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