Literary Lies of Respectable Liberals
Shaw, Peter
. . . . . B . . . . . . . . . . D . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....
...As Professor Jack Salzman summarizes the case in his introduction to Theodore Dreiser: The Critical Reception, there were some unfavorable reviews of Sister Carrie, but the remarkable fact is that "many who read the novel were able to recognize an element of greatness in it...
...Instead of attacking the assembled bureaucrats, of course, Howe offered them a confirming version of literary history: one that encouraged them to view themselves as establishment antiestablishmentarians...
...He begged me to outline the details of my rem~kable secret...
...The evolution from the one to the other represents a striking triumph of sixties ideas...
...This is the notion that Dreiser brought into the literary culture what Howe calls "new rhythms," a "coarsening of taste," and "the unruly, the uncouth, the 'barbaric.' " It is astonishing that Howe can have forgotten Lionel Trilling's well-known refutation of this caricature in the essay "Reality in America...
...Certainly the crude impulse of the sixties to turn art into agitprop has passed away, not least because of opposition from Irving Howe and other liberal and radical intellectuals...
...Speaking at a Cooper Union forum in New York City, he treated the reviews as part of "the uniform attack on American books and writers that make the slightest criticism of what has become obviously sacrosanct...
...As usual, my good intentions went up in smoke...
...Both held to the complexities and difficulties of the modernist tradition...
...Here's my $10...
...Running into an old buddy brought back memories of those "didn't want to quit" days...
...On the contrary, his defect was repeatedly and ludicrously to strive for what he thought of as elegant, impressive, "literary" diction...
...Thus one suspects that it was no easy thing for Howe to reduce literature to social terms, given both his place in the old tradition and his innate sensibility...
...And if his concern was with the cultural consequences of institutional power, he had before him an excellent example in the politicization of prize and fellowship awards by this and similar organizations...
...But the uneasiness that he has identified has a different source...
...I guarantee it, with no strings attached...
...One hardly expects Howe to impose the same demands on minority group writers...
...A secret that set me free in just 30 minutes flat...
...In a larger context Howe was supplying a justification for extending the political breach between liberals and neoconservatives into culture...
...For this prediction he was accused by Ellison of attempting to force black writers into a political and social role of convenience to himself but violative of their literary autonomy...
...I was hooked--again...
...Permanent no smoking...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program, Name Address City State Zip Telephone THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 21 English editions...
...He is author, most recently, o f American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution (Harvard...
...And I know what it's like to be able to smilingly pass it by without pangs of yearning...
...Eventually the split in attitudes between the former allies produced considerable animosity...
...Thus since he approves of "a tense engagement with the culture of one's time," he should welcome conservative resistance to unconventional new writers...
...both defended the autonomy of high culture against demands that it render itself socially useful...
...The two short reviews in Contentions hardly resembled Howe on Roth in their severity...
...PhiUips's lack of information called to mind Nathan Glazer's recent comment in the New York Times Book Review that the style of New York intellectuals--one set by a now fading older generation--consists in "pronouncing judgments on a basis of less than adequate knowledge in politics and literature...
...It is largely a result of the atmosphere of sanctimonious praise that has come to surround minority group writing...
...Gone, too, without gaining an extra ounce...
...The temptation is always great to view art and culture, including political culture, as continuous...
...Matter of fact, my wife says that I even lost a couple of pounds...
...Just this once give in (o your common sense and give my secret a "look...
...He could have offered no better demonstration of the intimidation that had heretofore succeeded in enforcing a critical silence...
...A pigheaded, "didn't want to quit", die-hard smoker...
...Rush the "Stop I | Smoking Secret...
...Super-important to my daily life...
...Completely out of control and destined for disaster...
...Oryour next pack's on me...
...His shortcomings were those of "literary tact" and an absence of "sustained coherence of form...
...Repeatedly in literature, he writes, that which has seemed new, rough, "proletarian," vulgar has in the end proved to revivify the tradition...
...The bottom line is this: You really don't want to quit--and you'll dc~anything to avoid it...
...If you can lick a stamp, you can lick your cigarette habit just as I--and they --did...
...Merely return it for a full, every-penny-back refund plus $1 extra for a pack of cigarettes...
...Toward An Open Culture" was delivered at a symposium of the New York Council for the Humanities and reprinted in the March 5, 1984 New Republic...
...10018 Simply send for my "Stop Smoking %crct" and read it...
...When one turns from Dreiser to the current literary situation, the true state of affairs can be gleaned from Howe's own description of a neoconservative uneasiness with rather than opposition to or suppression of new writing...
...But it is no great leap from agitprop in the service of radicalism to the social utility of art in the service of democracy as now preached by Howe...
...Cancer or no cancer, doctor or no doctor, I loved smoking much too much to ever stop...
...In truth, whatever there is of intimidation in the air these days is directed not at new writers but at their potential critics, who have largely fallen silent...
...Who was I kidding...
...I know exactly what's running through your mind...
...In this talk Howe distinguished two kinds of attitudes toward new literary developments...
...Thus he writes, "I would propose a rule of thumb: criticize whichever outlook is dominant at the moment, whether in the sphere of cultural opinion or public decision...
...the second book, The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, received the American Book Award for a first novel...
...Watch it automatically work for you in the only way that counts...
...Not a cigarette in 20 years~ My smoking is past-history...
...Now, in a recent address, Irving Howe has set forth the grounds for a cultural breach between the former allies...
...K a z i n ' s interest in who exerts cultural hegemony and therefore deserves to be called the Establishment surfaced in a recent discussion at New York's YMHA between Daniel Bell and William Phillips...
...In writing about Roth, Howe was not in search of a vivifying coarseness...
...They confined themselves to plot summaries followed by brief statements to the effect that, given the absence of literary distinction, the novels were evidently being honored for their disaffected cultural attitudes.' These lone dissents, which appeared in a publication of limited private circulation, were quickly seized upon by Alfred Kazin as examples of a " s i n i s t e r " cultural hegemony...
...Trapped in an aggravating love-affair--with cigarettes...
...Smoking was an undeniable necessity...
...Conservative intellectuals have fostered a cultural atmosphere that is "more and more racist," Kazin concluded...
...The trouble, though, is that the descriptions of both present literary realities and their historical precedents are demonstrably inaccurate...
...What's more, I know that you can honestly and truly stop smoking for keeps in half an hour flat--even if it's the last thing in the world you'd rather do...
...But there is another element of the Dreiser myth as Howe presents it that bears more importantly on his analysis of the current literary situation...
...You'll pocket 100 times your investment in cigarette savings alone...
...That such nominally daring works are hardly at risk from the prizegiving critical community is well understood, if rarely stated...
...And I never felt better...
...Those who regarded the sixties as a deviation having no bearing on the essential agenda of liberalism and socialism took up where they had left off...
...Me give up smoking...
...In the circumstances who can doubt that the silence will be renewed...
...But what about the rest of our critics...
...Openly, I cursed their choking grip on me...
...After this, despite the fact that his predictions for black writing were largely borne out, he offered no further observations on the subject...
...I know what it's like to have that compelling urge to light up...
...Recently, two unfavorable notices of minority group fiction did chance to appear--in the October 1983 issue of Contentions, the newsletter published by the Committee for the Free World...
...His implication is that some kind of genteel, literary fastidiousness prevails...
...Both novels are celebrations of black lesbianism, and both make extensive use of profane, vernacular speech...
...Guaranteed to workB o r yOur next p a c k ' s on me...
...Kazin similarly refrained from saying anything about the two novels That was me...
...Despite the fact that the book came from an unknown author and was released without publicity, it was called "a noteworthy addition to American literature" by one reviewer, and "a great American novel" by another...
...Some of them are tyros, as Roth was not in 1972...
...Under the old Partisan Review separation of the two realms, that temptation was resisted at every turn...
...Most certainly, Howe never delivered a negative critique of a black or other minority writer in the fashion of his well-known decimation of Philip Roth...
...Dreiser was undeniably an awkward stylist, but this was not because he brought some sort of unliterary, proletarian vigor to the novel...
...for minority subcultures: blacks, women, gays...
...Howe protested his innocence of any patronizing or limiting tendency, but Ellison insisted that the white man was once again trying to put him in a " j u g " - - t h a t is, forcing him into a predetermined, caricatured role as a "good Negro...
...I If you ever start smoking again after reading my secret--and I mean ever-you haven't lost any money...
...But just this once, listen to that little voice inside your head...
...The grim warnings of the Surgeon General, the American Cancer Society, and my worried doctor all went in one ear and out the other...
...It is instructive to note the manner in which the myth of resistance to Dreiser originally sprang up...
...When in 1962 he published an essay on the literary situation for black writers, he became embroiled in a lengthy exchange with Ralph Ellison...
...10018 I I | O K - - I ' l l take a risk-free look...
...Unfortunately, the laugh was on me...
...Better ask for my right arm...
...For the new writers with whom he is concerned have been grievously imposed upon...
...Dreiser's liberal champions, Trilling there pointed out, confused Dreiser's "plebeian origin" with his prose...
...Yes, it's as easy as that...
...This second attitude is marked by "an uneasiness with and sometimes distaste Peter Shaw has wri(ten for Commentary, the New Criterion, and other periodicals...
...Nor was he in a mood to celebrate vulgarity in defiance of genteel opinion...
...Phillips, though sharing Bell's liberalism, felt bound to disagree...
...Philip Roth seems never to have recovered from Howe's attack...
...Take the case of Dreiser, the major figure from the "plebeian Midwest" of the period...
...My treat...
...After it did the trick for my buddy, he told some of his friends...
...You can't fool me...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great b~ks of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...My tobacco addiction was like a runaway train...
...Similarly, the historical record for the turn of the century simply does not support the notion of an effete literary community shrinking from "any soiling plebeian touch...
...Not a single cigarette in 20 years...
...Howe praises William Dean Howells, the writer most frequently associated with the genteel tradition, for having broken through the prejudices of his time to champion two such new, rough talents: Abraham Cahan and Stephen Crane...
...Roth lacked "compositional rigor and moral seriousness...
...In America "each breakthrough" by writers like Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser "was seen as a threat to established standards by the genteel cultural establishment of the East...
...Me give up all these irreplaceable pleasures...
...Ed...
...and furthermore, by now Howe's literary eminence is such that any unfavorable criticism from him would be devastating...
...The Dreiser case illustrates that liberal cultures do not have a monopoly on openness to the new...
...In the final analysis, Dreiser was "not only genteel but fancy...
...The conservative outlook seems dominant" to Irving Howe, and the neoconservatives to be "little despots of the media" to Alfred Kazin, because a particular group of intellectuals has managed to make itself the center of intellectual debate...
...9 MCMLXXXIV Stop Smoking Co., 49 West 37th Street, New York, NY...
...Has any of them ever come down with the full weight of literary standards on the work of the kinds of writers under discussion...
...For, borrowing perhaps from a formulation offered by the critic Richard Chase some quarter of a century ago, Howe declares that "democratic cultures move ahead _ 9 through internal struggle...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 know that numerous articles based on survey research have been published by Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Ladd detailing the preponderance of liberal opinion in the universities, while Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter have reported similar findings for other intellectual elites: journalists and television news personnel, bureaucrats, and members of public interest groups...
...Howe in effect represents himself as a kind of Howells of the present day: an established literary figure able to "embrace" the new even when its aspect may be unsettling to less democratically inspired literary sensibilities_9 He presents himself, one may say, as an establishment rebel...
...The debate on what constitutes the Establishment threatens to degenerate into a comic struggle for bottom-dog status...
...Freed me in 30 minutes...
...For it settles the question of whether or not the counterculture opposed by both was a passing phenomenon...
...The myth of the shunned proletarian that Howe has adopted, this is to say, was itself a product of genteel literary culture...
...He apparently did not For a different view of the literary merits of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, see Reid Buckley's review in the November 1983 American Spectator...
...All of this sounds doughty, insouciant, risk-taking, and in keeping, as Howe points out, with the openness and optimism of Whitman's inspiring Democratic Vistas...
...Inwardly, I was totally unwilling to do anything else but puff away...
...Even with my foolproof, risk-free, money-back plus guarantee, you're still looking for a way to get out of sending for my secret...
...I 49 West 37th St., Dept...
...Howe's terms came from the genteel or at least the hightoned Jamesian tradition in American letters...
...Does there exist anywhere an essay on one of these writers to set beside Howe's "Philip Roth Reconsidered...
...This 3-packs-a-dayer had tried everything but still couldn't stop...
...The politicization of culture by respectable liberals bears directly on their quarrel with neoconservatism...
...He observed that in the universities, it was his experience that liberal opinion does hold the ascendancy...
...Moreover, were they not inaccurate, Howe would be contradicting himself...
...In the same issue, Norman Podhoretz expressed his literary agreement with Howe but offeted a cultural-political explanation for Roth's popularity with which, he remarked, Howe was not likely to agree...
...How I enjoyed that first eye-opening drag in the morning--that satisfying end-of-the-meal lighting up --that nerve-settling inhalation when things got hectic...
...This essay appeared in 1972 in Commentary, and was a good example of the then continuing cultural alliance between liberals and neoconservatives...
...Patronized by acts of literary affirmative action, they are being denied the informed criticism that any developing writer stands most in need of...
...Howe had suggested that the black struggle for equality was such an overriding reality that it was bound to claim a dominant role in the black fiction of the future...
...He has wisely chosen to concentrate at this stage of his career on singling out worthy writing--a project he has carried out with exemplary good taste through his essays and introductions...
...That one simply cannot speak freely when it comes to the groups Howe wishes us to encourage, he himself was one of the first to learn...
...That night, I wrote it out in plain, step-by-step language anyone could understand and mailed him a copy...
...Bell, like Kazin and Howe, treated neoconservative intellectuals as culturally dominant...
...Frantically scrounging in the garbage for soggy butts...
...This group continued to battle against the political programs and cultural values of the sixties as they expressed themselves in the less militant terms of the 1970s...
...On the contrary, unconventional new voices in literature probably stand the best chance of acceptance from elite cultures...
...When Sister Carrie was reissued in 1907, it was widely greeted with enthusiasm as a previously suppressed work--this despite the fact that its 1907 advertising blurbs drew on the favorable reviews of the original American and THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...Your typical chain-smoker wildly raving about kicking the habit--and not meaning one single word...
...If I ever start | smoking again, I can return it for | $11 refund...
...B . . . . . . . . . . D . . . . . . . . . . . O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ O . . . . . p . . . . . . . The intellectuals who joined in opposition to the countercultural Left in the late 1960s eventually parted company...
...whose critics he was attacking...
...Popular myth to the contrary, his Sister Carrie was not rejected by genteel critics when it appeared in 1900...
...The one, his own, is represented as liberally open and receptive...
...On the contrary, he found Roth's work "deeply marred by vulgarity," by the author's "thin personal culture," and by an intrusive "rassentiment...
...Thus if anything, Sister Carrie's reception in the older, more sophisticated culture of England was still more enthusiastic than in America...
...Just read it...
...But if each side is able to claim that status with some justice, the explanation is not far to seek...
...Though not conceding Ellison's case, Howe fell silent...
...Before you could say "Jack Robinson", there I'd be...
...That's $10 back plus $1 I | extra for a pack of cigarettes-- [ | GUARANTEED...
...But the point is that at the present time writers from "minority subcultures" typically do not meet with resistance...
...F . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Stop Smoking Co...
...All for a ten dollar bill...
...Thus the awards were nowhere remarked as exceptional, it being obvious to all that they were of what is by now a routine nature...
...Gone without such games as switching brands, chewing gum, fake candy, diarykeeping or saving dirty stubs in a messy jar...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...But one day, I discovered a secret that turned my burning passion into red-hot hate...
...As it turns out, he is not really worried about such a decline, for he believes that the historical record shows a positive outcome in similar situations...
...Soon, I was hunted out by pleading strangers for the same "Stop Smoking Secret...
...But this is very different from this group's having made inroads in the media, the universities, among government bureaucrats, or among literary critics for that matter--a collection of groups and institutions that may properly be dOscribed by that much abused term, "the Establishment...
...Every so often, I would make a good old college try at quitting cold turkey...
...The English compared Dreiser not only to Balzac, but more accurately to Zola as well...
...i | New York, N.Y...
...I I | Name | | Address | | City | I I | State Zip__ | i.,, SS-101 i man mmlm m ~ am ~ I I I Ham m l l l m ~ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 23...
...It's not the money...
...In addition, the uneasiness is a product of the aggressiveness with which the same writing is championed...
...It is to be thought of as corresponding to an undiminished commitment to liberal social values...
...Over the years he obsessively returned to it in essays, interviews, and a trilogy of novels...
...Howe argues that the literary culture, in the name of democratic values, should be willing to accept writers from these groups at the expense of "a momentary decline or even, in some respects, a permanent decline in cultural standards...
...Yet when it came to the cultural values that had originally united them, the two sides remained in agreement...
...Gone without hypnosis, behavior modification, pills, drugs, classroom courses, nailbiting, will-power or climbing the walls...
...The fact that his talk entirely omitted examples of contemporary books and writers testifies to the suspension of his aesthetic sense...
...Unstoppable...
...Thus if Irving Howe was interested in applying his rule that " n o one has ever gone very wrong by jabbing at established power," he need have looked no further than the New York State Council for the Humanities that he was addressing...
...It just does...
...I can't tell how it works...
...Crane was, moreover, already a highly polished stylist--arguably the finest one then writing...
...Chance" is the correct term inasmuch as the books under review were those selected by the year's prize committees for the Pulitzer Prizes, the American Book Awards, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards...
...Yet when challenged by Bell to cite the studies that supported his view, Phillips was unable to do so...
...The other attitude is the product of "today's conservative outlook [that] seems dominant or at least increasingly powerful...
...As for the accompanying antiestablishmentarianism, this represents an equally impressive triumph of that period's style...
...B e t t e r a s k for my r i g h t arm...
...Its author was compared favorably to Balzac, and declared to have outdone Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells, the reigning realists of the day...
...Both the American Book Award for fiction and the Pulitzer Prize went to the first book reviewed: The Color Purple by Alice Walker...
...On the contrary, theirs is all too likely to be an automatically enthusiastic welcome from the critical community...
...The example of Crane does not perfectly serve, for he had published three novels, including The Red Badge o f Courage and a book of poems, to considerable publicity by the time Howells wrote in 1896...
...In contrast, those intellectuals just coming to be known as the neoconservatives believed that the sixties had exposed essential flaws and dangers within the liberal and socialist creeds...
...It was a joke...
Vol. 17 • June 1984 • No. 6
