria later that year and worked on a manuscript: the letters to Tovarich.
No, I have not been asked to come to London during the summer, and I do not know whether I could go there were I asked this summer. What would delight me no end is to come for a month next January, and, in 10 lectures of one hour each, give the social science manuscript, which just then will be about ready to go to press. About then also, I shall have in hand "The role of reason in human affairs" or "The Intellectuals" (an 8-ch5apter item). Oh, these days I'm a regular wholesaler of ideas, a department store of cultural wares. And so modestly priced too: for transport and living expenses while there, I'll go anywhere, and there present the unpublished word. But I suppose London next January is mere fantasy, all the more attractive, though, in that I can think of nothing that would better enable me to improve these books. But if they do not ask me, it only goes to show that they do not deserve me. So let them all wait, and pay their two pounds each to follow the wordy little trail of a North American aboriginal.
I think a letter to Paris, care of the author's agent, Miss Ellen Wright, 14, Rue Mr-le-Prince, Paris VIe, will reach me, as I want to try to see her. But send a carbon to Copenhagen to make sure. Returning from Paris, I turn right around and go by train to Frankfurt for 2 days, then back here for 2 weeks or so; then to Salzburg.
Listen, if you are serious about going, and can go about July 1, please now do this:
figure out a rough plan of where we go via what: Salzburg
― 240 ―to Salzburg. (Remember I am on a US passport but I suppose I can go across Czechoslovakia.) Maybe Mrs. Birnbaum will give you ideas of the best route. Road conditions don't matter; if a goat can walk it, the machine can scramble it. So choose freely some vast and intricate circular route. By the way, where is Poland anyway?Go to the Automobile Association (Fanum House, New Coventry Street, London, W.1 Whitehall 1200) and in my name (Membership Number 895851 OD/6) tell them your route and ask them to give you a "strip-map." They'll make it for free; but act right away because my membership expires soon.
But from them or elsewhere [get] the best maps available of the terrain, in some language we can read or learn to read in a day or so. Try not to get a great sheet; small, cleverly foldable ones are much better on a motorcycle. I'll reimburse you the cost.
Tell me what if any experience you've had with motorcycles. None is required, but perhaps then I'd best tell you something of this way of life. Also about luggage and about clothing. About luggage: forget it, put it in your pocket. We have more important things to carry: these are far wilder places than we have ever known, and what we do not know is whether we can drink what people there may mistake for wine, whiskey, even water, should we be reduced to that. About clothing I shall write later a little technical exposition for you, which I've been wanting anyway to get done. But in the meantime, please tell me your own expectations about it all. Also your weight, as we are both so gross I fear I must have the factory at Munich heavy up the rear shocks. They like to do that sort of thing anyway as the machine is one of their special little competitive creations. Merely to look upon it is to experience the essence of the only truly human mobility.
Do you like the way I have written this letter? You ought to. I have only been writing as you spoke one Friday night in Surrey. Both of us, I take it, are admiring strangers of the English. Perhaps, if all goes well, other things remaining equal, someday we shall show them how to do it.
Sincerely,
Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
When Mills and Miliband visited Warsaw, Poland, in July 1957 (traveling by car instead of motorcycle), it was a time of great ferment against the repressive Soviet-style government. Socialist intellectuals were deeply involved in the political upheaval. Stalin had died in 1953, and Khrushchev had publicly attacked Stalinism at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. Following Khrushchev's speech, a strike by Polish workers against food shortages and other restrictions had helped pave the way for a degree of liberalization: some enhancement of civil liberties, a halt to the collectivization program, and the return of Wladyslaw Gomulka as First Secretary of the Communist Party in October 1956, after his release from prison.
[30] Later, in 1966, Gomulka was expelled from the Communist Party.
Mills's meetings with dissenting socialist intellectuals in Poland, including Leszek Kolakowski, Pawel Beylin, and Adam Schaff, made a strong impression on him.
[31] Kolakowski, a philosopher and fellow of All Souls, Oxford, wrote Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today, Main Currents of Marxism (3 vols.) and many other works. Pawel Beylin, a Polish sociologist, philosopher, and dissident, inspired—along with Kolakowski and others—political and intellectual ferment. Adam Scha, a Polish philosopher and theoretician, was a member of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party at the time and had served as an intermediary between the dissident Communist intellectuals and the government.
A few months later, in a letter to Adam Schaff about the possibility of giving a lecture at the University of Warsaw, Mills wrote: "My visit to Poland—and Yugoslavia before that—although dreadfully brief, has been very stimulating to me. It has deepened my own socialism and hardened my attitude towards the triviality and formalism of much ‘social science’ in the US. It has also shown me something of the great difficulties now faced in eastern Europe and made me want to confront them. I shall never write seriously again without including in the inner forum to which one writes the kind of intellectual public representatives of which I met in Poland."[32] Letter to Adam Schaff, dated October 29, 1957.
To Tovarich, probably from Innsbruck, Austria, 1957
ON GUILT
Over in Munich, West Germany, I visited a friend of mine of whom I am very fond. It was he who introduced me to many features of German life that have, I think, been not only enjoyable but formative as well. What I did that morning in Munich was first to work four hours on a book I am doing, which went very well.
Afterwards, walking the streets, I had a great realization: I do not want a single one of anything they've got to sell, I thought. But later in the hotel room, I knew it was a lie. I wanted my absolute choice of all of them. Am I talking to you about the fleshpots? Yes of course, but of something else too. What? My bourgeois soul, my philistine self, my unsolid identity of which I know so little.
Here were boxes of dark Brazil-type cigars made in Bremen, piled up carelessly in the back of a window in fifty boxes behind twenty much more expensive ones; they are magnificent after a good meal of hot soup and roasted meat and vegetables full of color and salad and cheese and fruit, and expresso. Six big [coffee bean] grinders, whirring away behind the great stretch of plate glass; and through the open door comes the odor of nine types of bean. You understand all this was only Munich; I've not been to the USA for well over a year. God knows I passed a meat market and looked at the windows. Landwurst from the Tyrol, the lovely pink salami from Denmark; twenty kinds from Italy. To see the leather was to smell it right through the plate glass. Think of the woolen pullovers for sport and cardigans as thin and rich as fine silk. Egyptian cottons for shirting and loden suitings and all the English and Scotch stuffs as well, ready for custom fitting and careful tailoring.
I went into a small Wurststand [sausage store] and immediately counted thirty-eight huge jars of fresh gherkins on the shelves in back of the counter. On the black market in Krakow how long could a family live on the sale of that, and in my own wallet were the solid Deutsch marks to buy all of them—five times all of them.
I came over the mountains from Munich to the Inn Valley by a network of back roads; in some stretches they were mere trails. The BMW motorcycle sings in all gears on all gradients; when it's in the woods it's like a mountain goat, a go-anywhere apparatus—not a tool, not a machine—a true apparatus.
I went to a hotel that was between second and third class, got a room and the key for it, and pushed the button for the automatic elevator. I thought of the elevator that didn't work half the time in the best hotel in Warsaw. This one came at once and in it stood an embarrassed cleaning woman. Evidently the lobby button had electrical priority and evidently she wasn't supposed to be using it anyway. The hall porter told her to walk up. I grabbed her shoulders as if they were salvation and with one arm around them we went up together.
We've got to get into our bones the need to get into real contact with our colleagues in East Europe. Intellectually and morally and politically we've got to understand and act with reference to the underdeveloped countries as well as the overdeveloped countries of the world.
To Ralph Miliband, from Innsbruck, Austria, postmarked August 1, 1957
Monday
Dear Ralph:
You really can't know how glad I was to get the second issue of Univ and Lef Rev [Universities and Left Review]: it made for two evenings of quite good reading, although this issue isn't up to the first. I'm managing to work a good deal on the letter to the Russians thing [Tovarich], but I do have times when I'm not quite up to that but don't want to read trashy private eye stuff, which is all I can get here and not much of that. I'm enclosing a check for 30 American dollars; if you have any trouble cashing it let me know, although I don't see why you should have trouble. If you'll keep a little rekogning [reckoning] (how do you spell it?) of the subscriptions and books …
Would you please send me the following:
DISPUTED BARRICADE. By Fitzroy Maclean. Cape.
THE NEW CLASS. By Milovan Djilas. (The US edition is by some little firm called Fred. Praeger, but surely there's an English edition.)
[Isaac] Deutscher's letters. Russia After Stalin, isn't it?; but this only if you judge it still worthwhile; better send it. I've not read—or if I have [I've] forgotten—any book of his.
If anything in magazine or book comes along which you think neat and suggestive of the bloc, go ahead and send it. I don't think I want just now very very scholarly stuff but more good reportage and speculation I suppose. Thanks a lot.
― 244 ―I'll let the London and Warsaw lectures ride a while, perhaps a month. As for Warsaw anyway I've not even been invited yet: no response to a carbon I sent Gottesman … the same as I sent to you.
O by the way if anything is recorded or published on the Rockefeller seminar on Marxism (Bottomore) [that] you mentioned, do send it.
[33] The seminar was probably at Bellagio, Italy;Tom Bottomore was a sociologist at the London School of Economics.
I'm right in the middle of that. The sponsorship is amusing, my god.Katie is doing very well; couldn't be doing better. […] The only thing happening is my own writing, which is rather curious. Here I am writing rather impassioned stand-up-all-you-bastards-and-begin-to-fight stuff on world politics and intellectuals for two or three or even as many as six hours a day, and then collapsing exhausted. I shall remember these days. There ought to be some way to exploit them intellectually.
As Ever,
Mills
To Leo Lowenthal, from Innsbruck, Austria, postmarked August 8, 1957
Dear Leo:
Thank you for your letter and the lovely made-up story about the cabbie. Which reminds me, if you see Eva Hoffberg around, do tell her that last month when I was in Warsaw I thought of her. She hates me now, probably, because once upon a time I was such a bastard, but no matter. I still love her most of the time, so tell her so, and then tell me what she says, really.
I went to Warsaw for 16 days to interview for my book on the intellectuals. They have asked me to fly back there in January and give them three lectures on Marxism and Social Science: imagine! In January also I am supposed to give "The University Lectures" at the London School of Economics. But alas, my year of looking around Europe is not ending so well.
[…]
Innsbruck is very gay now, in full holiday stride. I still manage to write several hours each day—lectures to the crazy mixed-up kids in Poland and to the benumbed English. The atmosphere is very curious for me. It is like one of the German films of the early 1920's in Innsbruck these days.
Mills
[P.S.] Leo-
[34] Mills wrote this short note by hand on the outside of the aerogram; the body of the letter was typed.
Later: Write me a huge, quick letter about the world. Nobody ever writes me. Tell me the most important thing that has happened in the USA since 1954, say, or what you really think of, say, Poland. Tell me gossip. Or as somebody, Gide I think, said to somebody, Cocteau I believe: Astound me! But most of all, tell me gossip, thick and rich like gravy. Sitting here in this silly, wonderful little town, with a pillow in the window for the elbows, gazing at the medieval street, I yearn for gossip. As you must realize, I've plenty of weinbrand.
[35] Brandy.
To Harvey Swados, from Innsbruck, Austria, dated September 9, 1957
Dear Harvey:
The last three evenings I've spent On the Line. I've enjoyed it thoroughly; but more than that, I think it has added a new dimension to my rejection of Amerika. The wageworkers, the factories, as of now, they are really a new world quite unexplored. Nobody examines them with any compassion; they don't know them at all but merely assume them; or more likely they think they know them as of the images of the thirties, which they all want to forget. But you've examined them and by doing so have opened up the thing. It's going to be said, as you well know, that it's overdrawn; it's not real; for in the unreal world in which books are selected and rejected, criticized and celebrated, anything real is almost automatically thought unreal.
Still the thing is so professionally constructed and has such a neat swing about it, if you know what I mean; I think even in the unreal world of Culture, it's got a real chance. Besides, that world's unreal, and so not for keeps.
I've not read American publications for over a year now, except a very few now and then, but isn't it true that there's something of a swing away from the conservative silliness and incapacity for moral discernment that's paralyzed the postwar imagination? Aren't there signs I wouldn't have seen? I've the vague feeling that "we" may be coming into our own in the next five or ten years. And it makes me want to hurry and finish the next one.
[…]
Mills
To William Miller, from Innsbruck, Austria, dated September 24, 1957
Dear Bill:
I got your letter yesterday. Why are you petulant? […]
As for myself I am getting down to a little work finally and of course I have been writing stuff; all along, some of it quite usable in an odd way. As you know, I've a manuscript pretty well done … in Copenhagen … on The Social Sciences, which I think very hot: a short book of ten chapters, it requires several months with my own library and files and then will be ready.
I have about one half of a book, the size of White Collar, I suppose, which I now call The Cultural Apparatus: all about artists, scientists and intellectuals, in US, West Europe, and the Soviet bloc. Do you like that title? Anyway, the manuscript has some of the best stuff I've ever written, if that means anything, in it. Or so I think and that is what I am now working on.
[…]
The fall is beginning to break now in the Tyrol. My God it is a magnificent place. I climb a bit and ride up in the hills on my motorcycle, on back roads and paths. At night I drink too much and eat
[36] Actually 99 kgs is 217.8 pounds.
down from Copenhagen 238.[…]
Yours as ever,
M
Mills
To Tovarich, from Innsbruck, Austria, fall 1957
ON WHO I MIGHT BE AND HOW I GOT THAT WAY
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)from "Song of Myself"
by Walt Whitman[37] Leaves of Grass: The 1892 Edition, with an introduction by Justin Kaplan (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 72.
Tovarich, of course, you realize that these letters to you are also letters to myself. That can't be helped if only because we are so separated; we are so ignorant of each other. That's why I am going to become very personal indeed in this letter and tell you something about who I might be and how I think I got that way. Yesterday afternoon when I was thinking about how I'd write to you about this, I thought: how can I tell him who I am when I'm not yet sure myself what I wish to become? And as for the past, like almost everyone, I've got several different pasts that I find variously useful, and comforting; and all of them are equally convincing. Perhaps the best thing to do is resort first to the conventional dodges? Let us see.
I. Growing Up
[38] See "Growing Up: Facts and Fancies," on p. 24 of this book.
Several of your colleagues, Tovarich, last month asked me, "Where did you grow up?" I answered them politely by saying,
You say you did not ask for all that; you ask, "Where did you grow up—meaning come of age?" Don't be so impatient; give me time to become properly intense. Until I was twenty-three or so I lived in Texas, if that's all you want to know. The point is, it was less any twists of childhood than the upheavals of adolescence that shaped me down deep and for good.
Let me try to summarize it all. The son of a white collar man who traveled all the time, I grew up under the projections of a Carol Kennicott of a mother,
[39] Carol Kennicott is the central character of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis. She is a bright and imaginative person who admires artistic and intellectual pursuits and feels stifled in a provincial middle-class environment; she transfers her unfulfilled and idealistic aspirations to her children.
was accordingly a sissy boy until my first year of college, and so was sent to a military academy "to make a man of me." It didn't work; it did work; it was a mistake; it was the best: I revolted. Because of certain teachers, the revolt took an intellectual turn. Because of isolation, it made me a kind of spiritual Wobbly.[40] A Wobbly is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The union of the IWW, established in Chicago in 1905, sought to organize skilled and unskilled workersinto one union dedicated to building a new society according to general socialist principles. Wobblies refused to endorse any socialist party, or any other type of political party; they preferred using direct action such as strikes, boycotts, and passive resistance. They were able to organize certain groups of unskilled workers who had been ignored by the established labor unions: lumber and textile workers, copper and coal miners, farmers, and dockworkers, including blacks and newly arrived immigrants. When Wobbly speakers were being arrested in a number of American cities in 1909, Wobblies organized a series of fights for free speech. They sent replacement speakers until Wobblies filled the jails; the authorities were forced to stop the arrests and allow Wobblies to give speeches in public. Bill Haywood, Mary "Mother" Jones, and Joe Hill were well-known Wobbly leaders and organizers.
What are the liabilities of such a biography? That you're very restless, and you tend to make a fetish of energy—in order to exploit the restlessness intellectually you need great energy—and you do grow older. To exploit it morally, you're thrown back upon yourself; that does get tiresome, and you have the need to escape. The asset of such a biography is that you have a real chance to get on top of it, to transcend it and to be self-making. In brief, it's possible, most of the time, to act as a free man.
Stages of Autonomy
There is this curious fact I have never quite understood: a withdrawal as it were from chronological time. I was an adolescent during the thirties: at the midpoint of that decade, I was 19. I don't know how typical I am of that generation in one very important respect: I did not personally experience "the thirties." At that time, I just didn't get its mood. I've got that only later and indirectly. Only with the onset of World War II did I become radically aware of public affairs, or aware in any way. I was, I suppose, too young; I was in an outlying region—Texas. I was not really alert to any sort of politics, studying philosophy, especially logic, at the time. And, above all, it happened that during the thirties I was reading the literature of the twenties.
I sometimes think that during the thirties I was living in the twenties, and that during the early forties, I was living in the thirties. Maybe now I have caught up with "my own time"—although I'm
Ever since I can remember, I have had a constitutional inability to sympathize with the upper dogs, and a temperamental distrust of all of them. At the same time I do not, as a matter of intellectual conviction, or of moral feeling, always admire the underdogs, much less those who speak for them. And as for the middle class, let us be honest: what American boy out of middle-class circles who has reached the level of self-consciousness we call intellectual has not spent half his life—and some of the best of it too—rooting out the inhibiting pretensions and the convenient prejudices that seeped into him before he was under his own control?
What this means, again, is that I have been intellectually, politically, morally alone. I have never known what others call "fraternity" with any group, however small, neither academic nor political. With a few individuals, yes, I have known it, but with groups however small, no. The Old Fighters of American radicalism have known that fraternal feeling. Communists in Europe and America have known it. The New York boys who were in the YPSL [Young People's Socialist League] knew it then and sometimes now they cry for it. It must be quite a thing; they all cry for it after they've had it. But I have never had it; I've never joined any groups much less identified fraternally with any. And the plain truth, so far as I know, is that I do not cry for it.
Now the point I want to make about this is that there have been four stages of my "independence."
At first, as an undergraduate student, it was just something that happened to me: of course, it had roots in a personal situation of home life, in a very sensitive mother who imparted to me, thank God, many "feminine" sensitivities in the middle of Texas, which insulated me, made me repelled by the rural and military crudities of Texas A & M. There was a genuinely moral choice for me at Texas A & M when I turned my back on The Company (maybe you'd call
― 251 ―it "The Collective"?) with which I lived and completely isolated myself. If one thing can be said to have made me into an intellectual, that was it.Then for a time, it became a conscious set of gestures, until Professor Clarence E. Ayres told me that if I felt that way, good, but by all means to "keep my pants pressed," a bit of advice for which I am very grateful.
But then a third stage of the pose began. For after my pants were pressed, I became in due course—what else?—an academic man. As I skirted the edges of the world of learning, looking in now and then, I was fascinated and frightened by what I saw. In some ways it looked like a trap, but in some ways, like a wide-open space. I know now that I was afraid of getting "inside the whale." Not consciously, because of course I didn't yet have a clear view of the sort of man I was becoming. So for four or five years I must have been pretty damned hard to deal with academically. For all I had to lean on, against the trap aspects of the academic world, was that old—and I distort it when I use the words because I didn't have the words then—that old Wobbly feeling.
So in the early part of that third stage, it was all poured into a furor of work, quite technical work in philosophy and a branch of sociology called "the sociology of knowledge."
[41] Mills included the following footnote at this point in the text: "For examples see, ‘Language, Logic and Culture’ and ‘The Methodological Consequences of the Society of Knowledge’" [in Power Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, ed. I. L. Horowitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963)].
And then the war came. What did World War II mean to me? In threatening personal terms, it meant the rural idiocy and militarism of Texas A & M. In intellectual terms, it meant a greatly increased interest in politics. In one sentence: following it closely and thinking about it made a radical of me. Personally, however, I did not take a moral stand; I drifted. So it happened that I woke up early one morning to be rejected by the Army for the physical reason of "hypertension." That afternoon I almost came to believe in divine intervention.Then I was invited to New York City and began to direct a research staff; [at the Bureau of Applied Social Research]. This kind of adjustment is becoming a major academic pattern of success in the profession for which I was trained. The old-fashioned professor who
― 252 ―quietly writes his books and teaches is passing from the academic hierarchy in social science as well as other fields, but that old role was one of the important roles I had in mind. In due course, when the opportunity came to move up in the manner of the new career, I promptly turned my back. It is inconceivable that I should not have. For this—and I knew it at the time—was another moral pivot of my biography. I turned my back on the opportunity offered me to become an administrator and an entrepreneur of large-scale research; and that clinched the main line of my direction, the direction of the independent craftsman.
You think it must be lonely in America? No doubt. But no need to cry about it. There is also freedom in it. Maybe only in it. I think that after you've been through loneliness and have become aware of it, you feel both audacious and free.
Over the last several years I have become quite aware of a certain mixture of personal and political and professional factors which have come together to determine such intellectual roles as I play, and even such intellectual and moral work as I have done and am doing. All these factors, to put it briefly, have constructed in me the ethos of the Wobbly. You've asked me, "What might you be?" Now I answer you: "I am a Wobbly." I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation than to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat.
(I want to tell you this in order that you may understand my own values as fully as possible and hence be able to better control your understanding of my letters to you.) I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It's a kind of spiritual condition. Don't be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He's also a man who's often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn't made up himself. He doesn't like bosses—capitalistic or communistic—they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom.
To Tovarich, from Innsbruck, Austria, fall 1957
ON INJUSTICE AND PERSONAL TROUBLE
Every man who is faced with the possibility of a calamity inevitably plants himself upon the bedrock of his individual character. For one man this may be an idea; for another, his faith; for a third it may be love of family. Some there are who have no such bedrock, who find themselves standing on quicksand. The whole outer life, with all its terrors, may avalanche upon them, burying them inexorably.Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
[42] Mills provided this epigram and the following citation for it: "(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1942), 72."
I. Fate as Injustice
Tovarich, suppose you encounter something that seems to you like fate as injustice. Say there is a man, better than you in every way, who is impoverished while you are rich and mainly because he happened to be born in a different country than you were. That's fate as injustice. What to do? Well, there are four possibilities:
You can go blasé and call your feeling romantic, and forget about it. This just doesn't seem possible for me.
You can go saintly. Give up all your worldly possessions and aims; sacrifice yourself for others, anybody, in order to realize yourself. This does seem rather ineffective, and moreover probably selfish. Anyway my guilt is not the sort to be relieved that way. Tolstoyism is out for me.
You can rationalize unjust fate and see it as after all not unjust fate, but in some higher and perhaps unknown sense, justice itself. Then you can bow down to it. I've never gotten satisfaction or relief from such sacrifice of the intellect. What to do, then?
You can go radical politically and personally; you can use your mind and your sensibilities to try to make fate less unjust. Of course, this is the choice I have made. Isn't it the moral root of socialism? Isn't this a good definition of a "radical": one who refuses to accept
― 254 ―injustice as fate and whose refusal takes active political and cultural forms? For the sociological meaning of fate has to do with the types of biography that arise from the very structure of a society. And politics and culture of a radical kind have to do with modifications of a society and so with the control of fate, as history and as biography.Those to whom fate has been kind—as it has been to me, generally speaking—have the chance to treat their own characters radically, just as politically they would treat the structure of a society radically. Well, I am not just writing or whistling in the dark. I believe this, and I've gotten hold of some skills that make it quite possible to survive almost anything. These skills I can use and am using wherever I am, and for long periods I can use them just as well alone as with friends, no matter how pleasant being with friends might be. This brings me, Tovarich, to something about being in personal trouble.
II. Personal Trouble
Listen Tovarich, I know in these letters I've been cheating you; I've not told you all about my private life, my women and all of that. But I can't tell you about all that … after all, this is probably going to be—I hope it's going to be—a very public letter indeed. Anyway, it's just a tale of monstrous tragedies, Tovarich. (I'll tell you what, if you answer my public letters, maybe we'll write some private ones too. I'll release the stuff on women and children to you privately; or better still, when we meet—in Peking?—I'll tell you all about women and such. But we mustn't lie, Tovarich, no more than we can help.) What's important anyway is not the details of one's past—although one should become aware of them—but how one interprets them, what rules for the present and the future one draws from them. I can't resist telling you one such set of rules: what to do when you're in personal trouble.
When you're in trouble, it's as if you're sitting at a huge table with many little piles of notes on it, as if for the chapters of a book. Every day or so the major themes of the book mysteriously shift so that you've got to sort everything out in a different way. Too many decisions all at once, with too many elements you've got no control over; that's what being in trouble is. The decisions and the re-decisions, the tentativeness of anything you do, of all action, gradually wears you down. Questions no longer prod thought; thronging up on you, they clog reason itself.
The process wouldn't be so bad if you were getting somewhere—if it really was a book, for instance. For that's what writing a book is; no matter how complicated all the questions are, no matter how many times you have to decide again, still you come to have more and more control over more and more aspects of it. That's why to write is to get out of trouble, for the trick is to sort it all out in such a way as to be able to work on one part of it at a time, with the whole merely a vague and helpful outline.
To write is to get on top of it all. Writing, at least the thing about writing I'm talking about now, is another name for the creating and the maintaining of a more or less orderly mind of your own, and so a sense of your own identity. When you're writing, you've got a plan, and the changing of it is more or less in your own hands; but when you're in trouble, you are overwhelmed by events and issues you have no control over. To be in trouble is to be in the grip of fate but not to be able to get any melodramatic pleasure out if it. To be in trouble is not to be able to plan.
To cope with trouble, you've just got to keep on trying "to write"—trying all the time to find an outline of the whole that's stable enough, that's comprehensive enough to permit you to reason about one part of it at a time.
I've only been in personal trouble three or four times, but I'm an old pro at trouble. In trouble I feel like an old man—not a tough old man, but still a survivor. As they say in Austria: "Bend but don't break." Or as I say: "Set up a new file." Plan 9 has collapsed; set up Plan 10. I used to think old George Mead's slogan, "We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way," pretty weak stuff, but it's not. It's the theme song of being in trouble but not being dead.
That's how it has been with me, or how it seems, but how about you? Tovarich, I know it's hard to tell the truth about yourself and your ideas. Look how in these letters I disguise so much of what I think and feel; how elaborately and awkwardly I go about it. But I'm going to try to help you. Let us proceed as if Bertolt Brecht's little maxim were true, that truth is concrete.
In the fall of 1957, when Mills was still on leave from Columbia University, he wanted to dispel some false rumors circulating there concerning his professional plans. As the next letters show, there were also other, more philosophical issues at stake.
To Lewis and Rose Coser, from Innsbruck, Austria, dated October 29, 1957
Dear Lew and Rose:
Thanks for your letter and the information in it. I think you are mistaken about Columbia, but no matter. Anyway, you mustn't think I'm sitting around here in the mountains building little paranoid castles. The world's too big for that, and I am at work. "The Social Sciences: a Cultural Critique" is now in draft, with only a few gaps to check when I get back. Early in the spring I'll mimeograph it for criticism. Quite frankly, I've high hopes for it; it's the first thing I've ever written "about" the social sciences of any length; and since I keep it quite close to practice in the craft, it has, I think a certain freshness and lack of pretension. The Politics and Culture book is about half done,
[43] An unpublished manuscript.
although it won't yet focus just right. There are just too damned many themes written into it too closely, and I've not got the guts ruthlessly to cut it.The autumn Dissent came the other day. It's really excellent—broader and more assured in tone somehow. You and Irv [Irving Howe] ought to be quite proud of how it's grown, and I don't mean only circulation. I particularly like to see books handled critically but also without any smart-aleck bullshit. I think books is what you ought to strengthen, and you ought to include a lot of English stuff coming out. A hell of a lot of people will read a magazine just for the book section if it's really good. Like in the old New Republic, and the New Statesman today.
Don't you see Bendix—or is he away? You don't mention his name. I've always thought he was a pretty good man; don't you think so? Tell Leo [Lowenthal] I'm mad at him; he didn't answer my letter of last Aug. sent via Paul Massing … or didn't he get it?
[…]
Take care,
Wright
To Ralph Miliband and Norman Birnbaum, from Innsbruck, Austria (c/o American Express), dated November 22, 1957
[one:] Forgive my delay in writing and also the rude fact that I write you both at once; the carbon goes to toss up. My excuse is that for 10 days now I've been doing nothing but write long, two page, single spaced letters with carbons to various people about the Columbia situation. I've had to "save" two instructors, Litwak and Siegel, and ward off other predatory silliness […] mounted by Lazarsfeld.
By no means is this sociological brawl at Columbia finished; by no means should it be assumed, as Norman apparently does, that I will lose. On the contrary, this round I think I have won; at least I've strengthened my position considerably and more importantly have broadened to confrontation: administratively by getting it squarely before Dean Barzun and Dean Chamberlain (my college dean); and intellectually by making it turn on something worth fighting about—the cultural crisis of the social studies and the problem of a proper liberal arts education. Until now I have not really fought these people in American sociology; I've ignored them and done my own work; but they've been fooling around behind the scenes and now I declare war: I am going to expose their essential bankruptcy; perhaps with a little circuit of the Ivy League schools; certainly with my book on the social studies, mimeographed drafts of which I shall, if I may, get to you by March.
"I don't hate nobody," he said. "I'm just tired of the bullshit." He said it slowly so they'd all hear it good. Then he swung a couple of chairs into the bar, one following the other like one smash; knocking the bottom off a whiskey bottle, … [he] moved in close.
Two: Seriously, all that is easy—and can readily be taken, as I do, as a sort of relaxation from serious work. […] I've booked a flight and will fly to NYC on Dec. 27th. Who will be on it with me is not yet certain.
Three: For a long time now I've been designing The House. Probably it's my favorite occupation. Although I haven't got my drafting tools here, I picked it up again the other day, using squared paper. That's just as good, of course. I am working on a module basis: four foot square, with the total layout on the classic Leica size negative 2 by 3. The model I've got just right now is 16 by 24 and two story;
Why don't you all come and spend Christmas in Tyrol?
W. M.
Mills returned to New York and Columbia in late December.
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated December 23, 1957
Dear Ralph:
[…]
Terrible hard schedule this spring: Feb. 27 Toronto; March … last week of Hillman lectures; three lectures in April, Chicago, U. of Ill., Colgate; and two in May. Plus book deadlines and regular teaching load. But what the hell, I accepted them, and what with the mail
[44] The cover story of The Nation had been Mills's "Program for Peace," which presented a fourteen-point proposal including the abandonment of the production of nuclear weapons, the recognition of China and all other "Communist-type states," and the development of worldwide educational and cultural-exchange programs. The Nation 185, no. 19 (7 December 1957): 419–24.
One woman bought 5,000 reprints for her own personal distribution. Crazy I guess. And a millionaire toy manufacturer wants me to design toys that will realize craftsmanship as laid out in White Collar. What a country. What an epoch.It's not a buzz saw, boy, it's a bowl. Put both hands in.
as ever,
M
ole mills
To Hans Gerth, from New York City, dated December 27, 1957
Dear Gerth,
Forgive me this short note, but I only want to let you know that I have finally arrived in New York City—alone—and that I am well established at […] W. 114th Street; the University kindly held this charming little apartment for me, right back of the University library.
Ruth is […] in Innsbruck. […] We shall probably be separated at her wish upon her return. […]
[45] Ruth obtained a divorce from Mills in May of 1959 after living apart from him for almost two years.
The future is extremely uncertain, but as of now I have so much work to do I can't think about it.
In late March I am to deliver the Sidney Hillman lectures, "On War and Peace."
[46] Mills presented the basic outline of his book The Causes of World War Three in his Sidney Hillman Award Lectures at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in March 1958.
Because of this if you happen to see my piece in the Nation of 7 December[47] "Program for Peace."
I'd be very grateful for your comments pointing out any arrogant foolishness that may well be in it. I wrote it before leaving and it may well be an expression of hysteria on myAs ever,
Mills
After Mills's return to the States in December 1957, he had lunch with Irving Howe, who had been a political friend for almost ten years. Howe remembers discussing the political situation in eastern Europe—listening to Mills's emphatic opinions about the changes he expected—and feeling a personal and political alienation from Mills.
[48] Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 244–45.
Meanwhile, Mills was corresponding frequently with Ralph Miliband.
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated New Year's Eve (December 31, 1957)
Dear Ralph:
new year's eve 10:30. Enclosed is a print of the Nation piece for which you ask.
[49] This must have been "Program for Peace."
In view of the Hillman lectures being on war and peace, I'd be grateful for as full a reaction as your time and patience allows. Perhaps this, straightened up a bit and filled out, might do as tail chapter of the book to be made out of the lectures … a little book of perhaps 5 chapters.[50] The finished book had four parts and twenty-five chapters: The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster and Ballantine Books, 1958, 1960). In 1985 M. E. Sharpe reprinted the 1960 edition.
I give only three lectures and shall of course not use this again. I think I told you of the Toronto speech 27 Feb: to the evangelical board of the United Churches of Canada. On Religion and War, or Moral Insensibility. I've been drafting it and it's going to be real cute. I turn the whole thing against them and speak to them as a Heathen, calling them You Christians and throwing all the old righteousness of the Hebrew prophets at them mixed up with my angle towards war and peace.[51] See "A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy," The Nation 186, no. 10 (8 March 1958): 199–202.
This will also be a fill-out chapter in the little book. Got to get down to the Hillman lectures as such soon.Yes, of course I know Lukacs' Studies in European Realism. He is great on Balzac, who is indeed himself great. He can be read over and over again, at different stages in one's own life. A real classic that is. But I am not going to buy the big set we looked at. Just too much money and I've no time to read him well for the next year. Got to get educated on a lot of stuff I've not yet looked into.
A word of advice, if I may, about the fascism piece.
[52] Perhaps this article was Miliband's "The Politics of Contemporary Capitalism" in New Reasoner 5 (summer 1958): 39–52. Its first section is entitled "Fascism and Liberal Democracy."
Bill Miller who is, technically speaking, the most skilled writer I know, says, "Anything but anything can be put into two volumes or into one paragraph." It is always best to begin with an idea in 12 or so pages: numbered points by paragraph, a sort of propositional framing of the thing: lead sentence in each paragraph—a numbered proposition. Split the proposition into two parts. Part One: assertions, descriptions, narrative, the what-is-to-be-explained. Part Two: the explanation. Then if needed, Part Three: the meaning or implications for this and for that. I know that is a very unEnglish kind of writing, but no matter; it is the way to get ideas down in an open form, permitting their shaping in any number of ways. So don't take the fascism notion too big at first; get it down clean. Taking it too big is too easy a way not to do it at all. Nowadays men with ideas are too badly needed to have to work them all out in detail. Let others do that. State the damned ideas.[…]
As ever,
M
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated January 26, 1958
Dear Ralph:
Of course you do not write flippantly. I told you how it was: you decide to live or you decide to die, and I've decided to live. The only questions are: Can you? And how do you want to?
[…]
I've gotten a small grant from Columbia and have hired a typist and another woman who is copyediting The Social Sciences for mimeographing and forcing me to rewrite. She is Mrs. Jarrico, the wife of a blacklisted Hollywood scriptwriter. She's a swell old gal and happens to be a fan of mine, in fact her whole circle is. I expect to get some really professional advice on style and such matters. (In fact, I am blocking out rather loosely now a play-novel-movie script called "Unmailed Letters to a Fey Tiger" which isn't so damn bad.)
I am getting work done—no new writing yet and no reading but periodicals.
[…] Slowly I get on top of it all. In some crazy, unknown way that can be neither explained nor denied, I am going to win out. Questions for you: 1. Where is Polish stuff? 2. Please let me know at once when the Br J of S [ British Journal of Sociology] is actually going to be out with my piece in it. (It would be very much O.K. with me if they killed it!)… The point is I want to use it in a few speeches around and can't do so after it's published. Inquire discreetly and as not from me please. The speeches are scheduled for a month or so away and I'll have to find something else if they print before that.
I share your indignation about the quiet and the noisy Americans you describe, but I don't think it worthwhile to waste energy about it in small ways: analyze the world and locate them as a piece of shit within it. I am glad and skeptical about your apartment. The limeys are thru boy. No style of daily life left in them; they're all knotted up in the soft coils of useless tradition. In the end you'll have to come to America or go to Russia (joke).
Write soon.
yours,
M.
The following letter mentions two essays on peace published in The Nation: Mills's "Program for Peace"
[53] See letters written in December 1957.
and his fiery piece entitled "A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy." In his pagan sermon Mills railed against moral insensibility to human destruction and the preparation for it, saying, "The brotherhood of man is now less[54] The Nation 186, no. 10 (8 March 1958): 199–202.
The article provoked "a flood" of letters—most of which were positive, judging by the sampling printed in the magazine—and so many requests for copies that The Nation found it necessary to order reprints.[55] The Nation 186, no. 12 (22 March 1958): 247.
To Mr. Lee Grove, editor, Trade Department, Oxford University Press, from New York City, dated March 16, 1958
Dear Lee:
As you know, I've been fooling with three lectures on war which I must deliver at Howard University the last week in March. I have also done two essays for The Nation, 7 December '57 and 8 March '58, on the subject. Ian Ballantine, who is a longtime friend of mine, read these essays and has suggested that a softcover book—I'd call it a pamphlet—be put together from it all. It would be about 40,000 words in total; he could get galleys to reviewers ten days after manuscript was received (on or about April 20th, perhaps a bit later, depending on my personal situation); and publish it sixty days after manuscript. He would run a 100,000 [copy] first printing.
Oxford, as far as I know, is not set up to do this quickie sort of thing, which is rather like the old "Penguin specials," with which Ian
The money involved does not amount to anything. However, it's not money but readers that interest me on this topic. The thing would be a blast, a sermon, a warning, a demand, a squeal. I'd like to go ahead with it, so I would like an exception to be made in Oxford's option on my books in this one case.
I want you to know that this has nothing to do with my overall and long-term relations with Oxford. Long ago Ian and I had that settled. He knows he cannot pry me from Oxford, and as my friend he does not want to do so. He knows and I know that Oxford and I are good for each other. This item, however, obviously isn't for Oxford. The fun of it is to get it out fast, to distribute the hell out of it all at once, and so maybe raise a little impolite hell.
Yours for peace and freedom,
Wright
C. Wright Mills
Oxford University Press agreed to Mills's request, and Ballantine Books published The Causes of World War Three in mass-market paperback in 1958;
[56] Simon and Schuster published it in hardcover and trade softcover the same year.
it was a commercial success. The "pamphlet," as Mills called it, was featured in a display arranged by SANE, a nuclear disarmament advocacy group, at the Pacific International Exposition in August–September 1961, Vancouver, B.C., Canada; it was the only book sold there.The fact that The Causes of World War Three (and Listen, Yankee, 1960) sold in great numbers to a general audience increased Mills's popularity; and his popularity tended to increase his isolation from colleagues and some friends or former friends, who thought he should be writing for a more intellectual audience. Among his defenders, Jamison and Eyerman point out that Mills's isolation from his professional colleagues and his refusal to be drawn into mainstream work preserved his critical voice and allowed him "to become a spokesman for the next generation, seeking a way out of the wasteland and keeping alive the task set out in The Sociological Imagination."
[57] Jamison and Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties, 46.
This next letter mentions Yaroslava Surmach, who later became Mills's wife. The eldest child of Ukrainian immigrants who founded a Ukrainian book and music store,
[58] Yaroslava later illustrated twenty-five books, including The Mitten: An Old Ukrainian Folktale, retold by Alvin Tresselt, adapted from the version by E. Rachev (New York: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard, 1964); Helen Kay, An Egg Is for Wishing (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1966); and Tusya and the Pot of Gold: From an Old Ukrainian Folktale, retold and illustrated by Yaroslava (New York: Atheneum, 1973).
Mills wrote to his parents about Yaroslava, "I am building up a new life and I think I may well have found the woman with whom to build it: an artist, professionally and as well down to her fingertips." He wrote that he loved her thoroughly and had "never been old enough to value love of this sort so well."
[59] Letter to Mills's parents, dated February 1, 1958.
She was almost thirty-three years old and Mills was almost forty-two when he wrote the next letter.
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated May 1, 1958
Dear Ralph:
You may very well be right that the first three chapters ought to go in the back of the book [The Sociological Imagination]. At any rate it is one of those ideas that deserves a hard try; I'll spend a week playing with a draft that way. I want you to know that I am aware that much hard work is still to be done on this manuscript. Such a reordering may be just the thing to make the doing of it more pleasant and more profitable. I am most grateful to you. By the way I agree that 1 and 2 are the weakest chapters. Know also that the more detailed comment you give me I shall use fully.
Since returning to the US I have also written a little book which goes to the publisher next week. It is only 50,000 words or so and will be a softcover original at 50 cents, published by Ian Ballantine, called reflections on war;
[60] The Causes of World War Three.
it incorporates the Washington lectures, [the] Sidney Hillman series, I mean, and the Nation articles … all redone and fitted together. I'll send you a copy of course; should be out in about 2 months.[…]
I have been a little ill, with heart nonsense; and I am very tired. This summer I shall try to take it easy and just redo the social science book. I wish I had a good title for it. The present one is no good. It is after all sociology not social science and it is not exactly an autopsy. I want the whole thing to be more positive.
Yaroslava and I have ups and downs, but on the whole it goes very well. She is one damned good craftswoman in wool, oil-paint, silver, wood, paper (paper sculpture) and she has just made me a great mobile of a school of fish, which really is delightful.
The lectures in London are all set now, for the week of 12 to 18th Jan. next, I think.
[61] "On Reason and Freedom." Read to the London School of Economics and Politics and broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation, February 1959.
Then on to Moscow for a week. Do you happen to know anything about a hotel there called, I think it is, the Bristol?I got my motorcycle today, and this evening Y and I prowled the Wall Street district, in fact all the docks and the lower East Side. She knows where all the districts are: here is a whole street full of leather, here is one for yarn, another for buttons and equipment for making, mending, destroying buttons. Fabulous, really.
In general, since I last wrote to you, I've been in pretty good shape but with bad spells and missing a lot of classes, what with the heart and out of town lectures. But it doesn't matter really. Slowly, very slowly I am afraid, I get on top of it all. Two years from now (who knows?) maybe it will all be a vague memory, or even half forgotten.
Take care, as ever, and many, many thanks!
W
Wright
To Richard Hofstadter, from New York City, dated July 10, 1958
Dear Dick:
I am immensely grateful to you for your careful reading of the manuscript and your forthright comment. I have now taken into account all of your detailed criticism and corrections.
[62] In the acknowledgments of The Sociological Imagination, Mills thanked Hofstadter and thirty-one other colleagues and friends for criticizing the manuscript in whole or in part.
As I readChapter one is almost new: it defines in a good euphoric way the sociological imagination (which will be the title for the book) and the milieu vs. structural distinction; then a brief note on peculiarities of sociological tradition. Chapter two is liberal practicality with a new lead section, which is a kind of little sociology of knowledge of the social sciences but not called that. Then come illib practicali, grand theory and abstract empiricism and bureaucratic ethos: edited in detail and with more positive stuff thrown in as contrast. This is 7 chapters, but I think none of them more than 30 pages. I'll try to shorten them more still. Chapter 8 is more or less new: it is a summing up and a new beginning. Remember the list of for and against at the tail of the old manuscript that you liked, a sort of balance sheet. Well I elaborate that into a chapter and do so in terms of a sort of definition of "the classic social science tradition" or what have the sociological greats got? [Chapter] 9 is called Biography and History and consists of the old chapter two but pointed up to the two big problems of history making (the fourth epoch) and individuality (the cheerful robot); again this is positive for social science. [Chapter] 9 is the politics (pretty much like the old chapter 10 but shorter); and 10 is the craft…the letter thing but God help me again rewritten.
Either in 7 or in 10 or perhaps in a little appendix, I am running an annotated bibliography of great books, past and present: these are the core of the real thing, or so I claim. When I get that in shape I'll send it to you; maybe also the new chapter one.
You've worked hard enough to have the right to see that your reading has made a difference, and to read some decently put stuff! About the chapter you didn't like at all, industrial relations, I won't talk of that now as I am still thinking about it and working on it hard. You may be right. Although I read that to the boys themselves when I was VP of the industrial relations association and they gave it a big hand indeed. True it was in another version then. But we'll see. Anyway can't I save much by just saying up front and again in the back of the chapter that I am not concerned with their consultantship but only with their theory?
[…] I would very much like to ride up to the Cape for a weekend with you sometime but I don't know whether I can make it before August sometime. I think of swinging through Vt. to see Dave Riesman, with whom I've been having an enormous sort of correspondence.
[63] Concerning Riesman's comments and criticisms of the manuscript of The Sociological Imagination.
I've always liked Dave personally.… […] Katie does marvelously.I was in Aspen, Colorado, for the International Design Conference a week or so ago and had a fine time with designers, architects, city planners, artists and other disgruntled types.
[64] Mills's speech at this conference was published as "The Man in the Middle" in Industrial Design (November 1958): 70–75.
I still think I ought to have been an architect. But since it's too late I am going to theorize for them! God they are a confused but good willing lot. They now confront all the problems the political intellectual grappled with in the thirties; amazing really.But again thanks very much indeed for your time and effort on the manuscript; it has helped immensely.
yours,
M
To Hans Gerth, from New York City, dated December 2, 1958
Dear Gerth:
I have read your fine paper, given in Seattle, which you sent me, and I am very moved and encouraged by your generous remarks on WC and PE. They are not that good, my friend. Anyway, we are quite alone among American sociologists in thinking them perhaps worth reading. See for example Mr. Bell's debater's points in current J S [American Journal of Sociology], which of course I shall not answer.
[65] Daniel Bell's negative review of The Power Elite appeared in the November 1958 issue of the American Journal of Sociology. Bell later reprinted the review in his book, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1960).
Oxford has just gone to press with The Sociological Imagination (an earlier version of which in mimeo I think I sent you last spring or summer). Now I work hard on the lectures for Warsaw and London. I really am up a creek in Warsaw: I don't really know these people and don't want to get them into trouble, but of course I must state things as I see them. So I am trying to treat them as if they were in Chicago or an audience in LA and yet reach them.
[…]
Yours as ever,
CWM
In Gerth's answer to this letter, he invited Mills to take a vacation in Wisconsin and to plan on writing a book together with him at that time. Gerth wrote that after reading one chapter of The Causes of World War Three he thought it wasn't as informative as White Collar or The Power Elite, and that he didn't like the title.
To Tom Bottomore, from New York City, dated December 9, 1958
Dear Tom Bottomore:
Believe me, I'd love to give another paper while in London, but I just can't. In the six days I'm to be there, I must deliver 4 formal papers (on which I now work) and cooperate with Secker and Warburg's nonsense; they publish upon my arrival The Causes of World War Three. Then I go thru the same thing in Warsaw the very next week. On top of that, I am already bone-tired from lecture touring this fall to raise some money.
I do hope that you understand, that you know I really would like to if I could, and so forgive me.
Please also try to arrange time that you and I can have a good talk over a bottle of wine some evening.
Yours sincerely,
Wright
To Mr. Russell Johnson, Peace Secretary, American Friends Service Committee, from New York City, December 15, 1958
Dear Mr. Johnson:
I'd like very much to be with you in Boston in April but I cannot. My job is writing books: that is my action. (Sometimes I lecture publicly because I must for the money in it—my minimum fee as of now is $500 and expenses.) If I go out speaking as I am asked to do I could not do my proper, and I believe—for me—more important work. Meetings and speeches: that is your job. If I can help you in this by my books I am very glad indeed, for that is a major reason why I wrote the last one
[66] The Causes of World War Three.
and the ones before that. But I have now to complete the next book and the one after that.I'd like to do everything, but I can't. Accordingly I hope you will understand and, should my position inconvenience you, forgive me.
With very best wishes,
C. Wright Mills
Professor of Sociology
In the spring of 1959, Dissent published two opposing reviews of The Causes of World War Three. The first, by the pacifist A. J. Muste, stated that "Mills has written a sound, brilliant and most timely political tract. In using the latter term I do not mean to put it into a minor category but to praise it as being in a great tradition of books which are of high intellectual quality but which also propose a program and sound a call for action. That an American sociologist of Mills's standing who is also an unusually well informed and sophisticated analyst of political events should publish such a book is an event in the world struggle against war."
The opposing review was written by Irving Howe, who wrote that he believed Mills's sense of urgency "has led to the analytic carelessness and moral disequilibrium of Mills' pamphlet. Many of his specific proposals are fine, many of his specific observations valid; but the mode or style of thought to which he has recently turned seems to me unacceptable for the democratic left."
[67] "C. Wright Mills' Program: Two Views," Dissent 6, no. 2 (spring 1959): 189 and 191.
Mills replied by writing a pointed "Dear Irving" letter, which Dissent published along with Howe's tense reply. Mills asked exactly how Irving Howe's position toward
[68] Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, 244–45.
In the spring of 1959 Mills was occupied by other major events aside from arguments about his latest book. That spring he began building a new home in Rockland County, New York—with Yaroslava Surmach, helping to design the house and acting as the general contractor as well as contributing his manual labor. Mills married Yaroslava in June, and soon after the wedding Mills, Yara, and Katie moved into the new house. They had been living there three months when Mills wrote the next letter.
To Ralph Miliband, from West Nyack, New York, dated "late Sept '59"
Dear Ralph:
I'm very sorry that I missed you when I went thru London last week. We got there earlier than expected and I looked forward to several long talks with you on radical matters. I know you must be very busy with the election and all, so if the questions I raise in this letter are too much bother to answer, please forget them. First, a bit of news: I've just rec'd a very depressed letter from Julian Hochfeld.
[69] Political sociologist and socialist activist who was the director of the Institute of International Relations, associated with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from 1957 to 1960, and who later became deputy director of the Social Science Department of UNESCO.
Apparently the Poles are trying to suppress the Polish edition of PE; I'm not sure of that, but that's what the letter seems to say. Also Hochfeld's longish introduction to it, which he worked on very hard;[70] A Polish translation of The Power Elite was published by Ksiazka i Wiedza, Warsaw, with an introduction by Mieczyslaw Manelli, in 1961.
also his study of the Polish parliament. He even speaks of "leaving" the institute. Don't let on that I wrote you, but why not write him a friendly, encouraging note? I've just done it. He plans to come to [the] US in January, and of course I shall treat him royally.I saw P. Worsley at Stresa [Italy]
[71] The anthropologist Peter Worsley, author of The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957), among other titles. Stresa was the site of an international sociological conference where Mills also met Russian sociologists.
and tried to help him outline a little study; I think now in my damned enthusiasm I might have been rude or something, but I like him, what I saw of him.In about a week, I am told, I'll know whether or not the Russians are going to invite me to their fair land. Wish they'd make up their minds…It would be in the spring, and I've got to say yes or no to dates in the US, lectures and all. Also there's a chance (also not yet jelled) to go to Mexico; and I think I go for a week to Rio de Janeiro in late Oct, but they only hint around and don't send tickets. God damn it, I want to travel, beginning in Feb or so, with Yaro and Katie. Tired of being a hick.
I don't know what questions, if any, you wanted to raise with me…about work I mean, but if you'll write I'll respond of course. So forgive me now for raising my own.
I've decided to do a short book on Marx. […] I'm very excited about it but can't get on it just yet; probably start seriously in about 2 months. Questions to you:
What do you think are the best two or three summaries of what Marx said? Preferably some kind of precis or propositional outline.
What are the best two or three criticisms of Marxism: critiques as it were that one really must take into account? I don't mention those I have at hand for both A and B because I want it off the top of your head.
I must now tell you that I've never really read Laski: what of his about Marxism, about socialism in general and about USSR, should I by all means get into?
My final question is also open-ended. I've got to edit a Reader of classical sociological, or social (perhaps including political) thinkers. I don't like this sort of thing but I've got to do it to pay a few debts remaining on this house, and I may as well try to do something useful. […]
[72] Mills included a rough outline that closely corresponds with the sources in the final book, including Karl Mannheim, Herbert Spencer, Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Emile Durkheim, and Gaetano Mosca, among others. Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking, selected and edited and with an introduction by C. Wright Mills (New York: George Braziller, 1960).
Do you think that would be useful to put― 273 ―together? Of course with brief notes introducing each and words defined in footnotes if need be. Who have I missed? Any of these you think to hell with?
Think of this: suppose you had to go off on a mountain without communication for 10 years and could take only 10 books with you. What would they be? Do answer that…I mean of course only books in social science.
Again forgive my imposing these questions on you, but the truth is I need advice and discussion and there is no one around here to talk with anymore.
I've seen some reviews of Sociological Imagination that appeared in England: on the whole rather good, but sort of stale. I'm sick of writing about academic stuff, and want badly to get back to writing about realities. The Marx book, however, I realize I really must do, as I've always addressed my stuff to liberal doctrine, since that is so dominant in the audience.
Send me your news.
As ever,
Wright
Mills
To Hallock Hoffman, the Fund for the Republic, Inc., Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, from West Nyack, New York, dated October 7, 1959
Dear Hallock Hoffman:
Your query of 23 Sept, just rec'd, gives me a good chance to talk to myself as well as to you. If you don't mind my rambling, I'm going to write for my own carbon. First, for the externals: I am and have been at the address posted above; this is my Sabbatical year. Have just returned from ten days at the Fourth World Congress of Sociology. Will go to conference in Rio from 18th to 29th Oct. Otherwise—apart from a few speeches about the country—will be at this address
Second, the state of my comparative project, for which the Fund gave me money last spring:
[73] The project was a comparative sociological study of 124 countries.
the money is spent and here is where I am on the project. I've got a good file set up, and with the assistant I had spring and summer, we've coded in three big notebooks about half of the information readily available on 110 national structures. Until I am over the rest of that first big empirical hump I'm rather stuck. I'd judge about four or five months with Guterman, the assistant, would see me to a set of cards. It just takes a lot of plain drudgery with apparently simple facts before I am freed, as it were, to make with the theory etc.Third, as to my immediate situation: I'm on half pay, this being the Sabbatical ($366 per month take home), and without even a typist. I've told Jacques Barzun my problem and he is trying to do something about it; I think probably he will. I should know in about ten days or so. You remember I applied to various foundations for $25,000 … enough to do the job elegantly and also avoid my having to scruge (sp?) [scrounge] around for personal income. Well every damned one of them turned it down flat. Some promptly, some with aggravating delay. So I now face up to the fact that I'm not going to get any adequate research money. I'm just off the list. So to hell with them. In the meantime, for the personal income in it, I am editing a Reader […] of great sociologists for George Braziller:
[74] Images of Man.
it should be done in about 2 more weeks. I am also in touch with an interesting guy, Ivan Nagy, who turns out to be a former student of mine and who runs a thing called Deadline Data. He's got a file of nation-states and internal affairs he sells as a service, and he likes my stuff. I may make some kind of deal with him…to work out indices for him to use and in turn I use his stuff to further my own file and later the cards I need to set up. I see him again next Tuesday Oct 13th.So much for externals. What I wanted to say is that two things now preoccupy me. This comparative file, first. I've known of course that it was a longtime thing, but I grow more sure that I have got to do it even if in the end I do the clerical work myself. It is the sort
The second thing I must do, and which I have begun, is a real confrontation of "Marxism." You see, I have always written with reference to liberalism, because that is a kind of common denominator of the public for which I write. I've not felt the need to confront Marxism because the audience wasn't preoccupied with it, indeed didn't even know it. So I've just used what I wanted from the body of Marxist stuff but never defined my relation with it. This is getting a little messy now, especially as I get more into the comparative stuff and more into what I suppose is explicitly political philosophy. So I have outlined and begun to draft a little book of about 30,000 to 50,000 words (certainly not more than 50,000) which might run like this:
ONE: liberalism and socialism.
TWO: propositional inventory …of Marxism-Leninism…reducing the whole thing to 30 or 40 pivotal propositions, and none of these damned boring long quotes. What is being said?
THREE: theses on Marxism, in this take a stand on two, point by point, of course taking into account the three "revisions," the turn of the century stuff, the sociologists, such as Weber and Veblen, and the Soviets.
FOUR: Soviet Marxism…along the lines of Marcuse's new book.
[75] Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).
FIVE: a new left?…here an attempt, for both East and West, to work out a political orientation.
ONE I've got well in hand: a sort of model suggesting the four major questions that one must confront in any political philosophy.
Well, that is crude, but you see the general idea? Do you like it? Think I ought to carry it thru or just leave it in the kitchen, in the back room of the shop? It seems to me that I'm a pretty good person to do this kind of summing up and orientation because I've never been emotionally involved with Marxism or Communism, never belonged in any sense to it. And yet I know the stuff pretty well.
Despite that I find that I become curiously agitated when I work at it … which for me at least means that whether or not I publish it I am going to finish it. By the way did you happen to read the appendix to The Sociological Imagination, the thing on intellectual craftsmanship? I'm tempted to send a copy of it along with a reapplication for support to all the bastards that turned me down. But it wouldn't do any good I suppose, and besides I'm not going to ask any more.
Let me know what you think of the Thesis on Marxism; I'll keep in touch about developments in the comparative study.
Yours,
Wright Mills
In Rio in October 1959, Mills read his "Remarks on the Problem of Industrial Development" at the International Seminar on Resistances to Social Development, sponsored by the Latin American Center of Investigation in the Social Sciences.
To Tovarich, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, fall 1959
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN INTELLECTUAL?
To transcend by their understanding a variety of everyday milieux, but not to be able to modify, to change the structural forces that are at work within and upon these milieux; to sit in judgment, but not to have power to enforce judgment; to demand but not to be able to back up their demands—that is the general position of most political intellectuals, at least of the Western societies today. Finding themselves in this position, many intellectuals have ceased to judge, have withdrawn their demands, have swallowed their presumption, have sunk back into the political and moral routines of their professional and residential milieux. There are many ways, social and personal, of doing this, and all these ways are now busily being followed. Despite all this, there is something about intellectuals and the intellectual life that exerts a strong pressure to take up this political role of transcendence and judgment. There are, in fact, many things, but the first of them is that it is simply true that to think in a really free and wideranging way is, as they say, "to stir up trouble," to question and in due course to demand and to judge.
Although for a variety of motives, he may play at being otherwise, the scholar must not only be diligent; he must be obsessed in his devotion and moreover, at least at times, he must possess a supreme confidence in his own mind and judgment, or rather he must feel that he is his own most severe critic—no one else could know so well his own errors.
I don't think it is too much to say that a political intellectual is a person who demands of himself clear statements of policy. He can't go off half-cocked; when he has to do so, he is uneasy about it. What he experiences—in the language of Hollywood—he takes big, and what he says about it, he takes seriously. If his task is to formulate policies, it is also to fight for an orderly comprehension of reality, for such comprehension must be gained if the quality of his policies are up to his self-imposed standards.
In the country you live in, is there room for a free-ranging use of reason—reason beyond mere technical rationality in the service of authority? In the country I live in we can write whatever we want; nobody locks us up. Nobody has to. Many of us lock ourselves up. Many intellectuals of the USA are voluntarily abdicating the carrying out of protest and the debating of alternatives to the stupid policies and lack of policies of the power elite in the United States. They are abdicating the role of reason in human affairs. They are abdicating the making of history.
Tovarich, I want you to know that intellectuals of my sort, living in America or in Britain, face some disheartening problems. As socialists of one sort or another, we are a very small minority in an intellectual community that is itself a minority. The most immediate problem we face is the nationalist smugness and political complacency among the dominant intellectual circles of our own countries. We confront a truly deep apathy about politics in general and about the larger problems of the world today.
I. Uses of Alienation
To be an intellectual human being involves certain choices between grand, although I hope not grandiose, alternatives. The first alternative has to do with everyday life and may be put as follows. Most people relax into the private and everyday life of their milieu. Generally accepting it and their place within it, they take its values as
Here is the second alternative, which can be put in the form of questions: Shall I build my life around projects that transcend the everyday and private life? Generally rejecting as paramount the values of that life and my place within it, shall I come into tension with it whenever necessary? Shall I come to see myself as not only an ordinary man but also as in some way representative of the discourse of reason?
One key word here is "project," which I take from Simone de Beauvoir, an admirable woman who has chosen the second alternative, and whom you ought to read, especially if you are a woman or know any women. Another key is "standard," by which I mean the demands that you formulate and accept and make upon yourself. It is not so much that you live for ideas, it is that you really cannot live without them—although of course you can exist. But you are not in involuntary servitude to the powers of the commonplace and the terrible domination of the everyday.
Most people do not go after things which are out of their reach, but the intellectual, the artist, and the scientist do just that. To do so is a normal feature of their working lives. They look at their paintings, they think of their books, they examine again the formula, and they know that it is not good enough and perhaps never will be.
To be disgruntled with the way the world is going is not necessarily to be a disgruntled person. To be uneasy about the world is not necessarily to be uneasy with yourself. Although a good deal of your experience is perhaps necessarily estranged, the capacity for life experience need not be expropriated. It is quite possible to be suitably isolated and therefore not alienated; it is possible to live in an overdeveloped society but not be an underdeveloped person. In part it depends upon the ways in which one escapes from unpleasant features of oneself and one's condition. Everyone with any liveliness does a great deal of escaping, and is continually planning future escapes from which he hopes to learn something more about himself and about the world. For what is important about escapes is not avoiding them (or
II. The International Character of Intellectual Life
You and I, Tovarich, we are students, writers, and readers; we belong to something that's bigger than any government; we owe loyalty, if you want, to something higher than any one state. Political loyalties are conditional upon our reasoning, and such loyalties are not circumscribed by national boundaries. This is a very important point for our attempt to communicate. Intellectual life, and so the working life of any intellectual, is not confined to any one nation. The minds of intellectuals have been formed by an essentially international process, and their work is essentially an international traffic.
The internationalism of the mind and sensibilities is not an abstract internationalism. Nor is it inaccessible. It is available in the bookstore on the corner, and the library downtown; it is as solid as the feeling set up by the look of a steel beam, as specific as the grace of a bamboo shoot, as general as the idea of nature or humanity. The internationalism of the mind and sensibilities is inherent in the intellectual's principle that all belief ought to be conditional upon the individual's reasoning, and that all his or her sensibilities and preferences of moral and aesthetic value ought to be products of conscious self-cultivation. There is no other meaning of the free use of the human mind, of the genuine liberation of the self.
III. What Writing Means
As a writer, I have always tried, although in different ways, to do just one thing: to define and dramatize the essential characteristics of our time. Whether I have written of labor leaders or farmers, of business executives or Puerto Rican migrants, of office workers, housewives or workingmen, I have tried to see them as actors in the drama of the 20th century. I have often failed in this, and no doubt will again, but that is what I am trying to do.
[76] This paragraph is from Mills's autobiographical statement for Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, ed. Stanley J. Kunitz (New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1955), 674.
The good writer tries to unite a variety of private lives with public affairs. He tries to enrich the private life by making it publicly relevant. At the same time, he tries to put human meaning into what is now called public affairs, reshaping them to allow and to invite a more decent variety of private lives. We ought to refuse to separate the two, for although the proper measure of public affairs should always be the character of the private lives they permit, it is the nature of one of our many traps that we can't expect to solve the problems of private nor of public life separately. What we must do as writers is to begin to turn all of our traps into a series of tasks. For we have often gotten into the habit of the trapped animal; we have often forgotten that we are not merely animals, and that we are not merely trapped.
One other thing we ought to remember, which I always tend to forget, is that we must not underestimate what even a small circulation of ideas can do, especially—if I may say so—comical and inane ideas. Men of power are grim, and our chief weapons in times like these are audacity and laughter. I wish I had more laughter, Tovarich, but I just can't seem to get that, personally, or into the stuff I write.
Writing, if you are at it long enough, is of course a set of habits and of sensibilities that shape almost all your experience. Writing is, among other things, always a way of trying to understand yourself. You understand your own feelings and your own ideas only by writing them out.
I don't pretend, Tovarich, to know all the reasons, deep or on the surface, why a variety of people write, but one motive, for me at least, has to do with the feeling of getting some further part of the world into orderly shape while engaged in a real bout of writing. To write is to reason; it is to fight against chaos and murk. There's an enthusiasm that "takes you over" when you feel—it doesn't matter now whether it is so or not—when you feel you're conquering a little more of it for and by understanding. Of course it is also a fight against other ideas and arrangements of ideas and images that you are against, morally, logically, or factually.
Over and above all this, there's an aesthetic element in writing that is probably involved in any craft, in any attempt to impose form upon matter. It's probably similar in stone, wood, or sound, but of course it's most intricate and most gratifying to me in the medium of language.
In the end, I suppose, the main reason I am not "alienated" is
In the next letter Mills refers to Miliband's "sermon" in the New Statesman; it was a satirical piece that argued, "Christ, whatever attraction he may have had in the past, is now a definite hindrance to Christianity."
[77] "A Re-Thinking Sermon," New Statesman (7 November 1959): 618.
This was a spoof on the debate within the Labour Party about dropping the commitment to nationalization from the Labour Party's constitution. Decades later, in 1994, the clause about nationalization was dropped by Tony Blair.To Ralph Miliband, from West Nyack, New York, dated November 9, 1959
Dear Ralph,
I've just read your sermon in NS. It's great, really great. You've the gift for it. You must do more, not about religion but about all sorts of things—labor party policy and conservative too. That's what's needed: less long-winded analysis than short funny stuff. Do 20 or so—then interleave them with chapters of a serious book—calling them "Words to the Wise, I," "Words to the Wise, II" etc.
[78] Miliband did write another piece of satire: "Bold but Sound" proposed abolishing the House of Commons and allowing public relations firms to run the British government.
[…]In a few days am sending off the Classic Sociology writings
[79] Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking.
—a kind of supplement or companion, I guess, to The Sociological Imagination. I am not ashamed of it. But it's just a job. Am in the middle of "Theses on Marxism"—have about 25,000 words I guess. Looks promising. In mid-January, we go to Mexico City to give 3 months "seminar on Marxism" at university there. It looks like a paperback for 75 cents—200,000 [copy] edition, a kind of "primer" in book trade jargon, but an advance for me, intellectually I mean. From young Marx to Mao—the whole range. I'm up to my ears in all thisSalut,
CWM
To Hans Gerth, from West Nyack, New York, dated December 22, 1959
Dear Gerth,
Congratulations on the child!
[80] Gerth and his second wife, Nobuko, had just had a son.
Enclosed is a copy of a review (on Bendix's Weber book) just mailed to NY Times Sunday Books. Although they asked for it, I've no idea [if] they will run it or not; often they don't run negative reviews.
[81] Mills's review of Reinhard Bendix's Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait was published in the January 7, 1960, issue of the New York Times Book Review.
Anyway, I thought you'd be interested in seeing it. But my main reason for writing is to make a suggestion to you—one I've been wanting to make for some time: Why don't you do the definitive intellectual biography of Weber? Why in God's name don't you get onto it? You're the obvious man to do it. It would be the way, the royal way, to consolidate all your work in translation. If you did decide to do it, please know that as far as the English is concerned, I should be glad to edit the manuscript with no mention of my name in any way. I mean that. Do think upon it. So far as the publisher is concerned, just now that would be no problem. Thru my agent (who would become yours for 10% and worth every penny of it) I believe you could get between $2,000 or $3,000 advance—half payable now, the rest when there's a couple of hundred pages available. That should be enough for a typist and a summer's trip to Germany if you needed to get at stuff there.Things with me are more or less straightened out now. Yaro expects a baby this coming June and we are both very glad about that. Katie is in magnificent shape, but I have to face her being taken from me this coming fall.
[82] Katie was supposed to start spending school years with her mother in Indiana in the fall of 1960; instead the move was postponed, first to 1961, then to the summer of 1962.
I am working on a short book, a kind of primer on Marxism, which is going very well. This is my Sabbatical, and apart from short trips to here and there, I stay home and write, refusing all this speaking. It's the only way.
In January we may go to Mexico for a month or—if I should give a seminar on Marxism there—for three months.
Yours,
Wright Mills
Gerth took Mills's suggestion and proposed writing a biography of Weber for publication by Oxford University Press, but the press wanted to see manuscript samples; Gerth did not follow up since he had to teach summer school and feared the risk of investing substantial time in the project before a publishing contract had been obtained.
To Elizabeth Cameron, editor, Trade Department, Oxford University Press, from West Nyack, New York, dated December 31, 1959
Dear Miss Cameron:
Thanks for the information about sales and coming royalties; hope check comes before I leave on 15th Jan.
About the possible updating of WC. It is a very big job, because the basic stuff in that book is recoded occupations from the census. Would take at least two months of hard work. So I am not inclined to do it for an Italian edition, especially since the ideas and the trends stated are still dead right. Cf chapter on "status panic" with "status seekers" etc.!
Perhaps in several years the thing to do is to combine WC and PE and the Harcourt Brace book on The New Men of Power (which never did very well after the first year): to use these three as a crude draft, cut them drastically, then build up a really big book on USA. But you can see I can't undertake that the way it should be done, to make it a new book, until I have finished my next really big project: the comparative sociology, the "States of the World" (coding all UN data on 124 nations and territories) and that is going to be slow going. I have an assistant working on it now part-time, out of money the Fund for the Republic gave me … a couple of thousand, but in the
Forgive this letter's form,
[83] Typed but with some text added in handwriting.
but I am full of fever from some kind of lethal virus. To hell with the new year.Yours,
M
Mills
To Ralph Miliband, from West Nyack, New York, dated January 2, 1960
Dear Ralph:
Have yours of Dec. 24, 1959. Glad to hear about the book but hope you've not signed yet. You're very foolish if you sign at all without seeing an agent, even if you sign with Furth. Here's a good one: Innes Rose, J. Farquharson Ltd., 15 Red Lion Sq WC1 Chancery 4843/5. For God's sake use him; he's worth every penny of his percentage. Watch foreign rights especially and try to get it out in cheap edition right away. I know about this because of trouble in England particularly, where I am not at all distributed as you know: cost is ridiculous. It would seem to me your agent and you should retain all foreign rights, specifically American; and that Secker and Warburg would do better by you than a stodgy outfit like Allen. But it's a very complicated and tricky business, getting distribution, so why not use a pro? (I'm breaking in part with Oxford over the silly pricing of the last book … see below.) And by the way no options on next book.
Well anyway here's my news. Just up from week of 104 fever—some damned virus we all had. Leave for Mexico to give seminar on socialism etc. Marxism about the 15th. No address there yet, but mail to here will be forwarded in due course. Seminar to last 2 months; after that no plan except: come back here and work more. Russians just don't peep. So guess it's off. To hell with them anyway. I've now
[84] The following year, when Mills sent out his complete preliminary manuscript for comments, it had about 50,000 words by Mills and about 150,000 words from the classics of Marxism. The plan at that time was to sell the book for $.50 or $.75 in an initial printing of 200,000 copies ("Dear Colleague" letter, dated April 28, 1961).
This 75,000 words is the middle part of a hardcover book, to be published one year after Dell publishes, on "Liberalism, Socialism, and Communism," which probably Simon and Schuster will publish.[85] This project was not pursued.
Whether it bores anybody or not, I've got first to straighten out my view of Marx & Co. before I can lay it on the line about socialism, etc. In this publishing program I can do that, without many pretenses, you see, because it is a useful job of work to put these selections together: no one has done that in just the way, the scope, I'll do it. Besides in this country people do not know Marx, much less Mao and Tito and Stalin for that matter.In addition I work very hard now, with one clerk as an assistant (the Fund for the Republic gave me) on the comparative sociology; we are coding some 100 pieces of information about each of 124 nationstates and territories. All states and dependencies in the world above 500,000 pop. This is forcing me to think thru the dimensions of "the big words" Democracy etc. in a way that is quite new to me, for I've never thought in terms of "isms" before at all. Political science, if you don't mind my saying so, is much fuller of richer shit than even sociology. This comparative thing is now all mixed up in my mind and in my files with the Marxian job… which is all to the good because today any job has to be comparative and I've neglected that badly, up to now. That's what's been blocking me from writing neat little essays, etc. Got to hold off that until I get it all straightened out.
Of course I'll do something for the New Left Review just as soon as I can do it in a worthwhile way; no I haven't gotten copy of one yet, but of course I've subscribed so it's probably on the way. The election does make it a different kind of venture, seen from over here at least.
[86] The U.S. presidential election of November 1960. John F. Kennedy won against Richard M. Nixon, with a very slim margin of the popular vote.
So all in all, I've worked like hell since returning from Rio—late Oct. I think it was. "Theses on Marxism" is now a 12 chapter draft, about ¾ roughed out, and about half of which will go into
Mills
To Harvey Swados, from Cuernavaca, Mexico, dated February 15, 1960
Dear Harvey,
Thanks much for the clipping of the book review—I missed it: I always like to see what they cut, the bastards.
Tomorrow I begin lectures—on the other side of the hill
[87] In Mexico City at the University of Mexico.
—will do so each Tuesday for 6 weeks. […] The book on Marxism (including, of course, The Cuernavaca Themes) is coming along slowly—in part because no tape service as yet, & no typewriter even. But no matter.Harold Rosenberg (head of something called Longview Foundation) sent me a check for $300, to pay me for printing "Decline of Left" essay in "little magazine" (Contact 3).[…] Am glad of the $300 because university here pays practically nothing.
CWM
Here is Yaro:
Planned a trip to Puebla yesterday but were "snowed out." Heard that roads were blocked by snow and Mexicans curious to see the stuff! […] My [Spanish] vocabulary is growing—must be 20 words by now & I think I said my first grammatically correct long sentence yesterday! Will go into Mexico [City] with W. tomorrow and have a solo look around. We've not socialized here at all, but will look up your friends eventually.
Muchos kisses to all.
Yara
On the back of the aerogram to Harvey, Mills wrote:
address: care of Edith Hart/Casita Azul. […] Good for 8 weeks or so. Have house in backyard of head of English school here—an old lady who's been here forever. In fact, 3 little houses, two baths & swimming pool, all walled in; of Mexico only this: "Mas cornodas da el hambre que los toros." (Hunger wounds worse than the bulls.)
Katie "matures" rapidly; now eats almost everything because we are people with strong stomachs who need much food to climb mountains well. Yaro "matures" rapidly, but in a curiously localized way.
[88] Yara, who was pregnant with Nik at the time, added a footnote in the margin: "The tamales have awakened my little one!"
Mills doesn't mature, but diets on hard-boiled eggs & beer._[Yara filled the remaining space.]
Trip a huge success despite hectic start. Actually had much fun driving. Katie […] is enchanted now with our little garden filled with birds and flowers. Starts nursery school Monday. […] We had 3 miserable days in Mexico City before deciding to explore Cuernavaca (our VW top slashed). Looked up "Trini" (nice stuff) and Palm mentioned school for Katie. Following his lead we found Mrs. Hart (ancient school teacher) who had this place—and we rented on the spot. Moved in yesterday. A million thanks for your excellent advice! […]
Much love to all,
Yara
When Mills wrote the following letter to Ruth she was working as a statistician for the U.S. Census Bureau in Jeffersonville, Indiana; she had been working there since September 1958.
[89] Ruth continued to work for the Census Bureau until she retired in 1978. The U.S. Department of Commerce awarded her the Silver Medal "For Meritorious Federal Service" for her work in the 1970 Census, and the Gold Medal "For Distinguished Achievement in the Federal Service" for her work related to the 1980 Census.
To Ruth Mills, from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, dated March 13, 1960
Dear Ruth:
We've just returned from a several days trip to Oaxaca, and I have your letter of the 8th. You are correct in assuming that my last lecture is the 22nd of this month. The day after we shall begin driving back to New York. I am sorry the schedule was vague at 1st but my seminar was wedged between two semesters at the university and I could not know it exactly until I wrote to you.
[…] We have to stop in San Antonio for possibly two nights—as my father is quite weak, as you know, and it may be the last time I'll see him alive.
[90] That was the last time Mills saw his father, but, as it turned out, the senior Mills outlived his son by more than a decade.
As soon as we arrive in NY, I'll of course let you know.Katie is physically in great shape—brown from the sun and visibly growing. Morally she has come up against the fact of Mexico—which is poverty—and it has been a great experience for her. Her best friend is now Rosita, a housekeeper's daughter, with whom she plays all the time when not in school and loves dearly.
Mills
[P.S.] Enclosed is best picture K has done.
When Mills returned from Mexico and opened his mail he found a copy of The Power Elite translated into Russian, along with an invitation to visit the USSR for twenty days. The Russian publisher offered to pay his expenses in Russia, as a form of compensation, but Mills had to pay his own fare to and from Moscow. He accepted the invitation and visited the Soviet Union for the first time, leaving in mid-April 1960
[91] Letter to Gerth, dated April 3, 1960, and letter to Mr. Cameron at Knopf, dated April 5, 1960.
and traveling with Igor Alexandrov as his guide and translator in the USSR.To Tovarich, from Moscow, spring 1960
Up Closer
As you see from my dateline, Tovarich, now I am in your country—and already I have a complaint: I haven't been able to find you—or if we have met, I didn't know it. In Moscow, Tashkent, Leningrad, Tbilisi, I have been talking with dozens of your colleagues, always trying to find you, and often talking with them about you, although none of them knew that.
Tonight, in my hotel, I have been going over the notes I have made during all those talks, and every night too, often until early in the morning. My trip began, I suppose, when I received a cable from Lydia Kislova, Chief, American section of "The Soviet Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations." Of course I came as soon as I could.
Now, after three weeks here, I have at hand a mass of material: I guess the interviews alone will run to over 300 pages of double-spaced type. The question is: what am I going to do with all this? Much of it, of course, is for special purposes: mainly for the book I am doing on The Marxians—a sort of historical profile and critique; from the young Marx to the present; and for a long-run comparative study of the intelligentsia of a dozen or so different countries. Some of it is "merely informational" and just now, at least, I don't have the time to check it and write a "little book on Russia." This I wouldn't want to do anyway. I have a great repulsion for all those books on "My Soviet Trip" by twenty-one-day experts; I could never do such a book.
To Ralph Miliband, from West Nyack, dated June 22, 1960
Dear Ralph:
This is confidential and makes no requests of you, so relax please. Chaos still prevails here, and each night I fall into exhaustion about 6 p.m. The Nation piece has indeed started on its little way.
[92] C. Wright Mills, "The Balance of Blame: Further Notes on the Strategic Causes of World War Three," The Nation 190, no. 25 (18 June 1960): 523–31.
They tell me the volume of mail is very heavy at the magazine; and that just now the London Tribune has cabled asking if they can run the piece. I told them the Tribune would have to get it out of [Stuart] Hall; the[93] Perhaps a reference to Out of Apathy, ed. E. P. Thompson (London: Stevens and Sons, 1960). As it turned out, that anthology did not include an essay by Mills.
Anyway by the time you get this, we'll probably know. I don't really care. And I don't think the piece is very important for Britain; here I think it is, if I may say so. The NY Times just phoned for an interview about the trip. I refused to talk on the phone; let them come out if they want to talk properly. But you see what I mean about the Nation piece over here.Sunday Yaroslava gave birth to an 8 and a half pound man child, who shall be named Nikolas. […] We are both delighted, as is Katie. […] I've got to go now and do some errands on the way to the hospital. But I'll continue this. I've a very important "career decision" to make, about which I need your advice.
Back from hospital now. In the morning, after 3 days there, Y and N come home. […] Yaro is magnificently in love with him; a real joy to see how radiant she is about Him. But […] once and for all: all, repeat, all infants if they are normal look very much alike. […] Yet it is true that the hands develop very fast; Nikolai, sorry Nikolas, has hands exactly like my father's (and mine) and almost as big! Real mitts he has. I hope he turns out to be an honest carpenter or racing mechanic, if there are any decent cars left by the time he's ten or twelve and can get next to a motor.
What I wanted to talk with you about, that is—please at this point—just between you and me, is this: I'm thinking seriously of resigning from all teaching, from Columbia. The decision involves a lot of things, but above all it involves my need to write. To have time to do nothing else. The money side of it I can now handle, not lavishly certainly but I can meet all my obligations and live in a decent way by writing. Besides I don't want to make a lot of money; it is only a damned worry, with taxes and all. What I want to do is write. If it were possible to give one big seminar a year, or perhaps every other year at Columbia, then OK. I'm going to try—if I do anything—to set that up: a sort of half or third time load. We'll see.
Now there is no hurry, except I am in a hurry! […] I've got four, yes four books bubbling up inside me:
The Marxians, first: it is turning out fine, a neat little thing of 90,000 words or so; it'll be done by August or so.
Then a terrific idea, about which I may have talked with you, called now Contacting the Enemy. It is 10 fat letters—I'd estimate about 90,000 words, again, in all—to a Russian intellectual. Into this I weave the Russian and Polish diaries, but that is only about one-fifth of it; mostly it is about you and me, Tovarich, with an up-close tone and not a line of bullshit in it.
Then there's The Cultural Apparatus, waiting there in draft. Now it is a crude thing from which I steal for everything else; but Ralph there is a good book in that stuff, a good, heavy-duty, full-of-awe, but what's-it-all-about book.
Then there's The Comparative Study: a long-term thing, to be sure, but if I am to do any magnum opus, that must be it. (In fact, honestly, the stuff I've written so far, it really is dry-run stuff; I've never let loose; you must know that.)
Now I've got to have a drink; it's five thirty and I'm a creature of habit. Be back.
So why shouldn't I quit the philistine nonsense and write my guts out? Please assume I can make the money to live. Then, what do you see against just being Mills of Strawtown Road? Tell me, friend. And nose around on one more point: do you think I could get a year's pay out of some outfit in Britain? If I quit, I'd be free to live anywhere; royalties know no boundaries. […] And don't think I'm drunk; I'm not, and even if I am I began this letter with the intention of writing this to you and I was stone sober. So now I'll go out across my little acre and put this in the mailbox for the mailman and not read it again. As Gide or somebody said to Cocteau or somebody: astound me! But I say: advise me, friend.
As ever,
Your Polish traveling companion,
Mills
He later decided not to resign from Columbia.
Mills's comments about his newborn son, Nikolas—and Nik's remarkable hands—were borne out in more ways than one. When Nik was about twelve years old (many years after his father's death), he began tinkering with motors, by his early
To Tovarich, from West Nyack, New York, summer 1960
Specimen Days of My Life
Tovarich, I want to give you, as Walt Whitman once said, "some authentic glints, specimen-days of my life."
[94] Whitman's Specimen Days was published in 1882.
(But I can't, of course, do it as he did; I haven't the guts, much less the skill.) Anyway that's why I'm writing such personal letters to you; and that's why I hope you'll answer me in just the same way.I. In My Study
My daily routines happen to be work routines—and I seem to have three of them, according to where I am: in my study, on the road, or at the university. In this letter I'll cover only the first; the others later, perhaps.
Nowadays I'm on sabbatical and so working at home in my study. Each morning I get up sometime between 5:00 and 6:30. After washing and dressing, I go down to make my own breakfast: a large glass of defrosted orange juice and two raw eggs, splashed into a Waring Blender and well mixed; and a quart-sized pot of expresso coffee, taken black. While the coffee is making, I go out to the road and get the New York Times. Then, with the paper and the coffee, I go up to my study. No one else in the house is up yet; the house, which I built last summer, is twenty-five miles from New York City, in Rockland County, on two acres beside a lake.
Usually it takes between twenty and forty minutes to read the paper, lying on the couch, marking it for clipping later. Sometimes I begin to write on the margins of the paper, spilling over onto one of the variously sized pads lying around. But at any rate, usually by 6:30 or at the latest 7:30 A.M. I am at my desk. These early morning hours
My daughter [Katie], who is just now five years old, comes into the study around 8:30 or 9:00 A.M. to show me a picture she has drawn, and to show me her own beautiful self. This I do greatly enjoy seeing, and we talk for a few minutes about her day.
During the morning I do not take any phone calls (or at any other time if I can possibly avoid it). I don't like the telephone, and I consider it rude of people to phone without warning; it is much better to write.
Usually I don't take lunch, although sometimes I have a sandwich or a salad. By 1500 [3 P.M.] I am lying down reading the mail and current magazines; also, now I clip and file the Times I read early in the morning. I try to answer the mail at this time too—if possible, by jotting the answer on the letter received and mailing it back. For mail that requires a lengthier reply, I do a draft in pencil and try to dictate it, on my tape recorder, toward the end of the next morning. Apart from magazines and books, the mail consists of: bills (I give these to my wife); requests for articles or lectures (I try very hard to avoid these, managing to turn down most of them except during low financial periods); comments people are kind enough to send me about books or articles I have written (I try to respond to as many of these as I can); and manuscripts sent from New York City by the woman there who transcribes the tapes I mail her. (These I seize upon, proofreading fully and beginning to rewrite.)
Often though, I begin to write again in the afternoons, usually about 1630 [4:30 P.M.]. This is more likely to happen after I've had a drink—that comes between 1650 and 1750 [4:50 and 5:50 P.M.]. This writing usually consists of scribbles made while lying on the couch reading. Often it is a little wild, but sometimes the beginnings of a very good idea come about just then: often they come as an outline of a new essay, chapter, or book, or a new outline for a project under way. Often too, these "new outlines" turn out to be exactly like the old ones I am too lazy to get up and look for. But anyway, I let myself go, trying not to inhibit in any way the flow, if it should come. The several times I've thought of doing a novel have occurred to me at this perilous time of day. These late afternoon scribbles are the first thing I see at the desk the next morning, after finishing with the Times. About one half of them are then thrown in the wastebasket.
We have dinner about 1800 [6 P.M.]; then I read for a while to my daughter [Katie]; I read to her from books she cannot understand, for she hasn't the vocabulary. As I read, I must translate and explain in simpler language; it is a rewriting on sight I do for her. Most children's books I've been able to get are such infantile trash—usually about little animals. Some of that is all right, but I've found that children like more of the real thing, if they are only given it in some intelligent manner. Just now I am reading P. Yershov's The Little Humpbacked Horse [Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House] and Vera Panova's Time Walked [English translation of the Russian novel Serioja].
[95] Serioja—the title cited in the English edition—is more commonly transliterated to English as Seryozha. This novel was written for adults; its main character is a child living with one biological parent, one stepparent, and one half-sibling, just as Katie was.
I tried Dickens recently but it was too hard to explain, so I'll wait a year or so. I exert myself to read to her as well as I can because she has quite a dramatic flair and I want to nourish it. She enjoys this period, I think, and I know that I do, even though I am usually quite tired. After she is asleep, I read books or periodicals in bed for an hour or so, usually falling asleep myself about 2100 [9 P.M.].So that's my usual daily routine—when I am not at the university and not traveling. To keep the day just about as I've described it, that is my continual goal and my continual struggle. I do not want anything about it to be changed; if it is seriously interrupted, I am afraid I do become most irritable and unpleasant; I do not want anything to tear up its structure or the rhythm of work from day to day that it allows and encourages. Almost anything that upsets long stretches of such days I regard as unlawful interference into what I ought to be doing and what I most want to be doing. (Sometimes of course it just all goes to hell; the routine collapses, and lying on the couch all day I just read. Those are good days too. They usually happen only a few days out of every month.)
But, you may ask, isn't such a day, multiplied by 14,600 (that's forty years) a retreat from the world? Isn't it a defaulting of the political obligations of every man today to act? My answer, Tovarich, is flat no. It is political action. It is the most important action of which I am capable and which, just now, I can possibly imagine.
On many fronts, all at once, the world is now going to hell: true. But also it's now rising to human magnificence. Which is which? The
[96] The last three sentences of this paragraph and the last sentence of the preceding paragraph were excerpted or adapted from Mills's essay entitled "The Decline of the Left," Listener 61, no. 1566 (2 April 1959).
But maybe you have some much better ideas of what we—people like you and me—ought to do? We really ought to begin to carry on, as we say in America, the God-damnedest interchange that's ever been. Let's talk among ourselves about ourselves first, and then about the world. Tell me just how you live. Tell me all that you did yesterday. Come on, Tovarich, set up a new file.
II. At the University
Now that I've seen something of your universities, I feel it's even more important to tell you about my work routine at the university than I had thought it might be before I visited Russia.
[97] Mills visited the USSR for the first time in the spring of 1960. His second and last trip there was in the summer of 1961.
I've been thinking about what universities mean to me, and perhaps to a nation as well. I'll first quickly run through my own work routines at the university. Then I'll tell you about how universities as a locale of freedom are used and abused.When I am "in residence" at Columbia University, I usually drive into Manhattan on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. (It's 25 miles from my home.) Although I lecture only in the afternoons, I find that I cannot get down to work at home in the mornings on
What do I teach? The truth is that, in one way or another, I teach about whatever I am writing at the time. Since that is usually two or three different topics, I have no trouble. I don't think I've ever given the same course more than once.
I no longer teach in the graduate school;
[98] During most of Mills's time at Columbia, he did not teach in the graduate school.
I had a little disagreement with some of the people over there several years ago, the result of which was that I withdrew into the college. Since then I've published a book, a few chapters of which are a kind of "Anti-Duhring" against one or two of the less fortunate views and habits of some of my colleagues, so I guess the split is more or less permanent. That's too bad, really, because more and more, for a number of intellectual reasons, I feel the need to be in touch with more advanced students, and some of them, I understand, wouldn't mind it.The disagreement, by the way, had nothing directly to do with political questions, although I'm sure you'll agree that almost all academic quarrels have political implications and undertones, and of course personal ones as well. But directly, at least, it had to do with more technical matters—the scope and methods of social study, the whole question of what the social sciences are all about—and what we ought properly to make them be about. But I won't bore you with all of that. Along with this letter, if I ever find your address, I'm mailing you a copy of the book mentioned: The Sociological Imagination.
[99] This was eventually translated into seventeen languages.
I don't know how much this minor quarrel—and its results upon where I teach—is responsible for the fact that of late I don't enjoy teaching as much as I once did. What I'd really like to do is to be able to go on half-time at the university in order to spend more time on research and writing. I'd like to give one medium-sized seminar, say 15 students at most, each year or so, and possibly supervise three or four dissertations, and that's all. The main reason for this desire is that I become more and more overwhelmed by the materials and ideas
You see, I work alone without any real assistants—capable assistants I could train and then count on for a year or two at a time. The university does not provide for such assistants—or even a secretary—in its regular budget. And the foundations have turned down my several requests for small research grants,
[100] Earlier in his career, Mills was not so frustrated in his requests for research grants. He received funds from the Social Science Research Council of Columbia University as well as the Guggenheim and Huntington Hartford Foundations for work on White Collar and The Power Elite.
all except one: The Fund for the Republic, which doesn't have much money but generously gave me a little of it.To a considerable extent, the U.S. university does provide a basis for a life that is pretty much outside the U.S. money trap. Of course, it is not really outside; the trap is merely less noticeable. Still it is an important fact that a college professor who is well located in a good school is a sort of salaried rentier. Although compared with other professions involving the same length of formal preparation, his income is often ridiculously low, it is also true that in many ways indeed he is freer than the men of those other professions. If he is an able man, he is very free to do something that very few men are free to do: he can work on what he wants to work on, and yet be secure financially, even if a little threadbare. He suffers during inflationary periods, comes out only slightly better during slumps, but in the leading institutions he definitely has security of tenure; he cannot be dismissed except under personal moral conditions that only a fool would open himself up to. The successful American college professor, make no mistakes about it, is a member of a privileged class.
I have written rather harshly at times about the academic life and the college professor. I have done so because I have loved that life, and because I do esteem many of my colleagues. Yet I do grow angry that some of them do not avail themselves of their marvelous intellectual opportunities. I do not speak here merely of doing a bad job of teaching, or just teaching and doing nothing else with the time left over from that. I refer to the lack of exercise of the freedom that is theirs. For freedom of thought, if it does not go on under such after-all ideal circumstances of leading American institutions of
What I dislike most about some of my academic colleagues is how readily they seem to intimidate themselves; they coordinate themselves instead of acting and speaking as they really think and as they would like to do. Take the attacks on freedom of the early fifties—the McCarthy business which I'm sure you've heard about.
[101] Mills was not asked to testify at the McCarthy hearings, but when a colleague, the historian William Appleman Williams, was subpoenaed, Mills worried that he would also be summoned (personal communication from Yaroslava Mills, 1997).
What should the universities have done when they first heard about that sort of thing? Or more specifically, what should the presidents of the 25 leading universities have done immediately upon hearing that the McCarthyites were going to look into their shops? (I write now from notes made at the time, which nobody would pay any attention to.)In each of these universities, the president and the leading seven or eight professors should have come together to form a common front, a common policy, a coordinated plan, not a plan of defense but a plan of attack. Perhaps it might well have taken some such form as this: these universities should have relieved of teaching duties for a period of a month or so a dozen of their best sociological, legal, journalistic and—in this case—psychiatric people. An all-American team, these scholars should have quickly researched in great detail the McCarthyites involved, down to the days of their infanthood. As a committee they should have been given the funds to employ two or three ex-FBI men—and they are quite available here—in order to aid them in their investigations. From this research and detection work they should have drawn up a complete report on the men and their activities, a full dossier of character and career. They should have then prepared a series of press releases to be let out over a period of two weeks and focused upon 1) McCarthy's impeachment, if the evidence warranted that, and if it did not 2) the challenging of the man to a full-scale debate on a national hookup one hour each evening for four or five successive evenings. The presidents of the leading universities acting in unison along with leading staff members had
On McCarthy our reports should have been as firm and factual as we were capable of making them; if we of the universities are not capable of knowing what a fact is, who in the world is? The facts we should lay alongside the policies of the universities as centers of free inquiry and free speech. They should be presented, at first, in a straightforward and solemn way. Then after three or four days of that we should start getting downright comic. What should we have done about McCarthy? In one word we should have laughed at him. I know he wasn't very funny, not funny at all, but a deadly serious phenomenon. Still I say laugh at him. But laugh in a certain way and in certain places and for certain purposes. Laugh to reveal what he truly was: a ridiculous and silly little man, an opportunist without principles or brains. We should have dramatized the facts as revealing the most ridiculous and silly situations imaginable. We should have done this with intelligence and taste and discernment but we should have done it. In short, we should have stopped merely defending our civil liberties; we should have used them.
III. On the Road
The one unambiguous exception to the kind of working routines I've described comes when I am on the road. Over the past decade, I've found that for me at least it is best not to travel in a foreign country for more than about one month. (Of course I don't mean living there. That is something else; one then takes some work in progress.) After a month I've reached a saturation point; I've become too tired and the truth is that I get anxious about my work. I know that newspapers and magazines and books are piling up in my study and have to be gone through, marked and clipped. Of course I am working while traveling, keeping very detailed notes and interviews, but somehow that is different.
On occasion I do like to tour, by motorcycle if possible; otherwise by open automobile, but that is a form of sport; also I have done
I detest the more formal greetings, dinners, and farewells in which one sometimes gets involved when abroad. I do not contact the US embassy, nor usually accept embassy invitations, if any. I don't travel in, say, Poland, to see Americans; I want to see Poles. In a short account of a journey to Poland and Yugoslavia which one eminent economist recently published, I had my elder daughter [Pamela] count the Americans and the Poles and the Yugoslavs with whom he talked; a large percentage of the people he visited for any length of time were Americans! How incurious he must be.
In a foreign country, or even in the United States, what I like best is to have a real job to do and to be doing it. A few lectures, perhaps—if necessary to help pay your way—but better a few real themes to study by means of a schedule of interviews and discussions. From the trips I've made in this way (beginning back in 1945 with research trip for a Senate Committee on Small Business), I have gotten so much that usually it takes a month or so, after getting home, for every week on the road just to get a first draft of it done.
On Interviewing
Apart from mere sightseeing, short visits to another country amount to a series of interviews one has with a small and highly selected number of its inhabitants. That is the major basis of one's "observation." The selection of these people is obviously of the first importance. In two visits to Poland and one tour of Yugoslavia, as well as in interviewing in the United States, Western Europe and Latin America, the rules I try to follow when on the road are, roughly and briefly, as follows:
Don't try to cover a great range of topics and of people. You cannot do it. Focus on one or two problems about which you've read a good deal. Next month in the Soviet bloc, for example, my topics are going to be: a) the position and role of the intelligentsia and changes in these respects since the death of Stalin; b) Marxist theory and changes in it since the death of Lenin; and c) an open-ended interest, which I can't yet focus well, on the collective and freedom.
Don't just converse at random, at least not all the time. Try to
― 301 ―raise the same or very similar questions with each person interviewed. If you don't do this, you can't very well make comparisons between their views.Don't try to find out the frequency (among the intelligentsia, for example) with which some opinion or some type of person prevails. You can't do it. That requires a technique of sampling beyond the visitor's means. Try instead to find out the full range of opinion on each of your chosen topics of concern. Try to get an interview with at least one or two people who represent each type or each outlook that you come upon. But how do you do this?
First select someone who is known (from publication or from reliable informants) to represent one extreme of the range of opinion or of types being studied. Interview him, then ask him to refer you to someone else who might be able to give you an interesting or worthwhile view of the matter under discussion. He will generally refer you to someone rather similar to himself, but start interviews with someone who is known to represent an opposite view or type as well. Ask him also for a referral. Now follow up the chains of these referrals from both extremes of the range. Generally, after about six to eight interviews from either side, you will begin to get a great deal of repetition in your answers and the answers will become more "mixed" in the middle of the range of viewpoint. The chains of referral, in other words, will "meet." When this happens, you'll know that you've gotten about all you can from a short visit on that topic.
Sometimes it happens that the answers from everyone you interview are quite uniform. That can mean one of three things: a) Opinion on the point is official and everyone, regardless of their true belief, is putting out the same line. The only safeguards against this are skill in interviewing and playing off facts previously known by you against what the person is saying in the interview. b) You have not gotten hold of people who hold "extreme" views; you've not covered the range. In this case, all you can do is to try again to find the other end of the range of opinion. c) There really is uniformity on the point in question; the range is quite narrow. In that case, if you're sure, then you've made a finding, but be very careful about this point.
In the case of my topics for the Soviet bloc, one obvious scale is the Diehard Stalinists versus the New Beginners. The latter, in 1957
Writing on the Road
When one travels seriously, one is working very hard. This reminds me of the difficulties of finding places and times in which to write while on the road. Countries I've been in differ profoundly in this respect. I know it's a rather curious point of view, but I've come to judge a country somewhat on this score. Of course almost anywhere there is a hotel room, but sometimes I don't use hotels. In Europe during 1956 and 1957, for example, I traveled by motorcycle, camping out, and later in a small bus fitted out for sleeping. This was convenient and of course cheap; savings on even the cheaper hotels just about paid for the bus, which was more comfortable than most and much more convenient. I was therefore in need of a place to work several hours each morning, for I was working on several books and had deadlines to meet.
I have never been the kind of writer who requires certain conditions of work. I can work almost anywhere so long as I am fed and kept warm, but there are limits. I find it difficult to imagine a place less well-suited to serious and sustained work than the Latin Quarter of Paris, France. An essential lack of seriousness now marks at least the sidewalk scenes of Paris's Latin Quarter, as well as New York's Greenwich Village. In both one finds types of people who are not—but who wish to appear to be—intellectuals and artists. These semi-intellectuals have taken over: in the Latin Quarter students from abroad, many from the United States; in Greenwich Village, many from the means of distribution of mass culture—well-heeled advertising and promotion men and elaborately casual wives in ponytails.
In Paris there are many cafes with midget tables on the sidewalks and inside. But they are on streets that roar and whine with the bustle of cars and the zip and drone of scooters. They are crowded, like jam in a jar. I do not believe you could take out a notebook, put it on a
It is, I think, odd that the open terraces of those cafes on the German Autobahn are better than any place in Paris—during the summer of course. Often they are well placed, with views, and with the edge of the Autobahn traffic far enough away to avoid much noise.
For sidewalk cafes, go to Copenhagen; it is not usual to work there, but no one minds if you do work, and it is altogether pleasant. To work in a cafe in the wintertime, go to Yugoslavia or Austria; those are the places. In Yugoslavia, there are cafes of just the sort one thinks of as places for quiet talk and for work as well. In Zagreb and in Sarajevo there are huge rooms with big windows and widely spaced out tables with marble tops, newspapers from the capital cities, and quiet. Such places, no doubt, invite work in a semipublic locale, with just the right kind of stimulating interruptions of one's own choosing. In Salzburg there is the Cafe Mozart, where any waiter will protect you while you work. I wonder where I'll work in the Soviet Union. Are you civilized yet?
Mills kept the following brief statement in his Tovarich notebook, perhaps with the intention of integrating it into a longer essay at some point.
SELF-IMAGES AND AMBITIONS
Here is a summary which I am adding to this account in June of 1960.
I am a politician without a party, and within the American political context, without any talent for real politics, without opportunities to develop them, and with little inclination to do so. The political demands that I put upon myself are now more or less satisfied by writing.
I am a writer without any of the cultural background and without much of the verbal sensibilities of "the born writer"; accordingly I am someone who has worked for twenty years to try to overcome many deficiencies in the practice of my craft and yet remain true to whatever I am and how I got that way, and to the condition of the world as I see it.
I am a man who feels most truly alive only when working—
And I am an impersonal egoist; impersonal because of the craft I try to cultivate; egoist because my ambitions far outrun my capacities. My demands upon myself, in fact, are often downright silly and certainly have interfered and do interfere with my attempts to be "a decent human being." So I am a man who rejects that ideal if it is an ideal, or better yet, I am one who sets up for himself his own ideal of "human being."
To Hans Gerth, from West Nyack, dated July 15, 1960
Dear Gerth:
I have your long letter and your note, and want to let you know three things that you might be aware of: first, that despite my running around so much, I too, am very much isolated and alone; second, that over the last several months especially, I have been going thru a very deep and broad reconsideration of many ideas I have assumed up 'til now; specifically about the world scene and the place within it of the Soviet bloc and the United States; and third, that I take very seriously and will continue to do so whatever you have to say about it.
We must plan a bit about your visit, because I am going to Cuba sometime early in August for about two weeks, and might even be delayed a bit beyond that. I have to go and find out certain things for myself before I write what I feel the need to about the place. So I've arranged to be invited there by the foreign minister. His son, the UN delegate, tells me that Castro sat up in the Oriente reading and discussing with his band The Power Elite! My God, and this sort of thing is coming about more and more with that book, and some of the others too. Had a big talk the other day with a wonderful fellow from Yugoslavia, who asks me to come there and study the intelligentsia. Well, we'll see, but I must somehow relax a bit somehow, sometime, for I've been wound up and the words have been simply flowing out of me. I know it is ridiculous but I am actually at work on six books, all of them at least halfway written, and two almost ready for the printer. One pays a price for this sort of moral and psychic energy; I am sure I am not aware of the full price, intellectually I mean. And that is why
Next morning: had to break off letter yesterday; now it's 5:30 a.m. and am beginning to work. Besides, no good writing letters like this. Must talk. Just one comment on your letter, which I've earned the right to say to you by what I wrote above: you … like me … tend too readily to scatteration. That will surprise you: my saying that I tend that way. But it's true. But Gerth you don't fight it enough. I fight it like hell. I fight it with whiskey sometimes but most of the time I fight it with work, overly systematic work maybe, but work. Read the new Thomas Wolfe biography by Elizabeth Nowell.
[102] Thomas Wolfe: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1960).
Just out, first rate. I've never really read Wolfe but my God that man is my brother.I don't know how to end this except to say I get the impression that you think it's bad all over. Correct. But not good enough. All of them, they are murderers and the rest of it. Correct. But not yet good enough. I think you know what you're doing: you're mixing up terribly your personal tragedies with public affairs, history with biography. Well, by God I am solving that; it is something you have to keep on solving you know, and never let go of.
Please write me right away the date of the meeting and of your trip here.
[103] The meeting was a sociology convention to be held in NewYork in September 1960.
Will you bring family, etc.? I shan't attend the meetings, or at least don't think so, but plan to stay out here. Will you drive east?Yours,
Mills
To Ralph Miliband, from West Nyack, New York, dated July 18, 1960
Dear Ralph:
You are such a funny man! Of course you are going to Moscow. Be an idiot not to. Go this summer: it will help the book.
[104] Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961). Miliband did not visit the Soviet Union while working on that book, but he did go there in the spring of 1961.
Make it[105] The guide who had been assigned to facilitate interviews and make other arrangements during Mills's visit.
give him my best, and tell him you and I are close friends and went to Poland together, etc. Tell him who invited you and that this is what you want to do: focus upon one or two themes and not run all over the place just sight seeing: your themes are of course: Trade Unions in the Soviet Union … all about them, then maybe one or at most two additional themes. Don't try to do more. Tell him by the way about our evening's talk in London (he'll like that: it's his business). Then be firm with your hosts, and get them to line up a series of interviews with appropriate people for your themes: don't let them have you talk with more than 3 at most at a time. Tell Alexandrov that and he'll phone for you and make it clear.The trade union stuff you pick up there you will not of course use in any direct way in your book. But no matter how horrible or how wonderful Soviet Trade Unions turn out to be, it will be most helpful; there is nothing, repeat nothing, so powerful as comparative stuff. And here's the chance to get some of it, don't you see? Please do let me know all about the setup as soon as it's fixed. I give you no more names because Alexandrov is truly all you need and he's back from vacation now. I seem to have worn him out and he was given a month's vacation!
As for me: I work. The Soviet Diary came to 300 typed pages.
[106] An unpublished manuscript, also entitled "On Observing the Russians," which consists mainly of transcripts from Mills's interviews in the Soviet Union in April 1960.
Cuba [Listen, Yankee] is almost one-fourth drafted, all I can do here: just the clips and books available: all that is done with; now I've got my questions ready for them. "The Marxians: Thinkers & Politicians" is about 85% done now. Looking quite neat, on the whole. Still got a mess with "the second revisionists": they really haven't done anything, you know. Really nothing at all. Sent a day ago, or[107] "Letter to the New Left," New Left Review 5 (September-October 1960): 18-23
Hope they like it. Hope you do. Tried to do a bit with these "students" towards the end of it. Let me know if you see it around. I rather think the ending is the nuts, but it could be … just corn.Yours as ever,
M
Wright
Mills's "Letter to the New Left" became one of his most well-known essays. The following are his concluding paragraphs for its publication in the British journal New Left Review, which he discussed above:
In the Soviet bloc, who is it that has been breaking out of apathy? It has been students and young professors and writers; it has been the young intelligentsia of Poland and Hungary, and of Russia too. Never mind that they've not won; never mind that there are other social and moral types among them. […] We've got to study these new generations of intellectuals around the world as real live agencies of historic change. Forget Victorian Marxism, except whenever you need it; and read Lenin again (be careful)—Rosa Luxembourg, too.
"But it's just some kind of moral upsurge, isn't it?" Correct. But under it: no apathy. Much of it is direct non-violent action, and it seems to be working, here and there. Now we must learn from their practice and work out with them new forms of action.
"But it's all so ambiguous. Turkey, for instance. Cuba, for instance." Of course it is; history-making is always ambiguous; wait a bit; in the meantime, help them to focus their moral upsurge in less ambiguous political ways; work out with them the ideologies, the strategies, the theories that will help them consolidate their efforts: new theories of structural changes of and by human societies in our epoch.
"But it's utopian, after all, isn't it?" No—not in the sense you mean. Whatever else it may be, it's not that: tell it to the students in Japan.
Isn't all this, isn't it something of what we are trying to mean by
Yours truly,
C. Wright Mills
When "Letter to the New Left" was reprinted in slightly different form in the American journal Studies on the Left, Mills dropped the last paragraph.
[108] "On the New Left," Studies on the Left, I, no. 4 (1961): 72.