LETTERS
Editors: In the last issue of DISSENT you carry a review of Nkrumah's Ghana by M. K. Kamath. The author of this review implies that Nkrumah alone freed Ghana and created the "Secret...
...But his picking on those poor fellows doesn't help in getting back at me...
...So it's not a question of memory in general but of one kind of memory...
...Back of the whole movement of black nationalist liberation in West Africa is the Pan-African movement which is headed by George Padmore...
...A further peculiarity is that it secretes a fluid that slowly eats away the substance under its body...
...I won't try to rebut it—the evi dence is in print, after all—but I would like to show the specific grounds for it...
...If Gandhi is better known than Padmore, it is because of Western racial prejudice...
...when he speaks about art it is plain his ideas are kitsch...
...though that "our best journalist" (how cutely he snags Goodman's compliments...
...The difference between Macdonald's reaction to my writing and mine to his is that he wonders wnether he understands what I say, while I wonder whether he understands what he says...
...Time-Life, The New Yorker, Hollywood are full of lovers of Gris, Braque, Picasso and Etc...
...This is clearly of slight importance to him—and his own writings, so hasty and formless, so obviously dashed off in the heat and so little worked-over, demonstrate this—while good writing is for me a most important quality in a book...
...But this admiration of old modern art and of artists who are, with one exception, dead is the typical kitsch attitude...
...His tone is that of a wise old professor chiding a clever but "unsound" young pupil...
...But this turns out to be a rather mild compliment...
...so damnably abstract" (Rosenberg) , both of whom had beset him in a "smug and sectarian spirit," though Macdonald does not explain what we were smug about or why it's sectarian to think him a bit ridiculous...
...a writer who actually had to operate only on the basis of his current three-months stock of culture would in fact be the sort of breezy ignoramus Paul thinks I am...
...What the devil did they use to teach at Townsend Harris and City College...
...I'm not seeking to devalue the great accomplishments of Nkrumah, but it ought to be known that behind Nkrumah is a "black international," a well-knit, in telligent, public organization which is holding its Sixth World Conference this year in Accra...
...his italics) By "develop" Macdonald means taking a single notion and stretching it out through arguments and illustrations until it can slip easily in and out of his mind while seeming to leave something there...
...for example, the protest of minorities which has resulted in marked changes ("new reality" to you, M) in their movie status...
...R. expected the American heroes of magazine fiction to receive worse treatment than minority and foreign groups), the increment of knowledge is minimal, and the line of action has been clear for several generations without any help from Drs...
...In short, a very different sort of chap from Paul, the one-man academy...
...He must mean this because (a) the only place I've written about modern art was in my New Yorker profile of Alfred Barr and (b) the only criticism hostile to any phase of modern art was that directed against abstract expressionism...
...If Gandhi laid the foundations for Indian freedom, then Padmore, the mentor of the leaders of West Africa, is now, today, laying the same foundations for West African freedom...
...I shan't help them there—let them do their own work—but may I at least demonstrate their incompetence...
...I might add that I wrote the introduction to Padmore's Pan-Africanism or Communism...
...He judges on general, pseudo-philosophical grounds instead of on those specific grounds where exists all truth...
...This might sound as though I'm grind ing a racial axe, but he who cares to look into this matter will see that I'm merely stating facts...
...But this kind of friendly exchange could go on forever, and in the case of Paul's review seemed indeed to do so...
...The author of this review implies that Nkrumah alone freed Ghana and created the "Secret Circle" and the Convention People's Party...
...I said that analysis which exposed the propaganda in popular works served a useful social purpose, while writings "from the standpoint of culture" (a gem) that drew the interest of the reader to profundities hidden in crummy art did not...
...Frankly, I am unable to conceive abstractly what Macdonald thinks thinking is...
...When he speaks about art it is plain his ideas are kitsch...
...From a naive point of view, this is true...
...Rosenberg's strictures are an aside in a manifesto written in his most epigram matic and gnomic style—if he could just once develope a point, he'd become a se rious writer...
...Is this a disagreement between Macdonald and me about painting...
...An artist—or to be more modest, a craftsman" (Macdonald) has risen in defiance of one "very abstract type thinker" (Goodman) and one "thinker (who) is...
...Yet I'd do it, were it not for the fact— and this is something that Macdonald does not grasp about writing—that if you "develop a point" in the direction of simple comprehension you, and your audience, have to pay for that development in undevelopment all along the line...
...To equate this one school with "modern art" and, on the basis of this to call me "Philistine" (When you say that, pardner—smile...
...Another difficulty between us is that Paul's temperament is that of the prophet —if Harold is pontifical, Paul is Messianic— while mine is that of the artist— or, to be more modest, the craftsman...
...Having been hit hard by the white West, the African has less of the past in his heart than the Asian...
...What else—in their appeal to the crowd against suggestion, overtone, allusion difficulty, in short, against the tradition of epigrammatic statement as a form of the subjective, the immediate, the intuitive, the visionary, personified by Pascal, Nietzsche or Rend Char...
...The white West has been long sold upon the idea that the ancient traditions of Asia spell a higher culture and a greater capacity for political development...
...I have no intention of instructing Macdonald on style, at least not without pay...
...LIKEWISE WITH PAUL'S review of my book —I do like using first names, so friendly...
...Of course, today people know more about Asia than about Africa...
...You put over a point, just that and nothing more, at the expense of the total texture of your thought...
...Nkrumah apparently did not...
...Of course, "reality," whatever that means, is different from kitsch (does that make it a "counterconcept...
...Paul goes in for big, basic philosophies of life, which he expounds in a confident way...
...This particular piece in the Mass Culture anthology, as I pointed out in my review of the book in Encounter was an extreme example of what I call the Academic-Cautious approach to kitsch...
...Rosenberg, is that their "aim is not knowledge alone but action, to dissolve the 'old crap' [Engels] by means of a new reality...
...He suggests that he might not have understood my "thesis" and I feel compelled to agree with him...
...when he speaks about art it is plain his ideas are kitsch...
...When Macdonald speaks against kitsch," I had said, "he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art...
...It is often overlooked that the African has been in intimate touch with the Western world much longer than the Asian and that the African is really more politically advanced...
...Alas, an ignorant and superficial fellow, a kibitzer (rather than "a man determined to a goal of action or truth") , a mouther of current slogans, a parasite on the day's headlines "who seems to have no experience of the passion of the intellect...
...I didn't say their article was good, or daring, or correct in its conclusion, or loaned with novelties...
...ANOTHER COMPLAINT of Macdonald relates to my remarks in "Pop Culture" about the function of the current wave of studies of kitsch...
...This is a wrong slant on West Africa and her present-day leaders...
...I feel that the contrary is really true...
...To wind up, Macdonald genially declares that "Trouble with Rosenberg as a thinker is he's so damnably abstract [Goodman too...
...Sticking to the matter of kitsch, the notion that to call writing "epigrammatic and gnomic" is to set it out of bounds is a typical mass-culture (consumers') notion of writing...
...Rosenberg...
...He was more charitable than Harold, but also more condescending...
...RICHARD WRIGHT Editors: In your Winter [1958] issue, two old friends, Harold Rosenberg and Paul Goodman, writing independently, have some unkind things to say about the quality of my taste and mind...
...I've been trying to think, using my trusty Reming ton portable, why Paul feels so superior to and irritated with me, and I've decided it's because he is a very abstracttype thinker while I'm more on the concrete side...
...It seems I'm outgoing, decent, honest, independent, unspiteful, and brave...
...But of course none of these people ever "developed a point" by the standard of The New Yorker...
...To qualify, Macdonald denies that modern art revolts him...
...1 nere is nothing to prevent one from regarding this process as a lifetime of search and its victim as blessed with "an open mind...
...When Macdonald speaks against kitsch," he writes, "he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art...
...As these softened under him he fell through and had to go looking for a new nesting place...
...I admire and enjoy the work of Gris, Braque, Modigliani, Picasso, Klee, Matisse, etc., which is what most people would call "modern art...
...Well, I do remember, and I also remember, as Paul apparently doesn't, that we were talking about Freudian therapy and my point was that I would be a poor subject because I wasn't much interested in my own past and couldn't remember it very well...
...It is so plain that Roesnberg feels no need to try to demon strate or even illustrate this sweeping charge...
...But who but Macdonald would tell you "where exists all truth...
...In his book, Pan-Africanism or Communism?, Padmore gives a detailed history of the movement of black nationalism—a movement which is older than Communism...
...When Rosenberg says that kitsch's counterconcept, its antagonist is not art but "reality," I don't know what he is talking about...
...But Rosenberg isn't most people, he's a member of a very exclusive little club, and by the term he means simply (or merely) the New York School, or abstract expressionism or action painting or drip 'n dribble (the avant garde equivalent of rock 'n roll) —anyway the kind of painting Rosenberg and I have had more than one argument about...
...Some "trouble"—one thinks in ideas...
...Editors: In the last issue of DISSENT you carry a review of Nkrumah's Ghana by M. K. Kamath...
...Not to be aware of this is to be hopelessly enmeshed in kitsch—including the kitsch device that makes it possible to praise stylistic complexity in Henry James in order to score against Cozzens, who is not an issue of art, and at the same time to rant against Finnegans Wake, though not in public, since Finnegan is only an issue of art...
...The author says that: "Nehru had a Gandhi to fall back upon as intellectual and spiritual guide...
...After a laborious survey of "198 short stories published in 8 of the country's most widely read magazines in 1937 and 1943," replete with statistical tables and other instruments of pedantic torture, the authors triumphantly conclude: "On almost every index— frequency, role, delineation, status, goals—the Americans received better treatment, both qualitatively and quantitatively, than the minority and foreign groups...
...I find it interesting that he describes me, in a casual aside, as "a very fine writer and craftsman...
...The career of Macdonald has consisted in attaching himself to the perimeter of one idea or attitude after another...
...Now modern art does not revolt me...
...but so is it different from art (or high culture) . The serious battle today, for all who love literature and art and philosophy and the other forms of the culture we have inherited from past ages, is the battle against the cheapening and debasing of high culture by the lords (and consumers) of kitsch...
...I'd become a serious writer if I took steps to convince Macdonald and wrote in a manner that would accord with his reading and thinking habits...
...If you don't do this he threatens not to understand you...
...I know that Paul thinks he is one of the major poets and novelists of our time because I remember, improbable as it may seem, sitting with him years ago in a restaurant off Astor Place (now what was the name...
...What nonsense...
...Now I'd gladly be accommodating, though what good it would do to convince a man who has been convinced and unconvinced so often I don't know...
...On the basis of his one article on the subject I should hardly have picked him out as an example (by the way, pard, I was smiling when I said "Philistine" but not because it was an odd idea) . LET us MOVE over to the art of writing...
...But from an historical point of view it is all wrong...
...The West, in its brutal attack upon the fragile tribal culture of Africa, freed the African psychologically to build stable and modern states...
...July 4, 1958 HAROLD ROSENBERG Replies: Despite my Iack of talent for the "specific," I am happy to note that Macdonald (or his typewriter) celebrated July 4 by setting off firecrackers under Goodman who prophesied against him and under Rosenberg who pontificated...
...ah—Conti'st) and having him tell me so in dead seriousness...
...Moreover, and in addition, I'm "our best journalist...
...thought has to start somewhere) and of having no memory: "Dwight once told me, but he will not remember, that he couldn't remember anything more than three months back—the period, I guess, for researching an assignment and thinking it up with one's typewriter...
...he's way up there in the empyrean, and my own earth-bound little typewriter-ideas, always limited to some specific aspect of things, must seem intolerably trivial to him...
...It is against the art that is not yet Modern Art "for most people" that our self-styled "artist," who doesn't know but maybe he's only a modest craftsman, swings his hatchet in the organs of the uninformed...
...Against me Macdonald's complaint is that I made a charge without demonstrating or "even illustrating" its soundness...
...Macdonald objects to my "epigrammatic and gnomic style—if he [Rosenberg] could just once develop a point, he'd become a serious writer...
...Kitsch, as the spurious Good Thing, the phony classic, ancient or contemporary, is never in opposition to what is accepted (and certainly Modern Art, even the best of what was done in it 40 years ago, is accepted) . Kitsch reserves its hostility and contempt for "the extremists," "the very exclusive little club" to whom recognition of Modern Art in the past is not enough, in a word, for what is alive and in motion now...
...For what is a journalist...
...but, yes, Paul could be wrong) has much to learn is "demonstrated or at least illustrated" by the quality of his irony: "pontificates Harold XII," "his Marxistical heart," "Dr...
...Nonetheless—or possibly therefore—I think he is not much interested in the art or craft of writing, and that this is why he reacted to my book so negatively...
...Very well, let's demonstrate it...
...It is not kitsch to say, modern art stinks —that is forthright conservatism or ignorance...
...Now I don't say that it would be impossible to find something critical to say on this topic, but I do feel that my old friends write in a rather smug and sectarian spirit, and, therefore, that they have quite failed to discover my real weaknesses...
...replete with statistical tables" (oh, his iron-clad word combinationst) ; apparently, "our best journalist" never misses anything if it's obvious enough...
...He also claimed he knew as a matter of scientific truth, not taste, which poems were good (his were) and which bad, and that he could demonstrate this knowledge in such a way as to compel agreement (the demonstration was a flop...
...I believe that the immediate future progress of West Africa will bear me out in this...
...At any rate, I see no need to discuss the Berelson-Salter article which I mentioned as an example of an approach to kitsch as propaganda...
...I have therefore been forced to fall back to "the concrete side," as Macdonald calls it, where the following fable occurred to me: Imagine a creature whose habitat is, exclusively, the edges of roofs...
...My lack of cultural background is very distressing to Paul, but the three concrete instances he gives seem not such at all: the Greeks did contemn the State, using "State" in the Hegelian sense I did in "The Responsibility of Peoples" (the Persians were closer to Hegel's idea of the State) ; whether Marxism has a richer intellectual tradition than pacifism is, of course, a matter of opinion and not, as Paul pretends, of knowledge, and I think I have a better right to an opinion because I was for years actively engaged in both these camps and Paul wasn't (in fact, it might be hard for the outsider to determine by just looking at our careers which of us has been The Man Determined To A Goal Of Action And Truth and which has been the kibitzer) ; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, my dear Paul, were the watchwords of the French Revolution (1789-1794) and so expressive of bourgeois liberalism...
...He specializes in answers, while I go in more for questions...
...any artist that high up and that far back) who stand ready to defend Modern Art against "the avant garde equivalent of rock'n roll...
...Well, the reality is not new (unless Dr...
...Those nations in Asia and Africa today who are making the fastest and most stable prog ress are those whose past has been shattered, whose outlook is uncloudily turned toward the future...
...In his current letter Macdonald recommends that critics analyze mass culture "from the standpoint of culture"— presumably, this means, if it means anything, from the standpoint of art...
...The special virtue of such articles, quoth Dr...
...I CAN'T HERE, or at least won't here, go into Rosenberg's general thesis, insofar as I understand it, except to say that I agree there is perhaps too much written these days about mass culture—it's become almost as much of an intellectual fad as action painting—and don't agree that Lowenthal was wrong when he wrote, "The counterconcept to popular culture is art...
...I often admire Paul's ideas, when they aren't too cosmic, but rarely his way of expressing them...
...It's all those sociologists and Marxologues that have come stampeding into the field that I find superfluous—precisely the ones that Rosenberg, in his sophisticated obscurantism, picks out as the only respectable practitioners: "To study kitsch as propaganda is legitimate," pontificates Harold XII, and then makes the mistake (which, to be fair to him, is the kind of mistake he rarely does make) of being specific: "e.g., the Berelson-Salter piece in Mass Culture...
...Behind this attitude is the assumption that Asian civilization is ahead of African culture or civilization...
...It's generous of Macdonald to tip me off about what's boring in "laborious surveys...
...I suppose one can "judge" things "on specific grounds" by smelling them...
...On the contrary, he asseverates, he admires "Gris, Braque, Modigliani, Picasso, Klee, Matisse, etc., which is what most people would call 'modern art...
...or, to ,put it another way, he is a wholesaler of ideas, while I'm a retailer...
...Is there something gnomic about this...
...in short, I have all the Boy Scout virtues...
...it's not clear) —agreed this, I think that critics can profitably, from the standpoint of culture, analyze and expose the corrupting effect of mass culture...
...Its criterion is the machined "communication"— and this and nothing else is in Macdonald's mind when he boasts that "good writing is for me a most important quality in a book" and conaemns a superb stylist like Goodman for not "working over" his prose more...
...Otherwise, I really can't explain it...
...They appear in Rosenberg's statement that "modern art revolts him [me...
...This is one of the blind spots of the Western world...
...After all, there were at least fifty pages of good writing there...
...Paul accuses me of thinking with my typewriter (which is true but what's wrong...
...In other words, with the former the "aim is not knowledge alone but action...
...He judges on general, pseudo-philosophical grounds—whence his absurd reaction to the Berelson-Salter article—instead of on those specific grounds where exists all truth...
...The question is therefore: Can Macdonald speak from such a standpoint, or only seem to...
...Agreed that the best way to fight it is for each artist, writer, etc., to do his own work and let the masses have their kitsch (or does Rosenberg still have a soft spot in his Marxistical heart for the masses...
...Berelson and Salter (who would be horrified at the very idea) . Trouble with Rosenberg as a thinker is he's so damnably abstract...
...this seems to me a mite sectarian...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
