Where Were You In '62? A Look-Back at 'American Graffiti'

Where the gang meets: Mel's drive-in

Directed by George Lucas, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, ‘American Graffiti’ has stood the test of time as  an extremely entertaining and enjoyable film. It’s a film that stays with you for life; especially if you first saw it when you were the same age as the characters that are portrayed in the film. You will either remember -- for example --  where you were living, or -- what theatre it was where you first saw it. Or who you saw it with. Or what year of school  you were in when you first saw it – trust me: ‘American Graffiti’ has that kind of effect on a receptive audience. Made on a miniscule budget when George Lucas was a struggling film school geek, driven by Francis Coppola’s belief in the project, and featuring a cast, that, with the exception of Ron Howard, no one had ever heard of, I would argue that ‘American Graffiti’ is an ideal example of  American independent film at its most vital and creative.

Back in the days before the Ewoks, Princess Leia, or Luke Skywalker existed, George Lucas first  wrote a screenplay about a night in the life of a group of teenagers in a small California town. Unfortunately, no studio was remotely interested in his project, and financial backing was difficult to obtain. Finally, with the assistance of Coppola, Universal studios expressed a  tentative interest.  Thanks to the subsequent collaboration with  screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, as well as casting director Fred Roos, Lucas got the green light from a studio that had no confidence in the project, much less any interest in how it would be made, or received by a mass audience. Lucas ploughed ahead anyway, and the result was a totally enchanting portrait of the lives of a group of young Californians against a tantalising backdrop of America’s loss of innocence: the end of the first chapter of American rock and roll, and the beginning of the nightmare of the war in Vietnam. But the greatest enjoyment of ‘American Graffiti’ is that it captures the tentativeness, joy and despair of growing up in a way that doesn’t patronise adolescents. This makes it a virtual fountain of nostalgia  for those of us who are older, but remember  what it was like to be on the verge of adulthood, believing we had the capacity to achieve anything we chose to do in life.

Built upon a number of storylines which are ‘free-standing’, the film’s narrative structure would today be considered ahead of its time.[1] By free-standing, I mean that there are several self-contained stories within the narrative; a group of two or more characters share the same story, but are not included in others. This prevents audience interest from flagging, with so many things going on, unlike a more enclosed narrative which contains only one story that caters to all of its characters. Hence we have Steve’s story (played by Ron Howard) as he tries to convince Curt to leave ‘this turkey town’ with him, to pursue their lives  further on the east coast. Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) has his own story, as he aimlessly wanders the town at night, hitching a ride in the backs of other people’s cars as they cruise around to celebrate the end of the school year. Terry the Toad (Charlie Martin Smith) also has his own story. He is looking after Steve’s car, and picks up a pretty girl named Debbie (Candy Clark) for a night of somewhat downbeat, but funny adventures. John Milner (Paul Le Mat) is the elder of the group, an expert cruiser who complains about the  ‘slim pickins’ of the current drag and is finagled into picking up an eleven year old girl who gets him into all kinds of trouble.

  Legendary casting director Fred Roos auditioned hundreds  of young performers for the main as well as minor parts in ‘American Graffiti’, and apart from Ron Howard, known for his television work, most  of the performers were unknown to the audience. This was a stroke of casting genius (or maybe just a matter of not having the budget to pay big salaries to the performers). To have picked better known faces would have compromised the film’s freshness and turned it into a gawking parade with the audience. The film was shot on location in Petaluma, California over 27 nights. There are no daytime scenes at all. A cast member recalls how, after 27 straight nights of shooting it wasn’t hard to act being tired, when everybody actually was – tired. [2] 

Terry and Debbie on the prowl for good times

The film was completed properly in post-production. Walter Murch was responsible for the brilliant soundtrack of at least twenty songs from the era that began with the birth of rock and roll to the death of Buddy Holly, the emergence of the Beach Boys, and the pre-dating of the British invasion in the United States. Instead of a regulation score, the music is used  in a subjective fashion, in order to gain audience empathy for the emotions of the young characters. [3] The soundtrack becomes an indispensable part of ‘American Graffiti’, in a way that is unthinkable to most other movies, especially those that use mickey-mouse scoring as a way of filling up dead time on-screen.

Universal Studios continued to be un-cooperative with Lucas until it dawned on them that maybe they had a hit on their hands[3] The film-maker arranged private showings and persuaded the lower echelons of Universal to attend. They all loved what they saw and word-of-mouth escalated about the film. ‘American Graffiti’  grew to be one of the biggest moneymakers in the history of the studio. [4] The film’s arrival in Australia for example,  was heralded with a lot of publicity, so the studio must have started taking an interest in it.  It had done better than  expected when it was first released in the United States to mainly positive reviews. [5]

Wolfman Jack without his melted popsicles

 Whilst  ‘American Graffiti’ was a big hit in its day, I would argue it has become less well known as the years have flown by. George Lucas went onto bigger things; Coppola became embroiled in the making of ‘Apocalypse Now.’  Perhaps its greatest claim to fame has subsequently been the fact that Harrison Ford, who became a famous star, has a very small role, and he became better known than the other cast members who had the larger (or main), roles. Also, because it was so popular on first release, it was not a well-known fact at the time, that ‘American Graffiti’ was made on such a small budget, and everyone concerned with the project had only modest ambitions for it to succeed. [6]

I think that when you live with a film for so long, it becomes hard to remember, or understand, what your first reactions to it originally were. I only started out as a humble member of the audience, and wasn’t meant to be writing essays, unless they were about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  You know what I’m saying? There are some things you are made to love, and there are others you aren’t.  I don’t recall exactly what it was I liked the most about about ‘American Graffiti’. But since then it’s just been an accumulation of positive thoughts and feelings, ever since I first bought my own copy on video.  So, if you haven’t seen it at all, or just haven’t seen it in ages, take a look (or another look.)  And for me, taking the time out of  my Christmas break to write this post will have been worth it. Enjoy!!

The above citations are taken from the Making of documentary contained on the freely available Universal DVD.

Writers on Film: From Emile Zola to Truman Capote

Biographical portrayals of writers lives through their work

Samuel Beckett 

Of the broad range of  human activity available to us, the act of writing is probably the least exciting for a cinema audience to be asked to  observe. But it can’t be denied that there are a number of interesting movies out there, concerning themselves with the lives of famous (and infamous) members of the western literary canon.  When entertainment value should be considered, you’d  think that watching someone with a pen and paper in front of them is not exactly  a world-beating idea for a movie. Just some hack sitting down at his desk, either tearing his hair out from writers’ block, or just ‘there’, in deep prestidigitation about -- God knows what.   Despite the Paris Review interviews that have been archived for posterity, and all  the biographies, and  the autobiographies that pass themselves off as fiction, (not to say the academic research), writers seem to have us convinced that they carry out  a uniquely public function in the world. But is this assumption correct, or merely a collective creation of writers’ lofty ideas about themselves?

 I believe that literary biographies on film fall into two broad categories: one is what I  call the ‘literature as public function’ category. The other, I call the confessional category, in which the writer is more subjectively  portrayed as dissolute, drug-addled and/or incapable of functioning in normal social activities.  The first category provides the public with the reassuring cliché that writers are concerned human beings, interested in what ‘normal’ people are, what they do, and their aspirations. They lobby about important issues on behalf of ‘normal’ people. They criticise repressive social structures like the government and the Church on behalf of ‘normal’ people. Hence they push the envelope of possible human experience on behalf of ‘normal’ people. The second or ‘confessional’ category is more problematic, which to my mind makes it more interesting.  In a number of filmed biographies that use a mixture of fiction and fact, the lives of writers are mythologised and melded into our collective bourgeois experience, without us knowing, or probably caring, if the so-called facts as presented are true, or not.  

Oscar Wilde

The function of this second category is not to be historically representative, its purpose is far more important than that. Its purpose  is to enable us to  carry  on, as if what writers do is important to the social fabric of our lives as individuals. Often, its their incoherent personal involvements which entertain us; or their problems with their art; or problems with their publishers. We want their lives to entertain us and we are less encouraged to listen to their opinions about the world. In this respect their public function is less important than their lived experiences and how these nourish their work and our appreciation of it.

  As a fan of literary biography, I once recall reading, in tandem, one biography of Oscar Wilde, and another of Samuel Beckett; you could not find two more contrasting personalities. Beckett was an aesthete, quiet, shy and retiring. Before he became famous in middle age, he led an uneventful life. Wilde was notorious all his life, for his flaunting of Victorian conventions, his homosexuality and his incorrigible wit. He chose to live in the glare of the public spotlight and was never ashamed of it, but had enemies who eventually  destroyed him. Beckett on the other hand, never had an enemy, was strict about his privacy, and never sought the public gaze for any other reason than it was possible that his work could enlighten people. I’ll give you three guesses as to  which book was the most entertaining: it was the one about Wilde. His very public and intriguing life seems to have been made for biography and the biographer did not let his readers down.

What point am I trying to make exactly? It’s this: no matter how much writers may talk, they exist in a state of perpetual self-creation, so what may have been right yesterday, could be wrong the next -- it’s their entitlement for putting in so many man hours. I suppose most of us do live in a state of perpetual self-creation, but the fact is, we just don’t write about it. We live it, and let the writers write about it. And how important is their function as public mouthpieces in any case? Wouldn’t we rather see them dissolute, drunken, sleeping with as many people as they could find, and generally living a life the rest of us dare not imagine?   Despite my  reservations,  I’ve picked five of my favourite films about  how writer’s lives, and our perceptions of them become  tangled webs of fact and fiction. It will be easy to see  how my ‘public function’ category has taken a beating lately, as political correctness is being questioned and writers are being told to loosen up more so we can watch them making more (and better)  fools out of themselves.

Emile to the rescue

 The Life Of EmileZola (1937). Made after the advent of the Production Code, but before the outbreak of WWII. With contributions from at least four writers (see IMDB) and directed by William Dieterle.   Starring Paul Muni in the title role,  produced by the Warner Brothers studio, which pitched its output to a less sophisticated audience. There were a number of titles in their catalogue such as this starring Paul Muni, and considered as more prestigious pictures than the studio was used to making, such as ‘The Story of Luis Pasteur’ (1936) and ‘Juarez’ (1939).


We see the emergence of this great French writer as he struggles to find his voice in various writer’s garrets, grappling with personal and professional problems. Not very long into the film, there is a time jag and we suddenly see Zola as a rich and successful older man, with his lovely wife and genteel home. At the risk of his personal comforts, he becomes involved in the Dreyfus affair, a scandal involving a Jewish soldier transported to Devils Island for a crime he didn’t commit.

 The film is expertly executed and it becomes understandable why Warners chose to make it. Zola is portrayed as a man of integrity speaking truth to power, a selfless fighter against injustice and prejudice, in the same way that connects the better known  Warners gangster movies with the social issues of Depression-era America. ‘The Life of Emile Zola’ almost has an aspect of propaganda to it, considering it was made before the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939. It focuses   on the sensitive issues of freedom of speech and the inequities of crime and punishment.  This must have struck a chord with liberals in the 1930’s who were concerned with German aggression and what it meant in terms of whether hostilities would break out once again in Europe after an uneasy hiatus.


The film’s style reminds me of Zola’s writing, the narrative is reasonably conventional, despite the time jag just mentioned, and it does not concern itself much with Zola’s personal life, save how he sacrifices personal considerations in order that he perform the public function of assisting a man who has been falsely accused of an act he did not commit. In this way ‘The Life of Emile Zola’ becomes a hagiography to the point of us today having little choice but to believe what we see in the movie, with no other surviving  recollections or testaments that Zola’s life may have been any different. Despite this, Zola emerges only as an enigma, with little personality, merely functioning as a public mouthpiece with no other purpose than to stir the masses into action.  3 ½ stars

Another example of the all-star cast. See older post.

Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962).  The brainchild of producer Jerry Wald and made by 20^th Century Fox, with an all-star cast including Paul Newman, Susan Strasberg, and Eli Wallach, with a screenplay by A.E. Hotchner. The film  is an old-fashioned rendition of the writer-as-hero and a good example of the German bildungsroman, which concerns a writer’s coming-of-age and his ultimate decision to practice his true vocation in life. Based on the autobiographical short stories of Ernest Hemingway, we can never know the veracity of the events portrayed in the book, much less the film that its’ based upon.  Made with obvious care in the aspects of cinematography, acting and production design, the film sadly is a bit stodgy, in its efforts to mythologise Hemingway as a post-war American cultural hero.

 Richard Beymer gives a glum performance as the young Ernest, dwarfed by the scenery, and lost  amidst the sturm and drang of family conflict and the wider tragedy of the First World War’s negative impact on an entire generation of young people. These Hemingway labelled as the ‘lost generation’  because of their experience of European indifference to what I would (perhaps unkindly) label  American war neurosis. A deeper examination of this phenomenon  would have been welcome, but sadly the narrative doesn’t concern itself with themes of such importance. Instead ‘Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man’,  is all around the ballpark and doesn’t seem to be about anything in particular. As  literary biography, it is sadly lacking in direction or purpose, save the limited criteria  to transcribe Hemingway’s stories into a narrative that the audience will be able to understand. I can’t deny though, that it works as conservative Hollywood entertainment, reflective of its time and place.  Whilst  disappointing and not terribly inspiring, it  endures as a testament of sorts to an antiquated notion of so-called manhood, and Hemingways’ undying commitment to such a notion in which he firmly believed.  3 stars

Jane Fonda plays Lillian Hellman in 'Julia'.

Julia (1977). One of legendary director  Fred Zinnemann’s last feature films, ‘Julia’ is a story originally from the collection ‘Pentimento’ published in the ‘70s by Lillian Hellman in her emeritus years as an acclaimed American playwright and screen writer. It was in turn adapted for the screen by Alvin Sargent and stars Jane Fonda as Lillian and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia. Some critics tossed ‘Julia’ off as being too effete and old fashioned. But the subject matter is compelling and to make it more so,  it’s  told from a woman’s point of view, which so rarely happens in any movie, much less in the genre of literary biography.  The story is told in flashback and concerns  a reminiscence of how Lillian Hellman once did a favour for a friend, and how this favour put her in great danger. Hellman was Jewish and was required to pass through Germany with a sensitive package at a time when Jews in Germany were the scapegoats of the Nazis. Nevertheless, out of friendship and a sense of public duty, Lillian succeeds in her task. The rightness of the task, or even its ultimate purpose, is left up in the air as the narrative jumps in time to explain Julia’s sad fate.  Lillian is unable to forgive what happened, nor  to forget what Julia’s friendship meant to her.

 The sequence in which Lillian boards the train in Moscow to make a trip into Germany  makes for a lot of suspense, the audience alerted to the fact that it may be possible that she will be prevented by the Nazis from carrying out her task. If you’re familiar with Hellman’s memoirs, you will be aware of her radical political stance in the 1930’s and how her life was detrimentally affected when partner Dashiell Hammett served a prison term for being a communist sympathiser. She belonged to a generation of writers who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and supported Russia against Germany when war broke out in 1939.  It seems natural that ‘Julia’ is primarily concerned with a writer’s attempts, in her own small way,  to be part of a public political process which has always in the past been the bastion of male participation. ‘Julia’ wears its feminism on its sleeve in a method which is audience-friendly, so that no one could possibly be offended by what it’s trying to say. In a world of limitations, I guess this is necessary if you want to get your point across without being killed by the critics, or at the box office in the process.


‘Julia’ actually exists within the frame of a dual narrative, in which the private lives of the two characters are as important as their ambitions and fortunes in the public arena. Personally, what I found the most appealing about this film was its portrayal of the private friendship of two women, and how that friendship sustained them through wars, and other great moments in history.  4 stars

 Johnny Depp as Wilmot, the libertine of the title

The Libertine (2004). Written by Stephen Jeffreys and directed by Laurence Dunmore, ‘The Libertine’ is the story of John Wilmot, 2^nd Earl of Rochester, who lived during the 17^th century of Charles II, restored  to the throne of England in 1660. Alternately a royal favourite, who was banished from court for causing offence and embarrassment to the monarch, the Earl’s poetry became better known after his death at the age of 33 years, due to his alcholism, provocative behaviour  and sexual proclivities. ‘The Libertine’ is by turns, serious and mocking, as it attempts to convince the audience of the pointlessness of the Earl’s adventures, since, as a man who does not believe in love, he can never be a romantic hero, but is, instead, a monster created from his own massive sexual appetites. He rejects absolutely, the  conventional society of which he is a part, but which he cannot bring himself to acknowledge. The women in his life, played by Rosamund Pike and Samantha Morton do their best to assuage the Earl’s debilitating fears and desperation, as he loses Charles’ support and begins a downward spiral of alcoholism and familial rejection, leading him eventually to death’s door. From this description, you may ascertain as to the lack of veracity of the argument that the Earl of Rochester had any interest in bettering the state of his society. (He certainly didn’t.)

Mock up of famous Avedon shot for the film

 Writers in 17^th century England struggled along as best they could, with a combination of royal patronage, and family money, as they were usually  high-born aristocrats who weren’t expected to work. This goes to show that a different context existed for the writer in the 17^th century. They did not exist for the betterment of society, but merely for its entertainment.  ‘The Libertine’ is  best described as an example of confessional biography. It deals with the Earl’s struggles with his inner demons and his desire for his work to gain some kind of acceptance, if not from the ‘merrie gang’ he socialises with,  then at least from his royal patron. ‘The Libertine’ is an excellent example of in-your-face confessional.  It’s an entertaining re-imagining of what it must have been like for a man with the Earl of Rochester’s intelligence to be penned by convention, and ultimately unable to come to grips with his innately creative nature and aspirations.  4 stars

Capote (2006). Directed by Bennett Miller, screenplay by Dan Futterman with material based upon the biography by Gerald Clarke. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives an understated but effective performance as Truman Capote who, whilst researching the murder of a family in Kansas, forges a relationship with one of the alleged killers, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jnr). Capote needs plenty of material for his book, but there’s something the killers aren’t giving away, and it’s the one thing he needs, but I have no intention of revealing  it, since it’s the moral pivot the movie revolves around.  Initially, I found ‘Capote’ puzzling. It’s pace is leisurely,  not hurried. The camera doesn’t seem to move much and there are many long takes with little MTV-variety cutting. It’s very lack of a judgmental narrative made me wonder exactly what the film was trying to say, or, on the other hand, trying to avoid saying. This elliptical approach was annoying at first, but then grows on you, as you begin to notice small gestures, and make connections which serve to illustrate Truman’s deepest feelings about the murders, and his ambivalent relationship with Perry.

Obscure purposes aside, ‘Capote’ is a fascinating journey concerning the nature of the artistic process, and the price it exacts upon writers, (but not only them),  aware that their words have the capacity to maybe hurt people, but go on writing anyway. The writer’s  public function in the 20^th century  as seekers after truth is blurred by the ongoing redundancy of popular culture. It chews up and spits out information, seemingly for the sake of it, with little or no thought for the lives that are detrimentally affected in the process, and one of the lives in this case, happens to be that of the writer himself.  ‘Capote’ is an elegant, and elegiac, examination of the writing process in microcosm, over a period of years in which the work is created, produced, introduced to the world and finally left to rest. Unfortunately, there is little left of the protagonists, or the creator, to live to tell the real tale. But at least it’s a good movie. 4 ½ stars

Barbarism From Whose Side: The Intellectuals or the Masses?

Review of ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ by Prof John Carey

T.S. Eliot sets out one of his plays as a diagram

 I found ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’  (as is often my wont) whilst browsing in a bookstore, uncertain of what subject I was interested in exploring further. Playing devil’s advocate with my own soul, I interpreted it on a very personal, and confrontational level. Giving myself more credit than I deserved, I felt I had reason to be offended by the premise of an elite group who did not have the noblest motives, in their desire for social and intellectual control of the rest of the population. But there are times when I am not the most accurate barometer of my own purposes. Rather, what this book did for me was to confirm my deepest fears about the nature of intellectualism itself. As a result, I have opened my eyes a little wider in order to observe that class-based societies are in and of themselves, evil, and intellectuals (of all political beliefs) only exist in order to create a consensus that permits  nasty things to occur without a stir or whimper from the rest of us. I grabbed onto this book for dear life, knowing full-well that it explored a decadent period of history in a far away place that I really didn’t have anything to do with. But the way it castigates these so-called great minds, who were deluded into thinking they were superior to everyone else,  appealed to my Australian sense of fairness, and I guess my own youthful sense of idealism.

Who else but D.H. Lawrence

‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’  is an excellent book which made me wonder about my taste in reading, and whether it had turned me into an right-wing intellectual snob, promoting  the benefits of eugenics and the advantages of having Adolf Hitler in power in Germany.  It seems that my literary heroes such as T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and H.G. Wells, in their attempts to pass themselves off as big brains,  were essentially  cold-blooded elitists who didn’t give a damn about the public -- or the term which I prefer, originally coined by Edmund Burke -- ‘the swinish multitudes’. Between 1880 and 1939, a yawning gulf existed between the upper and lower echelons of society in Britain as well as the rest of Europe and  Prof. Carey makes an entire book out of the fact.  A number of writers, despite a benign image of goodwill they fostered toward the rest of humanity, were merely a grubby and insalubrious group of elitist charlatans. They actively encouraged a vicious and reactionary mind-set of  perpetual and fatalistic class bias in order to have their privileged place within society unquestioned into  fruitful perpetuity. I had to investigate further.

Professor Carey aims  accusations against  Yeats, Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence among others. These accusations mainly concern the writers’ shabby treatment of those ‘not in the know’. Who these people are, Carey cannot ascertain, only that they are probably poor, living in the London suburbs, and attempting to make a paltry living at anything that their betters claim is not ‘art’, however their betters may define what ‘art’ is, exactly.  This lumpen mass of proletarians, or whatever you want to call them,  read newspapers and go to movies in an attempt to make sense of their limited lives. The fact that their lives are limited does not move the intellectuals  to  compassion. Instead, they react with outright condemnation. They complain that there are too many people in the world and believe that this creates a mass kind of culture that interferes with their livelihood and their belief in themselves as an intellectual elite.  To highbrows looking across the gulf, it seemed that the masses were not merely degraded and threatening, but also not fully alive. [1] p.10.

 The ‘science’ of eugenics was created as a means for writers such as Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot to bemoan the lack of an intellectual aristocracy of which they could be part, in order to stem the rise of the mediocre, and those they regarded as inferior and retarded. [2] p.13.  Instead of supporting the concept of universal education, the intellectuals did everything in their power to discourage and undermine it, tantamount to deliberately making their writing so obscure and irrational that it was almost impossible for anyone (presumably with or without an education),  to understand. [3] p.17.  The self-proclaimed theorist of Modernism, Spanish writer Ortega Y Gasset argued that modernist art acted like a social agent which separated people into two different castes, for the purpose of allowing the elite to distinguish themselves from the drab mass of society. [4] ibid.

The rest of the book is a well-researched and written argument that points to the elitism of a  number of revered writers and how such a mindset  can be directly linked to the rise of European totalitarianism and the persecution of the Jews.  The final chapter entitled ‘Wyndham Lewis and Hitler’ is a devastating critique on the similarities between Hitler’s ideas about culture and those of the English intellectuals of the same period. The Americans possessed cars, clothes and refrigerators, but the Third Reich boasted 270 opera houses, giving it the right to look down on American philistinism and crass materialism, an attitude shared by many English writers and intellectuals. [5]p. 198-99.

Wyndham Lewis was also a painter

 Needless to say, these attitudes seem antiquated to us today, and I was shocked at the pointedness of Carey’s attack on such writers as Lawrence and Yeats, who have been canonised for years by the universities, and our WASP first world society at large. I also had the same reaction when I once  wrote an essay on the life of German composer Richard Wagner. I was shocked to discover that he wrote anti-semitic pamphlets in his own lifetime, and also that his second wife flew the Nazi flag at their Bayreuth residence out of  admiration and support of Adolf Hitler, his rise to power which Wagner himself never lived to witness.

 I think that books and investigations of this kind have the capacity to inherently change the way we think about the people whom we view  as having a talent that is somehow unique, and superior to anything we would be capable of doing ourselves. I recall wading through the letters of outrage published in the Age Monthly Review from readers who were convinced that these accusations of Wagner being an unattractive individual -- at the very least -- were not only superfluous when it came to judging his music, but downright slanderous, that is, if Wagner had been alive to answer to them. With time however, this new information becomes accepted as part of the textual rendering of the person’s life.  It becomes  possible for any individual interested enough to either accept this new information as fact, or deny it for their own personal reasons. To accuse the investigator of being intolerant of the person in question’s own beliefs or the times in which he lived, or  attempting to  be too politically correct. cannot stand up if the information is well researched and argued in a convincing way. I believe this is the case with Cary’s book.

 ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ galvanised me in its own way, concerning the nature of social elites, their purpose, and the people we inadvertently choose to rule over us.

My footnotes are taken from 'The Intellectuals and the Masses' by John Carey, London, Faber & Faber, 1992.

The Intellectuals and the Masses