The Third Journalist

TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE by Renata Adler. 259 pages. Random House. $7.95.

The Old Journalism examined the handwriting on the wall. The New Journalism writes on the wall. But there is a Third Journalism whose sole preoccupation is the wall itself--the texture and structure of society. Its practitioners suffer an absence of dazzle, and their egos--like poltergeists--throw no shadow at all. But once a specific event has passed, it is their witness that shows the most significant truths and the fewest signs of age.

Renata Adler is a Third Journalist. "I guess I am part of an age group [she is 32] that, through being skipped, through never having had a generational voice, was forced into the broadest possible America," she writes. "In a way, in culture and in politics, we are the last custodians of language--because of the books we read and because history, in our time, has wrung so many changes on the meaning of terms and we, having never generationally perpetrated anything, have no commitment to any distortion of them."

Luck and Tendencies. Such a passage could be interpreted as an apologia for the Silent Generation's chill neutralities. But George Orwell--another Third Journalist--would have understood that her commitment is a virtuous aversion to political language "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Like Orwell, Adler refuses the facile role of advocate or judge. In the trial of history she is simply a friend of the court. Luck and journalistic instinct informed her of tendencies just before they became movements. She was with Martin Luther King in Selma and Stokely Carmichael in Mississippi. She was in Israel during the Six-Day War, and in Chicago for an initial New Left conference.

Each account in this collection of 14 previously published pieces is fused with a quiet irony, as when she observes that whatever the rhetoric of the black militants, white supremacy has yet to see its first martyr. Her criticism is no less saline. Neither the Grand Existentialist nor his angel manque can ever be the same after this Adlerian analysis: Sartre "allows Genet only the leap of accepting his destiny, of willing what is in fact the case. And to will what is the case is the essence of a staid Conservative position, so that Genet, when Sartre gets through with him, is not a rebel but a bureaucrat, doing the job Fate has assigned him."

Premonitory Power. Educated at the Sorbonne by Claude Levi-Strauss and armed with an encyclopedic historical knowledge, Renata Adler refuses to allow her writing to slant. The Susan Sontagalongs land at Hanoi or at the movies, seeking a geometry for their preformed conclusions. The Mary McCarthyites seem to go against the grain simply because it is there. Adler maintains a gyroscopic balance--and gets the work done. That work, at its best, has a premonitory power. The best article is last, a report on the National New Politics Convention in Chicago. Gouts of words, pollutions of principle, corrosions of politics all characterized the convention, which began in choral rage and ended with internecine squeals. Adler records it all, more in sorrow than anger. It was in Chicago that it all began to cohere--the demands for reparations, the open insults to Martin Luther King, the bifurcation of white radicals and black separatists, the totalitarian language. As the conference deteriorated into violent poses and elliptical rhetoric, Adler crystallizes the radical tragedy: "A movement born out of a corruption of the vocabulary of civil rights--pre-empting the terms that belonged to a truly oppressed minority and applying them to the situation of some bored children committed to choosing what intellectual morsels they liked from the buffet of life --now luxuriated in the cool political vocabulary, while the urban civil rights movement, having nearly abandoned its access to the power structure, thrashed about in paroxysms of self-destruction. Both had become so simplistically opposed to order of any kind that society may become simplistic and repressive in dealing with them." And that was in 1967.

The radical middle, according to Adler, is a consciousness of "something infinitely fragile and viable in the System, in its accommodations with radicals, rednecks, soldiers, blacks, thinkers, visionaries, lunatics, the ordinary." Unhappily, Toward a Radical Middle ends before the '60s do; there are many events that go without Adler's precise vision and formidable diction. They may be forthcoming. After a stretch as the New York Times film critic--a period she justifiably describes as "a year in the dark"--she resigned "to do occasional articles." It is to be hoped that the occasions will occur frequently. There is a vast no man's land between Walter Cronkite and Norman Mailer. Renata Adler is just the right woman to fill it.

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