LITERARY RADICALISM IN AMERICA
Bromwich, David
Left-wing literary people talk more these days about criticism than about fiction or poetry or plays. The statement sounds too flat to be true, and it is fair to ask what "left-wing" signifies...
...His glory was that he did it...
...They turn upon any rash one who continues idly to speculate...
...It starts as a general hope, touching those who sympathize with movements outside literature, yet it ends in a general bewilderment...
...Let, please, the sun shine in...
...Pass in, pass in," the angels say, "In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise...
...At all events, he seems to be what destiny intended, and represents fully a certain side...
...In America's Coming-of-Age, Van Wyck Brooks argued that our official and popular cultures had taken opposite paths in the 18th century, and continued apart ever since, with results disabling for both...
...The case of the peasant accidentally proves too much, by suggesting that it may be instinctive even in a state of nature...
...The great practical effect of Emerson's teaching was that it gave an idea of originality to a generation that included Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, along with others who seem minor talents only in that company...
...Fuller's "I accept the universe" meant that the universe was hers, to make of what she would (and change how she could...
...These represent merely the latest efforts of exclusion—armed on one side with conventional skepticism, and on the other with conventional faith...
...The other, for whom the large town is itself a half-way house, whose destination is on the verge of the continent, stops contentedly at the first good lodging place: he may stand for Emerson...
...Liberals call the result pluralism, and think it the very stuff of democracy...
...Emerson has more than one name to describe what we recover then...
...The ex-humanitarian, turned realist, sneers at the snobbish neutrality, colossal conceit, crooked thinking, dazed sensibilities of those who are still unable to find any balm of consolation for this war...
...Yet the present mood is not less favorable to creation...
...Rather, he took it as simply demonstrable that the alliance suggested by pragmatism—between new suc41 cesses of any kind and the creation of new truths—left radicals on a lower moral ground than before, in their contest with the heroes of industry and commerce...
...and in the 20th, the interval between the world wars...
...The aim is not to interpret texts but to change them, and there the enterprise stops...
...For the group around the first Dial—edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller—formed an avantgarde in something like the modern sense...
...Responses like these have the terrible simplicThe results of war on the intellectual class are already apparent...
...But "The Invisible Avant-Garde," which John Ashbery christened in an essay of that title, has always sustained a belief that culture is not identical with cultivation...
...It is willing to regard failure as a mark of election...
...We have lately begun to get alternative descriptions from critics Who speak for the homeless academy...
...Indeed, if one tried to imagine an America free of Emerson's influence, the strictures of Democracy in America would turn into an accurate prophecy...
...I will use the phrase here because, provisionally, it helps to define Emerson...
...Carlyle's appeal, when he backed the South in the Civil War, was to an ideal duty, with fighting representatives in the actual world, who were to be honored as an active principle of order and the preservers of the spirit of a race...
...and according to Brooks, they had joined only once, almost freakishly, in the writings of Whitman, whom he therefore called a "middlebrow...
...Many of its heroes come from two periods: in the 19th century, the 20 years leading up to the Civil War...
...The Eliotic-Trotskyist sermon against mass culture was less simple, and perhaps less hard to act upon...
...I have quoted some instances already, but saved the best for last...
...III S ince Emerson, the project of literary radicalism has never been isolable from an ambition to reform our social arrangements...
...There must be some intellectuals who are not willing to use the old discredited counters again and to support a peace which would leave all the old inflammable materials of armament lying about the world...
...The strength of our individualism in culture appears to have been paid for by the eclecticism, the impatient or capricious energy, and above all the discontinuity of our radicalism in politics...
...But if it is a question of controlling war, it is difficult to see how the child on the back of a mad elephant is to be any more effective in stopping the beast than is the child who tries to stop him from the ground...
...They wrote with equal assurance as skeptical observers of American culture and as monumental historians of the European avant-garde...
...All this remains implicit in Brooks's discussion...
...Repin's picture affords a "wealth of self-evident meanings" by which the peasant "recognizes and sees things in the way in which he recognizes and sees things outside of pictures— there is no discontinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention...
...What they wanted to foster, it seems clear in retrospect, was a gigantic second-rate literature, a sort of continuous collaborative American sublime, a high, flat, reliable, democratic achievement...
...It has the step of Fate, and goes on existing like an oak or river, because it must...
...and in the details of his practice, Emerson adopted the strategy of the Lake school in English poetry half a century before...
...These were critics who pointed to a recent past, and said: "The great thing is already there...
...There is no good holding back...
...It is only on the craft, in the stream, they say, that one has any chance of controlling the current forces for liberal purposes...
...I turn accordingly from Emerson's group to their successors, the social critics whose work began in earnest about 1915...
...Did he not rather, with a degree of reason, say to himself: "These papers will serve very well to improve my mind...
...This included the entrepreneurs of business and war...
...The intellectual who retains his animus against war will push out more boldly than ever to make his case solid against it...
...One can expand this statement in a way that seems consistent with Brooks's intentions...
...I do not claim that political radicals ought to take satisfaction from the results as they stand...
...I am aware that there is a strong and a weak version of my argument...
...and the effect of such moments is to give fresh life to other radicals, who seek political remedies...
...and the baccalaureate sermon, as we know, beautiful as it often is, has never been found inconveniently inconsistent with the facts and requirements of business life...
...The thing he will fear most is premature crystallization...
...Meanwhile, however, there is comfort on board...
...The encouraging parts of the story, varied as they are, may seem to lack a moral about the uses of art...
...Brooks understood pragmatism as a decadent idealism that had betrayed genius in the name of practical power...
...Yet Brooks, in a passage like this, was also reacting against the pragmatists, that is, against another school of Emerson's readers...
...I believe that his interpretation is wrong...
...Irreconcilable radicals, wringing their hands among the debris, become the most despicable and impotent of men...
...This realistic boast is so loud and sonorous that one wonders whether realism is always a stern and intelligent grappling with realities...
...We manufacture consolations here in America while there are probably not a dozen men fighting in Europe who did not long ago give up every reason for their being there except that nobody knew how to get them away...
...I do not want to enter into the merits of Bourne's view...
...I shall read them when I have the time...
...But, writing in 1968, Ashbery saw all of these as contingent enemies, and remembered the example of Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s: At that time I found the avant-garde very exciting, just as the young do today, but the difference was that in 1950 there was no sure proof of the existence of the avant-garde...
...After Dewey lent his support to American participation in the war, Bourne published a record of his disenchantment, in an essay called "Twilight of the Idols": To those of us who have taken Dewey's philosophy almost as our American religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique...
...They are trying to invent cultural conservatism in America...
...We can hardly know culture at all, except as just such a mixed entity...
...The belief continues because the visible church takes many forms— a congregation, a board of censors, and an academy being only the most persistent...
...but it was sufficiently provoked...
...Emerson's admirers, who liked his cunning, still heard the same sermon no matter what the text...
...and the conventions themselves are defined formalistically: "the arts," as Greenberg said in another place, "have been hunted back to their mediums," and a work only exempts itself from mass culture by virtue of an emphatic concern with its medium...
...It is a pamphleteering manner, sometimes direct, sometimes ironic, always hectoring...
...For what does it amount to, this declaration...
...His mind will continue to roam widely and ceaselessly...
...He sympathized with a new thought at the moment of its invention, and left others to plan its consolidation...
...Brooks, on the contrary, felt that while capitalism thrived on such divisions, democracy grew weaker from them...
...In keeping with this aim, they satirize the universities, where the avant-garde is known to have taken cover...
...A painter like Pollock for instance was gambling everything on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn't, he was nothing, and the drops would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless housepainter...
...Substitute a New England yeoman for the Russian peasant, and what happens to the fable...
...My argument thus far has been that Emerson is so expansive a friend of revolt as to be favorable to no particular party...
...Criticism of the ruling powers will only be accepted from those intellectuals who are in sympathy with the general tendency of the war...
...The most acute descriptions of our situation were written more than a decade ago, by Harold Rosenberg, from a position sympathetic to the avant-garde but unhappy about the completeness of its acceptance...
...it merely warrants a change of tactics, for the artist "must now bear in mind that he, not it, is the avant-garde...
...In the arts he did without ideas of high and low...
...q 39 obedience to the Fugitive Slave Law, was to a conscience that ought not to comply with the dictates of social expedience, or even the ultimate injunctions of social order...
...And yet, after a meeting not much tempered with epigrams, she found a use for Carlyle, as he could not for her, and published an appreciation in the New York Tribune: His works are , true, to blame and praise him, the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than to legislate for good...
...Brooks replied.in 1918: "Could one ask for a more essential declaration of artistic bankruptcy than that...
...Their successors appear to be "the media...
...What, exactly, did the suggestion amount to?—for anyone, I mean, but especially for an American...
...There seems no choice for the intellectual but to join the mass of acceptance...
...This essay is about the nature of those ideals, and I take it for granted that they are what we have to work with...
...But it does seem possible to view them as a broken series of victories...
...The American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany...
...In what follows I try to sketch a recurring pattern for our literature since Emerson...
...Yet they belong recognizably to a life we still know, where the literacy of our neighbors has nothing to do with their conversability...
...May it not be sometimes a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal through a sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense...
...He settled in a place unknown to letters, gathered significant neighbors around him, treated all his younger disciples as equals...
...What happens," he added, "when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it...
...Such critics exist at all times, and often speak on behalf of the imperative of the actual, or some similar phrase...
...On occasions when one can sense other interests at work, the effect is very curious...
...The phrase always means, "Show us what is good about our society (we are so lost in it that occasionally we forget...
...Did he feel that his profound instincts had been touched and unified, did he see opening before him the line of a distinguished career, lighted up by a sudden dramatization of his own finest latent possibilities...
...so we make no remonstrance as to his being and proceeding for himself, though we sometimes must for us...
...What we see around us now, on the other hand, is probably not far different from the way things looked in 1884...
...We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into place as contributory...
...or remain aloof, passively resistant, in which case you count for nothing because you are outside the machinery of reality...
...But the conservative wants to perform the latter function above all...
...We can decide to risk everything for what we believe in, and there may be vastly different grounds of defense for such a move, even in thinkers as congenial as Emerson and Carlyle...
...IV The legacy of Emerson, Fuller, James, Dewey, Bourne, and Brooks is what we still have to build on...
...Of two travellers, one, refusing to stop at the half-way house, pushes on to the large town which is his destination: he may stand for the average radical...
...I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back...
...Dissenters are already excommunicated...
...An avant-garde differs from other societies for mutual promotion in only one way...
...We are still Emerson's disciples more or less, and he is a possible, though difficult, ally for a radical, as he cannot even begin to be for a conservative...
...The American, in living out this philosophy, has habitually confused results with product, and has been content with getting somewhere without asking too closely whether it was the desirable place to get...
...American literature is mostly the story of an avant-garde that did not stay at home...
...But when they reappear, in large enough numbers to think of travels like this, they will still be meeting Emersonian ideals along the way...
...Be with us, they call, or be negligible, irrelevant...
...They believed that they were looking for a home-grown epic to surpass Sir Walter Scott...
...The diagnosis turns on the assumption that avant-garde artists have the same superior indifference to mass culture as avant-garde critics, when in fact their attitude has more often been one of ambivalent fascination...
...An artist is sometimes improved by a critic 42 who shows how his work is careless or foppish...
...In the political processions," Emerson observed, "Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship...
...In case we have forgotten, Emerson brings them all together in one sentence of a letter: "Carlyle is no idealist in opinions, but a protectionist in political economy, aristocrat in politics, epicure in diet, goes for murder, money, punishment by death, slavery, and all the petty abominations, tempering them with epigrams...
...We will be listened to as responsible thinkers, while those who obstructed the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall be cast into outer darkness...
...He accomplished this in a society where a shapeless conformity of opinion appeared to have taken hold forever...
...But his most solid effect may be seen in the lives of others who would have been free minds anyway, but were made bolder by his example...
...That label, if unfair, is at any rate intelligible, and we would be better off if it were not...
...Earlier I quoted Emerson's disclaimer, "I unsettle all things...
...About the same time, Brooks was writing a polemic against literary critics who pleaded for realism of a well-behaved sort...
...The hope before the war had been to fortify the individual in his plural relations with life, by representing his ability to shape it variously and inventively, from one situation to another...
...0. W. Firkins wrote about this aspect of Emerson's appeal: His hunger was not greedy precisely because it was insatiable...
...But there seems to me a nominal rather than a practical difference between this and his "Note to the Reader" of the Dial, written for the first issue in collaboration with Margaret Fuller: The spirit of the time is felt by every individual with some difference,—to each one casting its light upon the objects nearest to his temper and habits of thought...
...From another perspective Emerson was only the accidental success among many comparable types of the 1840s and 1850s...
...His idea of culture is that it can be understood, and once understood it can be kept running smoothly by a team of impartial custodians...
...But I suspect, for American readers, this weighs very little by comparison with a more local objection...
...The New Criterion was launched two years ago as a monthly journal of the arts...
...What has changed is that the avant-garde has taken up residence in the academy...
...Its very name makes a similar point, for it honors as a precursor T. S. Eliot—founder of the old Criterion, but an avant-garde poet and critic before he became a Classicist, Royalist, Anglo-Catholic, and editor...
...Why does this sound strange to an American...
...There is work to be done in still shouting that all the revolutionary by-products will not justify the war, or make war anything else than the most noxious complex of all the evils that afflict men...
...There is nothing surprising in this: every marginal movement in culture leads a second life in the history of criticism...
...The statement sounds too flat to be true, and it is fair to ask what "left-wing" signifies in the context...
...Much of this was foreseen by those who observed the progress of modern painting...
...With no living tradition behind them, and an infinite vista of improvement ahead, they are free to enjoy the scandal of mimic wars...
...He concluded every attempt to define it further with a pleasant but inscrutable compliment...
...Tradition," Eliot wrote, "cannot be inherited"—not, that is, passed on like a correct opinion...
...His apathy towards war should take the form of a heightened energy and enthusiasm for the education, the art, the interpretation that make for life in the midst of the world of death...
...It is a noble realism which opposes itself to futile obstruction and the cowardly refusal to face facts...
...Other writers have noticed this, but the analogy has sometimes been called exotic, and I will try briefly to justify it...
...To act as if one's beliefs were part of a total drift that might some day carry everything with it, was to be sound on the only going definition of soundness...
...none are profane...
...Radicals are so little in evidence now that it is hard to know what an average radical would be...
...He refers specifically to James and Dewey, but otherwise leaves the charge unexplained, and I can offer only a surmise about what he might have said...
...To experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink...
...Second, art alone has the task of modifying conventions...
...But the important moment for a literary radical comes earlier, when he discovers that his analysis is widely shared...
...But, of course, we do have a choice...
...I am using it simply and I hope accurately to mean: people who in a better time would be doing political work...
...Its editor, Hilton Kramer, and the regular contributors who set the tone are nonuniversity academicians...
...As it is, they have come out looking a priori and short-sighted...
...and, from an Emersonian point of view, I believe she had the better of her famous exchange with Carlyle, where she took a chance in speaking highmindedly...
...But the consequential debates in our culture have always taken place somewhere else, and the rival parties have agreed that words are acts that change our lives...
...And that was enough...
...new ideals must be forged...
...This account may concede too much to the "great man" theory of history (in which, however, I believe...
...But again the terrible dilemma arises—either support what is going on, in which case you count for nothing because you are swallowed in the mass and great incalculable forces bear you on...
...and occasionally, instead of a Preface, he issued a Declaration...
...In all its movements, it is peaceable, and in the very lowest marked with triumphant success...
...In the weak version, this turns out to be so because for us the avant-garde is only another name for radical individualism...
...But the debates I mentioned have a more immediate cause...
...It comes from Kenneth Burke, whose career almost spans the period from Bourne's generation to mine, and who wrote more than 50 years ago in Counter-Statement: "An art may be of value purely through preventing a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself...
...An academy in the older sense existed for the purpose of inculcating received ideas and judgments...
...One reason is that art meant anything for Emerson—"beauty," "language," "discipline" —anything, that is, outside the world of commodity...
...It has become universal, and at the same time it has migrated inward...
...The notion of a familiarity that may be realized in the absence of any convention is of course very odd...
...If their style is heavy, that is because their task is heavy...
...Not only is everyone forced into line, but the new certitude becomes idealized...
...But a mistaking of product for results led the pragmatist (we instrumentalists, as Bourne puts it) to think well of those already employed in reshaping the world...
...In this, the journal betrays a certain nostalgia...
...Looked at from this side, Emerson has all the qualities of the typical baccalaureate sermon...
...It tells us to stand apart from our society...
...The criticism I have in mind is addressed to readers familiar with the current theoretical debates...
...That is why the names Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, McKinley, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan make such a homogeneous list...
...Often, this is a result of valuing him as an encourager while underrating him as a writer...
...Artists, Brooks added, who do follow such advice "do not so much mature at all as externalize themselves in a world of externalities...
...It told us to stand apart from one element of our culture...
...Tocqueville simply did not bank on anyone like Emerson occurring...
...They are really arguing about something else—a social question of some kind—though neither knows it yet...
...The tendency of his writing is to break down the boundaries that separate literary invention from the conduct of life...
...A sustained effort to revise their style of cultural tolerance came in the 1930s and '40s, from the Eliotic-Trotskyist group...
...But in the background of all these books has been an intellectual movement that could act as an incitement to their authors, and that saw itself as preparing the way for genius...
...It taught that a poem of 1350 lines could be written proclaiming "oneself...
...Nobody knew this better than Emerson, or kept it more constantly in mind...
...What shall we do with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness, or who make "democracy" synonymous with a republican form of government...
...Character teaches over our head...
...He shall not his brain encumber With the coil of rhythm and number...
...Beginning, then, with Emerson, we have had an age of concentration and expansion close together...
...But idealism as they knew it was an exhausted orthodoxy of a thoroughly antiempirical character...
...Both differ sharply from the man who stays at home...
...In short, the personal culture that Emerson invented had foreclosed the possibility of a common culture, even as it made ideals a redundancy for selfreliant men of action: The social ideal of Emerson...
...Yet Brooks's analysis did not depend, after all, on a questioning of motives...
...The step of Fate and the stairway of surprise, the house without compartments and the fortress without outworks, offer variations on a single trope with a single moral: the power of individuals is equal to the power of fate...
...Third, in this situation—where art, if it is to be vital, is fated to be modernist, and the appeal of modernist works is confined to a few—the distance between the cultural and political avant-garde has widened irreparably...
...He meant this scrupulously: all the disposable materials of nature and art, which he summed up as "commodity," were an outward realization of "Man thinking," a writing-it-large for the slow of wit...
...In religion, long before, he had moved from the doctrine of a visible church to that of a hidden personal divinity...
...He is not quite a miracle, for he knew very well what he was doing...
...in "The War and the Intellectuals" he wrote: "This realistic boast is so loud and sonorous that one wonders whether realism is always a stern and intelligent grappling with realities...
...I quote these familiar judgments to show that his saying, "Whenever a man comes, there comes revolution," was merely an adequate description of the way his thinking had mattered in his own life...
...In Letters and Leadership, Brooks's immediate target was an assertion by W. D. Howells that "the more smiling aspects of life" are "the more American," and a request of novelists that they be faithful to our "well-to-do actualities...
...He allegorized the 40 split by adopting the names "lowbrow" (for a writer like Franklin) and "highbrow" (for a writer like Edwards...
...It is, on a narrow view, technical advice to poets about their craft...
...Without something of the same sentiment, culture would cease to be a vivid abstraction, and turn 43 into the sum of its institutional conquests...
...She is determined nevertheless to build with such materials as the time affords, however intractable in appearance...
...At the same time, it has resisted any steady collaboration with the short-term plans of reformers...
...Searching our tradition for a cause of the trouble, he came up with Emerson, whose thinking assured that we would remain content with our discrete virtues: for the lowbrow a vulgar gusto, for the highbrow an austere refinement...
...a second age of concentration in the early years of our century, with the criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank...
...Once the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a cog in the great wheel...
...and it is worth recalling here that his next words were: "No facts are to me sacred...
...It identifies the reality of the artist's vision with what is accepted as reality in the world about him...
...If the American intellectual class rivets itself to a "liberal" philosophy that perpetuates the old errors, there will then be need for "democrats" whose task will be to divide, confuse, disturb, keep the intellectual waters constantly in motion to prevent any such ice from ever forming...
...It uses a political vocabulary ("undermining," "totalizing," "reification," "rupture," "bad faith") yet it has no implications for practical politics...
...I wonder what passed through the mind of the American business man of Emerson's day when he heard all those phrases [of Emerson's], phrases so unrelated to the springs of action within himself...
...Yet his warnings were directed against sects rather than causes, and in his 1851 address on the Fugitive Slave Law he told a Concord audience that it was "a law which every one of you will break on the earliest occasion...
...Our daily habits of feeling seem to tell against it, and I think one reason is that the principle of self-trust, which we grew up believing, favors those who shake tradition in some way...
...But the intellectuals whom the crisis has crystallized into an acceptance of war have put themselves into a terrifyingly strategic position...
...37 But, leaving rule and pale forethought, He shall aye climb For his rhyme...
...One can see this in Emerson's writing, even when his subject is something as narrow as the use of meter in poetry: Great is the art, Great be the manners, of the bard...
...In a polemical exchange, for instance, between a Marxist critic and a poststructuralist, one may know what sort of event is being staged...
...The pattern holds true to such an extent that some people have a special name for left-wing writers who think consistently about politics: they call them "European-style radicals...
...We can use Carlyle for his hatred of the laissez-faire system, though, to arrive at something better, we need to think beyond his sense of "the duty to be intolerant...
...Their thought becomes little more than a description and justification of what is going on...
...There is no thing (at once diffuse and substantial) that the word "reality" helps to explain...
...The life that these pragmatists wanted to encourage was not mainly or even largely "business life...
...When, therefore, James taught his readers to care for the "live option"—when Dewey redefined truth as "warranted assertibility"— they were seeking to make practical wisdom again coincide with the highest instincts of men and women...
...This pattern of course leaves out a good deal, and I use it without any pretense of caution...
...The Emersonian sermon against public opinion is simple though hard to act upon...
...The ages of contraction (to add a third term to Arnold's pair)—the age before Emerson's, the Gilded Age, ours—coincide with periods of retrenchment in politics...
...It reminds us of Emerson's insistence, in a work like The Conduct of Life, that he be taken at once as a detached aphorist and a guide to worldly advancement—part of his appeal that Melville captured in Pierre, with its portrait of Plotinus Plinlimmon, the halfinspired enthusiast with an eye for the main chance...
...but, as one listens to the presentations, and compares the eloquence on both sides with its apparent subject, one sees that criticism is not the point at all...
...The circumstance suggests that their ambition was essentially distinct from Emerson's...
...There is a sense—better understood by historians than by critics—in which an Emerson makes room for a William Lloyd Garrison...
...What began as a program of literary revisionism thus works its way into all the channels of reform...
...Brooks, however, implies that this in effect makes him a valuable servant of the status quo, which in America is itself expansionist...
...To be more precise, it has come to be identified with literary study in the universities, which once seemed a natural home for the academic view of art...
...He is guided in his judgments by a sequence of implicit equations: taste = inherited opinions = rules = norms (= social norms...
...It is refuted by the miscellaneous power of his emblems and symbols...
...She was announcing her intention not to quit the contest, while acknowledging the conditions in which she was obliged to work...
...What he did was to describe, with sufficient plainness and sufficient profoundness, a condition of personal independence...
...He need not even be "impossibilist...
...From The War and the Intellectuals" by Randolph Bourne, first published in the Seven Arts, June 1917...
...So we easily stray across the boundaries that separate the exalted from the humble—categories that, with us, are always being revised for present purposes, and that a single sharp challenge may suffice to upset again...
...We have to come at this a long way around...
...No single impulse unites such books as The Scarlet Letter and The Sun Also Rises, or even Leaves of Grass and The Bridge...
...But this very real possibility is paradoxically just what makes the tremendous excitement of his work...
...The sort of figure who dominated such a movement used to be called a literary radical...
...around Partisan Review...
...This I take to be what Emersonian critics from the first have been saying in other words...
...Now, with that function suspended, the avant-garde seems to be in force everywhere...
...An artist works from an internal life— thoughts, feelings, impressions—which he seeks to render external...
...This thought has lately been echoed by Joseph Epstein in a review of two novels in Commentary, which concludes: "of plain pessimism . . . we have had quite enough...
...His purpose was to give us back the world of our ideas, and hence of our ideals and spiritual laws, as identical with the world of practice...
...The language now spoken in literary theory is a language of the avant-garde...
...And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy, when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values...
...Skeptics like to reply that the underground quality of such encounters is a sign of a hopeless cultural moment...
...And evidently, for an object with this range of meanings, we have to be content with a surmise as to its function...
...There must still be opposition to any contemplated "liberal" world-order founded on military coalitions...
...Or it made the state appear as a contingent enemy to the man who would not pay taxes for an evil war...
...The reason the balance works out this way is that, between cultural and political radicalism, the former adds up to the stronger tradition...
...The realist thinks he at least can control events by linking himself to the forces that are moving...
...But is the realist, who refuses to challenge or criticize facts, entitled to any more credit than that which comes from following the line of least resistance...
...It was not their fault that they could find nothing in that line big enough to satisfy their expectations...
...Carlyle, it seems, took her to be showing a polite condescension to the universe...
...The arts do not disdain these things: "Some stars, lilies, leopards, a crescent, a lion, an eagle, or other figure which came into credit God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort at the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or most conventional exterior...
...The situation today, as Ashbery describes it, when the artist commonly finds himself "at the center of a cheering mob," is doubtless more enervating than in the heyday of the avantgarde, when an interval of decent neglect was still allowed...
...In his 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Clement Greenberg imagined a Russian peasant after a long day's toil, offered him a choice of pictures to look at—on the one hand a battle scene by Repin, on the other a cubist abstraction by Picasso—and supposed he would prefer the Repin, on the ground that it was familiar...
...Fuller knew most of this as well as Emerson...
...The first type was marked chiefly by the instincts of gregarious self-advancement, the second chiefly by the duties of solitary speculation...
...The pacifist is roundly scolded for refusing to face the facts, and for retiring into his own world of sentimental desire...
...So, once we have seen past the words of a writer, or the acts of a leader, to the soul that produced them both, it turns out that we are looking at something in ourselves...
...If their analysis succeeds in fostering a literature that is powerful, the analysis and the literature stand doubly vindicated...
...She speaks here on behalf of those who do want to legislate for good—"we sometimes must for us...
...Both attitudes retain the purity of assertions at the level of "as if...
...Evert Augustus Duyckinck, for example, and Cornelius Mathews, along with the critics, patrons, and entrepreneurs who made the subject of Perry Miller's The Raven and the Whale, set themselves up as New York's 36 rivals to Concord, in the search for a native literature...
...Margaret Fuller can stand for these...
...If we obstruct, we surrender all power for influence...
...The old ideals crumble...
...Emerson's appeal, when he urged distheir guiding any more than a preference whether they shall go over the right-hand or the left-hand side of the precipice...
...The defect of many commentaries on Emerson—especially those written in the 1940s and '50s, from an effort to interpret the "American Renaissance"—is that they regard him altogether as a special case...
...A small number of writers get together, agree that their culture has lost vitality, and decide to blame everything on its habitual arrangements, which they hold in contempt...
...These types are cartoons...
...44...
...We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work...
...Perhaps he can...
...First, the taste for mass culture is instinctive in an industrial society...
...But there was always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as it achieved ends...
...For we know what acceptances he had in view...
...World War I was a disgraceful period in our intellectual life, and Bourne proposed to test radical ideas by the character they showed in surviving it...
...He was, in consequence, the cruelest satirist of his own followers: he called Brook Farm "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan...
...And did he not thereupon set to work accumulating all the more dollars in order that he might have the more time to cultivate his mind—in legal phrase—after the event...
...and the epoch of concentration, in which critical thinking advances and the impetus is given for expansion in the next age...
...There must be some to find no consolation whatever, and some to sneer at those who buy the cheap emotion of sacrifice...
...By this double emphasis, their work appeared to offer a new conception of intellectual freedom...
...The "irreconcilable" need not be disloyal...
...A revisionist, whether in politics or culture, can no more exclude them than a speaker can exclude the perfect tenses, for they point to habits we still renew unquestioningly...
...I believe it is more interesting to think of him as a beginning: someone, like Rousseau, whom others have to return to before they can start for themselves...
...It tells the artist, as Emerson told his young audience in "The American Scholar": "If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him...
...It became a conscious emphasis in the writings of Randolph Bourne, who had started as an admirer of the pragmatists...
...No artist has ever been improved by a critic who urges him to portray a certain kind of subject, or eliminate a certain mood...
...To believe this is not to deny the need in every culture for authority and deference...
...There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade...
...Well, it is true that they may guide, but if their stream leads to disaster and the frustration of national life, is 38 ity Emerson asked for but distrusted...
...But sometimes, the only way of changing an old story is to retell its happier episodes, in the hope that their atmosphere will invigorate...
...The generosity of the verdict is Fuller's own, but it owes its confidence to Emerson's thought that genius is serviceable in spite of itself—that it cannot even be known, except as it assists the practical ends of those who admire it...
...Of course, it rouses the opposition of all which it judges and condemns, but it is too confident in its tone to comprehend an objection, and so builds no outworks for possible defenses against contingent enemies...
...Is there no place left, then, for the intellectual who cannot yet crystallize, who does not dread suspense, and is not yet drugged with fatigue...
...For Bourne, this had become the voice of American capitalism...
...Every American is born with a little of it...
...Now, James and Dewey saw themselves as fighting the same battle, a little further on...
...But when, from within their precincts, Moby Dick emerged, they were unequipped to appreciate it...
...In the strong version, we Americans are all potentially of the avantgarde...
...It gave the master-clue to the workings of a state that was only healthy when at war...
...a second age of expansion, including Hemingway, Faulkner, Stevens, Frost, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Allen Tate, and William Carlos Williams, among others...
...is a sort of composite of the philosopher, the mystic, the skeptic, the poet, the writer and the man of the world...
...Action means action with respect to texts...
...May it not be a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal through sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense...
...If we responsibly approve, we then retain our power for guiding...
...Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing...
...It gives the critic authority, indeed, to create new 35 values, and not only to guard the values already in place...
...If we like some of them, we may call them actual...
...On this analysis pragmatism, itself the offspring of idealism, was eventually converted to the uses of realism in the vulgar sense, which implies a hostility to all ideals...
...He wrote in "The Over-Soul": That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily but involuntarily...
...They present themselves as lonely and embattled figures...
...and his reply, "By Gad, she'd better," was aimed at the paltriness of the human conceit that we have any choice in the matter...
...There must be some irreconcilables left who will not even accept the war with walrus tears...
...In other words, if one wanted to depart, even moderately, from the norm, one was taking one's life—one's life as an artist—into one's hands...
...Nevertheless, Greenberg, who in this may be taken to represent many others, made the following deductions from his reading of the hypothetical incident...
...It must often have occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn't an artist at all, that he had spent his life "toiling up the wrong road to art," as Flaubert said of Zola...
...He had no stomach for truckling or compromise...
...If this is correct, the sort of criticism now emerging from the university avant-garde, as well as from the homeless academy, is in fact irrelevant to the growth of a new literature...
...if we dislike others, we may call them pessimistic or less smiling...
...and yet, the tone of the attack is itself borrowed from the militant avant-garde, in the days before its triumph and assimilation...
...There must be some to call unceasingly for peace, and some to insist that the terms of settlement shall be not only liberal but democratic...
...but one thing about his argument is certainly attractive: it, too, is pragmatic...
...It is a gamble against terrific odds...
...He saw the extravagance of his claim, and warned: "I unsettle all things...
...But whatever he calls it, he is sure that it has the power to alter traditions and laws as well as customs and habits...
...This was a good translation of Wordsworth's injunction to "create the taste by which you are judged" (grant nothing to the existing taste...
...There are only the available externalities...
...they have too often been recounted as a single continuous defeat...
...His motive was a readiness to suffer inexpediences as the cost of fresh truths...
...A change for the better usually happens like this...
...I borrow Matthew Arnold's idea of antithetical "epochs": the epoch of expansion, in which great works are created...
...Emerson's own thinking had been an idealist answer to the materialism he supposed was becoming the dominant philosophy of the age...
...Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened...
...This is the light in which his witty reply must be read, and in this light it is honest enough, yet coarse and contemptible...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
