Albert Jay Nock, Superfluous Man

In 1910, Albert Jay Nock, then 40, joined the American Magazine. His writings, unusually good, were his best credential. Otherwise, no one knew much about him. Nock described himself when he wrote of Thomas Jefferson as "the most approachable and the most impenetrable of men, easy and delightful of acquaintance, impossible of knowledge."

His secrecy achieves epic grandeur in his brilliant autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943). He does not disclose the place and date of his birth (Scranton, 1870), the names of his parents or the occupation of his father (Joseph Albert Nock, an Episcopal clergyman, and Emma Jay, a descendant of John Jay), the name of his college (St. Stephen's College, now Bard), his 12 years as an Episcopal priest, his failed marriage (he left his wife after his second son was born in 1905) or his brief career in minor league baseball. He felt such information was unnecessary. Memoirs was a "purely literary and philosophical autobiography," noted the book's publisher. A reader might know Nock's mind through his work without needing to know him.

To our culture, Nock's secrecy is unnerving. When he worked for The Nation during World War I, he refused to provide his superiors with his home address. During the early 20s, when he was editing The Freeman, a peer of H.L. Mencken's The American Mercury, Harold Ross' The New Yorker and Frank Crowninshield's Vanity Fair for consistently brilliant writing, his editorial staff believed, according to his literary editor, Van Wyck Brooks, that Nock could be contacted outside the office only by leaving a note under a certain rock in Central Park. Nock read by the age of three. He taught himself in his father's library until he was eight, when he began studying Latin and Greek with some slight assistance from his father. At 14 he began formal classical studies while developing his taste for Latin, Greek, German beer and the local "alfalfa-fed" girls. Then he went to St. Stephen's. According to Nock, the college was, outside of certain Jesuit institutions, "possibly the last in America to stick by the grand old fortifying classical curriculum." At graduation, Nock felt himself prepared for living, albeit in proud ignorance of the natural sciences since Aristotle, Theophrastus and Pliny, or any history since 1500 AD, including that of the United States. His education, he believed, had left him without a "lumber of prepossession or formula to be cleared away."

Nock then bounced among universities, receiving an advanced degree almost by accident, and played minor league baseball. He was ordained in 1897 and served in various parishes until he left the priesthood in 1909. As a journeyman muckraker in New York, Nock wrote memorably about William Wirt's experiments in progressive education in Gary, IN, and the lynching of an African-American millworker in Coatesville, PA. He knew offbeat reform politicians, including New York Gov. Martin Glynn and Mayors William J. Gaynor of New York and Brand Whitlock of Toledo, OH.

In 1915, during the first year of WWI, Nock traveled to Europe as an agent of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. According to Michael Wreszin's critical Nock biography The Superfluous Anarchist, Nock was to investigate State Dept. employees' surreptitious cooperation with British agents. Apparently, Bryan had no one else he could trust. However, Nock returned to America on Bryan's sudden resignation on June 9, 1915. What he found and would have told Bryan is unknown.

Nock then worked for The Nation, which so strongly opposed American intervention that the government closed it down. In 1920, he organized The Freeman, which he intended as a radical publication. Great editors inspire great magazines. Nock claimed only two gifts as an executive. One was judgment of ability: he claimed, "I can smell out talent as quickly and unerringly as a high-bred pointer can smell out a partridge." The other was his belief that "a good executive's job is to do nothing, and [one] can't set about it too soon or stick to it too faithfully." Nock never gave orders, assigned subjects or set general policy. He sought merely writers (1) with a definite point of view, (2) stated clearly, (3) using "eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English." He told one would-be contributor, "Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that?glad to have it."

Nevertheless, the paper had a distinct point of view. When The Nation welcomed The Freeman to "the ranks of liberal journalism," Nock replied that he didn't want to seem ungrateful, "but we hain't liberal. We loathes liberalism and loathes it hard..."

Within two years, success became a bore. On Feb. 10, 1924, after an extended sick leave and a dispute with his backers, Nock announced the magazine would fold with the issue of March 4, 1924. A day later, he sailed for Brussels, his favorite city, where he largely remained for 15 years. In 1926, Nock published Jefferson, the first of three biographical studies that occupied him for the next 13 years. The author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, dismissively suggested Nock had created a Jefferson with the inner vision, aspiration and values of Albert Jay Nock. Nonetheless, the critics found it "provocative and insightful" and "sparkling, charming, witty, and all the other adjectives inevitably called forth by Nock's inimitable prose style."

After lecturing on education at Bard College and the University of Virginia, Nock published The Theory of Education in the United States (1932). To Nock, education was a preparation for living, to see things as they are. Getting a living is merely a question of training. Few are educable; all can be trained. Certain intellectual and spiritual experiences are open to some and not to others. To Nock, this was simply a fact of nature, such as one's height. He argued the distinction of education and training had been destroyed because the meanings of equality and democracy had been perverted. The first now meant "the rabid self-assertion...of ignorance and vulgarity." Similarly, as he later wrote in Memoirs, "...the prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. Hence, despite human experience, everybody must be educable."

Nock's intellectual framework shifted in 1932 when the self-professed radical and Jeffersonian stopped believing in the improvability of man. This was catalyzed by Ralph Adams Cram, a distinguished architect, whose essay, "Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings," appeared in the September 1932 issue of The American Mercury. Cram's reputation as an architect (he redesigned the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights) obscures his social criticism. In his essay, he argued most men did not behave like human beings because they were not human. They were Neolithic barbarians with delusions of grandeur. The doctrine of progress?that the most recent stage of human development was superior to earlier stages?was unsupported by recorded history. Cram argued that anthropologists had erroneously categorized all men as human. The distinction between the mob (Nock's "mass-men") and the few who were a glory to the human race (Nock's "Remnant") was greater than that between the mob and certain higher anthropoids.

Nock soon professed his new faith. He wrote of momentary distress at seeing a man scavenging in a garbage pail. A few minutes later, he was undisturbed at seeing a dog do the same thing. Then he realized his erroneous presumption: that the man was a human being, rather than merely a man. Now, he no longer found any anomaly in a man's behaving as a brute and not as a human being.

Oddly, he claimed he no longer hated anyone or lost patience with anybody. He wrote in Memoirs, "One has great affection for one's dogs, even when one sees them reveling in tastes and smells which to us are unspeakably odious... One can hate human beings...but one can't hate subhuman creatures, or be contemptuous of them, wish them ill, regard them unkindly... If cattle tramp down your garden, you drive them away but can't hate them, for you know they are acting up to the measure of their psychical capacity... The mass-men who are princes, presidents, politicians, legislators, can no more transcend their psychical capacities than any wolf, fox, or polecat in the land. How, then, is one to hate them, notwithstanding the appalling evil they do?"

In this frame of mind, he wrote Our Enemy, the State (1935). Nock saw the state as antisocial, commandeered by one group or another of "mass-men" to legalize their appropriation of the product of others' work without compensation. Revolutions merely reapportioned "the use of the political means" for such exploitation. He argued that most liberal reforms, such as the income tax, merely enhanced state power to further exploitation. If "Communism, the New Deal, Fascism, Nazism, are merely so many trade names for collectivist Statism," he asked, why should one think more of Roosevelt than of Hitler?

From 1933 to 1939, Nock contributed a current affairs column, "The State of the Union," to The American Mercury. He consistently assaulted the New Deal's swineries, both foreign and domestic, and after 1936, argued American foreign policy was conducted to provoke war. In 1941, he published "The Jewish Question in America," a two-part article in the Atlantic Monthly. Wreszin calls it "subtle and restrained." Indeed, the prose is elegantly polished; the tone is serenely analytical; the venue is respectable; and the argument favors excluding the Jews through apartheid. Nock claims, as Wreszin says, "that he wished to launch a meaningful dialogue whereby intelligent Americans might probe the bigotry that infested not merely the lower orders but all society..." He claims to be charting "quicksands and rock formations so the piers of some future structure might be secure."

He argues that Jews, being Orientals, cannot understand or communicate with Americans, who are Occidental. He suggests the Jews have failed to know their place, and anticipates seeing the "Nuremberg Laws reenacted and enforced with vigor." Finally, Nock dismisses criticism by claiming Jews would be peculiarly unable to understand his meaning.

Thereafter, fewer editors accepted Nock's articles. He appeared in Scribner's Commentator, an odd collection of general essays and Nazi apologia, until its publisher closed it down after Pearl Harbor. Finally, he was reduced to reviewing books in the Review of Books, published by Merwin K. Hart's National Economic Council, a front for the few rightists openly opposed to the war after Pearl Harbor.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man appeared in 1943 to great praise. Clifton Fadiman, that most energetic of second-rank men of letters, wrote, "I have not since the days of the early Mencken read a more eloquently written blast against democracy or enjoyed more fully a display of crusted prejudice. Mr. Nock is a highly civilized man who does not like our civilization and will have no part of it. He is a rare bird, one of an almost extinct species, and as he very properly puts it, a superfluous man. We are not apt to see his like again." The New York Herald Tribune's Isabel Paterson wrote, "Whether for instruction or for entertainment, this is a unique book, of instant timeliness and permanent value."

In Memoirs, published two years before his death, Nock wrote of being asked what he thought were the three most degrading occupations open to man. He replied that the first was holding office in a modern republic. The second was editing an American metropolitan newspaper. As for the third, he was unsure whether it was pimping or managing a whorehouse. He died on Aug. 19, 1945, 10 days after the bombing of Nagasaki.