INTRODUCTION
by Dan Wakefield
In all eras there are a few figures in every field—the arts, academia, science, entertainment—who not only speak to and for their own time but whose work and message also resonate in future periods, making an impact on life and thought in generations to come. Such a figure was C. Wright Mills.
A sociologist whose vision and objectives often overflowed the boundaries of that discipline (and often riled those within it), Mills was also a powerful and controversial social critic, teacher, writer, humanist, and individualist. A Texas-bred maverick, Mills transplanted himself to New York City and addressed the world through his books and ideas, which shook up and energized the gray flannel 1950s and gave grounding and voice to the radicals of the 1960s. His work continues to illuminate, inspire, and challenge those who hope to understand and even to ameliorate the circumstances in which we live.
The core of Mills's classic study of American society at midcentury (which is only one part of his contribution) is composed of three volumes: on labor (The New Men of Power), the middle class (White Collar), and the upper class of decision makers (The Power Elite). These books "stand relatively alone as a comprehensive corpus of social criticism in the decades following the Second World War," according to Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman
[1] Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 16.
They go on to say that these three volumes are sociology in the classic sense of "the study of society" rather than the compressed and jargon-ridden approaches of the profession that Mills brilliantly analyzed (and dismissed) in The Sociological Imagination.Not surprisingly for one who had his own personal vision, Mills became increasingly impatient with the technical, impersonal, statistical side of sociology. But first he proved he could master those techniques exactingly and efficiently, directing studies for unions and government, leading research teams like one that produced a book Mills coauthored, The Puerto Rican Journey. The book was a solid one and valuable in its field, but it could have been written by any number of research teams; it is hardly recognizable as Mills. He later wrote me that "my own slight experience with them [the Puerto Ricans] was disappointing, especially in PR itself.… But I don't really know them. My stuff was at a great distance and necessarily statistical in nature." A journalist I knew who interviewed Mills a few years before his death said that when he brought up the old controversy about Mills's relation to his academic profession, Mills waved his hand, as if brushing the matter away, and said, "What the hell, I take polls."
It was with White Collar that Mills really first broke free from the constrictions of formal academic sociology, in terms of both style and audience. He began to reach a wider public that was hungry for the kind of interpretation that illuminates life concerns, the kind of analysis affirming Mills's basic belief that "neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both." As Mills later elaborated this idea in The Sociological Imagination, what people need, and "what they feel they need," from "the sociological imagination" is help seeing "what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves [as a result]."
How successfully Mills delivered such insights can be seen in his readers' response to White Collar and The Power Elite, as well as to later, shorter works that were a kind of high-level "pamphleteering," as Mills himself described them: The Causes of World War Three, his impassioned plea for an end to the nuclear arms race, and Listen, Yankee, his early argument for the Cuban revolution from the viewpoint of a Cuban revolutionary. Mills began to receive a growing amount of mail from people who wanted to know what they should or could do not only about the issues of war and peace, foreign policy, and the social sciences but also about their own lives. They seemed
The personal nature of the response to Mills and his work can be seen in the homage of people like Dick Flacks, a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Michigan, and his wife, Mickey, when they named their son "C. Wright." After Mills's premature death of a heart attack in 1962 at age forty-five, strangers who knew him only from his writing joined his family and friends at his funeral. As part of the Quaker service (Mills professed himself an atheist or, as he liked to put it more dramatically, a "pagan"), some of them spoke up, prefacing their tributes with "I didn't know C. Wright Mills personally" and then reading a favorite passage from one of his books, much as if reciting from a sacred text. I think the kind of personal response Mills's work elicited was best explained by his longtime friend and neighbor Harvey Swados, a distinguished novelist of the era. Swados wrote in Dissent magazine after Mills's death that "the best of the young academics" as well as "many thousands of plain readers" here and abroad were drawn to his work because
all these people were responding to what was at bottom not merely a logical indictment which could be upheld or attacked, but a poetic vision of America: an unlovely vision perhaps, expressed with a mixture of awkwardness and brilliance, but one that did not really need statistical buttressing or the findings of research teams in order to be apprehended by sensitive Americans as corresponding to their own sense of what was going on about them, more truly and unflinchingly than any other contemporary statement. They were responding in that unlovely decade, the fat and frightened fifties, to one who refused to compromise or to make the excuses that others were making—excuses mislabeled descriptions or analyses—for what was happening to their country. They sensed correctly that, faulty and flawed as it was, the vision of Wright Mills cut through the fog and lighted their lives for them.
[2] Harvey Swados, "C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir," Dissent (winter 1963): 40.
Affirming the impact of Mills's work in that era from a scholarly viewpoint, Jamison and Eyerman contend that "almost single-handedly in the 1950s, Mills would try to keep alive what he later called the sociological imagination in countering the drift toward conformity, homogenization, and instrumental rationality; in short, mass society."
[3] Jamison and Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties, 30.
Nor was it only the readers of "the fat and frightened fifties" who were
defied the drabness of academic life and quickly became the oracle of the New Left, combining the rebel life style of James Dean and the moral passion of Albert Camus, with the comprehensive portrayal of the American condition we were all looking for. Mills died in his early forties … during the very spring I was drafting the Port Huron Statement, before any of us had a chance to meet him, making him forever a martyr to the movement.…
He seemed to be speaking to us directly when he declared in his famous letter to "The New Left" that all over the world young radical intellectuals were breaking the old molds, leading the way out of apathy.
Mills's analysis validated us not only personally, but as a generation and as activist-organizers, the political identity we were beginning to adopt.
[4] Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988), 78, 80, 81.
In The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak explains Mills's cultural as well as political influence on the 1960s, pointing out that "Ginsberg and the beatniks can be associated chronologically with the aggressively activist sociology of C. Wright Mills.… Mills was by no means the first postwar figure who sought to tell it like it is about the state of American public life and culture … But it was Mills who caught on. His tone was more blatant; his rhetoric, catchier. He was the successful academic who suddenly began to cry for action in a lethargic profession, in a lethargic society."
[5] Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 24–25.
Nor was Mills's influence limited to culture and politics in the United States; if anything, he was more appreciated abroad, where his books have been translated into twenty-three languages, including Croat and Flemish. Perhaps the most striking example of that appreciation abroad can be traced to the time when a young revolutionary in the mountains of Cuba's Oriente
It's largely forgotten now that Mills was not the only American intellectual to pin great hopes on Castro in the early days of his regime. Just after the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the Village Voice published an "Open Letter to Castro" by Norman Mailer, who wrote, "I have said nothing in public about you or your country since I signed a statement last year in company with Baldwin, Capote, Sartre, and Tynan that we believe in ‘Fair Play for Cuba.’ But now I am old enough to believe that one must be ready to be faithful to one's truth. So, Fidel Castro, I announce to the City of New York that you gave all of us who are alone in this country, and usually not speaking to one another, some sense that there were heroes left in the world."
[6] Norman Mailer, "An Open Letter to JFK and Castro: The Letter to Castro," Village Voice 6, no. 27 (27 April 1961).
Listen, Yankee was a best-seller, and it brought down the ire of not only critics and reviewers but also the FBI, which began actively tracking Mills and his work and activities. The book was popular in much of Latin America and was hailed by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and other leading Latin American intellectuals, but in the United States the resulting furor led to mounting pressures that clearly contributed to Mills's early death by heart attack.
I had the good fortune of knowing Mills personally, first as a student of his at Columbia, then as an assistant on a research project, and later as a friend. I make no pretense of detachment in commenting on the life and work of a man I knew to be as great in generosity and kindness as in talent and dedication. My first conversation with him occurred in the most inappropriate of places: an elevator. Riding in an elevator with Mills was rather like riding in a Volkswagen with an elephant, not so much because of the reality of his size (at a little over six feet and weighing two hundred pounds, he was bigger than average) but because of the terrific sense of restlessness and ready-to-burst energy about him; and perhaps it was also because he came to work in a rather bulky getup suggestive of a guerrilla warrior going to meet the
In that era of cautious professors in gray flannel suits, Mills came roaring into Morningside Heights on his BMW motorcycle, wearing plaid shirts, old jeans, and work boots, carrying his books in a duffel bag strapped across his broad chest. At the time of my first encounter with him in 1954, Mills was an already legendary professor at Columbia College, and I was an undergraduate recently inspired by reading White Collar and anxious to see its author in action. My only chance was to get permission from Mills himself to take his limited-enrollment seminar in liberalism.
I waited for my quarry in the cold, cheerless lobby of Hamilton Hall, ambushed him on the way to the elevator, and squeezed in beside him to make my pitch. He fired the requisite questions at me in a rather aggressive, discouraging tone, and I think my answers made it obvious that I had little qualification and a lot of enthusiasm for taking the course. When the elevator ejected the crowd at the floor of his office, I had the feeling Mills glanced back at me and said "OK" mainly to rid himself of a temporary nuisance.
In the classroom as well as in the pages of his widely read books, Mills was a great teacher. His lectures matched the flamboyance of his personal image, as he managed to make entertaining the heavyweight social theories of Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, and José Ortega y Gasset. He shocked us out of our "silent generation" student torpor by pounding his desk and proclaiming that each man should build his own house (as he did himself) and that, by God, with the proper study, we should each be able to build our own car!
"Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps," Mills wrote in the opening sentence of The Sociological Imagination, and I can hear him saying it as he paced in front of the class, speaking not loudly now but with a compelling sense of intrigue, as if he were letting you in on a powerful secret. Against the awful image of Willy Loman's wasted life, which haunted our dreams of the future in the 1950s, against the lockstep fate of The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man, which seemed to lie in wait for us after graduation, Mills offered more hopeful possibilities. His withering critique of the stifling elements he saw in our society and reported in his books and articles was not simply negative. The very audacity of Mills's attacks on the status quo carried with it a promise of something better.
In the undergraduate classes he taught back in the 1950s, Mills surprised and enthralled us with calls to "abandon" the cities, which he felt were already
All this was more than a decade before the first communes were established and before Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became a bestseller and a kind of Bible to a whole subculture. At the time of his death, Mills was working on (among other things, five books either just completed or in various stages of progress) a proposal for a book about a political consciousness that was just emerging in this country; he called it "the New Left."
The vitality and continuing value of Mills's work spring partly from the fact that as an inveterate teacher he told us not only how things were but how they might be, and sometimes how each of us might make them better. His stand was that as intellectuals we have a responsibility to make them better. He labeled and excoriated "the rise of the cheerful robot, of the technological idiot, of the crackpot realist" both in this country as well as in totalitarian societies.
Mills originally took an interest in me because of an offbeat paper I wrote for his course comparing Ortega's The Rise of the Masses with a short story by Hemingway called "Banal Story." He called me in after class, and instead of berating me for frivolousness as I had feared, calmly stoked his pipe, observed me with a detached curiosity, and said he'd enjoyed the paper—not so much for its eloquence as its novelty. He said it was a relief from the usual student reports, which bored him. He urged me to "do some more like that," which led to a growing number of discussions between us, and eventually to his offer of a temporary job.
When I finished his course and graduated soon after, in February of 1955, I told Mills I was taking a job as a reporter on a weekly newspaper in New Jersey. He took a knowing puff on his pipe and said, "Small-town stuff, you'll be back"—and I was, courtesy of the job Mills offered me that summer doing research on intellectuals in America (one of several projects he didn't live to complete). Another former student, Walter Klink, who had done research on The Power Elite, also worked on the intellectuals project that summer, and Mills took a genuine and fatherly interest in both of us. As a "boss" and a mentor and friend, he was, to each of us, patient, kind, and helpful, both personally and professionally.
"Now Dan," Mills counseled me during that summer of '55—long before the dawn of women's liberation—"you're not married yet and you're
Mills introduced me to the Homestead, a restaurant famous for serving the biggest pieces of beef at the best prices anywhere in New York City. It was over in the meat-packing district, on the western fringe of Greenwich Village, and supposedly its proximity to the fresh meat coming in accounted for the great deals that this popular, plain-style restaurant offered its customers. Mills was known to go there and, after the meal, say to the waiter, "That was good—I'll have the same thing again." He'd eat a second helping of everything, including the sirloin steak, and pie for dessert. He practiced what he preached. (Another example of his "double dinners" is described firsthand in his letters.)
In his efforts to help me in my own career I learned a good deal about his. He had urged me at first to go into sociology, and when I said I was more interested in writing than in doing scholarly research or compiling statistics, he said that didn't matter; if you wanted to write about the world you had to have a "handle," and sociology could provide that. That's how he used it himself. He thought of himself primarily as a writer and devoted his most intense efforts to the difficult discipline of English prose. Ideas and theories came rather easily to him, but writing did not, and he sweated over it, seeking advice and criticism, often from Swados, who respected Mills's "unending and humble desire to learn how to commit to paper with precision and fluency all that he believed."
[7] Swados, "C. Wright Mills."
That desire was so great that it was, as far as I know, one of the few things Mills was humble about.He attached an almost magical quality to the power of writing; after all, hadn't it brought him, with academic whistle-stops along the way, out
It was not academic positions but his personal vision that absorbed and obsessed him, and White Collar was the first book he was able to express it in. He later wrote that creation of this book was "a task primarily motivated by the desire to articulate my own experience in New York City since 1945." He put it more dramatically when he slyly told me he had met a woman at a party who "really understands me. She told me ‘I know you, Mills—I read White Collar and I know what it's all about.’ I asked her to tell me and she said, ‘That's the story of a Texas boy who came to New York.’" Mills paused, frowning, and then broke into a giant grin as he said with delight, "And my God, she was right!"
Certainly there were elements in Mills—that big, gruff, motorcyclemounted scholar who had burst out of Texas—of a kind of intellectual Gatsby. He mentioned once that the first books he remembered reading were a series of little volumes on "Success" that were owned by his father, a whitecollar businessman. Like all boys from the provinces in those days, Mills identified New York City as the citadel or headquarters of success, and as one who had come there myself from Indiana I understood the feeling. I think the sense we shared of escape from province to city was one of the things that informed our friendship. I remember once driving with Mills from his house in Rockland County to Columbia on a bright winter morning, and as we crossed over the George Washington Bridge he pointed to the dazzling skyline and, with a sweeping gesture, said, "Take that one, boy!" I shivered and smiled, imagining that in other crossings he had said the same thing to himself.
During my summer of research for Mills, I worked mainly in the Columbia library and my own apartment, and every week or so spent a day at his house, reporting, discussing, and listening as Mills paced back and forth, thinking out loud, the puffs of smoke from his pipe reminding me of the steam from an engine, for his mind in high gear seemed like a dynamo. When classes resumed in the fall, I moved my notes and typewriter into Mills's office in Hamilton Hall and worked out of there. But his real office was at home. The Columbia office simply contained old student papers, files of finished projects, a hot plate for warming up soup, and an electric espresso machine. Neither his stomach nor his mind operated with its usual gargantuan appetite at the college office, and our talks there were disjointed and
Nor did he get much sustenance from his colleagues, especially in sociology, whom he rarely saw or mentioned. He took more lightly and humorously his occasional intellectual conflicts with people in other departments and especially enjoyed a little exchange with Lionel Trilling, the distinguished English professor and literary critic. Mills had published an essay in which he jibed at this colleague and other intellectuals for engaging in what Mills called "the American Celebration"—an uncritical and flowery promotion of the United States. Mills received a long letter of reply from this professor—so long that Mills held it up and said, "My God, he could have published this!" The effort seemed wasteful since the professor's office was only one floor below, so Mills wrote him a card suggesting they get together and discuss the matter. Mills got an elaborately worded reply postponing the discussion, but then one day he came into the office in especially high spirits after meeting his correspondent in the elevator. After an awkward silence the professor had looked at Mills, who was wearing some new sort of motorcycle cap, and said, "Why, Wright, what a lovely cap—wherever did you get it?" Mills simply smiled and answered, "Not in this country, Lionel."
Mills longed to spend some time abroad. His only trip to Europe then had been a two-week BMW motorcycle repair course in Munich (he received a certificate, which he proudly had framed). That fall when I worked in his Columbia office, Mills was looking forward to a sabbatical the following year, and had received a Fulbright lectureship at the University of Copenhagen that would enable him at last to live and travel in Europe. My research job with him was to end in January (1956), and in the meantime I had published my first magazine articles in The Nation and arranged for a series of assignments that would take me to Israel. Mills was pleased about both our good fortunes, and during the last weeks of my job, when anyone came into the room, he announced with a flourish, "This office is leaving the country!"
We corresponded after I got to Israel, and Mills wrote me in Jerusalem in May of 1956, just before he sailed for Europe. He reported he had been promoted to full professor at Columbia, but most of the letter dealt with the reception of The Power Elite (see part 5 of this book). I had hoped to go on to Europe and visit Mills after my Israel assignments, but the closest I got to Copenhagen was a week of waiting for a plane in Rome.
It was not until December of 1957 that I saw Mills again. He had been through difficult times with family misfortunes and was back at Columbia, living alone in an apartment on 114th Street, which he had managed to turn into comfortable living and working space, imposing his own order of books and files and bright decorations on one of those stubbornly dingy flats in Morningside Heights.
Like a great wounded bear he had retreated inside this comfortable cave, and he refused to go out except to meet his classes. If a publisher or editor—or even a friend—wanted to see him, it was necessary to travel uptown to his lair. There one was rewarded for making the trip not only with Mills's good talk and bourbon but also with one of his superbly cooked meals. He was cooking for himself, attacking that art as he previously had attacked (and mastered) motorcycles and photography, and, as with any of his newfound enthusiasms, he looked with mock scorn on anyone who hadn't discovered this new key to the universe. On my first trip there, after he served me a home-cooked meal, Mills asked me incredulously, "My God, man, you mean you don't bake your own bread?" (Just as he would ask in the same tone, "You mean you'd live in a house you didn't build yourself?")
Mills was one of those rare and resourceful people who in times of personal difficulty work harder and longer and more ferociously; instead of talking about his troubles—which he gave a brief, straightforward account of, in the manner of the New York Times covering a story—he talked of his plans and ideas and projects. If he hadn't seen you for a while, Mills began pumping you for information—what were you reading, what were you working on, what was happening that he ought to know about and might have missed in his reading of current events and trends? While you talked he jotted down notes, filing ideas that interested him, ordering books that were mentioned. When he finished that quizzing on my first trip to see him on 114th Street, he asked what my plans were for the coming year—and then told me what they should be.
"China," he said.
"China?"
"A third of the earth's population," he proclaimed with hushed drama, "and we know nothing about it."
"But I—"
"You'll be the reporter. We'll also have a photographer, an economist—and perhaps a cook, so we don't have to fool with that. I'll be the sociologist and head up the expedition. We'll fit out a Volkswagen bus, or two, and
― 12 ―tour Red China, getting real stuff—it has to be done. We'll worry about the State Department nonsense when we get back." (At that time U.S. citizens were not allowed to travel in China.)
I knew nothing about China, and that part of the world held no fascination for me in those days. And yet, by the time Mills finished his spiel I could hear the mysterious tinkle of bells in ancient temples and feel the immense weight and drama of that massive landscape, and when he harked back to the beginning motif—"a third of the world's population and we know nothing about it"—I was ready to pack for Peking. The great project never came off, but like everything Mills got excited about, he could make you believe it was the most important thing in the world. I'm sure he could have worked the same spell with Labrador.
But while Mills dreamed of China he was stuck at 114th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. I enjoyed making pilgrimages up to his den, and after some months he began to venture out of it. He told me about attending a party of Columbia graduate students in sociology, and his account of it seemed to sum up the impasse he had reached with the academic side of his profession.
"I simply sat in a chair in a corner," he said, "and one by one these guys would come up to me, sort of like approaching the pariah—curiosity stuff. They were guys working on their Ph.D.'s, you see, and after they'd introduced themselves I'd ask, ‘What are you working on?’ It would always be something like ‘The Impact of Work-Play Relationships among Lower Income Families on the South Side of the Block on 112th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway.’ And then I would ask—" Mills paused, leaned forward, and his voice boomed, "Why?"
Mills himself was then working on The Causes of World War Three, a book about a subject he considered worthy of the attention of "a full-grown man."
In 1959 Mills married Yaroslava Surmach, and they built a new house in Rockland County. Some local people supposedly mistook it for a bomb shelter because it was built with its virtually windowless concrete back to the road, while its marvelous glass-paneled front faced a scenic view.
I visited Mills there shortly after he moved in, and again when he returned from a lecture trip to Mexico. He'd been frequently questioned there about his—and his country's—stand on the new revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, and the overriding interest of Latin American intellectuals in the question kindled his desire to go there and write about it. After intensive preparation in the spring and early summer of 1960, he went to Cuba in August, equipped with his latest beloved gadget, a tape recorder;
After the enormous effort to get out the book, instead of relaxing, Mills shifted himself back into high gear to prepare for a nationwide TV debate with A. A. Berle Jr. on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.
I saw Mills once while he was immersed in this preparation, and he was terribly worried, alternately unsure of himself and brashly confident. He seemed to take it as some crucial test that he would either pass or flunk with profound results, as if it were a matter of life and death, which in some weird way it turned out to be. One or two nights before the broadcast in December 1960, Mills had his first major heart attack.
Walter Klink drove me out to visit him the next month. It was incredible to see Mills in a sickbed, and yet his old fire and enthusiasm hadn't left him. He was pleased and proud about the sales—if not the U.S. reception—of Listen, Yankee, and above his bed was an advertising poster proclaiming there were four hundred thousand copies of the paperback edition in print. Mills delightedly explained that such posters were carried on the sides of news delivery trucks in Philadelphia. He was reaching a greater public now than he ever had—"mass circulation stuff," he proudly called it. He lectured us on publishing, emphasizing that paperbacks were now the important thing. He told us publishing was done much more intelligently in England, and reported that after seeing the English system, he told one of his older, more conservative American publishers, "You gentlemen do not understand what ‘publishing’ means. You think the verb ‘to publish’ means ‘to print,’ but that is not so. It means ‘to make public.’"
Flat on his back, he kept us entertained and laughing, joking about his pills, praising his doctor (a fine young man whose excellent qualifications included a familiarity with some of Mills's work), talking of books and of the world—even then, in that condition, "taking it big." There was one thing, though, that frightened me. He had, in a drawer by the bedside table, a pistol. He had received a death threat because of his pro-Castro position.
When Mills was on his feet again he went on a frustrating journey to Russia and Europe, not finding the answers for his heart problem that he hoped a Russian clinic and specialist might offer, and grappling with unfinished projects. He sent me from there a rough copy of The Marxists, which he finished in Europe—an anthology with extensive commentary in which he blasted all political orthodoxies from right to left. When he came home exhausted in the spring of 1962 there were many projects awaiting his attention: the book on the intellectuals; a political book he hoped
I picked up the Times one rainy morning that March and while sipping coffee in Sheridan Square saw two stark lines on the obit page that numbed me:
C. Wright Mills;
A Sociologist
It was the first time I cried at the death of a friend—one who had never let me down. He was forty-five years old.
Of anyone I have ever known, Mills was the most individual, the most obstinately unorganizable, the most jealous of his right and need to "go it alone" and to fire at all sides when he felt so moved. I think his deepest, most characteristic outlook—the long-range one that he always returned to after excesses of enthusiasm—was expressed that summer I worked for him. A man who belonged to a small socialist splinter group came to seek Mills's signature on a petition asking that the group be removed from the attorney general's list of "subversive" organizations. Mills obligingly signed, but then in discussing politics he challenged all his visitor's beliefs and arguments until the poor fellow said in frustration, "Just what do you believe in, Mills?" At the moment Mills was tinkering with his motorcycle, and he looked up and said without hesitation, "German motors."
After the man had left, Mills told me: "It's ridiculous to say those guys are a threat to the government. They've only got about 150 guys—how could they overthrow anything? Besides, they're anti-Moscow and anti-Washington, and that's where I stand." His real home was outside any group or government or intellectual clique, and his favorite political heroes were the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World), the homegrown American radicals of the early part of the century who opposed nearly everything and everyone and valued most of all their independence. Whenever Mills liked someone, he'd say, "That guy's a real Wobbly."
He wrote once that his aim was to "define and dramatize the essential characteristics of our age," but I would argue that he went beyond that, in an effort to make it a better age and inspire generations to come. In "taking it big" Mills sometimes fell very, very hard, a risk that he understood and was willing to take. He appreciated others who took such risks, as he showed when he wrote a sensitive appraisal of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise
[8] C. Wright Mills, letter to the editor, politics 5, no. 2 (spring 1948): 125–26.
In that same spirit, I speak of Mills.
Though I knew Mills personally as a mentor and friend, and professionally as my teacher and a writer whose books I admired, I have come to know him better and on a deeper level, personally and intellectually, from reading this remarkable collection of his letters and autobiographical writings, lovingly collected, selected, edited, and annotated by his daughters, Kate and Pamela. The letters and writings here assembled and arranged chronologically serve as a kind of informal, highly personal autobiography, a journey seen from inside the mind and heart of the pilgrim himself.
This record of a life conveyed through the highly personal and literary form of letter writing is all the more rare and valuable since the form itself is fast becoming obsolete, a cultural artifact like the quill pen or the Smith-Corona typewriter. In our age of instant communication via e-mail, FAX, telephone, cell phone, speakerphone, and beeper, few of us take the time and trouble to sit down and write a letter that conveys to a friend or colleague our thoughts, ideas, feelings, and news, then read it over, make corrections, sign it, put it in an envelope, address it, seal it (the sealing gives a sense of privacy and perhaps encourages the intimate nature of personal letters as opposed to those sent by electronic transmittal), put a stamp on it, and carry it to a mailbox to drop in for delivery several days hence.
A good letter was its own art form, and Mills often told me he used letters as a way of getting unblocked if he was stuck while writing books or articles. The letter was not only a way of expressing and sometimes codifying ideas and projects but was also an important and useful outlet for venting emotion, a private (sealed) message to a trusted friend who would understand and sympathize with one's personal triumphs, disappointments, and frustrations, as well as a means to convey news, thoughts, and intellectual arguments or discussions. Mills used letters for all this, and in so doing left a moving and powerful testimony of a life lived by one whose work affected the lives of others, in his own country and abroad, in his own time and the future.
Themes emerge from the letters that not only show Mills's personal and intellectual concerns but reveal much about his character. His lifelong dedication to the development of his writing skills and his eagerness for instruction—his humility in asking for it even from his harshest critics—can serve as a model of commitment and integrity for anyone aspiring to creative work.
In his application for a Guggenheim grant in 1944, Mills explained that he had experimented with forms of writing in various journals and "little magazines" because "I wished to rid myself of a crippling academic prose and to develop an intelligible way of communicating modern social science to non-specialized publics." He revealed how deeply and seriously he regarded his writing when he said in a letter to his parents in 1946 that he regarded the book he was working on (White Collar) as "my little work of art: it will have to stand for the operations I never will do, not being a surgeon, and for the houses I never built, not being an architect. So, you see, it has to be a thing of craftsmanship and art as well as science. That is why it takes so long. There is no hurry. It will stand a long time, when it is finally done."
Three years later, in a letter to a friend, the historian William Miller, he shared his frustration in getting the book the way he wanted: "I am disillusioned about White Collar again. I can't write it right. I can't get what I want to say about America in it. What I want to say is what you say to intimate friends when you are discouraged about how it all is … how lonesome it is, really, how terribly lonesome and rich and vulgar and God I don't know."
When the book was published in 1951, it was not the good reviews he dwelled on but the criticism, for he wanted to learn from it. In a letter to several friends he sent a copy of a highly critical review from his old friend Dwight Macdonald and said, "There's only one kind of question that seems important to me, and I'd be very grateful if you'd answer it: Can I learn anything from this review?" To Macdonald himself he wrote, "You owe me this: think out concretely what I should avoid and how I might learn to do so.… Be constructive. Be practical. I'm a very willing learner in this writing stuff."
I know few (if any) writers mature enough and humble enough to respond in such a way to a harsh review. In one of his "letters to Tovarich," his hypothetical Russian intellectual counterpart (these "letters" are really superb autobiographical essays), he said, "I'm 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 any 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."
As late as 1960 he was still holding himself to higher standards as a writer, aspiring to express himself more fully and powerfully. In June of that year he wrote to his English writer-scholar friend, Ralph Miliband, that he was thinking of leaving his professorship and trying to live more modestly in order to devote full time to writing, saying, "I've got four, yes four books, bubbling up inside me.… The stuff I've written so far, it really is dry-run stuff; I've never let loose; you must know that."
The following month he responded to Miliband with what was obviously an answer to a request for advice: "Of course you are going to Moscow. Be an idiot not to. Go this summer; it will help the book. Make it help: never lose anything." Mills continued with advice on who and what Miliband should see to get the most out of his firsthand study of the Soviet political system.
When in 1961 his friend Harvey Swados got some critical reviews of his new collection of stories, the fine and lyrical Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn, Mills wrote to him and his wife, Bette: "Harvey is not to allow the shit-liberal types of reviews […] to bother him or hurt him. They are inevitable: would be same if book being reviewed were half blank paper or great American novel. It is a good book, especially the title story, so fuck them all."
In perhaps the most eloquent response to a friend's distress—one that any of us can find inspiring in the inevitable low times of life—Mills wrote to Bill Miller:
You ask for what should one be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it's been plowed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote and have you ever read Macaulay's speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we just now discover and there's still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when no one else can. That's what the hell to get keyed up about.
This is vintage Mills, a man who inspires as well as informs, who stood by his friends and sought instruction from his critics.
The lives of many writers seem surprisingly divorced from their work, in a way that is sometimes disillusioning. Reading these letters I am struck
Then, as always, he gets practical: "But how can you do this? One answer is: you must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist's need for systematic reflection demands it.… In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities[:] … what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person. Here you will not be afraid to use your experience and relate it directly to various work in progress."
Finally, Mills advises, "Before you are through with any piece of work … orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society."
Work conducted in such a spirit, Mills assures us, "has a chance to make a difference in the quality of human life."
[9] C. Wright Mills, "On Intellectual Craftsmanship," in The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 196, 225, 226.
That is the high goal to which C. Wright Mills aspired, and to which he inspires us today. His uncanny relevance to our own time is sounded in advice he offered back in the 1950s, in phraseology popular in the 1990s: "By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake." His work will continue to speak to those who want to keep their "inner world awake."