Heresy and Modern Culture

...And he points out that, this being so, presentday conformism is hard to account for and hard to combat...

...That the Times Book Review should be ostensibly the most powerful opinion-making organ among literary people is a national disaster...

...These writers were aware that academicism, commercialism, and the gradual institutionalization of literature were producing a mediocre middlebrow culture which was rapidly filling the gap between the highbrow and the lowbrow...

...It is not in itself a work of great importance...

...It should be clear by now, however, that in America no radical socio-literary criticism can either derive from or champion a middle way of culture...

...Not that such a theory is easy to come by...

...Finding himself in a political vacuum, he keeps on slugging, but both his enemies and his weapons are cultural attitudes and opinions...

...He puts ona protective coloration under which wesee the attempt to resist definition byforegoing the hazards of a highbrow orlowbrow view...

...Thus the chapter of "The Situation of the American Writer" recalls to our minds the sense we had just after World War II of an emerging literary activity...

...The names of Jean Stafford, Carson McCullers, John Horne Burns, Norman Mailer, Paul Bowles, and Truman Capote are cited as promising young writers of the time and many others might also have been cited...

...For one thing, this book keeps reminding one of a political act perpetrated in the arena of culture...

...A lowbrow is a man whose sense of things has been formed by thegive and take of life, and whose ideascome from inherited folk wisdom, folk art, or folk prejudice, or from the mythsconveyed to him by the mass media orby the lodge, legion, or union to whichhe belongs...

...The latest book in the field of liter ary sociology is John W. Aldridge's In Search of Heresy: American Liter ature in an Age of Conformity.* Al dridge's book is alternately witty, turgid, mistaken, and willfully per verse...

...One thing is clear: if you are merely against the conventional culture but have no real way of saying why or of offering an idea of a better culture, you wind up as what Mr...

...But it is so characteristic of its time that there is some interest in observing its implications...

...Aldridge sometimes seems to be—a middlebrow by default...

...It is made so because highbrows, critics, and quarterlies have had * According to a survey of four large universities instituted by the University ofNorth Carolina Press, faculty membersread book reviews in the following magazines, arranged from most read to leastread: Time, The New Yorker, Harper's, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, Atlantic, The Reporter, Newsweek, Scientific American, New Republic...

...He observes that in contrast to the conformism of earlier decades "present-day conformism is not morally or ethically based, but rather emphasizes passive and amoral qualities — comfort, security, peace of mind—which do not represent a dogma or suggest a heresy...

...In both of the first two chapters of Heresy the method is the same...

...tive tension...

...saw a prophetic intelligence, in the lowbrow Anderson a native instinct, pragmatic force, and closeness to reality...

...The modern movement of cultural protest and advance guardism that began in this country with Brooks and his contemporaries assumed that the bastion of conformity and mediocrity was the middlebrow center and that this had to be destroyed and replaced, or at least revitalized, by an alliance of the highbrow and the lowbrow...

...They apply withfull accuracy only to relatively recent socioliterary phenomena...

...This cultural animus, with its attendant longing to buttress aesthetic judgment with non-aesthetic ideology, is intensified by the apparent absence of those hotly contested political ideas that once engaged the minds of literary critics...

...Thus he speaks of "the fear of ideas and distinctions which, in egghead and middlebrow circles, has taken the form of contrived affability and a tense avoidance of argumenta...

...The first postulate for the literary sociologist is: History so far shows that the cultural health of America lies in an unresting dialectic of extreme views and tastes and that the middle way fails to normalize and consolidate the vitality of the extremes but destroys it instead...

...By "university critics" Aldridge means not only the New Critics, like Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and R. P. Blackmuir, but nearly every other contemporary critic who has tried to write about literature in a serious manner, including, oddly enough, John W. Aldridge...

...Now we are confronted with mass mediocrity and mass conformity—a situation that is far more perplexing and ambigous...

...The middlebrow is by natureindefinable except in terms of otherthings that can be defined...

...This ironic entombment of the modern tradition of cultural protest appears to the tenacious reader of In Search of Heresy to be about equally the result of the author's uncertainty as to his own beliefs and his real if unarticulated commitment to the middle way of culture...

...These centers of power are not, as Aldridge claims, schools of highbrow critics or magazines like the Partisan Review and Kenyan Review...

...The difficulty one has in grasping Aldridge's position is partly the fault of middlebrowism itself, which from one point of view at least is fundamentally a way of avoiding definition in order to gain worldly power and public esteem...

...Aldridge's judgment about what happened seems, in 1956, to be true: something blighted the brief burst of genius...

...By now, however, the phrase "bourgeois values" has come to sound somewhat archaic and there has been much discussion of the implications of mass culture...

...But there are few heads of English departments or book reviewers across the country who are not suspicious of teachers and writers who deviate from its vague and disorganized but generally middlebrow views...

...The insurgent extremes which, it was hoped, would instruct and strengthen each other, were embodied by writers like Waldo Frank and Sherwood Anderson— in the highbrow* Frank one • I have elsewhere tried to define these terms as follows: "A highbrow is a man with an ideal of disinterested intelligencewho makes strong demands on our powers of attention, reason, sensibility, andseriousness...

...He seems to lack even a sense of what a convincing social criticism is, and instead of analysing our literary culture, he irritably attacks (like practically everybody these days) "the university critics" and allied "highbrows...

...through with its several insights...

...The view that the intellectual and literary health of America lies in a middle culture is now the dominant view, as with the exception of sporadic advance-guard opinion it has been since the time of W. D. Howells, who stood, at the beginning of our modern literary tradition, in a mediating position between two writers greater than himself, Henry James and Mark Twain...

...There have been many differences of opinion among them, but from the beginning these critics have agreed that two main enemies of a free and serious literature were conformity to bourgeois values and the traditional cleavage in American life between in telligence and action, art and reality, theory and practice, highbrow and lowbrow...

...In some unexplained manner, the "reproductive and energizing force" of the movement was "cooled down to small fastidious tics experienced by graduate students...

...Mr...

...Often he envelops in a trumped-up ideology what are really only matters of taste...

...Aldridge's book—a rhetorical polemic without clarity or force...

...dridge stands...

...Ostensibly Aldridge agrees with his predecessors among literary sociologists that the enemies of a serious literature are conformity and the split in our culture...

...One must sympathize with Aldridge's Introduction, where he says that nowadays there is only a small margin of "possibility for action beyond conformism...

...The author is like many other contemporary critics whose judgments are permeated with an animus determined by the critic's conception of himself as belonging among highbrows, middlebrows, or lowbrows, or as being intellectual or non- or anti-intellectual...

...To judge by the perplexity and despair of their authors, they have been inspired by a sense that unprecedented dilemmas face the serious novelist, poet, and critic of our time...

...The real centers of power in the literary world have to be recognized as such...

...In their darker moments they prophetically saw what in the Age of Eisenhower has actually come to pass in the literary world: an almost complete smothering of heresy and insurgence by an all encompassing middlebrowism...

...But there is a difference...

...The momentary plausibility of the claim that there is a cultural tyranny of highbrows, critics, and quarterlies is only apparent...

...We seem to locate his taste by observing that he attacks the conformism and mediocrity of Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which might be called lower middlebrow or middle middlebrow successes, but that he admires William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness, a middlebrow novel with flourishes of highbrow rhetoric...

...Aldridge often strikes one as a combative political partisan whom history has robbed of both party and politics...

...Itshould be added that although theseterms suggest certain universal and timeless values, they are strictly speaking sociohistorical categories brought into general use by Brooks and his associatesabout forty years ago...

...Although Walt Whitman and Henry Adams were concerned with the relation of the writer to society and with the social value and function of his work, the genre of literary sociology in its modern form stems from Van Wyck Brooks's Three Essays on America (the first essay, "America's Coming-of-Age," was written in 1915...

...it generates more heat than light, and it does not follow * McGraw, Hill, $4.00...

...But mass civilization has not fundamentally changed the problems raised by the split in our society between a high and a low culture which Brooks was correct in tracing back to the 18th century—a split he conveniently symbolized by the "highbrow" Jonathan Edwards and the "lowbrow" Benjamin Franklin...

...On the other hand, middlebrowism, which is now the fundamental challenge to the cultural critic, never gets seriously examined at all...

...This is accurate, but it leads one to reflect that in Mr...

...Unlike his predecessors in literary sociology, Aldridge lacks such a theory...

...Aldridge's own unaffable writing the tension is emotional and rhetorical rather than intellectual...

...I am concerned with these sociological essays, although the book also con tains a number of literary pieces...

...This eloquent book was the first radical response to the problems created by the growing alienation of the writer and the degradation of culture that was both cause and effect of his alienation...

...In recent years there has been a marked interest in what may be called "literary sociology," and a good many books and articles on "the situation" of the American writer and of American literature have appeared...

...These problems have been considered in various ways and at various times by such writers as H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, and Malcolm Cowley...

...The novelty of Aldridge's book, and also its essential misinterpretation of the American scene, is that in effect the author presents the reigning middlebrowism as a form of heresy and charges the highbrow and the lowbrow with succumbing to conformity...

...In the innocent old days an adequate ethic of rebellion could be arrived at simply by being against the puritanism, commercialism, and philistinism of the bourgeoisie...

...Aldridge does, the Partisan Review and Leslie Fiedler...

...Consequently his means are ill-adapted to his materials and to his ends...

...a flurry of prestige and power in the last fifteen years...

...For these are the organs* that continue to form the ideas of most of those who in and out of universities distribute the cash and make or break reputations...

...He goes on to say that "the paternalism of the cultural institutions, the institutional values of money, status, security, and power, have filled and padded the vacuum left by the loss of the values of disaffiliation and dissent...

...The inevitable result of such an attempt is what we find in Mr...

...Presumably the Times Book Review would have rated higher had the surveybeen confined to teachers of literature, although it is possible that, for example, the New Republic, which maintains a relatively high literary level, might have rated better too...

...It is hard to say just where in the miasmal hierarchy of the middle Al...

...The main value of these chapters and of Heresy as a whole lies in certain of the author's incidental remarks...

...In Search of Heresy contains an introductory statement called "The Choice of Heresy," two long essays called "The Situation of the American Writer" and "The Writer in the University," and a shorter piece called "The Function of the Book Critic...

...But during the 1920's and 1980's they counted on a dialectic of the extremes to keep American cultural life open, vital, and flowing...

...The second chapter deals with the new institutionalization of culture and the bad effects this has had on the free spirit of creativity...

...The author makes a broad indictment of the times and of the general situation, and then he covertly narrows the scope of discussion down to the field within which the enemy (already decided on) operates, at the same time mythologizing the enemy into a monster...

...By the end of the 1940's, it was clear that with one or two exceptions these young writers had largely failed to take the positions of authority and influence which had appeared to be opening to them only a short time before...

...It would seem, then, that more than ever the polemic of cultural protest must be based on a stable, clear, and far-reaching theory of American culture...

...They are the New York Times Book Review, Time, The Saturday Review, and magazines like Harper's and the Atlantic...

...The protective colorationsuggests a general benignity, powerlessness, and belief in moderation, an attiude of being bewildered by what otherpeople claim to understand, a belief in the virtue of gentle, wistful humor...

...Aldridge has no doubt that it was the universities...

...for example, his remarks about the Foundations and the paradox of mass-circulation "little" magazines, like New World Writing and Discovery...

...In fact, the situation with which they were now confronted was such as to invalidate entirely the system of accession to power and prominence, the very possibility of reputation in the old sense, which had been the feature of the decades just past .. . And what was the cause of this tragedy...

...An important problem this—but it cannot be dealt with simply by blaming, as Mr...

...IT SHOULD BE an axiom of the cultural critic that any radical protest against conformity in this country has to begin with a declaration against middlebrowism...

...But the least the critic needs is a method analogous to Marxism or to the cultural dialectics of Brooks...

...Yet these earlier writers were correct in thinking that if revitalization were to occur, it would be a revitalization of the middle by the extremes, rather than vice versa...

...My guess is that he is a middlebrow with a certain highbrow severity and a good deal of highbrow rhetoric...

...It is true that Brooks and his immediate successors often advocated a revitalized middle culture into which the extremes might be absorbed and reconciled (it is true also that Brooks himself came around in later years to a middlebrow position which was anything but vital...