The Pennsylvania Review

In 1870, when Mark Twain was a young journalist, he wrote a series of comic sketches for The Galaxy and The Buffalo Express.  These brief whimsical excursions were collected and reprinted in 1919 under the title The Curious Republic of Gondour.

One of the sketches is “The Tone-Imparting Committee,” a satire of those self-defined progressives who show up at every avant-garde lecture or reading or performance for the purpose of ratifying it with their presence, and proclaiming their own enlightenment.   In Twain’s day, a typical representative would have been Horace Greeley, or Henry Ward Beecher, or some other insufferably self-righteous prig of that ilk, accompanied by the usual bevy of hatchet-faced bluestocking females.   This “Tone-Imparting Committee” would sit there in smug benevolence, bearing witness to their liberalism and open-mindedness, and ready to excoriate anyone so obtuse as to express skepticism at what was being presented.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…  today the modern versions of these characters continue to make their appearance at sundry public functions, bravely holding the torch of enlightenment.   Go to any poetry reading at the Ninety-Second Street Y, and you’ll see them: the fat, bald schmuck in tortoise-rims who voted twice for Stevenson; the aging nut-case from The Nation who persists in defending Alger Hiss; the Park Avenue dowager still sporting her Obama button, the Angry Young Man with his fashion-accessory leftism; the mid-level employee of The New York Times, the neurasthenic little dyke from some Women’s Studies program.  They’re all present: Twain’s Tone-Imparting Committee in 2010 garb.

One of the reasons I stopped attending poetry readings is the inescapable presence of the Tone-Imparting Committee.  You can see them scattered through the audience, like cow-flops in a meadow, sitting there in sublime anticipation of That Which Is Seemly And Appropriate.   As a scheduled reader you know that the slightest hint of off-color language, or edgy impishness, or hard satire will send them into cardiac arrest.  So you sigh, and dig out your Petrarch translations and a genteel villanelle.   And you make a mental note never to show up again at this particular poetry forum.

The Tone-Imparting Committee wields real power.   One august leader of a Manhattan poetry venue told me he was offended by some of the salty language in my magazine TRINACRIA.  I retorted that I didn’t edit and publish the journal for the delectation of tea-drinking Episcopalians.  He wasn’t mollified, and gave me a mini-lecture on the need for dignity and decorum in formal verse.  I deferred to him because of his age, but I secretly rejoiced in the realization that TRINACRIA was doing the right thing by blowing open the cocoon of Victorian gentility that has suffocated formal poetry for so long.  The more we offend the Tone-Imparting Committee, the better.

As a card-carrying right-wing reactionary, I’d love to blame the potent influence of today’s Tone-Imparting Committee on the presence of too many women in the poetry world.  I’d love to argue that inherent feminine prissiness is the engine behind our enslavement to decorum.  But guess what, folks?  I can’t do that.  Believe it or not, I’ve had my consciousness raised.  It began with the late Margaret Menamin, a tough, ballsy lady who showed me that women could be as hard-hitting and rowdy and randy as any jock.  I never met Maggie in the flesh, but from her poetry and our correspondence I’m sure she and I could have sat down and knocked off a fifth of good bourbon as we exchanged dirty jokes and scurrilous anecdotes.  And then there’s the hard-bitten Candace Ruggieri, whose poems pack the wallop of a heavyweight boxer.  Or Angelique Wellish, who can mouth off in verse like a whorehouse concierge when she wants to.  These women have no feminine prissiness about them, and they would never be in any Tone-Imparting Committee.  God bless them all.

No, gender isn’t the source of the problem.  We have a Tone-Imparting Committee because of modern society’s need for a public orthodoxy to which defensive and insecure people can cling.  As David Riesman long ago pointed out, the contemporary world is dominated by “other-directed” people—that is, persons who have lost all sense of their identity as autonomous individuals, and who mindlessly follow the lead of those around them.  Such  other-directed types, who have no real foundation for their existence, need the life-raft of that which is approved by their peers.   And what better and more convenient source for common agreement than decorum?  Add to that the faddish accoutrements of soft-spoken left-liberalism and trendy avant-garde posturing, and you see why the Tone-Imparting Committee is even more powerful today than it was when Twain wrote.

A large part of this phenomenon could be explained by what Gustave Le Bon called “the psychology of crowds” (la psychologie des foules).  That highly astute observer of modernity noticed that otherwise upstanding and peaceable individuals showed a marked reversion to savagery when they became swept up in a tumultuous mass.  Riots, lynchings, vandalism, looting, assault, and sheer pointless mayhem become possible and even probable when crowds gather.  The fairly high moral standards of an individual’s superego dissolve, and he descends to the level of the criminal and the sociopath.  No one is quite sure why this happens, but there is no doubt that it does.  Ask anyone who has been to a street demonstration, or a frat-house party.

Something similar happens in the Tone-Imparting Committee, except that its savagery is kept in reserve, like a sword in a scabbard.  The Committee is always conscious of its crowd solidarity, and watches hawk-like for anything that might threaten it, or anyone who might challenge it.  And when something of that sort occurs, the Committee en masse swings into action to annihilate the heretic.  Insult, calumny, vituperation, and mockery are thrown at the offending party from every side, and from all members-in-good-standing of the Committee.  And since the ordinary person is totally unprepared for this sort of mass attack, he “folds like a cheap camera,” as Bill Carlson used to say.  The Committee members then all smile, and congratulate themselves on having kept the world safe for progressive thought and decency.

This sort of thing was de rigueur in the old Communist Party, and is still a feature of most leftist associations.  But now it also happens quite regularly at faculty meetings, cocktail parties, and poetry workshops.  And it is generally so successful that those who dominate the Tone-Imparting Committee come to think of browbeating and intimidation as a kind of sacred calling, one that they have a prescriptive right to practice.  They become—if it is possible—even more smug and more arrogant than the average left-liberal jackass.  They expect deference from everyone, and they tend to get it based on simple fear.  No one wants to cross them.

There is only one way to beat this game, and that is to refuse deference.  The Tone-Imparting Committee counts on hesitation, uncertainty, and Christian forbearance from their victims.  It never occurs to them that a target might fight back.

Don’t oblige them by being polite and deferential.  React to their assaults with Promethean rage and contempt.  Spit venom and ridicule right back in their faces.  They don’t expect that, and are shaken by it.  Do this often enough, and the Tone-Imparting Committee will collapse like a punctured dirigible.  That’s how Mark Twain would have handled the problem.