Benjamin DeMott

The Uses of the Rothermans

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Originally published in “New Mexico Quarterly” in 1953.

I was eleven when my uncle closed with the Rothermans. This was 1933, in a village on the south shore of Long Island that is now pure metropolis and that was then becoming a suburb. My uncle’s family and my sister and I (our parents were killed in an auto accident in the mid-twenties) had moved short­ly before from a great, white-pillared, Georgian house that faced the new golf course. The vicissitudes of a stock called Vanadium were the cause of the move: the house, the Lincolns, Robb (the former dumptruck driver who chauffeured them), Anna and Maria, illiterate German housemaids in their teens, help that had been pressed a year before from “The Daisy Huggub Agency” in Hempstead, and some other ill-chosen earnests of marginal gain — all were let go at once. The Georgian house, a product of my uncle’s massive pride, was sold to the Jewish owner of a chain of retail jewelry stores.

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Hells and Benefits (Benjamin DeMott on Sexology in the Seventies)

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Originally published in The Atlantic in 1975.

Are sexologists dumb? I’ll admit that’s an impolite question—and I’ll also admit that a little of my skepticism of the sexological tribe stems from irrelevant literary fastidiousness. Sex researchers and commentators sooner or later “bring in” a poet or two to decorate or amplify their arguments, and depressingly often, they misquote what they’ve appropriated or otherwise deface it. (One recent volume includes the following remark: . . [we] realize that, in a paraphrase of John Donne, the unsatisfied metaneeds of any group within a community weaken that community and reduce the chances of all its members of reaching their full potential.” Of what in hell could these words be a paraphrase?)

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Character of the Assassin

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The author wrote this right after JFK’s assassination, finishing it on the day Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby. It was published in The New York Review of Books and in the essay collection, You Don’t Say (1966).

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Hanging out with Horses (in the 80s)

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THERE WERE A HALF-DOZEN wonderful family shots in our batch of holiday Polaroids — but so far I’ve had eyes for only one picture in the pile. It shows Tom, our older boy, and my wife holding a horse, with James, our grandson, in the saddle, steadied by myself, Granddad. A New Yorker, 3 years old, James hasn’t been on a horse before. He’s looking at the camera, not at us, or at Terence — Terence is the horse — but what is his expression? I keep coming back to the shot, trying to read James’s face. Is he enjoying himself? Is he the kind of kid who, a bit older, will think it’s cool — or whatever they will say then — to spend a horsy summer in the Berkshire hills?

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Whitewash as Public Service

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The following takedown of The 9/11 Commission Report by the late Benjamin DeMott first appeared in 2004 in Harper’s Magazine. DeMott’s essay remains vital because it’s an act of imagination as well as an act of protest.

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Gentlemen of Principle, Priests of Presumption

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The following piece—originally written in the early 70s for a UK anthology (Approaches to Popular Culture) culminates with a celebration of Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.” Levine mused (a few years ago) that the essay was “so moving and so relevant”: “It should be reprinted somewhere…”

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Indispensable Men

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A 70’s piece on The Uses of James Baldwin by Benjamin DeMott takes on a new resonance after a viewing of No Direction Home. Baldwin figures in the Dylan documentary because he was a presence in Greenwich Village during the 50s and 60s, but these two bohemian culture heroes shared more than a social context as the opening lines of DeMott’s article suggest:

Pity spokesman: their lot is hard. The movement of their ideas is looked at differently, studied for clues and confirmations, seems unindividual – less a result of personal growth than of cultural upsurge.

DeMott defined a range of difficulties faced by any artist who went public in the 60s including one problem having “to do with expense of spirit”:

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