This is my 1000th post at the die is cast, and what better way to celebrate than a review of a 50 year-old book that has nothing to do with gambling or Las Vegas? Suffice it to say that I’m just not a centralist. You don’t know what that means yet, but if you go ahead and read the review, you will.
Alan Harrington. The Revelations of Dr. Modesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. 256 pp, hardcover.
Fittingly, I have no idea how I acquired this book. I might have bought it at a thrift store, though it doesn’t have a price written on it, or snatched it off a library discard cart, though it doesn’t have any cataloging stamp. But a few days ago I saw it sitting on my shelf and said “Hey, you’ve been working pretty hard. Why not take a break and read something fun?”
I wasn’t sure what to expect–perhaps it would be the tale of a super-hero or super-villain based in Central California. What I got was a novel that’s thin on plot but very, very thick with meaning in a 1950s pop psychology meets “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” sort of way.
The Revelations starts as the tale of Hal Hingham, a life insurance salesman in his late twenties who is curiously lifeless. He can’t sell a policy to save his life and only got his job because his deceased father had been a star agent for Arcadia, the firm he works for. He doesn’t really like his girlfriend Rose, and she’s ambivalent about him. Everywhere he goes, he feels outcast and abused.
But then he read a small ad in the back of Popular Technix magazine advertising a system called “Centralism.” He sends $7 to an address in Broad View, Nebraska, and can’t wait to learn more.
In the interim, he meets with his boss, Fred Purdy, who tells him that his job and his life are completely unimportant, and that nothing in the world had a higher purpose. The best approach, he counseled, was to embrace “unbelief,” which “frees a man for action.” Treat life like a game, and have fun! This doesn’t help Hingham much, and when he finally receives his copy of The Revelations of Dr. Modesto, he eagerly devours it.
The good doctor’s manifesto is presented as a 22-page book within the book, also called The Revelations of Dr. Modesto. In it, Modesto recounts his life story, then espouses the principles of centralism. There are thirty key points to the philosophy, but they boil down to:
1. You personality is annoying to other people, so get rid of it; never be yourself.
2. In fact, have no self at all–just become the average of everything around you: the Central Man.
3. Always “live centrally,” as close to the middle of town as possible, sit in the center of all group photos, and surround yourself with the crowd.
4. Adopt their beliefs whole-heartedly: “give your loyalty to any popular cause in the vicinity. And give it in precisely half-measure, depending on what your neighbors believe.”
5. The Centralist must be totally amoral, following only the whim of the crowd.
6. Play centrally, too: Never be a champion or a pushover, and always lose out in the middle rounds of any tournament.
7. Give up any thought of Love, but instead only appear to love by mirroring your significant other.
“Modest, safe, and sure,” lies the way to power, Modesto writes. He proposes to raise a “massive nothing in the heart of the United States of America. Some might say that his philosophy is unprincipled. But what, he asks, have principles gotten the misfits? Science, in fact, is disproving all of those principles.
Reconditioned as a Centralist, Hingham becomes a star salesman and reconnects with his Rose. But he is a victim of his own success: like Icarus, he flies too high and meets disaster. Hingham makes such a dramatic turnaround that his boss decides to showcase him at an upcoming life insurance convention, and Rose learns that having a fiancee who does everything you’ve ever dreamed of is a little creepy, particularly when he follows the same script again and again.
From there, the novel takes a few turns, as Hingham runs into Merko, the Human Fly, who reads Schopenhauer and confronts any obstacles (including gravity) with sheer will, and Johnny Swan, a conniving publicist. At the end, the reader may share Hingham’s desire to grasp at straws of meaning in a confusing, mercenary world.
The book’s real significance is as an artifact of the 1950s. Hingham represents the underside of the Organization Man. He’s an insignificant misfit, and can’t even be a cog in the bigger corporate machine. Sexual and particularly romantic love are debilitating–every character is, as Harrington paints them, corrupted or weakened by their attachments to others. One woman looks forward to an awful marriage as self-punishment for her own hubris, and the publicist Swann is undone by his lust for Rose’s voluptuous blonde room-mate.
This book shows a bleak world where the individualist has no part. So on one level, the book could be a critique of any kind of collectivism or any political movement that asks its followers to bury themselves in the will of the people, or the Fatherland. Revelations was written just after World War II, with the specters of both fascism and communism still very real. A man who follows the crowd has, at his center, only a mirror, and no soul.
It also might be a cautionary tale: the Centralist as Harrington describes him sounds much like a politician, trying to be everything to everyone. A guy who has not one lucky charm, but a whole closet-full that he picks from to satisfy the mood of the day’s special interest group is, basically, a Centralist. The only way to get elected is to stand for nothing.
The Revelations of Dr. Modesto is a very strange book. It’s not exactly a page-turner, though it’s a quick read. The philosophy seems out of a bizarre mirror universe but in fact isn’t that far off the mark. It’s an interesting read, if you approach it in the right mood.