American Notebook To Hell With Culture
Kramer, Hilton
Despite all the claims and complaints to the contrary, it now looks as if the 1950's will go down as one of the most barren decades in American criticism. For nearly ten years the...
...We lack a new term to describe their collective character and social function, partly be cause of our unwillingness to admit that the avant-garde is a thing of the past and partly because the new phenomenon is itself so baffling when approached by way of historical categories which apply only to this celebrated past...
...In particular, I find his discussion of the avant-garde quite as irrelevant to the living literary situation of the 1950's as the remarks of Brooks which he properly disputes...
...See also "The Article as Art" by Norman Podhoretz, Harper's Magazine, July, 1958...
...It was precisely this alliance of interests which gave Edmund Wilson his distinction as a critic, and it was the source of Partisan Review's authority during the forties when it still wielded power in the sphere of ideas...
...Chase's book...
...Now this may by no means be the case...
...Their relation is ambiguous, sometimes accidental, occasionally programmatic, but it can scarcely be assumed that their interests are identical...
...He has taken no trouble to make this term, already so fashionable and abused, more precise in its historical and critical meaning...
...IN THE CONTEXT of this critical swindle, Richard Chase's new book, The Democratic Vista,* takes on a special importance...
...In this universe, "radicalism" and "avantgarde" are dreams from which one never quite awakens and in which one never quite believes...
...In this dialogue we have a true picture of the sophisticated literary professors of the the fifties, with their soiled diapers and damp ironies, groping in the sacred canons of the past for some clue to the meaning of the present, yet utterly unprepared to face the present in its bewildering reality...
...What emerges from The Democratic Vista is not an incisive declaration of the radical role, but something else, something infinitely more depressing...
...Moreover, it is at least arguable that under "modern" conditions—I would say since the thirties, but certainly since 1945—it has no longer been possible for an avant-garde to exist...
...As a mode of criticism, it is an ideological strategem which enables the critic to maintain his status as a highbrow long after he has mortgaged everything but his rhetoric to the functions of middlebrow expediency...
...For their defense against the present they have the magnificent edifice of their "cultural" hallucinations—an unreal universe in which art, politics, and the rumpled suburban bed all shimmer with "meanings" of equal importance and equal inconsequence...
...I hasten to add that we are by no means without writers and artists of great distinction and accomplishment, but it is selfdefeating to speak of them as members of an avant-garde...
...The leading image of the day is a sort of mystic centrality, an equability of mind...
...While the sheer quantity of criticism has been prodigious, there has been a fundamental decline in seriousness...
...Without an interest in political theory, and indifferent to rigorous intellectual and artistic values, it has abandoned itself entirely to the hum and buzz of so-called "culture...
...He stands to the left, as it were, of Trilling (but then, who doesn't...
...No doubt this is an honorable form, but one questions the validity of reshaping published magazine articles, in which the writer was presumably speaking in his own voice, into dialogues in which the same remarks are assigned to differing points of view...
...As for politics, they have sociology instead— a literary sociology which invites no social action and which is second only to psychoanalysis in providing moral alibis...
...Only once does he touch on recent literature—and then it is literature of the forties, not the fifties—and this passing reference (which I shall return to presently) reveals the fundamental confusion of his thinking on the subject...
...This is only one instance—I think the crucial one—in which Mr...
...Chase has been at no pains to make distinctions between the radical and avant-garde imperatives, and I am afraid the answer is that from the point of view of middlebrowism there are no differences...
...Fending its way among political shibboleths, psychoanalytic cant, and works of literature and sub-literature...
...Chase is without a coherent idea of the meaning of avant-garde, and yet the avant-garde is central to his program (if that is the word) for a cultural radicalism...
...We finish The Democratic Vista with no firmer sense of political possibility nor of artistic values, for both are drowned in the "cultural" bath...
...Now this statement comes very close to being nonsense...
...Chase brings together six speakers on a September week end at the Massachusetts seashore...
...It serves only too well in getting its author off the hook whenever he is called upon to do some hard work at the theoretical level...
...Guilt-ridden by its failure to do justice to the artists of the past, it has reached out to new generations of writers and artists with an embrace which has now become a stranglehold...
...Now I do not count it a virtue in a work of this order that its form imposes at once an obstacle and a query...
...The fact of the matter is that since 1945 bourgeois society has tightened its grip on all the arts by allowing them a freer rein...
...By speaking of the "critical function" of the avant-garde, Mr...
...I agree only with the diagnosis...
...as Mr...
...Chase has chosen to cast his book in the form of a dialogue...
...3.95...
...A lively "cultural" approach to literature is now the favored practice among those bright younger critics who have seen at a glance that the mileage has run out on the close reading of texts...
...With this self-inflicted noise in its ears, it approaches questions which can only be significantly phrased—not to say, answered!—within the intellectual disciplines which it has dropped along the way...
...Chase outlines it, it is less a task than an emotion, a vague ache of the heart which one feels but does not act upon in any precise way...
...This may seem like very narrow ground from which to issue an invitation to cultural radicalism, the ostensible purpose of this book...
...The search for a middle way of culture is in certain radically significant ways a denial and abandonment of the cultural ideals of the American mind of the past, as this mind is mirrored in our most characteristic historical figures and in our most characteristic and original literature...
...Trilling himself could not improve on it...
...Chase never moves his discussion beyond the points which I have quoted above...
...They are dreams which relieve one from the necessity of dealing with the new experience— the new art, and the new politics—of our period...
...Chase's silence on this question is astonishing when one considers that it has a special importance for American intellectuals...
...Two quotations from Mr...
...Chase's refusal to distinguish between creative achievements and the writings of literary journalists is another demonstration of the literary decline of the fifties.* It is apposite to his inability to define the avant-garde in any meaningful way, for the fundamental difference between the work of art and a discourse on literary subjects seems lost on him...
...Thus, Professor Headstrong declares: "In its critical function it [i.e., the avant-garde] is wherever anyone is trying to give a true account of the history and nature of our civilization...
...Thus, the "Letters" of the book's sub-title refers not to the creative literature of our own period but to what the college catalogues call "American Studies...
...The fact is that Mr...
...Chase reveals himself to be writing about this question from within the middlebrow camp itself.* * Another evidence of this middlebrow bias is Mr...
...his dialogue is set: "The spirit of the We've read quite a few books of this place is no longer avant-garde—I mean, description lately, but this is the first what I like about it is that it has all which comes in the name of a radical the comforts of home and some of the criticism...
...Among the most perceptible observers of American life the most influential are those who (1) tell us that our culture has always been marked by striking differences, even outright contradictions, of taste and low culture, and (2) view this split with alarm and advocate a middle ground in which contradictions and differences may be reconciled...
...Chase arrives in the end at exactly the same impasse as his Columbia colleagues: like them, he can only address himself to a void which he is pleased to call "culture...
...its creative function...
...Chase conspicuously fails to do) between creative artists like Bellow, Lowell, Ellison, and the writings of literary critics and journalists...
...I doubt if we can use this term to cover so many diverse groups and still have it retain any precise historical meaning...
...Chase wants to sweeten this bath with the scent of radicalism, but it is merely a vapor...
...The spirit of Mr...
...Despite all the claims and complaints to the contrary, it now looks as if the 1950's will go down as one of the most barren decades in American criticism...
...Chase suggest a claim for recent literary accomplish...
...The assumption is that they are somehow congenial in their historical objectives if not precisely identical in their contemporary interests...
...They talk about "current psychological, moral, political, sexual, lit erary, and other matters," and the talk —most of it between the middle-aged professor, Ralph Headstrong, and the graduate student, George Middlebyis pretty much what you would expect a Columbia professor and graduate student to be talking about during a week end in the country: Walt Whitman and Henry James, William Dean Howells and Henry Adams, the early Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson, D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature and de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and the rest of the books which used to be on Trilling's reading list for his graduate course in American literature...
...Yet, he shares the academic ethos, the reticence and parochialism, the political hesitations and artistic compromise, which characterize his colleagues...
...Mr...
...The rest is a garrulous exchange about what "our best writers and thinkers have always done" and some facile references to the life of the mind as it struggles amidst the impedimenta of modern domestic duties...
...Chase is part of the Columbia community from which this "cultural approach" originates, and he has lately shown an engaging willingness to reconsider the radical option on which his colleagues have turned their backs with such finality...
...Such a critic would be brave indeed, but let us hope that he would begin by making some distinction (as Mr...
...Their precise relation— and its modifications from country to country, and from decade to decade—is indeed one of the richest questions in modern intellectual history, and a magnificent book could be written on the subject...
...lumbia alumni, he is practically an agent provocateur...
...Chase's book is very like the house in which restful atmosphere of a museum...
...In relation to the conservatism of recent Co * The Democratic Vista: A Dialogue on Life and Letters in Contemporary America, by Richard Chase...
...It shares with most of the serious fiction and poetry of the decade a diminished sense of the power of art, and a sense of politics so relaxed as to be indistinguishable from lassitude...
...Chase's farcical suggestionthat Chaucer and Montaigne are middlebrows whereas the gloomy Pascal is ahighbrow...
...The unintimidated criticis still wanting who will prove brave enough to defend a decadewhich saw the emergence of writers like Saul Bellow, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Ralph Ellison, Alfred Kazin, Isaac Rosenfeld, MaryMcCarthy, and Leslie Fiedler among many others—a decade which, furthermore, if it was too academic, nevertheless came to understand American culture and its "usable past" much more accurately than they were ever understood before...
...Once we find ourselves in a situation, as we do today, in which society has assigned vast bureaucracies to the task of seeking out and exploiting the last word in all the arts, and when the artists themselves have joined as eager accomplices in this orgy of self-exploitation —in this situation, I think it is mere piety to deny that the avant-garde is dead...
...The last book of any real, intellectual urgency was Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, published in 1950 but essentially a document of the forties— the most brilliant document we have of the cultivated liberal mind recoiling from its radical inclinations in the face of the Cold War...
...I think it adds nothing to our understanding of the Russian novelists, for example, to confuse their status as part of the Russian intelligentsia with the notion of the avantgarde...
...I can only reply that under modern conditions the avant-garde is a permanent movement...
...His mind moves backwards in literary history...
...Chase will perhaps give his justification for it...
...However one may write the history of the avantgarde in the last hundred years, it cannot be made to conform to the history of radicalism in the same period...
...It is thus heavy on professorial irony and rather light on intellectual subtleties...
...The distance between Trilling's Columbia seminars and the pages of Harper's is now a straight line...
...ment...
...The chief consequence of the dialogue form in The Democratic Vista is the blurring of issues...
...It longs for a time, not of explicit political and artistic tasks but for a period when these tasks were conveniently confused with each other...
...Just as the "Life" of the sub-title refers to life on a college campus and the suburban environs...
...Chase gives one the impression that for him the avant-garde is synonymous with any kind of literary excellence during the last century and a half...
...Only once does Mr...
...ONE OF THE CONSEQUENCES of this distance is that while Mr...
...Chase fails in the two tasks which might have justified his use of the form: he has been unable to bring to it a distinguished literary style, and he has suffered a loss of incisiveness in transforming his magazine pieces into something more pretentious...
...This means that Mr...
...THE FACT IS that Mr...
...The concept of "culture" has now become the last refuge of the liberal mind...
...In any case, Mr...
...But what is this "culture" which is so fondly invoked, so handsomely worried over, and in the end so utterly supported by the liberal critics...
...Russian literature did not have an avant-garde in the Western European sense until the Symbolist movement of the nineties...
...Mr...
...Frightened perhaps by the demands which celebrated generations of avant-garde writers allowed art to make on their lives, the writers of the fifties have domesticated their sense of literary mission to a neat, manageable size...
...For nearly ten years the intellectual energy and artistic commitment of our critics have been diminishing...
...it is completely at home with the celebrated figures of American literature and it has many original points to make about them, but it always keeps a safe distance from the present...
...Chase manages straightaway to beg the question, which is (need one add...
...It was this alliance which Trilling successfully challenged in The Liberal Imagination...
...And unlike the explica tion of texts, the "cultural" approach has obvious advantages—namely, a career in middle-brow journalism...
...Notwithstanding all his ironiesand qualifications on this score, it is ajudgment which could not be improved on by Van Wyck Brooks himself, early or late...
...FOR xts DIALOGUE, Mr...
...This middle view of things find a sanction at its best in the tragic sense of life and in the inherited common sense of the race...
...But then, as if this weren't imprecise enough, he also wants to give it a political slant...
...I think we have to ask why Mr...
...Doubleday Anchor Books, New York...
...Criticism has thus conformed to the general literary decline of the period...
...this is the paragraph in its entirety: The literary academicism of the 1940's was on the whole a fairly tame movement, although I cannotrefrain from expressing my feeling that that period has been muchmaligned...
...At various times he applies it to Wordsworth and Coleridge, to the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, and to the modernist poets of Europe and America...
...in both cases it is Professor Headstrong who is speaking: I start with the proposition that in our time there is a general drive, in all segments of our culture, to ward some sort of middle ground of taste and opinion, a general desire for passivity and rest and conformity, a fear of the turmoil of the mind, a longing to escape conflict, a longing to assuage all the vivid contradictions and anomalies that in the past have engaged the American mind...
...Without conviction in the power of art or the reality of politics, criticism has given itself over to "culture...
...Unlike his Columbia colleagues, Mr...
...Its primacy derives above all from the fact that an uneasy and often contradictory alliance of radical political interests and avant garde artistic taste formed the prevailing intellectual style in this country during the decade and a half preceding the advent of the Cold War, which finally shattered it...
...It makes few demands on them, and with a tactful reciprocity, they in turn make very few demands on art...
...Like most people nowadays, you think the avant-garde is dead...
...One is unclear about what specific tasks it would perform...
...Its most noticeable manifestation is the smothering orthodoxy and conformism of the Eisenhower Age...
...Chase is firm in his attack on middlebrow culture, he is curiously vague about the content of highbrow culture...
...By the late forties it had become an accepted and unexamined idea, no longer in touch with the creative and political realities of its time, and it could offer no defense against the first incisive blow to its prestige...
...In discussing The Democratic Vista, one must first confront its peculiar form...
...in the fifties he has only succeeded in polishing his style, widening his influence, and refining his distaste for avant-garde literature in the European sense (for that, too, was considered a form of radicalism...
...Occasionally they touch, more often they clash...
...His book is thus the first I know to be written out of an implicit nostalgia, not for the thirties —don't let that talk of radicalism fool you—but for the forties...
...Our criticism at large has degenerated into a helpless confession of boredom with the present condition of literature, or, what is worse, an undisguised effort to exploit the postures of criticism in the interests of middlebrow careerism...
...Chase leaves this idea in its unexamined state...
...He leaves his notion of cultural radicalism—like so many other things in his book—conveniently undeveloped...
...There is much talk in his book about radicalism and the avant-garde, but there is only silence on their relation...
...The Democratic Vista shows us what happens to this narrow liberal sensibility when it suddenly reawakens to its radical past...
...shopping for objects of interests—up-todate, but not too demanding—like a housewife putting together a smart menu out of the deep freeze, this new "cultural" criticism addresses itself to a "culture" which is oddly without content, a "culture" which looks more and more like a projection of the criticism which is ostensibly written to clarify it...
...Everything in our economy and in the social organization of the arts conspires against the privacy and independence which would be indispensible if the spirit of the avant-garde were to survive...
...At its worst, it finds a sanction in mere complacency, laziness of mind, fear of extreme ideas and feelings...
...The result is a book of great interest, but a book which confirms what has often been alleged: that liberal doctrine as it is now constituted is incapable of addressing itself to 'fundamental questions...
...For as it seems to me, it is the duty of the intellectual these days to oppose, or at least to question, the ideal of a middle culture, as our best writers and thinkers have always done .. . This is really the core of Mr...
Vol. 6 • April 1959 • No. 2
