(2 of 2)
I saw the best minds of my generation Destroyed—Marvin Who spat out poems . . .
Macdonald insists there is more parody around than the work done by those who say they are doing it, and he has enriched his study by adding odd categories, such as unconscious self-parody, and by ranging outside the official field into politics and the crypto-language of psychiatry. Antiestablishmentarian Macdonald gleefully produces a mimeographed jeu d'esprit by American Heritageman Oliver Jensen. It is a Gettysburg Address in Eisenhower, beginning: "I haven't checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a governmental setup in this country . . ." Ike, in a West Point Address, is quoted as doing almost as badly by himself, and thus joins an illustrious company of those capable of unconscious self-parody. Others: Henry James, Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Johnson himself, quoted in an impenetrably opaque passage on the subject of glass. Hemingway fails to get his unletter on this team; "for obvious reasons," Macdonald mourns, Across the River and Into the Trees could not be included. E. B. White, however, is a very good stand-in (see box).
Comic Ghoul. Max Beerbohm remains the master among the parodists, although men of greater genius (e.g., Proust, who makes an appearance in French spoofing Balzac, and William Faulkner, in a rare item, parodying himself) have worked in this deceptive motley. Why the passion for parody among writers? Macdonald finds parody inherent in a mature culture; it is a way of digesting the past. Parody obviously demands that the original parodied should be well known to the reader, and this calls for a firmly held common culture. It persists today among the British as a form of "upper-class folk art," but its great age was the late Victorian period (C. S. Calverley, Lear and J. K. Stephen), based on a common Oxbridge education. In this century Macdonald loyally finds U.S. parodists better than Britain's best (Belloc, Chesterton, Beerbohm, Connolly notwithstanding), and the best of these in The New Yorker school (E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Peter De Vries). The reason: that magazine, with its "peculiar combination of sophistication and provinciality," provides the necessary "compact cultural group." "The old lady from Dubuque," it seems, now digs Jack Kerouac.
But Macdonald takes a dour view of the future of this comic ghoul among the arts. Life, he seems to think, is getting beyond a joke. "The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality outdistances it. What can a satirist add to the U2-Summit-Meeting fiasco? Or to the dealings between the United Nations and Premier Lumumba of the Congo Republic—the latter a character right out of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief? Indeed, in the Congo tragicomedy, history seems to be parodying itself."