Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BY ANN G R IF F IT H
A N N GRIFFITH, who contributed a report on the love pulp magazines to the October ig^S
MERCURY, studied at Barnard. She is currently worl^ngfor an aviation trade journal.
J-73
before the guests arrived she would berries, fresh peaches and canned
certainly stab to death the first one pears.
that laid a fork on her "carefully ar- After having somehow found, and
ranged platters." Who wants the paid for, this curious hodgepodge,
work of sixteen hours, by conserva- she still had a long road ahead of her
tive estimate, to be eaten? Listen to before she could make it come out to
what she has gone through to pull off look like the pictures. She had to
this simple little dinner party for whip or beat thirteen different bowls-
eight people. ful of things. Part way through the
It took her a good three quarters of master plan the author of this recipe
an hour to read through the menu had become apologetic about this as-
and write out a shopping list. After pect and said, "There's a lot of talk
checking to be sure that she had the about beating here — sorry — and
required staples — salt, vinegar, mus- I'm not through yet, but you don't
tard, pepper, sugar, paprika, Worces- have to knock yourself o u t . " There-
tershire, Tabasco, cloves, bay leaf, after she became cagey, and in-
cornstarch, flour, cornmcal, baking stead of directing, "beat egg whites
powder, baking soda and powdered and add" she had phrased it, "add
sugar — and finding that she was beaten egg whites."
lucky enough to have all those on Indirection is common in these
hand, her shopping list still ran to two recipes. Although designed for the
pages. Somehow she had to get the woman with no "help," there is the
following stupendous aggregation of implication that a staff of fairies is at
groceries home to the kitchen be- work in such instructions as "combine
fore she even started to work: a five- 6 cups of peaches, peeled and cut into
pound chicken, a veal bone with one cubes, with 25 maraschino cherries
pound of veal attached, a veal chop, cut into quarters." " T h i n sandwiches
celery, carrots, milk, bread, thirteen should be served with this course" is a
eggs, heavy cream, Chinese seasoning happy circumlocution for "make thin
powder, gourmet powder, salad oil, sandwiches."
an avocado, garlic juice, butter, blue
and yellow vegetable coloring, lots of In a few articles there is an ALice-
peas, some parsley, a couple of green in-Wonderlandish attempt to tackle
peppers, onions, chives, half a pound social problems. The pattern which
of shrimp, pimentoes, cream cheese, emerges is of good advice and expen-
water chestnuts, fish fillets, hme juice, sive art work lavished on trivial mat-
tomatoes, coconut, okra, mayonnaise, ters; and of inadequate, unillustratcd
chih sauce, beets, radishes, cauU- advice allotted to real problems. Thus
flower, a calf's foot and a calf's tongue, eight pages of fashions, in color,
water cress, butter milk, lemons, will precede an uninspired two-page
cherries, broken nut meats, straw- " t r e a t m e n t " of the conditions in
desperate as the months drone on. to pull up stakes and dash off wher-
All her home-making instincts are ever love demands is a requisite. Few
thwarted by the limitations of their people have jobs, and almost nobody
flat. Quarrels increase, tempers fray. works from nine to five. Those who
One can follow Ken and Jane this far do work seem to hold vague positions
with some behef, if total lack of in- in advertising agencies or brokerage
terest, because one knows that a firms which allow tliem an unhmited
housing shortage exists and that a amount of time ofl^. This is a good
cold-water flat can be hard on the thing, for husbands arc required to
nerves. It is with a heart as heavy as spend a great deal of time at home,
Jane's, however, that one reads the family hfe being a series of major
resolution. Comes the Big Quarrel crises in which everybody partici-
over a burned steak. Bitter words, in- pates. The single man must be away
cluding the ever popular, "I hate you, from the office even more than the
I hate you!" Tears. Ken storms out, husband. One indefatigable suitor
but is back in a gratifyingly short chased his heroine back and forth
time. All words are retracted and we across the continent four times be-
are served the following bit of Pab- fore he was able to land her. Unlike
lum for a solution. " W h a t did it mat- Ken and Jane, most of the people in
ter where they lived, as long as they this fiction are free as air, with no
were together? What did it matter worries about jobs, delinquent chil-
about the world if they had each dren, money, housing, the high cost of
other.?" living, elections, the state of the
Such stories, played out against a world, or any of the problems that
recognizable backdrop, are rare. T h e dog us mortals on the outside.
vast majority take place in a never- The contrasts between the people
never land inhabited by disembodied inside the women's magazines and the
spirits completely free of entangling people the reader must encounter in
environments. There is a constant her daily life are endless. T h e heroes
dashing around from Bermuda to and heroines are an incredible syn-
Paris to Hawaii to Mexico by people thesis of the good, the true and the
with no visible means of support. beautiful, actuated always by the
T h e traffic between New York and highest motives, as gamely virtuous
Reno is exceptionally heavy, and as Little Orphan Annie. The pre-
the travelers amazingly light-hearted. occupation with cleanhness is again
There are no time-tables, reservations, apparent. They are clean morally,
or lawyers' fees. Practically every- and, above all, physically. "Hair nice
body lives in New York, Florida or and clean and red," "clean-jawed,"
San Francisco. "a good clean profile," "a good clean
It takes a shadowy character to sur- brow," "a clean, rugged face" —•
vive in a shadowy world. The ability these and a hundred variants are in
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him tight. Her arms had gone around his nite aura of "God's in his heaven, all's
waist, to rest him, to keep him. right with the world" emanates
Darling, my darling, it's going to be all
right! her body said. from the great editorial bosom of
With one hand, he held her away from these magazines. "There, there, little
him; with one hand he touched her-eyes, women, leave all your thinking to us"
her cheek, and her hair. is about what these magazines tell
"Please marry me very soon," he said.
their readers. To be advised on every-
One of the reasons the variations thing, from how much to nip in her
are so weak is that the strictest moral- waist this month to the proper atti-
ity must always be observed. A typical tude toward atomic energy is certainly
hero was "shocked" when a girl he easier for her than thinking for her-
had taken out six times allowed him self. To be assured that she need not
to kiss her. A more daring story sends bother her pretty head about atomic
a couple who have known each other energy is perhaps reward enough in it-
eight months oif for a week end to- self. •
gether. Before they reach the first I dare say you are neither excited nor be-
stop she gets cold feet and demands wildered by the fact that men can burn
to be taken home. For three months coal and make steam, and with the steam
he stays away and she mopes around turn generators that produce electric cur-
rent. The chances are that your only in-
the house, sure she has lost him, and terest in this phenomenon lies in the re-
thinking well, maybe she should have, sult of it. when you flip a switch your
but then oh no, no, better this than percolator works, or your lights go on, or
that. Virtue is at length triumphantly your vacuum cleaner starts sucking up
dirt. You do not have to know anything
rewarded and the male is forced to eat whatever about ohms or kilowatts or
humble pie. He does love her, after transformers in order to make use of the
all; he can't stay away any longer; and energy that comes through your meter in
finally he appears at the door with a the basement. Atomic energy is the same
thing. It is electricity, nothing more. The
bona fide offer of marriage. only difference is in the fuel that is used to
It is time to ask point-blank why produce the electricity. Coal produces
women swallow this sort of thing electricity because it burns and boils water
hook, line and sinker.? — if they do. to make steam. Uranium produces elec-
tricity because its atoms can be split apart.
What do they get.? What is the re- This spUtting process releases huge
ward for the tortuous mental gymnas- amounts of heat. This heat can be used to
tics that women must have to employ boil water and make steam, which in turn
to keep their faith in as complicated can be used to make electricity. That is all
there is to atomic energy. We have a new
and contradictory a credo as is handed fuel.
down to them by their magazines.?
A suggested answer is that if they For her, that's all there need be to
can believe everything they read in it. Atomic energy is just a new means
them, they can save themselves an of powering her vacuum — to get
endless amount of worrying. A defi- things cleaner.
NEAL STANFORD is a State Department correspondent and foreign affairs specialist for the
Washington bureau q/'i/if Christian Science Monitor. His last previous contribution to the MER-
CURY u>as ^'Report on Russian Imperialism" which appeared in the issue of December i()^y.
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