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The End of All Ambition
Nathaniel Hawthorne writes of a young man who liked to wander in the fields enjoying the flowers and the butterflies. His industrious neighbors objected. "He wastes the sunshine," they said, "by walking in it." Presumably he should have used it for making hay. This Puritan doctrine of work has suffered, I am told, some change, some atrophy; but it persists, nevertheless, and the American is likely to feel at least uneasy if he is not busily improving the shining hour. There are those who say that keeping busy is
What are we all so busy about? What do we want? We are trying, of course, to be successful. We all want to play in the majors. This, too, has been called a particularly American habit. They say that we worship the goddess Success, and William James gave the goddess a name not suitable to be spoken in ecclesiastical surroundings. They also say that we worship money - or at least they said so until a short time ago. Now it is said that we worship the appearance of being rich and successful. You will have noticed that the people who advertise Cadillacs ask us to buy them not because they will carry us to the A&P or to
A vast industry instructs us in dissatisfaction. It wants us to be unappy with our 1956 Chevrolet, with the black and white television screen, with peanut butter glasses that don't have ducks on them. That industry rides on a strong current of American tradition. As early as the 1830s, Tocqueville was saying that Americans are "forever booding over advantages they do not possess." The American, he said, "clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grip to pursue fresh gratifications." He "builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on; he embraces a profession, and gives it up; he settles in a place which he soon afterward leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere... Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which is forever on the wing." Tocqueville was anticipating, and partially answering, the question What Makes Sammy Run?
Sammy, like the White Queen, runs because he must if he is to stay in the same place. He runs even harder than she, because he knows the American dogma that one who is not obviously moving ahead must be slipping behind. He knows the terrible onus that accompanies failure and the plaudits due to success. Sammy is a paradigm - as well as a parody - of the successful man. Sammy wastes no sunshine, nor midnight oil, either. He gets the goddess and she turns out to be precisely what William James said she was. His career suggests that there may be something wrong with, something missing from the ordinary conception of success.
At the extreme from Sammy Glick is Holden Caulfield, whom I hope you have met. If you have read The Catcher in the Rye, you will remember how one night, when he had been kicked out of Pency Prep, he crept into Phoebe's room to talk with her. Pheobe was only 10 but she was bright and Holden thought she was the best sister anybody ever had. Holden was right. They talked about Holden's troubles, and old Phoeb finally said,
"You don't like anything that's happening. You can't even think of one thing."
"Anyway I like it now," [Holden] said. "I mean right now. Sitting here with you and just chewing the fat."
"That isn't anything really!"
"It is so something really! Certainly it is! Why isn't it? People never think anything is anything really. I'm getting sick of it."
Once more, in deference to my surroundings, I have cleaned up the words a little. But I have not tried to improve upon Holden's wisdom. "People never think anything is anything really." No, not unless it has a fine name, a high polish, and comes in a choice of colors. Not unless is slams into the consciousness like a hammer, has "significance" and, possibly, use.
Yet even a moment's reflection persuades us what an exclusive, even hopeless, idea of life that is. It leaves out all the things that give our lives their tone and quality. What is it that most frequently makes us unhappy? Not blows or betrayals, not the failure to get an MG for Christmas, but an unsmiling face turned upon a cheerful greeting, refusals to share our moment's gladness. We are made miserable by people's apparent unwillingness to let us love them. We feel these as big things; the things that give us an empty feeling in the stomach. Yet they are precisely the things of which it is said that they aren't anything really.
It is the same with joy. It more often comes in drops than in tidal waves, and he who ignores the drops because they are small is likely to carry an empty bucket. There are bright young novelists, and some neither bright nor young, who would make us scorn the life of diapers and pea soup and one woman; who sneer at the humdrum virtues, and invite us to despair of our commonplace lives, bounded as they are by the office and home and family parties in the back yard. But life is not a perpetual frenzy of adventure, and those who must wait for happiness until they can go to
Success in the conventional sense of the word - becoming an excellent surgeon, a learned judge, a wealthy man - is not in itself happiness, though for many men the opposite is misery. In the surgery, or on the bench, or at the stock exchange, these men exercise their public functions, and no doubt they feel pains or pleasures according as they exercise them well or not. But when the public hour is over, the go home to wives, children, friends. In their dealings with their children, their fame or wealth or learning count for nothing. What counts is their commonplace humanity - their honesty, their power to share the child's play and problems, their being able to love. The fame of a husband has never yet been enough to make a wife happy. Not all a man's honors can console him for a gray coldness in the face of a friend.
If these things are true, as I think they are, for the eminent and the well-to-do, how shall it be with us who are of the middle lot - who cannot read about ourselves in the paper and there find a small consolation for our human inadequacy? Who cannot build a great new house and swimming pool to attract the people who seem not to like us for ourselves? If you have encountered Jay Gatsby, you know what I mean. If you have read Sinclair Lewis' Dodsworth, you know what I mean. Most of you will in any event have heard of Richard Cory, the rich man who "went home and put a bullet through his head."
We can't all play in the majors. If we like, we can eat our hearts out in the bitterness of disappointment, wishing ourselves like one more rich in hope, desiring this man's art and that man's scope. But beweeping one's outcast state has never yet changed the state. So long as we define success only in terms of large public achievement, and turn our daily bread to ashes because we haven't achieved in that way, we shall be miserable. We'll apologize for practicing law in the home town instead of being Chief Justice. We'll think we count for nothing because we teach in a small college instead of at Yale or
Or we can try to remember what children don't have to be told - that defending the
The throng of your colleagues who were too busy to attend this occasion will of course be burning to know what was said. You may, if you wish, say that I counselled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth. That I urged complacency and an end of striving. But, if you do, I shall think you wrong, or that in trying to express one aspect of the truth, I have expressed myself clumsily. I prefer that you should say, "He elaborated upon a wise sentence of Samuel Johnson's, that 'The end of all ambition is to be happy at home.' "
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Denham Sutcliffe was a member of the faculty at
