Quickly (8 February 1956)
The Village Voice, 8 February 1956; transcription provided by Jerry Lucas; proofread against the source 2026-06-01.
Column Five
A parody is a return to common sense, and its appeal is due precisely to its common sense—it attracts the common denominator in everyone, it is horizontally vulgar, it flattens all spurs of thought. The meaty satisfaction of a parody is that it rouses in a reader the satisfying emotion of “How ridiculous, how perfectly ridiculous.”
Still, the fear of being ridiculous stifles more thought than the act of being ridiculous, and common sense is notoriously uncreative. What distinguishes Kenneth J. Schmidt’s parody of last week is that he is unwittingly if happily profound. I quote:
Like when I write something and expect people not to believe it. (Even though it’s true they shouldn’t believe it, because when I wrote it I thought it was a lie.) This is my favorite type of communication. One where truth and un-truth are indistinguishable.
With poetic concentration, Schmidt has succeeded in capturing the essence of social communication. To the people who work in the mass-media, truth and untruth are indeed the same thing, and as a practical matter are usually indistinguishable to them.
For once, I am going to take a most definite example. The item concerns myself, and I quote it to satisfy my profound egotism, and incidentally to avoid any larger arguments about “facts.”
The following bit appeared in Hedda Hopper’s syndicated column in the N. Y. Daily News a few weeks ago:
The British are gloating over “The Big Knife”; they love the way the film takes a swing at practically everybody in Hollywood. In light of this, I can’t understand a major studio paying $200,000 for Norman Mailer’s story “Deer Park,” which takes an even more sadistic look at our industry.
Hedda Hopper is a human being, and so probably has a virtue or two tucked away somewhere. But her accuracy is not what will bring her to heaven. The item I quoted is untrue. Not only did no major studio pay $200,000 for “The Deer Park,” but indeed I have not yet put the book up for sale, as every story editor in Hollywood knows by now.
Yet Hedda’s untruth produces very real if small reactions. People who have read the item in Hopper’s column, and are impressed by money, were bound to have raised me a little in their unconscious estimation. People who dislike wealthy authors doubtless put me down a bit. Years from now it is quite likely I will meet someone who will act toward me in a very real way on the basis of a very unreal story. An “untruth” begets a “truth.”
I am taking of course a very special definition of the word “truth.” Still, in the world of events, I do not see how social truth can be defined as anything other than that which happens, that which makes history. Long after it is impossible to determine the truth or falsity of a given “fact,” people continue to act on the basis of what they believe has happened, and their actions in turn create further actions. History, finally, is the sum not of people’s sentiments, but of people’s actions. (And, please, no letters that sentiments lead to action. Obviously, not all sentiments do, and a sentiment which remains just a sentiment never enters the network of human actions whose overt result is change, is human history.)
Yet if social truth is to be defined as that which happens, then for the mass-media a lie, a half-truth, or a whole truth (whatever that is) must all be considered in the same way, and can be measured only by their social effect. At a guess 10,000,000 people read Hedda Hopper; 20,000 read this column. For whatever tiny social significance it has, the un-truth of Hopper has more social reality, hence more social truth than my refutation, and five years from now, let us say, when my next novel comes out, some reviewer in some literary purlieu like Kansas City will think unconsciously: “That rich dastard, Mailer, I hate his guts,” and his review—a modest social reality—will be partially a reflection of the $200,000 I never saw.
It will be remembered that this column is called “Quickly.” I have made my points in great haste and most sketchily. Yet what I have tried to present more or less formally is taken for granted by all columnists, reporters, publicity men, editors, advertisers, movie-men, etc., etc., etc., and they always proceed on the unself-conscious rule-of-thumb that personal truth and untruth become, through the alchemy of the mass-media, equal social realities. So I would suggest that the only way to guess what might possibly be happening in any historical event big or small is not to accept what you read as that which is actually happening, but rather to attempt to divine what public personages A, B, C, D, and E and their mass-media midwives a, b, c, d, e, wish you to believe about event X.
And in a small way this is as true of The Village Voice as it is of Life Magazine, the N. Y. Post, the Journal American, and for that matter, the New York Times.
Even though it’s true, they shouldn’t believe it, because when I wrote it, I thought it was a lie.